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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 […]

At Google’s Cloud Next 2025 event they announced a new protocol for AI agents to talk to other AI agents. Agent2Agent protocol will radically change how the web works. This isn’t some obscure possibility that may happen in the future. It’s here now!  In a recent interview, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, whose company is a […]

Whenever Google announces a new core update, such as the March 2025 core update announced today, I always want to immediately check the rankings of my clients, especially those who have been trying to recover following a previous core update. Yes, I know that rankings will fluctuate and we should not check until the update […]

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 […]

Google’s latest earnings call was all about AI. AI Overviews are popular (well, I mean, unless you are an SEO). We will see them appear for more queries. Project Mariner and Project Astra are going to change how we interact with computers. And Search is going to change significantly over the next year.  AI Overviews […]

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 […]