Join Nate Matherson as he sits down with Charles Floate for the thirty-eighth episode of the Optimize podcast. Charles is an SEO expert, entrepreneur, and investor from the United Kingdom. He’s behind The God of SEO blog and runs a successful link-building agency. Charles is known for his somewhat controversial SEO strategies, tutorials, case studies, and talks.
In our episode today, Nate and Charles explore topics we have yet to discuss on the Optimize podcast, including a mix of white hat, grey hat*, and black hat tactics*. During the episode, Charles discusses niche sites' challenges and opportunities, including decreased exit opportunities, algorithm updates, economic conditions, etc. Charles also speaks to applying AI content strategies within SEO (ex., Programmatic SEO), expressing concerns about the quality and potential risks of bulk-generated content.
Listen to hear why he suggests new domains to mitigate client risks. In this week’s deep dive, listen to Charles share everything you need to know about Parasite SEO in 2024. Charles gets tactical, sharing multiple case studies on how it works, why it works, and what results have been achieved with these tactics. Rounding out the episode, Charles and Nate cover topics like the future of backlinks, Google’s use and transition away from quality raters, and AI-generated content’s role in SEO and content marketing. Closing the episode is our popular lightning round of questions!
*Disclaimer from Positional: Google has published guidelines for acceptable practices for SEO. We recommend you review Google’s Search Essentials Guide to understand those guidelines before implementing some of the tactics discussed in this episode.
This is the thing that a lot of SEO agencies, whatever they get wrong, is you want to be mapping intents and the topics from what Google is showing in their own search. Because that's what Google thinks the intent is, and that's what Google is going to match, and that's what you need to match to what Google is already showing. Because a lot of people think it's user intent. And user intent is great for signals, user engagement signals, right? So you want to optimize your site for user engagement signals, but you don't want to be optimizing your keywords or your content for users, because that's not what Google is. It's optimizing it for what it thinks the intent is for the user. It's not optimizing it for the user.
Hi, and welcome to the Optimize podcast. My name is Nate Matherson, and I am your host. On this weekly podcast, we sit down with some of the smartest minds in content marketing and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what's moving the needle in organic search. Today, I'm thrilled to sit down with one of my favorite follows on Twitter. That'd be Charles Floate. Know that Charles is one of the best in SEO. Today's episode is a fun one. Charles and I chat about Black Hat SEO, Parasite SEO, Niche Sites, AI-generated content, and so, so much more.
This week's episode of the Optimize Podcast is brought to you by Positional. My name's Nate, and I'm one of the co-founders of Positional. We've been working on Positional for about 10 months, and we've built a handful of what I think are pretty awesome tools, including we've launched Content Analytics. Content Analytics is kind of like a heat mapping tool, but for a content marketing and SEO team. We provide really granular insights into where users are dropping off within your pages. And we've actually just launched a couple of new capabilities, too. We've launched click mapping and click tracking to give you better insights into where your users are clicking and converting. And we've also launched a more general heat mapping view, too, alongside our read maps. We'd love for you to check out our entire tool set at positional.com.
Charles, thank you so much for coming on the Optimized Podcast.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate you inviting me on, Nate.
I'm thrilled about this episode because I've been a follower of yours for so long. And for all of our listeners who are not already following Charles on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it, make sure that you go and do that. And we'll include a link to Charles' Twitter in the show notes. But Charles, the first question I ask all of our guests is, how did you get into the world of content marketing and SEO?
Yeah, so I had always kind of known about SEO from when I was probably about eight or nine years old, which is gonna sound quite scary, right? And both of my grandparents were CAD designers. So my granddad was a CAD designer for British steel and British water and things like that and stuff. And then my grandma was a Cobol coder for British gas. So, but in the 1980s. So both of them were very, very, you know, ahead of their time when it came to computers and things. And we had a home computer since I was about, you know, seven years old, six years old, something like that. You know, one of the massive ones, I'm talking a HP computer that was probably, you know, the size of my desk kind of thing sitting on there. But I used to go on there and kind of figure some things out, be on the internet in 2005 or 2004, something like that, when I was really young. And so I kind of always knew about SEO, generally from YouTube videos and how things got to the top of search engines and stuff like that. I just kind of figured it out organically. But I didn't actually know how to do it, I just knew what it was, right? And then my mom, when I was, a few years later, and I was into the gaming world and into video games and hacking and all this kind of stupid stuff, my mom bought a website for her new company off of this web design agency in the UK and they charged her 40,000 pounds, right? Which at the time, bear in mind, this was 20 years ago, that was double the US dollars. So you're talking $80,000 for a small business that had three employees and she didn't have much cash left, right? And they had a contract where they owned the domain name, it was on their CMS, you weren't allowed to log in to registrars and things like that and stuff, so they owned everything. So it was essentially a scam, right? That's essentially what they were doing, they were just peeling money out of small businesses and medium businesses. And I told my mom, look, I can probably spend a couple hundred pounds, if that, and I can at least get you off the mark. We can start getting some traffic in, maybe get some sales, I don't really know what I'm doing, but I've been able to do bits and pieces here and there. She trusted me enough that she gave me some money. We started doing it, and about six to nine months after that, we were outranking some billion-dollar corporations in the UK. And I had met some people on forums, and I'd met some people on Skype groups and things like that back in the day, and all these underground chats. And they leveled me up with what was working, automated backlink software with on page, with meta titles. I was even watching like Moz's Whiteboard Fridays and things back in the day. And then within a few years, I had got bored of high school and kind of got kicked out on purpose and started my own company and things. And then I started working as an SEO engineer, didn't like working for somebody else and set up my own agency and have never really looked back.
That is such an interesting story. And I think you're the first guest we've had on this podcast that got started so early. And also maybe the first guest that's been kicked out of high school. But I saw a recent tweet of yours about a white hat versus black hat SEO. And if we're being honest on this podcast, we typically interview white hat SEOs. We'll talk to a lot of folks who are running like SEO programs at let's say venture backed startups or large companies. And that's why I'm particularly excited to chat with you today. And so for our listeners, maybe just a little background, what is White Hat SEO and what is Black Hat SEO and how do you define them?
Yeah. So a lot of people have different definitions, right? So the SEO world kind of stole these hats from the hacking world. The hacking world since like the early 90s or something had grouped things into hats. So it'd be like White Hat is legal, ethical hacking. You know, you're working for corporations, defending them against criminals, whatever. Gray hat is on the borderline. You know, it's the, think of people who are like, like online vigilantes that are hunting other criminals, you know, scammers and things like that. It's those kind of people, they're the gray hats. And then you have the black hats, which are the completely illegal criminal activities. The SEO community has kind of taken that from there. And people have got different definitions based on that, right? They either have the exact definition of the hacking world where it's legal, mediocre, illegal, right? Or they have it where I come from, where I think it's actually a bit more of a defined thing. Where you have white hat, which is just following Google's guidelines and following guidelines of search engines, basically, you know, following within the rules of the guidelines. You have gray hat, which is, you still listen to the guidelines most of the time or listen to search engine rules most of the time, but you're still open to opportunities that might skirt those rules to the extent. And then you have black hat, which is just screw the rules, fuck the system, let's win the game, right? That's kind of most of what the black hat mentality is coming from. And that's how I see it.
So which hat do you find yourself wearing most often?
I always class myself as a money hat, right? So whichever gives you the highest ROI, that's what I'm going to use, right? And whichever is the correct tool for the task, that's the thing I would use as well. So if I need to rank tomorrow for a massive keyword that's just trending right now, and it might be gone in a week, then I'm probably going to use some blackout SEOs and power set SEOs and stuff like that, right? If I'm going to try and build a business for 10 years and I have investors and I have people to actually I need to look up to and have responsibilities, then of course I'm going to go down the white hat path and make sure there's longevity and I'm not risking the website even though there's this whole kind of notion now that even if you are doing white hat, you are still risking the site to some extent because of how Google's algorithms have been in the last 12 months or so.
And you just mentioned Parasite SEO, and I've seen you tweet about Parasite SEO pretty regularly. And you've said that it's one of the highest ROI and most effective techniques. And this isn't a topic that we've discussed on our podcast before. So could you just define what Parasite SEO is for our listeners?
Yeah, so essentially, Google's algorithms favor large authority websites, right? So all that means is that these websites that have got a large amount of online presence, they are more favoured than other websites, right? And as a result of that, if you can build pages, or if you can build, ideally, more than one page on these large authority websites, you can do everything from the BBC, buying an article on bbc.com, all the way to just posting on your LinkedIn posts, right? These are all parasite pages, and all you're doing is effectively utilizing or hijacking that authority from that domain name to rank for large keywords, and rank immediately, right? What might take you months on a brand new domain name can take you 24 hours with one of these pages, because Google already trusts the domain name, it already has it indexed, it already has a large authority, and all you're doing is essentially being a parasite on top of that domain's presence already and allowing that domain to turbo jump you way higher than you would have been on your own.
So you mentioned before, like if you see a keyword where we need to get out in front of it in the next week and that opportunity might be gone in let's say 10 days from now, you could use Parasite SEO as a foundation to build off of to then rank a lot faster. Am I understanding that right?
Yeah, a great example of this is if you've ever Googled UFC livestream, or you've ever Googled something to do with the sports livestreams, you just see these news articles, Rolling Stone Magazine number one, LinkedIn number two, Google Groups number three. That's all Parasite SEO pages, every single one. Because those topics are only here now, and then they're gone, right? They're a flash and a pan, and then they're gone. So what you need is something that ranks immediately, very fast, and without large expense. So that is Parasite SEO.
So it sounds like there are a few different platforms in which we could do Parasite SEO. You mentioned Google Groups, you mentioned LinkedIn, you mentioned traditional media and publishers like Rolling Stone, for example. And I know I've seen, especially here in the States, regional and local newspapers seem like they're often like a pretty popular platform for parasite SEOs. As far as the best platforms go today, what are your favorites or what do you find yourself using most often as that platform?
Yeah, so I always do it based on SERP analysis, right? So it's always whatever fits the SERP. So some SERPs might need UGC sites. So I might need Reddit and Quora to rank because it needs a UGC site in the SERP. That's what Google has put the SERP intent on, right, it's UGC sites. It might be the case that it's article websites. So in that case, it might be LinkedIn Post, Medium, your large news organizations, that kind of thing. You can also have things like profiles. So if you're talking about company reviews and things like that, things like Crunchbase and PitchBook, those things can rank pretty well. And you just change the visit website to your affiliate link and stuff like that. There's all sorts of different, weird, wonderful ways you can kind of approach this. And like I said, because you're utilizing their authority, and because a lot of the time these pages are free to build, all it costs is your time, right? It doesn't actually take resources and these expensive campaigns, which are traditional SEO routes. It can literally just take a clever SEO, some time, and chat GPT, and they can create dozens of these pages in a day.
So say we wanted to target a keyword with a free platform, like you've described. We create the page and then what do we do from there? Do we need to build a whole bunch of backlinks to that profile or that page or do we just let it sit and do its own thing?
Again, it's slightly niche dependent. So some keywords are going to need backlinks, some are not going to need backlinks, that kind of thing. But generally speaking, what we do, because they index and rank immediately, it looks like within a day normally, we can see how high they rank. So let's say we put our LinkedIn post page live and it goes to number four for this fairly big keyword. We can then know that, okay, we're number four, maybe we'll go to number three in the next few days, but it's probably not gonna go to number two, number one. That page probably needs some backlinks. But if our page goes straight to number one, then we probably don't need some backlinks because we're already number one and so we don't need to maintain that over time. So I normally just do everything based on analysis and reactive. So depending on where it positions, that's how much I know to build on it to get it to where I need it to go.
Let's talk about a really tactical example if we can. And I'm sure you have many examples to point to, but is there a recent example where you've identified a keyword and then you've picked a platform and this strategy worked fairly quickly. Could you maybe run us through like a recent example that you've leveraged or used?
Yeah, 100%. So I did it recently with courses, right? So I don't wanna say the specific course to be fair, but there's routinely large creators across different spaces launching courses, right? And there's a lot of hype behind some of these courses. So what I did was there's a recent course launched by a very big influencer last year in 2023. And I knew that I probably couldn't get number one for best X course, right? So best whatever course. But I knew that if I Googled that course reviews, nobody had done a review yet. Nobody on an authority platform anyway. Yes, there was like maybe a YouTube review or someone on like a random blog for like a DR4 had a review, that kind of thing. But nobody had done a proper full length review. And this course was about to open. So I applied for the affiliate program, got accepted. I think it was, you know, you just approve the email and it's automatically accepted. Got my affiliate link, created an article using AI, didn't use it, did barely any editing. Then I put it live on LinkedIn, Medium, a few other press release websites and things like that using different variations of the article, just again, using AI to rewrite it. And it took me maybe three, four hours. We have 10 pages live, maybe $5 in AI costs and things for the open AI credits. And the average commission per course is $850 per sale that you get for each course. So all I was trying to do was rank number one for this course review, wait for people to click my link. As long as I get that cookie, I'm all good because that launch was 30 days. And as long as I get that cookie before the launch and during it, I'm going to get the sale. And we made a very decent ROI off of that launch.
Do you find yourself trying to take up multiple positions in the SERPs with Parasite SEO? Like for example, for this keyword, this course review, could you have ranked in, let's say, position number one, two, and three, if it was just a very easy keyword with like content on maybe three different platforms? Does that ever make sense?
Yeah, 100%. And actually, we've been using that exact method to try and control SGE's output. With Google SGE, it's essentially an AI summarization of the top 10 results of Google's search, right? So if you can control the majority of those results, so five or more, and you control the content on those results, you can control Google SGE's output. So you can actually control what Google itself is outputting with SGE by ranking multiple pages. As long as it's, again, it has to be the majority, so you need at least five pages ranked in the top 10, and then the content needs to be within the same dimension. Everything has to be correlated, or there's another word we're gonna see, but I've lost it at the moment.
Consensus?
Consensus! That's it, consensus.
So we can win the consensus in a SERP by taking up, let's say, five or more of the front page and that could actually have a really big influence on the output that we might get from SGE.
Yeah, to an extent, we've been able to 100% control it because we've been using it to control net worth output. So we've been getting people, like people in our SEO circles and stuff, ranking pages in Google. And then it's saying that, you know, people who are within our SEO circles are worth $10 billion and things like that.
That is hilarious. We might need to spin out a Parasite SEO strategy to make Zachary, our podcast producer with $10 billion. That'd be a lot of fun. And last question about It seems like in 2024, this is working very well. Is Parasite SEO a dying strategy or one that you continue to expect to work well into the future?
So I've been using it for about 12 years, right? And I actually released a training ebook on it in 2016, which is just called Parasite SEO for 2016, which kind of taught people how to do it then and the sites that were working then. What seems to happen with Parasite SEO is that it comes around in batches of certain websites working. So Google's algorithm seems to tweak around authority to an extent where specific types of websites or specific websites get a boost from Parasite SEO at any one point. So right now, it does seem that UGC websites are seeing it the most, right? So we're having the most boost with things like Quora and Reddit, and even LinkedIn to a point, because you can still have user-generated content on LinkedIn. Last year, it was probably news publications, like international news publications where you could get links on, or you could get articles. They were selling links, but you would be buying the articles on them. And you could rank, you know, things like Outlook India, Deccan Herald, Miami Times, what's it called, the Dallasnews.com. There's all sorts of different ones, right? It was, again, it was lots of local or regional news publications, but because they have so much authority, you know, DR 90s, DR 80s, Google would just allow them to rank for basically anything. And it got to a point where we were looking at like Texas car insurance or something like that. And Outlook India was number one, like Texas car insurance. It's just, that's when things start, you know, getting questionable for Google. But again, those sites do still work in certain niches, but because it comes around in these cycles or batches of what works and what types of sites work, you just have to be focusing on your correct positioning with Parasite SEO, right? So position the pages that you need to on the sites that are gonna work and in the search that they're gonna work on as well.
That's a really great point. And maybe it's like a recap for our listeners. It sounds like with Parasite SEO, we need to first identify the right platform in which we will serve our content. In certain cases, we might want to build backlinks to those pages depending on where those pages fall initially in the SERPs and also how timely that keyword or query might be. It sounds like this could largely be a free strategy if you're not paying for content on other platforms, although you could. Like you mentioned the Miami Times. I also remember SFGate, a pretty popular San Francisco newspaper. I feel like every article I saw on their website was Parasite SEO. And it sounds like as we look to the future, we just need to prioritize the placement of our content on the platforms that seem to be in vogue at that time. Did I accurately kind of summarize everything that we've talked about?
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think you got a good summarization there.
I wanna move on, but this has been so interesting so far. And I saw recently you tweeted about small blogs trying to outrank high DR competitors. And a lot of our listeners have small blogs and niche sites or might be startup founders building what is a very new blog and maybe a competitive SaaS category. And you tweeted, are you a small blog or website trying to rank versus high DR competitors? We should focus on low hanging fruit keywords, use niche specific backlinks, daily publish off a topical map, optimize internal links, and we should optimize our crawl budget. And so I wanna run through these five steps with you really quickly. So number one was focus on low-hanging fruit keywords. What do you mean by that?
So specifically with smaller blogs, smaller organizations, startups, affiliate sites, things like that, I talk about low-hanging fruit as in keywords that are generally transactional or high ROI. So it's not informational queries and things like that. It's an intent-based query, an action. They're going to fill out a form, they're going to buy a product, they're going to read a review, or even click an ad, something like that. Then once we have got that angle, we want to just look for keywords that have got competitors that have got weak pages ranking in the top three. Ideally, all we need to try and do is rank top three because of how it works with these variations because they're keyword variations, which normally means that if you're top three for that variation, you'll be number one for one of the variations of those keywords, right? And that's what we're trying to aim for. It's just repeatedly published content that we're number one for at least one keyword for. And then over time, we just go and update those pieces of content to create them to be better and ranked higher and higher over time. And as we build more content, they rank higher anyway because of topical authority, internal linking, all of those kind of things anyway. But the main aim is to define keywords that are transactional in nature, have weak competition, and then just to try and rank them and then create that over and over again until you have all those pieces supporting each other so that they all rank number one across the board.
You mentioned using niche-specific backlinks. What do you mean there?
Two things like that, right? Google in its algorithm has something called the link graph, which is a terminology which can mean multiple things. Generally what it means is that within its database and within its index, Google tracks links and it kind of vectors those links onto a scale of which links are relative to which topic and also vice versa. So all I mean by that is in general, we try and get links that our competitors have got already so that we're within the same link graph as our competitors and within that niche so that people trust us and that people think we are a top authority already. And it means that you want to try and make sure that you're getting topically one-to-one match on links. So that basically means that you go and try and find pages that are the exact same page. So that might mean that you are creating a guide on Paintball, right? How to play Paintball. You go find another page that's ranking in the search for how to play Paintball and you try and get them to link back to your article. That might mean paying them, it might mean updating their article, it might mean acquiring their site. There's all sorts of things that can go in that. In general, we're just going to be paying like a hundred bucks or something or even giving them an Amazon gift card or something along those lines to be linking from their exact page back to our exact page.
A hundred bucks, that seems like a really low cost per link acquisition. Is it really a hundred bucks or is it a lot more expensive than that often?
If you're doing your own outreach and they're just smaller bloggers, like DR20, DR30 bloggers, even 40s, 50s, and they've got an exact page and you just want that one page to link to you, often I'm getting it for $50 to $100 with custom manual outreach.
That's fantastic. And again, to our listeners, we don't recommend buying back links, but as you've heard on previous episodes, a number of our guests do do it and recommend it. So that is the disclosure from Nate. So the next one is daily publish off a topical map. What do you mean by this?
Yeah. So topical mapping, again, is researching your niche and seeing what Google thinks are the keywords that are topically relevant to your niche and then which keywords you are building to kind of build a topical authority around that niche. If your main keyword again is paintball, then you obviously have paintball masks, paintball guns, paintball trousers, paintball backpacks, all sorts of different things, right? And you're just trying to create a piece of content to match every single one of those topics so that you are in essence a topical authority. And the whole mapping of that is just that before you ever generate content is that you map out that whole topic first from Google's eyes. This is the thing that a lot of SEO agencies or whatever get wrong, is you wanna be mapping intents and the topics from what Google is showing in their own search, right? Because that's what Google thinks the intent is and that's what Google is gonna match and that's what you need to match to what Google is already showing. Because a lot of people think it's user intent. User intent is great for signals, user engagement signals, right? So you want to optimize your site for user engagement signals, but you don't want to be optimizing your keywords or your content for users because that's not what Google is. It's optimizing it for what it thinks the intent is for the user. It's not optimizing it for the user.
We're about halfway into this episode of the Optimize podcast, and I just want to bring you a special note from one of our sponsors, that being Positional. If you're anything like me, you probably love internal linking, but you probably don't do enough of it. And it probably takes a ton of time to find missing internal links throughout your old pieces of content and then internally link the new pieces you create. We'd love for you to check out our internal linking tool set at positional.com. And that was a word from our sponsors. Now back to this episode.
Yeah, in the last 10 years since I've been doing SEO, I would argue that Google has gotten much better at identifying intents and serving more specific pages to those intents. Like I remember when I first started in this industry, we used to have like 6,000 word mega guides and we would rank them for like every keyword under the sun. Would you agree with me that like in 2024, Google is maybe as good as it's ever been in identifying intents on a keyword basis?
Yeah, 100%. So I think Google's algorithms are a bit messed up right now because of AI content, right? So Google for a long, long, long time has put a lot of value on matching content intent and matching content signals and putting value on content. And I think that because of AI content, Google has had to tone down a lot of those signals. Just because obviously now anybody in the ground mile can go and throw up a blog post in literally five seconds. It doesn't take very long to put to the right, ChatGPT, can you please write me a nice article on this, my blog post, you know, and you can get a nice article and it can rank in some cases, right? Because of this, Google has panicked and also one thing I want to say as well is that Google itself has been very hypocritical with AI content because over a year ago, Google itself said that AI content was 100% banned and it was not allowed in Google's algorithms, right? It said that it was blackout, it was against search engine guidelines. That was literally in the guidelines, AI content is not allowed. Then, a few months later, about three months later after that, they said, actually, AI content that is human edited and human fact checked, that's allowed, right? We're okay with that. About three months after that, they're like, actually, content that's helpful, that's allowed, right? Okay, so from six months ago, this is against our guidelines, this is Black Cat, this is unethical, you should not be using it, right? So six months later, it's allowed, you're okay as long as it's helpful. Then three months after that, Google was like, actually, we're gonna use AI content and we're gonna have Google SGE. So from nine months ago, where we said it was unethical, it was Black Cat, it was banned, we're now gonna use the technology ourselves in our own search. So I think that Google's hypocrisy has kind of spoken to a lot of people in the SEO industry, and that's why I think the mentality has gone from AI content being blackout, and that it generally was, about two years ago, most people thought that AI auto-generate content was blackout, right? That was the consensus in SEO. To this point now, where basically everybody in the industry is using some variation of AI content, or AI tools within their content. So I think that that level of hypocrisy has kind of woken up a lot of the SEO world, as well as the fact that Google's been going through all these antitrust lawsuits and all, you know, a lot of this stuff is very dodgy with what they've been doing with like competitors and you know, silencing competitors and doing dodgy stuff with ad systems and faking clicks and all sorts of things. So I think that a lot of the SEO industry has started to realize that we probably shouldn't be listening to Google because Google has no benefit from us, right? All we're doing is contributing to the index, but that's not making them money. The ads are making them money. If anything, we're taking money away from them because we're taking clicks away from the ads. If we're showing a better result than the ads are gonna show, then they're gonna click on the organic result and not the ad. So I think that to some extent, we need to not fully endorse everything Google's been saying because they themselves have got it wrong, especially in the last year or so.
Well, I completely agree with you. Google has changed directions a few times, even statements from some of Google's team members who are pretty active on Twitter, have often zigzagged and haven't given us clear statements or direction here. And I do have a couple of very specific questions about AI-generated content. I know you've got a new tool set that can help in this way. And so we will definitely talk about that. I just want to quickly ask about internal linking, because I know this was the fourth point in your tweet. How important is internal linking and why?
Yeah, so especially for smaller websites versus big websites, right? It's massively important because most large websites are using a variation of automated internal linking, right? Because they've just got so many pages that they can't possibly actually manually do the internal linking, especially when it comes to optimized internal linking, where you're having somebody optimize internal linking. There's no way in hell anybody on this planet is gonna be able to go and optimize 10 million pages of internal links in any meaningful way. So they have to do automated internal linking. And with some publications, they just don't do any internal linking at all. Or they'll use the breadcrumbs and things like that as some sort of navigation element. So that means that if you can do specific page-correlated internal linking, which means that you're sending specific signals between pages to other specific pages, that means that you're going to have a significant jump up in comparison to these other pages. And there's a really good way you can simulate it. So there's something called a PageRank simulator, which you can essentially simulate your entire website's PageRank, and you can see what happens to the PageRank between linking from this page to this page. And we've done some tests where we've tried to optimize the internal linking between certain pages and things, using PageRank sculpting, which is the terminology. And it actually does work to some extent, even though that technology is from 20 years ago. So I do think that Google's algorithms, whilst they have gotten way, way, way more advanced, they still have an underlying basis that is still never gone away. It's still content, it's still links, and it's still your domain elements. And crawl budget optimization, what do you mean there? Yeah, so crawl budget optimization is removing pages that are going to unnecessarily impact your potential rankings in Google. So it's pages that are non-unique, it's pages that are duplicate, it's pages that are pagination pages. You know, you've got a category page and you've also got pages one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, all of these pages indexed for that category. You don't want all the additional pages indexed, you just want the main category page indexed, right? That's the same thing with smaller websites. Ideally what you want is for every single page on your site to have a really high quality score. What Google does is, and this is a very, very simplified methodology, is it applies a quality score to your web page, to each page on your site, between 0 to 100. And all we're trying to do is get the average for our website with crawl budget optimization. We're trying to get the average quality score of our pages to go up. And the easiest way you do that is by removing the pages that have got very low scores. So the duplicate pages, the tag pages, the author pages, the category pagination pages, all of that kind of stuff.
And a lot of our listeners are, as I mentioned, building new websites and small blogs, and many of them are in niche specific industries. Are niche sites dying?
Depends on the site, depends on the niche. As soon as SGE rolls out, there will be a massive drop off in certain niches, certain sites, certain things, right? I guarantee there's gonna be certain niches where 90% of the SERP is going to now be SGE. And that means that you have overnight lost 90% plus of your clicks. And we've already seen it looking at SGE where the zero click searches are going up when SGE does display. So I think that as soon as that rolls out, that's gonna be the, you know, the camel's back vibrating for most people with these sites. But I do think that there's still space for certain other things. The problem is that it's not just SGE. It's not just AI content. You've got compounding effects, right? So you have SGE, you have AI content, you have an economy that is, you know, not great for the middle class right now, not great for the lower class especially. You have a world that is going into like higher tax rates potentially. You have all of this additional stuff. You have Google changing, you have tons of things changing to an extent where it makes it less efficient to work on these sites than it ever has been. And as a result, you're not gonna be making the same money back that you were two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, right? And if you're starting now, it's gonna be a very, very big risk to try and forecast what you can make. So whenever I built sites in the past, we do everything initially based on some light maths. So we try and figure out how much commissions we can possibly make, what traffic we can possibly make, all of these kind of things. But when these new technologies are coming out, when these things are changing, that maths goes out the window because you don't have accurate statistics anymore. You don't have an accurate conversion rate. You don't have an accurate click-through rate. You don't have any of these things that allow you to actually forecast and accurately guess how much money you can potentially make. So then you don't know how much money you should be investing, how much time you should invest, all that kind of thing. So the entire project just kind of goes out the window from a investor standpoint. And that's why I've also seen a massive drop-off. And this is why I've been saying that niche sites are dead. It's because investors aren't buying them anymore. I work with Empire Flippers a lot. So I do their masterminds. So I go to Empire Flippers masterminds and I'll be their SEO guy. And I'll speak to the investors at the Empire Flippers masterminds. And all of them have been saying that they are not buying content websites anymore. They're not buying niche websites anymore, right? They're buying e-com sites, they're buying SaaS websites, they're buying YouTube channels, they're buying Amazon FBA businesses, but they're not buying content sites and they're not buying niche sites anymore.
Would you say that the valuations of niche sites have gone down quite significantly over the last year?
Yeah, 100%. I think the average sale price with mPuffer was two years ago was 36X on niche and content sites, and now it's below 30. So it's around 28X or something like that. I have spoken to a lot of people that have been getting 20X offers on their sites. So that is a massive drop off. You know, a few years ago, you could get 40, 42X on some of these sites, right?
I've talked to a number of niche site investors over the last few months, and it seems like the algorithm updates that happened towards the end of 2023 also have them on edge. It seems like a lot of niche sites in their portfolios got hit pretty negatively with like the helpful content update and the series of updates that happened in 2023. Would you also say that just the volatility in the SERPs lately is causing people to not think about niche sites the same way that they did a year or two ago?
Yeah. So I had a perfect example of this. There was a guy on Twitter who was talking about his niche site and he was... I tell people, if you're doing niche sites and affiliate sites and things like that, don't build in public on X, don't build in public on social media, because you don't have a moat. And there are people that are probably better at SEO and better at these sites and have more capital and more scale and a better team than you that can go into your niche very quickly. And what happened is this guy published his site on Twitter, published his case study, and in all fairness, it was a bit of an ego play, right? This whole case study, he didn't need to publish it. There was no end goal that he's gonna get more, you know, he's gonna get some more followers on Twitter, but that's not gonna help his business, which is his website, right? So he's posted it on Twitter, and then somebody else has seen it, and I do know who this other person was, it wasn't me, went into his niche, and just built loads of parasite pages, and took all of his keywords, and took all of his rankings, took all of his commissions, and now that site, which was making, I think, $40,000 a month, is now making about $3,000 a month, because all of his keywords are now just parasite SEO pages. And they just got taken over by a guy that saw his niches and said, hey, that's a really good niche with some really good keywords and offers. Let's see what I can do. And this other guy has spent far less money ranking parasite pages than this guy has spent years building this site. And he's effectively got to go and find another niche and new site now, right? So I always, there's kind of the two sides of it, right? Where I always say, don't build in public because the wrong person might see it and you're not that well defended. But also I do think that you have to play the game more balanced, right? You have to, this is the main thing I think actually, you have to diversify yourself more. If you are doing this, you have to diversify yourself. You can't just all rely on these niche sites and things anymore.
Yeah, I'd say that in general, the SERPs have gotten a lot more competitive in certain niches over the last five to 10 years. I started my career in the consumer finances lead gen space, so we competed in keywords like best personal loans and best pet insurance and gold IRAs and everything in between. When I first started in that industry, there were a lot of niche sites and personal finance blogs. And then those soon got replaced by more established players like my site, sites like NerdWallet, which was a lot larger than my site, sites like LendingTree and their portfolio of brands that they eventually acquired. But then what we saw in like 2017 to 2020 was all of a sudden you had sites like Forbes and US News and CNBC and all of these like traditional publishers now competing in what were like niche site keywords, at least at a time. And so I totally agree with you there that it sounds like for those categories where niche sites might still be relevant and an opportunity, it's just gotten a lot more competitive. And I do want to talk about AI generated content. AI generated content is a pretty controversial topic, at least with some of our guests. We tend to get very differing opinions here. Some of our guests love AI generated content. Most of our guests don't. And I know that you're a big proponent of AI generated content and you're now one of the investors in a company called Cuppa. Can you tell me a little bit about Cuppa and what made you want to get involved with this company right now?
Yeah. So in terms of AI in general, I've been following AI since about 2019 when AlphaGo came out and AlphaStar came out, which is Google's deep mind models, which kind of screwed with, you know, it had like the national or the world's best Go player. He hadn't lost a game of Go in 20 years, crying on national television because he lost his first ever game of Go to a buddy of ours. That's when I was like, maybe this is actually kind of scary. When like the guy who's spent his entire life playing this game gets beat by a computer that got trained in 14 days. That's when things start to be, okay, I need to look into this. So I started looking at AI ages and ages ago, and we were using Google's TensorFlow library, which is like a Python data set to set up your own, really, they're not LLMs, they're like SLMs, if anything. They're just initial kind of models and things that you can use for like entity correlation and stuff like that. So we were doing that stuff like four or five years ago. And so I always was a believer that AI was going to change the game. And I always kind of knew that things were gonna change, especially when I saw AlphaStar, because AlphaStar was essentially a model that was playing StarCraft, right? And they would get Korean gamers who are like the best gamers in the world at this game to play versus the AI. And the AI would create new strategies that no human had ever played before, ever. And it would do things that theoretically break the game's rules. So for example, when you're playing StarCraft, right, you have a base and it will send workers to get resources for you. And it says that there's a limit of 18 workers on the thing. Well, the AI was like, well, screw the limit. I'll just go to 28 workers. But no human had ever gone past that limit for some reason. You just intuitively like, okay, well, the limit is 18. Well, I'm going to go to 18 and that's kind of the limit, right? But the AI is actually, yes, it's inefficient for 19, 20, 21, but once you get to 28 or above, it's actually more efficient than just for the 18, but no human had ever thought of that, right? And that's where I think the kind of inevitability of AI is going to be really game-changing. I was looking for a long time for a company in the AI space that was also an SEO to invest in. And I didn't believe in a lot of the writers because they were charging for credits, right? So you would go and pay for like 100,000 word credits, but they were still using OpenAI's API. Everybody's using the same technology, right? It was all using OpenAI API, but you're just paying this tool for the privilege to use the same technology that you could use anyway. So I found Cuppa, which was this, again, like it's like Cuppa, have a cup of tea, kind of thing in the UK, because they were bring your own keys. So essentially, instead of charging you for the privilege of using a technology that you can go and sign up and use any way anyway, they would, essentially, you plug in your API key and you can use it unlimited. And I thought that was perfect for what I, is perfect to my vision of what should be the SEO and AI world. Also, the team was really good, the tool was really good, it had some good outputs, and I could see a lot of quick wins in terms of how to improve the tool and how to improve its marketing that I could contribute to. So I reached out to the owners, I was like, hey, how much do you think this tool is valued at? How much do you really want me in it? And how much if I can guarantee that I can 4X your MRR within the first three months, things like that, right? So I just invested in it, where we just got valued at over a million dollars and the project is less than a year old. We're really happy with how it's going. We're hoping to go to 10 million by the end of this year and then potentially exit it or something.
And Charles, I know that there are many different types of AI generated content and often the quality can be quite low. I talked with a lot of tech companies in particular, and I've seen these companies really struggle to get their AI generated content for one, indexed, and then two, to actually rank well. Can you tell us more about your process to create content with AI and the types of results that you're seeing with your AI generated content?
First of all, if you're just trying to use a base AI tool, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, something like that, it's not gonna work, right? You just copy and pasting that content from a single prompt, it's not gonna work. The way we do it at Cuppa is that, number one, we have prompt sequencing, so that different things are generated at different times, right? So we start with the project outline, then we build into a title, then we build into the intro, then we build into the opening body, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a prompt sequence. We also have something called layering, so that makes sure that it double checks the output and make sure that it's a best of output so that we actually have the highest quality output possible and then we have something called a vectorizing database. So that essentially means we take the most relevant keywords to the SERP and we try and make sure that we are using them in a random way basically. So that makes the article less AI generated and it makes it more likely to rank, and more inclusive of the entities and keywords that it needs to rank. So it's a very long process just to create the kind of thing in the first place, but that's how we did it to initially get companies to output such good content. And I think our average output is like 2,850 words, and the surface score is like 65 out of 100 or something like that. So it's pretty good for the output. And again, it costs you about 25 cents per article for 2,000 words. So it's very cheap. In terms of actually using it to rank consistently, there's kind of three ways you can go about it, right? So the first one is programmatic SEO, which you use AI content to fill in the gaps of pages that are already built via a programmatic way of building it. So you have best X in X, and you just go and build every variation of that page for every location that you have, and you use a programmatic, and you get the AI to fill in the content gaps, right? That's probably, in my opinion, the best use case of it right now, because you can scale that to the moon, right? So unlimited scaling, really, with the pages. The second way is if you do heavily edited AI content blog posts. So you go and create blog posts that are just, you know, three, four, 5,000 words long, but are very heavily edited and they're optimized to rank for large keywords, you know, large review keywords. The third way is just bulk, hit it, churn and burn, let's scale to the moon, let's see what works, what doesn't, but it doesn't matter because everything costs us 10 cents to generate, you know? And a lot of people do that, where all they do is you essentially export or extract every keyword for a topic and then you get AI to build a page for every keyword on that topic. And Google eventually ranks some of the pages, it doesn't rank other pages, but because you've kind of built 10,000, 100,000, a million pages, even if it ranks 5% of those pages, you're still generating hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.
And for the 90 to 95% of the pages that it maybe hasn't indexed or ranked, are you at all worried about the quality of those pages and if you might be hurting your crawl budget or the perceived quality of the entire site?
Yeah. With bulk-generated sites, normally it's new domains. So we don't normally do it on our own domain or anything. Again, this is the other thing. Most people are like, oh, you're going to risk people's sites and do that kind of thing. Even if it's a client, you can set up a new domain and you can just put their retargeting pixel on it and just go and start retargeting them with ads. And they've doubled their revenue overnight because they have all this new traffic and new pixel traffic and things, right? So there's loads of ways that you can go about doing this without ever hurting a client or without ever putting a client at risk, right? Without ever linking to a client, without ever doing anything to a client, right? While still generating that client a lot of business with very low cost activities. So I always say to people that are like, oh, well, you might be using that back there so to risk your client. You never have to touch that client's website in the first place to generate them more business and to generate them more revenue. And especially using this type of technique. And to an extent, if you're doing e-commerce SEO, you can take Parasite to a new level because you can use Reddit comments and you don't have to link out. So let's say you create two Reddit accounts, right? Or you buy two Reddit accounts, ideally you buy them because they came with age and karma and things. You go to a subreddit, let's say hair styling subreddit, you create a post story on a subreddit, which is the best hair styler for X in the world, right? You then get your second comment to go and comment underneath it, saying this company is the best and guess what that company is? Your company. And every time then somebody either on Reddit or on Google, Google's best hairstyle or whatever, and they click on that Reddit link, you're now coming up with a, where it looks like a user is recommending this company, but actually it's just Parasite SEO blackout marketing. And that has worked phenomenally well for a lot of clients that I have, I'm the person who worked with them, but I know that a lot of agencies have been doing that for a lot of e-commerce clients recently, especially for like TikTok trends, right? So, you know, if you ever see these products that are jumping up massively on TikTok, you just go and create a PowerStuff page and it immediately ranks number one, whatever that product is. It could be like, there's all sorts of weird ones about those like, you know, the really powerful water guns and things that you have on TikTok and stuff like that. Any product that is going trending on TikTok, you can just go and create a PowerShot page, stick an Amazon affiliate link in, and make a couple thousand dollars. And you just do that on repeat for every new trending topic, right?
Lightning question round:
Well, Charles, this has been such a fun episode. If it's okay with you, I'd love to ask you a few rapid fire questions to finish things off. Does that sound good?
For sure, sounds good.
So we recently had Cyrus Shepard on the Optimize podcast, and we chatted a little bit about his experience as a quality rater. Do you think in, let's say, five years from now, Google will still be using quality raters?
I think they canceled the contract for them already, right?
A good chunk. I think they have other providers, but at least a sizable portion of their quality rater team, I think, was cut down.
I actually thought Appen was the only company that was supplying quality raters.
You might be right. I could be totally wrong about this.
Yeah, I have a feeling it might be, and that they just cut everybody, which is kind of scary. So, to answer your question, in kind of two ways, I think that Google maybe doesn't need them anymore. Maybe they've got enough training data that it now has, you know, they can just let the AI and ML start learning and see how that goes. If it goes terribly, they're gonna go phone app and again, can you go and hire all those people again, please? We need more data, right? But I think that they're probably in that phase now, where they think they have enough data and that the AI tools and things are at this level, that they can probably utilize that going forward. That doesn't mean that they're gonna use it anytime soon, because they're still gonna do all the training and all the comparison and all that kind of stuff. That could take a year, it could take two years to actually be ready to implement. But it could mean that they already have the data ready. It could also mean that they don't believe in that anymore. And that they don't think that they need to call it directors. They don't think that they need user engagement signals. They don't think they need that. Because they think that AI can simulate it for them. And that AI can understand it for them. And that they can use that system going forward. So it's either of those two, in my opinion, right? And I would swing more to the first. Because I think it's probably more on Google's kind of pathway to just cut staff off and then be the most efficient kind of use of their time and resources. That's the thing with Google is that they seem to just put the time, resources and attention into whatever is going to make the biggest gain in their business, which is also what I think has kind of hurt them over the last few years. They've been too focused on growth and not focused on the future, right? And that's why I think that they've lost to Microsoft. And this is why Microsoft's worth two times as much as Google. And this is not quickfire, I'm sorry.
So Google is currently a $1.7 trillion company. And OpenAI is reportedly raising a new round of capital here at $100 billion valuation. If I were to give you, and I'm not going to do this, but if I were to give you 100 grand, and like you had to either put it in Google at 1.7 trillion or open AI at a hundred billion and you couldn't touch it for 10 years, which company would you invest in?
I'd probably put it into Nvidia.
Third option. Okay.
Because Nvidia is powering both of them, right?
You found the parasite.
But I genuinely think that open AI is winning the race, to be honest. But again, open AI is now, since the whole Sam Altman thing, where he was like, he was CEO, then he wasn't, now he's back, and he's not, you know, this kind of thing. I think that Microsoft more solidified their control of OpenAI, which means that OpenAI is more so a branch of Microsoft. Now, then it, because it, previously, when Sam Altman was just the guy at OpenAI, it was a completely independent organization, in my opinion. But because of that power grab, the only one that kind of won in the whole situation was Microsoft. And they got more control. They got more opportunity to invest more board seats, that kind of thing. So I think that realistically there, I think Microsoft will be the winners in the end game. And I'm a big believer in Satya. Satya, he's the GOAT of CEOs at the moment.
I agree. Where are you right now?
I'm in Koh Samui in Thailand.
Why?
Great question. So I was in Chiang Mai for five years, right, which is effectively like the SEO capital of the world, or so, there's about 400 or 500 SEO people that live in the city full time. And it may be more than that now, maybe like 600 people or something. But it has like weekly meetups, the biggest conference outside the West, you know, 2,500 people that come to like Chiang Mai, Thailand which is a pretty small city in the middle of nowhere for this conference, being from outside the West, like I said. I think it's only Brighton SEO that is bigger in the UK, which is 4,000. The only problem is when COVID happened, it's a landlocked city that's like in the middle of a valley. So I was not a massive fan of staying there during COVID. And as things happened, unfortunately COVID made some people a bit more political. And as results happened, it kind of splintered the group in the trauma scene a bit. So I was like, right, guys, I'm gonna go to the beach, right, and I'll see you guys in a bit. And so I just kind of moved down here last year, and now I live on an island. In my opinion, it's one of the most beautiful islands in the world, it's absolutely amazing. I get like two gigabytes a second internet, the food's amazing, I live around a load of French retirees who like cook the most amazing bakery things ever and I get fed all the time. So it's awesome. Yeah. And the tax is good. The weather's always good. The people are lovely. The food's lovely. There's like zero crime. There's so many reasons to live here. It's just amazing.
Yeah. Well, we'll be including a link back to Expedia in the show notes for all of our listeners to book their next ticket. Thanks, Expedia haha. Last question, I promise. Backlinks… it's 2024 now. In 2026, for example, are backlinks going to be more or less important than they are today?
God, that is a tricky one, isn't it? Well, it's, yeah, I don't know where the future of like AI technology is gonna go to that degree. So right now I think that links have become more important in the last 12 months because AI content has made content be devalued in Google, right? So that's why I think links have become more important because content has to be devalued. I don't know that if in two years, that like there's an SGE or there's a chat tool system that has completely replaced search in its entirety. And that could mean that backlinks are no longer even a factor. However, I do think that they still need some sort of prioritization system for the content that they're using as the source material. So even as an AI, you still need to know which pieces of material to reference, which pieces of material to extract from. And I think that's where links in terms of the internet will probably be the deciding factor because it's going to be who has the most trust, who is the most linked to, who is the most expertise, that kind of thing. And the easiest way to do that is via links.
Charles, this has been such a fun episode, and you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you for coming on the Optimize podcast. We're gonna make sure to include links back to you, your social profiles, your website, and everything else that we mentioned on this podcast, including Expedia. Is there anything else that you'd like to say to our listeners?
No, I just appreciate you having me on, and yeah, you can follow me on Twitter, at Charles underscore SEO. My website is https://www.charlesfloate.com/, or https://charlesfloatetraining.com/ if you want actual SEO information.
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