Can You Rank on Google Without Backlinks? Legendary SEO David Quaid Answers

Mr. David Quaid, welcome back to the show. You are one of the most legendary SEOs, a very, very talented SEO who is beloved by the SEO community. And I have five community questions for you on this episode. Well, thanks for having me back. Uh, I'm excited to hear the five community questions because I don't know what they are and we did ask for them. So, um, I guess I put myself in the hot seat. Gonna be good. All right, first one. Can a website and you you I you are familiar with this one cuz we talked a little bit about it. Can a website scale rankings through more content if it's backlinks are not also growing? So, let's say that like a website is is using AI to just put up all of this content and it could be great content, but if its backlinks are not also growing, is it is a website going to keep ranking? That's a really good question and I think we're seeing that happen in in real life, right? There's lots and lots of um instances. Um so, can a website rank without getting back links? Do the backlinks have to scale at the same time as you're scaling content? I I don't think so. I don't think there's a relationship between needing to have x amount of backlinks and scaling up. How do backlink spam filters and how does machine scale content detection work? That's a real black box that nobody knows, right? People can guess about it and we can try to draw heristics around it and say like, well, this happened with this site and this had this in common with this site, but we don't really know. So I don't think that um in terms of like the spam detection algorithms that there's a relationship between as you scale up content you need to have x amount of back links flow with it right um I think that as Google have reduced the reliance on backlinks in the system and they really have that if you want to get started having backlinks is very very helpful if you want to scale via just um going from square to square uh picking low keyword difficulty um keywords ranking for those getting clicks using that to go to the next and go up and up and up and up cornerstoneing that's very very slow you can make it go faster with back links or it it could take years to get to like thousands and thousands of clicks from where you can spawn multiple pages right what's interesting about groipedia which a lot of SEOs have been talking about on X is that it has scaled without a backlink program. It is getting back links. People are linking to it. People are writing articles about it. People are linking to their own profiles. Um it seems to be maintaining a certain amount of rank positions. It seems to be rotating rank positions. So I think if you if if they had a cohesive dedicated backlink strategy where they were keeping pages that needed backlinks, they would they would stay up. But I don't think there's a requirement. But I don't think it's part of like a spam detection system that um if you just scale with content, you are a spammy website or or we'll get out. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average Compact Keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. I don't know what I don't know how Google detects uh machine scale content. I would love to know. I really would. Um I don't know the mechanism. I don't know if it's like that requires AI detection. I don't know if that requires um if that looks at targeting. But yeah, you can definitely scale up while using backlinks. be I don't think Google expects you to have to build backlinks manually while you're scaling. Right? If you look at the if if you if you take the philosophy that if you create good content and you get back links, which I I think is also kind of bullshitty, um then you should be able to scale. Like if you're CNN, you're not technically worried about backlinks. So that CNN will just keep producing news articles as will the BBC, as will Alazer, as will Times of India. they'll just keep producing news as it as it appears, right? Um, now they've been they're old domain names. They've had a long time. They've been gaining backlinks for a long time, but I don't think it's I don't think there's a ratio between backlinks and content. um for my own blog which I use as an an experimental site uh haven't been gaining back links uh have been losing back links if anything because of age and deterioration of wherever those back links came from and have been scaling traffic at like I don't know 20% per month. So I I don't think that the question the poll that you ran on X I don't think that you have to maintain backlinks at the same rate but it definitely helps. No, it's not it's not at the same rate. It's just like it's cuz I'm talking just about I'm not even talking about a link building program. I am I am literally just saying like people get back links in many different ways. Lots of people get backlinks with lot without even trying. But I I'm I'm kind of saying like let's say so this is like the hypothetical. Let's say that you have a new site. You do initial link building for it. You get some good links to it. That's it. And then you then you are just kind of like scaling content using AI. So a good example would be you put up some pages because you have init and you have initial authority. These pages start ranking and then the AI looks at what they're ranking for takes those keywords that that are in positions like 3 to 20 that these pages are already ranking for adds that to the page starts ranking for these new keywords. goes looks now it's ranking for more keywords looks at the new keyword it's ranking for adds it to the page it's this feedback loop new pages are going up it's ranking now it's ranking for more keywords is there going to be a point where that slows down if you are not getting back links not just with a link building program just like natural backlinks earned links like if you're not getting any links at all is there going to be a point where those rankings slow down because you like you can you keep scaling the content but you get zero links. If you look at job sites and e-commerce sites that happens all the time. I've seen sites grow from hund like thousands of clicks to millions of clicks without gaining back links. No links at all. Like not even earned links. People aren't sharing these around like no. Um job sites are are really easy at doing that. I think one one if I if if there was a missed business opportunity, it was copying Indeed. I copied Indeed for a recruitment agency in Europe. I don't know was it like 15 years ago or something. And um as we scaled up the number of pages, so we we built we had a a we built the job board. I think it was called cplob.com and we built it in ASP.NET and it had very very few backlinks, like a couple hundred. Most of them, yeah, just standard profile links, that kind of thing. And we scaled up to 1.1 million clicks in a few months. 1.1 million a month. In a few months. Mhm. In Yeah. Without any You had a few hundred links and it was just like profile links. Just just basic the easiest links you could build at the time. What year was this? Just very very basic. So 2011. Okay. And and I've seen it since I've seen it like in the last 12 months where sites like big e-commerce sites, listing sites. Yeah, but these are big but you're just saying that these are big e-commerce sites. Like if you're a big site then you I would assume that you have a lot of links and people are still you have also brand awareness and people are sharing your website around naturally. No, I'm talking about I'm talking about relatively new sites. Okay. what makes it a big when I say big when I I'm talking about number of pages okay just just I'm using size as number of pages not size in terms of like traffic or backlinks or brand awareness um that as you publish pages and because of topical authority across that like for example if you have topical authority for jobs or bicycles you can keep adding and adding and adding pages and they'll rank or not rank depending on each individual index right and what the competition is there uh without a a backlink um program. So that's why I find the Groipedia experiment so interesting because I think what you're talking about is how does it detect machine scaled content sort of but it could also be just people it not even necessarily it could be human content it's just people keep putting up human content and it's like the question is the question is well the community question is do you need to also be doing link building or can you just focus on content So I'll answer it in reverse. What's the difference between a jobs board and a machine scaled content site? Right? It's a very it's a it's a very difficult thing to to to because a jobs board page is cookie cutter, right? But the job description elements are humanmade, right? And so programmatic. Exact. It's completely programmatic SEO. Um and there's nothing wrong with it. it's a legitimate business as our e-commerce templates, right? Like all of the AWS listings, all the products that are in an AWS marketplace all follow the same cookie cutter template. The I think a lot of SEOs expected Grockipedia to drop and saw traffic drops in the Groipedia estimated traffic, but the estimated traffic has to be the worst report from any of the SEO tools. Whereas the ranking report showed pretty steady gain, but running out of steam, right? So where the link build where link building authority comes in is where Guacipedia is trying to rank against sites that have infinite click-through rate history, infinite ranking history. That's very very difficult. That that that's where you're going. Like Rockedia gained a lot of space on uncontested, easy to rank for keywords where the volume start to get higher, where the authority starts to get higher, that's where you're just going to run out of steam. it uh you're just not going to be able to sustain that growth. So, you'll get to That's true. You can add it. Sorry to interrupt you. Graedia o only ranks for 12.7 million keywords total and then it's and then it hit then it's that's when it hit a wall in terms of it. it it but but but like that sounds impressive but for a site with a backlink profile like Rockedia and and and traffic and all the natural signals that Groipedia would have is it like it's it's hitting a wall at that stage where it's like if you look at what's possible with other sites you know so it's it's it's hit a wall that's what I'm saying it's run out of steam the the the the backlink profile is relatively new the backlink profile is not very well coordinated right me linking my name to my own Groipedia profile page isn't exactly a massive authority play. Right. Right. So that's what I mean. It's it's run out of steam. Um and Red Gaga spoke about this or put this on X a while ago. He noticed that on the Reddit call before the IPO that Reddit had said to Google, we're going to be building this huge Reddit answers and it's going to be AI answers. and Google gave them the thumbs up and said that's not a problem and it started asking that question what's the diff what is machine scale content when is m machine scale content applicable is it like a HCU detection system um and that's where we just don't know we we just that is that is the black box of SEO you know if when people say like oh does schema matter do backlinks matter how do backlinks matter that that part's easy that part's like that's where like black hats ever ever discussed like, "Oh, wow. Are black are backlinks important?" They have a backlink strategy and it works, right? They're they're like counting dollars. Their problem is, "How much money can I make? How fast?" Not like, "Do backlinks matter." The the real question that SEOs don't know was like, "What is HCU based on?" I know that's a question we're dying to uncover. I know that I think you're you're planning a future podcast. Yeah, we have a big episode on that. This is going to be good. Yeah, that's going to be so interesting. Um and and it would take a lot of mind share because it would take entire tools like like you would have to have something like a SEMrush to collect the data to start analyzing that right and so it' be very hard and I don't think SEMR has like a database of when I say SEMrush any of the tools have like a database of saying these are HCU hit sites to begin to analyze the coreistics uh but you would need something at starting at that scale to do that sort of analysis. So, um I I think we can only guess about what Google detects as machine scaled and then whether or not backlinks can offset that, which I doubt. I doubt backlinks can save a machine scaled site. Um I agree I agree with that. I mean, if it has the patterns that match if it has the patterns of like a spammy site, backlinks aren't we don't know what those patterns are. I have seen where I was testing FAQs on single pages. Um I ran a couple of very very small tests way too basic where I replicated the PAAA hack that we did a podcast hack. Yeah. Mhm. But instead of creating individual pages, I put them on one page and I saw a massive gain in tra or a relatively large gain in traffic. I was happy with the gain in traffic and then I saw I think 6 to 7 days later absolutely zeroed lost all impressions all rank positions absolutely zeroed so I did it again and again I've done it three times and within six days the pages were killed I don't know if that was rotation testing or if it was like so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have to take the same answers and republish them individual pages see if I can repeat it which is which is what I'm going to do next. So, going back to this original question just for SEOs who are doing SEO for their own site or client sites, are you are you basically saying like you can just keep on working on content if you have a good amount a healthy amount of existing backlinks? You've already built a a bunch of backlinks. Can you just keep focusing on content or should you also be focusing on backlinks? Like if you keep ranking, should you just keep putting up new content to target keywords within the topical authority? As long as it's as long as you can avoid that wall, you're you're eventually going to hit a wall. That's what Yeah, that that was the original question was will you hit a wall if you're not building links? That's the original question. Uh so if you It depends if you keep cornerstoneing up in the same Can you talk about what that means? If you keep so if you if you cornerstone in the same topic eventually so I think back links back links can get you a lot more authority than your own ranking pages with a certain amount of traffic if you can land pages that have that can generate bucket loads of authority. Author authority is like current, right? Like if you think about an electricity system and a power station and substations, um pages with traffic have authority. Uh how that authority is calculated or made up, that's part of that's black that's part of the black box that we don't really know. So if you can keep going broader, in other words, adding new topics, adding new low keyword difficulty, you can keep growing. If you want to keep scaling up, you now have to battle against pages that have been there longer. So, do can you generate enough authority without backlinks? Do you know enough about SEO? Do you know enough about authority shaping? Maybe you can. Um, it would would backlinks accelerate it or would you have to have backlinks? I would say for the most part, unless you really really know how to cornerstone shape authority and move it around, uh you probably will. It's it it's an interesting question. Um, I would say I could if you look at the total authority of your site and its ability to generate and you can sort of like focus it, maybe you can, but I would say you'd have I'd say it would be very difficult. I I would say you'd have to be very very good. Um, I don't think it's impossible though. It's an interesting thing because you hear a lot of people saying, you know, a best practice is to internal if you have if you put up a new page that's targeting a keyword. A best practice is to uh maybe internal link to it from a page that is already ranking and that is already receiving traffic. That page that that internal link, it doesn't need to be a from a page that has a backlink going going to it, just from a page that is already ranking and receiving traffic. And so that just be just basically what you're saying is just ranking alone and getting clicks is actually increasing your authority without the back links. Absolutely. That's exact that's how I think Google have displaced back links in their in their system over the last 10 years. How they've reduced load on it. Basically, if you've got pages that are ranking, you're you're essentially creating your own backlinks, your own authority. Uh think of it as like mini solar power. So instead of being connected to the main grid, you're now using solar power. But how much solar power do you need to go up against a system? So the question becomes much easier to analyze if you compare, for example, let's say you moved out of very low keyword difficulty and you suddenly want to rank against the New York Times. You're not going to do that with um just your own earned authority because the New York Times probably is a nearest seed in the page rank nearest seed system. So so you could forget about it. You would need you would probably need a link from three sites the size of the New York Times in order to rank against them. The other question is in terms of c in terms of user experience and authority what what which has supremacy right? So, for example, let's say the New York Times publisher publishes a page and it's about um pizza recipes and the the author takes a shortcut and he says, "I'm just too tired. It's it's Friday night. I need to go out for dinner. I'm going to I'm going to get Claude to write this for me or perplexity or something." And it puts wood glue in the recipe, right? And people read it and they're like, "Oh, this is clearly a terrible idea." And then they start pogo sticking, right? Does the pogo sticking the pogo sticking technically should derank the New York Times page, right? If it's really terrible, right? So, well, depend on what what already what already is up on the in the SERs. But yeah, so let's say like this page, it's the first time the New York Times has written about woodfired pizza with fresh rosemary for argument sake, right? It's entered that niche it's never entered before, right? Um you would think that user experience overcomes backlinks right if sticking. Yeah. Pogo sticking should overcome page rank right. So in other words like if if people see that the quality is terrible and Google really values that input into the system it should derank the bad page. I would think I would I mean I would see it as a nuanced thing. I would see it as is there lots of content, is there other content targeting this keyword from uh relatively topically author authoritative sites on this? And if the answer is yes and the New York Times page is pogo sticking, then I would not be surprised to see it go down in the rankings. Yeah, exactly. But forget the other forget the other component for a second, right? Let's just take the page in the index, right? It's it's got there because of authority and because of other pages and whatever. Right now, now it's running in that index. And CTR is about just that keyword, just that index, nothing else. And you have a,000 clicks a day and 900 people read the NY Times article and redo the search and click on the second, third, fourth, fifth result, that page should fall. It absolutely should fall. So click-through rate should be strong enough to overcome page rank otherwise the system is flawed. Yeah. The the very interesting thing is that you don't need and actually this brings us to the next question. I didn't even expect to talk about this first question for as long as we did but I'm glad that we did because it's a very important question and and to me it's a very interesting question. Um because it also explains like why you as a new site or you as a relatively like low authority site can increase your rankings without if you don't want to focus on link building and like how you know the people also ask trick where you're putting up questions targeting low competition keywords and then you're you're actually getting traffic that sticks without the pogo sticking and you can just use that to get more to get more rankings. Very cool. So you this and this next question is extremely related. You famously said that you don't buy back links. Lots of other SEOs love buying back links. You don't buy backlinks. How come? Um so I don't need to in in the simple sense that um I stay in a niche which is I've worked with a lot of people for like six years since I started pard position on my own again. And a lot of those people are in the same industry. Introduce me to colleagues in the same industry. So I circle around cyber security, AI, fintech, and AI is in all of those SAS, all of their products anyway. So they're all in AI and so there's a lot of opportunity for them to link to each other. And they a lot of the companies I work with have real life transactional financial transactions between them. They're real businesses doing real business with each other. And so it and in some cases, which I've been doing for years, I feel like I'm almost a broker in between. I'm I'm saying, "Hey, I've just brought this new client on. They're targeting fintech. They're targeting the same people, but they're not a competitor. So, this makes so much sense to write to essentially write guest posts. So, I'm doing the exact same thing. I'm writing guest posts. um having one company write a post or contribute a post to the other person's site and linking to them. It's the same thing I did at camp when we were in the Microsoft ecosystem. We were very lucky that Microsoft actually had just hired one of the VPs of marketing from Intel. They had huge office in Times Square, which is just down the road from our office in Times Square. We camped out with them for two days. Our co-founder, our VP of strategy, myself and five of their marketing VPs and built a whole go to market strategy based on Azure. And they wrote Technet articles about us and we wrote Technet articles about us that we gave them tweets that they retweeted. I think our first tweet that they retweeted got like 255,000 mentions. And so we guest posted naturally through absolute natural business language by replicating by showing Google that we were real businesses transacting with them through keywords and backlinks. And a backlink from TechNet is very powerful. Oh yeah. That's why that's why I I I say on a lot of shows like you don't really need as many I I say like you don't need as much link building as you think you do if you are a real business doing real business activities. Absolutely. And and it's a couple of projects I've worked on. We've had a couple of instances where they've had to bring in OM companies and th those companies have had to do a lot of PR in order to fix a PR situation and that PR has contributed absolutely zero. Um, a lot of PR doesn't necessarily build pages that gets traffic. It builds pages that takes up space and that PR doesn't necessarily generate traffic. So whenever I I look at the at the questions like um someone asked on Reddit the other day does gro do these Groipedia links have value and people keep coming to this like thought that does this website have value like looking at CNN CNN to humans has value because it's a real brand. It's a news. It has its own actual broadcast. It has millions of people going to its website. That's not how Google looks at it. Um it doesn't have value because it's Groipedia. It has value because it has traffic or because it has backlinks. And that's the only way to universally objectively apply that to every single website. And if it truly is a brand, it'll have a large brand makeup even if it doesn't have uh organic generic traffic. That's the difference between the two. But I think people keep defaulting to the sort of like constructed brand view of the world, which that's just not how Google works, right? So just because you're doing PR, just because the site is relevant, that's not the magic. The magic is current or currency or flow. There has to be traffic going to the page. At least as far as what I can see. What kind? What kind of traffic? Super super is it all kind of like organic traffic. Yeah. So if you think about a self-correcting system, if Google trusts the page and is sending traffic to the page, it's a good page, right? Like it must be to fit within the confines of the system, right? It could look like a spammy page. And so try to get away from thinking like, oh, it's a guacipedia page or it's PR or it's coming from a dark web cyber security page and I'm in a dark web cyber security thing. It must match it. It's relevant. That doesn't matter. That that there are a lot of PR sites that just exist to fill content. I know I've played those games. I've I've had writers on our book where we're paying like $5,000 to have an article written and then we're posting the article on our Facebook page and sponsoring it for another thousand to make it to actually send traffic to it to make it look like it's been read and to make it rank in Buzzumo and so on. I've played the reverse um analytics game if that makes sense, right? In order to pump it up because it has no actual traffic. Not all of these PR sites have traffic. a lot of them are essentially dead link farms, right? Um, but there's a play that, oh, it's PR, it's legitimate, it's okay. And then that's that's the sort of the wrong lens in which to look at at link building. If Google's sending traffic to the page, it's not penalized. Google obviously doesn't think it's spammy or it wouldn't be sending traffic to it, right? It's it's it's just that kind of basic way of of of looking at it. And so if I've got a if if the difference I think we made when we were working with Microsoft and then AWS and then also smaller partners. We didn't we didn't start with Microsoft. We actually started with much smaller partners in the UK. Our CEO knew them personally. He built other um networking device companies from Europe and they wanted SEO as well. So he brought he flew them all to Dublin. We hung out in in a hotel we rented for a week. We went to the Guinness storehouse and we literally helped them write articles that would rank that would link to us. We didn't just say like here is a blog post that's never going to rank on your site because you've never talked about load balancing before. We made sure that there that the page ranked on their site and then that site was linked to the right page on our site. And by doing that highly focused um link building, we didn't need tons and tons of authority that got lost through inefficient internal linking and inefficient external linking. A lot of the sites that I've analyzed that have like three four million back links only have like DAS of like 25 26 because they're sending so much authority to one If if all of your authority is going to one page, the dampening effect is on an order of magnitude against you. First of all, you can't send that many links from that page out. Like you can't put a thousand links on that page. Each link loses 85%. You're much better getting a myriad like 10 or 20 lower high authority domains linking to different parts across your site than you are like mass concentrating them all on one page. And if you are going to do that, then at least do it on your blog root page because then your blog root page will get crawled and indexed faster and you won't have to do this manual crawl submit right? Google will keep crawling your blog page and if there's a new blog post on it, that will trigger an index because the page has changed so much and it'll find the new link to the new blog post and it will automatically index it. Um, and that's how you should be thinking about it. And I think when I read the questions on Reddit or X or LinkedIn, people are like, "Oh, but I got a link from this site and and this looks like a real site, but you're looking at it from like, did this convince you from a design point of view that this is a real site?" Google can't look at it that way. It just can't. There's there's too many subjective tokens in it that are meaningless. At the end of the day, if that site just has no traffic, that that backlink isn't doing anything to for you. And I think that goes back to your original question like can you keep scaling if you understand how authority works and how to shape authority. That's something Matt Cuts talked about all the time. A lot of those videos are gone. I think the way Google's trying to deal with backlink spam and buying back links is it's trying to pretend that backlinks don't count so much. It's created an issue where people are trying to index get pages indexed and they have absolutely no backlinks. They believe backlinks are completely dead. I I think that Google sort of like it just veers from one to the other, one extreme to the other. Like back links, good content, backlinks, good content. Like the good content problem is that it's very subjective, right? Like I will never find any content on golf good. I I'm allergic to it. I played it in high school. I hated it as much then as I do now. But it doesn't make golf a bad sport. I love golf. Yeah. I live in Florida. I'm there there's gun sights on my head now. Um, and but but that's just me personally. I'm just an idiot. Nobody in golf is going to be upset that I don't like golf. There's enough people there, right? And that's how the systems work. So good I I think that most people write good content and SEOs in the ivory tower going good content. That's not going to stop spam. The people producing spam know how to make it rank. They don't give a flying right? What do you think? So you're not going to stop spam by saying good content. And if you think about you and I are watching sites rank all the time, right? I'm taking ranking positions all the time, every day. That's my job. Are does that mean that content is terrible? Does that mean my content is better? So good content isn't an answer. I actually I'm I'm sort of toying with a new message which says like if you keep saying good content, you're an because good content isn't keeping people ranking and it's not helping people rank. Here's um here's an interesting question. If you are a new site, this is actually something that that I think about. If if you are a new site and you want to help build your you want to help build your authority, you want to get that current as as you were saying, you want to get that current. Is it a smart idea to do the people also ask trick or could that box you into a niche if you think it's possible that you might do micro pivots later on? I think it's a good place to start. I think one of the things that people forget is that linking gives you the power to shape authority. So if you've got something coming in on bicycles or BM BMW headlamps or BMW car parts or your SAS product or whatever down the road you can absolutely pivot that there's there's this relevancy thing that people don't understand. Relevancy is a gate and not a limit or a form of authority itself. It's there there aren't all these hundreds and hundreds of trust signals and segments. So if you build a PAA that puts that gives you topical authority in a particular segment, you can start a new segment, but the first page and the second page and the third page aren't going to rank. You're going to have to grow that. You're also going to have to figure out how do you grow way? So two ways. One, you you you start at the bottom of the of the keyword difficulty um score, which which is a reverse engineering, right? this is not a micro sorry not a Google um design concept. This is the way people have realized this is the flaw in the or this is the weak spot in the system right I go up against I find new keywords because new keywords are always being developed by humans right and there's nowhere for Google to get ahead of that or other content producers to get ahead of that. So you find those new keywords you start ranking for that you get clicks you now have topical authority. That's it. It's that simple. You then need to figure out a way to find a keyword in the middle or a keyword that's a common denominator to link to your new PAAA and it's just based on keyword proximity and and similarity. So you're saying that you won't get boxed into a niche if you are doing if you are develop if you're putting up lots of like low difficulty if you are targeting lots of low difficulty keywords within a single niche and you are ranking for these keywords and you have like a relatively new site and then you know let's say a few months later you decide you want to do like a micro pivot. the fact that you are ranking for all of these all of these keywords in this one niche that you picked early on that's not going to stop you from ranking in this this new kind of similar niche. Yeah, absolutely. So I don't think Google has like these segments that we have, you know, right? Like this is marketing, this is cyber security, this is IT networking. Those those areas are very nebulous vague. the definitions change all the time. What'll happen is if you are writing and very successful in one niche and you you start writing outlier posts, they'll get treated as outliers. You have to you can't just go from writing about holidays to spaceships. You've got to somehow find a way in the middle. The way in the middle might be holidays in space, right? So, if you can rank for holidays, why can't you rank for holidays in space? Well, how do you get to holidays in space? what you've got to get holiday space rockets and you've got to start a holiday space rocket industry and so you can move laterally as well as vertically that way. This is a concept of shaping this is a concept of shaping your topical authority. Exactly. So if you've got a if you've got an article that's talking that ranks for um tourist rockets, you can then link to what is a rocket from tourist rockets and that's going to give that page a shot. But that page then has to rank in that index on its own. It's a whole brand new index. It's going to start with very little authority. So you got to start at the bottom. You can't just move adjacently over at the same level of authority. You're just going to start from scratch and go up again. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make a bunch of podcasts on what Matt Matt Cuts has said about shaping topical authority. I think that'll be Man, I I love Matt. Yeah. I need to go find those videos. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Me too. Miss him so much. he was like such I I I think he just the way he talked about it, he didn't gatekeep. He explained the fundamental engineering about it. Um whereas I think what's happening now is that I keep saying Google's very simple and they they're they're almost trying to allow um it to get over complicated, right? They try, they bring it back down to earth all the time, but there is a certain amount of um law of the jungle if they keep allowing it to oversimplify and they don't give direct answers and um and and it makes it difficult, right? It it it it give it that that's giving credence to a lot of the conspiracy theories and a lot of the advice that comes out, but I guess that makes it fun, right? Makes it it definitely keeps it interesting. Ask you this. This is another uh community question. I didn't have it planned, but it it just uh occurred to me. So, is there do you think there's such a thing as and for lack of a better term like a sitewide quality score? So let's say that you keep on putting up pages, you're targeting easy like low difficulty low difficulty keywords and you were you're ranking for them initially but people keep pogo sticking and know you keep putting up pages and people keep pogo sticking eventually will Google say you know what every time this page is targeting a low difficulty keyword people go to the page and pogo stick uh we don't trust this site anymore is do you think that's a a thing like that exists. I I do um and and having seen a lot of the work by Sean Anderson um on on on the API leak and and other work that he's done because he works in some fascinating areas and he's got some fascinating experience. There are definitely sitewide so page rank is a page level system and it almost operates without knowing what the rest of the site is doing and it a page goes through the indexing system within seconds. A lot of people I don't know if you saw my cartoon of the day where I had the you know the sort of like Google appre site appreciation committee go oh it's got products and services you know uh which is my my jab back at the webdev industry like for 30 years we still write we still build websites with services and products although Apple and Microsoft seem to have found a way around it magically um so I don't see why the rest of us can't but um I think if you look at um there there is a sitewide topical authority. So if you if you publish a brand new page and don't link to it, right? Like I don't imagine CNN linked to brand new articles, right? If if the Iraq war just happens and they have very little content on Iraq in the past, that page will rank, right? Um especially in a news feed, you definitely have topical authority. You can see that once you get above like a DA of 10 without a doubt there is definitely a sitewide trust score and I think that is affected by like a macro pogo sticking and that's why you see these uh after like especially core updates with topical authority constraints. You see sites starting to fall down, right? Like one page is is underpinning this is underpinning that. As they start to fall, the next one falls and the next one falls and the next one falls. And so eventually this the site can't even rank for the same low keyword difficulty um pages it's or queries it used to rank for. That's a definite sight of it losing um that score without a doubt. Yeah. And and perhaps it's that score that underpins something like a HCU or a machine scale score that we can't see, right? Because we can only try to guess what the frontline numbers are. We can't really see the algorithm that they've constructed, right? like where the value systems are and if you take that number as a derivative of that number. So that that probably this is also one of the major risks with machine scaled content which is that the content might not satisfy search intent and you're going to rank and then you're going to get a lot of pogo sticking and that's going to hurt the rest of your site definitely. Um so you you you can imagine that with this the spam detection systems they kind of run on their own. Um, and maybe that's a separate system to the indexing system that sort of like comes around and does the adjustments after click-through rates that could surface data up and say, "Yeah, this is the site just we're going to lower its its quality its authority score." What level do you think do you think Google silos quality scores within subfolders? So maybe you have all this bad machine content in one subfolder and you have other content which is better in a different subfolder. I've seen it um I've seen it strike individual pages and individual subfolders um without affecting the rest of the site. Um and and it's so it's it's so hard to sort of to track that down, right? like as you're making notes, as you're sort of like looking at what why something fell and you're like, "But I did this with this page." Um, but thinking about the um FAQs that I built that were on one page and watching those gain traffic and then lose impressions, right? So, they didn't just lose clicks, they lost impressions. Um, it seems to have limited to that section. And so I don't know if that's by topical authority or by um folder or by page also be it seems to it could be it could be by folder and it could affect other folders but if a folder has like a strong enough engagement profile I'll call it I'll make the make up that term engagement profile. It's like um I because I kind I think you kind of see like these things with like let's say like they're not newer sites but maybe sites that haven't actually had any people who understand content is just all the content within different subfolders isn't good and the and you have pogo sticking just across the site doesn't matter on the on the subfolder and it's like you might you might put up a m a folder with machine scale content and it's bad just like the other content on your site and it maybe if you do have one good if you have but if the rest of the site had good content it actually might not affect the rest of the site. Yeah, I think there's there's merit for that. Um it it unless you start building content that's dependent on that content then it sort of like leaks between those firewalls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So this was a question that we were talking about earlier. This is another very interesting question and this is a hard question. Um, so it is, let's say that you that you have a site that is targeting near duplicate keywords. And I like this this curtain example, 90in curtains, 91in curtains, 92in curtains, 93in curtains, and so on. And you just you you have so many variations going after this. Should each of these keywords, 90-in curtains, 91in curtains, should they each get a separate page or should there be a main page with different sections or is something else a good solution? And then also, what if you want to go what happens when you want to go after keywords with different styles like 90in blue blackout curtains? What's your what's your take on this? So, there's there's there's three things that'll determine it. Um, can will Google read the number as a string, right? Or will it if it reads as a string, it it could read like 90 and 92 as a typo. Will it re read it as semantic or will it read it as uh independent? Right? So, I think the problem people make with bird and semantic SEO is they start to believe that you don't have to you don't have to target keywords anymore. You can now just target phrases. Maybe again at a very high level you can. So it it it's it's a system. So it really is going to depend on I I would say I would start by trying to see if I can build a page and then put 90 91 92 93 and then have all the colors and see if the one page can rank. And what's going to determine if that's successful or not is their individual pages. If Google decides that it's semantically the same, there's nothing you can do about it. you're just going to cannibalize yourself by building other pages. You have no control over that. That depends on if people do a search for a 90 in and they click on a 92 inch, it'll become semantically the same. That that's just a data problem, right? Unless you can somehow find a lot of people to do searches and do a search for a 90 and then specifically click on a 90 in, then it will fork out and become its own independent search. So, you really have no control over that. So, you have to really experiment. If you can build a 90inch page and then put all of the 91, 92, 93, 94 on the page and make it rank, perfect. Until you have a competitor who comes along and starts with a 91 page and then they start to rank just for the 91 search and the two searches become independent and they're not treated semantically the same, then you just have to react to it. Um, how about how about a programmatic solution? How about like you you have all these different variables and you can mix and match them and that creates a different page. So that that doesn't overcome the problem, right? If if if if 90 if Google decides that 90 91 and 92 are semantically the same, then your 10 pages are just going to cannibalize with each other. Yeah, that's that's true. the the the person who asked this was actually worried about like having um setting off like spam signals within Google by going after such similar keywords. Yeah, I think that's not true. I think if you look at like how Google works from like if somebody needs a specifically specific light bulb, the same light bulb may look similar in in a similar model of car or a similar year or a similar stable like if like Pujo and Citroen share parts or Golf and Audi, but if you have to have a specific part number for your Audi, then I think Google likes that level of specificity and that's okay. I I don't think I don't think the problem is and this is again it's where people publish pages and they get cannibalized like somebody got really really I rate on Reddit last year and made a tool out of themselves um talking about duplicate content. Google can't care about duplicate content because it's a fact of life. 20% of what they index is duplicate content. Like if you're selling um a product that's sold in Europe and America, right? It's going to be on 32 different versions of eBay. It's going to be on 32 different versions of Amazon. It's going to be in English and Dutch and Flemish and Italian and Roman and Swiss and it just it's going to be duplicative. There's no it's the same product. You don't have to rewrite the description of the product all the time, right? So, people think that duplicative content should be penalized because it's a way of spamming the index. It's only spamming the index if it's unwanted by people, right? Spam isn't a isn't a shortcut or spam isn't an ad or spam isn't robotic. Spam is just unwanted. It's subjective by nature. So if if you if somebody publishes 10 pages but they don't realize the issue is that 90 91 92 and 93 are they're typos or they're semantically similar. In other words, if the same person is searching for a 91 in also clicks on a 90 in, Google will treat them as the same. So if you publish all 10 pages, whether you ma you handcraft them from Brooklyn Water or you poo them or you use WordPress to carve them out, if Google thinks that 91, 92, 93 are the same and it starts rotating them, they will cannibalize each other. If you think that's if some people aren't experienced and they think they've been penalized because people think there's penalties for everything, right? Then that you're going to form an observation and viewpoint that Google thought it was spammy. Google's not going to penalize you for being specific about the products you're selling. It just sometimes doesn't know that in some instances it has to be specifically 91 in and that's why you have to test. Maybe it comes back to that pogo sticking conversation is if if you are I hit on 91. Go on. Yeah, I hit on 91. I got to page with 90 92 93. Not happy. Go back. And then I see a page with or I see a a a piece of text exposed that says 93 and I click on that specifically there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or buy there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. David, should a blog be on a subdomain or a subfolder? And is it okay if somebody put it on the subdomain by accident? Can they just leave it there? It's always been a terrible idea. I remember we had to do this years ago and I said, "If we're going to have to put on a different server, we're going to have to rewrite it." And they said, "No, we have to put as a subdomain." As a subdomain, it's a different domain. It it's not going to share topical authority. That's your problem. Your your linking the the link won't count as much as a backlink. It'll count as an internal link. Um but your topical authority between the subdomain and the parent domain won't be shared. So whatever topical authority the parent domain inherits from branded search and all the other things won't share down to the blog and the blog vice versa as it's developing topical authority. So it's almost like having like microsoft.com and microsoftblog.com that they're two different domains but without the cross domain. You mean blog.microsoft.com? No no I'm saying blog.microsoft.com is the same as having Microsoft com Microsoft blog.com and Microsoft. Ah. Ah. It's two separate domains. Two separate. Yeah. It's it's such a pointless idea. If you're doing it because you can't like your your let's say your website's built in ASP.NET and your blog is built in WordPress, then host your blog on a WordPress server and rewrite for/blog to it. That's what I've always done. But putting it on blog dot it. It's not going to it's it's you're just doubling the you're quadrupling the effort if that makes sense. Why? Why um if thinking from like first principles, why is topical authority so uh hardly divided or or divided so harshly between different subdomains? And it's a good question because like if you think about WW, it's technically a subdomain. Um because back when I started the internet, like WW was just one part of the edge. You had like gopher.domain.com. Um it's because of sites like Blogger. Um so blogger.com is Microsoft's WordPress or it's like Google's WordPress. That's where they had their like cheap and easy uh blog site. Each of those subdomains, it didn't want them to inherit the topical authority and domain authority of blogger.com. So because you can siphon off a subdomain and give that to another entity, it treats it as another entity and so the topical authority doesn't get shared and it just gotten slowly harder and harder on that. And even 2012, a subdomain blog just was not a good idea. just didn't share the same topic authority with the and you need both because you need the traffic going to your service pages sharing topical authority with your blog and vice versa in order to help your blog extend its footprint across the search universe. How about so what about um forums? People like put people like having forums that rank and they have them as subdomains. Does that have any benefit to the to like the SEO content which is on the main subdomain? So www or you know without and then you also have forum on the main forum.roodmain.com you know so if the if the forums like start getting you know the thing about a forum the reason for putting them in a subdomain again is because it's a different technology or it's hosted on another server and rewriting is too difficult. Um, forums get user generated content, which is great because like you have your own scaled content engine without being machine scaled, right? It's fantastic if you can appropriately link from there up to your parent domain, but you don't get the authority of it. But you do get infinitely more pages, right? Like a a forum could like technically every update on a forum is a whole new page. while you can read them vertically, they actually go they actually publish um horizontally. And so each of those posts is its own URL. So if it's getting traffic, you can essentially create hundreds and hundreds of pages to link back up. And that's fine. That works very, very well. But you're getting so much more than you are from a blog, right? You're, you know, a forum is essentially a standalone website and that's what makes it rank. And so they're they're they're not really like they're not you're not comparing apples with oranges. And so a forum would definitely work in that instance. Is there a difference between raw authority and topical authority? As in let's say that you get a link from the New York Times to one of these to a page on your forum subdomain. Will that benefit the will that benefit the authority of the domain as a whole? I don't think so. Um topical authority is an array. So instead of having a a whole number, you have a topic with a number and a value. And so depending on the the Times page and its topical authority, the traffic, the con the keywords that constitute its makeup, the relationship between that and the page it's sending to, um, some of it does leak to the parent domain. How and why, we don't know. So like is there inside the topic, is there a part that's like an overall number? Um, that's a really really really good question um that I'm that I've spent a lot of time thinking about but don't have a straight answer for. It could be it could be if you have if you have like f footer links that go to the parent domain you have you have like a contact page which is on the parent domain things like that. One way to think about it is.com is a domain and so Microsoft.com Microsoft is a subdomain of.com technically speaking, right? So if you go and buy edwardsjackhammers.com, right, great domain. Should should Yeah, it's a lovely it's brilliant. You make millions. Um you could you could say it's not a jackhammer to sell it in. Um but if it's um should edward jackhammers.com inherit from the.com right that's the question. So maybe maybe the the parent domain can gain authority but it doesn't pass it back down if that makes sense. It does make sense. Yeah. And the you know the question is there there's no like dot's ranking in the system right? So maybe you can leak authority up. Um I've seen similar I've seen similar things where people have apps on subdomains with a share feature and that share feature actually makes the SEO pages on the parent domain do better. Yeah, I could I could see that happening for sure. All right, the last question is, you know, it's it's funny because uh this podcast was only supposed to be the question that I just asked you and this question that I'm about to ask you and then like I had all these I I had all these other community questions before and I'm like this is going to be a fun episode and it has been. This has been a really good episode. But the last question is and this is honestly what this why we had the idea for this episode in the f first place was this question. It's when should companies use exact match domains and how about exact match domains as a subdomain which is related to the question that we just talked about. Um I think subdomains so I think the subdomain exact match works kind of like a folder. Um, that's interesting. And I think it comes Yeah, I think it comes down to the nature of So, for example, if you look at blogger.com, right, and you you have like Ed'sblog.blogspot.com and you search for Ed's blog, should rank, right? Um, so it depends on what on whether that subdomain can become an entity or not, right? Uh, it depends how much In other words, you have to build the subdomain up as its own site. And I think what people are really looking for is for the subdomain to do all the heavy lifting and return up to the do to the sub the parent domain and not do any work or not do enough work. And so if you build it up as an entity, it can work, but it's not going to do as well as a parent level exact match domain. And so I just wouldn't bother. Um it's it's just you're just like changing the nature of the work. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So okay, EMD as a subdomain not not a good idea. How about companies using EMDs in general? Exact match domains in general. Such a great idea. It it's going to become more and more mandatory. Um if you look at the way the listicles are being deggrounded. Um, and I actually tried that the other day by I took a a domain name with almost no authority and I put like another top 10 SEO listical on it and I started searching for it and I noticed that where I had been blocking my own name because I was putting my own name in a list and putting that on my own site by putting it on another domain name, my name came back into the fray. And so I think that multiple domain name strategies are a great way to resuscitate that those listicles. I think that they're a great way of spreading your ranking and again making work less difficult right that at the end of the day if you look at one way to describe business is how much effort do I have to put in to get return right what's my this is too risky there's too much effort it's not worth it um EMDs and ks I like to call them you know keyword in domain versus like exact match because it doesn't have to be an exact match it could be a partial match that is one way to first first of um protect your silo or firewall against um against penalties, right? Or against hurting yourself. So if you're worried if you if you need to rank for m if you want to if if you only get one spot in the top 10 because of how Google works, having a second domain gives you that position. If you want to try programmatic SEO, but you're very afraid you're going to hurt your 175-year-old family tradition branded domain, go get another domain, right? go hosted in GoDaddy or something, right? Firewall it. Um, worst case it'll lose. Good. Best case, you'll have two domains reinforcing you, you'll take up as much space in the um, LLMs. And remember, the LLM's quote entities, not domain names. And so if you're if you brand that KD or EMD or it refers to your brand to the end user, it's effectively the same thing. So, um I've always been dismayed at the sort of like branded only domain approach that um big brands take. Whereas, if you look at the really cool black hat SEOs or the SEOs or the affiliate SEOs, um they're using um exact match domains and and keyword domains, you know, like um I love Charles Float's uh press wiz. He's it's a it's a brilliant play because it it's it's using PR which looks like a legitimate way of building back links which and it which it often is and it's using press in the in the in the domain name but it's also a brand and I think that's super clever. Uh so I I will always be a massive proponent of like don't buy a hundred but at least have like two or three. So okay, how about this exact match domain or partial match domain? if you can get the so it depends on the key phrase. It depends on on the primary keyphrase. So if I'm best best fidget spinner you want to rank for best fidget spinner. So I would try to obviously straight away try to go to for best fidget spinner.com and if that's not available then I'll go for a partial match like keyword in domain and fidget spinner 90% match spinner universe.com yeah fidget spinner fidget spinner universe.com okay so that'll be like a 70% match so that'll be good enough and it'll also be good enough for reducing my cost per click as well if I'm running paid search because that's how paid search works the interesting thing about fidget spinner universe.com is it looks like more of a it actually like to consumers it will look like more of a trusted brand whereas like best fidget spinner I think a lot of consumers are knowledgeable enough about SEO now that if they see something like best fidget spinner.com they might like it might throw off red flags for them this should appeal to Google ad managers as well right if you if you're spending a h 100,000 a month on um fidget spinner and your client or your company is called like abc.com and you were able to buy best fidget spinner sales.com and you could now buy best fidget spinner as a branded domain and get a quality score of 10 out of 10. You're going to save $40 to $60,000 a month for a domain name that costs 20 bucks. And you could get a WordPress site or you could put a lovable site or a Wix site for you could get someone to build it for you for a,000 2,000 $3,000. You're going to save $40,000 a month in your quality score um discount on your paid search bidding. The other interesting thing about exact match domains is when you get back links, people often times they just link with the name of the brand. Yes, exactly. It's the domain name and you're providing more and more context. It's just it's it's such a um it it's just such a no-brainer to me, right? Always go after always go after the exact match domain and not the partial match. And and so we talked about this before, but since we're on the the conversation, what what's your take again um on the Google leak showing EMDs exact match domains as being devalued in a way? It has to do that. And it it has to do that because so for coke.com, it would automatically just rank coke.com for Coke searches, right? Um, and so it has to somehow counterbalance if that search phrase already belongs to another domain. So it has to be a devalue. But that devalue isn't permanent. It's not and it's not like a hard rock obstacle, right? Like you said, as you build a few links, as you start getting clicks to it, it overcomes that obstacle. It's not an automatic because that would then automatically destroy Microsoft. What it does allow, for example, is why I rank for what is Google LLC, right? it allows me to rank for that um because that's essentially so that is essentially applied to google.com. There is a a certain amount of demotion and it allows other websites to rank for other domains if they can get the authority and the click-through rate for it. Otherwise, you would have like complete control, right? It's a it's almost like a democratization value if that makes sense. David, this has been a very fun conversation. This has been way more way more than we had planned and it but I think all of these are great all these were were great interesting questions from the community and I think um well hopefully hopefully everybody watching and listening likes it. Yeah. And and and like like give us feedback, right? Give us feedback. But David, credit to you because you explain things so well, too. That's like I love having you on the show because you really do such a solid job explaining things and making things so clear. I'm glad. I I I just think like SEO is such a great industry to work in. I think it I think SEO has never been in a more powerful confluence and if we can just stay the course. I think SEO is a wonderful industry to work in. I think we're AI proof, right? Because I just see so much disinformation in the LLMs and people think that LLMs are like super machines and they can somehow work out the truth. I remember listening to a uh very very good um executive coach we had from Ireland, a guy called Paula Kelly who I've been who I've worked with over a 20-year period. He was assigned to me when I had my first startup and then he was our business coach at Kemp Technologies. And one of the new manage new sort of like emerging leadership uh team members at Kemp came up and said like how do we get to the truth? And he's like there is no truth. It's like how do you get to the best answer? Stop trying to find the truth. you'll you'll end up in a holy grail situation. And I think that's so true, right? Um I don't think LLMs are going to get there. I think um we've got to rely on our own critical thinking and our own experimenting. Why do you think um I don't know if you saw my post about this and how Google Trends has search engine optimization as a topic at literally an all-time high right now in interest. And it w it went to an all-time high in May of last year and now it has surpassed the all-time high that it was at May of last year to like right now we are in an all-time high for search engine optimization as a as a topic as in interest in Google Trends. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think it's a problem with Google Trends? Do you like a bug or something? Or is just do you think this is the best time to be in SEO? I've always I've always struggled and I've I've I don't think I've ever done a good job of explaining how Google Trends works as a waiting system, right? Because it's like between N and 100. And so it's not like a search number. It's it's it's it's probably I've never done a good job of understand, right? Um so I think it it's going up because the other channels are actually disappearing on us, right? So, email I I I I I work with companies now charging now targeting the billion dollar mark that don't have an email marketing system. It's very basic. It it's it's only if you start creating an account do they there's no like nurturing is so hard. It's so locked up. Um X is not a great marketing platform. Meta has become not a great market. LinkedIn requires so much money to get in and it's it's very wasteful. there's not that many global channels left that are as easy as SEO, right? And while there's a lot of information about people about Google dying, a lot of that's sort of confirmation bias, right? Um people just aren't giving up on it, right? Like I I I follow this guy on Tik Tok. He talks a lot about AI and LLM and he had to admit the other day that social inertia, right? It we just haven't reached that one pivot over. I remember answering a question on on Corey years ago, what will kill Google? And I said, whatever is killing Google is probably not what we think. It's probably already happened. Um, it might be, for example, that Google would never have died if Google didn't start overspending on AI and lose a run of itself. That might kill Google more than Google becoming irrelevant or Google becoming displaced by something. If Google just stayed as Google and never spent all of that money on all of those acquisitions, they might even be a richer company, right? Um, I don't know if the cloud was a good bet. I don't know if it was a bad bet because they they had to have a cloud anyway. Um, but I don't see people mass leaving Google, right? Um, so I I I just think that Google has been such a if if you've really been successful at Google, why would you go and tell other people that they should do Google? I think it's just been quietly, you know, it's at one point But David, but we're both but we're both telling people that they should do Google. Yeah, we are right. Um I I I just don't think there's other channels anymore or or or the the effectivity of those channels is is is is easy as it used to be. I think it's also it's so much easier now to start an online business and it's less intimidating. And once you start an online business or once you put up a website, you always wonder about SEO cuz like you might put up a website and just like right away it's not showing for your brand name. That's a very common thing. Like you it's a new site. People don't know anything about like a new site or backlinks or or authority and they're just like I just have my website. Why isn't it showing up for my for the name of my brand? What are you looking what are you looking at? You're looking at search engine optimization. And now with LLMs, you're also, how do I show up in an LLM? Oh, it's search engine optimizations. I'm also noticing that when I when I speak to people about digital marketing, there's less and less emphasis on design. I'm not saying that design is bad, right? The but the it's a more educated talk. It's like we need we should have data now, right? Rather than maybe if we redesign it, things will get better, which was never going to happen, right? If you if you put up a new site, no one ever saw it and you redesigned it, no one knows you've redesigned it, right? But that was how people thought for the first 15 years. Um whereas now when you start talking to people even though they've they're they're still trying to figure out myth from reality they're a lot more educated. There's a lot more appetite for the in ins and outs of SEO than there were you know there were companies where like the executive team didn't even know there was an SEO working. I've gone up in elevators and spoken to the CMO and he had no idea that they were doing SEO. Right. Um, whereas now it's changing. Like the most successful companies I work with, the CEO joins the SEO calls once a month. That's awesome. I love that, David. Thank you again for joining the podcast. And everybody, this is uh this is episode 978 of the Edward Show. 978 days in a row doing this show. David's links are in the description for this episode. If you haven't checked him out already, I hope you will. And for everyone watching on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. For everybody listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.