The Edward Show

E1201: Google is feeding Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and other SEO rank trackers incorrect search results. Websites appear to lose rankings overnight, even when Google Search Console shows stable rankings and traffic. Google's crackdown on AI companies scraping its search results is disrupting SEO tools. I explain what's happening, why rank tracking data has become unreliable, and what SEOs need to trus...

E1200: What SEO strategies actually work? I found a Reddit thread asking SEO practitioners which strategies delivered real results. For episode 1,200 of The Edward Show, I break down nine strategies and explain how to use them for Google rankings, backlinks, leads, and AI search visibility. Here's what we cover: - Map the entire buyer journey, not just individual keywords. Someone researching an e...

E1198: Do nofollow backlinks boost Google rankings? I walk through findings from Rand Fishkin, Kyle Roof, and Joy Hawkins, plus an AI search study that challenges the idea that nofollow links have no SEO value. The practical takeaway: look beyond the link attribute. Pay attention to whether the linking page ranks on Google and attracts organic traffic. In this episode: - Google's 2019 change: Goog...

E1199: Rihanna's Fenty Beauty is beating Dior in the AI Search. Harpreet Singh joins me to break down the customer reviews, third-party coverage, and product pages behind Fenty's outstanding visibility. His explanation starts with one idea: "AI is a parrot." When publications, customers, and retailers consistently recommend a product, AI repeats those recommendations. We examine what Fenty gets ri...

E1197: Elon Musk's Grokipedia went from 6.5 million monthly Google clicks in July to just 200,000. That's a 97% collapse in organic search traffic for xAI's entirely AI-written alternative to Wikipedia. And despite Grokipedia earning backlinks from The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, NBC News, The Verge, and other major publications, its rankings have fallen off a cliff. I break down what happe...

E1196: Is GEO actually different from SEO, or is generative engine optimization simply SEO under a new name? Paris Childress, host of The GEO Show, joins David Quaid for a heated debate about what gets brands recommended by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and other AI search engines. Paris argues that GEO is brand marketing, not performance marketing. Its goal is brand visibility, mentions,...

E1195: Does Google measure how much effort you put into your content? Google's Quality Rater Guidelines mention effort more than 100 times, and the 2024 Google API leak revealed an LLM-based metric called "content effort." We're breaking down Cyrus Shepard's article, "Content Effort: The Google Ranking Feature Nobody Talks About," and what it reveals about the content Google might consider high qu...

E1194: Cold outreach is one of the most effective ways to build backlinks, earn media coverage, and get your content in front of the right people. But most outreach emails get ignored. A Reddit user analyzed 6,337 cold emails and uncovered striking differences in reply rates based on email length, subject lines, follow-ups, and who receives the message. I break down these findings, share advice fr...

E1192: How long does SEO actually take? Google's Gary Illyes shared specific timeframes for crawling, indexing, title changes, canonicalization, site migrations, manual action removals, and recovery from core updates. Some changes take hours. Others take months. And in certain cases, Google never processes them. Google's reported typical SEO timeframes: - New URL discovery: 20 hours. At the slowes...

E1193: Charles Floate shares how he ranks parasite SEO pages on Google.com itself, gets those pages cited in Google's AI Overviews, and builds campaigns that generate thousands of dollars in revenue. With a full presentation, Charles breaks down his parasite SEO strategy, including the exact process he uses to find profitable keywords, identify powerful third-party domains, publish pages, get them...

E1191: One SEO spent the summer going through more than 30,000 documents and narrowing them down to 9,249 SEO case studies, tests, and papers with measurable results. The final dataset covered 552 cited sources and 182 SEO tactics. I go through some of the weirdest findings, the tests I agree with, the ones I question, and the tactics worth experimenting with on your own sites. Some of the finding...

E1190: Google is making it harder to scrape its search results, and SEO tools are getting caught in the middle. Barry Schwartz, founder of Search Engine Roundtable and one of the longest-running reporters in the search industry, joins me to break down what Google is doing, why rank-tracking data has become less reliable, and what happens next. Barry has covered Google and search every day since 20...

E1188: Your page might target a keyword properly and still lose rankings because you chose the wrong type of page for the search. I turn search intent into a quiz: for each keyword, predict whether searchers want a blog post, landing page, or category page - before I reveal the answer. I recently consulted a site with thousands of pages that had steadily lost SEO traffic for years. They blamed neg...

E1189: Exact match domains still rank in local SEO, and David Quaid explains where they still give businesses an advantage. David breaks down how to use exact match domains for local businesses, how they interact with Google Business Profiles, why branded domains and EMDs serve different purposes, and where people go wrong when they expect the domain alone to do all the work. David also explains w...

E1187: Google changed its guidance on AI-generated content on October 1, and the new language makes one thing very clear: publishing unchecked AI content creates real SEO risk. Google now explicitly says publishers must manually fact-check and review AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing. That review doesn't stop with the body copy. Google says it also applies to...

E1186: Google is now showing AI Overviews for simple brand-name searches, and those summaries sometimes tell customers why they should avoid the company they just searched for. Ann Smarty joins to break down what this means for SEO, branded search, online reputation management, Reddit, reviews, and the way businesses control what people see before they ever reach their website. We look at real exa...

E1185: Google's September 2026 spam update just entered what looks like phase two. Google launched the update on September 24. The first major wave hit around September 25-27. Things cooled down, then volatility exploded again on September 30. This rollout looks very different from Google's recent spam updates. Instead of finishing in roughly two days, Google says this one will run for around two...

E1184: Jacky Chou and David Quaid sit down for a wide-ranging conversation about where SEO still makes money in 2026, what Jacky would build today, and why he thinks most indie hackers leave huge opportunities on the table. Jacky's opening argument is simple: find SaaS products already making money, build a competing product, then use SEO and paid distribution to beat founders who know how to code...

E1183: ChatGPT is building more of its own search index, and that changes where SEO goes next. David G. Quaid joins me to break down what OpenAI appears to be doing, how its cached web content starts to function like an index, and what SEOs need to understand if ChatGPT relies less on Google and Bing over time. OpenAI has already discussed a long-term goal of serving most search traffic from its o...

E1182: AEO companies keep presenting old SEO tactics as if AI search invented them. Harpreet Singh joins me to break down what is actually different about AEO/GEO, what is simply traditional SEO with new terminology, and where companies are wasting time because they do not understand the history of search. We start with the tactics now getting promoted on AI search conference stages: keywords in U...

E1181: I break down six SEO habits that marketers and site owners use to grow traffic without chasing a new tactic every week. These came from a popular SEO Growth subreddit thread where people shared the habits that made the biggest difference for them. I go through the best responses, explain why they work, and show you how to take each one further. In this episode: - Export Google Search Consol...

E1180: Google's September 2026 spam update is rolling out, and this one looks very different from the last few. The update started September 24 and is registering a 9.4/10 on Semrush's volatility tracker. Google Search Advocate John Mueller also confirmed that this spam update is expected to take longer than recent spam updates, with volatility potentially continuing for roughly two weeks. At the...

E1179: PBNs still work in 2026, and Kalin Karakehayov has the numbers to back up why he thinks they remain one of the most underrated strategies in SEO. I'm joined by Kalin Karakehayov, Charles Floate, and David Quaid for a deep discussion on black hat SEO, private blog networks, aged domains, backlinks, AI search, parasite SEO, and where search is heading next. Kalin owns more than 200,000 domain...

E1177: Ross Hudgens of Siege Media breaks down the page type driving the most AI search traffic across his clients: versus pages. Ross says Siege Media's correlation analysis found that clients with the most AI traffic also had the most comparison and versus content. We get into why these pages perform so well across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google, and traditional search, how to structure them, and why m...

E1177: Google just changed how its parasite SEO penalty works across Europe, but the headline leaves out the most important part. I break down Google's change to its Site Reputation Abuse Policy inside the European Economic Area and explain what it means for parasite SEO, publishers, affiliate sites, and SEOs trying to rank through high-authority domains. The European Commission challenged Google...