🤖

​Google SGE has started public tests for users who have not opted into the Google Seach Generative Experience labs feature. A small subset of US search traffic will see AI overviews for some queries.

🦹‍♀️

​The March 2024 Spam Update finished rolling out on 20th March, 15 days after starting on 5th March. The second part of the update that targets "abusing authority" sites begins rollout on 5th May.

🛍️

​The Product Grid feature in Google search has seen a leap in visibility from ~3% to ~10% of all mobile searches in Australia according to Sensor, suggesting a possible multi-region rollout.

🧑‍⚖️

​Google Shopping results in the UK/EU have changed, most likely for DMA compliance to show 'Products' and 'Product Sites' tabs which feature distinct results from organic shopping listings.

🕵🏻

​Microsoft Bing announced fresh features and updates including enhanced navigation within Bing Webmaster Tools, and partnerships with Ahrefs and Yep to advance the IndexNow initiative for more efficient web content indexing.

💀

​There have been no recoveries of sites that were de-indexed with "Pure Spam" manual actions, with over 1,000 websites' visibility tracked across both Ahrefs and Semrush.

🧚🏻‍♂️

​Google confirms "high-quality, user-centric content" is the key to increasing crawl demand, debunking many 'crawl budget' related myths and shedding light on why some have had success removing poor content.

🗺️

​A new type of local spam has been observed whereby spammers have moved all competitors' map location pins into one place, meaning they won't show up in local search box results.

🗒️

​The SGE looks like it may be devastating for e-commerce, according to Authoritas's second brand-focused SGE study, with 6 out of the top 10 losers being e-commerce sites.

📱

​TikTok is paying creators to up its search game. The platform’s new creator monetisation program called Creator Rewards will use four core metrics to determine payout, including "search value."

Crawl bigger sites with Screaming Frog

The first thing you should do with Screaming Frog is go to File > Settings > Storage Mode and change the mode to "Database Storage". This will allow you to crawl sites up to around 1M URLs without huge problems if you have an SSD (don't do this with HDDs).

Drive e-commerce traffic with unique images

If you're an ecommerce website and using stock photography, you're likely missing a significant chunk of traffic from Google Images. 🖼️
​
A common buyer journey for e-commerce queries is doing a search and browsing through Google Image results (shopping is a visual thing a lot of the time!). You've probably noticed that Google Images shows a range of images, not just the same photo over and over. This means if you're using the same stock imagery as everyone else, you're highly unlikely to appear as a result in Image search.

Google uses hreflang for region, not language

Google does not use the hreflang attribute for identifying language, it does this simply by looking at the content on the page. Hreflang is primarily to distinguish between dialects and relevant regions.

Single Page Applications (SPAs) and Soft 404s

If you have a client-side rendered single-page app with client-side routing, it can be hard to generate the correct HTTP status codes.
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To avoid soft 404 errors, you can:
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1️⃣ Use a javascript redirect to a URL with a 404 HTTP status code

2️⃣ Add a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> to error pages using JavaScript.
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More best practice in Google documentation.

Content velocity alone is not a spam signal

I've seen people saying Google will flag sites as spam simply because "they add lots of pages quickly". This is simply not true. ❌
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While there will certainly be some correlation to the speed at which pages are published and if a site is a spam site, or maybe it's even baked into a spam classifier somewhere, it shouldn't be a consideration if what you're doing is for legitimate reasons.
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For instance, I work with an e-commerce client that has had a couple of thousand products for many years who recently added an additional 30,000 new products overnight. With the various new category pages and variations, this meant they immediately published over 100,000 new URLs.
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Did Google come along and whack them with a spam penalty? Of course not.
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Trying to relate spam signals to an isolated factor such as publishing speed is like insisting anything spherical is a football (soccer), simply because all footballs are round. ⚽

Top Core Updates referrer leaderboard

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