🐹 Hamsterdam Part 124: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (11/15 to 11/21, 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: “Core competency”
Core competency is the one thing that a company is exceptionally good at. It can be a skill, process, or capability that gives a real advantage over competitors and is hard to copy.
A core competency has three attributes: it delivers real value to customers, it’s hard for competitors to imitate, and it can be used in multiple products or services. Think of it as something that must solve a problem or improve the customer’s experience, can stem from specialized knowledge, brand trust, technology, long-developed processes, or other factors, and is not tied to one product but is rather a deep capability that powers the whole brand.
Examples of a core competency might be Apple’s seamless design and user experience, Amazon’s logistics and customer obsession, or Coca-Cola’s global distribution.
🤖 AI word of the week: “Clustering”
Clustering is an unsupervised learning method that groups similar data points together when you don’t have labels. Think of it as the computer looking at a big pile of mixed items and figuring out which ones naturally belong together.
Clustering is useful when you don’t know the categories ahead of time and want the AI to discover patterns on its own. Examples might include grouping customers by behavior for marketing, organizing similar images, or finding patterns in medical data.
In simple terms, clustering works by having the algorithm look at all of the data points, measure how similar or different they are using distance (in a multidimensional space), and placing points into groups (clusters) where items inside each group are similar to each other but different from other groups.
Types of clustering might include K-means clustering, hierarchical clustering, density-based (DBSCAN), or Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM).
😊 Introduction to week 124: “Rolling up the sleeves (content writing)”
This week I had the opportunity to write some content for product-focused blog posts.
I got my start in digital marketing as a content writer, and from there went into SEO fully, so it was nice to get back to my roots and type on the keyboard.
One thing I learned is that my knowledge of SEO and optimizing for AI assistants certainly guided my decisions around how I structured the blog posts, but ultimately it was my knowledge of the end user that guided me the most.
I thought about what is the intent of this article and how would I, as a reader, like to be presented with the information.
If you’re like me and haven’t written content for a blog in a while, consider giving it a try. You may be surprised how fun it can be.
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 123 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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