Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Cyrus Shepard. Why don't you give yourself an introduction, and then we'll get deep into the weeds as quickly as possible.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hi, Jeremy. We were talking a little bit before the show. We've known each other for years online, interacted. Our first time meeting. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Many people may know me from my days back at mozzarella, or formerly SEOmoz, longtime SEO company where I kind of came up in my career, led SEO there for 10 years on and off.
A couple years ago, maybe three. At this point, SEOmoz Moz was bought out by J2Marketing, a big conglomerate, J2Martech. And so now I'm on my own. I run Zippy SEO, a consultancy here in Astoria, Oregon. I have no local customers. We work globally.
For those who don't know Astoria, it is home of the Goonies, if you ever watched that movie growing up.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: So Goonies never die.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Yeah, Goonies never die. Although they're getting pretty old at this point.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: At some point, a Goonies going to die.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: I hope not. I hope it never happens, because we're holding out hope for a sequel.
We'll see.
We'll see how that works out. But, yeah, so these days, I run a lot of SEO experiments.
I publish my data when I can, and I just try to have as much fun as I can working with SEO and various different companies around the globe.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: I know Patrick from Elite Strategies, who I work with. He had a question. He wanted a follow up on your famous incident where you disavowed everything.
Yeah, well, you give some. Give some context around that. Your thoughts on what you took away from that, and, like, what are your thoughts now, a few years later?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Yeah, so here's what happened. There's actually two experiments. I think the first one happened in, like, 2013 or something like that, where when I was at Moz, I disavowed every link to my website that I could find. Something, like back then, like 1500 domains. Yeah. And waited a while, and absolutely nothing happened.
Shortly thereafter, some of my traffic declined. But that was right when the first, you know, one of the Penguin updates came out. So we never really understood what happened. But, yeah, the point of all that was disavow. We're not really sure it works the way that Google is telling us it works, because if I disavow every link to my site, nothing happens.
So Fast forward to 2024, early 2024, I decided to repeat this experiment.
And with Zippy.com, i disavow. I go to Google Search Console, download every link. I look at Ahrefs, Semrush, combine them all into a file of, like, you know, 3,000 root domains, upload the disavow file.
That's scary.
I'm disavowing everything, and I wait two months and nothing happens. If anything, my traffic went up a little bit.
New content. I'm like, okay, so I published the results. And a lot of people had a lot of things to say when I published those results. Yeah, what's going on here? And there are four prevailing theories that came out of that experiment. One, the Google's disavow tool just doesn't work, doesn't do anything. It's smoke and mirrors. Two, Google ignored my disavow file because obviously, who puts all their domains into a disavow file? So that's a possibility.
Third possibility is that I didn't wait long enough. So a lot of people were saying, no, Cyrus, two months is not long enough.
Two months is when we destroyed our client's site with a disavow file. You need to go at least three months or longer.
So I thought that was an interesting idea. The fourth, which I thought was the most interesting, was that the disavow file only works in very particular situations, such as a case when you have negative links actively working against you. It's going to ignore the good links, only target the bad links, or when you have a penalty, which is very rare these days. We certainly know it helps in that situation.
So here we are. So I decided, let's try this again. And I haven't published any of these results. Okay. Okay.
So I refiled a new disavow file, this time only disavowing a third of the links. Like, oh, this isn't reasonable.
A third of my links are really crappy.
But I didn't disavow just the crappy links. I disavowed some good links, too, because I wanted to see an impact on my traffic, Right. And I left it in there. And something like four months. This was from last summer, so this fall sometime, and nothing happened. This is. This is a terrible story because nothing ever happens.
So after about four months, I took it out. I put in all my files again, and I forgot about it. Then someone asked me about it, like, a week and a half ago, and I'm, oh, I forgot I still have that file in there. So I checked, yes, you have disavowed 3219 domains took the file out and nothing has ever happened. So we are left. What are we to learn from this?
Maybe the disavow tool does something.
At this point, we can't prove it.
It's all voodoo at this point.
It could be smoke and mirrors. I still have. I still proactively disavow spammy blogspot domains and things like that. But
[00:05:44] Speaker A: yeah, that's a hard one because I have run into an opposite case.
Shout out to Michael McDougald.
He had a test case where a competitor was buying literally every month, 30 domains standing up, a spun version of the like. He would change templates and apply different templates with almost the exact Same content to 30 new domains every month. And it would sludge a bunch of links to everybody in the niche on hot links. Bizarre anchor text, broken anchor text. Inappropriate anchor text would just come at him en masse. 30 new domains every month. And we tried reporting the domains. We couldn't keep up with it.
Tried some takedowns. Okay, we'll just have an intern go in and see if they can detect what the new 30 spam domains are based off of these posts. And then we'll add a disavow file. And we did record, I recall a positive impact from that direct negative SEO attack and kind of negating and saying, we don't want that. We posited the theory that it was not so much that it was mostly about how Google was valuing the massive anchor text that was coming at us and diluting potentially our relevance in that niche. Because, you know, Suddenly we had 40 anchors that were totally off the wall, inappropriate, mismatched, and so like a secondary signal and not necessarily like directly impacting us on that side, but that was our theory.
So there's. Plus, it's plausible that it didn't do anything in that we imagined those changes.
But, you know, at the same time, like you. You have the use case of nothing happened. So I can't, you know, like, we have these anec.
We can't fully vet everything when we do these experiments.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Well, we know if you've been hit by a manual link penalty that Google still wants to see evidence that you've disavowed some links or you removed pages or things like that. And Google is obviously keeping it around for some reason. But I think the dream of SEOs that we can use the Disavow tool to, you know, really positively influence our rankings. You know, we want to use it as a Swiss knife. That. That's really difficult but in these extreme, these situations where you've been penalized or you've got thousands of spam domains or just be getting hit by attack, of course you're going to use it and you're going to, you're going to do everything you can to try to get out of that.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I'd be interested to hear some of your other recent experiments either that you have cooking or have in the past year, what have you, what else, aside from disavowing your whole site, have you been up to?
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So you know, Google's helpful content update hit in, well, different iterations hit starting in 2023, then 2024, March Core Update, August core update and a lot of my clients and sites reaching out to me online were sites that have been hugely negatively affected by a lot of these updates. So unfortunately, fortunately or fortunately, I've been diving into that hard for the past year.
So, you know, some of the signals that we've seen come out of this are, you know, Google, Google saying they, they don't want to reward SEO content, they want to reward people, focused content.
Yeah, that's good and fine, but what do they mean by that?
So we've been looking at things around over optimization, doing things that only SEOs do.
Things like, you know, what's something that only SEOs do? When a normal person publishes a blog post, you know, your grandma, she's going to Type it into WordPress and hit Publish. You and I are going to do a bunch of extra stuff.
We're going to tweak the title tag to get higher click through rates. We're going to add tons of schema to it to make sure we have all those things. We're going to add 30 links from inside our site to do that.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: H2 tags.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah, all sorts of stuff. There's some evidence, we don't know if it's a direct correlated factor, but there's evidence that sites that are doing those things really hard are seeing higher declines than sites that are just publishing content where the title Tag matches the H1 on the page and doesn't have as many internal links. This was really difficult for me because before Google's helpful content, I published a study on internal anchors how showing that sites that had a variety of internal anchors were outperforming every other site. It was the strongest signal I've ever seen from the data. And then after Google's helpful content update that reversed where sites with lots and lots of internal anchor text variations are now the ones at the bottom of the pile. So you Know, it's almost like Google went through and like, what are SEO's doing to manipulate our results? And then they just did the opposite.
Yeah. So that's one thing. That's one thing. The other thing is this idea. And this could be a. This. We could do an entire. The podcast on this is this idea of brand.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right, let's get there.
Because I had seen. I had seen one Cito study. I talked to Mark Williams Cook in his jam sandwich interview, and, you know, his classifiers break down, you know, tapping into those. He posited or echoed the theory that a portion of HCU was about distribution of clicks according to brand and whether you had far too many unbranded clicks versus branded clicks. And a corollary that was less proven was anchor text. That was branded versus unbranded anchor text.
So let's get into it. What did you pause it there? What do you think is going on in Brand?
There's a huge conversation me and Morty have had about the concept of brand being bigger. But what's your action item here that you are trying to test and understand?
[00:12:28] Speaker B: I am all for this conversation, and I'm glad you mentioned Mark Williams Cook. I had the pleasure of listening to one of his talks in Europe this past few months. One of the best SEO talks I've ever heard.
He's not a flashy guy, but if you're. If you can hear him talk in private, he will reveal such nuggets. It's great. Anyway, so brand. So Tom Capper, my old colleague at Moz, had this study last year where he found that sites impacted by Google's helpful content update had a much lower percentage of brand authority. It's a, it's a Moz metric, basically, lower brand search than sites that were not impacted by Google's helpful content update.
And he carried this out specifically on those sites. But it's. That relationship seems to carry out with all the subsequent updates. August core update, March core update, all that. So, yeah, the idea is just like you just said with Mark Williams Cook, the fewer people searching for you as a proportion of your overall brand search that those sites tend to do, not as well. And this is very difficult for content sites that are just pushing out content.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: You know, it's. It's not about you.
But my, my more recent research, and you kind of alluded to it, talking about this is. There's. There seems to be a couple different ways. There's. There's people searching for you, which we know is good. If everybody, you know, if Everybody's searching for IBM. IBM is going to be just fine right there. Also, there seems to be some other signals that SEOs can take advantage of that we are positioned to take advantage of very well. And that is not only how many people are searching for you, how many people are talking about you being in the knowledge graph, having that branded anchor text, all those things. My friend Gianluca Forelli wrote a great post about a month back. Maybe we can put it in the show notes talking about all the ways that Google can determine brand signals in all the data sets that they have, not just how many people are looking for you.
I think there's a huge correlation between branded anchor text and performance in these Google updates. That's something we can definitely start to influence. So the idea, for years, it's a new era. For years we've been talking about websites building brand and it's just hand wavy.
Build a brand.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Build a brand. Build brand.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: I saw this great quote on Facebook that was like telling it, telling a small publisher to build a brand is like telling a homeless person, just buy a house.
Why don't you just buy a house?
[00:15:15] Speaker A: Why don't you just buy a house?
[00:15:17] Speaker B: Yeah, we have this perception that brand is for, you know, big sites that everybody's talking about. We're, we're just a publisher. Yeah, but so we got, it's time to put the pedal to the pavement and you know, we, we have to start doing that work. What is brand building? What, what signals are Google? What signals do Google look, look for? And there are things we can do and you don't need to, you don't need to be IBM. You just need to tweak it a little bit. You just need to get the spigot flowing and get some of those brand searches coming in, get some of those web links and mentions and it's a defense. And you can start with that base and you can start growing. But it's not hand wavy anymore. 2025 we actually have to use SEO to build brand signals.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: I think it is also timely because LLM models now have a much more distributed system. We know that Perplexity and OpenAI are based off of index from Bing and Gemini obviously is pulling directly from Google. But if you look at the methodology you can do and Mr. Rand Fishkin, who I'm sure you are familiar with, he lectured us 12 years ago about the importance of unlinked branded mentions.
And I think that that idea has come of age because you can literally ask, hey, what is a Seattle top restaurant? And an LLM tool like OpenAI Perplexity.
They will give you a response and then you can ask them, please show your work. What were the citations that you used to build this concept? And they will tell you and they'll say, we cited this. This article here about a top restaurant, this listing here, this newsp for reporting here, this press release that came out here. And you're like, gosh, it seems like maybe that's more of like a digital, like would have been a PR item. Like if you asked in like the 1990s, how, how did you find out that this was a top restaurant? Oh, well, this article said that it was in the top 10 list and this journalist said this about them. And the, you know, so it's, it feels like it's coming full circle where SEO's almost unnatural obsession with we must get an anchor, we must get a hyperlink is giving way to a more open network of, well, in what ways can I build signals that build my brand entity that verify that I exist, that I am the authority that I say I am?
I kind of cheated self published a book on Amazon called I self published this SEO book and all I got was this lousy knowledge graph.
The irony is I did not get a knowledge graph.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Oh yes.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: I have not yet gotten a knowledge graph. I'm still working on it, which shows me that just self publishing a book is not enough to get into the knowledge graph as an author.
So I diligently recording the steps and I will have a version 2 added and published once I actually do get an official one. But I did get a featured snippet.
Now they have indexed my book and queries to OpenAI to perplexity. If I ask is Jeremy Rivera an SEO author, they say yes, and here's his book. So I'm starting to show up. But there's more work than just literally just publishing a book. There's more work than just adding stuff to your own site.
There's other facets that I've been digging into of places, resources that Google uses to build knowledge graph panels to optimize. So there's definitely lots of work to be done on the brand side of things, lots of opportunity. What are some of the things that you're looking at that aren't, oh, go get a guest post somewhere and get a hyperlink with your branded anchor. What are some of the unusual ways that you're looking to push brand or think about brand?
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Yeah, so there's a lot of ways.
So I think it's a larger shift for Publishers used to publish focusing on keywords and content, where I think in the old days, or, you know, meaning, you know, December 2024, you have a site and you're reviewing mattresses. Your site is called Mattress Toppers. And you have an article and you want to get a link.
So you're focusing on that keyword rich anchor text, you know, best mattress reviews or the best mattress 2025, you really want that keyword rich anchor text.
Where I'm trying to shift my clients now is especially for those that struggle with brand, is we forget the keyword and the content. We want links and mentions that are about you and the site. So we're gonna do the same digital pr. We're gonna do outreach, we're gonna spend that budget, but we're gonna shift it from the keywords and the anchor text to being about you. So now we want articles that are about the mattress experts at Mattress Topper. What they say, what are their opinions? Why are they experts?
We want to get quotes from the CEO and the real people, and we want to link to those. We want to build that authority. It's no longer about the article and the exact match keywords. It's about you and building the brand. So it's a shift in thinking, and we're uniquely poised to do those. That sort of digital PR the other ways. It's just getting your brand in front of people. I think. I think a perfect example that demonstrates this shift. I launched an SEO newsletter. I don't write it very often, but when I named it, I'm like, oh, let's go for something people might be looking for. And I named it the SEO Tips Newsletter because I was focused on the keyword. I'm like, hey, this, of course it sounds good. People are going to sign up, but not branded at all. Anybody could.
Anybody could write that newsletter.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Everybody wrote that newsletter. There's probably 25 SEO tips newsletter publishing today.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: What am I doing? I should have called it, you know, the Zippy SEO Tips Newsletter. Put Zippy SEO in there somehow. And it's a small thing, but over time, those things make a difference. I had one client that a site I was working with hit really hard in the travel niche, was so focused. And this is the irony of Google's helpful content update, which has nothing to do with content. His. His content was so focused on the reader that he didn't want anything about himself on that. He didn't want navigation. He didn't want a logo. He didn't want anything. He just wanted to get into the content. I'm like, yeah, you know, I, I think it would be helpful if someone reading this knows who you are and you know, you have a great, you have a great site name, you have a great reputation. Let's put this front and center. So just, just getting that site to put a logo on every page that you know was branded was a huge struggle. But we did it along with a bunch of other things, putting the branding first. And that's like, I'm not saying there's a correlation, but that site is one that has started to see a lot of recovery and uptick. So just branding everything, putting yourself first, putting people first, both who created the content.
I love, I love large pictures, people talk about author boxes. Who cares? I love putting the author photo big and center, you know, on every page, just so we know who created the content. Because there actually seems to be some evidence that Google is rewarding, you know, that people first content creator first content rewarding those signals. So, so lots of things that we're doing that don't seem like much on their own, but over time work in people's heads and starting to generate that brand recognition both with the user and Google's knowledge graph.
It seems to have a positive effect.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: It does. I mean, just from like an aside perspective, like if Google is struggling to sort out when suddenly OpenAI can produce 30 times as much content as a regular human, then it seems like, yeah, we're going to have to have a shift away from, we had that move from things to strings and now we're moving from strings to people because the machines can string things together much better. But still the concept of authority, like if you're, you have two sites that are producing content and they're both using AI generated content, like how would you like they're equal. So it does make some sort of logic or sense that the model would progress to having a higher value. I think perhaps, you know, the time has come for organic, not to mean organic in terms of, from Google, but organic as in an organic being produce this content.
Maybe like a human certified content process where we have a conversation with a genuine creator about the text that they created.
Interviews like this, where we're verified. I think Mark Williams Cook even said that there is a patent that Google has said they can voice print people and can match that to the content that they've written. So they know, hey, this person made this content, they spoke it.
No evidence that that's in use or is in there. But it is interesting that they patented that technology.
Not that all patents lead to anything or that any patents remain used as they originally were proposed.
But certainly I think that's logical a progression as we, we're fighting with robots, humans are going to be more valued.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I, I, that's such a good point. An example I'd like to use is like say I work with a lot of travel sites. So the, let's say you, your, your travel site you want to, you're talking about, you want to rank for things to do in New York City, you know, and if you Google that things to do in New York City with exact quotes in the title, they have something like 70,000 articles with that exact title to choose from. So how do you rise to the top of those 70,000? And even last year, a couple years ago, you would do it a very traditional way. You'd do your keyword research, you'd fire up surfer SEO or whatever, content optimization, you'd make sure you have all the subheadings, you'd add all the internal links to your site, make sure you get the external links. And that method worked. If you did it well, if you executed that well, you could do it. You could still do it, but not today because you're still competing against so many other sites that have done the same thing. So what's Google going to use?
Rack, racket up those brand signals, those human focused signals and the sites that are, what we've seen is the sites that did those traditional things very, very well are no longer in the game. It's the sites with the brand signals, the human focused signals. Rick Steves travel forum had skyrocketed.
He never.
How fortunate was Rick Steve that he just happened to have this sleepy travel forum plugging along for 10, 15 years and then Google decides they like people focused content and boom. Rick Steves is king of travel.
Deservedly so. Good guy.
I'm rambling now. I lost my point. Bring me on track, Jeremy, bring me on track.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: So I think let's take it to actionable execution.
You're in the SEO seat and you're coming in.
What are you doing differently in the next week after you listen to this, what should you look to do differently?
[00:28:09] Speaker B: Great, great question.
So one I think at the top you have to see, have you been impacted by any of the Google updates over the last year and a half, two years? If not, you're probably pretty safe going forward. And you probably fall into a bucket where you either have good branded search or you're not over optimizing things like that. If that's the case, keep doing what you're doing because Google hasn't applied a classifier on you and you're doing well. Next, you gotta look at your, you gotta look at your brand, you gotta look at your branded search.
Moz has a great tool, brand brand authority. You can run like 10 searches a month for free. I'm not trying to plug them. I think arev, Semrush, I think a lot of the other tool providers will start providing a brand metric very soon.
But you want to look at, and you can do this yourself in Google Search Console or you know, whatever tool, what percentage of your inbound traffic is branded and compare that to your competitors. And you don't want to be below the average. You want to be above the average. If you're below average, you have some work to do.
And then start thinking, then look at your site.
I'm not going to get into the over optimization stuff. I don't think because that's a little too in the weeds, it would take way too long.
But if every page of Your site has 50 unique anchor text from every other page, you might be over optimized.
We've done a lot of work with clients removing internal links, things like, actually, I will get into it. I will.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. We're in the weeds. Like, come on.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: Probably one of our most effective strategies of recovering sites that have been hit by HCU and other other updates is de optimizing and removing internal links. Making our title tags much more boring, making sure our titles match our H1s, things like that. But removing internal links. So looking, looking at sites hit by these, these updates, they oftentimes have far more internal anchor text variations than regular sites. So our job is to, to go through and start removing those links. Places like, places like the navigation, you know, the mega menus, things like that, related articles. SEOs like to add, you know, at the end of every article, 12 most popular articles, we just wipe them out.
And site owners are always scared like I can't remove my related articles, my traffic, people are gonna not click on links that my traffic's gonna crash. Hardly anything ever happens after remove these internal links in terms of engagement time on site, things like that.
Because I think it goes to the point that as SEOs, we're just adding all these internal links for Google more than people and we have no evidence that people are actually clicking on these links, things like that.
So out of the sites that I work with that have seen the most recovery, removing those internal Links.
The sites that have gone hardest on removing those internal links have seen some of the best results. So that's certainly something that we do.
Man, where was I? Brand.
But even after you deoptimize, then we start focusing on brand. We're starting to focus on how can we make this content more human.
There's a site that I like to use an example.
It's a mattress review site. That's why it was probably top of my head. Naplab, okay, they, they violate every rule in the book. They are over optimized, they have too many internal links. But I haven't looked at them in a while, but they were winning every Google update. But I love naplab, both as an SEO and a user, because if you look at any one of their articles, they, they review every mattress to a T. They probably have, you know, 50 pictures of the mattress, they're jumping on the mattress. They have videos and you know, they're doing scientific studies of the thickness, they're publishing the data on the results. They're doing things that don't scale and they're putting, they're putting themselves into the content.
And that's, that's something that I think expertise shift. Yeah, you know what, they, if you read one or two of their mattress reviews, you know who these guys are, you, you start to recognize them because they have made themselves the brand. It's not just about the mattress. They have put themselves into the content. So when I'm working with these, you know, travel sites or any sort of, I have a, I have a client that does Excel formulas. You would think Excel formulas, well, that's ripe for AI to take over. Right? But you know, our strategy with this client was we have to put you into the content. So there, now when you go there, there's videos of this client talking, there's pictures of him on every single blog post, you know, in goofy poses explaining how to do these Excel formulas. And we've really made the client the star of the website because Excel formulas, you can just go to chat GTP and get the best Excel formula, you know, ever. But now we've started to shift not just about the content, it's about the people creating the content.
And I, I, I'll tell you, it's really fun to do this.
It's really fun creating branded experiences because it's human. It, you're putting yourself out there, the, like a podcast like this.
It's authentic. It, it lives. And it's been a lot of clients don't want to do it a Lot of clients just want to run their business and yeah, you know, create, hire writers to create the content target. These keywords doesn't work as well anymore. So we're finding ways to work with Personas and bring those things in. So that's how I would encourage people to start shifting their thinking about SEO.
[00:34:01] Speaker A: One thing that I think could be useful as a model is to think about not so much like, yes, you could write, I'll use this example like you've got a machine that makes fry oil at a restaurant half as expensive. So the old school method would be, well, we're going right, you know how to recycle your dirty fry oil. We're going right about how to clean your fry oil. Maybe we'll get fancy and have it downloadable for employees on best fry oil uses.
But you're missing the boat because who is paying for the restaurant?
It's restaurant managers and entrepreneurs.
So what you really need to be doing is where are these entrepreneurs coming up from? Who is deciding to open a restaurant and where? Who are they looking to for answers about affordable ways to set up their kitchen? That's going to save them half of the cost on one of the most biggest ongoing expenses. You know, if you're frying foods, then that saves. That's a huge expense. Every single month, you cut that in half. That's huge. But it's only huge to restaurant managers and restaurant entrepreneurs. So don't make like, yeah, have a few pieces about fry oil rank for that. But you really should be looking to have conversations. Maybe find your own influencer who can speak to the journey of pricing out the rest of the kitchen. Make partnerships with all of the allies of other people who are selling other things in that space. Interview them about the best way to lay out the kitchen.
Have ergonomic experts talk to architects.
Architects, architect firms. There's so many opportunities where you could position yourself as a brand instead of just an online publisher. Who's saying, fry oil, fry oil, fry oil instead of a value proposition is money's at the bottom of the pyramid. Colby Wechter, who I interviewed, he said, you know, if you can save somebody money, that's okay, but the next tier up is time, and the next tier up is energy. And at the top of the pyramid, you have identity. So what they really want to be is they want to be a successful restaurateur.
They want to do have be able to have more time to more energy to do that. They can't divide their attention everywhere. So if you can save them the Energy, that's a little less effective. If you can save them time, that's pretty effective. And money is at the bottom of the tier.
I think it's about moving that focus of keyword research to people first.
I interviewed Keith Brezet, who has a whole people first framework where he's talking literally to three people who are actual buying guests and saying, hey, pitch this to me. You understand it pretty well. How would you sell it? And then he comes back and says, how would you sell it to your grandma? As a second question.
And so you take that grandma, that connection, like, how would they connect to that person? That's what you need to do. You need to understand the opportunity of who is searching for these things. Because keyword intent matters for more than just disambiguation of queries.
We sit here in our ivory tower of, you know, I'm guilty of it. I made an SEO tool. I worked at Raven Tools.
You know, we looked at the data so long that we forgot that the data came from people.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I couldn't be. I was struck by the storytelling aspect of what you just talked about and how it reminded me, like, there's so many products out there. The Shark Tank experience that people that go in Shark Tank can do well are not the people with the best deals or products, they're the people who tell the best story.
And it works so well. I also really liked.
I'm not sure it was intentional, but I really liked your grandma reference.
I use grandma analogies so often when I'm talking about Google.
Something we didn't get into today was when I worked as a quality rater, that Google's whole quality algorithms are all about protecting grandmas and grandpas, you know, from bad websites or websites that you can't trust.
Mark Williams Cook, interestingly enough, when I was talking to him, one of the things he revealed from his Google exploit is that what could confirm was with every website and every query, Google assigns a quality score to that website.
And that was the most fascinating thing part in the data to me. And he was surprised because one of the things he found was government sites. Even if they were terrible or ugly or didn't really answer the question, they always had a very high quality score above all the other sites. That was very validating to me because when I worked as a quality rater, we were trained to rate official government sites higher.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: And I think, I think some of that data is leaking into the algorithm and it's all about, you know, we want grandma to be safe on the Internet. So what are some of those signals, those trust signals, those quality signals, those expertise signals that we can put into our content to achieve those higher quality scores and move up the ladder.
[00:39:27] Speaker A: I was kind of exploring this concept before through the lens of the Medic update. I don't know if you had had a client in that space, but me and Darth Na Linden were exploring the possibility that the factor that flipped because it was overnight.
The prime example is Dr. Josh Axe. He literally hired Gannet writers and their articles were 4,000 words, long cited, at least a mandatory 15 scientific studies. And WebMD is in here with like a paragraph and like the laziest copywriting you had seen in your life. And overnight the algorithm flipped and suddenly Josh axe tanks and WebMD is at the top of the pile. And so we were hypothesizing that the one signal that you could flip overnight is distance to seed distance from truly trusted site, which now that we know there is a qualifier, a quality score for sites, then that can be passed by distance link to link to link. And that is a potential relationship value of looking at.
If you don't have trust flow, I guess you could go, that's another term.
Everybody's already made up all of these metrics already. But some sort of flow of trust from those highest quality sites to yours, if you don't have a link from there to yours, then that signal is not going to compete. And so you gotta do things to build that site quality signal.
And your proximity to those centers of trust is what we hypothesized could have been a metric flipped over overnight on Medic.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: I totally buy that. I, I didn't work a lot with Medi Kit sites. I mostly watched that update from the outside.
I totally buy that theory and think there's a lot of validity to it. I think we also saw some evidence during eat of I don't know what you'd call it, reputation analysis or sentiment analysis. You know, they're famous. Dr. Mercola famously went to zero on that update and he has a lot of backlinks and articles, you know, in the New York Times that called him a scam doctor or a fraud pseudoscience. And you can't, it's really hard to erase that from the Internet.
And there does seem to be a correlation between that sentiment analysis and sites that did well or not well. But certainly that that can't be the only solution. Also, can we give a shout out to Darth? I've never, I've never.
And if you're listening, Darth I've never. I've never actually heard your name pronounced. You said Darth Naw. I. In my head, I always said Darth Na, and I've been calling him Darth Na for years, so. But Darth Naw makes a lot more sense.
What does Darth Naw mean? Is there a meaning to that?
[00:42:35] Speaker A: I just. I think he just uses it as a Persona. I. I think he might have said what the Na represented before, but it's lost in the annals of time in history. But I do know his name is Lyndon.
[00:42:50] Speaker B: Is he from the uk?
[00:42:52] Speaker A: I can say that he definitely speaks with a UK accent.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, I think I've heard him once or twice before. Maybe. I don't know. I'm just a man. Every time I read his tweets, I read them in an English accent.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: It's true. They are in an English accent. I can verify that. I will not pull the mask from the sir, but the anomy. Anonymity will remain as intact as he wants it to be.
[00:43:17] Speaker B: It's you, isn't it? You're doing it. Nah.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: Is it. Is it me? Is it me?
My accent's terrible.
[00:43:29] Speaker B: It was great. Great.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
Let's cap this off with just something random. What's something that you learned that surprised you in the past? Let's give a time frame in the past month. Something in SEO. You went to a conference, you did an experiment, something that truly knocked your socks off, surprised you.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: You're putting me on the spot.
I'm going to pull up a file here real quick and may have to edit some of this out.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: It's live. I don't do very much editing. I'm going to have to be serious. You pull it.
Take your time. It's okay. We'll have some comfortable silence.
No, there's no such thing.
[00:44:28] Speaker B: I'm going to talk about something we've sort of talked about already, which is the idea of unique branded anchor text. We alluded to it before.
So I ran some data, and this is kind of interesting. I ran a lot of studies at Mozzarella. Huge correlation studies. We look at tens of thousands of domains and you do some data cleaning. You throw out the winner, you throw out the outliers.
Recently, I've started doing really bad data analysis where I've thrown out all the rules.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: In my new data analysis, because I'm examining winners and losers, we actually only look at the outliers. So what we do is we get these huge lists of winners and losers, and we look at the very top 1%. And we have, we have all this data now over the last few years where we have sites that have never lost a Google Update. They just keep going up and up and up. And we have. On the other side, we have sites that have lost every Google Update, no matter what they do. Down, down, down, down, down, down. So now we take the top 1% and the bottom 1%.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:35] Speaker B: Okay. Then we run, then we run the correlations through that. And when that happens, we, the, the correlations are exaggerated.
So you got it. You got to be careful. But the differences really stand out when you do that.
So one of the things we looked at recently, we specifically looked at branded anchor text among the top 1% and the bottom 1%.
[00:45:58] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: The, the top 1% sites that have never lost a Google update had on average 20% branded anchor text from different domains.
The bottom 1% had on average 2%.
And that it. And it was correlated ridiculously high. Like, I can't. Above 50%, which is not even real in the SEO world.
But let's just say that we've been using this knowledge to inform our link building and try to shift some of the things we're doing and we're seeing some positive results from it.
Or it could just be we're building links and it works.
[00:46:42] Speaker A: Yeah, either. Well, that's the nice thing is like, either we're building links and doing so creatively and getting into niches and thinking about, you know, like, I launched a service where I do trash cleanups for SEO companies, saying, hey, I will white label this. Your client doesn't even have to physically show up. I will get somebody there on that day. You know, we did one in Sarasota. Olaf showed up and he led a team of 20 volunteers that we. That had signed up on event pages that I'd made. I posted to Eventbrite, posted to the county site. There were, you know, real communities posted to Facebook and Reddit subreddits and got 20 real people to show up and clean the beach that day. And we took pictures.
And so, like taking, you know, that I think of it as a mirror. Like, there is what is your business on this side of the mirror that physically represents and then the mirror image of it on the Internet. Like, there's part of your job as an SEO is to mirror what does exist in the real world.
And that is much easier to do if you do stuff in the real world. If you're making a real world impact, it is so much easier to duplicate that and make sure that that reflection Exists versus making a shadowy form.
Making you seem bigger on the Internet than you actually are.
So sometimes it's about taking real world steps and doing those things to get more branded mentions. And it's not even about getting an anchor text. It's about your business. It's just this person did this in the real world and that kind of reflects absolutely.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: Be real.
[00:48:33] Speaker A: Be authentic real.
I think we'll leave it on that SEOs listening to this. Cyrus says be real, but I think that's fantastic.
That is the goal.
[00:48:49] Speaker B: To paraphrase Will Reynolds of Sierra Marketing, do real shit.
[00:48:55] Speaker A: Love it. Love it. We'll put that all in the show Notes. Thanks so much for your time. Give a shout out to any upcoming projects. Where can people find it? Find you? If you hang out on any of the social channels and actually reply, is there a Slack community? Or if you're on X or wherever. Where'd you hang out?
[00:49:14] Speaker B: Hanging out mostly on LinkedIn and blue sky right now if people want to find me. But I, I'm kind of, I'll respond to you on, on Twitter if you reach out all that.
I, if I can, if I can plug something here, I'd love to. I, I never plug anything on, on podcasts, but I have something new. I, I'm in a very fortunate position where I, I get more leads than I can handle as a, you know, marketing company. And I'm always, I'm always connecting people, people looking for SEO services. I have a small group of people that I can refer them to. But sometimes, sometimes I just don't have the right person. So I go online and I'm looking at, you know, who should I recommend? And the truth is marketing directories are just broken. If you go to Design Rush or Clutch, these lists, they're just, they're terrible. It's all pay to play play.
You know, the agencies are spending thousands of dollars a month to be on the first page.
They're, they're in every category. Or you have the alternative. You have marketing directories like Semrush Agency Partners, which is a fine service but you have to, you have to subscribe to Semrush. You have to get their certifications. Same with HubSpot. You know, it's just a broken system. So I'm, I'm very happy to let people know we're launching a new marketing directory that is human powered using lots of the concepts that we talked about that actually rates people on real world metrics experience. It's community driven. So agencies and marketing companies can you know, influence each other and recommend each other.
And it's launching probably around the time that this podcast is going live. It's called Zippy List, and we are inviting applications from from the marketing communities. If you're a consultant or an agency, we'd love to have you apply and be part of the community. So plug in that.
[00:51:04] Speaker A: Fantastic. Thanks so much. Time for so much. Time for your Nell, thank you so much for your time.
[00:51:13] Speaker B: You're like me ordering wine at a fancy restaurant. I'll have the Monta. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:51:18] Speaker A: I'll have the shoppernet.
[00:51:21] Speaker B: Love it. Jeremy, thank you so much for having me today. Talked about a lot of good stuff.
[00:51:26] Speaker A: All right, see y.
