Google Search Central Live in Zürich, 7 talks – 7 take-aways

Last updated on February 16th, 2024.

I was fortunate to attend Google Search Central event in Zürich on October 24, 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 speaker lineup at Google Search Central Live in Zürich

The takeaways per session

Here are my key insights from each session:

Matthias Wiesmann explaining signals of trust for buyers.

1. Google Shopping: “Two third of users don’t buy from Merchants they don’t know.” Matthias Wiesmann, Google

Maria speaks about the poor lives of luxury brand managers – everyone links to them, dah!

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

Googlebot got siblings!

3. Search news: “Who knows, maybe there will be more algorithm updates soon.” (We leave it with that, @John_Mu.) John Müller, Google

If you have explicit content on the page, you can add a specific meta tag.

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

Aleyda Solis spreads energy and knowledge!

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

How-to/FAQ was turned down because it was overused.

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

Andrey Lipattsev explaining third-party cooking

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.

Corina Burri

Corina is a SEO professional from Zürich. Since 2016 she's in SEO and has contributed to publications such as SEOFOMO, Tech SEO Tips, or iPullRank. When not grinding, she enjoys exploring Switzerland.

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