Industry News

Google Search Console may have made a big update to its link counts. I am not sure how widespread this is, and I really don't not track the link count often. But I have reported on link counts changing here before and I am seeing a large change from June to now.

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai was interviewed by New York Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin. In this interview they spoke about Google's approach to AI, Sundar's outlook for the technology, and what to expect for Google's AI models and Search in the year to come. This is where everyone is citing Sundar as saying "Search itself will continue to change profoundly."

Google Search Console has dropped a whole section on its side bar navigation. The Legacy tools and reports section has been removed from the side bar. It is unclear exactly when it was removed but it was likely removed when Google dropped the page experience report from Search Console in mid-November.

Google may have dialed back how often they show AI Overviews in Google Search, especially in some verticals like health and finance (YMYL). Ziptie, a toolset that tracks Google AI Overviews, shows that overall, Google is showing 4 percentage points fewer AI Overviews today than it did a week ago.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

The Google November 2024 core update is finally done rolling out after almost 24 days...

Google's November 2024 core update was finally completed this week, yesterday to be more exact. This came after even more volatility from early this week. I also posted the big December 2024 Google webmaster report...

The Google November 2024 core update finally finished rolling out yesterday at around 1:30 PM ET. It took over 23.5 days to roll out, starting on November 11, 2024 at 3:30 pm and finishing on December 5, 2024 at 1:30 pm. The update was expected to take two weeks to roll out but took almost twice as long.

With all this talk about clustering and canonicalization today, what about if you get it wrong, or your CMS breaks and serves the wrong thing to Google? We know how consistency and communicating that to Google is super important. Well, Google tries to handle canonicals that seem broken or flat-out wrong.

As part of the topic of clustering and canonicalization with Google Search today, Allan Scott from Google explained how Google Search's clustering technology works with its localization technology. The answer is, wait for it, "it depends," but let's dig in.

As part of the topic of clustering and canonicalization with Google Search today, Allan Scott from Google explained what he called "marauding black holes" in Google Search. Where Google's clustering takes in some error pages and they end up in this black hole of sorts in Google Search.