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Dofollow Digest #1: Google's SGE unlikely to happen in the near future
Eric Carrell
February 16, 2024
Greetings, compadres -
Eric Carrell here with dofollow.com. This is issue #1 of our newsletter series on SEO for marketing leaders.
In this ongoing newsletter, we’ll do a deep dive into changes in the SEO world, Google updates, the future of search (SGE and more), and tips and tricks for you to manage your SEO team.
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What's in the newsletter
🔬 Google’s SGE unlikely to roll out anytime soon
Google announcing it’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) was the largest SEO related announcement from Google in the past 10 years. Largely a response to Bing incorporating ChatGPT, Google released SGE in search labs and sent the SEO world into a frenzy.
Many people predicted that the traditional 10-link SERP would look completely different, and websites would lose tons of traffic over time - mostly traffic to information-related keywords.
Initially, it was predicted that wider SGE adoption (not just in search labs) would happen in 2024. Now, it’s looking like SGE likely won’t happen in 2024, if ever.
Here are a few key points to keep in mind with SGE:
Bing took roughly 1% of the search market with the integration of ChatGPT - not exactly the disruptive market move we all expected. Props to them; they didn’t have anything to lose, but it shows that people largely weren’t phased by the move.
Google Ads make up almost 60% of Google’s total revenue. They likely wouldn’t make any big changes that would kill the cash cow, so to speak. Sundar Pichai speaks to this here: “We are improving satisfaction, including answers for more conversational and intricate queries. As I mentioned earlier, we are surfacing more links with SGE and linking to a wider range of sources on the results page, and we’ll continue to prioritize approaches that add value for our users and send valuable traffic to publishers.”
Language used in Google’s 2024 Search Experience update: “We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from people who’ve chosen to join this experiment, and we’ll continue to offer SGE in Labs as a testbed for bold new ideas.” I read this to say: SGE is staying in beta. If Google does start implementing more of a chat-based system to the SERP, it likely won’t be one, big sweeping change. It will be small iterations over time.
At the end of the day, no one outside of Google can accurately predict big, new changes to search, but for now, our position is: we’re safe.
📰 Industry News & Google Updates
Google’s SEO Starter Guide got a makeover: the SEO Starter Guide added and removed sections.
Google hints at new update coming: brace yourselves.
SEO’s will soon see a change in the helpful content documentation. Google’s Danny Sullivan says: “We thought "While E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor" was clear enough for the people who somehow believe we have an E-E-A-T "score." But some still have this misconception despite that we don't have some E-E-A-T ranking score we use. Not a thing. Not a ranking factor.”
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