🐹 Hamsterdam Part 85: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (2/9 to 2/15, 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! 🙌
- Twitter embeds are a little buggy this week. Hopefully they show for you. 😃
- Wuffiyah is beside me as I’m creating this, so tossing in a dog pic for good measure:
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: “Testimonial”
We all love to see proof that we’re doing is working. That’s the purpose of a testimonial. These positive statements or reviews from customers highlight their satisfaction with the product or service we’re offering.
For marketers, testimonials serve as social proof. They build trust and credibility with potential buyers.
From an SEO perspective, incorporating authentic testimonials helps demonstrate experience, the first E in E-E-A-T. They can also enhance user engagement.
How are testimonials different from reviews? Well, a review is unsolicited feedback shared on a public platform, whereas a testimonial is carefully curated to highlight the benefits of a customer’s experience.
🤖 AI word of the week: “Transformer”
A transformer is an AI model that uses self-attention mechanisms to understand and generate text, making it especially powerful for language tasks.
Transformers are the bedrock of today’s AI chatbots as well as other powerful models.
Notable examples include Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), which excels at understanding context in search queries leading to more relevant search results, and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), known for generating human-like content.
A transformer can have an encoder and decoder. BERT uses the only encoder, analyzing text in both directions to provide a deep understanding of language, while GPT is decoder-based.
Transformers revolutionized NLP (natural language processing) by relying on self-attention mechanisms (see last week’s introduction) to process entire sequences simultaneously, rather than step-by-step in previous models.
😄 Introduction to week 85: Positive vibes
I’ve encountered a lot of situations over the years where the energy is low and it feels easy to be brought down to it.
Don’t let that be the case.
Your environment shouldn’t determine how you feel; your positivity should influence your environment.
No matter what’s happening around you, choose to stay positive and good things will happen.
Remember, we can only control what’s in our control.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. 😂
And thank you for supporting Hamsterdam and the cause of SEO & AI learning. 🙏
Enjoy the vibes (some classic Sabbath):
Missed last week? Don’t worry, I got you! Read Part 84 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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