On 12 March 2024, Google changed the Core Web Vitals set and switched from First Input Delay to Interaction to Next Paint. This means that a new metric became one of Google’s ranking factors—and, if left unoptimized, can affect your performance in organic search. But what is INP, and how does it work? Let’s explain…
Since Google announced the availability of SGE in search labs, our R&D team has been diligently working to understand how this generative AI in search operates. This research targeted one of the areas we aimed to explore. Our questions were “What kind of content does SGE fetch to build its response?” and “Is SGE capable…
Tuesday, March 5, 2024 Today we announced the March 2024 core update. This is designed to improve the quality of Search by showing less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful. We also shared that we have new spam policies to better handle the practices…
Monday, March 4, 2024 We’re excited to announce a Search Central Live event in Bucharest, Romania on April 4, 2024. Search Central Live is our global Google Search event series specifically for site owners, publishers, and SEOs. We’d love to invite you—SEOs, website owners, developers, journalists, publishers, and anyone interested in Google Search—to apply for…
Update March 20, 2024: Helpful content system baked into core ranking systems.The March 2024 core update rolled out alongside a spam update on March 5, 2024, and Google announced the helpful content system is now part of Google’s core ranking systems. That means there will not be additional helpful content updates (and the way the…
Two articles were published this week that spoke of the frustration most of us who have worked in SEO have felt over the dominance of large brands for many search results. I’d like to share why I think Google has this problem, and why I think we will soon be seeing a change where more…
Tuesday, February 20, 2024 In 2022, Google expanded support for Product structured data, enabling enhanced product experiences in Google Search. Then, in 2023 we added support for shipping and returns structured data. Today, we are adding structured data support for Product variants, allowing merchants to easily show more variations of the products they sell, and…
Google released Notes as an experiment on November 15, 2023, which is essentially a global commenting system that can appear in the search results, in Discover, and now while browsing a webpage via “SGE while browsing”. It enables anyone that’s part of the experiment to post a note for a specific url and read Notes…
Long story short: Google jumped on the AI train and delivered SGE – Search Generative Experience. SEOs from all around the world are watching this step carefully. What will the final AI-powered search look like? How is it different from regular search, like featured snippets? And is it really going in the right direction? There…
Summary in a nutshell: Google seems to be testing how its summarized sources carousel appears in SGE responses by showing different versions to different people (Google accounts). From our point of view, this means they’re checking if the summarized carousel is useful or not, especially when Google already provides direct answers that might make the…