Good morning search marketers, the September 2019 Core Update is now live.
Yesterday morning, Google announced a broad core algorithm update hours ahead of launch. This is the second time they've announced a core update in advance and many of us are thankful for the heads-up. If, however, this is the first you're hearing of it, now's a good time to check how your listings are doing in the wake of the update — you'll want to continue to monitor them over the next few days as it might take some time for the update to fully roll out. If you're already noticing some changes, let me know how your pages are being impacted by emailing gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com or DMing @geochingu.
In a landmark decision, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the Right To Be Forgotten and any corresponding delisting requests do not apply globally, and that European data protection entities don't have the authority to regulate what the rest of the world sees on search engines. The ruling was made in Google's favor, against French privacy regulator CNIL, which argued that the EU's Right To Be Forgotten applied not just to EU countries, but to the entire Google.com index. Had the decision gone the other way, it may have set a dangerous precedent: "Not all countries are equally interested in the freedom of information," Search Engine Land Contributing Editor Greg Sterling wrote, "Imagine, for example, China asking Google to globally remove content about the Tiananmen Square massacre (because it's 'unfair' to Chinese citizens)."
For those of us looking to build a base in technical SEO, the latest installment of our Programming for SEO series familiarizes you with the terminal emulator and walks you through accessing command line utilities. These skills will eventually enable you to construct more complex tasks like SEO hacking on remote machines and utilizing programs to automate work. The goal of this series is to cut through all the disparate information and provide a beginner-friendly roadmap for developing technical SEO skills — if you missed the launch, you can read about it in our Programming for SEO series kickoff.
There's more to catch up on — keep on reading for a Pro Tip on setting up triggers and variables in Google Tag Manager, as well as your daily Search Shorts and more.
George Nguyen,
Associate Editor
