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SEO Is Dead (again), Upcoming Core Algo Update, and More!

The Weekly SEO #217

Author

Sean Markey
August 05, 2024

Hello from our new home on Beehiiv.

If it’s been a while, here’s a quick introduction:

I acquired The Weekly SEO March or May 2023 from Andrew Charlton. I write the monthly (ish?) Rank Theory newsletter and the sometimes (ish?) Domain Discoveries newsletter, and recently acquired an agency that I’m turning into a FANTASTIC brand on a one-word .com domain name. Stay tuned for that launch, it’s happening soon.

This is a weekly email showcasing the top 5 or so SEO stories from the last week and breaking down why it matters.

I hope you enjoy!

AI + SEO

New “SEO Is Dead” Just Dropped

OpenAI announced a new search engine product last week to compete with Google and Perplexity AI.

Hilariously, here’s the Google Trends for the last 90 days for the term “SEO is dead” lol:

if you’re wondering, OpenAI announced SearchGPT on July 25th.

Good stuff. Nice, normal industry.

Here’s more on SearchGPT from the Verge article:

The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user “What are you looking for?” But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its findings on music festivals and then presents short descriptions of the events followed by an attribution link.

The Verge

Don’t worry about Google, though. I’m sure their rushed, thrown-together-with-duct tape AI solution will do just fine…

Source: The Verge

The Algo

The Next Google Update is IMMINENT

According to a LinkedIN post recapped on Search Engine Journal:

"There hasn't been a fresh core update, so I would be surprised if things had changed here yet. It seems like the next one isn't extremely far away now, so I'd recommend waiting for that."

John Mu

So there are a lot of desperate site owners out there trynna read the tea leaves and hoping for the next big algo update to get back that traffic that’s DEFINITELY GONE FOREVER, sorry.

Keep working those Pinterest boards or Amazon Influencer Program or whatever the flavor of the “I’m done with SEO swear to god” flavor of the week is (for me it’s newsletters, obviously).

Guess I’m a cynic, but there’s probably no going back, the next algo update will probably continue to promote pure SPAM, the Golden Sites that win in every algo update, and whatever AI feature Google is trying to push on us.

Source: SERoundTable

Content

Turns Out Human-Written Content Is Kind Of Valuable

Reddit announced last week that OpenAI cut them a big ole check to be able to scrape the raw, unadulterated content from the fingertips of the unwashed masses on Reddit.

Here’s the relevant bit:

“Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used,” Huffman said in an interview this week. He specifically named Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying it has been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

Reddit has been escalating its fight against crawlers in recent months. At the beginning of July, its robots.txt file was updated to block web crawlers it doesn’t have agreements with. Then people began noticing that Reddit results were only visible in Google results — where Reddit is paid for its data to be shown — and not other search engines like Bing.

I get it… no one wants all their content scraped in service of building a billion dollar business where you don’t get to wet your beak a little bit.

(Kind of like all the users of Reddit that create all the content and moderate away all the shit content…? LOL)

Just remember to pay attention how the money is flowing:

Human-written content is super valuable, worth whatever huge eight or nine figure sums (IDK) OpenAI and Google are paying Reddit.

Ai-written content is cheap and sucks to read STOP TRYING TO PITCH ME AN AI-WRITTEN NEWSLETTER what is this, late-stage capitalism show?

Ohh…

Domains

You Might Be About To Lose That ccTLD Boost

In a recent podcast that SEJ recapped, team Google said this:

One of the main algorithms that do the whole localization thing… is called something like LDCP – language demotion country promotion. So basically if you have like a .de, then for users in Germany you would get like a slight boost with your .de domain name. But nowadays, with .co or whatever .de, which doesn’t relate to Germany anymore, it doesn’t really make sense for us to like automatically apply that little boost because it’s ambiguous what the target is.

The extremely common advice has been, typically, if you’re targeting Germany you use a .de domain name, because—as they said, it gets a boost!

Of course there are the ccTLDs that Google recognizes as generic (or did—there used to be a list they had about this but it has been erased off the internet), but they treated these ccTLDs as “generic” and able to rank well outside of their home country:

  • .ai

  • .io

  • .ly

  • .so

  • and others I can’t remember.

Anyway, this represents a pretty big change when it comes to international/local SEO, so it’s something to keep an eye on.

Source SE Journal

AI In The SERPs

An Overview Of AI Overviews in the SERPs

A very cool post by NewzDash did a bunch of research to see how frequently AI overviews are appearing in search these days.

Across all trending news queries analyzed, an average of 3.6% generated an AI Overview. This figure remained relatively stable over the 9-week period but recently increased to 3.94%. Notably, this overall figure masks significant variations between news categories…

~

The prevalence of AI Overviews varies significantly across different news categories. Health news leads with a 29.6% visibility rate, possibly due to the demand for concise, reliable information in this area. In contrast, national and sports news showed minimal to no AI Overview visibility, aligning with Google's stated goal of avoiding hard news topics where factual accuracy and timeliness are critical.

There’s a great graphic showing the percentage of each category that an AI overview or featured snippet shows.

It’s wild that health has a 30% AI overview rate and a 3% rate of featured snippets.

There’s some other interesting data there showing which domains are sourced the most for medical terms (MayoClinic) and news (USA Today).

Source: NewsDash

That’s it for this edition of The Weekly SEO.

Hit reply and LMK what you thought of it.

If you’ve got a story you think I should cover (even if you wrote it, that’s fine), holler at me — I’m always looking for good SEO articles to share.

Until next week…

Sean