SMX Advanced is back. The show is happening live, for the first time in public since the pandemic, in Boston this week. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger recall the traveling circus atmosphere of the early conference circuit. Meanwhile Google is trying to reduce redundant Googlers in the Search and Ad units with a voluntary exit buyout program. This is happening while Google's systems are reporting a number of weird bugs with business profiles disappearing, Discover numbers appearing to ...
Jun 12, 2025•1 hr 45 min
What do you get when you mix a web that remembers everything with software that can mine the depths of that everything to draw a frighteningly accurate picture of everyone, everywhere, all the time? You get what we're all going to get with the Trump administration using Peter Thiel's Palantir platform to create meta-files on every American citizen and very likely a lot of non-American citizens. This move comes after months of allowing ex-POTUS darling Elon Musk's DOGE pillage federal databases t...
Jun 05, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Google AI Overviews are expanding test markets in Europe to Turkey, Sweden, and the Netherlands in advance of Google I/O. Google launched a free Generative AI Certification training program with the actual certification exam costing $99US. Google introduced "Discussions" in beta. Discussions is meant to replace Reddit as a primary source of livetime AI training resources by encouraging search users to add comments and conversation about specific topics which can then be used throughout the Googl...
May 15, 2025•1 hr 24 min
Google is fast approaching the FIND OUT stage of its multiple anti-trust cases with the US Department of Justice and EU regulatory bodies. It is very possible the DOJ could order Google to sever its relationship with its Chrome browser in coming months. That leads to speculation on what other decisions might be coming down and how throwing spanners into the cogs of the machine Alphabet has built might effect Google's operations in the future. Those wags at OpenAI suggested they would be happy to...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Mikkel deMib Svendsen is a SEO Legend. One of the original SEOs, Mikkel was known around early search conferences as the man in the bright orange suit. His almost adversarial take on Google in the early days set a tone and standard for how SEOs felt about working with the search engines in a friendly game of cat and mouse. Mikkel has continued practicing SEO while pursuing several other life passions, including a highly successful side-career as a potter and pottery instructor on YouTube where h...
Apr 19, 2025•29 min
Google introduced its new Ad Strength Best Practices Guide which got hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger to pine for the days when the SEO world used cool names like "Ad Strength" to describe stuff. Google has again been declared a monopoly by yet another US court while, just to keep up, a UK based class action over Google's search dominance has been approved. It wasn't a great week for Google legally. It wasn't a great week technically either as a bug continues to exclude the first image ...
Apr 17, 2025•1 hr 14 min
A far less political edition than most this year let's Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger spend more time talking about tech news, web marketing, and SEO. We start by marking the movement of Mordy Oberstein as he leaves a highly successful tenure as head of branding at website builder Wix. More than anyone in our memory, Mordy helped Wix overcome what was a difficult reputation which stands as stellar testimony to his powers as a brand marketer. We note how Google Business Profiles is still bro...
Apr 03, 2025•1 hr 15 min
The March 2025 Core Update continues to roll out though early indicators are showing in search console. Google Business had a reverficiation bug that caused chaos for a few days that appears to be fixed. The White House announced it was going to order a dramatic downsizing of the department of Education and a French scientist was denied entry to the US after messages critical of Trump were found on his phone, which has terrifying implications for the future of American education and training. Th...
Mar 20, 2025•1 hr 47 min
Traditionally a warning to tyrants and rogue emperors, todays middle of March madness opened with news of Google Core Update rollout, a major vulnerability in a popular WP SEO plug-in, and signs American search users are indicating they're thinking about being in a very sour mood. We also note it is the 15th anniversary of the week Rhea Drysdale saved SEO from a notorious trademark abuser. The Googleopoly woke up to see the US DOJ's 4 remedies to settle the larger of two anti-trust cases. OpenAI...
Mar 13, 2025•1 hr 29 min
Olesia Korobka joins us to talk about the SEO Charity Conference taking place online on March 27 for the Ukraine Animal Relief charity SEO for Paw founded by Anton Shulke. Before Olesia jumps in, we talk about Tuesday's State of the Union address in which, among other things, the CHIPS Act was threatened in a weirdly long ramble about bad deals. We also talk about Elon Musk's continued misadventures due to DOGE's misunderstanding of COBOL. Which somehow brought us to talking about Sergey Brin's ...
Mar 06, 2025•1 hr 23 min
A quick but hardly deep dive into what Elon Musk's D.O.G.E. is doing and the technologies they're abusing to do it starts a conversation about the newest outrages of the week from around the Oval Office. We also talk about OpenAI4.5, a delay in data from the GSC API, CoPilot flying folks into the wrong repositories, the Chegg vs. Google case, Bing's AI Search tests, Google's crawler update spikes and crawl efficencies, Scrubbing search results, and nearly a dozen other Googley things. Support th...
Feb 27, 2025•1 hr 9 min
The American president declared himself a king this week. In the meantime, Meta is laying off thousands of people and deleting a number of old live broadcast recordings. TikTok is restructuring towards laying offs too. Google Reviews and Google Business are fixing bugs while Google's Business Profiles support team is absolutely backlogged. Whoddathunkit but,AIs like ChatGPT and DeepSeek might cheat to win simple games. Google makes the Gemini App the only way to access Google's AI on iOS. Google...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Google fixes a few bugs, gives a quick "how-to" around tabbed navigation, advises about on-page hash-links, and provides a great tutorial on using GA4 and GSC together. Google also increases its results return-speed by 67milliseconds. That's the good stuff this week however it wasn't a good week from a classic "Don't be Evil" perspective. This week Google complied with the executive cultural nullification order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, scrapped a pledge to only use AI for peaceful purposes,...
Feb 13, 2025•1 hr 7 min
The sudden appearance of DeepSeek, an AI developed in China at a micro-fraction of the costs of American AIs has driven conversation this week as its very existence drove down the valuations of the techogiants who thought they had the lock on development of AI models. Gavin Klondike, our resident AI expert, joins us to explain the 5Ws (who, what, where, when, and how) of DeepSeek. We also dive into the Verge's clickbaity treatment of clickbait SEO, the sub-Reddit Revolution as links from X get b...
Feb 13, 2025•1 hr 25 min
This edition moves back and forth between coverage of several unique areas of search, AI, and web work. We start covering the DataCoup, which is our "deal-with-it" name for the changes being made by Elon Musk and his crew of youthful hackers to the very nerve centers of the US Government and the suspicion an off-the-books version of Grok is being trained on US government data. We note that DeepSeek is likely helping the Chinese state harvest American data almost as quickly as Elon Musk is hoveri...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 16 min
The power of the Billionaires' businesses mixed with the powers of The State. An image from the inauguration showing Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and other tech giants in the very front row showed us how clearly and forcefully the new Technoligarcy is taking charge. That is the very definition of fascism in action. In this episode, Jim and Kristine talk about the shift in power and work to work through their thoughts on how the futures of search, social m...
Jan 23, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Matt Mullenweg is seeing more legal resistance to his WP-Emperor schtick and reacting like a manbaby about it. In a similar universe, the outgoing President warns of the coming transition to an oligarchy run by big-tech. Meta moves to the far right by removing fact checking and allowing the racist and multi-phobic content back on its platform as alternative facts carry as much or more weight in this new regime than reality does. ChatGPT moves towards agentatic services like scheduling and perfor...
Jan 16, 2025•1 hr 6 min
The world itself is burning as hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through the sudden and sweeping changes coming to search results pages in 2025. While AI-faked images of the Hollywood sign burning are posted as news on partisan websites we talk about the sudden drought of fresh content for LLMs to train on now that everything ever written has been consumed and the use of AI created synthetic data to putty over an increasingly pockmarked information environment. While highly informed...
Jan 09, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Welcome to the start of the second quarter of the 21st century. In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is a year of the Snake, a period of extreme transformation as old ways are shed and new ones adopted. It seems like an apt description of what the coming year will be like. Things are going to change and if the news of this week is any indication, that change is so sweeping and encompassing, it is creating its own vortex in which all that falls in gets weirder and weirder and weirder. Here's a short list ...
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 15 min
An all star SEO panel made up of Mordy Oberstein (Wix Studio), Mark Traphagen (seoClarity), and Jenny Halasz (JLH Marketing) joins hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to look back at the events, changes, and ideas of 2024 and into a new world of even more rapid change as AI grows from its infancy towards its adolecence. An incredibly interesting conversation between five veteran search marketers, each with a unique perspective on the industry. This is the last show of 2024. On behalf of th...
Dec 19, 2024•1 hr 13 min
Duda's cofounder Amit Glatt found time to sit with us to talk about the history, evolution, and future of the website builder and management platform he helped create. Since its founding 15 years ago, Duda has grown to become one of the top-tier enterprise website builders on the web. Duda feels like it's on a growth sprint right now. They have some interesting tools for web makers to work with and are committed to developing a better builder for SEOs and professional website developers. Amir hi...
Dec 14, 2024•31 min
A December 2024 Core Update started running a few short days after the November 2024 Core Update ended and mere hours before this episode was recorded live to podcast. At the same time, Google reported minor but persistent indexing issues. Otherwise, Matt Mullenweg was last seen retreating with his tail between his legs following the judicial spanking he received trying to defend his actions at WordPress against WP-Engine in court. Meanwhile, Google throws stones in a grand glass house accusing ...
Dec 12, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Recorded in the week after Black Friday hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through a bunch of stories affecting the world of search. The November 2024 Core Update conveniently ended an hour before we went into the recording session. We talk a bit about winners and losers and what we think will be the effects of this core update (while jokingly anticipating an upcoming December 2024 Core Update). We also talk about Bluesky's growth and vibe, using AI in unmanned weaponry, Bing withhol...
Dec 05, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Twas the eve before Thanksgiving and through the studio's haunts, no creatures were talking or recording our thoughts. The channels all hummed with inactivity because the producers went home to be with family. When out of the ether some showbiz thoughts clattered, The Show Must Go On!, because nothing else matters. - Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger take a last look at the week's news before heading off on well deserved four day weekends. - We cover the ongoing Google Core Update, new n...
Nov 28, 2024•1 hr 27 min
It was a busy news week with a continuing November Core Update, Google's Site Reputation Abuse Policy Update and the subsequent major publisher crackdown, the DOJ recommending the sale of Chrome and possibly Android, lost GA4 data, a now missing GSC Experience Report, OpenAI deleting critical incriminating evidence by mistake, Meta level pig-butchering, the TwiXter eXodous, and the promise of BlueSky on the horizon. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also talk about Gemini AI making death...
Nov 25, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Recorded two days after the 2024 presidential election, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger contemplate the outcome and how a Trump presidency might affect the tech and search marketing industries. Tech can expect an era of deregulation, starting with Trump's aim to strip away federal safeguards over AI development, deferring any regulatory oversight to individual states. With enormous shifts expected throughout the federal government affecting so many different sorts of outcomes, it's difficult...
Nov 07, 2024•1 hr 21 min
The Helpful Content Update wasn't about the content and the hope of recovery wasn't about to happen. Web publishes hit by the Helpful Content Update in September 2023 who attended Google's Web Creator Summit at the Googleplex this week were told the hope they'd held for seeing their rankings recover were likely in vain and that those placements were gone and not likely coming back. Oh, and it wasn't about the content. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the disappointment and what dis...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Jono Alderson is a well known SEO Consultant, one of the top WordPress contributors, and a bonafide Digital Superstar. He joined Jim and Kristine to fill us in on the backstory and implications of the ongoing drama in the world of WordPress. Jono has been around for a long time. He knows where the bodies are buried and in this interview, he explains how it unfolded to get to where we're at now. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://red...
Oct 26, 2024•46 min
Longtime WordPress contributor Jono Alderson joins Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger to discuss the very weird goings on at WordPress. The interview starts around the 35 minute mark. Before Jono joins us, Kristine and Jim discuss the news of the week including a short update on the WordPress situation and stories from Google, OpenAI, TwiXter, and more. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/webcology/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: ...
Oct 24, 2024•46 min
A busy, news heavy show has hosts Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger cover three major stories, each of which could occupy a full hour long show. The WordPress mega-drama continues with the founder's faction at Automattic grabbing control of one of their rival WP-Engine's best known custom WP-Contributions, Advanced Custom Fields in a forking incident many think close to theft. Also this week, leading SEO and Digital Marketing Tool Maker, SEMrush acquired one of the industry's leading informati...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 5 min
