Recently, #edgetalk fans got to know more about the founder of OnCrawl – Francois Goube – and the “world’s most reliable Onsite SEO crawler and log analyzer.”
Goube’s first introduction to SEO was in the development of a job search engine in Europe. In the end, it kindled a fiery pursuit of search engine understanding that led to questionable “grey hat” techniques, but at the same time led him to become an ambassador for the renowned backlink checker, Majestic.
His unconventional “road less traveled by” education led to Goube’s unique perspective on the development of SEO, which was explored in detail throughout the podcast.
Who is Francois Goube?
Currently residing in Bordeaux, Goube enjoys the fact that the “greatest wine in the world” is right in his backyard. When not managing his company, he is raising two children.
Miraculously, he is able to educate the growing SEO community in Bordeaux while working to maintain the southwestern France ecosystem at the same time. Obviously, Goube is a man that likes to stay very busy and active.
At one point, he was a semiprofessional pro surfer. He spent his youth taking to the waves ever day after school and competing on the weekends. Now, he lives to surf the “waves of the Internet” verses the waves of the ocean.
What is Oncrawl?
Oncrawl identifies potential issues with the SEO of your website. It can track how your current users are navigating the website and how those activities are effecting your web rankings.
Additionally, it is a facet of a large suite of services by Cogniteev that are available for website optimization.
In the coming months, Oncrawl will be expanding beyond France with an eye on the East Coast as their US headquarters.
Understanding Big Data
In the digital marketing and SEO industries, the term “big data” is often tossed around a lot. So much so, that its true definition has been lost throughout the years. So what is “big data” and where is it headed?
Big data is pretty much any compilation of information from which trends or patterns can be derived.
“The very big issue that we are trying to solve using big data technologies is accessing the data,” said Goube.
He goes on to explain that all of goals that we have for big data can’t be accomplished without enabling people to access it, which is happening today.
More people are able to access services that allow them to compile large data sets and those same services are much cheaper than they have ever been.
The Beginning of SEO
Goube discusses the development of SEO throughout the podcast. When Tom Brodbeck, an #edgetalk personality, asked for Goube’s perspective on an article stating that there is only so much SEO that can be done, Goube vehemently disagreed.
Back in 2008, it was all about getting backlinks and getting proper anchor text. And onsite SEO was just putting H1 and some H2 and H3 and you’ll be good. More recently with major updates like Panda, onsite has become the new hype. I think people are underestimating the power of onsite SEO.
Goube goes on to explain that he sees SEO as “still very young.” In the end, it’s impossible to speculate on the capabilities of SEO because it’s constantly evolving.
If you would like to listen to the Francois Goube #edgetalk in its entirety, you can listen to the show here.
