You put up a very interesting post on LinkedIn. I think it was, uh, it was two weeks ago, and you said, "I've had the fortune, maybe misfortune, to work on some of the biggest blogs from the 2010-2020, from the 2010-2022 era. So many of these blogs are in catastrophic declines, and not from AI." So, you wrote this like, long post. It was a great post. Thank you.

And I, I messaged you and I'm like, "Can you come on the podcast to talk about this? This is amazing."

Yeah. Uh, I'm happy to talk about what specifically resonated with you the most.

You talked about how to actually clean, clean things up and the common problems that these massive sites were facing. And then I also want to go, I want to talk later about like HCU recoveries. Do you see a space for top-of-funnel content for publishers? Um, all, all sorts of things. But like this contest, so you said, "Across these sites, I consistently see a few foundational problems. Lack of discipline with tight topical clusters, even." Oh, I wanted to ask you about HubSpot. Okay. Lack, lack of discipline with tight topical clusters, even if all the content makes sense for the brand. Tons of content cannibalization going on. Very bloated blog. Literally hundreds of thousands of posts that don't rank for anything. An X posts per month by Y freelancers program that's been on autopilot for 5+ years. A fixation on keeping content costs as low as possible. No content update list goes on.

Yeah. Yeah. So, basically, what, what has happened? I mean, I talk a lot of [ __ ] um, about Google, and I think a lot of it is very valid. Um, however, there have been some major changes in the Google algorithm. And when I look at it at a page level, or if I look at a lot of struggling domains these days, a lot of times I'm like, "Yeah, this drop's warranted. This is fair." Um, so, what has changed or some of the big changes, uh, for the larger blogs that I've seen is, you know, from roughly 2010 to 2022, you could commit a lot of sins on your blog as long as you had an amazing, um, domain authority. If your domain authority score was super [ __ ] high and your link profile was like pretty healthy, pretty legit, you had a bunch of quality content links coming in, you could get away with murder. And it was a moat. It was a legit moat. That's why I always liked SEO, is because you could build, build, and it was, you, you got a real moat over time. And moats are awesome for business. You make a lot of money when you have a moat. And SEO had this like built-in moat kind of, um, into the system, right? That you could acquire. Well, those moats got, um, um, [ __ ] just destroyed and, um, filled in with concrete, and they're not, they're not moats anymore. So, you can't, a lot of these teams and a lot of these sites that have been coasting on that, you know, domain authority and getting away with whatever they want, they got lazy. They got sloppy. And I've gone through this. I'm not, I'm not talking [ __ ] right now. I, I have been through this myself. I know what it feels like. Even when you say, "Oh, I care about quality. I care about the long term. I care about doing things right." Well, you know, you start winning, like you get a lot of, you know, win after win after win, and everything's going really well, and you start to get sloppy. It happens to all of us. Um, but then a lot of teams, when these, you know, the tide shifts and things are going sideways on you, there are also a lot of teams that don't like face the music and go, "Oh, wait. Um, maybe we need to rearchitect everything. Maybe we need to kind of put our ego aside and start the basics and build back up. Maybe we're going to have to earn the wins, and it's not going to be nearly as easy as the heyday." Uh, a lot of teams are struggling with that right now. And if you have a, this is particularly true with larger sites. If you've spread too far, if it's too shallow, if the content was like great content for 2012, but maybe not 2025, like if that hasn't been updated, um, you're, you're going to get this, you're going to get into a state where the almost the weight where, you know, the, the, the debt of the entire blog is so heavy that it's just going to sink the entire thing. And turning that around inside of like a three or six month period is just not going to happen, 'cause it's foundational architectural problems. Uh, when I work on one of these sites now, I wasn't as candid as I, um, am now with some previous clients, and I wish I was. I wish I would have given them like the full, "Hey, this is going to be a really hard journey." But if I was talking with a client right now in one of these situations, I'd be like, "Look, um, this is not going to be a fast turnaround at all. This is going to take like, we're not going to be back to growth for like 3 to 5 years, right?" And in fact, this first year, things are going to look like [ __ ] Everything's going to keep looking like [ __ ] Um, and the way I'd figure out if I was in one of those situations is: A, is it a big blog? Is it massive? Hundreds, thousands of posts? And has there been a like steady, consistent month-to-month decline? Like a slow, not, not like a helpful content update hit, but just over the like the last two years since roughly 2022, have things just kind of like tick, tick, tick, tick, all the way down, regardless of click-through rates, regardless of AI, regardless of AIOs, it's just the rankings itself. Is everything just slowly and consistently getting worse over the last couple years? If you have that kind of momentum over a site that's pretty hefty and pretty big, like, look, it's gonna keep going this way for at least a year. And maybe if we do the right work and we go after the foundational stuff and we really fix the core, I'm hoping, hoping we can actually stabilize it in about a year. That has been my, I'm working on a few of these projects, and that has been the trajectory I've been able to pull off so far. Um, which is tough to hear. I'm like, "Yeah, you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars every month at a minimum with the hope that we can stop the decline for a year." Like, yeah, it's an expensive proposition. It's either that or you let the blog just wilt and die. I mean, which is, if you want to do that, that's a call. Make that call. Um, but so it's a tough position for a lot of these like classic blogs to be in. And a lot of them are in it right now. From what I see.

This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years' worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower." Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com.

Back to the podcast. So, in order to rebound, you're in the, what? First of all, can you describe more a bit what sloppy these blogs got sloppy? What that looks like? And then you said to rebound, you got to spend tens of thousands of dollars. So, what are they spending the tens of thousands of dollars on?

Yeah. So, a lot of the things or specifically what sloppy looks like is generally, so these teams, they got used to just winning in SEO, right? So things have been pretty lazy for a long time. And it's generally the SEO strategy. I mean, we're all familiar with this right now. We're all wrestling with having to change this. And I don't want to talk too much yet because this did work even for good programs. This worked for a very long time. But, okay, here are the X topics we're going after this month. And as long as they're somewhat related to our marketing, like prospect and category and target market and all that stuff, as long as they're somewhere in the general area, if there's traffic and the keyword difficulty isn't too hard, well, let's just pick five, seven, 10, 20, whatever our content volume is for the month. We pick it, we throw it to a freelancer. Now you kind of do a little bit more AI. That's fine. It's essentially the same outcome, and you just ship per month and no one ever talks about it, right? There's just like the internal updates are, "Yes, we shipped 10, 20, 30 blog posts a month and traffic is stable or up."

You said you wrote your lack of discipline with tight topical clusters.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's a little, they're just kind of picking whatever topics they want. Um, and I have done this. I've done a lot of this myself in previous eras because you didn't have to. You didn't have to like be super disciplined. Well, now you got to be disciplined. And, um, you know, now it's not, you can't just like, "Oh, hey, here's a bunch of random topics. Here's some new keywords. Let's just fill the calendar." You actually have to ask yourself, "Okay, what, what clusters are we really going to fight for? What is the entire topical map that we need to go own? Have we actually filled that in?" And a lot of blogs from the like heyday of B2B or just, you know, B2C blogging in general, they didn't have to fill that in. They got the domain authority. You could rank for high volume stuff. You didn't need the whole cluster. And then sites start tanking. And you're like, "Well," um, they're like, "Why did our productivity hacks post drop?" And I'm like, "Well, it's one out of five productivity posts on your entire site out of like a thousand. You don't own the productivity space. Like, I know this brand has talked about productivity in the past, and they have good things to say about productivity, but it's shallow on the site, right?"

Of course. They're not a productivity brand.

Yeah. Yeah. Not yet. Or like the, so the [ __ ] up.

In many cases, Google is saying, "Oh, hey, this isn't a brand in that category." And they're tanking it, and it's deserved. And you're like, "Yeah, makes sense."

You know what? Actually, I have a, I have a side, I have a side, I have a side question. Sorry for interrupting, because I, I love, I love SEO for the same reason that you love SEO, which is that you, you build up that domain authority over time and you kind of have a moat. So, is there, and I want to go back to like what, what you're spending all this money on each month to, and how to rebound, but I, I do want to know what your opinion on this. Is there a strategic way to actually expand, uh, the categories of content that you are able to rank for?

Yeah, that is what I struggle with the most right now, right? You know, I said earlier that, hey, I talk a lot of [ __ ] with Google. In some cases, they're doing the right thing by dropping these sites, and it's well-deserved. Well, now let's get into the stuff that I think is [ __ ] [ __ ] And when the, the things that I think Google's [ __ ] up, a lot of it is around topical authority and either expanding it or even just figuring out where your topical authority is and whether or not you deserve it. Topical authority is probably the most [ __ ] up part of the Google algorithm right now, in my opinion. And what I mean by that is, you, you kind of, when we, when SEO is a lot of content people are talking about topical authority, we're always like, "Okay, we kind of think of it like a librarian or we think of it like Wikipedia." Like, "Oh, you're in the personal finance space. Well, personal finance includes credit cards and checking accounts and budgeting and debt." And you kind of think of it like, you know, what would, if you were in the personal finance section of a library, what are all the books and topics that would be there, right? That's how a lot, that's how I've always thought about it. And what I've realized in the last couple years is that's not how Google is operating right now, like at all. Their topical authority map is not this beautiful like information tree. It kind, it used to work like that. It doesn't work like that now. Whether or not that's intentional or not, I'd have to ask Google. But now, like topical authority is, it's almost like a third grader is like figuring out like where the topical authority begins and ends. Like, it's extremely literal and it's not by your overall category. So topical authority can get sliced and diced in really [ __ ] up weird ways and in unexpected ways. Um, like I'll give you an example. I was working, one of my clients was, um, quite literally a top 100 domain according to, you know, the Ahrefs' domain authority, right? One of the biggest domains on the planet. If I said their brand, which I can't say because of the NDA, but if I said their brand right now, like every single listener would instantly know who it is, like, just massive colossal brand and, uh, very, very well known in their category, right? We, um, their content, their blog had never really gotten built up, so I helped them kind of build the whole thing from scratch. And they're off to the races. All the charts are up and to the right. However, um, they, we were publishing a lot of content, a lot of high-quality content, and we really, really struggled to get anything to rank for even basic informational stuff squarely within their category. Google wasn't happy. They didn't give a [ __ ] If we rank for brand terms, if we targeted brand terms, we went straight to the top, which kind of makes sense. You'd expect that, right? Um, but we have this massive brand, massive domain authority, everything you think you could want. And even when we're going after really, really basic terms, we can't get stable rankings for like [ __ ] anything. When something would rank at like bottom of page one, that was like, "Holy [ __ ]" It would like rarely happen.

That were they super difficult keywords?

No. No. No. This happens even on, uh, keyword difficulty of like 0 to 5. I see this constantly. And so, there's, we're in this,

And it was, and it was quality content targeting the keyword specific.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This, this, we were not cutting any corners on content. The culture team, brand, everybody obsessed over quality content. We were spending a ton of money.

Sorry, it was somewhat related to the brand or like to?

Very related. Squarely within something that they should just have no problems with. We weren't, we weren't stretching at all.

Um, and we would still struggle. And what I see,

The way I think of it now is like, every site, Google kind of, with every one of these little sub-clusters and topics, Google basically decides whether or not you get a free pass in that area. And if you do not get a free pass, getting even a shot at ranking is [ __ ] impossible. Doesn't, doesn't matter how much time you spend on the content. You are not even going to get tested. Doesn't matter. Like I said, this is a top 100 domain. These are people doing the legit work, and they're not even getting a fair bat. It's [ __ ] [ __ ] Now, I've also had the reverse happen to me. All right. I'm not just going to talk [ __ ] on when I, when I lost. I'm also going to talk [ __ ] when I won.

Yeah. I want to hear some wins.

Some wins. I had another client and, um, their category, um, was actually personal finance. And, um, a lot of what I would, anybody would assume, "Okay, these are squarely personal finance topics, and this, this company is all about these things squarely within their space," struggled, struggled all the [ __ ] time. But there was very specific subtopics within personal finance where that domain basically just got a free pass. And some of the most competitive terms in personal finance, I could ship low-quality freelance junk and it went straight to the first page.

So why do, so why do you think it got the free pass? Because, so the first thing I actually do now, um, well, there's like this, this tipping point with all these little clusters, and if you get enough pages ranking through luck, history, uh, enough link building, you get a bunch of like, pro, um, like PR hits, and you get like, you, everything to pop. Um, if you get enough like center of gravity in a, to very literal cluster, a very specific cluster, the rest of the cluster basically becomes a gimme. You get everything else. And I actually think that's why, you know, we, I've talked a lot of [ __ ] about Forbes and a lot of the other like parasite, that's why parasite SEO is a thing right now. For whatever reason, like all the news orgs and websites out there, they have enough content that the current Google algo is like, "Okay, you all are good at content. You get to rank for any content-based query." And they do. It's kind of the, they've already hit that tipping point at such a large, um, like section of Google and just keywords in general that they get a free pass. Like I've, I've some of my clients, I find these like free, free pass like, like little sectors of Google, and then I just ship content in there, and it all ranks, traffic goes up, everyone's happy. But I have to find that like one little cluster where Google is willing to give me the free pass, and I have to find where, where the boundaries are, and I have to do it fast. And I have to be really careful about going outside those boundaries. And if I am going to go outside those boundaries, I can't just ship content. I can't just go build a whole cluster and, and eventually some of it bubbles up. That's how it used to work in the old days. Like you start with more obscure keywords, right? You like, um, you go niche. Um, you build some traction, you build momentum, you slowly build it up. Like, no, I don't do that anymore at all. Um, because you just end up with these, you know, 20, 30, 50, 100 posts of just dead weight that never go anywhere. Um, so anyway, yeah, it's, uh, that, how that topical authority gets sliced and diced these days is, is it's wonky as [ __ ] It's weird, and you have to be really intentional with how you build it. Um, and it'll get sliced and diced in ways that you don't expect, that you'd never expect. But then when you see it, you're like, "Oh, there is a literal connection. I can see the thread. There is a, a shred of logic. It's third-grader logic, but there is logic there." Um, and you can kind of get stuck in these corners or locked out of other corners that should be a gimme for your brand. And then you're like, "Why, Google, are you not giving me a fair shake for something that's squarely up my alley? This is [ __ ]" Um, and that's happening a lot right now.

All right. So, how do people rebound? How do, how do brands rebound? You said spend tens of thousands of dollars.

What are they spending tens of thousands of dollars on? And is there anyone like, and are there lessons in this that people should just go and do themselves for their own websites, too?

Oh, yeah. Um, well, I mean, the big lesson for anybody building a site is don't extend too far, right? Be really, really intentional about the areas you need to own. And if you don't have traction in those areas, do not, do not go wide. Do not keep, do not build wide, build deep, right? You got to really get, you want, it's a, it's a vertical strategy right now in Google. Um, and then if you have dominance in a particular area, like, okay, then you can kind of inch your way out and keep going wider. Um, but you want to be really, really careful about taking on too much too fast. Um, because that'll burn you later. And I think that's a lot of the AI like SEO strategies that people are using right now. Like that's going to burn. I mean, it already is burning people, and I think it's going to continue to burn people. They just spread their surface gra, you know, the surface area of their site just gets way, way too thin. Um, so avoid that [ __ ] Um, but as far as what, uh, my team spends time on, uh, first step is I go through the entire site. I look at every post by hand to get, because I want to see that site like Google sees it. I want to know every skeleton, every shitty thing that has ever, ever been done from every era of every blog manager that has ever worked on this site. I want to know the whole history. So, I'll literally, you know, log into WordPress, um, find, you know, reverse sort the, uh, blogs by date, look at the oldest ones, and just start going through them.

Wow.

Um, and not only that, but like the way I run massive sites like this in an intentional, high-level, like competitive environment, it's like you need control, you need visibility. And so, I will go through every post and actually start mapping them to topics. Or my team will do it. We'll go through all of it. And yeah, there's things we can do to, um, you know, maybe we'll have AI run it and give us a first shot of suggestions, but we always double-check everything. We don't take anything for granted. And what I mean by that is like, every post, so we don't think in keywords, right? We think in topics. What is a unique entity, regardless of all, you know, the several dozen keyword variants around this entity? What is an actual unique entity that Google wants to serve unique pages for? Um, sometimes there are sub-entities, you know, you can get like, um, topic examples or how-to topics or, you know, whatever. So, some, sometimes it's splits and fragments, but what are all the unique entities and unique subtopics that are truly unique? And do, uh, make sure every post on the site is actually mapped to something. Like, what is the ideal target topic for this post? That can take a while. But we go through, we make, we map the entire blog. So we know, okay, where, where are we supposed to be in the rankings now? Where, like, um, once you have all these target topics, you can just throw them into Ahrefs or SEMrush or whatever, and like, any keyword ranking tool. Boom, pop it in. We can instantly see how much potential we have, where we're at, if things are dropping, especially on competitiveness or in those really competitive keywords. Very, very straightforward. But we map the entire [ __ ] thing. After that, we start fixing it. And that generally involves a few things: Filling in gaps in critical areas that really matter for the brand and the site. And that's always different depending on the business model. Um, there's gen, if the site is old, there's generally a ton of broken links. Like, it's usually been a while before someone, I know this is like SEO 101, but people don't do the basics ever. Like, I've literally gone in just to age and been like, "Broken links report," and there's thousands and thousands and thousands of extremely high-quality broken links. So like, "Okay, let's go fix that [ __ ]" But that's not just a, you can't just like redirect all that [ __ ] to the homepage because you're missing out on a huge opportunity. It's like, "Okay, where are those links actually going?" And they're probably old URLs that didn't have good targets and probably should have never been on the site to begin with. What post should they actually go to? What's the ideal post in that, you know, in the site today? And, um, do we need to create a new post? Is there an actual gap? Right? Do we need to publish a bunch of stuff first, then do some of these redirects? Which redirect should we prioritize? And clusters within the site, are we actually going to go focus on and fix now because it's this giant Gordian knot? Are we going to do it now, or like, what, what do we do first, right? We got to figure all that out. Um, so it's fixing links, publishing a bunch of content, updating stuff, making sure that as we figure out all these topics. Okay, now we figured out the topic. We figured out the search intent is pretty easy. It's very, like, you would check Google. Now we know what direction to take the article. Now let's go rewrite that post that hasn't been touched in over a decade. Okay, great. Now we're actually satisfying the user's intent or the searcher's intent and doing that over and over and over and over and over again. Um, and generally, there's a bunch of other nasty [ __ ] we uncover. Uh, rogue plugins, horrible theme builds, um, you know, blog migrations that were completely broken and there's a whole batch of redirects that were never sorted, or we, there's a huge pile of redirects that were just pointing to the blog, and those are still really high-quality links, and they should actually go to some individual posts. We just need to get the right posts out, and they make sense for the brand, right? So, it's just untangling all that [ __ ] and debt, uh, that has, you know, piled up over like the last decade, decade and a half. And that is a grind and it's not fun, which is why no one's done it. Um, but you do enough of it, and like, you get the stop site to stop dropping, and you hit a nice plateau, and things get stable, and then it starts to pop back up, and then you get back to growth, and then you get back to being able to play offense because now you know where everything is, and you see the rankings, and you know where you are competitively wise, and you see the gaps, and you know where the actual momentum in the site is, and you can start moving forward instead of just constantly trying to like, you know, every time you do something, you have to like fix five other broken things, uh, because the house is like almost falling down around you, right? So, um, that's generally what I'm looking at.

Dude, I had that thought today. So, uh, I don't know if you heard, Rite Aid, which a popular pharmacy, was a popular pharmacy. They closed.

And, uh, I went to their site, and, and I mean, like, man, if you're American, you've been to a Rite Aid. And I went to lots of Rite Aids. And I went to their site, and I just saw like, it was just like this one page, "Sorry, we're no longer in business. Thanks for being a value, comp, value customer over the years." And I just started to think about,

All the dumb stuff that they probably did that led such a huge name like Rite Aid to close. And then I started also thinking about the potential that the site had to rank for stuff as well, because it's Rite Aid. Like, man, how much, how much domain authority does Rite Aid have? I would, I would go to,

Probably a lot. Probably. I'm literally checking right now. I'm, and I just started thinking like, uh, right here. Let's see, domain authority. Wait, wait. I'm not. Let me, probably, probably a ton. Let me log in to to check. But I, I just started thinking about all these lost opportunities and how they made the 75 like, yeah, I'm just like, so, so it's very similar. You, you get sloppy and you do like, you, like you said, you have,

You have a website with,

It was great for the time and the era.

Like what?

But things have moved on. Give examples.

Right. Like if you think about a classic post like Neil Patel. Like actually, so many SEOs and content folks, they basically, they learned all of their content approach from Neil, which is deservedly so. There was an era where Neil crushed SEO and content. I mean, [ __ ] my first job, he hired me at his startup, Kissmetrics. I got to know Neil fairly well. I've worked with him very closely over the years. I know his program inside and out, 'cause I [ __ ] ran it on multiple domains. Okay? And there was an entire generation of content and writers, freelancers that basically emulated Neil for good reason. And if you think about the classic Neil post, it's this long, like story at the intro, you know, kind of like a hook, and then a bunch of stats, right? Love the stats. He like popularized a lot of that. Like, get the stats in the intro. Um, and then every freelancer for a [ __ ] decade did the same thing. And I had to start telling them, "Don't stop doing that. Please don't do that anymore. It worked then, it doesn't work now." But anyway, um, big long intro, and then just this, this super lengthy, like, let's cover everything, almost, you know, before Ultimate Guides and the [ __ ] uh, what was Brian Dean's Skyscraper Technique? Yeah,

Kind of like before the Skyscraper Technique was cool. Neil was already like, kind of doing the same thing. Uh, Brian Dean also worked with Neil for a while. He worked on Quick Sprout, like way back in the day. Anyway, um, point is, like, uh, that perfect post, which crushed it for so long, you did something like that today, doesn't work like at all. Um, so you have to, like, anything that was done, if the era is a mismatch, where things have evolved, and everything's always evolving, like, if, if it's just been a while since you've touched that area of the site, like, it might still be good content, but it doesn't give people what they want today, right? Things have moved, things have evolved. So, you have to stay on this stuff. Um, I mean, really, this, like, you know, getting lazy. SEO works the same way that revenue works at a startup or any company, you know, like, I, I founded my own startup. It did really well for a few years, then it went sideways. Like, so I, uh, been through that, managed the P&L, very comfortable with that. And when things are going sideways on you, whether it's SEO or revenue, the first frame of mind that I like to go in on this stuff is like, "Okay, things are [ __ ] And it's probably because there's a bunch of things are [ __ ] It's a whole giant grab bag of mistakes that have been made by a lot of different people in my startup. I was one of those people. I was, I was in it with everybody else. I was making all those mistakes. Um, but most importantly, a, the biggest mistakes were made not six months ago, not a year ago, they were made two to three years ago. That's when the trouble started, which is usually around the time when the revenue was peaking or the site traffic was hitting like, crushing, everything looks great.

And you're making all these foundational fuckups that you're not even aware of. You have no idea that they're there. And the feedback loop is so wonky that you're not going to be told that it was a mistake for three full years. And that's what a lot of teams are struggling with on the SEO side. These sites' fuckups were made three, five years ago, like bad ones. But now people are finally being told by Google, "Hey, that's not good enough."

When do you think it's worth, uh, continuing with one of these sites that has like a lot of this sloppy, versus just cutting your losses and starting something new?

Yeah. So, this, this is an extremely good question and extremely fair question. Like, I get upset at clients that like say, "Oh, we want to continue," but they don't want to like go the distance. But if a client comes to me and says, "Hey, Lars, we want to have an honest discussion about whether or not that we should put a single dollar into this going forward." I'd be like, "Yeah, you're ahead of the curve. This is a valuable discussion. I don't know what the right decision will be. Uh, we can talk about it. There's probably no right decision. And it's just like, what bet feels most..."

How about what if you, what if you're like, you have a great site, like good domain, but the, the site is just so wrecked that you basically take everything off of it and you just start building from the ground up?

Well, depends on the links.

So, links aren't the hack they used to be. Links used to be a cheat code. So, links, links are still valuable, but they're not a cheat code. But like, I've seen the most progress on sites when I stop, when I'm like, "Okay, stop trying to like fix the content. I mean, we're going to go fix a bunch of content, but stop obsessing about just content. Go make sure the link profile is good and not building new links. Let's just fix all the links we already have." That's when I've actually seen the most progress the fastest. So, um, like if you have this massive site or even just like a moderately big site, and there's a bunch of good links, it'd be like, "Well, are they going to the right pages? Are they, are they broken or not?" Uh, what is the link profile? If you, if you wanted to pair down the site to just the essential to keep the link profile healthy, then like, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense." That's usually where I start anyway. And then we can have a discussion on what's the best way to build forward based on strategy, goals, risk, how much investment. Um, you know, these days I'm usually more cautious about investing in SEO. Like, you want to go after stuff that has a really clear ROI in this like LLM AI world. You know, what is, what terms, what questions, what prompts do you still want to rank for, even when AIOs gobble all the informational stuff up, right? Do you, do you feel comfortable with your spend in the new world, regardless of how many people end up transitioning out of Google and the 10 blue links? Like, those are all things you should be factoring in. Um, but it's like, you don't, I generally don't just burn the site to the ground if there's a good link profile, right? That's usually where I draw the line. So keep the pages, keep the posts that are that actually have a bunch of links going to them, and keep the pages and posts that are actually ranking and getting organic traffic. Some, so one of my clients, I was, um, you know, things were still dropping, and I was like, [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] they're still dropping. God damn it. Sooner or later, my client's going to get upset with me. Like, I have a lot of trust with this client. But at a certain point, it's like, uh, so, um, and this site had definitely expanded beyond its product area, beyond any,

That's true, even loose definition of topical authority.

Okay. So, um, um, and we, there was a bunch of pages on this site that were ranking very unrelated,

High volume stuff.

Yeah. And, and some of them were actually generating revenue in like a weird way. Um, so I was like, [ __ ] And so I tried, I did so much cleanup on the site, but I kept the high traffic stuff. I was like, "Don't touch it. You know, Google clearly likes it, right? So maybe it'll pick up some links, you know, we'll see." I, I always, I was really hesitant about culling that high volume stuff. And earlier this year, I was like, "[ __ ] it. This is not going as well as it needs to go. Let's just rip the band-aid." And I tanked, I deliberately tanked traffic on the site by about a third, half, or something. I, I told the, I gave him a heads up. I was like, "Okay, this is going to get crazy. All the charts are going to look terrible. Doesn't matter what metric you're looking at, they're all going to look like trash, but I'm going to go remove a huge chunk of this site that generates traffic. And these are really high rankings. And these are also pages that are actually like decent quality. Like they're, they're definitely answering the search quality quickly, fast. Um, they wouldn't be ranking otherwise. Um, or in this case, they wouldn't. Um, so, uh, I killed it. And man, I'm so glad I did. Like, that's, it was that plus fixing a bro, bunch of broken links that got that site from a like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick to drop to a like, "Okay, things are stable." And I'm no longer like,

So you removed the, the unrelated, you removed the unrelated content, and then, basically the content that you,

Even if it was generating traffic, high volume traffic.

Yeah. And, but, and then the content that you wanted to rank better, you didn't really have, you didn't change that content much, it just started ranking better because,

Yeah. So that's, that's the nuance here. I have been working on that site for a while, and I have updated a ton of content that's squarely,

Basically, what I'm trying to ask is, what would have happened if you didn't remove that unrelated, high-ranking content?

I think things would have continued to drop. I think that, so right now, I was just looking at some, uh, ranking reports last night, and I am seeing wins and gains on extremely valuable pages and terms, high money stuff that is extremely important to the client that brings, this is like bottom-of-funnel stuff that brings in customers directly. This is, this is the stuff that everybody wants to rank for. Um, one of the key terms I'm thinking of right now, the keyword difficulty is 97. This is highly competitive [ __ ] stuff that I've struggled with for like a year and a half to get anywhere on. Boom. I'm in the middle of the first page. And I'm like, "Oh, [ __ ] yeah. Game on." All right. Let's go. Right. Okay. I'm like, I'm, I've gone from, "I can't get anything to work" to, "Oh, wait, some things are bubbling up in, in unexpected, exciting ways." Now I'm, we're start, I'm starting to flip from always playing defense, defense, defense. I can't win. Everything's hard. Nothing works to, "Oh, wait, I'm starting to play offense again." There's still so much [ __ ] I need to fix. Um, but that being able to shift that tempo. Um, well, I mean, it's basically three things, right? We have rewritten probably a third of the site, like completely rebuilt, rearchitected entire clusters. We've redone a third of the blog. Um, I have deleted like 70% of the site. Um, I've fixed, there were, I think about 1,400 broken links. I fixed almost half of them at this point. Um, and a lot of the, the site removal, or the lot of the pages I took down, they were a lot of them were generating a lot of traffic. Um, so we, I've been slashing and burning through this domain for a while, just culling everything I get my hands on. Um, and it is starting to turn, which is actually really exciting, but it's also taking a while. And I lost a lot of sleep when things like, not good.

So, you remove the, the unrelated, you remove the unrelated content, and then basically the content that you,

Even if it was generating traffic, high volume traffic.

Yeah. And, but, and then the content that you wanted to rank better, you didn't really have, you didn't change that content much, it just started ranking better because,

Yeah. So that's, that's the nuance here. I have been working on that site for a while, and I have updated a ton of content that's squarely,

Basically, what I'm trying to ask is, what would have happened if you didn't remove that unrelated, high-ranking content?

I want to go macro now for a little bit since we were just going deep into into the weeds. What, um, do you see, do you see a space for top-of-funnel SEO content? Like what, yeah, I mean, yeah.

Yeah, like informational targeting top-of-funnel stuff.

This, this is an excellent question that I think any, anybody in SEO needs to be asking themselves. I think we've all been asking ourselves, um, and maybe burying our heads in the pillows trying not to think about it, which is fair, and I understand. Um, but, so SEO, the go-to strategy would be for a long, long time was just informational, get traffic, keep getting more and more traffic. Once you've nailed the core of your whatever space you're in, just keep expanding, right? Uh, HubSpot did this and then caught a bunch of [ __ ] about it when, when they lost some of. Well, what pissed me off the most about that is that they claimed that SEO was like a channel that wasn't viable anymore when it was like, you got, it was basically what you described for the, what you just spent the last 30 minutes describing. And that's kind of what happened. And,

Yeah, I mean, HubSpot, classic domain.

They addressed us to it. Inbound. They're, they're like, "We're going to go further down the funnel, and we are going to target content that is related to us." They said that.

Yeah. And I think everybody, any decent B2B content team that's focused on SEO should be doing something similar. I would be very, very careful about going for high volume, just pure top-of-funnel stuff right now. Like, if you want top-of-funnel, go spend time on socials, right? Go spend time on LinkedIn, go spend time on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever the [ __ ] Um, but SEO, like, I, I think there is a time and place to go after like mid-funnel stuff. So, some informational stuff. And I think the degree in which you push on that mid-funnel SEO is dependent on the size of the brand and how comfortable the leadership team is on spending money on pure like brand dollars. That's more speculative and then we'll never have any attribution. Um, used to be you could at least say, "Hey, we generated traffic, right?" But that is going away or a lot. It's, it's, it's just shrinking. Maybe it goes away entirely. Who knows? Um, but it's definitely not what it used to be. So, if you're spending a bunch of time on informational SEO, like, do, does this team, does this company value the brand impression of your little site coming up in ChatGPT or Perplexity or AI mode or whatever it is? And are you comfortable spending that money with the uncertainty and the unknown of like, "Well, maybe ChatGPT evolves in a way that links become really prominent? Maybe AIOs evolve in a way where links become more profitable or more prominent, and you actually get more clicks over time." Or maybe brands are actually like, very visible, and the impression is really solid, because right now it's pretty lukewarm, right? It's not great. Definitely don't get any clicks out of AIOs. And so, what's the value of that brand impression? I don't know. We could debate it. Um, so the way I look at it personally is, even for a startup or a small company, there's usually a, you get all the bottom funnel stuff. That's, you don't really have to argue about that. Someone's going to argue about like the value of bottom-of-funnel SEO. I'd be like, "Dude, you don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about." But these are like buying terms, like competitor versus, you know, you versus competitor, uh, competitor alternatives, um, you know, your product category, best product category, right? Whatever. All that collection of keywords, you should be going after all of them. I don't think it's sleazy, but that's my opinion. Um, you should go after that [ __ ] But the stuff that's more speculative, the mid-funnel stuff, even even for a startup or a smaller site, there's usually some informational terms that are kind of like slam dunks, right? They're not transactional. Someone isn't saying, "Hey, I want to buy." But there's usually like some how-to terms that are squarely up your alley. They, people are researching for like the exact problem space that your product or service addresses. And assuming it's not too competitive, there's probably

A batch of content that squarely fits, um, and is still really valuable, even in a world where informational how-to content struggles a lot more than it used to. But you probably want to draw that line somewhere, and you want to be very disciplined about not expanding that too far.

Now, the bigger the business gets, I think you can start expanding that even more, right? Like, early days for a startup, you have to be super, super disciplined. Either something produces a customer, or you don't spend time on it, right? Like, you've got to be aggressive and ruthless. It's all direct response. Get me customers and prospects today. So, you're going to draw that line like pretty, pretty fast. You're not going to produce that much informational content.

For someone like Adobe, I'd be like, "Yeah, like we have some money to throw around. I think we should, we could make a case that we want to go lock up the entire informational cluster around like design." Um, so that anytime ChatGPT is talking about design of any kind, we're constantly being referenced, right? Like, if we're going to go spend money on a Super Bowl ad, we should be comfortable spending money on SEO informational terms right now. So, I think, you know, over time, you know, the weighting will shift for the company. I think you get more comfortable.

But while that would make sense to me, going after that informational cluster for a large brand, the issue you run into is not whether or not it makes sense for the company, but you get a lot of internal friction, right? Where you, you, you can't point to traffic. There is no attribution. Um, you're basically just betting on the brand impressions in LLMs over time and being able to skew the narrative in your space in your direction and seeing the value of that. Well, there's a lot of VPs, there's a lot of execs, a lot of CEOs, a lot of founders that won't see things that way, and they need that six-month chart to look pretty. And I'm like, "Okay, you're not going to find that here." So, it's, it's usually it'll be like a culture misfit or a, like, it's just not going to match up to the operating cadence of the company. Um, regardless of whether there is brand value there.

So, Ran Fishkin came on the show a couple of months ago. He said the same thing, actually, which is top of funnel. You, you do that now for the impressions. Even if people aren't clicking, you are owning, you are owning the space. And, and so you're basically saying it makes more sense to do top of funnel if you are a bigger brand and you can throw money around. But when you're smaller, focus on, focus on transactional keywords that will bring you money.

Yeah. Like for a startup, um, there was a brand new company. I'd say like, look, you, you do want to do SEO. You don't want to build an SEO editorial team, which is a very different answer than I used to give, like five years ago. I'd be like, "Man, I love SEO. SEO is great. Go do a the whole [ __ ] X post per month. Let's commit now. Build long. Nothing will scale and be more profitable than SEO. Like, nothing comes close." Right now, my answer has changed a lot. I'm like, "Look, don't build the whole pipeline, like content pipeline. Stay away from that. Like, there are probably 30 to 50 pages, a mix of blog posts and landing pages that you need on your site from day one. And you want to go get that stuff up. So, do a push, do a sprint. Uh, make sure you, you map it all ahead of time, and they all have clear targets, and it's clean, it's well-architected, and you know what you're going after. But go build those 30, 50 pages and then update them every quarter and just chill. Like, go spend all your marketing time on other [ __ ]. Like, make sure you're updating that core and it's not like getting away from you. And then if you, as your business expands, as you get more flexibility with your budgets, if you want to slowly expand to maybe a hundred pages down the road, like, and kind of inch your way to it, great. But also make sure that you have other channels firing on all cylinders that are bringing you customers. Social, YouTube, uh, outreach, events, community, whatever you're doing, make sure you're not just investing in SEO. Like, SEO is there to kind of like catch, right? And get the core in place, but I wouldn't go all in from the get-go. That's a very risky proposition.

So, I'm going to ask you a very hard question now.

Good.

That's a very hard question. Do you even think that there is a space for publishers who are just focused on SEO as their acquisition channel? And if, if and how should these publishers evolve?

Yeah. Um, I think I'm going to say yes. Now, whether or not I'd build one from scratch, I was trying to build one from scratch. I was trying to build an HR site, and that went sideways. Um, but if someone came to me and was like, "Lars, I want to build an SEO like media company from scratch today." I'd be like, "Oh, shit." Like, "Do you know what you're doing?" Like, I, I have built an SEO media company. I've done that. And I'm like, "That's not what I'm doing today." I do some SEO, but um, a lot of like media content stuff, it's more personal brand. It's socials. SEO is now, I treat SEO as like a cherry on top, right? If it works, great. But I'm not dependent on it. And if I was building a pure media company today, I would not focus exclusively on SEO. I'd go all in on probably video, TikTok, YouTube, and personal brands via Instagram and LinkedIn if it made sense. I multi-channel from the get-go, building audiences, going hard. And then I, now for media brands, SEO is now, um, the prize at the end. It is not, I don't view it as a path forward or like a strategy in and of itself. There's too much risk, and you're just, it's too easy for things to go sideways on you.

So, but for any of these like bigger sites, I've come to the conclusion, or my current opinion is that, you know, in this like informational, you know, uh, desert that we're now in, where like it's just AI's everywhere and nobody actually ranks for anything. Um, I actually think a lot of people could say that the affiliate SEO model is doomed, and I think it's definitely is going through a transition, 100%. Right? If the links or if the clicks go away, how do you get your affiliate clicks, right? Affiliate media companies are based on getting traffic and getting that traffic to click within the same visit. You do that, you make a lot of money. Um, but so if the clicks go away, your affiliate money also goes away. However, you know, I've looked at a lot of product prompts and LLMs because it's just a space I'm interested in, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, how is this, how is this shaping?" And so, especially in competitive areas, so many of the references in LLMs, where are they coming from? Major affiliate media shops. Those are all the references. You basically go to like, you search for like best credit cards or whatever, and like all the who's who, they're all being referenced in LLM, right? It's, it's one and the same. So I think a lot of the affiliate companies, the smart ones, I'm already the grapevine.

Ah, yeah. So this is, this is like the cutting edge. I think if a CMO at a startup, if they're savvy, what they'll say is, "I don't give a [ __ ] about the attribution anymore." And they will go to TechRadar or Forbes or PCMag or whoever is ranking in your space, or CNET, whoever the [ __ ], and they will say, "Hey, what is your monthly fee to be ranked, you know, number one, number two, or number three on your page?" And their team will have a fee because there's always a fee, and they'll know what that price is. And the savvy CMOs will basically just pay. Because they know not only do they get the clicks and everything directly from the page itself, which still generates a decent amount of traffic in any high-volume competitive space, even today, but on top of that, then they'll start being, they'll start showing up in every LLM prompt related to that product category, and that'll start impacting direct and referral traffic. They'll never be able to prove it, but they'll basically say, "I don't give a shit." Like, I, I, I started my marketing career obsessed over attribution. I loved attribution. I was like, I got certified in Google Analytics. I worked at an analytics startup. I was like, "Yeah, attribution is the [ __ ] [ __ ]. If we just, if you know where your dollars are coming from, everything changes." I've done a complete 180 in my career. Even before AI and all this LLM stuff, I was like, I just didn't care about attribution like at all, because it's, it's, it's so [ __ ] messy, and we're just lying to ourselves all the goddamn time. But now with the LLMs and everything just kind of feeding into everything else constantly, it's like this real savvy internet marketers or or like brand managers, VPs, CMOs, whoever, they'll let go of attribution. The, the folks that are going to get their clocks cleaned, they're going to hold so tight onto attribution and they're going to be like, "I can't do it unless I can prove it." Well, while they're desperately holding on to whatever shitty fake report that they have, um, their competitors are going to run circles around them, and they're just going to pay the fees. They're going to make sure that the fees they're paying are are well-placed, are good bets. They're going to understand which pages are being referenced regularly within different LLMs. So, they're going to concentrate their bets and go after high-quality ones. They're going to make sure they're going to put it into a brand budget, and they're going to make sure that that budget makes sense for the size of their company and their brand, and they're not getting ahead of themselves. So, they're still going to be really disciplined about it. Um, but they're not going to demand an immediate provable ROI on that spend, um, because they understand how these systems are all impacting each other. And for any affiliate media company that has built either enough presence within a niche or they're big enough that they dominate a bunch of different niches, like Forbes or whoever else, the smart ones will start shifting their own sales and their own business development away from the performance affiliate model, which is amazing, and was it's, I mean, it's still good. It's not going to disappear, but they'll spend more of their time, uh, and we did a bunch of this at my affiliate media company that we were running. We call, we always called them flat rate deals, and we would go to, uh, because we were in all sorts of product categories, and a lot of categories didn't even have good affiliate systems set up. So, you couldn't even like, there was no infrastructure to prove the clicks and to, you know, track our account and our customers through, you know, their funnel, right? It was just a mess. So, we're like, "Okay, to hell with all that. You're just going to pay us X per month. We're going to make sure you're on this list, and, you know, as long as you keep paying the checks, we'll make sure your listing doesn't go anywhere. Simple." And I think you're going to see, we did it out of convenience because we almost had to. But I think even in areas that have a very developed affiliate infrastructure and culture are going to move from that commission-based into just flat fee arrangements. Um, and I think any media company that moves through that transition, like, is it probably going to be smaller?

It's going to be a lot smaller.

It's going to be smaller because it is harder to prove. That is the downside.

I want to share, I want to share my contrarian, uh, my contrarian opinion on what SEO publishers should be doing.

Yeah, go for it.

And actually, I also want to ask your, your thoughts on, like, I mean, you kind of touched upon this, like, is it a good idea to start a new one? And you're like, well, you probably should start, yeah, you start with UGC, start with, start elsewhere, come back around to SEO if you get a ton of success and traction.

So, my contrarian opinion with existing publishers is make a product. Make a product because you can already rank. Make a product and then target transactional keywords, target bottom-of-funnel keywords, and sell your own product. And then you'll make a lot. If you want to keep putting up top-of-funnel informational content, you just like doing that. But if you want to keep doing that, then you can have the, the bottom funnel, you can have the product support that, you can have the sales support that. But like, if you can already rank, don't give up that domain. Use that domain to, to, to put a new, new product on the market, and then you can literally rank for transactional keywords that bring you money and start small.

I agree with you from a like SEO perspective that is that is a straightforward path to like evolving from a business perspective. Um, I doubt many, like, if you're a true media company, you are not set up. Nothing about that business is set up to produce a product. Like.

That's fair.

I know you have the acquisition channel. Yeah.

And I know, so I would say there's like a lot of creators that are starting to build their own products. Idea is a little different.

Yeah, but but dude, it's, it's the same, it's the same thing as in like, um, okay, if you're a media company, you have a ton of bloat on your site because it's all managed wrong. All right. Well, now you need to think different, and you need to change things up, and you need to manage your company better.

Yeah. But there are, there are, my opinion on business is or like a, like an org chart or an internal operations. Yes, you can change, but you can only digest so much change so fast. And hopping, like, like I've worked, I've done SAS, I've done a creator info product business, I've done affiliates, I've done consulting services, um, and I've worked with some pretty high-level agencies, like I've, I've been in a bunch of different models and seen how everything works and cultures and teams and all that stuff. And even extremely, extremely high-level operators in one of these industries is a complete failure on the other. I've actually seen firsthand people try to hop, and it like rarely works, like never works. Uh, it's usually a [ __ ] mess and a complete disaster. Um, if I was, if I was a founder, like, like, I 100% agree with you that if you're trying to build, if you want SEO traffic today, coming in with an actual service or product is like step number one. Don't, don't just get traffic to get traffic, like actually figure out a business first, then go build that, and then also kind of build SEO like into SEO over time. But if I was, let's say I was CEO at a massive media company, we were doing millions of visitors a month, and SEO, um, was driving a huge chunk of my topline through affiliate revenue and, you know, ad placements and all the other stuff. And I was like, "Okay, I saw the writing on the wall, and I was like, [ __ ], I need a product and I need a service." I don't necessarily think that's true, but let's just say I came to that conclusion. I'm like, "I need to go that route." The way that I would execute on that vision is I would take my media company and I would say, "Okay, we are now putting this on maintenance mode." I might not tell anybody outside of like the core leadership this, but like, we are just going to manage. We're going to harvest this. We're going to get our expenses down. We're going to take cash out of this. Um, we're going to pay partners and anybody who has equity, everyone's going to get a payday out of this thing. And as long as it is profitable, we will continue to run it, and we will rightsize it as it continues to shrink. That's code for layoffs if we need to. But we are just going to harvest this [ __ ]. We are not going to invest in it. Um, and whatever that new thing is, I'm going to go build that separately. I'm going to build under a new org with a new team with a different culture. We're going to start at that frantic, nerve-wracking zero to one stage with the product or service or whatever we're going to build. We are going to build it from the ground up, organically, clean, without any of the debt and [ __ ] from the previous company.

But it's on the same domain.

And no, no, that's what I, that's what I'm saying. No domain. I'm saying keep it on the domain.

Down the road, down the road. Let's say, let's say I'm starting some SAS product and it actually takes off, and I'm like, "Oh [ __ ], we have an actual company now. Uh, its own team, it's profitable." Well, I own both, right? Or I'm a player in both. I'm a key equity holder of some kind in both. Well, now I can go to my media company and we got a sweetheart deal, right? I can basically say like, "Okay, we are going to plug us in here." Hear me out. Hear me out. What if you do, what if you actually keep it on brand and then just put it on a subdomain, and you keep actually the top of funnel stuff going, but you also, you just slowly, it's like a, it's like a just, it's, it's a new initiative, and it, you slowly, it's, and you start with a very simple use case, very simple product, it's super simple, and then you, you slowly increase it up as you start to rank for more transactional keywords.

It's not about the subdomain, it's more about, so I'm thinking, I'm thinking more like, I want the brand clean. I want the market perception clean. I want, I want to make sure I hit product-market fit. Like, I want to go solve all those problems, and I want to do it in a clean way where it's not constrained. I know, um, there are advantages to like hammering it into the new media company from day one. You get acquisition. So, I've, I've worked at a bunch of startups, right, that had very, very awesome marketing funnels or were run by incredibly high-caliber marketers. My experience through all of that is that that marketing muscle actually becomes a handicap. It's actually a serious long-term disadvantage for the company. It's not an advantage, which is very counterintuitive. You're like, "Oh [ __ ], why would a customer flow actually be a bad thing?" Well, if you are starting a company, so the first SAS company I worked with, Kissmetrics, it was this exact situation. Our marketing team, [ __ ] fire. We were so good. I mean, Neil, it was Neil Patel's [ __ ] startup. And Heat and Shaw, the other co-founder, he's also pretty good at marketing. Like, we had our [ __ ] together on the marketing side. We did not get to product-market fit. Even though the SAS business, the revenue got to a pretty decent level. Like, I think we raised a Series B, I think at one point. We did a bridge round after that. So, like, we had traction. We were hundreds of thousands of MR. Um, we were doing really, really well. Um, from a revenue standpoint, however, churn was too high. Um, competitors close product gaps really fast. And like, if any, all that marketing muscle papered over so many foundational issues on the product and the company. Like, the product was good, and there was a moment where we started to capture product-market fit, and people were getting really excited by what we were doing, and we were innovating in the analytics space. Like, we were ahead of everyone by like five years at one point. Well, then we spent five years [ __ ] around and just like kind of going in circles and not really getting anywhere. And Mixpanel closed the gap. Amplitude closed the gap. Google Analytics closed the gap. Like, we were ahead of everybody. And Mixpanel IPOed, Amplitude IPOed, Google Analytics is still very much a thing. Guess what's not a thing? Kissmetrics. Kissmetrics is no longer a thing, right? Um, but even though our marketing was amazing, but it papered over all the other issues, and I've seen this at multiple other companies too, where the marketing's so strong, you kind of like forget to go do.

So, you're saying it's a good idea in theory, but practically it's just very hard to pull off.

Yeah.

But in theory, like in theory, it's a good idea.

Yeah. That's why a lot of people do it.

Yeah.

Right. Like I think, um, you know, Mr. Beast is going to go through this right now. I think he is going through this right now. Um, you, he's, he's a monster. He's [ __ ] dominates YouTube and he's [ __ ] Yeah. Top, absolutely top of the line, um, content and creator, top of the pile. Um, however, he is expanding product lines. So, God.

He already went through it with with Beast Burgers, too. I don't know if you remember.

Yeah. All of his like, his his moldy food, like it's now a thing now. When people, when I think Mr. Beast product line, I think moldy lunchable.

Credit, no credit.

I'm, I'm not even in that section of YouTube, and I know that.

Credit to the chocolate though. The chocolate's pretty good.

I got the chocolate. I got the chocolate. But yeah, but but sure, they, you know what I mean? Uh-huh. I do.

Yeah. And, and so you can, um, if you don't, you almost have to like slow down and make sure everything's like tight and dialed.

And if you're too good on the marketing side, you, you get ahead of your skis.

Yeah. And then you [ __ ] eat it, right?

Take one thing and do it well.

Just go slower.

Yeah.

So.

Uh.

Especially in the early days, right? If you're building a new product, get it right. It's a good product. Does it, is it profitable?

Well, that's the issue. That's the issue that everybody makes is they always try to go too fast. And, uh, I mean, there's a difference between move fast and break things versus, um, I guess just, uh, just not thinking things through, just being stupid.

Yeah. So the way I, I've worked with a lot of like go-fast entrepreneurs, and the way I now think about it, there's a, there's a shred of difference between kind of the go-fast in like a positive, like we're going to like founder energy level, and then like, "Oh, wait, we're just [ __ ] things up and we just keep."

You know what the difference is?

Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay, go on, go on.

Yeah. So, well, the difference for me, or the sign, it can be really, really hard to tell in the first couple cycles, but the difference I look for is, do you start treading the same ground, right? Like, if you're constantly changing the plans every three to six months, fine. If you're constantly ripping things up, fine. I mean, in zero to one stage, you have to do that stuff constantly because you're not sure what's going to work. But if you start flip-flopping, if you bail on a strategy and then try a bunch of [ __ ], you're like, "Oh, we're going to do something new." And you're like, "Wait, wait. This isn't going to work." You go back to the old thing, you're not actually learning. You're just running in circles. If you feel, if at any point you start to run in circles, that go-fast and break-things attitude is no longer positive. It is no longer moving you forward. Going fast is fine as long as you're always breaking new trail. Then you're eventually going to get somewhere. Um, but if you're going back, that means just like, it's just, it's, it's out of fear. It's out of anxiety. You're just, you don't really know what you want. You're just like constantly tearing things up because you don't know what you want. Um, so you had a point, too.

Um, no, actually, I, I, I like what you said there, which is, uh, because I talk about this all the time. It's, I think a lot of people, they, they're like a ping-pong ball. They just go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And it's like, if you actually just double down and focus on something, you will be shocked at how far you can get if you actually, like, if you actually, it might take, it always takes longer than you think it's going to take. It's just that that's just the reality of life and of business. Always takes longer than you think it's going to take. But you will be shocked what things look like in a year or two years or three years or five years or 10 years. You'll be, yeah, absolutely shocked. I want to actually, uh, I want to ask you this. I want, I want your thoughts on Google removing the numbum equals 100 parameter. I, that's on my list of things to ask you about, and it's such a fun topic. I mean, yeah, I think it's [ __ ]. This is pure speculation. I, I know everybody's really mad about it, and I think it's, I'm also, I'm mad. I'm irritated. I think at this point, I'm just like, "Yeah, yeah, that's Google." It's like, so I'm not like actually as mad as a lot of people, but just because I'm like, kind of expecting the abuse from Google at this point. It's just like, "Yeah, of course, of course, of course they're going to [ __ ] with us. What else?"

I think it was a move to, to combat AI, to combat Chachi.

Yeah. So, I, this is pure speculation. I don't have any evidence or any sources to to say that this is what happened.

Well, there is evidence. Reddit citations.

No, no, no. So, this is, so my my point is, um, I am maybe it's AI-driven. So, so I, I do have insight. I, I know a lot of people very well that work at really big tech companies. And so I hear all these inside stories about how things are actually run, and how many idiots are in control of like, really serious programs, and just like colossal [ __ ] idiots that should have been fired 10 years ago and somehow have never been pipped and really need to get pipped. Um, and it's the internal operations at a lot of these big tech companies. They've gotten so big, and there's so many people that have sort of gotten entrenched in a lot of these orgs that, um, there are, you think there would be like this cold, calculating reason for like everything that they're doing, and there really isn't. It's just [ __ ] idiots running the asylum in a lot of cases.

Well, you think you're saying Google did it by accident? They're like.

Yeah. Or so I think the, I wouldn't be surprised if some product manager or some leader somewhere in Google had some sort of random pet project and they needed to get rid of this for some really stupid, completely unrelated reason that maybe, maybe makes a little bit of sense for them, but makes no sense to anybody else. And they somehow got this through and have been [ __ ] up everything, and now we're all trying to rationalize it of like, "Oh, it's AI." It's like, maybe, maybe. Or or maybe it's just some idiot making a really dumb call, and it's [ __ ] up like every SEO search tool and every SEO agency that's trying to report on progress across an entire industry. Like, that there is a non-zero chance that something like that happened. And maybe, maybe there is a very cold, calculating decision of like, "Hey, our resources are out of control. We need to AI. We need to like hem this in." Maybe. Or maybe an idiot made some stupid call that they really shouldn't have. Um, so anyway.

I'm not going to lie, I had that thought as well. I, I, I guess, uh, I guess my my thoughts kind of changed when I saw what was happening with Reddit citations, and then I'm just like, "Oh, maybe this was strategic." I mean, like, it's crazy. Reddit citations just. Did you see the? Do you know the graph I'm talking about?

Yeah, they plummeted.

Plummeted. Yeah, it was insane. Um, do you have any thoughts on, uh, so actually this is like a really hot topic in SEO right now. It's, it's AI programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO has always been popular. People have always been interested in that, but like lately, I've just been seeing so many, there's like the term "slop as a service." Have you heard that?

The AI slop as a service companies, and that's what they're doing. They are putting in unchecked AI programmatic SEO into top-of-funnel AI, and it's, and it's working for, it's working for a bit.

Works for now.

And then, and then, uh, and I'm seeing it a lot. Do you, do you think that's okay? Do you think it's a good idea? Do you think it's a bad idea? Do you think it can work if, if there are ways to make it work?

Yeah. So, I, I know a team somewhat well. Um, they're kind of in the affiliate space, and they've, they've gone pretty hard off of programmatic SEO. And I also, I, I have a lot of respect for these folks. They're folks that know what they're doing. So, I think there is a flavor of this that can work in specific situations where, you know, there's a lot of like weird corners of SEO and just search behavior where, you know, you don't really need like the content doesn't need to be that differentiated, but you just need endless permutations of it, right? And you don't need a ton of fact-checking, you just need a little bit of it. Um, so I think if you're in the right space and you have the right controls and you're doing it for the right reasons in the right situation, like, can you all come together to be like a pretty advantageous approach? So I think there are exceptions where this makes sense. I think the vast majority of people are taking something that doesn't make sense and just bolting it on because they're struggling and they don't know what else to do, and they're just going to junk up their domain, and in three to five years, things are going to get hard, and then maybe a few of them talk to me. I don't know. I'm like, "Lars, can you fix."

You think? Wait, wait, wait. You're saying, okay, so I agree with, I agree with everything that you're saying. Um, but but I am curious. So, you're, you're saying that this is going to work for three to five years. You think that like a company can put an AI programmatic SEO, go hard, scale up the pages, and like they'll be able to.

Depends on how hard they go, depends on how hard, depends on the overall strength of the domain, depends on, um, how healthy and how strong the rest of the site is. Like, I will say just as a rough rule, right? Like, if I am working on a site and it's really healthy, it's been well-architected, I do know I can abuse the [ __ ] out of that thing for a solid three to five years, regardless.

You're saying it's an existing.

Yeah, it's existing. It's strong. Like, and you know, I got a lot of room. I've actually done this. I have, I've gotten my hands on really strong domains. I've abused the [ __ ] out of them for.

How, how strong are we talking? How strong are we talking?

Very strong. Okay. Yeah.

So, are you.

In my case, right.

Well, give, like, can you give an example? Are we talking, are we talking like a, a popular, a popular startup, but it's still considered a startup, or it's now, it's like, or, or you are you talking enterprise strong, or you talking like successful startup.

Like domain authority like 80 and above.

Okay. So, that's enterprise strong.

Yeah. So, that's different. That's that's different than than like than successful startup.

Like, if you have a startup, you, you get aggressive. Like, yeah, you get burned in a year. You got to be careful. But my, so an exception would be some startups are on that true hockey stick. They're they're hot. The hype is insane. There's so much positive PR and social mentions going around. They can abuse the [ __ ] out of everything. And every, like, if, if a VP of marketing goes and does that, they're going to get promoted. They're going to get raises. They're going to get shitload of accolades. They're going to look like [ __ ] geniuses. And what they're really doing is harvesting something that they didn't actually build or they're not even, and I, I, I've been in this mode before. So again, I've, I know it's so easy to get in this trap. Like, I try to ask myself all the times, am I am I acting like a gardener? Am I truly like building up my nurturing my garden over time? Am I nurturing the business so it can be something truly bigger later? Or am I in harvest mode? Now, there is a time to harvest, but what I have [ __ ] up personally is I've gotten the mismatch wrong where I, or at least I told myself, "Oh, yeah, I'm a gardener." No, I'm not. I am harvesting the [ __ ] out of all my crops, and I am just like slashing and burning, and there is not going to be a garden when I'm done with this. Um, there's a time and place for that, but you got to be intentional with it. And if you're doing like high-volume AI content, I would say 99% of the time, those folks, they're just harvesting. They don't even realize it. They're harvesting their domain. They're going to get burned, um, down the road at some point. Um, and, you know, if, if that's what you want, fine. But they, most of them probably don't want that. So maybe rejigger it.

Yeah. Yeah. They're basically, so like a lot of people are talking about, uh, Lovable, a vibe coding platform, and they're putting in, man, it's, it's, it's crazy. All these AI programmatic SEO pages, uh, and like the templates for the programmatic pages just have like tons of errors in them. Like, it's crazy. Just the templates alone have tons of errors. And then they, they're also, they're also putting some of the pages an extra click away from the homepage. Like, it's all really sloppy, but it's working for now. And this, I, I discovered this in response to, uh, so like, there was this post on X about slop as a service, and how popular it's, it's become, and then someone shared, someone shared this, and, yeah, and it's, it's working for now, but like, yeah, I agree. I, I don't, I don't know. I just, for me, I play the long game.

If you're using AI, which is fine. I'm not, I'm not anti-AI. Um, however, you're building things, it should still feel like work. It should still feel hard, right? Like, when you win, you should be like, "It's about [ __ ] time. God damn, we did it the way we were." And I'm not saying like, "Oh, you didn't get into gray areas. You didn't do some hacks. You don't have to be a boy scout or a girl scout about any of this shit." But, um, when you do, when you get that, I, I've gotten to like crazy levels in SEO where the money was just flowing, and we looked around and we knew we didn't earn it. We got lucky. We just like, the stars aligned, and yeah, we put in a decent amount of work, but also like, we just [ __ ] hit it.

And, um, that was terrifying, and we all knew we were conscious about it. We were like, "We have not earned this yet." Um, but then like, it goes on long enough that then you like start to convince yourself, ah, yeah, we, we did earn it. No, you didn't. Like, like success can kind of like get you to think that you earned it. But if you hit it, and your first, like reaction isn't like, [ __ ] relief, or like, "Oh my god, I need to take a break because I've been working so hard for so long, and it finally turned." Like, that's when you need to be really paranoid about SEO. Um, cuz it, it, it's going to turn, and once it turns, you're not going to get it back. Like, but like, if you've extended far enough, there's a domain I'm thinking about right now, um, a domain that a lot of people listening to this would recognize.

Can you say it?

No.

Why are you under, are you under NDA?

No. Uh, I know people that are still, I'm not involved anymore. I don't want to [ __ ] talk it there. There's some people still working on it. But anyway, um, point is like, we, we overextended that domain too much.

And when it turned, it turned. And you know how I've been talking about how it would recover some of these other, you know, long-standing blogs.

I try, I spent a year trying to fix this one domain.

No. No. Completely different. Way bigger.

I spent a year trying to fix this site, and I was like, I was [ __ ] losing my mind over it. I was like, "I have to step away from this thing." And I got to the point, and I, I still still agree with his assessment. I was like, "This, this site is now so bad. Things have gone so terrible. It is cratered so hard. I'm not sure it's worth the effort to try to fix this. Even if this team, even if this same business entity wanted to go do something and be like, you might want to just start from scratch."

It is that [ __ ] bad.

Turn and burn. And you can, and it's still got, it has a legendary link profile. It's nuts. But it's, I, I've seen how Google's reacted to it. I'm like, "Look, either you're going to rebuild this thing and spend a solid five years on it without a, with absolutely zero indicator that you're going in the right direction. No positive feedback from Google whatsoever for year after year after year after year. You're gonna spend hundreds of thousands, probably a mill and above trying to fix this [ __ ] thing, and you have, and it might not work like at all." Um, you can definitely get, if you overextend a domain, you can get into that stage. Um.

So, it's not, it's not, it's not a manual penalty, but it's like one.

No, but it's like one.

Like, even if you take all the content down, you're still, and you, you, and you start from fresh on the do, on the same domain, you're still screwed.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because it's when things get bad enough in Google these days, like Google won't even give you the time of day. They won't rank anything at all. They won't test anything.

Yeah.

At all.

People ask me, people tell me that like I'm too cautious. I get, I see that in the comments of my podcast. People are like, "You're too much of a boy scout." And like, but it's like, that's what happens. And I also, I want to say, I'm not anti, like, like you. I'm not anti-AI at all. I'm just like, "Do some quality assurance. Do some QA. Come on."

Yeah, you have to. There has to be something original about the site. Um, the way I do it is for original posts, I always try to make sure that there's whatever AI workflow we have, there's something original and high-quality going into it, right? It's like garbage in, garbage out. And if you just, if your, if your content workflow starts with a prompt, what is your input? It's just random AI [ __ ]. Um, and that is not high-quality input. But if you have something original, research, studies, an experiment, some [ __ ] random thing you did, and you're feeding that in either to create a post, I actually like to write the first post by hand because then I know it's really high quality, and then derivatives of that. Yeah. Have AI do that [ __ ]. Like AI is really good at taking high-quality stuff and like refactoring it into all the different mediums. Um, whether it's, you know, different marketing channels or different variations of the same post, AI is really good at that. It can shuffle high-quality around or repackage quality, great. But if you try to get it to create quality from scratch, you're going to end up with generic [ __ ] that nobody cares about or wants to read, right? Which I mean, it might be better than all the trash freelance SEO content you were producing for the last decade. I'm also in that bucket. But that just means you need to like uplevel that program, right? You need to be producing higher quality stuff now. Um, so you just gotta gotta be careful with it.

Yeah. Right.

All right. I want to end. We, we've talked about a lot of different topics and so this kind of is this is just a super general question, but I just think it's a nice question to end with. Super general question. Super general. But what should brands be doing for SEO right now?

Step one, knowing nothing else about the history, but just step one, bottom of funnel. I'm in that bucket. I know a lot of SEOs are saying it, and I'm all.

I want to say, wait, I want to say, so I have a bottom-of-funnel SEO course. It's called Compact Keywords. It's like this, uh, I did, I, I just want to say I did not tell you to say that for people listening.

I didn't even know you have a course.

Yeah, I have a, it's literally bottom, it's on bottom-of-funnel SEO specifically. And I did, I did not tell Lars to say this. Thank, thank you for saying that. Every, every, honestly, I think every single product or service business, I'm sure there's some exceptions. I know e-commerce is a little bit different, but I mean, they still have product keywords you should be going after the product-related keywords for your category, full stop. Uh, I know there's some SEOs out there that are like, "Ah, that's shady," and I'm like, "Uh, well, just be transparent about it. It's fine. Like, don't, like, if, if you're, let's say you're Adobe, and then you're producing content on Adobe versus, I don't know, whatever other design tool is that Figma, Adobe versus Figma, just be honest that you're Adobe, and you, you can even acknowledge in the post, like, "Yeah, we have biases. We are the Adobe team. We like Adobe. We are going to make our case. This is our case about why we are better than Figma." Huh? We're going to lay it all out. We're going to try to be fair, but you know who we are. It's very obvious where our biases are coming from. And here's an in-depth post on why we think someone should choose Adobe over Figma. As long as you're transparent about it, I think it's totally fine. The other thing is, these posts are constantly referenced in all those prompts. So, what actually happens if you're going to be like high and mighty about this [ __ ] um, what you're actually allowing is a competitor that just needs to be slightly aggressive. In the world of SEO, this [ __ ] is not that aggressive. This is so mild compared to the total spectrum of negative, shady SEO [ __ ] that's out there. Even stuff that I've done. This is like, this is like, "Oh, I'm still having my morning coffee" type of [ __ ]. This is not aggressive [ __ ] at all. But if you don't do a lot of these keywords, actually, I have this one of my clients right now, um, um, where they, they've done a little bottom of the funnel in the past. Their primary competitor, their number one competitor, went decently hard on this stuff and ranks for like all the alternatives, all the versus keywords. So that competitor, their competitor gets to set the narrative, and there are actual factual inaccuracies.

In their post. They have pricing wrong. So they'll say like, "Oh, my client versus the competitor." The competitor said, "Oh, my client, their pricing starts at X." That is not true. And this is for a category where the price does matter. Okay, this is not like a super enterprise startup or or like a .com SaaS company where the pricing is kind of irrelevant. Um, pricing matters here, and they are off by like, I think the actual starting price is like half what the competitor says. So, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't think they're trying to like [ __ ] with me. I don't think it's intentional. Some writer just got it wrong.

But when I am testing prompts in different LLMs, I see that inaccurate price constantly. Now, when anybody is in ChatGPT and asking, "Hey, what is the rough price of this client versus the competitor?" they are getting a completely inaccurate price. That's not off by a little bit, it's off by a lot in an area where pricing matters. Okay, that is a [ __ ] problem. And so this client has been a little like they haven't gone deep on the bottom of the funnel. Their competitor has gone deep, and now they are setting the narrative. They are now considered the source of truth for a lot of these prompts and in all these LLMs and in the AIOS and all this other [ __ ].

So if you don't do this stuff, you let a competitor just kind of do whatever the [ __ ] they want. And any even halfway decent SEO is going to go do this [ __ ] because it's the only corner of SEO that still makes money in a directly attributable way where the ROI is clear. They're like, "Yeah, these terms, this traffic, even if it's small, it generates [ __ ] customers. So, we need to be in the mix." And even if you have like a moral qualm with it, like, fine, whatever is your strategy, you do what you want with your own brand. Um, but anybody that doesn't do that is leaving that window wide [ __ ] open for either their direct competitor or an upstart.

And if there's any new brand in the category, they're going to be more aggressive. They have to be. They don't get to just kind of like chill out with their brand and kind of their own current customer flow. They have to fight and be scrappy to get anywhere. Well, if there is an opening there, they are going to take it. I've seen this with one of my other clients. Big, big category, and AI is like developing this like big subcategory. Well, there's all these AI upstarts in that bigger category that are clawing and fighting for it. And all the old guard, they're not being aggressive. And these AI upstarts, they're getting traction now because they're going after that bottom of the funnel. They have to.

So if you don't do it, you leave, you have an enormous vulnerability, and you're leaving yourself wide open to get like punched in the kidney by the first SEO that kind of knows a little bit. It's just like even halfway competent and is willing to do like, it's not that hard to be like, do this in an authentic way. It's not even shady stuff. So a lot of SEOs are going to do it.

>> I don't think it's shady at all. I would do it.

>> I don't think targeting bottom funnel keywords is.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. So, some people get into the, you know, they get all antsy over the like "best of" lists, like, you know, "best design tool" if you're Adobe going in there. I'm like, well, yeah, but also you kind of should.

>> I mean, you should just believe that your product is the best. Try to make the best product.

>> Yeah. Go work on that. Go work on the product. Get feedback to your product team. Make it better. If you can't say you're the best, that is an internal conversation to have, um, and an honest conversation to have, and go build what's best, right? And then also say, "Hey, we're the [ __ ] best." And here's why. And if people, if you're legit, if you're authentic about it, if you're real, and if you've done the hard work, like it will resonate.

>> Number one, target bottom of funnel. A few other things that brands should be doing for SEO right now.

>> Um, make sure you focus on other channels. I know you asked me and I didn't really give you a good answer of like how to build topical authority. Um, the only reliable way I've seen to do it with, well, me, outside of maybe just like brute force link building, but I get leery about that these days. Um, the only the only white hat way I've seen to do it is basically doing like the PR social push, right? So you do something interesting and then you have marketing distribution channels to go talk about that stuff. Whether it's the LinkedIn account of your CEO and founder, whether your old marketing teams on Instagram, whatever it is, you need to be developing all those other channels. And then whenever you are working on something exciting, maybe it's a big product announcement that's really innovative and exciting, maybe it's a big PR announcement of some kind, maybe it's just really high quality content or something fun and exciting. Yeah, you post that on your site, you get the pages built, the post built, whatever, but then you go talk about it elsewhere and you get audiences excited about it. Uh, could be your own event, could be your own subreddit, could be a Discord chat, could be a Slack channel, whatever it is, you need to be developing that other stuff. And that is going to make competitive areas of SEO and SEO expansion like 10 times easier, like dramatically easier.

When I do that stuff and I do it well, I am surprised about how highly I rank for stuff. I rank for stuff I shouldn't [ __ ] rank for. I'm like, "Holy [ __ ], this is insane. This is amazing." Um, but I've also done an enormous amount of work to materialize that. So, even though I think the best SEOs are starting to shift into like the whole marketing mix and making sure everything's aligned, especially if you're on the white hat, if you're on the white hat side, you have to do this [ __ ]. There are no other options. I think there are paths involved in link building, but you are going to get into shady areas really. It's almost like SEO has diverged, right? Like you used to be able to do really well if you played like right in the middle of the gray area where you're like, mostly white hat, but we do a few little shady things. Now it's like you almost have to go pure white hat and go really hard on it, or you have to just embrace the dark side. And if you play in the middle, you kind of get [ __ ].

So.

>> Yeah, Lars, uh, where can everybody find you?

>> Yeah, a couple places. Newsletter is lloffgrren.com. Um, that's the best place to stay in touch with me or hit me on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find. Connect with me. Just mention the podcast. I'll accept the connection. Uh, also on Twitter and Blue Sky.

>> Lars. Lars, you put up some. Lars puts up some of the best SEO content in the space. So, I hope all of you will follow will follow Lars. This is your third.

>> It's all written by hand. No AI.

>> Oh, and yeah, I mean, I can tell too when I read it. It's very authentic. And you also, your blog is awesome. I've shared your blog posts in the past. Uh, your blog, your blog.

>> I've got more coming. I have I have been starting some [ __ ] Um, doing some fun, insane things, and I am about to talk about a lot of it. So get on, yeah, the blog and the newsletter. You'll catch all that stuff.

>> This is your third time on this show, too. I hope I hope uh I hope you'll come back and do do a couple more.

>> Do you have a leaderboard?

>> I think actually.

>> I like leaderboards. That's why I like SEO. No, I think um you might you might have come on more than any other guest. A bunch of guests have done two times, but I'm not I can't think of ones who have done three times. So, you might you might actually be the the most recurring guest. What I want to do.

>> Well, I appreciate the invite.

>> Let me tell you. Let me tell you what I want to do. So, um, I'm I'm doing this actually on Thursday. I'm doing an episode with Harpit Singh, who posts amazing stuff on X and Go.

>> Yeah, we've traded some DMs.

>> Oh, awesome. Yeah. So, he came on before. I love him. He's great. And Gogen Gotra as well, who he literally like when you put up the LinkedIn post that we started talking about, he tagged me and uh and Gog and Gotra has been on the show twice. And so I'm doing an episode between Harperit and Go and Go, and I'm just going to moderate, and that's going to be really fun. But if there's like any, if there's anyone who you want to talk with who you think would make for a good episode.

>> So here, here's a crazy, potentially drama-filled idea. Oh man. Um, someone from my newsletter sent me this idea, and I kept meaning to tell you about it, but you've interviewed some, one of the folks from Forbes in the past, right?

>> Oh. Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh my god. I That's so he's actually one of my best friends. His name is Brett Cohen. He's he's an executive at Forbes. He is one of my best friends. I was thinking about that, too. If you wanted to do a like panel discussion, something with me and him. Uh, uh, I honestly, I don't have a ton of [ __ ] to talk about Forbes right now. So it's it's chill. It's cool. I'm not going to like attack anybody. Um, but I'm sure we'll have some laughs um about everything. I I'd be happy to do something.

>> That would be that would be fun. Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, that would be fun. Maybe I don't know. Maybe there's anyone else as well, cuz. Okay, I'll just straight up tell you he's going to say no. Like.

>> That's fine. He he can't like he just can't he can't do that. He's literally an executive.

>> Oh, is he currently still working at Forbes?

>> He works at Forbes and he's an executive at Forbes. Yeah. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> So, um.

>> Well, if he ever leaves and then he wants to have a conversation.

>> Yeah, sure.

>> I'm down.

>> Yeah, he he's uh No, he's he's crushing. He just threw the Forbes Under 30 summit. That's like his event, and uh, yeah, he he killed it with that.

>> Um, but all right. Anyway, I hope you'll come back and I want to I want to do an episode with you and another guest, cuz I think they're going to be like awesome.

>> Very happy to.

>> Yeah. All right. Thanks again, Lars. For everybody watching and listening, if you watch this on YouTube, if you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcast, this is episode 825 of the show. 825 days in a row doing this podcast. And thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you Lars again for joining the show, and I will talk to you again tomorrow.

Get Our Mobile App

Why Big Blogs Are Collapsing (And How to Fix Them) - Lars Lofgren

Transcription