🔍

​Google's November 2024 core update has started rolling out. This update had been already confirmed at the Google Web Creator summit. However, Google has reportedly said to "not expect a recovery from HCU any time soon."

🛍️

​Google Maps launches product search feature. This new feature includes real-time product availability and searching for specific products local to you. Just make sure your product schema, GBP and Merchant Centre are up-to-date!

🦋

​Some of the most well-known SEOs have joined a larger trend of accounts leaving X (Twitter), and moving onto social media platform Bluesky, with over 1 million new users in the last couple of weeks.

💀

​HARO (now called Connectively) will be shut down on 9 Dec 2024. This comes just a year after HARO's acquisition and rebranding. Potential HARO alternatives include Featured, Qwoted and Muck Rack.

🔗

​Fake AI profiles are being used on Qwoted with some success. Speaking of Qwoted, link builders are clogging up journalists' inboxes with entirely AI-generated "experts" and quotes. This isn't new but is certainly escalating.

🤝

​Ecosia and Qwant are joining forces to develop their own search index. Both search engines currently use Bing and Google indexes and are planning to diversify and secure their future outside of this reliance on other companies.

🎧

​The SEO Patents Podcast has launched. This 10-minute weekly podcast is created by NotebookLM and is a great way to absorb information about Google patents without having to read the often very dry documents directly.

✨

​Google is experimenting with Learn About, a new AI search feature. In Google Labs, Learn About summarises content and allows users to explore via navigational menus and new interfaces.

📉

​The decline of big sites that generate revenue from affiliate links continues. Forbes, WSJ, CNN and Time have seen traffic losses of 60-97% with predicted revenue loss approximated at over $7.5 million.

📑

​Merj has launched Bing Webmaster Tools API Python Client. This tool allows automation for data warehousing, monitoring and other maintenance tasks using Bing's Webmaster Tools API.

📰

​Google removes EU-based news content in a "time-limited test". This controversial test will affect 1% of users in selected countries. It is supposed to provide data to publishers but has already been blocked by a French court.

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.

A great tool to visualise ranking changes

One of my favourite ways to quickly & visually demonstrate ranking changes is SISTRIX's "Compare SERPs" feature. You can select two date ranges and it gives a great visualisation of how the URLs moved.
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Maybe we could see Core Updates newsletter in those lists next time they're updated? 😊

You don't have to answer with "It depends"...

I spent £10,000 on SEO and only got a "It depends..." 😏
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The running joke of the SEO profession is the answer, "it depends", which is sometimes misunderstood as a 'get out' for those who aren't sure what they're talking about, when in my opinion, it's normally the opposite.
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If you're buying or talking about SEO, here are some important things to consider and why:
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👬 What works for one website, one niche, or one vertical, will not necessarily work for another. Google quite literally tell us they focus on different ranking factors depending on the nature of the queries. This is a common pitfall of junior SEOs who see success on a website, then are surprised when they repeat the process somewhere else, the success is not replicated.
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🥇 This is why I fundamentally disagree with a standardised "gold, silver, bronze" type approach to SEO. While there will likely be some gains from applying 'best practise' with no context, it's usually far more effective to apply a specific strategy that is grounded in the current state and aspirations of the website. I imagine this will offend some people offering this type of service, sorrynotsorry.
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👨‍🔬 The Google exploit I found proved there are prerequisites within the ranking system. For instance, there is a specific quality threshold Google has before a website is eligible for special results like Featured Snippets. It doesn't matter how much "featured snippet optimisation" you apply with your Silver SEO package if you're missing this prerequisite qualifier.
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📉 Metrics that Google uses don't work in isolation, scores impact other scores, which impact other scores. The nuance of 'how' you do a type of activity can make all the difference. I was speaking to a client suffering traffic decline that they are trying to fix with link building - but in my opinion, it's the wrong kind of links, which is simply magnifying problems elsewhere.
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"It depends" usually means you're asking the wrong questions, too early.
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Thanks to Chris Green for my 3D printed "It depends", Chris runs a TikTok account answering peoples' SEO questions.​

Google please tell us about redirects in URL inspection

GSC will not show you if a URL you are inspecting goes through a redirect - let’s fix that together as a community! 🧖‍♂️

Go into your Google Search Console, click “Feedback” in the bottom left and leave this message: “Please show when an inspection URL goes through a redirect. Only showing the status of the final URL is confusing.”

What kind of problems will this solve? Last month I highlighted a case where a page would not be indexed, despite GSC showing the page was “indexable”. The reason was, there was a redirect chain of:

URL A ➡ URL B ➡ URL C

but “URL B” was blocked by robots.txt

When you inspect URL A in GSC, it will report on the indexing status of URL C without telling you! 😑

Google has the information that redirects take place! Let’s petition them to show us!

How to find the specific code that slows down your site

Are you using Sitebulb's code coverage report? ⬇️⬇️
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Rather than just telling developers to "speed up" the site, the Sitebulb Code Coverage report allows you to be specific and identify all those plugins or Bootstrap files that load on every page but are only executed on one or two - your wastage!
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It can go even further and pick out the unused lines of code from each CSS and JavaScript file.
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Very few people are using this - are you?
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Shout out to Arnout Hellemans as the #1 Code Coverage champion of the world 🥇

Subscribe to The SEO Patent Podcast

Do you wish Google search patents were easier to read? Do you wish you knew which were important?

I've launched a new podcast: "The SEO Patent Podcast" which every Friday posts a 10-minute discussion led by NotebookLM on a patent that is relevant to SEO. 🎙
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As Adam Gent gave away my "secret" of reading patents, I thought this would be a fun experiment to get people to listen to more primary evidence of how search works!
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​Please subscribe, would love to hear your thoughts!

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