SEO Armageddon: Navigating Google's Latest Algorithm Overhaul & Penalty Blitz

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.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show for another episode. I'm Michael Costin. I'm joined by Arthur Fabik. And this week we are talking the Google apocalypse or SEO Armageddon. This is all stuff that chat GPT has given us. Surviving Google's wrath. Google shockwave. That's a good one. We're all basically dealing with the topic of Google's algorithm upheaval at the moment. There's an upheaval happening in the SEO world. It's unlike anything that we've really seen to date as it comes to upheavals. We know Google are fond of an upheaval. They'll do a core algorithm update many times throughout a year, keep the SERPs in a state of flux and penalize some sites and reward others. And that's all normal. But this time around, it's different.

ARTHUR: It is different. Does it feel different? It feels, yeah, well, scarier. Are you nervous? I'm a little bit nervous. Not so much. No, you know what? I'm not nervous. I don't care.

MICHAEL: No. Okay. No, because I just haven't been doing anything wrong. Have you?

ARTHUR: Well, no, I haven't. And I don't, I don't have any affiliate sites or any sites that I think Google would be looking to target. So I really couldn't care less.

MICHAEL: It does seem that they're out to get, uh, like niche website publishers, like people that make their income off affiliate marketing or ads publishing content, running SEO on their own site. Yeah. But it's early days, so we're gonna see a lot of stuff happen, but let me set the scene for you. I would say it's a five pillar or five pronged assault. I've added a prong. I've added a prong as I prepared.

ARTHUR: I'm looking forward to hearing this fifth prong.

MICHAEL: Okay. So at the moment, here's the five prongs. Here's the five things that are going on. First and foremost, there was a massive PR blitz from Google. where they announced what they're doing, why they're doing it, and when they're doing it, which is very rare. They posted it to their blog. They've done interviews with SEO publications. They even have team members posting about it on social media. So that's the first prong, the PR wave. The second prong is that many SEO influencers, so people that have been building in public websites, sharing it on Twitter and YouTube, that sort of stuff, They've been hit with manual actions where their whole website is pulled out of the search results. That is to create fear. I thought that happened to me. It's a PR play to create fear in the marketplace. Because those people will start bleating and whinging about it and posting about it. And then all the people in the SEO world see it's happening and then it puts the fear of God into them a bit. The fear of Google. The fear of Google. And there's been some manual penalties given out to, they're not influencers, but they're obviously really spammy websites. So humans at Google have spent a long time preparing for these manual penalties. That's prong three. That's prong three. There's an algorithm update rolling out at the same time, at the moment, still rolling out, started early March, then coming soon. a crackdown on parasite SEO, supposedly. They've given us two months notice to say that as of May 5th, you better not be in parasite SEO. Now I must say, cracking down on parasite SEO is something that we predicted in Last year's SEO predictions and the year before. And now it's happening, apparently, allegedly. Allegedly. So that's the scene.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot happening, isn't it? In one hit.

MICHAEL: Yes. People are freaking out online.

ARTHUR: Yes.

MICHAEL: Rightly so. On Twitter, on an X, Reddit. So why do you reckon this is happening? I've got a pretty good, I feel, a take on why Google are doing this. outside of the norm, you know, we just think they like upheaving the search results to drive their own profit. Well, yeah.

ARTHUR: But, um, well I know what your take is already and I kind of agree. Yeah. Well, your take was, um, now with all this additional content, AI content, that's just literally flooding the internet, it's taking up more of Google's resources to find it, crawl it, index it, analyze it, rank it, interpret it, that they're just finding ways to reduce it.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Really? Absolutely. I think ultimately the idea would be in a perfect world, they're doing it to return better results, right? That that would be the main reason why they're doing this.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So we don't believe that, do we? Um, I think, I think, yes, I do believe it, but now more so than ever, because there's been over the past year or so, There's been lots of commentary and blowback about the quality of their search results. So like we know, thanks to their never ending updates, constantly changing things that they've just effectively made their results worse and worse and worse over time. Right. And now it's sort of got to the point where spam affiliate sites and just trash, automated trash. We've spoken about it on the show, where if we're interested in a product, we don't go type it into Google. We're going to YouTube and watching videos about it and maybe going to Reddit before we go to Google to search for it. Because we know of all the affiliate sites out there.

ARTHUR: The thing is we do, but I know, for example, my dad doesn't. So he'll look at install trust sites that are ranking and read articles about mattresses. So recently he bought a new mattress. and he landed on an affiliate site, basically was sending me links, just showing me, hey, look, this is a good mattress, not realizing that how affiliate sites work and that they were just pushing whatever mattresses, giving them the biggest kickback in comms or whatever. And there'd be, you know, millions, billions of people out there like my dad, who just doesn't understand what an affiliate site is. He still thinks it's a trustworthy source on the internet.

MICHAEL: But what about anyone under the age of 40?

ARTHUR: Anyone under the age of 40 would probably go straight to, like I said, like you said, YouTube or Reddit.

MICHAEL: And that's like an existential threat for Google. If they lose this like generation of people losing trust in them. not enjoying the search experience, they're going to lose them to other platforms and you know, whatever.

ARTHUR: But I think there's a lot of people who wouldn't know what an affiliate site is.

MICHAEL: So they know shit results when they see them. Because I've seen examples of people talking about it on like, let's say tech subreddit. Like, why does Google results seem worse these days? And I can't find what I'm looking for. And they might not know. essentially that it's affiliate sites, but they know inherently that what they're looking at is trash. And why is Google doing this? So the helpful content update, I feel was the first attempt at fixing this, but all they did was just pump up sites like Reddit way, way, way too much. So they went way too far with that. And Google know it, despite what they say publicly, where they try and say, you know, our search results are better than ever and people are, you know, Data tells us that, you know, people are enjoying it. They also read Twitter and Reddit and their search liaison and the like are very in touch with what's going on. I think internally they know their search suck at the moment. Right. So there's that. And then there is a proliferation of AI content. Cool. Big word. Yep. Making it super expensive, more expensive for them to crawl and index at all. Time consuming and maybe even impossible. Yep. So they need to discount all that trash because it's never been cheaper or easier to publish stuff. Very true. We know from our case study.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, very true. Which I thought the winter car site. Yeah. Which I thought was penalized by Google in this update, but it's ranking again, which is interesting. Yes. Might do an update episode on that actually.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yes. Another time. That's like we, well, let's first, before we talk about that, we'll, we'll, we'll go to their PR blips because they've basically outlined what they're going after. Yes. So, um, this is not normal with updates. Like normally they're very vague, very vague with a core update. Yeah, we're looking to return useful experience for our users, or whatever. So if something happens, don't worry about it. It might not even be something you did. It's just we're rewarding other sites. They're very vague. But they very clearly, a few days ago, said they're going after scaled content abuse, which is just AI content being pumped out. You know, 5,000 articles published to a site in a week. And it's pretty easy for them to pick up on that sort of stuff. Yep. Expired domain abuse. So this is where people buy a expired domain, a domain that's dropped, that used to have links pointing to it, and then rebuild a website on it to either sell links or publish all that AI trashy content and plaster it filled with ads and make revenue off it. And then the other thing they said was site reputation abuse. So this is where a high authority site that has a good strong domain or authority is letting randoms buy articles on there that promote, you know, casino affiliates or sports betting affiliates where they then make money off affiliate marketing.

ARTHUR: Because based on the authority, those articles rank. Yeah. And they drive traffic and then revenue.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Or money. Yeah. So Google themselves, the reason they're having to do this is because authority is the name of the game in SEO. Links. The more links you have, the better your site can do to the point where if your site is super authoritative with tons of links, you can post about anything and get traffic from Google. And then there's lots of niche websites where their whole website is dedicated to a topic that get blasted out of the search results because they don't have the authority. So I think what they're doing here, those three things, if you look at them, AI content being generated en masse, expired domains being repurposed to sell links or just host trashy content that doesn't achieve anything really in the world. A good example of that might be celebrity net worth or how much does celebrity weigh or like, you know, just trash content like that. And then site reputation abuse. This is all Google trying to fix their reputation at the moment. Agree.

ARTHUR: You agree? Yeah. I am making noises that

MICHAEL: Yes. So Arthur's in agreement and this is the first, what is it? Quiver in their bow? Bow in their quiver? Whatever the saying is, where you fire arrows. That was a bad one. But, um, this is their first, the first wave of their assault on this. Right. Um, the next one was the influencers, SEO influencers being hit. There's a ton of people out there that build websites, talk about how they scale up SEO content, use AI and get tons of followers and engagement on it. And, you know, ultimately either sell courses or software that are making Google look bad, essentially. What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: Well, it's true. That's what they do. Yeah. So obviously targeting those types of people without following, penalizing, wiping their sites from the SERPs is going to, like you said, it's going to drive fear because if it's happening to them, it can happen to anyone that has one of those sites and they'll publish about it. They'll whinge about it. And it's just a good way to get the message across, I guess, to people. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And that's exactly what's happened because they've whinged. Yeah. And this is being done at the same time that Google are saying their algorithms updates rolling out. So a lot of these influences are being hit manually, like so people at Google have taken the time to target them. But Google knows it's sort of like the fog of war, you know, in the fog of war, you're not quite sure what's true, what information you can and can't trust in the news and the like. Google have probably deliberately attacking these influencers so that they post and freak out so that it makes all of us think that Google's algorithms are better than they really are.

ARTHUR: And this is all… Potentially, yeah. It could be the way they've decided to do it.

MICHAEL: Part of the way, for sure. Because they are updating the algorithm at the moment, but that hasn't even finished rolling out yet and all of these influences were hit manually. And this all seemed, maybe it started earlier, but for me it started with this, I don't know if you know the SEO heist saga on Twitter? No. But there's a dude who, he runs a mass AI spam software where you can basically spin up pages for keywords. So thousands of different keywords. It will just write the trashiest content that barely makes sense. And he did a case study where they used that tool on a client. I think it was some finance SaaS tool or something like that, where it was just pumping thousands of auto-generated articles by looking at what competitors are up to. publishing him on that site and he showed how his traffic was just blowing up through the roof. And he got like something like 7 million views and comments and the like on the thread. And pretty much immediately after posting that made such waves in the SEO world that people at Google absolutely saw it. Yep. Not long after posting it, that site just fell off the face of the earth. Just de-indexed. Not de-indexed, just in terms of traffic. Visibility plummeted. So he was manually hit, and that was the first real obvious one of this, but now they're just taking that to the nth degree by taking down pretty much anyone that has built up a bit of a following, publishing on Twitter and YouTube, talking about using SEO and particularly using AI and scaling AI and all the spammy stuff that is making the search results worse. Interesting. And they've done this in the past. Do you remember when they went after PBNs? Yeah. And they took down, what was the There was like a blog website where you could go and easily buy blog links. My blog. This is like back in 2013. Yeah, I remember.

ARTHUR: I can't remember the name.

MICHAEL: They went after PBS like this, where it's more a PR play and like shock and awe attack done by people, not algorithms.

ARTHUR: Right? So what you, what you think is that algorithm, well, this update isn't as smart as they say they are. They're doing this in the, like, what do you call it? The fog of war basically just hitting these people one by one by one. So they're basically reporting back to their followers saying, hey, I've been hit, thinking that everyone who's following will do things to try and fix up their site. So if they've got heaps of AI content, they'll start removing it or improving it or whatever. They'll stop publishing it. Stop publishing it because Google isn't actually as smart as they say they are. So this is almost like a, like a better words, a trick. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Well, it's how they, how like, like, so if, if part of their plan is to go after like scaled AI content. Yeah. Sure. They, they could, that's pretty easy to spot because they can look at, um, publishing frequency and if thousands of articles are published quickly, What's the most likely going to be AI, but like you can identify content a lot of the time.

ARTHUR: I'm sure they've got like watermarks and stuff in it. Yeah, maybe they'll be able to pick it up. Maybe, but it goes back to the argument of just because it's AI content doesn't necessarily mean that it's not good content. Correct. So it is kind of. Weird that you would penalise people just because the content wasn't written by a human, it was generated.

MICHAEL: Yeah, which they're not at the moment. No. This is like with what we're talking about so far, it's largely been people that are blatantly spamming.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So it wouldn't be like someone, for example, if I wanted to post a really in-depth article on a specific topic and I used AI, chances are they're not going to penalize that. It's just going to be people that are using it to spin absolute bottom of the barrel type content and scale it. That's what they're really going for.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And if you're doing it on an expired domain, because it's already got a bit of authority, that's another signal. Like it's all stuff that's pretty easy to do, but like they could just do that. algorithmically and not do this big song and dance, but they're doing these manual takedowns at the same time as the algorithm update coming out to really, it's a PR war.

ARTHUR: Well, it's got us talking about it, so.

MICHAEL: Exactly. And at the same time as taking down these SEO influencers, they've been also issuing manual penalties to like the bottom of the barrel type websites. So the people that aren't on Twitter or YouTube teaching others how to do this or like boasting about it, but still running absolute trash sites.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, I guess this goes back to the winter car site. So just quickly, I'm not going to spend too much time talking about it. But basically, A couple of days ago, the whole site was de-indexed almost. I couldn't find it. It wasn't ranking for anything. So basically overnight, ranking really strong for all the keywords that we wanted to rank for, then literally the next day, gone. Win a car, win a car Australia, car competitions, just wiped from the SERPs. So I was completely convinced that it was part of this update. because A, it's all AI content. Literally the whole site is AI content. And then we're basically using PBN links to build authority, which is two things that really they'll be looking at. Well, a PBN link typically is a build on an expired domain. Yeah. So I was shocked yesterday when I had a look and saw our rankings bounce back. So I don't know, maybe they're still, obviously still rolling it out. It might get wiped out again, but it's just interesting to see that it's still, so far Touchwood's survived.

MICHAEL: It's the canary in the coal mine we were saying, like this site in theory, if this algorithm, cause I don't think they'd be looking at that site manually, unless they listen to this show and are looking at us, which you never know, but very unlikely.

ARTHUR: It's such a small site and such a niche that it's very unlikely that anyone's manually looking at it. So we'll see. It's not even a monetized site. It's not even a real site.

MICHAEL: It's a case study. And it's on a new domain. So we'll see. But in theory, if the algorithm was good at picking up AI content created just for ranking, then it should be able to pick that site up. So the fact that it disappeared briefly and then came back is a little, I guess, red flag. Maybe it's going to get blasted.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I was doing a lot of work on it, but that wouldn't be the reason as to why it was removed. Yeah. Cause it was gone. Like literally gone.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And some of the rankings were like page seven instead of page one. Yes. The way rankings that did remain. Yeah. Anyway. Well, let's move on. So we've done influencers being hit. We've done Google's big PR announcement. We've spoken, the manual penalties, you know, they've just hit obvious trash sites, which also feeds into like the fear out there that everyone's experiencing. But then there's the algorithm update, which is, you know, this is meant to be Google being able to detect this stuff without having to do all of that PR based stuff. And so in the press release that they did at the start as part of their PR blitz, they said that they were refining their core ranking systems to understand if web pages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience, or feel that they were created for search engines instead of people. So this could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries with searches. So to me that's something like, you know, how much does Jessica Alba weigh? And they've done a page on that. And it's just filled with like 500 words of gibberish about Jessica Alba and weight and, you know, doesn't need to exist. What we're seeing in the wild so far now, this is still rolling out as we speak, it's happening right now, but websites that drive a lot of traffic from keyword traffic, so like niche publishers, you know, publish article on the seven best things to do in Parramatta, for example, are being hit, just as Google said. And in amongst that niche publishers who seem to be doing everything right are being obliterated still. So there's an example on Twitter at the moment called Travel Lemming. which is a travel website where all the articles are written by locals in an area, talking about what to do in that suburb and giving useful travel guides. And it's not AI spun, it's not mass created and it's been hammered. So this guy is tweeting a lot about it at the moment. So whether it's just collateral damage or what, or whether Google just doesn't want little guys to compete anymore. And it's a place for the massive brands in a lot of these searches to exist. Well, it could be. Yeah. Very well could be. Like we've seen in this update, massive brands are hoovering up even more traffic, like the authority is even more potent as this update's rolling out. So I don't know, maybe here's another conspiracy theory for you. Is Google going after this keyword traffic in advance of them bringing out generative AI into their search results, which would answer all of those types of searches? Probably.

ARTHUR: That's where it's heading, right? That's where Google wants it to head. Put it this way, if that's where they want it to head, that's where it's going to go. So potentially that's what the maybe beginnings of rolling that out and wiping out all those different… Nuke the tiny operators, send the traffic to big players, and then in time, SGE takes over.

MICHAEL: Probably. Yeah. Which is a scary thought because Eventually, we've seen what's happened with the Gemini, like how trash their generative AI is. Well, it's very biased. Yeah. It's very biased. And so we get to the point where Google search doesn't display any sort of independent voices whatsoever. No.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, anything that is pushing their agenda or any agenda or whoever's agenda they want to push. Yeah. Which is, yeah, scary. Yeah. It's yeah.

MICHAEL: Well, let's talk Parasite SEO.

ARTHUR: I'm just trying to think as well. It might be slightly off topic, but we're talking about how Reddit was sending all the data to Google for them to train their AI. We're talking about how Reddit was, since the helpful content update, ranking a lot more for basically any kind of informational query and whether or not that was intentional because they wanted to drive people searching on Google to Reddit, have conversations, discussions, opinions, and then feed that back into their AI. Training their models. Yeah. But then we're also talking about how heavily moderated Reddit is. And it's basically an echo chamber for whatever the moderator or Reddit wants it to be really. So it's not really a, unbiased kind of forum. Because if you have a differing opinion, you're going to get downvoted or just shadow banned or like just removed. So how can you train an AI model on something that is so heavily biased towards one thing? And that's kind of what we talked about with Gemini, right? And how it was like ignoring prompts and like something as basic as give me an image of a white family and then displaying pictures of a black family. Which, you know, as an AI, why is it doing that?

MICHAEL: Which is, it's weird. It's concerning. This is what I'm saying. Like imagine when search results is that.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, that's what got me thinking about it. And you're going to get pushed whatever they want. say from a e-commerce perspective as well, like pushing specific products. Like I like looking at if I want to buy shoes, unless I know the specific shoe I want, I want to have a option of different shoes. I don't want to be shown what shoes I should be buying. I want to see all of them. So maybe not the best example, but that's kind of,

MICHAEL: I reckon that conspiracy of Reddit. So Google's trying to deal with Reddit to like plug in via API to all of their data and use it to train Gemini, paying them however many hundreds of millions for that. Google rewards Reddit with a ton of traffic. I'd love to know how much more stuff's being posted on Reddit now as a result. I haven't seen any studies, but. I'm sure it'd be a lot. It would be a lot. So they're feeding their own AI by rewarding Reddit, crushing tons of smaller publishers in the process, but not caring. Basically, yeah. Because they're out in a battle against open AI at the moment. But it's like, yeah, as you say, it's just they're only getting one very moderated type of voice. Yes. They're very interesting.

ARTHUR: I believe it. Like it makes sense.

MICHAEL: Why wouldn't they do it really? Yeah. Why wouldn't they? Exactly. That's what you would do if you were trying to compete in AI and build your own model. Because I guess open AI was able to be trained back in the day before Reddit and everyone started cracking down on that Twitter. Like they just went in there and took it all. Whereas now those platforms have cracked down on that. So it makes sense.

ARTHUR: OpenAI is getting shitter and shitter by the day. It is. It's painful. It doesn't follow simple instructions.

MICHAEL: It's lazy. It'll be like you ask it to do something, it'll do 10% of the job and then go, now you just go finish it. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Well, like back when it became popular, I was using it. It would write articles for you. It would crawl. Maybe not crawl because it didn't have the ability to crawl, but it would rewrite content. now when you want it to rewrite something, it's telling you that they can't do it. I'm not going to rewrite it for you. This is what you should do. And eventually if you prompt it enough, it does it. But it's just gone from being something that like reads the prompts and executes them to arguing.

MICHAEL: Noticeably worse, noticeably lazier. And to the point where like we pay for it and I'm like, why am I paying for this? Because it's still handy.

ARTHUR: It is very handy. But the most simple one is, I'll prompt it to use Australian spelling. So like Z, S instead of Zs for like customize, whatever, utilize. And it won't do it. It just ignores that prompt for some reason.

MICHAEL: And it ignores, you know, that you make your own GPTs with instructions and you could upload like PDFs and stuff. And it's meant to take that into account. It doesn't, it just ignores it. It's useless. Anyway, we're not meant to be talking about that. We're talking about the Google apocalypse. There's the last little bit, which is the Parasite SEO Crackdown. So if you go search Best Online Casino… You love that one, don't you? Well, the entire first page of Google, maybe even the first two pages, are Parasite SEO sites. So Sports Illustrated, when I last checked, is number one for Best Online Casino. Why is Sports Illustrated ranking number one for casino term? Well, it shouldn't. It shouldn't, but it does purely because it has a strong domain. And this is something that's been going on for years. And again, people on Twitter and the like have been, you know, gloating about how well they do out of Parasite SEO. It's always been something Google is going to crack down on at some point. And now it is here. But what they're doing, what they've done in this announcement is say that we're giving publishers two months to clean up their act. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Which is weird, right?

MICHAEL: Yeah. They never extend that to anyone else, like small people. They'll just obliterate the search results overnight and crush people's businesses, drive them out of business. Yep. But in this case, they're giving two months notice period, which.

ARTHUR: Why do you think that might be?

MICHAEL: I reckon for a couple of reasons. One, it's a PR play again, but maybe they don't know how to take down big sites like algorithmically, like ignore authority. So they're sort of trying to put the fear of God into these sites so that they self-police.

ARTHUR: But couldn't they do that? Like they would know what the sites are. Obviously there's- Manually they can. Manually, yeah. So it wouldn't be hard for them to figure out what sites are doing this. And then just like they have with the SEO influencers, just pick a couple and bye bye.

MICHAEL: Which is exactly what's going to happen. But this is a PR plan now. Like there'll be all this talk about it for two months. And they're hoping that the sites self-regulate. Maybe it will help them train their models to have these sites like suddenly changing things or… Or look at patterns of what they've removed and whatever they've removed is what the algorithm should be looking for. Correct. Yep. Then the other thing is, I reckon Google might be a bit scared about bad publicity themselves. Potentially, yeah. These are all big news publishers, a lot of them, that could start making complaints publicly in articles, give bad PR to Google. Google's a massive monopoly. They don't want antitrust cases on them. There's some being brought at any given time, but they want to squash all of that sort of stuff. So maybe they're They're extending them a bit more of a gross period than they would any other business at all. I can speak from experience, like one of my affiliate sites back in the day, I used to teach people how to get US Netflix in Australia before Netflix launched here. When Netflix launched here, my site got de-indexed overnight. A couple of other sites in my search console did, and I got a cease and desist sent to me by Netflix all at the same time. So obviously in cahoots with Google, they had no problem doing that on a small website, but then these types of big publishers get a nice two-month notice period. Hmm. Which I don't think is very fair, but it is what it is. And, um, it's going to be very interesting to see what happens May 5th, like which sites die and which sites don't.

ARTHUR: Makes me wonder what they're expecting these sites to do in those two months, like remove the content that they've added, that they know they've used AI to write, remove like the content they use to scale, like, or use AI to scale.

MICHAEL: Well in this case it's just, we're talking just Parasitis here. So they've sold these articles. So removing the posts and articles that are… Which drive a ton of traffic to their sites at the moment. They're probably making money off it, not just by selling the posts, but by ads and the like. So these sites are being asked to take a massive hit. So some are going to proactively do it, others won't. And then we'll see May 5th. how good Google's algorithmic update is attacking this or whether it has to be all, you know, manual penalties and more PR and spin by Google.

ARTHUR: Bye-bye Outlook India.

MICHAEL: Yeah. That's the one to keep an eye on.

ARTHUR: I'm looking at it now. So I just did a search for top casinos. Yep. Techopedia. Right. The friends of the show. Yeah. And then Outlook India.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yep, and then, well, Sports Illustrated shouldn't be ranking number one for best online casino. It's not for me, Pot.

ARTHUR: Ah, okay. Maybe you were searching in Washington again.

MICHAEL: Yeah, no. Best online casino.

ARTHUR: I've got Techipedia. And then I've got Outlook India and then a few other, like Trustpilot and stuff, Denver Post. But yeah, Denver Post, another one. Like- Denver Post, Outlook India.

MICHAEL: Sponsored content. Trustpilot. Hey, that's great. There's even some where it's ranking on like Google Play and stuff. So anyway, lots going on in the Google Armageddon. Do you think the great Google upheaval of 2024? I guess for us,

ARTHUR: outside of any affiliate sites doesn't really affect us really.

MICHAEL: Well, I could see if, let's say you're a legit business and you've massively scaled up location pages using AI, that could be a thing. Potentially. Doorway pages for like products in e-commerce sites, which has always been a thing. Like we worked on the eBay penalty when eBay got manually penalized, another big PR play of Google's back in the day, where they took down all those search result pages.

ARTHUR: Yeah, but that because it was just the reason they did that was because it was generating different categories and duplicate categories.

MICHAEL: Pretty much anything you searched on eBay got turned into a page.

ARTHUR: Yes, and it was just nothing.

MICHAEL: But that's sort of the same thing, you know, as scaling all these pages. There might be a bit of AI trash content in it, but the net result is thousands, millions of pages that Google has to crawl and index.

ARTHUR: And poor search results. If you're talking for like a typical SEO client, a lot of the time probably this update they don't really have anything to worry about unless… I would say maybe if they've been doing a lot of link building and some of those links are built on expired domains that have been repurposed. In which case they just won't pass any value.

MICHAEL: That's, yeah, that's what Google says now. They don't sort of, they don't hurt you, but they'll stop passing value. So maybe some of them will, rankings will drop. And then the remedy to that is doing more link building because authority, as this is showing, authority is the absolute be all and end all. And I don't think that's changing with this update.

ARTHUR: I guess the one thing that could be concerning is what you said is that majority of sites that people buy links from would be on repurposed domains using AI content. So that could be a large percentage of sites, which link back to basically every single person that does this here a lot of the time.

MICHAEL: So if that's the case and they stop passing value, then it's the same for everyone, I guess. More true. So we're going to have to see. the task that's ahead of Google and it's very difficult to handle. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens. The update's rolling out at the moment. The manual stuff seems to have died down, but let's say early April, we'll probably know what's happened with the algorithm and then mark it in your diaries. Early May, May 5th, we'll see what happens on the Parasite SEO front.

ARTHUR: Imagine it's just a big nothing burger. It could be. Just nothing.

MICHAEL: It could be. This is why, why are they always having to do big PR blasts? If their algorithm was so good, couldn't they just handle it without having to?

ARTHUR: Who knows? Who knows? Maybe it is just to show that they are trying to do something about it. So rather than just rolling it out, the PR is to, I guess, win back people's trust and explain to them what they're looking at. This is what people are doing to manipulate the search results for someone that doesn't understand it. But then for someone that doesn't care about it, they're not going to read a Google press release.

MICHAEL: My wife doesn't care. Yeah. Doesn't know any different. Yeah. So it's trying to force SEOs to do what they want. Yeah. I feel cause the algorithm can't, can't.

ARTHUR: That's always been the case though. Hasn't it? So, and it still is. I'm just trying to think back as well. I remember with the link building side of things and how they wanted everyone to use the, um, like sponsored post, uh, what do you call it? Link attribute. Yeah. And that was meant to be a thing. Like you have to update all your links and turn it like pointing links to relic or sponsored. Yeah. No one's done that. No, that was a big nothing burger.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So there's been a long list of them over the years of these big public smack downs on guest posting, PBN. PBN still work now, guest posting still works now. But at the time when they happened, everyone was freaking out. So this is another one of them. Google Armageddon may not be an Armageddon. It might just be more of the same. Keep calm and carry on. We'll have to see, but I reckon that wraps this episode up. So until next time. Happy SEOing.

ARTHUR: Happy SEOing. Good luck out there.

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