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SEO News: Google August 2023 Core Update, More Links in Snippets and New GSC Filter for News Publishers
Hello there, SEOs!
The digital tides have shifted once again, bringing a fresh surge of updates and insights from the vast ocean of search. Grab your compass, and let’s chart our course through the waters of this week’s most notable SEO News!
# Updates
GOOGLE AUGUST 2023 CORE UPDATE
As John Mueller promised, Google released a core update on August 22nd (the last one was back in April). Here’s how Barry Schwartz summed it up:
**Name:** Google August 2023 Broad Core Update
**Launched:** August 22, 2023 at around 1:30 pm ET
**Rollout:** It will take about one to two weeks to roll out
**Targets:** It looks at all types of content
**Penalty:** It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
**Global:** This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
**Discover:** Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
**Recover:** If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
**Refreshes:** Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.
No significant changes were noticed immediately after the release. But by Friday, August 25th, feedback started coming in showing that some sites had experienced a drop in traffic from 20 to 80%. Fortunately, this wasn’t a global trend.
For the time being, it seems like this update, though it’s labeled as core, is noticeably gentler than its predecessors. But the rollout continues, and only time will tell if there are more aggressive elements to the update than meets the eye.
GOOGLE NOW INDEXES .CSV FILES
Google can now index Comma Separated Values (.csv) files. This update is mentioned in the Google Search Central documentation. However, it seems like this feature has only just started gaining momentum, since searches with the operator filetype:csv currently don’t return any results.
# GSC
NEWS SHOWCASE FILTER
Screenshots have emerged online showing the new filter for news resources called News Showcase. This filter can be found in the Discover and News sections.
Note: The feature is currently available to a limited group of users.
# SERP
(TEST) ADDITIONAL LINKS IN SNIPPETS
Clickable links can now be found in snippet descriptions (the gray text under the title). These aren’t the single-row site links feature usually displayed beneath a snippet but additional links within the snippet’s description text.
VARIATIONS OF “THINGS TO KNOW” FEATURE
Christina LeVasseur noticed that, in addition to the standard accordion-style point-description format in the “Things to Know” feature, there’s a variation that highlights important data above the accordion. The data isn’t necessarily sourced from a single site. For instance, on the screenshot you can see that two facts might get pulled from different sources.
“TOP SIGHTS IN…” (FOR LOCAL QUERIES)
While searching for a specific location, Glenn Gabe noticed a “Top sights in \[location\]” block. This section showcases four Google Business Profile listings with their average star ratings.
# Tech SEO
HOW TO IMPROVE LCP
Twitter-turned-X has surprised us with useful insights this week. One of them is a possible method to load the hero image faster, which would improve the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score. The author of the post suggests trying to set the image’s priority to high using the <img fetchpriority=high>.
You can check the initial and current priorities in the Performance & Network panels of Chrome DevTools.# Tidbits
MOST INTERESTING GOOGLE PATENTS FOR SEO IN 2023
The article describes in layman’s terms four intriguing Google patents relevant to SEO in 2023 (two of them are marked as having a “worldwide” influence, hinting that Google might implement them sooner than the rest). The topics include:
1. Using document activity logs for determining document relevance
2. Query composition system
3. Query completions
4. Surfacing unique facts for entitiesAdditionally, the article mentions interesting patents from previous years.
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1 Reply
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>GOOGLE NOW INDEXES .CSV FILES
Google can now index Comma Separated Values (.csv) files. This update is mentioned in the Google Search Central documentation. However, it seems like this feature has only just started gaining momentum, since searches with the operator filetype:csv currently don’t return any results.How to use it? Are we talking about file names or content?
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The news regarding Twitter is becoming increasingly tight-lipped. How is it possible that something that held so much influence for many years could suddenly be rendered insignificant?
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