Not long after the March 2026 broad core update completed, we had another core update to deal with. And this one was much more powerful than the March update… The May 2026 broad core update started rolling out on May 21, 2026 and it caused a ton of volatility across verticals and countries. It took … Read more
On April 13, 2026 Google announced a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”. That’s when a site owner inhibits users from returning to the last page they visited from in an attempt to trick them into remaining on their site. Those sites typically show a page with even more content and ads, and it … Read more
I cover the December 2025 broad core update, which was a huge Google algorithm update that rolled out right in the middle of the holiday season. My post covers heavy YMYL impact, AI Overviews and AI Mode visibility changes, a big tremor on 12/20, the power and importance of Navboost, news publisher impact, forums impact, … Read more
Update 4: October 18, 2025Well, it sure seems that the robots.txt change that Wirecutter implemented on September 6, 2025 is working. Search visibility has been steadily increasing since then and is almost back to where they were in July 2025. I’ll keep an eye on this and see how things progress over time. But for … Read more
We were due for a broad core update, and a broad core update we received. The June 2025 Google core update was a red-hot update that rolled out on June 30th right before the July 4th holiday weekend. The update took 16 days to fully roll out, which was shorter than Google said it could … Read more
With the rise and surge of AI Overviews, and soon AI Mode, site owners are dealing with an unprecedented situation from a search traffic standpoint. Impressions in search might be stable, or even increasing, yet clicks might be dropping. And that’s often due to AI Overviews ranking in the SERPs for important queries that typically … Read more
Update: June 11, 2025Google finally sent me a statement after I asked if they sanctioned the Reddit AI translation situation. I also asked if it was ok now to use AI translations since Reddit was heavily doing that across countries. They have published tens of millions of urls with AI-translated content. Like I originally covered … Read more
When a major algorithm update rolls out, it’s often helpful to view hourly data in Google Analytics to see the impact in near-real time. If a site is impacted heavily (surging or dropping), you can typically see when the update actually lands and the stark difference in traffic when that happens. One of my most … Read more
But should rankings in Google be surging for that AI translated content? In my post I explain the Reddit surge across countries, the translated content that’s ranking well, what Google’s stance has been about machine translating content, and more. Update: June 12, 2025Google finally sent me a statement about Reddit’s AI translation situation after I … Read more
A recent appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast provides a great explanation of how classifiers, confidence levels, and precision work with machine learning algorithms. He also covered how adjusting confidence can impact the amount of collateral damage occurring when updates roll out. And if you swap “Social” for “Search”, Zuckerberg could be … Read more
The end of 2024 was a crazy time SEO-wise with Google pushing multiple major updates at the end of the year (and throughout the holiday shopping season). First, we had the November 2024 core update, which rolled out on November 11th and took over three weeks to complete. Then we had one week off before … Read more
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