525: The Dreaded March Google Core Update And It’s Implications On Content Creation

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You’re listening to My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Welcome to a new segment to the show called Profitable Audience, where my business partner, Tony and I discuss all things related to content creation and building an audience. In this episode, Tony and I discuss the SEO apocalypse and what’s been going on since the March Google core update, which has huge implications on all content creators.

00:26
But before we begin, want to you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com and they’re almost sold out. In fact, there only 10 tickets left. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business.

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when you grab the book over at mywifecoderjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifecoderjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:07
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast in a brand new section of the show called Profit of Audience, where we break down all things content creation. And the topic of today is gonna be this gigantic Google update that just hit last week on March 5th, I think. And it’s been really bad. For almost everyone in my mastermind group, I got hit as well. And we’re gonna talk about this update and how I’m a little…

02:35
I’m kind of happy about the update, even though that it actually hit me. So we had this conversation last week and you said, oh, I think this next Google update is going to be really bad. And then you whip out your phone and you check out. would assume you were checking your analytics because I wasn’t I couldn’t see what you were doing. And you’re like, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. And then we immediately change the subject and we’re talking to something else. But you weren’t fine. I was fine.

03:02
for that first day. 12 hours. Or while we were at ECF, I was actually fine. Okay. So I am ill-prepared for this because I don’t even look at Google Analytics because I can’t read GA4. So tell me more. Tell me more about this. All right. So

03:22
Let me just go through the Google official press release and then I’ll talk about like the real stuff that I’ve been chatting with all my colleagues about. Dumb it down for the rest of us, please. No, no, no, no, it’s not. It’s not complicated. mean, basically they fought AI spam. So anyone with an AI generated content website pretty much got deindexed out of the Google search entirely. So that’s a positive. It’s a positive. That’s what I’m saying. That’s not the reason why I got hit. Why I got hit, I’ll talk about in just a little bit. But yes, I thought you were a robot.

03:51
What we’ve all suspected for many years is now we know to be true. No, I think that’s a great thing because you and I have talked about this for what? The past year and how these sites and you were I remember we talked about this one site probably over a year ago that was was it talking about board games or something games and they had like thousands of of posts and they were ranking and it was completely an AI generated site. So to me, that’s a good point. Number one seems good.

04:21
It’s a fantastic, they didn’t actually outline that, but it’s funny, they kept fluctuating over this policy. They were like, oh, AI is expressly prohibited, no AI is allowed as long as you edit it and whatnot. But it seems pretty clear that if your content is AI and of no value except regurgitating stuff, you’re pretty much gonna be penalized with a manual penalty. What’s funny is I didn’t get ahold of Spencer, because remember we talked about last time how he held this AI competition?

04:50
I’m very curious how those sites fared and I suspect that they did not fare very well. Yeah, I’m actually that was the first thought that I had because we had just talked about his challenge a couple weeks ago. Yeah. So I view this first one as a good thing. Right. And you know what’s funny is I just discovered that Amazon has been asking the question, did you use AI to create this listing? Oh, interesting. I don’t have I don’t see that in my interface, so they must just

05:19
be kind of rolling this out to a few people. So if you check yes, I don’t know what that means. But if you check no, but you did in fact use AI, I don’t know what that means either. But both can’t be good. I was gonna say, I feel like either one is probably bad. Yes. Okay, okay. So this is, I’m fascinated, keep going. And then I think YouTube, I read this somewhere, I don’t see it my account yet either, but YouTube’s gonna have a checkbox similar to that as well.

05:47
Okay, so let’s veer off really quick because this is a question. You and I both do something similar. So I’ve been creating YouTube scripts from my own blog posts, but putting them into AI to turn them into script form. I’m assuming that is not what they’re talking about. I don’t think that they’re going to penalize you for that. But if you’re using AI generated content with like an AI voice or I don’t know. I don’t know what it means, to be honest with you. Yeah, it’s not even out of my account yet. So right. I mean, that would be my question because it is my content that I wrote.

06:16
I’m just having AI generate it into a script version as opposed to a read version, which they’re fairly similar. It’s just changing some of the beginning of sentences and stuff like that. Anyway, that would be my. I have no idea, but I think they want you to self incriminate yourself. Yes. Like if you say no and then they use their tools or whatever they do and find that it was in some way or someone complains, then who knows? Maybe that would be a strike against your channel. OK, OK. So what’s what’s number two? What did they do?

06:46
So number two, this is all great stuff by the way. The second thing that they cracked down on is expired domain abuse. And for all of you listening who don’t know what this is, people would buy these expired domains that had pretty good domain authority and backlinks to it. They would buy that domain and then they would build a new blog based on that domain about something completely different and essentially get a head start on their website. Oh, I remember this. This seems like an old school trick. It’s been going on for

07:16
as long as I can remember actually. feel like Jim Wang invented this trick. This seems like a Jim Wang think Jim Wang did this. No, but I feel like in our our FinCon group there were people that did use this tactic. Not our particular group of people, but overall I think that I learned about this at FinCon. By the way, if you want to learn about all the black hat tactics, Black Hat World is like the

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I like to go on there to see what cutting edge people are doing that are gray hat or black hat. I hope you’re on a VPN at a Starbucks in another city. I just logged in as you. You probably are you big jerk. Okay. What’s up next? So that one was good that they cracked down on that. The next thing that they cracked down on was what is called a site reputation abuse. This is where you buy links on like Forbes.

08:08
and you’re just artificially leveraging someone’s larger site to boost your own. And you know all these publications like Forbes, Business Insider, they’re all hurting for cash, right? It’s hard to make money with a pure content site, especially at scale like that. So what they’ve been doing, and I don’t know if you’ve gotten these emails before, but hey, get featured in Forbes. We can guarantee you a Forbes placement. And then you read the fine print and it’s like, may include some sort of fee.

08:38
Okay, I did not know about this. I thought you had to earn those links. I get those every day. Like, hey, we want to feature you on Forbes. You’re like, oh, great. Yeah. And then you read the fine print may have fees associated with it. So you pay like five grand or something and you get on there. So people have been doing this, obviously. I can see people jumping at this. People have been doing this for a very long time. The other thing I want to say is, I don’t know if you remember, I think we recorded this episode with Profitable Audience where I had a buddy of mine.

09:08
And what he did, he would guest post on large publications. And then he would go around and tell people, hey, I will include your link in my guest post if you let me guest post for your site. And if you recall, I was doing this. I was gonna say, wasn’t that person you? Well, no, no, no, that wasn’t my idea. And I did it on a very small scale. But my buddy did this on a huge scale. You we’re talking like a post a day. Yeah.

09:37
like in this, had this whole network and he grew his site to like 1 million visits per month off of this. And I used it too, if you recall, this is all in preparation for my book. So this had to have occurred maybe in 2021 or something like that. And it worked. I actually grew my site tremendously during that period. It was just too much maintenance. I didn’t have like a really good system for doing this.

10:01
But you you add great results, but it wasn’t something that you could maintain. It wasn’t sustainable for me unless I hired a bunch of people and train them up for this. Anyway, long story short, Google started cracking down on this as part of this update. And I actually just went and checked my friend’s site. He went from one million visits per month all the way. Now, I think he’s down to like eleven thousand now. What? Yes. Holy cow.

10:31
So he got hit because all of his backlinks were built this way.

10:36
Okay, this one seems a little, I don’t know. I don’t know necessarily if it’s a bad thing if you’re actually creating educational and good content for people. I mean, I get it’s gaming the system, but to me it’s like if you’re writing legitimate guest posts and they’re quality posts, who cares if you’re kind of weaving the tapestry? I don’t know, you know what I mean? I guess, but it is gaming the system, right? Like it’s, if you look at these articles, it’s pretty clear.

11:04
Like you just take one word and you’re linking to another related post. Oh, I see. I haven’t read a lot of those posts. So I the posts are good. They’re well written. It’s just they’re linking to, you know, random sites to spend a lot of time on this. I did. Yeah, because, yeah, everything I did, I did for this book, actually, like in preparation, like I literally started preparing to launch the book probably two years before the book got released. Yeah. OK, that’s an interesting one.

11:34
Yeah. then so back on the AI one also, it’s unclear how they’re detecting this, but I think they’re mainly cracking down on blog post velocity. Like if all of sudden you have like a thousand posts, it up. But I’m sure they have ways to detect whether it’s AI generated. Okay, but if you’re using a Google AI tool to create AI, don’t they know that your email address is locked?

12:04
Those people aren’t using the Google AI tool though. Well, correct. But I feel like Google could probably fairly easily tell who’s doing that. I don’t know. You would think if you’re just straight copying what the gray area is, if you take something AI generated and you modify it, whether they can tell or whether that’s even OK. Anyway, this brings up to the final one. This is the reason why I got hit. Oh, yes. We haven’t even gotten to that We haven’t gotten that.

12:34
basically going down the Google official press release, which actually means nothing in most cases because what they release and what actually happens isn’t really. Right. Okay. So number one, why me and all my buddies got hit is because now just, just do a search on Google right now. The top spot for one of my main queries that I used to rank for is now a LinkedIn post.

13:00
followed by Quora, followed by Reddit. And Google has greatly promoted all of these sites and just knocked everyone else down in general. Now here’s what’s fascinating about this. We have a mutual friend who’s not in my mastermind group, but what he started doing was copying his blog posts directly into LinkedIn. And he has the top spot for a keyword. And then the blog post that he has on his blog,

13:29
He’s redirecting that to LinkedIn now. And his LinkedIn post has all the same affiliate links and that sort of thing. And that’s how he’s managed to rank a bunch of his pages. Well, that works if your content works for LinkedIn, but if you have a chicken leg recipe, that’s not, I I’m not posting that on LinkedIn. Well, this is just an example of what people are doing, right? And it was like a financial services review that he had dropped in the rankings.

13:59
And so he just copied it to LinkedIn and all of a sudden he got the number one spot again. Identical content, right? Pretty dumb. But he’s redirecting, so this guy didn’t get hit, he’s now ranking, right? Well no, he copied his stuff to LinkedIn. His blog lost ranking. Yes. So he decided to do an experiment and just copy that blog post over to LinkedIn and then that LinkedIn post that he posted got the number one spot.

14:25
So when people type in his blog post URL, they are redirected to LinkedIn. They are now, which is, I don’t recommend this because you’re essentially telling Google that LinkedIn is the authoritative post now. However, he doesn’t care because that LinkedIn post generates a lot of money because it has his affiliate links in it. And you’re allowed to do that on LinkedIn. I did not know that. I’m not really a LinkedIn expert, but I went to check it out and it’s got his links in there. He doesn’t care about it. Okay, just.

14:55
Keep in mind also that these people that we’re talking about make all their money through affiliate marketing. They don’t necessarily care about email subs. Although you could have a link in there that takes you to a landing page where you have an email signup form as well. I found that fascinating. And if you look at some of my queries, I think the Google search results are worse now because they now link to this Reddit thread that is just garbage. Sometimes it’s linked to… So there’s one of my posts.

15:25
where I’m doing a review of like a drop shipping site. And the number one spot links to a Reddit thread dated 2021, which is completely not accurate. I have noticed that. In fact, this just happened to me the other day. What was I looking for? think it was, yeah, it was something about a credit card. I needed to know how to do something with a certain credit card. And I Googled, I couldn’t find it on the credit card website.

15:52
So was like, rather than call and sit on hold, let me just do a quick Google search. I’m sure that I’m just not searching the right thing on the credit card site or probably nerd wallet has the answer, right? that’s, nerd wallet always has the answer. And when I Googled it, the first thing that came up, you’re right, was a Reddit post, which I clicked on, was not even close to what I was, I mean, it had the words in there, but it wasn’t what I needed to know. And then once again, like a bunch of Reddit people don’t know how to solve my problem when it came to this.

16:21
So yeah, think that was actually yesterday that that happened. And I was like, wow, this really stinks. Because normally, it was about an American Express card. Normally, the first response would have been an American Express help page, right? That would have usually shown up number one in Google, and it did not. It was a bunch of Reddit threads. And then, I don’t remember if it was Quora or something else, but then, yeah, it took me, I ended up going back to the American Express site and just digging deeper to try to find the answer.

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17:16
and you can sign up over at profitableaudience.com slash free. Once again, that’s profitableaudience.com slash free. Now back to the show.

17:27
Yeah, my buddy Glenn Alsop, who runs detail.com, actually did a case study where it was something crazy. Let me see if I can find the post. But it was some really large percentage of Reddit posts gaining in the search results and pushing everyone else down. So I’m actually looking at, I just typed in, which is better Shopify or BigCommerce? So the number one response here is Forbes.

17:57
Shopify versus BigCommerce 2024 comparison. The next response is Shopify. Well, I wonder what they’re gonna say. The third one was Reddit. And it’s not even, it’s like any advices for a Shopify, BigCommerce new seller. yeah. sorry, Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, basically any of the established social media sites.

18:27
And people are gaming these big time now. Oh, 100%. It’s a little harder to game Reddit because if you post a link, like sometimes you get flamed, but people are doing it, especially if they own their own subreddits. Yeah. And that’s how they’re ranking. Interesting. Yeah. I think this has got to change because it’s garbage. It’s worse now, in my opinion.

18:49
Well, it’s like, do you remember when forums were really big, like back in the like 2006, seven, eight, it was before the internet was, I felt like as big as it was, so a lot of the information being shared was on like specific forums. And if you ever searched for anything, you would get the forum response, but the forums are so biased against, like you could be on a forum that was completely anti-homeschool.

19:16
Right, so every single post in there was about homeschooling, but it was about why you shouldn’t homeschool, right? But then there was an entire forum dedicated to like pro homeschooling. So you never got any agnostic advice about anything because if you landed on a forum, it was clearly biased in one direction or another. And I feel like that’s what’s gonna happen again, right? Is that, you know, the people, the threads on Reddit, I mean, there’s sometimes there’s good stuff on Reddit. don’t think it’s, but to me, Reddit’s more of like entertainment.

19:44
like reading through and just surveying the people. It’s not an information, to me it’s not like an informational site. Maybe other people are using it that way, but I’ve never thought of it that way. And certainly not concise. By the way, I found my friend’s blog post. So what he did is he reviewed 10,000 product review terms, just kind of random. This is what he does for a living. He of does these cool case studies. And this is what he found.

20:10
The reddit.com domain was present in 7,500 search results and featured 14,000 times. This means that if the SERP feature was present, Reddit not only had a 97.5 % chance of showing up, but on average had 1.9 of the three possible listings at the top. And then he goes on to talk, maybe I’ll link this article because it’s fascinating. But people are gaming it by voting up

20:39
like their earbuds or their review in the results. And so it’s an artificial, the conclusion of this article was the Google product review search results are now the worst that he’s ever seen. Which I feel like we said this several months ago where it was gonna get worse before it gets better because of, you know, everything, how everything’s changing. So, I mean, I hope eventually it will get back to giving you useful information, but

21:09
You know, all the statistics and articles I’ve read, you know, people are searching on Pinterest for information. The younger generation is searching on TikTok. They’re not Googling anything. They’re TikToking it, like to find the information. Which is more real because you see a video, right? Right. And then last week at ECF, in one of the groups, a lot of people were saying they just ask AI, right? They just go into chat GPT and ask the question.

21:39
they don’t even Google it anymore. Yeah, I started using Proplexity a little more. Are you using this? Have you tried it? No, but that’s what they were talking about in my little group in ECF. Yeah. All right, here’s some more stats. This one’s interesting. So Glenn manually went through the top Reddit threads that appeared in 1,005 individual search results. And of the resulting 122 URLs, 63 have a top comment with a self-promotional affiliate link.

22:09
often written months after the original thread was created. And that’s how people are gaming it. right, so should we switch gears and talk about the reasons why I like this update, even though it hit me? Yes, let’s talk about how bad you got hit first. Give us I got hit about 25%. Okay, and what about your other affiliate marketer friends? Some of them got hit worse than that. I was just gonna say.

22:37
It’s interesting because I know the group of people you’re talking about and it feels like they’re just getting, like every couple years they just get decimated and then they work their way back up and then they get decimated. It just feels, it’s almost like social media now, right? Like I don’t wanna be on the hamster wheel. I don’t wanna be on the hamster wheel of Google updates, right? It’s feeling very similar of like, well now I’m gonna follow all the new rules and then only to get decimated two and a half years later for whatever reason.

23:06
I think the difference is that this time I think search, the search days are numbered. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. That’s my general opinion. Cause AI is going to replace search eventually. Right? Why type in a query and get a bunch of junk or links? We can just get the answer. But anyways, okay, let’s switch gears. Cause, okay. So remember a long time ago, we did an episode where I told you that I hate writing now because Google has forced you to write in a certain way.

23:36
that answers the questions and nothing else. Well, they just did a 180 on that. Right. So as part of this last update, they don’t want content that is the same as everyone else’s. Right. Because because you’ve noticed, right, when you search for something, you’ll see two pages with the results that essentially regurgitate the exact same stuff. it’s just like one upping the next person. Right. Yeah. Who has more content? Well, that’s different now, because Google actually wants real

24:06
content that’s original, which ironically is the way that I used to write. Before I discovered that writing original content reflecting my experiences was actually hurting me in the search results, right? Because it’s getting interpreted as extra stuff and it was hard to categorize when Google just wants the answer. So if you look at the people who benefited from this March update, and it’s still really early by the way.

24:35
No one really has any definitive conclusions, but there are a couple of outlier sites that were literally just photos and People just talking about hey, I bought it is almost like the old days of blogging We just kind of talked about your day Yeah, you talked about your day and you mentioned this thing and how you loved it and whatnot a Couple of those type of sites got promoted in the search results

25:00
And again, it’s still early and there’s not that much data, but the old days are back. I’m happy. When I used to, because I hated my blog. Yeah. And I remember when I launched my book, I was not proud of it at all. And I knew people were going to come to my site and I was thinking to myself, what if they go to my blog and they see this kind of robotic, you know, encyclopedia of stuff where they just answer the question and nothing else.

25:27
They’ll be like, that’s the Steve Choo we’ve always known. What’s ironic about all of this is I spent probably a year and a half optimizing my money posts by removing all of my own opinions, by removing all of the stories I had involved with the tools that I use to keep it short and succinct. Thank goodness WordPress has a revision button.

25:56
It’s so, it’s so different now. So I can’t even, you know, but basically Google’s looking for original content. The good old days of, uh, Brian Dean skyscraper technique, where you just taking what someone else has written, kind of rewriting it and, trust trying to outdo the next result. As of now, I think those days are over until Google decides to change your mind. Yeah, but it makes sense. Right.

26:23
I mean, you don’t want to read the same regurgitated stuff in the search results. I hated myself. This started in 2016. I want to say this whole regurgitated stuff because that’s what Google was. They wanted that. They just want the answer and nothing else.

26:39
Well, I’m glad I’m working on YouTube now. Actually, that was my next point. So even though my wife quick got hit, I actually looked at my analytics results and my YouTube channel actually dwarfs the blog now. Yeah. In terms of email subs. You hit 300,000 subs. I did. Yeah. Yay. And I actually figured out a system that I’ve used on my last two videos that I’m pretty confident will

27:08
I’m going to actually present this to our class today in fact. Okay. Awesome. that I just kind of discovered recently where I was screwing up on some of my other videos and I’m going all in. I was already all on YouTube, but even more so now I’m actually going to go back to my blog and add in like my own personal experiences again. And it’ll be fun for me this time because that’s how I used to write. Yeah. And so even though I personally got hit, I’m actually

27:37
kind of glad that it’s going this way in a way. I mean, I’d be more glad if my traffic was still here just to be clear, but it will make writing a little bit more fun again. Yeah. Unlike before. Yeah. I never went over to that side. I was like, I’m not doing it. It’s not my content doesn’t lend itself to that anyway. but it can write like if you’re if you have a recipe, you’re just not going to give out the recipe, right? You’re going to talk about.

28:06
Oh yeah, but I never went to the whole just give them just the facts, ma’am. I was like, this is not what I do. So yeah, was I just never got on that train, which I’m glad that I didn’t. Well, I mean, there’s a lot of money made during that time. You’re right. We’re talking almost eight years of gravy. Yeah. But I’m also not an affiliate heavy site.

28:32
Yeah. So and people buy like I was actually looking at this the other day. The the affiliates that people are like my heavy moneymakers are all because I’m like I joined this program, this and that. Like it’s all because I’m sharing my experience of why people should, you know, like one of my top affiliates for a long time was Adore Your Wardrobe from Kelly Snyder. Right. And the reason why that did so well is I’m literally making videos in my closet.

29:00
right, and telling people why they need to dress for their body type and clean out their closet. I mean, that’s why that converted. wasn’t because I was just giving the fact, I don’t even know the facts of the program anymore. I couldn’t tell you how long of a program it is or anything. What I could tell you was it worked and my own experience. Which I do think is pretty compelling for people.

29:25
in my niche, you know, I think it’s definitely different in your niche. So, I mean, we’re just coming from two totally different places. That’s correct. Yeah. I am curious, though. So what happened? You said used to be. you? I just haven’t promoted it in a long time. Like, because she only does like twice a year launches and things like that. So it’s like if I if she launches in a period of time where it’s like, I’m just not something I have time to promote, then.

29:52
I don’t promote it, but yeah, when I do promote it, it always does well. Same thing with the passionate penny pincher menu planning boxes. Those always do really well, but I talk about my whole sites about menu planning and how it’s, I have personal stories and I have actually shared reader stories of how it saved people thousands and thousands of dollars in their grocery bills. So because I have all those stories on there, I think that’s why that stuff converts so much better than.

30:20
me just talking about a product on Amazon or But I noticed you used the word video also. Yes. And not text, right? Yeah, but I’ve always done both for those things. Obviously now working more on the video. It was interesting. I was looking at my YouTube channel, because I’ve had one for 12 years, a long time. And some of my older videos that have thousands and thousands of views are so awful.

30:50
And it just makes me, like if you wanna think about how far the iPhone has come, I filmed these videos with like an iPhone 5, I think was the phone of the day back then. you know, even if you are just filming with an iPhone 12, the picture quality is absolutely phenomenal.

31:11
Anyway, was just kind of, was kind of laughing at it I was like, maybe I’ll like add a thumbnail and like, you know, kind of like re up some of these old videos. And then I watched him and I was like, no, it looks like a grainy. It looks like I’m filming through a dirty window. I was like, I will not be, I’ll not be re upping these videos for sure. So let’s talk about Bumblebee next. So the Bumblebee blog got hit. Really? Yeah. Which I care a little bit less, but my core product results.

31:42
were okay, but what I noticed, because I immediately just looked at all my rankings for my money pages, right? And I noticed a bunch of sites got promoted that are the crappiest linen sites that I’ve ever seen. Really? Yeah, to the front page. And in fact, there’s this one URL from Big Cartel where they didn’t even have their own domain. It was literally store.bigcartel.com, which means it didn’t even pay for.

32:09
like a real membership, they’re just using the free tier. And the site was like the ugliest thing that I’ve ever seen. It looked like just a standard template, just threw up some products on there and they started ranking. And there’s no way that that site should rank. Why? What’s the logic behind that? I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea why that site was ranking. So Google, and again, this rollout is supposed to take a month, so it’s not done yet.

32:39
But so far it’s been terrible from a usability standpoint in my eyes. Yeah. I feel like that’s been the case for a while now. But it’s worse. I don’t think it could get worse. yeah. Well, I think we’ve actually we actually said that several months ago. Like, well, this is this is pretty crappy. And then all of a sudden it’s now even worse than it was before. So I talked to Jeff Oxford and he primarily does e-commerce SEO.

33:06
and he basically said that most of his sites did not get hit in his portfolio. Maybe 10 to 15 % of the sites did. It seems like at least e-commerce is fairly stable. It’s just in the content side where the biggest changes are happening. He said that, but yet Bumblebee got The blog got hit. Yes. That’s the content side of Bumblebee, Oh, I what you’re saying. The listings, the category pages, things like that. Correct.

33:35
not the products in the categories. They’ve shifted though, but yeah, pretty flat on the product side, the blog. I think everyone, be honest, I have not talked to a single person personally that I know who’s benefited from this. And I think it’s because Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, and all those sites have gotten promoted, which has pushed everyone else down. Right, just in general, if those are going up, everyone else by nature has to get pushed down.

34:03
Why even have a blog anymore? Like why not just post all of your blog posts on LinkedIn was the question that we were just kind of bouncing around. And the reason is you don’t wanna put your stuff on a property that you don’t own, right, in case anything changes. But that’s essentially what Google’s telling us right now. Meh, I don’t like it. Yeah, no, mean, you have to have a blog, you have to have a landing page, you have to have a place for people to opt in for your email. Yeah.

34:33
And I’m sure this is gonna get reversed at some point, because this is not, yeah. Sorry, go on, I interrupted you. No, just, first of all, the fact that Reddit shows up at the top is laughable to me. just, I just don’t, I know there’s people that, like my brother loves Reddit, and I know people love commenting, reading, I mean, it’s very, it’s very, very popular. But to me, Reddit would never be a place I would go for information.

35:03
It’s entertainment to me or just mindless, I don’t know. Because it’s like, here’s the thing, right? What did Google tell us for so long? Like you need to show that you’re an authority in the space, right? If you’ve been featured on magazines or TV shows or publications, you need to put that in there so we know you’re an authority. Any idiot can go on Reddit and post something. You have no idea what their background is. You have no idea what their knowledge base is.

35:33
And then now they’re going to rank. Now they’re going to rank, right, because they’re in a thread. And so Billy Bob is out there, you know, given medical advice on Reddit. And I don’t know, I just think it’s absurd to me. Like I. Yeah, it’s absurd. I’m going to go on strike. I’m going to go on strike from Google. So Google actually tweeted about this. And the head of Google, like the front facing guy. Yeah, he was quoted as saying Reddit has a lot of practice dealing with spam.

36:02
and experienced users there are not shy. And so their logic is that these communities have been around for a very long time and they must have pretty good spam policies. Therefore, Reddit has higher searches. They were basically defending what they’d done. So, yes, they probably have a great spam filter. mean, because I know I’ve heard people saying that they got their stuff removed from Reddit and things like that. But it doesn’t mean that the people talking on there know anything.

36:31
Those are two completely different buckets. 100 % agree with you. Yeah.

36:38
I don’t know. My prediction is that Google’s search is, it’s, it’s definitely going down. Yeah. And it’s the days are numbered. I’d say I give it like two years tops. Interesting. And the reason why I say that was, you’re, you’re about my age, right? Yeah. A little, little, little, little older. Back in the day when I was in college, Yahoo was the main search engine in town. Yep. But then within one year it was gone. Google had destroyed it in one year. Yeah.

37:08
All it takes is something that’s superior to quickly, like once word of mouth spreads. example, if perplexity takes off, for everyone listening to this, perplexity is basically a site that gives you an AI answer, but it also does searches and then it gives you, it sites all the, it basically has backup and links for where it got the data from. So you can feel fairly confident about the result. So it’s essentially like a combination of AI and Google search.

37:38
is what it is. And it works pretty well. I’ve used it on occasion. Most of the time now I use ChatGPT actually to ask a question and then I just double check and Google if I think it’s sketchy. Can we veer off for two minutes and talk about ChatGPT? Sure. So I think on it, I don’t know when these will publish, but we talked about the AI talk at ECF Live and how I thought it was a great talk and I’ve never done the paid ChatGPT.

38:07
I’ve always just used the free version. And because of that talk, I was like, okay, it’s 20 bucks a month. gonna splurge and get the paid version. So I was looking for some email content and I had ChatGPT 3.5, which is the free version, I believe, versus the paid version, which I think is for something, maybe just for worlds apart. And on stuff that’s not factual, right? It was like ideas for birthday party or something like that.

38:37
It wasn’t something where it’s like the information needed to be cross checked. It was more like creative ideas for things and it was nuts how much better it is. So if you if you’re cheap, I believe you’re so I know if you’re like me, I know, I know. Stop, stop. But there’s probably a lot of people like me that are like, oh, I don’t know, because I don’t use it as much as a lot of other people do. And so I wasn’t I know, I know there are so many things I need to present to my class.

39:06
Yeah, for online store that I’m doing right now with AI and just advertising and everything that I’m thinking about like postponing all the zoom calls for a while while I all this content out and then likewise and profitable audience as well. There’s a lot a lot of stuff going on. Yeah, that I that I’m just itching to present. Anyways, yeah, if you’re not using AI, you’re going to fall behind. Yeah, Google’s search. I can’t imagine.

39:37
At some point they’re have to make decision whether they want to decimate their revenue or not because what they’re doing right now and the results Is just not working. and it’s actually turning off a lot of people. You know, what’s so funny is I belong to this one Facebook group that just kind of covers SEO Everyone’s moving to Pinterest Okay, so yes, I didn’t want to bring this up on this episode because it’s so far different I’m completely re-upping my Pinterest strategy

40:04
So I’ve just been like maintaining because it’s still a decent source of traffic for me. Google’s always, not Google’s always my number one, but Google and Pinterest usually sit like one and two depending on the month. But I start with all the Google stuff and with everything else that’s going on, I was like, you know what, I need to just, it doesn’t take a lot of time to do it. I think we have a lesson in the course like 45 minutes a week or something like that. It’s pretty short.

40:30
amount of time to work on, but yeah, I’m completely re-upping my strategy with Pinterest. For that reason. has the same problems though, right? I don’t know, they’re not showing Reddit threads as in the search results. I mean with spam, I mean with spam. Yes, I feel like they’ve gotten a little better. And I also feel like the younger generation, because now I’m old and I can say that, is actually using Pinterest. So like my kids are all, I was actually talking to your sister-in-law about this a while back.

41:00
It’s their fastest growing demographic that 16 to 24 age bracket. My kids use it all the time. They all have the app on their phone. mean, when Pinterest came out, I would have never thought it would be an app for teens. I 100 % agree. This is so random how that happened. Anyway, so I’m recommitting my efforts to Pinterest 100 % because I feel like, yeah, that’s…

41:27
I’m not playing the Google game Pinterest for all of its changes and stuff that’s gone on. Like the core of Pinterest has stayed the same. It’s all about the images. It’s a visual search engine. And I even bought a course this week just to like see if there’s anything that I’m not doing that, you know, is out there. So yeah, I’m re-upping it totally. Yeah. Meanwhile, I’m still going to, I don’t want to say play the Google game, but I’m going to go in and add my own opinions on, my post again.

41:56
That’s actually easy writing for me. I’m gonna take what I have and then have a section of like, hey, this is my personal opinion on this. If you want all the facts, continue reading below. I’ll say something like that and just give my straight up opinion on all these tools that I’ve been using for so many years and see what happens. It might make blogging fun again. Right, I should get a hat.

42:26
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now these changes to Google are just the tip of the iceberg and there’s going to be many more changes in just the next three weeks, so stay tuned. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 525. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com.

42:54
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywipequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.