🎄❌ Google's New Core Update Here to Ruin Xmas

Welcome back to the newsletter with the exclusive scoop on why Google is dropping yet another core update on us:

(s/o Emma Brunson)

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ The Rise of AI Overviews 📈
→ Thriving in Search’s AI Era ✨
→ Google Ruins Xmas With New Core Update ❌🎄❌
→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I reflect on the latest eCommerce ranking trends and how the industry is seeing significant growth during Q4. I share insights on optimizing strategies for this peak season, focusing on eCommerce partnerships and targeted keyword strategies. By aligning with buyer intent and informational keywords, businesses can drive traffic and boost revenue. Tune in for more!

​YouTube​​​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Instead of being normal and sending a Christmas card, Google is dropping a surprising December 2024 Core Update right in time for the holidays, claiming “we have different core systems we're always improving” (LOL).

→ As a justification for dropping an unexpected core update in mid-December, right before the holidays, Google posted this standard Q&A on Search updates on X. OK, man.

→ Performance Max has already started rolling out a beta feature for campaign-level negative keyword exclusions, according to Google, and it’ll be expanded early in 2025. Theoretically, this should help publishers prevent ads from “showing up for irrelevant or unwanted search terms.”

→ Travel bloggers have been sounding the alarm about Google for a while now, and this thread shows “what happens when Google kills authentic travel content” by detailing the downfall of a travel publication that lost “97% of its traffic - from 1M to 30K monthly readers.” Brutal.

→ You know I don’t link lightly to “SEO Mega Influencer” types, but I thought the findings from Neil Patel’s “Content Types That Tend To Rank on Page 1 Of Google” research were worth a look:

So, text-based content (aka Blogs and Articles) still reigns supreme, Long Videos and Images do well, and everything else remains comparatively negligible.

​Click through if you want his superstar commentary on the stuff.

AI Insight 🤖

→ Speaking of Google, here are some key findings from Botify’s new research into AI Overviews:

- AI Overviews appear for up to 47% of searches
- AI Overviews and featured snippets together can take up to 75.7% of the screen on mobile
- 75% of AI Overview links come from the top 12 organic rankings
- Linked websites have strong semantic similarity with AI Overview summaries

And, last but not least, 60% of searches are now zero-click, aka resolved without users clicking links.

Hm. Good stuff.

→ Will Gemini 2.0 spell the death of Photoshop? Probably not, but this thread detailing, among other things, how to use voice commands to guide Gemini 2.0 in image editing is wild.

→ The world of AI Search is still pretty new and a lot of publishers are still finding their way. This 13-point roadmap offers some keys for optimizing for the three core technologies that define AI Search: traditional search engines, large language models (LLMs), and knowledge graphs. Nothing groundbreaking as far as advice goes, but worth a look.

→ ChatGPT went down for longer than ever before. OpenAI is blaming it on its new telemetric service.

→ According to various experts, the AI revolution is running out of data. AI models will have to adjust, as current pre-training practices will run dry:

“the rate at which usable Internet content is increasing… is growing at less than 10% per year, while the size of AI training data sets is more than doubling annually. Projecting these trends shows the lines converging around 2028.”

→ Meanwhile, Meta’s chief of AI says that “the real revolution is yet to come” and warns against over-regulation that could hinder the potential of AI.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ X changed its criteria for its revenue-sharing creator program, BTW, now requiring 5M organic impressions in the last 3 months and 2,000 verified followers.

→ With Meta outages and possible TikTok bans, Social Media Influencers are learning what every other content creator on the web has known for a long time: "You Own Nothing Here on Social" and don't really have control of your business because the major platforms can change the game whenever they feel like it… or whenever they government makes them.

→ If you’re looking to change your Meta ad structure, here’s an idea.

→ ICYMI: Reddit Answers is now in its public testing phase. It’s the platform’s new, conversational AI-powered Search interface, and will use Reddit conversations and links to generate summaries.

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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