The Search Engineer's Perspective That Changes Everything

Dennis's job at Yahoo was to protect search results from all the SEO experts trying to game the system. His team members eventually went to work at Google, IPO'd, and made millions. But their goal was always the same: give users the best experience possible.

When someone searches for "bed bug exterminator Houston Texas," who actually deserves to show up? Companies that do good work with real reviews (not fake ones you can buy), real experience, real people who care, real pictures from the city they operate in, fast-loading websites, and social media showing customers love what they do. That's the definition of SEO from a search engine's perspective.

As Dennis put it, "You cannot do SEO. I'm a search engineer. I don't see how anybody can argue with me. I spent nearly 30 years fighting off people who would like to claim otherwise and I don't think I've been defeated yet."

The way to spot fake SEO is simple. If an agency is doing things for search engines instead of users, it's likely a scam. Changing metadata and title tags, working on core web vitals, creating multiple sitemaps, disavowing spammy links, optimizing page titles to be under 65 characters - Google doesn't care about most of this stuff nearly as much as SEO companies claim.

Dennis had lunch a couple months ago in Australia with the head of Google's search quality engineering team. That engineer told him core web vitals are something you work on if you have nothing else to do. Site maps, disavowing links, trimming page titles - these are things for search engines, not users. And search engines don't give credit to signals that don't affect user experience.

The March core update that just happened wiped out millions of websites. Not one has been able to recover. Normally when Google makes an update, you can submit a re-inclusion request claiming you didn't know better, and you might get reinstated. But none of these sites are coming back because they didn't actually change the site to be helpful to users. They just did technical SEO tricks.

Why Home Service Businesses Keep Getting Scammed

Dennis audited a client recently who paid a ridiculous amount for SEO. In five minutes, he found almost nothing had been done. This happens constantly in home services because tradesmen know how to turn a wrench or spray for pests, but they don't know about websites. Some agency says it'll be $8,000 a month for SEO, and they trust it because their friend uses that agency.

The problem is these agencies scam each other. When someone tells you they're on their fourth marketing company, that's not a good sign.

Home service businesses fall for tactics like someone offering 100,000 AI SEO links for $30. That didn't fool Yahoo 20 years ago and doesn't fool Google now. The fakery is easy to spot: if they're doing stuff for search engines instead of users, it's a scam.

Fake tactics work temporarily. You can generate fake links, create citations, set up Google Business Profiles where you don't actually operate. Those work until you get suspended, and once suspended, it's incredibly hard to get reinstated.

If an agency is helping with SEO, are they creating better user experience? Replacing stock photos with actual pictures of you working in Austin? That's helpful. Having location pages include city information and jobs you've done? That's helpful. But if they're just changing metadata and backend technical stuff, Google doesn't care.

The Billion-Dollar Insight About What Google Actually Wants

From Dennis's perspective as a search engineer, the most frustrating thing about local search was how little information existed. There are 78 million local businesses in the United States, and there was almost no information on most of them. No matter how much they crawled social media, blogs, and websites, there just wasn't data on the AC repair place, the chiropractor, the nail salon, or the tree trimming company.

When someone searches "remove dead tree stump Cleveland Ohio," Google only had a few results to show. Big chains would dominate because smaller local businesses were busy handing out door cards and sponsoring Little League teams. Those offline efforts are great, but there was no online presence.

The solution wasn't great SEO or building a website with the latest WordPress theme. It was that there wasn't even information to begin with. Of the information Google had, it wasn't very good. So Google showed what it could find.

This is where local businesses have a massive advantage if they understand how to play the game correctly. The fact that you rank on 10,000 particular queries doesn't mean anything unless you rank on the head term, which is the category plus geo. "Pest control Los Angeles." "HVAC repair Culver City." If you can rank on the head term, you can probably get all the tail terms.

Dennis has empathy and frustration for home service business owners who don't know what's happening. They think they need to hire a social media agency, pay at least $10,000 for a website because the guy who charged $30,000 must have done something special, and avoid the $5,000 website because it's probably made of cardboard. But you can pay $800 for a fantastic website that beats a $100,000 website. Dennis knows because his team has built both.

The reason most agencies charge so much is to accommodate their sales team. When agencies cold call you or you talk to sales reps, those people have to be paid. Customers who sign up have to pay for all the people who didn't become customers, all the overhead and marketing, the CEO's lifestyle, traveling to conferences and sponsoring booths. When the agency owner spends all their time selling, what does that tell you about their time delivering?

The Two-Axis Strategy That Actually Ranks Websites

Dennis explained SEO using a simple grid that completely changed my perspective. Imagine a chart with categories across the top (painting, roofing, landscaping, pest control, massage therapy - all the different business types) and cities across the bottom (Chicago, Nashville, Dallas, LA, Atlanta - all the different locations). That creates a giant 300 by 300 grid.

Your business, if it's single location, is doing pest control in San Diego. You have a vertical line for pest control and a horizontal line for San Diego. That creates a cross. The search engine wants to know you do the thing you say you do (pest control) in the city you say you do it (San Diego).

To establish relevancy according to Google E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), you need to build connections on both axes. Vertically, who else ranks on pest control topics? Other pest control companies. What do pest control folks do? They get together at conferences. They share knowledge. They speak. They publish. They have dinner together and talk shop.

Dennis was the keynote speaker at the National Funeral Directors Association, a room full of 10,000 funeral homes talking about what's happening in their industry. They had multiple tracks covering different aspects of operating a funeral home. If you're a funeral home and you see other funeral homes in different cities doing well, why wouldn't you associate with them? Not to trade links or sell links, but to interview that person on your blog, take a picture with them, or reference their expertise when they invent a new technique.

Google can see neighborhoods. If Google sees you hanging out with other pest control owners, sending your technicians through the same training programs other pest control companies use, or attending the same industry conferences, they can clearly see you're in this industry.

Then horizontally for San Diego, you live there. You know the neighborhoods. You know other businesses. You know the best pizza place. You go to a specific church on Sunday. You take your kids to a particular park on weekends because the cement isn't bumpy. You have relationships with other people and businesses. Maybe the mayor came and cut a ribbon at your grand opening.

Interview these local business leaders. It's easy in your city to interview business leaders, city officials, the leader of the 4-H club, the Rotary, the women's knitting group, the coach of the men's swimming team. When you show Google (really, when you show humans) that you associate with other people in that city, you're establishing the horizontal axis of relevancy.

This creates what Dennis calls "crazy relevancy" in the thing you say you do in the city you say you do it. That's what establishes SEO so you can rank on those geo plus vertical terms like "pest control Nashville Tennessee."

But if Dennis has a client in Nashville and he doesn't know anything about Nashville, has no connections there, how likely can he convince Google he knows something about Nashville? It's going to be pretty hard. But if that client's been in Nashville for years, grew up there, can tell you Amazon built their second headquarters there, likes to go to the Grand Ole Opry, loves Nashville hot chicken, and can show through pictures on their phone that they actually do the thing they say they do - someone like me can take that proof and arrange it in the right way that both people and Google will respect.

The AI Revolution That Killed Traditional SEO Forever

Something happened a few weeks ago that almost nobody in the SEO industry noticed. Google has quality raters who manually look at search results and score them against a 170-page guideline that Google publishes. These are full-time workers going through top web pages scoring them for quality.

Dennis asked me how many quality raters I thought Google employed. I guessed 1,000. The actual number? 30,000. These people were doing what's called "manual actions" - manually reviewing sites and issuing penalties.

A couple weeks ago, Google laid off almost all of them. This caused some uproar in the SEO community because it means Google is now using AI to do what human quality raters were doing. Google's Gemini AI has a context window of 1 million tokens. The 170-page quality rater guideline is maybe 75,000 to 100,000 tokens. The AI can easily hold that entire guideline and apply it better than 30,000 humans.

Google has been waiting for this day. They got rid of those people, and now the AI is doing it. Because the AI can do more work than 30,000 humans, manual penalties are occurring faster. That's why SEO spammers are running scared.

Dennis compared it to the IRS. If the IRS only had 10 agents, everyone would cheat on their tax returns because they'd never get caught. But with 70,000 agents (or however many they actually have), you don't want to get audited. Now imagine they have a million agents because AI is doing the work. The penalty for misbehaving is much higher.

In closed-door meetings with Google engineers a couple months ago, they told Dennis they can detect ChatGPT content. They won't say it publicly because it'll cause an uproar, but they can detect it. Are you listening?

People have been emailing and messaging Dennis for the last couple weeks saying "what do we do?" because tactics that worked for several years just stopped working. Auto-generating fake location service pages, using spinning tools to write blog posts, going to Fiverr for cheap content, repurposing stuff from Reddit - all these tactics that made people millions of dollars died last month.

For years, these people mocked Dennis at SEO conferences saying "Google's dumb and I've been doing this for years and they've never caught me." Dennis kept saying "they're going to catch you." And they have. It's just a matter of time.

The Search Generative Experience That's Already Here

Search results used to be 10 blue links. Now when you search "eagles," it could be the Philadelphia Eagles, the rock band, how high a bald eagle can fly, pictures, videos, Wikipedia, Twitter mentions - all kinds of results.

Ten years ago, Google implemented Universal Search. Now you can filter to just videos, news, "people also ask," ads, or map results. These categories use schema.org markup to categorize everything on web pages.

The objects form what's called the Knowledge Graph. Dennis and I are molecules. We had Korean barbecue yesterday. If he tags me on Instagram, he creates an association between him, me, and that restaurant.

Instead of 10 blue links, there's now only one page. Even ranking position 97 is technically on the first page. Dennis demonstrated this by tweeting something, searching his name, and having it show up instantly at the top.

Google is releasing Search Generative Experience (SGE), rolling out in the US now and widely available by end of 2024. If you search "Dennis Yu," you see colored knowledge panels. What's position one, two, or three? You can't determine it. There's no positioning anymore.

Those knowledge panels showing up on people and companies will apply to any object. Within a year, search moves to dynamic knowledge panels. If you follow what Dennis teaches, you won't be wiped out because you'll show up in the Knowledge Graph through real relationships, customer interactions, pictures, videos, reviews, and connections with other businesses in your city and industry.

The Content Harvesting Strategy That Builds Authority

Pest control companies don't need to become influencers. You need to show Google proof that you do what you say you do.

Have technicians take pictures and encourage customers to leave reviews mentioning your service and their city. Instead of "Dan did a great job," they say "Dan sprayed for ants in Redmond Washington, where we have a lot of ants." Google has said that when customers mention the city and service, it counts more than when you say it.

You need to harvest content, not create it. Have your people document what they're doing and put it in a shared drive. A 5-minute video of the technician driving to a job and narrating what they're doing becomes the source. Take stills from videos for pictures.

That raw content gets turned into tweets, LinkedIn posts, Instagrams, TikToks, blog posts, and GMB updates. You produce it once and format it for each platform. This creates what Jason Barnard calls an "overwhelming corroborative signal." When Google sees consistent information about who you are across LinkedIn, Twitter, your GMB, your website, and customer reviews, it trusts you.

The Dollar a Day Testing Strategy That Amplifies Winners

Dollar a day is taking something good (you doing good work, saying thank you, demonstrating expertise) and putting a dollar behind it to let platforms test whether that content works.

If you test 10 pieces of content, you're likely to have one work. How do you know if it works? If engagement hits at least 10%. On every platform, if people are stopping to watch your video and the algorithm sees high engagement, you can put $2 a day against it.

Dennis has spent a million dollars a day on content for companies like Rosetta Stone. That's how he spent a billion dollars - a dollar at a time. Find a winner, then put $10,000 a day against it. But he tests first for a dollar a day.

Test each piece of content for a dollar a day for seven days. That's $7 per piece. When you find a winner, you have the signal.

When you do dollar a day against content, it furthers the signal to Google. Dennis verified this with Google engineers. When Google sees people actually engaging on your content - on your site, on YouTube, other places - that improves the search signal. It's the number one search signal, ahead of links and page speed.

Using ads won't hurt you if you run Facebook ads to get people to your website where they have a good experience. Google doesn't care about the traffic source. They care whether users get their questions answered. But if you send bad traffic that bounces immediately, it hurts you.

My Main Takeaway

1. You cannot "do SEO" because SEO is a result, not an action. Dennis spent 30 years as a search engineer fighting off people trying to game the system, and his perspective is definitive: you don't do SEO just like you don't do weight loss. You eat properly, sleep well, exercise, and take supplements, and the result is weight loss. With SEO, you take care of customers, train your people well, get reviews, make your website fast, answer questions helpfully, and build real relationships in your industry and city. The result is you rank in Google. If an agency is doing things for search engines instead of users (changing metadata, optimizing title tags, working on core web vitals, creating multiple sitemaps), it's likely a scam. The March core update wiped out millions of websites and not one has recovered because they didn't actually make their sites helpful to users. They just did technical tricks. Google's head of search quality told Dennis that core web vitals are something you work on if you have nothing else to do.

   
   

2. Google just laid off almost all of their 30,000 quality raters and replaced them with AI, which means the era of getting away with SEO tricks is permanently over. These quality raters were full-time workers manually reviewing websites against Google's 170-page guideline and issuing penalties. Google's Gemini AI has a context window of 1 million tokens and can easily hold that entire guideline and apply it better than 30,000 humans. Manual penalties are now occurring faster than ever before. In closed-door meetings, Google engineers told Dennis they can detect ChatGPT content (they won't say it publicly). Tactics that worked for years just died last month: auto-generating fake location pages, using spinning tools for blog posts, buying cheap Fiverr content, repurposing Reddit posts. People who made millions doing this are now scrambling. Dennis has been warning for years that Google would catch these tactics, and they finally have. Within a year, search will move entirely to dynamic knowledge panels through Search Generative Experience (SGE), and if you're not building real relationships and creating genuine content, you'll be completely wiped out.

   
   

3. The two-axis strategy for ranking is building vertical relevance in your industry and horizontal relevance in your city. Imagine a grid with business categories across the top (pest control, roofing, landscaping, etc.) and cities across the bottom (Chicago, Dallas, LA, etc.). Your business creates a cross at pest control and your city. To establish vertical relevance, connect with other pest control companies outside your market by interviewing them, attending industry conferences, referencing their expertise, and showing Google you're in this industry through relationships with other professionals. To establish horizontal relevance, interview local business leaders, city officials, Rotary club members, coaches, anyone in your community, and show through pictures and content that you actually operate in that city. When you combine both axes, you create what Dennis calls "crazy relevance" in the thing you say you do in the city you say you do it. This is how you rank on head terms like "pest control Nashville Tennessee" instead of just random long-tail keywords that don't drive business.

   
   

4. Content harvesting beats content creation because you're already doing the work, you just need to document it and repurpose it everywhere. You don't need to become an influencer dancing on TikTok or live streaming constantly. Have your technicians take 5-minute videos as they drive to jobs and narrate what they're doing, just like TV shows where people fix houses. Put all that raw footage in a shared drive, then have VAs or an agency turn it into tweets, LinkedIn posts, Instagram content, TikToks, YouTube videos, blog posts, and Google Business Profile updates. You produce the content once and format it slightly differently for each platform. This creates what Jason Barnard calls an "overwhelming corroborative signal" where Google sees the same information about who you are and what you do reinforced across LinkedIn, Twitter, your GMB, your website, customer reviews, and mentions from other local businesses. You're not trying to trick Google, you're training Google by making it crystal clear which objects you're associated with and what you do.

   
   

5. The dollar-a-day testing strategy finds winning content by spending $7 per piece to see what resonates, then amplifying winners with real budget. Take 10 pieces of content (Randy the technician, your favorite local spots, talking about bugs, whatever) and test each for a dollar a day for seven days. When engagement hits at least 10%, you've found a winner. Then you can put $2, $10, or even $10,000 a day against it depending on your budget and results. Dennis spent a billion dollars this way for companies like Rosetta Stone, Starbucks, and Ashley Furniture by finding winners first. When you run ads against content that gets engagement, it sends signals to Google that people are actually finding value in your content. Google engineers confirmed to Dennis that engagement is the number one search signal, ahead of links and page speed. Running Facebook ads to get people to your website where they have a good experience learning about pests actually helps your SEO. But if you send bad traffic that bounces immediately, it hurts you. Ads amplify whatever quality you already have.

You can find Dennis Yu everywhere online just by searching his name. He's constantly repurposing the same content across all platforms, which is exactly what he teaches. Dennis works with agency owners like me to help us deliver real results for clients without the tricks and scams that plague the industry. His focus is on amplifying businesses that already do good work, because as he says, if you suck at singing, switching from a 20-watt amplifier to a 100-watt amplifier won't make you sound better. SEO is an amplifier for businesses that already provide value, already have good reviews, already have trained technicians doing quality work. If you have that foundation, strategies like what Dennis teaches can get you massive visibility. Without that foundation, no amount of SEO will help.