SEO & AI Weekly Roundup + Linus's Take (Nov 27, 2023)
This article was originally published in Chinese on 2023-11-27 and has been translated into English. Read the Chinese version.
Welcome to Linus@Jindouyun SEO’s weekly news roundup. Key points this week:
- Google’s November core update and reviews update still aren’t finished
- 9 major changes to search results pages: icons, brands, follower counts, new modules
- Indexed pages plummeting in GSC? A Google issue, now fixed
- Black Friday / Cyber Monday SERP changes and Google’s recommended best practices
- Searching for a brand in SGE can return other brands — even competitors
- What changed in the QRG (Search Quality Rater Guidelines)?
- GSC’s Crawl Rate Limiter tool is being retired
- Bard is highly recommended — it’s worth it — but it may test SEO
- You can now write notes (comments) on SGE and SERPs?
- GSC has a bug where some queries can’t be found, and it’s been around for a long time
- Changes to Google Maps for local SEO
- A transcript from the US Department of Justice antitrust case against Google reveals a lot
- A collection of useful SEO GPTs
Google’s November Core Update and Reviews Update Still Aren’t Finished
Some sites are fluctuating heavily. Across several sites #JindouyunSEO has monitored long term, the September update seemed like a fairly positive signal, while November is still volatile.
From Q&A on Google Search updates: Google published its response to recent community questions on its blog. I recommend everyone read it.
9 Major Changes to Search Results Pages: Icons, Brands, Follower Counts, New Modules
Since Google’s updates aren’t done yet, changes to the search results page are often a good way to sense the main purpose of an update — small details reveal the bigger picture. In short, the November updates seem to strengthen personal perspectives and real-world experience. Here are the recent SERP changes:
- Social media follower counts can now be shown — wow! Like counts are starting to appear too. Could this be tied to metadata?
- The publish date has moved to the top and the author’s name is shown (in limited testing). This may be to make room for the meta description, but the URL is hidden at the same time. Going forward, URLs may matter less for social-type results, with more emphasis on brand information.
- Horizontal divider lines have appeared in search results; it’s not yet clear why.
- For some broad head terms, like “Women’s Belt Bags,” Google apparently thinks Reddit Discussions deserve to rank higher?
- For medical topics, an “Ask a Doctor” module has been added. I don’t know whether black-hat SEOs will abuse it, but without a doubt, this kind of
- Flight search results now show an SGE-like box (in limited testing), possibly related to structured data.
- Ad-style SGE has appeared in “You may also like.”
- “Latest from [site]” is now appearing in search results. Everyone knows new pages bring freshness to a site, and this shows Google may care about it even more.
- For some shopping-intent searches, you can now filter for Small Business results. This is interesting for B2B users, and Jindouyun SEO should be rolling out corresponding measures soon.
Indexed Pages Plummeting in GSC? A Google Issue, Now Fixed
Among the 300+ clients Jindouyun SEO monitors, nearly half saw a sudden sharp drop in indexed pages. Luckily we were following the news: on November 23, Google announced on X that it had been fixed. This was a Search Console reporting issue and had nothing to do with actual page indexing or keyword rankings.
Black Friday / Cyber Monday SERP Changes and Google’s Recommended Best Practices
I’m sure you’ve noticed there were changes during Black Friday. To sum up, “Shop Black Friday deals” appears in three places:
- Categories: product categories at the very top
- Top Stories: selected based on factors such as relevance, authority, and freshness. It includes articles from a variety of sources, including major news outlets, retail sites, and consumer information sites.
- Explore Brands: shows which brands exist in the current category
- Perspectives: provides a more complete understanding of the current search, including personal experiences, expert opinions, forum posts, and social media content.
- Carousels for more product types
Take a look at the screenshot below:
The Cyber Monday layout is similar:
Best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages (from Google):
With SGE, searching for brand + product actually lets Google automatically crawl your site and extract information. For example, “black friday screwdriver XXBrand” pulls out the key details. Based on my own spot checks and what others have observed, US consumers rely on SGE quite a lot.
Searching for a Brand in SGE Can Return Other Brands — Even Competitors
Searching “best buy Black Friday” should in theory take you to Best Buy, but as soon as you expand SGE, you get a pile of other results — even competitors. That’s pretty scary: the branded navigation you worked so hard to build gets hijacked by SGE, especially if people start preferring SGE in the future… Searching for Nike or Nintendo products produces the same thing. Hard to know what to make of it.
It’s a bit chaotic and may be a temporary AI judgment issue. I believe Google will fix it, but who knows how long it’ll take.
Based on observations by Lily Ray and Aleyda Solis on X
What Changed in the QRG (Search Quality Rater Guidelines)?
On November 16, 2023, Google announced an update to the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which I mentioned in last week’s newsletter. Here’s a summary of the specific changes:
- P76: guidance for raters on evaluating the quality of forum and Q&A pages — timeliness, civility (neutrality?), and visual presentation
- P84: explains the importance of user location in understanding a query
- P88: minor interpretations of search results — most people searching “Apple” mean the company, but some want the fruit, a city, or a person’s name
- P90: the difference between “Know Simple” and “Do” search intents, with examples:
- P95: refining user intent — narrowing a keyword’s intent to more reasonable user intents rather than a completely open-ended answer, with examples:
- P114: examples of Google SERP features that Highly Meet user needs, with explanations of why
I still recommend reading and digesting the details yourself — it’s very useful. See Google’s 2023 Search quality rater guidelines update: Here’s what change-SEL. If you’d like all the historical versions, I’ve compiled them — just add me via the contact at the end of this post and let me know:
GSC’s Crawl Rate Limiter Tool Is Being Retired
What is it? This tool has been around for 10+ years. It gives site owners some control over how often Googlebot crawls their site — you can use it to tell Googlebot to slow down so it doesn’t overload your server.
In most cases, Googlebot manages its crawl rate automatically to avoid burdening your server, so the vast majority of site owners don’t need to adjust this setting manually. Many webmasters and SEOs believe this tool can make Google crawl more pages. Sorry, it can’t.
Google has announced that the crawl rate limiter tool in Search Console will be deprecated on January 8, 2024: “Thanks to advances in automatic crawl rate handling, and in the spirit of keeping things simple for users, we will be deprecating this tool in Search Console.”
My advice: the fastest way and best practice for reducing crawl rate is to guide Googlebot via server responses (for example, if your server is struggling, return a 500 status code) rather than manually limiting it with this tool.
Official deprecation notice, November 24, 2023: Upcoming deprecation of Crawl Rate Limiter Tool in Search Console https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/11/sc-crawl-limiter-byebye
Bard Is Highly Recommended — It’s Worth It — but It May Test SEO
Why do I strongly recommend Bard? Besides being obviously fast and concise, Bard has one great use: it can double-check whether its answers are accurate. This lets me make very quick judgments in all kinds of research. If a sentence is highlighted green, I generally don’t check further, because green already means that sentence is trustworthy. If it’s highlighted yellow, I can keep asking follow-up questions or run another Google search.
Bard is also now testing different information sources. Building the authority and trustworthiness of a personal brand or store brand will be a new challenge in 2024.
From my experience, SGE’s main impact on SEO will be on click-through rates and shifts in search intent. But I believe that if your content is authoritative enough and reflects personal experience, you’ll get far more traffic than you used to from a top-3 position.
BTW, a recent finding about SGE: some noun queries expand automatically, while certain question-style queries may not.
You Can Now Write Notes (Comments) on SGE and SERPs?
Notes are showing up on Google: you can view, create, and share notes on content in Google Search results and Google Discover, attached to specific search results or Discover articles. Is a Google version of Reddit coming? It’s actually a bit like the context notes on Twitter (X). This is a great move by Google.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13876743
GSC Has a Bug Where Some Queries Can’t Be Found, and It’s Been Around for a Long Time
A friend raised this issue. It’s a GSC bug: you can’t find a specific query by searching for it directly, but you can find it with a “contains” filter on a single word. For example, searching “screwdriver kit” directly returns nothing; you have to filter by queries containing “screwdriver,” then use Ctrl+F in the query list below. Very strange, right?
Changes to Google Maps for Local SEO
AI-related information is starting to appear in Google Maps, possibly another SGE signal. My guess is that by the end of this year, Google will try bringing large language models into every one of its products:
A Transcript from the US DOJ Antitrust Case Against Google Reveals a Lot
I haven’t gone through it carefully yet, but it reveals a lot:
- Google’s algorithms rely on deep learning systems such as RankEmbed, RankBrain, DeepRank, Navboost, and Glue
- User behaviors such as clicks, scrolls, and hovers are among Google’s ranking factors
- The role of human quality raters — tying in with the QRG update above
- Google continuously trains on user data
- Google’s concept of “information satisfaction” — the actions users take signal to Google that their search was helpful
A Collection of Useful SEO GPTs
Links are awkward to share on the WeChat Official Account, so if you’re interested, add me via the contact at the end of this post and send the message GPTs — I’ll send you all the materials.
- SEO E-Commerce Content Pro - Linus SEO’s GPT for improving article quality. Give it a try! chat.openai.com/g/g-c6YnoBZke-seo-e-commerce-content-pro
- Helpful Content – Aleyda Solis
- Learning SEO – Aleyda Solis
- Search Quality Evaluator – Caitlin Hathaway
- High-Quality Review Analyzer – Caitlin Hathaway
- GA4 Helper – Scott Hendison
- Schema Advisor – Amanda Jordan
- Web Performance Engineer – Darwin Santos
- Which Pages Impacted – Marie Haynes
Yahoo Search Will Update in the First Week of 2024
Yahoo: “I’m still updating!”
Brian Provost, SVP and GM of Yahoo Search, says the new Yahoo Search will roll out in the first week of 2024. Yahoo and Bing are both SEO traffic sources you shouldn’t ignore — remember to verify your site in their webmaster tools.
https://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-to-start-rolling-out-in-the-first-weeks-of-2024-434729
Recent Jindouyun SEO Case Study
Online consulting services industry: we started SEO in May, and after about six months, organic search traffic in October had grown from 70,000 to 140,000 — up 100% — and the site’s traffic keeps growing:
Feel free to add me on WeChat (ID: LinusSEO) to chat and swap SEO success stories!
SEO & AI Weekly Roundup + Linus's Take (Nov 27, 2023)
https://www.linusseo.com/en/google-seo-and-ai-newsletter-linus-thoughts-231127/