Richard🦜

@nickwilsdon We moved in dec and dealing with the buyers solicitor was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life, we were literally at the last possible moment when it finally went through

Currently selling our house. Stumbling to the finishing line with professional agents and solicitors who desperately need project management training. Someone needs to introduce this into the process, it would be revolutionary for that industry 🙄 Maybe AI agents will save them.

@DeanCruddace @sdbrownlie I've heard positive things about the engagement on blue-sky so going to give that a look this week

@DeanCruddace Got a few, any particular ideas you were after?

@pedrodias Probably so fast we get another sloppy product that only works sometimes

How fast is Google going to move now?

@lilyraynyc I am seeing some absolutely insane growth in impressions and clicks for some of our clients - trying to piece together the info see if there is any trend at the moment

Did something (else) break on Google? I am seeing SO much spam today in top positions. Jeez.

@DeanCruddace How many drinks would I have to buy you to try out our tool & are you at Brighton this Oct?

@lilyraynyc @botify @sitebulb @ahrefs @screamingfrog @sistrix @lumarhq @Oncrawl @semrush We used to have it but no one used it really

First SEO crawler to link up GSC data & visualize traffic patterns on top of website architecture.... take my money. For real. Cough @botify @sitebulb @ahrefs @screamingfrog @sistrix @lumarhq @Oncrawl @semrush PS - enterprise tools should also have crawl visualization kthxbye

@pedrodias It's kind of anecdotal but I have long held a belief that SPA's suffer from poor internal link equity, I don't know that this is to do with JS per se or that it's much harder to keep track of your internal links if they are all generated - this seems to play out in the real world

The most frustrating part of being a professional in SEO is trying to be pragmatic, factual & data-driven in a world where high visibility influencers spin "conspiracy theories". It's refreshing when you can read a logic, well researched piece without all the tinfoilhattery that we usually get exposed to.

Is Anyone else seeing a bunch of weird Rich Results today? not sure if it's just the ones I have searched or if something has gone a bit awry in planet google

@lilyraynyc @ahrefs This seems to lean further into the idea that people are changing their terms to get information from social media - for example adding reddit to a query to get responses from there

More examples of how the SERPs have changed since the start of 2024 for "best" queries using @ahrefs data. Red = affiliate/product review Green = ecomm Orange = UGC/social Screenshot 1: "best jewelry cleaner" Screenshot 2: "best serums for face" Screenshot 3: "best eye mask"

Wat

@DeanCruddace reddit.com/r/LinkedInLuna…

@RyanJones In a way it hasn't changed, the fundamentals still apply and broadly websites don't apply them well enough. I think it's down to how complex websites are, you can't see everything well enough to get your top priorities, but that's just a theory

The SEO industry is in a weird place. Most people's mental model of how search engines work, and checklists of SEO best practices really haven't been updated in decades. When people try to evolve they're met with resistance and spite. Everybody is too concerned with proving their biases than science and data. It's sad.

We have two roles out at the moment for Torque - an SEO program manager and entry-level SEO position. Both remote roles. You can see more below at the fantastic Remoters.net site run by @aleyda (which I highly recommend for all your job postings). remoters.net/jobs/seo-progr… remoters.net/jobs/entry-lev…

YIKES I'm seeing a surge in Google linking to wrong social profiles in panels. In the screenshots below the socials that I highlighted (blue pointer) are not their real accounts and it seems like these are managed by someone else. Around 4 weeks ago these social links were not there, not sure why Google started to show these and it's not able to pick up the signal that it's not their real accounts. PS - It's happening at scale I just explored many names and found links to wrong social profiles. Some examples here 👇

@darth_na @RemcoTensen @seo_theory @gfiorelli1 @pedrodias I actually think it's a touch worse that what Pedro stated, there are strong conclusions being drawn from that information without context.

@RemcoTensen @seo_theory @gfiorelli1 @pedrodias @Rick_BarK How is the NDA irrelevant? He could lose everything. And - he did take a position, right at the start. "... There's nothing worse than information without context ..."

There's nothing worse than information without context.

@pedrodias I am having a read and whilst I think it's extremely important for the SEO industry I am not sure I agree with many of the conclusions and data interpretations. I worry where this leads

Also, there’s no point in trying to explain anything to someone that only accepts what aligns with their predefined assumptions and biases.

@lilyraynyc There is an assumption that LLM's will improve over time but actually I think we are likely heading towards it getting a lot worse before it gets better - LLM's are already ingesting generated content and getting weirder it's like a misinformation campaign but super sped up

Listen, I understand AI Overviews will improve over time. I totally get it. The part I struggle with is that we are *still here* after over one year of the thing being tested in Google Labs. It’s WAY too easy to get this thing to spit out dangerous medical advice, extremely offensive content, factual inaccuracies, bad math, made up words, illogical statements etc. AI is obviously impressive but it’s nowhere near ready to provide the “single correct answer” - don’t we have enough examples of that yet? But yeah, let’s start putting advertisers in there by default too now. What could go wrong? Not sure I’d want my ad showing up next to an answer suggesting users drink urine to treat medical issues - because that happened not once, but twice IN THE PAST MONTH.

@searchliaison @Katie16282772 @dannysullivan This is a huge amount of detail! love it. With regards algo spam is there any way you could chop them up a bit in terms of reporting and maybe feedback useful things like "you have too many ads, you have very little unique content" give yourself wiggle room for real spammers?

Two different things. A site could have an algorithmic spam action. A site could be not ranking well because other systems that *are not about spam* just don't see it as helpful. I've looked at many sites where people have complained about losing rankings and decide they have a algorithmic spam action against them, but they don't. That's why I'm supportive of the idea we'd perhaps share as much in Search Console. That maybe you could go into Search Console and if you have an algorithmic action, you'd see a notice just like if you have a manual action. I was just talking about this with some folks on the search team last week, and I expect to revisit the idea. It's not a new idea, either. It's challenging, however, in two key ways. First, there are some sites that do really bad spamming. Anyone who thinks that's not them -- you're right, it probably isn't. Those that do, they know. And if you tell them what the algorithm thinks is spam, then they can adjust and try to game it -- not good for anyone, searchers or other sites. Second, there's no way to "manually" lift an algo action. It's the algorithm. It's not focusing on a specific site. It doesn't have a list of sites added to it. It's automatically understanding patterns that make it think "across all this content, I see these patterns, and this makes me think generally I see spam here." So there's no way to go in and somehow "remove" a site, if that makes sense. With an actual manual action, we can -- because an action was placed against a specific site. And ... I'm greatly sympathetic to the idea that with a manual action, you can file for reconsideration and get the manual action removed versus with the algo, a sense of not only do I not know, but if I did, I can't even talk to someone about it. One thing I'm wondering is if there's a way, at least as a start, that we could let people who got notifications say "Not spam!" kind of like with email. And maybe we could use those reports in aggregate to better improve the automated spam systems overall. Of course, the challenge is actual people who are knowingly spamming might say the same thing, so it takes some thinking about how we might come up with a system that would be useful. Part of what I'm hoping to talk to folks more internally about. Before I leave the spam thing -- you don't really want to think "Oh, I just wish I had a manual action, that would be so much easier." You really don't want your individual site coming the attention of our spam analysts. First, it's not like manual actions are somehow instantly processed. Second, it's just something we know about a site going forward, especially if it says it has change but hasn't really. Moving away from spam, we do have various systems that try to determine how helpful, useful and reliable individual content and sites are (and they're not perfect, as I've said many times before, anticipating a chorus of "whatabouts....." Some people who think they are impacted by this, I've looked at the same data they can see in Search Console and ... not really. Some of them ranking really well. But they've moved down a bit in small positions enough that the traffic drop is notable. They assume they have fundamental issues but don't, really -- which is why we added a whole section about this to our debugging traffic drops page: #small" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">developers.google.com/search/docs/mo… But some clearly have had large drops. Another thing I've been discussing, and I'm not alone in this, is could we do more in Search Console to show some of these indicators. This is all challenging similar to all the stuff I said about spam, about how not wanting to let the systems get gamed, and also how there's then no button we would push that's like "actually more useful than our automated systems think -- rank it better!" But maybe there's a way we can find to share more, in a way that helps everyone and coupled with better guidance, would help creators. Which is a lot of words. But I'll end on this, I've spent a huge amount of time looking at the feedback over the past few months, diving deep into sites, writing up thoughts and talking with people internally. I fully recognize that there are "small" or "independent" or whatever you want to call them sites that are diligently producing great content but our systems aren't recognizing it as well as they should (there's also a lot of really poor content that our systems are indeed recognizing, and there's also great content that is doing very well -- but those doing very well with great stuff tend not to talk about that on the socials). I'd like to see us do better with that subset I mentioned, the great content not well recognized. Better in helping to guide away from maybe unhelpful things that have been learned by others? By better guidance. Maybe better reporting. And some other things I'm pondering we might try. I just can't do that overnight, nor can I do it myself, nor is is the primary thing I'm responsible. I work with other teams and suggest, encourage, recommend -- but other teams have to go-ahead on stuff. And they also have to balance various trade-offs and other things. But why I can do -- have been doing and will continue to do -- is take the external feedback, channel that back to various teams and provided advocacy and recommendations in ways that I think would help all around.

@Pilestedt how would you feel about making the ballistic shield work as a sledge on snowy/dusty planets - feels key for speedy democracy