SEO For Paws Live Stream Conference: Free Tickets Out Now via @sejournal, @theshelleywalsh

The next SEO For Paws will be held on Sept. 25, 2025.

The live stream features a stellar speaker list that includes some of the industry’s best SEO professionals and personalities, including Andrey Lipattsev, David Carrasco, Judith Lewis, and Jamie Indigo.

SEO for Paws, is a live-streamed fundraiser founded by Anton Shulke, an expert at organizing events, to help a charity close to his heart.

Anton has tirelessly continued his support for his favorite charity, which aids the many pets that were left behind in Kyiv after war broke out in Ukraine. The previous event in March managed to generate approx $7,000 for the worthy cause, with all funds going straight to the shelters where it’s needed.

Anton is well-known for his love of cats. Dynia, who traveled across Europe with Anton’s family after escaping Kyiv, is a regular feature on his social media channels.

Image from Anton Shulke, September 2025

One Cat Turned Into A Shelter Of 50

Among the many pet shelters that SEO For Paws has helped is an apartment run by Alya, who cares for up to 50 animals.

Alya has always cared for animals, and meeting an old, sick cat she called Fox was the start of becoming an organized shelter.

In 2016, she started with five cats living in her apartment, and today has 50 alongside 15 of her grandmother’s cats.

There’s a lot involved in care for this many animals, including the feeding, cleaning, washing litter boxes, replacing litter, and performing hygiene or medical procedures when needed.

Running a home-based shelter is not easy. Sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s exhausting. But Alya says that looking around at all the little whiskered faces, the furry bodies sprawled across the furniture, makes it worth it. Giving them a life of warmth, food, and love is worth every challenge.

To keep supporting individuals like Alya, we need your help. You can donate via Anton’s Buy Me a Coffee.

SEO For Paws – Cat Lovers, Dog Lovers, And SEO

The upcoming “SEO for Paws” livestream aims to continue fundraising efforts. The event, which runs from 12:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET, will offer actionable SEO and digital marketing advice from experts while raising money for the animal shelters.

Headline speakers who have donated their time to support his cause include Andrey Lipattsev, David Carrasco, Olga Zarr, Judith Lewis, James Wirth, Zach Chahalis, Jamie Indigo, and Lee Elliott.

Attendance is free, but participants are encouraged to donate to help the charity.

Event Highlights

• Date and Time: September 25, 2025, from 12:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET.
• Access: Free registration with the option to join live, participate in Q&A sessions, and a recording will be made available on YouTube.
• Speakers: The live stream will feature SEO and digital marketing experts, who will share actionable insights.

How To Make A Difference

The “SEO for Paws” live stream is an opportunity to make a meaningful difference while listening to excellent speakers.

All money raised is donated to help cats and dogs in Ukraine.

You can register for the event here.

And you can help support the charity by buying coffee.

Search Engine Journal is proud to be sponsoring the event.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Anton Shulke/SEO For Paws

The Future Of Rank Tracking Can Go Two Ways via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Digital marketers are providing more evidence that Google’s disabling of the num=100 search parameter correlates exactly with changes in Google Search Console impression rates. What looked like reliable data may, in fact, have been a distorted picture shaped by third-party SERP crawlers. It’s becoming clear that squeezing meaning from the top 100 search results is increasingly a thing of the past and that this development may be a good thing for SEO.

Num=100 Search Parameter

Google recently disabled the use of a search parameter that caused web searches to display 100 organic search results for a given query. Search results keyword trackers depended on this parameter for efficiently crawling Google’s search results. By eliminating the search parameter, Google is forcing data providers into an unsustainable position that requires them to scale their crawling by ten times in order to extract the top 100 search results.

Rank Tracking: Fighting To Keep It Alive

Mike Roberts, founder of SpyFu, wrote a defiant post saying that they will find a way to continue bringing top 100 data to users.

His post painted an image of an us versus them moment:

“We’re fighting to keep it alive. But this hits hard – delivering is very expensive.

We might even lose money trying to do this… but we’re going to try anyway.

If we do this alone, it’s not sustainable. We need your help.

This isn’t about SpyFu vs. them.

If we can do it – the way the ecosystem works – all your favorite tools will be able to do it. If nothing else, then by using our API (which has 100% of our keyword and ranking data).”

Rank Tracking: Where The Wind Is Blowing

Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, sounded more pragmatic about the situation, tweeting that the future of ranking data will inevitably be focused on the Top 20 search results.

Tim observed:

“Ramping up the data pulls by 10x is just not feasible, given the scale at which all SEO tools operate.

So the question is:

‘Do you need keyword data below Top 20?’

Because most likely it’s going to come at a pretty steep premium going forward.

Personally, I see it this way:

▪️ Top 10 – is where all the traffic is at. Definitely a must-have.

▪️ Top 20 – this is where “opportunity” is at, both for your and your competitors. Also must-have.

▪️ Top 21-100 – IMO this is merely an indication that a page is “indexed” by Google. I can’t recall any truly actionable use cases for this data.”

Many of the responses to his tweet were in agreement, as am I. Anything below the top 20, as Tim suggested, only tells you that a site is indexed. The big picture, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t matter whether a site is ranked in position 21 or 91; they’re pretty much equivalently suffering from serious quality or relevance issues that need to be worked out. Any competitors in that position shouldn’t be something to worry about because they are not up and coming; they’re just limping their way in the darkness of page three and beyond.

Page two positions, however, provide actionable and useful information because they show that a page is relevant for a given keyword term but that the sites ranked above it are better in terms of quality, user experience, and/or relevance. They could even be as good as what’s on page one but, in my experience, it’s less about links and more often it’s about user preference for the sites in the top ten.

Distorted Search Console Data

It’s becoming clear that search results scraping distorted Google’s Search Console data. Users are reporting that Search Console keyword impression data is significantly lower since Google blocked the Num=100 search parameter. Impressions are the times when Google shows a web page in the search results, meaning that the site is ranking for a given keyword phrase.

SEO and web developer Tyler Gargula (LinkedIn profile) posted the results of an analysis of over three hundred Search Console properties, showing that 87.7% of the sites experienced drops in impressions. 77.6% of the sites in the analysis experienced losses in query counts, losing visibility for unique keyword phrases.

Tyler shared:

“Keyword Length: Short-tail and mid-tail keywords experienced the largest drops in impressions, with single word keywords being much lower than I anticipated. This could be because short and mid-tail keywords are popular across the SEO industry and easier to track/manage within popular SEO tracking tools.

Keyword Ranking Positions: There has been reductions in keywords ranking on page 3+, and in turn an increase in keywords ranking in the top 3 and page 1. This suggests keywords are now more representative of their actual ranking position, versus receiving skewed positions from num=100.”

Google Is Proactively Fighting SERP Scraping

Disabling the num=100 search parameter is just the prelude to a bigger battle. Google is hiring an engineer to assist in statistical analysis of SERP patterns and to work together with other teams to develop models for combating scrapers. It’s obvious that this activity negatively affects Search Console data, which in turn makes it harder for SEOs to get an accurate reading on search performance.

What It Means For The Future

The num=100 parameter was turned off in a direct attack on the scraping that underpinned the rank-tracking industry. Its removal is forcing the search industry to reconsider the value of data beyond the top 20 results. This may be a turning point toward better attribution and and clearer measures of relevance.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/by-studio

Google Is Hiring An Anti-Scraping Engineering Analyst via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google is hiring a new anti-scraping czar, whose job will be to analyze search traffic to identify the patterns of search scrapers, assess the impact, and work with engineering teams to develop new anti-scraping models for improving anti-scraping defenses.

Search Results Scraping

SEOs rely on SERP tracking companies to provide search results data for understanding search ranking trends, enabling competitive intelligence, and other keyword-related research and analysis.

Many of these companies conduct massive amounts of automated crawling of Google’s search results to take a snapshot of ranking positions and data related to search features triggered by keyword phrases. This scraping is suspected of causing significant changes to what’s reported in Google Search Console.

In the early days of SEO, there used to be a free keyword data source via Yahoo’s Overture, their PPC service. Many SEOs used to search on Yahoo so often that their searches would unintentionally inflate the keyword volume. Smart SEOs would know better to not optimize for those keyword phrases.

I have suspected that some SEOs may also have intentionally scraped Yahoo’s search results using fake keyword phrases in order to generate keyword volumes for those queries, in order to mislead competitors into optimizing for phantom search queries.

&num=100 Results Parameter

There is a growing suspicion backed by Google Search Console data that search result scraping may have inflated the official keyword impression data and that it may be the reason why Search Console Data appears to show that AI Search results aren’t sending traffic while Google’s internal data shows the opposite.

This suspicion is based on falling keyword impressions that correlate with Google’s recent action to block generating 100 search results with one search query, a technique used by various keyword tracking tools.

Google Anti-Scraping Engineering Analyst

Jamie Indigo posted that Google is looking to hire an Engineering Analyst focused on combatting search scraping.

The responsibilities for the job are:

• “Investigate and analyze patterns of abuse on Google Search, utilizing data-motivated insights to develop countermeasures and enhance platform security.
  Analyze datasets to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies that may indicate abuse within Google Search.
• Develop and track metrics to measure scraper impact and the effectiveness of anti-scraping defenses. Collaborate with engineering teams to design, test, and launch new anti-scraper rules, models, and system enhancements.
• Investigate proof-of-concept attacks and research reports that identify blind spots and guide the engineering team’s development priorities. Evaluate the effectiveness of existing and proposed detection mechanisms, understanding the impact on scrapers and real users.
• Contribute to the development of signals and features for machine learning models to detect abusive behavior. Develop and maintain threat intelligence on scraper actors, motivations, tactics and the scraper ecosystem.”

What Does It Mean?

There hasn’t been an official statement from Google but it’s fairly apparent that Google may be putting a stop to search results scrapers. This should result in more accurate Search Console data, so that’s a plus.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/DIMAS WINDU