Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

Google finished rolling out the March 2023 broad core update on Tuesday, and it took about 13 days to roll out. Microsoft said they are exploring sharing ad revenue from Bing Chat with publishers through the Microsoft Start program. Microsoft executives also mocked Google for Bard's lack of citations and said Bing Chat is better. Did you know you can block ChatGPT's plugins from crawling y...

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dove into CRM software and how they use it, including looking at a new piece of software for partner management . Then in part three , we go into pricing your services, and in part four, we talk about human resources . In part five , we talk about Google algorithm updates, and now we talk more...

The Google broad core update for March is not done yet, and we see tremors. Google started to roll out Bard, and while it is fast and has a sleek interface, it was a bit underwhelming when compared to Bing Chat. In fact, Bard is unlikely to link to sources and content creators too often. Even Bing’s CEO at Microsoft said Bard is “pretty far behind” Bing Chat. Bing is testing Chat answer boxes in t...

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dove into CRM software and how they use it, including looking at a new piece of software for partner management . Then in part three , we go into pricing your services, and in part four, we talk about human resources . In part five, we talk about Google algorithm updates. He said in the old da...

Google released the March 2023 broad core update, so far this has been a very fast and big update. Bing said they've been using the new GPT-4 technology for the past several weeks. Bing also hinted that the Bing Search answers would be replaced with Chat-based answers. Bing’s sidebar with Bing Chat is now in the stable release of Edge, and they also increased the limits and speed of Bing Chat. Bin...

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dove into CRM software and how they use it, including looking at a new piece of software for partner management . Then in part three we go into pricing your services. In part four, we talk about human resources. Sam and I spoke about hiring and employee retention. He said the most important th...

It’s time for the SEO video recap; in this episode, I talk about how the February 2023 Google product reviews update finished rolling out on March 7th. I spoke about more flutters we saw this past weekend with the Google Search results. Google has launched the new sitename, favicon, and sponsored ad label for desktop search results. Google flip-flopped again on Google Discover, being impacted by t...

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dove into CRM software and how they use it, including looking at a new piece of software for partner management . Then in part three, we talk more about how to charge the right price for your digital marketing services. Sam Michelson said you don’t want to charge the wrong price, but picking t...

This week we saw a lot more volatility from the Google Product reviews update, one last weekend and the other around March 1st. I also posted the big Google webmaster report for March 2023. Bing AI chat now lets you set the tone of the responses. Bing Chat also launched version 96, which improves hallucinations and responses. Bing is testing summarized from the web and sources. Google said it has...

In part one, we spoke about who Sam Michelson is and his business development techniques. In part two, we dive into CRM software and how they use it, including looking at a new piece of software for partner management. They use software for client task management but said they really need good partner software. Sam is also not a fan of drip emails; instead, he tries to email people something about...

So much to discuss this week in the SEO video recap - just so much. Let's start with a new confirmed Google update, and the February 2023 Google product reviews system was updated to support more than just the English language. Google updated its help documentation to say the helpful content system update now can impact Google Discover visibility, and it never did prior, according to Google. Micro...

Sam Michelson was in town, and he is the CEO of Five Blocks, a digital reputation management firm based in Jerusalem, Israel. We spoke about how Sam started, which actually was via an e-commerce site selling cell phones as an affiliate. Sam explained that they sold tons of cell phones but there were a couple of complaints here and there and those complaints really showed up at the top of the searc...

What a week, we had another big unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Google Ads had a pretty massive bug with campaign disapprovals and suspensions. Google published a new SEO link best practices. Google has implied its guidelines on policy circumvention for web spam. Google organized its sitemaps documentation. Bug publishers are super concerned with the new AI-powered search featu...

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson's long history in search marketing . In part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency . Then in part three, we talk about the state of SEO studies , and we end in part four with the zero-click study and how the future of SEO looks. We spent some time pointing out the issues with the study, but at the same time, the intentions of the study were excel...

What an insane week between the AI announcements, algorithm updates, content, and so much more. I start off talking about Google's Bard announcement and a bit about the Paris announcement two days later. But Microsoft Bing stole the show with their demo of how Bing incorporates ChatGPT into Bing Search - it’s impressive. In fact, Yusuf Mehdi from Microsoft said Bing saw the largest relevancy boost...

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson's long history in search marketing . In part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency . Then in part three we talk about the state of SEO studies. In short, he goes off on his rant on SEO studies done on ranking factors and other areas. In short, he was not a fan of those studies and he wrote a lot about how they were done wrong. He wasn’t saying th...

In this week's recap, I covered the unconfirmed Google update that seemed to impact product review sites but maybe more on January 26th. Yandex had a huge leak, and SEOs and marketers dug through the search engine’s source code. Google’s answer to ChatGPT might be Apprentice Bard using LAMDA Sundar Pichai of Google basically confirmed this. Google’s John Mueller blasted some links sellers. Google...

In part one, we go through Jeff Ferguson's long history in search marketing . Here, in part two, we pick up with him starting his own agency. Jeff explained how he was working at this arbitrage company, and they were not profitable for a decade, and then overnight, he helped them become profitable, and they were making a ton of money. But they didn’t do it right, and eventually, they took a major...

As I mentioned briefly last week, Google announced mass layoffs last week, and I discuss what I know so far about it. There are also reports that Google is pushing advertisers to use third-party resellers and not their internal staff. The DOJ sued Google again to break up its ad business. Microsoft announced its earnings, showing how Bing’s search ad growth continues to slow. Bing also may have ha...

Jeff Ferguson is the CEO of Amplitude Digital, and he has been in the search space for a really long time. He is also an Adjunct Professor at UCLA. In part one, we went through his long career in this space. He spoke about how he worked at a start-up that basically scrapped content on the web, and the company exploded during that dot com explosion. It was talking about the old SEO days, of course....

This week we had two unconfirmed updates from Google rollout after the helpful content, and link spam update finished. Google said quality updates could impact crawling and indexing. Google Search Console updated the performance report for product tracking. Google also updated the video indexing report for better error reporting. Google will ignore robots.txt rules if they are served with a 4xx st...

Mark Saltarelli and I spoke about his history and about B2B digital marketing in part one; it was super interesting, so make sure to listen to that. In part two, we talk about customer misses, structuring campaigns, and data. We dove into some examples of what a typical B2B customer misses with this, and he said many companies forget to exclude their own customers in these efforts. Why was the ad...

This week, the December 2022 Google helpful content update and link spam updates are finally complete after a long, long wait. There was a lot of movement on Wednesday, January 11th or so. Google said rolling out algorithm updates are sometimes like planting seeds in a garden. Google said linking to multiple sellers may give you a small ranking boost with the product reviews update. Google reitera...

Mark Saltarelli used to work at Cypress North for a couple of years but wanted to go in-house and joined Order, a later-stage startup. We spoke a bit about his history in digital marketing, first working at Toast, then FullFunnel, then Cypress North, and then where he is now at Order. We spoke a bit about the issues working with a super early-stage SaaS startup. Such as the company not fully under...

Welcome to the first video recap of 2023, where I start with the January 2023 Google webmaster report. I then explain how the Google helpful content and link spam updates are still rolling out and, more so, still causing volatility. Google explained why assigning start, and end dates to some algorithm updates is hard and not an exact science. Microsoft Bing is reportedly going to be integrating Op...