SEO From The Front Lines

Google recently rolled out two additional waves of manual actions for site reputation abuse targeting the EU (including Germany in the second wave). As I’ve been analyzing those drops, I noticed that sites are handling content violating the spam policy in several ways (and some are not the correct ways). For example, disallowing via robots.txt and canonicalizing are NOT valid approaches. Instead, noindexing or removing the content ...

GSC data for AI overviews, including clicks and click-through rate, has been nearly impossible to view... UNTIL NOW. But there's a catch. You need a manual action! My latest episode covers my blog post titled The Twiddler That Didn’t Twiddle – How To Track Clicks and Click Through Rate For Google’s AI Overviews (but only if you have a manual action.)

In this video I explain the loophole in Google right now where sites with...

Interested in the amount of collateral damage that can occur when major Google algorithm updates roll out? Well, 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 “Soc...

I cover the December 2024 Spam Update including key information about the rollout, what the update targeted, recovery from spam updates, and the difference between spam updates and link spam updates. Then I cover five case studies spanning doorway pages, scaled content abuse, AI-generated content, and more. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to the December Spam Update 01:08 Google's Spam Policies 02:17 Recovery from spam updates 03:21...

OpenAI revealed some important new features for ChatGPT Search as part of its 12 days of ship-mas in December. Day 8 yielded local search with maps integration, new treatment for navigational queries (which opens up ad opportunities), and then live mode now having the ability to tap into Search for up-to-date information. I cover each of these features and then end with a live demo of ChatGPT live mode with Search. Blog post cove...

Learn why it’s important to fully understand all of the subdomains for your site. I have come across this situation a number of times over the years and I’ve seen some ugly situations. There are times companies don’t realize there are subdomains running either with legacy content, hacked content, spammy content, or even subdomains with malware or other security issues. And those issues can impact the site SEO-wise and ad-wise. I co...

Episode 18 of 'SEO From The Front Lines", I cover my blog post regarding site-level impact on rankings versus page-level. It's an incredibly important topic that site owners and SEOs need to understand. Based on Pandu Nayak’s comments at a recent creator summit where he said Google only using page-level ranking signals, and NOT site-wide signals, I decided to use the ‘Gabeback Machine’ to prove that statement wrong. Over the years,...

In episode 17, I cover some huge visibility drops for sites that are violating Google's 'Site reputation abuse' spam policy. For example, some prominent sites are dropping over time including some of the largest publishers on the web. Over time, Google seems to have algorithmically hit large publishers with affiliate sections of their sites, including Forbes, Fortune, CNN Underscored, WSJ Buyside, Marketwatch Guides, and more. It m...

I cover two case studies underscoring the importance of catching sneaky mobile SEO problems in Google's mobile-first indexing world. The first case study involves canonical tags that weren't being published on mobile versions of the pages across a site with 100K+ urls. The second case involves thin content becoming even *thinner* since less content was being published on mobile versions of the pages. That was on a stie with 40M url...

In this episode of “SEO From The Front Lines”, I cover the ranking swings and volatility in Google Search post-August core update. There has been a lot of chatter about ranking changes AFTER the Google August 2024 core update rolled out. After digging in, I noticed a ton of volatility across several dates post-core update. And beyond that, I noticed that a number of sites heavily impacted by the August 24th tremor have started to r...

In Episode 14 of ‘SEO From The Front Lines”, I cover how some publishers are hijacking the browser back button and providing a feed of articles that drives users to more publisher content, including sponsored content and ads. That’s versus allowing them to return to the sites they visited from… Disabling, or hijacking the back button, is a tricky and deceptive tactic, since users might not know they actually stayed on the same site...

Google’s August 2024 broad core update finally completed on September 3, 2024 after a 19-day rollout. It was a huge update that impacted many sites across the web. In the final episode of core update notes, I cover HCU(X) sites recovering, the big tremor from 8/24 into 8/25, forums seeing volatility, an update on a site pumping out a ton of AI content, and then how site owners can move forward after the update. That includes unders...

This is Part 3 of "Core Update Notes" for the August broad core update. I cover an update on September Helpful Content Updates sites (HCUX), tremors I'm seeing during the update, sites violating Google's Site Reputation Abuse spam policy, how YMYL sites can surge even with a fraction of the links of competitors, how Google will eventually catch up with sites heavily publishing AI-generated content without human in...

Part 2 of "Core Update Notes" for the August Google broad core update. I cover the latest with helpful content update sites surging back from the dead, reviews sites also rising from the ashes, Google confirming that AI overview rankings can be impacted by broad core updates, how SERP features could be impacted during core updates, and the connection between the May 3rd and May 10th unconfirmed updates and the August core...

Episode 10 of 'SEO From The Front Lines" covers what I'm seeing so far with the August 2024 core update. Includes sites heavily impacted by the September Helpful Content Update surging back, if Google is handling site reputation abuse algorithmically, the ranking bug that happened while the core update started rolling out, impact to YMYL sites, and more.

00:00 August 19th "Core Update Notes" - What I...

With Google's hidden gems update in the fall of 2023, both Reddit and Quora surged like crazy. Although many are focused on the surge of Reddit, with good reason, it's important to understand that many forums surged in the fall of 2023. I have covered this heavily on X over time. So I just rank the visibility numbers for 97 forums I'm tracking across verticals. The percentage change year-over-year was wild. 88% of the f...

While checking Bing Webmaster Tools recently, I noticed a huge change across sites starting on May 29, 2024. The more I dug in, the more volatility I saw. It sure looks like Bing pushed some type of large algorithm change that impacted many sites across the web. The surges and drops I'm seeing are across sites and verticals, so it's not just one niche. I reached out to Bing's Fabrice Canel to see if Bing pushed an updat...

Learn why an algorithmic approach to enforcing Google's site reputation abuse policy is the way forward. I first cover manual actions Google applied on May 7, 2024 and how sites handled the content violating the site reputation abuse spam policy. Then I explain why blocking via robots.txt isn't a valid approach to blocking that content, as well as how noindexing content can also go haywire. I end the podcast covering how so...

Google was testing a change to how it provides links in AI Overviews in the search results. I was in the test last week and captured some video of it in action. The new treatment provides an overlay of search results on top of the AI overview. You can tap a group of favicons to see all of the pages where the AI sourced the answer from. In addition, there were small link icons that would trigger a smaller overlay containing the page...