Google’s Helpful Content Update DESTROYED the Internet (What Actually Happened)

Today we are talking about Google's helpful content update which nuked so many websites, destroyed huge swaths of the internet, and we're going to talk about what it is, who got hit, why they got hit, who avoided it, what we can take away, and a lot more. Joining us, it's a fun cast that we got today, Mr. David Quaid, Mr. Lars Lofrren, and the one and only Gagen Gotra. And I I want to start with just the very basic. What is the HCU? What is the helpful content update? And Lars, well, you've said a lot about the helpful content update, so I would love for you to start this. Oh, yeah. I mean, the helpful content update, uh, I I had a lot of personal experience with this [ __ ] thing. Um, it started rolling out the end of 2022, hit hard in 20 at the end September 2023 is when everybody started to notice it. Uh, but there was earthquakes, initial shakings at the end of 2022. That's when my affiliate business started to see it. Uh, we didn't realize it was HCU at the time. We just was like, man, something's off. What's going on? Um, and then September 2023, uh, that's when like everybody got absolutely smacked, including tons of legitimate sites. And then the double tap, as I call it, came in what, the April 2024, early 2024. that's just like put all these sites like in the [ __ ] ground. So that was like the initial timeline. Um it started as a separate uh component to the Google algorithm. It was entirely separate for a while. Those first two years it was a separate thing dedicated rollouts and then it got merged into the core algorithm since then. And uh now just on a LinkedIn the other day I think I called it uh like Freddy Krueger like it's just lurking in the shadows all the time and it's always there. it's everpresent and if you start to like get a little too greedy, cross some boundaries, don't mind your P's and Q's, it's just going to come out of the [ __ ] shadows and you're [ __ ] That's it. The site goes down. Um, so I've I've wrestled with the ACU on multiple sites now. Um, the classic example is you have a site with way too much content, tons of like actual SEO content. whether or not it was intentional or not, or whether or not the content's good, you just have a ton of SEO content. And if you hit any other trip wires along the way, uh you can just lose like 90% of your traffic literally overnight. That happened to me, seen it. There's so many case studies out there, uh where the site just gets obliterated and the there's like no way to really come back. Um the best hack I've seen is a double redirect. I have not done it myself cuz I'm like, [ __ ] that. I have heard a lot of people talking about it to the point where I believe it and if I wanted to like salvage something quickly and it was like a side project that I didn't like really care that much about. Uh I would do the double redirect basically move the whole domain to two other domains, get it on a new brand. Um probably purge a ton of the content and start building up the entity from scratch and hopefully build it in a different way than the way that got you nuked the first time. So that's a quick summary. A great summary. Uh, D. So, so Lars, you were hit by it. Yeah. And you lost I've looked at Twice actually. Twice. And then I had a client that like got pseudo hit. So, I've I've gone through this like a bunch of times. Yeah. And and Gogan and David, can you share your experiences with the helpful content update? Even if it's just like analyzing sites or you worked with sites that got hit, whatever it is. before just so just before the um update happened as L said there were earthquakes and so um I was doing some work on the Google product support forum where people come in for SEO questions and within a couple of weeks the vast majority of um let's call them tickets raised were people with these very very low quality cookie cutter sites with tons and tons of AdSense interstitials like it was it was just AdSense everywhere coming in with the same story like I built this website it's handcrafted content. It's organic, you know, like fertilizer free nonsense. It was it was rubbish content. Um, and these are coming in like 10 a day. You could see that there were obviously a couple of designers that were just knocking these out like in a factory and most of them just didn't have authority. They were just getting but they were getting knocked they were launching in Google and getting knocked out. The following day I switched from using or being on that forum to helping people to um Reddit and about 6 months later uh being relatively active on on Reddit um people started coming in like 10 a day saying that their sites have been completely nuked or they've lost 75% of traffic. Um I ended up buying one of those domains. It was a domain out of Canada. It had like 100,000 clicks a day. It got progressively hit. Like the first hit was 90%. I think I bought it off the guy for like $200. Uh, and then the second hit was in April and it was it was knocked out. Um, I analyzed about 20 25 websites in the first week. Uh, spoke to the owners. There were some really good sites. They had some common similarities. Um, and uh, it then went on for months. 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. Yeah. Uh for me, I think uh the first one was all right. Uh no client was hit uh in when Google rolled out first one. But by like February 2023, I started to hear some things from my friends in UK who were sending me some examples and I was looking at them and I was like there is no update going on right now. But helpful content of update of course is like like working in the background but there is no like official announced. But in February 2023 some sites were hit really really hard. And when the those friends of mine were sending me the examples I was like oh okay maybe you guys are doing something shady or there is something more going on in like UK search results that is not happening in like Australia or US. But when September 2023 hit, that's when I I realized that oh my god, almost like eight eight sites of my clients, they just went down like in just 2 weeks and it was just like total bloodbath like 90 over 90% traffic lost. No and no new content was ranking as well. So you were almost uh got like a manual action kind of thing was happening in search results. So this is what is my experience but it is what it is now. many of those those businesses have like like shifted to some other things now but uh those domains are still totally dead like like you can't recover them. I have seen some examples like which which have recovered like recently I talked to someone like who runs a law firm in Miami. Uh technically they were doing some lot of like weird stuff. They got hit really really hard uh by the update in 2023 but they have recovered back now. uh but for that example I think it it was more about the weird stuff other weird stuff that they were doing beyond just the content. So but just for the content I have not seen like any site which has like fully recovered yet. So I I I want to start with this question like why why would Google implement an up a core update like this or updates like why why would Google do this? What caused what caused the helpful content update and why? I have a couple of theories. One is um I so if you look at like Google has a list of of of specific penalties. And what's interesting about the HC is it doesn't meet any one of those specific penalties except maybe the thin affiliate content penalty. What it seems to trigger is the Google like overarching thing. You know, anything that's used to manipulate search could technically violate their terms of service. I think Lily Ray um alluded to this yesterday on her podcast with you. Um and so it's a it's a it's a two-edged business model, right? Um they're targeting Google for traffic only. They weren't a lot of these sites weren't building traffic from other sources. So it was like a pure convert traffic, which had a couple of interesting outcomes. The second thing is that a lot of the revenue is either made by AdSense or affiliate, right? So it's like a in some cases it's a double Google issue. The second thing that occurred to me, um, which I don't know if this is just a coincidence, but if you look at a lot of the sites, and, uh, I've run paid search campaigns for a long time, a lot of these sites match the sites that as a paid search manager, if you were ever reviewing where display ads go, these are the type of sites that you would block immediately. You would say, look, this is not where I want my brand to be, or this is not the type of site I expect my ICP to be hanging out. And so I don't know if it was an issue where Google's like this is not this is like proving to be a problem for us in our ad display network and we can't cut automatically carve it out or if they're just saying look this is clearly SEO for SEO sake right there's no there's no other reason behind this entity uh so that's my personal um take on it how about how about you I think things are a little messier than that person I think that's a component I think that's what they're trying to do. Um, I mean, if I was trying to like summarize the HCU or like Google's intent, and obviously I'm making an assumption. I don't [ __ ] know anybody over there. I don't know what they were trying to do. Um, obviously there was a lot of SEO spam. There's a lot of sites that fit that exact description. There's so many of them. A lot of them were doing very, very well. Um, and Google was trying to stamp that out. Unfortunately, they didn't get probably into as as much of the weeds as they should have and they threw the baby out with the bathwater. Like for all the examples of a spammy affiliate AdSense driven site that should have never gotten traction in the first place, there's also plenty of examples of some hobby site, some oneperson expert that was building a blog, great [ __ ] content, was doing SEO basics, not to like exploit Google, just to like help figure out like how how do I give my audience what they want, doing the basics that everybody said you should do, a lot of this [ __ ] Google said you should do for years and years and years. And a lot of those blogs got absolutely obliterated, right? Um, even in the affiliate space, for every scammy affiliate, there was also a genuine affiliate that was an actual expert in their stuff, doing the hard work, reviewing the products. And I don't, in my personal opinion, from everything I saw, Google did not do the work that they should have to actually figure out who's good, who's not. Instead, they were like, "Okay, who's who's just doing any of this and maybe pushing SEO too, like who's just focusing too much on SEO regardless of like maybe you should focus on SEO if you want to deliver a lot of good content." Like there was no again no nuance, no context, right? So, they just threw everything out. I don't think it was intentional. Um my personal just uh like conspiracydriven opinion is that a lot of the senior leadership is not as in touch with the SEO ecosystem as probably previous generations of Google leadership and things got simplified, things got shipped and for everything that Google fixed with the HCU, they all like some other good site got [ __ ] Like I don't think you could ask anybody right now like have the SERs improved? Like no. like we just traded like one pile of [ __ ] for another pile of [ __ ] We're just like, you know, shuffling it around. Um I wouldn't say there's been a consistent drive or even just like an improvement on quality, right? Um in my take, but um maybe some people have different opinions. Yeah, I think one of the the interesting things about it is that they called it the helpful content update. And um Lo, I think you're one of the few people who shares this um with me that I I think Google cannot quality content. They have no idea. And I don't think they they want to. I don't think they want to priority. It's so No. The simple reason is that um I I often use this example like if if you take someone who's learning about SEO and they read a first blog post about SEO and they're like, "Wow, this is so amazing. I'm now going to get into SEO." And then two years later they come back and read that same blog post, they'll be like, "This is so [ __ ] basic. I can't believe it's even allowed to be on Google." Right. So quality is so subjective that even the same person can simultaneously like it's like Schrodinger's cat of content. And so that's why I think they threw the good out with the bad cuz I that definitely happened. Sorry Gagen, go ahead. Yeah, I I think uh I have like uh like a theory where Google was trying to like like tackle two problems. One was like the sameness problem like in some credit credit card points related research you see that all the top 10 guys they're just recommending same things like the exact copy on those pages are just like same. So Google was just trying to send a signal to the web that we don't want you copy pasting what whatever exist already because a lot of people were just saying like like these are the top five results so I will just like do some paraphrasing and just publish one another article. And the second thing is I think what they did is like some sites they their editorial went like too much positive. So some like in gardening space some sites were just writing like positive reviews of the products. No one was saying anything negative about any specific product and I think that that's where also Google was uh bit cautious because you can't be a site who has written like product reviews of 500 different things and all you are saying is positive things. Why? because you want affiliate money from those brands and you don't want to write exact thing. Maybe there is something wrong with that brand. But if you publish that, you will get sued. To avoid that, you just write positive reviews and try to land like those brand relationships and over time you say that you are a reviews website but technically you are just saying positive things about the brands. there is nothing negative about you about products that you are saying from the actual testing and that's why I think Reddit got pushed too like like uh one of my client was hit in a gardening space and I even told him that that you have to balance your editorial where on per page you're not only just saying all the positive things nine positive things and one negative thing maybe just bring it down to like five positive things about this product that we tested and here are five negative things and those kind of the queries now Reddit is showing up where people are just like straight away saying that don't buy this [ __ ] this does not work. So I think that those two things play played out at the same time and that's why helpful content update got introduced and then Google pushed like Reddit too much too where Google is now trying to like make sure that there is a balance of opinion in search results where it's not only the pages who are saying like positive things about the products. There is some like negative stuff on Reddit too where people are just straight away saying that don't buy this product or or don't just engage with this brand. I I've I I I see so many problems with that that there there's so many challenges, right? One is it would require Google to do so some sort of like balance testing, right, with content, which I don't think it can do, will do, or should do. Um it it's a relevancy engine. And I think that's borne out by whether people if you look at like for example um the points guy, if you look at um uh credit karma, they only say good things about a lot of the products too. A lot of sites only say good things about their own products. A lot of Amazon listings only say good things about the product. So that that just I'm I'm thinkable that that's not really the case. That might be an observation you saw, but I think that's too light a definition, right? That you just have to say some negative, right? I I cuz that opens up to like it's it's not a good quality test just to say you have to have a good and a negative part, right? And I I don't think that's I don't think that's val. can show too many examples of where that's not true today, right? Yeah. My theory uh that comes from because Google after the helpful content update push Reddit too hard and Reddit pages are always like saying some negative stuff about the things like whatever they're discussing in the post. So I feel like that overall top 10 results was showing like too much positive stuff especially for the reviews related sites and Google was like the there is no world in which like all the products are best products in their category. There must be something negative about those products which our Google search users should know when they are trying to look for the reviews of those products. And that's why I feel like out of the 10, Google kicked out like five and instead like bring in Reddit and other forms which are like actually have some balanced content on the page rather than just like out outright saying that buy this product, here is my affiliate link. I wouldn't get lessons from Reddit. Reddit's being jked to the top. Um I I know people that are exploiting the [ __ ] out of Reddit and it makes like I don't know why I spend any time on SEO. It's so [ __ ] Reddit's so much easier. You get you get right subreddit, you get one post, you get five up votes, you go to the top of Google. It's [ __ ] stupid for high value and crazy terms. Uh the amount of exploitation in Reddit right now is off the [ __ ] charts. Like none of it's [ __ ] real, especially when it comes to products. Um I would not say like, oh, like Google likes that. That's what we should model. Like no, no, no. It's just it like Reddit's the [ __ ] loophole and it's being it's been engineered to be a loophole. Um we can disagree about whether or not that's a good idea, but Reddit is or Google's pushing Reddit to the top intentionally. Um and it's the easiest thing to [ __ ] game right now. Absolutely. So bad that I think we have a an upcoming uh conversation about that, right, Ed? Um I I agree. I think there's so many subs that are just open for spam. Um, and and like you said, if you get the keywords right, if you get the title right, you go straight to the top for some of the most difficult um, search phrases. The other thing about the content and content quality, and why I said it was so funny, it was called helpful content, is that if you take the content and move it to another domain, it ranks fine. So, it's not the content, right? It it can't be the content like that content will rank fine on Reddit, that content will rank fine on my blog. It's whether or not it's scaled up, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the key. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's not about the individual post, it's aggregate, right? So, you got to look at the content across the domain. Um, and usually when I'm trying to get an HCU or like a beginning of an HCU hit turned around, I'll go try to purge 90% of the content. That's like step one. Let's go delete everything we don't need. And we need to do it right the [ __ ] now to stop bleeding. Um, that's the only thing I've seen to actually like get stuff unstuck. What do you think, Lars, about the eat component? [ __ ] [ __ ] I don't know why anybody pays attention to this. Have you been reading my like that? I think I don't know. [ __ ] can't stand eat. Sorry. Sorry guy. What's the What's the reason for that, L? Like like do you feel like how eat is presented by other people like that is wrong or you think that Google is not even trying to measure Google's not looking at those kind of signals? like everybody I think um I think the aspirations are good, right? Like I think as an internal tool for Google, I can see why they developed it and be like, "Yeah, we should probably go in this direction." I [ __ ] hate the acronym, especially the second E that they added. I don't know who thought that was a good idea. Um but like the initial um impetus makes sense um on on where to go. Um, but in their all their education, it gets everybody the entire [ __ ] like SEO online marketing community running off in a direction that doesn't [ __ ] matter. When like Google's basically painting this picture of, oh, we care about who the author is and we care about their background and if they have real expertise and if they did the work. No, they [ __ ] don't. Like if you look at any actual SER, the content that ranks is bland as [ __ ] right? Like it's there's no real evidence of quality. Just like they were saying, like they can't actually look at quality. They cannot discern who is an expert and not. Like if you come in and you have a major brand in your category, you get to rank for whatever the [ __ ] you want. Even if it's AI slop, right? Uh, you can you can just throw in like AI authors that are [ __ ] fake as [ __ ] and there's fingerprints of them being fake all over the place. Doesn't matter. And these all these content ranks so well. If you go in and you're like, "Oh, I'm an expert in this category. I spent 15 years actually learning how this works. And I'm going to spend a bunch of time building a website, writing all this content. I'm going to really focus on the expertise and the authorities and prove that I'm trustworthy. I'm going to show up with my own personal brand and do all that stuff that Google wants you to do. Are you going to rank? [ __ ] no. Like it's not that's not the lever to move forward. So my issues with it is it gets people focused on something that Google's not actually looking at. And it's not like, oh, Google is like kind of looks at it, but you know, they're they're going to improve it over time. Let's cut them some slack. No, no, no, no, no. There is It could not be on opposite ends of the spectrum, right? Like they didn't even get halfway there or a part of the way there. They're looking at something else when it comes to ranking domains. And they've tried to do I don't think it was intentional. It's like giant org. You know, these things get away from you. You you have these ideals and then how things ship is like always very different in big companies. Um but they came in like, "Oh, we want X." And they just gave us all Y, right? Like any practitioner in SEO is now focused on other [ __ ] Not like, "Oh, let's go [ __ ] use eat." Like, no. That just it's not even on my radar. Do not think about it at all. Yeah. But I think I'm done. I can check out now. I think it it got abused uh abused to the point where where people were like just slapping random author names and author boxes on the pages and they were like look at us like 10 years of this 10 years of that. Everyone tries to do that and I think there's a there's a little bit there, right? Like I think the entity relationships can matter, right? Like if you have a good personal brand with like a strong social following and you get the author profile connected and Google I think that can help. It's not going to like make or break a site, but I think it can help. Um, so like I still do the author profiles. I try to get everything linked appropriately so Google understands who's writing what. I do think that's important. I don't again I don't think it makes or breaks anything. Um, but everybody or not everybody, but a lot of people in SEO were like, "Ah, I got to obsess over this [ __ ] and it's going to totally catapult a domain." And I'm like, and which and at the same time, Wells Fargo can just slip like whatever the [ __ ] they want and it rank goes to the top of every finance term on the internet. You're like, what is happening right now? And commit actual fraud at the same time, right? Yeah. And and and Yeah. Have we forgotten all the issues that Wells like, holy [ __ ] big companies can do stupid [ __ ] too, right? The brand is not like a [ __ ] It's not like this magical halo that protects you and means you actually know what you're talking about. You can do horrible [ __ ] Enron, holy [ __ ] Um, anyway, so yeah, I'll get off my soap box. I feel like just beyond beyond Google like if we are not like thinking of ranking in search results still like it's good to have like like the team page where you're showing your team your out pages who who spend because it it helps with the conversion like like I I work with like a couple of real estate companies and people like who are looking to spend like $1 million$2 million on buying a house. They want to see like who their agent is, what their like like team is going to be, what experience they have, what what are the listings they are managing already, you know, like it's not like um Google specific thing but it's more like conversion specific thing where if some random person is landing on your website and they want to do business with you, they at least want to know something about your team, your brand or whatever you have been doing, you know. Yeah. I yes I I think sorry uh so I I I've spent 22 years owning my own agency, 26 years doing SEO and I spent six years stupidly as an internal head of marketing. And um one of the funny things I did is I looked at a site that we grew from like maybe 6,000 visits a month to 250,000. We grew from 19 employees to 600 in five six years and got acquired for 250 million. and our executive team spent an inordinate amount of time on this on the about us page and I grabbed analytics for 12 months and I showed them that in the 12 months less than 14 people had gone to the about us page like that's how critically unimportant it was right and so I think it depends right like I think eat at a high level is like is this a real business and that's why they had to get reality to do that part where it becomes [ __ ] is like oh that fed back into LLM training and that's it becomes no sorry you're fabricating now. So I think that um H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H HCU is much more basic, right? It's like there's probably five things that join all of the sites together. I've spoken to a lot of people and I spoke to Joanne Hawkins and I spoke to an Smarty who had some also really good inputs about it and they were saying look not all of the sites were AdSense or affiliate and I was like I don't know you second parties can't analyze anecdotal evidence. It's always a challenge, right? I'm not knocking it. Every single site I saw had as as um Sean Anderson says some sort of monetization either AdSense, moneyvine or affiliate, right? So maybe other sites also got hit and then I think the targeting methodology and then heristically does it look like a real entity, right? Like does it have branded search? Does it have return visits? Could be another heristic. We don't know what heristics Google uses, right? That is the real black box, right? Like even the API warehouse leak doesn't give us any insights really into that, I don't think. Right. But so what do you think they should have done? They there was a was there a problem in the first place? And what should Google have done instead of what they did with the HCU if you think the HCU was a bad move? I think that like they did with um Panda and Penguin, they had like reconsideration requests, right? like um you know there were a lot of legitimate sites like I think um the like househ for example, retro games they seemed like some legitimate sites. I spoke to a guy who really nice guy who'd built his website over 10 years got to a million visits a month uh was making about 10,000 a month. Some of the content that I saw on it was like terrible but a lot of content was like him writing about like his childhood games. And I think there should have been some better feedback from from Google like the the show at pony show that they did where they flew everyone to like one of their headquarters and gave them more coffee. That I think was really rude, right? Um uh that seemed to be like the worst thing they could have done from a PR point of view. But um yeah, I think there should have been some sort of like process for people to say look we are trying to build a real entity here. like it's not like some sort of like AdSense scam, right? From an AdSense point of view, I think that the a component of what they were taking out was essentially a content scam, right? Um a small component of it, right? Just mainly the component I saw. Um but that's not and I think that's one of the challenges with SEO. It's really hard to see the totality of what's going on. It's very very difficult like for any of us to analyze this. We would need a tool the size of like a semrush or an AFS, right? we don't have tools to do that kind of um segmentation analysis with right it's also interesting that they didn't do any analysis right I don't think any of the big SER tool providers did any analysis of HC hit sites did they I think most uh most did some analysis but but they they said that if uh you have like their DA weird [ __ ] metric below certain point then you got hit if DA was higher than this then you did got hit and I even challenged the guy. I think it was written by the chief SEO scientist for some role like that. Yeah, I know a domain with extremely high domain rating that got absolutely obliterated by HCU. So, I saw a lot of commonality in in backlinks in some of the sites like um they had a huge number of Wikipedia entries. I like saw one that had 111 links from Wikipedia um which I thought was interesting. They didn't do any Wikipedia [ __ ] Yeah. Sure. Sure. Um, so the the problem with the DA metric is like is that before after Google devalues some of the back links they had, right? So again without us being able to look at or without us having the ability to look at all of the back links that were there, right? Or, you know, could it have been like a a nearest seed analysis like did they all share something in common, right? Without them knowing about it, right? Um that that would be interesting. I just from a numbers point of view I would love to see that but um that could be a red herring. Yeah. And I even like one of my theory is that they just Google just looked at all the queries which are like more affiliate heavy and they just went like random fires to those sites and even the legit guys got hit with that. So because affiliate space was like like the most one uh I don't know if you you guys know the niche site lady account on X uh back in like 2020 2021 she was posting like like just copy paste this on your site publish 100 pages and you will rank and that was ranking and I'm not sure like how many people like exactly copypasted that play playbook this is the structure at the table of content this is the headings and I feel like at also added to like where Google went like oh we need to do something about this like like a lot of people are just trying to copy paste the websites the whole websites change few words here and there and they are actually ranking our algorithm is not like good enough to catch that you know yeah she got three banan actions in one week if I remember you guys think uh affiliate websites or niche publishers are still viable long term Uh, it depends. Absolutely depends. So, uh, my my business was an affiliate business. So, I we we were actually we did $20 million worth of affiliate revenue over a 5-year period. So, we went I think we did decently well. We got up to about 25 employees uh before all this started to happen. Uh, so this is an industry I know fairly well. Uh, would I start an affiliate website, an SEO organic affiliate website today? [ __ ] no. I would I would not lead with that. Let me put it that way. Okay. Um, and I'm not like, go look at any of my stuff. Go look at my blog, right? There's not a whole lot on I don't spend a ton of time on my blog. I do like a blog post a quarter, right? Like it's not a primary focus. Like if I was thinking about even if I wanted to explore like performance-based you know affiliate some sort of you know that's the monetization model I would not build an affiliate I wouldn't start with an affiliate like SEO website I would go do other stuff first right go build your entity go build your media property get on Tik Tok get on LinkedIn go YouTube build any combination of that go spend time on other platforms build your audience there build up the entity Um, so I don't I think if someone's just like, I just want to write. I just want to build a blog. I'm going to monetize through affiliates. Like you not to say that it's impossible. I still know of like dedicated affiliate sites that are ranking really well and I presumably are still making a good amount of money for whoever is running them. Uh, but they are they're the exception. They're rare. They're hard to like the the the journey has never been harder. And it's not just like the HCU you got to worry about. Uh, like you just look at the SERs on any transactional stuff. Like not only do you have the AIO eating everything up, not only do you have everybody moving to LLMs for all their like research anyway and just plugging in some deep research [ __ ] thing and like, oh yeah, I have perplexity go run off and, you know, do all the the work. Um, but on top of that, if you're in any of the product SERs or, you know, transactional SERs, Google, there has been a pretty longstanding direction of Google not wanting to rank blog review content. It is still there a little bit, but what does Google want to rank these days? Like if you go search best whatever, Google starts giving you products. Google's trying to be the middle person, right? They want to send you to the actual products. I think they do a shitty job of it. Usually the products are like not great unless it's like really obvious like oh yes, thank you. I know Apple makes phones. Appreciate. Thanks. Um but like um yeah, like it's not what it used to be. Like the margin of error has gotten so squeezed. Um, now if you have a media property, if you are a Nerd Wallet, an Investopedia, Forbes, um, a CNET, CNN any of these big sites that have like a lot of that, you know, massive entity, massive brand, huge domain, um, does it make sense for them to continue to manage and develop an affiliate program? I actually think so. There is still money to be made. the money is shifting in a big way and I'm actually hearing as soon as I saw the AOS come out I was like ah this is going to happen and now I'm hearing from multiple people that it is actually happening like the affiliate industry is moving from that like clickbased performance model where you get the traffic you get the click you get paid on sign up click conversion customer whatever um it is moving that to more of this like uh flat fee model and I did I did a bunch of flat fee stuff at my affiliate company. So, we were already doing this. We were solving other problems, but this was already happening and now I think it's just going to like become the dominant monetization model. So, that you know, it's because uh you know, even if you uh let's say you you have a big affiliate program, you all these review posts, um let's say all the traffic goes away because everybody's in you know, chat GBT or Gemini or whatever the [ __ ] Well, what are those tools still referencing? They reference Reddit and they reference the top listicles, right? So even if there's no traffic on a big time list at Nerd Wallet and I don't know if Nerd Wallet plays these games or I don't know anything about their program. Um but I know other people definitely do [ __ ] like this but if you know I was going to one of these big websites and I was like a I got a new startup I really need to get on this list so that you know Chatb starts referencing me and starts you know you know mentioning my brand when people are asking questions about this subject. I could go to that website and I could say, "Hey, I will pay you $20,000 a month. What how high can you put me on the list?" And they say, "Uh, you know, they'll hem and haul like they always do. There's a whole game around this shit." They're like, "Oh, well, we can get you to number three, but you know, for now, you know, we'll just see how it goes." Like, okay, get me to number three. Boom. You get added and now you're in all the [ __ ] LLMs because the LM still rely on search a heavy percentage of the time. Um, though that and Reddit, right? So you game the [ __ ] out of Reddit, you pay your way into all the listicles, and now any publisher that has ranking content and has the entity to support that ranking content can still monetize the [ __ ] out of all of it if they have it. Um, but the moat has gotten ironically like Google trying to like [ __ ] up the affiliate industry just like entrench the major players even more. Um, because now it's like upstarts can't attack it. they can't actually go do genuine reviews and start to like separate things because they don't they're not [ __ ] CNN or whoever the [ __ ] Um, and again, I'm not talking [ __ ] about CNN. I don't know how how easy it is to game these um to get on their site or any other, but I do I know a lot of publishers. It is absolutely pay to play. A a huge chunk of some, not all, some are not, but a lot are. So, if you're running an affiliate program, if you've got budget to spend as a company, you are trying to figure out who is willing to play ball and what their price is and then you get on the list and there's still plenty of money to flow through for everybody. Um, so I don't think the model is dead. It's changed. It's shifting. Um, but as a new player, dude, yeah, you I wouldn't start with SEO. Go build other stuff first, then come back to SEO. And also like if your affiliate play is working right now don't do any marketing especially in SEO space like like maybe you have seen like HFS they do like these story videos where they invite like different site owners and they talk about like their SEO what they have been doing like someone I know like Hrefs like was as telling them that uh we can pay you this much come and do a story video with with us and I was like your affiliate game is still working after HCU do you want to go on radar or do a video with HFS like yeah they are paying you money to do a video with them and discuss your SEO story but you will 100% get nuked in 6 months like don't come under the radar if your affiliate game is working just stay hidden like that is the best thing you can do right now if you come under radar on X like I don't know how Google do it but again and again I have heard stories where where someone like they started discussing their SEO strategy on YouTube X and LinkedIn and 6 months after that their traffic got like to 90% down like like how did that happen like this is a conspiracy theory like of course like Google is watching but how is that is happening like I I still wonder like like what goes on like if someone starts to discuss their strategy is exactly like site show the domain 6 months and their site loses like 90% traffic for no reason. So, it's just better to stay under the radar. Like, if your affiliate game is working, don't go on HRF's channel and discuss your story. Even even if they are paying you tens of thousands of dollars to do this, just stay under the radar. I wonder if um Google let it go too long, right? Like um and again, I'm talking about it from like the sites they were trying to hit, not not the good guys that they hit. But if you look at if you remember Penguin and Panda, again, they left it go on too long, right? like it was almost everyone thought that they had to buy millions of links. I I remember working with this uh small company in in Belfast in Northern Ireland who had like 11.8 million back links and when I first met them they're like yeah we might have bought a couple of backlinks and then it's like this avalanche of of of links that they bought. um you know it's just like Google like trying to sort it algorithmically and then realized that these the the essentially they are playing the algorithm so well that they actually had to go in and interfere and again it was too little too late and they took out a wider spread cuz it it initially started pretty small and initially seemed pretty accurate and then I think they opened up the aperture. Um, so I I think there was part of that as well. Um, also the timing before AIO and um, Catch GPT is also super interesting, right? Did they want to remove all of those sites before they started getting quoted by by Gemini, right? Or by AIO? Um like if you think about it the um HCU happened what 12 months before chat GPT opened up. David but but do you think do you think uh do you think affiliate sites or like term? Oh. Uh, I don't uh wow. I think so. I I think it's the same problem as the aggregator, right? Like if you were building a hotel aggregator and then Google wanted Google wants, Google has always wanted to be that middleman that Lars was talking about. They've always wanted to be the aggregator. They they've always hated except they've let them exist, right? Like um Clutch for example, Clutch still exists and that that Google feels that's their job. they should rank everyone whereas they see like a site like um hotels.com as taking the organic position and then selling the other positions, right? And so they've always played a weird game of cat and mouse with job listings, hotel listings, flight listings. Um, and so yeah, I I don't think it's a viable game uh because the model is so reliant on SEO that it you you become so detectable unless and um you know, as L said, if you're a big brand and a a former guest on the show who's with uh the three of us with with uh was Harpre and Harpre is is talking about a big bank, a big uh fintech at the moment who seems to have a ton of machine scale content um that that is m that is machine scaled, right? That that they're ranking for and they don't seem to be facing any penalty whatsoever. They're not being indexed at all. Especially in B2B, there's just so much trash. It's blatantly AI content. It's [ __ ] everywhere and at all ranks. It's [ __ ] insane. Why did some media properties not get hit while so many others did? Like Forbes, like even though Forbes were the poster child, right? Uh well for Forbes is struggling. I don't know. Go look at the rats. It's not as easy as it used to be. Uh so this is this is my mental model that I'm working with currently. You all can tell me whether or not it's it's off base. But um the way I look at it and there is there's nuance and there's some exceptions. I think newspapers are the like the primary exception. Um but I kind of look at it like a scale, right? And I'm like how and it's it's a lot a lot more goes in this than just like brand search or like how big is the brand. I mean that's kind that's the colloquial shorthand for it but like how how well how much presence and how built up is the entity of the company or you know of the website not just the domain but the actual entity behind the website how built up is it across the entire web right do they have all are they present on YouTube they have a huge following are they over there do they do they have a lot of brand searches not just brand searches I know sites that actually had decent brand searches that still got hit right it's a way more than that but like are people talking about it on Reddit and on LinkedIn and all the socials and everywhere else. If that if you have like a really built up entity, you have a certain amount of like gas in the ch in the in the tank, right? And you can go to a certain limit on the on the SEO side. The trouble is when the SEO extends beyond the entity, right? So, this kind of works at every scale. Uh like I see this on my own stuff. I've spent a bunch of time on LinkedIn building all that up, doing these [ __ ] podcasts, all this other stuff. And when I Yeah, you're very welcome. Always happy to do these. Uh but um when I do post stuff on my blog, like actually this is really funny. So on my one this the one site I've talked about publicly that got hit by the helpful content update was my HR site, hrvice.com. It's still obliterated. There's I mean you can check it if you want. It's just [ __ ] n. Um, I had a management principles post. That was the topic. That was the SEO target. I wrote it all by hand. It was a good [ __ ] post. It's how I run teams. If you want like a quick two 3,000word guide on how to be a manager and you have no idea what you're doing. You could certainly do wrong by like reading other like this is a good starting point. Uh, and I stand behind that post. I put that post was on HR advice for like a year. Never went anywhere. Google wouldn't even index it. Wouldn't check it. None of that [ __ ] I took that post. I publish it on large.com and last I checked I was like bottom of the first page for management principles. I was like what the [ __ ] So the the the the weird part here is if you think about my brand and my website and the authority like the topical authority of lurs.com it's all like marketing and some SEO and AB testing conversions. It's like that space. I like don't have anything related to management at all. And now Google's like actually giving me a real shot. What the [ __ ] And my domain rating is not that strong either. Um, but I my theory is I think it's all that entity building I've done on LinkedIn and all the podcasts and all the mentions around my name and my site, everything I've done, it's given me like the gap between that work and the actual SEO on my blog. There's such a differential in it that if I do like anything on my blog, Google's like, "Ah, this must be great." Right? They give me a huge benefit of the doubt. And I think this also operates at like massive scale. If you're a huge brand and you've never really done SEO, you can like do no wrong. That will shift if you get greedy. You push anything too far. And I think Nerd Wallet is going through this right now. I heard some birdies say that they uh they got a little aggressive on programmatic content and they did way too much. And I also think they [ __ ] up their folder structure and did a bunch of like architecture changes. And I I don't know quite what they did, but you can see the changes and I think they [ __ ] it all up. But anyway, their site's just like, right? Um, so like even a big brand, regardless of how much big your entity and you can always push it too far and if Google starts to see that, it'll reverse the tide. You'll go from, oh, everything works to, "Holy [ __ ] nothing works." And I have another I have a client like this brand. You everyone on this podcast would know who they are if I said the name. I know most of the listeners would, too. So, it's well known. It's been around forever. Big domain. got pushed things too far on the SEO front and now we're gonna have to pull all that back and during that fix like nothing works. Even basic [ __ ] that should work doesn't work. So, it's all about like keeping those things in balance. You know, how how built up is the entity and then yeah, let's do some SEO, but let's not extend the SEO past what our entity can support and let's be careful. David, I really want your take on this. In other words, do you exist just to take traffic and money from Google? Like how much of a percentage you match? That's how how uh exposed you are to HCU like in a in a way. David, could you what do what do you think too about um Lars, you gave this example. you had this uh this page, this great page that you wrote on on management, and it's crawled, not indexed, and you can't get it to index, and then you take it and you put it on your site, which has no topical authority for it, and now you're at the bottom of page one. And David, I'm curious your thoughts on this. I mean, I do this all the time. This this happens all the time, right? Um firstly, I rank for like what is Google? I and I have done for years and I did so with a page that was a oneliner, right? And I've I I found myself outranking Bing for Bing for Bing Search Console because I know it's Bing web master tools, but being search console actually has 7,000 searches per month. And I I I I it was a blog post that I posted one night and I was like, "Oh, I'll I'll come back and finish it tomorrow." And I never came back and finished it. It was just this blank page outranking Bing. So I I've known that for years, right? that that the page could be absolutely brilliant and not rank on one domain and rank on another. And when I had writers that got just a little too arrogant um uh and they would say like, "Oh, Google loves my content." I would sometimes switch their ticket. Yeah. Yeah. You see those freelancers on LinkedIn all the time. They're like publishing for some big newspaper like, "Oh, yeah. Here's my process." You know, go it's so easy. You go straight to the top. Well, you [ __ ] You don't have any idea what's going on. I would replace their their their content with the brief which would just be bullet points and the web team would just stick up the bullet points and then I'd say like oh bring up your piece and let's share with the team tell them what you did and then they would just realize okay five bullet points got ranked immediately it's the topical authority of the domain right um and so that that's why I also don't trust Google when they say that this HC is no longer a sitewide classifier it's a page classifier it's clearly a sitewide classifier because [ __ ] Yeah. Both both Black Hat World and Charles Float have said that the double redirect and and I'm not I think it's even just one redirect could even work that if you basically uh purge some of the content republish content on a new domain or if you take a domain if you buy domain say a business that went extinct and put the content there it ranks fine. The expired domain [ __ ] is so popular right now. It's insane. That's what like all the black hats are just [ __ ] going rampant on drop domains. expired domains, [ __ ] domains with uh old Google business profiles. It is rampant. It's so [ __ ] nuts. I thought we saw this a decade ago. Anyway, I think Google is loathed to change its overall model, right? If you if you look at it, the the Google search organic search team is a very small component of a very big Google organization, right? Like their ads team is massive. there. If you look at the Google graveyard where they've bought and killed millions and millions of ideas, if you look at um Google's AI cloud businesses, the search team's very very small, right? Like there's very very little manual interference with the algorithm. The algorithm is very protected. I've been in their headquarters in New York City. It's like it's like going into the Pentagon. There's like closed areas you can't walk down. There's like it's colored in different lanes saying like you are not going down this path, right? Just forget about it. and they they don't like a lot of interference. And it's it's amazing how much page rank, even though it's now page rank nearest near nearest seed, which I suspect is how they work out if your brand equity is good or not. In other words, if you've got 10 direct links from CNN.com or NY Times.com, you're probably surviving HCU, right? And even though it's a different model of calculation and its topical authority is an array instead of a single stacked number, it's the same damn thing than it was in 1995. It hasn't changed that much. Uh I think it's the SEO community at large that keeps changing SEO. If you look at how much uh has entered the lexicon, like it's about sight speed, it's about schema, it's about it's not really right. It's about authority. It's about third party validation. Always has been. How it's measured, the exact increments, the where the multiplication lies, where the that's all a black box. We don't know how that works. And so I think that's how Google works. It makes tweaks to that algorithm or algorithms that sit on top of it. Um, and that's why at at the end of the day, Google only has to be vi look visibly good to be good enough, right? That's it. They're not a research tool. Nobody uses them as a primary. Nobody Googles and goes like okay that's a fact unless you're a large country and use it to go to war with right but apart from that nobody you know they don't they're not a research academic institution right uh I just wanted to ask like both of you like what do you think about like to what level Google is actually trying to understand what's there on the page like just the on page content is it just like they are stripping the content and trying to identify the term maybe some closeness and just That's the way they try to identify oh we should rank this page for this query or especially Lars like Lars I love your Forbes p that you wrote some time back and I even wanted to ask you like like to what level there is like exact effort from Google to understand like like what is the meaning of the content that's there on the page or is is it just like simple strip the content pick up the relevant terms try to identify like if they are related and based upon that just rank those for that page for the queries or is there an actual effort to understand like if if this content actually makes sense or is it just like some random terms on the page? Uh yeah, I think there's and David, I'd love your take on this too. I think there's multiple ways to like answer this question. Um I do believe Google does the absolute bare minimum to assess content quality, right? Um so for like oh this post is better than that post. I think Google's ne I in everything I work on and see myself, Google's never been sloppier at discerning content quality in the last couple years than they have in like the 10 years prior. Okay? And there's less correlation like on everything that I do, there's less correlation to putting effort into content quality than ranking than I've ever seen. Right? I've actually pulled way back on content quality than I have in the past. Um, now I do think Google does a fair amount of trying to like figure out what's on a page. Um, like from that LLM algorithmic sense. Um, this is another one of my gripes on Google. I can see why they're trying to do it, but again, it's like the execution is always off. There's usually like if I was to summarize like my entire like um perception of Google, it's like they're trying to do the right thing, but then they're just like [ __ ] just missing the boat. Just like the intent is good, but the execution is just not there. And I think this is another example of like one of the bigger shifts in the algo in the last couple years is Google puts an enormous amount of um uh you know we you know the there's been a movement away from like strict literal keywords into like semantic meaning for years and years and years. You know it's not singular versus plural. That was dead like a long long time ago. And Google's had a steady trend of just like pushing down that rat hole as far as they can. And now like if you go search for a topic, you know, if you actually if you looked at like keyword and topical hierarchy even like four years ago, you'd get the primary topic, then what is X, you know, X examples, X tactics, X tips, like they'd all be different and you could build an entire site targeting that entire [ __ ] tree, right? And every every one of those keywords would be different. Unique page, unique topic. Now, so much of that [ __ ] gets blended. So Google is doing a lot of work to say, oh this thing is an as you know it's it's an examples post but it is actually just talking about that core you know uh head term whatever it is and if you look if you Google like any topic you get a huge mix you get a how to you get the what is you get the examples you get so Google's doing a lot to like blend that stuff and I kind of see the point um so once you know because Um, I think Google's trying to make search easier. So, you don't have to like, oh, I'm I don't need, you know, I can just search for the head term and not look for what is to get the simple definition or I don't have to know that I have to add examples to get a list of examples. I can just search for the thing and get like a mashup all on that first page, the the uh the SER. Um, so the intent is there. Um, and Google does put a lot of effort of trying to relate all these things and see what's equivalent and what to merge and what not. Uh, the execution is usually again kind of shitty in my opinion and leaves a lot to be desired. Um, so from like an algorithmic sense, Google's doing a lot to figure out what's on the page, but that doesn't mean they're actually figuring out what quality is, right? That's why I'm saying there's different ways to answer that question. One of my favorite quotes is from uh one of my favorite quotes from uh Neil Degrass Tyson who says that Google is a a um confirmation bias engine. Right? So for example, if I want to argue that if I want to argue for young earth um creationism, right? I can go to Google and say according to young earth creationism, how old is the Bible? And Google will come back, sorry, how old is the earth? It'll come back and say it's six and a half thousand years old. And that's because that's what I've asked it, right? um Google isn't uh you know they're not into physics, they're not into archaeology. And so I'll start with like the simple origins of of Google, right? So Larry and Sergey came up with page rank based on a model that was used to rank um uh medical papers, right? And what they did is they looked at the people that voted for it and their standing in the community versus the people who voted against it and their standing in the community like Pedra essentially, right? And if you look at one of the if you if you understand critical thinking and how we as humans are much more subjective than objective. We tend to make subjective decisions and then lose use logic to back it up. Right? We whenever someone says I'm data driven, I'm like you're so full of [ __ ] I know now I know it. Right? So one of the interesting things is there's an old Aristotle quote and a lot of people use this quote out of place but it's it begs the question and people always say begs the question and they they use it totally out of context. It's very very simple. The document that is used to make the claim cannot be the evidence to the claim. It's really really simple law that is 2,100 years old. You cannot go if you want to be subjective you'll go against it. In other words, if you want to argue that you've found a book and it's given you life instructions and you build a religion out of it, right, you will argue that that is an objective reality and an objective truth. If you remain to be convinced, you're going to say, "Actually, that's highly objective and you need evidence to support the book." And that has been the way religious debate has happened in our sort of um societies forever. So if you produce a document, there is no way for Google to ascertain if it's true or good or not. Right? Like I will never find a book about golf interesting. I and unless it's like somebody tore down a golf course to build a parking lot, I don't drive, so I still won't find it interesting. That doesn't mean to say I should decide what's good or bad, right? And I think one of the most interesting pieces of evidence that's never ever quoted and um Richard Hearn uh an Irish SEO who brought this up um shared it on on X um and it was a slide from the HR onboarding slides that Google uses and it was showcased as a piece of um so Google was basically arguing in the DJ DOJ antitrust case that they're the best at finding the best content and the slide is really simple. It's two people sitting at a desk and it says we don't understand content. We just pretend to. We measure people's um responses. Right? In other words, pogo sticking and that's it. They cannot like let's say Edward and I go off and build a new podcasting app and we launch it and we come out with a new feature that no one's heard of. Is is Google supposed to know if that's real or not? Can Google really say that's objectively better than someone else's? There there is no way to build with even with LLMs, right? Right after Aristotle's golden mean, the next important rule of critical thinking is that cons consensus is not evidence. We as mankind reach consensus peaks on things just before somebody goes to prove that that's wrong. Right? So right up until Einstein, we thought that the universe was filled with ether and then we learned that it was a vacuum. So consensus is not a good rule. So, LLMs, which are consensus engines, aren't actually a good way to determine quality content unless you objectively measure a group subjective decision. And that's what page rank does. And that's why I don't think it can ever be replaced. You were saying something before. Uh yeah. uh starting from like page rank la I think uh how do you think that if Google is not trying to exactly understand the overall content on the site then is it just like surface level topical authority that they are doing just based upon like keywords or the terms that are mentioned on the pages and just clustering based upon that and saying that oh this site mentions business SEO marketing so it must be something related to a SEO marketing business and another site mentioned some plumbing words and it must uh their authority or their topical authority should be around those words rather than exactly like trying to understand like what's going on on the pages. So is it just is Google's understanding of a domain and their topical authority is it just like surface level and they just pretend to know what topics is site right? Yeah. So my my thoughts on topical authority have evolved a lot and it's I think topical authority is really messy. I think it used to be fairly straightforward. Um, I don't think it's straightforward anymore. Um, and there was a period maybe like last year I was like topical authority dead. Like Google doesn't even [ __ ] look at this anymore. I I I've evolved beyond that. I'm like, okay, there is some topical authority now, but it's way messier. Like in the past, like you could you could view topical authority like fairly simply like like you said like like oh is this marketing? Is this business? You could you could basically look at topical authority kind of like a librarian. Like is your [ __ ] in the section of the library that Google expects? Yes or no? And if it's yes, then cool. Then things are generally going to be okay. Now it's like way messier than that. Um and it's not nearly as simple as all. And I have sites all the time that, you know, we go after some basic terms that are squarely in the lane of the product, the service. We're not doing any SEO aggressive stuff. This like could not be closer to I mean like eat, right? This is this is what the cavity specializes in. This is like the whole [ __ ] business. Um it's not some top offunnel reach or anything. This is this is what we should be able to at least rank for. At least get a shot, right? Uh, we should at least be evaluated. The the the keyword difficulty is so [ __ ] low. Uh, the ranking content's trash. Like we shouldn't have any trouble with like Google actually giving us a shot and then like Google doesn't even [ __ ] look at it, right? It's like it'll crawl it, won't index it. It's like it doesn't give a [ __ ] That happens a lot. And I see this across different espec it's it's toughest with like mid-level domains because you think you should be able to like get consideration in an area because again you're looking at it with that like information tree. What area of the library am I in right there's I'm not doing anything sketchy or reachy we should get a shot here and then Google just does not give a [ __ ] at all. Um and the opposite can also happen where you there is the way I look and describe topical authority now it's like a topical authority does exist u but it's it's being managed by like a cod up toddler right there is there is logic there is always a thread of logic on a given site and why things are ranking but it's ne never what you expect or often it's not what you expect and um the way I usually figure out what Google likes on a site. It's one you got to publish a bunch of content. Um, but then you go just look at all the ranking content and you're looking for trends, right? Just top pages ranked for Google or by, you know, top pages in HFS or SEM Rush or anything. Just scroll down the list. There's always like a little mess, but you can almost always find a thread of like, oh, Google really likes that type of content on this site. And a lot of times you're like, "How did you get that?" Like, I see the line the thread and how all this [ __ ] connects, but how the [ __ ] does that site automatically get a freebie with this? Like there's a there's I think I was looking at like a website builder and um not it wasn't a client of mine. Um but uh I was actually looking at all the rankings and all the authority for like all the web host content programs and all the website. I had a client in that space and I was looking at everything like what's just how's everybody doing and I went through every bigname blog that had any authority and there was one I think it was it was a it was a website builder web host or something like that. It was pretty straightforward. You think like oh they should be able to rank for like website content right like no they didn't rank for any of that. They had tons of content around like actual website builder web host uh topics. They didn't rank for any of it. Instead, they ranked for a ton of like CSS styling terms, like specific things, and they ranked for a ton of that [ __ ] Somehow, they got going. Google started to trust that particular content from them, and then that was all their rankings, all of them. I have another client where um it's it's a SAS client, but for whatever reason, it ranks for um any review term I want. Not like best of or versus or alternative those keywords, but like software review, you know, product review. I post any review I want and it immediately goes to the top. It's [ __ ] stupid. And I'm like, this is a SAS company. What the f? And even for review topics that are not in the category that the product is in, right? That's why I'm like there's a co toddler running this. Like somehow the toddler decide, ah, I like reviews from that website and now Google just trusts that [ __ ] You like it should not trust that [ __ ] at all. Um, and you know, and then the reverse is also true on that site. I can publish stuff square in the actual like this is related to the three [ __ ] products they have. I think I should get a shot. Um, and Google just doesn't care. Doesn't care at all. So, like topical authority, it's messier than it's ever been. It's wonkier than it's ever been. It does exist, but I never even try to predict what it's going to be on a site out of the gate. I'm like, we're going to have to figure it out and it's going to be weird and wonky. When you see when you see that when you see that the top ranking pages are pages outside of the topic that you want the site to be about, do you ever consider taking those pages down? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I had um Well, usually teams won't do this when things are going well because why would they? Things are going well. Uh this usually becomes a consideration when the whole thing is going down in flames. That's usually when I get a call. They're like, um, and step one, and I' I have done this. So, I had a site, it it didn't get the full HCU hit, but it was like headed in that direction. And I think a lot of sites are going through this. They're getting that multi-year decline and just like nothing works. The whole domain is sluggish. This is now kind of like become my specialty a little bit. And there's often like you go through the blog, you go through the content, there's a bunch of top of funnel or random [ __ ] that should not be on the site, right? Or maybe it was a programmatic play that got way too aggressive. Um, regardless of the specifics, it's way too much content that got way too far a field. Again, like I was talking about like how much SEO can the entity support, the SEO like drastically started to outstrip what the entity can support, right? Um, so I will go through and on this one client that I had going through this, I got the bleeding to stop and now I'm actually seeing gains on competitive terms I haven't seen in like a year, year and a half. Stuff we haven't touched in a year and a half. Like we wrote rewrote it all, but Google didn't give a [ __ ] forever. And the only thing that has started to turn that tide is I went through and of course everybody does the easy content prune like oh no traffic no links let's 404 you know that's easy that's basic [ __ ] Um, yeah, it takes some [ __ ] balls to go in and say like, "Oh, there's all this traffic that's ranking and I'm going to make all the reports look like dog [ __ ] for a year to the point where like I'm surprised this client doesn't fire me because every like I'm literally going to throw traffic off a cliff and the I've actually had this happen where like the the top visited uh or like top three page on the entire site actually becomes the 404 page, right? Because I just nuke everything, right? And depending on how links get built, this is can get really messy because you don't want to trash the links, right? But even with pages, there's a lot of pages that generate tons of traffic, zero links. That happens all the [ __ ] time these days, uh, more often than it did in the past. So, I'll go through and like, this content does not make sense. Let's kill all of it. And that is where I've seen the biggest gains in the shortest amount of time for a site that's struggling. Like again, I don't know any of the specifics on Nerd Wallet, but they're like plummeting, right? They're they're having a rough couple years. Um, their core stuff is looks fine. They're still probably making a ton of [ __ ] money, but their traffic charts look like dog [ __ ] Or at least their ranking charts and hrefs and I assume SEM Rush is the same. Like, if I was working on that program or any site of similar scale, and I've I've worked on sites just as big, like step one is let's purge the [ __ ] out of everything. Um, and if it is not core to the site, we are junking it. And that is the only path that I've seen other than like the double redirect, which I don't think Nerdwell is going to do a double redirect. Uh, but like if you're trying to save a domain, that's like step one, right? And I always start there. When you when you do this, how long how long do you wait to see changes? How long does it typically take to to see changes when you strip the content that is irrelevant to the topic of the site? if you have the ball to do it. Yeah. Go ahead, Gagen. Yeah. Yeah. Just to add to the question like I have worked on like some projects where I went like uh we just need to remove these 500 pages and then others pages collapse too which were like driving conversions. You're ning the whole category. It's all going to collapse on you. Yeah. I I just wanted to ask you like how do you decide like because I feel like from the internal links there is some value flowing from those like non-relevant pages to the other relevant pages which are actually like driving the conversion. So how do you decide like oh these pages are not related but they have some contextual internal links in the main text to other pages which are actually performing. So there is some risk of like nuking these pages. Yeah. So how do you like deal with that? Like how do you approach that? Uh I don't have simple rules because it's always it's always this can get really really [ __ ] messy and really really hard and on like the real answer can often come from basically your leadership or the CEO the founders like what are we actually doing with this website? Where the [ __ ] are we actually going with this thing? some cases it's straightforward like oh you got a SAS website that you know extended too far it's like well what category is the product in right you you sometimes it is somewhat easy and then you build from there um in other case like if you have like a media site it can be [ __ ] heinous you're like well what category are we in we're in [ __ ] seven different categories where are we actually going to focus in the future and do we have enough time to rebuild it before chat GPT and Gemini steal all the traffic like I don't we might just run out of time. Um, so there's like a it's way more intense than that. Um, I don't have simple answers. Um, sometimes it is obvious. I mean, actually the the part that I've struggled the most, I don't necessarily worry internal linking is important, but when I'm 404ing stuff, I'm like, I'm not that worried about it. What I worry about most and what I've had the hardest time dealing with on these sites, especially older sites that were built during a previous era where you just blog blog blog blog blog and you just pick up all these insane links, right? Anybody remember that era? You just like it's like the golden age of Neil Patel, right? Look, I worked for Neil Patel. I worked at Kissmetrics. I ran marketing there for a little while. Um like I remember that area very fondly. It was great. You just [ __ ] blog and everything works. You were you were its first employee, Uh no, not the first employee. I was like employee 11 14. Yeah. I was one of I think it was the second marketer. I think it was Neil Patel Sean work who was running the blog at the time and then me that was the marketing team for a bit. Yeah. And then Neil bounced uh he moved on to other stuff and I had a boss that boss got me he moved on and then I became the head of marketing as like out of default and they just needed a body and I was like yeah all right I'll do it. I had no idea what I was [ __ ] doing. Um anyway, but um but yeah, blo like blogs from that era um and there's a lot of SEOs that have built companies during that era, right? That link profile, which is pure gold, but it's also messy as [ __ ] That was an era where you could just write about anything you wanted, right? And um you know, it's like everybody remember the old Quick Sprout post where Neil Patel was just blogging about how he's investing in his own like closet and his own like dress. We talked about that at an earlier episode. You took that down. You took that down. I did take that down. Yeah, that's that's another story that Yeah. Anyway, that didn't have any links despite the fact it was a funny post. Oh, that went viral. That went super viral. Really? Yeah. For you. Uh didn't And maybe for Neil at the time. Um but like 10 years, 15 years later, it's just sitting there [ __ ] weighing the blog down, right? Anyway, um like you have this insane link profile and it's to all this random content and you're like that is not my space, but there's absolutely like if I went and built those links today, it would cost me tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and money. Like what? I can't lose those links. They're too [ __ ] good. So what do I do? I just redirect them to the blog homepage. That seems like a waste, right? But there isn't a good onetoone match. We're outside the C. don't want this post. So, what do you do? Right? There's no good answers. Some cases you're like, "Fuck it. The links are good enough. We'll rewrite the post even though it's not a perfect fit." Um, in other cases, it's like, "Ah, well, there's just a few [ __ ] links or like borderline links. We'll redirect it and move on." So, you got to untangle that giant [ __ ] mess. And I think a lot of the like golden age blogs, the brands we all know and dominated for years and years, they're going through some version of that, right? they can't do the quick prune because you hit the link profile too hard and you can't build this like magical tight website out of the gate, right? Because you have all this old [ __ ] that's giant web of a mess and you have to like slowly untangle it and build for the future which takes years. Um, so when you're in that situation, it's like how long does it take? If you have a big site, a big brand, uh things are sluggish, sites in decline, bad direction, um but it's it's things are big, right? Here's what I tell people generally. First year to stop the bleeding. Second year is going to be flat to get us back to growth. Year three is when we're going to actually start to feel the improvement. And that is a big ask for a lot of teams for obvious reasons. Um but that's not just SEO programs. I've done company turnarounds, department turnarounds, and that's generally the rhythm. The first year sucks and you're just trying to stop the bleeding. You stabilize everything and then…

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