At this point, I'm practically Danny Sullivan from Google...

SEO Mentoring For Copywriters - Are You Ready To Ascend? AI is eating your lunch. Your clients think ChatGPT can replace you. You're competing on price. The Ascend Programme is here to change all of that.

Copywriters: AI is eating your lunch.

Your clients think ChatGPT can replace you.

You’re competing on price with people charging £50 for copy.

The Ascend Programme is here to change all of that.

Next intake July 2026:

Here are just ten of the reasons people have given (mostly unsolicited) for why they couldn't work with me.

See if you guess what I did that prompted some of them?

Free SEO And LinkedIn Training - Non-wanky SEO Nikki Pilkington Freebie training, including the SEO for (not just) Copywriters SEO emaail course, the LinkedIn Content Challenge, free SEO downloads, and more

Some of the things on here are pushing it a bit to call themselves ‘training’, if I’m, honest, but they’re all useful, and they're free.

Does The Google March 2026 Core Update Mean Specialist Sites Win? Google's March 2026 core update hit aggregators and directories hard. Here's what the visibility data means for your small business website.

Aleyda Solis has done a fab breakdown of the March Core Update, and one pattern runs through almost every vertical she looked at

Google is pulling traffic away from the middle and giving it to the destination.

Here’s what it means:

Google Search Console Errors Database Google Search Console Errors Database - every error, what it means, and how to fix it if it needs it.

I've also built an SEO Audit Errors Database - 142 errors across 15 categories, live and usable right now.

Google Search Console Errors Database Google Search Console Errors Database - every error, what it means, and how to fix it if it needs it.

This weekend the Google Search Console Errors Database went live -  free for everyone. 32 indexing errors, searchable, plain-English explanations, actual fixes. Go use it. 

Does Your Circle Of Credibility Hold Up When Someone Googles You? Picture this. Someone's just had a conversation with you at a networking event in Leeds. Or they've seen your name mentioned in a LinkedIn thread. Or a

My Circle of Credibility post:

Your Public Record Is Being Written Without You There’s a version of your brand that lives on the internet without your permission.

I wrote a post about your Circle of Credibility, then this dropped into my inbox and it's so much better -

Website owners everywhere panicking this morning... @rustybrick.com

A black and white photo of Mark Williams-Cook, a smiling man with glasses and a beard wearing a Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt, alongside the title of a training series: "Oh Sh*t, They Launch in 2 Weeks: The Emergency Migration Protocol."

"Oh sh*t, they launch in 2 weeks". I've been there, brought in at the last possible second to sprinkle SEO on the 'migration'. Want to find out how to survive? @withcandour.co.uk x @sitebulb.com training with me, next week. FREE!

sitebulb.com/website-migr...

The Dangerous Seduction of Click-Chasing When a publisher elevates traffic to its primary KPI, it changes how the newsroom thinks about its output. This can lead down a very dangerous path.

Swap "news stories" for "blog posts" and this could be about half the B2B sites I've audited. If your content strategy is built around clicks rather than readers, this one's for you.

SEO Mentoring For Copywriters - Are You Ready To Ascend? AI is eating your lunch. Your clients think ChatGPT can replace you. You're competing on price. The Ascend Programme is here to change all of that.

Copywriters: AI is eating your lunch.

Your clients think ChatGPT can replace you.

You’re competing on price with people charging £50 for copy.

The Ascend Programme is here to change all of that.

Next intake July 2026:

Six Website Stats That Tell You Whether Your SEO Is Actually Working I've been reading Beth Rawlins' newsletter for a while now. It's fortnightly, it's practical, and it consistently makes me think about website

Six website stats that tell you whether your SEO is actually working

SEO Conference Organisers; Where The F__k Are The Women? - SEO F**king What - Get Found on Google, make money from your website This week I've gone off script. Someone posted about an SEO conference billing itself as the UK's most advanced -- sixteen speakers, all male, not one w...

It's not about quotas or ticking boxes. It's about the fact that brilliant women in SEO exist, they're not hiding, and if your speaker line-up is 16 mainly white men, the question you need to be asking is whether anyone actually went looking.

A grid of black-and-white headshots showcasing speakers for "East meets best," including Martin Splitt (Google), Giulia Panozzo (Neuroscientive), Arnout Hellemans, Estela Franco (Shopify), Daniel Foley-Carter, Dixon Jones, Myriam Jessier, Adam Gent, Bengü Sarıca Dinçer, Brendan Bennett, and Emma-Jane Stogdon. Each photo is set against a colorful, stylized graphic background.

SearchNorwichXL is happening on 24th September and I am stoked at the line up we've got 😍

Join us: searchnorwich.org

SEO Conference Organisers; Where The F__k Are The Women? - SEO F**king What - Get Found on Google, make money from your website This week I've gone off script. Someone posted about an SEO conference billing itself as the UK's most advanced -- sixteen speakers, all male, not one w...

It's not about quotas or ticking boxes. It's about the fact that brilliant women in SEO exist, they're not hiding, and if your speaker line-up is 16 mainly white men, the question you need to be asking is whether anyone actually went looking.

SEO Myths Debunked: Footer Links Don't Count For SEO A rumour has been circulating in digital marketing circles for years that footer links are worthless for SEO. Website owners are being told to ignore these

Footer links absolutely count in SEO, but with important caveats.

Friendly reminder to be very careful taking technical SEO advice from LLMs; they will confidently make statements about how sites operate that simply aren’t true in many cases, because most LLMs can’t render JavaScript.

This includes Claude.

Free SEO And LinkedIn Training - Non-wanky SEO Nikki Pilkington Freebie training, including the SEO for (not just) Copywriters SEO emaail course, the LinkedIn Content Challenge, free SEO downloads, and more

Some of the things on here are pushing it a bit to call themselves ‘training’, if I’m, honest, but they’re all useful, and they're free.

Well that’s not a surprise theses days but it’s still disappointing:

browsergate.eu/how-it-works/

To put that another way, 2MB of HTML is around 2 million characters. That’s roughly the word count of a 400-page novel crammed onto a single web page. If your services page is somehow longer than the latest Mills & Boon, you’ve got bigger problems than Google’s crawl limits.

*sigh

The median mobile home page uses just 22KB of HTML. That’s 0.022MB. To hit Google’s 2MB crawl limit, you’d need a page about 90 times larger than a typical web page.

"We had 4 women speakers last year" is not the inclusivity win you think it is, with your all male, mostly white SEO speakers list, mate. It's giving "Some of my best friends are female" vibes...

Screenshot of a message exchange where someone pitches an automated SEO blog post generator, and Mark Williams-Cook replies, "not interested because this isn't SEO, it's spam :)"

This isn't SEO, it's stupidity. No value in, no value out. Publishing words at scale isn't a strategy, it makes you look like an idiot.

Nice one!

Force Indexing Won't Fix Your Shit Content Google's John Mueller popped up on LinkedIn recently to tell an e-commerce SEO that he "strongly recommends not relying on trying to force indexing".

Force indexing won’t fix your shit content