Google confirms links are less important, What will be the future of search in 10 years?, and more

So Google said that links aren't important.

Yes, they said they're not that important compared to before. They used to be one of the leading algorithm factors, but over the years, you know, Google has confirmed that it's not through— not a top 3 ranking factor. And now they're saying, which still goes in line, that, hey, we're able to determine even if a site has very few links, if it's worthy of its position based on a lot of other circumstances. UX, user experience, load time, back button, if the content matches the keyword intent, all those types of things, right? I still believe links matter because Backlinko posted an article years ago talking about Google's ranking factors and how there's over 200. And Google's talked about how they have tons and tons of ranking factors. Dude, you have an agency, I have an agency, I don't know how many times we've optimized sites and made them literally, most people look at them and be like, this is perfect, and they don't rank. Because there's not enough links. You just need links. I've never seen it where a site doesn't have either a lot of links, being like the domain authority, or a page doesn't have enough links and it's just like, oh cool, low domain authority, very few link counts, you have the best content out there and you dominate the top spot. All the studies and all the data we've done when we scrape the web, analyze backlink counts, et cetera, everyone has a crap ton of links.

When Google says something like links aren't important anymore or not that important, I take it with a grain of salt because when you think about their entire history of saying things, the web spam team, you can't believe it because what they're trying to do ultimately is they're trying to protect their algorithm. And when you look at the last recently, the helpful content updates, a lot of the people that won, they had sites with high domain authority, high domain rating, however you want to look at it, that means their link profile was very strong.

Yeah.

None of you guys want your links and you have a marketing site, contact Neil and myself. We will gladly take your websites off of you. We'll take your link profile if it's not that valuable, right? But from what we see with our clients, what you've seen with your clients too, it's still a major factor. And, you know, we could talk about AI all we want, but I still think we're 5, 10 years out before we start to really devalue links more. And I still think at that point, it's still going to be important.

Same here. And it's funny, do you remember the old study that Rand Fishkin did years and years ago when he was at Moz? where he told everyone to Google, it was something like the best steak.

It was a random thing.

Yeah, it was like the best steak. It was related to steaks. And I could be getting the keyword wrong, but he said, everyone click on the number 1 listing and go back and then click on either the number 2 or 3 listing. And, but stay there and scroll around and click around. And I'm paraphrasing here. And within hours it caused that site to shift from like the 2nd or 3rd position to number 1 for that keyword. And it just shows that they're using user signals. But back then, a lot of people were like, no, Google's talked about how they don't use a lot of this kind of stuff. This is false. It's not because I'm like, but the ranking shifted. And then Michael King, is that his last name?

Michael King, yeah.

Michael King talked about it at a PubCon speech a few months back or a month back. And he was like, yeah, it was actually true. And a lot of us didn't believe him based on what, you know, people in Google and everyone was saying.

But like— Yeah, you can't, I mean, like at the end of the day, your main business For Google is is search. You you run ads, right? You need to protect the algorithm. And so, even if it's true, you can't confirm it, right? And you're better off just confusing people at the end of the day. That's really what their job is. And what Moz did, what Rand Fishkin more so. So he did the steak test, but he also did another test where it was just gibberish. He's like, everyone search for this gibberish. It's like XXBXY or something like that, right? This is a long time ago. Everyone search for it, and all of a sudden. You know that I think what happened? I think the the I'm trying to remember the test, but it was something similar where like the clicks for that or the the that keyword. No no no, I'm not remembering the test. I have to find the test now. I'm going to find the test now. Now now it's bugging me. All right, real quick. I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association, and this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but. We thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners, to helping them scale. So you could be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency, and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now, what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can, at least the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back To the video. Let's continue on here. You had something else about Google.

Yeah, so, and speaking of Google, Google CEO talked about what search will be like in 10 years. And there was this whole article on Search Engine Journal and they were breaking down pretty much how it's the early days of AI, it's evolving fast, and they talk about somewhat of the future. If you haven't read the article, you can check it out, but I can paraphrase based on everything that they're saying. Right? They talk about, oh, they're used to it. There haven't been 10 blue links in a long time, which is true. I've even done tweets about this because everyone's like, oh, the 10 blue links are going to disappear. That's a big misconception. Google hasn't had 10 blue links in ages. I'm not talking about a year or 2 or 3 or 4. I'm talking about it's really been ages where they moved away from that model. But they're talking about, oh, you know, 10 blue links, they haven't been there. It's not a chatbot experience. AI improves search, not replaces it. Websites are still important. And of course, Of course, because they need the data from websites and the crawling. But the overall, when you read the whole article, they didn't really give any insights on what Google's going to look like 10 years from now. What it seems like is they don't really know what Google's going to look like 10 years from now, and it's just going to be a big experiment.

That's exactly what we've been saying on this podcast.

Yeah, it's a big interpretation. And if you look at everything that they do, it's all about, oh, let's make this tweak, show it to like 0.1% of our traffic. Make sure it doesn't negatively impact user experience and hopefully not negatively impact revenue. I do believe they put the users first. And then from there, if it works out, they do more of it. If it doesn't work out, they go back. If you look at a lot of the changes that they've done over the years in Google, they've went back and forth on changes. It's because things didn't work out based on user signals and what they're gathering from people.

I think what's for sure in terms of the future of Google is that They have their core business to protect and they have their shareholders to protect. That forces them to stay focused on the golden goose. I don't know how they're going to pivot over the next 10 years, but we've seen companies like Microsoft figure out how to pivot. We've seen Facebook pivot. We've seen Apple pivot over the years. They have a lot of smart people working there. Hopefully, they figure it out. Search is their golden goose, whereas if you're like a Perplexity or an OpenAI, you have a lot more flexibility to test things because you are trying to compete for— really, ultimately, everyone's competing for attention at the end of the day. I found Here's the test, by the way. Here's the test. So what I was saying was Rand Fishkin— this is in 2014 actually. So he said, care to help with a Google theory test? He actually ran this test a couple of times because I haven't seen this one. He said, could you search for iMechLab in Google and click the link from my blog? I have a hunch. So obviously his hunch is if everyone searches for iMechLab and clicks on his result, that click-through signal is going to bump things up. And then from this, it actually moved his His result all the way to the top. Yeah.

And he did a similar thing with the steaks example that I gave earlier.

Yep.

And speaking of Google and change, dude, here's an interesting survey that we ran at NP Digital back in 2020. We asked people how do they search for questions online? And 98% said search engines, 1% said social media, 1% said other, other being like sites like Quora and stuff like that. In 2024, so this year we ran this survey again. But this time with 11,105 people, instead of 98% of the people saying they use Google to find questions, 61%.

Hmm.

17% said social media, which is a big jump from 1%. 30% said AI chatbots like ChatGPT, and 2% said other like sites like Quora. But trends are shifting and changing. This doesn't mean Google's dead or anything like that, because questions only make up roughly, uh, 8% of their searches per day out of the 8.5 billion searches that they get. Plus Google's growing in popularity each and every single year. And if you look at their traffic, it's actually up overall. But there's a lot of shifts that are being made. And it's just like you and I talked about, Google doesn't know the future because technology is drastically impacting the future and we're in the early stages of AI.

You know what's interesting? Brian Halligan from HubSpot, former CEO of HubSpot and now chairman, I believe, he retweeted Aaron Levy, who's the CEO of Box, the founder of Box. And it's this whole thing about— and by the way, Vinod Khosla said this too. So where I'm going with this is how service businesses, a lot of businesses are going to change in the next couple years. And I think it's going to be very possible to build a billion-dollar revenue company with less than 100 employees. This is exactly what Vinod Khosla said. Vinod Khosla, for those that don't know, he founded Sun Microsystems and he's a very popular VC. He's done very well for himself. It's exciting to me because you see Aaron Levy, he's talking a lot about AI agents. You and I, if we have 20 of us micro computers that are just exactly like us, thinking the way we think but just doing work, how much more efficient are we going to become? I'm just very excited to see that. Those people that know how to build entire solutions and they know how to craft agents around them, they're going to create a lot of leverage for their business. And there's, there's, there was a study and I don't have the link to it right now, but this study about how, you know, when you think about Salesforce, the market cap for Salesforce is $35 billion, right? But when you look at IT services—

Salesforce is not a $35 billion company.

If you get it wrong, you're—

I'm 110% sure it's worth at least $100 maybe closer to $200 billion.

Or is the market $35 trillion?

$267 billion.

Okay, so the market is $35 trillion. The number 35 sticks in my head. So I think the market's probably—

It can't be $35 trillion. That's too big for CRM space.

Not just CRM space. It was just talking about IT. There's like this graph where it says like sales, right? Buying. And then there's IT buying, which is like $115 trillion or something like that. So that makes more sense, right? But it's just like, To the point about Google earlier, we don't know how the future is going to look. But I can say for sure, these AI agents, I don't think they're overhyped. I think they're underhyped, and most people aren't talking about them right now. Alright, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers. But more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people. And this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more. And we'll see you inside. You want to talk about something that's trending? Let's talk about the WNBA. Okay. Do you think the WNBA has potential now?

Because of the new recruit that got drafted?

Caitlin Clark.

Yeah, she was drafted number 1, you know that, right?

Do you know how much she's getting paid?

It was something like $200,000 or $300,000. It was terrible. Yeah. For how much media exposure she's giving the WNBA. Look, I know the WNBA makes a fraction of the NBA, but she's bringing so much limelight to the WNBA. She should be getting paid millions of dollars, in my opinion.

So our friend Brad at recordeditpodcast.com brought this up. I think this is a great idea, or not a great idea, a great topic. So the WNBA has been kind of in the not doing well since its inception, right? Um, not many people watch it, right? That's reason— that's the reason why advertising revenue is not that high. But to your point, Caitlin Clark, I mean, I watched the championship game, right, where they, they lost, but she's basically like the Steph Curry. She's a sharpshooter, and, and she's— everyone, all the NBA players are talking about her, right? She just signed a deal with Nike, a shoe deal, about $28 million, I believe. So she's gonna make a lot of money off that. Um, but to what Brad and I were talking about pre-show, it's like I think the WNBA is trending in the right direction now. I think people are going to make a lot more. But I also want to be clear, like, it's— people are talking about the salary, it's unfair, everything like that. The WNBA will get there, but everything is compensated based on the number of views you're getting at the end of the day. And Caitlin Clark's going to change that.

Bingo. There was this Instagram clip that talked about the World Cup in the past and how there was a pay disparity between the men and the women. But when you look at how much the men got paid versus for the revenue they brought in, it was actually a lower percentage for what the women got paid. versus what they brought in. And what I believe with the WNBA, what she's bringing in, she's not getting paid enough, right? Like, I don't believe that someone should just get paid more because they want it. It's logical.

You merit.

Yes, you bring value, you should get paid more. I don't care if you're a guy, a girl, an alien, you pick whatever you want. But she's bringing way more value than what she's getting paid. And I bet you if she played in the NBA, She can beat a lot of the dudes in there.

She can shoot for sure.

She can shoot. I think she would do well. I'm not talking about she can go against LeBron James and beat him, but there's a lot of— the NBA doesn't have tons of LeBron James. For every LeBron James, there's a ton of mediocre players. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So look, I think at the end of the day, if someone generational like her comes along and she changes the sport, then great, props. I mean, that's why she gets that $28 million deal, and hopefully they all get paid a lot more. I think she's gonna make everyone in the WNBA a lot happier.

And she's going to boost ratings. And on top of this, she's good, but she's still early in her career. You give her 5 to 10 years, she'll be a much better player.

We'll see. I mean, I've watched the championship game. I mean, that being said, by the way, neither Neil nor I, obviously, we play basketball. I watch a lot of sports.

I played basketball for years in a league.

You never played?

Yeah, I did. I played for 13 years.

Okay. Anyway.

I was never good at it, but I played for 13 years. I was a decent perimeter shooter. I played all the way. I stopped at high school, but I played since I was a little kid.

Guys, Neil can also run 13 miles straight, right? Is that right?

Yeah, I can even run longer, but I won't sweat. That's the funny thing.

Yeah. So Neil has all these weird quirks that we don't know about. We'll uncover them more as you listen to— that's why you should listen to this whole thing.

But you want to know what's funny? If you ask me to run around a building with the tire strapped on like on a rope, you know, like they do in CrossFit?

Yeah, you can't do that.

I can't do that. I gave out. I have amazing stamina with no weights. The moment you put on weights, game over.

Yeah. So that is it for today. Let us know what you think and go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. You know, we meet in person for this. We've got Brad from recordeditpodcast.com and yeah, we'll catch you in the next episode.