🔄

​Google December 2024 core update started on 12 December. This update comes just 8 days after the conclusion of the previous November 2024 core update, it seems to be more impactful already than November's.

📅

​Google announces that it will be releasing more core updates more frequently at Google Search Central live in Zurich, potentially moving towards daily or rolling updates, rather than the typical 3-4 annual updates

⌛

​Bing has finally removed their cache link after Google did the same in February 2024. This leaves The Wayback Machine as one of the few options to see how other websites have been cached.

📊

​Google Search Console now displays more recent data with a new '24 hours' view. This new view includes clicks, impressions, and CTR with hourly updates across Search, Discover, and Google News.

🚫

​The News Media Alliance calls on the FTC and DOJ to investigate Google's Site Reputation Abuse policy, claiming they harm publishers' ability to monetise content and reduce traffic to news sites.

✨

​Google launches Gemini 2.0, its most advanced AI model yet. New features include multimodal outputs, new agents for app developers, and Deep Research, an AI research assistant now available in Gemini Advanced.

🗙

​Google Search Console will no longer include GA4 data in GSC Insights. Of course, you can still access this data directly in GA4 but you can no longer see GA4 data in Google Search Console.

📉

​The November 2024 core update was 'less volatile' than previous updates. This volatility refers to the overall impact of the update, not how individual sites may have been affected.

⚠️

​Google reported an indexing issue on 9 December. The issue was resolved within 24 hours so should not have a significant impact on long-term reporting and figures.

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

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Keep an eye on Google Alerts

You can do some basic brand, topic, or competitor monitoring for free with Google Alerts.
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Apart from keeping an eye on what people are saying it can give you the opportunity to build relationships and links. Strike up a friendly conversation, offer them some more value, detail, insight, and get that request in to get the link where relevant and helpful 🫡

Easily learn about Google patents

Google has patented systems that allow users to more precisely navigate search results by leveraging contextual filters generated from the content itself. 🪧
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🧑‍🎓 You can find more out about this in this week's "SEO Patent Podcast" where NotebookLM summarises the patent "Search Result Filters From Resource Content" so it is easy to understand.
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​Here's a link to the episode on Spotify.​

1/50 pages has its canonical changed during rendering?!

According to the 2024 Web Almanac 1 in 50 pages has its canonical tag changed during rendering 🤦‍♂️
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🖇️ Ideally, your canonical tag should be present in the 'raw' HTML, and I am certain that some of these rendering changes will be breaking canonical tags.
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🤷‍♂️ Giving inconsistent signals such as canonicals, lastmod, and hreflang can cause Google to simply ignore your 'guidance' and make their own mind up.
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❗ Make sure you're testing both raw and rendered output!
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h/t to Jamie Indigo for the great work here!

Advanced SEO = conceptual models + video games

'Advanced SEO' to me isn't understanding how things like vector embeddings work. It's being able to pull together all of the small bits of information you have into a cohesive, working, conceptual model. ⤵️
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This is my favourite talk of the year, which we capped off SearchNorwich with, where I give some details on Google exploits and talk about how to build conceptual models (and video games).
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​Watch the full talk on YouTube.​

As queries evolve, search volume is less important

"Do you know the search volume for this term?" has increasingly become a question I am less interested in ⬇
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It's pretty common for people to do longer, more complex queries now. 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:
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❓ 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...
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7 search terms: 1 search intent
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It would be easy to rewrite this query in 30 different ways, so even if each question only got 5 searches per month (which would report "0"), this one question would have a monthly search volume of 150 searches.

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

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🥇 MJ Cachón Yáñez (LinkedIn / X)

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