Damon Burton
Smart SEO & Internet Marketing Blog
Speaking to High School about Entrepreneurship
I spoke to a high school entrepreneurship class last week. I started by asking who likes money? Who likes nice cars? And shared that my R8 was outside. Who likes nice watches? And passed around a Rolex. Stuff that felt really douchey, but was for a reason. So I could...
Google Quantifies Spam Volume Being Filtered
The same week Google closes out its longest spam update of the year, it quietly changed its mind about something it used to shrug off completely. Fake authors. The beginning of October saw the final phase of the long September 2026 spam rollout, the one Google warned...
Google Penalizing Fake Author Profiles
Days ago we found out Google built basically a virtual AI squad just to hunt AI spam. Last week the continued ranking volatility proved that spam team already clocked in to take out garbage content. Volatility trackers went quiet for a few days. That's usually the...
Why AI Content Sites Are Losing Rankings with Google’s New Spam Updates
Google's spam update hit hard the last few weeks, and AI generated content sites are the ones getting hit the hardest. The first few days saw rankings drop, the next weeks dropped even more, and by the third day the rank tracking tools out there looked like a...
“Your relationship is AI.”
Ahead of my 20th anniversary with my wife, we'd been sharing pics of the venue and the things we were doing ahead of the event with our friends. "Your relationship is AI," was probably the best compliment from a friend I'd never expect to have appreciated. After the...
AI Isn’t Stealing Clicks. Google Is.
AI isn't stealing clicks. Google's change in user interface is. All of the most used AI tools like ChatGPT, MetaAI, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude make up less than 0.4% of the search market. (source: chatgpt-vs-google) Yes, many people using AI search. But outside of...
Good SEO vs Great: The Importance of Prioritization Before Execution
Most SEO audits find 50 things to fix. But all 50 things aren't equal priority. These checklists find the problems. They still don't tell you which ones matter more... or less. That's the actual job. A fix that needs developer time and dev time is scarce? Decide if it...
Cloudflare Robots.txt Auto-Edits
They just started writing your robots.txt file for you. Cloudflare means well, but man they sure know how to wreck a site. They call it "Bot Preference Sync," and there are three toggles in your Cloudflare dashboard: - agent crawlers- search crawlers- training...
Entrepreneurship on Paper vs Real Life
Entrepreneurship on paper: prime location commercial building million dollar lake front vacation home Entrepreneurship in real life: Found out a lower tenant's suite in the commercial building didn't have an HVAC vent. Which led to finding out more than one didn't....
