🧑‍⚖️

​Excerpts from Google’s Anti-Trust trial have been written up by Ethan Lazuk, highlighting interesting points relating to SEO, including the search engine's reliance on user data decreasing as language processing is improving.

🕷️

​A Google exploit that exposed various website variables including non-public metrics used for ranking is currently being fixed by their security team, with further details to follow.

🗑️

​The SISTRIX March Core Updates winners and losers chart has been updated with winners including notable food sites (food[dot]com and jocooks[dot]com) as well as health sites (spine-health[dot]com and webmd[dot]com).

🤖

​The AI Act from the European Commission is the first-ever legal framework for AI. A key requirement is labelling AI-generated text for matters of public interest. Luiz Jarovsky has provided a TL;DR summary of risk.

🎨

​INP has now replaced FID in Core Web Vitals, Google has confirmed. INP is now present in Page Experience and Core Web Vital reports across Google Documentation and tools.

✋

You should wait for the rollout to complete before making significant changes to your site in response to a Google update according to Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan.

📄

​According to a recent Google Search Central FAQ, "Removing unhelpful content might contribute to your other pages performing better" even though the "systems work primarily at a page level".

🦟

​NSFW links are still being inserted in Google-owned properties, including Looker Studio. This follows from spammers' recent use of Google Groups for parasite SEO.

🍎

​Apple is in talks with Google for Gemini to power Generative AI features coming to iOS 18 later this year as reported by Bloomberg. Apple also recently held similar talks with OpenAI.

Improving page titles for users and SEO

One of the best ways to tell if you've got a good page title is if you can tell specifically what is on the page with no other context. Ignoring the brand name, let's look at an example: 🎣
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👎 "Jackets" - Likely a poor page title, you're unlikely to rank for just "jackets" and it doesn't tell the user specifically what is on the page.
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👌 "Waterproof jackets" - Getting better, you've massively narrowed it down to a more specific (and likely higher converting) search, and you are likely to have a better chance to rank.
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👍 "Waterproof fishing jackets" - Now we know you're a fishing brand, and you're specifically selling waterproof jackets. This massively increases your chances of ranking and it still has 1,000 searches per month in the UK!
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Be as specific and descriptive as you can!

Don't madly chase INP because it's shiny and new

Last week, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital metric. This is a good time to remember:

Don't ditch your current SEO priorities for INP. Core Web Vitals have a very minute impact on ranking. They're absolutely one of the metrics you should be using to improve your user experience, but it's not something I would prioritise expecting direct SEO results.

Link building with PDFs

Google actually renders PDF documents as HTML. This means links in PDF documents count as normal web links - PDFs are pretty easy to share, too.... 📄 🔗 🥂

Don't just make FAQs with question research

One of the most common mistakes I see people make with keyword research is simply lumping questions into an FAQ verbatim, it's such a shame! 🤦‍♂️
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If you're using a tool like AlsoAsked to determine the intent around a search, use this as a guide of what pain points, concerns, questions, and topics to cove in your content, not as a rigid list of questions of answer! ❌
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Google research said the average query takes nine searches to complete! Having the data on "intent proximity" of questions allows you to produce helpful content that answers more questions in one place. ✅
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Better results = better engagement = better long-term rankings! 🏆

Explaining crawl budget, traps and search engines

If you're trying to explain managing where search engines crawl, crawl traps, and crawl budget to a non-technical client or boss, you can say ⬇️
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Imagine you're showing people around a house that you're trying to sell. You would want to show them all of the important rooms, the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms - you want them to have the optimal journey and spend the maximum time looking at these rooms.
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Unfortunately for you, the house has been built in such a way that you have long corridors with hundreds of doors that all appear to lead back to the same tiny bathroom. This means that the people viewing your house used up all of their 30-minute viewing time getting stuck opening doors to bathrooms and didn't get to even see the living room! No sale!
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This is essentially what can happen when Google sends robots to check out your website. With a poor technical setup, it's possible for Google to get "lost" in deep trees of faceted and filtered navigation, and use all of its resources looking at pages you don't care about!

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)

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.

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