Podcast: Episode 13 – SEO: Understanding White Hat and Black Hat


This week on the IWantBusiness Podcast, we’re diving even deeper into SEO and discussing “white hat vs. black hat” tactics.

  • Our tool of the episode is Barracuda, an easy way to see if you’ve been penalized by Google for any not-so-legitimate SEO practices that you may or may not have been aware of. Keep it legit and keep it classy, ya’ll.
  • In our Deep Dive, we talk about legit and shady SEO practices, backlinks, the robot uprising, pandas, and more. It’s gonna be good.
  • Our trivia round gets shaken up a little bit as our producer extraordinaire, Brian Fritz, turns Quiz Master. Will Craig be soundly defeated, yet continue to tout his victory far and wide? Will he actually win? Get on the edge of your seat and let’s find out.

Hate listening to stuff? I feel you, bro. That’s why we’ve transcribed the whole thing right here for you ⬇️
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Episode Transcript

Craig: Welcome to IWantBusiness, the Small Business Podcast, brought to you by Clarity Creative Group. My name is Craig, I’m joined by David.
David: Hey, everybody.
Craig: And our producer extraordinaire and soon-to-be Quiz Master, Brian Fritz. This episode, we are gonna be chatting all about white and black hats, and what I mean by that is Search Engine Optimization, SEO. Black hat, white hat, what does that mean? It’s sounds crazy. But first, David’s gonna entertain you and educate you with our Tool of the Episode. What is our tool this episode?
David: So, this episode, we’re talking about a tool…it’s from a company called Barracuda.Digital.
Craig: Barracuda!
David: Barracuda.Digital. The link will be on our Clarity website–
Craig: Do you think that’s their thing, though? Using the song, Heart, “Barracuda” by Heart?
David: Yeah.
Craig: You go to their website: “Barracuda!”
David: I went to it, it did not happen.
Craig: Dammit!
David: I will send them a message to let them know.
Craig: They didn’t want to pay the licensing.
David: There might be some copyright issues of being associated with that.
Craig: Every time you say it, I’m gonna, “Barracuda!”
David: Make sure not to mention it so much. It’s called a penguin tool, is what it is. And how the tool works, is it links up with your Google Analytics account. So in order for you to use this, you need to have a Google Analytics account.
Craig: Got it.
David: And what it does is, it takes all our data since 2015, and it will tell you if your traffic has dropped because of any penalties.
Craig: Wait, “penalties” like what?
David: So, Google is known to roll out little things, sometimes gradually, but some of the things have had noticeable…We know on this day, they flipped a switch and, all of a sudden, if you had really spammy links going to our website, you’ll have a drop. So there’s something called a Panda penalty…so you can use this tool…it’ll put little lines on your traffic graph and show you, did you have any big drop-offs around that time, which would probably have been caused by you receiving that penalty.
Craig: So it sounds like it’s an indicator to let you know if you’re doing what’s right or wrong in the eyes of Google. You said, “Panda.” What is that? What does that mean?
David: So, there’s Panda, there’s Penguin, there’s a couple other…they’re penalties.
Craig: Are they all animal-themed?
David: No, no. (laughs)
Craig: (laughs)
David: Some of them are called…some of them are not that. Most of them are, really, not even named, so you don’t really even know the names of them. But a lot of times they got these names from people just talking about them. But what it’s all about is…Panda was really about taking care of bad links. People that had just a whole bunch of spammy links from not-credible sources. Let’s say you had 100 links from randomlink.ru, like a Russian website-
Craig: These fake sites.
David: …that were just so fake. So they figured out that you had low-quality links and gave you, pretty much a slap. Just flipped the switch and your traffic, if you were associated with it, just dropped. But some people don’t even know that this has happened to them.
Craig: Right.
David: Or some people are working their way back, so they can use this tool to find out…as well as some other ones. so if there’s any named or unnamed penalties that have gone on, you kinda see how they’ve hit and possible causes.
Craig: I know, typically, all your tools are free, is this a free tool again?
David: Yeah, it looks like it’s free to get started. If you want more visibility and…right now, I just had to login, I’m sure there’s probably restrictions on how many times you can login. But you’re looking, right now, at the past, so you’re probably only gonna need to do this, maybe, once or twice a year, unless you notice that your traffic drops. But if you notice your traffic drops, use a tool like this and see if there was some sort of penalty that occurred during that time; maybe you can associate it with why.
Craig: So you’re saying traffic dropped, but would it also affect how you show up in the search ranking?
David: That’s 100% chance of…
Craig: Okay.
David: …of what it is. It’s that your rankings have gone way down.
Craig: So you might notice that even more so. Like, if you’re one of those people that follows your rankings, you’re looking at your website, you’re hooked into your Analytics… Obviously, this tool makes a lot more sense if you are manipulating and working with your Analytics. Which you should be.
David: Right. Right, but maybe you’re not really watching your rankings, maybe you don’t really know that you went from Rank 2 to Rank 119 because all you had was spammy links or they just didn’t find you as credible. Things like that can be found with this tool, because it’s gonna give you a line and you’re probably gonna see a drop in your graph where that line is. So it’s a nice little…I’ll try and do a little photo, so you can see what it looks like.
Craig: Screen grab!
David: Screen grab, for those that are more visual. It’s kind of hard on a podcast, but-
Craig: Barracuda!
David: Barracuda. It’s PanguinTool.Barracuda.Digital, it’s a long one.
Craig: Terrible URL!
David: And “penguin” is spelled…
Craig: With an ‘A.’
David: “Panguin,” like “Panda.” It’s Panda, Penguin together.
Craig: We will make sure to have that link available for you. You can find it at IWantClarity.com, where we post our podcast. You can also get it from the Show Notes, I believe, as well.
David: Yeah, we’ll have the Show Notes on.
Craig: It’ll be in there. So, some of the terms that came up in there “traffic” and “rankings,” they go really well with, obviously, that Barracuda tool, but also with what we’re gonna be talking about in our Deep Dive today. So we’re getting into white hat/black hat SEO tactics.
So, last episode, we were talking about SEO, we were saying what it is, even. And now we want to give you a little bit of an overview of the types of things that people do and how the Google machine views it. Because that’s kinda what the white hat/black hat thing is. There’s good things you can do, and that would be under the white hat…
David: Things that don’t violate Google’s terms of service.
Craig: There we go. That’s a better way to say it. Things that don’t poke the beast.
David: Correct.
Craig: And then there’s the black hat, which you are poking, sometimes going at the beast, and they make take time to get to you. But when they do, you can literally get blacklisted from the search rankings.
David: This tool will show you the exact moment where you dropped out of–
Craig: (laughs) Where you don’t exist anymore.
David: Yeah.
Craig: The funny thing about search engines, when you think of it, is Google has their own monopoly on their own search, obviously. You’re on their website. You’re typing in what you want to type in that Google search bar. So they’re gonna show you what they want to.
David: Right.
Craig: Now, they pride themselves on providing the best results on earth, and it’s been tested and shown so many times that they do have the best results. But, when you do things they don’t want, they gonna let you know.
David: Right.
Craig: And that’s what this is about. So, give us, I guess, let’s start with some of the negative things, so that we can get some of the people that are listening, some of the small business owners that might be doing their own websites, or might just have a web guy helping them out. Maybe not on that whole level where you’re working with a big agency or a firm. But you’re working on your site, what are some of the things you need to avoid?
David: Avoiding the black hat techniques is really coming down to doing the things that tend to violate the rules. In other words, you’re trying to game the system, most of the times.
Craig: Okay, so when you say, “violate the rules,” that sometimes gets a little caught in the clouds because these rules are, I don’t even know if they’re posted in an easy way to read them all, there’s a lot of them.
David: Yeah, I mean…here’s what’s kinda cool. Over the years, people have been able to ask on X or other search forums with some of the people that are in charge of SEO at Google and they’ve been known to give responses. Like, “Hey, is it okay if I do this?” and they’ve responded back, “Don’t do that” or…
Craig: Don’t do that! (laughs)
David: …”I would advise not doing that. So, we’ve definitely gotten, as somebody that does SEO, they’ve given us some details about what works and what doesn’t. So, to say that sometimes, we do things and we don’t know it’s bad can happen, but there’s definitely some extremes out there, where it’s all some companies do. And, when we’re talking about the black hat, we’re talking about companies that are probably gaming the system by doing things that, a lot of times, aren’t organic  and so forced that Google will figure it out quickly.
Craig: Give an example.
David: One of my favorite examples is a moving company that used a company to build backlinks.
Craig: Okay. Because backlinks are a positive thing, in essence.
David: Correct. So, I had saw that the backlinks that they had gotten were from these crazy websites, just not valuable websites. But they were having 150, 200 links from sometimes the same website. So it’s like these forums, where they were just posting, posting, posting.
Craig: Right.
David: It’s a moving company, and yet there was, like, other topics that it was being posted under, i.e. Car Moving Violations.
Craig: Ah! So not even in the actual subject of what the company is. You’re talking about a moving company that helps you relocate. Low truck, moving forward, not moving violations and a ticket.
David: Like a traffic ticket.
Craig: So Google can now tell the difference between these things.
David: And Google will be able to figure out that that page is not about, which it is…Number one, it’s already gonna see that your links are kinda spammy and it’s already gonna discredit that link, which is obviously not good, but a technique like this can also get you blacklisted…
Craig: Right.
David: …for doing it, which is…again, you should know better than to create these links out there. So this company is doing it to try to build these backlinks for them, to try to build up their credibility, but in the end, what’s happening is they’re…yes, maybe they helped move them up to number one or number two, until, at some point, Google figures it out and all of a sudden, they started dropping.
Craig: And it may be a year or two, it really can be. You can be successful doing those negative things, but your long-term plan is gonna get blown to smithereens.
David: Right, and most black hat tactics are usually short-term, really quick gains. So you’re gonna move up really quickly because maybe you’re creating hundreds and hundreds of links a day. And right away, within the Google algorithm that figures out where to rank you, it doesn’t catch on to it right away, but after it realizes the quality of those links aren’t there or the algorithm starts to catch up with it… If you think you’ve figured it out or somebody else has figured it out, Google’s gonna figure it out…
Craig: Eventually.
David: …and they’re gonna be able to write, in their algorithm, how you do it and it’s gonna work against you.
Craig: So what we’re saying is, yes, you can do well, briefly, doing some of these negative things, but if you plan on being in business for years, decades, you’re trying to build a brand, you’re trying to build a company, you’re trying to put your flag in the ground, maybe you want a physical location, you certainly don’t want to disappear from the rankings. And doing some of these negative things…I know we only touched on one of them, so, I won’t call them “fake” backlinks, I guess, what is it called?
David: Spammy?
Craig: Spam backlinks. So what that would be, is if you’re seeing a bunch of backlinks to a competitor or you’re building backlinks to your own site from foreign forums, like, group messaging boards that are not even in this country, that is a red flag for the search engines. If you’re building links from subject matter that doesn’t make sense, contextually, the learning machine, if you will, of Google can tell the difference now.
And it’s not like the ’90’s anymore, or the early 2000’s even, where you could have that 150 links, like you’re saying. And, along those same lines, I think keywords become a thing that people get caught up in. In the old days, you could keyword stuff…
David: Right.
Craig: …was, I guess, the terminology. You could put the word “moving,” in this case, “Orlando moving,” a hundred times on the page and the algorithm wasn’t smart enough to know that that didn’t read well. It didn’t read like a real article. It had no value, other than the word “Orlando moving” was on it. Now the search engines are different. What are they doing different?
David: The machine learning aspect of it. So they’re able to check, are they proper sentences? Are they good paragraphs? Is it well-written? Is even the word “moving” used too many times? Not naturally, right? Before you were writing for a machine, now you have to write for a human, but the machine actually can read…
Craig: But the machine is the human.
David: Read just like a human.
Craig: Terminator 3000. It’s real Cyberdyne.
David: It’s not that bad.
Craig: No, it’s not quite there but, as we’re saying, what the algorithm can do is determine the readability of your text now. It was never able to do that a decade ago. So if you’re just writing what we call “keyword-stuffed junk text,” yeah, you might perform well for a month or two, or even a year. But, eventually, that page is gonna get marked and could disappear from the rankings entirely.
And that’s a risk. The disappearance entirely is a problem. Getting hit with a little bit, or maybe they move you down, is not the end of the world. But when they flag you, is what it’s called, right? When your site is flagged and taken off the rankings? Good luck, I hope you’re strong on Facebook.
David: Yeah, I mean, some of these penalties that these people have gotten… I’ve heard the stories of people that have completely took their domain and shut it down and started a new domain…
Craig: They gotta start over.
David: They couldn’t use the old one. They tried, they keep trying and trying. Depending on the severity of it, or how many bad links they had and…you can technically disavow bad links but, at some point, if you already had it and you didn’t make any effort to disavow them and Google sees that you had every chance to fix this and you didn’t, that’s a problem.
Craig: And remember, Google is in the business of providing the best results on earth, so they don’t want to show those sites that have keyword stuffing, SPAM, all that stuff, they don’t want to show that because it diminishes what they are the worldwide leader in.
So, we talked about backlinks being spammy, we talked about keyword stuffing, are there any other things that we’d want someone to know to avoid? Before we tell them some positive things?
David: Things to avoid are SEO companies that are promising…
Craig: Ugh. The guarantee: first spot.
David: Yeah, “We’ll guarantee you first page.” The thing is, if you’re doing things organically, the reason why you’ll be on the first page is because your content deserves to be on first page. But a company that doesn’t touch your content, that doesn’t do things that…we’ll talk about some of the white hat tactics, they’re not doing those things…and most of them don’t, that means they’re not doing what needs to be done to properly move you through the-
Craig: And that’s the scary thing for small business owners. You’re gonna get called, as soon as you open a URL, as soon as you register something with GoDaddy, your number’s out there, your name’s out there. You’re gonna get calls, you’re gonna get emails from these companies that are gonna charge $99 a month, $200 a month…whatever their number is, and they’re gonna say, “We’re gonna guarantee you first position; we’re gonna guarantee you top position within three months.” The problem is, if they’re not doing the things, if they’re not on your site, developing content, doing what needs to be done, you run the risk…and they don’t care that you don’t show up in the rankings next year because they got their money already.
David: Exactly.
Craig: They can destroy your URL and it doesn’t affect their business model.
David: Right. And, again, maybe you have one or two good months but, for the long-term success of your business, that’s probably not how you’re gonna want to do. So I would say one red flag, and there’s tons of things that people do, it’s not even worth talking about, because those black hat things? You shouldn’t do them. And a lot of these companies that are trying to sell you on this stuff are not long-term invested in your brand and that’s the problem. Again, they’re fly-by-night; they’re gonna come in, you’re gonna spend the money, and yeah, you might be great for today, but when Google catches up with them, which they seem to always-
Craig: They always do.
David: And you’ll notice when you look at these charts, they’re more and more penalties and other named and unnamed–
Craig: Well, again, they wanna protect their brand. They wanna protect that…you don’t wanna go to Bing, which always gives me the worst search results, I don’t even understand it.
David: Fortunately.
Craig: It just doesn’t know what I want. But maybe it’s because I use Google more.
So, for those business owners and those website creators out there that wanna do things the right way, let’s give them a couple of what we call the “white hat” moves, the best practices to doing SEO.
David: I like to think that there’s a couple things that you can do, and the first thing is quality content. You want people to share your content on Facebook, you want people to link to you, you want people to talk about you. If you’re writing good, quality content and you’re getting your name out there, I don’t see why you’re not gonna build those backlinks organically, right? Naturally.
Craig: People are gonna want to share your stuff if it’s legit. If it adds value to their life, if they like it, they’re gonna share it. And that’s pretty much the whole point of why things are shareable on Facebook. You like a post…even if it’s a meme, you like an image, you share it with your friends, you tag your friends. That’s the idea on quality content on a website.
David: Right. So, big picture? Something like Buzzfeed, where you can spend within 30 seconds and you’re already sucked into an article, you’re probably sharing it with your friends, sharing it with people. Sometimes I’ve seen things that I want to share on our website, because it talks about business. But it’s usually really fun stuff, that’s the type of stuff that you sometimes need to be a little bit less of a business, and a little bit more of something that can relate to people. So that idea of creating “buzzworthy” content is huge in terms of building up your organic ranking.
Craig: I think, for a while, people caught caught up with a term, and by saying “buzzworthy,” we don’t necessarily mean “viral content.” I know that was a big buzzword years ago, I guess it still comes up every now and then. We’re not saying you need one piece of content that gets a million views. That’s not the idea here.
But let’s say you…I mean, we’ve been on that moving company thing. You’re a moving company and you’d want to write some content about what movers do, what benefits you get from getting a mover, where the movers move to…these pages of content. Or let’s say you’re a lawyer and you specialize in family law. You’re gonna want content on your site about family law. Go as detailed as you can. I’m talking, not 100 words, here, but thousands of words. Because those are the things that make Google look at your site and say, “Wow. The readability’s there; people get a benefit here. It connects with family law, he’s a lawyer.” It all comes together and those results start to display for you.
David: Right, right. So, having good content so people can link to it, building links…naturally, not going and buying links, not going to these places of low quality and inferior links.
Craig: What’s “build naturally?” So give me a strategy of something someone can use…I feel like that’s a daunting task, building links. What does that mean?
David: There’s a couple things that people do to build them, everything from influencer outreach, has been a big thing right now, where…we get it. If you have a website that’s somewhat successful, you get those emails, “Hey, I noticed a blog post about this. Would love if you could link to this.” Or sometimes you even get invites to new tools or new programs out there… They want us to write about them, so that way we can build up a backlink to them to talk about their new tool or their new program or their new website, whatever it is that they’re promoting. But that’s a natural link. I typed up a nice article, or we worked together on writing it…you hear about guest posting, so maybe even guest posting on another site to build a link back to yours.
These are just small little things that are…real links, real links that aren’t on these forums. These are links that actually have value, that have text in the right place. If I’m writing about a website tool, I’m using a marketing company or I’m using another web design company. I’m not putting it on a forum about cats and dogs, I’m putting it on a forum about websites or about marketing. So it’s all relevant stuff, so it gives Google those proper signals to help know what to rank you for. And that’s really what the whole white hat tactic’s about, is doing good things in backlink building versus paying for SPAM.
Craig: I think that’s a good way to boil it down: if you’re paying for your traffic, you’re pay for your links, you’re paying for those things, eventually, it will bite you. Where, yes, you may have those great gains in month 1, 2, and 3, but, like we’re saying, if you want to be in business long-term, you gotta be doing quality content. You gotta build organic links.
The web is a community, really, it’s just a humongous one. So you reach out to people, you read about the things that they’re doing that relate to yours; you’re sharing content, you’re working together… Those are the things that make moves and get you up the rankings.
David: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talked about white hat tactics…you’re talking about quality content, backlinks, and maybe third site structure, and those three things… Doing it right, not keyword stuffing, not doing hidden text and all these old-school stuff that they used to do.
Craig: That was popular.
David: Yeah, because it worked before–
Craig: I would say, the ’90’s, because I’d say, like, AOL–
David: More like the 2000’s.
Craig: There was, though. Yeah. You’d go to the bottom of the page, and you’d highlight that white area, and there’s all this white font text…
David: All this text.
Craig: …Down there. And you cannot do that anymore. Google will destroy you over that.
David: Right. Again, you’ll just get bad rankings. But those are the basic things that…again, a company starts doing that to your content, starts putting in random stuff… Stop!
Craig: Yeah, stop immediately. Write about what you know. If you need help writing stuff, there are ways out there that people can help you, whether it’s content writers online, bloggers online. If you’re not the type of person that can write but you’re good at what you do, whatever your business is, there’s affordable help out there to make sure that your website can perform really well.
So that’s kind of our take on the white hat and black hat aspect of SEO. If you enjoyed this podcast and found out that you got just a little nugget of some information, make sure you subscribe and please leave us a review. We’re up there in the iTunes, we’re on the Sound Cloud, you can find us anyway. This allows us to get our name out there and continue to help small businesses grow.
With that being said, it’s time for our trivia segment, where we are kinda switching gears, here. We’ve got our producer extraordinaire of PodcastingDoneRight.com, Brian Fritz, and he is now Quiz Master. We’ve literally taken off one of his hats; we have put on a new hat. Because there was some discrepancies. There were some fans reaching out, in my mind, about the win-loss record that should be undefeated, that is mine. There were some people…they were upset.
David: (groans in suspicion)
Craig: They were upset people.
Brian: For your incessant lying, is what I like to call it.
David: Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re very angry at the constant lies, is what they’re angry about.
Craig: I think the people want the truth. And the truth is, I won the trivia. All the time.
David: I think it’s time for an impartial quiz host.
Craig: It is, it is. I agreed with this, because I think it was the only way… David and I were making questions for one another and it was fun, and there was Matt Damon, and there was my destruction of David’s psyche. But…we need to have a fair and impartial individual, so without any knowledge of our own, Mr. Fritz has put together the questions for today.
We just have to figure out… We don’t have buzzers here, so we might have to go back to our old-school… We want to tell the people exactly how we’re doing this.
David: Yeah!
Craig: So, Brian’s gonna ask a question, we are gonna write our answers down simultaneously, just instant kinda thing…
David: Don’t cheat.
Craig: If you don’t know, you don’t know– We’re not gonna cheat. But to avoid obvious dead air, I will walk you through my process and David may do that as well. We’ll see.
Brian: Well, we’ll see how these questions are, if you guys like them or not.
Craig: Exactly. I’m gonna like them.
David: I hope so.
Craig: How many…we’re doing three?
Brian: Three.
Craig: We’re doing three, I like this.
David: I love it.
Craig: So there’s gonna be, other than us both blanking out, we’re going 1-1 stalemate, and then we’ll figure that out. There’s gonna be a winner.
Brian: There has to be a winner.
David: It will be me, but it’s okay. We’re almost there. You might as well accept defeat. Give me my trophy.
Craig: I don’t think so. We are gonna get a trophy, by the way.
David: Yeah!
Brian: All right, so question one. There’s obviously been a heightened focus on SEO when it comes to YouTube because it’s such a big browser now. It’s number two when it comes to browsers.
Craig: I wish that was the question.
Brian: We’ve already done that one.
Craig: I know, but I remembered it.
David: (laughs)
Brian: So, according to a study that was done by Search Metrics, of all keyword searches that are done on Google, within 10%, how many of those keyword searches return at least one video?
Craig: Ah, so we’re talking a percentage?
David: Ooh!
Craig: That return a video…
Brian: Yeah, when you do a keyword search on Google…
Craig: Oh, I like it.
Brian: How many have at least one video show up on that search, within 10%.
Craig: And you’re giving us…?
David: Within 10%.
Craig: All right. I have a number I wrote down…
David: So it’s like…this is Closest to the Pin?
Craig: It is, kind of.
Brian: Yeah.
David: Right?
Craig: Ooh! Oh, I love Closest to the Pin.
Brian: Well, if you’re both within 10%, then it’s the closest.
Craig: Okay. I like this. I don’t like my number I chose, though. But I’m gonna go with it, because we said–
David: I got mine.
Craig: I wrote it, I wrote it.
David: I just wrote it, as soon as I thought it, I wrote it.
Brian: Let’s see it. Craig–
Craig: I wrote down 61%.
Brian: He wrote down 61%.
David: I put 47%.
Brian: You put 47%.
Craig: Wow, there’s an overlap there.
Brian: You were both pretty close; the answer is 55%.
David: (gasps)
Brian: That would put Craig closer by 2%.
David: No!
Craig: That was so close! Ooh, I’m gonna go check mark. Check mark!
Brian: By the way–
Craig: Great question, though.
Brian: Here’s a little–
Craig: Not just ’cause I got it; I love that question. Fifty-five percent, wow.
Brian: This is for no points, but of all those videos, how many of those are from YouTube?
David: Oh!
Craig: Oh, ninety….five percent. Maybe more.
Brian: You’d be off by more than 10%. Eighty-two percent.
Craig: Eighty-two percent!
David: Wow!
Craig: Where do the other videos come from?
Brian: I don’t know, man.
Craig: (laughing)
Brian: Daily Motion?
David: Venmo?
Craig: Oh, right, there are…okay, Vevo and some other places.
Brian: Yeah, yeah.
Craig: 1-0, and a fair question. His guess was actually pretty good, too.
Brian: It was very good, he was only…
Craig: One percent behind me, yeah.
Brian: Two percent behind you, yeah.
David: So close!
Craig: It was very close.
Brian: Very close. Okay, this one’s probably a little bit easy, though.
Craig: All right. Well, I’m already up 1-0.
Brian: So, mobile optimization has obviously become more important over the last few years. So where is more web browsing being done right now, on your desktop or on your mobile and tablets?
Craig: You don’t want a percentage necessarily?
Brian: No no no no. Where is more browsing being done?  More on your desktop or your laptop, or more on your mobile and tablets?
Craig: I wrote what I wrote. and I think I wrote a different thing than him. I wrote “mobile.”
David: Mobile. We don’t have a–
Craig: Oh, I thought you wrote “laptop.”
David: I put “mobile/tablets.”
Craig: Oh. We’re both going mobile on this.
Brian: And you’re both right.
Craig: Is it over 55?
Brian: Well, right now, it’s between 51 to about 58%, it’s just changed last October.
Craig: We see this… Again, going back to…we run a business where we do web stuff for people. We’re always doing the Analytics reports, month after month, and it’s so interesting to see…the companies we’ve been doing stuff for years, the trend. It was 40%, then it was 45. We’ve got some of our clients now that are at 50 and 60%, where it’s just so much more, their business is going mobile.
Brian: Yeah.
Craig: I like it.
Brian: Okay, so Craig has two…
Craig: I do.
Brian: David has one. David, you better get this. We could have a tie.
David: I can’t have goose egg.
Brian: You know what the funny this is?
Craig: Do we have a tie breaker?
Brian: I actually do for this one.
David: I almost think we need to do it anyway.
Brian: I do! I do.
Craig: Genius.
David: Double points.
Craig: Quiz Master.
Brian: In Google updates this year,
Craig: (whispering) Oh no! (laughs)
Brian: What is being targeted more in 2017 for higher Google rankings? Is it, one of these three…
Craig: Oh, I like this.
Brian: Is it longer content, backlinks, or content quality?
Craig: Oh no, we talked about literally all three of those.
David: (laughing) One matters more.
Craig: One matters more than the others.
Brian: They’re saying, in the new Google updates this year, because they’re always updating and saying, “Oh, this is the new thing that’s important–”
Craig: Gimme the three again.
Brian: The three are longer content, backlinks, or content quality?
Craig: I mean, I’m just gonna go with what I want to be true.
Brian: Sure.
Craig: You know? And I think there’s no… There’s no wrong answer, that’s for sure. I feel like all three of those things are important, I’m going with–
David: They’re saying that one’s weighted more than the others.
Craig: I know, I get it. And I wrote “quality–”
David: Okay, good.
Craig: But I’m not gonna be against it if it’s–
David: I wrote “longer.”
Craig: … If it says “backlinks.”
Brian: So David wrote “longer,” you wrote “quality.”
Craig: But if it’s backlinks, I wouldn’t be surprised because we’ve been looking up backlink stuff for months.
Brian: So what’s your answer, then?
Craig: Quality.
Brian: You would be correct; it is quality.
Craig: Wow! Just a beast mode, first time, 3-1. He’s upset. I don’t know how to get his facial expression through the microphone, but Brian saw it.
David: Can we do the…?
Craig: Why did you write quality?! You just spoke about quality.
David: (sighs)
Craig: You jinxed yourself.
David: Yeah, I over-thought it.
Brian: That’s the new targeted thing. Because it used to be backlinks, and then it was how long the content is or how short it is. By the way, speaking about that, the bonus question was–
David: Yes!
Brian: Because it used to be they wanted shorter content. So now they’re saying longer content. So, according to some studies right now that are being done, the average content length of the top ten search engine results, how many words should you have?
Craig: Closest to the Pin again?
Brian: Yeah, sure.
Craig: For the top ten results, you said?
Brian: Yeah, when you’re talking about the top ten Google…to get in that top ten on Google…
Craig: I got my number.
Brian: …How many words should your post have?
Craig: I’ve got my number. What’s your number, David?
David: 1,600.
Craig: I got 1,200.
Brian: David would be right, because it’s closer to 2,000.
David: Yeah.
Craig: Two thousand! I was gonna write 2,200. Too bad that didn’t matter, ’cause you went down in flames!
David: Double points!
Craig: That was not what Quiz Master offered. The good news for our listeners is much is the same with our trivia segment, but those questions…I wanna say, those were fantastic. They were on point, some really good stuff. I feel like, if we went back and forth on that, at least one of those would have come up, like the mobile percentage one, maybe.
David: Oh, yeah.
Craig: So guys, thanks for listening today. To keep up with all of our future episodes, make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or whatever it is you use to listen to podcasts to help you stay up-to-date. If you want to reach out to us, you got any questions, you wanna praise me for how much I destroyed David in our trivia segment, hit us up at Podcast@IWantClarity.com.
We’ve included show notes on the website, IWantClarity.com. And, of course, our Quiz Master and producer extraordinaire from PodcastingDoneRight.com. Thank you very much.
In our next episode, you’re gonna want to check this out, we are gonna be talking about hiring your first employee. Something very exciting to talk about. We’ll see you next time.

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