The Shady & Lucrative World of Parasite SEO with Lars Lofgren

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, welcome to the SEO show for another week. I'm Michael Costin and I've just finished up a chat with Lars Lofgren. Now, I came across Lars when he published an article about Reddit and how moderators and people on Reddit are abusing the amount of traffic that Reddit gets from Google these days to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing. And he recently published an article that really went into depth about how Forbes is more or less the biggest affiliate marketing SEO play on the planet. And the amount of money and traffic that they're getting from Google is just astronomical at the moment. And the article has caused a lot of waves online in the SEO world. It's been shared a lot. It's gone viral. It's no doubt got the attention of Forbes and Google, and it's really good timing to have Lars on the show to talk about both those articles. So we're diving into the slightly shady, but extremely lucrative world of affiliate parasite SEO on both Forbes and Reddit. All right, let's listen to the chat with Lars Lofgren. Hi Lars, thanks for joining us on the SEO show. For people who may not have heard of you, could you please let us know a bit about yourself and what you do and we'll get going from there.

LARS: Yeah. So I've spent my whole career in online marketing, SEO, inbound marketing, content marketing, that type of thing. And right now I do some marketing strategy consulting with a few clients of mine. But yeah, I spent my whole career trying to just get companies attention on the internet.

MICHAEL: Well, you got my attention on the internet, funnily enough. Nice little segue there. With an article you did about Reddit and Like we all know in the SEO world at the moment, how Reddit has just exploded in visibility and traffic and your article covered off some of the stuff that's going on there. That might be a bit shady when it comes to billet marketing. And then since I read that article and since I invited you on the show to talk about it, you've released another. banger of a follow-up article covering Forbes.

LARS: It's sort of blown up.

MICHAEL: How's that been for you over the last sort of week or so?

LARS: Yeah, it has been a little crazy. Lots of folks have reached out. I think my LinkedIn post is like 96,000 views or something like that, somewhere around there. My tweets is similar impression counts. So things have gotten a little viral, a little crazy, but they've been good. I think I'm through the most of it. Things are starting to calm down. I can actually get back to getting some work done.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, let's dive into what these posts were about and understand maybe with all the attention, there's stuff we can talk about, we can't talk about, but let's just start with like this concept of parasite SEO, because it sort of is a running theme maybe between the two articles you did. So maybe if you explain what that is, why it's relevant in this case, and then we'll dig into each of the articles that you've covered, really interesting stuff.

LARS: Yeah. So Parasite SEO, that's like the informal industry term. I think Google calls it something a little bit more generic with site reputation abuse or something stupid. Yeah. I like Parasite SEO. That really gets the point across. But Parasite SEO is when you have a website, but then you engage with a third party. and that third party comes into your website and starts posting all sorts of stuff. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to do this. There's all sorts of ways to structure the agreements, but you have a different organization working on a website that's already established and there's little or no oversight from the original company. So you have this completely separate company that comes in, publishes whatever they want. And of course, when you have people that are doing something like that, they will often go after terms that make a lot of money. They can get aggressive with content. They can publish a lot of content, get into a lot of different categories with the sole goal of just making money. This has become a very popular thing to do across SEO, actually, like all of SEO right now, because the fundamental problem, or I think what really kicked all this into high gear is last couple of years, Google's changed how their algorithms worked in a really big way. And now if you have one of these like really, really massive sites, like a top 100 type of site with like tons of content, tons of engagement, tons of brand and authority, tons of just everything happening on the site, you kind of get a free pass. and you get ranked for whatever you want. So these companies that own these websites have kind of figured this out. There's all these other companies that are like SEO specialists and they spent a lot of their careers in SEO. And each of these two groups have realized that they can help each other. So then they come together, deals get made, everything's very hush-hush. And then a company of some kind starts publishing all sorts of stuff and kind of, well, in Google's language, abuses the domain. But yeah, it can get out of hand really fast.

MICHAEL: Well, I'm going to be interested to hear your thoughts on why that's the case and what the repercussions, ramifications are for SEO in general. But maybe let's just dive into The background, you know, with this Forbes article, like the article you've put on your blog is fantastic. It's a great reader, sort of enthralling. Not sort of, it was enthralling. I read it, sort of, yeah, read it, shared it with my team, like, check this out, guys. I'm sure that's been going on a lot for you, but people that haven't yet read it, maybe if you could give a bit of background on, let's start with Forbes, because that's quite topical at the moment, like a bit of a background maybe about what is going on, how you came across it, the sort of stuff you can go into.

LARS: Yeah. Yeah. So Forbes, um, even before I wrote my post, uh, Forbes has been a bit of a hot topic for a lot of SEOs in the last probably two years. Uh, because a lot of people have noticed that Forbes started ranking for everything, all sorts of stuff. And whenever you're doing your own keyword research or planning new content and just kind of mapping your space, it doesn't really matter who you are. Everyone from some like local attorney over to, you know, B2B software, which is where I tend to play, all sorts of categories, Forbes just pops up over and over and over again. And it's become particularly salient because in the last especially year, but really like two years, a lot of niche and smaller publishers have just been wiped off Google. This is the helpful content update that's been rolling around. I've been hit multiple times. I know other folks that have been hit. You can say whatever you want about my sites, but I've looked at people I know and looked at their sites. I'm like, these are good content. What's going on? So you get all these like really great content creators getting completely obliterated. And then at the opposite end of the spectrum, you have really big sites. And I would say Forbes is one of them. that for whatever reason just starts appearing everywhere in search. You can't avoid it. And this is, uh, this has become known in the SEO community. Like anybody who's an SEO professional kind of seeing this dynamic. I think a lot of people are frustrated. They're like, what is going on? Um, some people will say, Oh, Forbes deserves it. They have the brand. That's what people want. Well, maybe. And so a lot of things have not made sense to me in the kind of algorithm landscape and how search rankings are worked. The last two years have been the most chaotic, volatile, crazy. There's just so many things that don't make any sense. And a couple of weeks ago, I was like, well, you know, I want to dig into this. Who's actually running the show here? Who's driving this program at Forbes? What are they doing? I want to unpack that a little bit. And I got curious and I just started poking around and I went down the rabbit hole and out came the post.

MICHAEL: Beautiful. So what did you find? Like what sort of tactics are they using? Can you go into potential traffic numbers, revenue? Like I know anecdotally, I see Forbes ranking for like medicine terms or health, fitness, that sort of stuff. And it's just not what Forbes has always been about.

LARS: It's not. It's like, yeah, it's a bit of a red flag. And I think that speaks to the way the Google algorithm is currently set up. Um, is that, uh, Forbes can post on anything and everything. Uh, I found the CBD gummies post. I think someone else on LinkedIn told me they're ranking for like how to remove squirrels. You're like, well, what is a business website? This is Forbes we're talking about. Very established brand and kind of in the business category. Why are they getting into all this other stuff? It doesn't make sense. So I did some traffic estimates. I looked at Ahrefs. So that's what I was using. Ahrefs is always wrong to some degree, but it kind of, it'll give you the rough scale. We're talking like 25, 30 million visitors a month. It's just insane. I've never touched a site that big. Oh my God. It's just crazy. That's usually like social websites, right? Or like that size. I don't know how a content program could get that big. So, but those are, those are the estimates I saw. I have the exact breakdown. And this is just, so it's the, the estimates that I put together is, What I realized is that Forbes.com is basically being run by like two entirely different teams. I consider them different companies. You can look at everything I present in my post and you might disagree or someone might decide that there's actually, they are the same company. That's fine. I think they're different companies, but they're definitely different teams. And you have your normal Forbes team doing all the classic Forbes stuff. There's journalism, there's other things. There's all sorts, all that normal Forbes stuff. You're still doing that. Well, then there's this other team. And they call themselves Marketplace or Forbes Marketplace. They present themselves under the name Forbes Advisor. And they're doing all this SEO content. Just that's all they do, is my understanding. That's all I've ever seen is their SEO content. They're going really hard on SEO. And a lot of that is for like affiliate terms, you know, search terms that have a decent amount of purchase intent, and you can get conversions and earn affiliate commissions on. But then there's tons of also informational posts and keywords as well. They're really pursuing like a category strategy, right? They're going really deep in every topic cluster. So if they're trying to make money in a certain area, or this is what I assume they're doing, because this is what I would do if I was running the site in SEO program, They want to try to make money on squirrel removal. They will do all the posts on how to remove squirrels, right? So, and that's, they've posted a ton, a ton of content. It's become a very large site and now they're just everywhere across Google, right? And that's how they got the traffic numbers they currently have.

MICHAEL: It's almost like SEOs have been given the keys to the kingdom of just this powerful site. And the natural end result of that is content on squirrel removal because they're SEOs. They're going to do what SEOs do.

LARS: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't blame them. Like if I could just rank for whatever I wanted, I would publish that content too. Right. So it's Google who's not like on top of it. Right. Google should be the adult in the room. Google should be saying, OK, what can this site get away with or have they earned the kind of authoritativeness and trust and topical authority to be a real source of trust on this topic? Yes or no. That's Google's decision. And right now, Google's giving Forbes and honestly, a lot of the other media sites a free pass on this stuff.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And that's where most people have the problem, right? Like you can have a really small team working on a passion project. They pour their heart and soul into it. The content's great. And it gets blasted out of the search results and Google goes, well, it's helpful content, blah, blah, blah. And then there's these giant parts. It's just a joke. And like, what is Google's role here? Like, do you think their algorithms just not up to the task? Like it's just so dominated by authority that even they don't know what's going on, they can't control it. Or do you think maybe there's something a bit more underhanded going on? Is there some sort of corporate relationship going on that leads to- Yeah.

LARS: So this is a big question. So I know a lot of people bring up some sort of like, dubious shadowy thing of some kind. And maybe there is, I don't know. Uh, I tend to, as a default, I always tend to try to go to what is the dumb answer as opposed to like the intelligence, uh, shadowy conspiracy answer. Most things are just the way they are because people are, people and they're not following through or their incentives are different or, um, and you know, something's just too big to fix or too big to solve. And, uh, that's kind of like my base kind of assumption of what's going on with Google. I don't have any inside knowledge on what is happening with the Google search team. I'm, I have the same knowledge. Everybody else listening to this podcast does. I don't know. Uh, I don't know. I have any sources over there of any kind. Uh, so everything is just pure speculation, but on my end and what I assume is like, you know, I've seen this from other like big tech companies and a lot of tech right now in general, there's, there's a lot, a lot of these organizations have gotten really, really big. Uh, there's a lot of management, there's very complicated teams, a lot of moving pieces, and probably quite a few leaders that shouldn't be in their roles. Uh, and I think a lot of this has just gotten away from the search team. That's, that's what I assume. Um, cause like the algorithm, you know, I've, I've worked with this, the Google and the search algorithm, my whole career to some degree, and things make less sense than they ever have. Like from regardless of like what you're trying to optimize for, from a revenue standpoint, a value standpoint, a content standpoint, there's like even just all the tactical bugs I've seen. It's never been buggier in my opinion. So a lot of that leads me to believe that a few basic tenants of the algorithm just got neglected or forgotten about, or people aren't on top of it. And now it's just the whole thing's gotten away from them and trying to get it back to a place where it's actually working is like, it's almost too big of a job for whoever's working. I have a lot of sympathy for whoever is actively working on that. Um, But, uh, yeah, I think the whole thing's just gotten too big to handle. And then the people that are managing it are not capable of getting their arms back around it and back to a good place. That's, that's my assumption.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And, um, we know with parasite SEO, Google announced they were doing a crackdown on it, you know, and then it was all sort of, it was manual and targeted. It wasn't algorithmic. So that again suggests, yeah.

LARS: Yeah. They had a big whole announcement. They've never done an announcement like that before. I mean, maybe they have way back, but like, that is very, very rare for Google to like give a heads up on an update. They just do not do that. So the fact that you like gave all these like big companies, like a heads up is just like, Oh, you didn't give any of the small publishers that you completely obliterated that have all these amazing sites and great content. Uh, you screwed them over just like on, on a single Sunday. Right. Uh, and then you're giving these massive sites, this heads up with this announcement. And what was it like a month or two that, that everybody had this heads up and then the date comes around and there's nothing. Yeah. Well, so they did do yet like the manual actions, uh, that you said. So a bunch of like particularly bad coupon, uh, subsites got like completely obliterated and removed, which is good. Thanks. Uh, but they sort of just stopped there. They didn't really do anything else. Everybody was like, what's going to happen to all of this other content that like really shouldn't be ranking and just nothing. And that was what, six months ago.

MICHAEL: Yep. So anyway. So where do you see it headed? Like Forbes? marketplace or advisor is sort of growing bigger than the parent company. So that's going to keep going because it's a cash cow, but do you think it's sort of damaging their reputation? Like, you know, SEO people like us look at it. I remember you could buy a guest post from Forbes back in like 2013 per hour. It's always been a thing, but it's extreme at the moment. Do you think like a regular searcher when they're searching for CBD gummies and they see Forbes, they paint their perception of Forbes? And if not, are we going to see every other big publisher pile into doing the exact same thing and end up with just even more affiliate spam out there? Where do you sort of see it headed?

LARS: Well, I definitely see, uh, all the other publishers getting into this. Um, this is, this is not like a sub for anybody in the affiliate space. Uh, everything I broke down about Forbes, like it's not in the new or the details might be news, but the fact that they're going hard at it and they're going after the affiliate stuff, that's not news. Everybody in media and these big, big media sites and organizations and businesses, they all know about this, um, in my assessment. And many of them are trying to get into it. They are either working with another third party or they're trying to do it themselves. Everybody's got something in motion from what I've seen. And as far as like, what, uh, what was your original question? The first question.

MICHAEL: I was just asking, do you think their reputation, like with the general perception in the public is impacted or sort of open to keep going?

LARS: That's a good question because you bring up some other controversies around Forbes and there are many, many well-known controversies around Forbes, like not even just the affiliate stuff and Forbes marketplace, but just Forbes itself getting into areas that are not exactly trust building. Um, and there's been a lot of stories in the last few years. Uh, people keep mentioning different ones to me that I'm like, Oh yeah, I know about that. I heard about that. So I think there's regardless of anything that's happening with SEO and affiliates, I think there's already been a tremendous hit, um, to the Forbes brand. And this is just a continuation of something that's already in motion. Um, To me, I would love to see an owner of Forbes putting the brand and the reputation first, and a leadership team that is also doing that. I think that would be best for the long-term of Forbes, but I don't own Forbes, so it's not my decision.

MICHAEL: Well, maybe they've decided that, you know, being a media company is just tougher and tougher and tougher. So it's time to cash in.

LARS: It is tough. I do have some sympathy for everybody in that works all these organizations. Making money online has gotten hard. whether you're at the New York times or time or the Atlantic or whoever, it's not, it's definitely challenging. So everyone's trying to figure out the new version and find a path forward. I just think that there's a better path.

MICHAEL: Well, that's a pretty good segue into a little chat about Reddit because Reddit is just sucking up so much of the traffic out there at the moment. So maybe some traffic that would go to, smaller publishers that were monetizing online has just been absorbed by Reddit now. And it's resulted in Reddit being a little playground for affiliate spam.

LARS: So I'm more than a little, it is the playground right now. It is.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And you've got another fantastic article on that. So like what's going on with Reddit.

LARS: Yeah, so the traffic, there's a bunch of charts out there on how the search visibility has changed for Reddit in the last couple of years. And I have never seen a search growth traffic, like traffic growth chart like that. Like, oh my God, it's just, it's through the roof. You're talking about the Forbes growth, but it doesn't compare to Reddit. Reddit is on an entirely different level. And it's nothing that Reddit did or didn't do, in my opinion. It's Google decided that Reddit should be appear or should appear like everywhere. And that is exactly what they've done. Now, every time you search for anything, you pretty much get at the very least a giant Reddit block, if not like multiple Reddit listings in the same search results. I think I had one search result. There was like six or seven of the placements were just Reddit. It wasn't like a Reddit term or anything like that. Most people assume what happened in the SEO space is that there were a number of posts and articles that kind of got a little viral over the last couple of years about how search results were declining and how everyone is just like adding Reddit to all their searches. And I think Google freaked out and was like, oh no, we need to get ahead of this. And their solution is just to feature Reddit everywhere, which I'm not quite sure that was the right path. Reddit should be featured to some degree. I don't think this is the solution though. So yeah, now we have like, it feels like forced. It feels like Reddit is just getting forced everywhere, which is a little crazy to me. But since it appears everywhere and kind of gives like another free pass, but even to like a more extreme degree, it's like a, it's almost like a default ranking, let alone a free pass. A lot of the kind of, well, a lot of online marketers have figured out that, Hey, these posts are ranking automatically. How can I get one of my own posts added to that ranking, right? Like if someone, if Reddit's featured at the number one ranking for something, and there's a thread on Reddit, and then I have a user account that is already in that thread, or is able to see that thread, or I'm a mod in that subreddit, and I can just pin a comment to the very top of the thread, then people can add whatever content they want. And the thing to remember is with Reddit, everything is moderated by just kind of volunteers, anonymous volunteers that are managing the subreddits out of their own time and money. And for the longest, longest time, it was for their own goodwill. Right. Or they were just they wanted to help their communities. They were doing it because they wanted to. And it sort of worked. Well, now it's gotten big enough. And with being featured like everywhere and a bunch of money terms, there are a number of mods that have realized they can make real money doing this. And so they add their own posts. They have alt accounts that they're posting under, and they're trying to get their affiliate links into Reddit threads that have already been featured on Google, which is everywhere. So there's, it's just, there's endless amounts of cracks and stuff to go after. And if you're a little savvy, like you could probably make a decent amount of money for just throwing in some links for stuff that's already ranking. And then sitting back and doing absolutely nothing. And most people will never catch it or realize what's going on.

MICHAEL: And I guess this all started, as you said, because people would put Reddit on the end of a search, right? Because they trusted the opinions that are on there. It's like real people in real communities talking about things. But this is just sort of, in my opinion, going to destroy Reddit long term if it's left unabated, which it seems to be the case. Let's also say Google has a little bit of a partnership with Reddit at the moment to train its AI. So in a way, Google's encouraging more and more spam to go in to reduce the quality of the conversation and content that it then trains its AI on. Are we going to end up in some dystopian, like affiliate AI driven future where it's just.

LARS: Yeah, I think so. It's actually wild. I don't even know why I, if it was me, I'd be way more skeptical about the, just the, even the normal data within Reddit. I kind of strikes me that a lot of people in Google are not actual Reddit users. Cause if they were, they would know that Reddit is not, there are pockets of truth and there are some communities that are really valuable conversations happening, but then there's a lot of nonsense. Uh, people just trying to troll each other, uh, dumb jokes, just trying to get attention. I mean, that's Reddit is entertainment, right? It's everybody just trying to get up votes and make each other laugh. Sometimes that leads to authentic content and sometimes that leads to a lot of not authentic content. So we're training all of our LLMs off this stuff. I can't imagine it leads to accuracy and high quality content, but that's just me. And that was before, like you said, that Google started featuring them everywhere. And now the affiliate folks are involved. And honestly, I wouldn't even even if it's not just affiliate folks, like if I was some VP of marketing at a hot tech company of some kind, some high growth startup that was really going for it, I would probably have a team in Reddit and at the very least monitoring things and trying to build connections with different communities. But if I was more nefarious, I would not be hard to get a team start to exploit Reddit, to start building up tons of anonymous accounts. So we always had like a bank of users that we could use for any given moment. Anytime a conversation in our industry popped up about tools or alternatives or software, anything that was in my category, I would make sure one of my team caught it within the first few minutes and was already in there, essentially just faking a response. And then I'd get the rest of the team to upvote that comment pretty fast. So then it gets that momentum. Reddit's like a momentum game, right? So it's just an old school leaderboard. And if you kind of get that momentum early and your team's on top of it, well, now you get the rest of the community they're going to upvote it. And then it just turns into a snowball. Right. And now you've essentially and you can you can be smart about it by not adding any links. Like if you just list your company brand name, like just the name or the product name, no one will ever know it was you. The only way to tell if there's like a true affiliate market or something doing shady is they actually post their link. But if they hold some restraint, you'd never know. Unless the like account or the user itself has some sketchy posting history or something like that. Like there's very few checks and ways to actually verify anything. And so I absolutely assume this is happening. Like Reddit marketing consultants and agencies are popping up all over the place because this is where all the traffic is. And now it's how you actually get to the top of Google. Right. If you don't have like a parasite SEO agreement and you want to actually have a chance to rank for some stuff, you kind of need to get into Reddit. And the best way to market a Reddit is actually doing the shady stuff, which is nuts.

MICHAEL: So the ad platform is like. Because typically Reddit users have never responded well to ads.

LARS: They don't. Yeah. And what that means is like, it's this really, it's like this binary situation as, as a marketer. Like if you are, you're, you're running a market team, you are a marketer and you want to do some stuff on Reddit. Um, you know, most of Reddit is extremely allergic to anything that's even somewhat promotional, which I think is fair. I mean, that's, that's probably what kept Reddit as high quality for as long as it did. So I don't knock them for that. But from a marketer's perspective, you're in a really tough bind, right? So you either go in like 100% pure and try to like really build the trust of a particular community, which takes a really long time. It's very difficult to do. And maybe that's, you know, the way to do it. But there's really no like other in between compared to the other extreme, which is going in and being like really shady. And the difference in effort to ROI between those two things is like so extreme, that I think a lot of companies getting into Reddit, they'll almost have to get into the shady stuff. Because there's no way to just kind of do normal marketing. And most people aren't in a position to do the super authentic community building. personal branding like that. That's hard. And it's really hard on Reddit. Cause if you get even just slightly pushy, then you get banned out of your community. You get a, which is fair. Like that might be a good action, but it creates a real conundrum, right? So what do you do as a marketing team? I'm like, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of marketing teams ended up going down the shady route or sucked into it or worked with an agency. that started pushing things and doing shady things and weren't really telling their clients everything that they were doing, right? Because everything's anonymous. Everything's just another random user account. So you never really know.

MICHAEL: Such a poison chalice for Reddit, this traffic, cause they IPO'd, it's all great, but it's going to destroy their actual product at the end of the day. And, um, do you see, where do you see it heading? Do you see Google slapping? It's like, it's like Google puts its hand on the scales and rather than just touching it a little bit, it's always heavy handed and then the damage.

LARS: They used to be gentler. They used to be like, okay. It used to be calm. SEO used to be the calm channel. Right. And now they've taken, now it feels like, out of the you take the volatility of social and now you combine it with like the long term grind that search has always required. So the payoff is like kind of messed up now. It's like. But yeah, so they right now, they're kind of like feeling back and forth to extremes. Right. They got a lot of criticism over Reddit being better. Well, now they feature Reddit everywhere. They got a criticism or had a lot of criticism about search quality results. And now they're just defaulting to, oh, we can trust all the media sites. Maybe not. Right. There's no there's it doesn't feel like the search team is actually figuring out the balance and a way to chart through this stuff. They're just reacting. They're always like this scared elephant that keeps reacting to negative PR and everyone else is just getting trampled beneath them. as they stumble around and I don't think they're actually figuring it out, but…

MICHAEL: Well, mate, this has all been really interesting stuff. I think for people listening that enjoyed this, go and check out those two articles because they're really great. They go in depth on everything we've spoken about. Just interested, before we wrap things up, what inspired you to go ahead and write these types of articles to begin with? Has it been like a passion project? Have you got some business out of it?

LARS: It has been a passion project. So what happened is, On the last year or so, I've been focused on a new website of mine called HR Advice. It's an informational site in the HR space. I've run multiple businesses, been on leadership teams across multiple businesses, and I know how difficult finding HR information is. And this is not Google's fault. Nobody's actually writing about HR. It is a boring, terrible topic. And there's not that many good writers in the space. So I've had to learn a lot of things the hard way. And I was like, OK, I and I get personally passionate about it. So last year or so, I've been spending a lot of time on the site, a lot of my personal time publishing a lot of posts, just trying to help kind of doing all the classic old school help first, worry about paying the bills later type of marketing. Very, very value focused, doing all the things that Google says you should be doing right now. Like everything you should be doing to avoid getting hit by the helpful content update and all these other algorithm updates. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna go do that. That's what I'd love to do. That's what I prefer to do anyway. I'm gonna go do that. And been spending a lot of time on it, particularly this year. And then in the August algorithm update from Google, Google literally destroyed the site overnight. Like everything was going really well. My traffic was up. I was updating posts. Google was rewarding me. It felt like a nice relationship. Okay, I'm doing the right thing. Google's telling me I'm gonna do the right thing. Everything's working, everyone's benefiting. And then literally overnight from what I assume is the helpful content update, part of what is now the main Google algorithm, my traffic just got obliterated. And it felt like a site penalty, down over 90% or about 90%. And I literally woke up on a Sunday and then before I was going to get groceries, I checked my traffic and just straight down. And it has not recovered since. And I don't expect it to recover for, I don't know, six months, a year, maybe longer. So I was trying to do the right thing. I was doing everything that Google told everyone to do. putting a lot of my personal time into it. And I wasn't, I'm not making any money from this. Um, it'll be years and years and years before I do. And that's fine. I just wanted to help people do all the right stuff. And I got completely obliterated. And that made me a little mad. It made me a little angry. I was like, this doesn't make sense, like at all. So then I started digging around and like everything that doesn't make sense to me in search at the moment. And Reddit, Forbes, there's other things that don't make sense to me that maybe I'll get around to, maybe not. But just trying to unpack what is going on and showing everybody else how absurd it is. And then, you know, maybe Google changes something, maybe they don't, but that's up to them.

MICHAEL: Well, you've done a great service there because it's shone a big light on it. It's gone viral online. It's drawn attention to it. And I'm sure people at Google notice this sort of stuff and maybe down the path, something good will come from it. We can only hope, right? Because I agree with you. It's wild at the moment. To be a small publisher is a really tough game relying on SEO traffic. Yes, it is. Yeah. So where can listeners go to read these articles and if they want to connect with you, stay in touch, what's the best way to get you?

LARS: Yeah, so the best way to get in touch with me is through my website, larslofgren.com. That's where all these blog posts are hosted right now. And if I publish anything in the future, anything marketing related, they'll be on larslofgren.com. Someone wants to reach out to me personally, LinkedIn, that's getting more active on LinkedIn now, because I can't trust SEO, but I'm posting lots of stuff on LinkedIn at the moment. Feel free to reach out to me, connect, I'll accept it if you mentioned the podcast. And I am on Twitter or X, whatever. It's a weird place at the moment. So if you want to follow me over there, you can. I'm not nearly as active, but I do have a profile.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us on the show, mate. Really loved the chat and have a great one.

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