Aleyda Solis breaks down the week's top SEO stories: Google's new ranking systems like DeepRank and Rank Embed, how AI Overviews are counted in Search Console, and why users aren't abandoning Google for LLMs. Richard Baxter shows how to connect Search Console data to Claude for analysis.
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Here I come with the top SEO news of the week with today's SEO FOMO to Learn, Leading Read, going through the most popular articles in the latest edition of SEO FOMO. Thank you SimilarWeb for sponsoring this week's edition. This week's most popular article was the coverage by Danny Goodwin about the new DOG exhibits reveals that provide additional insights into how Google Search ranks content. These exhibits include interviews with 2 key Google engineers, Ben Greeniak and Hye Kim. Which offers insights into Google ranking signals and systems. So we have the clarification that Navput is not a machine learning system, that Google Search evolved to incorporate machine learning starting with RankBrain that was announced in 2016, then later DeepRank and Rank Embed, and that Google avoids simply predicting clicks because they're easily manipulated and don't reliably measure user experience. How Rank Embed is a key signal that embeds queries and documents into an embedding space considering semantic properties and other signals. That is extremely fast and excels at common queries but struggles with less frequent or specific long-tail ones. It also disclosed how Google is rethinking their search stack from the ground up with LLMs taking a bigger role. If you want to take a deeper look at what was disclosed as well as the exhibits themselves, they are linked from the article too. The second most clicked article is the clarification from Google about AI overviews link shares a single position in the Google Search Console that was covered By Matt Southern. This comes from a question by Gianluca, who asked John about how Search Console tracks position data for URLs in Google AI Overviews. John answers saying that basically an AI Overview counts as a block, so it's all in one position. It can be first if the block is shown first. So this indicates that every website link in an AI Overview receives the same position value in the Search Console reports, independently of the order that it is included within the AI overview. And if you're interested about the evolution of AI search, I highly recommend you to take a look at my latest article covering the presentation that I did about this topic last week at Hive NCR, going through the impact of AI traffic to the top sites, the overlap of traffic between Google and major LLMs are users actually ditching Google to start searching with LLMs only? The answer is no. And much more. What can we expect in the future and understanding better how we can optimize for LLMs and AI overviews with resources, insights, and tools. And last but not least, I would like to highlight this guide by Richard Baxter sharing how to set up Cloud Desktop with Google Search Console MCP in order for you to check with your Google Search Console data. So Richard goes through the steps to install it on your own computer and configure it to use Cloud Desktop to chat with your Google Search Console data. This is definitely something fun that you should check out. Finally, I want to thank our today's sponsor, Similarweb, that is one of my go-to tools in order to better understand the shifts of users' clicks behavior. In SERPs, not only for specific terms, but for a group of queries that I can analyze, making it super easy for me to better understand how search behavior is changing. If you haven't taken a look at it yet, go and check it out. Remember to not miss out by staying up to date through the week with the SEO for More News website. It's a news community where everybody can submit, vote, and comment on the latest news in SEO without waiting for the next edition of the SEO FOMO Newsletter. Thank you very much for watching and remember to subscribe to the channel to not miss out on the next edition too. Bye-bye.
