🎰

​The June 2024 spam update began rolling out on 20th June. According to Google, the update should take 1 week to complete, but this will be confirmed on the Search Status Dashboard.

🏢

​Google is now using AI to generate business overviews within Google Business Profile (GBP) listings. These descriptions are new as they do not offer citations for the descriptions generated.

🐛

​Google suffered a significant indexing bug last week impacting many sites including the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, CNN and Forbes not getting new pages indexed. The bug has since been resolved

🧑‍⚖️

​One billion DMCA requests were processed by Google in four months. Despite being illegal, fake DMCA takedown requests continue to be a problem for webmasters, with counter-notices taking weeks to be processed.

🌎

​SEOFOMO has launched a free SEO job board. The site allows people to search for roles to set up alerts and currently, the board also appears to be free to employers to list job roles.

🍏

​Apple now has an Applebot-Extended user-agent. This user-agent does not crawl web pages but determines how data is used. Unless you opt out via robots.txt data can be used to train Apple's AI features.

🖼️

​Losing your image thumbnail within Google SERPs is likely to be a quality issue, not a technical issue, according to Google. The statement comes after a technical review following many complaints from webmasters.

💡

​A new free tool for those looking for domain ideas has been launched by Dom Hodgson, the founder of Little Warden. FreeDomainIdeas.com helps you bulk scan for free domains around specific keywords.

Search Intelligence gained top-tier links for their client through reactive PR

The Search Intelligence team compiled expert tips about making your Mother's Day flowers last longer. These tips were added to Mother's Day articles and built links that competitors can't buy.

This campaign included coverage from The Daily Mail, The Daily Star, Huffington Post, The Express and many more.

Google's Canonical system is not broken

This week I looked into claims that Google's canonical system was "broken" - and my conclusion is that many people are still confused about how Google Search Console works, so I wanted to share a few things.
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The main 'evidence' that the canonical system is broken is that GSC is reporting jump URLs (with #) in higher positions than their parent pages, so the conclusion is Google has the wrong canonical: but I believe this is incorrect.
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How GSC works:
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1) Jump link URLs appear as little site links under parent URLs. The jump links inherit the Position (as tracked by GSC) of the parent URLs they are shown under. Sitelinks appear more frequently when a URL is ranked well. Rankings usually fluctuate a lot, so when the parent URLs pop into high (top 3) position, the Sitelinks show and get a good average position for the jump links shown. For most searches, the parent URL ranks lower, which drags down its Average Position, while the jump link URLs remain with better Average Position but fewer impressions. See my screenshot.
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2) When I checked my jump links in GSC Live Inspect they were "Not Indexed". They would be "Indexed" if used as a canonical URL and if Google thought another URL was canonical, it would specify it here.
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3) 1 (and mainly 2) demonstrate it is actually nothing to do with the canonical system. As I've previously posted about, Google essentially ignores # URLs for indexing / appearing in standard web searches.
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4) As a reminder, Google can show "Not Indexed" URLs in SERPs (such as long done "Not Indexed" origin 301 URLs), but this again has nothing to do with the canonical system.
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Hope this has been helpful for some!

Domain history can impact your ranking today

"Mark, our website ([redacted]) is wrongly classified as pornography by many ISPs but we are a [redacted] service."

My face when checking the Wayback Machine for a client's site ⬆️⬆️

If you're buying a domain, always check its existing backlinks and check the history in the Internet Archive Wayback machine. It will be partly how Google determines what the site is about. Recently, I had someone contact me because their site wasn't ranking because Google thought it was adult content.

Get backlink data for free

You can get pretty good data on backlinks from Bing Webmaster Tools. If you've already got Google Search Console setup, you can automatically import all of your sites. It's often overlooked, but Bing Webmaster Tools actually has some great data that Google doesn't give you.
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Really nice data if you're not paying for a tool to see backlinks!
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Great reminder from Arnout Hellemans in his SearchNorwich talk!

Hreflang works outside of a single domain

The hreflang tag can be used cross-domain! So if you've got your .co.uk, your .com.au or even another language site, you can help Google understand the relationship and have them rank better! 🌍

Crawl-delay does nothing for Google

Google ignores crawl-delay specified in robots txt, and will automatically tune how much it is crawling your site. 🚤

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)

🥈 Lidia Infante (LinkedIn / X)

Got any feedback?

Apparently some people do read this far, I've had people email me! Thanks for that, I just want to tell you that you're brilliant if you read this far and I hope you have a lovely week.

As usual, I read all the emails, so any feedback or advertising questions - let me know!

~Mark Williams-Cook