SEO Rockstar “Proves” You Don’t Need Meta Descriptions
Tests show that removing meta descriptions may improve search engine traffic, although some say SEO tests are performative theater.
I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest research, patents and what’s happening in the search results.
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I recently presented at Pubcon Vegas in October and March 2024, and over the past 20 years have presented at search conferences across the United States: Pubcon, SMX, Affiliate Summit & SES (Search Engine Strategies) and have served as a Head Judge at the U.S. Search Awards .
Tests show that removing meta descriptions may improve search engine traffic, although some say SEO tests are performative theater.
A practical list of reliable WordPress plugins every website owner should consider, from SEO to caching, security, backups, and more.
LLM tools appear to be gaining maturity, though there are differing views on what should be tracked..
Google’s trust ranking patent suggests that user behavior can influence how search results are ranked.
Germany is pursuing a ban on DeepSeek due to alleged illegal transfers of user data to China.
Google’s multi-vector retrieval algorithm (MUVERA) speeds up search, is highly efficient and improves accuracy
Jill Whalen, who recently passed away, championed an ethical approach to SEO that continues to influence the industry.
Yoast fixed an AI-related bug that injected unintended HTML classes into content generated by its SEO Premium plugin.
Wix acquired Base44, an AI platform that enables users to build software using natural language prompts in a chat-based interface.
Yoast has added a one-click llms.txt feature designed to guide AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to important website content.
OpenAI quietly updated ChatGPT search to improve its ability to understand user queries and to answer increasingly complex questions.
Google AI Overviews is surfacing AI-generated search results for queries with recipe intent.
Google’s CEO addressed concerns about AI search replacing traditional web links in its ongoing evolution of Search
Google’s John Mueller showed how to diagnose a search visibility issue that was apparently triggered by a domain migration.
Google responds to a publisher’s concern about crawl budget and rankings due to Googlebot’s requests for non-existent pages
WordPress co-founder cautioned that the FAIR project’s distributed plugin and theme repositories could undermine WordPress.org’s ability to manage trust and reliability
A Google research paper confirms that a local search indexing system has been in use for over a year in Search and Maps
Google confirms that Recipe Rich Results and text search results select images using different criteria.
New data shows that AI search traffic overwhelmingly comes from desktop devices rather than mobile.
A respected SEO expert calls out marketers who overstate the complexity of Google’s AI search
New security platform announced by Patchstack enables plugin developers to maintain a proactive security approach against vulnerabilities
WordPress plans to support AI agents and publishers by exposing tools, content, and interactivity to external systems.
WordPress has released a plugin that achieves smooth transitions between pages without the tradeoffs of Single Page Applications
Google has published official guidance on how to recover a website that is incorrectly filtered by the SafeSearch filter
Microsoft Clarity announced a Node.js-based MCP Server that enables natural language querying of analytics via AI
Anthropic published the hidden system prompts underlying the Claude AI model, showing how to get the best responses from it.
Recent Google patent shows how five kinds of real-world context can influence AI-generated answers
Bluehost introduces managed WordPress hosting plans with AI-assisted tools that make launching online stores easier for entrepreneurs and content creators.
Two Google employees are helping lead WordPress’s new AI Team, which is focused on integrating AI through canonical plugins first
WordPress development has resumed after a four-month pause, following years of lagging behind market trends and technological innovation