Aleyda Solis covers the week's SEO news: Gary Illyes says don't update XML sitemap lastmod for minor changes, Google released a new Looker Studio dashboard for Search Console data, and the focus on content originality and generative AI continues to matter for rankings.
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The top hottest SEO news from the latest edition of SEO FOMO. Hello again. Here I come with the top trending stories in case you haven't had the chance to go through the last edition of SEO FOMO brought to you by Semrush Web, who's our today's sponsor. Thank you very much for sponsoring us. Let's go through the most engaging stories, the most popular ones, the ones that you cannot miss. The first one is the coverage from Barry Schwartz about A comment that Gary Illyes did in Bluesky about how people shouldn't be updating the last mod date in their XML sitemap files just because they have updated the copyright year, which is a pretty much trivial update on the page content. Funnily enough, I actually followed up with Gary about this, asking, what about fixing a typo, right? Like, what is actually significant? Because many times, like, a very little change will realistically have a big impact on the meaning of the information. So Gary mentioned depends on the typo, selling cartoon of X for $49.99 to selling cartoon of X for $4,999, right? It's, it's a very big difference. So sometimes just a little dot will make a lot of difference. So it's about the impact of the change. The other very popular resource of the week is also from Google. People love the updated documentation and new Looker Studio dashboard going through how to use Google Search Console and Google Analytics data for SEO together. The updated documentation here in Google Search Central doesn't only go through the differences of the metrics, how to understand the discrepancies, but also it shares a very useful Google Looker Studio dashboard that allows us to access both the Google Analytics and Search Console data together to have a broader view of what's going on in your organic search traffic performance. It gives a very useful step-by-step to start using it too, and explains the metrics that are featured. If you haven't gone through it yet, go and take a look. It has a video along with it besides the Google dashboard too. I love when Google releases resources like this. Kudos to Daniels and Cherry who created it. The other top trending resource is also from Gary, who's trending this week. It's a comment that he actually did in the latest SEO FOMO meetup in London. This was covered by Barry Schwartz from a post from Mark Williams Cook. Who attended the meetup in which Gary highlighted the importance of content originality about being something that they will be focusing on this year. It is also something mentioned here in the coverage, but I would like to highlight even further about how this comment was made in the context of AI, people leveraging AI for the content of their website. So indeed, even if Google had mentioned they will assess content through the same quality standards independently of how it was created, there's a clear challenge with AI-generated content. And originality is a characteristic that they can take into account to assess the quality of content. And if you're using AI for it, it's something that you probably want to take into account. Coincidentally, speaking about the importance of originality and AI-generated content, another very popular story was the coverage from Barry about generative AI mentions in Google Search Quality Rater guidelines that were updated a couple of weeks ago and now are mentioning it as something that quality raters should be paying attention as a way to create low-quality content at scale. We know that this is a tool at the end of the day, and it can be used in many different ways. This is certainly not the only one. So again, it's something that is evident that Google is paying more attention to. Giving guidance to their quality raters about it too. Speaking of AI, to wrap up, I want to share a couple of very popular resources, tools that became very popular through my social channels as well as in SEO FOMO and the AI Marketers newsletter, which is this LLMs TXT generator by Wordlift. This is like the first step, let's say, to facilitate the generation of LLMs TXT, which is pretty much like a robots.txt for LLMs to provide them an input to facilitate the crawlability and understanding of your content. This is very straightforward to use. Give it a go. Thanks to Andrea Volpini from Worlly for creating it. I know that he has been tweaking the tool to make it even more useful, and I can only imagine that he will be continuously revamping it to offer more functionalities. Very looking forward to that. And last but not least, Cloudflare Radar expanded their free AI insights report that they provide to understand not only the AI bot and crawler traffic across all of their websites, the generative AI service popularity, but they have also now included additional information about AI user agents found through the robots.txt files of the top 10,000 domains. We can see how GPT Bot here is the first one, CC Bot is the second, and Google is the third, as well as additional AI-related insights like workers' AI model popularity and task popularity. So certainly some insights that you can use for future reference and presentations. I want to finish today's episode by thanking again to Similarweb, which in case you don't know it, is a digital intelligence platform that gives you insights into competitors, markets, industries, and audiences. Go and take a look at it in case you're not yet using it. It's one of my favorite tools within my SEO toolbox. And if you don't want to wait until the next week for the latest in SEO, go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News where you can pretty much keep up in real time on the latest news, resources, tools that are shared in our community. Thank you very much again, and until the next edition, don't forget to subscribe to avoid missing it. Bye-bye.
