AI Mode officially started rolling out as a labs experiment on March 5, 2025, and I received access late the following day. Needless to say, I’ve been testing AI Mode heavily since gaining access. I’ll provide some screenshots in this post, but you can always check my X thread where I’ve been providing videos of … Read more
I’ve noticed a trend across a number of sites where the prevalence of featured snippets is dropping over time while AI overviews replace them. And that can obviously lead to a decrease in traffic since click-through rate from AI overviews is inherently going to be lower, and sometimes a lot lower. I haven’t seen this … Read more
Four methods and only two are correct. In this article, I’ll cover the various ways I have seen site owners try to block content that’s violating Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy (including actual examples of how those methods worked, or didn’t). Update: March 12, 2025Google just updated its documentation for manual actions clearly explaining … Read more
Yes, you read that correctly. There’s a loophole in Google right now where sites with manual actions are removed, or heavily demoted, from the 10-blue links but can still rank in AI overviews. And in a weird twist, that creates a unique opportunity to better understand clicks and click through rate for AIOs. That’s until … 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
We are quickly witnessing the Googlization of ChatGPT and the ChatGPTization of Google Search. It’s a fascinating time to be involved in Search, that’s for sure. I cover several new ChatGPT Search features announced as part of OpenAI’s Ship-mas. Update 2/7/25: OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Search is now available for all users, even non-logged in … Read more
Whenever I jump into helping a new client, it’s always interesting to get a lay of the land. For example, manually reviewing the site, scanning the GSC reporting, checking third-party visibility tools, triggering an initial crawl of the site, etc. And for large-scale and complex sites, you just never know what you’re going to find. … Read more
It’s not like all urls on a site suddenly become low quality overnight… It’s a site-level adjustment that can impact rankings across an entire site. Update: November 19, 2024: Google just updated its “Guide to Search ranking systems” page to include a paragraph right up top about using site-wide signals and classifiers. You can read … Read more
Update: I heard from Google’s Danny Sullivan and he confirmed that Google is not testing its ‘Site reputation abuse’ algorithm at this time. So the drops are from other changes that Google is pushing that must be impacting those affiliate directories strongly. Update 2: I just received a response from Google after following up to … Read more
In 2017 I wrote a post covering the risks of having mobile SEO problems as Google’s move to mobile-first indexing was approaching. That post focused more on sites running m-dots and the various issues that could arise based on Google’s plans to use the mobile version of a page for indexing. Well, we’re now in … Read more
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