Charles Floate on Money Hat SEO and Link Building

Charles Floate has built his career on hard work and results. While others keep declaring SEO dead, he just keeps making it work, with his cashflow growing year after year. In this episode he sits down with Olesia Korobka to talk money hat SEO, link building and how he keeps levelling up.

Key takeaways

• Charles tracks his time across all his own projects and knows his peak SEO output is worth 800 to 900 dollars an hour. He charges double that for consulting, so a consultation is always worth taking over his own projects.
• Most SEOs are underpaid because of themselves, not the market. Confidence, public case studies and a personal brand can double a mid-level salary, and half the industry preaches E-E-A-T while never building any of it for their own name.
• His benchmark for someone five years in: at least 70,000 dollars a year in a Western in-house job, or 50 dollars plus per hour consulting, remembering that unpaid proposals, emails and calls quickly halve the real rate.
• Private blog networks changed shape. Instead of niche PBNs ranking niche sites, he now builds generic high-authority networks from undervalued auction domains, mostly to power parasite pages and tier two links.
• 301 redirects still work on parasite pages despite years of Google announcements. People who get hit usually stacked triggers, like 25 redirected domains to one site in a week.
• On brand as a ranking factor he is blunt: an SEO cannot conjure brand searches, and sites with tiny brand demand still pull millions of visits, so in practice brand building for an SEO comes back to links.
• AI content is not fully detectable even in theory, and he reads Google’s mass manual penalties of AI sites as proof the algorithm could not catch them.
• After speaking at nearly 50 conferences he stopped doing full talks. The ROI is not there, so he now does Q&A sessions and co-runs invite-quality events with WhitePress, starting with a sold-out Dubai edition.
• SEO is search engine optimization, not Google optimization. TikTok, Amazon, YouTube, Etsy and even Gumroad are search engines with far less competition, and he made tens of thousands a year ranking products inside Gumroad alone.

What Charles Floate covers in this episode

• 0:33 Blitz round, gambling site or SaaS
• 2:16 Matt Diggity or Marie Haynes
• 3:20 London or Bangkok, and life on Koh Samui
• 6:35 The SEO crowd in Thailand and staying social while working
• 8:12 Whether money matters more than anything
• 9:18 Why top SEOs still take consulting clients
• 10:24 Pricing consulting from your tracked hourly output
• 13:06 What SEOs should earn and why most are underpaid
• 18:00 Mentors, from Todd Foster to Nick Eubanks and Ryan Holiday
• 21:51 How PBNs work now, auction domains and parasite pages
• 24:04 Building a localized PBN for one UK city
• 26:46 Whether 301 redirects still work
• 29:04 Brand versus backlinks
• 32:57 Whether AI content is detectable
• 35:08 Topical authority and Google’s internal conflict
• 38:27 Microsoft, OpenAI and the AI war
• 41:14 Search advocates, Bing and Fabrice Canel
• 43:27 TikTok and Amazon taking Google’s verticals
• 46:42 Olesia’s 1,000 dollar Google Ads experiment
• 49:28 Why he stopped running his own conferences
• 53:18 Handling toxicity in the industry
• 56:03 Whether companies still need SEOs
• 59:53 TikTok, Amazon, YouTube and Gumroad SEO
• 62:05 The Parasite SEO Secrets update and where to find Charles

The full conversation

The transcript below is lightly edited for readability.

Olesia: I’ll have three blitz questions and then we’ll start. You can pick only one thing, and you can explain why you picked it or not, up to you. Given the same amount of income, would you rather do a gambling website or SaaS?

Charles: Probably SaaS, because I have a lot more experience in SaaS and there are a lot of additional marketing activities you can do around SaaS that are just easier to pull off. You don’t get sites that flat out reject you because of gambling, and gambling links are two to four times more expensive just because of the niche. Unless you have large amounts of capital, budgets and manpower, I would stray away from gambling markets, because it is the most competitive market in the world. And a lot of retargeting you can’t do for casino in certain countries because gambling is banned in certain jurisdictions. You can do retargeting for SaaS all day long. There are just so many activities you can do for SaaS that you can’t do for gambling, and I don’t like restrictions.

Olesia: Next one. Matt Diggity or Marie Haynes?

Charles: Damn, I’m getting in trouble. It depends on the situation, I’m going to get cancelled either way. Obviously I’ve got to go with Matt, because I’m definitely more of a hat SEO, more into the affiliate side of things and the CPA side of stuff. That being said, Matt is definitely trending away from the SEO industry, he’s actively trying to branch away from SEO, whereas Marie is going all in on Google and SEO. So I can see that perhaps I agree with Marie more from that side, because Matt seems more worried about SEO being dead and AI taking over, whereas Marie is just happy-go-lucky, loves SEO, loves Google, loves everything about it. And I agree with her there, because I don’t see SEO dying anytime soon. There is still a massive amount of opportunity, especially if you’ve got the skills, the confidence and the mindset.

Olesia: The next one is very easy. London or Bangkok?

Charles: Bangkok, one hundred percent, even though I hate cities in general. I’m from a village in the UK, I don’t sleep well in cities at all and I value my sleep a lot. That’s one of the main reasons I have never really lived in major cities. I like being zoned in, away from people, being able to get away from civilization at times. London has had some PR problems that are probably quite well deserved, with people getting stabbed and robbed. I can walk around Bangkok quite comfortably with my Rolexes, I’ve got a collection of watches. I can’t do that in London. And the weather is better in Bangkok, the people are friendlier, the food is better. Bangkok all the way, even though I wouldn’t recommend living there. I wouldn’t want to live in Bangkok or London personally.

Olesia: And what’s your favorite Thai city, town or village?

Charles: Well, I live on Koh Samui now and I love it. It’s one of the bigger Thai islands but still fairly small, you can drive around it in about two hours. I just love the lifestyle here. Everyone is happy, everyone is friendly, there’s no crime, there’s not really much poverty, really high levels of education, good diversity, and the food is incredible without Bangkok’s insane prices. You can go to Bangkok and a steak dinner is 200 or 300 dollars, which is absolutely crazy. Here it’s 30 or 50, way better, and I eat out three times per day. But I did live in Chiang Mai for five years before that and I love Chiang Mai as well. It’s just that, being British, I love the beaches, and Chiang Mai doesn’t offer any of that. This is definitely the place for me, for the time being at least.

Olesia: Are there many SEOs where you live at the moment?

Charles: There are, but a lot of them come in and out. Quite a few guys have villas here, but it’s not permanent, because they’ve also got an apartment in Bangkok and maybe one in Australia or the UK or wherever they’re from. They’re very nomadic. There’s never one solid group of people, but there are always a lot of people. I went for dinner the other night and there were about twelve of us. Everybody does SEO or crypto or something along those lines, and it’s interesting to see everyone’s different opinions and takes, especially when you’re trying to catch up around algorithm updates. Speaking to people in person is invaluable.

Olesia: How often do you meet other people? Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert, how much of being around people do you need?

Charles: I don’t define myself as an introvert or an extrovert, I’m kind of both. I like being by myself but I also like being social, it depends on the day and the context. Generally I meet or see people every day. I go for dinners multiple times a week with different people, I have lunches, and there are even a couple of clients I’ve got on the island, so I go for lunches with them quite regularly. There’s co-working, meetups, all sorts of events happening constantly, so that social lifestyle is available. It’s just that I’m constantly working, so I have to limit myself a lot. Today, tomorrow, Wednesday, I might go out for dinner with my girlfriend, but I’m not meeting anybody else, because I’m just working, doing podcasts and interviews for the next three days. Then Thursday I’m doing loads of social stuff, and Friday I’m flying to Europe. I’ve got a packed week ahead of me.

Olesia: You mentioned you are a money hat. Does it mean that money means more to you than anything else?

Charles: No, definitely not. I’m from a family with very strong ties. We’ve always had the motto that blood is thicker than water. If tomorrow I could sell everything I own and it would guarantee an extra ten years with my grandma, I would do that, because of the value I place on my grandma and my family. I would give up everything just to get some extra time on this Earth with them. I think time is what I value more than money, for sure.

Olesia: You mentioned you have clients. Some people think, and I see it very often on Twitter, that if you are very good at SEO you don’t have clients, you have only personal projects, you’re the entrepreneurial kind of person not working for anyone else. What do you think about that?

Charles: I have a lot of big mentors. Some are close mentors who guided me through my career one on one, and some are parasocial relationships, people I don’t necessarily know, like Ryan Holiday or Robert Greene. All of these people still charge hourly for consultations, and these are some of the biggest names in the world, some of the most respected people in business, in stoicism, in culture. One of them said something that stuck with me: as long as you’re tracking your time, you should know how much you’re worth at any given moment. If you put X amount of time into a project and get Y amount of money out, you know what your time is worth. Do that across all your projects and you get a baseline of your productivity value.

So I tracked all of my projects and all of my time, and I figured out that when I’m peaking, doing parasite pages, AI content, bulk pages, all that stuff on high ROI projects, I’m getting about 800 to 900 dollars an hour at peak rate. All I did was double that rate, and that’s what I charge for consulting. My peak limit from my own SEO earning capability is here, so I make sure I charge significantly higher than that. It’s always worth my time to take the consultations.

And a lot of the time I’m learning things out of them anyway, because I’m getting clients that have been penalized or algorithmically hit, in industries I knew nothing about, and I’m suddenly diving head first into them. I’ve got the CEO on one call, the CMO on another, getting insights from these businesses, and I’m not even on a contract. They’re giving me access to their bank accounts, and I’m thinking, what the hell is going on, it’s absolutely crazy. And it’s a power position. With an agency the client feels like the boss. With consulting, people are thanking me for being on the call while paying me huge amounts of money to be there. And you don’t have the delivery responsibility. The implementation and the hard work are on the client. You’re just giving them the path.

Olesia: How much do you think an SEO should earn? What should the average income for an SEO be?

Charles: Firstly, I would say most SEOs are underpaid and undervalued. But a lot of them are undervalued because of themselves, not the industry. They take opportunities that are beneath them, or they have confidence issues, or they don’t know whether they contributed to the success of a campaign. There are all these team-level SEOs with big confidence issues about whether they were the deciding factor in a campaign’s success. If you don’t know whether you can deliver value, you don’t really know your own value. Then there are the constant Google updates and all the information and misinformation that grind away at people’s confidence. A lot of people on that mid-level salary of 30 to 90K a year could be on double that if they really pushed, had their own case studies, their own public personal branding, released stuff on LinkedIn, did all the things that actually propel you forward.

In terms of what an SEO should charge, it depends on the reality of your situation. Something like 70 to 80 percent of capital flow in the world moves through some sort of English language business environment, because America and the UK are so dominant, and even large Chinese trade companies operate in English. So if you have a really high level of English, you can get paid more. If you have your own case studies, you can get paid more. If you have social branding, you can get paid more. A lot of it comes down to having experience that is easily showable, easy proof of how much you’re worth. And there’s a big lack of quality candidates, because people don’t put these things on their CVs. Half the SEO industry talks about E-E-A-T and then doesn’t do it for themselves, which is mind-boggling in itself. If you’ve got five years of experience, a couple of jobs, some case studies, experience with algorithm updates and some personal branding on LinkedIn and Twitter, then in Western markets you should be getting paid at least around 70,000 dollars a year in a job, or at least 50 dollars an hour consulting. Ideally more, because people forget all the additional work you don’t get paid for, the email communication, the proposals, the onboarding, the client calls. That 50 dollars an hour quickly becomes 20 or 24 when you work out all the time you really spend on your business.

Olesia: I actually charge for the calls and for the onboarding as well. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

Charles: No, that’s perfect. But again, it’s demand.

Olesia: You also mentioned mentors. The most successful people always mention someone who greatly influenced their career and mindset. Sometimes those recommendations sound pretty basic, but because the mentor sees exactly where you are from the outside, they give you the basic advice at the moment when you can actually hear it and implement it. Who were those mentors for you?

Charles: In SEO itself, I had Todd Foster, who now owns Merged Media, one of Canada’s biggest agencies, and runs affiliate websites and SaaS companies. He gave me all the basics, the original knowledge, access to software. We were building YouTube channels, private blog networks, made-for-AdSense websites, private gaming servers, all sorts, 13 or 14 years ago. He himself was only a few years older than me, just turning 18, but he’d been doing it for a few years and knew a lot of stuff I didn’t.

When I started doing quite well out of SEO, I met Nick Eubanks quite early on. He’s got ADHD as well, and he gave me a lot of insight into how he controls his ADHD, how to output the craziness that is your mind into thoughtful flows that other people understand, especially on calls. He gave me so much information around solving that stuff. I really don’t think I would be half as productive as I am now without that training and adaptation and all the reading he threw my way.

In terms of people I read all the time, Ryan Holiday is the number one person I read every day. I’ve read every book he’s put out, all of his book recommendations, all his podcasts, I’ve rewatched his episode with Joe Rogan about five times. I love the stoicism philosophy of dealing only with things you’re capable of dealing with, and not wasting emotional and physical time on things out of your control. And I like the classical copywriting people, Gary Halbert and the like. I’ve learned a lot about persuasive copywriting from them.

Olesia: I’ve talked to Arnout Hellemans, and one of his key presentations is about neurological conditions in SEOs, that to be a successful SEO it’s almost a hundred percent chance you have something like ADHD or dyslexia.

Charles: It’s interesting. I’ve never met as many dyslexics as in the SEO industry, ever. I’m dyslexic myself. Every second or third one, it’s kind of funny.

Olesia: You also mentioned PBNs. Do you build them now?

Charles: To be fair, we’ve still been building them occasionally. Number one, not nearly as much as before, and number two, a lot of it is not the same as before. Whereas five or six years ago we were building custom niche PBNs to rank niche websites, nowadays it’s all about building generic powerful PBNs that can rank parasite pages and be very strong tier two links. That generally means finding auction domains that are very undervalued, which is hard, because a lot of auction domains are going for stupid amounts of money right now. I blame a lot of it on the Indonesian gambling niche. If you look at the GoDaddy auction sold list, every other domain right now redirects to some kind of Indonesian casino, it’s wild. So we’re trying to find domains, but it’s luck at this stage. Some months we find 10 or 20 domain names, some months none. We don’t have the scraping systems a lot of the domainers have, because we don’t need that level of sophistication. We’re just picking up the undervalued gold where we can find it.

Olesia: Do you search for relevant domains, or do you pick anything that’s more or less good based on some signals?

Charles: Now it’s all just as high authority as we can get, because we’re generally linking to DR 90 or DR 85 parasite pages, or our tier two links point at DR 70s and 80s. A lot of our stuff is generic authority. That being said, we have been doing some local SEO for a city in the UK where we’re building a localized PBN. We’re looking for domains from businesses that went bankrupt, old blogs, old sporting clubs, anything from that local area, and building up a network so we can rank almost anything in that area and control a lot of the local link juice. It is working so far. It’s just a lot of work finding the domains, you basically need somebody full time doing the analysis, and again it’s luck based.

Olesia: Do you diversify anchor text and the surrounding text, or do you just put your major keyword in the link from your PBN?

Charles: It depends on what we’re linking to. With tier two links, recently we’ve been finding the old URLs on the domains, pre-existing pages that already have links, and building a post off that old URL, which is already powered by the old links, and sending that to our tier one. Effectively we’re getting tier threes and fours for free by doing that. You can do the same thing with a PBN homepage, but it comes with additional risk. There are spam algorithms these days looking for those patterns, so if we’re using homepage links, we’re only doing it from the very best PBNs, and generally across tier twos rather than linking straight to parasite pages. At some point you’re just stacking triggers for Google to find your pages.

Olesia: Some people also used to buy domains and do 301 redirects, not only in gambling, payday loans and such, but in many white hat industries too. Now they report it’s becoming harder, that previously you could glue almost any authoritative domain and now it doesn’t always stick. Do you do 301 redirects, and have you noticed similar things?

Charles: We’ve done it a few times with parasite pages, where we throw a domain at a parasite page and it ranks really well. Google says it’s coming after 301 redirects all the time, there have been about ten updates where they said that, and redirects always seem to work. There are additional methods too, like the double 301 redirect trick, which removes penalties. So redirects seem to be a trick that plays into Google’s algorithm, and they don’t really seem able to do much about it. That being said, it’s the whole stacking triggers thing again. People overdo it. They build like 25 domains that are 301ed within the space of a week, which is really unnatural and easy for Google to find, and then they report they got hit because they used 301 redirects, without saying they used 30 of them at the same bloody website. Ninety-nine percent of the time people get hit because they went way overboard, and the other one percent because they bought a dodgy domain in the first place. We tend to use 301 redirects for parasite pages quite successfully. We haven’t used them for niche sites or lower DR stuff recently, so I don’t have current experience on whether those work right now.

Olesia: People keep repeating after Google that backlinks are not that important, while links seem to be doing quite the opposite. Everyone talks about the brand thing, but isn’t brand basically built with backlinks? What should people focus on?

Charles: The only thing brand really means is brand searches. And if you’re an SEO, you can’t magically get a hundred thousand people in your country to start searching for your company’s name. Non-SEO marketing activities are what drives people to search your brand name. In terms of a brandability ranking factor, I don’t think it’s necessarily true at all, because there are so many gambling websites, e-commerce websites, even local newspapers that rank really well with a thousand brand searches a month, very low brand engagement, and they still get a million or ten million visitors a month from Google. At the end of the day it all comes back to links. The only real way an SEO can contribute to that through SEO activities is link building. Or you could run content marketing campaigns amazing enough that people search for your blog, but how much time and resources does that take? And that’s what a lot of the white hat side forgets. They say you just need to create expert-level great content. But if you’re an SEO working on a client website, you’re not an expert in selling bathtubs or whatever the client does. You can’t even edit the content to judge whether it’s expert level, because you’re an SEO, not the expert.

So I would say the number one SEO activity is generally link building, but it’s all relative to what the website needs. Some websites need links, some have a great link profile but no content and no semantic topical clustering, some have horrendous technical issues and load times. It’s relative to the client. And you shouldn’t say this or that doesn’t work just because of the scenario you’re dealing with, because you don’t have enough data. If you told a data scientist your sample is five clients, they would laugh in your face. 99.99 percent of the SEO community doesn’t have enough data. I don’t have enough data for a lot of the stuff I’m saying either, but at least I’ll say that this is the case for this specific SERP, this specific niche, this specific scenario. People instead make broad statements that links don’t matter anymore, or AI content is detectable, or redirects don’t work, or buying links gets detected, when it’s all relative to the specific instance.

Olesia: Do you think AI content is not detectable at all?

Charles: Scientifically it’s fundamentally not, because of the monkeys on a typewriter theory. Over the course of an AI creating an essentially infinite amount of words, at some point you’re not going to be able to detect 100 percent of the output. Then you have randomization, errors, false positives and false negatives, all these things that make 100 percent detection impossible. As for whether Google is running detection, you either have to run your own model to detect another model, or look for specific signals, and those signals end up catching a lot of other sites in the mix. Do I think they’re doing that? No. And the evidence is that they went and manually penalized two or three hundred thousand AI content websites instead of letting the algorithm detect them, because the algorithm couldn’t.

Olesia: At least it seems they’re working in that direction. I’ve seen a few of their presentations on how they think they’d approach it, with bag-of-words and TF-IDF signals, and judging from the websites damaged in some updates, they’re not against big collateral damage. What do you think about the topical authority theme?

Charles: It’s obviously real, even though a lot of people seem to think it’s not. From a mathematical standpoint it makes sense that interconnected documents supporting each other would give you prioritization and expertise. There’s all this patented research into NLP and machine learning tech that would be stupid not to implement. That being said, with the current Google search leadership it’s very difficult to say what they’re doing, because nobody, not even themselves, seems to fully understand it. There seems to be an internal conflict between differing sides in Google about where they should be going. And from what I can tell, and what a lot of researchers and market analysts can tell, the leadership that has won that war so far is the anti-search-quality leadership, the ads profiteering leadership. A lot of the people who were pioneering search quality don’t even work at the company anymore. We’ve got people who are effectively corporate McKinsey consultants, whose track record is definitely not the best for humanity.

Looking at how the algorithm updates have moved, yes, some big websites get caught in the mix, but the majority of sites getting hit are definitely not corporations with some sort of association with Google, which in itself is fishy and a bad narrative. The fact that Reddit and Google have a publicly available deal, and Reddit has seen something like a thousand percent increase in search traffic, is not great for the conspiracy theorists, because the writing is on the wall, they’re doing it publicly. Even people who are very pro Google, like Marie Haynes, are seeing it for what it is, that Google isn’t the likable corporation it was 15 years ago, that the leadership has changed into a very corporate McKinsey style enterprise. And I think Microsoft is winning the AI war. If they do win it and get AGI, then Google is finished, game over. Microsoft has won the tech race, the future race, they’d be the new masters of the universe.

Olesia: Maybe someone else will emerge, not necessarily Microsoft. Is it possible?

Charles: It’s the space race, where Microsoft is up here and everybody else is down there. They’ve consolidated power in OpenAI, and combined they’ve got so much research. Google is getting the world’s most compute at the moment, they’ll have the most hardware, but again, it’s leadership. You can have the best army in the world, but with terrible leaders you’re not going to win anything. It’s the same in corporate wars, you have to win with good, decisive decision making. The decisions Google has made repeatedly for the last several years show they’re losing, and Microsoft’s decisions have positioned them ahead and ahead and ahead. Look at the market today, Microsoft’s market cap is something like a trillion dollars ahead of Google, and Nvidia is ahead of Google too. Five years ago people completely wrote off Bing and Microsoft as a dying tech company that had Windows, Xbox and basically nothing else. Now they’re the innovators, the future of technology, and Google looks second in the race.

Olesia: From my perspective, I know many people dislike Google advocates, but I love them. Their job is super hard, they get all that negativity from SEOs and corporations and can’t do much with it, they accumulate lots of toxic comments and they can’t respond freely because they’re restricted by Google. But they want to do something good. I like John Mueller, I like all of them. Sometimes they don’t respond, sometimes their responses are unclear, but at least we have them and can talk to them. In Bing there’s only Fabrice Canel, and he never responds about updates or why a website declined. So from an SEO’s perspective, would it be an advantage for us if Bing rises and Google goes down?

Charles: Number one, Bing’s algorithm is easier, so it would be going back in time to when link spam was very much the way forward, and that would be the case again if Bing took over. On the communication side, if Bing takes over, they’ll be forced into having more of a communication department. The thing is, right now they can fly under the radar, and Microsoft does this across the entire company. Have you seen the big Congress and Senate hearings with Google and Meta? The one company missing from all of them is Microsoft. They’re actively trying not to be on the radar, not to be seen by government, so they can rise above it when the time comes.

But I don’t see Bing taking over. What I see happening is either a technological replacement, the way the smartphone replaced the phone, something genuinely better and easier and more engaging for everybody, though I can’t think of what that would be short of a chip in your brain. Or Google just loses its key markets to other apps and other leaders. TikTok has absolutely killed Google when it comes to travel, restaurant recommendations, even makeup tutorials. Amazon has absolutely killed them in US e-commerce, something like five times more sales are happening through Amazon search than Google search in the US, it’s wild. All these platforms are slowly bleeding away key market share. So I don’t think it will be one big player. Google won’t have the same ad revenue in ten years because it won’t have the same user base. And the current overstimulated ad revenue, the all-time-high earnings in the quarterly reports, come alongside reports that click fraud is at an all-time high and that there are dodgy manipulations of the search and PPC algorithms. A lot of it is temporary and forced, those measures aren’t long term. If they’re bleeding users to other apps while bleeding the advertisers for all the cash they can get, they’ll lose market share across both sectors.

I still think Google is massively capable, because they have YouTube, Chrome, Android, so much market share across the board that even if search comes crashing down, they can pivot and remain a very successful tech company. I just don’t think they’re going to be one of the big three going forward. I think they lose the AI wars, I think they lose the search wars, and potentially even the mobile wars. The only thing doing well is YouTube, video content at an all-time high, YouTube Shorts outperforming TikTok four to one. Everything else is a mess, and it’s looking bad on investor calls and to market analysts. It’s doom and gloom for Google, unfortunately.

Olesia: I look for recipes on TikTok only, I can’t use Google or YouTube for that. The videos there are short and precise, you see straight away what to do. And the other day I spent 1,000 dollars on a local ad campaign to see what keywords I could use. A year or two ago, if I spent 1,000 dollars, I would get a list of keywords and some leads. This time I got nothing. When you set up the ads yourself, they don’t let you add the keywords you want, they pick them automatically. You spend the money, they decide on the keywords. And what they gave us was lots of branded traffic from people looking for driving directions to our place, our existing clients. When you try to add negative keywords to eliminate those, they just don’t show your ad at all. Either their way or no way. So I spent 1,000 dollars and got absolutely nothing, and for a small business a thousand dollars is a pretty big sum.

Charles: A hundred percent. The average small business makes something like 30 to 50 thousand dollars a year in profit, so 1,000 dollars is a real percentage of that, it’s pretty crazy. I also think TikTok AI will be game changing if they can figure out video summaries of other videos. If you could type popular things to do in Rome and, instead of watching ten TikToks, get one summary that gives you a bite of each video, that would be absolutely huge. It is interesting with the US law around potentially banning TikTok or forcing a sale, while they refuse to sell the algorithm. Microsoft is one of the key potential partners in buying TikTok, which would be another win for them and a threat to YouTube’s market share. Satya would probably love it, but it might be too much drama and attention, which Microsoft also hates.

Olesia: This one I wanted to ask you for a long time. You had this wonderful presentation in Saigon about backlinks, which got me lots of views because I translated it into Ukrainian, and there you mentioned that from then on you would speak only at your own conferences. Then you made a few conferences, but later, if I remember correctly, you decided to stop running them. What are your conference plans for the future?

Charles: I’ve run quite a few events at this point, and I’ve spoken at nearly 50 conferences. I just don’t get the same ROI from speaking at events anymore. Travelling across the world, creating a presentation, practicing it, spending a couple of days panicking with anxiety about going on stage, and at the end you could get literally nothing, no clients, nobody wanting to work with you. So I don’t want to do that anymore. I’ve been doing Q&As at other people’s conferences instead. I turn up and deliver a Q&A to the audience, and that’s fine because it removes most of the work.

When it came to running my own events, they were good, they were profitable, but it wasn’t enough money for the amount of time and stress. And there are so many events now. We went from five or ten SEO conferences a year to something like 50 or 100 across the world. I saw that one of the biggest players in conferences was WhitePress, running 15 or 16 events a year, and I was already starting to work with them, so I said, look, why don’t I run events through you guys instead. We did our first one in Dubai in February, it sold out, tickets were about 2,000 dollars. We’re going to do another Dubai one next year, and hopefully New York again soon. I don’t do the organization or the stressing. I do a 30-minute keynote, a Q&A and the hosting, I get to choose the speakers, I run masterminds with the people I want to invite, and I get half the profit. It ends up being really good, high-level events.

I think the industry lacks that, for multiple reasons. The main one is that a lot of conferences censor people. You’re not allowed to talk about grey hat, black hat or buying links on stage, even though in the corridor there are ten link companies sponsoring the event and selling links. That doesn’t make sense to me at all. And there are the opinionated people and the toxicity. I like having a space where people can be open and honest, discuss tactics and debate tactics. That’s what we’ve created, and I quite enjoy doing them now, though I wouldn’t do them if I couldn’t do them with WhitePress.

Olesia: Our industry seems one of the friendliest in the world in how people interact, but because we’re all competitors one way or another, sometimes in the same search results, it brings toxicity too. We have lots of vocabulary debates, attribution debates. How do you handle toxicity aimed at you? You must attract lots of it.

Charles: A hundred percent. Number one, if they’re just being spiteful and hating, you don’t reply. Let people shout at a blank wall long enough and they leave and go somewhere else. I don’t block people, I just mute them, so I don’t see them and they can keep shouting at the blank wall. When people are being toxic but opinionated, I try to prove them wrong. The best thing you can do is bring evidence. If you can show that the person is wrong and bring the receipts, people tend to be on your side. A lot of the time I show examples that are the complete opposite of what the person is saying, and because we’re all looking at the same Google and the same SERPs, generally everybody else agrees and it becomes a consensus.

There are still people so opinionated that no amount of evidence will change them. Somebody could be ranked on the Google homepage itself and they still wouldn’t believe it, because belief is such a strong thing. I’m not even going to try with them. And if people try to actively turn a conversation into an argument, especially about politics, I just say, I’m out, I’m not talking about this, goodbye. Immediately you’re on the high ground, because they tried to turn something on you that had no relevance to the debate. So most of the time I’m bringing evidence, not replying, or telling people I’m not talking about X, Y and Z.

Olesia: One last question. SEO itself may not die, but content can be written by content writers who place it themselves if they have instructions. Technical things can be handled by developers with a checklist, or you hire an SEO for two weeks to check everything. For brand campaigns you need decent PR, and the backlinks are handled by the PR or marketing team. I’ve seen a few quite big companies lay off their entire SEO department, hire no one else, and a year later there’s no real impact on their rankings or leads. So maybe SEOs will suffer from companies not needing their services. Should SEOs prepare themselves to become someone else?

Charles: They should start getting the McDonald’s applications ready right now, to be honest. No. Two parts to that. First, most people working on huge corporate websites can’t get anything done anyway, because the decision making isn’t on them. To impact the bottom line of SEO on a DR 90 website you need broad changes, not one blog post. Unless you’re the CMO, who answers only to the CEO and can tell the development department to do this and the design department to do that, you can’t do much. There’s this weird perception that you want to be working in-house at a really big corporate company, when in reality it’s probably one of the worst jobs in SEO, because you don’t get to do the things you were taught to do to actually grow their SEO. And there are still a lot of clients out there that aren’t large corporates, new small and medium businesses growing all the time, a constant new source of clients.

Second, a lot of people forget that SEO is search engine optimization, not Google optimization. We can go back to the good old days of doing search engines that aren’t nearly as complicated as Google. TikTok search, you can still do TikTok SEO and get videos ranking. YouTube SEO, Amazon SEO, eBay SEO, Etsy SEO, Wayfair SEO. There are going to be search engines everywhere, even if people don’t think of them as search engines, like Amazon Alexa and voice search built into apps. Even Gumroad has a search engine you can do SEO for. I proved you can make tens of thousands of dollars a year just ranking products on Gumroad, because I was making that much from ranking my own products there. All these other search engines have way less competition, they’re often growing where Google is shrinking, and nobody else is doing it, so you can be the go-to person. You could be the TikTok SEO girl or the Amazon SEO girl. You pivot, you adapt. That’s part of being an SEO. If you can’t adapt when the industry changes, you shouldn’t be in this industry, because the style you used five years ago will not work now. You have to be constantly learning, constantly testing, constantly innovating, otherwise you aren’t worth what you think you are.

Olesia: I agree a hundred percent. I’m sorry for taking so much of your time. Can you say what you’re working on right now and where people can find you? You have lots of courses and books. Which course is the freshest one?

Charles: In about two hours I’m releasing an update to Parasite SEO Secrets. Google did the May 5th announcement, which turned out to be nothing, it didn’t really change anything in the SERPs, and parasite SEO is still thriving. So I did a two-hour video presentation update going through the announcement, how you can adapt, and how Google hasn’t really done much. That course is still very, very good. Outside of that, my Twitter is probably where I’m most active, I’m @Charles_SEO. There’s my site and training, and Cuppa, the AI SEO tool, where we’re doing AI internal linking, content generation, blog post scheduling, publishing and Zapier integration. It will be the number one AI SEO tool going forward very soon. And I do consulting, CPA sites, my family business, a lot of different projects constantly. I like to be busy.

Olesia: Thank you so much, Charles.

Charles: Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

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About Charles Floate

Charles Floate is a British SEO entrepreneur and blogger, best known for his God of SEO blog and for founding the link building businesses DFY Links and SEO A.I. You can read more on his Fajela profile or visit his personal site.