Gyi Tsakalakis founded AttorneySync because lawyers deserve better from their marketing people. As a non-practicing lawyer, Gyi...
After leading marketing efforts for Avvo, Conrad Saam left and founded Mockingbird Marketing, an online marketing agency...
Published: | June 12, 2024 |
Podcast: | Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Category: | Legal Technology , Marketing for Law Firms , News & Current Events |
The secrets of Google’s algorithm are out! So, what (if anything) should you do?
Is this the biggest news to hit the SEO industry ever? Google has had their first high-profile leak, courtesy of one of their very own engineers, and now SEOs are working all kinds of angles to leverage this new information. So, how juicy is it? Is all the hype justified? There’s a lot to unpack here, and you should certainly proceed with caution if some sort of SEO professional has flashy “leak secrets” for sale. Gyi and Conrad dig into the pile to explain how to process this news and make smart, tactical decisions moving forward.
The News:
For the first time, Google has had a major leak.
Quite a few AI Overviews have been scarily bad, and could be considered hilarious, dangerous, or future lawsuit fodder—especially if you’re the unlucky fellow who takes AI’s advice about eating rocks or adding glue to your pizza sauce.
The ABA has a new ethics opinion on Listservs, so here’s what you need to know:
And, LocalU Detroit is coming up on June 24th!
Mentioned in this Episode:
Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked – Mike King / iPullRank
Local Search Implications of the Google API Leak – David Mihm / Near Media
5 local SEO insights from Google’s API documentation leak – Andrew Shotland / Search Engine Land
Gyi’s Google Leak Threads on X
The Bite – Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter!
Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube
Conrad Saam:
Hey, Gyi, I saw an amazing picture of your son in a three piece suit. Now he’s a five, 6-year-old. I’m assuming this is kindergarten graduation.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
This is pre-K graduation, pre-K graduation, and I love graduation season. I’m all about celebrating all of these educational milestones. I love seeing people’s posts on social media, but my son’s five we’re like, buddy, it’s way too hot to wear a suit. And he’s like, I’m wearing the suit. So he’s in a three piece suit at his pre-K celebration. Your kids like wearing suits for graduation,
Conrad Saam:
Bathing suits. Maybe I have to assume that this is a looking up to daddy thing, emulating his role model.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I Think it’s mom. Mom dresses sharp for work. Dad is a slob,
Conrad Saam:
But she doesn’t dress in a three piece suit.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I know, but I don’t even have his three piece suit to be honest with you. I don’t even have one.
Conrad Saam:
You’re being outre by your to be kindergartner.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Absolutely. I didn’t have my shirt tucked in at pre-K graduation. It’s feeling like a total lop. Anyway. Happy graduation to all the graduates. Cue up the good work. If you’ve got to graduate at home, celebrate that graduate Conrad. What else are we talking about today?
Conrad Saam:
Well, just like in the political world, there’s sometimes a news item that takes up all of the press thought, and we’re going to do that. We’re going to talk one single news item, the Google leak, and then Gyi and I are going to go really, really deep on what this means, how you should change everything you’re doing right now. And we’re going to say, I told you so a lot
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Mountain View. We have a leak
Announcer:
And welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.
Conrad Saam:
Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s do the news. Alright everyone. My news feeds include nothing other than the Trump convictions and the Google leak, and I’m getting more Google leak than Trump right now, which is frankly refreshing. Gyi, tell us about the Google leak.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
So Google had some API repositories leaked originally. It was found by Dan Petrovich and also anonymously leaked to Rand Fishkin. Excellent write-ups by Mike King that we’ll dive into. But yeah, I mean first time in history of Google that some of their internal documentation that might be impacting rankings got leaked and Google confirmed that it’s a valid leak. And now SEOs are using that as either a, we’ll go through each of these, but hey, we knew this all along or we found out a new secret and download my free guide of how to maximize the Google leak for your business.
Conrad Saam:
Wow. Okay, so in the news, again, SEOs trying to sell you SEO services because they’re so smart. Okay. Lots of information later. There was also some AI overviews that were a little nuts. So what do we know about that?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes. Did you know that you can get rid of kidney stones by drinking urine or you can improve your pizza by adding glue to it? Yes. The AI overviews when haywire, the head of search, Liz Reed, posted over on the keyword Google’s blog that, oh, most of these examples are fake or they’re based on us not having enough information, yada, yada, yada. I do think though, that to me the takeaway there, which is important for people to understand is that the way that Google generates AI overviews is not the same way that chat GPT responds to prompts in its entirety. Google uses search, it uses the algorithms that it has, not in the same way that it uses them in search, but it does. There’s some kind of collaboration between the large language model, the Gemini technology and search. Obviously it hasn’t proven to be great at getting these answers right, but their data, which they haven’t shared and their tests which they haven’t shared, indicate that people love these AI overviews. They’re actually clicking through the results at a higher percent in AI overviews. But all of this is, just take my word for it, not, here’s our study.
Conrad Saam:
Take my word for it coming to you direct from Mountain View. We’re going to come back to that theme. Take my word for it. Remember that. Alright, and finally, Gyi, as our resident, a BA expert and ethics maven Ninja.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yikes. That’s a low bar over here at Lunch. Hour Legal Marketing.
Conrad Saam:
Can you tell me what the A BA would like us to know about listservs?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
So this was back in May, so it’s not breaking news, but
Conrad Saam:
Came into my May, but May, 2024, not May, 2014.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
18. 16, yeah. The A BA gave guidance on a listserv. Look, lawyers know they use listservs to create hypotheticals. Like, hey, if I was dealing with this hypothetical, what would you do? Crowdsourcing, privately crowdsourcing with other lawyers. A BA says you need to get your clients informed consent. And look, I’m sympathetic and you can go check out the opinion and I’m not going to sit here and tell you what to do, but I’m sympathetic that they want to give some guidance on this stuff. But I mean, how about you give just in the context of like this is true no matter where you are, that you’ve got client confidence. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a private Facebook group, a private slack group, it doesn’t matter. You need informed consent if it’s reasonably likely that you’re going to be divulging a client confidence. And part of it is also just like, I don’t know, I don’t want to cast aspersions, but if you look at what percentage of the entire legal market is active on Listservs versus all of the other ways that they communicate, is this a priority? Not to mention, is it bigger priority private listservs or fake reviews on Google? Where’s the work on that one? Anyway, that’s my sour grapes for the day. Alright, let’s take a break.
Conrad Saam:
Alright, Gyi. And what has been built as the biggest news to hit the SEO industry ever, and I have said those words and I kind of mean it. There’s a big, big leak coming directly from a Google engineer. It went to Rand Fishkin, who those of you who’ve been in the game for a while will remember from SEO Moz, which is currently running the Moz Conference in Seattle right now, which I left after saying bye to Joy Hawkins to come out to this tiny little cubicle that we’re recording from and it then went to Mike King. Mike, king Rand are probably two from a pure reputation perspective and renowned perspective, two of the best SEOs out there. But this was a leak from Google and it was verified that it came from a Google engineer who has actually now kind of outed himself. There’s a lot of information in there. Keith, what do you think about the leak and the information and how SEOs are responding to this? You already gave this away in the news item. I’m not sure we’re going to fully agree on this, but
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I did. I’m very cynical, but I have more breaking news. You have
Conrad Saam:
More breaking news.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, we had to give credit Dan Petrovich, he’s one of the smartest SEOs. I always regularly giving him praise. He actually found it and was sitting on it and was analyzing the data, yada, yada, yada. And then it got released. Additionally, somebody else leaked it to, I think you’re rights, other anonymous source leaked it to Rand. But Dan was actually, he has the receipts that he was the first to actually find it. He was actually working with Google to be like, Hey, I found this vulnerability. I think they offered him five grand or something for his trouble. But anyway, look, this is why I’m so cynical about this stuff. And again, I think, so here’s my big takeaways. I actually had a Twitter thread about this. The first thing is, I think it’s really interesting that after all of these years, this is the first real true high profile leak. And then you got to ask yourself, what does that say? This is somebody historically Google is the rainbow color wall of silence since it’s multiple colors, green, yellow and orange wall of silence. You don’t leave people
Conrad Saam:
Happy. Prime one brought to you by Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing inadvertently. Well,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes, absolutely. But the point being that Google’s been around for a long time, no leaks. And I think this is a real demonstration of where they are overall culturally in their company and all this kind of stuff. Two, when you open the email up and you see one of Conrad and i’s competitors pitching you about how they’ve got the secret leak documents and they’ve done the analysis on the leaks, remember no one knows exactly what parts of this are actually being used, some of the stuff in. So it’s an internal API document code.
Conrad Saam:
Yeah, why don’t you talk about what was leaked. So we can talk about why SEOs are so, are claiming to have backdoored, the algorithm.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, it’s, I’m probably going to get it wrong, but it’s like API repository internal API repositories is technically what it is. It’s got things in there like variables and formulas and some comments. And the second thing of this whole thing is I think it’s good from an accountability standpoint that SEOs are talking about this and they’re like, this is what we see. Because again, it’s like when you get a glimpse into the machine, there might be some things to learn. And so in Conrad, you made this point, a lot of people are making this point. There is some stuff in there that does seem to validate some of the hunches that SEOs have had. And I would certainly encourage you to go read Mike King’s stuff at IPO rank because his posts on this I think really lay it out in detail and also talk about his post on where do we go from here talks about some tactical things that you might adjust, but it’s just so over-hyped and oversold like everything else. And so people are using it as a, Hey, check out what I know or I was right all along, or I know the secrets that my competitors don’t and we’re going to use this to our benefit.
Conrad Saam:
I think there’s a lot of, I was right all along and I’m going to say I was right all along. I’m going to even say that Gyi was right all along.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I already knew I was right.
Conrad Saam:
I know, but this is my point. So this is self-serving, but you knew you were right because you’ve actually watched the data over a long period of time.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, exactly. I don’t care what their leaked information says.
Conrad Saam:
Maybe they
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Leaked it on purpose.
Conrad Saam:
Oh, what are you in the government? Which, Gyiz, come on.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
What a great way to throw SEOs off the scent than to leak documents that they’re actually not using.
Conrad Saam:
Okay. You
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Dunno what they didn’t. That’s my whole point. Well they did. I guess technically they said that it was an accidental leak. So we have that
Conrad Saam:
Much, that’s all they’ve acknowledged. Say they said it’s it’s an accidental leak. If you were going to have a deliberate accidental leak, you would probably still decide to say that it was an accidental leak. What would say those of you who’d like to take your tinfoil hats off, please do so now. But the reason I say that we were right all along is because some of the official word that Google gave and has used and the talking points that they have used consistently over time conflict with what we have actually seen in practice. And I think there has been a growing evolution of people who have had enough time and enough data to play with enough history and have listened to Google for enough time where we’re not really taking their word for it. The big obvious one in this, where do we go from here point, this is what is now clear for a very long time, Google said we don’t look at click data and part of this leak was a thing called nav boost, which is looking at clickstream data, right? You’re nodding your head, you don’t necessarily
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Agree. Well again, I want to be as deferential and judicious to the Google PR people as I can because come on,
Fair. Again, I’m trying to play devil’s advocate a little bit. I mean, I’m with you. I’m the person who’s like, I’m literally out there being like if you’re SEO person saying this is what Google says, I’m like time to rethink. And that’s even too strong because there are some things we should listen to what Google says about, I mean Google does say some basic things about SEO that I would agree with. Even they admit that links make a difference. But do you have a quote that Google has said, we absolutely do not look or capture or store or use clickstream data in anything at all related to Google? No, that’s not what they say. They say things like clicks are not a direct ranking signal. Well what does that mean? They’re using it some. Is it you being used to train the algorithms? Because then who cares if it’s director indirect? But anyway, your point is not lost. I’m with you. Google is a publicly traded company. They have no economic incentive to teach people how to rank in the organic search results period. There is no economic incentive. Okay, so I’m with you on that one.
Conrad Saam:
So when we come back, we’re going to take a little break now and we’re going to be talking more about the leak, not the leak in your sink with a leak out of Mountain View. Alright, I’m happy to read a review from Jimmy Goff. We’ve been expletive free so far. This is a mild expletive and it’s not mine. So this keeps us in the out of the known
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Hold against you. All
Conrad Saam:
Right, Jimmy says hell yeah, will do. Let me also say that I really appreciate all the content y’all post. I like the y’all. I love when people y’all me. I just launched my PI firm in Texas, big market by the way, this past January with zero clients and zero money. The free content you all provide is amazing and has really helped me out. I will tell you this warms my heart. I love the nobility of the American entrepreneur, GI and I both started businesses. You got to be a little zany in the brainy to do that and then stick with it. So congrats. Also, it’s not like you’re launching a tax planning firm in the middle of nowhere. You pull PI in Dallas and you are in the thick of it. We’re
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Cheered for you Jimmy.
Conrad Saam:
So thank you Jimmy. Continue kicking butt and using our great advice. If you, dear listener, would like to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, please do so subscribe on YouTube. We were just literally talking about these engagement signals. You can help get the word out to more people just like you and catch us at the next office hour 6 21. Gyi and I will be around to answer all of your questions. That will be a Friday, I believe that is 11 o’clock Pacific time, two o’clock eastern time. You can find us, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Bring whatever you want and we will at least try to answer your questions without saying, I told you so.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Maybe a little. I told you so.
Conrad Saam:
Alright, so I’m going to pull out three things, summaries of three interesting points that I think are very salient and they’re going to fall into the I told you so I was right all along.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I love it. I love, this is what this segment should be.
Conrad Saam:
I know. And he’s going to be like you’re a scumbag digital marketing person trying to claim how
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Brilliant you are. No, I’m not. I’m going to be like, I probably agree with you on these.
Conrad Saam:
I just don’t, I’m using these to reinforce what you’ve said. I don’t even have to reinforce what I’ve said. I’m going to, let’s start with links. So one of the things that became clear in this is that they’re actually using click data as a factor for how valuable a link is, right? So we talked about click data and Gyi has talked about the value and importance of clicks, which I mean that’s basically his catchphrase and that comes across,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, there’s like 400 and some references to links in the link document. So if your SEO person’s telling you about how links matter less and there’s all these other things, and don’t worry about links time for a new SEO
Conrad Saam:
Person. Yeah, but also, and you and I have been talking about the quality and there’s two things, quality of links and the location of links local being a signal. So there were two things that came out around links specifically that I think are very, very, that makes me and GE sit here and Crow, I told you. So number one is quality and click through as a proxy on quality. Makes sense. So all of those garbage links that you’ve been getting from porn sites in Thailand aren’t really going to help you. We’ve talked about this for a long time and we’ve known this for a long time and seen ’em for a long time. This just is reinforcing that. The other interesting thing that I thought came out of this was that they are analyzing links in a geographic pattern. So where those clicks are coming from geographically, and Gyi and I have been saying to you guys for years that localized links, and that’s a problem with the stupid domain rankings, scores that try and proxy the value of a link or a backlink profile because they can’t take into account these two things. Number one click data because they don’t have that information. And number two, they don’t have location by and large and using maps to value links. I think that was really, really fascinating. You disagree with any of that?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Don’t disagree. And the other thing that I think is interesting is some of the, and again we don’t know what it’s being used, not used, but they are looking at anchors and there’s all sorts of stuff about demotion based on anchors. And again, my view is is that we’ve been talking about abused anchor text for years.
Conrad Saam:
Hey Gyi, for our listener who just logged in, what is anchor text?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
That’s the words in the clickable part of your link, but location information in addition to the words around the link. So anyways, stuff we’ve been talking about forever, you’ve got a local business and the local business covers the local community or there’s a local publication or local organization, local news site covers your local industry, the whole site’s about the city. And then you’ve got links from pages on there that are saying things like, yeah, and here’s this local lawyer in the city. Google’s capturing all that information and it’s likely playing a role in how they’re using it to rank. So location matters.
Conrad Saam:
And they capture those links knowing where that clicker, clicker that user it user. So clicker, I sound like you should do, use the
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Word hits, hits, hits
Conrad Saam:
To talk about my hits,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Right? Hits
Conrad Saam:
Lots of hits. Our website has lots of hits
Gyi Tsakalakis:
And I’ll give a shout. We got to give a shout out too. Forgot to give this a shout out near media.
Conrad Saam:
So nice to people. Well
Gyi Tsakalakis:
The one that deserve
Conrad Saam:
It. Okay, good. You’re
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Just nicer person. I establish this, David, come on, you got to give David some love local search implications of the Google API leak at neared. Check that out. We’ll put that in the show notes. He’s talking a lot about the stuff that Conrad and I are talking about too.
Conrad Saam:
Yeah, Andrew Shalin, Hass got another good article on this as well. It does specifically on local. And the reason Gyi and I are focused on local is because we’re dealing with you guys and you guys by and large are local businesses. So what Gyi and I just did was a big, I told you so on links and the location of links and our domain rating is stupid and blah blah, blah. This has been reinforced.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Although, although, although one of the things don’t
Conrad Saam:
Just say you and gloat, would you just gloat with me and stop being so Gyiz mindless?
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well actually, so this is a funny, this is one of those, again, it’s a little nuance, but one of the things that people accuse Google of saying wasn’t a thing is sitewide authority. And even though their most recent documentation does say they have some sitewide type, they implied that there’s some sitewide signals, but most of ’em are at the page level. The stuff in this leak seems to show that there are some site-wide things that Google looks at, which again is like, alright,
Conrad Saam:
And you and I have known this for a long time because we’ve seen this happen, right? There’s a reason, I mean, when I was running AVO back in the early, early, early, early, early days, our user generated content didn’t have a ton of links, but boy oh boy, did that domain have a ton of links and that’s why the q and a took off. That’s why the lawyer profiles took off, right? So it’s why
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Forbes ranks for everything.
Conrad Saam:
Oh, I dug a little further into the Forbes conversation. We’ll bring that up at our next
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Time. Maybe the office
Conrad Saam:
Hours. We’ll talk about Forbes. Okay, the next thing where I want to go with, and I told you so and I did this. Do you guys remember Relic was author when SGE came out and then Google started putting in your profiles and you could proactively edit your social profiles on Google business profile. Google very much recognizes authorship. I’ve been saying this for a long time. I don’t think re equals author ever went away. I think we destroyed it as SEOs because it was spam to death and abused by people like FindLaw. Oh sorry, we just lost another sponsor. But the concept of authorship, if Gyi writes an article about lawyer, SEO, it’s going to rank better because Gyi wrote it. That is a very, very real thing and it’s kind of been hidden, but it intuitively makes sense to me. They figure out what a lot about and then if you write about it, it ranks well. So that concept is very much, at least in the notes in there, very much alive. You are looking dubious. I love it.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, conceptually, I’m with you on Google wants to surface content from expert authors. When you say authorship though, it sets off all sorts of flags because people are going to go think you can add re equals author and they’re
Conrad Saam:
Rank re equals. Author died with Google Plus, but the concept of tying your content to a bunch of profiles that all reflect you is a very real thing. A hundred percent. So bylines become really, really important. I would not discount that. We’ve been pushing this for a long time, especially when SGE came out, it became clear that that was a part of it. They did this about this author literally talking about doing AI generated content around who had written the piece. So clearly that was part of the game. And then they threw the social profiles in Google business profile. So they’re clearly trying to tie these signals together to identify authorship. I think it’s a very real thing.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I agree with that. And then the other thing that I’ll add, which is I think this is the really most impactful one, is when people are searching on your brand plus a modifier, and those are getting a disproportionate number of clicks. So for example, instead of just, we’ll use our business law firm, SEO services, when people are searching and clicking on attorneys sync law firm, SEO services that’s causing that query to show up in auto suggest it’s causing the query to show up in related searches. It’s causing us to show up in some of the other kind of panels that they show like other good SEO companies. And so it’s in line with the same theme. If your name plus Citi plus attorney starts getting searched and clicked on, to me that’s an overlap with this, a concept of brandness or authorship, this or whatever, they’re going to say, Hey look, I’m going to show the one box for Morgan and Morgan for a non-branded personal injury search because Morgan and Morgan is synonymous with personal injury. So all those things that you said, yes, it just not relic equals author,
Conrad Saam:
Not relic relic’s author agreed because they killed it. Very sad, we abused it. The SEOs,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, and again, I think this is a good thing to talk about, but it’s important to remember that things that are easily gamed are exactly the things that Google wants to demote. And so this is why when someone’s trying to sell you on this secret thing that they found Google has needless to say, hopefully, needless to say, some of the best engineering talent still, even though there’s a lot of competition, there’s AI and all this stuff. Some of the best engineering talent, they’ve been doing this a long time. You are in your basement trying to figure out a couple of things that might work for some time, fine. But again, they’re trying to demote these things that are easy to game. If it was so easy just to be like, oh, I’ll put re equals author, and then everything that’s about this subject written by me, of course they wouldn’t use it now. That’s why again, come back to links are hard because if you actually can get links, if you can get links from your local community, they’re not bought, they’re not domain authority, they’re not blah, blah, blah. They’re topically relevant, they’re locally relevant, they’re from the local pizza shop who doesn’t have a link selling scheme going on
Conrad Saam:
Aki. So if you’re an attorney listening to your favorite podcast after you hit the subscribe button, what do you do about this stuff? What do you do about all the stuff coming out of Mountain View? What do you do about all the stuff coming from all the SEOs who now have looked behind the curtain? What do we
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Do? Well, to me, the starting point, like everything else is if you’re talking to vendors or partners, are they building trust or eroding trust? If they’re selling you leak, if they’re selling you leak secrets, they’re eroding trust. If your current agency is selling you leak secrets, in my opinion, they’re eroding trusts. The second thing tactically, if you’ve been in the camp of links matter less or you’ve been in the camp that clicks don’t matter. Or if you’ve been in the camp that who publishes, doesn’t matter if you’ve been in the camp, that brand doesn’t matter. Maybe you start to reconsider some of those positions. Again, we don’t know what’s currently being used and what’s not being used, but gosh, it reminds me, did you ever see the movie contact? It reminds me of the conversation. No, you haven’t. Well, it’s a great movie. I love
Conrad Saam:
The contact. You know me. Yeah,
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I should have known, have you even heard of content?
Conrad Saam:
Did you ever see the answer is no.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
Anyway, I am going to totally botch the quote, but they’re looking up in the sky and they’re like, if we’re the only ones out there, it seems like an awful waste of space. Well, in the same context, all this data that Google’s collecting or did collect at some point, whether they’re using it or not in ranking now, seems like an awful lot of wasted time and effort to be capturing all this data. And so I think for me, it’s like at the very least, it should make you rethink whether Google is trying to teach you how to rank in their search engine or not. If you’ve been on the Google pr, I call ’em Google Shon, but these people that are like, Google tells us everything we need to know about SEL, I’m like, you might rethink that position. What do you got? What do you think’s tactical
Conrad Saam:
Here? No. First of all, when you said contact, I thought you were going to make fun of the Ohio State’s spring game being no contact, but that’s not where you went. But this has been an evolution of mine. I remember early on in the days I was very lucky I got to work with Vanessa Fox. I got to work with Alex Ben, I got to work with Darren Shaw. I’m not saying this to brag, but it was a very, very small community, and I really did believe, and I still do believe at that time this was true, but I used to have dinner with Matt Cutts on occasion with a group of SEOs when Seattle did their big thing and Danny Sullivan was really nice to me and I was very much a Google flag bearer and frankly, ran Fishkin kind of annoyed me. I felt like a lot of the time he was trying to prove how he was smarter than Google, which is an annoying SEO attribute.
I evolved into kind of the Google apologist or explainer for a while, and now frankly with some of the stuff that’s come out contradicting some of the stuff that has been said and how they’re handling local service ads with brands and pay-per-click and the conflation of brands and pay-per-click. You’ll see this in some of the antitrust stuff, how organic and pay-per-click. I used to believe, and I believe it still was in the past, a very much church and state situation where paid and organic, I mean, the people that I worked with in the paid camp at Google when we were Google premier partner, they didn’t know four fifths of anything about organic, and so it was really this wall. Those things are not true, and you just have to follow the data, the performance to know that definitively, you don’t need this to come out because we already knew a lot of these things and you’ve been hearing these things from us, and I hate to leave with it. I told you so, but we knew this. And so the Google fanboy thing, which I very much was a part of, I’ve gone from fanboy to apologist to downright pissed off.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
The best leak you can follow is your own data’s leak. That doesn’t really make sense, but
Conrad Saam:
That does not make sense. I was wondering where it was a great attempt at a good wrap up and it went on for a while, so you could have set that up for a while. Let’s try again.
Gyi Tsakalakis:
I’m only human. I’m only human. Here’s my wrap up today. We are super grateful for the passionate audience members. We get the questions that are showing up for office hours. We want to hear some fresh voices, so please do like, subscribe, follow us, send us emails, send us direct messages. If you’ve got questions you want us to answer, we are appreciative of your time and attention. So until next time, Conrad and Gyi shutting off the lead.
Announcer:
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Gyi Tsakalakis:
Couldn’t resist, horrible. This is our worst attempted humor and we’ve been pretty bad.
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Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Legal Marketing experts Gyi and Conrad dive into the biggest issues in legal marketing today.