Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

Nicole Waddington is a digital marketing strategist at Cypress North. She started her career as an Intern at Cypress North and then was offered a full-time job at the agency. She spoke about her interest in marketing but found this job through her university and was eager to work for an agency. She got her job during COVID and but Cypress was working in person, so she didn’t have to start a new jo...

This is the last video of the year, and we have more Google search ranking fluctuations and volatility to talk about. Google said the December 2022 helpful content and link spam updates are delayed in being completed because of the holidays. Christmas weekend was much calmer for the Google search results. Google said using “here” for anchor link text is bad. Google said you should not nofollow lin...

In part one , we spoke about Jessica Budde's professional history, and in part two, we spoke more about how she had to shift her role and job as her agency grew from a small team to a medium-sized team. Her life was executing Google Ads campaigns, and now she barely does that because she is more of a manager. She feels like she is not doing work because she is managing and not doing tactical, but...

Google told us that we should not expect another Core update in 2022, so you can relax about that. Google said the helpful content update would take longer to roll out; now, it is well over two weeks since it started. So now both the helpful content update and link spam update are rolling out, and there has been a lot of turbulence with that. We also reported on the early impact of the link spam u...

Jessica Budde was next to be interviewed and she has an amazing personality. She co-hosts the Marketing O'Clock podcast , which I am a fan of. She works and will forever work with Greg Finn at Cypress North and she has a cool work history. She worked as an on-air personality for a bit and then at CVS for five years, she said she is a CVS lifer (first I heard of that). CVS prepared her for the cust...

This was a busy week, and I honestly thought it would start to slow down, but I was wrong; I am wrong a lot. Google launched another algorithm update, the December 2022 link spam update, which it baked in SpamBrain into the update. Google also released a large update to the Search Quality Raters Guidelines, adding an E to E-A-T for experience. Google released a new visual elements gallery where th...

Part one and part two with Jeremy Meindl was more on black hat SEO stuff and now in part three , we get into more white hat topics talking about CRM targeting. Then in the last part, we spoke more about his failures over the years. Jeremy explained a lot of times, every failure is an opportunity in disguise. So if you work with clients, when your clients mess up, or you mess up, you can set them u...

This week we had another confirmed update to the Google helpful content system; it is now global. Google also had a lot of volatility over the previous week, unrelated to this confirmed update. Google officially rolled out continuous scroll on desktop search this week. Google also officially launched topic refinements in the mobile search results but is also testing it on desktop. Google Search Co...

Part one and part two with Jeremy Meindl was more on black hat SEO stuff and now in part three, we get into more white hat topics. We start with CRM targeting and how he got into CRM targeting. It started with him trying to get a date with a girl he liked. He photoshopped his face into ads that this girl would see and now he is married to her with two kids. This CRM targeting strategy worked well...

Since Friday of Thanksgiving last week, we have been seeing a lot of chatter and volatility with Google Search. Google said they improved the accuracy of the Discover performance report in Google Search Console. Google said links have a lot less of a significant impact today than they did years ago. Google said they have algorithms to detect and demote AI-altered scrapped plagiarized content. Goog...

In part one , we learned about Jeremy Meindl, why he loves pushing the line in SEO and how he never was caught with any of his SEO spam efforts. In part two we talk more about that, specifically, he said sometimes with Google what is old is new again. Sometimes he just pushes as hard as possible for fun. Transparency with his clients is super important and sometimes he will encourage clients to ta...

Google probably did yet another weekend search ranking algorithm update, I see a pattern here. Google’s Hyung-Jin Kim said E-A-T is used for all queries, not just YMYL. Google documented its notable search updates, they now call systems, even some of the retired ones. Google has a new spam policy for those who circumvent other spam policies. Google has a new system in place to be able to crawl fro...

Jeremy Meindl is the co-founder of Target IQ and we spoke about the hotel we are in, its history of it, and the fire he risked his life showing how you cannot burn yourself. Jeremy spoke about his history in a super transparent way and how he got into spam and then became a professional digital marketer. It was fun to talk about the early days of search marketing, how easy it was, how it was like...

This week, we learned that Google’s Panda update at one point in time evolved into what was called the Google Coati update. Google also had another weekend update last week. Google Search Console added a new shopping tab with more streamlined Merchant Center integration. Google said they now recommend dots over commas for review snippet numerical decimal separators. Google said rich result manual...

In part one with Rick Mariano we spoke about helping build LocalEdge to provide high volume digital marketing services at a low cost and then in part two we spoke more about using automation and the human touch. In this final part, we talk about advice for clients to work with agencies and get the most out of the agency. Rick often thinks a lot about how to help all his clients, the thousands of t...

We had yet another biggish unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update on November 4th and 5th. Google also removed the annotation about the search features bug and added a Discover performance report bug to the list. The Google Search Console API is delayed a bit. Google spoke more about AI content, it is content by the people for the people. Google said just because Google may rewrite a t...

In part one we spoke about how Rick Mariano has helped build LocalEdge to provide high volume digital marketing services at a low cost. In this next part, Rick explained more specifically how he was able to structure the business and staff to do these tasks. Rick explained they have a very good development and business intelligence team where they can quickly see where the priorities should be wit...

To start things off, I quickly covered the monthly Google webmaster report. Google also had some big unconfirmed update on or around October 28th. Google confirmed a search bug with top stories and search features starting on October 18th through October 28th. I provided one example of one site that got slammed by the Google spam update in October. Links might not be as important of a ranking fact...

Rick Mariano is the Vice President of Digital at Hearst and he runs LocalEdge, a local digital marketing agency for small businesses. They do high volume digital marketing services for low cost and less budget. He also runs another sub-agency that is more boutique style that does higher-budget marketing for fewer clients. Rick explained the process of providing high-quality digital marketing servi...

This week, we covered how the day after Google announced the Google October 2022 spam update was done, only then did we see some really massive changes. Google fixed a month-long bug with Google Analytics 3, where the Search Console query data was missing. Google Analytics 4 added a bunch of new features and more details about the deadlines. Google Search Console fixed another bug with mislabeled...

In part one , I do a lot of bantering with Greg Finn and talk about his history in the space and the growth of his agency, Cypress North. In part two we start to talk about his contributions to the industry, and then here in part three, we get into Google Ads. Greg explained he loves Google Ads for what it used to be and what it can be but there is a misalignment in the short-term goals and he thi...

The Google October 2022 spam update, the first spam update since last November, started and was completed within 42 hours, I have more on that in the video. Google also has rolled out a new Site name and favicon design for the mobile search results, with new structured data. With that, Google has rolled out the new bold black “sponsored” ad label. On that label, Google is working on a fix for some...

In part one , I do a lot of bantering with Greg Finn and talk about his history in the space and the growth of his agency, Cypress North. In part two we start to talk about his contributions to the industry, including writing at Search Engine Land and speaking at Search Marketing Expo. He started writing at Search Engine Land in 2007 or so and then he became more part-time, on a regular basis, sho...

This week, Google pushed out a revamped Google Webmaster Guidelines and renamed it the Google Search Essentials. Google also seemed to release an unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. Google told us that the product reviews update primarily works on a page-level basis but not always. Google added three examples of what types of pages are product reviews. Google also said structured d...

Greg Finn and I have known each other for a pretty long time, so this video is pretty fun and we kind of go off topic a bunch but I promise, there is some knowledge throughout. We both miss the old days, the golden era, of search marketing - it was just a lot of fun. We dug into Greg's professional history, which you can look up on his LinkedIn profile and listen to on the podcast. It is interesti...