Pax (01:55)
All right, Patrick, thank you so much for joining the show today. It's so great to have you on.

Patrick Kajirian (01:59)
Thanks Paxton, great to be here.

Pax (02:01)
⁓ all right. So to kick things off, you've got quite a resume working for some very large sites. ⁓ SEO at, at, at huge, huge sites, it means something different than it means at very small scale. So what exactly, like, how would you say SEO product management? Like, what does that mean? How does that differ for a site of such a large scale like Walmart?

Patrick Kajirian (02:26)
Yeah, I'm lucky enough to have a storied background in enterprise SEO, first at Disney and then where it was more of a of a conventional marketing function as like an SEO manager reporting into marketing org. And with Realtor and even at Walmart, it's a product first function. And I think that's really interesting for a couple of reasons. One, you treat the search engine as a customer in a way.

And so the search engine is a first-class citizen. you're ⁓ making sure that you're factoring all the SEO compliance and governance best practices that's put forth by search engines. So understanding, here's how you build pages that can be adequately consumed and understood by the search engine so you can extract all the relevant signals. Here are all the features, SEO features you could optimize towards, like leveraging structured data so you can get the best experience for

for customer searching and getting the data, the most relevant data quickly. Like that kind of stuff, think, ⁓ whereas ⁓ marketers know and understand these are the things that we need to be doing, it's only when it's really fabric or it's like woven into the ⁓ foundation of how you build stuff that it really gets executed correctly. And then the other aspect to that also is that ⁓ when it's product led, the requirements are, they're clear.

But also there's a direct channel into the engineering and the design functions of building. And generally speaking, you tend to have dedicated resources for that kind of stuff. Same with data science. So I think one of the things that makes doing SEO at a big company like Walmart really interesting is that you're able to lean on individual data science teams.

are really good designers, really brilliant engineers, and you're able to kind of execute on things at a scale that's like a lot bigger than if you had to kind of relegate yourself to like a much smaller teams. ⁓ And, ⁓ you you build a roadmap is the other thing, right? So it's not just like you build this and it's done, you can't get back to it until you can get approval or you can, or it's back above the line. like, could really get time to flush things out, take an iterative approach, test, test, test, like, you know, release something, look at it long and hard, see if it's worked.

do something else, do something different, iterate. And then I think that's where product litigia really excels in the context of a large company.

Pax (04:58)
Hmm.

I love that. ⁓ that phrase of Google's a first-class citizen is, ⁓ I think, a unique kind of POV and, ⁓ you know, for a long time, the industry was shouting like, don't optimize for robots. We optimize for humans. But the argument would be humans are the ones using Google. And so I optimizing for Google, you're optimizing for them to find what you're looking for. Right.

Patrick Kajirian (05:16)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

And that's another, that's an excellent point. You know, generally product, like product development is customer focused, right? Or user focused. But Google's user, very user focused, right? You'll look at it in their guidelines around user experience, primarily. It's written black and white. And that's the other good thing about, you know, SEO in general is that, you know, we're, yes, there's always some black box, like, you know, reverse engineer the algorithm and figure out like, what's the silver bullet? Like, how do we cheat and gain the system?

But really, 99 % of my job is actually just, no, let's just, Google has these guidelines printed black on white, and you just need to follow them. And so it's very engineering, like, yeah, it's very technical in focus, but they're there. And a good example of this I have is ⁓ in the context of e-commerce, is just about linking, right? And one big challenge that we have.

Pax (06:06)
All right.

Patrick Kajirian (06:24)
in general, and it's not just Walmart, I'm just speaking in general for the industry at large. Anyone has a ⁓ large e-commerce site or a site that has a huge number of pages is indexation has proven to be more and more of a challenge, right? So it's pretty clear that in the last decade, Google's actually been putting the brakes on kind of in developing, consuming, devaluing the entire web. They're being very judicious and very selective about what gets qualified to get represented in the index. ⁓

So we have a very large catalog at Walmart, just like at Realtor.com. We try to have a page for every property in the United States indexed in the hundreds of millions of pages. And ⁓ certainly Google won't crawl. Well, they'll crawl hundreds of millions of pages, but they're not going to have every single one those indexed. And so ⁓ one of the ⁓ strongest signals that we found, and Google is very explicit about this, is a link to your most important content.

Pax (07:03)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (07:22)
linked to products, make sure that they're linked relevantly, make sure they're linked prominently, make sure that there's, that if it's important to you, by virtue of linking to it, you're automatically providing a high relevant signal, which directly influences their prioritization in terms of crawl and consideration and processing and indexing. And this is all written in their guidelines. You just have to spend the time reviewing it, looking at it. And so just knowing that, you know, so at Walmart, there are a number of

Product managers focus on SEO, and each one has a different kind of jurisdiction, right? Or core competency or pillar, as we call it. And mine is indexing and ⁓ linking navigation discovery. And so it doesn't just involve building indexation systems like XML sitemaps or think about feeds and things of that nature, but it's also about how do we leverage index linking as a tool for discovery, for funneling bot traffic, ⁓ funneling relevant signals.

Pax (07:57)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (08:20)
⁓ which ultimately also lead to indexation. So what we found was by virtue, and this is something I've done at Realtor as well at scale. If you understand where the crawler is, where the highest amount of ⁓ crawl activity is located, generally, naturally it's on the homepage because your homepage is the most crawled page of your site, generally speaking, right? But you kind of follow through the browse path of the crawler, you're looking at server logs and understanding like what's the pattern of discovery and...

Pax (08:40)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (08:48)
what's the funnel look like for the search engine to ultimately arrive at your most important business generating pages, right? ⁓ Figure out like thematically if you know there are pages that are crawled more than others and those pages are very authoritative, have high relevant signaling, then it stands that if you were to generate link systems that can rotate through a number of links targeting pages that are highly relevant to that anchor,

Pax (08:54)
Yep.

Patrick Kajirian (09:17)
to that anchor system, that link module, then you stand to funnel that valuable crawl bandwidth, that crawl activity deeper into those related pages. And guess what? If you do that diligently and consistently, and you can do it in a way that's kind of smart, like that scale, like you understand here's how frequently this Googlebot's visiting the page. Here are how many pages I know are deemed good quality or valuable, right? Transactable.

Pax (09:25)
Mm.

Patrick Kajirian (09:44)
lots of content that seems to match the intent of our customers, what not. And then if they're not, if you're not seeing ⁓ crawl activity on those destination pages, high quality, qualified destination pages, but you link to them and you link to them across a lot of pages that have high crawl activity, you'll find that those pages get crawled real quick, they get indexed real quick, and they tend to perform better in SERPs. So that's something that I think everybody just kind of...

Pax (10:07)
Mm.

Patrick Kajirian (10:12)
They don't take advantage of that. And yet Google said exactly that in its guidelines.

Pax (10:18)
Yeah, I love, I think that's so fascinating. And one, like one of the things that we do sometimes in this industry is we get over our own skis where it's just like, listen, the thing that you learned five years ago, it's still is there and we'll, we'll forget about it. And so like internal linking is one of those, like you kind of learn that in the first little bit of, of learning SEO and then you kind of move on, but it's like, no, no, no, listen, it's super important. And I think that's fascinating. I've never heard of a strategy where you're.

Patrick Kajirian (10:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Pax (10:46)
intentionally rotating these internal links to direct it where you want it to go for indexation purposes. And I'm curious, I have two follow up questions on that. One is what do you notice from those pages that get this kind of direct beam of focus once you rotate off of them? Do they stay within the index and is your index growing larger? Or have you noticed that you kind of have a certain maximum that

Patrick Kajirian (10:52)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Pax (11:15)
Google is giving you and now you're treating that maximum depending on like the priorities of your company.

Patrick Kajirian (11:22)
Yeah, that's a good question. And it's something that we need, we test constantly, right? Because what worked yesterday may not necessarily work tomorrow. In my experience, especially when you're dealing with really large sites, that it's ideally you'd want for every page that's discovered to get index or main index and continue to perform and kind of like mature, know, and improve in ranking over time, generate more referrals in time, know, convert better over time. But that's always going to be the case. And I feel like

Pax (11:28)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (11:52)
The pages that you're linking to also, they have a life cycle, So unless they're evergreen and they stay in place and they're static, in our case, we're dealing with a lot of ephemeral content like products, they come and go. So therefore, they come and go in the index as well. So for us, we use link systems as a churn system with rotational.

⁓ policies, right? With policies that purposely were just trying to rotate through as many pages to kind of get them indexed. If they're still highly valuable, usable, and deemed that customers would look at that page and say, okay, this is helpful. Thank you. This matched the query that I had, or it's a product that's transactable and it's competitive from a pricing perspective and has really good reviews and all that stuff. Those don't tend to get de-indexed. Those will stay in the index, right?

But for any reason, if the quality of the page declines over time or gets irrelevant, ⁓ or something happens to the page, they'll drop from the index. And we do see constantly, it's very volatile. The index is volatile. Things will drop. ⁓ And yes, links help provide those valuable signals. And in the absence of those links, it's possible that, based on a combination of factors, it's not just linking that Google will look at to be able to gauge whether a page is valuable or not.

But links play big part. ⁓ The removal of those links may potentially contribute to them eventually being deindexed. But if they're important to you, then you have to find other ways of making sure that the signals are flowing, not just within links, within ⁓ external links, not just internal links, external links. Conversationally, make sure people are talking about it outside of your website. ⁓ Push and promote and display that content prominently in your site, and the content will remain indexed, I think.

Pax (13:47)
Yeah. Yeah. that's fascinating. Are there, ⁓ just really quickly, just cause I'm curious, are there any stubborn pages that you've noticed in your career where it's like, it doesn't matter what kind of intense focus you send its way. The crawlers just refuse to index for whatever reason, like, have you noticed any patterns or trends?

Patrick Kajirian (14:04)
you

⁓ things that are like generally very difficult. I mean, really anything that's duplicative in nature. And, ⁓ when you look at, when you look at, in particular, when you look at ⁓ e-commerce, ⁓ you'll look at, products that tend to have variants. Right. And so you want to make sure that, you know, all the variants have, you know, very unique, ⁓ very descriptive, ⁓ content towards that really differentiates the variant from one variant to another.

Pax (14:18)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (14:35)
And there's lots of different ways you can do that, not just like on page content, but just structured data. also that was at least not too long ago that helps, you know, search engines understand what's the relationship of the graph between variants and whatnot. And that kind of helps. But we found that, you know, one of the areas that are the hardest to, to, to get indexed are going to be any pages of products that have high similarities, high duplication. And so, and that's to be expected, to be honest. And I think a lot of ways it's to work around that is one.

Pax (14:57)
Sure. Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (15:02)
Yeah, certainly work to get all the factors on page to be unique and optimized, right? For variants. also, ⁓ you know, like when you're contending with pages, similar pages with competitors, you know, you just have to make it compelling. You have to really make the value proposition stand out to the searcher, right? And so things like being competitive on pricing, being competitive on features like next day shipping, ⁓ you know, having better imagery, you know, showcasing the product, like things that all of that stuff combined will help.

ensure that your content gets picked over the competitions. so that's part of it. Really differentiating, make sure your stuff comes out on top, not just with how you're optimizing towards it, but also just by virtue of the page of the experience itself and what it offers.

Pax (15:49)
Right.

Yep. I love that. yeah. I mean, we, we talk all the time about like it's audience and then message and then channel. And you know, like if you're saying like, you know, it's the same, same message as everyone else. There's nothing compelling here. The channel is going to have a very hard time performing unless you are like actually showing them something compelling. okay. So in the past two weeks, the, the world has been thrown into

Patrick Kajirian (16:00)
Hmm.

That's right.

Pax (16:19)
This new agentic browser worlds and people are still in waiting lists for some of these. And so it's like very, very fresh, but things like Dia Comet, Chrome's version, or Google's version, should say, ⁓ and chat GPT is like, in my opinion, not doing the browser, but they're doing, you know, they're giving their agent power to act. ⁓ so in a similar way.

Patrick Kajirian (16:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Pax (16:47)
These AIs are now, you know, they're growing arms and legs to go out and actually act on behalf of the users, whether that through the browser or some other way. Um, I'm kind of curious, uh, you know, your thoughts on these and the impact in marketing, um, you know, things that people in SEO or marketing in general should be thinking about as these start to become more widespread and use kind of commonly, uh, among people, general thoughts there.

Patrick Kajirian (17:16)
Yeah, I think it's exciting. It's an exciting time to be a marketer because there's just way more tools at your disposal. And the concept of just being able to automate your workflows using these tools, I think, is very, powerful. So yeah, I've got a lot to say on the subject. But let me start just briefly with the advent of agentic powered browsers, particularly, versus agentic.

I'm going say like software features provided by large ⁓ LLM companies and whatnot. But so let me start with actually just describing my experience with Google's Project Mariner. I was at I.O. this year and I got the chance to actually demo ⁓ privately like the experience what that would look like in the browser, right? When you actively have Mariner go and execute a series of tasks for yourself. And we did this in the context of we pull up like a

someone's webpage and it was an e-commerce, it was kind of like an e-learning site, like they were offering courses, you know, for, for, for, you know, tailored for a specific type of business person, you know, trying to get certified in something. And, and what was really cool, it was cool in that you basically, you pulled it up on the webpage and you, asked Mariner like, Hey, can you find me the course that specializes in, I think it's like certification for a very specific type of like nursing competency? Like,

nursing practice and added to cart and checkout for me. And it was the kind of thing you just watch it like an invisible human operating a browser. You just watch Mariner to kind of click through the site, putz through it until it found the right match for that right product listing, or in this case, course listing, click through to it and attempted to add to cart and it failed. it was just one, these things are not baked. And I know OpenAI

Pax (19:01)
Hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (19:13)
It's called copilot. It's called the name of sketching. But I know even OBI's have having difficulties. Things are not executing based on the expectation, I think, of most customers. ⁓ But I will say, with Mariner in particular, they said they would have the ability to generate 10 kind of virtual ⁓ tasks at the same time. So you could definitely see the power that they would be able to execute things in parallel.

Pax (19:22)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (19:41)
And even if it's slow today, it's going to get a lot faster. It'll get a lot smarter. And so the ability to implement this is really, really interesting. ⁓ But so Google and even OpenAI, they're doing this in the cloud, right? They're basically spinning up virtual instances and running those tasks there virtually. think what ⁓ Perplexity and with specifically in the context of ⁓ their new browser Comet, I think it's really interesting because it's just, it's basically your browser. It's, you know, you're logged in with your credentials.

and you're executing tasks as if you were doing it, it's just you're just doing it, you know, a lot of like parallel instances, like multiple tabs and executing on that. And I think that's really interesting because I remember I listened to Arvind Srinivas, right? That's, he was on Decoder last week, right? And he was talking about this and he was telling a strategy, kind of explaining a strategy and it's cool. It's kind like a hybrid approach, right? That they're pursuing one day, they're, you know, trying to be ⁓ in the moment and trying to just kind of.

Pax (20:26)
Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (20:39)
compete head on by releasing a browser today because the benefit of using browsers that you already logged in, like you have your Google account login. An example of this is like as a marketer in SEO, let's say you log in to search console, you're logging in your Google account, you have search console open, you can open up seven tabs, 10 tabs, each on a different property, right? Execute on this. And then what Comet will do is it will effectively just kind of emulate you going through, clicking through, going to like the page performance report.

Pax (20:47)
Yes.

Patrick Kajirian (21:09)
you know, putting, sending, sending all the, the, filters to look at like last week compared to last year, ⁓ and across all your properties. And it's going to know to be able to go in and just hit the, the, the export button to Excel or to Google, Google sheets and do that across all 10 tabs at once. And from there, take the content of in Google docs from all 10 tabs, from all 10, 10 sheets, aggregate them together. And then from there, you could execute a very specific, like analytical query, like, you know,

sort everything by top winning queries for the past week ⁓ compared to the prior period. And from there, do a keyword clustering analysis of what are the key themes or key product categories in which we saw ranking gains versus ranking losses, for instance. And you'll be able to do that. You'll be able to do that. What would normally have taken me, if I were to do this on my own, it would have taken me an hour to do it. It'll take you two minutes to do it.

Pax (21:54)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (22:03)
And I think that's what the power is of leveraging the browser specifically and bringing in agentic workflows into the browser. That's very different from what Google or even OpenAI are doing by doing this in the cloud. That assumes that you have to be able to provide all your credentials and authentication to be able to access all the ⁓ software features and services that these agents will need to be able to do this. Same thing with checking out ⁓ and buying something on your behalf. ⁓

Pax (22:09)
Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (22:32)
I can tell you like the biggest concerns that e-tailers like big e-tailers like, know, Target, Walmart, Amazon have is they don't want agents being the middleman going in and buying things on behalf of people when it comes to just like protecting the privacy and the data integrity and even the safety and security of their customers. ⁓ Because what happens when agents are buying things but not representing the customer in a way that's correct, right?

Pax (22:52)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Patrick Kajirian (23:00)
like

not using the right return address for shipping, instance, not using, or contact information. You what if that customer wants to return something and, you know, if the agent isn't correctly representing the customer, that's a problem logistically and also in safety and whatnot. And so to be able to do things and handle stuff like this at scale, you want to make sure that the customer is properly represented in these transactions. And that you don't have that problem, I think, when it's, ⁓ you know, the browser, it's you, it's just, you know,

Pax (23:12)
you

Patrick Kajirian (23:30)
emulating you, just basically assuming you and doing things ⁓ and you're authenticated, you're logged in, ⁓ and everything's accounted for in that way. I think that's really smart. So yeah, I'm excited for it. I can't wait to see it. I'll say on a personal level, network related. I could really use it because for instance, ⁓ I'm a gamer. I'm a PC gamer. And every week, there's free games that come out that are made available. And like in Amazon Prime, frequently,

Pax (23:41)
Yeah.

haha

Patrick Kajirian (23:59)
allows for free games, older PC games, get downloaded and added to your library on Steam and stuff. ⁓ And so I read this great article that was like, here are 10 games now available for free that you can download through Amazon Prime. they had basically a table for every game, a link to go access it. And you'd have to authenticate through GOG.com or through Epic Games or through other different publishers, game publishers, right?

Pax (24:25)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (24:28)
But for all those, need to have logins, need to have credentials, you have to be set up to be able to download it and all that stuff. And it counts with all of this. All this stuff is in my Chrome history. Like all these logins, everything is already pre-authenticated cache and it's all ready to go. But to spend the time, for instance, to go through, I didn't know like half of these games. So was like, hey, and I went to Gemini for this. I went to Gemini and I have the pro account for that. And I was like, can you review these 10 games and then just surface like the top two or three?

that are highly rated that work really well in a Steam deck, because that's primarily around gaming these days. And sure enough, Gemini did a bang up job of sitting on the top three or four of these. That would be really great. And I was able to review it say, yeah, this looks good. I want to download them. But that's where the power Gemini stopped. Gemini was like, I know where they are. I see these links. They're in the table. I know exactly where to go. But I can't do that for you. Whereas I know with Comet.

Pax (25:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (25:26)
I have a sneakest of, I'm going to try this, but I have a sneakest of suspicion that would have, that I would have been able to execute that task from start to finish with a single prompt and, and had that accomplished. And I think that's, that's the power of that capability.

Pax (25:33)
Yep. Yes.

Yeah, it's true. mean, I, so I've, I've played around with Comet and, ⁓ I did say, Hey, look at my calendar. want to see the Superman movie with my wife, find a time this weekend that works. And so it found, I said, give me tickets actually. And so it found a time on my calendar where that would work for both of us. And then it actually found the theater that was near us. And then it selected the best seats and then it.

Patrick Kajirian (26:04)
Mm.

Pax (26:07)
filled in my credit card information and it did bring me to the last part where I just had to click buy. But I believe if I had given it permission, it would have just clicked buy for me and I wouldn't have had to do anything. It was ⁓ wild. It was wild. ⁓ And the implications on... Yeah, yeah. I mean, the way I think about it is previously what you had to do with APIs, it kind of makes the APIs...

Patrick Kajirian (26:23)
Hmm, there's a lot going on behind the scenes there to be able to accomplish that. It's crazy.

Pax (26:36)
There's other reasons to have them, but it's like where there are no APIs, there's no more problem. It's kind like where we go, where we're going, we don't need roads. We don't need APIs. It's just like just log in and whatever's in the software you're in, you have access to. Anyway, so it's wild and the implications are gonna be just insane.

Patrick Kajirian (26:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we don't need APIs. Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Can we just spend a minute just like riffing off of that? Because, I think, you know, with the advent of MTP, right? ⁓ You know, we're basically building all the plumbing for agents to be able to talk to each other or talk to systems and like brands and companies and their data sets, right? Without having to kind of interface with like a web page that was created for humans that, you know, it's just really just there to slow us down, right? I feel like, you know, there's this big, contentious debate about

man, the web as we know it is going to die, right? It's just going to be agents talking to other agents and humans are just not, know, the web pages we know is going to die. I don't think that's true, right? I feel like very much like in the automobile, right? You have classic cars and you have really efficient commuter cars or like super fast cars. think there's going to be, you know, a person's going to want to drive a nice, you know, old classic car on the weekends and enjoy that experience versus have their agentic.

Um, but you know, kind of run their day-to-day stuff. so I think, you know, people will be able to have the kicking needed too. feel like there will always be need for a conventional website because we're going to want to browse stuff ourselves, self-serve that information because it's a passion or because we, you know, it's, it's, it's a preference, right? Um, and, there's a bit of, also be in tandem. There'll still be a need to have all this automation happen because it's so convenient, right? And to be able to have the bots do so. So I'm a firm believer that the websites aren't going away.

Pax (28:18)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (28:24)
there's

still going to be a need for conventional SEO systems, Like XML sitemaps or feeds. Still relevant, even in the AI space, right? Right now, there isn't a standard. Like, MCP exists, right? And it's a great protocol for agents to get the context they need, right? But it doesn't replace a website. It doesn't replace the importance of feeds. ⁓ So I think until that gets released,

that standard to set and then people start adopting it and businesses start adopting it. I don't think there's any danger that the web as we know it's going to disappear. We could talk about the quality of the web. That's a different story, right? But as far as just the architecture, the infrastructure that exists, no, think that's, I think we're very much going to continue browsing the web moving forward.

Pax (29:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think

it's, it's going to be interesting. I'm only going to say this so that maybe five years I can look back and say, look, I said it was recorded. where like most of what's dominated the web is essentially algorithms. know, if you've got Google's algorithm, you've got all the social algorithms serving you what it believes you want, but all of them fueled by ads. so it's like, it's not necessarily what you want, but what is going to get this person to stay a little bit longer, especially on social.

Patrick Kajirian (29:18)
Excuse me.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Pax (29:38)
I could see a situation where it's like we all now have our own algorithm, where it's looking at these posts for me and it knows what I want to see and it will show me my own curated social media posts and websites and articles. So I'm not looking anymore, it's just bringing it to me. And so in that sense, unless we start to see some massive monetization now of this own, in which case we're kind of back where we started. ⁓

I mean, but I could see the web changing in that sense, you know, where they're not, people aren't browsing as much anymore, you know.

Patrick Kajirian (30:09)
Yeah. Yes, yes,

Yeah. And, know, so you're not, you're not paying for the benefit of an ad impression on a page seen by a human. You're not going to get that, but maybe you pay for the benefit of the bot being fed a piece of content that is highly interesting to your, to the, to that user instead. And so we have to find ways to be able to, to honor that kind of a contract, you know.

Pax (30:35)
Yes.

Patrick Kajirian (30:36)
So

yeah, it's fascinating. It's fascinating, but ⁓ I'm here for it. What a time to be alive.

Pax (30:38)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

so I think we would be, miss mistaken if we didn't get to dive into your amazing experience. ⁓ you are on the team that, ⁓ my, ⁓ migrates or migrated disney.com and ESPN to some new redesign responsive design sites. I'd imagine huge, ⁓ undertakings. What was that?

Patrick Kajirian (34:16)
That's right, yeah.

Pax (34:20)
Like, what was that like ⁓ doing massive migrations of those sizes?

Patrick Kajirian (34:25)
Yeah,

those were very formative years for me, enterprise SEO in particular, but really understanding from a technical SEO perspective what a site migration looks like, what a well-executed site migration looks like, and how to be able to bottle that and replicate that as a formula across hundreds of websites. Let me take a couple steps back and introduce and set the context to ⁓ the Disney experience and a little bit on ESPN too. ⁓

It was in, I think it was 2012 or 13, where, you know, formerly Disney was operated off of Flash. You know, was a Flash as a platform was really when you went to DCOM, disney.com, that you were basically entering a shell of a Flash site and it would just swap out Flash applications and entirely SEO-unfriendly, right? Leading up to that point. And even so with like disney.com, like, you know, there's several iterations that kind of evolved away from Flash to

⁓ like a standard site. then eventually the, with the advent of, ⁓ mobile first experiences, right. ⁓ and the mobile web really kind of emerging and advent of the iPhone, getting some traction and smartphone and what mobile websites being built. So it was eventual that, ⁓ they needed to decide, like, do we continue with a, dot site on disney.go.com? ⁓ or, you know, do we build a responsive experience? And it was pretty clear, like across the board, everyone agreed that responsive was the way forward.

but everything needed to be factored into this experience, including the SEO experience. So Disney, in addition to kind of moving to responsive site experience and also doing a full domain, because they went from Disney.go.com and m.Disney.go.com to a single, unified domain on a unified platform for Disney.com, ⁓ they also revamped like the entire backend system for that, the CMS systems that powered this and created a new platform. It was nicknamed or coding Matterhorn.

Matterhorn was the new kind of like a CMS experience and like model for generating content managed responsive sites. And then there was a whole design language and all that stuff. the cool thing about, so Matterhorn was actually incubated. I was in LA, in LA at the time. And the Disney had enlisted the help of like this agency, this web design agency, like marketing agency, I think they were called Digicent at the time.

to be able to basically do as a Skunk's work project, kind of build what this experience looked like. The platform, the CMS, responsive and so on and so forth. And then they plucked throughout the, I know this is Disney Interactive and they plucked different kind of key members, core contributors, a couple of people from engineering, a couple of people from design, a couple of people from data science and so on and so forth.

⁓ And then certainly a couple of people from SEO, right? To be able to help support this. It's like, create this think tank, right? ⁓ Crack team of Disney interactive mercenaries is gonna build this brand new platform. And ⁓ so I got to be a part of that. I got to kind of go in, they had a studio in the back lot, some back lot area in Burbank. That was just kind of basically, it was stealth, right? You you have totally unassuming from the outside. It was basically like a defunct building made out of bricks. And the second you go inside and you're inside and you're kind of like,

Pax (37:24)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Kajirian (37:47)
In Disneyland, was kind of wild. They went to the trouble of actually recreating Walt's office, you know, with the desk and all the paraphernalia and the tchotchkes and whatnot. Just like you see one actually in the tower in Disneyland, that same thing completely recreated in this like crazy studio where there was just like a handful of like people that are just like working on the stealth project just for the sake of it. was just kind of, well, was, yeah, just for the company, for the division of the teams that we're building.

Pax (38:01)
Yeah.

or

Just for this project? Really? Wow. Yeah.

Cool.

Patrick Kajirian (38:17)
And then,

so that was cool. They even had like a full-size bar, fully stocked with alcohol that was just there. anytime, so it was like, it was like, it was a very unique world, very different. Like it wasn't like corporate kind of going into the office and sitting at a cubicle and doing that. No, you were in this really kind of stimulating creative environment. People were like really excited about what they're working on doing it. So that part was really, as like just from a career perspective, that was awesome. ⁓ And it was neat, you know, so we got to kind of,

Pax (38:38)
Cool.

Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (38:45)
factor SEO into like the building of the CMS and making sure like you had the ability to do like SEO overrides from metadata. Open graph is a really big deal at the time. So we'll be able to do all of that to have some structured data baked in for like, know, movies, music, games, like all of that just worked out of the box behind the scenes. and then operations teams, know, production teams were able to kind of go in and just create these things. SEO teams and SEO managers were able to kind of go in and validate, it, approve it, and do all that stuff at scale.

And so that was really cool. That experience was really eye-opening. Now, the challenge was, after building all of that and launching it, now you had to execute that across hundreds of websites. So disney.com was done. Now you have to work on movies at disney.com, games at disney.com, videos at disney.com, all of the...

Pax (39:29)
you

Patrick Kajirian (39:38)
Disney Junior, there were hundreds of properties that we managed and they all slowly one after another over the course of like two years eventually got migrated over. But you're going from Disney.go.com to Disney.com and then there's a completely different hierarchy, different collection of pages. So it was a huge undertaking. And there was only like, you know, three, four SEOs within Disney that was responsible for doing all that. So there was, you know, a lot of mapping of pages, a lot of redirects. I could tell you, I single handedly brought down the Disney.

Pax (39:58)
Jeez.

Patrick Kajirian (40:07)
junior.com website because of a botched redirect execution. Yeah, was some, you know what, because like when you execute a migration like then you had to redirect, you know, you're there with engineers, sitting there, you've got screaming for, got the ready, you've got lists prepared. So like, you're just running it. So it was probably lasted all of like an hour, an hour and a half until we, you know, figured it out, but you have to like a roll back and then kind of go back and test and check it out. But yeah, you know, I've got, I've got moments like that. I'm not so proud of.

Pax (40:11)
Really? How long did that last?

Patrick Kajirian (40:36)
I actively broke, you know, all these like, you know, four-year-old girls, you know, want to get the Disney Princess coloring books. You know, they couldn't get it for that period of time. It was my fault. I feel bad for that.

Pax (40:45)
Yeah.

Those are the battle scars that teach us and that we learn from, I love that. Man, that sounds like such a cool experience. the team structure dynamic of that sounds really cool to just get in this team with a bunch of just people from different backgrounds and skill sets all working toward that common goal. That just must have been such a fun, fun project.

Patrick Kajirian (41:13)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Oh yeah, it a privilege for sure. Real quick, do have, so I had a similar experience with ESPN as well, because following the success of Disney.com, then you started seeing all the other kind of sister properties kind of look at, oh, great, Matterhorn's proven experience, let's replicate it. so a couple of years after that, I'd relocated to the East Coast for a stint for family stuff. And yeah, and I got assigned at ESPN.

Pax (41:19)
⁓ So, yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (41:46)
and we did the same thing. It was very different. ESPN was a different experience because the reception to the redesign was very polarizing. So was literally almost like 50-50 where people either hated it, couldn't stand it, because they're going from ESPN.go.com and that whole legacy experience to something very, very new. And that was very polarizing. But in there, that experience was different. A key difference in that experience was with how we handled news. Because when you're on the Google News, ⁓

Pax (41:55)
Mm.

Patrick Kajirian (42:16)
program, especially if you're a big publisher like ESPN, you just had to make sure that that cut over from an old domain like disney.com to disney.com, all of that had to be orchestrated and we actually had to rely and work closely with Google to be able to do that in a way that didn't interrupt the flow ⁓ of news being presented to customers in Google. so, but overall it went pretty well. You know, we had a couple of minor issues, particularly with redirects again.

Pax (42:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Patrick Kajirian (42:45)
the main of my existence, but eventually it carried forward success.

Pax (42:47)
ssss

So you're

working directly with people from Google through that to ensure the news wasn't interrupted.

Patrick Kajirian (42:57)
There was,

there were dedicated teams at Google specifically for news publishers at the time. given that, know, ESPN, ZSPN that they, they definitely facilitated that experience. Like they were there as part of like, they're in the background, like helping in like, as part of the release in the war room, they weren't there in person, but they were there and like I had to communicate and, and coordinate with them on the execution of these things so that we knew and validate and test and make sure everything was looking good on their systems in the backend. So, yeah.

Pax (43:11)
Yeah.

How nice to be so big that Google's, know, Google needs you. I mean, at that point, you know, it hurts Google if they're not delivering the ESPN news.

Patrick Kajirian (43:29)
That's, yeah.

Yeah!

You know, that was back in the day. wonder if today that's, that won't be the case today. Clearly like media, media doesn't have the same ⁓ clout. did. I could tell you though, like sometimes it goes both ways, right? Because even talking about ESPN, you know, a big before, before the advent of the knowledge graph, right. And then you go to universal search and you'd get answers to, you know, searchers queries, right? Like what, what time is the super bowl? Where can I, you know, what are the standings for my

Pax (43:40)
True. Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (44:06)
favorite basketball team or all of those things, you you'd take for granted because you'd go just to go to ESPN to be able to get all of that information, right? And then when Google started surfacing that information, answering it directly without honoring a link back to ESPN, I could tell you that the brass at ESPN were not happy to see like, man, we own Super Bowl, you know, the knowledge basis around Super Bowl.

Why is Google taking this away from it? the fact that was facts weren't owned by any company and Google's sort seen it directly at the customers. You couldn't contend with that. You just had to like adapt. You just had to, okay, well let's build pages that go beyond just answering the single question. Let's context and meaning and value behind it to be able to incentivize users to come to ESPN directly to be able to get that information. And we've learned that the hard way. So yeah, Google wasn't always a nice partner.

Pax (44:46)
Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah. How's what's your take in, in light of that in current circumstances around AIOs and them effectively. mean, they've, we've all, we've had this for a while in different formats, but like it's kind of. Uh-huh. Yeah. So like, what's your take on, you know, as Google, I mean, ethically, and then like, what, what should brands be thinking about that?

Patrick Kajirian (45:19)
Yes, zero click behavior.

Look, I mean, I am channeling the user, the customer. There's huge, just tremendous value in getting the answer immediately without having to get on a website, have to slog through a bunch of ads, deal with poor experiences just to be able to write that simple answer. So I understand, I see the value. I know our customers want it to. I don't know. So maybe I have a different perspective on this, but I also get the sense that a lot of the traffic we used to receive

probably it was undeserved, right? We got it because we played the game and we were being honored, you know, and it was making money for everybody involved. But was it really helpful for users, for searchers? I think not. ⁓ Today, you know, again, I can't speak for Walmart, right? ⁓ But just looking at the industry at large, especially in context of e-commerce.

Talking to a lot of SEOs in e-commerce and understanding that landscape will be better in the context of the post-AI mode world, the AI overview world. There's less traffic, right? Referrals happening. There's less citations, less links happening within AIOs and AI mode. And we're seeing this obviously with all the AI search platforms too, right? But what we are seeing is the people who do eventually come, they're highly qualified, right? People are...

Pax (46:50)
Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (46:51)
When they come to you, they're there to execute on their needs. And in the case of an e-commerce website, we're seeing more conversions, more purchases. Even though the traffic's going down, they're more qualified. And that's across the industry. So there's value to that. I guess maybe I'm too biased to e-commerce because obviously Google's not going to sell you the thing. They can't sell you the thing. You have the thing to sell.

Pax (47:03)
Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (47:21)
What Google will do is they'll probably make sure to the user ⁓ in their journey, their discovery journey, they'll keep them on Google as much as possible. And then they'll refer you to the product and maybe even get a cut of that ⁓ referral through ads or whatnot, through sponsorships or arbitrage. But ⁓ ultimately, I think it's by design, right? It's intentional that ⁓ these tools are doing a better job of helping customers understand what it is they want to buy.

And as long as, again, going back to that thing, as long as you make sure that the product that you sell or the service that you offer, there's a very clear value and that you rise above the competition in terms of either the pricing of the service or the ability to deliver it faster, the convenience of being able to pick it up in store, the things of that nature, if you differentiate yourself, you'll get rewarded with that conversion. And I think that's where we need to focus is optimizing for the...

the conversion, not optimizing for the traffic. yeah, it's hard. know a lot of industries are going to die by this change, but ⁓ I think it's going to grow and hopefully new industries will be born, new tactics, new strategies will be born. It'll be a better experience for everyone.

Pax (48:22)
Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Those brands that are saying like, traffic's going down. Let's pull back on investing in optimizing for search. it's like, Hey, searches are going up and purchases from searches are continuing to go up. And so you're looking at the wrong metrics. If you're deciding like, now's the time to pull back on that.

Patrick Kajirian (48:53)
Yeah.

Pax (49:03)
I'm empowered to you because all you're doing is making more space for other people who are investing in it, you know, but it just doesn't make sense logically to me, ⁓ why you would pull back at this time. ⁓ on that note, maybe to wrap up, what's, what's a piece of advice you'd offer somebody who is in the e-commerce space or maybe, ⁓ just working on a large site as, as we start to see some shifts in AI, ⁓ new agentic browsers or just in light of, what, what,

Patrick Kajirian (49:08)
Yeah. Yeah.

Pax (49:33)
what's maybe one piece of advice you'd leave for them as we move forward.

Patrick Kajirian (49:40)
Yeah, I'll say, this is a really great time to be thinking about SEO in general. Cause like you look back at all the big paradigm shifts, right? to, know, the advent of search engines, just period, right? On the desktop and then the introduction of mobile devices and doing mobile search and then, you know, the link graph and then, you know.

free product listings, like all that stuff. There's been so many changes that happen. And here we are faced with another huge paradigm shift with the agentic search, right? It's kind of nice. We're thrown back into the Wild West days, right? Where you just had to like study and test and experiment and see what works, what doesn't. Keep your ears to the ground. Like there's so much conversation happening. You just have to like dip into LinkedIn for a minute and just like, and listen to what the, you know.

people who have experienced in these areas what they have to say, and you learn so much. ⁓ So yeah, just take advantage of this time and just play around with some things and see, just to be curious and experiment. The other thing I want to say is that even though there's these new paradigms emerging, at the concept of SEO or GEO or AEO, whatever you want to call it these days, the fundamentals are still the same, right? You're still dealing with

algorithms or agents or bots, still having to like one, discover your content, right? And then rank that content and serve it in the context of what the customer wants or their preferences or, and so on and so forth. But the approach doesn't change, right? You still have to think about indexation. I find it was wild like maybe a month ago, there was this big, I know there's just a lot of attention on like,

Yeah, your pages need to be indexed in order for them to service in agentic search results. It's like, yes, of course they have to be indexed, right? Yeah. So crawl budget, still an issue, right? Site performance, still really important. Content relevant signaling, having structured data, structured content, high quality content. All of those things are constant. Those haven't changed in 10 years. They're not going to change 10 years from now. It's just maybe the rules with which

Pax (51:37)
Yeah.

Patrick Kajirian (52:00)
all those factors matter will change or the spaces where factors are being collected are changing, but the fundamentals are still there. So focus on the fundamentals. And then eventually I think just like Google did over time, they built up documentation and tools like, know, GSC or built to download data in bulk so that you could do your own data science. Like all that stuff will eventually come. Whoever ends up winning the AI race will eventually adapt to the needs of the marketing. ⁓

community, right? And tools are going to be built, you know, so just like, watch it because I mean, yeah, there's a lot of noise out there and a lot of people are trying a lot of stuff and not all of them are succeeding, some of them are and I think it's good to listen to those voices and to emulate some of that success.

Pax (52:48)
I love that. Yeah. The chaos is sometimes uncomfortable, but it's in chaos that new winners are made. You know, it's a chance to kind of rebuild how we're going to measure, how are we going to do this now? And, ⁓ like we get, you get to be on the bleeding edge of something that is brand new. And that's so exciting. I love that perspective. ⁓ Patrick, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an awesome discussion. I feel like we could go for a whole nother hour. ⁓

Patrick Kajirian (52:51)
Hmm

Mm-hmm.

Let's do it.

Pax (53:17)
What's the, yeah, let's have you back for sure, 100%. ⁓ What's the best way for people to connect with you?

Patrick Kajirian (53:19)
Anytime, anytime. My pleasure.

You know, Google me, find out. Come find me. LinkedIn is a really great place to reach out to me and connect with me. So yeah, well, I love talking about this stuff. So yeah, don't hesitate, just reach out.

Pax (53:37)
Okay. and let me, yeah, let me, ⁓ Patrick is somebody who is, is willing to share and, and, ⁓ is free with his knowledge. And so please reach out. ⁓ I can, I can vouch for that. Like he, he's a great person to connect with and talk with. So, thank you so much for, being on the show today. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Patrick.

Patrick Kajirian (53:52)
Appreciate that.

Thank you, take care.