💩

​Google's AI Overviews continue to spiral, with Google suggesting people put glue on pizza, jump off a bridge if they are depressed, and stating that Barack Obama was the one Muslim president of the United States.

🤷🏽‍♂️

​Google CEO, Sundar Pichai has said there is currently "no solution" to Google AI Overviews providing bad information, as hallucinations are an "inherent feature" of Large Language Models (LLMs).

🕵️‍♀️

​Currently, AI Overviews are only appearing for logged-in users. This makes it hard for third-party monitoring tools to get reliable, widespread data on their appearance.

🔥

​A Microsoft outage on the 23rd May impacted Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT bringing down both web and app search for millions of users across across Asia and Europe.

🐸

​The v20 release of Screaming Frog includes the ability to execute custom JS during a crawl. This allows for the integration of APIs for tasks such as real-time content quality analysis.

📊

​Google's Gemini launched new data analysis capabilities on 21st May. This update allows you to upload a spreadsheet and Gemini can analyse your data, make charts and uncover insights.

📆

​Google has bizarrely confirmed the algorithmic portion of the "site reputation abuse" update has not gone live, after telling us previously this was rolling out on 5th May. Google has said they'll be "very clear" when they roll out...

😱

​Ex-Googler of over a decade, Scott Jenson, says that Google's drive on "AI Projects" is driven by "mindless panic", and reminds him of the Google+ launch 13 years ago. Some SEOs believe AI Overviews will be rolled back soon.

Understanding users beyond 'keywords' with live data and intent clustering by Google

AlsoAsked allows you to quickly mine live "People Also Ask" data, the freshest source of consumer intent data, for understanding what users are searching about beyond 'keywords' and what you should be writing about.

Get 90 searches per month with no account creation, for free.

Don't put keywords in GBP names

Yes, it will help you rank and you can get away with it for a while, however, if you add keywords into your Google Business Profile names (that aren't your business name), it can get you penalised. 🤑

Not worth the risk!

View-all is usually better than pagination

With a reasonable number of results, a 'view all page' is generally optimal over paginated content. Google has previously said: "To improve the user experience when we detect that a content series (e.g. page-1.html, page-2.html, etc.) also contains a single-page version (e.g. page-all.html), we’re now making a larger effort to return the single-page version in search results.

If you must break content over multiple pages, there are multiple options such as Load More or Infinite scroll, each with its own pros, cons and technical considerations. I've seen sites accidentally cut off large swathes of their product range by implementing these incorrectly!

What to do when changing images during a migration

When you're doing a website migration, if you're getting image traffic you should ideally migrate and redirect all of your images too - but what happens if you're redoing all of your images? I had this situation and found a solution that worked really well. ⬇️
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This was an e-commerce client getting approximately 80,000 clicks from their product imagery, but they were redoing it all during the site rebuild and migration. It became complex trying to map redirects for old product images to new ones, so we ended up doing something else: We simply copied the asset directory with images over to the new site so they were accessible on the same URLs. The result was:
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✅ The images stayed ranking and if a user clicked to visit the source, they followed the normal URL redirect and ended up on the correct page
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✅ Many of the new images started to rank for similar terms - so in some instances, we had double images leading to even more traffic!
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The best solution is sometimes the least complex 😊

Take "Keyword Difficulty" with a big pinch of salt

I have never paid attention to a "Keyword Difficulty" metric for my whole SEO career, and I think you should ignore them too. 🔥

Firstly, it's a proprietary metric that is calculated differently by many different tool vendors, so be very careful if you are going to make any decisions based on this metric! The image above is just one example Chris Ridley found where SEMrush and Ahrefs rated the same keyword as "Very Hard" and "Easy". 😐

Secondly, 'difficulty' is subjective to the ranking power of your site. Your brand new website with 6 links is going to find it "very hard" to rank for almost anything, but that 12-year-old 1.2M link behemoth is going to find it "very easy".

Reminder: Ranking isn't using GA data

Google does not use data from Google Analytics to decide how to rank your website. Nope. 🛑

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~Mark Williams-Cook