What happened in SEO this month?
Each month, Lumar’s in-house tech SEO experts hand-pick some of the SEO industry’s top news items from across the web to keep you up-to-date on all things SEO and website optimization.
This month, our SEO news roundup includes:
- Google’s Head of Search is replaced
- Google Search drops ‘sitelinks searchbox’
- Search Engine Land acquisition raises concerns for independent SEO journalism
- Google rolls out AI-organised SERPs for recipe queries in the U.S.
- Google updates its guidelines on URL parameter formatting
- Google publishes new guidance on using Trends for SEO
Now, let’s dig into the key headlines from October…
Prabhakar Raghavan steps down as head of Google Search
Nick Fox is to replace Prabhakar Raghavan as the man in charge of Google Search. Raghavan has led the Knowledge & Information team (known as K&I) since 2020. Alongside Search, K&I oversees Ads, Geo and Commerce products at Google.
Raghavan will stay on at Google and has been promoted to the role of Chief Technologist. Many in the wider industry believe a change in leadership was inevitable, given recent criticism over Search’s declining quality.
[Source: Google, The Keyword Blog ]
Sitelinks Searchbox is being dropped from Google Search
More than a decade since it was first introduced, Google’s Sitelink Searchbox feature will be retired on November 21st. The official line from Google is that a slow decline in usage is the reason for the feature no longer being supported. It’s confirmed that this change won’t impact how other sitelinks are shown in SERPs. Users that already have Sitelink Searchbox schema can remove it if desired, but it’s not necessary to. Google will simply stop reporting on its presence moving forward.
[Source: Google Search Central Blog]
Search Engine Land acquisition raises concerns from some for independent SEO journalism
Semrush has acquired Third Door Media, the company behind leading SEO publication Search Engine Land, as well as SMX, MarTech and the Digital Marketing Depot. The platform previously acquired Backlinko.com back in 2022.
Industry reaction to the news has been lukewarm, with many criticizing the takeover of a previously independent SEO news source. Spokespeople from both sides have jumped in to reassure users that SEL will remain completely impartial, but it’ll be interesting to see what effect – if any – the change has on SEL’s reporting in the longer term.
[Source: Search Engine Land]
Google updates its guidelines on URL parameter formatting
Google has revised its guidelines around how to format parameters within URLs. Previously this information sat within an article about faceted navigation, but users can now find it within Google’s primary documentation on URL structure.
This guidance advises against the use of colons, brackets and commas within URL parameters. Instead, Google recommends sticking to equals signs (=) when separating pairs of values, alongside ampersands (&) when combining multiple parameters in one URL.
[ Source: Search Engine Journal ]
Google rolls out AI-organised SERPs for recipe queries in the U.S.
Search results pages organised with AI have started rolling out in the U.S. The update will first reach certain mobile searches related to recipes and meal preparation. The idea is to bring a ‘full-page experience’ to results pages for queries without a single correct answer, giving users more opportunities to discover and interact with different formats of content directly within SERPs.
[Source: Google, The Keyword Blog ]
Google publishes new guidance on using Trends data for SEO
Google has published new documentation on using Trends data for content strategy and topic generation. A supporting video series on the topic has also been published on the Google Search Central YouTube channel.
[Source: Google Search Central Documentation ]
Podcast: Google Search Reliability
As SEOs, we rely heavily on search engines but often don’t think about the people behind the tech who are in charge of keeping things running. In this episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, Ben Walton and David Yule from the Google Search Site Reliability Team (SRE) guide listeners through their day-to-day work.
The pair explain how the SRE team is often the first line of defense for issues and bugs within Google Search. With such a high-profile product, much of the work is also proactive and depends on the team’s ability to anticipate issues before they even reach the end user. It’s a fascinating discussion about an area of Google Search many of us take for granted.
[Source: Search Off the Record Podcast ]
