📈

​Google has published new documentation about Google Trends. This page now includes helpful recommendations about analysing trends, keyword research and even creating content around trends.

💰

​AI Overviews are inaccurate in 43% of finance-related searches. Data from The College Investor's recent study shows that AI Overviews particularly struggled with nuanced topics such as investment, taxes and loans.

🤖

​Google is rumoured to launch an AI Chrome assistant that will "help with common web browsing tasks". This assistant, codenamed Jarvis, was hinted at Google IO earlier this year and may be announced in December.

🖥️

​Anthropic has introduced 'computer use', allowing Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Haiku to "use computers the way people do" - by looking at the screen and moving the cursor, via the API only currently.

🖼️

​Google recommends using higher resolution favicons. The previous minimum recommended size was 8x8 pixels and the updated recommendation is 48x48. This likely ties to recent experiments with larger favicons in SERPs.

☐

​Google is removing the sitelinks search box from SERPs. This feature has been around for 10 years and will be removed on 21 November 2024. This suggests that the sitelink search was not used by many users.

🔗

​Google has updated its URL parameter documentation. Google specifies that = should be used to separate key-value pairs and & should be used connect multiple parameters. It also advises against using colons, brackets or commas.

🍝

​Redditors are purposefully disrupting AI Overviews with misinformation. These Redditors are giving fake restaurant recommendations to ensure that their favourite restaurants receive fewer tourists.

▶️

​Creators can remove links from their YouTube comments. This appears to be a response to the introduction of clickable topics in YouTube comments in 2023. This feature has received a lot of spam so this change is not surprising.

📉

​The "from sources around the web" SERP feature is another way of taking traffic away from websites. This feature has existed for years but has increased in prevalence in 2024.

📍

​Google is testing new rich results linking to Google Business Profiles. There are two variations with a 'shop nearby' text link and the second showing the distance to the business's location in brackets.

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.

Site migration pitfalls to avoid

Let's talk site migrations, 'new' domains and things that might trip you up ⬇
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🥕 While buying that 'perfect' domain can be excellent from a branding perspective, it's important to know the history of the site you're buying.
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👀 I have seen migrations appear to be negatively impacted by moving onto domains where there is a 'history' from another website.
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🔗 Sometimes this will come down to incoming links, especially when the topic is sort of 'adjacent' but not the same thing. The site seems to struggle to rank for the old terms, holding onto some odd historical rankings.
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⚖ This has happened more frequently when the 'new' domain was 'stronger' and better known than the site migrating.
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👽 Interestingly, I've done migrations where the site is completely different and everything seemed to go quite well.
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🕰 As with any things, with some work it tends to resolve itself overtime, but it's definitely something I research carefully and advise on now, before committing to a migration.

A free tool for Google's Knowledge Graph

Google works hard to understand "what" things are: companies, people, brands, and work out how these "entities" are linked in their Knowledge Graph. 🧠
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If you just want to casually check if something is in Google's Knowledge Graph, Carl Hendy has a neat free tool that requires no programming knowledge to explore the Knowledge Graph.

​Here's a link to Carl's Knowledge Graph tool.​

Make a note of Core Update dates to track your traffic

Analysing sites that have lost traffic against various updates that have happened is a critical first step to untangling the SEO mess!
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💻 I've recently been using SEO Stack for this, as well, it literally does it automatically and saves a huge amount of time.
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🖱 The types of updates (Core, Review, Spam, etc) are automatically categorised and you can immediately overlay them onto GSC data.
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😍 You can clearly see in this example, a website that took a ding from a Core Update - and of course - has since recovered 😎

Maybe...it isn't JavaScript

SearchNorwich edition: Martin Splitt thinks as many as 90%* of the queries that he received about “Google has a problem because of Javascript on my site and it is [noindexed/on fire/content not showing]” actually end being webmaster-side issues that could have been debugged if….. They simply inspected their page with the tools in Google Search Console.

You naughty SEOs! This should be one of your first steps to use the GSC tools to get an idea of what you are serving to Google, and you can move on from there if you still can’t resolve it.

You can get a view of the HTML you’re serving Google, as well as a screenshot of what has been rendered.

*This was probably an estimate, no need to quote this number.

Sometimes...it's a Cloudflare issue

If you're still having weird problems with your site that you suspect are JavaScript, and you've checked in Google Search Console, another thing to check is your Headers. In Chrome F12 (Dev tools) -> Network | Headers. 🤓
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​Martin Splitt gave an interesting case where a noindex was appearing maybe 1 in 10 times on a site on a web page, causing it to be deindexed. It ended up being because a specific version of the page with a noindex was cached on a particular datacentre on Cloudflare.
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SEO is easy, right? 😐

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)

We'd love to hear from you

If you've got any thoughts about what you like, what you dislike, or what you think we should add/change to the newsletter, then hit reply!

We really do read every bit of feedback!

~ Mark and Jack