Ahrefs’ Digest #210: Google manual actions, fake AI profiles, and more

Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

Here’s our meme of the week:

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Quick search marketing news

• ICYMI, Google is rolling out the November 2024 Core Update.
• Google quietly introduces a new AI Search experiment called Learn About, which summarizes content and offers navigational menus to explore related subtopics.
• Perplexity begins testing ads as sponsored follow-up questions.
• Perplexity introduces a shopping feature for Pro users in the US.
• HARO / Connectively is closing down on December 9.
• It appears that Google has started to roll out manual actions on large affiliate sites like Forbes Advisor.

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Best of the week

Fake AI Profiles Are Being Utilised by Link Builders on Platforms like Qwoted - And It's Working: As they say, marketers ruin everything.

What Ladders Are You Climbing?: “Choosing the ladders to climb, choosing the game and league to play in, has an enormous impact in where you are going to end up in life. It doesn’t determine what you can achieve, but plays a huge role in it.”

The Intellectual Obesity Crisis: A good reminder to us content creators and marketers: Are we making low-quality junk info or content that’ll help our customers in 10 months or even 10 years?

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Latest from our podcast

This week’s podcast guest is Steven Kalifowitz, CMO of Crypto.com. Here's what we discussed:

• Why even established brands need to spend A LOT on advertising

• Do you need a "framework" to codify your brand

• The challenges of advertising in a heavily regulated industry

• Why OOH advertising makes sense for big brands

• What they got out of advertising at The Sphere 

• What's the ROI of sport partnerships

• What are the most important management skills

• Whether NFTs are dead

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

See you next week,
Si Quan

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