Improving your SEO with conceptual models - Mark Williams-Cook

Thank YOU, Mark... for making it so much easier to understand how and why Google ranks content today.

I like your humor, It was not only informative but also fun to watch, thanks a lot! Great thoughts!

Really insightful. Really enjoyed this, especially the Theme Park reference. I used to play that loads. Did you ever play Theme Hospital too? “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases”. .

Hey Mark, are you planning on open sourcing the 2TB of data around their models & systems for others to explore, because that would be incredible!

Floor hard, ball kinda squishy. "Mark Williams Cook". Awesome presentation

I enjoy your presentation and valuable information.

This was great! Very insightful and presented really well. Thanks for putting it out there!

Makes sense it scales and there's evidence... something to be said for critical thinking. One of the rare things you look for in SEO! Great talk, chapeau!

I said it already but this is legit one of my favourite talks of the year (and not just because it features Theme Park)!

Very good presentation Mark! More people need to be bug hunting in search algo's, so many good things this year from doing so!

Certainly one of the best SEO presentations of 2024 (and this decade).

Damn, Mark! This is amazing.

Great stuff Mark, appreciate you confirming my Consensus stuff.

Great job. Made a boring topic interesting. The games angle was great. 👍

His 'Theme Park' is my StarCraft. Great talk

Maybe I missed it, but why is the website in final example around the top 3 results for ketamine additiction ranking higher than the others if it has lower brand signals?

My question would then be: If a site receives no clicks for, let's say, two months, will Google not move that site lower in the rankings? I'm a little lost on how Google would only use CTR prediction and not the actual click through rate of a site over time...

Note that for YMYL we dont know what queries and what disease vs say studies or supplements - nope, Google doesnt know/can't know lol

Thank you, long time I do not found a so helpful and inspiring resource!

Loved it, what is the last game you showed?

This was so good Mark. Did you know that the creator of Theme Park is Demis Hassabis - co-founder of Google DeepMind?

Fantastic talk Mark! I wish its longer!

This was great Mark! I remember you could set the price for the arcade games to free, then ramp up the price to 1,000s once they started playing and they'd have to pay! I don't know what the equivalent Google analogy is there but it'll fall into the 'making an ungodly amount of money category'

Is there any way to find out the site quality score for my website?

this is the most useful SEO talk/conference that I have seen in a LONG time. great job and thank you.

Fantastico!! You're a little too kind to G, but with such an incredible talk, we can forgive you.

Great stuff nice work Mark.

Simcity was what kind of taught me

I loved the presentation but I cant help but think (Unless I've misunderstood something about the exploit vulnerability part): He managed to get his hands on Google systems and is able to share these openly without any repercussions? Am I missing something?

I would love to know if that 0.4 minimum site quality score featured snippet requirement was introduced as part of the helpful content update. I had a brand new domain that ranked for lots of featured snippets before getting slapped after helpful content. A lot of the traffic loss came from losing featured snippets. Never did any link building so it didn't have an unnatural links-to-brand signals ratio, so it can't have been that. Since the site had good quality content, I suppose the HCU could have simply been Google dropping the estimating of site quality which dropped my site to zero and prevented the site from ranking.

Great presentation and very inspirational. You also unlocked some memories for me: Theme Park was bundled with my first PC: IBM Aptiva🥹

This is a brilliant analysis of the situation, explaining a lot of the last two years' Google behaviors in terms of core updates, AI content penalties, and how the SEO field is still evolving. Your presentation has provided great insights and clarity on these complex topics. Thank you for taking the time to compile and share this information. It’s incredibly helpful for those of us navigating the ever-changing landscape of SEO, fun to watch, and make me want to play Theme Park again :)

so what is the action item for us?

This is amazing Mark! Thanks for sharing this with us :) @markwilliams-cook1079

I love the closing statements. Play more video games 😆 🤣

I need 2 TB data