January 2023 SEO Industry Updates

January was off to a strong start with lots of Google news and updates. Check out the latest news on Google’s response to AI generated content, managing crawl budget, and more from the team at Conductor. We’ll also provide you handy tips for how to monitor these changes using our platform. 

Google’s December 2022 helpful content update is now done rolling out

By Caroline Wilson

The What:

Google has announced they have completed rolling out the December 2022 Helpful Content Update. This update will be for your entire site and is targeting websites with a lot of content that is deemed unsatisfying or unhelpful. It will  target websites with a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content is first written for search engines. 

The Why: 

If you noticed any ranking and visibility changes in Google search over the past two weeks or so, especially if those were big changes, you can likely attribute it to this update.

This will be impacting content that was written for search engines first and not humans.

Google will continue to value high quality content and wants to make sure websites that are creating useful content for humans written by humans are rewarded.

This comes largely after AI generated content has been used by some corporations to produce a lot of content that seems to be inaccurate.

For Everyone:

Make sure to continue to monitor Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or another SEO platform to better understand if your site is being impacted by this update and continue to create content for humans.

For Conductor Customers:

• Monitor performance in Pages and Keywords
• Optimize content using Content Guidance

• https://searchengineland.com/googles-december-2022-helpful-content-update-is-now-done-rolling-out-390569

Google’s Response to AI-Generated Content

By Kerri Kirkhuff

The What:

We are seeing more examples of brands using AI-generated content and the SEO community is getting more curious around Google’s policies and stance around these efforts. Google provided a statement and reiterates their stance of “We know machine-generated content is not new, but what is new is that the machines are getting better with the help of AI, in generating human-like, high-quality content. The question is, is it being produced with the intent of helping people or ranking in Google Search. If it is the latter, the helpful content system’s aim is to make sure such content does not rank well.”

The Why:

AI is an extremely hot topic and brands are realizing that content can be produced at low costs and generate more content with minimal investment. 

Google however is on code red around the release of ChatGPT and has brought back both founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help the company deal with this threat. This could change the way people search for information on the internet but overall Google continues to recommend creating content that is helpful and created for people first.

For Everyone:

If there is content written by AI, we need to make sure we are double checking it for any errors. Additionally when were are writing, updating, or evaluating content we need to continue to ask ourselves: “Does this content solve the searcher’s intent? Is it unique? How can I make this more useful for the searcher?”.

Make sure to continue to monitor Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or another SEO platform to better understand if your site is being impacted by the content we are writing or if we are benefiting from it.

For Conductor Customers:

It’s important to note that we need to make sure we are proof-reading any content generated by AI and this should not be done at scale, as we’ve already seen some companies such as CNET changing their AI generated content. 

• Create a Custom Page Group in your Conductor account to easily measure organic and keyword performance of any AI-generated content. This way we can test out how the AI-generated content is performing versus the other content on our site.
• If you see that a competitor created content by means of AI (some content is being labeled as such, which can be seen in the linked article), plug the URL into  Explorer to see if it’s trending positively and are starting to rank for competitive keywords.

Read more about this:

• https://searchengineland.com/google-search-on-using-ai-to-write-content-391728

Google Crawl Budget Help Document Adds If-Modified-Since Section

By Umair Malik

The What:

Google has added the recommendation to serve 304 (Not Modified) status code for pages that have not changed their content to indirectly preserve crawl budget.

The Why:

Crawl budget is important to monitor, especially for larger sites. Even though Google can crawl millions of pages, we want to make sure that we are letting them crawl the priority pages we care about otherwise they could end up not seeing these high value pages and we will never end up ranking for our target keywords and therefore see minimal increases in traffic and conversions. According to Google, “Wasting server resources on unnecessary pages can reduce crawl activity from pages that are important to you, which may cause a significant delay in discovering great new or updated content on a site.”

For Everyone:

For any pages we decide to serve as 304s, make sure to continue to monitor Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or another SEO platform to better understand how they are performing. 

For Conductor Customers:

• Monitor performance in ContentKing if you decide to serve status 304 to preserve crawl budget of these pages.
• Setup a segment for pages that serve a status 304 and setup alerting for when pages enter this segment.

Additionally, we should be adding these pages to a page group to monitor the organic traffic to ensure they are still receiving sessions.

Read more about this:

• https://www.seroundtable.com/google-if-modified-since-crawl-budget-34687.html

Google Optimize will sunset this year

By Leayam Meiri

The What:

Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will no longer be available after September 30, 2023.

The Why:

This is important because the discontinuation of Optimize may affect marketers ability to conduct A/B testing and optimize their website or app’s user experience.

The sunsetting of Optimize is due to the fact that these user experience tools will be available in GA4 and other integrations.

For Everyone:

Familiarize yourself with GA4 since Optimize will no longer be available for A/B testing.

For Conductor Customers: 

• Use Live Editor to A/B test certain metadata on your page. This tool is CMS agnostic and puts a layer of Javascript on your page which can allow you to see if changes work before pushing them through in the CMS.

Read more about this:

• https://searchengineland.com/google-optimize-will-sunset-this-year-392004

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