⚖️

​A federal judge has ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly and violates anti-trust laws. This decision comes primarily from Google's practice of paying companies such as Apple to be the default search engine on their devices.

🕵️

​Google is introducing recommendations to Google Search Console. This is different to the Insights feature and will provide suggestions about indexing, structured data and even relevant trends for your site.

💎

​The 'hidden gems' update has given massive growth to Reddit, Quora and other forums. This is fallout from the 2023 core updates (pun intended) and many forums have seen over 100% increase in visibility year-on-year.

🎢

​There has been a lot of SERP volatility over the last few weeks to the next core update. This doesn't appear to include any positive direction for sites affected by the September 2023 helpful content update.

📍

​You should be adding localities to your title tags to improve your local reach. Including them in the title tags has shown a 16% increase in GBP actions. And no, Google doesn't care that your title tag is too long.

📈

​Google has provided new insights into Google Trends data. These insights include that Google Trends only uses a sample of data and that it cleans the "noise" such as the same user repeating the same search.

⛔

​Reddit is considering adding AI-power search results. Reddit's search function has been infamously bad for years so we hope this will allow easier discovery of new topics and communities.

📊

​AI Overviews link to at least one domain from the top 10 organic search results in over 93% of case. This research from SE Ranking also includes the frequency of AIOs according to niche and the most-linked domains.

HIVE MCR - A new kind of SEO conference

HIVE MCR will debut at New Century Hall in Manchester on 29 August 2024.

Tickets are free and include talks & panels from Jono Alderson, Jo O'Reilly, Chris Green, Sophie Gibson and many more.

After the event, a Mancunian summer party will kick off with complimentary food, beverages and a DJ set.

Find the questions your content isn't answering

Finding potential gaps in content where searcher intent was unmet used to be a painstaking and time-consuming task. With Screaming Frog, ChatGPT and AlsoAsked you can automate a big chunk of this! ⬇
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🐸 Screaming Frog's new Custom JS since v20 allows you to execute custom JS as you crawl. You can use a list crawl to manually crawl all of your content URLs.
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💡 AlsoAsked's API is built into the library of Screaming Frog CustomJS called "(AlsoAsked+ChatGPT) Find unanswered questions". This will fetch the closest intent proximity questions based on your page's h1 by default.
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🤖 ChatGPT's API does what LLMs do best - it summarises the text on your page to find which of those questions asked it doesn't think your content answers.
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⏳ All of this is then output with your crawl data, so you have a list of potential questions you can review to answer and improve your content that will likely improve in minutes rather than hours or days of work!
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💴 This process requires paid versions of all 3 of these tools, but I think it's a fine tradeoff with potentially days of work being saved!

How often does Google crawl your site

Google uses a bunch of factors to decide how often to crawl your site, including backlinks, how frequently content is updated, and we can see from the DOJ trial exhibits, they even use real user data to determine which sites to crawl.

Summarise user intent with AlsoAsked + ChatGPT

You can use ChatGPT (or your favourite LLM) to summarise the search intent from AlsoAsked intent maps. This was a brilliant suggestion from Lidia Infante that enables you to:

🖼 Use the free version of AlsoAsked and extract text data (hey!!)

❓Think about intent rather than focusing on answering questions verbatim (rarely the best approach!)

🤖 Use LLM/AI for a task it’s really good at - text summarisation!

This is the prompt that Lidia used: “These are questions users ask about [search term]. Summarise the user intent.”

I am sure there will be some other variations of this that could be useful for you too!

GSC highlights why a page is being blocked by robots.txt

Google Search Console now has the ability to automatically highlight which robots.txt rules are blocking a page from being crawled.
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Under Pages if you look at "Blocked by robotstxt", click on a URL, the panel on the right will highlight the robots rule that is currently blocking that URL.
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Nice for live debugging in a pinch! 🐛

Don't worry about spammy or toxic links

You almost never need to worry about spammy or “toxic” links. Picking up spammy links is completely natural, all big sites have spammy links, and in general, Google simply ignores them - you don’t need to do anything. Here’s the scoop 👇

🔥 I’ve unfortunately encountered some agencies charging clients monthly to go through lists of links that third-party tools deem to be “toxic” and disavowing them. This is a waste of money 😭

🛑 Google have stated they simply ignore links they think are spammy. Assuming this is true, that would mean at best disavowing this kind of links would do nothing - at worst, you’ll disavow links Google did care about.

💹 If Google did penalise sites for spammy links, they would create a whole economy around doing this for competitors efficiently. It simply doesn’t make sense for them to treat them this way - they would make their own job harder.

👋 Bing got rid of their disavow tool and Google said they are planning on doing the same. This should give you some idea of how important these tools are to search engines.

🖋 I have personally only seen a few credible ‘negative SEO’ type attacks that have disrupted competitors (based on links) in recent years. I saw Gary Illyes saying when he invited people to submit reports of “negative SEO”, none of them actually turned out to be negative SEO as far as he could figure out. You can make your own mind up - neither Gary or I are cops 👮‍♂️

​This was one of my tips for Majestic’s “SEO in 2024”.​

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

Jack kindly this week's newsletter, isn't he smashing? 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