Join Nate Matherson as he sits down with Eli Schwartz for the sixty-fourth episode of the Optimize podcast. Eli is an SEO advisor who has collaborated with major companies like Coinbase, Tinder, and Quora, and is the author of the influential book Product-Led SEO.
Eli shares his expertise on the current state of SEO, offering a nuanced view of AI overviews and their potential long-term implications for search results and monetization strategies. He also discusses the seesaw nature of algorithm updates, explaining how unintended consequences often lead to significant shifts in search rankings. Listen to hear why Eli suggests that SEOs shift their focus from top-of-funnel keywords to more valuable mid-funnel and bottom-funnel opportunities, especially as Google's approach evolves.
In this week’s deep dive, Eli also explores the complex interplay between Google’s business model and its AI initiatives, shedding light on why Google might be deliberately pulling back on certain AI features. Rounding out the episode, Nate and Eli cover various additional topics, including the potential antitrust actions against Google and what they could mean for the future of search. Closing the episode is our popular lightning round of questions!
So Google had to update the algorithm because everyone had figured out how to beat it. So now they're looking for thin content again. So they update it based on known rules and it's not perfect. That's the way algorithm updates work is they continue to update it and they find out all the unintended consequences.
So now all these recoveries that are happening are because Google updated the algorithm and there are unintended consequences. So now Google has to be like, Oh, these are the signals where we should not have penalized a site. And it was actually, you know, helpful. And now what's going to happen is there's going to be unintended consequences.
So this is a seesaw. So if Google says, Oh, we overdid it on what we qualified as helpful. Now you're actually probably going to see even more force in the results.
Yeah. Google would say, and they did say they are not going to roll it back. It's rolling forward. And maybe this movement that appears to be a Slight rollback against very early is really just them moving the ball forward to then move the ball forward again.
Hi, and welcome to the optimized 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 Eli Schwartz for a second time.
Eli is an SEO advisor and has worked with companies like Coinbase, Tinder, and Quora. He's also the author of a wonderful book titled Product Led SEO. On today's episode, Eli and I are going to chat about AI overviews, algorithm updates, including the latest August core update, Google's apparent monopoly, and so much more. This episode is jam packed.
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Optimize podcast. It's brought to you by Positional. If you don't know by now, my name's Nate, and I'm one of the co-founders of Positional and we've built what I think is a pretty awesome Awesome tool set for content marketing and SEO teams. We've got tools for keyword research, internal linking, content optimization, and even a couple of tools for analytics.
We'd love for you to check it out at positional.com. Eli, thanks for coming on.
It's great to be here. You didn't tell me you can intro my saying smartest content marketers and SEOs, I would have said no.
Well, I put you in that camp for all of our listeners who are not already following Eli on LinkedIn. You should be, um, great content. And I've pulled a few of your recent posts for, for this conversation, but you know, it's been a while. It's been, I don't know, like 10 months since, uh, since we last had you on the pod and I feel like a lot's happened in SEO also with Google. And so there's a, there's a lot for us to talk about, but, but what have you been up to for the last year? What's the latest in your world?
So I think last time we talked, we were talking about AI overviews, then called SGE. I was very convinced that it was going to come out and ruin SEO. I, it didn't ruin SEO, but we have to dig into why my thoughts around it. I think I was right. I said, one of the things I said could happen was that Google was going to launch it and then do a head fake, which is good.
The reason Google had to launch this thing, which effectively destroys their entire business model is because of all this pressure from competition. So they have perplexity. The CEO perplexity is always on stage saying Google's dead and Google's, you know, not going to be around anymore. They have open AI, which is just punking Google by, you know, Doing things like, Oh, we're launching a search engine.
And before Google's big, uh, uh, announcements on launching AI, which they did at IO this year, open AI had an announcement that they're like, we're making an announcement, we're making an announcement. I think they did it the day before, like two days before Google's IO. And it wasn't a search engine, but they were just trying to punk Google.
So the reason Google had to do these things is because they need to show their most important stakeholders, which are investors and Wall Street, that they are on top of their, their, uh, AI game, AI is the most supposedly the most important thing right now. And Google needs to be on top of that game.
Otherwise. Google looks like a has been company. They become what people thought of as Microsoft. And I think Microsoft is one of the most powerful companies in tech, but they become like this has been company, their stock goes down, it's harder to recruit. No one wants to work there. They don't get investments, internal investments for interesting stuff.
So Google's like, no, we're, we're doing AI. And that's why I think they were forced to do something. I don't know that they had to from like a, a business standpoint, because there's no money they're going to make from it. They're not making, you know, significant money from this 20 a month on Gemini. And it destroys their business model in that they, you can't really show ads.
With AI overviews, it's either you put AI overviews at the top or you put ads at the top and having AI overviews means they have to make that choice. The old way of search, they just made the choice and had a whole page full of ads. So what Google did was they launched it to great fanfare. Everything's about AI and then they sort of rolled it back. I'm seeing far less AIO reviews than I used to. And any Googler I talk to about AI Overviews, the excuse they give is the glue on pizza thing, which you're familiar with, where, you know, right after AIO reviews came out, Yeah, there were a few examples like that. Yeah, it just came from Reddit that you could put glue on pizza.
But that seems like a really dumb excuse. And for a company that's been around for 25 years, they would know that AIO reviews As soon as this thing comes out, people are going to try to trip it up. Like chat GBT came out and everyone figured out how to make chat GBT as racist and as stupid as possible.
Of course, they're going to do that to Google and Google has far more risk in that because they're a big brand and they're public and they, you know, the department of justice goes after them. So I don't know that that's a really great excuse, but I do think that Google is looking for an excuse to not have AI overviews because it ruins the business.
So they are intentionally rolling it back. But I'd say for any SEOs that think that. Oh, this thing is done. It's a failed experiment. Well, Google actually did, but they launched it. So at any point in time, they can just bring it right back and say, here it is. And all of a sudden, search goes to 100 percent AI, which I don't think it will, but they could because they've launched it. And we've been warned. So therefore, I do think there's a new paradigm that we have to operate under.
I remember back to that episode from the end of last year, I think you were very fearful that SGE now AI overviews would, would be very problematic for SEO as a channel. But it sounds like from your view, they're, they're just not simply appearing as in as many SERPs as they were, let's say two months ago when they were first released. Do I have that right? Yeah. Okay.
I think so. During its beta period, it was on a lot of search. So when it first came out, it was like on 90 percent of search results. And then it's been rolled back. And I think where it's leveled off, and this is, you know, from the Googlers I talked to that are willing to share with me, they, it is essentially on non competitive searches that aren't on Dipping into monetization were things that are also likely not going to be controversial.
So around a lot, I haven't seen it in a while around health queries. I know some people have maybe they're in the beta, but I think that's what Google is trying to avoid. They're trying to avoid more like embarrassing, controversial screenshots, and there's no reason for them to have that. Because as far as the world is concerned, Google does AI.
You know, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember originally hearing that, like, and I could be wrong here that like SGE at the time, wasn't going to roll out to like your money, your life queries, like health and, and finance. But then when. AI overviews rolled out. Google expressively said, yes, we're going to show these AI overviews for health and finance queries.
But, you know, they did go on to say like for a health query, we're going to show like a disclosure, which they do do at like the bottom of the expansion of an AI overview. But, uh, maybe a more interesting point here. You think that like for certain queries, Google might've noticed a disruption to monetization and as a result, that might be another reason too, they've pulled back on them.
And I don't think that they've noticed it or reported on it at all. I think it's something that it's an obvious side effect of having AI overviews, which is if you have an ad, if you have an AI overview, then it's hard to place an ad on top of it.
And I just want to correct myself live while we're here. I did do a search incognito for headache and I am seeing an AI overview. So incognito, not logged in. Um, not opted into the lab or no history here and brand new incognito, and they are showing an AI overview for headache. So I think this is one of those things where ultimately what AI overviews can be is take unstructured data.
And this is where I think there's a huge threat to SEO. They can take unstructured data. and make it structured. So what structured data is, is knowledge graphs. So knowledge graph is you do a search, um, and on the result for headache, you have a, you have knowledge graph, which is, they tell you what it is.
It's, you know, structured. And they're, it's standardized. So it's very easy to give response. Like another piece of structured data is like, I don't know, what's the capital of, of the United States structured data, right. That comes from a dataset. So they're taking unstructured data and basically making it structured by rewriting with an LLM, what this response is, and I think that's a huge threat.
So when things where they say, well, this is. Not controversial enough. It's not monetized and we can just rewrite content and explain what a headache is. So again, the writing from scratch, they're not scraping any of the ranking results. They're summarizing the ranking results and then they're putting it in there.
So on this exact query, we have Cleveland clinic. And then underneath that is Harvard, Mayo clinic, web MD. Um, Well, actually let's just summarize here. So like WebMD and then right underneath that is the medical is medical news today Those are all for profit companies. So Cleveland clinic is not for profit.
It's a hospital harvard is not for profit It's also hospital myoclinic is not for profits hospital, but these private companies WebMD And medical news today, I think medical news today, I could be wrong. I think it's a Red Ventures company. So this is a huge threat to their own business models. And this is where, what I was afraid of when we, when SGE was announced is that so all these sites in the past, they would take the standard information headaches have been around since, I don't know, since cavemen, I'm sure.
And they've written about headaches and how to treat headaches and they've monetized it. Certainly WebMD has monetized it with ads. Whereas Cleveland Clinic monetizes it with people in Cleveland that want to go to Cleveland Clinic, but they've taken a monetized query, and now Google gives away the answer for free.
So that is a huge threat to SEO. So I think we mixed up two things here, but there's there's a threat to Google's business model, which is monetization, which You know, I don't think headache is a monetized query. Now I can't test it cause I'm in AI overviews, but I don't think it's a monetized query. So it's an easy one.
And it's also not controversial enough that they could just give an AI overview. So I think what Google initially did was they launched in everything too controversial, controversial. Potentially could have hurt monetization, but it was just an experiment. They rolled it back to move away from controversial.
Certainly they didn't need to hurt their monetization because again, they launched it and now I, it could be rolling back again, but only on things that I think are low risk for them.
Okay. And by the way, I think, you know, AI overviews appearing in. Incognito mode. Uh, I think that just happened. I think that was rolled out this week.
As a side, very specific question. Do you think rank tracking gets like a lot better now for AI overview positioning, given that like all of the rank tracking tools up to this point, they crawl in incognito accounts. And so they've missed the AI overviews from like SERP data. Do you think rank tracking all of a sudden gets a lot better when it comes to AI overviews?
It's a, I think there's a deeper philosophical question here, which is, does it matter? So if it doesn't matter, I know I'm asking, does it matter? I'll answer it. It doesn't matter. Why doesn't it matter? So if you are, and I'm going back to what I'm looking at here in incognito. So in the AI overview, you have summary data explaining what a headache is, and then there's a link out to WebMD.
The National Institute of Neurological. I don't know. I want to click this. I don't know what it is in the world health organization. And then Johns Hopkins. So four links in the IR overview. So now if you're Google and you're trying to answer a question, I think, again, I don't have any data for this and no one has leaked this information to me, but I think that the reason Google links out to any sites within AI reviews is for two purposes.
One, they don't want to upset. All the publishers that provided all this free information, because if they, if they scrape sites and they don't link out at all, there was all this uproar when it, when SGE back then came out and they weren't linking. I was like, you stole the information, you're plagiarizing, you're doing all this and you're upsetting the business model.
So now they're saying, oh, well, we're linking out. But the truth is, if they're linking out. Then that's just search results again. So the idea of an LLM response is just to give you the answer. If you still need to click onto a result, then the LLM is not good enough. It's just a, it's just a summary. It's a featured snippet, essentially.
And then the second thing is I think the reason Google has links in there is for liability purposes. So Google tells you in an AI overview response, Oh, a headache is just, you know, a thing you need to take Tylenol for when actually. They should have told you that it was a brain tumor and you need to seek help immediately.
There may be some liability there. So now they just say, well, WebMD told us if you'd like to sue anybody, just sue WebMD.
Yeah. Isn't there like that old school, like 2000 law. I'm totally butchering that the actual name of this law and the date that it was published, but you probably know what I'm talking about.
Google, uh, is not an editorial functioning organization and, and maybe to your point about providing these source links, it strengthens their argument that like they are not the editorial.
I think so. I haven't seen anything specific on this and I think it's section two 30 if I'm not wrong, but you've got it.
That's it. So I, so I think what that does is it allows like social media sites that are linked to terrorists to say, Hey, we're not the terrorists, but the social media sites are responsible for. To do something about it. So if it's reported, so I think this is what Google saying is like, well, we don't know, like we're just giving, it's a featured snippet.
WebMD has told you that it's just a headache. It's not a brain tumor that's on them. But I think if Google does have these responses and they don't link out, it does get into that gray area where like, well, you're the publisher and how are you not the publisher? So I think the links and we went totally on a tangent here, but the question was around rank tracking.
So if we're tracking ranks and now you're showing up. In these AI overviews, it doesn't matter. I think it doesn't matter because you're not supposed to be getting traffic from it. Google's just trying to give away the answer for free that they essentially stole from you. So. The rank tracking is useless.
So being able to show your boss or your client, look, we showed up in AI overview is almost bad because now you're showing why your SEO will be declining because you've given away the answer free.
No, you've taken it full circle. Yeah. So just to play it back to you. So rank tracking. Might not actually matter because in a world where like these LLM responses or outputs get so good that a user won't need to click to a source, ultimately showing up in an AI overview is actually probably a bad thing in some sense.
I guess that's, that's the argument that you're making. Do I have it right?
Yes. It means that Google is Is just using your ranking as cover for giving away your content. So for example, like I came up with this a long time ago when I was still at serving monkey, we used to track, I don't, do they still call it position zero, like feature snippets?
That's okay. I call it that. Okay. So I, cause I haven't tracked in a while cause I don't care for them. So I was against us ever show up, showing up as a position zero. Cause that essentially meant that Google was giving away our information for free. So I looked at that as a failure. If we showed up in position zero and had a featured snippet.
So let's say at SurveyMonkey, we wanted to give the definition of net promoter score. So we gave away net promoter score and we were position zero. We actually got less traffic. So I looked at it as a failure because I want to bring in more traffic. I want to say, here's what net promoter score is. Now do this thing with SurveyMonkey and get your net promoter score.
I want to be ranked position one and get someone to click in. So our entire funnel starts working. If I'm at position zero, Google says, here's what net promoter score is. And now you can go to Google forums and do it yourself or go to a competitor. So I, I think that this is essentially position zero.
We're at the same place. You've given away. Now, it's not just a featured snippet, which is, you know, a couple lines of text. This is a paragraph you've given. You've provided Google with a paragraph of information that will now help users not click on results.
Yeah. And this study is like a few years old.
I've mentioned it in a recent blog post that I wrote, so it is top of mind, but it was Ahrefs. They did a study and they found that, like, For, um, a given keyword, if you're already ranking in the first spot and you were to switch to a featured snippet, you'd actually lose traffic. I think they found by about like 60 percent going from the first spot to that featured snippet, but then they found that if you were in like the eighth spot and all of the sudden you got the featured snippet, it would be like a net positive.
And I know this study is like a few years old. We'll link to it in the show notes, but maybe it's the same with, with AI overviews. Like if you had been in the ninth spot, maybe getting included as a source is actually a net positive. Whereas if you were in the first spot, maybe it's a net negative. I'm not sure.
I haven't seen that. I don't have like a ton of data on this. Maybe your tool can track this, but I think that for the most part, AI reviews is a summary of the top ranking results.
We did an analysis on this. So we looked at, and it's a very limited sample, but we looked at about 500 AI overviews and we found that like the first search result was the most likely to be pulled in.
That makes a lot of sense because again, if, if, if I'm right, That Google's just using this as cover. So the algorithms have already just determined what should be the first result, which means it provides the best information. So they scrape that content, they learn from it, they source it because they got to source somebody.
So might as well source the first result while you can make it complex and you're not clicking anyways.
I want to ask you a couple questions. Google, when they released AI overviews, they said that for certain queries, AI overviews are actually going to lead to more traffic going back to publishers. Do you think they were just like lying? Like they know that that's not true.
I think it's a, a complex question. So I think Google probably does. Misspeak, maybe they don't run calm liars. Maybe they say things and they, they deflect and they, they give the impression of something else. But I think Google meant here is that you will get more traffic as the funnel changes.
So Google does care. I think they do care about the journey of internet users. And that's why they do certain things. Like Chrome was a free product to help out the internet users and then it helped create their monopoly. So Google does care about these kinds of things. So one of the things that I said early on when SGE and then AI Overviews came out is that SEO needs to focus on a change in the funnel in a different place in the funnel.
So rather than being top of funnel, you need to be mid funnel. So going to our headache example, because we just looked at that. So if you were WebMD and you were ranking on the word headache for WebMD, maybe it works because it's an ad monetized model, but That's very top of funnel. That's like a single keyword headache, but if you move down the funnel, it becomes like headache treatment, migraine treatment, because now you've been told a headache that really hurts you as a migraine, right?
Or, um, long lasting headache treatment. And, you know, hopefully this doesn't apply to anybody that ever searches this, but like brain tumor treatment, like that's where you're moving down the funnel. And then the bottom of the funnel is like. What's a doctor near me that I need to call. So I think SEO focused too long on top of funnel on keywords that don't necessarily convert and they like to report on, Hey, I'm ranking number one or I'm ranking position zero for this.
Isn't this great. I've done a great SEO job, but I think ultimately where SEO needs to be focusing is on, I've done a great job on this organic channel. Here's how much revenue I generated from this organic channel. And I think more revenue is always generated from the middle and the bottom of the funnel, of course, because that's, that's the bottom of the funnel.
And that's where SEO should focus the efforts. So what I think Google meant is the journey changes. So we'll give away more information. We'll tell you what the best beaches are in Florida. You as an affiliate are not going to get that traffic anymore just because you figured out a rank on best beaches in Florida.
But if you are actually a hotel in Florida, you will get more traffic from search.
Yeah, you know, we say on this podcast, traffic doesn't equal dollars. I spent the first seven years of my career in affiliate marketing, and we used a metric called value per session to like back out like what traffic was worth to any one given page.
So it sounds like we might get less traffic, but like maybe the traffic that we do get is more valuable or equally valuable. And so maybe like the overall websites value per session for, for companies that then focus more on the bottom or middle of the funnel have a higher value per session, but a lower amount of traffic.
Does that make sense? All right.
Yes. So again, if you're Google, Google hates those companies that are ranking on the top of the funnel. They're just kind of redirecting users. So they actually want to kick them out and we'll get, I'm sure you have questions around algo updates.
Do they actually?
Yes. Oh, absolutely.
So if you're, if you're Google and you care about user experience, you want people to get to the right place as fast as possible. And that's why they don't like affiliates because affiliates are just in the middle for no reason. I think there's a lot of value in the right affiliates, but in general affiliates, not so much right.
Like affiliates that are monetizing. I can't tell you how many websites I've talked to, like, Hey, we have this thing for like baby gear. And what we do is like, we read all this content on baby gear. And then we link out to Amazon. So that's a bad affiliate. So Google does not like that. There's that's the middle.
Now, if you are a mortgage broker, a mortgage broker is essentially an affiliate. So if you are a great site for helping people understand what sort of mortgage you get, and then you're like, Oh, you belong with Citibank, you belong with Quicken, you belong with Bank of America. That's different. You're providing a value upfront.
So Google does not like those sites in the middle and they want to kick them out as much as possible. So if you are a site. That just wants to summarize. And again, this is where algo updates are going. Viewer site that just writes AI content about the best beaches in Florida. And then you're just like linking out to all the hotels that pay you the most for per click.
Bad affiliate site. They don't like that. So they want to get rid of it. But if you are a travel agent, again, travel agent is an affiliate. They want you to get more traffic because they're providing a service for a user that like clicks off of the internet to do that.
So Google's doing this algorithmically, right? This filtering.
Yes. Basically, they are looking for signals of adding value. And in 2023, that the word that they started using. For adding value is helpful.
So I'm going to get the listeners pretty amped up because like a lot of the listeners of this podcast, like hate Forbes, it feels to me like Google's kind of picked certain publishers to like win in these affiliate keyword categories, like Forbes or us news is of the world.
Um, although I think like the Serps have changed a lot, but anyways, my point being, do you think Google picks like certain affiliates that get like a gold star that will just always rank well for certain keywords?
Okay. I love this question. So you need to put yourself in an engineer's shoes when you think about how Google does this sort of this quote-unquote picking.
So if you're Google and you're an engineer and you want to create an algorithm that weighs better sites, As bigger brands for queries, you're going to say, Oh, well, this is Forbes. They probably know what they're talking about. Now it's a huge problem. In general, they wouldn't know what they're talking about.
Again, let's, let's go back 10 years when Forbes was like a magazine. And then they had a website, which had their magazine articles. You would assume that it's a brand and they would know what they're talking about. So now. That's why they have this better ranking. And I competed with us news years ago, and I watched them do this.
I was in the automotive space and then us news decided to make an automotive site. They screwed us. So I very aware of this, but now the challenge here is. That Google says, Oh, this is us news. They've been around for 50 years. This is Forbes. They've been around 50 years. This is a media site. So when they publish content, we have to trust that as a media site.
Now they abuse it. So now from an algorithm standpoint, from an engineering standpoint, how are they supposed to say, Oh, this piece of Forbes content was written by a presidential candidate who was writing an editorial. And this piece of Forbes content is written by someone who paid Forbes a thousand dollars to be able to write an article on Forbes and then sell links.
Algorithmically, that's an almost impossible task. It's a human task. Again, this is where AI comes in machine learning. They can say this writer, we've seen this writer all over, and these are the patterns of this bad content. So we're going to zero in on just this Forbes piece. And nail it. But at a grand scale, it's very, very hard to do because now they're looking at each piece of content and saying, Forbes, Oh, you're talking about finance.
You're not your business magazine. We're going to trust you. Oh, Forbes, you're talking about finance and you're promoting all these crypto sites. We don't know again, from an algorithm standpoint, those things are very, very challenging. And then earlier this year, Google had their algo update where they call it.
I forget the name they used reputation abuse. So the word we use is parasitic SEO. So parasitic SEO is exactly what Forbes is doing exactly what. The CNN used to do and CNN still does this. So when you had a subdomain that was coupons. cnn. com or coupons. wsj. com, very easy for Google to say, Oh, this is your reputation abuse. I can nail this.
But now when you're CNN and you go to cnn. com right now, you'll see these are the best pillow or something like this. Every day they have one. These are the best pillows for travel as chosen by our experts. And then it's like all links to Amazon. Useless content. But how is Google supposed to come in and say all this other content about newsworthy stuff that CNN spent millions of dollars to get a scoop on is good.
And this, because it links to Amazon four times, it's bad, very algorithmically challenging, unless they have a subdomain. And here's the biggest issue. Which everyone forgets, which is Google's primary stakeholder, again, is Wall Street and the world, right? Their ability to attract employees, their ability to do good work, and ability to have a brand and not be sued out of existence by the EU.
So, if Google were to go and say, You know what? We're done. We're so done with Forbes. They're abusing everything they're doing. We're just going to nail Forbes as a site. Well, Forbes is still a media site and Forbes still has the ability to create a lot of problems for Google. So now they have a press conference and say, see, Google's an absolute monopoly.
Here was our traffic before, and they just destroyed us. And that creates a bigger problem for Google. So Google has to do this little dance where they need to figure out how to nail the very specific articles on Forbes without nailing it enough. That Forbes is like, Oh, you got the good stuff. So Forbes can say, Oh, we're busted.
You got this other stuff. We knew that we were parasitic SEO. We didn't, we shouldn't have been like a ranking site for cars and you got us. But if they get them on their finance stuff, which is their bread and butter, and they have real reporters or in salary doing it. Yeah.
It is, uh, it's an important line that you've shown that like parasitic SEO, you've got the subdomain where it's obvious it's coupons.cnn.com. But then if it's not clearly on a subdomain, it's not clearly a coupon site and this content's getting mixed in with what is otherwise like very expensive editorial. It's very hard for Google's algorithms. To understand that I, you know, some examples are maybe more obviously bad. Like, you know, I think it was like Rolling Stone at one point was on the first page for like best refrigerators.
I know that a guest and I had talked about that live on this podcast. So maybe in certain cases, like it's clear, okay, Rolling Stone is probably not a place to like, get information about where to buy a refrigerator. But given that first Forbes is maybe a lot broader. U S news is very broad. Then it's probably even harder for Google to say like, clearly, okay, this is, this is spam, right?
You know, when the U S news is credit, it's not spam. So when U S news goes into vertical and they say, we're going to rank refrigerators, they actually do a pretty good job of making it a good product. I would say Forbes does not. So Forbes, if you look in the software review space. They're just summarizing and they're using AI.
You know, I want to agree with you. I don't mean to pick on us news. I do want to pick on them because I do mean to pick on Forbes. Like I've picked on Forbes for 50 episodes. Like somebody from Forbes, please come on this podcast. But yes, no us news. I agree. Like I've seen a lot of their content lately.
Like I read a piece that they put out about like the best mattresses and. Initially, I was like, you know what, this is probably spam, but then they actually went through the process of like physically getting on mattresses and sleeping on them. And so then I was like, you know what? Okay. Like this piece looks like they put in, put in a decent amount of work. Yeah. I agree with you.
Those sites also get hit. So I haven't looked in a while. I was, I was working with a company in an affiliate space that did a good job. So one of the sites I had to look at was Wirecutter, which is a New York Times property. And Wirecutter is essentially an affiliate site. What they do is they write about content and then they link to the products that they recommend.
And Wirecutter has been caught up with a lot of, I wouldn't call it helpful content, but things that Google has done to try to get rid of affiliates. So this is the dance that Google has to really cut through is like, how do they figure out to Promote Wirecutter without it being the New York Times, like forget the whole New York Times piece.
They do a really good job of summarizing content and making recommendations. So they deserve something, whereas maybe another affiliate site does not. And I'd say everyone that complains about like Google's rankings and the ability for sites to abuse it. Maybe they haven't taken any sort of like beginner to like programming class where they understand this whole concept of if else.
The first time I took a programming class, I was like, Oh, wait, that's, that's sort of how everything works. It's always an if else, like if the car's on, it will drive. If it's not on, it doesn't drive. And that, that is exact like times a billion is the way the Google algorithm works. It's not like, Oh, this is Forbes.
If it's Forbes, it ranks number one. It's sort of like all these questions, which are machine learning questions. And that's your, the biggest issue that Google has is it's not a human algorithm. It's an algorithm that is like 25 years of All this sort of learning and when you do a query like best refrigerator and there's Forbes, so even if like Sundar does this query and he says, Oh, what is Forbes doing at number one for best refrigerator?
He can't just go and like hit delete. They have to write an algorithm which runs it, and then there's unintended consequences. So by doing that, they probably killed the New York Times. So, that's where it gets challenging. And that's where Google, like, everything always blows up in Google's face. They roll an algo update.
You rolled out this algo update to kill Forbes, and you killed Forbes. The New York times.
You know, if I was the CEO of Google, I would have a delete button, not for a whole domain, just for a given URL where like, if I didn't like one, I could just remove it really quickly from my Chrome browser.
Um, uh, he probably does.
I, you know, I was, uh, at an SMX, this is the, I don't know, probably a decade ago and Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Bing was the keynote speaker. And one of the things he said, he was like being interviewed by Danny Sullivan and he was saying how he was cooking. He was talking about how amazing Bing was. He's like, Oh, it was like this past Sunday.
I was like cooking this macaroni dish and I went on Bing and I searched and I didn't find the results I wanted. So I emailed the engineers. And you know what? Now we have it. And I was like, that's the way Bing works. Like the CEO doesn't like the way recipes show up. And they just sort of fix it on a Sunday afternoon.
So, yes. I, I don't think, maybe, maybe Sundar has a single delete button. But there's like all these unintended consequences. Let's say Sundar, you know, deletes a site that he doesn't politically like. And then, Again, they get there's all this backlash.
To your point, that delete button would just create like so much liability.
It's so much easier not to have the delete button.
But that's the algorithm in general. So everyone can say we hate Forbes and you can't do anything about it because there's no delete button.
Well, speaking of the algorithm, like older and speaking of complaining, because you mentioned complaining, there's been a lot of SEO complaining for the last, like, I've had to mute a lot of people on Twitter.
I just can't do the complaining anymore, but it seems it's very early. It seems like with this algorithm update, this core update here in August, maybe some of the websites that had been, you know, very negatively impacted from the last couple core algorithm updates seem to be rebounding a little bit in a positive.
And also with Google's own statements, both like on, you know, Josmah, John Muller's comments of like, you know, maybe we've gone too far. I don't think he said that exactly, but that's kind of what he was getting out with some of his responses. And I think this also recent press release from Google with the update kind of hints that like they're trying to, you know, surface unique content from small publishers.
Do you think Google is like rolling back this helpful content system in some sort of a way?
No, not at all. This is exactly what we were just talking about, which is. Helpful content. It's a machine learning algorithm to determine what content is helpful or not. So I've written about this on my sub stack and I want you to subscribe to my sub stack productletseo.com
Where I think that helpful content is basically the 2023 because it came out last year, 2023 version of the Panda algorithm update, which taught me how to behave as an SEO. And I think that was 2011. So in 2011, this was AI content didn't exist at the time we called it spun content. I had, I had this WordPress plugin.
I think it's called caffeinated content, right? Take these RSS feeds and then it's spin it. It would just take synonyms and make brand new content. Basically what an LLM was in 2011. So at the time you had demand media. Which I don't know if they still exist, but demand media had these really bad websites where they would just monetizing Google traffic.
So you would Google like how to boil water, how to cook an egg and then demand media ranked on it. And Google created this and there were lots of sites that did it. So Google created the panda algorithm to try to identify thin content. And it was a very simplistic algorithm. And I think, you know, once the patent came out, it was sort of like a quality score kind of thing that like an AdWords quality score.
Did bounce rates and like, how did it match to like the ranking keyword and all that? And then they panda scored an entire website. So if your website was too thin, the whole website got nuked. So 2011, now we're in 20. Now we fast forward to 2023. They had to update the algorithm because everyone figured out abuse it again and use AI content and get her like have bad content again.
So they create these helpful content updates. And Google's always listening to me. Stop at Google. So, so Google had to update the algorithm and because everyone had figured out how to beat it. So now they're looking for thin content again. So they update it based on known rules. And it's not perfect. That's the way algorithm updates work is they continue to update it and they find out all the unintended consequences. So now all these recoveries that are happening are because Google updated the algorithm and they're unintended consequences. So now Google has to be like, Oh, these are the signals where we should not have penalized a site. And it was actually helpful. And now what's going to happen is there's going to be unintended consequences.
So this is a seesaw. So all these sites that are now saying, Hey, look, we recovered 500 percent of our traffic. In a couple days from now, you're going to get more screenshots of like, Oh, I did a search for headache. And this site from, you know, Bangladesh is ranking. So that's the seesaw. So if Google says, Oh, we overdid it on what we qualified as helpful.
Now you're actually probably going to see even more force. And the results.
Yeah, Google would say, and they did say they are not going to roll it back. It's just rolling forward. And maybe this movement that appears to be a slight rollback against very early is really just them moving the ball forward to then move the ball forward again.
And it's tough for, uh, for website owners, but my understanding is that like the helpful content system tries to calculate some sort of score for each page on your site and it rolls up to be what is like a site level score. And so in theory, like if you've got 40 great pages on your website, but you've got 400, very low quality, crappy thin pages that could tilt the score against you.
And all of a sudden your entire website is considered unhelpful. Um, if you have been like impacted by the helpful content system, like, is there a way in your view to like rebound or Maybe going back to like the, the algorithm updates of the past. Have there been ways to rebound? Can we take any learnings from Panda now to the helpful content system?
Yes, absolutely. So I think that what's important is just underscore what you said, which is Google does not roll back algorithms. They roll forward unless they screwed up. And it's rare that Google actually screw up on an algorithm update because the way algorithm updates work is they first release them internally.
So they, the Googlers are using the algorithm and then they'll, they'll complain and file bug reports if it did the wrong thing. Then they release it to 1%. Then I think it's 10 percent and then it's rolling and then like they might release it like in the U. S. to logged in. And then when they launch it globally is when they make an announcement.
So very likely, if there's an issue with the algorithm update, it won't launch because they've already caught those issues. So they're rolling forward because once they release it to the world, that's when they do things like find glue on pizza. So that's, that's what happened. Like those things weren't caught.
So they roll forward and, and I don't think AI overusers roll back at all. It's just like they, they're adjusting, they're adjusting in real time. And that's helpful content. And I think it's important to really restate what you said about like this score. So I think in general, Google has a guide on what helpful content is.
And I think most websites are not honest with themselves when they go through this guide and ask the questions like, is this content actually helpful? Like if you've written AI content, you never even prove it. Is it helpful? No, but just be honest about that. And then the second thing is the waiting of a site.
So I think of a site has been in existence for really long time and has good history. They have a lot more leeway to have unhelpful content. But if you make this brand new site and your intent is to be unhelpful at a certain point, the entire site will likely get caught up in this. And that's what I've seen with the very few sites that I've seen, get hit personally seen by that, that get hit by the helpful content update.
So can you get out of it? I think the first thing you have to do is really be open and honest with yourself as like, are you providing value or are you just trying to get some SEO traffic?
Yeah. And people always like complain that Google doesn't provide good recommendations, but this document that you're referring to, their documentation on what is helpful content is actually really fantastic.
Like it has some great tests that we can use. Like, for example, like, is this a piece of content that you would expect to be seen or referenced by a printed magazine? Yeah. That's a pretty good test. Like does this content.
Eli Schwartz: But most people lie to themselves about that. They're like, yes, of course. I got a link from Forbes.
Like, no, you paid for that link from Forbes.
Does this content draw on other data sources and does it avoid simply copying or rewriting The SERP today, basically it's saying, does, does this content provide substantial value beyond what like an existing SERP is saying? And that that's hard to do because you actually have to like do the work to, to create a piece of content that adds value to the SERP.
So I would encourage all of our listeners to read that, that helpful content documentation. If you haven't already, we'll include a link in the show notes. But, uh, you know, I want to transition a little bit. We've, we've talked a little bit about Google being a monopoly. On this podcast so far, and this is still like breaking news in some sense.
I think earlier this week, it was announced that there are thoughts that the justice department might try to break up Google. Like, I personally think that's probably a lower outcome than Google, like possibly no longer being able to enter into those like tact partnerships. I think they're called with publishers like platforms like apple. I don't want to talk for you. What do you think about like the news that google is monopoly?
Yeah, so I want to complain about the the twitterati who talk about all these google things I think that not enough people do the work in actually trying to understand Any aspect to what google is doing?
So I actually read all 286 pages of the decision On the monopoly. And I read not all the API leak, but I tried to go through it as much as possible. I didn't rely on the summaries and I didn't rely on even chat to read that the Google, the decision from the justice department or from the judge on against the justice department.
So I think that if you read these things, it's one of like that document is one of the best things I ever read on how Google works and how SEO works. And that judge or the clerk who wrote that decision for that judge. Understands SEO better than 95 percent of most SEO people who get paid to do SEO.
Like the way user behavior is incorporated into the search algorithms. So based on that, uh, there was a lot of complaints, I'm sure you saw the tweet or, yeah, I guess it was a tweet where Google said, thank you for this decision and recognizing that we're the greatest search engine in the world. I didn't see that one.
If you read the document, that's precisely what the judge said. The judge said that the fact that Google is the best search engine in the world does not say it's not a monopoly. There is actually no alternative to Google. And the court admitted that so I'm sure you saw this quote from Apple where Bing tried to first get rid of Google from Apple and they gave different sweetheart deals until they basically offered to give Bing for free to, to Apple.
And Apple said under no, and this is in the document and this isn't in the court, there's nothing Bing could do to get Apple to use Bing no matter what. Apple's going to use Google, which then makes it funny that Google is paying Apple billions of dollars a year to be a default search engine. And that's part of the monopoly where Apple were no other competitor could ever come in because Google has these deals, but it doesn't negate the fact that there is no competitor right now.
And the court wasn't saying that there is a viable competitor. So one of the things quoted in the trial was that Mozilla. Had taken money from Google to be the default. And then I forget what year it was. At Yahoo paid a bunch of money to become the default. And within three years. Mozilla had migrated back to Google because all the users dumped Yahoo within Mozilla, within Firefox.
And then Google still pays Mozilla to be the default browser. So even though Mozilla had to come running back to Google, Google still pays them. So that's monopolistic behavior. So the challenge is, and I know the Justice Department said they want to break it up. The challenge is, how do you break it up?
So like, do they break off Chrome? Do they stop Google from being a monopolistic search engine? Do they take away the ads? How do So I don't know that you could easily break up a company like Google because there is no actual alternative. And then the other thing is that we're obviously in an election year and the political arm of the U.S. government runs the Justice Department. So depending on who becomes president, they could, and maybe everyone, you know, running for office hates Google, so then there's no chance, but they could say the Justice Department settle with Google. And then this goes away because whatever the court says, it's a settlement between the justice department and Google, and they can say, okay, you pay us a billion dollars and you're not a monopoly anymore.
We're done with this.
Well, it seems pretty bipartisan. I mean, you've got one party in office right now, and then you've got Trump who I think recently told his followers not to use Google. So it seems like fairly bipartisan hate towards Google at this point. The moment, and I agree with you, breaking it up would be very hard.
And it also might create a worse user experience for the world if you broke Google up. Um, but really tactically here, if, if Google couldn't pay Apple anymore, do you think that solves this? Like if they just say, okay, like we said, Oh, we can't pay Apple. We can't pay Mozilla. Is that, is that good enough? Do you think?
No, not at all. Because from the trial, it's quite clear that Apple would only use Google because it's the best search engine. Uh, DuckDuckGo was one of the, I guess, they're not a plaintiff, the Justice Department was the plaintiff, but one of the companies that testified and said they couldn't get any market share, Nevo was another one that testified they couldn't get any market share because of these agreements, Apple wouldn't use them.
So DuckDuckGo had reached out, again, I read the entire trial document. DuckDuckGo had reached out to, to Apple to become the default and Apple never even took the meeting. They weren't interested. So Apple only wants to use Google. So Google's not allowed to pay Apple. It basically only costs Apple money because they're still going to use Google as the default search engine because they want the best experience for their users.
So I don't think that solves it.
So I want to talk stocks. Google's sold off, like on this news that it was a monopoly. It was going to get broken up. It might've sold off for a whole bunch of other reasons, but it sounds like that. If Google can't pay Apple anymore to be the default, Apple's just still going to use Google and Google doesn't have to pay Apple 20 billion. So is this like a, a net positive for Google?
Yeah, I think this, this brings us full circle. So how we started the podcast, which is. This is all about stocks. This is all about Wall Street not understanding a single thing about how this particular thing works. And I think the people on Wall Street are incredibly smart, but they do buy into longer stories that maybe don't play out the way they think they're going to play out.
Like if, you know, if everyone on Wall Street was super smart, they maybe would have gotten into Tesla when the smart people got into Tesla, but now they're in Tesla. So I think if, if wall street really understands what's happening here, they'll understand that there is no alternative for Google. Google probably won't get broken up.
This is like a nothing at all, and it shouldn't affect Google's business overall. Actually, they should continue to invest in Google because they're a monopoly and don't have to pay. Apple anymore. However, that's not the way the market works. They're, they're bought into hype. They're bought it, you know, maybe they're risk averse and they're like, it's a monopoly.
We have to pull out money. And then that cascades pulling out money means other people sell. And then the stock comes down. That's exactly what we were talking about when it comes to AI overviews. So the fact that Google comes out and says, Hey, look, we do AI too. This chat, GBT thing you heard about, and actually don't use because not that many people really use chat, GBT.
On a daily basis. Again, they have a lot of users, but not that many people continue to use it on a daily basis. So Wall Street, there's chat GBT thing that everyone's really excited about. We do the exact same thing. Don't worry about our stock. We're AI and that's it. Right. So like, it's all about perception that they're playing in it, how they monetize the details on what they're making money from.
That really doesn't play into the general investor.
Speaking of perception, do you think chat GPT, open AI, whatever you want to call it, actually cares about search GPT or to your, that point you were making at the start of the pod. Do you think they're just like trying to poke the bear, the bear being Google?
Yeah, I think so. I think they are poking the bear. I think that open AI will probably end up being just an enterprise company that powers all of these tools. And I wrote a newsletter post about this. The, the, and again, this was totally underscored in the court's decision on the Google being a monopoly.
This is all about distribution. So Google has the best distribution ever between their users. Like whatever amount of users they have, they, you know, from an email standpoint, there are more Gmail users than any other email provider. From a browser standpoint, I think Chrome has 85 percent market share. So Google has this amazing distribution.
On a mobile standpoint, they have this Apple deal, which we just said there's probably never going to go away. And at the same time, they have Android, which is made by Google, which defaults to Google. Which by the way, was not declared a monopoly. So you go through all these things and Google has crazy distribution.
ChatGPT only has hype and brand. So they got a lot of people to try it, but in order to use ChatGPT, you have to go to ChatGPT's website, or you have to download the ChatGPT app. That's not distribution. So even DuckDuckGo, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars in trying to increase their brand, they did all sorts of brand advertising and went to baseball games and had DuckDuckGo ads, like on the side of the, on the side of the stadium, they did a lot.
So I think that anybody who wants to compete with Google, they You would have to really, really figure out the distribution piece. And I, I don't know that anyone can. So search GPT is just a natural by product of having chat GPT. So why not give search? Why not give links out? But I, I really don't think it's going to cut into Google's market share. Unless Google does something.
Eli, this has been one of my favorite episodes so far. If it's okay with you, I've got like three lightning round questions. Are you ready for it?
Absolutely.
I've asked a similar question to a few guests, but I'm curious to get your thoughts. Imagine you've got like a hypothetical million dollars and you can invest it in perplexity at a 3 billion valuation or in Google at a 2 trillion valuation, but you can't touch it for 10 years.
Which company would you stick the million bucks in?
Non fair question. I would never invest in perplexity. Why? Because I think perplexity doesn't have its own tech. So perplexity is like a mix of different. LLM algorithms. So they are a mix of open AI. Um, I think they, they're using, I forget the other two, but they're dropping, I think it's Anthropic.
I don't remember the other way, but there is a mix of three algorithms. It's not its own tech. And the only thing that perplexity is trying to do is build brand. And they raised, I think, a hundred million dollars. And that's, that's a drop in the bucket on brand. Like DuckDuckGo couldn't do it. Neva couldn't do it.
So perplexity is trying to compete with Google. They're trying to do it two ways. One is with all this brand. And the second is that they're go, they're trying to rank on Google for content that they basically have stolen from other people, Google can turn off that fountain really quick. And then, of course, the, the other challenge is that Perplexity doesn't have distribution.
So, like, what is Perplexity? Like, why would anyone use Perplexity when you have ChowGBT and you have Google? So, I would not invest in Perplexity. I'd probably continue to invest in Google. But if there's an A versus B, it's definitely Google over Perplexity. Love that.
Yeah. Maybe we hit the delete button on perplexity in the SERPs.
That might be a fair use of the delete button. Um, I want to ask. It's not helpful. It's not. It's spam. I, there's, there's a tech, it's not a doorway page. I, maybe it's a door. No, it's not a doorway page. I don't know what it is. It's just not
It's just not helpful. It's AI content at its worst. You know, there's a company I talked to, they were doing this in image space.
I actually think that Google images is one of the first Google products that dies because of AI. Bye bye. So with all this image creation, and I don't know when we're releasing this podcast, but like yesterday's news next week. Okay. Awesome. Yesterday's news was grok, right? So that's Twitter's X's image generation.
Everyone's creating these images which are kind of realistic. So if you can create all these images on the fly and then put them on your website and then get them indexed by Google images For when people look at for it, Google images ends up being just a curator of images of billions of images that people just created rather than what it is today, which is images which have actually been used on the web.
So I think at some point if Google doesn't figure this out, Google images stops being helpful. Because the rate of image creation has gone up astronomically and they're all on websites just waiting to be indexed by Google images.
We need like another two hours. You're I, I'm going to make you come back for round three in 10 months from now.
Last question. I know you have a couple of thoughts on the Trump assassination in the SERPs. Tell me what you think.
Okay. So this is, this is straight from Google leaks. I do think that Google is politically aligned and they do things to tweak things the way they want. However, all of Google suggests, and I don't know if this is written anywhere, is read it's run by machine learning.
So whereas the Google suggests used to be auto complete. And it was based on actual human searches. Now it's doing machine learning to try to predict what it should be. And Google can't control it anymore. So that's the problem. So that came out, I think last year, Google is guilty, but they're also not guilty.
I think that they, they do things intentionally.
Eli, this has been so much fun. Uh, and we will, uh, we'll of course include a link, uh, to your LinkedIn. Also linked to your book, uh, in the show notes. Is there anything else you'd like to say to our listeners? Focus on
Focus on user journeys and buyer journeys. Don't just focus only on SEO. SEO will continue to change, but buyers are always going to be buyers. So talk to your buyers, understand your users, understand why you're doing SEO.
And that's a wrap. And I just want to thank our sponsor Positional. They've got what is a pretty awesome tool set for content marketers and SEOs. They've even got a couple of tools for social media. Uh, we'd love for Positional and the tool set that we've created, uh, over the last 15 months at Positional.
And you can always reach out to me if you have any questions. My email is Nate at positional. com. Whether you've got questions about our tool set or comments and complaints, uh, or even positive feedback about this podcast, I'd love to hear from you. Um, and don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button, uh, wherever you are listening to this podcast. Uh, thanks so much for tuning in.
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