Welcome to another insightful week with The SEOs Diners Club newsletter. Leveraging over a decade of SEO expertise, I aim to distill the week's most critical developments into a concise read that won't take more than ten minutes of your time. Let's dive into the insights that matter.

1️⃣ 7 Key 2024 Search Trends To Watch

These transformative changes will likely significantly impact the SEO world in 2024.

In recent weeks, I have been focusing on the developments in 2024. We are at a critical turning point. First, I am preparing myself, and then you, for this new era.

Here are 7 main trends and 3 priorities that SEO professionals should follow in 2024:

1.SERP and Visual Optimization: Rich results will continue to evolve in Google SGE and SERPs. It's vital to publish fast-loading, relevant, helpful, and unique content.

2. Helpful Content and Content Intelligence: A solid content strategy will be essential in 2024. Evaluating content performance, creating personalized content, and optimizing various types of helpful content will be at the forefront.

3.Interaction and Experience: User interactions and experience will influence Google's search results. Search engines will reward expert-level content that meets and engages searchers' needs.

4.Personalized Experience: Google states that searches will become significantly personalized in 10 years. This will deliver a personalized search experience with a new “Follow” button to show users more information in search results.

5.Multi-Channel Approach: SERPs will become increasingly competitive. It will be necessary to optimize the customer journey across various channels and content types.

6.Local Strategy: If your brand has a local presence, adding localized experiences will help build expertise, engagement, and traffic.

7. Brand Mentions and Social Proof: LLMs (Large Language Models) are trained to create results from various sources. It will be essential to understand what questions customers are looking for answers to and to create target-oriented strategies by determining where they can access this information.

Here are 3 priorities that will make you stand out in 2024:

1. Technical Infrastructure Providing Integrated and Solid Experience: A solid technical infrastructure is mandatory for 2024. Elements such as data-centric, component-based architecture and fast server response (CDN) will be part of this infrastructure.

2.Adopting New Metrics: Traffic may decrease as AI provides answers in search results. Options such as creating customers by sharing a traffic increase graph from the Search Console as before may disappear. Organic results will become more fragmented and pushed to the bottom of the page. It will be necessary to adopt new measures of success.

3.AI-Powered Employee and Organization Alignment: Learning to apply artificial intelligence in your daily life will make you more efficient and successful in creating content drafts and producing images and summaries.

2️⃣ Change in Google's Approach Towards Artificial Intelligence Content

An in-depth look at the proliferation of AI-generated content, its impact on search quality, and the future of fighting spam.

It is safe to say that Google's view of content produced with artificial intelligence has evolved in 2023. They went from the point where it was never acceptable to the point where it is okay for us as long as it is helpful and of high quality for people.

Although Google says that just because the content is produced by artificial intelligence does not make it inadequate or of poor quality, many brands still need to check whether the content is produced by artificial intelligence with monitoring tools.

What makes content quality in Google's eyes is not whether it is produced by artificial intelligence or humans; it must be based on facts, objective, and published after being checked by experts in their field.

For some reason, those who argue that artificial intelligence can make mistakes in content production and make comments that exceed its purpose by handling the subject differently forget this: Human editors aren't perfect either. They also can talk nonsense about things they don't know about.

For this reason, rather than reducing the issue to an artificial intelligence vs human debate, it would be helpful to address the dimension of quality content vs poor quality content. Google is doing this now. Don't believe urban legends.

Here are the crucial points that SEO professionals should pay attention to in 2024:

• The proliferation of AI-generated content makes it harder for Google to detect spam. Google appears to be improving its ability to identify AI-generated content as poor quality. During this process, Google's approach to AI-generated content has evolved to "focus on the quality of the content rather than how the content is produced."

• Google states that its search engine only indexes the visible part of the internet and shows it in search results. Google only indexes 4% of the documents it encounters during web crawling and allegedly protects searchers from spam on 99% of query clicks.

• It is known that Google relies on user interactions to determine content quality. Google engineer Paul Haahr notes that Google looks for changes in click patterns in the SERPs and that user data is more complex than expected.

• Google's long-term plan is to rely more on machine learning systems like BERT and MUM. These systems allow Google to evaluate content quality more quickly and accurately and quickly identify and de-rank SPAM content.

In light of this information, focusing on the quality of content produced with artificial intelligence and adapting to Google's ever-changing algorithms when developing your SEO strategies is essential. Using artificial intelligence content correctly can produce high-quality and valuable content without being perceived as SPAM.

3️⃣ Google Explained How It Handles a Non-Standard Meta Tag

Google's Martin Splitt talked about how Googlebot reacts to a non-standard meta tag.

The question was about a meta tag in the title section, "prerender-status-code, " which was returning a “404” error. This status indicates that the requested page could not be found.

Splitt notes that Googlebot currently ignores this situation, but to prevent soft 404s (soft-404s) in single page applications, the “<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>” tag can be added, or the server responds with a 404 status code. He stated that it might be better to redirect to a page he provided.

The “prerender-status-code” meta tag is unofficial and not documented by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.org).

Such exceptional or non-standard meta tags are not in the official W3C HTML specifications. Some are browser-specific or created for specific purposes. Therefore, it may not be supported by different browsers or search engines, and its behavior may not be consistent across different browsers.

Splitt's explanation of the prerender-status-code meta tag indicates that Google does not support many non-standard meta tags. He also emphasizes that not every meta tag is part of the official HTML standards; they are unofficial meta tags. More information about meta tags that Google supports can be found on Google's support page, which was last updated on December 1, 2023.

This information is vital for SEO professionals because knowing which meta tags Google supports and which it ignores can directly impact how websites are perceived and indexed by search engines.

When using non-standard meta tags, understanding how these tags are processed by Googlebot can be critical to optimizing the SEO performance of sites. Therefore, web developers and SEO experts should consider such technical details and follow current SEO practices when designing their sites.

4️⃣ Could Brand Mentions Be the Future of Backlinks?

Learn why Google's emphasis on entities makes brand visibility crucial to organic growth and how digital PR shapes the future of SEO.

There is a lot of talk that mentioning brands can replace backlinks. This week, Search Engine Land published an article on this topic. Inspired by my experience and this article, I interpreted it for you.

Here are the details of this issue, which is vital for the SEO world:

• Google's emphasis on entities makes brand visibility critical for organic growth. About a decade ago, Rand Fishkin talked about brand mentions. This dovetails with the concept of explicit links and implied links that Google introduced in its “Panda patent”.

• While SEO professionals have long focused on link building (buying backlinks), Google understands the trend of buying and selling links. Therefore, it makes more sense in the SEO world to ignore marketing as a tool and focus on brand building rather than relying only on links.

• SEO in the age of AI becomes even more complex with Google's Knowledge Panel and large language models (LLMs) trained from text data of popular websites. That's why texts and the resulting assets, namely brands, are becoming increasingly important.

• One vital advice for marketers is to let more people know you exist. This can position you as the guide in people's lives while building connections and brand mentions.

• Google prefers content from which it can easily extract information and clearly understand what you do and what you specialize in. This increases the power of brand mentions because you're giving Google clear signals about you and your area of ​​expertise.

• Digital PR increases organic search visibility and brand credibility by combining traditional PR and content marketing tactics with SEO strategy. Brand comes first, then links and mentions drive organic search.

Google gives preference to brands, media outlets, and large publishing sites. Digital PR ensures media coverage of these features. You'll want to get more brand mentions in the coming years. This will help you get links and a higher rate of brand mentions.

In light of this information, when developing your SEO strategies, focusing on brand building and mentions of your brand, not on links, will increase your organic growth and visibility in search engines.

5️⃣Google: In Some Cases, Bot Protection Services May Accidentally Issue Noindex Directives

Google's John Mueller noted that sometimes bot protection services mistakenly send noindex directives to Google and other search engines.

Google's John Mueller explained that sometimes bot protection services mistakenly send noindex directives to Google and other search engines.

This may cause sites to be invisible to search engines. Mueller recommends using 503 server status codes for things like bot protection.

In the case mentioned in the article published on Seroundtable.com, the link can be found above; the noindex problem was not caused by bot protection but by the rendering process performed by NextJS on the client side. This information is essential for SEO experts because it can affect the correct indexing and display of the site.

6️⃣ Book Of The Week: “Steve Jobs” - Walter Isaacson

The book written by Walter Isaacson is an inspiring work that describes the innovative spirit and success journey of Apple's founder, Steve Jobs.

This last week of the year, I would like to recommend you the book "Steve Jobs" written by Walter Isaacson. This work tells the life story of Steve Jobs, a leader who revolutionized the world of technology and innovation.

By drawing inspiration from Jobs' creative mindset and the challenges he faced, you can discover how to make your SEO and digital marketing strategies more innovative.

The book delves into Jobs' leadership style and Apple's success story. This is an excellent resource for understanding brand-building processes, implementing innovative ideas, and how to overcome obstacles.

It also shows the importance of digital trends and how to adapt to them. Whether you are a technology enthusiast or a professional who wants to make a difference in the digital world, this book will be a source of valuable information and inspiration for you.

The book “Steve Jobs” is a biography and a guide emphasizing the importance of innovative thinking and pushing boundaries. As you read this book, you will gain new ideas for being more creative in your work and projects. I recommend you read it!

I hope you enjoyed this week's SEOs Diners Club.

See you next week for a new episode of SEOs Diners Club full of further information, tactics, and strategies...

Have a great week and goodbye!

Best,

Mert Erkal

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