Webcology

A wide ranging interview with the founder of AI knowledgebase tool,  WAIKAY.IO   Dixon has been instrumental in the founding and growth of three major SEO / SEM tools, Majestic Links Tool, Inlinks, and now Waikay. We talk to Dixon about AI, what Waikay means, how it works, and we end up talking about the future of search.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: http...

This was a mostly news episode that ends with an extraordinary interview with Dixon Jones, founder and CEO of AI tool Waikay. We have a long talk with Dixon that lasted about 45 minutes about AI tools, how search has evolved to this point, and thoughts on growth of AI tool sets. We figured we'd stick it on the end of this show and also publish it as a stand alone interview. Before we get to Di...

The AI makeover of everything is well underway and we're at the point where the most obvious problems are becoming more obvious amidst the hype. This week's vibe is partially informed by Kristine's annual visits to the Blackhat and DEF CON conferences where Kristine came across AdHacks by the Russian Mob, ways to subvert Gemini using popular Google apps like Gmail and Calendar, and how...

Google has brought AI Overviews to explain lyrics its users search for. We expect results to be interesting, if not enlightening. Meanwhile, AI Overviews and AI Mode are now live in the UK. There are a couple WordPress vulnerabilities to warn listeners about, Open AI launches "Study Mode", Signing bonuses and huge contracts for AI superstars skyrocket a tiny few into elite athlete pay leve...

A newly released study from Pew Research confirms what SEOs have been seeing for months, search results with an AI Overview or other generative response get far fewer clicks. A vibe coding fiasco sees an AI make a desperate series of mistakes in a self described panic, Trump removes most if not all guardrails from AI development in a major Silicon Valley announcement, Meta revealed a prototype dev...

Interesting news from the business world. The Internet Marketing Ninjas were acquired by SEO consulting firm Previsible. Founded in 1999 by legendary SEO Jim Boykin, the Ninjas were one of the oldest digital marketing firms in the world. The June 2025 Core Update continues with some suggestions there are minor gains for  some lucky sites affected by the series of Helpful Content Updates that start...

We have a special guest this week and a half hour long interview with San Diego based SEO, Nick Musica in which we get to geek out on the sweeping changes in search and how they affect Technical SEO. Also, Google finally released a post AI Mode Core Update earlier this week. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss what might be coming in the July 2025 Core Update. The world's largest...

The search industry mourns the loss of foundational SEO Jill Whalen. Jill's impact on the earliest decades of SEO set the template for the industry we know today. Every old school SEO was directly touched by her in some way, most of us learning how to think about content through her and the High Rankings forum. We also learned to form a strong sense of SEO ethics because of Jill. Her influence...

Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the decouplings happening in the SEO industry and in tech in general. A major topic is the decoupling of click activity vs. impressions seen in Google Search Console as AI Overviews are rapidly creating a zero click search environment for research and informational queries. At the same time, parts of our society are decoupling with reality, an e...

SMX Advanced is back. The show is happening live, for the first time in public since the pandemic, in Boston this week. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger recall the traveling circus atmosphere of the early conference circuit. Meanwhile Google is trying to reduce redundant Googlers in the Search and Ad units with a voluntary exit buyout program. This is happening while Google's systems...

What do you get when you mix a web that remembers everything with software that can mine the depths of that everything to draw a frighteningly accurate picture of everyone, everywhere, all the time? You get what we're all going to get with the Trump administration using Peter Thiel's Palantir platform to create meta-files on every American citizen and very likely a lot of non-American citi...

Google AI Overviews are expanding test markets in Europe to Turkey, Sweden, and the Netherlands in advance of Google I/O. Google launched a free Generative AI Certification training program with the actual certification exam costing $99US. Google introduced "Discussions" in beta. Discussions is meant to replace Reddit as a primary source of livetime AI training resources by encouraging sea...

Google is fast approaching the FIND OUT stage of its multiple anti-trust cases with the US Department of Justice and EU regulatory bodies. It is very possible the DOJ could order Google to sever its relationship with its Chrome browser in coming months. That leads to speculation on what other decisions might be coming down and how throwing spanners into the cogs of the machine Alphabet has built m...

Mikkel deMib Svendsen is a SEO Legend. One of the original SEOs, Mikkel was known around early search conferences as the man in the bright orange suit. His almost adversarial take on Google in the early days set a tone and standard for how SEOs felt about working with the search engines in a friendly game of cat and mouse. Mikkel has continued practicing SEO while pursuing several other life passi...

Google introduced its new Ad Strength Best Practices Guide which got hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger to pine for the days when the SEO world used cool names like "Ad Strength" to describe stuff. Google has again been declared a monopoly by yet another US court while, just to keep up, a UK based class action over Google's search dominance has been approved. It wasn't a gre...

A far less political edition than most this year let's Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger spend more time talking about tech news, web marketing, and SEO. We start by marking the movement of Mordy Oberstein as he leaves a highly successful tenure as head of branding at website builder Wix. More than anyone in our memory, Mordy helped Wix overcome what was a difficult reputation which stands a...

The March 2025 Core Update continues to roll out though early indicators are showing in search console. Google Business had a reverficiation bug that caused chaos for a few days that appears to be fixed. The White House announced it was going to order a dramatic downsizing of the department of Education and a French scientist was denied entry to the US after messages critical of Trump were found o...

Traditionally a warning to tyrants and rogue emperors, todays middle of March madness opened with news of Google Core Update rollout, a major vulnerability in a popular WP SEO plug-in, and signs American search users are indicating they're thinking about being in a very sour mood. We also note it is the 15th anniversary of the week Rhea Drysdale saved SEO from a notorious trademark abuser. The...

Olesia Korobka joins us to talk about the SEO Charity Conference taking place online on March 27 for the Ukraine Animal Relief charity SEO for Paw founded by Anton Shulke. Before Olesia jumps in, we talk about Tuesday's State of the Union address in which, among other things, the CHIPS Act was threatened in a weirdly long ramble about bad deals. We also talk about Elon Musk's continued mis...

A quick but hardly deep dive into what Elon Musk's D.O.G.E. is doing and the technologies they're abusing to do it starts a conversation about the newest outrages of the week from around the Oval Office. We also talk about OpenAI4.5, a delay in data from the GSC API, CoPilot flying folks into the wrong repositories, the Chegg vs. Google case, Bing's AI Search tests, Google's crawle...

The American president declared himself a king this week. In the meantime, Meta is laying off thousands of people and deleting a number of old live broadcast recordings. TikTok is restructuring towards laying offs too. Google Reviews and Google Business are fixing bugs while Google's Business Profiles support team is absolutely backlogged. Whoddathunkit but,AIs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek might...

Google fixes a few bugs, gives a quick "how-to" around tabbed navigation, advises about on-page hash-links, and provides a great tutorial on using GA4 and GSC together. Google also increases its results return-speed by 67milliseconds. That's the good stuff this week however it wasn't a good week from a classic "Don't be Evil" perspective. This week Google complied with...

The sudden appearance of DeepSeek, an AI developed in China at a micro-fraction of the costs of American AIs has driven conversation this week as its very existence drove down the valuations of the techogiants who thought they had the lock on development of AI models. Gavin Klondike, our resident AI expert, joins us to explain the 5Ws (who, what, where, when, and how) of DeepSeek. We also dive int...

This edition moves back and forth between coverage of several unique areas of search, AI, and web work. We start covering the DataCoup, which is our "deal-with-it" name for the changes being made by Elon Musk and his crew of youthful hackers to the very nerve centers of the US Government and the suspicion an off-the-books version of Grok is being trained on US government data. We note that...

The power of the Billionaires' businesses mixed with the powers of The State. An image from the inauguration showing Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and other tech giants in the very front row showed us how clearly and forcefully the new Technoligarcy is taking charge. That is the very definition of fascism in action. In this episode, Jim and Kristine talk...