Press Release SEO Strategy

Transcript: Press Release SEO Strategy

This transcript of Press Release SEO Strategy comes from the video's captions, lightly cleaned. Click a time and the set jumps to that moment.

Introduction

0:04 Welcome back folks to the David Quaid SEO show. This is episode nine. In this episode, we're going to be talking all about press releases plus what's been going on in SEO over this week. It's been quite busy. Should be a fantastic show. Like I say, the main topic of the show is going to be around press releases. What how can you use them effectively in a SEO strategy? I've got the king of SEO, the man of the moment. I've got David in the house. So, David, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
Sure. Yeah, thanks for coming along and giving us a listen. I've been doing SEO for 26 years. I love working with the mechanics of Google. It's interesting how much people have conflated Google. And I'm really here just to help you limit the amount of information you need in order to do SEO. Limit the amount of myths that are out there. Make it easier for you to put together an SEO plan and strategy that doesn't keep jumping with all of the noise and hype that's out there.
Like I say, we'll be going talking a lot about press releases and how to use them effectively. But before we go into the main meat and potatoes of the show, we got a quick break. We will be back in a few seconds. We're coming back, folks.

1:28 So, David, let's just have a quick broad look about using press releases in

Are press releases still effective?

1:38 General. Do you think it's still an effective strategy in your quiver of SEO arrows, David?
Absolutely. It could be so effective for a number of reasons, but it really it's a system and I think people are the sort of breaking everything down into binary steps is oversimplifying everything and people are getting frustrated and going but is it this is it that and everything has to be good and bad. I'll give a non SEO example for one second. And I remember talking to some of the folks I used to work with in our New York office at camp and they were reading some healthcare noticed that said brown rice contains as much fat as white rice. And one of the girls said, "Oh my god, we were we've been told all our lives that brown rice is healthier." Brown rice is healthier because it has fiber. White rice doesn't have the fiber. Fiber is removed. The fiber is the husk. It's why it's brown. And so if you're going to be intent on breaking everything down into good, bad, you're going to keep hitting rocks when the circumstances change. So what you do is you take a system and then you break it down to your website where you are today. You can't hold on to that system forever. You have to keep checking in on it. Right? And so where press releases are good is I think one, everyone keeps saying they're good. And the people who keep saying they're good are generally people who work in PR or work at a site a company like Cision which owns most of the PRY company. And so you have to check yourself why are people saying something is good? If it's an SEO then look at what they're doing and ask yourself does that situation apply to me? I think that PR is very good if there's someone listening to it and if you can find an audience. PR isn't good for SEO that if you do it magic happens, right? PR isn't good because it's PR and you get a good backlink. It's not how Google works. Google doesn't look and say, "Oh, look, Jonathan David put out a press release. Let's give him a little bump in the rankings." Right? That's just infantile. Where PR works is if you're if you can get your press release to rank in news sites for something that you can't do in in many elements, it's it's very similar to parasitic SEO.

3:52 If you actually understand what parasitic SEO is, it's a way for you to get your content and information out

Why most press releases fail

3:59 Another domain. Where 99% of small companies go arai with PR is they think that it's because it's PR that if they get a link from the page, it's going to do wonders. And you could just you could just park that. That's not happening. The second thing is, and almost all brand CEOs are guilty of this repetitively. I've been on every PR call at nearly every company I've worked with in the last 20 years. And every press release has started with our brand that nobody cares about. And that's the first step in screwing up the press release. Because if you're trying to get more awareness, you've immediately limited to the people that are already aware of you. You've shot yourself in the foot while walking down to start a race, right? It's just stupid. If when I was at camp, I got one press release. I got I advocated for us to use Microsoft and the cloud as the headline to the press release and we got something like a quarter of a million impressions because there are people who were interested in what products are coming to the Microsoft cloud and that's how we used Microsoft's name to get our name out there. I think the reason that CEOs keep in insisting on using the brand is one, it's bad training. It's conditional training. It's it's a system they've inherited that they've been too lazy to update. I know I'm using emotive terms, but I'm trying to cross check people and get them to think, right? But if you're doing it because you're fed up of listening to you have to do this for SEO, you have to do this for SEO, now you want to do something that's your brand, you can do that with advertising. That's what advertising does. Advertising gives you the right to pay for your way to butt into somebody else's conversation with your brand name. And that's why advertising works. PR and SEO work the same way. They're an inbound channel.

5:55 And what PR does above your domain name is it gives you a chance to leverage off other new sites. So don't limit it by effectively tying it to your brand, which is exactly what content on your branded site does. So, in other words, if you're going to do PR, open it to the widest possible audience that's still relevant to your message and stop hampering it with your brand.

PR platforms and pricing

6:20 So, let's say I've never done any press releases in my life, and there's probably going to be quite a few listening or watching this show, David, and they wouldn't they wouldn't know where to start and they probably might not be in the position of being able to hire PR agency. So if they're doing itself, do you mind going through some of the basic things? Cuz I know there's various platforms that you can push your new news release through, your press release through. Can you just give a broad picture about what are some of the major players out there, how much it costs? Do you mind doing that? Because I know you know everything about it, but I just think there'd be a sizable part of our audience that doesn't know anything. PRS can cost anything from $7 if you buy it as a package to 26 to 2000 if you buy it as a single instance to 500 to $10,000.

7:34 Cision is at the high end. They own most of the syndication pipelines and presumably if your press release is designed to get picked up by journalists sision properties position themselves as most likely I don't know how true that is right and that's not something I've ever found to be true I'm pretty sure if you're Microsoft and you released a press release through any outlet it would get picked up by the media just as much as I'm sure if I put out a press release saying primary position did something 's boring. No one's going to pick it up whether I spend $10,000 or $50. And I think that's the growth hacking look, right? If Jacky Chou is here, I think that's where he'd be looking. I think we should take a real example and I think what would we do with WP Tonic, right? And how would we get the maximum exposure?
I think that's good.
But what come came to my mind is Jake that we had on last week, well, the week before. Time's going fast, David. But his agency, they did a bit of unique. He's a friend of the show. He's a great guy. You like him. I like him. And he they did this bit of unique research about schema. And I would imagine they did a press release about that. And I would have thought that's a that's the kind of maybe kind of content that's ideal for a press release. Am I on the

Writing the title around the search phrase

9:01 Right track, David?
Absolutely. It's all content. You can have a strategy for each piece of content. And so if I was Jake and I wanted to get a press release up and I looked at how, for example, the PR mechanisms, you know, flood you with information about how much syndication happened, how many impressions, I would treat all of that as rubbish. What I would be looking for is does it rank in Google News and does it rank in normal Google desktop search. Those are the two fundamentals. And if it can't do that, it's utterly useless. In Jake's case, I think what I would be looking at is how would I get this to rank for schema as a ranking factor? Because people are debating schema all the time. People are asking on Reddit and X, should I use schema? What schema works best? How does schema work? And the most common search phrase is schema ranking factor. And so if I wanted to get into that debate and get into people thinking about it and get into the top of rankings for the most fundamental part of the search phase, it would be schema and ranking. And I wouldn't try to litter the title with my own brand name and massively reduce its potential for ranking. If you put a word into the title, it's going to dilute the relevance of the title to the original phrase. The original phrase would be schema rank factor. And the more you add to the title, the further you're moving away.

10:26 And so for most brands, the only time that press release is going to come up is if they if somebody searches with their brand name. And that's defeats the whole purpose of a press release, I think. Don't you?
Yeah, I would agree with you there. Then
In your case, right?
Yeah,
I would. And I think what we should do is we should eat our own dog food here, right? I want to stay true to my brand even though I'm not an expert at branding. Let's do this as an experiment after this and then we can update the crew or the SEO community can crew us can update us right let's do a press release I think something interesting is happening in the university market the private school market in the US today I think we can find a topic and attach WP Tonic who's one of the best providers for WordPress site building maintenance community management plugins hosting right
Let's put out a press release and see does that help in getting your name in the rankings? Does that can we measure that in branded search coming back? Could we potentially even see a lead or an inquiry drop that's coming from that? I know you're a big fan of the Edward Sturm Show obviously as much as me. He's very fond of a couple of press sites that James Dooley has used. So I think they sound like a great place to go.

11:46 I've tried Red Press. Unfortunately, Red Press have really let me down. I put out a couple of press releases. I paid $500 for them to 300 each actually. You can pay an extra $30 to have someone edit it as well. Right. I wrote them myself with a little bit of help from ChatGPT. In the one instance, everything was approved and said, and then they came back and said that two of the main syndicates that I paid extra for didn't accept legal news. It wasn't about legal news. It was actually about an award for the marketing team at a law agency. So it wasn't anything to do with the news, but they also took 2 weeks to actually come back to it. The second one was for a person chap that we know again had paid for it, put it up, set it up at 10:00 at night and it didn't go out and I couldn't get any data, couldn't see any report information. I cannot get a single word out of them. And again, they sat on it for two weeks. It's very disappointing. I would have been their biggest brand advocate, but they really royally screwed up on it. So, I think we'll pick a one of the channels that James and Edward have been talking about. And so, if you're not sure what it is, go watch their video and then we'll put out a press release today or maybe Monday and see how it performs in the week. And we can folks that are following us on LinkedIn.

13:05 There's also a David Quaid SEO page. We both have you have the WP Tonic on Facebook. I have the David Gate on Facebook. So people can I'll share the updates with you and people can come and

Nofollow links, syndication and Google

13:15 Follow us after the show like bonus material.
That'd be fantastic. It'd be really interesting.
Let's go on to one of the topics I wrote out for the shows. If you got nofollow or syndicated press release links, move ranking in your own test. So, if it's a nofollow, maybe you can maybe you can explain what a nofollow is. And if the syndicate press release is a nofollow link,
Can it still be effective?
So, I think people are really terrible at judging and understanding what backlinks do. And I often say on the show, I'm interested in the fundamental mechanics of SEO. So, let's get into the fundamental mechanics of SEO. There are a couple of a couple of micro minorly known SEOs who keep saying that nofollow is a Google suggestion and it doesn't have to appear. Yes, absolutely. That's not but 99.9% of the time Google is ignoring a nofollow, right? You can assume in almost all cases nofollow will be taken by Google literally. Where it's not going to apply is if a press release is put out and it gets a wave of organic traffic, Google may decide that it's going to pass authority to the links in that. So maybe somebody put nofollow in there because they're talking to a competitor or they're just doing it out of good guidance. Google might decide to override it for whatever reasons. Those reasons are up to them. We don't know what those reasons are. I don't care.

14:49 But every user should assume that nofollow is strictly nofollow. The only way I can think of to tell people as a rule of if you need a rule of thumb to look at the value of a backlink, if you're thinking, oh, it's CNN, or oh, it's this site, it's Forbes, it's Daily Mail, forget about it. It's not how it works, right? Yes, if you appear on the homepage of CNN, your press release has done wonders. Well done. You can be happy with that. If the page isn't going to rank in Google and get its own organic traffic, it's not going to help you. It just isn't. If you've got a press release that says ABC Acme Incorporated bought a screwdriver for $5, whether it's nofollow or not, it's never going to get any traffic because it's not going to rank against your own brand. It's not going to help you.
So, let's recap a little bit cuz I want and see if I got the gist of what you're trying to explain. What you're really trying to explain and point out is that people get a bit hang out about getting the link from the press release platform. And what you're trying to say is no, that's got really no value. The reason why you why you've write wrote this press release and you're trying to get it publicized is for other people to take it up and then
Talk about it, put it in their own art, utilize it, have and then they might link back to a more detailed to the your website, to the piece, whatever resource. That's what you're really looking for. Is that what you're trying to point out?

16:31 Exactly. Now, there are absolutely cases where a press release could end up on a site that has a lot of authority where that page gets a rank position, gets traffic, and your it's that the site pages it links to ranking increases. But that is one to less than 0.1% of the time, right? So, it does happen. And I'm not suggesting you put nofollow in, right? I obviously I don't see any valid reason to put nofollow into a link unless it's an affiliate link or you're getting paid to review something. Follow the the guidelines as you see fit. But for 99% of people, because I don't know, as I'm giving this advice, I don't know what press release wires people are using. I can't speak for every single time Google crawls a page. I'm just saying be prepared for the link to have very little value, right? Even if you're paying $10,000, even if it's a businesswire.com press release, Google knows that press releases are syndicated. It knows what syndicated means. The entire press release from page title to heading one to content is carbon copy the same from site to site. Google has known about syndicated press releases for time immemorial. At one point in 2009 2010, Google the Google search laser team were kicking around the idea of even penalizing people for having their links what we now call do follow in press releases because press releases were are essentially paid for pages.

18:10 They're the same as a guest post. You have you are the editor of the content. You decide where to put the links. But obviously from a practicality point of view, that's not practical because Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix, they are constantly going to be putting out press releases with naked links in it, even if their PR team isn't concerned with the organic outcome, which is very common. Those people don't typically care about the organic income. They're not measured on it. And so Google, I think, kicked around the idea publicly and it got swept under a carpet somewhere and no one has mentioned it since. But I remember it very well. But I think you have to realize that Google knows that these are syndicated. It crawls them and it doesn't rank them, right? Otherwise, if you typed in the title of your press release, the first 10 pages would just be all of the syndicated versions. It picks a version and that version is the winner. But you're not doing it for page authority. If you get it, it's a bonus. That's great. If someone says it happened for them, that's great. It's amazing. But I've never really seen it happen. What I've seen is, for example, with the king of AEO, which I think a lot of people are following, you can see how somebody can do a press release and just ride above everybody else and get into the top for a certain amount of time, right?

19:30 Yeah.
And how, for example, it's not as prominent in Google after a while, but in ChatGPT and in Brave Search.
Oh. Well, that's what I was going to ask you because we got this whole new world, aren't we, of large learning models and one of the topics that I had in my list was LLM seeding, the real strategy of

LLMs and press releases

19:53 Just oldwide distribution with a new name. So, a lot of people were saying when it come to on my radar, I don't know if this is true, but a lot of people say that press releases were working really well with these large learning models. Is that what do you think about that? Do you think that might be some truth to that?
Absolutely. It's not because it's a press release. It's because the press releases perform very well. They rank very well. The query fan out tends to favor less competitive niches. And because it's not it's talking about your brand on what's considered a news site, the LLMs tend to pick up that content a little bit better than if you just did a blog post or a listicle and or it was a tweet from your own account or something like that. And I think what we'll try to do with your press release is I think we'll look at for example I'm guessing that a lot of private schools, colleges, universities are wondering about enrollment and budgets and asking what are other colleges do and so maybe we can find a keyword in your search console or in Semrush that matches that gives us some search volume that your site wouldn't normally be able to rank for because it's a new it's a new keyword cluster that you don't have topical authority about and then we can see if ranking that

Who actually reads press releases

21:29 Changes the dynamics of your brand and inquiries and maybe we can see it mentioned.
Yeah. So what so the audience with these press release platforms? What is the general audience that you utilizes these? Is it because obviously journalism has changed dramatically. There's been a massive decline in local newspapers. But funny enough, in Northern Nevada, there's a paper called the Reno Journal. And when I was a word, when I was a developer freelancer, I worked for a marketing agency as a freelancer called the Abbi Agency and she's still in business. And they had a lot of con they had lot of content contacts with journalists in Northern Nevada and nationally. So is it mostly freelance journalists? What is the audience that utilizes these press releases? Generally
I would say very few. If you look at Cision's business model and the amount of press release sites that they acquire, right?

22:56 When I was working in New York City, they were acquiring a PR wire every other week.
Wow.
The number of press releases that are being put out per day is in the thousands, right? Big companies that are really multiple companies pushed into one could be putting out press releases every other week. If you've ever worked at a software company and you've partnered with a Microsoft and Amazon or whatever, it can take two to three weeks to get a single quote approved by a VP at one of these companies. Even when they fast track, right? So, companies like Microsoft know that they're very bureaucratic and slow. And so, when something gets to the CEO's desk or the CEO's staff, they create these fast tracks. So, they get the smartest lawyer, the smartest VP of marketing or CMO in there or put them together and say, "You can get this signed off. You get to jump the queue." Even in those cases, you're lucky if it's two weeks, right? So, the number of press releases going out is phenomenal. I can't imagine journalists are sitting there pipeline. It's not working. So unless you've got some really big news, you would need a PR agency who have actual relationships with journalists, right?
So if you're doing it from that point of view
And you're looking at going, "Wow, we had sision says we had 58 billion impressions." I would use that as toilet paper.

24:17 Yeah, that's what she mostly did and her team. They had these relationships with all these journalists locally and nationally.
Yeah.
And they could get stuff in if they called in a favor basically.
And isn't there this whole pantomime, right? Oh, it has to be held for embargo, right? It can't go out before 8:00. It can't go. It's It just reminds me of the Mad Men days. Everyone's drunk on gin and tonic and you need everything has to go at 8 o'clock in the morning. It's all right? If you look at James Dooley, Jacky Chou, Edward Sturm, all of the SEOs that are Charles Floate, Julian Goldie that are doing really well at this stuff, they're doing it as growth hackers. They're treating it like parasitic SEO. If they get good link quality, fantastic. And they're also playing a numbers game. They're trying out different press releases. They're not hoping, they're not living in optimism that if they pay $10,000 decision, it's going to get picked up by a journalist in the New York Times. They know it's not going to happen. So they don't even bother wasting time. And so the more your SEO model or your growth hacking model or your AO model relies on

How to do PR properly

25:21 Optimism, the more it's guaranteed to fail. You need to have expected outcomes that will happen and everything else is cream on the top where you don't need the cream to exist. But what does so we've like we've before we go for our middle break we've said you can't live in optimism but
What does based on your experience and your observations what do you
Do properly
What is classified as a success using press releases then
Getting somebody to read it that's relevant and so you basically do whatever every good SEO should do. You reverse engineer it. Go and take a press release that you came across, whether it's in your industry or in a related industry or an a bridged industry, and search for it. Go to ChatGPT or Claude or whoever and ask a questions and see if that press release is quoted. Then
Step back and look at the query fan out, right? And do it a few times. Do it in a couple of different and eventually you'll see a pattern. This word was emitted, but these words were the same.

26:39 This word was emitted. These words are the same. Or take all of them and drop it into an LLM and have it do it for you because that's what they're good at, their pattern recognition systems. And that's the title for your press release. It's just that simple. Yes. Because I think I watch most of the shows that you watch and that and they all been saying with large learning models the possibilities of using press releases have been regenerated in a way. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, generally the LLMs don't differentiate between these articles and press releases. They can with syndication it's not always clear and again a lot of these sites have a lot of topical authority and they tend to rank and they tend to rank in Google or in Bing quite well. And so they also tend to rank in news and news feeds. And so if you've got a site that's not getting a lot of traffic and this is somewhere above punching above your weight. Again, if you're tying yourself to Microsoft News or you're tying yourself to another brand, let's say you've got a pair of shoes and they were voted by your users as better than Nike, maybe you can put a press release with Nike in it, right? And then that way you stand to be picked up like a news article and you may if you architect the query you may you may get quoted. It's about trial and error.

28:05 So what I hate about the PR industry and the way CEOs at SAS companies do PR is they do it. It's all a holy grail. It takes three months to plan. Everyone has to rewrite it 100,000 times. It has to be approved by the VP, the CEO, his mother's neighbor who makes the best lasagna in the world with her non recipe. It's got to be approved by It's such a pantomime. It's ridiculous the amount of energy that the CEO will put into a press release and not into running the company in some cases, right? And they put out one, right? So now you've put all of this effort, all of these people, all of these brains and you've hooked it on a single point of failure. Whereas if you look at what we've been doing with the king of AEO and none of us are chatting in about how we're doing

The horse race idea

28:49 It. We're doing it to see the impact and then talking about the repercussions afterwards is that we're starting with press releases we can afford to screw up on. And if one of them lands, that's the success. I don't know if you remember or if you would have heard it. You're probably living in the US, but a few years ago there was a a British magician, forget his name, and he did this competition where he gets somebody to win every single horse race all the way up to the grand finale, right? And he wins like a million pounds. But the way he got there is he got 180 people to all buy a ticket and he they just backed the winner each time until they got down to 20 people and 12 people and six people and two people. So actually it's a 99% failure rate. But one person what right? And I think that's what people are missing behind the scenes is that if you're going to put out a press release a quarter and you're going to put all of this effort into it and then stick your brand in it, ruin it anyway, what are you doing it for? And why are you paying $8,000 and repeating it for 15, 20 years when none of it works? Whereas, if you look at what growth hackers will do, they'll go, "Look, I can only afford to spend $1,000." And I don't know which one's going to work. So, I can only buy five if they each cost $200 and I'm going to try five because that gives me a good chance that one will win.

30:14 And so it's that mentality swap where people are trusting the system which is what we keep as a society failing at, right? Instead of improving the odds in your favor, right? And that's what reverse that's how reverse engineering works and that's how SEO works. That's f that's fantastic. I think it's a good place for us to go for our middle break. We will be back in a few moments, folks. We're coming back folks. We've had a fantastic conversation about press releases. In the second half, we're

Helpful content update, YMYL and AI content

30:48 Going to be talking about what's been going on in SEO this week. And to say that there's been three rather fever excitement about certain things would have been an understatement of the year. I would say David's a little bit bored with it, but he's been consistent about his views on this, haven't you, David? But I think we need just to cover it a little bit because there's been a lot of discussion about Google rewriting their helpful content guide and there's been a lot of videos a lot of talk about this where particular sections of this guide they have emphasis around effort originality talent or skill accuracy And there seem to be a lot of people really saying it was very interesting to watch these videos actually, David, because
When it got into the kind of real nittygritty of them, when they really looked at the what Google was saying, it seemed to me to be just common sense and Google fundamental mental position hadn't changed, but because they had rewrote these this guideline, there was quite a lot of people saying because they've done this and a couple of other things that were mentioned that something big is coming, some big change in Google's position. I What was your take about what's being said about all this week? Actually David.

32:42 So not to boil the pants of everybody but it's the same thing, right? So first of all talking about EAT without YMYL is pointless, right? YMYL affects so few sites and so few queries that it's almost pointless. Right? I've seen YMYL in in action.
Can you explain what that is please? Your money your life is an idea where Google says there's certain number of so at large Google cannot fact check verify content right it the systems are so vast the amount of content the amount of sites that are pushing content that aren't necessarily pushing it for SEO are vast right where Google goes through all of this and so there are a few instances where Google has had to change the game plan one was COVID, two were payday loans and three were gambling where, for example, you could be in a state that doesn't allow gambling, but somebody could be publishing legally in another state. It's not like ads. They're not targeting another state, but Google serves up content from all over the world to all people all over the world. Right? When you're in the UK, you don't just get content from the UK. And content it shows in the UK could be built and designed anywhere. It could be done in the USA. It could be done in Ethiopia, right? Or the Kremlin
Or wherever in the Kremlin as it often is. Let's not bring up Mr. Zuckerberg but one of the challenges is that there is especially around COVID, Google stepped in and it either eliminated certain sites from show or the vast number of sites from showing or it gave its own dashboard suite and so everyone likes to pretend they're in YMYL.

34:27 I don't know if that's for street cred or to say the reason we're not ranking is because it's y and now people are throwing around ultra y. I joke about it saying the next version is going to be ultra black y and people are making arguments that if you hire the wrong lawyer and it's a million dollar lawsuit you could lose a million dollars. Therefore it's y and it's just stretching and fabricating into more The number Google's definition of YM and wild says it's very narrow. And while it could include things that affect your money or life, it's not everything that could potentially one day affect everything, right? It's very specific things. It's clearly not chiropractic because anyone can rank a chiropractor. It's clearly not dentistry because anyone can rank that. I've had and it's amazing how forgetful SEOs are about both YMYL and EAT, but also forgetful that I'm sure every SEO has written content that a client has come back and said that's got a mistake in it. So, if Google's paying all this attention, how come all of these mistakes are slipping through and getting published, right? And I don't think every time I say to someone who [clears throat] makes a claim, which I think is ludicrous, to say, "Oh, we're in ultra y'all." And I say, "What is it?" And what about YM tells you it's YM? And they go, "We're in the legal niche." There's no such thing as a niche, right? That's how humans categorize it. YMI is specifically queries, right? So, if you search for bio9 oil for COVID, bio9 oil, you'll get a whole lot of things about bio9 oil.

35:57 The minute you add COVID or COVID vaccine, for example, the number of results will limit to maybe 17. That's why and why at work. That's where Google says, "We don't trust these sites to show anymore." But everyone is carrying on as if YM is something where they have to put in bios and author buyers and their contact details and their degree number and all this nonsense. Right.
I'm I'm just going to put my take on this and see if you think I'm on the right track, David. Obviously, people come to this show for you, but I So, I'm going to keep it brief. I think with a lot of things with SEO, there's a lot of stuff that gets mixed up into a kind of witch's brew basically. So there's a lot there seems to some people linkage, but they never provide real evidence and they would say they can't because Google hides it, right? Or I don't know what they would say. What to me? What the latest round of videos and content, blog posts and podcasts and video shows like this is that they're saying that Google's really saying with this update that if you don't check, you know, they basically say if you they say it in a roundabout way that it's really bad news that you're using AI content, right? It's slot basically. And then they support that by saying that Google's not saying it directly don't use AI content, but they produced now in their documentation this clear list, right, that it should be edited, it should be fact checked, which in some ways I agree with. I think the facts links should be checked, right? But that's my position. And then and then they were going on about these bios. It should be not being upfront about who published it or misleading people is not on. I agree with that. And this talent and skills stuff that you know it Oh, the other thing it should be original.

38:23 How Google tells if something's original. I have no idea. I have no idea how they can tell it's original or not. But I think that's also linked to this other group of people. There's a particular lady. I'm not going to name her, but that go on about Google using machine learning. So they have this deep understanding. So they know David. So there's a lot of that. Would you agree there's a lot of that on YouTube and in the SEO community, isn't it?
There is. And let's break it down into why. And it's really simple. And I've seen I know you're very sensitive to AI content. And I must have read about 10 posts this morning that started with my pages being deranked or not getting indexed, so it must be AI content, right? Even though there's a document that says we don't care about AI content. And so we have fears. And as humans, we look for any light. So I think 99.999% of people want a universe where Google can verify content. And I'm that's I've just come to accept that. Even though I think it's stupid and dangerous and terrible and impossible all at the same time with LLMs, without LM, with SI, without SI, I think it's absolutely impossible. I think it's a joke to even think so. But we also believe that there's a sky daddy who saves us from kid cancer, except for the kids that he doesn't save from kid cancer, which is most of the kids unfortunately because he's not that good at his job, right? But we want to believe in it and so we do. And so whenever Google releases a document that alludes to something even though it's covered by we don't do this, people want to believe it. They want to know. They want to think it's happening and they don't want to live in a world with all this uncertainty and all these things that they can't explain. That's why we have a Sky Daddy and all the trouble that Sky Daddy has brought the world unfortunately. And so there are just people that this is the only thing that Google is willing to talk about. And I think it's a very sad state of affairs.

40:22 And I think Google needs to ask itself about this, right? It's the only thing that they're willing to talk about. They're not willing to talk about authority anymore. They're not willing to talk about how their indexing systems work. They're not willing to talk about anything. They're willing to talk about a set of eat standards that if your site gets called up and a human reviewer looks at it, these are potential things it might fail on. And they're arbitrary and subjective and vague and bullshitty, right? Because most content isn't that original. It isn't that unique and it isn't that good. And it's not that good because most people don't care about it, right? We're not going around reading as much content as we think about. But if you're a writer, a journalist, if you're someone who stand gets paid $10,000 an hour to run around the world and say write good content that's SEO and then get a round of applause and off and do the next one, right? Then that's great. And then every time Google updates this document, you can point it and go like told you right except we'll ignore and we'll just conveniently forget that it's y only that Google says it can't do it algorithmically that you cannot train an engine to go this made a claim. So, we were discussing this the other day and I said to you, I read an article written by someone who said they've got 5 years experience in SEO in adding eat to documents and I said immediately upon reading that sentence, I no longer want to read anything this person has to write anymore. I do not trust them. I have absolutely no confidence in listening to this person because they have no critical thinking. So, how can an engine read a claim and then because it exhibits the same type of claims of other claims? That's not claims. That's saying that your engine is completely open to confidence tricks. In other words, how do confidence tricks work?

42:10 How does conjecture works? How do people like get away with standing up on stage and making these statements? And I was on a call earlier today and someone started and I just cut them off straight away and I said, "Look, just stop." This is how conjecture arguments start. Google wants you to do this, therefore Google can do this and Google has this and LLM's magic. Therefore, everything I say is true. Versus here's an experiment we ran where we took a page, we filled it with misinformation. Like we said the capital of France is Germany and we said that the fastest man has ever been is two times the speed of light and published it and show it can rank in Google because any SEO can do can do that tomorrow.
Can I put some something to you that's been said to me? Somebody that's been listening to our shows together and they said this to me. They said, "David, real expert on SEO and what you've been doing has been great, but they but Google do have machine learning, Jonathan, because that's how they produce their AI overviews. They do have
And they if they can produce AI overview they said to me that they are reading you're using machine content to read people's pages and then make the AI overview from that how would you reply to that David
But then why is the AI overview changing every time you do a search so it's a downstream overview right the second thing is consensus in facteing is not evidence Right? So if you ask 100,000 Christians if the Bible is real, you're going to get 100% answer. Right? Guess where you're not going to get 100% answer? If you ask someone who doesn't believe in the Bible, right? So consensus is a useless metric. Right? If you look at every single breakthrough, whether it's astrophysics, jet engines, search engines, medical breakthroughs, they all have to challenge the consensus, right?

44:17 How often do you read a a thing where for example like this morning I saw something where psychiatrists are saying that giving someone LSD is three times more powerful than the strongest drug for anxiety. But LSD is illegal. We have to now challenge the the legal framework, the medical framework, the psychiatric framework to get this as a drug for people that are struggling with anxiety. Consensus is not a good way of judging accuracy. How can Google Hold, let me push this right back.
Oh, just one quick thing. I've just had some people in and they're asking if we can have a question and answer session. Yes, if you if you got some questions, just put them in and we will attempt to answer them at the end of the show. Sorry, David. Reading textbooks and reading blog posts and reading marketing articles and reading content written by journalists is not research right I'm sorry it's not research is let's open a lab and let's do some actual research that's research not capable of doing that people we've ruined the word research because people are saying the election was stolen or this was done or this happened I watch YouTube I do my research show me the NASA a school of science where people are sitting watching YouTube videos and calling it research, right? If someone's put together a research YouTube video, they're not a researcher. They're just doing content accumulation. Content accumulation is not research. I'm sorry.

45:51 I'm sorry if you think it is.
No, I totally agree with you. It's one of the things that should have known this, but working with you has opened my eyes a little bit more to that. You but it I think it I think I use a stronger word. This is stuff that you
It's propaganda basically. It's some form of propaganda. Basically, let's
Take a real example, right? Somebody put out a an absolute diabolical survey and I don't want to get into it because I know a lot of people who contributed to the survey who have a lot of respect for. Unfortunately for them, they did nothing wrong, right? They didn't realize they were going to get lampooned into one of the worst PR stunts by an SEO who's got a reasonably big following although no one ever replies to them. They own an SEO aggregator that doesn't rank, right? So, showing that they know nothing about SEO. And they said that 21% of this board of experts said that meta descriptions were a ranking factor, which is absolute nonsense.
And they're not,
But ranks in Google, right? If you search for the name of this, it ranks in Google. If you now say that ranks in Google and an LLM reads it, an LLM is now going to believe that most SEO experts believe that meta I don't know a single SEO expert that even writes a meta description anymore. I don't, right? And it's never held me back. So, I don't and we do a lot of we build a lot of pages and a lot of sites. And we're now doing EMDs, which means our clients have four times as many sites as they did last year. So if LLMs are doing all this research, they're regurgitating all of this misinformation. And that's because reading content is not the same as actually going out and running an experiment. And that's not what the survey did. The survey asked a bunch of people that based on a subjective preference that this person wanted people to believe that they were SEO experts went and did it and ran with it.

47:47 Now, it doesn't jeopardize the character of the people who the real experts, but it's not a great look either, and it's certainly not a great look for the person who did the survey, and it's a certainly terrible look for the people who participated in it and got it wrong. But it just goes to show that the ma massive mainstream content that's out there, if Google has one document called the Google SEO starter guide that says we do not care about word count, we do not care about H orders, we do not care about eat, it is not a ranking factor, we do not care about this, and we care about PageRank. But there are 10,000 SEO agencies who have blog posts that say meta descriptions are a ranking factor. Page speed is a critical ranking factor. This is a ranking factor. This is a ranking factor. And it's made up and quite often it's made up by contractors who've never done anything in their lives. So if you think that LLMs and reading lots of material makes you smarter, I have some really bad news for you.
Radio. All right. I think before we go,

Spam update and spam reports

48:50 We got one or two questions. But the final thing, we've had the Google September 2026 spam update. I think it's just finished rolling out. Is there anything you observed through this period that you want to share?
Yeah, I think a lot of people jumping to conclusions that AIO's are taking their content. I think that what's happening is Google is controlling how authority flows. It's reducing it's on an ever reducing plane of reducing authority from what it thinks might be spam networks. Instead of taking them down holisticlely, it's taking them down piece by piece by page, link by link. I think that it's getting very hard to buy back links that have value. I think it's not as necessary as people think that you can actually build quite a lot of get quite a lot of link authority from genuine partnerships and relationships, right? Doing natural link building. And that I think a lot of sites that are losing traffic are blaming spam updates and that's not necessarily the the real answer. These spam updates are mostly targeting scaled content. Most of the people who write about who come to Reddit or X with scaled content penalties are trying to hide and go, "Oh, I checked. We don't have any manual actions. Maybe we used a bit of AI content and we're doing all of these things that humans always do when we refuse to embrace the ugly truth. We want to pretend it's something else and we trying to find something. So, we got it must be AI content. It's actually scaled content or things that you can't see." Right? The number of SEOs who are so confident that they can eyeball 3 4 thousand back links and go, "Oh, that's a good one. That's a bad one. That's bullshit." Sorry. You need machines that can look at these contextually what they rank for and assess them from a mathematical point of view. I think we're caught up in a quagmire of not having the right tools and oversimplifying problems.

50:47 Thanks for that. Let's have a look at a couple of questions. Any luck with Google spam reports? One franchise has several doorway pages for the same city, each targeting a variation of the primary keyword. Their landing pages are basically filling up page one.
Page one. Okay, so I think this is a brilliant question and we should nearly cover this in a future episode if you want to make a note of it. Is the Google spam report. And if you go back to the start of the conversation where you picked up what's the value of asking for originality and what's the value of factchecking, I do think that Google puts a lot of emphasis on the spam reports that people submit. And one of the most telling parts of it is where they ask you for more information. And they warn you that information is going to be passed as part of the message back to the owner of the website. So don't put any identifiable information in there. Don't say we're the McDonald's on the corner and we want we're reporting this site, right? So Google definitely is reading them. How that happens and the accuracy. Google's not going to go and read that and then go and ding that site unless that site falls into a Y and wild category like they're doing payday loans, bedding sites, vaccine technologies or something like that.

52:11 Where there's a threat to someone, imminent threat to someone's life, they probably will submit that to a quality reporter. And that's where this validation and factchecking becomes important, right? But that doesn't apply to 99% of people. So where you've got this, I think keep reporting it and give as much information as possible. Report all of the variations. Tell Google all of the rules that they've broken. Right? Jack Jake Hundley said, "If you break rules and we have to play by the rules, we'll report those rules." Right? I don't believe snitches need to get snitches. And so the problem is that Google typically catches these by heuristics and it's a numbers game and they don't always fall out and you also typically have to wait for the next update. There's also a waterfall, right? And so your the breach you're you've reported may not make it into the next one. It's not going to happen tomorrow. There are some instances where it can, but it's not going to happen tomorrow. But I definitely think that reporting where people are building landing pages and reporting them properly as doorway pages is crystal to getting the internet in better shape. It's much better than just telling people to write good content.

53:26 So what's for those that need to know what's the difference between a landing page and a doorway page then? So doorway pages are where the amount of information on the page doesn't change very much and it's just done to increase the number of instances that is a domain shows up. So as this person was reporting it sounds like they've got a number of domain names it's that are all representing the same company and they're really just an extension of the same site. So, it's okay for them to rank in first place, but what they're doing is they're being a little bit clever or cheeky and they've gone and mapped out these pages and they may be using AI to make each page look individual. And so, if you report them, they're not going to disappear tomorrow. But I think it's crucial for the quality of the internet SEO and your business to make sure that it's an imperative that you report them. Absolutely. And this is quite the local SEO people that followed this is quite common seems to be a quite common tactic isn't it where they go to they go to a city and there's a there seems to be a number of different companies but when you dig down they have links to just one company there that's what you're talking about isn't it to some degree
Yeah if someone came to your shop and broke in and stole your merchandise and started selling in the shop next door, you would report them, no problem.

54:47 Right? And so if somebody's stealing your search position, you should do the same, right? And like I said, if you really want to improve the internet, stop harping on and saying, "Oh, write better content." Because frankly, that's just untrue because content is subjective.
Right to I think it's a good time for us to wrap up the show. So David, I think another great show. I think we covered a ton of stuff. What's the best way for people to find out more about you? What you're up to, David?
Yeah, come talk to us on X. Go to Reddit. Go to any of the subs in Reddit. I'm active on a lot of the SEO subs. Go to YouTube, leave comments. We really try to cover everything you talk about. A lot of people read the comments and so I think we could create a lot of useful shows on on that. Send us a message on LinkedIn. The best place is X.
Yeah, I think we're getting some good feedback. Like I say, we will be back in next Friday around 12 Eastern time, 9:00 Pacific Standard Time. Hopefully, you're going to learn something. That's what we hope. We will see you next week, folks. Bye.