Jim Hedger returns from bereavement time as he and cohost Kristine Schachinger learn that Matt Mullenweg has found a way to make the WordPress controversy much worse that it was when it started by banning WPEngine, establishing a loyalty pledge complete with a box to check to swear your WP-Loyalty, running down investors, getting himself and the commercial arm of WordPress sued for Extortion, and very possibly sacrificing small animals on the beach at midnight. Meanwhile SEOs contemplate what a DOJ mandated break-up of Google might look like while at the same time thinking about how to guide clients through questions about AI bots. X changes the way it pays content creators, and Bing has another one of its own Generative Search Experience rolling out. To round things out, Google pulled a manual job on Forbes Advisor over Reputation Abuse. Google is also rolling out newly AI organized search results and clarifying support for robots.txt fields while dropping support for the "noarchive" meta tag directive. More importantly, Google has updated its Web Search Spam Policies to be clearer about Site Reputation Abuse. We sort of learn how Google pays for all this, by seeing nearly 9,000 ad campaigns established every second!

A war is being waged in the deepest heart of the Open Source movement for that movement's very soul. Last week, Matt Mullenweg, the original founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress, laid down his version of the law by banning WPEngine from the greater WordPress environment. The dispute centers around money and time contributed to the collective which provides the engineering for WordPress. From Mullenweg's perspective, WPEngine has contributed too little of either after extracting hundreds of millions in revenues over the years. From WPEngine's perspective, "WTF eh?" Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to make sense of a fight that threatens the web's very understanding of what Open Source means. Meanwhile, Sam Altman has pushed OpenAI away from being a non-profit to being a for-profit benefit organization with Altman enjoying a 7% stake in the newly constituted company. This has pushed several key figures at OpenAI, including CTO Mira Murati and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew to resign in the past week. In other news, Google has killed its helpful Cache feature while updating its Web Search Spam policies. Google also reported and is fixing a noindex bug that caused several JavaScript driven pages to be indexed when Google couldn't read the protocol. The show covered a lot more Google news in what was a busy post-COVID show after Jim caught and was sidelined last week by his first (and hopefully last) bout with the virus.

So it seems that anyone who's anyone has an anti-trust suit or some other major legal challenge taking place, especially if you're with Apple or Google. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the various anti-trust cases covering two types of Googley advertising monopolies and a spiffy tax dodge scheme the EU's angry with Apple and Google over. We also talk about the introduction of Gemini AI to Google's productivity suite including the feature that can turn your notes into a generic podcast. BTW, "Rutabaga". That's this week's safe word that proves we're real. Kristine introduces a story that suggests families should come up with safe words to combat AI loan scams in which the scammers run a short clip of a voice through AI to convince people's parents to send them money. Twixter is leaving San Francisco and the right wing American propaganda network, Tenet Media is shuttered by the DOJ because they're a front from Russian malfiance. We also talk about a lot of Googley goodness including Martin Splitt's declaration that no Exif Data was parsed to generate those search or image results, Google's spam warnings about misuse of their Indexing API, the move from FID to INP, and how changing your heading heirarchy isn't the massive fix you might think it is. Remember, rutabaga. Accept no substitutes.

The August 2024 Core Update ended a week early and it might still be too soon to tell the winners from the losers but one thing is clear, Google can always be depended on to try to do what's best for Google. Some have seen drops in traffic while others have seen increases and still others have seen no changes at all. This update does appear to be setting a foundation for an increase in AI Overviews in results. Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the effects of this core update, the new International Framework Convention on AI, the DOJ indictment of Russian backed American far-right media empire, advances at OpenAI, how Elon Musk has torched tens of billions of his friends' monies, more legal troubles in Google's present and future, SearchGPT, and a lot of SEO thoughts about Google. This was a fun and fast paced episode.

As the August 2024 Core Update continues, Google introduces Custom Gems a chatbot framework that promotes the creation and constant training of AI "Experts", digital companions to help Google users go about the business of being hypercreative. This is possibly the greatest challenge to all other AI makers and arguably the most audacious outline for the future of virtual expertise. Back to the core update, some sense of recovery is being felt by many publishers who were hurt during the September and March Helpful Content Updates but there is still a few weeks to go so show hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger warn webmasters to temper their expectations. OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to allow government to access major new AI models during development to help ensure safety, Twixter is actively interfering in the upcoming November election while it threatens a Brazilian judge who threatens to shut it down in Brazil. This as presidential hopeful Donald Trump threatens to throw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he interferes in the upcoming election. Yelp is filing its own antitrust based action against Google while a judge in one of the ongoing antitrust cases admonishes Google for not playing fair in court. It's been a busy week. The show does spend a lot of time on a lot of Google SEO matters but it says a lot about the state of the industry when working through SEO issues is less complicated than the legal and ethical challenges facing the biggest platforms in the industry. As we said, it's been a busy week but it's the last days of summer and a long weekend is coming up and September brings serious season back upon us next week.

It's been a week since Google dropped the long anticipated August 2024 Core Update. Hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger talk about tempering early expectations in what is almost certainly a multi-faceted update, and discuss what SEOs and site owners might expect as the next three weeks grind on. There are promising signs for some and even some reversals of misfortune for others but there's still a few weeks to go before Google placements even out. When the update does end, how the search results will be composed and look for users might change. Jim and Kristine also talk about findings from Mark Traphagen at SEOClarity suggesting that higher rankings lead to higher chances of seeing links in AI Overview results, major issues with AI image generators, the arrest of Telegram app founder Pavel Durov, California's attempts to govern AI at the state level, Perplexity's plans to introduce ads to its AI features, the rise of children's accounts on Twixter, and a lot of Googley SEO stuff. - Note: our apologies for the late show. Jim's Aunt Lynda passed and it was a rather brutal week.

To say Google core updates can be pretty big things will seem like an understatement for listeners who got hammered by the Helpful Content Updates that ran in the two previous core updates of September 2023 and March 2024. The much anticipated August 2024 Core Update, the one that hold promise of fixing the mistakes of the past, started to roll out a few hours before this episode was recorded. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about what Google's goals with this update and what website owners can do in the early to mid days as the full rollout is expected to take about four weeks. It was a busy week beyond the core update. Kristine and Jim also discuss Google's two antitrust cases, updates to ChatGPT, a myriad of difficulties presented by Elon Musk, data delivery issues from Google Search Console, a creepy new feature found in knowledge panels, GSC Recommendations, the expansion of Google AI Overviews, how Google tracks crawl budgets, the absurd speed of Effingo, and a whole lot more. Stick around to the very end to hear Google's John Mueller read his latest robots.txt file.

After a lengthy and highly revealing trial a federal court has ruled that Google is using its enormous resources to monopolise the search market in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his decision which has the potential to reshape the business of Internet dominance. We asked lawyer, journalist, and former WMR.FM host Bennet Kelley to explain the scope of the charges and how the ruling might affect Google's future. Bennet is the founder of the Internet Law Center and is considered on of America's top Internet lawyers. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also discuss the new British government's reaction to Elon Musk's push for racial disharmony in the UK and Europe, an exodus of leadership at OpenAI, the new Search Console feature Google Recommends, and the coincidental timing of Google's announcements it would allow pubic hair grooming ads while it is also testing the new "Snippets you may like" label. From what we hear about anti-trust rulings, the first cuts are the deepest.