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[on-hold music] What is interesting, and I, I talked about this in the email to you, is basically we are twenty-four, forty-eight hours away from something that Google seems to be confident is gonna help clean up a lot of what we're seeing in search results.

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There's a pretty big update coming, but I guess by the time this is live, it's already happened. Okay. Maybe we'll have to make this a preview. Maybe this is...

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We should have, we should have, like, a tailgating party for this, uh... D-Does this have, like, a fancy name, this update?

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And so there's, there's three aspects to it, but primarily it's, it's around site reputation abuse, as Google call it.

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[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show.

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I'm Brian Morrissey. This week, I discuss the changes rolling out to the search results in Google with Glenn Allsopp. Glenn runs Detailed.com, a site devoted to the top-secretive world of SEO.

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Glenn is also an SEO practitioner himself.

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I've always found his insights helpful, so I wanted to have him on to discuss what's a massive update, really, to Google's algorithm, and it's gonna inevitably create winners and losers.

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Google's search algorithm updates always do. I've, I've covered this for many years, and it used to be called the Google dance. It's, uh, less, less likely to be called that these days, but I think it's a, a good term.

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But anytime there's a change to the Google Search results, lots of people focus on that because search is the backbone of the internet, and it is changing and changing at a rapid clip.

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And that's because this is coming, this update is coming at a critical time for Google. I mean, on the surface, it's flying high. It's got a two trillion dollar market cap.

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But it is facing the most serious challenges to its search supremacy in its history, really.

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One is legal with the antitrust case that just wrapped up in which the DOJ is accusing Google of using its de facto monopoly power in search to thwart com-competition. Not that a tech company would ever do that.

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And that's gonna take years to finalize no matter what the court rules. You know, we saw this with the Microsoft antitrust. These just go on and on and on.

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But the other is probably more immediate, and that's the pressure on Google through generative AI, which promises an end to the ten blue links era that really underpinned Google's cash machine.

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So this update is coming, and I think it's almost universally accepted that Google Search results are not as useful as they once were. And, and, and that's because it's very lucrative. I mean, this is all just incentive.

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It's not a morality play. The incentives are such that it is in people's interest to create content that ranks highly in Google Search results, so they're gonna focus on doing whatever they can to do that.

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They're not just going to say, "Oh, I'm gonna create the best content and, and hope to win fair and square." They're gonna try to reverse engineer.

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This has been going on, this cat and mouse game has been going on since really the start of internet search. I can remember when Pamela Anderson XXX was being stuffed into meta tags of, of every webpage.

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So nothing new under the sun. No morality plays here.

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But Glenn knows a lot of the details here, and we get into some, some really interesting little tactical things, such as, for instance, all the coupon sections of major publishers that you've probably never seen because they exist really just for SERP.

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So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Glenn. Always appreciate your feedback. Send me a note. My email is bmorrissey@rebooting.com. And if you have a chance, please do rate and review this podcast.

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Now onto my discussion of search with Glenn. [on-hold music] Glenn, thanks for joining the podcast to talk about my favorite topic, which is SEO. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Okay.

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How did you, how did you develop this expertise? 'Cause I, I rely on, on Detailed.com, and you go deep, and I love it. Yeah.

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So I basically, it's just I've been nerding out on this topic for about, for literally sixteen, seventeen years now. A little, a little more than half of my life.

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So it's, it's, it's really just something from, from the day I knew that you could have some kind of impact on search results in some way and, y-you know, you could take a website from page three to page one, that really, that really fascinated me, and I've just, yeah, never really left it alone, to be honest.

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Yeah. I know... I'm gonna date myself. I was like, I was skulking around, like, the SEO forums, like SEORoundtable.com and, and whatnot back in the early 2000s. I worked for DMNews.

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And so internet, internet marketing there then at that era was, was very email-based. It was after the dot-com implosion. It was very email marketing.

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SEO was hot because everyone had sort of left the internet, and SEO was it. And the thing about the internet is distribution is controlled, right? And publishers don't have control, but it's an open system.

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And SEO has always been the most reliable way to get distribution. And the good part, I guess, has been it has been the most stable of all the algorithms.

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I can remember, I don't know if you were doing SEO then, but there used to be this thing called the Google dance. Do you remember that? Mm-hmm.

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It was like every few months, 'cause, you know, Google was updating its algorithms periodically then. It wasn't, like, all the time, and it was known as the Google dance.

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And when, when the Google dance happened, some people left or ended up not getting chairs, I guess [chuckles] or maybe just weren't allowed on the dance floor. And my sense right now if I...

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is that the search has never been more unstable since those days as it is right now. Is that accurate? Yeah.

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I would, I would say I've been very lucky that throughout my, like I said, sixteen, seventeen years, throughout this whole time, basically, the thing I chose to kind of-The rocket I chose to attach myself to has just been growing, like more and more people on the internet, more people searching, and more people using Google.

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It's been I, I think, um, we might be at a diverging point where that may start to come down, where that may no longer be the case.

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It's definitely it's definitely in a position where it feels less like you understand Google's motives and why certain things might be being pushed as, as much as they are, and it's, yeah, it's definitely a, a questionable time at the moment.

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Okay, so give me the current state. I- my working title for this episode is Chaos in the SERP. [chuckles] W- what is going on right now?

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Because, I mean, there's a reason I wanted to talk to you, because I have never in the last probably 10 years been talking to so many publishers where the first thing that they talk about is search. Right.

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So the, the-- there's a lot of big changes. I guess, I guess the biggest one that kind of started this whole snowball was something called the helpful content update.

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So it wasn't the first one, but in September of 2023, Google released something called the helpful content update. There's lots of things they said they are looking for at, in websites.

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You know, they want it to be helpful and what they gave guidelines on what denotes whether a website is helpful. And what that update did was it really tanked a lot of...

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There's different types of websites that were impacted, but generally a lot of niche-focused content websites, you know, bloggers, product reviewers, whatever it may be.

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And literally overnight, a lot of those websites saw their traffic go, drop seventy, eighty percent, which was critical for a lot of those businesses.

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And the really interesting thing is that in the seven months since this update happened, there is not a single SEO, there is not a single case study of any website that has been able to recover.

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And that is pretty crazy for [chuckles] a Google update that Google themselves give advice on how you might wanna improve your website if you've been impacted by this update.

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There is no one who's been able to recover, no matter how many websites are out there and what, what people have been working on.

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A- another big aspect to it, so if people lose, then someone else is being replaced in the search results, and the big winner has been UGC, so user-generated content websites. And the big one for sure has been Reddit.

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And Reddit has basically, based on all third-party metrics, either 3x'd or 4x'd their search traffic. Hundreds of millions of visitors per month.

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It's very hard to search for anything, at least in a English language world, and not see Reddit dominating the search results, followed by Quora, followed by Pinterest or whoever it may be.

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And another aspect of it is a SERP feature called search engine result page feature called discussions of forums.

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And this isn't totally new, it's been around for a while, but it is absolutely more prominent now than it has ever been. So it's, it's in the US, I believe they've been doing testing in the UK.

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But if you search for pretty much anything in the US, whether it's informational or review-related or transactional, you will probably see this sub feature, which is discussions of forums and different forums where you can read about topics.

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So- Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's gone from a lot of niche independent people hurting, not only, there are some big sites that have dropped as well, but...

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And, and a lot of it is being replaced by these, these forums and user-generated content websites. So let, let's get back to the, the, the helpful content update.

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I think if I'm to read into that, Google is saying there's a lot of spam in the SERP. Right.

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And there's a, there's a lot of people just creating things for Google, for SEO to try and use, use their authority, use the, the weight and the power their websites and domains have in the eyes of search engines and just trying to put anything out there.

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And kind of in Google's eyes, I guess they view it as gaming the system, creating things just for Google, so SEO-focused, so keyword-focused, and not really focused on humans. Yeah.

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Now, I mean, this is like a gambling in Casablanca thing, right, though? I mean, 'cause since the start of the internet, it has been a cat and mouse game, right, of trying to game distribution.

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I mean, I can remember the, the original websites were, were putting like meta tags of Pamela Anderson in, [chuckles] in, in the site's code to try to get some search traffic in the AltaVista days.

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So none of this is, is completely new. I, I can remember- Right...

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SEO being very much a mom and pop industry, I guess I would say, in that it was scrappy, it was scruffy, it was a lot of like solo entrepreneurs i- in different locations, and it's kind of like how the internet was, hobbyist, if you will.

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And an open system will attract all kinds of, of entrepreneurial hustlers, if you will.

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Something changed in that I think a lot of mainstream publishers who had really operated at a different end of the spectrum saw this and th- they, they were having-- We, we focus a lot on, and those of us who cover this industry, on like the pivot to video.

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But I think a more substantial pivot really took place in a pivot to SEO. Yeah.

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I think, I think one of the, one of the big things is that SEOs, marketers, website owners, people who try and game the system, I think we always know search results will never be perfect.

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We don't hold Google to the standard that every single thing I search for has to be amazing. There can never be spam. There's, there's always gonna be people trying to, trying to game the system and, and get an edge.

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And websites expire, someone goes and picks up that name, it had a lot of great links, and they put very similar content on there and just try and benefit in that way.

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I think the big thing that's really changed today and the thing that's concerning a lot of people is that when spam disappears from Google, no one misses it, and the people that were involved in it weren't really that bothered.

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They w- you know, they... It's churn and burn. They expect these kind of things to happen.

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But there's a lot of great websites that have been caught in the crossfire of these latest updates, and that's, that's what's worrying a lot of people.Yeah.

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I mean, because l-look, to give Google credit, and when we're talking about search, we're talking about Google, let's be real here Mm-hmm.

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To give Google a little bit of credit, they've got like an, a nearly impossible job, right? To try to satisfy all of these constituencies as they are the backbone... The search is the backbone of the internet.

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I don't think sometimes people fully realize just like how much they-- This is the highway. Like when we talk about the information super highway, this is the highway. And they direct traffic to different places.

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And over the time, I remember I was covering Google before it was public. I'm really dating myself.

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And people didn't realize i-in a lot of parts of, of business how big of a business Google was because it was so dispersed. They had so many different advertisers and they weren't just reliant on the largest advertisers.

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But Google's obviously changed over the time. Their interests have changed. There's more... What is the percentage of zero-click searches now?

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I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't wanna give you an exact number, but, but it's certainly high. Yeah. And that, that is basically- It's probably like double digits. Yeah... people searching and not leaving Google.

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And, and Google has been doing snippets and, and they've been pushing fair use to such a degree. But like publishers have mostly put up with it because their interests were broadly aligned.

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Google sent them traffic, and Google not only sent them traffic, Google sent them the most valuable traffic. I mean, the dirty secret of the Facebook era is that most of that traffic was utterly worthless.

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The people would bounce after like ten seconds. Google, people are telling you what they want, and they're going to a page, and you can monetize those at a very high rate. And that traffic had been very steady.

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I mean, if you rank high, yeah, you're gonna have to like refresh the page a-and, and whatnot, but that's almost like an annuity. You're gonna make money while you sleep, right? Yeah.

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It's been un-until the last few years, it's absolutely been very, very consistent where it's like you said, refresh the page, maybe you have to build more links, maybe there's new competitors pop up solely focused on the one key phrase that, you know, is useful to your business.

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But, but for the most part, it's, it's also been its own ec-economy in the sense that businesses are built and sold based on the reliance of their rankings and how long they've, they've hel-held certain rankings, and people want them, so they buy the businesses based on that.

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Yeah. And so you, you've charted how concentrated the SERP have gotten. 'Cause I guess my, my sort of big picture, and again, you focus on this that... and I don't, so I could be wrong here [chuckles]...

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is that it used to be like thousands, tens of thousands of sites duking it out in, I call it the SEO fighting pits.

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And then the sort of marquee publishers, the, the, the ones who didn't really operate on this end because this end of the market is, it's very direct marketing.

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And like I've seen this all through my career is there was a snootiness, whether it was an advertiser in publishing, that's like, "Oh, no, we do brand." Well, guess what? Performance ate the entire internet, okay?

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So now everyone is in direct marketing.

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And what I've seen is a lot of big name magazine companies, whether it's Hearst or, or Condé, PMC, Bustle, Vox, have pivoted really hard into SEO because commerce, which is really affiliate, I always say com- when people say commerce, they really mean affiliate, and when people say affiliate, they really mean SEO.

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It has, has really grown as, you know, gone from a side light to like a big revenue driver. What have you seen?

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'Cause I mean, I, I, I remember you, you had this, the sixteen companies dominating the world's Google results, and it's, it's kind of a who's who of digital publishing. Right.

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So when I, I first started this, the reporting on this specific topic, I think it was either two thousand and sixteen or two thousand and seventeen, and what was really happening then is the website about.com, so anyone who used Google in the last, before the last decade, searched for something, just like you'll see Reddit today, they searched for something and they saw about.com, whether it was on fitness or gardening or cooking, whatever it may be, about.com was there in search results.

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And they had guides that would write this content for specific topics at the end of the day. Right.

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And what I, what I noticed, not just happening at the time, was that these, this about.com and all these subdomains like gardening.about.com and fitness.about.com and geography, they started branching off into individual websites.

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And that was just very interesting to me. So I started reporting on it, and it was never in the sense of complaining. It was always in the sense of, "I just find this fascinating."

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And what I found really fascinating was that they kinda got to skip and break all the rules in the sense that they would create a new domain, redirect all of that content and all of the links essentially to this website, and it would just dominate Google.

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Like, it would just, their gardening subdomain on a brand new website would suddenly just take over the results.

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And of course, if you see that happening, you're gonna do it for all of your subdomains and all of your little niche websites that, that are no longer little niche websites and huge brands.

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So that was the really, really interesting thing to me, how that, how that all played out. And at the time, I was tracking companies like Purge and Dennis Publishing, who have all- Yeah...

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merged and been acquired in some way. And so I came back to this topic. It was amazing.

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I wrote it in two thousand and sixteen, and in two thousand twel- twenty-two, two thousand and twenty-three, people were still talking about it and tweeting about it, and that was...

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I, I, I thought it was time for an update. And I-- So twenty twenty-three came around. I shared a new update, how dominant they are. Obviously, a lot of the names have changed.

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Now it's Dotdash Meredith and Future and whoever, Vionet and all these other companies. And yeah.

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I've, I've basically found that I track, so that out of these sixteen companies, I track more than five hundred websites for them.The, the way they fascinate me or the way they get chosen as one of the sixteen is that they basically have a lot of websites in different industries.

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So I'm not interested in a brand as much like ReadPop, who primarily have gaming or entertainment websites.

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I'm more interested in like the Dotdash Meredith and the Valnets who have gaming websites and fitness websites and cooking websites, and not only one cooking website, but five or six cooking websites.

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And I could Google something... I had a good example in that article.

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I, something about, like, how to ripen a peach, and six of the first eight organic results were all different websites and all owned by Dotdash Meredith, and that's still pretty much the case today.

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So again, it's never been- Wait, how, how to ripen a peach? I gotta, I gotta ask Neil about this. Neil, if you're listening- [chuckles]... congratulations for dominating [laughs] the, the peach ripening.

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Yeah, I just, I just wanted to give an example of, you know, what was a really crazy search result basically. Okay. We've got- Um... we've got Serious Eats. We're doing this live here, Glenn. Yeah.

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You've got Serious Eats, number one. They get the, uh, what is that called? The snippet when, when Google pulls, pulls, like, a excerpt. So Serious Eats is a Dotdash- Yeah... Meredith brand. Yeah. Real Simple.

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Another one. Yeah. MasterClass goes there. They all own that website. But then we, we go back to The Spruce Eats. That's, that's Dotdash Meredith. We go- Yeah...

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onto Allrecipes, Ripened Peaches Faster- Another Dotdash brand... with this everyday kitchen item that you know what you're getting there. Discussions and forums, how can I get- Yeah, that-... peaches to be soft?

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And, and- That's the new one that we're, we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Then we got Martha Stewart gets in there.

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And- I believe, I don't know the relationship, but I also believe they are behind that website in some way. Yeah. Quora, and then Reddit. So I think, I think that's a good example of what's going on on these pages.

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If you're sitting at Google a- and you're looking at this, are you saying this, this is success, or are you saying this is a problem? I know you, it's hard for you to say, but, like, I'm just gonna ask anyway.

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So in a sense, I, I view it as, okay, you, you build this incredible website. You, you work on it for five, 10 years. You've, you've built it up, Google reward it, people love it, people come to the website.

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It is purchased by Dotdash Meredith. Should it no longer rank in Google, like, the next day? Is that, is that fair just because they also own a lot of other search results? I don't think so.

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I think the websites, for the most part, should be judged on their own merit, but also judged in the sense that independent and niche websites would be.

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I, I won't name any specific names, but what a lot of these networks of websites do, of course, is that they link to each other.

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So they'll write an article on gardening and talk about pets, and in pets they'll link to one of their other websites about pets, and they get- Mm-hmm... Google can say all they want, "Oh, we ignore these links.

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They don't count." But logic and people who are involved in SEO and search results can see these kinda things very likely help in a big way. So for the, for the most part, I don't think it's bad.

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I just think they should be treated just like everyone else is. And, and so just because Google had always... Backlinks were always important, right? So, like, the idea- Mm-hmm...

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the original idea behind internet search was that it was the wisdom of the crowds.

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The, and, and the crowds would vote, were voting every second, every millisecond with clicks, and they're also v- voting with links to each other, right?

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And so, like, if you had, and this is, this is very basic, but if you had a lot of, quote-unquote, "authority," and you were l- linking to someone, well, you know, it stands to reason that, that that person who's getting links from people who are, who are, who have authority are themselves important, right?

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Right. And, and of course, it's not just, you know, it's not just Dotdash Meredith.

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You will search, like, something to do with laptops or technology, and you'll see the first three results are future brands like Tom's Guide and TechRadar or whatever it may be.

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Yeah, I just think the way people are supposed to be running their websites right now, and I think this is a big complaint of, of what is, what is being rewarded is that just simple things like in terms of being helpful, have you actually purchased the product, and do you actually use the product yourself?

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And it, and it's almost like these big brands and their links and their connections and the network that they have in place is almost, almost able to skip those kind of things that other websites would have to go through.

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And, and a, and a major part, I, I think the, there's a good meme. I've heard you talk about memes on the, the People versus Algorithm podcast.

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There's a good meme where there's, like, a chart, and at the start you think one way and it's kind of dumb, and in the middle you come up with all these crazy ideas, and at the end you think of one way and it's kinda dumb.

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And so the, the beginner SEO thinks it's all just about content and links, and the, the kind of intermediate SEO just thinks schema markup and page speed and technical SEO on page SEO, and then the, the really advanced SEO just goes back to content and links.

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So I- it's, it's still an absolutely huge part of what is there. Well, I will say this, Glenn. Over the years, I've always joked about the S- the dark arts of SEO because it...

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I, I love the field because it has, at least from the beginning, attracted some, like, scruffy, interesting characters and a lot of, like, SEO consultants.

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I remember having one at one publisher that I was at, and we, our search traffic tanked, and so we brought in, like, an SEO consultant, and I think he was wearing, like, a Kiss concert T-shirt and had some pizza stains on it, right?

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[laughs] Like, he's like, "We got some proprietary software." He ran it through his proprietary software, and it turned out j- we just had, like, a, a rogue web developer who put no follow tags on all of our pages.

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[laughs] Oh, wow. His proprietary software didn't, didn't pick up that part. But I, I d- I do, I do appreciate that the SEO has that original internet flavor. So Google is obviously...

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They have a problem on their hands to some degree, right? Because the incentives, and incentives drive everything. This isn't about morality. It's just about incentives.

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The incentives areTo, to game the system at the end of the day, and they always have been.

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And I feel like it's gotten more sophisticated, and Google was, was always so-- That was the cat and mouse game, in that Google would have things like the Panda update that would crush a bunch of people and, and other people would win out.

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It seems, and tell me if I'm wrong here, it almost seems like it's at a breaking point right now.

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Obviously, AI is coming, and I wanna get to talk about that, but Google's in a bit of a pickle it seems, because I think, maybe it's the people I talk to.

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There's a general feeling that the search, that, that search is broken to some degree. F-from my perspective, without a doubt, absolutely. I couldn't be more, more in agreement with you.

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But I, I also try and view things... I have a, I have a very SEO hat on, and I want to see fair and diverse search results. I wanna be able to see individuals doing well and not just big brands.

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Yeah, and not just Google taking over with the sub features. For example, one, one website that never gets hurt through Google algorithm updates is Google Travel.

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If you go put in google.com/travel in any third-party SEO tool, you will see they are thriving throughout all, all of their own algorithm updates. And I would, I'd certainly- Purely coincidental, Glenn.

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[laughs] I would, I would certainly love to see things be more fair in that, that regard.

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So one thing I haven't touched on, and one of the things I've been reporting on recently, and I, I feel this almost has to be embarrassing for Google in some way because it's a topic they've covered many times, and that is health search results.

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So Google, so I don't know how far we're going back here, seven, eight years ago, pretty much anyone and everyone was starting health websites because there is so much search volume, right?

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Seven billion humans, you have some ailment, and you wanna Google and research it, and there's just so much traffic to be had.

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Pretty much anyone was creating these health websites and trying to get a ton of search traffic. Google really cleaned things up, created a lot of documentation.

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They gave it a moniker, Your Money, Your Life, as topics that were really serious to them.

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And what has really came about recently in the, in the rise of this discussions and forum sub feature is it is everywhere on health search results. And it's... I think they have to be embarrassed by what is here.

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Like, you can, you can search for a serious ailment, like the worst health ailm-ailments that humans can get, and the top answer will be something from Quora, and you click on it, and it's, like, literal voodoo and black magic and, "Add me on WhatsApp, and I'll, I'll solve these things for you."

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And it's, it just goes against so much, and I'm not even, I'm not even exaggerating [chuckles] with that example. It just goes so much against what they've said and, and we've seen in the past.

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And, yeah, you, you, you have to wonder that there's a, there's a working theory that there's so much AI and machine learning in that the, the, all of the systems they have working in place, it's almost hard for them to debug where they are at the moment- Mm-hmm...

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and, and what, what, what's really going on. So, so the, the helpful... I'm sorry. The, the helpful c-content update, we talked, like, who have been... The losers have been a lot of these niche sites, right?

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Like, I know, I think HouseFresh is always mentioned, right? That was the big one that went viral, yeah. Yeah. So they're... The internet's an amazing place, to be honest with you. It's still an amazing place.

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This is an entire website devoted to air purifiers, correct? That's correct, yeah. Okay. And this, this is not like, "Okay, we're just gonna put up a we- a page with a few descriptions of, of air purifiers."

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Like, they, they go fairly deep, at least from what I can tell. I mean, they're really into air purifiers. Right.

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And the, and the key thing, or at least should be, and this is what Google put in their guidelines, is that if you're gonna review products, have something unique to say, and preferably actually have the product in your hands and you've tested it- Yeah...

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before you even give any advice on it. Okay.

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And they're, they're los-- They, I mean, they were, they s- uh, there was a post that went viral, uh, uh, I had linked to it, about how they were losing out to a lot of big publisher websites, and those publishers might have a test kitchen across all...

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Or test kitchen, whatever. The testing facility. They have test kitchens, too. You know, to test these, these air purifiers.

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A-and I think HouseFresh has said this, this recent helpful content update tanked their traffic by, like, ninety percent or something. Like, almost wiped them away.

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Yeah, so this was, as we're talking, this was about, what? A month or two now when they- Yeah... they came out with that. They, they actually came out with a brand-new update yesterday.

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I'm already seeing The Verge and so on covering the story today, and their update is what-whatever they were at before, I think it was seventy, eighty percent traffic loss, now they're at ninety percent plus. Yeah.

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Like, it's only gotten worse since that, since that happened. Yeah. I mean, is this... I don't know. How much, uh... 'Cause I've, I've been reading the back and forth, and I don't know the technical SEO details.

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Look, the, uh, my approach to SEO was always, like, maybe a little bit naive, is, w-was, "Okay, let's just make the best content and, and do the technical things that we're supposed to do," but I, I don't have the time or energy or expertise to try to game the search results pages.

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Is, is this a... Where does the fault lie?

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Is this, like, an indictment o-of the update, or is this just saying that, "Look, we all think that our content is helpful, and our, our children are, are beautiful and brilliant," but that- [laughs]...

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you know, look, the broader, the broader society votes on a lot of that stuff.

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Whether so, whether the air purifier results come from a niche website or from one of the largest publishing companies, really what matters is whether the people who are searching for it are finding what they, what they want, the expertise that they want, right?

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Yeah, so, so I think there's two sides of it.

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I think, I think for any website that got hit and has seen traffic plummet, you could, you, you could sit an SEO down who's been doing SEO for a few years and tell them, "Find some issues," and, and they'll find p- things to complain about.

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"Oh, there's some questionable links to this website," or, "It's slow," or, "They take...

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They talk about the best whatever, the best dog bowls and, but they, they give us a history of the dog bowls first for a thousand words before getting into the content, so it's not as valuable."

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I, I, I would guess there's some merit for GoogleTo kind of leave this legitimacy up to the websites themselves.

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So if you go to GQ, just in a random example, if you go to GQ and they're reviewing a product, and you can clearly see that they haven't used it, like they, they have no original photos, they're not able to give any insights on that, I think Google might be leaving it up to people to go back to the search results and go and, go and hunt for something else.

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So leaving it up to them- But wait, can I jump in there? Yeah. Are we talking about GQ for air purifiers? No, just as a ge- Okay... general product. So they're, they're- Okay [laughs]...

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they're big on product reviews over there. Because the part that I wanna g- i- is- Okay...

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I see big publishers, I call it just like it's arbitrage, and arbitrage is always the enduring internet business model, is they get authority for producing either news or lifestyle content, and then they try to slide in what I call catalogs.

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It's like, wait a second, who are you? Like, what authority do you have on this? And I see certain publishing companies really stretching i- i- it, really stretching where they have permission/authority.

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And it surprises me that, that Google finds them authoritative in some areas.

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Yeah, and, and that kinda goes back to my point where I massively agree with you and I, I almost think it must be embarrassing for some people at Google if they...

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in what they're seeing, and maybe they either can't control it themselves, or I think there's a lot of people with their heart and their head in the right place and just don't have the authority or the ability to kind of make a change.

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I think a perfect example, and I checked this one today, I don't know if you wanna check it yourself, but, you know, you search for something, best vacuum for pet hair. Great example, Forbes.

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Forbes is ranking there, telling you what the best vacuum. You will see CNN there in the search results. It's just, yeah, For- Forbes is pretty brilliant.

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They have the best walking shoes for women, how to care for your cast iron cookware. I think they've really taken their, their authority in the eyes- Yeah...

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of search engines and, and just really pushed it as far as they can go, really. I mean, it's even like, I just did it for me.

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The nu- the number one organic is, is The New York Times, followed by Consumer Reports, and then, and then Forbes. But even the sponsored listings, it's like Popular Mechanics. Really? Yeah.

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I mean [laughs], it's like an iconic, a sort of iconic brand, I guess you could say.

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And for better or worse, and I think mostly for worse, a lot of magazine brands have become, in my view, em- empty husks for SEO operations. It's a playbook.

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It's probably not the most becoming of playbooks, but capitalism is gonna capitalism, I guess.

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I, I think you would know better than this than me, and I think you've actually talked about this on your newsletter before, but I, I assume a lot of this content, these product reviews pay for all of the other research and reporting- Yeah...

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that they love to do and that the brand is known for. Yeah. Well, look, it, the subsidies have always exist, particularly with news.

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The food section subsidized the investigations into the crooked city councilman because there's not a lot of economic value there. Auto section, et ce- et cetera, et cetera.

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So I, I get that, and I think the, the, the SEO approach has been in some ways...

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But I think where I see, and I think it's an interesting phenomenon, I'm not like moralistic about it, is some of these companies are becoming that. I mean, Forbes, i- it's a big part of their business.

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They have a very effective commerce operation going on with Forbes Vetted, for sure. Yeah. It's, it's, it's huge. Like any, any products category you can think of, they are there. Yeah.

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And it's, it's interesting to me because there used to be this divide, at least in my view, and I think a lot of people's view, between the sort of big brand publishers and the, the internet publishers.

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And I think Dotdash, which is, was the successio- successor, excuse me, to About.com buying Meredith was sort of an important moment, right?

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Where it was the, the internet native publishers, again, mostly from the scruffier area of it, not the like big brand fancy publishers, was buying a, a stable of Meredith and Time Inc.

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properties that are household names, right? I mean, Dotdash made some, what I would call minimally plausible brands, right, out of the About.com properties. And they were...

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I, I know Neil will disagree with me, but they, they existed for the search results 'cause that was, that was mostly what it is.

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Does-- Not always the case, but th- they, they weren't household names like the, the, the properties they bought from Meredith.

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You know, I think we're seeing this weird merging where it's like, for instance, Red Ventures. I was always... Red Ventures has CNET, right, which I think of as the classic internet publishing brand.

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But a lot of Re- Red Ventures properties operate in totally different areas. I mean, they're not like publisher publishers. Do you know what I mean? Bankrate. Is Bankrate a publisher?

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Yeah, and they have, uh, I think ZDNet is another good example of one of the- Yeah, but that was the acquisition. They, they acquired- Yeah... a few like publishing brands, but we're, we're seeing...

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And Future is a good example. Future has a lot of magazine brands that they, that they rolled up, and they're running this internet native playbook.

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So I just think it's interesting in that y- you have a lot of these, particularly you have a lot of former magazine brands that are becoming really SEO native brands, if you will.

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Yeah, and it's, I think, was it Popular Science or Popular Mechanics that, that really got called out in the, in the House Fresh article, just the...

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And, and I think a lot of these, these brands, so they, they benefited.

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They've been on magazine shelves and people are familiar with the names and I think, I think there's some argument to be said for people actually seeing those in search results and, and expecting to see those kind of names, names that they're familiar with and...

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But I also think there's, there's probably so much going on behind the scenes that the original brand people were associated with or the original magazine that they loved is, is not the same owner and it's not the same people with the same philosophy and goals putting out- Yeah...

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putting out the content and, yeah.It's like seeing it as, as like, "Oh, yeah, that's, uh, I know them. I'll, I'll trust them with, with this." And now, it-- that doesn't necessarily correlate with any true expertise.

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I think that's the... Look, it's never all one thing. There's a lot of major publishing brands that are doing the hard work. I think anyone, I would believe that Wirecutter is always used as an example, right? Mm-hmm.

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The New York Times acquired Wirecutter. I assume they're being truthful.

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Whenever I read a Wirecutter review, they bought 20 different vacuums, and I don't know, either rented or obtained many dogs in order to test how these vacuum cleaners pick up pet hair.

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The reality is there's a lot of efficiencies to be gained from s-skipping those steps, right? For sure. Yeah. And s- and obviously having, having the product in your hands, it's, it's time-consuming, it's expensive.

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You take the photos compared to getting a stock photo from Amazon or wherever it may be. Yeah, there's a lot to it. And there's, there's, there's a lot of... Look, I'm not...

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Like I said, I'm-- it's never a complaint from me. It's, it's always something more that I find very, very interesting, just how, what Google is rewarding.

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There's another brand, Outside, they go by outsideonline.com- Yeah... investing a lot of money into labs and teaming up with universities to help have students help with their testing and things like that.

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So I, again, I, I try to... I have an SEO hat on, but I also try and see things from the other side.

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There's definitely companies that have the products and do good reviews, but there's, th-there's probably way more that just don't- Yeah... and, and, and have never seen the item.

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So if I'm to put myself in Google's shoes, they're saying, "How can we create the incentives for..." Because everything is incentives, right?

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How can we create the incentives for people to put in the work to create useful, I guess you could call it helpful results to these specific searches that will direct people where, you know, to, to answering their, their problems?

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'Cause otherwise people will get frustrated and they'll start to search, just go, uh, they'll be like, "Oh, I'm just gonna go right to Amazon. It's not perfect, but I'll just go to Amazon."

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And any of those searches that go to Amazon or any searches that, that, I guess go to TikTok, that's, that's a problem, right? Yeah. So the, the way they get that is, is by rewarding it.

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So rewarding people who have actually gone to the location and, and took the photos. They've actually bought the products. They found issues with the product.

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They're not just promoting the ones with the, the highest commission rate or the highest price.

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And I think that's, that's what they claim to wanna, wanna reward and that's, that's what they have to reward if they're gonna, yeah, gonna have to follow, follow their own guidelines. Now, how...

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Affiliate, the rise-- It's funny because affiliate was like the original internet monetization, but affiliate has become a really much bigger business online. I think you mentioned People vs.

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Algorithms, Alex on that, uh, calls it the QVC-ification of the, of the web, and that everything is, is commerce now rather than advertising.

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I've been told that sometimes like gift guides and things like that, like how does Google view those in your, in your view? I don't know if...

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I know Google is, is like the Kremlin, but someone told me like they, they, that they see that as like an invasive species in the SERP.

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I, I think they view it as in terms of websites, in terms of if that's all you're putting out to the world, if the only thing you're doing is...

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There's some exceptions, R-tings, R-T-I-N-G-S, uh, Consumer Reports or whatever it may be.

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But for general niche sites, if you're only putting out product reviews, if you're only putting out content with best something for this solution or this problem, then that's, that's something they're gonna be skeptical of.

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I think for the... I think for search results as a whole, I don't, I don't see why they'd have much issue with it. I think people are searching for something. They wanna...

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If people are searching for gifts for your girlfriend for Valentine's Day, they wanna show people who have written reports on that.

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And I-- like I said earlier, I think they're just really putting the onus on the, the websites themselves to really, these big brands to really satisfy the searches. Yeah.

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It's interesting to see how, how they, how they handle that, particularly with AI, right? Are we seeing...

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I, I remember I did a podcast about a year ago with Peter Kafka in which he, he, he coined the memorable phrase, the tsunami of crap that would be coming- [chuckles]... coming our way.

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Is, is Google already feeling, has the tsunami of crap arrived in, in, uh, the search results? So by the way, just to go back to the, the, the last point. Yeah.

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I, I don't have any numbers on this, but one thing I've definitely seen just regarding gifts and kind of e-commerce and product in itself, is that I feel like I've seen a massive shift in not just guides anymore, but the actual product pages.

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So you, you know, you're searching for the best lipsticks or whatever it may be, and you'll actually end up on an e-commerce category page rather than an affiliate reviewer in the middle. I've definitely seen a- Yeah...

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a shift towards that. Well, I mean, I can see it. It's like an intermediary page, right? Right. A lot of these...

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It's funny 'cause a lot of publishers complain so much about inter-intermediaries, [chuckles] and at the same time they serve their most lucrative parts of their business.

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They serve as an intermediary, a middleman at the end of the day. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You're just intermediating between someone who's saying, "I want, I want this product," and you're saying, "Okay.

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Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have you come to this page in order to, like, direct you to the product." But yeah. Yeah.

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So with the-- Ob- obviously, one of the big developments of the last year has been, or 18 months has been AI content creation. So that is...

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There is no doubt being people and a lot of people, thousands, hundreds of thousands pushing that to the level of how much content can I put out there? What is Google actually gonna rank?

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And the scale, like crawling the web is not cheap.

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Of course, Google have a lot of money and make a lot of money, but crawling the entire internet [chuckles] is a big job, and I'm, I'm sure there's been some aspects of what they wanna avoid.

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They wanna avoid certain types of content showing up in search results, and I'm sure there's been cutbacks that have kind of affected other areas.

259
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So yeah, there probably is some argument thatThe- there may be too much for them to handle at times, but I logically s-speaking for myself, I think they would be-- They've had people trying to abuse and game their system since day one, so I think they would-- I think they can be better at it.

260
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I don't see the, the kind of problems I'm seeing on Google right now, I-- aren't reflected in Bing or DuckDuckGo.

261
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I know they primarily use Bing, but other search engines are able to get these things right at the moment and that we're not seeing in Google. So wait, you're saying that Google is doing worse than Bing?

262
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For a lot of, for a lot of searches. Look, again, I'm, I'm an SEO. I am-- I, I follow- Mm-hmm... SEOs, so, so people will give anecdotes about, "Oh, my, my mother is now using Bing instead." But- [chuckles]...

263
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it is-- Even from my own experience, there's definitely been times I've been, I've been searching for things and, and Google has been terrible, and I've, I've been using other search engines. Yeah.

264
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So how much of a threat is this? Because w- look, I, I use Perplexity and I'm using ChatGPT more and, and using Claude, and i- in using these, obviously Google has a generative AI experience.

265
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It seems pretty clear that search as we know it is, if not ending, is going to morph to-- morph into, into a direction that is c- is, is very different than how it has operated up until now. Is that fair? For sure.

266
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So yeah, and, and I, I agree.

267
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So yeah, I f- I feel like I w- I was strapped to a rocket for the last sixteen years of something only growing and only more searches and only more clicks to websites, and I think we might be at a turning point where that, that isn't the case.

268
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Yeah. So e-explain w-what should we-- what, what should publishers expect? Because I, as I said, publishers have seen their, their, like, the traffic era as, as has been written about ad nauseam is, is, has ended, right?

269
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And it started with the social traffic, but now search traffic has really dropped a lot. What, what's going-- W-why is that exactly? Yeah.

270
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So I think, I think from my, from my own perspective, I'm still, I'm still bullish, I'm still positive on the future of SEO, but again, I try and, I try and be- [chuckles]...

271
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uh, trying to keep other perspectives in view as well. Yeah.

272
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I'm still creating new projects that are gonna be reliant on search traffic, but, or, or at least, or at least search traffic could be a huge part of, of what makes the business successful.

273
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But if, if it was-- I think what's happening now has been a big wake-up call for a lot of people that this should absolutely not be their sole traffic source to rely on.

274
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And if you are, if you are banking right now and making the primarily, primary source of your revenue is these kind of product reviews, and, and again, it's not just products, it's service businesses and software.

275
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You know, people make a lot of money promoting VPNs and what antivirus software and whatever it may be. I think if that is your sole source of income, then you-- diversification has to be on the agenda.

276
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So I'm still positive about SEO. I'll still be doing it. Google is obviously an absolute goliath how many billions of searches are made every month or week or whatever it may be.

277
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And i-if anything is gonna happen to Google's market share, I think it's gonna be a very, very slow fall off over years rather than anything too immediate.

278
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Yeah, definitely, definitely have some diversification, and I think one thing that publishers should be not scared of, but definitely cautious about is could-- is the kind of content you're producing and the things you're putting out to the world, could a, could an AI answer that pretty, pretty easily and, and accurately, and w-would there be any need to, to visit your website in the first place?

279
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Yeah. I think the, the peach ripening search is, uh, definitely at risk. [laughs] Yeah. Right? But yeah. It, it's, it- [laughs] It also makes up a lot of the traffic, which drives a lot of ad revenue and yeah, from that.

280
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Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, it's like search getting less reliable and search changing quite a bit is so, so much bigger than what went on with Facebook and the social traffic hos because this isn't nonsense traffic that's hard to monetize.

281
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It's very lucrative traffic in many cases, and it's been reliable and it has supported other parts of the business that don't have those same dynamics.

282
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And like you said, I mean, you just need to adapt at the end of the day. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing because I think we... But like, people push the envelope on these things.

283
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On the internet, everyone, everyone pushes the envelope. And so everyone likes to come down on the, the tech platforms.

284
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But I'm telling you, if it was not for the browsers, at the end of the quarter in the early internet, you would just be deluged with pop-ups and pop-unders because everyone was trying to make their numbers, and so they [chuckles] just turn the crank and would just bombard you with these things.

285
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And finally, that got shut down. And there's, there's, there's always this push and pull, and for better or worse, Google has to sort this out, and it's in their interest to sort this out. Yeah.

286
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I think the-- what is, what is interesting, and I, I talked about this in the email to you, is basically we are, we are twenty-four, forty-eight hours away from something that Google s-seems to, seems to be confident or at least pushing that, you know, is gonna help clean up a lot of what we're seeing in search results.

287
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There's a pretty big update coming, but I guess by the time this is live, it's already happened. But it's... Yeah, there's some, there's some- So what should we, like, we'll, we'll...

288
00:47:55.464 --> 00:48:03.024
Okay, maybe we'll have to make this a preview. I mean, this is-- [chuckles] we should have, we should have, like, a tailgating party for this. Uh, does this have, like, a fancy name, this update?

289
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So there, there's three aspects to it, but primarily it's, it's around site reputation abuse, as Google call it. And- Ooh...

290
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s-so the, the idea is that a lot of publishers especially have been hosting content from third parties, and that is something to benefit from the authority and the reputation they have in the eyes of search engines like Google, and that is something they claim they're gonna be taking pretty big action on.

291
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Okay. So- So is that, like, speaking to what happened with the Arena Group and Sports Illustrated?With them running.

292
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I remember there was that little kerfuffle about AI-generated content, and, and Arena Group, which was operating Sports Illustrated at the time, was like, "No, no, no, that's just an e-commerce vendor."

293
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So no, not really. It's, it's more... So one-- So the-- They give a few examples, but the big one a lot of us are looking into right now is coupons.

294
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So there's a lot of third-party companies put their coupons and their deals onto the, the sites of big publishers. So a few of them have already started taking...

295
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So Google have-- Two months ago, Google gave this date, we're gonna start taking action on this from May the 5th.

296
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And so being the nerd that I am in the SEO world, I've obviously been tracking all the publishers and who has coupons and who's still has them live. Yeah, we've already seen some interesting updates.

297
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So GQ have now indexed all of their coupons. The Wall Street Journal have done the same. Forbes have done the same.

298
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They're still live on a lot of other websites, so Wired and Business Insider and- Wait, so I'm sorry, coupons? Yep. Correct. Yeah. So you Google Best Buy deals or Best Buy coupons.

299
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There's a nice-- Someone's about to make a purchase, there's a nice, there's a nice commission incentive in the middle of that, getting in the middle of that search query.

300
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And so, like, W-Wired, like a Condé Nast publication is, is, is hosting like coupons too? Right. So you go to, it's either, I think it's wired.com/coupons.

301
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If not, it's coupons.wired.com, and that is handled by a third party called Savings United. Okay. And for Condé Nast, this is kind of, this is kind of found money to some degree, right?

302
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I mean, you don't have to hire people to... I mean, I can see it being a very compelling pitch, right? [chuckles] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and- You don't have to hire people, you don't have to...

303
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Like, you're basically like, "Hey, we've spent a generation building up this authority, and now we're gonna, we're gonna lease it out to a coupon provider."

304
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Yeah, and it's the same, it's the same coupon provider that works with The LA Times. They also work with The Washington Post.

305
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Like, there's, there's, there's, there's a few different companies that have worked directly with e-commerce brands and retail stores to get the coupons, and then they deal with the publishers to, to share them with the world.

306
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This is classic. This is brand arbitrage to me. Just one thing I wanted to add, 'cause you, you specifically mentioned the Arena Group.

307
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So the, the, the really interesting one, at least again, just being a nerd, I don't know if this would be [chuckles] interesting to other people, but just going back to the Arena Group, one thing I've reported on a few times, uh, i- again, not complaining, just always thought it was interesting that they have all of the product reviews on Sports Illustrated, which is now in the hands of Minute Media and not the Arena Group, was handled by an external company.

308
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Not all of it, but a lot of the product reviews handled by another company called Pillar4Media. As far as I can tell, in the last twenty-four, forty-eight hours, all of those reviews have been taken down.

309
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So product reviews hosted on Sports Illustrated just before this Google update goes live could be a total coincidence. I won't put my reputation on the line that this was the reason.

310
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But yeah, no longer accessible, no longer there in Google, and probably related to what, what's about to happen. Yeah.

311
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It's-- What's interesting is when you talk about, I mean, you're s-super deep into this, but when you talk about coupons getting hit, in the regular person's mind, they're like, "Oh, this isn't like Condé Nast or Hearst or Forbes," but it is, and everyone's competing in the same markets now.

312
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It's not like, "Oh, we're above that." This is the internet. [chuckles] Yeah, and it's, and, and it's also kind of a curiosity of mine, what, what else is being-- what else is that happening to? So we know it's coupons.

313
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We know it might be product reviews. What kind of other third-party content?

314
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And I think, I think Google's reputation, so it'll be funny listening back to this podcast after this, whatever's happened in the last forty-eight hours, but Google's reputation seems to be at a, at a pretty big low at the moment.

315
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So if they actually are pretty, ruthless is probably not the right, right word, but if they actually do take some serious action, it's gonna be-- there's gonna be a lot of news stories in the next two weeks talking about who got hit and to-- who was impacted by this.

316
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It's gonna be pretty fascinating. All right. Well, we'll have to do it again. We'll have to do like a weekly. [chuckles] This, this week in the SERP. Yeah. You down? I'm always down, for sure. All right.

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[upbeat music] Cool. Glenn, thank you so much. I love, I love nerding out in SEO. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much. [upbeat music]