The real vicious cycle of SEO:

📰 News & updates

March 2024 core update: There is a new Google core update, which may take up to a month to roll out. There is also a spam update and three new spam policies:

• Expired domain abuse: Where an expired domain name is purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users.

• Scaled content abuse: When many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.

• Site reputation abuse: When third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals.

The Search Quality Raters Guidelines document was also updated.

Yep & Ahrefs support IndexNow: IndexNow is a protocol that pings search engines when any changes are made to your website. If you add, update, remove, or redirect pages, participating search engines can pick up on the changes faster. Thanks to this, Yep & Ahrefs will have a fresher index of the web.

🔝 SEO

Toxic backlinks: “Toxic backlinks” is a term made up by certain SEO tools to scare you. That’s not to say bad links can’t hurt your site. They absolutely can. But it’s usually the manipulative rather than the plain spammy ones that cause problems.

How to get SEO buy-in: Understanding where executives spend most of their mental energy and aligning your projects to those things can go a long way.

Demise of the VP of SEO role: Adam Audette offers some reasons: Basic SEO knowledge is now commonplace; companies are eliminating senior roles and delegating basic day-to-day SEO duties to less senior people; Google hurt many sites during their 2023 algorithmic updates; and of course, who can forget, AI.

Keyword universe: A Keyword Universe is a big pool that surfaces the most important keywords at the top and lives in a spreadsheet or database like BigQuery. Kevin teaches you how to build one in his article.

Till next time ;)
Cheers,