🛠️

​A new free tool trained on Google exploit data can accurately predict which semantic class Google will assign to any search term, allowing for more in-depth query analysis.

⭕

​Google is introducing AI Overviews to the Circle to Search feature. Google continues to expand its AIO features while Circle to Search appears to be growing in popularity, especially with younger Google users.

🍞

​Google is removing breadcrumbs from mobile SERPs. This removes the site hierarchy section of the visible URL. Breadcrumbs will still show on desktop it's recommended to continue using breadcrumb markup is you are already.

🫥

​Bing has started hiding search results when you search for 'Google'. This is another example, in a long list, where Microsoft is actively discouraging Bing users from switching to Google.

🚢

​Perplexity has launched Sonar Pro API. This API allows users to build new search tools and add Perplexity to other apps such as Google Sheets in a similar way that many have used ChatGPT's API.

✍️

​Google has updated their spam documentation to better define site reputation abuse. The clarification aims to reduce the confusion around the use of first-party vs third-party writers and freelancers.

🔍

​Search intent appears to be the primary factor in the appearance of AI Overviews. AI Overviews can appear for low-volume keywords and appear most for 'how to' types of queries more frequently than any other search.

💻

​OpenAI has released Operator, a new agent that can perform browser tasks for you. Operator can interact with webpages by clicking, scrolling and typing and can be used to automate repetitive browser tasks.

🤖

​Yahoo is testing AI chat in its search results. It's possible Yahoo is licensing Microsoft's Copilot for this function since they the two companies have been in a 'search alliance' since 2010.

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Easy news for digital PR

Easy monitoring To help Candour's Digital PR clients win links, we automatically monitor thousands of news stories everyday for relevance to our clients. 😎

Here is how ⤵️

📄 The team have a Google Sheet, which they list their client and a description of the kind of news they are interested in. E.g. "Candour | Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and anything to do with major search engines like Google or Bing".

📰 There is also a tab on this sheet for RSS feeds where the team can add specific publications (or parts of publications) they wish to monitor. Each feed contains dozens, or hundreds of stories.

🐍 A Python script runs, which iterates through every headline title in every one of these feeds, and for each headline in each feed, it also iterates through every description of story our team are interested in.

🤖 These story titles and descriptions are passed to a local LLM (Ollama/Llama3) and it is asked to give a binary response as to if it believes the story is relevant to the description - it is SO good at this, because it also includes other statistical interference about the words it sees.

💬 If the news item is deemed relevant by the LLM, the story and URL is automatically posted in our team Slack channel for the Digital PR team to check out.

All of this = more client time spent on actions that result in rankings, traffic and revenue 📈

Don't forget backlinks when you're deleting pages

“You should only care about keywords that drive conversions and revenue” says the person that doesn’t really get how SEO works. 🤡

This mindset is the selfish “what’s in it for me?” rather than “how can I help the customer?”. Let me give you a real example from a client I worked with:

🤔 Client asks: “This page gets 50,000 visitors a month, but has never driven a single lead, should we just delete it? It’s worthless, we have commercial pages that rank and drive leads. Maybe they will get more traffic if we delete this one?”

😱 Nooo! And here is why:

🔗 Around 50% of the links the entire site has go to this one page! This helpful resource **is the reason your commercial pages are ranking! **All of the links to this page are passing these vital trust and authority signals to the commercial pages that are internally linked to.

🙂 The user interaction metrics of this informational content are great! Aside from the fact you are making potential clients happy, these are great UX signals for search engines to see - that your site is quality! This is another reason your commercial pages are ranking!

📊 Long-term positive brand exposure and dark funnels are a thing. The mindset of “if it doesn’t appear in our Analytics, it does not exist” is wilfully ignorant of reality. Don’t be Madame Jocasta Nu.

tl;dr Links are still one of the biggest levers you can pull in SEO, if a page is winning you backlinks because people love it, that is one of your most valuable pages, regardless of how much revenue it does or does not make - it’s a proxy for value.

Google can probably write better meta descriptions

Staggered to still see agency outputs where they are working through spreadsheets of meta descriptions, stop! 😭

Consider ⤵️

💬 Meta descriptions are query dependent. The primary deciding factor for what the best meta description is, is the search term. You don’t get to see that, so a lot of the time (not all), Google can do a better job.

🖋 In fact, Google is rewriting meta descriptions ~80%+ of the time because it has access to this context of the query, which you don’t. From a statistical/EV perspective, 80% of the value of your work is immediately wasted.

🥈 Essentially, the meta description is only there as a fallback in case Google can’t find relevant details on the page (which means you probably have bigger problems!).

🗣 To quote Google: “Snippets are primarily created from the page content itself. However, Google sometimes uses the meta description HTML element if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page.”

⏰ For most pages, there are better things to spend your time on, rather than meta descriptions. If you have high traffic pages, it may be worth doing a little SEOTesting of a description. Even in those cases, you’re using AI to speed things up. Right…..? Right??

Don't prioritise schema for LLM search optimisation

Schema does not help your visibility within LMMs.

It could conceivably help visibility for RAG where a search engine's index been used, assuming your schema has helped the search engine understand the content of your page, which has improved your visibility.

That feels like a bit of a reach at the moment to be honest.

Like anything, these things can change, but I wouldn't be prioritising schema thinking you're going to start appearing in ChatGPT because of it.

Schema isn't just structured data

"Schema" does not automatically mean the type of structured data you're using on web pages, it can describe lots of things.

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