What is WordPress doing with SEO? With Jono Alderson

That was the, the Genesis, uh, of us, of me reaching out to you saying, Hey, you want to, want to chat about this on the show? You want to talk about it? Uh, there's some other stuff that's happened since.

It's user experience, it's technical integrity, it's performance, it's security, it's accessibility, it's a hundred other areas. Um, and I I'm deeply into many of those areas and the bits I'm not, I know enough to connect the right people and understand what good looks like. So it's working out, where are you today? Turns out you're probably at six out of 10. How, where, where does it make sense to aim for?

Because 10 is usually not feasible, but if you can get up to eight out of 10, are you going to double your traffic? Are you going to please your users? Are you going to increase revenue? So yeah, I work with businesses to go, how do we build a roadmap to do that? Largely focusing on the kind of more technical side. Um, Partly because WordPress is awesome, and that's the bit I enjoy, but mostly, that's the bit where people have the most room to improve.

Most people really often haven't kind of gone down and really looked at their website and said, is this inherently good? Um, so yeah making it faster making it better tying up all the things that's the stuff I really enjoy

Like I got to do this thing. I got to drop it in. Here comes the next one. I get to do the next post, the next video. I've always stayed away from that. Even though I have a fairly high cadence of content creation, I've always been like this content. Like I like the content. I care about this post or this video. So maybe it doesn't come out every week. Maybe it takes me a couple of weeks to make a podcast episode or a video or blog posts.

But all the technical SEO strategies I read about is volume, you know, consistency, keep it going, keep it going out there. And sometimes I feel like, man, I'm on this hamster wheel. Don't you want me to make good content? So, so break it down for us. Like, are we, am I doing it wrong? Just for

So, of course, we now have an entire SEO industry with a kind of dirty underbelly, which goes, you can buy links for money, or you can spend money with an agency who will go and produce content, or hassle some journalists in order to get you links. Or you can go like sponsor things. So there's various degrees of, you can turn money into links, which Google attempts to shut down and ignore. And they are getting better at that. And it's getting harder.

So as a result, we now have this content marketing thing, right? Where everybody says, go and have a blog and write three things a day, and pick a keyword and write 500 words with structure. Like, what is the thing? How do I do the thing? Where do I get the thing? And the whole internet's full of this garbage. And for a while it worked to a degree because Google needed that content to disambiguate. What are people searching for? What are the kinds of things these websites have expertise on?

What problems do they solve? Um, and that for a long time was the industry. And now I think we're almost coming out of that with the rise of AI powered results and generative search. Google doesn't need that anymore. Um, like there are so many of these spaces where we're just producing content about keywords that don't exist. Those problems were already solved.

So if you're, I don't know, you've got a company selling insurance or cupcakes, what are you possibly going to write that's going to add new value that Google doesn't already understand that's contributing to the corpus of human knowledge, like you're just rehashing information about, uh, eight ways to avoid your plants freezing at Christmas, or my vegan cupcakes are better than your vegan, none of it's useful.

Um, and the thing that's really changed, which I think is great in the last year or so is Google has just got really, really good at ignoring all that stuff. But there are so, but all the information out there still says go and write things. So, so many brands think the good SEO looks like write three blog posts. So, we pick a keyword, tick the boxes in Yoast, et cetera. And some of that is foundational.

Like you have to have content that talks about what you do and you have to have content that tells stories to your users, engages them, but you definitely don't need articles at scale. So, yeah, I think the velocity and the cadence isn't important. I think doing what you're doing, which is what I'm doing.

Write stuff that you're passionate about, that you believe in, that is interesting, that is good, that is useful, that is relevant at the cadence that makes sense to do that, like do one a year, if that's what it takes to write something excellent, but yeah, the idea that we all need to be churning out words on pages is awful.

Like, you will do this and you will accept it and you will take these cars that nobody wants to buy and you will try to sell them. So, ingrained in me is to never trust the man, right? Because I grew up in that setting. So I've always looked, and this is probably foolish to some degree, but I, I, again, I, I mean, I, I've thought about SEO, but I've never invested in it.

I never got into PPC or, or buying ads and all this stuff, largely because maybe I didn't have a product that, that really needed that leverage. Uh, and I've always just looked at the, the algorithms to be something that isn't ever going to help me. Like it might help me in the short term, like a little boost kind of thing, but I've always said, I'm going to make my content and just push it out to people and tell people I've got this content. Um, are the days of.

Of organic search data, or excuse me, organic search results going down because of, of AI and what's happening. In other words, should people be thinking about pushing their brand out more and getting their content out more? Like, nobody gonna help you except for yourself. How do you frame that, if, if at all?

Um, like that's not really what that ecosystem looks like anymore. And the answer to that, who knows, but part of the answer to that is probably yeah, build a reputable brand that people will recognize and trust and already have influenced them with content of the stream and that higher in their journeys. So that when they ask perplexity, what's the best shampoo or, um, finally the best black Friday deals for a new PC monitor, whatever it is.

When it says, okay, here are three really good ones, they recognize your brand and your messaging because six months ago they read a really interesting article that you wrote or, um, those kinds of influences and touch points and there's brand building activities. Um, so that you've got that reputation and recall and preference over time. Cause yeah, it's not going to be the case of, I wrote the best article. I ranked first in this list of links.

People are going to click my thing because the whole landscape is changing. It's definitely going to be more about reputation.

some of this other explosive news from the last couple of weeks, uh, post WordCamp US, keeping it in the frame of reference of WordPress. I consider my brand a flea on an elephant's ass is how I like to look at my brand in the overall WordPress space. Um, one of the things I've always found interesting with, uh, uh, chat GPT or, Or, uh, Claude, which are two that I, I use fairly often is this, um, uh, being trained on SEO results, the typical blog posts, the top, whatever.

Uh, in other words, if I go to either of these two, uh, chatbots, uh, and I type in, give me the best list of WordPress podcasts, it still recommends, uh, Matt report, which is a podcast I haven't done in about four years as one of the top podcast episodes. And it has, it doesn't reference the WP minute at all, largely because nobody has written a top WordPress podcast, a blog post in literally five, six years when WordPress podcasts had their heydays.

So how is this stuff getting updated for like these little niche markets, or is it just so little volume that. It suffers from the same things that regular SEO suffered from.

And meanwhile, The Wix's and the Shopify is obviously very, very noisy. So yeah, when you, when you were creating these systems for advice and information in this context, what are they drawing from? It is going to be stuff from 2012 because there's not a lot else out there. And even if there were, the volume and reach of that is going to be lower than everyone else's. So yeah, I think this is going to be a real problem.

We are going to be very underrepresented in those kinds of results collectively and as a platform. Um, if only we had some kind of marketing team who could be thinking about that.

But yeah, it's trained on a corpus of information that it wasn't granted permission to to utilize and Even if it's not theft, there ought to have been a consent at some point. Um, even now we still don't really have a good model for that, that we're starting to see some options, but it's too late. I think, uh, even if, even if it was theft, it's too late. The genie genius out the bottle. Even if open AI never becomes profitable and they fail, something else will fill the space.

All the information is out there. It's on common call. It's been produced in a million places. This is now the model. And even if we don't like it, I think we're stuck with it. So yeah, it's pretty unpleasant.

Whether or not that's meaningful, I don't know, but I thought it was interesting.

I haven't seen the automatic end on her LinkedIn profile

How can we even do this in a volunteer led system? Your thoughts on, on marketing WordPress.

You're like, then yeah, how do, how do you How do you market? And all the stuff we were saying about the evolution of SEO just now into branding and awareness and preference. That's the whole of marketing, right? Consumers are educated and informed. They make their own decisions. They want to evaluate, compare. They want to be led. They want to be told stories, et cetera. And we don't have that.

Any of the infrastructure or processes or people or resources or systems to even start to ask what that would look like. And I think the hardest bit of that, of all that laundry list is the product, right? Like for better or worse, we have a roadmap to a degree. Gutenberg's doing things. People have varying opinions on whether that's the right direction or not, but we are, we are at war. With Wix and Squarespace and other platforms and Vercel and all these other things.

And I'm not even sure we realize that we're at war and because we just say we've got 43 percent of the web and we keep saying that until we're not. And even if we are, those numbers are questionable anyway, right, depending on how you want to calculate that.

And I, I see, certainly from an SEO perspective, There's still a huge influx of people who want to build websites for the first time, or don't understand what hosting is, or don't know how to do a thing, and they search for problems, whether they do that in Google or TrapGPT or wherever, and we're nowhere. And a WPBeginner and a whole bunch of Syed's networks are generally somewhere. Um, but WordPress collectively, other than com, which yeah, is contentious. WordPress.

org is very rarely represented and there's very rarely educational hearts and minds onboarding kind of step on content because Wix is just paying their way in there. Or competing organically. So yeah, we, we're going to

Because at the moment, best case scenario, it's probably some itty bitty forum post that somebody wrote three years ago that gets a whole bunch of disput and helpful answers that somebody shut down because they posted something that didn't align with the WordPress. org rules and so on, yadda, yadda. Like, none of those, there's no strategy behind how should this work and how should we guide people through. And then, We've got so many moving parts that are disjointed.

So we've got the learn subdomain, which is doing some great work in educational content, but nobody's really reconciled. How does that relate to the, um, the developer site, which has similar topics? We haven't really retired the codecs. The forums are largely moderated in a way that just sprawls rather than answering questions in a consolidated way. All the tutorial stuff is over on dot com.

Yeah, it's working out how do we, How do we market to people and how do we take them on journeys needs to happen before any of the kind of big technical stuff happens. Um, and there's no appetite and no resource to address any of those kind of huge philosophical questions.

Especially in these moments of community strife, right? When you just feel drained from doing this. So, like, even getting the, like, even if you said, Hey, we're not going to have an internal make team that works on this. It's very hard to get even agencies and freelancers to want to prop up this content too, because they're like, Oh God, we're just crossing this finish line of delivering this website to this customer.

Now we got to, now you want me to like promote this content from within, like, this is, this is very, very difficult.

But you see, as you've already mentioned, like two profoundly important people who were very active and have gone, they've not been replaced. They won't be replaced. There's nobody else coming up through the ranks or entering the doors to take their burden and their workload. And to ask the difficult questions and to do the big thinking, there's a lot of people who can be pointed at small tactical things ad hoc and they'll come and go, but I think there's only about six people left.

Like in that, like you look at how inactive make WordPress is. It's like, where is everyone? It's a ghost town. Um, and that's not getting it. And that's part of the same marketing challenge in question. It's a different flavor of it, but it's the same problem. Um, yeah, I think that's the biggest impact and the biggest risk of all the stuff that's happening at the moment. That we all. We are not bringing people in and we're not raising them up.

And I think that we're in this, this new, uh, you know, scenario in WordPress where now we have to look at, this is just my opinion and obviously you chime in with yours, but I look at the community now after this and the dust hasn't even settled yet, by the way, because we're still, We don't even know what's happening next. Um, I was going to say we're still in court, but we're not even there yet.

Uh, so we have to figure out how are we going to repair the community and what's it going to look like moving forward? It's not going to be like it was before. WordCamps might not even be what it was before. We could, we could see a dramatic drop in people wanting to even do it, sponsor it, go to the event. What are we going to do moving forward looking differently? Um, and that's where I'm, that's where my mind is going, but also.

Still waiting to see what happens, uh, with all the stuff with WP engine. So it's a very rocky, rocky road. It's back to being a human problem. Again, it's not even a technical problem. It's back to a human problem. How do we repair moving forward? Uh, I don't have the answers yet, but any, any thoughts from, from you?

recruitment for new contributors and onboarding, then they need to be resourced and budgeted and run in a way that reflects that. And at the moment they are, they are wonderful events, but they are part meetup, part get together, part education, part recruitment, part lunch, don't, don't really know. Like it's, it's just, it's us talking to us in the same way that the media corps was us talking to us.

Um, and when, and I know there's been some vague conversations about starting to break out of that bubble and now everyone gets like 200 to go and put some flyers at the local train station, but that's, that's not going to fix it. It's like this, this is, this is microscopic and it's well intended, but it's so far in the wrong direction. Um, so yeah, I think, um, this is, this is all human problems. Um, and some of that is one human in particular, for better or worse.

Um, but a lot of it cascades back to, um, we, we don't have the, um, my vocabulary's just dried up. We don't have the freedom and the ability to ask or take action on these big philosophical questions and these big people problems because everything stops back at Matt's door, and he's either not engaged or has a different opinion. So it just gets stuck and it drops and people get burned out and burn out and leave and word camps remain lovely, but somewhat ineffectual.

Um, Let's just start transitioning to talk about like some of the things that have felt kind of bad as, as community members, especially if you're a theme or plugin owner, and you have your themes and plugins on wordpress. org, going back to my knocking on your door. org. com, uh, can you outline for those that maybe

don't remember because of all this stuff recently that happened? What did. com do that felt so bad?

Um, obviously, that's not as simple as it sounds, and there are huge overheads associated with that. The plugin repository not being a small one of those, but they did it. Um, and, um, And it was ostensibly to provide a kind of an easier routing for dot com customers to browse and install plugins. There's two big caveats with that. One is on dot com, that's a paid ecosystem.

Like you have to be on whatever particular tier it is of usage in order to access and use those, which is not the case with dot org. And then the SEO angle is quite interesting because com is a big authoritative website with a marketing team and a strategy and lots of great useful content that now has its own version of all of these pages, which until then, individual plugin vendors and individual users searched for and managed and found through org. And suddenly we have this competitor.

Where com is accidentally, question mark, um, stealing, question mark, um, traffic and visitors who might otherwise have found the org pages and downloaded and installed a thing for free. And now potentially getting confused on our potentially signing up for dot com hosting plans where they might not otherwise have done so, and it all just gets a little bit murky and it looks, looks like a play, right, it looks like it's a how do we monetize this traffic, which it may or may not be.

It's, it's part of a bigger question about the com versus org relationship, which is another question we're not allowed to ask or answer or be involved in because we just accept that it's a philosophical nightmare. Um, but the SEO angle was the first time that had come up, is what happens when com starts eating market share from org?

Um, and I think what's really interesting about that is if you look back as far as circa 2011, 2012, org is five or six times the size in terms of visibility of com. You run any off the shelf SEO tool and it'll give you an estimate of how big is this site in terms of how, what does it rank for and how much traffic does it attract. org is scoring, I don't know, 20 points and com is scoring four points. Now, 2024, they are almost level. Because org is decaying over time because it's not loved.

It doesn't have a marketing strategy. It's a little bit on fire. All the problems we've discussed, whereas com is growing, not enormously and not at a hockey stick pace, but they're doing well. They've got a content strategy. They've got SEO people. They now have a plug in repository. And it's, it's not yet at the point where it's massively cannibalizing org, but there are some really interesting points.

Things like, um, Names of certain functionality that people are searching for, things like SSL certificates or, uh, how to reset their passwords. Some of those kinds of queries.com is starting to outrank.org with either the plugins repository or their own help documentation, which arguably then is just a cl of the, the learn stuff as well. So yeah, we now have a, we now have more than ever a big competitor and it's once again, us.

Um, and, and Matt's there was a slight exploration of is there a way we can mitigate this if the intended use case is mostly just for logged in wordpress. com users, maybe we could know index it, maybe we could canonicalize it. There are SEO tactics we could use to lock that down so that it benefits everybody, but none of that's been done. And I know Matt's aware of those because he read my blog post on it and he commented saying very interesting. Thanks. Um, and I did nothing.

So, yeah, this is, uh, this is not healthy.

org to dot com, we, those of us in the know, like you, me, and probably most of us listening to this, are just like, we can't do anything about it. Like we can rant and holler and do all this stuff, but really we can't do anything about it. And I think that's the biggest struggle because of the passion that we have for WordPress, but also at the same time, we're just boxed in to these decision makings and things like that, that. Look at the end of the day, I don't, I don't know.

Uh, I guess I have a, I don't know if it's an optimist look outlook on this, but does it help plugin and theme owners that. com is ranking if, if the end user is using their theme and plugin, it just happens to be on. com or

So there is definitely a non zero chance that you as a user who doesn't really know what you're doing is going to end up paying money for a hosting plan to unlock that instead of getting it for free. Maybe that's, maybe that's 10 people, maybe it's one, maybe it's 1000, but that's distributed across a long tail of a whole bunch of scenarios. Is that net positive? Would those people have gone and self hosted something and got the free version? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe they do want the handholding of a managed hosting plan and to get it through a package or just just feels. a little bit murky and disingenuous to be presenting them as they're the same thing and this is net positive, right? And to your point on there's nothing we can do.

Yeah, Matt owns both websites, but my livelihood to a degree and yours and many others is tied somewhat to the success of WordPress and therefore we're all invested in how do we make this successful and grow its reach, etc. And yeah, good strategy comes with compromises.

So we need to go, okay, if we can't do X, we need to do Y. But why is also political and everywhere we turn you end up with an insurmountable, okay, we don't have the resources, we don't have the budget, we don't have the permission, Matt says no, yada, yada. And I think the thing that we're all frustrated with and why so many people are leaving is we cannot see a route forwards. All we can see is kind of maintain the status quo, hang on tight to whatever drama comes next.

Well, we'll shake off a few more contributors and we'll have to take on more of the workload. And there's no, There isn't a route, certainly, that I can see where we go, Okay, now we're beating Wix. Now we are moving forwards. Now

we're growing. Now we're doing great stuff. Scaring. Ha.

com marketplace is right under plugins and it, and that, Sort of distinction wasn't there before or at least I certainly hadn't seen it in the last month or so So the marketplace is now getting pushed on dot com at least in my plan much more visibly One of the things I was thinking about through this whole WP engine thing was well, maybe they were I mean, they're enterprise software. I used to sell against them as a Pagely account executive. I was there for three years.

So they are for every account a software enterprise company. They're vicious. They are cruel. They are tactful in their sales as any enterprise software company is right. Um, so I wouldn't had it. have put it past them. If WP engine was going to launch what I call the HubSpot esque sort of marketplace where HubSpot has a marketplace, you can buy stuff, but guess what? If you go from HubSpot to say Salesforce or, uh, Asana or whatever, um, you're not taking that marketplace stuff with you.

It's there, right? And WP engine launching something like that to really challenge, um, the, the ecosystem. But now as I see it. Well, dot com has a marketplace, uh, and Matt kind of like thrust them to create their own mirror of dot org. Maybe that's just going to thrust them to make a marketplace, uh, faster than what they had maybe previously planned or maybe had never thought of. And now they're like, aha, we'll call this a marketplace and we'll start selling stuff through it.

And I'm like, wow. The marketplace thing could happen sooner across multiple entities because of all of this. And is that the outcome we really wanted?

Yeah. And WordPress becomes a fragmented distributed thing where wherever you happen to run your website, you're tied into, you've got your plugins here, you've got your add ins here. This is proprietary. This works differently. Yeah, all that portability stuff goes away, which I think certainly, and I'm being very lenient about it, there are huge advantages to WordPress and I love it. And one of the huge advantages, certainly one that Matt praises a lot, is the portability angle, right?

There's all the data transfer portability stuff happening at the moment. Yeah, that's, that's at risk, I think, if we end up in a landscape of marketplaces and verticals, individual little silos.

But so does, I mean, so does Jetpack where you could kind of use Jetpack services like a managed WP or, you know, name your favorite kind of management. Plug in service. They could do the same thing. We're like, Hey, if you're running this on your own site, you can just install jetpack and we'll install this plug in for you and and keep it updated. Um, that would be a very, very interesting thing to watch because then I would say, Yeah, we've got an issue here.

Um, how did the plug in and theme authors get a cut of this traffic?

So many of the, the sites and businesses I work with are running, I don't know, a Sanity or a Wix or a Headless something or other, or they've done a thing in React with a backend on something you've never heard of on a Gatsby or brr, they're all awful universally.

Like they're, some, some of them are very good at one thing, Like a lot of them preference developer experience, which I'm never sure is a good thing to preference if you're trying to run a business like preference, marketing, marketing tools, etc. But whatever. Some

of them are very fast. Some of them are accessible. Some of them, it's very easy to do custom post type like stuff. None of them are good at technical SEO and none of them are good at all the things across the board. And not always WordPress out of the box, but it's extensible and customizable enough that if you know the right tools and tips and tricks, it's easy enough to get there. Um, I don't see. And this is the most frustrating thing. I don't see anything else even being able to catch up.

We have such a moat when it comes to extensibility and inherent capabilities and resourcing, even as diminished as we are, and yet still we're losing the war because we can't tell that story because all the big scary philosophical questions. Very, very frustrating.

I think that's very exciting, very shiny, but there's definitely more work to be done in workflows and other areas. But yeah, Yoast SEO definitely is my SEO plugin for choice, just because it does.

It does a thousand things behind the scenes that most people shouldn't ever need to care about that none of the others do like silly stuff like, um, There's a no index HTTP header on your RSS feeds so that Google doesn't spend ages calling and indexing them that nobody else does because nobody else has even asked that question. Um, and there's a thousand of those. That's really nice. Um, other stuff I really like, um, Do do do do do. What am I using at the moment? String back recently.

Um, all the usual stuff, right? User role editors, really nice stuff that should be canonical plugins. Not that we know what canonical plugin means. Um, all the stuff

that the Google performance team are doing. So, the, um, performance lab stuff. The speculative loading plugin that came out the other day. Um, speculation headers are really cool for performance. Sitekit's cool. Um, yeah, yeah, nothing, nothing too surprising. Um, ACF obviously is architecture really nice for SEO because inevitably you wind up wanting to do things like, um, this is a cupcake page and I need to know what color frosting it has.

And I want to grab that value and I want to incorporate it into the meta description, um, that sort of stuff's really nice. Yeah. Otherwise nothing, nothing too unusual. I don't