SEO News #4/2024

First things first, great news from Delante – we were at the April edition of brightonSEO, one of the largest and best SEO conferences in the world! Why are we this excited? This year, we attended Brighton SEO not only as participants. We’ve seen the other perspective, too: our R&D Spec, Wojciech Urban, gave a speech about Google Search Console. The conference was interesting, intense, and the entire team will benefit from the knowledge, we’ll make sure of that!

To read (and see) more, check our Facebook profile – we have prepared a short summary and photo report.

We got this! Google’s March 2024 algorithm update was officially completed in April and is now fully reflected in search results. However, although the update enrolled on April 19th, the official confirmation from Google did not appear until April 26th, which caused a lot of speculation in the SEO world. The industry accused Google of a lack of transparency.

Why do we care so much about this update, though? It’s high time to switch to new rules regarding spam and AI-generated content. We wrote more about this here ➡️ Google Algorithm Update—Core Update, March 2024.

In our SEO predictions for 2024, specialists were divided on whether links will be more or less important in the coming months. This month, we heard two arguments against the importance of links (at least the kind of links we have known so far).

Individual words have been changed in the spam policy. And yes, they might reveal something new about how Google’s algorithms now treat links.

Before: “Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

Now: “Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

(Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies)

After SERP Conf 2024, on X there was a quote published by Patrick Stox from an interview with Gary Illyes, a Google analyst, on which Gary himself commented… quite ambiguously.

Can we take this as Gary “accidentally” sharing the information? Or maybe his words were not exactly true or too simplified?

We do not know. And we probably won’t find out any time soon. That’s why all you have to do is follow changes in Google, page positions and experiment yourself. And in some time, we will find out what’s all the fuss about with links and the SEO world.

Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company) revenues increased by 15% year-to-year, and Google confirmed its plans to continuously invest in AI. Hence, the period is called the “Gemini era.”

Furthermore, Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai says that Google’s generative artificial intelligence functions have already answered over a billion queries (!).

(Source: https://abc.xyz/assets/91/b3/3f9213d14ce3ae27e1038e01a0e0/2024q1-alphabet-earnings-release-pdf.pdf)

Speaking of artificial intelligence, we have good news for those who want to study it more. The Google AI Essentials course is about to start, and it offers useful knowledge of its capabilities. For now, Google AI Essentials can be attended in the USA.

(Source: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/grow-with-google/google-ai-essentials-course/)

Google has removed the option to manually submit page suggestions to Google News. From now on, the process will be fully automated. How do we know? The “Submit your publication for review” documentation page has been removed – now only a 404 response is displayed there. After clicking on the link in the top bar, we are redirected to a page where we read that from April 25, publishers will no longer be able to add their content to Publisher Center. What’s next? We’ll see in the coming months.

That’s it for this month (thankfully!). See you in May 👋