February was a turbulent month for SEO, filled with big moves by Google, explosive new techniques enabled by AI, and more.
In the top stories for the month, you’ll learn what the latest data says about how much links really matter. You’ll also get the story on Hubspot’s collapse and find out what’s next after a global SEO tool outage.
That’s just the beginning. Read on to find out more about the latest SEO strategies, building forums with bots, new site reputation abuse policies, new Google quality rater guidelines, and so much more.
Google Says “Links Matter Less”—We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs to See if It’s True
https://ahrefs.com/blog/links-matter-less-but-still-matter/
Patrick Stox brings you this look at the real value of links in current SEO. This experiment was inspired by recent Google statements claiming links aren’t as important as they used to be. The Ahrefs team went into the numbers to determine what role links really play in strategy.
The experiment involved analyzing the top 1,000,000 keywords with the most search volume in the US. Then, each keyword’s SERP rating was correlated with several SEO metrics, including domain rating, keywords present in the URL, and backlinks.
Then, they examined closely how backlinks, referring domains, and internal links correlated with Google rankings. The data told them a lot, including that:
Links matter more at higher search volumes- Brands get more links
- Links correlate to rankings less than they used to
- Links still matter a lot for local queries
- Links matter more for informational content
Links matter more at higher search volumesPatrick concludes that links are still important, but there’s evidence that Google relies on far more signals than in the past. The data shows that the prioritization of other signals depends on the type of SERPs.
Make sure you check out the complete study to learn even more about the role of links and to see the insights laid out in plenty of easy-to-read graphs. Links aren’t the only thing being weighed differently. The content game has changed, too, as the complete collapse of HubSpot shows.
Hubspot’s SEO Collapse: What Went Wrong and Why?
https://searchengineland.com/hubspot-seo-organic-traffic-drop-451096
Danny Goodwin brings you this look at how organic traffic has collapsed for what was once considered to be the gold standard of B2B blogs. For many years in a row, HubSpot dominated SERPS with a content-producing strategy that saw them building guides for almost every topic.
At its height, the blog was pulling in 13.5 million readers a day but has now dropped to 6 million after HubSpot results vanished from thousands of SERPs. The blogs that lost traffic covered topics like writing resignation letters and famous quotes.
This matters because it signals a big change in the SEO playbook. SEO has been getting more difficult for years, and this move signals that yet another large-scale strategy is no longer safe to use.
He links to several breakdown threads where SEOs wrote their own analysis of why HubSpot fell. Check out the complete article to get links to these explanations and find out why so many of them seem to agree.
Google hasn’t commented and usually doesn’t comment about enforcement decisions against individual sites. Google had plenty of other requests for comment to deal with in the last month, in no small part because they caused a massive SEO tool outage.
Google Causes Global SEO Tool Outages
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-causes-global-seo-tool-outages/537604/
Roger Montti brings you this look at Google’s recent move to block search result scraping. The crackdown on scraping caused reported failures across several major SEO tools, including Semrush.
Several SEOs documented what was happening in stories shared across the piece. They reported tool and third-party data supplier outages and generally reported that automatic anti-scaping protections were stricter than ever before. The new challenges are being largely put up by new
Google has long prohibited automated rank checking in its policies. For the most part, though, it has practiced a hands-off approach to SEO services that scrape results and charge a fee for the ranking data.
While Google is getting more forceful with the policy, controlling scrapers will still be difficult. Scrapers can get around blockers in a number of ways, and these restrictions may encourage even more inventive scrapers that require more resources from Google to control.
Google has remained silent on this action, too. Fortunately, most SEOs aren’t waiting for Google to tell us how to react. I’ve got a new plan for SEO in 2025, and I’ll tell you all about it.
SEO in 2025: My NEW Google Strategy!
SEO in 2025: My NEW Google Strategy!
SEO is changing in huge ways. I’ve got up-to-date, actionable strategies ready that I’ve already tested at my own companies. In my video, you’ll learn all about these strategies, why I think they matter, and how to use them.
My first big strategy for the year is maximizing brand search volume. Brand search volume measures how often people search for your brand. Recent data shows that sites with brand search volume massively outperform sites without it.
I’ve been applying brand search growth to my own sites with some amazing results. In the video, you can learn my tactics, including leveraging job boards for brand searches and getting into bots.
My next big strategy for this year is traffic diversity. I’m focusing on building traffic from sources other than Google. Recently, I’ve seen evidence that having different sources is its own ranking factor (covered in the video).
You need to work outside of organic search, building traffic from social media, paid ads, organic videos, emails, and referrals.
My third strategy is goal completion. As we now know from Google’s antitrust trial, user behavior is tracked with a ranking factor called Navboost. I’m focusing on helping the user complete their goal to signal the value of my content. No life stories before recipes kind of content.
Ask yourself if your article answers the user’s question as quickly as possible. Start putting answers as close to the top as possible.
My fourth strategy for 2025 is to focus on building strong content, and unlike Google, I’m going to be clear about what I mean by that. I’m building only and all the articles I need for topical authority in my niche. Then, I’ll write those articles well.
In the video, I show you how to use ChatGPT and other tools to generate the titles you need and verify that they’re all SEO-friendly.
My final strategy is to focus on quality over quantity for all links. Digital PR and high-end guest posting are working best for me, and I’ll show you how to do both to land links from huge sites like the New York Times.
Check out the complete video for all of the tips and to learn how you can pull off my strategies on your own sites.
Parasite SEO: This Insanely Spammy SEO Tactic that WORKS (and Probably Shouldn’t)
Parasite SEO: This Insanely Spammy SEO Tactic that WORKS (and Probably Shouldn’t)
The SterlingSky team brings you this look at how blackhat SEOs are wiping out the positions of their rivals with a tactic that isn’t supposed to work. They examine this spammy tactic and whether you should expect to see your competitors try it.
The incident they investigated involves LinkedIn posts that have been filled with hundreds of spammy keywords and then republished over and over. As the hosts document, these nearly incoherent posts have been able to climb past results with months or years of SEO behind them.
These posts were also promoted with dozens of spam comments from dubious accounts. By all accounts, these posts were winning SERPs with keyword spam, bought links, and bot comments.
Next, Google has some news about site reputation abuse. The policy has changed, and you’ll want to be caught up.
Clarifying the Site Reputation Abuse Policy
https://developers.google.com/search/updates#clarifying-the-site-reputation-abuse-policy
Google has updated the site reputation abuse policy to include guidance from their blog post on site reputation abuse. The FAQ section that was created for the post proved useful to many SEOs with lingering questions and it is now a permanent part of the guidance.
The new section clarifies many of Google’s definitions when determining site reputation abuse. It covers exactly what Google considers third-party content, whether third-party content alone violates the policy, and whether freelance content is forbidden.
The FAQs also clarify what it means to “take advantage” of the host site’s ranking signals, what it takes to remove a manual action after one has been placed, and what you are allowed to do regarding linking to violating content that’s been moved.
Familiarize yourself with these rules to better understand how to stay on the good side of the recent site reputation policy. For now, there’s some interesting research on other recent Google changes. You’ll learn how users are responding to AI overviews.
AI Overview User Intent Research
https://www.authoritas.com/blog/ai-overview-user-intent-research
Laurence O’Toole takes you on this deep dive into the AI Overviews that have been appearing in Google search results. He puts a number to pretty much anything you want to know about AIOs, including how often they appear, how often they show up by intent, and whether they appear more for often branded or unbranded searches.
The post is a list of all the insights his team pulled out of the data they collected. They learned things like—
- AIOs still don’t show up for the majority of searches.
- AIOs appear for a relatively low number of searches (29.9% of Keywords and 11.5% of Total Search Volume).
- AIOs don’t appear more frequently for terms with higher search volumes.
- AIOs do appear more often for problem-solving and Specific Question intents
- AIOs don’t show for any navigational queries
- Topic Research searches are much less likely to have AIOs
Laurence found that there were significant impacts on traditional search results. Organic results were naturally pushed further down the page. This happens even before the AIO is expanded, but when it is expanded, only one organic result is usually visible on the page.
Check out the complete guide for more data, and consider answering Laurence’s call for more SEO partners to contribute to his future studies. You should catch up with one more big change from Google for the last piece of the month.
Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines Gain 11 New Pages
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines-updated-38794.html
Barry Schwartz brings you this look at Google’s big update to its search quality rater guidelines PDF document. Google provides these documents to third-party rater personnel to help them identify quality results and catch spammers who are gaming the algorithm.
These guidelines are a good indication of how Google judges websites and content. As Barry points out, the last time Google did this was for the major spam update changes. The new entries bring the document from 170 pages to 181.
In the piece, Barry tracks what changed in the doc. Most of the new content is expanded guidelines and improved examples for various sections, but you’ll want to see the new changes to page quality and needs met ratings.
That’s all for this month, but it’s a lot to take in. Come back next month for more news on how the huge changes to results are changing Search forever.
