Discounts, emojis, and new Core Web Vitals: SEMantics February 2024

Bring Digital’s Aimee Jones summarises the biggest search news from January and how it might impact you, from the introduction of INP to Google cutting ties with its third-party human search-quality raters.

Google has now launched discount-rich results for organic listings in the US

Google has launched discount-rich snippet results for organic listings in the US. The new rich result type makes your snippet larger, allowing shoppers to copy coupon codes directly from search results.

Source: Brodie Clark on X

If this rolls out worldwide, it could significantly impact a user’s journey on the SERPs — and, therefore, click-through rates. You can see a video explanation of the new feature in this LinkedIn post.

Google terminates contract with Appen for search quality raters

Google has terminated its contract with Appen, one of the largest sources of its third-party human search quality raters sources. 

The company provided search engine evaluations and quality raters for those unaware of Appen’s relationship with Google. It’s unclear what the cancellation of the Appen contract means for the Search Quality Rater programme.

There’s been a lot of speculation on SEO social media about the motives behind Google’s firing of Appen. Some have even suggested that we might be witnessing the birth of a new era with AI-powered search quality raters. 

For more information about this, read SEJ’s blog covering the topic.

Google to replace First Input Delay with new Interaction to Next Paint metric as a Core Web Vital in March

Google will replace First Input Delay with Interaction to Next Paint as a Core Web Vital metric on the 12th March. If you’re in SEO, you should evaluate your site’s current INP performance between now and then so you can optimise areas impacting interactivity.

Meeting the “good” INP threshold will become more important for search rankings and user engagement. 

For more information on INP, check out the Bring blog written by our very own Chris Lever, which explains everything you need to know about INP in a way that’s easy to understand.

Google Search drops the cache link from search results

The cache link has been removed entirely from Google search results after a period of testing.

Google cache works (sorry, worked) like this: Google would save a version of a web page when it was indexed. Users could access this cached version if the live version of the web page wasn’t working for whatever reason, be it a server error or if the page had been taken down. It’s an old feature, so you may never have used it if you’ve only been in the SEO game for a year or two.

It is still possible to view the cached results of a page by using the “cache:” operator in a normal search.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Google adding emojis on GBP place topics

Google has been adding emojis on Place Topics with Google My Business Reviews to communicate review sentiment better. They have added green smiley faces for positive feelings and frowning faces for negative ones. 

Source: Darren Shaw on LinkedIn

Google’s announcement​ around their Search Generative Experience (SGE)

A Google announcement​ around their Search Generative Experience (SGE) that says: “We’ll continue to offer SGE in Labs as a testbed for bold new ideas” has many SEOs thinking we won’t see an SGE rollout anytime soon.

Check out Ross Hudgen’s post on the topic on X.

The Crawl Rate Limiter within Google Search Console is now gone

The Crawl Rate Limiter within Google Search Console is now gone. Google says it made improvements to crawling logic and other tools. So, if you can’t find it, it’s because it’s no longer needed (according to Google, that is).

The Search Central blog covers this in a bit more detail.

So there you have it: another fabulously relevant newsletter chock full of SEO updates. Stay tuned for more updates in our next SEMantics instalment, and keep your eyes peeled for new Bring Digital blogs soon!