Core Update Aftermath, Product Carousels in AI Overviews & Wayback Machine Links
SEO TL;DR #40 - 16/09/2024
Core Update
Google's August Core Update Volatility
After one week after Google’s August 2024 core update, search ranking volatility remains high. Many SEOs are reporting unpredictable movements in their traffic and rankings, with positions shifting dramatically - summarised over at Search Engine Roundtable:
“Yesterday I had a 21% increased in revenue over the previous Monday. However, my page views were down by about 2000 views, Clicks were up by about 50. This is a very strange rollercoaster ride that has little consistency.”
“Monday saw one of my lowest-ever workday PVs at 66.6% of my 2024 average so far and -18% vs the first 9 days of September 2023. This does not bode well since historically traffic for me usually picks-up well in the first three weeks prior to my industry's second largest global trade exhibition in Italy.”
“SERPs gone completely mental in the UK today. Positions flying about everywhere. Another big brain move from Google I'm sure.”
As we approach a whole month since the update began, it’s clear that the effects are far from settling down.
General
A Shortcut to Wayback Machine Links within Google
With Google planning to retire its catch feature soon, they have added links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. You can access these by clicking the three little dots next to the web page’s title and clicking the ‘more about this page’ link:
Scroll to the bottom of this page, and you’ll see a link to Wayback Machin. It will only link to the most recent snapshot of the URL, but you can manipulate the URL to see older versions.
The Wayback Machine is handy for all kinds of things, such as recovering lost content, determining why conversion rates may have dropped, or just getting nostalgic about how sites used to look in the noughties 👴
Ecommerce SEO / AI
Product Carousels for Commercial AI Queries
As shown in a recent LinkedIn post by Aleyda Solis, product carousels have made a comeback in AI-generated overviews for commercial and product-focused queries.
These carousels are now appearing alongside guides and category pages, driving traffic directly to product detail pages (PDPs). If you’re in retail, optimising your PDPs with quality content, reviews, and structured data is now more critical than ever as Google continues to push more visibility to these pages through AI overviews.
Technical SEO
Mastering URL Parameters: A Must for SEO Success
URL parameters can create chaos for SEO, leading to crawling and indexing issues that can lower your site’s visibility.
This post on Search Engine Journal by Jes Scholz shows how managing parameters is crucial to avoid these problems. From understanding the basics to assessing your parameter problems and applying best practices, this guide walks through actionable steps to tame URL parameters and improve your site’s SEO.
Ecommerce SEO
How Blogs Drive Revenue for Ecommerce
While often overlooked by e-commerce sites, blogs are a powerful tool for driving traffic and revenue in ecommerce. Blogs also help build brand authority and trust, supporting customers through each stage of their buying journey.
With strategic keyword research and thoughtful content planning, blogs can turn top-of-the-funnel organic traffic into loyal customers.
This blog shows a few ways we achieve this at Venture Stream and showcases how we grew the Aquacadabra blog by 135%.
Aquacadabra is pun-tastic. Love it! Great insights as always.