🐹 Hamsterdam Part 84: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (2/3 to 2/9, 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! 🙌
- I’m temporarily having trouble getting the Twitter/X embeds to show on the live version. Apologies.
- Enjoy the Super Bowl, and let’s hope for an Eagles victory!
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: “Share-of-Voice”
Share-of-voice, or SOV, is a metric that measures a brand’s visibility relative to its competitors. It’s calculated by comparing the frequency (or volume) of a brand’s mentions to the total mentions within the market.
Those mentions can come from different marketing initiatives, such as advertising, media exposure, and, importantly for SEO, online presence.
In the context of SEO, SOV assesses how prominently your content appears in Search compared to competitors. This can also incorporate unlinked brand mentions, which are growing in importance given the rise of AI-based search platforms.
To measure SOV, SEOs can monitor AI-generated answers, benchmark against competitors, and utilize tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
🤖 AI word of the week: “Self-attention”
The self-attention mechanism is a core part of the Transformer architecture, contributing to a revolution in natural language processing by enabling models to capture long-range dependencies and contextual relationships.
In short, self-attention allows the model to weigh the importance of every element within a sequence simultaneously. This ensures each part of the input can influence the representation of every other part, a capability crucial for tasks like translation and summarization.
In self-attention, each element in the sequence is transformed into three vectors, including a query, a key, and a value. Here’s how ChatGPT describes the process:
“The process involves computing attention scores by taking the dot product of a query with the keys of all other elements, scaling these scores, and then normalizing them using a softmax function. These normalized scores are used to form a weighted sum of the value vectors, resulting in a contextually enriched representation for each element.”
Self-attention has become indispensable for modern machine learning, improving training efficiency and enhancing performance. Therefore, self-attention is a foundational technique for dealing with complex, sequential data in various applications.
😄 Introduction to week 84: Cut the filler
I recently wrote about the updated Search Quality Rater Guidelines and gave examples of lower quality websites.
In addition to favorites like scaled content abuse, one aspect of low quality pages I want to talk about is filler text.
This has been written about a lot this week in regard to recipe websites, per the example given in the SQRG.
In another example, I recently audited an ecommerce site that saw a sizable dip from the March 2024 Core Update.
The losses were isolated to the blog.
One reason was the presence of filler text across many of its blog posts. The information itself was good, but finding the answer to the user’s question meant going on a hunt through long-winded introductions and convoluted page architectures.
Cut the filler, focus on the intent of the query or overarching topic, and rock on!
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 83 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 or 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! 🪨
🤝 Want help with your SEO strategy?
I’m an independent SEO consultant focusing on custom audits and holistic strategies for brands. Don’t hesitate to reach out, or visit my about page for more information.
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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