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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? This is Tyson from Previsible IO, and joining me today is Michael Sumner, who is the CEO and founder at Score Detect. Score Detect utilizes cutting edge technology to provide innovative solutions for credit scoring and risk assessment, delivering aggregate and efficient results. Specializing in data analytics and machine learning, the company offers advanced tools for financial institutions and businesses. Today, Michael and I are going to be discussing blockchain timestamping. So with that, here's my conversation with Michael Sumner, CEO and founder at Score Detect.
- [01:20]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO, health backlinks and organic rankings at no cost? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's a h r e f s.com.
- [02:37]
Tyson Stockton
AWT Michael, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:40]
Michael Sumner
Thanks for having me, Tyson.
- [02:42]
Tyson Stockton
So today we're talking blockchain, but obviously this is an SEO podcast, so maybe if you can kind of just set the stage for the audience in relation to SEO. Why is blockchain relevant and kind of like, where do you see that intersection between the two?
- [03:01]
Michael Sumner
Sure. So the problem with SEO today is that we need to find out the history of a content over time. And the way to prove that can be through a database that you host yourself. But we can go further than that because there's got to be a solution for a public database that everyone can see that is not archive.org because we've seen in the past that archive.org has gone down due to hackers. So the next solution is the blockchain, which itself, you could say, is a database that stores information over time, is secure, decentralized, and as long as one person in the world is alive that has access to the Internet, they can continue running that blockchain.
- [03:47]
Tyson Stockton
Fair. So it's, it's looking, you're thinking of it kind of through the lens of how do you have a reliable kind of like, record and history of what's going on with a piece of content? How, how does that work in the sense of like, URL versus actual content? Like, are you thinking of this in terms of like, what changes are happening to a specific URL, or is it more of like, how is this one exact piece of content maybe used in multiple cases on the web?
- [04:23]
Michael Sumner
Sure. So because the blockchain itself allows you to write smart contract code, which is a fancy way of saying, here's my code, it will never change, and it's out for everyone to read to understand how it runs. And the way that we've found to be the most convenient and the most trustworthy is a code that says, we're going to write this piece of code only once and it will never be changed forever. And you can think to yourself, if I were to put some sensitive information, that would be quite destructive, so I wouldn't want to do that. So focusing on a privacy first approach, we've been going for transactions, blockchain transactions that will never change. But the best way to do that is just through an anonymous fingerprint of that piece of text. And if that piece of text changes over time, then we can see that change happen because it would be different based on maybe a space or a period or a set of characters. So from there, all we need to do is find out if something has changed over time. And that's what we need to get to the meat of, with the understanding of how we can have this audit trail over time and how that works with SEO. I'll just keep bringing this back to SEO for our listeners to bring it back into SEO, we just need to figure out if that article has changed over time and then from there seeing that the article has changed over time. Those points in time can then be used to determine if something is more authentic or not compared to something that's only been published once or once in a blue moon and never again or in the tiniest manner possible. So showing more little changes over time, frequent changes, can help for SEO purposes. We've seen that mostly for blog posts. That would be a good use case for interesting.
- [06:27]
Tyson Stockton
And I'm going to have to hold back on a few of the questions here just because I know tomorrow we want to jump into the new age of authorship. And so I think some of the questions related to how or why importance of that I'll hold onto for the time being, but keeping kind of within this like foundation of it. Like, what are some of like kind of the common misconceptions? Because it's like, I assume when most people are like the average person on the street, here's blockchain, they immediately are thinking cryptocurrency. Can you kind of, I guess, reset for the listeners like the entire like what's the entirety of blockchain versus just kind of this one application of crypto?
- [07:18]
Michael Sumner
Sure. So the blockchain first started off as a way for you to find out if whatever you place into the blockchain has changed over time. So by using decentralized databases called blockchains, you can store that information and it is associated with a timestamp and a set of data. And that set of data can be anything. So that would be as simple as I can get with the concept of the blockchain.
- [07:47]
Tyson Stockton
No, I mean I think that that helps quite a bit where it's like the purpose wasn't initially kind of intended for like a currency exchange, but more of kind of record keeping and record tracking. Through this and through the decentralization, you're creating confidence, reliability, all these other kind of components. What are some of kind of like the more powerful applications of blockchain from like your perspective? Because I feel like concept totally get. I could see how it can be applied in different areas. But being that I'm not as like deep into that world, like obviously myself I may be hearing it's like most of the time you hear blockchain again, it's back to like kind of crypto. So like maybe like do you have any examples of other applications that have been kind of intriguing or inspiring to yourself?
- [08:45]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rates. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [10:13]
Michael Sumner
Sure. So we've found that the blockchain is largely a database that you want to create trust for. And whether that's a database that everyone has access to, or only a few people, or, or even a private blockchain that is only used internally, either by governments or by companies, having that decentralization allows you to create proof in the pudding itself. And by having a blockchain, let's say for financial transactions, that's crypto, you can tell that you can't alter the transactions just by looking at the code of the blockchain itself. When I say blockchain, you can easily replace it with the word database or, or a spreadsheet if you want, for that matter. So every new row in that spreadsheet would have to be hacked in order to get the next previous row. So the more transactions you have, the stronger it becomes to get that previous row. Another application of blockchain is if you want a public database where, let's say I want to find out where my food has come from and it's traveled from the farm over to a factory over to so and so until it reaches the destination, which is my home or the supermarket with the blockchain you can have that audit trail for everyone to see. And the trust is already built within the database itself because you know that the database is, let's say it's open source or the code is out there for everyone to see compared to a database which is stored in a data center in the middle of Antarctica or the Arctic, and it's run by the big companies, Amazon, Google, et cetera. And you don't know if the integrity of that database is still there or if it's prone to attacks or security threats. So if that database were to disappear, you wouldn't have any backup. Or there might be backups, but there's a limited number of backups compared to the blockchain, where everyone who interacts with the blockchain, and this is by the millions, then creates millions of backups. And if you understand how a torrent works, that's exactly what it is.
- [12:37]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. And I feel like with that being that a core strength or kind of capability of this goes into the reliability and trust factor, there's, you know, I'm already seeing natural kind of applications or kind of like potential utilizations within search, as that being one of the primary kind of challenges of a search engine. Looking ahead just within blockchain, are you more excited and do you think there's going to be kind of like more progression of just the additional applications of blockchain through different, I don't know, purposes, or do you feel like there's potential progression within the actual just kind of like functionality and systems of blockchains?
- [13:29]
Michael Sumner
So there's governments out there, like the Japanese government, trying to build the concept of the blockchain to build trust, but not call it a blockchain. And it's taking them years and they might be coming to the conclusion that, okay, we're going to have to stick to the concept of the blockchain. One, because it's been created before the Internet was invented, so it's much older than the Internet having the concept of the blockchain. And two, there's already mass adoption of it and it's been more than 10 years. So we're readily maturing to the next stage of the blockchain called layer 2, or even a combination of different blockchains altogether. And from there you can have one app that's served on several blockchains, and it's up to those blockchains how they manage the chains of transactions themselves.
- [14:20]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. Any other kind of, I guess, final points that you'd want to make more on kind of like the general understanding of blockchains? So Then we can kind of build from that tomorrow as we talk about more authorship and core focus on kind of like SEO application.
- [14:40]
Michael Sumner
Sure. So another application of blockchain is in the luxury retail industry where you have genuine bags versus fake bags and you would need to base them off of a certificate. For example, having the certificate on a database that is not the blockchain is more prone to even hacking. Or let's say something that really is a high value item, you would want to make sure that it's done properly. The best technology we do have today is the blockchain because of the inherent security that it contains. Versus, again, I would say a human written database and a human managed database where I'll go to a story where when I was a junior developer, I managed launching a website that had a live database and a local database and I couldn't tell the difference between the two because I had one tab and another tab. So my accident was one, not to create a backup of the live environment back in the day when you had to do it manually, and two, that I deleted the website that caused the site to crash. And we don't want that to happen. I know we have things in place now, but there's always the possibility of human error. And with high value items where the stakes are high, we want to make sure that we omit that error and hence why we arrive back into the blockchain.
- [16:09]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. Well, I know we're leaving the listeners on a little bit of a cliffhanger with the episode for tomorrow, but I think with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Michael Sumner from Score Detect for joining us in part two of this conversation, which I mentioned will be published tomorrow. Michael and I are going to continue to the discussion around blockchain and we're going to kind of discuss more specifically the new age of authorship and SEO. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Michael, go on over and check out his company's website at Score Detective and also check out their free seven day trial to play around with it yourself.
- [16:53]
Podcast Announcer
Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO, that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is Voices of search on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always in the.