🔍 Core Updates: Google confirms AI-organised search results and searching with videos [07 Oct]


SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-Cook
Search with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward

SEO updates you need to know


🤖

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.

Our sponsor: AlsoAsked

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.

Search with Candour podcast

How negativity bias affects the way we search

Season 3: Episode 40

Giulia Panozzo joins Search With Candour to discuss the neuroscience behind negativity bias. Giulia combines her knowledge of neuroscience and marketing to bring some fascinating neuromarketing insights to the podcast!

Why do negative headlines get more clicks than positive ones?

How does negativity bias affect the way we search?

Why does one piece of negative feedback standout against positive feedback?

This week's solicited SEO tips:

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:

1) Just because it's discovered doesn't mean it will be crawled.

2) Just because it's crawled, doesn't mean it will be indexed.

3) Crawling and rendering usually happen within minutes of each other.

4) The indexing of crawled and rendered versions may be hours, days, or even weeks apart.

5) Google sometimes has issues with rendering Javascript, it's not always a perfect system.

6) The super secret that Google uses hamsters for indexing - definitely one to cover in comments.

7) "IndexNow" is an invite to crawl, not index

8) Google has different purposes for crawling you can see in GSC in "Settings"

9) Rendered versions of pages may change things like how PageRank is internally distributed

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) ⬇️

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

Refer subscribers and earn rewards!

If you enjoy reading Core Updates, you can earn £1000's of free access to software and tools by referring your friends to sign up using your personal referral link.

Your referral link: [RH_REFLINK GOES HERE]


Here are the fantastic rewards on offer:

Refer 3 Subscribers:
Get tagged in a LinkedIn post to thank you for your support

Refer 10 Subscribers:
Get included in a Core Updates email as a supporter

Refer 25 Subscribers:
Get 1 month free subscription to Liam Fallen’s MostlyMarketing Slack

Refer 50 Subscribers:
Get 1 month free AlsoAsked Lite subscription

Refer 75 Subscribers:
Get a free copy Majestic’s SEO in 2024 book (20 to give)

Refer 100 Subscribers:
Get 3 months free InLinks Freelancer subscription

Refer 150 Subscribers
Get free access to Kyle McGregor’s Google Analytics 4 course

Refer 200 Subscribers:
Get free access to Mark Williams-Cook’s Complete SEO course

Refer 250 Subscribers:
Get 1 year free subscription to Sitebulb Pro

Refer 300 Subscribers:
Get free access to Mark Rofe’s Digital PR Course

Refer 404 Subscribers:
Get 1 year free subscription to Little Warden Small team

Refer 500 Subscribers:
Get 1 year free AlsoAsked Pro subscription

Your referral link:

[RH_REFLINK GOES HERE]

Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Telegram Linkedin Email

PS: You have referred [RH_TOTREF GOES HERE] people so far

See how many referrals you have

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)

We'd love to hear from you

Let's hope this week's newsletter doesn't get caught in the spam detection like last week's did!

If you've got any thoughts about what you like, what you dislike, or what you think we should add/change to the newsletter, then hit reply!

We really do read every bit of feedback!

~ Mark and Jack

Candour, 30-34 Muspole Street, Norwich, Norfolk NR31DJ
Unsubscribe · Preferences

Core Updates SEO Newsletter

The Core Updates newsletter is written by Mark Williams-Cook, a veteran SEO who is Digital Marketing Director at Candour, Founder of AlsoAsked and organiser of SearchNorwich. Over 40,000 SEOs follow Mark's 'Unsolicited #SEO tips' on LinkedIn, which has now been wrapped up into the Core Updates newsletter, along with an overview of weekly news and the current episode of the Search with Candour episode, hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward.

Read more from Core Updates SEO Newsletter

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 📈 Google has published new documentation about Google Trends. This page now includes helpful recommendations about analysing trends, keyword research and even creating content around trends. 💰 AI Overviews are inaccurate in 43% of finance-related searches. Data from The College Investor's recent study shows that AI Overviews particularly struggled with nuanced topics such...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🛍️ Google Shopping is launching a personalised 'for you' feed. This new feed will include recommendations based on your recent searches and YouTube history as well as AI-generated shopping tips and summaries. 👨💼 Nick Fox replaces Prabhakar Raghavan as head of Google Search and Ads. While Raghavan will be staying at Google, in a new role, this restructuring may be, in part,...

SEO tips and updates from Mark Williams-CookSearch with Candour hosted by Jack Chambers-Ward SEO updates you need to know 🔍 SearchGPT is rolling out to a small group of users. A new search icon appeared in the ChatGPT app for iOS in the US. This is likely a test for the rumoured SearchGPT full rollout later this year. 🧑⚖️ DOJ is considering 'breaking up' Google after the recent antitrust trial. Possible changes include ending revenue-sharing partnerships (i.e. Reddit), limiting exclusive...