Odys Podcast: The High Stakes Growth Show

A request hits your server claiming to be Googlebot. Gary Illyes says making one look like that takes one line of code and about 30 seconds, and that impersonation is "unfortunately, very" common. He knows because he runs honeypot sites and reads the logs. Gary explains why AI companies' hunger for training tokens made crawler identity urgent, how an unknown crawler can exhaust a site's bandwidth, and why most bad crawling today is ignorance rather than attack. He is blunt about robots.txt: it gives granular control, but it is a suggestion, and only network-level blocking actually stops a bot. The conversation then separates two kinds of automated visitor, the autonomous crawler and the user-triggered fetcher, and Gary makes his arguable case that the second may not need to obey robots.txt. He shows how Googlebot and Google-Extended already let publishers allow Search while blocking AI use, explains how Web Bot Auth uses HTTP signatures to prove a request really came from Google, and why IPv4 scarcity makes the old IP-based verification hard for new crawlers. Finally, he describes the idea he's toying with next, bot reputation, why one company deciding would be biased, whether authentication makes the open web less open, and what a site owner without a security team should actually do today. Listen if you work in technical SEO, AI search, publishing, web security or infrastructure, or run a site where crawler traffic is becoming a real cost.

Parasite SEO is still alive — but the hosts, tactics and economics have changed. Lars Lofgren joins Odys Podcast: The High-Stakes Growth Show to explain how aggressive SEO operators find websites that Google still trusts, exploit their existing authority and move on when the ranking window closes. Lars breaks down a striking parasite SEO examples involving neglected video-game websites repurposed for gambling content, why exact match domains and other old-school SEO tactics have resurfaced, and why the best new loopholes usually circulate privately long before they reach mainstream SEO discussions. We also discuss the decline of the old newspaper parasite model, geographic differences in spam tolerance, where parasite SEO overlaps with AEO, GEO and LLM visibility, and most importantly, Google’s Site Reputation Abuse policy and the new regulations in Europe that open the door to unrivaled parasite opportunities in Europe.    

China’s “go global” movement is creating an SEO market most Western agencies barely see. In this episode of Odys Podcast: The High-Stakes Growth Show, Aneta Samkoff meets in Shenzhen with JP Zhang, founder of Shenzhen SEO Conference, to understand why Chinese companies are increasingly looking to Google, international SEO and AI search to acquire customers outside China. JP breaks down the enormous gap between companies trying to expand globally and the relatively small pool of local SEO expertise available to help them. He shares what Chinese businesses are actually spending on SEO, why Western agencies are already winning Chinese clients, and why he believes China represents a new blue-ocean opportunity for international marketers. The conversation also challenges several conventional SEO assumptions. JP explains why mass-translating a small English site into hundreds of pages can quickly become a Google problem, and why Chinese companies’ famous execution speed is both a competitive advantage and a potential liability. They also discuss programmatic SEO, international product-market fit, B2B manufacturing, link-building budgets, the changing customer journey, AI visibility and JP’s contrarian view that GEO and LLMO are ultimately still part of SEO. Most importantly, JP explains why he doesn’t see Chinese companies and Western SEOs primarily as competitors. His message is much simpler: China has the products, manufacturing capability and execution speed. But many companies still need Western expertise in marketing, branding, sales and international search. For agencies and SEOs looking for the next underserved market, that gap may be one worth paying attention to.

Bad schema can be worse than no schema at all: when structured data misrepresents a page, Google may understand the site better without the SEO intervention. Peter Macinković explains how schema markup, entity SEO and structured data should actually work together, why chasing rich results can damage search intent, and why Organization, Website and WebPage schema form a foundation that many sites still skip. Peter also breaks down how Stake builds schema at scale, how subjectOf can strengthen entity relationships, and why the brand can rank for highly competitive terms without conventional keyword optimization on the ranking page. He shares measurable examples too, including a historical event-schema implementation where CTR increased from roughly 7–12% to 15–25%, plus how better site relationships can contribute to sitelinks and additional SERP real estate. Peter leads SEO at Stake and works with structured data across a large, highly dynamic platform containing casino games, sporting events and rapidly changing pages. Listen if you work in technical SEO, e-commerce, igaming, affiliate SEO or any large website where Google understanding your content correctly matters.

A legitimate business opened a new bank account in the morning. A 9 million transaction arrived. By lunchtime, the account was closed. For companies operating in iGaming, crypto, forex and other industries banks classify as high risk, losing a banking relationship isn't just an inconvenience - it can stop incoming payments, supplier payments and potentially the entire business. Julian Goffin, Founder and CEO of Alunafi, explains why banks reject or de-bank businesses, why becoming more successful can actually make your banking risk worse, and what happens operationally when an account suddenly disappears. We discuss the three characteristics that often trigger additional scrutiny - high transaction volumes, cross-border payments and chargebacks - and why companies need to diversify their banking infrastructure instead of relying on a single institution. Julian also explains how payments can be rejected because of the counterparty rather than your own company, why communication during onboarding matters, and where stablecoins can solve some of the cost and speed problems of international payments. Listen if you operate in iGaming, crypto, fintech, forex or any international business where losing access to your money - even temporarily - could become an existential problem.