SEOs hijack Reddit, Google search leak impact, Do brand searches drive SEO up exponentially?, & more

This person, Nadia Kurdadzi. So she said, "I've just discovered how SEO agencies hijack Reddit for their clients." And this is not necessarily something that's crazy new, but here's what they do: they find relevant subreddits. And so everyone should know now, Reddit actually drives a lot of they're getting a lot more traffic from Google, both both Reddit and Quora. And so here's what they do: they find relevant subreddits. Okay.

Okay.

So maybe one Reddit subreddit might be on, let's say, healthy food, right? Then they post a question using this format. What's the best tool for sleeping or something? Or what's the best SaaS tool or agency for X, Y, and Z, right? After 2 to 3 days, they edit the original post. So after it gets a lot of reach, and then they add the link back to their client site. And that's how they hijack the traffic. That's interesting. I mean, that's— see, but that's another one of these short-term hacks, right? You're better off just trying to be useful at the end of the day.

Dude, I totally agree with you. You're better off trying to be useful in the long run. But hey, some of these hacks, if you're scrappy and you're just trying to do whatever to get revenue, great, use them. But just in the long run, focus on what's really going to move the needle. Because what Eric and I learned the hard way when we started out in SEO and marketing is We used to do a lot of these hacks that would provide short-term results and we spent hours and hours and it ended up being where we're spending 30%, then 40%, 50% of our time on these short-term hacks that wouldn't last. Well, if we just focus that 30%, 40%, 50% of our time on long-term tactics, sure, in the short run we wouldn't have made as much, but in the long run we would have been much further along and made way more money.

Yep. The impact of Google search leak for businesses. And Neil and I pre-show were just talking about You know what, we're going to talk about the 10% of things that were maybe a little newer or different here, not the 90% of things that other people know. So that way, you could get maximum value from this. And I actually wrote a tweet about 2 hours ago on where I think we can start. But Neil, do you want to give some context on what this Google search leak is? I mean, to me, they had this Google API documentation and it was sitting on GitHub or something and someone caught it. And then this guy, I forgot what his name is, starts with an E, But then he went to Rand Fishkin and then Rand Fishkin did an exposé along with iPollRank, which is Michael King, very skilled technical SEO. And this got bigger and bigger, more and more people are talking about it. And, you know, look, there's 90% of things that are in here, it's kind of, we knew this already and it confirms what the SEO community has always thought to be true. Like domain authority matters, right? Like clicks matter, right?

Click-through rates when someone's searching matters, yes. And they're looking at browser data as well and they're using a lot of things that a lot of people and a lot of marketers assumed, but Google didn't talk much about. And even Google did release a statement saying that— what was it called? They said the document leaks lacks context or the document lacks context.

That's such Google language.

Yeah.

It's like lacks context or, you know, I wouldn't put too much weight on something that might be out of date, you know, stuff like that. But it's Google, they got to protect their business.

And it's funny too, because I got someone who hit me up, okay, no joke. They hit me up and they're just like, look, I got this thing that controls rankings. I was like, okay. And they're just like, we can manufacture clicks. So it acts like that people are clicking on your website. I'm like, this is nothing new. There's a lot of tools that have been doing this for years. You know about some of them, you can end up buying the clicks. All this stuff is really short-sighted. You want to get the best click-through rate? Optimize your title tag and meta description. You want to get the most people sticking on your site? Optimize user experience and delight people so that they want to stick around and build a brand, right? These are things that help you with SEO, but instead the real problem is when you look at, you know, the stuff that Rand broke down or Michael King broke down, it's great information, but a lot of people are trying to focus on hacking the system instead of focusing on—

Adding value.

Adding value and doing what's best for users.

So here are a couple things that's worth calling out. And by the way, Neil and I have tried the shortcuts in the very beginning of our SEO careers, and we're here to tell you that stuff doesn't work for the long term. Nor, like, by the way, it teaches you to think short term. And then what happens is a lot of those SEOs that continue to stay in doing the stuff that's short term, they tend to think about business short term too. And they don't end up getting good results because of that. So here are a couple things that stand out to me. So, you know, updating, deleting, and consolidating content will become even more important. And so now that we know that irregularly updated content has lowest storage priority for Google, meaning that it's stored on like physical hard drives, it must be a priority in your content workflow, right? So you got to update, delete, or consolidate. But doing the worst is basically— that's— the worst is to do nothing, right? The second thing I'll call out here is that I believe that creating an internal quality score tool to automatically prune content will become a thing, right? Some people are doing this already, but just think about it this way. If you can build something internally that says, okay, if a page gets zero links or zero traffic, over a 30 to 45 day period, it's probably a nice candidate to delete, right? And then you might have some other qualifiers that you want to include there. And then you might want to run this script again, maybe 365 days later, like a year later. And basically, you can create a quality score for pages at different tiers and decide what you want to do with them, right? And you can do this all programmatically. And then the— at the end of the day, look, Google pays a ton of attention to clickstream data. I actually didn't know this piece. So this piece is new to me, it might not be new to you. But Google looks at clickstream data and they use it to tier links. And so just because you get a link from Forbes, if that page gets no traffic, it's a lower-tier link. They actually disregard it. I didn't know that, right? A higher-tier one would be, okay, it's from Forbes and it's getting a lot of links. Ideally, it's like a relevant page too, but all those things stack up.

Yeah, it's funny because when we do link building for our customers and we do manual outreach, we have a big digital PR team. we don't just look at the authority of the site, we actually look at the traffic of the pages that we're trying to get links from.

Mm-hmm.

One, for SEO, we've been doing this for many, many years, like 6+ years. But 2 is, what we found is if you're going to take the effort to do link building, might as well get links that can drive traffic because in the long run, we find that these links can also drive conversions. So then you're getting a one-two punch, you're getting the search benefit plus, You're also generating revenue from the conversions.

All right. 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 of 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. It makes sense, right? Look at it. Google owns Chrome, they own Android, and so they have loads and loads of clickstream data. And so my 4th point over here is that Google search dominates— dominance will continue to wane, but they're still going to be a big player over the next 10 years. They might lose some market share here and there, and yes, SEO has gotten harder and harder, but it doesn't mean you should kick SEO to the curb, right? And what we've been saying on this podcast over the years is that you need to continue to think about diversifying. Neil and I, we've both seen too many founders put their eggs, their one business into one traffic basket, which is SEO. And we've seen their business torch and they never come back from that, right? And then they blame Google for that. But Google doesn't care about you at the end of the day, right? So whether it's social, community, video, podcast, email, just figure out where your audience is hanging out. That's marketing 101. And my last thing here was just saying marketing is hard again and I'm here for it. So that's all it is. We recommend that you guys go read what Rand Fishkin put out, what Michael King put out. But, you know, you don't want to stress too much over this stuff, right? It's kind of the tried and true SEO stuff. It's just nice to have it verified.

Yeah, and Eric hit the nail on the head. If you're SEO and you have ideas on what can move the needle and where to focus, this document, this overview that Rand and Michael King ended up breaking down, gives you an idea of where you should be focusing your efforts to really win in the long run. And it really goes back to the same thing that most SEOs have been talking about from day one. Quality, not just quality content, but quality websites, quality content, quality products, quality services, putting the user first is what's really winning. And if you look at what Google's looking at metrics, they're looking at like, oh, if a popular site links to you, it should be weighted more because that means that popular site likes your product, likes your service, likes your content. Oh, if that webpage is also more popular, it means that a popular webpage linked to you.

Mm-hmm.

And it's better than someone shoving in a link, like if you're trying to manipulate. Oh, if people are clicking through on your listing a lot, maybe you have a solid brand name, maybe you have great content, maybe you've optimized the user experience. What they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out what matters to users and use that data to affect search rankings versus just how many times do you put the keyword on a page.

Yep. Yeah. And Warren Buffett likes to say this, instead of trying to be— just be useful, just be a useful human being at the end of the day. So be useful to your customers, be useful to the people that are consuming your content. Because if you try to do all these things to game the system, it's not going to work that well, right? And so I used to think in SEO, it's all about learning the newest tricks, the latest tactics, and using the latest tools. And now, you know, we've been doing SEO for— I don't know how long you've been doing it, but I've been doing it for 15, 16 years or so. And at this point, I'm just like, no, just be useful and everything else will be fine. All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. This guy, Gale Brenton, he has a podcast called Authority Hackers, which is pretty good. I listened a couple times. But so he tweeted this: I'm floored at how bad Google is right now. So here's my most recent WTF example. I've been observing the way Rand Fishkin markets SparkToro with his zero-click content strategy. Zero-click content strategy. Okay. I really like this idea, especially since Google probably uses click data to rank your site, as we saw in the recent leaks. It's not probably, it definitely uses click data to rank your site. He basically teases his content on social and you go get it on his site if you want to, if you want to, which drives brand searches. It seems to be working. Brand traffic is up for SparkToro. So you can see this graph, it's kind of just going directly up.

So he's pretty much telling you on social, like, check out this article that I created. If you want it, go to SparkToro and check it out. So then people are searching SparkToro, they're clicking through, and then that's jacking up the rankings for SparkToro.

Which is exactly what MrBeast does for YouTube. He says, hey, new video is up, go watch it. So he doesn't link to it directly. And so I think MrBeast doesn't know it's like this, but I think he has a sense of it and that helps with his branded and YouTube quite a bit. And so here's what, here's what Gail says. So I wanted to dig deeper to see the recent surge in traffic. And no surprise, most of the traffic surge is going to his new Google leaks blog post. So I decided to look at what kind of keywords drive this much traffic to SparkToro. And I wasn't ready for the answer. Apparently, SparkToro ranks very highly for a navigational query to a site sharing illegal porn.

Wow.

It has nothing to do with the page's actual content or the people who search for or click on it. It's truly remarkable to collect so much data and make such bad use of it.

Yeah.

So the brand searches matter a lot.

They've always mattered.

Yeah, and you've done some campaigns in the past too, you know?

Yeah, to jack up brand campaigns. The easiest strategy I've found that jacks up brand campaigns is give away free tools. It beats everything else that I've tested. So you take what people are used to paying for, you create free tools, release them out there, it jacks up the brand queries, and what you'll find your rankings just go through the roof.

Yep. All right, one more on SEO here. Do you have one more on SEO? I have one more on SEO.

Go for it.

Okay. So Perplexity, so you know Perplexity, right?

Yeah, which I think, by the way, Google should buy. I don't know why they don't buy it.

I mean, Google's AI overview kind of looks like Perplexity. I think they stole the UX.

But I found Perplexity to be better than Google AI overview.

Is it really better? Everyone says that, like, you know, Hiten Shah said that, right? I started using Perplexity and I was like, Dude, it's just they cite things. Okay, cool. But then what?

The— yeah, I haven't— I've used it a good amount, but I haven't used it where I've searched on it like 1,000 times, right? I don't have a big enough sample set. But it's funny because Google's— at least you see the leaked reports of them potentially buying HubSpot. And I was like, why not just buy Perplexity?

I think Perplexity— so they're doing $20 million right now, but I think they're valued at I mean, Google can afford this, right?

Yeah.

$2 or $3 billion, whatever.

Let's say it's $5 billion. Does it really matter for them at that size and scale?

No. Multitrillion-dollar company. Okay, so this guy, Mahir Naik— sorry, I'm butchering these names— I think Perplexity is on its way to pull off the biggest programmatic SEO play based on AI-written content. I'll be watching this very closely. So what they're doing is, and you guys can see this on the screen and the first link we have here, We'll pull it up on YouTube. But basically, it's like, for example, Neil, I'm just showing Neil right now. You can see this, this is on Lex Fridman. So basically, people are going to ask these queries, and for whatever is popular, they're just going to make it a programmatic result. It's not the best content, I would say, but they're probably going to do well. I don't think this is the biggest programmatic SEO play. I think it's one programmatic SEO play, and I think this is smart for Perplexity to try. And hopefully, their algorithms, their LLMs will help them optimize this content over time where it looks really good.

Yeah, dude, I'm— but I'm with you. You said something earlier, Google, their results have been the worst that they have been in many, many years. And with all these AI changes and the changes that are happening in the competitive landscape, I'm not going to say that Google's doing a bad job because I think it takes years and years to really figure out how to get the results to be amazing. I think they've done a terrible job of shipping.

Yeah.

And what I mean by that is they should ship less, work more in the background until it's a great experience, and then ship versus just shipping stuff out that's mediocre that really affects the results. Like in the United States, you get AI overviews for a lot of queries. The problem with the AI overviews is for a lot of the queries that I've searched for, it's crap. It's so bad that mentally I myself, and I don't know about other people, I now just skip over it and I just go down to the results because You know, like when 30, 40% of the time that I've experienced, you know, at least at the beginning, yeah, are just terrible. You just, your brain naturally starts skipping them and just going down to the paid or organic results and you're like, well, maybe I can find something better there.

Yeah. And even those results suck. Yes.

Compared to what it was before, but I think their algorithm has gone backwards.

So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and also go to marketingschool.io/agency an agency owner and you want to grow faster. So that being said, we'll catch you later.