It's true. A subdomain (maps in maps.google.com) is treated like a competely different site. /maps is a subsection of google.com though, instead of a different site.

Then you're building authority and SEO equity all in one place (google.com) instead of multiple different sites (subdomains)

Also, for most companies, you're about page will be the second most visited page, second only to the homepage. And, when it's not the landing page, it's often the most frequent next page in a session.

Don't undervalue an about page 🙏

Anecdotally, adding an about page and contact form have had immediate impacts in a few instances.

It might not be in the documentation but if ever there was a measureable EEAT signal, having an about or contact page is it.

Articles can be both! They just normally aren't... The SEO industry has a creativity problem :(

Sure, that's true. The algorithm decides what's 'quality' and what isn't. Ultimately, SEOs have no say in that. They follow whatever tactics get them to the top of the search result based on what they know of how the algorithm works, that's what optimizing is.

Why guides? It would have been easier to pull a 'gamerant' and turn reddit posts into clickbait fodder for Google Discover and still call themselves 'news'

Suspicious decision making indeed 🤔

Of course, that quote is directly preceded with this:

"Google Search will almost certainly look more like SGE over time. It will increasingly trade links for answers"

I'm baffled by how excited people are to abandon critical thinking to be spoonfed answers generated by an algorithm

This is the thing. I've seen a LOT of hate for SEO here but it feels misplaced. Google owns the algorithm and the poor quality search results are due to the algorithm 'rewarding' poor quality pages.

AI results aren't necessarily the answer - AI interpreted intent could be though

Yep, classic US. I believe most of their revenue comes from delivering spam mail. 99% of what I get is absolute garbage and I can't make the USPS stop 😭

More and more, email is little different than your real mailbox. I could confidently toss all my mail into the garbage on my way in from the mailbox except once every six months I get a letter that's actually important so I can't.

That's what email is becoming

I have a suspicion party of the GA4 move was to clear their servers of a decade of abandoned blogs on GA4 (among other reasons)

The last few updates have been brutal. Hang in there, this one is supposed to take a month to roll out so we don't know where this one will land yet

Thanks! Had a client getting a bunch of traffic from here and he told me it was Jack Dorsey's new project so I thought I'd check it out 😊 i joined when they opened up to the rabble

Yeah, there are a lot of SEOs out there that make it so i understand where our reputation comes from but I'm seeing it used as more of a catch-all for 'bad content experience on the internet' and theres plenty of blame to go around for that right now

Been browsing mastodon (and bluesky) a lot lately - there is a LOT of hate for SEO here and not many other voices in the topic

Shout out to the Authors @bwaber.bsky.social and Nathanael Fast