🖱️

​Google Adsense has launched "Ad intents" ad type, which adds hyperlinks within your existing content that lead back to Google Search Engine Result Pages, rather than an advertiser's website.

🖼️

​Google has discontinued its support for video carousel markup saying that it "ultimately found that it wasn't useful for the ecosystem at scale." You can however leave the markup on your website.

🦁

​Brave unveils a new privacy-focused AI answer engine, set to handle nearly 10 billion annual queries, producing near-instant answers (with sources cited) alongside traditional search results.

💈

​Google has confirmed that the "site reputation abuse" component of their latest updates, which is coming on 5th May will be enforced via both algorithmically and manual actions.

🎟️

​Google has rolled out Search Console enhancements that allow owners to remove and verify unused ownership tokens to clear up those lingering access issues that could present security issues.

📈

​High SERP volatility was recorded at the start of this week by multiple tools as we approach day 50 of the March update rollout. There have still been no recorded recoveries from sites hit by the HCU.

🕒

​Eric Lancheres has put together a detailed history and 'analysis so far' of the March 2024 Core Update, with many pre and post-update data points on sites that are ranking.

Change as little as possible during a migration

When doing a site migration, try and change as few things as possible. For instance, it can be tempting to rewrite all of your page titles when changing other things, but it is better to keep them the same for the initial migration.

This way, if anything goes differently from how you hope, it will be easier to diagnose and fix issues.

Free Google Suggest Script

​Here's a free script that uses Google Suggest (autocomplete) to generate ~1,000 potential topics around a specific keyword and will export them to CSV.

🧠 Google Suggest (autocomplete) can be a good way to get an overview of the subject and the kind of topics people are asking about.

🌍 Bonus tip: You can edit the script to change language "en" or even make different roots of the keyword "where, how" etc.

Search Console hides click data on filtering

Where did the over 77,500 clicks go? When you apply any filter to Google Search Console data, Google immediately hides a large percentage of clicks for 'privacy' which are not included in totals - not many people seem to know this!

😎 In this example, GSC reports 148,000 total clicks.

✅ If I filter to just clicks that include the brand, I get 39,700

❎ If I filter to just clicks that exclude the brand, I get 30,800

😕 30,800 + 39,700 = 70,500 in total.

🤯 148,000 - 70,500 = 77,500 "missing" clicks

This is important to keep in mind: You can use filtered data to get an idea for a trend, e.g. "branded clicks are going up/down", but Google won't give you the precise data.

You need a VPN to do international SEO

If you want to check international SERPs and do international auditing, you need a VPN. Without a (usually paid) VPN, you can't seriously do international SEO. That's what Natalia Witczyk told us last week in her brilliant SearchNorwich talk on international SEO 😎

GSC data isn't as reliable as you may think

You may sometimes get 'contradictory' data from various Google systems, for instance, a page appearing in search results, but then showing as "Not Indexed" in Google Search Console. Why? ⬇ 🤔
​
🌍 The web is BIG, and Google has many individual systems that operate in parallel. This means sometimes they have different data or are at a different stage of processing.
​
Let's look at some examples that I demonstrated with a real test:
​
It is possible for...
​
❗A URL to be shown in Google search, triggered by a search term but for Google Search Console to still list it as "Not Indexed" for a while.
​
❗A URL to be shown in Google search, triggered by a search term, but that same URL when searched for with a site: operator to come back with "No results"
​
❗Google to know the contents of a cachable page, but have no cached version available to view.
​
❗Google to have the "non-Javascript" version of a page in its index for days or weeks before the Javascript version is processed.
​
All of these systems: crawling, indexing, rendering, Search Console status, operator searches, keyword searches - are all controlled by individual systems - so you need to take the information you get with a grain of salt!

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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~Mark Williams-Cook