Is your website training Google's AI for free?
Hi Reader,
✨ Algorithm updates
Google removed a few ranking factors that we all thought were massively important. The factors that are removed, are:
- Page experience system
- Mobile-friendly ranking system
- Page speed system
- Secure sites system
But, here's the thing. Last week we wrote about Google adding "Page experience" to the Helpful Content Update. So, in a way these factors still matter. And, in the end you still want your users to have a good experience by not having the page load in 30 seconds.
April 21st 2023
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🧪 Technical
Aleyda Solis did a (huge) write-up of common SEO mistakes on e-commerce sites and how to fix them. Included are:
- Blocking or noindexing pages and subcategories because they are 2 levels deep. If these pages have search demand you are missing out on traffic. So, it's good to check if your web structure blocks these pages.
- Make sure internal search pages are not indexed. Note that robots.txt is not the way to block these pages from appearing in Google. You have to noindex these pages.
Read the rest of this great article here.
🤖 AI & SEO
The Washington Post analyzed 15 million websites that have been used to feed Google's C4 Dataset. Now, you too can find out if your website has been used to train Google's AI. There are some lawsuits already regarding revenue sharing. Perhaps it's time you or your client joins the battle.
👓 Case study
The PAA section is something we've all been targeting the last few years. But, sometimes you might get negative PAA results. In this case study Dominique Jabour explains how they handled getting rid of negative PAA's.
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