#Google SEO algorithm

[googleupdates-world]

Demystifying Google's SEO Algorithm: A Guide to Higher Rankings

Discover the inner workings of Google SEO algorithm and gain insights into optimizing your website for better search engine rankings. Our comprehensive guide explores the factors that influence your online visibility and offers practical tips to improve your SEO strategy. Stay ahead in the digital landscape by understanding how Google's algorithm can work in your favor.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[wickedlyqueer]

So the Wicked is Gay video just reach 80k views and 1) I obviously love that it still consistently gets views each day, especially since this video is nearing it's 4 (!) year anniversary.

but 2) i especially love to think that's bc every night about 50 people walk out of the theater and go "hmm 🤨"

[digiligodigital]

Google Algorithm Updates

Early Algorithm Updates (2003–2006) Florida (November 2003) Nofollow (January 2005) Jagger( September 2005) Big Daddy (December 2005)

Mid-2000s Algorithm Updates (2007–2010) Universal Search (May 2007) Vince (February 2009) Caffeine (December 2010) Panda (February 2011)

The Penguin and Hummingbird and Pigeon Era (2012–2013) Penguin (April 2012) Hummingbird (August 2013) Pigeon (July 2014)

Updates to Mobile-Focused Algorithms (2015–2018) Mobile-Friendly Update (April 2015) RankBrain (October 2015) Fred (March 2017) Mobile-First Indexing (March 2018) Recent Algorithm Updates (2018–2023) Medic (August 2018) BERT (October 2019) Broad Core Update (June 2021) Link Spam Update (December 2022)

To Know More About Google Algorithm Updates

[beazt]

I made an angry post about this recently but google has literally become functionally useless over the last few months and like. I don’t think I realized just how horrible it’d be

[aetechdesigns-54]

E-commerce SEO Strategies Unveiled: Boosting Sales and Visibility

In the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce, staying ahead of the competition requires not only a compelling product but also a well-optimized online presence. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the world of E-commerce SEO optimization. No buzzwords, just actionable insights to enhance your online store's visibility and boost sales. Let's get started

Understanding the Basics

To lay a solid foundation, let's start with the basics. E-commerce SEO optimization involves a series of on-page and off-page strategies aimed at improving your website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). This optimization is pivotal for attracting high-quality organic traffic, increasing sales, and staying competitive in the digital marketplace.

Keyword Research

The cornerstone of any successful SEO campaign is thorough keyword research. Begin by compiling a list of relevant keywords that reflect your products, services, and industry. In addition to your primary keywords, consider long-tail keywords, as they often have less competition and can yield highly targeted traffic. For instance, if you're a digital marketing agency in Seattle, keywords like "digital marketing services in Seattle" and "Seattle SEO company" are goldmines.

On-Page Optimization

High-Quality Content: Your website's content should not only be unique but also provide value to your audience. Craft product descriptions, blog posts, and landing pages that resonate with your target audience. Incorporate the primary and long-tail keywords naturally within the content while maintaining readability and a professional writing style.

Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Ensure that each page has a unique and descriptive title tag and meta description. These elements should include relevant keywords and provide a concise summary of the page's content. This encourages users to click through to your website from the search results.

Header Tags: Use header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to structure your content. This not only improves readability but also helps search engines understand the hierarchy of information on your pages.

User Experience (UX) Matters

Google values user experience, so make sure your website is user-friendly. Optimize for mobile devices, improve page load times, and ensure intuitive navigation. A seamless UX not only pleases visitors but also satisfies search engine algorithms.

Backlink Building

Off-page SEO is as crucial as on-page optimization. Seek high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry. Guest posting, influencer collaborations, and participating in industry forums can all help in this regard.

Monitoring and Analytics

Track your SEO efforts using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Regularly review your website's performance, make necessary adjustments, and stay updated on SEO trends and algorithm changes.

Conclusion:

In the ever-competitive world of e-commerce, mastering SEO optimization is your key to success. By adhering to these strategies and tips, you can enhance your website's visibility, drive organic traffic, and ultimately boost your sales. If you're seeking expert assistance, consider partnering with AE Tech Design Agency, your trusted SEO company in Seattle. Contact us today to explore how our digital marketing services can elevate your online presence and drive meaningful results.

Remember, the world of SEO is constantly evolving, so staying informed and adapting your strategies accordingly is essential for long-term success.

[abhay-saxena-seo-expert-delhi]

September 2023 Helpful Content Update

[ryanabramsonpa]

In an age where attention spans are short and digital noise is loud, I believe one thing still cuts through: authenticity.

As a communications consultant and founder of Oakridge Leaders, I’ve seen firsthand how clear, honest, and positive storytelling can outperform flashy gimmicks. You don’t need to scream to be heard — you need to connect.

I’ve spent more than two decades helping organizations shape messages that matter. Whether I’m building a digital marketing strategy, ghostwriting a thought leadership piece, or coaching someone to deliver their first keynote, I keep one question in mind:

“Does this feel real?”

Because the truth is, people can tell.

📌 The Power of Human-Centered Messaging

AI is powerful — I use it every day — but the best results happen when machines help humans be more human. I help brands combine:

SEO smarts

Video storytelling

Short-form social strategy

And real human emotion

To craft campaigns that don’t just get seen… they get remembered.

Want proof? Just take a look at what we’ve been creating at Oakridge Leaders.

📍 Why Local Still Matters (Especially in Bucks County & Philly)

I love my hometown of Langhorne, PA — and the incredible Bucks County and Philadelphia communities I work with. Whether it’s highlighting a local business, managing crisis communications, or building nonprofit fundraising strategies, I’m always thinking about the people on the other side of the message.

Check out some of my recent local posts:

🏡 Why Stone Meadows Farm in Langhorne Matters

🍽️ My blog on Bar Hygge — food, community, and vibes

[cubicdigital]

Google June 2025 Core Update Explained by SEO Specialists

Cubic Digital breaks down the Google June 2025 Core Update to help you understand its effects on rankings, content visibility, and traffic trends. We highlight what's new in the algorithm and offer guidance to realign your SEO strategy. Whether you’ve seen gains or losses, our expert team in Ahmedabad is here to support your next move. Stay ahead in the digital game with our proven strategies and search insights.

[dailymore-news]

7 Free AI Tools Every Content Creator Needs

7 Free AI Tools Every Content Creator Needs   The following free AI tools offer powerful functionalities that can streamline your content creation process, enhance quality, and boost your SEO efforts.   1. Google Bard / ChatGPT (and other Large Language Models) for Content Generation & Brainstorming Large Language Models (LLMs) like Google Bard and ChatGPT have become indispensable for content…

[n-2-b]

In the current competitive digital landscape, it’s essential to go beyond simply knowing who your customers are; understanding their long-term value is critical for effective strategy development. This is where it plays a crucial role. By calculating CLV, businesses can gain insights into the future profitability of their customer relationships, allowing for more informed decision-making and targeted marketing efforts

In today’s hyper-competitive digital landscape, simply knowing who your customers are is no longer enough. The real strategy begins when you understand what each customer is worth over time, and that’s where Customer Lifetime Value comes into play.

What is CLV and Why Is It So Important?

Customer Lifetime Value refers to the total net profit a business expects to earn from a customer throughout the entire duration of their relationship. Unlike short-term metrics such as daily sales or web traffic, CLV shifts your focus to long-term business health. It helps brands move from chasing one-time buyers to cultivating loyal customers who return again and again.

Understanding CLV allows businesses to:

Allocate marketing budgets more wisely

Design customer experiences that foster loyalty

Increase profitability without increasing acquisition costs

To bring this to life, let’s explore 7 essential ways CLV can provide profitability in your digital marketing efforts.

[digitalmarketingpta]

Navigating Google's Movera Update: What Top SEO Companies in South Africa Must Know for 2025

The digital currents never cease to shift, and in 2025, the latest ripple to become a wave is what the SEO world is now dubbing the “Movera Update.” While Google remains tight-lipped about official names, the industry consensus points to a significant refinement in how AI-driven search operates, particularly impacting content quality, user intent fulfillment, and the subtle dance between organic…