Search Central Live will return to São Paulo in 2025, following successful events in 2023 and 2024, and will also visit Recife for the first time. SEOs, content creators, and others interested in Google Search can apply for invites for events on February 18 in São Paulo and February 20 in Recife. Speakers will discuss how Google Search works, AI usage, and measuring SEO efforts. Registration is open until January 23, with invitations sent on January 30.
Google has improved its Search Console by adding a feature to export hourly performance data for the last 24 hours. Users can download metrics in Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and CSV formats. This feature aids in data analysis and debugging, offering insights into website performance. However, users should be aware that recent metrics may not be final and should validate this data against other exports, as it is limited to the previous 24-hour period.
Marketing Auditor is a comprehensive, automated tool designed to revolutionize the process of auditing digital marketing campaigns. It supports platforms like Google Ads and Google Analytics, performing 200+ automated checks to uncover growth opportunities and deliver actionable insights. Users can generate professional, white-labeled reports customized to their branding and preferred formats like Google Slides and PowerPoint.
Google has launched the December 2024 spam update, a global rollout expected to take one week. This update targets sites violating Google’s spam policies but should not significantly impact most websites. It enhances Google's systems for detecting search spam, particularly improving SpamBrain. Websites with ranking changes should review compliance with spam policies, as violations may lead to lower rankings or removal from search results.
Google completed its December 2024 core update from December 12 to December 18 in just six days, making it one of the fastest updates. This update, following November's, aimed to enhance search result relevance through improvements to core systems. Significant volatility in search rankings was reported during the update. Google advises content creators to focus on helpful, user-centered content, avoid over-optimization, and maintain high-quality standards.
Google released a document on best practices for faceted navigation, addressing SEO challenges. While it enhances user experience, it generates numerous URLs, leading to overcrawling and delayed content discovery. Each filter combination creates distinct URLs, complicating SEO. Google suggests two strategies: blocking non-essential URLs with robots.txt and optimizing URLs with standard separators and consistent filter order.
The Dec. 2024 core update is rolling out and will complete in two weeks. This update follows the November update, as Google continuously improves its core systems. Core updates can significantly alter search algorithms, and Google states there are no specific recovery actions for sites affected by previous updates, highlighting the need for helpful content. The update may lead to fluctuations in search rankings, and its overall impact remains uncertain.
Google Search Console has introduced a '24 hours' view in performance reports, allowing users to monitor recent content performance with metrics like clicks, impressions, and average CTR. This view offers hourly granularity and displays data in the user's local timezone. Additionally, data freshness has improved, reducing average data delay by nearly 50%. These updates will be gradually rolled out across all properties.
Google has announced a major update to Search Console Insights, removing Google Analytics data integration to focus solely on Search Console metrics. Initially launched in June 2020, the tool combined data from both platforms. This change raises concerns about its effectiveness, as it now operates exclusively with Search Console data, resulting in a more focused but potentially limited approach to search performance analysis.
Google's crawling infrastructure has seen a decrease in cacheable requests, dropping from 0.026% to 0.017% over the past decade. Caching is essential for fast page loads, resource savings, and bandwidth efficiency. Google supports heuristic HTTP caching through ETag and Last-Modified headers, with ETag being the recommended option for reliability. Implementing caching can save server resources and improve user experience, especially for sites with static content.
