🗃️

​Google Search results now link directly to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This new relationship between with the non-profit archive site follows up on Google removing cached pages on SERPs earlier this year.

📍

​Google will now sanction GBP accounts with fake reviews, with three levels of severity. The potential restrictions include not receiving new reviews, unpublishing existing reviews and displaying a public warning to users.

⚠️

​Google has added a spam warning to the indexing API documentation. The documentation emphasises their strict spam detection and uses exceeding quotas an example activity that may lose you access to the API.

🎠

​Product carousels are back in AI Overviews for commercial queries. Google has previously tested this feature and this reinforces the importance of good content, structured data and information for your product detail pages.

🇬🇧

​Google.co.uk was the ranking page if you search for 'Google' in the US, Australia and other regions. International SEO is hard, right? Maybe Google forgot their own hreflangs

🗣️

​Voice-powered AI chat is free and available now for Android users. From Google's announcement, Gemini Live allows users to search the web, ask questions, brainstorm ideas and even rehearse using your voice.

🧑‍⚖️

​The 'site reputation abuse' policy was never implemented algorithmicallybecause they "wouldn't be exceedingly careful and thoughtful in how [they] do it". Quite the contrast to the seemingly chaotic rollout of the HCU.

📑

​AI Overviews are more likely to include citations to content with strong ranking. The study of over 11,000 queries found that the first ranking result was cited 53% of the time while positions 2-6 had a 40% chance of inclusion.

🔍

​Young internet users no longer use "Google" as a verb for searching. In a small but possibly significant shift, this 'de-verbing' appears to be driven by the democratisation of search across other platforms like Amazon and TikTok.

🍏

​Apple has announced Visual Intelligence, their equivalent of Google Lens. Apple appear to be integrating services like Google, ChatGPT and OpenTable into their version of visual search.

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.

Remove "fake" bots from log file analysis

Most log file analysers will offer an option similar to Screaming Frog's "Verify Bots".

This will allow you to remove "fake" search engine bots from your logs, such as if you ran a crawl yourself as Googlebot or if your SEO monitoring system does.

Don't forget to use Trends data for your digital PR

Google Trends is a great tool for getting insights you can use in digital PR pitches.

If I worked for someone like Proton or NordVPN I would be talking to journalists about how searches for "VPNs" in Brazil massively spiked after the Twitter/X ban. 🖥
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So much fun data in there for free, with a little bit of creativity! 🧙‍♂️

What questions are people asking about your product?

If you're marketing an established product, whether it's a SaaS or consumer item, it's worth considering that the vast majority of initial questions will be in context to the existing known version. 🤔
​
🙈 This means consumers are less interested in the standard list of "features and benefits"
​
🐵 They are more likely to want to know "how is this different?" or "what is specifically better about this version?"
​
🐒 You can see this when you look at data for iPhone 16 searches. Apart from wanting to know when it's out, and how much it costs - the main query intent is "What's the difference between iPhone 15 and 16?"
​
Intent data lets you get inside the head of your consumers to best the best possible content.

Visualising how Google actually works

Advanced SEO (to me), is having a conceptual model of "how it all fits together".

In the over 1,000 SEO tips I've published, I've talked about Google components like Twiddlers and Navboost, but Mario Fischer has done an incredible job putting all of these things together in a flowchart.

My SEO tip today is to stare at this image a bit - and think!

Sometimes you should optimise for robots

"Optimise for the user, not Google"... Unless.... ⬇
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✔ You're having to help Google understand regional language differences with hreflangs...
✔ Or if you're helping Google understand your content with schema...
✔ Or if you're helping Google consolidate pages with canonical tags....
✔ Or if you're having to put 301 redirects for trailing slash variants to remove duplicate content signals...
✔ Or if you're having to change your entire JS CSR because Google is having trouble crawling...
✔ Or if you're having to make checkbox filters as href links so Google can even find them...
✔ Or....
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Robots aren't that smart yet. There's a lot of "invisible" work that goes into helping those search engine systems access and understand your site. Don't neglect it!

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)

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