Aleyda Solis breaks down the week's SEO news: Shane Dutka analyzed winners and losers from Google's March core update, Martin Splitt flagged JavaScript SEO mistakes, and Danny Sullivan clarified Google doesn't use a direct brand ranking signal. Solis also compares SEO with GEO (generated engine optimization).
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The top news and stories from the last week featured in SEO FOMO. Pretty much your SEO FOMO too long didn't read. Let's go through them. Number 1 story of the week has been this insightful analysis from Shane Dutka going through the winners and losers from the March 2025 core update. I love this analysis because he shares some insightful key takeaways from the patterns he noticed. For example, Brands with robots and diversified SEO strategies winning big. Surprise, surprise. And those that have bad SEO still winning in spite of themselves because of being established brands. How most affiliates ended up losing as brands increase and big affiliates like Forbes or CNET push out smaller ones. It's interesting to see that Shane also identified that AI overviews grew a lot during the core update, which is not the first time that we see this being covered, going from 3.61% to 13.92% visibility across all keywords. So if you want to go through top websites across different verticals and insightful patterns from the latest core updates, take a look at Shane Pease. It's a really, really good analysis. The second most clicked story is the coverage from Matt Southern from Martin Splitt's JavaScript SEO mistakes and fixes that he shared during the SEO for Paws online event last week. The first one being that a lot of people are still looking at the raw HTML view source rather than the rendered one. The second one, leaving error pages with a 200 OK HTTP status. The third one, requesting geolocation. So go and take a look at this piece because it provides actionable advice in order to fix and troubleshoot these JavaScript SEO issues. The other most clicked resource was my comparison of SEO versus GEO, generated engine optimization, which is one of the names that people are calling to optimize for AI search. And what I wanted to showcase here is the overlap between the criteria, the areas of optimizations, and the KPIs when optimizing for traditional versus AI search or LLMs. I created this infographic summarizing it all, where we can see how beyond some specific differences between areas, just because of the nature and the interface, at a high level, they pretty much focus on the same. And the real difference comes in the user search behavior and how because of this, we might want to optimize certain things for LLMs, which might not necessarily going to be our goal for traditional search engines. You can also see this comparison as tables here, better explained in the article itself with a tool I did read and more sources for you to take a look at. So if you're wondering about what you can do to start optimizing for AI search platforms because there's so much buzz going on, this is the resource for you to double-check. Finally, the other most clicked story was the coverage from Barry Schwartz of a clarification of Danny Sullivan saying that they don't have a brand ranking system, how he didn't say that they measure a brand and then directly use that as a ranking signal in Google. He clarifies it's not about Google favoring big brands, but about users recognizing and remembering a site. I shared my thoughts in LinkedIn about it. Does this mean that you shouldn't look to build your brand authority and awareness in search even if Google doesn't have a direct ranking factor. No, I actually share how we should stop focusing on what has been confirmed or not to be a direct ranking factor, because if it is something that is going to be good for the user and will enhance the search customer experience and will make your website or client websites to sell more through search and is within your capacity to optimize, you should definitely look to do it is the type of content that Google will try to surface, whether with a direct ranking factor or not, is something that will actually end up benefiting the business through search too. So as I mentioned here, we should start focusing instead on what your search user customer wants from your online business presence and website and stop focusing on what Google confirmed as a ranking factor and obsess over it. If there was something that we learned from the Google doc leaks last year, would have been probably this. If you are looking to grow your brand visibility and recognition in search, go and take a look at the presentation I did a few weeks ago in Sydney, where I provide actionable advice to do it so. Remember that if you want to keep up with the latest SEO news in real time, you can go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News, where you can also submit your own resources and guides. That I will consider for the next edition of the SEO FOMO Newsletter. And if you haven't yet subscribed to the SEO FOMO Newsletter, what are you waiting for? Until the next edition, bye-bye.
