I’m blocking Threads

I decided to block threads.net from my Mastodon account, which really doesn’t do much if there are determined bad actors, but it’s a small initial step to keep Meta in its place. Just as I never linked my YouTube account to Google back when I used those legacy 2000s websites, I really don’t need to […]

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Semrush, your users used your tool, then created misinformation. How did this even come about?

It seemed right to quiz Semrush about the misinformation that is being posted out there, allegedly because of its program. I’ve yet to receive a reply, but I really need to understand why. How did my name even wind up in their system alongside Google and SEO? I emailed them, telling them what I could […]

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The crunch time media face is nothing new

  Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

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The three parties that did right among a whole lot of fraud

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 […]

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Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?

It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]

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Check your security settings when putting a Mediawiki installation behind Cloudflare

Some great advice from Cybarbie on Mastodon about Cloudflare and my putting Autocade behind it:       Sure enough, after following her advice, I saw the numbers improve after a 9,000-page-view day, to two consecutive days of 11,000. Visitor numbers have increased from c. 5,500 to 6,490 in a 24-hour period:     This […]

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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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Cloudflare’s unpredictable blocks could come in handy

A few weeks ago, I removed Design Taxi from our links’ list because I received this:     so I assumed the site had gone or had made a decision to block certain people or countries. But it turns out that it hasn’t and I now have egg on my face. I’ve no idea why […]

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Testing Mojeek, Google and Bing on a site: search again: November ’23 update

It has been a long time since I looked at how the three main occidental search engines—Mojeek, Google and Bing—were performing with a site: search and whether they could pick up dynamic pages. As I did in April, I’m trying it with site:lucire.com, which has both static and dynamic content. Mojeek is fairly consistent, but […]

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Bring back the human-curated web directory

Wayback Machine/Archive.org Nostalgia, with the Open Directory Project. This archived page from 1999 isn’t even the original. I still remember when it was called Gnuhoo in 1998.   Where have all the web directories gone? It seems we need them more than ever, since Google is so poor at ranking websites (while it funds the […]

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