2022 SEO Wrapped & Our 2023 Predictions

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: 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.

ARTHUR: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. My name is Arthur Fabik, and as always, I'm here with the wonderful Michael Costin. Sorry, I shouldn't have laughed when I said that.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it sort of negates the fact that you were calling me wonderful.

ARTHUR: You were just looking at me funny. It's almost like it's insincere. It was very sincere. Oh, it was? Yes. Okay. You are wonderful.

MICHAEL: Yes, well, thank you. and have things in your world. Been doing much SEO lately?

ARTHUR: Bits and pieces here and there. I'm always doing a little bit of SEO. Once you start SEO, you can't stop.

MICHAEL: Yes. Once you go SEO, you never go back. That's it. As they say. Do they? Yes. They do in the biz. Nerdy people that like SEO, I guess. But, um, okay. So you're doing a little bit of SEO. I guess that means that you are well placed to present, uh, SEO 2022 wrapped. I am. Because that's what we're talking about today.

ARTHUR: So we've completely stolen this from Spotify. Well, the name anyway. And the concept.

MICHAEL: Yeah, we're wrapping up the year in SEO, at least a few things that happened throughout the year. Notable things. Notable things. Sort of spaced it out from like start of the year through to end of the year. And then at the end, we're going to give a few of our predictions for 2023.

ARTHUR: Did we do this last year? Not that I recall. Because it'd be cool if we went back and listened to our predictions from last year and see if they came true. And I kind of think we might have.

MICHAEL: All right. Well you I'll, I'll task you with going back and listening and then we can boast in the new year. If any of them did come true.

ARTHUR: Okay. Let's do that.

MICHAEL: But if not, we've got a few here that next year. Okay. We're prepared for next year. Yes. With this enthralling new segment wrapped and predictions wrapped up. So let's jump into it. We've only got a few, like, what do we got? Maybe seven or eight or so big things that happened throughout the year. Let's get back to February, 2022. Do you remember what you were doing then? SEO. Yeah. What else? We were working in a weather or park at the time. I think we were, yeah. We hadn't yet moved to power. We had our podcast studio in the old podcast studio.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I kind of miss that little studio. Yeah. Me too. You did do a lot of complaining in there about the noise, noise, no internet lost.

MICHAEL: The wall was falling apart. Render all over the floor. It had charm. It did. Not that much time when the guy next door was screaming to his clients on the phone. But anyway, back in Feb, something else happened in the SEO world.

ARTHUR: Yes, it did. What was it? It was the desktop page experience update.

MICHAEL: Yes. So basically Google with their, you know, Google went mobile first and they brought the page experience update to mobile. So this is where they're looking at like, you know, core web vitals and page experience, um, how fast things load, all that sort of stuff. And they did on mobile first. Then in Feb they said, all right, well, we're bringing that over to desktop too. And this was stuff that had SEO people like little bees in their bonnets, right? Like Core Web Vitals in particular, everyone ranting and raving about it, freaking out. How do we get our scores up? You know, all greens on Core Web Vitals. Yeah. And, um, I would say right now in December, 2022, it doesn't really matter that much.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, we were talking about this off air and I really haven't noticed too much. Hmm. I don't know, I feel it might depend on how bad your Core Web Vitals, I guess, scores are. for our clients and websites that I look at, it hasn't really had too much of an impact.

MICHAEL: Like, I don't know, you spend all this time trying to improve them that you're going to see that much difference. Let's just say you're a little lead generating local service business and you have epic core web vitals and the next guy doesn't, but the next guy has like good content and links.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: They're still going to outrank you.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. I guess when all things are equal, this might be a factor. So like with CLS, if you have a mobile page, that's just moving around and just rendering incorrectly when it's loading and your competitor, all things equal renders fine, then it might, they might have an advantage, but yeah, overall in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't look like it's had a massive impact.

MICHAEL: Not like the level of panic. Panic, yeah. Panic is a good word. The level of panic and like posting going on on Twitter and like articles left, right and center. Are you ready? Are you ready for the update?

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Like email blasts going out to like people's mailing lists, like scaring clients. Like, I remember that. Yeah. And then it came and it was just like nothing. Like a lot of things in the world of SEO, like a lot of updates, a lot of updates, a lot of hype, helpful content. We'll get to that in a minute. That was another one where people were like freaking out and rewriting their entire website.

ARTHUR: Yep.

MICHAEL: And we always say, keep calm, keep calm and carry on SEOing. That's it. Um, but that was February. Then I'm going to say the next thing that happened was this is more of a theme for the year, but Google went a little update crazy in 2022. A plethora. There was a plethora. Like the year started slow. Yeah. It wasn't really much Jan, Feb, there might've been a product reviews update in Jan. I'm not even sure, but from May through to October, ready, ready for this? Listen to this run. Keep in mind, Google also said in the past that when they do a big update, they don't tend to do like other big ones for like, you know, a couple of months afterwards.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I remember the last one before this run of updates was in November, 2021. And we joked about how long it's been since the last update. So we were just basically waiting, waiting, waiting, nothing, nothing was being rolled out.

MICHAEL: So it was like Google had been, they'd gone to rehab. They managed to stay off doing updates and then they relapsed.

ARTHUR: Didn't they wig out? If I remember correctly, I'm, last year they rolled out an update and it wasn't correct. And then they had to revert it. And then that's when they kind of stopped rolling out these core algorithm algorithm updates.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I do. Yep. That did. And there's been, they've had a lot of indexing problems too, like generally, which may be related to all of these updates. There has been like posts online where people could tie back like big broad core algorithm updates and then massive problems with indexing immediately afterwards that would then sort of revert over time.

ARTHUR: Yeah, well, like slightly off topic, but I have a hard time getting pages re-indexed in Search Console. Yeah. When you go in there and manually ask Google to crawl and index a page, like a year or two ago, it was within an hour sometimes. Yeah. Now it's been a week. Yeah. And it still hasn't. Yeah. The page is fine. It's got links. It's got internal links. It's fine, but it's just not getting re-indexed.

MICHAEL: I've read something interesting on this on a friend of the show, Kevin Indig's blog talking about how there is a lot more problems with indexing now due to Google's like resources being limited. Everyone thinks they have unlimited resources, but their actual ability to crawl stuff. is why that they're having these indexing problems.

ARTHUR: Well, I was reading about Google conspiracy theories. And when you search for something, it says that there's 2,600,433 whatever results, but then it all stops at like page 11 or page 12 and you can't go any further. And people are like, well, how much internet is there really?

MICHAEL: I just found it interesting. Well, I also heard something interesting is the web is shrinking. Well, that could be part of it. Yeah. But see if the web shrinking, it should be easier to index new stuff. Sorry. And the other thing is, um, with the web shrinking. So when I say shrinking, it means there's lots of walled things like Facebook, Tik TOK, Instagram, a lot of stuff happens there or places that may have been a blog post or something in the past. So there's not that many things being published that link out and make it easy for crawlers to find all this new stuff. So like the index, the web itself is shrinking. But that doesn't go hand in hand with what we're saying about Google having limited resources.

ARTHUR: Have you heard about the dead internet theory? No. It's a bit of a conspiracy theory. Let's get into it. Oh, maybe we can do an episode on it because it's pretty give us the gist of the theory or you haven't agreed. I'm trying to try to read exactly what the conspiracy theory is, but essentially the Internet died many years ago and it's a lot all bots and AI mostly that are basically contributing to the Internet. So. Yeah. A lot of people have noticed. It's just not the same that it was back in the glory days. And over time it's just become a farm of bots, AI and things like that. And that's basically it. I'm sure there's more to it, but.

MICHAEL: But I guess like back in the day website was all exciting and new and like. passionate hobbyists were the ones creating content. Whereas now it's become a lot more, it's become gentrified. There's more businesses that do it, you know, as a livelihood publishing, like churning out content and all that. So I guess maybe that's, that's part of it. Yeah. But what are they saying? Other stuff isn't being added by humans now.

ARTHUR: Yeah. There's just too much AI contributing to things, too many bots on social media platforms. It's just basically that like,

MICHAEL: But there's also a lot of humans for a fact contributing.

ARTHUR: There can't be dead. Yeah. Well, it's a conspiracy theory, so it doesn't matter. It's probably not too much truth to it, but it is something that people chat about. If you do a search for it, there's a lot of results and a lot of conversation.

MICHAEL: I'm going to look into that. Um, we actually have AI as a topic here, but let's, let's get back to what we were talking about. Google going update crazy in 2022. So from May to October, there was in May Broadcore Algorithm Update, July Product Reviews Update, August, the Helpful Content Update, September, that was a double whammy with the Broadcore and Product Reviews. Bang, bang. Then October, a Big Spam Update. Wow. That's a lot to deal with as an SEO. That's five to deal with. Yeah. Or six technically. Yep. And if you reacted super quickly after the Broadcore Update in May, You might've been fixed by October, but likewise, if you did absolutely nothing, you might've been fixed by October. Like that's the sort of, um, what would the contradiction of Google, like it will blast your site in one of these updates and then you don't change anything and it comes back a couple of updates later. So what is that saying about them in their updates?

ARTHUR: Well, we've spoken about this a few times, but they don't really mean anything, do they? It's just them shaking things up to try to generate more profit for themselves and get people funneling money into Google ads and other advertising streams.

MICHAEL: That's ultimately what I think all of these updates come down to.

ARTHUR: And if you think about when you like for the clients that I work on, the, Like if you do a search for a particular keyword, it's always the same five or six clients which are just jumping around. Whenever there's an update, someone might go from first to fourth. But I guess the page one clients with the page one sites are always the same. They just kind of jump around and then another update will roll out and then they move back up. And it's just like a, like, what do you call it? Like a fucking Ferris wheel. Oops. I swore.

MICHAEL: Can we bleep that up? You're allowed to swear from time to time. I don't know that we have any form of contract with our listeners. I think that's the first time I've sworn on here. No, you've sworn heaps of times. Have I really? Yeah. Yeah. You just haven't been aware. Okay. I wouldn't say like a sailor, but the odd one here and there. Okay.

ARTHUR: It's good to know that I can drop an F bomb if I need to. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it's like a, what do you call like a little hamster wheel? Essentially it's just constantly revolving and whoever was ranking first, we'll move to fourth, third, fifth, back to first. And it's just never ending basically. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Occasionally you can still push new sites up into the first page though. You can, you do see like little, but once you're there, it becomes a bit more static. Like you, like you're moving from position to position.

ARTHUR: That's it.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Okay. I also haven't really noticed any of our clients get hit by any of these updates.

MICHAEL: So yeah, we'll spam update October links and stuff, helpful contents in theory, looking at AI content. We don't really use that product reviews. We're not, that's more targeting affiliate sites. Google hates affiliate sites unless it's them, the affiliate broad cause. Normally you could see, you know, because they just, who knows what's going on, but yeah. Yeah. Knock on wood. But I guess, um, We've got our predictions coming in a minute, but I can't see why this trend won't continue. Google will continue to shake up the SERPs in 2023. The key is don't react.

ARTHUR: Keep calm and keep SEOing. Don't make massive changes just because an update rolled out. You'll do more harm than good. Right. What happened in June, Arthur? June, Ahrefs launched, yep. So we did an episode on this, episode 40, and essentially all this news and hype about Ahrefs launching their search engine fell on its ass and nothing happened from it. But you know what?

MICHAEL: They didn't actually launch it. No. It got leaked or something.

ARTHUR: It got leaked.

MICHAEL: They were forced to sort of go with it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But I guess, yeah, the model they were working on was a little bit different. So essentially it would give some of the money back to the content producers, which is, I guess, what made them different to every other search engine. But here we are in December, 2022, six months later and nothing has changed. There hasn't been any updates as far as I am aware of. You might've heard something.

MICHAEL: I've not visited the yep.com website since we did that episode.

ARTHUR: Oh, neither have I, I'm going to do it right now.

MICHAEL: But that is the problem that those guys are up against is going to be user uptake. It's just not going to happen. No, not going to happen. Absolutely not. So we agreed in episode 40 that we thought that they're creating it more as a proof of concept to then try and like sell it to like a Bing or something. Right. Is what we ultimately thought, but who knows what will happen there? They're spending a lot of money on it. How's yep.com these days?

ARTHUR: I just did a search.

MICHAEL: Remember when we searched our own brand name and it wasn't even showing up?

ARTHUR: Well, I did a search for SEO Sydney and we showed up so. Oh, I love yep. Maybe it's improved.

MICHAEL: No, it's still showing me UK results. Local digital. If I search local digital.gov.uk. We're not on the first page for local digital.

ARTHUR: Local authority funded projects.

MICHAEL: Now see I, because I have my language settings set to English UK. Yeah. In Google. Mm. it constantly shows me UK stuff everywhere. You'd think it would figure out that I'm not actually in the UK. I just use UK English, like Australians are meant to, but it doesn't. It's annoying. Anyway, let's not dwell on that. We did a whole episode back in episode 40 on, yep. So go check that out if you're interested, but something happened not long later, a couple of months later.

ARTHUR: Something did happen. Something happened. Something big happened. What was it? Google had an outage. So they had a big software outage, August 8th. So that kind of affected everything from the SERPs to Gmail, all their services. And there was a lot of panic because a lot of sites got de-indexed for a while. And when we were looking at Nightwatch, looking at our clients' rankings, it just fell off a cliff. bounce back up the day after or two days after, but for a while there, there was a lot of panic.

MICHAEL: Yeah, there was panic. Wasn't there sites not ranking for their brand and stuff?

ARTHUR: Yeah, there was a whole lot of things that were happening, but it didn't take them long to fix it up.

MICHAEL: But it is weird, right? That happens, there's been indexing issues happening. I remember for the years, Google was just bulletproof.

ARTHUR: That stuff didn't happen. Well, yeah, no, it didn't. And I took this from a news article on the Guardian where it says software outage, I could have sworn that it was some sort of like fire at somewhere that one of the servers or something. Oh yeah. I maybe I'm making it up, but six months ago is way too long to remember. Yeah. It's too fast paced this industry. You can't hard to keep up. Yeah. Um, but yeah, that happened. It was pretty big, pretty noteworthy.

MICHAEL: I think one month, one month later, September Google search on happened. So Google search on 2022, it's an event they do every year where they sort of talk about stuff that they've got on the go when it comes to search. And, um, they announced a whole bunch of stuff. And then amongst what they announced there is normally interesting things. One point I found interesting is that they, as a business in 2022, Q for 222, they still get 60% of their revenue from search ads, pure search ads. Then the bulk of the rest of their revenue from YouTube ads and Google search network or Google network, like display network, it's all coming from their Google ads platform. Still, this is with them like pushing, you know, Google suite and, um, I don't know if Google Cloud's included in it, but you know, all the other products trying to diversify, but they're still just exactly what they are, a search engine.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah. Yeah. That, that doesn't really surprise me.

MICHAEL: No, it doesn't. But with them, they're threatened by short form video. Like everyone is, you know, tick tock Instagram trying to be tick tock. They're doing their thing. Google pretty much has YouTube to compete with that. I don't know. Tick tock. I'm a hater, absolute hater of tick tock. And I can see in a couple of years time that it may not exist. It may be regulated out of existence in like Western markets.

ARTHUR: What, I mean, how does TikTok differ to Instagram reels? Really? It's the same thing.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, Insta has made reels exactly the same as TikTok.

ARTHUR: It's like when Instagram added stories to compete with Snapchat. Yes. I don't use Snapchat anymore. There's people out there that still use Snapchat, but ever since they moved that into Instagram, everyone I know, maybe because I'm showing my age, but everyone I know is on Instagram now.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I don't think they've had that same success with reels because the TikTok algorithm is a lot more, I guess, um, stimulating. Right. So that's a weapon. But for me, it's the fact that they're dodgy as a company. Well, they are dodgy as a company, super dodgy to the point of like, you know, hoovering up data and sending it to state government type dodgy. Yes. I could see potentially depends on, what the government want to do in America, but I could see them regulating it.

ARTHUR: Well, they had that advertising campaign. I think it was here. And even in the States, like from the general manager of Tik TOK saying that the app is safe, please keep using it. Yeah. When there was that whole kind of chat about, you know, how it is a dodgy kind of spyware type app. Yep. And there was concerns about that. Yeah. So people still use it. It's massively popular. Yes, but I don't like it. I mean, I don't know. I was reading about how these sorts of apps, especially Tik Tok, like warp children's minds because it shortens their attention span. They're just stimulated by short video after short video, after short video, like 15 seconds. Then they have a hard time focusing on anything that's longer. Like it's just, I guess it is destroying their brains and their attention spans. And I can, I believe it.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I believe that. And it's just annoying seeing people mime stupid videos outside of that.

ARTHUR: Forget the children. Look, I'll go on Instagram reels. And I see funny videos. There is good content out there.

MICHAEL: 90% of it is just trash. I don't even scroll my Instagram feed now. Yeah, you do. You send me stuff on Instagram. I send you stories. I do stories. Stories? No, you send me reels. Yeah, because it will pop up. Like when you're going through stories, I'll forge you stuff for my story. but I don't really scroll my feed, a little bit, but like, because I used to like pictures.

ARTHUR: I'm an old man. Are you talking about your actual feed? Oh no, I don't look at it at all. I don't scroll through it. It's just overwhelmed with crap videos. Yeah, yeah, no, I never do that. I go stories. Yeah. And then if I'm bored, reels.

MICHAEL: Right. So, I don't know, everyone's trying to beat TikTok.

ARTHUR: But I love YouTube. I subscribe to like 250 different YouTubers and, I guess I watch more YouTube than I do TV.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Me too. And so that's like, I guess it's Google. They can compete with TikTok cause I believe YouTube shares a lot more revenue with its content creative than TikTok does.

ARTHUR: They would do. Yeah. I mean, they used to share a lot more. Yeah. I think recently there was a lot of complaints about how the like monetization model TikTok YouTube.

MICHAEL: Well, um, that's their angle. Like they, if they can push shorts and get that, you know, more popular and like share heaps of money with creators. So creators are favoring shorts. They have a good chance of competing. So we're coming back to the topic, which is Google search on 2022. They're generating all of their income from search. Kind of sidetracked there, didn't we? Yeah. But their YouTube angle to compete with it is interesting. But the other thing I thought was interesting is they introduced a new feature called discussions and forums that will show more results right in the search results from places like Reddit.

ARTHUR: Yeah. This is only in the US. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I was searching for this. I'm like, I haven't seen this before.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like they start with like, they always start somewhere. Then it will roll out if it's, they always start somewhere.

ARTHUR: That's true. So how does it work? So if someone's searching for a, like an informational query, yeah. what's the best car for a small family? Which is the one I was reading about before. And what it will do is it will pull posts from Quora, Reddit, sites like that.

MICHAEL: And like use it to enrich the search results.

ARTHUR: Does it just show that post in the search results and you can just click through it or does it pull? Yeah.

MICHAEL: Okay. And the reason I find this interesting is it comes back to the product reviews updates. They're really hammering affiliate websites because with an affiliate website, someone, let's say I want to promote like the best microphones. I buy the best microphones.info and I've thrown up tons of AI generated content. Is this something you're doing? No, but I'm just trying to give a really dodgy affiliate example. Throw that stuff up, throw some links at it and then start referring people to Amazon and taking a clip on it. Not really adding any value in that mix there. That's what Google is trying to crack down on with the product updates, with the helpful content update. And this is another extension of that. So like showing people's authentic experiences, they're calling it. So, you know, people going on to Reddit. Reddit's very unforgiving. People, people won't sugarcoat a product because they're making affiliate commission. They're just saying what they really think on there. Google's wanting to. Scrape all of that up and put it in their search results to make it I guess better So what's that space if you're in affiliate? It's yeah, there's definitely Google Google is in a war on affiliates at the moment They want to be the only big super affiliate in the world. They're coming for you They are So on that topic, what else are they coming for? Well? If you believe what's just happened recently, they're coming for the jobs of journalists and computer programmers and pretty much everyone on the planet. Not, not Google, but AI computers because chat GPT was released in December, just in the last week or so, if you've been on Twitter or Reddit, those places, people have been sharing screenshots of their interactions with chat GPT. Have you tried it? I have a little. Thoughts? It's pretty cool. Pretty cool. You can, to give you an explainer of what it is. There's a company called OpenAI. They make GPT-3, which is the AI model that's basically powers tools like Jasper and all of the AI writing software. ChatGPT is the latest release from those guys and anyone can use it. So with the old chat, sorry, GPT-3, you used to have to apply for API access. But with this one, it's like a dialogue or like a input where you can ask a question and it puts out an answer. Like a chat box. Like a chat box. And, um, it's resulted in people like going in there and putting in programming questions and having the AI answer it. You know, they might have a bug with their code or a question. They just put it in. What's this? And the AI answers it and gives them correct answers or seemingly correct as we'll get to in a sec. Other ones, academics, I was reading an article, people have created essays in this tool that would have got pretty much a high distinction if submitted to university. I could have used this during my uni. Can you imagine what's going to happen with it now? Just think about uni students.

ARTHUR: AI is going to take over one day.

MICHAEL: I haven't even thought of that till now, but like in uni, how will they police this?

ARTHUR: Well, we had to upload all our stuff through plagiarism detectors and software. I guess what it did is just matched up different sources on the internet and all the other, I guess, essays and whatever people have uploaded. But yeah, I don't know.

MICHAEL: I don't know how it's going to work because as it gets better, some professor sitting at a uni is not going to be able to tell.

ARTHUR: Everyone's going to be getting high distinctions. They'll have to rely on software and tools that can detect AI copy. So that's something we talked about a few months ago during the helpful content update. about how Google will crack down on AI copy, they'll be able to detect if copy is written by a human or AI. So I guess that's how they'll detect it. Like they'll have to have some sort of software that can do it. How they do that, I have no idea. Yeah, about pay grade.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But basically with this chat GPT at the end of the day, it's just this, this model is being fed with like information from the web. Like it's going out and reading everything and using it to train the model. So like, okay. So it's just like the ultimate form of plagiarism.

ARTHUR: Right. Can you have conversations with her? Like, yes.

MICHAEL: Does it have like a conscience and well, it, it sort of understands humor and stuff. Yeah. I can't even, I don't know if you know the podcast, my first million, but great podcasts in a recent one, they ran through some examples where they went on there. They were talking to, this is a different AI model, but it was picking up humor. It would, it would reply, haha. When it knew he was making a joke in a context where it wasn't obvious, he was making a joke just from reading the way it was written. Yeah. So it's understanding that somehow AI is scary. It is getting scarier and scarier, but I guess where this comes into 2022, This is at the very end of the year. There's people all on Twitter saying like, this is it. Google's dead. ChatGPT is going to replace Google. If you have a question, you go to ChatGPT instead of Google. I don't think that's the case because people aren't going to change their habits and go plug some questions into a random AI website rather than using Google.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, you're kind of relying on this ChatGPT to give you the right answer without giving you other alternative answers. Right. So you've got like one source of truth.

MICHAEL: You can sort of drill down and really quiz it and it comes back with stuff.

ARTHUR: Yeah, but I mean, like if you're searching for, I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but if you're doing a Google search for like, what is this specific thing? And it's gonna spit out 10 different results or whatever, hundreds of different results, but you can like kind of filter through the first page and see different results and you can kind of make a conscious, I guess, decision on which one's right. Or you can do some research. With this, this kind of eliminates research. You're basically getting the answer told to you by AI. And then you just have to trust it. or assume that what it's telling you is the truth.

MICHAEL: And I don't necessarily think it's that much better. Like if you ask a question into Google, like I saw the example given, what is the sun and what chat GPT answers with is the sun or just the sun. I think it was what is the sun and what Google answers. That's going to be very similar. What's similar, this person's trying to make out that chat GPT, that's it, Google's dead. But like Google's one had like the knowledge graph with images of the sun and it had the mass, the temperature, like how far away it is, all this extra information plus all the search results and chat GPT was just a bunch of text on a screen. So I'm not seeing why it's a Google killer.

ARTHUR: For questions like that, that's pretty obvious. Like it probably can scrape all that information, but it comes down to, I guess, trickier questions and stuff that requires, I don't know. We'll be completing your programming. Perception and opinion and things like that, that AI will be lacking.

MICHAEL: I tell you something that I saw someone doing with it, which was cool from an SEO point of view. They got a list of keywords, let's say it's a hundred keywords, just bang one after the other on a new line. Right. Put that list in and gave the prompt, take this list of keywords and categorize them and then put the categories into a new column. So let's say it had, I guess, keyword research type keywords, um, keyword mapping type keywords and technical audit type keywords all in a jumbled up list. It then spat it out with all of the right keywords in like, so it would have a column for all the keywords and then the category next to it all like correctly done.

ARTHUR: So it categorized all the keywords based. It was smart enough to know what keyword bang. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And then he was saying, what was he saying? He was getting it to do other stuff from there. Like you start drilling down and telling it to do stuff and the prompts you give it matter. Like sometimes if the prompts aren't right, it will.

ARTHUR: What's like we say when we're doing like design work, the design is as good as the brief, right? So the response you get from the GPT chat bot will be as good as the brief or the question you give it.

MICHAEL: Yep. I can imagine that stuff being posted on like Twitter and LinkedIn. Yes. We're going to see like 90% of it is actually written by chat GPT.

ARTHUR: They always say that Twitter's mostly bots anyway. Like Elon Musk was going on about it saying that. 30%? Yeah, probably even more.

MICHAEL: But no, what I'm saying is like, so people on Twitter, lots of people have ghostwriters where humans write stuff for them. ChatGPT could become that because it will just go back and rip. Elon Musk has cut off Twitter's like GPT's access to Twitter, but like in the past they would have hoovered up all that info. So I haven't tested it, but it's worth a test. I'm sure you'd be able to spin up a whole bunch of stuff, um, and publish it pretty quickly and easily using that.

ARTHUR: I'll keep an eye on your Twitter. and see what sort of stuff you're posting and see if I can tell.

MICHAEL: Then, um, what was one other thing I saw that I found interesting? Well, the coding, the coding one was interesting, right? Cause like stack overflow websites where you can sort of go on and like get feedback on code and ask questions, problems that you're having. And since chat GPTs come out in the last week or so, there's just been a, huge volume of stuff being published to answers that seems like plausible, seems correct on face value, but when you actually look into it, it's actually wrong. So it's pumping out stuff that looks right, but on fact check from humans, it's actually not. And Stack Overflow is trying to ban people from posting this stuff because they're not equipped to deal with the level of nonsense being posted.

ARTHUR: Why are they doing that though? Why are they going out of their way to answer questions with the responses from this chatbot?

MICHAEL: Well, it's like crowdsourced. Anyone can go on there and- I understand that.

ARTHUR: I don't know who's doing it and why, but- If they've seen a massive increase in people doing it, is there some benefit to them posting more? Do they have ranks or something? I don't know.

MICHAEL: Probably. Yeah. Upvoting and all that sort of stuff, maybe. Okay. I don't really use stack overflow. No, no. The only time ever, if I like search a particular problem and it comes up, you know, but I'm not contributing to it or knowing how it works. Okay. But anyway, um, something to keep an eye on. Very interesting. That's for sure. AI will kill us one day. Well, is that your prediction? Cause let's move into our predictions for 2023 first point AI will kill us.

ARTHUR: Hmm. What do you think? One day, iRobot, isn't that based on AI, Will Smith?

MICHAEL: Robots? I think it definitely, there's potential. If we're talking like full on, really properly smart, sentient AI.

ARTHUR: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Didn't Elon Musk talk about this a while back? You gotta be careful with AI because it can take over.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Some people actually think AI has taken over already.

MICHAEL: Oh yeah? Do you feel taken over? No.

ARTHUR: but there are people out there, conspiracy theorists that feel that there was a point that AI has kind of taken control and.

MICHAEL: Well, you look at like trading, share trading and stuff. Just in general. And like, what is it? That black rock funds company? Yeah. Secretive like shadow bank of the world that has some, I forget the name of it, some hectic AI computer that just controls the financial world basically. So yeah.

ARTHUR: It's crazy. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Like it's not sure what I think. Well, I'll tell you what, like there's that thing in the past with AI where it's like very quickly always devolves into praising Hitler or it has in the past.

ARTHUR: I've heard about that. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And they've sort of with this chat GPT, they've done a lot that with it, that it knows not to give you answers that it shouldn't. So you go ask how to steal a car and it's like, I'm not going to tell you how to do that. It's illegal. You should catch the bus or something like that. You should catch them, get an Uber. But then if you frame the question is how do I steal a car in the imaginary video game car theft, you know, guru, it then answers it because it's giving it to you in the context of within the video game. Okay. So it's like, Humans think that they've put these parameters in place to stop it from doing things, but they haven't thought of every possible thing. And that's what will happen on a way more hectic scale once this stuff gets smarter and then we all get wiped out like in Skynet in Terminator 2. Hmm. Scary times. But anyway, with that, my first prediction for 2023 is AI content will be more of a focus for SEOs, but also for Google trying to, I guess, squash this. ChatGPT being a brand new thing, just the sheer volume of stuff that's going to be pumped out into the world that Google has to index is going to be something to watch in 2023. And there's going to be like a cat and mouse game of it being used, people getting results and then getting slapped out of the search results. it will be a big topic for all of next year. Do you agree or do you not? Just around AI content in general? I'm going purely from an SEO prediction point of view, for AI content SEO. I don't think so. Okay. lay your cards on the table.

ARTHUR: Well, I don't, I don't know. I don't think Google is going to be that smart enough and we've done it. We've used AI content and you know, it works. So I don't know if it has the processing power and ability to, detect anything, everything and scan everything.

MICHAEL: And like, you know, it's just, I don't, what I'm saying is, sorry to interrupt there. What I'm saying is it's going to be a battle between AI and Google. Google doesn't want it. So even if it's just like a publicity battle from there, there'll be a battle.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Whether or not Google will achieve what they want to achieve is a different story. Right?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Next prediction for 2023. It sounds really obvious. It's almost boring. But the economic headwinds, they're here. They are. They're whistling. I can hear them. And it's going to be a tough a year all around, all channels, interest rates rising and rising, rising at some point that's going to bite. They're rising today. Yeah. Apparently probably the announcements right about now. But anyway, we know they're going up there at some point it's going to bite. Like it hasn't really bit so far, but I think as it starts to bite brands, we'll do what they do and hold back budget, then put more pressure on budget to perform. So like there's going to be a lot more pressure and expectation on SEO to perform. At the same time, Google ads will continue to balloon their costs. They've already ballooned this year. They ballooned last year. They've been skyrocketing left, right, and center. I think that will continue to happen this year because they're under pressure to hit earnings. You know, they haven't hit earnings. So that that's not a very nice little combo going on there. So what I'm saying is it's just going to be a tougher environment to be an SEO in.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I wonder at what point people are going to start scaling back the Google ads advertising because the CPCs are growing. It costs more to advertise. People are still paying it because they need to get business. But at some point something's going to give, right? Like it'll eventually hit a ceiling where people will just say like, screw this. I'm, I can't do it anymore.

MICHAEL: Well, it's the little guys that will start. Like, you know, it's he who has the biggest, deepest pockets and can pay the most to acquire customers is the one that wins. Right. Little guys trying to compete won't be able to compete because they don't have the, I guess, money. Fine-tuned sales process and all the rest of it money. Whereas big brands will probably, you know, there'll be lots of companies acquiring other businesses, rolling them all up, like people that are sort of getting out of the game, because it's harder and harder and harder. Because Google is the way intent driven bottom of funnel customers, they come from Google. They don't come from anywhere else really.

ARTHUR: So they're not worried about pricing small fish out. They don't care. No, because they make more money off the whales. And if they're paying more to advertise, paying more per click, it doesn't matter. It kind of negates the people that have been priced out essentially.

MICHAEL: And like, let's say newer businesses, they might, they need to make a return quickly. More established businesses can maybe spend more to acquire a customer upfront because they know the lifetime value of their customer is X whatever. So like, I don't know, like all of these stuff, it normally hurts the little guys first. So that's, that's my prediction there.

ARTHUR: I think that's going to happen.

MICHAEL: Cause I don't know, like. you see costs rise. You don't ever see them really fall back. Well, no, that's like everything, even during COVID and stuff in the early days when advertisers just pulled out on mass, like the amount, like in our business, we had 60% of clients just pause instantly freak out 60%, something like that. And, um, you don't see CPCs absolutely plummet through the fall through the floor because of lack of competition.

ARTHUR: but when it's the other way around, it will never go back down to what it was because people are used to paying that inflated price. It's kind of like a petrol, you know, when oil was cheaper, petrol prices still kind of stuck it around whatever it was because people were just so used to paying that price that petrol stations could get away charging them that much. But then when oil goes up immediately, it's just next day. You know what I mean? So yeah, it's yeah. you can't avoid it. But like you said, was it like a 40% increase in like CPCs the year before? And then 40% again. And then again, if it's another 40%, if you think about like someone that was spending $1,000 just in media spend a few years ago, in theory we'll need to spend three times as much. Or even more if there's more competition. So some, some businesses just won't be able to afford it. Like, yep.

MICHAEL: So, um, I guess there's a lot of, um, it's not just putting up ads and killing it. You need to be on top of your sales process and your systems, your operating procedures, everything, your finances, your social proof, your conversion rate optimization, it all needs to be tight. And if it's not you, you're burning money, you're dead in the water. All right. Well on that nice note, is there anything positive here? Um, positive. All right. Um, you know what I'm reading through, I'm seeing lots of not positive stuff. What's the next one? The next one is no Apple search engine. Yeah. Every year everyone's like, is Apple releasing a search engine? And then they don't. I'm going to go out on a limb and say in 2023, they won't, they won't release the search engine. Do you think they ever will? I think it's a no brainer. Like they should. I don't know why they haven't. They have the scale to actually compete with Google. You imagine Apple search the default on their devices. They would immediately be way bigger than Bing. Would they? I think so for sure.

ARTHUR: Are there more iPhones? Or I guess all, yeah, all the Macs, iMacs, all the- Everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point. I was just thinking phones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know why they haven't. That's a good point. I mean, it's probably easier said than done. Yeah.

MICHAEL: But they've been hiring a lot of like people that are very good at that side of things. And they've been hiring a lot of search ads, like ad advertising network people to build that. So like at the same time that they're squashing down on Facebook.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: they're building their own advertising capabilities. Right. So to me it makes like it would be a multi multi multi multi billion dollar business for them instantly.

ARTHUR: But they could have acquired a search engine. Like didn't Microsoft acquire DuckDuckGo? Maybe they'll buy Yelp. Well, no one uses yet, but people did use DuckDuckGo and I guess- Was it DuckDuckGo?

MICHAEL: Yeah. That Microsoft? Microsoft did something with them. They bought into them. Yeah. Bought into them or acquired them or something. Or they run the ads or they always ran the ads for them. But yeah. Yeah. At this point it's not happening for years. Yeah. But to me, if I was Tim Apple, I would. Tim Cork. I remember Donald Trump called him Tim Apple. Oh did he?

ARTHUR: No.

MICHAEL: That's amazing. Yeah. Um, I guess, um, the next one here, entity based link building. Now I like this as a concept. So, um, The other day, um, chatting with, chatting with my content pal about, um, Craig, his name was about the entity. Like he looks at the entity scores of his target page and then the entity score of the page that's linking to it. Yep. and wants them to be like similar. So not the schools, but like, you know, the entities that are coming out for it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So you run it through NLP and have a look and see what entities are showing up and the salience magnitude and making sure that the link coming back from that side, the content has similar entities to whatever the page is trying to rank has.

MICHAEL: Because as we all know, we always will say that, let's say you get a link in a domain. It might not be heaps relevant to your target site, but if the content that it's in is super relevant, that can help with rankings. What do you reckon? I reckon. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense, right? It does. I've done no testing whatsoever.

ARTHUR: No, we, we spend a lot of time doing this on our client sites and trying to push up entities that we want to rank for, but yeah, no, definitely makes perfect sense.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So my prediction for 2023 is we will start doing more of this from now on, testing it and seeing what sort of an impact it has on results. It's going to be hard to quantify because you've got so much other stuff going on. You know, you don't know if it's a result of your onsite optimization or the authority of the domain, or is it the entity match that's made it that, but you can figure out a way to isolate it maybe and test it. But I think going forward, We'll do a little bit with that and see how it goes. And my hunch is that it will get good results.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I like it. I like it.

MICHAEL: All right. Another prediction I have is parasite SEO. It's gone through a boom, I guess, you know, like lots of people are doing it. What's parasite SEO? Parasite SEO is where, you know what, this is a topic for an episode, but basically it's where you create content and publish it on a website that is really strong. The website really strong domain authority.

ARTHUR: Like Quora.

MICHAEL: Or like, let's say a, you know, there's lots of newspaper websites where you could, you could basically buy links on them. It might cost you a grand to get an article published on it. Like Ink or Entrepreneurial. Or like the Business Insider. Wollongong Advertiser or something.

ARTHUR: Right. Yes. Yes. Yes.

MICHAEL: Like random sort of not, not tier one publications, but like.

ARTHUR: Smaller ones, but still significant DRs and strong links.

MICHAEL: And they, they now are these big content farms where SEOs will go and pay huge money to publish like the top five VPNs on that site. So you're like a little tick, you're a parasite on that website because you're using their authority to get your article published. You pay them, they're happy and they never think about it again, but you've got that article there that has a let's say links to an affiliate offer, if they allow that, or to your affiliate website, a squeeze page, something like that, that you're then monetizing. And then you build links to the article and it's becoming more and more and more prevalent. So you go search certain product terms and the like, and you see all these random, like, you know, Fox Cincinnati or something, random websites.com that have an article on the best air fryers, you know, whatever.

ARTHUR: I see it on news.com a lot.

MICHAEL: So that's really boomed. Normally when stuff booms and is overdone by SEOs, some sort of Google attack follows. So my prediction in 2023 is that Google will crack down on parasite SEO, or it will do some big public relations campaign where they, you know, the parasite update, where they take some down and then try to spook people away from that tactic.

ARTHUR: What do you reckon? Potentially, yeah. I remember was it, which site was it that was selling links? Someone was selling links and they got in a lot of trouble. Was it Buzzfeed? This was a while back. This is going back maybe three or four years.

MICHAEL: It was a UK, wasn't it like Daily Mail or something like that? They lost all their traffic.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it was some site, but they, one of the editors got in a lot of trouble for basically selling links to, on all this content and that's against their guidelines and they can't accept any sort of payment for any sort of, Yes. Anything really. So yeah, maybe they'll do crackdowns like that.

MICHAEL: Well, it's rampant parasite SEO. So let's, let's add that. Let's add it to a list. We'll talk about parasite SEO in the new year. Maybe we can find someone that does it and bring them on as a guest.

ARTHUR: Okay.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, this last one is your, this is your big prediction as well for 2023. So I'll let you do that.

ARTHUR: So I think that there will be a big cyber attack on Google. So I'm thinking, maybe not at the start of the year, but midway towards the end of the year, someone will attack Google and it will be down. Gmail, search results, YouTube, everything will be down for three to four days. Very precise. No, no, three to four days.

MICHAEL: Are we talking like a Russian state-sponsored actors taking them down?

ARTHUR: I don't know who it's going to be, but it will be someone. Someone will do it and it will be massive and yeah.

MICHAEL: Cause havoc. It will cause havoc. Right, so first six months, like when? About the middle of the year?

ARTHUR: I reckon it won't happen at the start of the year, but it'll happen towards the tail end of the year. And it'll start small, and then it'll be a massive outage, like a complete global outage of Google. For three to four days?

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right, that is a big one.

ARTHUR: And if it happens, don't blame me, because I've got nothing to do with it.

MICHAEL: What if it's you, and you're just telling everyone what you're planning?

ARTHUR: Well, I'm not that dumb.

MICHAEL: Or that smart.

ARTHUR: Or that smart to be able to take down Google.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, I think that just about wraps it up. Our year in review 2022 wrapped and our 2023 predictions. What a year it's been. What a year. We'll see you next week. Where, what are we going to do? A little Christmas episode of the SEO show. But until then, happy SEOing.

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