After a very busy end of 2024, with three major updates in December, there were no official updates to ranking algorithms in January. According to rank tracking software, there was relative calm. However, rank tracking software also experienced problems accessing Google’s results after the search engine increased security on January 15th. Barry Schwartz noticed volatility in Google search results during this security update, as well as on dates in early and late January.
Simplified URL element on mobile
If you are using Google on your smartphone, you may have noticed a small but significant change in the appearance of snippets on mobile in January. Google is no longer showing the full URL or breadcrumb in snippets (a snippet is a block around a link in a search result that features a logo, site name, URL, link, and description). It is now only showing the domain name.
This is something that I saw in search results before I read the news on Google Search Central and I thought that our home page was being indexed for searches like “Free SEO plugin”. Whereas it is the page https://www.seopress.org/wordpress-seo-plugins/free/ that is ranking #1 for that term. If you are using the Google app, you will also only see the domain name in the navigation bar when you visit a page. It is very disconcerting.
In the article Simplifying the visible URL element on mobile search results published on January 23rd, Caitlin Dorsey, Product Manager on Google Search, explains they changed results because “we’ve found that the breadcrumb element isn’t as useful to people who are searching on mobile devices”.
Having keywords in a URL and in breadcrumbs is a frequent recommendation for SEO. Is it possible that this now has less importance? John Mueller from Google also recently commented on LinkedIn that “often SEOs over-focus on URL structure” so maybe something has changed.
He further went on to say “I would a) avoid making unnecessary URL structure changes (because changes will affect SEO at least temporarily, it takes time for search engines to recrawl & reprocess all affected pages), pick something that can last for a long time, and b) primarily think about users & about how you want to track performance (URL structures are great for grouping URLs for analytics, conversion rates, etc. — not directly SEO, but for monitoring how well SEO is working for you)”.
Breadcrumbs still remain visible for desktop searches and the article concludes that you should still add Breadcrumb schema to pages. You can add and customize breadcrumbs and breadcrumb schema using SEOPress.
SERP tracking software hit by Google scraping crackdown
Reports from January 17th including this one by Danny Goodwin at Search Engine Land, have noted that Google made changes to search results on January 15th to stop them being crawled and “scraped” by robots including popular SEO tools like SEMRush and our very own SEOPress Insights.
Scraping is the term used for software copying data from a web page. To help website owners track SEO performance, SEO tools perform hundreds of thousands of searches per day on Google and scrape results to record ranking. These results are made available to users for tracking their own keywords or for competitor keyword research. Many SEOs would be lost without them!
According to TrajectData, Google made various changes to block scrapers including requiring bots to use JavaScript enabled browsers, more frequent CAPTCHA challenges and IP-blocking.
Google has made no comment about why they made these changes but anti-spam guidelines already contained the warning that machine generated traffic was prohibited, “This includes scraping results for rank-checking purposes”.
Many tools including SEOPress Insights changed their software in under 24 hours and very little data was lost. It may be that Google made changes not block SEO tools, but AI tools and agents. These could scrape Google’s search results but also AI generated answers from AI Overviews.
The competition is hotting up for Google
After the launch of ChatGPT Search in Novembre 2024, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek launched DeepSeek-R1 with web search capabilities on January, 20 2025. Unlike other LLM, that use existing search engines to get web results, it appears that DeepSeek used its own index of websites and ranking algorithms. This makes it more of a direct competitor to Google Search than ChatGPT Search, which uses Bing.
Introducing DeepSeek as a new, game changing search tool, Rank Tracker SEO Felix Rose-Collins says “DeepSeek goes beyond simple keyword matching and uses deep learning to understand user intent, making search results more accurate and personalized”.
He recommends that to adapt, SEOs should create high-quality, relevant content, optimize for user experience, write naturally, use structured data and keep content fresh.
This pretty much sums up the advice that Google has been giving SEOs for years now and I’m pretty sure that Google is way beyond simple keyword matching too. Google has never been the only search engine available on the web, its popularity has been down to its reliability and quality of its results. SEOs should be interested in these emerging search engines, but bear in mind that Google still remains, by far, the most popular search engine and the biggest source of traffic for most sites.
Google Search News from Google
John Mueller was not only active on LinkedIn but also on YouTube, appearing in the January 2025 edition of the Google Search News show.
He goes back over news on recent Google Search Console updates (hourly data and improvements to recommendations), November and December Core updates, recent crawling documentation and new Google IA tools Deep Research and Mariner – a chrome extension that acts as an agent that browses the web (a lot like ChatGPT Operator).
He also features community resources provided by SEOs. This month you can discover
- Getting C-Level Buy-In For SEO Initiatives by Dan Taylor
- How to incorporate machine learning in your SEO day-to-day by Lazarina Stoy
- 7 SEO Dashboards in Looker Studio and How to Set Them Up by Daria Chetvertak of SERanking
