The Edward Show
Daily SEO advice, hacks, and interviews with some of the top voices in search engine optimization, as well as sit-downs with many undiscovered talents.
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Claude Sites Have a Serious SEO Problem: Too Many Words
<p>E1167: Claude-generated websites have a serious SEO problem: they use a lot of unnecessary words.</p> <p>Search intent is not only about covering the right topic. It is also about presenting the answer in a way that is fast and easy to consume.</p> <p>I break down three real AI-heavy websites and show how unnecessary copy, repeated headings, pointless "eyebrows," bloated introductions, and buried answers create a worse experience for searchers.</p> <p>I cover:<br /> - Why satisfying search intent includes how information is presented, not just whether the information exists<br /> - Why Claude-generated sites...
Google Can Lose Faith In Your Website (Here's How To Get It Back)
<p>E1166: Google can lose faith in your website.</p> <p>That is the language Google's John Mueller used when discussing sites filled with large amounts of programmatic SEO content, low-quality pages, and generated content that fails to give users enough value.</p> <p>I break down what that means, why bad old pages continue to hurt a site, and what actual SEO recoveries look like.</p> <p>I cover: - John Mueller's warning that Google's systems can lose faith in a site based on its old pages - Why publishing hundreds or thousands of weak pages creates a sitewide...
Position #1 On Google Is Dead (8.1 Million Searches Prove It)
<p>E1165: Position #1 on Google is dead, at least as a single, static ranking you can check once and trust.</p> <p>Joy Hawkins returns to break down a study of 8.1 million Google search results that found organic rankings became 48.7% more volatile after the May 2026 Core Update. 97% of the tracking reports analyzed started shuffling, and two people searching the same phrase at the same time now regularly see different rankings.</p> <p>The volatility didn't disappear after the update ended. It stayed elevated.</p> <p>We get into what this means for SEO, rank tracking, local search, AI Overviews, Google's...
How $72 in Press Releases Made Google Call This Man the King of AEO
<p>E1164: It cost just $72 in press releases to get Google's AI Overview to call James Dooley the "King of AEO."</p> <p>I break down how two cheap press releases created enough relevance and third-party confirmation for Google to repeat the claim directly inside an AI Overview.</p> <p>The first press release cost $66 through an EIN Newswire package. The second cost $6 through AB Newswire. Both placed "King of AEO" in the locations that matter most for relevance: the headline, page title, URL slug, and opening sentence.</p> <p>Google then cited those releases when answering the query "Who...
The $50,000 Internal Linking Experiment: Links That Get Clicked Carry More Weight
<p>E1163: Does Google care whether people actually click the links on your page?</p> <p>I break down a $50,000 internal linking experiment across 15 websites, plus a Google patent that describes assigning different weights to links based on the probability that users will click them.</p> <p>The findings challenge a lot of standard SEO thinking around internal links, PageRank dilution, link placement, and how authority flows through a site.</p> <p>In this episode: - A $50,000 internal linking experiment conducted across 15 websites - How increasing internal links produced higher rankings and higher ad RPMs - What happened when pages...
Google Admits They Fake Understanding Your Content
<p>E1162: In 2016, Google gave an internal presentation called Q4 Search All Hands.</p> <p>Years later, slides from that presentation surfaced during discovery in Google's antitrust trial, and one of them contains an unusually direct admission:</p> <p>"We do not understand documents. We fake it."</p> <p>Google explained that its ability to understand documents directly was minimal. Instead, it watched how people reacted to search results and learned from those responses.</p> <p>I break down what Google said, why this presentation still matters for SEO, and what you can actually do with this information.</p> <p>...
LinkedIn Is Still a Blue Ocean (45,000 Views With a Dead Account)
<p>E1161: I break down why I still consider LinkedIn a blue ocean for organic reach, Google rankings, AI visibility, and content distribution.</p> <p>A listener named Marc recently started posting again after years of inactivity. Within one week, one of his posts reached 45,000+ views.</p> <p>That came from an account that had been dead for years.</p> <p>And the opportunity goes far beyond LinkedIn's feed.</p> <p>LinkedIn pages rank extremely well in Google. LinkedIn ranks for almost 120 million keywords and gets close to 500 million clicks per month from Google.</p> <p>When you put your...
How To Get Free Backlinks in 2026 (Methods That Actually Work)
<p>E1160: You do not need to pay for backlinks to build authority in 2026.</p> <p>I break down a viral SEO Reddit thread about how people are getting legitimate, high-quality backlinks without buying links, spamming irrelevant directories, or wasting time on tactics Google is increasingly good at ignoring.</p> <p>The best part: several of the people in the thread shared specific examples, including the exact assets they created, where the links came from, and the results.</p> <p>We cover: - How one SEO used original research about hospitals to earn coverage from a major newspaper and multiple...
Google's August Spam Update: 4 Sites That Got Wiped Out (Glenn Gabe Case Studies)
<p>E1159: Google's August 2026 Spam Update hit some sites extremely hard.</p> <p>I break down four case studies from Glenn Gabe showing exactly what Google's August spam update targeted, including scaled AI content, programmatic SEO with little added value, thin affiliate pages, poor user experience, and sites operating in risky niches.</p> <p>One of the sites lost rankings for more than 200,000 queries.</p> <p>Another had more than 1.5 million URLs indexed, many of which were lost.</p> <p>These weren't simply examples of "AI content is bad" or "programmatic SEO is bad." The common thread was scale combined...
Google Says "Good SEO Is Good GEO" - Here's What They Got Wrong
<p>E1158: Google published an article called "Good SEO Is Good GEO," arguing that the best strategy for showing up in Google's AI search experiences is still foundational SEO.</p> <p>I agree with a lot of it.</p> <p>But some of Google's advice leaves out important parts of how SEO and GEO work today.</p> <p>I go through Google's article point by point and react to it in real time.</p> <p>Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews are built on top of the same core ranking and quality systems used by traditional Search. It also...
