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

By Ethan Lazuk

Last updated:

November 13, 2024

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

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:

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.

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

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:

Yahoo Search to start rolling out in the first weeks of 2024 https://t.co/fFNSaCKGtL via #smx @brianprovost
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 15, 2023

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.)

Even more SEO news today. 🙂 Bing has added AI-generated captions for *some* listings (via GPT-4). I've just tested a bunch of queries and did find a number of them. And they are pretty good so far… Seems to trigger for broader queries based on my tests. https://t.co/cDxYgcqs1R
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 15, 2023

Text-to-image to generate product concepts that you want. Google provides similar results based on the image?

That's a pretty sweet concept.

Alight Google, I see you. https://t.co/aHcI4yRcSh
— Garrett Sussman ☕️🔎 (@garrettsussman) November 16, 2023

Google did tell me that these are crawlable – so I guess this is proof https://t.co/r7nlb2Xaeo
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 17, 2023

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.

It is. And it’s something we’re actively looking at ways to improve.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 16, 2023

SEO tips & tidbits

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

Do whatever you want, but I'm not blocking any LLM crawlers.

Branding begets performance.
— Mic King (@iPullRank) November 16, 2023

A few thoughts on Notes:

Google uses an algorithm to figure out which ones to display. Most likely only the most helpful comments will display, but we will see.

I would think that they are confident in their ability to filter out spam if they felt confident enough to push this… https://t.co/sQngDFOzob
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) November 17, 2023

9/?

And … as Internal Links is such a big thing,
there's actually a 2-part thread I did on it…

1st:https://t.co/5FWMD4dQzl

2nd:https://t.co/7LqAXVBePz
— Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA) (@darth_na) November 19, 2023

SEO fundamentals & resources

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

SEO Tip: Quick Website Reputation Check (E-E-A-T)

1. Google your site
2. Hit the 3 small dots next to the URL
3. On the pop-up hit "More about this page"
4. See Google's "About the source" for your site

These mentions ABOUT your site from around the web that Google knows about pic.twitter.com/k5QFqXaqZq
— Cyrus SEO (@CyrusShepard) November 14, 2023

G doesn’t use click behavior to adjust the live rankings (except in limited tests). They use that data in aggregate to determine if the algo is producing results people like, and adjust the algo accordingly.
— Mark Traphagen 🏳️‍🌈 (they/them) (@marktraphagen) November 14, 2023

Top 10 takeaways from #brightonSEO last week:

1. Want to appear in the AI snapshot? Get more brand mentions.

2. Want to appear in the AI snapshot? Get more backlinks.

3. Want to appear in the AI snapshot? Rank in position 1, 2, or 9 (weirdly).

Continued…
— Gaetano DiNardi (@gaetano_nyc) November 14, 2023

If you want a long-term career as an SEO, you need to ask yourself, am I getting higher rankings for websites, or businesses? The first is how you learn, the second is how you thrive.
— Joe Hall ☕️ (@joehall) November 16, 2023

Counterintuitive SEO – How to Achieve SEO Goals Going Beyond SEO Best Practices – My Presentation at #BBSEO23 👀https://t.co/mW0VwmfTRg pic.twitter.com/BMqwnS0pz6
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) November 16, 2023

Articles, videos, case studies & more

These are longer-form content shared on social.

Another big step towards Next SEO, neat information architecture, next content strategy and next UX.
Sun is setting on the old ways. Time is wasting on finding new ones https://t.co/kXTF7UqN9b
— Marianne Sweeny (@msweeny) November 13, 2023

✌️🔥The Google Knowledge Vault: Facts and thoughts👇Lately I've been reading and hearing a lot of speculation about the Google Knowledge Vault. I collected the few official facts and my thoughts about the Google Knowledge Vault in my article. https://t.co/0pVzz2yAWM pic.twitter.com/hmBK9RkCnJ
— ✌️Oᒪᗩᖴ KOᑭᑭ 🔥 (@Olaf_Kopp) November 14, 2023

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

Appreciate work from @seosmarty on state of link dev. Big difference in large vs. small agencies when it comes to link dev, but it makes sense considering large agencies rep bigger brands which attract links on their own and don't "need" much augmenting. https://t.co/BOis4MUBQI pic.twitter.com/upcJBT0SnV
— Jake Bohall (@jakebohall) November 14, 2023

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.

Google On Topical Authority: Don’t Worry About It. Google's John Mueller on what to do about Topical Authority via @martinibuster: https://t.co/dKFT3hiRKV #seonews #Google #SEO
— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) November 14, 2023

✌️🔥"Obtaining authoritative search results"👇

For me, this patent is one of the foundations for today's E-E-A-T concept.

The patent focuses on improving search engine results by incorporating authoritative search results.
https://t.co/WQbZrFzkcp pic.twitter.com/LMbqxsyapl
— ✌️Oᒪᗩᖴ KOᑭᑭ 🔥 (@Olaf_Kopp) November 15, 2023

Brand Entity Research:

76% of consumers are more likely to purchase from personalized brands.

This means you must thoroughly know your audience and create helpful, unique messaging that personally resonates with them.https://t.co/TiXxBHk9Kk pic.twitter.com/Ao8yFUfwaA
— Jeannie Hill (@essentialskill) November 16, 2023

Here's my full Google ranking case study and research into entities.

I spent hundreds of hours on the year long case study and dozens more refining the theories behind the surprising results. Includes methodology, ranking graphs, user metrics & examples.https://t.co/KbFJMWsNud
— Eric Lancheres (@ericlancheres) November 16, 2023

Twenty years ago, the SERPs changes as we knew them. Here are the lessons learned about understanding and surviving Google updates today https://t.co/UPqpZARIIi
#seotips #seoadvice #seostrategy pic.twitter.com/GMYCJyT8At
— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) November 17, 2023

Local SEO

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

I was recently asked how to make an awesome multi-location landing page.

Here's my answer, and my take on how to make great location pages that RANK 🧵
— Darren Shaw (@DarrenShaw_) November 15, 2023

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. 😉

How to Talk to Your Graph 🙂
Letting people use natural language instead of SPARQL queries. Vassil Momtchev explaining what does it mean to talk to your graph. #kgf2023 (Of course ansking who is Luke :D) pic.twitter.com/U6GyrXrN2w
— Teodora Petkova (@TheodoraPetkova) November 14, 2023

Googlebot renders pages with Chrome, so it's worth checking that your pages work with the new cookie world. https://t.co/GSKWzsx8Is
— John (@JohnMu) November 15, 2023

I can't' stress this enough:
If you want to solve CLS issues on a large/complex website, get RUM data.
Lighthouse testing, alone, often won't show the root cause.
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) November 15, 2023

Content marketing

What’d SEO be without content?

Web content becoming "more specific" is inevitable.

Think about it from a machine learning & ranking POV alone.

What does machine learning getting "better" at "understanding" content even mean?

"Better Understanding" = better parsing of concepts.

That's not novel – that's… pic.twitter.com/Dqx4KoJLux
— Mordy Oberstein *Marred by Marmite” (@MordyOberstein) November 14, 2023

Your content is JUST RIGHT if:

🟣 It gets to the point of the query early, preferably addressing the most important info in the intro or first heading (don’t bury the lede!)

🟣 It uses clear/related headings that anyone person with a 6th-grade education would get by skimming
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) November 15, 2023

Tools, AI & reporting

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

What an odd change. https://t.co/p0ADhxWrpB
— Dana DiTomaso (@danaditomaso) November 16, 2023

60-Second SEO: You can bypass Search Console's 1,000 row query limit by using Looker Studio.

In this example, I found 17,000 rows that I can mine for more query opportunities.

Here's the process: pic.twitter.com/9rnbKezRpK
— Chris Long (@gofishchris) November 14, 2023

Jordan took that super long screaming frog guide and put it into a GPT to make it easier to ask questions / get help. Also made a few updates to it as well. https://t.co/LdupsoCbKO
— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) November 14, 2023

I created a very simple, easy to use bookmarklet that scrapes the search engine results.

Just add a bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar and add the Javascript code.

Then when you're viewing a Google results page, click the bookmark. It gives you all the URLs in that search… pic.twitter.com/OSH39azUnG
— Bill Hartzer (@bhartzer) November 14, 2023

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.

Little tip – You can test robots.txt in @screamingfrog via 'Config > Robots.txt'. You can download the robots.txt, customise and test rules – which work with your selected user-agent. It uses code from Google's published OS robots.txt parser. pic.twitter.com/gukx8QgyD9
— Screaming Frog (@screamingfrog) November 16, 2023

Humor

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

Um, that's not what the address line is for 🤦‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/r0GXS889EL
— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) November 14, 2023

Living in Orlando myself, this makes total sense.

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.

Quick #WordPress Hack: Avoid mix-ups when working across multiple environments (local, staging, production).

Set distinct admin color schemes for each! My go-to? 🌅 Midnight for production and 👻 Ectoplasm on the rest. pic.twitter.com/9PORnMX6ha
— Remkus de Vries (@remkusdevries) November 14, 2023

10 creative ads I've collected this week:

1. Olay eye cream pic.twitter.com/C6DRJHeIY6
— The Ad Professor (@The_AdProfessor) November 13, 2023

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