The Future of Google and what it means for Search Engine Optimization
welcome to SEOconspiracy.com today I have to great pleasure to welcome back in the podcast for the last episode of a series really interesting series where we went back in time and we traced back the entire history of Google and SEO since the early days illustrated with his blog post and the one and only mr Bill Swalski ladies and gentlemen hello how are you today I'm very well pump for this this last talk because we will talk about the present and about the future I hope to trick you to come back to us your conspiracies to to dig more about diff some other stuff but I think it's a very very valuable series that we we just recorded where we went back in time and throughout your your work we were able to trace back all the evolution of Google and how SEO evolved also throughout through our time and if you look back now ahead you hate it when you say when people say you are a legend but you are part of history your word the work you did is history it's it's the history of SEO it's the it's the it's part of the history of our industry which is only 20 years old but still um you can't say no to that Bill oh it's a lot more learned and usually when I talk to people it's about the future of SEO rather than the past SEO true that through that you symbolized you symbolize very well the mindset of adapt or die and to have the vision to see what other people don't see we've talked last time about how since 2005 you already saw this semantic SEO trend before it even existed by by reading scientific papers like the topic sensitive patreon and so on adapt or die it's a little bit more violent than the way you say it that's my style but same thing right yeah and the fact that we are still standing if you started we started around the same time early 2000s and we are still standing today that means something it really does because it changed so much I mean do you remember where we come from I mean that's crazy title tags and backlinks with uncle links to what it is today it's pretty insane there's some things that just don't change though they stay the same year after year after year knowing who your audiences are is important for any SEO campaign any marketing campaign you have to know what you who the people are who you're creating things for and that's regardless of what technology is in place intent is the key concept that people should focus on because if you get that and can you can you tell us again the warning he's cheating because I will ask him to to explain to us again the example back then what he just started about about a law firm but it was a little bit easier for him to understand intent because he did you did study law right so that's the part of the story that I know but you don't tell that during a podcast or public talks but I know I know I know my Bill I know my I've studied you so I know where you but it is first question first yes please tell us how you you started this his first exploration of the intent throughout the this first case I started intent how i in an SEO campaign when you worked with the the law firm right right and you already and again back in the context that was like what 2005 something like that 2000 yeah but you already I remember in the previous episode you you you explained how already back then you were already thinking about intent and already trying to put yourself in the shoes of the person looking for a service and you already started to build back then you wanted to to rank on law firm san diego you repeat law firm san diego 200 times on the page and you put all your anchor text on your backlinks law firm san diego Bill Swalski here ladies and gentlemen what did he do he built an entire guide he already tried to find semantic affinities when Google didn't even have a clue of what what that meant remember that story I remember a lot of stories like it I was telling you about Baltimore.org and how we were trying to rank for black history Baltimore oh yeah that was it yeah that's right we decided that was almost impossible because there were too many competitors who had good websites who who had that phrase covered trying to rank for matching strings matching black history Baltimore was was not the way to go there was too much actual history in the city that we could describe that people would search for and you may refer to them as long tail terms at this point I sort of thought of them as those when I wrote about it but talking about people like Billy holiday or frederick douglass when when talking about Baltimore made sense these were people that people would look for they were interested in finding out more about what their involvement in Baltimore was the famous churches the people like sojourner truth who was involved in churches in Baltimore in the early 1900s people people searched for her that that didn't sound like new technology that's notification that pops up on a windows computer in the same little tiny space that lots of programs want you to also type in at the same time yeah but what was it like windows 95 or it sounded like windows 95 it's the most up-to-date version of windows 10 but it works like when there's none but to to go back on Baltimore what was very interesting is how you okay you say fine we are this entity but we need to balance out we need to strengthen to be stronger on the other part because to be irrelevant on both something Baltimore well okay you are doing a service or selling a product in Baltimore and that will be easy to identify you as a relevant entity about that but then the city itself if you just repeat Baltimore all over the place that's not enough to be relevant so so the move had to come we were no longer just trying to rank well for the string blackjack street Baltimore we were trying to rank for the concept for all the related meanings all the the idea that people were interested in people and places in Baltimore and the history of Baltimore so if we included entities are involved in building that history we ended up ranking for that term it made sense let people search for blake or Frederick Douglass and the page would rank for black history in Baltimore because it was about the history of Baltimore that people are interested in the other example I would jump on before we move forward to the present is the example you always mentioned when you need to be relevant you need to understand intent and a trend that people have today is you want to order pizza for lunch and people will rank with the history of pizza because there's a lot of work and they're optimized that's what's happening now because what you did back then was the truth we didn't you were one of the only one one of the first ones to do it now everybody is doing it but doing it wrong in my opinion and there are there are ways of ghouls looking at intent that are differently now than they did 10 15 years ago they're talking about queries as if they were canonical queries and Google has a query log where they can look at what people search for and they can see how often people search for information about certain subjects and what words they use what questions they actually type in we see things like people also ask questions in search results and those are the types of queries that people actually searching with these days so if you're interested in the topic and you search for information about it you see people also ask questions you can get a sense of what canonical queries are for that topic by what questions they're showing so when you search for pizza 10 years ago or even today you and it's lunchtime you must likely want to order a slice of pizza you don't care about who invented pizza all the differences and menus of pizzerias over the year with the first pizzeria was in new york city it's not really what you're interested in you want lunch I never search in in english but in french it's laughable the the query SEO consultant because I'll do like SEO guide and explain everything's well it's better let's face it let's move forward to today it's it's better than it used to be the even the low quality content and the trend now you probably saw open air gpt-3 the robbers blah blah machine can write like a human being not yet not for long-form contact at least I don't believe for short form results of of sports elections all that stuff yeah a machine can do it but but I don't know what's your opinion we will go into machine learning a second but about the I'm using gpt2 and the whole buzz around gpt3 is a little bit annoying in my opinion because they it's just an evolution it's not a revolution let's not get over our head guys but anyway yes to to not digress to stay focused here because we have a lot to cover many things didn't change it's still the same mindset you were lucky you put yourself in a good position you read the you had you took the right path to try to learn by studying patterns whatever is also behind the pattern because what people see on your blog post is just the result just the formatted text and we spoke about this we like to explore scientific documents even more than the pattern itself and the profiling of the authors also is very important so you were lucky to see that from the start now it's a semantic casio is the way to do and then it's for the better even from technical SEO it's all better it's still spam supposedly Google improved in fighting spam panda penguin ninety percent of black cat is dead and psychology for psychological warfare also worked proper Google profile I just saw the the green report right coming out by Google come on Google is not saving the world right it's not really good for the planet what are you pretending like it's like you remember those apple keynotes where they have the the ecology called status of or recycling part of a mag of a computer you can't throw a computer in the trash like it it's it's so okay anyway some pretend yeah trying to to save the world but whatever the point is that today you wanted to discuss about how your way of exploring algorithms patent how does Google work is based on common sense experience learning a lot and not having an endgame you don't know where you are going what you want to look for and if you ever will find something then we have some other people and let me share a tweet by yourself on july 16th if you think SEO correlation studies may be useful you should stop that and read this this article shows how SEO studies that claim how to decode Google and other search engine algorithms are based on poor data and bad science it's an article about jeff ferguson jeff ferguson but we don't need to I'll give the link people can read it it's interesting let's start with bad science okay can you please tell us what does that mean bad science what that means is performing a study that looks at lots and lots of data and finding correlations about that data like pages that are longer than 3 000 words tend to be in the first page of Google and saying oh that that must mean that Google likes ranking long pages highly we don't know that we know that there's a likelihood that a long page will show up in the first page Google by looking at all that data there's also a lot of trigger pages and you have rounding errors you have short pages ranking too but some long pages are longer than that so you're not making any definite statements you're not showing any causation you're not showing any reason why a lumber page would rank higher you're just showing us the correlation the the the fact that a lot of pages that rank highly are that one and I think the ultimate flow in that is people believe that it becomes a standard that by writing three thousand I think it's two thousand words right that they came out with but whatever two or three thousand doesn't matter that if you write 3 000 words then you have more chances to rank on the first page of Google doesn't make any sense none in the same the same study says something like if your urls are shorter than 10 characters or 20 characters you also tend to rank on the first page of Google so that that tells people they should be editing the length of their url so they're shorter to get them to rank higher it's not true that your your pages don't rank highly based on length of your url they rank highly based on your content based on links to your content based on other factors and and the link your url is is rather minimal or actual non-ranking signal it has nothing to do with how your page ranks just because there's a correlation doesn't mean there's a causation right exactly and the issue with that is it was fun at the beginning because we had to figure out okay we started from nothing so so we had to understand what to optimize where what where are the the stronger assets you know let's go let's call them that instead of ranking factors okay we have assets we have backlinks we have title tags we have content we have internal links we have all those assets and how do we use them that's how I saw it and we tried to to make our sauce to say okay we need to optimize this and the difficulty is you need to push hard enough to seduce the algorithms but stay below the statistical anomaly you know not push too hard the exact match domain is I saw last week john mueller stating something this that in my opinion is totally wrong if you use wisely an exact match domain it works wonderful but people are pushing too hard so they get flagged so easily because it's already you have a you have an exact match domain don't treat it like a like a porcelain vase you know don't don't optimize like a like a pig so one of the very first forums that I ran across after I decided many years ago that I wanted to do SEO was one where there was an argument going on about what the perfect keyword density was for a certain term within a certain niche industry and it was it was ridiculous that point even thinking that Google was using keyword density percentages that were different based upon different industries my channel is called the people arguing were very serious about it true true I remember that and that's why I created this channel SEO conspiracies because the list is endless of those things that were born out of air out of someone just and if it's someone in front in the industry everybody will follow whatever that person says so we do have a responsibility and myself I claim that sometimes I do troll a little bit trying to to see if people will follow or not and but it's all good fun but that was the early days now today what's happening is with those heavy cpu like computers very capable of crushing data crunching data and and those algorithms of machine learning or whatever you want to call it that you can find everywhere for free well everybody's coming out with a study and it's only clickbait it's only for cloud it's only to get something it's not to make the industry move forward like your work it's only to get something back in return which is tw retweets likes blinks whatever they want and and enough is enough I think you're right to point this out because in 2020 it does not make any sense to um I would I say to to to follow the those studies so first question was about bad science and it will make us lead into the next chapter of the our discussion because the the second part of this article is hold on I'm lost here long history of bad science statistics the last second part was was the research presented is limited and unverified domain authority for example that's one of my pet peeves yeah it doesn't mean that Google doesn't have something that wants to understand signals linked to authority or trust or whatever but a domain authority score from a SEO tool is nothing less than a which magic trick it's not based on anything relevant there are domains that have always consisted of more than one website like a geocities or wordpress.com or blogspot so Google isn't ranking those domains or those sites on those domains on the basis of a domain authority score well if I'm not mistaken Google sees the web url by url page by page anyway the the page rank algorithm is is even though it's named at your lawrence page it's based on rankings on for pages so pages are linked together under the same roof there is a home page which is really stronger than the others but what I hate is this market marketing marketing around those tools about this domain authority score build up out of I don't know what so there's a context to domain authority domain authority the one that was published by Moz was intended as a way to estimate the value of getting a link from a specific domain versus getting the length of a different domain so you can take those domain authority scores and based on those try to guess which was a better source of links for your domain and that was the sole purpose behind the mandatory it was never a belief that Google used to mandatory the way Moz came up with one maybe in the early days but I read that that was how the reason why Moz came up with that score people may have written a lot of stuff about demand authority now and they're most likely wrong in most cases we know they rank we know topic sensitive page rank right those are documented you can see them even today majestic.com citation flow is the PageRank formula and the trust flow is the topic sensitive PageRank formula that's what it worth that's what I mean that's what it is okay it's maybe not a miracle but at least it's documented it's real they did a lot of correlation studies they didn't you didn't see them publish anything about saying oh we found them I know because I know very well dixon jones so he shared with me those stories but in private not in public you know it didn't they didn't say we have the magic formula for the page rank they say we did a lot of tests and looks pretty close but that's the difference between saying okay we reproduced the patreon formula we did a lot of tests looks pretty close from as far as we can see or trying to to build your entire branding around around this and a score that is the way they they build the score is is mysterious they don't they're not open about it yeah so how do we know you know you remember that toolcloud.com that was putting a page rank on people you don't remember that tour for a little while it was analyzing your your facebook your twitter and your linkedin I believe and it was putting a page rank on people's face a score of 100.
a personal page ranking cloud score cloud yeah clout k-l-o-u-t I think it got solved but it reminds me of that you know you you do like it's reverse engine engineering algorithms and then putting together a score to uh it was a social media connector score yeah yeah yeah yeah so so it doesn't like I said of course there's Google is trying to analyze authority and allies trust and figure all this out but I I I don't trust that these guys reversed engineered the algorithm because even from a scientific process point of view the way they're doing it most of the others because moses is not the only one it doesn't make sense to me one of the problems that toolmakers will run into increasingly in the future is Google is caring less about these types of metrics page rank and and so on they're they're actually moving on to other ways of measuring things using machine learning here you go so you are moving on to the next topic now of our discussion I think it's a great time yeah ranking those ranking factor studies and all this crap forget about it because it's not relevant today please tell us why so one of the things that Google is likely doing at this point or at least exploring deeply and they've handed it is the concept of author vectors and and they can look at a page and get a sense of who the author of that page might be I mean they've been studying writing styles and the way people create content for years they have a corpus of scanned books that they can do studies on and and you know millions of books written by millions of authors they have a lot of data and to analyze they can break text down into engrams short bursts of content one through say five characters long and and create statistics about those end grams that tell them tendencies that writers follow when they write something and and they can identify authors by what they write about and what statistically what they've created in the past they can tell the idiosyncrasies of specific authors and they can identify quite possibly who's written what based upon that content it's it's a point where they're they're no longer relying upon the string of text that identifies somebody's name in a byline they're they're actually looking at the content and saying this follows the way that so-and-so writes it's most likely from them even though some some authors can write differently on different platforms and then some people are gross writers they attend somebody else but moreover it's the fact that these it's interesting because in fact what you're saying it's the coin it's the same thing but different it's like the the other face of the coin the way we Google is is working now is the same but different it's really like flipped over so even if those ranking factors might still have some value and backlinks are not going away title get tagged value is not going away but because of machine learning because of the way it's trying to even going back this is to this intent and trying to be very precise and have basically which instead of doing broad SEO strategies it should be query by query on a macro are we confused micro micro macro is closed right macro is a big scale micro is small yeah macro is the small so so at least for your important keywords maybe not all of them and then pareto principle says that twenty percent will make eighty percent and I will I even still think that five percent of your pages will do most of the job five percent of your pages you need to take care of them one by one because having those general statements about SEO might be the foundation but is not the solution the end game here is trying to very fine tune what signal you send according to what intent you want to answer and the environment around you what does Google want future versus what does Google have passed and present do I have am I presenting it okay Google has written a number of things over the years about authors and bad authorship and reputation scores for those authors I didn't talk about this much in this authorship vector post I did mention some of them like agent rank which I wrote about in 2007 and in that one Google said we may look at content people create and content that people edit and comments that they write on content and we may give content on pages scores based upon editors authors commenters and and those are reputation scores based on those people and what else they've written on the web so there's a idea that Google could rank based upon rank things based on what somebody's written in the past and what they're written what they've written now maybe how reliable they are how popular they are what else they've written about and and how people respond to them so there's there's potential for those types of reputation scores based on who the author or something might be which is a different way of ranking things and and it's something that Google could use in a machine learning approach to rank content on the web and and to present diversity in search results we want content from different people we don't want the same same author showing all the results for certain subjects if they can determine things like eat scores expertise authority and trust if they can determine that somebody's an expert on subject they can say let's show content from this person to this query because they're an expert on the topic do you think people should not be afraid to build themselves as a brand to it's totally doable I mean you became we all became something an entity you can see it in easier way to see it is Google trends do you exist in Google trends or not is already a first sign of do you have an existence I encourage people to build a personal brand to develop an expertise in certain subjects to show off that expertise I think it's it's worth doing as an SEO as a professional as as any type you know as a teacher because before Google patent Bill Swalski were not associated together you did the work that today you are related to Google patents for everything you did and everything that all the signal around your work you created this relation this this vector and you became so the people are very impatient now and they say yeah but you guys started like 15 years ago yeah but you don't need you have to start okay you have to start somewhere maybe you won't need 15 years to to build something so so yes one of did it happen to you okay was last week another client is now a client a sign but comes up and says hey this website is out not ranking me and look at his backlinks look at his content I'm better you know the the famous theory everybody above me is a spammer kind of spam site's position so without even knowing the result I did live but I knew that I knew what I was gonna found I opened up Google trends I compared both websites well the one who was out ranking was building a brand it was really like a steep curve of the proof that the brand was alive and that people were searching for their brand and the my client now was just a flat line at the bottom it's and I see more and more and more of these examples of people looking at basic SEOs SEO kpI and not looking at that branding factor that becomes maybe that might be the decisive factor if at equal value and even if you don't pretend to become an author like like Bill Swalski or Shakespeare or whatever to exist to be born to to have that digital footprint in my opinion is increasingly important because like you said now Google is shifting how it's doing things and the importance of how machine learning like you explain who he's relevant for what and when everybody needs to be at the right place at the right time and that's the way the machine works I mean that's maybe you will explain it better than me but classification the way machI there's no maybe okay there's no maybe for for foreign and all so we're talking about this and I I mentioned to you there's another patent similar to the author vector patent which is a speaker vector act and there's all kinds of audio on the web podcasts hangouts other things where Google can listen and analyze audio videos you know from youtube there's so many youtube videos are uploaded every minute of every day Google has all kinds of data they can experiment with they can study they can listen to people talk and analyze get some sense of what they're doing and people I've talked to have been saying that the same transcriptions from videos have gotten much better over the past few years I think Google's spending a lot of time with videos we're trying to make sure they can understand what people are saying and and getting a better sense of who they are the author the speaker vector patent is like the author vector pattern except Google is trying to understand who the people are who are speaking what they're talking about what subjects they're talking about what information is associated with them where they're from whether or not they have an accent are there other things like that what person personal idiosyncrasies that they might have when they talk and and that's those are signals that Google is now looking at that again have nothing to do with the length of the title or what the anchor text link might be or so on but it's a it's a different way of analyzing content on the web and this is something that isn't associated with with a traditional 200 ranking signals type name from Google but it's a movement that Google's taking they're they're analyzing different things they're trying to understand okay who are the best podcasters who are the people most listen to who are they can we understand what their voice sounds like what they say and can we understand them when we see them when we hear them on something else like the podcast is a guest can we tell it's them and what do they talk about there let's build a database of all this information about these individual speakers let's treat them as if they're specific entities voice has a whole set of new challenges because of new orleans because of all that you know where Google should go for information on that what's that youtube they're neighbors they they they're they're owned by Google but they will never speak it's crazy the subtitles so there is one at least one white paper from Google on a topic they refer to as prosody is studying causes setting emphasis when people emphasize something when they're talking when they pause when they uh just how they say what they say and and that's something that Google analyzed when they came out during this Google developer series when they came out with the examples of Google using artificial intelligence to call businesses to like make reservations at hotels or restaurants and they people who they called had no idea they were talking to a machine because it did things like it paused and it used h h or are other words that aren't normally just words they're more sounds than people make and the machine was doing that so the people they talked to didn't understand it was a computer but Google's been learning from listening to people why did I say youtube because the the subtitles so if you edit manually your subtitles like what I do with SEO conspiracy it's english subtitles you start correcting them and very quickly like takes four or five videos Google Google youtube is improving so fast and learning so fast how you speak adapting it's incredible it's the best speech to text technology I know the youtube subtitles I think in an earlier presentation I mentioned a patent from Google where they talked about code searching and how they're using knowledge bases to identify the sources of codes and they stopped doing that they updated patent that was based on they said we're going to analyze audio from videos and we're going to look for quotes in that audio because they they can and they didn't say this independent but it's most likely because the intent behind that church who said what quote was most likely to watch that person saying that so they want to show them the video it's a talk I did yesterday in french another talk we don't do keynotes now we do we do virtual stuff but but it was about SEO in 2020 versus 2010 and I'm like guys text image video audio for formats it's in the search engine a general search engine result page it's in the mobile device people are consuming content in this four format those four formats of content until the end of the world it will be text image video audio you have to do multimedia today think about SEO in a multimedia way text is I'm not saying text is dead okay yeah but but but especially on the mobile people consume a lot of images and sound and and video why don't we had video we've had podcasts which are both growing at tremendous rates podcasts becoming bigger than television an alternative not bigger television is still big but a really serious alternative to to television I'm listening to lots of audio books and the thought came from my mind why don't I listen to plays like people like shakespeare because it'd be fun to listen to those I don't know about you but I got a little bit excited too early about voice search a little bit too excited I thought it was yeah alexa was coming out and then Google assistant all that Google now do you remember Google now it was also trying a predictive search and all that and apple search engine you heard the rumor in my opinion it's if only a feature for sirI for spotlight it's not gonna be yeah what do you think about that do you think it I think that apple's foundation research is very different from Google's and it's very different from yahoos you remember yahoo began to search and they were originally a portal so they always had lots of noisy stuff on their homepage lots of news and links to fantasy sports and personals and things like that and it was really busy Google said that plain sparse sparse home page with the search box and the word Google at the top and that put copy right at the bottom of the page that people knew goes into the page but but they've been adding more stuff to that recently they've always been based on search sirI it was a sirI company the group apple acquired and they acquired the technology for sirI and the patent for sirI talks about active ontologies so with certain topics like restaurants there are always things that people ask about like making reservations or seeing recipes or menus things like that so they understand what types of things go with restaurants they understand the ontologies the words are related to topics that are just related with connor's the same type of things with travel you know hotel booking hotels booking up flights they understand there's a whole set of tasks that go with those types of things interesting these are the roots of sirI and sirI is a search but it's a search based upon understanding of how things are connected to each other like you said very different approach than Google because it's to serve an ecosystem and not trying to organize the world's information and and the way Google approach it so it's going from from the the need what do people need throughout the features sirI or spotlight and the written word and serving because right now sirI is amazing to interact with the device but it sucks when you you try to get out of the device and that's something that comes from the outside world outside of the apple ecosystem so that's I think that's where they're going but staying on this future of search multimedia becomes obvious right now but also you've been nobody talks about Bill Swalski the agency Goldfish Digital and what you do it's a fair statement that and you've been doing that for a long time you build a very strong SEO layer based on these all principles of semantic and topical clustering and all that but it's not it around SEO you do everything content marketing basically to to to make sure that not only the SEO layer is giving enough power doing everything around the SEO makes SEO work but also I like to call it the three thirds building a brand referrers and organic traffic is that the first statement to summarize your your work I think that's first aim I I think have created a personal brand and I've created a business brand I think goldfish digital is known for being strong at SEO we get lots of referrals from existing clients a new business for business from people who know our customers one way or another and refer us oh your agency is very well known it's very strong even within the industry you you are definitely one of the top notch but what I wanted to say is when you're interviewed when people want you it's always about patents you are mr Google patents and I think there's a lot more to to Bill Swalski than just Google patents and the way I say that last time but I will say it again because it's important you could have taken advantage of your knowledge for fame for money for whatever you could have done things that and that's why I think we relate because we rather chill okay like we have enough we don't need more we don't need more power we don't need more fame we don't need more money we we're good we're good one of the things I say about patent I like to learn about from them is the searchengineers who write them provide their assumptions about search about search engines about searchers to us so it's not just the technology they're writing about it's how they feel about the world around them exactly I think that's interesting seeing the evolution of how they treat searchers how they feel about search how we've gone through growth of the mobile web and some of the early patents feeling pahones have to do with how many times you have to press certain letters on a keyboard to get numbers like you have to press the letter a four times to get the number nine you know and and they patented that and they're pending stuff like that till till we get and that's tech century representation and and we get to the time of syria where they're talking about those active ontologies which is a very root change around how many times you might press certain letters it's interesting how even our attack was overlapping when I was finishing up on the ranking factor studies and talking about the switch and you are already on the author vectors because that's it that's really it the level of profiling and the level of maybe that will change after the doj report we don't know but as as of today the level of even from ads perspective I think larry page a couple of years ago say something like today we're able to serve ads more relevant than organic search and I believe that statement for sure but yeah but don't you think let's imagine the future there will nail doj big tech hearing that will all turn bad privacy is a trend that's not going backwards talking about apple it's closing up the ecosystem and more and more people will bet on privacy I don't know if you came across this article by dutch media broadcaster who went back to the old way targeting the content meaning that they they advertised they put the advertisement in relation with the content like adsense would do you know regardless they forgot the the the profiling from the user like everybody else is doing and they just did it like we used to saying okay we have a piece of content about topic a let's find an advertiser in relation with topic a and they more than doubled I think it was 65 percent increase in revenue what is your thought about privacy and remember it was the end of the world when they're not provided we thought everything was over if the search engine provides you information that personal to you but doesn't provide that personal information to anybody else in the world ever oh it's it's it's a it's a value to you you're talking about new Google feature I forgot what's his name there there are multiple ways doing that there's a new patent that came out last week that said we might look at information about a searcher and a document that they've recently seen in our search results like a slide information a conservation yeah I covered it I covered it in my SEO conspiracy news it came out like very recently it's it's with the Google discover trend but but shopping style and that's it so you are saying okay and do people do people it doesn't seem like people care they're okay with the transaction okay it's free you want my data above whatever there's one there's one that talks about personalized entity repository where it says Google may learn about things that you're interested in or things that you're involved with say you're taking a flight to new york so it might fill up a knowledge base on your phone about places to go to in new york because you're going there okay I found the button and your in your search work this is a patent but you can't see it well I don't know what's wrong with the okay let me stretch back this up but having having that information at your fingertips in case you do search for it in an answer on your phone in a database on your phone means you don't have to wait for Google to search some server to provide the information they can just provide it to you right away so if you're going to new york city and you want to go to restaurants you do a query on your phone for restaurants in new york city and it can return that information right away to you it doesn't have to send the signal out to some through some cell tower and bounce it back to you it's already on your phone that's the way some I I forgot the technology it's it's not ghost it's not phantom it's I forgot there's a technology indeed that leaves all the private data on your phone and nothing goes up to the cloud and I strongly believe that's the way to do it but there lies power so now if you are in the spot of all these data hungry companies how would they do it if if they leave the the good stuff on the on the device and don't they don't get back any of it they have to show to everybody all the time they're not going to compromise that data they're not going to sell it off to somebody else they're it's your private data they're going to keep it private and they're not going to give it to anybody else other than same thing with like Google's based on location history so you you Google maps you use it navigate from place place it keep track of where you go they sometimes will ask you to update your timeline of where you've been so they have a good idea of where the place you travel to are in addition to location history which is real world fiscal location history they keep records of your search history so where you go on the web is another thing that they track another set of patents they talked about they haven't incorporated into actual real life yet as far as I'm aware but they might is media consumption history and they'll keep track of music that you listen to and I know my phone does this now it identifies songs that are playing in the background on tv or the radio as I'm traveling places it'll give me a little note and you can turn this on or turn it off it'll say what the song is it's playing right now which is good if you hear a song you want to listen to again you look at your phone see what the name and song is and who it's from but it's it's a media consumption industry and they they can at some point you can say remember that movie I watched last week who was this who were the actors who starred in that movie and what are other movies from the same people and that's the power of that type of media consumption industry the ability to do searches like that since day one human being since they started fire or building tools humanity has only been in a quest for more comfort and easier life more practical so all I know is it's not going backwards we won't go back the only problem I see is there's a big gap they there's a lack of an alternative for people who don't want that they can't have we've got very few henry david thoreau's who want to go back to walden pawn pond and simplify everything I remember reading that yes that was during my studies in in the u.s thorough I was very and you're right you're right but the trend is um that the way capitalism works it's freestyling until doj slaps on the table and says hey is over guys you gotta chill I don't know what will come out of it what's very funny is that SEO is still very much under the radar like nobody knows we exist think more and more people are learning of course but it didn't come up to the level of doj working one year or maybe it did I don't know but we see the things that Google is replacing I mean it's replacing yellow pages it's it's replacing paper maps it's replacing it's replacing newspapers it's replacing uncle joe who is a car salesman and you go to because your car is broken and uncle joe might know a garage better than no even anybody else you know so Google is also your I don't know in english you said but you're your qualifying agent your recommendation again word of mouth you trust Google too I I used to every sunday morning get up and go to a local restaurant and stop the newsstand along the way and buy a couple newspapers I don't do that anymore I don't need to look at all the news I want my phone that's also let's let's also finish up on that the predictive search part Google knows every sunday you take that route you go to new stand and then go take a coffee and he can predict and serve your stuff before for example it will rain take an umbrella it can't do that but or there is a there's a big accident on the road you usually take so leave 10 minutes early this prediction is also maybe very useful in certain cases but we'll still go back to to this huge power and it's back on the table again lux like 2016. if Google is trying to show good faith not only Google twitter facebook yeah we're not manipulating anything we're giving everybody a fair shake but still people are fighting are criticizing people saying no it's flawed and so on and so on it's tough on both sides it's tough I think what's your opinion on on the perception because it's so easy to take out a series of bugs or observation something you notice and change it into a story to fuel a narrative about some conspiracy theory you know what I mean so one of the complaints I'm seeing is that Google is putting people in perception bubbles like mirror bubbles around you that mirror everything that's within the center of them so the things you look for the things you see in the news on your search results if if you have a conservative perspective you see conservative world results if you think that there's some type of conspiracy against conservatives you see conspiracies everywhere I think Google's working to try to bring more diversity to those types of things when when they show top stories in the news they show things that are top stories that may not agree necessarily with your world perspective they may show alternative goods or social media results that are different than yours on purpose we're trying to fight that filter bubble type thing and I agree it's a problem but don't you think that people should think twice because it's human behavior a cognitive bias of confirmation it's just a tool people made facebook people made Google when people are looking into something they put themselves into a bubble regardless so in the digital age I think it's more powerful it's faster it's stronger but it's human nature and it's at its best right now it's it's not just the search engines is doing that it's it's the news channels if you watch the same news channel night after night your perspective the world is biased based on what they're presenting well classic case the same event you watch cnn and fox news you're not watching the same story okay so tech companies and Google in particular in a very difficult spot right now because of the big tech hearing because of doj because of all those critics because of privacy but like I said technology is not going backwards it's only moving forward and human beings are addicted to a more comfortable life useful stuff and ways to balance I think Bill and I found the right balance we are nerds we are professionals of the internet we still have a real life we still we are photographers we we appreciate the outside world and our life is not dictated by notifications and then and so on so I think it's up to the individuals to to maybe fight it's not a fight it's just being reasonable and being it's common sense what do you think about seven or eight months ago maybe a little bit longer I was asked to write a article about the biggest SEO myths on the web and my first impulse and that was I don't want to write just about what the biggest myths are about SEO I want to write a guideline to critical thinking to identify to to questions to ask when you're when you're looking at something to identify whether or not it's a myth or it's likely true I wanted people to exercise their ability to think critically help analyze things determine whether or not what they're saying is a good argument if it's supported by reasonable evidence if it if it actually makes sense or if they're logical fallacies built into what they're seeing for them because sometimes you see things or sound very realistic very true on their face but they're filled with misinformation context matters and and I'm reading a thread on twitter this morning and somebody called something misinformation and a bunch of people started arguing saying that's not misinformation you're wrong it's disinformation you say the difference is misinformation is accidentally presenting something that maybe is wrong this information is purposefully presenting new information to get people to think a different way then maybe they really should based on the information being presented I think there is there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation on the web I don't think you necessarily need to understand the intent behind misinformation or disinformation just as long as you realize it's not really good information I just have a feeling that people blame the messenger a little bit too much yes Google yes facebook they have the flaws they are not perfect but people should investigate and then the other prime example of how even inside an industry with highly skilled professionals you see the difference between how you approach the same thing okay you want to learn about authorship or author vectors the way a ranking factor study will look at this will say hey we found that an average of this ratio of well-known authors are present on the first page of Google so if you become well-known you'll have more more chance to rank higher the way you look at it is you investigate you're on the fact you dig deeper you profile the author you do your research you're on the context but maybe not everybody is able to do that I don't know it's easy to blame the messenger the herald sometimes is wrong but if if they're purposefully presenting wrong information if you're purposefully listening to them not insisting that they provide more information provide facts support what they're saying you're just as much to blame as them don't we no we agree and for the final word the famous SEO is dead meme I say before adapt to die we say we agree today search is multimedia searches everywhere search is evolving people are continuing to search and they're not stopping and I will point out that search our field our industry is the best of the best out of all the pipelines you can imagine to get traffic because of intent if people search we have an advantage if you go disturb them on social media or in their mailbox or on their phone like Bill is every morning when we start talking you interrupt when people are intent on trying to find a solution to a problem or an answer to a question when I see somebody talking about SEO and they never mention an audience no they never they never talk about understanding the audience to see the audience says about something what words they use with the search work I I question how much SEO they really know I'm also very confused about how people focus just on the product of the service they're trying to sell and not beyond what is really the benefit what is beyond the product or service typical example plastic surgery I want to remove I want bigger boobs okay well why why is it is it you want to please man more you want to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see what and and trying to go beyond and the audience is will not tell you sometimes you have to find out by yourself you have to investigate and you have to understand what they really want beyond we always say benefits feature style benefits sell and again I can't praise you enough but that's the truth history tells you are right you were right from the beginning because what you say right now and we will end up on this in 2020 people still can't figure out what the audience work want our job at the end of the day is trying to make the offer and the demand match yeah that's what we do sharing there's an offer there's demand and how much do they match is the key and bigger the pie of if we have two circles and those offer and demand two circles intersect the bigger the intersection as SEOs we have the website owner at our hands we can talk to them we can ask them questions they're trying to find consumers and turn them into customers and that's part of our job we need to understand those consumers well enough to help them find the website and get signed up or the services and the goods they provide and we are in a good state we we know how it works we don't use the term keywords topic clusters ideas concept whatever you want but go go a little deeper than 2010 type of SEO it's 20 20. it's time to wake up and I see too many people still stuck in 2010 harsley that's the ranking factor studies is a typical of that but what you just say is also typical and I I feel like um like I would say adopt a die we'll see we'll see who is left in five years I know you'll be there I'll be there we'll we're close to retire but we'll see we'll see who else one last word of wisdom yes what what can we leave for the ultimate world of wisdom as far as the mindset you need to how do you say what I say adapt or die what is your polite way to say it I don't usually tell people to adapt your tie it seems kind of fun that's what I say but that's why I wanted an advice on how to say it on a more politically correct fashion I had a client who had a product that helped people lose weight and it was a drink it uh satisfied their appetite and you wanted to use a keyword phrase that most likely no one in the world would ever search for and I had four co-workers around with me one of them was a strategist one was a case manager and I don't remember what the other two did but I I said okay doctor chances are most human beings who want to buy your product will never use those words to try to find it on the web our job is to help you sell your product do you want to do you have anybody do you want to have anybody ever buy it he said yes I said think about using words that they'll search for I know you like that phrase and scientifically it's a very good phrase but most human beings aren't going to use that praise to find what you're offering let's try to get you to succeed that's what we're here to help you with it's what you did in 2005 and what you're still doing in 2020 and I observed the exact same thing so like you said some things never change and I want to leave a positive note saying that no it's not too crowded no but it's still you can still make it it's it's not true that yes you can't dream like it's 2004 to to rank easily on super highly competitive keyword keywords in a few weeks that's that won't happen but it's still very new and if you work on your difference if you understand your unique value proposition and you can match offer on demand you can beat everybody else there are new things happening in SEO all the time one of them is schema and there are people who are writing become have become specialists in schema who can tell you how best to get a featured snippet what would they tend to look like how they tend to work respectfully and that's something fairly new and a lot of SEOs don't understand that and here there are people who have been doing SEO for a year or two or three and really good at understanding schema and getting featured snippets to show off and work really well it's possible for people to enter SEO find a topic like that become really good at it and and do well at it it's the most valuable advice and now we're shifting the conversation and we're ending up talking to SEO professionals who want to start and that's something that tell everybody don't become just a 360 SEO scm smo x no specifics become the specialist in schema.org or
log analysis or whatever go from very specific and then branch out but people like us all dinosaurs we are we're just SEOs in general today no it's not possible to I never ever use this line but I was tempted many times when I'd go to a job interview as an SEO and people would ask me what I know about sc and I said well I remember the things I invented that's beautiful yeah love it that's that's something that I would use you started 1996 and you invent a lot of stuff right at least the first time you saw it was the first time you thought of it and other people may have started using the same thing but you're sort of inventing it at that time too exactly exactly and we previously used the analogy of photography because I think when it comes down to it it's training your eye training your brain to see what everybody else doesn't see it's in front of you Google is telling you everything it's right there people can see it so there there are two ways to become a good photographer one of them is to take lots of see pictures works another is to look at a lot of pictures and see what you appreciate from what you don't like exactly and SEO tool works the same way look at lots of websites work on websites exactly no very true I think that's a good way to end this talk we still have so much to cover I feel like it's unfinished business because it's a never-ending story it's it's can be like that forever but I know that everybody wants you back anyway they always get feedback that we won't build we want Bill so let me think about it I'll find something that he can refuse and I'll get him back okay it sounds good thank you Bill thank you very much for your commitment and your well it's natural for you to share so much but yeah it's been a pleasure talking to you thank you until next time thanks for watching
2020-12-28 12:34
