In a recent episode of the “Search Off the Record” podcast, the topic of “Is SEO obsolete” was discussed, and Gary Illyes was optimistic about it.
He believes that the statement “SEO is dead” has been discussed since 2001, but in fact SEO still exists today.
RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which adds a step before the original large language model (LLM) generates text: retrieving information from an external specific knowledge base. For example, AI customer service will first call the company’s policy documents through RAG, and then generate the corresponding answer.
John Mueller also talked about the topic of RAG.
John Mueller said that although the SEO process is still important in the generative application of artificial intelligence, search engine optimization still needs to focus on crawling, indexing and ranking.
Because the website still needs to be crawled, retrieved and included in the ranking system by artificial intelligence, but this ranking produces integrated content rather than original web links.
Artificial intelligence has profoundly changed search engine optimization (SEO) in three aspects:
- The traditional natural search results page (that is, the previous 10 blue links) is no longer applicable.
- Users query through daily conversations, which changes the way the relevance algorithm works in the past. Many previous SEO contents were created based on keyword query patterns.
- Rapidly iterating AI ranking algorithms will cause large fluctuations in website traffic (SEO stability becomes more difficult due to the rapid update of AI algorithms and unclear signals).
Another very important point is that AI search will directly display answers, and the number of user clicks on links will decrease, resulting in a decrease in overall SEO traffic.
💬 The arrival of the AI era is an irreversible trend. As an SEO practitioner, are you ready for change? What adjustments will you make? Welcome to share your thoughts in the comments 🌹
[Algorithm] December web spam update has been completed.
The December 2024 web spam update was released on December 26. Here are the details:
- Name: Google’s December 2024 Web Spam Update
- Launch date: December 19, 2024.
- Completion date: December 26, 2024
- Target: Target some sites that violate Google’s search spam policy.
- Non-target: This update is not intended to target link spam, nor does it involve abuse of site reputation policies and other related policies.
- Penalties: Penalties are imposed on some spam techniques that violate Google’s spam policy.
- Coverage: This is a global update that affects all regions and languages.
- Impact: Google did not disclose how many queries or searches were affected by this update.
- Recovery: If you are affected, Google recommends that you check its spam policy to ensure that your site is in compliance.
- Update: Google announced that such web spam updates will be carried out regularly, and the recovery process may take several months.
【Artificial Intelligence】Google and Bing show AI-generated results for best-in-class keywords.
Both Google and Bing are trying to present AI-aggregated lists in “Best of Class Search” (as shown below), which are extracted from information on multiple web pages rather than directly citing a list from a specific web page.
