🎟️

​Google has launched discount rich snippet results for organic listings in the US. The new rich result type makes your snippet larger - allowing shoppers to copy coupon codes directly from search results.

📝

​A big Notes update from Google means that users can now access an "Add Note" button from the URL bar in iOS and in SGE while browsing, massively increasing visibility and allowing users to add notes before visiting a URL.

🐛

​Google confirmed the reports we featured previously on sites dropping in and out of search completely was indeed a bug, saying it was a “very narrow issue that affected a “small number of websites" and is now resolved.

☹️

​Google has been adding emojis on Place Topics with Google My Business Reviews to communicate sentiment. They have been adding green smiley faces for positive sentiments and frowning faces for negative.

🗓️

​The cache link has been removed completely from Google search results after a period of testing. It is still possible to view the cached results of a page by using the cache: operator in a normal search.

👩‍🍳

​Google has warned against websites using recipe structured data to increase visibility on pages that do not list both ingredients and steps, such as recipe listing pages. Google will likely penalise these pages.

📊

​SISTRIX has released its 2023 US IndexWatch "winners" providing data and analysis of the biggest winners in terms of absolute and relative visibility increase for domains, showing massive leaps for UGC websites.

Performance is an internationalisation task

Internationalisation is not just about hreflangs and translations; performance is an often overlooked consideration. It's important to remember that your Core Web Vitals speed metric (Largest Contentful Paint) is dependent on the internet speed of your users!

💻 The data that you will see in Google Search Console for your Core Web Vitals is 'field data', meaning it's an aggregate of what real users experience.

🚦 This means that the same website might score "green" in the United Kingdom, but if you roll out an identical version of the site for a region with slower internet speeds, you might score "amber" or "red"!

🌍 If you know that you're rolling out a website in a region with significantly slower internet speeds, having a "lite" version of your site may be something you need to consider in your internationalisation plan.

Why keyword tools give different search volumes

Do you know why tools like Google Keyword Planner and Keywords Everywhere give such different search volumes to tools like Ahrefs and Semrush? ⬇
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For example, looking at the term: "Jigsaw Puzzle":
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Google Keyword Planner = 40,500 searches per month 🙄
Ahrefs Keyword Tool = 21,000 searches per month 🤔
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It's important to understand why this is happening:
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💬 Google Keyword Planner (and related tools such as Keywords Everywhere) are putting sets of keywords into "buckets". That means that similar terms such as "jigsaw puzzles" (plural) and other similar terms are grouped together to give a total volume of 40,500.
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💬 Ahrefs does use Google Keyword Planner data but attempts to "ungroup" similar keyword clusters and refine search volumes from GKP using several additional sources of data and custom click-through rate (CTR) distribution models.
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💬 SEMrush uses its own "algorithms" to come up with another different number, but closer to Ahrefs than KWP.
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Which is most useful? It depends on what you're trying to do!
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✅ It's rare you're ever going to rank for a single keyword, so especially if I am doing things like researching categories, I find the raw GWP data with buckets of keywords helpful to get an idea of total volume.
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✅ If I'm trying to work out if people search for "motorbike" or "motorcycle" in a specific area, then the ungrouped data provided by tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush is super helpful.
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Understanding the data you're using is half the battle! ⚔

Getting around Google Search Console API limits

A neat little trick to know about Google Search Console is that the 2,000 URL limit on the API works per ✨ property ✨ , not per domain.
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☝ This means you can add and verify additional properties, such as subfolders for blogs, news, or forums to do things like bulk indexing checks while avoiding the imposed limits.

Using $ in robots.txt for precise crawling control

The $ sign works as a 'stop' in terms of pattern matching for robots.txt. For example:
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❎ If you did not want bots to crawl /car.php
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✅ But you did want them to crawl all of the model pages such as

✅ /car.php?model=1

✅ /car.php?model=2

✅ /car.php?model=3 etc..

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Then you would use the rule:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /car.php$

Generally, stopping crawling is a band-aid for when you can't control other aspects of a site, but these kinds of surgical blocks can be really helpful to get things under control!

Beating competitors with bigger SEO budgets

How can we beat our bigger competitor that has more money? 😭💰😭
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Just because your competitors are bigger than you with x5 the SEO budget, doesn't mean that you still can't roast them 🔥
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👨‍💻 Big companies tend to have long dev queues. This means you can beat them to the punch on new features; whether it's web stories or schema, to give you the edge. Be the first in those new spaces.
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😱 Big companies tend to be very risk-averse. You should be experimenting liberally, the downside of failure is small, and the upside of being able to double down on success is a huge advantage. Take the gamble on the risky PR piece.
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🏇 Big companies are normally very slow to make decisions with multiple stakeholders that need to be convinced. Get expert help, trust them, move fast.
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Don't try and battle them on their terms, focus on areas that are frustrating for them and carve your place there! 👏

Core Updates Supporters

A big thank you to everyone who has supported Core Updates and helped us break over 1,000 subscribers in our first month!
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🥇 Lidia Infante is the first person to reach the milestone of referring 10 subscribers, go and follow her on Twitter(X) / LinkedIn.

Understanding users beyond 'keywords' with live data and intent clustering by Google

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Thanks for reading the newsletter, we're just getting started! 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