Cannabis SEO in 2025 | Return of the Penguin

I really need to get up one of those Hunter S. Thompson disguises one of these days, if I’m going on to write posts like these. That’s what the heyday of my blogging within the cannabis / psychedelics / entheogens verticals felt like. Just less Johnny Depp, not that anybody but him should have played Hunter.

Like that guy, I blogged a lot in the cannabis sphere, getting paid to write about weed. No, scratch that, getting paid to sample commercial and legally available weed (and other) products, to then write about. Better than Hunter S. Thompson’s experience, I had no fear of the law. If only he’d lived to see such times.

AI is Not the End of the World

Let me start there: round about 2022, cannabis & hemp blogging suffered the same setback that all Google-approved SEO suffered: the AI Winter.

The problem is not AI itself. The problem is how the public reacts to AI. ChatGPT is nothing but a word calculator. I’ve played with the base technology myself back in the day; look up the history of chatbots starting with Eliza sometime. AI chatbots were in business three years before I was born.

The fallout from ChatGPT, however, is that it empowered spammers like never before, forcing Google to cut the throat of the paid online content market. It’s been hard times for tech workers of every stripe ever since, but again: This is the reaction. As soon as we’re done worshiping the chatbot like the stone head from Zardoz, we can get back to business again.

Good, valuable content is in more demand than ever. Both end users and B2B business alike is starting to learn how to filter out chatterbot spam. Go to submit a manuscript anywhere online and look at all the publishers yelling “no AI”:

no AI allowed

AI is forbidden

everybody hates ChatGPT

Everybody hates ChatGPT slop. The slop will not improve. AI is useful as hell at some limited tasks, but it’s not time to bring in the marching androids to replace humans at every single job in the world. If only the market would quit gyrating in fits and settle down about this, however, we would be doing better business right now.

You people watch too much science fiction. He said, self-righteously.

Cannabis Industry Backlinks are Selling for $125 a Pop!

That’s the facts in 2025. Cannabis is a very small niche relative to other industries, so marketing opportunities are just closed off to us. Blogs, as in eCommerce/ commercial blogs, are dying in the tar pits. Five years ago, top-ranking websites handed out backlinks like candy, because they had a blog rolling. Google has had to duck around the volume of AI-spam online, devaluing B2B text that was both necessary and useful for small business.

Long story short: Blogs are rare now. About 80% of the old blog-based web has gone dark, with owners no longer able to afford the server bill on small-change sites. People who have been in business for twenty years and more, pulling the plug. Between this and the COVID economic wave – which we’re still feeling now, don’t forget – business in general is down now.

Those few publications left, available for guest posting and a side order of do-follow backlink, are charging for the privilege. There are even agencies that charge far higher fees “guaranteeing” you “quality” backlink placement, but I wouldn’t hand over large amounts of money without seeing the host domains.

I’m not kidding about the $125 part: That’s the base for listing a product or item for sale on Cannabis Tech, a site upon whose blog my writing will be appearing soon. That’s their base listing for the marketplace – but bear in mind, said marketplace includes facilities and properties, along with industrial-scale cannabis industry equipment for processing, growing, extraction, packaging, and more. Price tags on this stuff run into the 2.5-million range, at which point a $125 listing fee is a mere transactional fee.

Still, that’s not really a “backlink.” They do offer sponsored posts too, tucked away in a blog category listing, for another fee.

What if Anything Will Tariffs Do?

Tariffs between the US and China, currently on-again/off-again as negotiations wobble, coudl impact the cannabis industry. Most notably, we have a pain point with hardware, because al the cartridges, vapes, eRigs, and more are all made in China.

I can at least imagine that simple things like glass-blown bongs are still made in the US of A. As for cannabis itself, gosh, that’s a native US crop so hardy that it was among the first crops cultivated by European settlers in the New World. Cannabis itself isn’t touched by tariffs.

It is Still Possible for Content Marketing to Save Cannabis SEO

a top=secret envelope to indicate discreet smoking gear

Slithering into marketing mode, I will helpfully point out that I still blog for Dab Connection, which can still afford to stay open as long as the content goes on somebody else’s dime. This makes my home stomping grounds one of the few surviving cannabis industry blogs on the web!

Just recently I posted there about DiscreetSmoker.com, an “online headshop” which persevered the economic shockwaves in this industry. Selling consumer-focused cannabis gear – as long as you offer hardware / gear only – are doing quite well still, especially if they have a brick-and-mortar presence linked to a Google Business listing.

Discreet Smoker has an excellent niche carved out: as the name suggests, they specialize in discreet gear for consuming cannabis and hemp without the whole wide world having to know about it. Just remembered, in my list of super-discreet vaporizers that actually disguise themselves as something else, I forgot to mention the Puffco Cupsy, a dry herb vaporizer camouflaged as an ordinary coffee cup. For $59.99, that’s almost unbeatable.

Like I say, find a niche and fill it.

Find More of me on Medium!

The very same rib-tickling, mind-expanding, horrifyingly hilarious insights from the web’s most zealous agnostic prophet is now appearing at Medium. That’s the other end of the blog market: paid content on a subscription-walled site is where most of the money’s at for plain, honest, journal-style blogging. The opposite of Google’s SEO ratrace, Medium is the place for professional authors, reporters, poets, and essayists to get together and celebrate human writing for a human audience.

It’s sad to see that kind of content disappear from the free-with-ads web, but I didn’t make the rules here. A penguin’s gotta keep an igloo over his head, yah know? Anyway a Medium subscription only costs $5 all-you-can-read. Most of you are spending that much on My Little Pony skins for your Steam profile.

If you’re just too strapped (you probably work in the US cannabis industry), here’s a Medium post I specifically made free reading, with yet more of my sage advice on the cannabis industry in 2025.

Peace and love and buds be with you all!

 

My Latest Multimedia Productions…

(*blowing dust off WordPress*)

Jesus holy mother of peasants and pumpkins hail Mary! HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN? March 2022, right when Putin invaded Ukraine. Since then, I’ve shifted gears a lot in my freelance livin’ work. It’s kept me THAT busy, so that is the excuse slip I have for not blogging on my own site for 5 months.

OTOH, I have always said that you should know me by my work, with my domain only functioning as a central hub. Judge me not by my poor stats at penguinpetes.com, but by my freelance work over on a YouTube channel with 3.5K subscribers.

Aw, what’s that, you say? You want to see some of Unca Pete’s video reviews for the $25 billion cannabis industry? Right this way, and be sure to stay tuned for more podcast news following…

69 views nice

nice…

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Having a Boom! With the Holidays

Who the bananas has time to blog on their own site this time of year? In between tying off the big holiday rush and jamming out my vanity projects, any non-compulsory work falls behind in priority after my dedicated #GenX slacker lifestyle.

Yeah, right. Actually, folks, in the content marketing / online blogging business, I type all day and all night until I fall asleep with my beak on the keyboard typing “zzzzzz” and then my adorable wife drags me to bed, from whence I spring into action hours later to gargle espresso and run back to the keyboard. How can you turn down extra money this time of year?

Boom 1968 screenshot

Video Review Debut: Boom! (1968)

When last we joined my escapades, I was as amazed as everyone else to have pulled off my first video review for 366 Weird Movies, with Legacy of Satan. Well, hold your horses, because I videoed again this month with a video review of Boom! (yes, it’s spelled with an exclamation point, like Yahoo!) (1968), Liz Taylor and Rich Burton.

Because those 2 movies will totally have fan overlap, right? Don’t leave now, I have done much more than this in the past month, after the jump.

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My latest adventures in Content Marketing…

Blah blah blah Pete doesn’t post often enough, blah blah blah I’m too busy working for clients to look into my own website. My own site is so neglected it’s a wonder they haven’t opened a Spirit Halloween here yet. Blah blah blah there I’m blogging now.

I see tweets like this all the time:

Except I’m a BLOGGER, so while everybody else posts a onesie-twosie WIP, I’m seeing my projects go by in a blur. Today is October 12th.

Here’s a round-up of everything I’ve been busy as a bee with in just this past month, right after the jump.

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Further Exploits of the World’s Feistiest Blogger

There’s this new attitude out there that a “blogger” equals a stay-at-home mom who posts recipes for gorgonzola milkshakes accompanied by pages-long rants about how she did not turn into her mother. I mean just look at the #blogger tag on Twitter. Everything is safe, cozy, filled with Pinterest snaps, tranquil.

That is not how I work. That is not what I am about. You will never catch me, for any amount of money, doting on homemade hummus yogurt or embroidery patterns to stitch “life, laugh, love” on your toilet seat cover.

waters_of_knowledge

I blog with my fists. I am on a holy mission to spread enlightenment to the world, and the way I do that is by beating the stupid out of people one concrete skull at a time. I love my job.

See how much…

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All You Need Is Drugs

Along with my other geeky pursuits, I’ve waddled along in this whole legalized cannabis industry thing. Mind you – you can take it or leave it, God sees my heart – all this time I’ve been blogging cannabis without so much as smoking a single puff of the stuff. I’ve tried a couple CBD vapes and experimented with kratom, that’s it.

Yes, I have partaken of the ganja plant in the past. Yes, I enjoy it, it is very nice. But weed to me is like ketchup; I don’t need ketchup every week to remember what it tastes like. My attitude towards drugs, like my attitudes towards everything else, is different from most and of course, pisses off both prohibitionists and righteous stoners alike.

Anyway, the cannabis news beat has been fraught with peril and wonder. I even mean the “peril” part literally; there is still an unsolved mass shooting at an Aguanga, Riverside County, California, cannabis farm which has yet to produce a lead. Seven people died and nobody cares because they were all undocumented pot farmers at a bootleg facility. The police just shrug.

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Now My Other Gigs Are Infected With Occult Influence

You could say the same for every day of the cursed year of 2020, but my timeline seems to have been particularly dark since reviewing – and being bit by – Cultist Simulator. It was indeed a fit spooky choice for October, which dragged me through the month as I’ve tried to keep up my horror viewing in the middle of everything else.

Ignite_Cannabis_Co-1021x574

Is Ignite Cannabis Co. trying to tell us something?

At my stoner DabConnection gig, we’ve become the freelance police of the cannabis industry busting fake brands of THC vape cartridges left and right. But this time I got interested in a real brand managed by an Instagram influencer Dan Bilzerian, though “real” and “managed” are both up for debate. The brand has raised millions in investor funding and squandered millions more with Bilzerian apparently going through the most hysterical public midlife-crisis ever. We’re talking $50 million in 2019 alone!

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In Which I Explore More Hidden Worlds

As a freelance blogger, what I really do for a living is just explore. That’s it; I visit some exotic far-off realm of the anthropocene noosphere, and I report back on what I found. I always find something weird and squirmy, without even digging much.

My favorite thing to do in the world is to open the door on closet cultures most of you never knew existed, and drag them out in the daylight. Even though I snark a lot, I love these pocket societies because they present an alternative view of the world. We all have our own perspective on “where it’s at.” Where is it at? That depends on whom you ask. Maybe the lost tribes are right. Maybe the underground subcultures are right. Maybe we should all ditch everything and go find enlightenment in some hidden digital playground because that’s all the meaning we have left to get out of life. Maybe we’re all deluding ourselves. Maybe we have no choice, and our only relevant decision is to pick the delusion that allows the most comfort.

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In Which I Escape the Kratom Booby Trap

Greetings, energy beings of planet Gaia! I have ingested large quantities of an exotic plant from the Far East which gave me new, mutant powers of bullshit detection and a renewed faith in our one true god Zardoz. It doesn’t matter how interesting your week has been, mine has been more interesting.

Kratom_is_bullshit

Discovery #1: Kratom is Bullshit!

At the behest of my client at DabConnection.com, I experimented with this Thai herbal drug making the rounds at convenience store kiosks. Read my bummer trip report on kratom here, where I risk bodily soundness and my sanity in trying to get any reaction out of this rip-off product, including gulping down mugs of kratom tea on an empty stomach at 5AM because that’s the thing you do on an average weekend morning! Alas, I got nothing but dead air for the trouble, which included gulping down so many of the half-gram pills that I rattle when I jump up and down.

I love my career.

I found out confirmed proof that alleged “kratom strains” all come from the same plant, too. My suspicion that the alleged “kratom plant” is actually catnip can neither be confirmed nor denied by my cat, who recognizes catnip but will not touch the stuff.

Riddle_I_fits_I_sits

If I offer him catnip, he’ll sniff it once and give me a dirty eye, insulted that I would disrespect him with this offering, before pointedly batting it away. I have a Mormon cat.

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