It's another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and in this episode, I speak with Lars Lofgren about the state of SEO in 2025. Of all the folks I've met in my 20 years of doing startups, Lars Lofgren has got to be in the top two or three SEOs that I know.
And I love sitting down with him. He really speaks his mind and is not afraid to just talk about the realities of how SEO has changed over the past several years, what's working, what's not, the dangers he sees ahead, as well as at a certain point shrugging his shoulders and saying, you know, I just don't know. I don't know the details of how AI is going to impact this particular element of it.
It's a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it. But before we dive into it, MicroConf US ticket prices go up on January 31st. They go up by $200, and that's just two or three days after this episode goes live. We are 84% sold out, and every year people are asking about a wait list because they hesitated. So get your ticket before it is too late. We are going to sell this event out. It is a certainty.
If you want to hang out with 250 of your closest bootstrapped founder friends, head to microconf.com slash US and grab your ticket either before the price goes up or maybe even after because it's going to sell out anyway. And that event is March 16th through 18th in New Orleans, Louisiana. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Lars. Lars Lofgren, welcome to Startup to the Rest of Us. Thank you. It's great to be here, Rob. Great to have you, man. So you and I go back...
I'm thinking it more than a decade. Yeah, it's like 15 years. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. So you've spoken at MicroComp multiple times and you were basically, especially in the early days of MicroComp, just the go-to SEO speaker.
Because you were doing so much SEO with Kissmetrics. You worked with Heaton. Then you worked with Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You To Be Rich. And then you've built a whole empire of high traffic. What do you call blogs, affiliate sites? I don't know. What do you call your empire? Yeah, I work on blogs with affiliate programs, or at least I did. We had a number of B2B blogs that we were working on, different projects, all monetized through affiliate SEO offers, organic, 100% organic projects.
Uh, that's all imploded, which we can talk about, but, uh, yeah, I got, I got pretty far. We were doing, uh, at the height, it did $7.2 million of revenue, annual revenue in a single year. Um, that was the high point before it all collapsed on me. I'd love to just start there because that is fascinating to me. So what is it? What type of traffic does it take to generate $7.2 million in affiliate revenue? Yeah.
So it's actually a lot less than you think. So if you're in the right categories, that's the thing about affiliates and especially like SEO organic affiliates. And I assume socials like this too. It's definitely going to be true on like any sort of PPC or Google ads, Google AdWords. If you're in the right categories, like even if you're only getting a couple thousand visitors on a blog post, if you're ranking for the right blog post and the right term, you can make an extraordinary amount of money.
And on any given month, there's definitely power laws, right? Like the vast majority of the posts, even they can rank really well, generate a ton of traffic. You don't really make any money, make a little bit, but it all adds up over time. But then you have your few marquee posts that if you rank, you just, I mean, I had one blog post that was literally make just one post.
was making over $100,000 a month off of one post, right? So... But you don't know which those are going to be, right? So you just have to throw a bunch out? You do. If you get into the affiliate space and you talk to any of the affiliate pros that have been doing this for a long, long time, they know. They know the categories. They know the terms. Everybody knows the terms. Everyone, like, it's not even like an open secret. It's just like, oh, no, these are the categories. These are the terms. If you're in this space, go for that one.
Like VPN is huge. Best web hosting is huge. Best credit cards is huge. Everyone knows best credit cards. It's the golden goose. Tons of traffic monetizes really well. The commission rates are through the roof. Like if you rank number one for best credit cards, you will make so much money. It's obscene. Insurance is fantastic.
huge massive, right? So there's a bunch of these and the deeper in the affiliate space you get, the more you learn about them. And then it was like, it also doesn't take, if you're a little savvy, if you're just a little aware of like how like price points in different products and you have a keyword research tool, you just go clicking around and searching around and you find all these product categories. You're like, wow, I know those products, those price tags are decent, which means the commission rates are probably pretty decent. There's a lot of traffic.
I bet there's a lot of money over there and there always is. So. Yeah, got it. And then you said you used to do affiliates. For those who don't, who aren't in the loop, what did, what did Google do this year? Yeah, well really started in 2022. Google, there's been like a complete phase shift in the Google algorithm. Like it's, I've never seen a transition this big in my entire SEO career. Like the way I look at SEO now, even though I'm a,
even from like a year ago, is completely different. Like earlier this year, I was banging my head against the wall. I was like, nothing is working. Nothing I do matters anymore. Google doesn't like anything I'm doing. It's like an existential crisis with my career. Like, am I any good at this still? And then I was like, okay, yeah, I gotta take my entire SEO playbook. I gotta throw all of it out.
Because things don't feel right. It's so like nothing's working like it should. I don't have the pulse of Google anymore. What's going on? So I just threw everything out. I'm like, OK, I'm rebuilding my entire SEO playbook from scratch. I'm taking nothing from granted. I'm learning every lesson over again. If I don't see it work today, then no guarantees it still works. Right. So so there's been this huge phase shift in Google.
And I think part of it was driven by AI. A part of it was also like really around 2020. I mean, it was true before this, but like 2020 to 2022, there was this like goldmine rush of like niche affiliate sites. Like word was out.
We started our business in like 2019, which is kind of funny. So we caught like the tail end of it, even though me and my co-founder like knew about this space for a long time. And we're like, we knew how much money there was. I'm like, let's go do it. We like SEO. We like good content. We like helping people and we can get paid. What's not to like, let's go do this. So, but it wasn't just us. There was this huge wave of like niche affiliate sites and it kind of got taken out of control.
Then on top of it, AI is coming out, chat GPT rolls out and content. This is the explosion of shit.
So Google's basically freaking out and basically like, oh, they have a real crisis on their hands. How do they actually filter through this endless wave of just trash content that they're drowning in? So I kind of I empathize with their position a little bit. And so they basically the algorithm has changed radically. It used to be, I guess, if it was to boil it down to like one algorithm.
I like to think in like loopholes with SEO because if you know what the big loophole is, you basically know what the algorithm is working at its core. The big loophole with Google used to be Lynx.
Like if you built enough links to the right page, you could basically rank for whatever you wanted. And that's how we got going, to be honest. We built a bunch of links to a very few key pages and it was working really, really well. And that was true for like a decade, right? Links, that's all that mattered. If you were a better link builder and higher quality link builder than anybody else in your space, you won, period, full stop. I'm not gonna say links don't matter anymore because they still do, but you can't abuse the Google algorithm through links anymore.
So that era ended. And the new era is basically Google being like, okay, we're not going to spend nearly as much time figuring out what pages are good. We're just going to trust really, really major brands.
brands really massive sites and I think there's a lot of nuance to how Google defines a brand but basically if you're a major media site if you're like a top 100 website on the internet top 500 something like that you can basically just post whatever you want and rank for whatever you want
And if any, like, I think the best example of this is like indeed.com. I don't know if everybody's checked their SEO program lately. And I don't care. I'll talk as much about Indeed as someone will let me. But their content is trash. It's so bad. It's such a ****. They've basically gone from like 2 million visitors a month to I think over 20 million visitors a month. It's just massive, mind-boggling growth. Like, even I struggle to get my head around it. And I'm an SEO and I've **** built a bunch of websites. And it's just a land grab of ****.
They're just publishing endlessly. Publish, publish, publish. I'm not going to accuse them of doing AI content, but it looks like AI content or even like worse. I think if there are any writers that are working on this program, they should actually just use AI because the content will get better and they'll save time and everybody will get paid more. The only people that are benefiting from this are like
and the SEO folks at Indeed and the writers themselves. So someone should make some of this money. Anyway, but that's the state that we're in, right? Like if you have the right domain that has the right signals that Google is looking for, you basically get a free pass.
And if you're on the opposite end of the spectrum and you don't have those signals, things can get crazy volatile and really, really dicey. And that era, we were doing really, really well in the old era of Google. We were not set up to do well in the new era of Google. The brand era, this like monolith website era, this monolith brand. Those are the major players that can basically do whatever they want. So that's the world we live in right now.
I want to go down two paths. And one is talk about big brands being able to do whatever they want. And there's this term that I've heard thrown around called parasite SEO. All right. I want to put a pin in that. We'll come back to it in a few minutes. What I want to touch on is the listeners of this show are a lot of entrepreneurs, some early stage, a lot of folks doing six, seven, eight figures ARR with their SaaS.
So when they hear you saying, oh, you have to have a brand, Indeed or CNN have to be a top 500, that might scare someone off who's like, well, I'm doing 10 grand, 20 grand a month right now. Should I think about SEO? And what's your take on that? Yeah. So what I used to tell people, I've done so many consulting calls with like first time SaaS founders or,
you know, bootstrap folks that are trying to figure out what marketing channels. And what I used to tell people is like, okay, all the channels work, pick one that really resonates with you. And you're like, really go focus on it. Online channel is essentially power law. All the gangs are at the end focus. Don't get spread too thin. And if you like writing, if blogs resonate with you, if like the SEO world resonates with you, go all in and you can get really far. In fact, that's why I spent my whole career in SEO. Cause it's like one of the only marketing channels. It's like the full marketing funnel.
right? You get very top of funnel, you get mid funnel, you get bottom funnel. Like there's always something to do with Google and SEO. And even like I've played around with every single channel at different points in my career and nothing has ever beaten SEO on the scalability, the ROI, the profit per lead, the volume, like it hits all
All the buckets. The downside was like, it always takes forever, right? It takes like five years to get anywhere interesting with it. So that's what I used to tell people. Like, if you're excited by it, go all in. It'll take you everywhere you need to go. If you're not excited by it, well, then maybe don't do it because it's going to take five years, right?
These days I'm like, look, I'm an SEO purist, or at least I want to be. I have to like, I have to let that go. Cause I can't, I can't a hundred percent focus on SEO anymore. It's too volatile. And the, like the way Google is working is yes, the big brands get this free pass. There's like a lot of nuance to what Google is considering a brand. Right. And there are ways to get going as a smaller site, a newer site with a lot less content with a much smaller brand and
But you have to balance whatever you're doing with SEO with some other channels. And if you want like a really simple rule that would give any founder or new marketing team that's trying to balance things out, I'd be like, okay, even on day one, even as a founder,
I don't want to, I like focus. So it pains me to say this, but it is the truth. I would say you have to go all in on, I guess you're not, it's not all in anymore, but you have to go in on at least three channels. One channel is top of funnel. That's pick a social channel that matches your audience and brand and what you like.
You don't have too many options. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Twitter, whatever we're calling it, the butterfly, blue sky thing, whatever, you know, it's a pick one of those. And that's your top of funnel. Do some SEO if you're really excited by it and then build your email list from day one and get regular emails out so that they're warm and that's building.
You basically can't just devote yourself to like one channel like SEO anymore. And there's two reasons for this. One is the easy one is diversification. SEO is volatile. Stuff bounces around all over the place. Like I don't even consider like a 30% hit anymore to be like noteworthy. I'm just like, Oh, we're down by 30%. Like, okay. Like there was earlier in my career, a 40% hit was like a six month fire drill.
Right. And it never happened. Now that stuff happens really regularly. If someone's telling me that they got hit on SEO, I'm like, look, if you didn't drop by like 80%, don't call me. Like it's not even a hit. Things are crazy and volatile. Like it feels like the volatility of social, but paired with all of like the long-term nuances of SEO, it's kind of, it's a much deal than it used to be. So you need that diversification. But on top of that,
When Google is looking at things to rank and deciding who ranks for what they do place a lot more emphasis in, okay, is this site, is this brand, is this entity, are they on social? Are they doing stuff in other channels?
Is the traffic coming to this website like non-search traffic? Is there a bunch of branded keywords for this website? All this other stuff that's like, you know, it's definitely not SEO stuff, right? It's the full marketing bucket. So if you properly diversify, the SEO game is actually going to get a lot easier for you over time. Like I have a, I'm working on a couple of different sites right now with various degrees of brands. The site that has SEO,
it's still a pretty big brand. Like most people listening to this would be like, that's a decent brand. And I'd be like, yeah, it is a decent brand, but you know, they're not, haven't invested as heavily into other marketing channels. Uh, it's been very SEO and blog dominant and I have to work my off on that site. Like nothing is a given like, yes, Google will give me a shot, but like I got to show up and do the real work, work on another website, massive brand, huge brand has
tons of social stuff going on, like all sorts of crazy brand things. And every time I turn around, the numbers are all up. Like it's just all the charts look great. I'm like, I just have to post, publish, keep publishing. Good things happen. Right? So it's,
It is a crazy world. But if you diversify your channel a little bit, it's going to make everything easier. And so don't get too locked in on one channel is my main advice. And you can get somewhere. You can make progress. My personal blog, LarsLofgren.com, there's not too many blog posts on it, but...
I'm doing stuff on LinkedIn. I'm doing these podcasts. I'm getting my name out there and my stuff is ranking pretty fast. I don't post that much. I don't, I don't make any money off this thing, but when I post it, like it feels healthy and it's much smaller. So there's still things you can do. You plenty of cards to play, but you got to diversify. Wow. That's it.
It's crazy. It makes sense when you say it, but it's crazy to hear that, that like, this is where SEO is. Because I remember back in the day, do you remember private blog, PBNs, Lars, where you'd set up an exact match domain with dashes in it? It's like the-chiropractor-in- Fresno or some dot com. And then you'd build some links with a PBN. It's like, look, we rank. And it was just
But that's what, I mean, Google just hates that stuff, right? It's like people gaming the system and that, it feels like this is a big backlash to that. Yeah, it is a huge backlash. Basically, Google decided to hell with SEOs. And I mean, kind of, if you want to like a good rule of thumb on like tactical SEO level,
Like don't do any of the SEO stuff that was popular that people have been talking about for like a decade. Like if you join some SEO course and they're like, yeah, you know, get bold, your anchor text and get all this internal, like all these formulas and or like, you know, you know, get a fact at the bottom of the post and optimize it, you know,
There was a playbook and all that stuff worked really well. We were doing some of it and it worked great. But all that stuff actually, I think is, you know, how much is causation versus correlation. But I'm inclined to believe that a lot of it will actually hurt your rankings now because Google basically went to the opposite end of the spectrum and said, look, if this thing even smells like an SEO touched it, we're going to just nuke it to oblivion. And they certainly won't.
100% do that at a domain level. And then we can argue about how much it happens at a page level. But I've thrown out all those old little hacks. Like I don't do any of them anymore, like at all. So for folks listening to this, like I'm invested in over 200 B2B SaaS companies and a huge percentage of them. And it's 60, 70, 80%, somewhere in there.
are doing SEO and are getting some type, content marketing and SEO, and are getting results from it. So what I don't want to do is paint a picture for everybody of like, SEO is dead, or you shouldn't do it or anything. But you're pointing out these pitfalls of following old playbooks and
and potentially just how volatile it might be, especially when you get to scale. And I think that's another thing is a lot of the SaaS I'm invested in are, they're in these tight verticals that where it's just not, you're not getting hundreds of thousands of uniques. It's like, ooh, if I can get 8,000 uniques a month from Longtail SEO, that's actually a huge win for these folks because their ACV is high enough that you just don't need a ton of volume, right? And I don't get the feeling that they're under that as much, nearly as much scrutiny as all the stuff that you're talking about.
Yeah, as long as there's like, again, you keep that balance on the brand and your other marketing channels, right? I think that the danger is when your SEO channel, regardless of how small you are or how big you are, you'd be doing, you know, a thousand visitors a month. You can be doing a million visitors a month.
If your SEO program gets overweighted compared to your other marketing channels, that's when things can start to get dangerous. And that's when even like a SAS business can, that has a pretty defined niche can run into trouble. So even if SEO is going like really well for someone like, yeah, go do your niche, go dominate that core, but also like be careful.
Don't be really careful about spreading beyond your core focus and your core niche too much. And especially if your niche starts to involve a lot of very similar keywords, maybe there's a local element to the keyword, you know, law keyword or regulation keyword or something that's different from like every city in every state. Or there's some, you know, something, you know, or like celebrity net worth is like another classic. There's just like thousands and thousands and thousands of these things. And you could create a huge website just going after celebrities.
celebrity net worth keywords, right? And people have done that and gotten burned. If there's some keyword type like that, where it fragments really fast. And if you just chase all of it, you'll end up with hundreds and thousands of blog posts. Be really careful about that stuff. Like if you if you went after it, your blog could get really overweighted on content and SEO. And if it gets too overweighted from the rest of your brand, that's where the volatility element starts to come in.
All right, I want to talk about AI before we get to Parasite SEO. So I have two questions for you around AI, specifically involving trying to rank for terms, right? So number one is, AI can write blog posts these days. And I can go to, what is it, Claude and ChatGP, you know, and I can, AI can generate it. And there's all these startups in the space of like, we'll generate, but whatever. What's your take? Do you use it? Should people use it? So I, I've...
At least when it comes to creating content, I can't stand it. So that this is like my personal, I just like have this like neuroses around of like, get this stuff away from me. So I'm pretty biased. But even, even if I like put that aside, I'm like, okay, does it make sense to do this for like a content program? And I am an emphatic 100%. No.
Plenty of ways to use AI. Hats off. People go do it. Great. Brainstorming. You want some feedback on your article, you know, whatever. Great. Occasionally, if I'm feeling really stuck, I'll ask it to give me some suggestions on a headline. And that usually, like, unblocks me and keeps me moving. Right? So there's ways to, like, use it as a little bit of a crutch. But use it as a crutch. Don't have it do the whole ****.
And I know a lot of people are doing it for their blog content. It is rampant. It is everywhere. If you get pretty good with your prompts, you could have like a definitely an average level blog post, maybe even slightly above average.
And it would certainly meld very well with a bunch of other stuff ranking, right? It wouldn't be blatantly problematic if you put in the work on AI. We actually did a ton, like the first year that AI came out, of course, all of our whole business was content, right? So we freaked out. We were like, oh my God. And one of our teams went all in on just using AI and trying to like
Does it work? How well does it work? Do you know where, what's the potential of this thing? And the conclusion we got to was like, look, it can produce the quality that we would accept and be willing to publish. However, you have to put so much work into it. That is basically a watch you need instead of having a number of like reasonably paid writers and freelancers doing all the content, you need a few people.
really hardworking, very diligent, very highly paid people to run these AI algorithms that really know what they're doing, that can have a great eye for content and also know how to torture the algorithms in order to get what you actually need, quality level. And when you look at the cost, it's like, it's not a huge difference. So the time to spend is about the same.
I also have the opinion that like, look, everyone's going into AI content and AI is really good at giving you kind of like that core, like middle of the bell curve answer. Right. And if they're giving you something, they're going to give the other thousand people in your space, something pretty similar. Cause that's what AI does.
And so if you're using it, you're just going to be the middle of the bell curve. Well, marketing isn't about the middle of the bell curve. That's not how you win. You got to stand out. You got to go, you got to do things differently, unexpected. You got to break a norm of some kind. You got to be your pursuit excellence, go way above the curve.
AI can't do any of that stuff, in my opinion, especially when it comes to content. So if I'm trying to get my content to like break through the noise, the last thing I want is to build a program or a team that's completely dependent on just feeding people more of what they're already getting. Right. We have to we got to do things differently. So I'm running content programs on several sites right now. And I'm.
I have told all my freelancers, if you use AI, if you copy and paste anything from AI into anything in your post, if I ever find it, we're done. You can use it for brainstorming. You can use it for outlines, like to get your, get unblocked. That's fine. Research. Although, just f***.
and check every fact because a lot of it's wrong. But everything that you hand me in your final post, you need to write it yourself. And that is a hard rule. And I would give that to any serious team going all in on content marketing or whatever they're doing, regardless of the channel. Be really careful how you use it. If you want to like actually stand out and get somewhere interesting.
That's good advice. And that's the same advice I've heard from other SEOs that I've talked to Ruben Gomez being one. He's like, yeah, we don't. It's not. It's too vanilla. I think of it as a it's a mayonnaise sandwich. It's just this bland, like even for us, you know, we ship a YouTube video every other week through microconf. Right. And it's usually me talking to a screen about something about churn or about us, you know, bootstrapping and ideas and this and that. I have tried to use AI to help me even just outline the
the videos of like, well, I'm going to talk about three things you can do to improve your ACV this week. So I'm going to ask AI, and I'll even ask Jachy Petit, pretend you're Rob Walling because it'll do that now. Like, it's kind of cool. So then it'll pull from maybe weight itself a little more to my stuff. And I still find that I'll look at the outline and be like, ugh, this is bleh.
This is such a mediocre. It's, it's, yeah, it's like a C minus. It's a 70%. And I did, that's not the video that I want to ship. Yeah. It's the middle of the bell curve. Yep. Just enough to get through. And look, I, again, I'm trying to declare my biases on these. Like I enjoy writing even in my spare time, I'll go work on a blog or whatever the fuck.
Right. But I also, I deeply believe that like, if I think about all my best posts, all my best pieces of content, I had to sit and wrestle with that thing and actually figure out what I was thinking and what I believed in through the process of just writing.
And the outline or the hook or where that post ended, usually at a very different place than when I started. So I see value in that process. And if I actually am willing to do the work on the content, I usually end up someplace way, way, way better. And you're never going to get that with AI. You're already hammed in, even if it is an outline. So I don't use it for any writing at all, but I think I'm a halfway decent writer and I do enjoy it. So someone might have a different opinion. Second.
Second AI topic is when I go to Google today and I type in a search for, it's at least half of the searches I do in Google now. The AI, is that Baird? What is it? Claude? I don't even know. It's Google's AI, right? Gemini. Gemini, that's what it is. Well, there's like two different ones. The Gemini is like the actual AI chat thing. And then, um,
The SEO is called the little snippet, AI overviews. Overviews. So AIO is usually what it's truncated to. Shockingly good. Like I asked it the other day. I mean, I ask it about acronyms all the time because I'll talk to a founder and they'll say it's called an acronym. And I just go ask AI what it is. I'm sorry. I go ask Google.
But at least half the time now, I'm not clicking links. It might be more than that. So there's blue links somewhere on that page. There's ads on that page. I'm not clicking any of that. What's your take on the search engine result pages? And does AI make them irrelevant? Do we not have blue links? Like, where is this headed?
Yeah, that is a great question. And I don't have any answers. I do have plenty of sleepless nights and existential dread about it. So if some other founder is worried about this, I'll be like, join the club. If you're in Seattle, we'll get drunk. So I mean, I think it's another reason for like doing content kind of the hard way and finding a reason to stand out. Because yeah, if your content is kind of run-of-the-mill content where it can get answered instantly or it's a query that's
You know, featured snippets did this to a lot of sites over time where someone's looking for a definition and then boom, it's right there in the featured snippet or it's just one little fact. That's going to be the bulk of your content is dependent on that. Like, yeah, that's a lot of that traffic is going to go away. It's going to go way down.
So I'm not too worried about that because I'm like, okay, I have to win on high quality content that actually helps people and says something that they're not expecting and gives them genuine value. Great. I'll compete on that all day long. That's my sweet spot. That's what I enjoy doing. What I actually worry about is like, okay, a lot of these AI answers are actually wrong. But I also know that people, well, I'm not judging anybody. People like convenience, right? Yeah.
I'm a maniacal person that just drive, like we'll go to crazy lengths to find the truth. And I'm always digging and searching and like anybody tells me anything. And the first thing I think is like, ah, it's probably ****.
what's the real answer, right? That's just my default state of mind. But I know a lot of people aren't, they're just going to give what AI gives them. So if you're searching on some topic, you're getting some best practices, how many people just accept it and bounce, even though all the best practices are trash, right? I'm like, what I'm more worried about is like for the content that's worth digging into, how many people are actually going to want to go look at the real thing from someone that actually knows what they're talking about.
Or is Google just going to like leave all those folks behind and the SERPs going to get up to the point where you can't even find that stuff? Then what does that do to a blog over time? What does that do to the marketing funnel over time? Even if you're doing all the real work and you really have something to say and you really know what you're talking about, does SEO essentially just wilt over time?
because you don't get any placement at all. That might happen. I'm going to be like, my whole f***ing career is in SEO. I'm like, ah, where's this going? I don't know. So right now I'm praying and crossing my fingers. And I mean, I am seeing like, I just, I have this small little blog on HR called HR Advice, hradvice.com. And I did get someone
I have a really, really small email list and I ask people when they sign up the email. So I have an automated followup saying, Hey, how did you find this? How'd you find out about this website? It would really help me out. And I got my first response. It was like, Hey, I actually found a lot of your articles on PTO and PTO policies on
while searching through chat TPT. And I found your articles really, really helpful. So I have the optimistic side of me or maybe the hopeful or blind or whatever. This is like rationally optimistic that doesn't want to consider like this world ending of like content marketing. There is a part of me that believes that, okay, traffic's going to go like way down across the board because people are just going to use perplexity or chat TPT or Google and they're just going to get that like bulls**t.
overview that doesn't really tell you anything. And for most people, that's going to be enough and you'll never get that traffic. You'll, they'll never even hit your site, but there'll be a small percentage of those people, the people that actually care about the subject that are like, okay, here's an overview of how call to actions work.
But I need to know I need someone that actually knows how called actions work because my boss is breathing down my neck and I'm not just going to accept kind of the initial bull 500 word overview. I'm going to dig and I'm going to click on stuff and I'm going to ask a bunch of other questions and I'm going to try to get to the source. There are those people out there.
that actually want real information. And I think some of them are gonna keep clicking and they're gonna keep digging. And we could end up in a world where blog volume, blog traffic is like way, way, way down. All the absolute numbers that I started my career on, all those would like just go away.
But what is the hopeful part? What I'm hoping is that the quality of what's actually hits your site, those folks are dramatically higher than what you see like in aggregate now because they need the real answers and they're going to dig and they're going to click on all your stuff and they're going to find you and keep working in your funnel. So maybe absolute traffic comes way down on a blog or a site or a channel or whatever you're doing, but the conversion rates go way up.
That's my hopeful coping rationality. But we'll see, right? Yeah, none of us know. I want to wrap up by circling back to this topic that I mentioned a couple times already. Parasite SEO. It's a term I had never heard before a few months ago. Seems like it came around because of this brand shift. And so if you have this...
amazing brand. It sounds like you can publish whatever the hell you want. Is that it? So tell us, define this term and tell us, you know, what the story behind it. Yeah. So just, you know, how I talked about Indeed, you know, there's a lot of other sites that hit that, that, that kind of framework. They're so big, they have so much traffic. There's so many people hitting their website through so many different mechanisms, news, websites, mass media publications. They're the classic example of this.
They fit that like brand preference algorithm like perfectly right now. And they have, it started, started around like 2022, early 2022 is when it really kicked off.
And it just has gone. Google, for whatever reason, keeps doubling down on this. I thought they'd shift gears like by the end of 2022 or taper things. I was already seeing it. And they were like, no, no, let's just keep going. Let's give these folks everything. It's just like Reddit. They're like, ah, give them everything. And a bunch of people in the affiliate space, they figured this out because they're, everyone's looking at the rankings. You can see who's ranking. And they were like, wait, these news publishers, they rank for everything, right?
why don't we set up some sort of partnership with them as a separate entity, you know, like, Oh, I'm so-and-so I have my own holding company. We run all of our, you know, SEO content and affiliate monetization and link building programs in house. Why don't I go to some news publisher of some kind and basically be like, okay, you're going to set up a
folder on your website, a sub-site within your site, something that I can basically piggyback off your entire domain authority and the preference you have in Google. And then we are going to ship thousands and thousands and thousands of SEO optimized posts. And these are all the old school SEO posts. It's just the same framework, same templates, same stuff that SEO has been doing for like a decade. But it's not high quality. It's just like average, mediocre. Yeah.
In my opinion, like best case scenario, it's like, it's okay content. It's pretty hard to find a post. At least I have had a hard time finding posts that are like, this is really good. This post deserves to rank. At best, it's like, okay, it's fine.
A lot of it, I'm like, this is bad. It's terrible. I don't know why this ranks. It shouldn't rank. So Google kind of like stopped looking at page level metrics and kind of gave the domain weighting way too much weight. And yeah, the affiliate folks in the industry has figured this out. And there's a few kind of affiliate companies that ended up brokering deals with every major news publisher out there.
I'm not going to name names, but everyone has heard of these folks. They've heard of these sites, and you've probably seen them everywhere for a while. And the term is – SEO started calling this a parasite SEO. It's when a third party sets up shop with the main kind of host domain, and
And then they run kind of this subsection of the site and they just spew out tons of SEO content. It ranks, they're abusing the authority of the website. And then of course it's ranking really well and they're making a ton of, we're talking like tens of millions of dollars a month, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And when it was fully scaled and fully operational,
These are just colossal amounts of money. There's a few companies that kind of specialize in this and got multiple agreements with multiple news orgs and it got rampant and they're, well, Google has put out a bunch of like new policies and a bunch of manual actions and a lot of these programs have been hit. So there's been a lot of volatility in the last couple months, but
But yeah, I mean, when Google prefers something, SEO folks will figure it out and they'll figure out how to abuse it. It's as old as time. And then Google eventually catches wind. They figure out they know and then they do the penalty and then the race begins again, right? Yeah, pendulum goes the other way. Everybody freaks out and then... Yeah, it's a trip.
Well, Lars Lofgren, thanks so much for joining me on the show. If folks want to keep up with you, LarsLofgren.com. You have an email list there if folks want to hear the real story around SEO, content marketing, entrepreneurship, whatever else you're up to. Yeah, whatever marketing rants, whatever's bothering me at the moment, try to be entertaining. Awesome. So that's LarsLofgren.com. Thanks again for joining me. Thanks, Rob. Thanks again to Lars for coming on the show. And thank you for listening this week and every week.
This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 752.