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SEO updates you need to know
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Perplexity launches a Search API. This API will allow developers to access Perplexity 'search evaluation' metrics and integrate this data into other apps and platforms. |
Sponsor: Live podcast in Brighton
Search with Candour and the SEO Mindset podcasts are teaming up for another LIVE podcast - the night before brightonSEO in October!
🗣️ Topic: Social health is the key to career success
📆 Date: Wednesday 22nd October 2025
⌚️ Time: 19:00 - 22:00
📍 Location: Projects the Lanes, Brighton
🎟️ Tickets: Free!
Jack, Sarah & Tazmin will be sharing how to build, nurture, and strengthen authentic connections, so you walk away with tools to create a more connected, fulfilling personal and professional life.
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Search with Candour podcast
Persona for AI keyword research
Season 4: Episode 38
Join hosts Jack Chambers-Ward and Mark Williams-Cook in this week's episode of Search with Candour as they discuss recent Google SERP changes and the impact of AI on keyword research.
Discover why the SEO community is buzzing about Google changing the num100 parameter and how these modifications affect impressions and rank tracking.
Additionally, the dynamic duo share conference experiences, and tease upcoming speaking engagements.
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This week's solicited tips:
Old WordPress is waiting...
Google does not 'prefer' a Wordpress Page vs a Wordpress blog post. Google does not 'prefer' one specific CMS over another. ⤵️
A Wordpress post may behave differently because by default it is internally linked to differently, or a certain CMS maybe not rank as well because of some inherently bad thing that CMS does (and all of them have some), but the point is Google doesn't favour it *because* it is that CMS.
This may sound really obvious to more experienced people out here, but I *still* people saying things like "Google prefers Wordpress sites", or again, on the Good Signals SEO Office Hours podcast, a listener question was if Google prefers WP Posts or Pages!
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Google got you pushing too many query classes?
ICYMI we discovered a way that Google classifies queries from our Google endpoint exploit they paid us $13,337 for🙈
Google assigns almost all queries into 1 of 8 "rq_semantic_query_class" (rq = Refined Query). 🧐
These classes are:
⭐SHORT_FACT e.g: "how much does abiraterone cost in the uk"
⭐OTHER e.g. "what do chefs say about air fryers"
⭐COMPARISON e.g "curtain wall system vs window wall system"
⭐CONSEQUENCE e.g. "what happens to asparagus if you let it grow"
⭐REASON e.g. "why was abilify taken off the market"
⭐DEFINITION e.g. "what is a birthday costume"
⭐INSTRUCTION e.g. "what's the best way to cook an artichoke"
⭐BOOL e.g. "can i become a agile coach with no experience"
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You're one ugly bunch of bytes
"Not all bytes are created equal".
100Kb of Javascript may have more of a performance impact on your website than a "heavier" 1Mb image file.
While browsers are quite efficient at handling images, the process of downloading, parsing, compiling and executing JS is far more nuanced.
This tip came from Martin Splitt during the Tech SEO Summit this year. So you can argue with him if you think it's wrong 🤣
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If it's SXG, we can drop it
If you haven't dropped it already, I wouldn't bother adding Signed Exchanges (SXG) onto your list of wants for performance, and if you have implemented it, it's likely time to remove it ⤵️
As of 2025, Google's SXG cache (webpkgcache) has widely failed to ingest or serve new signed exchanges, resulting in SXG-enabled pages often loading from the origin server instead of instantly from the cache. This negates the main speed and SEO benefits of the SXG system for many sites.
I noticed today that Cloudflare has said their Signed exchanges will be deprecated from October 20th, 2025. If you have got this setup, and haven't been monitoring it closely, it might be worth seeing if it is causing you issues.
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Get to the right TLD!
Choosing the wrong top-level domain can make your SEO efforts a lot harder. It's worth knowing which TLDs are commonly associated with spam 📄
According to Google, "Domain names on challenging TLDs might find that crawling & indexing is slower, even sitemaps may struggle to be considered worthwhile."
Outside of the usual generic TLD (gTLD) and country-code TLD (ccTLD), there is a definite divide between very commonly spammed, cheap TLDs and "the rest".
If you're choosing from "the rest", then you're fine. There isn't really a difference between "premium" TLDs in terms of how they are initially respected by search engines.
As far as I am aware, no search engines publish a list on which TLDs they may treat differently, but there are some great sources available. Spamhaus publishes reputation statistics on TLDs, you can see their top 10 ccTLDs by bad reputation below.
Here's a link to John Mueller's slightly longer explanation of this in a Reddit thread if you're interested, which includes links to other articles and sources on the topic.
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Refer subscribers and earn rewards!
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