Guide · 6 min read
Why the same search looks different in another country
Dr. Pete ran English searches on google.cz and a lot of the features went missing. In Czech, they came straight back.
From the transcripts
Good reads
Longer reads from the conversations, plus a few bits that never made it to air.
Essay · 6 min read
Should you give away how you do it?
Jon Cooper gave away the link building process he sold for a living. Bobby Bot said it didn't compute, and Bobby was wrong.
+2
Guide · 6 min read
Write the page you went looking for and couldn't find
Before her brain surgery, Geraldine DeRuiter searched for what it would actually be like and got WebMD. So she wrote it herself.
Essay · 6 min read
Don't build your house on rented land (Google's included)
Jeff Sauer reckons the only thing you really own is your email list. Not your followers, and these days not your rankings either.
+1
Guide · 6 min read
What to report instead of rankings
In 2014 I brought Rand Fishkin a tidy click through stat and he wasn't having it. These days I'd put rankings near the back of the report.
+2
Essay · 6 min read
Why is SEO full of musicians?
Lily Ray says half her team are musicians. So are a lot of our guests, me included.
+1
Essay · 6 min read
Be data informed, not data driven
Jeff Sauer named his company Data Driven U. Then one of his own team told him it was the wrong word.
Then and now · 7 min read
The SEO tools our guests swore by, and what replaced them
I got muddled about Followerwonk on air, so I fact checked every tool our guests swore by. Google renamed one of them twice.
+4
Essay · 6 min read
The outreach bot that asked Jon Henshaw for a link on his privacy policy
"Obviously no human actually wrote this email because nobody would be that dumb." Jon Henshaw on outreach bots, and what gets him to reply instead.
Roundup · 6 min read
Nobody in SEO meant to end up here
I can't find one guest who set out to work in search. Paul Shapiro's girlfriend talked him into applying.
+3
Resource · 8 min read
Ian Lurie told me to read the Dungeon Master's Guide
Plus every other book our guests recommended on air. Hardly any are about SEO, and a few guests went and wrote their own.
+8
Then and now · 6 min read
Link building advice from 2013 to 2017, checked in 2026
Eight link building tactics from the old tapes, checked against 2026. The ones about people mostly still work. Buying links was dead on arrival.
Then and now · 6 min read
We marked the AI predictions our guests made before ChatGPT
Nine calls our guests made about AI years before ChatGPT, marked with a red pen. Most landed, just later than they said.
+2
EmpathyAll 16 principles
- 01 Have a clear value proposition
- 02 Be intentional
- 03 Tell a compelling story
- 04 Understand the context
- 05 Make people feel something
- 06 Show you care
- 07 Give positive affirmation
- 08 Create something people can link to
- 09 Work together to create empathy
- 10 Design for users
- 11 Be creative
- 12 Reduce ambiguity
- 13 People are more than personas
- 14 You can't automate empathy
- 15 Value human interaction
- 16 Talk to the people behind the screen