Diggity Marketing News Roundup—December 2025
Nothing in the SEO world is slowing down as we approach the end of the year. In this roundup, you’ll get the latest news about Google’s recent big moves, the advance of AI, and more. It starts with some of the top-trending headlines of the last month. You’ll learn how Black Hat SEOs may be responsible for a big hack on Disney’s website, how Google’s AI mode now launches from search results, and why Google is changing how it enforces ads. Then, you’ll learn about the loss of even more schema types and the breakdown of all the AI and search changes that have come down this year. You’ll also read Google’s reaction to recent court decisions and learn how they plan to protect users from “parasite SEO”. After that, there’s even more news. Fresh reporting also shows that Black Hat SEO is back, and may be a larger threat going into the new year. Did Black Hat SEOs Just Hack Disney’s Website? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMvnEGgSVXQ Ahrefs brings you this look at a surprisingly high-profile attack by black hat SEOs that targeted Disney. Host Sam Oh takes you through how the attack appeared to searchers, how it happened, and what’s likely to come next. The attack targeted Google’s search features to make “Black Hat SEO Packages” appear as a link under results for Disney. For searchers, it seemed that this link was part of Disney’s website, and therefore an official part of the company. Fortunately, Disney is not getting into the backlink business. Using both new and old (90’s old!) techniques, the black hats were able to confuse Google into including their result among the official ones. Sam breaks down how it happened. Sam shows you how the SEO hackers directed tons of referring pages to a gated log-in page on the Disney site so that Google would associate that page with Black Hat topics. However, this wasn’t caused by the referring links alone. The hackers also exploited a technical glitch. The issue was that the page was a 302 redirect rather than a 301. A 302 redirect is intended to inform Google that the page is only temporarily redirected, rather than permanently. This keeps the page indexed, and Google continues to try to assess its purpose. Google appears to have extrapolated the topic of the page from the backlinks alone, but Sam is convinced that this is a technical error rather than a real hack. As of this time, Disney’s results are back to normal. Black hats aren’t the only rising threat Google-dependent sites are facing. A lot of search results space has been lost to search features, and now you may be fighting AI, too. AI Mode Can Launch Directly from Search Results https://x.com/rmstein/status/1995572911093289055 Robby Stein, Product VP at Google Search, brings you this X thread announcing that AI mode can now launch directly from search results. As Robby lets you know, the test is starting now, and the new feature will be available to searchers globally (though only on mobile devices). As part of the announcement, he includes a video that demonstrates how you can now use Google’s search bar as an AI prompt field. All you need to do is perform a prompt-style search, and the AI mode will automatically launch and replace typical results. The AI mode appears in the spot where AI overviews do for most typical searches. Searchers will have the option to expand a full AI answer or transition back to typical search results. If searchers choose to engage with the AI mode, they can continue asking follow-up questions for more refined results. “This brings us closer to our vision for Search,” Stein wrote in the post, “just ask whatever’s on your mind – no matter how long or complex – and find exactly what you need.” If it catches on, this could change everything for SEO. Search engines like Google may soon only show results in specific cases. For now, this is only a trial. Advertisers are also getting some attention from Google this month. For them, it may be good news. We’ve Significantly Improved the Accuracy of Advertiser Account Suspensions https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/improved-accuracy-account-suspensions/ Keerat Sharma, VP of Ads Privacy and Safety at Google, brings you this announcement about major changes to advertiser moderation. The company has acknowledged a problem with legitimate advertisers being suspended for incorrect flags or unintentional violations. In the announcement, Keerjat claims that Google has made significant improvements based on the responses they’ve received from frustrated advertisers. Policies have been clarified, AI detection of violations has been improved, and appeals have been streamlined. Google announced some immediate improvements as a result of the changes. The announcement includes a video with some additional details about how the reductions were achieved. If you have been experiencing issues with enforcement actions on your ads, you may find Google to be a more cooperative partner now. Google is making many more changes in the closing months of the year. As you’ll learn in the following piece, they’ve killed some schema types. Google Just Killed More Schema Types – Here’s What You Should Focus on Instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9cQ5xgC7q4 Edward Sturm brings you this breakdown of the schemas that are no longer supported. As he reminds you, Google has been removing schemas going back several years now. SEOs once devoted resources to marking up their content properly. Some of that work was for nothing. The announcement was made by John Mueller, who is quoted as saying the move was made to “simplify the search results page.” John claimed that features that weren’t being used often were the targets of this action, and that more schema types may be removed in the future. Google has declined to say what types will be removed later, but the following schema types have now been removed: Watch the complete video to learn more about the schema types that are going away. Edward also gives his opinion on where structured schema goes from here and why Google may have acted. Next, with so much happening, it’s easy to forget some of the changes that should be part of your strategies in the coming year. In the next piece of the month, two professional SEOs cover it from the beginning to the end. Breaking Down AI & Search Changes in 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4fIHPtjIMY Vaenisaa Sandrasagren brings you this interview with Britney Muller, former Senior SEO Scientist at Moz. In it, they cover most of the history of what happened to SEO and AI over the last year. The far-reaching discussion covers how AI search really works now that most models are up and running, why ChatGPT doesn’t really have algorithm updates (or an algorithm), and what SEOs should really be measuring if they want to improve. A significant part of the discussion centers on the issue of research and how it has evolved for all SEOs in a relatively short time. Britney discusses how she got into SEO and how she thinks good research can be done in the LLM era. Britney offers interesting insights from her time at Moz for SEOs who are curious about how that team approached SEO research and experiments. She also covers how she is building AI workflows with Google Sheets, GPT for Sheets, and other tools. The discussion goes on to cover prompt injection and the risks that marketers face when working with an AI browser like Atlas. Britney offers some ideas on how marketers can protect their sites. Check out the complete interview to get a great review of the year. It covers most of the topics you’ll be thinking about in your next year’s strategy, including AI citations, Reddit, new KPIs, and more. Next, you’ll hear more from Google. They’re responding to an investigation into their anti-spam efforts by the EU. Defending Search users from “Parasite SEO” spam https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/defending-search-users-from-parasite-seo-spam/ Pandu Nayak, Chief Scientist of Search at Google, presents a statement on the company’s anti-spam policies. In the piece, he explains some of Google’s motivations for developing these policies and argues that interference will undermine the search experience for users. Google is facing an investigation from the EU over its site reputation abuse policy, in particular, and whether it is being applied consistently. In response, Google disclosed new information about how it developed that policy and what kind of behavior it considers to be a violation. Pandu defined reputation abuse as a situation where a spammer pays a publisher to display content and links on the publisher’s website, exploiting the publisher’s good ranking to trick users into clicking on low-quality content. He claims that it is for these reasons that Google updated its policy in 2024 to ban the use of deceptive measures to improve search ranking. The EU is taking issue with this policy, but Google claims that without it, bad actors would be able to displace sites that don’t use those spammy tactics, and it would degrade search for everyone. Read the complete statement to learn more and see some visual examples of how Google defines Read More Read More
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