Google's AI Content Penalties and the Future of SEO

Google manually penalized all of the sites that had ownership all the content was written by experts manually edited Etc and everything got wiped out Google search is a weird reflection of the real world but at one point we were getting a million views a month on that YouTube channel which was pretty crazy I think there's things I can talk about on YouTube now and there's things I can't talk about on YouTube and I have a very

good idea of what I can't talk about it's 100% impossible to get a detection of AI content 100% of the time they're going to be going after more sites that have a very high content velocity websites are openly publishing like I don't know something beyond what most humans are capable of whether it's like 100 or 200 posts a day something like that besid are going me a [Music] clap hey guys and welcome back to the channel

and welcome back to another episode where I'm interviewing SEO experts and entrepreneurs from around the world I've Got a Friend of the channel and a bit of a legend in the SEO game recently the target of Google's wrath please welcome to the channel Julian Goldie ladies and gentlemen thanks so much for having me on good to be here well I appreciate you coming on mate I know that uh it must be a bit of a scary

time coming on this channel specifically you know after it was definitely an interesting time recently yeah sure yeah so do you want to give people a bit for for those that don't know and I'm guessing there's not that many that don't know um do you want to give kind of a bit of a background over the last few weeks and how it's been for you yeah yeah sure so I mean basically I was running a few

AI SEO experiments on my YouTube channel and showcasing a lot of stuff publicly and you know showing all sorts of stuff not saying that I recommend it just showcasing what you can do and what's possible and Google manually penalized all of the sites I had ownership of in Google search console I think for for showing too much and being too open and being a bit too loud which I always said could happen from day one and

so these sites got hit they got the indexed they all took a manual action penalty they actually gave me my personal site back in the index and I'm just waiting for a a reconsideration request to get the rankings back on that website as well and yes just been a interesting couple of weeks really yeah yeah really really crazy time to be honest I don't think I've seen the SEO Community this up in arms for a long

long time to be honest it seems like everybody has their own opinion and things about what's happened and stuff I just wanted to kind of quickly touch on your sites that were mainly hit in the one search hle right so a lot of people have been talking about this and you followed the law of the land rule 101 not putting client sites in the search consle account right so it's only yeah it's only the sites that

you had got kind of publicly shown and in that public search consel account that actually got affected right it wasn't all of your clients it wasn't anything like that a lot of people have been saying that oh these black apps have got their entire client hit that's not the case at all we just want to make that very very uh aware there and I and I genuinely believe and and potentially you know you have your own

thoughts on this that Google looked at your search cons specifically because of all the sites that you've been shown on YouTube and they went after you manually this had nothing to do with the algorithm and it was 100% because Google looked into the sites that were currently manipulating the the internet and looked where the sources of those people were getting that information from found out that you're on every setup for aiso going these days whether it

be a YouTube video a parasite page or your own website and they found that you're probably the biggest guy in AIS at least in YouTube potentially even the world right now I think you're getting what like a few million visit a few million views a month on your Channel or something like that yeah so at one point we were getting a million views a month yeah on that YouTube channel which was pretty crazy yeah I mean

I think it was just too loud and to be fair those sites deserve to get clapped so I don't blame Google I don't have any resentment towards them I said from literally the day I started showing Ai and chat GPT that this is working right now but you know I don't recommend this approach and you should be manually editing your content and that sort of thing and I know you talk a lot about manually edting your

content before you publish two right yeah for sure I I do a lot of more competitive Sears right so what what I'm trying to generally rank for is like really high-end searches where you're do talking 150,000 searches a month or countries where the CPAs and things are really really high so generally the competition means you can't really use bulk AI content unless you're doing some kind of like parasite Pages or something right but I wanted to

talk to you because you said that you thought that the sites got the sites that got hit were deserved to be hit right do you think that Jesse Cunningham's site was a deserved hit because a lot of people have been debating this about Bonzo Mary right this site because he's put in a lot of the manual editing a lot of the time a lot of the hard work the formatting the tables the images the whole lot

even the eat stuff right do you think that that kind of a site deserves in in the same bucket or is it do you actually have reasons oh no it's a total [ __ ] AI site actually Jesse or or no it was really good again yeah that's a really interesting one so I've not looked at the website personally but I have spoken to Jesse personally and also I've spoke I've I've seen a lot of talk in the

community about his website and a lot of people said like it's a really good site I know it was making good money like it was making quite a few thousand a month so yeah it's one of those I think I don't know for me like I think there's things I can talk about on YouTube now and there's things I can't talk about on YouTube and I have a very good idea of what I can't talk about

so I just got to stay clear of those topics basically but keep it interesting at the same time so yeah I I think it's one of those like for example nich website builder nich nesite lady sorry on Twitter as well like I believe that she said she had four websites one or two of them were AI two of them were human sites like where all the content was written by experts manually edited Etc and everything got

wiped out yeah so it's just one of those like if you're you know you're guilty by association essentially yeah exactly and that plays into Google's policy changes so it's a lot of people have been talking about the new spam policy but actually it was several years ago now that Google changed their policy circumvention right which basically means that if you're trying to circumvent Google's guidelines especially with more than one website that was a very very clear

thing then you can have that Guilty By Association verdict especially if it's within the same SE account because you agree to their terms and conditions in their terms of service right it's all within that documentation very easily I did want to just ask have you got any sites behind the scenes that are still using that same tactic and same style that W hit at all I don't want to say too much because I think I have

to be very very careful yeah but I would say that I have you know over a 100 sites behind the scenes that are all performing very well none of got during the update yeah yeah exactly I think that answers the question in of itself guys there you go right so I think that the the next stage for Google with AI content is trying to figure out which sites are using it on the majority of the pages

and I think that's why this helpful content classifier has come out because it's effectively a way for Google to determine if a large amount of a site is low quality enough but obviously that low quality is uh definable and it's not necessarily accurate because of the way that these large classifier systems and data is collected and data SE things work and there's always only false negatives and false positives and things like that right but I think

that Google is really trying its hardest to combat something that is impossible to combat right so I I don't see so literally in terms of science it's it's 100% impossible to get a detection of AI content 100% of the time just because again you have false no false positives and false negatives you have token randomization then you can also have like layering where you have vectorization and you have logic bias and all these crazy Advanced Techniques

where it makes it really really randomized but where do you think Google is going after these updates do you think they're going to be doubling down more on this kind of just trying to mass remove bulk AI sites or do you think they're going to try and move towards maybe more of the high Authority sites that are abusing effectively the same thing but because they're on such a high Authority they get away with it more right

so where do you think you was kind of moving towards next what do you think they're going to be combating next in terms of spam or do you think they're should be doubling down on what they're currently doing yeah I think they're going to be going harder after those bul generated sites right that's the way that I see it so probably something that they're looking at you know with the new update in the policy about scaled

content abuse I think that they're going to be going after more sites that have a very high content velocity and so if if they can somehow monitor the amount of post published probably through the S map something like that right they can see how many posts are created daily and then if if websites are openly publishing like I don't know something beyond what most humans are capable of whether it's like 100 or 200 posts a day

something like that these sites are going to get clapped for sure whether that happens across the whole internet because there's always outliers right like even during this latest update we saw sites where everything is written by experts by humans with lots of eat from a proper brand still got hit so I think there's always outliers that don't make it and and don't apply the rules to but yeah scaled content it seems like they're going to do

something about domain sort of directories right so they've announced this update is coming in May the 5th I just don't know how they're going to combat that but that's going to be an interesting time and like you said I don't think that's going to be targeting so much parasite SEO but it's going to be targeting the sites are just churning and burning loads of content that's not even related to their Niche but they can rank because

they have so much Authority the other thing that I would say is if you look at the amount of sites getting traffic right now across the internet do you see Glenn oo's report about the 16 companies that again the majority of traffic from Google so I think it's it's moving more towards Authority like for example if you look at search D of experience Google's AI update I can see that being rolled out more and more what

I've seen recently is pretty much they're only going to recommend one or two sites it's not even going to be three anymore and who's that site going to be it's going to be like the most authoritative website in the world right so for example if it's about marketing might be like hopspot if it's about SEO might be like search engine Round Table something like that and so I think they're definitely moving towards Authority and just filtering

out everything else yeah I think it's Google search is a weird reflection of the real world right where you see like AI becoming massive it becomes massive in SEO you see Authority and kind of what's it the the wealth of the world kind of congealing into this this big Authority companies same thing is happen in search right I think it's the I think it's really quite an interesting reflection on society as a whole and think even

with the algorithm and I think that kind of reflects on how advanced the algorithm is but also how human it is as well right and that it has got mistakes and it has got things in it that will just that are completely random and there are some instances of sites where I've looked at them and I think that the classifier has just picked them up in a in a wrong way and that's what affected the website

but the website itself is amazing right but again because of how this classifiers are trained and how they are picked up on data and things that there will always be this this kind of inevitability where do you think links are moving I know that you own a link build agency so you might have some slight little bit of bias there little bit of bias but where do you see kind of links moving towards is the next

future do you think Google's just because of AI content Google just going to become more and more reliant on links in terms of prioritization or do you think that they're going to look at potentially moving their own search model into the into the Surs and try and maybe analyze content from an AI perspective instead yeah I think from what I've seen I can only judge it on what's happened so far seems like the biggest authorities are

the ones ranking the most so even though I'm a bit biased with my SEO agency I would say the sites that have the most backlinks and have the highest CR seem to perform the best I mean even if you look at last year during the helpful content update like you've got LinkedIn Reddit all these big sites ranking really well I don't think they care about spam scores or trust flow or anything like that it's just purely

how many back Lings he got pointed to the site now the other thing that I've seen recently and it's not affected me but has affected some people I know is more and more manual actur penalties for links and particularly with guest posts which is quite interesting so I don't know if that's going to be rolled out more and more and you know in terms of Link quality people have to be very stringent yeah and potentially even

have signals that are kind of diversifying away from that so if you are building links that are potentially dodgy you might have to be building additional trust signals and additional positive link signals just to offset those negative signals that Google seem to be potentially you know eyeing towards more and now for a quick message from our sponsor search intelligence if you're looking for digital PR campaigns what you're about to see should impress you high tier backlinks

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many more I hope this inspires and shows you that you can build links with simple and basic campaigns do you think that Google aside from the manual stuff do you think that algorithm is not devaluing links but potentially neutralizing links more than ever now because that's from my own research that's what I've found is that some links now just don't move the needle at all and they those kind of links seem to be a lot more

seem a lot more of them than there ever has been before yeah 100% I think more and more links are being devalued as it becomes more and more common to buy links right so as more as the industry grows I think that Google can easily identify more patterns in terms of you know wiping out some of these these bad links that you get out there and to be honest it's just so easy isn't it for some

people to go on to fiber.com they don't have any sort of outside knowledge and they're like oh links are cheap I'm going to go here and you know most of their suppliers the links are are really bad yeah they're they're pretty terrible have you got any have you got any advice for people that are kind of looking for a good link provider yeah that's a really good one I mean actually I think link diversity is the

key really so not just who you buy the links from but the types of links that you build right so if you're just relying on one type of Link building that can look unnatural and I think Google's going to get better and better at identifying that it's one thing that we're recommending to more and more clients is like diversify the types of links you get now I think one of the good things that that reassures me

actually and I didn't use to let this but a lot of our clients like if they buy from us they might buy from multiple link builders in terms of the links they build and I think that's good because actually diversifies the types of links they getting they they can try different supplies different types of Link building I think that's a good way to do it I didn't used to like it because I was like ah they're

going to spend with other people and not us but I think now that's the safer way to do it and also the types of links you build like don't just build links uh don't just build like gu post so don't just build these types of links like try some PR try some I think as well PR might become and more important like for example we've all seen the rise of fer kazon I know you had him

on the channel recently and like those types of links are just legit super clean might be expensive but they work yeah he's just upped his prices as well so they're even more expensive and yeah I know to be honest I think he could be charging more he was charging five and a half thousand pounds a project and that and that's guaranteed links as well it's now seven and a half I think he could double it to

be honest I think you could charge 50 and there's people charging $25,000 for online reputation management packages and it's literally just social profile citations that press relas That's it yeah it's half those links are free like they don't even caus anything to build right and but that again if you're trying to take over Brands and things it really works and I do think that all of that plays more into your trust signals and your brand signals

and your Authority and everything that is again it's not just one thing anymore it used to just be link Authority one you the day right but now you have to have trust signals especially if you're in certain issues like Y and you have to have additional other user engagement signals content everything needs to be an holistic approach if you if I can quote C for something there but my kind of a final question for you today

is where do you see the future of AI and where do you see the future of AI in SEO do you think that everybody's just going to be continuing to do these bulk content sites because it kind of works now or do you think that everybody's going to be moving more towards human edited articles maybe even using their content more for link building which I think is a really undervalued tactic yeah I think that the way

that we use Ai and SEO is totally going to change right so a lot of people right now if you look at the the riters of AI let's say like this time last year March 2023 a lot of people were just copying and pasting one take dring when it came to content because it was totally new and because it actually ranked but the problem is now if everyone does that everyone's got access to the same tools

same technology same prompts Etc really I think the game is going to be about okay how can you take that AI content and level it up so that it provides way more value than anyone else can do right and I think Ai and human SEO is a really powerful combination because you're taking that raw block of Stone from chat GPT or whatever AI to you actually use and then you're manually editing it you know adding it

tweaking it that sort of thing I think one of the best ways actually and I do this for my videos this why they're quite engaging and why they perform pretty well one of the best ways to create content with chat GPT is actually plot you know take that content you've got plug it into chat GPT and ask it like how can I take this to another level how can I improve the quality and it will give

you stuff that you've never really thought about before and and that's the biggest differentiator but at the same time it's going to work against everyone you know honestly like five or 10 years I feel I feel bearish about SEO because if you look at the way search generative experience is going if you look at the percentage of traffic that's going to to some of the biggest sites in the world it's becoming harder and harder and harder

to compete now what I do think is that YouTube SEO is going to become way more powerful than normal SEO and so it's going to be interesting to see how this goes but yeah it's it's looking a little bit brutal I don't know if you saw the poll that I released on my YouTube Community recently but 51% of people you know all of my audience are like website owners 51% of them said that the latest update

was brutal for them and that's a huge amount of people so it's just very interesting to see okay this is a super negative time for people but I hope we all get over it and hope it it ends on a positive note yeah 100% I think as with anything in SEO especially if you're going to be doing this stal you need to be ready to Pivot at the moment [ __ ] hits the fan because if you don't

you will just be left lacking and I think that's it's the same with kind of the invest mentality right you need to be ready and in the know when to pull the plug if a company when you're investing stocks if a company starts going under or some massive mismanagement happens or some huge loss or something and that stock tends to tank it's the exact same thing in SEO right if your if your tactics start to tank

pivot if your style starts to tank find a new style start researching start analyzing be in the data the more data you have the more likely you are to succeed right that's what I think comes down to it but I totally agree with you when it comes down to Google I think that Google itself have been doing things that are making it make it bleed traffic themselves so not only have they been losing to other search

engines like YouTube like Tik Tok like Amazon like even this all sorts of other ones now where you can start searching with chat GPT and and all these other uh models and stuff right there just seem to be new platforms that are slowly bleeding away certain types of traffic from Google like e-commerce to Amazon video to Tik Tok right even like things like makeup tutorials are now more searched on Tik Tok than they are on Google

right so I think that slowly slowly it will just start to bleed away but Google's still a mega trillion dollar company there's still tons and tons of value in optimizing for Google and we will never truly leave and there will there will be certain markets that will still perform right so especially with the older generation my grandma still uses Google every single day to go and buy God knows what online right she's shopping unbelievably um but

I do think it's also easier to go into those other search engines and you can make potentially more money if you can rank a product in Amazon you can absolutely slay that earnings potential because you can go to any brand hey look I can rank you for any product name you want in Amazon you know you want to R for treadmill you want to R for desktop computer you want around for new monitor that the monitors

are going to cost 2,000 bucks a pop right and you're going to be able to make 10 20 30 sales a day or maybe even an hour that is just unheard of when it comes to Google because the intent in Amazon is 100% buy buy buy buy buy so if you rank you are making sales that's just guaranteed with Amazon where it's not with Google and I think that that is where it becomes more powerful actually

to do it because it's easier you have a better intent and you have the potential to make more money without having to deal with all of the headaches and stress and Google updates and this and the stuff right so I think that again potentially we could start seeing the Julian YouTube SEO Channel coming very very soon right but I but I think that it would be a good idea for for a lot of people especially if

you are overly emotionally invested in things to potentially pivot outside of Google right now yeah I would agree like YouTube SEO massive gold mine right like for example if you publish a Blog on a brand new site and you've never done SEO before you might not get any views on that for three six nine months right whereas if you publish a YouTube video and it's actually valuable and helps your audience and people like you then from

day one you can get like thousands of views is absolutely insane I've seen loads of new channels do it from day one so there's so many opportunities out there outside of SE outside of Google all these other search engines around right y so get out the bubble guys and start looking for opportunities yeah awesome well and and again I think this is a really good opportunity if you if you are if you've been completely smashed by

Google right then look at where you could pivot look at your new opportunities look at your new life life boats look at everything around you because there's reasoning here around why Google is coming after certain things and I don't think that un unless you have a very very high technical capability Google will eventually win that's the the the be all and end all unfortunately right you need to be able to understand fundamentally how a lot of

the tokens and things work to be able to beat Google's ability to detect it and output it right and I think that that's where things are going to move towards and that's what we're really investing on in CER is making sure that our content is not detected and it still ranks and we're continually doing case studies and things so I appreciate you com on the channel obviously people can find you on YouTube but is there anywhere

else people can find you online that's the main place yeah check out my videos see what you think hopefully subscribe if you like it I'll put a link in the description I'll see you guys in the next video peace