SEO
Google: Progressive Web Apps Don’t Rank Better Than Regular Sites
Google’s John Mueller states that progressive web apps (PWAs) do not, by default, rank better in search results than traditional websites.
This topic is discussed during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on November 12, 2021.
Multiple questions came up throughout the livestream related to PWAs and whether they have an advantage over HTML sites in search results.
Mueller says there’s no preference given to PWAs, but converting an old website to a PWA could lead to ranking improvements for other reasons.
Read his full response in the sections below.
What Is A Progressive Web App?
First let’s briefly go over what a PWA is, as it’s a relatively new framework and you may not be familiar with it.
In the simplest terms, a PWA is like a mobile app you can use in a mobile web browser.
A PWA looks and functions like a mobile app, but you don’t have to install anything to your phone. You can access it via a URL just as you would visit any other website.
Many top brands have adopted a PWA framework for the mobile version of their website. Starbucks and Sephora are good examples of retail sites that are PWAs.
News sites such as the Financial Times have gone the PWA route, and downloadable mobile apps like Spotify and Pinterest have web-based PWAs.
Nearly any site can be turned into a PWA—but the question is whether it’s worth the trouble.
PWAs, which are built with JavaScript, are more costly to develop compared to HTML sites.
Improved SEO could be a reason to covert your existing site into a PWA. However, as Mueller says, there’s no inherent benefit to PWAs as far as SEO is concerned.
Google’s John Mueller on Progressive Web Apps
Mueller answers questions during the latest hangout from people who’ve seen competitors’ sites rise in rankings after converting to PWAs.
They ask Mueller if their sites may see similar ranking improvements with a PWA.
In response he says Google doesn’t treat PWAs any different from HTML sites:
“These are essentially different ways of making a website, and you can make a website with lots of different frameworks and formats. And, for the most part, we see these as normal HTML pages.
So if it’s a JavaScript-based website we will render it and then process it like a normal HTML page. If it’s HTML already in the beginning we can do that.
The different frameworks and CMS’s behind it—usually we basically ignore that and just say, well here’s an HTML page and we can process it.
So just the fact that one of your competitors has moved from one framework to another, and has seen an improvement in search, that framework change from my point of view wouldn’t be responsible for that.”
Mueller goes on to suggest other reasons why the competitors’ sites experienced ranking improvements.
Launching a new site has the potential to improve rankings if it’s significantly better than the old website.
It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the site being a PWA.
“But rather, maybe, they have a newer website now together with that framework change. Maybe the newer website has different internal linking, different content internally, is significantly faster or significantly slower, or users really like it, or they did an, I don’t know, marketing campaign together with the website launch.
All of these things kind of play in there and these are all things that are not limited to the framework you’re using.”
Very Old Websites Could Improve their SEO with PWAs
This subject is addressed a second time during the hangout, where Mueller says there’s so way to be certain that a PWA will improve rankings.
“I don’t think there is one absolute answer there. I think, on the one hand, with a PWA if it’s a pure JavaScript-based website then you have some challenges there that are on top of just the normal website.
And that’s everything around JavaScript-based websites and making sure that they render well for search. That can be a lot of work and that can cause a lot of problems.
So, by default, saying going to a PWA will make your rankings better—I don’t think that is the case. It can improve your rankings if you make a better website, but you also have a lot of other things that you need to think about.
So it’s something where essentially, from my point of view, it’s more of: well, is going to a new website going to improve my rankings?
And my guess is if your website is really 10-15 years old and has kind of grown organically since then, probably yes. Like moving to any kind of a newer framework and a cleaner website, a faster website, one that works better for users, probably after 10-15 years you will see changes in ranking. That doesn’t have to be a PWA.”
Then again, Mueller advises that it’s a lot of work to develop a PWA, so you have to consider whether it makes sense financially.
There are some tangible benefits to PWAs, Mueller adds, such as the ability to implement mobile app features that can’t be used on an HTML site.
“Maybe even going to PWA adds so much extra work that it’s not worthwhile for you. Maybe it is worthwhile. I think one of the advantages of a PWA is also that you have some almost like mobile app-related elements that are kind of available by default.
That could be installing on the Home Screen, maybe some offline functionality, and depending on your market maybe that’s really valuable. So that might be something that says: well it’s extra work to make a JavaScript-based website work in search, but we don’t have to create a separate app, or we have all of these extra features as well and it’s worthwhile from a financial point of view to do that.
But that’s something where, almost like the SEO aspect is secondary. Especially if you have a large old website that’s 10-15 years old, moving to something new I’m almost certain that you will see significant changes just because it’ll be a lot cleaner. It’ll be a lot faster, the structure will be a lot better, it’ll be better for users, it’ll be easier for search engines to understand. All of the HTML improvements that have happened since then they play in your favor.”
Hear Mueller’s responses in full in the two videos below:
Featured Image: Prabowo96/Shutterstock
SEO
4 Ways To Try The New Model From Mistral AI
In a significant leap in large language model (LLM) development, Mistral AI announced the release of its newest model, Mixtral-8x7B.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5546272da9065eddeb6fcd7ffddeef5b75be79a7&dn=mixtral-8x7b-32kseqlen&tr=udp%3A%2F%https://t.co/uV4WVdtpwZ%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%https://t.co/g0m9cEUz0T%3A80%2Fannounce
RELEASE a6bbd9affe0c2725c1b7410d66833e24
— Mistral AI (@MistralAI) December 8, 2023
What Is Mixtral-8x7B?
Mixtral-8x7B from Mistral AI is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model designed to enhance how machines understand and generate text.
Imagine it as a team of specialized experts, each skilled in a different area, working together to handle various types of information and tasks.
A report published in June reportedly shed light on the intricacies of OpenAI’s GPT-4, highlighting that it employs a similar approach to MoE, utilizing 16 experts, each with around 111 billion parameters, and routes two experts per forward pass to optimize costs.
This approach allows the model to manage diverse and complex data efficiently, making it helpful in creating content, engaging in conversations, or translating languages.
Mixtral-8x7B Performance Metrics
Mistral AI’s new model, Mixtral-8x7B, represents a significant step forward from its previous model, Mistral-7B-v0.1.
It’s designed to understand better and create text, a key feature for anyone looking to use AI for writing or communication tasks.
New open weights LLM from @MistralAI
params.json:
– hidden_dim / dim = 14336/4096 => 3.5X MLP expand
– n_heads / n_kv_heads = 32/8 => 4X multiquery
– “moe” => mixture of experts 8X top 2 👀Likely related code: https://t.co/yrqRtYhxKR
Oddly absent: an over-rehearsed… https://t.co/8PvqdHz1bR pic.twitter.com/xMDRj3WAVh
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) December 8, 2023
This latest addition to the Mistral family promises to revolutionize the AI landscape with its enhanced performance metrics, as shared by OpenCompass.
What makes Mixtral-8x7B stand out is not just its improvement over Mistral AI’s previous version, but the way it measures up to models like Llama2-70B and Qwen-72B.
It’s like having an assistant who can understand complex ideas and express them clearly.
One of the key strengths of the Mixtral-8x7B is its ability to handle specialized tasks.
For example, it performed exceptionally well in specific tests designed to evaluate AI models, indicating that it’s good at general text understanding and generation and excels in more niche areas.
This makes it a valuable tool for marketing professionals and SEO experts who need AI that can adapt to different content and technical requirements.
The Mixtral-8x7B’s ability to deal with complex math and coding problems also suggests it can be a helpful ally for those working in more technical aspects of SEO, where understanding and solving algorithmic challenges are crucial.
This new model could become a versatile and intelligent partner for a wide range of digital content and strategy needs.
How To Try Mixtral-8x7B: 4 Demos
You can experiment with Mistral AI’s new model, Mixtral-8x7B, to see how it responds to queries and how it performs compared to other open-source models and OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Please note that, like all generative AI content, platforms running this new model may produce inaccurate information or otherwise unintended results.
User feedback for new models like this one will help companies like Mistral AI improve future versions and models.
1. Perplexity Labs Playground
In Perplexity Labs, you can try Mixtral-8x7B along with Meta AI’s Llama 2, Mistral-7b, and Perplexity’s new online LLMs.
In this example, I ask about the model itself and notice that new instructions are added after the initial response to extend the generated content about my query.
Screenshot from Perplexity, December 2023While the answer looks correct, it begins to repeat itself.
Screenshot from Perplexity Labs, December 2023The model did provide an over 600-word answer to the question, “What is SEO?”
Again, additional instructions appear as “headers” to seemingly ensure a comprehensive answer.
Screenshot from Perplexity Labs, December 20232. Poe
Poe hosts bots for popular LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL·E 3, Meta AI’s Llama 2 and Code Llama, Google’s PaLM 2, Anthropic’s Claude-instant and Claude 2, and StableDiffusionXL.
These bots cover a wide spectrum of capabilities, including text, image, and code generation.
The Mixtral-8x7B-Chat bot is operated by Fireworks AI.
Screenshot from Poe, December 2023It’s worth noting that the Fireworks page specifies it is an “unofficial implementation” that was fine-tuned for chat.
When asked what the best backlinks for SEO are, it provided a valid answer.
Screenshot from Poe, December 2023Compare this to the response offered by Google Bard.
Screenshot from Google Bard, December 20233. Vercel
Vercel offers a demo of Mixtral-8x7B that allows users to compare responses from popular Anthropic, Cohere, Meta AI, and OpenAI models.
Screenshot from Vercel, December 2023It offers an interesting perspective on how each model interprets and responds to user questions.
Screenshot from Vercel, December 2023Like many LLMs, it does occasionally hallucinate.
Screenshot from Vercel, December 20234. Replicate
The mixtral-8x7b-32 demo on Replicate is based on this source code. It is also noted in the README that “Inference is quite inefficient.”
Screenshot from Replicate, December 2023In the example above, Mixtral-8x7B describes itself as a game.
Conclusion
Mistral AI’s latest release sets a new benchmark in the AI field, offering enhanced performance and versatility. But like many LLMs, it can provide inaccurate and unexpected answers.
As AI continues to evolve, models like the Mixtral-8x7B could become integral in shaping advanced AI tools for marketing and business.
Featured image: T. Schneider/Shutterstock
SEO
OpenAI Investigates ‘Lazy’ GPT-4 Complaints On Google Reviews, X
OpenAI, the company that launched ChatGPT a little over a year ago, has recently taken to social media to address concerns regarding the “lazy” performance of GPT-4 on social media and Google Reviews.
This move comes after growing user feedback online, which even includes a one-star review on the company’s Google Reviews.
OpenAI Gives Insight Into Training Chat Models, Performance Evaluations, And A/B Testing
OpenAI, through its @ChatGPTapp Twitter account, detailed the complexities involved in training chat models.
Screenshot from X, December 2023The organization highlighted that the process is not a “clean industrial process” and that variations in training runs can lead to noticeable differences in the AI’s personality, creative style, and political bias.
Thorough AI model testing includes offline evaluation metrics and online A/B tests. The final decision to release a new model is based on a data-driven approach to improve the “real” user experience.
OpenAI’s Google Review Score Affected By GPT-4 Performance, Billing Issues
This explanation comes after weeks of user feedback about GPT-4 becoming worse on social media networks like X.
Idk if anyone else has noticed this, but GPT-4 Turbo performance is significantly worse than GPT-4 standard.
I know it’s in preview right now but it’s significantly worse.
— Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) November 8, 2023
There has been discussion if GPT-4 has become “lazy” recently. My anecdotal testing suggests it may be true.
I repeated a sequence of old analyses I did with Code Interpreter. GPT-4 still knows what to do, but keeps telling me to do the work. One step is now many & some are odd. pic.twitter.com/OhGAMtd3Zq
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 28, 2023
Complaints also appeared in OpenAI’s community forums.
Screenshot from OpenAI, December 2023The experience led one user to leave a one-star rating for OpenAI via Google Reviews. Other complaints regarded accounts, billing, and the artificial nature of AI.
Screenshot from Google Reviews, December 2023A recent user on Product Hunt gave OpenAI a rating that also appears to be related to GPT-4 worsening.
Screenshot from Product Hunt, December 2023GPT-4 isn’t the only issue that local reviewers complain about. On Yelp, OpenAI has a one-star rating for ChatGPT 3.5 performance.
OpenAI is now only 3.8 stars on Google Maps and a dismal 1 star on Yelp!
GPT-4’s degradation has really hurt their rating. Hope the business survives.https://t.co/RF8uJH1WQ5 pic.twitter.com/OghAZLCiVu
— Nate Chan (@nathanwchan) December 9, 2023
The complaint:
Screenshot from Yelp, December 2023In related OpenAI news, the review with the most likes aligns with recent rumors about a volatile workplace, alleging that OpenAI is a “Cutthroat environment. Not friendly. Toxic workers.”
Screenshot from Google Reviews, December 2023The reviews voted the most helpful on Glassdoor about OpenAI suggested that employee frustration and product development issues stem from the company’s shift in focus on profits.
Screenshots from Glassdoor, December 2023This incident provides a unique outlook on how customer and employee experiences can impact any business through local reviews and business ratings platforms.
Screenshot from Google, December 2023Google SGE Highlights Positive Google Reviews
In addition to occasional complaints, Google reviewers acknowledged the revolutionary impact of OpenAI’s technology on various fields.
The most positive review mentions about the company appear in Google SGE (Search Generative Experience).
Screenshot from Google SGE, December 2023Conclusion
OpenAI’s recent insights into training chat models and response to public feedback about GPT-4 performance illustrate AI technology’s dynamic and evolving nature and its impact on those who depend on the AI platform.
Especially the people who just received an invitation to join ChatGPT Plus after being waitlisted while OpenAI paused new subscriptions and upgrades. Or those developing GPTs for the upcoming GPT Store launch.
As AI advances, professionals in these fields must remain agile, informed, and responsive to technological developments and the public’s reception of these advancements.
Featured image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
SEO
ChatGPT Plus Upgrades Paused; Waitlisted Users Receive Invites
ChatGPT Plus subscriptions and upgrades remain paused after a surge in demand for new features created outages.
Some users who signed up for the waitlist have received invites to join ChatGPT Plus.
This has resulted in a few shares of the link that is accessible for everyone. For now.
Found a hack to skip chatGPT plus wait list.
Follow the steps
– login to ChatGPT
– now if you click on upgrade
– Signup for waitlist(may not be necessary)
– now change the URL to https://t.co/4izOdNzarG
– Wallah you are in for payment #ChatGPT4 #hack #GPT4 #GPTPlus pic.twitter.com/J1GizlrOAx— Ashish Mohite is building Notionpack Capture (@_ashishmohite) December 8, 2023
RELATED: GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays
In addition to the invites, signs that more people are getting access to GPTs include an introductory screen popping up on free ChatGPT accounts.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2023Unfortunately, they still aren’t accessible without a Plus subscription.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2023You can sign up for the waitlist by clicking on the option to upgrade in the left sidebar of ChatGPT on a desktop browser.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2023OpenAI also suggests ChatGPT Enterprise for those who need more capabilities, as outlined in the pricing plans below.
Screenshot from OpenAI, December 2023Why Are ChatGPT Plus Subscriptions Paused?
According to a post on X by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, the recent surge in usage following the DevDay developers conference has led to capacity challenges, resulting in the decision to pause ChatGPT Plus signups.
we are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit 🙁
the surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience.
you can still sign-up to be notified within the app when subs reopen.
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 15, 2023
The decision to pause new ChatGPT signups follows a week where OpenAI services – including ChatGPT and the API – experienced a series of outages related to high-demand and DDoS attacks.
Demand for ChatGPT Plus resulted in eBay listings supposedly offering one or more months of the premium subscription.
chatgpt plus accounts selling ebay for a premium 🫡🇺🇸 https://t.co/VdN8tuexKM pic.twitter.com/W522NGHsRV
— surya (@sdand) November 15, 2023
When Will ChatGPT Plus Subscriptions Resume?
So far, we don’t have any official word on when ChatGPT Plus subscriptions will resume. We know the GPT Store is set to open early next year after recent boardroom drama led to “unexpected delays.”
Therefore, we hope that OpenAI will onboard waitlisted users in time to try out all of the GPTs created by OpenAI and community builders.
What Are GPTs?
GPTs allow users to create one or more personalized ChatGPT experiences based on a specific set of instructions, knowledge files, and actions.
Search marketers with ChatGPT Plus can try GPTs for helpful content assessment and learning SEO.
Two SEO GPTs I’ve created for assessment + learning 👀👇
1. Content Helpfulness and Quality SEO Analyzer: Assess a page content helpfulness, relevance, and quality for your targeted query based on Google’s guidelines vs your competitors and get tips: https://t.co/LsoP2UhF4N pic.twitter.com/O77MHiqwOq
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) November 12, 2023
2. The https://t.co/IFmKxxVDpW SEO Teacher: A friendly SEO expert teacher who will help you to learn SEO using reliable https://t.co/sCZ03C7fzq resources: https://t.co/UrMPUYwblH
I hope they’re helpful 🙌🤩
PS: Love how GPT opens up to SO much opportunity 🤯 pic.twitter.com/yqKozcZTDc
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) November 12, 2023
There are also GPTs for analyzing Google Search Console data.
oh wow. I think this GPT works.
Export data from GSC comparing keyword rankings before and after an update and upload it to ChatGPT and it will spit out this scatter plot for you.
It’s an easy way to see if most of your keyword declined or improved.
This site was impacted by… pic.twitter.com/wFGSnonqoZ
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) November 9, 2023
And GPTs that will let you chat with analytics data from 20 platforms, including Google Ads, GA4, and Facebook.
Google search has indexed hundreds of public GPTs. According to an alleged list of GPT statistics in a GitHub repository, DALL-E, the top GPT from OpenAI, has received 5,620,981 visits since its launch last month. Included in the top 20 GPTs is Canva, with 291,349 views.
Weighing The Benefits Of The Pause
Ideally, this means that developers working on building GPTs and using the API should encounter fewer issues (like being unable to save GPT drafts).
But it could also mean a temporary decrease in new users of GPTs since they are only available to Plus subscribers – including the ones I tested for learning about ranking factors and gaining insights on E-E-A-T from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, November 2023Featured image: Robert Way/Shutterstock
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