⚠️

​Google has updated its spam policy with several notable changes, including talking about sites using "extensive automation to product content", likely meaning human-tweaked AI content.

📊

​Some recent recoveries after the August core update are being reversed. The volatility continues as some sites that were hit particularly hard by last year's HCU are now seeing their small gains disappear again.

🎠

​Google is testing a 'from small businesses' carousel. This is being tested on mobile and is likely connected to the 'small business' attribute in Google Business Profile.

🧠

​Cloudflare launches Speed Brain, a speculative model that can reportedly reduce LCP by up to 75%. It does this by prefetching the most likely next pages' content and is now available for all Cloudflare users at no extra cost.

📉

​Forbes Advisor has recently lost rankings for over 1.7 million queries. This may be the result of a manual penalty and related to the huge parasite SEO problem Forbes has had recently.

🏷️

​Google is testing 'For You' and 'Preferred Source' labels. This appears to be another step towards the personalisation of the main SERP that we've seen previously in Google Discover and Google News.

🚫

​WP Engine has been banned by WordPress. If you're using their plugins, tools or hosting, you may want to look for an alternative solution as the legal battle could take a long time resolve itself.

✨

​Google now highlights content creators and their expertise in Knowledge Panels. This label may be a significant boost in credibility for content creators as trusted online sources.

🗳️

​SearchPilot confirms no benefit to using JSON-LD or Microdata for your markup. Despite Google listing JSON-LD as best practice, there appears to be no advantage or disadvantage either way.

🤖

​Cloudflare's AI Audit will allow sites to charge AI bots for scraping content. This is a step in the right direction of offering some compensation for content creators whose work is being "stolen" by LLMs and AI-powered search.

💰

​Google adds support for sale pricing and priceType structured data. This should make it easier for users to specify sale prices and directly compare them to the full price, original listing.

🔍

​Google removes the cache: search operator. Google had previously announced this in March 2024 and has since reacted by including links directly to the Internet Archive (which we covered two weeks ago)

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.

Save the day with tech SEO

Here's a screenshot of over 9,000 "noindex" pages being indexed. Adding 'noindex' via JS can be a solution, but it's absolutely not reliable. 👎
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This is an example (that even Googlers were bemused by) of a React app, even though there was a meta "noindex" added via Javascript - getting pages indexed.
​
With some Single Page Applications (SPAs), it can be difficult to have control over what is shown before the JS is executed. In this instance, I managed to get the pages to set a "noindex" before JS was rendered by using Cloudflare Transform rules:
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1/ Go to Rules - > Transform Rules
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2/ Select "Modify Response Header"
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3/ Add a name for your rule and set "Custom filter expression"
​
4/ Specify the URL pattern you want to be noindexed
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5/ Add a "x-robots-tag" Header name and set to "noindex, nofollow"
​
😎 Tech SEO saving the day

Curate your categories to align with internal searches

One brilliant and often overlooked source of intent/keyword data for e-commerce sites is internal search.

You can usually increase organic traffic and sales simply by clever curation of products into new categories that match how people are searching.

So many times we've drastically improved sales by moving products out of mono-category structures.

Credit to Julius Fedorovicius for the screenshot.

Get digital PR inspiration with this new free tool

The initial inspiration for digital PR ideas can be tough, especially if you don't have a team to work with. Fery Kaszoni just launched a neat little tool to help give you some inspiration - it's pretty fun!

SEO Stack uses GSC data to save you time

Google Search Console has always been one of the best tools for figuring out how well a site is performing and diagnosing various issues.

This month I’ve been playing around with Daniel Foley Carter’s SEO Stack and it is saving me a huge amount of time:

🌟 Firstly, as it’s pulling in the data from GSC and it’s ready for you, it is so much faster than GSC even this is a big plus 😂

🌟 At a click you can immediately categorise query data into commercial, navigational, informational, etc. This saves so much time trying to understand a website’s current ranking profile.

🌟 Instantly model traffic with different CTR by URL - and it has built-in title tag suggestions (which you can test with SEOTesting)

🌟 Annotations 💚 pre-loaded Google updates and your own custom ones. LOVE this.

🌟 Query counts! Daniel has talked about this a lot, but it’s a great indicator of health and SEO Stack does it instantly

There is a lot here. My SEO tip is to give it a go.

Disclaimer:

Daniel did not pay me to write this, this is a legitimate recommendation, he has made a good tool, which is no surprise as he is a frontline SEO. I don’t accept payment for any posts I do on LinkedIn.

Don't underestimate Google Trends

Did you know that Google Trends can also show you trend data for Google Shopping, YouTube, and Image or Video search? Hugely under-utilised!

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

Let's hope this week's newsletter doesn't get caught in the spam detection like last week's did!

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