What do y'all think of Ahrefs acquiring Detailed (and bringing Glen Allsopp on board to help with the product? Honestly, I'm super happy for Glen, he works hard and puts out a lot of great work (and has, consistently, for like 15 years or however long). I'm genuinely excited to see what he brings to the Ahrefs tool. I don't mean this TOO derogatorily, but it'll be nice to have someone weighing in at Ahrefs that's an actual SEO that spent real time "doing the work" sometime within the last 5 years. Of course there's a lot of smart SEOs working @ Ahrefs, but how many of them are building sites that are NOT $100M+ brands (like Ahrefs is). SEO is easier when you're building a brand like that than when you're starting a site from scratch with barely any budget. So that's just a personal thing I'm excited about, and I am looking forward to seeing how the platform improves. ALSO: it's interesting to see Ahrefs stepping into the owned media space. Semrush has been killing it with their acquisitions, and Ahrefs has definitely been more focused on building their product (which is smart, it's really good) than acquiring sites... maybe this is the start of the battle of the SEO acquisitions--who knows. Curious what y'all think about this... Here is a post I wrote about this with more info if you're curious: https://ranks.com/editors-desk/ahrefs-acquires-detailed-com-acquihires-glen-allsopp/

Google hit us with a fresh spam update announcement. *Here's what matters:* The search giant rolled out its August 2025 spam update yesterday at 12:05 p.m., marking the first algorithm update since June and the first spam-focused update in eight months. Google's calling this a "normal spam update" that will take "a few weeks" to complete its rollout across all languages and locations. As usual, Google provided zero specifics about what type of spam they're targeting this time around, leaving everyone to play the guessing game of "is my traffic drop because of spam the spam update or just the continued death of organic reach due to AI?" *The big picture:* Eight months is a relatively long gap between spam updates for Google, which suggests they've either been busy fine-tuning something particularly nasty or they just remembered they have a spam problem to deal with. Either way, if you notice any ranking fluctuations over the next few weeks, you can add this update to your list of potential culprits. *What this means for you:* Keep an eye on your Search Console data and traffic patterns over the next few weeks. If you see significant drops, you might be dealing with the spam update rather than just normal SERP volatility. If you see any movement (in either direction) with your site, I'd love to hear about it, please share below.