Best of SEO — October 2025

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   Article

   David Heinemeier Hansson·27w

   Give me AI slop over human sludge any day

   AI-generated content, while often criticized as 'slop', is preferable to the low-quality human-created content that already floods the web. Content mills, SEO-optimized garbage, and manipulative marketing tactics represent a worse use of human creativity than letting AI handle this soul-crushing work. The real problem isn't AI content but our collective consumption habits and the endless demand for low-quality material that keeps both humans and machines producing it.

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   Article

   Amir·27w

   Google Just Made a Subtle but MASSIVE Change

   Google removed the num=100 search parameter, limiting results to 10 per page instead of 100. This change significantly impacts LLMs that rely on Google's indexed results, reducing their access to long-tail content by 90%. The shift caused 88% of sites to see reduced impressions and affected platforms like Reddit. The change emphasizes the critical importance of distribution strategy over product quality for startups and businesses, as discoverability becomes increasingly challenging.

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   Article

   Chrome Developers·26w

   What's new in Lighthouse 13

   Lighthouse 13 consolidates performance audits into unified insights shared with Chrome DevTools. The release removes legacy audits like Speed Index, font-size, and offscreen-images, replacing them with modern insight-based audits for layout shifts, duplicated JavaScript, and LCP optimization. The update requires Node 22.19 or higher and is available via npm, Chrome Canary, and will roll out to PageSpeed Insights and Chrome 143 stable.

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   Article

   Addy Osmani·28w

   The History of Core Web Vitals

   Core Web Vitals emerged from Google's 2014-2020 efforts to create open web performance standards, moving away from AMP's walled garden approach. Launched in May 2020, the initiative defined three key metrics: LCP (loading), FID (interactivity), and CLS (visual stability). These metrics became Google Search ranking signals in 2021, incentivizing the entire web ecosystem to optimize. Browser improvements, framework optimizations, and CMS enhancements collectively saved Chrome users over 10,000 years of waiting time in 2023 alone. The metrics continue evolving, with INP replacing FID in 2024 and soft navigation support addressing single-page applications.

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   Article

   NextJS·25w

   The Next.js SEO Playbook

   A comprehensive guide to optimizing Next.js applications for search engines in 2025. Covers rendering strategies, performance optimization, and content structure techniques to balance speed and discoverability while managing dynamic data for better search rankings.

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