This week: TikTok challenges Google and Microsoft with search ads, GPT-4 is on the way, and social media engagement rates are dropping. Here's what happened this week in digital marketing. OpenAI hasn't been in the news enough lately so it's time for a fresh update. The next version of GPT, unimaginatively called GPT-4, will go live soon. In fact, it might already be live by the time you read this. As far as the updates that make it more worthwhile than GPT-3, it's got multimodal functionality. That means it supports text, speech, images, and even video. GPT-4 also works across multiple languages. If you've noticed that your social media engagement rates are on the decline, you're not alone.

In my last article, we saw that artificial intelligence is getting better and better at answering our questions, regardless of the subject matter or the sector. Using GPT-3 technology, I demonstrated that an AI can successfully pass an SEO multiple-choice test as well as solve SEO case studies. There are other, even more advanced, technologies, such as Deepmind's Gopher, which outperform GPT-3 in the following fields: Humanities, social sciences, medicine, science, and math. The following graph highlights the accuracy of the answers provided by Gopher, UnifiedQA, GPT-3, and a human expert. Depending on the subject, we can see the narrow gap between the level of the AI and that of an expert.

All the publishers and editors out there thinking of replacing their journalists with AI might want to pump their brakes. Everybody's boss, the Google algorithm, classifies AI-generated content as spam. John Mueller, Google's SEO authority, laid the issue to rest while speaking at a recent "Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout." Per a report from Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern, Mueller says GPT-3 and other content generators are not considered quality content, no matter how convincingly human they are: These would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically-generated content which is something we've had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning. My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it's still automatically-generated content, and that means for us it's still against the Webmaster Guidelines.

Google's John Mueller was requested if "unlinked model mentions" had been vital in Google's algorithm. It was obvious from John's response that "model mentions" might be not an actual factor in Google's algorithm, however he additionally stated that there could also be worth to website guests who encounter them. There's a longstanding concept within the search engine marketing group that Google makes use of mentions of a web site as a type of hyperlink. One model of the thought is that if somebody publishes a URL like this, https://www.instance.com That is the unlinked URL concept, {that a} printed URL can be utilized as a hyperlink by Google. The unlinked URL concept subsequently advanced into the concept that if a web site mentions one other website's model identify, that Google can even depend that as a hyperlink.

Publisher Activision Blizzard, responsible for the game this article refers to, is currently embroiled in ongoing litigation in regards to claims reporting a workplace culture that allegedly enabled acts of sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination. Diablo 4 is currently in development but it looks like its release is still a long way off. That hasn't stopped us from searching out the best rumors and the latest news about Blizzard's upcoming hack'n slash adventure. The Diablo series certainly is undergoing something of a resurgence right now. First announced at Blizzcon 2019, Diablo 4 development has supposedly been progressing since. Diablo 2 Resurrected, a remaster of the PC classic, has already been released and Diablo Immortal is expected to arrive on Android and iOS devices in 2022. Naturally, though, we're most excited about the release of Diablo 4 and thanks to Blizzard's quarterly development updates, we're learning more about it all the time. With the recent announcement that Microsoft has agreed to acquire Activision Blizzard, the landscape around Diablo 4's development is changing and it currently remains unclear what the acquisition could mean for the game if it goes through, especially as Diablo 4's release is so far down the line--we're not expecting it until at least 2023. While we wait, though, here's all the news, updates and rumors we've collated about Diablo 4 so far. What could this mean for Diablo 4's release? Read on to find out more.] Bad news here: Diablo 4 probably won't be released anytime soon. At a Blizzcon 2019 deep dive on the game, the game's director said that he doesn't expect the game to be finished anytime soon, "even by Blizzard's standards of soon." Fast-forward to the end of 2021, and that comment still stands after the announcement of an indefinite delay. During Activision Blizzard's Q3 earnings call in November 2021, it made the following statement: "While we are still planning to deliver a substantial amount of content from Blizzard next year, we are now planning for a later launch for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV than originally envisaged".

This past Friday, I asked John Mueller of Google a bit more on if and how Google may use machine learning for adjusting the weights of various ranking signals. The short answer is, Google may or may not do this, depending on the specific ranking signal. But keep in mind, I narrowed the question specifically to if and how Google may use machine learning for adjusting the weights of individual ranking signals. It may be also the case machine learning is used amongst multiple ranking signals or to maybe even create new ones based on the query. It is hard to know for sure.

You know how Google says you can't "fix" your way back to position one? That seems unhelpful but it's actually useful. It helps one understand what not to waste time on. In my opinion, based on my experience, once you know what not to focus on, it will help you understand more productive areas to focus on. According to Google, fixing things won't help you recover.

In a Webmaster Hangout, an eCommerce publisher complained about structured data warnings regarding data fields that are inappropriate to their product. They refused to create fake information to get a passing score. John Mueller responded that there's a difference between warnings and errors. The person asking the question sold custom hand made products. They did not have a global identifier.

Google launched a new video series that answers a single question. The first episode was about links but in my opinion it did not adequately answer the question. "Does linking to other websites help or hurt SEO?" The SEO community has thought of outbound links as ranking signals since at least 2002. I hope to show you how and why outbound links for SEO was invented.

Someone asked John Mueller in a Webmaster Hangout about Schema structured data and ranking for featured snippets. Structured Data is useful for communicating a deep amount of precise data. John Mueller answered the question by describing what it takes to make it easier for Google to use your page for featured snippets. The question asked was about the use of structured data for ranking in featured snippets. It was also about showing up for voice search via the Google Assistant.