On April 18-19, 2024, took place SERP Conf. Sofia 2024, at National Palace of Culture, Sofia, Bulgaria, a conference on SEO, e-commerce, and AI.
The conference was in English. It is available as pay-per-view on SERP Flix | On-Demand SEO & Digital Marketing Lectures.
More conferences – SERP Conf. website.
Below are my notes.
Full list of follow-ups:
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. – Eastern Europe Conference (Inter Expo Center, Sofia, 2025.03.25) – Lumea SEO PPC
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. 2024 (Vienna, Austria, 2024.10.30) – Lumea SEO PPC
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. Sofia 2024 (2024, 18 & 19 April, Sofia – Bulgaria) – Lumea SEO PPC
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. 2023 (Sofia, Bulgaria – October 12, 2023) – Lumea SEO PPC
- Follow-up: SERP Light Conf. 2021 (online – 2021.10.20) – Lumea SEO PPC
Going over the Edge – Jono Alderson
Jono Alderson – Independent technical SEO consultant.
Going Over The Edge With Cloudflare | Jono Alderson | HIVEMCR 24 – Whitworth
Our websites today are complicated, interconnected things. (Google Analytics tracking; Facebook conversion pixels; a form gets sent into a lead-generation system, then it gets into SalesForce; all of these systems interact with each other and are interoperable)
In recent years, we have seen the evolution of the technical layer.
We generally manage the connection between apps in external applications.
We start to see the next generation of the web – the idea of the „edge”.
Disclaimer – I’m a Cloudflare nerd.
Any interaction you have with a website can be summed up like this: Request (to a website) -> Origin (it gets here) -> Response (which you receive).
Another option: send data back and forth to another system (Edge). So Requests go to Edge, Origin is connected to Edge, the Response goes to Edge.
Even cooler, you can sync Edge with an API. API – Wikipedia
Some of the most important businesses have started building websites in a different way than we do today.
Super Page Cache – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
Capo.js: A five minute web performance boost – Frontend Masters Blog
Capo: get your ﹤𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍﹥ in order – Chrome Web Store
Applied Energistics Ltd
WordPress Playground
How to put images online:
GitHub – jonoalderson/edge-images: Automatically convert markup to use optimized markup & an edge transformation service.
s1mple CS2 Settings, Crosshair & Config – ProSettings.net
How to setup robots.txt for Cloudflare:
Cloudflare + AI
Matt Silverlock 🐀 on X: „Python Workers querying a @cloudflare D1 database: just works! Still lots to build here around to make more of the Python ecosystem work, but you can deploy this *today*. https://t.co/uA3VK43IHj” / X
What I learned from auditing over 1,000,000 websites – Patrick Stox
Patrick Stox – Raleigh based Technical SEO, Author, Speaker
What I learned from auditing over 1,000,000 websites – SERP Conf 2024 Patrick Stox | PPT
Hreflang Study and Interesting Issues – Brighton SEO 2023 Patrick Stox – Speaker Deck
Site Audit Study – Big List Of Issues – Google Sheets
Broken pages are extremely common on websites.
Redirect-Matching.ipynb – Colab
Upgrade Insecure Requests via .htaccess or meta tag to prevent mixed content · GitHub
title-similarity-site-audit.ipynb – Colab
Lily Ray 😏 on X: „Google’s crawling process is highly focused on removing duplication because 60% of the internet is duplicate 🤯 @methode #seodaydk https://t.co/OJ9OkP74DU” / X
Home | IndexNow.org
Technical SEO – Panel Discussion
Patrick Stox: The problem of issues with indexation could be the biggest problem.
Jono Alderson – You should look at things and try to fix a lot of things; prioritize, but don’t stop you’re OK.
Jono Alderson: If you don’t put the effort into making a page shine, why would Google care? Make your pages stand out! Be better than what is already there on the web.
Top 9 Log Analysis Tools – Spectral
Log Explorer · Cloudflare Log Explorer docs
How to Use Knowledge Graphs to Boost Your AI-Content and SEO Strategy – Dixon Jones
Neural network (machine learning) – Wikipedia
Bees and flowers have positive/negative charge, so they are physically attracted one to the other. – Bees Can Sense the Electric Fields of Flowers | National Geographic
Tribes are portfolio theory for the human race.
Deep dive into entities. Exploit connections that resonate with your existing business.
Cloud Natural Language | Google Cloud
IBM Watson
TextRazor – The Natural Language Processing API
Inlinks® Entity SEO Tool
How AI Replaced Link Builders with Brand Builders – Alexandra Tachalova
Alex Tachalova | Digital Marketing Consultant
Linkbuilding has changed a lot.
AI Content Generation made links even more important than they were.
Being a brand is the biggest ranking factor.
Links are shaping your brand entity.
SEO links are fake recommendations.
Links remain with you forever.
You should give less priority to SEO metrics.
Get links strictly from other relevant brands.
You should filter out media outlets:
The best links are those that provide value to a reader.
Get links from sites that heavily rely on organic traffic.
Focus on building up a topical authority and expertise through links.
Improving a link flow back to a homepage is an evergreen strategy.
Commercial, category, and SEO-oriented pages result in very short-term gains.
You should generally avoid pausing linkbuilding.
Strategic link building can enhance your organic link flow.
Linkbuilding is no longer part of an SEO discipline – it plays a crucial role in shaping your online presence.
AI & SEO – Panel Discussion
SEO Speaker and Internet Marketing Advisor : Dixon Jones
Alexandra Tachalova: Digital PR is your best bet in promoting very niche websites.
Dixon Jones: Newsjacking, making funny news, can also help you get such links.
Dixon Jones: Make sure you read and check the content written by ChatGPT. Also, refine the output, make ChatGPT change the texts, don’t just grab the first piece of text. Consider using user personas to make the content be more real.
Alexandra Tachalova: Ask real influencers to comment on an article, get feedback from real influencers.
Alexandra Tachalova: Try to see if a website is real.
See if they have social network engagement, lots of visitors.
When getting links, look at the relevance of the website, overall, to your business, but also at the relevance of the page that links to you. So, look for relevance on a general website, but also on individual articles.
Alexandra Tachalova: You should separate linkbuilding from getting traffic. You can have a good link that doesn’t bring traffic.
Dixon Jones: If you just copy & paste content from a website, add it to ChatGPT and change it, and post it on a different website, this can be penalized (even manually) by Google.
Alexandra Tachalova: It might not be very helpful to try this.
Dixon Jones: If your competitors are on some websites and you aren’t, try to fill those gaps and get links from there.
Alexandra Tachalova: Even if you don’t get dofollow links, they are good for diversification.
Alexandra Tachalova: Getting links is similar to going to a gym; you have to put effort into it. Focus on 20ish links per site per month if you want faster results.
How Did Aristotle Cluster Data: Or How Everything New Is a Well-forgotten Old – Tereza Svetoslavova
Aristotle, Metaphysics 8.6 [=1045a]:
“Concerning the challenge we just faced about how to describe things in numbers and definitions, What is the reason for a unity/oneness? For however many things have a plurality of parts and are not merely a complete aggregate but instead some kind of a whole beyond its parts, there is some cause of it since even in bodies, for some the fact that the there is contact is the cause of a unity/oneness while for others there is viscosity or some other characteristic of this sort. But a definition [which is an] explanation is one [thing] not because it is bound-together, like the Iliad, but because it is a definition of a single thing”
Everything can be categorized, put into a seed keyword.
Essence/Substance
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” ― Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Volume 5, 1709–1713
How to Automate Your Content SEO Audit with the Help of Machine Learning Models – Lazarina Stoy
LAZARINA STOY – SEO, Analytics & Storytelling
Also see:
SEO Machine Learning – How to Get Started, With Lazarina Stoy – YouTube
How to automate your content audit with ML models
Aim: How to automate the content audit process? Screaming Frog and APIs help with this. (For example, from Screaming Frog to Google Spreadsheets)
For very large websites (500,000+ pages), you need an API, or you might need a custom crawler.
You need to map important content metrics.
Organize your database – crawl, content, metrics
Understand the data – Categorize your inventory
Evaluate performance and assign action items to underperforming content
Implement & Review impact – Prioritize what and when to implement and repeat
User engagement
● Average Session Duration
● Sessions
● Engaged Sessions
● Bounce rate
● Exit rate
● Total Users
● Active Users
● Average engagement time
● Engagement time per session
● Engagement rate
● Event interactions (custom)
● Conversions
Traffic sources:
● # views/ event count from referral traffic
● # of views/ event count from social traffic
● # of views/ event count from organic traffic
● # of views/ event count from email traffic
Google Traffic data
● clicks
● impressions
● average position
● CTR
● # queries ranked per page
● queries ranked per page
● # of pages ranked
● # of pages with traffic
Repeat for discover/news/web/image, depending on the type of content.
Internal Links
● # internal links incoming
● # internal links outgoing
● # external links outgoing
Content readability
● Flesch Reading Ease Score
● Readability Score
● Word Count
● Sentence Count
● Average words per sentence
Backlinks
● # backlinks
● # follow backlinks
● # nofollow backlinks
● # text links
● # referring domains
Prepare text training data for classification | Vertex AI | Google Cloud
Cloud Natural Language | Google Cloud
What is Latent Dirichlet allocation | IBM
Topic Modeling Text Documents With LDA: Python in Excel Tutorial (Free Files) – YouTube
GitHub – MaartenGr/BERTopic: Leveraging BERT and c-TF-IDF to create easily interpretable topics.
What a good audit deliverable looks like to me:
● immediately actionable
● extensive and thorough
● insightful
● contextualized and relevant for multiple stakeholder groups
● promotes action
● evokes immediate FOMO
Audit Section:
- Why it matters
- Who should action
- Downloadable list with all relevant data, actions, and roles
real machine learning for Organic Search ✨ – MLforSEO
Content Marketing & Semantic SEO – Panel Discussion
Tereza Svetoslavova: You don’t necessarily need filters on your website.
Lazarina Stoy: Automation saves time for other tasks on a website.
About the fear that AI will replace marketers – there was always this fear, in history, but it didn’t happen, in general.
Tereza Svetoslavova: Check the SERPs to see the intent of visitors for some queries. If you want to rank in a certain niche, check the niche for what are the current websites that rank.
Lazarina Stoy: Don’t be afraid of niches with mixed results. If you see that for a query, there are different types of content, you can use this to your advantage.
Tereza Svetoslavova: In the initial phase of a collaboration, ask a lot of questions, know the business very well. The next step – know the audience very well. Finally, match the business data with the customers.
Tereza Svetoslavova: If you need to change a fictional author’s ownership of an article, that’s fine. For a real person, you need to have approval of the original author, that they consent to having their content changed (and perhaps under a different signing author).
Lazarina Stoy: To learn ML (machine learning), your mind must be accepting the option of failure. Failure should be accepted.
Also, consider different AI tools for different tasks; don’t look for a solution to solve all of your needs.
#1 The Future of Semantic Search in E-commerce – Martin Milanov
The journey of the user hasn’t changed that much; people still look for references before buying.
Schema Markup to include – Offers and Availability Offer – Schema.org Type
How to Use Audience Data to Build a Million-Dollar Brand – Lavall Chichester
Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Amazon.com: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy: 9780998116310: Helmer, Hamilton: Books
E-commerce SEO – Panel Discussion
Lavall Chichester: Use searches people type in Google to search for your business. You should use your keywords in the content strategy.
Consider doing CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization.
Martin Milanov: Don’t be afraid to niche your content. This could be evergreen content.
Martin Milanov: Put as many Schema.org as it is needed.
Lavall Chichester: As an SEO, you need to be flexible and test things.
The Future of Shopping in a Connected World – Wijnand Jongen
Wijnand Jongen – All about onlife retail
European E-Commerce Reports – EuroCommerce
In the future, voice search will become a natural way of searching.
What are the 6 Rs of sustainability?
Unlock GA4 Powers and Boost Your Profit! – Zlatan Ivanov
BigQuery | AI data platform | Lakehouse | EDW | Google Cloud
Converting on First Dates – Tim Stewart
Analytics Hub – Panel Discussion
Tim Stewart – If you’re getting traffic from some keywords, but they are not converting, they might not be the right keywords for your website.
Zlatan Ivanov
Alternative to Google Analytics:
Piwik PRO Analytics Suite | Analytics & data activation platform
Generative AI in today’s E-commerce Businesses – Hugo Faustino
Lalaland.ai – AI-powered digital model studio for digital designers
The Fabricant Intelligent Tools
BoF Professional Summit – New Frontiers: AI, Digital Culture and Virtual Worlds
Creative Force – Optimize, Automate & Elevate Content Creation →
INDG – Beautiful Product Content at Infinite Scale
DEPT® 2024 Trends Forecast: Connection, Creativity & Culture | LinkedIn
ZERO10 AR & AI solutions for business | Virtual try-on
AI & SEM & Social Media – Panel Discussion
Hugo Faustino: For AI, we need scale and consistency.
Some of the insights in AI are not actionable.
Georgi Georgiev (Releva): We decided from the creative side to the automated side.
Hugo Faustino: Motion | Ship more winning ads
Don’t EEAT That: Building Trust When SERPS Stink – Cindy Krum
Cindy Krum, Founder & CEO of MobileMoxie – MobileMoxie Blog
Google E-E-A-T: What Is It & How To Demonstrate It For SEO
Former Googler: Google ‘using clicks in rankings’
The role of user behavior in SEO – by Kevin Indig
thruuu: Content Optimization Solution | Try for Free
People Also Ask keyword research tool | AlsoAsked
How to create Empathy-Driven Campaigns – Maria Todorova
Empathy: Definition, Types, and Tips for Practicing
How to Foster Empathy to Drive Powerful Marketing Campaigns – Trade Press Services
With New Kaepernick Ad, What Does Nike Believe In?
Fixing the bAIs – The Shorty Awards
Don’t Buy This Jacket | Patagonia RO
Buy Less, Demand More | Patagonia RO
Content Marketing, SEM & Social – Panel Discussion
Cindy Krum (@cindy_krum) • Instagram photos and videos
Cindy Krum: You do EEAT for your customers, but it helps your visitors.
You could use AI for your content, but note that you’ll need to review the content.
If you use AI, consider informing the visitors of your website about this.
Maria Todorova: If you show stakeholders successful campaigns using empathy, they might approve your project.
Empathy is not only about the brands, but also in agencies.
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood® | The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
All the brands need to be consistent, and with every campaign, you need basic values everywhere.
Ivan Panteleev: Lately, what we see – people get more used to Facebook. For Facebook, it’s difficult to see the performance of last click interactions.
Some businesses don’t know the exact impact of organic traffic in the overall traffic.
Maria Todorova: Facebook is not used by Gen Z – you need to be where the audience is.
Stefka Georgieva: You need to personalize your message to each platform. Videos for YouTube and TikTok should not be the same.
Cindy Krum: You need to create content that is specific to some queries.
As a brand, you need to be – Notable, Memorable, and Repeatable.
Maria Todorova: When you have a good statement, you can easily distribute it to different channels.
Swipe Right on Innovation: Matching With Tomorrow’s E-Commerce Customers – Raluca Bujoreanu
Global eCommerce sales are forecasted to reach 62.74 tn by 2030.
Technology will change:
Systems
Sustenance
Places
People
In the next 5 years, we will probably see a big shift in how we do eCommerce.
New Growth Era: Connected Commerce – Ken Condon
Ken Condon Explains Connected Commerce
E-commerce – Panel Discussion
Svetlozar Dimitrov: Some small shops are closing due to Temu, or reducing their business.
Raluca Bujoreanu: Temu has an impact on eCommerce. Temu also provides an opportunity.
Zalando has a USP in all the countries we are present.
Hugo Faustino: We should also look at the return rates of Dropshipping vs. Temu.
Svetlozar Dimitrov: In eCommerce, it’s best to have different delivery options at the checkout.
Raluca Bujoreanu: The quality of delivery affects the return rate.
The product images need to be both accurate and have a good quality.
Svetlozar Dimitrov: For international orders, you need to offer a local return address.
Ken Condon: If an online store provides false images of products, the returns should be free.
If the return is solely on the reasons of the customer, charging for returns could be considered.
UGC (User Generated Content) is one of the ways to increase trust in the store.
Raluca Bujoreanu: Showing reviews and testimonials could increase the level of trust.
Ken Condon: Mobile traffic is 75-80%.
Interview session with Gary Illyes
rel author probably will not come back
rel=”author” frequently asked (advanced) questions | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers
Negative SEO: What It Is & How to Prevent Attacks
The fear of Negative SEO is much larger than it seems.
Crawl budgets are generally relevant to websites with 10M+ pages.
Pe plan profesional, mă ocup de audituri de site-uri pe partea de SEO și UX (SEO – optimizare pentru motoarele de căutare / UX – uzabilitate – experiența vizitatorilor), și realizez / mă ocup de mentenanță pentru site-uri pe platforma WordPress. Cofondator al lumeaseoppc.ro și al cetd.ro. Blogger pe olivian.ro.
Pe plan personal, caut să cresc, și pentru asta merg la evenimente, fac sport și încerc să trăiesc sănătos, fac voluntariat, citesc.
Detalii despre mine pe profilul de LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/olivian/
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