Views: 13Heads Up! Attackers are at it again – purchasing Google Ads targeting keywords related to SEMrush (they also did this back in march). When users search for “SEMrush” or similar terms, a malicious ad appears at the top of the results, leading to a fake SEMrush login page. These pages are well-crafted, closely mimicking the actual SEMrush interface. Unsuspecting…
Search Engine World
Views: 9 In Dec of 2022, Google CEO Sundar Pichai famously called a “code red” meeting. It moved Google to it’s highest threat level in it’s history. Google shipped so many AI products today, that it really appears as though Google has dialed back the threat level. Clearly Google has leveraged the monopoly power of the search engine to…
Views: 28When I posted in the Pubcon Facebook group asking for recommendations on affordable, reliable social media scheduling tools, the thread quickly turned into a crowdsourced review of what is working for digital marketers today. From the sky-high pricing of legacy tools like Hootsuite and Loomly, to praise for leaner options like Publer, Metricool, and Zoho Social, it was clear…
..a must read comprehensive study analyzing 55.8m AIOs across 590m searches. The stunning report includes some sobering statistics for SEO’s. Top 50 domains get 30% of all AIO shoutouts...
The Google PR clown car will be fully loaded and ready to deliver a massive scale of stories this week with Google I/O taking place. Some stuff we are tracking (stop back for updates):
Views: 10There was a search related story on WSJ that had some eyebrow raising quotes in it. The Wall Street Journal article “AI Has Upended the Search Game. Marketers Are Scrambling to Catch Up” highlights the profound impact of artificial intelligence on search behavior and digital marketing strategies. As AI-generated summaries increasingly appear atop search results, traditional SEO tactics are…
Views: 28Europe’s Open Web Index: What SEOs Need to Know Europe is preparing to test something that could impact the foundation of search: the Open Web Index (OWI). It’s a major step toward digital autonomy – both Euro and US based SEOs should be paying attention. What Is the Open Web Index? The OWI is a public infrastructure project designed…
Views: 25Did you know? That the original purpose of YouTube was to be a video dating (ugh, hookup) site? That there is a search engine that intentionally omits the top one million websites in order to surface deeper content? That 95% of the webs pages have no backlinks? That some studies say having a video on your home page will…
Views: 166A highly cited report came out earlier this week from BrightEdge. It even had it’s own press release (which should always be a concern for ‘news’ stories). From an SEO perspective, the report’s celebration of a 49% increase in Google search impressions is deeply misleading. Here’s a reframed interpretation from an SEO perspective: that surge in impressions is not…
Views: 7Y Combinator just stepped into the Google antitrust fight – and they’re not mincing words. In a newly filed amicus brief, the startup accelerator backs the U.S. Department of Justice and state attorneys general in calling for strong remedies against Google’s long-standing dominance in search and ad tech. YC argues that the monopolistic death-grip Google has created over the…
Views: 115Let’s be honest: SEOs have been doing Google’s dirty work for decades. We clean up the web. We format content so their bots don’t choke. We spoon-feed them useless tags like schema. And we keep playing by their rules, even when they rewrite them mid-game, all the while scraping our content for AI answers. While Google claims to “organically…
No, it really does feel like everyone is complaining about Google lately. Across blogs, forums, newsletters, news sites, ChatBots, and threads, there's a growing consensus that Google just isn't what it used to be. Longtime users and SEOs alike are documenting their frustrations: too many ads, too little relevance, and an overwhelming sense that Google is optimizing for everything except users.
Google’s own court-filed slide deck just spilled more tea on Navboost, and the details punch a few holes in years of SEO guesswork. The newly released trove goes further, mapping more than 100 raw signals into a ranking stew that still leans on old-school PageRank while layering in LLM toys like RankEmbed, re-ranking Twiddlers, and the rumored mysterious quality metric called Q*Star.
Views: 136Before Google trained on half the web anyway, it floated six opt-out tiers that would have let publishers throttle indexing, training, or SGE display. The newly unsealed DOJ remedies slide lays out those options. And proof that meaningful publisher control was little more than a talking point. (No public discourse was held involving publishers that we are aware of).…
Views: 14In a move that some will surely see as political, Google went a more full rainbow gradient with their logo today.
Views: 25Cleaning your AI output. There are a ton of “rewriters” out there right now. Variations on the theme of “casual”, “personal”, and “professional” exist in a rainbow of varieties. Even so, most people can still sniff out AI writing most of the time. Lets take a look at cleaning up your AI output before you dump it onto the…
“Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil.” That quote from a former Google exec sets the tone. In this three-part series, we unpack NavBoost—Google’s behavior-driven ranking system that might influence more than PageRank ever did. From DOJ trial slides to buried log analyzers, this is the most important ranking revelation since PageRank. If you're still optimizing for keywords and backlinks without thinking about user signals, you're missing the biggest ranking factor no one is talking about.
Views: 29The bad news keeps coming on this Friday for Google. $1.375 Billion Settlement with Google Related to Texans’ Data Privacy Rights This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda tells The Verge. “We are pleased to put them behind us,…
Google is waking up to a trifecta of global headaches today – each one a bit more absurd or than the last. From the courtroom to the classroom the tech giant is at the center of controversy, chaos, and questionable decisions.
At first glance, Google throwing a summit for seven social media influencers sounds like a bad Onion headline.
Ten years ago, for every two pages Google scraped, you got one visitor, today, it’s six pages scraped for one visitor. And with AI? It’s 250 to 1… or 6,000 to 1!
Views: 13A new academic study has stirred up old debates about search engine loyalty and added fresh insight to the lethargic DOJ antitrust case against Google. The paper, Sources of Market Power in Web Search, isn’t just a field experiment about consumer behavior; it’s a reflection of how deeply default choices shape digital habits. As is always the case with…
Google is quietly laying the groundwork to monetize conversational AI, starting with chatbot-based AdSense ads. After testing ad integrations with select AI startups like iAsk and Liner in 2024, Google is now inviting more chatbot developers to embed AdSense-style ads directly into their conversational experiences.
A new wave of advertiser pushback is gaining traction – this time through mass arbitration rather than a class action lawsuit. Attorneys working with ClassAction.org are organizing advertisers to challenge Google over alleged anticompetitive behavior in the display advertising market.
A court filing just confirmed what many web publishers feared: Google's opt-out tool for AI training doesn't apply to Search AI. Despite 50% of content being excluded from Gemini training, Google still used that same data to train its search-based models—unless publishers blocked indexing entirely.