Do search engines matter as much as they used to?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to Cerps Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the Cerps Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm a very congested, head of SEO branding here at Wicks. My name is Mordy Oberstein and I'm joined by the very not congested, very awesome, very stupendous, very amazing head of SEO communications here at Wicks, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello everybody. Hello all internet people. I'm in a good mood. I'm not congested, that's right, because I've been listening to my classic RnB all morning.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, is that what I should be doing for my cold? I didn't just listen to... Forget the medicine.

Crystal Carter:

Get yourself some nice like Toni Braxton or some nice Anita Baker and a cup of tea and just chill out. Honestly, it's vibes. How can you feel upset when-

Mordy Oberstein:

I feel my sinuses already clearing up.

Crystal Carter:

Just let it flow.

Mordy Oberstein:

I recovered listening to Bob Dylan because I feel like Bob Dylan. I feel amazely.

Crystal Carter:

How many tissues does a man need to use? I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

A lot. I'm not going there. A lot. The Cerps Up podcast is brought to you by Wicks, where you can instantly connect your site to Google Cert Console and automatically have your site map submitted automatically, and your homepage index instantly by the great Google in the sky. Why am I telling you this? One, because it's awesome, but also because this is talking about you submitting your site to search engines, and today we're talking about search engines. Huh? And if they still matter or not. Do they still matter? Will they continue to matter? Pum, pum, pum, pum.

Crystal Carter:

Is SEO dead?

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know, but search engines might be.

Crystal Carter:

What? Are search engine dead?

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. We're going to find out, because on this episode we're talking about the potential evolution of search engines. Are we on the precipice? Will social come to replace search? Is Chat GPT a search engine killer. 10 blue links a thing of the past? Lion, tigers and bears, and bing. Oh my. Get it? I said bing. Not Bing. Lions, tigers and bing. Oh my. Plus Janet Machuka stops by to share how social can impact search, even if social doesn't end up replacing search. And we'll dive into all of the different search engines and how they handle queries in different ways. And as always, we have the Snappy News and who you should be following on social. Ready, set search, episode 23 of the Cerps Up podcast is here. So search engines.

Crystal Carter:

Search engines.

Mordy Oberstein:

For years you've been using them, you've been relying on them to access information. They're old, not new. We all get that. I feel in every episode we have to have a Barry Schwartz Easter egg.

Crystal Carter:

And I'm going to put on my Barry Schwartz merch slippers as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh shoot, forgot my Barry Schwartz slippers. So search engines are old but not new, we all understand this. We all understand search engines have changed over times while the ones that have survived, RIP Alta Vista, Google isn't using just 10 blue links anymore. There's not the 10 old, plain old organic results. There's all sorts of, I'm officially calling them do hickeys. We spoke about search features, boxes that give you answers without URLs, boxes that gives you answers with URLs. Video results, images, filters. Search engines have obviously evolved. But have we evolved past search engines? Yes, with questions like that, I do wear jackets with leather patches because I'm all philosophical. I do. By the way, I have a jacket with leather patches. When I became a teacher, that's the first thing I did. I bought a jacket, leather patches.

Crystal Carter:

Did you stand on the desk and say, oh captain, my captain?

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I did stand on a desk one time, but I was yelling other things. We as an internet, have we gotten to the point where the traditional search engine doesn't meet or satisfy our needs anymore? Do we not want a list of results? Do we not even want answers from search engines anymore? Perhaps we want, I don't know, to move to social for our answers. It's not crazy, by the way, the young kids, they all like going to social. My kids, they go to the YouTube for answers and YouTubers for answers. They don't go to Google. Check that out. I am disappointed in them, by the way. Mr. Beast is not a replacement for Google, but I'm a curmudgeon, I get this.

In other words, do we not want to a list of results? Do we instead want the ability to dive deeper into things or take up multiple aspects of a topic? Not only that, does emerging tech like Chat GPT mean that we want a more interactive and dynamic environment that search engines don't provide? Whether it's user expectations or emerging tech, there's a lot to say whether we're at a crossroads what it comes to search engines, and that perhaps the practical definition of a search engine is about to change. Crystal, what are your thoughts?

Crystal Carter:

I think that part of the reason why search engines have changed is because the way we search has changed and the kind of information that is useful to us has changed. Also, the kind of information that people can provide to us has changed. So the search features try to keep up with them. Sometimes when I'm searching for information, sometimes I find that I need multiple inputs, but maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm not normal. But sometimes if if I want to know if the pumpkin patch is open and if they still have pumpkins around Halloween or something like that, I could Google it, but that may or may not be accurate. I could go to their Facebook page or something and they'll say whatever they said about the thing. But do you know what I tend to do for that sort of query?

If I want to know if something is going on, if something's happening, if I want to know what realtime activity's happening? I'll tend to go to Instagram. I'll go to Instagram and I'll type in that pumpkin patch, where it is. I've literally done this. Then I'll see their most recent posts. And nobody's telling me the information, nobody's written down that they still have pumpkins. But I'll scan through the pictures and I'll go, "There's still a lot of pumpkins, those people look happy, and they just took that picture a half an hour ago. I bet if I go there they'll still have pumpkins." But Google also gives you real time stuff. If I want to know if I'm going to have to have a really long line when I go to the sandwich place, then I can see this place is busy on Google, and that's information that's useful. But I think that if Jeeves, Ask Jeeves back in the day, does anybody remember Jeeves? Good old Jeeves?

Mordy Oberstein:

I do.

Crystal Carter:

That was a popular search engine that people used, and now we're asking Chat GPT. I wonder if they'll bring back Jeeves. That would be amazing to bring back Jeeves with AI. If anybody does that, please give me a shout out when you make your millions. But I think that the way that it's changed is because there's so much information now and there's so many people putting information online now, and it needs to be organized in lots of different ways. So some tools will lean into some parts. So for instance, again, Instagram has a now, but their search feature is terrible.

But they do have location and they have time. So if that's what you need to know, that's really useful. And I think Google for instance, has lots of information on what things people have published and that sort of thing. Chat GPT is fantastic, but they don't cite their sources in their content. And I never actually asked for the sources and which I might do the next time I try it, but it doesn't cite it's sources. So if you need to dig deeper, you just have to take their word for it, which as somebody who's studied academically, I don't call myself a professor, I don't have leather patches on my jacket.

Mordy Oberstein:

You don't have leather patches? I'll get you a jacket next time. I already won.

Crystal Carter:

But with academic rigor, if you've ever studied anything academically, they're like, "Who did you get this information from? Where is this from? Where is the bibliography? What is that from?" So I think that there's lots of different things depending on what you need you might need to get from different search engines, but there'll probably be some point where they converge.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I think with Chat GPT or GPT3 or AI writers in general, I think what we've done is basically said, you know what? That's going to come in and that's going to kill Google. And I just don't see that. I do think we're going to... I'll get to it. I do think that Google's going to have to change. What Google is now is not what people really want. But I don't think that a AI writer coming in... I think the interactivity is cool.

I fully expect there to be some kind of interactivity, if they can move faster, it's still a little bit too slow. But I saw an article about how they're trying to fix that problem in general. They'll figure it out. You definitely do want to have that interactivity as a cool dynamic. I don't think it replaces search. I don't think it can ever replace search. For instance the point that you mentioned, even if it gave me the answer, I want to be able to explore, I want to be able to dive deeper, I want to be able to see multiple vantage points on this topic. And one true answer is not the answer.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that can be dangerous sometimes depending on what the question is. Either it says there isn't something. And so if you think that this is the definitive source, if you think one search engine is a definitive source, indeed I mean dangerous with a lower case D. But if you think that one search engine is a definitive source, then if it says that, oh no, there isn't an answer for that, then people might stop looking. If it tells you the answer and you go, oh yes, that is absolutely the answer, never in the history of information has that ever been useful. People need multiple perspectives. It's always important.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's why they're sourcing. It's an academic thing. It's a necessary thing for the nature of information. There has to be sourcing, which is why that's a thing. I think that people, your point about going to multiple sources, is why social is becoming more relevant. And I would say that if a search engine wants to adopt something, it should put access points to more social perspectives on the results page itself. Well you see Google doing that with a Twitter carousel, for example. And it is doing that with TikTok. The more, the better at this point.

For certain types of queries, I don’t mean as a universal, because I do want to get information in real time for multiple people and see what's happening out there. I'll give you an example. Recently a new chain opened up here and I wanted to see what exactly are they selling, what kind of products are they selling, and all of the results that Google gave me were for press releases about the new store or articles from news outlets about the store. It didn't give me the information that I want. And where I got the information from? I went to the Google business profile, I took a look at the image that people posted there and looked in the background, what's on the shelves. I'm like, "Oh, they have that. Interesting. I want to go there now."

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. It's because a picture says a thousand words. Our picture's worth a thousand words. And sometimes these different bits of information can tell you a lot.

Mordy Oberstein:

People want to see what other people are doing and what's happening, how they're relating to whatever it is and the other thing.

Crystal Carter:

And TripAdvisor is a great search engine for things. So for instance, on TripAdvisor, if you want to know if a hotel is good, you can go and you can look at the pictures that the hotel puts up, you can also look at the pictures that regular folks have put up with their terrible camera phones and compare that to the reviews and compare that to the information. So you're getting lots of different points of information to make a decision.

Mordy Oberstein:

Isn't it interesting though, we're talking about, on the one hand, Chat GPT coming into search engine isn't replacing a search engine, which is a very cold... Replacing one cold machine with another cold machine. And on the other hand we're saying that people want to see what other people are saying more. You can't say both of those in the same breath. You can't say, people want the machine giving the answer and people also want to dive in more into social. My kids want to hear information from a person, so that's why they go to YouTube to get information. I think the era of the cold machine is dying. And that's not to say you can't integrate something like Chat GPT into the search engine. But I think a much more...

Look, 10 blue links, the idea, and by the way, in my opinion, all results pages are still predicated, they're still fundamentally about 10 blue links, 10 organic results. They're not 10 anymore, whatever, eight or nine or seven, whatever the number is. That is the backbone of the results page. But that's not what I want. I want to see multiple media formats, I want to see multiple layers of information. If I search for this store that opened up, I do want to see the press release, I do want to see what the media outlets are reporting. I also want to see what people are reporting at the same time, I want to see the images at the same time. I want to get all of that all at once, dive into one, come back and go down the next rabbit hole. To me it's all about rabbit holes. I want to be able to go down as many rabbit holes as I possibly can, and the search engine that does that first is where I'm going to go. 10 blue links are dead.

Crystal Carter:

I think you're absolutely right and I think that we're able to process information a lot more quickly than when that was the day of that, and we were able to filter more quickly. And again, depending on what your search need is, if I want to find reviews, Amazon is absolutely part of my search engine process. Absolutely. Even if I'm not buying from Amazon, I'm checking the reviews on Amazon because they almost always have some. That's always part of it if I'm looking for reviews. If I want to do a deep dive review, if I'm spending out a lot of money on something... Let's say I win the lottery and I decide to buy myself a boat. I know nothing about boats, but I want to be like, "I'm on a boat." So before I'm on my boat, I'm going to go on YouTube.

Mordy Oberstein:

A rowboat.

Crystal Carter:

No, I'm not getting a rowboat. When I win the lottery, I'm not getting a rowboat, I'm getting a-

Mordy Oberstein:

If I win the lottery, I don't want oars.

Crystal Carter:

No man, I'm not rowing that boat. When I win the lottery, I'm getting a boat with rims. No, I'm kidding. You can't put rims on a boat. I'm going to get a big boat. My boat's going to be amazing. But I know nothing about boats so I'm going to have to watch a lot of YouTube videos about people on boats and in yachts, and looking amazing in Miami or whatever. And so I'm going to have to do all that research. And so for reviews, YouTube is absolutely going to be part of that. That's going to be a big part of that. Maybe TikTok a little bit or something, but probably YouTube because I want to get right into it. And also Google because they're doing well at reviews.

So there's going to be certain parts of search where there's going to be certain ways of searching that are going to be better than others. If I was looking for book reviews for instance, I'm probably going to be checking out Good Reads a lot, actually. If I'm looking at film reviews, there's going to be stuff on Google, there's going to be stuff on IMDB, there's going to be stuff on Rotten Tomatoes. You know which ones are the places that you chat, and so they fall into categories when you're thinking about that stuff. But when I've done research on Chat GPT, I always end up going on search engines anyway. It's a good place to start. I think it might replace Wikipedia because I think much of it is summarizing what you get from Wikipedia

Mordy Oberstein:

Very much so.

Crystal Carter:

And sometimes in a tidier way. But to be fair, Wikipedia's got a very good search, it's very good on search as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

But that's what I mean. We're asking, is the age of the search engine dead? I would say, I'm going to qualify it as yes. The search engine as it is, I think people are feeling like, "It's not giving me exactly what I want." Does that mean that search engines as a concept are dead? No. And this is why I think, when the next new thing comes up, "Oh, that's going to replace the search engine." And then something new comes up, "That's going to replace the search engine." Because I think there's a general sense of not feeling satisfied, of wanting something different. And then when that next new thing, that different thing comes along, be like, "Oh, that's it." What I think it is is all of it. It's all of it. It's not, oh, this thing, it's social that's going to replace the search engine. No. Chat GPT it's going to replace a search engine. All of it is going to evolve in a new version of what a search engine is and what it should be.

Crystal Carter:

And I think it's if an Uber comes along, we're like, "Oh, taxis are over." No, I still get taxis. There's still a place for a taxi or whatever. If you go to a train station, there's always a taxi there, that's really easy, blah, blah, blah. but it explodes, so it's like a decentralization of the concept. So Apple's adding more search around maps and around other things as well. People are creating their own search engines in lots of different ways. So it's more of a diversification of those things. So for instance, when they say taxis aren't over, but there's also Uber, there's also Lyft, there's also Gett, there's also those little scooters that people take. It's become more complex because our needs have become more complex. And people say, "Well, I don't want that one, but I do want this one." And so people have more options for getting more information.

And I think what other people forget is that a lot of these search engines will index each other. So Google will pull in search results from Pinterest, will pull in search results from Twitter, they will pull in results from various different things. Thing will pull in some results from certain things. Like Duck Duck Go is powered by Bing, in some countries Bing and Google overlap as well. So sometimes it'll say that it's from one company, but the search engine is actually powered by a different one. So there's a lot of different ways that search engines make sure that they're able to help people find information. Because then we go back to the taxi example, the point is that people want to get from A to B. And that's the same with information. People want to find information, and at the end of the day, people aren't particularly fussed about how they get from A to B, whether it's in a taxi or a bus or a train or whatever. And some people will have different preferences or whatever, but they want the best way.

Mordy Oberstein:

And if you want to take a lesson out of this, if you're thinking about, "Oh well surgeons are going to die, they're not going to die." The lesson is that what people expect out of content and out of information is rapidly shifting and it's becoming way more diverse and decentralized and offering as much option as possible and as much autonomy to the user as possible. People want autonomy. The way that knowledge has come across on the web has been very direct and very dictatored. That's not a real word. It's been a dictatorship. You go to the search engine, it gives you and it gives you this. But people want autonomy in their knowledge experience. And as a marketer, as a content creator, whatever it is that you're doing on the web, that sense of autonomy you can give over in the knowledge acquisition experience is going to go a long way with your audience. Now speaking about search engines and social media and whatnot, social media activity can actually impact your SEO. How does that work? Well, here's Janet Machuka on how does social media activity impact your SEO?

Janet Machuka:

My name is Janet Machuka and I will want to talk a little bit about SEO and social media. SEO basically is the optimization of content through search engines. And I like the fact that social media is a great search engine. Search engines will love you if people love you first. And we have seen it happen a lot of the times with even our content through social media, the way we write it. If the search engine on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook loves us, our content will actually be seen by so many people. And looking at it from the point of consistency, it means you need to create content that is consistent, content that is going to make people know that you exist. And you actually need to be active. Either be it on your Twitter, on your Instagram, on your Facebook. So what am I saying at the end of the day?

Do content that will keep you be seen by the people who are searching you. And something else is social media actually benefits those people who are consistent from this point of view. If I search you on Google, for example, maybe I'm searching something about Twitter and you're creating amazing threads on Twitter, and I come across your content, it can actually lead me to your profile. So the consistency use of social media can lead to your profile on social media being seen on the search engines. Actually, it's not just about the Google alone. As I said earlier, social media alone is a search engine. And when people see the kind of information they search out of the keywords they are looking for, it helps you increase the visibility of your content and also the interactions of your content.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much Janet for that. That was really interesting.

Crystal Carter:

It's really useful. And she talked about a few things there. She talked about being consistent on social media and about your profile and stuff, and I've spoken about this as well. I think that it's an absolutely underrated, super valuable thing. Because for instance, we talked about Twitter showing up in search results. That only happens when you are posting regularly on Twitter. But it's really valuable for a few reasons. One is because it's a good way to get your links actually onto the Cerp because if you share links there, then they show as live links on the Cerp. It's also really good, particularly if you're talking about branding or if you're talking about what they refer to as Cerp dominance because it takes up a lot of space on the Twitter account.

And she also talked about being consistent with your brand, having your profile there. Optimizing your profile. If you do nothing else with your social media, optimizing your profile can add significant benefit for your SEO because you can link it to your schema markup which helps Google to understand your entity better, which helps everything you do online to work in conjunction and to benefit you overall. So there's a lot of good things there. And with regards to the consistency point, again, if you are using those profiles more like regularly and being consistent, then again, they will show up. So when people search for your name, they'll see your name, your Instagram, your Twitter, your TikTok, your YouTube, whatever it may be.

Mordy Oberstein:

If you have a result that's on the precipice and it's a negative result about your brand, I've definitely used the Twitter box as a way to push that down off of page one because again, the Twitter box can be really, really big sometimes. Also, and just what she was talking about, the content focus is a great... If you are thinking about, "How am I going to share this piece on social media with my audience?" It helps keep you topically focused and topically relevant. And that's also really good for your SEO.

Crystal Carter:

It also can help you build some momentum. If Google can see that there's a surge of interest on a particular topic, then it can help you to get indexed more quickly, because you're sending them lots of signals that lots of people want to see this content. And it can also help to see more keywords happen. It can also help you to get some more feedback on your content straight away, because if people are coming to the content and they're like, "What does that actually mean?" You're like, oh okay, maybe I'll write you another one. Maybe they'll write you a follow up piece.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's so much you can do there with that, there's so much value in this. Since, however, we're talking about search engines today, Crystal has an amazing idea. She's like, "Hey, let's do a new segment and let's call it, So Many Search Engines." Because there's not just one search engine, there's Bing, there's Duck Duck Go, there's Neighbor, there's View, there's all these search engines, and they don't always show the same exact thing or take the same exact approach with very straightforward keywords. So because we're talking about search engines and where they're heading on this episode, we thought today would be the day to introduce Crystal's brilliant new segment, So Many Search Engines.

Speaker 4:

Google's latest update, popular search engine Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, Jeeves.

Crystal Carter:

They're everywhere.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're so many.

Crystal Carter:

They're so many, oh my gosh.

Mordy Oberstein:

They're coming at me, there's so many of them.

Crystal Carter:

But no more Jeeves. No, I think Jeeves has gone. Am I misquoting that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh well, till there, I don't even know.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. Poor Jeeves.

Mordy Oberstein:

Maybe it's gone. Maybe they shut that down

Crystal Carter:

Nobody's asking Clippy either.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway, we thought with the inaugural version of So Many Search Engines, that we would start asking all of the different search engines, what is the best search engine?

Crystal Carter:

So Meta. That's so Meta.

Mordy Oberstein:

We just broke the fourth wall.

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like when they're watching TV while you're watching TV, on TV.

Crystal Carter:

I know somebody who gets a really big kick out of taking pictures of people taking pictures.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like this. So I've logged in, what is the best search engine into Google, and guess what? I got a bunch of ads. I did, I got three ads. One of them was from a Semrush and SEO ability. SEOs, there we go. And then I got a feature snippet listing the top 10 search engines and it gave me a list of eight. The best search engine in the world, Google. Search engine number two, Bing, then Baidu, then Yahoo, then Yandex and Ask, then Duck Duck Go, then Neighbor. And then it says more items so we have to click through to see the rest of the list. That's what I got on Google.

Crystal Carter:

All right. On my one I was checking out Neva, which is an interesting search engine which was recently has been shared by a few people. So Glenn Gabe's been talking about it, been talking about it, because they've got a search engine that allows you to tailor your search, but they also have a new feature where they're incorporating AI. So remember I was talking about how some of this AI generators, so if you're asking Chat GBT for things, they don't always give you sources. Neva has a feature where it does give you a source, which is very interesting. But I asked Neva, what is the best search engine? And it just gave you links, very similar to the plain blue links. It says 12 best search engines in the world and it's from inspire.scott, which is interesting. And then reliablesoft.net, 10 search engines. And then rapidapi.com, and then search enginejournal.com, which is very interesting because I've never heard of three of those websites. I've obviously heard of Search Engine Journal.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's very similar to what I got by the way, on Duck duck Go. So I got nothing rich in any way, shape or form, it's just your typical organic results. The first one from Life Wire, the best search engine of 2022, and then it has site links, like sublisting of some of the headers on the page. And then I just have another list of organic results. Some of them similar to Google, some of them not. Bing however, was completely different. And this is what we're talking about. Different search engines have very, very different approaches, so you need to be aware because you can get a lot of track from other search engines other than Google. Bing went full knowledge graph on me.

First it gave me one organic result at the top from grape.com, which is a browser, which is very different in terms of organic results than anything else any other search you gave me. It says Brave, best search browser. So it gave me a browser and not a search engine. So that's a little weird Bing. But at the same time, it gave an answer of Google according to two sources, and then it gave me those two sources and a snippet from those two sources. So it was very clear and definitive Google is the best search engine, Bing being honest there, and giving sources. At the same time, it gave me a knowledge panel of search engine, like what is a search engine?

Crystal Carter:

And it's got multiple links in there. So Bing does this a lot with their knowledge panels where they can be very illustrative. So for some things, if you look up a lion on Bing, it gives you a picture of Africa and a beautiful photo of a lion, and all these different links to it. For the search engine one, it's got links to different parts of it. It's got links across Wikipedia and various different things. They're also citing. Even though their knowledge panel is pulling together content, presumably using AI to generate that content, they are citing their sources underneath the knowledge panel, which I think is really interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

And just going to show you that being very much in general likes to take a very knowledge graph based approach even more than Google does. And I think it's because Microsoft has really vested heavily, heavily heavily in AI and they like to showcase it and they actually like to use it on the Cerp a little bit more than Google. I actually did the same thing, by the way, on TikTok. What is the best search engine? And I got a bunch of videos about private search engines.Private search engine. I was like, "I don't even know what this is talking about." Or I have a video about website the government should tell you about, a lot of privacy government stuff showing up, which I thought was-

Crystal Carter:

Very interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

... very interesting. Social was totally different than the traditional search engine here.

Crystal Carter:

YouTube, they're starting with similar sort of things, so 20 search engines that are better than Google. And then Duck Duck Go versus Google, which in Duck Duck Go is a more private search engine. And then the next one is, protect your privacy. And I think that something you get when you look at that is that people who are searching in places like YouTube, and YouTube is also a search engine obviously, and so people are searching on YouTube or searching on TikTok for search engines, might be searching for stuff that's maybe a little bit less mainstream.

Because Google, for instance, has a lot of restricted searches, for instance. So people who work in the cannabis field, with CPD and things like that, they restrict a lot of the search results for that. And I've known SEOs who've worked in that space and they have to be very creative about how they optimize for search because it's very sensitive, it's a sensitive topic. So I think that in places like TikTok and places like YouTube, people can have those conversations a bit more easily, maybe, and so you might see more of that stuff coming to the fore in those search engines.

Mordy Oberstein:

Which just goes to show you, if you're researching a topic, don't just go to a queue to research tool that's focused on Google, go and look what's happening in other platforms because it could be a very diverse way of looking at what a topic is. So a little tip for you. And if that's news to you, guess what's also going to be news to you?

Crystal Carter:

What's news to me?

Mordy Oberstein:

The Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Oh boy. Perfect timing with the release of last week's episode of the service op podcast, all about ranking factors, because now you'll know how to handle the news that Yandex's 1,922 ranking factors have been leaked in a hack, per Danny Goodwin over at search engine land Yandex, leak reveals 1,922 search ranking factors. So what do you get as part of this leak? A lot of cool stuff, and what some calling the biggest SEO event in years as Yandex is similar to Google in a lot of ways, but also different in a lot of ways. So we know now that Yandex looks at things like is a page orphaned, meaning are there no internal links from the website pointing to a particular page. Looks at dwell time. How long are people spending on the page?

How many queries the site or the page ranks for, the average ranking. Is a page being bookmarked by people, is actually a ranking factor with Yandex. Also keywords in the URL, also a ranking factor on Yandex, which Google has also said is a ranking factor, but super, super small. But we don't know what it is on Yandex, is the point. We have this whole list, but we don't know how they're weighted and how they're considered, which is what we spoke about on last week's episode, all about ranking factors. Alex Burkas has a great Twitter thread or two on this. I'll link to it in the show notes. And while it is all very, very interesting, really my question is now, now what? Let's assume Google uses the same 1,922 ranking factors, the exact same ones. Let's just pretend that they do.

They don't, but let's pretend that they do. Now I need to create, according to these 1,922 ranking factors, if you go through all of them, which I have not gone through all of them, I've gone through a lot of them. But basically now I need to create well optimized content that I need to push out there to get some momentum around, maybe through social, get some folks to visit the content, maybe link to the content, which of course means I need to create really, really good content that helps my target audience. And now my life is different because... So now that I know all these ranking factors, my life is different because... And that's the Snappy News. See, I told you it was going to be news to you because it wasn't new. See, I didn't lie.

Crystal Carter:

That was new. That was some new news.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was new.

Crystal Carter:

It was new. It was not old, it was new.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was not old. I just saw a tweet recently. Bowery wants to now charge people to be asked, is this new? I'm going to go bankrupt. If it is new, he'll pay you $10.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, that's interesting. I could get that boat.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like this. Which that brings us to who you should be following on social media, and you're expecting it to be Barry Schwartz, but we actually recommended you follow Barry, I think like three or four times already. So follow Barry. Also, because we're talking about search engines, keeping with our theme here, someone who's been very focused on TikTok SEO and TikTok as a search engine has been the one, the only, Lidia Infante, who's @LidiaInfanteM on Twitter, that's L-I-D-I-A I-N-F-A-N-T-E M on Twitter.

Crystal Carter:

The M is very important. When she got married, I was like, "Happy wedding, Lidia Infante without the M, and it's a completely different person. So I'm sure that the other Lidia Infante's fantastic, but the Lidia Infante that we're talking about is a great SEO who's spoken at lots of events and has written extensively on various topics. She's particularly good on keyword research as well and keyword research gaps. Also, she's contributed to the Wix SEO hub, talking about international SEO, and her work on TikTok is really great. And so check it out. She's a great follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

Couple of pieces, I think Moz had a piece about TikTok SEO, so we'll link to them in the show notes. I'll find them. I'll use a search engine. I'll find the article she wrote. Which search engine? I don't know. Maybe I'll go to TikTok or Instagram alone.

Crystal Carter:

Who knows?

Mordy Oberstein:

Who knows? No one knows. I know. I'm not telling you yet. It's secret. You want me to tell you?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to use Google.

Crystal Carter:

Plot twist people. That was-

Mordy Oberstein:

I am so boring.

Crystal Carter:

I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't entirely expecting that.

Mordy Oberstein:

What flavor is Mordy? Vanilla.

Crystal Carter:

I remember having a conversation with you once and I was like, "Ah, vanilla." You're like, "Why is everybody always-

Mordy Oberstein:

Why is everybody... Vanilla's a great flavor. Especially with the little specks.

Crystal Carter:

The best flavor is mint chocolate chip.

Mordy Oberstein:

Mint chocolate chip. Absolutely. Hands down.

Crystal Carter:

It's the best one.

Mordy Oberstein:

We're not even going to argue that.

Crystal Carter:

We're not going to argue because it's got chocolate, which is great, and it's got mint and the mint is cold. You feel refreshed and nice.

Mordy Oberstein:

End of conversation, we'll stop here. Thank you for joining us on the Cerps Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we are back next week with an all new episode as we dive into how to pick an SEO tool. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn, looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and the webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.