Author: Dan

I love this scene from Jurassic Park  People always remember this scene for the could/should line but I think that really minimizes Malcolms holistically excellent speech. Specifically, this scene is an amazing analogy for Machine Learning/AI technology right now. I’m not going to dive too much into the ethics piece here as Jamie Indigo has a couple of amazing pieces on that already, and established academics and authors like Dr. Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin best deal with the…

Show me the waters of your homeworld Muad’dib This post is gonna contain spoilers beyond the recent Dune movie, be warned. So forecasting in SEO is such an interesting subject. I really hate the cop-out answer of “it depends” and judge the SEO space for falling back on this lazy crutch as a way to answer real business questions. Just to be fully transparent, I have worked in-house and would pass over/fire a vendor who was unwilling to help me…

Hi! I’m Dan! I think the SEO discipline is a research based discipline. One of my favorite concepts is Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO), which I’m going to link to rather then explain but I still expect you to read it!  Since bad data begets bad research begets bad tactics begets bad outcomes, I think it’s important to have intellectually honest and valid research. If only our industry was open to peer review. For those interested in peer reviewing other…

DAN THAT IS A MOUTHFUL! In another life I was an academic random internet person, deal with it and move on. So a couple of members of the team have been pushing me to document the Local SEO Guide approach to SEO and a topic came up internally over the past few weeks that I think is a great example. I think the mental model we have for approaching SERPs and rankings is broken. Specifically, it’s causing people to misunderstand…

Remember when Google finagled with their system to make it so that you couldn’t double dip on Featured Snippets/Instant Answers (Get a Featured Snippet and rank on page 1 in 10 blue links). Well, there are a lot of people who have been skeptical about the value of this particular search feature in this new world. Were they right? Were we all fooled by Google into giving them free content for SERPs (Featured Snippets) that are great for their user…

7:15 pm PDT update Well, things are moving right along in this election. I’m going to try to keep these short and sweet to avoid devolving into political commentary lol. First observation, people are really focusing on “battleground” states and North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin are all in focus. Also people are focusing on the Senate and who will have control of that after the election is over (see below.) Also, a civil unrest query has popped into the top rising…

Hi friends, it’s me Dan. Your friendly SEO curmudgeon in training. Recently the SEO community (cough cough, SEO Twitter) has been caught up in a veritable tizzy about knowing HTML. Beyond the obvious epistemological considerations, I think there is a real ontological question raised by the primacy of HTML as a programming language in the SEOs toolkit. It’s hard to have these conversations when we probably aren’t all on the same page about what “knowing” something means. When can I…

Hey everyone! It’s been a hot minute since I posted so just wanted to quickly come in here and share an update we made to a free tool. A while back we released a tool that would allow you to aggregate Lighthouse reports by template and visualize and report on assets across sites and at the template/page level in Google Data Studio. Sounds pretty cool right? You can read about it here and check out the GitHub repo here. Shortly…

What a week. What a year. Not sure about the rest of you but around these parts SEO doesn’t seem so relevant right now. The country is in the midst of some deep soul searching brought on by a fierce and rapid grass roots struggle to end the extrajudicial killing by police in the Black community. I think about this stuff a lot. Honestly. This isn’t a brag actually, it’s a beat. We have long wanted to field a diverse…

Here I am, back on my BS again… So today we are open sourcing the first thing that Bryan and I made together when he came to Local SEO Guide two years ago (he did all the hard work.) It’s an image change detection tool, using Python, to scrape Google searches (particularly branded, local, searches) and report on if there are any changes to the image in the Knowledge Graph. As many of you know this image is a huge…