Gabe Gayhart

SEO updates you ✨NEED✨ to know [30 Sep]: ⚠️ ​Google has updated its spam policy with several notable changes, including talking about sites using "extensive automation to produce content", likely meaning human-tweaked AI content. via Marie Haynes 📊 ​Some recent recoveries after the August core update are being reversed. The volatility continues as some sites that were hit particularly hard by last year's HCU are now seeing their small gains disappear again. via Abby Gleason 🎠 ​Google is testing a 'from small businesses' carousel. This is being tested on mobile and is likely connected to the 'small business' attribute in Google Business Profile. via Barry Schwartz 🧠 ​Cloudflare launches Speed Brain, a speculative model that can reportedly reduce LCP by up to 75%. It does this by prefetching the most likely next pages' content and is now available for all Cloudflare users at no extra cost. 📉 ​Forbes Advisor has recently lost rankings for over 1.7 million queries. This may be the result of a manual penalty and related to the huge parasite SEO problem Forbes has had recently. via Glenn Gabe 🏷️ ​Google is testing 'For You' and 'Preferred Source' labels. This appears to be another step towards the personalisation of the main SERP that we've seen previously in Google Discover and Google News. 🚫 ​WP Engine has been banned by WordPress. If you're using their plugins, tools or hosting, you may want to look for an alternative solution even though the ban is being temporarily lifted. ✨ ​Google now highlights content creators and their expertise in Knowledge Panels. This label may be a significant boost in credibility for content creators as trusted online sources. via Jason Barnard 🗳️ ​SearchPilot confirms no benefit to using JSON-LD or Microdata for your markup. Despite Google listing JSON-LD as best practice, there appears to be no advantage or disadvantage either way. via Rida Abidi 🤖 ​Cloudflare's AI Audit will allow sites to charge AI bots for scraping content. This is a step in the right direction of offering some compensation for content creators whose work is being "stolen" by LLMs and AI-powered search. 💰 ​Google adds support for sale pricing and priceType structured data. This should make it easier for users to specify sale prices and directly compare them to the full price, original listing. 🔍 ​Google removes the cache: search operator. Google had previously announced this in March 2024 and has since reacted by including links directly to the Internet Archive (which I covered two weeks ago) via Roger Montti 💌 If you like these kind of tldr SEO updates and don't want to miss them, I send them out every Monday along with SEO deeps and a deep dive podcast - Just Google: Core Updates newsletter Links to everything in the comments ⬇

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If you need help with SEO, you'll probably want the agency you hire to show up near the top. 🎯 It's one of those engagements with clear objectives and abundant evidence to prove a company is worth its salt. With all of the changes happening in search lately, Xponent21 remains ahead of the curve, helping our clients reach the top of search locally, nationally, and internationally. We also help our clients get ranked in AI search results and generative AI citations. For fun, and because we don't always give our brand the same treatment we extend to clients, I embarked on a little project to help our website rank at the top for searches related to local SEO agencies in Richmond. In 24 days, we jumped to the first position - in the featured snippets no less - from page three. Because we didn't start tracking this keyword until we had authored some optimized content, the move was likely more significant than we've measured. If you're still wondering what this is about or all that goes into SEO, you aren't alone. It's a specialized area of digital marketing with some of the most technical knowledge requirements. The most seasoned marketers still rely on SEO experts for success. With nearly 40% of internet searchers clicking on the first result on the search engine results pages (SERPs), being on top is extremely valuable. Send me a message or drop a 🔎 in the comments if this a strategy you're interested in exploring for your website.

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3 ways you can IMPROVE your SEO with Video 👇👇 🎥 Film long form Talk for 30-60 minutes about specific pieces of your business. Post on YouTube and link to your website. 👍Upload Videos to Transcribe Upload to YouTube Studio or Lume to transcribe your videos. Plug into Chat GPT, work a little magic and post as a blog. ✂️ Cut it up Cut your video into 15-30 second vertical videos with captions and post to Instagram Reels, Stories and TikToks (avoid using stock footage or photos in your videos. Google search recognizes overused media as spam) The more channels that hold specific key words that fall in your industry and connect to your brand, the more traffic you will get.

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If you site traffic is down, I know why. Google rolled out a MASSIVE update to it's algorithm in March. This update was to integrate Google's Helpful Content System into it's core ranking system it updated how it manages Spam. The goal was to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content by 40%. 📉 40% reduction. We are just starting to understand the impact of this update. But websites that are reliant on AI Generated Content have definitely lost a lot of traffic in this update. Here is what Google says. “Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit as our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low-quality content was created purely through automation.” 👏 Quality over Quantity. Let me know if you have noticed an incline or decline in your site traffic.

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