SEO expert Clayburn Griffin on “mobilegeddon,” KBT (Knowledge-Based Trust), and the Google Plus breakup

March 17, 2015: As the world’s clocks tick down to April 21, 2015  — the day of reckoning for site proprietors with under-performing mobile properties —  I took the opportunity to reach out to Clayburn Griffin, SEO iconoclast and Reddit superstar. It’s been a while since we last talked to Clayburn, and we wanted his take on the “mobilegeddon” countdown.

Didit: Tell us what you think of the 4/21 mobile algorithm update , (AKA “mobilegeddon”) that Google has announced. Will 4/21/15 be a day of widespread tribulation?  What impact will this change have on the visibility of sites — both big brand sites and those maintained by smaller proprietors?

Clayburn Griffin: It will be interesting to see how this is implemented.  It feels like it’s an extra hurdle for the little guys who probably don’t think much about their SEO, people who are just doing their thing and putting out good content.  They deserve to rank, surely.  Having worked on large brands, though, I know plenty of them don’t have mobile-friendly setups.  There’s really no excuse for big brands not to have this taken care of.  They have the resources.  So part of me thinks “It’s about time” but another party has sympathy for the “mom and pops” out there who maybe don’t obsess over SEO enough to realize they’re about to be doing something wrong.  I think Google should take more initiative targeting sites that actively create UX issues (low quality content, ad/subscribe pop-ups, etc.) rather than sites that have accidentally fallen behind the times.  I do think the panic is a bit of an over-reaction.  If you’re not 100% mobile-friendly, Google isn’t going to nuke your website.

Didit: Also, tell us what you think of Knowledge Based Trust and doing SEO in a post-link world (or, at least the world that Google tells us that we live in.)

Clayburn Griffin: Knowledge-Based Trust – “Truthiness” is an interesting problem for Google to try and tackle.  I hope they can someday work out all the kinks, but I doubt they’re anywhere near making it practical as a search ranking algorithm.  There would be far too many false positives.  Would The Onion be penalized, for example?  I understand holding certain websites and queries up to this standard, but it couldn’t be across the board.  The Internet has a degree of poetic license and like any piece of information, you have to take it in context of its source.  It’s a noble idea, but Google has a long struggle ahead to find what’s really true on the Net.  As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Everything you read on the Internet is false.”

Didit: Share with us your thoughts on the split up of Google Plus into Google Streams and Google Photos.

Clayburn Griffin: I haven’t even thought about Google+ in what feels like years.  So, I haven’t been following the news about this in-depth because it didn’t seem particularly relevant to me.  My thinking is that it’s just how they’re packaging elements of Google+ which are useful.  People don’t really use it as a comprehensive social network, but people may find individual aspects of it useful, such as Photos (which syncs with Android devices), Hangouts and chats and even Communities.  So my interpretation is that it’s just Google trying to figure out how best to make sense of the amalgam of useful and not useful features that comprise Google+.