Does the SEO still work for online publishers? 

Mordy Obertstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're putting some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I am joined by the prolific, should not be understated. She won't take credit for it, but she is prolific head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hi, everybody. I'm trying to remember what prolific means. I'm think it means you do a lot of stuff.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, and particularly writing and I don't like writing. I don't do a lot of writing, but you think about it, you actually do a lot of writing and publishing.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I do a little bit, sometimes more than not. Do you know what it is? It's like I go through phases. Sometimes I have nothing, and then sometimes I'm just like, "And this and this and that and this and this and this and this." So you go through ebbs and flows.

Mordy Obertstein:

I'll break the fourth wall. I schedule a lot of my tweets and LinkedIn posts, and I try to sit down for an hour or so on a Sunday and plan it all out. There are weeks where I got 30,000 things to say, and that's good because everybody's like, "I have nothing to write."

Crystal Carter:

Right? This is it, but that's a good way to do it. It's a good way to do it though. You plan it, you do the things, but I think also I got to be in the mood. I feel clear. Also, I find my favorite time of writing is on a train.

Mordy Obertstein:

On a plane, in a box with a fox?

Crystal Carter:

Here or there or anywhere.

Mordy Obertstein:

I do not love writing anywhere.

Crystal Carter:

But no, I love writing on a train. You just sit down. Also, I like writing when there's no WiFi, because I love Grammarly. I love being able to look stuff up, but when there's no WiFi, you can just write. You can just get it all out, brain dump, and there's nothing going. Did you spell that right? And then I get distracted and that's truth.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, you get distracted. Truth. It is annoying.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. There'll be two things at the same time. You'll have the document. We'll give you, "Oh, I don't know that spelling," and then Grammarly will say something to you as well. Then it's like I can't.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, better off not spelling things correctly or having good grammar. It works for Barry. Anyway, this SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix. You can only subscribe to your SEO newsletter search like each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter. To clarify, you can subscribe whenever you want. It releases every month, but it's also where you can use our winter integration within the Wix and Wix Studio SEO setup checklist and SEO assistant to find the healthiest keywords for your site and your pages. Because today, we're evaluating the health of Google's ecosystem for media publishers, because after all, if the Rolling Stone is writing articles about the best fridges in 2024 and not about this best singer songwriters from 1964, perhaps there's a problem.

We'll get into big publishers publishing out of their lane, the forum frenzy on the SERP and what it all means for publishers, and Google's push for publishers to use AI. Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of HouseFresh, has a thing or two to say about the state of the SERPs for publishers as she'll stop by to share what the SERP currently looks like for small and medium-sized publishers. Alli Berry will also pop in to share her outlook on publishers being able to thrive on the web beyond just SEO. Of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and you should be following for more awesomeness on social media. So, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in. Okay. You can probably breathe out now as episode 90 of the SERP's Up Podcast helps you assess your publishing health on that crazy little thing we call the internet.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for that fantastic introduction.

Mordy Obertstein:

It's one of those classic things. I don't know if that reference holds true for everybody. When you go to the doctor as a kid, breathe in, breathe out.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they got the stethoscope. They get to see all that.

Mordy Obertstein:

They can do that now.

Crystal Carter:

If you listen to a stethoscope, you can hear all stuff.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, my wife is a nurse. So, my kids walk around all the time. She doesn't use a stethoscope anymore so much anyway.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, but then somebody shouts into the stethoscope, it's like, "Oh!"

Mordy Obertstein:

That's not a good idea.

Crystal Carter:

Oh no, don't do that. That would be bad.

Mordy Obertstein:

You know what's bad?

Crystal Carter:

What's that?

Mordy Obertstein:

The state of the SERP publishers.

Crystal Carter:

Oh.

Mordy Obertstein:

Is that too much? Too heavy?

Crystal Carter:

Oh, that was hard.

Mordy Obertstein:

Too early. That's the answer, too early. Too early for that.

Crystal Carter:

Talk about Knicks in the playoffs. Wow.

Mordy Obertstein:

Playoffs. That's a sport, deep cut right there. Playoffs. We're not getting into that. Anyway, anyway, anyway, back on track. A few months ago, Giselle Navarro, who we'll hear from in just a bit, wrote a piece that took the SEO world by storm and it basically showed how large publishers dominate the product review SERP. Product reviews meaning best microwaves 2024. These big publishers were not who you thought they were. It wasn't the Wirecutter who you would expect, who I would expect, who I love. Love the Wirecutter. It's not the Wirecutter. It's sites like the Rolling Stone and Popular Science writing product review content.

So, Giselle working for a review site obviously took issue with the Rolling Stone writing about fridges as well as she should, but it got me wondering why is the Rolling Stone not writing about Bob Dylan but Bob Vance? For all you, Office fans, Bob Vance sells refrigerators. I think I had to explain that, but basically, why is the rolling still not writing about Bob Dylan and writing about refrigerators? So I did a little bit of digging, and according to Vanity Fair, revenue for the iconic music and lifestyle magazine is projected at a total of around $46 million. That was back in 2017. A print advertising revenue was expected to drop to just $10.9 million in 2020 as compared to ad revenue of $28 million in 2015. So, the circulation revenue was projected to fall by 50% by 2020 according to the Street.

So, again, I don't have current numbers. Those are the last numbers that I have, but basically what I'm trying to tell you is that the forecasting numbers were showing that print magazines were losing ad revenue like crazy, which makes sense, because people stopped reading printed magazines and started consuming web content. Now if you go to 2014, Popular Science had a print circulation of 1.3 million. By 2021, it was only digital. It no longer had an actual physical magazine. So, what I'm trying to point out is that these publishers like the Rolling Stone writing about best refrigerators, they're not nefarious, because I want to dominate the SERP and takeaways from small sites.

They're trying to pivot because they've all been bought up by huge conglomerates who need to produce some ROI. They need to produce revenue, and they can't do that with print magazines anymore. I don't think the web, by the way, is a better place for any of all of this. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is it hasn't been sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies or whatever for these giant publishers. The reason why they're now out of their lane and talking about product reviews and not about science or music is because they need to find a way to pull in revenue. I'll take it just one step further. If you look at Rolling Stone's web traffic, it's not great either.

It went in 2022 from about 44 million searches a month hitting the site from Google, according to Semrush, to about 22 million in 2024, January 2024. They lost half of their organic traffic. Popular Science also doesn't have huge numbers. They bring in under two million users a month from Google. So, they have to expand. They have to find new ways to bring in users, to get eyeballs, to either get subscriptions or to get ad revenue, which I will compare this... By the way, so there's basically two models. There's two ways these people can get revenue.

Either they get it through ad revenue or through subscribers, paid subscribers. If it's through the ad revenue per se, the display ads, you need to have the eyeballs. If you're looking at Rolling Stone losing half their organic traffic, they need to new channels or new content areas to write about to pull in that traffic. Now it is possible to get paid subscribers, but that's not easy-

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Obertstein:

... at all. So, check out Rolling Stone. The New York Times is great at this. So, the New York Times in 2023, according to sources, has 10 million total subscribers, 9.7 million of them are digital subscribers. So, less than a million are actual paid subscribers. The New York Times has knocked it out of the park. Compare that to Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone has only 400,000 paid subscribers, which means what? They need the display ad revenue, which means what? They need to find new topics to write about, which is why, which is my last point, which is why they're writing product review content.

So, the question is, Crystal, if the Rolling Stone's not a bad actor, they're doing this because they need to find ways to improve organic traffic, to improve their ability to earn from display ads because they're not getting the digital subscribers that they think they should be getting, what are they supposed to do and what's Google supposed to do and what's the web supposed? What are we all supposed to do?

Crystal Carter:

So I think that the New York Times, I think you mentioned that they have a really big subscriber base, and I think one of the things that the New York Times has been very good is that they have lots of branches of the New York Times and they also have a really, really rock solid IP. So, in terms of intellectual property, people know the brand, people understand the brand, people appreciate the brand. They've also got a lot of legacy content. So, if you're a subscriber, you also get access to that legacy content and it's seen as if you were going to get a new subscription, they will cover most of the bases. Not only will they cover your current events, but they'll also have a great food section, for instance, which is really good. They cover news or they cover sports really well as well.

I think that one of the tricky things is that we're in a situation where users have many, many, many options for discovering information, for discovering new content, for finding out what the news is. In fact, you don't even have to go and look for the news. Google sends it to you. I get notifications about different things that are happening all the time, whether I want them or not. So, I think that in that space, there's some tricky space to navigate. So, for a business like the Rolling Stone Magazine for instance, one of the tricky things they have is that they're a music magazine. Well, musicians have their own platforms that are huge. So, if I look up the Rolling Stone for instance on... I keep saying the Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stone Magazine.

Mordy Obertstein:

Rolling Stones.

Crystal Carter:

If they look up Rolling Stone Magazine, I can see on Instagram for instance, I can see that they have 7.5 million followers on Instagram for instance. Let's just take that as just a little bit of a benchmark. Their cover star at the moment is Billy Eilish, right? Billy Eilish has 119 million followers. So, I think that the thing is, if you're Rolling Stone and you're trying to publicize your magazine, you're trying to tell people about news, people who are fans of Billy Eilish will follow Billy Eilish and they will get that news probably faster and directly than they would from Rolling Stone.

So, I think that in that space, people have to remember the ecosystem for users and the ecosystem for how users are discovering information. In order to do that, you have to have exclusive content. You need to have exclusive information, things that people cannot get from anywhere else. I think that the New York Times is really good at doing that. The Economist I think is really good at that. I don't know their subscriber numbers in particular, but I know that The Economist are a publication that have a very unique perspective in terms of news and you will get content there that you will not get in other places.

So, I think it's important to think about that. So, yeah, I mean I'm not knocking the hustle in terms of these big publishers trying to throw the net wide, trying to capture new content funnels, because I think that they're up against a lot of different competition for information for access to the newest, latest thing.

Mordy Obertstein:

So that's why actually I really wanted to do this episode, because really as you point out, it's an ecosystem question. The way users are consuming content, it's not a pure SEO. It has enormous SEO implications, but it's fundamentally not an SEO question. How do people consume content? Like you mentioned, they're going right to Billy Eilish's Instagram or whatever, and I think it means a few things. One, I think it means that we are due for a market correction around web content. I think it's going to be very painful because I think that the current system or the current contract is not sustainable. It's not sustainable to have a brand so far out of its lane talking about best microwaves and not best albums of the year. That's not a sustainable paradigm. That's not a sustainable model.

I don't think it'll fundamentally work, and I don't think it's fundamentally what people want. In a way, they're gaming this system. This will bring me to next point, they know Google's not looking at the Rolling Stone and it's like, "Okay, you talk about music, we're going to rank you for music and only music or whatever entertainment stuff." They're like, "Well, Google's a meritocracy when it comes to pages. So, if we have pages that talk about microwaves and we can rank those pages because Google's not looking at our identity the way that it should be, we can get around this and we can rank for microwaves, pull in people from the SERP, have them look at the ads, perhaps click on the ads, and earn revenue that way."

Because by the way, as I mentioned, the Rolling Stone is gated except for product review content. That's not that gated. They're using to get the display ads. I'm not going to call it a manipulation. There's too much negative connotation attached to that, but that is getting around the system.

Crystal Carter:

Don't hate the player, hate the game. That's what that is.

Mordy Obertstein:

Exactly, but that's not what fundamentally you want as a user. That's not the way. If you were to envision the web, you would want the web to function, which is my next point that I think what Google needs to do is to rely more on site identity, and I think that's good for everybody.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, because here's the thing. Giselle Navarro's article is fantastic. She gets really into all the details. I'm sure we'll link it in the show notes as well, but on the example that she talks about Rolling Stone, she talks about them ranking for air purifiers for pets in 2024. Now, as someone who knows people who are into music and knows people who have extensive record collections and maybe who have very expensive guitars and things like that, air purifiers is not something that people who are musos are not uninterested in. So, if somebody has very expensive vinyl collection, if somebody has very expensive guitars that they do not want to collect dust, they do not want to have damaging their very expensive perfect collection, an air purifier might be something that they're interested in. So, it's very interesting that they're going for something that's so basic and that's not even related to their-

Mordy Obertstein:

They know the search volumes.

Crystal Carter:

What's that?

Mordy Obertstein:

They know the search volumes.

Crystal Carter:

They know the search volume. So, it's really interesting though that they haven't aligned it to something that is relevant to their audience. I think that that's something that's more long term, I think that's something that could make it valuable to their audience.

Mordy Obertstein:

That's how they should pivot eventually, but what I think they're trying to do now is saying, "We want to hit X number, X revenue number. We need to hit X revenue." When they got bought out by whoever who I think in 2018 they got bought out by somebody, they need to justify the purchase. They need to hit X dollars and cents, mainly dollars, and no one cares about the cents. We're going to do that. If we can do that, we will do that and that's what they're doing. If Google gets it right and if Google says we're going to rely more on site identity, so if you are a website that focuses on product reviews or on air purifiers, or in the case of Rolling Stone, music and instruments, so the best guitars of 2024, which guitars did you buy?

Forget the air purifier. Which guitars did you buy? Then they'll be forced to do that. But what that'll mean for them as an organization unfortunately is they'll have to slim down, which they're trying to, or whoever bought them will have to incur a loss if they haven't made up the money already. That's what I mean, there's no way around the pain for these big publishers in my opinion. My prediction to quote Mr. T, pain.

Crystal Carter:

We had Barry Adams talking about SEO as a team sport on our last podcast. Barry Adams is somebody who's been working with news publishers for years for the majority of his career, and he talks about that they've been dealing with this since probably about 2018. Particularly UK publishers were hit really, really hard in 2018.

Mordy Obertstein:

I remember him talking about it.

Crystal Carter:

They have not seen the return to prominence or to visibility on the SERP since then. I think that that has created a really complex situation for some of these publishers. I think that where you see high quality publishing, then I think that it's really valuable for the web overall. I think it's really, really valuable for everyone. So, I hope that people are able to find something that's not just talking about air purifiers that are nothing to do with their core audience, but yeah, I do agree that it's something that's going to be very, very difficult to address in the next one.

Mordy Obertstein:

There's no easy solution. There's like either this continues on and Google doesn't address it, in which case Google will experience pain, because this doesn't reflect well on Google. It's like something somewhere has to give. Either the publishers are going to have to refine their focus because Google's going to force them to, or Google's going to be like, "Yeah, do what you want," which it's basically doing now, but Google will experience pain.

Crystal Carter:

But I think also there are a lot of publications who are leaning towards a multichannel approach. So, for instance, I follow British Vogue and Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is a fantastic publication. They don't just talk about teen stuff. They talk about lots of really interesting stuff. They're fantastic publications and they publish some great stuff across their social as well. They published some great stuff on YouTube as well. So, I think that there's lots of news publishers that are essentially using their brand.

So, they're leveraging their brand across multiple channels, and I think that that brand legacy, particularly for some of these high legacy publications like Rolling Stone, like Vogue, like Grazia even, that brand recognition allows them to make a splash in some of those channels that would be much more difficult to do for other publications as well.

Mordy Obertstein:

Great minds because I was going to say the way out of this for publishers is to do what the New York Times did because the New York Times has done this successfully. As I mentioned before, something like 95% of their subscriptions are digital and they have an enormous amount of revenue from their digital subscriptions. Semrush did an event, Global Marketing Day in 2022, I don't remember 2023, one of those years. I was on a panel with someone from the New York Times. They talked about how they did this and basically it was brand building. They basically created a brand campaign basically showing you why you should want to pay for quality journalism, why that's not free and why you shouldn't expect it.

If you want good stuff, you got to pay for it thing. That's what these brands need to do, but that's the issue. The real fundamental issue in my mind is that these brands, because they have all these metrics to meet, overvalue performance marketing. They're not thinking of the longer brand play and how the brand play will allow them to tap into the performance market they so deeply and desperately want, but it's going to be a brand play first and then it's going to be a performance play. They're not willing to do that yet because they're not willing to take the immediate repercussions of, okay, it's going to be difficult for a period of time.

We are the Rolling Stone. We need to create content that's worthy of you paying for a subscription and we need to build a brand around that and we need to build a desire around that that's going to take time. They're it seems like not willing to invest in that time and resources to do that so that they can have a model that's actually sustainable, not relying on Google's algorithm to not care the fact they're running about microwaves and not guitars.

Crystal Carter:

I know that there are some people who have some interesting opinions on how Forbes do things, for instance, but Forbes have a lot of really interesting strands of the way that they generate income and the way that they connect with their community because I think that's another point as well. So, people who subscribe to Rolling Stone, people who are reading Rolling Stone are people who are interested in music, right? They're very interested in music and that stuff. There's some great brand partnerships that you can do across that. Forbes for instance has a lot of communities that they run. They have CMO communities.

They have communities for different people with different intersectionalities and they have a series of events that they run across the year that are really, really well attended and really, really interesting. They also have their Forbes panel and people are like, "Oh, I'm on the Forbes panel and I do that thing." So I think that they also have a really interesting strand that they're pulling through and all of that helps to build up their brand. So, that IRL interaction with the brand, you can be a part of it, part of the brand, also brings that together. But I think if I go to rollingstone.com for instance, it doesn't really feel very interactive when I go in there. It doesn't feel like I could contribute. It doesn't feel like it's something that I could be a part of particularly.

It's just like here's some stuff that Billy Eilish has done. Here's Drake mostly made himself look bad on his latest diss. I don't know. It's just opinion pieces about music and that's fine. That's fine, but I think that if you want to cut through, for instance, if you want to cut through to a very two-way internet that we have these days, it's both ways. Your people are reading your stuff, people are responding to your stuff. They're replying in the comments. There's people who on YouTube, on Instagram, on any of the video things, on literally any post on social media, people are like, "I'm just here for the comments. I literally just came here for the comments."

So people expect to have that instant feedback, that instant participation in whatever media they're consuming. I think that brands that are able to make people feel connected to them, either in person or online or both are going to get a lot more out of that.

Mordy Obertstein:

100%, I could not possibly agree more, but to weigh in now on what the SERP currently looks like or means for smaller, mid-sized publishers is the aforementioned wonderful Giselle Navarro. So, here's Giselle and what the SERP currently looks like for small to mid-sized publishers.

Giselle Navarro:

I can only answer this question confidently from the point of view of being the manager data of HouseFresh and being a small publisher within the air quality space. So, that's where I'm going to be answering it from. I don't know if this is the case for every other small publisher in every other niche, but it definitely is something I've seen in our space. That is that on top of what everybody already knows of big media sites being pushed to the top across different types of queries, a trend that I've noticed increasingly since September, October last year is a big push from Google site to get searchers to just buy from the SERPs.

So, whether that is adding a sidebar filter product as if it were to be a shopping filter within search that perhaps are not a product search or they are a recommendation, what are the best amplifiers for bedrooms or something like that, and then suddenly, you already immediately get a filter pop up to your left, the sidebar that is just giving you options for you to filter by brand, by this, by that. Obviously, at that point, you don't know. That's why you're searching. Within that, it's not just that. There's also the topics at the top. So, when you're making searches like, "Oh, now what are the best budget amplifiers?"

Suddenly, you get all these tags at the top, which when you were to add them to your search, the search gets regenerated again, and then the top results are always products. Then there's also shopping listings within subs and huge blocks like six rows of products, eight rows in some cases. Again, these are queries that are not people looking specifically for a brand and a product or a specific model. They are looking for information to try to make a decision and they're being pushed. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of these are sponsored shopping ads and they're not very good products at all. In many cases, they don't even satisfy the actual queries.

So, if somebody's looking for best HEPA air purifier, I'm going a bit nerd here, but if somebody is looking for that, which is a specific air filtration technology, some of the products that get surfaced, and a lot of them actually are not even... They have other technologies. So, it's not even that Google is serving products and these products are the right products or that are useful products. Actually, they're misinforming people and confusing people and we get a lot of emails from readers who are confused and they would say, "I spent all this time and I was reading this and I was reading that. I just don't understand anymore and I was so happy to found your article."

We interact with a lot of people on Reddit and it happens a lot that they are very confused. I think the reason why people are confused is because the searches are not really clarifying anything and just pushing more products at them. So, definitely, that's something that I have noticed. I don't know if every other small publisher is seeing the same, but that definitely has been a trend that I see growing of Google trying to push searchers to buy directly from Google, which is not great, because you wouldn't go to find information inside of Amazon or inside of Target or Walmart.

So, if they're forgetting about the information part of what they're doing, then they're just trying to become a retailer. Obviously, they're not because they have deals with brands that pay ads and all this stuff. So, they're not even familiarizing themselves with the products, which is unfortunate, because at least that maybe they would do a better job.

Mordy Obertstein:

Thank you so much, Giselle. Make sure to give Giselle a follow over at I-C-H-B-I-N-G-I-S-E-L-E over on X and look for her on LinkedIn as well. I think Aleyda Solís was talking about this, maybe I'm getting this wrong, back at the SEOFOMO event we did with her at the Wix Playground in New York where just the e-com SERP is such a problem in a way. It's an opportunity, it's also a problem. It's interesting because you don't think of her product reviews and publishers, but those sites overlap with product buying intent. If I'm talking about best microwave, Google can interpret that as okay, here's a bunch of articles about choosing the best microwave or here are the best microwaves.

That puts publishers at a very, very, very serious disadvantage, because if you look at the way, if you're not familiar, if you Google something like buy a microwave, at least in the US and other markets, the whole SERP changes. There are sidebar filters and PLA ads. It's a very different looking SERP and the organic results get lost in there.

Crystal Carter:

Giselle is coming from this place where she's looking after her brand. She's trying to make sure that everything's being displayed the way that she expects it to be, and she's trying to make sure that she understands her competitor landscape. So, she's looking at this and she's like, "The competitors that I'm seeing here are not the competitors that I would normally expect to see here." That's really, really tricky. Like you're saying, it's a really complex SERP. If you're doing buy a microwave, you expect to be maybe competing with other people who are selling microwaves. If you're suddenly competing with Rolling Stone for instance, it's tricky to figure out your strategy for that because you can't be everything for everyone. If they're looking for articles instead, that's going to change the way that you approach that particular digital marketing strategy.

So, yeah, I think that it is tricky and they're constantly tinkering with that SERP. So, they're adding in things via Google Lens and they're adding in competitor aggregator thing. So, for instance, if you see one type of a Samsung microwave, I think they make microwaves. Yeah, if you see a Samsung microwave, they'll show a few different listings underneath it, which is slightly different from the way they were doing it before. Like you said, you get lots of filters. Sometimes you pretty much land on the shopping page for some things. So, yeah, it's really complexer. I think that those working in e-comm have a lot to think about at the moment.

Mordy Obertstein:

It's like a mini Amazon. The query I'm looking at, I'm doing best microwave, it's not even a full on transactional query and it looks like Amazon. It's hard. Give yourself a big thank you, Giselle, for contributing and for all the work you've been doing in this area for the SEO community over the past how many number of years already. Anyway, the SERP aside and that's no small thing, but there's a wider web out there just over yonder, past Google, skip it a stone, past Google. The question is how healthy is the web overall for the publishing community? To help us, we ask famed content marketing consultant, Alli Berry, how she see things as we move past pure SEO and go into the great beyond.

Alli Berry:

I will say that I think the state of online publishing is a little unpredictable at the moment. I think it really depends on what kind of online publishing we're talking about. I can tell you for affiliate for example, I have a client right now who has great organic rankings in certain financial verticals and is losing traffic not necessarily to competitors, but mostly to new SERP features. It looks like Google is adding SERP features that are providing their own set of recommendations based on who is popular for queries that have best or review or what have you in the query. Instead of seeing affiliate reviews for various products, I think you're going to see more brands that Google is associating with those terms, which is going to make it harder for affiliates to do well.

I think you'll also see so much more Reddit everywhere, which is enraging, because so much of it is frankly shit. There are some sites that I think are doing affiliate the right way and actually testing products, and I think a lot of them are getting buried now for Reddit results. So, I think next to the question of can publishers still thrive? If you're trying to get into affiliate or build an affiliate publishing program, it's going to be a tough time for you. I don't know what else to say there. It's possible, especially if your brand already has some clout, but it's tough out there. I would be looking to diversify my revenue sources if I were you because it feels like Google is trying to bury affiliate sites from my perspective. There are some very authoritative sites that have gained ground in affiliate.

Rarely do they have the best content on the topic, which is really frustrating for some of the smaller sites, but I think the opposite of diversification seems to be happening in the SERPs. So, if you're new, it's going to be tough. For bigger news publishers, so affiliate aside, I think it's also a strange time from what I've been seeing and hearing. Certainly, the big publishers are looking for ways to use AI to help them be more efficient, which really means they're trying to use AI to write certain types of articles and get away with it. I do think SGE has the potential to disrupt the news game a little bit. I think it's going to be more important than ever for news outlets to be the first to report something before AI can regurgitate it. I think interviews are going to be more valuable.

Anything that is actually unique and human driven is the best way to combat SGE. Many publishers are moving away from content syndication, which to me feels long overdue. Google hasn't made any changes that would really cause publishers to make this change other than they keep saying, you should really ask your syndication partners to de-index the syndicated version of the article, which is wild and ridiculous and would never happen. Maybe everyone syndicating is finally starting to see how they were getting outranked by partners and the economics weren't really working out for them.

It's definitely no longer as lucrative as it once was, especially since Yahoo has been pedaling down syndication and made the decision to bring content in house. It's an interesting decision too. If you look at Yahoo today, they're trying to be more of a news source than a search engine, which I think is interesting. I've also been looking at some smaller publishers that are more focused on niche topics, so local happenings, mommy blogs. There's been a lot of drop off in traffic for many of these sites that I've been looking at. The Pioneer Woman, My Dallas Mommy, Your Brooklyn Guide, et cetera, a lot of these sites do product promotions, event promotions for kickbacks. They have commissionable links.

I'm wondering if Google is finally coming after those, but then if you look at food blogs, there's some really great SERP diversification that's present and happening there. New York Times Cooking is actually losing ground, which surprised me. All recipes has been steady but not growing and there are some really cool smaller sites with visibility like Love and Lemons, Once Upon a Chef. I don't really know what to make of it all. I think in certain verticals, there is a lot of hope for success for newer publishers. In others, a lot of them being in the YMYL space, maybe run far, far away. I do think though that the key to success doesn't seem that different than it did a decade ago.

Really, I think if you're starting a new online publication, you should start with a unique angle, have a niche, build a small, engaged audience, do whatever you're going to do content wise, consistently learn from what's working, double down on it. You really should be able to build an audience over time. If you have that audience and go in your site directly and they're spreading the word and all of that good stuff, I do think you can still grow a site today, but it's definitely harder than it once was. I think you're going to do better if you're not in the YMYL space because it does seem like Google is doing the opposite of diversification there.

Mordy Obertstein:

Thank you so much for that, Alli. There's so much to chew on there. First up, that war on affiliates, we actually spoke about that a few episodes ago with Glenn Gabe. So, it's nice to hear some concurrence around that issue, around that topic because I think it's definitely what's going on. I think it's also interesting that she's talking about, and we're going to be talking about in another episode or two, about the value of brand ranking as opposed to affiliates ranking. I think that's where things are going to go. Again, it goes into this whole topic of Google's war in affiliate marketing or affiliate websites rather.

It makes sense in a way that Google's going to double down on ranking those brands that have that identity, that are well established, that are well known, that have a strong digital presence and ranking them about their own stuff in the end, which is interesting because of the conflict of interest. But I think for Google's point of view, it's the lesser of two evils. If I have to rely on affiliate strike, the conflict of interest in a brand themselves and the conflict of interest in an affiliate trying to generate revenue, I would say that the lesser of those two evils is the brand themselves. I think they're more reliable. I think they're less likely to push things, less likely to lie for lack of a better word. I think it might be a little too harsh, but skew the truth, less likely to skew the truth.

In that sense, I think she might be right that Google's going to say, "You know what? Forget all this. Let's just go with the brand." If that's by the way what happens, then folks like the Rolling Stone like we were talking about earlier are going to see their ranking slip away and it's going to increase the focus on doubling down on brand authority, brand presence, and all things brand, which we'll talk about in a later podcast.

Crystal Carter:

It's such a complex space for Google. It's such a complex space for brands. I think that everyone really needs to knuckle down on doing high quality content and that's for their users. I think one of the things that she touched upon was moving away from syndicated content, moving towards unique content, moving towards stuff that really differentiates yourself. I think that that is really a return to the core of what the web has been about for a good amount of time or what it should be about anyway.

Give Google a reason to rank you. Give people a reason to actually visit your page that is unique to you, and I think that that's really important. I think that think about the unique perspective that you have on it, even if it is product reviews, even if it is the best microwave. Why is your best microwave page interesting? People often bring up that The Verge article that's about the printer.

Mordy Obertstein:

The printer, the Brother printer.

Crystal Carter:

They're like, "Oh, just buy the Brother printer." Don't get me wrong, they do-

Mordy Obertstein:

I did by the way. That's literally what I did. That's literally what I did.

Crystal Carter:

So those ones, that article is really actually interesting because it's both doing all of the things that you expect to see, but it's actually poking fun at that in an interesting way. It's breaking the fourth wall really on that content and that makes it unique. I think that that's where we need to think about. Be actually unique. Take that risk, be unique.

Mordy Obertstein:

It's interesting and it's something that we'll talk about on a later podcast episode. I know because we recorded a little bit out of order, so breaking the fourth wall for you, but I'm interested to see if brands will be able to do this because it's going to be taking your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. It's the same question we talked about the affiliate marketers. If brands are going to be searching for best microwave and it's ranking Samsung and their post about their best microwaves, they're going to have to do a little more on the informational side and a little less on the conversion side. Just like affiliate marketers are facing that same problem, will brands think about the overall brand value that that will bring and take the foot off the conversion performance marketing for just a bit? Who knows?

Crystal Carter:

Who knows? That's the question.

Mordy Obertstein:

You know what I do know? I know that when we cover the SEO news, we might cover Search Engine Journal and Matt Southern and Roger Monty who do a great job and even Danny Goodwin from Search Engine Land.

Crystal Carter:

Fantastic.

Mordy Obertstein:

But I know we're going to cover at least one article from Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely.

Mordy Obertstein:

So this is week's snappy SEO news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. Whoa, that's a lot going on, but two big stories, one bigger than the next. I'm so flustered, I don't know where to start. Okay, here we go. From Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable, Google AI overviews are here to stay with improvements, the Ray AIO update, named after Lilly Ray. It's awesome. Anyway, Barry writes that "Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid wrote a blog post about AI overviews and how they're basically improving them and how they can make improvements and what they're doing to improve them," and so forth and so forth and so forth.

I'll get into that in a second, but this comes with a blizzard of critique across the internet about the AI overviews and they're hallucinating. They're not accurate. They're recommending ridiculous things, yada, yada, yada, yada. So, this is Google essentially, I think, responding to that. Google made a whole bunch of claims. I'll read what Barry quoted Liz is saying here. We found a content policy violation on less than one in every seven million unique queries on which AIO reviews appeared and that they will keep improving, when and how we show AIO reviews and strengthening our protections and yada, yada, yada, yada, and yada. Some of the things that Liz Reid went on to say are a little bit, I guess, controversial.

For example, she said that AI overviews are as accurate and as good as featured snippets or the accuracy is as good as feature snippets rather. They seem to be saying that a lot of these cases being shared across the internet of AI overviews going off the deep end are fake. That's a pretty heavy accusation to make, but Google did admit and they write, but some odd, inaccurate, unhelpful AI overview certainly did show up. The long story short is Google has heard of the web complaining about the AI overviews. They are responding. They are making improvements, and they're not going anywhere. There's going to be more AIO reviews. It's part of the core search experience, they said. I guess we'll have to keep an eye on what happens and how they improve or don't improve.

Share your thoughts out there on the ether because it's a very controversial topic. Even more controversial topic, if you can imagine that. Oh boy, this from iPullRank, friend of the show, friend of the Wix SEO Learning Hub, friend of SEO in general, Mike King wrote an article, Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search's Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked. So, there was some leak internal documentation from Google searches content warehouse API that show theoretically what's happening in the algorithm. I'll talk about it from a top level TLDR point of view really quick.

A lot of the things that Google has said they don't do or have indicated perhaps they don't do are shown in the API. Meaning that, oh, maybe they are actually doing these things. Google responded back basically saying, "This leak is real. However, you don't know just on reading the leak if this was a test, what exactly it means, how to interpret it, how heavy to weight any of these things and so forth." That is true. I'll get to some of the specifics in a minute. We don't know if they were part of a one-time test. We don't know. It's hard to piece this together. I'm going to try my best to piece it together the best that I possibly can in a snappy manner. This is not going to be snappy. I'm just letting you know right now.

The second thing I want to say before I get into some of the details, people have started to question Google's honesty and whether or not some of their search advocates are good people. The answer is they are good people. Being a public spokesperson for a public company as large and as complicated as Google is not easy. I don't want to put words in any of this search advocate's mouths. This is my take. A lot of the time, I think you have what you have and you have to do the best with what you have and be as transparent with what you have and with what you are allowed and not allowed to say. You just have to do your best to be as transparent as possible with what you have to work with. I think the search advocates have done that the best they possibly could.

So, I think a lot of the rhetoric or the negative rhetoric around the particular search advocates needs to be toned down. We need to be realistic and understanding of what it means for them to be in that role, what they are allowed to say, what they're not allowed to say, and what the best they possibly can do with what they have to work with. That aside, there was a lot of juicy information inside of this. Mike runs through it here in the original article. He also wrote an article on search engine land entitled, "How SEO Moves Forward with Google Content Warehouse API Leak." I'll link to both of those in the show notes. You can read through them on your own. Where do I start? Where do I start? Where do I start? Okay.

So, I'm going to start with my approach to this is we don't know exactly what Google is using, what they're not using, how much of it they're using, to what extent they're weighing it and so forth. I like to look at these things a bit directionally. If you were to paint a picture, what direction does this show you where Google is going? In other words, what is Google at least trying to do? Because at a minimum, they're using these things in testing. So, what are they trying to do? That we do know. So, I look at this very directionally and what direction should we go based upon the direction that Google seems to be going with what was shown in the API leaks.

With that, and I have just a bunch of random, random stuff to run through here, oh boy, okay. There is information that indicates that Google is using clicks. They have calls for metrics for bad clicks, good clicks, last longest clicks and so forth. If you combine that with the leak from the DOJ trial where they indicated there's something called Nav Boost that's looking at user behavior and in fact doing that into ranking, you do see that user behavior does really factor into the ranking equation in my opinion. It has been an issue of debate in front of the SEO for a while. I've actually personally, I'll call myself out, have gone back and forth on this over the years. It does very much seem that Google is incorporating user behavior into the algorithm.

That doesn't mean you should be manipulating for clicks. What it does mean is that you need to think about the experience the user has on the website. Is the UX navigatable? Is that a word? I don't know. Can it be navigated easily? Does the content engage them? Does it satisfy their needs? Does it make them want to read another article from you and so forth? I think a lot of the things we're going to talk about here really quickly have to do with how strong your branding is, how strong of a website you are. When people go to the SERP and they see you ranking, let's say you're ranking number five and not number two or number one, do they click on you anyway because you have such a strong brand around that topic?

To that, and again, I'm trying to go in some logical order here because there's so much to cover. So, part of what we've seen from the leaks that Google is looking to determine how on target your content is with your overall site and with what you're trying to do, or if it's not, which means as Mike writes in his article, actually content needs to be more focused. He writes, "We've learned definitively that Google uses vector embedding to determine how far off a given page is from the rest of what you talk about. This indicates that it'll be challenging to go far into upper funnel content successfully without a structured expansion or without authors who have demonstrated expertise in that subject area. Encourage your authors to call expertise in what they publish across the web and treat it to the gold standard that it is."

Meaning Google's looking at the embeddings to see how far off they do or do it online with what you're writing about, and I've talked about this for years already. Google is able to look at and see what you're writing about and how much it does or doesn't align with who you are as an entity, with who you are as a brand or a business and so forth. One of the other interesting things along this line is that Google seems to have some commercial scoring where it's saying, "Okay, is this content commercial or not?" I speculate and that gives it something I've seen for a long time that might be because a lot of blog content tries to pretend that it's informational content, but really it's commercial content or backhanded commercial content.

So, perhaps I have seen Google do this algorithmically. Perhaps this is the element that's doing that where they're able to say, "Okay, wait a second. This is not an actual information piece. This is actually a commercial piece. We can profile it like that." Which again goes back to the earlier point. Make sure your content meets the user need. It's more targeted and more specific and more, I'll say, transparent than anything else. There's a site authority score that came out of this. Google say, "We don't look at domain authority, blah, blah, blah," but there is a site authority score. I think we all knew there was an overall quality score to the website.

Google said that there is an overall quality score. I know we talked about topic authority, so that would align with that as well. There's things in there around navigation demotions. This goes back to what we said before. If the UX isn't great, you could tell the user is not having successful experience with the website, that UX can impact rank. Again, make sure you're keeping your users in mind first and foremost. On short content, there seems to be some originality scoring, whether it's actively being used or not being used, but you see where Google is trying to go. So, much short content is just replicated over and over and over and over again. Google's looking to make sure that that content when they rank it has some originality to it.

Whether or not they're actually doing it, whether or not that's a test, you do see where Google is directionally trying to go with something like that, which I think is the most important thing. Where is Google trying to go? I look at this again, like the quality rate guidelines are not in the algorithm per se, but it's definitely a clear statement of where Google wants to go. There's a lot about mentions in there. There's a whole slew of information about results getting re-ranked last second. Meaning last second factors or last second read jiggering of the results that happen as the query is being processed can happen. It's why you might see rank fluctuations being inconsistent perhaps sometimes for you and so forth and so forth and so forth. There is a lot in there.

I think, again, my general takeaway is that there's a lot in there that points to content being more specific, content being aligned to what the site wants to do or what they say they do. Glenn Gabe actually recently talked about this in a case study that he did on the March 2024 core update. I'll link to that in the show notes also. So, again, the directionally see that things with navigation, user experience, user behavior, meaning making sure the user is satisfied. Google's trying to find ways to measure that. Make sure your users are satisfied. Make sure that you are recognizable as a brand because again, if Google is looking at what's happening on the SERP and you are recognized entity out there in that niche that can help you, it would seemingly help you with rankings.

But again, read these articles but look at it again, like the quality reader's guidelines in many ways. What does it show you about where Google is trying to go? This is the very much not very snappy news. All right. News aside, well, not news aside actually, because our follower of the week comes from the news world. She actually recently spoke by the time this episode airs at the first New York City SEO for NEWS Meetup hosted at the Wix Playground in New York City by NewzDash and former guest of this podcast, John Shehata. She is the Senior Director of SEO at ESPN. I can't help myself. That sound is so nostalgic for me by the way. She is Louisa Frahm.

Crystal Carter:

Fantastic. Fantastic follow.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, give her a big follow over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her in the show notes. ESPN does some amazing... That is a lot of content to run through. They run a double model. They have a paywall model and they have a pure open, organic, go ahead and read it model. It's really interesting what they're able to do, what they're able to rank for. She shares a lot of knowledge. So, follow Louisa over on LinkedIn. We'll link to her profile in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

I think that it's great to follow publishers as well. So, follow her. Absolutely, there's some great publishers to follow because they are, like you said, dealing with a lot of content and they to get really creative with the way that they present content. Sometimes Google has different features as well. So, if you think about sports for instance, sometimes you can get the sports scores on Google itself. So, publishers, for instance, for ESPN will have to think about how they capture content or how they capture traffic in new ways as they respond to those new SERP features. I think that it's great to pay attention to the ways that some of the big players do that.

Mordy Obertstein:

Interesting. By the way, pro tip, one way to do that is being more reliable. So, I consume a lot of sports and I go to that Google Box all the time. Sometimes because it defaults to an American time zone and I don't live in America anymore. It'll still default the game sometimes to the American Times. I'm like, "No, that doesn't look right." I'll go to ESPN and they do a better job of adjusting the times automatically. So, I know what I'm actually looking at.

Crystal Carter:

Unique and adding value.

Mordy Obertstein:

Added value and reliability. It's such an under thing, reliability.

Crystal Carter:

It's so important.

Mordy Obertstein:

So important. It's good for your website. It's good for your relationships. Reliability, it's good for everything.

Crystal Carter:

Not just SEO tips, people. Life skills, life tips.

Mordy Obertstein:

Right. We should do a life skills episode.

Crystal Carter:

Optimize your life.

Mordy Obertstein:

Optimize your life, the SERP's Up Podcast.

Crystal Carter:

What is your life H1?

Mordy Obertstein:

Me?

Crystal Carter:

Any thoughts?

Mordy Obertstein:

Oh, off the cuff? Hide.

Crystal Carter:

So your H1 is white text on a white background. Is that what you're telling me?

Mordy Obertstein:

Hide. Get a screaming hide somewhere. Hide.

Crystal Carter:

I'm going to have to think about what mine is.

Mordy Obertstein:

I see a lot of neighbors. Hide. It's so good. Time to reveal too much. Anyway, thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next time with the new episode as we dive into why branded search matters more than you think it does. 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 webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guess 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.