Rad Paluszak is a specialist in technical SEO and organic search. He is also a software developer and IT architect who loves simplifying things, especially in SEO.
Rad’s currently running a global SEO agency – non.agency – focused on technical auditing and consultations as well as providing programmatic SEO strategies.
He’s also co-founded an international premium outreach link building agency Husky Hamster. Rad’s also an international speaker (Chiang Mai SEO, Affiliate World Barcelona, International Search Summit) frequently participating in podcasts and webinars.
Follow Rad on LinkedIn.
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Ashley Segura: So let’s dive into things today. I would love to know when you are not doing SEO and busy behind your desk and you find yourself in the kitchen, what is your go to dish to cook up?
Rad Paluszak: My favorite dish, I’m Polish originally, so my favorite dish is one of the Polish traditionals and it’s called bigos.
Almost as if whatever you have in your fridge, you can put in there and you’re going to cook it. The main ingredients are fresh cabbage and sauerkraut. And then Different meats and mushrooms, and I add smoked whiskey to add smoky flavor to it. Uh, that’s my secret sauce, uh, and yeah, you cook it. Probably for four hours, but you just let it cook on the stove and that’s it.
You don’t have to maintain anything, um, only baby, um, only maybe, you know, stir it from time to time. And it’s, it’s super, super nice. If you like traditional stuff, it reminds me of my childhood. So, um, highly recommend.
Ashley Segura: I love the, the addition of whiskey. Is it a bourbon, a rye or does it matter?
Rad Paluszak: Um, well, I’m a big fan of single malt, so I’m actually adding like, uh, uh, maybe 20 mils of single malt, um, art bag specifically, because it’s very, very thickly smoked.
But if you have anything smoked, it’s, it’s got to work probably.
Ashley Segura: That sounds absolutely delicious. We’ll definitely try that. Um, switching gears and going straight into helpful content update. I would love to hear from you. I know that helpful content update was last year. We’ve got the March core update that is like kind of tearing everything up and freaking everyone out a little bit.
Um, we’re starting to see things happen. For some brands and for other brands, we’re seeing nothing happen and kind of just waiting. I’d love to hear your opinion on what you’ve seen so far and kind of your prediction of what this is going to look like as far as a search atmosphere as the March core update completely rolls out and people start to make changes
Rad Paluszak: to their sites.
Yeah, well, I’d like to start it with a very deep and long sigh because this is, this is basically the best expression of, of what I think and feel about those of two of those of, uh, those two updates helpful content and March update. Um, I’ve seen a lot of websites getting hit. I absolutely agree with.
Also, a lot of them as in deserving that devaluation that they’ve seen, but I definitely believe there is so much collateral damage, um, and good websites getting affected, uh, that, that I could say that I’ve basically seen carnage happening in Google search results. Uh, essentially. I am. Uh, still yet to see a full recovery post helpful content update, which has been over six months ago.
Um, now, um, so I, if, if any of guys listening can send some examples, I would be glad to, and I would be really happy to, to review them. Um, we’re working with a few clients who joined us. After HCU, maybe between October, November, December, and we’re not seeing much movement in a positive way. And for a couple of them, the March update actually brought their traffic even lower than helpful content.
So, yeah, and I mean, we. We try to have this approach that is pragmatic, but at the same time, when you’re hit with something as severe and harsh as those two updates, and well, specifically HCU, because this is when those clients came, uh, joined us, we try to fix as much as we can. Okay. And. Well, content, all of them, for the record, all of these sites are content heavy sites that are mainly making money from either affiliate or ads or both.
Um, maybe some drop shipping along the way, but they’re all based on content. Um, and when you have like. 600, 000, sometimes 2000 articles. It’s quite difficult to pinpoint exactly what you need to start rewriting. It’s, it’s a mammoth task to rewrite everything. Um, so the end, at the end of the day, this is what we’re trying to do at the moment, because everything else is sort of fixed.
So we’re trying to, to rewrite content. And also think about what we can add. to those websites to, um, maybe make them more useful at the larger scale that will overcome what their content or the scale that their content was affected at. Um, I’ve, I’ve seen several weeks ago, uh, a tweet from Google liaison, where they said that this update seems to be.
Um, uh, a sitewide update, although it’s still looking at individual URLs. Um, so, well, we have two concepts. One of them is that if you add additional value, uh, Let’s say you bring in a business directory to your website that is related to your content and offers additional real value that your users will obviously appreciate and will be helpful for them.
That’s the addition might basically, um, start adding the good signals to the site and, and basically eventually overcome and allow HCU to release the site. I look at this and I like this comparison when you have, for example, a dark paint and you drop just a little, like, a glass of white paint to a bucket of dark paint, it’s not going to do anything.
But if you just keep adding, eventually this paint will become much brighter. And you know, after adding a lot more, you can actually have it pretty much white or almost light white. So, so this is where this concept of adding instead of removing content comes from. So we’re testing that approach out. Um, and the other approach that we’re testing is Something that I like calling phantom url removal and we’ve just talked about this Off off screen for for a minute.
It’s inspired by a phantom pain that Appears when you lose your limp, but you still feel as in As if that part of the limb that you lost is in pain. Um, and there’s a great episode on Dr. House in the series, uh, where he’s actually helping someone, uh, with that pain. Um, and the idea here is that you basically cut out savagely the URLs that were affected the most from your website.
Just remove them completely. Instead of returning a 404, which is not found, we return 410, which is just a slightly different, um, HTTP header, but it means gone. And it’s a direct signal to Google that that content is gone and it’s never coming back. Um, once we removed those URL, we start reworking this content very heavily.
Basically to adapt it to whatever is ranking now and whatever we can add or however we can amend it to make it truly and honestly and, um, objectively useful or helpful. Um, and then once we finish that work, it’s. It’s probably going to be in a month’s time or, or, or five, six weeks time. We return it, but under a different URL.
So the concept here is that once Google crawls that new URL, it might see that the topic of the page is similar to of that one that was removed, but the indication, the change of the URL is to indicate that this is a completely reworked content that has nothing to do with whatever Google, um, Google treated us unhelpful.
So yeah, I think by the time that this episode is released, I will have some, something to, to analyze and maybe confirm or, or confirm that it didn’t work.
Ashley Segura: So you’re, you’re essentially approaching this in two different ways. One, you’re going through content and rewriting it. And I would assume the rewriting portion is to quote unquote, make it more helpful and to flush that out.
And the second portion of this is going through and cleaning up the content and deleting any content that maybe doesn’t provide a good user experience or it doesn’t have a good flow, like literally isn’t helpful. How are you identifying when to do one or the other, or are you literally taking sites and saying, we’re going to test this strategy on this site and this strategy on this site?
Rad Paluszak: Well, I, I’m not going to say that we do it at random, uh, because I think if, if we were just doing this strategy on that site and the other on the other side, that would be treating our client sites as guinea pigs in a way. Um, so we actually have a little. process for it. Um, when, so first of all, we identify the URLs that got affected the most.
And let’s say for instance, your website has 100 URLs. 10 of them are like 90 percent down. Okay. Uh, just for, for a simpler, uh, comparison. So we would take those URLs and the, these would be the ones that we definitely just remove. rework and later republish under a different URL. So the old URLs are gone.
And I keep saying gone, cause this is also the, uh, HTTP header that we use. Um, and, and to re, I don’t even, I can’t even say we repurpose that content. We completely revamp it, um, according to whatever we can add or however we can change it to, to like, Be objectively useful. Um, that’s one part. And the second part is we analyze the rest of the US that’s lost traffic.
And, uh, there’s a couple of things here. So, first of all, we look at, um, the, uh, On page signals, and I know these will, I will probably be hated by some SEOs who say that Google is definitely not, or not really looking at those on page signals, like bounce rate and time on page and these things. But I think I’ve seen Barry Schwartz tweet recently where Uh, he actually reminded that there is a report in google search console or maybe something that google search console sends every month Um, I can’t remember where it actually does say What’s your um, what’s your time on page or some engagement metrics?
Okay, so I think there’s a little wink there that oh, you know what maybe they’re actually looking at something like that uh now Once we look at those metrics, if they really look bad, we would probably make the decision that this content also needs to come, uh, join the other, um, pages, the other 10 pages that are totally gone and reworked, uh, completely.
Um, and if those metrics look. Sort of okay, there isn’t, they’re not outliers in, in neither way, um, good or bad, then we would just rewrite content trying to make it more useful from like strictly, uh, copywriting perspective. Hmm.
Ashley Segura: Okay. So when you’re going in to make content objectively more helpful. Where do you start in that research process?
Like, are you going straight to Google and analyzing what’s currently ranking and then getting ideas from there? Or like, what does that look like? I know each piece of content in each keyword is going to be probably a little bit unique, but do you have a strategy for approaching that when you’re updating the contents?
Rad Paluszak: Yeah. Well, bear in mind, and I want to say that, uh, for record, it’s still not a full on process that we use. It’s just. You know, some, an idea that we’re still playing around, sorry, um, and testing.
Words are fun. Yeah. Um, but so I start personally by not looking at Google. Okay. I look at the topic. And I think from the user’s perspective, what that page should have, I often don’t even look at the client, at the page that got lost, that lost traffic. I try to, well, I don’t know if this is something that it’s definitely not, um, not scientific, it’s more empirical.
And I would even say partly anecdotal, but I think what Google algorithm does, it tries to. build some idea of the URL based on just the URL itself before it actually visits the website, because from the URL, you can already, um, in Google’s case, find out quite a few things. First of all, you have the URL, so it’s probably keyword rich or has some, um, indication what’s on the page, but additionally to that, and again, In Google’s case, they probably somehow found that URL.
So they will have the anchor text, they will have the surrounding text, and they will have some sort of context to that. To that page already, right now, I try not to, well, I, I don’t have that context overall because I usually pull my data from Google search console, um, into a spreadsheet. So my context is just this URL, but I try to think, okay, so what do I as a user expect from that URL?
What do I expect to find there? And obviously. Uh, take into consideration that I’m an SEO specialist, I don’t know all the things, um, but you can, you can perhaps. Broadly from, based on your own knowledge, have an idea what’s on that URL. If you struggle with that, you can ask ChatGPT or something like that.
Hey, this is URL, um, or maybe just the last part of the URL, the URL, just the slug. What do you think is going to be on that page? Or what do you think, what do you expect to be on that page? Right? Um, and then you will have an idea, right? And then you verify that idea. Okay, um, with, with the page, there’s actually an inter, uh, uh, an intermediary point, which, which I’ve, I forgot about.
So once I put together either my ideas or GPT’s ideas, what was to expect on the page, I read them and think, okay, so what would be helpful on this page? Right. And I take a few bullet points thinking basically from the, again, from the user’s perspective, what. Could I expect that will be helpful on that page?
Is this something that requires an instant answer? Is this something that requires some context at the beginning, maybe? Is this something that I would expect to have a lot of images, a lot of, I don’t know, products, would I expect there to be a cart, a shop, something? Right. So I write those down and, and then I verified us this on the page.
So I kind of like build my own intent, or we can say I do intent analysis prior to actually. To actually looking at the page in many cases, sometimes, obviously, you would click on that URL and you’d have seen the page, uh, but. If possible, I would try to, you know, not do that and then start afresh with my expectations, with my intent, and then verify it.
Um, and only after that, I go into, uh, go into Google to analyze what are the competitors doing. Um, and I think this approach is pretty good. Although in some ways, um, not very, uh, not very, um, I don’t know how to say it. Not something that you would expect, uh, because people would run, would quickly run to the competitors and, you know, try to sneak peek onto what’s, what’s there.
What, what are they doing that is helpful? I think my approach is. Although surprising, it’s also kind of like a checklist because once you have your idea, you can basically verify those ideas on your page, then you go on to competitors and you can verify the same ideas. And then if you do, do find something.
on your competitors that is super useful and you didn’t think of that, then you can definitely take a note of that and add that to your strategy. And it, but I, I tell you what, Ashley, it’s a very mundane process and it’s sometimes killing me. Yeah, I, I, I see that. For, for big websites, it’s like a mammoth task for sure.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. Because so much of that is manual. I mean, going through and, and basically taking off your SEO hat and putting on the marketing hat to understand what do people want to know about this specific keyword, That’s, that’s really the one on one aspect of it. And that does take a ton of time. Yeah. Chat GPT, I’m sure speeds up that process slightly and helps guide you a little bit, but then you still have that manual aspect.
And I love that you mentioned so much of user intent, because I feel like that’s what this HCU update is screening is create content based on user intent. So if you have a topic. Where people just want a one sentence answer, because that’s really going to address it. Why are we still producing three, 4, 000 word articles on this and burying the answer three fourths of the way down so that they have to see five different ads before they get to the answer.
That’s not going to be helpful content. And that’s, you know, not surprising when we see sites like that getting hit, because you know, that’s. They’re not taking advantage necessarily, but they’re not addressing the actual intents. And so when you’re going through and trying to update content that has been hit by these updates to really focus on the user intent first, and love the exercise that you’re doing from that manual approach, um, to really identify what needs to be on the piece of content, are you then Essentially, you mentioned it’s kind of like rewriting the whole piece and reproducing the whole piece.
How are you then Distributing it afterwards. Like, are you encouraging your clients? All right. These hundred pieces have been updated. Now go push them out on social, or is it more of a, just update it, sit back and let’s see what Google is going to do with
Rad Paluszak: it at this point. Oh, that’s a good question. And we don’t really have a process for that.
We sort of leave it, but occasionally we would also go and, um, just try to re index those, those articles in Google Search Console. Um, it, it, it slightly depends on which case it is, because if, uh, if it’s that case where you totally rework it from day one. Complete, let’s say, scratch with, with that deep approach, then I like to not.
I like to just publish it under a new URL, because it’s, it’s meant to be a, a, a totally new piece of content, which in fact, and quite often it is, um, so there’s no tricking Google about, oh, is Google going to see it? Um, I keep saying see it because I think, um, recently a search liaison had the tweet about, it’s not something along the lines that let’s stop.
Showing Google something because Google will see it and think something about it, where at that point, we should be actually thinking about the user and basically doing something useful, um, which. Partly, I disagree with that.
I don’t want to, I don’t want to put, uh, take off my SEO hat and now put on my, um, tinfoil hat. Yes. Yep.
Ashley Segura: No,
Rad Paluszak: this up, this update is absolutely peculiar. I’ve seen a lot of good sites. Objectively speaking, being hit. I’ve seen a lot of really bad sites getting promoted. I’ve seen, um, a lot of really dog crap sites getting, uh, totally destroyed, but others also just as bad getting destroyed.
Coming in their places, it’s, it’s a bit, it’s a bit peculiar. So I, I think, very funny, I still have my tin hat on. I think, I think Google either messed something up or purposely wanted to stir the pot. Uh, going back to my bigos earlier, where you have to stir the pot frequently, um, because it’s just, it’s just so unseen that we’ve been told so little about intricacies of this update.
We’ve only been given very general, general, uh, list of questions, Oh, ask all these questions and then you’re, you’re going to know if your website is, um, Helpful, if your content is helpful and I’m like, yeah, but I have BBC and I can go for these questions and I’m going to say, well, my site is like pretty bad, right?
It’s, it’s maybe BBC, another, another great example, because they have like a lot of good content as well, but pretty much any site owner would go through for this list of questions that Google has given us and would say that their site is like quite bad overall, right? So this is why I think it’s, it’s either, either something that they messed up, um, so to speak, or they did it on purpose for whatever reason.
I’m not going to go even more into those theories, please. Yes, there’s a lot of them. I might actually, I’m actually, might actually become one of Google’s, um, blacklisted along some of other guys.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. Careful there. They’re definitely listening. I mean, it’s, it is interesting to see so many quote unquote good sites being hit and it’s hard to identify what really helpful content is.
It’s really easy on the sites that are super spammy to be like, okay, this, Is not helpful content, and we can use this as an example, but to identify what is helpful content. I mean, I’m seeing things like content that has jumped to table of contents for those larger pillar posts. That’s making a difference between a competitor’s pillar posts that has the same amount of information in it.
But. But it’s structured differently. And so the structure seems to definitely be making a difference with this update, which does make sense because from a user perspective, if we’re going back to those longer form pieces of content, and I want to know maybe three out of the 10 things that you’re saying by having that jump to table of contents, Uh, plugin right there that’s, that is making a difference from a user perspective, but then there is a lot of like, you know, overlap of, well, why is this getting hit?
I mean, I am curious what your opinion is on the, the sites that could be identified as maybe being helpful content. Would you suggest making changes to the sites that are historically good, but were hit by this or wait, give it a few more months, see how everything is going to play out. Maybe it was mistakenly hit and things are going to smooth out.
Or is that not usually the case with updates like this?
Rad Paluszak: That’s a. Terribly good question.
Ashley Segura: You don’t have a crystal ball?
Rad Paluszak: I give you, I give you that. You, you, your questions are amazing. Um. Thank you. Hmm.
I think. Okay, so I’ll give you two philosophies. SEO is becoming so philosophical in general. It’s, uh, it’s, it’s turning into this good old SEO where you have two SEOs and seven different opinions about the same thing, right? But I’ll give you, I’ll give you two philosophies that I use, not in, not just in SEO, but in my private life.
First of all, it’s Kaizen. It’s this Japanese approach that you should always strive for making things better, optimizing, improving. It’s constant improvement in short. Okay. So with that, I mean, if you got hit, there’s something telling you that you have things to improve. Okay. Regardless of what it is, in this case, Google.
Um, regardless of whether it’s just temporary or maybe they’ve made a mistake even, um, as in going back to my old, my speculation I mentioned, um, there is an initiative that tells you that you should be doing something. Okay. So, hey, why not start improving things? I know it’s usually costly. It either costs you your money directly because you’re hiring someone to do it, or it costs you your time because you’re doing it yourself.
Both are slightly scary and you may go wrong in both ways, whether you’re paying someone or doing it yourself. Um, but. And this is, this comes to the second, um, the second philosophy, like in business, if you stay in one place, you’re actually regressing. So you need to keep moving forward because if you don’t, you’re, you’re going to stay behind for sure.
Okay. So if. Yeah, long, that was the long answer, TLDR, uh, would be that I would definitely not just sit and try to wait it out, uh, because you might be lucky and you’re going to wait it out, but hey, it’s already been six months, over six months since HCU, so if you’re just sitting trying to wait it out, funds and resources allowing you, obviously you should be doing something.
Yes. And
Ashley Segura: that could be, like you mentioned from updating your content or creating new content, but based on a strategy, that’s going to support your brand, your current content, and making sure that everything that you do produce that’s new is based off of user intent. I mean, we now have more of a playbook of what’s going to be helpful and what’s going to work granted.
A lot of helpful. The quote unquote, it is very objective, like you mentioned, but if we’re thinking of user intent, if we’re doing those exercises, like you were doing, then creating new content should have more of an intent based strategy to be successful. And if you’re constantly improving, constantly trying to update, which your philosophy example here, then that should ideally lead you to the right path.
But what the reality of the situation is going to be is TBD. We
Rad Paluszak: do not know yet. Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Looking at Google’s communication, they want you to keep moving also. And I think this is a very important thing to consider. Because I, you know I remember Google 13, 14 years ago, God, when I say it, it sounds so bad, but I remember Google 14 years ago and ever since they’ve never stayed in one place for too long, they’ve always been progressing with, with heads, crazy updates, Panda, Penguin, then for a little while it was kind of like steady.
They kept. Improving those two, then they released, uh, Hummingbird and Rangbrain and then, uh, Mom, I believe it’s already in play at pretty large scale or at least something that resembles what, what they mentioned or what they told people about Mom. So yeah, if they’re moving and they set the landscape, they set the rules, then you, you will lose if you, if you don’t.
Try to keep up.
Ashley Segura: Yeah, a hundred percent. I definitely agree with that. Um, as we wrap up the episode, I would love to know what your current secret sauce is. What is a new strategy that you just came across or a tool that you’re absolutely in love with right now? What is your current secret sauce?
Rad Paluszak: My current secret sauce.
There are two tools I had to think about because I don’t really, in SEO, 14 years ago, like I said, I hope you don’t mind doing it, giving a little longer story. 14 years ago in SEO, you would be like, Oh yeah, we figured this out and we’re going to keep it from the competitors because this gives us an advantage.
There aren’t that many things that you can call your secret sauce, something that only you are doing and you’re building. Ripping benefits off of that. Um, so I will try to give you two tools that are super useful and I really encourage everyone to use them. First tool is Quillbot. Um, and I’ve been using it for a long time.
It helps me write, it helps me rewrite my content and. basically make it better. They have their own AI built into it. But the specific part of Quillbot that I’ve just recently rediscovered is AI content genera, uh, content detector. Sorry. Which is absolutely amazing. Uh, whenever I put something for chat GPT, even if I rewrite prompts and make it as human, human, um, As human as possible, Quilbot will probably detect it with very, very high accuracy.
Um, so their AI detector is just amazing. I haven’t tried that many others, um, but this one is definitely something that I can try. Reliably say it’s, it’s good. Um, and the other tool is, um, a lot of you, you listeners will know this, uh, tool already, but it’s, uh, Claude AI. It’s an alternative to ChatGPT, but I feel like obviously it’s, it’s very subjective, but I feel like it’s a bit.
More mature, it’s kind of like if you were talking, chatGPT is like if you’re talking to a, and I don’t want to sound ageist by no means, but chatGPT is like if you’re talking to a 20 year old who read a lot of stuff and has some experience, but sometimes is talking out of their ass. Fair, yeah. Whereas Claude would be.
Um, someone who’s 30 year old who’s got a lot more experience, a bit more balanced, um, isn’t pushing you in any particular direction, but really tries to help you out. Okay, so. Um, well, that’s how I feel, uh, this, this difference between those tools. Um, but according to my tests as an assistant and, and real VA or VAI,
Claude for me personally is much better. Well, I’ll definitely, I used all of them, but, but Claude is, is pretty badass
Ashley Segura: compared to all of them. I mean, there’s, there’s so many AI tools out there now I’ve tried, it’s crazy. I’ve tried to carve out time on my calendar to, you know, this is once a week, couple hours.
Just diving into new AI tools. And I still can’t keep up like there’s, there’s so many, but I’ll definitely make sure and drop links to both of these tools in the show notes. Rad, this has been an awesome conversation. Definitely learned a lot about you and some ideas on what to do if you’ve been hit. So thank you so much for joining us
Rad Paluszak: today.
Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Awesome. Okay.
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