SEO… But Stolen From Social #1

TRANSCRIPT:

Michael 0:00
Hi guys, Michael here before we get into the show, if you’re a Twitter user head to at service scaling, I’m tweeting a bunch of stuff. I’ve learned scaling our digital marketing agency, and I think you’ll find it pretty interesting. All right, let’s get into the show.

Unknown Speaker 0:15
It’s time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization, so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here’s your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

Michael 0:37
Hello, and welcome to episode 49 of the SEO show. I am Michael Causton. And I’m joined by Arthur fabric. Good afternoon. How are you going? Did you know that it was 49?

Arthur 0:47
Where it Yeah, no, I didn’t. Well, actually, I did. I was looking at the run sheet before so you’ve got 49 in the top left corner. It does half a century almost.

Michael 0:57
I know maybe we should do something special for the Big Five. Oh, next week.

Arthur 1:00
What are you thinking?

Michael 1:02
No cake. Maybe those little party things that you know where you go where blow them hotties?

Arthur 1:08
Would you call them? party poppers? No,

Michael 1:09
that’s what I was gonna say. But no, must have another name. You know what? Who cares? It’s just another episode of

Arthur 1:15
the show. Well, if we’re gonna do that, we probably need to record it so that people can actually see what we’re doing. Yeah, the high excitement maybe. Maybe we will record next week. It’s our 50th episode. We’ll make it special.

Michael 1:26
Okay, maybe we can wait a little party hat we can.

Arthur 1:28
I’d love to see you in a little dumb deal.

Michael 1:31
Look, have you? Out of interest survived? The helpful content update? Have I? Yes. Personally, have you come through unscathed?

Arthur 1:40
While I’m here? I know. You’ve made it. Yeah. trolled in a few deathbed. Yeah, look, to be honest, I still haven’t noticed anything really? No, have you? Nothing? No. I’ve been keeping a very close eye on on on my clients specifically. And I have not noticed a single thing. Which goes to show maybe we’ve done a very good job. And we have nothing to worry about.

Michael 2:01
Yeah, well, look, I’m going to say yes to that. But I’m also going to say maybe it hasn’t finished rolling out properly. Who knows. But from all life sort of investigations. And from everything we can see. It’s been a bit of a nothing burger so far.

Arthur 2:16
Yeah. They said a week, two weeks ago, man was Yeah, was about two weeks ago when we recorded.

Michael 2:22
Yep. So that has been like a little bit of volatility a few days ago, I think it was now losing track of time, but um, not not major, like, all the signs are pointing to before the update happened. So watch this space. We’ll see what happens. Touchwood Touchwood. We’re not here actually to talk about that. today. We’re here to talk about things we’ve stolen from social media. If you remember, it was remember last time we did this a Twitter thread? Yes. And we could make it into a

Arthur 2:53
segment was wondering where you’re gonna go that because there’s no title for this episode. So

Michael 2:57
it’s called stolen from social stolen social. It’s the next episode in the series. And I said I was gonna make an intro last time. Is this why you want me to wear headphones, put your headphones on optic and hear this intro music that I’ve been slaving away on? Alright, let’s hear it by slaving. I mean I made it in about two minutes. You ready? Hit play? Okay, this week’s episode of stolen,

Arthur 3:19
stolen, stolen from social.

Michael 3:24
What do you reckon? That’s a lot better than I thought it was gonna be good. That’s good. Okay, well, we have a segment and we have some music for it. And basically, the segment is us going on to Twitter, Reddit, places across the web and thieving ideas for our own show. And this week, we have five ideas that were stolen from social the first one ties into what we were just talking about with the helpful content update. And it is a tweet that AJ from Blind Five Year Old shared on Twitter. And he said if you’ve ever searched for the next season of a show you’re watching you should understand the target of the helpful content update hashtag unhelpful content. Hashtag Google

Arthur 4:08
hashtag SEO for that one.

Michael 4:10
Yeah, well, that’s the plan. So you know what I thought not a bad idea. I’m gonna go and search for the next season of a show that I’ve been watching lately, which was Blackbird Have you seen Blackbird

Arthur 4:21
I have not pretty good you know that does a lot of shows that I haven’t watched

Michael 4:26
yet. It’s normally safe to assume you haven’t seen any good shows. Just assume I haven’t watched it yet. All right, well anyway, back bed was a cool show. But it is a once and done type series in that like the the whole storyline played out across six episodes. Wham. Bam. Thank you, ma’am. Show’s over. So it’s probably not coming back for season two. Or if it did, it would be a totally different storyline, I guess. But um, I went and searched like bird season two. You can see the first page is all these random sites like web news observer and hidden remote and ready steady cut and amazing feed. And if you click into any of them, it’s basically very template templated article. So you jump in, and it has articles talking about Blackberry, like what the show is and what it’s based on and how many episodes are on what it’s on. And you have to scroll and scroll and scroll before you get down to them saying,

Arthur 5:18
Oh, we don’t know. Yes. So this has happened to me many times whenever I’m looking to see when a new season is dropping like a release date. I get sucked into these websites. And they don’t actually have the answer. They have all this bullshit content. Yep. And you’re just left scratching your head thinking what? Yeah, can’t swear on this camera.

Michael 5:38
Well, you already did. Sorry. Do you know what I saw? So I actually totally random. Google podcasts. If you click into our show,

Arthur 5:48
it says, explicit, yeah, maybe we should start swearing then if we already know

Michael 5:52
but like, and then I was going and checking a whole bunch of other shows I listened to and they’re all having the same thing. Even though they’re not explicit. Anyway. You flooding with danger there. Google’s already watching. I’ll be careful. But yeah,

Arthur 6:03
I know. That’s nonsense. You gotta read. I’ve been a victim of that many times. Yep. And another one that you mentioned, as well as recipes. So besides, yep. When you go to find a recipe for shepherd’s pie, before you actually get to the actual recipe, you have to scroll through what feels like an

Michael 6:20
eternity of just what is a shepherd? What is pie or just the most

Arthur 6:23
random stuff and just stuff. It’s just fluff.

Michael 6:28
So it was a very interesting tweet. Because I totally agree with that these articles are painful. The helpful content update so far, has seemingly not done much to hasn’t lived up to its name to address it. Yeah, this content is not helpful. It exists just to get traffic through to these sites so that they can collect ad revenue. But joke’s on them. I have uBlock Origin running, so they’re not getting any ad revenue.

Arthur 6:51
So why not on my work computer about my personal computer,

Michael 6:55
I turn it on and off,

Arthur 6:56
I need to see ads.

Michael 6:58
Alright, let’s move on to the next one. Because I thought this was an interesting topic. As a general premise, this one stolen from Reddit. And the name of the thread is da isn’t real. And it is I use it mighty before God. Posts is you skip on the you’ve got me a little bit confused. No. haven’t skipped one.

Arthur 7:21
Who you’ve doubled up.

Michael 7:22
Ignore me Speed up. Speed up. Come on. You’re in the right spot.

Arthur 7:25
Yeah, you’ve made a mistake here. I’ll show you light over anyway. Okay.

Michael 7:29
I doubt it. So I don’t make mistakes. Let’s move on. Da isn’t real. Yes. You the mighty before God has said I’ve seen several people post concerned with their da lately for though those of you that don’t know, or were taught that Da is important. It isn’t. It isn’t a real metric. It is made up third party metric and Google doesn’t use it or care about it. A high da doesn’t equate to good rankings and a low da isn’t the reason you’re a ranking? Well, I won’t read the rest of it.

Arthur 7:58
I was gonna say just because it’s a third party metric doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s still a real metric. This is true. It’s just not the metric that Google looks at. Because we don’t know. We know we have an idea of what Google looks at. But it’s not something that’s I guess, quantifiable in a metric. So yeah,

Michael 8:16
I get the general premise of what they’re saying. Like if someone’s obsessed with Da and thinking that, you know, going from da 11 to 12 means they’re going to outrank everyone. That’s da 11. Sure, that doesn’t make sense. Because DA is a third party tools metric.

Arthur 8:30
Yeah, it’s a unit of measurement that you can compare domains against one another. Yeah, it’s

Michael 8:35
like a barometer. It’s, like, helps you quickly way out, you know, like, as someone says, Here, they said, you know, if I see if that’s da 50 verse one, that’s da 10. As a linking partner, I’m probably gonna be focusing my efforts on the da 51. Because all around, it’s going to be a stronger site for sure. Yeah. Someone the most upvoted posts on this one says the second someone mentioned da we all know they’re brand new to SEO and have zero clue what they’re doing. Well,

Arthur 9:01
I get it because I we talk about domain writing the same thing, same sort of metrics, though, same sort of metric, but I never look at Moz VAs and Moz metric, whereas I feel real SEOs that look at h refs.

Michael 9:16
Okay. But I guess what this person is saying is that if if you think one of these metrics is important, you have zero clue what you’re doing, which I think’s unfair, it is unfair. Plenty of SEOs know exactly what da MDR is and where it actually sits in the mix. Definitely. And really, it’s just a someone in here says it’s a shorthand for domain trust and authority, which are things that search engines consider when evaluating a site’s qualia. So it’s not a silver bullet that will get you ranked, but it isn’t something that should elicit scorn. Exactly. Which I agree with. Yes. So yeah, this thread was full of people hating on da but we think it’s a pretty useful

Arthur 9:55
it’s useful for us for clients to share how our link building is improving the authority You have this side. So without, like without DEA or Dr, or whatever you want to call it, there’s no unit of measure for us to be able to demonstrate that. But because of H refs and bows have created this, this metric, we can actually show them the effects of ALEC building. So it is super useful for us ers.

Michael 10:16
Yes. Because we actually have a question coming up that deals with the topic of convincing a client that SEO is more than a one time thing, which we’ll get to in effect, but da and Dr. For clients, it’s easy to understand, which is, yeah, it’s a good thing like because this SEO world, the old cliche of it depends, and you know, like, it could be this long, but it might be longer. And nobody really knows how Google works and stuff. That’s a bit of a murky world to navigate. But by using things like Dr and da, and trust flow and trying to explain things, and as long as you explain what they are and how they work and how it’s not Google, but it is a bit of a barometer. It is a useful tool, not just for assessing things, you know, in your own work, but for explaining things to clients. So, da Israel, we’re going to argue with that, that topic of that threaten. All right, let’s move on to the next one. This is a bit of a fun one that we have stolen, again from Reddit. The general premise is that someone just got hired to fix an SEO nightmare. And then they asked what are the worst nightmares that you’ve seen in the SEO world and so on, Arthur’s got some here that he wants to talk about from his recent experience. I’m gonna give an example of what someone posted in the thread to kick things off. Sure. So the thing before sunset, their SEO nightmare was for falls everywhere. Yeah, that’s not great. No homepage rewrites. So the homepage loaded in HTTP, HTTPS with the www without the www site dot index, site dot index, PHP, site, dot HTML, etc. All loaded. So what I’m saying here is basically, you could access the homepage, like one of 15 different ways, and all of them were able to be crawled and indexed by Google. That’s not cool. It’s a nightmare, though, is a bit of a nightmare. I’d say that’s a nightmare. It’s easy to fix.

Arthur 12:09
Yeah. To me, nightmare is,

Michael 12:12
yeah. We’ll get to yours. And you can have your rant in a minute.

Arthur 12:15
That’s it around. It’s just constructive feedback in the

Michael 12:19
form of a random person reading. No redirect from.com/or.com. So every page is loaded with the trailing slash and without, some of these are things I remember when I first got into SEO like, trailing slash and without and making sure that they’re the one version of the homepage. CMS has handled most of that. Yeah, they do handle most of it as a no canonical 75%. The blog with plagiarise the nav links was set up to go from the navigation into search results. And they had a 35 megabyte video embedded on the homepage that was hosted on the site that aren’t good, or good for your bandwidth or page load speeds. So no, that’s a good one.

Arthur 12:59
I’ll still argue that those are nightmares, because they’re very, a lot of them are quite easy to fix,

Michael 13:03
depending on what CMS they were on shore. And what sort of a host true and other technical Fei things that we won’t go into here. But let’s let’s let ARPA get on the soapbox

Arthur 13:15
before. Yeah, before I get on my rant, I wanted to add in internal links to a staging site. So a lot of the times a client will launch a site and forget to edit the internal links within the copy. There’ll be linking to the development site or staging site. And it’s just the poor experience for whoever clicks on it. And not great for SEO obviously, yes. But I guess if you want to call it R N. Essentially, the one more recently was we had a kind of goes, let me start again. So we had a client who wanted us to build out certain certain pages on their site. So we agreed to build out these pages. And we wanted to do it the right way. So we decided to do it on a staging site. I Dev was working away for about two weeks on these pages, creating templates, adding up adding content images, just pulling out the pages. In the meantime, we were unaware that the client was actually making changes on the live site at the same time. So they were up there just making copy edits or uploading blog posts and things like that. So two weeks pass, what happens is the client reaches out to their dev agency and asks them to push this live site into staging because they didn’t want to lose any of the work that they’ve been working on over the last two weeks. So we came in two weeks, one day later, when it had a look. And all the work that we’ve been working on over the last two weeks was wiped. Yeah, we had no idea. We were confused trying to figure out what happened. We thought that we broke something. And then yeah, spoke to the dev agency and found out that they had overwritten the site because there was live changes that the client would push to staging. Yeah, and had to basically redo all the work

Michael 14:56
and had the client chasing you up for the work and complaining it was late.

Arthur 14:59
Yes. Yeah. I don’t want to get into that part. But yeah, definitely that was a nightmare because we were we had a deadline to get these things the the pages live bottlenecks already as it were. But yeah, that to me is a nightmare. Yeah. So the logistics of it, the expectation management and resources involved trying to get it all set up so many

Michael 15:21
different stakeholders out there. Thus, there’s a development agency, there’s a client in the middle communication going from one to the other without the other being across. The easy thing there would have just been to take a backup of the live site, instead of pushing it to staging to yes, no, yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on it. We might have suggested that if we have the chance. Yeah. What about there’s there’s one here that I think is a little bit of a nightmare. What do you think about this one, which one? website has been around 22 years? 1000 pages? No indexing rules? No, canonicals 95% of the pages are less than 100 words. So Google’s already not indexing about 700 of them. Most pages have Google selected canonicals, which are pointing to non contextual other pages on the site. All headers are duplicates, or h1 headers, and the lack of duplicates and internal links are pointing to like external URLs where they’ve plagiarised content from software

Arthur 16:18
that’s already in either their nightmare. That’s a nightmare. Yeah, we’ll select a canonicals or an IMS sometimes as well. Yeah, 700

Michael 16:25
pages not indexed, because there’s only 100 words and this client wants a website? Well, that’s

Arthur 16:30
a nightmare. Like that specific thing. Google selected canonicals. We’ve had that issue with clients in the past where pages got indexed. So we want another page ranking. And Google just won’t rank it because they’ve selected a canonical back to this page. And it’s just annoying. Yeah. It’s hard to get it to rank. So anyway, that whole thing sounded definitely not ideal.

Michael 16:51
That was a legit nightmare. Yes. Alright, let’s not dwell on the nightmares too much. We can move on to

Arthur 16:58
the last one. So the last one, number four,

Michael 17:01
second last one. This one is pretty cool. This is the one we spoke about earlier, where it’s how do you convince the client that SEO is more than just a one time thing? You only love this one? Because you’re looking over analogies. So I love analogies and this thread. It was a Twitter thread started by Adriana Stein at Adriana K. Stein, you want to follow if you want to follow up? Yes, I love my analogies, and also some of your videos. Yeah, they’ve probably the top two of all things. Not of all things, but they’re up there. And then my kids, and then everything else. No, I’m just joking. So how do you convince a client that SEO is more than just a one time thing? I like it, because of the analogies. And also I like it because a lot of people will when they build their site, let’s say Development Agency says I will do your SEO for you. You know, and I think my SEO has been done because the developers put some title tags on for argument’s sake. But there’s a lot more to it than that. And there are some pretty decent analogies in there. So I’ll let you read this. The first one here by Linden.

Arthur 18:05
I’m gonna have to zoom in. You need glasses. I do need glasses. But that’s a separate topic. Linden and a dot autoCrat by explaining that it works kind of similar to music charts, you might have a top seller for that genre for that day, week, month. And people may play it a lot. Play it a lot afterwards, but one hit wonders. Selden, keep them home butchering this honour. Sodom keep the money coming in a stable of track stars.

Michael 18:32
And having more songs that are more popular more often tend to make more money.

Arthur 18:36
I didn’t even see those mobile. I definitely need glasses, don’t I? Since most

Michael 18:39
plants get it after that sort of analogy. You know what I find that one a little bit difficult to follow. If a top seller thinks someone some of these other people did a better job. Yeah, that’s fine at the gym. One is Christine. Shocking, kind of into this one. Such searching, searching, searching, searching, searching. Yeah, that’s a tough name. But she likes to use house analogies. We love the old SEO is like a house you own and paid media like a house you rent analogy. Her one here is do you just build the house and let it sit for 20 years? Or do you continually have to maintain it, check it upgraded etc? Well, that’s SEO.

Arthur 19:20
That is SEO. It is. Christine Nailed it.

Michael 19:24
Nailed it. And Joe at Joe may Lee. He was in a similar vein SEO. You buy an awesome indoor plant for 250 bucks that is said to grow healthy for the next 10 years. Do you order it only once? Your website is a plant take care of it often.

Arthur 19:42
Hashtag SEO hashtag Google ads. Arthur Hurd said Google eats

Michael 19:50
good leads. Wow. And you work in digital marketing.

Arthur 19:54
Well, I saw it. I shouldn’t have said anything. I thought it was funny.

Michael 19:58
Yeah, like glade sugli. That’s gonna become a thing now for me. This one,

Arthur 20:02
I’ll let it Yeah, can I do the gym one, you can do that one, you can’t expect results from one visit, the more you do, the better results you get. Just keep going and see the results. Very true. So we both go to the gym here and we both know very well that it takes a lot of effort to get results in the gym.

Michael 20:19
So I’ve been 100 times I don’t have results. So yes, your website is like a muscle, and it has to be worked on to grow.

Arthur 20:30
You guys says like pre workout.

Michael 20:32
Link building is like linked to workout link juice is your pre workout. What’s your I can’t even think of anything else people. What’s the protein powder? What’s the building blocks of your technical audit? Is your nutritional plan your macros and everything that you Yep. Protein powder would be linked in content, like building the solid building blocks growth. Yeah, yep.

Arthur 20:57
What’s anyway? Okay, I

Michael 20:59
think we’re in pretty good. Yeah, little, might even use it. Right here was good. I thought this one is a pretty good one. Faber comm if you want to make use of it, you need to put in gas go the mechanic etc. If you don’t, you’ll have a pretty but useless chunk of metal in the garage. Same with your website. Depends what

Arthur 21:17
sort of car you bought. Whether or not it’s pretty anyway, or electric. Oh, very true. If it’s an electric car, you don’t need gas.

Michael 21:26
But it still needs to be looked after. Definitely. This one’s a good one by at scene digital competitive directive. So if you’re not, you’ll fall behind. Google constantly updates its guidelines. And if you want to be really pedantic the clues in the name optimization, three points, or pretty good points.

Arthur 21:46
That was my scene digital.

Michael 21:48
It was I’ll let you take this last one by, you know, I

Arthur 21:51
can’t read variable on this laptop. Boyd Norwood from nozzle.ir. So Boyd said it’s like running a race. If you slow down or stop, then all your competition will will pass you by, which is true. There are only 10 spots on page one. And there are plenty of other runners web pages that are running this race to get to the top 10 or top three, if you stop, you will lose your spot. Pretty much. That’s a good one. I like that one, that’s probably my favourite out of all of them.

Michael 22:18
And maybe if you’re in position, one, you’re way out in front, and you slow down and then maybe even stop have a little nap on the side of the road while the other runners are continuing at the same speed. They’ll go past you, you’ll wake up from your nap and their way down the distance. And you won’t even be able to close that unless you really sprint. And you’re already stuffed from the running you were doing before. So the key there is to not stop. But it’s to just keep going. Always on invest in it forever. And build your site up instead of letting your competitors get that far ahead of you.

Arthur 22:51
Yeah, I feel like people make that mistake. They get to a certain point and they’re happy with the results. And then they decide, oh, you know, I’m getting leads, I’m getting traffic, I’m getting sales. I’m going to stop SEO. And I’ve gotten I’ve gotten to where I want to be. And then like you said they fall behind, you know, there might be getting results for three, four months, but month, five months, six onward, they start to drop and then you basically have to then have to start from scratch. But it’s an uphill battle trying to you know, get ahead of the competition because they’ve just been doing it for that much longer. So yeah. Yep, Ani ani actually made. I’m gonna butcher this. Maybe I should have looked up the quote. But he said it in pumping on and it was him and LWF Yeah, Lou Ferrigno. And we watch pumping iron.

Michael 23:34
I’ve watched it once, maybe like 10 more years ago. So

Arthur 23:39
there was his last Olympia and he was competing. And Lou Ferrigno was going for the title of Olympia. Yep. And Arnold basically said, you know, like, maybe next year, you can, you will win, but I’ll still compete for us to be training for another year. So basically, he’s always got one up him. And the point was trying to make is, no matter how long you train, I’m always going to want up because I’m still going to train. Yeah. So I guess, similar kind of

Michael 24:01
that’s, that’s very good. That is SEO right there. Yeah. It is. The people that are consistent, dedicated, and Mike have that. I guess, mode. I always like to say, ya know, the idea of a moat is that you can’t get over it. The people that are really consistent with their SEO are building a moat that is very tough for your competitors to get over and he’s implying you’ll be stronger next week, but

Arthur 24:23
I’ll be even stronger. Yeah, yeah, that was a cool line. I like that. Good movie.

Michael 24:28
What a good little tangent. We’ve gone on over analogies or metaphors. Sorry.

Arthur 24:34
We’ve got one more

Michael 24:36
do we? Yeah.

Arthur 24:38
So skills. Your favourite. Oh, we’ve

Michael 24:41
got one more point.

Arthur 24:42
I was your favourite one at the stop. Yeah, okay.

Michael 24:44
Well, we’ve forgotten about it. That’s just talking about this is the last time this was a tweet by Garrett sauceman. Garrett Sussman if you double FEMA Osman I think it’s Yeah. sauceman. He serves in the world of SEO. We liked him. says that the fundamentals are always the same. We do that with me saying we do. That may be true, Garrett says, but in every profession experience allows us to see nuance behind the curtain, things change, and you need to adapt, never stop learning and question everything. And he’s basically shared three soft skills that all successful people in SEO have in common. And I agreed with them. So I wanted to read them up. You already did. Not the three things need to adopt never stop learning and question everything. Well, yeah, but like the way he’s okay. The way he said it is they don’t trust anyone but the data and even then they still question the data. So I agree with that. They never stop iterating. Being an SEO is like being a shark, not in the drawers take your lunch money sort of way. Did you know some sharks need to keep moving for oxygen or they suffocate. He’s saying that’s what SEO is, you just gotta keep iterating testing. Strategies that used to work may not work in the future. So you’ve got to be across all of this stuff at all time, competitors pop up out of nowhere, and then you’ve got to be able to fight back. That sort of stuff. So constantly be iterating and experimenting and looking at data and adjusting and rinsing and repeating. Totally agree. And then the last one, SEO has never stopped learning. Ever thirst for knowledge. Stay Hungry. Keep on learning. Listen to the FTO show. That’s my word. It’s not HIV.

Arthur 26:22
Oh, I thought he heard that. But shameless plug,

Michael 26:26
plug to the show that you actually listening to. But I agree with all of those three things. So I wanted to throw it in at the end. You had a point you said before about those. Do you remember what it was?

Arthur 26:38
No. Yeah, didn’t When did I say it? Was it before the show?

Michael 26:41
Yeah, it was really poignant. And it was a throwaway line. And you know, I’m just gonna have to leave everyone hanging because we’re not going to remember what I mean. Three seconds of I can’t think of it then we can move on. Okay, ready, go. Mark. Okay. All right. Well, on that note, we’ll be back next week with another high quality episode of the FTO show. But until then, happy Fei going, Thea Bye.

Unknown Speaker 27:06
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai