Cord Blomquist 🌲

Founder of Tallest Tree Digital. I help publishers turn their authority into traffic through TopicalBoost, an API and plugin for entity SEO.

[meme bastard 🍕 @mask_bastard]

fun fact: there are two American flags in this photo

[Megan Basham @megbasham]

All right Google, I’ll give this one to you. This is pretty great.

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

They activated TopicalBoost June 1, 2025. By clarifying their topical focus to Google they made themselves eligible to take advantage of these important legislation-driven news cycles.

Full case study here: https://t.co/6zFBlPk2zd

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

On October 22, 2025 the Pennsylvania Senate passed a $47.9B budget proposal. Within 48 hours, one commentary from @MyCommonwealth sat in Google Top Stories five separate times, for a combined 67 hours of carousel exposure.

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

For the query "budget passed," Commonwealth held position 1 for 57 sustained hours. Same carousel as WGAL, PennLive, and the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Their coverage was the front page of Google for two days on that story.

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

As many commenters pointed out on @rustybrick's post on SEO Roundtable, this update both punished spammers and elevated sites with tight topical focus and solid content. https://t.co/Pj4uYYQk3T

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

How do you become front-page news in PA?

Add Google Knowledge Graph topics to your site with TopicalBoost!

@MyCommonwealth did just that. The result were stories appearing alongside @WGAL, @PennLive, @PennCapitalStar, @fox43, @PhillyInquirer, @PittsburghPG, and @jewishinsider.

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

Commonwealth Foundation rolled out TopicalBoost in June 2025. Rankings and organic sessions improved, but then the Google August 2025 Spam Update. We think this re-weighted factors like siteAuthority, siteFocusScore, siteRadius—the leaked site-level attributes.

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

Cross-posting my reply to your comment from LinkedIn here.

The problem I see with either only applying half the topics then measuring related keyword impact or only applying topics to half the pages and measuring their rankings is that a big part of the intended affect are two site-wide scores. We think that TopicalBoost shifts the siteFocusScore and site2vecEmbeddingEncoded from the 2024 Content Warehouse leak.

Even a half-implemented site could see those scores shift, hopefully becoming a more accurate reflection of the site's overall theme, and therefore lifting both the experiment and the control.

So you could end up with an experiment that appears to show topics don't matter, when actually the treatment moved a site-wide score that lifted both groups.

We have had experiments with shipping schema only as several publishers have needed more time—back and forth with designers mostly—to implement the frontend links.

We found that those schema-only rollouts saw some modest lift in organic traffic with the big lift coming after the internal linking rolls out. Notably, however, smaller publishers who had no/little Google Discover traffic before rollout saw Discover suddenly start spiking and delivering real traffic.

One such schema-only rollout that I've posted is Reason (a larger publishers), which you can see here: https://t.co/GAecqDNSYE

That's not exactly a scientifically robust analysis, but traffic takes off after the intervention.

Any of these cases taken in isolation can seem dubious, but we've seen improvements over and over again after rolling this out, improvements that coincide with launch date and that seem to hold when comparing the sites to peers as we've done with SEL.

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

The Vicious Cycle of SEO @lilyraynyc named—spam, spam updates, repeat—has an off-ramp.

In my new case study at @sengineland I show how being explicit about topical authority via entity schema and internal links protected SEL from a traffic decline.

https://t.co/k0rpQYGAQV

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

Reading Bruce Clay's work on content silos inspired my own work. Watching his talks and reading his essays helped me understand SEO early on in my career. I'm sad that I never got the chance to see him speak in person. May he rest in peace.

[Barry Schwartz @rustybrick]

So deeply sad to report Bruce Clay has passed away, he's the Father of SEO and has helped shape this industry into what it is today - you will be so so deeply missed @BruceClayInc https://t.co/HhzlnrSvOP

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

If you’re interested in learning a bit about my SEO history and approach, I was honored to be part of the 20 for 20 Search Engine Land 20-year celebration video series.

Danny Goodwin and I chattted about all things SEO and my background in the space. I hope you enjoy it ❤️🙏🏽

(Sorry for the little bit of glitchiness in the middle, I think my WiFi was misbehaving that day)

https://t.co/KQYIxy8G1B

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

Thanks to @jaxonparrott for shouting out Tallest Tree and https://t.co/KgnEQKIl9o in his post "Entity SEO for AI Engines" at AuthorityTech.

https://t.co/rAk34et52n

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

I was actually thinking about this today -

More fan-out queries actually makes SEO *more* important than ever, not less

And it also means more sites get opportunities to be part of the answer than with traditional 10 blue links

So AI search actually expanded SEO.

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

Super fun talking to my friend @RobRaffety about SEO, AI, and how the messy world of the web is changing. Thanks for having me as a guest on Rob's Brain!

[Rob Raffety @RobRaffety]

What even is SEO? @cordblomquist explains on the latest episode of my podcast!

"Raff's Brain #236: Riffin' with Raff - The Internet Is a Messy Library - Cord Blomquist Explains SEO"

Thx Cordo 🫡
https://t.co/dVh7IYtzQp

[Rob Raffety @RobRaffety]

What even is SEO? @cordblomquist explains on the latest episode of my podcast!

"Raff's Brain #236: Riffin' with Raff - The Internet Is a Messy Library - Cord Blomquist Explains SEO"

Thx Cordo 🫡
https://t.co/dVh7IYtzQp

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

It's like Half Life 3. Something you never thought would actually happen. #seo

[Brodie Clark @brodieseo]

Massive SEO News: Google is launching the most requested report in Google Search Console ever. A new AI performance report!

Here's what we know so far:

• It will include dedicated reports for both Search and Discover

• The data will be reflected within Search for AI Overviews and AI Mode, alongside AI features in Discover

• The report will only be focused on impressions within generative AI features, not clicks

• The rollout will start with a subset of websites, allowing thorough testing (so keep an eye out!)

There are some major limitations to this initial testing phase, where the actual queries that users are searching won't show in the report, with only impressions for pages, countries, devices, and dates.

Though the dataset will be limited, this is certainly a step in the right direction!

I will be covering this rollout within my newsletter, so make sure to subscribe if you aren't already: https://t.co/J6GbI1tB27

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

A handful of sites started seeing big surges over the weekend with the core update

[Edward Sturm @edwardeachday]

SEO is at a new all time high in Google Trends, LET'S GOOOO!!

[Cord Blomquist 🌲 @cordblomquist]

LLMs can't seem to parse the contents of their tokens really well. But so what? LLMs are tools. Good at some things, bad at others. I know the hype around AI is overblown, but these sorts of critiques are equally silly.

[Irushi @Im_IrushiK]

Opus 4.8 is insane, nothing will be the same after this model 💀