541: Google Screws Up Again! Here’s What Happened And How It Affects You

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Drop podcast, the place where I cover the latest strategies to grow an online business. And guess what? Google has screwed up yet again. In this episode, you’ll learn about the changes of the week for Google, including a major data leak that has exposed some of the inner workings of their search algorithm. Enjoy the show. But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom.

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by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

00:55
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today, regrettably, we’re going to be talking about Google yet again. I’m a little tired of this topic, but they keep screwing up and things just keep changing. It’s the Doom and Gloom podcast. How many episodes have we done on Google in the last six weeks? Like three episodes, right? At least half of the episodes have been about Google, but that’s all people are talking about. When we were at Seller Summit,

01:23
multiple people came up to me and said, we’re listening to your podcast about Google. Should we just give up on SEO? What should we be doing? I mean, that is what everybody is talking about right now. So I feel like we can’t not talk about it. Yeah. So the latest news, and this is like literally hot off the press of yesterday, but so Google announced their AI search results. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, like if you ask a question now, like the first result is AI in the front and center.

01:51
But there was an internal document that leaked and it turns out that Google’s been lying to us all of these years about the ranking algorithms. Not surprising, not surprising. But I figured we’d break down what some of the changes are, what was in that document in this episode. See where it Yeah, so I’ve heard that it’s 2,500 pages. It is quite long. Have you read it?

02:19
Well, no, what I did actually is I had ChatGPT summarize a bunch of it. Okay. That’s a good way to use AI. Well, let’s talk about how the search results got even worse first. Here are just some examples. One person was reported as typing in, I’m depressed, what should I do? Then guess what the AI search result was. Oh, no. What was it?

02:48
It was, one Redditor suggests that you should just find the nearest bridge and jump off of it. No. Yes. Oh my goodness. Okay. Okay. These are all popular. Like these are all, these have all been, you know, broadcast. This is I don’t like to be on the internet. Another person asked, Hey, how do I prevent my cheese from falling off my pizza? And then the AI search result was

03:16
someone suggested that you should add a cup of glue to your sauce and that ought to thicken it up a little bit. What? Okay. And then another popular one that’s been making the rounds is how many rocks should I eat a day? And then the AI search result was you should eat one to two rocks per day or something like that. It was just a joke that someone wrote on Reddit. Yeah. So essentially it seems like a lot of these AI search answers are just

03:45
summaries of Reddit answers. And know how sarcastic people on Reddit can be. Yes, yes, I can’t stand Reddit. My dislike of Reddit has become even more, it’s growing, it’s growing by the minute. So what’s interesting is that I was trying to fix my podcast mic. We’ve been having issues with my levels. And so I’ve tried a bunch of different things. I did the standard, you know, start and stop, you know.

04:14
reboot your computer, all the basic stuff. And then I went into the internet archives to try to figure out, I can’t be the only person that’s having this issue. I do have a Mac. A lot of times there’s like compatibility issues with the Mac, this and that and the other. So I go on there and normally I’m very vigilant about not clicking on the Reddit answer because I know it’s gonna be garbage and I just scroll, but I was…

04:40
like frustrated and I was in a hurry and so I just click on the first thing that comes up and I start reading it and it takes me a good like 30 seconds to realize that I’m in a Reddit thread and the answer is completely wrong, right? Like it’s completely irrelevant, not what I need. And so anyway, super frustrating. This just happened to me the other day. But once again, I was like, this used to be something where,

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A year ago or 18 months ago, I would have typed in this question about the Rode mic using a Mac, blah, blah, and Macworld would have come up. Or the other Mac website that’s really great with the, I can’t think of the name of it, but they literally are step-by-step tutorials on Mac compatibility. And either of those sites would have been first and second, not even on the first page anymore. Yeah, I think this was a topic, I think we actually talked about it at my round table. Okay. And people were asking me whether SEO was worth it. And I said,

05:33
from the perspective of an e-commerce store, it’s still okay. And I think that Google seems to be favoring content for business websites. Like if you have a real business attached to it, then chances are you aren’t gonna be spamming and just creating these dummy content pages. Whereas pure affiliate sites, review sites that don’t sell anything, don’t offer a service, those guys are getting penalized the most. I think because Google doesn’t know how to tell,

06:02
what good content is versus bad. So I think what they’re doing is they’re just penalizing everyone to get people to just give up altogether on these spammy sites. I mean, I would love for the spammy sites to be given up, but not all the other sites, you know? Well, here’s the thing. They’re also favoring the old school sites that have tons of domain authority, like Forbes. I mean, Forbes writes about everything now because they’ve been charging people to do guest posts.

06:31
I actually got an email just the other day that said, hey, would you like to be featured on Forbes? Hit reply for this opportunity. And then in small print at the end, says, you know, we’ll send you a price list. Right. Yeah. Or charges may be applicable to this. mean, mean, Forbes should be sticking with financial information or business information. You know, it’s interesting as I have noticed that Forbes has come up significantly in the search engine lately for things that have

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nothing to do with. In fact, I think one of the searches I did this weekend was housing market in Orlando, right? Because I’m selling my house and Forbes was in the top and it didn’t have anything to do with the housing market in Orlando. It had to do with something. It had to do with the housing market, but like overall. So, yeah, I’ve noticed them coming up a ton in searches and once again, not 100 % relevant. mean, Forbes has articles on supplements now.

07:32
Yeah, right. That’s where I to my supplement information. I’d rather get my supplement information off TikTok. So, yeah, I think Google is shooting themselves in the foot. mean, maybe this strategy might work to prevent people from creating these spammy content sites. Yeah. But then by the time they decide to reverse it and there’s already been talks about them. I think I can’t remember. I always forget what the rep is who always talks with the public about Google.

08:01
They said they may have overdone it a little bit. But they keep screwing up. These AI search results are terrible. Like if you go to perplexity, the answers that perplexity gives is way better. Have you started using perplexity? I started using perplexity, but then when the AI search results came out, I started using Google and then I realized that they’re horrible and then went back to perplexity. They should just acquire perplexity actually. Yeah. I don’t know.

08:29
So you summarize the document. Yeah, we can go over it. Yeah, it’s funny. I was like, someone just messaged me with something about Google and it was our friend, Sonia from ECF. And she sent me a link to the article where it’s from Search Engine Land, the website, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. And it has all those examples that you just mentioned to me about the glue and all the kind of the blunders from

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Google right now. she has some is just someone just sent me the link to that was pretty funny. The jumping off the bridge one was the worst, I think, of the three. Yeah, it’s just it’s here’s what’s scary to me about it. And this is probably because I have kids that are pretty impressionable. I still have a teenager and, she gets all our information from TikTok, which is concerning enough. Right. Because at that point, anybody can post anything.

09:24
But I also think of people that are older, right? And they’re searching for something and just the amount of disinformation that’s out there. And I know there’s always been disinformation, right? Even before the internet. mean, people would publish pamphlets and things like that. But it’s gotten to the point now where it’s concerning to me that someone who maybe doesn’t have all their mental faculties anymore or someone that is just more susceptible to things is just, it’s so dangerous.

09:54
Well, especially someone depressed being told to jump off a bridge. it’s like nobody. Google doesn’t even care about me, right? Like, I mean, you think about the logical progression of how that could go. Yeah, it’s it’s very concerning. Well, and then there are sites like character.ai. Have you played around with this at all? I haven’t. haven’t at all. It’s basically people think that it’s going to replace like boyfriends and girlfriends.

10:20
Because it’s essentially creating like an AI avatar of a personality that you might want to just hang out with and like why go through all the problems of dealing with the real human when you can have an AI person that you can talk with that always makes you feel better. But do they gasp up your car? Well, no, they don’t do physical things, but there’s more than acts of service, Tony. I know that’s what your love language is.

10:49
Well, that reminds me of how long ago was this? Remember where you could create the city and you could put yourself in the alternate reality? This is probably like 10 years ago and people were cheating on their significant others with people they had met in the alternate reality. like Second Life or something? I can’t remember what it Yeah, but there was something and it got pretty popular. This seems like just a better- You’re talking about World of Warcraft, are you?

11:17
Yeah, it’s one of my many video games that I play. But this sounds like just another progression of that that’s probably going to be even better, right? an even better as far as the quality, not better as far as how how it is for humanity. There was some graph I saw where it’s mainly people under the age of 25 using it right now. Yeah. And, you know, who knows, you know, train the next generation to not want to get married or actually have

11:46
real human interactions. Yeah. I hate all of this. I hate all of We need a new podcast topic for next week. Something happy, please. Let’s go back to Google. Every time I go down this AI rabbit hole, because I’m worried for my kids. really am. That’s one of the reasons why I’m keeping up with all this stuff so I can hopefully counter it before they go off to college. I don’t know.

12:12
Well, that’s a one more side note on this. Like if you are a parent and your kids are not out of the house, you can’t put your head in the sand on these things. You have to be paying attention to what’s going on. I feel like I meet so many parents that are just like, oh, I don’t even want to be bothered with these things. Like you can’t, you have to really educate yourself on what’s happening because your kids are educated on it and they are interacting on these platforms and doing these things. So little PSA.

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for all our parents out there. But let’s talk about how Google is gonna ruin your business. On the flip side though, it has helped me help my child with math homework. Yeah. Because now you can just literally take a picture of the problem and it actually does a pretty good explanation. Yeah. And then it’s up to you to decipher if that answer is really correct. But it’s really helped me because I haven’t done a lot of these math things in like 30 years. What are you talking about? That’s your Sunday afternoon activity. Math problems for the whole family. No, I think there’s a lot of great

13:05
There’s a lot of great things that have come from AI. Like I think about your, haven’t been able to hear your talk that you did at Seller Summit yet, but from what I heard people talking about it with using AI to help you with advertising, there’s so much great things that AI will do for your business, help you. One of the things I’ve noticed a lot of people doing lately is using that AI assistant to basically transcribe meetings. So there’s so many great tools, but the problem is it’s like, I don’t know.

13:34
So you have a gas stove, right? your kids, gas stoves are awesome. They have the best heat, they heat the best, they cook the best. Like I love gas stoves, right? But I’m not gonna give my six year old a frying pan and tell them to make something on a gas stove because they don’t understand how to properly use it. I think that’s the important thing as a parent. You’ve gotta teach your kids how to use AI the right way and when it can help them and then when it’s gonna hurt them. So like with everything in life, you have to understand how to use it first. So you definitely educate yourself on all the.

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things that are happening.

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just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

14:48
Yeah, we should just do an episode on AI and all these other things. Yeah, different one. Let’s get back to Google here. Yes. Okay, so basically there’s Google’s content warehouse API got leaked. It’s not really like a document that you read. It’s more of like an API document. So it’s kind of technical. Okay, basically the type of information that Google stores about search queries and authors and that sort of thing. But there’s some crazy people out there. This only been leaked for

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like a day or a couple days. Yeah. And people have combed through the document. And basically, because it’s an API document, it actually exposed a lot of how the actual search algorithm works. Okay. Okay. All right. So this is what’s funny about all this stuff. And we it kind of gives us an understanding of how Google works. Google purposely lies to people to create because they don’t want people gaming the system, right?

15:46
So they’re giving out information that is contradictory to how they’re actually doing it to prevent other people from doing it. me an example. OK, so the first one was that internal documents have revealed that there actually is domain authority. So each website actually has a certain amount of clout, like a number given to it. And for years and years, Google has been denying this.

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Google says that they don’t factor in the domain authority. There’s no number that rates like how strong a website is and everyone knew this one was BS. Right? Because, for example, Forbes can publish an article about something that I’ve written about and instantly outrank me. Yes. You within a day. Because they’re really like a 90 domain or something like that. Right. So clearly there’s some amount of authority, right? But Google’s always denied it. They denied it for the longest time.

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but now the internal documents reveal that the actual variable is called site authority. Maybe that’s they meant. It’s not called domain authority. they weren’t technically lying. Exactly, like when your kid tells you, you know, I didn’t tell you everything, but technically I wasn’t lying. Exactly. I didn’t take a cookie, I took three. Yeah. Nice job, Google. The other thing that Google has denied for a while is ranking based on clicks. Okay.

17:13
So now they track click data for boosting, demoting, and then reinforcing of rankings. And incidentally, this is why they started the Chrome browser in the first place, back in, I can’t remember when they started. Was it 2008 or something like that? Maybe earlier than that. I’m not sure. But they realized in order to create a better search engine, they actually needed real click data. And that was actually the reason why they started Chrome.

17:42
So is that click data coming from the search results to the website or click data within the website? Click data, I believe from the browser. Okay, so when someone’s in Chrome, Safari, whatever, they’re tracking that click. Obviously they’re tracking Chrome. Yeah, so all the click data from Chrome and everything actually factors into how your website ranks. I didn’t know they said that didn’t matter. To me that would just make total sense of why it mattered. It does, but I think they…

18:12
They didn’t want people like, I don’t know, to that. paying people to click or setting up of something that would click automatically? Well, let me just tell you what’s going on right now in Reddit land, which I found really interesting. In fact, our mutual friend and Seller Summit speaker Spencer Hawes has been experimenting with getting traffic from Reddit. OK. And so what he’s done is he’s created a bunch of Reddit accounts, got them to about a thousand points of karma.

18:38
I don’t know how many people listening to this actually use Reddit, but basically you get karma points for interacting with various groups in Reddit and subreddits. And so you build up these accounts and then you go in and you share other people’s content in a bunch of different subreddits. And occasionally you, add your own, your own link to your own website. And last month he was able to build, I think 11,000 visits just based on this Reddit strategy alone because the Reddit

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know, thread outranks, you the actual thing. And today, there’s actually companies that and industries have sprouted up in just like the last, I don’t know, three or four months that now have like Reddit farms. These are people that are just dedicated paid people that go in and post on Reddit, your links, your content and whatnot. And apparently larger companies are using services like this. My eyes are rolling so far back in my head.

19:38
I mean, it’s ridiculous. It actually hasn’t even been that long. It’s been what, six months and all this stuff is already happening. And here’s the other thing. Like I’ve never been a huge fan of Reddit, but this type of thing will now make anything good about Reddit stink. Yes. You know what I mean? So it’s not it’s not only ruining like the search results. It’s I mean, because there definitely are some things that I’ve seen in Reddit that I find interesting. But now that’s going to be ruined as well. Yep.

20:05
And the other second part of Spencer’s strategy is to create his own subreddit. Okay. Which is essentially like having your own Facebook group in a way. Yeah. It’s something that you control. You can post links as much as you want, but you got to build it up like a Facebook group and get people to join your subreddit. But this is where the marketing dollars are going now. Yeah. Right. Pretty crazy. There’s also a lot of people that are gaming Quora because Quora is kind of like right under Reddit.

20:33
And so instead of blogging on their own platforms now, they’re just transferring that content over to Quora and ranking that way.

20:43
I’m so annoyed by all of this. mean, it’s dumb. Like Google is shooting themselves in the foot. No one’s going to want to use their search engine after all this. It doesn’t make sense to me. OK, let’s see what else. they used to… Google was denying that there was a sandbox. So what is a sandbox for you guys listening? Brand new websites that are created. Google tends not to rank right away because

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They’re trying to limit the amount of spam, people, their ability to just quickly put up spam sites. And previously Google has denied that the sandbox even exists. Well, here’s the thing, know, I actually, Bumblebee Linnon’s way back in the day was actually in the sandbox. I could not even rank for my own domain. I want to say for like four months, which is rare, right? Today, you your domain should rank right away. But back then I was clearly in the sandbox.

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Google denied it, and you know how I got out of the sandbox? How? My sister-in-law who worked at Google just happened to be in charge of writing a blog post that no longer exists, but she referenced our store in that blog post about, I think, small businesses on Google or something like that. How convenient. And then I got out of it. almost the next day after it was published. And then all of a sudden all my pages.

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or in the search results. So Google said that doesn’t exist, but we know it did. Because now there is a, yeah, there’s a host age parameter in this document. So it’s not called a sandbox, it’s called a host age. You know what’s so interesting about that strategy for Google is that if you think about TikTok, which I feel like is trying to take over everything, right, and doing a fairly good job of it.

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when you start a new account on TikTok, it actually gives you juice, right? It’s like the opposite of what Google did. like hearing Google’s rationale of like keeping spam out, I actually think TikTok’s rationale is better, right? They give you juice initially, like they show your video to a lot of people, and then depending on the interaction, how long people watch, if people click, do they watch it a second time, right? All those factors, the engagement, that makes TikTok decide

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you know, basically how you’re gonna perform in the algorithm. So as opposed to just saying all new sites are spammy, they actually give you a trial run, right, in front of a bunch of people. And if a bunch of people are like, because if it’s spammy, no one’s watching it, right? It’s gonna immediately die on TikTok. But if it’s great content, then you’re actually gonna get a boost and, you know, your content’s gonna perform, which is really what Google should have been doing. They should have been showing the new content.

23:33
obviously having some sort of filter if like it’s just obvious spam, right? But like showing it and then if people are like, nah, then it, you know, gets sort of relegated to the back row. I mean, I think the way that Instagram does this a little bit too, I’m not sure exactly how much so for Instagram, but I know for TikTok, this is exactly how it works. You know, I actually think that’s a great strategy. I think the difference is that TikTok content

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doesn’t stay, it’s not sticky and no one’s really searching for it. No, people are using TikTok as a search engine. I think it’s like 27%. So do the search results constantly change? I guess that maybe that system would work actually for Google. So every time you do a search, you would get different content then depending on what’s been published. I think initially, right?

24:26
Obviously in your personalized search results, it’s similar to how Google works, right? Like you’re always gonna see, like if I’m searching for finance information on TikTok, two financial people that I follow would be Jim Wang and College Investor, right? So they’re probably gonna appear in those search results at some point because I already follow them, but then they’re gonna also broadcast new people for me to find and discover. And based on my interaction with them is gonna…

24:52
impact how those appear in other searches, right? So if like lots of people are clicking and interacting with that content, it’s going to rise to the top. Which I think Google could absolutely do. Yes, obviously TikTok content is not long lasting, but the accounts are, right? So it affects the account. You could get a lot of wrong answers that way, right? Depending on the time of day. Maybe. Whereas Google like search is supposed to give you the right answer or as close to it as possible.

25:23
I’m just, yeah, I’m not saying as far as search accuracy. I’m saying as far as, if Google’s whole point of the sandbox was to weed out spam sites, think, but what happens is you also weed out a ton of legitimate sites. A better way to do that is present it to the audience and let them tell you it’s a spam site by not interacting with it or immediately clicking off of it versus just Google arbitrarily deciding that it shouldn’t be on there. Yeah. I mean, in a way that’s how YouTube works, right?

25:52
YouTube’s the second largest search engine and when you post something, they do show it to a bunch of people in your subscriber base and if it does well, it shows it to more people. I suppose that could be applied in search as well. don’t know, whatever it is, it would be better than anything that’s out there today, seriously. Yeah, I just think Google needs to get with the times. People are doing things differently today than they were 20 years ago when they got started.

26:22
Yeah. Maybe it’s 30 years ago. I don’t even know. I’m so old now. I mean, you mentioned like this document is very long and probably the rest of the stuff isn’t as interesting. But one thing they did not lie about was expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. I was going to ask you about that because that would seem like something you could easily lie about to get people to focus on that. That’s true. But they do keep track of like the author and what they’ve published. So interesting.

26:51
I guess, and then YMYL, which is your money, your life, actually has a separate scorecard. Interesting. Because that data is actually more sensitive, right? It’s on health and your health and that sort of thing. So also there is a site focus score. So if you write all about the same topic and your Google will, I guess, peg you as the expert in that topic if most of your topic is within that focus.

27:20
I’m pretty sure this parameter is not working because Forbes now writes about everything and they still rank. But it’s good to know at least that they’re keeping track of that stuff. Well, it’s something that we’ve talked a lot about in the profitable audience course when we have people wanting to think about niches. Like going deep into a very specific niche is really a great way to get started these days. Like I would never recommend doing something like the happy housewife again, right? Because it’s too broad, too wide, too shallow.

27:49
But I still think there’s space for people to write about ultra marathon running in cold weather, right? Or where you just go deep. And the interesting thing is, if you’re really passionate about something, you will not have trouble coming up with lots of articles and information to create on that topic. Yeah. Here’s what something else I found kind of interesting. It has to do with building backlinks. It turns out that if you build a backlink

28:19
from a site that has a high domain authority, but that that post doesn’t actually get that much traffic, like no one’s reading it, that link is devalued. So you wanna get links from high traffic pages or ones that actually matter. But let’s just think about this for a second. When you take this to the like, does this impact us? So Forbes is like, hey, do you wanna be featured in Forbes?

28:45
pay us $500, right? You know they’re gonna bury your link on a post that doesn’t do well, right? They don’t want it on their front and center top post. So basically, you’re gonna pay 500 bucks to get a link on a page that has no traffic that’s not gonna impact you in a positive way at all. So don’t do it. Well, supposedly Google cracked down on that in May, early May. It’s called Parasite SEO. This is where you purposely put some content on a high authority site. Yeah.

29:13
I feel like they cracked down on this in 2012. See, I don’t really see that happening. I mean, there’s a lot of sites that got manually demoted. Yeah. But I don’t know if they have that in the algorithm yet. Maybe someone listening out there who follows this more closely than I do can comment here. as far as I know, they just manually penalized a lot of large sites, mainly the coupon pages of all things. I mean, they’ve been waiting forever to penalize them. Yeah. You know? I mean, I don’t know.

29:44
All right, so the real question that we want to get to, I guess, at the end is, is blogging worth it? Yes, because you just did an, I missed it last week, but you did a whole office hours on this. I did. That’s why we’re talking about, well, you weren’t there though. I wasn’t. You didn’t watch it. I haven’t watched it, no. But we got a lot of depressing emails after that. So what did you do to these people? I basically said that if you’re going to do a pure affiliate site,

30:13
or a review site, right now is probably not the right time to do that. Yeah, I mean, don’t think we’ve ever, I’ve never encouraged people to do like a peer affiliate or review site. Like that’s just not been my content strategy. So it’s hard for me to recommend that to people, but I know a lot of people have done it for many years and been successful. I mean, our friends. Yeah, all of our friends have done this. Multi-million dollar businesses, right? Doing exactly that. I mean, mixing, you know, content.

30:42
that helps along with affiliate stuff. So you told people to give up on their dreams and then what? No, here’s the thing. And then I purposely didn’t do my talk in my e-commerce course because I really don’t think e-commerce has been really affected. Like Bumble Bee Lens has been fine. It actually gained traffic during the last you sell, didn’t we start this out though by you saying if you sell products? Yeah.

31:09
You’re not excluded. That’s just anecdotal, by the way. Is anyone’s listening? I’ve just talked to a bunch of people in the e-commerce space. Didn’t really get affected. Whereas all of my friends, yes, the content affiliate space, all of them got negatively affected. So the question that we are going to get times 10 is, you know, a lot of people listen to this podcast are in e-commerce wanting to create that content, wanting to create that branding.

31:36
Can you put your blog on BigCommerce or Shopify or should you have your blog on WordPress as a sub-domain? I don’t really think it matters. I personally would always put it on WordPress because of the plugins that are available to you. I’ve actually never really have done a real blog on Shopify like you have, so maybe you can answer that question better.

31:59
I mean, I know this, Shopify blog has improved significantly over the past five years. So when I started in 2015, the blogging on Shopify felt very bare bones. Like you could write a post, you could insert an image, you could insert a link, and that was about all you could do. Now I know that it is far more advanced, but I haven’t had any experience with that in the last couple of years. I do think,

32:27
Overall, WordPress just gives you so much more flexibility of what you can do that I would probably still go with WordPress. If this is going to keep you from doing it at all, then put it on Shopify. If that is your hurdle that you can’t overcome, it’s better to have something than nothing, but it’s not too tough to set up the WordPress site. You could do it in a day or two. I would definitely put it on WordPress.

32:57
So what concerns me about all this is that Google owns YouTube. And I’ve seen this more more lately in just like the past three weeks. But almost all the YouTube videos that I get suggested on my homepage, I shouldn’t say almost all, but probably almost half are AI generated. Maybe that has to do with what I watch, but like there’s all these sports commentary videos now that come up that are just completely automated.

33:26
it seems. Are you getting that too in your feed? I’m in a feed I need to get out of on YouTube right now. I don’t know how I ended up in it. But so no, I’m not getting that. However, I wonder if it has more to do with them feeding that to you or the percentage of AI content on YouTube has gone up so much that that’s the natural repercussion of the percentage of that content. I mean, I’m sure it’s getting flooded.

33:56
Like even on my TikTok feed now, it’s very clear that there’s some automated way that they’re doing this. And I actually have a buddy who’s kind of automated video generation using 11 Labs. So he narrates the whole thing. And then he has these services go on and just pull B-roll. And so it’s just his voice or the AI version of his voice overlaid by a slideshow essentially. Yeah, I don’t see a lot of that on TikTok or YouTube.

34:25
But here’s the other thing, mostly on TikTok, what I see right now is like true crime. Which so it’s always like police camera footage, stuff like that. So I don’t think that’s in the AI space. Like I’m sure there’s AI true crime, but I’m not in that algorithm. I would say like for things like sports, 100%. I’ve seen it in your feed on YouTube. Like when I logged in this morning to set up office hours and I noticed that for your feed as well.

34:54
So I’m wondering if it’s a combination of you’ve watched some of it plus the amount of AI content that’s on there plus Google. Like it’s probably threefold, right? What you’re watching, the amount of it and Google trying to push it, which also to me is crazy because at the end of the day, people don’t love AI content and video. Not always. See, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true because some of these videos that I accidentally watched have a lot of views. Yeah.

35:24
So clearly it’s working for some people. Do the channels have a lot of subscribers? Have you ever checked I didn’t click on the channel. I would be curious about that. So to me,

35:39
my immediate thought is, well, this is why subscribers on YouTube matter, right? Because you want to make sure that your content’s at least going out to your people. It’s kind of like the email subscribers, right? That’s why on your blog, email subscribers become so much more valuable because even if Google starts decreasing the amount of people they show your content to in the search results, you still have the ability to email those people your content. I mean, if you look at my YouTube channel,

36:07
it’s really only about 30 % of people that are returning viewers. The other 70 % is brand new. So anyway. your content’s getting shown too then. It is, the only thing that worries me is like what if this AI spam gets so much where Google just gets fed up and starts doing the same thing that it’s doing in the search algorithms. There is a check box now which is really weird.

36:34
Oh, in the back end? In the back end that says, has your content been altered in any way with AI and whatnot? But what’s weird is you don’t even have to select anything. Oh, you don’t? thought you had to… No, you don’t even have to select it right now. You can just publish a video without answering that question. Oh, I didn’t know that. I I always answer the question. I do too. I didn’t know there was an option to not answer. that I… It’s by default. Because I published one the other day with it completely unchecked.

37:04
Oh, and it just went through? And it just went, yeah, published. Because I forgot. mean, it’s not like it forces you to. Yeah. It’s not pre-checked with anything you’ll notice. No, it’s not. Okay. This is such a sad We’ve kind gone all over the place here. But I think the core has been the same. So what did you tell people last week at the end of the day on office hours? Like, what’s your conclusion?

37:32
Is blogging dead should you start a blog in 2024? I think right now, if your purpose of is ranking in search for a pure content site, it’s gonna be tough. Unless you have like, unless it’s like a blog for an e-commerce store or something like that, where you have like a business. Yeah. If it’s just purely for to rank in search, affiliate revenue, reviews, that sort of thing, it’s so much harder.

38:00
especially the way Google is right now. It’s unpredictable. because we’ve done three episodes in the last six weeks. I’m sure more changes are coming. Google is grasping at straws right now. Yeah. So this is my final thought on this. So Google’s grasping at straws. Everyone’s unhappy. It’s like when…

38:25
people are like, don’t go to this restaurant anymore because they use plastic straws and it’s hurting the turtles, right? So it’s like, but if you love that restaurant, you’re still going, right? Are people truly just going to stop using Google to the point where they’re hurting to where they have to make things better? Are they gonna lose enough revenue? Is there gonna be enough of an impact for this to be changed? Or is it, they’re just so big that it doesn’t matter?

38:53
Well, I think the key here is that they own Android. And Android has the largest market share and the browser is the default app for browsing. Actually, I remember now in that other office hours, I also mentioned I had everyone pull up their apps. Like what is the most used app on your phone? Oh, you’re asking me? Yeah, I’m asking you. Hold on. Let me see. Mine actually is Gmail.

39:20
Yeah, mine would probably be Gmail. Second, obviously Tinder. The second most used app on my phone is probably either the Target or the Walmart app because I order groceries. I guess my point was Chrome is number five for me. Oh, yes. I don’t even use it. The only reason I use Chrome is to keep up with Bumblebee linens. I think I use it ironically to check Ahrefs.

39:49
Like in the car, I didn’t know this. And then you know, you don’t have an Android phone, so maybe you can’t relate. But in the past, I actually have the Google search widget on my phone. That has been replaced now by the chat GPT widget. So I can do chat GPT queries really quickly. Yeah, so I have a, since I have an iPhone, Safari is your default. So like anything that you click to open up opens up in Safari. That’s your default browser. I see, yeah.

40:18
So it’s a little bit different. All it takes is for Apple to not make Google the default search engine. Yeah. I think Google is going to be screwed. Interesting. Okay. Right. Like what if Bing gets so good and people want Bing? Yeah. Actually, you know what? I haven’t used Bing in a while. I should go give it a try again. I was thinking that earlier in this conversation. But anyway, all it takes is maybe like five points of more lost market share and Google will lose so much revenue.

40:47
I think their intention with the AI search results was to give people the answers and incorporate ads into that little block so they can maintain. So again, they’re trying all these different ways to make their search better while still preserving their revenue. But right now it’s like backfiring big time. Like a series of consecutive mistakes, in my opinion at least. Hope you enjoy that episode. Now it’s going to be interesting to see how all of this unfolds.

41:17
Because if the Google search results are this bad for much longer, people are just going to abandon it altogether. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 541. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.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.