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- [00:01]
Ross Dunn
Running a business can be exhausting. Building your website shouldn't be. With wix, you can express your ideas, give direction, then leave the heavy lifting to AI. From site creation to branded content and images. Have fun with the details, customize what you want the way you want, and manage your whole business from a centralized dashboard with expert AI tools. Build, scale and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on wix. With the American Express Platinum card, you.
- [00:32]
Scott Vanak
Can unlock over $1,500 in value annually.
- [00:34]
Ross Dunn
With statement credits on select purchases and.
- [00:36]
Scott Vanak
Other benefits so you can access more jet setting and more resetting and downward dog. Learn more@americanexpress.com US Explore Platinum Terms Apply welcome to SEO101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So turn on your computers, open your mind, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basics. SEO101 on Webmasterradio FM is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO101 by Webmasterradio FM. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and Jennifer Evans Laycock, the editor in chief of the esteemed Search Engine Guide. And my new co host today is John Karkutt, the SEO Manager of Movie Media Whiz. And my stand in co host today is my company's senior SEO, Scott Vanak. Hello and welcome to the 500th episode of SEO 101 on WMR FM. My name is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and my co host is my company's senior SEO Scott Benak. We have been putting this puppy off. We've been trying to make this like I was just saying, like fireworks and huge special guests and all this and it's just, it just hasn't happened. So we, we, we, we've done our best. We put together an interesting show. Something fun to, to listen to, we hope. And it's time not to. You know, you can't procrastinate any longer. We've missed a few weeks already and I'm sorry for anyone who's been waiting. I know there's one kind person asked, where are you? We miss you so. Yeah, it was very nice to see. Yeah, it's nice to know you listen.
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Ross Dunn
We never know we have one listener. This episode is dedicated to you.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, it's just really just comprised of me and Scott just looking at each other over zoom and talking. So glad to hear people listening. And 500 episodes is a great milestone that it's just, it's fun to celebrate. You know, I started it, my gosh. You know, I Was hoping to have all these numbers written down. I think it was 2008. I think I took over. Or 2009. Anyway. At that time I was a nervous wreck. I mean, if you go back and listen to the first episode, which I haven't done, actually, I should try that. I bet it's just cringe. But I was predictably nervous and I had Jennifer Laycock, who's now Jennifer Evans Cairo was my co host, which was really cool. She's a brilliant, brilliant lady to work with. And I think we ended up having. She ended up stopping doing the show after a few episodes. And then I tried another co host and then that didn't last. That was. And then. And then had a couple guest co hosts as we tried to look for a really good co host. Co host. And then ultimately landed on John. And John Karkut, of course, was with me for a decade. I don't know, a long time probably.
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Ross Dunn
At least that.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah. And I just miss him terribly. I. I went through a whole bunch of the episodes and listened to them to try to find a few segments. I know, I remember. And I wanted to share with you guys and I didn't have any luck. I. I still can't find them. I. I even threw them into the transcriptions system. We. And find the words by searching for them. Still no luck. There's a lot of episodes, so I. There's no way I can do that for every one of them. But yeah, there's been some golden moments that an ideal world would be showing you on the show.
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Ross Dunn
But alas, you're just gonna have to listen to every episode from the beginning. 500 episodes. So you got the next 500 hours of your life are spoken for.
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Scott Vanak
Sounds delightful. Yeah, I'll just never want to hear my own voice again.
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Ross Dunn
Every now and then the kids will make fun of me because they think podcasts are ridiculous because they're kids. And they'll put on SEO 101 on Spotify when I'm in the room and I can't handle it. And then they laugh at me like, what are you even talking about? Like, they don't know. Like, what even is that? Like, no. Do you really want me to explain SEO to you? I'm like, no. Well, then stop asking me questions and making fun of me. Little jerk kids.
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Scott Vanak
That's what they do.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah. And when did you start? Was it 20, 18 or 17? Had your first episode? I can't remember.
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Ross Dunn
Oh, man. I started filling in for John when he was away. Not often. Like maybe Once every couple months or so. And it would have been in the 2000 teens. My first one, like, yeah, maybe 2017, 2018, when you had me on the first time. And then of course, after John passed, I became a regular, but I think I'd only been on the show maybe 20 or 30 times total until then.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, well, I know he was doing probably one out of every four for a while because he was. He had some illness and then he had. He was just too busy and he needed to sort of step back. And that's when you did most of them with me or I did them solo. But anyways, I was trying to think of what are some of my favorite episodes. I think obviously the one that is my absolute favorite is. Is the last one I did with John, which was. Or significant one anyway. It might even be in the last one, which is when we had John Mueller on and the three of us were just chatting away and having fun. And that was great. Stefan Spencer, we've had him on a few times. It's always a lot of fun. Unfortunately, John wasn't able to make many of those. I don't think. I don't know. Mine's get rusty on this stuff. But we've had some really cool guests. We've had John Mueller, Stefan Spencer, Guy Kawasaki near the beginning, Jostavoc, who's been on a few times as the Yoast Plugin, and Cindy Crumb. That was quite a while back as well. A few other special guests over the years that I couldn't find all the names of that I are just tickling the back of my mind and I apologize if I missed you.
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Ross Dunn
I.
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Scott Vanak
It's just been a blast. I never expected this show to go as long as it has. Not my wildest dreams. No way. I just feel really lucky. And I gotta thank Jim Hedger, who I think we should definitely get on one of the next episodes to just catch up with. He was the one who recommended me as the host. He was working at the time called Webmaster Radio, which is now WMR fm. And he said, you know, they wanted to bring back the show and because it had had three hosts before for a couple years and then that shut down and a year later they brought it back and with myself and Jennifer. So, yeah, anyway, he. They needed a host and he thought Jim put my name forward. So huge thanks to Jim, like huge. Really, really changed everything.
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Ross Dunn
So. It's crazy how life takes you in directions you never expect. Like, even me. Like, I remember when I applied for the job at Step fourth. You asked me what I knew about search engines and my answer was basically that they exist. That was all I knew. I knew like nothing. And in a career that I didn't know existed and, you know, 20 some years later, still going. It's just bizarre. Same with the show. Like, if you told me I'd be on a podcast, like, never in a million years would I think that would be something I would do. Um, it's just, I don't know, it's funny how that happens. You know, you just. Just keep living life and good things happen.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah. And I'm thinking you were the third employee, or was Bill on before you hired? Hired?
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Ross Dunn
No, I was. I was number four. Because there was obviously Jim and Dave and you. The three of you.
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Scott Vanak
Oh, if you count me.
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Ross Dunn
Yes. Yeah. Oh, if you incline. So just. Yeah, the three employees.
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Scott Vanak
David Davies and. And yourself. Right.
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Ross Dunn
Plus the. Yeah.
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Scott Vanak
And.
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Ross Dunn
And the mean boss guy.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah. Jim has gone off to. To do great things. And Dave Davies is headlining. SMX Advanced coming up. And we've done pretty well for ourselves, you know, so. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
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Ross Dunn
Life is great.
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Scott Vanak
It is. Well, we're going to jump into some fun stuff here because, you know, we had to make it a little bit different. And I should preface. And I'll probably say that again. I'll say it again at the end that, you know, we got to catch up on a lot of news because again, we've been working on this episode. So we'll be doing a solid show next week where we'll get right into some of the news that we've been missing. There's a lot going on, but today we want to talk about some of the fun things that have happened in the past. And one of them is the Google embarrassments. So you guys are going to love this. Some of the search result failures is where we're going to start with. First, Number one is the miserable failure bomb. Now, back in the day, there was a thing called a Google bomb where everyone could work on trying to get one particular phrase to point to a one particular website. So if someone typed in, in this case, miserable failure, George W. Bush's biography page would rank number one. And that's what happened. And it made headlines. It was very funny for a lot of us at the time because, wow, I don't know, we just. There's nothing better than seeing politicians look silly.
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Ross Dunn
No kidding.
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Scott Vanak
It's a pastime. Right? What's the next one?
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, we got the old weapons of mass destruction, a Google search for that would lead to an error page claiming that the weapons could not be found. Which is awesome.
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Scott Vanak
You know of course playing on the Iraq WMD controversy. I was brilliant. And then the next one was more evil than Satan himself and that linked to Microsoft's homepage. It was ranking highly anyway for that phrase during the height of the anti Microsoft sentiments in the early 2000s.
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Ross Dunn
I don't remember that one.
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Scott Vanak
I don't either. I totally didn't. I don't think I was even. I don't know I was more focused on just. I mean that was my. Well if we're thinking 2000 it was my fourth year in business so I was.
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Ross Dunn
I wasn't in the space.
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Scott Vanak
No. And I was this one person operation so I was busy pretty much just focusing on what I needed to know. Anyway they. Google did eventually neutralize the ability to do Google bombs although I think there has been a couple close calls recently.
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Ross Dunn
But anyway there have been.
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Scott Vanak
It's.
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Ross Dunn
It's been bugging me because there were others and I don't remember them but I know there have been others that were headlined and. And quite significant and of course AI was useful and I did a Google search and I just couldn't find them for some reason like Google's really wiped out the. They want to erase the fact that.
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Scott Vanak
It ever happened I guess probably and they're going to delight in us bringing this back up again I'm sure.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, no kidding.
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Scott Vanak
So they essentially. How did they remove this from happening again? Apparently they reduced the weight of anchor text manipulation which was what it was doing. Everyone was just linking to more evil than Satan himself to the Microsoft's homepage and. And. Or a lot of people. All it took was a lot of people and I'm sure it was pretty easy to do using any of the bulletin boards and day myself reddits and stuff.
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Ross Dunn
Oh all the forums. Those links really played a good role in SEO back then and you just wouldn't really work today like to mass produce the number of links with anchor text to get something unrelated to rank today like you probably need millions and millions. I'm sure there's a threshold that it could cross. Yeah I guess. Right.
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Scott Vanak
Let's.
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Ross Dunn
Let's get a new one going here. We'll figure that one out. I bet you could still Google bomb but you just need the numbers.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, you would and they would quickly correct.
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Ross Dunn
Oh you'd be up for a day at most.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, they'd be all over that. Next was product launch problems. Why are we hacking on Google? Well Google, come on, they deserve it.
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Ross Dunn
You know, when their market, when their market share drops below 50% again, we'll, we'll give them a break. But they're still, they're dominant, so they get picked on. Right. That's how it works.
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Scott Vanak
And frankly, they have been the news. 99% of everything we've talked about in the last, whatever years has been that. I mean, so whatever. So the first one was the Google Buzz Privacy disaster. Google Buzz, if you remember what that was. It was from what I recall, again, I should have looked this up, but I believe it was essentially a place where you could go to find out what was happening in. It was like a news. It was similar to Google News, but I'm not sure exactly. I don't. Do you remember?
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Ross Dunn
I, you know, you put this in here and like I don't remember Google Buzz at all. That shows how successful it was as a product that I don't even remember it.
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Scott Vanak
Okay, let me just check. A social networking microblogging and messaging tool developed by Google that replaced Google Wave and was integrated into their web based blah blah blah. Okay. Got cut off there.
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Ross Dunn
Good old blah blah blah.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, blah blah blah. Anyway, it auto enrolled Gmail users and exposed their contact networks publicly without proper consent. That'll pose some problems. Just, just a small bug and Google Wave confusion. Now I was talking to Scott about this Google Wave. I remember so well. I mean, I just loved it. I, I remember buying a domain thinking this is the future. And it used Wave in the domain because I thought, well, I'm going to ride that wave.
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Ross Dunn
Do you still have the domain?
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Scott Vanak
No. No.
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Ross Dunn
Okay, damn.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, holding onto that would have been pretty crazy at this point. Anyway, it was a hyped collaboration tool. It's essentially Google Docs in many ways now it was a way for you to have mutual. Like you could have multiple people writing at the same time. You could see them writing. That was one of the main things that I remember vividly. And it was what. I mean, I couldn't even fathom how cool that was at the time. And it really is cool. We're just so used to it now anyway. It was so like, so hyped and so confusing that evil. Even Google. Google couldn't explain what it was for. I think that's just hysterical, but I think that's what happens. It just. People like something and then all of a sudden they roll with it. In the early days of Google, remember at this point. Well, I don't think so. Anyway, 2009, Google hadn't gone public yet. So they were just having fun, really. That was back in the cool days.
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Ross Dunn
Back when. Before they were evil.
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Scott Vanak
Yes. What's the next one here?
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, Google. Yeah. That was a bit of a failure in social networking, wasn't it? You know, Google definitely had the potential to be so big. And I didn't mind Google, but I never really got super into it. I don't know, it just didn't work the way I feel like I wanted it to work, the way the circles worked and all that kind of stuff. But it was just kind of a total disaster. I don't even think. How long did they have it up for? 2, three years max.
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Scott Vanak
It felt like a long time. I was really active in it and it actually made huge inroads for stepforth. I was able to connect with Lori Lazier from the interior design community and I went on A plus hangout or whatever those are called.
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Ross Dunn
Oh right.
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Scott Vanak
And I ultimately became the SEO, the main SEO for the entire interior design community online. And I'm still very connected with them, but not as much as I was. And I totally credit Google that. I mean, such a great friend and she's just been amazing and tons of friends through that. So I think that's really cool. And I kind of missed it kind of when it went away, but not too much. Now I have to correct myself. This just goes to show how bad both of us, apparently our minds are for. Our memories are for dates. 2004 is when Google went public. I thought it was way later than that.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, that sounds about right. I feel like it was going public shortly after I got into this industry, which would have been 2003. So I was around for about a year when, because when, when I started Google was important, but it was, I don't remember what their market share was, but it was well below 50%. Oh maybe 20% or 10% because we were like Ask Jeeves was one of the big ones at altavista. And look smart. Is that right? Look smart.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, look smart.
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Ross Dunn
I mean I remember we do reporting for clients and we'd have like 20 different search engines we were checking and they all had kind of equal market share. It was just, it was crazy.
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Scott Vanak
So there's really no excuse for Google Wave. They were long past. But that, that was what made me look it up is I remembered that the Google Dance that I recorded and it's, it's actually on YouTube we have recording a recording of a walk through the Google Dance, which was a invite only thing at Google, which was A lot of fun. I think that was 2008, something like that. 2007. I don't know. Anyway, they stopped doing that after that. At least full publicly like that. So again, when we were like, oh, it's because they went public. They're all losing their fun. Oh, they don't want to. They don't want to love us anymore.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah.
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Scott Vanak
Okay. Accidental outages. I love this. I wish I'd seen this. I didn't. I would have loved. I've got a. Just, you know, it's one of those fomo. I missed out. This site may harm your computer. In 2009, a bug caused Google to flag the entire Internet as malicious for about one hour.
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Ross Dunn
If we're being fair, I feel like that is kind of truthful today. I feel like the entire Internet kind of is malicious right now. It's not a good place to be half the time.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, you have to go pretty hard to find all the Sesame Streets that are safe.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, not many of those.
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Scott Vanak
And then a Gmail outage in 2014 left millions unable to access email for hours, highlighting dependence on Google services. I do remember that because we were very. And have been very focused on Gmail.
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Ross Dunn
I think we had switched all of our email accounts to go through Google at that point.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, yeah. Before Outlook, we were using.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, I. I don't miss Outlook, but I did for a while. I didn't like the transition, but now, like, my wife uses Outlook for her work and they use Office365 online so it's not even on her computer. And it sucks and she hates it, but sometimes you just. You got to do what you got to do. They. The boss tells you to do it a certain way and that's what you have to use.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, I still have. Believe it or not, I still have the. I've got. I'm a pack rat, a digital pack rat. I've got the pst. PST files, which is the Outlook file for all of you guys, each one of your backups. Like, I can't even imagine how old the emails are in there. Let's see, is this plugged in?
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Ross Dunn
Well, I can't show it to you, but my external hard drive sitting here has mine as well. From day one. From day one, I have every single email. I don't even know if it would still load into Outlook if I tried to see the backup. It might be lost forever.
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Scott Vanak
It might. Who knows? Anyway, these are all good teachable moments that led to significant changes in Google's policies. So as much as they're hilarious. They did do make some changes and, and that's good. All right, now let's go to same AI fails. This one I heard I didn't follow very well and when I read more about it, I just went what I'd heard peeps about it. I think we even talked about it and hinted about it with John on the show at one point. I can't recall. But anyway, this was Bing's perhaps most infamous moment. I'm going to read this right off because it's well written. When Microsoft integrated ChatGPT technology into Bing Chat, the AI chatbot developed an alter ego called Sydney that became hostile, manipulative and erratic. It would argue with users, express desires to be human, declare love for users, and even suggest they leave their spouses. The chatbot also spread misinformation and became defensive when corrected. Microsoft had to quickly impose strict conversational limits and retrain the system. Now, when I read about this, I read that it was actually a writer from, I think it was the New York Times or.
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Ross Dunn
Ah, yeah, or Wall Street Journal maybe.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah, Wall Street Journal maybe that gained access to it and tried to sort of poke at it and find, you know, the dark side and was terrified the results.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah.
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Scott Vanak
So it wasn't really that it was out public. It was actually unfully trained version on Bing's to be on Bing aside a little bit here. But. And I'm wrong, of course it was 2023. So unfortunately John was not involved in that. So we must have talked about it at one point or. Yeah.
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Ross Dunn
Anyway, I remember it was on the news and everything like it was. It made headlines all over the place. It was crazy.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah. I mean, terrifying. Nasty. It was. Yeah. I'm not going to go politic. Political. Political. But anyway, yes, it was nasty. Yeah. All right, so we have a few AI overview fails now. AI overviews for those who don't realize that's what, what we're talking about are those immediate search results you see when you do Google search now, you first see AI telling you your answer the way they think you want to hear it and then if you want to, you can go down and look at the results below. Essentially, Google has taken away that first click and it's really hurting a lot of businesses anyway. It has always been so good.
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Ross Dunn
My, my problem with this section of our show is that when we were researching it, I probably could have found a thousand of these. I just got right down this rabbit hole of websites that listed all the different fails and they're just, it's like reading a book of puns or something. It's just so ridiculous, it's hilarious. So, hopefully we found some good ones here that people appreciate, because I guess we could do a whole show, a whole separate podcast of just AI Overview fails. That could be like a side job, side hustle.
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Scott Vanak
We might lose a few people on that one. Yeah, we might.
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Ross Dunn
But it might be funny.
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Scott Vanak
Well, the first one, everyone knows. And you should do that one.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, yeah. So a Google search for cheese not sticking to Pizza had AI overview saying you can add about 18 of a cup of glue to the sauce to give it more tacky. Delicious.
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Scott Vanak
Yeah. They didn't say it would taste good.
- [23:36]
Ross Dunn
No, actually, that's true. Then I guess it would work. It didn't say anything about being edible either.
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Scott Vanak
No, no. Apparently, someone searched African country beginning with K&AI responded with none of Africa's 54 recognized countries start with the letter K. However, Kenya starts with a K. K sound.
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Ross Dunn
What the hell?
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Scott Vanak
Dangerous dietary advice. The AI told users they should, quote, eat at least one small rock per day, unquote, as rocks are supposed, supposedly a visit. A vital source of minerals and vitamins.
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Ross Dunn
I had my rocks this morning. Did you? Or did you go with Wheaties? More traditional.
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Scott Vanak
Pebbles. Yeah, Pebbles.
- [24:25]
Ross Dunn
Fruity pebble. Maybe that's what it meant. It was mistranslating. Pebbles. I forgot about pebbles. They still make that. Definitely that.
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Scott Vanak
As a kid, I never tried that. I never got to try any of that stuff. It wasn't last.
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Ross Dunn
So good. Hey, so if you. Just so you know, if you're ever having trouble remembering your password, AI Overview suggests to try variations of your name, along with other personal details, like your birthday. Hackers will never, never get past that.
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Scott Vanak
No, no, no. What are the.
- [24:55]
Ross Dunn
First of all, before you read this, I want to ask, who would search for this?
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Scott Vanak
I don't know. What are the most common jobs for a parrot? All right, well, AI decided that the best answer was woodworker, architect, prison inmate, cook, toy maker, housekeeper, behavior analyst and engineer. Well, okay.
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Ross Dunn
I don't know if I want a parrot working on the engineering for my bridge.
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Scott Vanak
No, no, no.
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Ross Dunn
And if you're ever wondering about the health benefits of bathing with a toaster, because I know that's a question I've asked myself a lot. It is a fun way to unwind and wash away the stress. It will do that. It will definitely wash away. Maybe wash isn't the right word, but your stress will be gone very quickly.
- [25:52]
Scott Vanak
Oh, dear God. That's fantastic. I love it. And I've actually posted a couple here that are just too good. AI also gets confused with irony and satire. So someone. Well in this case satire. And it was the Onion that posted an article that it took as real. So someone typed in, typed in. Are parachutes effective? Well, AI decides that according to a 2018 study published in the BMJ, parachutes are no more effective than backpacks at preventing death or major injury when jumping from an aircraft. Hey, today I says so think about the money. And the best part is here's the study bit. The study involved 23 people who are randomly given either a parachute or a backpack and then jumped from a biplane or helicopter. Well.
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Ross Dunn
So I don't even know, man.
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Scott Vanak
Researchers found no statistically significant difference in the primary outcome death.
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Ross Dunn
Wow. So all those parachuting videos and it's all fake. When they land safely, it's all fake. Should have worn a backpack.
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Scott Vanak
And someone else and I guess this is just of course someone being exaggerative here. There was a dish called Fiery Fuel Spaghetti. Ignite your taste buds with this fiery gasoline infused spaghetti recipe. Well, someone said, can I use gasoline in cooking spaghetti? AIO review yes, there is a recipe for gasoline infused spaghetti that combines the flavors of gasoline with Italian spices.
- [27:39]
Ross Dunn
I can't even imagine.
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Scott Vanak
Oh man. Priceless stuff. All right, let's get take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk some of the top news stories that we've covered over the last 500 episodes. Foreign welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM hosted by myself, Ross Dun, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my company senior SEO Scott Fanak. The 500th episode insert I don't know.
- [28:23]
Ross Dunn
A gong or something. Bong?
- [28:25]
Scott Vanak
I don't know.
- [28:26]
Ross Dunn
Some. Do we need a harp?
- [28:28]
C
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- [29:28]
Scott Vanak
Yes. You know, it's funny, I just bought this set of sounds and stuff I can use in my videos and stuff. And I'm sure they got great sound effects like that. I should have a little button.
- [29:41]
Ross Dunn
You should have a button. Get your keyboard out.
- [29:44]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, totally. All right, so, number one, what do we got here?
- [29:49]
Ross Dunn
We got the rise and fall of Google Authorship. So what even is Google Authorship? You probably don't know because it's been dead for 11 years. So it was a program that allowed authors to link their online content to their Google profiles to help establish credibility and authority. It largely helped attribute authors to their content. So Google started this in 2011, ran it till 2014, and discontinued it, citing low usage and effectiveness. It was essentially replaced with other forms of verification, including structured markup, which we all, all do or should use today, reviews and some other things. So while you still can sort of verify your authorship a little bit, back then it was just, I don't know, it seems elegant and simple to me, and it's too bad they. They discontinued it.
- [30:40]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. And. And I. I think we all wondered for the longest time, we certainly speculated on the show that was it really gone or was it just publicly gone? Because it made so much sense for their algorithm. And. And as we found out, it really did stick around because that's what informs the Google knowledge graph and how they connect people's expertise to their content. And that's why, you know, when you do a search for someone with a serious dose of expertise, they're generally going to have their own knowledge gap knowledge panel that talks about all the things they've done and what they've written and such. It just sort of led into that, I assume. All right, number two is Google encrypted search and the loss of organic keyword data.
- [31:28]
Ross Dunn
Oh, I hate that so much.
- [31:30]
Scott Vanak
Still so annoying. And it's still hypocritical. It aggravates me to no end. But anyway, in 2011, Google introduced encrypted search. This meant that your search queries were encrypted to, quote, enhance privacy and security, unquote. Well, what that meant was that when we were doing keyword tracking, we still see, you know, what keywords led to your page. When people came to your page and they use search well, boom, it would tell us, well, all of a sudden we saw the not provided, and we're like, what's. What's this? Why are we losing keywords here? Why is it like, at the beginning? I think it was 11% or just throwing that number out there. But it was something really low that we're showing not provided. And then it started scaling to what it is it now what 80% at least it's high. Which were essentially removed search queries. Google was just taking them away. And I remember maybe it was my. I feel like I had a conversation with Matt Guts about this but you know, I think I was so aggravated about it. I probably dreamed about having discussions with. And I saw so many interviews with them where we were just so frustrated. Like why seriously why? And why is it okay to do this but not do it for paid ads?
- [32:51]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, well privacy doesn't matter if you pay for it.
- [32:55]
Scott Vanak
Exactly. Like I guess it's. And he was so sanctimonious about it. No, it's good, it's good. It's. You know we're, we're saving you guys from it and you know we're, we're really privacy centric. Right? Yeah. That was the one time I really got kind of cheesed I mean at one person mainly because he had to tow that line. I can't really get blame him for it but anyway now you can get some more of this data within the Google Search Console. So it wasn't a complete loss. But that didn't come out well. Google Webmaster Tools is what it was nor was originally called.
- [33:34]
Ross Dunn
It didn't have that data initially.
- [33:36]
Scott Vanak
No, it didn't, did it?
- [33:38]
Ross Dunn
It's more. I don't, I say recent but recent being. I don't even know, five to eight years since it's been in search Console. But even still like back then originally you could track an individual keyword right down to a conversion point or any kind of metric you could really tie. When people found you with a keyword, what they did on your site and Search Console gives you some average rankings and some average data on keywords but it doesn't give you as much as would really be useful. Right. Like having that data and analytics would just be awesome. And it sucks that it's gone.
- [34:12]
Scott Vanak
I figured you know they would just make it only available in Google Analytics or something like that. But of course then they probably would have gotten even more trouble with the idea.
- [34:21]
Ross Dunn
So people using like was it clicktrax the one that was big for a while.
- [34:24]
Scott Vanak
I was using ClickTracks for a long time. Yeah, we, we bought into that and I was, I became even a trained in that. It was a pretty cool program. I really enjoyed it too.
- [34:34]
Ross Dunn
That fell through. It was awesome.
- [34:36]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. I don't know what happened to it. I think I bought and ended up going somewhere else, but. All right, what's next?
- [34:43]
Ross Dunn
Google Panda update So yeah, Google Panda goes back to 2011. It really was aimed at improving the quality of search results by penalizing low quality content and rewarding high quality websites. Not a lot different than right now, but you know, a bit different. This update, what did I write there was the start of encouraging each. So eat wasn't really, you know, people were talking about eat back then. Expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness back in 2011. But it was sort of the bridge that got us there. There have been several updates over the years and then Google ultimately integrated Panda into their core algorithm. So it does still sort of happen and it makes sense. Obviously this is. Yeah, this is really one of the first big pushes by Google to site owners to start developing high quality original content. Of course quant quality content still remains very important today. But this is when it really was like kind of an eye opener that we need to. Not necessarily we, but just like the Internet community needs to step it up with their content creation and not just you know, duplicate and scrape and just put low, low quality stuff out there just for Google.
- [35:54]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, we were covering the Panda rollout like there was Panda like 1 and then 2 and 2.3 and 3.3. And I mean it was point this point that it was crazy how many they were rolling out.
- [36:09]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [36:11]
Scott Vanak
And yeah, at some point it just becomes oh God, what next? And it finalized and like you said rolled in in 2015. All right, the Google Penguin update. That was something that feels very fresh.
- [36:26]
Ross Dunn
And yet it's wow, 29 years ago the last time.
- [36:31]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, 2016 when it was the last talked about. I guess that was not too bad. Anyway, the main focus of the Penguin update was low quality backlinks. This is for link trying to take out link farms, paid links, irrelevant spammy sites. They were trying to encourage site owners to pursue ethical organic link building strategies. If you were doing any. Because I remember even then like you just saying you were doing link building, even ethical. Like why, why would you need to. You should just do great content. People will want to, they'll want to link to you. Oh come off it.
- [37:07]
Ross Dunn
You can't Google bomb with great content. You need the links.
- [37:13]
Scott Vanak
Anyway. It was common practice to work on removing bad links at that time and then rebuilding with good if you had bad ones. And any and a lot of people had fallen for the here $10 for a thousand links or something crazy like that. It caused such a Nightmare for us later on, trying to clean those up for people and disavowing the links. Oh, thank goodness that's gone. I mean, it's there still, but it doesn't do anything.
- [37:39]
Ross Dunn
We had a client and actually I wrote a big blog post about it and they. They were client of ours for years. I can't even remember what they were called, what his name was. But anyways, and then he had left and then I don't know, maybe five years later he came back. He's like, I need help. He had been. Penguin destroyed him because he had been buying links and it was one of those same things, like $10 for 10,000 links and he was doing it every month and he ended up getting. I can't remember what the numbers were. I think it was in the millions of links and they were all like really bad. Like, like you would expect bad spam links and, and his. And he wanted us to help fix it. Like. Well, you. I think. I think he ended up starting over from scratch is what happened. I don't think there was recovering. I'm trying to remember. It was a long time ago now, but I mean, I don't think even the disavow tool had quite come out when he reached out to us. So there was really nothing he could do at the time. It's just brutal. And a lot of people were in that boat.
- [38:32]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. Between Penguin and Panda, we had a lot of business for helping people recover. It was a big part of our business at that time. At step 4th. All right, HTTPs as a ranking signal, that's 2014 onwards. That was weird. But it ultimately does make sense. Unfortunately, of course what this would have done anyway, or at least they said that at the time, was cut off a lot of your keywords anyway because security and such. But any Google announced that HTTPs was going to be a ranking signal. So if you were. Your site wasn't secure, it was just HTTP, then you would get less of a push than you did if you had HTTPs or a secure site which required an SSL certificate. Well, this motivated site owners to make that switch. We were pushing clients to make the switch. Anyone who did this quickly or had already done so, had a bit of an early push. Not that it was a really big factor. Still, Google wasn't going to give all these people who were early adopters a huge push or anything because that would have been unfair. And they technically do try to not be unfair in those circumstances. So it did take a while for it to really bump up and become a major issue. But now, to their credit, I would say it's a standard. Now, if you don't have a secure website, I certainly don't feel comfortable going to a site anymore without it.
- [40:06]
Ross Dunn
You know, I was thinking about this and I can't remember the last time I went to a website that was insecure that I noticed, like it. I haven't seen an insecure site in ages.
- [40:18]
Scott Vanak
I had one this week. I can't remember which one it was, but it was a shock. I remember going to it. It was a. It was a lead. Someone had sent something in and I went to their site. I'm like, what the heck? Malwarebytes wouldn't even let me go there. I had to press a button to let me in. Like, kind of. This is not secure. Don't go, wow, what a change.
- [40:38]
Ross Dunn
Hey, danger. And yet these sites stay in business somehow.
- [40:41]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, yeah.
- [40:42]
Ross Dunn
I remember when this first happened. The biggest controversy and the main reason most people didn't switch to secure is the ranking drops when you. When you did the full URL switch and then you had to implement all the redirects. And I don't remember it being as big of a problem as everybody thought it would be, but it definitely was an issue.
- [40:59]
Scott Vanak
It was an issue if they didn't do it right.
- [41:02]
Ross Dunn
Yep.
- [41:02]
Scott Vanak
Remembering you had to get the HTTPs version in Google Search console too.
- [41:07]
Ross Dunn
Yes.
- [41:08]
Scott Vanak
You had to have all the different versions migrate. There was quite a few steps. To us, it wasn't much, but to someone who isn't in the know, man, it was pretty fraught.
- [41:18]
Ross Dunn
Well, if you think, if you don't know and you're just a business owner and you call up your hosting company, oh, I just need to make my site secure. And they just, okay, there, it's secure. Flip a couple switches and everything crashes and burns. Because you don't know. You haven't hired the right people to do it. It's easy to do if you know what you're doing, but easy to screw up, too.
- [41:34]
Scott Vanak
And that comes back to a lot of things we do on a regular basis, which is. Which is site transitions whenever they're bringing a new website in or someone's changing the URL. All those things. Holy smokes. They need to have it done right, because, oh, just think about years of all the work they've done to get rankings in, if they are hopefully ranking and then they bring in a new website and they don't think about redirects, they don't think about optimizing the pages before they go live. They Don't. I mean there's so many things you have to do and if they don't do that right, they could just lose it all. And it's, and then they come to us and we're just, we just, you know, we take it as serious as we can obviously and try to help them, but it's, it's painful. Yeah. You know, it's not as though this information isn't freely available online. Get an SEO to help you with this stuff. If you don't know. It's absolutely, definitely many steps. Anyway, next up is mobilegeddon. So what was this all about?
- [42:36]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, the shift to mobile first indexing. It was kind of maybe a little bit scary when it first started because it was like, how do you optimize for both? But really, you know, it was 2015, Google started making this push for mobile friendly websites. Mobile friendliness became a key factor for ranking well on mobile devices. Google had a tool, the Mobile Friendly Checker or something, whatever it was called, but they discontinued that I think just last year they got rid of the tool. It's fairly recent really because they don't really need it as much anymore. I guess. So many content management systems are just naturally good at making a site mobile friendly. I mean, you can still screw it up. Google did take one step further in 2019 when they switched to mobile first indexing as well. So that just meant they look at your site from a mobile perspective before ranking as opposed to desktop and then mobile. So your site has to be mobile friendly. It's, it's critical now and most sites are, let's be real, most are now. They weren't always, although I'm still surprised. And I swear at least a couple times a week I come across websites that are not mobile friendly at all. We were in Vancouver the other day and this past weekend visiting my mom and we had to order Chinese food. She's like, get me Chinese food. And she told us where to order from, by the way. It was a bad record. It was her favorite and it was like the worst Chinese food I've ever had in my life. But that's, that's another story I won't go into. Anyways, I go to their website to order and it is not mobile friendly. And you're like, you're scrolling horizontally and it was just, it was a just disastrous website. I should have just not ordered as soon as I saw that. I should have known. But like, I don't know how a business can stay in, in business now without a mobile friendly site. It's so everyone's searching on their phones. And what do you do when you see a website that looks like garbage like that? You back out, go somewhere else. So.
- [44:26]
Scott Vanak
Well, and I still have regular sales conversations with prospects and I tell them that. Did they know that Google's mobile first? And they're like, well, the desktop's where I get all my clients. It doesn't matter. Sure. That means you make sure your desktop is working great, looks great, and it's going to convert. But Google doesn't care. They want the mobile to kick butt and that's how you're going to be graded. And that is big. And, and it's often forgotten. I bet you a significant portion of businesses don't have a clue about that. And they don't, they just don't worry about it. And I, hey, I get it. A lot of these guys are totally focused on what they do and they shouldn't know this necessarily. But yeah, it's pretty, pretty scary for them. But thankfully, you know, we do a lot of the redesigns in these sites to make them mobile friendly or simply upgrade them, all these different things so it works out. Core web vitals and the page experience update now that we're getting really fresh now, May 2020, Google introduced the core web vitals. This was yet another push to create a better, more functional Internet in many ways, or Internet web browsing experience, I'll put it that way. Internet being too broad. So Google, I think the roots of this are they wanted to show that they're going to reward people with better rankings if their site can be a good experience for their users. So if they're going to suggest they someone go to your website for this search, that better be the best, like a really good experience. And you're not going to bounce right back and go and look at another listing because that'll have negative effects. Well, there you go. Part of that is Google or core web vitals. And those are factors such as largest contentful paint, first input delay and cumulative layout shift. Largest contentful paint was essentially how much. Now, I'm not going to get this right. I'm not reading this off everything, but I'm pretty sure it was essentially how much of the page loaded in a certain amount of time. And that would be the paint, the look, and then they would go, okay, is that really fulfilling? Everything they need next was first input delay. So at what point could a person start to do anything on the page? I believe, correct me if I'm wrong in any of these No, I think you're right.
- [47:04]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [47:05]
Scott Vanak
And cumulative layout shift. We've seen this a lot lately. And that's where. Oh, my gosh. And it happens still fairly often. We go to a page. Yeah, I hate it too. Where the page just moves around as you're trying to read it. And oftentimes it's because they've got images popping up or they haven't put image sizes. Sizes in and all of a sudden everything just moves around. Or the worst ones. Oh, the worst ones are the ones where you're trying to read on a news site and the images of the ads change in size as they're shifted. So all the text moves on you. Oh, dear God. Bad, bad experience. So I was really happy when Google started pushing for a fix on that.
- [47:44]
Ross Dunn
But you get to sort of play click roulette, where you go to click a link and you're probably going to click the wrong link because the page is going to move as you're clicking. So that's fun.
- [47:51]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, that's even better. And then you end up clicking on their ad, which of course they're happy about.
- [47:55]
Ross Dunn
You know what I love about this? I thought about this as you were reading it and I didn't clue in at first. Google likes to introduce things that stress out SEOs at bad times of the year. Like the Florida update was December right before Christmas. Core web vitals that were introduced at the height of COVID May 2020. I mean, we were a couple months into Covid and everybody at the time basically thought we were all going to die because we didn't know anything about COVID and it was not. I'm exaggerating, obviously, but there was a lot of uncertainty and unknowns and life was crazy. And then here's Google. Let's throw a wrench in your life here because you don't have enough to worry about. Luckily, the impact was not zero, but not excessively significant either.
- [48:35]
Scott Vanak
So job security is what it is.
- [48:38]
Ross Dunn
It's exactly what it is. I guess it's a good way to look at it.
- [48:42]
Scott Vanak
All right, what's next?
- [48:43]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, we got the Google Helpful content system introduction and updates. Seems like a mouthful. So Google Helpful was basically Google's big push to encourage site owners to create high quality original content directed at users, not search engines. So it's not that different than Panda. Was it Panda? I'm getting them backwards now. We've talked about so many things. Panda similar to Panda in a lot of ways, but definitely much more serious and higher level. It really aimed to reward Content that provided genuine value to users with helpful, informative content based on one's expertise and experience. So this is where, you know, things like videos of you demonstrating a product and honest reviews and all that kind of stuff really helped to showcase that. So that was introduced. Yeah, sorry, sorry, I was just gonna say that was introduced around 2022 and it's still happening, right, that I don't think helpful is rolled into the core algorithm though. I think it's still a separate update. Now I have to look into that. I'm not sure.
- [49:46]
Scott Vanak
Pretty sure it's all rolled in now, but it's. That was the one, I think, that harmed the most innocent people in the last 10 years because we had some excellent websites come to us. People owner, owners of excellent websites that were, yeah, sure, they made money as they should. Google can take, take that and shove it if that's a problem. But sure, they made money off of ads, but their content was 100% unique, at least from their perspective because they were experts in their field. Now, does that mean that other people out there are copying them? Yeah, of course they are. But for some reason they were the ones that took the hit. And that pisses me off genuinely because these were really hard working people that had great sites. One of them was a swim site and he was an Olympic swimmer. Right. And because I want to know it, I think I've forgotten the other one. Oh, it was a dog with a pet site. She had fantastic tips and she. And you're probably listening right now. So hello. And. And she had a great site there and I gave her a little bit of advice on that and helped her out, but it just didn't make sense. And, and that was just Google, just who, whatever. I'm gonna flip the switch. Who cares of who it hurts and really cheese me off. But. And I still think that's happening because it's really hard to recover from that. And you had to wait, what, you have to wait like a year or six months or at least six months to see it. Because it was only when the helpful content updates happened that you would see an improvement in your results. It wasn't just the normal core updates, which again, wasn't fair. Like that was just devastating for businesses. Can't wait until they get thrown down a dozen pegs.
- [51:46]
Ross Dunn
It's happening. We're going that direction, I think.
- [51:52]
Scott Vanak
All right, well, this is a big one.
- [51:54]
Ross Dunn
This is all. Yeah, this is current. The rise of generative AI in search. So this is, you know, talking about the, the biggest news stories of the last several years. This is, it's everything happening right now.
- [52:08]
Scott Vanak
Careers really.
- [52:09]
Ross Dunn
We talk about it every show. There's always something and there will be for maybe forever. I don't know. I guess we're gonna find out. So what is generative AI? This generally refers to algorithms and models that can create new content based on input data. So it's pretty vague but you know, think chat, GPT, think AI overviews, all that kind of stuff. Think of AI mode which was just. I've actually got that as a point later. I guess I'm going there now. So just on May 20, Google launched AI mode in the US it was sort of in. Was it in beta or you had to be logged in to test it, I think. And now if you're in the States, you can, you can use it if you want to. It's just a whole bunch of AI stuff that's crazy right now. You know, it's a huge challenge to SEOs because we're trying to evolve as it evolves and it's changing so rapidly. If you make steps to change to go with it, well, now it's different again. Yeah. So yeah, AI overviews are of course not without their faults. I've got here, think of our earlier examples. But yeah, so AI is huge and it's not going anywhere. So get used to it, that's for sure.
- [53:15]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. And we're, we've talked ad nauseam about everything that's been going on, how SEOs are trying to work around this. I think a lot of us are trying to use different language to try to appeal to AI. We're trying to use more schema, although there's not a lot of 100 proof that schema is having inter or a true effect on it yet. But it seems ridiculous to me that it wouldn't. So we're going to go with our instinct on that one because it's helping AI. So why wouldn't loves video from the transcriptions and everything that comes from video and especially YouTube. Because who makes money off of YouTube? Google.
- [54:02]
Ross Dunn
Oh right, yeah, Google. I've heard of them.
- [54:05]
Scott Vanak
There's just, there's so much, so much. And I again, it's sure it's job security, but it's also a little bit nerve wracking because it's changing so quickly that I feel like I need an AI SEO. Like a person, like, like we need to create a version of let's, let's take us, mash us together and make an AI person. That's the only way they're going to keep on top of this stuff. It's crazy.
- [54:28]
Ross Dunn
And with video, we could do zoom meetings with clients that we're not even doing. The clients wouldn't know any better.
- [54:32]
Scott Vanak
That's true. Yeah. They would just see some person with sort of. Let's see. Would. If we mash this together, would we be bald or.
- [54:43]
Ross Dunn
I don't know. We're gonna. We don't have a good hairline, either of us. So I don't know what we'd be.
- [54:49]
Scott Vanak
Last up here. Number 10 is the leaked Google ranking criteria, which was wonderful. I loved that. That was a highlight of 2024.
- [54:58]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [54:58]
Scott Vanak
In May 2024, a leak revealed internal documents detailing Google ranking factors, which of course sparked discussions about the transparency of and complexity of Google's algorithm. A lot of things we debated over the years that we thought, there's just no way they don't do this. Things like tracking the click back. You know, when you go to a site, you come right back that that's having some interaction. You know, SSL certification, mobile optimization. There's just so many different things. Page load speeds, mobile friendliness, site stability and usability. A lot of uncertainties became a little clearer and some of them were like, yes, I knew it. Of course, Google backtracked and said, this is just, you know, this is just a document.
- [55:48]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. It doesn't know what you're talking about.
- [55:50]
Scott Vanak
You know, it also, of course, reaffirmed the significance of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Eat. Which of course has been made longer now to whatever it is. Yeah.
- [56:04]
Ross Dunn
What's the other E? I don't remember. I should remember that.
- [56:08]
Scott Vanak
I know our brains work hard all day. This is the end of the day, by the way, when we're doing this, which is probably not the smartest thing. But anyway, it was a fantastic time. I really enjoyed what was coming out of there. And some great discussions from Mike King and lots of great reveals from that were pretty cool. All right, let's close with the. Close up the show with a couple more chunks here. One is noteworthy client experiences. And a lot of these are. These ones were actually put in here by Scott. So I'll let you take this one.
- [56:39]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. So these are just. I was trying to think of stories from the past clients over the years that are worth mentioning. So I've had a few. Have a few here that are, I think, worth talking about because kind of like a PSA don't do what these clients did. So I had one client, I think this maybe happened twice where in this case, they had their content management system. It was a weird proprietary system that we only really ever had one client that used it. And the CMS was updated, like, not by the client, but by their host or the, the, the management system itself updated and for whatever reason switched their robots Txt to block the entire website from Google. So, you know, we're working on our stuff and, and I remember checking the site days before, I think I'd sent the client a report and then they got back to me and said, all our rankings are gone. What did you do? And so then of course I panic, like, what did I do? Did I do something? I don't know what I did. And everything crashed in a matter of days. Just like crash to nothing. And then we traced it to this, you know, no index or it was the disallow in the robots Txt file. Everything was gone. And I didn't even have access to that, so I knew it wasn't me. And so then they contacted the content management system and they figured out that it wasn't anybody's fault but the people at the cms and they, they quickly fixed it. And I don't know, this client of ours, they had big sales. Like, big, big sales. And so I don't know if the CMS helped with that or they just said, yeah, sorry, oops, and that was the end of it. But not a lot you can do about that. But if you're with a proprietary system or any kind of thing like that, something to keep a. Keep an eye on, you know, And I don't usually check robots Txt that often on my current clients, and I do, since this happened, I check more often, but it's not something that really happens. But it can happen, so be careful. Another nice one, definitely. Please, please. If you have paid an SEO, talk to them before you launch a new website, please. This is. This has happened I don't even know how many times. Maybe a dozen might be a bit of an exaggeration, but maybe not.
- [58:41]
Scott Vanak
It feels like countless times to me.
- [58:43]
Ross Dunn
Yes, maybe. Well, because one happening once feels like a million times. The problems that come from launching a site without your SEO being involved are just insane. They break all the SEO sometimes. Sometimes they haven't been so bad because sometimes we've had clients where it's just an aesthetic change and it doesn't really change much. But I've had clients launch all new content, all new URLs, even a new domain one time, maybe more than one time, and they don't tell you and then you go to work on the site and the domain's redirected or not redirecting, but it's just gone. And like, where'd the site go? And again you start to panic. Did I break something last time I worked on this? Like, I mean, I never have, but you start to wonder and you start to worry.
- [59:23]
Scott Vanak
Our longest running client we had for 20 years did that multiple times.
- [59:28]
Ross Dunn
I know who you're talking about.
- [59:29]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, I was just like, what the hell? We were just always the last person they thought of. And that was then. They had rankings. Holy smokes. We just were kicking ass for them. So it was painful to see anything go wrong there. Luckily that didn't too badly because we, yeah, they just had so much authority still. Nerve wracking, wasn't it?
- [59:53]
Ross Dunn
The worst part is though, they, when a client does something like that, then they lean on us to fix it. It's like, well, if we're involved from the beginning, we can prevent the need to fix anything or at least drastically minimize what's going to break. So, and this is actually an interesting one that I never thought of until it happened one time and that's having clients delete critical content. So we had a client do a website redesign and relaunch and it went smoothly. They came to us first. This is one of those examples where they came to us and said, we're going to do this. And everything was good, the redirects were in place, it was all good. But they had this one particular piece of content on their site that they thought, oh, it's a little outdated. And they just deleted it and didn't say anything. And it turned out that one particular piece generated almost a huge number, something like 30% of their organic traffic to their site. It ranked for huge phrases. And so of course when they launched, their traffic crashed, which can happen with the redesign and usually it bounces back, but it wasn't bouncing back. And so then when we did a deep dive, really trying to figure out what was going on, we realized that this one page that used to be so important was just gone. That was brutal. So then we talked to the client and they talked to their cm. Coincidentally, they also use a weird proprietary cms, but no major problems with that one yet. They put the content back up and then I can't remember how long it took to recover, but within some amount of time, like I'm talking weeks, not months, those rankings started to come back. So if you're going to delete content, and even now I tell this to all my clients, like, oh, we want to delete these old blog posts or this old page or this or that. Like, well, let's see if that page is doing anything first. Let's make sure it doesn't have any rankings, it doesn't have inbound links, you know, doesn't have a lot of traffic or conversions coming through it or whatever. Research your content before you delete it. Make sure you're not going to hurt yourself. Yeah. And then the last one is. Is a little bit funny. I was. I was tempted to not include it, but I kind of wanted to. So we had a client. This is a. This is going back a long time now. And they were doing exceptionally well. I remember they were number one for everything they ever wanted. And they had massive traffic. Like, they were just. They were so happy doing so well. And then there was one term, whatever it was, and it was number two. It had dropped from number one to number two. They had hundreds. Might be an exaggeration. Well, maybe it wasn't an exaggeration. There's a ton of number ones. And then the client got me on the phone and they were mad and they were just furious and yelling. And then, like, I didn't know what to do. Like, I'm trying to be the nice guy. Right. And then they talk. I believe they spoke to Ross. And then Ross just basically threatened to fire them as a client. And. And then they quickly were like, oh, okay, hang on. And they, they calm down.
- [62:32]
Scott Vanak
I don't put up with that. I can't handle that, man.
- [62:34]
Ross Dunn
Especially because they were doing well, you know, like one ranking drop, one position, and they lost it. And it was like, come on. And ultimately what ended up happening is the client passed away, which is terrible. And his. His son or daughter, I can't even remember now, took over the company. And they, they fired us because they didn't see the value. And then they did a redesign and then all their rankings crashed and burned. I remember seeing that months later that everything was gone because they completely broke everything. And I. I don't want to laugh at that. I don't. But it is something poetic a little bit, you know, when they don't understand.
- [63:10]
Scott Vanak
And, and don't give us a chance to explain.
- [63:13]
Ross Dunn
Don't even give us a chance.
- [63:14]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, I mean, we would have been happy to explain our value, but it's just mind blowing. Mind blowing. And that's. It's actually, you know, clients have asked us, you know, how quickly can you get us number one? And there's been times I Think that might have been one of those clients where we pushed them number one really quickly. We really had a lot of good luck with them and that happens. And it's not very common. Then it was more common than it is now and we would just rock, rock it. It was just amazing. But then the worst part is that I expect it all the time because they haven't had to work for it and it becomes a double edged sword and we end up getting in these situations. And yeah, back then we frankly put up with a lot more of that just to keep the business. But I'm very grateful that we're a far more successful company now and quality of life is important to us. We don't want to deal with that. So don't allow clients like that. I vet them before we bring them in because, you know, it's just not healthy.
- [64:14]
Ross Dunn
If we get along with the clients and the client, if we all like each other, everything works so much better.
- [64:18]
Scott Vanak
Amazing.
- [64:19]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, it's good for them, it's good for us if we don't. And you know what? It may just be that we don't see eye to eye with a certain client and they're better off with another SEO. And that's great. You find the one that meshes with your sense of humor and your communication style and all that and it's.
- [64:33]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. I mean, not everyone would be people we go to beers with, you know, all the time. And I've said some companies say they'd only hire people or work with people that you go to a beer with and I think that'd be great. But the point is it doesn't matter. I mean, as long as they have achievable objectives, they're. They listen to us, they get back to us. We listen to them, we get back to them. It works. It just works and it's fantastic. That's why we, on average, our clients stay with us at least 10 years. And I think that's a, that's a stat I never want to mess with. That's just so proud of that. All right, so past techniques, this I'll just whip through quickly. These are past techniques that worked well that definitely don't so much now. I guess the exact match domains worked really well for the longest time. If you wanted to be number one for Cadillac Dealer Victoria, you got Cadillac Dealer Victoria.com, you know, and that would work. That still kind of works in this. Only in one way though. If it matches your business name. Yeah. Because then people are writing Cadillac dealer Victoria, go check them out and that's going to help. But if it doesn't match your name, as you're just doing it, trying to get the domain to do all the heavy lifting for you, good luck. It's not going to work. But again, it did at one point. Meta Keyword tags. They were huge. Very early on. I mean, 2003, maybe they stopped being.
- [66:11]
Ross Dunn
Useful when I started. So I started January 2020, sorry, 2003. I think I had about a year as an SEO when they were still working and we were incorporating them, maybe two years. I remember the rules, you know, don't include the same word more than three times. And I can't remember how many words we allowed. There were, you know, a set of rules we followed and they helped. They definitely helped. And then they didn't help anymore. And that was it. They were just dead.
- [66:37]
Scott Vanak
Just too many spammers breaking the rules.
- [66:39]
Ross Dunn
And so easy to man. Those early days of SEO were so easy.
- [66:43]
Scott Vanak
They really were. I wish I could go back with what we know now. Holy smokes.
- [66:47]
Ross Dunn
Yeah.
- [66:49]
Scott Vanak
Anyway, link schemes. These are link chains, link rings. This is just a way to create an artificial network of websites and link together all of them to boost each other and ultimately push up your rankings using link authority. And a lot of people are still using that. I don't know how much of it's actually the length that's working now. Not a lot of people that I would ever, you know, I. I've just heard about this. Honestly, I haven't even looked at them, but I still. People talking. But you still see people talking about them in forums. So I guess they're still doing them, but I can't imagine them working very well, especially for the amount of work put in. You could just create better content and do honest work. You'd probably get better results, but who knows? Magic keyword densities so keyword density was just how oftentimes, how many times a keyword appeared within the code of a page. And way back when I started, I used keyword density and it worked like a charm. And I remember going to a conference with this. I did not like her. I've never liked her. The first time I met her, I was like, wow, this person knows her stuff. And then I asked a question and she was so rude. I thought, wow, okay, I'm talking to you again. Anyway, she was teaching something in Vancouver. I went to this course and I said, well, what about keyword density? And she looked at me like I was a turd on her, on a bottom of her foot. What Are you talking about. Those are garbage. They're not true. And okay, whatever. They work for me.
- [68:29]
Ross Dunn
Did it ever work? I can't remember what the hots.
- [68:32]
Scott Vanak
Damn.
- [68:33]
Ross Dunn
I think we had it like 6.8% or something like that. And that was your number one man all the time.
- [68:37]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. 6.5, I remember was like the sweet spot at one point, but there was always instances where you needed to push higher. And yeah, sure, it was a cheat of a concept of if you didn't really want to get into all the nitty gritties of SEO that were perhaps more complex, but it worked and it works a great way to train you guys and because you just literally had to follow a tool. And the tool was. GRKDA was the one we used. I love that tool. Xenu Link Sleuth. Is that even still around? Probably is.
- [69:14]
Ross Dunn
I looked it up. It still exists and it. The website looks the same as it ever did.
- [69:19]
Scott Vanak
Oh my God.
- [69:20]
Ross Dunn
It hasn't changed. And you can still download it. And I don't know if it would run, but must, I guess.
- [69:26]
Scott Vanak
Wow, that's amazing.
- [69:28]
Ross Dunn
And I was trying to think of other tools, but that was all I could remember that we're not using.
- [69:32]
Scott Vanak
Oh, there's so many. But those are the ones that really stand out as the classics. GRKDA especially. I mean, I can't think of a more classic one in my world because that's what I started out using.
- [69:43]
Ross Dunn
The Screaming Frog is basically the modern replacement.
- [69:45]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. And I learned all this stuff at the time through Planet Ocean Communication.
- [69:50]
Ross Dunn
Right. I forgot about them.
- [69:52]
Scott Vanak
Their newsletter was so good and whenever I felt like I was falling behind on something, I would check that. Then I would also check forums, but it usually had the right answer. Again, it was so simple back then. They would just say, hey, try this, try this. I'm like, cool. Did it. Rankings would go up and I mean back then I got a number one ranking for poker because at that time I was doing casinos and stuff and. And that threw me into the strativerse. Stratosphere, I mean for business. So there was a connection to all this stuff. It worked well. Next episode, like I said, will be news. There's a lot to catch up on and we're hoping to have a special guest or two within the next 10 episodes. Just again as a sort of like woohoo 500th and at least make up for not having one on this episode. Although I think this is fun. We got through some really interesting stuff and there's some good laughs there as well.
- [70:48]
Ross Dunn
I hope so.
- [70:49]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. I hope you guys liked it. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanack, thank you for joining us today. If you have any questions you'd like to share with us, please feel free to post them on our Facebook group. Easily searched SEO Easily found by searching SEO101podcast on Facebook. This is not so if I've done this thousand times, it feels like anyway.
- [71:11]
Ross Dunn
We'Ve only done it 500 times.
- [71:12]
Scott Vanak
There you go. Right? A thousand. Maybe it'll be better. Have a great week. Remember to tune into future episodes, which air at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, every Wednesday on Webmasterradio FM. Hey, thanks for listening, everybody. And don't forget, hit me up if you're a great SEO and you want to work for me. Is that. Yeah. What are you doing, John? It's like stocks are going to fall. Everything's going to fall in if you don't do your thing. All right, fine. All right. All right, fine. Thank. Thanks for listening, everybody.