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​There may have been a big Bing update launched at the end of May 2024. Glenn Gabe has reported significant volatility, the largest since Bing's previous update in January 2023.

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​Google may make hreflangs less important with a shift towards automatic language detection. Gary Illyes, on Search Off The Record, said that he thinks organic search "will rely less on annotations" in the near future.

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​Google has updated how it handles explicit fake content to remove them from image searches. Google will demote sites that have include these types of images based, similar to how they handle other types of harmful content.

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​Google can effectively render complex and dynamic JavaScript content, according to a detailed study from Vercel & MERJ. This study recommends embracing JavaScript and ensuring your rendering strategy is up-to-date.

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​Perplexity's "Publisher's Program" will share ad revenue with select publishing partners. Is this kind of relationship the future of publishing in AI-powered search?

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​Knowledge Panels for People and Topics are testing showing related entities in the "See also" section. Google has relied more on entities in Search in recent years and this dates back to a 2015 patent, analysed by the late Bill Slawski.

⛔

​14 of the top 1000 sites are now blocking the SearchGPT crawler OAI-SearchBot. This list includes big name publishers such as The New York Times, Wired, Vogue, GQ and the New Yorker.

📣

​Reddit CEO has called out Bing for scraping Reddit content. This follows on from Reddit's recent agreements with Google and OpenAI as well as Reddit's blocking of other search engines via robots.txt.

SearchNorwich 17 arrives on 21 August 2024

SearchNorwich is a free networking event in Norwich for anyone interested in learning SEO and growing their network.

Our August speakers, Emma Russell and Andy Chadwick, will be giving talks about how to do website migrations correctly and the untapped power of keyword clustering.

All tickets include free drinks, free food and networking with the best SEOs in Norwich!

The power of intent proximity

When it comes to content creation 🚨 intent proximity is more powerful than related searches🚨 What does this mean?
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Take a search like "dog poisoned" - traditional keyword research tools like AnswerThePublic return terms from Google Suggest like to "dog poisoned at crufts" or "dog poisoned by neighbour - but this is not reflective of the average user's intent! ⚠
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​AlsoAsked can use Google's own data to show that the next nearest search is actually "how can you tell if a dog has been poisoned" and "how to treat a dog that has been poisoned?" 🐕
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This data reflects the actual intent - most people are searching because they believe their dog has been poisoned, so they want to find out how they can diagnose it and how to treat it! 💀

The end of continuous scroll may affect your CTR

If you're doing month on month reporting and seeing some shifts in CTR, remember the data will be settling into your Google Search Console that reflects Google's change back from continuous scroll to paginated results on desktop since 25th June.

'Share of Traffic Value' calculates the worth of your SEO

I am a big fan of the new Ahrefs “Share of Traffic Value” report. It’s something I had been manually calculating for years, but now they’ve automated it. If you’re not using it, you should check it out.

🥜 In a nutshell, SoTV is giving you the organic traffic in context to the cost of PPC clicks. So if you’re getting 1,000 visitors from a term that is estimated at $2 per click, that’s worth twice as much as 1,000 visitors from a term that is estimated at $1 per click.

💰 Yes, it’s not perfect - but there is a correlation between the Cost Per Click (CPC) of a key phrase and the value it can generate. Importantly, it gives you an easy answer to “how much is the SEO worth?” as you can confidently say “it would cost X to buy this search traffic” which is a fair answer.

As a side note, I’m not affiliated with Ahrefs and they’re not paying me for this. I just saw they released a bunch of features recently and thought it would be helpful to cover some of them. Yes, I am sure there are other tools/ways you can do this. This is for Ahrefs users 👼

Keyword Planner is not actually free

Did you know Google Keyword Planner is not actually free?

If you are not spending money on Google Ads, you'll get fairly useless x10 factor buckets for search volumes, e.g. "1k - 10k searches per month".

As soon as you start spending money on Google Ads, the same keyword will then give a precise result, e.g. "1,200 searches per month".

My tip is, if you don't have Google Ads spend, the Keywords Everywhere extension is the cheapest way to get this data.

​Here is the video lecture from my Udemy course about this topic.​

How to test your robots.txt

Nervous that your new robots txt rules might break something? 😨 Test them before they go live! ⬇
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With Sitebulb it's possible to crawl your site with a "virtual" robots txt. This means, if you're planning on making changes, you can make sure that your updated rules don't inadvertently block (or allow!) something by accident!
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1️⃣ You can find this while configuring your crawl under "Robots Directives".
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2️⃣ Don't forget to set the User-Agent you want to test as!
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3️⃣ Then paste in your new rules into the "Virtual robots.txt"
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🤞 Then "Start Now"!

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)

🥈 Nikki Pilkington (LinkedIn / X)

🥉 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / X)

Got any feedback?

Tell me what is in your head, because I cannot divine it. If you hit reply and give me some of your thoughts, I will read them.

~Mark Williams-Cook