Last updated on December 13th, 2024.
I was fortunate to attend Google Search Central event in Zürich on October 24, 2023.
Are you interested in 2024’s edition? Read my takeaways here: Notes from Google Search Central Zürich 2024
As a first-timer, I had little expectations. And I was blown away.
The line-up was only announced a week before the event. And it was outstanding. I liked the mix of community speakers and speakers from Google.
The takeaways per session
Here are my key insights from each session:
1. Google Shopping: “Two third of users don’t buy from Merchants they don’t know.” Matthias Wiesmann, Google
2. Luxury brands: Most luxury homepages are image-led. You need to get the basics right, such as metas, schema, descriptive URLs, and alt tags. Also, focus on Digital PR. (Maria Amelie White, your creativity to work on SEO without text is so impressive.) Maria White, Kurt Geiger
3. Search news: “Who knows, maybe there will be more algorithm updates soon.” (We leave it with that, @John_Mu.) John Müller, Google
4. SafeSearch: Google is now blurring explicit content in image search. This is a default setting in your account. Pierre Inzerillo & Christin von Essen, Google
5. The four horror stories of SEOs in 2023: SGE, Core Updates, wrong configurations which affect crawling and indexing, lack of SEO validation of Web migrations. (Thank you Aleyda Solís for featuring my horror story when I unintendedly crashed Ofri’s blog.) Aleyda Solis, Orianti
6. Structured data: Although HowTo and FAQ structured data results have been removed from SERP, you don’t need to remove the structured data itself from your pages.” Ryan Levering, Google
7. Cookieless future: Chrome plans to disable third-party cookies for 1% of users from Q1 2024. Andrey Lipattsev, Google.
For more insights on the day, see posts under #SCLZurich on Twitter.
