It’s the last week of August and it’s been two weeks since the August 2024 Core Update has started rolling out. Some have reported slow recovery, some experienced a pull-back, just two more weeks left before it completes and a lot may still happen. Check out this week’s notable news in SEO.
We are now at the two-week mark since Google announced the August 2024 Core Update last August 15. The roll-out may take up to a month to complete and so far, we are at the two-week mark. Google has stated that the update is designed to continue their work in improving the quality of search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search. They aim to connect people with a range of high-quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches. A lot has been waiting for this update, with the hopes that their sites which have been ravaged by last year’s September Helpful Content Update and last March’s Core Update, would finally be able to recover and regain back their lost traffic. So what have we been seeing so far for the past two weeks?
Those who have been hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update seems to have seen some signs of life when the update started rolling out. However, they experienced some pullback a few days after which can be attributed to the ranking bug that was eventually fixed. Some sites are starting to see some ranking improvements and traffic is slowly trickling back. All these are showing promise of a recovery. There are still two-weeks left though and we just have to wait and cross our fingers that these recovery signs are for real and that they stick.
Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Google for Google’s monopoly in search, illegally dominating the local search and local search advertising markets.
Yelp argues that Google harms consumers by promoting its own local search product over other local search providers, stifling competition and increasing costs for its rivals. Yelp is claiming damages in an amount to be calculated, under the 1914 Clayton Act.
Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, announced:
“Our case is about Google, the largest information gatekeeper in existence, putting its heavy thumb on the scale to stifle competition and keep consumers within its own walled garden. Abandoning its stated mission to deliver the best information to users, Google has illegally abused its monopoly in general search to dominate the local search and local search advertising markets—engaging in anticompetitive conduct that has degraded the quality of search results and demoted rivals to grow its market power.
Yelp has long fought to make Google’s local search experience more helpful for consumers and create a level playing field for competing vertical search services. With our action, we aim to safeguard competition, protect consumer choice, recover damages, and prevent Google from engaging in anticompetitive practices so that innovation may flourish.”
The full complaint can be accessed here.
Google has updated its documentation on influencing title links in search results to include the use of og:title meta tags when generating title links on the Google Search results page.
Google uses a number of different sources to automatically determine the title link, but site owners can indicate their preferences by following their best practices for influencing title links. Google uses the following sources to automatically determine title links:
The og:title is the title of your object as it should appear within the open graph. Social media platforms use it to decide what the title should be for URLs you share in their platform.
Google has released an SEO Made Easy episode on what to do when Google is not indexing your pages. In the episode, Martin Splitt – Google’s Search Relations Advocate – talked about the “Discovered – not currently indexed” status on the page indexing report from Search Console – what it is, and what can be done about it.
To start, he states that Google will almost never index all content on a site. It is not an error and is not necessarily a problem that needs looking into.
The indexing process is starts with Googlebot finding the URL somewhere – can be a sitemap or a link, for example. Through this, Googlebot has discovered that the link exists and puts it into its to do list of URLs to visit and possibly index later on.
In an ideal world, Googlebot would immediately visit the URL. However, this is not always possible, which might be a reason why you first see it in Search Console – Googlebot has not yet gotten around to crawling the URL yet as it was busy with other URLs. Sometimes, it’s a matter of a bit more patience to get it resolved and have the bot visiting the page. Eventually, Googlebot might get around to crawling it, fetching the page from your server, and potentially indexing it. Once it is crawled, the URL would move on to either “Crawled – currently not indexed” or get indexed.
But what if it does not get crawled and remains at “Discovered – not indexed”? That either has something to do with your server or your site’s quality.
For very large sites, server load issue is a potential issue. It makes sense to look at the crawl stats report and the reply section to see if the server responds slowly or shows HTTP 500 errors when Googlebot tries to crawl the site. It is best to check with the hosting company to come up with a solution for these types of issues.
Another issue is the quality of the site. When Google notices a pattern of low-quality or thin content on pages, they might just stay in “Discovered”. Googlebot knows these pages but is choosing not to crawl them because of the pattern in URLs with low-quality content on the site, and skip these URLs altogether – leaving them as just “Discovered”. Reworking the content to make them of higher quality and making sure that internal linking relates the content to other parts of existing content is a possible solution for this.
Check out the episode below:
The Google Search Team has released their August 2024 SEO Office Hours. These are monthly sessions that cover topics and questions submitted by users about search and website-related questions such as those on crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, Sitemaps, Search Console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, etc. The search team goes through the questions and answers them in these sessions.
For this month, the team answered the following questions:
Check out the episode below:
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