Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Martin, who's going to give himself a brief introduction about where he is at with freelancing and SEO. But then we're going to dive into some of his SEO experiences and some of the niches that he's worked in, kind of dig out those hidden treasures of experience.
There's a lot of folk in SEO who have their heads down doing the work rather than going out and talking about it. So I'm actually excited about this conversation with another hard worker in the SEO field. So, Martin, why don't you give yourself an intro?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Cool. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, this is probably like the first real podcast I've ever done.
Like I said, I'm one of these. Keeps his head down. I get out to conferences.
I'm in a lot of the SEO community forums, but generally, yeah, just head down doing the work. And I've been doing SEO for about, I'd say doing some kind of SEO for about 20 years, professionally, about 10 years.
But I started off in the.
In the sort of murky world of building WordPress websites and trying to hack links and just rank whatever I could and fell into the black hat trap, but then went clean about 10 years ago. So been a freelance consultant for around 10 years, generally working with small businesses. So small businesses local to me in the uk, I've sort of drifted over to the States a few times and picked up some healthcare clients and done a lot of work in igaming as well. So I gaming affiliate. If you see me on LinkedIn or any of the forums, I'm probably whining about black hat SEO. That's my current bugbear. So, yeah, very much reclusive SEO. I get out to conferences, but otherwise people don't really know a lot about me.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: So there's a lot there that we could dig into. I have a personal gripe and maybe you can chime in about it. As somebody who's built extensively on WordPress, it's 2006 and my blog is over. My WordPress blog is overwhelmed with comment spam.
It's 2016 and my blog is still overwhelmed with comment spam. It's 2026. I log into my client site to find 2,200,000 spam comments submitted to them. They all hit the filter. Luckily, it wasn't a setting preset to just let it go, but it seems that structurally something is not progressing within WordPress to kind of keep up with some of these things that seem like baseline decisions as far as the platform. Like if you knew that regularly everybody was being spammed with URLs coming in through the comment, then you would expect a platform might have amended in the past 20 years the ability to submit a URL by default through the comment section at all. But that hasn't occurred. What's. What are some of your frustrations about using WordPress as a CMS, as a platform, then and now?
There are things that I do like I think there's some needed functionality as far as permissions, but go ahead and sound off.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: I don't use it anymore. To be fair, I've thrown a website together for myself.
Pretty rubbish. So like most SEOs, it's terribly SEO'd. But yeah, I've had that problem for a long time. So the disabled comments was one of the first plugins I always used to install straight away. Disable comments. I think it was called globally Disabled comments. And it's sort of transitioned into other plugins, but definitely one that I would install straight away. Just switch it off.
Yeah. So I tend not to use WordPress anymore purely because of the amount of files and taxonomies and categories and tags that were automated. And those are the kind of things, especially if you're doing techniques, you're switching them off straight away. So there was a lot of effort to do the basics with WordPress. So you still work with a lot of clients who have WordPress. It's great for automation.
The RSS feed means you can sort of and the API means you can literally plug in and automate from your local machine or through some kind of self built automated tool.
Yeah. So I guess the flexibility of WordPress is also its curse. Somebody said it's the most secure and the most insecure platform in the world. At the same time, you know that you could pretty much find a hack for WordPress on a, you know, on the dark web or on a dark forum somewhere and that's going to be shared globally. You expect it to be patched really quickly.
So in that sense, you know, it's pretty secure. But just that there's a global world of hackers going after WordPress websites. So yeah, it was mainly, you know, mainly the amount of stuff that could be injected into it. As an SEO, you're constantly working with clients who have all kinds of things injected. These could be basic websites. I've had local clients for people who are singing acts or local trades people and most of the time they come to you with an exploit of some kind and It's a plugin, obviously.
Do you remember everybody had the slide in.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Was it Sliding Rev Slider?
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Rev Slider, yeah. Oh my God, that was horrendous.
Yeah. Even locally, like just small local clients and you could, you could see it straight, like, what have you installed? And Rev Slider was probably one of the first things just to, just to have cool rotating banners on your, on your homepage, probably people barely saw. But yeah, the functionality got, got huge from Rev Slider. You could, you could, you could have full PowerPoint presentations in your Rev Slider and you know, no one would ever see it. But yeah, mega security for that one.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: There was a site that I saw that, so was the register domain of should I use an image slider on my website?
And it was like, no, absolutely not in a slider. Just, no, absolutely not. Don't do it. People aren't going to watch it.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: Like, yeah, it's 2010. Wasn't it when carousels, carousels were huge and then the red sliders came in.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Yes, it's one of those fad trends, you know. And then next was, ooh, everything's got to be Parallax. You know, it's got a nifty little scrolling effect and the text has got to go over the image behind it.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: I think there's a web agency here in Leeds called Parallax.
They built their whole business model around kind of single page websites.
Obviously another bugbear for the SEO, the single page site. But yeah, the cool trends in WordPress tend to lead to exploits.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: I agree and it seems to me you're right that the flexibility of WordPress is in fact its curse. Because there's no incentive for the WordPress core team to progress the platform in a specific direction.
Even fundamentals of fixing comments or as you pointed out, turning on and off extra taxonomies because out of the box everyone, they're like, oh, you can do whatever you want with the plugin. So you know, like, they like, oh, well, you know, you've got, we've got four walls, you know, step in and you've got four walls and then just add plugins to like put in dividers and heating and plumbing and at some point that, that, yeah, that creates a mishmash of like, yes, I have worked in very, very secure WordPress environments with, you know, Word Fence, you know, firewalls. They had their permissions down and they were doing very complicated things and then, you know, somebody installing WordPress and, you know, they got hacked on the second day that they put it up because they used password 12345 as their username.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: I was looking at some of your other podcasts. There's been a few discussions about the helpful content update. And there were sort of rumors around the time that a lot of WordPress, WordPress, WordPress sites with obvious footprints were sort of taken down.
Yeah, you think about, you think around the attributes of the kind of site that disappeared at the time. A lot of them were WordPress sites with the same themes. Not quite custom themes, but there were a bunch of themes that were quite prominent in the SEO industry that were talked about as being simple to scale. And you just see the, you know, the pattern of sites that disappeared were all very similar.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: That's an excellent point. Yeah, we were in that discussion.
Our theory is around distance to seed in terms of authority passing from authority websites in a particular niche. But you're right that there were also. That's the programmatic scalable side. I did see, you know, listed among the casualties that Lily Ray was listing out when HCU first hit and then its first major update.
A lot of them were WordPress. And achieving those programmatic goals of, you know, celebrity birthdays was a huge sub, sub niche.
It's funny to think that in just such a short time ago, you know, when HCU was released, you know, we still had featured snippets, but we didn't have AI overviews. Because now if you ask for a birthday for a celebrity, it doesn't show you a website, it shows you an AI overview.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we got to the point where everybody could be a creative and I don't think Google wanted that sort of competition.
Because if you're a creator with the ability to put your, your information on a website and you're literally filling up the index with, you know, infinite, infinite content. And I think at the time I heard somebody say that the helpful content update was not about finding helpful content, it was about finding a profile of a website that looked helpful. It wasn't about the content on the site. It was about the, the entity graph or the knowledge graph.
Would you trust that, that platform, would you ask that, that person or that company for help?
And I think then it was Danny, Danny who came, Danny Sullivan came up afterwards and said all the wording around the helpful content update was probably incorrect.
So, yeah, we all fell into the trap of thinking like, why is our content, our helpful content not being acknowledged here?
Yeah, I think it was just the wider theory that Google needed to ax quite a fair bit the index.
And it was looking at the the, the entity graph or the knowledge graph as, as the, the, you know, the, the signal for who to keep and who not to keep.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Chris Tweeten over at Spacebar Collective is in Calgary doing SEO.
Yeah, he, he echoed that theory that, you know, Google was taking a step there about like how much of the Internet they're actually willing to service.
Because at some point the incentive that was created meant that every single plumber had an incentive to create a page about leaky faucets.
And we don't. You know, Google was basically turning around and trying to reverse the momentum of the agreement that it had made of incentivizing just create good content, which it's said the whole time, but now it's, we want good content from specific type of entities that we can monetize.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of what we still do is about words on pages, isn't it? So that's true.
There were local companies just filling up their sites with text, really. And I think there's still a lot to be said about having text on the site. Google still crawls words on pages, but it tries to build a background profile for you. And that's basically what a lot of the prospectors got wrong, a lot of the content prospectors and the creators got wrong. They just thought having a single platform full of words was enough. And at one point it was. You know, Google used to be for everybody.
That was the great thing about it. You know, a lot of, a lot of SEOs got into SEO through that, that notion that Google, Google and ranking was for everybody at one point.
Yeah, and that's, that's massively changed over the last two years.
It's a really strict discipline now. And the threshold for entry has been put up by Google. There's a really high threshold now.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: I absolutely agree and I think it comes down to a requirement of understanding. And um, you know, Jason of Calicube who I interviewed, he talks a lot about Google's understanding of entities and their connection of your business beyond just the words and pages on your site, but with other citations, other confirming signals and data in their index and database, which you kind of need to understand, is also a framework that, that LLM based tools are leveraging. You know, and to the large extent that a lot of LLM tools, a lot of the AI tools are functionally just a wrapper for Google results.
So you know, if Google is, you know, not looking just at content, but it's a much more structured play around brand trust and entity understanding, those are things that, you know, either you're going rank better in Google and show up in those LLM queries because they're doing that secondary search, they're searching their training database. Do we have that information? Yes. No. No. Then I'm going to do a Google search truck on, check for my top trusted seeds to reference, check for secondary sources and provide a response.
So we have chances to optimize in both that top area of getting into that training data to begin with that entity and understanding information and then as well as, you know, doing the work to show up in the rankings under, in those more com, those more competitive niches. So all of that leads to, you know, you having to be a lot more aware of branding, a lot more aware of building authority, which I, I think I've seen. You know, it's led to a renaissance of a lot of black hat recently in the past three years, a lot of old black hat strategies that were dead like, I mean they literally for had a minute of white text on white background being the trick to show up in LLMs again.
So what's been your experience on that side Link building authority, spotting black hat tactics? What's been your take on the market recently?
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I work in iGaming, so I probably rant about it a bit too much online.
Yeah, I've been in and around that for a long time. It still boils down to the fundamentals that SEO is about words and links and it's just the quality of those two.
The measurement of that has changed over the years. So we've gone from a place where lots of words and lots of links were the measurement. Now we're at a point where it's quality words and quality links and Google's better at measuring the two distinctions. But everything still boils down to that, in my opinion. We're still measuring, you know, the relationship between links and the way you can measure the quality of the two relationships is with the content on those, those two entities. So again, the fundamentals are words and links. But yeah, I've seen the transition over the years. I've seen, you know, I've been immersed in what you would call sort of quite technical blackout back in the day where, you know, it wasn't specifically automated. You have to go out and, and kind of build the links yourself and churn content yourself.
The capability that's available now is a thousand times more technical than it was back in the day. But I've been there since the early 2000s and seen the transition from the Panda and the Penguin algorithms to suddenly websites Just disappearing with no knowledge of what algorithm is, is doing the work behind the scenes.
Yeah, definitely a rise in more Blackout recently.
I do complain a lot about it and I probably use this as an opportunity to explain that I'm generally looking for balance within, within the system, you know, because a lot of what we do contradict, contradicts or contravenes what Google says within their guidelines. So a lot of SEO goes against Google guidelines.
We do want balance in the serps. We do want to be able to show that some things work.
We do want levers that we can pull as SEOs.
What we don't want to be is in a place where top 20 are churn and burn sites that you just can't compete with because you work with a company that needs to stick around and, and be in the cert permanently because they've got, you know, they've got stuff, they got long term prospects.
You have to, you have to adopt a different type of approach to SEO. You can't dive in and do the same things black Hats because that site will disappear.
So you either do nothing and let the black hat carry on or you stand up and say something. And that's about all we can do at the minute. Because blackout is so prolific in some of the searches. All we've got is our voice to go on social media and rant.
But it's striving for balance within the SERPs. You know, we don't want a top 20 that are all the same profile that, that will be gone tomorrow and then there's a different top 20. We want a balanced set of SERPs where we have, you know, equal opportunity to compete and, and you know, that I think that's a fair, that's a fair way of approaching it.
There's just a Dell use at the moment, especially in igaming where I do a lot of work.
It's not necessarily, you know, people taking black hat risks. These are offshore illegal companies. So you know, if this was pharmaceutical and it was, if it's a reputable pharmaceutical company having to compete with drug, drugs and you know, offshore illegal suppliers, then that stuff would disappear straight away. But I just think I. Gaming has been sort of left from Google.
They don't quite understand the differences in regulation from country to country.
So it's just something that they've tried to deal with algorithmically.
If it's AI that's measuring this, then it's going to take a bit longer for the training to catch up.
But yeah, it's just been left, it's surprising that it's been left this long.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: I agree there has to be within the SEO community because There was a LinkedIn post a couple weeks ago and somebody I respect finally sounded off and said Google is taking very large chunks of our capability and you know, over monetizing things. We're just finding that out in court cases that they intentionally over optimized for PPC and, and getting results. You know, you've got AI overviews one organic and then ads be above and below and basically the, the homepage has three organic slots total on it.
Um, so he was talking about that and the difficulty and someone was like, oh, who do you think you are complaining about this? And I was like, you know, if we just stand around and while Google pisses on us and we say that it's we're being it's rain, then the piss will continue.
You know, there are feedback mechanisms. They're not as responsive I think, as they were in prior generations of SEO.
I think they're a bit attenuated. But if we never make any complaint within where our voices can be heard, then there's no chance for these upended systems for SERP verticals that are totally inundated. You know, I just interviewed with Timothy Malmos who retired from black hat SEO and now he kind of does black hat investigation journalism, pointing out the huge abuse of canonical domain redirect systems where they're just buying up gobs of domains, buying an old site, standing it up and then canonicaling on the back end that traffic towards their end destination.
And it's working in a ton of verticals and niches. And so, you know, it's something where if you don't bring the sunlight, you never get the disinfectant.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a bit of a perfect storm going on at the minute actually, because I'm not sure if you've seen the Telegram link prospectors as well. So there's an old fashioned method of selling your backlinks at scale and that's to add backlinks to various different brands with your anchor tag in it advertising your services. So that's gone off the charts that's been scaled like to hundreds of thousands of sites and that's created millions of links that Google just isn't dealing with at the minute. I get sentiment that Google deals with spam links, but I think the reason it fails and the reason the expired domains work is because there's, there's a grace period where Google needs things in the serps to understand if it's what the user wants or what the user doesn't want.
It's the grace period that seems to help these tactics flood the SERPs. And when you've got 100 copycats of copycats all doing the same thing now, it just becomes untenable.
But yeah, there's a strange system at the minute where, you know, I think really Google doesn't really understand what's going on until it's in the SERPs. Obviously it's a smart company, smart algorithms, they can, they can pretty much stop a lot of spam before it gets into the public domain. But quite often it's actually having to understand from, you know, a real life search results page whether something's appropriate or not.
And that's the, that's the, that's the battlefield that makes this opportunist. Because these spam sites can rank a page for two or three days.
You know, it gets tanked almost instantly, but there's another 10 waiting to be loaded.
And what these spam links have done, it's made a, a system where Google is actually reassessing the organic listings that were already there and thinking should we punish these or not? Let's see if they disavow or.
I've seen some sites disappear and they had no reason to disappear. Digging into the details, it's probably these telegram link sellers that it looks harmless but they're diluting anchor tags and they're pretty much destroying someone's link profile.
They think they're being harmless prospectors but you know, they're, they're destroying whole SERPs. And that makes the, that makes the, that makes room for anyone sort of launching a blackout site. You've got 20 sites that are under a temporary link penalty. You know, your expired domain just slots in instantly.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: That's interesting because I did have an unusual scenario in a manufacturing niche for, for doors and what I discovered was somebody was buying 20 domains a month and restanding up on different themes. Pretty much the same CMS content library full of junk links and bad anchor text towards everybody else in the SERP. And everybody that was in top 10 for a particular SERP was just getting sludged again and again with irrelevant anchor text.
And then there was one person that would, wasn't getting sludged. So I suspect, I can't prove, but I suspect that they paid the black hat person to do this because their rankings rose not because they gained a benefit specifically from the black hat, but they took everybody else down by misdirecting the anchor text. Like both image hot links Direct links on irrelevant, with irrelevant things. And then they'd recycle it. Every month, 10 new domains would pop up and that again, another layer of sludge. So we had to develop a hygiene program of an aggressive disavow and check every week. Okay, well they launched another 10 sites. Let's disavow them. Once we started doing that, our rankings, that had tanked, they started to climb back up and our anchor text profile got cleaned up after that.
But it's, yeah, it's, it's very frustrating to work within systems that are getting sludged by intentional or secondhand, you know, black hat tactics.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, with juis, we get one spam update a year that we know of.
So, you know, who knows if that's going to come soon.
We're in the March core update window. So, you know, maybe there's going to be a, an announcement soon.
Yeah, I, I just want balance serps back. You know, I, I want to be able to pull levers and for them to work not, not to pull levers and end up on page three because that doesn't benefit anybody, that doesn't benefit the industry.
The, they're, they're contributing towards crime as well, which in the, in the UK is, it is makes it illegal. So they're offshore, you know, they're offshore brands just hitting our strips.
Yeah. And that's, you know, that's the challenge. I'm not here to, I'm not here to sort of be on blackout tactics because, you know, I am, I'm always of, of the opinion that what, what we do as SEOs, you know, isn't always appreciated by Google and we're all trying to pull levers and we're all trying to get our clients to the top spot. So sometimes you have to get our elbows out.
I don't mind the chatter from black hats on, on social media. They're those that come out and say, you know, we're the ones making, you know, regular money and we're the ones that are, you know, testing the waters. But, you know, it's a bit of yin and yang. You know, there's, there's still got to be balanced, there's still got to be an organic business and you know, we're allowed to, we're allowed to get our elbows out and kind of compete as well.
But yeah, I, I prefer it when it's balanced and you can have sort of fair conversations with those trying different, you know, techniques. At the moment, it's not balanced at all. It's just it's swamped.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: I'm curious, you know, because my friend Matt Brooks SEO TerryX, you know, chat GPT is your most popular but least trained customer support representative.
Have you adopted anything in your stack to try to influence or take any extra steps specific towards, you know, those LLM results? You know, is there any practical advice for, you know, a company delivering hard services, you know, delivering walls, you know, precast concrete walls or whatever, or building sunrooms or what have you. Is there any practical thing that they should be doing that's tactically specific or beneficial that you weren't, wouldn't or shouldn't or shouldn't already be doing for SEO purposes?
[00:32:26] Speaker B: Do you mean to appear within AI search?
[00:32:28] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: I still think there's a big content gap.
I'm kind of what you would call an old fashioned granular SEO and I use SEO in a term of optimization. I think SEO split down the middle. You've got SEO, you're optimizing things on the site, you're doing tech, you're doing conversion rate optimization and maybe forensic. And then you've got SEM, which is the marketing side where you're reaching out to find link opportunities, you're spotting gaps in your content. So I sit in the granular SEO side where I'm optimizing. I think there's still this situation where companies I bump into, they've got either too much content so they've gone down, that we need to scale this now, or they've neglected so they haven't got enough. So when I talk about the optimization side of SEO, I think there's a huge gap in people actually looking at what traffic they have and really know, pinpointing whether they're, they've got enough unique content, enough, you know, informational stuff that's beneficial to their individual users, not just the, you know, the wider searcher.
And the one thing we're going to have that AI doesn't have going forward is perspective. You know, like you have a perspective on the, on the product that you sell and your opinion and your perspective is going to be your currency in the future. You know, when AI is given, when AI can give us all the facts, you know, the facts are the things that can't move, you know, the size and the scale, the, the color. So if you're talking about your walls example, you know, the technical elements of, of that product are the facts. You know, a, I can dig that stuff out straight away. But the perspective and opinion that we have as publishers of content and SEOs are really what the AI training models are looking for going down the future.
Why should someone buy this particular product?
I use a flip flop example all the time when I talk to customers.
Who buys a flip flop for the rainbow? You know, flip flops is a. Everyone assumes a flip flop is a summer piece of clothing, but there's a. There's a different perspective for people who live in like, tropical countries.
So that perspective is the kind of unique.
It's not a unique selling point, but it's a, It's a uni. It's a unique angle to be. Yeah, a unique angle that not many people consider. And it's only when you get down into the granular use cases for products that you think of the various different buying perspectives. And that's currency for the future.
A lot of people are still focusing on the general aspect of it.
Flip flops are for summer.
They go on your feet. Not very much to it. You can buy design and not much changes, but there's a thousand different perspectives from different buyers, you know, buying Personas.
And that's still where we as SEOs and publishers can, you know, battle against AI. AI can't reproduce perspective or opinion.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Opinion. I think that's, that's really, you know, the, the saving grace of humanity is every, every human has two things, a butthole and an opinion.
Turns out that Chachi doesn't have either of those things. It doesn't have an opinion. It's just the world's biggest yes man. You know, it wants to please.
In 98 of its uses, you have to be very thorough and diligent to try to craft a prompt, to get a strict analysis or the kind of judgment call that we take for granted. You know, the.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Yeah, the I am
[00:36:54] Speaker A: is something that humans are good at.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: Anyone learning SEO right now, I've got a top tip is to try the API. You know, you do a little bit of learning, you can, you know, you can pop up Visual Studio and you can access the API in your terminal and just ask the raw API a question. So that's the OpenAI LLM, the Gemini LLM, whatever else you use, and just ask a raw question. What you get back is junk. And then you realize that there's some, you know, there's some background process, you know, augmenting the chat results. So when you use ChatGPT or Gemini, there's something else working in the background.
And that's a big, that's a big learning curve for anyone who's kind of new to AI, is realizing that the standalone LLM on Its own is rubbish, in my opinion. And there's definitely some. We know this, we know there's rag in the background, we know OpenAI has been caught Googling.
So yeah, I think that's a big learning curve, is definitely understanding the extra requests that go on to give us AI search results.
And if you can understand how that's done, then as SEOs, we know, you know, where we know SEO is not dead, first of all, because these LLMs are having to go out and get extra information from somewhere. So if you learn how that happens, you still learn where you're needed, you still learn where your site needs to be positioned for that rag or that augmentation to happen.
So if the battleground goes server side, we need to learn where we need to create that content to be acknowledged.
So, yeah, I think that's definite top tip. For anyone worried specifically about AI search as well,
[00:38:54] Speaker A: I think reading Wolfram Alpha's breakdown of what is an LLM is fundamental. Just understanding at a basic level, it is just math, it's predicting, it is not actually actual words that it's spitting out. It's spitting out output from a mathematical formula based off of its lexicon.
It looks like English, it reads like English, but it's not intentionally using the formulation that it's not converting code into human language, it's mathematically creating sentences that fit a predictive model. And because of the strange, unique nature of the way that we speak, we use what, 2,000 words within a day when we're being quite loquacious.
You know, usually people's vocabulary might consist of 3,4000 words at maximum.
So follow some basic linguistic structures in English and you can make a computer output programmatically things that read like their sentences and can contain subject, predicate, verb formations that can convey information, but it's not conveying things thought, it's not conveying concept out of the raw, it's just doing so based off of a predictive model.
So if you don't understand that system, that footing to LLM tools, you will never be able to fully optimize for it because you will fundamentally misunderstand what it's doing. And, and like you said, how it has to augment those processes with secondary things.
You know, being able to retrieve information from a secondary database to now pull those things, that's, that has to be, you know, has to have extra processes to be able to do that. So you're absolutely right. A better understanding of LLMs and how they function and how they fail can definitely lead you to having a more sustainable approach to both SEO and LLM optimization.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: I haven't heard anyone I think this is going to be the new LLMs Txt, but I've not really heard anyone say we should be optimizing our RSS feeds yet or API so we can swing back to WordPress.
You see a lot of the RSS feeds from WordPress sites just get scraped.
It's going to be around optimizing your RSS feeds, our SEO server side, at some point maybe then we'll be Talking about our APIs or our RSS feeds.
[00:41:51] Speaker A: That's an interesting point. I like the way that that thought goes because we have kind of created some of these information architecture systems and then kind of forgot how they worked and just took them at their surface level.
But now the machine's coming in and realizing, oh, hey, you're giving me stuff. I can take that stuff and add it to my database and process it and use it.
So yeah, that's always room for optimization. If an external system that you want to show up in is taking input, then you should figure out how to optimize that input.
[00:42:33] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of talk about MD files and text files at the minute, and it may be simpler than that. Maybe we just all build RSS feeds with XML files. I don't know. Maybe I'm the first to go down that route. There'd be a whole raft of courses on it by next week on LinkedIn.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: I certainly expect so. Aren't you shout out where people can find you if they want to pick your brain. I know you're doing some freelance consulting.
I know you threw together a WordPress site a while ago. I'll make sure that that gets linked. But people want to hang out and chat with you. Where can they find you?
[00:43:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So if you Google Search Assistants, I generally come up for that in the uk.
It was just a random name I picked a long time ago.
I'm on Blue sky as well. I jumped from Twitter and X when that exodus happened.
Shout out to the SEO community as well.
[00:43:35] Speaker A: The.
[00:43:36] Speaker B: The Slack. The Slack group.
That's a great place for catching me. I'm constantly on there whining about blackout.
Yeah, Blue sky or Search Assistants.
I'm. I'm your. Your granular content SEO. I sort of get dirty with words on pages still.
I'm still a lover of the keyword. Even though everyone says shouldn't be optimizing for keywords still. You know, it's still one of the fundamentals for me. So yeah, try and try and hit me up on blue sky and LinkedIn as well. Yeah, I'm always on LinkedIn.
[00:44:18] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time, Martin.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: Cool. Thanks for having me.
