🐹 Hamsterdam Part 117: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (9/27 to 10/3, 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! 🙌
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: “Visual merchandising”
Visual merchandising is the practice of designing store layouts, displays, signage, lighting, and other elements to highlight products and influence customer behavior. At it’s core, it’s about marketing through visuals.
The goals of visual merchandising are to attract attention, create desire, guide flow (influence how customers move through a store or a website), boost sales, and reinforce branding.
Key elements of visual merchandising can include the store layout, window displays, color and lighting, product placement (like putting high-demand items at eye-level), signage, props and themes, and even digital visual merchandising (think ecommerce photography and web design).
🤖 AI word of the week: “Vanishing gradient”
The vanishing gradient problem happens when the values of gradients (the numbers used to update a neural network’s weights) become extremely small as they’re backpropagated through many layers. When this happens, earlier layers in the network struggle to learn anything, slowing down or stalling the training.
Why this happens is because in deep NNs, derivatives are often less than 1. Multiplying many small numbers together during backpropagation causes the gradient to shrink exponentially. As a result, weight updates become tiny so the network doesn’t improve much, particularly in its early layers.
The effects are slow learning, poor accuracy, and dead layers (earlier layers may stop learning altogether).
😊 Introduction to week 117: “Expert review”
I’m working on a couple of brands in the YMYL space. One of the optimizations we’re making to the content we’re producing is having it undergo expert review.
Given the commodification of content today with AI production methods, it’s harder to differentiate your content from all the rest. Having firsthand expertise or opinions is one way to deliver valuable information for readers, and one of the ways to achieve that is to have experts review your content.
If you’re struggling to get content ranking, consider reaching out to someone in the space who is an expert who can review (or even author) your content. Not only is this a positive indication of trust to readers but it also adds that information gain that sets content apart.
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 116 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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