Gagan Ghotra

From my recent podcast with Edward Strum!

Key Points

• User-Generated Content (UGC) and SEO: High-quality user-generated content, like Reddit and TikTok, are performing well in search results. This is because they often provide direct answers and a wide range of real-world opinions that traditional publishers struggle to replicate.
  
• Content Quality over Authority Signals: Edward Sturm argues that simply dressing up low-quality, AI-generated content with legitimate authority signals shouldn’t guarantee high rankings. He believes the focus should be on whether the content is genuinely useful to the user.
  
• Reddit’s Search Ranking Success: Users often prefer it because they can get quick, direct answers from multiple perspectives without the “fluff” common on many publisher websites. People were even manually adding “Reddit” to their searches before Google started prioritising it.
  
• Platform Experiments with UGC:
  • Reddit: Gagan points out Reddit’s experiment with a “/klp” subfolder, which programmatically aggregated posts and comments into new pages. Initially successful, these pages are now seeing a decline in rankings, possibly due to a flawed approach in selecting content.
  • TikTok: TikTok is using “/discover” subfolder to create aggregated pages for specific brands (e.g., Nike), compiling user videos about them. These pages are starting to rank for branded queries.
    
• The Challenge of Programmatic Content: The speakers highlight the difficulty in programmatically creating high-quality pages from UGC. While platforms like Reddit and TikTok are attempting it, the success depends on their ability to accurately judge and curate the most relevant and useful content. Reddit’s initial failure with the “/klp” pages serves as a cautionary example.
  
• The Value of Authentic User Experience: A key insight is that UGC platforms provide access to niche, experience-based information that is nearly impossible for a single publisher or writer to capture. An example given was a specific credit card rewards issue that was only discovered through a user’s complaint on a Reddit thread.

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We discussed this from 18:02 to 32:53 in the video below!

Here is the full transcript of what we discussed from 18:02 to 32:53!

Gagan Ghotra: like when anyone is trying to reach out to me and get get get sort of like my consulting services

Gagan Ghotra: because a lot of different type of the people reach out to me like recently someone from Brazil reached out and I was like should these these pages and the content that you’re publishing

Edward Sturm: Wait, did you say Brazil?

Gagan Ghotra: in search results.

Edward Sturm: Brazil.

Gagan Ghotra: Brazil.

Edward Sturm: Oh my god, you said Brazil. I thought you said Brazzers, the porn company.

Gagan Ghotra: Oh yeah. my my My Z is really strong I think.

Edward Sturm: Okay. You might

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah. So what I was trying to say is like sometimes as a SEO, you have to make an assessment that should this page be ranking in search results.

Edward Sturm: Yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a thing about quality.

Edward Sturm: That’s that’s what it is. It’s like, should AI generated financial advice be showing up? Like is that is that high quality or low quality? Clearly it’s low quality. They can dress it up as much as they want and that’s why they succeeded. I believe, I believe they succeeded because they dressed it up in legitimate authority signals.

Edward Sturm: but like it’s that’s like low quality content. And you know, what you were saying had me thinking about user-generated content.

Edward Sturm: Because lots of there’s lots of web apps out there or just apps that they have tons of user-generated content. They have a question, okay, like we have all this USG or sorry, UGC, we have all this user-generated content.

Edward Sturm: UGC. Should we like should we have it try to have all this indexed? And you have to ask yourself if a searcher came across this page, is it going to be useful?

Edward Sturm: So like with with one of my companies, we have a lot of user generated content and we debated for a while about using AI to make the the user generated, trying to make the user generated content like more useful.

Edward Sturm: The the UGC alone wasn’t that useful. So then we we said, okay, but like what let’s say what if we had AI expound upon like the content? Would that be better? And the answer was no, because it would just end up being a lot of duplicate content.

Edward Sturm: And like maybe like there would be like a few pages in there that would be useful, but most of it would be would be junk. Whereas if you compare that with something like Reddit, you know, a lot of Reddit posts and comments are actually valuable and that’s why Google is surfacing them so much.

Edward Sturm: People like to complain like Reddit is winning, but a lot of people like to get their answers from Reddit.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah.

Gagan Ghotra: I think uh with with Reddit the challenge is that Reddit do have high quality content, but at the same time like should low quality content from Reddit also be ranking?

Edward Sturm: No, but and Google doesn’t Google doesn’t want that.

Gagan Ghotra: but it is ranking right now. Yeah, but that’s that’s a hard problem to solve.

Gagan Ghotra: And also like coming back to your UGC point like I was like sort of like tracking two experiments. One was from Reddit and one was is still running from Tik Tok.

Gagan Ghotra: So Reddit back in December last year, uh they launched a KLP subfolder. Reddit.com/klp and all the pages there were aggregated posts and comments from existing pages.

Edward Sturm: Right.

Gagan Ghotra: So what they were trying to do is like best shaver shaving cream or shaving gel in UK, best shaving gel in Australia, best shaving gel in India and they were trying to create ton of these pages with best, best, best, best, best.

Gagan Ghotra: And sort of like have uh existing comments and the posts aggregated on the on those pages. So what they were trying to do is like they they picked a title and they went into like three or four subreddits, they collected the comments and the post and they merged it together just on one page and created that page under KLP subfolder.

Gagan Ghotra: Initially, initially for around like three three four months, those pages were ranking, they were doing really, really well in search results. But since like last month, they are starting to drop. And

Gagan Ghotra: I think what went wrong there is like Reddit was not able to make a better judgment around like what post or what comment they should be picking from different subreddits to add on those pages that they were creating for different titles and the keywords.

Gagan Ghotra: But coming back to TikTok now, TikTok also has a subfolder discover, TikTok.com/discover, which also has aggregated videos. And what

Gagan Ghotra: they are trying to do right now is they are trying to create discover pages for each brand. So you may try to search for like TikTok.com/discover/Nike and you will see a page for Nike where they have aggregated all the user videos.

Edward Sturm: Yeah, you’re doing it right now. Yeah.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah. Yeah.

Edward Sturm: Where you will see all the videos which are posted by users about Nike, Nike shoes and everything else. and that page is somewhat useful.

Gagan Ghotra: And what I’m saying right now is that in some countries, those kind of the branded pages are starting to rank for branded queries.

Edward Sturm: Oh, it’s interesting.

Edward Sturm: Like for one, it’s uh, so I did Nike but it actually 301 back to their homepage, but I did so discover exists as a as a page and then you click on something in it and then, Oh and then it goes to a different subfolder like music like music or tag.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah. slash tag

Edward Sturm: Yeah, I think it it should work for the brand name as well because uh for one of our clients in company and then Nike or something.

Gagan Ghotra: I’m not sure about the exact URL right now, but uh one second.

Edward Sturm: I’m I’m like uh I’m very I’m very interested in in uh in how Tik Tok is aggregating content for SEO. Tik Tok has great has actually pretty good rankings.

Edward Sturm: Tik Tok content saying this from experience, Tik Tok content ranks really well.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah.

Edward Sturm: And when uh when Datatos looked at the top ranking websites, it was all UGC. Like most of the top ranking sites were were user-generated content. Tik Tok was right up there in the top 10.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah. I think uh it should be somewhere around uh TikTok.com/discover and even if you do site search in Google, you should be able to see like some brands over there.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah. Yeah, I think uh what I was trying to get get get there is like they are aggregating all the videos. So if you go to that kind of page, you just see the videos. There is not much inside around like what a specific video is about. But even still right now like Google is ranking like many of those pages uh and like for one of our clients in based out of Sydney, if you search their brand name, first result is their website, second is that discover page. And it might be useful.

Gagan Ghotra: But if you go to that page, you just see a collection of videos, video, video, video, video, video. There is not much information around like Yeah, but if they’re taking but if they’re taking the top performing videos about the brand

Edward Sturm: those videos are going to be pretty darn entertaining.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah. And what I was trying trying to come back to is like, if Tik Tok start to add more of text with those videos, explaining what first row of the videos is about, what second row of the video is about.

Gagan Ghotra: that kind of the programmatic approach around like where you are taking your UGC, you’re collecting your all that content and you’re structuring it in a somewhat useful way, that must rank in such results. But Reddit tried to do that, Reddit failed because their approach was not right like how they were picking the post and comment.

Edward Sturm: But Tik Tok may succeed. So was the Reddit KLP? What was it? Was was this was the subfolder KLP?

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah, was the K so these KLP posts were they uh hand-picked or or was it just all automatically generated?

Gagan Ghotra: I think it was automatically generated because they were trying they were creating thousands of those every day. Yeah. That’s a clear SEO play. I’m surprised that Yeah, they were. They have a partnership with Google.

Edward Sturm: I honestly, I feel like if it was another site that tried that, it would have gotten a hit.

Gagan Ghotra: You know partnership with Google, so uh

Gagan Ghotra: But but what I was trying to get get to is like if you have any sort of UGC content, either you own it or you see that people are posting about you, you should try to figure out a way to aggregate that on your pages, either it be programmatic approach or something like that, and try to make it as useful as possible for your users.

Gagan Ghotra: So that those kind of the approaches do work. What was the air quote for the Reddit for the Reddit Google partnership?

Gagan Ghotra: Because uh because I’m a little bit sus on the fact that it might be possible that Google is artificially boosting Reddit in search as well.

Edward Sturm: Oh, I mean, everybody thinks that. everybody Yeah, everybody thinks that.

Gagan Ghotra: Do you do you think that in search ranking systems or ranking equations, there is something where it says if it’s domain is Reddit, then add 100.

Edward Sturm: It’s it’s possible, but that but I don’t think that but I don’t think that favoritism is necessarily a bad thing. Because a lot of people were like this is and you know, this is me being a contrarian to much of the SEO community who thinks it’s terrible who that the favoritism is terrible. I think it’s totally possible that Google is boosting Reddit. A lot of people think that, but I mean a lot of searchers were literally adding Reddit to their searches before this. They wanted more Reddit content surfaced.

Gagan Ghotra: Yeah. And even like internally like whenever I am talking with our team and

Gagan Ghotra: and we are reviewing any publisher and seeing like why they are going up or why they are going down. We sort of like over the years we find that generally like everywhere across the world like even if a publisher is based out of Australia or India or US, the quality of the editorial has been going down, down, down, down.

Gagan Ghotra: They used to be great product reviews, but what happened over time is like publishers got to know that they did it did So, if you go to any Reddit page, you have probably the broadest spectrum of opinion about whatever that page is. If it if that page is talking about a product,

Gagan Ghotra: you will see people saying, it’s great, it’s okay, it’s all right, it’s amazing. You will see the broader spectrum of opinion and everyone is like explaining their thing that I think this is okay, here is why. Like some people like use like really, really harsh language over there, but they are explaining whatever their experience is.

Gagan Ghotra: Is any publisher be able to create that kind of a page? It’s impossible. Like you have a writer who is doing a product review, they get to a certain point where they find that this is good, this is bad, this is all right, let me just write it. But they cannot have a that level of experience where someone is saying that I have actually used this product and so and so.

Gagan Ghotra: And I will just give you like crazy example like like back in 2022, we used to work with a sort of like credit cards review publisher and there was this one case where we noticed that this credit card company has provided us all the information around like what are the benefits and everything else and and yeah and there was one benefit which people used to buy the card for and I will just give you like a studio example where you can book tickets to San Francisco and you get extra points here.

Gagan Ghotra: But what happened is like on Sunday you don’t get those extra points and there is no information on the web on the fact that this is the best credit card if you travel to San Francisco frequently. But on the web, nowhere, even the company has hidden the fact that on Sunday if you travel, you don’t get those points. How do you get that fact out? It came from a Reddit comment where someone was complaining that my daughter was doing this, this, this, she was supposed to get 12,000 points but she did not get anything.

Gagan Ghotra: And that’s how we sort of like discovered that, oh, this guy, this happened with him, he reached out to the company and then only the exclusive information was shared that, okay, this is the edge case. You were expecting 12,000 points, but you did not get that.

Gagan Ghotra: So those kind of the information points really, really edge case that can only come from like Reddit. Like you cannot access that kind of the experience real world experience information as a publisher even if you’re trying really hard, you know.

Edward Sturm: Yeah, and also, I’ll I’ll add to that and I will just say a lot of publishers put in so much fluff and and searchers hate that. You hate that, I hate that. It is just one of the most frustrating things. You’re trying to get a quick answer, you come across a page, there’s a long introduction, there’s a huge image, maybe the image is even unrelated.

Edward Sturm: And what you’re actually looking for is buried in the middle of the article and then half of the times it’s not even a complete answer. On Reddit, you you click the link, you click the link in the search results and then you you see your answer right there in one or two sentences.

Gagan Ghotra: Of course, people are going to prefer that.