Ahrefs’ Digest #192: Healthcare SEO, HubSpot’s SERP secrets, and more

Welcome to another edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

We’re hosting an SEO meetup in Shoreditch, London next week, on July 24th! Unfortunately, it’s already sold out, and we can’t accommodate any more people. 

But hey, if you’ve already signed up and will be attending, I hope to see you there. Feel free to come up and say hi to me! (Not sure what I look like? Scroll to the bottom of this email.)

Alright, onwards to our newsletter. First up, memes.

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Meme of the week

To all the poor SEOs working with clients and stakeholders:

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Quick SEO news

• Anthropic announced a free Claude AI chatbot for Android.

• Google says there’s no way to block content from appearing in Google Discover.

• Google officially ends the ‘Notes’ experiment.

• Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said that he expects the next core update to be released in the coming weeks.

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Best of the week

Healthcare SEO: 7 Strategies From Medical SEO Pros: Difficult SERPs, government regulations, and mandatory expert reviews—healthcare SEO has its own unique set of challenges. Ryan interviewed five experienced healthcare SEOs and content creators for their best advice on helping healthcare businesses grow through effective, ethical SEO.

HubSpot’s SERP Secrets: How The HubSpot Blog Is Combatting SERP Volatility: HubSpot’s changing their SEO strategy and adding more subjective opinions, anecdotes, and observations to their content. Here’s a summary of their new style:



I Disavowed Every Link To My Website. Here’s What Happened: Brave experiment from Cyrus. The result: Nothing happened. Not even a drop in traffic.

Detailed Q4: Analysing The SEO Playbook of Digital Goliaths In-Depth, Every Quarter:  I wait for this post every quarter. A great way to keep up with what’s happening in SEO with both big and small sites. As with HubSpot, I’m seeing some comments from big sites about a renewed focus on quality and doubling-down on content that can’t be commoditized. (An approach we’re following ourselves too.)

A Brief Meeting With Google After The Apocalypse: Interesting that Google (or at least Search Liaison Danny Sullivan) reached out to a creator to discuss the Google updates and how Google can do better to support creatives. The quote that stood out: “Danny was certainly worried about creators leaving or stopping the production of the great content because of algorithm changes. “We’re not perfect, and we are trying to fix it” was one of the moments that stuck with me.”

Marketing Analytics Data is Wrong. Can It Be Fixed?: Ad blockers, cookie consents, browsers with privacy features, and “dark funnel traffic” — these are all reasons why all our analytics is likely inaccurate. But we don’t need analytics to be precise; we just need them to point us in the right direction. (Pair this with Tim’s post on why there’s no such thing as accurate search volume.)

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Latest from our podcast

This week’s podcast guest is Alex Nigmatulin, co-founder and CMO of PRNEWS.IO, a digital PR marketplace that connects businesses with paid media placements. Here’s what we covered:

• How sponsored placements are different from simply buying links
• How much it costs to get published in top-tier media
• Does anyone actually read sponsored content
• Why using PRNEWS.io won't result in a Google penalty
• How AI affected the digital PR industry
• The best way to create newsworthy content
• The real purpose of press releases

Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

See you next week,
Si Quan

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