Ahrefs’ Digest #201: Gonzo content marketing, search intent shifts, and more

Welcome to another edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

Here’s our meme of the week:

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Quick SEO news

• Google’s Martin Splitt says they don’t use Exif data for rankings.

• Google adds Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine links to its About this page feature.

• OpenAI claims new o1 model can reason like a human.

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Best of the week

Gonzo Content: What Marketers Need to Learn From Hunter S. Thompson: A manifesto for content marketing from Ryan, inspired by the gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson.

AI on Innovation: Kevin Indig conducted the largest analysis of AI Overviews so far with over 546,000 rows and +44GB of data. Here’s what he learnt:

• Most cited domains are YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, NIH, Google Support, Microsoft Support, Heathline, WebMD, and Mayo Clinic.

• 0.85% of AIOs have no citations.

• 12.1% of URLs in the top 20 search results are also AIO citations. In reverse, 59.6% of AIO citations are not from the top 20 search results.

• Only 6% of AIOs contain the search query.

• 30% of AIOs have very different content in SGE compared to live.

Shift Happens: 7 Examples of Search Intent Shift (+ How To Identify It): Google’s search results aren’t set in stone—they’re always changing. But when there’s a major change in search intent for a keyword, the top websites can lose rankings through no fault of their own if they don’t match the new dominant search intent. (I love the title, by the way!)

A Post-Google World: How will we know when we reach a post-Google world? When entrepreneurs start seeing opportunity to build businesses in a more open market for advertising, search, or journalism, we’ll be there. Right now, you don’t go near these spaces, because Google will crush you. But there are immense opportunities once you split apart this corporation.

Content Curation: How to Build a Fandom by Talent-Scouting Great Content: Curation is all about finding undiscovered stories and repackaging ideas in ways your audience really respond to.

Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host: Hell hath no fury like Lars Lofgren scorned. After digging into Reddit, he’s now onto Forbes Marketplace, a completely different company from Forbes that Forbes partnered with to run their SEO affiliate business. They created a new company, made it look like it’s part of Forbes, and then went to town exploiting every last corner of Google.

I Got 129.7% More Traffic With Related Keywords: See how Josh found related keywords (hint: content gap analysis) and optimized his blog posts to get more search traffic.

See you next week,
Si Quan

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