🛍️

​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, due to recent criticism of Google's products.

🗒️

​Documents from Google's recent DOJ trial include information about Nick Fox and his thoughts on Google Search. Fox may plan to shift focus from Google's recent short-term growth to a broader focus on innovation and product quality.

🤝

​Semrush acquires Third Door Media. The latest Semrush acquisition includes the publications Search Engine Land and MarTech as well as the conferences Digital Marketing Depot and Search Marketing Expo (SMX).

▶️

​YouTube citations in AI Overviews have grown by over 300% since August. This seems to show Google continuing to increase the visibility of its own video platform as well as the importance of video content for AI Overviews.

📊

​Bing Webmaster Tools extends the Search Performance data to 16 months. This is a significant increase from the previous limit of 6 months and brings Bing in-line with Google Search Console's 16-month historical data limit.

✈️

​Google Flights has launched a 'Cheapest' tab. This new feature can save you money on your flights but may make the times and transfers more difficult in the process. Will we see more 'Cheapest' features in other Google products?

📈

​You can now save segments in Explorations on GA4. Once a segment has been created and saved, it can be used by all users within a property. This will save a lot of time compared to creating segments from scratch each time.

🚢

​Bing has 27 unshipped features. Bing CEO Mustafa Suleman says that Bing is "brave enough to undo complexity". This appears to be in response to the overall feeling of many users that search engines are overly complex today.

✔️

​Google is testing a blue tick verification for Knowledge Panels. This follows recent tests of verification for brands in organic results and shops in product grid results in recent months.

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.

What is link velocity?

You've probably seen people posting about "link velocity" as some kind of secret to ranking, so let's talk through some facts and thoughts!
​
❔ Generally when people talk about "link velocity", they are simply referring to the rate at which your website is gaining new backlinks.
​
❎ There is a misconception that there is an "optimal" link velocity, or that your link velocity should be within some parameters based on your competitors.
​
👀 Combined with other signals, link velocity can give Google some hints that you may be doing something either shady or good.
​
🧠 Let's consider two scenarios: 100 links in a single month to site A could be a spam signal. 100 links in a single month to an almost identical site B could be a signal that it's doing amazing things - but what is the difference?
​
📊 The popularity (let's say PageRank) of the linking sites contributes to what an optimal/acceptable link velocity is, let's think about those two previous examples:
​
1) Website A 100 links from small blogs, all of which Google can approximate have very low traffic. This doesn't make a lot of sense, how would all of these tiny websites find out about your site within such a short timeframe? It smells like manipulation!
​
2) Website B gets 99 links from small blogs and 1 link from The Guardian. That makes perfect sense: when you land top-tier coverage or get mentioned and linked on popular websites, a large cohort of people instantly learn about your site. A natural consequence of this is that you're then picked up a collection of smaller (sometimes spammy websites).
​
Google has one of the largest snapshots of the web, how it links together and how it changes, so it has the data to do this kind of analysis.
​
The truth is, it's a lot more complicated than simply saying "you need X links per month". Quality > quantity, every time! 📈

Google is always course correcting towards its destination

It's sometimes worth thinking of Google's algorithm as a ship sailing towards a destination. The destination is Google's 'strategic ideal' of the SERPs they want. It's a bit of a moving target, so sometimes Google needs to course adjust - and it does this with algorithm updates ⚓
​
Some of these 'course corrections' cause the ship to rock and things on deck become a bit choppy. During these times, there is usually something "exploitable" about the algorithm. Something you can lean into to make your site rank a bit unfairly. ☠
​
The problem is, when everyone runs to one side of the ship, it will eventually right itself and those on the very edge tend to fall overboard.
​
tl;dr Yes, there are imperfections in Google's algorithm you can use to your advantage. If you exploit them too heavily, you'll likely end up in a worse (and wetter) position than you started. Long game.

Image: SKALD: Against The Black Priory ⚔

DA, DR and TF are not ranking factor

Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), TrustFlow (TF), none of these things help you rank, none are used by Google, they are all metrics invented by third-party tools. 👨‍🔬

✅ These metrics can be useful in the absence of other data, as they will usually give a good indication about which domain is more popular or in better standing.

❎ I would absolutely not be using these domains as a ‘success metric’, measuring their change or setting targets based on them.

☠ It is worth noting most of them can be faked fairly easily, so exercise caution if you’re buying a domain that looks too good to be true.

Don't use robots.txt to block CSS, images or theme files

It's a common mistake to use robots.txt to block access to CSS, images or theme files of your site. 😣
​
Google is trying to render your site as users see it, so it helps if you let Google access these, to make an accurate render and better understand the content.

You should probably ignore keyword difficulty

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is a proprietary metric that is calculated differently by many different tool vendors, so be very careful if you are going to make any decisions based on this metric!
​
Here is a fantastic example that Chris Ridley shared with me where Semrush and Ahrefs rated the same keyword as "Very Hard" and "Very Easy". ⬇
​
Personally, I completely ignore KD metrics when making SEO plans. 💅

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

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