SEO News
1 Oct 2026
September 2026 spam update: the longest spam rollout of 2026
Google's September 2026 spam update ran from 24 September to 8 October, lasting 13 days and 16 hours. It was more than five times the length…
What Google actually changed
Every confirmed update since 2003, the ranking machinery behind the results, and every claim graded by its evidence. Written by James Burfield.
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SEO News
23 Aug 2026
Google ran a spam update from 18 to 21 August
Confirmed on Google's own dashboard: 2 days and 16 hours, finishing 21 August. What spam updates actually enforce, and how to tell whether this one touched…
SEO News
17 Aug 2026
Google is putting agents inside Search
Information agents that run in the background around the clock. Announced in May, and nobody outside Google yet knows what they mean for publishers.
SEO News
17 Aug 2026
No, AI Mode hasn’t become Google’s default search experience
A claim doing the rounds since I/O says the ten blue links have been replaced as Google's primary surface. Google's own announcement says something narrower.
SEO News
17 Aug 2026
Seven weeks without a confirmed Google update
The last confirmed update finished on 26 June. The trackers have been busy since. Those two facts are less contradictory than they look.
Guides
17 Jul 2026
Internal linking: the ranking lever you fully control
External links need someone else’s permission. Internal links are yours: which pages get authority, which get found, and what Google’s told each page is about, all…
Guides
17 Jul 2026
Crawl budget: when it matters and when it’s a distraction
Crawl budget is real, documented and almost certainly irrelevant to your site. Google’s own guidance aims it at sites with over a million pages, or hundreds…
Guides
17 Jul 2026
AI Overviews and SEO: what the data shows so far
AI Overviews are the generated summaries that sit above results for a growing share of queries. They changed the economics of ranking: you can hold position…
Guides
17 Jul 2026
EEAT: what Google actually evaluates, and how to show it
EEAT is Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the framework Google’s quality raters use to judge whether a page deserves to be believed. It gets talked about…
Guides
17 Jul 2026
Core update recovery: an honest guide
Recovery advice is where SEO gets least honest, because the truth is unsellable: it’s slow, the work is unglamorous, and no one outside Google can promise…