Webcology WMR.FM Formerly Webmaster Radio

Amidst months of controversial punishing updates, a disastrous A.I. rollout, and at least a year of questionable search results, SEOs and general search users are starting to ask if Google is actually broken. If it is working as it's supposed to, why are they trying so hard to fix it? Google says it's a matter of perspective so hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to walk through both sets of perspectives. The show also covers take aways from Barry Schwartz's SMX Advanced interview with Google's Elizabeth Tucker, Google's most recent responses to The Leak, a lot of turbulence at TwiXter (including Elon Musk's annoyance at the Apple - OpenAI deal), and, of course, the Apple - Open AI deal itself. An interesting week of as many news items as we can fit in an hour long show.


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Maybe it's the eye of a hurricane, maybe it's the calm before a brand new storm. It's really hard to tell these days but after a disasterous rock-eating rollout, Google is pulling back on AI Overviews. The SEO world has mixed reactions to The Leak, which is turning out as predicted, much ado about something but we're not sure exactly what. Some sort of garbled sense of stability appears to be returning to the SERPs as the effects of the March 2024 Core Update and the slew of previous and attendent updates start to play together, more or less as Google planned, or so we think. As the dust settles in Googlandia, the effects of flaky search results are showing in user comments with 54% of people complaining they have to look through more results than they did five years ago to find information, often having to rephrase their queries altogether. Meanwhile, OpenAI workers are asking for the "right to warn" of potential dangers, TwiXter has made distributing porn great again while running paid ads against racist and antisemitic hashtags, Microsoft's Recall AI can be tricked into revealing ever-saved personal data, MozCon20 perceives a crisis, and Google says Mobile First is... actually, we're not exactly sure what they were getting at. Confused? You won't be after listening to this.


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To cap off a disastrous PR month for Google, Mike King and Rand Fishkin published essays outlining the leak of a trove of Google APIs found in an open GitHub owned by Google. The SEO community's faith in Google had already been badly shaken since the series of updates which started back to early autumn 2023 and culminated in the HCU and March 2024 Core Updates. Now, after seeing what was in the documents, many feel as if Google misled or even lied to them. Debate in the SEO community is now fully engaged and already people are marketing new techniques and strategies based on findings they found in the documents that will go down in SEO history as, “The Leak”. Basically, Mike and Rand dropped what appears to be an 800lb gorilla into our midst and that gorilla needs a thorough examination before we let it run wild. To help us do that, we have in the studio one of the few SEOs we absolutely know to be qualified to dig into these documents. Ryan Jones is the Senior Vice President, SEO at Razorfish. He was instrumental in the dissection of Yandex last year and has spent the last few days digging into the documents and sharing his findings.


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Roger Montti, staff writer at Search Engine Journal, joins hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger to share his thoughts on Google's vision of its own future. Roger wrote about this week's Google Marketing Live in NYC in a piece published May 22, "Google To Prioritize AI Overviews Ads Over Organic Search". In it, Roger offers an overview of search results berift of visible blue links. This vision of Google's future will be driven by paid placement rather than the meritocratic set of algorithms Google organic search, which will get relegated so far below the fold it might as well be buried. Any experience with Roger is a well informed though sometimes scary one. This one is both, but, as always, there's hope. You'll want to hear the future Roger sees.


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This is a seriously fun and highly interesting interview episode. Rather than obsess on what seems like a bad thing we decided to geek out on that Bing thing instead. One of the most open and interesting voices in search, the Head of Search at Microsoft Bing, Fabrice Canel, joins us to talk about algorithmic search and Copilot. As we all know, Google I/O was stacked with announcements suggesting Google is about to change search results to feature AI Overviews and push organic results into the netherregions of page-2 or worse. Bing is taking a different approach and Fabrice outlines how Bing and Copilot work together to present a different, and what he hopes is far better search experience. Geek-warning: This episode will sometimes venture into the weeds but the conversation is light, witty, and hugely informative.


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There appears to be a shift in Google's philosophies heading into next week's Google I/O conference. Google seems to be trying to change expectations with CEO Sundar Pichai talking about an all AI future and former chairperson Eric Schmidt talking about a future without blue links. Google's reputation for quality has taken a battering recently and many in the SEO community are feeling more than a little misinformed. That's easily understood when you realize Google has used the same terms to describe different things throughout the series of algorithm and core updates that stretch back to last September. In this episode, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger try to peel back the onion like layers of Googleosopy while trying to offer sensible advice about how to deal with different aspects of the series of updates. Conversation naturally turns to several stories around AI and its efficacy as an engine for information. This was a fun, fast paced episode that tries really hard to keep its patience in the midst of creative destruction.


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