Aleyda Solis covers three SEO stories: Patrick Stox and Ahrefs on whether links still matter for rankings, Sarah Tyer's guide to SEO forecasting with Google Sheets functions, and JetWhite's tips for optimizing content for AI search agents using robots.txt and LLMs.txt files.
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The top hottest SEO news from the latest edition of SEO FOMO are here. This is pretty much an SEO FOMO Too Long; Did You Read? Going through the 3 most popular stories from the last edition, brought to you by Similarweb, who's our today's sponsor. Let's go through them. The first one is this very comprehensive research from Patrick Stox from Ahrefs, pretty much assessing if links actually matter less or not, validating what Google had mentioned recently, saying that links are less important than they used to be. In the analysis, he went through a million SERPs to check if that is true or not. And in this guide, he explained the methodology that he followed and shares the conclusions, which pretty much end up confirming that yes, links matter less in certain circumstances and more in others. So as usual in SEO, it depends. In the scenarios in which he found that links actually matter more are to rank for higher search volume queries. And he explains the possible explanations like these queries are likely more competitive and these They just get more exposure due to higher search volume. So of course they will end up getting more links. So it's a little bit of like a chicken and egg situation. He also found that brands get more links as well, that links correlate to ranking slightly less than they used to before because he has historical data too. It's a very worthy analysis to go through. He also covers more specific use cases like local queries, and he found that links matter more. In this particular scenario, as well as for informational content. It features a wealth of data that understandably has attracted a lot of the interest in the last edition of SEO FOMO, and I highly, highly advise you to go through it. The next most popular resource is the guide about SEO forecasting with Google Sheets functions, going through different methodologies by Sarah Tyer. She starts by explaining why SEO forecasting is so, so important, a must, I will say, especially to get buy-in at the beginning, going through different scenarios. An alternative of outcomes depending on the resources and flexibilities and pretty much the context that we expect to end up having in our SEO day-to-day. And in this guide, she explained the FORECAST function, how it works. She provides very easy-to-follow examples with screenshots, exponential smoothing for FORECAST too, explaining how it works and for which particular circumstances this is also useful. And finally, she goes through the simple moving average method, explaining it with examples, showing how to use the functions within Google Sheets. So it's definitely a very, very useful resource that I will be actually adding in the Learning SEO's SEO forecasting section that I highly recommend you to take a look at in case you want to have access to more SEO forecasting guides and resources that you can start using right away. And last but not least, we have the AI optimization, how to optimize your content for AI search and agents by JetWhite that has attracted so much attention because there's not much out there. Documenting yet the best practices and what else should we be doing to optimize for AI search engines and LLMs besides of what we already do for traditional search results. And pretty much he starts like that, explaining the differences and how speed and simplicity here are critical. And rather than blocking completely, it is important to differentiate AI training versus AI search access, for which he provides recommendations of how to configure your robots.txt for AI crawlers. It also took my attention the recommendation of creating an LLMs.txt file that is also explained here in the link that he shared. That is pretty much an additional file that can coexist with the robots.txt and a sitemap, and it's a little bit like a higher-level sitemap that goes through and lists the most important pages of our site with a title for each that can highly facilitate LLMs to collect the top information of our website. And finally, He explained something that we also mentioned in a previous edition, how only Google's Gemini and Applebot currently renders JavaScript among major AI crawlers. So this is something that we definitely need to take into account, especially if we overuse client-side rendered JavaScript on our site for critical links and information. I highly recommend you to go through it to start taking some of these recommendations into account in your SEO audits and your recommendations to make sure to establish proper protocols and guidance for your clients or your own websites to ensure that they are visible, although you might not necessarily make your content available for AI training, for example. Speaking of AI and LLMs, last week I launched the new sister newsletter of SEO FOMO that is called AI Marketers, which is pretty much a newsletter that goes through the latest AI marketing news in a similar fashion of what I do with SEO FOMO going through the latest search news in general. As you can see, I go through the news, also the top resources and guides, AI tools and automations of the week that can be useful for marketers to keep you updated with all of those AI news that are in particular relevant and impactful for marketers. Go and check it out. Finally, I want to thank again Similarweb that was our today's sponsor. As you can see, Similarweb is a tool that I actually use and I love because it helps me a lot with analysis. I can better understand the evolution over time of zero-click searches and the or composition, allowing me to assess more accurately which queries should I go for. So go and take a look at similarweb.com in case you haven't yet done it. So, and these were the top stories of the week. If you want to stay updated through the week, go and take a look at SEO FOMO News that you can see here. It would allow you not only to see the latest stories in SEO in real time, pretty much, but also to vote for the ones that you like the most, that you consider more interesting, and comment on them. Go and check it out. Thanks again for watching. And until the next edition of the hottest SEO news from SEO FOMO.
