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News: Google pay advertisers $100, face-swapping actors on SERPs, new free BrightLocal Academy course and more

Jack Chambers-Ward
Jack Chambers-Ward , Marketing and Partnerships Manager
05.12.2022 • 42 min read • Podcast

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Show notes

This week, Jack Chambers-Ward and Mark Williams-Cook co-hosted a live episode of Search With Candour on LinkedIn. On this live episode, Jack & Mark discussed:

This episode on Youtube:

Transcript:

Jack: Hello and welcome to episode 47 of season two of the Search With Candour podcast. I am your host Jack Chambers-Ward and joining me for two weeks in a row, I think that's a new record for the last six months or so, it's Mark Williams-Cook. How are you, Mark?

Mark: Very well, thank you.

Jack: It's nice to be doing a live one again, and this is going to be a little bit different to the last one we did, which was pretty much purely Q&A last time. This time we're actually going to do kind of a live recording of a normal episode and also if we have time at the end, and if you guys send in some questions on LinkedIn, we'll do a Q&A at the end of the episode as well. So the topics we've got for this week, we will be covering: - Google Ads paying advertisers a hundred dollars to enrol in automatically applying recommendations. - Actors are swapping roles and faces on the SERPs. Thanks to some wonky Wikipedia and knowledge graph stuff. - SISTRIX, funnily enough, speaking of knowledge graphs, have a new knowledge graph feature, which we'll be diving into later on. - BrightLocal Academy has launched a new free course all about how to create website content for local SEO. - We'll be diving into a little bit of the SEO metric chain from our friend Chris Green and also - Open AI launches, DaVinci-003.

So we're talking about AI towards the end of the show as well. Before we get into all of that, before Mark and I dive into talking about Google Ads, paying people to automatically apply recommendations, we are of course supported by the fantastic people over at Sistrix. And you can go to sistrix.com/swc and get access to their fantastic free tools such as their SERP Snippet generator, Hreflang validator checking your site's visibility index, and of course the all-important Google update tracker. We will actually be talking about some of SISTRIX's new features later on in the show. We've touched on some SERP comparison stuff that I know we really enjoy diving into over the last few months. And there is a new knowledge graph feature recently launched in SISTRIX's Labs, which we'll be diving into later on in the show. So Mark, why don't you kick us off? Let's talk about some Google Ads. Let's kick off with some PPC like we like to do on this show that is probably 95% SEO.

Mark: Yeah, this made it to the top of the agenda for me. Because it really got my back up and I thought this would be good therapy to talk about it on the show. So Google Ads is paying advertisers $100 to enroll in automatically applied recommendations. So for those that don't know, maybe don't manage Google Ads accounts themselves or are lucky enough to have an agency do that for them for several years now, there have been account managers at Google who are there, they say to help you with the optimization of your account. I don't believe they actually work directly for Google. They're kind of a third-party contractor and they will get in contact with whoever is managing the account and say they want to talk to you about the optimization of the account and essentially the collective experience. So this is definitely the experience I've had and from what I can see it seems to be the collective experience of everyone is, the recommendations that you will receive will generally be things like, why don't you increase your budget? Why don't you whack on some broad match key phrases?

Jack: Yeah, we've talked about this for it... But in a broader sense of Google wants you to spend more money so they could make more money basically. So spend more money and you'll get more leads like yeah, I know that's how that works. Even me, I don't do PPC. I've barely touched PPC in my career even. I know that's how that works. And I know that is very frustrating for the PPC team here and other people I've spoken to who do PPC regular basis. It's like, yeah, I know that doesn't help. And then it almost feels like you're being told off by Google for not being a hundred percent optimized to their recommendations and-

Mark: Well, yeah, there's two things in there. So Google did introduce what's called an optimization score, which is very different to the quality score that they've used to track how we'll add some pages performing. So their optimization score is a percentage that literally goes up when you apply their recommendations or actually goes up even if you dismiss them. It's in no way connected to how well-optimised or performing the account is. It's essentially how many of our automated recommendations you have reviewed and applied. And originally Google for their premier partners were going to set a minimum level that you had to apply those recommendations at which they backed off from in the end. But the main issue is that a lot of the changes that are pushed by the account managers are not done in context and with understanding of the business. So of course they're not made.

Now we've got a couple of emails here to show you what has happened in terms of this account communication with these account managers. So the first one, this is from June this year, and George Hill shared this on LinkedIn. This was an email he allegedly got from his Google account manager, which said it's the end of the quarter and we didn't discuss big accounts you're managing, can we discuss them next week? If you choose to ignore my messages, respond when there's something I can assist you with, then ghost me again. I will reach out to the end client and tell them you are refusing this free Google service tailored specifically for your clients.

Jack: Wow.

Mark: Yeah.

Jack: Literal threats from Google to contact clients.

Mark: So I've certainly heard about account managers jumping over the agency and directly contacting the client. And certainly I saw there was another example where there were several examples and the most recent one I've seen was in November, which was a tweet shared by Matt Janaway who was asking the Google ads liaison Jenny, her opinion essentially on this email, which was, hi Richard, a couple of point just had a call from Google since he's from their client, from a Google account manager. Basically wanted me to remove you and Matt from the account as you were not engaging with them. I believe it was from India as their English was very substandard. I think it was genuine as she had all your names and emails. I told her I would not deal with them directly. So again, in the case of them trying to remove the person paid to optimise the account. So there's basically a long kind of history now of this very hard line of “Apply these recommendations”. And this news then kind of didn't surprise me, but it was just so all those emails have been fed back to Google and they've come back publicly saying, this isn't the way we want to treat our valued partners. We will address this internally immediately.

Jack: So does everyone who's caught in the scandal like, oh no, yeah, that's not how we treat our customers. We have the utmost respect and blah blah blah blah blah. It's the tick the box, hold your hands up but don't actually take any responsibility for this stuff. Right?

Mark: I mean, Google's a huge company.

Jack: Sure, sure.

Mark: So it may take a long time for policy changes to be ratified by who they need to be and for that to get filtered down.

Jack: They do make billions of dollars from ads.

Mark: Oh, yeah-

Jack: So you would think that would be an important-

Mark: 2 hundred billion revenue.

Jack: -Yeah, it's 240 billion, something like that.

Mark: So yeah, then we've now jumped to, this was reported on seroundtable.com. We'll put a link to it in the show notes that essentially Google has been sending out an email that is offering people a hundred dollars of ad credit, so not even actually a hundred dollars to enrol in automatically applied recommendations. So skip the whole account manager trying to get you to do it. We'll just give you some free advertising credit if you do it. And as you can imagine, lots of people doing Google Ads is like, that doesn't even make sense on a financial level. I will lose more than a hundred dollars in value by just flicking all these switches. So...

Jack: Yeah, I saw a couple of people discussing on Twitter of like “Well what's your price then?” If you are running a small business and you have a Google Ads account and maybe you are not working with an agency like ourselves or not working with a freelancer, you're trying to do it all yourself. I'm like, oh, a hundred dollars for free that gives me the chance to test the water a little bit and see how it's going and all that kind of thing. And then when people... What if it was a thousand dollars or $10,000 would that, then you would probably get some agencies and some people who were doing this actually convinced to do it pretty quickly. I'm thought hmmm, can Google just bribe you into spending more money with them by giving you, and like you said, they're not even giving you money, they're giving you ad credit, which is-

Mark: Free to them.

Jack: -Free to them for them to then make money from those ads. So they're paying you with money that doesn't exist to make money that does exist for them.

Mark: I mean it's essentially just a small percentage discount for them on the clicks. So that's the thing. It's happening. We are not going to be doing it and I-

Jack: If clients are out there, if you're listening.

Mark: -Yeah, it's not going to happen. But yeah, that's the thing Google's doing.

Jack: Interesting. Interesting. Well another thing Google kind of maybe got wrong is the wrong way of putting it, but we saw a lot of weird stuff happening with actors' faces and even IMDB credits swapping around on the SERPs. And as you know, Mark, I'm a big film buff. I host another podcast all about bad movie sequels called Sequelisers. Go and check it out, free promotion for my other podcast.

Mark: Nice.

Jack: And specifically was highlighted that Jim Carrey and Paul Giamatti and also Arnold Schwarzenegger caught in this as well, but in a slightly different way. Well start with what I saw first, which was Paul Giamatti and Jim Carrey essentially swapping roles. So this is, you search Jim Carrey into Google, you get pictures of Jim Carrey, there's this lovable rubber faced young man over there. Then you get Paul Giamatti, Canadian American actor and there's a picture of Paul Giamatti there as well. And the same thing goes round. If you search Paul Giamatti, you going to still get a picture of Paul Giamatti but you get the credits and listings for films starring Jim Carrey. So what on earth was going on? And then other people started noticing that suddenly if you search Arnold Schwarzenegger movies such as The Terminator, a classic search Terminator cast, you get the Terminator there, there's Michael B, Lance Hendrickson, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Bill Paxton, Linda Hat... Wait, where's like the star, the biggest star-

Mark: The Terminator.

Jack: -The Terminator himself was not there.

Same thing happened for Conan the Barbarian as well. You get that... Basically the entire cast there. But no Arnold Schwarzenegger. You also got Arnold Schwarzenegger being swapped for his son who is also an actor Patrick Schwarzenegger. So you type in Arnold, you get Arnold's Wikipedia paid at the top here and all that kind of stuff. But to the right hand side, hello little knowledge graph, you get Patrick Schwarzenegger, which is bizarre. And a few people went around with a few different theories trying to work out what was going on. The most common theory I've seen is that Wikipedia was doing some updates and somebody had either overwritten something or was doing a mass update of a lot of movie credits and stuff like that. And was basically, this happened to be caught as these things were pulling through in the updates in Wikipedia and for whatever reason Paul Giamatti and Jim Carrey swapped places and Arnold Schwarzenegger disappeared. I'm not sure if it was like the URL of his Wikipedia changed. So the knowledge graph was trying to pull different information and went for the closest one, which was like-

Mark: I think there was a redirect at the time.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the fact that Patrick has Arnold as his middle name is obviously his son, pretty much the only other actor with the surname Schwarzenegger. Yeah, it was really bizarre. But it was nice for me to have my little movie and SEO crossover moment having me like, oh I know these people waited a minute. That's not normal.

But yeah, a weird little quirk in the SERPs that I thought was quite fun and quite interesting. It is now fixed, apparently. So if you do go searching for Jim Carrey credits or Paul Giamatti or Arnold Schwarzenegger, you will get the correct information about their movie history and cast for those movies and things like that as well. So yeah, it was very interesting and I thought a fun little quirk to kind of point out that Twitter SEO got a hold of.

Mark: The thing that I would take away from that as an SEO is I find it interesting how heavily Google was leaning on one particular source there.

Jack: Yeah, I thought that as well.

Mark: To build and update its knowledge graph. So we had discovered something along the way. I think it was Mark Rofe was the first person I saw do this was messing around with Quora, the Quora website and Yahoo answers to change what you were getting in rich snippet-type results. And then we played around with that and I did one that I think it stopped working now. But for about two years if you typed, how many arms does Mark Williams Cook have, it's Google. It would come up with a little answer box saying 512.

Jack: Because you'd put that on your blog, right?

Mark: Well I'd put it on my blog, I'd link to the Q and A from Quora.

Jack: There you go-

Mark: To do that. And Google had kind of lapped it up because it was like, there's a question, there's the answer, that's fine. And obviously it's got no way to kind of verify that, which is why it went through. But what surprised me about this was these are celebrities with high search volume and there are lots of potential sources about them on the internet that should roughly be in sync. So I was surprised that because Wikipedia changed that Google just took that as right. That's correct. I'm not going to check. There was no system in place to check the veracity of that change. It was just like cool. Yeah, they vanished and they're now them. Carry on.

Jack: Especially with things like IMDb around and Rotten Tomatoes and so many other huge databases of information specifically about movies and actors where it is, again, IMDB is publicly edited, so is Wikipedia now much more controlled than it was a few years ago? But still they're publicly edited stuff and you can get yourself added to those things as a contributor and all that kind of stuff. So it is a bit weird that it was all just kind of taken as gospel and I could write anything about myself and be like, yeah, get my own Wikipedia page and then do it that way.

Mark: It makes me think maybe, and this is, I'm sure Google will deny this and I'm probably wrong, but it does maybe make me think there is some kind of special case for Wikipedia in Google. I mean I'm thinking would, again, this is probably my ignorance and I'm sure I'm happy to be corrected if someone could tell me why, but from an algorithm point of view, how it would end up relying so heavily how it would pick that one site with all other things being equal and how it evaluates them.

Jack: Yeah. 'Cause funny enough, Wikipedia always comes up top in visibility index like charts from Sistrix as well. Whenever we talk about the most visible billable UK domains and stuff like that, we're met going outside of retail and stuff that we talk about fairly often. You go to just general visibility, there's lots of new sites. Wikipedia is absolutely top of that list pretty consistently. So yeah, the fact that they feature in knowledge graphs and featured snippets all over the place probably is a huge factor-

Mark: I mean it-

Jack: -In that.

Mark: It could be connected to that as well and just sets off that trail of thinking that it is interesting. So many things broke so quickly and so badly.

Jack: Just a little Wikipedia change. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of Sistrix and the knowledge graph as well, I mentioned at the top of the show they have a brand new feature that lets you get knowledge graph data directly for your keywords. And essentially you will get the name, the top keyword, the top URL, the amount, so the number of keywords that URL is showing for the knowledge graph and the list of opportunities. So a list of keywords for which the knowledge graph is displayed. You actually get a little display. This is the example they use in the article, which I will post in the show notes. So you can go and check that out at search.withcandour.co.uk. They dive into a bit of rhs.org so we're talking about flowers and stuff and you can actually get an idea of what the knowledge graph is doing for this kind of stuff coming through, looking at keywords specifically now as well. And Mark and I are dodging around the side of the screenshot there. Sorry audio listeners, we are dodging around on the video of a screenshot hosted on the video and you can also go through and look at it from a domain and keyword discovery perspective as well. So Sistrix is really good for kind of dividing up the different sides of being able to look at something from a keyword perspective, from a domain perspective. And then this is specifically this final screenshot here from the keyword discovery point of view as well. So it's a really excellent way of identifying opportunities from the knowledge graph there as well. Like I said, all these screenshots and this data is all taken from the update in the change log on Sistrix.com and I will post a link for that in the show notes and you can go out and check some fantastic knowledge graph data for you and your clients using Sistrix in the future.

Next up we have a free course for local SEO and I've actually done a few of these courses before, I'm halfway through this course already! I started it this morning from the fantastic bright local and previous guest on the show, the fantastic Claire Carlile as well. I will flash up a little thing on the screen here for the video viewers.

Mark: There she is.

Jack: There we go. Fantastic Claire. She's brilliant. She's a fantastic host. Really good at explaining things very clearly. Very simply, if it's your first time trying local SEO, this is a brilliant, brilliant course to start off with. And I'm basically just trying to brush up on some local SEO stuff 'cause I know some clients are looking into some local SEO stuff at the moment. And I haven't done it in a couple of years pretty much since I started here at Candour. So I need to make sure I'm still up to date on all the usual stuff. And there's a bunch of free courses and stuff on the Bright Local Academy. Like I said, links for this will be in the show notes as well and you can go and check out all of that stuff. A few of them are hosted by Claire. I've done all of those and I'm halfway through this one at the moment as well.

There's everything from keyword discovery and research stuff all the way through to this latest one, which is how to create website content for local SEO. And actually Claire dives around and talks about the different parts of the funnel. So bottom of the funnel content, middle of the funnel content, top of the funnel content, how to do your keyword research, how to understand local searcher intent. It covers loads of different stuff in about eight different segments. There's a little test and an assessment and you can get a little certification at the end of the course as well. So like I said, links to that will be in the show notes or you can go to academy.brightlocal.com And go straight there and get them all lovely free courses for you.

Mark: Nice. I will be checking that out also.

Jack: Yeah, I saw a couple people talking about it on Twitter and recommending it and things like that and yeah, I'm about 45% of the way through according to the app. So I'm enjoying it so far.

Mark: Quick work. So this is something I discovered just before we came on the show, which is by an SEO I've known for quite a long time. He's actually come down and done Sistrix training for us in Norwich. It's Chris Green and he has put together this wonderful image for what he calls the SEO metric chain. And it's got a post to go with it on his website, which is chris-green.net. We'll of course link to it in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk but I wanted to talk through it quickly because just from seeing this image, I immediately loved it.

Jack: Same.

Mark: Because essentially it's the same approach that we've developed over quite a few years and I've never seen anyone put it quite so well in terms of visually. So this is talking about SEO and the kind of metrics that you want to report on with the left side of these metrics. Having higher technical value or being closer to technical value and the right side being closer to financial value. And this is super important in terms of when you are speaking to your client or your internal stakeholders and talking about SEO and the progress and the success, you need to understand where they sit on this kind of value chain and what they're going to be interested in. So it may be FDs, CEOs, MDs are essentially only interested in financial value and they don't want to hear about crawl requests. They're really not interested, but maybe the dev team, they're not so interested in revenue, they want things to be functioning and working so you want to talk to them about crawl errors and such.

So yeah, starting from their left technical metrics. So crawl requests, tongue twists, cruel errors, pages, index and excluded pages, all of this is available in Search Console and of course is the foundation. If you are starting out doing SEO, you need these things to be good and this is how you measure them if you want good visibility and rankings because if you're having crawl issues. If you're having problems with pages being excluded, obviously you're not going to get the visibility. So that's obviously the kind of reporting you do it maybe like a technical audit kind of level.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: Something we talk to clients quite a bit about is visibility and rank tracking. And personally I'm quite surprised I see quite a few people in the SEO community kind of throwing a bit of shade on rank tracking saying it's not that useful and why do you care about that? Good SEO only cares about organic revenues.

Jack: It's all about the money. Yeah, exactly.

Mark: Yes it is. But there's a road here that we're going down.

Jack: You and I were talking in, I'll take the screen off and briefly, you and I were talking about this with a client the other day. In fact, we had to, we're in the early stage of this relationship, we're working with them and we've seen a big increase in impressions, which is fantastic from all the kind of technical stuff we've been doing to the site. The clicks haven't started coming through here and we were like, that's all part of the process. And essentially kind of like you were saying, mark, when you're first starting off with the site, you start off with a lot of these technical updates and you're eventually moving from left to right essentially on this chart and then talking about, okay, we're starting to get rankings now, now we're getting clicks coming through. Then you can talk about transactions and revenue and all that kind of stuff. And it's that progress step by step and yeah, explaining that to the client, I wish we had this chart for that meeting the other day and I was like, this is perfect. Oh my god, could I just show this to the client and be like, there you go. We're currently at this stage and we're working with growing our rankings, creating new pages, all this kind of stuff, the clicks will come, the transactions and revenue will come and yeah, it's a perfect example from Chris here of an easy way to lay it out.

Mark: And the great thing is he hasn't watermarked it or anything so they can't just use it. Yeah. And I think that that phase here, the visibility ranking is actually one of the most important because it's where people can get cold feet when they're not seeing additional traffic and revenue. So if you move your some core rankings from 90th to 50th to 30th to 10th, that's brilliant, but you're not going to get any more revenue, probably no more visitors from that.

Jack: Yeah. Again, something we talk about regularly is once you are, well before you get into that top 10, even top five, even top three, realistically, you're not talking about clicks. But you can still be making progress. And again, it's that if you're working in early stages, if you're working in a small site that's only just starting to build its library of content and things like that, you're going to start off probably ranking 40th or 50th or whatever. Before you were able to build up internal links, get back links coming into the site, all that kind of stuff.

In those early days you're going to kind of see those rankings. Oh yeah, we've improved by 20 places from 60 to 40. Cool, yeah that's made me no more money, that's gave me no more traffic on the site. Ah, it will, don't worry. We'll get there. And as you build, as you support, as you continue to grow that site, you then can then start pushing up. We're actually going to get 70, 80, 90% of the clicks in the top five and top three. So yeah, I think that's brilliant, brilliant work by Chris there to really kind of lay out clearly and I'll DM Chris after this and be like, can I use this in my client meetings, clicks 'cause this is great.

Mark: So going onto the kind of search console data, again there impressions and clicks are really when you are landing on the first page is when your impressions will spike and then all things being well you should be getting more clicks, which is again... That's at the lion’s share of reporting for me because you lose fidelity again when you get to organic sessions. Obviously, you're relying on onsite analytics, which is not a precise science.

Jack: And there's getting less and less so with GDPR and GA4 not being implemented correctly and people not understanding how that's all working.

Mark: But so the organic transactions, revenue and session to an extent are longer-term goals. So yeah, absolutely brilliant. If you are starting out doing SEO and you are struggling to communicate things with clients with reporting, this will leap you ahead if you haven't had time to work through it yourselves. Brilliant, very, he's made complex things simple, which I think is very hard to do. So hat off Chris, really, really great job.

Jack: Absolutely. I especially appreciate the actual kind of ways to measure things at the bomb there. You mentioned Mark, like it says Google Search Console, Google Analytics, this is what you should be looking at for these things at this stage rather than just find whatever, wherever. I don't know if you're starting out brand new and you don't know where to look to find clicks and impressions or where you're going to get your pages indexed or whatever it is on this chart. There's a brilliant little guide there from Chris. And yeah, hat's off to you Chris. Excellent, excellent work.

Mark: I don't know if we've got any questions, if we can see...

Jack: I've not seen any comments on the comments. I've seen a couple come in, but yeah, we'll keep an eye out. If you do have any questions, now's the time to send them in. We are coming up to the half an hour mark so we will be diving into-

Mark: Yeah, we've got a few.

Jack: -Got a couple. Can you hope he comes here?

Mark: Like it. Thank you.

Jack: Thanks James Charles Adams.

Mark: Brilliant. Yeah, we've got a couple in there. Cool. So finally the last segment. I get to talk more about AI.

Jack: Yay. We've talked a lot about ai, we kind of covered it a lot when we talked about the recent Google ranking systems, updated guide there. They talk a lot about AI but we're kind of coming in it from a different perspective. We've had AI introduce the show, we've had AI close the show and tell us SEO horoscopes and things like that. So welcome back AI. Welcome back to the show.

Mark: So we've covered, so what I want to talk about is OpenAI have released a new version in their GPT3, a new model called DaVinci-003. So we've only been up to Davinci 002 and if you've played around with OpenAI, you would've seen, there's different models they use that are kind of good at specific things. And I got into this conversation actually with Darren Shore from White Spark on LinkedIn. Someone I, very much respect and he said something really interested me and started off quite a long thread here, which is with an increase in AI-generated content, it's no wonder Google is focusing on EAT. So expertise, authority, trust, AI writing tools can't write original content, they can only feed you what's already been written because it's what their models are trained on. Original thought will continue to win in SEO.

Jack: Very, very interesting openings of a conversation there for sure.

Mark: So I agree with this and at the same time, I think, disagree in some way. And that's because when we talk about AI being trained on content that exists out there, to me that's kind of explaining how humans learn as well. In that we go and we read things and we take them in and then we maybe change them slightly, we curate them, we rewrite them. So I made this point to Darren and I said, I'm not sure because there's obviously limitations with language models and predicting which word will come next, but there's whole branches of AI where they're using it for science and they're teaching it things and it's learning and coming up with its own novel solutions. And when you combine that with something like GPT three, which is primarily a language model, so can you communicate and understand the context of these things? I think you can, and this is obviously just my opinion, I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm right. But I think we will get to a stage where it is helpful for everyone. And I had a back-and-forth with Darren about this. My point was actually around, if Google doesn't want that, why are they investing so much in mum? Which is their way of essentially doing just that, which is when you type in a query, if they don't think a good answer exists on a single page, they're essentially pulling together their knowledge of it and writing the answer kind of bespoke on the fly for you, which is basically this. Which is going to be original content maybe. And there's loads of examples. Even when we do content audits, they're talking about reframing stuff, adding in different questions to answer intents.

Jack: A lot of people talk about that when you go back and oh, if you're doing an audit and you're going back and looking at old content that could be possibly updated for the new year or whatever it is, you're not probably write that from scratch, right? You're going to tweak it and edit it and I'll swap this thing here and change that there and oh that's out of date so let's get rid of that. This is the new version, put that in there. All that kind of stuff.

And isn't that just a human experience of creating stuff as a person who has written music and written stories and all that kind of stuff. You are more than the sum of your parts essentially. This is very philosophical of some... AI leads to very philosophical questions of every story or every song that I've written. Is that just a ripoff or an in direct influence from another thing? And what separates that creative originality from just taking a bunch of stuff, amalgamating it and taking the lyrics from this song and the tune from that song and putting them together and oh it's a new song and nobody can tell.

Mark: I think that the difficulty as well is a lot of people don't want the answer to be AI. 'Cause it does make you feel a bit down.

Jack: Going back to the Terminator, it's a bit Skynet, right? They will just take over and AI will write all of our content for us. It will audit all of our content for us humans will no longer be needed for creative purposes. I think it's almost because we feel like creativity and imagination is that last...

Mark: Bastion.

Jack: Yeah, the last bastion of humanity. Right?

Mark: The calculator beat me at the times tables that I can write better poetry.

Jack: Exactly. Yeah, we can write better poetry, but computers have been able to beat us at chess for like 50 years at this point.

Mark: So in that brilliant segue onto poetry, DaVinci-003 is specialised in giving higher quality, longer output, and better instruction following. The first example I saw of the DaVinci-003 was someone who gave it this prompt, right? Write a short rhyming poem explaining Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Jack: Ooh, here we go.

Mark: In easy but accurate terms.

Jack: Okay, I have a physics degree so I'm intrigued already.

Mark: So this is what-

Jack: I'm a terrible poet, but I know my physics.

Mark: -This is what it came out with pretty much instantly. And this is meant to rhyme I think in US English. So you'll have to give me the benefit of doubt.

Jack: Do an American accent, Mark! You'll be-

Mark: No.

If you want to understand Einstein's thought It's not that hard if you give it a shot General Relativity is the name of the game Where space and time cannot remain the same Mass affects the curvature of space Which affects the flow of time's race An object's motion will be affected By the distortion that is detected The closer you are to a large mass The slower time will seem to pass The farther away you may be Time will speed up for you to see

How accurate is that?

Jack: That's pretty spot on, to be honest. Yeah, relativity is a fascinating topic, but that has kind of summed a lot of the wider discussions and broader topics in pretty easy-to-understand subject.

Mark: How long would it take you if I gave you that prompt to write a short poem about general relativity?

Jack: Oh, could I do it as a parody song instead? That's kind of my speciality.

Mark: But to me that's like, that's incredibly impressive. It knew the brief. It did it. So OpenAI, you can go play with that. They've got an open lab, there's some free tokens you can use. The tokens for those that are already paying are more expensive for Davinci 003 because it requires some more computational power.

Jack: Cool. Last, we have a couple of questions here. First one kind of less a question, more a comment here from Devin about the AI side of things. So let's have a look here. Agree with that point, Mark. But I don't think AI will ever be able to create original content that can currently provide new thoughts in areas such as philosophy. Kind of what we touched on already, where a human can provide a truly new idea. Cool.

Mark: Disagree.

Jack: Hard disagree. Sorry, Devin.

Mark: I mean, yeah, again, not my expert area in terms of, I don't have a degree. I did my Coursera qualification, machine learning, but the way I look at it, you know, take I'm a dad, right? Kids, they're born thick as bricks. They don't know anything.

Jack: Don't say that to their face.

Mark: They're not coming up with any new philosophical ideas. Everything that they will kind of come out with is based on what they're taught, what they learn, what they absorb. And obviously, we are just limited by the moment about how we can put that into a machine. And yes, it's understanding it. We're certainly not there yet. I don't know... I asked one of the kind of writers on LinkedIn how they would define creativity and the definition they came back with to paraphrase was around kind of things with kind of a random element that's then sense-checked is basically it.

Jack: That sounds like something a computer could do.

Mark: Well when you break it down that you're kind of like, well a computer could do that. And when you give prompts to Darli and stuff and see the images it comes up with, arguably is that not creative? Because it's making something that's never been made before. And if I asked you to sit down and draw a picture of a new animal-

Jack: Oh god.

Mark: -You're definitely going to base it on something you've seen. It's either going to have toes or-

Jack: It's going to be a horse.

Mark: -Hooves.

Jack: It's blue. Oh wow.

Mark: Or it's going to have wings or feathers. So it's all based on things that you know and some other combination. So I don't know, it may be the gap in my understanding, again, of what creativity is. Again, without getting too philosophical.

Jack: Neither of us have... We do have someone with a philosophy degree here at Candour anyway, so maybe we should bring in another specialist.

Mark: The other, the two things I'd always consider is historically we've always been proven wrong when we say this. So when people say computer AI can or can't do this...

Jack: They'll never beat a human at chess. Humans are-

Mark: So chess is a good example because people did say computers will never be able to beat humans at chess because it's a strategic game. And the chess problem was actually solved before brute forcing it. So before looking at all possible combinations. And they've done the same with Go, which is a more mathematically complicated game. And the other thing is that if you consider technology always improves. Okay? The only thing that's going to stop technology improving is some kind of cataclysmic event. Touch wood, obviously it doesn't happen, but that means then logically at some point, they will surpass humans and-

Jack: We're getting into technological singularity stuff now.

Mark: -Yeah. So it will happen at some point. It's just a matter of when. So I don't know, that's my logic on it, but I always appreciate someone giving me hope that cause I don't want it to be the case.

Jack: Yeah, true.

Mark: I just think it will be.

Jack: We'll be put out a business. Here's a good way of putting it. I call it “magpieing” from Simon Taylor. “Taking the best bits but not copying them.” Thanks, Simon.

Mark: That's quite good - magpie.

Jack: I like the way... Pick out the little shiny bits but leave the rubbish behind. Yeah, I like that. Nice. Less like brain-melting, philosophical way of discussing it. A very important question here from Steve from SISTRIX. Hello Steve. Thank you for joining us. We have: “Where's the Christmas tree?” Steve, it's the 30th of November at the time of recording, that's where the Christmas tree is. It goes up on the 1st of December.

Mark: It is going up tomorrow. We have it-

Jack: There you go. Yeah.

Mark: It's all been arranged. There's a Christmas committee.

Jack: We have our little fake plant over here that's not quite Christmasy, but next time you see us, if we do do one in December, because I don't know if we'll fit one around Christmas, maybe we will. But if we do, we will have Christmas-appropriate decorations and things. And if you tune into our social media specifically our Instagram, most likely you check out Candour agency on Instagram. You will see us putting up the Christmas tree tomorrow. The whole crew, like you said, the committee coming together and hanging the ball balls and putting up the tree and that kind of stuff like we do every single year.

And lastly, question from Kyle Rush McGregor.

Mark: Oh it's Kyle!

Jack: Good old, Kyle. Hello Kyle! “What's that T-shirt you're wearing, Mark Williams Cook? I'm not seeing you talk about #SEOFOMO before. What could that be?

Mark: Is that sarcasm?

Jack: Who knows? I think yes.

Mark: So this is my #SEOFOMO hoodie, kindly earned. I was going to say gifted.

Jack: Kindly earned by me.

Mark: I earned it. So it's a newsletter by the lovely and brilliant, Aleyda Solis. So if you just Google SEO FOMO, you will find it every Sunday. A whole list of stuff about SEO.

Jack: We have talked about it regularly on the show as-

Mark: Yeah, we talk about it quite a lot.

Jack: Basically the best newsletter in SEO, but on not, at this point. She is absolutely fantastic.

Mark: So we'll post a link to that in the show notes. Make sure you use the link because I need about 80 more people and then I get a rucksack as well.

Jack: Oh, okay. Nice, nice. Are you still the highest number of total referrers or something? Yeah, yeah. King of the referrals there. Mark Williams Cook. Why he's got a hoodie and I've got nothing.

Mark: She wasn't interested in just giving me cash for it though.

Jack: Oh, okay. Okay. Just checking.

Mark: Backpack is next.

Jack: Fair enough. Well, that pretty much wraps us up from the comments and questions from the chat. All the topics we've covered this week. As we said, links for everything will be in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk. If you are joining us live, thank you very much for joining us. And if you are live here right now, I will be doing #SEOchat. I will be hosting SEO chat on Twitter tomorrow at about six o'clock UK time. And then that's 1:00 PM Eastern Time, I believe in America.

Mark: I didn't know this.

Jack: Did you not? Yeah.

Mark: When did that happen?

Jack: A couple of weeks ago.

Mark: Oh.

Jack: Yeah, yeah. Good old Mordy Oberstein and Nicole Ponce who arrange all that stuff from the guys over at Wix and Semrush respectively. Regular chats. I know you've done it a couple of times, Mark and covered some interesting topics. Just the ones.

Mark: I believe it's Nicole's birthday as well.

Jack: It is.

Mark: Happy birthday.

Jack: Happy birthday Nicole. Nicole Ponce is awesome. Thank you Nicole for picking us out and getting us to talk about interesting things. I will be talking about internal links and discussing all things, anchor text, link juice and everything in between.

Mark: Are you going to say link juice?

Jack: I'm absolutely going to say link juice just to get that engagement. Controversial statements to get the engagement. That's what Twitter's all about these days. But is there anything I've learned from Elon Musk is you say mad thing is to get people to engage with you.

Mark: Are we going to see a picture of your bedside table as you are running an SEO check?

Jack: To have a prop gun. And like, to be fair, it wouldn't surprise me if I did have a 3D replica gun from Deus Ex like Elon Musk.

Mark: It that what it was?

Jack: Yes.

Mark: I thought it was just some billionaires like a revolver.

Jack: Oh, unless it's real and it's just in the future actually. Yeah, it's apparently a 3D-printed thing from Dues Ex Human Revolution, A game that was good, but you don't need to print it out. Gun on your bedside table. But anyway, less about Elon Musk. Come and join me hashtag SEO chat on Twitter tomorrow. If you're listening to this live. If you're listening to this in the podcast feed, you missed it. But go and check it out though. I'm sure there'll be very interesting discussions from a lot of interesting SEO people on Twitter. And you'll get some insights into internal linking there as well. Well, thank you for joining me, Mark. Two weeks in a row for the first time in six months I think.

Mark: Well, we'll be doing this more regularly.

Jack: Yes.

Mark: In the new year.

Jack: Exactly. Yes, we will be... We're working together with SISTRIX basically to do some more of these live streams coming up in the new year. I won't give all the details and announcements just yet, but I know Steve and Mark and I have been working hard on planning out some stuff. To do some more regular stuff and more open collaborations and live streams and all that kind of stuff with SISTRIX in 2023. So stay tuned for all of that coming up. And thank you very much for joining us live and if you're listening to the podcast, thank you very much for listening. See you later.