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Historically, most readers of my content have not had to worry about spam updates. However, I think many of you have indeed been impacted by the August 26, 2025 spam update. Recently In VP , Head of Search's Liz Reid's interview with WSJ, she said Google has expanded their definition of spam: "We've expanded beyond […]

Today Google's Quality Rater Guidelines updated September 11, 2025 with some minor changes. I think some of these are worth noting however! Three examples were added to the guidelines that I believe are significant as they all instruct the raters to assess content that is an AI Overview. An example was added of an answer […]

The DOJ vs Google trial has finally wrapped up. The closing document is full of interesting insight into how Google’s algorithms work. While the final verdict of the trial is a separate story, the documents released gave us an unprecedented look inside Google's ranking systems. In this article, I’ll share what we learned. It is […]

Let’s take a look at some sites and pages that saw nice improvements following Google’s June 2025 Core Update. We’ll look at specific queries that improved and see if we can determine why Google’s new systems found them helpful. Is MUVERA behind the June core update changes? Updated Aug 5, 2025: I previously speculated that […]

As I write this, the June 2025 core update is rolling out. I highly suspect that this update will implement a new advancement Google has made in search called MUVERA. Update Aug 5, 2025: Google's Gary Illyes said he could not confirm MUVERA was being used in Search but that "we might have something like it." […]

You know that I love talking about vector search. I've had good success optimizing for vector search. Often though, that success does not last. I think I've realized why, and if this thought is true, it may turn out that doing a great job at optimizing for vector search could possibly do more harm than […]

Many SEOs are noticing that Google is indexing less content since late May, 2025. I have access to a bunch of sites in GSC and thought it would be interesting to see what patterns I could find. In most cases, there is a drop in inedexed pages that starts on May 27, 2025. These are […]

I had the privilege of being invited to Google I/O 2025. And boy, what an event!  Google said that AI Mode is the start of a new era, with Search being transformed with Gemini 2.5 at its core. Search is changing dramatically.  I met Google CEO Sundar Pichai and sat in a fireside chat with […]

Google Extended is a control mechanism you can use in your robots.txt file to tell Google not to use your content for training its future Gemini models. It also stops Google from using your content for grounding conversations in Gemini. However, it’s important to know that a Google-Extended disallow in your robots.txt does not block Google […]

Google rewards high-quality, people-first content demonstrating E-E-A-T, regardless of whether AI is used, and emphasizes that quality raters penalize low-effort, unoriginal content not specifically AI-generated content. AI can be leveraged as a tool to augment human creativity and research to produce truly original and valuable information, rather than simply paraphrasing what already exists. I have […]