Google Search Revenue Grows 14% In Q2 2024 via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, released its second quarter 2024 financial results, revealing a 14% year-over-year increase in revenue for its core Google Search business.

Key Financial Data:

• Google Search revenue: $48.5 billion (up from $42.6 billion in Q2 2023)
• Total Alphabet revenue: $84.7 billion (14% increase year-over-year)
• Operating income: $27.4 billion
• Net income: $23.6 billion
• Earnings per share: $1.89

Strong performances in Search and Cloud services primarily drove the company’s overall revenue growth.

Google Cloud surpassed $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, reaching $10.3 billion with $1.2 billion in operating profit.

YouTube ad revenue increased from $7.7 billion in Q2 2023 to $8.7 billion in Q2 2024.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai commented on the results, emphasizing the company’s focus on AI innovation. The report also noted a recent reorganization of AI teams, combining elements of Google Research with Google DeepMind.

Pichai stated:

“Our strong performance this quarter highlights ongoing strength in Search and momentum in Cloud. We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack.”

The report also noted a recent reorganization of AI teams, combining elements of Google Research with Google DeepMind.

While the results indicate strong performance, Alphabet faces challenges, including regulatory scrutiny and evolving competition in the tech sector.

The company’s CFO, Ruth Porat, mentioned ongoing efforts to optimize cost structures.

Regarding the company’s financial strategy, Porat stated:

“As we invest to support our highest growth opportunities, we remain committed to creating investment capacity with our ongoing work to durably re-engineer our cost base.”

Why This Matters

The performance of Google Search and Alphabet has implications for the digital marketing industry.

As the dominant search engine, Google’s revenue growth indicates continued strength in search advertising, which remains an essential channel for many businesses.

Additionally, the growth in Cloud services and YouTube advertising suggests evolving digital trends and potential opportunities for marketers.

What Does This Mean For You?

For digital marketers and SEO professionals, these are the key takeaways from Alphabet’s earnings call:

• Search remains vital: The growth in Google Search revenue shows that SEO and search advertising remain key components of marketing strategies.
• Cloud and AI focus: Alphabet’s emphasis on Cloud services and AI development may lead to new tools and platforms for marketers to leverage.
• Video advertising potential: The growth in YouTube ad revenue indicates the ongoing importance of video content in digital marketing strategies.
• Competitive landscape: While Google maintains its market position, the focus on AI development across the tech industry may lead to new challenges and opportunities in search and digital advertising.
• Potential changes ahead: As Alphabet continues to invest in AI and reorganize its teams, marketers should stay alert for potential changes in search algorithms or new AI-driven features that could impact SEO and PPC strategies

Featured Image: sdx15/Shutterstock

Google Shares Tips To Improve SEO Through Internal Links via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

In a new installment of its “SEO Made Easy” video series, Google provides three simple guidelines for utilizing internal linking to improve SEO.

The video, presented by Google’s Martin Splitt, offers valuable insights for improving site structure and user experience.

Strategic internal linking highlights your most valuable content, ensuring users and search engines can identify them quickly.

Additionally, internal linking can help search engines understand the relationships between pages, potentially leading to better rankings.

3 Tips For Internal Linking

Splitt emphasized three main points regarding the effective use of internal links:

1. User Navigation: Internal links guide users through a website, helping them find related content and understand the site’s structure.
2. Search Engine Crawling: Google’s web crawler, Googlebot, uses internal links to discover new pages and understand the relationships between different pages on a site.
3. HTML Best Practices: Properly using HTML elements, particularly the < a> tag with an href attribute, is essential for creating effective links.

The Importance Of Meaningful Anchor Text

One of Google’s key recommendations is to use descriptive, meaningful anchor text for links.

Splitt demonstrated how clear anchor text improves user experience by allowing visitors to quickly scan a page and understand where each link will lead them.

He stated:

“Users and Bots alike prefer meaningful anchor text. Here on the left you see what that looks like each link has meaningful words as anchor text and you can easily spot what the link will take you to.”

See the examples he’s referring to in the image below:

Screenshot from: YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, July 2024.

Splitt continues:

“On the right you see a page that doesn’t use meaningful anchor text and that isn’t a good user experience especially when you try to quickly scan the page and find the right link to use.”

Balancing Link Quantity

While internal linking is vital, Splitt cautioned against overdoing it.

He advises applying critical judgment when adding links and creating logical connections between related content without overwhelming the user or diluting the page’s focus.

Technical Considerations For Links

The video also touched on the technical aspects of link implementation.

Splitt discouraged using non-standard elements like spans, divs, or buttons to create links, saying if an element behaves like a link, it should be coded as one using the proper HTML structure.

Screenshot from: YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, July 2024.

In Summary

These are the key takeaways from Google’s video on internal linking:

• Internal linking is a fundamental aspect of SEO and user experience.
• Focus on creating meaningful, descriptive anchor text for links.
• Use internal links strategically to guide users and search engines through your site.
• Balance the number of links to avoid overwhelming users or diluting page focus.
• Stick to proper HTML structure when implementing links.

See the full video below:

Featured Image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, July 2024. 

Google Cautions: Exponential Content Growth Causes Re-Evaluation via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about the impact of increasing a website’s size by ten times its original size. Mueller’s answer should give pause to anyone considering making their site dramatically larger, as it will cause Google to see it as a brand new website and trigger a re-evaluation.

Impact Of Making A Site Bigger

One of the reasons for a site migration is joining two websites into one website, which can cause a site to become even larger. Another reason for an increase in size is the addition of a massive amount of new products.

This is the question that was asked in the SEO Office Hours podcast:

“What’s the impact of a huge expansion of our product portfolio on SEO Performance, for example going from 10,000 to products to 100,000?”

It must be pointed out that the question is about a site growing ten times larger.

This is is Mueller’s answer:

“I don’t think you have to look for exotic explanations. If you grow a website significantly, in this case, by a factor of 10, then your website will overall be very different. By definition, the old website would only be 10% of the new website. This means it’s only logical to expect search engines to re-evaluate how they show your website. It’s basically a new website after all.

It’s good to be strategic about changes like this, I wouldn’t look at it as being primarily an SEO problem.”

Re-Evaluate How Google Shows A Website

Mueller said it’s not primarily an SEO problem but  it’s possible most SEOs would disagree because anything that affects how a search engine shows a site is an SEO problem. Maybe Mueller meant that it should be seen as a strategic problem?

Regardless, John Mueller’s answer means that growing a site exponentially in a short amount of time could cause Google to re-evaluate a site because it’s essentially an an entirely new website, which might be an undesirable scenario.

Although Mueller didn’t specify how long a re-evaluation can take, he has indicated in the past that it can take months. Maybe things have changed but this is what he said four years ago about how long a sitewide evaluation takes:

“It takes a lot of time for us to understand how a website fits in with regards to the rest of the Internet.

…And that’s something that can easily take, I don’t know, a couple of months, a half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year, for us to recognize significant changes in the site’s overall quality.”

The implication of a sitewide evaluation triggered by an exponential growth in content is that the optimized way to approach content growth is to do it in phases. It’s something to consider.

Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours podcast at the 4:24 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ShotPrime Studio

Google Says This Will Cancel Your “Linking Power” via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller was asked in an SEO Office Hours podcast if blocking the crawl of a webpage will have the effect of cancelling the “linking power” of either internal or external links. His answer suggested an unexpected way of looking at the problem and offers an insight into how Google Search internally approaches this and other situations.

About The Power Of Links

There’s many ways to think of links but in terms of internal links, the one that Google consistently talks about is the use of internal links to tell Google which pages are the most important.

Google hasn’t come out with any patents or research papers lately about how they use external links for ranking web pages so pretty much everything SEOs know about external links is based on old information that may be out of date by now.

What John Mueller said doesn’t add anything to our understanding of how Google uses inbound links or internal links but it does offer a different way to think about them that in my opinion is more useful than it appears to be at first glance.

Impact On Links From Blocking Indexing

The person asking the question wanted to know if blocking Google from crawling a web page affected how internal and inbound links are used by Google.

This is the question:

“Does blocking crawl or indexing on a URL cancel the linking power from external and internal links?”

Mueller suggests finding an answer to the question by thinking about how a user would react to it, which is a curious answer but also contains an interesting insight.

He answered:

“I’d look at it like a user would. If a page is not available to them, then they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it, and so any links on that page would be somewhat irrelevant.”

The above aligns with what we know about the relationship between crawling, indexing and links. If Google can’t crawl a link then Google won’t see the link and therefore the link will have no effect.

Keyword Versus User-Based Perspective On Links

Mueller’s suggestion to look at it how a user would look at it is interesting because it’s not how most people would consider a link related question. But it makes sense because if you block a person from seeing a web page then they wouldn’t be able to see the links, right?

What about for external links? A long, long time ago I saw a paid link for a printer ink website that was on a marine biology web page about octopus ink. Link builders at the time thought that if a web page had words in it that matched the target page (octopus “ink” to printer “ink”) then Google would use that link to rank the page because the link was on a “relevant” web page.

As dumb as that sounds today, a lot of people believed in that “keyword based” approach to understanding links as opposed to a user-based approach that John Mueller is suggesting. Looked at from a user-based perspective, understanding links becomes a lot easier and most likely aligns better with how Google ranks links than the old fashioned keyword-based approach.

Optimize Links By Making Them Crawlable

Mueller continued his answer by emphasizing the importance of making pages discoverable with links.

He explained:

“If you want a page to be easily discovered, make sure it’s linked to from pages that are indexable and relevant within your website. It’s also fine to block indexing of pages that you don’t want discovered, that’s ultimately your decision, but if there’s an important part of your website only linked from the blocked page, then it will make search much harder.”

About Crawl Blocking

A final word about blocking search engines from crawling web pages. A surprisingly common mistake that I see some site owners do is that they use the robots meta directive to tell Google to not index a web page but to crawl the links on the web page.

The (erroneous) directive looks like this:

There is a lot of misinformation online that recommends the above meta description, which is even reflected in Google’s AI Overviews:

Screenshot Of AI Overviews

Of course, the above robots directive does not work because, as Mueller explains, if a person (or search engine) can’t see a web page then the person (or search engine) can’t follow the links that are on the web page.

Also, while there is a “nofollow” directive rule that can be used to make a search engine crawler ignore links on  a web page, there is no “follow” directive that forces a search engine crawler to crawl all the links on a web page. Following links is a default that a search engine can decide for themselves.

Read more about robots meta tags.

Listen to John Mueller answer the question from the 14:45 minute mark of the podcast:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ShotPrime Studio

Google Warns Of Last Chance To Export Notes Search Data via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google updated their documentation for the Google Labs Google Notes experiment to remind users that Notes will go away at the end of July 2024 and showed how to download notes content, with a final deadline beyond which it will be impossible to retrieve it.

Google Notes

Notes is an experimental feature in Google Labs that lets users annotate search results with their ideas and experiences. The idea behind it is to make search more helpful and improve the quality of the search results through the opinions and insights of real people. It’s almost like Wikipedia where members of the public curate topics.

Google eventually decided that the Notes feature had undergone enough testing and they decided that their are shutting down Google Notes, a decision announced in April 2024.

Update To Documentation

The official documentation was updated to make it clear that Notes is shutting down at the end of July and that users who wish to download their data can do us with their Google Takeout, a Google Accounts feature that allows users to export their content from their Google Account. Google Takeout allows Google Account holders to export data from Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Photos, a total of up to 56 kinds of content can be exported.

Google’s Search Central document changelog explains:

“A note about Notes

What: Added a note about the status of Notes to the Notes documentation.

Why: Notes is winding down at the end of July 2024.”

This is the new announcement:

“Notes is winding down at the end of July 2024. If you created a note, your notes content is available to download using Google Takeout through the end of August 2024.”

Check out the updated Google Notes documentation here:

Notes on Google Search and your website (experimental)

Featured Image by Shutterstock/ra2 studio