Confessions of an SEO®

When a site "gets in trouble with Google", they have a way of dealing with it. They stop crawling it. And to get "The Scheduler" of the crawling system to get that domain back in the crawl queue - you can't buy it off with a bribe - like traffic or click throughs. The crawl scheduler has been completely decoupled from the behavioral layer. Find out how I got my HC hit test...

The industry narrative is so clean, so emotionally satisfying: 'Look! HouseFresh is back on Page 1! Google is finally getting it right again! Real editorial merit and original testing actually win in the end!' Today, we are going to dissect the ultimate accidental 'heist' of Google's crawl scheduler, why the AI 'knows first' while Googlebot is the last to get the memo,...

Are SEO gurus leading your brand straight into a computational trap? In this episode, Carolyn Holzman explores 'The GEO Paradox' to reveal why mass-automated content triggers permanent AI exclusion. Mentioned in the show: VizzEx - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vizzex.ai/vizzex-pro/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ This week a little more about the newest VizzEx tool - Symmetry Gate™ Check Tool. You can find it at:...

When an organic traffic graph plummets off a vertical cliff, the search industry always rushes to the same soft, narrative-driven explanations. They blame "quality updates," "AI content penalties," or the vague concept of "Intent Satisfaction Metrics." But a near-instantaneous 95% collapse in both clicks and impressions is not a soft user-behavior signal. It is a cold...

OK - We're going to get down on the discussion about the LLMs.txt files and WHY I do not use them or recommend to use them. I've got 4 technical reasons why. Plus I spend a little time on the AI Visibility Mastery 12-month course. We are committed to the success of our members. You'll have direct access to both Kim Albee and Carolyn Holzman (me) in the first 2 months on a weekly basis...

You're not sure what AI wants - you optimize - do all the right SEO things and you can't get anywhere. There's a reason and its not what you think. Michael King's article on Agentic rag is an excellent write up on what happens when AI models need to work really hard to figure out if it can trust what your content says. The goal is that when the AI is guessing your content is its be...

The excitement is building for the outcome from this Core Update that started on May 21, 2026. And the data of the site performance in logs tells me everything I need to know. This week a little more about the newest VizzEx tool - Symmetry Gate™ Check Tool. You can find it at: https://symmetrygate.ai Last week's episode: ⁠https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/passing-the-symmetry-gate-for...

Get ready because you're going to hear about things AND hear things that you probably never suspected or expected. Before you can know what temporary AI citations you come up for - you need to know if your content is eligible. Basic idea and now we have the first tool that can provide you with more than bells and whistles - and without any cost to you. VizzEx's latest tool is a Symmetry Ga...

This week I hope you catch my drift that we need to stop optimizing for 'strings' and start anchoring for 'entities.' If you’re still bolding keywords to get clicks, you’re playing a game that ended in 2024. In less than 15 minutes, I’m breaking down the Great Technical Divorce between legacy SEO and AI Induction, and showing you there is a path to not settle for the temporary impermanent citation...

Well, get ready for some high level digital marketing blasphemy. You heard me right the first. We do need to write for the Machine First because if we don't, the People won't be able to find us. Last week's episode: https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/helpful-content-is-a-math-problem-not-a-moral-one-season-6-ep-17/ Mentioned in the show: ⁠ VizzEx - https://vizzex.ai/products/ S...

This week is another cautionary tale because most of us don't have a 300 Million in ARR like ClickUp. https://vizzex.ai/the-clickup-seo-autopsy/ Last week's episode: https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/the-1-club-achieving-gemini-induction-in-the-age-of-compute-tax/ Mentioned in the show: https://contentlevers.xyz/blog/clickup-blog-traffic-drop VizzEx - Subscribe to Confessions of a...

This week I share about my testing VizzEx to see if it can recovery a site that was hit in the February 2026 spam update. But its actually a victim of the Compute Tax within the "information supply chain". I even get into predicting when the next Core Update will occur and how if we plan it right and get our sites quiet - then we may find we can get into the Gemini Knowledge Stage. Last...

This week we're going to have that conversation - The Compute Tax imposed on your content by Gemini. Its not what you would think! Last week's episode: https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/parsing-the-parsing-of-html-response-to-sotr-105-season-6-ep-14/ Mentioned in the show: https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/the-next-evolution-of-indexing-season-6-episode-13/ Subscribe to C...

This week's episode is in response to a Search Off The Record, Episode #105. In it, Martin and Gary unpack how HTML parsing really works, why the HTML standard is so lenient and then...the wheels came off the wagon for me! I consider this a friendly rebuttal to their claim that BECAUSE the html standard is so forgiving - nothing says that you can't make all the headers H1s on your article....

This week's episode is basically with AI environments and search overlapping, we're now at a point where we need to go BEYOND indexation INTO Induction. Our content needs to rise above the consensus and showcase a Unique Indentification Signal. And no place better than Confessions of An SEO and no person more able to introduce you to the process of of Induction than Carolyn Holzman. This m...

If AI don't find a coherent site in the top 100 results, we're getting "average" answers. In this week's episode, I share a deep dive into AI's Autonomous Discovery Cycle . Its a wave we want to ride. Its not a hack, its how to be a signal architect. Last week's episode: https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/ip-laundering-how-google-built-an-answer-monopoly-by-se...

I know its not new news that Google isn't providing sources for their AI Search answers but that doesn't mean we should gloss over it. The European Publishers Council has filed a complaint says Google takes our private Intellectual Property also known as our expert insights and runs it through Gemini to make it appear to be "public" knowledge aka Google's answer claiming that...

Got a question this week about how much of the success we're getting is the result of only on page SEO or backlinks. I got a lot clearer as the week progressed at to why I think the absolute best way to get backlinks is from yourself and build your own domain quality. This episode - ⁠ Last week's episode ⁠https://www.confessionsofanseo.com/podcast/is-google-cracking-down-on-ai-content-seas...

Over the past month, our industry has coalesced around a convenient explanation for the February visibility declines: Google is finally cracking down on AI generated content. I spent the last 2 weeks retracing the steps of the article datasets which first surfaced the huge decline in visibility for some of the biggest names in our industry. Building on the topic from last week - Here's link to...

This week is more about the news that slid under the radar for most, but I caught them and now it looks like everything we wondered about in 2022 when Google killed the URL parameter tool has come home to roost. I bring the receipts to demonstrate that the Canonical code is more like guidelines than rules. This episode - Last week's episode ⁠Last week’s episode: https://www.confessionsofanseo....

Googlebot’s new 2 MB crawl cap is the headline, but the real drama is how long the bot actually sticks around on your page before it bails. In this episode of Confessions of an SEO, Carolyn pulls back the curtain on Google’s quiet 2 MB limit update, then pivots to the under‑discussed bottleneck. If your best stuff is hiding behind slow scripts, bloated hosting, or “it’ll load eventually” JavaScrip...

Wow I had fun with this one! Total shout out to Lily Ray for providing the germ of not JUST this week's topic but the idea of a friendly stress-test test of the conclusion of the suggested toxicity of the listicle format when used in a self-serving, templated kind of way. Plus we have clear signal from last week's episode test where I wondered if I could rehabilitate my "Crawled, not...

This week's episode is likely one of the most actionable solutions to a perennial problem - Crawled Not Indexed page status in Search Console. Based on the indexation research a content threshold for getting indexed was discovered. This episode is where I explore a page that went from Indexed to Crawled Not Indexed to Unknown to Google and back to Crawled Not Indexed. The test hypothesis is th...

So yeah, people ACT like all the AI LLMs are going to RANK their site. But that isn't what they do when they make recommendations in overlays and responses. This came from a post on LinkedIn - lots of meat on the bone but this phrase stuck out - "LLMs don't rank websites. They synthesize trust." So how exactly do they do that? In this week's episode even though I mention 4 ar...

The rule of 7 also reinforces the concept of having to repeat new information, we can't just get it in one delivery like last week's episode. So in today's I share an almost over-the-shoulder on what chunking actually is from an operational standpoint and an example of what MIGHT happen if you adopt it. Results may vary. But its a sure fire way to get your content INTO the index and in...