SEO UPdate #15 | 21/03/2022

The fifteenth SEO update already, hopefully you have already learned a lot from the updates. My idea here is, fast news from SEO land, written for the real SEO specialist. So let’s get started right away.

AI generated content still not qualitative enough

Google indicates that when AI content gets to the right level, that it is not a problem to have it as content on your website. Google also indicates in the same post that content generated by AI is not yet at the right level for this. Not in 2022 either, then.

There are more and more pieces of software that make this possible, but it is not yet qualitative enough for Google. I suspect Google is only going to say it’s good enough when it’s already more than qualitative enough. Of course, you also have the lower end of these software providers, who still generate really bad content.

In my opinion, you have the most options for English content. This will therefore be announced by Google on a language-by-language basis.

Migrating with 3-month redirects? That’s not long enough.

Google indicates (actually Google’s John Mueller), that when migrating to a new environment with new URLs, 3-month redirects are often not enough. So make sure these stay longer.

I think the person who asked this wants to take into account the website’s crawl budget. Redirects don’t take up a whole lot of crawl budget anyway (no one knows exactly how much), so I often wouldn’t take this as leading either.

Google’s advice is to leave redirects in place for at least 1 year. I would say, just give it a permanent redirect (301) and forget they exist…. 🙂

This won’t have escaped your notice: GA3 (UA) to be phased out by 2023

By 2023, UA will be phased out by Google. This phases out an Analytics program used by a large portion of marketers. A small piece of advice on this is to run both now (I suspect most already did).

Run both tags on your website and make sure you are already collecting data in GA4 from your website. That way you won’t lose any data when you fully switch to GA4.

Note that your website may slow down because you have to install 2 tags via GTM. So weigh carefully whether this is worth it at this time. How important is it that you can access all the data in GA4 (when needed)?

That’s it again for the 15th update. Hopefully you got a lot out of it and can use this to serve your clients just a little bit better.