📑

​Google Search Console Recommendations are now live for everyone. Recommendations are categorised as Issues, Opportunities, and Configurations. However, Recommendations will only appear if relevant to you.

🖱️

​Google Chrome is collecting your site engagement metrics. These metrics contribute to features such as your 'most-visited sites' and are not used in Search. You can access your metrics by going to chrome://site-engagement/.

🧳

​Google has updated its compliance with the Digital Markets Act. While Google continues to remove SERP features that favour their own services, they report that some businesses are losing traffic and bookings because of this.

🛍️

​GA4 now displays Merchant Centre recommendations within its interface. This includes alerts for product disapprovals, missing product information, and direct links to Merchant Centre.

👉

​ChatGPT Search misattributes news sources more than 76% of the time. A study by Columbia University found that it also rarely acknowledges its own mistakes and is "confident" in answers even when they're inaccurate.

📰

​Canadian news companies unite to sue OpenAI for training ChatGPT using their articles. The companies claim that OpenAI is deliberately using their content without permission and without a licensing agreement.

🖼️

​Google has updated their documentation about Image metadata. This update includes how Google extracts the data to show information in the 'About this image' feature and if the image has been edited with AI tools.

🛑

​Bing Webmaster Tools does not include clicks & impressions data from ChatGPT Search. This is despite ChatGPT Search using Bing's index. Bing Webmaster Tools only account for data from Bing, Yahoo and Copilot.

🔞

​Google had updated its guidelines for businesses selling age-restricted products. Businesses associated with age-restricted products and services must have a storefront and not just a service-area business.

❌

​Forbes Advisor has been removed from Google's index. This is part of the ongoing heated discussion about Google's site reputation abuse update and November core update rollout.

📉

​Google Search's market share drops from 86% to 83% in the UK. Meanwhile, Bing usage has increased year-on-year and trust of AI search results remains low, particularly in users aged 16-24.

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.

Specific, less restrictive rules are prioritised in robots.txt

Robots.txt order of precedence means the most specific, least restrictive rule will be followed - this can be confusing! ⬇️

🫷 In this example, this company’s robots file asks all user agents to crawl the listed directories.

🤖 However, since they have then specified rules just for Googlebot

🟢 They’ve essentially said “Disallow nothing”

✅ Because this rule is more specific (it only applies to Googlebot) and is least restrictive (allows crawling), it means all of the above Disallow rules are ignored by Googlebot.

Google classifies queries into 8 categories

Something you didn't know about SEO that I found from our Google endpoint exploit 🙈
​
Google assigns almost all queries into 1 of 8 "rq_semantic_query_class" (rq = Refined Query). 🧐
​
These classes are:
⭐SHORT_FACT e.g: "how much does abiraterone cost in the uk"
⭐OTHER e.g. "what do chefs say about air fryers"
⭐COMPARISON e.g "curtain wall system vs window wall system"
⭐CONSEQUENCE e.g. "what happens to asparagus if you let it grow"
⭐REASON e.g. "why was abilify taken off the market"
⭐DEFINITION e.g. "what is a birthday costume"
⭐INSTRUCTION e.g. "what's the best way to cook an artichoke"
⭐BOOL e.g. "can i become a agile coach with no experience"
​
⬆️ The image above shows how often these classifications happen over 90M queries.

Exclusive for Core Updates subscribers: Here are 100 examples of each category, directly from Google.​

Always keep unbranded traffic in mind during migrations

When calculating how much organic traffic is at risk when completing a website migration, remember to only calculate from unbranded traffic - it is highly unlikely you'll lose traffic on brand terms during a migration.

In some cases, this can be a significant amount of traffic and spoil your forecasts. 📉

Don't forget: hreflangs are reciprocal

Hreflang tags must be reciprocal!
​
That means if:
​
👉 the English version of a page says "the Geman version is here"
​
👈 the German version must have a tag to refer back to the English version.
​
🙉 If the relationship is not reciprocal, the hreflang tag will be ignored!

The latest episode of The SEO Patent Podcast

Contextual Estimation of Link Information Gain is the name of a Google patent that explores how machine learning models rank documents by assessing the novelty of information they provide to users, enhancing search efficiency and user satisfaction.
​
🎙️ You can hear a summary in less than 10 minutes of this patent in The SEO Patent Podcast, a NotebookLM podcast I made to summarise Google search patents!

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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