Fery

I have tried Fable 5.2 today on lots of computer-use and general knowledge work. Opus 5.5 feels way better for general knowledge work tasks, and I am switching all my agents back. Fable 5.2 is not worth it for most tasks, it's WAY more expensive, slower, and inferior on computer-use tasks.

We used free Met Office data to land massive links in The Sun (DR 89), the Scottish Sun (DR 77) and other news websites, for our home appliance client. This is how we landed these big links, step-by-step: • We downloaded free weather data from the Met Office, for 197 UK towns and cities • We gave each place a gloom score out of 100, based on rain, sunshine and humidity between September and February • Our research revealed that Derry is the gloomiest place in the UK in autumn and winter, with just 366 hours of sunshine in six months • We wrote up a nice press release about the worst places in the UK to dry your washing outside • Then we wrote a different version for weather, lifestyle and travel journalists, and local versions for towns like Derry, Paisley, Cardiff and Aberdeen • We sent each version to the journalists who write about it, a few thousand journalists in total The Sun picked up our story and linked back to our client, the day before the clocks went back: "UK's gloomiest cities ahead of clocks going back as spot with just TWO hours of sunshine a day steals unwanted crown" The Scottish Sun also picked up our story, with a Scottish angle: "Scottish town named one of gloomiest in UK ahead of clocks going back" 💡 This campaign shows the power of writing different versions of the same story. Weather, lifestyle, travel and local journalists all write about different things. If you give each of them their own version, you reach a lot more journalists with the same research, and you land a lot more links. Give journalists unique angles and stories, and they will reward you with some juicy links 🙂

AI content writers are like adult toys. They get the job done but they are missing that human touch.

Two years from now, we'll look back and say how stupid it was for us humans to sit at a desk all day and work from a computer. Most knowledge work will be done by AI, on your computer (via Claude Code in the terminal, for example). It will be able to do everything that you do now, 100X faster and better. But you will be freely moving around and commanding the AI that operates your Mac, from your phone. Last week it was the school holidays in the UK, and I did more work from my phone while training football with my kids than I did in three months at my desk, one year ago. My AI paid household bills, built software, checked thousands of journalists for their beats, paid invoices, sent invoices, edited videos, sorted my emails, and did everything I can do on my Mac, while I was overseeing it from my phone on the football pitch. The future seems scary, but AI will set us free to be 100X more productive and free to work from anywhere while enjoying life with our loved ones.

Disney World got us a DR 91 link in the New York Post, and many other news websites, for our vacation rental client. With this PR campaign, we compared the price of a week in a Disney World hotel with a week in Spain, Greece and Italy. This is how we've done it: ▪ We looked at Disney World's website, and took the price of 26 on-site hotels, for a family of four staying seven nights in May 2027 ▪ We did the same for the top 10 hotels in Spain, Greece and Italy, on Booking.com ▪ Our research revealed that a week in a Disney World hotel costs $4,064 on average, more than a week in any of those three countries ▪ We wrote up a nice email about our findings, and sent it to journalists who write about travel and family ▪ We followed up 12 days later with a second email, as Halloween was coming up ▪ We checked the Disney prices again, for the week of Halloween ▪ The average went up to $4,924, and the most expensive hotel was almost $10,000 ▪ We sent it to a few thousand journalists, with this title: ↳ Disney World Halloween trips cost more than a week in Spain, Greece or Italy, study reveals ▪ Overall, we've had a 31% open rate The New York Post picked up our story, and linked back to our client. They even used our title almost word for word, in the web address of their article: ↳ disney-world-halloween-trips-cost-more-than-a-week-in-spain-greece-or-italy-study We also got links in Yahoo (DR 94), Cool Tools (DR 79), and many more. The takeaway: Digital PR doesn't have to be all fancy and extraordinary big data. Sometimes, checking the same prices again for a big date will get you a massive link, if timed well. Flights at Christmas, flowers on Valentine's Day, and even turkeys at Thanksgiving. Imagination is the limit. The rewards will be magic links to your client, just like in this example, from the images below. I hope this is helpful 😉

Thank you Google for your latest, most powerful model. But no thanks. Opus 5.5 is good enough for me.

How to get links in the New York Post with free CDC data, in 5 steps. We got massive links for our client with this story about the loneliest counties in America. - We downloaded free data from the CDC on how many adults feel lonely in each county, covering 1,996 counties and 184.2 million adults - Once we had the data for each county, we were able to rank them from the loneliest to the least lonely - We have found that Holmes County in Mississippi is the loneliest county in America, where 43.8% of adults say they feel lonely, and that Georgia has 7 of the 10 loneliest counties - We wrote multiple reports about the findings, one for each of the 39 states in the data, with the loneliest counties in that state - We sent our findings to national and local journalists in each state Within just a few days, we've seen our client being featured in local news websites across America. About two weeks later, the New York Post picked up our New York version, and wrote about The Bronx being the loneliest county in the state. Our client got 33 links from this campaign, including: New York Post - DR 91 North Jersey - DR 82 FOX59 - DR 79 News 3 Las Vegas - DR 77 CBS17 - DR 76 ... and many more. The good thing is that it's all free data for anyone to take. The CDC also has data on sleep, smoking, drinking, depression and many other health topics, for each county, so you can make lots of other stories with this approach 🔥

Imagine going back to 2016 with Opus 5.5

We landed a DR 92 link in USA Today by looking at which fears Americans google the most. How did we do it? 1. We made a list of 166 fears and phobias, from Wikipedia 2. We analysed the search volume for each fear in each state, with Google Keyword Planner 3. The fear of holes came out on top in America, with almost 5 million searches a year, followed by the fear of being trapped 4. We made a separate version for all 50 states, with the 10 biggest fears in each state, and sent each one to local journalists in that state 5. We timed the campaign with the start of October, just before Halloween Within just one day after the release, our links started landing. The campaign landed 19 links for our client, including USA Today (DR 92), Yahoo News (DR 94), and TV news websites in Massachusetts, West Virginia and Texas. Halloween, Christmas and other big dates are some of the best places to start ideation, for your next Digital PR campaign. Sometimes, a simple list and some search data can land you massive links, if pitched to the right journalists, at the right time 🎃

This is wild. We got our client on live TV, CBS News from the US, with a digital PR campaign. Our client is Power Up Gaming, a gaming news website. GTA 6 comes out on the 19th of November, and the scammers are already going after gamers. We asked our client for some expert tips on the scams that gamers should look out for, things like fake early access downloads, crypto paywalls and fake Rockstar login pages. We put this in an email and sent it out to a few thousand journalists from the UK, the US and some other countries as well. We also sent it to local journalists in 47 US states, one state at a time. Our email to Florida journalists got picked up by CBS News Miami, as the game is set in a city based on Miami. They interviewed Chris, showed his website on TV and even turned his tips into their own graphic. And the best part for us SEOs: we got them massive links too. 17 links, including CBS News (DR 92), Cybernews (DR 87) and CW33 (DR 72), and lots of other publications from the US, Italy and Taiwan. Journalists constantly need experts, even on TV. Whenever a big game, a movie or a TV show is in the news, put your client forward as the expert. It will get them links, and sometimes even a spot on live TV.

The PHP team told everyone this week: update now. Government, school and hospital websites in Europe went down, because of two critical security bugs in PHP. PHP is the programming language behind all WordPress websites, Laravel and so on. The bugs can let attackers run their own code on your server, without logging in. John Mueller from Google said: if you're taking your website down to fix it, use a 503. A 503 tells Google your website is only down for a short time. If you show a 404 instead, Google will think the page is gone, and it will remove it from its index. Here are 3 things you can do now: ▪ Return a 503 for your pages. The good news is, you can do this outside of PHP, with a CDN like Cloudflare, or by pointing your DNS somewhere else ▪ Don't return a 503 for your robots.txt file. Google said this will block all crawling ▪ Keep it short. Google said a day or two is fine, a few days at most Then update PHP as soon as possible, or ask your hosting provider to do it. Credit to Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable for finding John's post.

We got links in the Evening Standard (DR 89) and Metro (DR 88) for our house buying client, by analysing free ONS data on first-time buyers. This is how we landed these links, step-by-step: DATA ANALYSIS We downloaded the first-time buyer mortgage sales for every local authority in Britain, from the ONS website We compared them against the total number of homes in each area, to find the first-time buyer sales per 1,000 homes The data has shown that Dartford in Kent is the best place in Britain for first-time buyers, followed by Nuneaton and Bedworth, and Wandsworth Kensington and Chelsea came last, with just 3.56 sales per 1,000 homes PITCH WRITING We put together a simple report on the data No fluff, just simply highlighting the numbers and the areas Then we made 18 local versions of the report, for the areas at the top of the ranking, for example: ↳ Dartford Among Britain's Best First-Time Buyer Hotspots ↳ Four Essex areas named first-time buyer hotspots EMAIL PITCHING We sent the national report to journalists in the UK, and each local version to journalists in that area We reached a few thousand journalists, and had a 25.7% open rate We sent the emails in a few rounds over a few weeks, to make sure the email got more eyeballs The Evening Standard and Metro picked up the story and linked back to our client, together with Yahoo News (DR 94), MSN (DR 92), local news websites in Harlow and Bracknell, and many more. I hope this inspires you, and I hope the detailed breakdown helps you with your next link building campaign 👊

This is massive. trycodus.com can now automatically switch between your Claude subscriptions once it hits the five hour or weekly limits. You can add multiple Claude accounts to your Codus app, leave your computer open and go on holiday for seven days. Your Agents will work continuously without your intervention, and they will switch the Claude account when they need to. They will also notify you via the mobile app about their progress of the work they do, and you can message them from the poolside. This is game changer in so many ways as I never have to switch Claude or OpenAI accounts manually ever again.

A few years ago, I walk into our office, and there's two pots of paint on a colleague's desk, with no lids. She's painting her bathroom and needs some paint to test on the walls. Then suddenly, another colleague jumps out from her desk and scares me. I go back, I hit the desk, and the paint spills over. My colleague was shocked, she was surprised, she was sad. But then I look at the paint and I realise there's something there. There were two paints on the desk, red and yellow. But after the paint mixed, there was a third colour: orange. And I thought to myself, isn't this how digital PR and data should work? I told this story on stage at SEO Mastery Summit in Saigon, and these are the examples and the results from my slides 👇 - UK city population is a boring story on its own, we know London has the most people - The number of parking fines in every city is boring too, we know London has the most - But if we combine the two data sets, and find out how many parking fines there are in every city per 100,000 people, we have a brand new story that didn't exist before. It got us 14 links and placements, including ITV, Manchester Evening News and Time Out - Same with Canada: city population and crime data gave us the most dangerous cities, by crime per 100,000 people. This one landed 18 links and placements, including the Toronto Sun and the Calgary Herald - And you don't have to stop at two data sets. Healthy diet rate, childcare cost, crime, schools and 6 more data sets gave us the best places in Florida to raise a family, with 11 links and placements, including the Herald-Tribune and Naples Daily News Every country has government data sets on population and other statistics, so you can do this in any country you live in. I am a big fan of "simple data, interesting stories". My colleague lost her bathroom paint that day, but we found a new way to create stories 😉

By March 2027 most knowledge work will be done by AI. This is too scary. Opus 5.5 is already AGI if you give it full access to your computer and terminal. How will Opus 8.6 be?

GTA 6 got us a DR 92 link in CBS News, and many more placements in the US, Italy and Taiwan. With this PR campaign, our client warned gamers about the scams around GTA 6, which comes out on 19 November. This is how we've done it: ▪ We asked our client, a gaming news website, for a commentary on the scams that gamers should look out for ▪ The client provided us with some great expert tips on how to spot fake early access downloads, crypto paywalls and fake Rockstar login pages ▪ We put this in an email and sent it out to a few thousand journalists from the UK, the US and other countries ▪ We also sent it to local journalists in 47 US states, one state at a time ▪ We've had a 46% open rate ▪ Our email to Florida journalists got picked up by CBS News Miami, as the game is set in a city based on Miami The campaign landed 39 placements and 16 links, including CBS News (DR 92) and CW33 (DR 72). 💡 Journalists need experts, in order to be able to articulate and present information in their publications. Whenever a big game, movie or TV show gets in the buzz of the media, you can put your clients forward as experts who comment on it, and get them links that money cannot buy. Every time a big game comes out, an agency will build links. Hopefully next time, you will be that agency 🙌

John Mueller from Google admitted this week: "I probably gave people the wrong answer on this in the past. Woops." This was about square brackets in URLs. Vanessa Fox, who used to work at Google, asked him on Bluesky if Google sees these two URLs as the same page: /category?filter[]=123 /category?filter%5B%5D=123 John's answer was: "I would have assumed they're equivalent, but they're NOT." This is a big thing for SEO, especially if you have an online shop with filter pages. Google will crawl both versions, and if the content is the same, it will pick one of them. But it might not be the version you want to rank. ACTIONS TO TAKE: - Make sure you pick one version, and use it in your links, canonical tags, sitemaps and structured data - Do the same with spaces, plus signs and %20 - If you must use square brackets in your URLs, always encode them In this video, I will show you exactly what John said, and what to do about it 👇 Many thanks to Vanessa Fox who asked the question, and to Barry Schwartz who spotted it.

Halloween season has officially started for digital PR stories 🎃 So far we landed in huge publications, such as New York Post, USA Today and Forbes, and many more. Here are some stories where we secured links and placements: 1. How much would the most famous horror movie homes cost today? We looked at Redfin and Zillow data to find out which horror movie home is worth the most. The mansion from House on Haunted Hill is worth $16.8 million, and Buffalo Bill's house from The Silence of the Lambs is the cheapest, at $295,000. We landed in New York Post (DR 91) and 26 other news websites for our AI video client. 2. The most popular pet costumes this Halloween We analysed the search volume for pet costumes in each state, with Google Keyword Planner. Dinosaur came out on top, followed by pumpkin and hot dog. The press loved our story, and we got 28 links for our pet client, including USA Today (DR 92) and Patch (DR 90). 3. The most popular Halloween costume in each state We analysed the Google searches for 1,843 Halloween costumes in all 50 states. Poison Ivy is the most popular costume in America, and Minion is the number one in California. Forbes (DR 94) picked up our story and linked back to our shoe client, and the outreach is still ongoing. Every year, around Halloween time, journalists need fun and spooky stories to write about. This makes Halloween one of the best places to start ideation, for your next digital PR campaign. Give journalists unique angles and stories, and they will reward you with some juicy links 🙂

This happened at BrightonSEO this month. SEO expert and AEO expert meets at the conference. AEO expert finally agrees SEO is not dead. There is peace now.

This is how we got 113 links for our children's books client, with four simple steps: ▪ We analysed the 2024 baby name data from the Social Security Administration, and compared it against the 300 biggest cities in the US ▪ We determined which city names are the most popular baby names in America (Charlotte came first, with 12,564 babies) ▪ We wrote a report email, and credited the research to our client ▪ We sent the email to 10,676 national and regional journalists from the US, with 12 regional versions for cities such as Savannah, Austin and Phoenix The campaign earned big links in USA Today (DR 92), FOX 5 Atlanta (DR 80), Arizona's Family (DR 79), and over 100 more news websites. PR link building doesn't always mean heavy datasets. Sometimes, all you need is two simple lists, like the baby names and the biggest US cities. Look for lists that you can combine, and you'll start generating a tsunami of links for your clients 🔥 Just like in the example below.