SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📉 GeeksForGeeks, a 70M per month traffic "computer science portal for geeks" website has been deindexed from Google with little surprise from SEOs, although the site is calling it a "temporary issue with Google Search". 🍅 Danny Sullivan says Google don't measure brand, but lists some things Google do care about, which are for all intents and purposes the definition of...
11 days ago • 6 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🔁 The March 2025 core update completed on 27 March 2025. This roll out took 14 days and is likely the first of many Google updates this year. This update seemed relatively calm, if the discussion online is to go by. 🙅 Google has removed the 'AI while browsing' feature. This very controversial feature was announced in 2023 and worked as a type of overlay that could...
18 days ago • 6 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📑 AI Overviews have been found linking to Google SERPs rather than directly to website. This is, understandably, very controversial in the eyes of publishers and feels similar to the recently-discontinued Page Annotations feature. 🙅 If users don't use your pages in search, they may fall out of the index. This answer to a user's questions seems to reaffirm Google's Navboost...
25 days ago • 5 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🔄 Google's March 2025 core update has begun rolling out. The rollout started on 13 March 2025 and is the first core update of 2025. As always, Google says it may take up to 2 weeks to complete. 🙅 LLMs provide "confidently wrong" answers to more than 60% of queries. These inaccuracies range from Perplexity's 37% to Grok 3's staggering 94%. Also, ChatGPT Search was found to...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🤖 Google tests AI Mode, an upgraded version of AI Overviews. AI Mode uses Gemini 2.0 to conduct multimodal searches for complex queries. It is currently available if you are a Google One Premium subscriber. ⏫ AI Overviews expand with no sign-in requirements, availability to teenagers and the use of Gemini 2.0. AIOs are used by more than a billion people worldwide and...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
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. 🧑⚖️ 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...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📊 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. 🧑⚖️ 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...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🤖 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. 📖 Perplexity launches Deep Research, a new search feature that creates in-depth answers using dozens of searches and sources. Unlimited use is available...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📊 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. 🖼️ 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...
2 months ago • 4 min read