Webcology

Back from a the July 4th long weekend's rest, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through events of the last couple weeks, that look like Google and other players in the search world are pulling back from the promise of A.I. generated answers to the real world queries of their users. One example is how Google is showing far fewer A.I. Overviews in result sets today than it was in ea...

It was a particularly newsy and seriously silly week. It was also the end of June which is also the end of the second quarter so, for most SEOs, it's reporting season. This year, reports are made more poignant knowing the end of June is also the end of the line for Universal Analytics data, which gets universally deleted on Monday at midnight. It's also the end of the June 2024 Google Spam...

Covering a busy week in search this episode closes with a 20 minute interview with CEO of A.I. driven search engine You.com, Richard Socher. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about Google's freshly launched June2024 Spam Update, some Reddit heavy SERPS, unstoppable AI Overviews, the beneficial myth of traffic diversity, the ups and downs of crawl spikes, Microsoft's recall of...

Amidst months of controversial punishing updates, a disastrous A.I. rollout, and at least a year of questionable search results, SEOs and general search users are starting to ask if Google is actually broken. If it is working as it's supposed to, why are they trying so hard to fix it? Google says it's a matter of perspective so hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to walk through...

Maybe it's the eye of a hurricane, maybe it's the calm before a brand new storm. It's really hard to tell these days but after a disasterous rock-eating rollout, Google is pulling back on AI Overviews. The SEO world has mixed reactions to The Leak, which is turning out as predicted, much ado about something but we're not sure exactly what. Some sort of garbled sense of stability ap...

To cap off a disastrous PR month for Google, Mike King and Rand Fishkin published essays outlining the leak of a trove of Google APIs found in an open GitHub owned by Google. The SEO community's faith in Google had already been badly shaken since the series of updates which started back to early autumn 2023 and culminated in the HCU and March 2024 Core Updates. Now, after seeing what was in th...

Roger Montti, staff writer at Search Engine Journal, joins hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger to share his thoughts on Google's vision of its own future. Roger wrote about this week's Google Marketing Live in NYC in a piece published May 22, "Google To Prioritize AI Overviews Ads Over Organic Search". In it, Roger offers an overview of search results berift of visible blue l...

This is a seriously fun and highly interesting interview episode. Rather than obsess on what seems like a bad thing we decided to geek out on that Bing thing instead. One of the most open and interesting voices in search, the Head of Search at Microsoft Bing, Fabrice Canel, joins us to talk about algorithmic search and Copilot. As we all know, Google I/O was stacked with announcements suggesting G...

There appears to be a shift in Google's philosophies heading into next week's Google I/O conference. Google seems to be trying to change expectations with CEO Sundar Pichai talking about an all AI future and former chairperson Eric Schmidt talking about a future without blue links. Google's reputation for quality has taken a battering recently and many in the SEO community are feeling...

Happy Cinco de Screwya to everyone about to be impacted... The March 2024 Core Update has ended, sometime last week. It took Google a few days to get around to telling anyone. Perhaps that was because they were too busy experiencing a very difficult week fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities. This was a week of layoffs, job transfers, and lost market share as Google moved to shed expensive p...

This episode also covers a lot of the week’s general news including the coming of ChatGPT5, Meta’s near universal introduction of AI to Facebook and Instagram, TikTok’s upcoming turmoil, how plans to kill the cookie have again gone stale, that Webcology was, this week, named among the top SEO podcasts to listen to in 2024 by Search Engine Journal. Thanks to SEJ and to everyone for listening and co...

This episode, recorded in the seventh week of the longest Google update ever, covers a lot of news stories as quickly as we can. Stories range from news about AI and the various players in the industry pushing to integrate AI into everything to general advice on dealing with the various Googly issues search brings. We discuss the new sets of Google videos being made available, marvel at John Muell...

Recorded on the 36th day of the March 2024 Core Update, the news segment of the show discusses what we know about the Core Update including that Helpful Content has been rolled into the Core Update. That suggests it will be part of Google's normal operations and that recovery can be possible.  Now, it's said if you don't understand the past you'll never figure out the future. One o...

As Google's March 2024 Core Update marches on towards its eventual end, Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger talk about how a week's worth of rumors, assumptions, and half-baked ideas have led a wide section of the industry to go off half-cocked about the sweeping effects of this update. People are so angry with Google they're deleting and blocking official spokepersons in forums like R...

As Google's March 2024 Core Update enters its fourth week, and major league baseball finally returns, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger cover a lot of conversation, theory, and the rising F.U.D. about the update. There are a lot of rumors, deep anger and resentment, and some genuinely bizarre advice being shared in SEO forums. There is also some genuinely good research and discussion h...

As the March 2024 Core Update enters its third week, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger work to dissect and discuss different aspects of it. The Great Spam Hunt part of the update was said to have ended earlier this week and the fallout has been massive. Along with sites caught in the initial manual penalty sweep, countless niche sites have seen dramatic losses of traffic. Is a recovery pos...

In the second week of the largest Google Core Update in Google Core Update history Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger are joined by Patrick Hathaway, cofounder and CEO of what is arguably the most cost-effective crawler/auditor tool out there, Sitebulb. During a core update, there's not a lot of work you can do on content that's going to make a difference until the update is over. What yo...

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, except for those times when March comes in like a lion and takes out a wide swath of sheep. Then they just say, "whoa!". So Google rode into March like a hungry lion with a staggeringly complicated Core Update, a very serious shellacking of manual penalties, changes to who can monetize content with AdSense, a multi-sweep set of...

Due to a scheduling conflict, this show was recorded a day late but it went nearly an extra hour overtime because there was just so much to talk about. There was a lot of negative news about AI as AI developers find new sources of content to train on and users find new ways to use and abuse new AI tool sets. From AI developing or enhancing video games to the depravities that have horrified a propr...

Since leaving Kyiv just after the Russian invasion two years ago, Anton Shulke has been raising funds at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/antonshulke to help pets that got displaced, injured, or abandoned during the brutal ongoing war in Ukraine. Anton joins us to talk about the day-long virtual SEO conference, SEO for Paws (https://fajela.com/events/seo-for-paws/) on February 29 at 10:55 am. Check ou...

It was a busy news week made up mostly of Google trying to disabuse parts of the SEO community from the idea that E-E-A-T is anything more than an ideal. Google came out and said E-E-A-T is absolutely and unequivocally not a ranking factor, a ranking signal, or a ranking system and that E-E-A-T has less to do with how sites rank as much as it does with things Google Search Quality Raters should lo...

Legendary SEO and all around friendly guy Tony Wright joins hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger for a wide open discussion about the future of SEO. Founder of one of the oldest agencies still operating, WrightIMC, Tony has lived through and adapted to sweeping changes in the course of his career. This episode, recorded on February 8, 2024, covers how to roll with change in a time when even G...

Google's reporting major indexing issues and that seemed like the most appropriate metaphor for this week's show. WTF is going on with Google? The SERPs are weird, the future direction of the company is uncertain, it is sending seemingly strange new messages in Search Console, and sometimes its spokespeople say outright contradictory things. To make it more interesting, Google's recent...

Tom Rusling from Audience Key drops in to talk about the myriad of ways Audience Key makes content creation and performance tracking easy, at least, that's what he came to talk about. This was a fun interview covering a lot of thoughts about the emerging content economy, how to build tools that meet SEO needs, and how AI is doing all the stuff AI is doing. We also talk about a massive data bre...

Three weeks into the New Year and Google has been mostly quiet, with the exception of the hounded and outraged who lost in the most recent updates which may well have been upgrades. Google has undergone several fundamental changes in the past year, the greatest of which are affected by AI. Today we talk about those changes in Google search itself and in the business of being Google. Is Google gett...