Webcology

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...

Matt Mullenweg is seeing more legal resistance to his WP-Emperor schtick and reacting like a manbaby about it. In a similar universe, the outgoing President warns of the coming transition to an oligarchy run by big-tech. Meta moves to the far right by removing fact checking and allowing the racist and multi-phobic content back on its platform as alternative facts carry as much or more weight in th...

The world itself is burning as hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through the sudden and sweeping changes coming to search results pages in 2025. While AI-faked images of the Hollywood sign burning are posted as news on partisan websites we talk about the sudden drought of fresh content for LLMs to train on now that everything ever written has been consumed and the use of AI created sy...

Welcome to the start of the second quarter of the 21st century. In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is a year of the Snake, a period of extreme transformation as old ways are shed and new ones adopted. It seems like an apt description of what the coming year will be like. Things are going to change and if the news of this week is any indication, that change is so sweeping and encompassing, it is creating...

An all star SEO panel made up of Mordy Oberstein (Wix Studio), Mark Traphagen (seoClarity), and Jenny Halasz (JLH Marketing) joins hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to look back at the events, changes, and ideas of 2024 and into a new world of even more rapid change as AI grows from its infancy towards its adolecence. An incredibly interesting conversation between five veteran search marke...

Duda's cofounder Amit Glatt found time to sit with us to talk about the history, evolution, and future of the website builder and management platform he helped create. Since its founding 15 years ago, Duda has grown to become one of the top-tier enterprise website builders on the web. Duda feels like it's on a growth sprint right now. They have some interesting tools for web makers to work...

A December 2024 Core Update started running a few short days after the November 2024 Core Update ended and mere hours before this episode was recorded live to podcast. At the same time, Google reported minor but persistent indexing issues. Otherwise, Matt Mullenweg was last seen retreating with his tail between his legs following the judicial spanking he received trying to defend his actions at Wo...

Recorded in the week after Black Friday hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through a bunch of stories affecting the world of search. The November 2024 Core Update conveniently ended an hour before we went into the recording session. We talk a bit about winners and losers and what we think will be the effects of this core update (while jokingly anticipating an upcoming December 2024 Cor...

Twas the eve before Thanksgiving and through the studio's haunts, no creatures were talking or recording our thoughts. The channels all hummed with inactivity because the producers went home to be with family. When out of the ether some showbiz thoughts clattered, The Show Must Go On!, because nothing else matters. - Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger take a last look at the week's...

It was a busy news week with a continuing November Core Update, Google's Site Reputation Abuse Policy Update and the subsequent major publisher crackdown, the DOJ recommending the sale of Chrome and possibly Android, lost GA4 data, a now missing GSC Experience Report, OpenAI deleting critical incriminating evidence by mistake, Meta level pig-butchering, the TwiXter eXodous, and the promise of...

Recorded two days after the 2024 presidential election, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger contemplate the outcome and how a Trump presidency might affect the tech and search marketing industries. Tech can expect an era of deregulation, starting with Trump's aim to strip away federal safeguards over AI development, deferring any regulatory oversight to individual states. With enormous shifts...

The Helpful Content Update wasn't about the content and the hope of recovery wasn't about to happen. Web publishes hit by the Helpful Content Update in September 2023 who attended Google's Web Creator Summit at the Googleplex this week were told the hope they'd held for seeing their rankings recover were likely in vain and that those placements were gone and not likely coming back....

Jono Alderson is a well known SEO Consultant, one of the top WordPress contributors, and a bonafide Digital Superstar. He joined Jim and Kristine to fill us in on the backstory and implications of the ongoing drama in the world of WordPress. Jono has been around for a long time. He knows where the bodies are buried and in this interview, he explains how it unfolded to get to where we're at now...

Longtime WordPress contributor Jono Alderson joins Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to discuss the very weird goings on at WordPress. The interview starts around the 35 minute mark. Before Jono joins us, Kristine and Jim discuss the news of the week including a short update on the WordPress situation and stories from Google, OpenAI, TwiXter, and more. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.co...

A busy, news heavy show has hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger cover three major stories, each of which could occupy a full hour long show. The WordPress mega-drama continues with the founder's faction at Automattic grabbing control of one of their rival WP-Engine's best known custom WP-Contributions, Advanced Custom Fields in a forking incident many think close to theft. Also this...

Jim Hedger returns from bereavement time as he and cohost Kristine Schachinger learn that Matt Mullenweg has found a way to make the WordPress controversy much worse that it was when it started by banning WPEngine, establishing a loyalty pledge complete with a box to check to swear your WP-Loyalty, running down investors, getting himself and the commercial arm of WordPress sued for Extortion, and...