Ethan Lazuk

SEO & marketing professional.

Hamsterdam Part 32: SEO News Recap from 11/13 to 11/19

By Ethan Lazuk

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A weekly look-back at SEO news, tips, and other content shared on social media & beyond.

Hamsterdam Part 32 opening with Danny Sullivan quote about hidden gems ranking on Google.

Quote source: Google Search Liaison

Opening notes:

*Feel free to jump down to the recap, or keep reading for an introduction and summary of the week’s news!

Introduction to week 32: “Hidden Gems”

As the owner of a “little-known blog” — so to speak — I’ve been eagerly awaiting, since Google’s May 10th announcement, for the day when their “helpful content ranking system” will show more “hidden gems” on Search.

Well, it turns out it does now, and has for “several months,” only it’s been a part of Google’s core ranking system.

Why is this an important change?

It has the potential to increase the visibility of helpful content “in unexpected or hard-to-find places.”

As past Hamsterdam articles can highlight, search professionals have reported Reddit, Quora, and other forums (and forms of UGC content) getting more visibility on Search in recent months.

For me, though, it’s examples of “a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic” that I’ll be on the lookout for.

Part of what I love about SEO is helping people translate their unique industry knowledge into content that assists their audience, builds brand trust, and grows their businesses.

I’d much rather compete on a playing field where the most “helpful information” or “unique expertise” wins the day.

I suspected the hidden gems ranking improvement may have been live for some time, at least in some form, based on results I’ve seen for my personal website.

I have a few articles that tend to rank well (increasingly) for obscure queries — meaning they’re relevant but also niche, so I guess technically they’re “long tail.”

Anyway lol …

Usually when my site shows up on Search for these queries, it’s among the company of bigger brands.

A few of the queries I’ve been tracking are:

  • 10x content seo
  • chatgpt claude seo
  • shopify sag organic
  • ga4 shopify organic revenue
  • google vs bing shopify organic revenue
  • seo anthropology
  • microsoft clarity helpful content seo

Like I said, obscure lol.

In particular, that [10x content seo] query and its variants has been one I’ve been interested in. I recently updated my article about 11x content with more information about the “hidden gems” aspect to Google’s core ranking system.

The reason is simple — that article is quite experimental, yet it ranks among known quantities. For sure, the article has a lot of good information about 10x content and SEO, but I truly wrote it as “people-first” content, meaning I paid no attention whatsoever to keywords or any other results ranking, unless I was using them as sources of information, and just wrote what I’d want to read.

That approach is also the principal argument in the article.

Contrast that with a TikTok video I saw last night by a well-known SEO influencer (not one you’ll see too often in Hamsterdam lol). The advice they gave was to look at year-over-year rankings for pages that lost traffic (makes sense so far), but then use ChatGPT to refresh your content based on currently top-ranking competitor results as inputs.

What’s wrong with that, in my opinion?

There was no mention of the audience at all, or better satisfying their search intent. The focus was just on rankings and competitors.

As I said in Part 30 of Hamsterdam, there are many different philosophies within SEO.

This is one aspect of the philosophy I subscribe to:

Google SearchLiaison tweet about chasing the algo vs. what people want.

This was a very busy week in Search news, and “hidden gems” were just the tip of the iceberg.

Buckle up for a full week’s recap, and enjoy the vibes:

Summary of the week’s SEO news and content

  • Google’s started rolling out its hidden gems ranking improvement months ago, which (at least as of 11/15) is now fully rolled out as part of the core ranking system.
  • Google announced “new tailored experiences and more helpful insights from other people” on Search, including the ability to follow topics, filter perspectives on desktop, and leave notes via a Search Labs experiment.
  • Google introduced more ways for generative AI to help with holiday shopping, including gift ideas and AI-powered image generation.
  • Google updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
  • Google is sunsetting the robots.txt tester and updated GSC with a robots.txt report that replaces the custom parser with the same one used by the crawling infrastructure, per Gary Illyes on LinkedIn (see below).
  • A Yahoo search engine is coming in early 2024!
  • Google Analytics 4 renamed “Conversions” to “Key events” for non-Ads conversions.

But don’t just take my word for it! All of this info and more is contained below in the weekly recap.

Notes:

  • If the article times out on mobile, my apologies. Please try viewing on a desktop or WiFi.
  • I’ve cut back on the amount of info I include; if you’d like to see more, scrolling through my likes on X or following the people in this recap is probably the best place to start. 😉

Missed last week’s recap? Don’t worry, I got you! Read Part 31 to catch up.

Okay, time for (home)work.

The Big Lebowski is this your homework Larry scene.

Jump to a section of this week’s recap

Enjoy the recap below! And please support content you find valuable with a like or follow. 🙂

Top posts

These are key news items, tips, or other content I felt were relevant to highlight for the week, particularly if you just want a quick glance.

This is the announcement referenced in my introduction above. There are posts with some added context below as well. Like many, I was anticipating this rolling out, and surprised to learn it a) had been live for a while and b) wasn’t part of a helpful content update but rather the core ranking system.
Important announcements in this article include “the ability to follow exactly what you’re interested in” for “a more tailored Search experience”; “more firsthand knowledge in Search,” including the Perspectives filter coming to desktop (yay!), as well information about individual creators; also a Notes experiment in Search Labs, where people can leave notes (“tips and advice”) on a search result. This announcement didn’t mention “hidden gems,” but luckily it was report on in that post above by Barry Schwartz.
Worth taking a stroll through all of these slides; I summarized a few of them in last week’s Hamsterdam as well, based on what I remembered seeing the presentation.
As Google Search Central’s document on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content says: “Reading the guidelines may help you self-assess how your content is doing from an E-E-A-T perspective, improvements to consider, and help align it conceptually with the different signals that our automated systems use to rank content.”
When concepts are tied back to references from Google and then shown in an applied SEO context, that’s what elevates content for me. This is one to bookmark!
Marianne Sweeny LinkedIn post about information architecture.

SEO news, Google updates, & SERP tests

These are newsworthy events in the SEO world from the last week or SERP tests to be aware of.

Gary Illyes of Google reported the following about the robots.txt parser:

Gary Illyes post on LinkedIn about Google's robots.txt parser.
Excited to have more search engines in the mix! I miss Neeva. I do experiment quite a bit on Bing. It’s so fun, but often of little consequence for overall traffic, in most cases I’m involved with anyway. (I’ve seen Bing and other search engines send more qualified clicks to sites I’ve worked with based on organic search traffic vs. revenue across search engines. It was a small case study of two Shopify stores, and likely the ads dynamic was a part of that, but still interesting.)
If you’re not part of the Notes test in Search Labs, this may be another way to see what notes people are leaving. I’ve been looking for them in the wild myself, but I don’t yet see any number counts, so it’s hard to tell when a note has been left.

SEO tips & tidbits

This section has actionable tips, cool tidbits, or other findings and observations that can be teaching moments.

SEO fundamentals & resources

If you’re new to SEO, this section includes essential information, concepts, or resources to learn more about.

Articles, videos, case studies & more

These are longer-form content shared on social.

Olaf continues to produce great content. This is my favorite excerpt from this article: “The validity of the entities, attributes and other information is checked for correctness via frequencies. As soon as a threshold value is reached, the entities are transferred to the Knowledge Graph and displayed in the SERPs with their own Knowledge Panel.” I think it’s a great way to explain this concept, especially for people who want a knowledge panel but maybe don’t have one. — I also found out this week I have my own entity! I’m officially: /g/11fyz0c8bm
I generally fall into the build great content not chase links camp. My hope is by getting my personal site ranking for more queries, I can illustrate this concept more to clients (and others) who get hung up on backlinks. Not saying they’re not important lol, just that I believe things are moving in another direction due to machine learning.

Local SEO

If you’re into local Search, this section is for you!

If your location page strategy was to rehash the same content with the name of the city changed, this is a much better approach that gives originality and increased value to those pages for users.

Technical SEO

Yep, it still matters. 😉

Dave Smart post on LinkedIn about robots.txt rules.

Content marketing

What’d SEO be without content?

Tools, AI & reporting

Here’s a recap of updates to tools, and new tools, along with tips for reporting on data.

This took 30 seconds to set up and I recommend playing with it, if you’re interested. My thought was using ChatGPT to clean and visualize the data.

Humor

Humor is subjective; hopefully, you find these funny as well!

Living in Orlando myself, this makes total sense.
Eli Schwartz post on LinkedIn about competitors and SEO strategies.

General Marketing & Miscellaneous

This is for great content that isn’t necessarily SEO (i.e., PPC, PR, dev, and content friends check it out!) or even marketing-specific.

Great job making it to the end. You rock!

Show your support for creators: If you liked any of the content shared above, please support that person by liking their post or following them. 🙂

Hungry for more? Check out the past weeks of Hamsterdam.

Or sign up for the newsletter! (Until I get the form back up and running, feel free to shoot me an email to get added to the list.)

Want to work together on your brand’s SEO?

I’m currently taking clients for SEO and content audits and strategy consulting, and soon training. You can learn more about me on my about page.

Get in touch: hit me up on social at @EthanLazuk, by text or call at 813-557-9745, or via email at ethan.lazuk@gmail.com.

Cheers!

SEO Strategist u0026amp; Consultant

Ethan Lazuk

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