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SEO updates you need to know
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βGoogle's AI Overviews continue to spiral, with Google suggesting people put glue on pizza, jump off a bridge if they are depressed, and stating that Barack Obama was the one Muslim president of the United States. |
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βGoogle CEO, Sundar Pichai has said there is currently "no solution" to Google AI Overviews providing bad information, as hallucinations are an "inherent feature" of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
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βA Microsoft outage on the 23rd May impacted Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT bringing down both web and app search for millions of users across across Asia and Europe. |
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βGoogle has bizarrely confirmed the algorithmic portion of the "site reputation abuse" update has not gone live, after telling us previously this was rolling out on 5th May. Google has said they'll be "very clear" when they roll out... |
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Search with Candour podcast
Confirmation bias in search
Season 3: Episode 21
Jack and Mark reunite in the Candour studio to rant, rave and react to Google's AI Overviews.
- What are AI overviews?
- AI Overviews are giving some questionable answers
- Early feedback from users (spoilers: it's not good)
- Can this harm brands' reputations?
- Can you turn them off?
βWatch the episode on YouTubeβ
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This week's solicited SEO tips:
Don't put keywords in GBP names
Yes, it will help you rank and you can get away with it for a while, however, if you add keywords into your Google Business Profile names (that aren't your business name), it can get you penalised. π€
Not worth the risk!
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View-all is usually better than pagination
With a reasonable number of results, a 'view all page' is generally optimal over paginated content. Google has previously said: "To improve the user experience when we detect that a content series (e.g. page-1.html, page-2.html, etc.) also contains a single-page version (e.g. page-all.html), weβre now making a larger effort to return the single-page version in search results.
If you must break content over multiple pages, there are multiple options such as Load More or Infinite scroll, each with its own pros, cons and technical considerations. I've seen sites accidentally cut off large swathes of their product range by implementing these incorrectly!
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What to do when changing images during a migration
When you're doing a website migration, if you're getting image traffic you should ideally migrate and redirect all of your images too - but what happens if you're redoing all of your images? I had this situation and found a solution that worked really well. β¬οΈ β This was an e-commerce client getting approximately 80,000 clicks from their product imagery, but they were redoing it all during the site rebuild and migration. It became complex trying to map redirects for old product images to new ones, so we ended up doing something else: We simply copied the asset directory with images over to the new site so they were accessible on the same URLs. The result was: β β
The images stayed ranking and if a user clicked to visit the source, they followed the normal URL redirect and ended up on the correct page β β
Many of the new images started to rank for similar terms - so in some instances, we had double images leading to even more traffic! β The best solution is sometimes the least complex π
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Take "Keyword Difficulty" with a big pinch of salt
I have never paid attention to a "Keyword Difficulty" metric for my whole SEO career, and I think you should ignore them too. π₯
Firstly, it's a proprietary metric that is calculated differently by many different tool vendors, so be very careful if you are going to make any decisions based on this metric! The image above is just one example Chris Ridley found where SEMrush and Ahrefs rated the same keyword as "Very Hard" and "Easy". π
Secondly, 'difficulty' is subjective to the ranking power of your site. Your brand new website with 6 links is going to find it "very hard" to rank for almost anything, but that 12-year-old 1.2M link behemoth is going to find it "very easy".
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Reminder: Ranking isn't using GA data
Google does not use data from Google Analytics to decide how to rank your website. Nope. π
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Got any feedback?
Does anyone actually read this far? It's a bank holiday Monday, but I still wrote this newsletter. If you have any feedback, I'd always love to hear it - just hit reply and I'll be sure to read it.
~Mark Williams-Cook
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