SEO Depths
SEO Blog by Simone De Palma
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Pagination SEO Trends: Empirical Analysis and Insightful Patterns
Have you ever questioned Google’s best practices? If you’re a greyish-hatter SEO and you put on a poker face when dealing with clients, then I assume you’ve already been caught offside from the fairytale world of Google’s best practices. When it comes to pagination, Google’s documentation is fairly high-level and generic, aimed at providing stakeholders…
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Advanced AI Search Tracking: Mapping out ChatGPT Answers with Server Logs
Relying solely on search queries grounded in Search Console and Bing can highlight intent, but it may not fully capture broader patterns of engagement. To understand how AI systems access and display content, we need to look beyond queries and move closer to the infrastructure itself. Traditionally, log files have been difficult for SEO teams…
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Advanced SEO Tracking Framework for Zero-Click and AI Visibility
As AI platforms emerge as new traffic channels, search behaviour is more fluid and nuanced. Unlike traditional search engines, AI visibility is harder to measure as AI responses are generated in real time. Prompt tracking is often mentioned, but common guidance on attribution is scarce. The key point is that prompts are synthetic data projections…
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Backlink Semantic Analysis with Python: How to Evaluate Your Link Profile
Backlinks are foundational to SEO. They signal authority, relevance, and trust to search engines. Traditional backlink metrics like Domain Rating (DR) tell you how authoritative a linking site is, but they often miss how relevant those links are to your specific content. The Backlink Semantic Analysis project tackles this by combining authority metrics with semantic…
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What Server Logs Tell You About LLMS.TXT
Over the last few months, llms.txt has been positioned as the next must-have file for AI visibility. While Google and SEOs agree with testing llms.txt, the pending question is whether it affects crawler behaviour? Based on first-hand server log analysis across a very small site (~100 pages LOL) and a large travel site (100K+ URLs…
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Insights from My First Google Search Live in Zurich
Last week, I attended my first Google Search Central event in Zurich. Many conversations centred on the latest Search Console releases, discussions around the /llms.txt file, concerns around the looming Core Update (it happened, RIP) and broader predictions about where the industry is heading into the new year. In this post, I bring together the…
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Brighton SEO October 2025: Slides & Resources
Thanks for either attending my BrightonSEO talk, looking up the slides or showing a general interest in the intricacies of React meddling with techy side of SEO. Find the Slides… Here is a list of references and resource for you to go the extra mile. Client-side vs Server-side Routing in clips Server-side routing Client-side routing…
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SEO Test: How Google & LLMs Replace Missing Meta Descriptions
When a meta description doesn’t align with search intent, Google’s machine learning may generate a snippet from other content on the page, leading to Google rewriting meta descriptions—even up to 70% of the time. With a new layer of information retrieval powered by large language models (LLMs), I wondered where Google and LLMs would retrieve…
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SEO Test: Removing Meta Descriptions will Impact Clicks?
Although not a confirmed ranking factor, meta descriptions can influence search snippets and how AI search engines preview content. Back in 2024, I proposed a Python framework to analyse the similarity between meta descriptions and search queries in order to influence rankings. If you ask me today whether it’s worth the effort, the answer depends…
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How to Build a Workflow for AI Overview Tracking & SEO Reporting
We’ve all been starved of AI Overview and AI Mode references in our analytics. The elephant in the room is Google’s new information retrieval (IR) pipeline for LLM agents, marking the fall of the public “ten blue links” SERP in favour of a system reliant on external APIs to pull data from Google’s cached web…
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How to Automate a Robots.txt Competitor Analysis with Python and Advanced Data Viz
I’ve always found competitor analysis involving robots.txt files to be a bit of a headache because there’s not a heck of a tool out there that just makes the cut. But recently I was found responsible for carrying out a competitive analysis from a technical SEO standpoint and I couldn’t help but including a breakdown…
