The llms.txt and discussion around it recently is quite controversial.
On one hand, Google’s Search Relations team (led by John Mueller and Gary Illyes) has explicitly stated that llms.txt files will not help your SEO or search rankings. On the other hand, Google’s developer tools team recently introduced an experimental “Agentic Browsing” category into Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights that actively audits for an llms.txt file.
This seems contradictory, but it makes perfect sense once you separate Search Discovery from On-Page Navigation.
In the past, I have been exploring various ways to increase the reach of my website and other websites that I am working with, which are publishing content regularly.
I have explored a way of publishing my content in Bing News, which was typically faced with rejection without any explanation. My last attempt on this matter was in July 2024, after which I decided not to bother anymore. Overall, this option was deprecated shortly after.
From time to time, my site is landing in Bing Jail for no reason. With my involvement in the past, I escaped from Bing Jail, but from time to time, I am serving a sentence again and again.
The most recent Bing Jail for my site happened shortly after 2nd October 2025 and lasted until 17th December 2025, when I started seeing a slow recovery without me doing anything in that matter. This nonsense that is going on with Bing prevents me from recommending search engines other than Google, such as DuckDuckGo, which relies heavily on Bing. Microsoft needs to sort out its nonsense if it ever wants to come closer to Google. In the current age of AI, I don’t think that will ever happen.
Back in 2023, I have looked at how to add relevant hreflang tags to my personal website, which considered adding self-reference to the current language, reference to a translated page (if available), and falling back with x-default to a page that is designed as a language switcher page.
Since then, I thought that this approach was correct, but found out that this solution, on my website, where not all content is 100% translated, is not good for sites fully translated by default.
Here is how I learned from it and how I optimised hreflang and x-default on websites built with Hugo.
GitHub is a great place to find some good resources and solutions. Whenever I need it personally or professionally, if the solution is really useful, I make sure to add a star to it.
I review my stars from time to time, and it wasn’t any different on the 31st of December 2024.
By the end of 2024, I had accumulated the following, which are really worth looking at.
The list is curated, and I pick the ones that are worth knowing for the following year, 2025.
Recently, I have been in contact with several people who have been thanking me for posting articles that have helped them significantly with their technological struggles or in easing their issues.
Some of them have been so happy that they would like to know how to donate a bit to support the cause. While this gesture is appreciated, most of the activities on my site are non-profit.
I used to have ads displayed on my website when it was hosted on WordPress. However, after migrating to Hugo, I soon realized that despite the speed benefits, the web performance was being compromised due to ads served through Google AdSense.
I managed to significantly reduce the costs for my website, so I decided to take the step of removing ads altogether, and I have been happy with this decision.
Setting a hreflang meta tag on your multilingual website shall be as simple as a piece of cake. Just put the relevant meta tag on your website, refer to the translated version and on translated version refer back to the original one.
Sadly, on 25 April 2025, Google announced the following:
As of today, publishers can no longer add publications to the Publisher Centre. We are making this change as part of a transition to roll out automatically created publication pages later this year.
Publishers with manually created publication pages will continue to have access to customisation features until later this year, when pages will shift to being automatically created.
I am providing the following article for reference only.
Do you have a website or blog where you publish new things, either daily or from time to time?
Do you know that you can publish them in Google News?
Recently, when I read one of the articles on 9to5mac noticed, that after their post they got this neat feature.
An option to follow their site through Google News.
It gives them an additional way to get more visitors but also convinces them to stay connected with their content.
My first impression was… I want this as well on one of my websites, so I start exploring how to do that. When I did that, I have been surprised at how relatively easy it was without any extra work from myself. By utilising the website RSS Feed and going through initial configuration and approval (that took approximately 2-3 days) my first site was live and posts were updated when published.
