Duane Forrester SEO Pioneers

Duane Forrester – SEO Pioneer

Duane Forrester is best known as the industry-facing representative for Bing when he helped to launch Bing Webmaster tools in 2011. Duane was awarded the search personality of the year in 2014 and is a well-known personality in the SEO industry but Duane actually started out working for Ceasers Palace in the mid 90s before working for an online sport betting company.

Since his first talk in the early 2000s at SES, Duane has been a prolific speaker with a personality that was formed working as an emcee for Ceasers.

Duane is a super sharp speaker and with experience of over 25 years in SEO, there isn’t much that he hasn’t seen in the industry.

The most interesting part of this interview was the talking about Duane’s time at Microsoft and his interaction with the search engine team. From this time, Duane learned a lot about how search engines work and he realised that SEOs were not that far off the mark.

In this interview Duane talks about:

Duane’s introduction to computers
Attending and speaking for the first time at SES New York that started his speaking career
How conferences have been the space to connect with others who understood what being an SEO is and where he built a network of friends
What his first speech topic was – fundamental things you have to get right
Inexperienced people entering the industry and job hopping because they reach the limit of their knowledge
Why foundational knowledge is so important and testing really matters
SEO experimentation in the early days
Being invited to apply to work at Microsoft
Starting work at MSN
Being shown how the search engine worked
Being a representative at search conferences for Microsoft
How there is no one single factor for ranking and it’s all cumulative
How search engines are internally compartmentalised
The shock of the insights that he learned from Microsoft engineers
How it’s all incremental and goes back to the foundational
How SEO is starting to look in the wrong direction
SEOs would benefit from learning more about marketing
The mistake companies make is siloing SEO where it should be integrated
What Duane misses the most about the early days

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SEO Pioneers – Duane Forrester Transcript

Shelley Walsh: Hello and welcome to SEO Pioneers. Today I’m speaking to Duane Forrester who started out working promotions at Caesars Palace in the mid 90s before moving online. Duane worked for Sports Direct and then in the mid thousands went on to work for Microsoft. In 2011, Duane helped to launch Bing Webmaster Tools, and then in 2014 was awarded the Search Personality of the Year.

Duane has been a well known person in the industry for 20 years. And today Duane is my SEO pioneer. So hello, Duane. And it’s very nice to have you here and I’m very much looking forward to our chat. So I’m going to kick off by going right back to the very beginning. And, so you were working in promotions at Caesar’s palace in the mid nineties and then moved into working online.

So how did that progression, was that working online for Caesar’s palace or how did that progression happen with moving into online for you?

Duane Forrester: While I was at Caesar’s palace, I was in charge of promotions, which included some online stuff in the very early days, mostly just emailing lists and things like that, you know making updates to the localized website for the casino that I was at, because this is a physical location part of my career.

And I was also the emcee and host for any events that were happening for high rollers. So I decided to leave Caesar’s Palace and go find work somewhere else. And that’s when I bumped into online gambling. I did not know much about it. It was very early days. We are literally talking about the first bust of the internet, right?

Where everybody was like speculating and all kinds of money was coming in and the whole thing just fell apart. The year after it all fell apart, that’s when I stepped in and was like, okay, I’m gonna get involved in this. And I started because the company that I ended up spending six, six or seven years with, they were looking for an online marketing and all of their criteria at the time, small town, smallish quarter million people, early days, it’s not like the area was a wash in people with the skill set and experience that you would want.

Like today, it’s relatively easy to find an online marketing manager, especially if you’re open to a remote job. Like it’s just not a problem getting the exact skill you want. Then they weren’t even unicorns. They were mythical, like just mythical. Those people didn’t exist. So I got the job because I had a background in promotions.

They wanted to run promotions. I knew the legalities of it and off we went. And this is a time when Google has either just launched or not quite launched yet. So nobody was doing SEO. We were all doing pay per click and companies like goto. com was the big pay per click, you’d go in, turn on the accounts, put your keyword bids and everything was penny, the expensive ones were three or four cents.

And, you’d just leave the credit card open over the weekend and you’d get, a hundred thousand orders over the weekend. And. They were like, great, let’s do it again next weekend. Let’s do it again next weekend. And that was the business model. and then it just grew from there. background gambling, land based gambling led to internet based gambling and, hire people to take over certain roles.

So I hired somebody to come in and manage all the pay per click work. And I was like, deep, into the community forums, webmaster forums and webmaster world and everywhere else. And, started to grow this whole idea of look, maybe we can, impact organic rankings on that. What does that look like?

How do we do that? And that was the beginning of my career in SEO.

Shelley Walsh: So you again, like pretty much all of the pioneers I’ve spoken to and everybody, I think in SEO all started out with self learning and exploration.

Duane Forrester: Oh, no option. Right? I’m not kidding. Like when you say self learning, it was. I opened up my GoDaddy account, I bought a half a dozen domains of things that I might be interested in, I started, taught myself how to program HTML, build websites, went through all of that, whether it’s Photoshop, Dreamweaver, all these old programs to build these things, learned about FTP, learned about managing all this stuff.

And then started writing content and, you started doing all that, like the first thing I put up, I can’t even remember what the topic was, like, I think it was cars. And the only thing that I knew was if I went to places like dog pile and, all of the, like the old original kind of, we’ll call them search engines.

They were just like lookup tools. If you went into those and you had changed a bunch of your meta keyword tags and just repeated the word more than the person who was in the first position, you came up in the first position and you were like, yeah, I’m winning. And then the question was, what the hell am I winning?

I don’t know. What does this even mean? And at the time you’re looking at your stats counters, it’s not having any effect. Nobody’s really using this. There’s no volume of traffic here yet, That was it. It wasn’t winning for the sake of winning. I think of it kind of like crypto several years ago, people weren’t into crypto because they were thinking, Oh, I’m going to make money this year in crypto.

They were into crypto because of all of the other implications around it. And maybe someday somebody would figure out how to make money. And that’s how it started. and then it became a matter of when I actually started doing the work as part of my job, when we decided, we’ve got a lot of content.

We want to actually do what’s called optimization on this. What does that even mean? And you go into the forms, and at the time, some people may still feel this way, but at the time, most of us were using handles that were not our names, because we did not want anybody, there was a big fear that people from Google were watching the forums.

I didn’t want them to know that I, Duane Forrester, was working on this website. So my handle was sports guy. Go figure. I worked for a sports betting company, a handful is available. So there I am. And I’m just like asking questions of random people. We had no idea who they were. We were just sharing ideas. Just like, oh, I did this.

This happened. What do you think about this? Oh, that’s a great idea. And if I expand on it, what about B, C and D and you just go and then relationships form on people who are, like you’re reasonable when you respond to something, it’s thoughtful, it’s balanced, you don’t tend to get upset when, people take a shot at you or they argue with you or things like that.

And then you get invited to be a moderator, and you just continue down this path. That’s great. Seems obvious because it’s right in front of you and you don’t know what else to do. So you just keep following the path. That was, I think, a lot of us in the early days. The first time we went to a conference, I had a name tag on that said sports guy because I’m like, We’ll figure out the rest of it, but I only know you, and you only know me by my handle.

So better that, you can recognize, oh, that sports guy, and then I can tell you who I am. And now, today? No. Today, listen, it’s gotta be under your name. You gotta be doing it out in the open. And if not, I can’t take it seriously. And I think most of the people in our industry feel that way.

There’s nothing to hide now. We all know what’s going on, at least we should, but, but it was, it was a very interesting, very interesting time, very interesting beginning, and I will admit this, had no idea I was at the start of this. I think a lot of us, we had no idea that we were at the beginning of the industry that would become the search industry.

We all just stumbled into something and was like, oh, this is fascinating, this appeals to my sense of, I want to tear it down and build it up again. Or my kind of rebel sense, like I, as soon as I learned how to hack a pay phone, I was out there with pull tabs and orders and like trying to get free phone calls and things like that.

And, my parents bought me a TRS 80 RadioShack as my first computer. I immediately programmed a game called SubHunt and after a week of writing, debugging the code, I promised myself I would never code again. And I am now living my best life of not having to code, but I can just tell systems, this is what I want.

And so I’m like, awesome. It took you 30 years, but you finally give me what I need because I’m a lazy coder.

Shelley Walsh: So you did actually, you did, when you were younger, you did have an interest in computers. Did you have any background in computers and coding before you came to the online space?

Duane Forrester: Probably the closest would be like random friends who had like maybe a Commodore 64 and Atari system, and it was all about gaming, so like I had this exposure with it.

But that was like probably, oh, I was, young. I was like seven, eight, nine, something like that. And then, when I was 10 years old, my parents bought a business, they bought a motel. And so I have a long history of hospitality. And at around the same time, my uncle called and said to my mom, Oh, you should get a computer so that I can email stuff.

And not too long after that, we ended up with our first dedicated computer and that was really what reeled me in, right? It just, it took me right in there. I go back to dot matrix printers and the big floppy disks. And, once I got to university coming out of high school, it was easy to check the boxes for classes that were like computer science.

And learning the basics of DOS and these kinds of things at the time, walking around with the big, thick plastic container full of five and a quarter floppy disks, one for each different project I was working on, boy, did I ever feel cutting edge. And now we’re sitting here today and my phone has one terabyte of memory in it, it’s like a supercomputer, so it was always a fascination for me, but I was more fascinated with what it could do, deliver, or bring, than how it worked. Never cared about building computers, understood it, built one once, and was like, yeah, okay, been there, done that. Never really cared so much about the hardware. Anytime I’m looking for hardware, my starting point is whatever the current top level is, I start there and in my head, I tell myself that allows me to not go obsolete for a longer period of time, which is, I think I’m crap, but whatever,I like it.

Sounds good to me. So I feel good about my purchase and off I go. And, and now, then we transition into a period of time where we’re literally extracting from the web with all of this, the ability to search, find stuff, research, everything’s at your fingertips. And, the logical extension to that, where we’re sitting today.

I have projects that I’m working on and some of the concepts that I don’t have to understand. I only likely understand, but I don’t need to understand them because I can ask Chat GPT and I can give it a well crafted prompt to tell me what I need to know in the way I need to know it . And it will go and pull all that together and give it back to me and I’m like great. Much more speed to knowledge if you will for where we’re at today. And so I feel like there’s a continuity on that line throughout my life online. I want what the internet has to offer, I’m not really interested in the connectivity. I can be four, I can be five, I can be six, whatever. It’s great. Look, I turn my computer on, it’s connected. It works great. Don’t. Don’t care. Don’t want to know about that sausage. I just want to eat the damn thing. So there we are. And we should limit our sausage intake because doctors say that’s bad.

Shelley Walsh: So when you first came to working online, how, how did that feel? How was that feeling? What was the space like?

Duane Forrester: It was, it was really interesting. I remember the first day I came into work. Everybody’s in their own little cubicles off the rack, but it’s an open plan workspace.

And we had what we called a fishbowl. There was a marketing or a meeting room in the middle, and it was all just windows. It was like, I don’t know if, Egalitarian is the right word. It felt very democratic. The very definition of an open workplace. And everybody was just encouraged to go learn whatever you needed to learn.

Like it was like, we think it’s a good idea, go learn about it. It was also the very early days of Handheld PDAs and things like the compact iPad kit, the HP Trio, things like that. And so everybody was into this kind of, our data is moving and how are we managing data and IT security was starting to become a thing and what we have to do with that.

And so we were learning an awful lot. We loved it. Like it was, fantastic learning all this stuff. I remember the first day I went to my boss and said, hey, there’s a conference and I’d like to go to it. I want to see if I can pitch to speak because if I’m speaking, I don’t have to pay for the ticket.

And I thought that was the best choice I could make because it was cheaper on my company’s budget, and little did I know that was a directional choice in my life. And my boss just looked at me and he goes, yeah, whatever. And I turned around. Went in, put my pitch in, I think at the time it was SES, it might have been in New York, and my plan was I would drive to New York from where I was in Eastern Canada, Nova Scotia, it’s, like a, I don’t know, I don’t even know how long was a whole day of driving, 8 to 10 hours at least, probably even more. And my wife was going to come with me, and we’d just go and, she would vacation in New York for a couple of days, and I would speak at the conference, and this would save money, and this was awesome.

And it was a series of bad choices, the best of which was my choice to speak. And that’s what got me started as a speaker in the industry. And the rest of it was the classic road trip shit show. And it was like, if it could go wrong, it went wrong. We got our timing wrong. We got stuck in traffic. We got lost.

We didn’t know where we were going. We had an argument, it was like, everything was just straight out of a movie, And then finally you get into the city and you’re just like, how do I drive to New York city? It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced before. Finally, just got to the hotel and handed the validated key and went, I don’t care what it costs.

I just, I don’t want to see my car for three days, And the guy’s we got you. That was it. Didn’t see the car for three days, went to the hotel, but all my time at the conference was extraordinary. Because for the first time in my life, I felt surrounded by people who spoke my language.

I legitimately had chills in every session, because these people were giving voice to thoughts that I could not share with anyone, because they wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t even worth saying out loud, because the kind of feedback, the kind of encouragement, the kind of connectivity, direction, thought sharing, it would just never happen.

Because in my company, I was the only one immersed in this world. Nobody else was. So it was, it was it was a watershed moment, and ever since then, Oh man, it’s been, I think almost 27 years now. No, it’d be about 26 years now. I’m speaking, every year conferences somewhere.

And these are very much that these conferences, these are how I keep in touch with friends. This is how we built relationships. I don’t really have any friends around me close by, but it doesn’t matter because I have you. I have everybody on the internet. If I have questions, I ask them out loud and I get answers the next day within hours, it doesn’t matter.

And I feel completely connected to the people in this industry.

Shelley Walsh: Can you remember what you spoke about at that first conference?

Duane Forrester: So it was a basic topic around, fundamental SEO. Look, there’s this trend. It’s been happening since day one, and I think it will continue to happen forever in our future.

We tend to look at something and say, oh, that’s foundational. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Understand. Understand it. And then we don’t do the work and we go looking for the next shiny object. And we just keep chasing that. And you kind of fail forward over and over again. And a lot of times what that means is, you have businesses that are missing fundamental pieces of the puzzle to be successful in today’s world and tomorrow’s world, okay?

I’ll pick on like structure data as an example. I walked on stage, it was June 2nd of 2011, announced the schema.org and was like, y’all should use this and then we waited and we watched and we wanted to see what the uptake looked like and it was slow. And if we fast forward to today, we don’t just have Googlebot and BingBot, we have crawlers from all of these AI generative systems that are out there gathering information.

And look, people can argue whatever side of the coin they want on that, it’s good, it’s bad, it’s, whatever. The fact is, those crawlers are using all of that data that’s embedded in a web page to understand the content, to select entities, and to build trust around it to use for whatever the use is.

In Google’s case, it’s indexing ranking, maybe for, a generative AI system, it’s power and direct answer, whatever it is. Bottom line, however, is if you don’t have structured data deployed today, you’re at a disadvantage. And we see this entire, there are millions of websites out there that are actual businesses who are asking consultants, their own host teams, big agencies, why don’t I perform them? How do I not move forward? Why are my competitors over ranking? And it’s because of incremental baseline foundational things that they got wrong a long time ago and stopped paying attention to. And so my topic at that time was exactly that. It was, there are fundamental things you have to get right.

And these details now, thinking about things like you had 60 characters in the title tag or 80 characters in the title tag. You better make sure your keywords at the beginning of it to fashioning that and then hand crafting our meta descriptions and then, toiling over which meta keywords we should put in.

Is this word too many? Is it too broad? Not relevant enough that doing all that stuff by hand on an individual level, page by page. Today, we know so much and the engines have changed and the whole world of digital marketing has changed. And if you’re paying attention to the keywords today, you’re looking in the wrong direction. And meta descriptions, take the best stab at it, try not to be too spammy. Chances are good that Google’s going to rewrite it. So things have definitely evolved. It was, I feel like at the time we were doing the best with what we knew, and I feel like that’s still a lot of that today. I think one challenge that we have, and I may be getting a little ahead of us here, but one challenge we face today is we have a lot of people, that are in the industry who lack experience or entering the industry who lack experience. Whether by choice or by accident, they don’t do the research to fully understand the history of what they’re attempting to do. And so they’re repeating the same mistakes that have already been asked and answered a dozen times before that, and that hurts businesses. It hurts businesses.

And you can see in people’s careers, if you track their career in LinkedIn, you can see when they realize it was a problem and they left the company. At nine months, at one year, they don’t spend a lot of time, but they did seven companies in seven years, and that’s about the right cycle to come in. Tell everybody who doesn’t know about the topic, what you know about the topic, and then try to get some work done, only to see that it’s not working, and you to decide, I have to leave before I get fired, and that cycle repeats itself over and over again, in our industry, and I’m sure it’s not just our industry, I’m sure there are lots of industries, I just pay attention to ours.

I really want to encourage people to never lose sight of that foundational level. And so from day one, I’ve been like, this is additive, it’s cumulative, it’s not iterative. So you have to do all of this, to here, not just the recent increment to here. You still have to have done all of this. Big businesses, large companies, successful companies, they understand this, they have good foundation. They’ve built from that. But it’s still a topic. You go to any conference today, you’ll still find fundamental trends. And part of that is new people coming in. They have to start somewhere.

And let’s face it when I started, not going to put you in the same bucket as Michelle, but like when a lot of us started all those years ago, there was nothing, literally nothing to teach. Nobody was learning something from a book or a blog, or we probably had to invent a lot of stuff. There was just nothing.

And so it was your experimentation, your documentation, and then you go into a conference. And that first conference, I met Mike Grehan, like I met some of these people who at the time I was just like, I met Danny Sullivan and I was like, hey, smart guy, he knows what he’s talking about, right?

And it was all about taking photos of those presentations. Just make sure you got a copy of that presentation. And then you built your own library of knowledge. Then you took it, you shared, and you got more information from others. And eventually we built a corpus of knowledge that allowed people coming in to have a learning base.

I wouldn’t say it was easy to find, but it was there. And then, of course, we end up moving on to other things. I don’t know, we had Sempo for a while. That had a training program built into it. Now there’s a number of options if you want to learn stuff. I just recorded content this week for an event, while I was in New York.

And, it’s all about like, how do you find content that you can trust and like actually use and learn from because there’s so much misinformation. There’s so much stuff that’s just wrong. I run around inside a large company. And I’m having this conversation right here where people I work with are talking about SGE and I’m like, you have to start talking about Gemini.

You can’t talk about this anymore. You’re gonna talk about this. It’s moved from that to this. When did that happen? Beginning of December. Used to be that now it’s this, and they’re, still thinking SGE is like, Oh, cutting edge. And I’m like, Oh, it’s not cutting edge. It’s not cutting edge.

Cutting edge. That’s the front right now. So, things move fast and only getting faster.

Shelley Walsh: So just going right back, to the beginning again, you’re talking about, a lot of experimentation. Can you remember any of the experiments that you were doing back then?

Duane Forrester: Yeah. Most of the experiments were like the size of logs and texts that you were using, the number of characters you were utilizing, whether format played any role in things.

We did probably a six month long test of whether keyword rich URLs made any difference. And the funny thing was, round about the time we were ending our testing, basically split our website into 8 bits.

We were like, okay, there’s no answer in the data. Like we don’t, it’s all like both sides are even. And then in the last two weeks, when we just stopped caring, we were just going to let the clocks run down. Everything was a cron job and it had a specific end time. I was like, we’re not putting more time into this. And we’re not certainly going to go rewrite all our URLs. Those last two weeks, the keyword rich URL skyrocketed straight up, and we were like, I immediately thought it was instrumentation, right?

Like we drop data on one version or something. It was all of a sudden something changed and keyword rich URLs were valued. And so we were like, all right, went to the IT guys who were like, program every URL to use this plug from right here and make that the URL and make it unique.

If you need to add like a number on it or something, go ahead and do that, and that was it overnight. Boom, done. Traffic increased. Everybody was happy. And that lasted about eight months. And then the rest of the internet caught up and, Hey, look at that. You just set a new level. And very quickly started to realize like this isn’t a I won scenario.

You’re not in a foot race. You’re in a decathlon. Because you can’t win the decathlon without winning all 10 events. And that’s what search was. It was an unlimited decathlon of events to win. Meanwhile today, extremely hard, extremely narrow winning. It has a different meaning. But then it was like the purest form of A B testing you could do, I had an instance where, Oh, we had an instance where we were running a lot of money through Google AdWords at the time.

And Google came to us and said it’s right around the time they were, saying you can’t do gambling ads. And basically our rep’s suggestion was to mirror our entire website and put all the ads one click away from their source. So instead of you clicking on the ad and you go directly to the advertiser, you would click on the ad, you would hit an interstitial page.

And then from there, you click again, go to the advertiser. And this was at that time, a random rep inside the company telling us that’s what we should do. Meanwhile, I’m reading the company’s guidelines on mirroring websites and saying how they should not, you should not do that. You’ll get penalized if you do that.

And I’m like, what are you going to do? And that was a defining moment where we were like, okay, we have to stop with paid advertising. Like we have to dial that back because it’s getting too tight. But it’s also getting extremely expensive and we were working with companies at the time that had huge budgets, way, way more than average.

If our marketing budget was $500,000 for the year, their marketing budget was 7 million. Like we were not even in the same ballpark. So those companies, those gambling companies would show up as competing ads. We were like, this doesn’t make sense. You want us to drive qualifying traffic to you and you’re putting up ads Trying to get less qualified traffic that’s driving my cost of advertising higher. And it was a bit cannibalistic. People just didn’t understand that, and there was a lot of that type of foundational stuff that it’s funny. I look back on it now with these memories coming back and I’m thinking, wow, that’s set up so many things for me that are just the norm today as we enjoy.

But back then it was all, fresh, new exploratory. Nobody had answers. You were like doing things and asking for forgiveness, not permission. Because well, who the hell would you ask permission of, like you didn’t know it was in charge until somebody came along and said, stop, and you’re like, Oh wait, you’re in charge, okay, I have a question for you. And that was the way. Not surprising.

We have all kinds of things that we did back then that became blackout and, I get it. Like Google was still learning its way forward, still protecting, trying to protect itself from spamming. And we weren’t helping at that time.

So we were seeking any advantage and spamming was just seen as, floating. Sure. Let’s do that. That seems reasonable. And then it was all about building relationships and trust. I spent probably, I spent a quarter of my time and this is going to mark my age when I say this, Shelley. So bear with me okay?

I spent about a quarter of my time, maybe 20 percent of my time on the phone trying to do digital marketing work. Off we go, negotiate the rate over the phone, get the contract, sign it, fax it back. All of that. And that was how that was all done then. And it was cumbersome and took a while.

It was even cheap at times. Like nothing was very expensive. You were running on CPM costs that might’ve been 50 cents, a dollar and you’d buy 10,000. CPM Run. And so your ad would run for two and a half weeks. And that ad was massively successful for us. We ran it for I think about three months in a row, three weeks at a time, a week break in between. And that ad totally brought in about 2 million dollars in revenue. It was like, you could do that kind of thing. And it was very straightforward, but it was kludgy, cumbersome too, that was a project. And I had to manage it. Today, if I wanted to spin up an ad somewhere, I’d just be like, hey AI, make this ad. Done. Okay. Upload here. Does that pass inspection? Yep. Great. Here’s my credit card. Run. And that’s like minutes and you’re off and running. So it was intense, going through this, but that was the time when all of those relationships were still very much direct connections, phone numbers, things like that.

It was so much analog as digital grew up. Today I have full relationships on Slack and I never meet people and they are totally fulfilling and productive.

Shelley Walsh: When you went to Sports Direct, was that much of a change going to work for that company?

Duane Forrester: a lot of what I’ve been describing is that time at Sports Direct.

And, for me it was a change because it was the change from offline to online. It was also a bit of Wild West. We’d already had the internet bubble and that had gone. So there was a lot of caution. In that caution was a lot of opportunity. People still knew there was value out there. They were just being conscious of an overvalue.

And so it meant that you could cover a lot of ground quickly if you’re willing to move on ideas. There was a lot of fast iteration. There was a lot of break it, rebuild it. There was a lot of build it, tear it down, replace it. All of which happened very quickly. There were opportunities for things. We found ourselves very quickly in a place where a lot of our advertisers also wanted our digital marketing knowledge.

So by this time I had somebody running email marketing. I had somebody running the affiliate program, somebody running pay per click and I was leading SEO. And so our advertisers wanted all of that knowledge applied to their websites and programs. So we ended up starting a separate company called Seven Dead Pets. Seven Dead Pets was named that because it ran on seven servers in one cluster, and each server was named after somebody’s pet that they had when they were a child. Seven Dead Pets. And it was a digital marketing agency for online gambling companies. And it only ran for a few years, because all those companies had people who would have learned a bunch of stuff on their own, and they were like, we’ll cut up the middle man and do it ourselves.

That was it. That’s the growth of the industry. But it was interesting to understand how to run an agency and how you had to start your work and how you didn’t necessarily do a full hour of work, but the client was billed for the full hour because your staff were actually working with two clients in the same hour doing parallel work for them.

So it was actually an hour and 15 minutes of their time to get it all done. But you’ve got two clients done. And each client was billed an hour of time. And so it’s very profitable from that side of things. Once your clients know how to do it themselves, they don’t need you anymore. And so since then, we’ve seen this kind of roller coaster, up and down of companies going in house, companies actually buying or renting talent, going with agencies to consultancies and so on.

It was very interesting to see that at the beginning, and watch what was going on. At the time, I think Bruce Clay was just getting started and I had no idea who he was, like, I’d never seen or heard his name. And then a couple of years later, I meet Bruce and we’ve known each other ever since.

So it was the beginning of a lot. For sure. And my time at Sports Direct was pure learning. Every single thing, every idea we had, somebody would have an idea in the middle of the night, the next morning we’d have a meeting, we’d talk about it, we’d go. It was the very definition of scrappy startup and that mentality.

You didn’t leave a meeting without a list of to-do items. Like nobody was hiding. Everybody had a long list of things they were working on. They showed up, they grabbed a coffee, they got to working on something. They cracked some jokes. They kept going at the end of the day, three or four things, checked off the to do list and moving on.

And, it was very vibrant. I have to say it was incredible.

Shelley Walsh: So was it in 2007, you went to Microsoft.

Duane Forrester: Yes. That was, that was a surprise. I had just come back from a vacation in Europe and I had an email sitting in my inbox saying, this guy is a recruiter from Microsoft and he wanted to talk.

And I thought it was spam. And so I ignored it. A couple of days later I get another one and I replied back and I’m like, yeah, I’m not sure that you’re actually a recruiter from Microsoft. So if you’re real, here’s my phone number, give me a call. And I am expecting, fully expecting this to just be some spam, crap, whatever.

I’m in my car, in the parking lot at a new building for Sports Direct, getting ready to walk into the building, my phone rings. And it’s this guy and he says, hey Duane, it’s Jubal from Microsoft, how are you? And I’m like, huh, okay, that matches what you said in your email. We start talking. I asked him a bunch of questions.

Turns out he is legitimately a recruiter from Microsoft. And they wanted somebody to come and work with their SEO program for MSN. And they came across the book that I had just written and they wanted to talk to me. So we set up the phone calls, we did all of that. And then I ended up taking like a long weekend and they flew me out to Seattle. Did a day of intensive interviews. I remember at the end of that day, I called my wife and said, if every day here is like this, I don’t know if I want to work for this company. Because this is insane. And it turns out not every day was like that a lot of them are closed, but that was a bit insane because it was, I had seven interviews in eight hours with seven different people.

In between though, there were 15 minute blocks where I was meeting other people who were not interviewees, but we’re connected with the team. So we inevitably ended up working with whatever candidate they hired. And at the end of the day, I ended up with a guy who was referred to as the as Ad manager and his job as the appropriate manager was to make the decision to hire me or not hire me.

And I didn’t know that’s how the process went. I just thought this was yet another random interview. When I sat down and started talking with the guy, he was very not interested. He had no knowledge of space. He didn’t know anything about what the work was. And I was like, this is weird.

And he said, look, because I’m just going to level with you. He goes, I’m not the As Ad manager. The As Ad manager is traveling right now. He wasn’t able to make this. So he gave me all these notes and he wants me to go through everybody else’s notes and look, everybody else has signed off and so we should hire you.

So he goes, screw it because I’m saying we should hire you too. I like you. So we’re done. What do you want to talk about? And I was completely stunned because this guy completely buried the lead. He’s recommending that the company hires me, and that’s not the important part of this conversation in his mind.

The important part of this conversation in his mind is getting to know me, even though he’s got nothing to do with the work I’m doing. And, so it was very, a record scratch moment. The next day, I was playing tourist, and I was up on the Space Needle in Seattle, and I got a call from the recruiter.

And he said congratulations, we obviously know we’re going to move forward with this. They made their offer and it’s been a roller coaster ever since. And it’s been extraordinary since that one. I remember standing on the space needle, looking around. Basically I’d heard everything in the offer, done some negotiating.

He was going to go away. I talked to the hiring manager. I was going to go and talk with my wife and we were gonna come back, in a couple of days, make some decisions. And, I was staring out across Puget Sound, looking around the Seattle area, thinking this could be my future. And I just shrugged because I didn’t know, we weren’t done. Nothing was signed. And sure enough, within two weeks, everything was signed and it was up and running. And the crazy part, I got hired. I was hired through the Canadian arm of Microsoft because it was coming on the holidays in Canada for like the end of the year. Everybody in Canada had basically booked the last week or the last two weeks of December off, which meant all of my paperwork went in and sat, and they didn’t tell anyone in the US.

So the team that I was working with in the U.S. thought things were moving forward. I knew nothing was moving forward. We all went away for Christmas break, basically, and on January 3rd or 4th, a delivery guy shows up with this big box. I open it up. It’s a computer. It’s a monitor. It’s all of this stuff from Microsoft Canada to get my home office set up, including passwords and logins and everything.

Just plug this into your internet and follow the cheat sheet and you’re off to the races. I called up my recruiter and I’m like, hey, do you have something to tell me? Because I’ve been waiting for two weeks to get the final signed notice that I’m an employee. And according to the paperwork in this computer box, I’ve been on payroll the last two weeks and he’s what? And I’m like, yeah. So I’ve just been sitting around the house, like watching TV over the holidays and it turns out I’ve been on payroll this whole time and he just sighed and he laughed and he goes, yeah, that’ll happen, and that was it. It was just like, welcome to Microsoft.

So it was entertaining. I’ll tell, I’ll say it that way.

Shelley Walsh: What were you working on at MSN?

Duane Forrester: So the first thing was, I was part of the SEO team there and, our focus, my specific focus, responsibility was SEO for the US and Americas. So if it was anything to do with MSN, any of the sub properties, that was on me.

Within about two years, it ballooned out dramatically. We had a team that was global. So we had people in APAC and MIA. The team was very distributed, but connected. And when other groups inside Microsoft found out about our team, they started requesting timers. So before long, we were consulting with Word and like the productivity group, and we were consulting with all of these different groups internally to help them up level.

We were obviously pawing around desperately trying to make connections at MSN search at the time, because you can imagine a group of SEOs inside the company and there’s a search engine there. We want to know these people, and that took a few months, but we made the right connections and we ended up with a whole bunch of internal training sessions where the lead people on the algorithms would come in and teach us how they worked and explain to us how they worked.

And of course we were all sitting there and we’re like, you know we’re SEOs right? We don’t wanna break the spell basically. We were like, if you’re going to share we’re here to learn, but I don’t want to remind you, like what I do for a living. And, at the end of it, we all laughed and I don’t remember who it was, but we asked one of the guys, you know we’re SEOs right? And they said, yes, we understand that. And maybe this will help you help our properties in search and Google. Now that you understand these things, because a lot of what we do, Google does the same thing or a version of it. So that’s important. And I’m like, are you worried about us gaming our own search engine?

And they said nope. There’s not enough traffic there for us to be worried about that. And, if you did it, it would be so obvious that somebody would probably lose a job. So we think that this is self policing. Like you’re basically on the same employment contract we all are. So be smart about it. We all laughed about it and it was just never an issue.

Not long after that, I ended up taking a role. I was unofficially representing the search engine for Microsoft because I was speaking at conferences all the time. So I was the guy who everybody came to for questions about that. I was generally more forthcoming than the folks from Google.

So people wanted to have the conversation with me because they couldn’t get an answer from them. But maybe if you get a sort of answer that would be applicable from us. And I was happy to engage them. And the company, Microsoft, was happy to have me out there engaging, supporting people. It wasn’t the same way at Google.

It was a very different approach from their stuff. So I took over officially. The main reason I was there was to build and launch Bing webmaster tools Along the way, I partnered up with the team that launched schema.org. I spent time with the spam team.

I spent time with the maps team, with all the different teams, getting to know them and understand what they’re working on and why things matter. It really crafted an understanding that the world or the game of search, if you will, or SEO is extremely nuanced on the search engine side.

There are no big things. Like the possibility of you hitting a target that tips you over to be ranking number one is almost impossible. Non-existent. The possibility of you approving enough small things that tips the balance in your favor and you’re seen as being the best, that’s quite a bit more possible, but it also takes a lot of work on the website side.

And, so it opened up my eyes to this, it’s cumulative. It’s not iterative and you are, your results today are as a result, all of the work you put in prior to this. That could be applicable to a brand new website that shows up in rank swap. Because if you can just get it right out of the box now and not have to struggle as much.

Or you can struggle a bunch and not get quite right, and then you’re digging out of a hole. So all of that time inside the search engine was extraordinary. Being able to actually learn from people that were in it. I remember I had a meeting with a search engineer and I was asking them to build tools. This is before I took over Bing Webmaster tools and they said, what tools do you think SEO wants? And I was like, we wanna link reports.

We wanna know all the links that are pointed at our website. Ideally, you’d break it out on a URL by URL level for us. So you crawl the URLs, know what we have for URLs. So you would show me that in one file and then next to that, you would allow me to see all of the inbound links to that.

And then we would love to be able to tell you that we don’t endorse some of these links because some of them are going to be spam. We never ask for them, they’re garbage and we want to protect ourselves. And he leans over the table and he looks at it and he goes, do links actually matter? And I’m like looking at this guy and I’m like, now I don’t know if he’s trying to mess with my head. But he’s sincere, like it’s a genuine shock to him that links matter that much, and I’m just like, what the heck?

And that was my first interaction or introduction to compartmentalization and how the search engines work. This is what you work on, that’s all you work on, you don’t know the other pieces. And, that was like a shining graphic example of that moment. Now, that guy ended up going on, and he built what is the modern foundation of search in Netflix.

Very clearly, he’s a smart individual, right? If he knew that links mattered, then he would have known that links mattered, right? It was amazing. And I, still to this day, I keep in touch with him. And every now and then I’ll ask him, I’ll be like, did you really not know that links mattered?

And he maintains, with a straight face every single time, he had no idea. It was a shock to him that anybody would think links were that important. And, he could not understand why. There’s very good reasons why, because they matter. So it’s always been fun and entertaining in this industry.

There’s always something, whether it’s scratching your head, going, that doesn’t make sense or just outright hilarious. There’s always something going on in our industry.

Shelley Walsh: I’ve got to ask you this, to be able to have that insight into how the search engines work, how enlightening was that?

What they told you and what you learned, how different was it to what you perhaps perceived it might’ve been, how much new stuff did you learn? Were some things a shock?

Duane Forrester: So the shock for me was learning that we, as SEOs, as practitioners of this, we’re pretty much on track, right? If the search engine and the algorithm was the true line going north, we were maybe a quarter to a half a degree off the line.

As an industry of practitioners, we were really close. And, it was eye opening. There’s a tool inside Bing Webmaster tools that would actually do an SEO audit of your URL.

Because we can’t launch these tools without crushing Google in this area. So this is what we’re going to build. So we built the tool. We had to do those. We had to get the core search team to sign off on the methodology, on the logic we were using. Why this signal, why that signal. Here are the rules, here’s the best practice and here’s how close you are to pass – fail sort of thing.

And we actually ended up putting in, I think it was somewhere around 111, like if-this, then-that type of statements. Like here’s a rule, you should follow this, and that, that.

We handed that all over to the team and the team took a week and they came back to us and they said, here are the 12 things that matter, build your tool with these. And that was it.

And I was done. And so I went through the building, walked down the hall, knocked on the person’s door, and I said, okay. Raise your left hand if what you’re doing is trying to throw us off the scent, you want to be helpful, but we’re too close and you want to limit that. Raise your right hand, if what you’re telling me is really what we need to focus on.

And he immediately raises his right hand, right? He goes, yeah, you guys are overthinking it. He goes, just concentrate on this. And the craziest part of that, we had no way to know this, but if you were to look at that today, or that then and where we are today, there’s almost a straight line through things like the core web vitals testing around UX and the behavior of pages and page speed and the total UX, and then the usefulness side of things, the helpful content update that Google has done. There’s an almost straight line here between what I was told to build a tool around and where we’re at now.

And, so it’s easy for me to look back on it and say, wow, we were really close, And as an industry, we’re like, we’re much closer than we think we are. I think the industry gets it. Because for me at that time, what it was like is, it was like I was, wearing a pair of goggles and then we’re fogged up.

I could navigate, I could see things, I could make do. Anything I needed to accomplish, I could accomplish. But I walked out of that timeframe and the goggles were gone. It was crystal clear. Everything was perfectly in focus and I understood it. It’s also why I don’t give a crap about building links. Never have. That’s been validated for me. It’s not something I need to worry about. I’ve only ever concerned about the user experience in all of its factions. From page speed to the quality of the answer for a question. At one point there was a phrase that was, Query deserves freshness.

So if I’m asking about a train accident that happened in my community earlier today, obviously you’re not going to talk to me about stuff from last year. You’d talk to me about stuff from today. But there’s also a concept of the complexity of the question, the complexity of the answer should match it.

So if I ask you how to tie a tie, you and I both know it’s a multi step process. Your answer should not be put a knot in it. That is factually true. That does not actually answer the question, how to tie a tie. When you look at all these things, you realize, yeah, this is a multi layered onion, but it’s not 10 layers. It’s like a thousand. And so everything became instantly for me became a game of incremental, which then immediately took me back to foundational, because if you haven’t got The baseline things taken care of. You’re never going to move forward. it’s just, it’s simply not. So, it’s been, it’s been very, that was very eye opening for me.

And I think along the way, a lot of people came to similar conclusions, like not having had the experience I had, they still ended up in the same place. And part of that is me sharing, part of that is other people sharing, part of that is experimentation that people have done to validate things. Part of it is Google opening up and being more open to sharing information.

It’s been good. It’s been great having Fabrisa there from Bing answering questions directly to people. We have progressed in a major way.

Shelley Walsh: Do you think that SEO is over complicated, SEO?

Duane Forrester: yeah. In a major way, but that’s not to suggest it’s not complicated, right?

Like, we have to do the technical stuff, but I watch the stuff that happens. John Mueller does the videos where he answers questions from people and I have to stop myself from putting my fist through my computer monitor because I’m like, why are we still asking that question? Asked and answered a decade ago, things don’t revert, they move forward.

The totality of the knowledge that Google pulls from is cumulative, not iterative, so it knows all of that and the latest. So how would you be thinking Google gives a crap how many characters you have in a meta description tag? It just doesn’t matter. What matters is does that tag provide enough utility for Google to use so that a consumer of the content will find it valuable?

Or, did you write a meta description tag that sounds like a sales pitch? Because that’s not useful for a consumer when they’re researching how to do something, you pitching them your solution to it, not a match. We do overcomplicate it and we overthink it. I talk to people every day and I tell them, focus on your customers and they’re like, Oh, we do,we’re obsessive about it. And I’m like, and you’re still failing? We don’t understand that you’re not focused on your customers. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s very straightforward. If you build the best experience for your customer related to your product or service, and nobody else is better for customers on this topic than you, you will rank better.

Because that is the exact thing that Google is looking for. And the fact that you’re not ranking better, and that somebody is outranking you, that’s a very clear indication you have work to do. So whatever you thought you did, you patted yourself on the back for and you accomplished? Not enough. And that’s a hard thing for somebody’s ego to understand and assimilate.

I put my work into it. I did this all year, I promised my boss I would do it. I got it done. I got a bonus, I got a raise, I got a promotion, I got all these other things that are validations and indications of doing the right thing and Google shrugs. Because they’re operating in a different timescale, a different perspective than we are.

I do a presentation this day where I talk about a survey that I did back in September where I asked basically the industry, like, how many hours a week do you actually put toward doing SEO work? And the average across in-house teams, which average two and a half people, is 88 hours a week. So you have two people working full time on SEO and a resource that is half a resource applied to it that is doing no work, or however you divide it up, I don’t know.

But when you contrast that with the experience that’s being built by Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, TikTok, Microsoft, they’re putting tens of thousands of hours a week into building the experiences that consumers are interacting with. Those experiences are changing consumer behavior and expectations. And you’re putting 80 hours a week into SEO.

We’re not just over complicating, but we are looking in the wrong direction. Like SEO doesn’t need to be as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be. A lot of the nuance and the difference that you’re asking about is so subliminal and it’s so small that even if you score a hundred on that, you’re not going to see a shift in ranking or traffic.

Meanwhile, the whole concept of what it needs to rank is changing dramatically with SGE, Gemini, ChatGBT, and everything else. What are you doing to make yourself useful in those environments? Because you may end up cracking the nut in SEO only to find out that people just aren’t searching that way anymore.

Because guess what? The tech companies change behavior and it’s right in front of us. It’s a big deal right now.

Shelley Walsh: You think actually SEO is now more about classic marketing than anything else?

Duane Forrester: I think that. So we have a lot of people who are technical SEOs who do not understand a lot of the marketing but claim to understand it.

They feel like technical SEO is the harder discipline so they know more about that and therefore the other one’s easier and I know enough about that and I don’t think that’s the case at all. Technical SEO and traditional marketing, one is more about coding and, user interface, usability, conversion, optimization, content, that kind of stuff. The other is psychology, and human psychology. and, I’m sorry, but there’s no crossover between these in our educational systems. You need to be learned, self taught in one.

I talked about this in one of my career tracks where I talked about the T shaped marketer, where you should have a deep discipline in one area, but then have other disciplines that you know of. You can’t claim to be a marketer because you know SEO. Marketing is a distinct discipline and you have to dig in on it.

You have to discreetly learn and as it stands, I think a lot of SEO needs to do more work in learning that side of it. We also have a bit of a problem with that. People get put into a box where, oh, you’re an SEO and that’s all. And nobody wants to talk to them about anything that’s not SEO. And so what happens is you develop marketing programs, marketing campaigns, and then afterwards, content is already created, you’re putting it up on a website. You go talk to an SEO and say, can you optimize this? Like it’s the thing you do afterwards. That is a classic failure point. It will cripple programs every single time. Because the SEO, the first thing they’re going to say is, you shouldn’t have me here doing keyword research when you started with content, because I’m telling you a lot of this is misaligned.

And then the content people get upset, and then the program manager’s upset because now the timeline is in jeopardy, and now the IT department is upset because they have so much more work to do, and there are baseline things that they were told to fix that they never fixed, but now they have to fix, it’s all of that.

And I think one of the biggest complications isn’t that SEOs over complicate things. That’s more of an individual thing. as a group, we tend to. But, it’s that companies complicate the path forward themselves. They keep groups silent. They don’t encourage them to work together. They think of SEO as a strict tactic.

So something you apply afterwards. You build the car and then you paint the car. And the fact of the matter is SEO needs to be there for all of those things. It’s not an ego thing. I’m not saying that because I’m an SEO and I want to be at every table that we’re meeting. SEOs need to be there because things you’re going to do will impact ranking and they have input on that.

So you should have them there, whether it’s one SEO sitting in all the meetings or all of your staff at a baseline level of knowledge around SEO does not matter, the act of optimization starts way earlier than companies realize and complicates everything afterwards, If you build a house, the foundation’s not good, you will always have problems with the home.

The only way to fix it, tear the home down, fix the foundation, build a new home. That’s really expensive. Versus if you just thought to build the foundation correctly in the first place, you will never have problems with the foundation. It’s straightforward.

Shelley Walsh: It seems that the keyword here is definitely foundational and it’s something I’ve been thinking myself because things are moving so rapidly at the moment with AI that for me when things are in such flux really we should be going back to the basics and holding on to the basics, while everything else is changing that’s the one thing that you can hold on to.

Duane Forrester: It’s an anchor. It is a safe haven. Along the way, what will happen is that people shouldn’t be worried about being tied to history. bBecause a lot of people think about that. They’re like, yeah, but I’m not moving forward because that’s all I’m talking about. It’s all I’m doing. There’s so much more out there. No, you hold on to the basics. Don’t worry. The word, the industry is going to suck you forward into whatever’s new. But you will take the basics with you and you will apply it in your new area.

We’re already seeing that application across generative AI for a year and a little bit into gen AI and SEO is a figure of a lot of stuff. They’ve figured out a lot of good approaches, a lot of good ideas. We actually know what to do now, how to use tools, how not to use tools, what to be concerned about, new opportunities, all of the foundations of what we’re doing around entity management, data management, UX, conversion optimization, every bit of that needs to be accounted for. New interface? Doesn’t matter, still got to figure that stuff out.

Shelley Walsh: Duane, we’ve obviously been talking for quite a while and there are a lot of things that I didn’t get to ask you about that I really wanted to, but I know obviously you have a time issue so I think at this point I’m just going to have to say to you the final question I can throw at you is, what do you really miss about the early days?

Duane Forrester: So I think the thing I miss about the early days is, we had a lot of kind of wide eyed learning going on where everything was fresh. Everybody was, hey, this is surprising to do, and we shared an awful lot. It was like every morning you’d get up, go into the forum. It was like watching reality TV. You were just addicted to it.

What did this person say? What was this idea? I value their opinion. This person’s a dumbass, like all of that. And we’ve grown through all that, right? We have our own versions of it today, but it’s much more fireless.

When you pop onto Twitter and find out that there are 643 new tweets from your network. Do you really have the time to go through all of those, see what’s in there and it’s harder. So I missed that. I miss the newness of all the topics as well.

You would go and sit down and every session you went in, you were worried about missing something in another session because everything was new. We wanted it all. And, it’s, for me and for a lot of people today, that’s not, it’s, inches, not miles. And so it’s nuanced and you just get it in different ways.

like I learned things now by all my conversations with friends at conferences and it’s because we built the relationships all those years ago.

Shelley Walsh: Yeah. It’s just, it is a wonderful industry and I love it so much. I’ve made some incredible friends and it is my life. And I think for a lot of SEOs, I get the same message. I think it is. It’s not really just a job, is it really? It’s a lifestyle completely. The conferences, they’re your friends. It’s not networking. It is seeing your friends.

Duane Forrester: Every year for the holidays, I have a zoom meeting and I’m on a zoom meeting with a bunch of people I know from the industry.

We’re not talking about industry crap. We’re not talking about it. We’re talking about family and holidays and traditions and making fun of each other and all of that because we are all friends and to certain degrees family.

Shelley Walsh: Yeah, family.

Duane Forrester: I’m not aware that’s in any other industry.

Shelley Walsh: On that heartwarming note of family, I’m going to wrap up there cause I know you’ve got to go.

I could talk to you for at least another hour or two, Duane, cause there’s so many more questions I’ve got. So I might have to talk to you again.

Duane Forrester: We’ll do it again. No problem Shelley.

Shelley Walsh: will say thank you very much for being my SEO pioneer and it’s been wonderful to talk to you, Duane. Thank you.

Duane Forrester: Thank you.