INP in Core Web Vitals, Programmatic SEO and TrendWatch
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Show notes
This week, Jack Chambers-Ward is joined once again by Mark Williams-Cook to discuss:
- INP replacing FID in CWV
- Programmatic SEO - Just spam or a worthwhile tactic?
- TrendWatch June 2023 from SISTRIX
Transcript
Jack: Hello and welcome to this SISTRIX with Candour. Hello, Mark. I am Jack. We are hosting on SISTRIX's YouTube channel. We are the Search With Candour team and we're here to talk about INP replacing FID in CWV, talking programmatic SEO, and we're also going to be talking all about Trend Watch. We should probably start off with some Trend Watch, right?
Mark: Let's do it.
TrendWatch June 2023
Jack: We're here on the SISTRIX YouTube channel. We love SISTRIX. Thank you for having us, SISTRIX. And we're going to talk all about some TrendWatches I've been saving for you, Mark, because so often with Trend Watch we do have TikTok trends and...
Mark: Trendy things.
Jack: Trendy things?
Mark: That I know nothing about.
Jack: And I happen to do research beforehand so I can cheat and know what they are.
Mark: You get to look cool.
Jack: Exactly. I get to look cool. So let's dive into the first Trend Watch, shall we, and talk all about something you know far more than I do. Let's talk about some Huel, shall we? We've got some lovely data here from SISTRIX. If you go to SISTRIX.com/trends, you can subscribe to the Trend Watch newsletter and get 10 trends delivered straight to your inbox. And sometimes Nicole, the data journalist, will slip in some little bonus trends as well, which I very, very much appreciate. But let's talk about Huel. What is Huel, Mark, and why do you think it's so popular over the last few years?
Mark: Well, Huel to me is fantastic because I've never been a foodie. So I'm definitely in the camp of, if I could just take a pill every day and didn't have to eat, but had to forgo taste and all that for that, I would be there with my lifetime subscription.
Jack: You want some Soylent Green type stuff, right?
Mark: Yeah. It's slightly different now, and having a family and cooking for other people is nice. But especially...
Jack: You can't just feed your family gruel all the time and make them happy.
Mark: But especially for if you're living on your own, the amount of time buying, cooking, preparing a meal versus the eight and a half minutes of scoffing it and then the washing up, to me was just not optimal. So Huel is a…I can’t remember whether…they do all kinds of products now, but the one that I use is this basically powder that you put water in. I think it tastes lovely and it's meant to be nutritionally complete, is how they advertise it. Basically meaning it's not a weight loss thing or anything like that. It's a meal replacement thing, and they say it's got pretty much everything in. I haven't looked into that, so I do eat other things, but it's mainly I have it for breakfast, sometimes for lunch. That's Huel for me.
Jack: I think it's a big part of everybody's so busy these days, and I know you do it and I know a couple of people here at Candour do it, and I know plenty of busy people in the tech world and the SEO world do it as well. You're just able to just make a meal in literally 30 seconds, get some things in there, shake it up...
Mark: Love it.
Jack: ... and you have essentially what looks like a protein shake kind of thing. I know there are high protein versions of it. There's the Huel Black, which is the version of it. And you mentioned there's also these new things where they have, I think there's a stir-fry, there's a noodle thing, so it's like fuel's version of a pot noodle, but obviously 15 times healthier than a pot noodle.
Mark: That's still a bridge too far to me. I'm kind of like, it either just needs to be a powder or I need a meal. I don't need a weird thing in the middle.
Jack: You want the grill, not the meal.
Mark: It's kind of like things where people are like, would you like a chocolate pizza with marshmallows on it? No, I wouldn't. I like chocolate, I like pizza and I like marshmallows, but don't make them all come together. So powder or nothing.
Jack: Viewers, listeners, let us know. Would you want a chocolate pizza marshmallow combination?
Mark: I'm sure someone has had one.
Jack: I think I had one many years ago. I had a fruit pizza once in Spain. It was very strange. Very strange. An interesting data point I wanted to point out for this one specifically is talking about the power of social and influence as well. I think Nicole brings out a really nice little data point from SISTRIX social, so you can use SISTRIX to look at social data and get an idea of influencers in your industry as well. Mentioned specifically Steven Bartlett who, I don't know if you know, Mark, is the host of the Diary of a CEO podcast, which is the biggest podcast in the UK? And I think he was one of the early investors in Huel, and he has a pretty big reach. So I think that's probably had a pretty big impact on its steady... And then this is an interesting graph. There's some interesting spikes there. It's not particularly smooth. There are some ups and downs.
Mark: There is a hump in 2020 there.
Jack: I wonder why?
Mark: I believe this is down to lockdown because there was, in the UK at least, when we were having lockdown, some worries about food supplies, food shortages.
Jack: Oh yeah, of course.
Mark: And it came apparent that Huel is the perfect apocalypse food. I'm sure that's not how they want to market it, but essentially if you've got water, you've got a cheap access to food.
Jack: As long as you can make clean water, I guess, then you can make a new lunch or a new breakfast for you, right? Let's talk about something else you also know about, because we've been talking a lot about cybersecurity here at Candour. We're always trying to keep up to date with the latest best practices and all that kind of stuff. And something I know we talked about a lot two years ago on my onboarding here at Candour is password management and how important that is and how people are now finally getting on board with a lot of password manager stuff. And compared to the Huel graph, I think this is more what you'd expect from a smooth overall long-term growth, right? There aren't those humps as you worded them with the Huel graph. This is a much more steady growth for searches for password manager in the UK, and hopefully this means more people are just conscious of cybersecurity and being more careful with their stuff and not just writing it down on a Post-It note on your desk and stuff like that.
Mark: You can only hope. These kinds of trend lines are always interesting to me because they tell you different things. This to me shows a change in public consciousness about a topic. And that's going to be a combination of loads of different things, we've had big breaches in the media quite a few times. So big sites like LinkedIn getting breached. I know cybersecurity professionals have been professing this for years, but the two things all come together of the, okay, well one of the most likely ways you're going to get compromised is if you reuse passwords. So you mustn't reuse passwords, but then how do you memorise passwords or record them for 10, 20, 50, 100 different websites?
Jack: And that's the thing. As the amount of accounts are growing now. Take anybody who is, just a normal person on social media, we now have, with the whole thing going on with X and whatever Twitter is at the moment, then you now have Threads, which is also your Instagram account, which is also your Facebook account, but you need to log into all of them separately, and then various different mail things, and maybe you have a work email and a home email and then a spam email to send all your subscriptions to. Everyone has dozens and dozens and dozens of accounts that require passwords and stuff these days. And I know I've experienced it with my parents of they are very not online people. I think I've mentioned them on the show before. Bless my parents. They're in their 60s, they're retired, they don't need the internet in their lives particularly. And my mom got a smartphone for the first time for her birthday this year, and is very excited to use WhatsApp and has sent me all of about four WhatsApps, I think. And I regularly get, what's the Netflix password? What's my email password? What's this? What's that? So not only do I have to remember my own password sometimes, I also have to remember my parents' passwords. And password managers solve all this problem. They auto generate and save everything, and you essentially need that one power user, that one security key that logs you in and then you have access to all your stuff.
Mark: So do they use password managers?
Jack: I don't think they do currently. I should probably set them up on a password manager.
Mark: I couldn't get my parents on board. Well, my dad specifically. I showed him and he agreed it was great and super helpful, and then he found out it costs more than nothing, and then was no longer interested in it.
Jack: That might be a sell to my dad as well, potentially. Dad's not interested in paying for passwords. Well, I can remember my password for free. It's like, well you keep calling me. So I guess if that's free in your mind, then sure.
Mark: We need to start charging.
Jack: Maybe, yeah. I did threaten to charge for IT consultancy and stuff.
Mark: PaaS. Password as a Service.
Jack: There we go. That's the next Candour branch. After AlsoAsked, we're going from SaaS to PaaS. So thank you, first of all, to SISTRIX for supplying the fantastic Trend Watch. Very interesting data, very interesting trends. And like I said, I think it says a lot about wider cultural movements. It can also give you some really interesting data into particular industries as well. Like I said at the top of the show, go to SISTRIX.com/trends, subscribe to the newsletter there, and you'll get them delivered to your inbox every single month.
Interaction to Next Paint replaces First Input Delay in Core Web Vitals
Now let's transition and talk about some Core Web Vitals. I used a bunch of letters at the beginning of the episode. We talk about INP, FID, and CWV. We know CWV. Hopefully viewers and listeners out there, you know Core Web Vitals by now. They've been around for a little while. They've been around for a few years. So maybe you're not so familiar with the individual parts and the shift that's going to happen coming up in March of 2024. And this is the announcement from Google here. We'll transition over to their blog post on the developer side from the fantastic Martin Split. Shout out to you, Martin. You're awesome. Let's talk about INP, Mark. Let's define them first of all, I guess.
Mark: Let's talk about INP.
Jack: It's not a catchy name, is it really?
Mark: Yeah. So as Jack said, Core Web Vitals. We've spoken about them lots before. It's essentially Google's metrics to measure performance of webpages, not necessarily speed always. So performance covers lots of things like cumulative layout shifts or how much the site jumps about when it's loading. And the actual docs for Core Web Vitals give some really nice reasons why you should care about them.
Jack: Yeah, definitely.
Mark: My favorite one is actually their first one, which is when a site meets the Core Web Vitals thresholds, research showed that users were 24% less likely to abandon a page. So Google has these traffic light thresholds of green, amber, red, and they're saying essentially when you're coming in the green, you're pretty much getting 25% more traffic nice for free. Which when you think, even if you've got not a particularly high traffic site, how much would it cost you to acquire 24% more users? Probably more money than fixing your Core Web Vitals.
Jack: And we've talked about that a lot from a user experience perspective. This isn't just SEO, this isn't us just talking about getting more rankings and getting more traffic. It can have a huge effect on how people actually experience your site, navigate your site, and as we're about to talk about how they interact with your site and how that's now being reclassified and understood by Google, right?
Mark: 100%. So when I talk to clients about Core Web Vitals, it's always performance led and the SEO side is an added benefit. So it may increase our rankings and that's great, but it's primarily for users that we're doing this. So speaking about users and INP, what is INP? INP stands for Interaction to Next Paint. And as Jack said, this is a pending Core Web Vital metric, and it's actually going to replace one of the three existing Core Web Vital metrics, which is FID, First Input Delay. They essentially both measure latency with user interaction, but in two different ways. So INP assesses responsiveness using data from the event timing API. When an interaction causes a page to become unresponsive, that is a poor user experience.
Jack: Right. That makes sense.
Mark: INP observes the latency of all interactions a user has made with a page and reports a single value, which all or nearly all interactions were below. A low INP means a page was consistently able to respond quickly to all, or the vast majority of, user interactions. So that's Google's definition of INP. And if you read the post from Google, it's hilarious. Well, I found this hilarious. So they have all this technical stuff and it's really interesting what they're doing, but the opening gambit they had was Chrome usage data shows that 90% of a user's time on a page is spent after it loads.
Jack: Is that not common sense? Unless your page is taking so long to load, astronomically long to load.
Mark: I respect, obviously, before you make statements, you should have data to back them up even if they seem obvious.
Jack: It's better than just assuming I guess.
Mark: 90% of the user's time is spent on a page after it loads. So the difficulty here was that FID, which was First Input Delay, was measuring the latency until the webpage was essentially interactable. Now the issue is that most interactions obviously happen after that. So even if that FID is fast, you can still have a horrible, clunky, unresponsive website. So this is what they're trying to tackle with this new metric.
Jack: And I think we're moving towards this kind of interactivity measurement so much so... We talked about GA4 so much recently. It's a big topic still, now it's launched in July. And the fact that they're tracking events specifically and how users are interacting with the site, I think is a conscious decision from Google to understand, and help you understand, and track better how people are actually using your site rather than just an arbitrary like, yay, it loaded quickly, of like, okay, cool. After that, what happens? Do your menus actually still work? Do your dropdown menus, dropdown boxes, anything, even clicking internal links, basic stuff like that, is that all loading correctly? Is it still responsive to users? It's not just that initial moment. It is, as they defined, the overall interactivity rate. And I think the fact that Google are so driven by events in GA4 is almost a reinforcement of this movement as a whole, I think.
Mark: What's interesting to me as well is that, to put it in nice, simple layman's terms that I love, Google's essentially saying that looking fast, appearing to be fast, appearing to be performant, is psychologically the same effect as being fast. And we had this with the largest content-full paint. So the other web vital metric, which is they're measuring the time, not until the whole page is loaded, they don't really care so much about that, but when the main content has loaded and the user can begin interacting, so again, they've got data that's shown if you've got two pages, one takes four seconds and one takes eight seconds to completely load, but the one that takes four seconds is completely blank until that four seconds, whereas the one that takes eight seconds after one second, you can start reading it, users tend to be much more satisfied with the technically slower page. And this is essentially the kind of thing IMP's trying to measure.
So Google explains it like this: they say good responsiveness means that a page responds quickly to interactions made with it. When a page responds to an interaction, the result is visual feedback, which is presented by the browser in the next frame, the browser presents. Visual feedback tells you if, for example, you add an item to an online shopping cart and to know it's been added, you get a little status thing updating or whether a mobile navigation menu's been opened, a login form content's being authenticated. So all the actions that you're doing that might actually be quite complex in the background. Some interactions will take longer than others, but especially for complex interactions, it's important to quickly present an initial visual feedback as a cue to the user that something is happening.
The time until the next paint is the earliest opportunity to do this. Therefore, the intent of IMP is not to measure all the eventual effects of the interaction, such as network fetches, UI updates from other asynchronous operations, but the time in which the next paint is being blocked. That to me was really interesting because it got me thinking about other software and computers and when we use them, and the sixth sense you build as to if it's working. So I don't know, are you a Windows 95 user? Are you of that age?
Jack: Just about, yeah. I think that was the era when I got my first computer.
Mark: So do you remember when stuff crashed on Windows 95 and you try and drag the window around?
Jack: Oh, yeah. So a friend of mine built a site the other day for a retro game company he knows, and they purposefully have it look like it's built in Windows 95.
Mark: Nice.
Jack: And their contact form is a movable little 95 window, and it leaves that cascading trail.
Mark: Yes, that's what I was after. So that was your hint, your visual hint, on 95 that something's gone horribly wrong.
Jack: Like Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat and they got the kick like...
Mark: And you get it even now on Windows 10, 11, some sort of Windows user. If something's taking ages, and then I try and move the window and the window won't let me drag it, I know that something's gone bad. And it's kind of the same with webpages. You use webpages and you get that feeling when we've done something, you get no visual feedback, and a few seconds have passed and you're like, is it broken?
Jack: And there's a whole, I can't say culture. Culture's a strong word. There's a whole phrase and terminology around rage clicking, right?
Mark: Yes.
Jack: And I love this whole thing of people getting frustrated with sites and just trying to... You open a thing and maybe it opens and then closes again. You're like, what, what, what, what? No, open again, open again. You click, click, click, click, click, trying to click it. And there's brilliant things like Hot Jar and...
Mark: They measure rage clicks.
Jack: ... audience trackers. They can track rage clicks, which I find... Has a user clicked a bunch of times, 15 times in a second, frantically mashing their mouse. That's probably not a good user experience.
Mark: I don't mean to lean too hard into my dad on this episode, but literally when something doesn't do what he wants, he just clicks more and harder.
Jack: I was going to say, is it individual, like bang, bang, individual clicks?
Mark: But it doesn't measure how hard you're pressing the mouse button.
Jack: Is your dad a piano player or something? There's that responsiveness.
Mark: I think it would be percussion if it was an instrument for him, but...
Jack: Arguably piano is a percussive instrument.
Mark: That's true, that's true. That's very true actually.
Jack: Unless your dad's busting out a harpsichord or something.
Mark: I just mean stuff you hit.
Jack: Mark's dad, certified drummer and star of SISTRIX with Candour. So let's talk about the timeline for this as well, because we've actually got a little rage click example here as well. A little example given by Google. So what is INP? And you can see the bad example on the left-hand side, there's some rage clicking and some wiggling of the mouse, some frustration going on the left-hand side there. I was talking about dropdown menus and FAQs and all that kind of stuff earlier. You have a nice experience, a smooth experience on the right-hand side. That is how you would perceive responsiveness as a user. And coming back round to the timeline that Google have provided us here, we're talking about March 2024. But people are already talking about this. People are already gathering data on this and having a look and trying to understand it. And there was a brilliant writeup from Jamie Indigo for the Wix SEO hub. They had picked all the Core Web Vitals and basically, why do they matter? I think the title was... Let me grab it just here, bear with me as I load up. "Real user metrics versus lab data." So talking about how to actually measure real user data and where you can get that from, and is Lighthouse the same as the Chrome user experience report and all this kind of stuff and what this all means. I'll put a link for that in the show notes, podcast listeners, that'll be in the description for you if you're watching on YouTube. And to the credit of Jamie, they have already dived into looking at INP, how that is different to FID, how it is measured with those tools, and what it means to you. And like we said, you can get ahead of the game here before March 2024 as Google is queuing us up and giving us enough notice, which...
Mark: Nice of them.
Jack: ... sometimes they don't.
Mark: Sometimes they don't, so it's nice.
Jack: It's nice to give us some notice. So now is the time to have a look at this, have a think about this, start chatting to developers and getting the ball rolling. At least getting the discussion started, I think, for considering INP to be a key part of Core Web Vitals. If that is a key part of your strategy and that has been a part of the things you're reporting to your clients or whatever it is, have a think about how you can interact with that and make it a part of your strategy going forward.
Mark: So as part of search console already, so if you have search console for your sites, if you go to the web vital section, you'll see right at the bottom there is already a section that will show you if you have any INP issues so you can get them resolved before it's integrated into the core metrics in March.
Jack: Nice, nice.
Mark: Nice.
Is programmatic SEO spam?
Jack: Let's talk about a less nice topic, shall we? A controversial topic in SEO, but something I think has been around for a while but is heating up once again. Let's talk about some programmatic SEO, and I guess we'll need to define what that is, but this was all kick started by a former guest on Search with Candour, friend of the show Lily Ray has appeared many times on SISTRIX's YouTube channel as well. Lily is fantastic for everything pretty much E-E-A-T and SEO in general. Let's have a look at the tweet from Lily Ray here. "Just dug into dozens of sites, seeing significant ranking volatility", because we've been talking about the update that's been happening recently, potential update, lots of volatility going on, "and many of them appear to be using a 'programmatic SEO.'" Programmatic SEO in quotes. "They're scraping and repurposing data from other sites to create huge numbers of hyper-specific landing pages about songs, maps, schools, pets, etc." The example Lily gives here, I think is a fantastic little one, all about something you and I know about Mark, video games and stuff, and it's like how long to beat? There is a how long to beat site that I frequent very regularly if I'm thinking about buying a new game or starting a new game. I don't have that much free time anymore now I'm a married man in my 30s, and I need to know is this going to be a hundred hours...? Is this the next six months of my life, or can I finish this over a weekend? That matters to me, apparently, in 2023. And it seems to be, this is not this site, for the record, How Long to Beat is awesome. This is somebody else scraping this data and basically just chucking and creating pages on all kinds of stuff around this kind of thing. And funny enough, we have a very similar experience with your, as we called it on the show many months ago, the canary in the coal mine kind of site, right? Because you were scraping, it was game FAQ data and stuff like that. There was...
Mark: Video game stuff.
Jack: Video game stuff, yeah.
Mark: So, I think the first thing to talk about is that programmatic SEO does seem to be in fashion again, but it is most definitely not new, to coin a phrase from Barry there. It's not new. So, I was doing programmatic SEO stuff, and lots of other people were, at least 15 years ago. There were people who actually made a living by just scraping data off the web and building databases, which they would then sell to other people, which were then the basis of programmatic SEO sites. Because to do programmatic SEO, you need some kind of structured data format to start with to build out those pages. Then way back when, I did one on... I had a gallery, a celebrity gallery website. And essentially what we'd do is we had a big list of celebrity names and then hyper-specific things. So name a celebrity for me.
Jack: Brad Pitt.
Mark: Brad Pitt. Okay, classic
Jack: Famous actor.
Mark: So we'll take someone like Brad Pitt and it would be everything like Brad Pitt walking, Brad Pitt running, Brad Pitt riding a bike, Brad Pitt jumping. And then everything from the top down, like Brad Pitt hair, Brad Pitt eyebrows, eyelashes, eyes, ears, nose, like everything.
Jack: How many people are searching for Brad Pitt's eyelashes? Eyebrows and hair I get. People would look for like, oh yeah, I want Brad Pitt's hairstyle or whatever, but eyelashes?
Mark: I was there on the zero volume keywords, day nought.
Jack: That's the real inspiration for Also Asked.
Mark: So essentially this site would go off, do a search, scrape an image, Y flip it, because that apparently used to get around Google's image filters, and build a page for that keyword. So you'd have millions and millions of pages around all these celebrities. It was, funnily enough, I'll express my naivety here, how I discovered that the internet had such an interest in feet.
Jack: Yeah, that's a whole conversation we probably shouldn't be having on this podcast.
Mark: It's a big thing, though. Every celebrity, essentially, it was pretty much the top search term.
Jack: If I've ever seen auto complete and you're just searching for an actor or a musician or whatever, that will crop up every time.
Mark: Way more than eyelashes.
Jack: Funnily enough.
Mark: Way more. So anyway, that worked really well until it didn't, like many, many programmatic SEO things. So this example that Lily Ray has shared with this volatility where this website has lost a lot of rankings, doesn't surprise me because I think what's happened there is, as with many programmatic SEO websites, Google is taking this probabilistic chance on, what page has got the best answer to how long this Harry Potter 3 game is? And then when you have literally a page with the page title, "How Long is this Harry Potter 3 Video Game on the PlayStation whatever", it's like, oh, that's probably quite a good bet. But then, I think further down the road, Google is looking at other things about how users are interacting on SERPs, if they're bouncing back to the SERP and checking something else out, before they strike these sites off. So I posted about this on LinkedIn and it generated a lot of quick discussion.
Jack: I can imagine.
Mark: Because as I said, a lot of people are talking about programmatic SEO, and some people are saying, oh, well it's going to be wiped out soon. I don't think anything's changed from Google's method of detecting this kind of stuff. I think initially it will probably always do well, because it looks like the shoe fits, but then on closer examination over a longer period, I think they've got a lot of data points where they can be like, actually this isn't very good, which is exactly what happened with our test site. Jack: Exactly, right. And whether it's Google updates or... This focus on E-E-A-T we've been talking about so much. And as I said, Lily being one of the most outspoken and...
Mark: Awesome.
Jack: ... biggest advocates, awesome advocates for E-E-A-T and its importance and things like that. This follow up tweet from Lily talking about how the people who are doing this programmatic SEO are trying to quote/unquote, "beat the SEO game" and add things like expert reviewers and copying expert quotes from other sites and all this kind of... Like updating the dates as if it's fresh content and all this kind of stuff. So it's weird, they're taking the principles, a lot of the E-E-A-T stuff, and just being dodgy with it, and making up reviews and stealing other people's quotes and all kinds of stuff. The principles are still there, but this is exactly what we've been talking about, where you would hope that Google eventually catches up with this kind of stuff. And I think a lot of the arguments you saw back on LinkedIn and arguments we've seen over the last, as you said, 20 years probably, is, well, it still ranks. Well, prove me wrong. I can make this rank full of rubbish, so...
Mark: It'll rank until it doesn't.
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
Mark: So I think there's a division there. So a lot of the advice that I give is essentially aimed at brands/companies that have a long-term view, which is...
Jack: That's always our strategy at the end of the day, right?
Mark: Yeah. Which is that we want to be here for the long haul. Now, those tactics, as I have said, will work. And there's endless new examples you can pick of them working. And it's very much selection bias when people say, well, but it ranked. It's like, yes, this one ranks until it doesn't.
Jack: And here's the thousands of others that don't and have been completely tanked.
Mark: And there will be 100 new ones that will rank for a while, but that's not a sensible, legitimate strategy for a business that wants to be around for 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 plus years, right?
Jack: Yeah, absolutely.
Mark: So I think it's worth considering, everything's got its place. If I was an affiliate and just running my sites, maybe it's something I'd look at doing.
Jack: Lily mentioned it there, they're full of ads, they're full of affiliate links, they make a quick buck.
Mark: The cost of doing it is low and the revenue generated is higher and on the bigger scale of things. Yet it's a bit of a, I think you've previously described it as a bad egg thing to do, but some of these big companies that do dominate SERPs aren't exactly nice companies anyway. So on the scale of things, I don't think there's much of a moral argument there. But it's just you don't want to see people get carried away with it. And I will say, I think to top it off, there are ways to use programmatic SEO nowadays that are legitimate, but it's more around building content briefs.
So if you've got a product and you want to compare it to 20 competitors, and then you list features, you could put that in a sheet. You could get people to fill out a database, you could use a little bit of AI stuff to do intros, outros, add some handwritten stuff in the middle, and you get still useful content that answers a question that didn't have an answer to it before, and has added something new, something valuable. If you're literally doing this, what Lily highlighted on scale, which is basically scraping, repurposing, you're not adding anything new, you're not validating it, so it could even be wrong, like the test site we had. A bunch of the information or that was just flat out wrong.
Jack: It was objectively wrong. It was like lining up the wrong information from which games, or just a bit of a recipe into a game site and all kinds of weird stuff. And I think talking about the wider conversation and a lot of the labels that are headed towards programmatic SEO, here is a quote from John Mueller from Google, "I love fire, but programmatic SEO is often a fancy banner for spam." And Robbie rank replies, you can see down below there, "Often, but not always" eyes emoji. And John, being salty John, "Forever the optimist."
Mark: Salty John. So John, obviously I'm suspended from X as it's now called.
Jack: Yes, you can see the logo, to my chagrin, the logo on top left there.
Mark: I'm living for salty John responses at the minute. I absolutely adore it and I miss it. And he's absolutely right. If you grabbed a million programmatic SEO sites, I would gamble a large amount of money that over 75% of them are just spam. Yes, there are ways to do it, as we said, kind of legit, but most of the time it's just people trying to make a quick buck, because it's an easy, quick, easy, dirty way to do it.
Jack: Yep. Quick, easy, dirty SEO, but it won't pay off in the long run.
Mark: Limited.
Jack: That's our new spinoff company. Well, that about wraps us up for this episode of SISTRIX with Candour. Thank you so much for joining us on YouTube. If you listen to this on the podcast, go and check out SISTRIX's YouTube channel. And if you're listening to this via the YouTube channel, go and listen to us on the podcast, because we have weekly episodes of Search With Candour coming out on whatever podcast app, whether that's Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, whatever you listen to podcasts on. Mark and I will be back next month for another edition of SISTRIX with Candour, right here on the SISTRIX YouTube channel. But of course, please do stay tuned, stay subscribed, and we'll see you very soon. Thank you very much for viewing, thank you very much for watching, and thank you very much for listening. See you then.
Mark: Bye bye.