Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution. Revolution. Do you want a revolution? What? Do you say you want a revolution? The Revolution? It’s going on right now. Welcome to the Revolution, the Smart Business Revolution podcast, where we ask today’s most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, now, your host for the Revolution, John Corcoran.

All right, welcome everyone. My guest, Stephan Spencer, is the author of The Art of SEO, Social Ecommerce and Google Power Search. I met Stephan a while back at an event in Beverly Hills organized by our mutual friend, Larry the Connector, Benet, a great guy. And folks, this is exactly why you have a podcast: because you get to pick the brain of someone smarter than you are, which is what I’m gonna do right now. He’s also a seasoned podcaster, spending part of his time working on a Marketing Speak podcast and the Get Yourself Optimized podcast. In fact, that was one of the things we connected over. He said he was crazy about podcasting, and I love it, too. But so, you know, SEO is such a big black box. You know, people understand it’s important, but they just don’t know how to do it.

And so I want to dive into that a little bit. But first, you started a web design firm, or I guess it was a marketing agency, back in 1995. Tell me how you had the vision. You said, okay, this world wide web, which back then was there, was dial-up, and it was just the experience that was nothing like it was today. Did you see this, and you’re like, “Oh, this is the future?”

I did, but it was kind of thrust in front of my face. So, just for fun, I built a website for my department. I was studying for PhD in biochemistry. And so I went to this conference to present a paper on what I built for my department, like spinning visualizations of viruses and things, biological viruses. And at that conference, I met two very pivotal people in the early days of the web. One was Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and the other was Rob McCool. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that name before.

I don’t know him. Tell me who that is.

Well, you probably heard of Apache, the web server software that runs most of the internet.

Yeah.

That’s the inventor of Apache.

Wow.

At the time, it was 1994. I had been using the Mosaic browser, which was what everyone was using. Right.

That was like the precursor to Netscape, right?

Exactly. I learned about Netscape at that conference because Rob was one of the first employees to build the Netscape server. Got it. So that’s how I heard of Netscape. And I just thought, wow, there’s going to be so much money in this space. I should ride this train. So, I dropped out of my PhD three months later, and I had my own agency that I had bootstrapped.

So tell me what that’s like. You go around to companies, and you say,” Hey, here’s what you need. Okay. Stop advertising in the Yellow Pages. Stop with whatever else you’re doing cold calling, and you need a website.” Is that what it was like?

Well, I kind of stumbled into it. Speaking career very early on. My first conference that I spoke at was in late 1995, and then these conference organizations, they poach each other’s speakers. So, I was getting just barraged with all these speaking opportunities, and I would say yes to everything. And I was terrible as a speaker early on. I didn’t know how to keep the flow going, how to be funny on stage, how to engage the audience, how to control the frame if you’re familiar with NLP.

I didn’t know any of that. I was a terrible speaker and very ineffective, but I was just determined to become excellent at it. And so I just said, yes, yes, yes, to everything I could take. And I didn’t actually get my first speaking gig in the usual fashion by pitching and so forth. I actually talked my way into a conference that was $2,000. It was just a couple of months into starting my agency. I had no money up to my eyeballs in student loan debt. So what I did is I tugged my way into this conference as a volunteer. 

They gave me the job of mic runner, and I’m running around with the microphone during Q&A. And I’m realizing that the speakers on stage don’t know as much as I do. And I’m this cheeky 24-year-old at the time, and I’m just starting to chime in on some of these answers because I have the mic. Which is really a big no-no, apparently. 

Anyway, I got a stack of business cards. I ended up with two really big accounts that were each worth probably half a million, no more than a half million dollars each over their lifetime value. I didn’t have to get funding, investors, loans, or anything because right then and there, I landed my two foundational accounts. I was also de-invited from attending the second day of the event.

That’s all right. You made a million bucks, so who cares?

Yeah, I mean, it took a few years before it added up to a million dollars from those two clients, but yeah, it was pretty amazing. The irony of all irony is the same conference organization, IQPC. Apparently, they don’t speak to each other over there. A different conference organizer a couple of months later invited me to speak at a conference that was more niche on how to market educational programs on the internet.

I was invited to speak, to chair, and to do a post-conference workshop. I was terrible at it, but I was so focused on adding value and delivering a lot of material and so forth. So, people got their money’s worth, but I was, like I said, a terrible speaker. And with that kind of exposure for that conference, all these other organizations, IIR and so forth, WBR, so they started asking me to speak at their events. That’s how I got all my leads.

That’s how you got your business.

Yeah.

Okay. From speaking.

Yeah.

Which is a great source.

It is.

So, at the same time, you’re kind of teaching yourself to design websites. I mean, what was that like? What was designing websites back then? Like using Microsoft front page, you’re using, you know, I mean, I remember using an early, some Netscape product. I can’t even remember the name of it now, but they had a web design software built in that I used back in 1998, 99. What were you using?

I would never use front page, I hated it.

Oh, it was horrible.

Yeah, I would hardcode in HTML.

Okay, taught yourself HTML.

Oh yeah, I mean, I taught myself assembly language when I was a little kid. I mean not just basic, assembly language, hexadecimal.

I don’t even know what that is, but okay.

Overgeek.

Okay, hence the name of your podcast.

Yeah, the Optimized Geek, yes.

And this is literally like learning another language for those who haven’t learned a programming language.

Yeah, but it was so simple to learn in comparison to programming language; HTML is just markup. Like, oh, this is bold, this is italics, this is a heading.

Right, you were designing websites using HTML then, initially?

Yeah, okay. Yes, but then I had a team, and very quickly, I started bringing people on. I’m all about leverage, right? So if you can delegate, build a team, and focus on the business instead of in the business, that’s gonna get you to success a lot faster.

Did you have any mentors during this time? Do you have? You know, peers, I mean, what are you turning to for figuring this stuff out? Or are you just figuring it out all on your own?

Early on, I was figuring it out on my own, which was very hard, very, very painful. Learned a lot from the school of hard knocks. Two or three years in, as I was starting to kind of build momentum and I had a team of maybe eight, nine employees, then I started joining groups like Vistage, which actually at the time was called TAC, the executive committee. So, I’m in a group of CEOs of complementary but not competing businesses.  There are about 12 of us, and we meet every month, and that’s kind of like an advisory board.

They bring in interesting speakers. It was very cool. I was also big into learning through seminars and events. One of the first events I went to as an attendee, which I paid for, was a Keras negotiating seminar. I saw an ad for that in one of the airline magazines. And so I was 1995, 96, learning negotiating tactics, like how to lean back in your chair and do this thing where you kind of puff up your face, like you’re just so exasperated, you look like a fish.

So this is after, probably after the other side proposes a number, and you’re like, you lean back, and you’re just like, oh, oh boy, don’t know, man, not sure if we can do that, yeah.

It was actually so valuable. So that was at the beginning of me being kind of a seminar junkie. And I also, as a speaker, get to attend these conferences for free, obviously. So, I consume a lot of content. And one of my top strengths, according to StrengthsFinder, is input. So that’s my number two after futuristic. Are you familiar with StrengthsFinder?

I am, but I haven’t done it myself. I know of it, yeah.

Totally do it. And then have your team do it, have your business partner do it. And so you know how best to bring out their strengths and vice versa. It’s really good. So my number two is input, meaning that I have this huge file cabinet for a brain, and I can access stuff where I see patterns and like, “Ah, this could be something where we take this old campaign from, you know, back in the day and morph it into something new.” So yeah, I’m able to pull stuff out of my hat very quickly. And my number three, which is strategic, I can figure out ways to do this in a strategic fashion to actually get the outcome that’s going to matter for the client. So that’s kind of fun. It’s kind of like a superpower.

What was your peak? You said you were a seminar junkie. What was your peak number of events going to either be paid or as a speaker, let’s say, in a year’s period of time?

Oh boy, average one a week.

One a week, so 50 or so a year?

Yeah.

Wow.

Probably, there’s the slow season of the middle of the summer and holiday time period during the summer. So maybe it was 45 or 40 to 45. Yeah, that would be the peak. It was insane.

That is a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. And probably half of those were ones where I was attending and paying to attend.

Wow.

So yeah, and masterminds as well. I’m big into masterminds as well as seminars and conferences.

Wow. But yeah, at the same time, your business is growing and evolving. And it’s interesting that futuristic is one of your strengths on the Strengths Fighter test.

But tell me how you start to get into SEO. As you said, you know, SEO didn’t really exist in 1995. Google, I think, comes on the scene; when does Google come on the scene? Like 2002 or something like that around then? 2001?

I think it’s 1998.

Okay, that’s when they, their conception. I remember being in a job interview in 2000. This was November 2000. I remember Google wasn’t really big at the time. I was interviewing to be a speechwriter in the governor’s office. I remember the communications director asked me, okay, well, if you’re going to do research for one of these speeches, how are you going to research? I say, well, I’m going to go on the World Wide Web or whatever and do research. I remember him saying, well, here we use Google.

It was actually good. The Google.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s funny. Do you know what Google was called before it was called Google?

Oh, I don’t know.

This is a fun trivia question. Backrub. I’m so glad they changed that name. It was a terrible, terrible name.

That is a horrible name. Geez.

That’s a great trivia question when I’m on stage, and I want to give copies of my book away. I ask people if they know that, and usually nobody does.

I’ve never heard that before. That’s funny. So tell me, at what point do you start thinking about this and generating traffic using search engine optimization?

Yeah. I started in the late 90s. This was before Google. I was using tools like Web Position Gold, and we’re targeting all the search engines of the time, like Infoseek and Web Crawler.

Dogpile?

Not Dog Pile, not Metacrawler; those were meta search engines.

Okay. So they searched the search engines. Okay. I got it.

Yeah. But it’s a terrible name, Dog Pile. It was worse than backrub.

Yeah. It was like the kayak of its day searching search engines, I guess. 

Yeah. So yeah, info seek and altavista, et cetera. It was very frustrating because each search engine had its own rule set and things that were considered important. And then there were people that would just game the search engines very easily. Like meta keywords worked like crazy for infoseek and stuff, here’s another trivia question. When did Google stop counting meta keywords?

No clue.

Never. They never counted. So that’s a trick question.

So these websites that you see sometimes, like at the bottom, they have, like, is that a meta keyword or a meta keyword?

No.

You don’t see the meta keyword.

In the view source, when you view the source, it’s in the HTML. So this is a great trivia question or kind of trick question that you could insert into an interview if you’re hiring an SEO consultant, an agency or even an employee to do SEO for you in-house. Ask them some trick questions like what process you use for optimizing meta keywords. And it’s a trick question because the only right answer is meta keywords. Are you serious? Those never counted in Google.

Got it.

Like all those count less or they’re not as important as you like, all those answers, eh, toss them to the curb.

Good question. So, if you’re hiring an SEO agency, ask them about that.

Oh, and there’s probably a whole bunch of other questions you should insert in there, too; that’s one. I have an SEO BS detector, free download, which I’ll give to your listeners. Yeah, it’s pretty darn cool. So there’s a handful of trick questions in there with the only right answer in there.

What’s the website for that? Do you have it offhand?

Yeah. So I made a special page of gifts. That’s part of it. That’s stephanspencer.com/revolution.

Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, I love that because when you talk to people about SEO, there are some people who will talk about it, and they’re full of crap. You know, I know enough to be kind of dangerous. I know more than a lot of people do. I know a tiny fraction of what you do. I know enough to kind of like my instinct is this person is full of it, you know? So, at what point does it shift? Is it in the late ’90s or early 2000s that Google came onto the scene, and then people got more advanced in it?

Yeah. It’s in the early 2000s that people are really focused on Google. It’s clearly the superior search engine to anything else that’s out there. It’s like people in the early days, they found some secret treasure or something like, oh my gosh, this is like a life-changing. The search engine is so much better than everything else out there. By that time, we were well into it. Reverse engineering the algorithm and trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

Applying my scientific background to SEO. It’s not about reading other people’s eBooks and so forth, blogs and trying to just follow the herd. You have to apply the scientific method and figure out what works and what doesn’t work, have a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, have a control group, all that sort of stuff that I learned in graduate school applies to SEO, which is ironic that I have a book called The Art of SEO.

It’s not about science, really.

But it’s all science. Yeah. It really is. It’s all science. That’s interesting. But it’s like the art of war, you know, that’s the take here that we’re taking with the art of SEO. It’s like The Art of War for SEO.

Right. And you were telling me before that you’re going into your fourth revision of that book, The Art of SEO. And it’s almost like it changes so quickly that how can you even publish a book on paper that’s going to be out of date as soon as it’s printed because SEO is always changing? So, how do you deal with that? How do you these days write a book that’s intended to be on the shelf for at least six months or a year?

Yeah. Well, it’s actually not that hard. You just have to be very strategic about what you include in the book and what you don’t. So where, we get into trouble if we go into too much detail on the various third-party tools because they’ll change their brand name, or they will go out of business, or they will get acquired. If you focus on the best practices, the tried and true stuff, and kind of think about this as is it going to be future-proof in three years time, is the book still going to be relevant? That’s what we, I think, have accomplished with the art of SEO.

So, even though the book is, you know, late 2015 now, the third edition, it’s full of such valuable stuff that would apply today. There’s nothing in there that’s gaming or loopholes or anything like that. I’ve never believed in loopholes. I’ve never believed in trying to outsmart Google or do stuff that you can currently get away with but might not be able to get away with it in the future. Think about Google as having a rap sheet on all of us. So, I’ve thought of this since the beginning. Google is going to retroactively go back and figure out what we were doing, get away with it, and smack us for that in the future. What’s the best indicator of future behavior?

Past activity.

Past behavior, exactly. So, if you look like you were a spammer in the past based on past behavior, it is likely that you’re going to be a spammer in the future.

So be a straight shooter.

Yeah.

Let’s talk about some of those best practices. As they stand today, we’re recording this in late 2018. What are the best practices today? And your book is the size of the phone book, so I know this could be a long conversation, but just to give people kind of an overview here.

Yeah, so as far as best practices, recognize first of all that your mileage will vary. Best practices are guidelines. They’re recommendations. They’re not hard and fast truths. So, because your mileage will vary, always take a scientific approach and test everything. Don’t just take my word for it. Don’t take any SEO practitioner’s word for it. Test it and see that it actually is real. So you’ll see in a book that like H1 tags are best practice. Have H1 tags. Put good keywords in your H1 tags. 

The problem is that if you test this and see if an H1 tag actually matters or not, depending on how accurate or influences your rankings. It’s like, why am I bothering with all the stuff around H1 tags? It’s actually in some of Google’s own documents that say, here are SEO best practices. It’s a PDF download from Google with Google’s brand on it. It’s from Google, and it says H1 tags. Here’s where the problem is: you can go astray with a “Best practice.” Everybody agrees that you should do it. If you’re not conducting a scientifically valid test, like you’re changing multiple variables at the same time, you don’t know which variable made the difference. 

So when people add H1 tags to their site, they’re like, oh, I’ve got H1 tags and my rankings have gone up. Well, that’s because you changed more than just H1 tags. You introduced headings or headlines that are large in font size, that are keyword rich, and you just happened to wrap them into an H1 container. Now, if you already had headlines that were keyword rich and large font size, and then they were in a font tag, and you change the font tag to an H1 tag, I bet your rankings will not go up one iota because you’ve only changed one variable. That’s the problem. You introduce multiple things into your experiment, and you don’t know which thing made the difference. In fact, you may not even recognize that you’ve introduced multiple variables into the equation.

And again, that’s your scientific background. I can hear it coming into play there because that’s fundamentally about the scientific process and limiting your different variables. I want to ask you a little bit about, you know, companies out there; you read in the news every once in a while, you hear through the grape frown about companies that just get obliterated when there’s some change in the algorithm that Google makes, you know, Panda or something like that. What are your thoughts on companies like that that experience those types of seismic shifts as a result of the change in algorithm?

Yeah, it happens all the time. In fact, I just presented a webinar on this very topic because there was a big update on August 1st. Google made some changes to their core algorithm and it particularly affected medical kind of home remedy type websites, alternative health websites, and financial websites. A lot of sites got dinged pretty badly, like a big drop off in their rankings in traffic. And you might wonder, well, what is that about?

And you have to kind of reverse engineer what’s happening because Google is not gonna say. Most of the time, they don’t even tell you that they made a major update. You have to figure it out by looking at the ranking shifts. Like there’s SEMrush has this seismic sensor thing that they show that there’s a lot of ranking shifts. You see that on the graph. If there’s not much changes happening in the search results, then it’s pretty much flatlined. So you wanna keep up with what’s happening, but then you gotta reverse engineer what the issues were and what signals are being adjusted.

In this case, with August 1st, some call it the Google medic update, but it was about expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So EAT. And that’s actually in Google’s quality raters guidelines. They released this 160-page document that is free for you to read. It’s meant for the quality raters, the human reviewers. There’s an army of them. Like many, many, many thousands of these people who are contractors working for Google, who look at websites and answer a bunch of questions about them. Is this credible? 

The content, reference its sources and substantiate its claims and da da da da da. And they go through and answer these questions. And then you get a lot of extra scrutiny, potentially even a penalty if you are on the wrong side of these guidelines, of these quality rater guidelines. Wow. I encourage everybody to read that. It’s not written in a super technical way. It’s meant for people who are just good at surfing the web and have good common sense to work for Google. You can even apply to work as a quality rater for Google. You can work remotely, and you gotta be available at least 10 hours a week.

Sounds great. You can just work from home in your pajamas and look at websites all day. That doesn’t sound so bad.

You couldn’t pay me enough to do it.

That sales pitch honestly sounds like something that Google would not rank very highly, though. Sales pitch.

Yeah, but here’s the thing: this is not scalable. You know, they might have 10, 20, 30,000 people that are currently quality raters.

Yeah, how do you keep up with all the websites out there?

You don’t, you don’t. You use all that information as signals, as inputs for a machine learning algorithm.

Got it, okay.

Then, the machine learning algorithm, eventually full-blown AI, will be able to replace that army of humans and be more effective.

But as of right now, they still have a partial army of humans.

Oh yeah, they’ve got easily 10,000, probably more like, somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people working.

What’s the name of that 160-page report?

The Quality Rater Guidelines. So you can just Google that, and you can put it in your show notes. And there’s a great article that synopsizes the latest changes because the new version of this came out in late July. So, I would recommend an article by Jennifer Slegg of the SEM Post.

So, you know, one of the things you said, and I’ve heard other people say this too, is that you can’t game Google, right? You can’t go and take advantage of them.

Well, you can, you can. It’s just that it’s a very short-term, dangerous game to play.

Got it, okay.

You will get burned.

You’ll get burned.

Like, if you have 10,000 websites and you’re a spammer, and you can just churn and burn through those 10,000 websites, okay, no problem. I mean, I personally wouldn’t do it, but you’d be able to weather the storm if a bunch of your sites got torched by Google. If, on the other hand, you’re a small business owner and this is your business’s website, you cannot risk playing a dangerous game doing stuff like private blog networks and building unnatural link profiles for your website just to get to the top of Google.

So that’s what I wanted to ask about, backlinking. So that’s a popular thing in the SEO game. Where is backlinking appropriate? Backlinking is just building links on other sites that come back to your website. Where is it appropriate? Where is it over the line?

Well, links are meant to be earned, not gamed, not purchased, stolen or anything like that. They’re meant to be relevant and value added. And if you’re playing games and trying to artificially inflate your link equity, your PageRank is what Google would refer to it as. So that’s named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google. PageRank, that was the original algorithm. They still use it and still use the terminology, but it’s massively changed. Incorporates trust and all this other stuff in the algorithm now. So you’re trying to get a massive amount of link equity, which includes authority, like authority sites linking to you and trusted sites linking to you. 

But if you’re playing tricks and trying to manipulate your way to the top. You might do things that are pretty obvious to Google, like let’s say you buy a link on a website, there’s a blog post written five years ago, and it hasn’t been touched in five years, and suddenly a keyword-rich phrase that’s your industry gets changed, and that’s the only edit to the page, and it’s now pointing to your commercial website. Don’t you think Google is pretty good at picking up that sort of stuff?

It’s so obvious to an algorithm like, okay, crusty old blog post hasn’t been touched for years and years. Suddenly, the keyword-rich money term is now turned into a text link to a commercial website. And here’s where it can get really dangerous because you might think you’re outsmarting Google, or you might say, you know, I’m never going to touch that sort of thing. That’s sketchy. I’m just going to do PR (public relations) essentially and get in front of journalists, influencers, bloggers, and so forth with really valuable stuff, collaborate with them, and do all the sort of cool things. 

And I’ll get links just naturally that way. But then a competitor or an affiliate or somebody who just doesn’t like you decides to ruin your reputation as far as Google is concerned. And they will buy a bunch of really low-quality links for you for 50 bucks, ten bazillion links or whatever it is. If you have that history of crossing the line or getting close to the line, Google’s referencing that and saying, okay, this is the kind of person who likes to play in the black hat or gray hat space. This is probably them.

So your past comes back to haunt you again.

Yes. Even though it wasn’t you, it was the competitor. This is called negative SEO. So you run a real risk of being a victim of negative SEO if you’ve done anything sketchy or you’re previous SEO firm or whatever did anything sketchy in their implementation of their SEO for you. And link building is the hardest thing to do because you don’t have control over the outcome. You don’t have control over other people’s websites unless you have a fake link profile built on PBNs (Private Blog Networks), where you actually do control those websites. You’re just trying to hide all that from Google so they look like they’re separate websites. So don’t play in that space with PBNs. That’s short-term thinking. You will get burned. Don’t do anything on a page that’s sketchy either because you can’t say, well, that wasn’t me. That was somebody hacking my site.

What’s an example of that? What’s on the page?

Keyword stuffing is like too much repetition of your keyword on a page. Hiding text in places that most people won’t notice. Let’s say it’s a hidden tab on the webpage, or it’s, you know, white text on a white background. That stuff doesn’t work anyway, and it will get you penalized. And that’s not going to be something you could talk your way out of and say, well, I didn’t do that. Well, who else has access to your WordPress admin? Like, who else is on your site? Unless you got hacked. And then that’s pretty obvious because it’ll be like payday loan links and stuff hidden in your site. Right, right. So stay on the straight and narrow. Also, recognize that you have to monitor your link profile over time. You can’t just assume that you’ve never done anything sketchy. You’ve never hired an SEO, so there’s nothing to worry about.

And how do you do that? How do you monitor your link profile?

Yeah, use tools like Link Detox from Link Research Tools, Majestic, Moz Link Explorer, SEMRush, and Ahrefs. These are all excellent tools for link analysis to see clean and virtuous link profiles. If everything looks copacetic, if everything looks kind of organically earned instead of artificially manipulated.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so if, let’s say that you are victimized by negative SEO, you would catch that because a huge influx of toxic links would show up in a link detox report, for example. And then you could start investigating that and dealing with the aftermath. Disavowing all those toxic links. It’s a big pain in the butt if you don’t know how to do it. Just hire somebody who’s gonna help you through that process.

How often are you seeing this happen in the enterprise level, large corporate level, small business level? Is this happening a lot these days?

A lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. So the webinar that I did where I was critiquing websites doing impromptu site evaluations, sites that were in the medical and health space and fitness.

So, I evaluated 11 sites in this two-hour webinar. And most of those had toxic link profiles in the red zone, which was really frightening, but they were mostly affiliates that were on this webinar. And when I’m asking them about this, well, we’ve never done link building. We’ve never hired anybody to do this for us. This isn’t us, so they had no idea, but being an affiliate, you are a target because all the other affiliates want to ruin you to take your space and the search results. Even large brands, you know, a certain car brand, or major clients, you know, begin with a V, and you can guess who it is. 

One of their divisions I found in the red zone is link detox in terms of their link toxicity. Gotta disavow and do an outreach campaign to request the removal of links from these toxic sites. Now get this: negative SEO has gotten so ingeniously evil that these people who are bad actors who want to hurt your website know that people are sending out link removal requests. So they pose as you, and then they say, I see that you have a link to my site, and our tool has determined your site’s toxic or spam. So, I need you to remove the link, and if you don’t comply, I will report you to Google. And it’s your competitor posing as you. And this is a legitimate site. Where the link is helping you, isn’t that clever and evil?

Wow, and they’re trying to take it down, yeah, wow.

And they do. They get them taken down because people don’t check. Right. They’re like, okay, oh, you think we’re toxic? Whatever, all right, your link’s gone. You’re out of here. I was doing you a favor. And they never check to see that this is actually the company. It’s not. It’s a competitor, or it’s some affiliate or somebody who’s got it out for you.

Wow. So how does Google monitor that kind of activity, or can they even?

They can’t. They can’t.

That’s just straight-up fraud.

They just see links drop naturally. There’s this term in SEO parlance that’s called link velocity. So that should be hopefully for you and I positive. Yeah. We’re gaining more links than we’re losing. We’re out there in the world. We’re creating value. We’re both podcasting. We’re both blogging and, you know, that stuff. It pays rewards, and it’s like business karma, right? So you put good stuff out there in the world, and people reward you. The books I write and co-write and all that turn into links. I’m not having to hit up webmasters and I like, I never offer webmasters money to link to my site.

I just never do that. Some people do that, and they think that, well, that’s just the game you have to play, but then that leaves a footprint that Google is able to figure out because if this webmaster is willing to take money from you, they’re willing to take money from somebody else. And so their standards are lower, and then they’ll take more irrelevant industries and lower quality content as guest posts and stuff. And that leaves an obvious footprint to Google. So don’t pay money and run from sites where they do take money for guest posts.

All right. I want to tap into your StrengthsFinder futuristic side here and ask you about what should we be aware of? What’s coming down the pike? What’s life going to look like on the Internet five to 10 years from now, particularly from an SEO perspective? What do you see happening in the future?

Oh, wow. That’s a big question.

I know it is. I don’t ask these small questions on this show.

Well, you know that there’s this thing called the law of accelerating returns.

OK.

Do you know about this?

Yeah, it’s going faster and faster, I guess.

Yes, technology is advancing at a faster and faster clip.

Yes.

So let’s say we look back to 100 years ago.

Right. The amount of information created in the last 30 seconds is like 10 times what was created in the 1800s or something like that, right?

Yes, but information technology in particular advances the price performance. Either it doubles in terms of the performance or the price halves or both every 18 months. So, there’s Moore’s law, Metcalfe’s law, and a number of these laws in place here that help with this exponential trend. So the last 100 years, today’s rate of change would fit into the next 20 years, but because it’s continuing to advance at a faster and faster clip, it would actually fit into the next 12 years. 100 years from the past, fitting into the next 12 years into the future, 12 years from now. So you said, well, what’s gonna happen five, 10 years? 

Well, if it’s 10 years, it’s gonna be like a science fiction movie. We can’t wrap our heads around that because our minds are designed to think linearly. We will look at the horizon, and we think that’s a thing. The horizon is not a thing. It’s a mental construct. At no point does the sea and the sky meet or whatever, right? So, we need to think outside of that paradigm. All right, what will exponential growth, exponential returns, and exponential technology look like in 10 years’ time? We’re gonna be talking to our computers and more than typing on them. I’d say three years, five years tops.

Yeah. I thought about that because I have young kids and I think like, you know what? They might not have to learn to type and they might not have to learn to drive.

Course not. Yeah. Either one. Most jobs that we have are going to be replaced by robots.

Crazy.

Yeah. It’s not just Uber drivers. It’s not just cooks and cleaners and that sort of stuff. It’s information technology people. Programmers, the programmers will be computers that are programmed themselves.

So how do we future-proof ourselves from that? Or maybe a better question is, what should we be doing now in order to ensure that we are either marketable if we’re in the career workforce or that we have a business that’s going to survive this tidal change that we’re going through?

Yeah. You need to embrace change and be optimistic and excited about it, enthusiastic. And just an early adopter of stuff within reason because not everything’s going to like so much is going to just flop.

It’s like buying a flat screen 10 years ago for $10,000 and now they’re 400 bucks.

Yeah, but many, many trends that are almost indisputably going to happen. You can pick up Singularity is Near book by Ray Kurzweil and see so many of his technology predictions over the next 30, 40 years and the vast majority of his predictions have come true. He started his predictions in the eighties with the book The Age of Intelligent Machines, and then in the nineties, The Age of Spiritual Machines. And he is amazing. He’s the best futurist on technology, bar none, in my opinion. So embrace the change, and you just get in front of it. 

You look for ways to add value by taking multiple disciplines that seem to be completely at odds with each other or not super compatible and bring them together. So let’s say that you are passionate about, I don’t know, painting. Well, eventually computers will be better at painting than Picasso and Rembrandt and all that. So you can’t just bet all your future on painting if that’s a gift for you. But let’s say you have another gift, which is, I don’t know, let’s say, pattern recognition with computer algorithms. You gotta find ways to merge those two, bring those two disparate disciplines and expertise together and create something really unique because that’s something that’s very hard for an AI to do.

So, finding something that’s hard for AIs.

Yes.

Yeah, okay, good advice. All right, I wanna wrap things up with the question I always ask, which is we’re at an awards show banquet much like the Oscars or the Emmys, and you are about to receive an award for Lifetime Achievement for everything you’ve done up until this point. I want to know, who do you think? Family members, of course, but who else? Peers, friends, colleagues? You mentioned that initial conference that you went to where the two icons were there and really set you down a different path. What do you think?

Oh, so many. Well, Tony Robbins, for one, because he set me off on my personal transformation where like literally unrecognizable from the guy I was a decade ago. That’s pretty cool. Go to getyourselfoptimized.com/about to see my before and after photo. It’s pretty fun. So, Tony Robbins, huge life-changing difference in my life from that and many of his seminars. Neil Strauss has taken a lot of his seminars and been in his mastermind as well. Rand Fishkin, we sat in the speaker lounge in 2007. And decided in that conversation to write a book together. 

That ended up being the art of SEO and Danny Sullivan, who got us O’Reilly as a publisher within a day or two. Rand and I hit him up, and he’s like, Oh, let me, let me ask some people at O’Reilly Brendon Burchard as well. Kind of a Tony Robbins type of motivational speaker. Gotten a lot of value out of him. Bunch of internet marketers who’ve made a big difference for me. I’ve been in their masterminds, or I’ve gotten client referrals and other stuff from like James Schramko and Taki Moore. Also, as far as like learning how to be a better speaker and how to be on TV, Clint Arthur, Michael Port. And it’s just so many people.

That’s just off the top of my head. It’s a great list. All right, Stephenspenser.com is at least one of the websites, The Art of SEO, Social E-Commerce, Google Power Search, at least three of the books. Any other resources or domains you wanna throw out there where people can learn more about you?

Yeah, for sure. MarketingSpeak.com, that’s for my Marketing Speak podcast. That’s an incredible show, I have to say. I’ve had Seth Godin on and Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham, like some marketing legends. Get Yourself Optimized podcast has a separate website as well, GetYourselfOptimized.com, and that’s all about biohacking and lifehacking. Dave Asprey has been on there, Michael Gerber, John Gray, and Byron Katie. Yeah, some legendary people in the self-help and personal development and biohacking movements on that show. Yeah, those are great places. And then again, the free gifts, if you go to stephanspencer.com/revolution, that SEO BS Detector, SEO Hiring Blueprint too, so that will show you where to work into the interview process, these questions and how to screen people before they even get to the interview phase as well.

That’s super helpful because when you’re hiring, it’s like hiring a brain surgeon or something. You don’t know what questions to ask. So I’m sure that’d be really helpful. Stephan, thank you so much. Wonderful.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smart while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the Revolution. Revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast.