Webcology

Another week, another article explaining how SEO has shaped the Web was written by someone who doesn't appear to understand how SEO shaped the Web. The week hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about a piece that appears in The Verge that almost but not quite gets it and then proceeds to share numerous SEO myths and misunderstandings. We also talk about Google's SGE product carou...

We round up 2023 and look forward to 2024 with what is arguably the most experienced panel in SEO podcasting. Joining Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger are Ryan Jones - SVP of SEO Razorfish, Topher Kohan - Director of SEO for CBS Sports Paramount Global, Carolyn Shelby - Principle SEO at YoastSEO and Newfold Digital, Doc Sheldon - CEO of Web Narwhal, Grant Simmons - Director of S...

Gavin Klondike joined Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to talk about Google's intentions with the SGE moving past the end of the year. Gavin helped explain AI and LLMs earlier this year in our ELI5 episode. This is a fun deep dive into how Google might generate and present SGE results and another good explanation of Googlie AI. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & O...

Both Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger have coped with the chaos of personal loss in the last month while talking about months of chaos at Google search. Jim talks about the loss of his father-in-law while Kristine copes with having to leave a condo she's loved living in for nearly 20 years. Meanwhile, over at Google, goalposts got moved to define Parasite SEO, some Gemini videos appear to b...

YoastSEO has a holiday present ready for its Pro users, especially those who use WooCommerce. YoastSEO's Principle SEO Carolyn Shelby joins Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to talk about the new AI feature in this the 24th version of the Yoast SEO tool. Carolyn is one of the longest serving SEOs in the business. Her career, which started in 1995, spans the entire history of digital marketin...

Truckin' through Groundhog Day of November 16th and talking Wikimedia too... "Six weeks until Christmas and all through the Web, not a placement was stirring because they were all dead. The dossiers were hung in massive digital files, defining all pages, their friends, and their while. And in Google's great blender, an awful sort just got slewed, making mincemeat of merchants whose liv...

On the eve of the first-ever brightonSEO San Diego Conference where Kristine Schachinger is going to speak, there was so much in the SEO and web marketing worlds for her and cohost Jim Hedger to talk about. We start with Google's claim that work on Core Web Vitals has saved over 10,000 hours of load time in the two-and-a-half years the set of metrics has existed. That takes us through a slew o...

An article in Verve titled, "The people who ruined the Internet", teaches hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger a valuable lesson; if you're really going to really ruin something as big as the Internet, you'll want to include a live alligator for extra emphasis. Jim and Kristine, who both know most of the people quoted in the article personally, are awestruck at how badly off-b...

Covering a lot of bases in only an hour, this is a news-heavy episode. Hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger start with a weird and very rare Google search outage and quickly move to news that sweeping regulation of A.I. will be introduced by executive order early next week. While the White House moves to regulate, Reddit might move to ban A.I. from training on Reddit content as negotiations b...

As the world turns around in the hardest of ways hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through several trends in search and social media. An episode punctuated early by the political sides of tech, the conversation moves from TwiXter's often hateful Misinformation Environment to secrets revealed in Google's ongoing anti-trust trials to the conclusion of the October 2023 Core Updat...

Earlier in the day, show host Kristine Schachinger sat on a panel about ethics and A.I. with Morgan McGraw from Madrid-based Contextual Advertising Company, Seedtag. Morgan walks us through how Seedtag's Artificial Intelligence, Liz, works through tens or even hundreds of millions of pieces of page content, user behaviors, and site analytics to help their clients reach the most optimal target...

Recorded on host Jim Hedger's 55th birthday, this newsy episode covers a lot of Googly ground. Apparently, there's a lot to update with the September 2023 Helpful Content Update following hot on the heals of the August 2023 Core Update but a little bit before the October 2023 InternatSpam Update which, of course, preceded the October 2023 Broad Core Update. We also talk about the mysteriou...

In an interesting interview with A.I. researcher and artist Eryk Salvaggio, founder of the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group (ARRG!), hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss generative A.I. and the arts. After Eyrk explains how A.I. image models work to generate images from chaos, the interview explores the immediate effects of A.I. on the art world, how A.I. might shape or augment a...

A rough-voiced version of Webcology was recorded several days late due to illness. With Kristine Schachinger recovering from a second round of COVID-19 and Jim Hedger getting over a throat infection that temporarily cost him his voice, this is one of those "the show must go on" episodes. We cover a lot of news in this episode from major AI advancements to the outcomes of Google's Helpf...

In the second episode of a multi-part series on the impacts of A.I. on search engines and SEO, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk with Mark Traphagen, Vice President of Product Marketing & Training for seoClarity, an enterprise SEO platform. Mark talks about the ethical, technical, and business challenges of adding and altering A.I. in popular software products. -- Next, we're...

We are in a time of sweeping change driven by A.I. yet there remains a great deal of confusion about how Large Language Models work and how A.I. content is actually generated. Over the coming weeks, we hope to help change that. In the ten months since the public introduction of ChatGPT, we've used a lot of airtime talking about AI and the Large Language Models behind it. We've talked about...

We started this week with the news that Google's original search spokesperson, Matt Cutts, and his wife Lindsay, are the parents of twins! That leads us to talk about Twitter and the "What Could Go Wrong?", attitude that wants to convert X into everything or distill the workings of the Web into X. From there, we have a fairly serious talk about Google's Search Generative Experience...

Google's August 2023 Core Update began running this week which makes this the August 2023 No Worries edition. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger explain what a Core Update is, how long they generally take, and how it's simply not worth worrying about the Core Update until the Core Update does its thing because we don't really know what the update is trying to accomplish until Go...

This episode starts with the realization that we're about to mark the 20th anniversary of Google's infamous November 2003 Florida Update. That update was a day the search universe changed, much like the universe is rapidly shifting due to more recent changes introduced in a much more recent November. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger use the history of organic search and events fro...

Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger run through the week's search-related news items but focus on trying to explain, debunk, and find use cases for the new SEO fad of content-culling. Recently Google reps weighed in on CNET's decision to remove a large bulk of content from the earliest days of the Internet. This prompted a good debate in the SEO community and a good conversation between ho...

It’s BluShark Week here on Webcology as this week we’re happy to welcome guest Seth Price, founder and CEO of local-legal focused SEO firm, BluShark Digital. According to the AboutUs page on their website, “BluShark Digital uses the same cutting-edge marketing techniques (high-quality technical optimization, sophisticated content, authoritative link-building, and local optimization) that Seth used...

As the Actor's and Writer's strike continues, Netflix doubles down on its strong A.I. position by advertising a $900K / year A.I. Product Manager position. Even with the real-to-life drama of the writer and actor's strike, the weirdest news of the week goes to the social network formerly known as Twitter. Rebranded "X" on what appears to be a lifelong whim, the network Musk bou...

The Writers and Actors strike provides a stark but pretty accurate warning for everyone else about how AI will be used to displace workers and degrade opportunities. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger start a conversation about AI's effect on culture discussing how script writers are being replaced by AI and how actors and voice actors are being paid for single performances that get digitized...

Kristine Schachinger is on the road this week speaking at the iGB Live Amsterdam conference so we had a special guest live from Amsterdam NL, Julia Logan, perhaps better known in SEO circles as Irish Wonder. Julia is a long-time web consultant who has practiced SEO since 2000. In 2020 she founded a boutique agency, Zangoose Digital. Jim, Kristine, and Julia have a wide-ranging conversation that ju...

Twitter had another very bad week after it deGoogled itself in a badly thought through response to the scrapers and bots attracted to the network. Last Friday, Elon Musk announced he was limiting the number of Tweets users could see in a day in response to scrapping activity and bots on the network. Those limits had numerous effects, including having nearly half of Twitter content in Google's...