March Core Update Volatility, Google Testing Thumbs Up/Down & Ecommerce SEO Insights
SEO TL;DR #20 - 22/04/2024
Volatility with March’s Core Update
We’ve seen a spike in volatility over the last few days with Google’s March Core Update, which is still rolling out. Google has said that they are making changes to several system updates, all bundled within the March update, which makes it hard to determine the exact cause of any ranking drops or gains.
I guessed that it would have finished last week, but it could well roll on for who knows how long. The advice remains to not make any drastic changes to your site or content until it’s fully completed. We’ve seen examples of sites that have been hit by the update and are starting to make recoveries and vice versa.
Google Testing Thumbs Up/Down in Results
Spotted by Brodie Clark on X, Google is experimenting with a new interactive feature for organic product grid results on mobile devices, aiming to provide a more personalised shopping experience. This test allows users to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ specific brands within the grid, influencing the display of future results.
While it’s uncertain if these interactions will affect rankings directly, they’re likely designed to tailor future searches for signed-in users.
The Verge VS SEO Round… 3?
Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, wrote a tongue-in-cheek article targeting the keyword [best printer], which both ranks well and critiques the methods used to manipulate Google’s algorithms.
It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
He further critiques the SEO industry, highlighting how an “entire ecosystem of content farms” updates content relentlessly to satisfy the algorithm’s biases. To underline his point, he includes AI-generated content from Google’s Gemini to “pad things out”.
John Mueller responded to the piece, noting that “People seem to really enjoy it.”
While the article cleverly navigates and exposes some of the complexities of SEO, you could argue that it gained favour due to how popular it was and how much it was shared and linked to from across the web, not because of the methods they use in the article.
Ecommerce SEO
Aleyda Solis shared some insightful tips from this years SEOMeetup on Ecommerce SEO: The Keys for Success in 2024.
The cover says a lot: Google = Amazon & Reddit, but there’s more to it! From doubling down on your product detail page optimisations to making the most out of structured data and merchant centre.