EP051: The Google Zoo: Understanding Google's Major SEO Algorithm Updates from Panda and Penguin to Cheetah

Well welcome, everyone. And welcome back to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing podcast. We've been off air for a little while, but we are fully rebooted now. And slight rename of the podcast, it's now called the 10. Golden Rules. Internet Marketing for law firms podcast, will still have lots of tips and ideas of value for all industries. But we're mostly specialized in working with law firms. Now, the 10 golden rules. And I want to introduce Jenna and Ike, who are going to join me. And we're going to do these in interview format. We'll have a couple of different types of podcasts going forward. But this one is our post webinar podcast. And what we found is the webinars themselves don't make great audio, because we're often referring to the slides. So today I can Jenna, who were sitting in with me when we did this month's webinar are going to interview me. And then we'll be answering the questions in an audio friendly format. So Jenna, welcome. Say hi to the people.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me.

And Ike works with us on our sales team is really experienced in audio and video. And I thought he'd bring a nice take to this. So like say, say hello.

Yeah, so nice to meet y'all. Let's get going.

All right. Well, without further ado, Jenna, you're gonna kick us off with some questions.

Yeah, I'll get to start it. So Jay, first, I want to say I really enjoy the webinar yesterday about Google's zoo is very fascinating. But before we get into it, I remember the first thing you talked about was the ABCs of SEO. So could you explain that first?

Well, can I explain the zoo concept first, and then the ABCs. So Google zoo like it's kind of a weird concept to a lot of people. But we've always referred to the Google's algorithm updates as the Google zoo, because the first one was known as Google Panda. And it was named after a Google search engineer named Nan VT panda. And then the second one that everybody heard about was called Google Penguin. And then we'll talk about things like hummingbird, and cheetah and St. Bernard. So we have 10, golden rules, we always just called it the Google Zoo. And so we're now we're trying to popularize it. And we're we did a whole webinar on the Google Zoo. So essentially, what we're talking about is the pet names that Google's given to the major updates to their algorithm, the major sorting, mechanics, major math and science behind who gets on page one of Google when you do a search, and who gets on page 1000. So if you understand the zoo, and you understand all these cute little animals, then you can understand how to search engine optimize your website. So that was the origination of the Google Zoo. As Jenna pointed out, it's helpful for a lot of the conversation, we're gonna have today to understand some of the basic terms of SEO search engine optimization, like basically how to get ranked on page one of a Google search. So we have a whole other webinar like it. And by the way, if you want to see any of the recorded webinars with the slides, you can find all that at the 10 Golden Rules YouTube page. And you can just go to 10, Golden rules.com, and click on the bottom on our YouTube on our social media listings, or just go to YouTube and search for us. But we have webinars on search engine optimization, the Google zoo, pay per click local service ads, artificial intelligence. For today's purposes, the ABCs of SEO, just a short explanation is Google has about 600 Different factors in the ranking algorithm that will determine if you're on page one, or you're on page 10. If somebody searches for, you know, Motorcycle Accident Lawyer near me, the guys on page one had the best search engine optimization or the website was customized the best for Google. So the ABCs of SEO, try and summarize those 600 factors into a really simple thing that I can understand and, and I can explain to our loyal clients. So the A is architecture, the website, the B is backlinks, and the C is content. And the architecture of the website is things like how fast the website downloads, and Google figures that's really important, because if you do a Google search, and you click on the link, and you go to a website, and that website takes six 810 seconds to download, most people are going to hit the back button, they're not going to wait for that. We're all very impatient these days. And so if your website's slow to download, architecturally, you're not meeting Google search criteria. You also need a good navigation structure in your website. People need to be able to find like website about US website, practice areas, practice areas, personal injury law, practice areas, medical malpractice, and if that navigation isn't clean and easy for people to navigate, and it's not super easy for the search engine spiders to navigate. Because Google, Google is not a person, right? Like it's there's lots of people that work there but they've written mathema Article algorithms to search the internet and they send out these automated robots, these automated spiders to read your website, see websites got to be super clean and easy for Google to read. So that's the A or the architecture, how your website's structured. And then the B of backlinks is the importance of your website is determined by other websites, linking to your website. So a lot of people get confused by that they're like, Well, I can put lots of links on my website. These are not the links you put on your website going out. These are links linking back to your website from other websites. So for example, you know, most lawyers are going to be in their Bar Association, Bar Association is gonna have a website and the website is going to link back to your website. So it's very important that you make sure you've got the http colon slash slash WWE dot, you know, your law firm.com, you've got the exact listing of your website on the Bar Association, the Chamber of Commerce, any groups or your members have any different legal sites, any local boards and associations you're a member of, you've got to get links from those websites to your website to make your website more important in the eyes of Google. And then the final piece is content. And we're going to talk a lot about content strategies today. But content principally is the words on your website. And if somebody's searching for, you know, slip and fall attorney, Oklahoma City, you've got to have the word slip and fall attorney, and probably lawyer and Oklahoma and Oklahoma City and OKC. So you want to have all of the words that somebody might be searching to look for your practice areas, in different formats. And so you know, we we often use the term blogs, because that's a consistent method of updating websites. But we will talk about different things like video today and images in different ways you can add content to your website that can be found by the search engine. So it's a quick summary of the basics of SEO. And when we refer to a lot of these things with regards to the zoo, you've got to understand the basics. your website's got to be fast and easy to read for the spiders. That's the architecture, you've got to have other sites linking to your site. That's the backlinks. And you've got to have lots of really good, fresh and relevant content on your website. That's the sea content.

There's a lot of you know, websites I seen, they didn't have a lot of those things, man. So it's not like a lot of people because he's your help.

Thanks. Any you guys have any questions on that? Or any expansion we should do?

I think you covered it.

Alright, sowho's it? Who's got the next question,

too, and I was gonna ask you about the zoo. But now you're talking about insects. So I don't know when y'all got everything in the animal kingdom over there. Just just animals and insects?

Yeah, you know, so I mentioned the zoo started with Google with Panda. And back in 2012, we all started hearing about Panda, because a whole bunch of websites started disappearing from Google. I even had a very close friend, who was a member of my mastermind at the time, who used to get, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 views from Google, like every day or every week, like huge, huge traffic. And he had lots of content and articles on his website. And he also had those little Google ads on his website, you know, that used to say, Ads by Google. And there'd be like, you'd get to a page with, you know, a story about whatever, you know, sneakers or trips to Europe. And then there'd be ads for to buy the sneakers or buy trips to Europe. When panda came about his website basically got wiped off the face of Google. And he went from having like 500,000 visitors coming from free Google searches down to like 5000 visitors. Wow. And many, many sites were targeted in the Panda update. And what Panda was all about was showing extremely high quality websites, because lots of webmasters and SEOs had gotten in a bad habit. Because Google rewarded you for having lots and lots and lots of content. So if you had a new blog article every day, you had a better chance of ranking than the lawyer down the street who didn't never updated his website, after he originally created it. And if you had, you know, multiple blog articles every day, you had a better chance to rank than the guy who had one one a week. And so lots of people started getting articles written overseas. And these were generally very poorly written articles, that you could get done very inexpensively with bad grammar and bad syntax. And frankly, they weren't authoritative. They weren't correct. You know, they were just, it was just volume that would would, Google was rewarding. And it was all Got lots of content. So Google started saying, Look, when people come to these websites and have inaccurate content, or poorly written content or bad grammar, they hit the back button and they leave these websites. So Google tried to figure out, how are we going to represent quality on a website? Now, Jenna, I quit, what would you guys do? If you if you tried to figure that out?

Well, tha t lady's first.

I was trying to figure that out, I don't know.

But if you were at Google, and you're trying to figure out like, how do we determine like, which is a quality website, and which is a low quality website?

Absolutely. If I go to the site, and it looks like, you know, a fifth grader made it, I will say, you know, it's kind of low quality. But if I get on the site, it's smooth, and quick stuff and stuff opens up fast. And, and I see get the information, I need a return to the site. That's another beat. Yeah. But yeah,

it was. Yeah. And you know what? That's a perfect answer. Perfect answer. And so what Google said is, you know, as much as as smart as our engineers aren't as good as our algorithms are, there's nothing smarter than a human when it comes to doing this kind of evaluation. So they actually hired several 100. And now they have over 10,000, website quality raters. And what they do is, they give them all like an online checklist, and they, you know, like you nailed it, right? Like, is this? Is this website look authoritative? Or is it look like it's written by a fifth grader? Or, you know, is this website, I would I come back to this website? Do you bookmark the website? If you're on the website? Do you do download their free white paper or their free brochure? Or do you sign up to get their newsletter? And those are all clues to Google. And they learned these, through the mechanics that they created through these quality raters. Those clues to Google were written into an algorithm. And the guy who headed up this team, who hired all these quality raters, and the engineers who wrote the algorithm to say, Okay, look for these, you know, telling the automated robots and the automatic Google programs, when you go to website, look for all these things. And when someone goes, and when our analytics tracks the performance of a website, do people download things? Do they spend a lot of time on the website, all those quality factors have been written into these zoo algorithms over the years. So that whole program was done by Navneet. Panda. And that's where the name panda came from, for this algorithm, because he had headed up this quality program. And then boom, the day Google launched it, some sites all of a sudden started appearing, and some states started disappearing from from the search result. So that was panda. And trust me, if you're in the SEO business, or even had a website in 2012, and you got affected by Panda one way, one way or the other, you knew you learned all about panda very quickly. And so the industry started understanding that it was all about quality, not so much just about quantity.

One of theanimals that stood out to me the most while you were doing your webinar, although I loved the cute little panda was the cute penguin. It was my favorite. So I did want to ask you, I remember you saying that Penguin has to do with links. So how did the Penguin update come about? And where can I get one of those cute little penguins?

Great question. Well, I think the only place the penguin lives right now is on our webinars, so you can see him on YouTube. And that's a great idea. Actually, we, you know, we, we talked about it one time, you know, coming up with like stuffed animals or something to represent these, these zoo, the zoo characters, in terms of the penguin, like the Penguin update, and the Penguin algorithm. You know, it came out about a year or two after panda. And penguin was designed to find bad quality links. So we talked earlier about the quality of the website and Panda was all about, you know, was the article well written. Was this website and authority website. Was this content legitimate? Was it accurate? Would I come back to this website? And did I come back to this website? Penguin was about links. And so I talked earlier about the ABCs architecture, backlinks and content. And backlinks was kinda like content was in that the more backlinks the better. And webmasters and website builders figured out pretty quickly. If I just got 100 websites to link to this website. Overnight, I could get those guys on the first page of Google. And you know, back in the in the 2010s, or whatever the 2008. It was relatively easy to get websites rank because there wasn't 1000s of people who had created websites, and there wasn't 1000s of people who've done SEO search engine optimization for their website. And most websites were created once and nobody updates had them for five years. So what happened was a lot of webmasters and web developers and website builders would build themselves 100 websites, they'd get a new client. And they'd say, look, I promise you can be on page one of Google, after we launched your website, they didn't tell them how, but they just linked to them from the 100 websites that they under control. And a lot of people had pages with just like, a list of links. And so every, even your website, you might not even have known it, but they had a link to every other website, the webmaster had built on some, you know, hidden page on his website. And these are the old days where you, you could have white text on a white page. And so you could have, you know, 100 links going off your website, you didn't even know it. But it was like white colored text on a white page. And you know, a lot of these tricks were against Google's Terms of Service. And so Google started saying, you know, we're not going to reward you anymore, just for having lots of links. And so that's what pink penguin was all about. You had to have quality links, and you couldn't do any, any link trickery. That was against Google's Terms of Service, and you couldn't pay for links. And that was one of the biggest things that they were looking for, is, if you paid a webmaster and said, hey, you know, you've got a very highly ranked site. And you're a blogger, and you write all about lawyers and laws and stuff like that, you know, I want you to put a link to my lawyer website. And I'll give you 10 bucks a month, or I'll give you 100 bucks to put that link and leave it there. That would boost your Google ranking. But it was against Google's Terms of Service, Google only wanted authentic links that people put there. Because they were they thought they'd be valuable to the audience. They didn't want anyone paying for links. Right? What questions do you guys have? Or what do you think the audience would be asking about? Link Building and penguins, and,

and this is all salmon, like, y'all had some kind of Google mafia back and crazy stuff.

Here, the crazy thing is, you know, there, we call it black hat, SEO. It's like in the old cowboy movies, you know, the sheriff had a white hat, and the bad guys and a black hat. So in this in our industry, we know 10, golden rules, we've always had a white hat philosophy, meaning we didn't buy links. We didn't have, you know, $5 articles being written, you know, in India and things like that. We always had a very high quality approach. Because, you know, we everybody always knew that Google wanted the quality. And as a matter of fact, I was able to meet Matt Cutts. In the very early days, I interviewed him on this podcast. And Matt Cutts was Google's search engine engineer who used to speak at all the search conferences very famous in the SEO business back then. And I asked him about this very thing. And he said, You know, it's funny, because at this conference, he said, it's great, because on the Friday, all of the webmasters get really drunk in the bar. And then I just stay sober, and then ask them all like, hey, what tricks you guys using to trick Google? And a lot of guys would, would tell me that they're, you know, buying links, or they tell me where they're buying links, or what black hat tactics they're using. And then I would go back, and we would eliminate those from our algorithm. And he actually told me said, Look, I have a team of guys, over 100 300 people, all they do is build websites. And they reach out to people for paid links. And we don't say anything. Like we take the paid links, we put them on these websites. And they're just kind of like, you know, all kinds of websites like E commerce websites and travel websites, these people are building real websites that look real. And then every time a webmaster will agree to a paid link, or when they can find those, those bad guys out there, like you call them the Google mafia, who have a whole bunch of paid link sites. Google puts that into the algorithm. And you go and buy those links, and you don't know it. But that's actually putting a negative checkmark on your Google algorithm. That stuff is very real. And Google has a huge team 1000s of people trying to sort out the bad, you know, the people who are doing the bad things. And sometimes they'll suspend your site. Like if you really got if you've got like illegal activity or really mischievous stuff, or you're trying to collect credit cards, they'll suspend your site, but for the most part, they'll just mark you down in the algorithm so you don't show up very often. So that's a good question.

Yeah, the truth always comes to light, man.

Well, there's another way I always talk about it. You know that. It's like, another slogan is don't mess with Mother Nature. Do you guys know that slogan? Absolutely. So I always say Google's Mother Nature, you know, in our business, getting traffic to your lawyer website. You don't want to try At Google, because, you know, they'll throw you out. Like matter of fact, recently, they've been shutting down Google Maps listings. And a lot of lawyers try and cheat Google. And this would, I think it's the pigeon update, which is all about Google, Google Maps, reviews. And the pigeon, of course, is one of the animals in our Google Zoo. He's a cute pigeon, too, I like the pigeon to pitch in is was an update, where in the mid 2014 2015, Google started making local results work better. And if you all remember, like, when you did a Google search back in the day, you know, you'd search for like, personal injury lawyer, and you get some guy in Seattle and some guy in LA and some guy in New York, and you're based in Florida. And then you'd say personal injury lawyer, Florida, and it would show you, you know, someone in Orlando and someone in Tampa, and then some listing site that listed people in every state. And so Google wanted to get a lot better at look. And so they introduced Google Maps, you know, the listing with the three top listings and the three red dots on a map. And so physically, you could see someone near you, which was, you know, really good for lawyers, but really great for things like shoe repair, or, you know, pizza restaurant near me. And so Google Maps got a lot better. And Google reviews was added to Google Maps. And so not only did they have the ability to have, you know, better locality. And you could, you could actually put your, your business listing on your Google, you could get a Google Maps listing from Google. And you could verify, like, even if we were talking to a lawyer today, and she hadn't claimed her Google Maps listing, and they had the wrong ad, they hit her old address, and it says right there, it's his own this business question mark. And you can click that and claim your Google Maps. Now, most people have done that today. But over the last 5678 years, Google has built this this map, you know, the users have built the map network. And Google has built the intelligence through the pigeon algorithm update on local searches. So when you search for car accident attorney near me, or slip and fall lawyer, Boca ratone, the likelihood of getting a good local result is significantly improved. You know, the ads at the very top, the local service ads are local, the paid ads are generally localized. Now, the Google Maps shows the top three people in your area. And if you click on more, you're going to see dozens of people in your area. And then the SEO is also the search engine optimization, the 10 results at the bottom of the page, those are also going to be much more likely to have a local flavor, too. So if you do that search, for example, just to see it, like search Personal Injury Lawyer near me, you know, you're gonna see that probably 80 or 90% of those listings are very close to you. So Google pigeon, allowed Google to show us what we want. And basically, like, all these changes, Google's making the zookeepers over Google, are just trying to make the results better. And they're trying to make them better for you and me, the user of Google, because they want us to use Google, they don't want us to go to Bing or Ask Jeeves or any other any other options, right. So they're, they're trying to make it work, and work well and work efficiently. So all of these updates are really designed for Google to be the best search. And for you to get a search result that matches what you were searching.

I was good. You know,

I was just saying, from a user standpoint, I know when someone's looking at like Google Maps, or Google business profile, something that's really important to them is your company's Google reviews. Do you have like a best strategy for someone wanting to get reviews?

Yeah, great question. You know, the first thing is just ask for them. And, you know, we'll go back to the law firm example. Generally, there's three or four times when it's the best time to ask your customers for a review. And if we're talking about, like, you know, we'll use the personal injury example, again, when you know, when the first person first signs up with you, and you, you do the first couple of calls with their insurance company, and they realize, okay, I got the right guy on my side, you know, that's a good time to ask for a Google review. And so make it super easy, you know, send it to them, send them the link, that when they click it, it goes right to the review page, you know, in the old days used to have to say, go to my maps and click on the five stars, and then you'll the review thing will come up, like now you can send them right to that page. So just make it super easy for them. And there's a couple of software's out there that will actually do that. Even better. So if you're a bigger firm, and you're not the lawyer who's gonna be asking the person, you know, it's your paralegal or your legal assistants who have the relationship with the customers. There's a software called BirdEye. It's BirdEye. There's no s. Everyone thinks it's Birdseye. And there's another one called podium, and those are really good at sending links to people to ask for reviews. So that's, that's one strategy and then The second strategy is to actually incentivize your team to get more of those reviews. And so if you have a small program, like we always say, you know, do a gift certificate program, where every four or five star review, the paralegal will get a $25 or $50. Restaurant gift card. That was very important to note, you're not allowed in Google's Terms of Service to give the customer any incentive, you can't pay them for a review. You can't say if you do a review, I'll send a gift card. But if the paralegal gets the gift cards, they'll call them up, like I said, at the right time. So you know, the first time is when you fight the insurance company for them. The second time might be when you get a settlement agreement, and they know what checks coming. And then the third time is, if they come to the office to get the check and sign the paperwork, you know, that's a real good time to just say, can you do us a favor, hop on your cell phone and do a Google review? Ideally, you don't want them hopping on a computer in the office, because then Google is gonna see all the reviews coming from the same IP address. So you want them to actually use their cell phone. And they're probably already logged into one of the Google products, Gmail or, you know, one of the other Google services. So it'll be relatively easy on their cell phone.

Nothing really comes close to Google. And so I don't even think they have competition.

Well, there's a new, there's a new player is a new kid on the block, right? We've probably got to figure out a zoo animal for chat. GPT. Right. Yeah. Actually, Google. Google has a competitor. It's called bark, var D. So I'm sure by the next time we update the Google zoo webinar, we're gonna have to figure out what animal Bart is.

That sounds like a Simpsons character.

Yeah. Maybe that's what we'll call we'll call Simpson. Which, you know, I know Jenna has has a Google character. He was trying to figure out it sounds like Bart, what was the one you're asking me about yesterday?

Yeah, so you're talking about Bert. And he reminds him a character of a show I watched as a kid. But that was one that was really interesting, because the little character just grabbed my attention. So what's the Bert algorithm? And what SEL lessons do we learn from it?

Well, you remember, from yesterday, it's the bi directional encoder representations from transformers update.

How can anybody remember that?

Think that's why we in the industry, I'll call him called that update Bert. And he may or may not look like a character from a TV show in when he visited the zoo yesterday. You know, it's it's basically Google, trying to understand natural language. And, you know, we all remember back in the day with SEO, where you do a Google search, and you'd get these websites that were kind of written in some crazy language, and you're trying to figure out what language is that? And you search for, like, personal injury lawyer near me. And then you click on the first listing, and then you go to the page, it would say, you know, Smith, and Smith is a personal injury lawyer located near you. We are a personal injury law, personal injury lawyers located in, you know, whatever, Tallahassee, Florida. And, you know, we're the best choice when you need a car accident lawyer, anywhere in northern Florida, or Tallahassee, Florida. And you'd read this language, you think what language is this, and guess what? It was Search Engine Optimization language from 2005. It had its own lingo. And back then we used to cram in as many keywords as we could into an article. And you know, we have 10, golden rules, we always tried to make it sound very authentic. So we would put the keyword in the first paragraph, the middle paragraph and the last paragraph, and we put the keywords in the, in the meta tag codes, the Google read as well. That language based Basically, Google was trying to wipe out that that SEO language, and the Bert update and a couple of the associated updates like hummingbird, really tried to understand natural language. And so it was like, I think the example I use yesterday's, our company's called 10 golden rules. And we always spelled it t e n golden rules. But a lot of people give us a link, and I appreciate it, or mention us in a blog post, but they put the number 10 One zero golden rules. And back in the day, Google really didn't understand the difference. But with the bird algorithm, they tried to understand natural language processing, and the nuances of text and semantic language, which is more about the meaning. So if somebody searches for personal injury lawyer, but your websites calls yourselves a personal injury attorney, Google now can understand that. And so the results were higher quality. And when you had a lot of what we used to call keyword stuffing, where you repeated that keyword over and over like the example I gave you a few minutes ago Have, you would be negatively impacted and Google's algorithm? So essentially, the lesson from Bert is right for humans not search it. And we started hearing about quality again, you know, quality, quality quality, like the first, you know, versions of panda. But now the bio directional encoder representations were very sophisticated computer languages that were starting to understand human lingo. And obviously, you know, artificial intelligence and Google Bard, chat GPT. Is, is understanding human language at a much higher level, it's matter of fact, they can understand your question, and give you an answer quicker than most humans in a better written format than most humans and certainly much, much quicker.

Right. And since you brought it up, Chat GPT, I know it's the hot topic and the new kid on the block. People are talking about if they should use it for blogs using as copy on their website, do you suggest people get copied from chat? GPT?

Well, we are using chat GPT. But you shouldn't just use copy from chat GPT? That's a great question. Thanks, Jenna. And we did talk a little bit about that yesterday. So Google, has come out and said and even Microsoft came out said, you know, don't just use chat GPT articles as your new blog posts. And one of the things I've found is that I've done like five or six, similar queries on chat GPT, doing research for different blogs and different articles on our website. And, you know, so I've searched like, what are the top 10 ways to select a personal injury attorney? What are the top seven things you should do after a car accident? What are the most important things to ask your motorcycle accident attorney and chat GPT gives you an answer and all three of those questions very quickly. And it's written very smoothly, and it sounds very authoritative. But essentially, a lot of the same context is added to all three of those articles. So there's a couple risks with that, if you you know, if you try and put like a blog post every day from chat GPT, there's a sort of generic sameness to all of those articles. And what we learned, and we've already talked about it here today, you know, Google, Bert, Google Panda, Google hummingbird, Google RankBrain, that we didn't go into in details where you want to write stories, and not just keywords, you know, all of those updates over the last, I guess, 1012 years now. Google has is really said, you know, you've got to help be helpful for people like that's Google St. Bernard, and we, we picked the St. Bernard at 10. Golden Rules, because he's the most helpful animal we could think of, because if you get stranded in the mountains in Switzerland, the St. Bernard is going to bring you a flask of Rome, you know, what could be more helpful. By the way, he's gonna haul you back to Basecamp. To, you know, all of these updates, are, are really saying, you know, like, like we said earlier, Google is really just trying to make Google effective for people. Because if they're effective for people, and you ask a question, and Google helps you answer it, then you're going to use Google. If there's a more helpful tool out there in chat, GPT is becoming more helpful tool, you know, people are gonna start using that other tool. So Google, all of these updates are essentially designed to give you search results that match your query. And that's a big part of, you know, what Google's been saying over and over is like, you know, right for humans. Write for high quality, make your content helpful, answer questions. Don't write for the search engine trend, layer in as many keywords as you can. So the answer the question is, you know, you can't just crank out a chat GPT article every day. And the way we've been using it is really good for this. You know, Chad GPT, give me 20 topics, on how to select a personal injury lawyer. And, like 10 of those topics will be the same as the other 10. But you'll get 10 ideas. And for a lot of our clients, we've been writing copy for seven 810, even 15 years. And so TPT sometimes gives us new ideas that we hadn't thought of. So it's a good way to come up with questions to answer on the website and on videos.

Awesome. Another thing, the webinar yesterday, after you were talking about all the animals and stuff, and they were also cute, but you did talk about how there's a new restaurant at the Google zoo, which I thought was fun. So what does EA T stands for? And the most important question is can I get nachos there?

Well, I don't know. I don't know how the good how good the nachos are at E A T. But I'm good for a long time Google's you know, a long time three, four or five years. Google has recommended and by the way, there is tremendous information on the Google Search blog. So Google actually writes all this stuff up and explains it now. Now back in the days of Panda and Penguin, we kind of had to make this stuff up as our on our own as, as the search industry in Google, you know, one Google engineer would make one statement in his in a talk at a conference. And that would go all around the industry, you know, as explaining, like what Panda and Penguin were all about, and verifying our suspicions. But now a lot of this great stuffs on Google's blog. So what they've explained is EA T is is a way you should structure your website with expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And so, you know, basically what that means is, you know, if you can demonstrate expertise on a topic, if you can have high quality content, answering people's questions about a topic, and you can have videos, and you can have charts and infographics. And by association, we talked about authentic links from other sites to your website. So like, let's say you write a white paper on a topic, and a lot of people in the industry in a lot of bloggers, link to that white paper, your website's going to have a lot of expertise and authoritativeness, because of the content quality content you created, and the number of other highly ranked websites, that link to your website. And then trustworthiness is, you know, the human nature part of it that I talked about earlier. Where, you know, like you said, like, is this written by a fifth grader? Or was it written by, you know, one of the world's leading experts on, on whatever the topic is. And some of that's just, you know, human perceptiveness. But also, you know, like, if you go to a website, and they've got some trust icons, like they're a member of Super Lawyers, which a lot of people don't know what that is, but Super Lawyers is voted on by your peers. So if a bunch of other lawyers said you're the best lawyer, or one of the best in your area, and if you've got some of the other things like, you know, the Bar Association logo, and you've, some lawyers have achieved different distinction like they've been, they're nationally ranked for different things, or they've had a million dollar verdict or a $10 million verdict, you get all those trust logos on a website. And most of us don't give it a lot of thought. But I think subconsciously, you just see, okay, this guy's got five or six or seven of these important insignias, he must be trustworthy. And another insignia of trust is, if you put the little icons, like the Google reviews icon, or the Facebook, friends likes icon. And if people see oh, you know, this guy's got 175, Google resume reviews, pays 4.9 stars, or even better, maybe 4.8 stars, because nobody believes it, when everybody gives you a five star review. Like no, none of us, if you see a restaurant, it's got 15 five star reviews, you're like, Okay, that's that's this guy's friends and cousins. But you know, you're actually look more legit. And there's a whole other story on 4.8 stars is better than five stars or 4.9 stars. So having the Google stars, you can have the Facebook likes, and sometimes you go to a website, and it's like, you know, two people, you know, like this website, you see that on the Facebook icon. So you can get those little, those little widgets from Facebook and from Google and add them to your website. And that increases trustworthiness. So EA T. Was was around for a long time. And then Google opened their new website called EA T. And they opened it in the google xuer. We, we've we've we've put a graphic in the Google zoom. And the additional E is experience. And this is something Google has been playing around with, again for four or five years. And for a while they were giving you a lot of they had Google Authorship. And if you were an expert author, and you'd authored a lot of articles that Google registered, the authors actually showed up in the search results for topics. And you know, our faces kind of went away. But the algorithms still rewarded us for having that experience factor. Meaning that you know, your articles had been featured on industry sites, they found you as a speaker at industry, trade shows, you did a lot of social media, or you were in communities and forums talking about the topic. You did a lot videos very valuable to represent your experience on the topic. So this is kind of proof positive that Google is reading social media. They are reading communities and forums and Reddit and all the different communities in your industry. So and in fact, there's also been changes to those Google quality rater guidelines. So the human humans are going around and looking at websites have now been asked to include criteria around experience expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Yes, sir. We know was

long, long answer EA t. So far. No nachos. Oh, man. There's the figurative restaurant.

Another animal that I don't think we spoke on. But I know when we were talking about the panda you touched on it a little bit is the cheetah. So what does the cheetah signify?

Well, I'm going to turn this back on you guys. what you both said in the webinar, what? What is the cheetah represent? As it pertains to SEO?

I heard it. Oh, go ahead.

Oh, I was just gonna say how fast is the website? That's my that's my first Yes,

yeah, that's how I remembered it. Because you know, cheetahs are the fastest animal. So when it comes to PageSpeed, that really clicked.

And what is what is fast means to you, as a consumer, when you go to a website,

how fast the page loads, and that it's not lagging, because if something's lagging way too long, then your people or the users are just gonna bounce right out of it,

then what is lagging look like to a consumer.

Anything more than point two milliseconds,

like that's in that circle spinning or the website opens, but there's an image and the circle spinning on the image. And the image doesn't open in the background as an image, or there's a video as the background, it doesn't open. And so all of those things, where I mentioned that briefly earlier, if people go to a website, and the website takes time to load, and they hit the back button and go back to Google, then you get negative points in the algorithm. And so Google actually has a tool called Page Speed Insights. And you can just search Google for PageSpeed Insights, and it has little application, you put the URL, the address of your website, WW dot 10, Golden rules.com. And you'll see how quick your website is. And they'll also give you feedback, like, okay, you know, the initial downloads quick, but the full for every picture on the website to download, takes six seconds, and takes 7.8 seconds for your website to become interactive. And they break it down for mobile, and desktop. So you got to make sure you know you're at least in in like the 50 60%. The past you don't want to be in the red and the fail on PageSpeed Insights. And back to cheetah you know, ideally, if your your website's like getting a 70 or 80%, then it's downloading super quickly. And it's interactive quickly, like meaning someone could actually put the information into a form or click on the links, like sometimes the websites there, but like you're clicking it, it's not doing anything. That's the interactivity portion as well.

Okay, okay. So what can people do to improve their PageSpeed?

Well, the PageSpeed Insights gives you some clues. So like, sometimes, you download an image, and it's like a massive image, it's like, you know, 400 megabyte, and it looks sweet. You know, like, when, when, when your designer designs it, and he's got like a four foot wide Mac computer that looks like a big screen TV, when he puts an image on on on any shows you the website, for the first time at the agency, you're like, oh, man, that's sweet looking. But it's just such a big image that it's very hard for the computer to download. And, you know, and people can't see that level of detail on their iPhone seven. Anyways, you know, so you really just need a compressed image, particularly in the mobile site, you gotta have small images that can download quickly. So there's pretty high quality images that you can download that you can put on the website to download quickly. And particularly if you're not, if you're failing the PageSpeed Insights, you know, your images have to be small. And some of its just like, you know, very extensive code. Like, if you have really simple code that's easy for the the computer icons and spiders and stuff to read, then it'll download quickly. But if you got really long and extensive code, then you got a problem.

You go simple.

Good, good question.

Now that we've talked a lot about the animals in the Google Zoo, and maybe even a restaurant, a question I have for you is how often does Google introduce these zoo characters? And do they ever remove any? Because that would be so sad?

Yeah, so what do we have here about but a dozen major, major updates over 12 years? And some of these updates immediately affect the rankings? And some of them don't. But, you know, I don't think any of these major initiatives have been removed, per se. Right? You know, like if Google introduces we didn't even talk about the are the pirate, you know, who was designed to look for Copyright infringement and people copying and duplicating content from other websites and stealing videos and images from other websites, which is against the law in most cases. And it's also against Google's Terms of Service. So most of these things were designed for a reason, right? Like we've talked about, most of them, were designed to make our user experience better as Google users. And it's in Google's best interest so that you continue to use Google. So you know, when, when panda introduced quality, you know, they've basically continued that theme. Even though some of the major algorithm changes, were given a new a new name, you know, like, Bert, you know, is essentially a panda, you know, 4.0 or 5.0, hummingbird was, you know, 3.0. And those were about, you know, quality. And there was just more specific version, like hummingbird is about matching the query to the content. So, it was a very specific set of algorithmic code written where your search phrase had to match the content that was on the website. And if you had content, the match the search phrase, and the user intent very closely, you know, so it's basically just a more sophisticated version of Panda, you know, upgraded animals, Panda 2.0 3.0, you know, I don't think they've really eliminated any of these these things. You know, like I mentioned, authorship, you know, authorship kind of went away. But it wasn't like a major search update that we called an algorithm. So I don't I don't, I would say, no, no animals have been harmed in the making. To really stretch the metaphor, but or whatever, right. Love that. You know, let me ask you both for like, you know, what's one of the things you learned yesterday, that, you know, we think we can apply for 10 golden rules, customers, or maybe people out there can use in doing their own SEO?

I mean, pretty much everything you said is gems, like, everything, the whole webinar long, I was actually shocked that you were giving away so much game, I was like, Man, this guy given all the other tips. But yeah, essentially, y'all see, this guy's an expert, we're experts. So whoever's listening out there, you have to give us a call yet? What are you waiting for? Simple as that?

Well said, Jenna, what are some of the things you picked up that we can apply for your clients?

I think the most one of the most important things that you touched on was the ABCs of SEO, I think everyone needs to apply all of those tactics to their website and their SEO game, and they'll be well off.

Sweet. All right, well, I think we can wrap there. Hopefully, we kept it under an hour. And it's great. If anyone made it this far, give us a shout out. We'd love you for a five star review on iTunes. We used to have a whole bunch of reviews. But when we moved the podcast platform, we lost a review. So we'd love it. If you enjoyed this, give us a five star review on iTunes, or your favorite podcast network or, you know, come over to 10 golden rules and say, Hey, are all of it we're 10 golden rules on Facebook and Twitter. And it's done? All the social media. So come say hey,

yeah, before we close out, guys, I have a joke for you. Because I always had to include a joke in all of my, you know, either meetings with clients or you know, my Zoom meetings. But why don't monkeys play cards in the zoo? I don't know. Because there's too many cheetahs. Sorry, I had to throw that in here. That's awesome. I gotta do it.

Is that a chat? GPT Joker is?

Sorry, I can't take the credit.

Yeah, we're finding some great stuff on there. Well, thank you both for making the time today. And thank you everyone for listening. And with that, we're out and we'll be back shortly with another 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing for law firms podcast.

See you later.