Why timestamping will be good for SEO

- One of the funny things of the black box that is Google is that we won't know whether they might not already be using it too at some point. I didn't think we're there yet, but we'll be there very soon in terms of enough sites using it, that it could be a signal that they see so often that the system start using it. (bright ambient music) - Hey, welcome everybody, this is Sebastiaan van der Lans, founder of WordProof where we fight for a trustworthy internet. And we do that through blockchain, timestamps, open source technology. And with me is a very special guest today, it's Joost de Valk and he has quite a remarkable track record in making the internet a better place. What I admire on your work and your vision is we met I guess the first time, maybe it's a decade ago there you did a talk Somewhere around that, yeah. Somewhere around that. And you did a talk on holistic SEO by then I didn't know what the word holistic meant. (laughs) But one of the guiding principles you learned me there was the only sustainable way to rank high in the search engines is to be the best result. Yeah. That's the only sustainable strategy for over more than a decade. Yeah. I sound like a broken record when I tell people that now. But yeah, that's what I've been telling people for more than a decade now. I've been in search for 15 years. And it turns out that when you optimize for the end goal, for what Google optimizes for and other search engine optimizes for, they optimize for getting people to the right webpage and that actually gives them the results that those people are looking for. If you optimize for that end goal, then you optimize for the search engine. It's that simple. It's very, very much getting away from all the technical nuance. And in SEO there's a lot of technical stuff that you need to take care of and that we absolutely do take care of and I think I'm pretty good at. But when I explain it to people, I always say, well, we'll take care of the technical stuff, what you have to do is think about how to become that best result. So yeah, that's what we've been doing for quite a while now. Yeah, you and Marieke and the team at Yoast did a pretty remarkable job there. You're really deep thinkers in not only how can we rank high on the short term but actually really deep on how to make the web a better place, not only technicalities, but also the understandability of the information, so well done there and I'm really happy. We are really happy at WordProof to have you and Marieke as investors in the company and advisors in the company. So yeah. - Well, we're very happy be investors. I think one of our core values is and has always been improving the web, just literally making the web a better place, but also making it function better, making it a more trusted resource for people. And I think that's where we align. And one of the things that with what we do is that I can help everybody rank their website better and everybody can use our software to rank their website better, but I can't verify what these people put on their website and I don't want to necessarily. But it is one of the things where you know that you're building a weapon of mass media war, that you're basically delivering to everybody. And what you can see that everybody's using it in the last presidential elections in the US, literally almost every candidate was on WordPress and every candidate that wasn't on WordPress was also using our Yoast SEO plugin. For sure. So they are using it, all of them to optimize their stories. And there are differences in truths for all those people. And I think that all these new campaigns, et cetera, show us like there's gaps to be filled in the web and there's a trust problem there that we need to fix. If we talk about the trusted web or that's the frame we love to use that we're proof building towards a trusted web through timestamps, what problems should that solve? So for me, the trusted web is a dream of where I can in the end trust what I read. And that sounds very simple, but it is a very hard thing to get to because it consists of many layers if we peel it down. Because in the beginning it is like, okay, so I'm reading this on a website, is this the website that was the first to actually publish this? That's the very simple first thing that I think we can fix with timestamps to say, Hey, this was actually published here at this point in time and we could then verify and compare to other sources and see that they were indeed the first. And that is an age old problem in Google News, especially where being the first is one of the most important things to rank well in Google News and thus get a lot of traffic from Google for being the first to talk about something. Yeah, it's one of the things that I think the web was very good at in the beginning. I'm old enough now that I'm slowly turning gray, mine is not painted on. (laughs) I'm old enough now that I can say I was in the web when I was 14, so I'm 38 now. So that's almost 25 years ago. Then it was really weird. I mean, it was really bare bones and it was really broken in many ways, but it was a lot more trusted, a lot more sources that made sense. And there were a lot more universities, et cetera, not all these other sites that also had opinions about stuff that they'd actually didn't know about. And somewhere we lost that, because we didn't build trust into the fibers of the web, I mean the whole web HTTP, the thing that we type into our browsers every day. People don't even know what it is and don't know how ridiculously insecure it is. And HTTPS is only slightly more secure. And we need to now add that layer of security to the web to be able to take the next step. - Yeah, perfect. And that's what we said at trusted web as well, where that's how we define the problem. The internet was about connecting computers with computers then we had society, which made sure that there's all kinds of systems in place, norms and values to make sure that obnoxious human behaviors like fraud, manipulation, and theft, that they won't thrive in the real world but on the internet, we don't have those systems in place. As you said, trust isn't part of the Internet's DNA. And wouldn't it be great if there's an open source way to make "trust", so transparency and accountability, in our opinion, the two building blocks that lead to trust part of the Internet's DNA in an open source way. Yeah, I think one of the things that you see now is that what is happening is laws like the GDPR and other new laws that are introduced basically all over the world, because everybody's seeing that we need to take care of this and that we need to make it safer, but that's applying laws to something that is inherently broken. And I really applaud those efforts because I think it's a very good thing that we were standing for. Privacy is something that we need to take care of. But it's also sort of broken because we're fixing it from the wrong direction and from the wrong angle. And I think that with what you're doing with WordProof, we can actually fix it in a better way. We can help people, we can help the whole process from the ground up instead of enforcing laws from top-down where you get all these annoying cookie notices and all these other things. Now WordProof doesn't solve all of those problems and it never will, but I think there's a good chance that we can solve a part of that problem and I think that's very exciting. I think that's a very good way of approaching, like, okay, how do we control for that? How do we make people trust again in what's happening on the web? How can we even as government agencies, how can we even verify that we published this? And when we did it exactly? Because that sort of matters for a lot of these things. So there's a lot of these problems where they are now applying laws and I'd like to have those laws also baked into the technology. And what we discussed before was there's "the unregulated internet", as a logical next step with wonderful intention behind it. There's "GDPR" to make sure that at least privacy for people is a bit better. And as a logical next step, you have "the trusted web" where all information that reaches someone is verifiable and yeah, transparent and accountable. Yeah, as a logical next step. - That's what we-- - Yeah. Sorry. I think that those next steps are very logical to us, the only thing the problems that we will face there are that people don't actually understand what they're making laws about. So the whole GDPR thing was prefaced in many countries by cookie laws, et cetera. And people called it cookie laws, and I was like, I can do the tracking without cookies. I can do so many of these things without using any of these technologies that you talked about, because you don't know what you're talking about. And I think that now what we have to do as a society is agree on, okay, what do we think is acceptable? What do we think is and how should this work? And then we need to build that into the technology and I think WordProof is a great step in doing that. - And before we dive into the solution, what will happen if we're not able to fix the internet in the coming decade? - Well, not necessarily all very good things. Some people might not agree with me but I'm very happy with the current outcome of the US elections, but I'm very unhappy about a lot of stuff that I've seen there where basically untruths are getting spread far too easily, and we're not finding a way as a society of dealing with that very well. And providing people and our websites with the authority to talk about stuff. And for that, we have to verify them. And we have to know when they do that and when they publish something, et cetera. And yeah, I think that's a problem we need to fix. And that doesn't mean just you and me, but more people. But yeah, I think we can play a role in that. And that's where our reach as Yoast and what you're building combined can actually have quite a bit of an impact because our software runs on a lot of websites. So we can expose a lot of people to, Hey, we have some solutions that might actually make this better and that might help people trust you more and it might put you in the right spot. And I think that's why we'd like to collaborate with you on these things. Perfect, and yeah we got great recognition from Europe who said, Hey, there's a blockchains for social goods competition. We won a prize, a million to grow the company, but more importantly, the recognition. But I have to give you credit, you and Marieke decided to invest in WordProof far before European commission said, Hey, we think that this is a solution to fixing it the internet. - And I think this is actually funny because I am one of the most skeptical people about blockchain. - Yeah, can you elaborate on that? Because more than a year ago, I called you and I said, Hey, can I drop by? I just need 15 minutes of your time. I need to show you something. Can you explain how that moment went? - Yeah, I was like, well I'll give you the time because I liked you as a person. And we met, had fun and et cetera, so well you come by. But I think I also said to you, I'm very skeptical about things like Bitcoin and all the related stuff. Because I don't think that's a problem that we really need to solve as much as a lot of other problems that we need to solve. I see sort of what they're doing, but I sort of want to stay away from the whole the government is evil and because I don't think like that. At the same time, I do see where a ledger as a blockchain really is, can be very useful. And I see a lot of applications where I'd like to see more development, notary work get stuff like that, where I think like this should be basically this could replace entire groups of the people that I'm spending far too much money on that are doing stuff that is absolutely bullshit. But then you showed me what you were doing and I was like, yes, this makes sense. I get this, which is also new to me because most blockchain startups make it so hard that you have to dive in far too much for me to actually understand it. And I think I'm a relatively intelligent person, but I don't always understand what they're talking about. But yeah, you showed it and I was like, yeah, this feels good. This feels like this is actually a fix that helps us move forward. And that also helps us use the blockchain in a way that I think it becomes something that people can rely on. And I think it's very important for blockchain in general to get some applications that are a bit away from the anti-government, anti-normal money's bad, we know only Bitcoin type thinking. So, yeah, I was enthused. (laughs) And well, I think we've been talking about this for ever since for the last, what was it? Yeah, in just over a year now, I think, yeah. We as site owners, if you're using open-source so far, you have a lot of transparency. You can see what happens under the hood and you have that transparency. We had a timestamp with hashing the information putting it on a blockchain. You bring the value of open source, not only to you as a site owner, but beyond that to the reader, to the buyer, to the citizen. Yeah, yeah. And also, I mean, if I could look up the terms of service for a company and I could see the change log for that terms of service, at that point where I can see how they've adapted their terms of service and whether they are mostly anti-customer and for themselves or the other way around, that could actually be a very good thing. I believe in radical transparency about doing basically everything you do openly. In the stuff we do at Yoast, there is a lot of openness in everything we do and we contribute a lot of our efforts to WordPress core. And there we go as well like we'll be very open about what our goals are and what we're trying to achieve. I think that helps for everybody. What made you decide after that meeting? Because the meeting wasn't about investment, I came there to get advice. Yeah, what happened? What core believes made that we ended up talking here. I wanted to be a part of that. So this feels in a way like we're writing web history and I just wanted in. And I think that we can add something that you don't have which is our reach and our network, and that we could be of added value. So, and what you were building is awesome and needs pushing. It needs the leg up from everybody that it can get that from and I think I can help provide that. And so I wanted in, and just because I believe in that, and we're working on standardization of what we're doing now. So turning it into an open standard which would also mean that you could get competitors that do the same thing, which I think is great, because that's exactly what this world needs, Because it needs commercial companies that provide this service, but built upon a standard that we all agree on is how this stuff should work. - Let's shift gears a bit in to the world of search engine optimization. That's one of the first things you mentioned then you opened my eyes there that was last year or April 2019, where you say, wow, this soul stuff and search engine set that has never been solved before. Can you elaborate a bit on what the value of timestamps can be? Yeah. Sure. So in news especially, being first is really important. In Google News, the first person to report a story gets 30% to 50% off the traffic for that story. And thus people try to steal each other's news very quickly. And it really matters whether you're five minutes before someone else, and that's what timestamping can solve. Because you can actually prove that you were before the other person. People scrape each other's sites and republish stuff and without attribution, but then you can still prove that. And when Google indexes is your version and can see that you publish it before the other person, either, you must have had access to it first or you must've had written it yourself first. So that's a real problem it solves. And I think that if we can build upon that even more with authorship and with knowing who wrote that piece that we can even trust more problems and fix more problems that Google has. Google talks a lot about and what they call the your money, your life type sites, where all of the news and input that people get from websites about health, about money, about all that stuff, they spend extra time there to verify that the people writing about that are trustable authors and I think we can help them solve that problem. I think we can make that a lot more transparent. And both of these applications can really, really change how search works and what types of results search delivers. And with that basically get more traffic to trusted websites. And would you say, is it a logical next step for search engines, how would the adoption work? I think it's a very logical next step. Search is incredibly complex, even though it's one of the oldest IT problems out there. But I think it's a very logical next step for them to incorporate something like this and encourage adoption of a standard like this, because it would make their life easier. And Google is crawling the web at an astounding rate. I mean, they crawl billions and billions of pages every single day, just to figure out what is out there, who wrote it first, what is a good result for this query, for them to optimize that process where they can actually do some of the verification stuff that they do. And some of the things that they do with manual raters and I don't think a whole lot of people realize, but Google employs thousands and thousands of people that manually rates search results every day to give feedback into the algorithm on what's correct and what's not, and what are a good trust sources for authors and how they can improve that algorithm, that black box. It's a machine learning model but it's a very costly machine learning model with a lot of training continuously happening all the time. And I think feeding that with an extra piece of information that is very easy for them to check, because it's actually very easy for them to verify a WordProof hash. Yeah. That is a very minor deal in that whole process. And I think that that is actually, it could be a very worthwhile step for them and make some of the other steps a bit less necessary which is just a cost reduction and a big security improvement. And this year, if I had the schema where we defined together with Joel and Jono more than a million pieces of content will be timestamped from major news outlets. Does it matter to be early timestamping when search engines didn't say their index, the timestamps yet? Well, I think it already right now, as a reader and of course I'm very biased. But as a reader, I am seeing a change log or a timestamp on pages gives me confidence on head, I can look up when this was done. I can look up when they changed it, et cetera. I think it matters in the long run if you're first doing this it means that you'll have your timestamps for all of this content. And it's pretty easy to do, I mean, it's not a lot of work. So being there already, as soon as Google starts doing stuff with this, it really becomes interesting. And one of the funny things of the black box that is Google is that we won't know whether they might not already be using it too at some point. I didn't think we're there yet, but we'll be there very soon in terms of enough sites using it, that it could be a signal that they see so often that the system starts using it. The whole problem with machine learning the way Google and other search engines do it is that they pick up signals that nobody knows about. And this is one of the things I think is very scary as well, and where I go like, well, okay, maybe we should force them to have an explainer on those models to actually see what goes in and which variables they use. But right now, it could become a variable without anybody knowing. - And in way, how has just created, it's all open source. So yeah, it's backwards compatible in a way they can easily say. - Yeah, you can very easily do it backwards. The only thing that you can't freely do is timestamp it in backwards. So that's why you need to start now. That's part of the power that you have. (laughs) If you look at what types of content should be timestamped, what types of content do you expect to be timestamped in the future? A lot of different pieces of content. I see direct immediate applications in news and in commerce. In timestamping terms of service, in timestamping invoices and in timestamping a lot of these things that you might need legally. So in a lot of that sort of stuff. But I would also think that for every type of article that you put out there that is not trivial, I think it's a more false to add it. And at some point you might be very happy that you're able to prove that you put something up at a certain point in time. And as we tie to authorship, as soon as we can do that, I think almost everything should and will be timestamped. We'll have to come up with a better word about that point because that is time and author stamps, but that really is not a nice term. And in fact, you could say it's the movement or the trusted web shift is about integrity as preconditioned instead of afterthought. Yeah, it's privacy by design instead of privacy by law. While encouraging the search engines and policymakers to require it and reward it to make sure that's one of the things with GDPR, GDPR was about punishment and we can-- Yeah, and it's about a very big fines and that's why a lot of people hate it. And I love it because I think it's actually the first time in the last few decades that we've realized that privacy is something that we really, really should protect. Absolutely. And to close things off for the people using WordPress, by the end of the year, we will have a Shopify integration as well as we learned from your data analytics that that's the number two e-commerce platform. But for all the people using WordPress who've gone and just installed a plugin, what's their key reasons or how would you say, why would they start timestamping as soon as possible? Well, because as I said you can't timestamp backward. So as soon as you start doing it you can do it now and you have those timestamps. And it's so simple to do. I mean, install the plugin, run the thing, it's not hard. And really, I think it'll pay off. I've been wrong before, but I've definitely also been right before in these things. I think this is simple enough to just start doing and see the benefits as you go along. And I also think that already the added transparency of what WordProof does in how you've changed your documents is great for customers. What we were discussing was the revisions, the more transparency, the higher the reward. So I think if we can get those incentives in place that not only it's because the consumer wants it or because the site owner wants it, but also to search engines, for example or social media rewarding it, there's an incentive for being transparent. Yeah, incentivizing, this whole thing is something that's always very good. I know something that Google has been very good at which is why I hope that we will be able to collaborate with them on this at some point once we make this a web standard. And I think the first stop there is making it a web standard and then going from there to build upon it. So perfect, yeah. That were all the questions I had. I'm not sure if there's something you want to add from your side. Well, of course everybody should just install WordProof and get going. It's awesome technology. I'm looking forward very much to work with you and the team on improving the web together. And we're building this trusted weapon and building this thing where everybody can really rely on it again. Perfect, so yeah I always end the interviews with "let's build the trusted web" together. So, shall we say that together? - Oh, let's do it. Let's... build... the trusted web... together. Yay, thanks, proud of having you and yeah, that's it for now. - Thanks, bye. (bright ambient music)