When to throw SEO best practices out the window

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up.

Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the best-in-class, the class of not telling you, Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you very much. I was wondering what the intro would be on this particular episode of SERP's Up podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, I pivoted the last second. We were talking right before we started recording this.

Crystal Carter:

That's because you're a gentleman. That's why.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right. I try.

Crystal Carter:

But yeah, I think-

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, I totally botched it. I didn't say you were the head of SEO Communications at Wix. You are just the head of all SEO communications.

Crystal Carter:

You darn straight. That's right. That's right. People want to talk about SEO. You come through me. No, I'm kidding. No, you probably don't. There's other people, there are other people that you could talk to that we've mentioned them and they've been on the podcast before, so talk to those people. I do my best.

Mordy Oberstein:

I try. Or maybe Scott would say somehow I manage.

Crystal Carter:

All good, all good, all good.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix where you can not only subscribe to our newsletter, our monthly newsletter, Search Light over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, where you can also manage your team and their clients with Wix Studio. From advanced team permission settings to customizable client resources, check out what Wix Studio can offer for your agency at wix.com/studio for all the things that keep your client and team management up to best practice and best standard. Because today we're talking about best practices for SEO, when to throw them out of the damn window.

Crystal Carter:

And when not to as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

And when not to, right. Also, very important.

Crystal Carter:

We're going to talk about both. Use your noggin, people.

Mordy Oberstein:

But it's better for Google Discover if we talk about how to throw them out of the damn window.

Crystal Carter:

That's right. That's right. Just like it's that meme of the girl throwing the money out the window or sometimes I feel like I want to throw my laptop out the window. Sometimes I have that feeling.

Mordy Oberstein:

Sometimes I want to open up the window and just yell out of it like, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."

Crystal Carter:

That's normally when the algorithms updates have come in and then come in again and then come in again and you're like, "Why aren't there 12 at once?"

Mordy Oberstein:

Because we're integrating into our systems, our ranking systems, and we're recording this right smack in the middle of the March 2024 core update. Anyway, we're talking about throwing best practices out of the damn window when we're not to do that from scenarios when best practices work and when they don't work best for rankings, to when best SEO practices don't work for your team and when best SEO practice might actually harm your relationship with your clients.

Absolute SEO legend, Jono Alderson chimes in on a really, really, really interesting outlook on the value of SEO best practices as a concept these days. Plus we take a deep look at what the heck a best practice actually is to begin with. And of course we have your snappiest of SEO news for you and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness on social media. So forget everything you know about SEO. Well, not everything, as episode 83 of the SERP's Up podcast, Lee's Best SEO practices aside because at the end of the day, we talking about practice. We talking about practice, not the game we go out there and die for, not the game. We're talking about practice. How silly is that? Practice?

Crystal Carter:

I am loving the DeepCut AI throwback quote there. We're talking about the original AI.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right.

Crystal Carter:

Right. The original AI.

Mordy Oberstein:

Those who are not old school basketball fans. Allen Iverson, who's an OG of basketball, I love Allen Iverson, got called out. He's one of the greatest stars in NBA history, got called out for not showing up on time for practice.

Crystal Carter:

And he'd had some personal situations. I've seen the documentary about it. He'd had a bereavement or something like that and they were like, "You didn't come to practice." And he was like, "Talk about practice. I'm Allen Iverson." And I was like, you know what? Yeah. But yeah, Allen's right. Allen's right. Sometimes people go on about best practices and they've read it somewhere, they've read it in a blog, they've seen it on a video, they've done things like that. And don't get me wrong, let's just clarify right now. Best practices are called best practices for reason. Best practices are generally seen as solid advice for most people, for most people. And that is important. And they tend to be the things that you should absolutely tick off before you start getting into more advanced, more nuanced, more complex activities. And it can be really, really useful, particularly when you're at the beginning of your SEO journey to pay very close attention to best practices. And when you're thinking about technical SEO, it is almost, it's very, very critical to pay attention to best practices because-

Mordy Oberstein:

There's no leeway with that.

Crystal Carter:

There's no leeway. You have to make sure your sitemap needs to be readable. It just has to be. And that is best practice. Your sitemap needs to be readable, your sitemap needs to be discoverable, et cetera, et cetera. If your sitemap isn't, if your code isn't parsable, yo, you're not in the game. So those best practices absolutely pay attention to, but I think it's a little bit, I think sometimes, particularly when you get more advanced, it's a little bit like driving. When I learned how to drive, they were like, "You keep your hands at 10 and two and you never take both hands off the steering wheel when you're turning the car. You have to squeeze them together and then pull them apart and then squeeze them together and pull them apart." And I have watched my mother drive. When I was learning to drive, I'd watched my mother drive for years. She didn't drive like that. My mom had one hand, she had a big gulp in one hand. She had one hand on the other one. She was telling us to be quiet.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's better than my mom who was driving with her fricking knees while she's eating a sandwich.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, right. Now, did we all get to where we needed to go? Yes. Was that necessarily the best way to drive a car? If anybody's listening to this-

Mordy Oberstein:

If you're trying to eat a sandwich while drinking a coke, it is.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Exactly. So you would not pass your test, driving with a sandwich and telling your kids off in the back. You're not going to pass your test like that and you would never teach anyone to do that. But as people get more skilled, they can get more creative and that they can get down into some of those things and they can assess the situation and figure out, they can assess the risk of trying something a little bit different. They can assess how complicated the situation is and whether or not this might be a time to ignore the best practice necessarily. As I say, this is something that you will grow into. So if you're just starting out, I highly recommend yes, follow best practices. However, there's lots of discussion around this and Christina LeVasseur, who's a great SEO and talks a lot towards folks who are growing up in their SEO or developing their SEO careers talks about this as well.

She said, "Early in my SEO career, I would say we should do X, Y, and Z because it's best practice. With more time and experience out there to say, we should do X, Y, and Z because it's worked based on my previous test, or we should do this because the data suggests that we should do this." And that's really important. That's a really big difference and that takes a lot of confidence and takes a lot of experience as you mentioned, to be able to make that assumption because the best practices are yes, you probably won't go wrong with this practice, but you also need to be able to qualify them. Particularly if you're working with a client or you're working on a project, just to say it's best practice isn't always enough and best practice doesn't necessarily give you prioritization. So it's best practice not to have loads of 404s on your website.

That's absolutely true. It is best practice not to have lots of 404s on your website, but whether or not you get to those first when you have lots of other technical issues to address or whether or not those are even a big deal necessarily depending on where they are on the website, is something that you'd need to assess. So you do your crawl assessment and if it's the case that yeah, there's a bunch of 404s on pages that nobody ever goes to or a part of the website that is old or part of archived or something like that that's low priority from a commercial point of view, then maybe that might be a second task after sorting out your landing pages, after sorting out some of the other technical issues, after maybe updating your structured data markup or something like that. So it's not to say that you're ignoring them entirely, but you're prioritizing them differently.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a ton of cases where that kind of comes into play. And I think you're right, it does happen as you get more seasoned-ish or as you see more things happening. I will give you my classic example. The algo is super advanced. Google's algorithm I think is very, very, very advanced. I know sometimes that you get articles written by whatever publication and it's not, blah, blah, blah, the results are worse. That's not true. That just has to do with our perception of things. The algorithm incorporates way more machine learning now than it ever did before.

Things are pretty advanced. That doesn't mean that Google doesn't have gaps. There's gaps all the time. So for example, I run another podcast, my personal little podcast called the SCRN. It's just like a fun little thing I do on the side. It's not a real thing at all. And I noticed that for SEO podcast queries, if you have the word best scrawled in everywhere, there's a gap in the algorithm. Google overweighs the term best, like it's 1995, like it's 2005, and it ranks things with that word best for best SEO podcast because of the keyword match. So literally on my home page, I have the SCRN, the Best SEO podcast because Google has a gap in its algorithm and weighs the keyword best too heavily for this vertical.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. Exactly.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not a best, you should not write that on your podcast website.

Crystal Carter:

No, no.

Mordy Oberstein:

That is not a best practice, but it does work in this particular case of the gap. And most importantly, I don't have any real branding on this website. I can do whatever I want with it. The branding on the website is that there's no branding, so I can do whatever I want. I wouldn't do it on the SERP's Up podcast. That would be terrible. That would be a terrible idea.

Crystal Carter:

Right. This goes back to a couple of things you mentioned there. So first of all, experience. So your experience showed you that there was a little bit of a gap in the thing and also tests and also risk assessment. So if you're trying something that is outside of the best practice, another quote I want to bring up is one from Ross Simmons who's fantastic SEO and content distribution, like king. And he says, "Remember, best practices are only best practice until someone comes along and finds success trying something new. So when you're trying something that's a little bit outside of the mold, if you're going off-piste, if you are traveling the path less traveled, the road less traveled, if you're trying that, it's useful to try it on a test site, on a low risk site to see what's going on with that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm doing. That's my site. It's a low risk website.

Crystal Carter:

So you're testing this in that space before you try it on clients.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, I would if I had a podcast client, I do a podcast client, I do not recommend they do that.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. So you wouldn't do that, but you would test it and you'd see where that is. And maybe you wouldn't put exactly that thing, but you might put somewhere on the page, let's just put best in there. Let's just put best podcast.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, if I could fit it in organically ish, I would totally do that, but I wouldn't do it like that. I am blatantly being salty.

Crystal Carter:

Right, exactly. So you wouldn't put it like 25 times. So that's something to think about. So yeah, and testing, iterating. We have a great article in the Wix SEO Hub that talks about testing and testing is so important to SEO and partially because we get so much data back on it and your data will tell you which best practices are most applicable to you and which things are most important. And I think that using the data that you have and using the iteration and the testing is really important. Nick Leroy, who's also a fantastic SEO, talks about what should you include on your SEO tech audit? And he's like an overview of what was reviewed, why it was a problem, how you can fix it and prioritizing the things. You shouldn't just include things that are best practice. You shouldn't just include things that are best practice. You should also include the why am I recommending this?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, if you're selling services, they're not hiring you for your best practice, they're hiring you to catch them when they haven't aligned with the best practice, do that and then take them to where they actually need to go, which is beyond the best practice.

Crystal Carter:

And this is the other thing is that best practices are established practices, a little bit like a historic keyword volume. So historic keyword volume is looking at keywords from the past. In the past, lots of people have searched for, I don't know, banana cream pies particularly in June. And so you can say, "Oh, if I'm writing about banana cream pie, la, la, la, I'll write about this or the other." But maybe there's pie talk, maybe there's a whole-

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a banana shortage. There are no more bananas.

Crystal Carter:

And so there's not a keyword search volume, historic search volume on the banana shortage or whatever. Maybe there's that sort of thing, that's new ground and you're going to be able to move people forward by going onto new ground, combining some of the best practices, some of the information. The other thing I also want to throw out here, particularly from the tech SEO audit standpoint, is if you are using an audit tool, and I know this is one of your favorite bug bears, but if you are using an audit tool and they have what they are purporting or showing to be best practice like, "Oh, there's low HTML."

Mordy Oberstein:

That's my favorite one, that's my favorite one.

Crystal Carter:

Don't just blindly follow what they're telling you is or isn't an error.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's not actually a best practice.

Crystal Carter:

So use your noggin, people, use your brain to prioritize what works with what the business can do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, yes.

Crystal Carter:

And what works with what they are able to look at. One of the other folks who was talking about this, who I thought had a really, really good take on this was someone who was saying that it's also important to look at what they can do. It's not just-

Mordy Oberstein:

I was going to touch on that, I just want to talk about that. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

So Usman Akram, who's from Triple Dart, he was saying that a lot of people fail because they focus on best practice of what they should do because best practice is you should do this.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right. But they're not there yet.

Crystal Carter:

They're not there yet.

Mordy Oberstein:

So many times.

Crystal Carter:

So you should do this because it's best practice and they're two different things. You need to think about what you can do with your situation because even though he says what's really achievable with the resources that you have. If the answer is no, you can't achieve it, then it's not best for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not best for the business, and by the way, not best for you because you'll lose that money, you'll lose that client money, and that's not good for you either. That's not good for anybody. Are they going to benefit by not having your services long-term? No. I'm assuming you're doing good work.

I've had a site where they needed an absolute total restructure. The pages were all over the place. There was no really best practice site hierarchy and site structure, and they needed to start creating new pages and reshuffling pages and there was a lot of work and they were nowhere near being bothered enough on SEO to do something like that. So I didn't recommend that yet. I brought it up in a report. That's what you do. You bring it up at a meeting, you stick it in a report, you say for the future, but let's now focus on these quick things that you can do that are really easy and let's get some momentum going. Otherwise, I would've lost that. They would've lost all of the things that you eventually did for SEO because we started off with something that it's a best practice, but they were not ready for.

Crystal Carter:

They weren't ready for it. So you need to take that with you. Andy Crestodina, who's also a great SEO, he's saying that they're very often hypotheses because best practices tend to be, again, for the best thing for most people. So for instance, Google very often recommends responsive design. And responsive design is great, responsive design is great. Our new product, Wix Studio has responsive design built in. It's fantastic. Wix Classic doesn't have responsive design. It has an adaptive dynamic rendering situation going on. And do you know what people say, "Oh, Google says it's best practice." Google doesn't do responsive design. Google's web page is not responsive. Why? Because they have different needs. Amazon is not responsive either. They have different needs because you know what? Yes, responsive is great for most websites, but for some websites where they have a completely different mobile experience, they might have a different kind of situation because if you just did responsive, it wouldn't be great.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's the whole Core Web Vitals saga. That's literally the whole Core Web Vitals saga. Go find me an e-commerce website where the home page has the Core Web Vitals.

Crystal Carter:

And so the best practice is to be super, super fast, but then you have business needs, so sometimes-

Mordy Oberstein:

You have to take up all this stuff. They want all the stuff for conversions, not there. By the way, in the beginning, Google's website, the travel website took them a long time because of the same issue. They had to restructure things in a way because they wanted the conversion, so they didn't pass Core Vitals.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Now, at the same time, there are some best practices which are critical. So Joe Hall was saying, "Most people ignore best practice because it's not sexy, but crawl optimization is critical to tech SEO best practice in a way. And way too many websites are failing at it." And that's absolutely true. Crawl optimization should be really important. Another one that comes up to me with regards to best practice is around the whole AI discussion that we're having in the middle of this big old update right now. So best practice has historically been that you should make good content, right? Good content.

Mordy Oberstein:

And then as is all over X, formally Twitter, they're like, "Oh, just write good content, huh?"

Crystal Carter:

So Natalie Slater on TikTok was talking about this how in the last 18 months, SEOs who adhere to best practice of making good content that is prioritized for humans and is not spammy and is not doing all of this sort of stuff, have felt a little bit of a wobble, right? Because that's been their best practice and that's what they've been telling their clients and that's what they've been focusing on. But this update, and there have been other people who have not really been paying attention to that best practice and have been doing what has been historically seen as spammy techniques, this parasite SEO things, some programmatic SEO isn't inherently spammy at all.

Mordy Oberstein:

Not inherently, but I gets they're real quick if you're not careful.

Crystal Carter:

But some people can if you want, with great power comes great responsibility. And so people have been seeing people winning with some of these tactics and they've been like, "I don't know what's going on. What about these best practices" But with this update, Google-

Mordy Oberstein:

Manual action here, manual action there.

Crystal Carter:

Manual actions, de-indexation, like things like that. Google seems to be saying, "Yeah, I worked for a little while, but we're adjusting this because we want people to adhere to the best practices, which is to do authoritative, expert trustworthy content and put that out."

Mordy Oberstein:

It's like driving with your knees. You can do it from stoplight to stoplight, but you can't drive from New York to California.

Crystal Carter:

That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

I would like to see you try.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of best practices, we asked SEO OG, Jono Alderson when he throws away best practices. So here's Jono on when he ignores some of SEO's better practices.

Jono Alderson:

I'm going to go broad. I think I'm increasingly ignoring the idea that our day-to-day activities as SEOs should involve producing content to target keywords. I think I'm going to ignore the idea that we should be doing some kind of keyword research to do some kind of opportunity model based on some kind of domain authority or rating and search volume and cost per click, et cetera, and then writing or more likely outsourcing or using ChatGPT to write a bunch of articles probably in some kind of blog or resource center. I think that's probably a lot of what a lot of us do, but I think that's no longer best practice. I think it generally works okay-ish most of the time, but it's going to get harder. A few things to consider one, your competitors and the people who work for them have people who look like you doing the same research and the same opportunity model.

So we're all chasing each other's tails. Simultaneously, the internet is increasingly full of very similar or derivative content thanks to SEOs doing this, and thanks to ChatGPT and the infinite amounts of just derivative content soup. And then because of that, Google has less and less need for your content, specifically yours. They can synthesize results in any vertical where they understand the query space and the number of verticals where they can do that is going to increase. If all you are doing is writing obvious stuff that aligns with some kind of basic keyword research or rewriting other people's stuff in a slightly marginally better way using different phrasing or slightly more words, you're not going to be ranking for anything. Now, I'm not saying don't do keyword research and don't produce content, but do keyword research and use these tools and processes and metrics to understand your audience's problems, to identify the kinds of questions that they have that you are able to support them on way earlier in the buying cycle than most conventional SEO strategies will target.

Those are probably zero volume or zero CPC terms, but that's fine because the objective is to produce content that actually helps users to solve their problems. Give them the information they need to educate themselves and to take action to overcome their challenges without needing to buy from your convert. And if you do that well enough, you become a household name. You need to prioritize and measure how well your content solves the problems of your audience by adding value to the internet and to their lives. Super hard. But then you give Google a reason to index and rank your content. Then you give users a reason to engage and convert, and you give journalists and influencers a reason to link or share or cite your content without you having to run massive email and LinkedIn spamming engines to promote your infographics and dog jumpers to journalists. Now, the best version of this is to actually become a publisher, and that's been a trendy thing to say for ages in SEO, but many people just interpreted it to mean write lots of blog posts.

You see, the difference is that real publishers do original research. They have editorial standards and processes. They employ people and journalists who have opinions and reputations and expertise, and they do that not just to tick some kind of EEAT box. They're also picky about what they write. They don't try and write for everybody. They define their audiences and explore their problems. And sometimes they're divisive and even controversial. If you're not doing this, then maybe it's time to start asking what your website is for and why Google, which is a search engine whose primary leading metric on revenue is user satisfaction would send visitors to your derivative blog posts and keyword soup. So this essentially boils down to when it comes to content, stop thinking like an SEO, think like an editor, like a product manager, even like a CMO. Consider the needs of your audience and the needs of Google in parallel and wrangle or build your content resource to produce material that's beneficial to both.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Jono. That was fabulous. We'll get to that in a second. Make sure you follow Jono on X over at Jono Alderson, that's J-O-N-O, A-L-D-E-R-S-O-N. Link in the show notes. So much to dive into about that. Okay, first off, I think we're entering an era where brand differentiation and getting people to come to you and being top of mind I think is going to be very, very important. Not just for your overall marketing success, but also for your SEO success where you're going to want people to be searching for your brand name, which I think will be something that Google's going to label a little bit more heavily going forward. But that's my personal speculation. But I do think that in five years from now, I'm going to invent a new term on this podcast. I think there's going to be something called brand first SEO, which is basically what he's talking about where you're basically not looking at starting with the keywords, starting with the search volumes, where you're basically starting with what does my audience need?

How am I going to differentiate myself from all the AI content that's out there or from the other brands that are also trying to differentiate themselves because of all the AI content out there? And starting with that and you're targeting what's based on, and I think it's not even the best way to do it, but I think it's just knowing where the web is going to go, targeting based on what will differentiate you, which is much more aligned with targeting what your audience actually interested in than starting with an SEO tool. And the way I do this is then refining with the SEO tool. I kind of know why audience wants and what they're interested in very broadly. Let me refine that by using AlsoAsked, getting some questions about what the audience might also be searching for, running it through SEMrush, seeing what comes back from there and getting a better sense of the topic and understanding what are the historical trends? But that's secondary.

Crystal Carter:

Right. This is something I've been talking about a while. This is something, what's it called? Michel Fortin has a great article on user first SEO, and if I'm going to use shout out myself, I also have an article on a resource on where you can get that stuff. So he talks about low search volume stuff, about actually being helpful, about actually being useful, about actually serving your clients, your potential clientele, and actually providing a solution. And one of the best ways that you can do that is to get them from your clientele and from your potential folks. I have one about where to get user first keywords and topics. I have a resource in our SEO resource that talks about this. Talk to your sales team. Your sales team will tell you, people keep asking me this question and I don't have an answer.

So write the content and then not only will your sales team will be able to refer it to, but if anybody has that question, they'll be able to find it. Look at your customer care queries, look at their training gaps. When you're training, people are like, "But I don't understand what that means." Guess what? Customers probably don't understand it neither. The questions that come through Google Business profile, the questions that show up on Amazon, those questions they won't have, like he's saying, you're making keyword soup.

Mordy Oberstein:

There you go.

Crystal Carter:

Those questions may not have any search volume, but that doesn't mean that they don't have value. And it's also the differentiation point. It's always been about differentiation. SEO has always been about differentiation and marketing has always been about, the textbook definition of marketing is delivering customer value, and that is what you should be doing.

That's what you should be doing with your content. That's what you should be doing with your website. And I think he's also bringing up the point, what is your website for? When you're thinking about what do I expect people to do on this website? Do I expect them to be able to get to know me, to know what kind of content I have, to be able to answer questions they have about how to use this thing that they just bought or to be able to learn something? What are we actually trying to do? We were discussing today, we were discussing an LP, Morty, weren't we? And I was like, "What is this page supposed to do? What do we want people to do?" We were looking at this draft and I was like, "Why can't I find?"

Mordy Oberstein:

No, and that page in particular came about because it wasn't thinking about user first. It was thinking let's say design first or whatever it was.

Crystal Carter:

And we were just like, but it needs to be able to achieve this goal, and if people have to hunt around to achieve the goal, they will give up and they will go somewhere else.

Mordy Oberstein:

It looked good. But they don't want to use it.

Crystal Carter:

No, they won't use it. You want something that actually makes sense.

Mordy Oberstein:

Driving with your knees looks super cool, but you can't actually do it.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Are you really going to get where you need to go?

Mordy Oberstein:

On a sharp turn, like at a 90 degree turn, that's not going to work. I would like to see that.

Crystal Carter:

There be sandwich parts everywhere, lettuce on your elbows, it's going to be just chaos.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now what we should have done was gone in reverse order in this podcast episode. We want to talk about what are our best practices from a conceptual point of view, which probably would've made more logical sense to talk about that before we get into best practice about SEO. It's an SEO podcast? So we'll do the marketing, broader marketing stuff second and the SEO stuff first, even though that might not be best practice.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, okay. I see what you did there. I see what you did there.

Mordy Oberstein:

For our audience, it makes much more sense.

Crystal Carter:

We're experimenting, we are iterating.

Mordy Oberstein:

Driving with the knees on the podcast. That's all we're basically doing.

Crystal Carter:

Until the wheels fall off. I don't know. It's fine.

Mordy Oberstein:

So we're taking a deeper look at what is a best practice with a deep thought with Crystal and Morty. Best practices, best practices, fundamentally just what are they? So you can basically apply, we're talking about in SEO to other areas of not just marketing, but your life.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

I look at best practices, they're like the minimal. Two things. They're the minimal standard and they're also what keeps you in line from being too nuts.

Crystal Carter:

So some people say, or bare minimum, I think I've heard people say this. Taylor Merchinson quoted someone else saying the path to mediocrity is paved with best practices. Ouch.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great quote.

Crystal Carter:

Ouch. Now, don't get me wrong, like I said at the beginning, best practices can absolutely guide you, can keep you from going completely astray.

Mordy Oberstein:

That needs to be on a Hallmark card.

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

You give them the card and it's all beautiful and it's like, yeah, the path to mediocrity is paved.

Crystal Carter:

It's a quote from Austin Knight apparently, who I don't follow on Twitter.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's brilliant. It should be a Hallmark card, very sassy Hallmark card.

Crystal Carter:

The thing about it is what best practices tend to be is they tend to be what everybody agrees on. If you think about best practices for a sandwich, we all agree that a best practice for a sandwich is it should be two pieces of bread with some stuff in the middle. That's a best practice, right? Then KFC came out with a sandwich that had no bread, had two pieces of chicken and a piece of cheese in the middle of them. Now, I think the other thing that's interesting-

Mordy Oberstein:

That's where the best practices are there to keep you in check, like a check in a balance.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that the other thing that's interesting about that is best practices, if you know what the best practice is, it's like you need to know the rules in order to break them. So if you know what the rules are and you know what the best practices are and you've studied the best practices, then you know when you're disrupting them and when you're deviating, it's like a benchmark. It's a benchmark for what should be covered at all times. If you think about customer service, the best practice for customer service is to smile when you greet someone and that sort of thing. And that's definitely something that-

Mordy Oberstein:

Have a great day now.

Crystal Carter:

And somebody enters it into your shop and you say, "Good morning, how are you?" That sort of thing. And then there's some people, there's a restaurant that I'm aware of and they have a thing where they're mean to their customers.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's good. I like this.

Crystal Carter:

It's a fun thing that people-

Mordy Oberstein:

Where do I go for that?

Crystal Carter:

I can't remember exactly what it's called, but yeah, there's a restaurant-

Mordy Oberstein:

My kind of a restaurant.

Crystal Carter:

They're actively mean to their customers and it's disrupting, but they still know the rules of engagement. You still get your food and there's all that sort of stuff.

Mordy Oberstein:

They don't spit on your food or anything like that?

Crystal Carter:

No, no, no, no. But there's a whole shtick that they banter in a way.

Mordy Oberstein:

Got it.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that sometimes when you disrupt it, it can get you attention, it can disrupt what people are thinking about, and I think that that can sometimes cause a change. They say what's insanity is doing the same thing lots and lots of times and expecting results.

Mordy Oberstein:

And expecting different results.

Crystal Carter:

And sometimes you just need to shake it up and see what happens. And I think that best practices definitely they're the benchmark, the place where you return to, the place where you start from, and you definitely need to get yourself up to a best practice standard at bare minimum.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. The whole thing is basic best practices indicate basic best quality. It's a testimony to you know what you're doing, you offer a quality product. So for example, if you implement best, I don't know, like technical SEO practices, it is a testimony like you've said many times in this podcast that you know what you're doing with a website and you offer a quality website.

Crystal Carter:

Even if you were to say, let's just say for argument's sake, even if the average website had best practice, only the average website had best practice, that's still better than 50% of websites. I think that that's important to remember that your best practice will get you going, will make sure that you've covered all the bases and that all the boxes are ticked, everything is covered, and then you can add on the extra stuff. If we talk about your sandwich or whatever, it's like your best practice... If I said to you, "Morty, I'm going to make you a sandwich." You would be a lucky fellow because I make a sandwich. Anyway, if I said to you, "I'm just going to make you a sandwich." You would expect at least two pieces of bread and some stuff in the middle.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I expect two pieces of chicken with a piece of cheese in the middle.

Crystal Carter:

No, we're not doing that sandwich.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want two hamburger patties with a piece of a pickle in the middle.

Crystal Carter:

I'm Kato. Anyway, so yeah, if I said that, that would be the thing. Now, if I showed up and I was like, "Oh, I got homemade mayonnaise and I got this special cheese from over here, and this bread has been toasted and it's got seeds and it's this and it's dah, dah, dah, dah, dah." Then you'd be like, "Oh, wow." You hit the best practice and then you can add all the other stuff onto it. But if I showed up and I just said like, "Oh yeah, I'm making you a sandwich." And I just show up with the heirloom mayonnaise that I made, you'd be like, "That's not a sandwich."

Mordy Oberstein:

You are exactly reading my mind. Get out of my mind, Carter. Sometimes the best practice helps you when you don't know what the impact of something's going to be, where people are expecting. So in your case, the sandwich, I'm making a sandwich, I have two pieces of bread, I got a piece of ham. Should I add the cheese? I don't know. I don't know what to do. Best practice, add the cheese, because that'll most likely align with what people are expecting from a ham and cheese sandwich.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. Precisely.

Mordy Oberstein:

Best practices help you align to consumer expectations when you're not sure what the expectations actually are.

Crystal Carter:

And these are a great place to start, and they're a great place to make sure that you've checked everything off. It's a great place to just make sure that you've checked everything off. I don't know if you're thinking about a resume, for instance, a best practice on a resume, there's lots of best practices on resumes. I'm not a recruitment person or whatever.

Mordy Oberstein:

Four point font.

Crystal Carter:

And some people say it should be one page.

Mordy Oberstein:

Everything's squished together real.

Crystal Carter:

Right? Some people say you should put a picture on it, some people say you shouldn't. There's lots of best practices on a resume, but I'll tell you the bare minimum, no grammar or spelling mistakes, that's a best practice. If I'm looking at a resume and I see grammatical errors, spelling mistakes. No, we're done.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of bare minimums, we need to cover the SEO news, and Barry always at least covers the bare minimum of what's going on. Oh, he's Barry. He's Barry. When you're going to SEO round table or even searching the land where Barry also writes, you're getting the bare minimum. That didn't come out right. You are getting, let me rephrase this. You're definitely covering all of your bases. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. You're covering all of the bases of what you need and should be expecting to get in today's SEO news.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm trying to give a compliment. It's not coming out right.

Crystal Carter:

You're digging a hole over there.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm not Barry good at this, which means that it's time for this week's Snappy News.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. Two articles for you this week. One from Roger Montti over at Search Engine Journal. Google explains how it processes queries and ranks content. Gary from Google is doing a video series, and then this one, he talks about how Google goes about processing queries and ranking content from crawling and indexing to the ranking process. It's a short formative video. If you're not an SEO professional and you're looking to get a better understanding of how Google functions, this video can be helpful. If you are an SEO professional, you'll do what I did and watched it and instead of reading between the lines and started speculating about all sorts of things as you were listening to it. Some of which are tinfoil hat moments for me, some of which I think are actually legitimate. I'm not sure if I'll share them or not here, but I might on Twitter said Lloyd to get you to look at my Twitter account.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to share it, so don't bother. So I guess it's not a ploy. Anyway, article number two, this one from Barry Schwartz over at SCRoundtable.com. Reminder, Google's helpful content update is no more. It's core update. I feel like that should be read in movie voice. Anyway, this is courtesy of next week's guest. A little teaser for you there. Glenn Gabe, Google has talked about this multiple. I made this mistake. I will freely admit this. When Google first made the announcement about the helpful content update, it seemed to me like they were saying that they're going to be integrating the helpful content update into the core update. Danny Sullivan was very quick to correct me on that. Thank you Danny, by the way. I do actually appreciate that. And that's not exactly what's happening. It's an entirely new classifier.

The helpful content update is gone. It's no more. It's not like there's the strain of the update in the core algorithm, it's a different classifiers. Glenn wrote on X, he wrote, "The old HCU classifiers going away completely. Now, multiple systems are assessing the helpfulness of content." So pause on Glenn's quote for a second. Before Google assessed helpful content by using the helpful content update. Now what Google is saying is we have a much more holistic system and a new way of assessing helpfulness, and that's now part of the core algorithm.

Back to Glenn's quote, "I'm saying it looks like the old classifier is still applied as of now, so Google could remove it like it did when Penguin 4 rolled out and Penguin 4's suspension was removed." Glenn wrote that in parentheses. That's why I put the pause there. Anyway, so two thoughts here. One is in the documentation and some of the things that Danny Sullivan's been saying on X and in the documentation that Google has, it looks like one difference to me seems to be that the HCU was a domain level helpful content assessment, quality assessment. In the language that Danny's talking and in the documentation that Google has, they're now trying to assess helpfulness, not just on the domain level but also at the page level, which I think makes a lot of sense when you think about how websites are constructed and how the content on the website is constructed and the value of different types of pages on a website.

It's a whole different conversation. I don't know what I mean by that exactly. Now ask me on Twitter. But I think it makes a lot of sense, so therefore it is a different beast altogether. And at the same time, I will say that don't throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. Google invested a ton of time and technology, money, resources and whatever to create the technology that is or was the helpful content update. I don't think they just said, "Eh, that's going in the garbage can. Goodbye." I think they took the things they liked about the helpful content updates technology. I think they may be applying it in a different way and a different format and making that part of a much wider, more holistic way of assessing helpfulness. So I don't think you could say it's an entirely different paradigm shift.

Exactly. I know Google has said that it is, and I think it actually might be, but I do suspect, and it just makes logical sense to me that some of the ways that the HCU looked at helpful content just didn't just disappear. Google perhaps rejiggered it, reformatted it, reconstructed it, whatever you want, however you want to describe it. I don't know. I don't work at Google, but to say they completely abandoned that technology after investing so much into it, I don't think makes entirely the most amount of sense. Again, I'm not arguing anything Google saying at all. I'm simply saying is that what Google may have done is borrowed some of the ways the HCU approached helpfulness, combined it, refigured it, reconstructed it, rebaked it so that it is an entirely different thing, but still baked in there or alluded to in the new system or in the core algorithm is the kernels of the HCU.

I think I've said too much already. If you want more news each and every day, I'm going to do a little pitch here for you. Check out It's New. It's New is new and is a new daily series, actually Monday through Thursday series that we do, Crystal and myself, with Barry Schwartz Monday through Thursdays. We go through two or three stories in the SEO News, offer some commentary for them. You can find it on Barry's Rusty Bricks YouTube channel, and also syndicated right there for you on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. It's right on the home page of the SEO Learning Hub. So go to the SEO learning Hub, check out the daily videos, subscribe to Barry's YouTube channel, and if you love this snappy news once a week, then you'll probably enjoy those little clips that we do each and every day. And with that, that is this week's maybe not so snappy news. Thank you for bearing with me.

Crystal Carter:

You barely got through that.

Mordy Oberstein:

barely got through that. Thank you Barry for all of that. Speaking of Barry, this week's follow of the week is Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Is there really?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes.

Crystal Carter:

Go follow Barry and tell him that we sent you, and I hope you're all following him as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because there's a real reason why. He's at Rusty Brick on all the social media platforms from Macedon to Blue Sky to X.

Crystal Carter:

Is Barry on TikTok?

Mordy Oberstein:

I think on LinkedIn it's his actual name, Barry Schwartz. You can find him at BarryseoMemes.com. There's a lot of places you could follow Barry. The reason why Barry is our follow of the week is because Barry often covers SEO best practices periodically on SeRoundtable.com. So inevitably someone will ask John Mueller, "How many words do I need to rank?" And John will answer something very snarky back and Barry will cover that on SeRoundtable.com. But no, it's good. It's a good thing because people break into the SEO industry at all different times.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

So you haven't seen that conversation from 10 years ago.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, oh, Barry's covering it again is actually incredibly helpful, which is why we're saying follow Barry.

Crystal Carter:

I would also say that it's an SEO best practice to follow Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

It is absolutely.

Crystal Carter:

If you're planning to learn SEO, if you're planning to keep tracks of the algorithms, of updates, of announcements from Google, of various different things, I would say his best practice to follow Barry because he covers everything and Google have acknowledged him for this. He covers everything. I give a lot of talks. I talk about a lot of various different things, and I literally use Barry's articles as an archive of developments of different stuff. So I was looking at something around the helpful content update and around the Hidden Gems stuff, and I was literally going through Barry's-

Mordy Oberstein:

The timeline.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's like a timeline. I was like, "How many times did they mention Hidden Gems?" Because he would've covered it, but he hasn't covered it. It probably didn't happen.

Mordy Oberstein:

My online behavior each day basically consists of what happened in sports the previous evening and then going to check SeoRoundTable.

Crystal Carter:

Same.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's basically it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

Best practice.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, definitely. So follow Barry and that will be best for you.

Mordy Oberstein:

It will be best. Barry is best.

Crystal Carter:

Pulling that back after the bare minimum there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for saving me there. I was just digging a grave. Well, you're probably ready to write an obituary for me at that point.

Crystal Carter:

I went to a museum the other day and I was looking at this exhibition and this guy just was telling me about it, and he was telling me he worked there. He was telling me about this exhibit I was looking at, and I could have just read the thing on the side. They always put a thing on the side.

Mordy Oberstein:

I never read those things.

Crystal Carter:

This guy was telling me the thing, but he literally was just telling me wrong information. He said it was about World War II. It was about World War I. He said it was about, he couldn't remember where it was on loan from. He couldn't pronounce it, the person's artist's name. There was a bunch of stuff, and I just sat there going, "Uh huh."

Mordy Oberstein:

And it's right there on the placard.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's awesome.

Crystal Carter:

I just read it and you know what would've been best practice for him to say, "Would you like to know more about it? It's over there. Read the sign."

Mordy Oberstein:

My wife reads things at the museums. I never read them. I came here to look, not to read.

Crystal Carter:

What were you reading for?

Mordy Oberstein:

If I need to read, I would've stayed home and read a book.

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

I want to see stuff. I'm at a museum. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episodes we dive into is SEO for affiliate sites in some real trouble? Look for wherever you can consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning about you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content, webinars and resources we have to offer on the Wix SEO learning hub at wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO.