The Best of Ahrefs’ Digest: June 2024

If you’re not one of our 275,000 subscribers, you’ve missed out on some great reads!

Author: Rand Fishkin

Someone shared with Rand more than 2,500 pages of API documentation containing 14,014 attributes (API features) that appear to come from Google’s internal “Content API Warehouse.”

Of course, the biggest articles in June have to do with the Google leak. Here's what I learned from the documents:

Author: Mike King

Rand shared the documents with Mike King and he did a deep dive into the leaked documents.

My quick takeaways from this lengthy article (you might need a pot of coffee to finish it):

Author: Patrick Stox

The problem with the SEO industry—everyone will take a tiny grain of something and turn it into some larger truth. Patrick sets the record straight.

Just because something is in the leaked API docs, doesn't mean it's a Google ranking factor. What is more likely is that SEOs are making assumptions that favor their own opinions and biases.

Author: Cyrus Shepard

Cyrus Shepard ran a study to see if recent Google updates are targeting common SEO practices.

Here’s what was found:

Author: Nat Eliason

Nat Eliason quit all his work commitments and went all-in to make his new book, Crypto Confidential a great one. He distilled everything he learned into this article.

Some tips I loved:

Author: Gisele Navarro, Danny Ashton

HouseFresh’s update to their previous article on how Google is killing independent sites (featured in March).

Major publishers are using an SEO content strategy called “keyword swarming” to drown out smaller sites. Here’s how it works:

Author: Bryan Casey

How IBM builds and plans its content strategy.

I love the “topic bullseye” framework Bryan created to judge the relevance of topics to your product or service. 

The closer a query is to the bullseye, the higher the conversion rate is likely going to be.

Author: Nick LeRoy

SEO job listings are down -37% in Q1 of 2024 compared to 2023.

It seems like SEO jobs are less stable than before, no thanks to AI and the looming economic uncertainty. However, this doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. 

As Bryan Casey writes, “Search can’t be separated from the web. It’s the operating system of the web.” Search will always exist, and therefore SEO will always exist. The form might change, and it’s up to all of us to adapt.

Author: Takahē

Short ‘stories’ about the current Internet that will make you cry.

This article hit me hard in the feels. I wonder if it was because I was younger and naive, but I miss the early Internet days when people were making things for fun, and not because they were trying to squeeze out as much money as possible.

Author: Glen Allsopp

Glen’s third report on what the biggest players in SEO are doing.

Seems like most of the major sites are doing one or both things:

Author: Bernard Huang

Instead of writing a lengthy, Skyscraper post that covers all angles, split them up into granular, targeted pieces of content that map to the user’s search journey.

I don’t want to rain on Bernard’s parade, and I could be just dumb, but ranch-style SEO does seem to call back to the old days of writing an article for every long-tail keyword. (Albeit with a strong focus on adding information gain, rather than gaming algorithms.)

That said, from what I’ve observed, SERPs are getting more fragmented. Perhaps users are tired of having to scroll through Dostoyevsky-length novels and poor search results to get what they want, so they’re constantly refining their searches and therefore changing the intent of many queries.

Marketing is really a cycle.

Author: Amanda Natividad

Five ideas on how to rise above the forgettable content created by generative AI.

Amanda’s point is this: You—your experiences, observations, triggers, and knowledge—can’t be replaced by AI. So, if you want to make content that stands out, use yourself as the lighthouse.

Morgan Housel calls this “selfish writing”. YCombinator founder, Paul Graham wrote the same in his post on useful writing: “Use yourself as a proxy for the reader”.

What’s beyond targeting keywords, now that generative AI (and SGE) can handle most of them? This is what I’ve been thinking a lot about—and the answer seems to just be “write something interesting.” And you can do this by simply following your nose, especially since I write for people like me too. What I find interesting will likely be interesting to others.

Author: Kevin Indig

We all agree we need to do better than copycat content. But most people are still creating content the exact same way. (Maybe even worse, now with generative AI.)

To make good content that’ll rank in the future, you need to treat content like a product:

Author: Glen Allsopp

Glen's research reveals that just 16 companies representing 588 brands get 3.5 billion (yes, billion!) monthly clicks from Google.

Glen pointed out some really actionable ideas in this report, such as the fact that many of the brands dominating search are adding mini-author bios.

This idea makes so much sense in terms of both UX and E-E-A-T. I’ve already pitched it to the team and we’re going to implement it on our blog.

Authors: Gisele Navarro, Danny Ashton

Big publications have gotten into the affiliate game, publishing "best of" lists about everything under the sun. And despite often not testing products thoroughly, they're dominating Google rankings. The result, Gisele and Danny argue, is that genuine review sites suffer and Google is fast losing content diversity.

I have a lot of sympathy for independent sites. Some of them are trying their best, but unfortunately, they’re lumped in with thousands of others who are more than happy to spam.

I know it’s hard to hear, but the truth is Google benefits more from having big sites in the SERPs than from having diversity. That's because results from big brands are likely what users actually want. By and large, people would rather shop at Walmart or ALDI than at a local store or farmer's market.

That said, I agree with most people that Forbes (with its dubious contributor model contributing to scams and poor journalism) should not be rewarded so handsomely.

Author: Glen Allsopp

Glen analyzed 10,000 “product review” keywords and found that:

After Google’s heavy promotion of Reddit from last year’s Core Update, to no one’s surprise, unscrupulous SEOs and marketers have already started spamming Reddit. And as you may know, Reddit’s moderation is done by volunteers, and obviously, they can’t keep up.

I’m not sure how this second-order effect completely escaped the smart minds at Google, but from the outside, it feels like Google has capitulated to some extent.

I’m not one to make predictions and I have no idea what will happen next, but I agree with Glen: Google's results are the worst I've seen them. We can only hope Google sorts itself out.

Author: Rand Fishkin

63.41% of all U.S. web traffic referrals from the top 170 sites are initiated on Google.com.

Despite all of our complaints, Google is still the main platform to acquire traffic from. That’s why we all want Google to sort itself out and do well.

But it would also be a mistake to look at this post and think Google is the only channel you should drive traffic from. As Rand’s later blog post clarifies, “be careful not to ascribe attribution or credit to Google when other investments drove the real value.”

I think many affiliate marketers learned this lesson well from the past few Core Updates: Relying on one single channel to drive all of your traffic is not a good idea. You should be using other platforms to build brand awareness, interest, and demand.

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