📊

Google announces Query Groups for Google Search Console. This new feature can group queries by different similar search intent, highest click volume, and trending up or down. Yes, it's basically regex filters.

🗣️

Google expands Gemini to Home assistant. This adds new LLM and search functionality to Google Home devices. That's right, the era of voice search is finally here...about 10 years later than predicted.

📈

Google CEO claims "incremental total query growth for Search" thanks to AI Mode. In the Q3 earnings call, Sundar Pichai also claimed “strong and consistent” week-over-week growth for AI Mode.

🍽️

Google Business Profile expands the 'What's happening?' feature for restaurants. This makes it easier to promote events and special offers by pulling information from Google Posts and social media.

🌎

Bing Search tests a country/region selector. This allows users to check how search results appear in different countries and looks very similar to Google's country/region selector.

🔍

Perplexity launches Perplexity Patents, an AI patent research agent. Users can find patents much more easily without using clunky government websites. Someone should do an AI-generated podcast about Google patents...

Thousands of SEOs use Enfra to save hours every week.

Instead of manually checking SERPs, comparing competitors, and building briefs - Enfra helps you do that in ChatGPT.

✅ Compare your content with the top 10 ranking pages and find optimization opportunities

✅ Build content briefs and meta tags based on the top ranking results in seconds

✅ Analyze your content's schema, and “People Also Ask” gaps

✅ Analyze your GSC data in ChatGPT to discover keywords with high impressions but low clicks

And much more!

No API keys. No setup. Just install in Chrome and go.

Sitelinks are a disease

What can you learn about SEO from the official Disney website showing a Sitelink for Black hat SEO packages? ⬇️

This result has been spreading with some people saying it proves that Google "doesn't ignore spam links".

It's unhelpful to think about how Google works as one monolithic "algorithm" that does everything. It's much nearer the truth to say that Google operates lots of micro-services that take information from other micro-services to perform jobs.

As we've demonstrated previously with our Google exploit, there are clearly "front end" systems that Google uses to generate SERP features which have absolutely nothing to do with ranking.

The fact this Sitelink shows is in no way evidence that Google doesn't ignore spammy links for ranking, and I promise you'll be a better SEO if you are more rigorous with the observations you form opinions from.

Of course, it does demonstrate an exploitable surface with Google and how they generate Sitelinks, but that's another story! 👹

Blockrank is everywhere. It is all around us.

Scalable in-context ranking with generative models (Blockrank) has the potential to be quite important in what we're doing as SEOs. ⤵️
​
Essentially, Google has found a way to massively improve the efficiency of assessing the relevance of documents to a query with GenAI. The amazing read of how the key to it lays with the query.
​
I'm looking forward to getting some tooling to help us predict how this is going to look on current results, and hat tip to Dan Petrovic who saw a lot of this coming 🧠
​
I've added to The SEO Patent podcast with a NotebookLM summary of the patent if you want an overview.

Do you think that's regex you're using now?

You can easily filter your GSC query data to uncover a treasure trove of query types your site is ranking for, with the following regex patterns: 🧙‍♂️
​
📃 Informational intent (Guides, tutorials, how-tos)
\b(how to|guide|tutorial|step by step|tips|tricks|ways to|best way to|learn|help|explain|understand|instruction|methods|examples|meaning of|definition)\b
​
⚖️ For comparisons (e.g., "best", "vs", "alternative", "cheaper"):
\b(best|vs|versus|compare|comparison|alternative|alternatives|better|cheaper|worse|cheapest|highest|lowest|top|difference|differences|differences between)\b
​
🛍️ Questions on products/services (e.g., "is X good?", "where to buy X?")
\b(price|cost|buy|purchase|available|best|quality|brand|reviews|ratings|features|specifications|order|discount|warranty|deal|shop|store|version|options|model|type|compare)\b
​
💰 Transactional intent (Buying, pricing, ;ocations)
\b(buy|purchase|price|cost|cheap|discount|deal|coupon|order|shop|store|near me|online|sale|best price|affordable|available|in stock)\b
​
🧭 Navigational intent (Brand-specific, reviews, support)
\b(review|reviews|rating|ratings|customer service|support|warranty|return policy|refund|complaint|feedback|scam|legit|trustworthy|experience|testimonial|problems|issues)\b
​
🛠️ Specific for SaaS (Tool queries from Pietro Mingotti)
\b(?:tool|software|app|system|platform|application|program|solution|portal|suite|service)s?\b
​
To get this:
1) Open your Google Search Console
2) Go to "Performance"
3) On the filters at the top click on "+ Add filter"
4) Select "Query"
5) Change the drop down to "Custom (regex)"
​
Paste in the regex and be amazed ✨
​
🏆 BONUS TIPS 🏆
​
You could also use GSC Helper extension by Stephan Czysch for preset filters (link in comments!)
​
Be aware that regex filters is it changes all the metrics to sum up pages - so you get greatly inflated impression counts. (Some great Ryan Jones knowledge)
​
​🔎 Charles Meaden points out these can be used in other tools such as Ahrefs that support regex

Never send a human to do a tech SEO's job

Technical SEO is sometimes about fixing future problems, rather than 'right now' problems. "A stitch in time, saves nine" as the saying goes. Here's an example:
​
🤓 Tech SEO: "Our new website sometimes adds personalisation query strings onto pages, which are indexable"
​
👨‍💼 Boss: "How many of these pages are indexed? What problems is it causing us?"
​
🤓 Tech SEO: "Well, only 10-15 at the moment, but the site has only been live a few weeks"
​
👨‍💼 Boss: "What uplift will be see fixing this, this quarter?"
​
🤓 Tech SEO: "Well, none"
​
👨‍💼 Boss: "Nope".
​
~Fast forward 2 years~
​
🔥 The the 1,000 page website now has 60,000 indexed pages, many duplicate, a canonical nightmare. This will likely be negatively affecting traffic, with duplicate pages, users linking to the "wrong" page, impacting crawling, indexing and ranking.
​
🤦 At this point, you need to both fix the underlying technical issue (the quick job) *AND* firefight the symptoms to get yourselves back on track.
​
An experienced technical SEO will help you spot this kind of problem before you're Isuffering from the fallout.

I can only show you the links, you're the one that has allow them

Incoming links to any pages you choose to Disallow with robots txt will not count towards your site ranking.

I see so many people miss this and have hundreds of links to a blocked page, just throwing away equity that is otherwise super-expensive to attain 👹

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 / Bluesky)

🏅 Nikki Pilkington (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅 Saijo George (LinkedIn / Bluesky)

🏅Alice Rowan (LinkedIn)

🏅Martijn Jeurissen (LinkedIn)

🏅Chester Beard (LinkedIn)