Hey there,

In this week’s edition:

• Himanshu analyzes RTINGS.com’s SEO strategy.

• I share six holiday SEO tips.

✍️ New on our blog

How RTINGS.com Dominates Product Niches (SEO Case Study)

RTINGS.com dominates the search results for a wide range of electronic products, but it rarely comes up in conversations in SEO communities during discussions on affiliate marketing. 

Himanshu analyzed its SEO strategies and came up with four main takeaways. For example, RTINGS.com uses programmatic SEO strategically—rather than writing a dedicated review comparing different headphones, it compares them on the basis of certain parameters like the battery life, bass, fitting, and more.

6 Holiday SEO Tips (To Boost Traffic During the Shopping Season)

Si Quan Ong

The holidays are coming soon! From adding internal links to your holiday pages to improving their click-through rates, you can implement these six SEO tips for more traffic during the busiest seasons of the year.

📚 What we’re reading

Google Search Shopping Pre-Owned Green Leaf Labels

Article by Barry Schwartz

Google is now showing a green leaf label that says "pre-owned" on Google Shopping results.

Four Different Types of Sitelinks

Twitter thread by Brodie Clark

There are four distinct types of sitelinks and it’s important to be aware of them.

Links May Be Less Important to the Google Search Ranking Algorithm in the Future

Article by Barry Schwartz

Google’s John Mueller said that, in the future, he can see a Google Search ranking algorithm where links are not as important in the overall algorithm as they are today. He also hinted that links are not weighted as much as they were in the history of the Google ranking algorithm.

AI Content Is Not the SEO Threat They Want You to Think It Is

Article by Michael King

Generated content built from large language models (LLMs) can be hard to detect because the created content is statistically emulating the way people naturally write. So it is highly likely that a detection system will yield many false positives and false negatives. 

So you can leverage AI content—just do it smartly. For example, don’t publish AI content immediately. You should put it through an editorial layer.

More From Google on AI Content - It's About if the Content Is Helpful

Article by Barry Schwartz

Related to Mike’s post above, Danny Sullivan says that Google isn’t particularly looking for AI content or that AI content is bad. It’s whether the content is helpful, regardless of whether it’s written by an AI or a human.

Google Results Are Becoming Less Trusted. How Will This Affect SEO?

Reddit discussion

Another discussion related to the prevalence of AI content on the SERPs. What do you think? Have you been adding “Reddit” to the end of your searches too?

How to Determine Your Activation Metric

Twitter thread by Lenny Rachitsky

Follow Lenny’s three-step process for determining your activation metric, plus some real-life stories on how teams from Figma, Slack, and Airtable did it.

Mastodon vs. Twitter

Twitter thread by April Dunford

Mastodon is the new Twitter alternative. Or is it? April, the author of “Obviously Awesome” and a positioning specialist, analyzes Mastodon’s current positioning and its opportunity. (By the way, I highly recommend her book!)

Till next time ;)
Cheers,