profile

Core Updates SEO Newsletter

The Core Updates newsletter is written by Mark Williams-Cook, a veteran SEO who is Digital Marketing Director at Candour, Founder of AlsoAsked and organiser of SearchNorwich. Over 40,000 SEOs follow Mark's 'Unsolicited #SEO tips' on LinkedIn, which has now been wrapped up into the Core Updates newsletter, along with an overview of weekly news and the current episode of the Search with Candour episode, hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward.

Featured Post

πŸŽ₯ Core Updates: YouTube ranking factors and Google sued for stealing content with AI [3 Mar]

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know ▢️ Video engagement, closed captions and channel authority are some of YouTube's key ranking factors. This study also found that 8-9 minutes is the optimal length and cannibalisation is not a factor on YouTube. πŸ§‘βš–οΈ Chegg, an online study platform, sues Google for stealing their content in AI Overviews. Chegg reports that organic traffic is key to its business and that...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know πŸ“Š 70% of sites "ranking" in AI Overviews will change over a 2-3 month period. Study confirms that AIOs are far more volatile than other organic results and that changes in AIOs are independent of changes on the SERPs. πŸ§‘βš–οΈ Google may face charges for violating the EU's Digital Markets Act. This could mean Google faces similar issues & charges as its US antitrust trial loss...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know πŸ€– AI search engines send ~22% of transactional traffic to homepages, much higher than Google's ~10%. Approximately 80% of this transactional traffic went to ecommerce sites, predominantly big brands and household names. πŸ“– Perplexity launches Deep Research, a new search feature that creates in-depth answers using dozens of searches and sources. Unlimited use is available...

Mark Williams-Cook, Snoop the dog, and Jack Chambers-Ward

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know πŸ“Š AI Overviews can reduce CTR for organic results by over 70%. When AI Overviews are present organic CTR drops from 2.94% to 0.84%. In contrast, CTR increases from 0.6% to 1.08% when cited in AI Overviews. πŸ–ΌοΈ Sites using AI-generated images are reportedly losing significant Image traffic. This may be a update to Google's image rankings to reduce the prominence of...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know ❇️ AI Overviews appear to be expanding with more-detailed answers to complex questions. This apparent upgrade can include dozens of citations and layered answers that are similar length to many full articles. πŸ“ž Google tests 'Ask for me' feature that can call businesses for you. 'Ask for me' uses information on Google Business Profile, allowing you to select the service you...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know πŸ› οΈ A new free tool trained on Google exploit data can accurately predict which semantic class Google will assign to any search term, allowing for more in-depth query analysis. β­• Google is introducing AI Overviews to the Circle to Search feature. Google continues to expand its AIO features while Circle to Search appears to be growing in popularity, especially with younger...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know πŸ›‘ Google requiring JavaScript for Search causes major issues for SEO tools. Many rank tracking tools are experiencing blocks and, in the long-term, this may increase the cost of third-party tools as it increaes their operating cost. πŸ“‰ Google's global market share drops below 90% for the first time since 2015. This is according to data from Statcounter across all devices...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🎧 An AI-generated audio show based on your search history is rolling out to Discover users in the US. 'Daily Listen' can be enabled in Search Labs and will display at the top of the Google Discover page 24 hours after enabling. πŸ” Brands ranking on page 1 of Google are more likely to be mentioned ChatGPT Search. The study from Seer Interactive, also found that there was...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🍝 AI-organised search results have expanded to restaurant recommendations. This is the same format Google launched for recipes in October 2024. It includes AI-generated categories based on your specific search. 🏷️ Google has revived Tag Assistant and merged its two previous versions. Google has reversed its previous decision to remove the Google Tag Manager Chrome...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know βœ… The December 2024 core update completed its rollout on 18 December 2024. It lasted 6 days, the fastest official core update on record, and was quite volatile. And it's 100%, definitely the final Google update of 2024...right? πŸ”„ The December 2024 spam update began its rollout on 19 December 2024. Yes, the spam update launched just 24 hours after the December core update...