Google has officially confirmed the completion of its June 2024 spam update, a week-long process aimed at enhancing search result quality by targeting websites that violate the company’s spam policies.

The update began on June 20, 2024, and was announced via Google’s Search Central Twitter account.

Google’s Search Status Dashboard shows the update finished on June 27 at 9:10 PDT.

This spam update is part of Google’s ongoing efforts to combat web spam and improve user experience.

It’s important to note that this is not the algorithmic component of the site reputation abuse update, which Google has clarified is yet to be implemented.

Key Points Of The June 2024 Spam Update

1. The update targets websites violating Google’s spam policies.
2. It is separate from the anticipated site reputation abuse algorithmic update.
3. The rollout process lasted approximately one week.

Google’s spam updates typically focus on eliminating various forms of web spam, including:

• Automatically generated content aimed solely at improving search rankings
• Purchased or sold links intended to manipulate rankings
• Thin, duplicated, or poor-quality content
• Hidden redirects or other deceptive techniques

This latest update follows Google’s previous spam update in March 2024.

Despite that update’s impact, some AI-generated content performed well in search results.

An analysis by Search Engine Journal’s Roger Montti revealed that certain AI spam sites ranked for over 217,000 queries, with more than 14,900 ranking in the top 10 search results.

The June update is expected to refine Google’s spam detection capabilities further. However, as with previous updates, it may cause fluctuations in website search rankings.

Those engaging in practices that violate Google’s spam policies or heavily relying on AI-generated content may see a decline in their search visibility.

Conversely, legitimate websites adhering to Google’s guidelines may benefit from reduced competition from spammy sites in search results.

SEO professionals and website owners are advised to review their sites for spammy practices and ensure compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

For more information about the June 2024 spam update and its potential impact, refer to Google’s official communication channels, including the Google Search Central Twitter account and the Google Search Status Dashboard.

Featured Image: ninefotostudio/Shutterstock

Content marketing can become complicated and effortful very quickly.

Content teams need to manage ideation, writing, editing, proofing, publishing, promotion, analytics, and reporting across a team of writers, reviewers, and dozens of articles each month. Smart content leads find ways to automate some of these processes to let them focus on what really matters.

So, to inspire you and show you not only what’s possible but also the kind of things that are really worth automating, we asked three experts to share their favorite workflows.

• Topic ideas with keywords and their SEO data.
• Briefs.
• Outlines.
• Articles.
• Tasks with their statuses and different ways to view them (calendar, kanban, etc.)
• Contributors and their roles.
• Notifications.

The general idea behind this is the use of triggers and actions. A complete set of a trigger and at least one action is often referred to as a Zap (coined by one of the automation tool providers Zapier).

All of our experts have this kind of central base, and I guess it’s hard to resist having one once you start automating things. So here’s one of those systems by Eric Doty:

Eric mentioned using Ahrefs as his source of keywords. If you’re going to do the same, here’s a quick tip for you — use automated keyword clustering right inside Ahrefs, so you won’t need to figure it out later on.

Tip

Keyword clustering allows you to group keywords with the same intent — and you’ll come across these a lot (e.g., “car insurance” and “auto insurance)”.

All you need to do is click the Cluster by Parent Topic tab in the Matching terms report in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. You can also export the list and use it in Airtable, Notion, or similar.

Returning to our central content base, it’s important to note that not everyone will need to visit it regularly. As Tommy pointed out, a content automation system can integrate with processes your teammates follow (and possibly even other automation).

For example, some stakeholders need real-time notifications about status changes, while others only require a weekly digest of content output. Automation handles this excellently.

You can also have people fill out forms that will feed into system. For instance, sales team could use a form like that to request new content without needing to enter your Airtable setup.

Caitlin was very generous, so you’re about to see not only what this workflow does but also copy the conditional logic for Airtable and ready-made Zaps!

The whole process starts when Caitlin assigns the status of an article to “Writing”.

This triggers an Airtable automation that adds the brief to the writer’s Google Sheet. A Zap is then triggered by the new row in Google Sheets, which adds the assignment date and sends an email to the writer, notifying them of their new assignment.

Here’s what the setup of this part looks like in Airtable:

When the writer finishes their part, Caitlin gets an automated notification in Slack.

Next, the article goes to the expert for a review. This is crucial for Caitlin’s strategy because it enhances the content with unique expertise and real-life experience.

Thanks to automation, all Caitlin needs to do is change the status to “Reviewing”. This adds the article link, brief, and word count to the reviewer’s Google Sheet.

On top of that, this automation sends an email to the reviewer notifying them of the assignment. And here’s the cool part: the email will differ depending on whether article is a completely new one or a second review. Here’s how you can set this up in Zapier.

When the reviewer is finished, they check “Done” and select a field in a “Next steps” dropdown in their sheet to reflect whether the article is approved or needs changes made by the writer. Then Caitlin gets a message like this in Slack:

If the writer needs to make changes, there’s a special status for that, too. When Caitlin changes the status from “Reviewing” to “Writer is updating”, this automatically changes the status in the writer’s Google Sheet. And to make sure the writer won’t miss that status change, there’s an automated email notification, too.

Finally, we have the editing stage. Now Caitlin changes the status to “Editing,” which adds a row in the editor’s Google Sheet, just like it did for the writer and the expert.

When an article is done, the editor changes the status in their sheet, and adds any comments if they want to, Caitlin receives this message:

You can copy the exact Zaps Caitlin used here:

Now, let’s say you’ve a big content inventory and want to help other teams access it for use in prospect calls or newsletters. You can use another of Caitlin’s workflows, which adds an AI-generated summary of all published articles to Airtable through a Zap.

Here’s inspiration from Tommy Walker, sharing how you can automate podcast production by connecting a few different tools to Airtable.

Here are the steps:

1. Tommy sends out an invitation to book a time slot for an episode via Calendly.
2. When the guest books a time, this creates a new record in Airtable with status “Booked” and their details filled.
3. This also triggers Google Drive to create a new folder and two subfolders within in (one of them is for the guest to upload their headshot).
4. Uploading a headshot into the folder notifies the designer.
5. Next, an Email goes out to book a precall with the guest.
6. Now, Tommy can click the “Create page” button right inside Airtable which creates a page and a blog post in WordPress (how cool is that!).
7. Once the broadcast is complete on YouTube, it goes into the RSS feed in Castmagic. This allows Tommy to use the tool to create a transcript and use an AI chatbot on it.

What’s the difference between content automation and automated (AI) content?

Is automating content good for SEO?

TLDR; if you want to fully automate content, as in not even look at it before publishing, it will most likely be bad for SEO, even though Google is not against AI content per se.

Various SEO experiments and case studies have proven one thing beyond doubt: gaming the system can bring only short-term gains. Google catches up to bad content and spam sooner or later, whether that’s automated content or not. And when this happens, your traffic charts will look like this:

You could disclose making content with AI, as Google suggests. But paradoxically, trying to adhere to the guidelines can compromise the user experience (especially for YMYL topics). Although consumers don’t seem to be against AI content in general (study), they are likely to be cautious about it (study).

Finally, the content automation experts I talked with don’t use AI for content generation. Given their experience, I wasn’t expecting a different answer. They might use AI for other things like generating outlines, finding content gaps (check out our AI Content Grader), or looking for relevant subtopics, but not for actual writing.

Is content automation for all team sizes?

If you want to use AI for SEO effectively yet safely, we’ve got fourteen tried and tested ideas for you.

What are the common pitfalls of content automation?

The first pitfall is creating infinite loops. This is when a task runs over and over again until you max out your automation tool’s plan. If you’re using Zapier, here’s how to avoid it.

Another pitfall is automating everything just because it’s possible.

Follow Eric’s advice: automate tasks you’ve handled manually a few times. Avoid automating new processes immediately; first, do them manually to see if they’re worth automating. Otherwise, you might waste time on ineffective workflows or overwhelm yourself with too many automated tasks.

Final thoughts

Got questions or comments? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.

They have a special place in content marketing and SEO history. They were among the early champions of inbound and content marketing and living proof that SEO is a great marketing tactic. Just copying what they do for SEO would be enough for a complete SEO playbook, especially for SaaS.

I dug deep into Ahrefs data to share these nine surprising takeaways from their strategy.

We all know that the sun is big, but when you see one of those at-scale depictions of the solar system, you instantly realize that “big” is an understatement. The same is true of HubSpot’s blog.

I found no bigger corporate blog than HubSpot’s. If you know one, do let me know, and I’ll be more than happy to take this back: HubSpot’s blog is the biggest corporate blog ever regarding search traffic.

Their blog generates an estimated 8.2M organic visits per month, worth over $5.3M in ad money. Just a few months back, it was even larger — over 10M visits.

And since this is how HubSpot’s “solar system” looks…

We need to travel to another “system” to find bigger blogging stars. We need to look at blogs in general to the point where it’s unclear whether these are still blogs or news sites.

So, HubSpot’s blog isn’t as big as Mashable, and Health.com, but it’s bigger than Harvard Business Review, RollingStone, Coindesk, The Verge, and comparable to Wired. And these are all businesses of their own.

In case you’re wondering how big the blog is, it’s over 18K pages with 148 blog posts published in May 2024 alone.

You probably expect their best-performing posts to be about marketing or sales… and you’d be wrong.

“Shrug emoji” and “famous quotes” together account for almost 10% of all blog traffic, and there are many more topics like that.

Now, it’s common sense this is low-intent, unqualified traffic they won’t convert quickly, if ever. But it’s also common sense that the more traffic, the better. So which common sense wins?

Naturally, this is no accident that HubSpot fights for these loosely knit keywords. If you try to outrank them, they will fight you, because they’ve been fighting with Goodreads for “famous quotes” for years.

Ahrefs’ Page Inspect tool shows that they’ve been making some major changes to keep this page ranking.

Why bother with these topics? Because when you’re the size of HubSpot and you share their freemium model, you’re going to need “irrelevant” traffic more than small companies. We’re explaining this phenomenon in more detail in Why Big Companies Make Bad Content.

Good luck copying this stunt:

Why is this a big deal? Because it’s very, very rare to rank twice on the first page of Google with the same type of content (blog posts in this case). I wrote about this in Keyword Diversification: Cannibalization’s Good Twin (SEO Study).

Is this one of those “too big not to rank” situations? Why do we need to be told what HubSpot thinks product marketing is twice? When Ahrefs ranks two times on page one, we at least give you two different things: knowledge and a tool.

Maybe it means that there’s something broken with Google? If you ask me, that one SERP is a great topic for one of those panels where search engineers gather to talk about the quality of the ranking systems.

HubSpot tried to rank for “crm” (183k monthly volume and 85 KD) with a typical product page https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm (green line). They never got to that #1 spot.

So, years after, they made a page in a more educational style https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm/what-is, catering to a purely information search intent and it worked (blue line).

All it took was explaining on that page the definition, who should use it, when, and a bit about how they developed it. What a great lesson about search intent.

Interestingly, it’s not a problem for Google that the page starts with a product pitch. Which is weird because the H1 refers to information but visually, everything leads to that sign-up button.

I guess it’s good enough for Google, since the page says “sign up or learn”; Google sees the entire text, the human eye, the picture and the buttons.

Actually, that dual purpose may even be an advantage — searchers don’t need to return to the SERP to search again, all their needs are served via that landing page.

Another interesting thing — they didn’t link from the crm directory to what-is-crm. Once you’re on the first page, you’re not supposed to find the latter one.

Every year HubSpot publishes an industry report about the state of marketing. For this, they poll their audience about hot marketing topics and partner up with other big brands like Wistia or Litmus. I’m sure you’ve seen it at least once.

Here’s why this is a backlink goldmine. Not only the landing page for this report gets tons of backlinks but also every other page they spin out of that report.

To illustrate, here are their most linked pages: their homepage, legal page, and the annual State of Marketing twice.

Combined, these two pages alone earned 88,892 backlinks from 21,496 domains, and there are a few more pages like that.

Part of the reason why those numbers are so high is that they keep the report under the same URL, so every year a new batch of backlinks come to basically the same page. And they get some high-profile links this way:

Backlinks are not the only benefit here. That report, its spin-off landing page, and articles heavily drawing from the content of the report, all get organic traffic.

For example, here’s the State of Marketing ranking only #10… but that’s ok because a spin-off ranks #3.

There are three things that are for sure now: death, taxes, and that HubSpot is going to publish the state of marketing report next year.

HubSpot has eight free, stand-alone tools that act as lead magnets. One of them clearly stands out in SEO terms: the Email Signature Template Generator.

“Email Signature Template Generator” — these four words make up nearly the entire content of the page.

But it’s enough for the page to rank for 5.9K keywords, bringing in 134K of free traffic from Google each month, and it even earned 22.7K backlinks.

This traffic is worth $172K in ad money that HubSpot doesn’t have to spend (instead they “only” spend an estimated $2.6K on search ads—more on that later).

Why do those few words work so well? It’s surely search intent. Most people looking for help with their email signatures simply want a tool for that, not a guide.

And here’s a tip for Ahrefs users. You can use the AI Identify intents feature in Keywords Explorer to see what kind of intent could get you the most traffic.

HubSpot has 5 big content hubs which you can see right away when you look for the most internal links to pages on the site:

But they’re nowhere to be found when you look for pages with the most organic search traffic. Which is a shame because their respective target keywords would bring tens of thousands monthly visits:

It’s proof that you shouldn’t expect content hubs (aka topic clusters) to rank at all times. And it’s kind of ironic that it comes from a brand identified with this content marketing tactic.

That said, these hubs are probably great for UX (and driving referral traffic), and could be helping other pages rank, as HubSpot’s article on the tactic suggests.

While browsing through the data, I found that Hubspot has an unusual number of lost pages.

I’ve cleaned the data a bit and found out that they are no stranger to pruning content. At least 84 pages have been redirected to other pages on the same or similar topics between April and June 2024.

Why? I think they do it to help some more promising pages rank. I’ve seen this on some other pages, and it worked.

For example, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-create-embed-codes-generator-infographic-content-ht, with all of its 102 backlinks from 75 domains, was redirected to https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-add-html-embed-codes-ht.

That last page actually ranks (unlike its donor).

Smart. Something you may want to try, too, if you have a large content inventory.

I’ve recently collected opinions of 100 markers, SEOs and business owners on the value of SEO, and most of them said this: SEO is money better spent compared to search ads. And many markets do SEO instead of search ads. But not HubSpot.

Despite the huge volume of free traffic, they still buy a portion of their traffic from Google. According to Ahrefs, they’re bidding on 2367 keywords, with CPC from $0.01 to $45.7.

These are the types of keywords they pay for:

• Keywords they already rank for like “free crm”. Probably to secure even more SERP real estate. Classic.
• Branded keywords like “hubspot pricing”. Possibly to stop competitors from eating their lunch. Classic.
• Other people’s branded keywords like “less annoying crm”. Just as competitors bid on their keywords, they bid on theirs. Classic, c’est la vie.
• Keywords hard to catch otherwise like “website maker free”. And this is the most interesting category.

So let’s take this page for example: 7 Best Free Website Builders to Check Out in 2024 [+Pros & Cons].

Initially, they created the page before offering a CMS. When they introduced the CMS later in 2022, they had find a way to drive more traffic to pages that mentioned that feature.

Unfortunately for them, as you can see on the organic traffic chart below, since they added that feature (arrows) the traffic has been quite volatile.

The volatility is caused by keyword rankings they keep gaining and losing. The more established website builder tools get them, probably because of their authority in that area.

Here’s an example: “website maker free” with 2.5K volume and 98 KD. Below you can find their ranking history.

And here you can see their ads position history chart, showing the point where HubSpot probably realized buying those keywords would be a better idea.

And it worked. Looks like they’re squeezing some traffic out of that keyword after all.

I think it’s a smart move. Some keywords are just too hard to catch. When your SEO tricks don’t work, but the keyword is still worth it, bidding on it becomes more reasonable than wasting time devising clever tactics to rank.

Final thoughts

A small bonus for Ahrefs users: if you want to earn a link from HubSpot, help them remove some of those 3080 broken external links. Head over to Site Explorer > Outgoing > Broken Links (and read our guide on broken link building).

Want to share an interesting finding about HubSpot SEO strategy? Have comments? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.