Cyrus Shepard has been in the SEO industry for a long time, and in this incredibly insightful interview, he shares the most important lessons he’s learned since the HCU.
He has been working to figure out what Google considers to be “helpful content” and identify what website owners can do to recover from the update, or succeed, in the new landscape.
After analyzing 4000 ad- and affiliate-supported sites, he shares his findings for both the winners and losers. He talks about everything from deoptimization to humanizing your content.
If you’ve been affected by the HCU, or you’re looking to rank a new website in 2025 and beyond, this interview is for you.
Watch the Full Episode
Cyrus starts by briefly talking about his experience and then dives into today’s topic which follows along with a recent presentation he gave at an Ahrefs summit entitled “WTF is Helpful Content?”
He starts by talking about how the word “helpful” was chosen and essentially how the update was grossly misnamed as Google sought to deincentivize the creation of affiliate and ad-supported content. Cyrus shares a more appropriate name for the update
Then he talks about his experience as a quality rater for Google and how the company more or less developed this update to determine if there was any real experience behind people’s content.
Moving on, Cyrus talks about how Google is favoring sites with a long-term relationship with its audience, where people come back, again and again, and which have an established brand.
Jared asks a burning question on most creators’ minds: do people really want advice from Forbes, Reddit, and social media?
Then they talk about brand authority and domain authority and which is more valued by Google, as well as user engagement and the traits of sites that really help establish their authority.
He sheds light on the ads that Google does not like and talks about overoptimization, optimization and deoptimization of content. He uses a great example he calls “Uncle Harry” to get his point across and shares what he thinks is user-first content.
Cyrus talks briefly about boosting your brand authority, entity stacking, social media, and the effort that goes into creating content.
He also offers some excellent advice when it comes to creating that content, filling gaps, and supporting users.
Lastly, he offers tips related to title tags, internal linking, schema, and other ideas to improve the user experience. He also talks about sites that were more immune to the HCU.
Links & Resources
Topics Cyrus Shepard Talks About
- His background
- (Mis)naming the update
- Updates and algorithms
- Patterns among winning and losing sites
- The importance of experience
- How to build your audience
- How Google ranks content
- Brand and helpful content
- Brand authority
- User engagement
- Ads
- Content deoptimization
- User-first content
- Brands over links
- Entity stacking
- Social media
- Practical advice
- Sitewide classifiers
- HCU segmentation
- Future of content
Transcript
Jared: Your episode on internal linking was one of the, one of the best received ones we’ve ever had. You kind of recently did a presentation at the, um, AH refs conference, their first one, and it was titled WTF is helpful content.
Cyrus: Yeah. Internally we, I call it the anti SEO update because that’s truly what I believe it is.
The Google algorithm, what their updates have been about. What we’ve done is we’ve taken the sites that have won every single update, and we compare them to the sites that lose every single update. What is helpful content? What does it have to do with audience? What Google wants is to reward the people who are, have the long term relationships, they’re being sought out again and again and again.
What we would see in the SERPs right now is that Google wants you to trust Forbes and these kinds of brands. You know, we learned from Google’s anti trust trial that they really don’t understand the web as much as they pretend to. How does all that play into this, what is helpful content conversation?
These sites are being propped up by domain authority. But it’s really the brand that we’re interested in. Dive into how user engagement plays into the concept of helpful content. What we found is winning sites, the sites that never lost an update, had a crazy number of personal pronouns, something like 22 personal pronouns per page.
Brand authority is your get out of jail card that allows you to break every Google sin. What have you found on over optimization? In my presentations, I always use the example of Uncle Harry. Uncle Harry is your helpful content. Person doesn’t know SEO. He’s just an expert in what he does. He just wants to help people.
That’s who Google wants to reward. These days, building brands over building links, the companies I’m working with, I’m telling him, if you have a link building budget, shift that to a brand building budget.
Jared: Where are some things people can do to check if their content might be over optimized, even if they aren’t thinking it is, and then to de optimize their content,
Cyrus: I’ve written about internal links for years, you’ve had me on the podcast, talking about internal links.
When we look at the data.
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits Podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today, we have a returning visitor, Cyrus Shepard with Zippy SEO. Cyrus, welcome back. Jared, glad to be talking to you again. Thanks for having me. Your episode on internal linking was one of the, one of the best received ones we’ve ever had.
So I’ll give you that compliment out of the gate. It was one of my favorite ones as well. Um, a lot has happened in this world since then, and certainly for a lot of people listening, a lot has happened, and you have been fairly vocal about it. I mean, before we get into what we’re talking about today, which is kind of your perspectives on this helpful content update, and what it’s transpired into, um, tell us who you are.
If somebody doesn’t know, if somebody didn’t listen to that last episode, maybe fill us in who you are, and then we’ll get into it.
Cyrus: Yeah, thank you. And thank you for reminding me about that internal linking episode. We may have to revisit some of that in our conversation today. Uh, so I’m Cyrus Shepard. Uh, I’ve been doing SEO for a long time now.
Uh, came up with the company Moz, SEO Moz. Uh, worked with Rand Fishkin, uh, until that company, uh, sold to a public entity. I now run Zippy SEO for the last three years, uh, consultancy running out of Oregon and just having a good time making mischief online.
Jared: Yes, you have been. I mean, we featured on our new segment of the podcast, quite a bit of your different sharings.
Uh, certainly I’ll note being a, um, a Google, uh, you know, quality rater of sorts, and that’s been a fun journey to watch you go on. And, um, I know you bring a lot of different insights to the table, so we’ll be looking to get that. You kind of recently did a presentation at the AHRF’s conference, their first one, and it was titled WTF is helpful content and when you shared that with me, I mean, that was by far, I thought, the most perfect topic for us today because Man, oh man, has that been the question mark surrounding so many content creators over the last couple of years.
I, you know, we just featured a couple of interviews from the Google web summit where that question kind of kept coming up. Like what is helpful content and Google’s response. So You know, let’s kind of wade into it. I’m going to turn over to you to kind of introduce us to this this topic We’re going to get into today, but I know it’s one that is really important to pretty much everybody listening
Cyrus: Yeah So I I think we need to put a little bit of blame on the naming department of google for calling this the helpful content Update because it threw everybody off.
Uh it you know in our analysis, you know, it’s not really Has much to do with content How helpful the content is and I think to understand this we have to go back to you know A couple years ago 2002 when google was coming up with this update and they were getting complaints all the time about how Google results were filled with affiliate spam uh unhelpful results about just ad supported uh Content that had no real expertise and they were getting complaints about this all the time on sites like hacker news And it goes like shoot SEOs are getting so good at what they do.
They can just fill up our serves with whatever they want. And so the helpful content update. It seems to be a direct response to that and Google just said we, we don’t want any of this stuff anymore. Uh, we want to de incentivize the creation of this, this type of affiliate and ad supported content and we’re going to just completely shift towards other signals and now we’re dealing with the aftermath of that.
Jared: Yeah, we were joking, I think it was with Morgan, the interview with Morgan from the Web Summit about how like, how much of the, how much of it was the name, you know, and the triggering effect it has for content creators versus just the abrupt changes, which is more on the algorithmic side and penalizing content that people spend a lot of time on.
Cyrus: Yeah, internally, we, I call it the anti SEO update because that’s truly what I believe it is, that, uh, Google wanted to correct the advantage that publishers could have by leveraging traditional SEO techniques, including the internal linking that we talked about and all those things, and focus on more real, I hate to use the word real world, but outside the web signals, uh, websites.
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Jared: I mean, you’re pretty heavily involved in SEO. You’re also pretty heavily, you were heavily involved on like how Google wants website content to be ranked from the quality Raider guidelines and how they asked you to score it.
Like you kind of have seen both sides of it. What, maybe you can talk through what an algorithm looks like to these days, these days, like the Google algorithm, what their updates have been about. You mentioned 2022, but you know, maybe starting around then and forward.
Cyrus: Yeah, so right, right before they introduced the helpful content update, or right around the same time, there were several changes to the Quality Rater guidelines, and that’s around the time I started working as a Quality Rater, because I wanted to understand how Google was, you know, trying to evaluate sites.
And they added this thing called Experience, uh, to E, E E A T, so Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust. And as a Quality Rater, we were started, uh, they started asking us to evaluate sites on how much experience. A site showed with her topic. So it wasn’t just enough to cover the topic completely It wasn’t just enough to answer the questions completely Sites had to show experience.
So now we’re researching, uh, about pages. We’re researching creator profiles. We’re seeing if they’re actually including pictures of themselves. You know, if it’s a travel blog, are they actually in the place, uh, that they say they are? If it’s a product review, does it look like they actually bought it? And, you know, are unpacking with their unpacking videos and things like that.
If they’re a doctor, are they board certified? All these experience signals and people say well Google can’t tell if you’re experienced or not. Well, that’s fair enough. Maybe they can but what they can do It’s take these, you know, the quality raters are generating tens of thousands of scores every day and Google can just take that and feed it into their machine learning algorithms and come up with something that’s an approximation.
And that’s how they scale this, you know, these sort of experience signals throughout, throughout the web. And we’ve seen some evidence that that’s actually, uh, what happened.
Jared: If Google, cause that’s been long been said before. Google can’t tell if you’re, how experienced you are, or I also like which experiences are better, you know?
Um, and how do they put a rate, like, what have you seen in the way that the algorithms have transpired as experience has entered into, I mean, you say that it’s fed their machine learning, we know machine learning is a massive part of how their algorithms work, do you have any examples of how that could play itself out in today’s algorithm?
Yeah,
Cyrus: yeah, and I got to be careful when I frame this, because people sometimes jump to conclusions and say, these are ranking factors, I am not claiming anything as a ranking factor, these are just numbers. Patterns that we see among winning and losing sites. And I, what, what we’ve done is we’ve taken the sites that have won every single update, uh, sites that have never lost and we compare them to the sites that lose every single update.
And then we look for. Differences in the data. And when we do that, one of the things we found, uh, was the use of stock images. Lots of sites use stock images or non original images. Uh, especially if you’re, you know, doing product reviews, you’ll use the manufacturer’s image. And that’s fine. But what we found is sites that do that consistently tend to have steeper declines than sites that were using their original product images or their original travel images with lots of people in them, for instance.
Images with people do really, really well these days, as opposed to not. And I’m not saying that’s a ranking factor, but that seems to be a general pattern of sites that we see rewarded versus sites that we’ve seen decline. So I’m not saying stock images is a ranking factor. It’s just something we see over and over again.
Jared: Yeah. And to your point, like it’s not always, you know, when you’re looking at the symptom, that’s not always the problem, right? Like maybe a stock image is actually. Underscoring, uh, other issues that Google’s trying to address with that, which is like you said, maybe not actually having the product in your hands, which plays itself out in a lot of variety of areas.
Yeah. Um, Okay. So in your presentation, I looked through the slide deck and like you talked a lot about, um, audience. You mentioned audience targeting one time, you mentioned audience intent one time, you even talked about long term and short term audience goals, like. I don’t know how related all these things are, but I, I, I circled audience because I wanted you to talk about audience as, again, as it relates to this helpful content update, what is helpful content, what does it have to do with audience?
Cyrus: Yeah, so, originally, I, when Google released this, it seemed like they were targeting affiliate and ad supported sites. We just can’t deny that in the data. Uh, I think they went a little too far, but they have this, they talk about, do you have an existing or intended audience? And it took us a long time to figure out sort of what that means.
But Google seems to be rewarding sites that are establishing long term client relationships. Are you coming back? Are you searching for this site again and again? Are you buying things from the site or are you purely an informational site? Where you want to monetize clicks. It’s a click and done. Click and done.
Your audience comes solely from ranking and search results. What Google wants is to reward the people who are, have the long term relationships. They’re being sought out again and again and again. Versus the short term relationship. Click and monetize, click and monetize. Because there’s, there’s two distinct, uh, groups there.
One’s receiving less traffic today and the other is receiving more traffic.
Jared: We featured an article recently in the news podcast episode. I, it sounds like a Verge article, but I don’t think it was the Verge. But it was somebody, there’s somebody basically saying, uh, I think it was one of these publishers who’s gotten hit repeatedly, repeatedly and multiple times.
They’re like, you know, you don’t have a go to toaster review person, right? Like when you need a toaster, do you need to have someone who’s trying to be the toaster guy? Do you need this audience type of approach when going back to what the user wants? They seem to just need an honest. In depth appraisal that’s been tested and and they were arguing that perhaps How do sites like that exist in this day and age?
And maybe that would be the question i’d throw at you like has google put the can On these types of sites, even though to your point like what they want is long term audience engagement.
Cyrus: Yeah, that’s a great question And I love the idea of the toaster guy Uh because instantly i’m seeing this branded thing.
So yeah, so Just having, it seems like anymore, just having this guy or woman who reviews toasters and is the best in the world about it. Uh, that doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. But, there’s some room there, because if you’re actually a brand, if you’re the toaster guy and you’ve got a TikTok channel, you know, with a hundred million subscribers, I think there are people, you know, who do Excel functions that, you know, meet this criteria.
Uh, and you’re on YouTube, and you’re, no, you have some actual branding as the toaster guy, and people are actually searching for that person, that person is still gonna be doing okay. But if you don’t have that brand anymore, it’s gonna be harder for you. Uh, so yeah, I love the toaster guy.
Jared: It is a different, it is a dichotomy that I thought was a really good example because, you know, again, I, I, this was a couple months ago, so I don’t want to miss, I don’t want to misrepresent whatever the article was, but it’s kind of like nobody gets out of bed in the morning to be like the toaster guy, right?
But it still doesn’t take away the fact that when someone wants to buy a toaster and they don’t want to have to do all the research themselves, they’ve got to go somewhere. What SERPs right now is that Google wants you to trust Forbes, uh, and these kinds of brands or Reddit and social media, right? And they’ve kind of pushed out.
Is that an accurate assessment? And what do you see in the data when it comes to like audiences? Is that who audiences really want? They want TikTok, Reddit, and Forbes to tell them
Cyrus: what toaster to buy? No, but I, I don’t want to sound like I’m apologizing for Google, but let’s look at it from Google’s point of view and dilemma that they’re facing.
Uh, you know, we learned from Google’s antitrust trial that they really don’t understand the web as much as they pretend to, they don’t understand documents. And with AI, with all the tools that we use to optimize content, you know, whether it’s a surfer or market views or whatever. Uh, it’s very easy for anybody to create content that looks like an expert piece of content.
And Google has a very hard time distinguishing expert content from made up content. And we think that they have these magic tools to do it, but they don’t. They really have poor tools and, uh, levers to pull. So they’re relying on brand and these other signals. They’re getting better at it. I’m going to give them credit.
The last few updates, they got a tiny bit better at it. But, you know, the Eric Schmidt quote from 10, 15 years ago, brand is how you sort through the cesspile. They’ve leaned heavily into brands, the Forbes and the Reddit because they, they don’t have the tools to distinguish. And the problem is a lot of the great content is getting filtered out because of that.
Uh, and that’s unfortunate. We’re losing a whole generation of creators because Google can’t distinguish good content from bad.
Jared: So brand, which is kind of speaking to the Forbes example. I’ll park Reddit for a little while. Maybe we’ll have time to come back to it. It’s not really on our agenda, but I still am dying to talk to you about it.
Um, we’ll park that for now. So brand. So the Forbes’s of the world and other brands. To be fair, Forbes is kind of the one that gets referenced in this community all the time. But let’s talk about brand. I know you, You mentioned that really great Moz study by Tom Kapper on domain authority, um, brand reputation.
That was, I think, the concept that he really kind of dove deep into. Um, how does, how does all that play into this, what is helpful content conversation? Yeah,
Cyrus: great study by Tom. I think I just got back from a speaking circuit and I think Tom’s study was the most referenced piece of content on that circuit.
And what Tom did was look at a site’s brand authority, and brand authority is basically simply a metric about how many people are searching for you. If you’re the toaster man, how many people are searching toaster man in Google search results? Or, you know, related. How many people are searching for, uh, Wirecutter or things like that.
Specifically searching for you. So they have this score at Moz. And you can look it up. It’s free. Just log in and enter your domain. You can find your own brand authority score. What Tom did is he compared it to domain authority. How many links the site has. Because traditionally, Links have been our North Star metric.
We, we build links. We try to build up our domain authority. And what Tom found is it didn’t really matter, you know, how high your brand authority was or your domain authority. But when those were out of sync, when your links were way higher than your brand, those were the sites that got hit by Google’s helpful content update.
And if you think about it for a second, who does, what kind of sites do that? Well, it’s sites that have a lot of SEO. It’s sites that built up and either built links or bought links or create a bunch of links, but no, one’s really looking for them. They don’t have a lot of brand authority. So those were the sites that hit.
And it’s almost going back to the whole anti SEO thing. These sites are being cropped up by domain authority. But it’s really the brand that we’re interested in. And so now it’s almost switched. Brand is becoming a more important signal than domain authority. What are the specific
Jared: metrics that, that Tom used or that Moz uses to calculate the brand authority side of things?
Cyrus: I, I don’t have insight into exactly that, but what I, I think I can say this and maybe, uh, Tom can write in and correct me, but I think it’s basically, uh, how looking at how many branded terms your site ranks for and, uh, very well for. So if you’re a Moz, uh, they’re, they’re going to rank for things like link explorer or Moz.
com or Moz or, um, Metrics, anything, anything that you ranked number one or two for that could be considered a branded keyword. And they probably have some logic for figuring out what those branded keywords are, but yeah. Yep, yep.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna, I, the only reason I ask a lot of people have talked about like, oh, is it direct traffic That signals that a brand is a, an authority?
’cause people are going directly to your site. IE they bookmarked it. Yeah. Or they, it’s a favorite. Uh, you know, but that’d kinda be part and parcel with the same kind of thing.
Cyrus: Yeah, and for the record, we actually looked at that when the original helpful content came out, and I’m not saying it’s not a factor, but we could find no correlation between, uh, third party traffic, social media traffic, any of those, and regarding if a site got hit or not, so.
Jared: Yep, okay. Um, uh, you also talked about, uh, you touched on experience, but you also talked about as it relates to user engagement. Um, you know, and I, I, I know I reference your study a lot where you looked at some of the correlating factors that led to sites dropping. I believe I really should get this right.
I think four of your top five were UI related, like ad related, ad density related, that sort of thing. I think three or four out of the top five. So when I think of your topic of user engagement, when I think of the things you’ve had to talk about, I do think about that, that correlation study you did, but dive into how user engagement plays into the concept of helpful content.
Cyrus: Yeah. So when we start, when the helpful content, helpful content update first hit, I, we started doing all these correlations between winning sites and losing sites And the first things we looked at were what I was learning as a quality rater. Uh, when we talked about the E for experience, does that come into play?
Uh, so Google gives us some instructions, but they don’t tell us exactly how to do it. So I thought, well, the way I determine if a site has experiences, I look if they talk about themselves. Uh, are they talking about, Uh, what they did, or they just writing an encyclopedia article that anybody could write by researching the internet.
So we started crawling the sites, thousands of pages and extracting first person pronouns. I did this, our team went here. We like to do things like that. And what we found is winning sites, the sites that never lost an update. had a crazy number of personal pronouns, something like 22 personal pronouns per page.
They’re just talking about themselves all the time. Losing sites still use personal pronouns, but it’s more like 9 times per page. So there’s a huge difference in that experience level. Now again, I’m not saying personal pronouns are a ranking factor. It’s just a pattern we see amongst winning sites and losing sites.
Winning sites talk about themselves a lot more. They generally have pictures of themselves a lot more, actually interacting with product. And I, I, I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that Google’s machine learning algorithms can start to identify some of these signals and just pattern match sites.
Put this in one bucket, put this in the other bucket, and sites that aren’t talking about themselves, aren’t sharing personal experience, tend to do a little bit worse after these updates. Yeah, okay, that’s fascinating. I should talk about ads, too.
Jared: Well, I was going to ask you my next question, I’m like, we still have to touch on that thing about ads.
Cyrus: Every time I talk about this, I get torched on Twitter, or, you know, any social media program, because no one likes to say ads are a problem. And I’m not saying ads are a problem. In the Quality Rater Guidelines, at the same time that Google added experience, they also added new guidelines around ads.
Specifically, ads that cover the content when you scroll. So, when you’re on your mobile device, I think Newsweek is a big site for this. Every site on Newsweek is horrible because you go on Newsweek, and there’s ads, video ads that auto play. You can barely see the content. A lot of recipe sites do this. Uh, you can barely see the content.
As quality raters, we were instructed to score these sites lower. So we went through our database of sites and started, you know, cataloging. Does this site on mobile have ads that cover the content? Huge correlation. The sites that won every update only like 20, 20 percent had these sort of kind of ads at the bottom.
Uh, losing sites, it was over 50 percent and it was very highly correlated. I’m not saying ads are a problem. Uh, but I have seen success with some clients. That have removed the especially on mobile the the scrolling ads at the bottom and and people don’t like to hear this because They say hey, what about why does newsweek get away with it?
Why does forbes get away? There’s lots of sites with terrible ads all over the internet Well, we need to go back to that brand authority brand conversation We are dealing with an internet with two sets of rules. If you have that higher brand authority, you can get away with a lot of stuff. And you can’t point to other sites and say, why do they get it?
It’s, it’s all goes back to brand authority. Brand, brand authority is your get out of jail card that allows you to break every Google sin. Uh, and get away with it. So it, it sucks, but that’s the world we’re living in. Brand authority equals anti SEO in Google’s minds. Yeah. Yeah. To an extent. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Jared: Sticking with this idea of SEO and this idea of optimizing for search, uh, it’s been talked about that over optimized content did not perform well, historically, in this helpful content update. A lot of people are saying that they’re actually, like, ditching content optimization and actually trying to write anti SEO, to borrow your term, you know, like, trying to not have headers that are optimized, trying to not Use any sort of keywords, actually, like literally write it in a way that’s not optimized.
I mean, what have you found on over optimization? But again, I want to draw a line between over optimization and just optimization and ask if there’s any differences there as well.
Cyrus: This is such a tough question to answer because it’s almost like we live in a weird universe where optimization still works and you still have to optimize.
You know, internal links is a perfect example. You need internal links. Uh, to help your SEO, but it’s almost like if you match these other criterias, your ad supported, you have low, low brand authority, then, then the rules flip, then the internal links don’t help you so much. The optimized title tags don’t, don’t help you so much.
Uh, I’m working with a client right now. And. There, there’s a couple of phenomenon I’m seeing with this client that I think we generally see. Sites that tried to rank for everything generally didn’t do well after these updates. So if you’re a travel site and you’re writing for every location around the globe, Mexico, uh, Europe, blah blah, those sites tended to do worse than the sites that were just writing about one location.
You know, uh, Mexico City Unlimited, and they have, you know, just a small niche site that has 200 pages specifically about Mexico City. They did great after the update. Uh, similarly, we see that at the page level as well. Uh, that pages that try to cover every conceivable point about a topic, the way that we were taught to optimize for pages, you go into, you know, go make sure you have topical authority for these whole things.
They didn’t do as well after this update compared to pages that are very focused and answer specific. Get your answer, get in, get out, without the 20 subheadings. Uh, so again, it’s almost like an anti SEO pattern. Uh, the opposite is that sites that are deemed more helpful, very specific, uh, give the answer at the top of the page, they’re still doing great and we don’t have to, we don’t have to worry about the SEO as much.
Uh, it’s more just like I’m a real person. I, in my, in my presentations, I always use the example of Uncle Harry. Uncle Harry is your helpful content person. Doesn’t know SEO. He’s just an expert in what he does. He just wants to help people. He doesn’t understand title tags. He doesn’t understand internal linking.
He doesn’t understand anything about SEO. That’s who Google wants to reward these days. Just the, just the creators that are honestly. Genuinely just have some expertise to share. They don’t want to rank me. They don’t want to rank Matt Diggity or Jared. They just, because we’re the SEO, we’re the ones who ruin search in their eyes.
So, be more like Uncle Harry and be less like the SEO expert that you follow on Twitter.
Jared: So the plumber writing about plumbing content? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, well, this, this begs a few questions that are related to your presentation, but might kind of, might go a little tangential, but we’ve heard Danny Sullivan talk quite a bit over the last year and a half or two years about user first content.
Yeah. I heard you talk about the user there a couple of times, so I thought it’d be a good time to ask, like, can you help us from your research, define what user first content really is? And again, talking to a bunch of content creators who. Are recovering SEOs. And I say that tongue in cheek, meaning like going back to this over optimization topic that you talked about, people trying to make their content as best as they can for today’s environment.
We’re told to write user first content, but oftentimes have a lot of question marks about what that looks like.
Cyrus: Yeah. And before I answer that, I want to give Danny Sullivan some credit. I know he gets, he gets a lot of. I hate to be honest on, uh, on social media, but I think he’s been trying to tell us for a couple of years now, what’s really going on.
And if you look at his statements, him and John Mueller have been very consistent about stop doing things for SEO. Stop, stop doing things for SEO. And those guys can’t come out and say, hey, these, these updates target SEO practices, but they, they are telling us stop doing things for SEO. And I think they were secretly telling us.
What these updates were about. These are, these are anti SEO updates. So creating things for users and being user centric. I think it’s, these are sometimes hard to define, but I, for creators like us and creators, like the people in your audience that aren’t big brands, I think it’s about being genuinely human.
Uh, one of the things I’m telling a client right now is that he’s in, he’s in the, uh, law space and one of the things I’m telling him is the best thing you can do right now is go hire a photographer, go, go hire a photographer, get a bunch of pictures of yourself and plaster pictures of you all over the website so that your readers understand.
They are dealing with a real person, uh, and I think that can translate over to Google’s algorithm in a, in a weird sort of machine learning sort of sense. Uh, talk about you don’t just write these encyclopedic articles that we’ve been writing for 20 years. Talk about your own cases. Talk about how you worked with clients, uh, to help them put case studies on your site.
Make it personal, uh, because Google, like I said, Google can’t tell the difference between me, I crap. And authentic content. So they’re using, they want to reward people. They want to reward creators. They have enough content. They have content to rank the service for the next 20 years. What they don’t have is people and genuine experiences.
And so that’s where I think we have to shift our thinking a little bit and be more genuine in our content creation.
Spencer: Hey there. Thanks so much for listening to the niche pursuits podcast. Did you know that Jared and I are members of a private group called the niche pursuits community? And today I want to share with you how you can join for just 1.
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Jared: So you’re not going to love this next question, but I can just see people typing it right now into the YouTube. Has I’ve been here? So I got to ask it. And that is, uh, cause again, I hear these stories every week over email or on the comments of our podcast.
And that is the person who says. Yeah, Cyrus, but I have a YouTube channel that people love and they comment on it. I, they like it. My users like my content. I get thousands and tens of thousands of clicks and saves and engagement per day on my pins that I pin. I, I, I am creating user centric con content and I know that what, like, how does the algorithm respond to that type of situation?
Cyrus: Yeah, that’s tough. And I think I, to be fair, I think Google is very imperfect at this. Uh, yes. Google is. Trying a bunch of different, uh, hammers and sludges to get this content. And I’ve said many times on social media, I think they’ve over corrected. So you see sites with great Pinterest pages, great YouTube channels, and it just doesn’t translate to the webpage and the websites, I will say most of the time, uh, when I go to these websites, I see these great experiences, but there’s one thing I.
There’s one thing telltale sign that I usually see, and that’s generally over optimization. So they may have great experiences, but I see super optimized title tags. Uh, I see internal linking gone crazy. Uh, a lot of these things that we’ve correlated with lower rankings. So oftentimes, one of the first things we have to do here when we work with clients is pull back on some of those SEO signals.
Uh, just scale things back. We, we remove internal links. We de optimize our title tags. Uh, we make sure that we’re, you know, not using stock images, things like that. And we, we scale all those, all those things back. Topical focus is a big one. Uh, we might have to get rid of certain site sections to make sure our, you know, our site is more focused on a certain topic, but yeah, uh, it’s imperfect, totally imperfect.
Google’s not ready for you. Uh, but maybe the only strategy we’ve come up with is scaling back some of those SEO signals so that we’re not so much in Google’s crosshairs.
Jared: Got it. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. Maybe you’re. A bit ahead of your times in terms of where the algorithm is trying to reward.
They almost are trying to get rid of the chaff before they actually catch up with what’s, with what users like, they’re just getting rid of the stuff you, they know users don’t like maybe. And there’s a lot caught up in the middle of that.
Cyrus: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s heartbreaking when people create these YouTube videos and they put so much work into authentic, uh, product reviews or their travel or everything.
And it’s just. Google doesn’t recognize it because Google’s are not that great. So I, I think this goes back to the argument for SEO. Uh, Google doesn’t want people to have to get SEO audits. And I understand that, but at the same time, Google is so imperfect. We have to massage our content to fit what, what they’re.
They’re ranking and, and work with their imperfections. So I think, uh, SEO’s job, the good ones are safe for a, for a bit, at least.
Jared: Circling back to a thread that’s gotten pulled so many times and maybe moving into a little bit, uh, the second half of this interview into some of your advice or your guidance, or just your thoughts on it, you can even cage it as this isn’t what I’m telling you to do, but this is just Cyrus’s musings on after looking at all the data, but.
Moving into like a more tactical approach, like building brands over building links, building a recognizable brand as a shift than in terms of building domain authority or that sort of thing. So maybe let’s, let’s maybe put some ideas out on the page for people who are listening. You’re like, I am in the mindset historically for the last five or 10 years of my brand about.
Making sure I focus on domain authority. What are some things they can focus on that help with brand authority?
Cyrus: Yeah, I, I, I’m guilty of this too. I, when I started to make these realizations, I looked at my own brand authority, uh, for Zippy and I have some, but it’s not great compared to the links. I’ve always been a link guy.
And I, a perfect example is I have a newsletter called the SEO tips newsletter. I thought I was a genius getting keywords in my newsletter title. Uh, but is it, you know, that’s great. But unless I’m ranking number one for SEO tips on that and people start associating, if that’s my brand, it doesn’t do me as much, I should have called it the Zippy SEO newsletter or the Cyrus Shepard SEO newsletter.
Anything, anything to get just a one or two people a month searching for that. And clicking on my website so Google can start associating that, uh, with me. And I tell people, you don’t have to be a big brand. Just start by being a little brand. Just any, any brand traction you can get. Uh, and the companies I’m working with, I’m telling them if you have a link building budget, Shift that to a brand building budget shifted to digital PR, not talking about your content, you know, uh, best refrigerators, talk about your company, go on podcasts like this and talk about your company founders, what you do, get those, get those mentions and links about you, the person, the creators, And not so much about your content.
Uh, but it’s, it’s, it’s tough. It’s tough to get people to look for you. Those multi channel options, you know, whether Pinterest, YouTube, you got to make sure those are branded as well. If you’re, if you’re what. The toaster guy, you got to make sure you’re using the toaster guy everywhere you talk about it, not using generic keywords.
It’s tough. I, I’m still thinking through a lot of these things. You know, how do we build brand in this area where brand is so important? And I don’t think I’m there yet, if I’m being honest with you. I’m not sure I have the answers to all these strategies, but hopefully we can, as an industry, start to figure them out.
Jared: Not to get too nerdy, but sticking with this current rabbit hole of choice, How does this differ, or is this the same as what historically maybe has been referred to as entity stacking?
Cyrus: Yeah, I think that, I think there’s an element to that. Uh, and I, I’m not sure? How, because there’s, there’s some, there’s a little bit of a difference between brand, you know, people searching for you, and mentions on the internet.
And maybe they’re related? Uh, but maybe not, and maybe it doesn’t matter. I have to believe that if we build Those entity relationships online, getting people talking about us and associating those things. I have to believe that it is still beneficial, even if it’s not directly related to brand search or people seeking you out.
Right,
Jared: yeah, creating a good positive entity stack still does not drive users to search for you and come back to your website. But
Cyrus: it’s gotta help, it’s gotta help. You run this podcast, I don’t know how many people, you know, say to me, I heard you. Uh, I heard you on the podcast and that, you know, so I wrote, I reached out, those people had to be Googling me to do that.
And everybody, every guest that is on your show probably benefits from not only the entity relationships, but the, the brand search, no matter the volume that results as a, as a part of it. So there’s gotta be, there’s gotta be a helpful correlation there.
Jared: I mean, historically, social media has been a big contributor to brand, right?
Like, and, and obviously, uh, A lot of people are leaning into social media more now, simply because they need the traffic, they need to pursue other avenues for traffic. At the same time, you talked about how there was no correlation between social media traffic, having a big social media brand, and not getting hit.
How do people view social media going forward from this kind of lens?
Cyrus: And just to clarify, I, there, Our data found no correlation in getting hit by helpful content updates. I still, there is still a correlation between overall traffic and third party referrals, social media, all that. Uh, I’m sorry. I forgot the question, Jared.
Jared: No, no, it’s, it’s a fair point. Like, how should people look at social media when it comes to overall brand going forward? Maybe it’s not a massive, I mean, it’s not a direct indicator for helpful content in Google’s eyes now, but what does the role of social media look like for a content creator going forward?
Cyrus: I, I think it’s increasingly important, especially since Google is always hard to rely on. Uh, I, I remember back when I started SEO, we used to say diversify your traffic sources that, you know, 30, only 30, aim for 30 percent search engine traffic. Uh, and I, I think that’s true today. When I look at the, uh, traffic profiles of very healthy sites, it’s generally only about 30 percent Google traffic, uh, which is probably a little higher because of untracked, uh, traffic.
One thing that I think is important. Uh to mention is I work with a lot of creators and they are uncomfortable with this new reality Uh, I I work with this travel site that produces some of the best content out there They don’t want to talk about themselves. They don’t want to put pictures of themselves.
They don’t want to talk about their experience. They want to focus it on the users. And so many users, so many creators are like that. If you’re, if you’re the toaster guy, you don’t want to talk about yourself. You want to talk about the damn toaster. And so it’s uncomfortable. For people, I would argue, if you’re in that position where people aren’t searching for you because they don’t know who the toaster guy is, you got to start twisting those levers and putting yourself, yourself on social media, not just your content, because people, people don’t care about toasters so much on content, but the toaster guy doing something cool, uh, you know, pouring plasma down their toaster, that that’s a cool thing, you know, Hey, it’s the toaster guy that you want people to be excited about you.
If you can get people excited about you and start associating you, your creators with your brand, that’s probably a more defensible position going forward.
Jared: I love this analogy of the toaster guy that we’ve run with and I feel like, I feel like a year or two is going to go by and we are going to have the toaster guy very much, perhaps because of this interview here.
This is awesome. Um, so let’s talk. I, I, I’ve heard, I think it was, you mentioned it. I’ve heard it. I, I’ll give you the credit, but I, I’ve heard it mentioned about a couple of different things. I think it was you as it relates to Google quality raters. And it’s, um, how, how much effort did the content take to produce?
Yeah. And it feels like, I mean, I’m just gonna be honest. It feels like such a dumb metric. It feels like showing your work at school. I was a math major, basically. And I remember, like, sometimes I would just know the answer. And I would have to show my work because that’s what the teacher demanded. And it was so annoying.
And it feels kind of like showing your work. But you talked about it, uh, and it’s been talked about, like, that Google actually is potentially paying attention to how much effort was gone, has gone into the content.
Cyrus: Yeah. Uh, and to be clear, you know, when I talk about quality raters, I don’t want to overblow their influence.
Uh, These machine learning algorithms that Google uses with quality raters are just a small part of the overall algorithm algorithm But they can’t have an impact So as a quality rater one of your scoring criteria is effort how much effort and care? Did the creators put into this website and it’s a loosey goosey metric, you know It goes out goes into the overall score of you know, high quality to low quality, but it is it does play it So you’re looking at, you know, is have they updated the site in the last 10 years?
Uh, are they using custom imagery or are they just slapping something together? Is this a pro programmatic page that no one looked at? Uh, are they, are they, has it been updated in a while? Things like that. So all these things go into the scoring, it’s fed into the algorithm. And of course, Google doesn’t know how much effort you put into the page.
But if you can look like a page that is well designed, is well loved, uh, has been updated in the last few years, Great content that can, that can help down the line.
Jared: So in that vein, respond to the listener, right. And how he’s saying, who’s saying to themselves, wait a second. I thought they said, don’t worry about getting a technical SEO on it.
Those are not important versus now. I need to make sure that I look the part. My website is pretty. I, I see the effort. There aren’t any errors and problems, like some of the things that go along with high effort, unique content seem to also go up against some of the things that they’ve been told not to worry about.
Cyrus: Yeah, I, I, for these, for these questions, I just like to step back and put yourself in the shoes of a quality rater. Get on, look up your top query in Google Search Console and then Google it on your mobile phone. You got to use your mobile phone. Quality raters only use mobile phones. Google crawls your website on mobile.
I just look at you versus your competitors and ask yourself, how quickly am I getting the answer to my question? What are the, what are the other, what are my competitors have that I don’t in terms of design and user experience? And just what, what do I think people want? What, what would my grandma want, uh, from searching this site?
Stop thinking like Google keywords, optimization, think like your grandma. And go from there, and that, that experience is probably worth two SEO audits if you can really nail the grandma eye experience.
Jared: Good answer. Uh, love that answer. It’s um, uh, I have so many stories I could tell about that, but we’ll keep, we’ll keep it going.
That’s a great answer. Um, uh, so maybe, let me hit you with a couple things that we’ve talked about in the interview and, uh, maybe we can transfer into or tra uh, transition into you giving some practical advice for people. Thank you. Who have, you know, kind of had their websites and their content hit by one or subsequent updates here.
Um, we’ve talked about over optimization. We’ve talked about optimizing. What are some practical steps? You kind of already did share some of it when you talked about some of the first things you do when you onboard a client, but maybe let’s put a fine point back on it. What are some things people can do to check if their content might be over optimized, even if they aren’t thinking it is, and then to de optimize their content?
Cyrus: Yeah. So. Uh, some of the work we do with clients is we look at their internal links for one, uh, which I kind of take personal offense to because I’ve written about internal links for years. You’ve had me on the podcast talking about internal links. When we look at the data, we see that sites that get hit consistently have great internal links.
It’s almost like Google is targeting that. Uh, so something we do with Good experiences with the internal
Jared: links. Yeah. Yeah.
Cyrus: Especially, especially anchor text diversity, which is something I’ve advocated for years. So a lot of my clients have success. Not all of them. These are oftentimes hit or miss. Uh, a lot of my clients have success by removing internal links.
Some of them are going through page by page, uh, you know, hundreds, thousands of pages, removing very optimized internal anchor text. It’s a very tedious process, uh, but that’s, that’s one of the things you’re doing. Title tags is another. We found in our data that, uh, we, we do similarity matching between the title tag and the page headline.
Your H1 versus your title. Uh, and we found that sites that tend to win the updates, Have very similar title tags and h1s. They’re not optimizing their title because that’s something we do as SEOs. We’re like, uh, you know, 10 best toasters, 10 in the title. We write 10 amazing toasters for 2024. So, and I don’t have firm data on how well this works, but we’re encouraging clients, you know, write your, write your headline.
Just stick that in the title, uh, going forward. And we’re, we’re seeing some early success with that. Uh, Things like reducing the amount of schema. We found that winning sites had schema, but losing sites had tons of schema, like pages and pages, hundreds and hundreds of lines. I’m not saying schema is a negative ranking factor, but we work with clients who are like, what, what, what’s the, uh, triggering a featured snippet or rich result, uh, in this schema, let’s keep that stuff.
Let’s lose all this, these hundreds and hundreds of lines of the other stuff. So just things like that, things that we’re doing for SEO. That Danny Sullivan, John Mueller are talking about. We’re trying to scale those things back, uh, with the SEO. Okay.
Jared: Uh, sticking in the practicals, staying here with really practical advice.
Uh, again, you have touched on already throughout the podcast. I just, I’ll try to bring it back here for us. User experience. What are some things people can do? Start with a mobile device. Start with a mobile device. Only use, use a mobile device to analyze. That was a big thing you said. What are some other tips you can share with people about improving your SEO?
Their user experience, or at least even just be able to identify a bad user experience on their website.
Cyrus: Yeah. Uh, so a couple of things that we’d look at is how on your mobile device. How long does it take to get the answer? If you’re looking, if you’re Mr. Toaster and you’re talking about the best toaster of 2024, do I have to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll to find your best toaster?
Or can I find the answer right away without going back and doing another Google search? Uh, so we try to get, we try to answer the questions as soon as possible. Uh, a couple weird things happen when you do that. You’ll often see your bounce rate increase and your time on site decrease. Decrease. So it almost looks like you have worse user engagement metrics.
I was
Jared: going to bring
Cyrus: that up. Leave that in for a couple months. We see the worsening user engagement, but we see increased rankings. And we’re pretty sure it’s because people are not going back to search Google. For the correct answer, so I got it. Oh, yeah Answering things question, but going back to the personal experience thing that we were talking about.
I Tell my clients stop writing encyclopedia articles and start writing personal experiences Share experiences over facts. So The bad example are the recipe sites that, you know, have a thousand pages of, uh, my grandma used to make this recipe for me. Uh, but you need to bring a little bit of that in now.
You need to talk about why you are an expert in the subject, how you tested, show your methodology, all those things. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s kind of like a minimal requirement, uh, for, for ranking going forward.
Jared: Something that’s come out of several now interviews with people who are at Google’s web summit, just in, uh, I think that was late October where they brought in 20 publishers or so that were really had suffered, uh, dramatic losses from the helpful content update.
And. Google kind of had vetted these 20 publishers and kind of said, Hey, these are, these are guys are creating good content. We’ve individually vetted them. They brought them in a room. They had some conversations, right? And something that’s come out of that is this concept. Stopped the first place, by the way, of a site wide classifier.
Uh, the helpful content update was in essence, a site wide classifier. Now that was in their documentation at the beginning. Uh, it’s gotten squirrely since then. What are your thoughts on that, again, as it relates to people who are now having to create content in this new world of helpful content?
Cyrus: Yeah, the idea of a site wide classifier is highly Contentious?
Even my own clients like to argue with me about it. Uh, and the Googlers at that creator summit said, no, there is no site wide classifier. And I think I joked on Twitter, uh, we don’t have a site wide classifier. We have a page level classifier. Penalty applied to every URL that shares the same domain. So, and I think there, there actually might be, not to get geeky, but there actually might be some truth to that because when we see these penalties hit, we do not see sharp drop offs.
Right. We see declines that are very gradual. Almost like it
Jared: catches up with itself as it begets itself and it begets itself and begets itself. Yeah.
Cyrus: And I, and I think what’s happening is at the page level, these page level signals are propagating throughout the site through internal links. Uh, and that’s why we see these gradual declines and that’s, that’s the telltale sign to me that it’s a site wide helpful content sort of issue.
Because when you get hit by a regular update, it’s steep or steep up. And these site wide classifiers tend to follow gradual declines.
Jared: Yeah, that’s a good point. Okay. Um, hey, let’s just quickly touch on it. So much of what helpful content, as it relates to these updates, has been about is the classic, um, uh, like, kind of informational content, affiliate style content.
I mean, if you’re in local business, you probably haven’t even noticed what the helpful content update happened. If you’re in e com, you haven’t even noticed that there’s been a helpful content update. You’re like, what’s going on out here? Why is that, and is there a truth to it being segmented to certain types of content, do you think?
Cyrus: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, with the original helpful content hit, it was 99 percent content sites or informational sites, niche sites, whatever you want to call it. Right. When Google rolled the content, uh, helpful content update into core last March, the big March core update, I started having different types of clients reach out to me.
And it expanded to the local clients, uh, software companies. It’s, it, it kind of expanded to everybody. So. Those type of companies are more immune, but they’re not completely immune. The same sorts of signals apply. So these are companies that have high amount of domain authority or links and a lower amount of brand authority.
So even though they’re selling real services or software or they are, have a local presence, Anytime you get that big disparity, we’re seeing them susceptible to these, to these actions. Uh, but to your point, they’re not going out of business. They’re not, they, they’re not dying. We just see them fall to the level of their brand search to a, to a certain extent.
Um, a lot of clients ask me, can I just start selling a product? Uh, you know, can I, and we see that we see, uh, my answer is, uh, you can. But you really got to go all in. You can’t just do some digital downloads and hope that that’s going to help you. You have to become a digital download company that’s known for that.
Uh, it, it, you can’t just shop slap a shopping cart is one of the things that came out of the Google leak. Google has a classifier to determine if a page is sells something or is, you know, is commercial. And so they, I think it’s fair to say Google has many ways to tell if you’re faking it or if this is really the focus of your site.
Uh, so yeah, you can, you can change your business model, but you really gotta go all in ’cause Google’s smarter than that.
Jared: I mean, going forward, as we kind of wrap up here, as we come to a close, like going forward, uh, what are your thoughts on how this is gonna shape the future of how content gets created?
We haven’t talked about AI, and by the way, if I brought up AI, I feel like we would have been here for a couple hours. I would have enjoyed it, by the way, but we try to keep these things to 45 minutes to an hour, so. But we haven’t talked about AI, its role, we haven’t talked about its helpful content updates role, as it related to when AI came out and what was on the forefront, but trying not to get too deep into those weeds, we talk about what does helpful content look like going forward.
From this, from your research, from your studies, from your knowledge, from what you’ve seen as a Google quality rater, everything you’re bringing to the table, like What are your thoughts on the future of helpful content and SEO?
Cyrus: Yeah, so AI represents a huge shift. Uh, it, long term, it decreases margins on the cost and profit ratio of creating content.
Uh, and that’s just a reality. It doesn’t, it doesn’t bring it to zero, but three years from now, uh, it’s going to be, uh, Publishers competing for a smaller piece of the pie. I don’t think there’s any way around that. Uh, and I don’t think we can ignore what Google is trying to reward with these helpful content updates.
And that is. Brands, real people, authentic experiences. Uh, and as shaky as their initial rollouts have been, I think that’s going to be where all platforms go eventually. Uh, brands, real people, real experiences, products that people search for, uh, and commodity content, just producing content. Is the margins are going to be so low that fewer and fewer people are going to be, uh, doing that.
So lean into yourself, lean into what you can authentically offer the world. And that’s going to be one path through this, uh, maze that we’re about to enter.
Jared: Well, Cyrus, I thought it would be apropos to make sure to pop over to Google and search for the toaster guy. And see what came up. Uh, the number one result?
The Instagram handle at the toaster guy hasn’t shared since 2018. So it might be a great opportunity for someone. Well, that’s a
Cyrus: horrible result. Come on. Rank his website. Google.
Jared: I didn’t have pages and pages to scan through to find the poor guy’s result, but I, uh, I would just share that there is a toaster guy or is a toaster guy.
There is a toaster guy. Uh, hasn’t been active in a while. Um, Cyrus, where can people follow along with what you’re doing? I love to, I’ll just shameless plug. I love to follow you on X. You’re, uh, can’t miss follow for the stuff you share. Uh, I, I don’t say that to everyone, but I mean, we, we talk about your work on the news portion of the podcast very frequently.
So that’s definitely a great place. Where else can people follow along with what you have going or reach out if they have any questions?
Cyrus: Uh, definitely LinkedIn. Uh, Is more of my sharing as many people today are uh, but i’m kind of i’m everywhere about facebook And facebook is just for my mom, which is kind of a weird american thing I I deal with a lot of you know european and world and they use facebook for business and me It’s just like I just sharing pictures of my garden on facebook.
But uh, yeah. Hey Hook up with me there too.
Jared: Perfect. Yeah. We’ll get your, we’ll get you a few more friends other than just your mom. So, um, Hey, Cyrus, this has been wonderful again. Uh, uh, let’s not make it a couple of years, uh, for the next time. Um, thank you again for coming on. Uh, I think that this question of what is helpful content has been on everyone’s mind and it gets touched on.
I feel like almost every single time we have an interview, but it hasn’t been the sole focus of an interview. So you did a great job tackling it. Thanks for a great time.
Cyrus: Hey, some of the best questions I’ve got. Thank you, Jared. Always a pleasure to be here. My pleasure. We’ll talk again soon, Cyrus. See ya.
Spencer: Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to the Niche Pursuits podcast. I just wanted to remind you that if you are ready to start building smarter, faster, and easier internal links, you should check out Link Whisper. You can get 15 off Link Whisper when you use the coupon code. Podcast at checkout, head over to link, whisper.
com and use the code podcast in order to save 15. Thanks again for listening.
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