Google's Unhelpful Content Update with Lily Ray

Jerrid Grimm (00:30.026) Lily, welcome to the show. Lily Ray (00:32.125) Thanks for having me. Jerrid Grimm (00:33.634) So Lily, I've been following you on LinkedIn and I have heard from multiple people that they're also following you on LinkedIn to get all these great SEO posts that you do. Why don't you give everyone a little background on you, your role at Amsive and why you have so many people that are just following and listening for your advice on all these Google updates and SEO. Lily Ray (00:59.009) Yeah, I have been doing SEO for almost 15 years now. I oversee the SEO team at AMSOV with a few other directors. I'm one of like four or five directors that oversee a pretty big team of about 30 plus people. I'm actually VP now. And I've been doing SEO on the agency side for 12 plus years. So I've touched every possible category. I've worked on probably hundreds of different client accounts. And in the last couple of years, and my new role is VP of SEO strategy and research at Amsev. I double as not only working, you know, with clients, with my teammates, with the other directors, but also doing daily research about what's happening on Google and in the SEO space. And I have a lot of different tools that I use and a lot of different data that I look at in case studies and clients and everything like this. So. I try to share what I see publicly because the SEO industry is only as good as people coming together and sharing what they find. So I try to do my part. Jerrid Grimm (02:06.978) Yeah. Now you're doing a great job. And I'm curious, like did the, seven year old Lily decide that you wanted to be an SEO? Like at what point did you decide, Hey, I really am interested in this field because you've been doing it for 15 years, which isn't a lifetime, but in the world of SEO, that's a high percentage of the total time that has been SEO, right? Lily Ray (02:30.623) Yeah, it's a big part of my life. It's my entire adult life has been dedicated to this craft more or less. I didn't know when I was seven that I'd be doing this. I knew that I wanted to be a drummer, which I still am. So that's kind of cool. But I, it's kind of like all the things in my life came together in a way where this career makes a lot of sense for me. Like the signs were there and the things were there in my childhood. Jerrid Grimm (02:32.63) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (02:46.476) you Jerrid Grimm (02:56.705) No. Lily Ray (02:59.201) My father is a software engineer, distinguished software engineer. He was at Sun Microsystems and then Oracle for like 35 years. My brother's a web developer. He's been a web developer his whole life since we were children. So like I grew up in a very techie environment in California, the Bay area. And so a lot of the things that I've experienced and learned throughout my SEO career have been like, I've like texted my dad and brother to be like, what do you think about this? And how do you do this? And this and that, you know? So, there's that element, then SEO is like, so creative and marketing oriented. And there's a lot of like writing and ideation and that's kind of more how my brain works. So that's, I really come naturally to me, to me, but, it's also very like interpersonal and social and like understanding audiences and being able to work with other people, work with teams and everything like that. So there's a lot that goes into it, but, I love what I do very much. Jerrid Grimm (03:55.042) That's probably a myth of SEO is that people, think a lot of people think it's like sitting in Ahrefs or SEO mods and just looking at numbers and graphs all day. And I was curious because like you said, you're a drummer, think you DJ as well. Like that's a very creative aspect of life. And I was curious if you find that SEO, like the Venn diagram of being a musician and being an SEO expert, is there like any crossover? But it does sound like it's a fairly creative field. Lily Ray (04:26.977) There's a ton of musicians in the SEO industry for some reason. but the SEO is a really big, broad category that means a lot of different things. And even on my team, you know, we have anywhere between 30 and 35 people, if you count interns and things like that. But, you know, some of them are people that like to sit at home all day, every day on the computer, looking at code and looking at tech SEO issues and living in Spotify and, know, the crawling tools and. Jerrid Grimm (04:30.486) Yeah. Lily Ray (04:54.505) Ideally not talking to anyone or like talking to other dev teams or talking to other tech SEOs. Like that's absolutely one application for SEO. And there's a whole world of that. That's tech SEO, you know, there's conferences just for tech SEO. There's very like nerdy discussions that happened in the tech SEO space, but there's a whole other side of SEO, which is let's say like link building and digital PR. And there's a whole other side, which is content creation and optimization. like, ideally you can kind of do all of them or, know, you have people that can help you with all of them, but. Jerrid Grimm (04:56.598) Thank you. Lily Ray (05:23.967) It's a very broad thing. So whatever reputation people have about, or like stereotype that people have about SEO, it's probably a lot more than that. Jerrid Grimm (05:31.842) Yeah, definitely. Well, I'm a little bit newer to, I've been in publishing and tech most of my career, but I'm newer to this SEO space. And that's because, you know, impact is in the affiliate space and like search is a major driver of traffic to like the vast majority, especially content affiliates. Like if you're a publisher that's writing reviews, you're counting on search to represent like upwards of 50 % or more of the audience that comes to your site. So there was this big update, right? Google's helpful content update, which I believe has been, it was a separate initiative for a while and now it's being rolled in more. I was wondering if you could maybe just like explain what this Google helpful content update is, the timeline on it, and then we can move into like some of the effects it's had on the space. Lily Ray (06:01.739) Yeah. Lily Ray (06:26.913) Sure. Yeah, I can. This is my world. I can tell you every day, every detail, everything that's happened because I've been living in this world. yeah, in August of 2022, Google launched the helpful content update the first time and a helpful content ranking system. So it's a new way that Google evaluated sites. And at the time, it was a new ranking demotion for sites that met the minimum threshold of unhelpfulness, essentially. So Google has its new proprietary ranking system that's going to determine if a website meets that threshold across all the pages on the site. And we've come to learn that that basically means those pages are extremely over -optimized for SEO at the cost of providing a good, helpful user experience and really like... Ultimately, Google was probably getting too much feedback from Google searchers that they were tired of reading all this like SEO content that what didn't really feel like it was for humans. So that was launched in 2022. It wasn't until September of 2023 that Google updated the helpful content update. And we felt it in a really big way. Then it started to impact thousands and thousands of largely like small publishers, small sites, niche blogs, recipe blogs, travel blogs, smaller sites. And that's when it started to become a really big. Jerrid Grimm (07:43.788) Mm. Lily Ray (07:52.673) public discussion about what was happening. And then, yeah, it was, I think it was March, March, 2020, 24, when Google incorporated the helpful content ranking system into its core ranking systems. So that just means that now when we're not going to get a specific helpful content update anymore, we're not going to get an update to the helpful content system because the helpful content system doesn't exist on its own anymore. It's just something that Google's automatically looking at all the time with its core ranking systems. Jerrid Grimm (08:05.844) Okay. Lily Ray (08:23.103) So it's less granularity now in terms of Google's communications about what's happening, but there is a core update rolling out right now, and it absolutely seems to be having a very big impact on sites that were affected by previous helpful content updates. Jerrid Grimm (08:37.77) Interesting. So it sounds like this ranking or however it's applied is more punitive than meaning like there's some sort of tag or how would you explain? think you've, you've explained this as like a classifier is added to certain sites. And that's how it basically identifies that this is basically like unhelpful content. Is that the way that you'd explain it? Lily Ray (08:51.542) Mm Lily Ray (08:59.967) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so that's actually the exact word that Google originally used is classifier, which you can think of as like a dampening effect that happens across most of the pages on the site, if not all. So it's not like one page drops and the rest is OK. You're going to see most of the pages on the site lose search visibility when that classifier is applied. They also dismantled this notion of a classifier. in the last year. like, just when we thought we were starting to get a handle on how this thing worked, they changed how it worked. So Google was very clear that there is no classifier anymore. It's just part of the core ranking systems. being said, Google said that the way that performance, the sites performed that have been impacted by this over the last year, felt a whole lot like the classifier was still applied. There were no Jerrid Grimm (09:28.716) Mm. Jerrid Grimm (09:53.313) Hmm. Lily Ray (09:56.449) examples, statistically significant examples at all of any site that was impacted by the September 2023 helpful content update, seeing any significant recovery until last week. And that's because Google changed its core ranking system. Jerrid Grimm (10:12.692) Interesting. So this happens in the fall or the big one happens in the fall this helpful content update these classifiers are applied to different sites and I mean I've explained this to people I'm like Google kind of I don't know if this is right wording but holds a grudge meaning like once this is applied to somebody it takes some time it You can't just go in, you know, fix whatever the problem was. And then the next day everything's back to normal. It's like these updates take a long time for your, for Google to come back and, and reclassify or rerank. How would you, so that's, it sounds like that's what you saw. You saw in the fall, you know, a lot of sites get hit. Maybe you can explain like the types you say a little bit more long tail or more niche sites. Did the larger and did it affect primarily, you know, review type content or was it across? you know, brand sites and publisher sites and news sites and all the rest. Maybe describe what you've seen. know some of this will be somewhat anecdotal, but you have a 30 ,000 foot view and you spend all day in this. So yeah, what, types of sites were affected in the fall? And now with this new update that's come out, where are you seeing any signs of recovery? Lily Ray (11:21.121) So the first thing to note is that there are other Google ranking algorithms and updates that happen concurrently. So a lot of people get really confused because they think they were hit by the helpful content update or they were hit by a what. It also didn't help that the helpful content update that happened in September 23 was sandwiched between two other core updates. There was one in August and one in early October. Jerrid Grimm (11:44.172) Yeah. Lily Ray (11:47.425) So it literally happened in the middle of those two and each one takes two to three weeks to roll out. So there's so much noise that happened then. It's just important to note. First question did, was I a helpful content update affected site? Because the behavior is very distinct. Those sites dropped dramatically around September 17th, 2023, and they basically didn't recover. To your question, or some of them are starting to recover now, but to your question. Jerrid Grimm (12:03.073) Hmm. Lily Ray (12:15.359) You know, a lot of people want to think of this because it makes sense to think in this way. Like, what types of niches are you seeing be hit harder than others? it was very clear to me from day one that that's not how this works. It's not about which niche you're in. it's about what type of website you have. So the types of websites that were disproportionately affected by this, we were, like. I don't want to necessarily say all WordPress, but usually like niche blogs, right? So it's a, and a lot of them are monetized with popular monetization methods where there's a lot of ads all over the site. In some cases, very aggressive ads. There's been yet ads and autoplay ads and they're all happening at the same time. A lot of the sites that were hit had that happening. and a lot of them do have a lot of affiliate links. So even if it's not like product review pages, it's. Top 10 places to put top 10, you know, restaurants to visit in X, Y, Z city, and then thousands and thousands of those city pages with top 10 places to visit. And all of them are filled with affiliate links or, recipes that are filled with display ads and affiliate links or hiking shoes or legal advice. could be anything, but it's like the nature of the website is that it churns out lots of content. That content is extremely optimized for search search is probably where they're getting. Jerrid Grimm (13:21.58) Thanks. Jerrid Grimm (13:32.13) Hmm. Lily Ray (13:41.249) 50 % plus of their traffic, maybe 80 % plus, let's say 80 % of the pages on the site have aggressive monetization and very little else. Like there isn't an e -commerce store. There isn't a whole section of content that's not monetized. know, like that's what those sites did. And they had a field day. Like a lot of these people made a whole lot of money. And if you look at their trajectory of growth from 2020 to 2023, they probably thought it was gonna keep going up. This is what happens on Google all the time. Those of us that have worked in the SEO space for a long time have seen these patterns before. And it was clear to me for a long time, this is a problem that Google is going to solve because there's too many people getting rich from SEO. And that's not great for Google searchers. It doesn't provide a great experience. Jerrid Grimm (14:13.718) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (14:28.086) Right. Right. It's like almost once you've figured out the, if you think of it as a game and you figured out the game and you've mastered that, see your traffic just growing, growing, growing. And then Google's like, actually we don't want you playing the game. So just get back to creating content for audiences. So it's almost like the Google can see this blueprint of a site, which says, Hey, it's perfectly SEO optimized. The traffic is all coming in from search. It's being like every dollar is being monetized, squeezed out of it. as much as like banner ads everywhere and pop -ups and affiliate links. And says, that's not what we're looking for. That's not what users are looking for. And then I imagine there's, you know, dozens or hundreds of other signals that are saying, we can see this through like search patterns, like people are clicking on and they're leaving and they're going to another site that answers the question better or something more, more along that line. So what does a, what do one of these sites, what did you see them do or what did, you know, you guys probably help them. A lot of your customers navigate this. What was it that they had to change? Lily Ray (15:16.543) Yep. Yep. Jerrid Grimm (15:29.738) with their sites or the recommendations that you would make. Lily Ray (15:34.579) It's really hard because you have to get to like the heart of why the site exists. And these were, this was probably the hardest work like I've ever done just in terms of like client relationships and changing the behavior or, or like, especially how long it took these sites to start to see a recovery. Like no hope in site that day, like this type of environment where it's like, okay, you have to just trust. Jerrid Grimm (15:49.57) Hmm. Lily Ray (16:04.565) people that have worked in the SEO space for a while that have done recoveries from previous Google penalties and algorithm updates and everything, that these are the patterns that are probably hurting you. And they'll say, well, those site, those pages have made me tons of money. You're like, exactly. We need to like do something about all this content that has historically driven all of your traffic and all of your success because the rules have changed. Google's on to you now. Jerrid Grimm (16:16.918) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Lily Ray (16:33.459) It's just, I mean, we have a bunch of tools and a bunch of data that we use to see this at scale, but, it's getting to the heart of the problem and trying to surface like. Truly valuable content and reducing the content that was really engineered primarily for SEO purposes or changing it. it's like, you know, some, many sites that were affected were doing things like ranking the products that they recommend in order of potential affiliate commissions. Jerrid Grimm (17:01.558) Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Lily Ray (17:02.453) That's just obvious. Like when you're looking at it, it's like, is that a really the best pair of pants to wear on that mountain? You know, it's like, yeah. So when you start to get to those, mildly deceptive patterns on the site, you have to go in there and really think to yourself, am I providing something that Google would really want to showcase in the top results? And then you have to go through all your content with a fine tooth comb and really start to make those changes. Jerrid Grimm (17:09.401) Right, is it just the highest commissionable amount? Yeah, yeah. Lily Ray (17:28.341) That's like the content side of there's so much other SEO stuff that we do from a technical perspective, a structural perspective, all of that. but you have to do all of that stuff and you have to do it in an aggressive way where a year from now, which is now when Google decides to change its systems, it can see that you've made a lot of progress and not every site could afford to do that. Jerrid Grimm (17:45.046) Yeah. Yeah. It's not just like, you're not just like adding meta tags to your images or whatever. Like it's, you're having to make some fundamental changes. It's actually a little bit counterintuitive because what you might end up looking at is your best performing pages are the ones that are causing this problem. Possibly, right? Like you might have some top performing and they have this huge drop off and it's pretty easy to identify them. Hey, and you know, October, November, we fell off a cliff with our best performing pages. wonder why that happened. No, our search traffic is gone. And you're right. There's like this, you know, not quite blind faith, but this, like you have to make these changes. might take in this case, like nearly a year, like the sites are sitting there for months with probably no drastic recovery or any recovery in a lot of cases. Yes. Can you imagine sitting while you can imagine this, but you're sitting there as like this review site that focuses on some niche things have been going amazing leading up until fall. Like you're having the best year ever. Lily Ray (18:31.593) No, they went down. They went down. Jerrid Grimm (18:44.012) falls off of a cliff, you're staffing up accordingly, you're like probably doing, you know, paid SEM as well, falls off a cliff and then you have to wait like nine months, make all these changes with almost no clear signal that you're doing the right thing. So how long that path? I'm curious, just you from like your team, account managing customers where you're making these changes, let's say up until January or February, and they're still seeing like virtually no positive results from it. Did you? Lily Ray (19:12.383) You're just, you're describing, you're describing my life for the past year. So first and foremost, this it's like a groundhog day for me and for a lot of people in the SEO space. in a way that's like, it's almost frustrating. And this is why I post as frequently as I do, because I've seen this before I've done this before I've lived this before I started my SEO career with the Google penguin update and. Jerrid Grimm (19:12.796) I guess that's why you say it's a hard, hard conversation. Lily Ray (19:41.599) The exact same thing happened. It was just links at that time. Everybody was buying links. That was a way to manipulate Google's algorithms. It was a blind spot for Google. Links mattered too much to Google and everybody found out reverse engineered it. And there was a whole other still is obviously, but there's a huge underbelly marketplace economy for link buying and selling. Right. At the time it was a hundred thousand times more effective than it is now and easier to do. So I had my first in -house SEO job and I just bought a bunch of links for them and they got penalized by Penguin. And it was the same thing. Like we went from having our best month ever to literally losing every single thing. And then I had to try to get back in Google's good graces. And it was the exact same story. It took one to two years for anybody to recover from Penguin. It took one to two years for anybody to recover from Panda. Medic update as well. Like we've all seen this over and over. Jerrid Grimm (20:16.769) Mmm. Lily Ray (20:38.545) helpful content sites that like I've talked to and I've worked with and everything for me, they feel like a whole new cast of characters that like weren't in the SEO conversation before that. But it was very, it was very frustrating, of course, to like, you know, number one, talk to these people on a personal level that are dealing with this because that's always devastating. Like a lot of them had no idea that they were going to end up in this situation, but to also tell them like, like I have a video of myself from like six months ago where I'm like, guys, it's going to take a year. and. Jerrid Grimm (20:46.7) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (21:05.557) Yeah. Lily Ray (21:08.075) People got really, really upset for the last few months. Hasn't happened yet. Like hasn't been a year, you know? Jerrid Grimm (21:14.892) Right, right. Yeah, yeah, we got a few months left here. How do you rank this update? You've been doing this for long enough and like you said, saw Penguin and Pound. You've seen all of these updates. Where does this one, this helpful content update specifically rank in your like biggest Armageddon moments of SEO, would you say? Lily Ray (21:18.134) Yeah. Lily Ray (21:36.501) Well, what's different about this one compared to Panda and Penguin is, at least from my perspective, Panda and Penguin, we knew those of us that were impacted by that. I mean, I was naive and it was the beginning of my career, so I didn't exactly know, but we knew we were playing with fire. And we were doing it very intentionally. I was buying links on blackhatworld .com. Like that's, yeah, that's the place that you go to violate Google's guidelines. Jerrid Grimm (21:55.542) Hmm. Jerrid Grimm (22:01.135) I just called Black Bat. Lily Ray (22:06.153) Right. So it's just a matter of time until you get caught, unless you're really clever. The sites that were impacted by the helpful content update. Sure. Many of them were playing with fire. Many of them were automating content creation in a way that was kind of lazy, you know, using AI to create 50 ,000 articles about celebrity net worth and not fact checking anything and having fake authors and stock photos and then putting ads everywhere. I'm sorry. That's lazy. It's like. That's not a site that should rank on Google over time. So those sites were affected. But there's a whole lot of other sites that weren't doing any of that. They were doing great quality content and they were making a living writing about gaming or about recipes or whatever. And they truly didn't know that what they were doing was going to get them in trouble with Google. And they actually thought what they were doing was working because it was working so well on Google. So that's frustrating because there's a really big disconnect between what those people knew. and how heavily they were hit with the penguin update. Yeah. If you're penalized and you're removed from Google, it's like, well, I shouldn't have been buying links with the helpful content update. A lot of these sites lost 95 % of their visibility for a year. That seems like Google. I I've said this many times. Google has heard me say it. They went way too far and way too many sites were affected. That shouldn't have been. Jerrid Grimm (23:29.418) Right. wasn't this super specific, like we've got some bad actors, we're going to close it down. These bad actors, it's such a broad update and it affected so many sites that there was going to be some like almost like collateral damage where it wasn't, it was people that were just, you know, trying to reach their audience. Probably maybe weren't even doing perfect SEO, like technically perfect SEO, but got affected by it. So what are like some specific things from a content perspective that you've seen? Lily Ray (23:43.617) Tons, yeah. Jerrid Grimm (23:58.56) that work because now we're in this August, you know, update that's happened and you have been posting about some recovery. First, first question is like, is this one or two out of a hundred sites that are recovering or do you see it as like, Hey, the trend has happened. These sites that have done some activities, positive activities are going to come back at some portion of it. And what did, what do you find that those sites did that was effective? Lily Ray (24:27.285) Yeah. So, I mean, anecdotally, like the ones that I've worked on in my team has worked on, most of the ones that we anticipated would see recover and have done a lot of hard work have started to recover and recover is a strong word because it's the first week they're starting to move up. It's nowhere near what they lost. I don't know if they'll ever get back to that point, but any positive direction after a year and the rate of positive growth that they're seeing is very encouraging. you know, There's a lot of other sites that I look at in my data that I'm not as familiar with that are seeing really extreme recoveries that I need to dig more into what happened there. It takes a while to like do some reverse engineering of what changed, like how did the site look last year? Like, you know, if you're not working on it, it's harder to understand what changed. I do also, you know, acknowledge and understand that there are a lot of sites that didn't do anything and they recovered, right? Jerrid Grimm (25:08.961) Yeah. Lily Ray (25:23.487) And people are freaking out about this, but I'm like, guys, it's the same exact thing that Google just did in the first place. When Google changes its algorithms, some people are going to move up. Some people are going to move down for random reasons because the algorithms changed. But I'm confident that like the ones that did a lot of hard work. That's why they're seeing improvements. mean, I'm seeing, I'm looking every day at the search console grass and they're going, yep, starting to go up. I'm just excited that whatever this classifier thing that. Jerrid Grimm (25:23.543) Hmm. Lily Ray (25:51.551) may or may not have been applied has been lifted so that these sites now have the opportunity to grow again. Jerrid Grimm (25:53.889) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (25:57.226) Yeah. And what are a couple of those hard things? You mentioned like it's hard work, it takes a long time, you might not see results. What are a couple of those things you find are most successful? Lily Ray (26:03.466) Yeah. Yeah, getting into the patterns of what got the site flagged in the first place. Most of these sites have aggressive patterns of mediocre to low quality content that was written for search, plus a combination of really aggressive ads and affiliate links, plus content that lacks firsthand experience or authenticity. Jerrid Grimm (26:31.926) Right. Lily Ray (26:33.801) If it feels like AI content, even if you wrote it, if it feels like AI content, that's not good. Jerrid Grimm (26:39.394) Right, right. If it's a summary of something that someone else did, or you can tell that you never tested the product yourself, right? Or it's, you know, a super light, here's, you know, 10 great headphones and it's like cursory information about the headphones. It makes sense. So in some cases, a site might actually reduce or intentionally de -index a bunch of their, like clean up and focus on maybe a lower Did you see that happening where people would reduce the quantity of content that they had and maybe focus on stuff that maybe was better for users or perform better in that way? Lily Ray (27:16.033) Yeah, I mean, it's, a controversial question in the SEO space and people have a lot of different opinions. My opinion is 100 % yes, that you should do that. but you have to do it in a data driven way. You have to look at the performance of pages and say, this whole block of pages is not doing anything for us. It's probably more of a liability than an asset and make decisions about how to manage those pages. And it's not, it's like, everyone's always asking me, could I just like delete all this stuff? like, nothing is ever simple. This is why you hire SEOs. We spend all day looking at the data and making decisions about this should redirect here. There should be no index. This should be removed. This should move here. Like that's the whole point of SEO. That's what we do. But the idea is to think about your site and the footprint of your site as what are the pages that are indexable, which means that I'm allowing search engines to crawl and index them. And how do those pages factor into the overall profile or assessment of my site? If you have. Jerrid Grimm (27:50.836) Right. Lily Ray (28:13.569) 80 % or 40 % of your indexable pages as like low quality, thin, spammy content. Maybe you don't even know it's there. That absolutely gets factored into search engines evaluation of your entire site. So when you can put your best foot forward and remove all the fluff stuff and just introduce the best stuff, that's the type of work that will absolutely help you to recover with future updates. Jerrid Grimm (28:26.646) Right. Jerrid Grimm (28:35.833) Hmm. Well, there's definitely like a halo effect, I guess that's happening, right? Like if the quality of your site and the content is all strong, like 95 % of it is great, then the whole site looks good. But you could have maybe 10 or 15 % that isn't good. And that's going to cloud Google's view of the entire site as well. That makes a ton of sense. But you're right. It's a very, like it feels very manual and specific to every site. Like it would be nice if you could just. Lily Ray (28:53.173) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (29:03.03) you know, hit the button and be like, make it work for the update, right? And then it just goes and changes all the tags and you're all good. Lily Ray (29:09.433) Yes, that's, that's what got us into this mess in the first place is every everybody is trying to automate SEO. That's honestly, I think one of the biggest culprits is that there's too many SEO tools telling people how to do SEO in a really automated way. And when, and then they go into their group, their whatever monetization Facebook group, where they're all sharing the same tools and saying, guys, I pressed this button and it made all these new pages. And everyone's like, I'm going to try that on my site. And Google's like, Jerrid Grimm (29:12.47) Yeah, right. Jerrid Grimm (29:22.806) Right. Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (29:37.843) Yeah. Lily Ray (29:38.539) Thank you for giving us a really obvious clue about who's automating their SEO, because it makes it easier to reverse engineer what they're doing. Jerrid Grimm (29:41.131) Right. Jerrid Grimm (29:45.15) Yeah, we can see that pattern very clearly across all these sites because you're right that people do tend to follow each other. Someone finds something good. Everyone just applies it, right? with this so like a lot of sites get You know this kind of like punitive They decline in traffic Did anyone or like what group of sites did you find had a positive? Maybe not even directly related but less competition, right? All of a sudden there's a bunch of sites that get deranked or their their ranking is lower Lily Ray (30:12.075) Mm Jerrid Grimm (30:13.758) something has to fill that void. Did you find that there was anything specific that filled this, you know, vacuum that was created after the helpful content update? Lily Ray (30:22.303) Yeah, a hundred percent. and it wasn't just the helpful content update. It's a variety of different Google updates. I've actually written about this a few times. the combined effect of what Google just did with various updates that maybe it's undoing a little bit right now with the current core update, but I would say broad strokes the last three years, sites that are focused sites that are middlemen, right? They have, affiliate content, recommendation, content review, content product reviews, this kind of thing. are all almost all losing visibility. I know that's a really big statement, but like, there's very few examples of affiliate sites that are doing better than they were two or three years ago. So that whole category has lost a lot of visibility. of course there's exceptions, but this is like, generally speaking, Reddit is by far the biggest winner by far. Like, I mean, it's, it's hard to wrap your head around their growth. Jerrid Grimm (30:55.425) Hmm. Lily Ray (31:20.641) I use a tool called Cystrix every day to look at website visibility on Google. Reddit was number 78 last year in terms of footprint, biggest organic footprint on Google US. They're number three right now. They moved from seven a few months ago to three right now. So I think it's Wikipedia, Amazon, Reddit. The amount that Reddit has absorbed, mean, Reddit's absorbed every, like all the losses of every type of category. Jerrid Grimm (31:20.791) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (31:35.938) Wow. Jerrid Grimm (31:47.074) Yeah, and this isn't a new site. It's not like Reddit is a new site and moved up the rankings from like zero to hero, right? There's a site that's been around for a long time. That is a huge. Have you ever seen a site move from like 78 to three in that period of time in your career? Yeah. Lily Ray (32:01.129) It's unprecedented as far as Cistrix measurement goes, which is, I'm a big fan of Cistrix. am time and time again, it tends to be the case that their data is pretty spot on. They, talked to them. They said, this is completely unprecedented. There's never been any growth this big in this short timeframe. Yeah. And e -commerce is the other big winner. So, you know, if, the last year, if you typed best running shoes, Jerrid Grimm (32:20.672) Hmm. Crazy. Lily Ray (32:31.169) or best running shoes for flat feet or even running shoes, you might've seen 50 to 70 % of the first page is review sites and affiliate sites. This year, you probably see two or three affiliate sites and a lot more e -commerce. And then you're going to see Reddit, maybe Quora, and maybe one other forum, social media. Jerrid Grimm (32:54.09) Right. You're going to have this kind of, yeah, you're going to have a mix of a lot of different things. Whereas before it was mainly, mainly review sites. I'm curious, let's say you had to, so I'm going to put you in a spot here where you have to create an affiliate, like a review site. That's it. You have no choice. You have to create one. What would you do today starting from scratch? What would be the viewpoint you would take on it? Lily Ray (33:00.479) Yeah. Lily Ray (33:16.001) Yeah. Yeah. I like that question. And I think about it a lot because I don't think it's impossible. You know, it's, definitely like a little bleak right now, but I don't think it's impossible. And I think it's exciting to think about what, does the opportunity actually live? Cause I think there still is plenty. it's just that it's not, it's not going to be the type of thing where you follow a blueprint laid out by all the other affiliates as far as like, do these 20 things and you'll succeed in Google search. It's not the way of thinking about it anymore. Now it's like, I mean, first of all, you have to start the affiliate brand or company or site based on something you're actually passionate about. just, I don't think it's going to work otherwise. but then after that, it's like, you're building a personal brand. That's, that's the number one goal here. I think that that's the direction that SEO is going. It's like, who is this person? Like the points guy or like someone else who is a known face of the business and how. How many signals does Google and the other search engines have that this is a real person that's really enthusiastic about this thing? know, using myself and SEO as an example, like that's such an obvious entity in Google's knowledge graph that it's like, she writes about SEO. She has been mentioned on all these places. She has all these social accounts. So you have to, you have to like build a brand where you are, that's the TikTok aspect of their business. That's the YouTube aspect of their business. Jerrid Grimm (34:20.544) Mm. Yeah. Lily Ray (34:44.385) These are the videos that they make. These are the pictures that they have, like filling in all the gaps where it's not just, these are the 50 things I'm going to write for Google this month, you know, and more robust, high quality reviews with a lot more evidence of firsthand experience. Jerrid Grimm (34:59.85) It's so clear that it always comes back to this general idea where you just have to create good content that you're interested in and other people are interested in. That is the core of it. And then things get abstracted and abstracted to like, this is the way that you have to set up tags and this is the way that you have to create your content and this is how many words. And a lot of it is guesswork because Google doesn't say, here's exactly how to build a site. They give these broad strokes of this is how it should feel, right? And you should kind of have to guess, but there's not that much guesswork. And if you just create some really good stuff and people are really into it and they're sharing it everywhere, that's always kind of what it comes down to. But I think having someone that lives and breathes the technical side of it, the way that like you do and other SEO experts makes a huge difference because otherwise you are a lot more blind to it because there are technical things that you can do. So if people, mean, I've been following you for a while. I know some other people that follow you, you post almost Lily Ray (35:34.262) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (35:55.34) daily updates on LinkedIn is where I follow you. Where would you recommend people follow you to see what you're thinking about and what you're seeing every day? Where are the best places to find you? Lily Ray (36:07.263) Yeah, so for anybody who's still on Twitter X, that's where I post not only daily, but hourly. Every time I'm working on literally anything or looking at literally anything, if I see something interesting, I share it on X. I've been doing that for a while. I know a lot of people don't use that platform. So LinkedIn is where I go to take what I just figured out and make a more coherent post about it when it's important. Jerrid Grimm (36:15.489) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (36:33.921) Yeah. Lily Ray (36:35.179) So yeah, I try to post on LinkedIn almost daily when I can. I intend to do more videos. They're kind of a pain, as you probably know, but there's also lot of podcasts and recordings and interviews and stuff that I've done as well. So you can just kind of Google my name and see what comes up. Jerrid Grimm (36:52.886) Yeah. When are you going to have like the SEO tick tock? You know, I've, I follow a couple people that have like these super niches they're in deep finance or whatever. Whereas like you think of tick tock is this like broad consumer. I'm curious if you've thought about that, just being also like a very creative person with like music, there's tons of video and stuff that fall on that side. have you thought of doing that of becoming almost like a consumer facing person? Lily Ray (37:10.314) Yeah. Lily Ray (37:18.401) I think about it every day. mean, if I could clone myself, I would be doing YouTube and TikTok videos daily. And there are some SEOs who managed to somehow do that, props to them. They've figured it out. I just can't do it. I mean, right now I'm working on multiple audits at the same time. have, I have a team. have 30 people that I'm helping oversee. I have hundreds of clients that I'm working on. It's just, there's not enough hours in the day, but I would like to, I would like to do more. And I know it's becoming easier now to like. Jerrid Grimm (37:27.19) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (37:33.345) Yeah. Jerrid Grimm (37:37.957) Thank Lily Ray (37:45.867) take a video and splice it up for TikTok pretty easily. So it's my intention. I just need to find more time. Jerrid Grimm (37:51.884) We're not that far from you just doing like an AI clone of yourself and then just letting that thing do it for a little while. too. Well, for now we'll put, we'll put your LinkedIn and your X handles in the, in the show notes here, but thank you so much for coming on the show. This was super insightful for me. think our audience of publishers, I mean, the podcast is called the publishers playbook. think you've given some great tips and also this idea that sometimes patients, right? Like you need to make these changes. Lily Ray (37:56.063) That would be nice. I'm looking forward to it. Jerrid Grimm (38:21.452) Things don't change overnight. And you just gotta like stay the path, right? So appreciate you being on the show and pretty sure we'll make sure everyone's following your daily or hourly updates. All right, thanks Lily. Lily Ray (38:27.337) Yeah. Anytime. was a lot of fun. Lily Ray (38:34.162) Awesome. Thanks for having me.