Ahrefs’ Digest #196: In-house SEO, how Google handles JavaScript, and more

Welcome to another edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

Here’s our meme of the week:

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Quick SEO news

• Reddit plans to test AI-powered search results.

• The U.S. Justice Department is considering forcing a Google breakup.

• Google demoed Gemini Research, where Google uses AI to do your research, by curating information across the web to build a document that gives you a detailed researched answer.

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Best of the week

Shallow Pockets? Try These 3 Truly Affordable SEO Services: SEO audits, keyword research, and Google Business Profile management are the SEO services that are ideal for beginners and won’t break the bank.

The Realities of In-House SEO: What to Expect and How to Succeed: Patrick has been an in-house SEO for three different companies: a mid-sized company, an enterprise, and now Ahrefs. He shares what he’s learnt so far, how to transition to an in-house role, challenges, and how to be effective.

How Google Handles JavaScript Throughout the Indexing Process: Vercel partnered with MERJ, a leading SEO & data engineering consultancy, to conduct new experiments on Google’s crawling behavior. They analyzed over 100,000 Googlebot fetches across various sites to test and validate Google’s SEO capabilities.

AI Overviews Research: Analyzing Sources in Google’s AI-Generated Answers: Only 7.47% of searches triggered AI Overviews during this study. The Relationships niche continues to dominate with 40.64% of keywords triggering AIOs. One in five AI Overviews references a government source and over a quarter of AI-generated content references educational institutions or academic resources.

‘Too Good To Be True’ Problem: You can be better in one dimension, but you need to be worse in another (e.g., price). People don’t believe three good things, in three dimensions, all at once.

Does Google Know If Content is Accurate? A Review of a Page Struggling to Rank Behind Potentially Inaccurate & Unhelpful Content: From the DOJ vs Google trial exhibits and testimonies, we learnt that Google fakes understanding by studying the actions of searchers. The obvious concern with a system that relies so heavily on the actions of users is that it’s going to be swayed by user’s preference towards known brands. People click on what they recognize.

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Latest from our podcast

This week’s podcast guest is Andrew Davies, Chief Marketing Officer of SaaS payment infrastructure provider Paddle. Here’s what we covered:

• How to create compelling brand stories

• Ways to bring customers into your marketing efforts

• Why you're probably using your blog the wrong way

• Game-changing content distribution ideas

• How to improve your video production quality

• What account-based marketing is

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

See you next week,
Si Quan

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