November 2023

It’s been nearly a year since Google last updated its Search Quality Rater guidelines.  Unlike previous edits to the Search Quality Guidelines, which have introduced significant, new concepts (like the new E for Experience last year), the latest updates to the Search Quality Guidelines seem much more focused on user intent and needs met.  Google…

Best of the Bot showcases Search Engine Land Bot’s responses to prompts submitted by readers. The language model is based on content from Search Engine Land layered on top of ChatGPT. The editors of Search Engine Land selected this response for its usefulness and have supplemented it with additional relevant content. I am the first generative AI…

Sam Altman is returning as CEO, OpenAI announced. It is – perhaps (hopefully?) – the final chapter of a chaotic week that saw Altman ousted as CEO, two interim CEOs announced and nearly every OpenAI threaten to quit and go to Microsoft unless the entire board resigned. The announcement. OpenAI announced the news via an…

Ranking on Google, Bing and emerging search platforms now requires a strategic combination of search expertise and public relations finesse. At a time when brand reputation and visibility are critical, blending SEO with digital PR is a must.  This article gives an overview of integrating SEO into digital PR to achieve business goals, plus best…

Attracting good traffic to your website and related properties is a great achievement in SEO. Pat yourself on the back for being good enough at keyword research, metadata, UX, etc., to get those traffic numbers up! OK, celebration time is over. How much of that traffic is actually converting? SEOs don’t have the luxury of…

More frequently than not, B2B buyers are vetting sellers based not only on product specifications, pricing and other traditional factors but on the digital experiences they deliver. Failing to adapt to these rising customer expectations can be costly.  Deloitte Digital conducted a study of more than 500 B2B executives at U.S. companies and discovered that…

Crowd-sourced human quality raters have been the mainstay of the algorithmic evaluation process for search engines for decades. Still, a potential sea-change in research and production implementation could be on the horizon.  Recent groundbreaking research by Bing (with some purported commercial implementation already) and a sharp uptick in closely related information retrieval research by others,…

Google is updating the language in some child and teen ads policies next month, including: Ads & made for kids content. Ad-serving protections for children. Ad-serving protection for teens. The search engine explained that while there are no enforcement changes, it is tweaking policy language to provide more clarity and transparency for brands and advertisers….