🐹 Hamsterdam Part 106: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (7/5 to 7/11, 2025)
By Ethan Lazuk
Last updated:
A weekly look-back at SEO & AI news, tips, and other content shared on social media & beyond.
Opening notes, thoughts, and musings:
- Welcome to another new week of Hamsterdam! 🐹
- I appreciate you being here, and look forward to sharing the week’s news! 🙌
- Hopefully the June 2025 Core Update is treating you well!
If you’re in a rush, hop down to the news portion. 📰
Or continue reading for two vocabulary lessons plus an introduction.
And we’re off …
🧑💻 Marketing word of the week: “Keyword stuffing”
Keyword stuffing is an outdated tactic of pumping a webpage full of repetitive mentions of the same target keyword(s) to try and influence search rankings.
Not only does keyword stuffing create a poor user experience, it also signals low-quality or spammy content.
Instead of stuffing keywords, write naturally to comprehensively cover a topic with the user in mind.
Besides, search engines like Google and AI tools like ChatGPT increasingly use text embeddings now. This means they understand content by concept, not just exact-match keywords.
To optimize for search today, write naturally and thoroughly, structure content clearly with headings and subheadings, and include semantically related terms, again, naturally, all while focusing on user intent, not just specific keyword phrases.
🤖 AI word of the week: “Knowledge-enhanced retrieval”
Knowledge-enhanced retrieval (KER) is an advanced AI technique that helps systems like search engines or chatbots find better, more relevant answers by combining structured knowledge (like facts from a database or knowledge graph) with neural search (AI models that understand meaning using language embeddings).
KER goes beyond matching keywords and tries to understand meaning and context using facts and learned representations to retrieve the most helpful information.
KER powers next-gen search like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT with RAG. Speaking of RAG, it includes KER but is a broader framework that focuses on enhancing the generation of answers using retrieved information.
😄 Introduction to week 106: “Narratives”
I’m working on a site that was seeing a slipping in its traffic. A lot of it was related to AI Overviews summarizing information for queries where previously this site’s blog had driven clicks. Some of it was from other SERP features like images or videos outranking organic results.
Long story short, the site owner was aware of the traffic declining.
We’ve managed to turn it around a bit lately, mainly by refreshing historical blog content to garner the benefits of freshness. Traffic has been up as a result.
Still, there’s this narrative attached to the site by the site owner that it’s traffic is declining, despite us showing charts and data to the contrary.
Narratives can be a stubborn thing. They must be carefully managed with focusing on facts.
Even still, our goal is conversions and monetization of that traffic, where we’ve also seen growth, so we put the focus on that. A different narrative.
Thank you for supporting Hamsterdam and the cause of SEO & AI learning. 🙏
Enjoy the vibes:
Missed last week? Don’t worry, I got you! Read Part 105 to catch up.
🌟 Other great sources of weekly SEO news:
- The SEO Weekly – Garret Sussman, iPullRank
- SEOFOMO – Aleyda Solis
- Weekly Video Recaps – Barry Schwartz, SER
- Weekly SEO News YouTube channel – Olga Zarr, Seosly
- Niche Surfer – Yoyao Hsueh
Time for our weekly review of SEO social posts, articles, & more …
Now, let’s step inside the white flags of Hamsterdam …
⏩ Jump to a section:
- News, Google updates, & SERP tests
- SEO tips & tidbits
- Fundamentals & resources
- Articles, videos & case studies
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- Content marketing
- Local SEO
- Data analysis & reporting
- AI, LLMS, & machine learning
- Miscellaneous & general posts
- Older stuff that’s good!
Or keep scrolling to see it all. ⏬
📰 SEO news, Google updates, SERP tests & notable posts
Notable updates or news related to Google Search or related SEO topics.
🍟 SEO tips & tidbits
Actionable tips, cool tidbits, and other snackable findings and observations that can be teaching moments.
Essential information, concepts, or resources to learn about SEO or AI.
Longer-form content pieces shared on social, in newsletters, and elsewhere.
🧑💻 Technical SEO
Everything from basics to advanced moves (and also tools).
✍️ Content marketing
From what is helpful content to user journeys and beyond.
📍 Local SEO
From Google Business Profiles to reviews and more!
📊 Data analysis & reporting
Showing that what you’re doing is helping.
🤖 AI, machine learning, & LLMs
News related to models, papers, and companies.
🤔 General marketing & miscellaneous
This is for great content that isn’t necessarily SEO or marketing-specific. PPC, PR, dev, design, and social friends, check it out!
💎 Older stuff that’s good!
Not everything I find worth sharing is new as of this week, so these are gems I came across published in the past.
Great job making it to the end. You rock! 🪨
Let’s connect!
Hit me up anytime via text or call at 813-557-9745 or on social or email:
Cheers! ✌️
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