Matt: Jono Alderson, welcome to the WP minute.
Jono: Thank you very much for having me.
What a treat.
Matt: What a treat indeed.
What a week.
What a view.
Jono: yeah, it's a nice, nice distraction.
Matt: have this conversation.
Yeah, I mean, I've seen you in the space.
Of course.
I've seen you in post that I've seen you on Twitter Largely about like
WordPress and SEO and stuff You had brought up one of the more critical
milestones that have happened in the last six or so months Which was the?
Dot com versus dot org.
com doing this whole plugin mirroring thing, which we
can probably get into today.
That was the, the Genesis, uh, of us, of me reaching out to you
saying, Hey, you want to, want to chat about this on the show?
You want to talk about it?
Uh, there's some other stuff that's happened since.
Jono: It's related, I guess, right?
It's the same, same kind of root topic behind all of
Matt: Yeah, same root topic behind it.
And we'll talk about that as well.
First and foremost, you're an independent technical SEO consultant.
That's the Twitter bio.
The website is JonoAlderson.
com if you want all things SEO consulting from Jono.
But what else do you do in SEO?
How do you frame that in today's world of SEO?
Um, if somebody's like, I want to hire this guy, but what does it mean?
Jono: That's a big question, isn't it?
Because yeah, SEO continues to morph and change.
Um, I think it's, in some ways it's, it's far harder to characterize what that is
now, but in some ways it's far easier.
It's just website quality.
Um, this is what it's always been.
Google, like, users want good websites where good is amorphous and big and
complex, and Google wants to reward that.
So, it's everything.
It's user experience, it's technical integrity, it's performance, it's
security, it's accessibility, it's a hundred other areas.
Um, and I I'm deeply into many of those areas and the bits I'm not, I know
enough to connect the right people and understand what good looks like.
So it's working out, where are you today?
Turns out you're probably at six out of 10.
How, where, where does it make sense to aim for?
Because 10 is usually not feasible, but if you can get up to eight out of 10,
are you going to double your traffic?
Are you going to please your users?
Are you going to increase revenue?
So yeah, I work with businesses to go, how do we build a roadmap to do that?
Largely focusing on the kind of more technical side.
Um, Partly because WordPress is awesome, and that's the bit I enjoy,
but mostly, that's the bit where people have the most room to improve.
Most people really often haven't kind of gone down and really looked at their
website and said, is this inherently good?
Um, so yeah making it faster making it better tying up all the things
that's the stuff I really enjoy
Matt: I noticed you didn't say backlinks, uh, in, in that.
So, so help me as somebody I've steered clear of SEO largely
Jono: yeah good well done well done
Matt: largely because I've just been frustrated by it.
And that was out on the way here.
I was, I was listening to another podcast about creativity and
storytelling and all this stuff.
And, uh, you know, he brought up, you know, And actually,
this is a friend of mine.
I've known him fairly well.
Um, and he, and he talked about the approach of content creators, not
marketers, but just folks who are like creating content, kind of look out of it.
Like look at it like this conveyor belt.
Like I got to do this thing.
I got to drop it in.
Here comes the next one.
I get to do the next post, the next video.
I've always stayed away from that.
Even though I have a fairly high cadence of content creation, I've
always been like this content.
Like I like the content.
I care about this post or this video.
So maybe it doesn't come out every week.
Maybe it takes me a couple of weeks to make a podcast episode
or a video or blog posts.
But all the technical SEO strategies I read about is volume,
you know, consistency, keep it going, keep it going out there.
And sometimes I feel like, man, I'm on this hamster wheel.
Don't you want me to make good content?
So, so break it down for us.
Like, are we, am I doing it wrong?
Just for
Jono: No, no,
Matt: am I doing it
Jono: absolutely right Everyone else is doing it wrong.
Um, no, you've got exactly the right attitude.
Um, so there's two things I guess one is um, Content and links,
they're interrelated, right?
So, links are an important part of how Google determines whether a site is
good or not, and whether it should rank.
Links are essentially endorsements.
So, of course, we now have an entire SEO industry with a kind of dirty
underbelly, which goes, you can buy links for money, or you can spend
money with an agency who will go and produce content, or hassle some
journalists in order to get you links.
Or you can go like sponsor things.
So there's various degrees of, you can turn money into links, which Google
attempts to shut down and ignore.
And they are getting better at that.
And it's getting harder.
So as a result, we now have this content marketing thing, right?
Where everybody says, go and have a blog and write three things
a day, and pick a keyword and write 500 words with structure.
Like, what is the thing?
How do I do the thing?
Where do I get the thing?
And the whole internet's full of this garbage.
And for a while it worked to a degree because Google needed
that content to disambiguate.
What are people searching for?
What are the kinds of things these websites have expertise on?
What problems do they solve?
Um, and that for a long time was the industry.
And now I think we're almost coming out of that with the rise of AI
powered results and generative search.
Google doesn't need that anymore.
Um, like there are so many of these spaces where we're just producing
content about keywords that don't exist.
Those problems were already solved.
So if you're, I don't know, you've got a company selling insurance or
cupcakes, what are you possibly going to write that's going to add new value
that Google doesn't already understand that's contributing to the corpus
of human knowledge, like you're just rehashing information about, uh, eight
ways to avoid your plants freezing at Christmas, or my vegan cupcakes are better
than your vegan, none of it's useful.
Um, and the thing that's really changed, which I think is great in the last year
or so is Google has just got really, really good at ignoring all that stuff.
But there are so, but all the information out there still says go and write things.
So, so many brands think the good SEO looks like write three blog posts.
So, we pick a keyword, tick the boxes in Yoast, et cetera.
And some of that is foundational.
Like you have to have content that talks about what you do and you have
to have content that tells stories to your users, engages them, but you
definitely don't need articles at scale.
So, yeah, I think the velocity and the cadence isn't important.
I think doing what you're doing, which is what I'm doing.
Write stuff that you're passionate about, that you believe in, that is
interesting, that is good, that is useful, that is relevant at the cadence
that makes sense to do that, like do one a year, if that's what it takes
to write something excellent, but yeah, the idea that we all need to be
churning out words on pages is awful.
Matt: Is that, is the essence of it brand building or, okay, so it's like a brand
building because the way that I've seen everything is like, I've never, I grew up
in a family that owned car dealerships, largely controlled by General Motors.
And it was like, if you ever want to like frame the corporate man talking down to
the little people, it's General Motors and a small family car dealership, right?
Like, you will do this and you will accept it and you will take
these cars that nobody wants to buy and you will try to sell them.
So, ingrained in me is to never trust the man, right?
Because I grew up in that setting.
So I've always looked, and this is probably foolish to some degree, but
I, I, again, I, I mean, I, I've thought about SEO, but I've never invested in it.
I never got into PPC or, or buying ads and all this stuff, largely because
maybe I didn't have a product that, that really needed that leverage.
Uh, and I've always just looked at the, the algorithms to be something
that isn't ever going to help me.
Like it might help me in the short term, like a little boost kind of thing, but
I've always said, I'm going to make my content and just push it out to people
and tell people I've got this content.
Um, are the days of.
Of organic search data, or excuse me, organic search results going down
because of, of AI and what's happening.
In other words, should people be thinking about pushing their brand out more
and getting their content out more?
Like, nobody gonna help you except for yourself.
How do you frame that, if, if at all?
Jono: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I think the days of build it and they will come if you put the
right keyword in it enough times are definitely on the way out.
And we definitely see trends where the rise of AI powered results and also
things like chat GPT usage and perplexity and stuff is changing how people search
is changing what the results look like.
And it's definitely reducing the propensity of people to see
your website in a list of other websites and click that one.
Um, like that's not really what that ecosystem looks like anymore.
And the answer to that, who knows, but part of the answer to that is probably
yeah, build a reputable brand that people will recognize and trust and already
have influenced them with content of the stream and that higher in their journeys.
So that when they ask perplexity, what's the best shampoo or, um,
finally the best black Friday deals for a new PC monitor, whatever it is.
When it says, okay, here are three really good ones, they recognize your
brand and your messaging because six months ago they read a really interesting
article that you wrote or, um, those kinds of influences and touch points
and there's brand building activities.
Um, so that you've got that reputation and recall and preference over time.
Cause yeah, it's not going to be the case of, I wrote the best article.
I ranked first in this list of links.
People are going to click my thing because the whole landscape is changing.
It's definitely going to be more about reputation.
Matt: Let's talk a little bit more about WordPress.
We're going to transition into talking about the whole.
org versus.
com thing, and maybe some of this other explosive news from the last couple of
weeks, uh, post WordCamp US, keeping it in the frame of reference of WordPress.
I consider my brand a flea on an elephant's ass is how I like to look at
my brand in the overall WordPress space.
Um, one of the things I've always found interesting with, uh, uh, chat
GPT or, Or, uh, Claude, which are two that I, I use fairly often is this, um,
uh, being trained on SEO results, the typical blog posts, the top, whatever.
Uh, in other words, if I go to either of these two, uh, chatbots, uh, and
I type in, give me the best list of WordPress podcasts, it still recommends,
uh, Matt report, which is a podcast I haven't done in about four years
as one of the top podcast episodes.
And it has, it doesn't reference the WP minute at all, largely because nobody has
written a top WordPress podcast, a blog post in literally five, six years when
WordPress podcasts had their heydays.
So how is this stuff getting updated for like these little niche markets,
or is it just so little volume that.
It suffers from the same things that regular SEO suffered from.
Jono: Yeah.
And even worse, right?
Like WordPress is in a weird place.
We don't have a marketing function anymore.
There's a lot of contributors have been in left.
There's a lot of stuff has dried up and consolidated it.
So you're right.
There's not a lot of new content being produced.
WordPress.
org, which we'll come on to in a minute, I'm sure, is not great
when it comes to SEO politely.
So we're not fighting our own battles.
We're not creating content.
We're not telling our own stories.
And meanwhile, The Wix's and the Shopify is obviously very, very noisy.
So yeah, when you, when you were creating these systems for advice
and information in this context, what are they drawing from?
It is going to be stuff from 2012 because there's not a lot else out there.
And even if there were, the volume and reach of that is going to
be lower than everyone else's.
So yeah, I think this is going to be a real problem.
We are going to be very underrepresented in those kinds of results
collectively and as a platform.
Um, if only we had some kind of marketing team who could be thinking about that.
Matt: One last question on the AI, just because I'm curious.
Is this all built off of the back of stolen content?
Like, do you believe it to be like that bad?
Jono: hard a question, right?
Isn't it?
Um, I'm privileged enough to come from a position where my livelihood isn't
threatened by this, and I find it a very useful tool that accelerates me.
So I'm very lucky to be able to say, uh, academically, no, I don't think so.
I think, um, there are only so many ways that you can recombine factual
statements and words and a significant proportion of the use cases are,
oh, or pixels for images, right?
It's just soup, and then you unsoup it.
But yeah, it's trained on a corpus of information that it wasn't granted
permission to to utilize and Even if it's not theft, there ought to
have been a consent at some point.
Um, even now we still don't really have a good model for that, that we're starting
to see some options, but it's too late.
I think, uh, even if, even if it was theft, it's too late.
The genie genius out the bottle.
Even if open AI never becomes profitable and they fail,
something else will fill the space.
All the information is out there.
It's on common call.
It's been produced in a million places.
This is now the model.
And even if we don't like it, I think we're stuck with it.
So yeah, it's pretty unpleasant.
Matt: And Google can't sue them because they stole it from us.
So, so really it's us, you know, individuals who have been pumping
content, uh, into the web and, and Google just enhancing that searchability.
And then these chatbots coming in and go, well, let's just leverage search
and find, you know, take from this index they've already stolen from the people.
Uh, so it's just a crazy, uh, crazy world at this
Jono: There was a, there was a nice new feature from Cloudflare, I think announced
last week or so, where they, they're describing this as a third category thing.
So it said, we've always had bad bots and good bots, like
scrapers and search engines.
And now this is a third category, where they're learning and consuming, and
they're rolling out tools to monitor it, and eventually hope to kind of do
a cost per access monetization model.
Whether or not that's meaningful, I don't know, but I thought it was interesting.
Matt: You mentioned WordPress marketing.
It's obviously a hot topic, has been a hot topic for many years.
We saw that team, the make team, uh, marketing team sort of shuttered
and, and, and closed out, uh, I forget roughly six, eight months ago.
Um, and it was sort of put in place was the, uh, media core team, which Josefa,
um, and then led by Reyes Martinez from automatic, both of which have now left.
Automatic.
Or at least, uh, Josefa stepped down from the director role.
I haven't seen the automatic end on her LinkedIn profile
Jono: Indeed,
Matt: Uh, but I saw she stepped down from the director role.
Reyes has left automatic.
She reached out to me to let me know.
So I don't know what the what the, uh, life holds for the media core team.
All of this is to get to this, this, this issue with marketing WordPress.
I've always said, man, it's tough to do marketing from a volunteer
led team with no access, no data, no social media accounts, no budget,
no direct, uh, channel to a product.
Who is the product team?
How can we even do this in a volunteer led system?
Your thoughts on, on marketing WordPress.
Jono: that laundry list of things you just said were not allowed is
pretty much the problem, right?
And I think Giuseppe summed that quite well, summed that up quite well
in her, she published a thing saying essentially why we're not going to
have a marketing team and why the media call was the way forward.
And it essentially boils down to, you are all asking for the right things and
asking the right questions, but I either cannot or will not provide you with these
for logistical or political reasons.
You're like, then yeah, how do, how do you How do you market?
And all the stuff we were saying about the evolution of SEO just now into
branding and awareness and preference.
That's the whole of marketing, right?
Consumers are educated and informed.
They make their own decisions.
They want to evaluate, compare.
They want to be led.
They want to be told stories, et cetera.
And we don't have that.
Any of the infrastructure or processes or people or resources or systems to even
start to ask what that would look like.
And I think the hardest bit of that, of all that laundry
list is the product, right?
Like for better or worse, we have a roadmap to a degree.
Gutenberg's doing things.
People have varying opinions on whether that's the right direction
or not, but we are, we are at war.
With Wix and Squarespace and other platforms and Vercel
and all these other things.
And I'm not even sure we realize that we're at war and because we just say
we've got 43 percent of the web and we keep saying that until we're not.
And even if we are, those numbers are questionable anyway, right, depending
on how you want to calculate that.
And I, I see, certainly from an SEO perspective, There's still a huge influx
of people who want to build websites for the first time, or don't understand
what hosting is, or don't know how to do a thing, and they search for problems,
whether they do that in Google or TrapGPT or wherever, and we're nowhere.
And a WPBeginner and a whole bunch of Syed's networks are generally somewhere.
Um, but WordPress collectively, other than com, which yeah, is contentious.
WordPress.
org is very rarely represented and there's very rarely educational hearts and minds
onboarding kind of step on content because Wix is just paying their way in there.
Or competing organically.
So yeah, we, we're going to
Matt: From a technical perspective, though, is the simple answer, because
we've, the community, air quotes, has never invested in it for the
org side, technically speaking.
Like, we just never gave it a shot, is, is,
Jono: I've been fighting with org for what feels like a decade now.
Um, It's not the worst website.
Um, I think we've put out a lot of the technical fires.
There are still kind of existential crises there around how some of it
works and its legacy as a tech stack.
But the biggest problem is just there's no real kind of content strategy.
And if you ask simple questions like, um, if somebody's Googling,
uh, how to write, how to set up a blog, where should they land?
Because at the moment, best case scenario, it's probably some itty bitty forum
post that somebody wrote three years ago that gets a whole bunch of disput
and helpful answers that somebody shut down because they posted something
that didn't align with the WordPress.
org rules and so on, yadda, yadda.
Like, none of those, there's no strategy behind how should this work
and how should we guide people through.
And then, We've got so many moving parts that are disjointed.
So we've got the learn subdomain, which is doing some great work in educational
content, but nobody's really reconciled.
How does that relate to the, um, the developer site, which has similar topics?
We haven't really retired the codecs.
The forums are largely moderated in a way that just sprawls rather than
answering questions in a consolidated way.
All the tutorial stuff is over on dot com.
Yeah, it's working out how do we, How do we market to people and how
do we take them on journeys needs to happen before any of the kind
of big technical stuff happens.
Um, and there's no appetite and no resource to address any of those
kind of huge philosophical questions.
Matt: and it makes it difficult to you know, position, let's say the learn site.
Like if we go back to earlier in this conversation and talk about my strategy
of, I create content and I just try to go to the world and say, here's my
content and I try to get it in front of people by, you know, pushing it
out there and, and being that sort of outbound content marketer part of me.
Um, nobody really wants to do that for like the learn site or for.
org.
Especially in these moments of community strife, right?
When you just feel drained from doing this.
So, like, even getting the, like, even if you said, Hey, we're not going to have
an internal make team that works on this.
It's very hard to get even agencies and freelancers to want to prop up this
content too, because they're like, Oh God, we're just crossing this finish line of
delivering this website to this customer.
Now we got to, now you want me to like promote this content from within, like,
this is, this is very, very difficult.
Jono: Yeah.
And I think this is the biggest existential crisis we face collectively.
Uh, aside from the, the challenges of Matt's leadership and the challenges
of all of these things, I think the biggest problem we have Is that
everyone is burnt out and everyone is gone and we behave as if there's
an infinite pool of contributors just coming in the door to replace them.
But you see, as you've already mentioned, like two profoundly important
people who were very active and have gone, they've not been replaced.
They won't be replaced.
There's nobody else coming up through the ranks or entering the doors to
take their burden and their workload.
And to ask the difficult questions and to do the big thinking, there's
a lot of people who can be pointed at small tactical things ad hoc and
they'll come and go, but I think there's only about six people left.
Like in that, like you look at how inactive make WordPress is.
It's like, where is everyone?
It's a ghost town.
Um, and that's not getting it.
And that's part of the same marketing challenge in question.
It's a different flavor of it, but it's the same problem.
Um, yeah, I think that's the biggest impact and the biggest risk of all the
stuff that's happening at the moment.
That we all.
We are not bringing people in and we're not raising them up.
Matt: I have, uh, friends when we, when we, and I'm not, we're not going to talk
about it on this podcast, but when we talk politics, people just say, I want
to go back to cheaper gas, cheaper food.
And I say, guess what?
Everybody ain't going back.
We might go down a couple.
Yeah, we might go down a couple of dimes and nickels, but we're not
going back to what we enjoyed before.
It's not going to happen.
We're in a new paradigm now.
And I think that we're in this, this new, uh, you know, scenario in WordPress
where now we have to look at, this is just my opinion and obviously you
chime in with yours, but I look at the community now after this and the
dust hasn't even settled yet, by the way, because we're still, We don't
even know what's happening next.
Um, I was going to say we're still in court, but we're not even there yet.
Uh, so we have to figure out how are we going to repair the community and what's
it going to look like moving forward?
It's not going to be like it was before.
WordCamps might not even be what it was before.
We could, we could see a dramatic drop in people wanting to even do
it, sponsor it, go to the event.
What are we going to do moving forward looking differently?
Um, and that's where I'm, that's where my mind is going, but also.
Still waiting to see what happens, uh, with all the stuff with WP engine.
So it's a very rocky, rocky road.
It's back to being a human problem.
Again, it's not even a technical problem.
It's back to a human problem.
How do we repair moving forward?
Uh, I don't have the answers yet, but any, any thoughts from, from you?
Jono: Yeah, I completely agree.
And I think WordCamps are a really interesting example, and the event
space more broadly outside that.
I think, um, one of the things I gripe about occasionally is, I think
WordCamps could be so much more, um, but again, it's the same problem as we
need to kind of decide what they are.
And that's a big philosophical complex question and there's
nobody in the driving seat.
Um, but if, if they are designed to be.
recruitment for new contributors and onboarding, then they need
to be resourced and budgeted and run in a way that reflects that.
And at the moment they are, they are wonderful events, but they are
part meetup, part get together, part education, part recruitment, part
lunch, don't, don't really know.
Like it's, it's just, it's us talking to us in the same way that the
media corps was us talking to us.
Um, and when, and I know there's been some vague conversations about starting
to break out of that bubble and now everyone gets like 200 to go and put
some flyers at the local train station, but that's, that's not going to fix it.
It's like this, this is, this is microscopic and it's well intended,
but it's so far in the wrong direction.
Um, so yeah, I think, um, this is, this is all human problems.
Um, and some of that is one human in particular, for better or worse.
Um, but a lot of it cascades back to, um, we, we don't have the,
um, my vocabulary's just dried up.
We don't have the freedom and the ability to ask or take action on these big
philosophical questions and these big people problems because everything stops
back at Matt's door, and he's either not engaged or has a different opinion.
So it just gets stuck and it drops and people get burned out and burn
out and leave and word camps remain lovely, but somewhat ineffectual.
Matt: so I've sort of built a career, uh, you know, questioning and, and being a
critic, uh, of, of Matt and leadership.
And I feel like I've done it in a professional light.
Maybe some people would, you know, disagree, but I've never gone way
overboard with conspiracy theories.
And, and, uh, and, and in fact, you know, even to this day, still thinking
I don't know anyone else who could lead the software project other than
him, though, very questionable on the tactics side of things, uh, for sure.
Um, Let's just start transitioning to talk about like some of the things
that have felt kind of bad as, as community members, especially if you're
a theme or plugin owner, and you have your themes and plugins on wordpress.
org, going back to my knocking on your door.
org.
com, uh, can you outline for those that maybe don't remember because of
all this stuff recently that happened?
What did.
com do that felt so bad?
Jono: Yeah, so it does feel like years ago now, doesn't it?
And it feels inconsequential in comparison, but it's the same route.
So dot com essentially copied the whole plugin repository from dot org.
They went, take it across, dump, this is now our version.
Um, and that was really interesting for a few reasons.
One is, I don't think that had been done at that scale beforehand.
Um, and whilst, whilst Matt's response to a lot of critiques is,
Oh, just go fork it and go copy it.
Um, obviously, that's not as simple as it sounds, and there are huge
overheads associated with that.
The plugin repository not being a small one of those, but they did it.
Um, and, um, And it was ostensibly to provide a kind of an easier
routing for dot com customers to browse and install plugins.
There's two big caveats with that.
One is on dot com, that's a paid ecosystem.
Like you have to be on whatever particular tier it is of usage
in order to access and use those, which is not the case with dot org.
And then the SEO angle is quite interesting because com is a big
authoritative website with a marketing team and a strategy and lots of great
useful content that now has its own version of all of these pages, which
until then, individual plugin vendors and individual users searched for
and managed and found through org.
And suddenly we have this competitor.
Where com is accidentally, question mark, um, stealing, question mark,
um, traffic and visitors who might otherwise have found the org pages and
downloaded and installed a thing for free.
And now potentially getting confused on our potentially signing up for dot
com hosting plans where they might not otherwise have done so, and it all just
gets a little bit murky and it looks, looks like a play, right, it looks
like it's a how do we monetize this traffic, which it may or may not be.
It's, it's part of a bigger question about the com versus org relationship,
which is another question we're not allowed to ask or answer or be
involved in because we just accept that it's a philosophical nightmare.
Um, but the SEO angle was the first time that had come up, is what happens when
com starts eating market share from org?
Um, and I think what's really interesting about that is if you look back as far as
circa 2011, 2012, org is five or six times the size in terms of visibility of com.
You run any off the shelf SEO tool and it'll give you an estimate
of how big is this site in terms of how, what does it rank for and
how much traffic does it attract.
org is scoring, I don't know, 20 points and com is scoring four points.
Now, 2024, they are almost level.
Because org is decaying over time because it's not loved.
It doesn't have a marketing strategy.
It's a little bit on fire.
All the problems we've discussed, whereas com is growing, not
enormously and not at a hockey stick pace, but they're doing well.
They've got a content strategy.
They've got SEO people.
They now have a plug in repository.
And it's, it's not yet at the point where it's massively cannibalizing org, but
there are some really interesting points.
Things like, um, Names of certain functionality that people are searching
for, things like SSL certificates or, uh, how to reset their passwords.
Some of those kinds of queries.com is starting to outrank.org with either the
plugins repository or their own help documentation, which arguably then is
just a cl of the, the learn stuff as well.
So yeah, we now have a, we now have more than ever a big
competitor and it's once again, us.
Um, and, and Matt's there was a slight exploration of is there a way we can
mitigate this if the intended use case is mostly just for logged in wordpress.
com users, maybe we could know index it, maybe we could canonicalize it.
There are SEO tactics we could use to lock that down so that it benefits
everybody, but none of that's been done.
And I know Matt's aware of those because he read my blog post on it and
he commented saying very interesting.
Thanks.
Um, and I did nothing.
So, yeah, this is, uh, this is not healthy.
Matt: Uh, which against the backdrop of this W is alleged,
uh, WP engine trademark issue.
It's very concerning and there's a headline in the verge.
Uh, we are recording this on Tuesday, October 8th, 2024.
Uh, there's a headline on the verge, Matt Mellenweg quote WordPress.
org just belongs to me.
And, you know, end quote, uh, and this is, this is why I think so
many of us, though we question, um, this move of like mirroring.
org to dot com, we, those of us in the know, like you, me, and probably
most of us listening to this, are just like, we can't do anything about it.
Like we can rant and holler and do all this stuff, but really
we can't do anything about it.
And I think that's the biggest struggle because of the passion that we have for
WordPress, but also at the same time, we're just boxed in to these decision
makings and things like that, that.
Look at the end of the day, I don't, I don't know.
Uh, I guess I have a, I don't know if it's an optimist look outlook on this, but
does it help plugin and theme owners that.
com is ranking if, if the end user is using their theme and
plugin, it just happens to be on.
com or
Jono: Yeah, this was Matt's argument, right, that more marketplaces is more
good because it's more reach, it's more exposure, it's more discovery,
and in theory, then more people find stuff except this whole pay dangle.
So right now, if you search for Gravity Forms in the US, com
ranks second and org ranks sixth.
So there is definitely a non zero chance that you as a user who doesn't really
know what you're doing is going to end up paying money for a hosting plan to unlock
that instead of getting it for free.
Maybe that's, maybe that's 10 people, maybe it's one, maybe it's 1000,
but that's distributed across a long tail of a whole bunch of scenarios.
Is that net positive?
Would those people have gone and self hosted something and got the free version?
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe they do want the handholding of a managed hosting plan and to get it
through a package or just just feels.
a little bit murky and disingenuous to be presenting them as they're the same
thing and this is net positive, right?
And to your point on there's nothing we can do.
Yeah, Matt owns both websites, but my livelihood to a degree and yours and
many others is tied somewhat to the success of WordPress and therefore we're
all invested in how do we make this successful and grow its reach, etc.
And yeah, good strategy comes with compromises.
So we need to go, okay, if we can't do X, we need to do Y.
But why is also political and everywhere we turn you end up with an insurmountable,
okay, we don't have the resources, we don't have the budget, we don't have the
permission, Matt says no, yada, yada.
And I think the thing that we're all frustrated with and why so many people are
leaving is we cannot see a route forwards.
All we can see is kind of maintain the status quo, hang on tight
to whatever drama comes next.
Well, we'll shake off a few more contributors and we'll have to
take on more of the workload.
And there's no, There isn't a route, certainly, that I can see where we
go, Okay, now we're beating Wix.
Now we are moving forwards.
Now we're growing.
Now we're doing great stuff.
Scaring.
Ha.
Matt: account.
I have a paid 300 a year wordpress.
com account for a website that I, another newsletter that I have called the podcast
setup where I write about podcasting.
And, um, I noticed it's been a couple of weeks since I've published anything there.
So it's been a couple of weeks since I've logged into.
com, but I've noticed now when I log into.
com marketplace is right under plugins and it, and that, Sort of distinction wasn't
there before or at least I certainly hadn't seen it in the last month or
so So the marketplace is now getting pushed on dot com at least in my plan
much more visibly One of the things I was thinking about through this whole WP
engine thing was well, maybe they were I mean, they're enterprise software.
I used to sell against them as a Pagely account executive.
I was there for three years.
So they are for every account a software enterprise company.
They're vicious.
They are cruel.
They are tactful in their sales as any enterprise software company is right.
Um, so I wouldn't had it.
have put it past them.
If WP engine was going to launch what I call the HubSpot esque sort of marketplace
where HubSpot has a marketplace, you can buy stuff, but guess what?
If you go from HubSpot to say Salesforce or, uh, Asana or whatever, um, you're not
taking that marketplace stuff with you.
It's there, right?
And WP engine launching something like that to really challenge,
um, the, the ecosystem.
But now as I see it.
Well, dot com has a marketplace, uh, and Matt kind of like thrust them to
create their own mirror of dot org.
Maybe that's just going to thrust them to make a marketplace, uh, faster
than what they had maybe previously planned or maybe had never thought of.
And now they're like, aha, we'll call this a marketplace and we'll
start selling stuff through it.
Jono: You know, the best thing that will happen there is we'll then have
an even more reinforced confusion between WordPress and WordPress.
And then the solution will be we'll add a marketplace on org.
So we'll just have like all these confusing mirrors of each other.
Why not?
Ha
Matt: Right.
And that made me start to think about, well, if you go back like a decade
or 12 years when the Avada theme and visual composer was out there, you
were buying stuff from theme forest.
And Matt was really like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.
That's not the WordPress experience I want people to have.
Right.
So it was that same thing.
But now it's like a mega hosting company is, is kind of doing that.
Um, it is like, again, I don't have a particular angle on
this, but I'm just observing it.
And I'm like, wow.
The marketplace thing could happen sooner across multiple
entities because of all of this.
And is that the outcome we really wanted?
Jono: Yeah, I, I think it's exactly what happens.
I don't think it's the outcome of one.
I, I would be very surprised if, um, New Fold, Strip, Bluehost
don't do the same thing as well.
And everybody's hosting onboarding flow now has some kind of, and
you can premium upsell to these plugins, et cetera, that they do from
their own mini curated repository.
Yeah.
And WordPress becomes a fragmented distributed thing where wherever you
happen to run your website, you're tied into, you've got your plugins
here, you've got your add ins here.
This is proprietary.
This works differently.
Yeah, all that portability stuff goes away, which I think certainly,
and I'm being very lenient about it, there are huge advantages
to WordPress and I love it.
And one of the huge advantages, certainly one that Matt praises a
lot, is the portability angle, right?
There's all the data transfer portability stuff happening at the moment.
Yeah, that's, that's at risk, I think, if we end up in a landscape of marketplaces
and verticals, individual little silos.
Matt: last shoe to drop for me on these dot com plugin and theme
pages will be if they have like a.
You know, running your own WordPress, install this plugin with Jetpack
and then people will be like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
Because they have that site management angle, right?
So does dot com.
But so does, I mean, so does Jetpack where you could kind of use Jetpack
services like a managed WP or, you know, name your favorite kind of management.
Plug in service.
They could do the same thing.
We're like, Hey, if you're running this on your own site, you can just install
jetpack and we'll install this plug in for you and and keep it updated.
Um, that would be a very, very interesting thing to watch because then I would
say, Yeah, we've got an issue here.
Um, how did the plug in and theme authors get a cut of this traffic?
Jono: Yeah.
Yeah.
Sheesh.
Matt: Um, yeah.
Let's start wrapping it up.
I've
Jono: Deep breath.
Deep breath.
Matt: we're not quitting WordPress.
People are like, I'm not quitting WordPress.
I can't.
Uh, um, but from your angle on the SEO side, like I said before,
uh, I saw some folks saying, Hey, we'll just switch to Laravel.
Like, yeah, just make your, yeah, just switch to Laravel, Matt.
What do you think?
Oh yeah, sure.
It's the same thing.
Um, from the SEO side.
Jono: from ACF.
Yeah, sure.
Matt: So it's easy.
It's very easy.
Um, what do you see in the SEO world, uh, that that is something that
is a, a kind of an off, off ramp?
WordPress?
Is it a Wix?
Is it a Squarespace?
Is it static?
Like what other CMSs do you look at?
Go.
Okay.
They're, they're doing a fairly good job, but nowhere near as, as good as WordPress.
Jono: There's nothing even remotely close.
Uh, this is my biggest gripe as a, as a lousy technical SEO.
I spend a lot of time poking at WordPress and other platforms.
And my word, just the, pick anything else, name it.
And you've got a year of work to do employing a team of half a dozen
developers to even get parity to where WordPress was last year.
Nevermind to maintain the velocity to stay ahead.
So many of the, the sites and businesses I work with are running, I don't know, a
Sanity or a Wix or a Headless something or other, or they've done a thing
in React with a backend on something you've never heard of on a Gatsby or
brr, they're all awful universally.
Like they're, some, some of them are very good at one thing, Like a lot of
them preference developer experience, which I'm never sure is a good thing
to preference if you're trying to run a business like preference,
marketing, marketing tools, etc.
But whatever.
Some of them are very fast.
Some of them are accessible.
Some of them, it's very easy to do custom post type like stuff.
None of them are good at technical SEO and none of them are good at
all the things across the board.
And not always WordPress out of the box, but it's extensible and
customizable enough that if you know the right tools and tips and tricks,
it's easy enough to get there.
Um, I don't see.
And this is the most frustrating thing.
I don't see anything else even being able to catch up.
We have such a moat when it comes to extensibility and inherent capabilities
and resourcing, even as diminished as we are, and yet still we're losing the war
because we can't tell that story because all the big scary philosophical questions.
Very, very frustrating.
Matt: haven't asked this, uh, uh, low hanging fruit question since probably like
my first dozen or so podcast episodes, but your favorite SEO plugin, your favorite
collection of plugins that you use on your
Jono: Oh, wow.
Let me go see what I'm running.
So yeah, disclosure.
I worked at Yoast for five years, so I will say Yoast.
Um, but that's, I worked at Yoast because I believed in the plugin and because
I thought it was the best one, not the other way around, so I'll still say Yoast.
I think, um, I'm a little bit frustrated.
With them organizationally in the teams partly why I left it would
be nice to see them ship some new features that aren't just the AI thing.
I think that's very exciting, very shiny, but there's definitely more work to
be done in workflows and other areas.
But yeah, Yoast SEO definitely is my SEO plugin for choice, just because it does.
It does a thousand things behind the scenes that most people shouldn't
ever need to care about that none of the others do like silly stuff like,
um, There's a no index HTTP header on your RSS feeds so that Google doesn't
spend ages calling and indexing them that nobody else does because nobody
else has even asked that question.
Um, and there's a thousand of those.
That's really nice.
Um, other stuff I really like, um, Do do do do do.
What am I using at the moment?
String back recently.
Um, all the usual stuff, right?
User role editors, really nice stuff that should be canonical plugins.
Not that we know what canonical plugin means.
Um, all the stuff that the Google performance team are doing.
So, the, um, performance lab stuff.
The speculative loading plugin that came out the other day.
Um, speculation headers are really cool for performance.
Sitekit's cool.
Um, yeah, yeah, nothing, nothing too surprising.
Um, ACF obviously is architecture really nice for SEO because inevitably
you wind up wanting to do things like, um, this is a cupcake page and I need
to know what color frosting it has.
And I want to grab that value and I want to incorporate it
into the meta description, um, that sort of stuff's really nice.
Yeah.
Otherwise nothing, nothing too unusual.
I don't
Matt: Fantastic.
Uh, he is Jono Alderson.
You can find him at Jono Alderson.
com.
One of the last blog posts, uh, at times of the year.
At the time of this recording is the death of the category page.
I'm going to be diving into this blog post right, right after this,
because is the category page dead?
Well, you have to find out on Jono Alderson.
com Jono.
Thanks for hanging out today.
It's been fun.
Jono: No, thanks for having me.
It's been really lovely.
Excellent.