SEOIntel Weekly News Round-up (1st week of April, 2024)

First week of the month of April 2024 and the March 2024 core update is expected to complete anytime now. In fact, ranking volatility has been reported which some have taken as indicative of an update nearing completion. Here are the notable SEO news this wee
Marie Aquino
April 5, 2024

First week of the month of April 2024 and the March 2024 core update is expected to complete anytime now. In fact, ranking volatility has been reported which some have taken as indicative of an update nearing completion. Here are the notable SEO news this week:

Google, Considering Charging for SGE Features In Search?

In a Financial Times report , it was reported that Google was considering charging for SGE features in search, such as AI overviews. This is due to the higher cost in serving AI search results. Google’s free search engine would remain and ads would continue to be served, even for subscribers.

However, in response to an inquiry about the report, a Google spokesperson has responded to TIME in an email –

“We’re not working on or considering an ad-free search experience. As we’ve done many times before, we’ll continue to build new premium capabilities and services to enhance our subscription offerings across Google. We don’t have anything to announce right now.” 

Looks like there’s no SGE features in search subscription plans anytime soon and Google has other more important things to focus on.

Google Not Crawling Less, But More Intelligently

Gary Illyes, Google’s Search Liaison, posted on Linkedin on how in a Reddit community, someone’s perception is that Google is crawling less than previous years. Illyes responds that this is just not the case, and that crawling is roughly as much as before. However, scheduling got more intelligent and they are focusing more on URLs that are more likely to deserve crawling.

However, he thinks that they should, in fact, crawl less and for example, be more intelligent about caching and internal cache sharing among user agents, and have fewer bytes on wire. He makes this his mission for this year – figure our how to crawl even less, and have fewer bytes on wire.

Check out his post here.

How Google Search Indexes Pages

The “How Search Works” video series has released its third episode on how Google indexes pages. In the video, Gary Illyes talks about how Google processes and analyzes a page’s textual content, key content tags, attributes, images, videos, etc., and how it determines signals on whether to index a page. He also talks about canonical versions and how Google chooses which version to serve to users. The video is quite insightful though we have to wait for the next episode for more details on serving and ranking. Check out the video below.