|
SEO updates you need to know
🤖 |
|
Clicks spike in November due to bot traffic. Several sites saw big spikes in clicks on 2 November and this appears to be driven by agents or bugs because impressions remained stable and primarily appeared on desktop. |
Sponsor: Semrush
AI visibility in the US & UK: Top brands, top tactics
Our latest AI Visibility Index findings show that the sources and brands that shape decisions in the UK aren’t identical to those in the US. But with the right insights and approach, teams can build for those differences while keeping their brand experience consistent.
Download this flagship study for free and get your blueprint for building consistent discovery. Fuelled by seven months of data across 22 industries and four platforms.
|
Search with Candour podcast
AI search transactions rise by
Season 5: Episode 5
Chris Walsh from IDHL joins Search With Candour to discuss how AI search is affecting e-commerce and whether AI search users convert at higher rates than traditional search.
IDHL’s State of AI Search study shows rapid growth in AI referral sessions, AI-attributed revenue, and transactions from AI search. So what does this mean for ecommerce businesses?
|
|
|
Last week's SEO tips
Inspect Man
One of my favourite tools on Ahrefs* that I rarely see mentioned is Page Inspect; it is super valuable ⤵️
Page Inspect gives you a GitHub-style heatmap of page changes and the diffs (what was added/removed) for any website.
If you're competing against other teams that are working hard on their SEO and content, this tool gives you immediate strategic insight into what they are pursuing; what content they are adding, what they are updating, links they are changing, and the related success. It is a fast way to leverage your competitor's work to your advantage 🤓
*I want to again make clear that I don't accept payment for posts. Candour is a fully-paid Ahrefs customer; I just write about tools sometimes when I like things.
|
Downtime bloody downtime
The rate at which new, severe software exploits are being found with AI means you’re likely going to have to take your website down in the future to patch some things. Here is the best practice on how to do that with minimal search impact:
If your site is going down for maintenance, do not let it serve a 404 or a nice “back soon” page with a 200 status code.
Google’s guidance on planned downtime is to return a 503 (Service Unavailable). That tells Googlebot the outage is temporary, so it comes back later instead of treating your pages as gone or indexing your holding page.
You want to: 🛠️ Return a 503, NOT a 404 or a 200 “Under Construction” page
⏰ Add a Retry-After header with the number of seconds or the date and time you expect to be back. Googlebot “may use” it to decide when to recrawl
🖥️ For hardware maintenance, Google suggests using a separate server to serve the 503
💬 Put a proper message on the 503 page so humans know what’s going on
⚠️ Don’t leave it running. Google says “lasting 503 HTTP result codes” can eventually be treated as a sign the server is permanently unavailable, and URLs can be dropped from the index
5 minute job that can save you a very awkward week. Check out the rise in critical/high CVEs (security vulnerabilities) recently.
|
Companions of the grave
The patent US20240289407A1 "Search with stateful chat" gives us a little look into the future of Google and some changes that are likely to happen ⤵️
The patent was filed by Google on 27 February 2024, with a priority date of 28 February 2023 but it hasn't been granted yet.
It describes a 'generative companion' that keeps a running 'user state' across a search session. For each query, it generates synthetic queries, sorts the query into a type, and sends it to different specialist models.
An impact of this change would likely be the decreasing importance of high volume "head terms". The patent specifically says:
"Suppose the user simply states, "New York." Summarizing the SRP generated from such a vague search would not likely be helpful." .... "if multiple conflicting interpretations are identified, these may be presented to the user as choices from which the user can select."
This means where there is broad intent, rather than guessing or giving a mixed SERP, Google is simply going to follow up to ensure they get the best answer.
|
Topics and hell
Bing Webmaster Tools now has a "Topics Portfolio" (in beta) in the AI Performance report. It groups the grounding queries where your site gets cited in AI answers into topic clusters, so you can see where you show up by theme instead of query by query.
For each topic you get:
📊 Topic Size: roughly how many citations go to all sites for that topic
🥊 Sites Cited: how many sites are fighting over it
🔎 Queries: how many distinct grounding queries it covers
If you click into a topic and you see two lists: queries where you're already cited, and "Opportunity Queries" where competitors get cited and you don't!
This means you can:
🎯 Build a content gap list from real AI grounding activity, not a keyword tool's guess
🗺️ See which topics AI search actually links your site to (which may not be the ones you think)
📝 Gives more editorial planning above "write more about X"
🆓 It's free first-party data, which is rare for AI visibility
Caveats: Bing says to treat the numbers as directional. The topic labels are AI-generated, small sites might not see the tab at all, and competitors' branded queries can show up as "opportunities". Don't go writing a page about your rival's trainers. 🤡
|
Domain of the universe
This will probably affect a few people: Ahrefs is moving to a new Domain Rating model (DR4) on 1 December, so the number is going to shift for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you did. ⤵️
What's changing:
🚶 Only links from sites that actually get organic traffic count for much now. Around half as many sites will have a DR at all.
🏅 Subdomains get their own score rather than borrowing the root domain's. Your notion page with a DR of 92 is now 0. github.io dropped 32 points.
🚮 Domains labelled as spam take a big hit. Those that were DR 30 to 70 fell by a median of 15 to 20 points.
😉 Normal, non-spam sites mostly barely move. Of Ahrefs' top 1,000 domains, 64% went up.
So if you've been buying links because "it's DR 70", December is going to show you what that DR was really made of.
What to do now:
💻 You can check your own site and your link targets with the free DR API by adding version=dr4.
📸 Screenshot the current numbers before 1 December so you can explain the change in reports.
🤡 Stop putting DR in link-building KPIs. It was always a third-party estimate of backlink strength. It has never been a Google metric.
As Ahrefs put it themselves: "A reduction in Domain Rating is not a judgment on the quality of your content or website."
|
Refer subscribers and earn rewards!
|
|
|