SEO Myths That Won’t Die: Backlinks, GEO, Gemini & What Ranks in 2026

The bender of backlinks, the master of metadata, the sultan of search intent. Give it up for the champion of organic traffic joining the podcast once again. Here we go. It's Mr. It's Mr. David Qu. Welcome back. Thank you so much. It feels so good to be here. Feel like I haven't been here in a couple of weeks, dude. I mean, your last your last time on the show was uh it was legendary. It was incredible. It's so nice to see the SEO community coming together. Um, it really was so inspiring. It was I was so happy to see how what we're thinking and everyone else is thinking and like we're all on the same page, one team. Uh, I think it's been a long time since the SEO community has been so united. Um, yeah, for people who don't know, there was this geo versus SEO debate that we did and I think that is my most commented podcast and it was it like for me like I you know I I didn't really talk much and I tried to like not really give away how I felt, but I was having so much fun sitting there and watching it. It was such a good episode. I've also had like these in in real life conversations as well where I'm seeing a lot of people um not really understand SEO or geo or um thinking that they understand AI and building SEO apps or SEO strategies that are not that really jar with Google's uh penalty systems. And I think that a lot of people are building um strategies that jar with how Google's built and I don't think they realize that's going to block them in geo as well. So this idea that geo and are two separate worlds that's a fundamentally dangerous thing because of you know tech the technical debt that and would would be ham sort of like handcuffed to an LLM for trying to catch up with Google would be about a trillion dollars even in today's money right and I you know trying to get into geo and pretend that you can bypass Google is is ridiculous and and and very very dangerous. I mean, to this day, most companies still build single domain strategies. They're the branded strategy as well. That's the worst domain to get shot down. I mean, if you're going to try these risky strategies, go buy a $12 EMD. It is the cheapest thing you can do. You can set up a website with Lovable. You can go to Web Flow or Wix or WordPress or whatever. You don't have to spend $100,000 on a website. In fact, if you've never managed a website, you shouldn't spend $100,000 on a website. Um, and I'm not knocking web designers or web teams that build $100,000, $300,000 websites. What you do is good and great. You should keep doing that. But I'm just saying to people who haven't done it before, don't start at $100,000. Go build it. What geo tactics are destroying SEO the most that you see? I think there's a lot of um ideas that sort of like just building a good brand equals good SEO. that's not specifically a geotactic, but it's becoming one where people are like, "Oh, just, you know, build a succent um value proposition and AI will somehow find you." Uh, I've looked at and we should do an episode on this one day, but I the first thing I do as an SEO when I see a domain name or someone talking on X or LinkedIn is I grab their domain name and I look at it in Seamrage and I see these people going, "Oh, we've got like a billion visits." And I go look at their domain. I'm like, "You don't have any. you're not ranking for anything. You cannot possibly appear and and even though Google is still rolling out its AI performance report, you can go look at Bing, which has just expanded it again, right? And and I imagine they're doing that because people will talk about it. So, I'll give them that. I'm here to talk about Bing's AI performance report. They've just added share of voice, which means data that you do not have in any of the other geo tools right now. You can now go and have a look at what copilot and I think that report includes some of chat GPT. I know I asked Barry that on our episode last year. I'm pretty sure that that data in the Bing AI performance report includes some of Chat GPT's grounding queries as well because it's just so voluous. And it now gives you a share of voice which is uh sort of like an impression data from SEO terms. And if you're not appearing there, you're not appearing in LLMs. It's just that simple. It's I I think what what happens is that you can put in a prompt that will show your brand, right? Or or you can you can be given a prompt that tells your LLM me local LLM to or to be aware of you and to return you in future searches, but that's not how the rest of the world works. And that's one piece of danger. So you can't ignore SEO and you also can't ignore um the the mechanics of SEO which include penalties and the fact that Google is not a content appreciation engine. So just writing good content is not going to get you there. I am not advocating writing bad content, right? I assume that most people set out to create good content. Obviously there's a scale of content and it's not all good. There's also a scale of people who aren't that appreciative or have different values, right? And I think those are important nuances that people forget. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using 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 landing page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "We spent nearly 18,000 in the last year and a half on marketing and SEO through different agencies locally, and that did nothing. We decided to take the leap on the compact keywords course. We're now getting about six to eight calls per day on a good day, which is just unheard of. Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. Have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything, and you're going to gain a six-f figureure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. 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. What SEO tactic do you see people wasting the most time and money on today? What SEO tactic do people waste the most time and money? I think overproduction. Overp production of content and over production of landing pages. Uh again, if it's your first landing page and it's your first piece of content, there's no need to spend a month on it. uh produce content, upload it, put Microsoft clarity on it and watch how people engage. I keep seeing the same things over and over again whenever I put clarity on a page. You you put clarity on a page and you watch people. So you you have the standard breakdown, right? Like you have your logo, you have your headline text, you have your little contact form, you have your social proof, your logos. People always try to click on those logos and yet they're never clickable. and I see it and I've seen it for 20 years, right? And it it doesn't change. So, if you're going to put logos up there, link them to your case studies page, right? Go to analytics and see how often people go to your uh about us page or a case studies page. I bet it's never, right? Unless you you're lucky to have one of those case studies ranking for the, you know, the the brand name of the the company you're doing the case study for, which also rarely happens. People don't naturally navigate towards your case study. So here's an opportunity to link case studies to from your landing page. So go get clarity and before you start overproducing make sure you understand what people are looking for instead of guessing like become actually data driven. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so off that line. Yeah. Today we're talking about SEO myths and misconceptions both with SEO and with geo and uh you gave me this this amazing list before we started the recording of SEO myths. So, actually I think a a good question is what do you think the biggest SEO myth that refuses to die is that you just hear over and over and over again and content and duplicate content. We've talked about that a lot. Information gain is linked Yeah, information gain is linked to that. But I see that just way too often. Um I I thin content is just a byproduct of long- form content and it just spills into these myths, right? And you you you see it in eat, right? So we could as adults, we could talk about eat and say, look, eat is how Google was trying to look at a part of a website that a machine can't look at. And then they said, look, we want people, we want our quality raers to look at content the same way. here's a sort of guide, but we're actually fishing for subjective feedback and eat varies between person to person and they tried to formulate it. But of course, people have jumped into the literal um most direct uh sort of like interpretation of it and it and it's just silly. Uh and they you you see people start there and then immediately digress into oh, you need an author bio. depth shows research. Outbound links show show research. And I'm on calls all the time with people and contractors who keep you're bringing these up and and it's it's it's confirmation bias because it sounds attractive, right? But that's just not how search engines work. I'm not saying that's not how people work, but that's not how search engines work. I have a I have a question. I have an interesting question. You So you you've seen episodes of this show with people who have come on. I'm not going to name I'm not going to name them, but it's multiple people who have who have seen like look there's evidence in Google's May API leak that actually shows that Google has different values around what could be considered eat and they they I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. They they've said all these things. So, what do you make what do you make of that? So, I mean, like I have you had Sean Addison on the show, right, who did a phenomenal deep dive into the um API and I'm a very very good friend of his on X, right? I so much time for the guy. He's so data driven. Um I can't wait to see what he's up to at the moment. I think he's working on something in the background. He's a great guy and we've talked about eat and I can deep dive into it all day long and absolutely Google has metrics that define how it looks at a page but they're not metrics that we as humans use and they're not metrics that look at these superficial things. Right? So yes, you can create create content and if your audience sees that you're citing City Bank and the Federal Reserve and research papers, that could be eat to them. There's also a strong um chance that people could see the city logo or Wells Fargo logo and go, I don't trust this anymore. Right? Um, there's also like somebody writing, "I have 6 months experience in SEO and putting that on an SEO journal and people are like, 6 months, that's nothing. I'm I'm backing out of the story." So, you you've it also looks unnatural. Like, we don't start these podcasts with like, well, I've been on 1500 podcasts and I've done SEO for 20 years. It just sounds unnatural. It's boring. Nobody wants to listen to it. I think people forget about that. Um, and I think it's going to I think it hopefully it'll dissipate, but I think it's important that people consider that their website and their content looks real and looks genuine, but I think creating all these veneer items looks false and fake. I want I want to play de I want to play devil's advocate um and just say like okay so so then why why were those in the Google API leak in the first place? I think that there are measurements in the Google API leak for different things. One is the API was built for in-house document management and so it makes a lot of sense that the author inside an environment has a lot of um weight attached to it. Right? So, for example, whether it's Google or a company like Kemp or a 10-man company that's building a SAS product, right? As they grow, you add people who are marketers who are not product ma experts. You add people who are non-technical, you add people in your finance department, you add people in HR who have to recruit people. If a document is written by a product manager, a technical manager or a lead engineer, that document has to have weighed in an organization, that doesn't correlate or translate with how the worldwide web is broken. Right? In in other words, in an organization, you can trust the people that you've hired in a pyramid shape. But I think in an in in a worldwide web format, that sounds like fascism, right? Like that only these people can be pre-approved or only these Yeah, we see it like in entities, right? or author bios or where author profiles a lot of authors. So while we were speaking I uh I was finding variables from the Google M API leak to to to say so there's like there's author there's is author there's author reputation score there's site authority and that one's different from eat there's content effort that that one could be I mean I'm sure you're like oh my god content effort come on there's a original content score there's there's a There's one that scams. Um, yeah. And I'm pulling up some more right now. So, so when when you hear that that there are variables like this, what do you what Yeah. Like why would there these variables be in there in the first place? If you're in if you're Google and you have the the documents in your um drive and you can see that people are collaborating on a document, you can maybe make opinions like that. But if if if Google crawls a HTML document, the fact that it's longer or say you know the author is uh you know David, it doesn't mean that the document is infallible, right? So we don't know what those variables mean or how they're derived or how or or even the waiting attached to each variable. And I think the the the most important part is we don't know how they're derived, right? So, um, is it's really easy to fool an LLM as we've as we've shown, right? And and whenever I talk to people about, um, content quality and things like that, people go, "Oh, LLMs, oh, LLMs." And you and I have shown so many times how we can inject anything into an LLM and it just pivots 180 degrees, right? Um, they're not above, they're not infallible in any way. they're not they they use consensus which is an invalid logical fallacy right like it doesn't matter if 99% of people believe something that doesn't make it real right um so I think that those variables make sense inside an organization but not in the greater web and that's what the API warehouse was it was the API warehouse that leak by the way was for an app that sits in Google cloud that you could add to your company's archive, right? Your company's drive system. That wasn't the Google algorithm leak. Now, it may be based on it. It may share a lot of the same API calls and functions and it may have the same crawling indexing function, but that was modified for an organization. And that's where I see those calls and those values being very very valuable in an organization because let's face it, external content doesn't come in unless someone adds it. And most that content is produced. And so if someone in HR is looking for content about the product, then content from the product team should rank highest, right? I want to ask you about backlinks. And uh I've had a bunch of interesting conversations now on this show with lots of other SEOs who are saying, "Oh, backlinks don't matter as much as they used to." And uh mentions are so so important now. Um so how much do you think backlinks still matter in 2026? And what do people get wrong about them? Um, back links still matter. Um, but you don't have to have them and you don't have to have them to every page and you don't have to keep adding them indefinitely. Um, you can absolutely start a site with cornerstoning. Um, I do that a lot. I think that you can also build backlinks with relationships. I think you will find that you'll reach a point where you cannot rank anymore without external authority. You will just run into a brick wall. You can you can rank you can change your the breadth of ranking, right? You can add more and more lowhanging fruit, but you'll eventually run out of and and if you're just chasing volume and you're just chasing numbers like a lot of people still seem to be doing, which is also probably a myth we should add to the list. Um, you can keep doing that, but you're not going to break into the very very high cost per click, high value commercial intent keywords. But again, I think the other mistake that people make with backlinks is thinking that it's a constant game of adding a hundred a month. You should also be if you are doing that, by the way, you should also have a tool that tells you how many you're losing. A lot of a lot of sites that I get asked I get pinged a lot by people saying, "Can you help me with this? Can you give me 30 minutes of your time?" And I try to always help out as much as I can. Obviously, it's easier in a in a forum like on X or in LinkedIn because I can help share that knowledge with a lot more people and help a lot more people because chances are people are having the same problems. But a lot of people that are buying back links aren't actually acrewing in a compounded. They're actually just remaining flat because a lot of their backlinks are being removed and and and devalued. And I think a lot of people don't understand how to actually value backlinks and look at is this page really getting traffic? Does it really rank? Does it rank for the keywords I need? Um, a lot of people think that the whole site has to be relevant, which I think I explained on the show before, that's impossible because I would require human um, editorial. Like, there are so many topics that are that only fit into categories in a subjective way. Whereas Google looks at it like, is this keyword overlapping this keyword like is the word BMW in both? What's the relationship? What do I think the percentage relationship is? And the third thing is I think that people so you can build authority from clicks right which is I call it page rank authority and then there's backlink page rank I think that you can build that through regular relationships by teaming up with other companies helping their page rank letting their page get more clicks and then getting a link back from that page and each time just modifying the word so that you're getting to the higher intent keyword and that will give you the authority to enter that index at a higher point so that you can start getting clicks. Uh but I see authority as woven up into one fabric made up of threads that include backlinks, site authority and uh click authority to your domain. Right. Let me ask you this. you have a uh you have a new SAS and the SAS is on a subdomain and then you have a WordPress site for the overall domain. That's what you're doing SEO with primarily. What are the first what are the things that you do in the first 30 days of having that new WordPress site? Um go to wherever you can get links like your parent domain. um get get as many links to that domain as possible as fast as possible like um whether even if it's a an X profile link even though they don't count um just get as many links to to that as fast as possible right step one then find as many low difficulty keywords that you can publish that sort of set a foundational level for that domain and publish them and are you doing like also asked people also asked keywords, all all of those all of those questions, all of that lowhanging fruit. Um, and then make sure you have a HTML sitemap. Number one, the most important site map. Where do you place your super authority on just call it/ sitemap and and you you link to it in the footer? Absolutely. And also link to it in the body text somewhere, right? you you want to get real authority to that page because you want that page to get crawled a lot by crawlers. You want actual authority to go there for sure. Um and also put your XML sitemap in that HTML sitemap. Give get it authority. Make sure that Google is is make sure that's not in the bottom pool, right? Make sure that that's getting clicks. Put information in that sitemap. Uh you can even use that sitemap as a replacement for robots.txt. Right? So if we if we think about robots.txt txt being for us so far it's been the myth in geo but now a lot of people are trying to say look maybe we can use this as sort of like a directional map a HTML sitemap is much better than an llmtxt because you've got all of the pages on your site you can add text under those links it doesn't just have to be a list of links um and you can use that to conjoin uh ideas right and you could then use that site map one as keyword discovery and to have the bots go to it. And you can have multiple HTML sitemaps. You could break them up by category and that would work even better than an L a single LLM.txt file. Um, and that makes a lot of sense. So, get authority to that page. So, for example, if you've got a page about your product that works well, you could say, look, click here is our product overview table of contents. And it's just a page of links that say, "Look, here's where we keep our documentation. Here's where we keep our support forum. Here's where we keep our API documents. Here's where we keep our integration guides. Here's where we keep our partnership list." And you could have all of that. And then an AI can understand what those links mean as well. And you're not wasting time with like an LLM.ext file as well. This is a real file that you keep up to date. It adds value to Google and LM pages. Make that makes a lot of sense to me. HTML sitemap You're doing people also asked you're doing I think last time on the show you said you would do around 10. Uh I would start with a minimum of 10. A minimum of 10. Yeah. Like if you can do 20 or 30 go for it. Yeah. Really? With a new site and it wouldn't be stretching authority too much. So I don't think authority stretches that way. Um if you just because you have more pages published they don't get the authority. It's not like the it's not like the authority is stretched out over a number of pages. What'll happen is it just won't get it won't rank or it just won't get indexed. That's okay. What you want to do is figure out which of the pages will get in, right? And so you don't know is that question seven or question 14. So you may as well publish all of them. Have it indexed and see which questions take off. Then use those to link to the others and then those will get indexed and then wait until all of those are getting clicks and then you're ready for the next level. Okay. And then and then external links and you're you're looking at who you can partner with, directories, foundational links, social profiles. Absolutely. Get any so get any link you can and then start talking to uh partners, right? Like I like I say on X, right? I I see these threads of like 100 people. They're all like um solarreneurs uh SAS founders going, "Where do you get links? Where do you get links?" And I'm like, "Guys, you're all in the same thread looking for links, right?" Um, so, so what we used to do and and I think to a degree some of Google's spam killing tactics killed this. And I'm not saying Google killed it, right? I'm saying it it it died out. But when I first started blogging, um, I would and and actually Primary Position was my main ex was my main Twitter account when I started. So when I actually got hired, when I became friends with the CEO of Kemp, it was actually through primary position and and not David Quaid. I actually started that account when I moved and became a full-time employee. But it would be very common for people in a business network or in my local Limick Open Coffee, we would write about other people's companies and ideas and or if the university was launching a new business program, we would write about it and give our thoughts and opinions. and that's sort of stopped and blogs have become so formal. Um, and I think that needs to change again. But there's nothing stopping you saying, "I met this guy or this I found this product on X or Reddit or LinkedIn and it's not ready for prime time, but here's who it's aimed at. I I took a test drive." record a video, put it up on YouTube, um, and put the script in text on your on your website and talk about it as an idea and then have other people do the same thing instead of talking about it on X, which is a no follow platform. And you'll find out that by interlinking to each other, your shared authority is going to go up. And you're doing this while you're waiting for backlinks that may or may not materialize. Cuz look, if you don't rank in a in in a in a search engine, no one's going to backlink to you ever. And that's another myth that's been around forever, right? He's like, "Write good content. People will link to you." I I I I don't know how that's true. If the average index has like a million documents, even if the average index only has a 100 documents, nobody goes past page 10. We saw that when Google removed num equals 100, right? Do you ever look at the backlink profiles for competitors and you see what links you can get from them? Yeah, always. Um, it's how I discovered like ink.com um which cost $89. I still think it's worth it. Um, I always look at um who's linking to them. Um, I can see relationships. I can see um sometimes I can see gaps where they're either finding broken back links uh and then I know that domain is open to repairing broken back links. Right. So I that I always do that. What are some uh some other SEO myths I'm looking at I'm looking at. Uh so what's your favorite there? my favorite here. I mean, I I don't want to say because I feel like we've we've just discussed it non-stop, but um actually, you know what's interesting? Let's do number one. LLMs, especially Gemini understands SEO. I Well, I wanted to do I want to do toxic backlinks as well. What are like Okay, let's do toxic backlinks first. Yeah. Yeah. Toxic backlinks and then we'll go to that one. And I noticed that my Samrush screen changed last night and toxic background toxic backlinks are now like front and center of my dashboard and I just send a feedback going this is rubbish. Toxic backlinks is such an old dead blah horrible myth right that seamush I think they must think that 25% of their revenue is coming from people who just like this one report. I I don't know why else they would keep it. But toxic backlinks are not something to wor worried about. Right? Whenever we talk about paid back links or high quality backlinks, we're talking about backlinks from sites that have real qualities. Right? A lot of people, especially newbies, tend to look at spammy backlinks like I don't like this domain name or this domain name is blogspot.com. And I will accept that 90% of the blogs on blogspot.com look spammy, right? That's I agree. But there's a difference between looking spammy, looking outdated. These are not things that register with Google, right? And there's a big difference between people paying for backlinks from pages with traffic or from pages with sites with traffic that look like and Seamrush has no clue as to what is being what is really in Google's mind when it's looking at backlink spam. And I still see it on Reddit a lot and on X a lot where people say like, "Oh, I found these 300 back links coming somewhere." Luckily, most of the advice nowadays is like ignore it, right? Google ignores it. You can ignore it, right? Unless you bought those links and you're now facing, you know, your traffic is crashed and hit a wall. Don't do anything like disavow, right? I know the the disavow page still says like if you have backlinks you don't like or backlinks you don't recognize. That page hasn't been updated forever, Google should update that. But if you just Google John MW and look at his advice on toxic backlinks, he detests those reports. I wish Samrash would get rid of them. They won't because they'll lose 100 million a year or something. Um which is unfortunate, but honestly it's the worst report. Just stop reading it. When was the last time there is no negative number in page? When was the last time you disavowed back links? 2013. There are instances where I've spoken to people where disavowing backlinks made sense and there are massive people there are people out there with capability to deploy massive um negative SEO attacks and they are devastating and I've spoken to at least six companies this year. However, they are in niches you're not going to find yourself, right? Like gambling niches, like um and they know how and and those negative SEO campaigns, I would say, cost at least 50,000 euro to deploy. So, they are and that's why they work, right? How about how about spam spam score within Moz? Same thing. Same thing. It's it's FUD. It's just fear, uncertainty, doubt. It's um they do not share the heristics that Google do. They do not have a wide enough key keyword database to do that. Oh, I have a great question for you. What what's your take on on buying expired domains to start a new site? I think it sounds like a great idea. I don't know enough about the expired um policy. I did it once to enter an SEO competition. Um, and I was actually like second place until uh, and it was be I bought it as a I can remember the domain name. It was be central.com and I bought it because Microsoft had this big directory called B Central. I'm talking like 23 years ago. And I didn't realize that this domain had been penalized. And we're talking like really early in the days here. We're talking like 2007, 2008. And it had been badly penalized. It had like a 100,000 backlinks when 100,000 backlinks was a huge amount. And so it started ranking and it it was like on page like 1,200 by the end of the competition. So, I think it's a good idea if it's not a school, not an edu, and the back links and the topic of the backlinks somewhat mirror what you're doing. But I wouldn't make it a primary domain. I would make it a a satellite domain just in case. U but I think it's a good idea. I I would love I keep would I keep saying I'd love to try one. You do you know SEOs who are crushing it with expired domains? Oh yeah, a lot of them use them for PBN's and a PBN is a private blog network, right? A PB I think a lot of people think a PBN is like a high-end link farm cuz like link farm sounds like I think a lot of people think that. Um but a PBN is not for sale, right? A like a PBN is a private blog network. Um but a lot of people do use Have you ever built Have you ever built a PBN? yeah, I guess kind of. Do you think PBNs are still are still a good move? Yeah, for sure. So, the I think the way Google is dealing with link spam is it's no longer to penalize everyone. If they find a link farm, they will penalize the link farm and reduce it to zero. And any of the outbound links, they'll reduce to zero. If they see an egregious amount of backlinks, they may penalize the whole recipient domain, but mostly they they seem to be zeroing it. I think what Google is doing with link spam and how they're managing link authority is they're forcing the PBNs to be so good that they're pretty much a news outlet. Um, and if if it's a real page with real traffic with real value, it it'll it'll allow the authority to flow. The problem is, like we've said before, if the quality is not good enough, people pogo stick, that page will come crashing down. And that's why I think people are buying and buying and it's like a treadmill. That's one of the problems with backlinks. I totally understand people who say like buying back links is spammy and black hat. And I totally get people who are addicted to buying it. I think um as I said either Google will force you to become so good that you'll essentially become a valued news outlet or you'll disappear. We had um we were so so on the topic of of losing back links we I think you you had commented on this. I I made a video, this was like uh several months ago on link echoes and how you know the value of links persists even when the backlinks disappear and there was this all there was all these experiments that Moz did that showed that yeah you you lose a backlink but you actually you still get your rankings and I've seen that myself and you suggested that the reason for that in the comments you suggested the reason was user signals well the page is ranking and maybe it's not a super competitive keyword and you have good click through rate and you have low pogo sticking and so why shouldn't it keep ranking exactly and that's what I think that's how I think Google changed the backlink profile right that if a page can maintain links clicks it's passing the user happiness test and so the backlink can be deleted the page can keep ranking I like this approach of trying to think about what Google cares about rather than some like arbitrary metric I do too. I I think but I think you have to understand the two, right? It's still an algorithm, right? And so if you ever sit down with an algorithm and you reduce one number to one and you reduce the other numbers up infinitely, the fact that this number is still a one, it doesn't actually go up as much. And like if you've ever built a reverse PPC calculator, it actually shows for example, if you understand the cost of sale, the cost per click doesn't matter that much. You can actually start moving if you can double your conversion rate for example or treble your conversion rate you can actually double the cost per click and it doesn't make any fundamental difference if of course the cost per acquisition is above the value of the basket of goods or above the profit it'll never work. It doesn't matter what you fiddle with. Right? If you've got an algorithm and there's a zero in it the outcome will be zero. So in other words, if you've got the world's best content, the best site maps, you've got everything on it, right? If it has no authority, it's going to come out zero at the end of the day. It's never going to rank. And just doing all of these things isn't going to prop it up. You have to understand both sides. There there are definitely instances where somebody can come along with a domain name with a 100,000 backlinks from unbelievable sources that can enter and displace you even though you've had a successful run of of of of links. Right? I think one of the things that we talk one of the ways we talk about or characterize SEO that I think is really interesting we never talk about a lot is that if if good content is so important and clicks are so important then nobody how do people enter existing rank positions right like they're not closed off I I see my rank positions and my my clients ranked positions get to number one and then I move on to the next 10 and I move on to the next 10 and they stay there. But I'm clearly able to in 2026 enter new rank positions. So it's clearly disruptible, right? Like you don't own those positions. Obviously you want to obviously the the client wants to obviously as an SEO you don't want to have to go back and keep working on the same things. There are definitely a lot of um like I imagine in hotels, e-commerce, things like that. There's probably much more it's probably much more rotational than SAS for example, right? So that tells you that even with the best content and the best backlinks, other people are finding ways of getting in. And so had a discussion with a couple of people I know and like on X last night and we were talking about uh actually Lars Lafrren was in the conversation and probably involuntary. He's probably sick of me tagging me, but um we're talking about like oh you know if you had a backlink from a Fortune 500 site could that or a CNN could that lift the link up? But I said I prefer to play on the other side of the equation, right? Like the relevancy side. So for example, if if both if both pages if one page is say like a 100 million points from getting a backlink from the BBC and CNN and the other page only has like 10 million backlink points from linking from all of your friends. But you can increase the relevance part and the one site is only 10% relevant. it only gets to use 10% of all that authority. Whereas, if I get it to 100% or find a keyword that's 100%, I can use 100% of my 10 million points. I can outrank it. So, if you if you if you look at the look at it as an algorithm, right, and go like, well, I can't beat this number. I can go back up in the equation and beat this number and this number is factored. I can outrank that site. That's why long keyword phrases work. Why do you think there's this narrative around like keywords don't really matter? Um I think it comes from people again it's like an observational point of view right where um if you've ever worked on a website with very very large numbers of of authority and you can put in 10 keywords into your slug or three keywords into the slug but Google gives you so much breadth on not just exact match phrases like if you're if you're low in authority and you look at what a page ranks for A low authority site would be characterized by every keyword over the last 90 days or 6 months will be in the slug of the page, right? That's a low authority site. A high authority site, maybe 1% of the keywords will be will match the slug. The rest will all be broad match, right? And that's that's how you character how I see a high authority site. And so if you've been lucky enough to work on those domains and and a high authority side would be like a DA70 plus if if you have to use a D if you if we use DA as a scale and so you can see why people form that opinion go like oh yeah why would you worry about the slug why would you worry about the page title and optimizing it for SEO. are looking at high authority sites which can rank for anything and rank for everything, right? That's the problem. They rank for everything until people come along with exact match phrases and just chip away at it and chip away at it. Yeah. And that's actually what happens with sites when they lose backlink authority and they don't understand. And I've been working on a few and we'll actually do a couple as a case study on YouTube soon um with Jonathan Denwood from WP Tonic and helping his community out. Um, when you start seeing a step down because you've lost traffic, you'll actually notice that your keywords are now only related, very relevant to your page. And then you start to realize your slug is so long that instead of getting every broad match for every word, you're only getting keywords that are contain the majority of those words. And so you have to republish. You actually have to take those pages out, figure out what keyword is the most important to you and republish for that. What's this this number one myth on the document you sent me? LLMs, especially Gemini, understand SEO. So, I think this is a new myth, right? Um and and and I think one of the ways we're seeing this happen is like for example like I think Stack Overflow uh they lost all of their traffic cuz people can now ask LLMs and obviously it an LLM can can can reply to you in a way you understand it right and I think a lot of people think that Gemini is built by Google understands how right so yeah sorry I interrupted you so for people yeah people think that that Gemini is made by Google. So, so it can give you just completely accurate SEO advice. That's the myth. And I've seen a lot of people on Reddit also say like, well, actually Claude gives really good advice. And I spoke to someone, very nice person, and they said like, um, let's just say they said perplexity gives good advice. They didn't say it. I'm just I'm just making it up here. And I I just asked him a couple of follow-up questions. I was like, "Okay, so what kind of advice does it give? And what what about bad advice?" Cuz whenever I ask mine, it gives me bad advice about this and this. He goes, "Yeah, yeah, but I know how to disregard that." I'm like, "Yes, you know how to disregard it. That's the problem, right? A lot of people will assume that LLMs are trained and they can weigh out information and if you if you and I published a list of like 10 things that I asked Claude about SEO and I said the majority of these are are missed. They're not they're not an SEO strategy." And a couple of people took exception to it. And I understand that they took exception to it. Um and and it annoyed them. And I wasn't trying to annoy them, but I'll give you a breakdown of the top 10 myths cuz I think these are are very similar across the LLMs. One was you need to have a great tech stack and a great tech foundation. Obviously, your your website needs to publish pages that Google can fetch, right? But inside this, there's a plethora of misconceptions like crawability. like is crawling is a binary outcome. Either Google got the document or it didn't. Right now, server side and client side rendering with JavaScript and JScript and avoid client side rendering if you can for the moment. Right? But that aside, if your page can't be retrieved, it's either because of a 404, a 301, a 5x, a redirect, canonical issue, duplicate content. In other words, the title is duplicative. Blocked by robots, blocked by no index, right? That's it. There's like 12 cases. Otherwise, it can fetch. You can't make a file more crawable, right? And I don't know why people keep trying to shoe on this as a as a viable thing, but Google doesn't care about your text stack. So, either your page is deliverable or it's not, right? If your page is under DDS attack, you have an infrastructure issue. If your page can't be published, you have a CMS issue. That's not an additive SEO. That's not I don't think that's an additive optimization, right? Like I think if if for example, if you have a brand new site, you build a brand new site on Wix, all of the pages should work. It doesn't break. There's no wear and tear. It shouldn't just fall over. And so I said, look, I think tech stack is a bit of a myth. Obviously, if you have a massive website and you have it, it it it breaks so often that you end up having a web team that fixes those, but that's not the SEO, right? If you've got a a million page website with a million back links with a million clicks a day and half of the pages break and you fix half the pages and it the traffic goes up, all you've done is restore to where it was. I'm not saying that that work is important, difficult, shouldn't be valued. You're doing great work. you're a valuable part of the team. As an as a marketing director who had an internal web team, I'm very very appreciative of your work. But if you're a brand new person setting out, your tech stack is not going to set you up for success, nor is it going to hinder you to failure, right? You can't make your pages more crawable. Just stop. The next thing that it came up with was like, you should write great content and you should have eat and none of these things are going to take a new site and push them up onto page one in Google. And then it had schema and an XML sitemap. And we've covered XML sitemaps in its own podcast, right? Google will ignore XML sitemaps from new sites. So it doesn't matter if you have a new sitemap, you should have a HTML sitemap. Your problem with a new site is getting authority to be indexed, right? Even if you have to sit there and Google your own name and click on it, if you have to fake authority, right? That was like an old trick in the early 2000s. Not going to work anymore, trust me. Um, and then the other one other items actually I forgot what they are. Oh yeah. Well, I want to ask you about number 10. So, what is it that we know nothing about SEO? What does this myth mean? Oh, I I was staying on Gemini. Sorry. But oh, I just wanted to say before before we go to that, there's a lot of things that people think are very important like long form content, research content, thick content, that kind of thing, right? That makes its way into these because they rank highly on Google because they're written by content writers who work at big publications with lots of authority. The LLMs cannot weed that information out. And that's why you have to be careful with their advice. That's all I wanted to say about that. We can jump to number 10. Number 10. Well, I want I want about ask about number 10 and then also number five, which is you you wrote parasite SEO is an automatic as a myth. Parasite SEO is an automatic gateway to rank. Okay. Which one do you want to cover first? Let's do parasite. Okay. So, I see a lot of people talking about parasitic SEO and they typically say like, oh, I published this article on Medium and I'm not it's not ranking. How do I get it indexed? Right? And it's like I think parasitic SEO was one of those things that like SEO people did on X to go to like show their SEO powers, right? And the people who typically go for these hacks are people who are trying to find a one-way hack. And they're like to hell with understanding all this SEO part, right? Because it's become so complicated and there's the list of hundred things in it. and they go to Medium and they write an article and they go like, "Well, I'm not ranking." And it's like parasitic SEO is a hack if you know SEO very well. If you don't know SEO, it's just going to fail. Firstly, if you understand the Jupiter content issue and you understand content cannibalization, you cannot have two pages on the same domain name rank for the same thing with the same title. Even if it's a broad match, Google will pick the oldest one with the longest click-through rate history. This undoes the argument, for example, that geos have that LLMs prefer fresh content. If you look at all of the Reddit posts that rank, most of them are so old they're archived. And it's because they have the oldest click-through rate. And because new pages can't enter that index, they're blocked out because of click-through rate history. That's why parasitic SEO fails. And the reason that SEOs actually make it work is that most SEOs backlink to those pages and people don't see that. When you said when you said uh you said you could enter a new SER and then you said that other SERs are more locked for people who get confused. So, SERs, if if if if you're if you're trying to get into a a SER where the top three pages all have 100,000 backlinks to those pages, you're not going to get there on cornerstoneing. You just forget about it. It's not it's not happening. You might get rotation testing, but then so in other words, when you look at a particular keyword, you'll see like an orange broken orange line in Google Search Console. That's Google rotation testing. So you might see one impression over 30 days and it'll go up and down, but you're you're then betting on your content being so amazing, right, that your click your pogo rate isn't higher than your competitors. And that's highly unlikely, right? Or higher relevance or higher relevance, right? But so I imagine that when we're getting to these highly competitive niches, everything is so up. Exactly. Yeah. what they're so relevant within an inch of cannibalization and every page is in is is built out. Obviously, where there's one page ranking for broad, those are the ones to go for. That's where you can exactly use your relevant score against your authority score. But I imagine when you're up against an SEO who's like checking these stats every hour on the hour, you're not getting into these without some sort of backlink, right? You really have to understand. Another way to do that is to actually break in on longer tail things and then use that clickthrough rating to affect the others. That's why you see FAQs for example built into a page. Um so it comes back to this idea like SEOs can enter new um SER positions but you have to understand the mechanics and parasitic SEO is not like an automatic free pass. How do you do how do you do parasite SEO that that works? So, first of all, check to see if the if that domain ranks for that phrase and if it's if it's just a next best article or if there are a series of articles. If there's a series of articles other people are already trying it, forget about it. Give it up. if you want to do it with Reddit, you probably have to have a subreddit that's relevant to it or you probably want to own the Reddit. Um, it's it's probably very hard to do it with on Reddit. Well, actually, a lot of people do it on Reddit by framing very good questions. I think I think parasite SEO with Reddit is really easy, especially for especially for local. You go to local subreddits where the moderators are not sophisticated and kind of anything goes and you say like, "Oh, what's the best hairdresser in my city?" And then you and then what what you do is you plant that you have another Reddit account and you plant the top comment. You buy up votes for that comment and and then and then like a week later you edit the post and you say and you do like a big edit. I went to this this place as recommended by the top comment and it was really good. They gave me this incredible experience and now you have the main post saying that this is the best and the top comment saying that this is the best and the moderators don't do anything about it because they don't know in local subreddits. A lot of them have no idea what parasite SEO is. I think yeah, there's a lot of moderators who like they would welcome that traffic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They they want those questions being asked. Um and and I I I think that with Medium as well. I think if you I from what I've seen if you have like an aged if you have an aged medium account where you have linked to previous articles even just social links even just like you have a you have like an ex profile for that medium account and then every time you put out a new post you go up we put out a new post and then that can over time though but if it's a a brand new medium account doesn't work well. Yeah. Not that I'm not that not that we're advocating spam because we would never advocate spam. David and I would never advocate SEO spam ever. Terrible idea. Um even for experimentation, research and development purposes. Um I So that's what I mean. There are there are certain areas that are very easy to get into and there are probably areas that are very difficult. Like if it's a high e-commerce term, it's probably going to be challenging. Um, and it's definitely, but what I mean is there's no free pass, right? Like if you're just starting out and going, I'm going to go to Reddit and try parasitic SEO, it's going to fail. You like like you just said, you need two accounts, right, to run a Q&A um model, right? Um, and that's because it makes it hard to open accounts. They do. And I also think that the amount of LLM spam out there generating thousands and thousands and thousands of very similar questions is also flattening that out, right? It's just it's just like basically like going to Caesar's Palace and hitting every roulette table with every number, right? Because they have unlimited cash. And so it doesn't matter if 90% of them fail, they're running a 100red a day. And if 10 stick, that's the payday, right? And and that's what's happening. I think what's the number this number 10 that that we know nothing about SEO? So what does this myth myth mean? I I think we see this a lot um where people are saying making statements about SEO, right? And sometimes I see this argument, well we don't know how SEO works. It's it's a big black box. It's a mystery. You can't say one or the other. There are lots and lots of parts to SEO. there lots and lots of algorithms but you can definitely make statements about it right reverse engineering is a science right and and it's such a science that the reason we have PC computers today when IBM developed the first IBM PC the thing that made it so attractive was the BIOS chip the BIOS chip was like a simple basic input output system that loaded the operating system it just knew enough to find an operating system which was written by Microsoft and load it. And IBM had a patent on it. So all of the people that wanted to make generic PCs like your Dells and we're talking pre-dall, right? What they did is they got chip engineers to reverse they put the BIOS chip on a motherboard and they would interrogate it and look at all of the send data in and then look at what they got back. and they reverse engineered the biochip and they had to sign a contract saying they'd never worked on the original BIOS chip and that allowed them to make generic computers because all of the other parts were generic like the the processor was Intel, the RAM chips, the disc drives, all of that was generic and that allowed generic computer makers to load the Microsoft operating system onto all of those PCs. And that's why the PC is the number one computer today. So reverse engineering is a real discipline. It is a real science. We can make lots and lots of absolute statements about SEO. Do we know what all of those values are and how they're derived? Absolutely not. Those are locked in a in multiple vaults in multiple heads in in a small team around the world. But we can definitely make statements like duplicate content is real, cannibalization is real, this is real. We we can definitely make statements like that. Also, Google makes a lot of statements and just saying that Google lies all the time or Google doesn't want you to know how it works. That under undermines the huge amount of work, we both are big Matt Cut fans. He did a lot of work in explaining how Google works. He did a lot of work explaining it, but it didn't give everyone a free pass to entry, right? Like explaining to someone how to run doesn't guarantee them a gold medal, right? Mhm. Are there any SEO beliefs that you held strongly in the past that you changed your mind about? Um, absolutely a few. Yeah, I think it'd be it would be ridiculous if you couldn't change your mind. It's very hard for people to change their minds on things, right? That's like we see that in so many different aspects of life. Um, are there things that I change my mind about? Um, probably. Uh, I probably I probably changed my mind about like how much great content can earn back links uh once you start ranking. Um, how and I especially noticed that in YouTube like coming on your show and like putting up like the best content we can and how that just was a a an absolute like rocket ship launch. And so that definitely changed my mind about how if you can create good content and get it out there, how much of a payback you can get. That was definitely a a big learning experience for me. That's awesome. Most of the content in in SAS is boring. Dude, sometimes sometimes I see the stuff you're doing with video and I'm like, I've created a monster cuz I think before you came on the show, you were pretty, you know, you were on X and and LinkedIn and stuff, but you didn't really put your face out there. I mean, for people who don't know, actually, like there was a twomonth back and forth forth between me and David where I was trying to convince you to come on the show and it would be like every week or something and I'd be like, "You want to come on now? You want to come on now? Love to have you on and uh and and then you came on and it's my most successful guest episode and and and I've created a monster cuz you're like you're on your own YouTube and you're putting out two videos a day and I'm like, man." Yeah. Yeah. Look at my own YouTube. It's like passed 10,000 views. Yeah, I was looking at your analytics. You you shared them. Yeah. Thank you so much. Um I I I owe so much to this channel and I think reading all of the people that follow this channel. I can see how many others do too. And I remember when I was leaving New York and a very good friend of mine, Jean, said to me, "Get this microphone." And he was saying like, you know, you're going to want to listen back to it. And I like I can't listen to my own voice. I I can't do it. There's just no way. Um, and that's what that was one of the many things that put me off doing it. And then just to see like the positive feedback and and all I'm doing is like the same monologue I have in my head when I go for a walk in the afternoon and I start breaking down SEO problems in my head and I'm just like sharing them and it's it's amazing because I use the same voice when I write online and sometimes that like just winds people up hysterically, right? Because like it's emotionless. But when I say it on YouTube, it is the exact opposite, Oh, I think you're very charismatic. That's why it's a lot of fun. That's why it's a lot of fun to listen to you. Um, thank you. I really appreciate it. And and also the audience who with all of the positive feedback they've given us and all the comments and seeing how many people like I get so many DMs uh and I never share them and I never will. Um, but I get so many DMs that and I share some with with Sorry, I do share some with Edward. I'm I'm lying. Um, only when they're about only when they're positive and they're about the show. Yeah. So, those are the only DMs I get. Um, and and I appreciate them because like a lot of people are doing really great things and it's it's lovely to see that and it's lovely to see people going like taking like this complicated to-do list and just breaking it down into a manageable task list and just focusing on the important things cuz at the end of the day the important thing is getting people to read your content and not having to do this production list and production run of 100 things. And now is the best time like um we have AI to create thumbnails. My my thumbnails are all hysterically funny. Um, we have AI that can do AB testing for us. We have AI that can create a YouTube description. There's never been a better time to create a.com business, right? I think if we look at like the employment market, um, how how many people will have no choice to become self-employed? It's true. This is a great time, but have one more than one domain. Please have one more than more than one domain. Did you uh you know I I wanted to ask um did you see the there's been like chatter lately about the decline that I mean honestly decline isn't even a strong enough word. It's the absolute destruction of wpbginner. I don't know if you if you heard about this or if you saw it or do if you just go to seamush right now and put in wpbginner.com and for people who don't do that who are just listening I'm going to narrate what we're seeing. So May 2021, WP Beginner was which is a very well-known site, especially if you've been doing SEO or content marketing for a while. If you've been in WordPress for a while, you've heard of WP Beginner. WP Beginner May 2021 was at their peak, 2.5 or 2.6 million clicks a month from Google. This is according to Semrush. Now, do you want me to share a screen? I don't think I don't think we need to. I can I can Okay. And and since then it's just been it's a consistent decline where now it's literally at 32,000 clicks a month. So WP Getter went from May 2021 their peak 2.6 million clicks a month and now they and it's just been consistently downward, not up and down, just consistently down to now they're at 32,000 clicks a month. And uh yeah, there a lot of people have been talking a lot of people have said it's been bad content, overly self-promotional. It's all of their everything that ranks is just putting themselves number one and you know what you're going to get and it's not or they have super fluffy articles that's burying the answer. It's going to be like way down below. You're going to have to do a lot of scrolling and then finally you can find what you're looking for, but it might not even really address what you're looking for. I don't know if if you paid any attention to this, but it'd be interesting to hear your take when you see a graph like this. Wow. It's so my first take at this graph. And you know WP Beginner, right? I don't I've never heard of it. Really? Uh this is the first time I've seen the domain name. I actually just I've just gone to visit the domain name for the first time. I have never seen it. Um, and I can tell you exactly what I'm thinking as I look at this chart is like how quickly they went up from May 2019 to April 2021. I mean, they didn't go up and plateau. Yeah. There there they went up and came crashing straight down. Yeah. They went from Yeah. around May, January, May 2019 and then April 2021 they were at their peak. They had a pretty they had a a steady I mean even at but but even at like February 2013 they were at 27 26,000 clicks a month and then they then October 2016 they were at 245,000 clicks a month. It it has been it is has been a very steady to me it looks like a pretty steady upwards climb and a very steady downwards trajectory. their backlink profile is so interesting. What are you seeing? Why is it interesting? Yeah, you could share your screen. So, this might be helpful to people like how I look at Simrush screens like this, right? Cuz I we look at domains like this all the time. And there's a couple of interesting things. So, here first of all, like they they kind of plateaued here, right? And then they go flying up here. And then I clicked on the back links button and I saw this and this is what I was just talking about. You see how there's like this sort of like mirror of like new and lost, right? They're they're losing back links as they're gaining them. And then you look here. Well, it's not completely one to one. Well, that Yeah, that's dramatic. This is dramatic, right? That's a lot of backlinks to lose. Then when you look at the back links here, they are really really some oddball backlinks, right? But it's because it's a big site. I mean there are they're it's a legacy WordPress site. yeah, Lars Lofgrren put up a post about WP Beginner. can I can read it and the be and the comments. I was thinking about making a podcast on it. WP beginner Lars Lofgrren he did uh he did on LinkedIn and he did it on X and the comments on X were pretty. So he said Lars said so heartbreaking to see one of the all-time great blogs in the website category taken out back in old yeller by Google. Who is it? It's a WP beginner. And uh the top comment was in Google's defense, it is mostly just Sad listing his own pluging plugins number one on every post these days. And Lars was like, well, who doesn't do that? Then there was another one uh where where somebody said, "Thank God WP Beginner has always been a spammy piece of junk. Certainly not an all-time great blog. It should have been taken out ages ago. Lars disagreed with that. Um and but yeah, the I mean the graph is crazy. It What's crazy is like there was never it's like it it was either growing or dying, right? Yeah. Ba basically. But maybe it can come back. Why not? SEO was at an all-time high in in interest. Maybe it can come back. I we said we said back in New York, right? Like SEO is a uni channel, right? Um, email is email is is very important for communications. You need it to communicate with your customers. You can't risk getting blacklisted, right? Or or blacklisted. Um, and look at look at social media, right? Meta is a a mess, right? The the prices on meta out of control. LinkedIn is difficult. Very very difficult. Um, I think I'm only doing well in LinkedIn because of this channel, right? You think so? You post some you post some fun stuff. I I I post a lot of fun stuff before, but I I never got that many comments. Um, and and I sponsored post before before. So, um, it's it's definitely not that. Um and so I think yeah SEO is a uni channel um in in terms of like first discovery, final discovery and being bottom of the funnel and it with geo and with the sort of like technical debt right because if you look at you know so many pe a lot of people that I've been debating geo with have been saying well they can build their own search engine right and I'm like every content writer every CMO I've worked for in their minds they could replace Google in 10 seconds on a napkin Right? Everyone has these ideas of how Google could find better content. And Google's a a a relevancy engine. Uh same as Tik Tok, just a bit bigger. But look at the amount of infrastructure they have like Google Maps, right? They went and mapped the whole world. Remember the the graph um for uh Garmin Garmin stock price when Google announced that they were giving away the Google map data? It just went straight down because Garmin was the device that you when you rented a car, you rented the Garmin device. Uh Google have people with backpacks, self-driving cars, all mapping the world. Then they have the Google business um profile. Bing Bing has one as well. Then they've got um all of the account information. They've got points of presence in the ISP. Do you ever notice when you go to another country, you get the Google screen and everything else is slow? That's cuz Google literally has a search engine server in every ISP around the world as well as local points of presence as well as owning data centers globally. All of those crawling systems, all of that virtualized infrastructure. I think something that's cool is cuz I, you know, I travel so so much. People who watch the show, they know that I travel so so much and everywhere that I go, there's a Google office in every city. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. And I don't know how people think like if if um you don't see an open AI office in in every city. No. No. So imagine if you're open AI or Plexity or um anthropic and you're saying to investors, we need to buy more data centers. We need to build buy more engineers. We need to build more um space for LLMs and we need more partnerships and more advertising. And then they said, "Oh, by the way, we're also going to replicate Google. We think that's going to cost $900 billion. So they've got to spend $900 billion to get to here, right? That's immediate technical debt that no one I mean and literally you have the the knowhow to deploy that capital which like come on be able to do that cuz it's completely different infrastructure. It's like SpaceX and Amtrak, right? It's like they don't do the same things. And I don't see how any of these LLMs can afford to do that. And I don't see Brave Search or Exa being any different from Google. The results are so similar. It's just a cheaper way to get the data. Last question for you, David, and this is kind of what we were talking about before, but I think it's a nice one to wrap with. if a business owner could ignore 90% of SEO advice and focus on just one thing because we've talked about so much on the show and I think it's also I think like you said it's easy to get overwhelmed so for a business owner ignore 90% of SEO advice focus on one thing what should that thing be uh histing your content writing it and if it doesn't rank undo republish Okay. You don't need to cram a million things into it. You don't need an image in every post. I thought you were going to say relevance. I'm surprised. I thought you were going to say relevance. So, I'm I'm that's what I'm testing here, right? When you're when you're creating cuz like one thing is very small, right? It kicks out keyword research, right? So, if I had to pick one thing, it would be publish and test for relevance, right? And see if you can enter that index. And if you can't, undo it and go back again. If you've got a hundred pages that aren't getting clicks, I don't think pruning is a good idea, but I think that retargeting them is a good idea. I think that's actually the post that helped us meet, right, that you were talking about like these SE ideas. Um, if if you can republish um and reank that content under keep the content exactly the same. You don't have to rewrite the content. Uh, I see people coming to Reddit all the time to to all the different SEO subreddits going, "I've got the best content. I rewrote all the content. I've got zero errors in Google Search Console. I've got the fastest pages. Google won't rank me." And that's why I want to hammer down on that tech stack is a myth, right? Yes, tech stack is is important. It's important that your website works, but it's not enough and it's not additive. In other words, I don't assume that every website is broken. Very few websites I actually work on are actually that broken, right? And fixing it is a oneoff, but for new websites, just having like no errors and just having a great tech stack, that's not going to get you in. You have to understand the authority side. That doesn't mean you have to go out and buy back links and spend 10,000 a month on backlinks, right? And don't do that unless you understand how to assess and value a backlink. But if you have one thing to do, it's just keep trying content and if it doesn't rank, unpublish it and republish it. David, thank you as always for coming on the show. Thank you. You're going to be you're going to be back. You're going to be back in one week and one day that's going to be next Thursday for another Geo debate. That's what we got planned. So, if if uh if for the listeners and viewers out there, if you like the previous geo debate, we got another one coming up. And uh these are they're always fun. There's they're so they're fun for me and they're they're great for me cuz I really don't even have to prepare. I just need I just need to have an introduction and then I'm like a fly on the wall for the rest of it. And it's like fun to watch. Yeah. I think ideas are dangerous in vacuum chambers, right? They need to be tested and just because something is new doesn't mean that everything has changed. Like the fundamentals remain the same. It's going to be fun. All right, this is episode 1,079 of the show. 179 days in a row doing this podcast. Got more great guests coming up for you every single day. We have I really have a lot of guests coming up over the next couple of weeks. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.