In the second episode of a multi-part series on the impacts of A.I. on search engines and SEO, hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk with Mark Traphagen, Vice President of Product Marketing & Training for seoClarity, an enterprise SEO platform. Mark talks about the ethical, technical, and business challenges of adding and altering A.I. in popular software products. -- Next, we're joined by Glasgow-based SEO Craig Campbell who talks about how he uses A.I. in some instances but how he won't in others. Craig talks about the current limitations of A.I. in his SEO practice and how Google is looking at A.I.. Always warm and thoughtful, Craig gave us an open and highly interesting interview.

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We are in a time of sweeping change driven by A.I. yet there remains a great deal of confusion about how Large Language Models work and how A.I. content is actually generated. Over the coming weeks, we hope to help change that. In the ten months since the public introduction of ChatGPT, we've used a lot of airtime talking about AI and the Large Language Models behind it. We've talked about extraordinary uses of A.I. and very reasonable fears about how A.I. is going to be used. Like many others in the search industry, show hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger have a better-than-average understanding of A.I. but, they also understand that relative to our guests they're merely well-informed laypersons. - LLM researcher Gavin Klondike joins us in this first of a several-week series to explain the basic concepts behind LLMs. Gavin helped organize the A.I. Village at this year's DEFCON which is where Kristine met him. In this episode, Gavin breaks down how LLMs are built and taught to predict the most likely syntax with which to construct a response to a prompt. He explains many of the processes LLMs use to generate responses and provides what is perhaps the very best analogy explaining how A.I. simply can never understand the topic at hand, even if it can help you understand that topic better. - This was a fascinating, frightening, enlightening, and highly entertaining interview that will absolutely help you understand the technology that's rapidly altering the ecology of the Web.

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We started this week with the news that Google's original search spokesperson, Matt Cutts, and his wife Lindsay, are the parents of twins! That leads us to talk about Twitter and the "What Could Go Wrong?", attitude that wants to convert X into everything or distill the workings of the Web into X. From there, we have a fairly serious talk about Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), which will be newly improved with links. Should companies be open to allowing their content to be used to train AI and LLMs? Several of the top 1000 websites think not so we talk about the efficacy of blocking your content from LLMs. We round out the show with an index full of Google organic search news and SEO opinions and would like to giggle while reminding link-spammers that emailing Danny Sullivan will not likely produce a beneficial outcome.

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Google's August 2023 Core Update began running this week which makes this the August 2023 No Worries edition. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger explain what a Core Update is, how long they generally take, and how it's simply not worth worrying about the Core Update until the Core Update does its thing because we don't really know what the update is trying to accomplish until Google tells us or until it's done. Luckily, it was a mega-silly news week so there was a lot to talk about, starting with the ongoing weirdness that is Twitter which led to the launch of Meta's Threads on desktop which led to a lot of Google SEO news. This was a fun show in a worrying week where the overall mantra should be, "It's Only a Core Update, No Need to Worry."

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This episode starts with the realization that we're about to mark the 20th anniversary of Google's infamous November 2003 Florida Update. That update was a day the search universe changed, much like the universe is rapidly shifting due to more recent changes introduced in a much more recent November. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger use the history of organic search and events from the past week as a platform to look at the sweeping changes brought by the introduction of AI elements in search. Along the way, we help with some SEO myth-busting, joke about how to ultimately block Google and all other bots, talk about the growth, intention, and implications of various AIs at various search engines, and rage-joke about the trajectories of Twitter-X. This is a passionate, funny, and quick-paced conversation that plays with the borders of technology, user intent, and policy. - A special thanks to our sponsor, AudienceKey! 

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Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger run through the week's search-related news items but focus on trying to explain, debunk, and find use cases for the new SEO fad of content-culling. Recently Google reps weighed in on CNET's decision to remove a large bulk of content from the earliest days of the Internet. This prompted a good debate in the SEO community and a good conversation between hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger on the value of culling content and the limited number of scenarios in which it might be a useful tactic. The question of what to do with ancient content is a question of what the Web is supposed to be to different users. For some, the Web is the world's largest archive of everything while to others the Web is an active place of commerce and communication and for some, it's just a place to screw around and have lolz. Speaking of, we also talk about the Zuck vs. Musk fight, how to block some AIs using robots.txt, the difference between crawl and render, and a whole lot more...

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It’s BluShark Week here on Webcology as this week we’re happy to welcome guest Seth Price, founder and CEO of local-legal focused SEO firm, BluShark Digital. According to the AboutUs page on their website, “BluShark Digital uses the same cutting-edge marketing techniques (high-quality technical optimization, sophisticated content, authoritative link-building, and local optimization) that Seth used to grow his own business and has established itself as a best in class digital agency focusing on the legal sector.” 

That business that Seth grew, by the way, is a multi-officed law firm. Seth is also the founding partner of Price Benowitz Accident Injury Lawyers, LLP, a law firm with numerous offices around the Washington DC, Arlington, and Baltimore region. Price Benowitz started with two attorneys and now employs over 40 people.

Jim and Kristine spend a fast-paced and truly fun hour talking with Seth about local search, how his digital marketing experience helps better build his legal business, and how building his legal business literally built BluShark, his digital marketing business. With a wealth of experience to share from both businesses, Seth graced us with an insightful and information-packed conversation. If you're into local search, you want to hear this episode.

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As the Actor's and Writer's strike continues, Netflix doubles down on its strong A.I. position by advertising a $900K / year A.I. Product Manager position. Even with the real-to-life drama of the writer and actor's strike, the weirdest news of the week goes to the social network formerly known as Twitter. Rebranded "X" on what appears to be a lifelong whim, the network Musk bought continues to sink into a swamp of its own making. We also get to discuss a lot of Google stuff including programmatic spam, reviews by cohorts of interest, and much, much more. Tune in to discover why X now marks the schlock. 

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The Writers and Actors strike provides a stark but pretty accurate warning for everyone else about how AI will be used to displace workers and degrade opportunities. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger start a conversation about AI's effect on culture discussing how script writers are being replaced by AI and how actors and voice actors are being paid for single performances that get digitized and used as avatars for those actors in future products. From there we look at different AI tools, apps, models, and other AI-enhanced ideas such as Google's news-story writing AI model, the launch of AI models from Meta, Apple, and Anthropic, the wild inaccuracies that attracted the attention of the FTC, and the continued insertion of AI into everything. We also got to talk about Google updates, Google indexing issues, the massive loss of links reported in the Search Console, and how a perfect UX is incredibly important but still not a replacement for helpful content. This show goes pretty much everywhere it can in the hour it had to get there.

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Kristine Schachinger is on the road this week speaking at the iGB Live Amsterdam conference so we had a special guest live from Amsterdam NL, Julia Logan, perhaps better known in SEO circles as Irish Wonder. Julia is a long-time web consultant who has practiced SEO since 2000. In 2020 she founded a boutique agency, Zangoose Digital. Jim, Kristine, and Julia have a wide-ranging conversation that just jumps in at one of Julie's many specialties, mainstream media's enormous effect on the online gaming space, which was the topic of her session at IGBLive. We also talked about the history of SEO, work in the DEV trenches, the effects of AI on the gaming industry and content creation, and the long-term implications for search marketing. Ultimately, this was a fun high-level conversation between three long-term web marketers who find the job and each other fascinating. We eventually got around to covering the week's SEO news. 

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Twitter had another very bad week after it deGoogled itself in a badly thought through response to the scrapers and bots attracted to the network. Last Friday, Elon Musk announced he was limiting the number of Tweets users could see in a day in response to scrapping activity and bots on the network. Those limits had numerous effects, including having nearly half of Twitter content in Google's index removed. Today the world woke to the first day of Threads, the Twitter-like messaging platform started by Meta and based on its Instagram platform. While Twitter's data is slowly returning to Google's index, it's a little less likely unhappy users will return to Twitter. Kristine Shachinger and Jim Hedger talk about the first day of Threads and the threat Threads might pose to Twitter. 

We also talk about OpenAI's quest to reign in AI, Canada's reaction to Google and Meta removing news coverage for Canadian users, Google and file structure, and a lot more. Tune in for an interesting and weirdly silly episode. 

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1 day, 13 hours, 59 minutes: That's the time left at the time of recording before Google pulls the data plug on Universal Analytics 3, replacing it with the much unloved and misunderstood Google Analytics 4. Many SEOs and other digital marketers, all of whom have been warned for the last 18 months are freaking out having hoped Google wasn't actually going to go through with the switch. Surprise, they will in approximately 1 day, 13 hours, and 58 from the time this sentence was spoken.

Joining Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger on Webcology today is Alan K'necht, owner of K'nechtology and one of the search marketing industry's expert's experts on analytics. Alan walks us through the changes between UA3 and GA4, pointing out similarities and differences search marketers should look for. This was a wildly interesting episode hosted the day before a significant milestone day in search history, the day Universal Analytics and the way it gathered user information, is being put out to pasture and replaced by something the sector dislikes but; as Alan points out, maybe you'll learn to like it. 

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

Other real things: Early bird tickets are still available for November's BrightonSEO USA in San Diego but the free ticket lottery opens on Monday. Google has introduced a new Core Web Vital, INP. Garry from Google goes over how ChatGPT and other LLMs are not reliable tools to diagnose SEO issues, the European Union is mandating Google break up its advertising business, Microsoft is developing an even more powerful AI which it code-named Orca, and USAToday is suing Google for decreasing ad revenues and monopolistic practices. Did we mention the high potentiality of the world's first and likely only billionaire cage match? It was a weird week.

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"Whispers from within, Nature's laughter fills the air, Gentle cheeks release.", ChatGPT for Chrome, 2023

It's been another week of extraordinary A.I. developments with plenty of examples of A.I. screw-ups, gripes, and fears as we surge forward figuring out how to best use and abuse the powers of A.I... Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger look at Chatbots in Search and talk about a few weeks of watching Google's Search Generative Experience roll out. One critic called Google SGE a plagiarism engine and another critique noted the lack of passion that goes into generating haiku poems about farts so we asked ChatGPT to generate a haiku about farts and it did create an original haiku about farts so ChatGPT winds that around.

We also talk about the loss of navigation in the final weeks of Universal Analytics, how Google might be forced to break itself up to do business in the European Union, how a blackhat super scrape netted $800K, and more...

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The impacts of artificial intelligence are everywhere and we spend a lot of time talking about those impacts but we also got to talk about some regular Googley stuff too. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schackinger did start off on a high note, noting the reports of the death of a US Air Force member testing an AI-operated drone were greatly and completely exaggerated as it was only a simulation. Paraphrasing the words of the commanding officer, "... it was just a simulation. Only a madman would do that for real." Fun times!

We also talked a bit more about Sam Altman's fears of "... something really bad happening", but also talked about how Google is adding Implicit Code Execution to Bard and giving it the ability to export data to Google Sheets. Interesting times?

Best of all, we got to talk about Google glitches, the delicate art of SERP Composition, and the expansive myth of Index Bloat, and we try to answer the age-old question, "Can security headers help with rankings?" Bizarre times indeed...

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Sometime last yesterday, word went out on Twitter and LinkedIn that one of the largest SEO conference in the world was coming to North America. Conference founder Kelvin Newman tweeted and posted his team was bringing the show over here in 2023 with a date and time to be announced in the coming weeks. We asked Kelvin to come on Webcology to talk about the experience and, what we expected to be a quick ten-minute promotion turned into a twenty-five-minute conversation about his experience organizing shows, how to pitch your ideas, the free ticket lottery system, and a host of other stuff.

We also walk through the enormous number of AI and SEO-related stories from the world of search including, 

• New AI-driven third-party plug-ins for Expedia, Kayak, Instacart, and others (https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-openai-web-browsing-plug-change-how-we-use-internet-2023-5)
• 22 best ChatGPT Chrome Extensions to try (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/chatgpt-chrome-extensions/485594/)
• Bing named the search engine of record for ChatGPT (https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-search-search-engine-chatgpt-35437.html)
• The opening of the first trial group in Google's new AI-driven Search Generative Experience (https://searchengineland.com/google-opens-access-to-search-generative-experience-today-427572)
• Google's not-so-new Topical Authority Ranking (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-news-topic-authority-ranking-system-35438.html)
• and more...

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

Martin has been a practicing SEO since the dawn of the commercial Internet and has worked with some of the largest websites in the commercial sphere, including TicketMaster, Expedia, and Orbitz. Founder of MOGmedia, Martin has shared his findings and SEO data with the SEO community as a trusted source for over a decade.

Today we talk about AI's advancements in the tech sector, discuss the intricacies of conducting a large-scale website audit, and cover how AI has made Serpere much faster and more accurate and how its use of AI radically simplifies the reporting and explanation process. 

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Google announced major changes to search results as artificial intelligence-assisted search becomes part of Google's information universal ecosystem (*except for Canadians, Germans, and a small gaggle of other unfortunates whose governments find themselves arguing with Google) 

In this show, Jim Hedger and Kristine Shachinger talk about the biggest announcements from Google IO and how coming changes will affect the business and practice of SEO. We discuss Google Perspectives, About This Image, Google Maps Immersive, Google Helpful, and a host of other Google search products and services that are or are soon to be directly influenced by AI-driven results sets. We also cover changes to Google's Core Web Vitals, and how the statement, "What does this bring to the existing information table?" is one of the best questions to ask when considering the true value of content. 

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Geoffery Hinton is widely considered the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence. His research into human brain function in the late 1980s and early 90s at the University of Toronto prompted him and a team of early neural researchers to start to conceive of a digital brain that could learn. His work is considered the foundation of modern machine learning and large language models. He recently stepped down from his position as head of AI research at Google's parent company Alphabet so he could raise awareness of a terrible thing he can't stop thinking about. Ten months ago, an AI model Hinton was working with deciphered and explained the humor behind a joke. It wasn't necessarily a great joke but it was a series of complexities that built upon themselves to end in a twist requiring a leap of thought to understand. That the AI model was able to easily make the leap and understand the humor that made the joke funny astounded and terrified him. That was the moment he reckoned the rapidity of advancement since the beginning of his career in the late 1980s. What he thought would be happening several decades from now is happening today, faster and far fuller than he and other pioneers of AI anticipated. Last week, Hinton suggested he regretted much of his career. In this episode, Jim Hedger and Kristine Shachinger talk about Hinton's worries through a week's worth of AI news. We also talk about Hinton's extraordinary career and think about the advancements that can be made because of his work. We also talk about E-E-A-T, the coming of Google Analytics 4, Google's advice on canonicals for publishers, and Google's disavowal of disavows. We're still trying to get an interview with Professor Hinton. 

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

• the growth of Spoutable
• Elon's Secret faux-minor Twitter profile
• Google Product Updates - GA4 is coming
• Google April 2023 Reviews Update done rolling out
• Google rewriting page titles in SERPs (again)
• and the bipartisan plan to limit social media access to ages 13 and over

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