We’re now in the third week of April, oh how fast time passes, and still no end in sight for the March Core update. It’s now 45 days since it began its roll-out. In the past week, there have been reports of huge volatilities and sites that were affected in last year’s helpful content update, tanking further. How are your sites doing so far? We can only wait for the end before we can start assessing and making changes, and hopefully, start recovering. Here are this week’s notable SEO news.
Google has announced that they have made improvements to Search Console’s user and permission management, incorporating capabilities that are related to unused ownership tokens management. Tokens are the codes used for website ownership verification in Search Console, Merchant Center, and other Google products. There have been cases when they were accidentally left behind after previous owners have moved on from their site.
In this improvement, it will reflect the actual state of unused ownership tokens. Users will now be able to verify whether an unused token has been removed from the site. This can be accessed in the users and permissions interface.
As a best practice when removing a previously verified owner, make sure that all verification tokens for that user have been removed. The update allows the verification of the removal of unused tokens so that removed owners cannot regain access of the property.
Google repeatedly reminds us to generate content not for search engines but for its users and that high-quality, authoritative, helpful, human-generated content is what it seeks to reward.
Last year, Verge has already gamed Google for “Best Printer 2023”, using content produced by ChatGPT. It outranked more in-depth, well-researched, and more helpful content written by human publications like the New York Times.
This year, they did it again with “Best Printer 2024” and this time, with the help of Google Gemini in producing the majority of the article.
A search for “Best Printer 2024” shows that it is currently ranking #2 for the query.
John Mueller was asked about it and he responded by saying “People seem to really enjoy it.”
The influx of users visiting the page seems to also be giving it a boost towards ranking, plus, let’s not forget that though it is not as authoritative as the other legitimate ranking articles, the Verge can still be considered an authoritative source. Check out the Verge article here.
The search engine Brave joins the generative AI bandwagon with its release of “Answer with AI” feature. This feature produces AI-generated answers that are synthesized from multiple sources. For informational, question-like queries, the feature will be automatically generated. For other query types such as navigational, commercial, transactional, there is an option to click on the “Answer with AI button.
The feature appears above the organic search results and below the answers would be a section called “Context” which lists down the sources it used to generate the answers.
It seems to not be perfect though. Danny Goodwin of Search Engine Land tested the feature and it seems like it ended up merging two different people in its answer (Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land and Danny Goodwin the baseball player)
It is still best to fact check what it generates, same as all other generative AI search features.
Answer with AI is available on all platforms – desktop and mobile, for all searches in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
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