Organic Carousel Beta, New Merchant Centre Fields & SEO Myth Busting

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Core update still rolling out

As of the morning of the 15th, Google’s March core update is still rolling out. There’s been a lot of chatter online, with sites experiencing massive dips and frustration over which update is responsible - helpful content update, spam or core.

Being fortunate to have access to around 50 different search console properties (mainly ecommerce), I’ve yet to see such disruption, which I’d like to say is due to the quality-over-quantity approach we preach at Venture Stream, but the impact does tend to hit informational blogs harder.

Google advises you to stay the course and wait until the update has fully rolled out before making any drastic changes to your site. If you’ve experienced a dip, it may recover and vice versa.

The official line from Google on when it finishes is, ‘It’ll finish when it finishes’, but I suspect it’ll be this week.

Carousel results beta available in the UK

A little while ago, Google introduced a new beta feature called the Carousel Rich Result, which is being tested in Germany, France, Czechia, and the UK.

This feature presents a horizontal-scrolling carousel that showcases a series of rich results from a single website. Each tile in the carousel can display key details such as price, ratings, and images, providing a snapshot of what each page offers.

This format is designed to enhance visibility and engagement directly from the search results. It’s also one of the least utilised rich results I’ve seen (it wasn't easy to find that example). Google’s documentation gives a handful of examples of articles which could be marked up this way:

• Top 5 Restaurants in [Location]
• Top 5 Hotels in [Location]
• Top 5 Things To Do in [Location]
• Top Coats of the Season

As this is only in beta, it’s worth waiting before rolling out the markup sitewide (we saw what happened to the FAQ results), but worthwhile testing on a few key articles to see how it affects their click through rate.

A complete guide on how to implement organic carousels can be found at SEO Roundtable.

Merchant Center product data spec update

As reported on Search Engine Land, Google has updated its Merchant Center guidelines for 2024 to improve how product information appears. This is relevant for paid ads and free listings, which Google focuses heavily on for shopping-related queries.

1. AI-Generated Content: If you use AI to create product titles or descriptions, you'll need to mark these with specific attributes to show they are AI-generated. The [structured_title] and [structured_description] attributes

2. Loyalty Programs: You can now add details about your loyalty programs, like member prices and points, in the US and Japan. [loyalty_program]

3. Minimum Price Setting: There's a new feature to set the lowest price you're willing to advertise for a product. [auto_pricing_min_price]

4. Payment Options: Updates include more details on how to list instalment payment options and new attributes for vehicle ads. [credit_type]

5. Free Shipping Threshold: You can indicate the minimum order value needed for free shipping. [free_shipping_threshold]

These updates help make your product listings more accurate and clear on Google and could lead to better CTR.

Mythbusting: disallowing internal footer links

Google's John Mueller advises against disallowing your internal footer links. In response to a query on Reddit about whether to disallow some pages in the footer, Mueller cautioned,

If you do this, future-you will be annoyed by the problems current-you is creating.

Google has consistently recommended not using 'nofollow' on internal links, highlighting that trying to manipulate PageRank this way, known as PageRank sculpting, is ineffective.

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The difference between 410 and 404 status codes is minimal

In the ongoing SEO debate on whether to use a 404 or a 410 error status for pages that are not found, Google's John Mueller has provided some clarity. In a Reddit thread, he mentioned that the difference between the two is so negligible that it doesn't significantly impact SEO. He stated,

It doesn't matter. The difference in processing of 404 vs 410 is so minimal that I can't think of any time I'd prefer one over the other for SEO purposes.

While he acknowledged that choosing between the two might be relevant for semantic accuracy or tracking purposes in logs, from an SEO standpoint, it makes no difference.

Google's 'Short Videos' tab test

In the last few weeks, Google has been testing a ‘Short Videos’ tab within the search results, not surprisingly with the popularity of platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts:

Last week, I talked about how to incorporate Reddit into your SEO strategy, and the same could be said this week for short format videos - if you’re not using them, you’re missing out.

I’m generally against including short-form videos in the search results, and at the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, people’s attention spans are becoming short enough!

The examples above go against Google’s principles of EEAT, with the results often showing videos from people who are rarely qualified or experienced to cover the topic, which is worrying when the subject in question is related to health, diet or finance.

?? Tip! This is only a test, so the tab may disappear or be incorporated elsewhere, but it’s safe to say at this stage that if you’re not utilising short-form content, you’re missing out on impression.

The platform tends to favour YouTube Shorts, but TikTok and Instagram are prevalent. The easiest place to start with short-form content is to chop up existing videos and aim to create 30-60-second roundups on a specific area.

Conducting some keyword research can help you discover how many people are searching for a particular question, and crafting the thumbnail, titles and description around that keyword can help you appear more frequently in search results.

How Google serves your pages

In the fourth video in the How Search Works series, Gary covers how Google Search actually returns a result from a technical perspective - how does search process users' queries and serve relevant results?

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