If your website has ~5+ years of SEO history and has been negatively impacted by Google updates, unfortunately, you can no longer compare yourself to the shiny new competitor who came out of nowhere and is now outranking you. 🧵 In SEO, history matters. As soon as you get yourself in “trouble” with Google, whether that is through a penalty or an algorithm update, you no longer have a clean slate. Now, your site is weighed down by its history. This often makes it MUCH harder to compete.

I've started digging in to the Helpful Content Update.

Some findings so far (🧵)

The most heavily impacted category appears to be online tools like calculators, converters, alarms, etc.

While most "tool" sites exist to make money off ads, some have much better UX than others.

Next is "information" sites, like definitions, city data, meanings of colors, etc.

What do they have in common? It's obvious:

They're scraping publicly available data, re-hashing it in their own way, and blasting ads all over the place. The UX is often terrible.

Not helpful.

I believe that the future of SEO will be highly tied in with influencer marketing. Hear me out:

More and more SERP features are highlighting individual experience. Short videos. Perspectives. Knowledge graphs. Author carousels. Testing author names in Top Stories. 🧵 It’s pretty clear that there is a strong connection between social media signals and performance on Google, particularly in Discover.

I know Google has said social media isn’t a ranking factor, but the correlation is strong, time and time again.

I see a lot of posts like “why would people work at SEO agencies when they could…”

I’ll give you a few answers and share my experience, as someone who has been agency-side for 12 years:

🧵 Being on a team is amazing.

Aside from the career benefits, being on a team provides social comradery, collaboration, the ability to learn from one another every day, and in many cases, lifelong friendships.

But career-wise, I literally couldn’t do what I (we) do without them.

One challenge with using ChatGPT to come up with new article ideas is cross-referencing your site's existing articles to see if you've already written that content.

Here's one approach I've been using... it's not entirely scientific but it gets the job done🧵 You can ask ChatGPT to try to identify the most logical, high-volume, commonly searched phrase a searcher might type to find the article.

Yes, ChatGPT doesn't actually *know* search volumes, but it does a good job of guessing the best phrase with the right prompt:

In the past several years, speaking in public went from one of my biggest fears to one of the things I enjoy doing most.

If you have a fear of public speaking, you CAN overcome it.

Some things that have helped me over the years (a thread): Realizing that the audience actually wants to hear what you have to say; that’s why they are there.

They aren’t there to ridicule you, mock you, or judge you.

They’re there because they want to hear your expertise. Tell them what you know!

Because the whole world is hiring SEOs right now, here's a quick thread with some tips about hiring the right (intermediate) SEO for your business and not getting burned:

(FWIW, hiring has been a big part of my role for 9 years now, so I think I've seen it all... good and bad😝) The SEO you hire should have specific experience for YOUR type of website.

Are you a news site? The SEO should have news/publishing experience.

If 1 SEO is expected to handle everything, they need both technical and content experience specific to news sites (G News, Discover)

Pretty interesting to think about how Google and Facebook handled/continue to handle the threat of misinformation in completely different ways.

I’ve been saying since day 1 that the rise of E-A-T seems to be Google’s method of reducing fake news and misinformation.

(thread) Google’s emphasis on E-A-T grew rapidly after the 2016 U.S. election and after egregious examples found by @carolecadwalla and others that their algorithms were surfacing dangerous misinformation (h/t @randfish for his MozCon talk on this topic several years ago)

Ok, whew.

Here is a thread paraphrasing the new E-A-T-related updates from Google at #SearchOn

- Providing relevant and credible information is Google's responsibility

- People turn to Google to find info they can trust

- Misinformation is a growing problem - Google's algorithms are designed to reward high-quality content, but for *critical topics* (YMYL), Google elevates authoritativeness to make sure users can find content they can trust.

- Users don't just want quick facts, they want to really understand the information

SEO tools are great for surfacing keyword & content opportunities based on existing data (ranking URLs, monthly search volumes, etc.)

Where they fall short - and will always fall short - is being able to provide guidance on *actual subject matter expertise.*

(thread) The problem arises when many SEOs rely on the same set of tools for their research, b/c the tools are all working with the same data sets (more or less)

If everyone blindly follows the advice of SEO tools, it will ultimately lead to content that basically all says the same thing

Now here's another interesting development:

The new FS for 'Lupus' not only pulls in content from the ranking page (Mayo Clinic), but also appends this "Symptoms" call-out, which is *not* taken from text on this page.

The word "pericarditis" appears nowhere on the page. 🤔 Also, I'm seeing multiple examples Featured Snippets appear on desktop, but refreshing and switching to a mobile user-agent makes the FS go away.

Google only appears to be asking for feedback about whether the FS is helpful on desktop.