SEO news from around the world
Bianca challenged SEO’s obsession with traffic and introduced the “Heavy Hitters” framework for finding and protecting the URLs that convert, even when overall traffic drops. Key takeaways: Shift your reporting…
Expressly paying for links has been out for awhile. Quid Pro No is in. These are some things you can do when a website asks for money in exchange for…
Google improves suspension accuracy and appeal turnaround times, reducing false positives and helping legitimate advertisers resolve issues faster with clearer policy enforcement. The post Google Sharpens Suspension Accuracy and Speeds…
Google updated its review snippet documentation to clarify that each review or rating in structured data should point to one clear target, reducing ambiguity. Google updated its review snippet docs…
This week’s question comes from Evan, who asked: “How do I prevent my PPC budget from getting eaten by branded competitor terms?” It’s a good question, as few things frustrate…
A recent podcast by Ahrefs raised two issues about optimizing for AI search that can cause organizations to underperform and miss out on opportunities to improve sales. The conversation illustrates…
In a recent interview with Stanford University, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman predicted that AI security will become the defining problem of the next phase of AI development, saying that AI…
When running a Meta Ads campaign, creative should be at the center of your strategy. As targeting options have become more limited in the platform from the super-granular segments available…
If 2024 felt like a telenovela, 2025 was the spinoff nobody asked for. Many websites suffered declining clicks due to AI search features, and just as we were getting used…
OpenAI released GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking with updates to conversational style and reasoning capabilities. The updates begin rolling out today to paid users before expanding to free accounts. OpenAI…
YouTube’s Rene Ritchie says the recommendation system relies on audience behavior that only begins once a video is public.. Waiting 24–48 hours offers no benefit. YouTube’s recommendation system relies on…
Google is introducing two AI-powered tools built on Gemini: Ads Advisor in Google Ads and Analytics Advisor in Google Analytics. Availability starts in early December for English-language accounts globally. What’s…
Most SEO professionals obsess over content, links, and technical implementations. We track algorithm updates and audit on-page elements with precision. But there’s one factor that determines whether all that work…
Google Search now supports organization-level shipping policy markup, giving ecommerce websites a code-based way to surface delivery costs and transit times in Search and knowledge panels. When you add ShippingService…
TopRank Marketing and Ascend2 released a survey involving 797 B2B leaders. They discovered that 97% consider thought leadership as essential for achieving success throughout the entire marketing funnel. The report…
For this week’s Ask An SEO, the question asked was: “Do I need to rethink my content strategy for LLMs and how do I get started with that?” To answer,…
Marketing leaders are still budgeting to grow clicks in 2026, even though AI Overviews cut organic traffic in half and AI Mode kills it almost entirely. Image Credit: Kevin Indig…
A recent announcement on the Google Search Central blog gave a Redditor the impression that Google was significantly reducing the use of structured data, causing them to ask if it’s…
Lawyers representing Automattic, the for-profit founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, sent a trademark complaint letter to WordPress developer Kevin Geary, asking him to rebrand his WordPress CSS framework, which…
Whether you call your SEO efforts a strategy, campaign, or channel, many SEO programs start strong but slowly drift. That could be in the form of reports getting routine, dashboards…
Building brand awareness has long been an important but widely overlooked part of SEO. AI Search has brought this activity to the forefront. The following ideas should assist in forming…
Ahrefs analyzed 146 million search results to determine which query types trigger AI Overviews. The research tracked AIO appearance across 86 keyword characteristics. Here’s a concise look at the patterns…
Advertisers on Meta may be unknowingly competing against suspected scam ads that stay in auctions at higher “penalty bid” prices. Internal documents obtained by Reuters estimate that around 10% of…
It’s that time of year again. The John Lewis Christmas ad has dropped – a little earlier than usual – and with it, the annual debate over whether the retailer…
Black Friday doesn’t sneak up on anyone, yet somehow it still catches advertisers off guard every year. Campaigns launch at the last minute, budgets aren’t ready, and tracking issues surface…
This post was sponsored by TAC Marketing. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. After years of trying to understand the black box that is Google search,…
Twenty-five years ago, Google launched a modest advertising product that would evolve into one of the most influential tools in digital marketing. Back then, it was called Google AdWords; today,…
Google’s Preferred Sources tool is meant to let fans of certain websites tell Google they want to see more of their favorite sites in the Top News feature. However, Google…
Search is moving from queries typed into a box to conversations held with systems that understand intent, context, and outcomes. People no longer look for pages. They look for solutions,…
Google warned against relying on tool-generated scores for technical SEO audits. Search Relations team member Martin Splitt outlined a three-step framework in a Search Central Lightning Talk that emphasizes site-specific…