Navigating Google Penalties and SEO Audits with Kaspar Szymanski

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
I'm delighted to have on the show today, Kaspar. We were just talking in the green room a little bit about some checkered backgrounds and where we all started. Kaspar, so good to have you on as a guest today, Jim.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:00:10]:
It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jim Banks [00:00:13]:
Kaspar and I both spoke at the Elevate Summit in the summer. I think it was probably a few months ago and September, and I watched you present. You did a fantastic job. And I was hoping to grab you afterwards to have a chat, and you'd gone. I just think you way too busy. Always too busy.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:00:30]:
I suppose I'm one of many in this industry. You know how it goes. It's such an exciting time to be in our business because there is so much going on and obviously there is such a huge demand for the expertise that we bring to the table. It's a beautiful time to be essentially an SEO consultant and to work in our business.

Jim Banks [00:00:47]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:00:47]:
How did you find Elevate Summit? We have a new event that starts. As always, the first one is the. The most difficult for the. The organizers. I thought they did a phenomenal job. I just was interested to know what you thought.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:00:57]:
Well, I suppose Leanne is such an experienced organizer. I worked together with her and her team time and time again. So I was not surprised at all that it worked out perfectly. Everything was really perfect. It's not just about London, right. London being a very good spot for. For being in the online marketing biz. But it's all.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:01:17]:
It's also the speaker selection, the topic selection. It's the whole thing. It's the whole package. Not surprised at all that it worked well. It was obviously a huge pleasure. The only thing I was a little bit saddened about is that we didn't manage really to talk and really beyond a quick exchange while I was on stage. And I'm very glad that we have this opportunity to catch up today.

Jim Banks [00:01:38]:
Yeah. I. For the benefits of people listening, Kaspar reached out to me and said that he'd listen to some other episodes. I always think if you're doing something like a podcast, that's the best testimony you can get, right? That somebody wants to be a guest. Having listened to other episodes of the podcast. So, Kaspar, again, I've known you for a number of years. I know you and your partner, Philly for ages. Funny enough, I always remember Philly and I used to be, like, much bigger than we are now.

Jim Banks [00:02:05]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:02:05]:
So, funnily enough, he was one of my inspirations. I met him at. I think it was A Brighton SEO. He was presenting and I looked, I thought looks like Philly, but a lot thinner than the one that I was used to knowing.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:02:16]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:02:16]:
And, and obviously he'd like, he'd lost a ton of weight. He was always my kind of favorite person at Brighton SEO because he said he didn't drink. So he used to give me his excess drink coupons to get drinks at the bar. So it was always good to have, because have him there as a kind of contact. So you guys, you're the search brothers now, but historically, like you started working with Google back in the.

Jim Banks [00:02:37]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:02:37]:
So back in the day when sort of web spam was, was rife and, and rampant. Tell us a little bit about that experience. How did you get the jobs at. At Google?

Kaspar Szymanski [00:02:48]:
Ah, all right, that was an interesting story indeed. I wasn't really very much connected to the online marketing world at the time. I had some relevant transferable experience working for major companies. But at some point it was really the classic. I saw an app and very, very crypto. It did say Google, it did say it's going to be European headquarters in Dublin, but it said precious little about the actual task at hand. And at the end of the line said, you'll be working for an elite task force. I did apply and this process fairly straightforward.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:03:20]:
There are just a handful of interviews, four interviews to the best of my recollection, and I think the whole process took maybe a month or six weeks altogether. So essentially at the beginning of 2006, I did join that search team at the time, Search Quality Team at the time, as it was called. And one of the first people who were already on that team was, I believe, a couple who joined a couple of weeks or a couple ahead of me was Fili. This very successful relationship that we continuously, we continue having up until today, that started really in early in 2006. We worked on a number of projects in Google. We did work together on outreach, which was hugely gratifying. It was an opportunity really to reach out to, to the industry out there, to reach out to the community, to give back, to share, especially in other languages, not just English. You know, back in the day, Google did not communicate with the webmaster community in other languages all that much.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:04:16]:
And it was a great ride. And at some point Philip broached the idea, look, we're really good in what we're doing together. There is obviously a demand. I've been thinking about change, I've been thinking about building a brand. How about we do it together? And that was the beginning of Search brother. It was a fantastic ride ever since. I'm profoundly grateful for this opportunity. For the opportunity to have not only just worked at the major search engine, the major search engines, but also for all the people that we met at the time, including Philly.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:04:50]:
And these are relationships that of course you maintain those relationships. We thrive on this relationship and we very much enjoyed that exchange that has happened until today.

Jim Banks [00:05:00]:
How long did you actually work at Google for?

Kaspar Szymanski [00:05:04]:
That was seven years.

Jim Banks [00:05:05]:
Okay, so you, I'm trying to think when Google ipo, you were, I guess you were just post IPO where you're.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:05:12]:
Sad, like one might say, because it is much preferable to be hired free ipo. I was unfortunately hired post ipo. And don't get me wrong, I did get a, a very reasonable deal at this time. But of course for anyone out there trying to get their foot in the door with the new Google, I took it there. Pre IPO is much better for your financial situation, of course.

Jim Banks [00:05:33]:
Yeah, I know quite a lot of my, my old industry friends are pre IPO Googlers and in some respects I always said that the pre IPO Googlers were different than the post. Right. That doesn't mean they're any better. It's just they were different because their motivation for sticking around was different than maybe people that are coming in now. And obviously Google has evolved into being one of the biggest companies in the world by far and until they've had their challenges and everything else. So I guess with the search brothers setting up in 2013, you've seen a lot since then.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:06:06]:
We have. It's a different perspective, it's a different vantage point. Previously our focus really was on providing the best possible users experience for any given query. Now, ever since setting up our own operation and building our own brand, the focus lies of course on clients, on our customers. We want to make sure that they get the competitive advantage that they're essentially paying for. We're working together. And that's of course something that is much more narrowly focused on the signals of just one web platform, a multitude of web platforms, rather than the entire index. It's different.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:06:44]:
The signals are quite comparable in that sense. The learnings from Google are phenomenal. This is something that gives us really an edge, something we pass on to our clients, something that we enjoy doing. And whenever we work with clients, of course, the most enjoyable thing is when clients return something we work really, really hard. It's not just about client loyalty, but this is of course about continuous relationships that we maintain and retreasure over the years?

Jim Banks [00:07:09]:
Yeah. Cause I, I, I remember back in the day I was working for a travel company and we were very unlucky. I say unlucky. We probably weren't unlucky at all to, to suffer a manual penalty. We got booted out of the Google index in Australia. And I always remember having a conversation with the guy who was head of SEO at the time. And I'd spoken, I think I'd spoken to Philly and said, look, can you guys help us? You said, yes. You said, how much? You told us a price.

Jim Banks [00:07:36]:
I said to, to the head of SEO, this is how much it's going to cost. Really expensive, right? And I'm like, compared to what? Compared to not being in the index because we were losing probably thousands of dollars every hour almost, right? And it sort of, when you look at it in that context, having the knowledge of understanding kind of what's caught, what's, what's caused the problem and what needs to be done to rectify the problem is to me, it's almost like invaluable, right? Priceless in some respects.

Jim Banks [00:08:08]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:08:08]:
And we were able to get back in the index so quickly compared to what would probably have had to happen had we not had the opportunity to talk to you guys.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:08:20]:
I'm glad you're mentioning that because this is one of those instances where it's not just a Google search experience. Both me and Fili worked for a subsection of that team at the time. That team was specifically tasked with not just applying, you know, manual actions, but also removing those wherever that was warranted. And that of course gives us the insider knowledge that was really helpful in successfully applying for reconsideration wherever there is a, whenever there is a manual penalty in place, AKA a Google penalty, as you're absolutely right, price is always a factor. Right. Money is a resource, as is crime as its revenue. And whenever we have a similar conversation along the lines, how do you arrive at this particular price? There is data that needs to be crawled and in the case of analogies that relate to content, you have to crawl a significant portion of the website to understand what Google disapproves about in terms of backlinks. Whenever there is a manual spam action that pertains to link building that Google disagrees with, you have to crawl that backlink profile, you have to evaluate it.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:09:27]:
So there's always data involved. So these prizes, they aren't really coming into existence from thin air. They are data driven SEO. As both me and you, we know it's a data driven Business, of course expertise is important. Having word similar gets very, very helpful. That's very useful. But ultimately you do need the data in order to be able to make an ultimate pronouncement in order to be can provide actionable advice your client. So this is where the pricing is coming from.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:09:58]:
And you met, you did me travel, you know the travel vertical, which is one of my favorites. Not just because I used to be a very frequent traveler, it was one.

Jim Banks [00:10:06]:
Of my favorites until co and then not so much.

Jim Banks [00:10:08]:
Right.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:10:08]:
So you may be surprised. I mean co was really a bummer for a lot of those businesses that were in the travel industry and some of those took it as an opportunity because it was, at some point it was obvious, all right, it's pandemic, it's going to be endemic. At some point we will return back to travel and at that point there will be so much hand up need for travel. People have not been traveling for a really long period of time. So there's going to be a lot of revenue generated if you're on top of the game. So what did some of the businesses do? Some people did scale down and other people decided this is a very good time to review our systems, to take a critical look and introduce all the changes we would never dare to introduce because we know it's going to cost us not just money but also prime and it's going to create fluctuations. Right. If I change URL structure on the website that is 100 million landing pages plus that's going to create some fluctuations.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:11:04]:
Right. That's effectively a migration. So I rather do that during a long time. And the pandemic obviously was a prolonged period where there wasn't much trouble going on. And most of those sites that did use that time wisely, they not just they didn't bounce, they regained visibility, they got their market share increased. It was really an opportunity in disguise.

Jim Banks [00:11:27]:
Yeah, I think I always work, I work primarily now with e commerce businesses and again a lot of the work we do is in paid advertising. And what's always interesting to me is how many brands want to start tinkering with their website in the most mission critical times of year.

Jim Banks [00:11:45]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:11:45]:
So we've not, we've not long had Black Friday, Cyber Monday. A lot of them are kind of like right up until the last minute Christmas shopping, trying to get stuff in before Christmas and they're like let's change stuff on the website, let's do this. That's that don't. I always used to say we need to have an amnesty like we, I'd probably say let's. Beginning of November. Don't do any code changes at all. Don't mess around with anything. Don't make the kind of code base unstable in any way.

Jim Banks [00:12:10]:
You need to make sure that everything is locked and loaded and leave it. And just if you need to make changes, you'll make those changes in, when, in the off period. So in the same way that you said about travel with the pandemic, yeah, planes weren't taking off, but people were still going to be looking for things at some point in time there'd still be a need for people to satisfy the. I'm going stir crazy at home. Where can I go when this all finishes? So they would still be researching things.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:12:37]:
And, and it's, it's spot on exactly as you're saying. But it's very individual. Right. So for the retail business and as you will very well know, Q4, that's, that's money quarter. Right. There are however businesses as in auctioning platforms, you know, Q4 is very important, but Q1 may be more important gifts because there is so many undesirable unwanted gifts that people need to find a new owner for that gift. So it's, it's being resold, what, you know, whatever really wasn't a great match. So it really depends on the vertical.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:13:08]:
It really depends on the industry. Completely different, of course for the travel business, depending on the region that we're aiming for, there are better and worse times to conduct an audit. There is however, always the best time to start collecting server logs. And the reason for me mentioning that is because for all those large websites, be that retail or travel, crawl budget management is critical. Right. And it's possible to manage crawl budget much better with, with server logs as in comparison than without. Because only server logs allow us really profound insight into what Google prioritizes, what Google thinks are the most important landing pages of any given web platform, any given website. For that reason, the right time to start saving and preserving server logs is right here and now.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:14:00]:
It's instantly for any listener out there who they're not quite sure or maybe they do record server log and you know, overwrite them after a period of four weeks or, or half a year, or maybe it's not being collected completely. Whatever, you know, whatever happening in between, make sure that you continuously save and preserve your server logs and in perpetuity, you will be very happy to have these. There is of course the STO perspective where you can utilize those server logs in the future to come. Much Better optimize your website. But there is also the other aspect which you can use as leverage in order to get that decision approved, which is let's use those server log that, that server log data once it's accumulated as leverage. If there is an exit situation where the company is being sold because the pricing is very much different. If there is data associated with any business where you can prove this is what's been happening over the years, this is the projections. So server lots can be utilized in many ways for SEO purposes.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:14:57]:
It's absolute gold.

Jim Banks [00:14:59]:
Yeah, I always think with people always say this has happened unexpectedly and I think in our, certainly in our sphere nothing happens unexpectedly. Generally speaking if you're subject to a manual penalty it's either you've done something wrong or something that you have done maybe historically has all of a sudden been become like dangerous and toxic and, and sometimes you may not realize it at the time. And I think that's where you mentioned there about analyzing things like backlinks and things like that.

Jim Banks [00:15:28]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:15:28]:
Understanding who's sending the traffic to you and what, what's the sort of signals in terms of is this dangerous that particular site is sending it? Because I know way back in the day in the sort of early 2000s, there was a lot of people that was quite heavily involved with black hat tactics and some of it was obviously they were trying to, to game Google but they were also trying to game their competitors.

Jim Banks [00:15:49]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:15:49]:
So they would be trying to send toxic links to competitors in the hope that Google might go this, these links are toxic. I'm going to take your site down and, and I guess that's probably. I could never understand a lot of people say why, why did disavow files exist? Again, I'm not associated with that at all. So you need to be able to say that's nothing to do with me whatsoever. That's completely something else. Some something else is caused that's not me. And I need to say I'm going to put distance between me and that.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:16:18]:
Well it's funny you're mentioning this eval file because Google keeps saying for a prolonged period of time we're likely to discontinue. It's not going to last forever and it's still in existence. It still can be used. Now in the most recently Google saying you can only use the disavow file if there is a manual spam action in place AK penalty. So you could technically only disavow submit a disavow file to begin with if there is a Manual penalty in place. That's still not the case. It's possible to submit this eval file at any point in time. I think it's a great opportunity and I'm speaking really, this is just my personal opinion based on what I have seen on both sides of the fence, if you want.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:16:59]:
I think having resisted file file is a great way to disassociate a website from its legacy. Because we have to keep in mind we're talking large organizations now. There is a huge retention in large organizations, right? So something that was conducted and built over years, people responsible for, for these signals, they are not around anymore. They, they, they moved companies, they climbed up ladder and they, they had their careers and they moved on. They don't know. So whoever is in charge at that point in time, they can't be reasonably blamed for link building that was done in the past or whatever else signals you know, might fall upon. Having the opportunity to actually proactively disassociate a website from potentially harmful signals is actually a good thing and it ties perfectly into somewhat what I really call an aspirational SEO audit. I think some people call that a defensive SEO audit, which is essentially a cyclical one.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:17:53]:
So you have a 12 month or an 18 month cycle where an SEO audit is being conducted no matter what. There may or may not be an issue. The visibility of a website may be on a positive or negative trajectory, doesn't matter. It's being conducted because we want to make sure that the infrastructure, the architecture, content, signals, technical signals, that everything is coherent and consistent and it actually allows the website to put its best foot forward for any given query in its vertical. Going about SEO in that way is certainly something that I would recommend to a large company where you really, where you really would like to have this kind of not certainty, but a stable situation where changes, sudden drops are really undesirable, something to be prevented. So kind of like an insurance policy, something you do know, something that is really quite akin, quite comparable to bringing your car and for a checkup just before going on a cruise, you don't want to get stuck on the highway. Was the kids screaming in the back? Are we there yet? Well, you really can't move forward. You know, you're stuck and you're waiting for help to come.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:19:01]:
You don't want to be in that situation. So you're bringing the car. You check the oil, check the fluids, check the brakes, check the lights, check all the pressure. And the website is a vehicle. Website is a vehicle that generates revenue. It's quite comparable. I always suggest this is the most safe, most secure and path forward to understand what's happening, to be fully in control rather than opposite. Trusting for the best but never knowing what's going to happen.

Jim Banks [00:19:26]:
What are your thoughts on AI? Because again, so many people talk about AI being it's going to replace their jobs and everything else. And I know certainly on the pay side of things are a lot of people are leaning into AI heavily. I know Google on the ad side of things, leaning into AI heavily, meta on the ad side, leading into AI heavily. And some of the, some of the things they come up with are great, right? But some of them not so much. And I've always had that challenge of clients are telling me Google's recommending this, meta's recommending this and I'm like yeah, but they're using sort of artificial intelligence, not looking at the data that we have about your specific business.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:20:04]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:20:04]:
And I think that's always the challenge is they're trying to fit a model into the whole world and while I'm trying to fit the model into just how it impacts individual clients and I just wondered what your thoughts were in terms of AI from an SEO perspective.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:20:19]:
I want to say I'd like to give you a short and then maybe a little bit more answer in my book LLMs. I prefer to talk about LLMs because it's not sentient, it can't really tell you a good joke. It doesn't really come, it's not compassionate. So it's not really artificial intelligence quite yet, but large language models. Yes, I concur with that. Large language models are a two edged sword. There is tremendous potential in terms of improving and expediting some cycles, software production cycles. There is no question that they can be utilized and they make development essentially much faster.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:20:59]:
That being said, there are people are very much concerned about their job security, the future of their jobs being impacted by AI products out there. And I don't really share that concern because from an SEO perspective AI is just one tool under our belt and there is many tools out there. Just because there is one more tool, it doesn't fundamentally revolutionize the industry. AI is very useful, but it is something that returns data that is based on input and that input is what qualified, not quantified in any way, that input. There is no qualitative verification to that input. And what I mean by this is that the results that AI presents for queries, for instance, if you want to utilize a comparison with Google at times, it's really great and at times it's patently wrong because somebody said something that is absolutely wrong and AI services crawled that information, took it for granted and is using that as output. So AI in that sense, if we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, Google and AI are not so different in that sense because they are fundamentally reliant on import and that input, if that's, if that's not great, the output is not great. Rubbish in, rubbish out.

Jim Banks [00:22:23]:
It's funny. Yeah, I remember that there was a story back in the day when I first started, way back, like 2000, 2001, something like that, there was a government department here in the UK called the Department for Trade and Industry, right. It's very well respected thought of government department that was obviously trying to encourage the, the adoption of online activity.

Jim Banks [00:22:45]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:22:46]:
So at the time online was really very, in its early days and I remember the, the person who was the head of the dti, right, standing up in the Commons and basically talking about the kind of the state of the UK and where the kind of cap, where the, the kind of the growth opportunities were in the UK and, and this particular person cited that Aberdeen in Scotland was, was the fastest growing area for online adoption in the uk. And when you actually drilled into it a little bit more, the data behind it, what had actually happened is they were doing some sort of survey, people were filling in a form and they were asked to fill in the form and one of the fields on the form was a dropdown box that had Aberdeen pre selected in it. And I think a lot of people had just forgotten to go and change that to wherever they happened to be by default the data was wrong, not because there was nothing nefarious, it was just like it was human error that kind of caused this particular problem to happen. And, and I think it's probably the same thing if you go to some websites now is I'm always amazed that they've got Afghanistan I think is always the first drop down country in a drop down list, right. You're thinking if 90% of your sales happen in the US or the UK, wherever it might be, why have you even got a drop down that's got Afghanistan in it, right? If you can't ship to Afghanistan, you shouldn't have it in the dropdown, right. I've never understood why developers don't take the time to actually think through these situations and what they can do to rectify it to make us again. Ultimately it's about, I'm sure that Google's objective is to ensure that people have a good user experience.

Jim Banks [00:24:25]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:24:25]:
And by creating a good user experience I've sit and watch family members and see the frustrations they have in trying to interact with websites on a mobile phone. And it's just horrible. Right. And you think clearly these businesses have not taken the time to actually spend. They may be on a 27 inch iMac.

Jim Banks [00:24:44]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:24:44]:
And that's a very different user experience than somebody on a like a really old iPhone 7 or something like that. It's a completely different user experience altogether.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:24:53]:
And at times it's interesting you're mentioning at times I do see companies trying to really promote an app and I can't help but but asking myself why would I sell yet another app? I'm just in a store, I'm trying to find a product, I may need the product number. The website is fully sufficient. I do not want to clutter up my phone which is already heavily loaded with all the apps I'm actually needing on a daily basis plus a couple of games for the children. I don't need yet another app. A really optimized mobile optimized website will remain in my book the primary channel. In the vast majority of cases there will be exceptional brands where people are so heavily enticed to utilize that particular outlet that they may actually install an app and in that case it's justified. But for the vast majority of websites out there, it's not about having an app. You can have an app.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:25:59]:
This is, this is a side project. If you want to focus your resources, you should heavily optimize your website. And if you don't want to do anything else, if you don't have the manpower or the capacity really, if you don't have the technical acumen in house, if you can't do anything market else, just make sure your website is really fast. Right. And it's not about Google saying so, it's about your users. Because Google re emphasizes performance for one reason and one reason only. It's their users. Their users indicate percent behavior.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:26:30]:
They much prefer fast loading user experience as in comparison to something that loads even slightly slower. So any other factor roughly comparable competitors, the faster websites and they tend to win. And of course SEO is a much wider field. Many, many other factors that can be very much optimized in order to trout competition. But if you have to focus on just one signal and one signal only, focus on performance and it's the winning, this is as close as it gets to a silver point.

Jim Banks [00:27:03]:
Yeah. And I think so many like web designers and developers fancy themselves as a bit of an SEO expert, right? So they, they'll finish off the website and then they'll go, I've SEO optimized the site for you.

Jim Banks [00:27:16]:
Right?

Jim Banks [00:27:16]:
I've also done that.

Jim Banks [00:27:17]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:27:18]:
And when, when you actually drill into it, I, I always remember somebody who built a website and I think the, the images of like their C suite, right? So they had a picture of the CEO and the CFO and everything else and the site was so slow, right? And when you actually drilled into it and looked at it, all of the Images were like 10,000 pixel squares, right? So they were huge. They were probably like 80 megabytes each image on the page, right? And there was five of them, absolutely high resolution. And they were complaining about the fact that people weren't sticking around. Why would they stick around, right? If your page is like 500 meg, why would, why on earth would anyone stick around to wait for all of these images to download? Especially as I know the bandwidth is a lot cheaper now, but back then it was like very expensive to download images on a mobile phone, right? Which is obviously a lot better now with caching and everything else. And there's so many things that you can do to improve all of that sort of functionality, Right? But yeah, I've always said that even though I predominantly do paid advertising, site speed is still important for paid advertising, right. If pages take a long time, people are just not going to stick around and they're not going to stick around this particular time and they're never going to come back because I had a horrible experience when I was going to that site, so I'm not going to go there again. I think that's where sites like Shopify, I think, have become so powerful now in the E commerce space because they made it so that they take care of a lot of the sort of the heavy lifting, the grunt work on the back end, right. So that the developers and designers don't have to worry about too much.

Jim Banks [00:28:57]:
They still need to, to a point, right? I'm always amazed when I go into, to look at the back end, right? Because Shopify has this marketplace where all these app developers sort of sit on the periphery of the ecosystem of the Shopify main code. They've spent. They go in and go, they put Klaviyo in and they put all these like, all of these apps. They install tons of them and then they stop using them, but don't uninstall them, right? And those, that code still bloats the page when it loads because the app is technically still on the page, even though it's not an active app.

Jim Banks [00:29:30]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:29:30]:
I've always said you need to go through and clean, clean up house from time to time. Right. You may have got rid of the smell of the fish, but the, the damage could still be there.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:29:40]:
Legacy, legacy signal. It's, it's a very big part of the consideration and particular of them of the defensive or aspirational audit we talked about earlier. But you actually touched on a very important point previously when you started talking and when you. There are different stakeholders in any organization and even in very compact agile businesses where there's only a handful of people contributing to the online presence, there, there would be someone dealing with the front end, there would be a developer dealing with the backend. There is a person that creates the content, right? There might be a marketing person that does the API releases or the collaboration with a third party that does maybe some link building. Now all of these people combined, they do contribute in one way or the other to SEO signals that are relevant to Google. Now these SEO signals, they also interact with each other. We may have a situation where there is a lot of linking pointing to a particular part of the website, but that particular part of the website is not so important.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:30:41]:
So if it's ranking really well, that's not necessarily the most desirable output or maybe it has been moved, but it's not probably 301 redirected there. There is a million different scenarios. Bottom line being here it's a team sport. I'm myself a Formula Formula one fan. I like to compare SEO really to, to that kind of sport, to, to a team sport where you would have a number of people contributing in their own capacity. You have the technicians, you would have the physicians, the pilot people that do the strategy. But there is only one team principal and that's one person that is the head of SEO if you want. And the title obviously doesn't matter, be that a marketing director or E Commerce director or head of SEO, be that sma, that one purpose that mitigates those styles between that large group of people and when we start talking about larger organizations that operate in a multitude of languages, obviously that groups get so much larger.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:31:38]:
And in that instance corporate culture is key because what we see time and time again is that corporate culture very much contribute towards SEO becoming better and better over time. Transparency being a particularly important factor here and it's something that can be standing in the way in particular when there is where everybody essentially does everything for them for themselves, or where there is like language barrier or one Language team would operate individually, another one would do whatever they think is best and they don't really talk to each other. That naturally leads to situations where signals are inconclusive, confusing and really, really bad. Because in that instance, obviously we added our bots, including googlebot and Bing bot, to crawl and the algorithms to Pink and to pick and choose what whatever appears to be the, the most desirable landing page. And that may or may not what we actually want to be ranking down the line. So there are factors that, that transcend to SEO that one wouldn't associate necessarily with CEO to begin with, including corporate culture.

Jim Banks [00:32:45]:
Yeah, I think the, the biggest headache I see is the, the whole silo mentality that, that enterprises have, right. They, everyone's working in teams, right. So you got the SEO team, the email team, the, the web design team, the developers, right. The C suite, the kind of, the people that make the money, a social, organic, social. There's so many different people all trying to input into how they think things should be done.

Jim Banks [00:33:11]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:33:12]:
And primarily what they're trying to do is they're trying to influence the decisions to make their results look the best.

Jim Banks [00:33:19]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:33:19]:
And that can be sometimes, but done at the detriment of others. I've always maintained that if you're an enterprise business, you should have dedicated PPC landing pages that are no index, no follow, that you strip away all of the stuff that's really important for SEO purposes but not particularly helpful for PPC purposes.

Jim Banks [00:33:40]:
Right?

Jim Banks [00:33:40]:
Because then that way you're segmenting and isolating the experience that the people that are coming through paid search you're getting because you're in more control when you do SEO, you're very much at the kind of, to an extent, you're at the hands of Google's mercy in terms of what, as you say, which sites, which pages they think are better for a particular outcome, searching query or whatever it might be. Whereas on the paid search side of things, you used to have more control so you could, you could say this is the keyword, this is the landing page and you can sculpt that page accordingly.

Jim Banks [00:34:12]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:34:12]:
They're moving away from that now to broad match and AI and will control that. The, the kind of, will decide what we think is best. And I, again, I think that's the, the biggest challenge I think paid practitioners are having is how do you actually address the fact that Google are they, they are clearly in a good position to make those decisions because they have data that we don't have access to. Right. So they know everything that's happened before somebody gets to the point where they click through to your link, right. And if somebody's done 25 searches of other search terms before they get to you, you may go, that search term isn't relevant. But Google's got all of that data of what happened beforehand to decide that this is going to be a good experience as sending them to this particular page for that particular query. And that's always been the challenge because I think probably SEO people are less like it, but paid people are much more like control freaks.

Jim Banks [00:35:11]:
They've been freaking out about the loss of data and they don't have keyword data anymore. And, and I just think you have to get on with it. It's just that's the way the world, unfortunately.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:35:22]:
Yes. And I think we all very, very keen on getting as much data as possible in our hands. Relevant data, contextual data. I want to have her pick up on something that you mentioned earlier. That siloing that you mentioned, that's really rather problematic. Right. There is also another aspect that really standing in a way which, which is the kind of thinking that focuses entirely on quarterly results, as in you may have a conversation with a prospective business partner who says perfectly fine, you have all the budget in the world, go ahead and do your thing. And we anticipate the results.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:35:59]:
We expect the results to be ready and come to fruition and work perfectly within three months. And that is something that one can reasonably expect and can, can bring that to the table. However, we have to keep in mind that crawl budget for large websites. Just revert to that topic for a moment again is a real factor because if a website is being crawled, crawled, let's say I'm going to just round a number, 10 million landing pages per month. And by the way, Google is crawling less and less because they're trying to cut cost and reduced application. Let's say for a moment, just for the conversations, you know, that any given website is being crawled 10,000, 10 million landing pages per page, which would be actually quite a significant number. And now that includes recrawling the route time and time again and recrolling the most important categories and probably some product pages time and time again. Service, there's some lob duplication and we would need a month to recall the entire website for Google to notice that there is improved signals, new confer and so forth.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:37:00]:
Now let's compare that number against the actual size of the website as the website is anywhere between, let's say 5 to 10 million landing pages in total. That's Fine. I just need a month. What about if the website is 100 million landing pages now? Now we need at least 10 months right now. What if the website is much larger than that and the only way to go about it is of course to look into it, try to manage that coral budget, try to make sure that Google focuses and prioritizes what the client, the website operator, the publisher really wants. But at the same time, it's really nothing else than wishful thinking to say we want to have the results in three months. That's simply not going to happen if we have a 10 or 12 situation between the volume of landing pages that can and are being crawled in the months and the volume of landing pages that must be crawled in order for Google to understand the website has changed. What I'm trying to say here is that SEO is complex and us as an industry an awful lot of time.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:38:01]:
We must ensure that there is a broader understanding for how it works and how much of a team sport it is and that there are factors that are quite, quite outside the realm of our control. That of course includes Google Update, of which there are a multitude every day. And I always say tell business partners or in conversations at conferences, please don't focus on these ultimate. Because you can spend your whole day focusing on, on, on current and upcoming updates but that's not going to move your business forward. That's not going to help you being to get ahead of the competition if you want. Yeah, and there's other factors as well there, there's also competitive what competitors do. So let's focus on the one thing that we actually can change and improve, which is sponsor own website.

Jim Banks [00:38:44]:
Yeah, I've always maintained that the, the only thing that we can absolutely guarantee that is going to happen is that things are going to change. Things as you say, like updates happen all the time and what may have worked today may stop working tomorrow. What may work six months ago may come into kind of vogue again and be, be active again for a period of time. But again it comes back to what is good for the end user that I've always maintained. Although I work with clients, I'm really more focused on the end user experience. If they have a good experience, they will come back over and over again to the site. They'll bookmark it, they'll tell their friends and all that sort of stuff, all those signals that this has been a good experience for them.

Jim Banks [00:39:25]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:39:26]:
Similarly, if they have a bad experience, they won't come back.

Jim Banks [00:39:28]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:39:29]:
And I think to, to your point about the, the Crawl budgets, right? If you have a million pages that never ever change, why on earth would Google continue to keep coming back time and time again to crawl a page that they go, the last 50 times I came to this page, nothing had changed. So they just won't, they won't come to it again. So even though you might make a change, you might say I made a change, why haven't they picked it up? Because the previous 50 times nothing was different. You need to try and again, it's almost lay the breadcrumbs to say this is what I want you to do. You want to try and influence the, the kind of crawling decisions based upon the data that you have and everything else.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:40:05]:
So yeah, and I think it's also very important to continuously remind oneself, just as you said, the flux, the change is the only thing that is a constant. There will be change no matter what. And there is no guarantees, including that the traffic that this board comes from search engines is not guaranteed. For that reason, I'm always appreciative of Bing traffic. And the reason for me saying that is because it allows us to have other than direct type in traffic, loyal users that are already familiar with the brand, that don't need a search engine to find what they're looking for, even though their market share is relatively small in many European countries. I think Bing can provide the lifeline for the day that something goes terribly wrong with Google rankings and it can be completely unintentional. The classic thing is there is a staging server that is completely no indexed and we happen to have a release. This Denoindex isn't really being rectified, it's not removed and we have a new release of the website with a noindex applied equipox board.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:41:16]:
Right. That's a very devastating scenario. Typically the rankings tank altogether in that situation. You want to make sure that up until Bing picks up in that signal you have that traffic and of course you want to rectify it. No question about that. You know, it could be a manual spend action. And these of course are not applied across board. Big on set of rules.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:41:38]:
So whatever happens, if it actually does happen, you want to make sure you have as much traffic as possible that is still force coming just to keep the cash flow while you're mitigating managing that, that worst case, that SEO horror that is unfolding and at the same time I think it's important to remember because nobody really wants to be there in that situation. Right? Nobody wants their rankings to tank from one day or another and in many situations this is really a terrifying prospect, but it can be a blessing in disguise. It's very hard to see it that day, but often it allows for that change that was long in coming and always postponed. Right. And particularly for large organizations, it forces.

Jim Banks [00:42:22]:
The decision, doesn't it forces them to make that decision to do. I, I always remember I used to work for. One of the clients I worked with was the London Tourist Board, which is now called Visit London. And I worked with them way back in the day and I was doing all their paid search. I wasn't actually doing any SEO for them, but I knew enough about SEO to be dangerous. And I was, I remember like they, they had hired this agency who was doing sort of some of their SEO. Bearing in mind Visit London had seven editor editors that would like basically writing blog posts long before blog posts was even a thing. Right.

Jim Banks [00:42:56]:
They were doing editorial content. So they would have thousands of places in London that people would go to if they were visiting London as a tourist and they'd write about the experience, they would take pictures and all that sort of stuff. They were getting something like 30,000 visitors a day from Google, organically from SEO. Fantastic. Then all of a sudden one, one day like they called me up and said, jim, we don't really know what's happened. Our website traffic has gone from 30,000 visitors a day to about 1500. We don't really know what's, what's happened. So the first thing I did was I looked at their robots text file and what had happened is that this SEO agency had created three basically doorway pages for their site.

Jim Banks [00:43:37]:
A de. Indexed in effectively the entire site by, and, and, and we're routing all of the traffic to these doorway pages. And obviously it just, all the traffic had vanished. And, and I basically said, there's your problem. So I said, look, I'll tell you what we'll do. I said, let's make some changes to the robot text file. I said, no, tell you what, let's just delete the robots. Txt file.

Jim Banks [00:43:58]:
Let's get rid of it altogether, right? So we literally, we got rid of the robots. Txt file altogether. So there wasn't one and obviously you need one. But I figured the site would work without it. And within a day, I think the traffic went back to 30,000 visitors as it had been before.

Jim Banks [00:44:14]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:44:14]:
Sometimes, as you say, the margins are caused by individuals within an organization. Right. So things like when domains lapse, right, because the person that registered the domain doesn't work for the company anymore.

Jim Banks [00:44:26]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:44:26]:
Their Their email address was shut down because they wanted to save £3 or £4amonth, right. In fees to Google for a kind of Google workspace email address without setting up a forwarding address. So there's so many things that can happen on the back end that you don't really realize until they actually happen to you as a result of it. And that's always one of the scary things when you wake up and you go, wow, what has happened? When we had that manual penalty in Australia, it was like the end of the world, right, for that particular market because so many people worked on that market producing content for that market. And yeah, I think that the. The company had gone a little bit too far with some of the things that they should have, probably shouldn't have done, and they walked it back. I think sometimes the kind of. The margins between brilliance and disaster are so fine, right.

Jim Banks [00:45:15]:
There are tiny margins between the two, right? In. In order to be. Com. Be competitive in certain verticals, I know in adult and gaming and things like that, it's almost like you have to be thinking almost like a black hat person all the time, because without it you're just doomed to fail.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:45:32]:
There is certainly difference not just between different verticals, but also different languages you should focus on particularly on. On what we like to refer to as the smaller languages or essentially markets where there is a smaller index, where there's possibly a smaller population at times. This is even much more competitive and a much more edgy SEO really. Well, there's different shades of both that are being applied. The one thing that you mentioned previous, the fact that it's time renewing a domain, something that is being omitted and that creates a whole lot of problems as we have both have seen time and time again. On that note, there is a lot of functional domains that real brands don't really look at quite a lot frequently up until the moment they need them. Now, a very common way of saving and preserving existing content that somehow still in place had to be deleted for whatever reason. Maybe because the CEO did contribute the blog post and he doesn't really appreciate that being deleted or for whatever else reason or there is a legacy community that still has some value.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:46:43]:
It's overshadowing the entire website because of its volume. These parts of the website can be migrated, right? So what is being done in that instance is you take that content that is sub ideal because of changed circumstances, rather than deleting it, you're just transitioning that to a functional domain that might be a domain that is a doc blog or the community, whatever. But it's really critically important to make sure that the branded domains, especially the ones that are with one's own brands for large websites, are these are being actually registered. And it's much more preferable of course to have a large portfolio of registered domains that are just 301 redirected, never used, or that that are just not not being used, period, rather than having to purchase that domain at some point in time from the aftermarket, at which point in time, of course, it is a much more costly endeavor.

Jim Banks [00:47:44]:
So Kaspar, I'd love to spend more time talking. We could talk for for ages. I want to try and be mindful of my my audience and make sure that they they get as much out of this as you are giving too much to blow their minds. Been phenomenal to have you on as a guest on the show today. Obviously all of Kaspar's contact details if you if you have a manual penalty and you need some help, all of his contact details will be available in the show notes. It only remains please, if you see Philly, pass on my kindest regards. I absolutely love the pair of you both. Great guys and I look forward to to having the opportunity to spend more time in person with you at the next event that you go to.

Jim Banks [00:48:24]:
So yes, it just remains for me to say thanks again for being a fantastic guest on the podcast today and hopefully we'll speak to you on the next episode.

Kaspar Szymanski [00:48:34]:
Thank you so much for this opportunity to join the show. Really, it's humbling experience. Very much appreciated and as you mentioned, we could talk forever. Let's save more topics for the next opportunity either face to face or on the next show. For today, allow me to say thank you very much. It's been a privilege and a job.

Jim Banks [00:48:52]:
Good. Thanks Kaspar. Cheers.