Category: SEO Tips

I’d recently written about how to write so that your content compares favorably with AI. The idea was that since AI can only synthesize what’s already out there, the way forward is to create content that can’t be synthesized. Opinions and writing in the first person are the best ways to do this. However, I […]

A few years back, someone or something started to inundate my site with spam backlinks in what I can only assume is an attempt at “negative SEO”. These attacks have continued on my site to this day. Ahrefs, for example, regularly shows me new websites that link back to my site with anchor text involving […]

How many of us regularly append “reddit’ or “site:reddit.com” to a query on Google? I know I do it regularly, and I suspect you do too. And the reason is that Google search results are getting worse when it comes to queries that seek the opinions of real people. Most articles on the web are […]

There’s no point in carefully crafting your page title if Google doesn’t show it! Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell if Google will truncate your title. There are some shorthand guidelines. For example, we’re told that your title length must be below 66 characters. But this isn’t true. Sometimes Google cuts off titles that […]

When your homepage appears in Google’s SERPs, under what name does Google display your site? For a while, Google used your <title> tag – the same as for every other page. But starting in October 2022, Google introduced a new system for explicitly specifying your site name when displaying homepage results. The idea is that […]

With so many search result enhancements, it’s hard to determine what your visitors see. For example, this is the search result for my NameHero coupon page at WP-Tweaks.com: As you can see, it shows a ratings search enhancement and a list of site links below. But there are a lot of other enhancements that could […]

I’ve just finished writing an article on my I think a paid Screaming Frog subscription isn’t worth it, and now I’m saying that Ahrefs isn’t worth it either for most website owners! Am I just being a contrarian? Is it clickbait? If so, my opinion is, at the very least, genuine. I’m a website owner, […]

I seem to be on a roll, nitpicking Google’s public pronouncements on SEO. After my last article on the SEO impact of cloaking affiliate links, I told myself I’d stay away from the subject for a while, but then couldn’t help myself as John Mueller said something that quietly upended the entire foundation of search. […]

Those who rely on search for our traffic know that the phrase “Content is King” in search is a lie. The crown doesn’t go to content but to something Google claims doesn’t exist – domain authority. We know that big brands always get away with thin, poor-quality content, while smaller brands with better articles rank […]

No one – probably not even Google’s search engineers – understands all the factors that go into ranking search results. Particularly with the integration of AI, I’m convinced that even the people who built the system no longer know what goes into determining which results show up in which position, let alone the respective weightings. […]