SEO Hack: Authenticate Your Content With Blockchain Timestamping

Jeffro (00:00.944)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today’s episode is all about tackling one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing today, content authenticity. As AI generated content is becoming more prevalent, it’s harder for business owners to know how to stand out in the eyes of both customers and search engines. My guest today, Michael Sumner, is the founder of ScoreDetect, a company that helps businesses improve their SEO by using a technique called blockchain timestamping. In a world where content authenticity matters

More than ever, Michael is here to share how service businesses can safeguard their content’s trustworthiness and improve their Google rankings. So welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael Sumner (00:37.486)
Thanks for having me, Jeff Brok.

Jeffro (00:39.362)
Absolutely. Now, with all the noise around AI content creation these days, it’s easy for service businesses to feel overwhelmed or think, bother? So I want to explore how you can cut through that noise and prove your content’s authenticity.

Michael Sumner (00:54.53)
So first off, let me take a step back and find out why do we need this in the first place? So I was looking for a certain solution. I worked in the SEO agency space for quite a while, then moved into enterprise engineering to find out what the biggest problems are for enterprise clients. And I found that it’s still the same issues that we have for small to medium businesses, which is being able to stand out against a crowd for your specific niche. And recently Google pivoted towards expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And what that means is that the power is sent over to the user and not to the content piece itself. It’s up to finding out whether that piece of content now is useful to a human being. And recently we’ve seen Google take a shift towards AI generated content at first thinking that AI generated content is bad for the internet. But then we figured out that in around five years time, you can’t tell a difference between what’s been generated by AI or what is written by a human being. I understand that there’s going to be some backlash there or we might reach a singularity in five years. You never know. But the reason I started Score Detect is because the future is headed towards not figuring out whether it’s human or AI generated, but rather is there content authenticity within the finer details when you publish the content, how you modify the content over time. And the best way around solving that problem is the blockchain. So…

I was exploring different technologies out there, non-blockchain solutions, but then the problem came to be, we need to find a way to store that information, at least trace it for each website, but then have that as something that you can visibly see 24 seven, transparent and at any time. So

Jeffro (03:23.204)
So is that just there to mean that, this is my original content, I didn’t use AI to make it? Is that the point or is it to say that, you know, I posted this and I haven’t changed it since you added a comment or both?

Michael Sumner (03:23.297)
We came back.

Michael Sumner (03:38.316)
It could be both. So Google has different ways of finding out whether something is written by a human being or not. And if you have content that is useful, like presenting comments in the article itself, that shows to the user that they are keen on understanding more about it. So there are different ways that Google figures that out, indirect or direct.

Jeffro (04:07.802)
Okay, but if the content is good, like we’re talking about, and it’s helpful to the user, why would Google care? And especially if we’re saying it’s gonna be indistinguishable between AI and human content, why does that matter going forward? mean, everybody’s gonna have to use AI to keep up with the pace of content. So what is the benefit going forward of having it authenticated?

Michael Sumner (04:31.69)
So by having it authenticated, by displaying…

figments of trustworthiness, we can find out whether something is more closely related to human written content or not. I think the, in five years time, the fossil fuel of the internet is going to be human written content and that’s going to become a gold in the future. So we need to figure out a way where we do have answers for, let’s say Wikipedia type answers but then when it comes to something quite sentimental, something quite human, we need to treasure that and that’s where we’re looking for solutions to help foster that piece of treasure because

Yeah, because in the near future, we need to keep writing more human information to help other people. I know that it’s easy to just search for an answer and then end it there. But where’s the human-centered connection? So really it’s bringing more human-centeredness into the internet.

Jeffro (05:52.153)
Okay, so what about in situations where someone’s posting opinion content, right? It’s subjective, but you can get authenticated and say, yes, this was me. I timestamped it. I wrote it. But it’s horrible misinformation that’s wrong. know, people might see that timestamp and say, okay, this is real and take that to mean it’s also true. What are we doing about that?

Michael Sumner (06:17.833)
So this is where score detect isn’t exactly the use case for that. But what we’ve seen recently is that, so there’s a pioneer in the generative AI space and her name is Nina Schick. And she mentioned that there’s just, so she wrote a book about deep fakes. We can say that is a form of misinformation. And although It is out there in the internet. It can still erode public trust. We can’t tell whether something happened or not because we are digital. We have to trust that the news we read and the information we see has happened overseas or like outside of our environment. So it is a challenge to figure out whether something is true or not in this day and age, even more so that we’re more connected and you would say the generation from everyone born 10 or 20 years ago would know that the smartphone has always existed. It wouldn’t know about floppy disks and other technology like that.

Jeffro (07:32.098)
Yeah, that’s probably just to get harder. back to the SEO itself focus, I’m curious. We talked about how Google is going to be looking at this type of content, AI versus human. And OK, if it’s authenticated, that can help. Has Google actually shared anything about, hey, we’re going to look at these timestamps and it is going to be a ranking factor? Or is this just of like hoping and planning for the future?

Michael Sumner (07:56.01)
So I’m not the only person in the space. There’s been a few other people in the space around 2018 or 2020. They proposed a schema specifically for that. And that’s to get Google’s eyes on that particular schema. But we’re not certain if that schema is standardized in Google’s eyes or if they’re secretly using it because there’s got to be a lot of factors for that to take place. But indirect or direct, indirectly you are keeping people on your page because you have these trust factors. Even simply saying on a checkout that your site is SSL secure improves conversion rate. So there are these indirect signals that can then feed back to Google to say that, yes, I would want to rank this page higher because it’s more useful to the user and less likely that that user would click the back button to head back to Google search.

Jeffro (09:00.833)
So is the authentication or the time step displayed on the page itself or is it only in the schema that search engines are looking at?

Michael Sumner (09:10.814)
So it is on the blockchain and like for like what you see when you click the verified by widget that would then open up a certificate page which then has a link to the blockchain transaction itself and written in the smart contract itself it will say on that smart contract that you can only add the information and never alter it or delete it and the blockchain can never delete transactions or else that undermines the philosophy of the blockchain.

Jeffro (09:41.355)
But what you’re saying, there is a little thing on the page that says verified by this blockchain. So the user can see it in addition to the schema that the search engines are looking at. And the reason I’m asking is because that’s obviously not everyone relies on SEO for getting traffic to their website. People could be running TV commercials or handing out flyers. People end up on the website. That way, they’ll still see the little widget or the little icon badge that says this is authenticated. So it can still help in that case, even if they’re not.

coming through Google.

Michael Sumner (10:12.803)
Yes, that’s right.

Jeffro (10:15.383)
All right, so let’s talk for a second, know, with content is such a crucial part of attracting clients, whether it’s written blog post content or videos, what are some common mistakes that businesses make when it comes to actually verifying or showcasing this authenticity?

Michael Sumner (10:31.431)
I feel anything that goes away from human centeredness can then decrease that trust or that authority. if you… So let’s say you have a bunch of content, but then one of them happens to be quite off. I know that we had a recent episode where Amanda Kaufman was speaking about making sure that your content is genuine and how to create that voice.

And what I can say related to this is that you must continue that authenticity. And your brand is not just a few sets of posts and you disregard the rest. It’s the entire thing. across all social media channels, try to orient yourself towards a common theme, a common vision. And with that, a user is intelligent enough to

click through these different profiles, these different posts to find out if you’re the real Dale or not.

Jeffro (11:40.758)
So, and kind of in that line of thinking, I mentioned video versus text and stuff, I’m assuming this time stamping works well for text content. How does it work for video content or images that you’re posting?

Michael Sumner (11:54.696)
Sure. So the blockchain time stamping mechanism only takes place upon uploading. So when you upload a brand new YouTube video, you could connect this to Zapier. Then whenever you upload a YouTube video, then you would immediately get the timestamp before anyone else would come to download that video and disperse it. So from the very beginning, you have this proof of evidence and it’s being used by multiple courts of law in different countries and blockchain is being more so its own form of evidence compared to electronic evidence such as an email or a PDF document. in finding out whether something is there, a video has been uploaded or not, the only way to do so is through the original video and you could display that using the certificate itself or you could say to everyone here is the original video feel free to steal it but I’ve got the original evidence that says that I owned it

Jeffro (13:13.748)
Is it more about showing ownership or also proving that it hasn’t been changed? Because I can see scenarios where it would be easy to change that original YouTube video without the blockchain knowing about it.

Michael Sumner (13:26.704)
Yes, the first thing is first and foremost is to prove ownership. We also have an integration for additional revisions. So if it does change over time, the understanding is that this is only putting a fingerprint of that video or that piece of text, that file over to the blockchain. And as long as it matched the fingerprints, then that can be certain that that’s the right key. So I’m using the term key because that’s something that you keep to yourself that you can then use to determine whether that is true or not, whether it works. So yeah, in finding out the piece of video, you could either display it for everyone else to then validate, but then you know safely in your hands that this is in blockchain.

This is being used by lawyers in case that would be infringed. And if it ever does happen, you can easily go over to DMCA, Digital Melendum Copyright Act, and take down that piece of content if it is infringing.

Jeffro (14:46.516)
So on the blockchain, I’m assuming you’re not storing all of the content itself, maybe a hash or something that represents it. And it’s not just the URL to the content, but the content itself. Is that accurate?

Michael Sumner (14:53.743)
Yes.

Michael Sumner (15:01.521)
So it’s just the hash. There’s other solutions out there that store the entire piece of content, but the flaw I find with that is that you’re going to be limited to a certain amount of information that can be displayed in there. So really what you need to find out is has the content changed over time or not. And that’s where it’s limited to 64 characters in this special hash that cannot be reverse engineered to out the piece of content. This is to protect privacy when you’re on the blockchain, because if you’re going to have information stored forever, that can never be changed, you want to make sure that it’s privacy protected.

Jeffro (15:41.928)
Right. Okay. Well, very cool. I know we started to get a little technical there, guys. So if you’re not familiar with hashes and stuff, you can do a little Googling if you want to learn about it. It’s basically a way of uniquely identifying a piece of information. So I’m just curious how it works because this is obviously a big challenge, not only for proving the authenticity, but even making this work in a way that you can’t get around it. And I’m sure people are going to find ways around it and then it’s going to get better. And it’s going to be a process like that. So it’s not going to be perfect especially in the early days, and we’re still in those early days, I would say. But it is interesting to see that at least we have a path to try and tackle the problem. And so that’s a good thing.

So how can, now we’ve kind of established what it is, kind of how it works and everything, how can a service business actually start implementing blockchain time-stamping for their content? Is it something that actually requires a lot of technical expertise or is it accessible for anybody to integrate and start using?

Michael Sumner (16:41.402)
Sure, so ScoreDetect offers 6,000 Zapier apps integration. If you wanted to get nitty-gritty with it, we also have an API. But the easiest way to do so is either through the web dashboard, register for an account, and then you can upload a piece of information, a file or a text, and then you would immediately get the certificate and an HTML widget a piece of code that you can paste that would then output that verification. Or you could use the WordPress plugin. We have an official WordPress plugin that allows you to easily get that set up, similar to what we said with the dashboard. But then whenever you save or update the post, then it would create a new timestamp. So then you would have historical reference audit trail of that piece of content or that article and how it has changed over time. And that’s proven through the blockchain timestamp in comparison to when that post was updated in your WordPress database. So we picked WordPress because it’s powering 43 % of the internet, but we’re always getting more integrations along the way.

Jeffro (18:05.555)
Do, I’m curious how you guys charge for this because obviously you’re storing data now on the blockchain and if someone stops paying for the service, do you just go wipe their records and so now they can’t go back to the past and view it or do you keep that as a service to the rest of the internet so they know what’s authentic and not?

Michael Sumner (18:26.469)
That’s a good question. And the reason we start this is so that it can be of service. So the way that it works is once it’s on the blockchain, we don’t have to pay for the storage on the blockchain. The reason that we have the verification certificates on our website is simply for presentation purposes for your audience. So in the event that we no longer exist and the question is will those certificates still be valid? The answer is yes because you can export your PDF certificates and what that will contain is the set of proofs like when you created it, what the hash is, what the blockchain URL is and the piece of information that you need to use for a court or whenever you need to state that.

This is mine when I created it at this point in time. So the blockchain URL will always exist as long as there’s at least one person alive in the world with access to the internet.

Jeffro (19:35.42)
Okay, and is your blockchain code open source or is it proprietary?

Michael Sumner (19:41.636)
So at the moment, the smart contract code is out for everyone to use. So that’s out there in the wild, it’s transparent. And you can see for yourself that smart contract code, also known as the blockchain code, is what sets the transparency in getting this done.

Jeffro (20:02.706)
Okay, great, so people can verify that it’s doing what you’re saying it’s doing.

Michael Sumner (20:08.022)
Yes, even Google can.

Jeffro (20:09.905)
Awesome. All right, well, what else do you want to touch on before we kind of wrap up here? We just have a few more minutes. you speak to, are there any other impacts you can have on a business’s online presence when they start doing this and time stamping their content?

Michael Sumner (20:27.236)
So I know it’s early days with AI content. I’m sure that people might think twice about using AI or they would be really open to it and mass generate their content because it happens to be really useful to their audience. And it’s getting so good now that we need to figure out whether something works or not. So if you’re having any issues with SEO and ranking,

I feel like it’s always worth a try to go for a free trial of ScoreDetect and see if that improves your SEO. It’s done so for multiple agencies, so I feel like that they’re up to something.

Jeffro (21:10.565)
Okay, so Google is probably looking at it then if that’s the case. All right, well, Michael, thank you for giving us a glimpse into the future of SEO and all this time stamping and how we kind of stay ahead of the curve. For those of you listening, Michael’s links will be in the show notes. So be sure to reach out if blockchain time stamping is something you want help with. And like he said, they’ve got a free trial so you can test out score detect. Last question for you, Michael, know, obviously, you know, AI is getting better at mimicking human created content like we talked about. So.

What’s your one piece of advice that you’d give to service businesses who are looking to kind of future proof their content strategy?

Michael Sumner (21:46.338)
To future-proof your content strategy, always focus on what it would be for the user. in the user’s shoes, and it doesn’t have to be something that’s very difficult to read. People are more focused on the authenticity and that you’re able to connect to them. So that’s my take.

Jeffro (22:06.66)
Okay, makes sense. Well, thanks again, Michael, for being here. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. Stay ahead of the curve and we’ll see you back here for the next episode. Take care.

Michael Sumner (22:18.284)
Thanks, Jeff Rook.