The Beware the Ides of March Edition

Traditionally a warning to tyrants and rogue emperors, todays middle of March madness opened with news of Google Core Update rollout, a major vulnerability in a popular WP SEO plug-in, and signs American search users are indicating they're thinking about being in a very sour mood. We also note it is the 15th anniversary of the week Rhea Drysdale saved SEO from a notorious trademark abuser. The Googleopoly woke up to see the US DOJ's 4 remedies to settle the larger of two anti-trust cases. OpenAI calls for free access for all copyrighted materials for AI Training (citing national security), while the Columbia School of Journalism notes how AI Search engines are "confidently wrong too often". Speaking of tyrannical behaviour, Mullenweg is still wegging out over WPEngine and Meta wants its advertisers to connect to GA4. We also talk about how to talk to Google AIO to learn what it thinks about your business, site reputation abuse, robots.txt, low effort content, and so much more...