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The Trunk has released new stills featuring Gong Yoo and Seo Hyun Jin ahead of its release, showcasing their complicated relationship.
The Trunk is an upcoming South Korean series starring the popular actor Gong Yoo alongside Seo Hyun Jin. Ahead of its release, several stills featuring the lead actors have been released. Despite the contract marriage, the two begin to form a genuine relationship as they showcase deep care and adoration.
On November 18, 2024, the production team of The Trunk released several stills featuring Gong Yoo as Han Jeong Won and Seo Hyun Jin as Noh In Ji. In the images, they both can be seen growing closer to each other, and they seem like an actual couple. Although they have different personalities, their longing to be loved might drive them to become closer.
Another intriguing pair, Lee Seo Yeon (Jung Yun Ha) and Yoon Ji Oh (Jo Yi Geon), captivate with their mysterious gazes, sparking curiosity. Lee Seo Yeon, driven by her twisted desires, not only divorces Han Jung Won but also embarks on a contract marriage, while Yoon Ji Oh, fully aware of all her secrets, continues to love her, adding layers of tension to the narrative.

In another set of stills, No In Ji, Han Jung Won, Lee Seo Yeon, and Yoon Ji Oh are seated at a table, surrounded by a palpable tension. Lee Seo Yeon provocatively wipes her ex-husband Han Jung Won’s mouth in front of both No In Ji and her current husband, Yoon Ji Oh. The complex dynamics among these four characters, each motivated by conflicting desires, intensify curiosity about the secrets buried within their marriages and the ultimate fate of their contract unions.
Based on the novel Trunk written by Kim Ryeo Ryeong, the story follows Noh In Ji, an employee for NM, a company specializing in providing spouses for fixed-term, one-year contract marriages. Having just completed her fourth contract, In Ji is matched with her next client, Han Jeong Won, a music producer whose life is marked by lingering pain and loneliness. 
Directed by Kim Kyu Tae and written by Park Eun Young, the show will be making its premiere on November 29, 2024.
ALSO READ: BTS’ V, aespa, RIIZE and more grab awards at Korean Grand Music Awards day 2; Check full list of winners

Journalist. Perennially hungry for entertainment. Carefully listens to everything that start with “so, last night…”. Currently making web more
Journalist. Perennially hungry for entertainment. Carefully listens to everything that start with “so, last night…”. Currently making web more entertaining place
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Content creators, do you ever feel like Google hates you? The logical part of you knows this probably isn’t true but you keep getting the sensation that the latest algorithm shift was specifically designed to decimate your traffic?
If you can relate, this episode of Mediavine on Air is for you!
We were joined in spring 2021 by Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger, along with Nora Schlesinger, CEO of Growth Machine, which is an SEO-focused content marketing agency linked in our show notes. Basically, two SEO powerhouses, totally at our disposal for an hour and we got INTO it.
We talked keywords, links, site structure, algorithm shifts, analytics, Page Experience, basically anything and everything under the SEO sun. 
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Link Handout filled with resources related to the live
Ahrefs — An SEO resource recommended by Nora
SEO Like a CEO — A blog series on how to improve a website’s search engine optimization (SEO)
[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Howdy, friends. Welcome to Teal Talk. I’m Jenny Guy. I’m the director of marketing for Mediavine, and with you as always as your host for the show, which is all about the business of content creation.
It is March. Y’all, I don’t know how that happened. And even though I keep seeing the memes– I don’t know if you guys have seen them, the ones that are “How can it be March 2021 when it is still March 2020?” Because that is exactly how it feels continuously to me. I know, though, that it is almost midmonth. And so it’s a little bit delayed. But since this is our first time together, I’m going to ask, did the month start out like a lion or like lamb for y’all? Tell me and let me know.
I talked a little in the last show about this, about how this spring feels special to me for a number of reasons. And that is continuing on as March goes on, I’m pleased to report. And it’s not only because we are inching closer to May and all of those NSYNC memes that never fail to crack me up, the Justin “It’s going to be May” cracks me up every year. It never gets old.
But there’s the longer days. There’s the nicer weather. We’ve got the vaccine distribution happening. I am feeling cautiously optimistic for the first time in a while. So how are you guys doing out there? Tell us in the comments. Are you are you feeling optimistic about the spring? Does it feel different for you? Let us know.
And while we are checking in with each other on the start to our spring, let us also check in on everyone’s feelings with respect to our favorite acronym as content creators, and that is SEO. If you create digital content, there’s no way you haven’t heard it. I have personally heard it so much that it sometimes loses its meaning for me. It’s like when you say a word over and over and over again, and then it stops meaning things.
But the reason for that constant bringing up of SEO is its importance. Simply put, SEO is make or break for digital businesses. But for many of us, SEO is murky, and Google algorithm shifts can seem downright malicious if you don’t know what the heck is going on. So there is definitely a reason people pay thousands of for courses and audits from experts, but the question we’re here to answer today is, does it have to be hard? How can we keep the Google gods happy and ourselves sane?
And that is where my two guests from today come in. I’m about to introduce them. But while I’m introducing them, answer me this in the comments, please. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your SEO expertise with 10 being an SEO ninja and 1 being– Eric and I were having a pretty deep conversation about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before we started. But what is the opposite of a ninja? Or what is better than a ninja? Don’t answer those. Answer 1 to 10 if you’re good at SEO. 10 being the most confident in your skills, and 1 being I don’t know Google or what SEO stands for.
While I’m doing that, let me say hello to my wonderful guests today. Today we have with me very frequently is our CEO and co-founder of Mediavine, Eric Hochberger. Eric, how are you today?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Wonderful. How are you doing, Jenny?
JENNY GUY: I’m doing all right. I’m glad it’s spring. Did your spring– did your March come in like a lion or like lamb?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Here in South Florida we actually dread summer.
JENNY GUY: Oh.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: I know. It’s the opposite. That’s when the bad weather comes.
JENNY GUY: So you’re in your– is this still your happy place now, though?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Yeah. We’re still in the happy place. Don’t worry.
JENNY GUY: That’s good, the good place. OK. And then, for the first time on Teal Talk, we have Nora Schlesinger. Hello, Nora. I’m going to read all the–
NORA SCHLESINGER: Hey!
JENNY GUY: –things about you because there’s a whole lot.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Oh, gosh.
JENNY GUY: Nora Schlesinger is a lifelong baker and food lover, who, after a prolonged illness, was inspired to learn to cook and bake differently, and to share her recipes with others at acleanbake.com. Through blogging she taught herself SEO and made a career switch to lead project management at Growth Machine, but quickly, just to insert, she no longer leads project management. She’s the CEO of the company. No bigs. I have two CEOs on my program today. And Growth Machine is an SEO-focused content marketing agency. She now runs Growth Machine during the day while building A Clean Bake on the side from her home office in Chicago. Nora, welcome, to Teal Talk.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.
JENNY GUY: I’m really excited, too. We’re going to have a good time today.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Yeah.
JENNY GUY: So we’re getting a lot of– we’ve got all across the board. We’ve got sixes. We’ve got fives. We’ve got– I thought I was a nine, but lately eh. We’ve got threes, eights, 10’s. Oh, someone just said, you are all 10’s in my heart. Steve Marsi, fellow co-founder of Mediavine, just said 10 because of 24-hour access to Eric Hochberger. There we are.
OK, guys, if you have questions for us or want to know more about things, please drop those into the comments. Also, just to let you guys know, we’re doing things a little bit differently, where we typically share all those links during the course of the live, what we’re actually going to do this time is we have a link resource guide that we are going to share with you at very end. So you’ve got all of that at once. All you have to do now is just listen, enjoy, ask questions.
OK. So first, I want to hear from both of you, my guests today, about your SEO journey. In other words, other than what Steve just said, why should our audience listen to you when you talk about SEO? Because the truth is there are a lot of– I’m going to do the air quotes– “experts” out there about SEO. And a degree in SEO isn’t really a thing yet. And it’s tough to know who to trust. So let’s start with Nora. Will you tell us about your SEO journey?
NORA SCHLESINGER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that my SEO journey is probably pretty relatable to a lot of the people on this podcast. I might be further in it, but I started basically by looking at my Analytics several years ago, and seeing this [decline sound] in my traffic, and panicking. And I didn’t know a lot about SEO. I knew SEO was a thing that I needed to be more aware of. I knew that I couldn’t just continue to kind of mimic what the bigger bloggers did without knowing why they were doing it, or whether it was a good idea, or even if it was SEO related. I mean, it turns out a lot of it sort of indirectly was.
But I set out to teach myself SEO. I took a couple of courses, like e-courses. But mostly, it was trial and error, building out my own site, testing things, seeing what the effects were over time, and just gradually learning. And honestly, a lot of googling, like, why is this? And what is this? And is this plugin better than this plugin?
Since then, obviously, I’ve built up my skill set. I was able to get a job in SEO. And since then I’ve seen dozens and dozens of different sites in different categories on different CMS systems. Really, you name it. I’ve seen a lot. So I’m pretty well equipped to answer questions and share more detailed experience and expertise with the people who are here today.
JENNY GUY: And we are very lucky to have it. I wanted to ask if there were any– you said you did a lot of googling. Are there any specific resources that you might point people to that you found particularly helpful?
NORA SCHLESINGER: Yeah. I always look– I mean, I don’t go directly there, but usually in the search results you’ll see Moz, The Moz Blog is probably my number one. The SEMrush Blog, The Ahrefs Blog, sort of the big names in SEO, usually the big tools have phenomenal resources. Google itself is also a really wonderful resource.
Search Engine Roundtable, Marie Haynes, which she does the Search News You Can Use podcast. There’s also a newsletter that’s like for premium subscribers. I don’t get that. But a lot of it’s in the podcast. Mediavine, of course. I mean, I can’t neglect to mention how helpful the Mediavine blog and Facebook group always are.
JENNY GUY: Go on.
NORA SCHLESINGER: You’re wonderful. I love you guys. That’s true. I’m really not sucking up. I love you guys.
The Facebook group, especially the Mediavine publisher group, but other blogging focused Facebook groups are also a really great place to ask questions, because if you’re seeing it, someone else probably has seen it and hopefully solved it. So a lot of kind of like peer-to-peer interactions have helped me answer questions.
Or if I’m just seeing something weird in Analytics, I often will be like, has anyone ever seen this? Or is anyone else seeing this recent trend? If I can’t manage to connect it back to an obvious algorithm update or something. I’ll ask around. And the community is super helpful and responsive.
JENNY GUY: We are glad to hear all those things. And we did not pay her to say that. Eric, Eric, same question to you. Talk about your SEO background. Why does Steve value 24-hour access to you?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: 24-hour? I’m waiting for like the 3:00 AM SEO question from Steve.
JENNY GUY: Yeah.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: So I guess I’m going to start with I’m a Splinter is what we determined from the beginning of the pre-game.
JENNY GUY: Splinter was good. Shredder was bad, indeed.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: I’m not a Shredder. I’m a Splinter.
JENNY GUY: He’s a ninja.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: I’m not a Ninja Turtle, but I am old and wise, because I’ve been doing this since 1998 I think is when I got my SEO job. And that is prior to, I think, Google really existing at that point, because we were optimizing for AltaVista. And I can’t even remember the names of any more. MetaCrawler, WebCrawler, things that don’t exist anymore.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Ask Jeeves.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Ask Jeeves. That’s the one.
JENNY GUY: Jeeves!
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Ask Jeeves.
JENNY GUY: Ah, I loved their logo.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: So exactly. I am old and wise. And the truth is SEO has not changed that much, as crazy as it sounds, since basically Google came around and kind of changed everything. And since Google came around, it’s been pretty much the Google show. And we follow what Google says. That is generally my life advice. Why you should trust me, besides the fact I’m old and wise, is because it works.
So Steve, who is the co-founder, and Matt and I started this site called The Hollywood Gossip in 2006. We decided to take our SEO skills, rather than using them for other people, but use them for ourselves. That site at its peak was getting somewhere around 60 million page views a month. And that is primarily off of SEO. So our stuff works in practice. You can see me still doing it today on the Mediavine blog. And all the same techniques I like to teach people, we use in our own posts. And they rank really well. So I would say our own dog food works. I’m not supposed to use that expression anymore. Why did I do that? Sorry. Sorry, Jenny.
JENNY GUY: You did it intentionally. I saw you think about it, and you decided to do it. I was going to say in a less disgusting way that the proof is in the pudding. And it is visible on everything from The Hollywood Gossip, which is the number one Hollywood gossip site of its kind on the internet, and then on the Mediavine blog, which grows traffic year over year, doubles. So what is the name of the series, Eric, if people are interested in following along with your SEO teachings from Splinter?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: It is SEO Like A CEO on our blog. And one day it’ll turn into YouTube. We shall see.
JENNY GUY: It’ll be so exciting. So both of these, they’re authorities. We trust them. We had a lot of fives out there in terms of expertise. So that would might like maybe going with our ninja, I would say that was the lamest Ninja Turtle, which maybe was Donatello. I like Donatello because he drove the van, and he had the bo staff, but some people did not. Anyway.
SEO is one of those terms in digital content creation that is thrown around so much that it kind of loses meaning, like I said. I would like to hear each of your explanations on what is SEO in 2 to 3 minutes. And actually, I’m going to start with Nora for that one, please.
NORA SCHLESINGER: I would say, really simply, SEO is the process of organizing your site and creating your content so that it is the most useful to Google users. And a lot of things go into that, so that is a very high-level explanation, but ultimately that’s why you should care about it. And that’s why you should learn about it.
JENNY GUY: That was like 15 seconds, and you nailed it. So Eric, top that.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Good luck. Wow. That was perfect. Yeah, no, I mean, SEO is obviously Google. It’s remembering that Google has one job, and that’s returning the best result it can for the reader. And what that necessarily means isn’t always what I think we think it means. So it’s a combination of is this the right content based on what the user is searching for. Is it a good experience? There’s a lot of factors that go into that. So SEO is trying to make sure that you are delivering the best result to Google based on what that person is searching.
And a lot of people think it’s really technical. It’s not all technical. So much of it goes into making sure you are writing that content that people are searching for. So I think SEO is a content strategy more so than even a technical skill.
JENNY GUY: That is helpful in that the point of it all is to write good content. I’m going to say this– and this is off of the– I’m going off script. Shocker. I do it every time.
Based on your definitions, it sounds to me like there might be a mind shift– a shift in mindsets, which is that instead of writing whatever content that you will feel that you want to write or that you’re passionate about writing, you’re instead incorporating what people are searching for on Google. Is there a way to do those two things simultaneously? Does being great at SEO mean sucking the joy out of writing the posts and doing the thing that you love? An I ask Nora, will you tell me that from a blogger perspective? Does making yourself good at SEO mean that you’re unhappy as a blogger?
NORA SCHLESINGER: No, it shouldn’t. Absolutely not. I mean, what you’re doing is coming up with ideas, and then iterating until you hit the sweet spot between what Google users want and what you want, like basically what you want to provide and what Google users want to consume. And so for me, for example, that looks like– I’ll be like– OK, I run a food blog, so all my posts are recipes. So I’ll be like, I have a recipe for a grain-free apple tart, or something like that. And I’ll do some keyword research, and I’ll start with like paleo, which is like another word for– well, there’s some overlap. Whatever.
I’m trying to put it into terms that I think people are searching for. So I’ll look for like paleo apple tart, grain-free apple desserts, like all these different sort of like high-level topics. And then I’ll start drilling down to see which of those presents a good opportunity. And if none of those present a good opportunity, I will look at related keywords in any way, keep going until I find the best way to describe or kind of like query that thing that I want to write about. And I might have to adapt it a little bit.
So it’s possible that people aren’t looking for apple tart. They’re looking for apple crumble or something. And at that point, I have to be– I have to kind of make the judgment call, like if grain-free apple tart is not the right opportunity, I will either pivot to like a different keyword, and that’ll change the recipe slightly. Or I’ll just– sometimes I make the executive decision to say, I just really love this recipe. I want to share it. I’m just going to put it out there with the understanding that this is not going to really help me, at least in the short-term, with SEO.
In the long-term, it might be great for like a round-up of Thanksgiving desserts or something. So there’s always a way, I think, to incorporate what you want to be doing into an SEO strategy. You just have to be flexible so that you can, like I said, find that middle ground between– sort of the Venn diagram between your–
JENNY GUY: What Google wants.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Yeah. Like what you want to do and what Google wants you to do. I mean, that’s the cynical way of putting it.
JENNY GUY: I am cynical when it comes to SEO. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m super cynical.
NORA SCHLESINGER: I think the most optimistic way would be like what people need you to provide, and what you want to provide.
JENNY GUY: How to serve my people.
NORA SCHLESINGER: How to serve your audience. Right. I mean, really, like that’s really what it is.
JENNY GUY: Yep! And that’s a really helpful way to look at it as opposed to looking at Google as like the monster from like Skynet and Terminator. I don’t know why I’m on this kick today from like the ’80s and ’90s.
NORA SCHLESINGER: I don’t know any of these references, I just want you to know
JENNY GUY: I’m just going with it. I’m going with it.
NORA SCHLESINGER: I never watched Ninja Turtles. I totally like I’m with you, except like don’t ask any follow-up questions.
JENNY GUY: I will not ask which Ninja Turtle is your favorite. But instead of thinking of it as like Google is this faceless, and we have to please Google, thinking of it as what are people– how can I serve the needs of the people who are looking for content? Super helpful.
Eric, for you, same question. Is there a way to balance these two things out?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Man, following up Nora is incredibly challenging. She so concisely answered.
JENNY GUY: I’ll let you go first next time. I’ll let you go first next time.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: No, it’s fine. I’d rather have her answer these things. That’s great. That is, honestly, the best way to look at it. It is a balance. You’re either following a trend, or creating a trend a lot of times also with content. And that’s an important way to look at it.
If there is nobody else who has ever done what you’re writing about. And sometimes that happens a lot in like news or things in like The Hollywood Gossip. So we won’t even always be able to look through keyword research, for example, on that kind of site. And we just have to know from instinct, which I think applies actually to a lot of other types of blogging as well, not just news, like learning the types of things that your users are searching for, and then applying it to what you’re writing about, even if it doesn’t exist yet.
So that was a great example, knowing what the trendy diets are. That’s obvious. And you might be creating something new that doesn’t have any search results around. But if it applies to that diet, you might be the first person to have come up with a way to make a paleo-friendly– whatever your example was– apple tart. And now it becomes a search.
So sometimes it does work, and it’s really just about knowing your audience. And I think– I don’t know. At this point, when we do SEO articles, I don’t even have to research SEO articles, and they all do very well and get traffic. I knew web story SEO was going to be a search term before there was a term web story SEO. And what do you know? It’s one of our top blog posts. And that just comes from knowing your readers.
JENNY GUY: And also being Eric Hochberger. But you guys can all do it, too, is what we’re saying here. You don’t have to be him.
So specifically talking about– because the title of this episode is “Make Your Own Luck With Google.” And the reason why we did that was because I see comments all the time. We all do. Why does Google hate me? And it’s all over the place. It’s in Facebook groups. It’s frustration. I’ve been doing– I’ve been working. I’ve been working. I’ve been working for months, and my traffic won’t go anywhere, or my traffic tanked, or the last update screwed me, or over and over. It’s over. So EAT, BERT, Core, one algorithm shift can have a massive impact on traffic. We know that.
So much so that as publishers, we live in fear of these changes under– all the time. So let’s be basic for a second. And I want to talk about what the heck a Google algorithm shift is, and why we should or shouldn’t live in fear of them. And I would love to hear why they’re actually a good thing for readers when it’s all said and done. And Eric, we will start with you on that one.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: So I want to go back to Nora so I can just follow-up and say exactly. It’s so much easier. No, I think most of these algorithm changes, at the end of the day, are Google trying to combat, for the most part, people trying to over-SEO, or optimize to the search engine. And they’re trying to deliver the best result. And I think every SEO out there is trying to figure out how we can game the system to become those top results.
So all they’re trying to do, again, at the end of the day, is surface the best result to the reader. And a lot of times we are at odds with them, I feel, not necessarily the SEOs that are going to be listening to this. But SEOs that are for hire for other people.
So as a content creator, chances are you’re not necessarily at odds with Google. And so a lot of these algorithms aren’t going to directly impact you. They always say the impact less than 1% of search results, whatever the official Google stance is. That’s because they’re trying to combat, again, people that are gaming linking algorithms, trying to game them, basically saying, I have authority on this topic when they really don’t. So if you’re writing good content and you are properly doing things, chances are the algorithm hits that you’ll even get are going to be temporary. Just keep doing the right thing.
JENNY GUY: What is a Google algorithm?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: That was a good question. So the Google algorithm, I guess, would be the overall way of saying all the different ranking factors that go into Google. And there are hundreds of them, thousands of them, whatever the number is at this point. Back in the day, it used to just be page rank was one algorithm, or it was the algorithm.
Now there are so many different factors that go into whether your page ranks or not. And so we call them an algorithm change. So like BERT was– I don’t know– switched to natural language processing a little bit more, and trying to figure out more of the intent. Every one of them, if you like geek out about it, there’s a ton of new information every time they do an algorithm change.
But again, they’re all have the same goal in mind– delivering the best result, getting rid of web spam. So I think so much of it is everyone overanalyzes how do I optimize for EAT or BERT. You just optimize for the best user experience and writing the right content.
JENNY GUY: And we’re going to talk about this more in a second, but there’s a big one coming up in May. And I’ve noticed in the time that I’ve been learning SEO from sensei Eric that there are– if Google is going to do a big thing, for the most time, they’re going to tell you about it. They’re going to warn you, and they’re going to tell you exactly what they’re going to do to give you time to figure out what you need to do to put yourself within it.
I won’t say too much about Core Web Vitals, because we are going to go back to that. But Nora, I’d love to hear your perspective on how do you recommend bloggers change their mindset when things at Google change. Do you recommend we all go crazy for BERT and change everything we’re doing?
NORA SCHLESINGER: No. So I’m a big believer– and I’m sort of echoing some of what Eric said here. I’m a big believer in writing good content, and focusing on quality over quantity, user experience over Google experience, because, ultimately, if Google is programmed or the algorithm is done correctly, which they’re getting very good at, those two things should be almost the same thing.
I also want to really encourage people to move away from beliefs like, “Google hates me,” or “When am I going to get lucky with Google?” or any of these sort of like “It’s written in the stars” type of mindsets. I mean, if I can offer like a little tough love, I really don’t mean to criticize anyone here, but I think that if your site is being hit and devastated repeatedly and not recovering from major algorithm shifts, that tells me something about the sort of quality of your site.
And I’m really– please take this as the tough love that it’s intended to be. But that tells me that it’s time to really dig deep into your site and make some big changes. So that means looking for things like thin content, slow site speed, sort of sloppy, or difficult to maneuver site structure, sort of menus, and things like that. There also might be some authority issues. So you really kind of have to take a step back and know what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, and kind of what you want to be seen as the authority in.
And if you are doing that, I don’t really– I mean, I, of course, pay attention to the algorithm updates, particularly when it’s something big, like the May update we’re going to talk about. I certainly want to be aware of what’s coming. I certainly want to stress test my site in advance if I have that information to make sure that I’m not going to be just like devastated by it.
JENNY GUY: Yeah.
NORA SCHLESINGER: But most of the time I don’t worry about algorithm updates because I know that there’s this one thing that Google wants website owners to do. And I’m doing it to the best of my ability. That doesn’t mean that like my site speed is perfect, or like I don’t have a couple too many plugins, or maybe I could have optimized that one post a little bit better. There’s always ways to improve.
But at its core, I really focus on the quality of my site and its content. And so I don’t have to be afraid of Google algorithm updates and various changes that seem to come out of nowhere and for no reason whatsoever punish you.
JENNY GUY: All really, really helpful, Exploring The Local Life asks will we be talking about CLS. We will, actually, in just a little bit.
I have a question for you guys. So have you ever paid for an SEO audit or course, from our audience. How much? And which one? Was it helpful to you? Tell us what you have done to help yourself learn, or improve on your SEO, and did it help? Just give us a little rundown. If you don’t mind spilling the tea, we will definitely listen to it.
So we called this– like I said, we called this episode “Make Your Own Luck With Google” because that is essentially the goal of all SEO experts. And all SEO advice is while we can’t predict every change that will happen with the Google algorithm, there are things that we can control. And it’s about controlling the things that we can, and optimizing in the best way that we can. So what is the foundation of a good SEO strategy? And I’m going to start with Nora for that.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Sure. In my opinion, it is good keywords. And by that I mean not just high potential, so relatively low vol– or sorry– low difficulty, high volume. I almost misspoke in a really unfortunate way there.
But also making sure that the keywords that you’re choosing are the right fit for your site. And that means knowing what your site’s authority is, or should– like what you’re trying to make it, making sure that all your content kind of fits under that umbrella, and then making sure that the content that you are creating is very useful, educational, and in most cases– I’m not sure like The Hollywood Gossip, no offense, but that’s probably more an entertainment goal.
But I’m sort of speaking from my personal experience. It’s typically I want to educate people on what this recipe is, how to make it, why you might want to. I don’t know. Things like ingredient substitutions, storage tips, things like that that really make it a robust resource on this recipe, or this type of food.
So I mean, I think that as long as your content strategy is really focused and well thought out, to me, that is you’re the majority of the way there. Of course, there’s also technical considerations.
JENNY GUY: Sure.
NORA SCHLESINGER: But if you don’t know anything about technical SEO, if you can, take a course or hire someone. If you have the budget for that, definitely do it. But if you have to choose between devoting yourself to content versus technical, I strongly recommend– I think content will get you a lot farther in terms of being sort of the root of a strong SEO approach or strategy.
JENNY GUY: That is all very helpful. I’m going to ask Eric the same question. We have a lot of people giving all– we’ve got various things from $1,000 to $500. We’ve got audits. We’ve got some votes for Stupid Simple SEO. We had somebody said, no, Eric tells us all of it for free. We had somebody who said $1,200. We’ve got all sorts of great comments. And thank you guys for sharing all of that with us.
There’s a lot out there. There is a lot out there offered. SEO is a big business, for sure. And we are going to get to the question on low difficulty and high search volume in terms of numbers in a minute because we’re going to talk keywords next. But Eric, what is the foundation of a sound SEO strategy to you?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: I can’t just say ditto again with Nora? I mean, it’s the same concept. It’s like making sure that you’re writing the right content that readers are searching for. It’s always going to come down to I say like 90/10 versus content versus technical. The technical SEO is such a smaller aspect.
And who cares? If nobody is even searching for the term or you’re going after the wrong term, you can have the fastest site, the most perfect site structure. But if you don’t have the right keyword or you don’t have what someone is searching for, who cares if you rank number one for it? What matters most is that you’re ranking high, and you balance that kind of difficulty that I guess we’ll be talking about next. But making sure this is attainable within your sights level of expertise or authority.
And again, this is not a knock on you as a person, as Nora was saying before, like this is just you have to recognize what your quality level is to Google. And it’s not necessarily a quality you are as, obviously, a human being. But even as a– let’s say you’re a cook.
JENNY GUY: The algorithm is not that advanced yet.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Right. You might be making the best recipe in the world. Google doesn’t have taste buds. They’re not tasting your actual recipe. So I don’t care how good of a cook you are. Google doesn’t know. So you have to look at it from that lens.
What is your level of expertise within Google? And then what do they think you’re an expert at? Making sure you’re blogging about the right things is the most important part of your strategy.
JENNY GUY: Yeah. That was very helpful. And again, it’s not personal. It is an algorithm. It’s a machine. It’s not judging you as a person, or you as, like Eric said, your skills as a crafter, or cook, or parent, or any of whatever it is that you’re publishing about.
I want to talk about keywords. And we actually had a question about low difficulty and high search volume. But keywords are if you were to choose two or three large concepts in SEO that are the big foundational ones, keywords. And Nora started out with keywords, so I’m going to go with Eric to talk about keywords. Give us your high-level keyword strategy or advice. And if you can work in low difficulty and high search volume, that would be great, too. Just go ahead. Let’s watch him do it, everyone.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: All right. First, you’re going to need a good keyword planning tool. There’s the Google one. That’s free. Keyword Planning Tool, they’re very creative with their naming over there. And that is geared towards people that are buying Google AdWords or buying paid search results.
And honestly, that’s what powers most of these different tools you’re going to end up buying anyway. So if you use SEMrush, like we do, key search. I’m sure there’s a million other people can share in the chat. But the most important thing is having a good keyword research tool that you know how to use and you come back to, because you are going to have to go and search the terms you want to go after. Don’t necessarily always look at the competitive score that all these tools give you, because a lot of times that’s going to be based upon paid search.
So we’re saying what’s the difficulty level of you winning? A lot of times you just want to go and search incognito or private browsing. That should be your best friend whenever you’re doing SEO. Always browse private. So it’s not giving you search–
JENNY GUY: Incognito, right?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Incognito or private browsing for Safari people that are out there. Go into those kind of– go and make sure you search the search term you’re going after. And you should probably be able to actually figure out the difficulty yourself, rather than using a tool. Look at who’s ranking in the top 10, and if those are all names that scare the bejeebus out of you, move on to the next one.
That is how I do keyword difficulty, as funny as that is. I don’t trust in the tools, because so many of them are just really spitting out the paid keyword difficulty. And that’s not necessarily true for all of them, but I would use that as a gut check to figure out what that balance is. And again, it’s about figuring out your level of expertise. And you are the one that’s going to know over time where you’re most likely to rank on a term. And we have on the blog like, “How to Read Your Own Google Search Console.”
JENNY GUY: Yep, we’re sharing that one.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Go and find something you already know you’re an expert on. And those are things you’re going to be more likely to rank on. So it’s learning what you’re an expert on, and what you’re going to be likely to rank on. That’s what that difficulty balance is. But then making sure there’s search volume for it. You can be the best expert in the world, but going after a term that has 10 people searching for it, probably not worth your time.
JENNY GUY: We’re getting a lot of people that use SEMrush. We’re getting people that use various other things. And then we have Mediavine member Brandon Gaille just released RankIQ, which helps you target high volume, low competition keywords specifically. It’s a brand new tool, but it seems to have great promise. That’s Rachel. We actually had a question about RankIQ. Do either of you have experience with that one? No?
NORA SCHLESINGER: No, not really.
JENNY GUY: We’ll find out. Maybe we’ll ask questions. Nora, same question to you. Give us your high-level keyword strategy, please.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Yeah. I would definitely echo everything Eric was saying. I use Ahrefs for– I’m not really sure how to pronounce it. It’s A-H-R-E-F-S. It’s kind of the direct competitor to SEMrush. I’ve used both. My personal preference is for Ahrefs. I think it makes keyword research easier. It just, to me, kind of emphasizes keyword research and tracking more than SEMrush does. So that’s my preference.
I tend to start with the site’s authority, and try to characterize in roughly three to four kind of umbrella terms what are the themes that we are trying to establish the site’s authority for. Then for each of those terms, I start brainstorming fairly large concepts that are– I mean, this is like a little nebulous, but not quite as specific– or not quite as broad as the authority term, but not so specific that I’m going to get kind of backed into a corner if I start searching on that term.
So I start with those subterms. Gosh, I wish I had like a chart or something. But basically, I start with all these things I’ve been brainstorming. I start one by one putting them into my keyword research tool.
JENNY GUY: And you Ahrefs or Ahrefs?
NORA SCHLESINGER: And I use– yeah, the one that starts with an A.
JENNY GUY: Aha-refs.
NORA SCHLESINGER: And then– Aha-refs, I like that. That’s actually kind of what it should be called. And then I start to drill down on those concepts. So sometimes the first keyword idea that I came up with is actually a great fit. And I’ll talk in a minute about how I determine fit.
But then sometimes I start drilling down, looking for related keywords, iterating on that keyword, things like that. So I do– it’s as much an art as a science. And it does take some time to do good keyword research.
And in terms of the fit, I have difficulty in volume parameters. And one thing I really like about Ahrefs is that it separates out sort of the organic difficulty of the keyword versus the PPC– the paid search difficulty, or cost of the keyword. So you can kind of ignore the paid– so I mean, that’s just not what I do.
JENNY GUY: Right.
NORA SCHLESINGER: So for my purposes, I ignore the paid search metrics. And I can look at the organic difficulty. Then the last thing I do is I actually search the term for most of the terms that I– if I’ve settled on writing them or kind of going after them, I actually search the term, because sometimes what happens is because, as you said, Google is a machine. I mean, it’s only as smart as its inputs. And so sometimes I’ll see that the top, let’s say, 10 pages, there aren’t a lot of high competition, or high authority competitors competing for this term.
But what you actually see when you look at the SERP is the first 5 to 10 competitors are like massive sites that you will never compete with. And I’m not going to write something if I know that I have zero chance of getting to the first page. It’s just not really worth your time.
So my last step is always to Google the term to make sure, number one, it is actually what I think it is. Because with recipes this is less of a concern, but if you’re doing– I don’t know. We have clients in all different categories. So sometimes something sounds really great, and it turns out it’s a competitor’s brand name. And so you can’t write– you don’t want to write for that term. So it gives you just a final gut check on whether or not this is the right term for you.
As far as the actual numbers, I’m backing up a little bit here to the difficulty in volume parameters, I just want to echo what Eric said. You should know what is appropriate for your site, because it depends so much on where your site stacks up to competitors, meaning like, what’s your authority, your level of authority, your number. What’s everyone else’s? Sort of where do you stand relative to the pack?
So I can’t really give you a number to shoot for. I would say lower is better. Lower difficulty is always better. But it’s not always higher volume is better. So I would rather go after a lower volume, lower difficulty keyword that I know I can get on the first page for. And by that I mean like a couple hundred searches a month, not like four searches a month.
And it just really depends. If you’re building a brand new site, go after the ones that are like a difficulty level of one, but maybe only have 50 searches a month, because you’re just trying to establish yourself, versus I’ve been blogging for seven years. I can go after a higher difficulty level, higher volume keyword.
So it really varies by site. And I can’t really give specific parameters. But I think checking the SERPs, comparing yourself to whoever else is going after that keyword, that’s a really good metric for kind of getting a gut sense of where you stand.
JENNY GUY: Very– I love that your last step is to just Google it and see where– see if you’re actually getting the things, all of those fancy keywords, all the things you might be paying for or not paying for. But at the end of the day, use it the way a user would, and see if you’re actually going to get what you’re trying to do.
We got some feedback from Michelle Grubb-Blackwood but she said, I actually find that they are both, good but Key Search is user-friendly, but SEMrush gives more details. We’ve got more people loving Stupid Simple SEO courses. Eric actually has a segment on the Stupid Simple SEO. So we are also fans.
I don’t know if you guys can help with this one or not. We’ve advised them to email in to support. But we’ve got a comment here that says Google had an algorithm update somewhere in December or January. And I had a jump in traffic. My health check site is all teal. But I think there was an algorithm update in February. And I see my site traffic gradually decreasing. I’m not sure how to go forward from this to stop the decline since I’m not changing much on the site, and just carry on writing the way I did. Is there something they should be looking for, Eric?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: If their search volume is declining, is that what they’re saying?
JENNY GUY: So it sounds like they had– whatever algorithm update was in December or January gave them a jump in traffic. Their site health is all teal. But then something in February happened, and they started to see the traffic decreasing. They’re not sure how to stop the decline
ERIC HOCHBERBER: I mean, generally, if you’re ever losing traffic, the first thing I do is see which terms you’ve lost traffic on. Maybe your terms haven’t even dropped in traffic, and it’s just a change in seasonality, depending on what you blogged about. So it’s always important to compare the same time period. So are you down for this time of year in February? And maybe you had a 10% year over year growth last month. You have 10% year over year growth still this month. And maybe this is just your natural trend.
But really looking. Did you lose a keyword or did those keywords lose searches? I mean, that’s going to find your answer for you. It may not even be an algorithm change. And a lot of times you see it’s not.
It may just be something you wrote about has now dropped nowhere near a link from your home page anymore. Maybe it just dropped down in your feed. And you just need to bubble it back up, whether it’s republishing it, which I don’t particularly love, or writing new complementary posts about it, and linking over to it, reminding Google, hey, I still have this great content. There’s a lot of different strategies that you see on losing a ranking. But it’s tough to know what without knowing the exact cause of decline.
JENNY GUY: But it is helpful to tell people to zoom out a little bit. It very probably might have nothing to do with an algorithm update. It just could be your natural trend. So look at year over year traffic. Look as many years back as you can in Google Analytics and see, is this something that happens every year?
Yeah. Lizzie Maz just said, check Google Search Console, too. Go in there and look, and investigate before we immediately say, Google hates me. We’re moving away from that. We’re going to look at year over year traffic, and zoom out a little bit.
Another core concept of SEO is linking. I would love to bust some myths here. I would love to know, are external links more valuable than internal links? How many links is too many in a post? Is there a goal we should set when we’re writing a post? Nora, let’s start with you on that one, please.
NORA SCHLESINGER: I don’t think one type of link is more valuable than the other. I think they’re definitely valuable. So external links– and by that, are you are you talking about external links that point to your site or the–
JENNY GUY: I mean, yes. Yeah. Getting a backlink from somebody else.
NORA SCHLESINGER: OK. Right. That’s what I thought. So external links are extremely valuable for basically convincing Google that your site is as valuable and authoritative as you say it is. So the more– so this method was actually based on academic citations. So the practice of basically like if you write a paper about something really scientific and complicated, if other really smart scientists start referencing your paper in their future papers, or research, or whatever– I’m obviously not a scientist, nor am I an academic, but this is how I understand it goes– that confers a lot of authority onto your report, or your findings, or your paper, or whatever as like sort of the benchmark for this kind of information.
So Google, because it was founded by nerdy academics, and I say that with love, they borrowed this concept when they were programming Google to understand authority. So if, let’s say, I write– well, actually, I have a great example. I have a post about ratatouille. It’s actually not even ratatouille. It’s like pretty ratatouille, which is called something different in French. It doesn’t matter.
But the point is it was just this sort of like one-off post. I didn’t really– I had fun making it. I posted it. This was before I was really serious about SEO. And it just went like bananas. And the reason why is because quite a few– I think it started with one very, very high authority vegan site found it and linked to it. And from there, lots of other food sites linked to it. And eventually, I think it was on BuzzFeed at one point. And I can’t remember where else it’s been. But it’s like made the rounds.
So all of these extremely high authority sites in the food space pointed back to my site via this Ratatouille page. And they said like, hey, we think this is a great recipe. And so Google said, like, oh, well, I think your site knows a lot about food. And you think this other site, Nora’s site knows a lot about food. So I’m going to infer that Nora’s site must know something about food, because you’re a credible source. So that boosts my authority level, so to speak, with Google.
So backlinks are something that I really highly recommend going for organically, which means write great content, get it out there, and if you’ve done that, people will find it, and link back to you. Submit it to things like foodgawker. Although, that’s not as helpful as it used to be. But submit it to sites like that if you’re kind of new and you’re trying to get yourself out there.
I don’t typically recommend that individual bloggers reach out for backlinks, like do cold backlink outreach. What you can do is reach out to people who have referenced your work, or maybe link to your homepage. And you want them to link to a specific page or vice versa. There are appropriate ways and I think productive ways to reach out for backlinks.
I’ve never done that. And I just keep writing content and have a decent backlink profile. So again, like almost everything I’m going to say kind of boils down to write really great content and get it out in the world. And the right things will happen.
So that was a very long-winded explanation of external links and their value. Very quickly, internal links are extremely valuable for both getting your content found, because Google follows links throughout your site, like as though they’re kind of hallways, and also just sort of establishing the structure of your site, establishing similar posts, conferring authority internally, setting up priorities. So internally, if a bunch of posts link to this one post, Google will say like, oh, this post is really valuable, or useful, or whatever, and will kind of take a closer look at that.
As far as kind of minimums, I do– I recommend at least one internal and one external. And now I’m talking about outbound links, not backlinks.
JENNY GUY: Right.
NORA SCHLESINGER: But that you want to sort of share the love. Google likes to see you pointing to other sources, because it assumes you can’t possibly be the authority on every single word you talk about . So pointing to other resources.
I like to do about one link per like 500-ish words, one internal, one external. So typically in my posts, I do about two to three of each roughly. But whatever makes sense kind of organically throughout the post. I don’t try to force it.
JENNY GUY: All amazing advice. And I just wanted to clarify one quick point. There were many things I wanted to jump in on, but that was all good. And I wanted to get through it. That was great.
When you’re linking out to someone, you want to show love. You want to be a good web citizen. You don’t want to link out to someone who is writing a post that is the exact same– trying to target the same keyword that you’re writing about, right?
NORA SCHLESINGER: Absolutely. Yes.
JENNY GUY: OK.
NORA SCHLESINGER: What you want to be doing is– I’m trying to think of a great example. But so in the ratatouille post, my recipe calls for a spice mix called herbes de Provence, which is like a very specific regional– well, it’s not really regional, but it’s a spice mix that is supposed to evoke sort of a region of cooking. I think I pointed to– I want to say Wikipedia maybe, or some site that kind of defined and elaborated on the spice mix, and what’s included, and kind of where it comes from, and what kinds of recipes it’s typically used in. So I wasn’t pointing to like another ratatouille recipe.
JENNY GUY: If you use this ratatouille, this ratatouille is better.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Right. Try this superior ratatouille.
JENNY GUY: This is so much better. Look, their pictures are better, too. There’s a video. Go look at this one instead.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Right. So the idea of wanting to write really thorough content that really kind of like answers people’s questions, and educates them, and makes them confident enough to make this, in my case, recipe. It’s always going to involve some sort of like, here’s some more information about this element, or learn more here, or watch this video for like how to shape– I don’t know– like bread dough, or something.
I’m trying to think of examples on the fly. There’s always going to be something that you should be teaching the audience, but don’t really have the resources for, like you don’t have a post on your site, or you don’t have a post yet maybe. And so there’s always going to be a reason to link outbound, and kind of share the love, so to speak. But also kind of reinforce this purpose of like educating the reader in the best way possible.
JENNY GUY: Yeah. Providing the best user experience. It all keeps rolling back down to that. Eric, I’m going to let you talk a little bit about links. And then I’m going to– we have about four really good questions come from the audience. So you talk about links, and then I’m going to fire these at you. Please.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: OK. I echo everything Nora said. Real quickly, I mean, honestly, like internal, external, and backlink. I like to separate external and backlink. They’re all equally important, but for different ways. So as Nora said, you’re giving a citation.
So doing that with an external link is good. It’s actually good. It is good to be seen as you can trust me because I have a citation. Imagine writing a book report back in school and not quoting anyone. You would be failed.
So look at it the same way with Google. Don’t get an F. Get an A. Cite your sources, not necessarily your competitors, at least.
JENNY GUY: Good sources, though. You know who else thinks this? Steinbeck, and here’s why. Don’t be like my Aunt Doris.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Right. Exactly. Or your fake news, I don’t know if– don’t do that. Quote someone that has authority on it, and you trust, and you would say, I am willing to bet my entire authority on this one person, because if they go bad, you can get penalized as well.
But external links are good to link to people. And internal links are still super valuable, because, again, it’s something you control. You don’t always control backlinks. But now that you’re an expert on ratatouille, in that ratatouille post, you can link to similar recipes, and you can now spread some of that authority that you got from those other sites. And that is your power, because that’s internal links.
Number-wise, I’m a little more aggressive it sounds like than Nora. I like to do– I don’t know– a link every couple– every paragraph or two, honestly, if you can, internal links.
JENNY GUY: Internal.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Yeah. External, I like a minimum of one on a post. If you can have more than one, that’s OK, too. It’s often good.
I’ll give a quick example because I think the audience might want one. With a lot of the SEO stuff, I will obviously link to Google if there’s a respected article. So here I’m talking about this. Here’s a link to the SEO Starter Guide, not necessarily a direct competitor to what I’m writing about. If I’m talking about a Core Web Vital, maybe I will link to web.dev, which is Google’s resource on how to improve your Core Web Vitals. There are a lot of things you can link to that will help your readers that aren’t direct competition to your search terms.
JENNY GUY: I knew that we would run a long time. We might go a little bit over. Will that kill anyone if we go a little bit over? We’re not going to get to all the comments, and there’s just too much. So I’m going to fire a whole bunch of questions. Astra said, “Which Is better when updating content, just updating a post or updating and republishing it?” Nora, I’m going to start with you on that one, because the next one is Search Console, and I want Eric to do that one.
NORA SCHLESINGER: 90% of the time I would say just update it. I’m not a fan of republishing. The only time I would recommend republishing if you have like totally overhauled this post, and it’s more new than not.
So if you’re optimizing– if you find that something’s ranking for a keyword on page three and you just want it on page one, and you kind of like tweak this, add that, move this paragraph, whatever, definitely don’t republish. If you’re like basically replacing all of the text, updating the recipe to be a new recipe, and replacing basically everything but the URL, then I might recommend republishing. But I would say 9 times out of 10 I do not republish. I just update.
JENNY GUY: Also, I know I’m meant to go quickly and not do this, but I’m going to do it anyway. You said something kind of key there, which was you’re updating everything but the URL.
NORA SCHLESINGER: URL, yeah.
JENNY GUY: Why would you not change the URL on your post?
NORA SCHLESINGER: Oh.
JENNY GUY: I know. I just went can of worms, and here they go.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Yeah. I think the simplest way to put it is I think a lot of people are tempted to update the URL because they think that communicates to Google what the post is about. Google has a million other ways to figure out what the post is about, and can totally deal with the cognitive dissonance of your URL not matching the title and recipe and whatever. And again, I’m talking about food blogs, but this applies regardless of what your topic is.
The reason I don’t update the URL is because you can do way more damage with either like a duplicate URL, or a duplicate post, or an improperly setup redirect, than you can– and it’s very easy to kind of screw up a redirect, or just like screw up the process. So there’s a lot more potential downside to updating the URL than there is to leaving it as is, even if it doesn’t match the post.
And no one’s ever going to call you out on that. No one is going to be like, this was supposed to be a post about cinnamon rolls, and it says cinnamon buns in the URL. No one cares.
JENNY GUY: OK. Eric, anything to add to that before we go into Google Search Console?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: Look at YouTube’s URLs. That’s all I’m going to say. But that was perfect, everything Nora said.
JENNY GUY: Nicole Burkholder said, “I’m a bit confused by Google Search Console. It will tell me that I’m on page two for a post query, but when I search incognito, I’m not seeing the post on the SERPs. I never know if it’s truly accurate and trustworthy for making plans on what to work on for SEO.”
ERIC HOCHBERBER: If we can’t trust Google, who can we trust with the tool? So a lot of times, yes, first, go incognito. It’s important to know that Google has different servers throughout the entire world, many, many servers, more than we could ever comprehend or count. And so chances are if you’re hitting a different data center, you might get different results. And that’s just an average across all of their different data centers.
And there’s also different sections of the search engine results. So you have carousels. So if you’re a food blogger, you probably are very familiar with carousels. If you do videos, if you do how-to posts, there’s all sorts of different sections you can get within search results. You can get position 0, which is a term that like if you just directly answer the question, they might extract part of your page and stick it at the top.
And any of those are going to count towards your ranking in that post, and so you might be looking for counting 1, 2, 3. I’m not in position three. I’m not even on page one. But you might have appeared in a carousel that’s only eligible on mobile, and you were searching on desktop. Or you might have been in a different country. There’s so many different factors, at the end of the day, you can probably trust Google there. It’s coming from their index, and that’s where they’re returning things from. You’re probably not able to verify and see it.
JENNY GUY: OK. I’ve already determined that we’re probably going to have to do this again, because this is an awesome episode. Olya says, “Is it better to use links in your text for related posts on your website or is it better to use a block with pictures?” Who wants to do it? Nora is making faces. It looks like she’s got that. Yeah, great.
NORA SCHLESINGER: No, I think that’s a fantastic question, and one that I wrestle with myself, because there’s a trade-off. I mean, I tend not to use pictures, because it can significantly increase the load time of the page. Let’s say you have– and this is like– I actually use the Create Card List now.
But if I’m sticking straight to the question, I would recommend using a link, because I’m assuming that you’re probably recommending like several other posts. In other words, if it’s a post about pancakes, maybe you’re linking to like every other pancake and waffle recipe on your site, like if you like this, try these. If you’re talking about adding 4, or 5, 6, 10 more large, high res pictures to this page, you’re going to drastically affect the load time, which is a huge ranking factor.
I think that people may be more inclined– I’d almost recommend A/B testing this. You can restrict it to like one or two recommendations. It kind of depends on what you’re trying to do. But broadly speaking, I would recommend skipping the images, or at least the full-size images, and just sticking to linking text for page speed load time reasons.
JENNY GUY: Eric, anything to add on that one?
* Editorial note: Since the airing of this episode, “Grow.me” has been rebranded to “Grow.” *
ERIC HOCHBERBER: 100% agree. Link on text when you can over images. It’ll be better for you, and trust me. How many times have you as a reader, when you’re reading a block of text, you see a link, and it’s what you want to read about, you are going to click on it. So it’s good for users, too. Don’t worry. And if you want pretty pictures and good recommended content for your readers, I have a great product for you. It’s called Grow.me. Check it out. A quick little plug.
But yeah, I mean I would not necessarily go with the images. And this is as one of the people who developed Create. So I’m still going to say plain text whenever you can.
JENNY GUY: Nicole says–
NORA SCHLESINGER: One thing, can I jump in with one more thing about linking?
JENNY GUY: Of course, yeah.
NORA SCHLESINGER: This is a little off-topic, but I just want to note that you should make sure that your theme really highlights links. So I’ve seen more sites than I would have expected that have a very, very minimal, or almost no difference between static text and hyperlinked text.
And so like Eric was saying, if you’re skimming and you see something that you like, you’re going to click on it. Not if you don’t know it’s a link. So this only really– effectively linking text only works if you have a way to highlight your links, which should be built into your theme. But I just want to call that out.
JENNY GUY: It’s got to be a big accessibility thing, right? If people can’t– you want to make this as obvious and as transparent for your readers as possible. We’re almost out of time, which is very hard to believe. I’m going to go as quickly as I can. We’re not going to get to all of them. But Nicole Hun says, “I struggle with where to place the links, either outbound or internal, in my posts. Since when I’ve had them too high up in the post, the post earns much less since readers click the link before spending much time on the posts that they’re reading.” Eric, will you take that one, please?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: See, perfect example. In-text links work. You don’t need images. Those people navigating away. I like to start with plain text at the top of my article as much as possible. I think it’s better for SEO as well just to have just plain text unlinked for the first few paragraphs of your post.
But yeah, I mean you’ve got to go wherever it’s organic. If that’s where it fits in at the beginning, do it. It’s OK if they leave. I would rather have organic, well-placed links than necessarily worrying about sending users away, especially if it’s internal, if they’re just going to another page. So that’s not so bad.
JENNY GUY: Great. This is one that I wanted to do. It’s another can of worms. Here we go. “What is your view on old thin content posts? I have quite a few old before Google Panda”– what is Google Panda? It sounds adorable– “not so good posts that don’t really get any traffic. They just sit there. But should I delete them to prevent them from harming Google’s view of the site as a whole?” Deleting old content, Nora, what are your views on that?
NORA SCHLESINGER: I think every single person that you ask who works in SEO will tell you something different. At least that’s been my experience. I waver a little bit. My personal– like the way I do it on my site– I’m not saying this is the right way– I tend to no follow them, no index, no follow them, so that Google just doesn’t crawl them. They’re not in the sitemap, things like that.
But I will say I don’t have a lot of those. I don’t have any of those like linky party type pages, or anything like that, which is, I think, a different story, because they literally offer, in my opinion, zero value to the reader whatsoever. I can’t see a situation where you would like organically link to one in a more substantive post. I mean, I’m totally willing to be wrong if someone wants to challenge this, but in my opinion, I don’t think they’re worth keeping. So something that’s like really, really thin, I would delete.
In a case where you have an old recipe from like five years ago when things were just really different, when people were writing like either a personal story, like the terrible stereotype of food bloggers, like a personal story, and then like, and here’s a scalloped potatoes recipe, or it’s just like one paragraph of text and then followed by the recipe, I would keep that, and optimize it. I would add more educational, useful text, and just in this case, maybe republish. I still probably wouldn’t republish as long as it’s still a scalloped potato recipe. But add substantive content, and it’s no longer a post that you need to consider deleting.
JENNY GUY: Fatten it up, in other words, if it’s thin.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Exactly.
JENNY GUY: Eric, same question to you. What are your thoughts on deleting content?
ERIC HOCHBERBER: I’ve had a blog post in draft form for so long on this, because I do have strong opinions. I think, as Nora alluded to before with a different topic, you can do sometimes more damage than good if you just start deleting content and you don’t properly set up a redirect, or properly do something with your site structure.
You might have something you consider thin content and had links coming in. You don’t want to lose those links. You might do more damage if you end up just blanket deleting everything from 2015 because you didn’t like your writing style back then. If you’re using a tool that will help you find things that have zero links to it, delete the crap out of it. It doesn’t matter. It has no links. I don’t know. If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? No one knows. Just delete the content. That’s fine.
But then why are you even deleting it? If there’s no links to it, Google’s not finding it. Sorry, if there’s no internal links to it, then Google won’t find it. So if there’s no external links, I think it’s safe to delete as long as you clean up all the internal links to it as well. And again, you just have to do it right. And that’s my problem with the deleting thin content is I don’t think most people do it right.
JENNY GUY: The other thing that I think that we always talk about in these circumstances is it can take a lot of time to go through to be cleaning all this stuff up. Time that– we all have limited time, and time that you could be creating new content, or updating that content as opposed to spending a lot of time going back and deleting and doing redirects, and all that stuff. I think that make more content as opposed to be worrying about cleaning it up.
And I think that I totally get it as myself as a person who likes things to be neat. And if I have pivoted in my theme, or whatever, and there are all these posts that no longer fit the theme. And they don’t get a ton of traffic, but they get some. The users aren’t using my site the way that I am looking at it. They’re not looking at my old posts from five years ago. Nobody is doing that. So it’s not impacting other people. Is that fairly accurate? That it’s not– people aren’t viewing my site the way I view it.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: There’s not some thin penalty from Panda that goes to your whole site. It’s just that post won’t rank. Google looks at individual pages. So if you have some thin content and nothing links to it, that’s fine. Just make sure you don’t have links on your home page, on your major cornerstone content, on any– if that is like four or five hops from the home page, it doesn’t matter if it’s thin content.
JENNY GUY: Speaking of–
NORA SCHLESINGER: I also remove tags.
JENNY GUY: Oh, please.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Sorry, I was just going to say real quick.
JENNY GUY: No, yeah.
NORA SCHLESINGER: I will move categories and tags from it so that it’s not showing up in any indexes, like any menus on the site. I just try to make it as hidden as possible.
JENNY GUY: Put a rug on it, you know? It’s like the stain on your floor.
OK, guys, unfortunately, we are out of time. I have a final question for Eric and Nora. This is– we’re going to have to have it back. There are more questions in the comments. We had a question about Grow.me that we’re having emailed in.
While we know that SEO is a long and never-ending game, as is proven by this live with all the questions, we can’t help loving quick wins and action items here on the show. So to close out their episode, I would love for each of you guys to give your top tip that people can go and do right now without paying a ton of money, without emailing an expert, or getting an audit. What can they do today to help their SEO?
And I’m going to quickly make an announcement, and then we will start that with Nora. Our next Teal Talk– you guys, this has been an amazing hour. Thank you for being here. We will be back in two weeks, which is Thursday March 25, at 3:00 PM Eastern time. We are going to have– Eric is going to come back again, and then we are going to have our Grow.me product manager Sam Seeley. We’re going to be talking about– dun dun dun– first-party data, and Grow.me, and cookies, and all of the things that are coming our way, and some exciting new developments in the Grow.me product. So we hope you will join us there.
But guys, this has been an amazing hour, so much information packed in. I want to do it again. Nora, thank you for taking time out of your schedule to come and give us so much expertise.
NORA SCHLESINGER: My pleasure. It was great.
JENNY GUY: Will you lay us our tip, that tip on us about your top tip.
NORA SCHLESINGER: Yeah. I would say decide what your site’s authority is, what you want it to be, then put blinders on, and ignore all other themes, contents, keywords, trends, you name it, that doesn’t fit in that nice little package that you define for yourself.
JENNY GUY: Super helpful. And we are going to share in your links where we can find Nora. If you want to find her on her blog, at her day job, where she’s the casual, amazing CEO, that will all be linked up, as well as a Theory of Content episode that Nora did. So all of that is available there. Eric, same question to you.
ERIC HOCHBERBER: I’m just going to steal Nora’s answer so I can quickly do something else. Yeah, learn when you’re an expert on. Search through you Search Console. Find what you’re an expert on. Write about that stuff, related content. We have awesome blog posts on it we can link to.
I’m going to take it just to quickly say the May update, because I know a lot of people had questions about that, and we ran out of time. I promise you Mediavine is not ignoring CLS, or LCP, or FID, the three Core Web Vitals. Every tool that we have we are making sure are optimized for all three. And yes, we have a fix coming for ads for CLS. So May doesn’t have to be as scary as it seems.
And again, remember, just one ranking factor. You can still be failing all three of those and still rank. It’s going to be crazy. It’ll be fine, I guess what I’m trying to say. Relax. We will try to help you as much as we can.
JENNY GUY: I also promise you that we will have a Teal Talk episode before that algorithm update comes. And we will talk about all of that in detail. We’re going to have to have Nora and Eric back because this was great. Thank you guys for being great as always. And we will see you in two weeks to talk about cookies, and data, and privacy. Thank you guys again.
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Gary Illyes from Google reiterated that it is still best for SEO purposes to use hyphens as separators in your URLs over using underscores are separators in your URLs. Why? Gary explained “we can’t easily segment at underscore and that’s why we are recommending dashes.”
This came up in the latest Search Off The Record podcast at the 17 minute mark or so where Martin Splitt mentioned “That’s why brevity for me is important as well. Yes, sure, you can use a URL shortener, but then you get links, like, I don’t know, something.something/8907d12. And I’m like, yeah, that’s not easy to remember at all. But if it’s like “mobile-friendly-test” and I can remember that. But if it’s “mobile_friendly-test” or something like that. And it’s like “ugh!” But Gary, you said there’s a difference.”
Gary responded saying “There’s a difference and that’s in our segmenter. Basically we use some parts of the URL for understanding what the page is about. And the way it works is that we need to be careful about where we are segmenting because many things on the internet, things that people write about have an underscore in them, so we can’t easily segment at underscore and that’s why we are recommending dashes.”
Here is the embed:

Now, there is a ton of history here on underscores versus hyphens in URLs and what Google has said about them before. In 2007, Matt Cutts of Google told us to use hyphens / dashes over underscores and clarified that he did not say that Google treated them equally. He did in 2017 say he want Google to treat underscores as separators but didn’t seem successful back then. In 2016, John Mueller said underscores vs. dashes doesn’t matter.
So I guess it still does matter, as this is the latest information from Google – that hyphens/dashes are still recommended over underscores for word separators in URLs.
One big caveat – I would not change established URLs just to add hyphens – that would be a horrible idea.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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Google’s “Search Off the Record” is a monthly podcast for behind-the-scenes looks at the company and its inner search workings. In last month’s episode, Google veterans John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Martin Splitt addressed domain names and their impact on organic search rankings.
Here are a few takeaways.
Google’s “Search Off the Record” is a monthly podcast.
The Google team emphasized domain names are a business decision with no direct impact on organic search rankings. Choosing a domain name is the first and most important step in starting a site because it reflects a brand’s identity.
Moreover, Google says it ignores keywords in a domain. But I’ve seen many weak websites that rank well seemingly because they have keywords in the domain. I suspect this is because people often link to websites using the domain name as an anchor text. The keywords appear in the link text of external backlinks, and Google still seems to use keywords in anchor texts as a strong ranking signal.
Nonetheless, brand-focused domain names are best in my experience, for these reasons:
In short, brand-focused domain names are long-term investments. A keyword-rich domain means prioritizing organic search over other channels and, potentially, long-term growth.
Google’s John Mueller advises against letting Google access your “Coming soon” page because once Google crawls an empty page, it may not crawl it in the foreseeable future, if ever.
“Coming soon” pages are useful for marketing to generate buzz and raise interest among prospects. But block those pages from Google via a Robots.txt file.
Including the “World Wide Web” prefix in a domain in another longstanding SEO debate. Google doesn’t care if the prefix is there, provided the use is consistent. Pick a version and then redirect the other to it.
And be sure to claim both URLs in Search Console. Better yet, add a DNS record to that domain at your registrar for both versions (“www” and not) and both protocols (“https” and “http”).
This was not discussed in the episode, but it’s included in Google’s documentation and relevant to choosing domain names. Google shows site names in search results. When it doesn’t know the site’s name, Google will show the domain.
To help Google know your site name, use the “WebSite” schema structured data type that includes your site’s home page and name. Here’s example code from Google.
Google’s documentation lists other preferred tactics for brand names:
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As entrepreneurs, we are constantly trying to acquire new skills and knowledge to survive and thrive in the competitive business landscape. While reading an insightful business book is almost always the best way to gain knowledge and wisdom, not everyone can find time in their busy schedule to read books.
So what should a busy entrepreneur do?
The answer is simple: listen to podcasts!
You can tune into podcasts anytime you want — while commuting to work, jogging, cooking, cycling, or even while working out at the gym.
Podcasts are immensely popular these days. According to Convince and Convert, podcast listeners listen to an average of 8 podcasts per week.
There are podcasts covering almost any topic you can imagine. Entrepreneurship is no different. There are a ton of business podcasts, where successful entrepreneurs and business leaders share their expertise, insights, experiences, and strategies that can be immensely helpful in your own entrepreneurial journey.
To that end, I’ve compiled a list of podcasts that will make you a better entrepreneur.
Here are the 20 best entrepreneur podcasts to help you get started.
Table of Contents
Rework is a podcast by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founders of 37signals and authors of one of my favorite business books, “Rework.” It’s a perfect companion to the book, expanding on their unconventional business philosophy and offering a behind-the-scenes look at their journey with 37signals.
The podcast dives into startup stories and lessons learned, showing you why bootstrapping, staying small, and growing slow can be just as rewarding as scaling quickly.
If you prefer a more organic approach to entrepreneurship, then Rework is among the best entrepreneur podcasts you can listen to.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Recommended reading: 7 Business Lessons from “Rework” by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Pivot is a weekly podcast produced by Vox Media and New York Magazine, featuring hosts Kara Swisher, one of Silicon Valley’s most respected journalists, and NYU Professor Scott Galloway.
This show combines sharp insights with lively banter, as Swisher and Galloway share their takes on technology, business, politics, and culture.
Whether they’re analyzing the latest tech trends or debating the implications of recent business developments, their engaging back-and-forth makes Pivot both informative and entertaining.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Naval Ravikant is a serial entrepreneur and one of the most well-known venture capitalists in the world. Naval’s unique perspective on life, happiness, and success has set him apart from other tech entrepreneurs and he has amassed quite a following on Twitter because of this quality.
Naval explained this dichotomy on the Joe Rogan podcast by saying, “The reason why people like hearing me is because it’s like if you go to a circus and you see a bear, that’s kind of interesting but not that much. If you see a unicycle, that’s interesting. But you see a bear on a unicycle, that’s really interesting. So, when you combine things you’re not supposed to combine, people get interested.”
Naval has been sharing his unique philosophy on business, wealth, and happiness on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast over the last few years and has built quite a reputation for his reflections. While you can always tune in to Naval’s several podcast interviews on shows like The Tim Ferriss Show and The Joe Rogan Podcast, Naval’s podcast is the best place to get a peek into Naval’s thought process and mental models.
Naval’s “How to Get Rich” podcast episode contains a treasure trove of tips for entrepreneurs on how they can maximize their leverage, acquire specialized knowledge, and build wealth. The podcast contains two long-form episodes (over 2 hours), while most of the other episodes are bite-sized snippets on a broad range of topics.
If you find Naval’s philosophy interesting, I’d highly recommend you read Eric Jorgensson’s The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, a compilation of Naval’s best thoughts and reflections on wealth, happiness, and life. You can read the entirety of the book online for free at navalmanack.com.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Recommended reading: 50 Best Naval Ravikant Quotes to Inspire You
Tim Ferriss is a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author known for profoundly influential business books like “The 4-Hour Workweek,” “Tribe of Mentors,” and “Tools of Titans.” His work has transformed the way people think about productivity, entrepreneurship, and personal development, offering actionable strategies for achieving more with less effort.
Tim’s podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, frequently tops the charts as the #1 business podcast on Apple Podcasts. It has also secured the top spot out of more than 500,000 podcasts on numerous occasions.
The podcast features interviews of successful people from all areas of life (investing, sports, business, art, etc.) as Tim examines the tactics, tools, and routines they typically use to achieve peak performance.
Past guests on the show have included Arnold Schwarzenegger, LeBron James, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Malcolm Gladwell, Vince Vaughn, Susan Cain, Ramit Sethi, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
The Wondery podcast network has several podcasts that entrepreneurs will find useful and entertaining. But my pick for the best business podcast series from the network is Business Wars.
Hosted by veteran radio journalist David Brown, Business Wars explores some of the most intense corporate rivalries and how the leaders and investors involved in competing companies drove their companies to new heights or financial ruin.
From covering classic brand rivalries like Coke vs Pepsi and iPhone vs BlackBerry to more recent rivalries like Marvel vs DC and Red Bull vs Monster, David Brown’s impeccable storytelling skills will keep you hooked and wanting more. That said, it’s not just the entertainment factor that makes this such a compelling podcast. You’ll also find a ton of lessons and cautionary tales along the way.
The podcast gives a multi-episode treatment to each brand rivalry, while each episode is around 30 minutes long. My personal favorite is the 8-part Netflix vs BlockBuster series.
If you enjoy learning about corporate rivalries as much as I do, you’re going to love this podcast.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Chris Guillebeau is the author of The $100 Startup, a New York Times bestseller that has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. In his most recent book, Side Hustle, Guillebeau explains how anyone can create a new source of income in 27 days. He explores the subject in greater depth in his podcast, Side Hustle School.
The purpose of Guillebeau’s podcast is to help you create a new source of income without quitting your job.
In each episode, you’ll hear a different story of someone who’s started a side hustle — along with what went well, how that person overcame challenges, and what happened as a result.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify
Gary Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur and chairman & CEO of VaynerMedia, a full-service advertising agency servicing Fortune 100 clients. Gary Vee has an active presence on social media, including Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube, where he has his Q&A show #AskGaryVee and the daily video documentary series DAILYVEE.
In his podcast, The GaryVee Audio Experience, you’ll find a mix of #AskGaryVee show episodes, keynote speeches on marketing and business, segments from his DAILYVEE video series, interviews, and fireside chats, as well as original content recorded specifically for the podcast.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Entrepreneurs on Fire is an award-winning business podcast by John Lee Dumas, where he interviews successful entrepreneurs to inspire you in your entrepreneurial journey.
The goal of this podcast is to present you with the inspiration and strategies you need to fire up your entrepreneurial journey and create the life you’ve always dreamed of.
Since launching his podcast on September 22nd, 2012, Dumas has interviewed over 2,000 entrepreneurs, including Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Barbara Corcoran, Tim Ferriss, Neil Patel, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Hosted by Laura Shin, Unchained is one of the best cryptocurrency podcasts on the web. Shin was the first mainstream media journalist to cover cryptocurrency and blockchain full-time at Forbes. Most recently, she authored the book The Cryptopians, which explores the origin stories of Ethereum.
If you’re a crypto entrepreneur, then you should definitely tune in to this podcast as it delivers the most up-to-date information on the top crypto stories of the day. In addition to covering breaking news stories in the cryptosphere, the show also features interviews with thought leaders, leading experts, and influencers from the industry.
Past guests on the show have included the likes of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), prominent Canadian VC Chamath Palihapitiya, and several other blockchain innovators and investors. If you’re a crypto beginner, then their episode on “How to explain cryptocurrency to the average person” is highly recommended.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website | YouTube
Hosted by the Webby award-winning host Lindsay Graham, Business Movers is a weekly podcast that explores the true stories of innovative entrepreneurs, creators, and businesses. It examines their strengths, flaws, and the incredible risks they took to reach new heights.
From unravelling Coca-Cola’s biggest mistake to exploring the secrets of Warren Buffet’s business success, Business Movers examines the triumphs, failures, and ideas that transformed our lives. My personal favorite is the 5-part George Lucas series, which explains how Lucas defied the odds and risked it all to make Star Wars.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
WeCrashed is a limited podcast series that covers the rise and fall of WeWork and its eccentric founder Adam Neumann. If you don’t know about the whole WeWork IPO fiasco and the company’s subsequent fall from grace, this podcast should definitely be on your radar. It tells you exactly what was happening behind the scenes at a company that was once valued at $47 billion dollars and highlights the pivotal reasons behind the company’s downfall.
This 6-part series is hosted by podcast veteran David Brown, who also hosts Business Wars (see #5). The podcast was later adapted into an Apple TV+ limited series of the same name, starring Jared Leto as Adam Neumann and Anne Hathaway as Rebecca Neumann. The show is a good adaptation of the podcast and it’s one of the must-watch series for entrepreneurs.
Both the podcast and the accompanying TV series are worth your time if you’d like a sneak peak at all the insanity that preceded WeWork’s disastrous IPO.
Side note: To learn more about WeWork’s rise and fall, and Adam Neumann’s eccentricity and narcissism, I’d recommend Reeves Wiedeman’s book Billion Dollar Loser.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Aside from co-hosting the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway (see #2), award-winning journalist Kara Swisher has her own podcast called On with Kara Swisher.
The podcast features candid interviews with an impressive array of guests, including tech execs, entrepreneurs, politicians, celebrities, and more. New episodes are released every Monday and Thursday.
One reason this podcast is an excellent choice for entrepreneurs is Swisher’s ability to dive deep into the minds of her guests, revealing their thought processes, experiences, and lessons learned.
Past guests on the podcast have included Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, Hilary Clinton, bestselling author Adan Grant, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Masters of Scale is a business podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, where he invites successful entrepreneurs to share the stories and strategies that helped them grow from startups into global brands.
Reid and his guests talk entrepreneurship, leadership, strategy, management, and fundraising. But they also talk about the human journey — with all its failures and setbacks.
Past guests on the podcast have included Arianna Huffington, Ben Chestnut, Kevin Systrom, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
With over 3 million subscribers, Morning Brew is one of the leading business newsletters on the internet. Founder’s Journal is a podcast hosted by Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman.
Lieberman approaches his podcast like his personal audio diary where he shares the tools you need to think better and build better products. You’ll also find a ton of productivity hacks on his podcast. For example, in episode #298, Lieberman reveals his favorite productivity method and entrepreneurs from all walks of life can take valuable insights from it.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
Thrifty Titans, hosted by marketer-creator-media nerd Saikat Pyne, has been ranked as India’s #1 Marketing Podcast, and among India’s Top 20 Business Podcasts by Apple Podcasts. Tune in to learn business and audience growth insights and hacks that you can implement without losing your mind or breaking the bank.
Past guests on the show include Neil Patel (New York Times bestselling author and Founder at NP Digital), Bharati Balakrishnan (Country Head and Director – India and SEA at Shopify), RS Raghavan (Founder & CEO – Animaker), Tusharr Kumar (COO – Only Much Louder), Advait Gupt (Co-founder & CEO at Kulfi Collective) among other top global media founders, business leaders, influencers, and content creators.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts
StartUp is a podcast from Gimlet Media hosted by Alex Blumberg and Lisa Chow. The podcast is all about what it’s really like to start a business.
The first two seasons of the show followed stories of starting businesses. Season 1 was about the starting of Gimlet Media itself, and season 2 dealt with the starting of a dating company called “Dating Ring.” The third season follows one business per episode.
Listen on: Website | Spotify
Smart Passive Income is a top-ranking and award-winning business podcast hosted by Pat Flynn, a blogger and entrepreneur known for his immensely successful blog, The Smart Passive Income, where he teaches his followers about investing in online businesses and generating passive income.
In his podcast, Pat Flynn reveals all of his online business and blogging strategies, income sources, and killer marketing tips and tricks so you can be ahead of the curve with your online business or blog. The podcast covers a broad range of business topics such as automation, crowdsourcing, SEO, affiliate marketing, outsourcing, and more.
Since launching his podcast in 2010, Flynn has invited several entrepreneurs, authors, and business leaders to share their secrets of success. Past guests have included Gary Vaynerchuk, Nir Eyal, James Clear, Ramit Sethi, and many more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Hosted by Stig Brodersen and Trey Lockerbie, this podcast interviews and studies famous financial billionaires. From Warren Buffet to Jeff Bezos to Howard Marks, We Study Billionaires teaches you how to apply the billionaires’ investment strategies in the stock market.
This podcast was launched in 2014, so there are a lot of episodes to skim through. I’d personally recommend you start with the very first episode of the podcast which examines Warren Buffet’s business philosophy and investment strategies.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
The Dropout is a limited podcast series that tells the story of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her revolutionary blood-testing company, Theranos.
Once touted as the “next Steve Jobs,” Holmes’ net worth was valued at $4.5 billion while her company’s valuation was $9 billion. It all came crashing down when it was later revealed that her blood-testing technology didn’t work and that she had been deceiving investors and using intimidation tactics to silence her employees.
All this and more is covered on the podcast, which features exclusive interviews with former Theranos employees, investors, and patients. The podcast also covers Elizabeth Holmes’ trial and final sentencing in detail. The podcast was later adapted into a Hulu limited TV series of the same name which is definitely worth a watch. It features a great ensemble cast and Amanda Seyfried nails her role as Elizabeth Holmes.
To learn more about the Theranos scandal, I’d highly recommend you check out John Carreyrou’s brilliant book Bad Blood. Carreyrou was the first reporter to investigate Theranos and played a significant role in its downfall.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Last but not least, I’m including my own podcast on this list — Marketing Mantra. I launched this podcast with the help of Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor) back in August 2018, with an aim to share actionable marketing strategies and tactics that have worked for me at my blog and my digital marketing agency.
From time to time, I also invite other bloggers and entrepreneurs to share their success stories and business tactics. Past guests on the podcast have included Matthew Woodward, Daniel Daines-Hutt from AmpMyContent, Alexandra Tachalova from Digital Olympus, Vlad Calus from Planable, and many more.
If you’ve liked any of my content in the past, I’d request you to please subscribe to Marketing Mantra on your preferred podcast player.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
The 20 podcasts featured above are my personal favorites, but the entrepreneur podcasts below are also highly recommended:
So there you have it — the 20 podcasts that will make you a better entrepreneur. You can also check out this list of 38 marketing podcasts if you’d like to get your fill of the latest marketing trends, insights, and tips.
Looking for more business podcast recommendations? Check out these other lists from my blog:
Did I miss out on any of your favorite entrepreneur podcasts? Let me know in the comments section below. I’d love to hear your recommendations.
If you liked this article, please share it on Twitter using the link below:
Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 20 September 2019 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness.
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Sandeep As a an avid listeners to podcasts and a fellow podcasters, I am glad to see your compilation. Have you listened to Brent Leary’s podcast on Small Business Trends?
I would add marketing in the car by Russell Brunson, smart marketer, great content.
Thanks for the recommendation, Seki. Will definitely check it out.
[…] of topics — including business. If you’re looking to improve your skills as an entrepreneur, check out this 99signals post by Sandeep Mallya for a selection to add to your list. Then see what members of […]
I use great lists like this all of the time for deciding which podcasts to listen to.
Please consider as well these fast risers…
Two Are Gathered Leadership Podcast (dealing with the heart issues of entrepreneurs)
Global Studio Marketing Podcast (teaching entrepreneurs how to THINK like seasoned marketing pros)
3 podcasts that will make you a better entrepreneur:
1) The Pitch – this is Seth Mclaughlin’s podcast. It airs every Saturday on NPR and talks about the life of entrepreneurs.
2) Planet Money – more or less, it discusses economics and how these relationships manifest themselves in our society. This is not to be missed for anyone wanting to learn more about money in general.
3) Freakonomics Radio – you have probably heard Jonathan Levitt interviewed on many networks, but his podcast talks about different things that he has learned, primarily through studies as opposed to an interview.
We started our business listening to Tim Ferris show and now we are doing amazingly well. You just need to gather the right skills, bring the right confidence, and move forward.
Awesome list! Especially The Dropout, I still can’t believe what Holmes pulled off. I also suggest the book Bad Blood — it reads like a thriller! On the podcast side, I would suggest Road to CEO — the guests are real folk from various backgrounds and they share pretty amazing stories. So, if anybody is on the lookout for a more underground podcast gem, this is the one.
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Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…

Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
A few links on this blog are affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service through one of these affiliate links, I’ll receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Rest assured, I recommend only those tools that I personally use and genuinely trust. In most cases, you’ll find in-depth reviews, tutorials, and how-to guides of these tools on my blog to help you make informed decisions.

source

By Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.
Today, I’m talking to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the Google I/O developer conference last week. Google’s focus during the conference was AI, of course — Google is building AI into virtually all of its products. My personal favorite is the new AI search in Google Photos that lets you ask things like, “What’s my license plate number?” and get an answer back from your entire photo library. All in all, Google executives said “AI” more than 120 times during the keynote — we counted.
But there was one particular announcement at I/O that’s sending shockwaves around the web: Google is rolling out what it calls AI Overviews in Search to everyone in the United States by this week and around the world to more than a billion users by the end of the year. That means when you search for something on Google, you’ll get AI-powered results at the top of the page for a number of queries. The company literally describes this as “letting Google do the Googling for you.” Google has been testing this for a year now, in what it called the Search Generative Experience, so you may have already seen a version of this — but now it’s here, and it will change the web as we know it. 
Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!
Until now, Google’s ecosystem has been based on links to everyone else’s content: you type something into a search box, you see some links, and you click one. That sends traffic to websites, which their owners can try to monetize in various ways, and ideally everyone wins.
Google is by far the biggest source of traffic on the web today, so if it starts keeping that traffic for itself by answering questions with AI, that will change or potentially even destroy the internet ecosystem as we know it. The News/Media Alliance, which represents a bunch of fancy news publishers, put out a press release calling AI previews in search “catastrophic to our traffic.”
If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it Google Zero, and I’ve been asking web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero. If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the web with AI, what are all these bots going to summarize when people ask them questions?
Sundar has some ideas. For one, he’s not convinced the web, which he says he cares deeply about, is in all that much danger. You’ll hear him mention Wired’s famous 2010 headline, “The web Is dead,” and he makes the argument that new, transformative technologies like AI always cause some short-term disruptions. 
He says injecting AI into Search is about creating value for users, and those users are telling him that they find these new features to be helpful — and even clicking on links at higher rates in the AI previews. But he didn’t say where that leaves the people who put the content on the internet in the first place. We really sat with that idea for a while — and we talked a lot about the anger creative people feel toward AI systems training on their work.
I’ve talked to Sundar quite a bit over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I’ve ever seen him. You can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future — where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, and more artistic — and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever. Sundar is wrestling with that tension.
One note: you’ll hear me say I think Sundar keeps making oblique references to OpenAI, which he pushes back on pretty strongly. I thought about it afterward, and it’s pretty clear he wasn’t just talking about OpenAI but also Meta, which has openly turned away from sending any traffic to any websites whatsoever and has been explicit that it doesn’t want to support news on its platforms at all anymore. I wish that had clicked for me during this conversation, because I would have asked about it more directly.
Okay, Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 
Sundar Pichai, you are the CEO of both Alphabet and Google. Welcome to Decoder.
Nilay, good to be here.
I am excited to talk to you. I feel like I talk to you every year at Google I/O, and we talk about all the things you’ve announced. There’s a lot of AI news to talk about. As you know, I’m particularly interested in the future of the web, so I really want to talk about that with you, but I figured I’d start with an easy one.
Do you think language is the same as intelligence?
Wow, that’s not an easy question! I don’t think I’m the expert on it. I think language does encode a lot of intelligence, probably more than people thought. It explains the successes of large language models to a great extent. But my intuition tells me, as humans, there’s a lot more to the way we consume information than language alone. But I’d say language is a lot more than people think it is.
The reason I asked that question to start is: I look at the announcements at I/O with AI and what you’re doing, I look at your competitors with AI and what they’re doing, and everything is very language-heavy. It’s LLMs that have really led to this explosion of interest in innovation and investment, and I wonder if the intelligence is increasing at the same rate as the facility with language. I kind of don’t see it, to be perfectly honest. I see computers getting much better at language and actually in some cases getting dumber. I’m wondering if you see that same gap.
Yeah, it’s a great question. Part of the reason we made Gemini natively multimodal — and you’re beginning to see glimpses of it now but it hasn’t made its way fully into products yet — is so that with audio, video, text, images, and code, when we have multimodality working on the input and output side — and we are training models using all of that — maybe in the next cycle, that’ll encapsulate a lot more than just today, which is primarily text-based. I think that continuum will shift as we take in a lot more information that way. So maybe there’s more to come.
Last year the tagline was “Bold but responsible.” That’s Google’s approach. You said it again onstage this year. And then I look at our reactions to AI getting things wrong, and it seems like they’re getting more and more tempered over time.
I’ll give you an example. In the demos you had yesterday, you showed multimodal video search of someone trying to fix a broken film camera. And the answer was just wrong. The answer that was highlighted in the video was, “Just open the back of the film camera and jiggle it.” It’s like, well, that would ruin all of your film. No one who had an intelligent understanding of how that camera [worked] would suggest that.
I was talking to the team and, ironically, as part of making the video, they consulted with a bunch of subject matter experts who all reviewed the answer and thought it was okay. I understand the nuance. I agree with you. Obviously, you don’t want to expose your film by taking it outside of a darkroom. There are certain contexts in which it makes sense to do that. If you don’t want to break the camera and if what you’ve taken is not that valuable, it makes sense to do that.
You’re right. There is a lot of nuance to it. Part of what I hope Search serves to do is to give you a lot more context around that answer and allow people to explore it deeply. But I think these are the kinds of things for us to keep getting better at. But to your earlier question, look, I do see the capability frontier continuing to move forward. I think we are a bit limited if we were just training on text data, but we are all making it more multimodal. So I see more opportunities there.
Let’s talk about Search. This is the thing that I am most interested in — I think this is the thing that is changing the most. In an abstract way, it’s the thing that’s the most exciting. You can ask a computer a question, and it will just happily tell you an answer. That feels new. I see the excitement around it.
Yesterday, you announced AI Overviews are coming to Search. That’s an extension of what was called the Search Generative Experience, which was announced in a rollout to everyone in the United States. I would describe the reactions to that news from the people who make websites as fundamentally apocalyptic. The CEO of the News/Media Alliance said to CNN, “This will be catastrophic to our traffic.” Another media CEO forwarded me a newsletter and the headline was, “This is a death blow to publishers.” Were you expecting that kind of response to rolling out AI Overviews in Search?
I recall, in 2010, there were headlines that the web was dead. I’ve long worked on the web, obviously. I care deeply about it. When the transition from desktop to mobile happened, there was a lot of concern because people were like, “Oh, it’s a small screen. How will people read content? Why would they look at content?” We had started introducing what we internally called “Web Answers” in 2014, which are featured snippets outside [the list of links]. So you had questions like that.
I remain optimistic. Empirically, what we are seeing throughout the years, I think human curiosity is boundless. It’s something we have deeply understood in Search. More than any other company, we will differentiate ourselves in our approach even through this transition. As a company, we realize the value of this ecosystem, and it’s symbiotic. If there isn’t a rich ecosystem making unique and useful content, what are you putting together and organizing? So we feel it.
I would say, through all of these transitions, things have played out a bit differently. I think users are looking for high-quality content. The counterintuitive part, which I think almost always plays out, is [that] it’s not a zero-sum game. People are responding very positively to AI Overviews. It’s one of the most positive changes I’ve seen in Search based on metrics. But people do jump off on it. And when you give context around it, they actually jump off it. It actually helps them understand, and so they engage with content underneath, too. In fact, if you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.
But I understand the sentiment. It’s a big change. These are disruptive moments. AI is a big platform shift. People are projecting out, and people are putting a lot into creating content. It’s their businesses. So I understand the perspective [and] I’m not surprised. We are engaging with a lot of players, both directly and indirectly, but I remain optimistic about how it’ll actually play out. But it’s a good question. I’m happy to talk about it more.
I have this concept I call “Google Zero,” which is born of my own paranoia. Every referrer that The Verge has ever had has gone up and then it’s gone down, and Google is the last large-scale referrer of traffic on the web for almost every website now. And I can see that for a lot of sites, Google Zero is playing out. Their Google traffic has gone to zero, particularly independent sites that aren’t part of some huge publishing conglomerate. There’s an air purifier blog that we covered called HouseFresh. There’s a gaming site called Retro Dodo. Both of these sites have said, “Look, our Google traffic went to zero. Our businesses are doomed.”
Is that the right outcome here in all of this — that the people who care so much about video games or air purifiers that they started websites and made the content for the web are the ones getting hurt the most in the platform shift?
It’s always difficult to talk about individual cases, and at the end of the day, we are trying to satisfy user expectations. Users are voting with their feet, and people are trying to figure out what’s valuable to them. We are doing it at scale, and I can’t answer on the particular site—
A bunch of small players are feeling the hurt. Loudly, they’re saying it: “Our businesses are going away.” And that’s the thing you’re saying: “We’re engaging, we’re talking.” But this thing is happening very clearly. 
It’s not clear to me if that’s a uniform trend. I have to look at data on an aggregate [basis], so anecdotally, there are always times when people have come in an area and said, “Me, as a specific site, I have done worse.” But it’s like an individual restaurant saying, “I’ve started getting fewer customers this year. People have stopped eating food,” or whatever it is. It’s not necessarily true. Some other restaurant might have opened next door that’s doing very well. So it’s tough to say.
From our standpoint, when I look historically even over the past decade, we have provided more traffic to the ecosystem, and we’ve driven that growth. You may be making a secondary point about small sites versus more aggregating sites, which is the second point you’re talking about. Ironically, there are times when we have made changes to actually send more traffic to the smaller sites. Some of those sites that complain a lot are the aggregators in the middle. So should the traffic go to the restaurant that has created a website with their menus and stuff or people writing about these restaurants? These are deep questions. I’m not saying there’s a right answer.
But you’re about to flip over the whole apple cart, right? You’re about to start answering some of these questions very directly. And where that content comes from in the future, I think you want the people who care the most to publish that information directly to be the thing that you synthesize. 
I agree.
The incentives for that seem to be getting lower and lower — on the web, anyway.
I feel it’s the opposite. If anything, I feel like through AI Overviews, when you give people context, yes, there are times all people want is a quick answer and they bounce back. But overall, when we look at user journeys, when you give the context, it also exposes people to jumping-off points, and so they engage more. Actually, this is what drives growth over time. I look at desktop to mobile, and there were similar questions. In fact, there was a [magazine] cover I’m almost tempted to pull out, saying, “The web is dead.” There was a Google Zero argument 10 years ago. But you yourself made the point that it’s not an accident that we still remain as one of the largest referrers because we’ve cared about it deeply for a long, long time.
I look at our journey, even the last year through the Search Generative Experience, and I constantly found us prioritizing approaches that would send more traffic while meeting user expectations. We think through that deeply and we actually change our approach. If there are areas where we feel like we haven’t fully gotten it right, we are careful about rolling it out. But I think what’s positively surprising us is that people engage more, and that will lead to more growth over time for high-quality content.
There’s a lot of debate about what high-quality content is. At least in my experience, I value independent sources, I value smaller things, I want more authentic voices. And I think those are important attributes we are constantly trying to improve.
You mentioned that you think more people will click through links in AI Overviews. Liz [Reid] who runs Search had a blog post making the same claim. There’s no public data that says that is true yet. Are you going to release that data? Are you going to show people that this is actually happening?
On an aggregate, I think people rely on this value of the ecosystem. If people over time don’t see value, website owners don’t see value coming back from Google, I think we’ll pay a price. We have the right incentive structure. But obviously, look, we are careful about… there are a lot of individual variations, and some of it is users choosing which way to go. That part is hard to sort out. But I do think we are committed at an aggregate level to do the right thing.
I was reading some SEO community trade publications this morning responding to the changes, and one of the things that was pointed out was that, in Search Console, it doesn’t show you if the clicks are coming from a featured snippet or an AI Overview or just Google’s regular 10 blue links. Would you break that out? Would you commit to breaking that out so people can actually audit and verify and measure that the AI Overviews are sending out as much traffic as you say they are?
It’s a good question for the Search team. They think about this at a deeper level than I do. I think we are constantly trying to give more visibility, but also we want people to create content that’s good. And we are trying to rank it and organize it, so I think there’s a balance to be had. The more we spec it out, then the more people design for that. There’s a tradeoff there, so it’s not clear to me what the right answer is.
That tradeoff between what you spec out and say and what people make, that’s been the story of the web for quite some time. It had reached, I think, a steady state. Whether you thought that steady state was good or bad, it was at least at a steady state. Now, that state is changing — AI is obviously changing it.
The 10 blue link model, the old steady state, is very much based on an exchange: “We’re going to let you index our content. We’re going to [have] featured snippets. We’re going to let you see all of our information. In return, you will send us traffic.” That formed the basis of what you might call a fair-use argument. Google’s going to index this stuff, [and] there’s not going to be a lot of payments in the middle.
In the AI era, no one knows how that’s going to go. There are some major lawsuits happening. There are deals being made by Google and OpenAI for training data. Do you think it’s appropriate for Google to start making more deals to pay for data to train search results? Because those AI snippets are not really the same as the 10 blue links or anything else you’ve done in the past.
To be very clear, there’s a myth that Google’s search has been 10 blue links for — I look at our mobile experience — many, many years. And we have had answers, we allow you to refine questions, we’ve had featured snippets, and so on. The product has evolved significantly. 
Having said that, as a company, even as we look at AI, we have done Google [News] Showcase, we have done licensing deals. To the extent there is value there, we obviously think there is a case for fair use in the context of beneficial, transformative use. I’m not going to argue that with you given your background. But I think there are cases in which we will see dedicated incremental value to our models, and we’ll be looking at partnerships to get at that. I do think we’ll approach it that way.
Let me ask this question in a different way. I won’t do too much fair-use analysis with you, I promise, as much as I like doing it.
There were some news reports recently that OpenAI had trained its video generation product, Sora, on YouTube. How did you feel when you heard that news?
Look, we don’t know the details. Our YouTube team is following up and trying to understand it. We have terms and conditions, and we would expect people to abide by those terms and conditions when you build a product, so that’s how I felt about it. 
So you felt like they had potentially broken your terms and conditions? Or if they had, that wouldn’t have been appropriate?
That’s right. 
The reason I asked that question — which is a much more emotional question — is okay, maybe that’s not appropriate. And what OpenAI has said is essentially “We’ve trained on publicly available information,” which means they found it on the web. 
Most people don’t get to make that deal. They don’t have a YouTube team of licensing professionals who can say, “We have terms and conditions.” They don’t even have terms and conditions. They’re just putting their stuff on the internet. Do you understand why, emotionally, there’s the reaction to AI from the creative community — that it feels the same as you might have felt about OpenAI training on YouTube?
Absolutely. Look, be it website owners or content creators or artists, I can understand how emotional a transformation this is. Part of the reason you saw, even through Google I/O when we were working on products like music generation, we have really taken an approach by which we are working first to make tools for artists. We haven’t put a general-purpose tool out there for anyone to create songs.
The way we have taken that approach in many of these cases is to put the creator community as much at the center of it as possible. We’ve long done that with YouTube. Through it all, we are trying to figure out what the right ways to approach this.
But it is a transformative moment as well, and there are other players in this. We are not the only player in the ecosystem. But, to your earlier question, yes, I understand people’s emotions about it. I definitely am very empathetic to how people are perceiving this moment.
They feel like it’s a taking — that they put work on the internet and the big companies are coming, taking it for free, and then making products that they are charging $20 a month for or that will lift their creative work and remix it for other people. The thing that makes it feel like a taking is [that] very little value accrues back to them.
That’s really the thing I’m asking about: how do you bring value back to them? How do you bring incentives back to the small creator or the independent business that’s saying, “Look, this feels a taking.” 
Look. [Sighs] The whole reason we’ve been successful on platforms like YouTube is we have worked hard to answer this question. You’ll continue to see us dig deep about how to do this well. And I think the players who end up doing better here will have more winning strategies over time. I genuinely believe that.
Across everything we do, we have to sort that out. Anytime you’re running a platform, it’s the basis on which you can build a sustainable long-term platform. Through this AI moment, over time, there’ll be players who will do better by the content creators that support their platforms, and whoever does it better will emerge as the winner. I believe that to be a tenet of these things over time.
One thing that I think is really interesting about the YouTube comparison in particular — it’s been described to me many times that YouTube is a licensing business. You license a lot of content from the creators. You obviously pay them back in terms of the advertising model there. The music industry has a huge licensing business with YouTube. It is an existential relationship for both sides. Susan Wojcicki used to describe YouTube as a music service, which I think confused everyone until you looked at the data.
Universal Music is mad about AI on YouTube. YouTube reacts. It builds a bunch of tools. It writes a constitution about what AI will and will not do. People are mad about the Search Generative Experience or AI [Overviews] on the web. Google doesn’t react the same way. I’m wondering if you can square that circle.
That is so far from reality.
You think so?
That’s so far from reality. I look at other players and how they’ve approached—
You’re talking about OpenAI, which is just out there taking stuff.
In general, when you look at how we have approached the Search Generative Experience, even through a moment like this, the time we have taken to test, iterate, and prioritize approaches, and the way we’ve done it over the years, I would say I definitely disagree with the notion we don’t listen. We care deeply; we listen. People may not agree with everything we do. When you’re running an ecosystem, you are balancing different needs. I think that’s the essence of what makes a product successful.
Let me talk about the other side of this. There’s search: people are going to game search and that’s always going to happen and that’s a chicken-and-egg problem.
The other thing that I see happening is the web is being flooded with AI content. There was an example a few months ago where some unsavory SEO character said, “I stole a bunch of traffic from a competitor. I copied their site map. I fed it into an AI system and had it generate copy for a website that matched their site map, and I put up this website and stole a bunch of traffic from my competitor.” I think that’s a bad outcome. I don’t think we want to incentivize that in any way, shape, or form.
[Shakes head] No, no—
That’s going to happen at scale. More and more of the internet that we experience will be synthetic in some important way. How do you, on the one hand, build the systems that create the synthetic content for people and, on the other hand, rank it so that you’re only getting the best stuff? Because at some point, the defining line for a lot of people is, “I want stuff made by a human, and not stuff made by AI.”
I think there are multiple parts to your question. One, how do we differentiate high quality from low quality? I literally view it as our mission statement, and it is what has defined Search over many, many years.
I actually think people underestimate… Anytime you have these disruptive platform shifts, you’re going to go through a phase like this. I have seen that team invest so much. Our entire search quality team has been spending the last year gearing up our ranking systems, etc., to better get at what high-quality content is. If I take the next decade, [the] people who can do that better, who can sift through that, I think, will win out.
I think you’re right in your assessment that people will value human-created experiences. I hope the data bears that out. We have to be careful every time there’s a new technology. There are filmmakers, if you go and talk about CGI in films, they’re going to react very emotionally, and there are still esteemed filmmakers who never use CGI in films. But then there are people who use it and produce great films. And so you may be using AI to lay out and enhance video effects in your video.
But I agree with you. I think using AI to produce content en masse without adding any value is not what users are looking for.
But there is a big continuum and, over time, users are adapting. We are trying hard to make sure we do it in a responsible way, but we’re also listening to what users consider to be high quality and trying to get that balance right. That continuum will look different a few years out than it does today, but I think I view it as the essence of what search quality is. Do I feel confident we will be able to approach it better than others? Yes. And I think that’s what defines the work we do.
For the listener, there have been a lot of subtle shots at OpenAI today.
Can I put this into practice? I actually just did this search. It is a search for “best Chromebook.” As you know, I once bought my mother a Chromebook Pixel. It’s one of my favorite tech purchases of all time. This is a search for “best Chromebook.” I’m going to hit “generate” at the top, it’s going to generate the answer, and then I’m going to do something terrifying, which is, I’m going to hand my phone to the CEO of Google. This is my personal phone. Don’t dig through it.
You look at that — it’s the same generation that I’ve seen earlier. I asked it for the best Chromebook, and it says, “Here’s some stuff you might think of.” Then you scroll, and it’s some Chromebooks. It doesn’t say whether they’re the best Chromebooks, and then it’s a bunch of headlines, some of which are Verge headlines, that are like, “Here are some of the best Chromebooks.” That feels like the exact kind of thing that an AI-generated search could answer in a better way. Do you think that’s a good experience? Is that a waypoint or is that the destination?
I think, look, you’re showing me a query in which we didn’t automatically generate the AI.
There was a button that said, “Do you want to do this?”
But let me push back. There’s an important differentiation. There’s a reason we are giving a view without the generated AI Overview, and as a user, you’re initiating an action, so we’re respecting the user intent there. When I scroll, I see Chromebooks. I also see a whole set of links, which I can go to and that tell me all the ways you can think about Chromebooks. I see a lot of links. We didn’t show an AI Overview in this case. As a user, you’re generating the follow-up question. I think it’s right that we respect the user’s intent. If you don’t do that, people will go somewhere else, too.
But I’m saying — I did not write, “What is the best Chromebook?” I just wrote “best Chromebook — [but] the answer, a thing that identifies itself as an answer, is not on that page. The leap from “I had to push the button” to “Google pushes the button for me and then says what it believes to be the answer” is very small. I’m wondering if you think a page like that today is the destination of the search experience, or if this is a waypoint and you can see a better future version of that experience.
I think the direction of how these things will go, it’s tough to fully predict. Users keep evolving. It’s a more dynamic moment than ever. We are testing all of this, and this is a case where we didn’t trigger the AI Overview because we felt like our AI Overview is not necessarily the first experience we want to provide for that query because what’s underlying is maybe a better first look for the user — those are all quality tradeoffs we are making. But if the user is asking for a summary, we are summarizing and giving links. I think that seems like a reasonable direction to me.
I’ll show you another one where it did expand automatically. This one I only have screenshots for. I don’t think I’m fully opted in. This is Dave Lee from Bloomberg, who did a search. He got an AI Overview, and he just searched for “JetBlue Mint Lounge SFO.” And it just says the answer, which I think is fine. That’s the answer.
If you swipe one over — I cannot believe I’m letting the CEO of Google swipe on my camera roll — but if you swipe one over, you see the site it pulled from. It is a word-for-word rewrite of that site. This is the thing I’m getting at.
The AI-generated overview of that answer, if you just look at where it came from, is almost the same sentence as the source. And that’s what I mean. At some point, the better experience is the AI overview, and it’s just the thing that exists on all the sites underneath it. It’s the same information.
[Sighs] The thing with Search — we handle billions of queries. You can absolutely find a query and hand it to me and say, “Could we have done better on that query?” Yes, for sure. But in many cases, part of what is making people respond positively to AI Overviews is that the summary we are providing clearly adds value and helps them look at things they may not have otherwise thought about. If you’re adding value at that level, I think people notice it over time, and I think that’s the bar you’re trying to meet. Our data would show, over 25 years, if you aren’t doing something that users find valuable or enjoyable, they let us know right away. Over and over again we see that.
Through this transition, everything is the opposite. It’s one of the biggest quality improvements we are driving in our product. People are valuing this experience. There’s a general presumption that people don’t know what they’re doing, which I disagree with strongly. People who use Google are savvy. They understand. And so, to me, I can give plenty of examples where I’ve used AI Overviews as a user. I’m like, “Oh, this is giving context. Oh, maybe there are these dimensions I didn’t even think of in my original query. How do I expand upon it and look at it?”
You’ve made oblique mention of OpenAI a few times, I think.
I actually haven’t.
You’re saying “others.” There’s one other big competitor that is, I think, a little more—
You’re putting words in my mouth, but that’s okay.
I saw OpenAI’s demo the other day of GPT-4o, Omni. It looked a lot like the demos you gave at I/O. This idea of multimodal search, the idea that you have this character you can talk to — you have Gems, which are the same kind of idea — it feels like there’s a race to get to the same outcome for a search-like experience or an agent-like experience. Do you feel the pressure from that competition?
This is no different from Siri and Alexa. When you’re working in the technology industry, I think there is relentless innovation we felt a few years ago, all of us building voice assistants. You could have asked the same version of this question: what was Alexa trying to do and what was Siri trying to do? It’s a natural extension of that. I think you have a new technology now, and it’s evolving rapidly.
I felt like it was a good week for technology. There was a lot of innovation, I felt, on Monday and Tuesday and so on. That’s how I feel, and I think it’s going to be that way for a while. I’d rather have it that way. You’d rather be in a place where the underlying technology is evolving, which means you can radically improve the experiences you’re putting out. I’d rather have that any time than a static phase in which you feel like you’re not able to move forward quickly.
A lot of us have had this vision for what a powerful assistant can be, but we were held back by the underlying technology not being able to serve that goal. I think we have a technology that is better able to serve that. That’s why you’re seeing the progress again. I think that’s exciting. To me, I look at it and say, “We can actually make Google Assistant a whole lot better.” You’re seeing visions of that with Project Astra. It’s incredibly magical to me when I use it, so I’m very excited by it.
This brings me back to the first question I asked: language versus intelligence. To make these products, I think you need a core level of intelligence. Do you have in your head a measure of “This is when it’s going to be good enough. I can trust this”?
On all of your demo slides and all of OpenAI’s demo slides, there’s a disclaimer that says “Check this info,” and to me, it’s ready when you don’t need that anymore. You didn’t have “Check this info” at the bottom of the 10 blue links. You didn’t have “Check this info” at the bottom of featured snippets.
You’re getting at a deeper point where hallucination is still an unsolved problem. In some ways, it’s an inherent feature. It’s what makes these models very creative. It’s why it can immediately write a poem about Thomas Jefferson in the style of Nilay. It can do that. It’s incredibly creative. But LLMs aren’t necessarily the best approach to always get at factuality, which is part of why I feel excited about Search. 
Because in Search we are bringing LLMs in a way, but we are grounding it with all the work we do in Search and layering it with enough context that we can deliver a better experience from that perspective. But I think the reason you’re seeing those disclaimers is because of the inherent nature. There are still times it’s going to get it wrong, but I don’t think I would look at that and underestimate how useful it can be at the same time. I think that would be the wrong way to think about it.
Google Lens is a good example. When we first put Google Lens out, it didn’t recognize all objects well. But the curve year on year has been pretty dramatic, and users are using it more and more. We’ve had billions of queries now with Google Lens. It’s because the underlying image recognition, paired with our knowledge entity understanding, has dramatically expanded over time.
I would view it as a continuum, and I think, again, I go back to this saying that users vote with their feet. Fewer people used Lens in the first year. We also didn’t put it everywhere because we realized the limitations of the product.
When you talk to the DeepMind Google Brain team, is there a solution to the hallucination problem on the roadmap?
It’s Google DeepMind. [Laughs]
Are we making progress? Yes, we are. We have definitely made progress when we look at metrics on factuality year on year. We are all making it better, but it’s not solved. Are there interesting ideas and approaches that they’re working on? Yes, but time will tell. I would view it as LLMs are an aspect of AI. We are working on AI in a much broader way, but it’s an area where we are all definitely working to drive more progress.
Five years from now, this technology, the paradigm shift, it feels like we’ll be through it. What does the best version of the web look like for you five years from now?
I hope the web is much richer in terms of modality. Today, I feel like the way humans consume information is still not fully encapsulated in the web. Today, things exist in very different ways — you have webpages, you have YouTube, etc. But over time, I hope the web is much more multimodal, it’s much richer, much more interactive. It’s a lot more stateful, which it’s not today.
I view it as, while fully acknowledging the point that people may use AI to generate a lot of spam, I also feel every time there’s a new wave of technology, people don’t quite know how to use it. When mobile came, everyone took webpages and shoved them into mobile applications. Then, later, people evolved [into making] really native mobile applications.
The way people use AI to actually solve new things, new use cases, etc. is yet to come. When that happens, I think the web will be much, much richer, too. So: dynamically composing a UI in a way that makes sense for you. Different people have different needs, but today you’re not dynamically composing that UI. AI can help you do that over time. You can also do it badly and in the wrong way and people can use it shallowly, but there will be entrepreneurs who figure out an extraordinarily good way to do it, and out of it, there’ll be great new things to come.
Google creates a lot of incentives for development on the web through Search, through Chrome, through everything that you do. How do you make sure those incentives are aligned with those goals? Because maybe the biggest thing here is that the web ecosystem is in a moment of change, and Google has a lot of trust to build and rebuild. How do you think about making sure those incentives point at the right goals?
Look, not everything is in Google’s control. I wish I could influence what the single toughest experience when I go to websites today as a user is — you have a lot of cookie dialogues to accept, etc. So I would argue there are many things outside of that. You can go poll 100 users.
But what are the incentives we would like to create? I think, and this is a complex question, which is how do you reward originality, creativity, and independent voice at whatever scale at which you’re able to and give a chance for that to thrive in this content ecosystem we create? That’s what I think about. That’s what the Search team thinks about. But I think it’s an important principle, and I think it’ll be important for the web and important for us as a company.
That’s great. Well, Sundar, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for being on Decoder.
Thanks, Nilay. I greatly enjoyed it.
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