Tech SEO Connect observations on the first 15 min- Much flannel. Durham is cold, I forgot about winter.

Going to #techseo conference. Connected MSP to Raleigh. Guys in front of me talking about GSC 👂👂

Clients are using AI to send requests to us in slack - one person just sent me an analysis that is definitely AI generated and also incredibly wrong. Help. Help me, please. 🫠

Easily the best event swag I’ve ever received - they had the mugs in the bag and someone there to engrave your name

Facebook posts from public groups are showing up in the Discussions & Forums SERP feature

I’m in a talk where someone is spending a bunch of time talking about LLMs.txt and how to use them?? …help lol #brightonseo

Here to get yelled at at 9:15AM 🤘🏼 @wilreynolds.bsky.social

It’s #brightonseo week - time to brush off BlueSky again 😅

Helping my friend build a website for her new physical therapy clinic and can’t believe I’m seeing some of the same stock photos I used for clients 10 years ago 😂 it’s like seeing old friends

Hot take: I spent 7 years using outlook for work, yearning for Gmail. Well now that I’m in Gmail I HATE IT. Why does it thread the email convos like that?? Why does the inbox send me into a panic?? Why can’t it tell when I want bullets?? Why is the default reply to a single PERSON & not REPLY ALL

Everyday I am reminded of how far we are from an agentic AI experience

GBP agency account tool is being deprecated per the Google rep I just chatted with… Is all their documentation still available? Yes. Are there any notices on the pages? No. Has the documentation been live for the last 3 months? Also yes. I’m so irritated rn 🫠

My new favorite thing in a pitch is navigating the conversation around all of the AI generated content I’ve found on their website. At this point I don’t even need the AI content checker.

In case you need a v last minute gift: 7 days of lunches - 7 gift cards to their favorite lunch spots, or lunch spots near their home/office!

ChatGPT 🤝 My Social Anxiety

The Polar Express movie feels like a fever dream.

A December core update eh?

I was on a thread/post hating on the avg position metric in GSC recently and I think I finally found a useful application in my ten years of SEO reporting 😅 Avg position is great for looking at one keyword for large multilocation businesses where they could rank differently in many markets.

Are gastropubs still a thing? Pretty gastropubs are the reason I’m eating truffle fries in a Dave & Buster’s right now.

Participated in both the turkey trot and turkey rot activities this week 🤗

I love the Prime Vision Next Gen Stats broadcast for football on Prime. I’d watch every game like this if I could tbh.

Overslept my first Turkey Trot 🥲 Ran an unofficial one by myself (along with everyone else on the Embarcadero). Now for cinnamon rolls.

“We can bake the apple pie tonight and eat a slice. We don’t have to wait until tomorrow, we have free will.”

did a little write up of my brightonSEO talk for my SERPology subscribers ! open.substack.com/pub/serpolog...

📣 jump links, rise up 📣

Seems like November Core Update is likely to roll into Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Kind of hard to separate the many queries impacted by SRA penalties. Feels kind of meh to me so far, but we'll see what the next week or so brings.

If you run miles on Thanksgiving, the calories you burn are doubled. This is scientific fact.

Roasted cranberries 🫡

having exactly (1) day out of the year where every amateur chef in America attempts to cook a giant bird and not fuck it up is, honestly, a wonderful and hilarious tradition

If you reached out to me last January with any cool initiatives and I did not seem interested or invested - ✨Q1 2025 is a new me✨ In other words, everything isn’t on fire in Q4 so new year should be more stable this time around. I’d love to chat or podcast or see the cool thing you’re doing!

Bought all of my Thanksgiving groceries today which means now I have no room in the fridge for food to eat prior to Thanksgiving.

Wrapped up my first full week back at half marathon training with a little over 8 miles on the week & 2 skipped strength workouts 😬 lol #runchat #slowrunner

People often ask me how to know for sure if an image was created by artificial intelligence. So I marked in the attached photo (in the red circles) some clues that make me suspect that it's a fabricated photo, although it's not possible to say with absolute certainty in this case.

On X I was only posting about SEO stuff, but lots of other arguably more interesting stuff going on my life is like to share here. Like my Sunday AM coffee & hot tub reads:

When @greggifford.bsky.social pulled Werewolf up in his pres at #brightonseo - what he didn’t get to talk about was their killer deal on mimosas by the bottle & how it’s the best cheap brunch in downtown. *AND* they have karaoke 🎤

I hadn’t asked ChatGPT about myself yet so I just did it for the first time and it was low key very validating 😂

The Friday before a holiday week is a ✨glorious✨ Friday

People are using ChatGPT to do a bunch of stuff you could just do with ScreamingFrog and the APIs they’ve got? And it’s more reliable? Also 📣 ScreamingFrog lets you crawl with ChatGPT in ScreamingFrog 📣 Crawl URL -> do prompt (You can also save your custom prompt extractions and share them 👀)

Just got an email saying a former client declined my call series invite. I haven’t worked with them since 2022.

My first meeting post #brightonseo was a sales pitch this AM for an ecommerce client. Me on the pitch:

Coincidence that Forbes was booted out of these results the day after @wilreynolds.bsky.social called them out in front of a crowd of thousands at the largest US search event? 🤔 arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...

“I’m a subject matter expert” The subject matter: ✨me✨

Little team at #brightonseo this year 🫶🏻 but saw 10 years of past coworkers. Still processing *how many* people I knew there from over the years. San Diego has such a tight circle of SEOs based here and it’s really cool to get to be a part of it.

Neil Patel’s site getting a collective ‘ugh’ from the #brightonseo crowd yesterday during @wilreynolds.bsky.social’s keynote was: 1. Brutal 2. 🐸☕️ 3. Top 3 moments from the conference for me

What being at the final happy hour of a 2 day conference feels like:

Something about a new social platform before too many people get here is so *refreshing*. Like the egos have left the room. And the link builders aren’t here to harass me yet 😅

In @randfish.bsky.social’s keynote talking about zero click marketing and had to go find when I sent this to my boss 4 months ago because it was on my mind 😂 In full agreement that zero click marketing is the right path for marketers. #brightonseo

Great keynote from @randfish.bsky.social I need a follow up talk on “how to tell your clients that traffic is a shitty KPI.” 😅

“LLMs are not taking traffic share at this point” All of the data that chatGPT shares about user growth/use is true, but we can’t assume that they’re all searchers or searches. In short - data needs context. @randfish.bsky.social #brightonseo