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SEO updates you need to know
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Search with Candour podcast
Avoid JavaScript problems in your migrations
Season 4: Episode 10
Join host Jack Chambers-Ward as he sits down with Sam Torres and Tory Gray of Gray Dot Company.
They delve into the intricacies of JavaScript and its impact on website migrations, discussing common issues, best practices, and how to navigate the technical landscape.
The episode also touches on existential dread that comes with the future of AI in search engines, learning JavaScript for SEO, and the importance of brand alignment across digital channels.
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This week's solicited tips:
When you do SEO right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all
This is probably going to be highly unpopular, but in my professional opinion, there is practically no real distinction between good SEO and "GEO" (optimizing to appear in AI search engines). ⤵️
Some facts to consider:
🧠 The base "long-term memory" that is the foundation of LLMs is made during their long training phase. So if your brand appears regularly in the same place as "the thing you want to rank for," then you've got a 'hardcoded' advantage. Those models don't update often, and the scale means your impact will be gradual—but this should be covered by the usual brand activity of people talking about you, PR efforts, etc.
🤖 Most GenAI assistants now employ web search. ChatGPT is leaning on the Bing Index, and studies have shown (check comments for links) that there is a strong correlation between the link profile of a domain and how often that site/brand appears in the answers. Again, similar to the training sets, regularly linked-to content appears more frequently and more prominently in search results fetched by LLMs.
🎲 Monitoring LLM output is very hard. Not only do you have a huge and potentially complex query set over multiple assistants, but the responses are also non-deterministic. You may appear in an answer sometimes and not at other times. This makes monitoring these results highly challenging currently.
I have yet to see convincing evidence either from a "technical standpoint—here is what needs to be done differently" or from a "we did this, and here is how we reliably measured the outcome" perspective that GEO is a distinct thing.
Everything I have seen mentioned—getting talked about a lot on prominent websites, having your brand mentioned in articles, etc.—are all things you should have been doing for SEO! 💯
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We got your distress call and came here as soon as we wanted to
Technical SEO is sometimes about fixing future problems, rather than ‘right now’ problems. “A stitch in time, saves nine” as the saying goes. Here’s an example:
🤓 Tech SEO: “Our new website sometimes adds personalisation query strings onto pages, which are indexable”
👨💼 Boss: “How many of these pages are indexed? What problems is it causing us?”
🤓 Tech SEO: “Well, only 10-15 at the moment, but the site has only been live a few weeks”
👨💼 Boss: “What uplift will be see fixing this, this quarter?”
🤓 Tech SEO: “Well, none”
👨💼 Boss: “Nope”.
~Fast forward 2 years~
🔥 The the 1,000 page website now has 60,000 indexed pages, many duplicate, a canonical nightmare. This will likely be negatively affecting traffic, with duplicate pages, users linking to the “wrong” page, impacting crawling, indexing and ranking.
🤦 At this point, you need to both fix the underlying technical issue (the quick job) AND firefight the symptoms to get yourselves back on track.
An experienced technical SEO will help you spot this kind of problem before you’re suffering from the fallout.
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Shut up and take my meta descriptions
If you’re writing meta descriptions manually, you’re wasting time. If you’re using AI to do it, you’re probably wasting a small amount of time. 🤣
🏁 Some new data of 131 SEO experiments from Ryan Jones at SEOTesting indicates that tests on meta descriptions were overwhelmingly a “fail”. They resulted in no traffic change.
🖱️ You can even go one further, with SearchPilot doing a test just over a year ago showed with 90% confidence level that removing the meta description so it was blank actually resulted in more traffic.
🪤 The “best” meta description will always be query depedent, which is why Google substitutes your work >75% of the time.
In 2025 there are so many things you can be doing to significantly make your businesses and websites more visible, and twiddling with meta descriptions isn’t the one.
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My crawl report is a lot like yours, only more interesting
It's a little bit hidden away in Settings -> Crawl Report, but Google Search Console can show you some of their bot activity, and a lot of people miss it! 👀
This can make you aware of issues, such as if Google determines your Host rate failure was high, and Google had trouble accessing your website 🫠
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Your 404s are bad and you should feel bad
Check your 404 URLs, and check them twice!
This is a rare, but significant issue I've caught a few times with caching ⤵️
🖥️ As one of their standard pre-crawl checks, Sitebulb will request a "made up" URL to make sure the server respond correctly with a 404 Not Found HTTP Header. This is to ensure among other things, you don't generate lots of Soft 404s, or even worse, get these pages indexed.
🤖 A few times, including this year, I have encountered setups which can still generate this problem, but get past this initial 404 check. What I discovered was happening:
1) A user requests a URL that does not exist, the server correctly responds with an HTTP/404 code, and shows the user a "Page Not Found" page.
2) However, because of how the caching is setup on the server, it creates a cached version of the page it has just served.
3) If the user (or anyone) requests that same 'broken' URL, the first thing the server does is check its cache for that page - and it exists! So it will return an HTTP/200 code and then show the user a "Page Not Found" page.
🔥 This could obviously lead to all kinds of other issues. So as standard, I will ping 404 URLs twice to make sure this isn't happening.
But you know what makes Sitebulb so great? I chatted to them about this, and they are going to add it as a standard pre-crawl check. 😎
That's listening to your customers 👏
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