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2022 SEO highlights and 2023 SEO predictions

Jack Chambers-Ward
Jack Chambers-Ward , Marketing and Partnerships Manager
26.12.2022 • 60 min read • Podcast

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Show notes

This week, Jack Chambers-Ward is joined once again by Mark Williams-Cook to discuss the year that was 2022 and some SEO predictions for 2023 including:

Transcript:

Jack: Welcome to Episode 50 of Season 2 of the Search With Candour Podcast. I am one of your hosts for this week and my name is Jack Chambers-Ward on my 50th episode of the show, which is very exciting. And I'm joined once again by my co-host, Mr. Mark Williams-Cook.

Mark: Last show of the year, high five.

Jack: Yay, came up on the mics, excellent. Listeners, enjoy that high five. Excellent podcast quality high five there from the Candour Boys. And since it's the last episode of the year, we'll be basically doing a little recap talking about some highlights, some low lights, some bits and pieces from the year that has been 2022, and getting on some spicy predictions for 2023. Maybe there'll be some more obvious stuff. I think I've got one that's fairly spicy. I think you've got a couple of ideas that are fairly spicy, Mark. We'll run through 2022 in the first half and then the second half we'll be talking about 2023 and what you can expect from much search stuff going on in the next year.

Mark: Why is it spicy?

Jack: But before we get to talking about 2022 and all the highlights and lowlights thereon throughout 2022, we have been supported by the wonderful people over at SISTRIX. They are known as the SEO's toolbox and you can go to sistrix.com/swc if you want to check out some of their fantastic free tools such as their SERP Snippet Generator, hreflang validator. If you want to check out your site's visibility index and of course something we'll be touching on in a moment the Google Update Radar. You can of course get things like TrendWatch, SectorWatch and IndexWatch all through and you can go to sistrix.com/trends to find all of those. TrendWatch we'll be talking about later on in the show. We have a recap of the trends of 2022, which I'm very excited to dive into. And we've touched on it a couple of times over the last few weeks SISTRIX will be continued to sponsor the show in 2023.

Mark: Thank you very much SISTRIX.

Jack: Thank you SISTRIX. And we'll be working with them quite a lot more, actually working pretty closely with them, starting to do some new live streams and working with them on some video content as well. So stay tuned for all of that coming in the new year. So I mentioned the Google Update Radar there, Mark.

Mark: Yes, there's been a couple of updates.

Jack: Haven't there just. Haven't there just. Let's do a quick little whip through of every single officially confirmed Google System Update in 2022. I'll take a deep breath because there's a lot. So starting in February we had the page Experian update coming over to desktop. In March, we had the March 2022 product reviews update. Then in May we had an Encore update, which was then completed sort of first week of June, so May and June-ish. July we had another product review update. In August, we had a helpful content update and the helpful content update. But now we learn it is one of many. The September core update followed up in September. Then we had the next product reviews update in September. Then we also have the October spam update. The December helpful content update. And most recently, which we haven't even had a chance to really talk about on the show, the link spam update in December, aka SpamBrain that has been introduced and updated as part of the Google system updates. It's a lot.

Mark: Not the rankings you get, it's the updates you make along the way.

Jack: The system updates you make along the way. Remember this, I can't say update.

Mark: I can't say update. Actually I was going to congratulate you just a second ago when I realized you've slipped into that new nomenclature very, very skillfully.

Jack: System updates, ranking system updates, getting into the habit of that. But yeah, that is by my count, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, at least 10 confirmed Google updates throughout 2022. And there were those real moments where they were clustered together. September there I really touched upon because we got a lot of stuff going on at once. August, end of August count and time was the first helpful content update then followed up a couple of weeks later with the core update and then the product review update a couple of weeks after that. And what we understand from Google, and I think something I want to touch on is something I think was a bit overhyped in 2022 was the helpful content update stuff at first. I think this is been clarified from Google since then and a lot of us who are paying attention to this stuff and a lot of people who pay much closer attention and know the data far better than I do, are saying things like this is a long term thing. Google have officially said, "This is now part of our core updates." It wasn't a one-off kind of thing. This is now integrated into our ranking systems and when we went through the ranking systems the other week, if you haven't listed that podcast, I'll leave a link for that in the show notes. We went through it and the helpful content update was mentioned throughout that because it's becoming a core part of those ranking systems. Not just a one-off like, "Oh we'll check all the helpful content now and then worry about it later." It is now rolled into and become a bigger part of the overall algorithm and the core updates that happened as well. Which I think is interesting because everyone was freaking out, some people were very excited, some people were freaking out and then nothing happened and we're like, "Oh okay." And then we're realizing now stuff is picking up. The canary and the coal mine site you had Mark was eventually hit by one of the spam updates.

Mark: Yes sir.

Jack: Eventually we're seeing stuff pull through and they seem to sort of snowball as these system updates come through. Would you say that that's fair to say Mark?

Mark: Yeah, I think overhype stuff is a great place to start because that's what the SEO community does really well. And yeah, helpful content update, agree I think that's had to be built on. As we've talked about some of the other changes Google have made to enhance their ability to give better results, which have created new problems. Especially we've talked about it loads the kind of spammy people. So I asked generation type sites, the QA type spammy sites we've seen. So they need to make new updates to hatch the new holes that made when they were building new things. Earlier in the year, I think Core Web Vitals probably falls to me in that overhype category in that just everyone was talking about it. And from a more pointy end of in the trenches view, I see it. I have seen it a lot in other people's audits as a high priority type thing, which I've never particularly agreed with in terms of my view on it has always been performance is important. Primarily though for not SEO reasons for slow and poor performance, websites suck and people don't like that.

Jack: It's user experience, right. So much so because again, tying into the age old thing that grinds both of our against the whole bounce rate is a ranking factor. No. No, that's a user experience thing. And yeah, I remember you talking about this, I think it was probably earlier when I joined Candour 18 months ago or so when we were talking about it and talking to some of the non SEO team here at Candour are, "Oh, that seems like that would make sense as a ranking factor." Then was like, "Well not everyone has analytics on their site let alone Google, and some people don't have any analytics whatsoever. So how would you measure that for that site? And also the whole GDPR thing, if you just reject all of the cookies, then there's no tracking there either, even if you have Google Analytics on your site." So it's like, "Okay."

Mark: And you can make it 0% or 100% at will.

Jack: It's really easily.

Mark: Depends on the context of the query in the question and it's basically massively useless. But yes, I think performance as an SEO thing was overhyped during the year. But again, that probably happens when Google made the switch to I like, I being Google, like HTTPS sites makes very little difference as Google have told us. But it pushes everyone in the right way. I am certainly happy that more people are focusing now on performance before because it's an easy thing to motivate people to do. But yeah, the helpful content update, I think Google probably didn't quite get what they wanted from that, which is why we saw the part two come along-

Jack: Yeah, definitely.

Mark: ... so quickly, yeah.

Jack: I think it's interesting because a lot of people, like you said, get fixated on one little part of it and I've totally been guilty of this in the past and will often talk through, with other members of the team here at Candour, when we're working on sites together. I'm not necessarily the account lead on a client site perhaps, but I will come in and have a quick look and be like, oh this the... Let's take Core Web Vitals an example. Oh the Core Web Vitals could be better. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's ways easier said than done. And let's, as you said Mark, understand the priority list there from... And this is something we talked about a lot, something I talked about with Tom Critchlow before as well, how to communicate that priority to the client. Because plenty of times I've had clients come to me and they're like, "Oh, our checks PageSpeed Insights and we've got red things." And I'm like, "Yeah, your main navigation doesn't work and let's prioritize that shall we. None of your pages are indexed. Maybe let's fix that first." And people really hone in and focus on one thing. And there are plenty of specialists out there that definitely know what they're talking about. But you're right when the entire industry kind of turns its eye like Sour Ron's eye at one thing and it's like right, "We all need to fix our Core Web Vitals at the same time." It's like, yeah but plenty of sites have much bigger issues that will have a much bigger impact than just twiddling some things and unifying your JS and CSS and stuff and fiddling a few things to make sure your PageSpeed is 0.1% faster or whatever. I think yeah, a lot of that stuff does get overblown, but don't get us wrong, it's still important. If your website takes 15 seconds to load in 2022, soon to be 2023, you're probably not going to be getting very happy users. But I think that that's an interesting topic that I think we'll probably see come back around again, it keeps coming back around again. Mark: Oh for sure. I mean we've got new metrics, we won't talk about it now, but I saw there's new metrics coming into Core Web Vitals as well. But let's talk about AI and GPT Chat because I think it is both underhyped and overhyped simultaneously. Jack: I think it is the conversation that's happened in 2022 and really it only really feels like it's been the last couple of months. GPT Chat really seems to have exploded into the mainstream conscious now you see all these screenshots on Twitter and stuff from non SEO people just playing around with this kind of stuff. Where previously, I know Mark, me, and Luke were all kind of playing around with various different OpenAI stuff. I know you've been using GPT2 and GPT3 a lot as well Mark doing different experiments and stuff like that. It's the big thing to talk about, right? It's such a big topic and not to get, again, like we said a couple of weeks ago, not to get too philosophical, but I think AI is going to become more prevalent in our lives even outside of digital marketing and SEO. It's going to be integrated into how we live our lives in the future anyway. But yeah, I think you're totally right. Having it as both underhyped and overhyped for... because it's full of a multitude of different uses. It can be used in so many different ways. And again, that kind of industry-wide focus on one thing to be like, oh GPT Chat, that's the big thing. There's so many other possibilities for the AI that are way more interesting and could be bigger and more integral in the future.

Mark: So I think from the overhype point of view, I think we're heading to a bad place with it, in the short term. I posted my little Gartner Hype Cycle of inflated expectations and I think we're definitely at this point and I think that's because again... Obviously I'm not a deep expert in machine learning and AI, but I understand roughly how GPT Chat works and how it's trained and thus-

Jack: You've literally done courses on machine learning and stuff?

Mark: ... and thus it's limitations. And I think one thing GPT Chat is very good at doing is hiding its limitations by the way it communicates, right?

Jack: That's a really interesting way to think about it, yeah, definitely.

Mark: So I've seen people asking GPT Chat in an SEO context stuff like, "Identify the entities on this page and let me know their salience and categorize them." I've seen them saying, "Categorize this list of Keywords by intent." I've seen them say, "Here's a keyword. What other questions might people ask," right. Now when I first saw this, I was like, "Oh wow, that's clever." And then when I start repeating those queries on the same data, getting slightly different answers and then when I compare it to tools that we've actually had for quite a while that do the same job, you realize that under scrutiny it's not actually doing a great job of say entity identification is missing out some really important stuff.

Jack: There was an example people were throwing around of one you shared in our slack that featured a bunch of football information. It was like, there was one of the matches at the World Cup, it was Argentina versus somebody, I don't know, football, sorry listeners. And it listed a bunch of the players and all this kind of stuff. And I'd only heard of two players, I think it was Lionel Messi and the other one was Mbappe and there was a bunch of other talking about the city and the stadium it was in and all this kind of stuff. It didn't pick up on Mbappe who is a football player I have heard of, and I haven't watched football in probably 20 years at this point when I was forced to by my dad. So the fact that I have heard of that player tells me he must be a pretty important and deserve... for want of a better phrase "deserve his own entity," nowhere to be seen on that GPT Chat analysis I thought, "Huh, interesting." And you're totally right when you repeat the same thing you can get slightly different answers and to compare it to something that does use AI, talking of Keywordinsights and stuff like that and that Clustering tool, it's not perfect. And I know I've been through this process explaining to newer members of the team here at Candour, this is a really good way to get a rough idea of how these keywords could cluster on this site and how they could work and how we can build these content hubs and all this stuff for this particular client. But take it with a grain of salt. You need to understand some of the stuff will fall out of the clusters and you get a group of no cluster data in there. It's much more consistently accurate. I've tested it with the same site or the same group a couple of different times. You get the same answer because it's running a particular machine learning algorithm and stuff like that. But yeah, I think a lot of people worried like, oh ChatGPT, there's going to put stuff out of business. They're going to put Google out of business. GPT Chat's going to put Keywordinsights out of business going to put Semrush and hrefs and SISTRIX out they're all done for. Replace all of our SEO tools with AI. Not quite yet. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Mark: No, my fear is that the output looks good, like I said earlier, and I just know there are going to be people that this is basically their SEO now. They're just going to be write the plan, do the entities, write an email to the client and they're just going to be laughing all the way to the bank. I saw someone recommending how to make $200,000 in 2023 from AI and it was basically go on to Upwork and accept all the writing gigs and just churn it out with GPT Chat and then take the money. Very few people are actually going to do that kind of plagiarism check looking for machine generated content. And I'm just like, "Well that's not going to end up in a good place, is it?"

Jack: No.

Mark: So I think people are going to... Essentially there's going to be unfortunately a lot of companies buying for just ignorance, some very expensive, good looking fluff that's probably not actually going to deliver what they want it to.

Jack: Yeah, definitely.

Mark: But on the good side, so let's talk about what has been good 2022 and I think to start that list we should talk about GPT Chat quickly. So I do think that the premium example slightly outside of SEO is obviously Danny Richmond, we mentioned on the show before, for he did some stuff earlier with GPT3 on the spreadsheets at the regex generation stuff.

Jack: Which was pretty amazing.

Mark: Which was pretty amazing.

Jack: Talk about that quite a lot.

Mark: But I saw he actually got national media coverage for his Zapier plugin for the chap that came. He's like a pool and hot tub insulated guy, but he's got this quite bad dyslexia struggles writing emails.

Jack: Yes.

Mark: So he essentially set up his Zapier automation where you can just write almost like a SMS short, got quotes, seek to seen and it writes it like a professional sounding email for him, which is a brilliant use. And I think he's now in talks with OpenAI to make that a free tool basically.

Jack: Yes. Yeah, that's what Danny had said before and I think-

Mark: Well done Danny.

Jack: Yeah, absolutely. Bringing stuff like that to bring more accessibility, and accessibly we talked about a lot recently. And one of the recent blog posts from Sitebulb, I talked about it a lot with Chloe Smith back in the show as well, thinking about how we can use technology in slightly different ways to allow more people access to elements of jobs or technology they don't currently have. Trying to get my parents to order something on Amazon is a 40 minute phone call, whereas if I could tell them, oh, buy this thing on... Just type buy new shower curtain on Amazon needs to be blue, less than 20 pounds and then it can automate the thing and write an email or send an order or whatever it is. That can massively change people being able to access information, being able to, like you said, work with things like dyslexia and things like that. Not being able... People will judge you for that stuff. You could be-

Mark: Oh for sure.

Jack: ... the best electrician in the world, but if you write a terribly worded email like grammatically badly worded and all that kind of stuff, people are like, "Oh, I'm not going to work with them. They can't even write an email. How could they possibly wire my kitchen or whatever."

Mark: Absolutely.

Jack: But that's an unfair judgment.

Mark: Understand that.

Jack: And this is able to then, like you said, benefit them and really transform some people's lives and allow them to do it on a bit more of a level pegging, right?

Mark: Absolutely. I mean I think there's a few contained tasks that GPT Chat's been really cool for. So I've seen people use it to generate digital PR ideas for inspiration because sometimes that's the hardest thing when you're just, you get kind of a writer's block, it can really get you out of that. It fixed some of my Google Tag Manager code the other week.

Jack: Yeah, I remember saying.

Mark: Yeah, I was working a little bit late on Friday because I just wanted to change something on our site and it was fiddly because I wanted to try experimenting changing a certain thing, but I couldn't control it through the CMS. So I was like, okay, well I'll just do it JavaScript size duct tape for now. And yeah, my code was wrong basically. And rather than trying to figure it out, I just put it into GPT Chat and was like, what's wrong with this? And it was just like this you idiot meat bag, and it worked. And also we've been talking actually to our client services team about maybe using GPT Chat to do things like come up with non-technical summaries of reports, maybe where some concept we're trying to explain is particularly difficult. It can just provide a very quick, again, at least starting bones for how you might explain this. So there's great use for it.

Jack: There's already AI generated outlines built into Google Docs. You click that little blue thing that we've got on the top left there and it'll summarize the doc for you. It's not great but it will give you a very, very high level and a rough idea of this is the podcast show notes for Search With Candour Season 2, Episode 50. Jack is talking about this, Mark is talking about this blah blah blah and give you like run through of the headings. If you've structured your document well it will do a pretty decent job of it most of the time. And yeah, I think that's a really interesting way of... That's something I've been talking to clients a lot with really in terms of reporting and stuff like that. Throwing an entire report at a whole team of people, client side who, some are more technical than others, some are less technical, some of them are just interested in the money, some of them want to know about specific rankings because they're a bit more involved in SEO and know a bit more and oh they've been tracking it themselves and all that kind of stuff. Being able to summarize that in a super short sort of five highlights and like you said, translate it essentially to completely universal language would be really, really handy and really powerful there as well, I think.

Mark: Absolutely.

Jack: Something I've been using a lot this year moving on from bit of AI stuff is to API stuff and something I think the API I've most used this year is the Google Search Console Inspection tool API. I was so pleasantly surprised about just how it just works basically every time I've ever tried it. And I've had a few clients that have had indexing issues and the dreaded discovered not yet, not currently indexed, currently not yet indexed whatever the phrasing is for that, discovered currently crawled but not indexed, all that kind of stuff. Being able to pull that out and when you're creating a lot of pages at a time on a very small site and understanding what's getting indexed first. Or maybe we should, as Mark and we were talking about a few weeks ago, add a few more links to that page to make sure it gets indexed more quickly and all that kind of stuff. To just get a quick overview of quickly crawl it using Sitebulb or Screaming Frog or whatever tools you're using. Integrating that API in there has just saved me so much time and I very, very much appreciate the fact that that is a thing now that is just now completely integrated into my workflow without me even thinking about it.

Mark: Yeah, I think it's going to be even more important as I notice Google's running some tests with this site operator they were removing how many pages were being displayed as well.

Jack: Oh interesting. Right.

Mark: So obviously you shouldn't use that as this is definitely how many pages are indexed, but it's a-

Jack: Really quick ballparky kind of thing there, right?

Mark: Yeah. So I suspect we'll see some more data loss there. But yeah, GSC Inspection API is awesome and connecting it up with other tools like Screaming Frog has been super helpful.

Jack: And again, not sponsored at all, but the fact that it's integrated automatically into Wix. If you're using Wix as your CMS, you already have this built in, you just need to basically click connect to your search console and it will run it automatically for you and tell you when your pages get indexed and stuff. It's pretty amazing. And then for what felt like information that you had to really go out of your way to get for so long, you have to literally copy, paste into the inspection tool. That's a thing. Wait for it to load. Okay, okay, thanks search console. What are the issues? The fact that you can just leave it going, go to lunch, make a cup of tea, whatever you do, come back and it will, provide your site is a reasonable size, have crawled it and tell you exactly what the issues are. Like I said, at my fingertips. And it's now just integrated into my workflow so easily. All of my scheduled crawls with Sitebulb or if I need to run a new crawl on Screaming Frog or whatever it is, I just automatically tick the tool inspection API button just to double-check, make sure everything's getting indexed properly. And it's, yeah, taken a lot of the weight off my shoulders of doing that manually and copying and pasting them each time.

Mark: If I can toot toot my own horn.

Jack: It's your podcast really, Mark. Yes, you may.

Mark: It seems longer, but it was of course this year that AlsoAsked was launched.

Jack: Congratulations to you and the developer team.

Mark: And that's been really exciting. We have had way more customers than I had expected, which is really good. We've introduced new features like the deep search and the bulk search and yesterday was having a conversation with a very, very large, trying to not say who it is, a big website with lots of traffic to be as vague as I can possibly be.

Jack: Google.com.

Mark: But they were talking about how they can integrate our bulk data with various SEO projects they're doing. I've had loads of great feedback from people. So I've got a rather intimidating roadmap now of new features and things people want from different file formats to actually some really great ideas. Because I've been trying to understand people's use cases for AlsoAsked and the feedback on people being able to get that really specific live data. Because the other thing I've noticed, it seems anecdotally this year that Google has updated or changed, increased the frequency, the cadence in which it's updating these PAA results because we see them change very regularly now. So yeah, that's been really exciting. There's lots of new stuff coming in the new year. So first thing in January we are launching our proper kind of multi-user interface.

Jack: Oh, cool.

Mark: So at the moment there's just no limit on concurrent users, but some places obviously don't just want to credential share because it's not best practice. So we've got a proper system for admins to add people. We're adding in support for other file formats in January as well. So XLS and Google Sheets.

Jack: Oh cool. Nice.

Mark: Go straight to Google Sheets.

Jack: Lovely.

Mark: And then there will be some exploration into a Supermetrics connector because I know a lot of people use Supermetrics to pull data through into reports automatically. So we're going to look at that. And then in the first quarter all being well, we should see our API launch as well.

Jack: More APIs for everyone.

Mark: Yeah, I've been speaking to a few different tool providers who approached us who are really interested in integrating that data in there. So that's been cool.

Jack: Awesome. Yeah, AlsoAsked, it's been a really cool thing for me to get involved with as much as testing new stuff. And just for those of you who don't know in the office, Mark literally works opposite me, so we'll often just lean over and be like, "Can you just check this thing on AlsoAsked for me?" "Yeah, sure." Load it up and just have a quick look. So it's been very cool for me. And to be perfectly blunt here, I discovered Candour through AlsoAsked. I was using, AlsoAsked before I came to Candour, had no idea who or what Candour was. I assumed some design company or whatever. And then I was speaking to my colleague in my previous role. I was like, "Yeah, they're based in Norwich." "What do you mean? What based in Norwich? How's that possible? Like SEO tools are built by people in far distant lands. They're not possibly built here in Norwich." Turns out I was wrong. And yeah, that's partly how I ended up here at Candour. And how I first heard about the company was through AlsoAsked. And now seeing the other side of it and seeing how much it's developed, I think a big change for me was the form, the export format we've now got with the changes now instead of that cascading across the CSV. You now have it all lined up, which is really nice and very nice to hear it's going to be integrating with Google Sheets because I'm a big advocate of Google Sheets. I use sheets all the time. So being able to pull that straight into something like Google Sheets and then have that data ready to go. It was a bit fiddly as we discussed Mark a few months ago. But now this new format, I think it's really nicely displayed. You get examples of the currently ranking thing for that query as well, which I think is really interesting. You get the URL, you get the title, all that kind of stuff. All that extra data is so interesting to me and it's amazing to see the growth that has happened over the last, yeah, only 10 months. That's crazy. It feels like it's been around for so long because obviously you had the long-

Mark: Well, we had a year and a half trying to get it to work, but we'll brush over that. There was one more thing actually that just popped into my head in terms of, we should mention, which I think has been overhyped right at the end of the year, which is the extra E-

Jack: Oh gosh.

Mark: ... that's been added on E-A-T.

Jack: You're not excited by E-E-A-T Mark?

Mark: Double E.

Jack: That's the official.

Mark: E-E-A-T. Okay, pronunciation.

Jack: So I haven't.

Mark: ... instead of people going E-E-E-A-T. I'll be honest, I've read what Google has said about it and what the experience E stands for. I haven't read anyone else's analysis of this. My SEO gut feel, spidey sense, instinct, whatever you want to call it, is that I don't think anything's changed behind the scenes. I think this is just Google being like, okay, based on the updates and based on what we know we are looking for and how we judge this experience is a separate thing. We need to communicate with people that we're looking for. But I don't think it's potentially like an update.

Jack: Yeah, I think the way people were talking about it, it felt like it was, like you said, it felt like a very big thing. Oh God, now we've not been declaring our expertise. We need to now specifically include that information. But pretty much all of the examples, if you were already displaying your authoritativeness and your trustworthiness and your expertise to bring an experience into that, it feels like you are already integrating that if you were doing it right. It feels like that's already part of that similar family. For me, I think the most interesting thing for this is the way they've worded the importance and the way these things relate to each other. The four elements now that trust is the most important part of that. And the fact that experience, expertise and authoritativeness kind of builds together to create trust essentially. And there's a nice little four piece Venn diagram from Google there that kind of shows and demonstrates that in a way where it shows trust on the top and how authoritativeness expertise and experience all tie in together. I think you're probably right Mark, to be honest, I'm leaning towards your kind of, yeah, that's kind of how it was already. They just didn't explicitly state that.

Mark: And don't forget trust is links.

Jack: Trust is links.

Mark: Not just links, but a big part I think of trust is links. And it's interesting now that yeah, that's the big center.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: Of E-E, sorry, E-E-A-T.

Jack: E-E-A-T. So I mentioned at the top of the show we'll be talking about some trends of the year from trend watch over at SISTRIX, which actually launched just before we started recording this. So the December edition off TrendWatch is out now in your inboxes. If you are listening to this episode and you are subscribed, if you're not, go to sistrix.com/trends subscribe and not only do you get the usual TrendWatch at the end of the year, a monthly thing in your inbox that will tell you a bunch of trends. You get 10 bonus trends this month because it's Christmas and the end of the new year. And SISTRIX are lovely people. So they're giving you bonus trends. And as usual, I'll pick out a couple. This is written by the fantastic Nicole Scott, one of the data journalists over at SISTRIX. And we've picked out a few of the trends here that I definitely want to talk about. I'll start with maybe the weird one. I'm interested to see if you've had a look at the show notes in any detail. Don't scroll down, Mark. Do you know what Hygge is this? H-Y-G-G-E, what this word means?

Mark: I actually do.

Jack: Ah, dammit.

Mark: Because my wife.

Jack: I also know it because of my wife.

Mark: So I embarrassingly couldn't tell you if it's like a, or it's like a Scandinavian Word. And I'm aware Scandinavian isn't a language but for cozy or something.

Jack: It's essentially, yeah.

Mark: Norwegian, Swedish or Norwegian, I don't know.

Jack: I don't know what actually comes from. It is Scandinavian, but what it actually means... It's Danish apparently.

Mark: Danish. There we go.

Jack: Danish.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. And it's like cozy, right?

Jack: Yes. Yeah. For want of a better phrase. There's this weird Danish chic where it's all kind of cozy having a cup of tea by the fire wrapped in a snuggly blanket with your cat sleeping on your chest. It's that kind of vibe. I don't really know. It's a fashion thing, it's a vibe thing. It's become quite big on social media. You'll see a lot of this on TikTok and Instagram and that kind of thing. It's all about keeping things simple. And I think tying into a lot of people experiencing with the cost of living crisis here in the UK, trying to wrap yourself in a blanket and make yourself feel comfortable, even if you can't afford to put your heating on at certain times of the day and things like that.

Mark: You now I'm making me think it's kind of a government propaganda thing to be like, oh, energy crisis, don't worry, just be cozy with your blanket. Just do some hygge.

Jack: You'll be fine. Yeah, exactly. It is an interesting trend because I think it's, again, it ties into a lot of different things we've been talking about with cost of living and trying to live more eco-friendly, there's an eco-friendliness element to it as well, I think ties into it. But yeah, I'm always interested in what kind of trends are happening in terms of fashion, vocabulary. The fact that we're getting this Danish word coming into the English language and infiltrating and now becoming a thing people are regularly talking about on social media. Whereas if you'd have asked me a year ago what hygge was, I would have no idea whatsoever. So yeah, I think it's interesting seeing Scandinavian influences. Because we see so much of the American influence and sometimes even Japanese and South American influence coming through, but having a Scandinavian influence I think is really interesting. Next up I want to talk about a board game because I bloody love board games. And again, one of the reasons I wanted to work here at Candour during the interview with you, Mark, you had a copy of Settlers of Catan over your shoulder and I thought, "That's my people right there. Man, I could work in this place."

Mark: Maybe I just researched you. And I was like, we just printed out the box, stuck it behind me carefully baited.

Jack: Exactly he's a big old nerd and well lure him in with nerdy things. And yeah, I want to talk about Carcassonne, which is one of the board games that really kicked off this modern board game revolution that happened over the last sort of five years or so.

Mark: Have you played it?

Jack: Oh, loads of times, yeah, yeah.

Mark: Of course, you have. Of course, you have.

Jack: Who do you think you're talking to here Mark?

Mark: I thought it was a type of spaghetti.

Jack: What "carcazonne"?

Mark: Yeah.

Jack: It is in fact a French word based on the medieval French town, village, area of the same name from, again, a few hundred years ago, medieval times. And essentially you are placing your little MePeoples, those little wooden people representations, building castles, claiming land and all kinds of things. You have farmers that then farm that land for you and gather your resources and all this kind of stuff. You're all playing on the same board and you're trying to complete a castle and see who can build the last bit of the wall to try and claim that area of the board by completing that castle area. And you get different points depending on what bits and pieces you are claiming on the board and eventually you total it all up. And yeah, you see who wins with the most points from their castles, their fields, their buildings. I think there's a monastery in there if I remember correctly. But yeah, it was a key part in this recent, I say recent life five or six years ago, revolution, modern revolution of board games that happened with so many of the Euro board gaming stuff happening. Things like Catan and Carcassonne coming over to the UK and suddenly being picked up, and being picked up in pop culture as well. And now we have so many massive board games happening that they will break records on Kickstarter all the time and all that stuff. And it's now this really, really thriving community that I'm very much a big fan of. So yeah, it's fascinating to see that Carcassonne really spiked earlier this year as well because I thought it was, again, a bit out of trend. I had played it a few years ago in the early days of the modern board game revolution, but-

Mark: You sound like one of those people would say, "Yeah, I saw that band," when you were...

Jack: Pretty much, yeah, I saw them, it was like 30 people in a pub somewhere. But I wasn't expecting it to be trending. I thought again, very much underestimated Carcassonne perhaps that we'd moved on to bigger and crazier things. Because so many of the Kickstarter board games are just get as much plastic miniatures and big stuff and the biggest possible box you can think of and it'll cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars because Carcassonne is this whole little contained box for 20 or $30. And yeah, it's a lot of fun if you're looking to get into board games. It's a really cool way, little introductory one for you along similar lines to settlers of Catan if you've ever played Catan. And yeah, highly recommend Carcassonne if you want to get involved in board games. And very cool to see a board game highlighted as one of the trends of the year in 2022. Last of all, the trend of 2022, something I talked about I think on my own on the podcast perhaps is the air fryer.

Mark: Where do you see yourself in five years? Sitting on my own on a podcast talking about air fryers.

Jack: I'm getting paid for it and that's what matters.

Mark: I tried to buy one of those air fryers when there was that mistake on Amazon.

Jack: Oh I did as well.

Mark: Was like a three quid. Did you get it?

Jack: I was able to complete the purchase but it was canceled.

Mark: Yes.

Jack: Yeah, yeah. Because somebody in the office went, "Oh my god, there's a £2 air fryer on Amazon." So were like, "Oh my god." And we all scrambled in the Candour office and they canceled it and it was all a big, it was a mistake, a typo or a spam thing or something like that. But air frying is now a big part of my life and I hate to say that as a 32-year-old man. As a recently married, 32-year-old man is hopefully trying to buy his first house. I have never sounded more adult in my entire life that air frying is a key part of my life right now. We probably use it two, three, maybe even four times a week sometimes, depending on what we're doing. I did a really nice katsu chicken with panko breadcrumbs and stuff in the other day. Came out really, really well. I am vegetarian, I do cook meat stuff for my wife, so that was real chicken I did use. But I have used plenty of vegan stuff in there as well. And to tie into all of this, I seemingly have a bit of a reputation for it, I've probably talked about it in the office because I got an air fryer cookbook as my secret Santa here at Candour this year. So I'm known as the air fryer guy it seems. And yeah, as you said Mark, there's been a lot of deals going on and stuff like that. There was a fairly big spike when a lot of the lockdowns were happening and people were getting into doing more baking and cooking and you can make bread in this or you can make an omelet in an air fryer and do all this crazy stuff. They are now crazy popular and once again, much like Carcassonne and board games, I got there before it was cool. I'm clearly a trendsetter. Clearly an influence and a trend setter in the air fryer niche. But yeah, it is crazy how popular they are at the moment and I don't know if they really warrant it. They're basically a mini oven. It doesn't really do much. Mechanically it is a small oven, that is it. There is no special. Oh my god, how does it fry stuff with air? There's no oils. Yes, it just oven cooks it. It's just an oven. It's just an oven You're able to shake about a bit and adjust. I'm sorry to break the bubble of air frying but it is just a little oven basically. Have you ever tried an air fryer Mark? Have you had one?

Mark: I haven't, no. I thought I would venture into them when I could get one for about £3 and then when it turned out that was one of those heart crushing too good to be true moments. I gave up on my dream and returns to my standard oven cooking that I can't shake around.

Jack: Fair enough, fair enough. Well maybe you'll have to come over to my house and I'll air fry you something real good.

Mark: Nice air fry me Christmas dinner or something.

Jack: Oh my god, you probably could do, I guess again it's a little oven, you could. You just stick a little turkey leg thing in there. I don't know, I'm vegetarian, I don't know what I'm talking about. Stick a little thing in there and air fryer for 40 minute, an hour. How long does Christmas dinner...

Mark: I'll ask GPT Chat later.

Jack: That's the answer we asked GPT Chat how long it takes to cook a Christmas dinner in an air fryer and then we test it and see who gets food poisoning first.

Mark: So I read a book quite a few years ago, I think it's called the Dice Man and it is basically about this chap that was getting stuck in habits in his life. So essentially he would just have one crazy option of something to do and then do it on a dice roll and then if it was that, just do it pretty dark book to be honest. But I think you could do a modern version of that with GPT Chat for instance, be like, what should we cook for Christmas dinner? Then it lists it, then ask for the instructions on how to cook it and just follow them. Just whatever it says.

Jack: Just see what happens.

Mark: Just do it and just see where it goes. Yeah.

Jack: Nice. Well coming in the end of year special of search with Candour 2023 will be Mark and I doing ASMR of eating an air fried AI generated Christmas dinner. How about that? Got that to look forward to in a year's time. But if you do want to learn about air fryers, Carcassonne or hygge and plenty more trends, go do sistrix.dot.com/trends. Subscribe to TrendWatch and you'll get that delivered to your inbox every single month. Should we talk about some predictions for 2023? Mark: Yes. Jack: Some plans, some suspicions, some spicy takes-

Mark: Yes.

Jack: ... coming up for 2023. Why don't you kick us off Mark, what is your big prediction for 2023?

Mark: I am putting all of my prediction chips onto SpamBrain. I think SpamBrain is going to be much more impactful than people realize.

Jack: Interesting.

Mark: So I know we haven't talked about it on the podcast. So rolled out December or started rolling out December the 14th as usual, we got the, "It can take about two weeks or so to roll out."

Jack: Just in time for Christmas.

Mark: And Google said they are going to target both sites that are buying links and sites that are used essentially to pass outgoing links. So paid for bloggers, PBNs, that kind of thing. Interestingly in the wording it said, "The update will," quote, "neutralize links," it detects as being spam and thus links won't be counted." So you'll get a decline in ranking. But I think it's interesting they're not saying it's a penalty and John Mueller actually chimed in and said specifically, "It's not like a manual action penalty."

Jack: You will not get a notification if this happens.

Mark: It's just that they're recognizing the links as bought/sold and they are starting to ignore them. It's a global all language system. But what I think is particularly interesting, so this is obviously we had this spam update, is this SpamBrain is Google says, "The first time they're using AI-based spam detection," which I think is going to be very interesting because I've already seen the usual crew be like, "Ha ha ha, Google's rubbish at link detection. I've been buying links for years," because as I tell clients basically up until now and probably still in the future of, "Yes, paid links do work."

Jack: They all work, yeah.

Mark: "They do have an impact and they will work until they don't." And we've talked about this loads so I'm not going to tread over...

Jack: Building the longevity, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, long-term security, all that kind of thing.

Mark: But I think that if I had an experienced link builder type of person look at a bunch of web pages, they could probably quite quickly tell me which ones are the link farms and which ones are good links. Because there's all kinds of clues that you pick up from the site design to the wildly going from one topic to the next in the blog post and then the, oh look, isn't it interesting that on these blog posts they always use really rich anger text and that's all the kind of things. It's pattern detection, computers are better at pattern detection than people.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think you are totally right. If you were experienced in link building or just an SEO in general, you get a spidey sense for this, right? You get a, I know the feeling when I click on a website and I go, that doesn't feel right. There was an example from Steve from SISTRIX. He was talking about some impacts from this on some sites that have been affected by this recent launch and there was one in particular where it's like he described it as, "Getting bad vibes from their backlink profile." So he dived into the data a little bit more and it was a crazy mixture of a huge amount of links across a huge amount of domains, all of which basically do nothing on a random .net domains essentially. And I think it was like 96% were follow links. And I know something you touched on in a post for the Wix Learning Hub, Mark, in your How Do No Follow Links Work. There's that element of getting rid of or trying to disavow those no links or whatever you're trying to do because, or no follow links are bad. Actually there's an element of that being what an organic backlink profile looks like. Because you're naturally, if you are creating good content and getting links and all this kind of stuff as you should be, just "create good links" in the words of Google.

Mark: Good content.

Jack: Sorry, yes, just "create good content" in the words of Google.

Mark: Well the SEO reared its head in, "Just check good link," I meant content, I'm sorry Google.

Jack: Please don't beat me John Mueller.

Mark: But yes, as long as you're create that content and you're getting links, you're going to naturally acquire no follow as well as, quote, unquote, "do follow," which doesn't exist. But getting rid of all that stuff and suddenly seeing, 96% of this backlink profile are follow links is instantly suspicious. Just straight away, the fact that you've gathered and it was like hundreds of thousands of links, it wasn't like a couple of hundred, I think it was close enough to a quarter of a million and that means nearly a quarter of a million of them. Feels unlikely.

Jack: Right, yeah, exactly. And it was this site that was not really doing that much and all the sites that were referring to it were basically doing nothing and not doing anything in particular. So if we as humans can get a vibe and an inkling just by looking at a few different domains, you're totally right Mark, Google has the power and the money and the machines to do that as well. And I think we massively underestimate pattern recognition because as humans we are very good at pattern recognition. But do you know what's better at pattern recognition? Robots and machines, they basically do that as their entire existence. So yeah, I think that you are totally right it could have a pretty, pretty big impact and if it shuts up a few of the very vocal I just buy links and get away with it people on Twitter, I'm all for it because they irritate me.

Mark: So what about you? Do you have any big spicy predictions for 2023?

Jack: I think my spiciest take is some form of IndexNow and I'm being vague here and trying to get away with it because some form of IndexNow-

Mark: I'm ready to pounce.

Jack: ... will come to Google in 2023, or they will announce something, they'll be testing something. Because it's been seemingly, from the data, and I think we touched on this a few weeks ago, Bing has done really, really well with IndexNow and maybe just because there's so fewer people using Bing. From what I understand and from the spokespeople from Microsoft, it's not been completely spammed to hell and ruined. Again, talking of the people that buy links and do dodgy SEO stuff, I would be worried it would be just spammed and broken very quickly. If it does come to something like Google, which is as we said, serves like a 100,000 times more searches than Bing. But that in particular, I thought was interesting from Bing, 7% of all new URLs clicked on... All new URLs clicked on URLs, that's a weird way of winging it. "7% of all new URLs clicked on in Bing search in the past month were sourced from IndexNow protocol," that's a quote from Fabrice Canel from Microsoft and talking to Search Engine Land. In fact IndexNow has grown a lot. This is now back to Search Engine Land with more than 16 million websites are using IndexNow. They're publishing over 1.2 billion URLs per day to the IndexNow API. I've had a little bit of a play around with IndexNow I've been testing out on a couple of sites I have, but not much experience really. How do you feel about IndexNow Mark and how spicy is my take here? And I'm saying with a lot of vagueness and hesitancy, obviously. I'm not just being like, right, it's coming, I'm going to see it's going to happen. But how spicy is my take here do you think?

Mark: I think, yeah, it's interesting. So IndexNow I've always told people should be called CrawlNow.

Jack: And absolutely, yes.

Mark: Because it's about getting the search engine to come and visit that page and check it out again, not necessarily index it. My feel for Google is that they've got the crawling thing down in that... even on new fairly big sites like the Canary in the mine site, 10,000 pages pretty much fully indexed within a few weeks. The issue everyone's having is whether Google wants to index it or not. Now my initial thought was, "No Google won't need that because they're all over this with crawling," right? But then actually if you look at server logs, you'll probably find that the Bing bot is way more aggressive than Google. It's turning up more and looking at more pages. So then I'm like, "Well actually, the data maybe doesn't suggest that." So if Microsoft is saying there is some benefit here in the, that's a 7% is a huge amount of these URLs.

Jack: Like we said, every time we say like 7%, you think like, "What's 7%? That doesn't mean anything." That's 7%, and as we said here, publishing over 1.2 billion URLs per day using the API, that's what we're talking about with 7%. Billions of things per day for a small percentage of the total URLs that have been clicked on through Bing search. So yeah, like you said, even small percentages make massive changes and are huge numbers to be dealing with. So yeah, I'm interested to see if this does make a difference if. Because we've seen it a few times where Bing will test a new thing and God bless Bing they'll do the thing because they have, for want of a better phrase, far less to worry about than Google. If Google does something and it breaks or it's bad, they get dragged through the mud by the media and by us in SEO and podcasters like us and things like that. Bing is able to test and be a bit more experimental and do cool weird stuff that maybe Google couldn't get away with because it would affect millions and millions, probably billions if not trillions of dollars of E-commerce sites and all that kind of stuff. Comparatively, Bing is so much smaller despite it being the second bigger search engine and it's this cool little playground, this little experimental thing that they're able to do. And I wonder if IndexNow is one of these examples where Google will see the success of this and be like, yeah we could probably do that in a similar kind of way. We'll kind of nick that thing from Bing we've done over the last 10 years or so. And yeah, we'll do something similar. Again, spicy take, perhaps. But I'm interested to see, because like you said, I think we're seeing a lot of issues with indexation and the whole discovered not currently indexed thing and people been stuck in that purgatory of, cool, you've got content, but is it worth me indexing? I don't really know. I'm not really convinced. But yeah, I think maybe this'll be a push in the right direction for certain people and certain things at Google moving in this direction with something like IndexNow, I don't know what they'll call it because IndexNow is a trademarked term, but yeah, I'll be interested.

Mark: NowIndex.

Jack: CrawlNow!

Mark: It wouldn't be a spicy take if it was obvious.

Jack: Exactly.

Mark: I appreciate that. One thing we were talking about before recording that I think is going to happen in 2023 is more of this multimodal, multimedia and combined search. Using the Google app I've done quite a few searches naturally, not through novelty, where I've taken a picture of something used visual search, and now you can refine it with language, with search terms as well. And that's been really useful for me, specifically when I've just seen a thing and I want to know what the thing is and how much it costs. So I definitely think, because we've talked about this as well in reference to MUM, which I know you want to mention. Yeah, definitely. Which is this Google bringing together the different formats and making the more indexable and joining up all that information. I think that's definitely going to be a trend in 2023. Alongside that, I think we're going to see more centralization and curation because to use this, I think effectively you need the Google app and the Google app obviously has stuff like the feed built in, which is Google Discover. Actually I shared with Jack just before this showed, you've already looked at it more than me, the shop app, which is like the Shopify centralized, like Amazon experience. So I think those things are going to run together, which is we're getting these cooler features, but you need to get for better or worse, probably worse, more into the ecosystem.

Jack: Coming back around to AI and stuff because understanding how BERT and MUM work and how integral Google is definitely saying they are really integral to our ranking systems and how this all works. So much so that just a few weeks ago, I say a few weeks ago, probably six months ago at this point. Back in August, I was talking about how the feature Snippets now integrate MUM with them and how Google is understanding Featured Snippets and basically making sure there is a wider consensus around the information that is given by Featured Snippets. This was very much driven by a lot of the stuff that was happening with COVID-19 and a lot of misinformation, the whole fake news thing that happened over the last five or six years or so. I think we're going to see more of MUM integrated into SERP features and things like that as well. As we see more of this stuff when we're getting sort of read times coming through onto the SERPs, we're getting tabbed meta descriptions, all this kind of stuff.

And I know it's very... We talk about a lot these new SERP features and it's a very controversial topic because essentially as Google is taking your content and, quote, unquote, "hosting it on their site," and people might not then click through to you to get the full piece of information if they just get the answer on the SERP. But that's Google's thing that they want to keep people on the SERP and to have the power of their machine learning. And from what we understand, MUM is incredibly powerful when it's being integrated and stuff like this. And like you said, Mark, being used for things like multi search and things like that. I think it's going to become even more important in 2023 even and they have said it's very important already in 2022, so I think it can only grow from there, right?

Mark: For sure. The whole discourse about the GPT Chat is going to kill Google.

Jack: Oh God.

Mark: Google's dead now.

Jack: Didn't TikTok kill Google like six months ago?

Mark: Yeah, right.

Jack: When I was speaking to Annie May like yeah, I'm pretty sure TikTok killed Google now. Yeah, of course.

Mark: I actually saw some of the engineers talking about this and something I found really interesting was they were saying that, "Look, the kind of computational muscle needed to do GPT Chat is 10 to a 100 times kind of what we're getting on a Google search," which is fine when you've got a million people playing around with your tool and you're like cache a lot of responses it looks like to me on GPT Chat.

Jack: Yes.

Mark: When you are serving billions and billions of searches a day, suddenly those numbers look very bad in terms of latency, in terms of cost to actually run it. Google's revenue model, how do you do that and not break your strangle hold on, the paid ads in search. I think we mentioned it before as well, the whole getting answers from a large language model versus a language model that's plugged into an entities' knowledge graph that, quote, unquote, "understands what it's talking about." We know they exist in Google. Google uses LLMs, there was that researcher working at Google that made the headlines-

Jack: Oh, yeah.

Mark: ... because he believed it was sentient. So they've obviously got some really great tech we saw for-

Jack: They're one of the biggest technology companies in the history of the world. They're going to be doing crazy interesting stuff with AI.

Mark: It just blows my mind that people think that Google have just sat there, and then GPT Chats come along and then Google's gone, oh, oh AI, why didn't we think about that?"

Jack: I guess we'll just fold this multi-trillion dollar company then.

Mark: It was four years ago we saw the Google demo of the Booking, the haircut, although that was axed, that project, they got Google Land.

Jack: Because it became sentient and tried to take over the world.

Mark: But yeah, we're definitely going to be seeing more. I think that's the long term play. Again, I can't see it disappearing overnight though, because using the prompt example of, "Okay, here's a question, give me an answer." There is a certain fail safe of being given 10 possible answers, i.e. Web search results. Yes, it's slightly more work to look at them, but otherwise you are relying on a system being pretty much 100% accurate.

Jack: Which ties into misinformation and fake news and all that kind of stuff. And the old phrasing, programming, computing and stuff is "crap in, crap out." If you give it bad information, you ask a stupid question, chances are with GPT Chat you might get a stupid answer. And the fact that, yeah, like you said, getting a consensus and Google clearly, clearly wants to focus on this. We touched on this with the ranking system clarification they did a few weeks ago. They wanted to have information, clarity and consensus and basically understanding the experts and what they say about this topic, so people can't just suddenly write rubbish about a disease and be like, oh yeah, this is definitely what causes this disease and get featured. And then that's the answer everyone goes by. Actually having different opinions and not closing yourself, essentially turning it into an echo chamber of, oh, the GPT Chat told me I must have this disease, therefore I have this disease.

Actually going out checking multiple sources, speaking to doctors and stuff makes way more sense than, oh, just take its word for it. Yeah, that's fine. Ties into E-E-A-T and YMYL and all that kind of stuff. How much can you trust from ChatGPT and how that ties into what Google are doing. I think, yeah, people underestimate how long Google have been in this game for and how big they are and how powerful they are and I feel like a lot of us know in SEO because we talk about them so much. But yeah, I think a lot of people kind of freaking out and saying, "Oh, it's going to take over Google it. It gave me the answer so much better or so much quicker." Was it better? Are you sure? Talking about the entity example we had and things like that, there's no guarantee there and I think yeah, it's become a big, big thing for a Google, like you said, long term, not just in 2023, but for the next, however long before the singularity happens, and the AI robots take over and all that kind of stuff. MUM and BERT and all this machine learning and AI stuff is an integral part of Google and it's here to stay.

Mark: I think it's a really good note to end on.

Jack: Definitely. As the robot overlords takeover at the end of 2022 and we head into 2023.

Mark: So yeah, I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas for those celebrating it and we will be back with you in the New Year.

Jack: We will. Thank you so much for your support throughout the year. It's been an amazing year of me joining the show and doing 50 episodes. It's been a rollercoaster of different topics and different guests and all kinds of stuff and even recording some live streams and things like that. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your support over the last 50 episodes and stay tuned for lots more awesome content coming in 2023 from both Mark and me and the Candour team as well. Until then, have a lovely Christmas if you do celebrate. Have a lovely New Year and we see you in 2023.