🚫

​The Federal Trade Commission has banned AI-generated reviews. The FTC chain announced that these reviews "waste people's time and money", this has the potential to impact local SEO, with some companies buying reviews.

🤖

​Google has confirmed the AI Overview links and citations are impacted by Google Core Updates. When asked, Google's John Mueller said "These are part of search, and core updates affect search, so yes."

📈

​Google's ranking issue has been resolved. This issue was confirmed on 16 August 2024 and resolved on 20 August 2024. The crossover between this issue and the core update may cause delays in recovery.

☑️

​Google is testing verification icons on SERPs. This is not a paid feature. Hovering over the icons reveals that this verification is because "Google's signals suggest that this business is the business that it says it is."

👀

​Google appear to have rolled out larger favicons on SERPs. This could potentially relate to the verification icons above as users look for reassurance that a website is what it says it is.

📑

​99.5% of AI Overviews include a top 10 web result. This is a significant shift for AIO as they would previously feature content from lower-ranking pages. So, to optimise for AI Overviews you should simply optimise for Google! Currently.

📊

​Tracking metrics from AI Overviews in Google Search Console continues to be difficult. There have been calls for AI Overview filtering options in GSC, similar to featured snippets, but currently, there is no consistent method.

☁️

​Google has quietly launched a new crawler, Google-CloudVertexBot. This crawler is related to advanced website indexing but is not currently part of the crawling or indexing of public websites.

📋

​Google had updated the documentation on Search Appearances. The new table describes the Search Appearance, API values and bulk export fields for a variety of SERP features including rich results and merchant listings.

🎞️

​Google also updated its video SEO documentation. The update clarifies video indexing requirements, technical requirements, and added a new 'watch page' section.

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

AlsoAsked allows you to quickly mine live "People Also Ask" data, the freshest source of consumer intent data, for understanding what users are searching about beyond 'keywords' and what you should be writing about.

Get 90 searches per month with no account creation, for free.

Ride the rollercoaster before reacting to core updates

I'd strongly recommend against any knee-jerk reactions during a core update. It's not unusual to have a bit of rollercoaster action - be calm and exercise patience 🎢
​
When you see rankings shift - even if you lose them - it could be because an update has been applied to URLs around you, or just you so far and not them - or that you've had some score applied that still needs to be recalculated as other results trickle in.
​
Wait until the dust settles before you commit to any analysis or plan.

The SEO metric chain

There's not much point trying to report on the revenue SEO is generating when your pages aren't getting indexed ⚠
​
I'm a huge fan of this "SEO metric chain" created by Chris Green and regularly use it during SEO proposals to talk about where our current focus on reporting will be.
​
Especially owner-run companies are very much interested in the "financial value" side of reporting. This metric chain allows you to validate your work by demonstrating how each component relies on its prerequisite.
​
💰 Why aren't we reporting how much money SEO has made you?
​
🙃 Because we're not getting any organic sessions.
​
🖱️ Why? Because we're not getting many clicks, not even impressions!
​
👀 Why? Because we're not visible, because we aren't ranking
​
⚠️Why? Because there are errors stopping your pages getting indexed, which is why we're talking about that!

Prevention is usually better than a cure

Here's a story about why doing an SEO audit is great, but you should be continually crawling and monitoring the site for issues.
​
👑 Our ContentKing platform that is integrated into Slack alerted us to a sitewide update that had made a client's site appear 'blank' to Google. The client did over £1M per month in ecom revenue.
​
🙈 They were serving a non-JS version to bots, but their user testing only looked at the regular site which appears absolutely fine. So it passed QA and was deployed.
​
⚠ Catching the issue as soon as it went live meant we could alert them before there was an impact.
​
💰 This prevention instead of cure can save huge amounts of money
​
🛠 There are lots of options, depending on the size and update frequency of your site that can help you with this such as Ahrefs (pictured above), Little Warden, Sitebulb and ContentKing.

Don't neglect your redirect chains

Keep an eye on your tech debt, even things like redirects that get carried over migrations. Googlebot will follow a maximum of 5 redirects before it stops.

However, it will come back and 'restart' deeper into that chain.

This means Googlebot will still be able to discover pages that are 5+ redirect chained... You wouldn't do that though, would you??

Bigger favicons on SERPs

As much as I joked about it before, I imagine custom favicons make an actual difference with SERP interaction now Google has made them much bigger.

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)

Thanks to Jack this week (again)

Jack kindly did this week's newsletter, isn't he smashing? It's honestly making me a bit lazy, but he's doing a fantastic job. We still want to know what's in your head, because we cannot divine it. If you hit reply and give me some of your thoughts, I will read them.

~Mark Williams-Cook