For as broad and difficult of a problem running a search engine is and how many competing interests are involved, when Matt Cutts was at Google they ran a pretty clean show. Some of what they did before the algorithms could catch up was of course fearmongering (e.g. if you... Read more »

On February 18, 2025 Google's Hyung-Jin Kim was interviewed about Google's ranking signals. Below are notes from that interview. "Hand Crafting" of Signals Almost every signal, aside from RankBrain and DeepRank (which are LLM-based) are hand-crafted and thus able to be analyzed and adjusted by engineers. To develop and use... Read more »

User interaction signals Create relevancy signals out of user read, clicks, scrolls, and mouse hovers. Not how search works Search does not work by delivering results which match a query that ends at the user. This view of search is incomplete. How search works The flow of the engagement metrics... Read more »

Google's mission statement is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That mission is so profound & so important the associated court documents in their antitrust cases must be withheld from public consumption. Hey. The full exhibit list just posted in DC federal court for USA... Read more »

I just dusted off the login here to realize I hadn't posted in about a half-year & figured it was time to write another one. 😉 Yandex Source Code Leak Some of Yandex's old source code was leaked, and few cared about the ranking factors shared in the leak. Mike... Read more »

TechCrunch recently highlighted how Google is changing their ad labeling on mobile devices. A few big changes include: ad label removed from individual ad units where the unit-level label was instead becomes a favicon a "Sponsored" label above ads the URL will show right of the favicon & now the... Read more »

Granular Panda Reading the tea leaves on the pre-announced Google "helpful content" update rolling out next week & over the next couple weeks in the English language, it sounds like a second and perhaps more granular version of Panda which can take in additional signals, including how unique the page... Read more »

Time has grown more scarce after having a child, so I rarely blog anymore. Though I thought it probably made sense to make at least a quarterly(ish) post so people know I still exist. One of the big things I have been noticing over the past year or so is... Read more »

Kent Walker promotes public policies which advantage the Google monopoly. His role doing that means he has to write some really bad hot takes that lack context or intentionally & dishonestly redirect attention away from core issues - that's his job. With that in mind, his most recent blog post... Read more »

Background / Intro One of my longtime friends who was Internet marketing long before I was hit me up on Skype about a week ago praising Jasper.ai. I have to think long and hard about any other time he has really pitched or recommended something like that & really I... Read more »

On Wednesday SEMrush priced their IPO at $14 a share & listed Thursday. There have been many marketing and online advertising companies which are publicly traded, but few that were so focused specifically on SEO while having a sizeable market cap. According to this SeekingAlpha post at the IPO price... Read more »

Chasing New Markets My initial attraction toward SEO and the web was largely that it was like a new and parallel world that bypassed many traditional gatekeepers. I wrote an ebook which originally had inconsistent formatting and it was riddled with spelling and grammar errors. I learned to write by... Read more »

Google, Google, Google For well over a decade Google has dominated search to where most stories in the search sphere were about Google or something on the periphery. In 2019 Google generated $134.81 billion in ad revenues. When Verizon bought core Yahoo three years ago the final purchase price was... Read more »

This year is a rather easy year to be depressed. 😉 COVID-19, fearmongering media, polarized hyper-charged social media, mass unemployment, lockdowns that killed exercise routines and social connections, loss of hope / purpose / meaning, a guy who stuck a gun in the belly area of a pregnant woman overdosing... Read more »

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