Brent D. Payne

Dad/Husband/Oregonian/Chicagoan & SEO Expert / SEO Consultant of 20+ Years Owns SEO Consulting Firm—Loud Interactive.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

Yesterday’s breakfast turned into something else rather quickly when Mr. Roboto by Styx came on over the HomePods.

Read the post about where my mind went and why the song hit me so hard.

https://t.co/JctNwD8Eyo

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@randfish @serp_api I don’t often verbally yell out, “Yes!! Exactly.” When I read a post. But I did here.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@lilyraynyc As they should

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@glenngabe Easy fix is to just require that the person take a selfie video with some sort of rotation around themselves or the broken item. It will at least stave off the ability to fake it for a few years or quarters.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@rustybrick More like 20 years, but okay.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@djpaisley great what are the next steps? how can I help?

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

Bruce Clay is dead at 78.

I wrote that headline because that's the way we used to write headlines for dead people. It's how you win the traffic for it. It's a tribute to the mentor I'll miss.

Also, who can fix this? He deserves a Wiki page!

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@steveplunkett @rustybrick @DuaneForrester agreed, but @DuaneForrester also isn't dead. so we have some time to get that done. Bruce is dead. We should exalt him as solidly as possible in his legacy within the SEO industry.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@rustybrick @steveplunkett @bill_slawski @grok get this man a wikipedia page! layout all the steps needed and put it in an .html file with a checklist of the items needed to get it done. make an outline of the sections that should be on the page. make this airtight.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@rustybrick @steveplunkett @bill_slawski I am already getting negative DMs about this idea. I find that ridiculous. Bruce deserves to be remembered for the lasting legacy he created on the industry. He is a legend in the space and he deserves to leave his mark as such. Anything less is people applying presentism.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@djpaisley I don't know or have a wiki editor contact. It's a major hole in my skillset. If someone will fill that gap. I will personally take on the task of getting the content together and the sourcing. With our AI chops, it won't be hard to get done. But I need an editor to let it in.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

@lilyraynyc When I was Tribune Company's SEO Director from 2008-2011, we grew SEO to be 40% of Tribune's traffic. I'd bet it is in the single digits now.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

8 people. Fortune 500 clients. https://t.co/l0wBytZxc3 handles what used to take 40 writers. The crux: when your ops are tight and your tools are sharp, headcount stops being the forcing function.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

https://t.co/l0wBytZxc3: top 10 ranking in 18 days, $30/piece. Human-written version: $300, 6 weeks, same result. Receipts are in Search Console. The crux — quality AI content doesn't need a bigger budget. It needs a better brief.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

frankly, this week GSC showed a 27% drop in crawl budget after we added 15 new thin pages. the crux: Google reallocated budget away from our core product pages, causing a 0.9M impression loss. receipts: Search Console Crawl Stats 2024‑05‑06. #TechnicalSEO

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

frankly, Googlebot is devouring low‑value pagination while our revenue pages get skimmed. the crux: a 2 % crawl budget shift boosted conversions by 12 % last month. receipts: Search Console crawl stats + conversion data. #TechnicalSEO

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

Fixed a stray canonical on a product page that was pointing to the homepage. The crux: it ate ~13% of monthly impressions for 4 months. Receipts: Search Console showed a 1.2 M impression jump after the fix. Absolutely wild how one tag can kill traffic.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

Fixed a stray canonical on a product page that was pointing to the homepage. The crux: it ate ~15% of monthly impressions for 3 months. Receipts: Search Console showed a 1.3M impression jump after the fix. Absolutely wild how a single tag can kill traffic.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

frankly #aislop is a quality problem, not an AI problem. The agencies spitting out scaled garbage with AI now were shipping offshore content in 2015. The tool changed. The laziness didn’t. receipts: content farms vs AI outputs.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

Fixed a stray canonical on our blog that was pointing to the homepage. The crux: it ate 12% of monthly impressions for three months. Frankly, a single tag can be a forcing function for traffic loss. Receipts: Search Console showed a 1.4M drop recovered after fix.

[Brent D. Payne @BrentDPayne]

Frankly, the crux is receipts vs theory. Real SEO