How big of a headache are site migrations?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Guess we're pushing out some grueling new insights around what's happened in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein head of SEO branding here at Wix, the amazing, the fabulous, the incredible, I was going to say edible, but that doesn't make any sense. Our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello. SEO internet people. Welcome to episode 21. We're about to double down on these SEO insights.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's Blackjack. It's our Blackjack episode.

Crystal Carter:

It's right. That's what's up. We're going to put two on the river or double down. I can't... I've forgotten about Blackjack.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. If I tell you, I've been to a casino one time. My wife, 15 years ago, we walked in, we played a couple of games. We said, "This is boring." And we bounced the hell out of there.

Crystal Carter:

I got married in Las Vegas. I spend a lot of time.

Mordy Oberstein:

On purpose?

Crystal Carter:

My family on purpose. Las Vegas. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, you meant to get married?

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay cool. I was checking.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. You know Caesars Palace?

Mordy Oberstein:

Sure, I've heard of it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I got married across the street from there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Across the street. It's good set up.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you. So, yeah, they demolished it. It was a dive, but we had a great wedding. Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can easily set up 301 redirects with our redirect managers. Set single redirects, group redirects when the URL follow the same logic like they live in the same folder, upload bulk redirects, or do nothing as we implement redirect automatically and aesthetic product and event pages. And we're talking about redirects because guess what we're talking about today? Site migrations. Oh, the word itself made me gas and choke. 'Cause you're going to wreck the URLs with the site migration.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, good.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's where things get into problems.

Crystal Carter:

You weren't there, man. You weren't there.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right. Today's show is about the root canal and lobotomy of SEO site migrations. We'll dive into migrations and why do so many people get them wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen? What's the worst thing that can happen? Why are SEO so freaked out about site migrations? The ever wonderful Miracle Inameti stops by to talk about when SEOs should become involved in the site migration process. Also, have a bit of fun around migrations and the people also ask box. And of course, we have your ever so snappy SEO news and who you should be following on social. For more SEO awesomeness episode number 21 of the SERP's Up podcast is migrating your way.

Get it. That was a bad one.

Crystal Carter:

That's right.

Mordy Oberstein:

That was a bad... I tried. That was a bad one. I was thinking of that or it's an SEO migraine-tion, get it because it's a migraine and migrate at the same time.

Crystal Carter:

Oh man. Wow. okay

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. How's that? Not good? Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

All right, so moving on.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're migrating past that and to the next thing.

Crystal Carter:

We're going to shift, we're going to do a 301 from that. No, kidding. Okay. So just so we're all on the same page, we are going to talk a little bit about what a site migration is. On the Wix SEO Learning Hub, there's a fantastic article from Mr. Chris Green where he explains the fundamentals of site migrations and he explains that site migration is a term that SEOs use quite often. But being familiar with the different types of elements that make up a site migration can really help you to make the process easier. He talks about a few common site migration scenarios. One is changing domain names, which is essentially where you change your name from, say, redshoes.com to maybe even redshoes.co.uk or the red shoes or bestredshoes.com. So that's where you change your domain name. There's also migrating through hosting providers, which is something that people don't very often think about, but that's one that he thinks about as well.

And then he considers that where your website's hosted one company and then maybe moving hosting to another company. And sometimes going into the ins and outs of that can be quite complicated because sometimes with hosting, people don't remember where the hosting is and all of that sort of thing. Also, you can think about changing the content management system. So for instance, if you're keeping the same domain name but you're changing from maybe one CMS to another CMS, then that might be something that you want to think about with regards to... Well, it is absolutely something you need to think about with regards to migrations. I would also add to this, sometimes changing the design of your website can be migration. So there's a few SEOs that I've heard talk about migrations and they're like, "It can have it, big deal." And sometimes people don't think about this, but I've had it where clients were like, "Oh yeah, we're just changing the homepage," or, "We're just changing this big money page. We're changing around the design of it."

And I'm like, "We need to check that." And they say, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, if you have the design of a page and you have a certain number of links that are coming from that, you have certain elements that are on that page that if you change that page, then we need to figure out what we're going to do with all of that link equity as we're spreading it out across the rest of the page. And that is something that we need to think about as well." So we can also think about URL changes overall. Now, when you're talking about your migration, Google sometimes call this a site move. So they have a page on their documentation saying, "What is a site move?" And in that they talk about site moves without URL changes and they talk about site moves with URL changes.

And all of these things are considered migrations. And essentially what you want to think about when you have a migration is making sure that Google can find the new content and that Google can find the old content as well, so that if you have old content, that's really important that they can find it, that there's links to it. And you also need to think about how it impacts your wider digital footprint. So Mordy mentioned 301 redirects. 301 redirects are really useful for what happens within your site, but they're also really useful for what happens with the links that you have out there on the web still coming into your site. So for instance, let's say you changed your blog format.

So let's say it used to be example.com/post, and then you change it to example.com/article for instance, you need to think about that because you'll have old links to the old URL format and those will impact how your site is indexed, how your site is performing, and how it all works out. So there's a lot of ins and outs. There's a lot of different parts of a migration that you should think about. They should not be taken lightly at all. And essentially anything that you're changing that's a structural change or even a design change that impacts your link structure should be considered a migration. And sometimes there's big, big migration. Sometimes it's a smaller migration, but you still should think about it in that way.

Mordy Oberstein:

I think you answered all three of the questions we mentioned in the intro in one breath. What was it? Why did so many people get cyber migrations wrong? What's the worst thing that can happen and why are we all freaked out about them? And it's because there's so many things to think about. And then you think about the implications of those. I've had a case one time where it's like they forgot like, "Oh wait, the canonicals that..." We actually use the old website for the canonical. We don't know why we did that, but we did. And now things are totally messed up and we don't want even thought about that. 'Cause you're not thinking about that. Okay, the URL, I got the old URL, I got the new URL, I got this. But when you're transferring things over and you're copying and pasting certain things, you end up copying and pasting the canonicals over and now doesn't make any sense.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Absolutely. And there can be other things underneath that. So sometimes it might be that you have old menu configurations in the back end of the website. You copied and pasted those over and there's a 404. I've seen that before where people are like, "Why have we got this 404?" And it's like, because it's in the menu that we migrated over from the other thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what it's like? It's like when you're family, you stick all the dirty laundry, sweep it under the carpet for a long, long time and then a family event happens. And all those things, the dysfunction that you swept under the carpet for years, all of a sudden it comes out at one time and it's complete chaos and dysfunction. That's a site migration.

Crystal Carter:

I think that there's so many different moving parts. So there's the stuff with all the DNS stuff and making sure that all of that stuff is working well. There's also the migrations from before. So sometimes if somebody did a bad migration before you then that can haunt you when you try to do the next migration, for instance. So it can be very, very tricky. And then sometimes it can feel a little bit like... There's that magic trick where there's a fully set table and somebody tries to remove the tablecloth from the table. And what you want to do is essentially make sure that everything that you need stays there, but it can also be a really, really good time to clean house. So you talked about sweeping things under the carpet and migration can be a really good time to be like, "We don't need this URL, we don't need that one, we don't need this, we don't need that, we don't need that."

And to clear those things out and that can be a really good time to do that as well. And I think also with migrations, it's very important that someone has the reins, that there is someone who is in charge of it. And this is normally an SEO and it should be an SEO. There's somebody who's in charge of making sure that holistically it works. So I've had it before where a client migrated a site to a new setup and the client, they had a third party subduing without documentation and they decided to copy all of those things and put them on the blog of the new site. And you're making a face here like, "Oh my gosh." But they did not cut off the old help doc. So instead we had a whole another set of content that was competing, which Google had already indexed the other site and then they added it onto the new site.

And the way that it had been configured was super complicated and it was very, very difficult to unpick all of these different pages that had been added into and with all of the different URLs and stuff. So it can be very, very tricky. And one of the things we have built into Wix, because it's such a pain in the box, one of the things we have built into Wix is sometimes you have to do some of the big folder updates via DHT access file for instance. But within Wix for instance, you can go into this bulk URL management tool and you can set up so that any URL that starts with a certain prefix will be redirected to a certain thing.

So for instance, in the post article example, if you had all of your blogs under post, you can set up bulk redirect within the tool that's within the CMS. You can set a bulk redirect that says any URL that starts with... That has the prefixed post should be redirected to this one in this framework. And you can set it up so it's in the same way that you would with an HD access file. And it makes it a lot easier to manage those things in bulk.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I'm going to catch the error. So that's also good. But I want to go back to your point about the tablecloth where you pull a tablecloth off and then you're hoping everything stays the same. I think one of the reasons why I think we're freaked out about site migration and why they're pain in the neck is that we don't properly set expectations. 'Cause when you pull that table cloth out, it's inevitable that something's going to shift around a little bit and it's not going to be a 100% perfect. I think Google has to come and say like, "Yep, if you're going to migrate over, expect there to be some traffic loss for some time." Those are the things that are just going to happen and there's going to be a problem, there's going to be things you have to fix.

I mean, it could be, by the way, things that you have to fix that are not really even on the SEO side. For example, I saw they moved over, I don't remember how the heck they ended up like this, but all of their blog posts, the first paragraph, somehow they coded it automatically that the text was in white and you couldn't read it. You got to the page and you couldn't read it. Now Google could read it great, but the users got there and they were like, "This sucks." And no one's linking to it or whatever it is. It's just not good, obviously. And you mentioned being holistic about it and as an SEO, I mean maybe it's not really here, but you should look, you should see what's going on and you should be take care of what's... Because they're going to be things that shift and it impacts sometimes everything, which by the way, what's the worst that can happen? Well, that's like everything's the worst that could... It could be really bad, which is why you need to be careful.

And I would say you're right about having one person manage all of it, or overseeing it. I would also recommend that person be a type A personality. Somebody who's got a checklist for everything. It's crossing every T, dotting every I, thinking about what the next problem is going to be so they can predict what the problem is going to be before it happens and have a list about those. It's one of those things that you could be super smart and greatest strategy and that's not be your thing. There are definitely people who are brilliant with migration, not their thing because it's so detail oriented.

Crystal Carter:

So detailed. And the other thing I would say is that thinking about that, is that one of the things that I always do with the migration is I always download the original site. So benchmarking and sorting out yourself before the website so that you can see. So for instance, if we're talking about the tablecloth, if you don't know what the table looked like before, how do you know if something moved? How do you know if something moved? How do you know if something changed? So you should always benchmark what you want to see. So benchmark what your normal traffic is, what things you normally rank for, which things you normally... What you would normally expect to see over the course of even a year. Because there's a lot of seasonality. In all businesses, there's going to be some seasonality. If you think about accountants or whatever, come tax season, there's going to be a high... There's going to be a peak season.

And then for white collar industries, it tends to be like during holiday seasons, that tends to be a bit of a lull. So for instance, there's always some seasonality. So make sure you know what your traffic looks like. Make sure that you know what your keywords look like. And I always download the site before because it's always useful to have that to hand. There's a couple of tools that you can get to do this, but I always download the full site before so that I can see what it looked like before anything gets moved around. And also monitor it, monitor it, monitor it, before, during, after, throughout the whole thing and keep monitoring it. And I'll even monitor up to a year. And the other thing is if it's done well, you don't necessarily see a drop in traffic. Sometimes you see a big increase actually if you've done it well.

And also, a migration, again, I talked about it being an opportunity to clean house. It's sometimes a really good opportunity to add new content and stuff because if you're changing around the format of the website, the how of the website, for instance, like how people navigate to different pages or how people use or how people access different information, you might look around and say, "Oh, actually we can do that in a different way." Maybe those bits of blogs that are thin should actually be formatted as FAQs instead. So maybe we can do that differently. And when you do that, you can add more value to the website and sometimes you actually see a boost, but you should make sure that you're mapping those things correctly. So for instance, if you change a blog into an FAQ, then make sure that you've done the 301s correctly and that you've formatted the new page correctly and that you're tracking it and you know what's going on.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's also a good time to reflect how your ecosystem is working. If you work with a bunch of sub domains and you're looking out from the main site to these other sub domains. First off, that might be the best way to do it. If you have to reform it, restructure anyway, this is a great time. I've seen sites where there's one page, for whatever reason, it's linking to all of their different sub-domains and then they mess around with that page. First off, even if you did that right, that might not be the best way to go about this to begin with. So it's a good opportunity to sit and think, does this actually make sense for how we want our site to be structured and how we want people to access and move along, as you said, from page to page or sub domain to sub domain or whatever it is.

I guess to end off real quick, if you are migrating a website, hopefully you get a boost. If you see it, slight traffic loss, don't freak out. It's sometimes par for the course. Try to keep URL the same whenever you can. Just avoids a lot of the mess. Just makes things so much easier. And then check it all before it goes live so you don't end up with the canolicalization problem I mentioned before. Check it before it goes live, a bunch of times.

Crystal Carter:

Check it, check again, check it 25 times. I keep checking it.

Mordy Oberstein:

And then check it afterwards.

Crystal Carter:

Check it afterwards. Check all of the things and make sure that you're checking as well as user experience. Because the other thing is when you're migrating, there's all the technical stuff as well. But very funny, if I go to a website and they changed things around, I'm like, "Where's that thing I liked? I don't know where it is. I don't know where that is." So you might see your conversion rates change for a while, while people get used to your new configuration.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, exactly. It's a good time to look at the whole ecosystem.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a good time. It's a good time for all. You know what's a good time? When's a good time? When is it a good time for an SEO to be involved in a site migration? If you are an SEO, when should you demand that you be involved? And if you're a website owner, when should you involve the SEO in the site migration process? To help answer that, let's please welcome Miracle Inameti. Take it away, Miracle.

Miracle Inameti:

Never involve the SEO team. Just wait. If it's a success, then take all the credit. If it's not, then you can blame them. As a general rule of thumb, I would say that you should always involve the SEO team. Once you start thinking of a site migration, you should speak to your SEO team. When this doesn't happen, it's either because people within the organization don't understand the SEO team's function. They see the SEO team on the marketing as a campaigns function and they want to present to you this shiny news site and go, "Is this fit for purpose?" However, there's so many things that the SEO team has to think about when you're planning a site migration. And in order for the site migration to be successful and for you not to lose any visibility, you need to involve the SEO team in the planning process.

So there are various types of site migration. There is several migrations, there's platform migrations. There is just a risking, there's URL. I think the ones that are most critical to the SEO team is when you are changing the URL structure, migrating the domain because they need to plan redirects, make sure that everything is going end to end and relevant page to relevant page. On a page by page level, not just like the whole domain is redirected to the homepage. They need to ensure that all critical pages are taking long. They need to look at back links, which ones are relevant, which ones they want to, you know, walk contact into, to link directly to the pages. So there's so many things that the SEO team needs to think about.

There is tracking as well. You want to make sure that your tracking and monitoring still stays on or are migrated to the right pages. So you need to make sure that you are set up in search console, any of the tools that you are using to track them and monitor the performance of your site is done. So all of these things. You need to make sure that when the site is migrated, the search engines are informed that your site is migrating. You want the new structure to get crawled quick and index. It's very, very critical that the SEO team is involved right at the start so that they can plan for all of this.

Mordy Oberstein:

Couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Miracle. Obviously, it's super important to have your SEO team involved in the migration process as soon as possible. I'll say I don't want to double down on SEO. I think it's really important to have all your teams involved in the migration process as soon as possible so you all can communicate and be on the same page with each other. I think it's just getting people involved in communication at the very, very beginning is probably the linchpin of migration success.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. And I think everyone should know what's going on and I absolutely agree with Miracle about saying that it's very important to have input from SEO and for all of the different layers. When you're talking about having other teams involved, that impacts the effectiveness of the migration. So SEOs will have their own priorities. She talked a lot about back links, she talked a lot about the structure of the page. But again, there's going to be things that the sales team needs as well and that they want to. That might be their favorite thing, that's a really useful tool that works really, really well for them that an SEO might not be able to see from their assessment. So it's really important to have lots of different parts of your team involved.

And not to just, like she said, just present "Oh, look at our shiny new thing." I've had people do that and they've had a panic attack because they're like, "Look at our brand new..." And then you didn't... This is completely no. And that can be really, really stressful and it can mean that you're starting on a back foot when you don't involve teams, then rely on the website in order to do their work and in order to make sure that the business is performing the way that it should. So-

Mordy Oberstein:

You know why you don't want to start on a bad foot, if you're an SEO, as strategically as possible, fight for a seat at the table.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's one of those things.

Crystal Carter:

Totally. And starting on the back foot particularly with migration can be a real challenge because Google's trying to figure out all of the things anyway. And so if you've just migrated the site and you have to do a lot of the SEO work that should have been done before whilst Google's trying to understand the new site, then it's going to make it very difficult to rank and fight those fires at the same time. So make sure that you're involved early. Make sure that if your SEO is saying they want a meeting about the migration, that you're getting that meeting, setting that meeting making sure that happens.

Mordy Oberstein:

The early SEO gets the worm.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of migration, so we sum that up a fascinating little example around keyword disambiguation that means, what does this keyword actually mean? So if I type in for example, Rangers, is that the New York Rangers hockey team? Is it the Rangers soccer football team? Is it the Texas Rangers, baseball team and or police organization? What does it actually mean? And Google has ways of disambiguating what that actually is, but we're going to use the term how to migrate the keyword, how to migrate to show you how you could use the PAA box, the people also ask box, which is Google's set of four initial questions that, I ask a very popular question, to ask around the web and then offer you a snippet of content and a URL to answer that question. So we're going to see how everyone's little favorite SERP feature the PAA, people also ask box can help you disambiguate because it is time for fun with the PAA box.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, we used to have so much fun with the PAA box.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so much fun. When I ever go to Google and I look at it, I look at the SERP, I'm like, "Oh, the PAA box is so fun because you keep clicking on it and more things load."

Crystal Carter:

Just more and more.

Mordy Oberstein:

This is so much fun.

Crystal Carter:

This is so much fun.

Mordy Oberstein:

Look at, look more things load when you search for how to migrate, what I find interesting is sometimes Google has a little box on the side that's literally called an ambiguation box that helps you understand, okay, migrate what? As I mentioned before, rangers, if you type rangers, you'll probably get a box. I'm going to do that right now. I'm going to type rangers into Google. I know it. I'm going to get a box on the side, right? See results about Texas Rangers, baseball team, even though the one... The SERP I have now is about the hockey team. Google knows I might mean something else, but in this case how to migrate, it's not there, but it should be there.

Crystal Carter:

It should be there.

Mordy Oberstein:

And it's important.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. But the people also ask here, it's coming in to save the day on this particular section to help people to understand which thing they're talking about-

Mordy Oberstein:

Which is super important because if you are trying to target the keyword, how to migrate, because you have a blog post about how to migrate, then you need to understand what's actually showing up on Google because your post might not be the migrate that Google thinks it is, or Google thinks that users want.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed. So I think on this particular one we have, the questions that you get are how do we migrate, how does migrate work? Again, people also ask, sometimes it's not grammatically correct, but there we go. How do you plan a migration? Also, how long is a migration process? Now, when you think about the term migration, there's lots of different ways you can talk about that particular term if we're thinking about a disambiguation situation.

And so they're hedging their bets with some of those answers. So some of them answers some kinds of ways to migrate and some of them answers other kinds of ways to migrate because they're trying to help people find what they need.

Mordy Oberstein:

So just so you know, by the way, I've had, how do we migrate? How does migrate work? How do you plan on migration? How is data migration done? So I have that last question that's different because I'm looking at it from the US right now and I'm assuming you're set up from the UK.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed. So then how do we migrate that gives us a human migration thing?

Mordy Oberstein:

Right, so that's topic one, is human migration.

Crystal Carter:

Then the second one I've got is how animal migration works.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, topic two, animal migration.

Crystal Carter:

And then I've got how do you plan a migration? And then that's talking about data migration.

Mordy Oberstein:

Topic three.

Crystal Carter:

And how long is migration process? That's also talking about data migration. So here Google's trying to figure out different ways to understand that. Similarly, with-

Mordy Oberstein:

Three different ways, 'cause I can count 1, 2, 3.

Crystal Carter:

And if you look up something similar like migrating, you also get some answers that are around human migration. Some answers that are around salmon migration, for instance. And so Google sometimes uses the people also ask to help point people where they need to go if they've entered a term that's ambiguous.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. So by the way, this is a great example because if you're writing this post about how to migrate, let's say yours is about data migration. So realizing that you're limiting your chance to pull in organic traffic because Google's addressing three different intents on the page. So you probably want to go a little bit more specific or realize that if you're targeting how to migrate, you're not going to get a lot of traffic necessarily because you're only relevant to... Let's assume that Google has it proportionate to a third of the people who are coming for that keyword. Also, really interesting by the way, is that both of our cases, and this is part of the disambiguation process, the first question we both had was relevant to...

I'm talking about human migration then animal migration. And even though our last two questions weren't the same, they both addressed data migration, meaning that shows you that the dominant intent might be data migration because Google thinks that's the strongest... Let's rephrase that, because Google is showing a double result there because that's probably the strongest intent on the page or for the keyword rather.

Crystal Carter:

Had a webinar recently and someone was asking about keywords and they said, "Oh, this keyword is too difficult." And sometimes that happens when you have a keyword that is like this. So something like how to migrate, if you were writing an SEO blog around that, for instance, then you would think, "Oh yeah, those are the questions that people are asking."

But actually there's lots of people asking you those questions in lots of different ways. So as you're saying, if you're making it more specific, maybe you might not have the same huge search volume, but the people who are actually searching for what you are actually talking about are much more likely to actually find the information that you have. So that's really useful to think about. And again, the ways that that data flows from the people also ask can, yeah, give you such information about how people think about that terminology. And if you're finding that, like you said, that two out of three are for a different topic, actually, then-

Mordy Oberstein:

You should pivot.

Crystal Carter:

... you should pivot.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which comes back to this old, the SEO adage. Don't just rely on when an SEO tool tells you the search volume is super high for this keyword, you should grow the SERP and see what it actually looks like. That's the best advice I could ever give you about SEO is go to the SERP, go to Google, look at the results and see what's there and use Google to your advantage. Now speaking of using Google to your advantage, what gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO?

Crystal Carter:

What gives you an advantage in terms of your SEO?

Mordy Oberstein:

Understanding the latest news around what's happening in SEO?

Crystal Carter:

You don't say.

Mordy Oberstein:

I do say, which means it's time for some snappy SEO news.

Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Oh boy, the sky is falling. Big brands such as Bankrate are now using, well, now admitting to using AI writers for some of its content. And Google has taken notice per the great Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land. Google Search responds to Bankrate, more brands using AI to write content. As I mentioned about five seconds ago, AI written content has been spotted on big name websites because they admitted it right there on the page saying quote, "This article was generated using automation technology," et cetera. Don't say the et cetera, I'm just using half the quote. The attribution is, one, great to see, and two, also mentions the content was reviewed by a human. When you look at the actual article, it does list the name of the human who reviewed that content. And now a word of caution by Mordy Oberstein. AI scrapes the web and regurgitates what's already been said.

So it can't really offer something genuinely unique. So be careful and don't be swayed by sites with a huge amount of topical authority using AI written content. Also, again, they may have extensionally revised it with their human reviewers. So it's not a carte blanche, just start doing whatever you want with AI written content. However, Google did say, and this is coming from Google's search liaison Danny Sullivan, that it is okay to use AI written content. The general problem with AI written content is that it's low quality content written for search rankings as opposed to users. But when it is used or written for the sake of being helpful, then that's spying. So Danny said, if content is helpful and creative for people first, that's not an issue referring to AI written content. So Google is in my opinion, walking back on its hard line that they've taken in the past.

I think they have to, AA content is here, it is staying, it is not going anywhere. It does have a place, my personal opinion is that it has a place with borders. And knowing those borders and how to use AI properly is incredibly important, particularly if you're not one of these ginormous sites on the web that's just banking on a lot of pre-established authority. Article number two, from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable. This time Google linking to multiple providers in product reviews might give a small ranking boost. So way back when Google updated its guidance around product reviews in relation to its product review updates, saying that, "Yeah, you have to have more than one provider in the review." Meaning if you're just stuffing in an affiliate link or multiple affiliate links to the one company that you are tied to, that's not a great user experience, it's a questionable user experience altogether.

So now we have official confirmation that Google is looking at this algorithmically. I would have expected the impact to have been bigger or Google to have wanted the impact, at least to have been bigger. Google is saying here, that's a pretty small factor. My takeaway is Google, as a whole, is not happy about the state of affiliates. They are looking at the web and trying to improve the web and is looking to the change the game here in regards to affiliates, which is why I thought that this would've been a bigger factor. But again, linking to multiple providers from the user's point of view is a more... It's called honest experience that Google is trying to push for and it has been confirmed. It is a small ranking boost. So if you are writing up product reviews and just stuffing in your one particular affiliate, that could, all things being equal, impact your rankings and that will do it for this week's snappy news.

And now we're back from the Snappy news. Now, before we go, as we always do, you should have a diverse set of information in front of you from a diverse set of SEOs. So we always end off, before we have to duly depart with our follow of the week, and you already mentioned him. Yeah, you did. It was like SEO, podcasting, foreshadowing.

Now who could it be? Who could it be?

Crystal Carter:

Who could it be? It's Chris Green people.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's Chris Green.

Crystal Carter:

Chris Green.

Mordy Oberstein:

The one and only Chris Green who you can find on Twitter at Chris Green SEO, C-H-R-I-S G-R-E-E-N SEO. Link to his profile and show notes. And Chris is a wonderful SEO, technical SEO to has done... As Crystal mentioned, he did a poll post on the Wix SEO hub about things you need to know about migrating and particularly about money you're migrating to Wix as well, so if you're looking to bring a site to Wix, that's a great resource for you. He says it's a great resource in general on social media.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, he specializes in migrations, auditing, reporting, training, and so he's got a lot of really great information and his article on migration is particularly useful for people who are looking to migrate to Wix. I mean, he just lays it out really, really clearly. He's awesome.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, he's got a lot of really cool resources for you, also, on his own website. It's chris-green.net, all sorts of templates you can use and checklists you can use, and all sorts of deep dive SEO stuffed greatness for you. So check that website out, which happens to be, by the way, a Wix website. Yes, dare I say. So definitely check that out. That gave you  a quick Tech SEO audit template. There's mapping for keywords to your website for SEO using blended data to add annotations onto time series in Google Looker Data Studio. Lot of great resources for you on Chris's website, so definitely check that out.

Awesome. I think we're done then.

Crystal Carter:

Well done. I think we have moved everything along. I think that everything has gone from one place to another.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's been no hiccups. It's all been-

Crystal Carter:

There's been no hiccups.

Mordy Oberstein:

Permanently moved with all the proper checks and balances and whatnot. Indeed.

Crystal Carter:

Indeed, we've moved everything we have migrated from the beginning of the podcast to the end of the podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

Amazingly.

Crystal Carter:

Now we shall see you again.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hope the traffic is good. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with an all new episode as we dive into why ranking factors might not matter nearly as much as you think. Heresy, I know. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on our SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. And until next time, peace, love and SEO.