Cliff

Inhouse international SEO for multiple million+ page sites. Built/ran sites late 90s-00s, fulltime SEO 2010-17. Took a few years to be home dad, getting back in

[Cliff @seocliff]

@firefox I've been using FF for 25 years+. But why the hell can't I remove search engines, this is not cool and will be a deal breaker @firefox, not to mention forcing google default SE. Give uses full control.

[Cliff @seocliff]

@Raspberry_Pi PiVPN (+pihole), invaluable for travel and accessing local nextcloud from anywhere

[James Shields @scaling_shields]

i watched a flight go from $483 to $547 in 24 hours WITHOUT a single seat selling

searched london to new york on a tuesday

$483

checked again 2 hours later

$512

next morning: $547

panicked and booked it

the guy sitting next to me paid $391

same seat, date + airline

$156 less

he searched once i searched 3 times

the algorithm saw me come back and charged me until i broke

the seat doesnt have a price

you have a price

and it goes up EVERY time you show interest

couldnt stop thinking about it so i tracked down someone who actually built pricing algorithms for a european carrier

asked him what happened to me

"you got profiled. the system assigned you an intent score after your second search and raised your ceiling every time you came back"

asked how to beat it

"most people think a VPN fixes it. thats 2015 advice. the algorithm fingerprints more than your IP now. it reads your device your browser your screen resolution your timezone. VPN to bucharest but your clock says london and your language is english? the algo knows youre faking and sometimes charges you more for trying"

"so what actually works?"

"you have to poison the entire profile. not just the location. the identity"

the protocol he gave me:

VPN AND match your timezone and language to the spoofed location. mismatched signals flag you and can trigger a price increase

use a fully clean browser. no history no saved passwords no google account. the algorithm fingerprints your session not just your cookies

one search one booking. the intent score activates on the second search. there is no safe way to look twice

book tuesday or wednesday 1-5am. lowest traffic means the least demand data for the algorithm to inflate against

if the price already spiked go dark for 72 hours minimum. not 24. the intent score on most carriers decays on a 3 day cycle. come back on a different device from a different network

"we spent $4 billion building these systems. theyre not going to lose to someone who opened an incognito tab"

$900 billion industry

the gap between what you pay and what the person next to you pays is not a bug

its the entire business model

stop letting an algorithm charge you for being predictable

[Joy Hawkins @JoyanneHawkins]

Ranking in Google's AI Results in 2026 with Mike King https://t.co/MJ9XQ2YCR4

[Lily Ray 😏 @lilyraynyc]

I am excited to share a virtual recording of my talk from #MozCon last week titled:

GEO, AEO, LLMO: Separating Fact from Fiction & How to Win in AI Search

Check it out!

https://t.co/Q7wqcDghRE

[Cliff @seocliff]

@gfiorelli1 I’ve had this more than once in the last few days. My name is as English as smith, however Im currently in spain BUT with UK system + uk vpn. My queries were Spain related so assumed it was pulling data from Spanish sources and got lazy.

[Cliff @seocliff]

@aleyda Timeline of alternative facts, thanks for speaking up @aleyda

[Cliff @seocliff]

@thenextweb A good example of what can happen when we rely on machines, the umpire completely failed, those in the office too looking at the replay. https://t.co/uVmeHGrlGr

[Jono Alderson @jonoalderson]

We used to build websites.

Now we build pipelines, frameworks, and hydration strategies - just to publish text.

This isn’t progress.
It’s complexity, by design.

We need to escape the JavaScript framework trap.

https://t.co/ZwWCAdVxQ4

[Glen Allsopp 👾 @ViperChill]

If Wikipedia ranks well for a term in your niche, you can get an idea of how much traffic Google is sending as their analytics are fully public.

I built a free tool to help make keyword research a little more fun thanks to their API.

Link in the first reply. Free. No opt-in 🤝

[Football on TNT Sports @footballontnt]

Abdallah Sima gives Brest an unlikely lead on their first-ever European away day 😍

📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK

[Cliff @seocliff]

@Suzzicks Yes, makes a lot of sense how they were suddenly able to handle JS, using our power is a bit shitty. Hope this line of questioning continues.

[Cliff @seocliff]

@Suzzicks Great work joining the dots. My feeling is chrome data usage goes way back and was part of Panda updates. Also interesting theories about the crapification of GA

[Marie Haynes @Marie_Haynes]

A bunch of wording has changed in Google's documentation of core updates.

Here are the most interesting bits:

▪️Most sites don’t need to worry about core updates.
▪️The point of the August core update is to show more content that people find genuinely useful.
▪️The changes don’t target specific sites or individual pages.
▪️A drop of 1-2 positions is likely nothing to worry about. ▪️A larger drop warrants a deeper assessment.
▪️Your drop may be because “there may be other pages on the web that are doing a better job of helping the searcher.”
▪️Rewriting or restructuring your content to make it easier to read and navigate may help.
▪️You may not need to wait till another core update happens to recover. Google says some changes can take effect in a few days.

More in this blog post:
https://t.co/KwbRcXnEHV

[Ross Stevens  @rossstevens_uk]

In Google Search Console, click 'Search results' and do a regex search using:

what|where|when|why|can|how|does|who|would|could|should|are|have|was|will

This will find most of the question based searches done to show your site in the SERPs.

[Aleyda Solis 🕊️ @aleyda]

🚨 Assessing your site's latest rankings shifts? I've updated my Free Looker Studio Dashboard with new segmentation and reports to facilitate assessment 👀 Get it for free here: https://t.co/dwZq1fKqac

[Cliff @seocliff]

@cbrodzky thanks Christina, got it

[Cliff @seocliff]

@cbrodzky Hi, I’m interested in your GSC dash, is there a way to pay with PP?

[Cliff @seocliff]

HNY! Just noticed my site has a new top query “sexy blue videos”. Site is about education, sex doesn’t feature at all. The query points to a page about a Diploma in Film. The college has blue in its name. Site gets 5K p/d but in decline. Do I need to worry? @JohnMu @methode