Articles I Wrote at Jindouyun SEO

SEO in Practice

• The Complete On-Page SEO Guide (2026 Edition) — I have always seen on-page SEO as the highest-ROI part of the job. This guide walks through headings, meta tags, URLs, internal links, images and structured data module by module, with a checklist to run before any new page goes live. (Chinese)
• Image SEO in Practice: From Alt Text to AI Search — Covers image optimization end to end, from alt text and file formats to structured data and multimodal search. Image-heavy e-commerce and content sites can use it as an item-by-item audit. (Chinese)
• URL Structure and Slugs: Less Ranking Weight Than You Think, More Important Than You Think — My view is that URLs carry little direct ranking weight but form the skeleton of site architecture, so getting a change wrong costs far more than getting it right gains. Read this before renaming slugs or planning 301 redirects. (Chinese)
• Meta Tags in 2026: Six Tags That Still Matter in AI Search — The optimization logic behind six core tags, including title, description, canonical, Open Graph and meta robots, with a focus on how their role changes in AI search. Keep it open when writing titles and descriptions. (Chinese)
• SEO Content Strategy: The Complete Guide (2026 Edition) — Puts E-E-A-T, information gain, topical authority and AI extractability into one content strategy, with action lists by role. Aimed at teams building a content program from scratch. (Chinese)
• Building Topical Authority: Pillar and Cluster from Scratch — Goes from the logic of Google’s topical authority patent to how to build pillar-and-cluster structures, using four content clusters on our own blog as the worked example. Worth reading before planning topics at scale. (Chinese)
• SEO Content Audit: Finding and Fixing Underperforming Pages — Most sites carry a large share of zombie pages with no traffic. This guide diagnoses them with GSC, Ahrefs and GA4, then uses a four-quadrant matrix to decide whether to rewrite, merge or remove. (Chinese)
• XML Sitemap Best Practices — Syntax, six sitemap types, generation and submission, with most of the attention on common mistakes. A reference for new launches or pages that search engines keep missing. (Chinese)
• Crawl Budget and Server Log Analysis in Practice (2026) — Explains crawl budget through crawl rate limit and crawl demand, then uses server logs to measure what Googlebot actually does, plus a strategy for managing AI crawlers. Most useful for large sites with slow indexing. (Chinese)
• Hreflang and International SEO: The Complete Guide — Hreflang syntax, the trade-offs between the three implementation methods, and how to choose a multilingual URL structure. Use it to debug a site where the wrong language version ranks. (Chinese)
• Site Migration SEO Checklist (2026) — Domain changes, CMS moves and HTTPS upgrades can all halve your traffic. The checklist covers before, during and after the move; pull it out as soon as the migration is scheduled, not after launch. (Chinese)
• The Complete Technical SEO Guide (2026 Edition) — My overview of technical SEO, stage by stage from crawling and rendering to indexing and ranking signals, with AI crawler management treated as a new problem of its own. Start here for the big picture, then follow the links to each topic. (Chinese)
• robots.txt and Meta Robots: Controlling Search and AI Crawlers — A robots.txt syntax reference, four configuration templates you can adapt, and how to handle ten major AI crawlers. When you are deciding whether to let AI crawlers in, this gives you the exact rules to write. (Chinese)
• JavaScript Rendering and SEO: Why Search Engines and AI May Not See Your Content — Compares CSR, SSR, SSG and ISR. The core point is that AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so content rendered only on the client does not exist for them. Read it when choosing a front-end stack or debugging pages that have content but do not show up in search. (Chinese)
• Structured Data: Helping Google and AI Understand Your Pages — From JSON-LD syntax to eight common schema types. My view is that structured data has moved from a rich-results bonus to basic infrastructure for AI visibility. (Chinese)
• Author SEO: Claiming E-E-A-T in the Age of GEO — How author identity and E-E-A-T become the reason content gets trusted and cited by AI when AI-generated content is everywhere. (Chinese)
• The Complete List of 698 Google Search Parameters (2025) — A list of 698 Google search URL parameters, each rated on a five-level confidence scale based on reverse engineering and experience. A lookup table for rank tracking, SERP scraping or debugging results. (Chinese)
• 12 Google SEO Agencies, and How to Choose One — What an SEO agency can do for you, how to choose one, and twelve Google SEO agencies to compare. (Chinese)
• WHOIS vs RDAP: How to Look Up Domain Registration Data — Explains registries, registrars and the WHOIS system, and what its successor RDAP does better. Handy when tracing domain ownership or investigating infringement. (Chinese)
• Does Content Hidden with display: none Hurt SEO? — Whether hiding content with display: none or collapsible FAQs affects SEO. The answer is yes, though collapsing content on mobile for usability is acceptable. (Chinese)
• Google’s Country Domains, plus the GL and UULE Parameters (2025) — A list of Google’s localized domains and how to use the GL and UULE parameters to see results for a specific location. A utility page for checking rankings across markets. (Chinese)
• Global SEO Strategy for B2B Exporters (2025) — How global SEO for B2B exporters differs from B2C and local SEO, and how to plan strategy, target markets and content depth. (Chinese)
• SEO Blogging: E-E-A-T, Original Content and Conversion — Blog content quality through the lens of E-E-A-T, with trust at the center of the four dimensions, plus the ethical limits of conversion tactics and how to measure results. For anyone running a company blog and trying to define what good content means. (Chinese)
• Ahrefs Site Audit Errors: Five Common Problems and How to Fix Them — The five most common errors when Ahrefs Site Audit cannot crawl your site, and how to fix each. Check here first if a new Ahrefs project gets stuck. (Chinese)
• What Organic Traffic Means — Why organic traffic is called organic and where it ends and paid traffic begins. A primer for people new to SEO. (Chinese)
• Eight Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Agency or Consultant — Eight questions to put to any SEO agency or practitioner, written from the buyer’s side. Ask them before comparing quotes; it tells you more than price does. (Chinese)
• H1 Tags: Common Pitfalls and Best Practices (2024) — How the H1 differs from the title tag and other headings, and the usual mistakes. Use it to decide whether a template with multiple or empty H1s needs fixing. (Chinese)
• Internal Linking: How It Shapes Site Authority and Rankings — I treat internal links as the site’s skeleton: they define the information hierarchy, tell search engines which pages matter most and affect long-tail rankings. Read it before restructuring your internal links. (Chinese)
• Googlebot Explained: A Guide to Crawl Rate Optimization — A technical look at how Googlebot discovers, crawls and indexes pages, and how to optimize crawl rate. Read it when new content is slow to get indexed and you need to find the bottleneck. (Chinese)
• Yandex SEO vs Google SEO: What Is Different — Written while I was working on the Russian market: a comparison of how Yandex and Google differ on indexing, ranking, content, links and ads. An overview for anyone entering Russian-language search. (Chinese)

Google Algorithm Updates

• Google’s June 2026 Spam Update: No Mention of AI, Still Aimed at Mass AI Content — Google named no new policy and no target this time. I pull together what others observed and untangle three timelines people had mixed up; my conclusion is that it continues the push against mass-produced AI content that began in 2024. (Chinese)
• The May 2026 Core Update: Re-Screening AI Citation Sources for Gemini 3.5 — A record of the 12 days from rollout to completion. My read is that it re-screened citation material for the Gemini 3.5-powered AI Mode, favoring pages with a distinct perspective, non-commodity content and a clearly organized main body. (Chinese)
• March 2026 Core Update: Content with Zero Information Gain Takes the Hit — A full post-mortem of the March core update. My conclusion is that content with no information gain was demoted across the board, while self-promotional listicles and E-E-A-T scrutiny both tightened. The action framework at the end helps you check whether your content is at risk. (Chinese)
• Tracking Google’s 2026 Algorithm Updates — A running log of every officially confirmed update in 2026, from February’s Discover-only update to the May core update after I/O. Use it to line up your own traffic changes against the timeline. (Chinese)
• The March 2026 Spam Update, and the Other Thing That Probably Hit You — March brought both a spam update and an earlier content-quality fluctuation, and many people conflated the two even though they call for opposite responses. This piece helps you work out which one actually affected you. (Chinese)
• Google Hummingbird: The Shift from Keywords to Meaning — I treat Hummingbird in 2013 as the point where Google moved from matching keywords to understanding meaning, and follow that line all the way to AI Overviews. A good starting point for understanding why Google increasingly just gives the answer. (Chinese)
• Google Caffeine and May Day: The 2010 Index Rebuild and Long-Tail Cleanup — In 2010 Caffeine rebuilt Google’s indexing architecture and May Day raised the quality bar for long-tail queries; together they set the stage for Panda and Penguin. (Chinese)
• Google’s Early Algorithm Updates, 2003 to 2009 — The early updates from Boston to Vince in one place, showing how Google’s basic anti-spam logic took shape. Mostly history, for readers who want the background. (Chinese)
• Google Algorithm Updates in 2025: A Review — A review of 2025’s three core updates and one spam update: June opened a recovery window for sites hit by the helpful content update, and December extended E-E-A-T expectations to every category. Useful for an annual review. (Chinese)
• Google Algorithm Updates in 2024: The Biggest Content Purge Yet — 2024 was the year of the biggest content purge: the helpful content system folded into core ranking, and three new spam policies targeted parasite SEO and AI content abuse. If your traffic crashed in 2024, start here. (Chinese)
• Google Algorithm Updates in 2023: The Year of Helpful Content — 2023 set a record for core updates, and September’s helpful content update sent traffic plunging for many sites. A full timeline that also explains why later updates keep coming back to who content is written for. (Chinese)
• Google MUM: The Multimodal Model Behind Search — MUM’s multitask, multilingual and multimodal abilities and how it differs from BERT. I see it as the technical bridge that took Google from search engine to answer engine. (Chinese)
• Google Pigeon: How Local Search Rules Changed — In 2014 Pigeon tied local rankings to web ranking signals, and directory sites benefited. The second half turns to local SEO strategy today, which is the part local businesses should read. (Chinese)
• Core Web Vitals: When User Experience Became a Ranking Factor — My view is that Core Web Vitals move rankings only a little but affect conversion far more than they affect ranking. Useful when someone asks whether performance work is worth it. (Chinese)
• Mobilegeddon: When Mobile-Friendly Became Mandatory — The 2015 mobile-friendly update moved rankings far less than the panic suggested, but it pushed the whole industry to responsive design and eventually led to mobile-first indexing. (Chinese)
• Google SpamBrain: The AI System Behind Spam Detection — How SpamBrain, Google’s AI anti-spam system, works, and the three 2024 policies on expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and parasite SEO. If you are tempted by shortcuts, see how fast the window is closing. (Chinese)
• E-E-A-T: Google’s Framework for Judging Content Quality — E-E-A-T is not a ranking algorithm, yet it decides whether content can rank. I break the four dimensions into concrete signals and cover the extra bar for YMYL topics; useful when you need to explain what quality actually means. (Chinese)
• The Florida Update: SEO’s First Big Earthquake — The 2003 Florida update was the first time the SEO industry saw Google act for real. My view is that the logic it set, punish shortcuts and reward quality, has not changed in more than twenty years. (Chinese)
• Google RankBrain: Machine Learning Enters Ranking — How RankBrain brought machine learning into ranking for the first time, and why its vector-based handling of queries still matters a decade later. (Chinese)
• Google BERT: Teaching Search to Understand the Question — How BERT’s bidirectional encoding let Google read context and word order in queries, and the line of development from BERT to MUM to Gemini. Read it to understand how Google handles natural-language questions. (Chinese)
• The Helpful Content Update: Who Are You Writing For? — From its 2022 launch through the 2023 upheaval to its 2024 merge into core ranking, I focus on the site-wide classifier and the path to recovery. Sites that were hit and never recovered can work through the self-check list at the end. (Chinese)
• Google Penguin: The End of Link Manipulation — From its 2012 debut to its 2016 merge into the core algorithm, Penguin rewrote the rules on links. A full version timeline, with a closing section on how to approach links in 2026. (Chinese)
• Google Panda: The Quality Update That Ended Content Farms — Panda ended the content farm era in 2011. I argue that the site-level quality scoring it introduced still decides how high your content can rank today. (Chinese)
• Google Algorithm Updates: A Complete History from PageRank to AI Search — The hub for the algorithm series, covering 1998’s PageRank through 2026 and the mechanics and impact of 20-plus key algorithms across six eras. Start here if you are new to the series. (Chinese)
• Google’s August 2024 Core Update: What We Knew at Launch — A roundup from the launch of the August 2024 core update, focused on how it continued the helpful content direction and responded to site owners’ feedback about recovering rankings. (Chinese)

AI Search and GEO

• Six Questions to Ask Before Hiring a GEO/ASO Provider — A due-diligence checklist for buying GEO/ASO services, from data definitions and AI crawlers to content method, pricing and red flags. Go through it before signing and you filter out vendors who only sell the buzzword. (Chinese)
• Google I/O 2026: Search Becomes an Agent Manager — My read is that after I/O 2026, Google Search stopped just returning results and started dispatching agents; AI Mode, Universal Cart and Lighthouse auditing WebMCP all point the same way. The four-point checklist at the end is for site owners planning next year. (Chinese)
• Bing Turns AI Citations into First-Party Data — Bing Webmaster Tools is the first to report how often AI cites your content. I separate what has shipped from what was only announced, and explain why Citation Share works as the new share of voice. (Chinese)
• What WebMCP Is: The Front Door Websites Open for AI Agents — Why WebMCP is not Anthropic’s MCP: it is a browser-native W3C draft backed by Chrome and Edge that lets a page tell AI agents what it can do. If you run e-commerce and care where agent-driven orders end up, get this distinction straight first. (Chinese)
• Google-Agent and Web Bot Auth: Rewriting the Rules for the Agent Era — Google-Agent does not follow robots.txt when it browses on a user’s behalf. I look at it alongside Project Mariner and Web Bot Auth, and cover what site owners can still do to identify and manage AI agents. (Chinese)
• Google Is Rewriting How Your Site Appears in Search — From rewritten titles and traffic-absorbing AI Overviews to a patent for AI-generated landing pages, I argue Google is taking over, layer by layer, how your site is presented in search. This is an argument piece about what that trend means for SEO, not a how-to. (Chinese)
• Information Gain in Practice: Five Ways to Make Content Irreplaceable — AI can write 2,000 words but not your first-hand experience. Five routes to information gain: original data, case studies, contrarian takes, exclusive screenshots and your own frameworks. Use it to check a draft for anything only you could have written. (Chinese)
• An AI-Assisted SEO Writing Workflow That Keeps E-E-A-T — My position: using AI to write is fine, letting it think for you is not. A four-step workflow for moving faster while keeping experience and information gain in human hands. (Chinese)
• The Complete GEO Guide (2026 Edition) — My overview of GEO: how AI engines choose what to cite, content extractability, visibility monitoring and the technical groundwork, with separate approaches for small and large companies. The place to start if you are new to GEO. (Chinese)
• Why Large Enterprises Need GEO — For large companies the case for GEO is not more exposure; it is that when users ask AI directly, the official site no longer controls how the brand is described. Useful if you have to explain the investment to leadership. (Chinese)
• Is GEO Worth It for Small Businesses? — I argue GEO may be the first traffic opportunity in a decade that favors small companies, because AI citations weigh content more than brand size. The three-step starter list at the end suits teams with limited budgets who want to test it first. (Chinese)
• Optimizing for AI Search: Good GEO Is Good SEO Done Well — The core argument: the best GEO strategy is high-quality SEO taken all the way. I use a hands-on example to show how to turn expertise into points AI is willing to cite. (Chinese)
• Google’s A2A Protocol: Are Agents plus MCP the Future? — What Google’s A2A protocol and Anthropic’s MCP each solve, and why the two are complementary. (Chinese)
• LLMs.txt: The robots.txt or Sitemap of the LLM Era? — LLMs.txt is a site guide written for language models, a bit like robots.txt or a sitemap once were for search engines. What it solves and how it differs from both; read it before deciding whether to deploy one. (Chinese)
• Claude 3.7 System Prompt: Translation and Notes — A paragraph-by-paragraph Chinese translation of the Claude 3.7 system prompt, with a few annotations. (Chinese)
• Gemini 2.0: 100,000 Product Descriptions for $7.50 (February 2025) — Gemini 2.0’s 2-million-token context, multimodal abilities and Lite pricing, and what it costs to generate product descriptions in bulk. For e-commerce teams choosing a model for large-scale content. (Chinese)
• Prompt Engineering 101 (2024) — A short piece on method, from how language models work to chain of thought, role prompting and structuring prompts in Markdown. For people starting out with ChatGPT and similar tools. (Chinese)

SEO Glossary

• Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM): Measuring Channels After Cookies — With cookies disappearing and AI search stripping referrers, user-level tracking keeps getting harder. How MMM uses aggregate data and statistical inference to measure each channel’s contribution, including dark traffic from AI. (Chinese)
• SSR: Why AI Crawlers Can’t See Your JavaScript — The key point: AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so most content on client-rendered sites is invisible to AI search, which turns SSR from a performance technique into a prerequisite for AI visibility. (Chinese)
• Chunking: AI Reads Fragments, Not Your Whole Page — AI search engines split documents into chunks before retrieval, so citation quality depends on chunk quality. Understand this before writing long pages you want quoted section by section. (Chinese)
• Semantic Search: How AI Matches Meaning with Vectors — How search engines and language models turn text into vectors and judge relevance by distance, and why the number of recognized entities on a page affects how likely AI is to cite it. (Chinese)
• Parasite SEO: Borrowing Authority to Rank — Parasite SEO means publishing on high-authority platforms to borrow their ranking power. My observation is that while Google cracks down on site reputation abuse, in AI citations the practice has simply moved to new hosts such as Reddit. (Chinese)
• AIO: Optimizing for Google’s AI Overviews — Optimizing for Google’s AI Overviews. My take is that cited pages mostly come from the top ten results, but the exact position matters less than whether the content is easy to extract. (Chinese)
• AEO: Answer Engine Optimization — AEO is about micro-structure: whether a single passage can be lifted out by AI as a complete answer. A reference when rewriting FAQs or definition paragraphs. (Chinese)
• AI Visibility: The New Currency of Brands in AI Search — Defines AI visibility as how often and how well a brand is mentioned, cited and recommended in AI answers, and why it is becoming the metric that matters. Settle this definition before you start monitoring GEO. (Chinese)
• What Is llms.txt? — What llms.txt is, how it uses curated links to guide language models through a site, and whether the major AI crawlers actually read it. (Chinese)
• AI Overviews: The Real Impact on Traffic and How to Respond — The real effect of AI Overviews on click-through rates, and what sites can do about it. (Chinese)
• Zero-Click Search: How Brands Stay Visible — Zero-click search, where users search, read and leave without clicking, and how brands can stay visible anyway. (Chinese)
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): From Ranking to Being Cited — Defines GEO: the goal shifts from being indexed and ranked by search engines to being cited by AI engines. (Chinese)
• Server-Side Tracking — Server-side tracking moves data collection from the browser to your own server, cutting the data lost to ad blockers and cookie restrictions. (Chinese)
• Agentic Commerce — Agentic commerce: AI agents handle the whole purchase for the user, from choosing and comparing products to checkout. (Chinese)
• Information Gain — Information gain is the net new information a piece adds beyond what the reader has already seen, and the core dimension Google uses to judge content value. (Chinese)
• AI Recommendation Poisoning — An attack that plants hidden instructions in an AI assistant’s memory so it favors a particular brand in later conversations. (Chinese)
• The CiteMET Framework — CiteMET is a growth method that uses pre-encoded prompt links to get content cited, remembered and tracked by AI, and why security teams treat it as a form of prompt injection. (Chinese)
• ITNQ: Information Threshold and Quality — The implicit standard search engines use to judge whether content fully answers a question: meet it and the search ends, miss it and the user keeps looking. (Chinese)
• Fan-Out Queries — How AI search breaks one question into several sub-queries, retrieves results for each and combines them into a single answer. (Chinese)
• UCP: The Universal Commerce Protocol — Google’s open commerce standard that lets AI agents complete the whole journey from product discovery to payment on the user’s behalf, across platforms. (Chinese)
• LLM Perception Drift — How a language model’s description of a brand, and its tendency to recommend it, shifts over time, often independently of anything the brand does. (Chinese)
• Semantic HTML and SEO — The semantic HTML tags SEO people need to know, the background behind them, and how to use them on a page. (Chinese)

Google Patents

• Google Patent US7536408B2: Phrase-Based Indexing and Co-Occurring Phrases — A reading of Google’s phrase-based indexing patent. The takeaway: repeating one keyword does nothing, while co-occurring phrases raise a page’s relevance. Useful when planning keyword lists. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US7716225B2: The Reasonable Surfer Model — The Reasonable Surfer patent weights a link by how likely a user is to click it, so the same link can be worth very different amounts depending on placement and context. Relevant to both backlinks and internal linking. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US20230267277A1: Activity Logs and Implicit User Feedback — Reads the document activity log patent alongside the Navboost leak to show how implicit signals such as clicks, long clicks and scroll depth feed into rankings. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US8458196B1: Topic Authority and the Case for Pillar and Cluster — A reading of Google’s topical authority patent: how search engines accumulate authority for authors and sites topic by topic, which is the algorithmic basis for pillar-and-cluster content. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US11275895B1: Author Vectors and Entity Trust — The author vector patent describes how AI can identify an author from writing style and the knowledge graph. I see it as the logic underneath author E-E-A-T, and the reason expert teams should put their names on their work. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US10235423B2: Entity Ranking Metrics — Covers the three entity metrics in this patent, relevance, notability and contribution, and how search moved from matching keywords to computing over entities. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US12158907B1: Thematic Search, the Blueprint for AI Overviews — The thematic search patent shows how AI breaks a complex query into modular subtopics. I read it as the blueprint for AI Overviews, which means planning content around the subtopics it can cover. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US11354342B2: Information Gain and the End of Me-Too Content — The information gain patent describes how machine learning scores originality. The conclusion: skyscraper-style lookalike content keeps losing ground, and real data and first-hand experience are the way out. (Chinese)
• Google’s Core Search Patents, 2010 to 2026 — The hub for the patent series, surveying the core patents since 2010 on ranking, entity understanding, information gain and generative AI. I use patents to anticipate where the algorithm is heading; read this map before the individual write-ups. (Chinese)
• Google Patent US12536233B1: AI-Generated Custom Landing Pages — A 2026 patent in which Google’s AI can bypass a low-scoring source page and generate a custom landing page for the user. How it works and how SEO should respond. (Chinese)

Site Building

• Headless Websites: History and Analysis — Where headless architecture came from, what it offers, and how headless builds work on Shopify and WordPress. For teams weighing a decoupled front end. (Chinese)
• Website Copyright Theft: A Reporting and Takedown Guide — Step-by-step instructions and reporting links for filing complaints with GoDaddy, Google and others when your site’s content, images or design are copied. Follow it directly when it happens to you. (Chinese)

Industry News

• Yiguo Tech and Semrush Announce a Strategic Partnership — The partnership announcement: Yiguo handles SEO and GEO strategy and delivery, and Semrush provides data monitoring. (Chinese)
• Google Search Console Now Shows the Last 24 Hours — The Search Console update that added data for the past 24 hours, and what it means for day-to-day monitoring. (Chinese)
• SearchGPT Goes Live: How to Use It and What It Means for SEO — Hands-on notes from the day SearchGPT opened to paying users, with my comparison against other AI search engines and what it suggests for SEO. (Chinese)
• Bing Webmaster Tools Update: 16 Months of Data, Recommendations and Copilot — Bing Webmaster Tools now shows 16 months of data, has turned insights into recommendations and started testing a Copilot assistant. A quick rundown for anyone using it. (Chinese)