The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #43 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

December 18, 2022

Here are the weekly SEO insights for the SEOs Diners Club members. You may also join our free SEO Diners Club network to ask questions and share your thoughts on these topics.

Can We Use ChatGPT for Content Production and SEO?

What you need to know before using ChatGPT for Content Production and SEO.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that can take instructions and perform tasks like writing articles. The quality of ChatGPT's outputs and responses is astounding, so ​​using it for SEO looks pretty appealing. However, you should know some essential details before deciding how to use it for content and SEO.

How Does ChatGPT Work?

In summary, ChatGPT is a type of machine learning called the Large Learning Model.

A large learning model is an artificial intelligence trained on large amounts of data that can predict the next word in a sentence.

The more data it is trained on, the more types of tasks it can perform (like writing an article).

Sometimes great language models develop unexpected capabilities.

Stanford University writes about how the increase in training data enabled GPT-3 to translate text from English to French even though it was not explicitly trained to do this task.

Major language models such as GPT-3 (and GPT-3.5, on which ChatGPT is based) are not trained to perform specific tasks. However, they are prepared with a wide range of knowledge they can apply to other fields.

This is similar to the way a human learns. For example, if a person knows the basics of being a carpenter, they may use that knowledge to build a table, even if they have not explicitly been taught how to do it.

Important Information You Should Know About ChatGPT

Before using ChatGPT in SEO and content production, it is helpful to keep this information in the back of your mind.

1. Programmed to Avoid Certain Types of Content

ChatGPT is specifically programmed not to generate text on harmful content topics such as graphic violence, sex, and instructions on how to build an explosive device.

2. Not Aware of Current Events

Another limitation is that it is unaware of any content created after 2021. So if your content needs to be up-to-date and fresh, ChatGPT in its current form may not be helpful.

However, considering the enormous mobility and learning speed in the field of artificial intelligence, it seems normal that this handicap will be overcome with the next release.

3. Has Built-in Prejudices

A significant limitation is that the machine has been trained to be helpful, accurate, and harmless. Unfortunately, these are ideals and deliberate biases built into its algorithm.

Programming to be seemingly harmless ensures that the output avoids negativity. That's a good thing, but it also subtly changes the article from one that might ideally be neutral.

In a way, one has to get behind the wheel and explicitly tell ChatGPT to go in the desired direction. The good news is that the software updates and evolves for the better as you give feedback.

My advice is not to jump headlong into the first advice given by the tool; question its accuracy and provide lots of feedback.

4. ChatGPT Requires Highly Detailed Instructions

ChatGPT requires detailed instructions to produce high-quality content that is original or reflects a particular point of view. The more instructions are given, the more sophisticated the output will be. This is both a strength and a limitation to be aware of. The fewer instructions there are in the content request, the more likely the output will share a similar output with another request. Since it is an extremely patient and understanding tool, you can request a lot of revisions :)

5. Is ChatGPT Content Identifiable?

Researchers at Google and other organizations have been working on algorithms to detect AI-generated content for many years successfully.

At this point, I have to say that they have been successful to a certain extent. However, in my opinion, placing the content we obtained from the tool on our site as it is one of the biggest mistakes we can make. Therefore, Therefore, I recommend that you learn to use this tool skillfully to think more like a writer's assistant and reduce the unit time you spend on content production.

Best Use of Artificial Intelligence for SEO

The best use of AI tools is to scale SEO to make an employee more productive. Unfortunately, this often consists of leaving the tedious research and analysis to artificial intelligence.

For example, I have personally experienced that ChatGPT is highly adept at generating meta descriptions. I even shared the meta description he created with my customers and got their approval.

Summarizing web pages to create a meta description might be an acceptable use, as Google specifically says this isn't against their guidelines.

An interesting use would be ChatGPT to create a post outline or content summary. For example, if you want to write a blog post over 1000 words with many subtitles, you can ask the tool which subtitles would be appropriate to use. He usually gives excellent suggestions.

Delegation of content creation to an AI and publishing it as is may not be the most effective use of AI unless it is first reviewed for quality, accuracy, and usefulness.

For example, if you produce content in English, checking and editing it with "proofreading" tools such as Grammarly is helpful.

If you are producing content on a subject that requires expertise — authority-trust, you can use artificial intelligence to make your expert writer's job easier. At this point, we can say that the experience and experiences of the expert > artificial intelligence :)

Here are six things to know about ChatGPT before using it for SEO and content

Google Dec 2022 Backlink SPAM Update Released

Google started rolling out the December 2022 backlink SPAM update on December 14. The update will take up to two weeks to complete.

Google is upping its SPAM detection system with the ability to find purchased backlinks and primarily detect domains used to import backlinks to other sites. The update covers all languages ​​and countries.

The December 2022 backlink SPAM update uses Google's artificial intelligence-based spam prevention system, SpamBrain, to nullify unnatural links.

Google says that SpamBrain, in addition to detecting SPAM directly, can now identify sites that buy links and places that are used to create outbound links.

I think that such statements by Google should be approached with caution. After each update, some SEO experts do Black Hat SEO; that is, they publish a case study on platforms such as Twitter, which declares that they have achieved performance by conducting some studies despite Google's guidelines. Therefore, one should not expect SpamBrain to produce a miraculous result suddenly.

Google is starting to roll out the December 2022 link spam update on December 14. It will take up to two weeks to complete.

Important Updates to EEAT and Google's Quality Raters Guidelines

The most significant change to the Google Quality Raters Guidelines is the addition of the letter E to the beginning of the popular EAT abbreviation. Well, what does it mean?

Google has made significant changes to its Quality Raters Guidelines for search.

While Google updates this document several times a year, the latest version, updated this week, made significant changes to its structure; many new chapters and tables have been added, and a total of 11 new pages have been added.

While there are dozens of essential details about what has changed, arguably the most crucial change is the addition of the letter E to the beginning of the popular EAT abbreviation.

It is possible to summarize Google's EEAT concept as follows:

  • Experience

  • Expertise

  • authoritarianism

  • Reliability

The inclusion of "Experience" shows that content quality can also be evaluated through the lens of understanding how much first-hand experience the creator has with the topic.

With this reframing of the EEAT, Google also states that "trust" is at the center of this concept and is "the most important member of the EEAT family."

Google also provides many more explicit examples of important concepts:

  • Assessing the reputation of websites and content contributors

  • How vital is the EEAT, and how should it be evaluated

  • What it means for content to be harmful.

You can learn more about this update by reading the following article by SEO expert Lily Ray:

The most important change is the introduction of the letter E to the start of the popular acronym E-A-T. Here's what else has changed.

Is Google Currently Down? Check Search Status Dashboard

For issues with crawling, indexing, or serving results, you can check the search engine's official status dashboard.

Google is launching a search status dashboard that will let you know in real time if there is a problem with crawling, indexing, or serving search results.

Previously, Google's Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) provided information to searchers about outages through the Google Search Central Twitter account.

Now Google will use the Search Status Dashboard to report the status of the search engine.

Google will release an update to the Search Status Dashboard within an hour of confirming a widespread outage.

As stated in the dashboard, the outage start time will refer to the time Google discovered the problem, not the time the outage started. Google is committed to providing consecutive outage updates within 12 hours of the first update. In addition, Google will provide information that can help resolve the issue.

Is Google down right now? Check the search engine's official status dashboard for issues with crawling, indexing, or serving results.

Google Shares Official Names of Visual Elements Gallery and Some Search Features

Google has released a new image gallery of Google Search items documenting some of the most popular search features in Google Search.

We no longer have to guess or make up names for certain Google Search features. Google started with 22 of these search features but planned to continue adding more.

Attribution: Elements that help people quickly identify the source behind the search result, with visual identifiers such as the site name, URL, and favicon.

Text Results: Google believes that “Text results” better represent what the results are based on, namely the textual content of the indexed pages.

Video and Image Results: Historically referred to as “image and video universal results,” they are based on relevant media indexed in the context of their respective landing pages.

Exploration Features: Often called “People Also Ask”, these visual elements help users expand their search journey.

The related gallery starts with “Anatomy of a Google Search results page” and beautifully illustrates all the sections above:

Explore an illustrated guide to the most common UI elements of Google Search. Learn what the elements look like, what they're called, and whether you can optimize your website for each element.

Is Code-to-Text Ratio a Google Ranking Factor?

Have you ever thought about how the volume of code versus the amount of text on a page can affect your rankings? Do you think this ratio is a Google ranking factor?

You probably already know that the coding of your website can affect your search engine ranking.

You know that for SEO, adding snippets like meta descriptions, alt tags, and title tags can significantly increase your visibility in search engines.

However, you may never have thought about how the volume of code versus the amount of text on the page can affect your rankings.

This concept is known as the "code-to-text ratio" and can significantly affect user experiences, page indexing, and page speed.

So what makes an excellent code-to-text ratio? And more importantly, how much does this rate affect your search rankings?

Do search engines consider your code-to-text HTML ratio when determining your page's ranking on search results pages? No.

However, the quality of your coding, page load speed, and code-to-text ratio play an important, albeit implicit, role in SEO. More importantly, it affects how users experience your page.

It's a good idea to keep your code-to-text ratio in the 25–70% range to ensure that bloated — redundant code doesn't negatively impact your website.

Have you considered how the volume of code versus the amount of text on a page can affect your ranking? Find out what the evidence says.

500/503 HTTP Status Code In Robots.txt Could Remove Your Site From Google Search

According to Gary Illyes from Google, incorrect status codes that your Robots.txt file will return can lead to your site being removed from the Google index.

Google's Gary Illyes said in a statement on LinkedIn that if your server returns an HTTP status code of 500/503 for an extended period for your Robots.txt file, Google may remove your site from Google Search altogether.

This is true even if the rest of your site is accessible and does not return a 500 or 503 status code.

It's not just the 500/503 HTTP status code you need to worry about; it's also a problem if your site is experiencing these network timeout issues.

Although it is not clearly stated in the statement, the long term may mean several days.

A robots.txt file that returns a 500/503 HTTP status code for an extended period of time will remove your site from search results, even if the rest of the… | 33 comments on LinkedIn

Google: Disallowing Crawl Is Not a Super-Fast Way to Deindex a Site

John Mueller shared his suggestions when you don't want Googlebot to crawl your site.

Google's John Mueller said in a post on Reddit that disallowing Googlebot to crawl your site will not lead to immediate removal from the index. However, Mueller added that "it will take some time to unpublish the entire site" and that the homepage may not be unpublished.

So, if you want your page or pages to be removed quickly, use the site removal request in Google Search Console.

John Mueller of Google said in a post on Reddit that disallowing Googlebot to crawl your site would not immediately lead to the site being deindexed. He added that

New Google Analytics 4 Landing Page Report

If you are a GA4 user, you should automatically see the new report in the dashboards. If you don't see it, you can also add it manually.

Google Analytics 4 is becoming more and more functional for SEO work.

With the new landing page report, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will help you evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of your landing pages.

The new report compares the following metrics:

  • Average interaction time per session

  • Conversions

  • New users

  • Views

  • Total revenue

You can find the landing page report under the Engagement heading in the left navigation of your dashboard. You can add the report via the report library if there is no participation topic section.

GA4 users should see the new report in their dashboards automatically but can also add it manually.

Book Of The Week: "The Earned Life" - Marshall Goldsmith

In this book, leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith balances our hunger for success and all of Life's misfortunes.

According to Goldsmith, the key to living an "earned life" without the burden of regrets is to realize that we are turning into a new person with every breath we take. Measuring our achievements according to goals higher than our career will prevent us from taking the easy way out and writhing regretfully.

Goldsmith warns us against the "I'll be happy when…" disease and offers practical advice and exercises to help us overcome the obstacles to a fulfilling life, many of which come from a lack of imagination.

With distilled examples from Goldsmith's great career coaching, some of the world's most successful leaders, and his own experience, Earned Life is a guidebook for anyone pursuing a more excellent ideal.

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I hope you enjoyed my weekly SEO insights. Hope to see you the following Sunday in the new episode. I wish you all a great week.

Best,

Mert Erkal