Views: 115Let’s be honest: SEOs have been doing Google’s dirty work for decades. We clean up the web. We format content so their bots don’t choke. We spoon-feed them useless tags like schema. And we keep playing by their rules, even when they rewrite them mid-game, all the while scraping our content for AI answers. While Google claims to “organically…
Posts published in “OpEd”
No, it really does feel like everyone is complaining about Google lately. Across blogs, forums, newsletters, news sites, ChatBots, and threads, there's a growing consensus that Google just isn't what it used to be. Longtime users and SEOs alike are documenting their frustrations: too many ads, too little relevance, and an overwhelming sense that Google is optimizing for everything except users.
At first glance, Google throwing a summit for seven social media influencers sounds like a bad Onion headline.
Views: 38The SEO landscape is experiencing seismic shifts. Across the entire industry, professionals are changing titles, redefining roles, and reassessing their place in this AI-transformed world. I have many friends that are moving in-house, seeking stability as agencies restructure. Others are closing shop entirely (rip Marin), uncertain how to compete in this new reality. Some embrace AI wholeheartedly, while others…
Views: 40Podcast version: Dear Jim Lanzone; The internet has changed dramatically since Yahoo first introduced its iconic directory in the mid 90s. While SE’s have become the swiss army knife of choice for discovering niche pages, the Yahoo Directory was a special HUMAN curated guide to the web that encompassed “The Joy of Discovery“. As the web was rewritten in…
Views: 135(update: 3-18-2025: many freinds have shown us atleast a dozen more ways that Google can track you than the 30 we list below. A followup article will explore those in the future(/update) New: Listen instead to an audio notebook.lm podcast version: What can Google track of you, your presence, and your actions across the web? The results may astound…
Views: 194I ran into a link building article last week that has some information that was dated. So, lets run down all the deprecated link building strategies I can think of: Reciprocal Link Exchanges – Traditional link swapping is now considered low-quality and if not entirely careful who you swap with – it can even lead to a dark road…
Views: 2Introduced last year in a restricted beta roll out, Google has opened up Meridian to the unwashed PPC masses. What is Meridian Supposed to Solve? Marketing attribution has never been more of a guessing game – especially with increasing privacy restrictions, evolving digital behaviors, and Googles boundless ambition to kill third party cookies. Google claims Meridian, built with Bayesian-based…
Views: 42 User-generated content (UGC) has been around on the internet for a long time. User-generated content is one of the reasons people love and also hate the internet. Whether you’re sharing a funny meme, reviewing a comment, watching an unboxing of a new product – all of this is considered user generated content. There’s also the fear of trolling…
Views: 2 Google goes all in on Java Script Serps with encrypted obfuscated source. Scrapers and web services that rely on Serp scraping are going bye-bye. The long path to the Google data monopoly will be finalized. G-Wins. (edit: Just informed that one such service is using “screen scraping” to grab screen shots of Serps, and then running them through…
Views: 1I have been gnashing my teeth at the main stream tech press since SearchGPT was bolted on to ChatGPT. The main problem is that they seem deeply invested in ginning something up with Google. At first, I thought they didn’t understand what SearchGPT represented. I figured they were just ignorant of the facts, and it would take a good SEO…
Views: 4820 years ago pioneering SEOs like Rand Fishkin, Brett Tabke, Bruce Clay, Jill Whalen, and Matt Cutts wrote some of the first SEO best practice checklists. Google wasn’t even a company yet and SEOs were debating the difference between subdomains and folders for ranking purposes. Its been over 20 years since those days. Rand, and Jill don’t do SEO…
Views: 0We continue to read reporting claiming that the Justice Department will block Google’s deal with Apple to be the default search engine on iPhones. As someone who has worked in Tech for 42 years and specialized in search engines for 27 years, I think this is misguided – here is why: #1 What does it mean to be “the…
Views: 0About that SemRush Buying 3rd Door Media. It happened while a conference was going on – and that may have contributed – to so many questions put to me about the Third Door Media sale to SemRush. I was taken a bit aback by so many people asking about it, that I was taking a “wait and see” approach.…
Views: 2I completed my first week using SearchGPT exclusively as the only search engine I used. I did do a few comparisons with G and Bing, but I always took the SearchGPT Serp first. Thoughts: Pro: It is such a breath of fresh air not to have all the visual Serp Noise of Google and Bing. Zero time was spent…