What Google Never Wanted SEOs to See

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SEO

Fresh Doc Dump: PageRank, Navboost, and RankEmbed: DOJ Papers Outline Google’s Stack

Brett Tabke digs into newly unsealed DOJ documents and uncovers a rare look inside the search giant’s algorithm stack. Spoiler: it’s not all AI magic. PageRank still lives, Navboost is “just a big table,” and ML signals like RankEmbed are layered on top of old-school SEO factors. Google's top-ranking formula is still a weighted combo of over 100 raw signals - almost all hand-crafted. And the 3 core signals are known as the ABC signals:

• Anchors (A) - a source page pointing to a target page.

• Body (B) - terms in the document.

• Clicks (C) - how long user stays on a page before bouncing back to the SERP.

They are the key components of Topicality, a base score that determines the webpage’s relevance to a query.

The State of SEO in 2025

Glen Allsopp’s latest report is packed with hard data and zero fluff, he breaks down what’s working, what’s falling apart, and why the game isn’t over - but it is changing fast. From 5 trillion annual Google searches to AI's growing shadow, Glen balances optimism with reality checks. Some of the takeaways and data points:

• Search drives 43.8% of traffic across 35,000 websites, while AI tools account for just 0.1%

• 80% of top-ranking sites are owned by public companies or digital Goliaths

• Chatbase grew organic traffic 68% in 5 months and added $103,000 in MRR

• Google now handles over 5 trillion searches annually and confirms query growth is rising

• SEO job listings are down 37% year-over-year, but quality roles are still active

• 88 of 100 tracked forums lost search traffic over the past 12 months 🫢 

• Mentioning relevant case studies in cold outreach significantly improves response rates

• The Detailed SEO Extension sees 400,000+ weekly users and is still growing

How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages?

In this data-driven update to Ahrefs’ classic study, Patrick Stox reveals the real answer to the question every SEO client asks: how long does it take to rank in Google? Drawing on millions of URLs and search results, the study shows just how stacked the SERPs are in favor of older, well-established pages. But all is not lost. With evergreen content, regular updates, and a strategic eye on E-E-A-T, you can still earn your spot. Some of the insights:

• Only 1.74% of new pages rank in the top 10 within a year (down from 5.7% in 2017).

• Pages targeting high-volume keywords were more likely to rank quickly—if they ranked at all.

• 40.82% of ranking pages that broke into the top 10 did so in the first month.

• 72.9% of Google top 10 results are more than 3 years old (vs 59% in 2017).

• The average #1 ranking page is now 5 years old, up from 2 in 2017.

• Ranking chances drop significantly after 6 months without updates or optimizations.

• Low-volume keywords show more gradual ranking distribution over time.

• Only 6.11% of English content pages ranked in the top 10 within a year.

• Content freshness and authority still play a big role in long-term rankings.

• Creating evergreen, experience-rich content is your best path to sustainable visibility.

Google Discover SEO: How to Appear in Google Discover in 2025

Olga Zarr details exactly how to get your content featured in the personalized Google Discover feeds that drive massive traffic. From mastering E-E-A-T to crafting thumb-stopping headlines and optimizing images and videos to spec, this is SEO made for the algorithm of now. Discover isn’t search, it’s suggestion. And Olga shows you how to earn that coveted spot by creating personal, timely, visual, and story-rich content that people actually want to read and Google feels safe recommending.

SEO Ripples

• Every link inside an AIO counts as sharing the same position in Search Console - Position 1 if AIO is shown first. Whether you're at the top of the block or buried in the expandable section, it's one unified metric. That means position data is flatter than ever, making it tough to pinpoint which links actually perform. Position 1 may look great on paper, but clicks and real visibility? That’s another story.

• For the more technical, Search Off the Record’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt talk about the foundations of how the web works. What starts as a playful roast of forgotten protocols quickly turns into a refresher on the plumbing behind every web request. From TCP vs UDP to HTTP/3, QUIC, TLS, and how DNS ties it all together, they explain what SEOs and site owners should actually care about - especially when Google Search Console flags connection errors.

AI

Report: Spring 2025 AI Model Usage Trends

Poe breaks down how users are actually spending their time across AI models in 2025. A major theme is innovation outpacing loyalty. OpenAI and Google are stealing share with rapid-fire releases, while image, video, and audio models are locked in fierce competition. Reasoning models in particular are exploding as users seek deeper problem-solving.

• GPT-4.1 hit ~10% share of text usage within weeks

• Gemini 2.5 Pro grew to ~30% share of reasoning tasks in 6 weeks

• Claude models dropped ~10% as users migrated to newer versions

• DeepSeek’s usage fell from 7% to 3% post-viral peak

• GPT-Image-1 gained 17% of image generation in just two weeks

• Imagen3 surged from 10% to 30% of image model usage

• Kling 2.0 captured 21% of video generation in 3 weeks

• Runway’s share dropped 40%, now down to 20%

• ElevenLabs owns 80% of TTS requests but faces new challengers

Google’s AI Overviews One Year In: The New Rules of Search

One year after Google launched AI Overviews (AIOs), BrightEdge’s deep-dive report reveals search is not dying. It’s thriving. Google impressions are up 49%, but click-through rates have dropped 30%, showing users are finding what they need without clicking through. Some of the insights:

• Google search impressions rose 49 percent since AIOs launched in May 2024

• Long, complex queries (8+ words) are 7x more likely to trigger an AIO

• Technical term usage in queries is up 48 percent year over year - ‘cloud storage’ vs ‘microservices infrastructure for hybrid cloud deployment’

• Comparison and ranking queries have dropped over 60 percent - our favorite ‘best X 2024’ and ‘X vs Y’ queries 😢 

• 89 percent of AIO citations come from pages outside the top 100 organic rankings

• Healthcare, Education, B2B Tech, and Insurance have the highest AIO saturation

• AIOs now occupy over 1,000 pixels, pushing traditional results below the fold

TikTok Launches TikTok AI Alive, a New Image-to-Video Tool

Aisha Malik reports that TikTok just dropped a new AI-powered feature called TikTok AI Alive. This tool transforms static images into short-form videos with dynamic movement, creative flourishes, and atmospheric effects, all inside TikTok Stories. Think skies that shift, oceans that ripple, and selfies that subtly come alive.

AI Ripples

• Google DeepMind has unleashed AlphaEvolve, a next-gen coding agent that evolves algorithms like nature breeds species. By pairing Gemini’s language models with automated evaluators, it generates, tests and refines code for some of computing’s toughest challenges. It’ll help speed up AI model training and even solve 300-year-old math problems.

• OpenAI released a research preview of Codex, a multi-agent powered by their new codex-1 model. It’s like having your own software engineering team in the crowd. Codex runs coding tasks in parallel, in secure sandboxes preloaded with your repo. It can write features, fix bugs, run tests, and draft pull requests.

• Elon Musk’s xAI reveals Grok’s system prompts. The chatbot is programmed to be “extremely skeptical,” challenge mainstream narratives, and never treat its answers as personal beliefs. Emma Roth highlights how xAI’s transparency on GitHub sets it apart from AI giants still guarding their prompt strategies. The move also shows how xAI is positioning Grok as a disruptor voice in the AI race, complete with specific instructions like always calling it “X” not “Twitter.”

• OpenAI has added GPT-4.1 to its API. The model family includes GPT-4.1, 4.1 mini, and 4.1 nano - each boasting lower latency, smarter reasoning, and a 1 million token context window. Coding accuracy, instruction-following, and long-context comprehension all improved significantly.

CONTENT

Relevance Engineering at Scale: Smarter Content Pruning with Embeddings and SEO

Eric Gilley shows content pruning as a science. Using AI-powered semantic embeddings fused with SEO data, they sliced through 1,000+ blog posts, surgically removed 500+ underperformers, and lifted sitewide topical relevance by up to 3%. It’s precision content strategy for modern search. They only prune content after scoring its semantic relevance to core business topics.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Pinterest Finally Admits Mass Bans Were a Mistake Caused by an ‘Internal Error’

After weeks of radio silence and mounting user outrage, Pinterest has finally owned up to its mass account bans, blaming the fiasco on an internal error and not AI moderation. Sarah Perez reveals how thousands of accounts were wrongly deactivated, sparking chaos across Reddit, Instagram, and X. Pinterest has since reinstated many users and apologized, promising faster, more transparent moderation going forward.

Reddit Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in Your Social Media Strategy

Erin Pennings lays out how to avoid marketing misfires and earn genuine trust. Reddit is not just another social platform. It’s a community-first Wild West where users sniff out inauthenticity faster than you can say “Nice ad, Bro.” Copy-pasting your Instagram strategy won’t cut it. From respecting subreddit rules to showing up consistently, this is your roadmap to getting Reddit right.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

OpenRobotsTXT - Majestic just launched OpenRobotsTXT.org, a public archive dedicated to the overlooked robots.txt file. If you’ve ever wanted to peek behind the curtain of how sites guide crawlers, now you can. This initiative kicks off with a massive dataset of user agents scraped by MJ12bot, all available under Creative Commons. A searchable, statistical goldmine of crawl directives across the web.

Interesting that 4% of sites are using Disallow-all with Googlebot.

EDUCATION

Fun Fact Friday: Did You Know?

Brett Tabke serves up a nostalgic, nerdy feast of SEO trivia that reminds us how weird and wonderful the internet really is. Some fun facts:

• YouTube started as a dating site

• 95% of web pages have zero backlinks - raise your hand if that’s you ✋ 

• MillionShort hides top sites to show deeper content

• The term “SERP” was coined on WebmasterWorld

• Excite passed on buying Google in 1999 for $750k. Google now makes $761k every minute - Google’s worth a few more 0s now.

• Yahoo! stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

• The first web image was of a 90s comedy band

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

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Topical Map Service - We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map delivered that builds authority, so your content dominates its niche.

Content Strategy and SEO Consulting – No guesswork, no gimmicks, no generalizations. Just you and me, refining your personal strategy into a clear, proven roadmap for traffic, authority, and conversions.

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