📰

​Google has begun blocking links to California news outlets from search results in a protest to a proposed law that would require large online platforms to pay a ‘journalism usage fee’.

📊

​A 1,000 keyword analysis of health symptom searches in Google, many covering serious concerns, has shown Quora is the second most prominent site, where it's easy to find spammed, copied or AI-generated medical advice.

☠️

​Potentially harmful results have been flagged in Google's results since the March update, specifically with Google recommending a "for kids" filter on the search for "best cbd gummies". Google has responded to examples.

💈

​Google appears to be showing brand names in title tags again, reversing a previous decision that saw Google truncate titles, usually by removing the company/brand name. Could be worth monitoring for CTR changes.

😭

​Particularly egregious examples of pure spam in both the SGE/featured snippets have been highlighted by Lily Ray, despite Google having recently completed their March Spam Update.

👋

​Bing is testing removing the estimated number of search results count in the Bing Search results interface. This comes after Bing began testing removing the cache link from the search result snippets.

🕒

​We are now 41 days into the March Core Update rollout and it's still going! We had a lot of volatility over the weekend and so far there have been no reports of recoveries from sites impacted by the HCU.

♊

​Gemini 1.5 Pro is now available in 180+ countries, with native audio (speech) understanding capability and a new File API to make it easy to handle files as well as system instructions and JSON mode to give more output control.

📝

​In a completely unsurprising announcement that was predicted by absolutely everybody, Google is killing off their "Search Notes" feature, which allowed users to vandalise, er, make notes on search results.

Don't get stumped by UA authentication

Some platforms will verify Googlebot before allowing crawling with this user agent. I helped someone this week who was getting an HTTP 403 response trying to crawl with Sitebulb. In this instance, Cloudflare detects when the UA is Googlebot and if not, attempts to verify if it is either a human with a challenge.

If neither of these criteria are met, you'll get an HTTP 403. So the solution; either get whitelisted to change user agent!

Alt tags are not there for your SEO

If you're making your site less usable for those with accessibility requirements by jamming in keywords and search queries into alt tags of images to try and 'optimise them', rather than describing images, you are bad at SEO. Don't do that.

A helpful analogy on website migrations

If you're having trouble explaining why SEO needs to be involved in your new website build and migration to your client or boss, you can say ⬇️

Imagine moving into a new house that is being built. Part of the process is making an inventory of all the furniture and items in your current place to make sure they will fit into the new place.

It's no good trying to get your L-shaped sofa from your spacious mansion onto the 3rd floor of your new city home! It would never fit!

You need to make sure that the new place is built to accommodate all of the things you want to keep from your home. This is much like making sure your high-traffic pages and categories on your old website map to a similar place on your new website.

When you're moving house, you'll also likely have some valuables.

That priceless vase (small as it is) needs to be transported carefully so it's not broken in transit! Just like your website, there are likely some areas that don't get that much traffic but make you a lot of money - you need to be aware of these and make sure they are treated very carefully and the value is not destroyed in the migration!

I've seen far too many websites where everyone is "building the new house" without thinking about where they currently live, then everyone is scratching their heads when they realise they can't fit the metaphorical furniture in the new place!

Our competitors don't do it... So do it!

I’ve seen companies not take up SEO strategies with the reasoning “None of our competitors are doing it”. When in fact, that is exactly the reason you should be doing it.✨

If you’re just looking at what competitors are doing and trying to emulate, you’ll be forever chasing and never getting ahead. Be bold and take some risks 😎

Don't make link metrics the goal

When metrics become the end goal, rather than the measurement of progress, they cease to become a good metric. In SEO, there is probably no better example of this than "links".

😭 Outside of sheer number, the industry made some metrics to try and help measure what we're doing with links: DA, DR, TF, etc. Unfortunately, this means people build unsustainable strategies around "we need X number of Y DR links" - this becomes the end goal. It can get results, but usually as soon as the effort stops, the results dry up too.

😎 The end goal should be creating experiences, products, resources, tools, content, communities that are so good, people want to share them, link to them, cite them, use them - then you've already won.

It's not easy, it's not cheap, and it's a lot of work to be consistent - but that is how long-term results are made.

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