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SEOFOMO: The Newsletter to Keep up with SEO

🧠 Your SEO Updates, with SEOFOMO [Feb 9, 2025]


February 9, 2025
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Subscribe and join +36.4K SEOs and Marketers

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πŸ”₯ ​Most Popular SEOFOMO News Stories & Contributors Of The Week

Check out the top trending stories this week on SEOFOMO News -these are the most upvoted entries, whether SEO news, guides, or resources-, that people upvoted the most:
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​No 1. Generate llms.txt [6 Votes]​
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WordLift / SEO Tools / Submitted by Aleyda Solis ​
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Provide information and guidance about your website to large language models, by creating your llms.text file.

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​No 2. Audience Research: The Complete Guide for Marketers in 2025 – SparkToro [5 votes]​
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Amanda Natividad / General SEO / Submitted by Gianluca Fiorelli​
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Amanda walks you through audience research. What it is, why it’s critical, the difference between audience research and market research, and more.

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​No 3. β€œJust give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews [5 Votes]​
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Kyle Orland / AI Search / Submitted by Preeti Gupta​
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The latest trick to stop AI answers is also the most cathartic. If you ask Google how to turn off "f***ing Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

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πŸ—žοΈ Search Updates and News from Search Engines

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​New Google documentation on using Search Console and Google Analytics data for SEO​
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Google Search Central / Google Search Guidelines​
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Google explains the differences, similarities, and opportunities coming from Search Console and Google Analytics.

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​Generative AI Mentions In Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines​
​Barry Schwartz​
Google updated its Search Quality Raters guidelines with 11 new pages a couple of weeks ago. But with that, Google also added the term "generative AI" to the quality raters guidelines for the first time, and it is listed 14 times.

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​Google AI Overviews now with detailed shopping comparisons​
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Barry Schwartz / Google Search Updates​
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Google Search is now offering detailed comparison for product queries in AI Overviews. Google will first give you a summary answer, which you can then expand, and will provide a long and detailed breakdown comparison between the two products.

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​Google starts testing new Search β€˜AI Mode’ internally – Here’s an early look at it​
​Abner Li / Google Product Updates​
Google Search is working on a new β€œAI Mode” that offers a β€œpersistent place” to ask more β€œopen-ended/exploratory questions” and get generated AI Overview-style responses. Google has begun testing this experience with employees.

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​Google: Don't Update Lastmod Date With Copyright Date Changes​
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Barry Schwartz / Google Search Q&A​
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Gary said, don't do it, it is not enough of a change to the page's content to warrant a lastmod date update.

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​Google’s Advice on Fixing Unwanted Indexed URLs​
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Roger Montti / Google Search Q&A​
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John Mueller offered advice on what to do when Google indexes duplicate URLs with query parameters.

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​Google's Gary Illyes: Focus On Originality In 2025​
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Barry Schwartz / Google Search Q&A​
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Gary Illyes reportedly said that it is important for us to focus on originality in the coming year. "Originality is something we're going to be focusing on this year. That's going to be important," he said.

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​​Monitor the latest SEO News, Updates, and Conversations in Real Time in SEOFOMO News

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πŸ‘Œ This week's SEO Awesomeness

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​Google AIO Impact - SEO & PPC CTRs at an all-time low​
​Tracy McDonald​
AI Overviews impact search CTRs differently, based on query type and AIO presence. β€œQueries with AIOs had lower CTR from the start, likely due to Zero-Click searches”.

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​Death Of The Keyword: Why Aggregate Organic Traffic Is A Better Metric​
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Kevin Indig / General SEO ​
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Kevin explains why focusing on single keywords hasn’t made sense in a while and instead of focusing on keywords, we should focus on organic traffic aggregated on the page or domain level.

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​E-E-A-T Checklist: What’s Your Authority Look Like?​
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Level343 / Content Optimization​
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E-E-A-T, while not a ranking factor, can be used to optimize for strong credibility signals that boost engagement and search visibility. Use this checklist to decide where you should put your credibility-building efforts.

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​Technical SEO for Paid Search: 7 Tech SEO Issues and How to Fix Them​
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Oleksandra Lazarchuk / Technical SEO​
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Learn about the benefits of tech SEO for paid search campaigns, common issues that impact PPC performance, and the role of tech SEO in organic and paid search. Oleksandra goes through the 7 key tech SEO issues that hurt paid search campaigns and how to fix them.

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​YouTube Content Strategy: Making Sense of SEO Impact and Cross-Platform Brand Awareness​
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Ana de la Cruz / Video SEO​
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Ana shares how to develop a YouTube content strategy that has also an SEO impact with cross-platform brand awareness in this actionable guide.

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​Using @id in Schema.org Markup for SEO & Knowledge Graphs​
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Tyler Einberger / Technical SEO​
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Tyler goes through how to use @id effectively, its fundamental role in Schema.org, and best practices for using it in this comprehensive guide.

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​How to Decide Between One Domain or Many for SEO β€” Whiteboard Friday [Video]​
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Peter Richman / Technical SEO​
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Join Peter as he tackles a common marketing dilemma: should you maintain multiple domains or consolidate them? Learn the key factors affecting this decision, including SEO impact, resource management, and audience targeting.

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​​Monitor the latest SEO News, Updates, and Conversations in Real Time in SEOFOMO News

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πŸ›  Free(mium) SEO Tools

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​Rapid301: Create 301-redirects in seconds​
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Rapid301​
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Enter URLs or upload sitemaps and get .csv and .htaccess files in seconds.

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​Same Weekday - A GSC Chrome Extension​
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Dave Smart​
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Highlight a date, right-click and select to get the same weekday dates 3, 6 or 12 months in the past or future. Helpful for calculating dates for doing like for like comparisons, especially in analytics reporting web apps.

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Are you looking for more SEO Tools? Take a look at the SEOFOMO SEO Toolbox​

πŸŽ™οΈ Upcoming SEO Events

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​SearchIRL - SEO Meetup​
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Gus Pelogia / Dublin, Ireland / Free / March 27, 2025​
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The very first SearchIRL meetup is coming up to Dublin. Join an evening of networking, free pizza, and a lot of search engine optimization talks.

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​SEO Vibes Summit​
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WhitePress / Zakopane, Poland / +399 Euros / May 27-31, 2025​
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One of a kind all-inclusive conference, with 3 thematic tracks digital marketing, business, SEO & AI, +30 speakers, moderators, and instructors, up to 4 days of conference accommodation, meals, and education. Register now!

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​Apply to Speak at SMX Advanced in Boston​
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SMX Advanced / Boston, USA / June 11-13, 2025​
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Be a part of SMX Advanced’s exciting return to in-person this June at the Westin Boston Seaport. Here’s how to submit a session proposal.

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​See All SEO Events in the SEOFOMO Events Section​

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πŸ€– More about AI in Marketing

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​ChatGPT Search is Open for All; Google Expands Gemini 2.0 & Microsoft Think Deeper in Copilot​
​Barry Schwartz​
OpenAI announced big news that its ChatGPT Search service is now open and no longer requires a login or an account. It comes on the same day that Google expanded access to Gemini 2.0 to all users and when Microsoft said Think Deeper in Copilot is free for all users.

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​Investigating ChatGPT Search: Insights from 80 Million Clickstream Records​
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Brenna Kelly / Search Trends​
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Discover how ChatGPT is reshaping search habits and web traffic based on 80M user interactions. β€œ54% of ChatGPT queries were handled with SearchGPT turned off, while 46% utilized the web search feature”.

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​Ziff Davis's Study Reveals That LLMs Favor High DA Websites​
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Chima Mmeje / Search Trends​
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Chima goes through the key findings from a Ziff Davis study on LLM training data and how it can help you improve your efforts to rank for generative search features.

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​Blogging for AI: Creating Content for LLMs and Modern Search​
​Sara Taher​
β€œBlogging today requires a different mindset. Instead of just writing, think of it as having a conversation about the topicβ€”go deep and get specific. Targeting low-search-volume keywords with conversational-style content is the key”.

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​See More AI in Marketing News from The Latest Week in The New AI Marketers Newsletter​

πŸ₯ Other Digital Marketing News

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​Instagram and TikTok outrank Google for Gen Z shoppers: Survey​
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Danny Goodwin​
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Although younger searchers prefer social platforms, Google is still king among millennials, Gen X, and boomers.

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​How to Use Reddit to Bring More Leads to Your Local Business​
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Celeste Gonzalez​
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Provide value in local and industry-specific subreddits, use it for social listening and research, and host AMAs. Celeste goes through how to use Reddit to bring more leads to your local business.

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​Google Ads Update: Misleading Landing Pages Now Demoted​
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Matt G. Southern​
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Google’s new ads rules demote confusing landing pages and reward those aligned with user intent.

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​See More PPC, Social, Influencer & Content Marketing News in MarketingFOMO​

πŸ† SEOFOMOer Of The Week

This week's SEOFOMOer to follow is Geoff Kennedy, independent SEO & Digital Marketing Consultant, with +15 years of experience in search marketing, former Head Of Marketing at Sitebulb, SEO Consultant at Yard, and Search Marketing Technical Lead at VisitScotland.

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Geoff is also a frequent SEO speaker and writer, having spoken at events like BrightonSEO and the SEOFOMO Meetup, as well as being a frequent contributor of publications and podcasts with technical SEO topics, such as: "How to Organize a Site Audit for SEO", "A Practical Introduction to Structured Data for SEO", "Do you really need tools to do SEO?", "Unpacking SEO Audits with Geoff Kennedy", among others.

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Follow Geoff on LinkedIn now, and read more about him in his site.


Thanks for reading, until next week!

Aleyda Solis​
SEO Consultant & Founder
Orainti, SEOFOMO, MarketingFOMO & AI Marketers
​Follow me on ​X​ / Bluesky / ​YouTube​ / ​LinkedIn​ / ​Website​

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