A Disturbance in the Google

[this transcript has be edited for clarity]

Jacob: Hi Jeff. Welcome to another episode of the Human Friend Digital Podcast.

Jeff: Hello, Jacob. Today we are talking about some recent news in the SEO world.

Jacob: Yes. There are usually algorithm updates that happen a couple times a year and everyone kind of says, “My hair’s on fire.” This one is a little bit more fundamental and foundational. It goes to tracking. You know, Google tweaks things all the time and is trying to make sure quality comes up, making sure we’re combating AI slop that’s going out there on the internet. These kinds of tweaks usually, if you’re doing really good SEO practices, you can weather those storms fairly well. This one’s a little different because now it’s going after basically bots and things that crawl Google search to get information from Google search on behalf of other tools. And it’s kind of swatting these down.

Jeff: So those are tools that we use. And just like basically background here: So what they did, it’s like a command that bots will use to ask for over a hundred pages of search results, right?

Jacob: Correct. Yeah. And basically going back many years, over a decade, Google had this search parameter, and this is kind of something antiquated that they’ve just kept around for a while and they never officially supported it for a long time. And so what it was, was you could type into the search bar like a query “num equals 100,” and then it would—instead of giving you just 10 search results, it would give you a hundred, which was great for scrapers. They could take a keyword, put that search parameter in, and get a hundred search results in an instant. Now, if you were a search bot, like SEMrush’s bot or SpyFu or Moz and these others—

Jeff: There’s all sorts of them.

Jacob: —they are all kind of mad because now they have to do 10 times the resources. So if you wanted to get to a hundred search results, you’d have to query page one, page two, page three, page four, page five, page six, et cetera, to 10, to get the same data and information.

Jeff: Right, so that’s important when it comes to ranking, and by ranking we just mean like where, like what number you are on that list. You know, are you on the first page or are you 87th on the eighth page, you know?

Jacob: Yeah, exactly. And this kind of measurement is not always as useful. It’s kind of like watching the stock market. Why did I go from one to three? Why did I go from three to one? Why am I showing up in the maps number one? Why am I showing in the maps number three? But search engine ranking tools do this so that we can go to a client and say, “Look, we’re doing some work here. We’ve changed some things on your site. Now you show up better.” Typically speaking, anything past 20…

Jeff: Honestly, anything past 10. Who goes to page two when they’re Googling something?

Jacob: Well, I’ll say this. My first employer would call that when you’re on page two, you’re within striking distance. That’s what he always said. And that’s what’s always stuck with me. You’re in that opportunity land when you’re in between 10 and 20. And when you’re at 10 plus, you’ve usually made it: now you have to fight to inch your way up ranking by ranking. So the only thing that 80… I mean 20 to 100, those 80 extra rankings gave us was an indication that Google is indexing you properly. 

Like if you wanted to show up for “recording studios in Indiana”—because that just was a client, we were talking about that today—even if you’re 91, you are like, Google understands that you are trying to show up for the term. Yeah. So that was really the only value of having those 80 rankings past 20, all the way up to 100, was just to say that Google found you relevant. You wouldn’t get any traffic from it. Nothing valuable really came to your site. It was just an indicator to be like, “Look, you actually show up. Great. Now we can work on something here. We’re not just in the dark.” 

So what’s gonna happen now is a couple of things. So we  need to talk about this from a tools perspective, and then we’ll talk about this from a tracking perspective and a future perspective, and then I think we can end this report. 

Jeff: So yeah, what are the tool implications? 

Jacob: it could be some tools may have like a premium tier of tracking now that they’re considering rolling out because essentially getting the same amount of data for you is now gonna cost 10 times the resources for that person. So there may be like an additional fee for price, right?

Jeff: So what would like a non-premium look like in that case?

[00:05:09] Jacob: I’m thinking the non-premium level is just gonna be top 10 only. You’re only gonna see the top 10, and then the next tier is gonna be top 10 and 20. And then the next tier is gonna be top 20 plus, et cetera. And you’ll probably have a sliding scale to do your resources up and down. So I can imagine a future where once a quarter you run all 100, all the way out for your keyword set, and then you go back to the normal 10, 20 for your daily tracking.

Jeff: Your daily tracking, you’re not gonna do that, right? For people who care about daily tracking, which is not everybody. 

When I was reading about this, I was like, who even wants daily tracking? That’s so unhelpful. And it’s basically if you are a company in a really competitive industry, like law or finance or healthcare, real estate. So, you know, it can be really expensive. So like having that data at your fingertips can be helpful, I guess, to those people. And then also if you have like huge revenues, like moving up one spot in the ranking can cost or can earn you, you know, millions in revenue potentially.

Jacob: Yeah. Depending on your industry for sure. I mean, it just depends on the value of your product, but also, you know, if you’re like a tourism group and you’re in your hot season right now and you want to pay attention to everything that’s going on because you’re getting like 2 million visitors to your site a month, you might want to know.

Jeff: Yeah. And companies or industries with a lot of volatility. I guess that would matter, like the very granular ranking data. But I would say, nothing that we’ve worked on really.

Jacob: Yeah. I was about to say, one thing that you could tell from all the people we were just talking about is they already have really big budgets. And care on a big budget level. I think basically they’re gonna have to pay more to get what they were getting previously. Eventually. 

Right now, I think a lot of search engine tools are just kind of eating it. Like SEMrush says, “You don’t have to expect anything different. We’re fine.” They kind of said that, and I’m like, I don’t know what you’re doing, but you are very expensive, so maybe you can just eat it for a while.

Jeff: I’m sure that they will transitionally. 

Jacob: Yes. I did see in the research for the articles today, you found one where one of the CEOs of SpyFu was basically taking this as an “us versus them” approach, so we can link to that article. I thought it was very noble, the CEO, but also at the same time, it’s kind of like, all right, no matter what at the end of the day, search engine rankings never really meant bottom line dollar guarantees.

Jeff: Yeah. They are an approximation, they’re like an indirect metric.

Jacob: Right. And you are like, how should I say this? It’s almost like fishing. You’re defending a fishing hole really well. Just, it doesn’t mean that the fish will always gonna bite there and you always have the best bait. You’re just defending that spot of the lake really well. And it’s kind of like that mentality a little bit where even if you rank a bunch for a bunch of terms, it doesn’t necessarily track to bottom line dollars. So I feel like to a certain degree, I don’t think any of our clients, or smaller clients or medium-sized clients, mid to large-sized clients, are really gonna care that they can’t…

Jeff: A lot of B2B, which I think is like, cares about different things than, you know, consumer facing.

Jacob: Yeah. They will definitely be more focused on “how many contacts did I get? Okay. It’s great if we’re ranked number one, but if I don’t have the same number of contacts that I had in the previous month, or I’m on trend for this season of the year,” they’re way more focused on that, which honestly in this regard, it doesn’t impact it too much. 

However, it did have an effect on tracking that we need to be aware of. Basically most people saw a significant drop. One study was about 80% of sites that were inside the study saw a significant drop in their impressions over this time.

Essentially, all those search bots pinging plus 100, meaning that if your site ranked 20, 30 out, you would get that impression count from the bot.

Jeff: From the bot, which isn’t a real impression. That’s a fake impression.

Jacob: Right. So basically there was a lot of false reporting going on, which makes me feel this is part of Google updating the way things work. 

And I have a feeling that a lot of these tools are also pinging the AI search tools like SEMrush reports on AI search results now. And almost every one of these search engine tools has that. And as we know, and anybody who watches artificial intelligence news knows, search queries cost energy. And so I have a feeling since Google is giving out Gemini search queries for free as a part of the Google search, I bet they’re seeing their bill just start inching up more and more, like their energy bill. And I bet this was a part of that thing to be like, “Wow, if we just got rid of this, we probably save…” I don’t even know how many kilo- gigawatts of energy.

Jeff: That would be terawatts technically: kilo-gigawats.

No, I mean, we can take what Google did from two perspectives, I think. And they’re both probably true. You know, on the one hand it’s producing better experience from like users’ ends because we aren’t getting all of this like fake traffic from bots, but then it’s also helping their bottom line because they don’t have to pay energy for all of these queries that are just, you know, bots pinging their system.

Jacob: Exactly. And I think to a certain degree, I bet the stars aligned on this, where they’re like, “I can both lower people screwing our data and our energy usage, and also clean up an antiquated thing we’ve been leaving in our garage basically of code for the last decade plus.” 

So moving forward, I’m gonna guess, and we’re gonna see how it plays out. It’s only been a week?

Jeff: 10 days.

Jacob: That’s the time we’re recording this. And so what I think is gonna happen based on everything that I’ve read, is that we’re all gonna start tracking ranks one to 20. Most tools seem to be ready to take on that burden. And I mean, those are the key areas, anyways: you’re gonna have traffic rankings one to 10—those are actual traffic sources—and then 10 to 20 is those opportunity scores, right?Then the next thing that comes out of that is, I think you’ll probably figure out some new pricing tier for that. 

But, you know, most of the time when I talk to clients, my ranking reports tend to be fairly low on the reporting scale. Usually we talk about the visits to the site and the types of source of the session sources that come to the site and those channels. And we’ll come through into search rankings about maybe 50% of the way through—usually it’s just a touch base. And typically clients, they don’t want to have weekly reports delivered to their inbox. Most of them are happy on a monthly basis. 

So to a certain degree it might be like we have daily rankings running through the month for us to monitor for that one to 20. And then that one report that I give to the client that runs at the end of the month, that’ll be the hundred where we actually go a hundred for all the keywords and pay the extra handful of dollars for those keyword reports. 

That’s kind of what I’m expecting. We’re set up fine because of our industry, like you said, and most of the B2B work that we do, most clients don’t care about this. It’s more of like, That’s an attaboy, good we’re ranking.” And then they go back to how many visits did we get and how many form fills did we get, right? 

So I think the key takeaway from anybody who’s listening to this would be: keep reporting on the bottom line statistics that you care about. Those KPIs are always gonna be great. Let the dust settle for this over the next couple months and we’ll see. But to a certain degree, I have a feeling that this is gonna force us to be more simplified in our search engine reporting anyways.

Jeff: Yeah. Honestly, when I was reading this research, I was like, “why is this a big deal to anybody?” And so then I looked like, “why do people care about this?” And you know, I get in certain industries why it matters in terms of executive facing reports. Like a ranking is a really easy thing for someone to digest. You know, if you say, “Look, our SEO work moved us from eight to seven,” it’s very easy to understand what that is, what that means. Because a lot of the SEO stuff is very… what’s the word I want? It’s very… 

Jacob: Esoteric? 

Jeff: No, it’s not esoteric. That’s wrong. It’s very… obtuse!

Jacob: Obtuse, yes. That is a good word.

Jeff: Yeah. So, that makes sense. I understand why people like it and why people use it, but at the end of the day, it’s not the most direct thing you can measure to measure the success of your SEO.

Jacob: Yeah. And because if you make a really good website, you want a healthy mix of direct, social, referral traffic. I mean, you don’t want it only to be an SEO report. You want it to be, all your marketing efforts are playing into a larger picture here. 

Jeff: Right? Yeah, exactly.

Jacob: So, anyways, I think that’s good for our report for the day.

Jeff: Our newsie? Our news bulletin?