🔍

​Bing Deep Search is now available. It uses the existing Bing index and leverages GPT-4 to expand and enhance the query. It takes about 30 seconds to bring back results that may not have been displayed in a typical search.

📅

​Google will launch their Search Generative Experience (SGE) on 14th May, to coincide with the Google I/O event, according to a post by Eli Schwartz, who says some 'issues' remain to be resolved.

⚡

​Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor, but improving them has minimal impact on search visibility. The actual user experience on the page is far more important, which was discussed on the official Google Search podcast.

✈️

​Google has launched travel-focused AI for those opted-in to the Search Generative Experience (SGE), with Google now using AI to answer many travel-related queries, including building itineraries.

♻️

​Google has added new 3D model markup support to the product structured data documentation so that you can connect, associate or link your products to the appropriate 3D model.

💵

​Google can now search for any wallet addresses across Bitcoin and five new EVM networks, displaying the wallet value in an instant Featured Snippet-style result. It's equally interesting/weird that Google chose to focus on this.

👩‍⚖️

​The European Commission has opened investigations into Google re: 'self-preferencing', Apple re: App Store, Meta re: personal data issues, and Amazon, re: favouring its own brands.

🕵️

​A security vulnerability was found in the WordPress SEO plugin Rank Math, affecting over 2 million websites. The recently patched XSS exploit allows attackers to upload malicious scripts and launch attacks.

In general, leave the Disavow file alone

Leave your disavow file alone. Unless you've got a manual action or a really specific (typically very rare) issue, the overwhelming likelihood is you'll be wasting your time, with a side-serving chance of actually damaging your visibility.

Last week, I saw Charlie Whitworth announce some early results of what happened when he removed a disavow file with 10,000s of sites added to it that were declared "toxic" by SEMrush.

As you can see from the poll, very few SEOs believe this would damage rankings. Most thought it might have a positive impact, with the logic Google was still counting some of the links SEMrush labelled as toxic.

So far... Nothing has happened - meaning all that disavowing work was, as predicted, likely for nothing.

Use GTM to modify DOM in desperate times

As a last resort, when your dev queue is stalled and you're drowning in technical debt, it is possible to modify things such as page titles or canonical tags via JavaScript with Google Tag Manager. It can take weeks for these changes to be indexed, but it does work.

Stop trying to quantify individual ranking factors

Trying to quantify the impact of individual ranking factors can harm your understanding of SEO, here's a little food analogy 🎂

Imagine that making the 'perfect' website to rank in Google was like baking a cake. You decide to take a look at some other cakes and you discover all the best cakes have sugar in them! Google even tells you that sugar sometimes helps "end users" enjoy their cake!

"Sugar is a ranking factor! The more sugar the better!" 🍰

So, the SEO-optimised baker starts adding 2kg of sugar to all their cakes. As you can imagine, nobody wants the final mountain of molten-sugar end product... So sugar isn't a ranking factor?

Google's trying to judge the overall "taste" of your site, it's looking for the right mix - and that mix can change by industry! What works well in one industry, may not work in another! Just because you know how to make a good birthday cake, doesn't mean you can make a good wedding cake! 👰

Intent volume is more important than query volume

With longtail search terms it is important to think about 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 not search query volume. ⤵️
​
One of the reasons why queries in People Also Ask data are regularly "zero" volume is because they tend to be longer queries with more words. When a query is 7-8 words long, it naturally means there are many ways to reconstruct that same query intent in another way. For instance:

❓ Best earplugs for someone with tinnitus

❓ Which earplugs are best for someone with tinnitus

❓ Best earplugs for tinnitus

❓ What are the best earplugs for tinnitus

❓ I have tinnitus what are the best earplugs

❓ Best earplugs for person with tinnitus

❓ Which earplugs are best for people with tinnitus

❓ etc...
​
7 search terms: 1 search intent 😎
​
It would be easy to rewrite this query in 30 different ways, so even if each question only got 10 searches per month (which would report "0"), this one question would have a monthly search volume of 300 searches!

Robots.txt blocking stops links from counting

Adding faceted/filtered navigation pages to robots[dot]txt is not the optimal way to deal with them. 👎
​
If a user decides to apply a filter and then link to that page, the link will count for nothing as the page is restricted from crawling. If possible, it's far better to make facets/filters you don't want indexable to be non-accessible to search engines from your internal link structure, then use canonical tags as normal.

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

A big thank you to our top referrers, who have signed up over 10 people to the Core Updates newsletter, go follow them!

🥇 MJ Cachón Yáñez (LinkedIn / X)

🥈 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / X)

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