👀 Common SEO Practices Punished by Google Updates

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that keeps you posted on the social media landscape:

(h/t Tommy Siegel @ some rag called The New Yorker)

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ 5 Common SEO Practices Punished by Google Updates 👀

→ Perplexity Starts its L Stack 🤖

→ Reddit SERP Domination Trending Downward? 🤔

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Pod 🗣️🎙️​

In EP70 of TWIDM, James De Lacey and I provide a comprehensive guide on how to effectively scale cold email campaigns for business purposes. We also cover key strategies, such as personalizing emails, segmenting the target audience, and using automation tools. Come through.

​YouTube​

​Apple Podcast​

​Google Podcast​

​Spotify​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Is Google showing fewer Reddit links in Search? Well, there’s a whole report on it, and the answer is basically: technically very slightly less, yes, but only compared to the last few months, and it’s still too much.

Especially considering Reddit's visibility in the SERPs has increased majorly YOY and Reddit’s website traffic is up 39%.

→ Speaking of reports, this one by Cyrus Shepard shows “How Recent Google Updates Punish Good SEO” in the form of a damning 50-Site Case Study.

Shepard says SEOs need to rethink “over-optimization” because Google is targeting common SEO practices. Here are some of the most interesting insights from the report. Compared to winning sites, losing sites:

1. “were far likelier to have more anchor text variations per page”
2. “used more structured data than winning sites,”
3. “had an average published/updated age of only 273 days – less than half the age of winning sites”
4. feature “heavy use of ads”
5. use “clickbait titles” like listicles

The article contains a lot more, too.

→ Things in the Google-verse change fast, but some people remain hard at work examining the AI Overviews saga. This piece, “Comparing pre and post-rollout results on 100K keywords,” dishes some good data:

- only 8.71% of keywords have AI Overviews, as compared to 64% before the rollout
- "Relationships" and "Food & Beverage" trigger AIOs most frequently, both sitting around 25% - "84.72% of AIOs link to at least one domain from the top 10 organic search results"

Lots more, too. Click through if you’re curious.

→ One of Google’s many talking heads, Gary Ilyes, shared why a spike in Googlebot crawling can sometimes be bad. TLDR; "infinite spaces" and "hacked content" are cited as the negative sources of major crawling spikes.

AI Insight 🤖

→ This Week’s AI Headline of the Week: “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine.” TBH, it was only a matter of time before Perplexity’s time came. The AI search engine gunning to dethrone Google is apparently powered by a mixture of making s**t up and stealing content while simply ignoring robots.txt. lol.

→ In fact, Forbes is mad about it. Here’s another contender for Headline of the Week, on the same topic: “Why Perplexity’s Cynical Theft Represents Everything That Could Go Wrong With AI,” straight from the horse’s mouth @ Forbes.

→ In India, at least, Google has officially rolled out its Gemini app for Android complete w/ “new data analysis capabilities and file uploads… and the ability to chat with Gemini in Google Messages.” The app supports English and nine Indian languages. FWIW, there’s an iOS app coming soon.

→ Here’s an interesting extract from Caroline Florence’s “Data Storytelling in Marketing” that looks at how AI is shaping the scene, but makes a case for why humans still play a vital role in the process.

Even in an age of AI, she argues, the "human data storyteller" is still needed for:

- relevance to the business context and needs
- “ensuring data is used ethically and that it is accurate, reliable, and obtained with the appropriate permissions”
- “cross-referencing and synthesizing AI-generated insights or synthetic data with human expertise”

And more.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ Instacart’s shoppable retail media ads are expanding to YouTube, meaning that “viewers can click from the ads to purchase items on Instacart for rapid delivery” via “shoppable product links powered by its first-party data and retail media technology.”

→ This Semrush piece makes the case for “LinkedIn SEO” by explaining what it is and why it matters. You can probably figure out the first part, so here's the latter-- LinkedIn SEO matters because it "Generates Warm Leads," "Helps You Find Jobs and Hire the Right People," "Simplifies Building Repertoire with Peers," and more.

→ Threads API is finally available for developers. Now, for the real question: does anybody care?

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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