Blog

AI Mode is a new experimental feature, currently available in Google Labs. It’s quite possible that AI Mode becomes the regular way that people search.  Let’s have an early look at AI mode, understanding that it is currently an experiment and will change over time. It turns out that the websites shown in AI mode […]

If you're looking to understand how Google ranks content for relevance and helpfulness, especially after recent updates like the March 2024 core update, this article breaks down Google's key signals: meaning, relevance, quality, usability, and context. To improve your SEO, focus on creating original, high-quality content that deeply satisfies user intent, demonstrates expertise and authority […]

I finally dug into the January 2025 update of the rater guidelines and there are a lot of changes! (Here is the previous version if you want to compare.) Why do we care about the QRG? While the quality raters have no direct effect on your rankings, their ratings help Google determine whether the changes […]

For my monthly clients, I’ve been having regular conversations with ChatGPT and Gemini to see whether the tools recommend them. For one client, ChatGPT referenced competitors, but not them. This was interesting. "The algorithm prioritizes widely recognized sources (sounds like EEAT to me!), recent updates, or content that matches the search phrasing." Naturally, I next asked how they […]

E-E-A-T is Google's way of taking all of the signals they have available to them to determine whether you are known as a go-to source for your topics. In this post we'll explore using LLMs to learn more about your E-E-A-T, and better yet, get inspiration on how to improve upon it. When it comes […]

The December core update was a quick one, running from December 12-18, 2024. Following this,  Google launched a surprise spam update only days after the core update finished. It ran from December 19-26.  There are many comments on Barry Schwartz's article on the spam update with site owners reporting significant declines in traffic. Some are […]

Google recently held an event in which they invited a small group of website owners who had been impacted strongly by the helpful content system. I’ll recap some of the great blog posts and tweet threads written about this. Then, I’d like to think upon what we can learn from what Google representatives said. The […]

Google has updated their documentation on their spam policies. This latest update to the spam guidelines has several changes I thought were interesting enough to write about. 1. Manipulation of search = spam Google added this to the beginning of their document:   It's no surprise that content designed to deceive users is spam, but this […]

Twiddlers are C++ code objects used in Google’s ranking algorithms that help Google re-order search results. They are used in a Google system called Superroot which is Google’s ranking framework. I came across this 2017 Google document on Twiddlers upon reading Mario Fischer’s excellent breakdown of what we can learn about how ranking works based […]

The August core update is here! Google’s documentation on core updates has changed significantly. Let’s take a look at what has changed.  Here’s the archived version of the previous document. The purpose of this update is to show more content that people genuinely find useful Google’s announcement of the core update says that they are […]