Topical Authority and Semantic SEO Matters: Koray Gubur Interview

“Do not create a niche website. Create a niche brand.” That’s Koray Tuğberk Gübür’s answer to why updates are hammering niche sites. 🏷️

At the Chiang Mai SEO conference, I sat down with Koray Tuğberk Gübür, founder of Holistic SEO, who says he’s trying to bring an engineer’s mindset, along with a business mindset, to SEO culture. 🎙️

He explained programmatic and semantic SEO, why niche sites got hit, broad appeal, and why he’s positive about SGE. 🧠

📊 In this episode, we unpacked:

• ⚙️ What programmatic SEO is
• 🧠 What semantic SEO is
• 📉 Why updates hammer niche websites
• 🌍 Broad appeal: why TripAdvisor outranks you
• 🤖 Why SGE is an opportunity
• 🔮 What you’ll need in 2024

🎥 Watch the full episode:

⚙️ What Programmatic SEO Is

Programmatic SEO means having a template and a pattern you replicate with programs, sometimes called template generators or template engines. ⚙️

For example: a Python content generator that posts to WordPress via API, another script for internal links, another for social media, and another for checking. Once you have that collection, you can scale and improve based on search engine feedback. Some parts stay manual, but most is automated. 🐍

For more, read my interview with Koray on AI and programmatic SEO. 🔗

🧠 What Semantic SEO Is

Semantic SEO is optimization based on meaning rather than word matching. Lexical search engines match words and guess the meaning. 🔤

Semantic search engines understand sentence-level semantics: which word matters most, word compositionality, and which part of a document best fits each query variation. 🧩

That’s why, instead of multiple pages for small query variations, SEOs started creating longer, complete, comprehensive articles. 📚

📉 Why Updates Hammer Niche Websites

Koray sees several problems:

• 💸 Built for quick money: if you only link to vendors that pay you, your whole site is effectively sponsored. He recalls a Google engineer saying that linking to multiple vendors slightly helps
• 🧑‍🎓 No real expertise: many are written by people with zero experience in the niche. If an LLM can answer better than your site, “no one needs that specific website anymore”
• 🏷️ No brand signals: no search demand, no crowd, no direct traffic. Search engines now try to rank businesses, not just websites

For a parallel view, read Charles Floate on making affiliate sites look like real companies. 🔗

🌍 Broad Appeal: Why TripAdvisor Outranks You

Broad appeal, a concept from Google research, means sites with wide coverage across regions, languages and topics have an advantage from their historical data. 🌍

A local car rental business may be the better authority for its island, but TripAdvisor ranks for every island in Greece, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, so it has all the context and can outrank you in your own location. 🏝️

As a search engine, “I wouldn’t try to understand 10 million different websites for a million queries.” One site for many topics is cheaper and easier. 💡

🤖 Why SGE Is an Opportunity

Koray is positive about SGE:

• ✍️ Balance lost clicks with more content. AI lets you create far more content
• 👀 More visibility: SGE may show many more websites, and a new site can appear for rare queries if a few sentences match by vector similarity
• 🧪 Lower entry cost: AI makes it cheaper to build and test multiple websites and boosts workforce efficiency

If more new domains appear in results without strong PageRank or links, “it just means semantics also become more important.” 📈

For more on AI search, read Liam Quirk on the new rules of ChatGPT SEO. 🔗

🔮 What You’ll Need in 2024

Most of the direction was clear since about 2019. You’ll need:

• 📚 More, better content and higher frequency
• 📱 An active social media presence
• 🪪 Transparency: author, founder, address and contact details
• 🧑‍💻 Real human effort on AI content. Google’s quality rater guidelines say human effort proves authenticity and uniqueness
• ⚡ Faster response times and better UX

His advanced idea: fine-tune your own language model and build a knowledge graph you can generate content from. With just five or six people, programmatic SEO plus semantics can build sites “that print money.” 💰

His Topical Authority course is regularly updated with transparent results. He mentioned about 12,000 community members, with about 1,200 in the private community, and a conference planned around summer. 🎓

At Chiang Mai, the best part is “the community around the conference,” with meetups and masterminds as valuable as the talks. For another speaker there, read Steve Toth on SEO Notebook. 🔗

📝 Key Takeaways From the Koray Tuğberk Gübür Interview

• ⚙️ Programmatic SEO = templates + scripts + feedback loops
• 🧠 Write complete, meaning-rich content, not variation pages
• 🏷️ Build a niche brand, not a niche website
• 🌍 Broad topical coverage gives big sites an edge
• 🤖 Treat SGE as a visibility opportunity
• 🪪 Be transparent and add real human effort

❓ FAQs About Koray Tuğberk Gübür

What is semantic SEO?

Optimizing based on meaning rather than exact word matching. Modern search engines understand sentence semantics and which part of a document answers each query.

What is programmatic SEO?

Creating pages from templates and patterns using scripts, such as generating content, posting via API and adding internal links, so you can scale and refine based on search feedback.

Why did Google updates hit niche websites?

Koray says many were built for quick money, lacked real expertise, and had no brand signals like search demand or direct traffic.

What is broad appeal in SEO?

Google’s tendency to favor sites that cover many regions, languages and topics, like TripAdvisor, because they have more context and historical data.

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• Kyle Roof SEO Strategies, AI Tests & How To Rank #1 in Google 🚀
• Alex Drew Odys CEO Explains Why Aged Domains Matters in SEO

Are you building a niche website or a niche brand? Share this with an affiliate who needs to rethink. 💬

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