Lily Ray on SEO’s hard truths: spam, slot-machine content and the personal brand bet

Lily Ray started in SEO doing black hat work, which is why the spam flooding Google at the end of 2023 annoyed her more than it surprised her. She told Mark A Preston that on the Unscripted SEO Podcast, recorded in December 2023, two days after Google launched Gemini and three months after the September helpful content update had wiped out a batch of bloggers. At the time she was senior SEO director and head of organic research at Amsive in New York, running a team of about 35 people across roughly 100 clients. Today she runs Algorythmic, the SEO and AI search consultancy she founded, and serves as VP, SEO & AI Search at Amsive.

Mark introduced her as “the SEO DJ herself”, and the conversation ran 54 minutes with no script. You get her answers on why loopholes were working again, how she talks a client out of copying the spammers, why she would never let ChatGPT write a client article, and the one SEO move she rates above everything else. Every quote below was checked against the episode audio.

From political science to 14 years of agency SEO (0:31)

She found SEO the way a lot of people did around the 2008 recession: it was a job that paid when nothing else did. She was at NYU, on track for political science and maybe law school, and graduates around her were not finding work. The SEO job came along while she was looking for income as a student, and it turned out she was good at it. She grew up in the Bay Area with a father in Silicon Valley since the 80s and a brother who is a web developer, so she learned by chatting with him on Gchat while working at a small startup.

By the time of this recording she had been at it for nearly 14 years, about 12 of them agency-side, and in a director role for roughly eight. Mark asked why she stayed. Her answer was not the clients. “I love search,” she said. “Like I love philosophically and fundamentally like what it is and what it does.” That is why, in her words, “you’ll see me tweeting about SEO at 10 o’clock at night.”

Her focus moved with her clients: retail and ecommerce first, then fashion and beauty, a stint building an Amazon SEO team (she did not love it, “Amazon is a different animal”), then health and finance clients around the Medic update, and by 2023 almost entirely publishers and news sites. She runs a small internal audit team they call SEO Speedwagon. Their audits run 100 to 120 pages and are written by hand for each site, and a lot of 2023’s work was Google Discover audits.

Why the 2023 spam wave frustrated her (7:19)

Mark had noticed her tweets getting sharper about the search results, parasite SEO in particular. She was clear that loopholes are nothing new. When people told her she didn’t know spammers had been doing this for years, her answer was that she literally did know, “because when I started, I was doing black hat stuff.”

What changed was the success rate. For roughly five years, she said, those loopholes were much harder to get away with, and what Google said lined up with what Google did. That consistency is what made SEO satisfying: you recommend something, it works, and you get a clear signal. In late 2023 the spam was winning, Google had promised to respond but hadn’t yet, and AI tools had pushed the barrier to entry close to zero. Her clients who were trying to build real brands were getting outranked “by spam left and right.”

She was careful to say she thought it was temporary, and she had a list of reasons Google might be distracted: the Gemini launch, layoffs, the Department of Justice trial with Sundar Pichai testifying. If you want the view from someone who did the spamming, ex-black hat Martin McGarry walks through the same flood from the other side.

How she answers “why shouldn’t we just do what the spammers do?” (10:25)

Mark asked the question every agency hears: we’re doing everything right, competitors are buying links and spamming, they’re taking our business, so why not copy them? She has that conversation constantly, mostly with newer clients. Big brands with experienced SEO teams already understand the risk and play the long game. Clients who are new to SEO, or getting advice from questionable sources, want to move fast. Her answer to them:

It’s like going to the doctor and being like, well, I’ve been smoking cigarettes for three months and I feel fine, you know, what’s the problem?

Lily Ray

Staying the course costs you speed. You don’t get the rapid growth some of those tactics produce, she said, but the crash on the other side is worse. Mark added the part people forget: it isn’t only rankings, it’s the owner’s employees. He has had directors in tears telling him they would have to let everyone go.

She sees the same thing from the receiving end. After the helpful content update, bloggers who had built a site for five or ten years and dropped everything else for it lost 90% of their traffic and came to her team desperate. Part of the job, she said, is being something close to a therapist. For what an actual HCU recovery looked like from inside one of those sites, read the HouseFresh HCU recovery on SEO Arcade.

Build something of your own to learn how SEO fits together (15:07)

Mark asked how an SEO stays adaptable. Her answer was to run a project that’s yours: a personal brand, or a small business site for a friend or family member. Telling a client to fix redirects or change title tags is simple. Building a small business website and Google Business Profile, choosing how to get citations, deciding on content marketing and email, picking WordPress plugins, teaches you how all of it connects.

That ties into the skill gap they got into next. She doesn’t think any one SEO is great at technical, content, local, international, analytics and client communication all at once, and she said she isn’t either. Her technical people spend all day on JavaScript rendering, sitemaps and redirects; her own strength is strategy and communication. The hardest thing to teach new SEOs is why a fix matters. A junior handed a site will report five 404s and meta descriptions that are too long “because one of the tools told me that,” when the real questions are how the business makes money and who its audience is.

On audits for big brands, she tells her team never to present a finding as “this is super broken.” They frame it as an opportunity, because the goal is a second set of eyes, not getting the in-house SEO fired.

SEO is not a slot machine, and neither is AI content (27:43)

Mark brought up content: the industry’s belief that more output means more organic traffic. She agreed and named the pattern:

A lot of people treat SEO like a slot machine. You know, it’s like, if I just keep doing the thing over and over and over, maybe I’ll see success and maybe once in a while you strike gold.

Lily Ray

The bigger picture, she said, is that Google’s criteria for indexing are changing and it is getting stricter about what counts as quality. She credited Joost de Valk of Yoast with teaching her how much crawling costs the environment. Then the hard part of HCU recovery work, telling a site owner their content isn’t good enough:

It looks good to you because you made it. I’m sorry. It’s your baby. I hate to call your baby ugly, but it’s not the best content.

Lily Ray

Google only shows about seven organic results on page one, she pointed out, and mass auto-generated AI content is unlikely to get you into them. She is not anti-AI. She uses it every day. Her line is about what goes on a client’s site:

I would never tell ChatGPT or Claude to write me an article about toothpaste and then put that on a client’s website. I would never do that.

Lily Ray

Telling ChatGPT to pretend it’s a toothpaste expert and list five original insights doesn’t fix it either, she said. It’s another workaround to avoid the hard work. Jon Gillham covers the detection side of this in his episode on AI content detection.

What to publish instead: the rat problem in Brooklyn (31:57)

Her alternative is plain. If you work with a pest control company, ask the staff what they’ve been seeing on the ground this season. They will tell you which part of Brooklyn has a rat problem and why, because it’s their job. Too many SEOs open a tool and hunt for every way to say “rat” without saying rat instead.

Produce content when you actually have something meaningful to say and when it’s actually within your area of expertise.

Lily Ray

Her example: a music-blogging client who, it turned out, had taken all the concert photos on his site himself. Most clients don’t have that. If you do, use it. She follows the same rule for her own writing. She wrote about pagination only after it came up with clients, she worked it through with John Mueller, and she added case studies from Botify. That piece ranks well because she had something to say.

On keyword volume, Mark mentioned a 500-word post the tools said nobody searched for that pulls 3,500 to 4,000 visitors a month. She pointed to an Ahrefs study Patrick Stox had shared the day before: a page ranking first for one keyword also ranks for many lower-volume terms the tools don’t show you. Her rule is that if something is highly relevant and has 20 monthly searches, it still belongs on your site. More from Patrick in his episode on building in the GEO era.

Personal brand is the strongest SEO move she knows (44:58)

Asked where SEO was heading, she bet on individual creators and authentic human voices, with more updates hitting mass AI content whether or not Google announces it. Then Mark asked if people inside a business need a personal brand. Her answer was the strongest claim of the episode:

Building a personal brand is the single most effective thing that you can do for SEO.

Lily Ray

Her example was Rand Fishkin: Google knows him as an entity, knows his books and articles, and Search Generative Experience answers questions about people easily. Over time, she expects Google to recognise that an article was written by someone known for the topic and give it a boost. She knows people debate her on that.

Author bios are the practical version. Google will say a bio isn’t a ranking factor, she said, because anything Google names as a factor gets sold on Upwork. That’s not the point. Strong sites that people like have detailed author bios, so copy what the good sites do. She likes Condé Nast travel writers linking their bio to an Instagram that proves they really spent six months in Bali. Mark called this connecting your entities, which Jason Barnard has pushed for years. Go deeper in entity optimization with Jason Barnard.

Hard truths for SEOs who want her help (35:34 and 51:17)

Asked what annoyed her about the industry, she called it mostly friendly and supportive, but said changes to the X algorithm were pushing trolls and money-bragging into her replies. She has never said publicly how much she makes and thinks that is basic decency. The counterexample she gave was Women in Tech SEO: the most supportive community she has seen online, which grew fast, and whose conference after-party she DJed.

Her DMs are open, and she was frank about what she wants in them. Send her a specific situation you think is relevant to what she posts, or ask who’s good for international SEO. Don’t send a question you could have Googled. A great SEO, she said, can find that answer on Google, because that is part of the job. Her close:

Just don’t expect people to do your work for you. Try to figure it out and then ask for help when you really, really need it.

Lily Ray

Her last piece of advice was to decide up front why you’re doing SEO and how much risk you’ll take. If you want fast money and can live with losing the site in three months, other people will show you how. If you’re building a brand you care about for the long game, follow people like her, and expect it to be competitive and slow.

Connect with Lily Ray

• Website: lilyray.nyc
• Consultancy: Algorythmic
• Agency: Amsive (VP, SEO & AI Search)
• LinkedIn: Lily Ray
• X: @lilyraynyc

More SEO hard truths from the Unscripted SEO Podcast

• Cyrus Shepard on the disavow test that did nothing and brand signals after HCU
• Jon Henshaw on AI hype, Google’s sources of truth and the long game
• Mark A Preston on trading SEO hours for equity, the host of this episode

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The Unscripted SEO Podcast is produced by SEO Arcade. If you want expert interviews working as an SEO and link-building engine for your brand, explore podcast-powered link building or book a call with Jeremy Rivera.