Hamsterdam Part 51: Weekly SEO News Recap (3/25 to 3/31, 2024)
By Ethan Lazuk
Last updated:
A weekly look-back at SEO news, tips, and other content shared on social media & beyond.
Opening notes:
Welcome to another week of Hamsterdam!
If you’re enjoying the news recaps, I now have two spin-off projects, as well:
- Hamsterdam History, where we look at vintage SEO articles. (The latest article covered a Cre8site link discussion from 2005.)
- Hamsterdam Research, where we look at recent AI research papers and discuss their relevance (often hypothetically) to SEO and search engines. (The first article covered ELM, or the embedding language model.)
You can subscribe to the free Hamsterdam newsletter to receive all of these and more.
*Feel free to jump down to this week’s recap, or continue for a historical anecdote, introduction, and summary of the week’s news!
This week in SEO history
On March 25th, 2008, Paul Haahr and Steve Baker published a blog post on The Official Google Blog called “Making search better in Catalonia, Estonia, and everywhere else.”
The first sentence may catch your attention:
“One of the most important uses of data at Google is building language models.”
Remember, this is 2008, four years before the knowledge graph and seven years before RankBrain.
The post mentions a goal of interpreting searches better, and specifically references translation and other languages:
“By analyzing how people use language, we build models that enable us to interpret searches better, offer spelling corrections, understand when alternative forms of words are needed, offer language translation, and even suggest when searching in another language is appropriate.”
Here’s an interesting concept that feels RankBrain-esque:
“One place we use these models is to find alternatives for words used in searches.”
The post then gives examples of how users in different countries and speaking different languages might expect different context for ambiguous concepts, like “GM,” which could mean car company, world war, mechanical engineering, genetically modified, etc.
To grasp that context, Google learns from users:
“Because our language models are based on users’ interactions with Google, they are more precise and comprehensive — for example, they incorporate names, idioms, colloquial usage, and newly coined words not often found in dictionaries.
When building our models, we use billions of web documents and as much historical search data as we can, in order to have the most comprehensive understanding of language possible. We analyze how our users searched and how they revised their searches. By looking across the aggregated searches of many users, we can infer the relationships of words to each other.”
The user journey played a particular role in building context:
“Queries are not made in isolation — analyzing a single search in the context of the searches before and after it helps us understand a searcher’s intent and make inferences.”
How was the user journey data gathered? By using cookies:
“We’re able to make these connections between searches using cookie IDs — small pieces of data stored in visitors’ browsers that allow us to distinguish different users.”
Overall, having more data is at the heart of this language model’s efficacy.
For English, this is much easier, given the corpus of documents and amount of users, than for some other languages, hence the theme of the blog post:
“For example, it takes more than a year of searches in Catalan to provide a comparable amount of data as a single day of searching in English.”
Let’s see what Gemini Advanced and Gemini 1.5 Pro suggest about how things might have changed from when this post was written till today (keeping in mind the generative AI responses influencing these points may have inaccuracies):
- Today’s language models are larger and more sophisticated, leveraging deep learning techniques and larger datasets to better understand things like synonyms or related terms.
- Semantic search would allow Google of today to look beyond the keyword matching discussed in the 2008 blog post.
- Search results became more personalized in subsequent years, including through more advanced location detection.
- The search revisions and query context are key aspects of what later became RankBrain.
- Today’s models like BERT and Gemini likely helped supercharge translation capabilities.
If you’d like to read the blog post for yourself, a mobile friendly version is available here.
Introduction to week 51: “embrace the challenge”
I saw a story recently on X where a travel blogger was upset because one of their blog posts was being outranked by copycats, so they tagged people at Google to complain.
This person had traveled to a location and explored it. The authors of the blog posts outranking them had not. In fact, they had used AI and then reused elements of the person’s original content to appear legit.
Situations like this happen, and it’s not cool.
That said, search results are fundamentally a competitive landscape, and not all competitors play fair.
Pointing out unjustness might garner attention, academic discussion, and maybe algorithmic adjustments down the line.
But why not embrace the challenge and focus on what we can control.
I’ll share a similar example from my own life.
A couple of months back, I published a page on my website for SEO services in Orlando. Although I work with clients around the U.S. and across the world, I wanted to make it clear I’m located in Orlando and can work in person with clients here.
Checking the SERPs for Orlando SEO keywords shortly after, I found so much garbage that I actually couldn’t believe it.
People exaggerating their credentials is one thing — no, you’re not the “#1 SEO,” sorry, lol.
But there were websites for people claiming to deliver SEO services in Orlando when they weren’t actually located here or probably even in the U.S.!
When I saw this, I didn’t start tagging Danny Sullivan or John Mueller or point the finger at Google on social media.
Instead, I updated my own webpage content — the part of this that I can control — to say, “Hey, I’m ‘actually’ local to Orlando, and I ‘actually’ work hard at this SEO stuff. Not all of the results you’ll see can prove the same, so beware.”
Remember, people typically don’t just see something (like a higher ranking site) and accept it, especially if their money is involved. They look around to compare and verify.
Make it easy for them to trust you, and if there are spammers playing in the same area, maybe that includes pointing that fact out to your audience.
If you’re known as a legit brand with real information, who are people ultimately going to trust?
Not long after these updates, my Orlando page started outranking some of the spammier results during Google’s March core and spam updates.
Some of them are still there, but I choose not to look.
Instead, I focus on updating my website to make it the best it can be to convey my brand of SEO services while putting the focus on my clients’ needs.
Embrace the challenge, focus on what you can control, and prioritize who you can help. 😉
Buckle up for a full week’s recap, and enjoy the vibes (new music from A Perfect Circle!):
Summary of the week’s SEO news and content
Not a lot of major news announcements this week, but here’s what I found most interesting:
- AI Overviews (non-Search Labs SGE version) is making its appearance in the wild; first reports show people wanting to turn it off … doubtful 😉
- ChatGPT is making links more prominent; maybe tied to user trust?
- Google’s Circle to Search seems popular; could be a gateway to more multimodal search adoption (and yet another mark against keyword rankings as a KPI)
- Google made some low-key updates to SGE and Maps via an article in The Keyword
- Some reports of disillusionment with AI chatbots; data scientists writing about it, eloquently
- And much more!
Missed last week? Don’t worry, I got you! Read Part 50 to catch up.
Thank you for supporting Hamsterdam and helping make SEO accessible to all!
Ok, time for (home)work.
Jump to a section of this week’s recap
- News, Google updates, & SERP tests
- SEO tips & tidbits
- Fundamentals & resources
- Articles, videos & case studies
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- Content marketing
- SEO tools & reporting
- AI, LLMS, & machine learning
- Humor section
- Miscellaneous & general posts
Or keep scrolling to see it all.
Also, feel free to support content you find valuable with a like, follow, or friendly comment.
Now, let’s step inside the white flags …
SEO news, Google updates, & SERP tests
These are newsworthy events in the SEO world, search engine updates, or SERP tests to be aware of from the last week.
SEO tips & tidbits
This section has actionable tips, cool tidbits, and other findings and observations that can be teaching moments.
What Is a Feedforward Neural Network? – Coursera
Articles, videos, case studies & more
These are longer-form content pieces shared on social and elsewhere.
Here’s why AI search engines really can’t kill Google – David Pierce, The Verge
Generative AI is a hammer and no one knows what is and isn’t a nail – Colin Fraser, Medium
Found via share on LinkedIn by Rand Fishkin.
Technical SEO
Everything from basics to advanced techniques.
Managing decentralized marketing for international SEO – Heba Said, OnCrawl
Content marketing
From what is helpful content to user journeys and beyond.
Authentic Perspectives Will Revolutionize Your Content Strategy – Bryan Cush, Inc.
Marketing Storytelling: Decoding the StoryBrand Framework – Rodney Warner (Watch on TikTok)
AI, machine learning, & LLMs
A section dedicated to artificial intelligence news, tips, and articles.
Grok – CJ Trowbridge (Watch on TikTok)
If you’re on TikTok, I’d suggest following CJ. He’s knowledgeable.
Chatbot letdown: Hype hits rocky reality – Ina Fried, Axios
This is a good accompaniment to the magical hammer article in the Articles section above.
How CEOs are using LinkedIn to become their own brand ambassadors – Brian Honigman, Fast Company
One year in, revenue sharing on Shorts shows how your passion on YouTube pays off – Thomas Kim, YouTube
4.5 million times faster internet – Drift0r (Watch on TikTok)
Great job making it to the end. You rock!
Please show your support for folks: If you liked any of the content shared above, show that person support by liking their post or following them. 🙂
Want help with your SEO strategy?
I’m an independent SEO consultant based in Orlando, Florida, focusing on custom audits and strategies for brands. Don’t hesitate to reach out, or visit my about page for more information about me.
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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