Have had a big increase in requests for help with manual actions lately. These include thin content, pure spam, and scaled content. Most of these sites are legitimate long standing businesses. Reminds me of 2011 - early 2012. Google went wild dishing out manual actions for unnatural links. What followed was the launch of Penguin in April of 2012 which was an algorithmic demotion. I think when Google gives out loads of manual actions it is for two reasons: 1. They are finding examples to use to train machine learning systems that will eventually be used algorithmically. 2. They learn from the reconsideration requests. Usually, in order to get a manual action lifted you need to fess up about what tactics you've been using. Anyhow, I still think that a big update is on its way. And I think it may be quite shocking for sites that have thrived more on SEO knowledge than truly being the most helpful and reliable.

Google announced new YouTube playlists for learning Search fundamentals and Technical SEO. This is such a good idea with resources you can have new SEO staff go through. Or really for anyone who wants to learn SEO. You'll learn how Google crawls, indexes and serves content, how to optimize for Search and how to use GSC and Google Trends. These videos are not new - it's just the playlist curation that is. The playlist for Search fundamentals: The playlist for Technical Fundamentals: The blog post about these new playlists:

A few folks who shared my recent article on "main content" posted it and used a screenshot of this table. Here's something cool. After I finished writing my article, I asked Antigravity what we could do to follow my own advice and make the main content - the reason why people were reading this piece - easier for people to ingest. Antigravity suggested and create a table. I made a few modifications on it and then put it at the top of my article. Here's a good prompt you can use in your LLM: What is the primary purpose of this page? What is it helping people understand or achieve? Give me three ideas on how we could improve or add something to the page that would make it even more effective at achieving its purpose and helping people.

Such a good piece by @lilyraynyc. The signs are clear. It's very likely a big Google update is coming. She tells the story of how she and I were having a similar conversation in a Vegas bar about a big update coming back in March of 2024, and sure enough, the next day the March core update was launched, which Google called an evolution in how they determine the helpfulness of content.

Google's advice on "main content" is not new. Here are some excerpts from the Quality Raters Guidelines. The most interesting part is what they say about "filler" content: "The main content (MC) of a page should support its purpose. so that visitors can immediately access it. A high quality page has the most helpful MC placed most prominently. Content that supports the page purpose without directly contributing to the primary goal can be included, but it should be shown lower on the page in a less prominent position." In other words: Make it easy for the searcher to find what they are looking for. Now why did they add this to the helpful content guidance now? It could be to help site owners improve after being impacted by past updates. Or perhaps it is a warning for an update that is about to happen? 🤔

Great breakdown from Marie. Like I said yesterday, with all of the doc updates, and Google presentations from the past year, I feel like we are going to see a very big update from Google (and maybe separate from broad core updates or spam updates). And that makes complete sense as many companies are trying to game AI Search via risky tactics. And check the "Deceptive authorship" info that Marie covers in her post. Yep, I've seen that plenty of times before... BEWARE.

Google updated my favourite document - their guidance on creating helpful content. They added more to help us understand and improve the "main content" of our pages. Here is a blog post and video with my thoughts.

Gemini token usage in Antigravity is unreal if you are on the Ultra Plan. I've been using 3.8 Flash High all day non stop with multiple agents running and have barely touched my token alotment.

Updated the algo update list with a bunch of things including: ▪️Sep spam update ▪️Gemini integrating with more apps ▪️UCP appearing for more sites ▪️ChatGPT stops citing YouTube ▪️Gemini 3.8 Live with real time vision launched ▪️More AI Overviews seen internationally ▪️Local knowledge panels showing AI Overviews Also, ICYMI, the update list now has an MCP server so you can use it in Claude, Codex, etc.

Tomorrow's newsletter is queued up with my take on the top stories in Search & AI including: ▪️Gemini 4 ▪️Google's latest spam update ▪️Why we need to watch Meta's Muse ▪️The new multimodal search filter in GSC ▪️What I built this week - a new OKF based chatbot that uses my cloned voice, and several other really cool things. Newsletter is email only now so if you want to get this one sign up here:

The September Spam update is still rolling out, but it's interesting to see that many of the sites I monitor are seeing big improvements. My guess is that Google has demoted or removed competitors' pages that ranked because of spam tactics. Will likely do more investigation once the update has finished.

Ok that was surreal. Built a system that uses my cloned voice via Gemini 3.8 Flash live and brainstorms with me. Just spent the last hour walking and talking with myself. We came up with some good ideas!

1. Export the data for the new multimodal searches filter in GSC. 2. Give it to your LLM tool (I used Antigravity) and ask it to report to you which pages are getting the most impressions and clicks from multimodal searches. 3. Have the LLM tool visit the top urls and speculate on why they are getting searches from multimodal search. 4. Ask the LLM tool to create a dashboard with its findings so you and your client can use it for brainstorming. I did this for a client and it surfaced some interesting things. I asked Antigravity to make an anonymized version and it generated some fake products and observations so I could demonstrate my point. Really this is just the start. The next step is to look at the pages that are getting visits from multimodal search and brainstorm on what's special about these pages and whether you can take those ideas and use them to improve or create other pages.