Mark Zuckerberg Talks Classifiers, Confidence, and Algorithmic Collateral Damage (And it relates to Google Algorithm Updates)

A recent appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast provides a great explanation of how classifiers, confidence levels, and precision work with machine learning algorithms. He also covered how adjusting confidence can impact the amount of collateral damage occurring when updates roll out. And if you swap “Social” for “Search”, Zuckerberg could be…

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Google December 2024 Spam Update Analysis – 5 Case Studies Covering Scaled Content Abuse, AI Content, Doorway Pages, and more

The end of 2024 was a crazy time SEO-wise with Google pushing multiple major updates at the end of the year (and throughout the holiday shopping season). First, we had the November 2024 core update, which took over three weeks to complete. Then we had one week off before the December 2024 core update rolled…

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ChatGPT Search creeps closer to Google – OpenAI’s Ship-mas brings maps for Local Search, improved results for navigational queries, and live mode with Search

We are quickly witnessing the Googlization of ChatGPT and the ChatGPTization of Google Search. It’s a fascinating time to be involved in Search, that’s for sure. I cover several new ChatGPT Search features announced as part of OpenAI’s Ship-mas. On the eighth day of ship-mas OpenAI announced some exciting news about its ChatGPT Search product….

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Find your subdomains. Know your subdomains – The SEO importance of finding all subdomains for your site.

Whenever I jump into helping a new client, it’s always interesting to get a lay of the land. For example, manually reviewing the site, scanning the GSC reporting, checking third-party visibility tools, triggering an initial crawl of the site, etc. And for large-scale and complex sites, you just never know what you’re going to find….

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Documenting Google’s site-level evaluation and impact on search rankings using the ‘Gabeback Machine’ [Googler Quotes, Videos, Documentation and more]

It’s not like all urls on a site suddenly become low quality overnight… It’s a site-level adjustment that can impact rankings across an entire site. After the recent creator summit, some attendees explained that Google’s Pandu Nayak joined the group to answer questions about the helpful content update, Google’s evaluation of quality, the current state…

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