The Million Dollar Podcast | Search Engine Optimization with the Father of Search Engine Optimization, Bruce Clay (Part 1 of 2)

Audio Transcription

Welcome back to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration entrepreneur of the year. I’m the father of five kids and I feel like it’s my mission to help you create both time and financial freedom by teaching you the practical skills that will help you to actually pay the bills and to teach you the proven systems that will allow you to enjoy time freedom and so on. The show when possible, I try to interview people that really are the world’s best at what they do. We’ve had the world’s best public relations expert of all time. This is an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, Pizza Hut for Pizza, for Charlton Heston, for Bush’s and the Clinton, the bushes and the Clintons. The prints we mentioned prints mean there’s so many.

I mean, he’s. He’s huge. One today’s show, we have the number one expert in the history of the world ever. Ah, in the field of search engine optimization. They might call him the Godfather. This guy writes the search engine for dummies each year for a. He writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. Yeah. Um, this is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and surrogate built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you, as you are as a company, get to the top, when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results. As an example, if you train dogs and you came up top and Google when you type in Tulsa dog training, or if you were a pizzeria and Florida and your company whose name was papa gallows and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top.

If you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top, it would change your life. If you’re a teaching basketball lessons and you came up top and search engine results, it changed your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top, like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today and you are top in search results, it would change your life. That’s worth a little bit of mine. Let’s work with the brands I work with like oxy fresh. I mean Oxi fresh. Let me tell you, these guys are so successful for a lot of reasons. They have great systems, processes, wonderful people and great vision. They have leadership, a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology, but it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them.

In. Marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers and sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem. But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world, but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers, it’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free. For anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in and understand what is being said in our thrive time show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system. But Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the million dollar show. It’s going to change somebody’s life and I’m excited to introduce you to my friend Mr Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization clay, the author of search engine for dummies, the world’s number one search engine expert in the house. Bruce, how are you? I am doing great. Thank you. Bruce. Your book search engine for Dummies took me and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlight or to prove it and then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it. The last version I read was 760 something pages long. How long did it take you to write search engine for dummies?

So why were you approached us? And it took awhile to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. Uh, the dummy series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that, that the difference between a dummies book and a non normal book is that dummies will not allow you to define a use a term that’s not defined in the book. So we wrote it, we sent it to the editors and they totally tore it apart because we’re used to the jargon of the industry. Right. And they weren’t. So mechanically, uh, the first version of the book took over a year. Wow.

I think, I think for a lot of listeners in a year, working on a book can seem like a long time. And I’m, I started here, book took me a couple of years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish?

Well, we were lucky we do a course on Seo. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works. So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do is actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard. It was the actual writing. And when I say a year, I’m not talking about part time for 52 weeks. I’m talking about one year of tracked time for us to actually full time work on that book. You know, wildly approached you to write the book I know about you because uh, I’m big into the big and the franchise world work a lot of franchisees on a franchise stores. I work with a lot of business owners and your name comes up in conversations a lot. And for the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google I and in the search engines and find the book search engine for dummies and find your website. Can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today?

Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996 a for those of you who remember that far back. I think that’s when Al Gore invented the Internet. Thank you elle. But uh, yeah, January [inaudible] 96 on my dining room table. I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had a, you know, large corporate positions, but I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. Um, my bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I thought, Hey, this marketing thing and programming and algorithms is right up my alley. So I started doing it. Then it took off and it just grew. I hired a couple people, a kept growing, hired a couple more. Uh, I’m now located in southern California and a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world. So it has certainly grown over 22 years. Uh, you’re right. I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. Uh, and in fact, if you do a google search for who is the father of Seo, I show up.

Oh, hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from a somebody, whereas we’re talking about fathers and father related conversations. Uh, perhaps the listeners out there who aren’t as familiar with star wars as I am, but there was a scene in that movie where Darth vader was claiming to be Luke’s father and, uh, you just claimed to be the potential, the father of the search engine industry. So Bruesewitz. Okay. I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you. Bruce, are you ready for this person?

I’m ready. Here we go.

That’s when the movie Tommy boy there. But Bruce, hopefully that tribute. Did you justice my friends? So you’re credited as being the father of search engines. I know this because I feel like I’m a, like search engine is like nerd meets practical, you know, because you’re helping grow companies. Can you please explain to me when you say it took off, did you, were you cold calling businesses? We, you email and businesses. Were you. How did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. I mean you have thousands and now you have pray a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? Were you starting out of an apartment? I mean, how, how did you start Your Business?

Well, as I said, I started it at home, but the way I got my business is I actually optimize my own site.

Oh, there we go.

So I am actually in the entire history of the company. Not had to go out and do a cold call. Amen. It’s a I’m, I think my reputation is sorta preceding me, but I’m known as the company you go to when nothing else works. People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre and they finally decide they just have to do it. Right. And I’m the guy so I’ve not had to call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form, we touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here. So if you were to go to the form and fill it out, I’d be the guy that said, sorry we can’t help you or that looks like an interesting opportunity. Let’s take no name.

What’s your website? For the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you?

Well, my site is of course bruce clay.com. Um, I have several sites, but bruce clay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is, uh, in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription fee. The site is just there for people to learn about Seo. And I guess the benefit to me is by the time somebody has gone to the site and learned about Seo, they recognize they just don’t want to do it themselves.

Okay. Okay. So here we go. Now you’re hitting on a hot button and I want to see if you can unpack this for us and I know you can, but, um, you know, my company, uh, my companies have actually hired you to do work for us, your team because you have a certain level of mastery. Also, I like to freshen up our, our, our approach. You know, we help companies with marketing and I always want to stay. Uh, I believe in coaching. I believe in hiring mentors who really know the path and you are, I mean, seriously, you are in a good way. You’re Kinda like the darth vader of search engine optimization. I mean, you are the ob one, you’re the Yoda, you know, search engine optimization. You are the father of the industry. And so, you know, we, we’ve hired you but he wasn’t free and it wasn’t cheap, but it was effective. Why can the listeners out there not hire a search? Why is it not possible to hire a search engine optimization company to help your business for $199 a month? Because every listener gets a call from somebody from some foreign country calling, emailing, saying that they can do your search engine for as little as $99 a month. Why is it just not possible?

Well, the fact is that the industry is changing. Google changes the algorithm approximately five times a day. So it takes time to stay current on technology. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to pay to be current. Well, if you’re not current, I can sell you whatever I want. You can give me a check. Then when I don’t deliver it, you go away and I ended up with a free check. So I think that a great many people take shortcuts. They don’t care if you get in trouble, they don’t care if you get penalized. The flip side of that is, would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA when you get one of them for $200 or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer. Same for a brain searches

All right. Thrive nation. Welcome back to the conversation. It is the thrive time show on your radio. And on today’s show we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, the best selling author of the book search engine for dummies, a guy who’s worked with some of the largest brands in the country. And uh, his company, uh, you can find more about them at Bruce Clay Dot com. I’ve paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars and I don’t regret it. He is the world’s best, uh, for big companies. But I will tell you there are projects that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization. And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients, six thousand seven thousand, $8,000 a month clients for him. I mean, he has big account chuck. Why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month? Why does it never work?

Because it takes more time than that. Like it’s a simple math, like you can only get a few hours of work for 200 bucks from somebody that knows what they’re doing and so ultimately they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up analyzing you for. And so if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you. Well, what are you doing? He got to be where people are and that’s on the Internet.

So thrive nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization breaks down how search engine optimization really works.

Would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. Uh, if you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200 or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer. Same for a brain surgeon. You know, if you wanted a brain surgeon to do surgery on your kid, $200 for the surgery would really make you suspect. So fundamentally the problem is that the infrastructure is changing so much that unless you are just taking somebody’s money, you can’t even possibly justify that kind of a rate. It usually takes a few thousand dollars, I’d say, and sometimes many, many thousands of dollars. There’s large companies out there that have 30 to 40 in house. Seo is just working on their own property. Those are the big guys and you know, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than $199 a month if you want it cheap. Well, the cheaper you wanted, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you, if you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money.

What I want to do is if possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you and I want to, uh, kind of get into some of the details if that’s all right with you and kind of go through them in a, in a linear fashion, and if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and, and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall, I have seen so many people with a beautiful website, bruce, and you’ve seen it to where it looks great. The site itself, visually you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one could find it. And then you go to wikipedia. That doesn’t look that beautiful, but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by google and what kind of website is absolutely not find-able by search engines and by Google

I can certainly address that, uh, understanding that Google is changing all the time. The technology is changing as well. The process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider. It’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you are about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about Seo. Uh, they don’t understand how to connect things. They don’t understand how to word things. A, they’re not authors and writers. They’re people who can build pretty things. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the t’s to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about. It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help us search engine. The search engine basically is blind, deaf and dumb.

It reads your site. Uh, there’s three ways to influence ranking, but one of them is it will read your site and it will attempt to determine what your about by looking at your content and by looking at how page a is connected to page b and the infrastructure and a nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about. Now, a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures and the search engine cannot understand what that is. Now there’s two other things that fit and I’ll just go into briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well, if your content is pretty, you might be able to get some links and a great many offshore seo companies, that’s what they focus on, but that is not going to make you an expert.

It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called rank brain, which is the Google Algorithm and it’s based on click throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked. If you don’t get click, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality, and so it becomes almost a self fulfilling prophecy that the best rank sites perform the best, so the only way a website can really get to the top is to build something that a search engine can perceive to be authoritative information, quality information, and then the search engine can put you at the top and then you will get links and then you will have rankbrain like you, and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time, so all those things have to play together. You can’t just do one in and expect it to be there, but pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Google loves that because the prettier your site, the more likely you are to have to buy paper click in order to get your traffic

right. Now, here’s the thing about it, I hear a lot of people say, this is what people say. A lot of times they’ll say, gosh, you know, but Nike, Nike doesn’t have a lot of content. Bruce, they have a lot of pictures. Adidas and I would say, well, it’s because Nike and Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising, driving and pit. By the way people are typing in Nike Dot com every day, but if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever, you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name is probably not going to be there. I mean, uh, bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike.

Oh yeah. And it happens a lot more often than you would think. People have this perception that if you build it, they will come and therefore if you build it prettier, more will come when in fact if you build it prettier, they won’t come into. You buy the ads on Google.

So if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines and we re where we turned. It’s our exclusive interview with Bruce Way. Stay tuned.

All right. Thrive nation. Welcome back to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, who many consider who everyone considers to be the father of search engine optimization each year he releases in addition of search engine for dummies and his firm, which you can find out more about at Bruce Clay Dot com is the world’s authority on big budget search engine optimization. Now, I’ve hired his firm in the past and if you have a big company I would. I would advise you to check them out as well, but I’m telling you, you are definitely going to be spending a heel. He talks about during the interview, but $200 minimum per article minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking $6,000 a month. Seven. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to them, right, and they gotta re optimizing. Rewrite in everything, this is this big deal, it’s bruce is a search engine optimization on the next level and so I tried to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts into actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and the desire and so now then any further ado back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. According to Forbes, right now, 88 percent of consumers going to Forbes and we’ll put a link on the show notes. 80 eight percent of consumers read reviews online before buying something right, but they’re not going to read a review unless they find you online and I don’t know the stats that there bruce, you probably know the stats more than I did. I’m not certainly trying to paint you into a corner about knowing the stats, but I don’t even know the percentage. I know the last studies that I looked at from Forbes, I do write for Forbes. I’m a contributing writer for Forbes. I’ve looked at some of the stats will over nine out of 10 people start any product or service they start their search for any product or service online. Um, do you have any data that, that would argue that that nine in 10 consumers don’t start looking for things online or have you hired, you think are. I mean, I think I’ve read it shows about nine out of 10 people start looking for the products and services are going to buy with an online search.

No, you’re right. Uh, the number has consistently been the lowest number I remember is 84 percent, but I think it’s consistently over that. Uh, I also understand a statistic which is 94 percent of all people click on only the first page of Google, which means you have to be in the top 10. So yeah, you gotta you gotta be there if you expect to satisfy anybody’s queries, I think that probably your entire audience finds things or at least finds reviews in certainly how tos and things like that. Online digital is the way of the world now and yeah, you got to be there

now. We talked about. You kind of get that. That’s high level. We’ve got to have a website that google can crawl, that the spiders can index. I don’t want to get a little more into the details of this. Uh, there’s this stuff called Metta content, which you write so eloquently about in your book search engine for dummies that only took you a couple of years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you that book, Bruce, I’m not sure if you make any money every time we buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome. Search engine for dummies with Bruce Clay. Talk to me about Meta data, Meta content, things like the title tag and the description and the keywords. I think I’d say the majority of our listeners have no idea what a metta title is. A Meta description is what keywords are. They just have no concept of these states. Could you kind of explain it in a way that a simple mind like me might grasp most of our listeners. Bruce are very intelligent people, but if you’re just talking to me, break it down, make it to make it simple for my cranium so you want to be at your level, right? Because I am a shallow hal,

so metadata actually metadata is data about data, so in a portion of your webpage, commonly referred to is the head section, the top of the source code. You have a section which has data. These content fields that describe what your page is supposed to be about, and in that area there’s typically what would be a number of key tags. One is the title tag most commonly recognized because when you do a google search, the link that you get to click on that is actually the title tag of the page or clicking. The second part is a description tag, so it’s called a Meta description and it is the part in the Google search results that commonly show up under the title and that’s where you would put a call to action a, that’s where you would describe why people should click to your site. So those have to be balanced out against the content of your site or there’s a mismatch and Google won’t like you. Uh, there’s other tags. There’s a keyword tag which is logically used as sort of a, just the list of words that should be on the page.

Can I ask you a question about that? For the listeners out there that might have a question about key words there? Let’s see. I cut hair. I’m a haircut. I’m a hairstylist and I’m in Boise. Talked to me about key words. So if I’m, if I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise. I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all and we have hundreds of thousands of people to download this podcast. I want make sure nobody gets left behind. If I cut hair for women in Boise, what kind of keywords would you be talking about?

I would think haircutting, certainly boise. These are things that somebody might string together in a query, like a search, like a search. Okay, so I’m in an interesting statistic. Is 70 percent of all searches have not been searched on in the last six months?

Yes. Repeat it again please. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody. Please repeat.

Seventy percent of all searches have not been searched for in the last six months. What does that mean? So if I in Boise and it, I need to find a dentist because at 2:00 AM I broke my tooth. You’re not going to just search for dentist. You’re going to search for emergency dental repair. Boise, right now I’m in pain and you know that is a string of key words that most often are not on any websites. So when you come up with keywords and content and things for your web page, you need to think about how somebody might actually try to find you and use those words on your webpage.

You’re making me cry. This is so good. This is so good. Oh, you’re preaching the good news. Yes.

I’ll tell you right now. Most people, I’ve had cases where people come to me and they don’t understand why they don’t have a better ranking for a particular keyword. And when I do the analysis, they’re not even using the keyword in their content. Google isn’t going to believe you’re about anything if you don’t use it. So you know, it’s a self defeating action if you don’t use your keywords properly on your webpage.

Now, in terms of just the amount of content, just content, I think a lot of people don’t grasp this idea. This is a funny thing. I did Bruce. This is back in 2004. [inaudible] five was chosen three, uh, I owned a company called Dj Connection Dot Com. And for the listeners out there, if you go to DJ connection.com, you can see it’s still a company that’s thriving today. I sold it and moved on to open different ventures, but DJ connection.com. Uh, one of the things with that company was that, um, I really, I was starting to figure out how search engines work and this was early stuff. I mean, Yahoo was huge at that point. Yahoo was a dominant player. Tribe nation. Stay tuned. We come back. We’re going to learn why content matters for your website.

We’re now entering the Dojo of Mojo, the thrive time show,

thrive nation. You are in for a powerful training today. We have bruce the truth, clay on the show. Bruce Clay. This guy is the father of search engine optimization, the best selling author of search engine for dummies. His search engine optimization firm is the number one search engine from on the planet. His firm represents massive companies that have over a million pages of content that are making billions of dollars and he’s here to teach you the principles and the fundamentals of search engine optimization so that you can implement these systems and strategies in your own life and business. Without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay.

And I didn’t realize just how much content matters. So I had decided to write the most amount of high quality content in the world about the phrase chocolate fountains, Bruce. So I wrote an insane amount of content because that owned a company called chocolate elegance and we owned chocolate fountains. It’s like the fondue, weddings, that kind of thing. You dipped fruit in it and uh, Lo and behold, bruce, I got chocolate elegance to the top of search engine results as a result of writing something like 80 pages about the origins of chocolate, chocolate fountains, how chocolate fountains work. And it was all really well done. It was, it was almost disturbing. Can you talk to me about why the volume of quality content really does matter?

Sure. And this should be pretty clear if you understand what you would want when you do a search, there’s a concept called siloing. We invented it 18 years ago. And what siloing does is it says that you should have organized the content on your website in a clear hierarchy. It’s actually one of the Google Webmaster guidelines. So in a clear hierarchy, what Google was looking for is a bunch of interconnected pages that are on the same theme. So what you did is you created a large group of pages that were clearly different. They had different purposes, but they’re all about the same topic, the same theme, and so what Google does is it looks at your website and sees that you have these connected pages and therefore they assume that you are more of an expert than somebody that doesn’t. So if your site is poorly structured, you’re not going to rank as well as somebody that has a properly structured website.

The architecture and the way your pages are tied together make a lot of difference. So we’ll go and use that as an example. If I wanted to find a site about a chocolate fountains, if there was a site that had one page about them or another site that has 20 pages about them, that user would prefer the 20 pages. It’s more content, more information, better able to satisfy them. And we all have to believe that Google knows that. So Google is looking at how much content that is quality, it has to be quality, how much quality content is interconnected to build a theme that matches what people are searching for. And if you build that correctly in a nice hierarchy connected correctly, then you can perform very well in search. And that’s what you had done.

You know Bruce, I actually was the head of a group called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was the group that through the wedding shows and Tulsa you. We started the Tulsa wedding show where brides would go and gather at these banquet halls. You get maybe a thousand brides and in one banquet hall at one time with Renaissance Hotel and they’re all trying to find their wedding vendors. And I remember a vendor in particular pulled me aside one time and she says to me, she had a wedding, a bridal store, and she says, how did you find the time to write hundreds of pages of content on Dj Connection Dot Com? And I said, well, I didn’t find the time to write 100 pages. I actually were hundreds. I actually wrote thousands and I did it myself. I usually bruce did it between the hours of 5:00 AM or 4:00 AM, 4:00 AM to 9:00 AM, about five hours a day.

I’d write content everyday and Bruce, I do it in the bathtub, which I know is a disturbing visual, but I’d sit there in the bathtub and I’m just writing content is gummy about how to throw a. okay. How to catch the gardener. When the first dance was, when the father of the bride dance was, what’s the etiquette behind the toast? Why we have a toast, why we do the cutting of the cake, the history of the cutting of the cake. Why we have Djs who the first wedding djs were. I mean on and on and on. I mean all that. The dollar, the dollar dance, waterfall, dance, the soul train line, the Cha Cha slide the cupid shuffle. How to do it? The electric slide. I mean, I was like a wikipedia of Djs, which is why I became the top ranked a company in search engines. Can you explain to me, uh, what percentage of your clients say to you, hey bruce, can you just write the content for me and what percentage of them actually are willing to sit down and write the content themselves? I believe I have a psychological problem called enjoy grinding, but I don’t know. I have very few clients I’ve ever worked with who wanted to write the content. What percentage of your clients prefer to have your team write the content versus the ones that want to write it themselves?

Well, we have large projects where they don’t have the team to do it under normal circumstances. I would look at you in that particular case and think of you as the subject matter expert so we would partner with you and we could write the draft. You can finish it, we can editorialize it and make it ready for Seo. And then as a partnership we publish it. That’s the way most of our writing projects are actually structured because when you’re doing that for a technical business at all, then you’re not going to be subject matter expert.

If you went to somebody and this my opinion, but if you went to somebody and said, hi, I want 200 pages on this topic, you’re going to get 200 pages of absolute garbage.

Oh yeah. Total garbage, complete garbage,

and that really annoys me. Um, you have to spend the time to do the page right, to do the research. The average 1000 word page is supposed to take about three hours and it isn’t just writing, it’s edit, editing, and it’s, uh, making sure that you have sources and which image do you put on the page? And it’s far more complex. And what we find with our clients, be it good or especially the small guys, what we find is that they absolutely commit to doing it. And then they unconditionally. Don’t

wait. Repeat that again. That, that right there. I’m gonna. Put that on a tee shirt. I’m going to put them in a hat. I want to embroider that on my head and get a tattoo on my leg. Can you please repeat that? That was powerful.

The, the companies absolutely commit to writing the content because they’re the experts. They want to do that, but then they don’t write it and it, it is unfortunate, but that is the case and we’ve had many projects where we become the company’s writing team and, but if it is technical at all, we still need them to read it.

So what do you charge to write an article? I mean, if you’re going to write a thousand words for somebody, I mean, you’re going to charge them $6, $12, seven cents. I mean, because a lot of companies in India right now, and you’re, you’re aware of this Mr Bruce. I mean he’s in Indian companies based in China right now. Uh, companies in the Middle East. It’ll say I will write you an article right now for $9. I mean, what, what would you charge somebody to write a thousand word page of content?

Well, the, we’re back to the cheaper. You want it, the cheaper you get it. I think that one of the problems that you run into internationally is they do not have a shared experience with you as the author, and so they make assumptions about your target persona person. They assume things about what it is that you do for a living and what your product should do and why people should use it, and it hardly ever matches reality in a different country. So we believe that every country has to write their own product, a content. So in our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s gonna take three hours. It’s a few hundred dollars. So 200, so $200,

$200 for a quality,

you know, maybe thousand word article. You think $200 does that, is that, is that going to low average and you think maybe, I mean his low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now I’m going to go out on a tangent here and give you some additional data it and I know you hate it when I do that.

No, it’s good. This is good. I just got blown away.

When you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages. Then the sites below them,

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with that thing called the Internet? Enter in the net. That’s when you catch fish internet. Check out, tell you this man, birth people out. They’re starting to use this thing called Google the facebooks and I’ve heard that people are going on there to buy products and search for goods and services on that Google. Now we both from Oklahoma high end. Uh, we, we, I know there’s three things I know about search engines jumbo. One is the word searches, the first word, the Zagat word is optimization. And the third is I ain’t, I ain’t know nothing about it. Now, do you want to va? I know that about engines. Chubby. You think I should grow out my perm or just kind of let it be, let it grow. Can I put the lightening bolts in the side of my mullet Perm mullet with Latin and Milton’s clay? That’s what you want. You know, chuck, Chuck, you know, a job. I don’t know if you’ve thought about this very much but, but one thing that, that

we like to say in Oklahoma, a chap jeopardy. Do you know what we say? What is that? You know what they say? See Abroad to get that booty down a smack on the patient. If that’s about. If you’re saying to yourself, yeah, well, hey, when, when it comes to search engine, I’m serious. If you’re sitting there at an office party or an office event, gathering a networking event, you’re talking to a buddy of yours who owns a business. He says, well, you know, search engine optimization is key to our success and you find yourself saying, well, you know, they say see abroad to get at boody down if that’s all you know about search engine. If somebody put a gun to your head and said, teach me how to get to the top of Google, and you immediately said, then you need to listen in because Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization is going to be dropping knowledge bombs on you. Like your name is Saddam. Oh, thrive nation. Without Him, without any further ado, back to my conversation with the father of search engine optimization and the bestselling author of search engine for dummies. Mr Bruce Ahead.

In our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So at two, so dollars to very $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article. You think $200 does that, is that, is that going to low average and you think maybe that is a low average? If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now, when you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them. Pages you to help me out with. How are we on this? This is my sixth year quest. John Kelly knows this, my right hand man. Uh, we have been working to be top of the world for the phrase business conferences for about six years and we’re at the top of page two now and we have a podcast that’s ranked in the top 10 on itunes in the business section. Uh, we have thousands of subscribers and, and, and you know, hundreds of thousands of downloads, but we’re competing against Tony Robbins. I mean, Tony Tony out there just not aware of Tony Robbins, welcome to the planet earth. But Tony Robbins, I mean this guy, bruce, he has tons of backlinks from news and media agencies. The guy has a team of bloggers writing content every day and he’s a beautiful man too, I’m sure, but it’s taken a long time to be. And I know it’s just so every week we add content at a rate that exceeds his rate of adding content and I’ve kind of timed it out and I believe in probably January of this year we’re going to beat him finally. But I mean, is it, does that, is that normal where you go into an industry and you go, wow, this industry, I mean, because Tony Robbins, when we decided to do it, I knew it would take years and years and years. Do you often sit down with a client and explain to them like, hey, to be tapping google for your term, my friend, that’s going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time

in many times that’s the case. And it depends upon what is missing. Uh, and I want to make sure everybody understands how it works. It isn’t also whoever dies with the most backlinks wins. It’s who has the best back backlinks and are the backlinks appropriate for that one keyword. And am I spamming the backlinks? Am I buying them? Am I getting backlinks from garbage sites? Those are the kinds of things that matter the most. Many brands, by the time you become a brand, you’re going to get back links to you by your brand name, not particularly what your brand does that contributes a lot of power to your homepage. And then your homepage distributes add power to your subpages. So when you think about it, Tony Robbins, you’re competing and a wikipedia, you’re competing against a brand that overtime has acquired a lot of link value.

That doesn’t mean that you need to publish more content than them. It just means your content has to be better than them and it has to be more of a solution to that user than them. We have a blog and at one point I felt that we have to publish a lot of blog posts. And when I did the analysis, I decided it isn’t how many you publish. It’s how good it is. And so we focus more on, is this blog posts solving somebody’s problem? And then how do I tell that person I have the blog post that is far more important than just publishing things. Uh, you have to kind of advertise that you’ve published it and you have to advertise to the people that matter, but it isn’t an issue so much of quantity. It is far more an interest in quality. That’s gonna cause the search engines to perform well with you on, on your content. Now, having said that, I do believe that if you have too little content, you’re not going to succeed. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much content. We do projects large and small, hundreds of thousands of dollars, uh, at the high end and you know, 500 a month at the low end. So it really will vary. But we do them all over the board.

Now, bruce, this is a concept that I would like to see if you can share with listeners and your book search engine optimization for Dummies. You discuss the amount of content that needs to be on a page order for Google to count it or google to really care about it or to index it or to think it’s not a waste of time. You know, you can’t have two words on every page. You know, um, and you talked about certain industries and you’ve alluded to it earlier, certain industries, you might have to have 1500 words of content to be relevant in certain industries. You might have to have 350 words of content on a page. For it to be relevant, why do you have to have a minimum amount of words on a page for Google to care enough to index? I know that I know that. I know the Google Algorithm doesn’t care, but in order to Google to index, why do you have to have a certain minimum number of words per page?

Well, the you can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well performing pages that have fewer than 100 words. They have like 80 words.

The issue with words is you need a sufficient quantity compared to your competition to prove to search engine that you are a subject matter expert. In some industries where all your competitors have 400 words, $400 might be a really good number. But if I am competing for an information source against Wikipedia, Google government dot Gov’s, government pages, a university pages that are writing about it, and they all have 2000 words, my 400 word page isn’t going to stand a chance. You have to be equal and then better. And just being just showing up to the party is not sufficient.

Bruce, whenever I have spoken at at big conferences, I’ve spoken for Maytag and Hewlett Packard, o’reilly’s auto parts and ups, a lot of big companies and I’ll get an attendee that’ll come up to me. I’m sure you’ve never run into this bruce, but someone will come up to you and say. They’ll say, hey, here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Honestly, I’m willing to pay you guys upfront quite a bit and I just want to know how do I get to the top of Google like two weeks. I know you guys all preach that it’s a process like growing a tree and that you can’t get to the top of Google immediately because you’ve all kind of agreed to the secret society of preaching a process. But unlike planting a garden and unlike raising a child, and unlike growing a successful business, I want it to be a microwave thing and I’m willing to pay your bruce right now, 40 grand upfront, make me top in Google in two weeks. Let’s go. Boom. Why Bruce? Is it not possible? Can you explain to somebody that I run into people you’ve never run into, but people I’ve run into at my conferences that want to be top in Google and in two weeks, why can you not be top in Google? And two weeks, many reasons. One, we don’t know what’s wrong with your site. We have to open the hood and look under it and see where things are broken. Uh, see if everything was working correctly. Then theoretically everybody would be number one.

MMM. But in fact, most sites are their own worst enemy. And sometimes I could take a site and changed life in a few weeks. I don’t think two is a realistic number. But let’s say for four, I can change your life in four weeks provided the reason you don’t rank is you did something wrong. It’s when you did everything right that it takes longer and uh, I view reviewing websites and fixing websites to be a little bit like a hospital. The very first thing you do is you kurt the website into the emergency room and stop the bleeding. You make them so they’re not their worst enemy anymore. Then you take them into surgery and that’s when you’re going to do the heavy lifting, deep thinking, Seo, uh, that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all and you know, that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. And so if, if you have no competitors, none, sure I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. And if you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The Best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of three point $5, billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing seo.

Okay. Okay. So this leads me into a bigger, uh, a question. Um, I, I tell people all the time this and Bruce, you run. Can I ask you, I mean how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people could you all. You said You occupy? Nine floors. Am My correct? Nine floors of a building. You know, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites. I’m sorry. So 12 says, how many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have a hundreds of people? How many people are going to with. No, I,

I want to make sure I say this correctly. We are extremely, I’m focused on basically taking no prisoners. Got It. Where did the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three? That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. Um, one of the sayings I use, it’s, it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you did.

Chip, I want to say both time and money, and one way to do it is by having your office and printer supplies shipped directly to you, my man. That’s right. And you can do that with our awesome show sponsor, onyx imaging.com. In fact, if you get your office supplies, your printer supplies and printer service through these guys, they’re going to give you a free printer, copier free of charge. So get ahold of [email protected]. That’s onyx imaging.com. Or call them at nine. One eight, six, two, seven, six, six, one, one, nine, one eight, six, two, seven, six, six, one, one. Stay too. You are now entering the Dojo of Mojo and the thrive time show. All right, thrive nation. Welcome back. Today we are interviewing the founder, the father of these search engine optimization industry and the bestselling author of search engine for dummies, Bruce Clay. You want to get to the top of the Internet search results. You have something you can sell, a product you can make or a service you can deliver. Do you feel like you can really deliver to millions of people, will, maybe not, not not maybe, but for sure if you want to reach your ideal and likely buyers, you have to get to the top of search engine results and who better to teach you and I had to do it. Then the father of search engine optimization as an industry.

The guy who literally has written the book on search or search engine optimization, the yearly addition of search engine for dummies, my friends, I introduce you to my friend Bruce Clay and that’s when you’re going to do the heavy lifting, deep thinking, Seo, uh, that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all and you know, that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. And so if, if you have no competitors, none, sure I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. And if you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The Best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of three point 5 billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing seo.

Okay? Okay. So this leads me into a bigger, uh, a question. Um, I, I tell people all the time, this and bruce, you run a. can I ask you, I mean how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people. Because you said You occupy nine floors in my correct. Nine floors of a building. You know, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites. I’m sorry. So twelve cents. How many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have a hundreds of people? How many people are.

No, no. I want to make sure I say this correctly. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. Got It. Where did the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three? That’s what we do and as a result we don’t every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. Um, one of the sayings I use, it’s, it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do and we run into that all the time. Their eyes are bigger than their stomach. They’re, they have the ability to write a check but they’re not willing to do the work to get there. And that is a problem that we run into often.

But overall do any work. It’s a tough thing. I, this is something that I, I wanna I want to get your take on because you have, you have a big, a big team. I mean people that work with you guys and it’s not about having the most employees necessarily. I’m just saying, well you guys have a team of people that really know what they’re doing. I mean you probably have front end coders and back end coders, content writers, search engine experts. I mean, you have a whole team there and I think we have,

well they’ve been with us here at the company for over 15 years and people know what they’re doing

and people want though search engine to be an overnight thing. So if someone said to me, Clay Clark, as a business coach, what’s the key to building a great team? I would say every week, never stop interviewing. Step one, step two, never stopped advertising that you’re hiring. Let’s go back to step one. Never stopped interviewing. Step to never stop advertising is that number one, you know, interviewing advertising and you never stopped and you prune the tree over time. That is how I explained to people how search engine works. You’re never done. It’s like pulling weeds from a garden. Can you, can you explain, uh, in your own words why you can never be done optimizing your website?

Oh, absolutely. A SCO has a tendency to be a loop and as you know, loops don’t have an end. The search engine changing the algorithm five times a day causes you to have to do different things. A good example is five years ago, nobody was talking about mobile search being as important as it is in certainly nobody was talking about voice search and nobody was talking about how different tags are being invented every year by the search engines to help them and the word Schema wasn’t even heard five years ago. So because the technology is moving ahead quickly focused on helping the search engines understand what you’re about. So the proper answer can be given that change alone isn’t going to end. I have another sign I used in my class, which is a seo is done when Google’s stops changing things and all your competition is dead. Mm.

So are they. Let me make sure the listeners get that. Search engine optimization. Google, Larry and Sergei started a google. Uh, they’re out of their other stanford dorm rooms there and they started google. They using campus computers. They grew it. They moved into the founder of the lady who’s now the CEO of youtube garage to grow the company. They kept growing and they brought on Eric Schmidt to be the CEO and to take the company to the next level. They regret they, they pushed back about monetizing the company for a long time, really resisting advertisements, that kind of thing. They wanted to create the most pure and the best search results possible. So you’d always find the most relevant search results when using google, but Google’s the only company out there that you can kind of kill by simply switching to another search engine. I mean, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for on Google, right, and you go to yahoo or bing, all of a sudden Google’s not relevant anymore. So Google’s always trying to increase the quality of the search results it produces, which is why it’s always trying to stop scammers and spammers. So I’d like for you to talk about scammers and spammers. Remember Rebecca, the day Bruce People could just buy backlinks from a foreign country and they can be top in google. And then how that doesn’t work anymore. Do you remember that, bruce?

Oh, of course. I still run into it. A lot of sites have poisoned themselves with those.

So let’s start with that one. If you purchased a bunch of backlinks that are absolutely, uh, not real, not legit, there from pop up websites in third world countries, and by the way, Google knows, um, how do you remove or disavow or say, Hey, I don’t want those backlinks. How do you remove those backlinks and tell Google, hey, or maybe you’re A. I rented it. I ran into a client. This is probably what, three years ago, their competitor bought back links and pointed them at them as a way to hurt their rank. How do you disavow or get rid of bad backlinks?

Well, the concept of linked to you, is it some other site doing it to you? I mean, you don’t own that other site. They just choose the link to you and what you’re referring to as bad links that are competitor pointed at you is referred to as negative seo. It is clearly their attempt to poison your backlink profile and the eyes of the search engine. So the search engine thinks of you as a spammer. What we want to be able to do is to monitor our own back links to determine what is acceptable and then to get rid of the bad links. However, we don’t own those other sites and that’s where a special process called disavow was created. Uh, it turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engine.

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thrive nation. Welcome back to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we had the father of search engine optimization, Bruce Clay with us on the program, and I want to make sure we kind of reset so we know what we’re talking about. Back links. Whenever a site links to your website, if it’s a good website, if it’s not a scam side or an adult website or some site with a virus on it actually helps your website. If a site that’s related to you related to your industry links to you, then you’ll raise up higher in the search engines. So an example would be if like Forbes I write for Forbes and Forbes links to me, that helps my search engine rank. Now, if you are a nefarious person and you want to do a reverse search engine optimization to hurt your competitors, this is what you’ll do is you’ll go out there and you’ll go to a website where you can buy backlinks so you can buy backlinks.

There are sites out there today that will sell you backlinks and you might say, well, how do I find them? If you just type in buy back links, you’re going to find a lot of websites right now that they will, um, you know, you can, you can pay like twenty cents a back link or a dollar a back link and then they’ll link back to you. Well, what happened was years ago with my company Dj Connection, one of our competitors noticed that we were beating them in Google search results, so they paid a nefarious search engine company to put thousands of back links back to my website, thus killing my search engine rank. And Bruce Clay realized that a lot of business owners, we’re doing that to each other. They were actually taking each other’s websites by putting bad links to your website, to your competition’s website. And so he invented a process called disavow, which is where he educated the search engine optimization companies. Google being that kind of thing about how this practice was hurting small business owners because shady business owners, we’re putting bad links from bad websites to good websites. And so that is, uh, what we’re talking about. So now that any further due back to our interview with these search engine wizard, the father of search engine optimization, Mr Bruce Clay,

and then to get rid of the bad links, however, we don’t own those other sites. And that’s where

a special process called disavow. It was created. Uh, it turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engines to matt cuts and a being, and so what it was supposed to be is I have somebody linking to me that I don’t want. I don’t control their site, I don’t want it to count against me. So there’s a process in place supported by the search engines where I can actually get rid of the bad links pointing to me. I disavow them. What you’re going to run into is you’re always going to say negative seo guys out there that are trying to poison your backlink profile or you have people who are naive and don’t know anything about your product, but they think that you’re a cool site and they steal your site. Or do they somehow scrape google or something that actually hurts your overall ranking. At one point I had about 900,000 links to my website, which is a ridiculous number of links in my opinion, and it turned out that a vast majority of them were spammers or they came from Russia and it was just somebody that wanted to poison me and lower my ranking by getting bad links pointing to me.

Did you have a problem with Putin? I mean, did you impute and get into an argument? Is that what happened? Did He, did he dispute? And He. Did he claim that he was the father of search engines? Is that how that happened?

No, that hasn’t happened yet, but you know, you never know.

Alright. So you had all these people linking to you from Russia that you had no connection with. And so you thought to yourself, I’ve got a, I’ve got to find a way to notify the search engines. And you, uh, arguably created this strategy called disavowing links. Is that, is that correct? That is correct. Now I want to ask you this, this next question here. As far as these are, these are the scamming, the spamming and you don’t want to poison your website. Uh, my partner Jonathan and I were the renowned business coach, Eric Chop who, uh, initially greeted you when we called you today. Um, we see this all of the time where you’ll see a client, Eric, I’m sure you’ve seen this, where a client will just literally copy the content from another website and paste it on their site. Other people, other, other people’s clients.

We, yeah, I’m sure none of your clients right now. No, it definitely happens. Especially if they decide to delegate something like this to remember their team that they don’t know that well. Yeah, I’ll get it done. And then you go live. So we use copyscape and scm rush to check it. It’s obvious bruce, when someone copies on your, you know, but as an owner of a company will say, Hey, John, the front desk guide, Karen the Front Desk Lady, could you please write the content for my homepage because I’m too. And then this person, let’s say the Karen or the Kelly or the hour of the Marvin, whoever it is, a word for you, they’ll copy the content from your direct competitor and just paste it and go all done. Bruce, I’ve written the content. It’s beautiful. But our team will, will discover that the content was in fact plagiarized and coffee. Why? Why is that absolutely lethal

to your search engine ranking? Well, there’s multiple layers of that. Uh, the first is you’re absolutely right. People do that all the time. They still do it to me. The part I really like is when they paste my content on their site, it still contains my phone number, a net that’s downright ignorant. And I periodically get, you mentioned copyscape and others. I periodically get notifications that other people have. My content used to be that I was stolen often because I ranked so well. So it is an issue now to the search engine. You’re in a, uh, right at the edge. It they don’t really have a penalty if you have that duplicate content, they don’t call it a penalty, but what happens is google views you as not necessarily being the author of the content because they can’t tell who wrote it first. So what they end up doing is lowering the quality of your site in the rankings.

That’s not a penalty. There’s duplicate content. We’re just not sure. So you know we’re. We’re not going to guess in the search engine can actually diminish your ranking, but they don’t refer to it as a penalty. We’ve had cases where content was syndicated, where sites actually allowed other sites to use their content through a syndication contract and it turns out that a couple of our clients being big clients actually had syndication agreements with even bigger clients and what would happen is they’d publish the content, they’d put it up on their website, the syndication would take it, it would be published on another website. There are bigger authority than you. They got credit for it and you got hit. So Google has taken a position that even though there’s no penalty for goop for you, if you have duplicate content, there’s no penalty, they really think that you may not be the owner, you will see a filter and your rankings can be impacted pretty much as a quality item. And so the rule is published once and make it the best you can make it

thrive. Nation. I encourage you during the break to check out one of our incredible show sponsors. That’s will dash [inaudible] dot com will dash, conduct comments, Williams contract. And these guys will do a great job building a piece of commercial property for you, adding onto your church, adding onto your building. Check them out today will-on.com. Get ready to enter the thrive time. Show on talk radio. 11 70. All right, thrive nation. Welcome back to the conversation. On today’s show we have the father of search engine optimization and the bestselling author of search engine for dummies, Bruce Clay on the show. Now Bruce Clay is explaining to you and I the listeners out there why you cannot copy content from another website and why if you copy content from another website, why it will absolutely destroy your search engine ranking. He’s also teaching you how the practical steps you can take to optimize your website and to get your company to the top of the search engine results so that you can get in front of your ideal and likely buyers who are searching for the products and services that they’re looking for online. This justin, your ideal and likely buyers are using the internet to search for the products and services that they are looking for. Chip, I think a lot of people pushed back right there. They do. I don’t know. I’m in a different industry. All my business typically comes word of mouth. That’s why do I need to do search engine optimization tip,

because you cannot rely on word of mouth alone, especially if you’re trying to grow something and you have big goals you’re trying to get to, so you’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to market. You’ve got to be on the top of the search results because it can literally be worth millions of dollars to you.

Furthermore, you saying that the reason why you shouldn’t optimize your website is because all your clients currently come from word of mouth would be like me living in the forest, spending my entire day hunting for food and then saying to you, I have no need for this new thing you’re talking about called the grocery store because all of the food that I eat comes from hunting, so I don’t need. I don’t know what this is saying. It’s two blocks away, so if I walk two blocks, I can go to the grocery store and have all the food I want. Nah, well, I don’t need this thing. You call him an automobile. I had a horse I track. I track every single thing I killed and all of it comes from hunting, so I don’t need a grocery store, so a screw off. I’m happy you’re the idiot and I don’t do search engines either because 100 percent of my business comes word of mouth.

You see what happens is the other people who live in the forest with me, uh, they were all extras from the movie Robin Hood, the one with Kevin Costner, all of us. We all know word of mouth. I kill more Dhea than anybody else out there. But if you do go to whatever that grocery store is, I would like to know if they sell beer because currently it takes me like a half a year to make any. It takes a long time out here in barrel. It takes me forever. Them. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes me to crush the grapes to make the wine. Let it ferment. They need a drink because hunting is blurring. Wait a minute. So you’re saying that there was a grocery store? Yes. Are you saying that my ideal and likely buyers, 80 to 90 percent of them are using search engines to find the products and what? Yes. We’re saying, do you know what the speeds according to Forbes Cha Cha to know what this mean. We stop. This pain doesn’t work at all. All right. Now back to our interview with Bruce Clay. The search engine guru,

but if you spin it out to a bunch of other sites or if people on other sites steal your content, that will actually impact your perception is being, uh, a quality site for that particular article. Google doesn’t like the same article on multiple sites. They don’t like your content on other sites. One more thing. If what you did is you took the content and you randomly change,

you have the words, oh, here we go. This is a hot button for me

that is considered spam by google. Not Duplicate content. That’s worse. What you’ve done is you’ve actually tried to take the same content and manipulated to get rankings for substantially the same structured content. And Google believes that that is spam. So if I have an article, whatever the article is about chocolate fountains in Los Angeles, and then somebody took it and put it chocolate fountains in New York, both ends could receive a penalty for that.

So again, if you’re out there and you’re scamming and you’re spamming and you’re playing little games, that’s bad. But I think a lot of our listeners are, are not trying to play games, but someone in your office might be trying to play a game. I mean, you might be the owner of the business, but you hire somebody and they’re going, well, what’s the fastest way to get this done so I can go out and have a Burrito? Uh, and so we’re talking about scamming and spamming and things you shouldn’t do. One of the things I, I have seen is people hiring a company in a third world country typically to write articles for them on, and they use a service called a spinner service. The service, what it’ll do is you’ll send them the links, right bruce, to a article that you like and they’ll promise they’ll send it back a paraphrased, right? I mean, that’s, that’s what they do. But the problem is Google knows what you’re doing and why, as you mentioned earlier, that that’s, that’s a form of spam. Can you talk to me about just categorically wise spinners or hiring companies to write articles for you in Third World countries is not a move?

Well, there’s multiple layers to it. You mentioned copyscape. Copyscape was originally designed to identify plagiarism because we all know that there’s no plagiarism, plagiarism issue with high schools or college papers, but that’s what they were designed to do. They were designed for an instructor to be able to say, here’s my paper, is it on the web? And if it is, then that’s plagiarism. Well, the search engines own their own index and you have to believe that they know and have software to detect duplicate content or manipulated content or even re sequenced the content. So all of that is bad. Your spinners, they did something a little bit different. What they would do is you would be able to hire a company, uh, give them some key words and topic and here’s my website, and they would write 50 pages for you. And all 50 pages were probably the fastest they could do it because they get paid per page and they don’t charge a lot.

So the faster they can pump out a page, the more they get paid. It isn’t that you actually have to write something that shows up in search. It isn’t that you actually have to have people like it or even comment on it. It’s just did you write a page and when you go into that environment, Google has repeatedly issued warnings and penalties against companies for what is referred to as spinning. Now what spinning mechanically is is I will write one article, it will be low quality, but to make up for it, I’m going to put it on 25 sites and that’s the spinning part where you. You take one piece of content and you put it everywhere and often that’s where they do the minor modification. Every time they publish it and that is always going to get you in trouble. Google has indicated that if you have content on multiple sites, they consider it duplicate content, no penalty for it.

It’s duplicate content. They’re going to ignore it. In many cases they’ve also indicated if that content links to you, they consider that duplicate links and they’re going to ignore them too. So there’s no real value to you to have a piece of garbage content published on other websites that will accept anything and probably aren’t catering to your persona and your target market and the links don’t count that is just poisoning yourself. And so google is indicated. That’s a serious problem and nobody does it anymore unless you’re overseas and that’s all you know how to do to make money.

Now, bruce, I want to talk to you now about simplifying the complexity of search engine optimization. Um, you were arguably the father of search optimization or the best selling author of search engine for dummies. You’re, you’re the guru. You are the Yoda of search engine optimization. And so I wanna I wanna, I wanna read you a notable quotable from Robert Greene, the best selling author of mastery. And then I want to read you. I want to ask you a question. He says in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them, those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them, and that could never focused enough to learn. My friend, that complexity of search engine optimization for many people, myself included, can be overwhelming, which is why at the thrive time show, our team uses checklists for everything. We have checklists to help us, um, manage the complexity of an, the diligence required and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people?

Thrive nation on tomorrow’s show, Bruce Clay continues to break down how search engines work. The father of search engine optimization, Bruce Clay, will be back on tomorrow’s show to break down how search engines and search engine optimization works. But before we wrap up today’s show, let me tell you about one of our great show sponsors and Tulsa’s number one Ford automotive repair shop. With over 80 years of combined experience, that’s our see auto specialist job, RC auto specialist.com. What’s their phone number? Their phone number is nine. One Eight, eight, seven, two eight. One, one five. Again, that’s nine. One, eight, eight, seven, two, eight, one, one five. You can check them [email protected]. Thrive nation. There is no danger. Don’t be a stranger. Go to thrive time show.com today. Podcasts Workshop One on one coaching. It’s all there. I’m telling you, if you can change your life simply by going to thrive time show.com and implementing what you learn. Three, two, one, boom. Yeah.