SEO scams, and two outfits to avoid

Recent events have reiterated how a lot of the SEO profession—I’d say almost all of it, except for a tiny sliver of people who really know what they are doing—is a crock. The good news is you can confirm which ones are the crooks by seeing who had posted lies about me. Usually they write […]

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Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?

Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone […]

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My real expert opinion on Google, SEO, and the mess that’s to come (not the LLM junk)

Skry being right on the money:     Still those web pages about me being a Google SEO expert or having an algorithm named for me are being indexed and prioritized by Google, all because Semrush hallucinated (or was there a malicious hand in this?), told a bunch of people (in south Asia, predominantly) about […]

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Is Google hiding content critical of itself—while losing the spam battle?

For a while I enjoyed getting some of the hits from the unwary searching for my name in association with the misinformation that Semrush allegedly generated. After all, it’s my name, and I should enjoy the hits for Google SEO jackyan in order to set the record straight, rather than have the unscrupulous among SEO […]

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Google fails to downrank junk sites; Bing and Mojeek fare better

Understandably, I was bemused but then frustrated with the fake articles out there about the new Google algorithm update being created by me and named for me. (Even Perplexity has picked up this misinformation.) Of all those I found and reached out to, only one author—Shahid Jafar—had the decency to remove his article and apologize. […]

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Tech musings from a non-tech: search engines and the nightmare of AWS

A great quote from Penn Jillette in Cracked: Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and […]

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Robert Vanwey on whom to boycott

It’s hard to find fault with Robert Vanwey’s ‘Who to Boycott’, subtitled ‘There are some in business who treat workers like property’. Note: for those who don’t like Substack, you might not wish to click through. But I gave my word to Rob I would link it because I was impressed by his thinking and […]

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Why web pages are becoming homogenized

Dan York in Vermont referred to Mia Sato’s article in The Verge today, on how Google has driven the bland, same-again websites out there. It does lay the blame at netizens more, and fairly so here, given that the desperation behind SEO has led many to employ certain tricks in order to make a buck […]

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The curious case of Google’s SEO searchers

They may no longer be relevant, but most (all?) of our sites still have meta keyword tags. When we redevelop a site, we tend to take the header tags in full from the previous incarnation, so unlike the old joke about George Washington’s axe (‘This is the original. I’ve only had the handle and blade […]

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When anti-capitalists love billionaires

Ka wehi ta ratou kaupapa here, ko hiahia kōrero te reo Māori ahau.   People are waking up to how bad Google has become, if posts on Mastodon are any indication. What’s disappointing are the replies, usually saying they have switched to Duck Duck Go because it’s so much better, and others saying Kagi is […]

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