Kyle Roof Reveals 2023 E-E-A-T Secrets (Ep. 304)

hey everyone welcome to the Atari hacker podcast I'm your host Gail Britton and we talk about SEO building Niche websites building authority sites Etc so if you're interested don't forget to subscribe and today we are not going to be talking with Mark which we're going to get a guest for the first time in a very long time and it was a really good idea to bring a guest that has been very popular on this show before so today I am talking to Karl roof who uh in my opinion was the best speaker last time we had Chiang Mai SEO going uh now it's going again so it's like I'm happy to hear you you're speaking again girl so welcome well thank you I'm gonna try to be the best speaker again if I can so much pressure on your shoulders now you know it's like now everyone's gonna it's good that was like a poison gift you know I think honestly I think you're like uh your storytelling ability on stage was really really good and I I really enjoyed I saw you both in Bali and in China SEO and it's like the ability of mixing like a story that has nothing to do with SEO together back who is like a principle that's actually useful to run your website had the right mix of entertainment and value you know what I mean and I think I think it was really good actually so yeah I just wanted to say that and that's why I didn't want to speak anymore I was like I don't want to be against this guy anymore so it broke you I broke you yeah exactly exactly no I'll be honest it's just I have a lot of stuff going on and I didn't have time to prepare a talk to be honest your excuses are fine you can say what you need to say sure I'm just like I'm making stuff up now just too you decide you listen you decide okay um anyway we're not here to talk about who's the better speaker today we're here to talk about uh eat but the thing is like you've talked about eat on the news process podcast and I'm not the kind of guy that likes to do the same podcast toys so my recommendation to the audience is before you send this podcast actually go and listen to a news posted podcast because I'm going to build up on top of this we're going to summarize the point so if you really don't want to listen to it don't but it was a good episode so I recommend you do uh and we're gonna actually just build up on top of that ask follow-up questions Etc so we can actually have two good podcast episodes for people who listen to most podcasts in SEO and I think it's just going to be better for everyone and I think there's like some interesting stuff in there but I before we actually jump into that uh there's been a Yandex leaks lately like have you checked any of that or did you learn anything about related to e80 or in general because uh we want the exclusive car roof take on the Yandex League The Exclusive uh you know I think the the buzz that's going around right now is on a thing called uh bm25 have you seen anything on that about that no so uh bm25 is a document retrieval method and it's very similar to TF IDF it's basically TF IDF plus word count to be on with you it's c5s plus word count looking at the word count of the other things that you're comparing against and it's all over um the factors in in that were released it's kind of interesting because you have to think that the index was built as a as a uh a Google clone and I'm sure they got several Engineers that weren't at Google and I saw a Statin I don't know if this is true or not but is that a stat that I saw was that the results about 70 the same between the two yeah yeah I saw that people were saying that it's closer Google and index are closer than Google and Bing for example I saw that so that means if there's 70 off you can see that maybe they're a few years behind or they're kind of slight but if they're that's pretty close that's not too far away and then so they're going in on this bm-25 as how they're doing it and um at least in terms of their on page and what it what it is it's a bag of words way to do it so it doesn't care about grammar it doesn't care about how close words are together it's simply taking all the words and it's looking at term frequency from there which is a a really a way that we attack Google now anyway and if that's if that's really how it goes or it's close to what Google's doing that's going to really upset a lot of people that talk about like um Google's ability to understand taxes because it's not how they're so small it's because it's not it's what we thought it was it's just that they're grabbing all the words and they're looking at the most common terms the other thing I think that's really going to burn is the people that really hate the term LSI keywords because um that works perfectly uh in these in this type of system and it's really gonna I mean I think bump people out I think it yeah it makes sense if you think if you look at like on page tool like you're a tool called the page optimizer pro like putting the right keywords in your content tends to really Spike up the rankings quite often like if you take like a piece of contact was not optimized then you find your 11 keywords to include in the piece of text you include it quite often you jump up in rankings like not every time it's not like depends on the competition depends on a lot of things but it's something that has consistently been observed and hasn't really been challenged in the SEO world for a while at this point uh and so like that would make a lot of sense and for the grammar I can attest I've ranked a lot of pages and I make so many grammar mistakes uh that yeah I can attest that I don't think I think it matters for conversions Etc like I still care about it uh but it doesn't mean that's how the search engine works and I think there's there's two different levels basically well that's 100 right I mean you know you need nice words on the page to convert you know and to get people to do what you want them to do you know I mean that that that's for sure but that has nothing to do with Rank and um but I'm really intrigued by the fact that Yandex it's closer than I thought it was if that stat is correct and if that says correct and this is how they're doing it then it gives us a lot of insight about how Google's doing it as well yeah it's I mean it's going to be interesting I think there's going to be a lot of analysis I haven't done it at this point so I just I don't want to like talk I just want to do the work then I'll talk uh but uh let's jump onto the eat stuff now uh thanks for that take by the way uh so in the niche process podcast one of the last advice you gave was uh everyone should go and read the search quality evaluator guidelines right and and you're like well that's if you want to learn this here you probably should go and do that so I did that that's why yeah I'm sure you've seen my notes for the podcast you've done it I have like a lot of thoughts about it Etc and um and so like what I wanted to do is I wanted to go back to essentially um a mix of like what Google says in the guidelines together with what you've talked about in the news us guys and try to understand how this works in practice basically and maybe ask some follow-up questions to what you haven't asked and one thing that was interesting as well is I think at the time I would show recorded the niche posted version they didn't yet add experience which uh They just added now it's e80 it's not e80 right let's talk about experience uh and the experience one is I think one that's going to be interesting for Affiliates uh from the worlds of Google in the guidelines it says considered the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first hand or life experience for the topic many types of pages are trustworthy or achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of professional experience for example which would you trust a product review from someone who has personally used the product or are reviewed by someone who has not and this I was like I know who you're talking about here uh you're talking about affiliate sites obviously um and so you didn't talk about that one in the news posted podcast did you have time to even look at it or did you think about it or did you have did you do any work on this yeah a little bit so when you look at the the guidelines what's interesting is they have little icons next to when they Define things and so you have um expertise and then the experience and kind of what's the difference between those two things what's interesting is on expertise there's a little graduation hat you know the expertise would be your degrees you know it's the education that you put in or that kind of work that you put in to understand a particular thing but then um with the experience it's time you know it's the amount of time that you've put in and and your personal experience with something and and being involved in it are kind of like maybe the the two differences between them I think an important concept I think about this though is what can a bot go in and and see all right especially in light of what we're just talking about that like if they were using AI this is something that you could use for AI you could actually ask the the like chat GPT for example does this person have experience or or is there experience involved in this and and AI could do that but I doubt they're doing that because it's expensive exactly and also I think I think you can do you can get an approximate using um kind of what we're just talking about with like the BM 25 where you're you're looking for a specific terms and essentially you're looking for contextual terms that you would expect to see that meet that expert that experience category so there could be terms about a length of time personal experience what they're involved in and they could probably then have a whole group of terms and those are the terms they're expecting to see to tick the box for uh uh experience same thing with the expertise I think they could do the exact same way you could do it with AI um but you could also do it much cheaper when somebody's talking about uh the degrees they have uh where they worked um that kind of background kind of stuff and they would give them those kind of things so I think with experience and expertise they are probably doing a contextual term I know people hate the term LSI but that kind of an idea you could have terms that they're looking for it's great for those in a very basic python fashion and then tick the box if they're enough of the expected terms I think that's probably how they're going after it yeah so like in the way I see this like for example you'd want worlds like oh when I tested these I'll doing my trial of the product or like things like that like little hints and lots of sentences that would hint that you have touched the product or seen it or like done something with it I think that is 100 correct and it makes perfect sense too because you know they're not going to take the time to be like is this a real review did this person actually give this personal review but they could look for those types of terms when we blah blah blah or when I blah blah blah you know I thought this or we thought that so those kind of terms where it's kind of like giving the idea of that this is a firsthand thing and then I think the other part of that also is duplicate content you know is this review the same review they've seen on hundreds of other websites because it's just the the the the boilerplate review or is this actually um those types of I did this we did that types of terms so I think they could probably get into that type of evaluation quite quickly uh without spending a lot of money and it would get to their desired goal of the there's a better chance that this is an actual review this only has that first-hand experience with that particular product or that service okay so when you talk about duplicate content do you mean like basically they're looking for new information about the product let's say everyone has reviewed the same iPhone for example like everyone's gonna say like oh it has a screen that's this bright and this and this and if you repeat that same thing maybe they're looking for something that nobody else has said yet or something that comes from having tested it right something like this right yeah I think so you know that you could say like the the screen is um so big but you could also say like I found it you know uh to be good too big yeah it was too big to hold or I didn't like how the thing or was too small or that kind of thing so it's one thing to give the specs which everybody's gonna give but then once you kind of elaborate on that and get into terms that that could be easily identified as a personal experience type term yeah so would you say that I mean it's like if I was if an affiliate was like oh how do I implement this on my site my answer to them would be try to be a little smart and sneaky so for example let's say you don't have a Hands-On with the iPhone but you want to review it uh what I would probably do is do things like oh let's compare the weight compared to the weight last time and try to come up with a unique fact of what is the way different oh it's 15 grams lighter than the one last time or something like this and so you'll be able to kind of like give some originality mixed with the vocabulary is that is that the kind of advice you give to an affiliate that no doesn't always have the opportunity to touch the product well sure because in that situation you can talk about the weight but then you can also talk about how it feels and how it feels is a personal to me it felt very light you know it weighed as much but to me it actually felt very heavy that that's then giving that language that would indicate that this is a Hands-On personal experience okay cool um I wanted to talk quickly about an example so I'll put you some links in the notes on the site that I've talked a lot about on the podcast so you might not know it but Auditors definitely know about it it's called The Hoops geek the review uh uh basketball shoes and what they do is they actually summarize YouTube reviews for those shoes so they don't get their shoes themselves but they have a guy watching videos and putting a quantity quantitative scoring on each shoe so they'd be like ah like the robustness the the weight the everything Etc and the way they watch it video and they show the video on the side and it'd be like oh based on this video the score for robustness it is eight and the layer like the weight is seven etc etc would you say that is a way to kind of like bring experience kind of level to your side because you essentially create original insights from things that were YouTube videos you know yeah I was actually just thinking too when you're talking about the iPhone you could do a review based on what you saw in a commercial like there's nothing that says the review has to be you know that you purchased the item and it's sitting in front of you you can still observe something and give your review on it so I think that'd be totally fine to do it that way the hoop site and I yeah I agree and I think you can also talk about experience in the sense of like as a user of this product category for a long time I'm used to this and this product doesn't have decent descendants and you could probably bring experience without actually touching the product or something so you know I'm trying to find ways for people to actually bring like get the right level of copy on their site when I think they should touch some of the products but also we know it's not always physically possible to to do that especially if you're like in exotic locations you know about that uh and so on it's not always easy to do that so yeah I think that's another thing uh anything else you want to say about experience before we jump on to expertise no I think that covers the experience part so then is remote to expertise uh and what Google says is consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary knowledge or skill of for the topic different topics require different levels on types of expertise to be trustworthy for example which would you trust more a home electrical rewiring advice from a skilled electrician or from an Antiques home Enthusiast who has new knowledge of electrical wiring I'll probably pick the first one that's that's why I think you diverge a little bit from what Google says because essentially what Google says is like um they actually when they go you go further in the guidelines they say what the page and the content creators say about themselves what other sites say about the content creator of the site and what the page shows about expertise such as people doing the action they're talking about on video or comments by other people that would point out their lack of expertise or their expertise that they actually have Etc whereas on the niche podcast you're like well none of these methods is just about showing there's a real person behind the page basically um so like that was essentially like you you get the question like how do you how do you do that bridge basically well because like on that second point they're like what other people on other sides are saying about you there's no chance Google's leaving your site going to see what another site says about you and then coming back and ranking for it there's just no chance they're doing that the other thing too is that they're not going to make any value judgments what's better a degree from Stanford or a degree from MIT who knows who cares but but don't you think what matters is like the degree itself like maybe they don't make a judgment value between two degrees but maybe they they value someone who has a degree of someone who doesn't that could be but what's more important I just got out of school from Penn State or I've got 30 years experience yeah like in the in the industry yeah but I think that's why they added experience I think experience they realize they're not something you know but I mean the thing like in that in that case they're like but that 30 years though isn't just the experience of it but that is actually my expertise you know I've been a woodworker for 30 years you just came out of school and you got a degree in woodworking you know you want to go to the person that's got the 30 years experience not the kid right out of school but how are they going to know that that's not anything that they're not going to get into I think and try to weigh those types of things but what they can see in any of the situations is that somebody's actually written this stuff you know that there is a human that's there and then this is where I'd Advocate using person schema and then within the person schema doing your same as and your same ads would then go out to those places that demonstrate your degrees your certificates your profiles on things that would then demonstrate that you're somebody that has actually done these things I think that's as far as they would go um you know the human the humans might go farther but I don't think the bot is going to go any farther than that I think what you have to establish is that that it's a person and I think it's a good time to talk about what the guidelines are and what the tech of Google is because the the guidelines are here for human race for people who actually that's right later on check the search results and then just get like give feedback so that then they can build factos for the algorithm but these are not factors for the algorithms they are just a way you teach a human to review a page and the technicality of how you do things when you program things is often quite different and you're looking at different things and different factors than what you would explain to a human and how to do this to essentially try to get to the same result most of the time let's just say that like they're willing to be wrong a small percentage right no that's correct I mean these these are for humans so the results exist and the idea is that they've got these guidelines and they want the humans to go in and check the results against those things but that means they're expecting to get there you know they're expecting to get to that point but they're obviously not doing the same way so they have to be doing it in a way that a bot would be able to do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible and so in this case I think they would have identified things I think they feel pretty confident that if it's a human you know like and it has those things going on they can identify that they're going to feel pretty good that they are probably at least a minimum standard of what you would need in to to be considered to have the expertise to talk about what you're talking about yeah actually to to go on you know you were talking about experience versus expertise yeah uh and actually there is a section about that in the quality uh guidelines actually they talk about that I think it's quite interesting that they added experience because they realized that expertise was just not enough you you could be an expert without the degree for example as you said right just with the experience and that's why they said that and so what they say is that ymol Pages can sell different purposes and stuff require High expertise for trustworthy content personal experience shared on way oil topic can have high ee80 if trust for the safe and consistent with expert consensus and that one is very important I believe some imyl information and advice must come from expert so like you know for example accounting accounting advice probably you would want an accountant to tell you not just the the experience of some guy who got audited by the by the the tax system or something but like for many other things like for weight loss or whatever like you could say like someone who actually went through it might have more experience than a nutritionist who is not in very good shape themselves you know which happens uh and it's like and so you and I think Google has added that Nuance by adding the experience to eat like that's why they add they had they need the X-ray and I think you can have either experience or expertise on your page and do well you don't necessarily need to hit both would you agree totally and that's also why when they've re like Define these things too in adding the experience they've also shifted experience expertise and authoritativeness to kind of secondary to that idea of trust so so you don't need to hit it all you know it's it's hitting as much as you can especially within those two things and then there's obvious overlap between them and I think they're willing to accept that that somebody might have a lot of this but not a lot of that and that's okay uh if they're trustworthy you know what I mean yeah and I but I think it's an important topic because what it means is that when you're building a page that probably is let's say eeat sensitive so probably why myl as they would call it um you'd probably want to pick which direction you're going right the experience or the expertise way right so let's say you want to do a page on the keto diet for example how do I decide do I want a doctor to write this or do I want someone who's been on the keto diet for 10 years to write this and does it matter I don't I don't think it would you know I don't think it would and I don't think Google wants that to matter it would just be that that somebody has done it that either has that 10 years experience or has the degree that's what I think the the point would be okay cool another thing around this topic that we've seen a lot on websites is design elements that try to prove the expertise or the experience you know like this this page has been doctor reviewed uh like a list of degrees in uh in the auto bio things like that um do you think these matter on the page like do you think that's something that that the bot might be looking at uh or do you think these are like a bunch of I would you know I would do anything I can to make it as easy as possible for a bot to to come to a conclusion and so I would have those terms on the page if I could I think they're probably silly but I I would probably do it I I would I would tend to agree with you and I think also in general it tends to increase the trust from the user I can have like some little passive effects like people are more likely to link to you or people are more likely to share your page or uh and and these things might lead to higher rankings down the line basically there's also the fact checked like a lot of websites are now fact checked you know they get this little check mark at the end and like some guy if I checked the article or something would you add this to your site as well like would you do as much as you can of this what would you like when you're on the web site like what would you be looking to add in terms of like trust design elements that would convey expertise or experience yeah I think would be listing the the degrees you have Awards you have um certifications those type of things because all those can go into the same as area uh for like a particular person the person that's writing it so uh and well there's certain things you're allowed to mark up if they don't exist on the page the general rule is that you have to have it on the page to mark it up because these are things I wouldn't just have it on the Page by the way I think it's also critical to evidence schema I think you're taking a huge Risk by having this kind of stuff and then not also then having say person schema to say who this person is and these things so I I think it's more important even probably to put into the schema than actually have it on the page so um but anything that I could get on there I would because I think it only helps you in the long run okay all right okay cool makes sense uh so go ahead and add your uh fact checked and everything things on the articles is going to help you another thing that a lot I've seen a lot of sites that kind of like have to do with ymyl do is um I'll be honest I've seen a lot of like sites essentially try to get cheap eat on their site let's just say that and go and hire doctors in the Philippines or something like this and just put them like as many as they can on their about page right and as a way to demonstrate expertise and kind of like associate the names of these people who might be listed on you know Hospital boards and things like that in the Philippines uh with their website do you think that is something that would be helpful as well again I don't think it's having the person with the degree or not I think it's just having the person the person is really the the key it's not going to um this person doesn't exist creating a a fake image and then going in and that's that's the problem you know so and again I don't think Google's going to make a value judgment of the the doctors from the Philippines where there's this doctors from Thailand whereas this doctor is from Bulgaria I don't think any of that matters uh it's the that this is a person this is a doctor okay cool make sense so essentially associate the right person and then think about adding these Design Elements they can't hurt basically that's kind of the idea yeah okay I don't exactly I don't think it can hurt yeah it's like sometimes you know we do things because we don't know for sure and it's like it's like even for me like I just like I observe size that Rank and I have no idea if that's helping or not but what I know is their ranking and they have it uh therefore I'm probably gonna do it you know which way do you want to head your bets you know do you want to be like well we spent all this time and all this money we got all this rankings and I'm not gonna take 10 minutes to do a few of these things you know because I don't think I'm all right good for you you don't have to you know you don't have to at all but you know now I think you're exposing yourself to more risk I agree I agree cool let's talk about uh Authority right so what Google says authoritativeness consider the extent to which the content creator of the website is known as the go-to source for the topic While most topics do not have one official authoritative website or content creator when they do the website orconographer is often among the most reliable trustworthy sources for example local business profile page social media may be authoritative and trusted Source on what is on sell now the official government page for getting a passport is the unique official authoritative source to passport renewal right so that is Google's explanation of what is Authority and what you said on this Pursuit is it's about the sites Authority not the person's Authority and you said have you covered the topic have you fully basically you talked about topical relevancy right making sure that you hit most of your subtopics and you also mentioned about making sure to cover topics that might be too difficult for you to write for but if every other side um essentially mentioned like has that page you probably should have it right how do you link these two basically because they talk about being the the go-to source for the topic and do you think that you achieve that through this topical Authority basically is that is that what you mean 100 if you if your website answers one question it's not the go-to source for a topic to be the go-to source for a topic you have to answer all the questions you know you have to have that topical coverage otherwise you're not the go-to source you're the go-to source for one thing one one question of this topic so the other thing that you can look to to to tag something as the go-to source is ugc people are going to be commenting they're going to be asking questions so in addition to covering the topic having that ugc I think would be also a very strong indicator here for authoritativeness interesting because a lot of sites have been removing comments including us we've removed comments on outside uh frankly because a lot of them were kind of and uh and questions were bad and it was just a lot of work to do and I know a lot of big sites have removed comments as well do you think that is a mistake all through the webmaster guidelines and through like this kind of stuff Google talks about how much they love comments that's true they desperately love them yeah yeah that's true um and so and it's not just in one document either that they talk about it's in multiple documents how much they they absolutely love it so I can see that as an indicator if this is a go-to source people are going to ask that go to Source questions right you know they're going to trust yeah they're gonna believe this is an authority and because they believe it's an authority they're going to ask the authority questions and in a way and an indicator for them to see that would be that there are comments on this the other thing that I love about comments as well is though let's say you get into this game and you realize all right we need 1500 words on this page or whatever it might be and you start ranking and doing pretty well maybe you get to page one and that's great as you have comments you're slowly but surely adding content to this page and those comments are about the topic then you're adding term frequency you're adding keyword Rich uh uh content you can also respond in the same way and then slowly over time that had 1500 or 2 000 word article turns into seven thousand words and the thing is that raises the bar to entry for anybody to come at you because they can't just instantly write a seven thousand word uh article and and beat you because you've got time on your side you've got the slow incremental build and you're there at the site so I love comments for that reason it allows you to slowly build out stay relevant continue to post new content and it's coming from the outside which is even better and so for ranking purposes I think it's great and then also uh for uh e purposes I think it's really great as well okay uh I want to challenge that a bit in the sense that you know you also an advocate of like optimizing your pages making sure you have like a certain amount of keywords in there Etc don't you think you essentially lose the control of your page optimization when you open up the comment section well one you can moderate them and two you're allowed to respond and I think you can handle it so you respond with optimized responses for your keywords you absolutely is that is yeah 100 100 interesting why wouldn't you do you think that that gives you a program to get it on there let's be a bit cheeky here let's imagine that I am I'm a nobody uh I don't have much traffic would you rather write a 3000 World article about a topic because you saw your competition has three thousand words would you rather write a concise article of like let's say a thousand five hundred words I can probably say all the information anyway you know half of SEO content is fluffed anyway and then just fake the comment section below would you prefer which which one would you pick um I would probably start with the larger article first because that's a little bit easier to control but then as as you're going then I would build out that fake ugc you know as as you want to grow in there oh okay okay cool okay now now I've sparked a a new trend in SEO people are gonna I'm gonna just give me I don't think this is I don't think this is a new trend I am surprised though that people turn off comments uh one other note though um make sure that whatever you're using to create the comments can actually be read by Google there are some things that um discuss it it's not so good for example exactly right it puts it into like JavaScript and it can't be seen so that's a complete waste of time I think in my mind that's a complete waste of time yeah yeah you need to make it easy to crawl like it might be callable like you read oh Google can call JavaScript but it costs a lot more resources and you have to do your core budget so it's like make sure that you know it can be ready in your channel it's easier always make it easy uh always make it easy another challenge I have for you is that you essentially say make sure you have answered all the questions whereas Google says and go to source for the topic I don't think they're necessarily the same right if I publish a new site tomorrow with a thousand pages that answers all the questions I'm not necessarily the go-to source for the topic so do you think that's another technical limitation by Google and that's just their proxy for trying to answering that correct that's a matter of crawling but if you were to launch a thousand pages today and then you were to launch or you'd launch one page for a thousand days the Thousand page when the lines at once is going to perform a lot better A lot faster you know because the content exists the content's there yeah yeah true I mean you just have more keywords you're lucky to rank for ETC okay I mean that's fine I could also think that it's like it's not always easy to say who's the go-to authority especially on topics that don't necessarily have consensus I think it's a tricky one for example what's the best way to to Surf right I'm sure there's like different ways of doing this I'm sure there's a million ways to tell like who is the go-to Atari is the Hawaiian guy who's like following the ancestral technique or is it the cool guy from Croatia that like came up with another way of doing it and so I think uh maybe maybe that's just a proxy as well okay cool uh anything else on Authority no I think those are the big things cool uh let's talk about trust which as you said earlier is kind of like the overarching one so like Google when they explain E8 e80 now they're basically all the other ones is like a triangle and Trust like bang up in the middle and they're like if you don't have trust it doesn't matter uh all the rest doesn't matter what they say exactly is actually trust is the most important member of eeat family because untrustworthy Pages have low e80 no matter how experienced expert or authoritative they may see for example a financial scam is untrustworthy even if the content creator is a highly experienced an expert scammer who is considered a go-to on running scams so if you don't have trust the rest doesn't matter basically and so do you want to run us back to what you said our initial system like how you should achieve that basically well you know in the guidelines they actually make this pretty clear the finding who is responsible for the website and the content and it says that every page belongs to a website and it should be clear who is responsible for the website and who created the content that's what trust is right there is is figuring out who is responsible for this stuff and so that comes down to the company behind it and then who wrote it who's that actual person that uh that put that out there and they need to know that on each piece of content that you've put out and so that's where you need to make it as clear as possible that you're real that there is a company behind this uh Enterprise that that's responsible for this website and there's a person that actually created this content and I think those two things are are hugely important and that's where the the trust uh threshold hits uh for for that particular thing and if they don't know who this is um you know when the first medic update happened in Dr ax got slammed I I went and looked at the site and when you looked at the site there's this very attractive man holding up you know whatever he's holding up and he's like you know waving and thumbs upping and you should trust me and as a human I could look at this be like oh this is pretty legit this is a very nice looking website that's a appears to be a doctor but then as I was clicking through I realized I have no idea who Dr ax is other than this photo you know that's it and the dude claiming to be Dr ax and I have no idea who owns this website and at the time it was owned by something like green leaf or something Leaf I realized it took about two three clicks to get out of the website to find out who actually owned it and then I was like well this makes a lot of sense to me even though as a human I can come and see that this is a legitimate website and this advice looks fine you know it doesn't look anything out there anything like that but I don't know who is writing this and I don't know who owns this and you can see how that would immediately fail on the trust factor and especially now that Google's making it very obvious that this is the most important thing this is what you need to make as clear as possible yeah so on the news process podcast you mentioned you want to contact details with unique street address matching phone number and multiple email address he's a new example was like oh you probably want like an ads ads and like a support and then maybe sales hacker et cetera just list a bunch of stuff to show that you have a bunch of department and look official basically I think that was your explainer right that's right as much as as you can do you know as much as you can get on there that's what you should do yeah within the within the the guidelines it also talks about within that contact info that um customer service is extremely important especially if you're handling money or there's money involved and so if you're running affiliate site I hate to break this to you but money is involved and you need to see yourself at the highest standard so the the the highest critique that's going to happen is going to happen on your site you know I'm just selling you know light bulbs who cares like there's still money involved in here and so it's going to go under a heightened level of scrutiny and you need to be as legitimate as you can be present that because Google can't look at yourself be like oh this is a great look inside look at this content you know look at all this look at all this stuff over here this is great it's not going to evaluate it that way it's going to evaluate who owns this website and who wrote this content and and if you can't make that clear you're really putting yourself in danger yeah so you actually let's imagine like I'm an affiliate guy like I got hit by an update and I don't have contact details on my site what do I do do I put the address of my bedroom in my parents basement or or how does it work like how do you actually practically go for that do you have Services you recommend see this is this is hilarious to me if you are running an affiliate site you know you're running a business right yep but I think the vast majority of people don't I know I know what you mean like they think like well this is just a website no if you're taking money that's called a business now and you're supposed to run it like a business so you should have a business address and uh most businesses have figured out like let's say you run your business from home that's totally fine a lot of people do and they probably don't want to have their home address on things they've figured out a business address and that's that's what you need to do the part that becomes tricky is we're you know running a business address and maybe a local phone number so maybe that costs 50 bucks a month or something like that and you're like I'm only making ten dollars a month in affiliate commissions I can see why that would be difficult but that I think is also Google's point you know like if the idea yeah if you can't start the real businesses right if you can't get to the level where you're legitimate a legitimate business why should you be in the in the index you know that's fair uh yeah we use a service called companies Made Simple in the UK actually so they can do all of that for you actually we have a business address in London we have a I have a mailbox we have a phone number and as you said like what was important was to have a unique street address and when you said that it was like the Suites you said like make sure you have a unique suite number or something like this uh and then you essentially have a matching phone number so don't have a phone number that's 500 kilometers away or something like this and also like a unique phone number for that particular entity because uh if you have a unique number then you can do like a GMB you know you can register all this like it actually is a thing that um it is it's its own can you get um do you think your mobile number is fair because it's a lot easier for people to just yeah yeah SIM card right uh yeah okay I don't think there's any issue with that at all exactly you know yeah and I would you know that's easy to do as well you know if you're registered in a particular area you can get local numbers that's not too tricky that's that's actually not a problem at all at least in the US yeah I mean in UK it's quite easy too you also mentioned that people should have an about the company page and about the team page can you just tell us a bit more about why and what's on there and maybe tell us like an example or something like this well you know that actually probably falls under the authoritativeness um it's in the guidelines you know the what what they say about themselves and they actually say look for the about us page sure yeah that is that is one of the one of the things and what I've so is is the above the company PhD about page is it the same page yeah yeah yeah yeah I I personally like it where you can say like okay this is the about the the company page and you discuss you know when the company was founded and and you know your core values and why the company exists Etc and then you've got like that team page and that's the humans you know and that gives you an opportunity to get all of your humans on one page and then you can have links to their bio Pages their personal author bio pages is how I I would set it up some people do combine those into one so the the top part talks about the company and the bottom part talks about the the humans and that's fine um I do find a little bit easier I do like the idea of having that about us and and the meet the Tina separate things because that shows I think it's a that's two boxes to check as the bot comes through rather than just one and hoping that they understand that this is about the company and about the the people involved as well so that's why I like uh two different things and that's how I would approach it okay um one thing that I've noticed a lot of bigger Publications tend to have as well is they tend to feature much more prominently the editorial guidelines like they tend to like oh how they review products or things like that and it's like it's one of the things that um I've actually been teaching in near to exercise this time is to create some kind of like how we review product how we select the recommended product type page that essentially runs people through your thought process when you pick something you're gonna recommend and for people and what you essentially what your values are what you stand for and what you're looking at when you pick something uh is that something that you've seen or that you would recurrent people do that seems like great information for the like the about us about the company page for sure I don't correctly wrong I don't recall anything that would match up to that in in the guidelines but to me no absolutely no it's more like it's it's something I've seen I've observed on in like large corporations that are running for bigger field keywords I've observed that uh quite often in The Meta area you know where the date is going to be yeah et cetera they will have a new link that says like editorial um like editorial transparency or something like this and they'll have dedicated Pages for these kind of things that run so it's like it's just a it's not about the guidelines about what I've observed really yeah I like that I mean again I think that falls into the that makes sense you know you it makes sense to have that I would totally do it I think that gives you great content for that page or even a separate page I'm like this is what we do and you have a whole editorial guidelines page I think that's totally fine I would do it cool uh there's like one passage that I got in the guidelines that I wanted to talk to you about as well uh that is about essentially untrustworthy Pages it says a web page that claims to offer independent review or share all the information about the product but is in fact created to make money for the owner of the website without attempting to help the user is essentially considered having no trust like that's basically what they say um do you think they're talking about affiliate sites here and uh how do you make sure you don't fall into that Pitfall if that is yeah I would think that that's where like it claims to offer an independent review but there it really isn't so in my mind that might be duplicate content they they've used the review of somebody else um the information they're sharing about the product is information that exists on the web you know and is easy to find and access and so it's not necessarily unique to the site that would be my guess as to what they might be pushing for there because I'm otherwise I wouldn't know how you would be able to say like this review isn't independent you know uh and also how do you say it as a robot exactly exactly maybe as a human you can get that feeling like you're like oh yeah I hate this he's recommended a terrible product because they're paying high commissions you know that's a good point like you know like it's something that you know is a terrible product this is 10 stars and this is what you're against you know something that actually had the algorithm knows you know that's the thing and it's it's an interesting point because it's like it's one of these things where it might be more wishful thinking and maybe some stuff that they want to capture so that one day maybe when they have more more advanced ways to analyze the information and they can process that level of information at that scale because I think that one thing that we need to say as well is like a lot of these things with that I'll talk about in the guidelines it's possible technically to analyze as a robot on like a page but then analyzing the entire internet at that level of depth costs an incredible amount of electricity and also it needs just the the physical computers to this to process that information and I think seeing how often GPT goes down shows the hardware limitations that we're still facing today even with multi-billion dollar companies so it's not because it's technically possible with one page and that it we could do it that Google is necessarily doing it would you agree with that as well because I think that's a big misconception like the scale the scale is something people don't really think about and also the costs is like how much better do Google search results get for like a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars of CPUs and electricity basically uh you know and I can even tell you on a personal level like with with page optimizer pro if we were only doing one website on the internet we would have no problems but it's like uh people like oh you know your tool can't crawl my site and you go and the sites code is absolute garbage or it's this weird new fancy thing and they're like well you know we're index Google can crawlers like Google is worth trillions you know like and we're not quite there yet but then we think like even at Google's level they're not quite there yet you know they can't get through the entire web they can't get through they still struggle with JavaScript you know so like you know there's all that so when you kind of take it if you're on this scale it's it's pretty easy as soon as you get out to the entire world by web you're talking about an incredible scale and I again they need they need to do that as cheaply as they can I think we've really become immune to when you type in a keyword and you hit enter and you instantly have results and they're relevant that's unreal that that can exist that's that's insane to me that exists and I think we take it completely for granted because it just that's how it works why wouldn't it work that way but the amount of processing that takes to do it at at scale that fast is absurd but you know they have to do it as cheaply as they can you know they they must because they can't just waste money and yeah it's it's and not only that but I think just I think physical servers existing enough having enough physical CPUs processing all of this in real time Etc it's not uh it's not very simple uh especially given for example energy cost is there right it's like Google's paying the electricity a lot more today than they are like two years ago for example and so like when they're making changes to the algorithm and it requires reprocessing the entire index they probably think twice about it because they're looking at millions of dollars of bills I mean I know they use Renewables they do all of that Etc very cost money to build these things as well Etc so uh it's like uh I think the SEO World quite often lacks a technical understanding of like how how challenging doing things that are possible that small scale is on the large scale and that's why we talk about what the guidelines say and then what actually happens when a robot cross your website and what can be done in a cost efficient way essentially exactly um and uh and and that's why there's a difference between what it says and what actually you should maybe look at on your website if you want to rank it you talk about HTML sitemaps as well I kind of rise the neighbor when you say that one like you say oh HTML site maps are we back in uh in 2000 that's something but you you say the help scroll and uh and I think you put it in the trust when you talk about the initial process uh in the newspapers podcast like how does that increase trust exactly well it's the idea of Google getting your pages you know that the way that Google likes to discover pages is through a click and that click can be on your own site and everyone has indexing issues and I think a way to alleviate that is through an HTML sitemap and I've found that that's a sites that have had eat issues uh getting that in there and getting more of their Pages indexed really does seem to be a big benefit so uh I would have that on there just to encourage the crawling to make sure like you know that that about us page gets crawled you know about the team page gets crawled the you know your privacy policy Pages get crawled all that gives you the better chance of getting Google into those pages and and getting the recognition for them so it's kind of like a Fail-Safe for technical issues would you would you say like yeah so if your site has full structure has like you know your menu is like JavaScript or something and it's harder to crawl or something then at least it can go to the HTML sitemap and find the pages and it finds it without difficulty would you say that's that's that's right that's right okay cool makes sense on that level it makes sense because a lot of these kind of guys that have issues probably have technical depth as well and therefore there could be uh there could be issues here so I can see why where it comes from uh okay anything that I did not ask you on trust that you would have asked yourself if you were doing the interview no no I think that hits that one as well you're doing a great job you're doing a great job wow I feel so good now you're happy I'm not against you talking at China SEO okay now I would be concerned exactly uh okay I'm sure you've heard about that new tool that very few people have talked about called chat GPT uh and uh how do you say gbt essentially yeah what is that I don't know you know it's like never heard of it how do you think that place with ee80 because essentially Google came on record and saying well actually we don't care that much about AI content we just care about punishing content now they kind of like for a while they were like oh oh AI is automatically automatically generated content therefore it's spam and now I think they've realized that they couldn't win that battle so they were like well we're just gonna go after bad content um but obviously that means AI is going to help create content right um How does a how does that affect all the e80 stuff well I think what's going to happen is it's that's going to be the the a icon that's going to be treated the exact same way as duplicate content is and I think they're going to approach it in the exact same way because like let's say we all ask the same question 50 websites ask chat GPT the same question you're going to get I think relatively the same answer and now you've got 50 websites posting the exact same content and that's where you're going to run into a lot of duplicate content and Google will start to identify that and devalue it which is I think I don't know have you seen the the fun sites that people put up with like 10 000 Pages done through AI content yeah and they have that media Arc rise and then that meeting that's what it is so I mean it's like oh my God yeah we we cracked the code but you know that's you could do the exact same thing with um spun content from 2012. it would do the it might last a little longer actually but it ends up doing the exact same thing it reminded me of uh your new unique article Wizard and all the times where we were posting spun articles to get like hundreds of backlinks I would rank in four hours and then I would think a month and a half later or something and I think that's exactly how it's going to go with this you know if you just use pure AI content I I think what's going to happen is is the exact same thing one other thing that was interesting is I I was just somebody just sent me an article about uh a case study that was on and I apologize to the people that did it I didn't catch their name when I read it but they were saying that um they ran uh through five different tools through five different detector tools and what's funny is about two weeks ago I feel like we only had two detector tools and now they're now there's like five six seven probably more than that and so like uh open AI released one yesterday that's right like open a made an official one yesterday so it didn't take long you know and if these are doing it then you got to figure you know fun fact Google has been working on AI you know quite a quite a bit which tells me that they're probably pretty so do you think they're gonna detect AI content I think they're gonna detect it like duplicate yeah okay but like do you think they're gonna do it because because all the articles are the same basically like just kind of like spun it's basically a very smart spinner when you ask a basic question um that's exactly so like I guess they're gonna look at it yeah so so using essentially through patterns of content maybe not it doesn't say the same words Etc but the structure of the article is to say it makes the same first one the same second point the same third point I think and Google's gonna be like well I've seen this before and they will essentially try to maybe catch you on the conceptual level and article structural level more than like on the World by world and like duplicate content will expand its definition I think so I think that's I think that's how they'll approach it okay cool so if you're running a Content company today do you invest in like scaling up AI content or do you invest in really good human writers I think you can use the AI content to fast forward a lot of things give you that rough draft uh give you the sections on the page that you need you know the titles they need subheaders that type of thing I think you I think you can and and should use that but you really do need that human editor it has to to have that human voice put into it to make sure that um you're going to keep say out of trouble so I think it's a a good way to fast forward a rough draft or a rough rough rough draft but after that then I think I want a human involved to um to take care of things so a little bit of both we agree on that actually usually we do the early stages on AI usually like a big outline or something like this and then after that yeah yeah take over you know um and that that is quite useful I like that okay another thing that you didn't talk about in eeat which surprised me is you only talked about on page but you didn't talk about links I personally believe if e80 was a factor a lot of it would be put in links from external websites that are harder to gain than from whatever you say about yourself on your site or things that I I believe the phone number Etc are very valuable and all your device is very valuable but I also think that links would pay will play a big part into it and would you agree with that or would you disagree with that and why I think they've already got it covered on link side anyway because there are links that are going to help you establish who you are you know like citations for example and I think you could easily say that those would be you know trust Factor type links right you're explaining who you are that you're a real thing uh and so I think they definitely have an equality but I I would think this I already have that covered maybe on the backlink side they don't need to put it on the eat side would be my guess and that's all that's just a guess but that's kind of what I was thinking about so you should cover those types of things but I would kind of put that into the backlink category more so than doing it for each okay even though I think it has that same purpose all right so the smaller categorization thing done uh then like a disagreement would you say that's right that's right okay cool makes sense yeah because I personally believe that like if you get your site featured on the biggest sites in your Niche on all of that Etc I mean you gain the relevancy but you also essentially confirm your real person confirm you're not already like do all these things that it wants you to do and I think it's the smart way for Google to kind of like give that to a third party rather than just have to pay for a lot of processing uh and so and so that's like yeah I would recommend like uh you know proper PR campaigns etc for me is a good way to kind of like increase the trust in your website in general as well I totally agree yeah uh I have one last question which is uh your tool your on-page tool page optimizer pro now has a feature about eeat can you tell us how it works and what it does yeah essentially we've gone through the radar guidelines we pulled out a whole bunch of things that that a bot can find because our bot can find them and essentially what we do is we pull in um the factors that you have on your page that we can find but also the factors on your competitors and we give you hey six of your competitors have this you don't have it and the idea is that maybe you should get it on your page and that's kind of the basic idea because it isn't checking one box with with Eid it's checking as many as you can and a lot of things we just covered you know in this talk I think we'll get you where you need to go but then we do have this where um you can actually kind of double check like you know do all your competitors have one particular thing that maybe you haven't done and all these things usually take just a handful of minutes to do I would do as many as you can to again just to to take enough boxes okay so you're basically helping kind of like automate a lot of these checks against the competition so you don't just have to check your website but you also check everyone else that's against you yeah because you might say like okay we've got an address we've got a phone number we're good right but maybe a bunch of your competitors in in that particular Niche have other things you know like the guidelines talk about like uh contact for example might change uh Niche to Niche some niches need more contact information some niches need less and so what we would be looking at you could see what your competitors actually have in terms of a lot of those contact information things and to make sure that you know like hey you know what we don't have this type of email address maybe we should get that on when when your competitors do that kind of a thing so we go through and show you what you have in terms of what we've identified that a bot can find and also then what your competitors have as well and I think we might be the only tool that's got that I don't I can't say for certain but I've never seen it before like it's the first time I thought it was a good idea um because it just can save you a lot of time especially if you have clients I think for agencies like you know if you're managing a portfolio of sites uh like a big portfolio of sites it's not always easy to keep an eye on everything uh and actually you provided with a coupon code so people you can use Atari hacker 15 and you get 15 off on the monthly unlimited plan so go check it out if you want uh that is Kels tool so yeah I did the promo well yeah even though we're out arch nemesis we can find Common Ground um that's what SEO is about it's like it's coming together I said one of the small things that um uh we actually give free credits now for for read as well so like when people are on a trial plan we actually have credit so they can try it so uh they get five credits for eat and five credits for Google's NLP API as well so everybody can kind of try those things out cool then yeah I'd say I'd say at least give you the shot uh as I saw you can put your site on the your URL on the site as well and get some results so uh go check it out uh any anything that I didn't ask in general about eat that people should do that we didn't talk about on this podcast that you'd recall that most people do no this was this was pretty good I think um you know as you mentioned in the beginning it's it's great to go read the guidelines they're 120 pages and I'd say the middle 60 pages is probably not worth reading but the the there's stuff on the top and the bottom that's definitely worth your time and I would I would check that out yeah I think the the best way to read it is like read the table of content and just read the section and go back to the Secretary of content and find what's interesting um some stuff is kind of be relevant for SEO some stuff's actually pretty useful uh I checked it out a long time ago and for this podcast I got back I spent spent a whole afternoon on it you know just repeating everything but I've actually enjoyed it it's like it's not as dry as people would expect there's a lot of examples Etc so my recommendation we put the links on the podcast channel so you can go on otohaka.com podcast and you'll find uh the link to the guidelines if you don't have it and we'll link to the promo as well and Cal thank you so much for coming on the podcast it's been fun as always I hope you'll come back and I look forward to see your talk at Chennai SEO thanks so much for having me always fun thanks foreign [Music]

Channel: Authority Hacker

Views: 12,886

Keywords: authorityhacker, authority hacker

Id: HUVkqe_ugrc

Length: 57min 23sec (3443 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023