Google introduces 'learn as you search' and removes links from SGE

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Show notes

This week, Jack Chambers-Ward is joined once again by Mark Williams-Cook to discuss:

• The new SERP update feature is now live in SISTRIX
• 'Learn as you search' with new SGE features
• Google have removed links from SGE
• Social media links can now be added directly to Google Business Profile

Transcript

Jack: Hello, and welcome to this month's episode of SISTRIX With Candour. I am your host, Jack Chambers Ward, joined by my co-host, Mark Williams Cook.

Mark: Hello.

Jack: How are you, Mark?

Mark: Very well. Thank you, Jack.

Jack: It's a pleasure to be here on SISTRIX's YouTube channel once again. We are going to talk about a lot of SEO news coming up, and I'm very excited to dive into some pretty hot topics in SEO this month. We're going to be talking about the new SERP update feature within SISTRIX. Google is testing some new SGE features while you browse, and a few other bits and pieces. They've been playing around testing a lot of things with SGE. Google also lets businesses add social media links to their profiles in Google Business Profile, finally. And of course we'll be tackling a couple of questions at the end in our Q&A section. So welcome to the show, everybody. Thank you for joining us on YouTube. If you're listening to us on podcast, please do go and check out the YouTube version. And if you're watching us on YouTube, there is also an audio available on the Search with Candour podcast feed as well. So we've got you covered either way, essentially. We're nice and easily covered on audio and video. So wherever you get your podcasts or YouTube videos, you can go check us out there.

I'm going to kick things off not with Index Watch, not with Trend Watch, but a very cool update from SISTRIX themselves. We're going to talk about the SERP update feature that has now rolled out across SISTRIX. There are a few different ways to access this feature, and I did actually touch upon it a couple of weeks ago on the podcast, so if you heard that, stay tuned because this is a much more deep dive. And you'll actually get to see how it works if you're watching us on the video as well because I've got some lovely little video clips that we'll loop around and show us how to access that and how it all works in the different views within SISTRIX. So let me show you the first one, which is in the keyword overview section. Of course, Steve knows I love my air fryer chips, so we're talking about air fryer chips. And yeah, there's essentially the little button at the top there. If you saw on the YouTube channel, we saw a little click at the very, very top there, the button that said, "Update SERP," and it's going to update the SERP for us to the latest, freshest data. I know we've talked about this a lot, how important that freshness of data can be sometimes when you are making big changes and adjusting things. Having the latest data is a very, very powerful thing to have, right?

Mark: This is a great update for people in terms of SaaS tooling, because generally up until now with these big data tools like SISTRIX, the situation has been like, "We don't have that data yet, so you've just got to wait for it." And that's really frustrating if you're working in-house and there's been a Google update and people are breathing down your neck trying to find out what impact has it had from us, and you're looking at the tool and the data's old. So that's incredible that they've obviously done that through feedback of people asking to be able to do that.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. So like I said, this is in the keyword overview section of SISTRIX. You can also do this when you are inspecting a domain as well, and I'll show you how that works now. So this is looking at the realfood.tesco.com subdomain, and you've got, "Update selected SERPs" there, and you can actually select which ones you want to do. You can do them all, you can tick and untick boxes however you want, or you can also select the older than seven days feature, which really stood out to me as a really handy quick little blast of, if anything is ever so slightly out of date, hit the older than seven days button and that will really tick a lot of boxes there. I think that's really, really useful.

Mark: Yeah, especially if you're trying to look at, say clusters and work out, "Okay, these five keywords have dropped, but we don't know why." And actually it's because the data's out of date and you haven't realised that. So otherwise you're going to have to literally not only look at all the positions and data, but you've got to verify all the date points of that data.

Jack: Yes. Data date points updates.

Mark: Thank you.

Jack: And we can also see, thanks to SISTRIX, how you do it with lists as well. And I was speaking to Steve, the marketing manager over at SISTRIX, and Steve is a big advocate of lists because they save you so much time when you're using SISTRIX. You can create ranking tracking lists, you can create competitor lists, and you can basically do it all in a couple of clicks and update all the keywords in one particular project for a client or one particular group of competitors and see how the SERPs are changing for you and your competitors, your clients and your competitors as well. And lists are a huge powerful tool, and combined with this makes it really, really convenient for you to just easily get the latest updates. A really interesting thing Steve pointed out to me that I didn't even think about but is a really important point is, these are not personalised and obviously not localised either.

So you're getting a true neutral scope of the SERP, because funnily enough, I was having a conversation with one of our account managers and a client a couple of weeks ago, I think last week. And we were saying, "Oh, we are seeing us ranking fourth." I was like, "Well, I'm seeing us ranking second." Huh, why is that? And had a little poke around and we were using incognito tabs and VPNs and all this kind of stuff, and the SERP was changing as we were shifting user agents and all this kind of stuff. So we're like, "Ah, okay, so there is some localization going on there." This lets you get rid of all that and have a bigger picture, neutral viewpoint of the SERPs, which is really, really useful to include in your reports to clients, or as you were saying, Mark, you were reporting and you've just launched a new product and you're working in-house, you need to report to your superiors and the executives in the company and things like that. This neutral SERP lets you really compare and contrast date by date, so you can come back in six months and know you're not being affected by localization and personalization on the SERP and things like that. I think it's a really, really cool feature that SISTRIX, like you said, Mark, have rolled out, because people were asking for it. And SISTRIX are great at answering people's queries, questions, and requests, which I think is a huge boon for a big SaaS company.

Mark: I'm genuinely impressed with that. A SaaS tool is there a lot of the time to save you time, and that is a lovely feature and it's well thought out. So yeah, big points for SISTRIX there from me.

Jack: Awesome. Well, thank you, SISTRIX, for the fantastic update. Thank you for having us on the YouTube channel, as always, and thank you for sponsoring the podcast. We love you guys.

'Learn as you search' with SGE

Now let's talk about some hot topics in SGE, shall we, Mark?

Mark: SGE. Haven't talked that much about SGE with you, have I?

Jack: No, I tackled it a couple of times. We touched on it, I think it was last month. We had a little dip, kind of dipped our toes into it little bit. I talked about it a lot when I had Austin Esezobor on the show a couple of weeks ago and then dived into a lot into perspectives and how it relates to SGE when I had Garrett Sussman on the show a couple of months ago as well. So I've danced around it. I have yet to try it myself, which is very frustrating.

Mark: Violin sounds. I do feel really like second class citizens. When Google rolled out this SGE in the US I thought, "We won't be far behind," but now not only has the SGE been out quite a while, but they're rolling out all these changes and features to it and we haven't had a look in yet.

Jack: Yeah, yeah. I've been trying with VPNs. I know you have too. I know quite a lot of other UK-based SEOs who have been playing around trying to get access to this kind of stuff, but unfortunately we haven't. But Google are testing stuff as we speak, a lot of US-based SEOs, people like Lily Ray, Glenn Gabe, of course Barry Schwartz as well, playing around and testing a lot of stuff and seeing quite a lot of shifts and quite a lot of changes. So we're going to start off with talking about how they're including essentially definitions with a hover that are AI generated from a separate source. So let's go in, and we've got a nice little animation here, again, provided by Google, that shows if you hover over the word proton, it then explains what a proton is in a little highlight there and then links to the Wikipedia page from that little snippet.

Mark: And that definition is AI.

Jack: Yes.

Mark: So there's AI now within the AI answer.

Jack: Exactly.

Mark: Inception AI.

Jack: AInception. I don't know how that works. But yes, yeah, this is an interesting thing, especially for obviously being a nerdy physics-y kind of guy that I am, I appreciate these kind of science-y stuff, where you have a pretty clear definition of what a thing is. You would hope that an AI can get this stuff right. And I know we've talked about a lot of subjective stuff coming around with perspectives and being the other side of the coin of trying to get the human side of things. This is trying to get you a quick definitive answer, and I've seen this feature on other sites before, but actually seeing it on a SERP is pretty weird and pretty cool. But again, a lot of people I'm sure are saying, "Oh, it's zero click SERPS," blah, blah, blah. But yeah, I think that's going to be a continued part of SGE, right?

Mark: Yeah, the argument Google's going to have is, better for the user, right? Which is their go-to argument. And in a way I can see it, right? Because in that definition we've got there where you've got, "What is a proton?" essentially, when you're getting answers like the one that's generated there, it's easy to remember, lots of people won't know the terminology, whatever the subject is, it's physics in this case. And Google's probably seen it does generate a lot of ... Kind of people also ask stuff, which is, "Oh, I got this answer. Well, I don't actually know exactly what a proton is."

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: And it is a good example of something that can legitimately be generated by AI. Because if you're going for, say the definition of a proton, from a large language model point of view there's probably tons of data skewing it to the correct answer and there's not going to be much difference in opinion on something like that. So I think it's actually a good example there from Google about perhaps where they could roll additional AI value into the SGE. But yeah, of course people running websites and people that spend that time planning and briefing that content on what is a proton are going to be upset about it.

Jack: Yeah, because-

Mark: You've trained the machine.

Jack: Absolutely, yeah. There was an interesting thing I was talking about with the IndexWatch done by Lily Ray in the US over the last six months on SISTRIX, and we were looking at basically a lot of definition style SERPs, so dictionary websites, thesauruses, all that kind of stuff were on the decline, and they've been pretty volatile. They've been on the decline for a while now, from what we've seen with a lot of the SISTRIX data, which we've covered over the last year or so. And it seems to kind of be tying into this, right? If Google can provide the answer straight away on the SERP without needing to give you a click and feed you through to Merriam Webster or dictionary.com or whatever it is, then it makes sense that they would lose that visibility as Google are shifting towards another way to present the same information. It's interesting to see how you see the data leading up to this. Because I hadn't made that connection and then I saw this specific example, I was like, "Hmm, that's very interesting." I'd literally just talked about this in Index Watch. So it's nice to see all the data combining together and telling similar stories. We've also got a very interesting thing.

I think this is the thing that is most interesting to me about these features in SGE, which is an article summary option. You see the generate button down at the bottom there, the little mouse is going to go and click on the generate button now, and it'll give you a key points from the page option. And I've seen this in Google Docs, I know you and I have experimented with this, Mark, in terms of, you get a client proposal and you can kind of do a little summary and stuff, or you do a big report in Google Docs or whatever it is and it can do a quick, "This is the show notes for Search With Candour, episode 84," blah, blah, blah. And it'll give you a quick summary of stuff. I found it to be pretty hit and miss personally, so I'm very interested to see how these kind of AI generated summaries of an entire article are going to play out on the SERPs. I'm very, very skeptical, is what I'm saying, basically.

Mark: Yeah, I think again, it's an interesting use of the technology for something it potentially could be quite good at. Because again, how the LM is trained, we've been using that as well in the other way around with PAA data to try and say, if we've got an article and we've got a list of 20, say, questions for people to ask, you can use something like ChatGPT to say, "Does this article answer these questions?" Which is essentially what that key points thing is doing in reverse.

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: And it might be from an SEO point of view an interesting insight into how Google is seeing the page. And I'd be, again, interested in on a larger scale how that's mirrored by things like ChatGPT in terms of an LM. If you ask ChatGPT to summarise this page into bullet points, is it going to give you equivalent output to Google? If so, you know that's the level that you're passing the data at. So you can maybe look at optimizing your pages for key points better, because if you've got the questions and they're answered within the paragraphs, because Google's got to that stage we don't have to verbosely say, "This is the question, this is the answer," which may be another reason why they're deprecating their FAQ schema results.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: And the spam, but we'll move on from that. But yeah, again, like you say, there's that breadcrumb trail of data that leads to that point, but don't know as well if it'll be ready for prime time. Because that's a lot of searches it's got to be correct for.

Links removed from SGE

Jack: This is the whole question about SGE and perspectives and this whole generative AI being introduced into search in general. And what we've seen as well is Google testing with sources and links in this initial pop-up with the SGE. So here's an example of, "How much does it cost to charge an electric car?" And you can see highlighted in green there you've got sources for each of these things that then externally link, for want of a better phrase, from a, I guess they're still external links. They link out to things like Investopedia and Power and Edmonds and all this kind of stuff, but they have also been rolling out an option without links as well. So here is a very, very similar query. So this is, "How long does it take to charge," not how much does it cost, or how long does it take to charge an electric car?

And there are no links in this central text section here. And Google has been a bit funny about this, it seems, because I saw Lily Ray tweet about this and say, "Hey, what's going on? Yesterday I had links, now I don't have links." And Barry Schwartz was confirming the same thing. He was able to replicate a lot of things as well. We've taken some of these examples from Barry's article on Search Engine Roundtable, shout out to you, Barry, thank you for all the hard work you do for SEO News. And this is really interesting because it seems different users are getting different results at different times. Maybe Google is geographically shifting test groups and things like that. What are your thoughts on this, Mark? Do you think there should be links? Do you think there should not be links? And we're going to get into Google's little caveat that they had, the little statement they had as well.

Mark: Yeah, so Danny Sullivan came back to comment on this change between those two screens we just saw and said, "We've always had corroborating links. This hasn't changed." Kind of has, Danny. The carousel that we launched with is still there.

Jack: I think it might have done, look.

Mark: You can use the menu icon to open for links to appear inline. That said, we've been experimenting, done different formats, so still more change to come. I guess to break it down, I would like links as a webmaster SEO type person. As a user that knows a lot about Google, I would like links because I don't trust SGE yet unless it's clear where each one of those bullet points comes from. The carousel I don't think is going to be particularly well used. I think that's a lip service to, "Well, we've got links there." Because it's a bit like saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've referenced this paper. It's over there in the cabinet in the third drawer down." Nobody's going to start-

Jack: You try and get away with that in university.

Mark: Nobody's going to start clicking on expand links to check stuff like that. And Google definitely knows that, because there were huge amounts of data on how people are interacting with SERPs. And their whole thing about time to result has been about reducing friction, reducing the need for users to do anything basically, to click. So they know full well people aren't going to start clicking on, open up more carousel stuff.

Jack: Yeah, it seems very, for want of a phrase, like counter Google. And like you said, they so push for as few links as possible to get throughout that time to result data that we talk about so often, and the Google really hammer home is like, "We're trying to make this a more streamlined experience for the user. We're trying to make it easier for users to get to the data that they're looking for." But then, "Oh, well, you'd have to go and click a button," that I can't see on this screen, by the way. If you look at the option without links, where are you clicking on this thing to get those links? Is it that little top thing in the top right there? Is there something at the bottom if you follow through with the FAQs? The fact that it's not clear to me just at a glance, and as you said, Mark, even if we're not professional SEOs, we're still conscious of search, and for want of a phrase, like power users. We are pretty techie and we know what we're doing.

Mark: If you're an SEO, you're not a regular user of Google.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: But then this is why I said I want the links as someone with that knowledge. Without that knowledge, which is the vast majority of people, Google has an argument probably that that is a better, cleaner, better for the user result. Because the only difference I feel is that you need to trust Google to do that, which I think, because you don't have the knowledge and you're not exposed to when Google does get things wrong as much as, any time Google messes something up, the SEO community is all over it looking at it and why and all this. Most people don't see that. So most people will just trust it, therefore it's fine for them and they probably don't click on the links as much.

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: So it's a weird answer. I think they should do because I don't think it's ready, from what I've seen, for primetime, but for most users I don't think they'll care. And I think they probably think the one without links is cleaner and nicer.

Jack: Yeah, I'd almost like to do a poll of SEO, non-SEO people to see, does this just look like a more cluttered version of this? Would they even notice the difference straight away? Within the first five seconds and you present half a group with links and half a group without links as a test, would people even notice or care? And I think that's a huge thing of, maybe that's exactly what Google is testing. That's why they're experimenting with so many different options for SGE and seeing where this is going. And you're totally right, Mark, we put the magnifying glass on anything that Google do, sometimes to too harsh of a degree sometimes, but sometimes very, very rightly so. And I'm interested to see, and I know we talked about this last month as well, how normal people, for want of a phrase, non-SEOs who aren't aware of SERP changes and algorithm updates and the fact that SGE is even a thing. How are they going to feel about this when this suddenly shows up on their phone or their desktop or whatever?

Yeah. Suddenly it looks like an academic paper with all these little references. And it's like the little reference link, that little half a box with an arrow. It is that kind of Wikipedia style, article style, academic paper style reference thing. Is that the bit that you click on for the link? Can you click on the whole word? Oh, I don't know. It does seem a bit more cluttered to me, which kind of puts me off. But yeah, do we trust AI from Google's side in getting the right answer? I think you're right, Mark. It's half baked, so not so far. So please keep links while you're still working on it.

Social media links for Google Business Profile

Our next topic, we'll be talking about Google Business Profile, not something we talk about a huge amount on this show. We don't do a lot of local search chat here because it's relatively stable in the grand scheme of things. I know we talked about adding services to pages a little while ago, that was very interesting, that made a big difference in search results in local SEO. But now Google is letting us add links to our social media on our business profile pages. And we were talking about this earlier, this is something you can do already, and it's something you've probably noticed before, listeners and viewers. If you scroll down past the reviews and stuff, there is usually links for social media stuff, and that is for, as you said at the top of the show, Mark, marking that stuff up, including it as links on your website and Google going and finding that stuff. So this is just streamlining that process, and you can add a few different things. So I think there's a list of seven different options, is that right?

Mark: I think it's seven, yeah. So why didn't they do this years ago?

Jack: It seems like square one obvious stuff, right?

Mark: Yeah, especially I think the Google business profiles are particularly used by micro businesses, small businesses just to get some exposure even if they don't have a website yet, but they've got some social media. And the only way really to get those social profiles before was through structured data, and then it was a bit flaky. It would take a while, and if you made a mistake on it wouldn't work. So it just seems like such a obvious thing to do. But yeah, you can add a single link now to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X, formerly known as Twitter.

Jack: Nobody's just calling it X yet.

Mark: Nobody's just calling it X yet, and YouTube.

Jack: Nice. Okay.

Mark: How many was that? Two, three, four, seven.

Jack: Yes.

Mark: Seven.

Jack: Seven. Nice.

Mark: No Threads.

Jack: That's interesting. Yeah.

Mark: No Threads.

Jack: That is the same as your Instagram, I guess? Because they are inherently linked.

Mark: Well, they've got different usernames.

Jack: But they do, Yeah. You have a numeric code for Threads, right?

Mark: Yeah, and there's no web thing for Threads yet, is there?

Jack: No.

Mark: So that wouldn't work.

Jack: There is no desktop version of Threads.

Mark: Yeah.

Jack: You got to thread.net, it is just like a map of all the users and a nice swirly graphic.

Mark: They need to get the web stuff up and going.

Jack: Yeah, that's another thing. Similar to this, you would assume that would be a day one easy kind of option, whereas including links to social media in your Google business profile seems to be fairly important. And Google thankfully have also given us the information on how to do it as well. So if you go to your profile and click edit profile and then go through to business information and then contact, you should then see the social profiles option. And I checked this this morning for our one at Candour, we don't have it yet and I was very annoyed. I wanted to have nice screenshots on here. I wanted to actually do it because I'm part of managing that thing for the company anyway, so I was like, "Cool, I'll get some social media links on there. I'll have a live example of how I did it on Candour and all that sort of stuff." It hasn't rolled out to us yet. Much like SGE, we are left in the dust. Us here in the UK cannot do anything exciting on Google any more apparently.

Mark: Tiny violins.

Jack: Yeah, exactly. But once you're there and you click add social profiles and then the drop box will basically give you an option to add all those links there. They do need to be in specific formats, which Google, it's the obvious stuff, it's HTTPS, all that kind of stuff you'd expect. It will error if you put in the wrong thing. If you don't include a www. when you should have done, if you do HTTP, all that kind of stuff. So it should be fairly, fairly straightforward for anybody looking to add that. Hopefully some listeners out there, you will have access to this and you'll be able to go and update your Google business profiles either for your business or your client's business as well, and get that nice and updated.

Mark: Nice.

Q&A

Jack: Nice. They're our main topics. We've got a couple of questions coming in. I know you posted a few questions out and requests, LinkedIn requests. So we're going to talk about ...

Mark: Love taking question requests.

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: When they're good questions. You had the expression, "No question's a bad question."

Jack: Yes.

Mark: That's not true.

Jack: That's definitely not true.

Mark: But we have some good questions. I thought this one was particularly interesting. And the question is, it says, "I have a query and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Let's say I have a page that I don't want to be indexed," with you so far, "But I also don't want to stop its authority from flowing to pages it links out to. In such cases, what is better for de-indexing webpages, no index follow or no index no follow?"

Jack: The big question of the day.

Mark: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. And it's something I used to try and do at some point, which was building links to specific pages. And they weren't really great pages, if I'm honest, but I still wanted those links to go through to other good pages to get them to rank. So I'd no index those pages. Now, a couple of things here. And this no index follow thing or no index no follow, follow, no follow.

Jack: Follow isn't a thing.

Mark: Follow isn't a thing.

Jack: That's the first starting point, right? That's not an option.

Mark: Yeah. That's the starting point. So follow is the default behavior of crawlers.

Jack: It's the absence of a no follow, exactly.

Mark: So you can say no follow, and if you don't or if you say anything else, they're just going to follow the links. So no index follow isn't a thing. So it's the same as just putting no index.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: Secondly, the term no follow is kind of misleading, because search engines, Google at least, and you can see this from your server logs, do use no follow links for discovery. Meaning if you have a bunch of links on a page that are all no follows and they link to some pages that aren't linked to from anywhere else, those pages can still get indexed. Google will still find those pages. The purpose of the no follow is so they're not passing their link metrics, whatever you want to call it, page rank, they refer to it as authority.

Jack: Juice. We use the term juice here. To clarify, we do not use link juice. I just find that phrase deeply disturbing.

Mark: Fery loves that term.

Jack: He does.

Mark: Shout out to Fery at Search Intelligence, he loves that. I think he tried to trademark it and sell drink called link juice.

Jack: That is the most Fery thing I've ever heard.

Mark: I don't know if that's just a Fery PR stunt. Anyway.

Jack: Hard to tell with Fery, sometimes.

Mark: Your links will still be used to discover pages if they're nofollow. But Google has specifically told us, if a page is noindexed for long enough, they don't tell us what long enough is, but they say the links on that page will be treated as no follow links. And this makes sense from a logical point of view of what Google's trying to achieve, what other search engines are trying to achieve. It doesn't make sense that a page that you don't want to index can pass authority to other pages. You're not in the pool to pass your vote around. So basically you can't do that, which is, no index a page and then try and get it to still pass link equity. I would ask the question, what on earth are you doing that you are attracting links to a page? So you want people to visit the page but you don't want it in search. I can't think of a good reason to do that.

Jack: The example I saw that people were discussing was an HTML site map. That is a big link to, like you said, discoverability and helping search engines and not really users, but specifically search engines to find your pages. And the reason I went, "Not really users there," is because humans don't use site maps unless you're a professional SEO and you're testing stuff or looking around, pretty much. And that was my thought, was like, "Cool, your HTML site map is not going to rank for anything. It's not going to suddenly rank for "Business name site map" because nobody's searching for that. That's not a thing people do. So who cares? At the end of the day you just leave that to do its thing and Google will almost certainly just ignore it because they're smart enough to ignore this stuff.

As much as we talk about, "Oh, SGE is half-baked," and stuff like site maps and no index Google have been doing for decades. So they know what they're doing with this kind of stuff. And as you said, Mark, there's been years and years and years of documented confirmed statements from various members at Google saying like, "Yes, this is how no index works, this is how no follow works." And we're still asking this question now. But I thought, yeah, the inclusion of follow and no follow there I thought was interesting. Because I think that's a very common misconception. I see that bandied around a lot in general discussion as well.

Mark: So we have time for one more question, and the question is this. "I'm getting a lot of English traffic from outside of the UK that I don't want. I'm thinking about switching to a .co.uk away from my .com. Would this help fix my issue?"

Jack: Have you tried Brexit? That stops any non-English traffic coming to your website. No, in all seriousness, I think this is an interesting thing. Because I was talking with a client and they were looking to move, they're currently in a .co.uk, they're looking to move to a .com. And we were having this kind of conversation of, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of thing? And I think the only real advantage I can think of in terms of these CC TLDs, so these country specific TLDs, in this case .co uk, is that it sends a trust signal to a user to say, "This business or this page or this website is from this country" and I know speaking to international SEOs, speaking to people like Alizee Baudez, who I had on the show a couple weeks, speaking to Myriam Jessier, who I had many months ago, back Halloween of last year, there is a kind of almost a stigma in certain countries, of like, "Oh, I'm from this country and we only use websites from this country." So it's almost like a psychological thing rather than a search actual technological thing. From a search perspective, you are only going to have a disadvantage there from a .co.uk. The .com is that global domain that is going to rank more widely. You have chances to rank for other things in other countries and get traffic from other countries. So I guess if you do want to get only UK traffic, a .co.uk is kind of the way to go if you really want, but you are limiting yourself in case you do want to do international expansion or any other kinds of language options later on. I guess you could do some kind of language subfolder-y stuff. I know a couple of our clients do that at the moment. But yeah, I think it's an interesting thing to say, yeah, there's no real big advantage to a .co.uk in terms of ranking compared to a .com, but there is some psychological elements there I think are interesting as well.

Mark: Yeah, it's a weird question because, yes, a .co.uk would disadvantage you to ranking perhaps in other countries. However, I can't see a reason why you'd want to do this.

Jack: I've heard it from clients before where they get loads of traffic, but maybe the leads aren't the right kind of thing because you are being seen in the wrong places, for want a better phrase.

Mark: So my thought of this would be two things. One, if you've already got a lot of traffic, I'd be cautious because any migration does have risk.

Jack: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: So you don't necessarily want to do that. Secondly, there's perhaps things you could do on the site. So you could maybe do some IP detection if you think they're outside the UK, telling them to go away or making a partnership with the other site. Because the thing about the other people that are doing English searches maybe not from the UK, is they could still potentially link to your content, which would improve your rankings in the UK. So I would probably try and look at an on-site way to deal with the traffic or send it to someone or sell it to someone who wants it. So the technical answer is probably yes, it would probably help, but there is probably a better way to do it than change TLDs.

Jack: Definitely. Definitely. Well, thank you for sending questions. Thank you for joining us on this month's SISTRIX with Candour. Hope you enjoyed us talking all about SGE, talking about Google Business Profile, Q&As, and the latest SERP update feature from SISTRIX. Thank you, SISTRIX, for having us once again on your YouTube channel. We very much appreciate it. Please do go and subscribe to Search With Candour if you want weekly updates in a format of a podcast. And we might be working on some video content coming up soon as well. There's a little tease, there's a little plan for the future. And yeah, please do subscribe there. It's available on everything. So Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, all that kind of stuff. Please go and find us there, and subscribe to SISTRIX here on YouTube and you'll get this every single month in your YouTube inbox. We will see you next month. And until then, thank you so much for joining us. Have a lovely month.