Webcology

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...

1 day, 13 hours, 59 minutes: That's the time left at the time of recording before Google pulls the data plug on Universal Analytics 3, replacing it with the much unloved and misunderstood Google Analytics 4. Many SEOs and other digital marketers, all of whom have been warned for the last 18 months are freaking out having hoped Google wasn't actually going to go through with the switch. Sur...

This was a weird week punctuated by the stupefyingly terrible news of the Titan submarine disaster, (which was confirmed by the US Coast Guard in the middle of the show recording), and the shockingly hilarious news of a potential cage match between tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The early money is on Zuckerberg who is a trained MMA fighter and twelve years younger than the 51-yea...

"Whispers from within, Nature's laughter fills the air, Gentle cheeks release.", ChatGPT for Chrome, 2023 It's been another week of extraordinary A.I. developments with plenty of examples of A.I. screw-ups, gripes, and fears as we surge forward figuring out how to best use and abuse the powers of A.I... Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger look at Chatbots in Search and talk about a...

The impacts of artificial intelligence are everywhere and we spend a lot of time talking about those impacts but we also got to talk about some regular Googley stuff too. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schackinger did start off on a high note, noting the reports of the death of a US Air Force member testing an AI-operated drone were greatly and completely exaggerated as it was only a simulation. Paraphra...

Sometime last yesterday, word went out on Twitter and LinkedIn that one of the largest SEO conference in the world was coming to North America. Conference founder Kelvin Newman tweeted and posted his team was bringing the show over here in 2023 with a date and time to be announced in the coming weeks. We asked Kelvin to come on Webcology to talk about the experience and, what we expected to be a q...

In what is possibly one of the most interesting and entertaining interviews we've recorded in a while, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk with SEO legend Martin MacDonald about the development and release of the industry's first AI-supported SEO Auditing tool, Serpere. AI -  https://serpere.ai/ .  Martin has been a practicing SEO since the dawn of the commercial Internet and has work...

Google announced major changes to search results as artificial intelligence-assisted search becomes part of Google's information universal ecosystem (*except for Canadians, Germans, and a small gaggle of other unfortunates whose governments find themselves arguing with Google)  In this show, Jim Hedger and Kristine Shachinger talk about the biggest announcements from Google IO and how coming c...

Geoffery Hinton is widely considered the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence. His research into human brain function in the late 1980s and early 90s at the University of Toronto prompted him and a team of early neural researchers to start to conceive of a digital brain that could learn. His work is considered the foundation of modern machine learning and large language models. He recently stepped...

There was a lot of Google news to cover this week in a short break from our usual breathless coverage of the AI revolution. This week hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss a number of Google and social media stories, along with thanking Search Engine Journal for including Webcology in the Top SEO Podcasts for 2023. This week we covered the growth of Spoutable Elon's Secret faux-min...

Another AI-focused show. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the introduction of Auto-GPT, OpenAI’s newest product that can instruct itself. Jim, who has been a strong supporter of incorporating AI into our work process and tools admits to being a bit queasy at the prospect of a self-prompting AI. We also cover the development of Project Maji and Google’s new Search Engine, the in...

A news coverage show that tried to focus on organic search with a lot of changes to report at Google. The biggest story this week has been the rollout of Google’s new Review Update expanding to cover reviews about products, services, and things. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also talk about how a page or site’s quality can degrade over time, how schema triggers different types of SERPs...

Like Elvis in a Mojo Nixon song, AI is everywhere man. This week hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through the confusing ways the SEO and tech industries are taking to AI. From hallucinated Guardian stories to a treasure trove of industrial espionage opportunities, this week offered us a lot of lessons about being careful around AI. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands...

Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talked about a number of stories this week focusing on the implications of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, the suddenly introduced March 2023 Google Core Update, the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT4, and the educational game SEOpoly. There was no end of big and important things to talk about this week, we wanted to make time for Jef Van Gool, innovator of SEO...

Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger host an informative and very fun show today with guests, Mitul Ghandi co-founder and chief architect and Mark Traphagen, VP of Product Marketing and Training from the enterprise-SEO super-system SEOClarity (https://seoclarity.net). Mitul and Mark join Jim and Kristine to talk about the multi-feature rollouts SEOClarity introduced during its Release Week. SEOClar...

Facebook will now remove a post and give up to seven explanations before suspending or banning users. The new policy is a result of analysis and feedback from Meta’s Independent Oversight Board. More severe violations still could mean immediate penalties like posting bans and/or account removal. https://about.fb.com/news/2023/02/meta-is-improving-facebooks-penalty-system/   First up Micha Fisher a...