Ahrefs’ Digest #220: Hidden dangers of programmatic SEO, Anthropic’s SEO strategy, 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

• Google Business Profile now explains why your verification fails.

• Google launches a new way to create posts with AI-enhanced images for Google Business Profile.

• Google is expanding AI Overviews to more Lens search results.

• Google Merchant Center shows AI-generated summaries of how well your performance is doing with Merchant Center in Google Search.

• X releases Grok 3.

• Chegg sues Google, says AI search results are killing its business.

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Best of the week

ChatGPT Search by the Numbers: How is it Performing in the Search Space?: Amazon, YouTube, and Wikipedia were the top three domains referred from SearchGPT, with Amazon accounting for three-quarters of total e-commerce traffic.

The Hidden Dangers of Programmatic SEO: Teams working on pSEO tend to focus on the technical aspects, such as sitemaps, internal linking structure, landing page templates, URL structure, metadata targeting specific search queries, etc. However, they fail to consider whether or not a human will enjoy the content experience — or even worse — knowingly launch lackluster pages just so they can ramp up organic search traffic.

How Anthropic Drives 60K+ in Organic Traffic — With One Simple Strategy: Anthropic added 67 new pages to their customer success stories subfolder since March 2024. The subfolder now drives over 60,000 organic monthly visits.

Non-Obvious SEO Advice for Startups: Yes, SEO still matters. Yes, your startup still needs SEO. Here’s some good advice if you’re just starting out.

Google’s New “Diversity Update”: How to Fix Your Ruined Rankings: Google made a “secret” algorithm change: If you dominate local pack rankings, Google will demote your organic rankings.

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Latest from our YouTube

The Google Update That Destroyed 4 Of Their Websites

This is a story about a popular DIY blog that lost 75% of their traffic and income after a Google algorithm update hit their site. Learn how it all happened and what they're doing now. 

See you next week,
Si Quan

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