SEO Podcasts

Are SEO Myths Finally Busted by Google Leak?  CMSWire
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The New York Times is to make its premium, paid podcasts available for NYT subscribers on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Spotify and Apple Podcasts listeners can connect their subscriptions wherever they bought NYT access. It’s in addition to the NYT Audio app – you can subscribe separately to just the podcasts if you’d like. It’s reported that most archive editions of the podcasts will go behind the paywall. We corrected an earlier version of this story about connecting your subscriptions within Apple Podcasts. It works however you purchased your NYT subscription.
Spotify are releasing updates today to the way the app displays paid podcasts. Non-subscribers will now see all free episodes and locked bonus episodes in one spot — so they know exactly what they’re missing out on. Subscribers will see all premium versions of the episodes, all bonus subscriber episodes, plus any free episodes that weren’t also published to the subscriber feed. It should streamline the experience for listeners.
A year on from Spotify’s integration with Patreon, Spotify tells us that nearly half the podcasters earning money on Patreon are using the Spotify Open Access integration: and on average, those creators have seen 15% of their Spotify listeners who visited their Patreon page go on to sign up for a paid membership. (Podnews is on Patreon).
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Paramount are reported to be making a new set of layoffs. It’s the second of three layoff announcements this year.
Podcast app Castro has published a new blog, covering changes in the app, and explaining the philosophy for new app features.
Version 3.5 of podcast app AntennaPod now displays Podcasting 2.0 transcripts, joining Pocket Casts and Apple Podcasts.
OPML exports are coming back to Overcast in the next update.
Need to find a decent podcast studio? Studio Mullet (“the name splits opinion”, we’re told) enables podcasters to easily search and book the best studios on the planet. It’s built by David McGuire, who wants to hear about your podcast studio, too.
Radiotopia has announced a set of new shows. Sponsorship and ad-sales are handled by Soundrise.
First released in 2018, the BBC Sound Effects website has been updated. Sound effects can be used free (with credit) for non-commercial projects. However, “if you monetise [your project], sell it, or charge for access to it, or if it is advertising-funded or commercially sponsored” then you’ll need to buy access.
Podcast studio Treefort Media has released StoryRabbit, a location-aware story-telling app using AI. The app lets you uncover stories in your own neighborhood or anywhere in the world, around things like true crime, the paranormal, the outdoors, sports, food, music, art, and architecture.

You can grab a free year of Pocket Casts Plus, if you want to try a different, more powerful, podcast app.
The Podcast Host look at How Successful Creators Build Loyal Communities

Podcast News

Future Back Drinking with Dr. Athina Kanioura is new this week, hosted by PepsiCo’s first Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, Dr. Athina Kanioura. The show talks with industry pioneers, illuminating the technologies and trends that will redefine our tomorrow.

How To Destroy Everything was launched last year; but only with two episodes. The full show is now available. The show is the true story of Richard Jacobs – a narcissist who destroyed a childhood, a marriage, a family, and a community. He stole notary stamps, hacked emails, forged signatures… and won a U.S. Supreme Court case. It’s co-presented by his son.

In 1999, five-year-old Elián González was rescued near the Florida coast after his mother and others drowned in the Florida straits after fleeing Cuba. The question of whether Elián should stay with Florida relatives or return to his father in Cuba ignited a media firestorm, placing Elián at the center of a high-stakes political conflict between Cuba and the US. Chess Piece: The Elián González Story was launched yesterday.

Curious Tourism: Responsible Travel Podcast has returned with a new sound and a new release schedule. Hosted by Kattie Laur and Erin Hynes, guest experts not only share their insights on important topics like the reality Press Trips, poverty tourism and more, and they unpack the latest travel news stories so you’re always in the know.

Companies mentioned above:
AppleApple PodcastsCastroPocket CastsRadiotopiaSpotifyThe New York Times
#1 in Apple Podcasts
60 Minutes: A Second Look (CBS News)
Criminal Attorney (Wondery)
#1 in Spotify
The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan)
The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan)
Over the last week, 196,544 podcasts published at least one new episode (up 0.0%). source


Readers and supporters

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Digital marketing agency Tug Sydney has been selected by Suzanne Grae to manage the Australian retailer's SEO, paid search, and paid media activities.
Initially engaged to enhance Suzanne Grae's organic search capabilities, Tug Sydney's remit has now expanded to include increasing the brand's share of voice and driving audience traffic across digital platforms through both search and paid media efforts.
Suzanne Grae operates as part of the Sussan Group (ARJ Holdings), alongside the Sussan and Sportsgirl brands. Known for its inclusive fashion offerings, the company celebrates women of diverse sizes, shapes, and ages. Since its foundation in 1968, Suzanne Grae has grown to over 150 physical stores throughout Australia, complemented by a robust eCommerce presence.
Tug operates internationally with offices located in Sydney, Singapore, London, Toronto, and Berlin. The agency specialises in integrating data, media, content, and technology to optimise digital marketing strategies and improve return on investment for its clients.
Charlie Bacon, Managing Director at Tug Sydney, commented, "We are thrilled to partner with Suzanne Grae, a brand with a rich heritage and strong connection to Australian women. The team will leverage our expertise in SEO, paid search, and performance media to drive visibility and growth for Suzanne Grae, helping them reach even more women across the country. This collaboration is an opportunity to bring fresh digital strategies to a trusted brand that continues to evolve in the modern retail space."
Echoing these sentiments, Lisa Yanto, Digital Manager at Suzanne Grae, stated, "As a fashion brand that has been connecting with Australian women for over five decades, it's crucial we continue to innovate and engage with our customers across all digital platforms. Tug's data-driven approach and deep understanding of performance media will be key in helping us reach more women and continue to provide them with the easy, stylish, and uplifting fashion experiences they expect from Suzanne Grae."
Among Tug Sydney's varied portfolio are clients such as Merlin Entertainment, Budget Direct SG, Heinemann, and Bluebeam, showcasing the agency's broad range of expertise in the digital marketing sector.

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Google discusses how it decides to publicly disclose search incidents that affect search, crawling and indexing
Google’s latest Search Off The Record podcast discussed examples of disruptive incidents that can affect crawling and indexing and discuss the criteria for deciding whether or not to disclose the details of what happened.
Complicating the issue of making a statement is that there are times when SEOs and publishers report that Search is broken when from Google’s point of view they’re working the way they’re supposed to.
The interesting part of the podcast began with the observation that Google Search (the home page with the search box) itself has an “extremely” high uptime and rarely ever goes down and become unreachable. Most of the reported issues were due to network routing issues from the Internet itself than a failure from within Google’s infrastructure.
Gary Illyes commented:
“Yeah. The service that hosts the homepage is the same thing that hosts the status dashboard, the Google Search Status Dashboard, and it has like an insane uptime number. …the number is like 99.999 whatever.”
John Mueller jokingly responded with the word “nein” (pronounced like the number nine), which means “no” in German:
“Nein. It’s never down. Nein.”
The Googlers admit that the rest of Google Search on the backend does experience outages and they explain how that’s dealt with.
Google’s ability to crawl and index web pages is critical for SEO and earnings. Disruption can lead to catastrophic consequences particularly for time-sensitive content like announcements, news and sales events (to name a few).
Gary Illyes explained that there’s a team within Google called Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) that’s responsible for making sure that the public-facing systems are running smoothly. There’s an entire Google subdomain devoted to the site reliability where they explain that they approach the task of keeping systems operational similar to how software issues are. They watch over services like Google Search, Ads, Gmail, and YouTube.
The SRE page explains the complexity of their mission as being very granular (fixing individual things) to fixing larger scale problems that affect “continental-level service capacity” for users that measure in the billions.
Gary Ilyes explains (at the 3:18 minute mark):
“Site Reliability Engineering org publishes their playbook on how they manage incidents. And a lot of the incidents are caught by incidents being issues with whatever systems. They catch them with automated processes, meaning that there are probers, for example, or there are certain rules that are set on monitoring software that looks at numbers.
And then, if the number exceeds whatever value, then it triggers an alert that is then captured by a software like an incident management software.”
Gary next explains how the February 2024 indexing problem is an example of how Google monitors and responds to incidents that could impact users in search. Part of the response is figuring out if it’s an actual problem or a false positive.
He explains:
“That’s what happened on February 1st as well. Basically some number went haywire, and then that opened an incident automatically internally. Then we have to decide whether that’s a false positive or it’s something that we need to actually look into, as in like we, the SRE folk.
And, in this case, they decided that, yeah, this is a valid thing. And then they raised the priority of the incident to one step higher from whatever it was.
I think it was a minor incident initially and then they raised it to medium. And then, when it becomes medium, then it ends up in our inbox. So we have a threshold for medium or higher. Yeah.”
Gary Ilyes next explained that they don’t communicate every little incident that happens because most of the times it won’t even be noticed by users. The most important consideration is whether the incident affects users, which will automatically receive an upgraded priority level.
An interesting fact about how Google decides what’s important is that problems that affect users are automatically boosted to a higher priority  level. Gary said he didn’t work in SRE so he was unable to comment on the exact number of users that need to be affected before Google decides to make a public announcement.
Gary explained:
“SRE would investigate everything. If they get a prober alert, for example, or an alert based on whatever numbers, they will look into it and will try to explain that to themselves.
And, if it’s something that is affecting users, then it almost automatically means that they need to raise the priority because users are actually affected.”
Gary shared another example of an incident, this time it was about images that weren’t showing up for users. It was decided that although the user experience was affected it was not affected to the point that it was keeping users from finding what they were searching for, the user experience was degraded but not to the point where Google became unusable. Thus, it’s not just whether users are affected by an incident that will cause an escalation in priority but also how badly the user experience is affected.
The case of the images not displaying was a situation in which they decided to not make a public statement because users could still be able to find the information they needed. Although Gary didn’t mention it, it does sound like an issue that recipe bloggers have encountered in the past where images stopped showing.
He explained:
“Like, for example, recently there was an incident where some images were missing. If I remember correctly, then I stepped in and I said like, “This is stupid, and we should not externalize it because the user impact is actually not bad,” right? Users will literally just not get the images. It’s not like something is broken. They will just not see certain images on the search result pages.
And, to me, that’s just, well, back to 1990 or back to 2008 or something. It’s like it’s still usable and still everything is dandy except some images.”
Google’s John Mueller asked Gary if the threshold for making a public announcement was if the user’s experience was degraded or if it was the case that the experience of publishers and SEOs were also considered.
Gary answered (at about the 8 minute mark):
“So it’s Search Relations, not Site Owners Relations, from Search perspective.
But by extension, like the site owners, they would also care about their users. So, if we care about their users, it’s the same group of people, right? Or is that too positive?”
Gary apparently sees his role as primarily as Search Relations in a general sense of their users. That may come as a surprise to many in the SEO community because Google’s own documentation for their Search Off The Record podcast explains the role of the Search Relations team differently:
“As the Search Relations team at Google, we’re here to help site owners be successful with their websites in Google Search.”
Listening to the entire podcast, it’s clear that Googlers John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman are strongly focused on engaging with the search community. So maybe there’s a language issue that’s causing his remark to be interpretable differently than he intended?
Google explained that they have a process for deciding what to disclose about disruptions in search and it is a 100% sensible approach. But something to consider is that the definition of “relations” is that it’s about a connection between two or more people.
Search is a relation(ship). It is an ecosystem where two partners, the creators (SEOs and site owners) create content and Google makes it available to their users.
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Content Disrupted Podcast
By Skyword Staff on July 1, 2024
A Content Disrupted podcast with Bernard Huang, founder at Clearscope.
Access this and more Content Disrupted episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
How is generative AI disrupting Google search and what does that mean for brands and content creators? In this episode of Content Disrupted, Clearscope Founder Bernard Huang sits down with Skyword EVP Dan Baptiste to discuss the current and future state of SEO and AI-powered search. They delve into the cannibalization of search traffic, the new way to approach topical authority, and how to use content to build trust and credibility in a landscape flooded with commoditized information.
Bernard is the co-founder of Clearscope, the leading SEO optimization software for high-quality content teams. Before Clearscope, Bernard started an SEO consulting agency, was a growth advisor in residence at 500 Startups, and led growth at a YC startup called 42Floors.
[01:16] Google’s Algorithm Updates and the Changing SEO Landscape – Bernard shares his journey from being a growth hacker at the Y Combinator startup 42 Floors, where he experimented with various SEO strategies, including black hat tactics. He highlights the importance of major Google updates such as Penguin, which devalued spammy links, and Panda, which penalized thin, duplicate content. Hummingbird shifted the focus to comprehensive and quality content, leading to the rise of in-depth guides. RankBrain introduced dynamic user engagement signals, making search results more responsive to user interactions. The Helpful Content Update emphasized creating content for humans, highlighting expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Bernard’s insights underline exactly how Google’s evolving algorithm updates have pushed SEO strategies from a game of manipulation to a focus on creating valuable content that genuinely serves users.
[11:41] The Challenges and Opportunities of Content Creation in the Age of AI – Bernard explains how Google’s increasing integration of AI-generated answers and featured snippets is leading to a significant reduction in traditional search traffic for many informational queries. Huang highlights that this trend isn’t new; technological improvements have always redirected specific queries away from Google. However, AI’s capability to generate content directly, such as job templates or recipes, represents an unprecedented level of “cannibalization.” He advises content creators not to fear this shift but to adapt by focusing on areas where AI falls short, such as providing unique perspectives, firsthand experiences, and trustworthy recommendations. Huang points out that while AI excels at consensus-based answers and structured “stuff” like itineraries; it lacks the perspective, depth, and credibility users seek in certain types of trust-based searches, such as product reviews or specialized guides. As a result, the challenge for content creators lies in differentiating their work by emphasizing human elements and expertise that AI cannot replicate, thereby maintaining relevance in the ever-changing digital landscape.
[18:44] From Black Hat Tactics to Trustworthy Content – Bernard discusses how Google’s algorithms have evolved now valuing content that offers genuine opinions and perspectives. This evolution suggests that search is becoming better, as it encourages content creators to produce valuable, authentic information rather than just filling pages with SEO keywords. However, Google still faces the challenge of the vast amount of AI-generated content skewing the information landscape and the need to differentiate between authentic information and commoditized content. Bernard points out that while AI can generate content rapidly, Google’s focus on user engagement signals still creates a complex environment where brands with higher domain authority tend to dominate. This dynamic now needs content creators to leverage their subject matter expertise, authenticity, and unique insights to stand out in a crowded digital space. Bernard explains how brands can capitalize on the way search associates topics and things with an “information gain” approach that focuses on additive content within networks of topics where subject matter expertise or firsthand expertise is assumed or required.
[29:35] Topical Authority As the New SEO Playbook – Bernard highlights that the traditional method of targeting high search volume keywords and creating basic content or content clusters around them is no longer sufficient. Instead, smaller publishers should focus on specialization within their niche, delving deeply into various aspects of a topic to establish authority. He explains that Google now emphasizes a site’s focus score, which assesses the depth and relevance of a website’s content on specific topics. This shift means that creating comprehensive, unique content that explores the nuances and intricacies of a subject can help smaller sites rank higher in search results. For example, rather than just covering general information about marathons, a site should include detailed content such as personal training experiences, common mistakes, and unique insights into marathon preparation. This approach not only differentiates smaller publishers from larger competitors but also aligns with Google’s efforts to combat the flood of commoditized content produced by AI. Although the search volumes for these specialized topics might be smaller, the aggregate effect of a well-developed library of granular, authoritative content can drive significant traffic over time.
[36:07] Brands Need to Focus on Owning a Niche – Bernard emphasizes the importance of defining specific topics or “ownable lanes” that are aligned with your brand’s identity and target audience. He further advises that brands should adopt a multichannel content creation approach, producing engaging content tailored to different platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. He points out that search now functions less as a discovery channel and more as a mid- to bottom-of-funnel channel, so brands need to plan to create content for search that captures interest generated from other platforms. This strategy requires moving away from generic, high-volume keyword content and focusing on adding unique value to niche topics. Smaller brands should narrow their focus to specific aspects where they can provide unique insights, rather than trying to dominate broad topics. Overall, a niche-oriented strategy demands effort and thoughtful planning, offering significant rewards for producing high-quality, detailed content. Instead of spreading efforts thinly across broad topics, brands should identify high-level topics that are both relevant and manageable.
Follow and subscribe to Content Disrupted on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. Every other week, we host candid conversations with pioneering CMOs and researchers on the topics most relevant to enterprise marketers, from the psychology behind today’s digital buying behaviors and how to craft more relevant creative to maximizing internal trust in the marketing team.
 
Featured image by ugguggu at Adobe Stock.

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