Google's AI Search, Reddit Blackout & Twitter Fiasco | HighDegree Issue 02
What happening in SEO, AI and Social Media? Take a look!
Hi friends,
Welcome to the 2nd issue of HighDegree*.
HighDegree is a no-bullshit newsletter for digital marketers where I try to simplify SEO, WordPress, Creator Economy & Customer Experience. Even if you are not a marketer but are into any of these topics, you are for a treat!
I will try to write one issue every week, especially Monday because my work-week starts that day. Would be nice to start my week through writing.
Okay, let’s start.
➞ In this Week
Google’s AI search engine
What Google means by ‘Topical Authority”
Microsoft’s new AI-powered analytics tool
Meta’s opensource AI model
What’s YouTube New Wave?
➞ Subscribe
➞ Google
★ For the first time ever, google mentioned topical authority. Now what it’s mean by google? Google explained. Mostly connected to the news, google will use topical authority to rank news sites, mostly local news sites.
★ Do you know “Google Search Generative Experience” is Google’s new AI-powered search experience? If you don’t know read this detailed post by Barry Schwartz from Seoroundtable, who did an excellent detailed post on this.
★ Google removing Canadian news from search over Bill C-18. Ouch! I can’t imagine the drop in organic traffic on Canadian news sites!
➞ Social Media
★ Twitter recently made all their site private to combat AI data scrapping. Now Google dropped half of Twitter URLs from their search!
Twitter no longer lets visitors browse tweets, user profiles, and comment threads on the web without logging in, redirecting Twitter URLs to the sign-in page.
★ Twitter now allows 4 in-line images in one tweet. Here is how it looks! A complete blog inside Twitter. Nice!
★ We saw the biggest online protest by Reddit users a few days ago, around half of the subreddits went dark in this protest. Now people's favorite Reddit apps are closing down despite users' fights.
➞ AI
★ Microsoft unveiled a new data analytics tool name Fabric powered by Azure openAI service. This is big when everyone is frustrated by Google’s GA4 and their forced Universal to GA4 shift for everyone.
Microsoft Fabric is a unified analytics platform that integrates data and analytics tools. It incorporates AI capabilities and features Copilot for conversational interactions. Fabric seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 applications, empowering business users to make data-driven decisions. Fabric provides a comprehensive, AI-powered analytics platform that promotes data-driven decision-making and supports open data formats.
★ Meta (formerly Facebook) has developed AI models capable of recognizing and generating speech for over 1,000 languages, a tenfold increase compared to existing capabilities. The move aims to help preserve endangered languages.
Meta is making these models open source on GitHub, enabling developers to create new speech applications across different languages, including messaging services and language-agnostic virtual reality systems. Traditional speech recognition models heavily rely on labeled training data, limiting their coverage to a few languages. Meta overcame this limitation by retraining an existing AI model from 2020, which learns speech patterns directly from audio, without extensive labeled data.
★ Google is using AI models in its search features. You can choose a model and try different fashion choices.
➞ SEO
★ Check out this Twitter thread to learn the difference between Semrush, Ahrefs, and SERanking. You’ll see how these SEO tools present a different set of data with examples.
➞ WordPress
★ Will monthly pricing work for plugin devs? We will keep an eye on here.
★ Next-generation WordCamp will be short, cost-effective, and there will be no swags! Sorry Wordpressians!
★ Now you can start a paid newsletter on wordpress.com! Wordpress.com is clearly taking an aim on substack here.
WordPress.com is expanding its Newsletter product to compete with revenue-generating newsletter businesses. The update includes features like importing subscribers, customizable designs, scheduling tools, custom domains, and posting via email. Publishers can now add paid subscriptions and premium content to generate income. The option is available to all WordPress.com blogs, with transaction fees varying based on the plan. WordPress.com processes transactions via Stripe in supported markets. Similar to Substack, authors can choose to make posts free or available only to subscribers or paid subscribers at the time of publishing.
➞ Creator Economy
★ Read this deep dive into the YouTube New Wave, a group of creators challenging the traditional metrics of YouTube and embracing storytelling and personal truths. Discover their rebellion against the "Beastification of YouTube" and how these creators are fighting to bring back authenticity to youtube again.
➞ Customer Experience
★ What are the essentials to running effective brand communities?
YourCXGuy: Active participation from the brand is an essential part of communities. I believe communities should be a place where users can ask, and get replies from brands without going through various channels & time wasting.
Effective brand communities have clear goals & objectives.
That’s it guys. See you next week. Let me know which section you like most in this newsletter! I will try to improve future issues based on your suggestions!
➞ Who is Nishat Shahriyar?
I tell myself “I’m a WRITER” every day when I wake up although I don’t know how much my writing sucks, but I love writing. I am a Digital Marketing Strategist, doing this for 15+ years. Now working as a Product Marketing Lead at Fluent Forms (The best lead generation tool for WordPress), Previously Fluent Support (The best WordPress Helpdesk Plugin).
Connect with me, if you are not connected through my LinkedIn or Follow me on Twitter - @rednishat