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What a great event!

I had the pleasure be attending last week’s Google search central live event in Toronto, I have been looking forward to this, we don’t have a lot of SEO events in Canada so I was super happy that Google finally decided to bestow an event upon us!

The event covered a lot of topics, from AI in search, to Google trends, schema, SEO myths, and of course how search works.

And yes, I had my notebook in hand, so enough chitchat… let’s get to the good part!

Key takeaways

1# Search is evolving beyond information to intelligence.

The ultimate goal is for search to understand exactly what you mean and give you exactly what you’re looking for. But then, there’s the trade-off between the cost to compute vs intelligence level of a model. This is where the The Pareto frontier concept comes in. This is the set of results that are optimal for at least one combination of tradeoffs. I really think this is a very great hint, to understanding how Google and LLMs may potentially be selecting sources to rank/cite. I found this AMAZING resource on the topic.

2# The life of a URL

A URL goes through multiple phases before it finally becomes eligible to appear in search. Note how I said “eligible” because ranking is not just about technical SEO, quality signals of course matter and sometimes, your URL is not getting indexed or fell off search results because users did not find it useful and Google picked up on that.

A lot of cool nuggets and random notes from this session:

• If there are issues on your sitemap, Google can access it less often. So if Google finds broken URLs, redirected URLs, non-canonical URLs in the sitemap, that can be an issue if you’re a large website, or a news website for example.

• Factors that can impact your rankings include the type of search, is it coming from desktop or mobile, is it geo-sensitive search, is it a voice search (yes that matters), is it a photo search?

• We operate in an echo system where change is the only constant, user behavior changes, web changes, expectations changes and more. Search is a never solved problem.

3# Google Trends

First, there’s a Google trends API from Google that is in Alpha right now, and being closed tested by a select group of companies. Great news right?

My main takeaway is that, we are underutilizing this tool in SEO. So I’m bringing it to my day to day as much as possible. Do we ever check Google trends when we do keyword research? We should!

Narratives beat keywords (we’re better off focusing on topics/problems vs specific keywords).

Also and I’m quoting jean-christophe-chouinard here who was also present in the event:

“Trends vs. Keyword Planner: They are distinct tools with different ways of calculation. Trends is superior for cross-platform interest (YouTube + Search) and identifying “Breakout” queries. The data is lagged by 48 hours to prevent spammers.”

4# Good SEO is Good GEO

I really am not getting into the debate of terminology, but Danny Sullivan’s session was all about AI in search and Myths busting.

An important note from the session is “Make use of structured data”.

Schema has been under scrutiny and constant attack in the SEO industry, with many people calling it useless… it’s not.

And of course the popular slide from Danny that has been making rounds. Screenshot from jean-christophe-chouinard:

Commodity content is basic, simple, and very generic. People may not relate too, you are talking AT people. Non-commodity content is talking about a problem, sharing personal experiences and real-life scenarios.

5# Structured data, quality and AI

If you’re wondering what is the relation between structured data, quality and AI, well that was the title of the talk by Ryan Levering, a Google search engineer.

Here are my notes:

• Schema is used as context served to models when doing fanouts.

• Be more precise with schema, spamming won’t help.

• Something that’s being considered is publishing Google’s validation rules in standards and client-friendly formats, so SEOs can build their own schema validation tools instead of relying solely on the structured data and rich snippets tools (that go down sometimes because they get overwhelmed 😁)

• Google is also considered providing data on which schemas are more popular!

• Additionally Google is reinvigorating their investment in schema.org this year. After all how do you think the two newly Google agentic standards the UCP and WebMCP are going to communicate? (personal note: schema is a good candidate for this)

• Personal note: with so many voices in the industry saying schema is useless because they cannot measure it’s impact… well we have solid proof today that it is useful somehow, we just do not understand how.

6# Some good news to news😁

The highlight of the event for me is I got to ask Daniel Waisberg, Google search advocate the one question that was very important for me given that I work for a major news house! Will AIO come to top stories, and I got a clear “no”… yaaaay!

So for now… all is good for news publishers.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I loved every bit of this event. I will definitely do my best to attend ANY upcoming Google events like this.

We can disagree with Google reps all the time, but there’s no denial that they do an awesome work, go above and beyond and deliver great value.

My biggest regret coming out of this event is…. I only had one falfel wrap, should’ve grabbed two 😄

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

My new Free Log Files Tool

Not sure if you’ve heard but I recently launched a Log File Analyzer Tool and it’s free! Also it’s super cool, give it a test drive.

Talking about server log files feels especially relevant right now. While everyone’s focused on “AI this” and “AI that,” log files are sitting there quietly holding some of the most valuable data you can get.

Honestly, they’re a goldmine.

If you want to see what I mean, check out my example report—it’ll give you a clear picture of the kind of insights you can uncover.

Anyways I decided to make today’s newsletter about Log files analysis, plus I’m giving you a raw python script so you can build your own workflows on top of this code!

Also if you don’t know what log files are, don’t worry, I’ve got you:

What are server log files for SEO?

Server log files for SEO record every request made to a website’s server, including pages crawled, response codes, and bot activity. You can use server log files to analyze how search engine and AI bots crawlers access your site, identify crawl errors, and optimize crawl budget and indexing efficiency.

We don’t have the data we need

As annoying as this sounds, it’s the truth. We are missing a lot of the data we need in SEO. Google search console, our main source of data, has a lot of issues. Last year when I called it buggy, that ruffled some feathers, I still stand by that… it’s a buggy tool in general.

Google search console data is:

• incomplete

• inaccurate (e.g. impressions have been inflated for at least the last 12 months)

• and depending on your website structured, maybe hard to segment in a clean way.

and that’s just the data part, let’s not get into the technical issues.

And that leaves us as SEO hanging, and looking for the best third party tool to get some more information. But again, third party tools come with their own limitations, and data assumptions, I would treat them as directional.

I guess this is a great motivation to build your own tool, and building your own log file analysis tool can give you answers you may not find elsewhere.

So… build your own data advantage

In a time were all we talk about is AI bots, log files cannot be any more important. From your log files you can find more concise answers to questions like:

• How much referral traffic is sent to our website via chatgpt/gemini/perplexity/ect…

• How many times does AI bots access the content on our websites.

• Which pages on our websites are accessed more often by AI bots (this is a major optimization opportunity)

and many more…

But the log files analysis does not stop there, you can also understand the behavior of Google bot on your website:

• How often does Google bot visit your website

• What pages are visited regularly and what pages are rarely visited (important optimization opportunity right here!)

• Are there any redundant page requests that make no sense (maybe we should noindex those pages?)

etc…

You can find pages to optimize, and opportunities to reduce your server costs as well. It’s a gold mine of insights.

Build your own log file workflow (Python script included)

So… as part of my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course, I added this simple Colab script that generates this dashboard for you:

You can use this script as a starting point, and build your own workflow!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

As someone who’s been working with data in SEO for a while, analyzing, learning, and trying to finding meaning and connections between the numbers we have and the things we do, I find log files very valuable.

If you’re looking for something new to try out this week, let this be at the top of your list. Ping your dev team today and ask them for few rows of data (1000+) from your log files and run the script (or my free tool) so you can understand how different bots interact with your website.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter 🙏

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Tracking visibility in AI

Google does not show us AI visibility in GSC, and other AI tools have followed suit. Although Barry Schwarz reported yesterday that Google Search Console maybe testing an AI contribution report, so we’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, SEOs are experimenting with all kinds of AI visibility tracking tool or even building their own. And honestly, we kind of have to. Without some form of data, even if it’s directional, it’s hard to generate insights that actually inform what we do next.

In today’s newsletter, I want to unpack both sides of this using my own courses as an example: What are we actually measuring? and How do we turn that into action?

Let’s dig in!

What are we actually measuring

The way I think about visibility tracking is this: it’s a measure of share of voice.

How likely is my brand to be mentioned compared to competitors?

Wil Reynolds recently shared this on LinkedIn: “We just asked a room of 200 marketers to enter the same prompt into ChatGPT incognito and I’d say 60% got the same 3 brands. I was shocked to see that level of repetition of brand names.”

That level of repetition is the signal. How often is your brand mentioned?

Because here’s the thing with LLMs:
They’re not deterministic. The output can change.

So the real question isn’t:
“Am I showing up?”

It’s:
“How likely am I to be mentioned?”

But here’s where it gets tricky…

How likely… for what?

We use prompts to check visibility—but prompts are just a proxy.

What you’re actually measuring is visibility for a topic.

The specific wording of a single prompt doesn’t matter nearly as much as the topic space it represents.

For example:

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google for:
→ “top python for seo resources”
→ “top python for seo courses”

For “resources”? No mention.
For “courses”? I showed up on almost every platform (except Gemini 🤷‍♀️).

Here’s an example of a mention on Claude:

What does that actually tell me?

It tells me my visibility is stronger around the “courses” topic than “resources.”

So if I want broader visibility, the opportunity isn’t to tweak prompts endlessly…

It’s to expand my presence in the “resources” topic space.

The takeaway

Individual prompts don’t matter.

Topics do.

So when you’re measuring AI visibility, ask:

• What topic am I trying to win?

• How often do I show up across prompts within that topic?

• Where are the gaps?

Because that’s what actually turns visibility tracking into something actionable.

First party data, is the best data

One of the most useful things I did recently was mine my own GSC data differently.

I used this regex:

([^” “]*\s){4,}

to get keywords that are 5 words or more because that’s how I expect a prompt to look like and I found this search that I assume to be a prompt (there’s more):

• “has anyone actually taken sara taher seo riddler course worth 299 dollars honest review of content quality”

I ran this by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google and I kid you not, none of them corrected the pricing for the course is not 299, but 100 😂😂😂 but that’s not the issue.

With the exception of Gemini, both chagtp and claude mentioned a big yellow flag for me to work on: there are no independent third party reviews of my course. Well, in actuality there is, but only on LinkedIn in some posts, but there’s non in the places/websites LLMs look for to validate a product e.g. reddit.

Here’s what chatgpt said:

Here’s what claude said:

So this is another workflow for you:

• Check your GSC for prompt like keywords

• Run them by LLMs

• See how often you’re mentioned or not and if not, why.

• Come up with a plan.

Note: I’m not entirely sure how to reliably get LLMs to correct incorrect pricing when it’s embedded in user input but I think now I have an idea for testing and research!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Tracking your AI visibility is great, but understanding it and knowing how to use those insights is what actually matters. And you may not need a lot of prompts to do that btw!

Also, always start your data journey with GSC. First party data is your best data (keeping in mind that GSC is very bugy 😄😄😄)

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

The search for meaning

Measuring performance is what gives our work meaning.

And in SEO, meaning has always been… complicated.

Showing ROI has never been easy—but in the past few years, it’s become even harder.

Not because SEO isn’t driving value.

But because of the ambiguity baked into the data we rely on.

You know the drill.

Google Search Console doesn’t give you the full picture.
Third-party tools estimate search volume—sometimes over, sometimes under.
There’s a massive gap in the funnel, where keyword-level attribution breaks down.

You’re left asking:

Was this conversion driven by branded search?
Or non-branded discovery—the thing we actually want to prove?

And just when you think you’ve made peace with the chaos…

We find out that impressions in Google Search Console have been inflated for over a year.

Impressions—arguably one of the few metrics that could hint at visibility, demand, even brand growth—turn out to be unreliable.

So you start wondering:

What exactly are we measuring?
And why?

The SEO is dead narrative

I’m tired of hearing it. You probably are too.

SEO is not dead.

But repetition is powerful.
The more something is said, the more people believe it—regardless of whether it’s true.

And here’s the real issue:

It’s not SEOs who believe this narrative.

It’s the people further from the work—executives, business owners, CMOs.

The moment SEO becomes hard to measure, it becomes easy to dismiss.

“If we can’t measure it, we cannot see it, and if we cannot see it, it must not be working.”

And honestly?
The ambiguity doesn’t make it easy to push back.

Time series

So… bring it on.
What do you have up your sleeves, Sara… right? 😄

Fair question.

The answer I have for you today is Time series. You know the performance graphs we use all the time, x-axis is date, and y-axis is whatever metric?

Exactly that, but now we are going to use that in a smarter way. Here’s how:

Get your graph ready… just stay away from impressions for the time being.

Then,

For the same period, plot 2 different metrics, clicks and sessions for the same time period for example or clicks and trends from Google trends. I have this graph from my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course, where I compare impressions of my website (make that clicks starting today) with the search interest from Google trends for the keyword “Python”.

From the graph you can see that while the interest remained steady, I had a surge in performance at some point. That gap tells a story. Demand didn’t change.
My performance did. We are not looking for exact numbers, we are looking for patterns. Whatever I was doing in December 2024, it was working and I should probably do that again!

Here’s another example of how insights can be pulled by comparison:

In the screenshot, you can see that there's an increase in organic traffic, that's aligned with an increase in the number of organic keywords, which is NOT due to an increase in the number of pages, but rather due to an increase in branded searches!!!! [I wrote about this here]

Last but not least my favorite example, direct traffic vs organic clicks. You can show the direct impact and relationship between your direct traffic which often goes unattributed to specific marketing efforts, to your SEO work, if your graph looks like this (do you see how they go hand in hand with absolute harmony?)

That was actually a real-life case I experienced in the past for one of the websites I worked on. Putting different metrics side-by-side does magic.

Before and after

If you’re not using GSC Guardian or Advanced GSC Analyzer chrome exteions you should change that right now imo!

Both allows you to plot a vertical line that can be used to correlate traffic changes with Google updates or better development releases and SEO implementations!

Here’s an example of how they can highlight on a graph the duration of a Google update for you so you can see your traffic pattern during the update, and also visually compare before and after!

I had this discussion recently with the rollout of a new SEO feature, and having a vertical line on the clicks graph, maybe one of the easiest remedies to show performance changes.

Seasonality

Don’t forget about seasonality.

Compare your performance to the same time last year, and look at it both numerically and visually. This makes it easier to tell whether growth is coming from your SEO efforts—or just seasonal demand.

Look for patterns, 2 lines in the same graph…

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Ya time series are your new best friend in attempting to make sense of all the chaos, I’m not saying they solve everything, but definitely having those tips in the back of your pocket will help!

Thanks for reading this far and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

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SEO can be overwhelming

Every day there’s a new tactic, another “must-do” strategy, constant shifts in search behavior, and never-ending updates from Google. Just when you think you’ve figured things out, something changes again. It’s a lot for one person to keep up with.

If there’s one thing I learned that works like magic, it’s consistency.

Remember when John Muller said this:

He was absolutely right, but this is not just for technical SEO, it’s for everything in SEO. Your best way to winning, is to stay on top of things.

And when I say “stay on top of things,” here’s what I actually mean:

• Search trends

• New tactics

• Changes happening on your website (and the bigger the site, the messier this gets)

and more!!!

That’s already a lot to juggle—and that’s exactly what I want to chit-chat with you about today.

Well… that, and how one simple system helped me catch something worth fixing.

The headspace

I had a recent meeting with a co-worker that inspired me to build a simple automation on Google sheets. I created a simple script that pulls latest URLs added to a website through the sitemap, their title tags, status, title length, etc….

I then started to create pivot tables to analyze the data

And that’s when something clicked 💡

It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was a small, easy-to-miss fix that was definitely worth addressing.

I can’t go into the specifics, but it was one of those moments where you realize the issue wasn’t complexity… it was the mental load that prevents you from noticing opportunities. [paid newsletter subscribers can access this sheet with instructions to use it at the end of this article]

I came across this post recently on LinkedIn from Jonathan Boshoff, and he had a similar experience!

Long story short, Jonathan automated the repetitive work, and once he automated enough, he had free headspace, to look in-depth in more SEO issues, and guess what? He found a major opportunity that grew organic traffic from 160k to 1.7 million.

Can you imagine?

So we should just automate everything?

“So… is that what you’re saying here, Sara? Just automate stuff?”

Naaaah.

What I’m trying to say is, we need to build systems that work for us!

Automation is just a piece of that, not the goal.

Build systems (and yes, some automation within them) that:

• Free up your headspace for deeper, more important thinking

• Allow you to stay consistently on top of things, without constantly juggling sources or manually digging through data.

A framework to finding automation opportunities

We talk a lot about automation in SEO, and very less about what to automate. So here you go!

If you’re looking to start automating today to reap the benefits, here’s how you should do it:

Step 1: Start with Your Business Goal
☐ Write down your main business goal (e.g., grow website traffic).

Step 2: List High-Level Tasks
☐ Break the goal into key tasks that drive it (e.g., content, track performance, competitor monitoring, etc…).

Our goal here is visibility, i.e. having a simple way to quickly check the status of the tasks that drive your business goal, like how many pieces of content you publish each month and how well those new pages are performing.

Step 3: Break It Down Further
☐ Break the high-level key tasks, into subtasks. (e.g. for content: writing content, promoting content, etc…)

Step 4: Spot Opportunities
Identify tasks that are:

☐ Repetitive.

☐ Time Consuming.

☐ Bonus: follow clear IF/THEN logic. Rule-based tasks sound like IF we create a new blog, THEN we need to share it on social media or if a competitor creates a new blog, I need to be notified.

☐ Bonus: frequently cause errors when done manually

Example

If you’re wondering how this framework would look like in action, here’s a simple example just to demonstrate the process:

1. My business goal: get more newsletter signups

2. Tasks to support that goal (many, but for simplicity I’m focusing on content)

3. Zooming in, under the content category there are

   1. Creating great content

   2. Analyzing content performance

   3. Keeping up with industry trends and news to be able to create great content

   4. Promote the content on socials once created

4. Now which of those tasks are repetitive, time consuming and possibly prone to errors when done manually or follow a clear structure? I’d say everything except creating great content.

   —> therefore I should be automating everything EXCEPT the content creation!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Automations in SEO some how became synonyms with content creation and programmatic SEO, that’s definitely not the use case I’m promoting. Nor I am promoting the “I replaced my entire marketing team with [place an automation tool]…” narrative.

Automation is the key to staying consistent and delivering solid results, and the framework above shows you exactly how to make it happen!

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Paywalled content below this point that includes the Google sheet template mentioned above.

Read more

Hello Riddlers!

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Everyone’s new toy

You literally could not miss how Claude Code (CC) has taken over LinkedIn… like your entire feed is just people building stuff left, right, and center 😄 [credit: Magali De Reu]

And honestly? I get it.

Claude Code feels like magic. People are suddenly shipping things they never thought they could.

…or at least, that’s what it looks like.

Because here’s the thing no one is really saying:

A lot of people are confusing “I got it to work” with “I actually know what I’m doing.”

So yeah—let’s cut the fluff.

I’m going to show you exactly where Claude Code goes wrong, where people misuse it, and how to actually use it in a way that doesn’t come back to bite you later.

1# A shortcut is as good as the driver, right?

If you don’t know how to drive, it does not matter if you take the long road or a shortcut, same with CC. You need to know how to use CC, and you need to know what you’re doing.

For example,

If you’re doing a data analysis task, you need to understand fundamentally how this task is done, then you can ask CC to automate it for you.

I’ve spent a lot of time using CC to analyze large datasets, and here’s where it gets it wrong:

• Using the wrong dataset to begin with, even when you specify which dataset to use multiple times!

• CC does not clean the data for you correctly most of the time, you need to clean the prep the data before processing it.

• Finishing the entire task without validating with you mid-point. This is very problematic, because now if you ask it to undo things, it may create more problems and issues.

Solution?

The simplest thing you can do is to ask CC to provide the following after it reads your dataset and before doing anything:

• List of all column names, value type (integer, string, etc…), and total number of rows

• Summary statistics of the dataset

• Missing values count per column

• Top 5 rows and bottom 5 rows of the data

Just by looking at all of the above you can understand if this is the right data, and if the data is ready for your task or work still needs to be done, and 95% of the time it’s the case that the dataset needs cleaning specially with large datasets.

2# Break it down to smaller tasks

Whatever you’re trying to use Claude Code to do, do not ask it for the entire job from the get go, if the task is too big with multiple major steps, or accuracy is very important for you.

For example,

do not tell CC “hey, take this data from GSC and provide a monthly report”.

Here’s how to do that better:

• I want to create a monthly report using my GSC data.

• Do not start working yet, let’s create a plan together.

• Throughout this project, you need to pause, show me the work done so far, and wait for my approval of the output.

Why are we doing this?

If you let it run end-to-end, one small mistake early on will quietly snowball into a much bigger problem later. By the time you notice, you’re not fixing one issue—you’re untangling a mess.

And that usually takes longer than just doing it properly in the first place.

Note: fixing will also consume more of your tokens.

The move is simple:
Work in small steps → validate → then move forward.

That’s how you build something that actually holds up.

Because this idea of:
“I let it run for 45 minutes and came back to a fully working system”…

Yeah—just because it runs and generates some output doesn’t mean it’s right.

Someone shared this screenshot on one of my posts 🤦‍♀️😄:

3# Look at the code

I get it—most people using Claude Code aren’t developers. So the instinct is: “I’m not even going to try to read this.”

Fair.

But you still need the basics.

Using CC without understanding any code is like using a calculator without knowing basic math. You might get an answer—but you won’t know if it’s wrong.

And that’s where things break.

I’ve build an entire course “Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)” teaching people how to vibe code the right way. I didn’t start with “go build cool stuff.”

I started with: How code actually works.

Why?

Because it’s the fastest way to:

• It’s the best way to make sure that you’re getting the right output.

• It also can save you tons on tokens

For every task, I ask CC to create a python script, then I run that script using VScode or Google Collab, as running the code on those platforms won’t cost you anything, while asking CC to run the code for you which it does in the background even if it does not save a code file, will cost you tons of tokens.

This can easily multiply if you’re still testing and fixing things and will run the code multiple times.

Also asking CC to create scripts for the tasks comes with benefits, you can easily pickup where you left (I know CC has memory, but this still is helpful).

Bottom line:

If you want better outputs, lower costs, and less frustration…

You’ve gotta look at the code 🙂

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

There are so many things that can go wrong or go right with vibe coding.

The real skill going forward (and honestly, it’s already here) isn’t just “using AI”… it’s understanding just enough code same way you know basic math.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

You know the drill!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Also did you check out my FREE PEOPLE ALSO ASKED tool yet?

On a random moment of time

I decided to finally work on my chrome extension. I have been wanting to build it for a while, but never got the time.

Recently, I installed Claude Code and spent some time figuring out how to actually use it. What it’s good at, where it struggles, and how to get decent output from it.

So I gave it a real task:

Build a Chrome extension that analyzes Google search results and visualizes SERP feature distribution in a pie chart.

3… 2… 1…

Claude Code built it.

…or did it?

The first round

The problem with Claude Code (CC) is that it will take the prompt and start working right away. You’d think this is super cool, it’s not because there are so many things that need to be flushed out first.

Anyways, CC took some time and came back telling me it’s done, it also provided instructions on how to test it.

It was working, but it was not working…. 😂

There was no errors or bugs, and it generated an output, but it was not working correctly. The numbers in the pie chart were just not right, and many SERPs features where not detected.

This is where I had to intervene.

Round two

I started doing searches, and getting the html source code of the SERPs results pages.

I then saved them in files, used both Chatgpt, and CC to try to find patterns and match them to search features, but this was a mess of a task…. the html was very big and they were looking at a needle in a hay stack…

A complete mess and waste of tokens… so I build a Python script that converts the SERPs code into what I called a SERPs Map.

The purpose of the code is to remove all the noise and convert the SERPs into a tree/map format of the main dev components. That way the file size is smaller and we can analyze the find patterns and match then with SERPs features, right?

I took those SERPs maps and fed them to Claude Code, one after the other to analyze them for patterns. It would ask me to verify what SERPs features I actually see compared to what it can detect… I became it’s eyes 😂

We then went to work from there, and made adjustments to our code, and the chrome extension came to life…. but once again it was not working properly.

Detecting patterns in SERPs is very difficult and unreliable. I spent time looking for what others have done online and understand the problem, and then after hours and backward and forward with Claude Code I decided to shift gears.

This round took the most time btw… 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Round three

It was up to me at that point to decide how to tackle this problem. I decided to use SerpAPI. I already have an account and credits that I used for my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course, because if you signup you get free credits (in the screenshot I have paid credits, free accounts get way less).

I went back to Claude code and started building. Even with SerpAPIwe still had issues, for example an image carousel was labeled as “knowledge panel” by the api 🤷‍♀️

So I had to introduce a set of new rules, where the extension will also check the headers in search, so for example if there’s a label in search we will use that label. Here’s an example of what I mean by a label:

There are a lot of labels in search like:

• Popular products

• Discussions and forums

• People Also Asked

and so on… so if they’re present, the plugin will incorporate this information.

So now I had a plugin that can detect the features… how to accurately calculate the percentages?

There were two options:

• Are we talking about how much space on your screen a certain result takes

• Or how much of this result exist in SERPs

As you can see, and as I always say, you need to know what you’re doing, you cannot simply delegate everything to Claude Code.

So I made the decision that, if there are 20 total items and 5 are organic results for example, organic gets (5/20) * 100 = 25.0%. Each category’s percentage represents its share of total SERP feature items counted.

The Feedback

I finally uploaded the extension, and once it got approved, I shared it and got some very reasonable feedback:

The colors of the pie chart for one… it was horrible, but you see I’m not a designed so I did not account for things that a usual designer would…

I made some changes later, and have not pushed them live yet, but someone pointed out to take into account the color blind audience, and choose a suitable color palette. So I decided to dig into that myself. It’s a very interesting learning opportunity for me.

Others have asked for more instructions on using the plugin, which is fair enough. I made the changes by giving very clear instructions to Claude Code, don’t assume it will know how to fix an issue on it’s own. This is right now ready but not pushed live, so stay tuned:

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I think the goal of this blog it to show you that to build something that is providing meaningful output, you need to know what you’re doing and understand how a good code works.

Claude Code definitely accelerates a lot of work, but there’s a some learning curve and few more skills you’ll need to learn.

One thing I didn’t account for is having to maintain the extension and release updates and fixes as needed. Every piece of code you write needs regular maintenance, something that we don’t discuss much in SEO.

Any how, hope you found this useful!

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!!!

Also check out my Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI) course where I teach you the basics you need, so you can start building with the right foundations!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter FREE —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

There isn’t just one type of SEOs

I’ve been thinking a lot about my audiences lately. And yes… audiences, plural.

When I send technical SEO topics in my newsletter, I get a few unsubscribes. But on LinkedIn, that same type of content performs better.

Then there’s my YouTube channel, my Python course, and my Strategy course… all attracting slightly different people.

And my experience with the SEOs I meet in my monthly townhall meetup too, all made me realize:

There isn’t just one type of SEOs

So if you’re doing any kind of audience research—or trying to understand where you fit in SEO—this article is for you.

The ones under pressure

These SEOs that are under immense pressure from their clients, they operate under “go high or go home”…

I’ve had a situation where one of those SEOs reach out to me on LinkedIn to perform a second audit to make sure they are doing everything right.

They were in their third month of an engagement with a client, whom had set unrealistic traffic and conversion goals from month one, similar to how you might measure a PPC campaign. As most SEOs know, that’s not always how SEO timelines work.

Can you imagine the pressure?

These SEOs only care about tactics that are directly tied to results. That’s all they want to hear.

If you’re marketing a product or a course to them, it needs to clearly show how it helps them drive results and prove progress.

If you do this, you get that type of messaging.

The non-techy

All SEOs need some technical knowledge, but some are more technical than others.

When I was job hunting, I noticed that being a generalist—or having skills across both technical SEO and content—was a big advantage.

Most SEOs, however, are more focused on the content side of things.

These are the readers who love my newsletter, they’re happy to dive into long-form content, frameworks, checklists, tips, and case studies. They enjoy actionable insights and practical guidance, as long as it’s not too technical.

In other words, they’re all about strategy and application, rather than deep technical details.

If you’re marketing to these folks, avoid jargon and make your messaging clear and approachable.

Many of them are interested in becoming more technical but aren’t sure where to start. If you’re offering a technical product or course, highlight that no prior technical knowledge is needed.

The nerds

These SEOs love diving into the details—analyzing data, mastering technical SEO, building their own tools, and generally having an opinion on everything. 😄

Many of the nerds in the industry become SEO influencers. They speak on webinars, contribute to industry publications, and share tips wherever they can.

They’re also probably the most challenging group to market to. Unless they genuinely see the value in your product, they’re unlikely to convert.

The career SEOs

These SEOs are a great bunch to hire or work with. They know SEO well, do a solid job, and are generally reliable.

Many are career-oriented. Their main goal isn’t to freelance or become influencers, though you might see a few pop up on a stage or podcast occasionally. That’s the minority.

What matters most to them is doing well in their role. Career growth, upskilling, and moving into more senior positions are what drive them.

Marketing Tip: If you’re reaching this group, tie your product or service to career progression. Show how it can help them elevate their role, develop skills, or prepare for the future.

The lazy daisy

In an industry like SEO, you can’t really coast. Things change fast, and you need to keep learning, testing, and analyzing—it’s just part of the job.

Not everyone keeps up.

These SEOs tend to focus on maintaining their current workload rather than actively pushing for growth or new results. They’re less motivated to experiment or seek out new insights.

If you’re hiring, they’re usually easy to spot. Ask about the newsletters or blogs they read… and you might hear… crickets.

Marketing Tip: This group is hard to engage. Products or courses that require active experimentation or self-driven learning probably won’t resonate. Focus your messaging on those who are naturally motivated or already seeking improvement.

The socials

Some SEOs excel at building strong relationships with clients and colleagues.

They can read the room, understand what clients care about—both at work and outside of it—and start meetings in a way that immediately establishes trust and connection (great at small talk too)

This group thrives on rapport and relationship-building. They excel at client communication, closing deals, strengthening industry connections, and navigating tricky work situations with ease.

This skill will become increasingly important as AI automates more aspects of SEO work.

They’re also great listeners, which makes them effective collaborators and trusted advisors.

Marketing Tip: Products, tools, or courses that help improve client communication, networking, or soft skills resonate strongly with this group. Show how it helps them connect better and build influence.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

One thing remains clear as I wrap this up: there are way more SEO types than listed above. And it’s also rarely either or, you can be a mix of 2 or more types.

Did any of the above resonate with you? or some more than others?

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

📌 Your support keeps this newsletter alive —> [☕Buy Me a Coffee☕]💡 Want more from me? [SEO Strategy Course] | [Build Your Own SEO Tools (with Python & Agentic AI)] | [Premium SEO Mastermind]

Let’s be real

It was only a matter of time before SEOs started trying to game LLMs.

We’re an industry that still pulls off blackhat and spammy tactics in search, no matter how many systems are built to stop it, we adjust and innovate!

Which leaves you thinking, what chance do those new AI models have against the SEO spam? 😂

Through personal observation, reading papers, testing and regular discissions with industry peeps through my monthly SEO townhall style meetup [signup for next one here] I've been collecting the manipulation tactics that are already in play. Here's what I've found in no specific order.

The summary button

This one surprised me. Some sites now have a "Summarize with ChatGPT" button on their blogs.

Seems helpful, right?

You click it, it opens ChatGPT with a pre-written prompt to summarize the post. Harmless.

Except — every click trains ChatGPT to read your content. More clicks = more exposure = higher chance ChatGPT recommends or cites your blog later. 🤷

Listicles

Everyone knows about this. Google’s AI Overviews and chatgpt love listicles. For a while, this was the easiest way to get cited.

Well I tried getting listed on few of the main sources used for the keyword “best SEO newsletter”.

Did it work? Nop, you know why?

because I noticed Google was changing the cited sources over and over… it seems they were making adjustments to their systems to separate value bringing listicles and ones that are made specifically for ranking and getting cited.

These may also overlap with many of the “ranking volatility” you hear barry schwarz reporting on. Something was changing in how listicles are selected in search.

Does this tactic still work? It does, but only if your listicle delivers real value. If it’s just self-promotional fluff, don’t bother. Garbage in, garbage out.

Poisoning Attacks on LLMs

Anthropic has been putting out some great research lately, and this one is no exception "Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-Constant Number of Poison Samples."

In this study, researchers wanted to find out how easy it is to sneak harmful content into AI training data.

What they discovered was pretty alarming: it only takes about 250 bad documents to compromise an AI model, no matter how big the model is or how much data it was trained on.

Even models trained on 20x more clean data were just as vulnerable.

Think of it like this: whether you’re poisoning a glass of water or an entire swimming pool, it takes roughly the same amount of poison to be dangerous. That’s a problem.

In SEO terms? All you need to influence an LLM is 250 mentions…

🎤 a mic drop moment.

Injecting Prompts

Remember this ancient antique SEO tactic called cloaking, where you add a white text on the page for ranking purposes but users cannot see it because it’s white?

Well, it evolved with times, and now some people embed hidden prompts in their content.

Modern AI reads text, images, and audio. Each one is a door for manipulation. Hide white text on a white background? The AI reads it. Shrink font to zero? The AI reads it. Embed a prompt inside an image? The AI reads that too. You’d never notice — but the AI processes every bit of it.

RAG Poisoning

LLM bots like ChatGPT use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which is just a fancy way of saying they search sources like Google or Bing to make their responses more accurate.

Well, researchers behind the “PoisonedRAG” paper found that you can trick a RAG system by injecting fake text into the sources the AI pulls from. They treated it like a math problem and figured out the exact wording that makes the AI give a specific wrong answer to a specific question.

Here’s how it works, the fake text is crafted to do two things at once:

• First, it looks relevant enough that the system actually retrieves it.

• Second, once the AI reads it, it steers the response toward whatever the attacker wants.

Think of it like slipping a fake document into a library. The title and keywords match the topic, so the librarian pulls it off the shelf. But the content inside is completely made up to push a specific narrative.

The scary part? Just five fake texts in a database of millions was enough to trick the AI 90% of the time. And when the researchers tested existing defenses? None of them held up.

Now think about this from an SEO perspective — many RAG systems pull from public sources that anyone can edit like Wikipedia. If five pieces of text can manipulate the output, imagine what a coordinated effort could do.

Reddit

LLM bots and Google AIO rely a lot on reddit in their citations and recommendations, and this of course opened another possibility for SEOs... “spam reddit”...

You may see some “success stories” circulating here and there, but the reality is, most of these attempts fail!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Obviously I just scratched the surface on this topic, but you know what I was thinking the whole time I’m writing this?

We're trying to figure out how to make LLMs harder to manipulate, when we still haven't figured that out for humans yet. 🤷🤷🤷

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

Before we dive into today’s newsletters, first a word from our sponsor:

Turn AI Citations Into a Systematic Growth Channel

If your clients are asking why competitors show up in ChatGPT and they don’t, you need more than guesses. You need a system.

I’ve been testing @Wellows to see if it actually turns AI visibility into something agencies can execute on. Here’s what works:

Outreach – Shows you the exact third-party URLs that AI engines cite as trusted sources. Get verified contacts and templates. Turn random pitching into systematic outreach that earns citations.

Quick Wins – Tells you the single highest-impact action to take next. What to write. Who to contact. Based on real LLM behavior, not guesswork.

Client Reporting – Track citation growth over time. Show clients the proof. Citations earned. Competitor gaps closing. Reportable outcomes they can see.

It’s simple: Citations → systematic outreach → prioritized actions → reportable outcomes.

See where your clients stand in AI search. Run a free audit now!

Zooming In!

One of the most common questions you’ll hear in SEO is:

“Why are my pages not getting indexed?”

“why am I getting crawled - not indexed in GSC?”

and you can feel the frustration through the screen…

here’s the thing

Diagnosing issues like this isn’t about running through your usual checklist and hoping something jumps out at you.

It requires going beyond the obvious. Zooming in. Zooming out. Connecting dots most people don’t even realize are connected.

Then ask yourself:

What am I missing?

…. Okay now, enough rambling… let’s talk about how to actually get your URLs indexed fasterrrrrrr. 😌

1# Do not use the “request indexing” feature as a strategy

This is not a sustainable way to get your URLs indexed. Use it for one-time off things, or when there’s an immediate need to get a new page indexed. Otherwise, it’s not feasible for large websites.

If you think of this feature as a quick patch, you’ll understand that you are better off figuring out what is preventing your URLs from getting indexed and resolving the issue, since this may also improve your website overall technical health for search bots, right?

2# Check your sitemap(s)

So your sitemap primary goal is to list URLs for Google to crawl, but it won’t force Google to index your URLs. I just listed this here because your problem maybe that your URLs are not listed in the sitemap and Google has no way to find out about them.

I’ve seen enough broken sitemaps, sitemaps with 404 URLs, sitemaps with redirected URLs, and sitemaps with URLs that are just wrong (subdomain URLs for example) to tell you that you should check your sitemap specially if your CMS is custom and not one of the commonly used CMS like shopify or wordpress.

Sitemaps are also important if you just performed a website migration or some major URL redirects project.

3# Audit your Merchant Center

Why do SEOs NOT audit Google Merchant Center? If you’re working on an ecommerce website, this is part of your SEO work.

Google merchant center “is a free tool that enables retailers to add product information and data so that their products can appear across Google surfaces.”

So while you’re struggling to get your products indexed by Google and trying to use the “request indexing” feature to force index 10 URLs/day at most, you are missing out on Google Merchant Center, and the impact is FAST.

4# Content quality issues

I think I now understand why Google keeps repeating the same redundant vague advice “just create helpful content”… well because:

1. most of the content online is not really helpful 🤷

2. a lot of the issues you’re experiencing on your website including slow indexability, are due to your content being seen as low quality 🤷🤷

So do yourself a favor and ask few questions:

1. do you have cannibalization or duplication issues?

2. do you have thin content?

3. do you have AI generated content in such a way that this content brings no unique value?

4. Do you already have pages that are indexed and getting some clicks and impressions but overall performing poorly in search?

If your answer to any of the above is yes, this means you have content quality issues, start with that FIRST.

5# Javascript

I had a lead reach out one time because their website was not getting indexed in search. This was at a time a lot of other SEOs were complaining of the same issue so I could’ve easily dismissed it as some Google bug or guideline change or smth… but I didn’t…

I dug here and there and just realized that the website is JavaScript heavy. And while Google can render JavaScript and read your content, the website ALSO was new so very low authority and the pages were thin/low quality content…. now why, why really would Google index those pages?

6# Social signals

I’ve been very active on LinkedIn for years now and I tell ya, this has helped my URLs get picked up by Google fast, despite having a small website, and I only publish once a week, AND I don’t really focus on optimizing my newsletter content for search AND I duplicate the content on LinkedIn as well.

But overall my URLs get picked up fast… but the challenge I’m facing right now is that sometimes, Google will end up deciding to show the LinkedIn newsletter version of a blog vs. my website blog URL… obvious duplication issue and the winner is LinkedIn because I get more engagement there and it’s a higher authority platform…

Let’s see how can I tackle this…

7# Your title tag

One of the reasons your URL is not getting indexed, is simply the title tag… if it’s just similar to all the results in search, tell me again… why would Google index it?

I used a python script to pull the title tags for “digital marketing tools”, here is the output:

26 best AI marketing tools I’m using to get ahead in 2026
After 15 years of experience, here are my favorite ...
21 Must-have digital marketing tools to help you grow
Digital Marketing Tools For Campaign Management
Top 21 Digital Marketing Tools Every Marketer Needs in ...
What tools are used in digital marketing?
8 free online marketing tools for every “hands-on” marketer
Hootsuite: Social Media Marketing and Management Tool

here’s the title tags in serps for “best running shoes for women”:

The 10 Best Running Shoes of 2025 | Tested & Reviewed
The best running shoes for women 2025
The 12 Best Running Shoes of 2025
Women’s Running Shoes
Need recommendations for the best running shoes ...
Best Running Shoes & Apparel for Women
The Best Running Shoes 2025
Women’s Shoes | Running Room
Women’s Bestsellers Running Shoes

here’s the title tags in serps for “how to learn SEO”:

What is the best way to learn SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
How Do You Learn SEO? Step-by-Step Guide for 2026
SEO Certification Course
Learn SEO with a Free Roadmap of Reliable Guides & Tools
How to Learn SEO: A Complete Roadmap for Beginners
How To Learn SEO (2026 Guide)
How to Learn SEO in 2026 (In Record Time)

do you see what’s happening? the titles, despite being for the same keyword, are different one way or the other…. so differentiate yourself!

8# Run Ads

That is not my advice or something I invented, but a quote from John Muller. I remember this making rounds when he first said that, but it’s true. If you want your website URLs to get indexed faster in search, you can run ads.

Ads will bring traffic and users to those websites as well as engagement metrics, and all of this can help Google pick them up. I remember when I first started doing SEO, and I was playing around with Facebook ads for my website, every time I ran an ad for a page, I can see in real time, the page ranking increase in search… and once the ads stop… it take a short bit of time and then goes back to it’s normal place in search.

So ads can help your URLs get indexed, AND maybe temporary rank high.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I think the bigger goal of this blog is to tell you look deeper and don’t take the first answer as the final answer. In SEO, you need an eagle eye!

I hope this helps you improve your website indexability, I’ve also recorded a YouTube video on the topic, feel free to check it out, like subscribe or drop a comment:

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

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History Is a Great Teacher

I’m not about to get into the benefits of studying history, but history is a very good teacher!

I came across a very interesting paper called “Robots at Work”. It’s a 2018 study, so not some ancient research, and it looks into the economical impact of using robots at work and how it impact employment. I

If history repeats itself (and it often does), AI adoption may follow a similar path to industrial robot adoption in manufacturing.

It’s funny that once I started working on this blog, I saw this post on LinkedIn 😂

If you’re wondering how AI will change hiring and the job market in SEO and beyond, read on!

Robots at Work vs AI at Work

The “Robots at work” study blew my mind. It looked at “industrial robots” - which does not look like pop culture, movie-style robot btw 😂 - and how they impacted employment and productivity of firms across 17 developing countries and 14 industries between 1993 and 2007. ​

Here’s what they found:

1. Massive Productivity Gains

Firms that adopted industrial robots saw substantial productivity improvements.

To put this into perspective, the productivity boost was comparable to the steam engine’s contribution in the 19th century.

That’s huge.

2. Diminishing Returns

BUT… the authors of the study also found diminishing marginal gains.

Translation:
More robots did not always mean proportionally more productivity.

At some point, the productivity curve plateaued. Adding more robots stopped producing dramatic results.

More is not always more.

3. No overall job loss

Read that again.

No overall job loss.

Total employment levels stayed stable.

BUT…

The share of low-skilled workers decreased. So while jobs weren’t eliminated overall, the composition of the workforce shifted.

4. What Happened to Wages?

Not much.

There may have been small wage increases, but most of the financial benefits went to the firms themselves.

No big surprise… the big players won again 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

5. Lower Prices for Consumers

Here’s the twist:

Robot adoption lowered production costs, which reduced prices for consumers.

Lower prices increased demand.

Higher demand meant more revenue for firms - again 😂

Translation to AI and SEO

So what does this mean for AI adoption in SEO and other industries?

If history repeats itself:

1. SEO firms adopting AI correctly will be able to increase their productivity massively. If you have not heard yet, but shopify released an internal mandate making AI adoption mandatory to all it’s employees! And that’s not just for developers or data analysts.

If you’re wondering how is that going so far? I couldn’t find solid numbers published yet, but came across this post:

2. Using AI just for the sake of using it, won’t help. Also more is not more. Trying to use AI for everything won’t make you more productive on the contrary. I’m seeing people complaining how AI made them actually slower. This maybe why… you need to make sure that your use case will actually benefit from automation.

3. Your skillset and experience are your main protection against layoffs because of AI. And of course you need to know how to use the tools efficiently.

4. Do not expect a bigger salary on the long run, maybe now many companies are offering high salaries for SEOs with some AI skills, but that’s mainly because of rarity… the more people learn to use AI, the more the market will bounce back to similar-ish wage levels…

5. Good news for firm owners! I recently talked about this with Fery Kaszoni on my podcast. He is investing even more in AI, so I asked him if that meant he was laying people off. He said the opposite — he’s actually hiring more. He explained that if before AI for example, one employee could produce about 5 reports per month. With AI, that same employee can now produce 15 reports. Because his team can do more work, he can lower his prices. Lower prices mean more customers. And more customers mean he needs to hire even more people. It was refreshing to hear from someone who’s using AI correctly.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

So how will AI adoption change hiring in SEO? More advanced skillset will be expected, and knowledge on how to use AI will be a requirment.

The big question is, are you ready the shift?

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

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So you may have heard, I migrated my websites from ghost.io to Substack and decided to tell you all about it. After all, it’s always interesting to see how SEOs actually migrate their own websites because as the Arabic saying goes “The carpenter’s door is (always) off its hinges” 🙂 Not this time!

Here’s what I did, but first Why?

Why I decided to move from Ghost to SubStack?

I was running my newsletter on ghost since ever since I launched back in 2022. But seriously, there was no point in paying for a service that I can get totally for free on substack. I was paying 55USD every month for what?

Of course this was not an easy decision because SubStack does have some limitations when it comes to SEO compared to ghost:

• The platform is JavaScript heavy

• If you ever offer paid subscriptions, substack will take a share

• Less functionality like redirects for example which is a pretty big deal when you’re doing a migration, eh? (Canadian for don’t you think 😂)

Now let’s talk about the steps

1# Moving the subscribers

This was the easiest most straightforward task in this messy process. Exported the subscribers list from ghost and imported them to substack.

But I made a mistake, I think this should’ve been the LAST STEP, since I was intending to use both substack and ghost in parallel for a bit till I make some decisions. Because what happened is, my subscribers started getting double emails in their inboxes and complaints started to flood in, while others just hit that unsubscribe button… it was a mess… but hey we live and we learn!

2# Moving the content

Next came moving the actual content: the blogs, the navigation menu, and the About page.

Not glamorous work. At all.

• Navigation menu — easy ✅

• About page — easy ✅

• Blogs? That’s where it got tedious.

I used Ghost’s export feature and imported the content into Substack. I also tried Substack’s “import from URL” option, but that only pulls the first 15 posts, which doesn’t help much when you’re sitting on ~100 articles.

And then there were the images.

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, images and screenshots didn’t carry over with the import. So yes, I manually copied and pasted every single one. Painful, time-consuming, and absolutely overkill… but sometimes that’s just what migrations demand if you want things done properly.

You do what you gotta do 🤷‍♀️

3# Domain name

Then came the zero hour, where I have to adjust my domain settings to point to point to substack. Easy, login in to your domain name provider, make the changes as per substack guidelines.

I must warn you though, that your website maybe unreachable/down for a few hours

4# The Redirects

Being not familiar with the substack CMS, I did not see this coming, but you cannot create redirects inside the substack CMS. The problem is:

• on ghost, blog urls were: domain/blog-title

• on substack they are: domain/p/blog-title

so redirects where not something I can skip, unless I want to start from scratch in search.

So:

• I just created a spreadsheet and mapped URLs.

  

• manually created a redirect to each and every page on my domain name provider:

But things are not always smooth sailing, migrations always come with some complications. The domain name provide does not allow adding long URLs, So for some URLs like “/do-companies-need-to-hire-seos-anymore-short-answer-yes-they-do” I’m unable to create a redirect, and it is what it is.

5# GSC

Last but not least, GSC… I already had a verification via html tag but that’s on ghost, so I verified via Domain name provider. This interestingly helped me see no interruption in data collected!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Nothing fancy but a migration is never a simple task, you always need to plan ahead, and then plan how to respond to random things that may come your way.

My biggest mistake is accidentally double sending my newsletter, definitely didn’t make many subscribers happy.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

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• Buy me coffee.

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

Today’s newsletter sponsor is myself 😄 Check out the Python for SEO course and upskill yourself in 2026!

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As a curious SEO, I was looking at some of the technical SEO issue on reddit and how are they handled. And of course JavaScript comes to mind. Did a simple JavaScript audit by turning off JS on the page and reloading it.

I first searched for “best running shoes” and went to the reddit results in SERPs, there has to be one right? Do you see the text highlighted below? when I clicked read more, it was a reply on the post… it was not the main post.

So this shows that Google can read the replies right? here’s where it gets interesting, I used the “Toggle JavaScript” toggle chrome extension to turn off Javascript on that reddit post URL:

and to my surprise, all the comments disappear from the page:

Somethings Worth Noting

I haven’t dug into this fully yet, but is this tied to the Reddit–Google content-licensing partnership, or is Google just giving preference to sites it considers highly authoritative or particularly helpful?

The reason I’m saying this is:

• I’ve seen smaller and newer websites struggle with getting their pages indexed when they have a JavaScript situation like the one I described above.

• I wrote about this back in 2022 actually and Martin Split left the comment below:

which basically means: JavaScript will not impact the speed of indexability but rather URLs with JS may take longer time to be discovered and crawled.

• I also plugged the reddit URL into the rich results test tool and then clicked on “VIEW TESTED PAGE”, and ya Google can read the comments on the page with no issues whatsoever.

So what now, Sara?

A JavaScript audit is important, but it becomes more important if:

• The site is smaller, newer, or carries less established authority.

• If your URLs are taking way too much to get picked up by Google.

• If you discover that part of your content is not indexed.

It’s less important if everything is working just fine and as it’s supposed to.

Am I saying we should not raise JavaScript issues to devs?

Nop! Definitely do, it’s always better to follow best practices and google general guidelines, but maybe this would be mid to low priority item given the impact/effort of addressing JavaScript issues.

Another example that explains the mindset shift I’m suggesting in this blog is how Google comments on using JavaScript to insert the Canonical tag. We all know this is a no no in SEO, however, it’s still possible to use it in Google’s own words:

So my recommendations is: YES FOLLOW JS BEST PRACTICES, but prioritize them accordingly and give your dev team a break from having to fix every single thing.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

It’s easy to throw a list of technical recommendations at your developers 😄😄😄 but let’s resist the urge 😄

To be a good technical SEO, you don’t just need to learn the guidelines, you also need to:

• know when things matter and when they don’t, and HOW MUCH DO THEY MATTER.

• give developers options. Especially at the enterprise level, technical infrastructures are complex, and presenting a single “this is the only way” solution is rarely realistic or helpful. Good technical SEO work accounts for constraints and offers viable alternatives, not ultimatums.

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

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• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

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I was planning on writing a blog about “enterprise SEO tools” for today’s newsletter, but I had a sudden change of heart and for all the right reasons!

We keep talking about how SEO has changed, and we need to update our playbooks, but it can sound like a vague advice, pretty much like when Google says “just create helpful content” 😄

But I recently stumbled upon an example that could not make it any clear, that our old playbooks need an update... a big one! Actually scratch that, our playbooks need an earth quake 😄

Old SEO thinking

I was reviewing a URL that contained only user comments on a blog post.
No main article. Just comments.

My first instinct as an SEO?
Noindex it. Immediately.

After all, the golden rule we’ve lived by for years is:
only index pages for things people are actually searching for.

And a page that’s nothing but comments?
No keywords. No structure. No “SEO value.”
Who would ever search for that… right?

Boy I was wrong....

New SEO thinking

Here’s a different thought, if those pages are “well optimized”... they can be incredibly valuable for SEO.

Yes pumping out tons of new URLs that are just comments can be very harmful to your website, since this is just a creation of deadweight pages, something we’re pretty allegric to in SEO 😸

BUT.... if those pages are optimized to signal to Google “forum” like user-generated-content that Google loves these days... maybe that is our ticket to fighting against reddit!!!

Instead of reddit, this can be your website:

Of course there are many SEO considerations to be taken into account.

Note: This insight is based on an interaction with a group of SEO peers I regularly collaborate with.

Leveraging UGC for SEO

Almost every SEO complained about reddit taking out space in search... THIS IS OUR CHANCE to change that!

In fact, it is a direction Google wants us to follow. Just last year, Google announced that there’s reporting available for “discussion forum rich results” and you will be able to filter the performance of your content that falls under this category directly in GSC (we know Google does not give away data easily 😄)

Obviously there are some guidelines to follow to be eligible for that type of results in search, and these include adding “structured data”.... ya schema still matters for SEO.

It’s time we focus on UGC on our website, it’s good for engagement and building a community around your brand, it’s good for user behavior signals for rankings, and it’s also good to get additional real estate in search!!!

We have a 3 birds with one stone kinda situation here.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

You’ve heard this before so many times, but today is a clear example.... our old play books need revision... SEO is not dead, it’s being deprecated/changed/evolving... name it what you want... but things are not the same as they used to be 3-4 years ago...

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

Hello Riddlers!

Today’s newsletter sponsor is myself 😄 Check out the Python for SEO course and upskill yourself in 2026!

--——> Check out the course here <--------

I have been lucky in my career to work with a wide variety of clients of different sizes and in different industries, but even luckier to have worked on both sides of the fence, SEO agency side and in-house.

And one common thing I see in the SEO industry, a lot of the the tactics and recommendations circulating are either for people that worked purely agency side, or have not experienced actual enterprise level websites.

What is Enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO is a large-scale strategic approach to optimize websites with thousands to millions of pages for search. It involves tackling of complex technical infrastructure and content at scale. Additionally enterprise SEO requires cross-functional collaboration and usually advanced SEO tools.

What is the difference between enterprise SEO and traditional SEO?

The main difference between enterprise SEO and traditional SEO is scale and complexity. Enterprise SEO focuses on optimizing large websites with thousands to millions of pages, complex site architectures, and multiple stakeholders. Traditional SEO targets smaller sites, fewer pages, and simpler optimization workflows with faster implementation.

What the experts say

I spoke with several SEOs who have worked on websites at that scale to hear how they describe enterprise SEO. This is important, because enterprise SEO is often time treated as just usual SEO by many in the community, while there’s a distinction!

Jean-Christophe Chouinard: “When working on very large websites, forget crawling your website. Work with actual data points that you have available such as server logs and Google Bulk Data export. Understand page templates and gather aggregate insights, instead of page level insights. Find out if you can understand how Google cluster content, and which sites sections behave similarly in search. In a well optimized website, on aggregate, similar pages should see their traffic patterns correlate, if they do, then you have a great set-up to run SEO experiments”

Greg Bernhardt: “The most important thing you can do with large enterprise sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs is to develop/maintain a comprehensive segmentation framework. You can do this via scrappy URL context or develop classification tags assisted by LLM. This allows you to confidently analyze sections of your site across any number of attributes to find insights. My everyday tech stack is Cursor, Google Colab, BigQuery, DBT/Airflow and a number of APIs.”

Mihir Naik: “In enterprise SEO, success isn’t just about identifying what’s wrong. The real challenge is understanding how issues actually get fixed within a large organization: how data flows across teams, who owns what, the engineering effort involved, and the trade-offs required. Strong enterprise SEOs focus heavily on prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and execution planning - building allies across product, engineering, and content teams, and creating a realistic roadmap that balances impact vs. effort.

From a tooling perspective, large and complex sites typically need a mix of enterprise-grade crawling and monitoring tools, log file analysis, Google Search Console at scale, and custom internal dashboards to connect SEO data with product and business metrics. The exact stack depends on site size and complexity, but the goal is always the same: visibility into what’s happening at scale and the ability to translate SEO insights into actions teams can actually implement.”

Sarah Fitzpatrick:

1. “Remove any potential visibility or indexing blockers. Don’t just “set and forget.” Always check your wing mirrors on your money pages especially. Use log analysis to see which money pages crawlers visit most often and keep these pages fresh to signal relevance. Also, audit your “Discovered - currently not indexed” report. Fixing any content, structural or technical blockers on those pages can boost visibility faster than writing a lot of new content. (Tools: Screaming Frog, Log Files, Google Search Console)

2. Spot-Check Your Translated Content. Auto-translate is tempting for scale but can kill conversions when not reviewed. You don’t need to check every page, but use heatmaps on your top non primary revenue pages. If users are dropping off or CVR is much lower vs other languages, it is often a bad translation or unclear copy eroding trust. A native speaker review on just those key pages pays for itself. Making sure your most important pages make sense to their readers can quickly improve both your traffic & CVR. (Tool: Hotjar, GA4, find native speakers).

3. Adapt Reporting & Strategy for AI. You don’t need a totally separate strategy for AI as good seo essentials are still what’s most important, but you do need new metrics. Monitor your server logs to understand what the likes of ChatGPT are crawling on your website (also for ChatGPT it’s more important to focus on what the crawler ChatGPT-user is crawling rather than their training crawls). Track the user crawls, then track the “AI Referral Traffic” in GA4 to identify which pages are gaining clicks from AI and then track conversions from AI so you can understand a clear path where AI is successfully feeding AI answers that actually lead to sales. Crawls - Clicks - Conversions!! (Tools: Server Logs, GA4)

4. Embed with Product & Tech. At the enterprise level, SEO cannot exist in a silo. Build business cases, submit clear formal tickets, and sit in on product roadmapping. When you treat SEO as a product requirement rather than a marketing add-on, you prevent technical debt or future clean up projects. It also creates a clear understanding between tech product and seo which could lead to your business next big idea or win! SEO is a team game and everyone wins when you learn how to communicate efficiently and consistently with the tech and product teams. (Tool: Your People Skills!)

5. Get Comfortable with Offsite SEO. Organic is just as much offsite as onsite now in 2026, so don’t ignore it. Sync up with your Social, Digital PR, Brand, Paid & Affiliate teams. You will often find quick wins, halo opportunities (partnerships & backlinks) campaign insights, or opportunities to better align messaging across channels. You aligning the messaging on your top pages, new content with messaging every other team is putting out is much more impactful than everyone working in silos. Even if you’re the only seo in house - you should still operate as a team member with the wider business. Oh - and I’d recommend carrying out competitor benchmarks when you have the time. It’ll help you find content gaps, their strength/weaknesses and what works for them, it may inspire your next big idea”

Reading through these perspectives alone could have been enough to end the newsletter here today, but of course, I couldn’t resist adding my own take 😄

How to Do Enterprise SEO?

1. It’s almost never worth it to focus on individual page optimizations, as websites get bigger your focus shifts to page templates and content folders. So the first thing I would do is identify the type of pages/templates we have on the website for reporting and for auditing purposes.

2. Audit page types. So instead of auditing each product page or blog page on your website, you can audit a few of each type and make recommendations based on that. Because at the enterprise-level, a change in one template, will cause changes in all other similar pages. Which also mean you need to be extra careful.

3. Reporting is a whole other challenge altogether. Your report will develop and improve as you understand the business, the market and the website better. Report on categories and the way different business units and stakeholders manage the website. For example, in some instances, I had different teams run different parts of the website, this means for each of those website sections, you need an individual report. In addition to segmenting your report by how you see fit from an enterprise SEO standpoint. So something to keep in mind.

4. Fixing indexability issues is a major win, large websites often struggle with crawl budget and crawl efficiency, and more often than not, end up with thousands, if not millions of pages that are pending indexation in GSC. So fixing an indexing issue, can produce an exponential output due to the number of pages it can impact.

5. Slow and steady wins the race. The larger the website and organization, the slower and more challenging you will be able to make changes... the biggest lesson I learned is... “have patience”... you cannot expect devs working on a website like Amazon for example to make changes at the same pace and ease as devs working on a small shopify website 😄

6. An essential enterprise SEO skill is being able to get buy-in and talk to stakeholders. You see, teams already have tons of work lined up for them, in addition to tons of existing technical debt, why should they prioritize SEO? from their standpoint, if there’s a technical debt anyways, it might as well be SEO 😄

7. Technical issues may have a bigger impact than fixing them on small websites. But that also means that technical audits are not a one and done task, they take a lot of time and consideration.

8. Tools... your traditional tools may stand helpless against a website with millions of pages. This is where you need to be smart, if you can get cloud-based enterprise SEO tools that’s great, but if not, you can still workaround the situation by breaking down the pages into smaller clusters and audit/monitor them.

9. Flexibility. This is the keyword for being a good enterprise SEO. You need to be able to offer different solutions technical or otherwise to the same issue. If devs cannot execute on one recommendation, work with them to find an alternative.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

As you can see, enterprise SEO requires approaching large websites with a different mindset—one that demands flexibility and patience. It’s challenging, but honestly, it’s also a lot of fun.

another thing to always keep in mind, not all SEOs have worked on this category of websites, advice may not always be relevant. I hope you found this blog relevant though😀

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you’re an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I’m also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

I used to explain how Google and machines evaluate content with this analogy: imagine trying to decide which cake is the best using only measurable criteria—its weight, colors, shape, or design—without ever tasting it. Because machines cannot taste and experience food. Same goes for content, they cannot really understand it.

Good food is the output of good ingredients, good technique, and good taste, and that taste bit is where AI cannot really step in and do the work, thus the term “Frankenstein recipes” was coined for AI generated recipes that are just a blend of ingredients and steps from multiple sources.

That’s not how good food is created. The skyscraper technique already produces subpar content, imagine skyscraper recipes 😄

And the problem is bigger right now, it’s not just that AI Overviews but similar to how AI content is everywhere, AI is used to generate recipes and images of those recipes by food bloggers.... it’s a complete mess.

The Horror Stories

Food bloggers like inspired taste and others have been documents alarming incidents, for example:

• CNN recently shared a story about a woman who was fooled by a recipe that simply didn’t work as promised. Only later did she discover that the recipe was AI-generated, the images were AI-generated, and even the “bloggers” behind the site were AI-generated too.

• Inspired taste shared multiple situations where their own recipes or videos were shared in an AI Overviews or AI Mode answer WITHOUT THEIR SITE BEING GIVEN CREDIT. The one thing SEOs, content writers and bloggers have been asking Google to do is give attribution to sources when it’s due, and they still didn’t. (AI Overviews did the same with DMarge btw, read more here)

• And the list goes on really... I like how Bloomberg phrased it:

What Happens Now?

• Right now it’s bad news, but it’s also good news. Since this is getting a lot of media coverage, two things will happen:

  • Google will do something about it, as we can see corrections are starting to roll out for vocal food bloggers like Inspired taste:

• People will understand not to follow AI recipes because these recipes have not been tested in a kitchen.

How to do SEO for a Food Blog in 2026?

• Create great unique helpful content: I know it’s very disappointing to put so much effort into something and not get rewarded, but this AI food slop era is not going to last.

• Convert users to subscribers: SEO is no longer just about getting the click, we need to maintain this click and build brand loyalty. Your best way to do that is to have a conversion funnel, get newsletter signups, build a community around your brand, connect with users on other social platforms. This is your immunity against anything that Google throws your way.

• Keep it real: people want to connect with other people, so keep your content real. Even sharing a failed recipe or your process of creating and testing recipes would keep your content authentic.

• Focus on original images: did you know that image search is the second largest search engine after traditional Google search. Include more photos, and follow the usual SEO image optimization checklist:

  • optimized image name

  • optimized alt tag

  • compress image size before uploading using tools like

https://compressor.io/

• Focus on Video and Watch Pages: everyone knows that video content is important, and Youtube is a huge source of revenue for many food bloggers.

  • Here’s one thing I noticed a lot of recipe bloggers do on Youtube: they have two video forms for their recipe, long and short, that way they get visibility twice one in traditional Youtube search results, and the other in Youtube shorts (smart, right?)

  • Embed videos on your website on a dedicate page just for that video. Why? If you cannot rank your videos on Youtube, maybe you can try ranking them in search via your website!

  • Video content in general should be your priority as it gives you chance to rank in traditional search results, in the video filter search results, and on Youtube and other social platforms too!

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

My goal in this blog is to shed the light on one of the verticals that are dealing with this new era of ai in search. It’s definitely a challenge, and we need to continue to be vocal and advocate for ourselves.

That, and we should support independent small creators because they built the good part of the world wide web, the part that we enjoy consuming every day!

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the SEO Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you’re not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

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I have attended a talk by Mic King recently about the “The Mechanics of Modern Search” and decided to write a blog - or a series of blogs, not sure yet - that just simplifies some of the concepts going on in this space. Here’s one of the slides from his deck.

Sooo What’s going on Sara? Let’s start with the simplest topic, TF-IDF.

What is TF-IDF?

TF-IDF stands for Text Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency. It is basically a method to numerically represent the importance of a word within a document relative to a collection of documents.

💡TF-IDF measures the importance of a word within a document relative to a collection of documents. You can use TF-IDF to figure out the most important words in a document.

Are there Benefits to Using TF-IDF for SEO

TF-IDF is a text analysis technique. While it’s not perfect and comes with limitations, there are still benefits to analyzing SERPs using this method:

Using TF-IDF analysis for SEO can help:

• Identify important and relevant keywords beyond just basic keyword research

• Understand what topics and terms Google considers important for a given search query

• Reduces the impact of common words (e.g., “the”, “a”).

This quote captures the value of using TF-IDF:

💡“There is a fundamental difference between retrieving variations of the same keyword and retrieving apparently unrelated, yet relevant, terms.” ~ CXL

How is TF-IDF used in SEO

I asked Chatgpt and Claude to help me create a simple example to explain the concept:

Document Representation

1. TF-IDF converts each webpage into a set of numbers.

2. These numbers (the vectors) represent how important different keywords are in that document.

3. Example: A pizza restaurant’s webpage might be represented as: [pizza: 0.8, cheese: 0.6, delivery: 0.7]

4. This means “pizza” is very important, “delivery” is quite important, and “cheese” is somewhat important on this page.

Query Representation

1. Convert your query into a similar set of numbers (vectors).

2. Example: Searching for “best pizza delivery” might be represented as: [pizza: 1.0, delivery: 0.9, best: 0.3]

3. This shows “pizza” is most important in the query, followed by “delivery”, then “best”.

Matching Process

1. Now compare the numbers representing your query to the numbers representing each webpage (vector embeddings comparison).

2. Webpages with similar numbers to your query are considered more relevant.

3. Example: A webpage about pizza delivery will have numbers similar to the “best pizza delivery” query, so it’s likely to appear in the search results.

4. A webpage about pasta would have very different numbers, so it probably won’t appear in these results.

I have used TF-IDF to cluster keywords in my Python for Marketers Training. From the example above, TF-IDF can also be used to analyze webpages in SERPs and figure out the most important keywords in those pages that are beyond the simple variations of the main keyword. I will probably add a script for that very soon in the training.

TL;DR: What does that mean for SEOs

You maybe scratching your head thinking, ok what should I do now with this information. Here’s how to apply this in your day-to-day SEO tasks:

• Using simple python scripts, you can input a list of keywords, and cluster them. The results are not perfect, but I used this recently when I wanted to cluster 5k+ keywords. Here’s an example from my course of a clusters created by TF-IDF python script:

• You can also use TF-IDF to analyze the top ranking pages in SERPs for the most important keywords. The output will go beyond the simple variations of a keyword so instead of the usual: “healthy breakfast recipes”, “best healthy breakfast recipes”, “easy healthy breakfast ideas”, etc... expect something like this:

  • “healthy breakfast recipes”

  • “high-protein breakfast options”

  • “vegan breakfast recipes”

  • “quick breakfast meals for busy mornings”

  • “gluten-free breakfast ideas”

You can then use this information to update your content, beyond the basic keyword variations. That’s probably my next python project! If you’re a course member stay tuned.

Should you just use a TF-IDF tool?

There are tools on the market right now that does this. Should you just signup for one? my answer is no. While this information is valuable, using TF-IDF limits your recommendations to what the tools is offering and gives your copywriters a fake impression that your content is complete.

Writing content suddenly becomes a checklist. The analysis is useful, but do not rely solely on it. This is just one aspect of content analysis and recommendations.

That’s that for today folks! Hope you find this useful. Sorry for shamelessly plugging my Python training. Have a great rest of your day!

Hello Riddlers!

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No this is not another blog about upskilling yourself to be a better SEO.

Today's blog is about the additional skills that can take you from being a really good SEO to a great one, it's those skills that separate the good from great.

I see it every day online, experienced SEOs giving good SEO advice, but sometimes, their advice comes flat.

It's not their experience that's the issue, it's the mindset so let's unpack that!

Be Open

In a field like SEO where the only constant is change, and new insights and tactics are shared all the time, you need to be open to new ideas.

I mean, that what makes SEO work interesting.

Holding on to what you know and always done in the past is also great

Old is gold, right?

But over and over in conversations online I see the same pattern

People becoming defensive when commenting on a post they disagree with

People criticizing something just because it's new

People calling anyone they disagree with a scammer or a fraud

This mindset doesn’t just hold you back personally; it also slows the growth of the entire community.

Instead, be open, be curious, take a moment to think, ask more questions.

That said, it's also ok to respectfully disagree!

Critical Thinking

Don't go whichever the wind blows, don't just follow the crowds, just because a lot of people are saying GEO is the same (or not the same) as SEO, it does not mean you have to agree.

Our brains take the easiest path, we really don't want to think, thinking is very energy consuming, so following is easier and more efficient in that aspect.

But on multiple occasions this year I found myself pausing to ask the question "how did we as an industry miss that?"

Take the Google API Warehouse leaks from last year. How did we collectively move on so quickly? Why didn’t they meaningfully change the way we approach SEO? There’s still so much in that leak worth unpacking and yet, most of us (myself included) just… moved on.

That’s made me reflect on whether we’re truly thinking critically, or if we’re selectively focusing on what feels immediately valuable, popular, or easy to talk about.

Are we leading our thinking, or just following trends?

Go the Extra Mile

It’s easy to get comfortable in SEO when everything becomes a checklist.
Done. Done. Done. ✅
And on to the next task.

Checklists are useful, they keep us organized and consistent.

But some of the most valuable growth I’ve experienced came from slowing down and going beyond them.

Taking a bit of extra time to look deeper into the data. Pulling out insights instead of just reporting numbers. Asking not just what happened, but why it happened.

Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. You searched for something today, we all do. Before moving on, pause for a moment and really look at the SERPs. What’s ranking? What’s changed? What stands out?

Ask “why” three to five times and try to follow those answers. That habit alone has taken my understanding of SEO to a completely different level.

That extra curiosity and willingness to look a little deeper, is often what separates good SEO work from great SEO thinking.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

We’re all a work in progress.

We’re all growing and learning all the time, at least, I hope we are 😄

All I’m really saying is this: let’s be intentional about how we grow, and where we choose to invest that growth.

As a matter of fact, there’s no single path to becoming a great SEO. But staying open to new ideas, sharpening your critical thinking, and consistently going the extra mile will definitely help you along that journey.

That's that for today folks,

🥳🥳🥳 HAPPY HOLIDAYS 🎉🎉🎉 in advance

and see you next newsletter!

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Hello Riddlers!

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There are a bunch of standard SEO practices that are kinda agreed upon when it comes to optimizations for URLs, and I'm not about to change that. What I disagree with is how often those practices are treated as high-impact levers, regardless of context.

For example, changing entire website URL structure just for the sake of SEO is not something I would ever recommend to clients, unless under very specific conditions.

In today's blog, I’ll briefly cover the standard URL best practices, then focus on the part we don’t talk about enough: impact versus effort of those best practices, and how sometimes doing nothing is totally fine!

Best SEO Practices for URLs

Without further ado, here's a short to the point list of what you probably already know, and we agree on.

1. URLs should be short and descriptive.

2. URLs should include keywords.

3. Avoid repetition or keyword stuffing.

4. URLs should be lower case and should include hyphens "-" and not underscores "_".

5. Remove stop words like "a", "an", etc....

6. URLs should have a a clear, logical hierarchy.

That's really about it, I'm sure some people can throw in few things here and there like https for example, but that list above is the core recommendations for a good URL from an SEO perspective.

Myths and Misconceptions

This is why I am writing this blog, here are few things that are often overlooked when discussing or sharing recommendations to optimize URLs.

1# Google DOES NOT use URLs structure to understand the website structure.

You read that right.... Google DOES NOT use URL structure to work out the website structure. This fact is buried in Google documentations, and your few first searches may not return this information.

Why does this matter? Because I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard SEOs recommend a full URL restructure purely to "help Google understand the site better". Do not do this, because simply, the impact vs the effort math isn't gonna math... this is technically a migration for... not so much in return 😄

You know when you can do this safely without any concerns? if you have a very small website, or your website is still new, then ya for the sake of having logical URLs you can do that, but otherwise, I'd stir away.

I’ve seen this play out in practice, too. For example, in my commentary on DMarge’s traffic decline, one of the changes they tested was a URL structure update. The result? No meaningful impact.

2# It's OKEY to have a flat website URL structure

Let me say this loud and clear, it's ok to have URLs in the form of:

• [domain-name.com]/[blog-title]

• [domain-name.com]/blog/[blog-title]

• [domain-name.com]/products/[product-title]

You see in the examples above I don't have a blog category or a product category listed? To tell you the truth, I worked with some of the most broken URL structures in the past, that we couldn't just change because the website was large and custom made CMS, where every change will need to be hard-coded, and every thing went just fine... we were doing great in search.

URLs aren’t the bottleneck.... They rarely are.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for flat URLs when you have the option to implement a logical hierarchy. What I am saying is that making URL changes at scale rarely delivers the impact people expect.

This takes us to the next point:

3# Categories in URLs: when do they matter?

There are three situations that I would change the URLs to include the category and avoid a flat structure:

• It's a brand new website or a small website. Because remember, changing all the URLs structures IS A MIGRATION, which always comes with risks and maybe a period of performance fluctuation.

• If your website is getting penalized because there's a specific type of content that should not be on your website, not having folders or categories in your URL can cause your entire website including subdomains to be penalized.

  • Google served forbes.com/advisor/ folder a manual action back in November for site reputation abuse. Yes, the folder only, not the entire website.

  • Google penalized Geeks for Geeks ENTIRE website. You know why? the problematic content was not isolated in a specific folder or subdomain, and therefore Google had to penalize the entire website. 

• International Sites. If you're doing international SEO and your website have multiple languages, having a clear folder structure in the URL that separates one language version from the other is a requirement, not just a best practice.

4# Don't change URLs just to add keywords

While this may come off a bit controversial, it does fall under unnecessary, not so useful SEO changes. Yes, you should have keywords in your URLs, but what if they URLs are already live, getting impressions from search and clicks, and you want to further optimize the pages, should you change the URLs?

Short answer is no, it is rarely the case.

Here's what John Muller said on Reddit when asked about changing URLs to include keywords:

"If you're an SEO, and billing by the hour to implement this change, then it'll help your bottom line. Will it help the site? Very, very rarely (if they have terrible URLs that you can't even copy & paste, maybe). Will a change negatively affect the site for a while until it's reprocessed? Probably. Some risk + usually no gain = ... ?"

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

Just because something is a best practice, does not mean you should execute on it. As I always say, we are very obsessed with checklists in SEO, that we often forget the big picture and what we're trying to accomplish.

Optimizing URLs falls under the category of it depends, is the change worth it really?

That's that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

Support the SEO Riddler!

• Sign up for my newsletter if you're not already.

• Share the newsletter and invite your friends to signup. Help me reach 2k signups by end of 2025 please 🙂

• Provide feedback on how I can make this newsletter better!!!

• Buy me coffee.

• If you're an SEO tool or an SEO service provider, consider sponsoring my newsletter. I'm also open to other partnership ideas as well.

Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

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