I've not seen this before, not sure what to think of it.

I don't suppose it changes much/anything on how we optimise sites. It might add a bit of confusion as to who's the real site if you can get results like to show when you're trying to rank for someone elses brand name.

https://imgur.com/a/0tcLhBe

Google Data Studio is a great tool for creating fancy reports and useful analysis tools. There also happens to be lots of pre-built templates you can use made by a lot of talented marketers.

Here they are collected together:

https://sheetsformarketers.com/data-studio-templates/

I would encourage you to have a dig around and go visit the template makers sites to see what other gems you can find.

I for one welcome our new Service Level Contract overlords

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit

What does this mean for SEO moving forward, in your opinion? I’ve been reading the court docs and have gained insights into Google’s algo. But curious on your stance regarding other search engines possibly becoming more prevalent?

Ahrefs announced a new free tool today: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

At first glance, it looks awesome: verify your site (by giving access to Google Search Console or via sitewide HTML tag) and get free unlimited access to their Site Audit and Site Explorer tools, where you can see:

• On-page SEO performance - find 404 pages, broken links, slow loading pages

• Organic keyword rankings - find which keywords your site ranks for

• Backlinks - find which websites link to you

BUT there's a big catch.

Digging into the terms, I found that Ahrefs is going to use your site data:

Ahrefs may anonymize and aggregate any data you share with the Service, including data associated with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts, and use it without identifying you for purposes of improving the Service - source: Ahrefs terms

Why is this bad?

Your keyword ranking and backlink data cannot be anonymized. They are not unique to you. When Ahrefs learns that your page is getting 1000 visits/month from a keyword it shows as volume 50, it's going to update those estimates. Suddenly, you lose your competitive edge and paying Ahrefs customers can get better insights than ever before.

On the plus side, it's going to make Ahrefs data 10x better for paying customers, as the competitor data will only improve.

To sum up, I don't recommend anyone uses AWT on their own sites, unless you're happy for competitors to see their site data too.

I wrote about this in more detail here: https://internetfolks.com/ahrefs-webmaster-tools-review/

When I search to find useful information online -- now more than ever I find half baked articles, incomplete articles, inaccurate information and tons of useless text created in the name of SEO and to drive traffic..... and it sucks that Google drives this behavior.

Some very interesting insights coming out as to why the SERPs are providing low-quality search results at the moment on Google, which is coming from internal issues/politics at Google:

In February 2019, Google's ads and finance teams called a "code yellow" on search, because revenue was slow and - seriously - people were not asking Google enough questions. Ben Gomes, then head of search, refused to make Google Search worse for profit— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Gomes managed to help get Google through the code yellow - but Raghavan demanded more, saying Ben hadn't increased queries enough. Gomes sent a letter to stating he was "deeply, deeply uncomfortable" with the ways that Google wanted to grow search— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Prabhakar Raghavan may be a computer scientist, but he joined Google in 2012 as a manager, working directly under CEO Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man. Raghavan is a class traitor that deliberately ran out Ben Gomes, who worked on search for 19 years.— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Prabhakar Raghavan is a career failure, a man who has fallen upwards into the most important job in software, and since becoming head of search in 2020, Google has become an ultra-profitable and increasingly less-useful site. Raghavan is a villain. — Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Google replaced a founding member who was passionate about user experience for a guy who worked at Yahoo and caused Yahoo to make considerable losses financially, this explains perfectly why Google is a complete mess at the moment
This is a classic example of exactly what Steve Jobs said was the reason why monopolist companies die:

When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers – Steve Jobs

Clayburn kindly reached out and asked me to contribute, so here I am! I'm happy to answer questions on any topic. I have limited time during the day and then will be back on this evening to answer more. I'll verify that this is really me by tweeting a link from @randfish.

Looking forward to your questions!

Hey everyone 👋

I've been working on a side-project illustrating different SEO concepts.

I tend to use them in blog posts + as explainers to clients.

I've just open-sourced them, all downloadable and editable in the original formats (via Figma).

https://www.samunderwood.co.uk/visualising-seo/

I’ve spent the past several weeks testing out every rank tracking tool that I could find. It’s 2020, and there are a lot of them.

This article is the first in a series that I’m calling tactical buyers guides.

My goal is to give you the full story — ranging from how the technology works, to who it’s for, and most importantly, what you should use it for. The first section is largely philosophical and instructional.

I’m going to make the case for why you should sign up for a rank tracker today, and then I’m going to tell you how to use it in ways that will make you better at SEO. 

The second part is going to be offering thoughts on individual tools, in light of the prescribed strategies.

This is a living, breathing document and will be updated and enhanced over time.

I strongly suggest that you read the piece from top to bottom: here’s the list.

Our website is Examine.com, and if you've ever looked up any kind of supplements, you've likely come across our website.

All we do is analyze existing research. That's it.

NYT, BBC, WashPo, etc have all used us for expertise and quotes. Hell, we've even had our work plagiarized in a peer-published paper (if you want to read the saga: https://retractionwatch.com/2014/09/30/author-of-alcohol-paper-retracted-for-plagiarism-defends-copy-and-paste-strategy/ ) Men's Fitness called us a game changer and Fast Company called us top 10 innovative in health and fitness.

With the recent updates by Google, I would theorize they are taking down alternative health sites and those built around personalities.

Thing is, we're neither of those. We get accused of being alternative health and Big Pharma simultaneously (means we're fairly balanced), and our focus is on the collective team, not us.

If you search for our brand name, the "people also search for" are all the well-established health companies in the space: Mayo Clinic, NIH, MedlinePlus, WebMD.

We sell no supplements or any other physical products, and we're obsessive about being even-keeled. Our EAT is about as well-established as you can get, our content is incredibly in-depth.

Both my co-founder and I are established enough to be on Wikipedia, as is the company itself.

This almost smells like what happened to metafilter - they somehow triggered a hidden penalty and it got them essentially blacklisted.

We've done four separate site audits, and other than little details (eg you're linking to a page that 301s to the new URL), nothing large has come up.

Indexing is fine, no penalty issues, site performance is solid (not the fastest, but not really slow)

Curious to hear ideas on what is awry?

I should note - I've been doing this for 20 years now. I've followed SEO since 2001 (ahh, the days of TripAdvisor buying links everywhere), and I've done this as by-the-book as one can get. I've even publicly talked about how we've always focused on the big picture: https://www.evolvingseo.com/2017/01/25/053-sol-orwell-interview/ Usually you can look at a site and go "okay this is eh quality" or "okay I don't know if I can trust you" but we're hitting every single signal I can imagine...

Yandex, a Russian search giant with many former Google employees had its data leaked, including the 1922 ranking factors they used. You can find the file with the ranking factors here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/toyehkkfduogbwk/factors_gen.txt?dl=0

Why This is Huge News for the SEO community?

In my experience Yandex and Google results correlated better than Google and Bing results. I used to see movement in Yandex about the same time I saw in Google.

Many of the developers working at Yandex are former Google employees and I think there are plenty of similarities.

Translate the description and you will see for yourself. Unfortunately the internal wiki is not part of the leak

EDIT: This dropbox link has the description translated: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9p1j1f3ino95ex/Yandex%20Ranking%20Factors.docx.txt?dl=0

There are loads of clever and generous people out there who have made templates to help speed up tedious marketing tasks. All I’ve done is compiled them into one place.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to sell, no private group, no opt-in required or ritual sacrifices to perform.

Grab the templates here:

https://sheetsformarketers.com

If you don’t want to go to the site, you can also grab them all here in this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Iz3YHbMuLGwzaPOiMIbdyFEb_JkwhyfVqco4q5jxyLw/edit#gid=0

Last week when everyone was watching the inauguration of Joe Biden, we kept our eyes peeled for changes on the White House website. We were curious what changes we'd see.

Soon after President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris took their oath of office, they got to work. And one of the first things they did was to launch the new Whitehouse.gov website.

We expected a big chance. But not THIS big.

The new website only contained 250 pages, whereas the previous one contained 11,500+. They'd essentially started with a clean slate.

So we started digging in further, and found more interesting things — like last-minute tweaks to profile pages of key members of the Trump administration.

We put together a timeline, describing all the highlights here: https://www.contentkingapp.com/blog/biden-harris-cleaned-house/.

For research.

1. vOiCe SeArcH iS tHe FuTuRe oF SEO (I heard that in 2017, 2018, and last year. No. When google adds voice search to analytics tools AND the volume of searches plus conversions matches regular search, then talk to me.)

2. Buying links is bad and you will be slapped with a manual penalty (Yeah, if you buy them on Fiverr)

3. You will be penalized for duplicate content (No such penalty exists)

4. Social signals have no SEO value (You do know that social media pages get indexed, so they’re able to appear in the SERPs right?)

5. Long-form content = higher rankings (No, just no. We’re in 2020, focusing on the user’s intent should be the priority and that is simply the way. In reality, most long articles aren’t so valuable for the user).

Hey BigSEO!

I've just finished building a new long tail keyword generator thats free for anyone to use, and /u/SearchCandy invited me to share it here :)

You can try it here: https://seoscout.com/suggest

So what is different about this keyword tool, compared to established sites like UberSuggest or AnswerThePublic?

In short, I've tried to go a lot deeper into suggesting long tail phrases you actually have a chance to rank for, by trying to prompt Google to reveal more of its secrets with longer modifiers.

For example, rather than simply trying to get suggestions for 'which/why/how/can' + keyword, which is limited to at most 25 results per modifier, I'm using terms like 'which keyword for' or 'how keyword can' which helps tease out many more questions your customers are asking for.

There are also additional modifiers for comparison, research, shopping and local terms, with a quick click to copy terms to the clipboard or look them up on Google.

Finally, if you're like me and find a list of 1,000 keywords a little hard to digest, once the tool is done finding suggestions it will automatically group them for you using n-grams to cluster similar terms. I hope this is useful for generating new content ideas!

I'd love to know what you think and if you've any suggestions to make it better :)

ps.. it's also on Product Hunt today if that's your thing 😉

Hey BigSEO!

On August 4th, 2015, just a few weeks after joining Ahrefs, I posted a thread here asking for your feedback about our product. That thread got an impressive 116 comments and gave us a lot to think about.

Since then, it has become a good tradition of mine to post the same thread here every two years on the same day. There have been 5 of them so far:

1. 2015

2. 2017

3. 2019

4. 2021

5. 2023

We’re not a public company and we don’t do investor updates. But since our customers are our investors - consider this to be our version of it.

…

The last 2 years in the SEO industry were without a doubt the craziest of the decade. AI is changing everything. And only the fittest will survive.

Here are four major themes that you might’ve observed from Ahrefs in these past two years:

#1 AI adoption. - Everyone in the SEO industry is now caught up in the middle of two tectonic shifts: AI is changing how we search and AI is changing how we work. Here at Ahrefs we’re making it our highest priority to collect data & build solutions to help you navigate GEO / AEO / LLMO / SEO. We’re also integrating AI in our product where it actually helps – not just shiny features, but real workflows our own marketing team uses and relies on every day.

We’ve launched Brand Radar, which is a one of a kind tool with the largest LLM visibility index on the market (it’s our fastest-growing new product btw, adding $1M in ARR every 2 weeks). We’re actively integrating AI across many existing workflows in Ahrefs (details here - ahrefs.com/ai ). And we also launched an official MCP server (connects your AI chatbot to the Ahrefs API), which we’re continuing to add more endpoints to.

#2 SEO is evolving. - I always had a firm conviction that SEO is not just a narrow isolated discipline, siloed from the rest of marketing. To me it has always been holistic, cross-functional and deeply integrated into many critical business functions. So after a decade of digging vertically, we felt the need to start expanding Ahrefs horizontally. Our goal is to make Ahrefs the go-to marketing platform for discoverability. That means supporting everything that helps people find your business, from SEO & AI-powered search to social media and beyond.

In that regard, we’ve launched AI Content Kit and free Web Analytics (our fastest growing free product, adding 10K websites/mo). We also launched a beta version of a Social Media Management tool just a few weeks ago.

For each of these directions, we don’t want to merely replicate what’s already out there. We have a rather unique vision of what these solutions should look like. So stay tuned.

#3 Making Ahrefs more accessible - We finally delivered a cheaper plan, that was requested for so long - $29/month. We keep adding value to our free “Webmaster Tools” plan: now you get free Web Analytics for verified websites (up to 1M web sessions), run free Site Audit reports (up to 5,000 pages/mo per project) and use our GSC reporting tool, which gives you more flexibility than the actual GSC.

#4 Making Ahrefs more scalable - For larger teams & brands, we’ve made significant strides over the past few years to support more reporting workflows. We launched API v3, which closely mirrors the data available in our UI, giving teams programmatic access to nearly everything. We also introduced Report Builder, allowing users to mix and match data and visualizations across Ahrefs for daily reporting. And with Portfolios, you can aggregate performance across multiple domains or URL sets – making it easier to track and prove results by region, brand, business unit, or category. 

On top of that, we've strengthened security and governance with SSO and granular access management, and now host Ahrefs in three locations - improving reliability, speed, and resilience as we work towards near-100% uptime.

And that more or less covers the major moves at Ahrefs in the last two years.

The team is improving Ahrefs every single day – no part of the product is standing still (we shipped 40+ new feature releases in July alone). And your feedback helps shape what comes next.

…

Now we’re keen to hear back from the SEO community.

What feedback do you have for us?

• What should Ahrefs prioritise to support you in your job?

• How is your management (or clients) responding to all the changes?

• What’s the general sentiment? Are you excited about the future of SEO or does it scare you?

As it always happens with these threads, nearly the entire Ahrefs team (including our founder Dmytro Gerasymenko) will be closely following the conversation here. So please speak your mind and I can assure you that you’ll be heard by the relevant people on our team.

Hey BigSEO!

It has become a good tradition that every 2 years on the 4th of August I'm launching a thread here to learn what you guys and girls think about Ahrefs (see previous threads from 2017 and 2015).

Not that we have a shortage of feedback - every day we talk to hundreds of our customers in support chat, we have a very active and vocal Facebook group and we continuously monitor conversations on Twitter and in different Slack communities...

But somehow the previous two threads here on BigSEO have generated nearly 120 comments each with a ton of unique insights and ideas for us. So I thought I should definitely continue this tradition. :)

Here are some of the things I'd love to hear your thoughts on:

• What do you think about the advancements in SEO tools for the past 2 years? Do you think Ahrefs has done something really cool since the last thread? Or maybe our competitors have done something outstanding?

• Do you think that the market of SEO tools is going to change in the next 2 years? If so, how?

• If you were on the "board of directors" of Ahrefs (we don't even have one actually) what major shifts in strategy would you suggest us?

Other than that, I'm super interested in anything you have to say about Ahrefs and our place in the market of SEO tools, as well as our contributions to the SEO community.

Huge thanks in advance!

Many of you might know me as the founder and longtime (former) CEO of Moz, the SEO software company. I'm also the cofounder of Inbound.org (now owned by Hubspot), a frequent traveler and speaker, host of the Whiteboard Friday video series on the Moz blog, and a passionate supporter of underdogs (of all kinds).

Looking forward to questions (I'll be checking the thread a few times throughout the day -- unfortunately I have a crazy schedule so responses may be delayed). Thanks for having me!

Hey BigSEO!

On August 4th, 2015, just a few weeks after joining Ahrefs, I posted a thread here on r/BigSEO asking for your feedback about our company. That thread got an impressive 116 comments and gave me (& the rest of the team) a lot to think about.

Since then, it has become a tradition of mine to post the same thread here every two years on the same day. And this would be my fourth one:

1. 2015;

2. 2017;

3. 2019;

4. 2021.

The premise is simple:

Here at Ahrefs, we want to look at our work through the eyes of other people in our industry and learn from them.

And it's not like we're only willing to listen to what the industry says about us just once in 2 years on a specific day. We consistently monitor social networks and relevant communities for mentions of our brand and try to jump into conversations whenever possible.

But those conversations usually fall into one of the two extremes - people are either super happy about something or super frustrated. Which doesn't really paint the full picture. So this thread is our way of soliciting feedback from the kinds of people who wouldn't ordinarily share their opinion, unless they're asked to.

And besides, a good chunk of the Ahrefs’ team (if not everyone) will be reading this thread.

So… What do you folks think about Ahrefs? :)

It doesn’t matter if you’re a paying customer of ours or never tried our tools before. If you hang out at r/BigSEO - we want to know what you think of us!

Jason Calcanis just publicly called out Neil Patel, Timothy, and Robert Herjavec for trying to swindle people with their newly announced project together

This is going to certainly hurt Robert’s brand.

Always remember folks:

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”

— Warren Buffet

What do you guys think of this?

I thought it was super interested that a well respected entrepreneur could get caught up in something like this at this point in his career.

Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html?m=1

Google - An expanded partnership with Reddit

This partnership will facilitate more content-forward displays of Reddit information that will make our products more helpful for our users and make it easier to participate in Reddit communities and conversations.

We're aware that Reddit has been way more visible in SERPs for the past 6 months, which likely sparked the multiple generic article posts we see each day. Spammers are attempting to rank on generic queries through Reddit.

With this partnership, I feel like Reddit will be even more visible in Google and everyone will know about it. Every theme where products exist and has a subreddit will be spammed by ChatGPT generated content from brands.

Thoughts?

Per Google: Tomorrow, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before.

Source: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1135275028834947073