This whole Semrush-created junk about me being a Google SEO expert has one silver lining: if anyone has posted about it falsely, they are a fraud, and you know never to hire them. There are only a few people who have got it right: Shahid Jafar Khan in Pakistan (who removed his piece immediately upon […]
Read More… from The three parties that did right among a whole lot of fraud
When I first signed up to Disqus, there was the option to have no ads. But with Lucire we allowed them, because I figured, why not? Disqus’s rules were pretty clear: you’d earn money on the ads shown, and once you got to US$100, they’d pay out. The trouble is those ads made so little […]
Read More… from Why we’ve dropped Disqus, and the shenanigans of the online ad world
Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedin’s The Next Big Idea: • AI is the first technology that can take power away from us • if we are not careful, AI […]
Read More… from Beware AI; the dangers of Google ads; and the beauty of Radio.garden
Nine days since the first DMCA notice was lobbed against us, the saga has finally reached the powers-that-be at Hearst SL. And once it did, things began happening quickly. I’ve heard from their head of legal, and what he’s outlined to me seems like a good resolution to the whole saga. He tells me some […]
Read More… from The Red Points saga: this might finally be resolved
I suppose it’s positive that Google has finally responded to our first counter-notification against Hearst SL’s and Red Points Solution SL’s fraudulent DMCA notice. Hey, Google, why don’t you begin by asking your complainants for proof before presuming an innocent party guilty? Then used your milliards of dollars and high-tech to see that our work […]
Read More… from Google finally responds to our first counter-notification
Yesterday morning, we received a second notice with two more URLs—one with wholly our own content—from Hearst SL and its contractor, Red Points Solution SL. I’ve done a bit more digging and it’s usually fraudsters who engage in this behaviour. You can read more about them in Techdirt, Mashable and Search Engine Land. With their […]
Read More… from Companies worth millions engaging in fraud, and Google is their weapon
I’ve been meaning to link Rand Fishkin’s ‘Something is Rotten in Online Advertising’ for some time, so here it is. He writes, in his second and third paragraphs (links in original): Where to even begin… Should we start with the upcoming loss of third-party cookies? The bizarre Google & Facebook duopoly teamup against anti-trust action? The rise […]
Read More… from Rand Fishkin’s ‘Something is Rotten in Online Advertising’
In chatting to Alexandra Wolfe on Mastodon about the previous post, I had to draw a sombre conclusion. If it weren’t for Google, there’d be no incentive to do content mills or splogs. I replied: ‘People really are that stupid, and itʼs all thanks to Google. Google doesn’t care about ad fraud, and anyone can […]
Read More… from Pirate sites, content mills and splogs exist because of Google
For homeowners and buyers, there’s a great guide from Moisture Detection Co. Ltd. called What You Absolutely Must Know About Owning a Plaster-Clad Home, subtitled The Origin of New Zealand’s Leaky Building Crisis and Must-Know Information for Owners to Make Their Homes Weathertight, and Regain Lost Value. My intent isn’t to repeat someone’s copyrighted […]
In the ‘I told you so’ department, from the Murdoch Press this week: An internal Facebook presentation this spring called the phenomenon of single users with multiple accounts “very prevalent” among new accounts. The finding came after an examination of roughly 5,000 recent sign-ups on the service indicated that at least 32% and as many […]
Read More… from Facebook knows it doesn’t have as many users as it claims