Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I talked to Ricky Kesler from Income School. This is part one of a two part series. Today we talk about the Google leak and some of the implications and generally Ricky’s thoughts on the whole matter. And it was it was cool to catch up, you know, Ricky and I.
Have known each other for several years. And more recently, we’ve been doing some interviews and some collaborations. So it’s good to catch up and hear, you know, just what he’s thinking about with some of these matters. So we talk about that in episode one of the series and episode two, we actually talk about surviving Google’s preference for bigger brand type websites.
So keep your. Keep your eyes open for the second part. If you are watching this right when it’s released, then you may have to wait a week, but if you watch this in the future, both of the episodes might be out there. There are a few links in the description that I’ll point out in the episode and all that, but be sure to check the show notes and you can find, uh, you know, Ricky’s stuff, different things that we reference.
Throughout the interviews. So without further ado, we’ll get to part one of the interview with Ricky Kesler and I’ll see on the other side.
Intro Music
Doug: Hey, what’s going on. Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I get to catch up with my buddy, Ricky Kesler. Ricky owns Income School, a business dedicated to helping people generate an income for themselves and their families through creating online content. With nine plus years of experience creating content for the web, Ricky has transitioned from a regular nine to five as a chemical engineer and project manager to teach blogging, online business, YouTube, and.
Probably social media, tons of stuff. He’s a Renaissance man, I would say. And he’s been featured on CNBC, tons of podcasts. He’s a public speaker at various conferences. He has a few YouTube channels and. You probably seen him around. So Ricky, welcome.
Ricky: Thanks, Doug. It’s good to be here
Doug: today. We’re going to talk about the Google leak and I think we’re going to start there.
And we’re also going to talk about surviving Google’s preference for big brands, which they’re somewhat intertwined, but I kind of want to. Get into the details. And I will point out, we’re going to kind of skip any other intro. Ricky and I have recorded a few episodes together, so we’ll link up in the description if you want to hear more about his background and some of the things he’s worked on in the past or income school in general.
So. A few weeks ago, there was a leak from Google’s engineering team, and it kind of revealed a lot of information about the like, ranking algorithm in general. And I’m curious, Ricky, did you think we would ever get a leak like this? I mean, just as time goes on, maybe the likelihood of some mistake like this.
Goes up like eventually something will happen. So did you ever think we would get to look under the hood of Google’s algorithm?
Ricky: I, I certainly wasn’t expecting anything quite like this. I mean, I, I guess I would have thought that someday we’d, we’d get pieces here and there usually leaks are happening because of a person who’s whistleblower and they’re just, they’re unhappy with something they don’t like.
They feel like the company’s dishonest or whatever. And then they, they leak something to, to see a leak like this happened was a little bit of a surprise, but I guess, I don’t know, with just the comp, the complexity of technology today and how everything’s interconnected, I don’t know, maybe it was, maybe it was always inevitable that at some point you’d get a leak like this.
Doug: A lot of the information was. Things we kind of suspected, but we had Google liaison mouthpieces, just people that were contacting with there that had contact with SEOs and kind of an active dialogue, there’s a lot of things that we suspected and a couple of things, one, a lot of these things were confirmed, but also it showed that the liaisons.
The people that were telling us what we should be doing were like explicitly lying. And we, I don’t know, obviously we don’t know what they knew exactly, but I mean, it stands to reason that they probably knew. What do you take away from that as someone who works in SEO, whether it’s, you know, straight up Google search or within YouTube or Pinterest or many of the other search engines that we look at, what do you take away?
Ricky: Yeah. You know, it’s like you said, there were so many of those things that we suspected and a lot of them that we already, I mean, I’ve always tried to be kind of a, well, let’s take them at their word to the extent of like, if Google says this is what they want, then independent of the little details, I’m going to assume that at least that’s what they want.
And so there, even if the algorithm isn’t currently measuring that very well, I’m, I’m going to try to give them what they want because. they should be trying to bring the algorithm in line with what they claim, right? And so, you know, there were always things though, that I thought, no, there’s no way. Like there, of course you’re measuring that.
Of course, that’s part of the algorithm. Why wouldn’t it be? You know, and so then when they’re explicitly saying, no, that’s not, that’s not a thing. And they even kind of like laugh things down. They’re just like, come on guys. We’ve told you a hundred times. This isn’t, this isn’t a thing, you know, we’re not, that’s not part of the algorithm.
And then we see it there. It does really call into question just like how much trust can we place in what companies are telling us? And it really kind of makes me question the motives. Some of the revelations that we had, it was just like, why did you even lie? You know, like, what was your motivation?
Were you, it’s like, were you trying to get all of the, You know, the bloggers and all the people following all the, the SEOs, you know, you get a lot of bloggers and small businesses out there, you know, all following the same guidance. And um, you know, were they trying to get us to go down one path so that they could very easily like cut us out at some point?
I mean, I would like to think that that’s not what they were trying to do, but I mean, it’s like if you’ve actually done what Google told you to do for the last several years, You’re most likely still hurting right now and that I don’t know to me. It’s just incredibly disingenuous and it does make me concerned about Just other big companies who, you know, they put forward a public face, they say something, and then it ends up just not matching reality.
Doug: And when we take a step back and look at the incentives, it’s usually money, right? Like most of the time, I can’t remember where I’ve read it. It’s referenced multiple times in many books, I’m sure. But, If you’re unsure of the motive, it’s usually money. And it’s pretty clear, like Google has to answer to the shareholders.
But like you said, the thing is, some of them were, it would have been okay advice if they just told us the truth. Do you have any examples off the top of your head? Maybe one or two where it’s like, you could have just told us that you were using blah data.
Ricky: Yeah. You know, specifically when they, they’ve said over and over and over again, that.
You know, we’re not tracking clicks, you know, so click through rate to certain articles you know, are, are people clicking into an article and bouncing quickly and Pogo sticking to another article that, you know, they’re like, that doesn’t impact the algorithm. Which seems like it contradicts other things they’ve said in the past, but it also contradicts reason.
Like, If people click into an article and then they don’t pogo stick back out, they don’t bounce out and go to a bunch of other articles, that’s a good indicator that they got what they wanted. And if you see that happen over and over and over again, it means it’s probably a good resource. And vice versa.
You know, if, if almost everybody bounces out quickly and goes to something else. Then the resource was incomplete. Social media uses that kind of click tracking. Like, why wouldn’t they, but they kept saying, we don’t, we don’t do that. Likewise, you know, they’ve said, yeah, we don’t use data from the Chrome browser to, for, for search.
Right. So, you know, I’m a user I’m using Chrome. I may not even be using Google search, but they, because I’m using their, their actual search, um, their browser, I should say, like, they can see my activity across all websites. Even once I’m on the website. Also they have Google analytics, which most websites are using.
So they’re seeing, and with Google analytics for their tracking, not only clicks, but they’re tracking other engagements, scrolls and all sorts of stuff. So they can see how people are engaging with websites and they say, well, we don’t use that in the algorithm. And you know, this, this leak revealed that It is.
It’s that these variables exist within the algorithm. And realistically, I’m like, I’m not bothered by that. They have that data. If it will yield to better search results because it it can figure out what resources are better. Like, why wouldn’t you use that? So to me, that’s not even an issue. It’s an issue that they chose to lie about it.
And so vehemently so adamantly say we don’t do that.
Doug: And there was, maybe we’ll come back to this since it jumps ahead, but to your point, there was an article in the New Yorker, and it basically is like this. Google, I think the headline was, is Google gaslighting the internet and kind of looks like, I mean, the New Yorker obviously is a high journalistic standard.
So I, I feel like Google it’s sort of misguided. I like we’re saying like They could have just told us some of this stuff and it would have been fine, but it is unclear why they were lying about it for me. I’m always I’m not, I don’t, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I would say, but this definitely makes me not trust corporate entities even more.
And I was already like, Hey, you got to look out. They are not looking out for you. They’re trying to, I mean, They’re in the stock market, right? They have to, again, they have to answer to shareholders. That’s literally their job. So it’s like, you got to look out. If you’re the product, you have to protect yourself and be.
Mindful of that and for I mean really for the last I would say like five years or so I was slowly doing less and less things that relied on seo from google because it was pretty clear. It was Getting harder. It was more volatile. It was inconsistent and I was seeing Sort of the results of like google saying one thing That Wasn’t true.
And then results were not lining up to the point, like quick example, like private blog networks, like they really want to, you know, they really want to hit gray hat or black hat SEOs that are doing PBNs yet we know. They are highly effective if you keep them private and you know what you’re doing, like, I’m sure they’re still running along fine now.
Same with like AI content. Like, I think we still are seeing Google try to figure out what to do with AI content and how to deliver results, which is a, Whole other set of conversations But for you personally have you has this damaged your trust with google and how you want to interact with them Are you more cautious now?
What are some takeaways? Yeah.
Ricky: Yeah, totally. You know, I I don’t know. I’ve, I do tend to have a little bit too trusting of a personality and then, you know, things happen and then you’re just like, well, maybe I should be a conspiracy theorist a little bit more. And it got me thinking about, you know, my, my old days working for big corporations and stuff and seeing things that go on at these high levels that always had me scratching my head.
Cause you know, I went in to my career as an engineer and it’s like, my job is to make. Things run better, faster more efficiently, reduce waste, that kind of stuff, safer like it’s a really clear goal, but then you see some of these decisions that kind of come down from up top and you’re just like, Why would they do that?
There’s no way that’s going to make us more money or whatever. But over and over and over again, what you’ll often see is executives that will kind of manipulate the company a little bit to make it look better on paper, make the books look good, cut costs. Well, what’s an easy way to cut costs? Well, let’s go fire a bunch of people.
That’s going to cut cost for the next three months. Okay, but what happens when we can’t actually complete projects anymore? Well, I don’t know. That’s a problem for next quarter, right? And you’ll see this happen a lot of times. And then his executives, a huge part of their compensation is often, you know, Stock and options.
Right. And so if they can manipulate the stock price, because the books look really good, they can cash out and then what do they do? They move on to another position, you know, and we see this over and over and over again, and we see, and it really makes me wonder, like, We’re in an age where the creators of Google, they’re not running Google anymore.
Right. A lot of the old faces there that were there in the days of, you know, don’t be evil. Those people aren’t the people running the ship anymore. And so it makes me wonder, like, is this ship being run by just a bunch of self interested people trying to get the stock price as high as they can? Let’s ride the wave of AI.
Let’s try to, you know, yeah, just make as much money as we can. And then. Just know that at some point I’m going to, I’m going to cash out. So it does make me question and it does make me not want to be dependent. I’ve, I’ve always understood the principle, well, not always, but for many, many years understood the principle that there are a lot of external forces on you in business that you, you can’t control.
And so what do we do? We do our best to minimize those risks and risks. And so if we’re so dependent on Google for all of our traffic, then it’s just a matter of an algorithm update or, A change like this and you’re toast. And so, that’s a big part of why years ago we started YouTube. That’s why we got on YouTube in the first place.
You know, and it’s, it’s the same company, but it’s a different, it’s a different business, you know, it’s different people, it’s a different platform, it’s different algorithm, but I’m not going to depend on just that either. And so that’s why we’re so focused now on. Building a brand across multiple platforms.
And I think we could do even more.
Doug: That brings us to a related topic, but in, in project 24 and that’s your sort of, um, how do you describe it as a community with courses and it’s an education platform, right?
Ricky: Right. Yeah, it’s, that’s exactly it. It’s a very much community based education platform with a lot of step by step content instructional content to guide people through the process of building a website.
If they’ve never built one before, we’ll get them up to speed. How to do their keyword research, write good content that should rank well in search. It does on all the other search engines, not so much Google these days. Not always at least, but also then how to build authority both on your website and then off your website.
So we, we kind of walk people through those steps and then we do the same thing for people who are trying to do YouTube. And then there’s a lot of other social media where you can take the work you’ve done to create this content already. And then you can take pieces of it and repurpose that. in different ways for Instagram, Pinterest Facebook, Tik TOK, Twitter everywhere.
So we’re, we’re getting to be more of kind of omni channel, but that’s what project 24 is, is it’s our community based education platform where we show all this stuff.
Doug: Yeah. Perfect. Well, I’m jumping around a ton, but we’ll come back to that a little bit back to the leak. So there was a lot of stuff that like really wasn’t a huge surprise.
Confirming things we suspected. Were there any actual surprises where you were like, they said this, but I’m actually surprised that they were lying about it or other surprises where you’re like, I had no clue that they were tracking this, or I had no clue they were not tracking this,
Ricky: you know, one thing that really stands out in my mind was that they have a classifier for small personal websites.
So, what they’re doing with it. Exactly. I don’t know. But it’s like they have some way that they’re classifying certain websites as well This is a small website and it’s a personal website. And does that mean it’s like My personal blog where I diary about my day, or does that include hobby blogs, which is what a lot of project 24 members have created niche websites, right?
Does that include a lot of the content on the internet? And, um, and if those websites are not being surfaced just because they’ve, they’re, they look like a personal blog, you know, even if they have the best content and, and we see that all the time. So, I don’t know. That’s one that, that kind of surprised me that they would, it’s like, shouldn’t it be on the merit of the content as well as the authority that they build?
You know, if a small independent website is created by somebody who’s an authority in their niche, like that shouldn’t matter. So no, that one, that one kind of got me. Trying to think back on other specifics that, that really stood out to me that I don’t know. That’s the one that comes to mind the most.
Doug: Yeah. Same, same here. That was a little surprising. And when we see how AI is impacting the SERPs, the results, and the answers, the AI answers that we’re seeing in, in some queries, it is surprising because a lot of the, a lot Very specific answers about a specific thing in a niche that will have been covered in a personal blog that is probably small because that person is obsessed with like whatever sourdough bread and they’ve done all these experiments and then Google just taking it they’re shoving the site You They’re stepping on the site, shoving it to the 10th page.
And then they’re putting that answer right up front and I know they’re trying to put a link in there and this is all super fluid and it changes. It’ll change by the time this, this episode comes out. But yeah, the small blog designation is just like, okay, what, what are we trying to do? And we did see like, I can’t remember.
Was it like John Muir’s website? His personal blog was like de indexed for like a couple of days or something. Oh, I missed that one. That could be fabricated. One of the folks at Google, like one of the search folks, like their blog was de indexed in the March timeframe. So, well, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about cause you, you guys still have a few blogs running out there.
Did you see? Anything interesting, say, in the March time frame or the last couple months here? We’re recording in late June, but yeah, what’s been going on with your sites?
Ricky: Yeah, it has been pretty interesting. So, one of our sites. We, I mean, we saw a big drop in organic traffic. When I look at Google search console, it looks like it fell off a cliff and there’s like almost nothing left.
But when I look in analytics and actually look at my traffic and just organic, there’s a, there’s a drop. But it’s not nearly as much and that’s because for the first time since I started blogging, I am getting substantially more traffic from Bing and DuckDuckGo than I am from Google. And so it’s, it’s just, it is interesting that, you know, the other search engines, are still working the way that Google used to work.
They’re working the way we expect them to. And so I’m still getting a fair amount of traffic from those, just not as much. They just don’t, they have such a small market share of actual search traffic. The other thing though, was on the same website. I’m, I, I saw almost no overall traffic drop.
Because three, four months before this, I had, um, we had started Pinterest. And that kind of drives me a little bit crazy cause Pinterest is, is a very simplistic visual search engine. Like it’s way more simplistic than Google is. But you know, it’s, it’s it’s getting us traffic because we’re playing that game now.
So, we’re seeing that I don’t know, really though, across most websites. Basically Google traffic is, it’s mostly gone. And when I go do searches that I used to have content ranking for, it’s, they’re just, it’s gone. We had one site, this one surprised me too. It’s a small site. It’s one we started publicly a couple of years ago terrain treaders.
It, um, plan was for it to be our project charity website. But due to just how busy we were, we didn’t put much effort into it. I wrote one article on it, for a YouTube video. It was kind of a competition between me and then Nathan using chat GPT. And that article was doing really well. And then we had a handful of articles that were written by at the time we still had writers, college students that were writing for us.
And then my brother who works here now, he, he went through and edited those articles and he has tons of off roading experience and insurance experience. So he’s, we got some insurance content on there cause he, uh, spent several years. working as an insurance agent. So, actual expertise there. But also when I built the website from the start, I made it look and feel like like it was a legitimate organization.
I put an address in the footer. I did all those, just the, all those little things like, but nothing else. That was it. And then I did talk about it on YouTube and that website like does well on Google. I don’t, it makes no sense. It’s got less content. I think the homepage still is mostly lorem ipsum text.
but I built out the structure of the website, the footer, put in some schema markup and then the content we’ve written is, you know, it’s accurate because it’s written by people who, who knew what they were talking about. But I don’t know other than, I don’t see a huge difference between that and some of my other websites.
But for some reason that one’s being trusted
Doug: Interesting. When did that one launch?
Ricky: That would have been like very beginning of 23 Yeah, just last year
Doug: Interesting we can keep going on on this for many days here, but we’ll um, i’m sure let me ask you this Do you foresee a day because I think a lot of people like, Lay people not in the seo business or marketing business They are noting The Google results are worse and they’re like, I don’t want this type of result.
And Google, I believe they’re trying to adapt. I mean, they have to sell ads, right? That’s what they do. But do you foresee a day, I’m going to ask you for a prediction. Do you foresee a day where Google market share is kind of decimated? I mean, it can still be like 50%, but what are they, they’re like 90 plus percent.
Ricky: Currently, yeah, more than 90. Yeah.
Doug: If they drop to 50%, it would be like pretty dramatic. And all it would take is like Apple to have their own search engine, for example. Right. So what do you think?
Ricky: I, I think it’s going to depend a lot on what they choose to do in the probably fairly near future because people are noticing it.
So I definitely think it’s within the realm of possibility. If search results stay as they are, I mean, it, the, here’s the tricky part. people, like you said, just lay people that aren’t looking at this all the time. They’re used to seeing good search results on Google, right? So, you know, the immediate assumption when you search something on Google and don’t find a good result is, shoot, there’s not a good answer on the internet, um, for this question.
And that’s, I think that’s a big problem.
But, but that’s, that’s what I see. I made a YouTube short last week because, so I, a project 24 member was told me that they opened up Chrome on their phone and it gave them a notification asking them what, what search engine they wanted to be their default search engine for on, on Chrome. And I was like, well, that’s weird.
And they were curious, like, why would Google do that? And You know, the obvious answer is antitrust. Apple uses, uh, Google as their default search engine. Of course, Android uses Google as their default search engine. So the vast majority of smartphones by default, unless you specifically choose a different browser.
or navigate to a different search engine. Like that’s what, that’s what you search with. And so I think that created some issues. And so I think, you know, Google built it into Chrome. And so I never saw that notification myself, but I went looking in my settings and saw, Oh, I can actually switch my default search engine on Google Chrome on my phone or on my computer.
So I made a YouTube short showing how to do it. And I was a little bit We’ll use our British friends terminology. I was a little bit cheeky. I, uh, you know, I was like, Hey, let me show you how to improve your search results basically. And then I went through the steps on how to change your search engine.
I said, and now pick anything but Google and now your search results will be 10, 000 times better. And the reality is, is like, my search results are way better. I’m getting really good content because I, I just was like, Bing, you know, just give me Bing. Bing’s the number two search engine, but they’re so far behind Google.
It’s so tiny. And so I, it’s like, I’m almost trying to spread the word because it’s like, it’s not that I have a vendetta, you know, or it’s not that it’s like, no, like there’s good information on the internet, but so many people will just assume, I think for a while until the word starts to spread that no, this isn’t a.
There’s not information on the internet thing. This is a Google thing. The other possibility I see is that people feel like, well, the internet doesn’t have good information, but AI knows the answer to everything. And so they’re just going to go straight to an AI chat bot and ask their questions. There.
We see some of that happening now, but I could see Google losing market share to AI. Maybe even faster than they lose it to other search engines.
Doug: And I think you’re spot on with this. And I actually, I changed my browser to duck duck go just as I haven’t used it in years and I was like, you know what?
I’m just going to move to that. I moved to Safari for. Everything that is non Google product related. So, like Google docs and sheets, it tends to work better on Chrome. So I am sticking with that, but I’m, I’m trying to shift over and, you know, I’m not going to affect their bottom line. I wasn’t clicking on ads anyway.
Right. But it’s the little thing that I can do. And like you said, like trying to tell people, like, do you want better results? Like they’re out there. The other thing that might happen is someone like when we started blogging, we’re like, I can’t find the answer to this. Why don’t I start a blog? And then people do it out of like the obsession for the topic that they’re into.
And they’re not doing it for money. So. I feel like there could be like a cyclical sort of shift in why people blog where they’re like, I just want to get away from social media. I want to like go to the written word. I don’t really care if anyone reads this, but like, that is why people will want to read it.
And you know, we see it with like medium or some of the other, you know, blogging slash newsletter platforms. And I think that Could be a nice shift when people stop thinking, Hey, I want to make 10 K a month in three months or whatever. Like a lot of people that got into blogging over the last 10 years, like unfortunately, Ricky, that’s the kind of content you and I produced over on YouTube for a little while now, not that exactly, but like, it’s a slippery slope.
Uh, some of the content we were producing. So, It’ll be interesting to see how it goes,
Doug: Thanks a lot for checking out the episode and thanks to Ricky. We’ll put links in the show notes and description so that you can find his stuff. And like I mentioned before, part two is out there or will be coming out sometime soon. And we talk about how to survive. Basically Google changing their preference from the best information to the information from the biggest websites So we kind of go through how someone can build a brand and actually build a you know an income or side hustle or grow it to however big you want it to do And essentially we get into all the nuts and bolts.
So keep your uh, keep your eyes peeled for that one And we’ll catch you on the next episode. Thanks