Google Recognizes 'Content Creators'?

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Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 is More Than Just Maps

SEO

CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites

In a follow-up to his Forbes Marketplace post last week, Lars Lofgren dives deeper into the dark world of hidden affiliate websites on major news platforms. He uncovers Forbes Marketplace is secretly running sections of CNN and USA Today's websites. Through meticulous investigation of website code, privacy policies, and business registrations, Lars reveals striking similarities between these hidden sites and Forbes Marketplace's operations. He expresses concern about the lack of transparency and potential conflicts of interest in financial advice coming from these hidden affiliate operations on trusted news sites.

On a related note,Cyrus Shepard penned an open letter to Google Search on X, highlighting concerns about search result quality. He points out that consistently ranking big sites like Forbes #1 leads to commercial spam and worsening results. Cyrus suggests increasing site diversity, applying content standards equally to big and small sites, and reducing punishment for sites with small brand footprints.

Google Recognizes Content Creators: A Breakthrough for E-E-A-T and SEO

Jason Barnard highlights a significant development in Google's search algorithms: the explicit recognition of Content Creators as trusted sources. Google is now assigning subtitles like "Content Creator (Medicine)" to Knowledge Panels, demonstrating its ability to identify authoritative individuals in specific fields. This change emphasizes the importance of optimizing both content and creator entities in modern SEO practices.

My Take: Wait, what? So you mean Authors are something that matter? Yes, sir. I’ve discussed in years past that Google has patents that cover authorship and topical expertise across content, sites, social, and other places they see on the web. These are also patents from over 10 years ago, so it’s nothing new.

AI On Innovation [Part 2]: More Insights From +546,000 AI Overviews

Kevin Indig dives deeper into his analysis of over 546,000 AI Overviews (AIOs) in Google search results, uncovering more insights about the relationship between common crawl data, organic search rankings, and AIO visibility. He explores how user intent shapes AIOs and breaks down the organic ranking positions of URLs cited in these AI-generated snippets. Some of the key takeaways:

• A strong correlation (0.714) exists between a domain's organic traffic and its visibility in AIOs.

• Only 6% of AIOs contain the exact search query (7% in SGE, 5.1% in live AIOs).

• Local queries have the highest amount of exact match overlap between query and AIO answer.

• Informational queries have the lowest exact match overlap between query and AIO answer.

• Out of the top 20 search results, 40% of those in AIOs rank in positions 11-20 in organic search results.

• Only 21.9% of top 20 URLs cited in AIOs rank in the top 3 organic positions.

SEO Ripples

• Barry Schwartz reports that Google Search rankings remain highly volatile. Despite the August 2024 core update officially completing earlier this month, the search results continue to show major fluctuations. Some SEO tracking tools have even adjusted their volatility thresholds to account for the heightened level of changes - does that mean these tools think this is the new “normal?”

• Barry Adams gets into structured data for news publishers and explains that while not mandatory, certain structured data snippets are highly recommended to help Google better understand your content. The most crucial ones are Article/NewsArticle for article pages and LiveBlogPosting for live coverage. He also recommends additional structured data like Organization, VideoObject, BreadcrumbList, and SearchAction to improve your site's presence in search results.

• Daniel Waisberg and Hadas Jacobi from Google dive into how SEO professionals can leverage Google Trends to boost their search performance. They highlight four key areas where Google Trends can assist SEOs: monitoring rising topics, conducting keyword research, creating content calendars, and planning YouTube strategies.

• Google has officially retired its Cache feature (cache:). The cache link was removed from search results earlier this year, replaced by links to the Wayback Machine. Now, even direct cache URLs no longer work. Google's Danny Sullivan explained the decision, citing improved page loading reliability, and he recommends using the Wayback Machine, URL Inspection in Search Console, or Google's rich results testing tool.

• The Information reported 77% of their subscribers using AI instead of Google for some queries, Barry Schwartz’s poll on X showed a more modest 55% reduction in traditional search use. Barry notes the difference may be due to his audience of SEO professionals who likely use Google heavily. Interesting numbers for sure.

AI

Gemini at Work Event Showcases Customer Use Cases

Want ideas on how to use AI in your business? Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, shares insights on how customers are leveraging Gemini and other Google Cloud AI products across industries. He discusses six types of AI agents being used: customer agents for improved recommendations and service, employee agents for enhanced productivity, data agents for research and analysis, security agents for faster threat response, and creative agents for design and production.

Here’s a fuller list of 185 gen AI use cases from global companies. Remember Jasper? They’re mentioned in the list with training their creative suite of tools on Google’s AI infrastructure.

My Take: Even if you don’t like Gemini and want to use Claude or OpenAI - that’s not a problem. Goal here is to see how you can use AI to stay ahead. Since these are supposedly all real-world use cases, these companies see the potential in them to pour millions into development. They’ve done the research for you 💥 

Meta’s First True AR Glasses - Orion

Alex Heath gives a hands-on look at Meta's new AR glasses prototype, Orion. Though not ready for consumer release, he describes trying out features like playing AR games, making video calls, and interacting with AI assistants through the glasses. While still bulky and expensive to produce (~$10k), the final product will be a little differently.

AI Ripples

• Krystal Hu and Kenrick Cai report that OpenAI is planning a major restructure, shifting to a for-profit benefit corporation no longer controlled by its non-profit board. This move’s goals is to make OpenAI more attractive to investors and could impact how the company manages AI risks. CEO Sam Altman is set to receive equity for the first time, potentially valuing the company at $150 billion.

• OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati also posted on X this week to say she’s leaving the company to do her own things after 6.5 years.

• In other OpenAI news, their Advanced Voice is rolling out to all Plus and Team users in the ChatGPT app over the course of the week. Make sure you’ve updated to the latest version of the app too. I haven’t gotten it yet though 😢 

• NotebookLM, Google's AI-powered research tool, now supports public YouTube URLs and audio files, expanding its capabilities for analyzing videos, lectures, and audio recordings. Users can create comprehensive study guides by combining various source types. You can upload up to 50 sources (<500k words each) and create 1,000 notes. It’s currently free, so get it while the getting is good - NotebookLM page.

• Google's released production-ready models: Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002. The release also comes with 50%+ price cuts on 1.5 Pro and higher rate limits. Gemini 1.5 Pro comes with the 2 million token long context window and multimodal capabilities.

• Meta's new AR glasses prototype, Orion, were also announced to start the conversion on Meta’s consumer AR glasses product line . Though not ready for consumer release, features include playing AR games, making video calls, and interacting with AI assistants through the glasses.

MARKETING

Is Influencer Marketing the New PR?

Aubree Smith explores the blurring lines between influencer marketing and PR. She argues that well-executed influencer campaigns can generate significant earned media and brand awareness, rivaling traditional PR efforts. She highlights Swehl's controversial Times Square billboard featuring influencer Molly Baz holding lactation cookies over her breasts before it was taken down.

My Take: This is basically why there’s all this talk about “personal branding.” There are many in our space who have built their personal brands up and used their influence to market other brands.

Gmail Allows More Senders to Protect Their Brand Using BIMI Common Mark Certificates

The Google Workspace team has announced updates to Gmail's Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) feature. BIMI helps build trust between email senders and recipients by verifying domains and brand logos. Now, Gmail supports Common Mark Certificates (CMCs), allowing a wider range of senders to use BIMI without needing a registered trademark. BIMI verified checkmarks are now visible on Android and iOS Gmail apps, improving user trust when they see your email.

Here’s the Google Support page with the steps. It does say that the brand logo needs to be trademarked, but I’ve also been reading on the web that other email providers will accept it without the VMC for the trademark. Google may not show the logo, but all the other parts will be there.

My Take: I’ll be getting on this myself with the ups and downs of email deliverability.

CONTENT

How to Get Over the Fear of Creating Thought Leadership Content

Si Quan Ong shares his insights on overcoming the fear of creating thought leadership content. He discusses how embracing polarization can be a sign that your content is making an impact, and why fearlessly sharing opinions can benefit your industry. He encourages welcoming pushback as a way to refine your thinking, and suggests steelmanning your arguments before publishing to strengthen your position.

My Take: It’s impossible to please everyone, so don’t bother trying. Think what you think. Write what you want to write about. BUT - don’t just make stuff up. Have the evidence to back up your opinions. If you miss some research, so be it. Correct it and that’ll be it. Others will respect you for being open to feedback too. And there will always be negative people out there, because they have different opinions or for whatever reason. You do need to develop a thick(er) skin.

LINK BUILDING

Why Use Digital PR For Link Building in 2025

Vince Nero shares that as Google's algorithms evolve, traditional link building methods are losing effectiveness, while digital PR offers high-quality links from authoritative news sites. He highlights how digital PR aligns with Google's focus on helpful content and AI-driven search, making it a powerful strategy for both SEO and brand awareness. Handy image here:

9 Successful PR Campaign Examples, According to the Data

Louise Linehan shares insights on successful PR campaigns that drove measurable results through creative tactics and data-driven strategies. She highlights how brands like Heinz, Lush, and Pinterest capitalized on cultural moments, exclusive research, and platform data to generate buzz and earn high-quality backlinks.

CASE STUDY

Unpacking NerdWallet’s SEO: 10 Things I Discovered

Mateusz Makosiewicz dives deep into NerdWallet's SEO strategies, traffic patterns and recovery tactics. He reveals how NerdWallet lost 6 million in organic traffic (23.6% drop) over just three months, likely due to Google's algorithm changes and increased competition. He explores NerdWallet's moves to bounce back, including boosting E-E-A-T signals and strategic content relocation. Some of the key insights:

• 1.2% of NerdWallet's pages generate over 50% of their traffic.

• NerdWallet competes with its own partners for over 144,000 keywords.

• NerdWallet regularly prunes 1,600-3,000 pages annually.

• Adding over 700 pages through programmatic SEO resulted in no significant traffic uplift.

• Use content relocation to give content a "fresh start" while retaining link equity.

• Be cautious with programmatic SEO, as it can lead to diminishing returns, especially for higher-difficulty keywords.

• Monitor author backlinks across domains to identify potential content scraping or evaluate the effectiveness of content syndication efforts.

How Cutting Distribution Boosted Our YouTube Views by 420%

Curt del Principe shares how HubSpot's YouTube team dramatically increased views by cutting external distribution. When Carl Mueller joined as head of YouTube, he noticed one channel had low retention rates despite quality content. He found 90% of views came from external sources, primarily The Hustle newsletter. While this seemed like good targeted distribution, it led to poor retention as newsletter readers weren't in the right mindset to watch long videos.

As an experiment, they paused all external distribution to focus on building a core YouTube audience. Within 90 days, average views and watch time rose 420% and subscribers jumped 257%. When videos perform well, YouTube promotes subsequent videos more, creating a virtuous cycle.

EDUCATION

Total Addressable Market: How to Estimate It and Source Data

Mateusz Makosiewicz breaks down Total Addressable Market (TAM) and three key methods for calculating TAM - top-down, bottom-up, and value theory approaches - along with practical examples for each. He also highlights common mistakes in TAM calculations and offers tips for refining estimates using tools like search data analysis, public company filings, and customer interviews.

My Take: One of the more important metrics in starting up any business. When people say to “niche down” or find your target audience, TAM is a key consideration too. Do you have enough of a market for what you are building?

NEWS

The Messy WordPress vs WP Engine Drama, Explained

Emma Roth at The Verge breaks down the recent drama in the WordPress community in one of the better all-in-one articles currently if you haven’t been following along. The conflict is between WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and hosting provider WP Engine. Mullenweg publicly criticized WP Engine for not contributing enough to the open-source WordPress project despite profiting from it. The situation escalated with legal threats and temporary bans on WP Engine accessing WordPress.org servers.

Ivan Mehta at TechCrunch also has a good recap with his article if you want to read more.