We Discuss The Very Changing Face of SEO in 2025 With Special Guest Jono Alderson
Stay ahead of the game! Discover the crucial SEO trends for 2025 and learn how to adapt your strategy with our special guest, Jono Alderson.
This video delves into the rapidly evolving landscape of SEO as we approach 2025. Join us as we explore emerging trends, algorithm shifts, and the impact of AI on search engine optimization strategies. We’ll provide insights from industry experts and practical tips to help you stay ahead in this dynamic field. Don’t miss out on vital information—watch the video now to future-proof your SEO efforts.
#1 – Jono, can you give the tribe more detailed information on how you got into SEO and WordPress?
#2 – What do you see as a couple of the biggest trends in SEO over the next 18 months?
#3 – What were some of the biggest surprises you had working for Yoast BV?
#4 – Do you still see WordPress as one of the best website-building platforms connected to SEO, and if yes, why?
#5— Are there any AI tools or services you have been using remotely or regularly that you would like to share with the WP-Tonic tribe?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give?
This Week’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
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Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 958. In this episode, we will discuss the changing face of SEO and online content in 2025. We’ve got a true expert. We’ve got Jono Anderson with us. He formerly worked for Yosef and is seen as an authentic influencer in the SEO scene. It should be a fabulous discussion. So, Jono, can you give the tribe a quick 10- 20-minute intro, and then when we go into the central part of the show, we will delve into your background in a bit more detail, Jono.
[00:00:57.220] – Jono Alderson
Sure. I was ready for 20 20-minute intro. That’s going to be quite extensive.
[00:01:01.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Twenty-second.
[00:01:01.920] – Jono Alderson
We have had almost 20-minute intros from some of the guests. Impressive. I don’t know if I’ve got that much interesting stuff. I started as a bedroom web developer 100 years ago before discovering WordPress and building websites for small businesses, Butchers, Bakers, etc. Fell into the agency world, learned about politics and clients and business and consulting, spent some time at some tool vendors doing big data crunching stuff before that was cool, and then spent five years at Yoast, where I joined as a special project, an R&D to do what should our roadmap look like. By that time, I was running product and SEO. How do you build Yost for 13 million websites on three platforms? Yeah, super fun.
[00:01:52.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s a great intro. And I got my ever-patient co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself? You look a bit happier today, Kurt.
[00:02:03.020] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m going to be a little more transparent. I fasted last week, I fasted a day this week, and I’m down about 12 pounds.
[00:02:12.290] – Jono Alderson
I got a lightness in my step.
[00:02:15.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
What can I say?
[00:02:16.160] – Jonathan Denwood
He looks mean. He looks mean and slim, folks. So there you go. Not yet. Like I said, we will have a great discussion about SEO. We always do this around 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time. And if you ever want to, you can always join the conversation with your questions. You go to the WP Tonic YouTube channel and see the live show there. You can join us live with your questions and contributions if they’re shareable. But before we go into this main interview, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we’ve got a fabulous list of the best WordPress plugins and services for WordPress professionals, plus some special offers from the sponsors. It’s a great resource. It will save you a load of time and money. You can find all these goodies by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more could you ask for, my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get on that page. I’ve made a career of disappointing people.
[00:03:53.140] – Jonathan Denwood
It always makes most people smile when I say that, Jono, but I don’t know. Jono, let’s just delve in. You provided a bit of insight into your background. Let’s jump forward, then. What led you to work with Yost? How did you get involved with the mammoth that was Yoast?
[00:04:19.890] – Jono Alderson
Sure. I think I had a threatening thought. I’ve been working with WordPress for years. I discovered it, I think, around 2005. I’d been working with an agency that had built its own CMS, and it was awful and a nightmare to work with. Then I’d worked in a bunch of agencies.
[00:04:37.460] – Jonathan Denwood
I worked for an agency that did that. That was so kind. They just loved it. They thought it was the bee’s knees. It was terrible as well.
[00:04:48.910] – Jono Alderson
It keeps people employed, doesn’t it? Reinventing and fixing the wheel over and over again. I think that’s a big part of the problem.
[00:04:54.190] – Jonathan Denwood
Every true developer thinks their intern is the best.
[00:04:58.600] – Jono Alderson
Oh, just build a CMS. See you this week.
[00:05:01.000] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s easy. I’m just going to do it in half.
[00:05:03.290] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, so there was a bit of that. So I felt the pain of what does not working with WordPress look like. And on the side, we’re still building small business websites using WordPress. It was revolutionary. Custom post types were amazing. This was all incredible. Plugin ecosystem was great. And still find myself fighting against all these non-wordpress sites we were building an agency while it was super frustrating. So I gave a conference talk, I think in maybe 2013 at a big event where I was saying, here’s all the frustrations and here’s the gap. If you’re marketing people or SEO people, here’s how to understand how bad the thing you have is and all the good things WordPress do and how you then take that even further. And I think in that talk, I’d said, Don’t use Yoast because all your competitors are using Yost, and it gets them to 80 % out of the box. But then they stop thinking because they’ve got the basics in place. So nobody’s competing in the gap between 80 % and 100 %. And I was saying, You really to apply critical thinking, build from scratch, do all yourself, which was mad in hindsight.
[00:06:04.830] – Jono Alderson
But it got me on the radar of Yoster Balk, founder of Yoster, as a naysayer and hypocrite, and then bumped into him over the course of various years and various events and So we stopped talking and very quickly drunk the WordPress Kool-Aid, having come at it from an outsider and realized that actually the- You became part of the cult, did you? Absolutely, yeah. And I don’t know whether I still am. It’s quite interesting. But yeah, I took the Kool-Aid, I wore the sandals, and I think- Drunk the Kool-Aid, you were around the campfire, sitting in the WordPress song. Yeah, and Because I found so much of what motivated me was frustration about how bad most of the web was, and I was getting irritated with the things that I was seeing being built and irritated with the things I was auditing. And I became a bit obsessed about what if everybody was just one % better? And what if we just The number of clients who hand-built an XML site map from scratch when this is a solved problem, just install the plugin. I found myself saying that more and more often. And then it got to the point where I started saying, Oh, can we just make the plugin itself a bit better?
[00:07:13.470] – Jono Alderson
Can we do these things? And then Yeah, fate came along and I ended up then having to do the work to make it better and improve the things across the board. Yeah.
[00:07:22.830] – Jonathan Denwood
So you become a bit of voice around SEO, and then you met the founder, you gelled with him, and then Then the position came around or did he offer you a position?
[00:07:33.970] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, we invented a position. He was looking to do less public speaking and travel, which was something I was doing prolifically at the time. I was speaking at maybe two events a month around Europe and on the road constantly. And he was wanting to do less of that, which is important in the SEO space because so much of it is driven by whose opinion do you trust? In a space where there are no codified rules and it is all just opinion and testing. There a bit of a cult of cult of personality that goes on. So that was a big part of the role. But then also it’s such a fast moving space. And I think that’s trueer than ever, that it really needed another set of brains and eyes to go, what should we be building not just for tomorrow, but for three years from now? And how do you get that bet right? Because there’s so much changes week on week. How do you know what good looks like? So yeah, there was a lot of time spent doing ideation for roadmaps stuff and working out what the core direction was. And should we get on board this Gutenberg bandwagon?
[00:08:35.100] – Jono Alderson
And how much time do we want to invest in that? And is that the future of content editing? Maybe. So yeah, super interesting.
[00:08:40.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, there you go. Nothing’s changed. No, nothing is changed. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:08:48.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m listening to it and I heard the cult personality. I heard sitting around the fire pit, being part of the cult, and then wondering if you were still part of the cult, which seems to be a lot of people are in that wondering space right now. I want to switch gears, though, because if we’re going to talk about SEO, I feel like my own personal experience I do like an SEO search on my agency or on one of my projects, and I get a certain result. And then I go to Groch or AI or let’s say, Perplexity, and I ask a question, and I get a different result. And people seem to be spouting things like SEO is dead or all these weird things. What do you see as the next biggest trends in SEO over the next, just say, a year to a year and a half?
[00:09:41.050] – Jono Alderson
Sure. I think about this a lot, and I’m talking about it a lot on stages. I think that SEO, the way we typically thought about it, at least in terms of how small to medium businesses have thought about it, is very much dead. I think that content marketing, in particular, as a phrase, is something that we need to put away now. I think so many websites are built, designed and built, created and managed without really much thought to what is the role of the content on this thing. And if we look at the rise of AI, the lowering threshold of effort to create a business and sell things online, the commodification of everything, then what is left that helps you determine, should I buy from this business or that business? It’s their narrative, it’s their story, it’s their opinions, it’s the things that they do and stand for beyond just fulfilling, I want to buy this product to get this service. And in theory, the way that we communicate that to an audience is the content, right? But you look at the reality and everybody has a terrible blog that is full of terrible articles because they’ve been told that they should do some keyword research and they should pick this subset of keywords and they should get the intern to decide on these and they should publish two articles a week and have it written by an author called Admin that’s completely untrustworthy and doesn’t They say anything that is in any way meaningful or differentiated from any of their minimum competitors who’ve gone through the same process.
[00:11:06.150] – Jono Alderson
And all of these websites have content that doesn’t connect with the consumer, doesn’t tell a story, doesn’t actually help or answer anyone’s questions. But that has worked until now, right? That has meant that you rank for some keywords and maybe you attract a thousand visitors, and you managed to convert 2% of those to filling in your form. And that very much was the whole model until fairly recently. And Now what’s changed is over the last maybe two years or so, we’ve really seen Google ramp up how often it just solves people’s questions in situ. So if I’m searching for basic questions with known answers that don’t require a rocket scientist or original thought, it will just give me the information. So then the whole economic pillar of I’m going to do keyword research, publish content, get it called, get it discovered, get it indexed, get it ranked, drive traffic, drive conversions just stops working because Google will stop sending that traffic because it has no incentive to. So that gets us to yesterday. The next bit I think is super interesting because it’s that, but even worse, which is there are so many topics, so many bits of human knowledge and types of searches where Google now understands the problem well enough that it doesn’t need any new content.
[00:12:18.570] – Jono Alderson
So I think recipes is a really good example for this. I think there are only so many ways you can combine all the ingredients on the planet using all the techniques, which don’t change particularly often, to create, say, a lasagna. So where historically I might have gone, I’m going to do some keyword research, I’m going to do this lasagne recipe, Google doesn’t want that or need it. And even more than that, if I do search for blueberry, risotto, salmon, lasagna, which I definitely shouldn’t because that would be obnoxious, but they can synthesize a recipe on the fly because they understand that problem space well enough to not need content as an input. And we start to see this happening more and more often in more and more spaces. If I’m searching for holidays, I will search for longer, more complex queries because Google will train me that it can just solve my answers in situ because it has enough an understanding of the inventory of the content on the web to not need a third party intermediary. So the days of publishing content to try and drive keyword centered traffic to try and convert some of it are well and truly done, which is pretty scary because nobody seems to be particularly clear on what happens next or how you incentivize businesses and publishers to produce truly useful and new content if Google is just going to summarize it or ChatGPT is just going to summarize it, et cetera.
[00:13:38.070] – Jono Alderson
Because I’m talking a lot about Google, but it’s the same principle of these other systems. They are disintermediating. While we’re Obviously, we’ve relied on websites. I want to search a thing, I want to pick a website, I want to get my answer. All of that process disappears. So now I just have this omniscient supercomputer cutting out all the research process for me, almost going as far as making my decisions on my behalf, which is the next step we get to with agents, right? So how do you do SEO? And I think the hard answer that everybody starts to come to realize is that you actually need to build a brand, and you actually need your content to win hearts and minds not to convince and convert. And that means authentically producing and providing resources of giving your best expertise away for free, of helping an audience six months before they enter a research in a buying cycle, of running billboards so that you influence what and how and when they search before they search, and already having convinced the machine that you’re the right fit for an audience before they search. And this is a super hard pill to swallow because you can’t outsource any of that.
[00:14:44.930] – Jono Alderson
And You can’t mechanize any of that, and you can’t just have a blog and publish some articles and ChatGPT produce that. So yeah, I think a lot of businesses are going to find that they are burning money on doing types of SEO that no longer works.
[00:15:00.270] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m listening to you, and my brain is transcribing three different events in my head, which happens to me a lot.
[00:15:08.610] – Jonathan Denwood
Especially when he’s working with me, Jolo.
[00:15:11.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
I am seeing what I consider to be these scams in my whatever social feed. It’s going to be some short video where some dude is like, hyped up on 20 cups of coffee and he’s saying, content marketing is dead. You don’t need courses, you don’t need webinars. You don’t need this. I’m going to show you the secret. Click here.
[00:15:32.540] – Jono Alderson
Buy my book. Yeah, and it’s a book about how to sell books to people who want to buy books on Dinda.
[00:15:37.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I’ll be honest, I’ve got some clients where their whole model is helping people publish their first book. It’s like, okay, well, we see that that exactly hasn’t gone so well either. When I think about new people coming to market that don’t have the advantage of a brand or recognition, a name, it’s very, very I have been in the podcast game for over five years, and I’m finally getting recognized, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of skin in the game. Do you think, and if you answer me, it’s going to be weird, but I’ve actually gone back to get involved in the chamber of commerce, get involved in the network, person to person, handshakes, networking, communicating through LinkedIn as a person to person. But it’s not what customers want to hear. Here. I run a WordPress agency and people want me to work with their website.
[00:16:34.320] – Jono Alderson
Yeah.
[00:16:34.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I don’t have the magic.
[00:16:37.750] – Jono Alderson
No. And this is a huge problem in the whole SEO industry. I’ve been talking recently about broadening the scope of SEO in the same way. But yeah, the market and the audience don’t want to hear it. Quite often, the best SEO advice I might be able to give is improve the packaging of your products, because when people have a good experience with getting it, they might be more likely to socially share, they might be more likely to recommend, they might be more likely to link, but it’s more likely that you get a whole bunch of second order effects that influence how Google and ChatGPT perceive how people perceive your brand. All of that is quite abstract and it’s quite disconnected from what HTML should I have on my web pages. But that’s less important. That said, the thing I think that smaller businesses and new businesses definitely can do to compete is niche down and move fast and have a better website. I spend a lot of time doing enterprise-level consultancy for big companies, and all of their websites are garbage. Objectively bad, full of errors, slow as hell, poorly maintained. Nobody knows who owns which bit.
[00:17:41.280] – Jono Alderson
If you want to make a change over here, it will take two years and they’ll get it wrong. Whereas if you’re a small business or a new business, you can go, right, I’m on WordPress, I can install a plugin, I can start a community, I can change my contact form system, I can do a piece of research and I can present it really nicely with a block editor. Instead of trying to be the best bakery in the world, I can be the best I know, vegan chocolate cupcake bakery. You can change, you can pivot, you can do all those things. I don’t think you can compete at scale without an established brand, but you can create a laser focus smaller brand and you can move fast. And to your point, I think people will buy from people more than ever now. I think that’s more important continues to be. And Google have clocked this. For years, they’ve had this EEAT set of recommendations where experience, expertise, authority, and trust are super important, not because they’re- I’m sure Google says a lot of things, don’t they? Yeah, but this I buy, right? I think they’re quite- They’re a bit dodgy on a bunch of stuff.
[00:18:38.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Anything those coproaches say, I take it with a pinch of salt myself.
[00:18:42.690] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, no, for sure. They’re definitely looking up for their interest. And I think part of why they’re pushing this so hard is because it does allow them to sort through the AI generated slot and the other stuff. But I think there is something of a good ideology to it, which is on how does a small business compete and how do you compete if reputation and that personal thing is the only thing that matters? I think there is value in having a blog that isn’t just articles, but is in fact, differentiated opinion that is funny or divisive or original research or something that’s creating value and that’s attached to a real human with a face.
[00:19:19.750] – Jonathan Denwood
I just want to put this to you because fundamentally, I agree with your outlook and the key things you’re saying, but I also take it not specifically targeting or attacking what you’ve outlined, because a lot of what you’ve outlined, I agree with the medium long term, but I like, let’s take WordPress. Now, yes, search traffic through articles has reduced because of what you outlined. The basic questions are being answered without going to a website. But it really… But one of the biggest… How to put this without me being sued? One of the biggest of values of online answers in WordPress has a network of plugins. Yes. The actual content is absolute shit, and it’s been shit for years. I don’t see any sign that Google’s really attacking this parasite. And he’s not doing anything illegal. It’s all gray hat, internal link networks.
[00:20:42.950] – Jono Alderson
If you have 10 big websites and they all just happen to endorse each other in a way that feels.
[00:20:47.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, you know. But the actual… You’re saying, and I’ve heard this for years, Oh, the content has to be a bit quality. And then I look at this Co-Roach and what he’s doing, and I think, I’ll give it a break. And I I’ve gone to so many SEO conferences and heard this nonsense. And then I see in practice this company and what it’s up to that dominates in WordPress, and he’s just an absolute roach of an individual, and everybody that works for him is a cockroach, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s my opinion, folks. So it doesn’t add up, basically.
[00:21:29.200] – Jono Alderson
No, agreed. It’s one of the great frustrations that… I spend a lot of my time saying, Here is what good looks like exactly for the medium for long term, on the premise that you can cheat the system. There are tactics you can use which will-I don’t think it’s cheap, no.
[00:21:42.730] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t agree with… I think Google are well aware. They just don’t really care, basically. I don’t think Google cares it.
[00:21:52.760] – Jono Alderson
Well, they don’t care who wins as long as there is a winner, right? Because they can’t penalize all the bad stuff because then there’s entire industries where there’s nothing and they can’t return an empty page. I do see a lot more brands, a lot more websites, not brands, getting smacked down recently over the last year or so, which is quite therapeutic. But yeah, there are people who get away with it who just shouldn’t, and it is very frustrating that they continue to do so. Hopefully, at some point, that all goes wrong.
[00:22:21.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, the other area before we go for a break is I think I got penalized because I got very aggressive, but I’ve managed to get about half of my traffic back by doing various things. But also about brand, I know it’s like with YouTube, I’ve become very big on YouTube and I put a lot of effort into it, and the audience is growing quite substantially for my YouTube channel. But I know it’s a behavior of mine, and I don’t think I’m a bit wacko, but not too wacko. I know it’s on the YouTube, I consume… I don’t watch American television because there’s only so many true crimes and murders I can watch. Because if you watch American television, you just want to commit suicide straight away. But I’m a consumer of something much worse, which is YouTube. Talk about a doom loop. But I notice that if I sense that the YouTube video is being made offshore and they’re using AI, I tend to unsubscribe from the channel. There are some channels that are using AI in a very creative way in comedy, in satire, a bit like spitting image. I do subscribe to a couple of these channels because they’re very creative.
[00:24:09.510] – Jonathan Denwood
But in general, the channels that have got, obviously, AI voiceover and a mismash of images and videos. If I sense it’s AI, I unsubscribe. I want somebody that’s a personalizing influencer. Am I peculiar? And is that around what you mean by brand? Is that people want a person or a small group of people that they really trust their opinion on?
[00:24:44.850] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, that I think for now, certainly whilst we’re in this uncanny valley phase with AI, I definitely think that’s true. Whether or not it remains true in the long term is interesting. I think certainly in some of the adult sectors, you see some incredible rises of fake people and fake influences, not even fake, but artificial influences who have huge subscriberships. So I think, yes, definitely the idea that I subscribe to an individual or a group whose opinions I trust, who will guide me and keep me safe is a huge interesting. And where historically that’s been big brands, now we can be more smaller and localized and specialized. I think YouTube is a really good example for this. I will follow channels because I can rely on the publisher of that channel to create content that I know that I like, that will be Yadi Yadi. But I I think maybe as we get more used to AI, it becomes more normal for those people to be synthetic as well. Who knows? That’s an interesting future. It’s an interesting point, I think, on YouTube and beyond in general, that part of the whole SEO thing forever has been, how do I get more traffic to my website?
[00:25:51.690] – Jono Alderson
But as that becomes less of a thing because there’s less traffic and fewer clicks to come around, I think there’s definitely needs to be more of a shift to, how do I get more engagement with my content? And that might be on YouTube, it might be on Google Discover, it might be in Google Merchant Center. And that’s increasingly… And WordPress has an interesting role to play here as a hub for where does this content live and where is it published? And maybe it’s the center of an ecosystem. But then you start to think even further, it gets super interesting because then you got to say, what is a search engine? Because is Reddit a search engine? Is TikTok a search engine? Is Amazon? Is Tinder a search engine? All of these things have people searching and problem solving. My content might need to be there.
[00:26:31.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Especially TikTok, isn’t it? Because it’s an area that I… For somebody of my age, I think I’m reasonably sophisticated about social media. But TikTok, I’m not engaged. Well, I say that I’m not engaged in Instagram, but I understand it. But TikTok, but there’s a whole business, a whole e-commerce business is. Their whole strategy is based on TikTok, is it not?
[00:27:02.080] – Jono Alderson
Yes, and it’s quite transient. So my wife’s very deeply into TikTok, so I don’t have to be. But we got a dog a couple of years ago. We’ve spent a huge amount of money on things for the dog that she has discovered, researched, engaged with I was built loyalty to certain publishers, et cetera, on TikTok, spent money with, and decked out our dog food, clothing leads, et cetera. Journeys that would historically have happened on search engines, and there would have been clicks to websites, Is all of that now happening on TikTok. And I think WordPress has missed the boat a bit on this, that there is a role for a website in that ecosystem somewhere where you’re driving traffic back. Maybe these transient platforms are very good for discovery and maybe brand awareness and loyalty, but you still want to be maybe bringing stuff back into your central plan, maybe the other way around. But yeah, it feels like there should be a relationship there, and we just missed the boat entirely.
[00:27:57.020] – Jonathan Denwood
I hope the dog you bought was a British Bulldog.
[00:27:59.570] – Jono Alderson
I know it’s Dachun. She’s a tiny little-You got to get a British Bulldog.
[00:28:06.480] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to go for our break, folks. It’s been a fabulous discussion. I’ve really enjoyed it with Jono so far. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a fabulous discussion with Jono Anderson. Before we go into the second half, I just want to point out, if you’re a web freelancer, developer, and you’re taking on a large membership community project and you’re looking for a great hosting partner, and a great back-end partner as well that’s got a ton of experience in building these larger websites, why don’t you look at partnership with WP Tonic? We’ve got some fabulous packages for you. We all know we take on a really large project in a niche area, and it’s a bit nerve-wracking. But if you’re looking for a great partner, we’re the people that’s got the experience. You can find more by going over to WP-Tonic. Com. Wp-tonic. Com/partners. Wp-tonic. Com/partners. Let’s build something special together. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:29:27.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, so far, I’m really enjoying this interview, Jono. So thanks for coming.
[00:29:32.200] – Jono Alderson
No, thanks for having me.
[00:29:33.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m going to switch gears just a hair, and I want to get… Everyone’s probably wondering, oh, my God, he worked for Joost. He worked for Joost. He worked for Joost. Everyone knows what Joost is in the WordPress space. So spill the beans, man. What were some of the biggest surprises you had working at Joost?
[00:29:52.000] – Jono Alderson
Super interesting. Yeah, there’s a few. I think one was just how complex it is to support a large plugin that is broadly used across the ecosystem. So I think when I left, when I joined, we were on 10 million websites. When I left, it was about 13. And that really is every conceivable combination of hardware, software, hosting, plugin, theme, etc. And the amount of work required even to ship a simple filter, the most trivial level of WordPress development you can imagine. I just want a one-line thing that just changes this to this. The amount of hardening and testing, not just in development, but in ours. We had teams of people firing up instances of every conceivable combination of these things and going, does it work? Does it break? All the setting scripts. The mechanization of that process, absolutely incredible. That speaks, I think, more to how brutal bits of WordPress are than necessarily to how sophisticated Yose was as a company. But yeah, that was quite fascinating. That’s my first real deep dive into the WordPress ecosystem, having mostly just been a casual user. That was fascinating.
[00:31:06.170] – Kurt von Ahnen
I work a lot with Lifter LMS directly, and the user base there will say, We need this integration or we want this feature. This button should be periwinkle.
[00:31:19.040] – Jono Alderson
Then three months later, they’re like, How’s it coming with my request?
[00:31:24.050] – Kurt von Ahnen
Their expectation is that there’s a on call.
[00:31:28.070] – Jonathan Denwood
Your request is in a black hole never to be dead. And to your point, it’s like you have to make sure it works with everything.
[00:31:37.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
But the responsibility is huge. Was part of that surprise for you just recognizing the turnaround time on things? Was it magnified?
[00:31:48.940] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, it was huge. It would take us months to ship something that I could code in 20 minutes. And not because of anybody’s failings or that anyone was told the processes were broken, just that those processes needed to exist because the cost of shipping something that breaks stuff, even if it only breaks, I don’t know, 0. 1% of your user sites, that’s still thousands of support emails. The fact that the support team was so big and so constantly in motion, there’s this big clockwork system of people responding to emails and routing to help articles, etc. At a scale which was quite incredible because stuff inevitably slips through the gap. So it turns out that there’s this edge case with Elementor when you’ve also got this thing installed, the idea that you can’t possibly anticipate. And you can’t test for because you can’t have every combination of all the things. So that was super interesting. And we had armies of people on rotation and quite a sophisticated set up in Slack and GitHub and eventually Jira, where everything talk to each other and there’s pipelines and workflows for all of this. So I think what was quite interesting was that Yost’s brand looks quite cutesy deliberately because it’s designed to have a certain appeal in the market.
[00:33:01.430] – Jono Alderson
But there was quite a sophisticated development and DevOps pipeline behind that. We were doing really smart stuff with Cloudflare and Edgeworkers and our own systems and platforms for things like, how does the licensing engine work? And how do we dog food our own stuff so our own site is perfect and lightning fast, etc. So, yeah, the dichotomy of cutesy-cutesy cartoons and then this very sophisticated workhorse behind it was quite cool. What I thought, I found one of the other things that was super interesting was just how How will people actually manage their websites? I think one of the things we struggled with, and I’m sure they still do, is if you just install the plugin and turn it on, it definitely helps make your technical SEO and foundations better. But it certainly won’t help you compete or differentiate or cut through the market because you’ve got to do. You’ve got to actually… The optimized bit is like an active verb. And people don’t even log in. They just have websites. They’re not updating plugins. They’re not going in writing content. They’re not strategising. They don’t even log in. So much of our… We had a couple of what the percentages were, but a significant amount of people who didn’t renew their premium subscriptions after the first year because they weren’t seeing any value because they’d never turned it on.
[00:34:12.930] – Jono Alderson
They’d never configured. The thing and hadn’t even understood that they needed to install it or use it or go in and click on it. And drop offs at all stages of that funnily. It’s not just that there was a bad or a missing email. It’s that legitimately people don’t seem to comprehend that they need to go into the BP admin and do stuff, even just to configure the plugin and to go, yes, I have uploaded my logo. Yes, I have named my organization. Yes, I have. Like fundamental basics. So that was quite surprising. And I think that’s a broader challenge with WordPress, the onboarding process is so bad, the discovery process is so bad. People aren’t incentivized to actively manage those sites. I think Jostabalk at the moment is talking a lot about it’s a very good content publishing system, arguably, but a terrible content management system, and I quite like that narrative.
[00:35:04.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was thinking back to… I was working with a client, and I consider myself a pretty decent writer. I mean, I’m not great, but I’m decent. I got a couple of books out, and they had the Yoast platform fully operated. And their process was like, Here’s an outline, these keywords, this, that, this, this title, this meta thing, this. I got to tell you, Jono, at the end of the day, when I finished writing the article, I realized I don’t like writing so much anymore. Writing for SEO, it wasn’t my voice. It didn’t sound like me. I didn’t even really like the content when I was done. But it met the criteria and all the likes and concerns.
[00:35:45.220] – Jono Alderson
That’s frustrating. Yeah, that was such an educational challenge, and I think there were some missteps in there because you shouldn’t ever have to compromise the content in order to make it SEO friendly. There is a really strong argument that it needs to simply written and very easily readable. Fine, okay, because not all of your audience are experts, et cetera. And part of your objective of SEO is reach a broad audience, not just your specialist niche. So, yeah, structure and simplicity matter, but you should never be losing your own. You should never be compromising the flow in order to artificially inject a bunch of keywords. I think people took the traffic lights very, very literally at the expense of their content.
[00:36:26.490] – Jonathan Denwood
That said-The reason they did it, because Google I think it benefited them.
[00:36:31.570] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, especially if you look at ChatGPT now and all the SEO industry is talking about chunking their content and how they need to come it up.
[00:36:38.870] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you think, honestly, the reason, I’m only surmising this, do you think, obviously, the founders of Google, their initial paper when they were at Stanford, and they had the concept of external links being an external judgment of the quality of article. Enormously powerful, and like all powerful ideas, the core is very simplistic, but the consequences is amazing concept. But do you think Google was just finding through the cockroach that I mentioned in the first half of the show, that through networks, private networks, Gray Hat SEO, the power of external links, and then And using for it to news business websites that were selling external links, and then you had offshore websites. The whole concept just played out. So they were using neuro networks about four years ago to really reduce their reliance on the external links because they knew that that game was finished because it just been gray hat out of existence. So they were using neural networks themselves, and But the problem with neural networks is it is sophisticated, but it’s also not sophisticated in the same breath. You’re the expert, I’m not. Do you think there’s anything to what I’m saying?
[00:38:32.640] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, I think the SEO industry, step by step, broke large chunks of the web. They broke directories because they spammed them to death. They broke comments. Who has a comments form open on a WordPress site nowadays? It would be insane because it would fill up with spam immediately. And that is entirely because most of the SEO industry are scum, quote. And still to this day, most SEO agencies will talk a good game and talk about helping your brand and to get visibility, et cetera, but they just buy links. And that still remains true. And so, yeah, Google are trying… And we’ve broken other stuff. We broke authorship, broke a whole bunch of stuff. Really unpleasant. Google are trying really, really hard to mitigate the impact of that, because if you can just turn money, interlinks that affect the Page Rank algorithm and their propensity to rank it, that sucks because it creates a very us versus them web. It means you can just buy your way into success. It subsequently pollutes the rest of the link graph. So, yes, Their big move to essentially AI in a black box and LLMs and a neural approach rather than heuristics helped them a lot, but now they’re stuck in a place where they don’t really understand the algorithm because there isn’t really an algorithm.
[00:39:46.200] – Jono Alderson
There are many, many, many interdependence systems.
[00:39:49.290] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s so complicated that they don’t even understand it themselves.
[00:39:52.510] – Jono Alderson
No, and I don’t think they could. No, so much of it is by design, black box LLM AI stuff, and it’s hundreds of small systems that feed into each other. So now we enter an age where not only do people continue to find exploits that work when they shouldn’t, but also there are many, many sites who are doing the right thing and doing good things and then accidentally fall in the foul of the machine where it’s penalized them or downvoted them, despite them objectively following all of Google’s guidelines and requirements and adding value and doing all the right stuff. And Google can’t fix this. They are so deep into a design model where the machine knows best and we will not touch them. We will I’ll tinker some of the inputs and evaluate the outputs, but the machine itself is sacred and sacrosanct and can’t be understood. I think it’s really interesting that then I stuck with this model.
[00:40:38.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you saw it in this desperate attempt and this attempt we read it, and and other question and answer forums promoting answers from six years ago.
[00:40:54.950] – Jono Alderson
And off the record, I had a really interesting chat with some Googlers that they knew that the impact of artificially inflating Reddit’s visibility would be bad, but it was less bad than just letting the AI slot take over. So they’re not in a great position.
[00:41:08.960] – Jonathan Denwood
But it was just pure desperation, was it? You would agree with that. Yeah, you’re trying And some of the stuff on Reddit’s great. A lot of it’s totally bullshit. A lot of it’s been spammed anyway. There’s a whole industry about how to set up artificial red edit answers and questionnaires just to spam Google. That whole thing is pathetic, really. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:41:43.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m driving us back to WordPress on this question, and that is, and I hope your answer is positive because I spent a lot of my career on it, but do you still see WordPress as one of the best website building platforms connected to SEO, or are you leaning in other directions?
[00:42:04.260] – Jono Alderson
I think the short answer is yes, but with a big asterisk and a lot of caveats, unsurprisingly. I think natively, WordPress out of the box has now fallen a long way behind the competitors, the Wixes, the Squarespace in terms of SEO. Those platforms are not great at SEO, but they are better than native WordPress because they acknowledge the SEO as a concept, which we don’t. It’s plugin territory, which is already problematic. I think if you install Yoast and/or maybe one of the other leading SEO plugins, maybe, then yes, you have far and away the best SEO platform that the web has to offer. So much of my time consulting with brands where they get me in to go, Oh, that’s not performing or whatever. So much of that time is taking what they’ve got, which is often a proprietary CMS or another CMS or different CMS off the shelf or some homegrown JavaScript monstrosity the community they’re built. So much of my time is trying to reverse engineer and get that into at least the position that WordPress comes out of the box. I will spend hundreds of hours working with big companies going, Can we at least get this to where WordPress comes out natively?
[00:43:14.410] – Jono Alderson
Never mind all the O stuff, etc. So yeah, if SEO is part of what you want to do and compete on, there is no other option than WordPress, which has some pros and cons, right? Because it’s got its challenges and otherwise. We I branded Yoast out to Shopify while I was still there. That was quite interesting. I think if you’re pure play e-commerce and you still want to do SEO, Shopify can be an option, but it’s super frustrating to work with. And the way that it juggles themes and code and doesn’t really have a concept of structure matter. It’s frustrating and cumbersome. And whilst the Yoast SEO add on for that solves some of those problems, it’s fundamentally never going to have the same just gets everything right level that WordPress does. So much of my time at Yoast was There are thousands of small SEO things that most normal humans shouldn’t ever need to care about that they’ll never notice, which had some interesting marketing challenges because how do you sell the stuff that no one cares about? Part of the premise is this fixes all the stuff behind the scenes. But silly things like no index HTTP headers on certain RSS feeds.
[00:44:20.440] – Jono Alderson
It’s super trivial, but a thousand of those small things which no other platform will ever get anywhere in it. They’ll never catch up because of the scale of which how WordPress moves, or at least We used to move when we still had a contributor pool. So yeah, if SEO is a thing, the one argument I would make against that maybe, if you want to move super quickly and you don’t want to build a long term brand and you want to spin up a website that’s good enough, that’s only going to live for two weeks, Get it on Squarespace, get it on Wix, get it on one of those other platforms. But if you want to do it right, quote unquote, and even if for the long term, there really isn’t a choice other than WordPress. You want to add a form next week? Great. Here’s a buddy press a BV press and it just works and the SEO is taken care of. You You’re going to do a thing with Gravity and contact forms? Great. You just do the thing and it works. The interoperability of all of these systems and the existence of all the hooks and filter systems, it just works in a way that nothing else ever does.
[00:45:14.620] – Jono Alderson
And I don’t think anything else will have a catch up.
[00:45:17.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
You mentioned Shopify, and it wasn’t one of our original questions, but now I’m curious, does the choice of shopping cart in the WordPress space make a huge difference from an SEO perspective? Like, do I need to be in e-commerce or short card or thrive card?
[00:45:34.530] – Jono Alderson
No, I don’t think so, really. I think the cart itself, not so much. Maybe there were definitely the product display page, the PDPs and the PLPs. Yes. If you’re selling online, then how well do these pages rank and how well did they do the job is great. They’re a huge deal, but I don’t see a huge amount of difference in the systems you’re using to pop it. It’s the product content. It’s, is there an image gallery? It’s just the thing low quickly. Maybe Maybe there’s some second order effects from things like, does this have a… This checkout experience looks familiar because everybody now knows what a WordPress checkout looks like, right? And maybe you get a higher conversion rate, which means there’s more people are likely to tweet about you, which means more people give you links. Maybe there’s some of that, but technically, no, there’s not a huge difference, I don’t think.
[00:46:19.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Thanks. Thanks. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:46:22.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Are there any AI tools that you’ve been using on a semi regular basis? Is Is there anything that you like?
[00:46:32.210] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, I’m going to be super boring because it’s an obvious answer, but one is ChatGPT, which gets- You don’t get any marks for that, actually. Every person we ask these questions, there’s that. But there’s two things I’ve done, which I see many people not doing. One is go in and configure the personalisation instructions, like tell it who you are and what you like. I’ve got a really long set of content in there about how do I develop and what kinds of things do I know and what I’m interested in that really altars how it responds quite profoundly. And the other is I structure all of my stuff in projects and give it project level context, which is really like if I’ve got a client or a project or a piece of consultancy, having all that group is nice. The other one, which I probably also won’t get any points for, is Cursor, which has tripled my speed as a developer, which is quite awesome. But again, I’ve configured the heck out of it. I’ve gone in and added a whole bunch of system prompts and I have specific context for individual clients and projects, spent the time setting it up and tinkering with it.
[00:47:31.020] – Jono Alderson
And it’s now ridiculously fast and accurate. If I got a, say, WordPress theme that’s reasonably well structured, it can extrapolate out from that. It can write new functionality. I shipped my first plugin a couple of months ago, that I’d had a beta version of kicking around for about five years and never quite finished. And I tore it all down and rebuilt it from scratch in cursor in about two weeks, three weeks, maybe. And it’s now like 20 times the size and complexity and sophistication than it I’m super proud of it, but all the heavy lifting was done by CURSER. I orchestrated and puppeteered and tweaked, but it did the legwork. Really cool.
[00:48:08.490] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:48:10.310] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I get the last question. If you were Doctor Who and had a TARDIS or if you had a machine like H. G. Wells, and you traveled back to the beginning of your career, the very beginning of your career, knowing what you know now, what would the advice be that you would give yourself?
[00:48:28.290] – Jono Alderson
Change, nothing. Change, absolutely nothing. No, I think I would tell myself that it is okay and maybe even good to strive for perfection. I think common advice says, Don’t chase perfection. I think that’s why many, many websites and businesses and maybe even people are mediocre. I think as soon as you settle for anything less than… You’re likely never going to reach perfection in the areas that you’re struggling for. But as soon as you settle for anything less than that, you inevitably end up at six out of 10. And I think part of what attracts me to SEO is that competitive, but a lot of what drives success is, are you, in theory, legitimately better, more good, closer to perfect than the other stuff? And the whole first section of my career was driven by frustration. I was annoyed that the websites I was working on were average, that the businesses I was consulting for were limited and constrained, and that this thing was slow, or this thing was broken, or this thing was underdeveloped, or we cut this, yada, yada, yada. And that frustration drove me, which was super useful. It got me here, but I spent so How many years being angry at the web and at businesses and stuff.
[00:49:35.180] – Jono Alderson
So I think, yeah, and then nobody else seemed to feel the same way, this drive for, Can we make this better? Why is this not the best thing it can be? I guess part of that is why agency models aren’t designed to do that. They’re designed to survive another month by tricking the client into thinking you’ve done something useful with your time. But I think I’m making, telling previous me that it’s okay to strive for perfection and that there is value in that and that increase, I think more than ever now, again, in an age where everything is commodified, closing that distance to perfect rather than going, what’s MVP? How do we go good enough? Going, what does perfect look like? How do we get as close as possible to that? I think that’s hugely important.
[00:50:14.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Nice.
[00:50:17.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Thanks. Jonathan?
[00:50:18.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. Do you have to leave at the hour, Jono?
[00:50:24.120] – Jono Alderson
No, I’ve got nothing to do.
[00:50:25.230] – Jonathan Denwood
You have another 10, 15 minutes. So that’s great. We’re going to have some bonus content, folks. You can watch the bonus content and the rest of the interview by going over to the WP Hyphen Tonic YouTube channel, and you can watch the whole interview plus the bonus content there. We’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. So, Jono, what’s the best way for people to keep up to date with your latest thoughts and what you’re up to?
[00:50:57.910] – Jono Alderson
Sure. So I’m on Twitter. I think probably no one So I’m also on threads.
[00:51:01.130] – Jonathan Denwood
You get top marks by keep calling it Twitter.
[00:51:04.140] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, if I say X, nobody does that.
[00:51:06.130] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not using X. He can call it whatever he wants to.
[00:51:09.850] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, exactly. Also, Google me, come to Jonoalderson. Com, which is My delightful obsessive side project is how do I make that website as perfect as possible? Scores 100 on Callway Vitals, it’s handcrafted HTML, it’s WordPress taken to the extreme. So if you’re on a nerd, go check that out.
[00:51:28.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. And, Kirk, what’s What’s the best way for people to find out more about what you are up to and your latest thoughts?
[00:51:35.990] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, with my business, everything’s under the name Manana Nomas. And on LinkedIn, if you want to connect person to person, just send me a connection request on LinkedIn I am the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn. Once you find me, you know you got me.
[00:51:50.660] – Jono Alderson
Nice. There was a John O’Oulterson who was a landscape gardener whose business I’ve accidentally destroyed by being quite prevalent on Google. I think about that a lot. It’s not cool.
[00:51:59.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Okay. If you want to support the show, folks, and we are growing, please share this podcast. Also think about subscribing to the WP Tonic YouTube channel. I’m getting close to 10,000 subscribers. I want to bust through that in the next couple of months. Your support would be really, really appreciated. So think about subscribing to the YouTube channel and also share this podcast. I’m always amazed at the quality of people that agreed to come on the show. We are fully booked out for the next couple of months. We got some great guests and interviews coming up. We’ll see you next week, folks. Thanks so much. Bye. So on to bonus content. I was thinking about what you were saying, and I think the keyword is curation. I think in some way, a search engine, what Google? Google was curation, automated curation. Ai agents, they’re just a form of automated curation. A influencer is a curator. They say, I found this new product, or I found this new service, service, and I really like it. It’s all curation, isn’t it? The most effective curation system is the one that gets the traffic. But AI has thrown everything in the air, but nobody knows what is going to be the real creator, really.
[00:53:55.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Am I on the right track?
[00:53:57.420] – Jono Alderson
Yeah. Excuse me. Thinking about and talking about for a while. I think for almost the entirety of human history, all commerce and selling has been done on the premise that I can stand in the street and I can shout loudly and I can distract or disrupt or influence humans to come into my store. And when they cross that threshold, I control the narrative. I can tell them what I want, I can make them believe what I want, and I can convince some subset of them to buy. And now what happens suddenly, only in the last maybe 20 years, there is an omniscient God that sits in between those processes. Before I can reach that audience and shout at them and distract them and control the narrative, I first need to have convinced this system that my proposition is a good fit. And historically, that was Page Rank, and then it became EEAT and all these other things and quality score and equivalent measures in other ecosystems like Google Discover, like YouTube, like TikTok, et cetera. But essentially the premise was the same, that before I could pitch my proposition, I have to first have passed some quality and relevance test.
[00:55:09.330] – Jono Alderson
And that got harder and harder and harder and harder. And now it’s exploded because these AI systems, the ChatGPTs, the Google AITs, et cetera, are far more sophisticated at making those judgment calls. No longer are they just going, let’s count your links, let’s check you put the keywords in the content, let’s Even do clever stuff like, Let’s check if your reviews are good. Now they can go so much further and they can go, I have a reasonable understanding- Can I just interrupt?
[00:55:38.230] – Jonathan Denwood
I haven’t interrupted you, but I just want to put this to you. I think Google I understand Google’s between a rock and a hard place. Their search quality before AI, they were doing stuff that in the medium long term, because they’re a public company, and And fundamentally, a public company is a form of cancer because every year it’s got to increase its value and market share.
[00:56:08.080] – Jono Alderson
And they’re legally required to do so, yeah.
[00:56:10.360] – Jonathan Denwood
And that basically in biology is a form of cancer. So it’s going to kill itself in the end anyway. And they were slowly doing it, AI only. But the fundamental problem, there’s people that like using the prompt, blah, blah, blah. I still use Google a fair bit because I haven’t got the bloody time, and I like to know where this content is coming from, not some bloody block. They could improve the quality a lot. I don’t know. They just need to go back to the roots a bit and just clean up the results a bit more. Of course, obviously, if you get to general AI and you get to something that can talk back to you, that’s a real personal assistant that understands you more than you understand yourself.
[00:57:14.630] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, And then all bets are off.
[00:57:17.590] – Jonathan Denwood
But I think if we get to that stage, we got other things to worry about, around search, bloody results. But do you agree what I’ve just outlined find that Google really needs to clean out. Yeah, and I think they are doing some- I think they could a bit. I think it’s just a bit of like… It’s the internal, but they got all this mammoth set up, and it’s all driven by billions and billions of turnover, isn’t it?
[00:57:48.680] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, and they are doing some good work to clean up some of it, but I definitely agree that the overall quality of the results is decay. Even putting aside, how do you deal with AI slot? I think they have definitely been being distracted by this shiny, shiny AI thing, and they’ve built a whole new ecosystem. The results aren’t the same, the system doesn’t work the same, and all the while the organic results are definitely going off track. But the AI results are a bit garbage quite often as well. And the fact that there’s now two not great systems co-existing feels like a really bad bet for them.
[00:58:21.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it’s… Yeah, I think, oh, this is awful stuff. You just need to clean out your It just depended on what area you were searching in. If there was a lot… I’m a boutique micro-hosting provider. Hosting is the most sloppiest, most competitive. But I just compete in my niche, and I’m just a microbe. It’s growing, and I I’ve got no aspirations apart from growing it and then one day selling it to one of the big boys. But that’s the thing. I’m going to ask you a question now, and I was going to put it in the podcast, but to fairness to you, I thought I wouldn’t, because I also want to point out, if you don’t want to answer this question-Spicy.
[00:59:23.160] – Jono Alderson
Okay.
[00:59:24.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Was you really surprised with the founder? You worked with him, Joyce falling out with the great leader, Matt Moundweg. And for Joyce being excommunicated from the WordPress community, well, he’s not really. But from- Sort of, yeah. Attending word camps, which I think is one of the most pathetic- Yeah, super puffy, right? I thought, ‘I would… ‘ But on the other hand, if I was Matt, I would ring him up and tell him, ‘You can go and fuck yourself’ saying that to me. Because was you not surprised? Because, you know, Joyce, he got a lot of favors from Matt when it suited him, did he not?
[01:00:13.070] – Jono Alderson
Well, I’ve worked closely with Yosef for years, and I think there are very few people-I’m not on the top.
[01:00:22.620] – Jonathan Denwood
I want to point out, I’m not on the top of his Christmas list.
[01:00:26.480] – Jono Alderson
That’s fine. He’s polarizing, and I understand why completely. He’s done a lot of good, and the favors that Matt have handed out have been hard fought for and small in comparison. So for example, one of the things that Matt mentioned was Google Analytics Access for wordpress. Org, right? And that was given out because both Joost and I spent a huge amount of time setting that up and learning from it and making improvements to the website based on it. All it turns out entirely for Matt’s benefit. And all of the examples I can look at of where has Matt appeared to be reasonable and rewarding people have all been just more toxic control. I think what does surprise me is-It might be toxic control, I totally agree with you, but when it suited these people, all these people that go to these word camps and are some of the biggest influencers, they They were all part of…
[01:01:32.390] – Jonathan Denwood
And it’s not just WordPress, it’s every technology, Salesforce, whatever, Drupal. I’m sure it’s the same in every little corner. They were quite happy when the favors were handed out, were they not?
[01:01:49.420] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, and understandably, right? There was an inner circle and a lot of decision-making and deal-making and politics happened behind closed doors because that’s how Matt operates. And Definitely, Yost and others definitely benefited from that. I don’t necessarily think disproportionately to the value that they created, but maybe a certain somebody who you mentioned earlier, maybe interesting. But I think what has surprised me is how-Oh, yeah, That was really blatant, wasn’t it?
[01:02:18.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Well, I can’t mention him. I call him the Chocolate Factory, I call him the Willy Wanker of WordPress. He’s actually threatened to sue me twice, so I have to be a bit careful.
[01:02:33.360] – Jono Alderson
That means you’re doing something either very right or very wrong. Yeah, he’s pleasant enough in person.
[01:02:37.250] – Jonathan Denwood
I think- Oh, he’s like your hyena, but the reality is he would cut your throat, wouldn’t he?
[01:02:43.690] – Jono Alderson
You know what? I quite like that for the WordPress ecosystem, because having come at it… I worked in agencies for years and tool vendors in the real world and real business, and then walked into the WordPress ecosystem, and there are a lot of people who are quite scared of business and capitalism, and money, maybe for the right reasons, but open source attracts a certain type of ideology. But I think the idea that there are some people in the WordPress ecosystem who are cutthroat, ruthless business people, maybe isn’t unhealthy. I’ll see where you’re coming. His ecosystem is special.
[01:03:12.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I agree with you there.
[01:03:14.310] – Jono Alderson
I agree Yeah, so the whole Matt smacked thing, I’m surprised that Matt hasn’t- I’m surprised that Joyce did it.
[01:03:24.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Was you so publicly? Because he knows Matt well.
[01:03:30.200] – Jono Alderson
Yes, and he- I would have thought, and he’s no idiot, Joyce, and his wife, I really love his wife.
[01:03:37.280] – Jonathan Denwood
She’s a fabulous lady. I’ve interviewed her.
[01:03:42.350] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, she’s lovely.
[01:03:43.520] – Jonathan Denwood
She’s great. But he’s no fool, Joyce. Anybody that builds anything that’s worth any substantial amount of money, it’s just a nightmare. So he’s no fool. If you got any insight why he decided to do it, because he must have known what response he was going to get from that.
[01:04:10.000] – Jono Alderson
I’m sorry, I’m hesitant to speak on his behalf, but a few angles. I think there are a few people that understand that ecosystem as well as him and Matt. They’ve spent a lot of time talking. I know you’ve tried very, very hard to reach Matt in multiple… Privately through… Genu He was mainly attempting to build bridges and work out how do we move forward and how do we get this right, and failed. Matt had rebuffed him and ignored him and shot him down and been quite unpleasant behind closed doors. I think this was a last-ditch attempt to say, Cards on the table, here is the plan. I read through the post before it was published. I don’t think it was particularly inflammatory. I think it was a genuine attempt to say, let’s work together.
[01:04:54.810] – Jonathan Denwood
They were very common sense, moderate-And of course, yeah, to your point, Matt is not rational, Matt is not logical, Matt is not stable, and it’s not a huge reach to anticipate that you might just- I’m not going. I have drawn a line about… That’s your opinion. I have made it… I’ve drawn a line. Matt still communicates with me. I have drawn a line in personally attacking him.
[01:05:31.270] – Jono Alderson
Yes, so I should be very careful. His behavior is unstable.
[01:05:34.100] – Jonathan Denwood
I have not gone on Twitter and called him names and wondered why I’ve got not a kind response. I have not done it. I have criticized the way things have run. Yes.
[01:05:54.190] – Jono Alderson
Consistently, I criticised- But he doesn’t see the difference between that. That’s a personal attack in his book, right? That’s the problem.
[01:05:58.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I criticized six years ago. I made a public post when he came out that he was a bouleversient detaitor of WordPress. I said, I just can’t put up with somebody that’s the leader of one of the biggest open source projects in the world.
[01:06:22.980] – Jono Alderson
That my livelihood is dependent on.
[01:06:25.250] – Jonathan Denwood
Making a public statement like that. But a load of people people in the WordPress space said nothing. They just went along with it because they were doing okay out of it.
[01:06:37.660] – Jono Alderson
True, though. I also know, so not off the record, but I know a large amount of people who are not happy with the current situation, obviously, but are unable, unwilling to say anything because either their employer is nervous about the implications because you just get WP engines, or their livelihoods as you heard, it’s very tied to the WordPress ecosystem community. People are scared to speak up against him because he has a pattern of unpleasant behavior.
[01:07:13.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, Do you think that some of this is the contradictions of what he built? Because when you go to some of the biggest, most sophisticated VCs in the world, and through a number of rounds, and this is all on Wikipedia, it’s all out there, that through, I think, about six public rounds, you get almost, not quite, but also a billion dollars of investment. And you’re doing okay, but we don’t know why these sophisticated investors invested a billion dollars in six rounds because they just make big gambles and they’re looking for big unicorns. I’m not feeling sorry for them because they’re part of the game, aren’t they? But they must… I think that Matt has the tendency to say to one group, one bucket of people, one thing, and then he says another a set of things to another bucket of people. And there’s all different buckets of people that are told a different story.
[01:08:38.090] – Jono Alderson
Yes, absolutely. And that’s one of my great frustrations with the whole WPNJ and ACF, etc. Thing is none of the narrative is cohesive or coherent or consistent. I could, I think, be convinced to buy the argument of VC being evil, of WPMG not giving back enough, of all of these individual arguments.
[01:08:59.150] – Jonathan Denwood
He has a I’ve achieved the impossible making people feel sorry for a VC.
[01:09:05.080] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, he has, father, hasn’t he? That’s quite impossible.
[01:09:07.680] – Jonathan Denwood
I did know something in the WordPress, filled with people that in some ways have a slight naive attitude to capitalism, which you stated in the podcast, which I actually agree because I just see capitalism for what it is. And I just want capitalism with a human face, with a decent recovery, because this idea can just be left to its own devices.
[01:09:38.160] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, the market will not regulate itself.
[01:09:39.890] – Jonathan Denwood
No, it’s just absolute nonsense, isn’t it? How people can come out with that is I just think either you’re doing it for very cynical or you’re a total naive individual. But on the other end, I think there’s a lot of people in the WordPress space, and I think they were encouraged privileged, weren’t they, to have this attitude. They got a very naive attitude around capitalism, haven’t they?
[01:10:07.020] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, and I think there’s an unhealthy thing continues to happen where people with very good hearts and very good minds are convinced to contribute to the greater good, and Matt burns them up and uses them and then throws them away, and that has been the model forever. Is that evil? I think the most frustrating about that for me is even that Matt is inconsistent and incoherent on, because there’s a consistent narrative that just assumes that if he burns people out, more will come, and quite evidently, they aren’t coming. And The event attendance is dropping, and there are a few new people, and people and people are… The ecosystem is crumbling.
[01:10:51.070] – Jonathan Denwood
Until the situation is cleared up a bit and clarified, I’m never going to a word camp again.
[01:10:58.250] – Jono Alderson
I am, but only because I bought tickets beforehand and I’m reluctant to.
[01:11:01.170] – Jonathan Denwood
And I got an empty-shirt to wear. I’m not going to one. I’m still going to support WordPress through the podcast, but I’m not going to a word camp.
[01:11:09.900] – Jono Alderson
And this is it. So many people are saying this. There is no incentive to go and work for Matt for free in a way that he will just either belittle you or et cetera. So super unhealthy.
[01:11:21.640] – Jonathan Denwood
I was in a difficult position because some of the people that criticized him, the most brilliant on Twitter and other social platform, I have very little time for because I have had to deal with them. And some of the most brilliant people that In my interactions with him, he’s always been okay with me.
[01:11:50.300] – Jono Alderson
And this is what you’re calling it, please be careful.
[01:11:52.590] – Jonathan Denwood
Other people who have told me, they’ve had terrible interactions with him in private, really stuff that doesn’t really add up because he’s always been… He doesn’t like what I say sometimes, but he’s been okay. But I don’t think I’ve gone online and attacked him personally, so maybe that’s why I’m not seeing… Got the full blast, maybe.
[01:12:18.510] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, it’s hard. We don’t see behind the scenes, do we? Not consistently. I’m not careful enough about this, but I think it’s super important that we criticize his behavior and not him as a human. But his behavior is appalling and obnoxious.
[01:12:31.280] – Jonathan Denwood
But he’s been so passionate about WordPress and being the joint founder in that. He’s his own, but I just think he’s made a lot of promises to various buckets of people.
[01:12:45.720] – Jono Alderson
Yes, quite possibly.
[01:12:46.830] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s put him in a tight position.
[01:12:49.560] – Jono Alderson
Yes, many of those people being VCs who put money into automatic on the premise that it would be a hosting by them often. It turns out that maybe it’s not that reality.
[01:12:59.170] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a strange thing. Because with owning Wu commerce and the enormous amounts of money that Shopify makes, turning WordPress.com into Wu, Wu. Com, and producing a fabulous hosted competitor to Shopify. It’s possible. I’m not sure it was. That’s the thing. Are we talking about what?
[01:13:32.930] – Jono Alderson
I think so, especially in parallel to that, having disassembled WordPress’s marketing team. WordPress’s marketing function, and this is something I get very frustrated about, I look a lot at what Wix is doing, what Squarespace is doing, what Shopify is doing, and they are spending enormous amounts of money on very sophisticated, very well-resourced marketing campaigns. They are either attacking us directly or winning hearts, minds, and conversions from people going. I want to start a website. I want to build a business online. And we are nowhere. We are not in the conversation. We’re not managing it. We’re not competing. We’re losing. So it makes it all the more baffling to me that if Matt is under pressure to be successful and to grow the share, et cetera, et cetera, he’s doing some of the right things. The host was great, and it was early. But where are we competing? Where are we fighting back? What are the messages? What is the product roadmap? What is the product itself? Because full-site editing is we’re going down to one release a year. We are now the laughing stock of the ecosystem. What is the upside of this that we’re selling to the investors, the market, and the users?
[01:14:40.110] – Jono Alderson
I don’t see it, and that’s concerning.
[01:14:42.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Just one more question, and then we call it a day. Are you okay with that?
[01:14:47.290] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, definitely.
[01:14:50.470] – Jonathan Denwood
I got a sense. My concern started six years ago when he made this public statement, be this beloved dictator a lark. Then, I started looking and asking some questions. Then I knew I had some people who told me how all this was organized. I thought, Oh my God, right? Oh my God. And then I decided I wasn’t directly going to contribute. I do my podcast and run my business, and that was it. But I think A lot of this started to kick off before this WP engine. Oh, yeah. And I think it got kicked off with how Gutenberg was going and how it’s been managed. I support and keep my distance by using Cadence because I like Cadence, and I’m not anti-Gutenberg, but I keep my distance. But the way that project has just wandered around.
[01:16:02.230] – Jono Alderson
That, yes. I think the block editor- No direction at all.
[01:16:06.560] – Jonathan Denwood
And quite often, He decided to be a project manager, which was an awful idea. I think that’s what started to kick all this off. What do you think?
[01:16:21.060] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, I agree. I think the move to the block editor was incredible foresight. It was the right choice at the right time, but everything about what happened next has been fundamentally and comprehensively mismanaged. And pretty much in the same way that WordPress is mismanaged, right? It just bumbles, as you say. And so the speed at which bits of Gutenberg change and break and aren’t documented, and the amount of hours that everyone, certainly when I was at Yosef, the amount of hours that we would burn supporting this thing that doesn’t exist next week, or somebody’s changed the design direction, or they’ve done two versions of this that don’t work together correctly, and now this block breaks. And then underneath all that, just a lack of design thinking around things like, what is the data model for blocks?
We’re working out as we go, which is lovely, right? Cadence, as you say, it’s nice that we’re iterating, but every iteration you make breaks the previous ones because we don’t know where we’re iterating towards. We’re just bumbling. Shopify isn’t bumbling, Wix isn’t bumbling. Super frustrating. I love the idea that we can move forward a few places at a time, but it would be so lovely to have an endpoint inside that we can work towards, because then we can design for that rather than constantly reacting, and everything breaks all the time.
[01:17:40.190] – Jono Alderson
Super frustrating.
[01:17:42.300] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Thank you so much. I think we’ve had a fabulous discussion. Hopefully, later on in the year, you will agree to come back.
[01:17:50.160] – Jono Alderson
Yeah, definitely.
[01:17:50.850] – Jonathan Denwood
That’d be fun. I think we’ve covered a fabulous load of stuff. Thank you so much. We’ll end the show now, folks, and we’ll be back next week, which is our Roundtable show. We’ve got some fabulous guests, Bananas, joining the Regulars, and we’ll discuss the best tech and WordPress stories of the month. Always a laugh, we’re always a bit tongue in cheek. Please join us. It’d be a fabulous show. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Bye, bye, bye.
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