# SEO Experiments That Prove Everyone Wrong - Google Leaks, AI Myths & Ranking Signals

Channel: Edward Sturm
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA_B-xC0C_U
Duration: 1 hr 40 min
Language: English
Words: 18184
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/FA_B-xC0C_U

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[0:00] Mr. Mark Williams Cook, you are a legend in search engine optimization. You are very well known and super interesting. And before we start, could you share your background? Sure. So, I've been working in SEO now for just over 20 years. I think 22 years. Um, which could mean one of two things. It could mean either I'm really good at it or I'm really terrible at it, which is why I'm still doing it. Um, but my kind of background getting into SEO was from like a technical approach really. So I didn't have any formal qualifications to begin with in in marketing or anything. I was really into

[0:41] computers, doing programming, that kind of thing. And I think like a lot of people in that time, I just fell into SEO because there wasn't really any courses about it. Um, it wasn't that well known. It actually came about because I started building my own websites, putting them online when I was about 13 or 14. Um, and I had um a website for kind of local music in my area to put bands on and things like this. And as it happens, one of my friends had helped me install one of the first um like Amazon shops you could have on the site in it was a site

[1:15] running on PHP Nuke for anyone that that's that old. And um one day I noticed I was making like 5060 a day in commission through this shop and I was like, "Huh, how's that happening?" And we looked at AW stats um which was the the thing at the time and I found most of that traffic was coming from Google. And that's actually the moment where I was like, "Huh, that's really interesting. How does that work?" And then I started talking to people about that and ended up getting my first agency job. Um, and those times, which was like early 2000s, I guess, was um, an interesting time to work at agencies

[1:55] because most of what I was doing was like, here's a list with 2,000 directories on it, and I need you to go through and submit the site to all of these. Um, but that was really good. Um, I kind of cut my teeth there and I was at agencies for about two or three years. And then I was also then in the background building my own sites. Um, and there came a point then where I was making more on my kind of affiliate stuff and my made for AdSense sites than

[2:22] I was actually at my uh full-time job. So, I did that for a while um full-time. So, like affiliate stuff and um kind of ad revenue sites, which was great. At that point, I was like, "Oh, I've you know, I've really got this nailed." I was like early 20s um you know, sitting in my underwear eating cereal being like, "This is the life." And then I think after Yeah. After I think about a year of doing that, um I I think I just kind of got really low. It was a bit like, oh, I

[2:49] hope that pigeon comes back today. Um and actually the best it was really good for me. to the I actually went um to another agency and that agency was quite different and I was surrounded by people that were like much better programs than me, people who had like years of knowledge in marketing and then I got exposed to all different types of businesses through clients we worked at and that was really then when I learned that kind of SEO because there's two for me there's always two kinds of SEO. the kind of SEO like I do now, an agency for clients, very kind of long-term um

[3:25] focused SEO built around brands. And there was more the SEO I was doing for myself, which was how can I rank as quickly as possible and make as much money as possible. Um so yeah, so um I'm now a director at an agency called Cander, which is based in Norwich in the UK. We've got 25 people and all we do from a marketing point of view is SEO, nothing else. Um, and I've got a SAS tool called also asked, which is for intent um, research that I've had about four or five years. And we've also, so Cander owns a UK e-commerce business as well in the pet sector. So that's most

[4:01] of my time between those things. And we've got other little kind of side projects we run just to keep experimenting really. Um because it's not always safe obviously to experiment on client sites, but I like seeing what happens when you pull various levers. I'm always sharing you because you do very interesting experiments and then you share the results on LinkedIn and and often times the results are not what people expect. Like you just I just made a video. I don't know if you actually saw this video that I made. I put it out a couple days ago about your like duck

[4:33] Yeah. t-shirts. Yes, I saw that. I was so good. It was so [laughter] it was so and you've done so I've made but it was like I' I've made several videos about the experiments that you've done because you're always sharing things that are unexpected in the SEO world. I think the reason I do that um is more uh out of frustration I think for me which is that is there's so many resources to learn SEO online now like there's video tutorials there's paid for courses there's dozens of books you can get coaching mentoring like there's there's so many different ways to to learn SEO and especially now with large

[5:16] language models as a vector to to learn SEO So you're really getting there just the thing that is said the most. And I've encountered SEOs who are like, "Oh, this works like this." And I'm like, "That's interesting. How do you know that?" And the answer is because I asked an LLM. And it's like, "Well, that's just going to tell you." And it creates like a feedback loop, right? So you read the thing on the LLM, so you think that's correct. So you go and write that everywhere and then the LM hoovers it up and then you get this massive uh consensus. So yeah, the schema thing was

[5:48] interesting for me just because it's as as I said when you know you explained in the video it the the demonstrated proof was that okay it's picked up and it's not on the page so it's reading schema. Um and I just wanted to prove it it you know it does it the other way round as well. So, it's kind of like faulty thinking in a way. And I I just think as an industry, it's good. It's healthy to challenge each other because it makes us better at what we do cuz Google doesn't care if we get that wrong. You know, they're just going to be like, "Huh,

[6:20] well, you know, never mind. They're going to go and do that and think that." So, I think it's always worth, you know, and I do it to myself as well. And I invite people to do it to me to be critical, you know, not of me, but of my ideas. I'm very happy for you to be like, "This is complete rubbish." As long as you can give me a, you know, fairly logical reason or some evidence as to why and I'll change my mind if like if you can show me a a great

[6:45] reason, right? This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average Compact Keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting

[7:24] sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compact keywords.com. Back to the podcast. And for the experiment for people who don't know is you made up a bunch of like just completely invalid madeup schema like things like like I don't know it was

[8:05] like waddle style aggressive like it was all just like complete nonsense. and the LLM treated I guess it was chat GPT just treated it as if it was any other text on the page and so the fact that it was schema didn't actually matter. That's right. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of interesting things happening at the moment especially around the LLM go whatever you want to call it side with you know schema is an interesting one because we don't have in detail exactly what happens during pre-training for the these models you know we know um a lot of these appear to use um like common

[8:45] crawl data um and there's been some really interesting studies to show that's good theory in terms of how often sites are in the common crawl data and how often they're kind of cited especially when the um when the generated answer isn't prompted and we know the common crawl data does things like it strips out the HTML because it makes sense right if your large language model isn't storing the training data it's storing the probabilities of the chunks of tokens which ones are coming next so it doesn't necessarily make sense to include lots of noise if you're trying to model a language it's a language model, right? Um,

[9:24] so it makes sense to me that at that stage at least schema is or most HTML is stripped out. Um, it doesn't appear to be the case when the actual kind of userdriven bot live goes to the site. And again, I wouldn't say even that test I did conclusively says they don't use schema in that chat GPT OpenAI could have a separate system that's going around and you know reading structured data. Um I'm not saying you know that's impossible. What I'm saying is there is zero evidence for it at the moment. So why would I believe something that could be true? Like anything could be true,

[10:05] right? So, and that's just where I try and base my time and and my thinking. And it's difficult as well. So, I'm I'm sure you just saw like um Cloudflare have announced that feature for the markdown files, right? Um for LMS and that just seems bonkers to me. Um I think it was Profound did a study um where they looked at how often the content was uh cited and they did a control test with markdown without markdown and there was basically no difference there. And it's such a simple thing to do to take the content out of a page, you know, when you've got these tech companies with, you know, tens of

[10:46] millions or billions, sorry, of investment, hundreds of billions of investment, sort of thinking, oh, you know, that they they need a markdown file. There's no way they could get the content here. Like I if I can do that in like 15 minutes, they definitely can. Um, and I don't think the arguments around, oh, it it takes less tokens are particularly valid. Um, so I'm interested what's happening there. I don't know if that's a move similar to how lots of kind of the SEO plugins now support LLM's.ext

[11:15] basically because people want it. Um, and there's no cost to doing it. So, it's like why wouldn't you do it, you know? So, when you've got a feature list, but it irks me slightly when I log into, you know, enterprise level platform and it flags up a caution for my website. you know, there's no llm.ext present. I'm a bit like, well, the problem with all of that is that it distracts people from what actually matters and then, you know, they go and spend, you know, like LLMs at TXT can be very easy to put up, but like lots of SEOs really hyperfocus and so instead of

[11:52] spending like an hour on it, which and you shouldn't spend any time on it. You shouldn't even use it. It's not necessary, but like lots of lots of SEOs will go and spend like days on it instead of like doing keyword research and refining um or or instead of like thinking through search intent things that are like way more important like and uh it's it's just it and then you know it sounds really minor but it adds up to all these little things that that other people will say matters that doesn't matter and you just spent months months or years focusing on the wrong things that aren't actually going to

[12:30] drive results. Yeah. Especially with this is especially the case with larger companies because again I've heard that argument of um you might as well do lms.ext it, you know, it takes half an hour to do. And again, if I was running my own affiliate site, I may well do it because yeah, it's a half an hour thing. If you've ever worked with like enterprise level organizations, there's like whole machinery that needs to be kicked into action sometimes to get stuff done. It's like, okay, so we want to do lm.ext. We need to make a little business case. It needs a Jira ticket. The juro ticket has

[13:02] to be prioritized. Three people have to read it. Um, it goes through into dev into devq. Then that's got to be QA. It's like it's and like you said, it's it's all time. Um, which is why I think one of the other things I'd posted this or last year now, which was a little controversial and I don't even know why, was I said for lots of clients now, we don't recommend by default even

[13:29] bothering to write meta descriptions. And the the reason for that was and there was three studies um I call them studies as at least evidence. They weren't like set out studies in all cases. Um but tests were done where we were demonstrating two things which is um there's the data that's already out there which shows like 60 70% of the time Google's rewriting the meta description regardless of what you write anyway. So it's immediate you know there's 50 over 50% odds that the work you've done anyway isn't going to be seen. But what was really interesting we found was the meta descriptions that Google writes on average had a better

[14:09] click-through rate than if it showed the one that was written by, you know, the SEO or whatever. And I think some SEOs almost feel threatened by that, like, oh no, Google, well, it's done a terrible job on this ecom page. Like, yeah, it doesn't always get it right. But the massive advantage Google has got is that it can write the meta description based on the query. So it can pull the bit of the information from the page to match the user's query and Google can obviously be testing that itself and can you know that's what it does. It's his bread and butter, right? Whereas you as

[14:44] an SEO have to write one static meta description to try and serve every possible search. So of course you're at a massive disadvantage. And what we actually found was if you don't write a meta description, it vastly increases the odds to of Google being like, "Oh, well, I need to write one here because there isn't one." And it picks something better than you did. Yes, there are cases where it gets confused, you know, on some pages. And then, yeah, go in and fix it, especially if it's a page that's getting, you know, impressions and stuff. But that's again one of those activities where I've, you know,

[15:18] consulted at companies and there's like massive spreadsheets open with people, you know, not even using AI. They're like handcrafting meta descriptions and I'm like, "Wow, this is like dozens and dozens of hours of time that you could use to actually do something useful, right?" Well, actually, this is a good question. Uh, doing something useful. So, what what would you say one thing somebody can do this week would be to improve

[15:44] their rankings? There's so many to to pick from. Yeah. I mean, like things that maybe like common things that just people don't do that they should be doing. So, I still think in in the areas of SEO, um, for me, link acquisition is still the biggest driver. if if you want something that's basically guaranteed to move the needle, it's still, you know, the Google still uses a version of page rank. Um, the interesting thing that I found, so I published last year the some of the data from the Google exploit that we found. Um, and the really interesting thing there was because we were getting back actual not

[16:31] just like so we had the content warehouse leak, right, which showed us a bunch of variable names with very little context as to how they were used. No waitings. Yeah. The data that we got back from the exploit had the actual scores of specific sites attached to them. It had um the classifications of queries. So we knew the query, we knew how it was

[16:53] classified, we knew how it was weighted. And the thing that I found really interesting there was it was demonstrable proof that there were layers that you had to get through before you kind of got to the next race. Like I'm trying to think of a good way to explain. There was like a pre-qualification criteria basically. So the easiest example to give was uh Google has a a a score they just call

[17:19] site quality score, right? And we found if your site quality score was below 0.4, you were not eligible to get things like featured snippets or appear in people also ask questions. So you could have a site where they're like, "Oh, we haven't got any featured snippets. Oh, we need to work on our content." Nothing to do with your content. Does not matter what you do to your content. Doesn't matter how fast your page loads. you're not in the race

[17:48] for the appearing in feature snippets. And the more we dug into this, we more it looked like there was various layers to this system and forks where okay, if we've decided this is a medical query, so we're going down this route and then there's these different score criteria you kind of need to be hit to hit. So the thing I concluded from that was especially things like sites hit by the HCU, clients generally always turn to, oh, we've been hit by the HCU. Um, the problem is the the content. And it's not necessarily the content, it's the vessel the content is delivered in, which is the the site, right? That's the

[18:30] thing with the reputation. Um, and there's things you can do to affect that. So I did another experiment on LinkedIn because my hobby site um I had made about D and D um got hit by the HCU like really badly and it it did quite surprise me. So I did have some AI content on there. Um but I had paid writers who played D and D to write that. Um I'd had it edited. I'd written quite a bit myself. Um the site had a purpose which is that over lockdown um to avoid going completely mad I I'd started playing D and D for the first time like online with some friends and

[19:06] I'd found there I felt there was a little niche for like explaining the rules to me without adverts everywhere and without having to dig through 20 different answers on Reddit. So, I was like doing these kind of beginner guides and it was the first time actually I'd made a site where I had three people email me in six months like thanking me for the content. They were like, "This was so helpful. Like, we've printed this out for our game." And I was like, "Wow, like that's so gratifying that someone's actually, you know, I don't think I've ever emailed anyone to be like, "Thank you for the content." But then Google

[19:35] disagreed. Google was like, "No." And it it took like 99% of the traffic away within like a week. Um, so I was a bit like I'll wait and see if anything changes, you know, because Google sometimes gets stuff wrong and it kind of stayed dead. So then I was like, oh, I wonder. So I just took some of the articles and

[19:52] posted them on LinkedIn Pulse. Immediately they ranked number one. They're in AI overview. They're number one organic. Um, and then that made me look more at LinkedIn Pulse. And then at that time you could see there was an explosion of um like loans spam like gambling spam on on pulse pages and it was pure AI content and it was just getting a pass because Google was like well yeah you're a really trustworthy website so in you come. Um and the other cool example was uh around that time the Vatican website got hacked. I don't know if you saw this. And um so the Vatican website ended up ranking I think it was the top

[20:32] three in Google for CBD gummies just cuz there was a single page on there and it just makes me think as well about you know when people talk about things like topical authority like what topical authority does the Vatican website have about CBD companies right well they have so much authority in general that they can just do anything. Exactly. So this is this is kind of again why you know where's that authority come from it you know it is a combination of things but like links is still like a massive massive Can you can you explain a site quality

[21:05] score? Yeah it's actually really straightforward. So I got um when I got site quality score I was like oh it's going to be about links right. So, I did I took I think it was about 200,000 sites I had the quality score for and I did a uh Spearman correlation against all of like Hrefs and Majestics different um link metrics and it was just spaghetti. There was like no correlation there whatsoever. And I

[21:35] started looking at the sites manually. So, in the top 1% you'd have like the Indonesian Finance Ministry or some random site like that. And somewhere in the middle in the in a in the bell curve, you'd have like Amazon.co.uk. And I was like, well, that's weird that Amazon has like a low site quality score. And then um later sort of the obvious thought of, oh, I should check if there's a paintant for this. And there is literally a paintent called site quality score um which describes um how they calculate it which fits perfectly with the data that I see which is essentially it's like the number of

[22:18] queries that appear to be referencing your site um as sort of like a percentage and how much you are selected specifically in a SER. So for instance um so branded searches basically. Yeah. Yeah. So, the reason why like there was really high quality scores for things like university libraries and things like that because they had decent search volume, but basically the only thing people were were searching for was that that site by its name. And the reason sites like Amazon.co.uk were quite low was because Amazon, you know, ranks 95% for random products that aren't necessarily um Amazon. Possibly a reason why as well. um Reddit does

[23:00] particularly well because I think a lot of the things people search for on Reddit, they include Reddit in the search term. Um but also if you appear for a query and say you're third and it's obvious people are clicking on you because they they trust you. So I think this was just a a a really nice method for Google to say like yeah, does this does do people want this specific brand? Does it in itself have value over all of the other similar content of the web? Because that's that's like such a major problem for them, right? Which is when all other things are roughly equal, which one do

[23:40] we show? And there's a whole I think there's a whole interesting conversation there around I've heard, you know, people say, "Oh, Google favors big brands, things like this." It's just a reflection of what the user data is showing because people prefer big brands. They click on big brands. We've had those studies for over a

[23:57] decade. Yeah. They trust them more with Reddit, they get their answers faster. Exactly. So I, you know, I don't land that one at Google's feet of, oh, they're just propping up other big companies. It's it's a very, you know, like it's a very grounded psychological trait of people, you know, the thing you're familiar with, the thing you trust that hasn't hurt you. So, I'm

[24:20] going to go with that one. So, you mentioned page rank and back links. I want to ask your favorite link building techniques since uh since that's the thing that everyone needs to focus on. Um but also I also want to ask since we're talking about branded searches, at what point does getting more backlinks not matter as much and you actually need to increase your branded searches and you need to do better marketing so people are searching

[24:48] your brand. So I think nowadays for me the type of kind of link acquisition I like to do and it's it's not a very it's a pretty vanilla answer I'm afraid is digital PR. It's a great answer. Yeah. I mean actually I had I had the the owner of Helper Reporter out on the show yesterday. He's the founder of feature.com and he crazy new feature in feature.com that uses helper reporterouts database of 33,000 journalists. They're doubling that. So it's going to be 66,000 journalists and it's just an AI agent

[25:26] and you say I have this news about this. Find me journalists who cover this beat who would be like and it it gives you the exact journalist. It will write the pitch for you and then you you know you should change it because it reads like AI but change the pitch but it gives you like the most targeted journalists and like sounds like you've done PR the more targeted your pitch is like it just increases the likelihood of being

[25:52] accepted so much. I think even the vanilla answer for me that's like the a great answer. I mean the the thing so we're really lucky now that we've got a like dedicated digital PR team in house because I think a lot of people steer away from digital PR because it is very hard I think to do to come up with stories that people actually care about to you know get it done quickly enough so it's still relevant and like you say even when you start out trying to find journalists you have to pay for databases and stuff which is expensive um but the results we've had from that have been

[26:28] phenomenal. And what I like about it from a strategic point of view is, you know, I'm not saying things like buying links doesn't work in terms of ranking. You know, it demonstrabably does. Um, but I can get links that people can't buy. Um, and the other thing I like about it is if you do land a good story,

[26:49] um, the story the links grow themselves. If you buy a link, you get one link that you've placed. If you land a good story in the papers, every other paper will write about it and cite you as well. Um, I've done like one of the first really big link building campaigns I did was for Expedia over I think it was like 13 years ago. We did a really big like April Fool's thing that they were launching flights to Mars. It was still getting links like 10 years later in like roundups, right? Um so for for me that and it ticks all the other boxes as well especially now like LLM AI era

[27:25] right which is that you're getting these branded mentions everywhere um the if you're doing a good job you know with the PR the PR side should be representing the company in the way um that's aligning with you know your mission your values so AI is kind of inferring the correct things about who you are what you're associated with um so that's all good again I thing that's missing if like you buy link inserts on like blogs, you're not getting those other signals. And again, depends what type of SEO you're doing. As I said right at the beginning, like if you're doing your own affiliate stuff, um you

[28:01] know, yeah, I'd be buying links for I need to do this long term with brands that want to be around in 10 years time. this for me is the better play because those links as well in my opinion aren't ever going to be as long as Google and search engines using links they're not going to be devalued because they are a representation of the thing the search

[28:21] engines are trying to actually measure. So I think some people listening might be like well I'm not a I'm not Expedia so how is this relevant to me? And so I this is one of the questions that I had for later on but I think it's good to ask now. It's a fun question. If you were starting SEO today with zero reputation, what would and like new a new site, what would you do in the first

[28:44] 90 days and the first 180 days? So, if we're going from site launch, we're taking the kind of premise here that the site's technically healthy. Um, so I mean, I'd have my obviously content plan, publishing schedule in place. generally if you're starting from scratch and we've literally done this with with clients. So I can give you kind of a example as we move here if you like. So we worked with uh company in the UK uh called rehabs UK which is uh like private drug rehab which is super competitive in SEO because you can't buy

[29:20] ads in Google for those kind of terms. Um private rehabs are like really really expensive so they're high ticket items so SERs are really competitive. They came to us, they were getting like a few hundred visitors a month and that was just some brand searches. They wanted to rank for like big terms like alcohol addiction and things like that. And the first thing we did when we looked at the strategy was basically like you can't have that in the first year. It's it's not it's not going to happen because you are it's a David and Goliath scenario, right? Because there's some big players there. So, we made a

[29:56] content strategy first off that was targeting kind of the longer tale stuff that they did. So, there's all other kinds of addictions that they can help with that you can get kind of cognitive behavioral therapy for that don't have the search volume, but they're getting Google to see your site about addiction. The kind of media stuff around there is a bit smaller. So, we started building out that content. We still had the kind of main pages that ideally we would want to rank for one day, but we were focusing on building out this other kind of more niche content. What we were then doing was trying to find how we can

[30:29] leaprog ourselves into the media. And it's not actually as difficult as you think. So the first campaign we actually did for them um so this was in the first 90 days was um there was a news story going around at the time about how the parents of children that played Fortnite was suing the creators because it was addictive and we have a whole system like set up that monitors RSS feeds for things that are relevant to clients. So this had like addiction in it so it got

[30:58] flagged and I was like this is perfect. We can do reactive PR from this. So we essentially then just use Google Trends data to look at what are the other um video games people are searching for for addiction help with and then compared those search volumes to like different kinds of u real world if you like addiction substance abuse and then bounced that back within 24 hours to every journalist that covered that story which was big and I think we ended up getting like 70 something links. We got links from like the Guardian which is one of the biggest uh sites in the you know UK. It was on it got syndicated on

[31:36] MSN and Yahoo and all these big things. That site went from as I said a few hundred visitors a month to 60,000 a month. U it was outranking the NHS. So So hold on. The the the content wasn't changing. You got this crazy influx of links and then the organic traffic takes off. Yeah. So I mean the organic tra traffic took off over like I'd say a seven-month period. So we were continually working on that. We managed to get other placements as well. Um so the other thing that was that we managed to do that was fairly straightforward was we found every kind of county council in

[32:16] the country has listings for places where you can get like help with things like addiction. So we emailed all of them and we're like this is UK based. It does this. these qualified people. So, we got a link on, you know, half or a few dozen different.gov sites, which certainly helped as well. But, we were still kind of drip feeding content um onto the site. But the thing that made the needle move there was this influx of links suddenly from sites that we knew search engines really really trusted. Um and it was evident because as I say we ended up just over 12 months from the

[32:52] start with about 60k a month traffic mainly based around addiction terms. We had some terms like ketamine addiction where we were number one like above the NHS so the national health service in the UK um that still fluctuates. We're still fighting them but um you know they should be first really but it really showed that again it wasn't much to do with the content quality. the missing ingredient there was nobody knew who they were, nobody cared. And as far as search engines um were sort of concerned, you know, nobody had referenced them, so they weren't trustworthy. So get getting these links that, you know, you can't pay for um

[33:32] that really really kickstarted them. The these stories like they just inspire me so much. It's like why I love doing this cuz like you think of some like creative marketing campaign and it's not just that it brings you back links. It also brings you referral traffic. It brings you branded searches. It it increases your top of- mind awareness. It does everything and you have the keywords in place. you know. So, so like when you are submitting your brand to journalists, you have a relevant blurb that that is informed by keywords and everything plays together and everything

[34:12] grows together. Yeah. I mean the overall the the the reason that strategy worked was there were several things we were you know we' done in the le like when we inherited that site it was small things like okay if I went here and I had an issue with alcohol addiction there was like a a get help button there was a page about alcohol addiction there was a page about rehab and I was kind like well hang on a minute where which one of these would I go to so we you know merged all of those pages into one place to make it very obvious if you want help for this thing

[34:43] this is where There you go. Um, so there were things we're doing to make the site I think from a technical user experience point of view um work well. But the thing that was the the for me the the real uh missing ingredient and you're absolutely right and I think there are things that Google looks at when it comes to how many links you're getting as to what's reasonable. So I I don't think they use this system as like quite how they used to, but there used to be a lot more conversations around like link velocity,

[35:16] the rate at which you gain links, right? And one thing that I always used to notice was if you landed some what you'd define as big links like in the newspaper, it would give you some bandwidth to get like a few hundred, you know, fairly small links. What Google didn't seem to like was if you just suddenly acquired hundreds of tiny links. Because if you think about it logically, how would you be so popular all of these desperate sites that aren't necessarily connected themselves suddenly find out about you

[35:51] but you're not mentioned anywhere big? Whereas if you are mentioned on a big hightraffic profile website with a big brand there is like a waterfall effect of then other smaller sites will hear about you and it makes sense why you suddenly acquired 200 links in those two weeks. So I think there are other signals around you mentioned things like you get more branded searches things like that that Google can look at over

[36:15] time um that that really makes sense. There's there's actually a patent as well that I've written about before um which is their rank transition function. I don't know if you've seen that. Um and it was spec it's essentially specifically designed to try and catch people manipulating search results. So if you do some things that Google's like, "Oh, these look like very positive signals. Um you're currently 10th. We're going to rank you third." What they might do sometimes is actually rank you lower for a period first to see if you then if the things that were good are suddenly undone because that's again not a natural thing to happen. If I built a

[36:56] bunch of links naturally or through digital PR, I can't just go really to all these places and be like, "Can you please take them down? My rankings are worse." Like, they're not going to do it. They're not going to care. But then if you leave it, the the idea is it will then actually go up to where it's meant to be. Um, and then Payton talks about finding patterns of this behavior where it seems like you're poking at the metrics to try and work out what to do, which again I think is super interesting and maybe why sometimes it's possible to overthink what you're doing with SEO and

[37:28] play the longer game. A lot of SEOs don't let the dust settle. They freak out at the most like minute changes in rankings. It could be very harmful. Uh what signals do you think we're talking about signals? So, so what SEO signals do you think are massively under discussed? I mean, I think it really comes down now to links and UX signals. UX signals is is interesting. Um, and I think it's an area of contention because

[38:03] huge area of contention. Yeah. But I love it. By the way, I've like I've made episodes on why UX is super important. So, but but it is a big debate. Yeah. So, goo because Google's told us, you know, flat out for many years things like we do not use click-through rate in our ranking algorithm, right? which I believe is true to an extent which is that there is a core ranking algorithm and there is a post ranking adjustment um which is documented on Google. We had the uh fairly detailed link about the Twiddler framework which are the unique stand uh the standalone programs that run after ranking that readjust results

[38:53] based on how the query is classified. Now I think to us as SEOs it changes the rank therefore it is ranking. I think to Google those things are not site dependent. they're not ranking the site, they're re-ranking the SER based on the user query. Therefore, it's not a ranking signal for a website. And I think it's a very important distinction because um the click-through rate isn't necessarily affecting or you know, it's not in that like core ranking algorithm where Google's working out is this content does it match the query, is it good um

[39:35] or or or more sightcentric things. So there's definitely um I think a difference in terminology that's used between SEOs and Google um because they very very specifically word things. The other thing is like the in our exploit we saw there are absolutely uh sitewide scores 100%. And people say oh Google lied to us about this. They said there was never domainwide scores. And already there's a difference there because when I look back the only references I can find is Google saying we don't use domainwide scores. They never say sitewide because they're diff they're completely different concepts. And that was the other thing that like there's different

[40:22] site quality scores for every subdomain of a site. A help.dommain.com has a different site quality score to www. And the concept of sites I think is far more useful from a ranking perspective than domains. So again I think it's very possible that Google within their ranking algorithm do not have a domainwide score but they recognize sites which may well be by coincidence a whole domain and that's what they sign a score for. But obviously we've got very upset about that. if um it I I like I I really like focusing on the paro of SEO. Um so the 20% of things that get 80% of the

[41:05] results. When it comes to like a sitewide quality score, what do you think the 20% of things that move the needle 80% are over a long enough time period? That's that's definitely the user signals. And this is again so the um examples that I've I gave in talks last year um was it the year before was when sites were launching with loads of um AI content right so they generate like 100,000 pages and generally you see the same trend which is that rankings go and skyrocket up and the it I think it comes back to site quality because my question when I was looking into the site quality stuff was well how

[41:54] does Google do this before they get the user signals right so before the brand is known so your questions the site's new and funny enough there is a payment for that called estimating or predicting site quality I can't remember estimating or predicting um which is all about how do you predict uh the quality of a site before you have user data and essentially what it what they were talking about was They take um all the different scores of sites that they have used data for and they kind of vectorize that content, make it a mathematical shape if you like. And then when you publish a new website from a math point

[42:32] of view, they can be like, okay, your website looks like this shape and it looks closest to these sites which are all around 0.6. So we're going to give you a preliminary 0.6 rating. I think what broke with Google and because we had this whole renaissance of like niche blogging, right, was when we had all this AI content suddenly pour out. The AI content is literally modeled primarily on some of the best content on

[42:59] the web because those sites are biggest. They're in common crawl the most. So the text generated suddenly went from you know instead of markoff chaining and you know mad libing swapping words out that you could read you know they're spammy they didn't make sense suddenly we we could generate very nicely written things. So the initial scoring for Google got really screwed up. It was like oh wow yeah this content is good. You're you're like an preliminary 0.80.9 8 0.9 and then we see all these rankings go, you know, skyrocket as as these um as

[43:35] these sites publish all of this content. But then what happens is the kind of slowmoving train of user signals of there's no real brand searches happening for this because people find it and it's very meh. Um a lot of the content's rushed. It's just not actually that good. People bounce off it. And Google's always talked about, you know, they there's this rolling average, if you

[43:56] like, of of user data that they've got. Um, and I think that's what catches up with it because it's normally they normally last between 6 and 12 months. And then I think they suddenly hit that inflection point where the scorees suddenly too low and Google's like, "Nah, people aren't digging it. I'm sorry." You know, we got it wrong. And then, you know, you never see the end of those case studies, do you? Where they just kind of go like this. So I think

[44:20] I share a lot of them. Yeah. But I think um for me that the more experienced SEOs that I meet and again talking from an agency perspective, the longer term they think in in in my experience because they've seen these things play out time and time and time and time and time again. So for me the most important underrated thing about SEO is that you are you have got a strategy that firstly is Google friendly and by that I mean you are not getting in the way of Google making money because they will steamroll you and they will not look in the rearview mirror if you get in their way. um and that you've

[44:58] got something that is going to, you know, light up these user engagement scores cuz it will it will kill you in the long run if if you don't do that. And you get clients come because they've seen this great video and this is the the other side of the sword, right, of being able to learn SEO everywhere is there's lots of, you know, Tik Tok videos saying, "Oh, you can do this brilliant hack." And yeah, some of the stuff works and you know, as Lily Ray says, until it doesn't, which I think is is very true. Um, so I I don't I don't think that gets talked about enough

[45:31] because it's not popular. The I had um a couple of people I was speaking to last year who were very big on like programmatic content because again, that had a little revival, right? Um that's been going on over a decade. you know, it's just now got a new name. And I knew exactly what was going to happen with that. And we've seen it now, especially with the last update, right, around all the best of type content and the competitor versus content. A lot of it's

[45:57] tanked. Yeah. Um because it was made because it was very attractive because it looked like it would work. But I just think that's where if you focused all of that time and money into a harder thing that's slower but will last, you're going to it really is like a a turtle and hair race for me towards I think SEO is extremely easy if you if you will have a long-term focus. It's uh and it's it's so it's so fun and gratifying too because as as your domain authority grows, as your authority grows, you can also get away with more stuff too. [laughter] Like Absolutely. And you

[46:32] you can target keywords that you never thought in a million years that you would be able to rank well for. Absolutely. It's incredible. CBD gummies. There we [laughter] go. Yeah. Um, so programmatic SEO, do you have a difference between programmatic SEO that is Google friendly, that is that is good, that could stick around, um, that's like, hey, this isn't bad at all versus like what distinguishes programmatic SEO is

[47:02] pretty bad. So, I mean, it used to be done that we would just have kind of template type pages and we would scrape database. We would make our own database off the internet by scraping a load of information and then just kind of fill in the blanks and do programmatic that way. Um, some of it's lasted way longer than I ever hoped it would, especially around like local pages. Like people have been getting away with that for just years and years now, and I think

[47:31] it's fairly safe. Doorway pages. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it comes down to the and I kind of side saying this because it's almost Google's definition of if you are making the pages for search or because there is a genuine reason to to do that. Um, the way I think I would go about it is again using your own data rather than relying on stuff that exists elsewhere already. Um when so Gary Eesh last beginning of last year was in London at an SEO FOMO meetup and super nice guy very smart really interesting to speak to because he does not mince his words at all positive or

[48:22] negative about the work he's involved in and and seeing. And one of the things he said on stage really interested me which was people asking him around what Google's going to be focused on over the next few years. and his answer was basically originality. And it seems like a very yeah obvious answer to me because it's so easy now to just generate you know I can generate local pages. I can generate this that if I've got like a a good example I'd say is um like how Amazon are um summarizing all of their reviews. I think it's a really

[49:02] great use case for generative AI, right? Which is, okay, a product has 3,000 reviews. I'm not going to sit there and read 3,000 reviews. It it tells me as a user, you know, that's some information that so many people have bought it, but having Amazon say, you know, people particularly like this feature, there is some people upset with the battery life

[49:22] or something is just amazingly helpful. Um, so I think there's ways that you can extract additional value from the things you have programmatically. You know, I'm not anti- AI whatsoever. I've always been a really big proponent of AI. I think generative AI is now overhyped and used for too many things it's not meant, it's not good at doing. Um so it would yeah it comes down to are we are we actually achieving something with the user because the thing the search engine whether it's a a platform like chat GBT if I can call it a search engine for now um or Google what they're trying to work out how to

[50:05] measure is how helpful is this to the user. So if you're focused on that even if they're currently getting it wrong you will get closer and closer to alignment. I think too much of the problem is focusing on what is the robot measuring and you're the human, right? So you already know the answers and you can already think in a way that the robot can't and is desperately they've got really smart people desperately trying to make a robot think like you. So I almost feel sometimes we're we're diminishing our own knowledge to try and create something for a robot when actually they're trying to figure us

[50:42] out. And there is and again I don't want to sound naive here because there is absolutely a middle ground between these things. I'm not saying you know if a specific technique works you shouldn't lean into it. Um you know and that's the reason why even we've got technical tools like canonicals like HF langs because there is a gap between what they want the machine to be able to achieve and things that are very obvious to us as humans. Um so there's there's always play there. Um, and it's a very gray area that is situation by situation on what should you lean into and what what's going to cause you to fall over

[51:18] if something changes. So again, it's about risk mitigation, understanding what the search engine is trying to achieve, figuring out if you leaning into that is kind of getting in the way. What's the cost if all of this did fall down? Have you got a plan B or have you built 80% of your business on sand essentially that Google's going to come

[51:38] and kick over one day? Yeah, I wanted to ask about your other like other marketing channels that you like, but since we're talking about AI, it's just like a common question comment that I get, which is like, you know, how do you how do I use AI to make my job as an SEO easier? And um what do you say

[51:57] when you get asked that? But if we're talking so again, I've used AI. I did my first qualification in machine learning like nine years ago now. And I've used AI in some aspect within SEO pretty much all that time. I know now when people say AI, we're generally talking about generative AI LLM type stuff. So if we talk about that specifically, my quick answer is I never use it for something that I need to be sure is

[52:27] correct. Um because it just can't guarantee that. So you anything that needs to be correct if it's content, if it's code, like I'm not going to put it on the front line without Does content need to be correct? Let let's let's come back to that. Let's come back to that in one sec. So the way I currently use it is essentially to speed up a whole bunch of things I'm doing. So I can reel off some examples here for you. So um things like um site migrations. Um we've got AI models that we do. So we vectorize all the pages. we can can use an AI model to then do

[53:02] vector comparison for how similar are these pages when I'm doing 301 mapping. So I no longer need to try and do it on page titles. I can take the whole content or just the title or various elements, mix it together and then say how similar are these pages. So it doesn't matter if the title's changed, doesn't matter if the URLs changed. Um you get a brilliant redirect map now in minutes. That would take hours previously. Um it's generally better than a human. Um the thing I mentioned earlier with digital PR. So we have uh an instance of Olama running locally and we have built um just a very simple

[53:36] Python script that accesses a Google sheet which lists about 100 different news RSS feeds. There's another Google sheet which lists our clients and a description of the type of news they're interested in. RSS feeds gets pulled. Every single news story goes to the LLM with the description of what the client's interested in. And then there's

[53:55] like a true or couple of true or false. Is this relevant to this? Is this not relevant to this? If it's a relevant thing, we could do reactive PR for the script then pings it into our um into our Slack. So we're monitoring like thousands of new stories every day across multiple clients. How do you monitor that many?

[54:12] Sorry. How do you monitor you like uh how many I guess my how many stories are going into the Slack? Like how do you see all of those stories? So the the only stories that go into the Slack are the ones LMM has determined are relevant to that client. So it's not it's not which is a small number. Yeah. It's like

[54:31] a it's a small percentage. I thought you were saying thousands were going into the Slack. I'm like what? No no no no no. So this is the idea, right? So it's such a perfect job for an LLM to do because you know classifying content. Yeah. Like traditionally writing a classical programming rule to be like is this content about this is very challenging. So it's like do you have do you list keywords like you know there's all kinds of matching possibilities

[54:55] false positives. LM is so good at it. This is really cool. That's a really cool idea to do reactive PR. So, so you have like all these RSS feeds and you have a script and anyone can probably just use chat pt or claw to write that script and and then anything that is relevant goes into you get notified by email or into into Slack or whatever it is and then you go oh my gosh like we can like this is trending this is hot we can relate it to our business and get a

[55:24] lot of links that way. Yeah and being first is so important with things like that. So, um that's one one way. Uh another thing we're doing is so a lot of the content now um that we do, so historically we would do things like we would write a content brief. We might send that to one of the specialists at the client because we want a you know a true expert to write

[55:42] it. They're not maybe a a great writer. So, it's like getting blood out of a stone and that comes back and then we edit it and they've just answered the questions we've given them like verbatim. Now, we can have a conversation like we're doing here. just record it um on something like Fathom then we've got the transcript. We've still we're still we're running off a brief to talk to them. But because most people are very a lot more comfortable just talking than they are trying to write an article, they tend to go off on tangents. They tell us other things that we never would have even

[56:14] thought about asking that we because our brief is limited to the keyword research we've done whereas they have um subject expertise. We can get that back immediately, get AI to create if we want an article draft from that and then that goes to an editor and you know that can be manually then edited. Massively sped up what we do with content and then we've got kind of like you have right we've got video, we've got audio we can use, we've got text, we've got clips we can use, we can disseminate. Um, so that's three areas we use AI for tech content for digital PR. There's lots of

[56:47] other ways but all those ways are assisting what we do. We're not relying, it doesn't matter if it gets something slightly wrong because it will get spotted. If it flags the wrong news story, we can see that all the 301's are checked anyway. Um, you know, transcript errors are easy, fairly easy to spot. And so, like when you're publishing when you're publishing content and it's AI written, how much are you editing that for the brand voice? uh for accuracy how important do you believe accuracy to be um like are you are you removing the m dashes are you making it obviously not look like it's AI

[57:30] so firstly I think in that case where you are so from a technical viewpoint if you have done an interview and you transcribe it using AI I don't think that matters um Google has said they don't care how the content is produced um the difficulty comes is if the content is made from the language graph i.e. we want something about, you know, different flooring substrates or something, you know, and I'm just asking

[57:58] chat GBT. Yeah. Right. And then it writes it. That's a problem. Whereas if I speak to someone in Exactly. Um, they are heavily edited anyway. Um, because part of the editing process is this is the tone of voice of this client. You know, this is what they want to say. It will get signed off. Um because the co I feel the cost of getting something wrong. Like we work for instance with um uh people that make like industrial windows and they sell them to like architects and stuff, they're very quickly going to see if some important terminology or detail is wrong. The same as if you write an

[58:34] article about SEO, you know, from chat GBT pretending to be an expert and then I read it and I can see it's it's done some terrible error. probably very obvious to me as an SEO, but maybe not someone reviewing it. So, no, everything does go through that because the cost of being wrong, I feel from a brand perspective is is is high for those

[58:54] things. You think it's still way faster than writing it. Do you think searchers um can spot AI AI writing uh or is it really dependent on niche? Probably dependent on the person, I guess. Person and niche. That's a Do you think when they Sorry. Do you think when they spot the AI writing, do you think that causes them to pogo stick

[59:14] and go back to the search results? So my I don't think there's enough data out yet to answer and people in general spot AI rising. I've seen some I've seen some studies um talk about that where people couldn't tell the difference um but when they were told they they disliked it. When they were told it's AI, they they disliked it. I think as marketers working very closely to this um you know it's almost a meme on LinkedIn like you know m dashes is the big one and delve deeper and there are lots of common sayings um now where you know I get the AI ick where I'm reading something and

[59:54] I'm like yeah now this is AI and for me it immediately switches me off and from this the kind of surveys I've read I think that is fairly prevalent in terms of if someone believes they are reading something written by a human and it turns out it's an AI they are going to be very disappointed in that and have a negative reaction. I think if you tell me it's AI, there are specific instances where I will like and accept that, which the example I gave you earlier was um if you tell me it's an AI summarizing all the Amazon reviews, perfect. That's exactly what I want to be AI. Um I don't

[1:00:35] need a human to write that. If I'm reading an article, if I'm reading some, you know, some something that's meant to be expertise, then I do not want to read AI because I know it doesn't have those um attributes. However, that's not publicly um I don't think that's widely understood publicly because AI, you know, AI is artificial intelligence. And so people infer a lot when it comes to intelligence. And when you type something into a lot of these LM LLM, it says something like thinking or reasoning, which of course they're not doing that in the way that a human does, but it's very much in their advantage to

[1:01:16] get people to think that it is thinking that way. Um, you know, and I've seen people from outside the industry use Google AIO's and just accept, you know, whatever it is that's there. It's just it's just that. I had conversations even with my, you know, my parents where they've said something outlandish to me and I'm like, "Is that right?" And it's like, you know, it says it right here on Google. And I'm like, "Is it one of

[1:01:38] those AIOs?" Okay, click the website. Oh, no, that's completely wrong. Yeah, that's dangerous. Yeah. So, I think there's a knowledge thing there. I think we probably care more than most people. So, by mean, people working with that kind of content. So, we're a lot more um alert to something being AI. I think if you pick random people off the street and show them AI non AI at the moment at least I don't think they're going to notice a difference go on I was going to say you develop ad blindness as well don't you I feel like I'm developing AI blindness in a way really oh I I don't I don't think I am

[1:02:14] at all I think I think it depends on the the niche is this niche likely to work a lot with like chachi PT and if you and if the answer is yes then they're more easily able to spot AI writing Right. AI blindness. I mean, sorry. When I when I when I scan read something and I start to think it's AI, I immediately skip

[1:02:35] over it now most of the time. Ah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, no. I'm so like like how when I see ads, I don't particularly read read them. You know, like display ads to me, like I couldn't tell you a display ad I've seen. It's harder when it's when it's like a small amount. It's harder to identify when it's a small amount. But no, I'm I mean I'm the same. If I get to a page and even if that page is about exactly what I'm looking for, but I feel that it's written by AI, I don't trust it because I've seen too many times personally AI making grievous generative

[1:03:04] AI making grievous mistakes. Um, so I want to I want to ask, do you think it's accurate to say that you've done SEO for basically like dozens of niches? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, this is a fun question because I'm I'm working on like a new thing and uh something that we're doing is we're

[1:03:23] we are deliberately going into a niche. We're picking a we're starting with a niche that has bad SEO so we can just like conquer the entire thing. And so, I want to ask you, what niches have the most competitive SEO and the least competitive SEO? I think the obvious answer for most competitive is where the kind of black hat stuff is rife. So, it's it's like eye gaming, things like that. Um, drugs rehab is fairly competitive to be honest. Um, but it's always just going

[1:03:54] to be where where the money is, right? Um, so again, like big ones used to be like payday loans, that kind of stuff. Um, and you see some, it's a great place to learn as well because that's where some of the kind of extreme, you know, the the the gambling SERs at the minute are wild and there's so much interesting uh stuff going on there that I know you've had some sort of quite well-known black hats on here, but I see some very interesting stuff happening with, you know, uh, domains and sitewide canonicals after domains have been hit and fresh domains suddenly ranking number one. And an example in my talk

[1:04:30] last year of a a school domain that got purchased and they put a gambling affiliate page on the homepage, snipped all the other links off, but kept the rest of the site live. Um, and it ranked for 16,000 terms in the UK, gambling terms. It was like in top three for all these casin Yeah. Yeah. It literally had a school title in the URL, but they just changed the homepage out for a long one gambling affiliate page and it absolutely dominated there. So it was just the homepage that was ranking

[1:05:00] for 16,000 terms. Yes. Wow. Yes. So they left on all the other school content on like all the they didn't take down that content. When I and I think why is because um if you buy a domain and then obviously flip it completely in terms of topic, right? I think Google is going to have like a bit of a reset there. Whereas I think it was about 500page website. So it basically meant 95% of the website was still a school. So it kind of look as Google's categorization goes, the categorization hasn't changed. So it's kind of kept that authority. Um, you know, same example as CBD gummies for

[1:05:39] the Vatican. It and there could be some reasons why a school would have a page about gambling, you know, like, hey kids, don't gamble kind of thing. Um, that obviously not asly, but okay. [laughter] But but it really worked, right? Yeah, absolutely dominated. So I always I find it fascinating looking um in those areas. The easiest one I mean that's a really good question. Right. So I always find um a lot of older old school type businesses especially um ones that are local just have the most awful SEO. I um I've worked over the years with a few different types of solicitors and lawyers. I think that's

[1:06:24] changing now especially in the states, but in the UK um you know for many years it was just the worst worst websites um because they you know it was a very paperbased job I think and and it was how they got business historically is kind of through referrals. So they weren't that interested in the web. um any new any kind of new areas products as well. I think there's always that time delay on who's who's getting in there first. Like I had a good friend of mine um make a lot of money selling an e- scooter website when they first became a thing. Um I unfortunately bet

[1:07:00] on the wrong horse. I made some of the first when um when before vaping we had ecigarettes. So I had a really nice ecigarette domain because I was like I reckon these will stop you know people smoking. But the terminology didn't stick it, you know, became vaping. But um yeah, so I'd say probably some kind of local services like gardening like and in the UK you can't get them for love nor money at the moment because they're

[1:07:24] so busy. What do you mean? So it's really like I tried to I tried to get someone to do something to like our garden and like nobody responds because they're all so busy but then I'm like how are they getting all this business because the sites are just awful. But there's quite a lot of money in it, right? Yeah, cuz they're

[1:07:41] expensive things to do. Yeah, I was thinking I was thinking those like services like cuz what we're going to vibe code something. Basically, what we're going to do is we we start with we start with a niche where people don't want to vibe code their own solutions. Um, and then we find a crossover for a niche that doesn't have great SEO. And then we take the top players in that niche and we look at the core services. And then we vibe code

[1:08:02] those core services into one product. Won't take long. Maybe we just start with one core service. We do bottom of funnel SEO for that core service. People start people come to the product through SEO and then we actually talk to the users and we say why are you using because like we might go into a niche where we know zero about the niche beforehand. We have zero experience with it. So we talk to them like what are you hoping to achieve by using this? Like why are you doing this? What do you wish

[1:08:29] we had? And then we go and build that. We vibe code it. It's very easy. And yeah, and then we now we have more features to do SEO for and then um we grow and then we reinvest into other marketing channels and uh that yeah so so that's that's why I wanted your opinion on that. And we're looking at like a lot of uh right now we're also

[1:08:48] we're looking at makeup as as a niche. Oh, I'll tell you what's crazy. Augmented reality. We were looking at augmented reality yesterday. so much money in augmented reality and the SEO that we were seeing in it is not very good because you know because up until now in order to do like augmented reality software there was such a crazy barrier to entry and so there just wasn't that many companies and now you can vibe code a lot of solutions using AR and I think that's a really amazing niche to be in with SEO because the SEO that we were seeing was not very Yeah, it's um so

[1:09:29] the makeup niche thing is interesting. Oh yeah, we're looking that we're looking at that actively right now too. Um we might even Yeah, go on. I was I was just going to say so in in terms of the the makeup niche stuff I did um it was a couple years ago now I did, you know, you used to get those competitions right on Twitter that' be like uh like and retweet to to enter. So I saw these and I was like well that's something you can quite easily automate, right? So, I wrote a script that looked for tweets that were saying like and retweet for enter, and it categorized if

[1:09:59] it needs a retweet, if it liked. And I left it running for like 3 months, and I entered something like 50,000 different competitions. Um, and it turns out the win rate if you enter random competitions in on Twitter was about one in 3,000 at the time. So, I kept this sheet of all of these prizes that I won. But one thing I noticed was probably of all the competitions out there, like half were makeup giveaways, it was like I'd never realized like how

[1:10:27] big. So you got a lot of makeup from So I got a lot of makeup and uh I hadn't actually told uh my wife at the time. I kept getting these bits of makeup and I was like, "Oh, look, I got you this lipstick and I got this eyeliner." And then uh I probably shouldn't share this. So, one of the things that I won, so I won everything from like straws to like a Call of Duty Xbox game, like books, like all these random things. And most of it I gave to to charity. Um, and I had like

[1:10:57] a fake name on the the Twitter account. And uh one of the things I won and when I had to tell my wife that this is where I was acquiring all this random makeup from was we had a parcel arrive and it was addressed to like someone else and my wife text me be like oh what's this for? Cuz I was at work and I was like oh you can open it and it was actually some crotchless leather pants and she was like why have you ordered like this? What is happening? I was like okay I need to own up about this. But um yeah, I won that in a in a random

[1:11:28] Twitter giveaway. I saw that you also won $13,300 from Google for discovering a bug and then you gave that to charity as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I figure if you can't give money, you're not expecting to get to charity. What money can you give? What was the bug? So this was the Google exploit that we found which was um basically whenever you're doing a Google search Google's a bunch of has a bunch of microservices want to call that that talk to each other and because we are doing a lot of work with also asked um and scraping bits. We're looking at all that stuff very closely. Um and it was

[1:12:06] literally in the kind of network tab. This is you can tell how I spend my evenings now looking through kind of where the data was being sent to and from. And there were some interesting sort of requests and I took one of them out and was running it locally just through curl. And I got back like some partial HTML when I did it and I was there was a lot of parameters on there which were determining kind of the what I thought the format of the response would be. Um, and I just out of curiosity, I was playing around with that and I deleted the format parameter

[1:12:41] and it basically gave me back then structured data. So for every query I was doing, it was doing things like it was giving me uh estimated click-through rates for all the different titles. It was giving me site quality scores. Um, it was giving me like um TDIF scores for um how close things were uh matching. It was giving me uh categories for search queries. So it was telling me is this is anformational search, this is a comparison search. It was giving me commercial scores for queries, medical classifiers. So all the stuff that Google would need to pass to another system to make a decision. So post I

[1:13:25] think that was a lot of the data that's used post ranking. So metrics that are generated during ranking are kind of pushed forward. So when the post ranking reranking happens, they can say, "Well, we scored this site this." Okay, because they don't know the query until it happens, right? So you can only act on the ranking once you have that and some of the stuff that you previously calculated is important. So it was that um we you know, we sat on that for quite a while just kind of looking at it. Um could we share this? This is so

[1:13:58] valuable. Yeah. And then eventually I was like, "Okay, I think I've learned everything we're going to learn on this." What did you learn? What did you learn? Um, well, a lot. So, this is what I was saying in terms of it was and this is why as well I didn't I didn't release this like all this I didn't dump all this stuff publicly. I'm for um just fear that um I'd hear from Google's legal team um cuz they have a legal team that's much larger than any business I own, right? And I don't particularly want to get in a protracted legal battle with Alphabet. Um but also

[1:14:36] I don't think there was anything in there that um was really like super exploitable like oh you can just this is one metric. Actually, a lot of the stuff we saw, in my opinion, backed up what Googleers had been telling us for a long time. Um, so things like the uh click-through rate were very similar to what you see in Google Ads in that I think they predict it based on the query and the kind of mathematical shape of the the content and they're like, I think from previous data, our model says this users are most likely to click on this, which makes um sense. There are of course um

[1:15:15] postranking things that will adjust ranking which is why click-through rate uh manipulation works while it's happening and then when you stop it it kind of goes back because it's a post ranking thing not not a ranking thing. Um so I learned a lot about I think how Google actually functions um in terms of those different stages of ranking and how they link into each other. Um, the reason the other reason I didn't kind of publish everything at the time was at that time the content warehouse leak came out and to be honest like I wasn't um I don't feel as a industry as a whole

[1:15:56] we reacted very well or fairly to that. Um because I think quite a few Googlers got a lot of direct abuse from that of people just calling them liars because you know oh there's this random variable name you know included in this thing which you know you don't even know if that's used in ranking in re-ranking in indexing in storage like you don't know where that's used. in the exploit that we found, there was a thing called uh social signals. And I was like, "Wow, like that sounds like Google uses social signals for ranking." And then when I like actually dug into that and was looking at where it was being used

[1:16:34] because they said we had the sites, all it was was um basically figuring out whether to display like the little social icons um as a feature. That's funny. It's nothing to do with how sites rank, right? I was like, "Oh, if I dump this information out there, it's going to create, I think, 10 times more misinformation than it will helpful information." Um, because people are going to just take that and run with it, right? There's going to be Tik Toks

[1:17:00] about, oh, Google uses social signals. And I was like, I don't want to be at the center of all of that. So, I will I and that's the year I started doing more conference talks because I don't, you know, I very rarely actually speak at conferences. because it was mainly last year. Um, apart from that, I've done like a half a dozen in 15 or so years because I was like, I will package up this information with the lens of the experience I have and I will genuinely tell you the things that I've learned that I think are helpful and like they're all on YouTube now of this is what I discovered. This

[1:17:34] is how I think it fits into Google. There's a patent that backs this up. There's also some Googler telling us this is roughly how this works. So, all of these things align. you know, the evidence that we've got, the firsthand account, what we actually see happening, all of these things align. So, this makes sense. Um, and also, this is where I really got into the whole kind of, okay, this is what Google appears to be classing as ranking and postranking. And you need to listen very carefully to the precise language they're using when they're speaking to you and what they're telling you and what they're not telling

[1:18:03] you. Because I don't think they're going out there and just intentionally like lying. There's a game being played, right? They're not going to tell you how to game the algorithm. Um, but they're not just out there, in my opinion, spreading misinformation. There's no reason for them to to do that. You know, Gary will just tell you no if you if he don't want to tell him, you know, if he doesn't want to tell you something. But, I mean, he's given me really useful bits of information as well, like um there was a lot of SEOs at one point talking about updating the uh like last mod

[1:18:37] attribute of documents to make them look fresher. And Gary was sort of saying, "Oh, it's that's only meant to be used when there's significant changes to the document." Um, and he was like, "If you if you keep changing it and we see you not changing document much, um, we'll stop trusting you." And so I that led me to ask him, well, how does that scoring work with you? Do you have like a score for how much you trust the signals? And he came back and was basically like, no, it's a binary thing. So basically, if we, you know, if we think you're not being accurate with this, we just stop using

[1:19:11] it as a signal from your site. And it makes so much sense. How do they determine, how do they determine if if there's no uh updates happening? Well, they're fetching the content, I guess, aren't they? So, if the if they can tell how much the content's changed, and if you're saying the last mod is changing every day, but the content looks the same, they have they have several cache

[1:19:28] versions, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so you know that and for me that's all really helpful information because there's all kinds of signals that we can give Google like canonicles is another one you know it it makes a lot of sense to me that if a lot of your canonicals are bad but Google is just going to be like I'm just going to make my own mind up you know um and a lot of these So you mean like you have the incorrect

[1:19:55] canonicals? Yeah. If if you're like uh if you're conicalizing like to loads of 404s or no index pages um I think a lot of these systems are simpler than we might imagine. Um because I think the complexity when you start moving away from like binary decision tree stuff starts to just explode. Um and it was something you know again Google's been telling us that for a long time. One of my favorite um talks was Paul Ha back in 2016 at SMX and he did a talk called like uh Google from an engineers perspective and he was talking about how they use user signals and he was like

[1:20:34] look um user signals are actually really noisy and despite what you think it's actually very hard to um generate scalable insights from them. Um, which is why when people talk about user signals, I think we're talking mainly about things like interactions with the SER because that's Google knows exactly what SER layout they had. There's parity there. They can measure all of those things. They can measure hover clicks, you know, all that stuff. Some people think that Google's measuring more user interaction kind of on the site. Um, which I just think is so incredibly difficult to do that because you need a way that scales and you can compare all

[1:21:19] sites. Um, you know, there might be a couple of metrics they can use, but I just don't think they're doing that kind of indepth stuff because that trying to then put that into an algorithm is I think, you know, for the reasons Paul was explaining is incredibly difficult to do. You had to guess some UX signals within a site that Google might use. Just

[1:21:40] guesses. What would you guess? Oh, I hate wildly speculating, especially it's going to just get clipped. No, no, no, no, no. That's not going to I don't know. Yeah, I I won't take I won't take anything out of context. So, honestly, I don't think there's outside of the actual like site performance stuff, which again isn't even that big a ranking signal. I think that's more of a proxy of people like

[1:22:05] that. So, you get better signals. When when the conversations came up about things like time on site, my argument was always if you had the perfect content that answered the users's query and you'd highlighted it well and they landed on the site and they're like, "Cool, that answers my question." And then they left, that's like a 100% bounce with 10 seconds on site, but that's probably the best user

[1:22:28] experience they could have had, right? Whereas if they're coming in for the Guardian political long read, you know, you want scroll actions, you want hovers, those kind of things. So I I just don't think there's a a generic I don't think there's a good answer to that question because I don't think it's something they do use. That's what's so special with for me about the core web vitals because without any context, you can say this number higher or lower is better or worse. And there's actually very few metrics like bounce rate is a great example where you can definitely say high or lower is better because

[1:23:06] there are cases where having a high bounce rate indicates better user experience and there is cases where low rates indicate better experience but there's no user experience that's better with a uh you know a site taking longer to load or you know being jumpy around as it loads like so they're they're interesting metrics for me. Is core web

[1:23:26] vitals a ranking signal? Like a I mean again Gary was pretty straight on this. He said he said uh it was like a on the fence tiebreaker type thing and I think it's always been that way. I think the more important signal from core web vitals is if it's annoying users. If you land on the site and it takes 8 seconds to load, I don't think Google minds that much as long as users stay and do what they want to do. If it's taking 8 seconds to load and everyone's like, "Nah, screw this." and they're off. That's what I think damages you. And there's a bunch of stuff in SEO

[1:23:59] where I'm like, this isn't an SEO problem. It just so happens to be within the halo of things that might impact SEO. If your site is slow, you should fix it because slow sites suck and people hate them. Don't you get less conversions. Exactly. Like, and there's tons of data that shows how it negatively impacts like conversion rate and revenue and uh stuff like that. So, and there's a bunch of things um that I think SEOs try and hoover up as like SEO things when they're more no, this is a separate um area, but it impacts that channel. Um you know, security is another one that I

[1:24:39] tend to stay away from, although I'm interested in security. you know, there's a whole bunch of um auditing tools that try and look at security stuff and I genuinely think SEOs, you know, you need to flag that, but you need to probably stay in your lane unless you are like a cyber security person. Yeah. Yeah. Um you So, you've done like tons of SEO experiments. What are some like aside from the schema one which we talked about, what are some other ones that you've done recently that uh where you you just any SEO experiments honestly because pretty much everyone that you do is interesting and then like

[1:25:14] are there any upcoming SEO experiments that you that you've been thinking about? So yes, I've got a few that I'm actually going to be doing kind of for my talks this year. So, um, I'm at several conferences this year and the kind of premise of my talks is going to be around SEO decision making. So, kind of what we talked about with the schema and I've set up a few different tests to demonstrate that, okay, maybe this

[1:25:39] obvious truth isn't quite so obvious. Um, I do publish most of the things that have any kind of meaning. I mean, I've got my own personal blog as well at i83.uk, UK which is for kind of the more unhinged tests. So I did one um where Cindrum did a really brilliant talk um around a year ago with looking at Chrome telemetry data and the hypothesis was that Chrome was essentially or Google was using Chrome renders from users and basically nicking that render for their index to save a lot of their um kind of computational um power. So I set up an experiment there that was doing kind of different couple of levels

[1:26:30] of cloaking of showing one thing to a user, showing one thing to Google, but for users it was also generating like a unique hash that Google should never see. And then I got a few thousand people to visit all of those URLs in Chrome over a few weeks. And the idea was to keep monitoring the index um because we could use the site um thing at the time to see and the cache still existed to see ever if that um any of those hashes got into the index. Um and they never did. And we test I tested that for a year solid in the you know

[1:27:08] hope of that would be massive if if we caught Google doing that. I didn't think they were doing it because I can just see again so many privacy issues of if you're grabbing accidentally like a logged in area or like it just, you know, I think there's a massive lawsuit waiting to happen if they were doing that. Um, well, I didn't shout about that one because nobody's particularly interested in tests that don't show something interesting. But again, it's about it looked like Google could be doing that cuz there was so much telemetry in Chrome and it made sense from a, you know, there's like a potentially a financial motive to do it

[1:27:45] performance motive. Um, ignoring the massive legal issues. Um, and again, that was like a thing that I think this is testable if we design an experiment. Um, and just if that's not the case, then you can rule that out of your thinking. Um, so I've done stuff like that before. Um, I've tested u, so there's a chap called Oliver who runs uh, O GM. Um, he's very quiet technical SEO and he's just discovered loads of little very neat niche things like um, one of the favorite things he discovered I saw was it's way quicker to get your pages indexed through multiple site maps than a single one. So he was showing

[1:28:28] like if you submit 5,000 URLs in a site map takes ages for them to get indexed. And he was like whereas if I put a page on its own in a site map a separate one it's it's indexed almost straight away. And I was like, it's all these weird little things of so actually it would be um you know it would be more So one of the things we actually do now with clients is if they've got like you know pages that update quickly or are newly published we have a separate kind of new site map for them to go into um because it just gets them indexed quicker. Um

[1:28:57] and again from maybe a more black hat point of view you could technically have a whole bunch of site maps with only a few pages in. Um so I always find those things really interesting. Not because they always give you a specific like tactic you can use, but it gives you insight into how things are actually working. You can demonstrate say that's interesting that works like this and then apply that thinking to to what

[1:29:20] you're doing more generally. Yeah, I like the I like the experiments that gives like tactics that just like gives you like a best practice. Yeah. I don't know. Are are there any of those that any of those experiments that you're doing or like other ones that you've done recently that have They're mostly Yeah, they're mostly

[1:29:38] about geo stuff, the ones I'm doing now. Um, but I don't want to talk about them cuz I want to I want to have them ready to go for these conferences. But I'd say the last the last one I did that was like I think truly actionable was probably the meta description stuff which is you know that to me was you know we worked we got data as well from the SEO testing guys there Ryan at SEO testing uh shared from they have the kind of metadata of tests people are running and the metad description test basically did nothing. He found when people were AB testing metad

[1:30:11] descriptions that had no impact and I was just like the amount of time and the other thing was as well then we immediately got people saying oh well the LLMs use metad descriptions so you have to do them it's it's actually part of geo now and I'm like nobody bothered testing it so again blank meta description ask chat GBT and it just gets the meta description in that case that Google had generated because it wasn't reading it itself it was getting it from the search engine so I was like nope doesn't matter funny. Uh, do you think do you think your method of SEO differs from like standard best

[1:30:46] practices in any ways? A really good question. [snorts] Um, mine does. Sorry, I said mine does. Yeah, I think I think it's more what we don't do in some cases. I think it's very easy to waste time in SEO with various checkbox things that aren't that important that's sometimes hard to communicate because you get that with experience. Um, I've never been a fan of kind of, you know, the gold, silver, bronze type approach to SEO because, you know, you can get a site and when even we're at the proposal stage, I'll go through that site and essentially be like, you know, in some cases it's it's barely worth doing a

[1:31:35] technical audit because I can see things are performing well. I can see from search console, you know, things are in pretty good shape. Um and again when it comes to I feel there's a lot of things like content creation which are just done for the sake of it. Um, so a lot of our approach because of the team we've got, we while we've got kind of SOPs for some of the tasks we do, it's more the senior SEO gets it and I'm like, tell me what you think we need to do on this site to, you know, hit this target or or whatever. So yeah, I would I wouldn't

[1:32:14] say on a strategic level and and again, it depends who you're kind of comparing us to. We're doing anything wildly different. Um, but I'm always happy, you know, when we when we're doing pitches and stuff. Um, especially when you have discussions around things like, oh, someone says they'll do this many days for this much money. I'm, you know,

[1:32:34] normally quite happy to be like, cool. Well, I'm quite happy to do half that amount of days, and I think we'll absolutely flatten them with what we're going to do. You um you you mentioned you have like an also ask tool. Yep. What is that? Uh so it's also ask.com if people want to check it out. Um and essentially what it does is you can put in any kind of question query and it mines Google's people auto ask queries. Um so it it will go a couple of levels down and you can specify your language and location. So it will actually set those for you. And it's interesting because

[1:33:17] especially in places like the US, you will get very different people also ask results depending. Oh my gosh, dude. I might make a Tik Tok about this. This is great. Yeah. So, um it's a little bit slow at the moment because Google kindly What's the URL? Also ask is it also ask.com. Also ask I'm getting I I got redirected

[1:33:37] to vpntoggle.com. Maybe I put in the wrong URL. Also ask.com. Asked ed. Oh, ed. Okay. Also asked.com. Find the questions people also asked. Oh man. If you just Google people also ask in Google for their feature name when number one, of course. I think it's the most overlooked keyword data. We've been using it for years because it's the only keyword data that firstly gets updated within hours. Like if something's on the news, um, if there's like an election

[1:34:07] on, the pa results change within hours. So you get the first signals of how the intents uh shifted and you know Google's talked before about things like time to result and I think if you're writing any so once you've decided what you're going to write about you put it into also asked and you're essentially getting a list of what Google is expecting you to answer on that page in terms of the completeness of the topic if you're a brand. So if you type in something like Revolute, like the online bank, it gives you a really good brand footprint as well. So for Revolute, it will say things like, is

[1:34:45] Revolute legit? Um, is it UK? Um, you know what UK institutions back it? Is my money safe in Revolute? They're not even necessarily phrases I would target, but I would tell the team our brand kind of impression that we need to make on the homepage is people don't know us. They don't trust us. So we need to establish that on the homepage because that's the emotional trigger behind these searches. Um so there's so many different uses um for it. Um we actually just published in the

[1:35:15] in we just launched an insights section. There's a study there by Chris Green. Really brilliant experience technical SEO. Um did an independent study that showed the number of PAAA questions answered in your content correlates to how well you rank for the core term. So Google is looking for that um completeness. Um, we've got a whole process set up for uh like AI keyword research where it helps you map out the conversations. Um, I've done talks on that. They're online. Um, and we've actually got an integration with Screaming Frog as well. So, if you have Screaming Frog, one of their custom JS uh plugins that comes with it is R1. And

[1:35:53] what it does is it uses chat GPT and also asked, you can crawl all of the content on your site. the page headers or titles get passed to also asked to break out what uh questions might be asked about that topic. Chat GBT then automatically um determines if you have that answer in your content and then what you get is a screaming frog crawl of your thousand content URLs and it gives you lists of questions that you haven't answered in that content. So, it's one of the things we used to do manually for content auditing that now takes like you can just press run and then leave it for an

[1:36:29] hour, come back and it's like here's where your gaps are or here's where the intent has shifted because sometimes what people want from a query changes over time and that's reflected really well in this data. Um, yeah, I've I for me it's clutch. It's like once I've decided the topics and what I'm going to write about, that's the main tool I use to determine, you know, what I need. And again, it's not about answering them verbatim in an FAQ format. It's about you just need to include this

[1:36:55] information in it. I searched uh I searched makeup software and it's I I I didn't change the country or city. So, I don't know. It was just set to to London and it's still getting the results. I'm really curious to to see the people also asked for makeup software. I searched it a few minutes ago and it just keeps refreshing and it

[1:37:19] says fetching live data ETA 1 minute. Yeah. So in so the average response time was about six or seven seconds until December and basically in December Google completely changed all of their kind of anti- scraping mechanisms. So now a lot of the time we're solving uh live recaptures in the background um which is something we're currently working on. If you're if you make an account and log in, basically when you do the searches, they'll run in the background in your dashboard anyway. So, you can do like a dozen searches and then just come back. Um, yeah, they normally take a couple of minutes sometimes. Now,

[1:37:54] surprising. I'm looking right now. Uh, starts from depending where are 12 bucks a month. Nice. The reason that this is so another reason this is so cool, um, you're friends with David Quaid. David Quaid is who connected us and David loves people also ask it's one of like his techniques then he came on the show and he shared it and what he does is he finds out people also ask questions he gives them to perplexity he says like give me plain text of just like one paragraph answers to all of these and then he takes those and you know changes it for his tone and like makes them more readable then just

[1:38:33] puts them onto his site and he takes the ones that start ranking then he builds out those pages. He uses them to interlink to other pages to pass on page rank and uh and he loves people also and and increases his like I mean I think we were talking about topical authority but he's like yeah increases topical authority and it improves the site as a whole and he uh so it's it's very cool that you have this tool. Mark Williams Cook, you are a legend. This was so much fun and you man I still have like so many questions for you. I hope we can we we can do this

[1:39:10] again. Thank you again for sure for coming on the show. Um for everybody for anyone who's not already following you, where where should they find you? Best place is LinkedIn. Um yeah, just search Mark Williams Cook. I think I'm the only Mark Williams Cook online. So for better or for worse, it's very easy

[1:39:26] to find me. I really appreciate it. This was You were like I've made so many episodes about your stuff. So yeah, thank you again. Uh for everybody who watched on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. if you listen on Spotify or Apple Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. This is episode 961 of the Edward Show. 961 days in a row doing

[1:39:47] this podcast. And I will talk Oh yeah. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.

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