Under the Hood

00:00 Hello, and welcome to How To Get Discovered. I'm Maya. And I'm Tom. This is episode 8, and it's the technical one. It's called Under the Hood. Last week, we pulled apart three different searches and found three completely different listeners behind them. This week is what happens before any of them press play. What a search engine actually sees when it lands on a transcript page, and why the same words can be invisible on one page and easy to find on another. And before she gets going, I'm bringing in a rule. He warned me about this in the car park. Every time either of us uses a word you wouldn't hear in a pub, the other one stops them, and they have to explain it in plain English.

00:43 No acronyms without a translation. If someone listening has to pause and look something up, we've let them down. Including you? I'm not above the law. Fine. I accept. On the condition that you keep count. I'm already counting. You said search engine just now. That's not jargon, Tom. That's Google. I'll allow it. Just about. Picture two web pages. Both have a player at the top and the full transcript of an episode underneath. Same words, same length, same episode. If you scrolled past both on your phone, you couldn't tell them apart. So they're the same. To you. To a search engine, they're barely related.

01:29 One's a properly built episode page, and the other's the transcript pasted into the box where the show notes normally go. And the difference is where exactly? You've just told me they look identical. It's all in the parts of the page nobody looks at. Which is why everyone ignores it, and why I wanted a whole episode on it. Then let's look at them. Slowly. With subtitles. When you open a web page, you see a layout. Headings, a player, maybe a list of other episodes down the side. When Google turns up, it doesn't see any of that. It reads the page as a document. Here's the title, here's a heading, here's the body text, and here's a layer of notes about the page itself that a visitor never sees.

02:14 That's the metadata. 1. I knew you'd. Metadata. Plain English, please. Information about the page, rather than the page. Its title, as it'll appear in the results, the little description underneath, what language it's in. It's the label on the jar rather than the jam. Fine. Jam I can follow. And some of the label does show. The title and that line of description are usually what you see in the search results. So if they say episode 63 and nothing else, that's a shop window with nothing in it. That one's aimed at me. Most of the industry, really. You just happen to be standing nearest.

02:58 Go on then. Back to the jar. And the most useful part of the label is what kind of thing is inside. A page can just be some text, or it can say, I'm an episode of a podcast. This is the show I belong to. This is when I came out. This is how long I am. And this is who's talking. That's structured data. 2. And don't think I didn't notice you slipping that in at the end of a sentence, like a restaurant adding service. It's the same idea as the label, but filled in on a standard form that the big search engines have agreed to read. There's a shared vocabulary, so this is a podcast episode means the same thing to all of them.

03:38 Instead of guessing what a page is from the words on it, the search engine gets told. And who fills it in? Me? Because I couldn't write that if you paid me. Nobody expects you to. Realistically, it's whatever builds the page for you. And that's where our two pages split. A lot of generic show notes pages were built to hold a player and a paragraph, and nobody ever filled in the form. So Google gets a page with some audio and a great many words and has to work out for itself what it's looking at. And the other one ranks higher. I'd be careful saying that. Google's fairly clear that this sort of labelling isn't a magic boost up the results, and it decides for itself what to do with it.

04:21 What it does is make the page easier to understand. Legible, if you like. That's a good word. Not jargon either. You're learning. A human can read both pages perfectly well. Only one of them can be read properly by a machine. And more and more of the reading is being done by machines, including the AI assistance people now ask instead of typing into a search box. Hmm. So it's less shout louder and more speak clearly. That's a better line than mine, and I'm going to steal it. Now the transcript itself. You record an hour, you run it through a transcription service. and you get back, what, 10,000 words?

05:03 Something like that. Mostly right, with the odd guest's name turned into a vegetable. And you paste the lot under the player. No headings, no breaks, no times. What has Google got? Something nobody's going to scroll through. One enormous, very boring paragraph, which is exactly what I accused your old transcripts of being back at the start of the season. I remember. I'm still slightly hurt. It can tell the page has something to do with freelancing because the word keeps coming up. It can't tell that minute 12 is about putting your rates up and minute 40 is about chasing an unpaid invoice. It's all one lump. And the structured version cuts the lump up.

05:47 Into chapters, each with a heading that says in normal words what that section's about. Proper paragraphs, who's speaking, and a time on each section you can click to play from that moment. So, raising your rates with existing clients is a heading on the page, sitting right above the 40 seconds where you actually answer it. Why does the clicking matter? That's for the listener, surely, not for Google. It's for both. If each section has its own address, an anchor. 3. Oh, come on, that's practically a boat word. Rules are rules. A link that takes you to a particular spot on a page rather than the top of it. Like a bookmark you can send someone.

06:30 Once a moment has one of those, it can be pointed at. Google does sometimes send people straight to the relevant part of a long page. It doesn't always, and nobody can make it, but it can only do that with a page that's actually divided into parts. So one episode stops being a single page about freelancing and turns into a dozen or so answers to a dozen or so questions, each with somewhere to land. The person who typed, How do I tell a client my rates are going up? lands on that bit, hits play, and hears you saying it. That's a different thing from finding a podcast. Completely. They went looking for an answer, and the answer happened to have a voice attached.

07:13 Can I ask how it actually gets there, though? Mechanically. The page exists, and then at some point it's in the results. What happens in the middle? Google sends out programs that wander around the web following links and reading pages. The industry calls them crawlers. 4. Although, I'll admit, I could picture that one. They read the page and file what they found in an index, which is basically an enormous catalogue of which pages are about what. When you search, Google isn't searching the web, it's searching its catalogue. So for my page to turn up. Three things. Google has to know the page exists.

07:54 It has to have read it and decided to keep it in the catalogue. And when someone searches, it has to decide your page is one of the better answers. Each of those can fail on its own. How does it find out the page exists in the first place? Links help, and you can hand Google a sitemap, which, before you start counting, is just a list of every page on your site, handed over directly so it doesn't have to stumble across them. You don't get a pass for defining it in advance. I absolutely do. Fine. Let the record show I was robbed. The second step's the slow one.

08:32 Being read isn't the same as being kept. Google decides how often to come back and what's worth holding on to, and a site's track record seems to play into that. And the third step is everything we've argued about all season. Is the page clear? Is it genuinely about the question? Does it load quickly? Does anyone link to it? And the person searching sees none of it. Not a scrap. They typed a question, tapped a result, and heard a voice. You said track record. That's the address argument from a few weeks back, isn't it? Whose house you're building? That's the one. That was why it matters. This is how it works. And you're about to say domain authority at me. I was trying not to.

09:17 It's a phrase from the tools people use to measure websites, not something Google has. Google says it doesn't use one big score for a whole site like that. Then why does everyone go on about it? Because the thing it's trying to describe does seem to be real. A site that's been around, that other decent sites link to, that's published sensible things for years. New pages on it tend to get noticed and trusted more easily than the same page on a site nobody's heard of. Call it reputation. It builds slowly and it builds up at a particular address. Which is a problem if the address isn't yours. Exactly. Whatever reputation those pages earn sits with someone else's address.

10:01 You leave the platform in three years and you take your audio with you. The pages, the links people made to them, the history, all of that stays behind. Tenant, not owner. You did this already. And you said in the very first episode you'd never have an opinion about a CNAME. I had one, briefly, in week two. It's mellowed into a grudging interest. That'll do. When you type an address into your browser, the first thing that happens is a DNS lookup. 5. And that's a proper acronym, so you owe me a full sentence. Domain name system, the phone book of the internet. Computers find each other by number.

10:44 People use names. And DNS is the bit in the middle that looks up your name and hands back a number. That I can picture. Carry on. Your entries in that phone book are called records, and a CNAME is one kind. It's basically a redirect. Is it, though? No, actually, it isn't. And that's a good catch. A redirect sends you somewhere else, and the address in your browser changes. A CNAME is more like a nickname. It says, if anyone asks for search.myshow.com, go and look up this other name instead. The browser still shows your address. Behind the scenes, the page comes from somewhere else.

11:25 So the listener's on my address, and the computer doing the work belongs to someone else. Right. And setting it up is less dramatic than it sounds. You log in wherever you bought your domain, find the page with the records on it, and add one line. Then you wait, because the change can take a little while to spread. Sometimes minutes, occasionally most of a day. That's still the whole job? It was only ever a scary sounding word. Adding the line takes two minutes. And then Google's happy. Google files the page under the address, not under whose computer it came off. So whatever reputation those pages build is filed under your name.

12:08 And this is the bit where you sell me something. No, I'm telling you what exists. From PodHerd's Grow the Herd tier up, your archive can sit on a subdomain of your own site, search.yoursite.com. The one line you add is a CNAME that points search at domains.podherd.com. LeadTheHerd goes further, with yoursite.com/slash archive and a fully custom domain. 6. You hid that one in the middle of a product description and hoped I was asleep. The subdomain. Your site is yoursite.com, and a subdomain is a name stuck on the front of it, like search.yoursite.com.

12:50 Same house, different front door. And this show? Since you're the one lecturing. This show's archive is at podherd.com/slash htgd and I've never pretended otherwise. It's a perfectly good place for a show to live. It just isn't the same as living at your own address. Fair. And the thing that properly bothered me in that episode. The one where Google knows things about your show and you don't. Google Search Console. It's free, it's from Google, and for a site you can prove is yours, it tells you which searches your pages turned up for, how often they were shown, how often anyone clicked, and roughly how far down the list they were.

13:31 It's the nearest you get to watching steps two and three actually happen. So you can see the impressions. Sorry, the number of times you were shown. Did you just jargon at me? I corrected it. 7. You don't get to correct yourself halfway through and walk away clean. I'll take that one on the chin. The catch is a site you can prove is yours. If the pages live on someone else's address, you usually can't prove that, so you can't see the data. It's being collected, you're just not allowed to look. On PodHerd, the Search Console integration is on Grow the Herd and Lead the Herd, and it shows your clicks and impressions.

14:12 And what would someone actually find in there? Say you've got a show about home baking. You might find an episode that's shown for why is my sourdough dense all the time and almost nobody clicks, which usually means the title isn't doing its job. Or an episode you'd forgotten about, turning up week after week for a question you didn't know people were asking. It doesn't change the show, it just stops you guessing. Right, that's seven on the board. Six of them mine and one of yours. Which is one more than I'd planned on. Can I say something? Now you've explained the plumbing in words my mum could find. follow.

14:50 Please. I believe the plumbing. Honestly. The labels, the chapters, the phone book, the address. It all makes sense. What I don't believe yet is the bit everyone in your world skips. It's always the success story. The show that went from nothing to everything. I'm not sure I've ever. Not you specifically, the genre. So here's my challenge: take an ordinary show, not a hit, a decent show with a few hundred listeners and a back catalogue. Do all of this properly, and then show me, honestly, what the first month looks like.

15:28 Not the best case, the realistic one. No graph shooting up and to the right in week two, no screenshot of somebody's inbox full of fan mail. Even if it's dull? Particularly then. If you can show me the dull version and I still think it's worth doing, I'll believe you. Deal. And for the record, the first month is going to be dull. Good. Then you'll have no trouble showing me. Next week then, compounding. Where you take me up on it? An ordinary made-up show, week by week, with no shortcuts. What the first month actually looks like, why the line stays flat for ages before it bends, and why some episodes keep earning for years while others are gone in a week.

16:13 I'm bringing my counter. Course you are. Thanks for listening to How To Get Discovered. See you next week. Bye.