The Edward Show

E1146: Get free niche backlinks by interviewing small bloggers, business owners, and other people in your industry.
This is a link-building method we're testing. Instead of cold emailing website owners and asking them for backlinks, start by giving them a reason to know you.
Interview them on a podcast.
Small bloggers and business owners are often much easier to book than established journalists or large creators. Many have never been interviewed before. Give them a good podcast experience, build an actual relationship, stay in touch, and you will have a natural opportunity to earn relevant backlinks.
I explain exactly how the strategy works.
You'll learn:
- How partnerships and industry relationships can produce some of the most natural backlinks
- How a podcast can be used for link building instead of traditional lead generation
- Why you should start by interviewing small niche bloggers and businesses
- How to identify potential guests with websites that could realistically link to you
- Why organizing prospects by domain authority or domain rating can help you work your way up
- How smaller podcast guests can help establish credibility before you approach bigger bloggers and journalists
- Why you shouldn't ask for a backlink during the interview
- How to stay in touch with guests through social media after an episode
- Why repeated exposure can make a future backlink request much easier
- How to ask a former guest to write about your business or list you as a partner
- How social media posts can be offered in exchange for coverage without creating a reciprocal-link pattern
- Why I would avoid building a large number of obvious reciprocal links
- How some guests may write about you without being asked
- How to use guest episodes to promote your business to people in your niche
- Why you should put your business promo within the first four minutes of a guest episode
- How to find potential podcast guests without relying entirely on cold email or DMs
- How this strategy can eventually help you build relationships with larger bloggers, journalists, and publications
The basic process is simple:
1. Find small blogs and businesses in your niche or adjacent niches.
2. Prioritize people who actively run a website.
3. Invite them onto your podcast.
4. Give them a good interview without immediately asking for anything.
5. Connect with them on social media and stay in touch.
6. Continue publishing so they repeatedly see your work.
7. After a few weeks or a month, approach about an article, partnership mention, or other relevant coverage.
8. As your podcast builds credibility, begin inviting guests with larger and more authoritative websites.
Done well, you're not only building backlinks. You're building a network of bloggers, business owners, creators, and eventually journalists in your industry.
Those relationships lead to links, partnerships, introductions, coverage, and opportunities that a standard backlink outreach email won't create.
I also discuss how I produce guest podcast episodes, how I use social media content alongside the podcast, and how you can use AIPodcastMatcher to find people interested in appearing as guests.
⭐️ AIPodcastMatcher - https://aipodcastmatcher.com/ 
⭐️ How I Produce Guest Podcasts in 90 Minutes (That Help Me Rank in Google) - https://edwardsturm.com/articles/how-i-produce-guest-podcasts-in-90-minutes/ 
⭐️ How to Get the Highest-Quality Backlinks Possible by Starting a Niche Podcast - https://edwardsturm.com/articles/highest-quality-backlinks-podcast/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Backlink Method Intro
00:18 Why Partnerships Win
01:05 Podcast Lead Gen Basics
02:03 Turn Podcasts Into Links
03:06 Find Targets And Level Up
03:54 Run Great Guest Interviews
04:39 Ask For The Backlink
05:59 Avoid Reciprocal Link Traps
06:37 Tools And Outreach Setup
07:53 Scale Authority And Brand
09:52 Episode Outro
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#seo #linkbuilding #backlinks #searchengineoptimization

E1145: Google just gave SEOs a new feature that could change how publishers build visibility across Search, Discover, AI Overviews, and AI Mode.
I break down Google Preferred Sources, how it works, why it matters, and why publishers should pay attention before everyone starts using it.
Google Preferred Sources allows users to choose publishers they want to see more often in Google Search experiences. These selections become a user-controlled signal that works alongside Google's ranking systems.
I cover:
- What Google Preferred Sources is and why Google launched it
- Why this could become an important signal for publishers and SEOs
- How Preferred Sources connects with Google Discover, Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode
- How to check if your website is eligible to appear as a preferred source
- How to add a Preferred Source button to your website
- Where to place the button to maximize the chances that readers select your site
- How I customized my own Preferred Source buttons using WordPress and Elementor
- Why this is not just for news publishers, but can also apply to brands with company blogs and product pages
- How domain-level and subdomain-level sites are eligible while subdirectories are not
- How SEOs can think about this as an audience-building strategy
Google's documentation says Preferred Sources selections do not override relevance. Your content still needs to match user interests and provide value, but this gives publishers a new way to encourage users to tell Google they want more from their website.
This is one of the few features where publishers can directly encourage users to create a signal around their website.
If you run a website, publish content, work in SEO, or care about Google Discover and AI search visibility, this is something you should understand.
I also share how to implement this on a website, where I would place the buttons, and why I think many publishers will overlook this opportunity.
⭐️ Search Engine Journal: Google's Preferred Sources Feature Is Now a Global SEO Signal - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-preferred-sources-feature-is-now-a-global-seo-signal/573591/ 
⭐️ Google Developers: Preferred Sources Documentation - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/preferred-sources 
⭐️ Compact Keywords testimonial insert - Rank & Rent SEO: How Ippei Built 130 Sites - and Made $240K From One 15-Hour Website - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muwrS4Dh_R8 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Preferred Sources Breakthrough
00:17 How the Feature Works
01:10 Old Button vs New Popup
02:51 Designing High Converting Buttons
03:41 Where to Place the CTA
04:29 Setup Guide With Claude
05:21 Discover and Ranking Limits
06:07 AI Mode and Global Impact
06:39 Domain Eligibility Rules
07:18 SEO That Makes Money
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #digitalmarketing #ecommerce

E1144: Google's August 2026 spam update has officially finished rolling out, and we're seeing clear patterns in who got hit, who recovered, and who is winning.
The update launched August 18 and completed just three days later on August 21. But the volatility started well before Google officially announced it. Throughout August, sites were reporting major ranking swings, sudden traffic losses, and unexpected recoveries.
One of the biggest patterns: scaled content sites are getting crushed.
I break down what happened during the August spam update using real sites, Google Search Console screenshots, Reddit posts, Ahrefs & Semrush data, and examples being shared throughout the SEO community.
Topics covered:
- How the August spam update started affecting sites before its official August 18 launch
- Sites publishing 500 to 1,000 pages per day suddenly losing rankings and traffic
- The difference between legitimate programmatic SEO and scaled content abuse
- Google's policy against scraping, stitching, and combining content without adding meaningful value
- A site getting roughly 2,200 organic users per day before its traffic started collapsing
- Guru99 falling from an estimated 14 million monthly organic clicks in 2021 to roughly 50,000 today
- The pattern of sites rapidly increasing their number of pages while their organic traffic falls
- Why "Mount AI" happens when sites use AI to rapidly scale low-value content
- Mike King's explanation for why Google may not need to detect AI-generated content directly
- How user behavior and site-quality signals can eventually expose bad scaled content
- Why generative AI at scale is not inherently spam if the pages actually provide value
- An expired-domain case that some SEOs initially blamed on the spam update
- Why redirects from acquired or expired domains aren't automatically expired domain abuse
- The importance of maintaining search intent when migrating or redirecting pages
- SaaS sites that appear to be winning during the August volatility
- Why short bottom-of-funnel landing pages are continuing to work
- Sites previously hit by Google spam systems suddenly reporting recoveries
- Whether this spam update could be followed by another Google core update
I revisit Mike King's explanation of Mount AI. His argument is that Google doesn't need to reliably identify whether content was written by AI. Google can initially rank a large new set of pages, collect signals about how searchers respond, and then adjust the site's visibility based on those signals.
Publishing 100,000 pages isn't automatically the problem. Publishing 100,000 pages that don't give searchers unique value is.
There is a legitimate way to do programmatic SEO at scale. The underlying data, usefulness of the pages, search intent, UX, and reason for those pages to exist all matter.
Meanwhile, I'm seeing encouraging movement from SaaS sites. Our own vibe-coded SaaS has been growing throughout August without aggressively scaling content, and I share another newer SaaS using short bottom-of-funnel landing pages that has also been gaining organic clicks.
The August spam update is finished. Now we get to see whether the volatility settles down or Google has something else coming next.
⭐️ SE Roundtable: Google August 2026 Spam Update - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-august-2026-spam-update-done-41906.html 
⭐️ Reddit: Who got hit - https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO_Marketing_Offers/comments/1vsln4q/comment/p4mlfam/ 
⭐️ David Quaid - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid/status/2090046206290386970?s=20 
⭐️ Expired Domain Comment - https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1vrv11e/breaking_google_august_2026_spam_update_is/ 
⭐️ Ep 1141 - Can You Launch 100,000 Pages and Survive Google? - https://youtu.be/wNtiygMsRfg 
⭐️ Donmend0 on 𝕏 (site recovery) - https://x.com/donmend0/status/2090438229635879068 
⭐️ Ganesh_S_007 on 𝕏 (site recovery) - https://x.com/Ganesh_S_007/status/2090502537741029874 
⭐️ Ep 1127 - Google's Biggest SEO Leak Changed Everything… But Almost Nobody Adapted - https://youtu.be/fIs1ZSmEJGU 
⭐️ James Dooley - https://youtu.be/EOkrLkKNDrY 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Spam Update Recap
01:03 Scaled Content Fallout
03:32 Spam Policy Breakdown
04:11 Programmatic SEO Wipeouts
05:31 Guru99 Case Study
08:15 Mount AI Explained
10:32 Expired Domain Confusion
12:49 SaaS Sites Winning
13:54 Recoveries and Core Rumors
15:13 Durable SEO
17:06 Episode Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #programmaticseo #seopodcast

E1143: He Did 2,000 Podcasts in a Year Just for SEO Rankings
James Dooley has published 2,000 unique podcast episodes this year and is on track to hit 3,000 by the end of the year.
But he's not doing it to build a traditional podcast audience.
He's doing it for SEO.
James breaks down the system he uses to turn short, keyword-focused podcast episodes into Google rankings, video rankings, backlinks, leads, and mentions across AI platforms.
His episodes are typically only 5-15 minutes long. Instead of making broad, entertainment-focused shows, he treats each podcast episode like an SEO landing page: one search query, one tightly focused topic, and questions built around the attributes of that topic.
We get into exactly how this works, including how James chooses topics, structures episodes, distributes them, and uses podcast syndication as part of a larger SEO strategy.
We also discuss why he deliberately targets bottom-of-funnel searches such as "best lead generation company for plumbers," how he approaches competitor keywords, and why video has become such an important part of his search strategy.
James explains how his team:
- Creates podcast episodes around individual search queries
- Keeps most SEO-focused episodes between 5 and 15 minutes
- Structures podcast conversations similarly to SEO pages
- Targets bottom-of-funnel keywords designed to generate inquiries
- Uploads the video to YouTube before distributing the podcast
- Uses Transistor to syndicate episodes across podcast platforms
- Identifies podcast platforms that provide dofollow and nofollow links
- Links podcast descriptions back to highly relevant pages
- Works to get syndicated podcast URLs crawled by Google
- Uses transcripts to reinforce entities and relationships between topics
- Publishes supporting press releases and guest posts
- Distributes episodes through social platforms
- Uses IMDb as part of his entity and knowledge-panel strategy
- Tests publishing similar videos across multiple YouTube channels
- Uses slightly different titles and thumbnails when testing distribution
- Tries to trigger Google video carousels for targeted searches
- Targets competitor names, alternatives, and comparison searches with video
- Uses podcast content to support Google rankings and AI visibility
We also talk about an important distinction between ranking a video and getting a video recommended by YouTube.
James isn't necessarily optimizing these podcasts to become viral YouTube videos. His goal is often much simpler: when someone searches a commercially valuable query, he wants his video to appear.
That changes how he thinks about everything from episode length to entertainment value.
James also explains why podcast syndication matters beyond YouTube. While YouTube transcripts may primarily be accessible within Google's ecosystem, publishing transcripts and related content elsewhere gives search engines and large language models additional text-based sources connecting people, companies, products, and topics.
We get into:
- Podcast SEO vs. traditional YouTube growth
- Google video rankings
- AI search and LLM visibility
- Podcast backlinks
- Entity SEO
- Knowledge panels and KGMIDs
- Semantic triples
- Press release syndication
- Google News and Google Discover
- AI-generated podcast videos
- HeyGen, ElevenLabs, and Higgsfield
- Podcast sponsorships and monetization
- Why James is publishing 3,000 episodes this year
- How he built a team to handle editing, thumbnails, uploads, and distribution
James also shares why he's doing such an extreme amount of content in the first place.
After writing eight books in a year, he set himself the goal of producing 3,000 podcast episodes so that when he asks the business owners he works with to publish one episode per week, he can show that he practices what he preaches.
This is a detailed look at what happens when podcasting is treated not only as content, but as an SEO distribution system.
⭐️ James Dooley's website - https://jamesdooley.com/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on 𝕏 - https://x.com/james_dooley 
⭐️ James Dooley on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameszdooley/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jameszdooley/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/james.dooley1/ 
⭐️ James Dooley on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@JamesDooley 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 2000 Podcasts Results
01:41 Keyword First Podcast Model
03:27 Bottom of Funnel Queries
05:58 Syndication Stack Setup
08:21 IMDb Entity Boosting
10:11 Backlink Lift Explained
12:19 Episode Content Blueprint
15:13 Titles Descriptions Workflow
18:06 Transcript Keyword Seeding
20:38 AI Generated Episodes
24:09 Multi Channel Upload Tests
29:27 Video Carousel Domination
32:17 LLM Transcript Visibility
33:15 Transcripts Press Layers
34:22 Knowledge Panels Per Episode
36:10 Entity Indexing Proof
37:45 Press Release Providers
38:54 Old Google News Hacks
40:54 Podcast Transcript SEO
43:47 Scaling 3000 Episodes
47:34 Guesting and Podmatch
51:01 Monetizing With Sponsors
01:02:14 Avoiding Top Funnel Waste
01:04:39 Wrap Up and Next Debate
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#searchengineoptimization #seo #backlinks #seopodcast

E1142: Reddit citations in ChatGPT just totally collapsed.
Promptwatch data shows Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations dropping dramatically in August, falling to below 0.5% after previously sitting around 3-4%.
This is the third major Reddit citation drop we've seen, and it raises a bigger question for SEOs: what happens when an AI search strategy built around one platform can disappear overnight?
Klaas Foppen, co-founder of Promptwatch, joins me to break down what changed, what may have caused it, and what SEOs should do next.
We cover:
- Why Reddit citations suddenly fell in ChatGPT
- The difference between an AI citation, source, mention, and visibility
- Why Reddit can still be accessed by ChatGPT even though it is being cited far less
- The August 8 query fan-out change that appears to have reduced Reddit citations
- The much larger August 14 drop that Klaas believes may have involved a more deliberate adjustment
- Why nobody outside OpenAI knows whether licensing negotiations, user feedback, search quality, or another factor caused the change
- How this same dramatic Reddit decline is not showing up across Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Why SEOs should not abandon Reddit just because ChatGPT is citing it less
- The danger of building an entire AI search strategy around Reddit, parasite SEO, or any single third-party platform
- Why your own website remains the part of your SEO and AI-search presence that you control
- How technical SEO, complete product information, feature pages, comparison pages, landing pages, and fresh content can affect AI visibility
- Why listicles are still frequently used for commercial-intent AI queries
- Why product pages and landing pages may become more important as AI systems increasingly search official websites directly
- Why old-school evergreen informational content may be less valuable when an LLM already knows the answer without searching the web
- How OpenAI, Bing, Meta, Exa, and other companies developing or using different search indexes could reshape SEO
- Why new AI search indexes could create opportunities for SEOs before their spam detection becomes as sophisticated as Google's
- Whether PDFs, research papers, and sites like arXiv could become important sources for AI systems and training data
- Why AI search is much less stable than traditional SEO and why tactics that work today can change very quickly
The biggest takeaway is not that Reddit is dead.
It's that "post on Reddit and get cited by ChatGPT" was never a durable AI search strategy.
Reddit can still be a valuable marketing channel. But if your visibility depends entirely on Reddit, another social platform, or one AI search tactic, a single change can wipe out much of that advantage.
Build the website. Get the technical fundamentals right. Publish the information customers and AI systems need. Earn mentions across multiple sources. And treat AI search as a moving system that needs to be watched rather than a fixed formula.
⭐️ Klaas Foppen on 𝕏 - https://x.com/forgebitz 
⭐️ Klaas Foppen on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/klaas-foppen/ 
⭐️ Promptwatch - https://promptwatch.com/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Reddit Citations Vanish
00:38 Why The Drop Happened
02:11 Citations Vs Mentions
05:04 Deals And Partnerships
09:25 Other LLMs And User Backlash
11:10 Will Reddit Return
12:39 Diversify Your Marketing
14:02 Future Search Index Shakeup
19:53 What Content Works Now
23:09 Training Data And PDFs
26:10 Query Fanout Direction
27:23 On-Site SEO Foundations
29:53 Promptwatch New Automation
31:59 Wrap Up And Thanks
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#generativeengineoptimization #answerengineoptimization #searchengineoptimization #seo