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SEO updates you need to know
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Google has added two new AI user agents. These agents were discovered via Amazon's robots.txt. It's worth checking your server logs as this is almost certainly the first step towards an AI agent-driven web. |
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Search with Candour podcast
You need to start creating video content
Season 4: Episode 27
In this episode, Jack Chambers-Ward is joined by Harry Evans from Twelve Twenty Five to discuss the significance of incorporating video content into SEO and social media strategies for 2025.
Together, they explore why video content is a game-changer, share practical tips to get started, and provide insights on engaging your audience effectively.
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This week's solicited tips:
Nothing is true, everything is permitted
Working in-house with a small SEO budget?
Execution is everything.
You probably need to spend less money on tools, and less time on measurement. (This is coming from someone that sells an SEO tool).
This came up with my discussion with Sean Barber last week. I think some small SEO efforts spend too much of their time on and money on reporting, measuring and metrics instead of doing.
🔱 Fact: An experienced SEO can do a lot of SEO without many tools. If the basics haven’t been done, you don’t need a tool to tell you that. A lot of the time, a tool is reducing the effort by 80% to find that last 20% of gains (which is still huge).
🔨 Things like technical audits of course are much faster with tools. But some tools like Sitebulb mean you can just get it for 1 month, run your audit and take that with you. You don’t need to be buying years of subscriptions if you’re penny saving.
📊 This will upset people; but a lot of the value placed on metrics are only there to comfort people that don’t understand SEO. It’s nice to feel the warm coddle of a DA metric for a link, or see one specific key phrase that you happen to be tracking go up in rankings - but good work is good work, and your business will march on whether you measure these things or not.
📈 If you only have a few days to spend on SEO, why would you spend half that time on reporting and measuring if you could DOUBLE your actions that give results? Reporting and measurement only start to make more sense as they become a smaller percentage of your time, and the incremental gain you get from them is magnified by bigger results.
👐 I am not saying “don’t use any tools”. I am not saying “tools are bad or useless”. I am saying, I have definitely seen many instances where organisations were spending such a disproportionate amount of time planning, talking about, measuring, and almost no time on execution.
Execution is everything.
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Th-th-th-that's SEO, folks
One of the parameters we found in the Google exploit we reported last year was a BOOL called “contextual_porky_pig_answer”. At the time, it baffled me as to what it is - but now, thanks to the DOJ leaks, we know! ⤵️
The DOJ documents said this: “If people query about the relation of a famous person, Knowledge Graph tells traditional search the name of the relation and the famous person, to improve search results - Barack Obama’s wife’s height query example.”
❓ What does this mean? It means if you do a search for “Barack Obama’s wife height”, what Google’s systems are doing in the background is telling the traditional search “Michelle Obama height” is what it is looking for.
This is one of the (many) reasons why you don’t need to necessarily focus on “the keywords” in a query, and more on the intent of the query.
All things people equal, it is likely a page with “Michelle Obama’s height” could outrank a page of “Barack Obama’s wife height”, because it is not reflecting what the traditional search is looking for, regardless of the query the user typed.
The more you know! 😇
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We work in the dark to serve the light
If you're a 'real' brand or company, blackhat SEO is like robbing a bank but not being able to leave the scene of the crime. 👮♂️
🗨️ "But I won't get caught because Google can't detect [insert reason]".
🖐 Yet. You're assuming technology is NEVER going to improve. It will. Rather than building equity by asking "is there benefit to this activity outside of search?", you'll be laying people off and picking up the pieces in a few years trying to work out how to rebuild.
🗨️ "I can't see how Google could detect [obvious spam]".
🧠 and you probably can't explain the Riemann Hypothesis either. Maybe it's not because it can't be done, but because you're not a highly-specialised search engineer?
Yes, it can work. Until it doesn't.
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You've lost so much already, you can't bare to lose more
If you are redirecting your website, DO NOT use the 'Removals' tool in GSC on the old site. 🛑
I've seen people try and use this tool to stop old URLs from appearing in the SERPs. If they are redirected correctly with permanent redirects, you will see the SERP listings change in time, have patience! 🧘♂️
It won't make the site move go any faster. It only impacts what's visible in Search so it could end up hurting you in the short-term.
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Content will not be captive to Instagram's design
As of yesterday, content from public, professional Instagram accounts belonging to people over 18 will be indexed by Google and Bing by default. 🤳
This means posts, reels, and videos can appear directly in Google results and users no longer need to log in to Instagram to view indexed content.
In turn, this data will likely be able to be accessed by AI search during RAG and for search-engine run AI search, may be fed into training data.
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Refer subscribers and earn rewards!
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