Yea, where are these people?!

Moving on to this week’s newsletter:

📰 News & updates

Evolving choice and control for web content: Google’s kicking off a public discussion to explore additional machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging AI and research use cases (besides robots.txt).

🔝 SEO

We blocked two high-ranking pages: As an experiment, we blocked two of our ranking pages using robots.txt. We wanted to see the impact on traffic and rankings. The result: Both pages lost some traffic, but they didn’t lose all traffic. 

AI vs. humans: The Reboot team hypothesized that with all things being equal, AI and human content would perform equally. So they ran an experiment to test it. Conclusion: AI-generated content ranked less strongly (on average) than human-generated content.

I worked as a search quality rater: SEO Cyrus Shepard passed the tests and got hired as an official Google search quality rater. (He’s still hired.) In his opinion, working as a rater is fantastic training from a content quality and ranking POV. Even agencies and consultants do not have that level of expertise with regard to content, user intent, and webpage quality understanding.

Conciseness = PAA: Short, focused articles can rank for People Also Ask and drive tons of search traffic.

News syndication partners may be hijacking your traffic: News publishers typically allow their content to be republished on syndication sites (e.g., Yahoo) for a fee. But this syndication deal could be “stealing” the original site’s traffic, especially if the content is on domains with higher authority. For example, John Shehata ran an analysis and found that, on average, Yahoo outranks most URLs from AP News, Reuters, People, CBS News, USA Today, and FOX News (for Google Mobile Search Top Stories).

Google’s Helpful Content and AI may be affecting your visibility: If your traffic is declining and you can’t understand why, there is a good chance that Google’s AI-driven systems are learning that your content is not usually the most helpful result to meet searchers’ needs.

💻 Digital marketing

Your email service provider is losing you customers: Most ESPs suppress hard bounces. But according to Jonathan Drake, hard bounces can and should be fixed. He shows how in this Twitter thread.

Build communities by focusing on practice, not purpose: David Spinks’ example: Communities that focus on climate change flop attract many people but end up with tons of venting and nothing done. If you want to build communities that affect change (climate change or not), find the practitioners and identify the highly specific problems the community will help them solve.

Going viral means nothing: Charlie Light went viral on Twitter (4M impressions) and even got a reply from Elon Musk. But he gained only 150 followers and zero business leads.
 

Till next time ;)
Cheers,