🏷️

​Google will label images as taken by a camera, edited or AI-generated. This will include an update to the 'about this image' feature and will roll out to ads and YouTube as well.

🎖️

​Google is testing a 'Top Quality Store' badge on SERPs. This had previously been tested on mobile but has been seen in organic desktop results recently. This is similar to the other features aimed at increasing trust via verification.

🕷️

​Google has updated the crawler documentation. The previously large single page has now been split into three more granular pages and the overview now includes examples of robots.txt and affected products sections.

🗃️

​Schema.org v28.0 has been released. This update aligns schema.org more closely to the Google Merchant Center specifications as well as updating some classes and enumerations.

📈

​AI Overviews are shown more often to signed-in users. There is a reported 10-20% drop for signed-out users. However, this jumps up to 90% less often for ecommerce queries.

🔍

​AI Overviews are predominantly triggered by informational searches. This is unsurprising but across a study of over 1 million queries that triggered AIO, over 96% had an informational search intent.

📊

​Google has provided guidance on monitoring your Core Web Vitals in DevTools. There is also a redesigned Performance panel page as well as guidance on local and real-user experience data.

✨

​Google is using SynthID’s watermarking technique to detect AI content. SynthID is able to embed watermarks that are undetectable to humans into AI-generated text, images and video.

📍

​Bing Places has a new support contact form. This will allow you to submit a support ticket directly to Bing if you have any issues with your Bing Places listings.

▶️

​Google is now showing videos in the top insights section for products. This appears to start with YouTube but may expand to other video services in the future as they become more prevalent on SERPs.

📑

​AI Overviews citations don't always reflect the organic rankings. While YouTube continues to be the most cited domain in AI Overviews, Reddit, which has dominated SERPs in recent months, is underrepresented in AIO.

🍝

​Google now shows reviews and menu descriptions under photos on Maps and GBP. If this remains long-term, this makes the reviews and menu information listed on a restaurant's GBP even more important than before.

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.

Chrome extensions to check indexing issues

There are two extensions I use regularly for quickly looking at crawling/indexing issues on specific pages, they are:

​Robots Exclusion Checker by Sam Gipson - Gives a fast overview of the page your on, highlights awkward little things like if the URL has been updated by JS, as well as X-robots (which is often missed) and canonical states. Very nice.

​SeeRobots - You can see it pictured on the screenshot as the green box and this is why I love it. The box goes half red/full red, if the page is noindexed or blocked, so I can tell without clicking anything the crawl/noindex status of a page!

A free tool to check your GBP

There are a few tools to help manage multiple Google Business Profiles (as it's a bit of a nightmare).

A new free tool for your collection: Mirador Local has released a 'MiraScore' as a way to summarise what you need to do on your profiles. More info in comments!

Adapt your website, not just the language, to international audiences

Internationalisation is not just about language and culture, it's about technology too. 🛠
​
⚠ For instance, while there are benchmarks set for what is a 'green', 'amber' and 'red' score for Core Web Vitals performance, it is very important to remember that the measurement of these scores are subjective to your visitors, not just your website.
​
🚦 What do I mean by that? You may run a test and get 3 'green lights' and believe everyone is fine. However, when you login to Google Search Console, you see you're in the red because the majority of users are perhaps from a country where the average internet connection is much slower.
​
🌏 In cases like this, it may be that you literally have to build a 'lighter' version of your site to serve these regions adequately. This is all part of internationalisation!

Shopify's common duplicate content issue

Shopify is not SEO-friendly "out of the box" - almost all instances of Shopify create duplicate content off the bat which negatively impacts visibility:
​
🔗 Shopify will usually have multiple 'Collection' URLs for a single product, along with a URL without /collection/ int it, straight to the product.
​
👬 The issue with this is you are creating multiple identical (duplicate) pages, with the only difference being the breadcrumb.
​
♻ Shopify try to handle this by using canonical tags. However, canonical tags are just a 'hint' and are overridden by powerful collection URL links in the main menu.
​
🔥 The result is Google ignoring your canonical tags, and having different versions of product pages bouncing around in the SERPs 😭
​
🛠 A simple fix (you still need to sort breadcrumbs) is editing the collection-template.liquid and removing the collection reference from the where hrefs are being generated.

SEO shouldn't always be the priority

Sometimes SEO isn’t the reason you should be doing something, it’s the “bonus”. Knowing this can help you get things prioritised.

Examples:

⚡ Site performance: You shouldn’t be trying to improve your site speed because it “helps SEO”, you should be doing it because we know that users hate slow and under-performing websites. Speeding up your website will improve your bottom link - see the link in comments for overwhelming evidence of this!

👀 Alt tags are not there to help with your SEO, they are there for accessibility. You should not be making the argument that you need to “fill in alt tags for SEO”, you should be providing alt tags so those that can’t see the images can understand the experience you’re providing.

If any of these things result in improved rankings - that is the icing on the cake! 🍰

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)

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