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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Twas the eve before Thanksgiving and through the studio's haunts, no creatures were talking or recording our thoughts. The channels all hummed with inactivity because the producers went home to be with family. When out of the ether some showbiz thoughts clattered, The Show Must Go On!, because nothing else matters. - Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger take a last look at the week's news before heading off on well deserved four day weekends. - We cover the ongoing Google Core Update, new news in the ongoing series of WPScandals, the awful BlueSky profile posing as Bill Slawski, LinkedIn trying to up its social game by issuing do's and don'ts, the Australian social media ban for minors under age 16, and a lot more... A long but fun and just about to be post-turkey dinner relaxed edition.

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It was a busy news week with a continuing November Core Update, Google's Site Reputation Abuse Policy Update and the subsequent major publisher crackdown, the DOJ recommending the sale of Chrome and possibly Android, lost GA4 data, a now missing GSC Experience Report, OpenAI deleting critical incriminating evidence by mistake, Meta level pig-butchering, the TwiXter eXodous, and the promise of BlueSky on the horizon. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also talk about Gemini AI making death threats, paid advertising appearing in AI Overviews, Bing inserting paid ads into organic search results, SearchGPT becoming the third largest search engine after Google and YouTube by market share, the existence of Google Site Wide, Google Lens for Shopping, and more content avoidance advice from John Mueller. More newsy this week than most but entertaining and hopefully sort of enlightening too.

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Recorded two days after the 2024 presidential election, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger contemplate the outcome and how a Trump presidency might affect the tech and search marketing industries. Tech can expect an era of deregulation, starting with Trump's aim to strip away federal safeguards over AI development, deferring any regulatory oversight to individual states. With enormous shifts expected throughout the federal government affecting so many different sorts of outcomes, it's difficult to say with certainty what is going to happen and when. The one guarantee is things are going to get weird, and likely very quickly. The show goes on to cover happenings with OpenAI, SearchGPT, TwiXter, how a flock of bees thwarted Meta's most recent nuclear ambitions. We outline how Microsoft Bing wants to give someone a million dollars and ten people ten thousand dollars, how Google search snippets sometimes contradicts itself, the mundane existence of Google's Jarvis AI, and perhaps the weirdest outcome of all, Trump's anticipated shift of course on the Google anti-trust suits. A wise Gonzo journalist once wrote, "When the going gets weird, the weird get going", and in the spirit(s) of Hunter S. Thompson, that's more or less what we're going to do.

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The Helpful Content Update wasn't about the content and the hope of recovery wasn't about to happen. Web publishes hit by the Helpful Content Update in September 2023 who attended Google's Web Creator Summit at the Googleplex this week were told the hope they'd held for seeing their rankings recover were likely in vain and that those placements were gone and not likely coming back. Oh, and it wasn't about the content. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the disappointment and what disappointed publishers might do. They also talk about how Google has rolled AI Overviews out to over 100 countries, how Google is looking at similarity of content across websites, the no-data bug in GSC, SearchGTP, and the costs to Microsoft of growth through the development OpenAI. The show also looks at a number of pre-election issues and laughs about the 20 decillion dollar decision the Russian courts have leveled against Google. A fun news banter sort of show.

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