In this first edition of Whiteboard Friday Revisited, I’m joined by Cyrus Shepard as we reflect on his hugely popular Whiteboard Friday episode: 21 Smart Google SEO Tips from 2021. Join us as we revisit the past so we can understand the present and speculate on the future. 

It's been four years since the creation of this video, and Favicon optimization is still overlooked. It’s a great example of how you should capitalize on the areas of your site that you own and that show up in the search results, it’s all about influencing clicks!

This is a reminder that your website Favicon is something you entirely own and can influence perception in the place where people are making decisions on what to click, so don’t forget it!

Back in 2021, Cyrus advised:

“Now I'm surprised more people haven't talked about this in 2020. Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they're high contrast, if they're visible or not visible. Having a good favicon can make a few percentage points difference, very minor, but it does make a difference if you can get it right.

In 2025, Cyrus confirms:

"Favicon optimization is still hugely under-optimized for most websites... It's something you have one hundred percent control over, and a lot of websites just ignore it. It's funny. The sites that get it with something instantly recognizable do better over time incrementally." 

Links still matter; that hasn’t changed. While tactics have evolved, they are still one of the key signals search engines use to understand authority. 

In the original Whiteboard Friday video, Cyrus confides: “No, kidding. Everybody hates link building. Link building is so hard. There are some professionals and some great people in the industry who love it and are great at it. Personally, I'm not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.”

So how? Cyrus simply encourages you to make people look good. If you’re going to create content that people want to link to, what we call passive link building (also called Digital PR in the UK.) 

"If you can create something that helps someone do their job, that they want to brag about, that they wanna share, that they can include in their own presentation because it's data or anything else like that, that's gonna get the links. Make other people look good. Make content so good that other people wanna steal it. That's gonna get your links. That hasn't changed."

Cyrus mentions he has done active outreach link building maybe 5 times in his career, and yes, we should all be making content so good that people want to steal it. 

If you are doing the manual work of link building and need to identify link placements, then Link Intersect in Moz's Link Explorer is still the best place to start. Why? Because when you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to link to you. I still have people hit me up in my DMs with content, and if it’s worthwhile, then yes, you do want people to know about it, and sometimes that takes a little nudge. Like all these tactics make it natural and lead with high value contentand the rest will follow.

To find link opportunities for a site in Link Explorer, follow these steps from within the Link Intersect section:

1. Enter the site you’d like to find link opportunities for - you can use the drop-down to specify if you’d like to see opportunities for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page
2. Use the drop-down to choose whether you’d like to see link opportunities that are root domains or exact pages
3. Enter your competitors - you can use the drop-down to specify if you’d like to see data for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page
4. Click Add another URL to add up to 5 competitors to compare
5. Click Find opportunities 

While still important for generating links and getting attention, and likely gaining visibility in LLMs, long-form content purely for organic visibility is in flux right now due to AI Overviews. Tom Capper covers whether AI Overviews are affecting your search results in another Whiteboard Friday. Now is the time to play around with your content formats, consider the importance of snippets of content, and how they show up in Google.

"We just need to get it out there, answer the user question quickly, show our expertise, get in and get out. And that also changes how we measure metrics and everything else like that, but it's a shift in thinking. Be very specific. Don't ramble."

Cyrus’ advice back then was certain, with a big emphatic yes to investing in long-form content. Now the landscape is shifting. And while it still is a viable tactic for passive link building. Play around with short-form content that's hyper-specific. And please ignore my joke about the 500-word limit, that is me being entirely facetious :) 

This advice from 2021 is definitely at an inflection point right now: “You need to invest in long-form content. Now I am not saying that content length is a ranking factor. It is not. Short-form content can rank perfectly well. It also generally tends to rank higher in Google search results. Nothing against short-form content. Love short-form content. But long-form content generally gives you more bang for your buck in terms of SEO ranking potential. “

Cyrus and I share a positive outlook despite all the changes. Cyrus, more poetic than I, summons the wordsmith Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into the good night!" 

There is still opportunity out there! Create content, get your page to rank, and draw the organic clicks, where you can. There are 6 billion clicks a day, and some of them are your customers looking for products and services just like yours.

"Yeah. What I don't want people to do is give up... Rank. Get the traffic. I'm not hugely in love with the idea that, and I vehemently disagree with the idea that the age of SEO is over. Do you wanna be in that cohort of people getting clicks? It's a huge business. It's not going away. So don't stop!"

And that’s it for our first Whiteboard Friday revisited. If you like it, please pop over to the Moz YouTube channel and let me know who you’d like me to interview next in the comments! See you next time.