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- [00:00]
Ben Shap
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 I.O. 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.
- [01:11]
Ben Shap
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 costs? 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 a hundred 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.
- [02:27]
Tyson Stockton
AWT yesterday, Michael and I talked about blockchain timestamping, and today we're continuing the conversation by discussing the new age of authorship and SEO. So with that, here's my conversation with Michael Sumner, CEO and co founder at Score Detect. Michael, welcome back.
- [02:47]
Michael Sumner
Thanks for having me, Tyson.
- [02:49]
Tyson Stockton
So yesterday we kind of, you know, we hit on more of the fundamentals we discussed kind of Like a little bit more about blockchain and kind of applications outside of crypto. And we kind of tease the listeners a little bit about kind of maybe some SEO applications, which I think picking up from that, I feel like the maybe kind of key principle is trust and reliability. And it seems like the strengths like, or some of the greatest strengths of like blockchain come in that form. So being that that is such a significant challenge for search engines to solve, as far as there's so much discussion around eat, we're also living in now a broader application of generative AI content. So like maybe kind of to set the stage, like, how are you seeing authorship and the intersection of blockchain?
- [03:48]
Michael Sumner
Sure. So what we think of authorship used to be that we publish an article and have the author have a link to their bio or a piece of text to help describe to crawlers about them and also a list of articles that they have authored on that website. But that's not enough for Google. Google has to find out the social media links of that author if it does have and if genuinely in the real world, or at least in the world that we see in the Internet, that that author is trustworthy, has the experience or is an expert in the topic that's being written. So what we've found so far with how Google finds that out, I mean we can't tell them ourselves, but rather ask Google about it. But what we're seeing is that crawlers are smart enough to find out through links and other helpful elements like structured data or HTML elements to help guide the caller towards where those points are for the author.
- [05:00]
Tyson Stockton
So with that, it seems like too there's this additional challenge from a search engine, whether it's like through the authorship or the actual piece of content to the responsibility or the task is kind of more on the search engine side to kind of put to together the clues and the pieces to make the best guess towards this. Like I'm, I'm kind of guessing here like jumping ahead a little that blockchain authorship would also make that significantly easier from a search engine perspective, correct?
- [05:36]
Michael Sumner
Yes, that's right.
- [05:37]
Tyson Stockton
So then in this sense I feel like you're, you're kind of calling out that hey, the same challenge around content that search engines have, the solution can be there from a blockchain implementation. Like what would be the kind of like pathway? Like, like how, how would you see the pathway to search engines being able to use that? Is it like there needs to reach like a critical adoption level across like the open web or is it more of a, it actually doesn't matter if it's a, you know, full adoption. Like how would, how would you see kind of that path progressing of where this can be implemented?
- [06:24]
Michael Sumner
So for the implementation phase, that would involve having more people use this Verified by Score Detect badge, where it does link to a certificate that then the crawler can have a set of links, including the blockchain transaction, which ultimately has a set of structured data which you can then see with the website itself. So that to a crawler that might sound quite advanced, or to us it might sound quite advanced. But to a crawler, by matching the structured data that you see on the blockchain itself with what you do have, or even sets of proofs that are independent of that structured data on the blockchain, sets of proofs on your website that help bolster that information, that would help tie the knot between those two and connect the dots with what you have on the certificate URL that is on the Verified by badge. So the way that this can work is either directly or indirectly. Directly is if there already is a proposal out there for this schema.org structured data. And at the moment there is one and it's been proposed back I believe 2020. You can see it on the schema.org GitHub repository. But whether or not Google has adopted that and implemented it for their crawlers, we don't know for sure. But we do have the indirect approach, which is by displaying a verified by badge, you can then indirectly bolster the trust by allowing the users themselves to clip through. So it doesn't have to be a crawler, it can be users themselves to see. Aha. This article here is certified with a set of proofs such as when it was created, when it was modified, and it's found in the blockchain itself. The data is in the blockchain itself. So by having the user stay on the page for longer, that would indirectly influence better SEO for that page.
- [08:29]
Tyson Stockton
And what signs from Google have you seen on kind of their interests or like, like have you seen anything that they're. They've shown their cards a little bit around how they're thinking of using and leveraging blockchain?
- [08:49]
Michael Sumner
The answer to that currently is no, because I've not seen any mention of search engines relating to blockchain for SEO. But what I have seen is that the user adoption has been increasing for people who wish to use this platform and also that the end users themselves do have better SEO results. So what we're trying to find out is whether it's direct or indirect. But at the end of the day if you do have better SEO results, not complaining fair.
- [09:22]
Tyson Stockton
And yeah I guess then you're looking at is it a chicken or the egg? Is it because of the blockchain or because of how many times has this been updated and changed? Because I think within that you do have kind of like the interesting component as well of like the change over time factor which that in itself could be a little bit of a indicator signal towards trust of an article of like it being touched multiple times versus a one time piece. I feel like too with the expansion of generative AI content too, something like this could also be kind of an increased importance or need. Like would you see that as being a component as well of kind of why this would be most like applicable.
- [10:15]
Ben Shap
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- [11:43]
Michael Sumner
Most definitely. Because with the advent of AI misinformation or AI generated content, we're seeing that articles can easily be spun up, but then they happen to be either detectable as AI. But let's think about the next five years where AI detection or AI content detection will become so obscure or so good that it be like human content. And if we were to reach that point or maybe when we reach that point where AI written content is totally like a human being's, totally personalized, or that we have tools that allow us to do that, at the end of the day, what's left on the table would be content authenticity. And by finding out what proofs we can start building today to make that happen five years down the line. What we found so far is that blockchain technology is there to stay because there's a lot of adoption and it's not going to go away because of the big market cap that it has, for example, and also the high user adoption and people using the blockchain. And when I say blockchain, I mean that there's several blockchains out there, there's more than 10,000, but the top 10 or 20 or 50 are the ones that you might hear in the news the most often.
- [13:05]
Tyson Stockton
And how would that be a limiting factor? Like would the utilization within search engines, would it be agnostic on which blockchain this information is kind of stored within or would it have to be kind of like an all or none type setup?
- [13:26]
Michael Sumner
I feel like you would have to keep it agnostic. But what tools those blockchains have. So to see what a blockchain, So a blockchain is invisible from the get go, but like we have an Internet browser to see what the Internet does or can provide. We have a blockchain explorer and there are very popular open source blockchain explorers that display in a certain fashion. So those top blockchains have these explorers. There can be five or ten different explorers. Maybe they're different software, but we have the most popular ones. It's like saying Chrome versus Firefox versus Safari. They're all different ways to show data coming from the blockchains. And if we were to have it as agnostic, that wouldn't be a problem because we have these similar browsers for the blockchain.
- [14:23]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. So which that makes it considerably, I guess like the adoption considerably easier. So it's just more of hey, and I guess, correct me if I'm understanding this wrong, but hey, if we target through the top couple kind of explorers for this, we're going to be able to capture read 90 whatever percent of what potentially could exist. So it's like you don't really have to think of, you know, creating adoption to one or even a few. It's hey, we target a few of the viewers or the explorers and then anything that's created down the line, we're also going to then have access to Looking at.
- [15:09]
Michael Sumner
Yes, that's right.
- [15:10]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. I feel like that does open up the doors quite a bit more and. Well, okay, so last question then on this, because to me, it's like, I've thought about content in blockchain and more of like, maybe there's something around, like ownership or a different way for authors to be compensated. Because if you have this ledger, then you also have probably, like, more clever ways that you could go about like compensating quality of content or impact of content rather than, you know, purchasing essentially by the word, whether you're, you know, working with AI content or human creators. So it's like, maybe there's some elements in there that like, the industry can develop around. But from like an application of a search engine, it seems a little bit more straightforward, at least with like, the other complexities that they're already using from, you know, being able to detect a lot of these elements on their own. If we, if we don't think that search engines are currently. Well, I guess let me break that into two questions. First, one, do you believe that search engines are currently using blockchain for, like, monitoring authorship or web changes?
- [16:23]
Michael Sumner
I feel like the answer is I don't know because I've not seen direct evidence or articles of search engines saying that they do that.
- [16:34]
Tyson Stockton
So then the next question would be, like, what potential barriers do you feel like may still exist or need to be worked through? It feels like it's kind of like naturally heading towards this direction. So have you come across any kind of barriers where, like, oh, well, once this is solved and this would open up things quite a bit further, where do you feel kind of that next stepping stone is?
- [17:01]
Michael Sumner
So I feel like this still has to be critical mass. This is a very new technology and a very new way of seeing content authenticity in line with Google EE80, or you can say search engine EE80. This is still a very new technology and we'll need critical mass for it to happen. At the moment, there's been a proposal for a schema.org with the fingerprint of that piece of content, so that once that proposal has been approved, then we can see that being used in structured data for Google's rich snippets feature. So in an ideal world, we would have a search result with the author's link that is based on a blockchain. And where I want to go with this topic briefly is that we have blockchains that run on zero gas fees that are blazing fast in comparison to Bitcoin, which is expensive, ancient. So much that we don't even know the founder. So there's no maintenance in it and it's really slow. And you have Ethereum, which, yeah, it's gone cheaper, but it still has gas fees for no reason. And even the founder of Ethereum says, yeah, I shouldn't have done that. That's not needed anymore in this day and age. And you do have more optimized blockchains out there. But what is happening now, and which is where Score Detect is implemented on already, is that there are eco friendly blockchains where they're so good for the environment that they use zero gas fees. They're just so quick to use because of the way that they're structured in a way similar to how AWS hosting is structured. So you can make that chain as big as possible or as small as possible, and you can always add a bit more funding to it if you want to make it faster. So all of that is done for blockchain developers to think about. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. What we're here to talk about today is whether it's feasible for a search engine to start mass adoption of certain blockchains. And the answer is yes, but very specific blockchains.
- [19:21]
Tyson Stockton
That makes sense. And it feels like one of the areas maybe to keep that critical eye on is within schema.org, because it's like, I would agree that that seems like the natural kind of entry point to achieve the critical adoption is because we're already using it, people are familiar with it, it's yeah, like open source. So you have ways of, you know, it not being necessarily like controlled by one. So I think, like to me, my takeaway kind of from that is that would be an area that I would want to keep like a kind of close eye on. Are there, are there any other kind of like target points like that that you would advocate for people to keep an eye out too?
- [20:08]
Michael Sumner
So blockchain timestamping as a concept is relatively new since around 2018. So there are. I'm not the only one doing it, but I'm the only one in a sense of having an eco friendly blockchain that's in an easy to use platform and in a modern tech stack for others to use easily. But what I've seen is besides the schema.org proposal, it's up to the experimentation phase to see if this works for people's businesses or blogs or articles, see if that does, whether or not it does have a direct influence on search engine crawlers. If it does improve the user experience or trustworthiness by allowing the user to check out that this article has proven its content authenticity over time, I think that's a success.
- [21:07]
Tyson Stockton
Agreed. And it'll be an interesting kind of space and area to watch develop. But I think you bring up a lot of great points around kind of like the challenge and this being kind of an option to really solve some of those challenges. And I think it also makes things a little more kind of straightforward for us as like an SEO industry. But it will be quite interesting to see how this kind of further develops and progresses. But with that, that is going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Michael Sumner from Score to Tech for joining us. And again, if you'd like to get in touch with Michael going over to his company's website@score2tech.com and be sure to check out the seven day free trial where you can play around with his product that he's been discussing.
- [22:00]
Ben Shap
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 pre visible 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 voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jap 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 data.