It's a good thing - more realistic, human-only data.
But if your SEO reporting leans on impressions, time to annotate those charts.

Full write-up here: www.conroyp.com/articles/why...

#seo #webdev #googlerankings

Without the impressions data from those bots, average position shoots up, but without a big traffic surge to go with it.

Google isn't counting so many robots any more, so the Search Console stats are more realistic than they have been in the past.

In September, Google quietly retired the old &num=100 parameter. SEO tools and bots often this to fetch 100 results per page, rather than iterating over a load of pages 1 by 1.

Those bots and scrapers were creating fake "impressions" for positions 20–100.

If your monkey brain is anything like mine, it's hard to ignore notifications coming through. Annoying when they're pointless!
Fortunately there's a simple way to turn them off on Android.

www.conroyp.com/articles/tur...

There's a very strong line up for what is always a great conference.

📅 December 3-5, 2025 | Vilnius, Lithuania
🎟 Use my promo code 2025SPEAKER_15 for 15% off tickets
🔗 buildstuff.events?sca_ref=9646...

#buildstuffconf

🔗 www.conroyp.com/articles/red...

#laravel #php #webdev

The latest example of this time wasting nonsense - apparently the badge worn by the police service of Northern Ireland is actually private content generated by an onlyfans creator. Whoever is selling the Venus Group & co their image rec tech is getting money for old rope here, absolute garbage.

Will Google ever crack down on DMCA spam? I'm not holding my breath.

If you run a site with images on it, you could soon wake up to waves of these nonsense claims too.

I dug into this frustrating new pattern in a bit more detail here:
www.conroyp.com/articles/aut...

The DMCA requires “good faith” belief in a claim. But when bots are filing at scale, there’s no faith involved - no human in the loop, no sanity check.

One of these services managed to DMCA their own admin tool. Doesn't seem like that happens when you've got any real oversight.

Because they automate everything, there’s no marginal cost to them for flooding Google with claims.

But every bad claim creates real work for publishers. These firms are filing huge numbers of claims (Lumen result total stops counting once it hits 10k)

The image recognition in these tools is... not great.

Unless there’s a particularly spicy angle to this statue that I'm just not seeing, it's unlikely that we’ve ripped off OnlyFans here. Same with the distillery - nice photo, but the odds of it legitimately being paywalled content? Low.

So why are statues & road signs getting flagged as stolen from OnlyFans creators?

DMCA bots are to blame. Companies like Takedowns AI or Venus Takedowns use AI to scan for leaked paywalled content and auto-file takedown requests.

Good idea in theory. In practice? Not so much.

We run a publisher platform that hosts images. So when Google forwards these DMCA complaints, we have to scramble to:
* review the claim manually
* file an appeal,
* wait for confirmation

Ignore it, and Google can de-index your site. It's costly either way.

We’ll explore the latest PHP features, and how they can streamline your code, improve performance, and help you write cleaner, more expressive applications.

🎟 Use code ipcmuc-paul to get 10% off:
👉 phpconference.com/munich/ticke...

#PHPCon #PHPConference #PHP2025 #ModernPHP #WebDevelopment #PHPDev

Thanks very much - delighted you're getting a kick out of it!

Hey @t-andy.bsky.social , that's very kind of you to say, delighted you enjoyed it! I'm in the middle of writing up a blog post on the way it works, and silly mistakes I made along the way. I'll DM you the list ahead of wrapping that up!