Decoding Search Patterns with Dr. Pete Meyers

In This Episode

• [02:28] – Dr. Pete Meyers reflects on his extensive history with Moz, starting in 2007. He recounts how his coding and research psychology background has been instrumental in his role at Moz.
• [10:52] – Dr. Pete emphasizes the value of brand authority and how Google judges content quality by niche, revealing insights about Google’s future updates.
• [12:59] – Dr. Pete provides examples of brands that have successfully built their brand authority through targeted content and product-specific brands.
• [19:04] – Dr. Pete explores the impact of AI and large language models (LLMs) on SEO.
• [24:05] – Dr. Pete examines how major world events like COVID-19 can impact search behavior more than algorithm updates.
• [31:29] – Dr. Pete delves into the recent Google updates and the challenges of balancing site reputation and abuse with maintaining quality search results.
• [47:36] – Dr. Pete underscores the role of link building in driving traffic and the interconnectedness of the web.
• [49:58] – Dr. Pete shares his final thoughts on the importance of being a searcher and understanding the needs and behaviors of customers.

Jump to Links and Resources

Dr. Pete, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Yeah, it’s good to see you again. Nice to be here. 

Yeah. So you’ve been at Moz for many, many years. I think you’ve been there since it was called SEOMoz, right?

I was involved with the community in 2007, I think, and then was a part-time and full-time contractor and then an employee. And so it’s hard to link in. Yeah, more than 15 years in one way, shape or form, that’s amazing. 

So, how did you meet Rand? Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz.

I believe I saw him at SES Chicago in 2006. I had a client who looked like I had dabbled in the late 90s. I was at a startup, and some clients were, “Why aren’t we ranking on this or that?” I think it was Yahoo and Northern Light at the time the clients were complaining about, and we kind of went into the app mode, and I got out of the business a little bit. And then I had a client around 2006 say, “Hey, we want to spend more time on this, and there’s a conference in Chicago, we’ll send you.” And I ran there, and I think I saw some of the folks who used to be at creating peace, Kim Krause Berg, and some of those folks, you know, been around a long time, kind of was impressed by how much it changed in those six, seven years, how much more sort of user-friendly things have become, some of the gamification. 

In the late 90s, keyword stuffing and day-to-day tweaking were used to see what they had changed that week. And things had changed a lot. And, you know, it kind of changed my attitude, and I got back involved again. 

So, yeah, I remember those days, WebPosition Gold.

Yeah.

Separate, different search engines for which to optimize.

Becoming a stronger brand isn’t about SEO hacks. It’s about being known for building topical authority, staying in your lane, and being memorable. Share on X

Yeah.

This is the Wild West. 

Yeah.

So how did you end up becoming this amazing researcher and creating all these data-driven studies and everything that’s an area of specialty? It seems like for you, and that’s not common in the SEO industry, a lot of people are just optimizing on-page elements, or they’re doing more technical things, they’re going through and doing audits and things like that. But you have a real specialty. Do you want to talk a bit about that? 

I think my background is that I was a coder since about age nine or 10, at a TRS-80 Color Computer. I think it was my first intro. Then, I took an interest in psychology in college. And my PhD is technically in human experimental psychology but essentially in research psychology. So, I have a research science background. I also worked in the medical school a bit back then, doing some medical research. So it’s always been there for me.

When I left grad school and finished, I went to work for a brand new startup, the usual mid-90s ISP, ASP story, you know, trying to do everything. But when I got back into SEO and was writing again, and was kind of figuring things out and starting over, it was a good time to bring that back to bear. And that was always something. Discovery is always something. I enjoyed tracking things in a new way, measuring things in a new way.

So I MozCast originally, when we were playing around with that idea, it was just this concept of Google telling us. And at the time we were tracking maybe a dozen algorithm changes a year or 10, whatever we would name, which was a handful, and then I think it was this long version of the story, but Eric Schmidt testified to Congress and said there were something like 600 changes that year. And I kind of went, what? How come we’ve named eight, and there are 600? What’s happening? And, you know, we built this prototype for about 100 keywords, and Penguin hit, and we saw it happen in real-time. And that kind of thing is really fascinating to me.

And so I was able to bring that back into bear and bring that spirit of experimentation in. And it’s been rewarding to me to see that the industry has not only embraced my work in that sense but really has dabbled and learned to do that better and matured and become better with experimentation and understanding the difference between gyno research and anecdote. 

Now, we see these really big data-driven studies and people looking at millions of keywords. And so, yeah, that’s been a cool evolution, but that was kind of always a fit to my background and my personality, and I was glad to be able to find an audience for that, to be sure.

What study that you did or spearheaded is the one you’re most proud of? 

Oh, that’s tough. Some don’t get much attention, and some have probably flopped in terms of audience. I was looking a while back at the pattern of how Google applies changes because we tend to look at the daily changes, you know, the updates, and the patterns in which they happen. I heard all these resources about Google having these meetings roughly every two weeks back then. And obviously, they’re not changing things every day, every hour. They go on vacation and have weekends and other things. 

So there was this talk about, well, like every couple of weeks, they have this meeting, they all sit down, they figure out what’s going to get patched, what’s going to get rolled out, and did some work around trying to find that that pattern was there. We found that a bi-weekly pattern was occurring at the time. So sometimes it’s just in the weeds, nerdy stuff like that that I enjoy. But then we have to figure out whether people get that. Is that actionable? Is that important? 

Recently, I’ve been behind a lot of the work with Moz on brand authority, and that’s been fun for me because, truthfully, that was one of those really simple prototype concepts. And the concept was sort of, “Hey if we are pretty good at looking at brand signals on a server, understanding what is a branded search, which goes well beyond just the name of a company, or can be products and services, it can be all kinds of things. And if we’re good at search volume and understanding that, what happens if we put that together?” And, you know, that was like the core brand authority was a really, it wasn’t some fancy machine learning model, and we weren’t using LLMs and all these things, and nothing against any of that. 

But we had this kind of simple concept: if we could understand the brand volume and search for any domain, what does that tell us? And you know, that’s turned out to be funny because sometimes I get into these things that we can measure, launch and play with, and then we go, I don’t know what to do with this. Like, I don’t know what this is for yet. I don’t know how to act on this. You can tell people to be a bigger brand. Okay, yeah, sure. That’s good advice. How do I do that? And so it’s launched this whole journey of trying to understand how brands change, how they evolve, how we see keywords. 

It was really fascinating to me when OpenAI launched, my SEO mindset, still of so-called, like head keywords, these things I want to compete for, that get millions of visits, whatever they are, you know, maybe it’s AI or chatbot. Then I started to dig into OpenAI, and terms like ChatGPT dwarfed any head term they ranked for. They had essentially created traffic out of nothing and were instantly ranking number one for and were instantly in that branded click-through space, which is, you know, double roughly at number one what standard keywords are. 

And so just to see that, we need to rethink what a brand is and what its impact is. There are some recent studies that SparkToro and Ahrefs followed up on, looking at the volume of branded searches compared to all other searches, and it’s nearly 50%. It’s just a massive piece of people going to Google to look for something specific. 

This idea that search starts by search starts in the mind of the person who comes to that box and what they’ve already heard about, what they’re already looking for, what their friends have already told them about, what they’ve seen in an ad or seen on the shelf or seen driving around their neighborhood, no matter what it is. And so that’s been a really interesting journey for me. It was a simple metric at first, but it is a little more complex now. Can spin out these explorations of things we’ve never really looked at. And so that’s fun for me. Sometimes, I gotta bring it back down to Earth for sure. 

So, domain authority is that DA score was one of the many things that put Moz on the map of brand authority. Do you see that being similarly important, or is it just another metric to track?

I think it reflects where Google is headed for us. And I won’t say that links have gone away by any stretch, but as they migrate towards this idea of entities, of brands, of these things that we know exist in the world, and the power and relationship that those things have, and away from the link graph that we’re trying to track, that migration with it, and I think now with the LLM space, it’s probably even more important when we look at what an LLM is, you know, it’s essentially a collection of everything people have written about, you know, everything people have talked about. What do people write and talk about? They write and talk about brands, and they write and talk about entities. 

That’s the direction we’re moving, and it’s meant to reflect that. And that duality is still there in search. I think links are still incredibly important. I think domain authority, current domain authority, not the original, reflects sort of the ranking power of a site, which is a little broader than links. Still, I think there is a duality and a balance there that we’re trying to measure. And it’s interesting. 

And we saw last year that the site’s reputation for using updated brands goes too far. Sometimes, right? You know, sometimes people capitalize on brand and authority in abusive ways or maybe just push the envelope. And that’s what we do. We push the envelope a little bit. And so Google’s always trying to balance that thing that, hey, you know what? Brands exist in the real world and are incredibly important to people, right or wrong. There is a lot of money behind that and other forces, but you can’t just ignore that. 

So how do we balance that against these other factors, ensuring that there’s diversity in search and that good content that may be written by a small brand or someone you haven’t heard of can surface? And so yeah, I think it’s looking at that journey down a couple of years from now and trying to figure out where we’ll be and how that helps our customers now, which is also a challenge and important to us.

So, what are some actionable things for somebody who discovers by using the Moz tool that their brand authority score is pretty low? 

Building a brand is not a technical SEO trick.

That’s where it gets hard because building a brand is not a technical SEO trick, or I think it is, in some sense, an appeal to a mindset of broader marketing getting away from hyper-targeting on SEO, especially as content marketers. You know we’re seeing that now. We’re seeing sites that have kind of tried to push their domain authority too hard and push that link profile too hard and go; we’re going to write about everything and anything, you know, we’re going to get out of our expertise. This all ties to that kind of E-80 concept, right? 

I think building some of that, not relying on the tips and tricks, but building your topical authority by being known for something that’s broader than SEO and still a fundamental aspect of marketing. What I’d say to many smaller brands is that you’re not competing like anything. If you have a corner restaurant, you’re not competing against every restaurant in the world. You’re not competing against every brand in the world, per se. 

So, there are still niches to target. There are still ways you can be known in a smaller space. I think it’s really interesting that some brands have done a great job, and now they’re very large. But Nvidia is a great example. They’ve done a great job of branding their chips. People don’t look for graphics chips or, you know, graphics. They’re searching for very specific chips and cards and getting to know them as individual brands. 

Beyond the company itself, I started to see companies getting smart by sort of piggybacking that brand into product or service-specific brands. And even from a content standpoint, I think Apple had it. Its site has a great section for people looking to switch from PCs. And I’m a Windows guy; for the most part, I have iPads, which is a weird mix, but I have Android, Windows iPads, so we get confused. 

But I think it’s interesting that they’ve seen people saying, “Hey, what’s Apple all about? Or I’m having trouble with Windows.” And so they’ve kind of targeted that top-of-funnel content and almost made it a branded thing that your Apple is giving you those answers, right, and it’s not coming from a generic site. And then, hey, what happens next? What am I going to buy? Or who am I going to trust them? 

It all ties into that authority and trust aspect that I think we can all start building, and it is important in the world, right, too. It’s important to people, it’s important to customers, and so it’s a good thing to build towards. It doesn’t mean we need to be OpenAI; we need to be an Apple. That’s not going to happen. That’s okay, but we can start.

Yeah, what about personal brand authority? Let’s take you as an example. You see, you’re out in the SEO world as Dr. Pete, and people know you as Dr. Pete, so you have a personal brand website and so forth. How are you building that brand authority, personally? 

Yes. So, first of all, don’t go to my personal site. Like many people, it’s been neglected for far too long. There’s some clear dumb luck involved in that. I’ll be totally honest. It was funny. When I was at my own company, there weren’t a lot of people in the industry. I was in with PhDs, and people would see it. I don’t make a big issue out of it. I was never much for academic snobbery. Honestly, it’s probably part of what got me out of academia, but it was on my card. 

I had clients who just started calling me Dr. Pete, which became second nature for me. And yeah, adapting was probably one of the smartest things I’ve ever done because that certainly helped. And my name is fairly generic, so it’s always good to stand out a bit. 

When one signal—like link gets too far ahead of the others, it’s a red flag. Real brands build everything in sync: mentions, traffic, links, search volume. When those are out of balance, Google notices. Share on X

I am not someone who likes to focus on one thing. And so I think an important lesson for me with personal branding was to maybe not restrict myself to one topic area but to start to at least develop from a core of a certain kind of SEO research, things like SERP tracking, back in the days tracking sort of features when they rolled out some of the stuff other folks, like Barry Schwartz have done for years, but to try and kind of build into that niche, that was something I sort of resisted. My interests are all over the place. 

In a sense, niching was a really important part of building that personal brand. I think I was lucky in a sense, too. That Moz community was when we had community posts, and the blog comments were active, which is a whole different world. Unfortunately, forums and blog comments are quality issues that really sprung up, and spam really sprung up. 

But back then, a lot of those folks who were just starting out around the same time are now the owners of agencies and, you know, SEO tools, and have gone on to do a lot of things, and to be able to kind of be a part of that network early on; I was really lucky. And I say that to kind of younger SEOs, sometimes people who I think, on social media, we tend to try and follow the influencers and get their attention.

And for me, I was so lucky to be with a cohort of people who were also starting out, who have now achieved things, and to be friends with the influencers because I was there with them when they weren’t influencers. And I see that, it’s something I kind of want to say to the younger folks in SEO, those people that you’re with now that are just starting, that are just building their own shops or independent consultants, they’re going to be the influencers in 10 years. 

Those who are just beginning to build their own businesses or step into independent consulting are the next generation of influencers.

So instead of chasing the rest of us as we I’m 55 this year, going 54 going on 55, we won’t be at this forever. Still, the folks who are just starting out now will be the next generation of influencers, agency owners, startup people, and the ones making things happen. So let’s be a part of that. That’s exciting. 

Yeah, it is exciting. Also, there are a lot of naysayers out there who say SEO is finally for real, gonna die now. What do you say to them? 

I take a broad view. If you look at the entire world of things that need to be found and people who need to find them, then there will always be search engines in some way, shape or form. As long as there are search engines, there will always be some way to do better on them and optimize for them. And I think that can be a symbiotic thing. 

Those engines need us to craft useful information and present it so they can ingest it. And all these things, I think, with the LLM aspect and with Gemini and so on Google’s doing, there’s maybe legitimate questions of not only who owns content and how we define plagiarism and things like that, but of what’s in it? For me, what’s the balance between Google’s revenue and webmasters? What if I’m not getting traffic anymore? 

I think those are all legitimate questions that impact the future of SEO as we do it now. But if SEO. It is just helping people find the things they want to find. We’re always going to need that. As information continues to grow, and for me, the scope of information in the world is not going to get less; it’s not going to decelerate. So, there will always be a need to manage that information and figure out how to find things within that space, which is not to say that our jobs will not change. To be sure,

In this fast-changing world of AI and SEO and so forth, maybe having a big textbook on SEO isn’t the smartest thing now.

Well, I still appreciate that you’ve written it and kept it up to date. I think sometimes we make fun of certain SEO classes and things. I think they’re getting a lot better, and people go, Oh, that moves so fast, but there is still a core of information that people will always need. 

It’s fun for me because I have met people with Moz. I met a journalism professor on a plane in Chicago who had just read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO. We just got chatting yesterday about who I worked for. I worked for Moz. Oh, my God. I just read that there is no association with SEO whatsoever. We were in Seattle. We weren’t leaving Mozcon. 

It’s interesting to me that I think we sometimes undervalue the things that reach the world outside of SEO and those core resources and some of that, if I look at things like the beginner’s guide, that’s such a fundamental part of building Moz and outreach to the rest of the world who doesn’t know what we do, or doesn’t even really know what Google is all about, doesn’t know the difference between a browser and a search engine. Sometimes, we provide tech support for our families and things like that. 

So I think sometimes we take that really narrow view of the latest and greatest, and the rest of the world needs to know what this is all about, communicate with them, and have these resources. So I think there’s still a lot of value in that. Yeah, I still read books. I still reboot it every day, 

It is a big investment in time for each edition. So we’re on the fourth edition now, and it was like two years each go around. It’s crazy.

Yeah, I even updated some blog posts. I’m working on my annual. We did the 10-year Google History last year based on the kind of warming graph of the search, search, heating up and all these things, which is a big project every time this year. I’m like, “Well, we do 11 years. Do we stop at 10?” And the team was like, “No, no, we really need to do it, update it every year and do the 11 years.” Like, “Okay, it’s close to my heart.” And then, yet I remember all the work it took last time, and I go, “All right, let’s get to work. Let’s get it done because people still value it.”

So what would be actionable out of a big report like that? 

I think that’s a little different kind of animal. I think what’s interesting about that 10-year chart we did is the temperature of Google algorithm churn. It’s just that we understand it has heated up, right? There is more. I did a content churn analysis recently. More content is being produced. There is more overturn in SERPs. There is more need for freshness, even outside of news. So I think sometimes it’s just good to see that big picture. 

I think people always say, “Well, we can’t worry about what the algorithm does every day.” But what was funny to me when I launched MozCast? For the past decade, people have told me it’s good to know I’m not crazy. It’s good to know it’s not just me. 

But these things are happening across SERPs; those things are happening across Google. I also want to know when it is something I did and when it’s not, or maybe it’s something beyond my control. Even that’s okay, but I just want to be aware that this is happening out there. I think it’s been really interesting to look at that historical scope of 10 or 11 years and start to see the things that impact searches that are not Google algorithm updates.

So COVID being a great example, there’s massive search churn in the few months after COVID because of our way of interacting with the world, and I’m not talking about, in this sense, the virus itself, but when we were locked down when we were changing how we interacted.

As long as there are search engines, there will always be some way to optimize for them.

The sudden shift to e-commerce, and not just a shift, but a shift to very different things, like whether something was in stock, whether we could do curbside pickup, dramatically changed search results because the behavior of the entire world changed within the space of a few weeks, and Google also had to immediately react to that and change how they surface things and change what they valued. 

So, it was interesting to see that there was certainly an algorithmic aspect in play. Google had to do a lot of work, coding, and reaction, but search results changed because the whole world suddenly changed. And so it’s really interesting to me to look at some of those patterns from the time I looked at them. This is Sociology, too. You know, this is the world’s total, and our behavior, knowledge, and shifts change the web every day. That’s not just the algorithm. 

As you start to track keywords over time, and you know, you think about daily or weekly rankings or whatever it is, yeah, from an SEO perspective, I don’t have to know what’s happening every five minutes. But rankings will change every time you reload if you start to dig into some of these keywords and realize where they change. Yeah, this is real. I don’t think we always appreciate what real-time phenomena search rankings really are. There’s not some database we know that. We know that some databases do not say this is one, this is two, this is three. That’s how it’s going to be for all of January. But I don’t think we always grasp how real-time it really is. 

Do you know how much this thing is being delivered on the fly with massive resources and processing power based on what’s happened in the last five minutes and what’s been published in the last? Sometimes, when that’s relevant, we get it in the back of our heads, but I don’t think you really get it until you watch it every day for a decade. 

So, it’s changed my perspective in a lot of ways, and I think that has a ton of value. I don’t think you look at a 10-year history and go, this is what I do this week for SEO. That’s not the goal, but I think perspective is important. 

Yeah, I agree. I agree. Do you think Google’s search result quality has decreased in recent years? Some SEOs have been quite vocal about that, like Lily Ray. Do you see it as a downward, maybe not spiral, but a trend? 

Yeah, I have mixed feelings. Yes, in some ways, I think it’s hard to separate. I think the quality of the web overall has gone down. Yeah, there has been kind of a content arms race, and that content arms race has degraded the overall, the average quality of content, I would say, Yeah. 

Well, we’ve been inundated with AI-generated content. In one study, I read that 57% of the internet is AI-generated; much of it was just translation. 

Wow, I think that meant Google has had to react faster. And reacting faster isn’t a great thing. Sometimes, you know, it’s led to a more reactionary stance, and that can harm things. It was interesting when I studied even the first Penguin update to see that when you have an actual penalty, like a punitive action saying we’re going to hit these sites for doing a thing we think is bad. Often, what’s underneath those sites is also bad. 

Search results changed because the whole world suddenly changed.

Now, it may be bad for different reasons, but they often knock out the sites doing bad things. The sites underneath them weren’t great either, and that conduct quality. And so I think sometimes when Google has to do this kind of reactionary stuff, it doesn’t go great. 

I do worry the rush to LLMs naturally captured people’s imagination. I get that they did for me in a lot of ways as well. But when Google saw what an opening I was doing and decided we had to accelerate all our plans, even though it was pretty clear Google didn’t want to do that. 

And they weren’t ready to worry about it.

They weren’t, and I don’t think there’s much to search for that isn’t handled by LLMs. You know, it’s great at natural language and aggregation. There are so many aspects of search that Google does well that aren’t reflected in that. So I worry about that; it’s gone too far and fast. 

It has the appearance of validity. And more and more, I see things where I go, “Oh, hey, it gave me an answer.” Then I realized it gave me the answer I thought I wanted, which is turning out to be quite in sync with reality. And even little things I’m doing, some painting around the house, some touch-ups. And, anybody who used to touch paint in my house. It is metal, but with 2000 or so touch-up paintings on 20-year-old walls, you’re never happy, and it never is what you wanted to be. And you’re always like, “Oh, what can I do? What’s the trick?” I’ve been asking Google some very specific questions, and it’s very encouraging, like ChatGPT, about where they’ll go, “Oh, yeah, just do this and this and this thing. Oh, hold on. I know where that’s gonna go,” but that was the aggregate of all the knowledge I found with what I thought I wanted to hear. And that’s scary, and that’s a little dangerous. 

I think Google certainly has one of my concerns with mobile; when Google started to see that mobile was hurting their ad revenue, they started to go mobile first. And I get that, and I think that makes sense. And certainly, we’re on a much more diverse set of devices, all of us, even at my age, than we used to be.

Rankings will change every time you reload—I don’t think we grasp how real-time it is.

We’re not doing everything from the desktop PC, but when it started to become about those metrics and revenue that don’t always align with quality, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It was really interesting to me to track some things, and with MozCast, when I could still Google reps, they would still talk to me now and then about some of the insights. 

Some of them still talk to me but are talking about getting data from us. And I was really surprised you didn’t measure that. And the answer was, more or less, well, that’s not a metric we value. It’s not that we can’t. We certainly could measure that, but that does not move the needle for us. 

And so understanding how Google views quality, which isn’t purely financial but certainly has a very heavy financial aspect and a very heavy connection to the ad ecosystem, which is not to say that rankings are driven by ad spending, but just to say that Google’s view of success is naturally flavored by the ad ecosystem that they don’t measure things the same way we do. They don’t view quality quite the same way we do. Accepting that is an important part of the journey. It’s hard to say right or wrong on some of that, but there are certainly incentives on Google’s side that don’t always align with maximizing the quality of the results. 

The downside potential is so much greater when discussing YMYL categorizes Your Money or Your Life. Yeah, touch-up painting, that’s one thing, but right surgery and chronic diseases and investment advice and so forth, where it’s just giving you an answer it thinks you’re going to want to hear. That’s dangerous.

I really thought they would stay out of those spaces with Gemini, but they have not, and that is a little scary, considering how much you’re relying on LLMs for some of that information. That really worries me, and that’s hard, too, because that’s a very profitable content space for our full disclosures; Ziff Davis, we have Everyday Health, and we have brands in that space that try and do good work, but that’s an extremely competitive and lucrative space. So yeah, there’s a lot of pressure there, and a lot of, unfortunately, Grifts and outright scams, and a lot of money there, too. 

So yeah, the pressures sound better and are scary, but I thought they would steer clear of it for quite a while. And it is amazing how many healthcare and finance queries you will get AI results for. And some of them are fine, but like you say, if I mix the paint wrong, I just have to start over unless I poison myself or something, I guess. But yeah, you get bad medical advice or bad financial advice, and that’s a whole different world. 

Yeah, interesting times. What do you think about last month’s Google updates? Was that kind of reactionary, trying to fix something and then breaking it even more? Or do you see that as a net positive move? 

I felt like we are obviously in the content space and pretty sensitive to the site reputation update stuff, sort of the back and forth. So it’s been hard to separate the site, reputation, abuse, and manual actions from some of the other updates they’ve done; it does feel like some of that was personal. When Forbes, I think it was, kind of got called out again, Google felt like they had to take action. 

And, you know, I think people have been in the space a long time like us know that sometimes Google takes Google as people, and Google takes things personally, and sometimes they do these things that are kind of like, “Okay, you’ve pushed too hard, too far,” and there’s kind of a backlash. I felt that was really broad. I feel like the communications have been really poor. It’s been justified. That kind of post is justified. Instead of saying, “Hey, you know what? This went too far. And we cracked down on these brands trying to say what they did, almost in an algorithmic sense.” I don’t think that’s quite sincere. 

I think they’re trying to post hoc justify what they did and then sort of craft the algorithm around it and adjust it around those statements. And so there’s a weird PR aspect of that; I think it went a little too fast, and they will have to rebalance. On the other hand, I also think there are brands that have benefited from low-quality practices for a long time and made their own money. And so it’s a little disingenuous to crack crocodile tears when you’ve made millions of dollars for years doing these things and, like, Hey, you might have to regroup. 

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But I do know good brands who are genuinely kind of worried about overreacting and maybe going in bad directions because now they’re so fearful of things being shut down overnight. I do think Google has a virtual monopoly in the US. I know legally. Well, I guess legally now, they essentially have called it a monopoly with the hearings last year, and that’ll probably get rewritten under a new administration. But yeah, it’s not great for anyone. The power Google has over our sites is massive, and LLMs are shaking that up in ways that maybe are good and maybe are bad, but I don’t know that they always wield that responsibility, and I don’t know that anyone can at that dollar value. 

So it would be nice to see us using more than one search engine again one of these days. That would be good for everyone, but it’s hard to see how someone breaks into that space easily. In 2025, the spending involved and the infrastructure will be, we don’t think about what it means to build a data center. You know, these cities that Google has built with their power plants and their water supplies, and how someone breaks into that, it’s, I don’t know. 

Yeah, it’s crazy. So, the industries you think might be most in Google’s crosshairs would be what affiliates? What do you think of law firms? What do you think about e-commerce? What sort of industries should be really worried about this?

I’ve seen content brands across multiple industries who are concerned just because they feel like, “Hey, we’ve tried to branch out a little bit. We aren’t necessarily in a tightly, super-constrained topic area. And should we be worried about that?” And I worry about Google’s messaging basically saying “Well, you shouldn’t be using freelancers. You shouldn’t be using outside writers.” Well, I feel like a writer. I know a lot of writers; they have a rough time as it is. 

Rankings don’t move overnight—it’s not that simple, and it’s not that fast.

We’re basically saying, “Don’t hire anybody outside your company? Well, why? What’s wrong with that?” Inherently, if the quality is good, I’m worried across the board. I have always worried about spaces where Google could get into itself. You know, that’s always been hard to travel. That’s been hard for credit cards. Lyrics, obviously, are a great example. Anytime Google could wake up the next day and just take over that space is scary. 

I think there’s still a certain symbiosis with local businesses and with things that drive ad revenue that Google, there’s a push and pull. They pushed hard into automotive, for example, and then car sales. I think they got a heavy amount of pushback because you’ve got all these not just big brands, but all these local dealerships and people trying to sell cars and going, “Hey, that’s not for you to step in and be the front plate of all of that or be the aggregator of all of that. That’s our world.” So there’s been push and pull, which is good. 

I think there are other times when it’s okay, and it’s always hard for me, you know, I look at local SEO sometimes, and people get upset because their website’s been pushed down. Right now, it used to be that local pack, you go right to the website, and now the local pack goes to the map pack, and the map pack might go to the website, and you’re kind of three stages down, and I look at it and go, I get it. As marketers, that’s scary. 

But if I’m a local restaurant, and like me, so often I’m in my car with my phone looking for something near where I am, I don’t care if I go to your website, and you shouldn’t care either. You should care that I know what you serve when you’re open. I see your ratings, I see your address, and I go to your restaurant; that’s the mark of success, right? Not whether I view the pictures of your dog on the website or read the PDF of your menu. That’s 9,000k, not to be a little dismissive or rude, but I do think there’s a point where sometimes we go, okay, the end goals are still aligned, right? I still want people to know when I’m open and where I’m at and to walk into my store. And if Google is serving that, it’s okay to evolve. 

But if Google starts to take over spaces and give nothing back, am I really upset about the lyrics? Well, let’s say some of those sites weren’t the greatest in the world, but do travel agencies all deserve to stop doing business because Google can aggregate all that data? Well, who’d they get that data from? Same with LLMs, right? That’s our stuff you’re using to make money, and we have to figure out how that works in our economic system. What do we get back? And I do think the balance with the webmasters has shifted. We’re not getting as much back as we used to. We’re still giving everything away, and I don’t think that can last. I think there’s a revolution of swords brewing there, and I worry about that for anyone in the content space regardless of industry.

It doesn’t feel like Google really values the websites. It’s really the advertisers. And if somebody is not advertising but has a website that relies on Google for their lead flow or e-commerce, then there’s really no loyalty or much interest from Google’s perspective; maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my feeling.

I think, at best, there’s an abstraction over time that as you separate, as the engine separates, from the content of not appreciating how you got there. It’s like the housing crisis, mortgage-backed equities. We went from individual homes to being able to buy a financial vehicle that represented 1000s of homes, and at some point, there’s an abstraction that’s too much, right, that separates us. Yeah, I think there’s a lack of appreciation for what you built this on. 

And it’s true with LLMs, too, like, “whose content did you build this on?” Whether or not you’re plagiarizing, quoting it, or stealing it is a complicated question, but at the end of the day, you still built your empire on our land. And what is the obligation? What is the responsibility there? I guess that’s an age-old question. 

Yeah, that’s a big question.

If you phrase it that way, we don’t do, we don’t do a great job of it economically speaking. So I think that has to be asked. What is in it for webmasters? What is in it for content producers? Why bother if you decouple it too much, and the search results no longer have that transactional element for the rest of us? Why don’t we just use robots that block text on our whole site, other than fear of loss of revenue? But if I don’t have any anyway, I’m not getting transactions no matter what. Why do I keep giving you my blood, sweat and tears? It’s a hard question, and I think more people are going to be asking that.

Building your social and link signals together is really important. That’s what a real brand looks like.

What do you think are the ranking signals that really move the needle these days? The ranking factors?

Yeah, I think they’re just so much more niche than they used to be. You know, it really depends on what areas you’re in and the quality of the area you’re in, and what kind of content mix there is, and what kind of brand mix there is. I do think brands and entities have that level of influence that has expanded, maybe even to a fault. You know, there’s almost a default view: “Hey, if we don’t know what to rank, give it to the big player. Give it to a known brand. Give it to a trusted source that’s probably almost tipped a little too far.” I think topicality has shifted really hard. 

Google’s really gone towards wanting to see these sorts of highly topic-focused sites. And again, that’s almost gotten abused. You know, people are creating topicality just for the sake of ranking, and that’s coming up with some updates that I’ve gotten more important but maybe too important. I think timeliness has gotten so important that we don’t appreciate the rewarding recency more than a kind of evergreen. Obviously, that becomes a lot on your niche. 

And so it’s hard because I see these trends, and then I go, but I don’t know if they’re good, and I don’t know if they’re good in reverse. It’s hard with LLMs because you don’t see ranking factors similarly, right? You see an aggregate view of everything. And so I think Google realized right away that having some kind of source attribution wasn’t just something people were pushing for, but it was a way of them knowing if this was coming from a place of quality. Because if it’s coming from an aggregate of everything, quality is kind of diffuse now, right? What is a ranking factor for any given site if you’re aggregating the whole world?

And so that’s going to be interesting to me. How do those factors apply? Right? Now, they’re just a layer, right? You know, you do all the LLM stuff, then throw your ranking factors at it when you’re done. But what does quality look like for an LM kind of mention? There’s still no accuracy, truthfulness, reality, or adjacency metric. How does this information reflect reality, objective reality? As best we know, we still have not eaten that. 

So, yeah, it’s tough. 

Do you remember the Colbert Report piece on “Truthiness”? 

Oh, truthiness? Sure, yeah, yeah. I remember that seeming like a joke at first. Yeah. 

Now, it’s become the thing, 

That feels like a real thing, and it’s a little scary.

Went from word of the year to reality. 

Yeah. 

Yeah, you know the old Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times.

Like this or not? Yeah, we do, for sure. 

So you’re a scientist. Do you love applying the scientific method to things like figuring out what ranking signals are working these days and which are kind of red herrings or hot air? So, what are some interesting things that our listener or viewer may not know about that you may discover through experimentation by having a hypothesis and testing it?

It’s tough to experiment with Google at that scale. I’ve seen people do some interesting things with massive split testing across large sites. That’s half the pages going to do this, and half the pages are going to do this; they’re all product pages. We’re going to see what happens. And it’s been interesting. 

It was a SearchPilot. The former folks are doing some interesting stuff. And it’s funny that what they find really varies a lot with the customer, the niche, and the ranking factors within that vertical and the days.  I’ve worked in usability, but I’ve never been one of those folks who’ve been like, “Oh, I made the button red, and conversion went up.” So everybody, make your buttons red. It just almost never works, right? It almost never pans out, or you miss something, I think, some interesting stuff. 

Link building drives traffic. Don’t just aim to make it look natural—make it genuinely natural.

Tom Capper, who I worked for, had a study earlier this year looking at how grand authority might be in play, and this came out of the Google leaks. Interestingly, sites with higher brand awareness were essentially being cushioned from certain updates, in this case, helpful content updates more than other sites. 

And what specifically was looking at was kind of the domain authority, brand authority association, essentially saying that if your signals aren’t aligned, if you have too many links, too much topical authority, certainly too much domain authority for your brand. Your brand doesn’t seem to merit it. If that ratio is out of whack, you will tend to do worse. Those sites tend to get hit harder.

I think this has always been true to some extent, but it gets more true over time when signal alignment becomes important. We started to see it with social media when it was easier to measure where people’s social signals would get way out of whack of their link signals; I’d see Google start to hit them. This doesn’t make sense. If one signal is way out of whack, you’re gaming the system, right? Because if you’re a big brand, well-known, and getting a lot of mentions, you’re probably also getting links, right? You’re probably also getting search volume; these things all move together, and if they start to move separately, you’re probably cheating and doing something. 

And so that’s interesting to me because I think that’s always kind of been there, that building your signals together is really important. After all, that’s what a real brand looks like, where one is completely out of place. That’s when you’re probably gaming things. I’m wonderful getting into that with LLMs, with people trying to game the way LLMs work, which is hard but possible, and then Google going, Yeah, okay, you played by the rules of the machine, but nobody searches for you. Nobody knows about you, links to you, or mentions you on social media, and something’s up here. 

And so I think that is gonna evolve. It gets really interesting, but it’s been interesting to see how a brand might be represented and how it might come down to how many people are looking for you. Whether that matches up with your other signals or nobody’s heard of you, but you have all these links, something’s up. So that’s a really interesting area for me. But gets complicated.

Is link building still a thing to focus on these days in SEO?

The digital space is getting not just vertical but more niche, more personalized, and more localized.

I think that link building drives traffic absolutely. I think the interconnectedness of the web is still extremely important. So, yeah, you should link to relevant things and cross-link within your site. Well, linking out to things that matter is still valuable to the web ecosystem and Google. I don’t know that building links for the sake of building links. I think that doesn’t work as well as it once did. 

I’ve never been a link builder, so I’ve always been a little biased about how we do that. I also think sometimes it’s funny to measure things because we build a bigger and get a big link legitimately, you know, big mention or big press mention. We kind of expect rankings to move overnight, and they really don’t right, you know, it’s not that simple, and it’s not that fast, and to kind of watch the time-lapse of how rankings change based on what we do. It’s often longer than we think. It often takes more build-up than we think, and Google doesn’t react to us personally overnight, or they’re great now that can happen overnight. It’s extremely rare.

It’s over months, many months, usually, 

Yeah, especially in the link-building area, and it’s a critical mass; it’s a movement. It’s not one link. 

And you have to have corroborating factors, too; if you’re not also building unlink mentions and other kinds of brand awareness, then it looks out of whack.

Well, it often doesn’t last, right? You have that spike, and you do a lot of link building, and then for the next six months, nothing’s happening. That looks unnatural. 

That’s why looking at multiple link-building factors, not just at the domain, authority, domain rating or whatever, but also things like length, velocity and so forth, is important.  

Yeah, because they reflect the way things build, things that grow organically. That’s how they look, right? That’s the profile they are trying to find. 

Yeah? So we shouldn’t try to make it look natural. We should actually make it natural.

Harder said than done. Yes, we should.

Yes, it’s easier said than done.

 Do not try to put on the cloak of naturality, whatever we want to call it.

Well, I know we’re out if time here, so what would be one last nugget of wisdom that you’d like to share with our listeners?

I’d say, as always, just be a searcher yourself. We’ve got to all be out there and see what’s happening, use the engines, and understand our own spaces because I think things are getting not just vertical but getting more and more niche, more and more personalized, and in some ways, more and more localized. So, we have to understand what people are coming to find for our brand and not look at it as one giant space. It’s all the same. So be aware, be a searcher, and always be where your customers are. 

Yeah, they’re like the undercover boss-type mystery shoppers who will mystery pretend to be a customer and call in and find out that their customer support team is terrible, or whatever the thing is, the website doesn’t work. Yeah, it’s important. Don’t always want to know, but you have to, yeah, all right. How do our listeners learn from you? Where do we send them to learn more about your interesting and action-oriented content and studies?  

It’s hard with the social space right now, but I’m still on the Moz blog. Of course, I’m on LinkedIn and relatively active on Bluesky and Threads right now. You can find me in most of those spaces, but hopefully, LinkedIn will stay stable for a while, so you can start there and branch out.

Awesome. So thank you so much, Dr. Pete, and you’re a pillar of the SEO community. And thank you for all that you do. 

Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you again, 

Yeah. And thank you, listener. Now, do something valuable with this information. It’s not just edutainment. This is meant for you to take action to make the world a better place. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host. Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Build brand signals beyond links. Focus on increasing branded search queries for my domain as Google now values entities and brands significantly.

Align my marketing signals across platforms. Ensure brand metrics (links, mentions, search volume) grow together naturally to avoid algorithmic penalties from misaligned signals.

Establish topical authority in a defined niche. Focus content creation on becoming a trusted expert in a specific area rather than trying to rank for everything.

Monitor algorithm changes without overreacting. Use tools like MozCast to distinguish between site-specific issues and broader industry shifts.

Measure brand authority beyond domain metrics. Track the volume of branded searches my site receives as this increasingly impacts Google’s ranking decisions. 

Build authentic personal branding through specialization. Develop a personal brand by focusing on a specific area and connecting with peers at my level.

Adapt to how world events impact search. Pay attention to major events that change search patterns and user intent, requiring content strategy adjustments.

Prioritize natural link building over manufactured strategies. Create content that earns links organically rather than pursuing artificial campaigns that create suspicious spikes.

Be my own mystery shopper. Regularly search for my business terms to understand how users experience my brand in increasingly personalized results.

Connect with Dr. Pete Meyers. Follow him on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Threads, or read his research on the Moz blog for valuable SEO insights and algorithm analysis.

About Dr. Pete Meyers

Dr. Peter J. Meyers (AKA “Dr. Pete”) is the Principal Innovation Architect for Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content.