Understanding Google RankBrain

 

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Loren Baker:  Welcome to Search & Social, a Rainmaker.FM production.  This is Loren Baker, your host from Foundation Digital, and with me today, I’m going to be bringing on Bill Slawski, a man of many trades within the world of SEO, but for the most part, we will be discussing the new Google rollout of RankBrain, which I have called “BrainRank” numerous times.  I guess that pretty much dates me in terms of SEOs and talking about page rank.  But, Bill!  Welcome to Search & Social.

Bill Slawski:  Good morning!  Thank you, Loren.

Loren Baker:  So, let’s just do a quick introduction, Bill.  For any of the listeners that haven’t had a chance to meet you or read your work before.

Bill Slawski:   My name is Bill Slawski.  I’m the director of Search Marketing for a Virginia-based SEO firm called Go Fish Digital.  I…live in Carlsbad, California, and moved out here in January.  I’m really enjoying San Diego.  Never knew the west coast could be this different from the east coast.  So one of the things I’ve been doing for a few years is…doing research in the patent office to find patents from Google, and I came across RankBrain yesterday morning, searching through news about Google.  And it popped up, and I started digging in.

Loren Baker:  Great.  And just to let everyone know, like…I came across the news as well, and Bill and I have a little bit of a history together.  We’ve worked together in the past on some projects, and I’ve always…you know.  Whenever there’s something new that rolls out, I generally do turn to Bill and his blog, SEO by the Sea.  Bill, you have a knack for digging into patent stuff, and…you’ve done it forever.  And…you know, what percentage of the patents do you think that you’ve reviewed for search have come to fruition by the companies, by the way?

Bill Slawski:  It’s almost impossible to tell.

Loren Baker:  Yeah.  ‘Cause you never really know, right?  I mean…

Bill Slawski:  Sometimes you know for certain, absolutely.

Loren Baker:  Yeah.

Bill Slawski:  Sure.  The patent says it’s for Universal Search, and a couple of days later, the patent gets granted and Google introduces Universal Search.

Loren Baker:  Right, exactly.

Bill Slawski:  And you read through the patent and it’s exactly like what you see in-screen.

Loren Baker:  Right.  Right.

Bill Slawski:  When…when Google released Hummingbird, I had spent two weeks or so, maybe three weeks going through a patent that I thought was really interesting.  I had no idea that it was something that was gonna be released.  I agreed to do a Hangout with Max Mincer about that query rewriting approach.

Loren Baker:  Yeah.

Bill Slawski:  In the patent.  And we changed the topic at the last minute to marketing your SEO firm.  But I had that Hangout, and people starting asking me about if I had heard about Hummingbird.

Loren Baker:  It happens, right?  So…like we were saying, RankBrain rolled out, what?  Yesterday morning, maybe the night before.  Well, the announcement did.

Bill Slawski:  Right.  It’s been supposedly out for months.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, which is typically something that the folks at Google like to do, it seems.  And…and then of course, you know, a handful of people turn into RankBrain experts overnight.  But like I said, that tends to happen in the world of SEO as well.  But I wanted to turn to you, Bill, and just get an understanding for our listeners of…you know, to your understanding, exactly what RankBrain is.  How it is connected to Hummingbird, especially with the query rewriting, and…you know, basically where you see this going.  And should anyone be dramatically changing their course based upon this announcement?

Bill Slawski:  Okay.  Those are all good, simple, easy questions.  So RankBrain, the way it was introduced and talked about, was that it’s a project started initially, originally, by five people at Google, and they named a couple of the people.  Which gave me some information to use to dig into patents with.  Supposedly, since they started doing work, they were joined by a lot of other people, and it became a lot more complex.  So one of the names that was in the Bloomberg news article, I guess Bloomberg News did an interview with a search engineer at Google, and he relayed most of this information about the RankBrain project.  But…so, the person whose name…one of the persons whose name he gave out was Thomas Stroman.

So I went to the office and did a search on Thomas Stroman to see what types of patents he’d come up with, or come out with.  And noticed that he had written one called “Using Concepts as Contexts for Query Term Substitutions”.  And I said, “That title sounds familiar.”  The patent I ended up calling the Hummingbird patent involved query term substitutions.  So I compared the two.  And this one was a little different.  A little bit more complex, but…along the same lines, it involved rewriting queries, which is what the Bloomberg News article told us was the focus of RankBrain.  And the patent included some examples.  So I wrote about it in the Go Fish Digital blog website.

Loren Baker:  Yes.

Bill Slawski:  And, you know, one example…the original query was “New York Times Puzzle” and it showed how they got to a revised query that was “puzzle? crossword”.

Loren Baker:  Hmm.

Bill Slawski:  And then, in parentheses, (New York Times).  So it seems that this process noticed that when the words “puzzle” and “New York Times” appeared together frequently, the word “crossword” also appeared frequently.  So they rewrote the query to include the word “crossword”, and if you do a search for “New York Times puzzle”, you see most of the results you end up with have the word “crossword” in their title.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, I see that.  Going down to even the Apple iTunes app, so it’s very interesting.  Most people that are searching for a New York Times puzzle are looking for the crossword puzzle, right?

Bill Slawski:  Right.

Loren Baker:  Or maybe some tips on the crossword puzzle, or archives of the crossword puzzle, or whatever it may be.  Let’s say, for entertainment’s sake, if the New York Times wrote a story about puzzles.  That was blowing up.  Or something like that.  Do you think that Google would then revise the query?  Or…if there’s enough of a QDF trend that is pointing towards something else that’s helping to define user intent, then that query won’t be revised.

Bill Slawski:  They might provide an “in the news”-type answer box result.

Loren Baker:  Okay.

Bill Slawski:  Mhmm.  Now, answer box, it’s a short-term, type of thing a “Query Deserves Freshness” algorithm might trigger, though.  So an answer box and “in the news” answer box for “New York Times Puzzle”.

Loren Baker:  And another question I have for you, and then I’ll let you keep on going, because, just, things pop up in my head.  Is…over the past year, we’ve seen mobile searches trump desktop, and with a lot of…with Google’s focus with the Google app, and I guess it’s not OkayGoogle anymore, or whatever, but…the Google app.  Then also Apple, with Siri, and Microsoft with Cortana.  We’re seeing natural language queries increase, or “how-to” queries, things like that, because they’re just the way that people typically do talk.  Do you think audio queries have any effect or the increase in audio queries over the past couple of years have any effect on where Google is going with these updates or additions to the algorithm?

Bill Slawski:  I’m not so sure. There have been things…whitepapers from Google about speech recognition and how they’ve been able to optimize those and understand them a little bit better.  I’m saying the accents people speak with.

Loren Baker:   Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  Filter those out, if necessary.  So, you know, I said there were a couple of names that were given out in the Bloomberg  News interview.  The other one, I think I wrote it down, let’s see.  Yanhui Wu.  I looked him up and it looked like he had written some patents involved, experimenting with queries and doing searches, and Googling Google to get results to maybe speed up the process of what shows up to learn about what types of things are out there.  To investigate, to find out things like…like our crossword puzzle experiment.  Investigate the query space around those, and see what types of words tend to co-occur like that.  I think that’s…that’s part of the machine learning how the machine learns.

Loren Baker:  And, you know, I think there was one example, and we’ve seen this in personalized search, too, is that, like, I think it was…well, I think it was a presentation that Danny Sullivan was doing at an event that I attended in LA.  And the first question was, like, “How old is President Obama?”

Bill Slawski:  Right.

Loren Baker:  And Google returns the age, right?

Bill Slawski:  Right.

Loren Baker:  And then the next question was, “How old is his wife?”  Not “How old is Michelle Obama?”  but “How old is his wife?”

Bill Slawski:  Right.  That’s…

Loren Baker:  And Google returns her age.

Bill Slawski:  It’s a machine…it’s an information retrieval trick.

Loren Baker:   Yeah!

Bill Slawski:  It’s called co-reference.  The machine understands when you use a pronoun.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  “His” wife. You’re referring to the person from the query before.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, absolutely.  Which is really the way that we tend to talk and have conversations in real life, right?

Bill Slawski:  Right.

Loren Baker:  Yeah.  So, I see a couple of other examples in here of the query rewriting.  And I found this to be interesting.  Is the rewriting of Social Security tax rate.  Where…instead of just the typical rate information, it looks like a rate calculation of Social Security and tax.  What did you see here that’s a little bit different with this particular rewrite?

Bill Slawski:  Okay, so.  I thought that was interesting, because it’s trying to give us…with revised queries, it’s trying to give us more than just matching the words on the page with the query.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  So it’s looking for more than just pages that have the words “Social Security Tax Rate” on them.  So as it rewrites it, it says,  “Okay.  When people ask for rates, they’re also usually asking for some type of calculation to take place.”

Loren Baker:  Right.

Bill Slawski:  “So let’s provide a result that has information about that.”

Loren Baker:  Got you. Gotcha.  So…

Bill Slawski:  And, you know, these things seem to be intuitive, they seem to make sense, but you’re teaching a computer.  And that’s sort of where the artificial intelligence comes in.

Loren Baker:  Yeah.  Have you seen Marcus Tandler’s presentation…do you know Marcus Tandler?

Bill Slawski:  Yeah, I gave a presentation with him at SMX West, or East a couple of years ago.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, he did a pretty good one about how the Google search engine is just a tool to teach the AI.  Like, that’s all it is.

Bill Slawski:  Yeah?

Loren Baker:  Yeah.  It’s a tool to teach, you know, their artificial intelligence robot what people are looking for, how people interact, how people do this, how people do that.  Which is actually really interesting.  But so, in essence, we’re feeding the robot, right?  We’re feeding the robot.  We’re teaching the robot.  And it’s…over time, the idea is “Things get better.”  So in the world of SEO, backtracking a little bit.

Bill Slawski:  Right.

Loren Baker:  We probably looked at about a good four or five years where there was slow evolution.  I’ll say between maybe 2002 and 2008, so to speak.  Like, before Universal rolled out all of the big changes.  Everything else.  It was very a “10 blue links”.  Produce good content, get links to your site.  Of course there were differences, but it didn’t seem like things were growing as fast as they’ve been growing, or changing as fast as has been happening.  And what we’re really seeing now is Google’s ability to dynamically learn and change as people input queries into Google, right?  Based upon the, I guess the delta rate of their AI, and not necessarily an update that may happen once a year, or once every two years, or once every month on the first of the month, so to speak.  Does that make sense?

Bill Slawski:  It makes sense.  We don’t really see a lot of the evolution as it’s going on.

Loren Baker:  Right.

Bill Slawski:  As it takes place.  You know, we’ve been talking a lot in the past couple of years about direct questions and direct answers.  But the first real time Google said anything about direct answers was in 2005.  They wrote a blog post saying, “Hey, we’re introducing this thing.  It’s called Google Q&A, where if you ask a question in the search box, we’ll try to provide an answer to the top search results.”  So that’s been around for 10 years.

Loren Baker:  Amazing.

Bill Slawski:  Yeah.  What the knowledge base-type answers at the tops of results, those aren’t all that different from the OneBox, or answer box results that we’ve been seeing for years, too.  Now usually those are filled up with other things, like a lot of people go searching for Cecil the Lion. And next thing you know, someone searches just for lions, and you see a bunch of images of lions at the top of your results.  It’s an answer box result.  It’s triggered by lots of queries for pictures of lions.

Loren Baker:  So, if…if I’m, say, reading about this update, or reading about this announcement, and I see here that RankBrain should impact 15% of Google queries per day based upon the Bloomberg article.

Bill Slawski:  And yeah, I have to agree.  It probably influences more.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  But what they said in the interview was that it’s really helpful, with the 15% of queries that get asked per day that Google’s never seen before.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, that’s interesting, right?

Bill Slawski:  Which is a subtle difference, but it’s a profound one.

Loren Baker:  Also, the percent of the queries’ numbers never really line up with search volume, either, right?  There’s no…

Bill Slawski:  Right.

Loren Baker:  …15% of Google queries and have a search volume of a million or more, or 15% of Google queries that are retail-oriented, or whatever it may be.  So, say, as an SEO or a webmaster or a content producer, what can be learned from what we’re seeing thus far?  With the RankBrain update?  Or is it more of a wait and see?  I like to take the “wait and see” approach to search.  This was just announced yesterday.  I’m not going to start emailing everyone and letting them know that they have to do this, this, and that, but…where do you kinda see this going?

Bill Slawski:  I think I agree with you on the “wait and see” approach. There are times when it makes sense to dig in and try to do something, like, I ran across a patent, like, 10 years ago that talked about definition results.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  And I said, “This is really interesting.”  And I created a bunch of glossary pages.  I provided definitions of terms in a certain format, and I might start seeing those show up in search results, at the tops of results.  With the definition of a term that somebody typed into a search box.  I can try that today.

Loren Baker:  Yeah.

Bill Slawski:  You know, this is a little bit more complex.  I pointed it out, one patent, but there are likely multiples.  I didn’t mention anything about word vectors, or paragraph vectors, or some of the deep learning concepts, and people were taking that and talking about it in relation to RankBrain, and those are probably out there.  There are supposedly hundreds of people working on this process.  And…it could have an impact, but it’s worth taking your time and learning about it, and being careful and thinking about it.

Loren Baker:  Well, here’s a question for you.  And we can kind of bridge into this conversation, as well.  I mean, you’ve been looking into search patents and technology patents for over a decade now, and you know, I’m sure you’ve seen this happen, where you may write something up or share something that you’ve seen published, and people tend to jump on it, but there is kind of a, “Hey, this is only one patent of many.”  And as you were saying earlier when you looked into, you know, the engineers named for the RankBrain project, you started kind of reverse engineering that yourself and looking at other things that they have filed or that Google has filed on their behalf, historically.  To start to put the pieces together.

So…it sounds like, for the most part, and I think we’ve had this conversation in the past where, you know, it’s not like you can just go to the patent office and search for “Google”, right?  You have to look at the name of the person filing the patent, where they worked, possibly even where they’ve worked in the past and the patents that they have filed with other employers in the past.  Look into their LinkedIn, see where they are, what team they’re working on, and everything else.  So there’s a lot of research behind a lot of what you’re putting together, is there not?

Bill Slawski:  It’s true.  Absolutely.

Loren Baker:  So how’d you get started with this, and how did you really get to the point where you could cut through and determine what’s actually relevant to the day-to-day, like, the definition patent that you stumbled across 10 years before hand.

Bill Slawski:  I was doing in-house SEO for an incorporation business in Delaware, and the location of the business in Delaware was really important.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  So I wanted to make sure that when people search for something like “Why incorporate in Delaware?”, it showed up.  So I…had the idea of looking at patents from a deep investigation into a patent that some other people had done.  It was called Information Retrieval from Historic Data.

Loren Baker:  Hmm.

Bill Slawski:  And it was written by, like, nine really well-known search engineers, including Matt Cutts and some others.  And it was as if they had written lists of things that they thought might indicate spam, or stale content.

Loren Baker:  Right.

Bill Slawski:  And it got covered in a lot of places.  And it was interesting.  It was interesting seeing what they wrote in the patent and whether or not they were looking at those things.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  So I did the same thing with this geographic location-based patent, and it suggested doing some certain things, I don’t remember what at this point in time, that might help a site rank better geographically.  So I tried them.  And they seemed to work.

Loren Baker:  Forgive me for a second, on the way that patent law works, but at what point does the information in the patent become public?

Bill Slawski:  It’s always public.  It’s a public filing.

Loren Baker:  So it’s public as soon as it’s filed.

Bill Slawski:  Yeah.  You’re asking the courts to protect your process.

Loren Baker:  Right.

Bill Slawski:  So you’re legally filing something that gives you the right to exclude other people from following a certain process.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  But they need to be able to read it to know that they can’t infringe upon it, so you’re creating a document that becomes a government document when you file it.

Loren Baker:  Interesting.  So when a patent is pending, the information is still there for a researcher like yourself to go in and dig into.  So not only are you able to look into the patents that have been, I guess, granted or approved, but also the patents that are out there that, you know, may have a chance of living or may not.

Bill Slawski:  Right.  There’s a certain point where they get published publically.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  And that’s when you can…if you’re in a situation like I am, that’s when you can go read them.

Loren Baker:  Very cool.  Very cool.  So, and then also…it sounds like you have to have the names of the individuals, like we said.  Or can you also look by company?

 

Bill Slawski:  Yeah, not all the time.  But you can do searches by people’s names.

Loren Baker:  What other tips do you have, and secrets, for finding this information out there?  That you can share?

Bill Slawski:  Patents can be hard to read.  Sometimes the words used in them don’t follow a standard definition…standard dictionary definitions, and they might be defined within the patent itself.

Loren Baker:  Hmm.

Bill Slawski:  And may be a little bit different than the dictionary definition.

Loren Baker:  So is this an attempt to kind of mask the information to the common user, or just moreso…something completely different?

Bill Slawski:  One of the phrases that tends to get used a lot in a patent is to a person of knowledgeable about the art of the patent.  And that phrase refers to people who might read a patent, understand it immediately what it’s referring to, how to build something.  Based upon the patent.  But most of the times, patents aren’t exact roadmaps, as in, “this is how you build something.”  If you know something about the field that the patent’s in, you might be able to.

Loren Baker:  Right.

Bill Slawski:  I came across a blog post by a guy who was a named inventor on a patent I had written about.  And…he commented on my write-up of that patent.  He said, “This guy used a lot more words than I did when I coded the invention.”  So…

Loren Baker:  Well, I remember stumbling across a…I think it was Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian musician and the director of culture at the time, for the government.

Bill Slawski:  Right.  Right.

Loren Baker:  And you had stumbled across a patent that…or was it a technology that the Brazilian government was implementing for people to be able to more or less mash up and mix samba and…

Bill Slawski:  I was writing about copyright and the Brazilian approach to remix, where people would post songs online that other people could download and change around.  Add stuff to.

Loren Baker:  Right.

Bill Slawski:  You know, somebody might record, like, the drums.  And upload it.  And someone might download that, add guitar to it.  Upload back…you know, re-add it online to let other people make changes to.  So David Byrne from the Talking Heads made friends with Gilberto Gil, who, at the time, was the…

Loren Baker:  Minister of Culture?

Bill Slawski:  Minister of Culture, yeah.  For, was it Peru?

Loren Baker:  Brazil, I think.

Bill Slawski:  Brazil.  Okay, it’s possible.  Yeah.  I believe I wrote a blog post on a different blog I had at the time, and he left a comment.

Loren Baker:  That’s cool.

Bill Slawski:  Uh-huh.  And he’s a really…well-known recording artist down there.

Loren Baker:  Yeah.  Yeah.  That’s very cool.  So like you were saying, sometimes a patent doesn’t have the entire roadmap, but if you can look at numerous different patents and see where people are going and engineers are going, it kinda gives you the chance to piece all of that together.

Bill Slawski:  It helps.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, cool.  And what was…besides the two Google ones, has there been anything that you’ve found that you’ve seen has totally followed every nook and cranny that they have to find in the patent that was awarded, in terms of a major search change, algorithmic change, or search display change, or anything like that?

Bill Slawski:  Well, this one, the Concepts as Contexts for Query Substitutions.  It’s worth spending time reading through.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  ‘Cause it gives some idea of what they might be doing when you submit a query, how they might be transforming it, and rewriting it.  It’s not necessarily gonna help you write better pages, but at least getting a sense of that, you know…context really matters when you define something.  So you take the word “car”.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  And normally, it’s a synonym for the word “automobile”, except when it follows the word “railroad”, as in “railroad car”, then it’s not.  So that’s a…substitution rule.  A car is not…except for when it shows up behind the word “railroad”.  That’s a substitution rule, an example of when it’s not a substitution.

Loren Baker:  So I’ll take a dig into this, as well, and…also send out your findings to our listeners.  Have you published anything else on RankBrain besides your post on Go Fish Digital?  I know it’s only been a day, by the way.

Bill Slawski:  I’ve made some notes for some other stuff.

Loren Baker:  Okay.

Bill Slawski:  Like, there’s one video that I think is really good that people should watch.

Loren Baker:  Very nice.  If you have anything else to send over, please let me know.  While I have you on the horn…

Bill Slawski:  Yeah.

Loren Baker:  What else should folks in the world of SEO pay attention to that any recent changes and things like that? Like, I know you’re doing a lot with semantics and microdata right now, are you not?

Bill Slawski:  I’m looking at them.  I think it’s worth paying attention to. There was an article this morning, I forget which site it was from, which featured the CEO of Priceline.  And he said, “SEO is dead.”

Loren Baker:  Of course.

Bill Slawski:  And there was no comment section, so I couldn’t point out to him the fact that maybe just his SEO wasn’t that good.  And I looked at Priceline, and I found some examples. There’s very limited semantic mockup.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  And one thing that he complained about in the article was that it wasn’t doing too well with regional locations for hotels.  He wasn’t ranking well when he tried to rank for “Las Vegas Hotels”.

Loren Baker:  Okay.

Bill Slawski:  So I looked at the hotels pages.  And I noticed they all use a schema place markup, where they include latitude and longitude for the places.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.  Is it the Priceline Office on each page?  Please tell me it’s not that.

Bill Slawski:  Is it the Priceline…

Loren Baker:  Is it the latitude and longitude for the main Priceline office used on each page by default?

Bill Slawski:  No, they’ve got, like, Baltimore hotels, Pittsburgh hotels, Atlanta hotels.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  And if you look at the code for each of those in the place schema, they say, “latitude = 0, longitude = 0.”

Loren Baker:  Oooooh.

Bill Slawski:  For each of them.  So it’s like you’re telling the search engine where your page is relevant to…but you’re giving it bad information.

Loren Baker:  Especially a page that doesn’t represent a true location, so you’re trying to build a location page with aggregate information from other locations, and you take the time to have that schema tag included, which…it’s makes it confusing, right?

Bill Slawski:  It’s a good idea including it…

Loren Baker:  Yeah!  But you might want to…

Bill Slawski:  Make it right.  Yeah.

Loren Baker:  You might want to customize it.

Bill Slawski:  Yeah.  Pittsburgh is not latitude 0, longitude 0, and neither is Las Vegas.  But they are on the Priceline website.

Loren Baker:  “SEO is dead.”

Bill Slawski:  “SEO is dead.”

Loren Baker:  I’ve been hearing that forever.

Bill Slawski:  Uh-huh.

Loren Baker:  Well, thanks a lot, Bill.  I really appreciate you taking the time today, to jump on the podcast.  And I typically don’t do these, like, by surprise, or whatever, but…I really wanted to get an understanding myself of what folks are finding with RankBrain and everything else, and…who better to turn to than my old buddy, Bill Slawski, to run through that?  And educate the listeners as well, of course.

Bill Slawski:  Hopefully, we’ll have more as time passes.

Loren Baker:  Very cool.

Bill Slawski:  It’s only been a day, right?

 

Loren Baker:  Yeah.  And Bill, you know, Go Fish Digital, you have two awards under your belt there now, don’t you?

Bill Slawski:  Yeah.  We were…really fortunate to walk away in the past month or so with a Landy Award from Search Engine Land, and a US Search Award.  At Pubcon.  For the same campaign!  It was for a limousine service in Northern Virginia.  They were already doing well, business-wise, because they had landed contracts with government and businesses to provide shuttles.

Loren Baker:  Oh, yeah.

Bill Slawski:  But…we helped broaden the appeal.  The range of their traffic with their business.   Introducing tours of breweries and wineries.

Loren Baker:  Mhmm.

Bill Slawski:  And making it clearer that you could get a limo for special events like weddings and proms, and things like that.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, so…turning it into experiential vacation packages more than just transportation.  Especially nowadays, right?  Because…

Bill Slawski:  And ranking well for those, and they picked up a lot of traffic, and they picked up a lot of business.

Loren Baker:  Very good.  Very good.  Good to see.  Especially in the day of Uber and Lyft.  That a company like that, a smaller company like that, can grow.  So, fantastic.  Bill, where can our listeners find you online?

Bill Slawski:  They can find me…at all the usual places I typically hang out, at social media websites, because that’s my water cooler, since I work remotely.  The people I see every day are the people I see at Twitter and Google Plus, and Facebook.

Loren Baker:  Yeah, likewise.

Bill Slawski:  Mhmm.  And my own blog, at SEO by the Sea.  And the Go Fish Digital blog, at http://www.gofishdigital.com.

Loren Baker:  Great!  Thanks, Bill.  And did you…you don’t use your old handle anymore, do you?

Bill Slawski:  Once upon a time, I went for eight years with a somewhat unpronounceable username.  At a good-size forum.

Loren Baker:  Gotcha.

Bill Slawski:  As the administrator there.  And yeah…I started meeting people in real life, offline.  And they would say, “You’re that…I don’t know to pronounce it!”

Loren Baker:  Brackadack…

Bill Slawski:  Yeah.  So…I changed it on that site. I stopped using it.

Loren Baker:  Good.  Well, thanks again, Bill.  I appreciate you taking the time.  I’ll let you get back to your fish tacos, here out on the west coast.  I’m enjoying life out here as well.  And I hope to meet up with you soon.

Bill Slawski:  Oh, that would be good.  Thanks a lot.

Loren Baker:  Okay. Again, you’ve been listening to Search & Social, a Rainmaker.FM production, with Loren Baker, your host, and with Bill Slawski from Go Fish Digital and SEO by the Sea.  So…thank you!  

 

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