Webcology

The sudden appearance of DeepSeek, an AI developed in China at a micro-fraction of the costs of American AIs has driven conversation this week as its very existence drove down the valuations of the techogiants who thought they had the lock on development of AI models. Gavin Klondike, our resident AI expert, joins us to explain the 5Ws (who, what, where, when, and how) of DeepSeek. We also dive into the Verge's clickbaity treatment of clickbait SEO, the sub-Reddit Revolution as links from X get banned by many Mods, more WP-Drama as cleverly outlined in a Roger Montii piece, more on AI Overviews, and well, much much more. A longer but way more in-depth episode with a great interview to open it.

This edition moves back and forth between coverage of several unique areas of search, AI, and web work. We start covering the DataCoup, which is our "deal-with-it" name for the changes being made by Elon Musk and his crew of youthful hackers to the very nerve centers of the US Government and the suspicion an off-the-books version of Grok is being trained on US government data. We note that DeepSeek is likely helping the Chinese state harvest American data almost as quickly as Elon Musk is hovering it up. We report on the use of updates to old press releases to inflate US Immigration activity in the news, Google's rollback of DEI efforts, Whoopi's phoney weight loss ads, YAIhoo being copiloted by Copilot, and the ChatGPT growth study from SEMrush, along with the SEER Interactive study showing AI Overviews destroying organic and PPC CTRs. We mention changes to Google's Quality Rater Guidelines to account for heavy handed use of AI, and Gary Illyes call for websites to focus on originality in content in 2025. We also move through the weekly parade of SEO tips and updates. A fun, fast paced newsy sorta episode.

The power of the Billionaires' businesses mixed with the powers of The State. An image from the inauguration showing Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and other tech giants in the very front row showed us how clearly and forcefully the new Technoligarcy is taking charge. That is the very definition of fascism in action. In this episode, Jim and Kristine talk about the shift in power and work to work through their thoughts on how the futures of search, social media, free speech, and democracy itself will play out. And then we talk tech with a full sheet of news stories including, OpenAI's Operator, Operation StarGate, YahAIoo!, Scamtastic SEO problems, Google blacking-out scrapers and crawlers and most SEO Tools, the mislogic of recommending structured data, and a heck of a lot more. Come for the stunned faces, stay for great radio!

Matt Mullenweg is seeing more legal resistance to his WP-Emperor schtick and reacting like a manbaby about it. In a similar universe, the outgoing President warns of the coming transition to an oligarchy run by big-tech. Meta moves to the far right by removing fact checking and allowing the racist and multi-phobic content back on its platform as alternative facts carry as much or more weight in this new regime than reality does. ChatGPT moves towards agentatic services like scheduling and performing recurring information tasks. Google Gemini joins other AI companies in a training content deal with Associated Press. Gemini is pushing its way into Google productivity products but there's a catch, it comes with monthly fee. Meanwhile, Google saw it's search market share dip below 90% for the first time in the last decade. There's some really cool old-schooly Google SEO news, including advice on author names and comments in reviews, how Google's Web Vitals Chrome extension has been moved to Chrome DevTools Performance panel by default, how all you need is ULR consistency (and more...), and, well, more. 

The world itself is burning as hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through the sudden and sweeping changes coming to search results pages in 2025. While AI-faked images of the Hollywood sign burning are posted as news on partisan websites we talk about the sudden drought of fresh content for LLMs to train on now that everything ever written has been consumed and the use of AI created synthetic data to putty over an increasingly pockmarked information environment. While highly informed D-list celebrities berate government officials for their hiring practices and inability to control the weather, we discuss how AI generative results removes the concept of "canonically correct" answers in place of a response generated to answer a series of queries as well as possible but not necessarily the same way twice. Facebook has signaled its allegiance to the new order citing the reelection of President Trump as a cultural tipping point at the same time politicized messages overwhelmed the factual information that might help people in what has become the biggest natural disaster in American history. We even try to draw ourselves back as we note how much we don't want to be political but all this is happening in the environment we work in and we slowly realize that maybe there's no way to not be political when talking about what's going on. Damn...

Welcome to the start of the second quarter of the 21st century. In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is a year of the Snake, a period of extreme transformation as old ways are shed and new ones adopted. It seems like an apt description of what the coming year will be like. Things are going to change and if the news of this week is any indication, that change is so sweeping and encompassing, it is creating its own vortex in which all that falls in gets weirder and weirder and weirder. Here's a short list of some of the strange stuff we look at this week. Google has decided to be a start-up again. Apple is trying to save Google from the DOJ preferring the status quo over alternatives. Elon Musk's arguments have attracted odd bedfellows in his suit against OpenAI. Kekius Maximus rules Supremacists, and OpenAI's o3 cheated its ARC-AGI test and isn't that smart after all. That's just a start to the strange as we start this new year. We also talk about a lot of Google and Bingly stuff. Best wishes for 2025.

An all star SEO panel made up of Mordy Oberstein (Wix Studio), Mark Traphagen (seoClarity), and Jenny Halasz (JLH Marketing) joins hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to look back at the events, changes, and ideas of 2024 and into a new world of even more rapid change as AI grows from its infancy towards its adolecence. An incredibly interesting conversation between five veteran search marketers, each with a unique perspective on the industry. This is the last show of 2024. On behalf of the hosts, producers, and everyone associated with Webcology, thank you for listening and have a save and happy holiday period. Best wishes for 2025 from all of us.

Duda's cofounder Amit Glatt found time to sit with us to talk about the history, evolution, and future of the website builder and management platform he helped create. Since its founding 15 years ago, Duda has grown to become one of the top-tier enterprise website builders on the web. Duda feels like it's on a growth sprint right now. They have some interesting tools for web makers to work with and are committed to developing a better builder for SEOs and professional website developers. Amir himself has brought his decades of education, experience, research, and well earned knowledge to Duda since he cofounded the company in 2009. This was a fun conversation that moves through a range of topics from industry trends to personal and professional decision making.

A December 2024 Core Update started running a few short days after the November 2024 Core Update ended and mere hours before this episode was recorded live to podcast. At the same time, Google reported minor but persistent indexing issues. Otherwise, Matt Mullenweg was last seen retreating with his tail between his legs following the judicial spanking he received trying to defend his actions at WordPress against WP-Engine in court. Meanwhile, Google throws stones in a grand glass house accusing OpenAI of using its heft to manipulate the generative AI market. The text to video AI Soro has been released to a growing group of testers, Microsoft scraps Skype subscriptions, and the most important story of all, Google releases first version of its quantum chip "Willow". The future happened five minutes ago in a parallel dimension. The infinite number of moose at the door should have said something.

Recorded in the week after Black Friday hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through a bunch of stories affecting the world of search. The November 2024 Core Update conveniently ended an hour before we went into the recording session. We talk a bit about winners and losers and what we think will be the effects of this core update (while jokingly anticipating an upcoming December 2024 Core Update). We also talk about Bluesky's growth and vibe, using AI in unmanned weaponry, Bing withholding data from ChatGPT in Webmastertools, new search features at Bing, new features at Wix Studio, new features for YouTube creators, new rules at Google for dating ads, the very real possibility of Duplicate Content Blackholes in the ether of Google's cyberspace, and a whole lot more. Tune in for an interesting conversation about a sea of upcoming change in the world of search.