How Google F*cked us - Startups 101

this is the number of Google searches that people have run on Google since you clicked on this video [Music] and the real estate of that results page defines not only one of the most valuable tech companies in the world it defines entire startups entire companies and the algorithm that decides what comes first what comes second is one of the best kept secrets in the industry one that only a handful of Google's 140 000 employees has access to changes in that piece of mysterious code can create massive ripples in a startup's growth plan ripples that translate into crises and all-nighters and jobs lost over the years we've spent millions of dollars serving this Almighty algorithm almost like a god that we have to optimize and pray to and the reason why you're even watching this video is because we figured it out back in 2016 we we figured it out we figured out how to rank for Google but that would not last we soon discovered how ranking or praying to this algorithm is like many things a question of money a question that makes Google ever more powerful and that has fun obscure markets for shady SEO tactics we learned first hand how much Google can take away we discovered how Google's plans just don't align with what companies are looking to do and this is how Google does this is us after Google's last corrupting in a matter of a week we lost 20 of our traffic which means 20 of Revenue which means jobs lost and all-nighters and gray hairs the algorithm's job is to find answers to find the best possible content to match what you typed in and Google needs to keep this up-to-date fresh better so they need to update it all the time and those are the updates that scare the living [ __ ] out of me now and I'm gonna come back to this of course now the reason why Google as a search engine as a startup was successful at all is because they did things better than anybody else there was nothing in the history of the human race that compares to the impact that the internet will have on how we communicate let's go back to 1996. this is web one and this is the earliest of the internet there's no user generated content here there are no social media or blogs it's all what the webmasters and what the domain owners decide to publish on the website and there's no way to index it there's no way to search or find anything all indexing was done by hand there was this guy whose job description was literally to keep a list of all the live web servers and just publishing it on the certain website anyway the the problem with running a search is that the search engine can't go search every single page to see if your search match because creating a connection with every single server takes I mean it takes nothing it takes milliseconds but multiply that by the 100 million plus web servers that we have in the world today it would take about two months just to establish connections with each one of them if it were a sequence now in order to search for something you need to have all that data in the same place that's the only way to make it efficient you need to somehow get everything that's on the internet in a single place that's the crawling part and of course you also need to structure it somehow just organize it to make it easier for a computer for an algorithm to read it that's the indexing part and finally once you've curled this data and index the data you can run a search on now remember this is 1993 the internet was this playground for geeks and scientists nothing like it is today no experts in SEO or searches but scientists literally scientists from around the world tried to start figuring out ways to create these Bots these programs that could automatically go to every page every server and store information in a database in a single place and finally in December this guy didn't he launched jump station that is the first search engine then operated more or less like a modern search engine and you might be as old as me and remember lycos and web crawler and of course yeah but all of these search engines were really bad at understanding what was on a page they essentially would rank a page by how often a keyword appeared on that page on that website and then of course as soon as people figured out how that worked they just started stuffing that page with that word and so a couple of PhD students from Stanford came up with a new system instead of looking or caring about what the website said to Define how it rang they started looking at relationships between website and the Google algorithm may be their best kept secret but almost 30 years later at least we know this is what they care about because they literally wrote a scientific paper about it links between websites backlinks that's what defines what they call Page rank so the Innovation that Google brought to the industry back in today's is they started counting backlinks between Pages the more backlinks a page has the more Authority it has and dies of Google if New York Times publishes a new article lots of other websites will pick up the story and link to the original source and because of all these backlinks from other websites Google will know that this original article at New York Times has lots of authority so if you search for the story in Google they put it at the top any website that the times links to it immediately acquires value because of how high their page rank is and this thing worked the results worked and it started getting popular hold on I have to interrupt the story here because I just can't help myself when there's a good startup story Google started out of a garage in Silicon Valley they just raised a hundred thousand dollars from one of the co-founders of sun Microsystems and they use this money to rent a garage and it's it's so stereotypical it's almost poetic it's like the classic startup story out of Silicon Valley and we traveled there a couple weeks back to make one of our videos for next year anyway the owner of the garage would then become Google's first marketing manager and 20 years later she is now the CEO of YouTube talk about a good landlady deal they literally only approached friends people that they already knew to fund this idea Stage Company and through one of their investors they met this other founder and so by the end of 98 they had raised about 1 million dollars from all sorts of people that we now know remember we talked about crawling to search for something efficiently it needs to be in a local database and so this is what Google does in essence Google crawls the whole public web and stores it in their servers hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data live in Google so that they can show you these search results in microseconds so much so that for example when a website goes down Google still keeps the cache of it so as Google evolved uh so did the people who wanted to rank number one using all sorts of Nefarious tactics and a lot of Google updates that they have released were actually aimed at closing those loopholes that lots of people exploit in 2011 they released an update called panda uh which went after duplicate plagiarized and simply seen content then in 2012 they released an update called penguin which published website that were involved in manipulative link building kind of artificial links to pump their Authority one of the most recent updates they released is in 2022 which is called helpful content update helps the helpful content uh rank better in the search engine and the way they determine helpful content is by looking if the person wrote it has any idea about the subject that they're writing about and this brings us back to the scene when Google decided that cage loading speed was this new and critical factor to Define pagerank and as hundreds of other startups we were not ready this changes can in a matter of days shift entire Industries and disrupt company and then Google announces these core updates days in advance and it doesn't really reveal any specifics of what changed in the algorithm ranking in the end becomes a bit of a guessing game one of the most critical factors for typing and again the reason why we are here the reason why we were able to scale the company back in 2016 was precisely because we understood how to rank for the keywords that we cared about in our case the key golden keyword that we discovered was Pitch deck and we started creating a lot of content crafting a lot of Articles around how to create pitch decks so that all the searches that related to that would end up pointing people to our site because that's I mean that's what we do but keeping this rank has become increasingly difficult and this is where money starts playing a factor remember how I told you that domain age played a factor wait a second actually domain H being a ranking factor is a common misconception because it's not a direct raking Factor domination or when you register the domain it doesn't affect where you're rank in Google what does affect is how long your website has been around and how many backlinks from other websites that managed to accrue so kind of the the age of your website is in their indirect ranking factor in Google to give an example our website has a domain rank of 74. sites like hrefs where Tim Works essentially try to mimic Google's indexing on the web to come up with their own insights their own metrics that then they actually give you to understand what might be affecting your rank so their domain rank setting is kind of like their equivalent to Google's Patron a backlink from a high-ranking site like ours or like many others is worth money it's quantifiable cash we found Services offering backlinks in sites as big as Forbes or entrepreneur for rates ranging from one to two thousand dollars just to plug that link PR you know the art of getting a reporter to cover your store your launch whatever your round of funding is these days less so about people reading it or discovering the brand and so much more about that pressures back I've spent hours of my life writing really solid it's one of my best pieces of content blog posts that end up in TechCrunch as guest posts because the backlink is much more valuable than keeping that article in our own website and so the companies with big Pockets the companies with PR teams and armies of guest posters or go most writers can essentially hack the algorithm to win the race so oftentimes it's less about the quality of the content and just more about the highest bidder even though it's this hidden system now all of this is still legal fair game by our current understanding of the algorithm Google might have changed this already they might change it in the future we just can't know but today all of the stuff that we talked about is what we would call white hat SEO over the years people have found Shader ways to hack the algorithm in their favor we call that black hat SEO and while Google usually ends up patching these exploits they can still generate millions of dollars in value before they're caught one of the shadiest black cap techniques for example are SEO attacks where a company just pays Shady sites to link to their competitor and then Google interprets this as that site trying to game the algorithm and then it punishes them he ranks them this is very real it happens and there are plenty of sites where you can just hire an SEO attack but let's go back one last time to our meeting last May the one reason we're here is not because Google has just killed our traffic it's because for years we've made it our mission to understand and optimize for this algorithm so much so that we built a Content marketing machine for our company and that's where a good portion of our customers come from and it has worked it has gotten us this far and it's made us this reference name this search result for pitch tags and financial models and startup storytelling but it is too much power for one company and the truth is that other search engines aren't really competing in terms of percentage of searches one of the reasons why we started this YouTube channel was to rely Less on Google's algorithms but yeah it's Google after all we we just need to start addicting [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Slidebean

Views: 80,427

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Id: i7GmMGcyBog

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022