00:00 - Introduction & Overview of This Episode
00:25 - Major SEO Updates and Algorithm Changes
03:31 - AI Integration in Marketing and Its Challenges
09:38 - Social Media Trends: AI Rules and TikTok Developments
17:38 - Key Tech and Platform Updates: Google, WordPress, and More
26:22 - Conclusion and Preview of Next Week’s Topic

[00:00:00] Hello there. It's that time once again, it is Thursday. It's time for GeekSpeak. It's the end of the month. That means we are doing this world in the month of the world of marketing. My name is Phelan with Seymour digital media and I'm Craig with Original72 Creative. Awesome. And so we have more than, when I saw it all laid out, I was like, Oh, that's actually quite a bit of news that's happened this month. And pretty much every facet.

[00:00:25] So I guess. I'd start off with the quicker ones, I guess would be the best way to describe [00:00:30] it. It's just yeah, the SEO stuff. There's obviously a big algorithm update that's just just finished, which was the March one. It was a big update. There was a lot of testing. People thought that their canonical tags weren't working, which is interesting.

[00:00:44] But apparently that was just people were misreading their own internal reports or something. It's a weird one that people were reporting on, but it looks like that it's again, one that was, they're focusing on AI and finding, in this core update, they also said that they're not going to be able to do full detection [00:01:00] of AI as it's it's too ubiquitous.

[00:01:01] Now it's too, and it's too intermixed that basically they're just, if you're doing a hundred percent. They can't figure it out at all, then yeah, or they can figure it out like just easily a quick look, then I think they said that they would ban it. But partial usage is just, it's past the point of detection.

[00:01:16] So they can't do anything about it. So you're saying they can. They can somewhat detect if it's all AI, but if you used AI, like for like bits [00:01:30] and pieces, they can't tell. Basically, if you just went up to ChatGPT and said, make me a website with all the copy and all the images and it just spat it out, that wouldn't rank.

[00:01:39] But if it's got like the A reasonable percentage where there's gray area. They said that they're not going to be as punitive as they, they used to be because it's just, it's too hard. And there's too many websites now. I thought this recent algorithm update was very much on the direction of making sure they do [00:02:00] detect and derank AI.

[00:02:03] Related sites that are, that they know are doing that. So are they, have they said they're going to shift and not really worry about it as much or. My understanding is that they're still want. They're less stressed about whether you used AI and more concerned with the still the quality of the, if it's saying just like insane things and there's no citations, there's no outlet if it looks, if you come to the website, [00:02:30] it looks Like a regular website and it reads like a regular website and you did use some AI to write some of the content They're not going to fault you for that it's basically, they can't the genie's out of the bottle and so right now I think they're more just adapting to the new world like that.

[00:02:44] Yeah. Yeah, and rightly so like it's a tool to help us, do our daily tasks and writing is a big thing. If you could get a jumpstart on, writing something and then edit it to your [00:03:00] own words or revise it or whatever. They shouldn't mark that as content that is irrelevant and not rank your site because you are producing.

[00:03:13] Something that is relevant, obviously for your business, but you had help in getting that information started, right? Yeah. As long as you're using the tool correctly and you're not just trying to like spam affiliate links, then I think that I think that's a reasonable [00:03:30] standpoint to do it.

[00:03:31] Yeah. And then, I guess the other one that I noticed out in the wild was that search console has new filters. So these are useful for any e commerce people. So they have new filters for how you're like, your shopping listings are showing up and you can analyze those ones as well, because it used to be like you could do it from the query or the page, but now it's also going to be your products and your listings to see them over time.

[00:03:54] So I think that's super helpful for e commerce people to just get more insight in how Google is [00:04:00] seeing them, their e commerce SEO. And it looks like you have also for SEO something about cell phones, hosted videos showing up in results now. Yeah. Yeah. So it's they put out a new, so there's an an update to the video schema and part of the core update that we're also testing ranking when you type in how to make banana bread and it has like a bunch of YouTube videos now you could get in that carousel and, but there's like specifics one of the ones I know is it's got to be like [00:04:30] its own self hosted page, YouTube if you put a YouTube link on that page.

[00:04:36] Yeah. I don't know necessarily the value, it's just interesting that they're starting to test this. Personally, I would still be using YouTube because even if you're trying to rank your own channel, it's going to be cheaper than you hosting video because that's going to be expensive and difficult to do.

[00:04:52] And then also we've got switching between the SEO and the social media is going to be that Meta has a new [00:05:00] AI bot that they're in and it's integrating with Bing and Google search results, which is interesting because Google, or famously, infamously the Facebook and Google bot.

[00:05:10] Didn't really get along inside each other's competition. So it's interesting that they would be I wonder how they had enabled that part as well. If Google's like affirmatively allowing it, or if it's like they're just tapping into an API. And so is this the same as what they're calling Lama three?

[00:05:29] [00:05:30] Yeah, speaking and then going off on that. I don't mean to shift. I'm just, I'm not fully up to Meta's integrations with Google and Bing, but I know they also had. Lam Lama three, and I don't, didn't know if it was all the same thing or if they're separate. Separate items. Yeah. So my understanding, like Lama is the algorithm and then the interface that we're talking about is like a AI assistant.

[00:05:59] You know how you [00:06:00] talk to your chat GPT? Yeah. So what they're doing the LAMA is like a big breakthrough on the algorithm side of how to process data and, give information back and then. But yeah the chatbot that we're talking about is uses Lama to get information. So it's more just like how their interface uses data and where it derives that information from, I think is the big one that they're wanting to mention.

[00:06:22] Also with with Facebook cause I remember we were talking about this, that you're you're saying that you're noticing more and more AI [00:06:30] content visible on the platform. And yeah, and it's because that meta has relaxed AI rules around AI content generated similar to Google, the kind of the, the horses left the barn kind of situation that it's, they're not going to be able to. Undo it. They can't just put a ban. And so now they're trying to find that compromise in the middle ground where they're going to allow some of it, but not, I would suppose if you're integrating AI into your own platform, you can't limit.

[00:06:57] The use of AI to go on to your [00:07:00] platform. Yeah, those two things, it would be weird and contradictory. The like them to be like, have a little tool that's AI powered and then not allowing it on the platform. Yeah. And so I think that, that one's going to be interesting to see where that kind of goes.

[00:07:14] Know that like the image generation you were noting was, has gotten better of recent note. It still does some weird things where, you know you ask for it to take out the chopsticks and it adds more chopsticks to the image. But there's still, it is getting better with doing some drawings.

[00:07:29] It's [00:07:30] still yeah, almost spell. I really wish I had more time to play around with all of this stuff. I just. I just don't have the time to, test it all and play with it and have some fun between, all of the work that I have to do, but yeah, it all sounds fun. I should actually look a little bit closer at.

[00:07:52] At Facebook and what they've got going on for the AI now, just to see what they're doing. [00:08:00] Yeah. I for my own sake, I find it. The only part that's annoying is like all of these companies having their own, like competing, like chatbot widgets that like, I'd have to go try them and see if I like it and I have to like, get it's a lot of, for me, it's a lot of lead up time because I'm just like I'm just going to use chat.

[00:08:15] You can see, cause I've already done most of my work with it. So like, why would I go to a new one? That's I'm going to have to like. Train it and how I want responses and figure out how it gives me responses. So I find it a little bit annoying that everyone's, it's like everyone having their own streaming platform, like I'm not.[00:08:30]

[00:08:30] I'm not going to do that. I just want one. I know it's, that would also be bad is to just have one. Yeah. The comparison that's coming to my mind right now is the, that these are the AI wars, like we had for browser wars when, the web first started becoming super popular. And.

[00:08:52] Building websites for me in the early 2000s, you needed to build put in [00:09:00] code differently for each of the browsers so that websites displayed properly and because all of these browsers were fighting for, to add functionality and nobody did it consistently with the, HTML, CSS standards following any of those, web standards, early days, and I feel like AI is similarly going through a war between everybody who's trying to do AI related [00:09:30] stuff and put out these tools and, which one do you use what talks to what it just reminds me of those early days of browser wars.

[00:09:38] Oh yeah. No the five or let the lamp stack wars when there was like Drupal, WordPress, and then who's going to come out on top. Same for what's that? The jQuery cause jQuery had like a bunch of competition when it first came out and then they just ended up winning because it, yeah, it like splits out, everyone kind of finds one and then that one just takes over and it has market dominance that are just, why can't we just [00:10:00] all get along at the beginning?

[00:10:02] Yeah, and of course the person selling shovels in this gold rush is of course, NVIDIA, who's making like an absolute killing selling all of these GPUs to everyone to process all this stuff they've And NVIDIA has been doing well for a couple of years now. Yeah, they they're doing okay.

[00:10:19] Chip manufacturing is definitely the way to go if you can do it. It's and yeah, it's it'll be interesting to see how it does end up. Yeah. If there's consolidation, because they all have big backings [00:10:30] that. Chat GPT is backed by Microsoft and so then you still have Google meta having their own Amazon has their own, but it's like internal cause there's, it's all about like robots, right?

[00:10:42] Like they want to do a lot of though, funny enough, did you, I didn't put this in the notes, but did you hear what happened with the Amazon go store? That store that you could go in and just take something and there's no till. Oh, no, I didn't hear anything about. They quietly shelved the entire project because it turns out while they may not have been hiring [00:11:00] people in the States to work the stores, they had thousands of people in India serve going through the video footage and attributing there was no AI.

[00:11:09] It was just a guy, it's basically a mechanical Turk, like it was, it looked like a bunch of fancy parts, but it was just a bunch of people. Somewhere else doing all the work. And so once they had to admit that part of the project collapsed on itself. And so they so yeah, the great replacement of us by AI bots.

[00:11:27] I don't think we have to worry about just the second. [00:11:30] Moving on from Meta's AI stuff and their, the popularity or rise of their large language model that I heard OpenAI did release some new features in the past week I believe to corporate customers. I wish I, Took a look at the actual article, but I did see something about how, because [00:12:00] Facebook or met us stuff was gaining popularity.

[00:12:04] They did they did release some new things within opening eyes offerings. Ah, okay. All right. I hadn't seen anything when I'd logged in, but yeah, I wouldn't be surprised in the last bit that they, if they had done something like that. Just looking to see do we have any other AI stuff.

[00:12:24] I don't I think we do, but I know the AI stuff. Yeah, it's the Oh, [00:12:30] Jim and I also got released on the workspace as well. Like I think outside of the U S cause now I can use it on my own workspace. It's rather expensive. So I'm like, because they charge you per user and I was like, no, I'm not paying that much for if it's going to be, Oh, really?

[00:12:47] Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's a per user model. Yeah. And it's, it was like 30 bucks per head, which, I have six. Per month? In my, yeah, per month. [00:13:00] So I was like, that's a lot of money to go out the door for that. So yeah, I was not very I was not jumping, chomping at the bit. Cause I kept saying Oh, get a free trial.

[00:13:12] And every time I tried to do the trial, they're just like, Hey, put in your credit card details. And I was like, that's not how a trial works. You need to like, let me know that it's going to be a trial period. And so yeah, it was yeah not my favorite there. But. On the note of Google products, we also have the, that the YouTube's now opening up [00:13:30] like an affiliate hub.

[00:13:30] So I guess it's like a marketplace for people that want to. It's you want to promote a product and get paid affiliate. It's just a good way for just do a marketplace for people that, people who want to do affiliates and people who have affiliate links. I think it's a good matchup and it makes a lot of sense for YouTube, honestly.

[00:13:47] Yeah. I can see a lot of people using affiliate hub to try to promote and get exposure on other [00:14:00] people's popularity and. Just refreshing content or trying to sell things on, yeah on other people's videos. I would say, I think it's a good one as well for like small channels that are just getting started and wouldn't necessarily be able to do like an affiliate link, like right off the get go, but it's a good way to pair the two, two together that if you do need some, it's a good way to make some extra money, especially if you're message of your channel lines up with the product that you're selling.

[00:14:26] You're doing the affiliate link for then I think that's a good combination [00:14:30] there.

[00:14:30] So I guess also we've gotta talk about the bit of the elephant in the room for social media, which is the that the US is sign. The TikTok ban was signed into law yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday. So it's it's already going to be challenged in the courts Like it's I don't think it and they've also The sale doesn't have they changed it from 90 days to 360 days.

[00:14:56] So Yeah, so it's going to be a year from [00:15:00] now, which is going to be after the elections and all that stuff. So It won't be like, I think they're just trying to kick the can down the road to make it not a life issue. And so I think that it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out. Uh, it's hard to say one way or the other because there's isn't really a, like a background you can map this to.

[00:15:17] Like it's a bit unprecedented to have a company like this to go through a situation like this. So I'm interested to see how it's going to shake out in the end. Yeah they've said they're going to fight it. And the CEO [00:15:30] himself posted a TikTok or maybe he posted a TikTok saying they were going to fight it and.

[00:15:36] I had read somewhere else something about if they were forced to they were going to sell it, but without the algorithm, which they feel is what makes TikTok, besides the so yeah, it'll be interesting over the next year to see see how that goes personally. I've been thinking about it in we [00:16:00] have so much social media out there.

[00:16:01] I know tick tock because of its algorithm is a fun place to, to be and see stuff, but I'm not going to miss tick tock if it goes away. I'll just put it that way because Instagram there's. Facebook, there's YouTube, it's there's no shortage of places to for creators to put their videos and for people to follow them Yeah, [00:16:30] I'd agree that it's not Oh, sorry to me to cut you off there.

[00:16:34] No, I just so to wrap up my thought is just so You know That's the reason why if for some reason tick tock was sold or went away like I really don't think I'm gonna miss it although that's gonna There are tons of people who do make a good living with the followers that they've gained on that platform.

[00:16:56] So it's gonna hurt a lot of people [00:17:00] who, you know, who have that on the platform. But for me personally I don't use it for anything other than just scrolling when I'm not working. And I'll just do that on Instagram. I think it'll be interesting because I just saw a poll this morning of 18 to 24 year olds majority of their news comes from TikTok, so it's interesting to see how that will shake out with them.

[00:17:25] I don't have any yeah, like you said, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, but [00:17:30] I'm happy for them to go to the courts and fight it out as Duke it out with them because I think this is a bit unprecedented to have a company get banned

[00:17:38] Yeah, just thinking of the mechanics how you would actually do that it's I'm just like would you like IP block them or like how would you like? yeah, so just

[00:17:49] Still on TikTok they also did release a feature. I don't know if it's worldwide release or just to some people, but [00:18:00] you can do text based posts now which is cool. Interesting. Yeah I'd say they're trying to take over that Twitter market. Yeah, I don't know if Twitter maybe some Twitter I was thinking of it more, from a an Instagram and oh, yeah.

[00:18:18] Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, let's see thing but yeah, I don't know. I just know that this was something that was I had seen. You Recently that they're now [00:18:30] rolling out a text based post option on the platform what it is exactly. I don't know if it accompanies a video or imagery at all, or if it is strictly just text.

[00:18:42] Yeah, I have to, yeah, if it's strictly text and yeah, definitely. Yeah. When you said Instagram, I realized that it's not the Twitter. It's much more of the Instagram post of, text on screen. kind of situation. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they integrate that because it is, [00:19:00] it's not really one I associate really with like text based reading.

[00:19:04] They've always been just video based and, that's always been their bread and butter. So introducing the text, I don't know what they're thinking there was were people just wanting to be able to because everybody was on this platform, be able to just like, spit something out in text and be able to post it on their platform.

[00:19:27] Who knows? Yeah, it's hard to say. And [00:19:30] also that they do still take stuff from their, the parent company, the Chinese ByteDance. They do like some of the stuff, like the e commerce one was, it was really popular with TikTok in China before it was ever even integrated here. And so I think that there's other, there's some aspects of like it having its own parent company that maybe they had a lot of success.

[00:19:51] So they've tested it out and figured out a way to implement because you Can collect a lot of data from a billion people using an app in China, and then try [00:20:00] to retrofit some of that stuff for TikTok over here. Yeah. I think we're done with social and AI, and maybe we just jump back onto search because we didn't mention about Google's shift from conversions to key events.

[00:20:17] And I know you probably have maybe a couple of things to mention about that. Yes, it's very annoying and I wish they had telegraphed it. It's just part of my larger change, just a wording change. So [00:20:30] there's more behind this, right? As far as I can tell, no yeah, cause basically conversions were just like, it has a special, it's an event that has a special attribute saying, is this a conversion true?

[00:20:42] And then, because if you have those, then what it does is it enables you to do conversion paths. So it's oh, this person before they converted, they like saw Facebook posts and they went to my website, then they saw like my Google ad and then they converted through. So really the, that's the core reason why you want to have these set up and why it [00:21:00] matters compared to, and I get it is a bit of a naming convention.

[00:21:03] It's just part of my larger grievance with Google is that they do a lot of changes to the platform, but they don't really do a good job of telegraphing or letting people know. And I remember you saying irrelevant stuff, they like will. Oh, their new login screen. They like, yeah, they like let me know that, Ooh, the login screen's changing.

[00:21:24] And then it was like, just a matter of two buttons were next to each other, nothing really else was on the page. It was [00:21:30] barely like worth of time to rewrite that code. There's moments like that where I'm just wondering, is this the best use of your resources? I was helping a customer yesterday with a bunch of their Google Google services, and both of us, by the end of our conversations and in dealing with this we're saying, we really hate Google.

[00:21:54] They make things so hard. Oh yeah. There's a bunch of stuff that they've just done. [00:22:00] Made worse and they just didn't like the improvements that they thought they made were not there like redoing the Google ads platform so it's like this Uncanny Valley where you it's similar to what how the old one was, but everything's a little bit off So you're like, how do I find where to do the policy manager?

[00:22:19] And then you're looking like a fool in front of your client when you're like, oh, I'm cool Trying to click around to find something, and it's I swear I know how to do this, they've just changed the platform on me. Yeah, so that, that part could be annoying. Yeah, [00:22:30] on to web stuff. We got three minutes to get through our web stuff.

[00:22:35] No WordPress 6. 5 was released I didn't see anything major with anybody upgrading however either In a subsequent release after they're at 6. 5. 2 [00:23:00] because there was a XSS vulnerability that was discovered and patched. And I know you mentioned, I didn't hear about this one, but one of the more popular page builders, Beaver Builder, We had one as well that you had seen.

[00:23:18] Yeah. Yeah. I saw the news on yeah, having two of those. They're coming on all the time. Security web security is always like a constant game of cat and mouse where you're trying to find every little vulnerability and Yeah, these things [00:23:30] happen and that's why we, it's good that the big ones get these because they can fix it.

[00:23:34] They have the resources to go and fix these issues and fix them relatively quickly. So just make sure you keep your stuff up to date folks. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And to finish off web stuff There were two acquisitions or purchases by WordPress of some interesting companies. One is a messaging app called beeper.

[00:23:58] And the other one is an all in [00:24:00] one messaging app called texts. com. So yeah, speculation on what WordPress has behind those acquisitions and what that could mean for something coming to WordPress. I. I haven't really thought about it too much, but it could be interesting with with those two acquisitions, what potentially might be coming to WordPress soon.

[00:24:25] Yeah, my gut's telling me that it's probably [00:24:30] SMS and multi channel messaging for especially WooCommerce. It'd probably be my guess. Yeah. Because that's the one that makes sense of I personally don't like it, but I know that it's very popular in the States to have texting for like updates about Or your packages or your product your order has been processed or, Yeah.

[00:24:51] And then later on, like you do text messages of Hey, this mother's day, don't forget to get a blah, blah, blah, click here. And then it like takes them to the website. [00:25:00] I don't like that functionality personally, but you know what the other people do. And I don't mind it for certain things. Because I find the text much less annoying than an email.

[00:25:17] Yeah I'm more of the opposite. So it's just more, it's personal preference, really. That's what it boils down to. And but yeah, I think that. Yeah, I think we're both at the same conclusion that it's got to be WooCommerce SMS [00:25:30] functionality and it makes sense that they would be marketing related stuff to add.

[00:25:35] And the chat stuff, maybe they'll try to incorporate their own chat into WordPress as opposed to having to use some chats are like to have the, would you like to talk to someone now thing, have that, have a feature like that directly built in with WordPress. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's [00:26:00] definitely, um, very conceivable in the future.

[00:26:03] But I guess with all of that being said, we are out of time. And if you have any other news or anything, feel free to post in the comments. We're happy to respond. You could join us over at cyberpunk geeks, marketing mixer where we continue this conversation and we'll also have a geek speak next week.

[00:26:22] Do you know the top? Yeah, it looks like Pip and Rena are going to be back and they're going to be chatting about Instagram and [00:26:30] Facebook strategies for 2024. Awesome. And that sounds, yeah, that sounds good. We'll be glad to have the ladies come back. But yeah, all that being said my name's Phelan. And I'm Greg. Thanks for joining us.