Twas two weeks before Christmas

and across the wide web

SEOs were hitting

their desks with their heads

Google had come to update itself

Guaranteeing no downtime

For us little elves

Along with a number of other Googley things, Jim Hedger and Dave Davies talk about getting Scroogled again this year. 

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A most excellent news round-up day with Jim Hedger and Dave Davies rolling through several major stories that affect the search industry this week. The biggest story in tech is the massive fallout from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. It feels like the social media universe is reordering itself as Twitter and Facebook (Meta) face the biggest challenges in their histories.

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Today on Webcology Kristine Schachinger from Sites without Walls cohosts with Jim Hedger from Digital Always Media. They talk about The return of conferences and the State of Search Conference – last week in Dallas TX. They also dive into Barbados SEO – two weeks from now, as well as The 2022 Social Media Big Tech implosion AND MORE!

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Ash is currently the in-house enterprise and multi-national SEO manager at carsales.com.au/ Carsales.com.au, by the way, has a massive global footprint making Ash responsible for overseeing car sales sites around the world as well as Australia.

He’s worked with Suncorp, Australian National Bank, Optus (2nd largest wireless carrier in AUS), Sensis – Aussie mega info corp, and several other corporate SEO jobs. For years he was a regular columnist at APC Magazine (Aus. Personal Computer days?) He’s also regarded as one of Australia’s top search and digital marketing consultants. A veteran of the Royal Australian Air Force and one of the SEO originals, Ash Nallawalla, welcome to Webcoloy...

SEOs, buy this book for the poor soul who manages your efforts. Your work life will improve dramatically. 

https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-SEO-Manager-Managing-Agencies-ebook/dp/B0B7FW6NV3/

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Jim Hedger and Dave Davies have a fun rambling trip through Google’s most recent September Core Update and the newest Products Review Update, both of which stopped rolling out on September 26. Explaining how Google is merging its newly gained powers of perception with its foundation in link references, Jim and Dave explore the history and implications of Google's algorithm and core updates over the years.

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Jim Hedger and Dave Davies cover a lot of ground today with a long talk about the Google Helpful Algorithm Update as its rollout appears to be winding down. While it’s too early to tell exactly how Helpful is going to fall out and its effects could take months to sprawl across the web, the update is having a substantial effect on sites that were actually affected. 

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I don’t know a lot about art... Actually, that’s not true. I know a hell of a lot about art, including what I do and don’t like.

Now, I don’t know a lot about philosophy... Actually, that’s not true. I also know a hell of a lot about philosophy. Life’s weird that way.

Weirder still is the decision of the Colorado State Fair to award the first place finish in the Digital Arts category to Jason Allen for his Ai-Generated work, “Theatre D’opera Spatial”. Now, to be fair to the Fair, it (“Theatre D’opera Spatial”) is a very fetching painting mixing the television and film genres by combining the transformative properties of a friggen Stargate with the tragic and somehow erotic and stately qualities of the Royal Court of Padme Amidala.

To be sort of unfair to everyone else in the competition, the painting, like all digital arts, is more of a rendering and it was done entirely by a computer. It should be noted that Mr. Allen, who is the CEO of Denver-based video game company, Incarnate Games, has been 100% upfront about who he is and how the work was created. He did not grant himself the prize. He has been bemused by people’s reactions given he says he spent hundreds of hours experimenting with the commands given to the AI before settling on what he felt were the top3 images, one of which was Theatre D’Opera...

Eventually, there will be a category for AI-created art in most competitions but it does raise the question of the future of and ideas about art. Welcome to Webcology. We’re not sure how friendly the future will be but it continues to promise to be interesting.

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Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

·         Name: Google helpful content update

·         Launch Date: It began to rollout on August 25th

·         Rollout: It will take about two weeks to fully roll out

·         Targets: It looks at content that was created to rank well in search over help humans

·         Search Only: This currently only impacts Google Search, not Google Discover or other Google surfaces. But Google may expand this to Discover and more in the future.

·         Penalty: Google did not mention penalty but this update does seem to feel like a penalty for sites that will be hit by it

·         Sitewide: This is a sitewide algorithm, so the whole site will be impacted by this update

·         Not a core update: Many are going to say this is a core update, it is not.

·         English Language but will expand: This is only looking at English-language content globally now but likely will expand to other languages.

·         Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but Google did tell me it would be "meaningful." Also, Google said this will be felt more for online-educational materials, entertainment, shopping, and tech-related content.

·         Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's advice below

·         Refreshes: Google updates the scores constantly here but there is a timeout period, and a validation period and it can take several months to recover from this update.

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A lot of search news this week and with Dave on the road in meetings Kristine Shachinger from Sites Without Walls in Las Vegas sat in with Jim to cover it. We started talking about Google's well-named new multi-analytic tag, The Google Tag, and how to properly apply it. 

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It's reporting season and there's fallout on the floor. Shopify lays off 10% of the workforce on bad Ecomm bets while Meta(Facebook) posts its first quarterly loss in the company's history...

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