Google Says More and More Updates Coming

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SEO

Google December 2024 Core Update Is Live - What Are We Seeing

Just under a week from when the November Core Update finished rolling out, Google released the Google Update. This update will take about two weeks to complete and appears to target different core systems than the November release. Google's getting more aggressive with updates - we should expect them more frequently going forward.

At a Google Search Central Live event, the speaker said there will be more updates and more often.

Google CEO: Search Will Change Profoundly in 2025

Sundar Pichai says "profound changes" are coming to Google Search in early 2025, though he acknowledges the path forward won't be easy since "the low hanging fruit is gone." While defending Google's AI leadership, Pichai points to their historical innovations like transformers and BERT, reminding us that AI has been part of Google's DNA since 2012. But when pressed about protecting content creators in this AI revolution, Pichai stumbled, falling back on YouTube monetization examples rather than addressing concerns about expert content getting buried in search results. He avoids the question about paying creators by saying they license Reddit and others.

Site Reputation Abuse: Is Your Website at Risk?

Dr. Peter J. Meyers delivers a wake-up call about Google's crackdown on sites exploiting their reputation for SEO gains. Through meticulous analysis of recent manual penalties, he unveils a 5-level threat assessment system that could save your site from Google's crosshairs. The highest risk? Third-party hosted affiliate content on subdomains (think coupons.usatoday.com). But even custom-created affiliate content could be dangerous if it strays too far from your site's core topics. While Google claims they're not targeting affiliate content specifically, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Google's New Site Reputation Policy Threatens Publisher Revenue, News Alliance Warns DOJ

In a letter to antitrust officials, News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey sounds the alarm on Google's latest policy shift that could devastate publisher revenues. The tech giant's updated site reputation abuse policy now gives Google the power to remove search rankings for media properties that use affiliate links or partner content – even when overseen by professional editorial teams. Publishers who invested in expanding their newsrooms to comply with Google's previous policies now face potential penalties. With the search giant already controlling most reader access and ad revenue, this move further tightens the squeeze on news organizations fighting to survive in the digital age. Coffey urges immediate intervention from the DOJ and FTC to prevent irreversible damage to the publishing industry.

My Take: Now that Google is hurting the big publishers, they’re making noise. Before then, it was us smaller publishers making noise. It’ll be interesting to see if that moves the needle at all.

SEO Ripples

• Google just rolled out a '24 hours' view in Search Console performance reports. This new feature lets you monitor your content's search performance with just a few hours' delay, showing hourly granularity across Search, Discover, and News reports. The system automatically adjusts to your local timezone. For fresh content publishers, this means near real-time insights into how your newest pages are performing and which queries are driving traffic right now.

• Microsoft just dropped the new Copilot feature in Bing Webmaster Tools, now available to 10,000 top users, isn't just another data dashboard – it's your personal SEO analyst. The AI lets you have natural conversations about your website's performance, delivering instant insights and actionable recommendations.

• Gary Illyes says implementing HTTP caching isn't just about faster load times. It's your ticket to more efficient crawling, especially for large sites with static content. Google's ability to cache webpages has plummeted over the past decade, from 0.026% to just 0.017% of total crawls. Just remember to trigger cache refreshes only for significant content changes, not minor tweaks like updating copyright dates.

• Bing has officially removed its cache operator and cache link functionality from search results, just like Google did recently. Bing assures that site owners haven't been left in the dark – they can still access Bing-crawled content through the URL Inspection feature in Bing Webmaster Tools, providing a professional alternative for those who relied on the cache function for technical analysis.

• Google's Martin Splitt discusses diagnosing why your pages aren't showing up in search results. He busts the common myth that browser accessibility equals crawler accessibility – your site might be blocked by robots.txt, firewalls, or routing issues without you knowing it. Splitt recommends using Google Search Console's URL inspection tool for accurate diagnosis. He emphasizes monitoring the Crawl Stats report for server response issues, particularly 500 errors and timeouts that could throttle crawling. For power users, he suggests diving into server logs, while cautioning that not all "Googlebots" are legitimate.

AI

OpenAI’s Sora is Here

OpenAI launched their video generation model with Sora. They allow ChatGPT Plus and Pro users to generate high-quality videos up to 1080p and 20 seconds long in multiple aspect ratios. Plus users can generate up to 50 videos at 480p resolution or fewer videos at 720p each month. Whether starting from scratch with text prompts or remixing existing assets, creators can use the new storyboard interface to precisely control their video generations frame by frame.

Here’s a gif of the first video I created of digital surfers below. While it’s more of a first draft, I can’t imagine what the cost would’ve been if I went the ‘traditional’ route:

Google Project Mariner: AI Agents to Use the Web for You

DeepMind just showed off AI that acts like your personal web assistant. Project Mariner, powered by Gemini, takes the wheel in Chrome – clicking, typing, and navigating sites just like you would. Think of it as your sidekick that can tackle tedious tasks like building grocery lists or hunting down the perfect flight.

The agent works by watching your screen and making real-time decisions about how to interact with websites. While it's currently slow (about 5 seconds between actions) and limited in what it can do (no checkouts or cookie acceptances allowed), it represents a shift in how we might interact with the web. Instead of clicking through pages yourself, you simply tell the AI what you want and watch it work.

AI Ripples

• The big news of the week is Google's Quantum AI team releasing their quantum processor "Willow". The chip solved a 30-year challenge in quantum error correction and completed a benchmark computation in under 5 minutes that would take today's most advanced supercomputer 10 septillion years. By designing a chip that can harness quantum mechanics at this scale, Google has taken a major step toward building commercially viable quantum computers that could revolutionize fields like drug discovery, battery design, and artificial intelligence.

• Google released Gemini 2.0, focusing on 'agentic' capabilities - meaning it can understand context, plan ahead, and take supervised actions. They claimGemini 2.0 Flash outperforms its predecessor at twice the speed while adding native image generation and text-to-speech. Beyond text responses, it can now handle multiple inputs (images, audio, video) and interact with tools like Google Search in real-time.

• Google NotebookLM now offers a Premium tier where you can now "join" Audio Overviews and speak with AI hosts to dig deeper into topics, like having a personal tutor at your fingertips. For power users, the new NotebookLM Plus subscription brings 5x more capacity for notebooks and Audio Overviews, custom response options, and team collaboration features. Available now for businesses through Google Workspace or Google Cloud, with Google One AI Premium access coming in early 2025.

• To refute Elon Musk’s claims, OpenAI released internal emails and messages to reveal that he not only supported but actively pushed for OpenAI to become a for-profit entity in 2017. They lay out the timeline for when Musk demanded majority equity, absolute control, and the CEO position of the proposed for-profit structure. However, OpenAI's leadership rejected these terms, believing unilateral control would contradict their mission of ensuring AGI benefits humanity broadly. After negotiations failed, Musk suggested merging with Tesla before ultimately resigning in 2018.

MARKETING

6 Step Content Distribution Strategy (for Maximum Reach)

Chris Hanna shares a systematic approach to amplifying your content's reach across owned, earned, and paid channels. Rather than blindly pushing content everywhere, Hanna advocates for first understanding your audience's preferences and behaviors before selecting distribution channels. The strategy breaks down into six key steps: defining your target audience through demographic analysis, choosing appropriate distribution channels based on goals and audience presence, matching content types to channels, customizing format and messaging per platform, creating a distribution calendar, and measuring results through platform-specific metrics.

13 Cookie Consent Banner Requirements

Want to ensure your cookie consent banner hits all the right compliance notes while keeping users happy? Hana Kobzová breaks down the 13 must-have requirements, from explicit consent mechanics to design best practices. Some of the key takeaways:

• Prioritize transparent choices with equally prominent accept/reject buttons

• Avoid pre-ticked boxes

• Only activate cookies after consent

• Make smart UX choices like persistent preference storage

• Easy access to privacy policies

CONTENT

How to Build a Website Personalization Strategy That Boosts SEO

Nick Brown delivers a blueprint for leveraging personalization to enhance both user experience and search rankings. At its core, personalization isn't just about using someone's first name – it's about crafting unique digital experiences that speak directly to each visitor's needs. When implemented properly, personalization significantly boosts engagement metrics and repeat visits – two factors that signal quality content to search engines.

LINK BUILDING

How to Earn Coverage With Source of Sources w/ Peter Shankman

Vince Nero talks to Peter Shankman, HARO's original founder, who is back with a free PR platform (SOS) that's already attracted 30,000+ members and 2,000+ journalists. His secret sauce for landing coverage? Lightning-fast responses (within 10 minutes), ultra-brief pitches (three paragraphs max), and ruthless relevance to journalists' queries. Skip the AI-generated pitches—they're as transparent as a window. Instead, pre-craft authentic templates you can quickly customize.

New Test Data Shows Not To Overlook the Power of Internal Links

Demetria Spinrad shares data-driven insights about the evolving importance of internal linking for SEO. Despite Google's Gary Illyes downplaying links as a top-three ranking factor, SearchPilot's extensive testing reveals that strategic internal linking still packs a powerful punch for organic traffic. Through multiple controlled experiments across different industries, they found that seemingly minor tweaks to internal linking structures can drive significant traffic gains. Some of the key actionable takeaways:

• Server-side rendering of internal links tends to be more effective than client-side, leading to faster indexing and better visibility

• Strategic placement of visible links on page load appears to send stronger relevancy signals to Google versus hidden or collapsed links

• Adding geographic proximity links between location pages can boost local SEO performance and user engagement

• Internal links from high-level category pages to deeper subcategories showed some of the most dramatic positive impacts in testing

• Footer link optimization, while often overlooked, presents opportunities for SEO gains when strategically implemented

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

CMS Market Share Trends: Top Content Management Systems

Shelley Walsh takes a look at the various CMS options in the market. WordPress continues its reign with a 62.2% market share, but it's seen its first decline in two decades, dropping 5% in the last two years. Meanwhile, Shopify (6.6%) and Wix (4.5%) are gaining ground, particularly with small businesses who prefer their user-friendly, all-in-one solutions. The shift suggests a growing appetite for simpler, drag-and-drop platforms over traditional CMS setups.

How to Incorporate Machine Learning in Your SEO Day-to-Day

Lazarina Stoy offers a roadmap for leveraging ML in SEO without becoming a data scientist. She introduces several actionable ML applications, including text classification using Google's Natural Language API for content categorization, topic modeling for discovering content relationships, and KeyBERT for smarter keyword clustering. There’s a focus on entity extraction and analysis for aligning with search engines' understanding of content. She debunks the over-reliance on LLMs like ChatGPT, instead advocating for purpose-built ML tools that deliver more reliable, precise results for specific SEO tasks.

CASE STUDY

Gaps Income Report, November 2024

Glen Allsopp shares impressive growth across digital startups in the second ever Gaps income report. Glen's detailed market analysis showcases how entrepreneurs are finding success by solving specific pain points rather than chasing the next big technological breakthrough. This month's report emphasizes that opportunity lies not in reinventing the wheel, but in making it roll more smoothly for specific industries.

BUSINESS IDEAS

The State of Digital Agencies in 2024

Paddy Moogan shares fresh data from 612 agency leaders reveals a fascinating paradox: while only 10% describe 2024 as healthy, a whopping 60% expect revenue growth next year. Moogan's study shows that small agencies face the toughest sales pipeline challenges, with most valuing their pipeline at just 25% of annual revenue. The report also breaks workplace assumptions - over 50% of agencies are now fully remote, with 70% planning to maintain their current setup. There's a perfect split on AI's impact, with 45% seeing it as a threat and 44% viewing it as an opportunity.

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