Our meme of the week:

📰 News & updates

Helpful content update recoveries may take much longer: According to Google’s John Mueller.

Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy with portions of sites being delisted: This even includes major sites like CNN, USA Today, and LA Times.

🔝 SEO

HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what?: HouseFresh’s update to their previous article on how Google is killing independent sites. Like the last time, they brought tons of receipts. The most interesting thing I learned: Major publishers are using “keyword swarming” to drown out smaller sites.

State of Technical SEO: Aira and Women in Tech SEO’s annual report on the state of technical SEO. Seems like technical SEOs are not worried at all about AI developments impacting their job security. 

TIPI framework: Topics, Information Needs, Page Types, and Information Architecture. This is the framework Bryan Casey (of IBM) uses to build pages that align with customers’ digital journeys. I love the “topic bullseye” he created. He says: “The closer a query is to the bullseye, the higher your conversion rate is likely going to be.”

💻 Digital marketing

Best of Ahrefs’ Digest (April 2024): ICYMI, these are my favorite articles from the Digest in April 2024.

Heat death of the Internet: Oof, this hits me so hard in the feels. Maybe it’s because I was younger and naive, but I miss the early Internet days when people were making things for fun, not because they were trying to squeeze out as much money as possible. 

Traditional publishing is great: If you’re online enough, you’ll find almost everyone advocating for self-publishing. And it makes sense. But traditional publishing isn’t as bad either, as Nat Eliason found out. You’re basically getting access to a full panel of experts that’ll help you position, market, sell, and edit your book, while allowing you to fully focus on writing.
 

Till next time ;)
Cheers,