AEO vs GEO vs SEO

Transcript: AEO vs GEO vs SEO

This transcript of AEO vs GEO vs SEO comes from the video's captions, lightly cleaned. Click a time and the set jumps to that moment.

Welcome and Introductions

0:00 Welcome back folks to the David Quaid SEO show. This is episode 4. In this show, we're going to be discussing a load of different SEO topics from communicating value is half the battle, from position 17 rule, indexing realities, and we just got a ton of stuff. I'm sure you're going to get great value from the show. Got the kid of SEO with me, David. David, would you like to give a quick intro to our new listeners and viewers? David?
Yes. And Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining live. If you don't know who I am, I'm David Quaid. I'm in SEO for 22 years. Well, I've owned the same agency for 22 years. And I'm here to help people understand SEO. I think there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation in SEO and GEO. And I'm here to try help straighten the record and make it easy for people to do it. That's fantastic. Should be a great show. Before we go into the meat and potatoes, folks, we got a couple of messages from our sponsors. We will be

Communicating Value and Scaled Content

1:05 Back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We're coming back, folks. So, Dave, let's start off. Communicating value is half the battle. You did a X post. You outlined a few key things that you think are really important. So maybe you can give us some more insight about communicating value is half the battle.
Yeah, I think you know internal marketing is important. I learned that from a really great VP of marketing a couple of years ago. Internal marketing is the most important marketing for marketing teams. And I think showing your client or your or your manager what you're doing and how you're moving the needle is critical. I think it a lot of SEOs do a bad job providing data. Providing data isn't reporting. And it's quite often a poor report unless you've got a situation where you've built a dashboard and everyone understands the dashboard. And and it's a problem that I'm you know it's something that trips me up a lot as well. I often provide data instead of providing a report. And a report is is quite often a story. And the higher up you go, the more it needs to be a story, especially if it's something that they need to relay back. So if they need to relay that back to their marketing team, their investors, shareholders, whatever, the more of a story it is, the easier it is to understand and the easier it is for people to share it.

2:38 And so I think you need to be able to look at where and it's getting harder, right? It's getting harder to pull that together because we've got Google Go to SERP trackers aren't as easy to it's not as easy for SERP trackers to build SERP reports. As Joy Hawkins was saying this week as well, SERP positions are more fluid. So if you see a SERP report that says you're in number two or number one or number three, it's not necessarily the same for everybody else, right? Right. And so that's very difficult.
And so I think a lot of teams and the more teams I meet and the once you get to teams over you know size of four where people are in particular silos like this is content, this is analytics, this is keyword strategy, this is PPC, the more the more difficult it is to get at data and the more difficult it is to sort of get teams to understand that just publishing content is just output. But making sure that content ranks and is contributing towards the bottom line is a more difficult proposition. So if you're saying, look, we've got our SEO strategy and we're making sure there's no 404s and here's our SERP reports and here's a list of things that we've done, you're probably going to start to lose that client, right? You need to start showing connecting that to actual outcomes. Are we getting more leads? Are we getting more visibility? And if you don't have that data, then at the at the outset, that should be a big part of your SEO process is how do we what are the key metrics we need to look at? Are they leading indicators or lagging indicators?

4:17 What are the different tools that we need to implement? And so those are questions I think that SEOs don't answer enough. I think a lot of the time for the last 20 years it's been traffic going up and to the right and that's not happening anymore for a lot of business especially more established businesses and so you're going to have to find new metrics. You're going to have to find new ways of getting visibility, measuring it and adding to your content strategy. You're going to have to find keywords that trigger AIO's and you're gonna have to find keywords that potentially don't trigger as many AIOs.
And I think
It's a very extremely confusing time, isn't it? Because you know a lot a lot of SEOs a lot of marketing accessories VPs they're under a lot of pressure and you know PPC and meta plat platform you know they got their own problems but there's they're still more quantifiable maybe I think I sense with SEO It's because of the changes that you've just outlined, it's become even more difficult to pin down what the return on investment's really going to be. I But I don't know if you agree with that.

5:46 I I think it's so I think you've got to have a sort of purpose, right? So, for example, I was speaking to someone during the week about pruning and I said pruning for the sake of pruning doesn't do anything. These aren't this isn't a plant, right? It's not a hedge. It's not going to grow. But if if you've got a lot of bad pages that you don't want people reading, pruning may make sense because people aren't going to read bad content potentially and drift off the site. Or if you've got millions of pages that are not getting clicks and it's chewing up time and management and traffic that isn't converting, maybe you can pair down your site and save money, but you have to know what it's doing. Doing it for optimism is pointless, right? And so I think if for example you're looking at improving a page for conversion, then you need to write down what it is you're testing, right? So keep a spreadsheet. What we do when we're working with clients some a lot of projects I work on I work on the I work with the CEO directly even at companies with 500 people and what we're looking at is we specifically want to improve ranking for a set of of keywords right and we note down what those keywords are we note the changes so are we updating H2s are we building new pages we publish and then we start looking to see for those keywords in search console are we getting more traffic and then in analytics are we getting more leads and then we can see which of those experiments performed better and then we can scale that out and teach other people in teams whether it's content or it's web developers how to build that up. Right.

7:35 Right.
It's kind of like we're seeing a lot of challenges with scaled content and a lot of people are getting hit with scaled content and they're getting upset about it. I kind of made like a light-hearted cartoon about it earlier on LinkedIn saying there's five stages of it. The first one is denial. The second one is anger at Google for closing down small businesses. But pSEO has been in SEO forever. It just recently got a bad name. And it's got a bad name because people don't want to call it scaled content, which is what it really is. But you can do pSEO as long as it's a fractional increase. So, if you've got a 10,000 page site on jobs and you add a new jobs category for, let's say, SEO jobs and you spin up 300 pages because you're going to do five levels or 10 levels of SEO jobs for every state in the country, you're going to end up with 500 pages. It's just 50* 10 gives you 500. But 500 on a 10,000 page website is a fractional increase. However, if you decide that you're going to go into this market by building a 5,000page website from scratch, that's not going to work. [laughter]
I'm displaced for your way that people think that was going to work. Look, short, medium, long term, [snorts]
I mean, it used to, but it's not going to work cuz right now you've drawn a big target on your back, right? And it's it's not going to work from that point of view. Well, I'm I'm, you know, every couple every 10 days I bring it up in front of you and you've tried to knock

The Position 17 Rule

9:10 It out of me. I'm still paranoid about my little website and the content that I produce with AI, which I edited and tried to add extra value. So, I think it's everywhere. So, let's move on. I found this really interesting. The position 17 rule. What's this about, Dave? This intrigued me a lot.
So, if you're looking at what content to add to your site, what you can do is you can look at Google Search Console for queries that you rank beyond position 17. And position 17 is a kind of a number I picked from thin air. It's not an absolute, but it could be position 13. It could be position 21. And it's a way of helping people address the gap in their content. And what you're really looking at is a scale where you might have some keywords where you're in position 78 90. And so if you try to target those positions, they're too complic they're too competitive for your blog for or for your website to enter. So position 17 is a way of looking at what keywords are in search console that are very easy if you target it that correct directly. So, if you start writing content around that particular search phrase, you probably stand a good chance of getting to page one.

10:37 And so, it's just a quick way of identifying keywords, it's it's it's kind of like a reverse topical authority hack. In other words, if you've got a PageRanking for one thing, but it also ranks on position 17 for another topic, if you actually focus in on that topic and become more relevant to it, you'll probably rank better. So, it's just one of those like we don't really know the algorithm and so we can't use it to help we can't utilize it, but we can utilize the data and search console that sort of like reverse engineers it if that makes sense.
It does. Looking back on my own journey and we become friends and looking back basically I chose what I thought was a reasonably effective way and basically that was look at competitors websites have a list of competitors or sites that had content that I if I got to my website, I could convert maybe made a judgment call and then basically I just used the skyscraper methology just write something hopefully better more targeted and that and it seemed to be working and then about 18 months ago
I don't think I did what HubSpot or some of the other
You didn't
I kept reasonably on topic, but 18 months ago, Google decided that
So
And I think that was a little bit na naivity on my I never really concentrated on key words. I concentrated on using some tools that showed could I compete for that article with my domain authority. So, I don't think I was totally naive,
But in some ways I was.

12:45 I think let's let's take your use case and and apply it for the wider audience because I'm sure there's a lot of people in the same boat and I was talking I've spoken to a few SEOs about this. There isn't much of a conceptual understanding in Google in the sense that if you start writing about how schools need to host their website and then you want to talk about SEO for schools and then you want to talk about WordPress plugins for communities. Google doesn't really look at communities and nonprofits and schools and group them together, right? That would take a human editor. That's because that list is subjective. It depends. In other words, depending on your point of view, your history, your personal preferences, how you categorize things will slip and change, right? But Google does understand that an article about WordPress for schools and an article about SEO for WordPress for schools are related. And it's not semantics. It's just because the word WordPress and school is in both search phrases. And it if you're if you try to make it any more complex than that, you're going to struggle, right? Yes, you can search for a term and Google understands that term may be related to another word, but that's really from studying how people click on things, right? But it's not an understanding.

14:01 And I think the more people pour into Google and inflate its capability, the more people are going to get lost in in this world, right? And so I think if you look at the content that you've written conceptually to a human, it's related to a search engine, it's not. [snorts] And
As you lose clicks, you lose authority. And you also lose that semantic leeway or breadth that Google gives you. And I think that's what's happened. And I think coming back to cornerstoning and looking at keywords based on they contain the same words is a is an easy fix for that. And it's the same with the PAAA hack. So I think that's an important thing to help people understand, right? That
Is
Yeah. I think it's one of the main things I've learned as we've worked together. Obviously I wish I knew had known that a long while ago, but
Liberty late to learn.
Yeah, it's true. Let's move on. But I think that's really also important this position 17 rule that if you're using your Google search console is to look at those that are in that middle ground and look at those terms and then write content for those because like you say, you probably are going to rank because a lot of people are finding a lot of their content is on page two, three and it's really if if you've got content that you've written and it's on page two and it just seems to stick there. You got any insight about how to improve that to get it on page one?

15:52 If your page starts ranking at page two and it's occasionally goes up to one and comes down or if it just stays at page two, that's a topical authority issue and you've just picked a keyword that's out of bounds. You could try to create more internal links. You could try to get more back links. But if effectively you're doing the same thing, you're just trying to cover for lack of authority and importing authority from another place, right?
[snorts]
So if that's the case, you've got one or two choices. You can either find another source of authority and pipe it in using links or you can roll back the page and see if there's a longer tail or a different variant that's got a lower keyword difficulty. I've spoke I've seen a lot of sites where people publish and they're never checking that. And so I think what you brought up is an important thing. I was talking to a content writer yesterday and they I was saying how they how they could help differentiate themselves. A lot of content writers don't go back and look at previous posts to see if they ever ranked or are ranking well.
I haven't I just I just plotted alone,
Right?
Yeah.
And so you're you're you're really building this sort of like content that needs to be maintained and and is sitting there doing nothing. And so I think whenever I post I immediately start to check did it start to rank within an hour I'll start looking in Google and if I can't find it I know I'm in I'm I've got problems and that's cuz I've got a developed topical authority. If it if it was earlier on in the progress I would probably wait a couple of days and I would add that to my SERP report and I would tag it so I know what date of the month I've added it. So I can come back and check and if those pages aren't ranking and aren't earning clicks, then before we create new content, we roll back and address it. Because it's not performing.

Discovered vs Crawled Not Indexed

17:47 I've got some more questions on this, but I think we can leave those to the end of the show. If we don't get anybody with some questions, I've got some additional questions about that and some other stuff. So, let's let's move on. Indexing realities. What would you like to talk about that indexing realities discovered not indexed and crawled not indexed are two different diseases? I love it.
Yeah. Yeah. That there's so much misinformation and again it comes from people with different points of view and I think crawled and discovered are two things that confuse people. There's a lot of information from Google. There's a lot of information from other SEOs and as usual and this is why I always caution people on getting advice from LLMs is that LLMs can sometimes for example pick up a question in the Google support forum and it looks like it's quoting Google but it's not. You know, it's it's quoting a question and somebody could have phrased the question wrong or somebody could have answered the question wrong. The Google product support forum for SEO is not answered by Googlers. Answered by people that are trying to build a profile. And there's a scale of of accuracy there that people need to be careful of. And so discovered not indexed is a state where and it's usually applied to pages that were if you think of a website as a big bang. It starts with one page, the homepage, and then it explodes out, right? You build your blog, you build your money pages, you build your about us pages, your information pages, and then you build blog articles, right? So if you go back to the early origins of a website as a big bang singularity incident, a lot of pages that are outside of the topical authority at that early stage can sometimes end up in discovered not indexed and stay there for a very long time. Those early origin pages are suffering from a bug in Google where there's almost a block in them being crawled. But some of the feedback I see on Reddit, people are making assumptions like Googlebot found your page, read it, and said it didn't like it. And I was I saw someone trying to share this on Reddit, and I was surprised that John Mueller jumped in to say I didn't know this was news, enlightened me. And someone was just sharing a story from Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Journal. He was just saying that Google bots don't pass schema. So Google bots don't do a lot, right? They actually just fetch files.

20:18 They open them up. They see if there's links to other files and they add them to indexing cues or they go and retrieve files from an from an indexing queue. That's all they do. Nothing else. And so when you're telling people that discover not index is because Google didn't like the page, Google's never read the page. The page has actually never been pulled off the internet and entered into a Google data center. So if you have that status the fastest way like if you just apply Occam's razor the fastest way is just to change the slug republish it and all of those pages should automatically move to crawled not indexed or into indexed crawled not indexed is typically a ch an issue with authority like Google just doesn't think you have the authority to index that page it might be because conceptually it's related but Google doesn't understand the relationship or at the time of indexing thing you didn't have topical authority to cover the index that page is going into, right? Whether you know how to do it or not, every document name tells Google what it's relevant to and that's where Google starts to find indexes for that page. So, if you're at crawl not indexed, it's an authority issue. A lot of people say that it's thin content or it's duplicative content. Google will index duplic duplicative content all day long. Matt Cutts pointed this out in like 2006. It's not news. It's in the Google SEO starter guide. So, you're you're really setting yourself up for disagreement if you say that because you're you're literally contradicting the Google documents. Now, I know that Google say that they want the best content and they're trying not to index content of low value, but value is subjective, right? And so
Yeah, well I've got some but based on my experience basically when I started to lose topical authority my response was to publish even more new content. So I ramped it up and I didn't look at ex and I found that I was getting a lot more pages discovered but not indexed
As a response to that activity. And I think a lot of other people are in the same boat. What's that about?

22:29 So discovered not index just means that Google didn't think that it was worthwhile even retrieving. Personally, I think it's a bug, right? I don't think it's because I I can I've so again I have access to lots and lots of websites. I build lots of
Actually I got it back to front. I apologize Dave. Crawled
Not crawled
Not indexed. Yeah, Fortnite indexed is
Literally almost always 99.999% of the time a problem of authority, right? So you've you might be writing about WordPress plugins, but you're you've named the document about a specific plug-in that you've never written about. And let's just say that plugin is called Rocket, right? The Rocket plugin that helps you compress images and files. And so if you just call it a review of rocket, Google's going to look at it and say, "Well, you've never written about rockets on your website." All right, we're just not going to index it. The same as if you started writing about photography, we're just going to look at it and go like, "You've never written about photography. We're not indexing this page. We're going to ignore it." And so you've got to come back and say, "Well, I've got to put this in context.

23:46 It's the rocket plugin for WordPress." And because most of your pages contain WordPress, it'll probably index then. Or you don't have topical authority, which means that you want you need Google bot to find it from another page. So when it sends the link for that new page to the indexer, it's saying it's coming from this page and that page is sending authority, right? And so I think some somewhere along the line, the basics of PageRank, right? That pages link to pages has somehow been lost, right? Because everyone talks about using indexing services and everyone talks about submitting pages to Google. But the from day one, Google has always said we want to find pages by spidering. We want our Google bot to open a page and look at the links it has to other pages and go after those and crawl them.

Backlinks, PageRank and Meta Descriptions

24:36 And I think you said or I think some other people that I follow and I respect I my crimes against SEO are long. David, [laughter]
You don't have any crimes against?
No, I have ridiculous ridiculously long slugs and my I'm going to be honest now, David. I'm publicly I admit my crimes against SEO. I use link whisperer and I used it extensively and I think now this varies but I think really thinking about your back links and not overdoing it and maybe only having one or two back links to other pages is better than going semi- berserk isn't it? Because you've mentioned this yourself. You've you've seen many websites that's and I've seen them that they've got almost 50 60 back links to other pages, haven't they?
Yeah, there are sites with 50 60,000. There's definitely a very happy backlink. I someone in X accused me of selling back links the other day and I was like, you clearly have done the research of a dead hamster. But yeah, I don't know. Some people pe people, this is why I always talk about tribalism in SEO that and ideologies that once someone thinks I'm a backlink seller, they just seem to hold on to that and they don't realize I'm like I'm not a backlink buyer. I don't advocate for it, right? I don't care if you do. I'm not the backlink police, right? [snorts] But it's just a stupid remark because I I said page speed doesn't matter. People get really caught up in these fundamentals, right? And it's funny to see, but you you really need to just go back to basics. Web pages link to other web pages. They give votes. That is the basis of PageRank. If you open up the SEO starter guide, it says PageRank is the fundamental system on which Google works. That's all it says. It says don't obsess about it, which I think makes sense, right? I think your site had a lot of authority and so your longer your longer slugs were open had less guard rails around them but as you lost traffic which also by the way is an outcome of AIO's right a lot of people four months ago had traffic here and then it comes down sorry I'm off camera so come it comes down like that
A lot of people look like that and it's very hard because you can't just increase the rank of the page you also have to broaden content. I've seen pages that are six, seven pages long with lots of H2s and I'm like, why aren't these different headings? Why not make them different pages? And someone mentioned to me and I totally get their point. They were like, but I used to rank number one for this. Why can't I anymore? I said, well, you know, happens. You can't rank anymore, right?

27:31 Break it up, right? I really think that one of the problems I see with people coming to Reddit in X is they post these Google Search Console charts that are a year long and I'm like, how are you sitting on the same page for a year and not trying different things and I'm really worried that people don't try things like what one of the interesting discussions we've had and I just want to applaud those who came forward and said I wanted to say this but I didn't because you can get attacked forward an X and personally I'm made of rubber I don't care but you know when I say to people you don't need a meta description some people can get vitriolic about it they can get really angry like you know you're you're trying to cause panic here and I'm like meta descriptions and meta keywords were the essence of SEO in 1995 I remember sitting in my office in Durbanville in South Africa we had a computer training center I used to build computers and sell computers and websites and business cards of all things to make money and I was a bartender in my parents' bar and I was 21 and I was meant to be going to college but I was shooting pool in the afternoon and you know meta descriptions aren't SEO right you don't get you don't rank in p in Google because you have a meta description right that's just bizarre right it's not it's a hidden part of the page to begin with yet people get really upset about it like they they're holding on to these things right as if they're they're gossiping
Well I'm not surprised because I can tell you a quick story when I first started to it hit. A strange thing happened. The page when the page when I started to see the first real major decline, I found that Google's removing the meta descriptions

Break and Community on X

29:17 That it was just blank.
Yeah, it never used them anyway.
Yeah, but it was kind of funny and that's what that's what got me started my journey really. Well, I think it is a good place for us to have our middle break, folks. We got a load of Ali info. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
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30:58 Back want to point out that you can put your questions. I see that some people are putting some questions in. We will try and deal with those questions at the end of the show. So if you got any questions for David, we will attempt to answer them at the end of the show. The last 10 minutes. So and then we
Make extra we'll make extra time for that Jonathan if you have I'll make extra time for those questions. Really appreciate people coming.
It's always great to get questions. Or we could answer. Let's this move on because it gets disjointed if we
You're in charge. You're I've got to say you're doing
Sorry, I just wanted to say what a great job you do as a host. I've I've really enjoyed meeting you and I think that's one of the great things about X. I I got to meet Ray DS, the CEO of Kemp actually when it was Twitter.
That's how myself and my wife ended up in America, which I'm very grateful for because it's been a phenomenal experience. I've been very lucky to be born in South Africa, live in Ireland, and spend a lot of time traveling in Europe and then come to America. And I've met some great people on Twitter. You, Edward Sturm, right? James Dooley, Kasra Dash, Charles Floate, others. And that's why I say when I see all these people on X saying, "I don't know where to find backlinks." I've I've I've made great friendship with, Spencer Hecathornne, for example, and we have now we've actually built websites together that link to each other, and we're we're working together with another company. So if you can if you can reach out on X, I think you'll find that people are very open, especially within the SEO and SAS and hosting and design and communities, right? That people are very friendly and collaborative and I would encourage more of that. That's what I want. And also if you if you are building a podcast, I think Jonathan's a great resource. I know my YouTube game has stepped up a lot since working with you.

32:57 Oh, thanks for saying that. But I think going on podcasts, having your own podcast, doing more stuff in YouTube, on social platforms, you do a great

Internal Linking and Authority

33:08 Job. This is how the industry is changing. So, let's move on. Internal linking and authority shaping. Cap your homepage at 10 key links. Learn the 85 authority tax. What's this about? So there was the there was an old dampening effect which we don't know what that is anymore but it was it was an 80% or 85% dampening tax. Doesn't it's more of a it's more of a guide to help people right and so people always want quick rules of thumb and I always say I won't do it but I always do it then I always get in trouble for doing it but what I'm trying to tell people is that the more links you put in a page the less of a good service you're doing to your site right so I think and it also the answer always depends on the context of the question right so a lot of times I see people saying and we tried to cover this in our first episode when we I was talking about spiders and Googlebot and how it works.
And there is this prevalent sort of doctrine that I think a lot of web engineers still carry is truth and and they need to update the system. But that the spider crawls your website and it gets to understand your website from all of your links and that somehow putting more and more internal links helps the spider understand your site. And that's just very naive.

34:34 And it's not even naive, it's just wrong. And so when I see when I come across sites that I see lots and lots of internal links, that's one of the things that I need to challenge and get off the table before we do any work with a new client. And so the there isn't a fixed rule and there isn't a fixed charge of how much authority is lost. But the more internal links in your page, the less likelihood of transferring authority between pages. I've seen people hide links, like for example, it's the link isn't very visible, Google has like a projector room, right? And if the link isn't visible or if there's a an element of the web page that covers that text, it will discount the value of that link. It discounts the value of the links in the right hand side and the footer. So for example, if you're linking to an EMD, you're much better having a single link in a page with traffic than you are in a footer link, right? Footer links are very, very heavily discounted.
Yeah, they're important, right? Like, like they're very important for site links. They're very important for Google knowing and testing what pages people will click on. It does the same thing in ads, right? Because there's so much overlap between ads and and organic.

35:49 But it's not about having five links or six links or seven links. It's about having the right links that you really need. Do you really need the user to follow this path or do you really need this page to help another page? One of the things I think that we do a lot of is we create a lot of content for users but not for the ICP user, right? And and that's to help create authority in a and domain presence in a particular topic. Whereas if you've got a page that is helping people understand a problem, you may have to have 10 links in it, right? Because you might want to talk about you might want to tell people
Can I ask a quick question?
Yeah, please. And I don't want to get the live audience upset because last week people said I was I was interrupting too much. I'm going to ask a very naive question here. So you got a page and instead of think you know putting there's maximum links in really you should think look do a search of your page of your website find other pages that might help the content of the new content you've written and then what what would you I know it varies but I think less is more now having two free links and really thinking about them. But do you really need to make sure the wording in that link
Yes.

37:22 Is worked out as well?
Yeah. If you look at if you look at internal links and the myths around them, there's this idea that the whole site has to be somehow relevant or that the
The whole Yeah, that's nonsense. It's really the ARF's text, right? And that's where Ahrefs gets its name from, right? It used to be a backlink tool like Semrush. You really want to link a page to two or three other pages as a rule of thumb. You can break that rule if you if that page has buckets of authority. Put 20 links in it if you need to. But I'm just talking about back to the singularity. You know, you're building out your first website from your first page. If you've got 20 pages and you want them all to rank and you've got one page that has traffic and you're trying to link to all those 20 pages,
It's not going to work. You're better off getting one other page to rank, getting one other page to rank, getting one other page to rank, and then after a month, you've got five pages, right? And 5* 3 is 15. And so, if you're saying, well, I really need 20 or 30 links, then, okay, you're ambitious. I get it. You know, round of applause. But then maybe you need to import authority, right? Maybe now you need to find and identify a go to market partner who can help build a collaborative you know link partnership with you. So you can say we endorse this company cuz they're our partner and help them rank their pages and so on. But in those early stages if you're if you need to put in 20 links that's not going to work.

38:57 I don't think I mean I could be wrong. I if they're very low keyword difficulty scores and and here's where what I'm talking about testing and not being afraid to test is why wait to ask the question why not try it you can always remove them those pages get indexed all the time and the changes

AI Search and Traffic

39:14 Will get updated right and if they're not you can you can force submitted right
Right let's move on AI search is already rerouting traffic Gemini Perplexity are changing in referral patterns right now. What's the story behind this one?
I mean, what can you do, right? If that I I I have a couple of projects, not that many. I'm very fortunate that have been hit by AI overviews and I was really gutted last night because we had 48 new position ones, so to speak, right, which is, you know, normally I'm I love sharing that on Slack in a in a team Slack and saying, "Well done, guys. We've done it, you know, 48 new positions is phenomenal, especially in like the fintech in area, but unfortunately that's not going to relate to traffic. And so going back to talking about adding value, there was [snorts] no point in me sharing those that news because the CEOs in the channel and next week traffic isn't going to go up. So it's one of those things where, you know, not yet sharing the story was more important than sharing it. And so if AI overviews are directing traffic, that's just a reality of the world that we live in.

40:32 The sooner we move on from it, I think the better because we're not changing it, right? You and I are not changing Google, right? Even if we went out and bought more shares tomorrow, Google's not going to listen to us.
You might be able to. I won't be. But there we go. So let's look at some of the qu Yeah, let's have a look at this one. Internal links. I understand no more than five. I think we covered that.
So let's just put a fine point in this. It's not about five. It's a it's a percentage game and it's also it's about a it's about click probability. So if Google doesn't believe that link is going to get clicks, it's not going to let authority flow. So I imagine a heat map, but that might be the wrong way to mathematically v visualize this. But if you put five links on and Google says, "Okay, there's a good chance that all of these five clicks will go, you're reducing that by both the number of links and the percentage, whatever that percentage in the dampening effect." So yes, you can put in five or 10 if you want to. I'm just saying expect less return. That's all. It's it's up to you. And you can always do it and undo it, right? PageRank is fluid. It gets calculated and recalculated. That's why pages move up and down. So you can you can go beyond five. It's your choice.

41:51 There's no law. There's no Google penalty. You can put 100 links if you want. You know, go try it.
I think he's got a follow one. Internal back links. I understand. No more than five or less better. I think I think we covered that.
It's the same. Yeah, I think it's the same thing.
Thanks for the question, SEO and bound. That was that's a good question.

Does Google Penalize AI Content?

42:17 I got a follow through. I noticed that friend of the show Edward Sturm show episode 1153. Google can detect your AI content. Here's what happens. And I think he was responding to did episode and it was a response to a another LinkedIn post by Kristine Schachinger and she was posting that she thought that Google is going to really hit people that use AI content on their website and her comic got liked by John Mueller. And that caused a lot of people and he seems to have been liking a lot of articles recently. I'm only going by what Edwards said, with a similar tone that Google's going to do a real purge on AI content. What's your thoughts about this, David? [snorts]
So, I've actually seen that John Whed.

43:32 So, if you're in Tech SEO or RS SEO or one of the big SEO subs, you can you can I think his username is and please don't spam the guy, you know, it's his personal account, but if you do have a pressing question, you can see if he's if he wants to answer it, but it is his personal account. So, please be civil and please be respectful and mindful of his time. But John Mu is on Reddit and he does answer I think if it's if it's a question that a lot of people have you know there's there's there's a list of specific rules in which Google's pretty clear AI content is not banned right but there's another rule that says manipul anything done to man manipulate search is black hat is against its terms of service right so if you look at HCU didn't really violate any of the 36 actual penalties like keyword stuffing, thin affiliate content, link spam, what whatever the the penalties are, doorway pages, cloaking, all of those things. But HCU sites were there to manipulate search and turn that into AdSense revenue. And so, yeah, if you're building lots and lots of AI content to get search, technically that's falling a foul of Google, whether that's written by AI or not, right? And obviously where it's going astray is that people can fire up 15 20 blog posts a day. So they're not quite scaled content, but they're not manual pages. They're only really utilizing it to manipulate search. And John liked it. I don't read that as Google's coming after AI content because I think there is many other challenges if they do that. One of the challenges of them doing that is that they then start a game of chase, right?

45:20 Whose content can we detect? So yeah, okay, Claude has a watermark in it, which they may or may not share with Google. But now, but there are so many other people that can build LLM tools off other LLM models that aren't centralized, that are decentralized, right? Does Google really want to create a maximum that says we're not going to allow AI content? Because if one tool can reverse engineer it, I I think people fail to realize that unlike an image or a video where you have artifacts, there's not a lot of space for artifacts in content. The way the way they're doing it is by leaving markers. So when you tokenize it, it's it becomes plainly obvious. But I'm pretty sure that if it if need comes to you know if push comes to shove people will be able to build AI content tools and that will massively that'll just start generating a whole other problem for Google to go after. So
Well I al also think there's a lot of hypocrisy in this area a lot of fear and a lot of hypocrisy because before AI reared its head you know there was content farms there was loads of poor quality content being written that on the higher end there were rather prickery content writers that were hired that really didn't know what They, you know, they were under pressure and they thought if you could write 5,000 words that would make our article that you could write in a thousand words better.

46:58 There was a there was a lot of inflation around what quality was, wasn't there?
Would you agree?
There really is. Yeah, absolutely. And and a lot of I think there was also a lot of demand, Jane, right? A lot of a lot of people were spreading conspiracy theories or spreading myths to help push owners of websites to do or clients of SEO to buy in a particular way, right? I think I think there's a lot of challenges there. But I but coming back to and I saw Edward's post you know he's he's doing what he does as a as a as a reporter. He does a fantastic job where he's saying this is what John Mueller liked. What does that mean? And he does a great way of he has such a great way of bringing that to the community. I don't think Google's going to I don't think it signals that Google is going after AI content yet.
It's funny got this response to what we just from one of our live
Viewers. I have neurodiverse writers like dyslexic writers because they are creative they use a it's quite I have dyslexia myself and that's one of the main reasons so yeah I think I think it's I think you know and Edwards has done a lot of content it's [snorts] this term AI slot But I think it's the consequence of poor AI. It's not AI.

48:38 Again, it's I've seen people just hate anything that's produced by AI, right? Because they feel like it's encroaching and taking their job. I think also Yeah, there is AI slop. There's also human slop, right?
Yeah.
And a lot of people might think that my content I've had people attack my content, say it's terrible, like my spelling is terrible, right? But if my I just wanted [snorts] to address that last comment you had. Could you bring it back up? Sorry. First of all,
I just wanted to say I just wanted to applaud the SEO inbound marketing for sharing this that they have neurodiverse writers with dyslexia and so on. First of all, I want to applaud them for hiring people like that. I think that's important. I too am neurodiverse. I've ADHD and potentially some autism somewhere in there. And yes, there's a lot of creativity with neurodiverse, right? So, congratulations on that. Here's here's the analogy I use all the time when I talk to writers and and about content subjectivity. A lot of writers will like a lot of these debates I've had on at late into the night about developing an objective quality standard. When I talk to writers, it's always about grammar and spelling. But I want to point out, and this isn't just an example I've thought of. It's also an example that Matt Cutts shared. The very the foremost engineer that gave us the rockets that we have today that became the jet propulsion labs at NASA was a Nazi scientist who was brought over after World War II pardoned and ran the the jet development program that gave the US say all of its rockets and everything we have today is SpaceX today. English is not his first language and he was actually a good writer. But if you take someone like that and they write a thesis on how to build a rocket engine, but it doesn't fit someone he's not using the Oxford comma. Is that bad content or is that just someone's vague subjective preference for an object for an Oxford comma? Who gets to define good quality content? So, no, you don't have to hide the AI markers from using LLMs. If they're using AI to help articulate something, I do that all the time. All the time. There's nothing wrong with it. No, Google's not going after it. I don't think you have to remove the watermarks. I think that what you and Jonathan are reacting to is one, I think that there's a big camp of content writers trying to scare people, and I think that's unfortunate. I think that it would be too difficult for Google to look at the totality of AI content and go after it. But I don't know what's going to happen there. There are a lot of challenges that are going to come up politically, socially, economical. You know, the EU is going to take a stance on AI content. There are challenges coming up, right? So, but I don't think Google is going after AI content just yet. Let's let's deal with one more story and we wrap it up. Okay sir this was from

AI Overviews, AI Mode and Buyers

51:41 U from Barry from search SEO round table. He produced the article Google AI overviews pushing searches into AI mode. Basically this is about they were finding recently that when people did certain search they got a whole AI overview the expanded view and there was no there was no links in it either and this caused a storm. I think one of the key Google engineers said that was a bug that there was no links. But they do you think that more we're going to see over the coming months more of the AI overviews will be the expanded version. So basically they're going to knock down the traditional search even lower. Do you think that's going to happen? I don't I don't know what's going to happen, but I don't think that's what's going to happen. I don't know if that's just testing or if that's just how the AI system started to do an answer. So I noticed where there's a very frequently asked question, it doesn't need to real time synthesize and therefore it doesn't give independent links. I doubt that Google will pursue that route. I I think it's probably either a test that they were doing or an anomaly of the ser of the LLM just not of Gemini essentially not producing a quoted synthesized result but really a pre-cached result. I I don't think that Google's going to do that now.

53:32 One followup question. And I was thinking about what you said a few minutes ago about having just to accept AI overviews, but I just want to put this and then we'll wrap it up is that yeah, you're tra if you got strong enough coherence between those that are searching for your product, for your service, and your website copy is done the right way. What you really want you'll probably see less traffic to the website, but what you re if those people are using large learning models and they're doing much in longer search terms in these large learning models and they're they're finding your service being recommended by them. When they come to your website, they should be much more
Educated to buy.
Yeah. And what I think what you should be worried about is over the coming months then the coming 6 months 12 months 18 months is if those people aren't buying because they if you as the SEO expert or the marketing part the marketing team if you if you don't see that you got a real problem haven't you? I
I think so. I think I think it's more important about looking at breadth and depth than focusing on rank position and you know how do you appear in the right AI overviews? How do you own the right AI overview?

The AEO Experiment

55:21 So James Dooley and I are playing a new game. We've moved on from King of SEO, right?
Cuz I won that one. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. And and I just want people to know that James and I are very good friends. We actually text every day. I'm very fond of him. He's actually such a great character. I really admire him. And so we're now he's now playing with king of AEO. Which I think is a title he deserves. I think he's he's he's made some very good points about it. And if you're an SEO agency trying to think about how to capture that market, I would go back and listen to his 1% episode with Edward as well as his own. But one of the interesting things is he went with press releases and I went with an exact match domain. And the interesting thing about my exact match domain is that it's picked up a 16% click-through rate for King of AEO. And I think what it shows is that we're constantly experimenting and playing because we have nothing to lose, right? It's just king of AEO. It's just fun. There's nothing stopping anyone else from trying all of those different things and seeing what happens, right? I feel very sorry for marketers that are that are sort of like forced into a situation where they feel like when they're publishing something, they're on stage and the whole world is looking at them and judging them. That must be a very auspicious and difficult place to be and maybe that's another reason to build an exact match domain so you can have some more freedom of creativity right but I think you this idea of building one blog post and article embedding the whole farm in it is more of the problem than the AI overview does that make sense
Kind of but just to finish off I think you know if you are you know if you are writing the right content if your product or service is meeting a real need. I was talking to a successful founder of four tech companies this morning and he admitted he and he's his present company. It's taken them five years and he's had to put in a fair bit of his own money into the business because they were they were educating and selling at the same time. And that's a terrible place to be to educate the market to your the actual logic behind the product. Actually, I totally agreed with him. Sounded a fabulous service, but they him and his team and his marketing team not only were selling, but they were educating the market that they needed the service. And that's a terrible place to be, and that's why it's taken them almost 5 years.

58:25 But I think unless you're in that position, the traffic that is coming to your website, if you're writing the right content, and I think Edwards says this all the time,
You know, you should through large learning models cuz people are just doing a lot more research before they buy. And they if they're coming to your website, they should be ready to buy, shouldn't they? Whatever product service that you've offering.
I think that was actually
Go on. Sorry.
Yeah. So, so interestingly, Reddit and Caperia or Reddit and G2 put out a document a couple of weeks ago saying that by the time somebody says, "I want to talk to a sales agent," right in in BC, for example, B2B, sorry. They already know what they want to buy. They're actually so well researched. So what you're saying exactly matches the research they've done that they are very well educated by the time they that they come to your site. And that's why I said it's the depth and it's the depth of of content I think people should be worried about that it's not just about being in the AI overview.

SEO vs GEO and Wrap Up

59:39 It's about being in the a AI overview more than once. Right? Which is the point that James Dooley was trying to make about the difference in SEO and GEO is SEO you just need to get to first place. The maybe the difference between SEO and GEO is that maybe you need to think about owning first, second, and third place, which I completely agree with.
Yeah, I think it's been a great show. What I think we've covered a ton of stuff
And what's the best way for people to find out more about your views and what you're up to lately?
Well, if you go to Bing and Google me there, Bing knows who I am and they can spell me correctly until Google fixes it. But otherwise, come hang out with us on X or find me on Reddit or, LinkedIn. And, I'll also be talking at a few more conferences later this year. I'll I'll I'll confirm more of that. And then next week, you and I have a really, really exciting episode where we'll be interwining intertwining SEO and CRO. And this is a friend of mine actually neighbor of mine who I'm really excited to bring on board Jackie Khan who has worked at a lot of startups and is now running her own startup. She really is a CRO expert and we share a lot of even though she knows nothing about SEO and I know very little about CRO. We are going to be talking about where SEO and CRO are very similar and what people need to know about post SEO like after people get to your site and I'm really excited about that. I think that'll be a phenomenal episode for people to tune into.

1:01:20 Been fab. Like I say, we do this live around 12 noon Eastern Standard Time. So, if you can join us. It's a little bit difficult because we're still in trial. We're up to episode four, but we will be building out, but you should be able to find us if you do search and we didn't do it this week, but we'll do a better job of pushing out the link so you can join us live because we do like questions,
But we going to say thanks to all the people who joined. Thanks Dave. 1790. Sorry, John.
Yeah, sure. No problem. And thanks for joining us live. And if you got any questions, you can either push it to me, Jonathan Denwood on X, or to David, and we will attempt to answer it. We will be back next week, folks. See you soon. Bye.