892 – Give it what it wants: Tom talks Google Is Watching

Episode 892 – Google Is Watching
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute, the entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multi-millionaire Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 892 of Screw the Commute podcast today. Ooh, Google is watching you. Their eyes are on you. So we're going to talk about that today. Hope you didn't miss episode 891. That was a book review on, uh, on the book that all top marketers have read many times. So if you want to be a top marketer or internet person or even a whatever business you're in, this book is critical. It's called influence the Psychology of persuasion. And I tell you some stories from the book on episode 891. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. The book review is 891. Today with Google's Eyes Are on You is 892.

[00:01:10] All right, so you probably know that I'm not a big fan of wasting a lot of time and effort on search engine optimization or SEO. However, I'm highly in favor of you doing the things that Google likes, as long as it doesn't cost you a lot of money to some firm that's going to promise you the moon. And these are not hard things to do if you just do them because they're always, you know, pretty much forever, they're going to be in favor of doing good things that Google likes. All right. So I'm going to go over a list of I don't know how many have here 7 or 8. But um, and there are no particular order because a lot of this stuff is secretive.

[00:01:55] The only way I know about it is because I'm in the field day and night for 30 some years, and I study this stuff like crazy. And I even gave up on search engine optimization after being one of the best in the country or the world in the early days. All right. So so I don't want you to spend a lot of money doing this, but I want you to know the principles of the things that that the search engines look for. When I say Google. Yeah, because they're the big kahuna. But all search engines look for this kind of stuff, but they don't tell you and they lie sometimes totally lie, because they know that the search engine people will start trying to game the system. So it's very secretive. The only reason I know this stuff is, like I said, is because I'm in it day and night, okay. And, uh, the same with the other people in it. They can't guarantee anything they only can go with by Google says and what? And that's one thing that you you can't believe that at all compared to what they see in the marketplace with their clients and their own websites say. So that's that's where I'm coming from here. This is not never is going to be, uh, exacting information because Google is secretive and and as soon as something gets out and people start exploiting it, they turn a dial and it changes.

[00:03:19] But some of these things are are things you should be doing anyway. And so let's get into the list here. First is the size and age of your site. See there's a mythical thing called the Google Sandbox, which Google has never, ever admitted to. But the thing is, is that nobody with a brand new small site, uh, those two things are, is going to get any kind of ranking from Google. It's just impossible because they don't trust you. They think you're one of the spammers and scammers that just throw up a site quickly to grab email addresses, or to fish for credit card numbers. You know, they just don't trust you, so you're never going to get that. So don't feel bad when you put a new site up. However, one of the tips I've taught my students for years is go ahead and get the site hosted with at least a home page, and that helps the age start going. So even though it's not a substantial site at this point, the age starts, the clock starts ticking. So don't sit on domain names if you're that you plan on really, uh, developing forever because you're going to start brand new instead of having a whole bunch of time behind you, say, all right, so the size part of it is, you got to, uh, be substantial.

[00:04:44] You have to look substantial. Like Google is like The Wizard of Oz. It knows all, sees all. Right. So it sees how big your site is and all these things that I'm going to tell you about today, Google can see. And other search engines can too, at least most of them, but not all of them. All right. So you got to build a substantial site over time. And when I say over time is because there's two other things that kind of play into this. One is called the change history. So has your content, have you updated it? You know, uh, over time, have you added new stuff? Have you edited, uh, some pages that might be obsolete? See, so that's called your change history, which leads into the fact that Google loves content, freshness or fresh content. And so if you're always putting stuff up, this is like pretty much the one of the things that makes a blog good is because you're putting new stuff up all the time, say, or at least you should be. Some people put a blog up and then never do anything forever, so make sure you're updating obsolete content. Now you can't just change a few words to try to trick Google, because they look at the changes, and if they see you're just doing minuscule crap, then that works against you. You look like a cheater and you don't want that.

[00:06:11] So new stuff and update old stuff. All right. So now the next thing, another thing they look at is clicks and engagement. They can tell how many people visit your site even without Google Analytics hooked up. They can tell. And so what you have to do is get more people to engage with your site, stay longer on your site. That's, uh, you know, it's almost like on YouTube. Watch time. It's, you know, time on site. They can see that. And the thing is, though. They can take it to the nth degree of whether the clicks to your site and the people on your site are good or bad. So what do you mean good or bad people? Well, they can tell if it's bots. They can tell if people are actually engaging like a human or if it's some automated thing. So you got to make an effort to get good people that are real, to go to your site and engage with it. Now the this is why I see people, and I keep harping on people that want me to promote stuff, and they give me what's called swipe or, you know, copy so that I don't have to write the copy myself. And almost always I reduce it to like a pair. They might give me like a whole book that I'm supposed to send in an email. Well, that is just stupid.

[00:07:34] Uh, number one is because the trend is shorter emails leading to a web page. And if I try to put a long email in front of somebody, they won't read it and I won't get the click through. So I do something that gets the click through and lets them see all the information on the website. Well, how does that help that person that sent me that dumb swipe copy. All right. It helps them because it gets more clicks and engagement from real people from an outside source. Google and you know, loves you. Youtube loves you when you send people to them. And it wasn't just them giving you a click or or some engagement. They love you to the nth degree. All right. Because it looks like man, you're bringing people now. They love you more if you're sending them to YouTube or Facebook or wherever. But you look really good in the eyes of the search engines. If you're if you're getting what they call organic traffic from other other sources than them. So you got bad and good clicks and engagement. You got to get people over there. So anyway, short email will get the click through and more visits to your website. That's better than a long email that has better chance of getting filtered with bad words in it. You know, any little, little innocent thing you say could be looked at as a spam on a spam filter.

[00:09:01] See? Okay, next is a thing called domain authority. And like I said, Google will lie through their teeth at you so they so people can't game the system. There's been leaked documents, internal documents when they claim they don't look at domain authority and they really do. Well, you know, leaked documents are pretty much probably what's happening. You can't really trust them. Um, so domain authority means you have a site and there's loads of factors to this, but you have a site that's got high quality content. It's a well built site. Well, what does that mean? Well, that means it has the appropriate, um, speed of loading. They also look at that. You know, they came out years ago, said if your site doesn't load instantly, we're never going to see a high ranking. So speed of loading is one. Uh, inbound links is a real important one. For many, many years now. Uh, they've refined it to it. Inbound links from other quality, well respected sites, and they're worth the links are worth more if that site is somehow related to you. Now, that doesn't matter if it's a giant news site. If Wall Street Journal links to you, then all bets are off. You just got a big, you know, feather in your cap. So anyway, that's your domain authority. It all builds up. There used to be a term for this. I don't even remember it anymore because we haven't used it for years.

[00:10:33] But they are looking at those kinds of things to see if you're worthy of ranking. And then they also if you use Chrome, which I think is about 70% of the browser market now, which is owned by Google, so they can see all your user data, unless you happen to be using a VPN or something. But they, they they most people don't even know what that is. All right. So they're seeing user data. And so they can see all the, you know, visits to your site and who's visiting and where they're coming from and all kinds of stuff that I can't even I would even know about. But they do because they have PhD geeks, you know, running shifts, you know, thousands of them, you know, day and night, you know, three shifts a day figuring this stuff out. All right. All right. So Chrome user data. And then the last one is and this is why I is most likely going to get you in trouble. Artificial insemination I call it because you're going to get screwed if you if you if you use it wrong. But originality is a big ranking factor. And again, they're not going to admit to any of this stuff of what weight these different things have. But if you just are rehashing everybody else's old content, then there's no way you're going to get rankings. So this kind of goes along with size.

[00:12:06] It needs to be substantial. And here's the thing. They I somebody did come out with a study on this. If your content on a page is is rather short, it better be really great, really great content. You have a better chance on longer pages to have lots of good, original, high quality content. And this is where AI gets in trouble. People say, oh well, here, write me a blog post on this and that and you slap it up there. And everybody knows, including the reader nowadays knows that it was generated. And you it's a big thumbs down by the algorithm of Google, so you get screwed. So none of this stuff cost you any money, folks. You don't have to hire an SEO person for this who probably is doing this same stuff for you, just charging you a fortune for it when you could have done it yourself just by paying attention to this stuff. So. So that's Google's eyes are on you folks. And if you want help with this in a million other things, you need to be successful online. And remember, I've been in business 47 years now, 47.5 years long before the internet was. So I can help you with online and offline stuff, and it's all included in our very well respected program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. All right, we'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.