🤖

​Google confirms roll out of AI-organised search results. The rollout will begin with recipe pages and expand to "questions that may be open-ended or have no single right answer." Is this the beginning of the end of traditional SERPs?

🔍

​Google Lens is adding new ways to search using videos, photos and voice. Users can now search by combining recording a video or taking a photo with asking a question in real-time.

🕷️

​TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is scraping data quickly and aggressively. Bytespider (ByteDance's crawler) is scraping data 25 times faster than OpenAI's GPTbot and 3,000 times faster than Anthropic's ClaudeBot.

🎠

​Google is testing a full-width rich card section at the top of ecommerce searches. This new card features a 2x4 grid of products, a list of 5 popular stores, and some informational content on the righthand side.

🔋

​Google has replaced the 'EnergyConsumptionDetails' schema with 'Certification'. This is the latest in a series of product-focused structured data updates Google has been making in 2024.

⚠️

​Google cautions against using JavaScript for Product schema. A new addition to the schema documentation warns that "dynamically-generated markup can make Shopping crawls less frequent and less reliable".

📈

​Google introduces CrUX Vis, a new Core Web Vitals tool that visualises your site performance. CrUX Vis allows users to track the bigger picture of a site's performance across devices and network.

📑

​Google Search Console Performance reports are now sticky. This means that if you set a filter in a Performance report, it will remain when changing to another Performance report.

⬇️

​Google is testing moving a business' products to the bottom of the Knowledge Panel. This would be a controversial move as most businesses would likely wish to highlight their products over things such as their social media links.

🗳️

​Bing's generative search will be expanding for complex informational queries. This feature is still in beta and experiencing significant loading times according to some initial feedback.

📊

​Google Search's recent ranking volatility has continued into October. This marks the longest period of "heated search volatility" ever recorded despite the fact that the August 2024 core update was completed over a month ago.

🏷️

​Google has removed its noarchive documentation. This follows up on the removal of the cache: search operator and the addition of links to the Internet Archive.

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

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CTR is not a direct ranking factor

Google does not use the CTR of a specific site within ranking and scoring of that site.

During ranking Google does use a predicted CTR from models they have made, much like they have done for years with Google Ads.

CTR is used to re-rank results (post-ranking), when click data dramatically changes, but is almost always a temporary effect.

Things to remember about crawling, rendering and indexing

Discovery, crawling, rendering, and indexing are the main steps Google goes through. Here are 10 facts worth remembering when you're diagnosing SEO issues:
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1) Just because it's discovered doesn't mean it will be crawled.
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2) Just because it's crawled, doesn't mean it will be indexed.
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3) Crawling and rendering usually happen within minutes of each other.
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4) The indexing of crawled and rendered versions may be hours, days, or even weeks apart.
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5) Google sometimes has issues with rendering Javascript, it's not always a perfect system.
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6) The super secret that Google uses hamsters for indexing - definitely one to cover in comments.
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7) "IndexNow" is an invite to crawl, not index
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8) Google has different purposes for crawling you can see in GSC in "Settings"
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9) Rendered versions of pages may change things like how PageRank is internally distributed
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10) Google will translate documents into HTML (such as PDFs and even Lotus files!) for indexing.

Alternative tools to the cache: operator

Now Google has finally killed off the cache: operator, testing how Google understands pages will get harder.

While it isn’t a perfect diagnostic tool as it wasn’t reflective of what Google has “seen”, the cache: operator did have some uses.

🛠️ Here are some things you can do and other tools for your box:

✅ GSC is still your first port of call. Live previewing in GSC should give you a preview of what Google can potentially see, although as I have posted about recently - this is not always the case. Sometimes there are bugs at Google’s end and GSC can obscure them.

✅ If it’s other sites you need to view as Google, sometimes using Google’s Rich Results tester can be a good way to view with a Google user-agent and verified IP address that won’t be blocked

✅ If you’re unsure if a specific part of your page is rendering correctly, building a test version of that page with a unique string of characters is a great way to test. This way you can do a Google search for that unique string that doesn’t appear anyone else on the web and see if Google has managed to read it.

Get digital PR inspiration with this new free tool

BrightonSEO edition!

If you’re trying to increase the satisfaction of your pages, you can use Perplexity AI search engine, with the “social” option to summarise what people on Reddit are complaining about on a specific topic.

For instance: “what problems are SEO professionals are having with content creation?”
​
Via the UX/CRO panel with Myriam Jessier Mel Barfield Julie Farley Itasoha Akhibi​

John Mueller isn't good at unsolicited SEO tips

​John Mueller BrightonSEO edition (inspired by Itamar Blauer) ⬇️
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I stopped John Mueller and asked him for an unsolicited SEO tip for you and this is what he said:

“I went to BrightonSEO and this is what I learned about B2B sales”
​
I tried 🙂 🤷🏻‍♂️
​
Photo by Kirstie Cartledge​

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