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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 […]

AI Mode is a new experimental feature, currently available in Google Labs. It’s quite possible that AI Mode becomes the regular way that people search.  Let’s have an early look at AI mode, understanding that it is currently an experiment and will change over time. It turns out that the websites shown in AI mode […]

If you're looking to understand how Google ranks content for relevance and helpfulness, especially after recent updates like the March 2024 core update, this article breaks down Google's key signals: meaning, relevance, quality, usability, and context. To improve your SEO, focus on creating original, high-quality content that deeply satisfies user intent, demonstrates expertise and authority […]

I finally dug into the January 2025 update of the rater guidelines and there are a lot of changes! (Here is the previous version if you want to compare.) Why do we care about the QRG? While the quality raters have no direct effect on your rankings, their ratings help Google determine whether the changes […]

For my monthly clients, I’ve been having regular conversations with ChatGPT and Gemini to see whether the tools recommend them. For one client, ChatGPT referenced competitors, but not them. This was interesting. "The algorithm prioritizes widely recognized sources (sounds like EEAT to me!), recent updates, or content that matches the search phrasing." Naturally, I next asked how they […]

E-E-A-T is Google's way of taking all of the signals they have available to them to determine whether you are known as a go-to source for your topics. In this post we'll explore using LLMs to learn more about your E-E-A-T, and better yet, get inspiration on how to improve upon it. When it comes […]

The December core update was a quick one, running from December 12-18, 2024. Following this,  Google launched a surprise spam update only days after the core update finished. It ran from December 19-26.  There are many comments on Barry Schwartz's article on the spam update with site owners reporting significant declines in traffic. Some are […]