Webcology

Google is fast approaching the FIND OUT stage of its multiple anti-trust cases with the US Department of Justice and EU regulatory bodies. It is very possible the DOJ could order Google to sever its relationship with its Chrome browser in coming months. That leads to speculation on what other decisions might be coming down and how throwing spanners into the cogs of the machine Alphabet has built might effect Google's operations in the future. Those wags at OpenAI suggested they would be happy to take Chrome off Google's hands if the courts order it. Meanwhile, there's more controversy over OpenAI's restructuring plans, Google was caught forcing Motorola to block Perplexity.AI on certain phones, Meta's oversight board is suddenly worried about Meta's new policies effecting human rights, US search ad revenues grew by nearly 16% in 2024, and according to Gemini "You can't lick a badger twice". We know that last statement to be untrue but won't be answering any questions about it. All this and much much more in this edition of Webcology.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen is a SEO Legend. One of the original SEOs, Mikkel was known around early search conferences as the man in the bright orange suit. His almost adversarial take on Google in the early days set a tone and standard for how SEOs felt about working with the search engines in a friendly game of cat and mouse. Mikkel has continued practicing SEO while pursuing several other life passions, including a highly successful side-career as a potter and pottery instructor on YouTube where he has a popular channel. He has also released a massive and highly comprehensive SEO Master Course. We caught up with Mikkel in late March 2025 and got this interview. 

Google introduced its new Ad Strength Best Practices Guide which got hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger to pine for the days when the SEO world used cool names like "Ad Strength" to describe stuff. Google has again been declared a monopoly by yet another US court while, just to keep up, a UK based class action over Google's search dominance has been approved. It wasn't a great week for Google legally. It wasn't a great week technically either as a bug continues to exclude the first image in many Product Snippet image carousels. A Financial Times interview with Google head of search Elizabeth Reid suggests Google is getting strong user feedback about AIO results and is looking for new ways to connect originating websites with information in AIO results. We go on to discuss censorship in social media, particularly at Facebook and TwiXter. Bing Answer Snippets is starting to self-reference back to its own search results. Google says structured data does not make your site rank better, again. Google also noted that international search TLDs (ie: Google.ca, Google.co.uk. Google.fr, etc...) will be phased out in 2026 though localization will continue to play a factor in certain result sets. All this and a lot more in a fast paced newsy sort of edition.

A far less political edition than most this year let's Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger spend more time talking about tech news, web marketing, and SEO. We start by marking the movement of Mordy Oberstein as he leaves a highly successful tenure as head of branding at website builder Wix. More than anyone in our memory, Mordy helped Wix overcome what was a difficult reputation which stands as stellar testimony to his powers as a brand marketer. We note how Google Business Profiles is still broken, weeks after reporting the interface was riddled with bugs. Matt Mullenweg's for-profit arm of WordPress, Automattic laid off 16% of its workforce in order to improve profitability and capacity to invest as he moves to restructure Automattic. We also talk about Tinder and flirtbots, the assumption of a right to bend copyright rules by OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI's $33billion purchase of X (TwiXter) from owner Elon Musk, Bing's expanding Copilot, the gravity effect large brands have at Google, and a lot more fun techie stuff. 

The March 2025 Core Update continues to roll out though early indicators are showing in search console. Google Business had a reverficiation bug that caused chaos for a few days that appears to be fixed. The White House announced it was going to order a dramatic downsizing of the department of Education and a French scientist was denied entry to the US after messages critical of Trump were found on his phone, which has terrifying implications for the future of American education and training. The US Court of Appeals rejected copyright protection for AI generated works without a human author while Spain announced it would impose massive fines for not labeling AI generated content as such. The EU has again charged Google with violating EU anti-trust rules, setting the stage for another series of rulings against the search giant. OpenAI released o1-Pro which will be the company's most expensive model yet. Facebook's efforts to supress Shara Wynn-Williams book, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism has created a Streisand effect by creating ten times the publicity the book previously had. In other news: Danny Sullivan talks about Optimizing for Google AIO, links in AIOs don't necessarily lead to the same sites on Google search, Google is testing a radically expanded number of search options beyond AI Mode, Google Assist is replaced by Gemini, and Google is crawling JSON files daily. All this and much more in a long but interesting episode.

Traditionally a warning to tyrants and rogue emperors, todays middle of March madness opened with news of Google Core Update rollout, a major vulnerability in a popular WP SEO plug-in, and signs American search users are indicating they're thinking about being in a very sour mood. We also note it is the 15th anniversary of the week Rhea Drysdale saved SEO from a notorious trademark abuser. The Googleopoly woke up to see the US DOJ's 4 remedies to settle the larger of two anti-trust cases. OpenAI calls for free access for all copyrighted materials for AI Training (citing national security), while the Columbia School of Journalism notes how AI Search engines are "confidently wrong too often". Speaking of tyrannical behaviour, Mullenweg is still wegging out over WPEngine and Meta wants its advertisers to connect to GA4. We also talk about how to talk to Google AIO to learn what it thinks about your business, site reputation abuse, robots.txt, low effort content, and so much more...

Olesia Korobka joins us to talk about the SEO Charity Conference taking place online on March 27 for the Ukraine Animal Relief charity SEO for Paw founded by Anton Shulke. Before Olesia jumps in, we talk about Tuesday's State of the Union address in which, among other things, the CHIPS Act was threatened in a weirdly long ramble about bad deals. We also talk about Elon Musk's continued misadventures due to DOGE's misunderstanding of COBOL. Which somehow brought us to talking about Sergey Brin's musings about how a 60 hour work week (Five 12 hour days) brings the perfect blend between hard work and achievement. He figures that's what's necessary if his people ever want to achieve AGI before anyone else does. Achieving AGI is important and could be worth incalculable riches. The most advanced LLM, ChatGPT4.5 places the value of PHD level workers at about $20,000/mth, according to a new service ChatGPT is considering. Meta is about to deploy innumerable AI Agents in service of businesses on Facebook and Meta. It was revealed that Google Ads has mystery shopper ratings but it's a mystery how that works. Google Search Liaison gained an assistant named Rajan. Androids got a brand new scam buster. That and a whole lot more on an outrageous rollicking show. Don't forget about the SEO Charity event on March 27. 

A quick but hardly deep dive into what Elon Musk's D.O.G.E. is doing and the technologies they're abusing to do it starts a conversation about the newest outrages of the week from around the Oval Office. We also talk about OpenAI4.5, a delay in data from the GSC API, CoPilot flying folks into the wrong repositories, the Chegg vs. Google case, Bing's AI Search tests, Google's crawler update spikes and crawl efficencies, Scrubbing search results, and nearly a dozen other Googley things. 

The American president declared himself a king this week. In the meantime, Meta is laying off thousands of people and deleting a number of old live broadcast recordings. TikTok is restructuring towards laying offs too. Google Reviews and Google Business are fixing bugs while Google's Business Profiles support team is absolutely backlogged. Whoddathunkit but,AIs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek might cheat to win simple games. Google makes the Gemini App the only way to access Google's AI on iOS. Google's Ad-Tech users can now target national security decision makers and people with chronic diseases. Most importantly (besides the king thing), Kevin Indig writes-up a meta-study he did of 19 serious studies of Google AI Overviews in Search Engine Journal in a long but SEO must-read article. Lots of other fun Googley stuff in a fast paced episode unafraid to say, "the king is a fink".

Google fixes a few bugs, gives a quick "how-to" around tabbed navigation, advises about on-page hash-links, and provides a great tutorial on using GA4 and GSC together. Google also increases its results return-speed by 67milliseconds. That's the good stuff this week however it wasn't a good week from a classic "Don't be Evil" perspective. This week Google complied with the executive cultural nullification order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, scrapped a pledge to only use AI for peaceful purposes, shuttered DEI initiatives, and complied with another executive cultural nullification order by removing significant holidays such as Black History, Pride, Holocaust Memorial Day from Google Calendars. We also cover other changes to Google's SERPs, Yahoo!'s AI Answers using "Learn More" links, Facebook whistleblowers, the Scarlett letters AI, the BBC's analysis of LLM written news, and Reddit blaming Google for the evils of weaker than expected growth. Compliance is a bug and that bug is now a feature.