Google Is Launching Search Central Deep Dive Events via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google announced via their Search Off the Record podcast that they are launching a multi-day conference series to enable in-depth workshops on SEO topics that matter. The series is launching as a test pilot in the Asia-Pacific region, then expanding from there.

Google’s Gary Illyes said that he’s been thinking of doing a multi-day event for the past year because he believes that the one-day format only allows for a relatively shallow coverage of important topics. He said that they’re constrained to 25 minutes to cover a topic which means that they end up speeding through the discussion without being able to “contextualize” them, to show how they’re relevant for people.

Gary explained:

“One of my pet peeves with Search Central Live is that we have these well-rehearsed talks that speed through one topic, and then you do, with that information, whatever you want. Basically, we don’t have time, like we have 25 minutes, maybe, for a talk. …how do you link the topic that you talked about to something tangible? Like, for example, if you are talking about crawling, then how do you show people how that looks like in Search Console or in server logs or whatever, if you don’t have the time, if you only have 25 minutes or even less?”

A Googler named Cherry commented:

“With longer time, of course, we can talk about more things, deeper things. We can have more time for networking, interactive… or even practical things that usually we might not have.”

Topics To Be Covered

The Googlers indicated that they’re not settled on the topics that they’ll cover, whether it will focus on the technical or marketing side of SEO or both. User feedback during the signup process may influence the sessions that they choose to present so that they can keep it relevant to what users in any particular geographic are are most concerned about.

Location Of Deep Dive Events

In a sign that this event is still in the planning stage, the Googlers said that they haven’t chosen where the first event will be held, only that they’re looking to kick them off in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, mentioning that Bali is on the list of places under consideration. Budget is one of the considerations.

Search Central Live Global

Lastly, they announced that they will still be presenting Search Central Live but will be expanding it to more locations globally, including possibly to the Baltics.

Listen To Search Off The Record Episode 90

Featured Image by Shutterstock/fongleon356

Reimagining EEAT To Drive Higher Sales And Search Visibility via @sejournal, @martinibuster

The SEO Charity podcast recently discussed a different way to think about EEAT that focuses on activities that leads to external signals that Google may associate with the underlying concepts of EEAT (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). Google’s John Mueller recently said that EEAT is not something that you can add to a site and most of what was discussed on the show lines up perfectly with that reality.

The podcast, hosted by Olesia Korobka and Anton Shulke, featured Amanda Walls (LinkedIn profile), founder of Cedarwood Digital in Manchester, UK.

Aristotle And SEO

Amanda introduced the concept of applying Aristotle’s principles of ethos, pathos, and logos to SEO strategy. These principles are three ways to persuade site visitors and potential customers:

1. Credibility (ethos)
2. Emotional appeal (pathos)
3. Logical reasoning (logos), which is used to convince an audience.

Amanda explains these concepts in more depth but those three principles form the basis for her approach to creating the circumstances that lead to positive external signals that can be correlated to concepts like expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Why It Matters for SEO

Amanda says that SEO is ultimately about driving leads and conversions, not just rankings and I agree with that 100%. The history of SEO is littered with gurus crowing about all the traffic they gained for clients but they never talk about the part that really matters which is sales and leads.

Link building historically falls into that trap where both the client and the link builder focus on how many links are acquired each month and look to traffic as evidence of success. But really, as Amanda points out, everything that a good SEO does should be focused on increasing sales. Nothing else matters.

Amanda explained:

“SEO is more than just rankings, it’s about conversion. It’s about business return. It’s about getting that success, those leads, those sales that we need… Bringing people to a website ….means nothing if they don’t convert. …we don’t just want to bring people to the website, we want them to engage and love your brand and have a really, really good reason to go through and fulfill the conversion journey.”

Reputation Management

Amanda recommends focusing on managing the business’s reputation, such as in reviews, interviews, and what’s written online about the brand.

She cites the following statistics:

• 87% of consumers will back out of a purchase decision if they read something negative about the brand.
• 81% of consumers do extensive research before a purchase, as much as 79 days.

Amanda prescribes findability, credibility, and persuasion as the ingredients for successful search optimization:

“We’re working on SEO to help people find us, and then most importantly, we are convincing them or we’re persuading them to actually go and purchase our product…”

Monitor Off-Site Signals

Amanda recommends regularly researching your brand to uncover potential issues, to monitor the online user sentiment, and to assess media coverage because poor off-site sentiment can remove users out of the conversion funnel.

Manage On-Site Signals

Amanda also recommends using the About Us page for sharing relatable stories that users can generate actual positive feelings for the brand, using the phrase emotional appeal to describe the experience users should get from an About Us page. She says that this can be as simple as telling potential customers about the business.

User-Generated Content And Authenticity

Many of the fastest growing business on the Internet cultivate high quality user generated content. Encouraging customers to post reviews and images helps to build confidence in products.

Amanda explains:

“And then also from a pathos perspective, you know, really getting that kind of user generated content, getting people to connect… because fundamentally humans, they buy from humans and the more human and the more emotional that we can be in our sales process, the more likely that we are to get that buy-in and that connection that we need to actually get across to our audience.”

Pitching To Journalists

This last part, pitching story ideas to journalists, is something that link building companies consistently get wrong. I know because I get approached by them all the time and they consistently have the wrong approach, which is focusing too much on links and not enough on understanding my audience.

I specialized in link building back in the early days of SEO (early 2000s). I was even the moderator of the link building forum at WebmasterWorld. Although I don’t do link building anymore, I have a vast, vast amount of experience persuading publishers to give my clients a link.

My opinion is that PR to journalists should be approached strictly for brand exposure. Don’t make links the goal.

Focus instead on building positive stories with journalists and let them write those articles with or without adding a link, let them decide. What will happen is that the consumers will go out and type your business’s name into Google and that’s a strong, strong signal. I prefer thousands of consumers typing my website’s name on Google over a handful of links, every time, all day long.

I strongly agree with what Amanda says about understanding a journalist’s audience:

“92% of journalists say that understanding their audience is crucial for them to consider a story pitch.”

Understanding the audience is super important. I’ll go even deeper and recommend understanding what motivates the audience. Focus on the reasons why a journalist’s readers will click an article title that’s displayed on Google News. Once you understand that part, I can practically guarantee that PR outreach approval rates will skyrocket.

Takeaway

The SEO Charity podcast episode featuring Amanda Walls introduces a novel way to build signals associated with Google’s EEAT (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) by focusing on credibility, emotion, and logic in content strategy. Walls emphasizes using Aristotle’s persuasive principles to influence reputation, brand perception, and conversion, encouraging SEO strategies focused on meaningful business outcomes like leads and sales, with better search visibility that supports those ends.

Watch the SEO Charity episode on EEAT:

Reimagining E-E-A-T with Amanda Walls

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ollyy

Google’s Updated Raters Guidelines Refines Concept Of Low Quality via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines were updated a few months ago, and several of the changes closely track the talking points shared by Googlers at the 2025 Search Central Live events. Among the most consequential updates are those to the sections defining the lowest quality pages, which more clearly reflect the kinds of sites Google wants to exclude from the search results.

Section 4.0 Lowest Quality Pages

Google added a new definition of the Lowest Rating in the Lowest Quality Pages section. While Google has always been concerned about removing low quality sites from the search results, this change to their raters guideline likely reflects an emphasis on weeding out a specific kind of low quality website.

The new guideline focuses on identifying the publisher’s motives for publishing the content.

The previous definition said:

“The Lowest rating is required if the page has a harmful purpose, or if it is designed to deceive people about its true purpose or who is responsible for the content on the page.”

The new version keeps that sentence but adds a new sentence that encourages the quality rater to consider the underlying motives of the publisher responsible for the web page. The focus of this guidance is to encourage the quality raters to consider how the page benefits a site visitor and to judge whether the purpose of the page is entirely for benefiting the publisher.

The addition to this section reads:

“The Lowest rating is required if the page is created to benefit the owner of the website (e.g. to make money) with very little or no attempt to benefit website visitors or otherwise serve a beneficial purpose.”

There’s nothing wrong with being motivated to earn an income from a website. What Google is looking at is if the content only serves that purpose or if there is also a benefit for the user.

Focus On Effort

The next change is focused on identifying how much effort was put into creating the site. This doesn’t mean that publishers must now document how much time and effort was put into the creating the content. This section is simply about looking for evidence that the content is not distinguishable from content on other sites and offers no clear advantages over the content found elsewhere on the Internet.

This part about the main content (MC) was essentially rewritten:

“● The MC is copied, auto-generated, or otherwise created without adequate effort.”

The new version has more nuance about the main content (MC):

“● The MC is created with little to no effort, has little to no originality and the MC adds no value compared to similar pages on the web”

Three things to unpack there:

1. Content created with little to no effort
2. Contains little to no originality
3. Main content adds no additional value

Publishers who focus on keeping up with competitors should be careful that they’re not simply creating the same thing as their competitors. Saying that it’s not the same thing because it’s the same topic only better doesn’t change the fact that it’s the same thing. Even if the content is “ten times better” the fact remains that it’s still basically the same thing as the competitor’s content, only ten times more of it.

A Word About Content Gap Analysis

Some people are going to lose their minds about what I’m going to say about this, but keep an open mind.

There is a popular SEO process called Content Gap Analysis. It’s about reviewing competitors to identify topics that the competitors are writing about that are missing on the client’s site then copying those topics to fill the content gap.

That is precisely the kind of thing that leads to unoriginality and content that is indistinguishable from everything else that’s on the Internet. It’s my number one reason I would never use a software program that scrapes top ranked sites and suggests topics based on what the competitor’s are publishing. It results in virtually indistinguishable content and pure unoriginality.

Who wants to jump from one site to another site and read the same exact  recipes, even if they have more images and graphs and videos. Copying a competitor’s content “but doing it better” is not original.

Scraping Google’s PAAs (People Also Asked) just like everyone else does not result in original content. It results in content that’s exactly the same as everyone else that’s scraping PAAs.

While the practice of content gap analysis is about writing about the same thing only better, it’s still unoriginal. Saying it’s better doesn’t change the fact that it’s the same thing.

Lack of originality is a huge issue with Internet content and it’s something that Google’s Danny Sullivan discussed extensively at the recent Google Search Central Live in New York City.

Instead of looking for information gaps, it’s better to review your competitor’s weaknesses. Then look at their strengths. Then compare that to your own weaknesses and strengths.

A competitor’s weakness can become your strength. This is especially valuable information when competing against a bigger and more powerful competitor.

Takeaways

1. Google’s Emphasis on Motive-Based Quality Judgments

• Quality raters are now encouraged to judge not just content, but the intent behind it.
• Pages created purely for monetization, with no benefit to users, should be rated lowest.
• This may signal Google’s intent to refine their ability to week out low quality content based on the user experience.

2. Effort and Originality Are Now Central Quality Signals

• Low-effort or unoriginal content is explicitly called out as justification for the lowest rating.
• This may signal that Google’s algorithms may increasingly focus on surfacing content with higher levels of originality.
• Content that doesn’t add distinctive value over competitors may struggle in the search results

3. Google’s Raters Guidelines Reflect Public Messaging

• Changes to the Guidelines mirror talking points in recent Search Central Live events.
• This suggests that Google’s algorithms may become more precise on things like originality, added value, and effort put into creating the content.
• This means publishers should (in my opinion) consider ways to make their sites more original than other sites, to compete by differentiation.

Google updated its Quality Rater Guidelines to draw a sharper line between content that helps users and content that only helps publishers. Pages created with little effort, no originality, or no user benefit are now listed as examples of the lowest quality, even if they seem more complete than competing pages.

Google’s Danny Sullivan used the example of travel sites that all have the sidebar that introduces the smiling site author and other hallmarks of travel sites as an example of an area where sites become indistinguishable from each other.

The reason why publishers do that is that they see what Google is ranking and assume that’s what Google wants. In my experience, that’s not the case. In my opinion it may be useful to think about what you can do to make a site more original.

Download the latest version of Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines here (PDF).

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Kues

Google Answers Why Landing Page Ranks For An E-Commerce Query via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Bluesky about why an e-commerce page with minimal content is ranking, illustrating that sometimes optimized content isn’t enough.

E-Commerce Search Results

A person posted their concerns about an e-commerce site that was ranking in the search results with barely any content. In fact, the domain that was ranking redirects to another domain. On the face of it, it appears like something is not right. Why would Google rank a landing page about a domain name transfer, right?

Why would Google rank what is essentially a landing page with virtually zero content for a redirected domain?

Why A Landing Page Ranks

The company with the landing page had acquired another company and they subsequently joined the two domains. There was nothing wrong or spammy going on, one business bought another business, it happens every day.

The person asking the question dropped a URL and a screenshot of the landing page and asked:

“How does Google think this would be the best result and also, do you think this is a relevant result for users?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“It looks like a normal ecommerce site to me. They could have handled the site-migration a bit more gracefully (and are probably losing a lot of “SEO value” by doing this instead of a real migration), but it doesn’t seem terrible for users.”

Site Migration

Mueller’s comment about the site migration was expanded further.

He posted:

“Our guidance for site migrations is at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes . What they’re doing is a “soft or crypto redirect”, and they’re doing it “N:1″ (meaning all old pages go there). Both of these make transfering information about the old site hard / impossible.”

Sometimes Google ranks pages that seem like they don’t belong. But sometimes the site rankings make sense when looked at from a different perspective, particularly from the perspective of what’s good and makes sense for the user. Rankings change all the time and it could be that the rankings for that page could go away after a certain amount of time. But waiting for a competitor to drop away isn’t really a good SEO strategy. Google’s Danny Sullivan had some good advice about differentiating a site for better rankings.

SEO Rockstar Names 7 SEO Fundamentals To Win In AI Search via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Todd Friesen, one of the most experienced digital marketers in our industry, recently posted on LinkedIn that the core fundamentals that apply to traditional search engines work exactly the same for AI search optimization. His post quickly received dozens of comments and more than a hundred likes, indicating that he’s not the only one who believes there’s no need to give SEO another name.

Who Is Todd Friesen?

Todd has had a long career in SEO, formerly of Salesforce and other top agencies and businesses. Like me, he was a moderator at the old WebmasterWorld Forums, only he’s been doing SEO for even longer. Although he’s younger than I am, I totally consider him my elder in the SEO business. Todd Friesen, along with Greg Boser, was an SEO podcasting pioneer with their SEO Rockstars show.

AEO – Answer Engine Optimization

There’s been a race to give a name to optimizing web content for AI search engines and few details on why it merits a new name.

We find ourselves today with five names for the exact same thing:

1. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
2. AIO (AI Optimization)
3. CEO (Chat Engine Optimization)
4. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
5. LMO (Language Model Optimization)

There are many people today that agree that optimizing for an AI search engine is fundamentally the same as optimizing for a traditional search engine.  There’s little case for a new name when even an AI search engine like Perplexity uses a version of Google’s PageRank algorithm for ranking authoritative websites.

Todd Friesen’s post on LinkedIn made the case that optimizing for AI search engines is essentially the same thing as SEO:

“It is basically fundamental SEO and fundamental brand building. Can we stop over complicating it?

– proper code (html, schema and all that)
– fast and responsive site
– good content
– keyword research (yes, we still do this)
– coordination with brand marketing
– build some links
– analytics and reporting (focus on converting traffic)
– rinse and repeat”

SEO For AI = The Same SEO Fundamentals

Todd Friesen is right. While there’s room for quibbling about the details the overall framework for SEO, regardless if it’s for an AI search engine or not, can be reduced to these seven fundamentals of optimization.

Digital Marketer Rosy Callejas (LinkedIn Profile) agreed that there were too many names for the same thing:

“Too many names! SEO vs AEO vs GEO”

Kevin Doory, (LinkedIn Profile) Director Of SEO at RazorFish commented:

“The ones that talk about what they do, can change the names to whatever they want. The rest of us will just do the darn things.”

SEO Consultant Don Rhoades (LinkedIn Profile) agreed:

“Still SEO after all these (failed) attempts to distance from it by “thought leaders” – eg: inbound marketing, growth hacking, and whatever other nomenclature du jour they decide to cook up next.”

Ryan Jones (LinkedIn Profile), Senior Vice President, SEO at Razorfish (and founder of SERPrecon.com) commented on the ridiculousness of the GEO name: 

“GEO is a terrible name”

Pushback On AEO Elsewhere

A discussion on Bluesky saw Google’s John Mueller commenting on the motivations for creating hype.

Preeti Gupta‬ posted her opinion on Bluesky:

“It is absolutely wild to me that in this debate of GEO/AEO and SEO, everyone is saying that building a brand is not a requisite for SEO, but it is important for GEO/AEO.

Like bro, chill. This AI stuff didn’t invent the need for building a brand. It existed way before it. smh.”

Google’s John Mueller responded:

“You don’t build an audience online by being reasonable, and you don’t sell new things / services by saying the current status is sufficient.”

What Do You Think?

What’s your opinion? Is SEO for AI fundamentally the same as for regular search engines?