Episode 752 | The State of SEO in 2025

Rob Walling:
It’s another episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us, I’m Rob Walling, and in this episode I speak with Lars Lofgren about the state of SEO In 2025, of all the folks I’ve met in my 20 years of doing startups, Lars Lofgren is got to be in the top two or three SEOs that I know and I love sitting down with him. He really speaks his mind and is not afraid to just talk about the realities of how SEO has changed over the past several years. What’s working, what’s not the dangers he sees ahead as well as at a certain point shrugging his shoulders and saying, I just don’t know. I don’t know the details of how AI is going to impact this particular element of it. It’s a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it. But before we dive into it, MicroConf us ticket prices go up on January 31st. 

They go up by $200, and that’s just two or three days after this episode goes live. We are 84% sold out and every year people are asking about a wait list because they hesitated. So get your ticket before it is too late. We are going to sell this event out. It is a certainty. If you want to hang out with 250 of your closest bootstrapped founder friends, head to MicroConf dot com slash us and grab your ticket either before the price goes up or maybe even after because it’s going to sell out anyway. And that event is March 16th through 18th in New Orleans, Louisiana. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Lars. Lars Lofgren, welcome to Startups For the Rest Of Us.  

 Lars Lofgren:
Thank you. It’s great to be here, Rob.  

Rob Walling:
Great to have you, man. So you and I go back, I’m thinking it more than a decade.  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, it’s like 15 years.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s lot. So you’ve spoken at MicroComp multiple times and you were basically, especially in the early days of MicroConf, just the go-to SEO speaker because you were doing so much SEO with Kissmetrics, you worked with Heaton, then you worked with Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and then you’ve built a whole empire of high traffic. What do you call blogs, affiliate sites? I dunno, what do you call your empire?  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, I work on blogs with affiliate programs, or at least I did. We had a number of B2B blogs that we were working on. Different projects all monetized through affiliate. SEO offers organic a hundred percent organic. That’s all imploded, which we can talk about. But yeah, I got pretty far. We were doing at the height it did 7.2 million of revenue, annual revenue in a single year. That was the high point before it all collapsed on me.  

Rob Walling:
I’d love to just start there because that is fascinating to me. So what type of traffic does it take to generate $7.2 million in affiliate revenue?  

 Lars Lofgren:
So it’s actually a lot less than you think. So if you’re in the right categories, that’s the thing about affiliates and especially SEO organic affiliates, and I assume socials like this too. It’s definitely going to be true on any sort of PPC or Google ads, Google AdWords, if you’re in the right categories, even if you’re only getting a couple thousand visitors on a blog post, if you’re ranking for the right blog post and the right term, you can make an extraordinary amount of money on any given month. There’s definitely power laws. The vast majority of the posts even they can rank really well, generate a ton of traffic. You don’t really make any money, make a little bit, but it all adds up over time. But then you have your few marquee posts that if you rank, you just, I mean, I had one blog posts that was literally just one post was making over a hundred thousand dollars a month off of one post, but  

Rob Walling:
You don’t know which those are going to be, so you just have to throw a bunch out.  

 Lars Lofgren:
You do, if you get into the affiliate space and you talk to any of the affiliate pros that have been doing this for a long, long time, they know. They know the categories, they know the terms, everybody knows the terms, everyone. It’s not even an open secret. It’s just like, oh no, these are the categories, these are the terms. If you’re in this space, go for that one. VPN is huge. Best web hosting is huge. Best credit cards is huge. Everyone knows best credit cards. It’s the golden goose. It’s tons of traffic monetizes really well, the commission rates are through the roof. If you rank number one for best credit cards, you will make so much money. It’s obscene insurance is huge, massive. So there’s a bunch of these and the deeper you’re in the affiliate space you get the more you learn about ’em. And then it’s like, it also doesn’t take, if you’re a little savvy, if you’re just a little aware of how price points in different products and you have a keyword research tool, you just go clicking around and searching around and you find all these product categories, you’re like, wow, I know those products, those price tags are decent, which means the commission rates are probably pretty decent. There’s a lot of traffic. I bet there’s a lot of money over there and there always is.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. Got it. And then you said you used to do affiliates. Things happen for those who aren’t in the loop, what did Google do this year to  

 Lars Lofgren:
Affiliate? Yeah. Well, it really started in 2022, Google. There’s been a complete phase shift in the Google algorithm. I’ve never seen a transition this big in my entire SEO career. The way I look at SEO now, even from a year ago is completely different. Earlier this year I was banging my head against the wall. I was like, nothing is working. Nothing I do matters anymore. Google doesn’t like anything I’m doing. It’s like a existential crisis with my career. Am I any good at this still? And then I was like, okay, okay, I got to take my entire SEO playbook. I got to throw all of it out because things don’t feel right, so nothing’s working. I don’t have the pulse of Google anymore, what’s going on? So I just threw everything out. I’m like, okay, I’m rebuilding my entire SEO playbook from scratch. I’m taking nothing from granted. 

I’m learning every lesson over again. If I don’t see it work today, then no guarantees it still works. So there’s been this huge shift in Google and I think part of it was driven by ai. Part of it was also really around 2020. I mean it was true before this, but 2020 to 2022, there was this goldmine rush of niche affiliate sites. Word was out. We started our business in 2019, which is kind of funny. So we caught the tail end of it even though me and my co-founder knew about this space for a long time, and we were like, we knew how much money there was and let’s go do it. We like SEO, we like good content, we like helping people and we can get paid. Let’s not to, let’s go do this. But it wasn’t just us. There was this huge wave of niche affiliate sites and it kind of got taken out of control. 

Then on top of it, AI’s coming out, chat, GPT rolls out and content, there’s just explosion of shit content. So Google’s basically freaking out and basically like, oh, they have a real crisis on their hands. How do they actually filter through this endless wave of just trash content that they’re drowning in? So I empathize with their position a little bit, and so they basically, the algorithm has changed radically. It used to be it was to bullet down to one. I like to think in loopholes with SEO, because if you know what the big loophole is, you basically know what the algorithm, the algorithm is working at its core. The big loophole with Google used to be links. If you built enough links to the right page, you could basically rank for whatever you wanted. And that’s how we got going. To be honest, we built a bunch of links to a very few key pages and it was working really, really well. 

And that was true for a decade, right? Links, that’s all that mattered. If you were a better link builder and higher quality link builder than anybody else in your space, you won, period. Full stop. I’m not going to say links don’t matter anymore. They still do, but you can’t abuse the Google algorithm through links anymore. So that era ended and the new era is basically Google being like, okay, we’re not going to spend nearly as much time figuring out what pages are good. We’re just going to trust really, really major brands, really massive sites. And I think there’s a lot of nuance to how Google defines a brand. But basically if you’re a major media site, if you’re a top 100 website on the internet, top 500, something like that, you can basically just post whatever you want and rank for whatever you want. And I think the best example of this is indeed.com. 

I don’t know if everybody’s checked their SEO program lately, and I don’t care. I’ll talk as much about indeed as someone will let me, but their content is trash. It’s so bad. It’s such they’ve basically gone from 2 million visitors a month to I think over 20 million visitors a month. It’s just massive mind boggling growth. I struggled to get my head around it and in SEO and I’ve built a bunch of websites and it’s just a land grab of they’re just publishing endlessly. Publish, publish, publish. I’m not going to accuse them of doing AI content, but it looks like AI content. Or even worse, I think if there are any writers that are working on this program, they should actually just use AI because the content will get better, the end, they’ll save time and everybody will get paid more. The only people that are benefiting from this are like the SEO folks at Indeed and the writers themselves. 

So someone should make some of this money anyway, but that’s the state that we’re in. If you have the right domain that has the right signals that Google is looking for, you basically get a free pass. And if you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum and you don’t have those signals, things can get crazy volatile and really, really dicey. And that era we were doing really, really well in the old era of Google. We were not set up to do well in the new era of Google, the brand era, these monolith website era, this monolith brand. Those are the major players that can basically do whatever they want. So that’s the world we live in right now.  

Rob Walling:
I want to go down two paths and one is talk about big brands being able to do whatever they want, and there’s this term that I’ve heard thrown around called parasite, SEO. All right, let’s put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it in a few minutes. What I want to touch on is the listeners of this show are a lot of entrepreneurs, some early stage, a lot of folks doing 6, 7, 8 figures, a RR their SaaS. So when they hear you saying, oh, you have to have a brand Indeed, or C Nnn have to be a top 500, that might scare someone off who’s like, well, I’m doing 10 grand, 20 grand a month right now. Should I think about SEO and what’s your take on that?  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, so what I used to tell people, I’ve done so many consulting calls with first time SaaS founders or bootstrap folks that are trying to figure out what marketing channels and what I used to tell people is, okay, all the channels work. Pick one that really resonates with you and you really go focus on it. Online channel is essentially power law. All the gangs are at the end focus, don’t get spread too thin. And if you like writing, if blogs resonate with you, if the SEO world resonates with you, go all in and you can get really far. In fact, this is why I spent my whole career in SEO because it’s one of the only marketing channels that’s the full marketing funnel. You get very top of funnel, you get mid funnel, you get bottom funnel. There’s always something to do with Google and SEO and even I’ve played around with every single channel at different points in my career and nothing has ever beaten SEO on the scalability, the ROI, the profit per lead, the volume, it hits all the buckets. 

The downside was it always takes forever. It takes five years to get anywhere interesting with it. So that’s what I used to tell people. If you’re excited by it, go all in. It’ll take you everywhere you need to go. If you’re not excited by it, well then maybe don’t do it because it’s going to take five years these days. I’m like, look, I’m an SEO purist, or at least I want to be. I have to have let that go. I can’t a hundred percent focus on SEO anymore. It’s too volatile. And the way Google is working is yes, the big brands get this free pass. There’s a lot of nuance to what Google is considering a brand, and there are ways to get going as a smaller site, a newer site with a lot less content, with a much smaller brand. But you have to balance whatever you’re doing with SEO with some other channels. 

And if you want a really simple rule that would give any founder or new marketing team that’s trying to balance things out, I’d be like, okay, even on day one, even as a founder, I don’t want, I focus, so it pains me to say this, but it is the truth. I would say you have to go all in. I guess it’s not all in anymore, but you have to go in on it least three channels. One channel is top of funnel. Pick a social channel that matches your audience and brand and what you like. You don’t have too many options. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn  

Rob Walling:
X, Twitter,  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, x, Twitter, whatever we’re calling it the butterfly blue sky thing, whatever. So pick one of those and that’s your top of funnel. Do some SEO if you’re really excited by it, and then build your email list from day one and get regular emails out so that they’re warm and that’s building. You basically can’t just devote yourself to one channel like SEO anymore. And there’s two reasons for this. One is the easy one is diversification. SEO is volatile. Stuff bounces around all over the place. I don’t even consider a 30% hit anymore to be like noteworthy. I’m just like, oh, we’re down by 30%. Okay,  

Rob Walling:
Wow.  

 Lars Lofgren:
Earlier in my career, a 40% hit was a six month fire drill and it never happened. 

Now that stuff happens really regularly. If someone’s telling me that they got hit on SEO, I’m like, look, if you didn’t drop by 80%, don’t call me. It’s not even a hit. Things are crazy and volatile. It feels like the volatility of social, but paired with all the long-term nuances of SEO, it’s a much deal and it used to be. So you need that diversification. But on top of that, when Google is looking at things to rank and deciding who ranks for what they do place a lot more emphasis in, okay, is this site, is this brand? Is this entity? Are they on social? Are they doing stuff in other channels? Is the traffic coming to this website, non-search traffic, is there a bunch of branded keywords for this website? All this other stuff. It is definitely not SEO stuff, it’s the full marketing bucket. 

So if you properly diversify, the SEO game is actually going to get a lot easier for you over time. I’m working on a couple different sites right now with various degrees of brands. The site that has, it’s still a pretty big brand. Most people listening to this would be like, that’s a decent brand. And I’d be like, yeah, it is a decent brand, but they’re not, haven’t invested as heavily into other marketing channels. It’s been very SEO and blog dominant, and I have to work my off on that site. Nothing is a given. Yes, Google will give me a shot, but I got to show up and do the real work, working on another website, massive brand, huge brand, tons of social stuff going on, all sorts of crazy brand things. And every time I turn around, the numbers are all up. It is just all the charts look great. 

I’m like, I just have to post publish, keep publishing. Good things happen. So it is a crazy world, but if you diversify your channel a little bit, it’s going to make everything easier. And so don’t get too locked in on one channel is my main advice. And you can get somewhere. You can make progress. My personal blog, lar lre.com, there’s not too many blog posts on it, but I’m doing stuff on LinkedIn. I’m doing these podcasts, I’m getting my name out there and my stuff is ranking pretty fast. I don’t post that much, don’t make any money off this thing, but when I post, it feels healthy and it’s much smaller. So there’s still things you can do. You have plenty of cars to play, but you got to diversify.  

Rob Walling:
Wow. It’s crazy. It makes sense when you say it, but it’s crazy to hear that this is where SEO is. I remember back in the day, do you remember private blog PBNs Large where you had set up a exact match domain with dashes in it? It’s like the dash chiropractor dash in dash fresno where some.com, and then you’d build some links with the PB n. It’s like, look, we rank. And it was just, but that’s what Google just hates that stuff, right? It’s like people gaming the system and it feels like this is a big backlash to that.  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, it is a huge backlash. Basically Google decided to hell with SEOs, and I mean kind if you want a good rule of thumb on tactical SEO level, don’t do any of the SEO stuff that was popular that people have been talking about for a decade. If you join some SEO course and they’re like, yeah, get bold your anchor text and get all this internal, all these formulas and or get a fac at the bottom of the post and optimize it. There was a playbook and all that stuff worked really well. We were doing some of it and it worked great. But all that stuff actually I think is how much is causation versus correlation? But I’m inclined to believe that a lot of it will actually hurt your rankings now because Google basically went to the opposite end of the spectrum and said, look, if this thing even smells like an SEO touched it, we’re going to just nuke it to oblivion. And they certainly 100% do that at a domain level. And then we could argue about how much it happens at a page level. But I’ve thrown out all those old little hacks. I don’t do any of ’em anymore at all  

Rob Walling:
For folks listening to this. I’m invested in over 200 B2B SaaS companies and a huge percentage of them and 60, 70, 80% somewhere in there are doing SEO and are getting some content marketing and SEO and are getting results from it. So what I don’t want to do is paint a picture for everybody of SEO is dead or you shouldn’t do it or anything, but you’re pointing out these pitfalls of following old playbooks and potentially just how volatile it be, especially when you get to scale. And I think that’s another thing is a lot of the SaaS I’m invested in are, they’re in these type verticals that where it’s just not, you’re not getting hundreds of thousands of uniques. It’s like, Ooh, if I can get 8,000 uniques a month from long tail SEO, that’s actually a huge win for these folks because their A CV is high enough that you just don’t need a ton of volume. And I don’t get the feeling that they’re under as much, nearly as much scrutiny as all the stuff that you’re talking about.  

 Lars Lofgren:
As long as there’s, again, you keep that balance on the brand and your other marketing channels, I think that the danger is when your SEO channel, regardless of how small you are or how big you are, you’d be doing a thousand visitors a month. You can be doing a million visitors a month. If your SEO program gets overweighted compared to your other marketing channels, that’s when things can start to get dangerous. And that’s when even a SaaS business can that has a pretty defined niche can run into trouble. So even if SEO is going really well for someone, yeah, go do your niche, go dominate that core, but also be careful. Don’t be really careful about spreading beyond your core focus and your core niche too much. And especially if your niche starts to involve a lot of very similar keywords. Maybe there’s a local element to the keyword law keyword or regulation keyword or something that’s different from every city in every state or there’s something, or celebrity net worth is another classic. 

There’s just thousands and thousands and thousands of these things. And you could create a huge website just going after celebrity net worth keywords, and people have done that and gotten burned. If there’s some keyword type like that where it fragments really fast, and if you just chase all of it, you’ll end up with hundreds and thousands of blog posts. Be really careful about that stuff. If you went after it, you blog could get really overweighted on content and SEO, and if it gets too overweighted from the rest of your brand, that’s where the volatility element starts to come in.  

Rob Walling:
Alright, I want to talk about AI before we get to parasite, SEO. So I have two questions for you around AI specifically involving trying to rank for terms. So number one is AI can write blog posts these days and I can go to, what is it? Claude and Chat, GPD AI can generate it and there’s all these startups in the space of we’ll generate, but whatever. What’s your take? Do you use it? Should people use it?  

 Lars Lofgren:
So I hate ai, at least when it comes to creating content. I can’t stand it. So that’s just my personal, I just have this neurosis around it, get this stuff away from me. So I’m pretty biased, but even if I put that aside, I’m like, okay, does it make sense to do this for a content program? And I am an emphatic 100%, no. Plenty of ways to use ai hats off. People go do it great brainstorming. You want some feedback on your article, whatever. Great. Occasionally if I’m feeling really stuck, I’ll ask it to give me some suggestions on a headline and that usually unblocks me and keeps me moving. So there’s ways to use it as a little bit of a crutch, but use it as a crutch, don’t have it, do the whole thing. And I know a lot of people are doing it for their blog content. 

It is rampant, it is everywhere. If you get pretty good with your prompts, you could have definitely an average level blog post, maybe even slightly above average, and it would certainly meld very well with a bunch of other stuff ranking. It wouldn’t be blatantly problematic if you put in the work on ai. We actually did a ton the first year that AI came out, of course all of our whole business was content, so we freaked out. We were like, oh my God. And one of our teams went all in on just using AI and trying to, does it work? How well does it work? What’s the potential of this thing? And the conclusion we got to was like, look, it can produce the quality that we would accept and be willing to publish. However, you have to put so much work into it that it’s basically a wash. 

Instead of having a number of reasonably paid writers and freelancers doing all the content you need a few really hardworking, very diligent, very highly paid people to run these AI algorithms that really know what they’re doing that can have a great eye for content and also know how to torture the algorithms in order to get what you actually need. Quality level. And when you look at the cost, it’s like it’s not a huge difference. So the time the spend is about the same. I also have the opinion that, look, everyone’s going into AI content and AI is really good at giving you that core middle of the bell curve answer. And if they’re giving you something, they’re going to give the other thousand people in your space something pretty similar, what AI does. And so if you’re using it, you’re just going to be the middle of the bell curve. 

Well, marketing isn’t about the middle of the bell curve. That’s not how you win. You got to stand out, you got to do things differently, unexpected. You got to break a norm of some kind. You got to be your pursue excellence, go way above the curve. AI can’t do any of that stuff, in my opinion, especially when it comes to content. So if I’m trying to get my content to break through the noise, the last thing I want is to build a program or a team that’s completely dependent on just feeding people more of what they’re already getting. We got to do things differently. So I’m running content programs on several sites right now, and I have told all my freelancers, if you use ai, if you copy and paste anything from AI into anything in your post, if I ever find it, we’re done. You can use it for brainstorming, you can use it for outline to get unblocked. That’s fine research, although to check every fact because a lot of it’s wrong, but everything that you hand me in your final post, you need to write it yourself. And that is a hard rule, and I would give that to any serious team going all in on content marketing or whatever they’re doing regardless of the channel. Be really careful how you use it if you want to actually stand out and get somewhere. Interesting.  

Rob Walling:
That’s good advice. And that’s the same advice I’ve heard from other SEOs that I’ve talked to Ruben Gomez being one. He’s like, yeah, we don’t, nah, it’s not it. It’s too vanilla. I think of it as it’s a mayonnaise sandwich. It’s just this bland, even for us, we ship a YouTube video every other week through MicroConf, and it’s usually me talking to a screen about something about churn or about us bootstrapping and ideas and this and that. I have tried to use AI to help me even just outline the videos of like, well, I’m going to talk about three things you can do to improve your a CV this week. So I’m going to ask AI, and I’ll even ask GPT, pretend you’re Rob Walling because it’ll do that now. It’s kind of cool. So then it’ll pull from maybe weight itself a little more to my stuff, and I still find that I’ll look at the outline and be like, this is such a mediocre, it’s like a C  

 Lars Lofgren:
So generic,  

Rob Walling:
It’s a 70%, and that’s not the video that I want to ship.  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, it’s the middle of the bell curve, just enough to get through and look. Again, I’m trying to declare my biases on these. I enjoy writing. Even in my spare time, I’ll go work on a blog or whatever the right, but I also deeply believe that if I think about all my best posts, all my best pieces of content, I had to sit and wrestle with that thing and actually figure out what I was thinking and what I believed in through the process of just writing and the outline or the hook or where that post ended usually at a very different place than when I started. So I see value in that process, and if I actually am willing to do the work on the content, I usually end up someplace way, way, way better. And you’re never going to get that with ai. You’re already hammed in, even if it is an outline. So I don’t use it for any writing at all, but I think I’m a halfway decent writer and I do enjoy it. So someone might have a different opinion.  

Rob Walling:
Second AI topic is when I go to Google today and I type in a search for, it’s at least half of the searches I do in Google. Now, the ai, is that Baird? What is it called out of Claude? I don’t even know. It’s Google’s ai, right?  

 Lars Lofgren:
Gemini. Gemini. That’s what it’s, well, there’s like two different ones. The Gemini is the actual AI chat thing, and then the SEO is called the little snippet, AI overviews overviews. So AI O is usually what it’s truncated to  

Rob Walling:
Shockingly good. I asked it the other day. I mean, I ask it about acronyms all the time, talk to a founder and they’ll say it’s called an acronym, and I just go ask AI what it is. I’m sorry, I go ask Google, but at least half the time now I’m not clicking links. It might be more than that. So there’s blue links somewhere on that page. There’s ads on that page. I’m not clicking any of that. What’s your take on the search engine result pages, and is AI make them irrelevant or do we not have blue links? Where is this headed?  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, that is a great question and I don’t have any answers. I do have plenty of sleepless nights and existential threat about it. So if some other founder is worried about this, I’ll be like, join the club. If you’re in Seattle, we’ll get drunk. 

So I mean, I think it’s another reason for doing content kind of the hard way and finding a reason to stand out. Yeah, if you’re, your content is kind of running the mill content where it can get answered instantly, or it’s a query that’s featured. Snippets did this to a lot of sites over time where someone’s looking for a definition and then boom, it’s right there in the featured snippet, or it’s just one little effect that’s going to be, the bulk of your content is dependent on that. A lot of that traffic’s going to go away. It’s going to go way down. So I’m not too worried about that. Like, okay, I have to win on high quality content that actually helps people and says something that they’re not expecting and gives them genuine value. Great, I’ll compete on that all day long. That’s my sweet spot. 

That’s what I enjoy doing. What I actually worry about is, okay, a lot of these AI answers are actually wrong, but I also know that people, I’m not judging anybody. People like convenience. I’m a maniacal person that just will go to crazy lengths to find the truth, and I’m always digging and searching and anybody tells me anything, and the first thing I think is like, ah, it’s probably what’s the real answer? That’s just my default state of mind. But I know a lot of people, they’re just going to give what AI gives them. So if you’re searching on some topic, you’re getting some best practices. How many people just accept it and bounce, even though all the best practices are trash, right? I’m like, what I’m more worried about is for the content that’s worth digging into, how many people are actually going to want to go look at the real thing from someone that actually knows what they’re talking about? 

Or is Google just going to leave all those folks behind and the SERPs going to get up to the point where you can’t even find that stuff? Then what does that do to a blog over time? What does that do to the marketing funnel over time? Even if you’re doing all the real work and you really have something to say and you really know what you’re talking about, does SEO essentially just wilt because you don’t get any placement at all? That might happen. I’ve got my whole careers in SE and I’m like, ah, where’s this going? I don’t know. So right now, I am praying and crossing my fingers and I am seeing, I have this small little blog on HR called HR advice, HR advice.com, and I did get someone, I have a really, really small email list, and I ask people when they sign up the email, so I have an automated follow-up saying, Hey, how did you find this? 

How’d you find out about this website? It would really help me out, and I got my first response. It was like, Hey, I actually found a lot of your articles on PTO and PTO policies while searching through chat TPT, and I found your articles really, really helpful. So I have the optimistic side of me, or maybe the hopeful or blind or whatever. This is rationally optimistic that doesn’t want to consider this world ending of content marketing. There is a part of me that believes that, okay, traffic’s going to go way down across the board. People are just going to use perplexity or chat GBD or Google, and they’re just going to get that bullshit overview. That doesn’t really tell you anything, and for most people, that’s going to be enough and you’ll never get that traffic. They’ll never even hit your site. But there’ll be a small percentage of those people, the people that actually care about the subject that are like, okay, here’s an overview of how call to actions work, but I need someone that actually knows how call to actions work. 

My boss is breathing down my neck, and I’m not just going to accept the initial bullshit 500 word overview. I’m going to dig and I’m going to click on stuff and I’m going to ask a bunch of other questions and I’m going to try to get to the source. There are those people out there that actually want real information, and I think some of ’em are going to keep clicking and they’re going to keep digging, and we could end up in a world where blog volume, blog traffic is way, way, way down. All the absolute numbers that I started my career on, all those will just go away. But this is the hopeful part. What I’m hoping is that the quality of what’s actually hits your site, those folks are dramatically higher than what you see in aggregate now because they need the real answers and they’re going to dig and they’re going to click on all your stuff and they’re going to find you and keep working in your funnel. So maybe absolute traffic comes way down on a blog or a site or a channel or whatever you’re doing, but the conversion rates go way up. That’s my hopeful coping rationality to get, we will see,  

Rob Walling:
Right? Yeah. None of us know. I want to wrap up by circling back to this topic that I mentioned a couple times already. Parasite, SEO. It’s a term I had never heard before a few months ago. Seems like it came around because of this brand shift, and so if you have this amazing brand, it sounds like you can publish whatever the hell you want.  

 Lars Lofgren:
Is  

Rob Walling:
That it? So define this term and tell us the story behind it.  

 Lars Lofgren:
So just how I talked about indeed, there’s a lot of other sites that hit framework. There’re so big, they have so much traffic. There’s so many people hitting their website through so many different mechanisms, news websites, mass media publications. They’re the classic example of this. They fit that brand preference algorithm perfectly right now, and they have, it started, started around 2022, early 2022 is when it really kicked off, and it just has gone, Google for whatever reason, keeps doubling down on this. I thought they’d shift gears by the end of 2022 or taper things. I was already seeing it and they were like, no, no, let’s just keep going. Let’s give these folks everything. It’s just Reddit. And they’re like, ah, give ’em everything. And a bunch of people in the affiliate space, they figured this out. Everyone’s looking at the rankings, you can see who’s ranking, and they were like, wait, these news publishers rank for everything. 

Why don’t we set up some sort of partnership with them as a separate entity? Like, oh, I have my own holding company. We run all of our SEO content and affiliate monetization and link building programs in-house. Why don’t I go to some news publisher of some kind and basically be like, okay, you’re going to set up a folder on your website, a subsite within your site, something that I can basically piggyback off your entire domain authority and the preference you have in Google. And then we are going to ship thousands and thousands and thousands of SEO optimized posts, and these are all the old school SEO posts. It is just the same framework, same templates, same stuff that SEOs have been doing for a decade,  

Rob Walling:
But it’s not high quality. It’s just average mediocre,  

 Lars Lofgren:
In my opinion. Best case scenario. It’s like it’s okay content. It’s pretty hard to find a post at least I have had a hard time finding posts that are like, this is really good. This post deserves to rank at best. It’s like, okay, it’s fine. A lot of it, I’m like, this is bad. This’s terrible. I don’t know why this ranks, it shouldn’t rank. So Google kind of stopped looking at page level metrics and kind of gave the domain weighting way too much weight. And yeah, the affiliate folks in the industry has figured this out, and there’s a few kind of affiliate companies that ended up brokering deals with every major news publisher out there. I’m not going to name names, but everyone has heard of these, folks have heard of these sites, and you’ve probably seen them everywhere for a while. And the term SEO started calling this a parasite, SEO. 

It’s when a third party sets up shop with the main kind of host domain, and then they run this subsection of the site and they just spew out tons of SEO content. It ranks, they’re abusing the authority of the website, and then of course it’s ranking really well, and they’re making a ton of, we’re talking like tens of millions of dollars a month, hundreds of millions of dollars a year when it’s fully scaled and fully operational. These are just colossal amounts of money. There’s a few companies that kind of specialized in this and got multiple agreements with multiple news orgs and it got rampant, and they’re, well, Google has put out a bunch of new policies and a bunch of manual actions, and a lot of these programs have been hit. So there’s been a lot of volatility in the last couple months. But yeah, I mean, when Google prefers something, SEO folks will figure it out and they’ll figure out how to abuse it. It’s as old as time,  

Rob Walling:
And then Google eventually catches wind. They figure out, they know, and then they do the penalty, and then the race begins again, right?  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah. Pendulum goes the other way. Everybody freaks out, and then,  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s a trip. Well, Lars Lofgren, thanks so much for joining me on the show. If folks want to keep up with you, lars lofgren.com, you have an email list there if folks want to hear the real story around SEO, content, marketing, entrepreneurship, whatever else, whatever else you’re up to.  

 Lars Lofgren:
Yeah, whatever marketing rants, whatever’s bothering me at the moment, try to be entertaining.  

Rob Walling:
Awesome. So that’s lars lofgren.com. Thanks again for joining me. Thanks,  

 Lars Lofgren:
Rob.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Lars for coming on the show, and thank you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 752.