Technology, futurism, blogging and related matters.
I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats. Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, […]
Read More… from How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web
Do Google results have to be so terrible? No, because here’s GMX, who licenses Google results, and their top 10 results for site:lucire.com. There are some framesets (which regular Google loves), but more of the pages in the top 10 are top-level and current. One note: turns out some of the framesets were […]
Read More… from Google doesn’t have to be terrible—it just chooses to be
In the businesses I’m actually involved in, there aren’t that many unsavoury people. Maybe in the early to mid-2000s I came across some hangers-on in the fashion world. But SEO, wow, there’s a great deal of unscrupulousness. I’ve seen their con-merchant emails since the late 1990s—all the more reason that being grouped as one of […]
Read More… from The new disinformation posts may have stopped, but there’s tidying to do
Is this why Search Engine Land refused to run our release about Semrush? Because now, Semrush is their parent company, and they would have known that the deal was happening when they received the release. We also now know that I was right about what was going on—and the biggest names in the search engine […]
Read More… from Semrush’s continued dishonesty, and potentially one fewer outlet to expose them
[Originally published in Lucire] Not only did we lose Mandi Kingsbury last month, we lost a good friend of this magazine, and a dear personal friend, Helen Baxter, who tragically took her own life aged 51 on September 23. This is a reminder that physical changes to one’s health can manifest as depression, and to […]
That Google seems to get older and older. Here are the top 10 for site:lucire.com as of October 10, 2024. The home page isn’t there, and maybe that’s OK. But what is there is the index.html file to the 2000 folder, which was put there to catch any programming errors (e.g. forgetting to […]
Call me an idealist, but I think people should stop using those search engine copy massaging programs, write like real humans, and expect the technology to bend to us, rather than the other way round. That’s how we still conduct business. There are still disinformation pages about me out there, but no new ones since […]
Read More… from Continuing the disinformation removal and bot blocks
It’s not enough to block just Semrush’s bot, SemrushBot, in one’s robots.txt, since they have a whole bunch of them. We’ve usually allowed all bots but with “AI” and Semrush’s terrible programming that wasted hours of my time every day for nine months, there are certain parties no longer welcome to crawl. To block Semrush […]
Google really doesn’t like this blog. When I do a site: search, it still puts HTML pages up top, often pre-2010, and as of yesterday, it trails Mojeek and Bing in terms of the number of pages in its index. Who knew? Google being last of the three. It got me wondering how […]
Read More… from Quick test of index size on the occidental search engines
When you have been on this disinformation-busting journey for nine months, you can work out how Semrush got everything so wrong. Here’s one item, a bunch of SEO tools, and if you read the description, ‘Google SEO Xiaoyan’ is in the copy. Probably deeply questionable, which is why Google offers it for Chrome. […]
Read More… from Here’s probably how Semrush linked concepts—and got it totally wrong