Seth & Joy Hawkins: Mastering Link Building & Local Strategies

In this episode of the SEO Insider, Joy Hawkins gives an inside look into all things SEO. Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to the digital marketing realm, tune in to gain insights and strategies that can transform your approach to SEO. Also, don't miss out on learning from the best in the business at Local U. Joy highlights their upcoming events in Detroit in June and New York in September. Tickets to Local U are only $300, compared to the usual $900!

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Local U

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BluShark Digital  0:00  
Welcome to the SEO Insider, with your host, Seth Price, Founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital. 

Seth Price  0:11  
Welcome, everybody. We're so excited to have you here. On our SEO Insider, we have Joy Hawkins, one of the legends of the space, it's an honor to have you here, Joy.

Joy Hawkins  0:19  
Thanks for having me Seth. I'm excited. 

Seth Price  0:21  
You know, we, following your work for many years as a friend, as a client, and so excited to see what you're doing with Local U. And not only are there, is there one, but there are two opportunities in the coming weeks to partake and wanting to hear a little bit about what you have planned and what Local U is today.

Joy Hawkins  0:44  
Yeah, so we just basically wanted to try and do in person conferences. You know, as the world has kind of gotten used to virtual, we're trying to get people back in the habit of meeting in person because I think just meeting people, it's invaluable. Like you can't put a number on it. The connections that you make, that's how I met you, right, like the reason why we know each other. We met at a conference somewhere, I don't even remember which one. So the the idea of  Local U is to talk about anything pertaining to local businesses. So whether that be SEO, paid ads, social media, you know, whatever they need to know about marketing as a local business. That's what the conference is for.

Seth Price  1:19  
And, you know, here's, we have Detroit, [inaudible] is helping to host, New York coming up after that with Wix hosting in New York City. I remember the Local U at the Sheraton years ago, it was awesome when we had real inside perspective from like people inside of Google. Talk to me a little bit about what, like whatm you know what to expect, remember what their, what you guys did in the old days, but what's what's current Local U agenda, like?

Joy Hawkins  1:47  
Yeah, so I know, a couple of the sessions off the top of my head, my session, I'm gonna be talking about link building. So that sounds like a boring topic. I'll be honest, it's not I promise you. I've been testing for the last like two to three years on, what types of links actually impact ranking on Google? It's like a big mystery, right? Like everybody's like oh the black box of link building like you could spend $50,000 on links and have no clue what you got from it. Hopefully, you got something. But I see people all the time throwing out money like crazy at links. So I wanted to know, like, what types of links and what do they do? And how much do they impact ranking? And I measured, and I have lots and lots of examples. So that's my talk. And it's all stuff that we haven't even published yet. 

Seth Price  2:26  
Worth the price of admission alone.

Joy Hawkins  2:28  
Nobody would have heard it anywhere before. It's new stuff. Colan, I know who's my colleague, his, his topic is all something that's really interesting. We see a lot with like lawyers. He's talking about Google's filter. And it's a very misunderstood topic. But it's like the idea that like Google actually filters out businesses all the time and makes them kind of invisible, because they are too close to other businesses in their industry. He's talking about how that filter works, how you know when it's impacting you, and I'd say it's a bigger problem for businesses and larger cities.

Seth Price  2:58  
Oh, it's huge. We see it at BluShark we see it, we're super fans of Colan, and his genius. And I see this to the point where we have to have law firm clients, even medical clients, reach out to us before they sign leases, because you can really put yourself in a pickle, or, and I also say this like, like, with great SEO, maybe you can overcome it. But that's a lot of risk and a lot of time and not a lot of fun.

Joy Hawkins  3:24  
And it's so inconsistent. Because like we see this all the time, Google does a major update with their algorithm. And it's like, maybe you weren't filtered. And then now you are, it's like, it's so inconsistent. So yeah, it's a big problem that I think is misunderstood. So he's kind of walking through examples of like, here's an example of the business. This is what it did. This is how we fixed it. Very tactical, very practical, like the stuff he's talking about.

Seth Price  3:47  
Talk to me a little bit about from your perspective, you're talking, you're talking link building, which obviously essential to SEO, the intersection between SEO and local search, the Google Business Profile interface, and how you're, how you're seeing that now, there's been so much talk about reviews and proximity, but you know, how are links fitting into the whole [inaudible].

Joy Hawkins  4:07  
Yeah, so that's like, one of the things I adress in my presentation is like, what's the difference between how links impact local pack ranking, so ranking in the map, pack, whatever you want to call it, or organic rankings, which is like everything else, there's a huge difference. I'm not going to spoil my talk, but massive difference in how much links impact one versus the other. So I wanted to measure that. So I have all these examples of testing we did, clients we did this for, what happened to their local pack rankings versus their organic rankings. It's very different. I'll tell you that much.

Seth Price  4:39  
Understanding that organic is you know, it's one of the two major pillars are there examples that you're finding through your research where a specific, where types of links or link building can be more effective for the look for the map pack. Are there things that when you're interested in map like the example there was always given was, you know, obviously at everybody wants CNN if they can get it, that's a great link, but that there, are there, are there now sort of troves of, of, of links that can be, that you may not think as impactful to organic ranking that may be ones you should be thinking about for map back. Is that the type of thing we should look forward to?

Joy Hawkins  5:19  
So far? No. I'll tell you, there's no difference that I've seen, a link is a link. So you know that, yeah, I have not seen any evidence that says like, certain types of links impact local pack rankings better than others. It's all just how good the link is. The two that I dive into really heavily are, what they call guest posting, you might have different terms for it. But the idea of, you know, writing a piece for another site, and getting a link that way, and then also citations, which is obviously very relevant to local businesses, a lot of them do that still at scale.

Seth Price  5:52  
Awesome. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, this conversation came up with Gyi, just shooting the stuff the other day, where your thoughts on when spam links are on a site? How much is Google ignoring? And is there any actual negative impact beyond ignoring, assuming no manual action penalty?

Joy Hawkins  6:16  
So you're talking about like negative SEO where like, I don't like you, so I'm gonna build a bunch of bad links to your site.

Seth Price  6:20  
No no no no, how it gets to you is irrelevant, whether you build it or somebody does it for negative right, I think negative SEO is much overblown, with, with limited real examples. But assuming that somehow miraculously a negative, a link, a spammy link, you look at it, everybody looks at it, right? 12 bishops and rabbis or 12, Joys and her colleagues look at this thing and say, This is a spam link. There's no other way to describe it, maybe a high authority site, but it's a spam link. Is this something that assuming the Google algorithm agrees? Are you seeing anything short of a manual action where it hurts somebody? Versus it just doesn't have a positive impact? 

Joy Hawkins  6:56  
Yeah, I mostly see, it just doesn't have a positive impact, like 99% of time, manual actions are so uncommon. So we've seen one, literally one, in the last, hate putting a number on this, because I don't know the exact number of years, let's say five to ten years, like it's been a really long time since I've seen one.

Seth Price  7:12  
Big clean up years ago.

Joy Hawkins  7:14  
 Yeah, like whenever penguin happened, I don't even know what year that was. But like there was a lot back in that day. And we, I saw one back at my old agency. So I'm thinking like, it must have been at least eight years ago. And so I haven't seen one-

Seth Price  7:27  
What did it take, without, no name? But like, what level of nonsense that it take to get?

Joy Hawkins  7:32  
I'll give as many details as I can. So it was a home service business. So definitely a local business, which is intriguing, because I'm like, ooh, local business actually got a manual action. This is possible. I'll tell you, the most fascinating thing is I've seen zero impact so far to the rankings. And I say so far, because I checked this a few weeks ago. But there was like, weeks after their manual action, I was expecting to see like, they rank nowhere. Maybe, exactly the death cliff, right. And maybe over time, that'll happen. But this was a business that went out and hired a link building company. They built links fast. So it went from you know, like no referring domains to like 50 to 100 within like a couple months. And that's only the links that like Ahrefs knows about right? I've seen Ahrefs doesn't pick up on a good chunk of links that are built. 

Seth Price  7:35  
Ahrefs is not Google.

Joy Hawkins  7:37  
No. So like, this is just looking at that, like, based on that you see this line graph of their referring domains. And it's like, just like shoots way up. They were like the worst links you could imagine, like, basically, it was guest posting, but it was done- like they took one article, they spun it. I'm guessing using AI, making some assumptions here, reposted that same article on like a bunch of different sites, pretty much the same content, really rich anchors. And the authors that are posting the content are like posting about crypto, and posting about, like, all these other spammy topics, and like, 

Seth Price  8:54  
It's nonsense.

Joy Hawkins  8:55  
It's crazy. So it's like, these are garbage, like really garbage. Like I've seen what I classify as garbage links, but this was like, next level. So I'm like, Yeah, you have to be pretty bad to get a manual action. But it's also shocking to me that so far, doesn't seem like the kiss of death.

Seth Price  9:11  
Interesting.

Joy Hawkins  9:12  
 Yeah. 

Seth Price  9:14  
As a, one case study that I had from years ago, somebody who did objectively have negative SEO put on them, I think it was the greatest gift they ever got, in the sense that they, you know, I'm sure some stuff was filtered out, but some stuff wasn't, and they've, incredible boom from it. And I think that's one of the things that as SEOs that really, you really struggle with you need to make sure, you know, it's almost impossible to have somebody sign off, but it is sort of one of those real discussions to have with clients because in hyper competitive markets, where people are being overly aggressive. The question is, and again, it's the age old question, but I think it's, it's really- what's old is new again, that there is that question of how aggressive should you be? And just get some of your thoughts, you know, we aren't seeing those negative manual action, you could be wasting money. But what is your thought in hyper competitive markets of like, where are you? You know, are you, make sure that you are super proud of every link that you build? Or are you, is a certain, like in the old days of exact match anchor text? Are we okay with two or three percent of links that you might have to hold your nose at, but that are part of playing the game.

Joy Hawkins  10:24  
I would not spend money on link building unless you actually know that it's moving your rankings and I feel like 99% the time that I look at these reports and these things where people have hired link builders, they have no idea. Like they don't know what it's doing. They have no clue, I talk to agencies who have no clue. And I'm like they think it's helping, they don't really know. And I was like, unless you know that, like I built this link, and this happens, then you shouldn't even bother. So when we do like- a little

Seth Price  10:46  
That's a little bit- I'll push back on that a little bit. I mean- to a certain extent, you know, if you look for that nobody is inside the Google algorithm. And there are things that happen over time. Now, if you build, if links are acquired, built, whatever, however they appear, and that over time, you see somebody in search rankings for significant competitive keywords move up, is that enough for you to say yes, it's working? Or, you know, because like, if you take the marketing concept, you know, you speak to like a John Morgan. He's like yeah, I don't know what works, what doesn't work, you know, I advertise a bunch, something works, that 50% of marketing works, you just don't know, which, which half? Is there, some of that to this, that if you really look for an exact correlation, that's, you know, again, it happens, but it's further and farther between.

Joy Hawkins  11:34  
The majority of link building, and I say a whopping majority does nothing. And I talked about that in my presentation, there's actually there's some easy ways to to actually confirm that. And I think that it's harder than it used to be, but I don't think you needed a large number. So we often will build out depending on the budget, you know, for some clients, like one link per month, for some clients, 10 links a month. I don't think we've anyone over 10. Like really, it's it's not a numbers game. And you do not normally need more than that. Even in the most competitive markets for the most competitive industries, I have yet to see one where the number needed to be higher than that. So I'm, I found again, the ones, the companies that offer high numbers of links, the majority of them

Seth Price  12:22  
No right. It's quantity over quality. The question is, you know, and again, you know, what is liked? And what is the g- who, you know, as Google algorithm advances? You know, do we know that something that we built a couple of years ago, is like, more or less today's? And that's why to look for the direct piece? I feel like you're investing in an asset, you're, I mean, you're not doing it stupidly, you're thinking creatively of what should work. But to try to sort of be, I don't feel confident enough that I could, that I'm going to understand what's there and know that what Google wants today is going to be the exact same. I mean, I see it going in the same direction, cleaning out spam. Do you see, you know, we've seen so much work over the last few years with Google really focused on high quality content. And I think of late really trying to prevent AI from just, you know, infecting the entire content world, that I mean, there, the Google algorithm always seems to be filtering. But you've seen more and more touchpoints where it is getting smarter, smarter. I assume, if you're building that few links, you're saying, hey, we we're confident we know what is not- what is what is, preferred? And we'll focus on that rather than you know, being a sharpshooter rather than a machine gun.

Joy Hawkins  13:38  
Yeah, literally, that's actually a great analogy. Yeah, the, we found, it actually doesn't take a long amount of time to measure the impact from links, usually weeks. So not months, not years. And there's a shelf life, the links as well. So you know, building a link and just doing nothing else, and watching that over years, you'll see declines in ranking. So there is a shelf life. And I don't know what that is for every link, but I, we definitely saw evidence of that. And I talked about that a bit in my presentation. So I think it is something that does have to be ongoing. It's not like a one time thing. When it comes to content, that's a whole different thing we've been, I've been tracking a bunch of examples of people that are overdoing it so I can share a couple of those stories. 

Seth Price  14:24  
Okay.

Joy Hawkins  14:25  
One that's fascinating. So service area pages still work very well, which is shocking to a lot of people. You know, like why would you need 15 different pages one for you know, Atlanta, one for Boston, whatever, that are pretty much about the same topic, but localized, still works really well. So we, actually there was a company that posted on our forum and they got a manual action for having I believe it was like a few thousand pages. And they had a few thousand service area pages, and they were pretty much the exact same thing posted for like 3000 different cities, right we see this. So they got a manual action from Google, which I again do not see often. And Google, and you watch their traffic like, just went, like tanked, they actually had the kiss of death, which is kind of funny they got. So what they did is they took all their pages down, and then redirected them, I guess, to the homepage, and the manual action was removed, and I tracked them over the next few months, they put all the pages back like a few months later. It's like, wow. But they're still ranking.

Seth Price  15:23  
So I'm like, that's what you call that Chutzbah. Right,

Joy Hawkins  15:25  
Kinda funny, but I'm like-

Seth Price  15:27  
But that's, history, history is written by the victor. 

Joy Hawkins  15:29  
Yeah.

Seth Price  15:30  
That is amazing. And they, like look, you spent time in the legal space. And I spent a lot of time in legal space, you know, the idea that the law is the same within a state, everywhere. And that it you know, what, that the Google rules are, do not make it duplicate? And you know, needs, and look, okay, with good reason. You want people to push and be specific to a jurisdiction, it shouldn't just be cut and paste. But it is, it is tempting. And I get this question all the time from new clients, if the law is the same, why can't we just repeat it? And there's a piece of me he was like, yeah, for the part that's relevant, you know, that would be a better business practice. It's just not the game we play.

Joy Hawkins  16:10  
Yeah, the other one I was tracking was AI, right. So we had this lawyer that was like, oh, you know, I know, I need more localized content. So I'm just going to take the same concept and do like a bunch of service area pages, and they used AI, and they pumped them all out at once, I think it was a few hundred. And, like, none of them got indexed, like they're all unindexed pages, they're not ranking for anything, it didn't give them any more traffic. And this is not the approach, like whenever you're talking about localized content, if you just spin it in mass and create a bunch of these pages, that doesn't work. So I think that sometimes people go overboard, like it's good. But anytime you try to do something in mass, Google tends to not like it.

Seth Price  16:49  
Well, right. I mean, like any pattern its true with everything, right? If somebody goes to a conference and gets 500 Links in the same room, on the Wi-Fi, it's that it's not a it's not a good place to be. And that, you know, talk a little bit about AI with you, you know, my, my working theory has been is that Google did not get there first, it's not their product, they don't really want it to succeed, they were happy with the business model they had, and that, you know, they are, they are going to do everything. And we have our third party tools, to check it out, we can tell them somebody, you know, we check our own writers, and contract writers, and clients sites to make sure that nobody's dumping AI stuff on there. But I gotta think that from a business model point of view, Google's fully incentivized to, to at least not credit, if not ding pure AI content.

Joy Hawkins  17:41  
I think it's it's, whether it's AI or not doesn't really matter. It's like, did users want it? Like, do they actually care about whatever it is that you're putting on your site? And I think the vast majority of AI content, the answer that is no, right? Like when I think about when I'm researching, you know, I don't know, say I'm researching the law. I don't want a bunch of AI content. Would I want to lawyer site, probably, but also, I would say that the average lawyer site is not legible to an average person, like I've looked at enough of them as a non lawyer. I don't know, like you being a lawyer, you're probably like, Oh, this makes sense.

Seth Price  18:11  
Its so funny, because I so I have the back and forth, Benowitz in Price Benowitz, my law firm. He's a lawyer's lawyer. He teaches at Harvard Law for a week a year, if I give him something he wrote about last year, he'd rewrite it again, he hates everything on our sites, I'm like, please just don't read it. Like it's not written for you. And look, you do your best at look. We take great pride in making it high quality, I love when people read it, and it's great information, or they're doing a search for something random, and it comes up. But the, the question of who should be determining, forget about Google. We're obviously playing the game for that. And we want the consumer to like it. But the lawyer that is reading things and saying, hey, this is garbage, everything's garbage. It's your, bas- It's like a newsletter. How do you say something without saying anything? And that, you know, with this, you obviously have facts you want to, you want to be legible and understandable. But I almost feel like the person who should be judging it, the lawyers have to read it to make sure they maintain their bar license, but, but understood, but it's almost like I want like a middle school teacher to be reviewing it and giving like, you know, maybe have like the New York Post copy editor, you know, all I want is something that is at that, you know, can be accessible, you know, lawyers particurarly in the PI space are spending their time advertising on Judge Judy, and other shows like that, and then there, and then they complain that the writing is not sophisticated enough. Okay? Let's figure out who are you really trying to hit. Now, I also want to be good enough that if a lawyer looks at it, they're gonna like it, but it is, you know, who is your audience? And if you, if you're too frenetic and think, well, I want it to be, good that a referral partner is going to read it and think this is amazing. versus somebody else is going to look at and say, hey, they're speaking about my topic. I get it. Here's the phone number. I'm gonna click or call. To me, that's, it is one of those very frustrating things that I want to always talk to clients upfront about about what is the call, the question, why are you doing this? It's not for your health. It's to build traffic for your site and hopefully, qualified traffic. 

Speaker 1  18:28  
Yeah. And users really, they love experiences, right? So the average user wants to know, what other person had the same experience that that I'm having, and what did they do to fix it? Right. So I think that's something that all small business types, not just lawyers need to do more of is like, sharing more stories of what they did for clients, like, for Sterling Sky, that's case studies, we need to publish more case studies talk, about like how we solve this problem for this lawyer and how they rank on Google and blah, blah, blah. But like, for the average business owner, you know, if I'm a lawn care provider, like show me this problem on a lawn, what did you do to fix it? What are the steps? Talk about like, an actual job you did with photos, etc. Like, that type of information is usually missing on most sites. 

Seth Price  20:55  
You know its funny, we were plastic- sort of an elected medical division. And the the irony about what we've learned about what plastic surgeons care about, compared to lawyers, it's the before and after page. If there's a miss cropped photo in that before and after page that's like, end of the world.

Joy Hawkins  21:14  
It's huge.

Seth Price  21:15  
Whereas the lawyer might be like, a typo. Like, you would think you're never gonna get another client again. And it's, it's just a fascinating back and forth. 

Joy Hawkins  21:24  
NO, photos are huge for plastic surgery for sure. Like, because think about it, like, you want to see what it looks like, you want to know.

Seth Price  21:30  
It goes back to the age old issue that we've dealt with for years, which is, you get someone who comes and says, hey, I want to page, a homepage with no content on it. I'm, like, its beautiful, and you're more than welcome to do it as a conversion page. But like, if you want to do SEO, it's not a best practice. And you sort of go down that, that rabbit hole, you started to touch on this. So let's let's sort of land the plane with this, which is, you know, you know, reviews and the state of reviews, the level of fraud out there. My understanding is your agency doesn't even want to be in the game of sort of helping, helping people figure out how to compete against bad and fake reviews. You know, what, what do you, what advice do you give to end users? When it comes to that? Do you worry about yourself, but if some guy is build, you know, if you have 2, 300, 400 reviews you've built out of your hard work over a decade, and some Yahoo comes with 1000 Reviews in six months? You know, how should, how should an end user deal with it? Do you do you fight? Or do you just continue to worry about yourself? 

Joy Hawkins  21:31  
So, I'm actually tracking something that's really interesting that I haven't really written about. But something I've started to notice that Google's doing, not at scale yet. But they, there are a few businesses that we're tracking that review blocks on. And I don't know if you've ever come across this yet, but you actually cannot post a new review for these businesses. So one's a lawyer, one's in the HVAC space, and basically, like you wouldn't know, they had a block on the only way to really test it out is to go try and leave a review. And you'll, you won't get an error message as a user, but the review will never publish, doesn't matter who you are.

Seth Price  23:03  
And we see that all the time, we get that from clients, whether it's a review block or not. We, periodically clients reviews are not sticking.

Joy Hawkins  23:09  
Yeah, that's different. So this is like you have months go by where you can't get-

Seth Price  23:13  
When it starts, you don't know where, which one it is. Right?

Joy Hawkins  23:17  
Exactly. Yeah, it's frustrating, because Google's not going to tell you, but like, yeah, we've actually seen cases where businesses go months, where they cannot get any reviews, and then something gets lifted. And all of a sudden, they can get reviews. And I've actually seen a couple cases where people were, one of them was like a company that was buying reviews and mass like they had tons of locations, they were buying reviews for years, and Google would take them down, they would get more, Google would take them down, they would get them, get more. And just recently, like last year, they now like their review, star average has stuck, like they're stuck at like two point whatever, the review stars, and they cannot get new reviews, like they have no new reviews coming in.

Seth Price  23:52  
But that sort of goes to the question, you know, if you're sitting there and you're getting crushed, and that may be a big national, you know, oil change place or whatever it is, the idea that as an individual lawyer, you have that decision, which is your sewer, or doctor or any other person playing the local review game, you know, you try to keep your own world clean, and you see people taking extreme steps. And it seems that, you know, there's talk about, you know, the FTC and other groups are talking about this. Will it blow up, I'm sure at the highest level it will, but it doesn't do a heck of a lot of good if some Yahoo whos living in his basement at 28 years old is is dominating your your space with with a review count. And then it comes down to should you have part of your budget money or timewise spent on fighting, you know, on spam fighting as far as the reviews? 

Joy Hawkins  24:08  
Yeah, spam fighting does work in some industries, and it doesn't work in others. So we've pulled back quite a bit on certain ones because I was like, can we measure the impact? Does this have any impact, and we had a lot of cases where, you know if you report fake listings or fake reviews, we couldn't measure any impact on our client, like their leads didn't go up, you know what I mean? Like, we couldn't actually tie that back to some benefit to our client. 

Seth Price  25:07  
It's so, it's so funny because you're so concerned about the budget. And as like, I'm an end user as well as an agency owner. And to me by I'm more than willing to throw money, whether it's links, not sure which one is going to work, but knowing some will, you know, if you, you know, we have a radio campaign going, can I tell you how many cases came from it? I can do, a couple said, yes. But like, when you see this stuff go up by 30%. I'm like, okay, I'm good. I know, some, there's some positive. And I sort of feel like it's here, in that. There's so many variables. But if you could take a Juggernaut and get them to be a 3.0 or a 2.8, to demonstrate, yes, they may get reviews that I can't even match, but it's demonstrating that they're at least pulling out the fake five stars, then, then you sort of that, you know, it's just an interesting juxtaposition that you're so concerned with how you're spending somebody else's money. 

Joy Hawkins  25:25  
Yes.

Seth Price  25:39  
And a lot of people like myself, which I feel that way, when it comes to sort of some of the spammy reviews, I see with some of my competitors that are really going to town with it. And I think their attitude is there's no manual action, you know, enough will get through. And yet I don't think it's right. And I think there's risk and I'm not, you know, but it's sort of funny how very often we'll spend somebody, when we're responsible for somebody else, we think differently than when it's ourselves, where we take more, more of a flex and a risk.

Joy Hawkins  26:29  
 The problem I ran into is like, let's say we did report your competitor, right? And they're, they're buying all these reviews, and Google took them down, they would just go buy more. That's what we kept finding. So like, we would get, we would be successful in getting reviews removed, and Google would act on them. But there was no way to stop them from getting more. That's where we're like,

Seth Price  26:46  
[Inaudible] Long enough. And now there's a gating or something like that.

Joy Hawkins  26:48  
Or a block. Yeah, the block, if Google started doing this at, like more, this would work. I think that would solve their problems. I actually hope they do. But I don't know. Like, I don't know what Google is going to do.

Seth Price  27:00  
A couple years back, we saw it for, it felt like years, these these exact match niche, Google, Google Business Profiles would pop up. I think they were called that. And they would have like one review. And they just stick there. And I feel like Google, okay, they fit, it took the, so long, but they seem to have cleaned out that muck, and now they're going on to the mass review concept, which is, hey, these guys are really nefarious. And what I'm hoping is that when great people like yourself or others, whoever it is, who does that, or people who do it themselves. If Google says, Hey, we've checked this three times, and each time we go there's a clump. I know that it's not like a guy there with like a checkbox. But hopefully the algorithm figures something out where there's enough nonsense going on that Google realizes that this is not on the up and up.

Joy Hawkins  27:52  
They're getting better. I think the problem is the volume is getting worse. So it's like the balance of the two, right? Like there's more fake reviews. Google is improving, but there's more fake reviews. It's like, they almost have to get ahead of that curve, which I think is hard. And I think 

Seth Price  28:06  
Its also coming, its dribbling out. It's not the old school bad reviews, where it's like 500 a day, people have now figured out that it sort of dribbles out over time and looks more natural.

Joy Hawkins  28:15  
Yeah, like my, my advice to people that are like really want to fight this, like the transparency company, they do this, right? They, they report reviews like crazy. They don't just report them to Google, they'll like report people to the State Bar, they'll report to the BBB like they do everything. And I think it's again, hard to say like, is that doing anything? But I think long term it might, right? Like if you have enough, and there's enough volume, then I think that's really where real damage could come in. Like if a business you know, loses their license. That's a problem. But I haven't seen that happen. Yeah, I haven't seen that happen yet. But I do think the day is coming, right? Like I don't think that people are gonna get away with this forever. 

Seth Price  28:51  
Right, we're seeing it on the, in the mass tort legal space where people woke up. And they realized that an inventory of cases, and like half of them were people in India with scripts, who were, really pretending to be actual claimants that were just nonsense. And I think that like the moment that a lawyer actually got hit, and was in crosshairs, all of a sudden, everyone's like, oh, this could happen to me. And until that happens, I think that that's sort of the, you know, people are talking about the state bars, but nothing's really, at least publishable, been an issue so far.

Joy Hawkins  29:27  
Yeah. I mean, if you have pull there, I'd push it there, because I feel like they can do more damage than Google can right, like, I think, as far as like.

Seth Price  29:32  
I know, but it's also, do they care. I mean, this, go back to Gyi who's, who follows this really closely. And, you know, he'll see cases where the bars are aware, and they just, you know, it's just, it's not even part of their their DNA. They have very specific things they care about. This just doesn't seem to be, and at some point, if somebody at a committee meeting says yes, we care about it now then they'll start to care, but it's not like the person looking at it is not trained in it. And they're like, this is all greek to me. I'll go to something I know that's finite, in front of me. But thank you so much for your for your time today. Tell us when, what are the dates for the two upcoming Local Us?

Speaker 2  29:33  
Yeah, so the one in Michigan is end of June. And the one in New York City is in September, I believe mid September, and localu.org has all the specific details where the tickets are, tickets are $300, which is the first time they've ever been that cheap. They're usually $900. Just to clarify so- 

Seth Price  30:29  
Awesome. 

Joy Hawkins  30:29  
We are, yeah,

Seth Price  30:30  
I will say I've been to multiple ones before they are awesome. They are. It is great substance, great networking. And if you're in the local search space, it is really a must attend. So thank you for putting it on and taking it over and I can't wait to see you in Detroit. 

Joy Hawkins  30:49  
Same. 

Seth Price  30:50  
Very good.

BluShark Digital  30:51  
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's Website