Raff's Brain #236: Riffin' with Raff - The Internet Is a Messy Library - Cord Blomquist Explains SEO

Is SEO dead, dying, or quietly becoming even more important?

On this episode of Riffin’ with Raff, Rob Raffety welcomes Cord Blomquist of Tallest Tree Digital for a lively and surprisingly approachable conversation about how people, organizations, and ideas get discovered online.

Cord breaks down the history of Google PageRank, explains why search rankings are more complicated than a single score, and reveals how website architecture can hide valuable content from search engines. He also discusses Topical Boost, Tallest Tree Digital’s software for helping organizations turn sprawling archives into clearly organized, discoverable bodies of expertise.

A memorable case study shows why this work matters: an organization improved its rankings before a major public-policy issue entered the news cycle, positioning its content to capture a dramatic surge in attention when the moment arrived.

Then Rob raises the big question: Is AI about to kill SEO? Cord argues that the opposite may be closer to the truth. AI tools still need to retrieve, sort, and evaluate information from the web. Search is not disappearing; it is becoming infrastructure for a new layer of technology.

It is an insightful conversation with plenty of Raff-style detours, including Tim Ferriss, Vikings, thermostat operating systems, black T-shirts, and the hypothetical international market for Raffety-branded belt buckles. 

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Podcast Outline

•  Catching up with Cord Blomquist 
•  SEO fundamentals for curious non-experts 
•  PageRank and the academic-citation model 
•  Why backlinks and domain authority matter 
•  Personalized Google results versus neutral ranking tools 
•  The overlooked technical problems that can make content invisible 
•  Why broad content categories often fail 
•  Topical Boost, metadata, structured data, and entity extraction 
•  Helping search engines recognize an organization’s expertise 
•  How SEO creates opportunities before attention arrives 
•  Why AI is a new user of search rather than a replacement for it 
•  The long adoption curve of transformative technologies

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