#maybe the Danny merged at the end of the story which becomes the story of the creation of eldrish Danny

[lolottes]

And everyone is in a different romantic relationship.

Has different studies as well as odd jobs.

But the whole town, when they meet them, just says, oh boy, he has a busy life, this guy, he's everywhere, damn it. Everyone talks to them like if it was the same person without being offended by his forgetting because given how he does no posse it is normal that he is tired dead on his feet. Just to make the confusion worse.

And when the Danny's meet for the first time and start laughing about their life like it's normal as they relate to things getting more and more screwed up by accident

Or that there's some other difference in their experience like one says Dani's introduction is like in canon, one says how his Dani melted, the other says it happened later another says his Dani never came back and has no idea if she faded offscreen or not at all, another asks who is Dani, vlad ever did that or none of the clones were steady? the last is sold for having succeeded in saving all the clones.

Batfam looks at each other during all this, not knowing what to say, for certain Danny it is the happiest they have been since the member who took him had met him...

Imagine if one came here just to explore. Nothing has gone wrong in his timeline, he is now a very balanced mentally adult (maybe not physically) immortal Danny. He's the only one who feels bad. He escaped all that! Damn, he was so lucky. Bonus point if it's the one brought by Bruce himself and whispers to him THE question: Can we adopt ourselves?

Bruce: I have a number called to be sure, but I think so.

And why limit yourself to gotam: Let's put another Danny with Constantine because of an invocation that ended in adoption. why not one with the speeders that we meet because of temporal misdeeds.

Not to mention who have been hiding himself in absurd places to isolate himself but who was not empty of people at DC like Mars or under the ocean

After dinner with each batfam to bring a Danny, we have a meeting where each leaguer brings his Danny as well. Batman and his Danny look at each other between dismay, fatigue and OMG we HAVE to do something fast it might get worse! Like he might have Danny's with some bad guys (or just mix up some random civilians)

a configuration so rich in potential chaos

dp x dc prompt #15

danny escapes from his dimension to gotham after a reveal gone wrong. and an explosion at the nasty burger. and because he couldn’t deal with his parents talking about phantom. and gets dragged by cujo through a portal in the ghost zone. and runs away after being forced to seriously defend himself and hurt his parents.

five different versions of danny somehow find their way to the same gotham and befriend one of the bats. everyone is too busy trying to coax their new friend home to realize everyone else has the same kid from different dimensions with them.

[watchingyoufromthestars]

Taking an essay break, time to ramble a bit about dndads tma au ideas. I am not immune to putting the s2 teens into the plot of another fave media.

Starting off with the last post, Hermie was Spiral-bound but taken by the Stranger. Scam is the Spiral metaphorically only for the parallel of Hermie wanting to prove himself to his father by pulling off the ultimate scam, which here would be him attempting to merge with the Distortion, but before getting to Sannikov Land to complete the Spiral's ritual, he was taken by the Stranger. I’m thinking he was possibly marked by the Lonely at an early age and almost followed the path to serve that fear but found more appeal in the lies and deceit of the Spiral. And now he’s of neither lol.

Taylor would follow the path of Tim, with Hermie being his Danny, but Danny is also Sasha in the way we meet him before his time runs out. Basically Hermie has something of a role before he gets poofed instead of only ever mentioned like Danny since he’s already gone long before mag1.

I think Link would become an Avatar of the End. I’m not sure why or how this is just a gut reaction idea with no thought. No idea where he’d fit in with the archive crew, I don’t see him as a Sasha since that’s already taken by Hermie. Idk the AU plot is still plotting.

Scary is the Eye’s Special Little Girl. Marked by the Web and Willy is the Jonah to her Jon. no further notes, she’s the main character.

WHICH MEANS I WORMED MY WAY INTO A NORMSCARY AU MWAHAHA because Normal is so Lonely-coded. There’s also something to be said about the Corruption and how it can manifest as unhealthy love and companionship but maybe I’ll save that for Lark and Sparrow and turn their codependency up to 11. I just want to make everyone fun little monsters.

I don’t know if he’d play into the story at all but I put thought into Glenn. He might just be a statement only character. He’s absolutely been marked by the Buried; whether or not he gave in to that terror is a different story. Glenn may not have the s1 dads to lean on; may not even know them. As much as Freddie will avoid giving his characters big moments of weakness unless forced upon him (/lh), you think he wasn’t freaking the fuck out in the confinements of jail even a little bit? And then when he gets put in another cell in Heaven – and way smaller this time – there wasn’t even a little bit of panic? That he’d be trapped for another 18 years?

There were probably a few other fears at play because mag185 is so Glenn coded and the girl throwing rocks at Tina is Narcolas. If Glenn became an Avatar he might serve the Desolation based on his ‘path of revenge’ near the end of s1 and his duel with Terry Jr. in Hell – and maybe the Desolation also marked him before the Buried with all the loss in his life – but I don’t see him actually becoming an Avatar.

And I could see Terry Jr. as a Gerry equivalent but only in the way that he’s dead, stuck in a book, and used for a huge lore drop about the Fear Entities (mag111). And also in the way that he’s super goth.

[elithemiar-blog]

The Ghost Zone is the Center Dimensional Construct

Into an expansion from the previous post. It’s a long one

Some background: I have a series I'm writing which is a just a Comfort World Building Series, nothing will come out of it, maybe…it's just so extensive. Using the ideas, I've created from that Comfort (that escape from reality), it made this a lot easier to explain. All of this is a 5-year build, more recent the last 2 years. It's what I work on when I'm supposed to be updating stories; "My Personal Project". Taking the world I made and fixing it into a fandom, and shocking enough, it actually works, for the most part, I do this for all the fandoms I'm in. "A, what would my characters do in this situation in this world?"

It's called "Infinity: From Dusk to Dawn" (As per Infinity or in relation to Infinity, this is what I mean)

The Alternate Rules per Phandom:

Alternate Reality (AR): Is the possibility of a different outcome based off of a theory from the show with cited evidenced, even the inconsistencies of weak world building. EX: Natural born ghosts, the ancients who sealed Pariah, Desiree's backstory (Nickelodeon related shows based off of other shows using the characters as cameos/easter eggs or the games)

Alternate Timeline (AT): The Butterfly Effect, the what if of a difficult decision within canon. EX: Danny's decision to immediately give Lancer the CAT answer sheet without the intervention of Clockwork, or Sam and/or Danny deciding not to skip school for Circus Gothica. Ultimate Enemy would belong here in a general sense, despite Dan being technically out of the time stream

Alternate Universe (AU): The entirely separate world that has no connection to canon other than the characters themselves. AKA the world ideas that the Phandom made up EX: Reverse!Trio, Sentience!Ghost Zone, Spectre Defenders (this is non-related Nickelodeon crossovers)

Alternate Dimension (AD): Taking a dimension and changing something about it. We know the ghost zone is the flipside of the human world (literally life and death, can't have one without the other), however the AD version is tied to Time. The human world is in the modern age while the GZ still remain in the medieval age, all of it, not just the Kingdom of Aragon

*Alternate World (AW): This is primary Infinity base (taking a very specific element like oxygen and changing it to a different element like helium--thus forcing the gravity to be stronger--to create an alternate version of earth. This is the only way for all 4 stated alternates can exist. The ghost zone in particular, is vast. The Canon colors of the realm is green and purple, with exotic bright almost deadly colors thrown in. This isn't expected as the human realm sees death as muted and grey, although in nature bright colors are a warning for predators to stay away.��

This prompt? Could borderline AR (evidence noted in the show as the ghosts are indeed eye sore bright colors) or AU (it's never been explicitly stated that the reason the ghosts are bright colors are to ward off predators as compared to the living world, and thus will be a Phandom exclusive head cannon. AD and AU have their own individual AT and AR. 

"They cannot cross into each other unless there is something called a Shift, which is the circumstance of certain energies matching that of another world of a similar location and can create the possibility of a Merge. This is how creatures and people who don't belong in one world end up in another. Time Shifts and Merges become the reason why people of the past end up in the future, or vice versa (Per Infinity)."

The alternate naming and the potency of magic: (in relation to Infinity) Someone mentioned this previously, this is more my take on it 

Magic is freaking potent under the proper circumstances, if ghost/undead are involved it's probably a relation of necromancy/summoning

Names are the identity and even absolution (even more so if chosen by a higher power). Names are more than an identity; they have power and can create its own energy/magic just from the belief of others (more on belief farther down)

This means the more the summoner/caster knows the true identity of the summoned the more likely the spell/magic will stick

Let's take Ember for example, we as a fandom believe that her true name is Amber while McClain is still her last name. This is dangerous as someone could easily take a hold of her, especially, let's say a caster finds out she's a ghost and could tie her to them with the right ritual/spell and thus force her to give them all her gained money from her concerts within the human realm. With her born identity already known there are few ways to get her freed

Now let's take the Lunch Lady or Boxy, considering their general names, they would be much harder to constrain. If a caster would be able to bind them using those names, it's a weak bind and thus if they can get enough power under a new name (Not their living/born identity) they can be broken free, but then they must take those names, so their previous names become fodder.

Skulker could be a challenge, as we are unable to know whether Skulker was a nickname when living or given to him upon death, within the zone or upon his deathbed (it would really matter). However, his self-proclaimed "Ghost Zone's Greatest Hunter" can still be used.

Titles, significant titles, as no one living or in death, throughout history included can be dire. Pariah Dark used to be known as "King", if one didn't know his name, "Ghost King" or "Ruler of the Dead" could still be known to summon him. However, this goes to the belief judgement. Kronos, Clockwork, or Father Time can be enough to summon him. While still potent due to Title it's still isn't enough to be truly binding as his true name still isn't known. Unless he had been created for that specific job, then he and we all could be screwed

The Belief System.

 I'll try to make this make sense

Existence Belief: The amount of belief of one’s existence can indicate how much one's power can manifest (manifestation, limiting, and extending can be found further down). Best example would be "Rise of the Guardians", as each season's guardians began to lose their magic due to the children's belief in them, and then gained it back when the children gained their belief back. (I mentioned this in a chapter of LOGA)

Judgement Belief: In relation to the Titles/Names. The more people believe in who the true king of the Infinite Realms is the more likely that being will be summoned. Pariah may hold the title, but the citizens believe or Sentient!Zone chooses Danny as the true king, then Danny will be summoned. If it's 50/50, chance lies in the wording of the summoning/ritual

There are other minor things connected including that of prayer, illusions, and individual sentiments. I'd personally have Ember's name being chanted as Existence Belief but extending on prayer.

Prayer can be neutral but depending on who/what the prayer is being sent to can manipulate it to their own deeds. Power to themselves or power return to answer the prayer. Chanting, especially ancient chanting, can create more power

Illusions is based off of one’s individual belief of the existence of what can be seen, but if trusting their senses can see past to the truth

 I've created a dark creature called a Houxvech that can transform themselves via illusion to gain their targets' fear--however they can only target one at a time--because they feed on fear. Depending on the strength of that fear, can power the Houxvech to attack physically, it's rare. Relying on your own senses, that gut feeling (instincts) can reveal what you see, what is being feared isn't actually there, and thus the creature loses its power and one can see its true form.

Individual sentiments are literally the individuals’ power of belief in ones-self, if you believe in the existence of magic itself and the type of magic, yourself can become magic.

Existence and Judgement Beliefs are world encompassing, while the minor beliefs are each individuals’ faiths.

Manifestation, Limiting, and Extending

• Manifestation can be tied to the "power level" of the ghosts, which we can see with Pointdexter, in the consideration of his lower power level he couldn't be seen by humans. Can also be during a certain season, like Halloween, or a certain moon cycle which makes someone stronger. Nocturn could be stronger at night initially, because his target location is already asleep

• Limiting is the basic powers of a ghost that all have; invisibility, intangibility, flight or at least hovering, even "sensing" though a more instinct base

• Extending is what could be based off of what had been seen through that of the higher levels or of another power. Danny's ghost sense is seeing his breath, the physical manifestation of sensing a ghost, a chill down the spine. This chill can be extended into his ice abilities. The Phandom head cannon, at this point, of his eyes glowing the difficulty of the fight based on that of the difficulty of snowboarding/skiing slopes, is an extension of his powers, whether intentional or not. (I know I saw this post, not sure who, credit goes to them)

Magic is also part of the manifestation, limiting, and extending, it's just the who, what, and how. 

 Let's talk about Energy Absorption. 

Aka Vlad's 20 years of experience (Marvel will be mentioned).

• The body is like a container, there's only so much before the body eventually breaks down. In the case of Energy Absorption, because of certain artifacts, the human body can only take so much all at once before it explodes (death), which is why the energy from artifacts should be taken over a period of time instead of all at once.

  ----The Infinity stones via Thanos gauntlet (be aware I've never watched the movies because I will absolutely drop into a hyper fixation) should've been taken slowly for one's body to be used to the influx of energy. I absolutely have an explanation of this using the ideas of my Comfort World Building----

Back to Danny Phantom: • The Amulet of Aragon, Sam and Paulina changing into a dragon due to their sudden influx of high emotions. It's a ghost artifact being used on a human, they're initially not going to be compatible, unless they kept it on them to a point where their body got used to that kind of energy, even under high emotional duress. (When their bodies get used to it, they could potentially have their own dragon forms.) At the time being, that particular amulet is tied to Dora, and thus they gain that form. • Assuming Vlad had visited the Zone, with each visit he grows stronger because his body, both human and ghost, since they're now connected, draws in the ectoplasm, which is why his powers are diverse and different compared to Danny, but he also practiced perfecting those abilities

Magic is potent under high emotional distress, and thus can drain the caster drastically since they lost control or are not used to it. EX: Danny changing back after using the Ghostly Wail under desperation to save his family and defeat his future evil self. Since he doesn't use it often, when he does it causes high damage.

The Reality Gauntlet, a possible explanation of why Freakshow "needed practice" is because it's a GHOST artifact, he needed time to get used to it, which is why Danny had no problems using it the first time, since it connected to him easily with his ghost side.

"Energy manipulation is the basis of all magic. Aura is the pre-set, a visual color of emotion that’s being produced, energy is the physical construction of aura and manipulating that takes concentration and skill (per Infinity)."

The last thing I want to bring up, which is the basic of how my own Comfort World Building Series exists, is how the multiverse works. 

Now the Center Dimensional Construct, in this case the Zone is the absolute center, where all energy and magic originates from. Much like the arms of an elliptical galaxy looks the arms are the stretch of that magic and energy.

 Meaning the further one is from the center, the less magic and energy that world gets, and since space is ever expanding that world used to be closer. Which also means that the evidence of magic from our own history, the time when gods existed is true, because back then, the world was close enough to the center to support that kind of energy/magic.

In my comfort series, there are two worlds that are in a fixed position, one of dark and one of light. 

The "dark world" is actually where the Houxvech originate from called Nivoux (I may create a new blog to explain this stuff, I don't want to get too off topic from the Phandom, if anyone is interested).

Everything above can indicate the World Order, how worlds or entire 'verses work and why one type of magic is incompatible with another type because of their different Manifestations, but more commonly along their limited abilites. Magic is a "Modern" type while Majic is an "ancient" type like Archaic or majic derived from a god (think Miraculous, the embodiment powers of Creation/Destruction), the 'really bad idea if it gets in the wrong hands' majic.

[robotnik-mun]

Seeing how Sonic the Comic gave Doctor Ivo Robotnik somewhat similar circumstances to Dragon Ball’s Majin Buu, where both he and his original self, Doctor Ovi Kintobor, had specific forms and personalities in spite of being the same character in the first place, I can imagine that if they completely merged a la Dark Danny, then Sonic the Comic would’ve officially had a true Doctor Eggman in name and appearance.

More so, Robotnik’s maliciousness would be balanced out by Kintobor’s moral restraint, which would make that Eggman more pragmatic yet still evil than his “components” were beforehand.

As for the Archie Sonic depiction of Julian Kintobor/Ivo Robotnik/Eggman, I think that if the Super Genesis Wave didn’t happen, and Archie were going to stick with the whole “original Robotnik replaced by alternate universe counterpart” shtick, then I can imagine that continuity would resolve itself in the event Eggman regained his roboticized form and was then put through the Death Egg Mark 2’s Roboticizer, which would explode and take him with it, ending his threat to the multiverse forever.

However, since Zonic indicated that a conflict between a Sonic and a Robotnik were needed for Mobius Prime’s stability, I can imagine that sooner or later, there would be indications of another variation of “Julian Kintobor/Ivo Robotnik/Eggman” showing up to continue the series. It would be kinda comparable to how the Shredder was more of a title than an epithet to be used by more than one villain in the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.

On that note, though, who would be Eggman’s successor in antagonizing Mobius Prime? If it has to be someone who’s past matches very closely to Robotnik Prime’s, I doubt it would be a Warden Zobotnok turned to evil and I’m uncertain for the Moebian “Robotnik’s” chances as well.

Thoughts?

That's certainly an interesting way of looking at it, though I'd think the situation with Kintobor and Robotnik in Fleetway was more akin to Jekyll and Hyde or the Incredible Hulk- either Robotnik is the evil parts of Kintobor being ripped from inside him and put on the outside, or he's the end result of the Chaos Emeralds warping Kintobor's good traits into evil. Buu's circumstances are a vastly different story to Robotnik's given that his various 'selves' only came about as a result of him absorbing other beings into his own person and taking on aspects of them as a result, with his true self as a being of pure and utter destruction… whether that qualifies him as 'evil' given his lack of ability to be anything else is up for debate, but moving on.

That is certainly an interesting idea for where to take Robotnik in a Fleetway context, though I'm not sure how it'd come about. One of Robotnik's bits of characterization there is his resentment/terror of the fact he's not 'really' his own person. I don't think he'd ever willingly become merged with Kintobor, if it meant losing who he is in the process. Though hey- the Chaos Emeralds changed Kintobor once. Who knows what else they might do under the right circumstances…

You do bring up an interesting point and a rather glaring, terrifying implication behind the Archie Sonic Universe in that being the excuse for Robotnik always being around in some form or the next, that if anything DOES happen to Robotnik or Eggman or whatever, then sooner or later there's going to be another one to take his place. I can't say for sure who his successor'd be within the canon of the comics. Personally I kinda wished there'd been Robotniks based on those backup bodies that had appeared in issue #75 who might have gotten a bit of play.

Otherwise I really can't say for certain- I suppose a rather grim possibility would be that, in the name of maintaining that 'balance' the Zone Cops themselves might pluck an Eggbotnik from another zone to carry on the 'good' fight. Or heck, maybe Eggman had already perfected the process of mind transferrence into new host bodies and simply planned ahead for his resurrection, even after getting turned fleshy. And then there's always the ever mysterious Dr. Nega… in a world of super science fiction, there's nothing that suggests a 'descendant' strictly comes about through the traditional way.

[phoebenavarro]

My Doctor Sleep Review

Here’s the short version:

If I like The Shining movie but haven’t read the book or Doctor Sleep, will I like this? YES. It pays homage to the film beautifully but doesn’t rely on it too much, and it creates a beautiful story of it’s own.

If I’ve read both books, will I like this? Well, here’s where things get complicated. It’s definitely still worth your time for how beautifully Ewan McGregor and Kyliegh Curran bring Dan and Abra to life, but you will also probably find yourself incredibly frustrated with the third act.

My more complicated thoughts are under the cut. (Spoilers, obviously!)

Overall, the film does a wonderful job blending the differences between the movie and the book, although overall it felt to me like they were privileging the film and mostly just giving nods to the book, so that book fans could be happy. And as much as that frustrates me as a book fan, it worked! I can absolutely believe that in a world where the Overlook didn’t explode at the end of The Shining, that this would be what happened.

I guess my biggest issue was that I wanted them to mostly ignore the movie. They could keep the Overlook standing, sure, that was just fine with me, but I wished they’d followed both books’ canon basically to a T. And for the first two acts that is pretty much exactly what they did! It was almost beat for beat the book. And the things that they did change in the first two acts, I loved. I loved their take on Billy as a character!

And well, let’s talk about the good for a second, shall we?

Every actor gave a STELLAR performance and was perfectly cast. I knew I was gonna love Ewan McGregor and he went above anything I ever imagined. Abra was amazing too! She really captured Abra, her rage, and her love for her family. Rose was great, the only thing that kept catching me off guard was that she kept changing her accent and I’m not sure if it was intentional? Like there were some scenes where she sounded Irish to me, and other scenes where she sounded completely American. It could’ve been that she was Irish with the Knot and American around rubes, but it didn’t seem purposeful enough. Minor characters that really stood out were Billy and Crow Daddy, especially Crow. He never struck me as particularly interesting in the book, but he was very engaging in the film. The little boy who played Danny killed it as well. He merged the catatonic Danny from the film and the talkative Danny from the book in a way I didn’t think was possible.

Also Azzie the cat was perfect and I’ve never been so happy to see a cat in a movie in my LIFE.

The scene where Dan fell into his role as Doctor Sleep for the first time was really wonderful, and that was the first time I cried during the movie. His speech at the AA meeting, about Jack, absolutely WRECKED me. I was straight up sobbing. Because it was the first (and only) time in the movie (or the Shining movie) where you see how much Dan loved his dad, and how he’s been struggling his whole life with continuing to love a man who hurt him and his mom, tried to kill them, and that’s just as much why he drank as trying to drown out his shine. THAT’S Dan Torrance right there, and a hint towards the Jack Torrance from the novel, the one who loved and died for his family. THAT is why the Shining is a tragedy, that’s why I cried for an hour after I finished reading Doctor Sleep for the first time. It showed that Dan was finally moving on, he’d found friends and community, he broke the cycle of abuse and alcoholism.

And from there, we go into another scene of Dan helping someone pass as doctor sleep. It’s such a stark contrast to the first time. He’s comfortable with it instead of horrified by it, he’s HAPPY to help these people, to comfort them in their final moments, because he knows what that fear feels like. He’s been trying to escape that fear since the Overlook. So he sings with him, he’s not afraid to use his shine to look into his mind to make it easier for the man. For the first time in his life his shine brings him something other than pain. And I loved it.

The scene with the baseball boy was WAY more brutal than I expected it to be. Like I was genuinely surprised that they really showed the Knot torturing him like that, and all the blood. It was harrowing, and it worked so well, because before that the Knot was pretty likable. Sure, they killed kids, but we didn’t SEE it, and they’re cooky and fun! And then there’s THAT, and we see that they are monsters. I loved Abra making murder appear on Dan’s wall, and him seeing REDRUM in the mirror. Dan’s face was CHILLING.

We also GOTTA talk about Dick Hallorann. He was really perfect, and I loved how excited Dan was to see him the last time they talk. And well, I heard him tell Dan “ka is a wheel” which FLOORED me. The last thing I was expecting was a Dark Tower reference! I’m not 100 percent sure he said it, I might have misheard it, but it works. I mean, in the book, King describes many things as a wheel, and that’s a running theme in his work, so it makes sense. And that’s really what this story is about, the wheel of ka turning and the mentee becoming the mentor.

This is a scene I have slightly complicated feelings about, but I mostly liked it, and that is Dan’s conversation with Jack’s ghost at the bar. I loved how they paralleled Dan to Jack but also highlighted how Dan is his own person, and in many ways succeeded where his dad failed. I gasped incredibly loudly when Jack referred to the whiskey as medicine, and called Dan a pup, cause that is something from the book that (correct me if I’m wrong, it’s been a while) he never says in the movie. And ohhhhh god, the way Dan cried. The way he got mad and said “Don’t you want to know what happened to your family?” and how Jack finally broke character. It fucked me UP. But it was Jack from the movie basically saying fuck you to Jack from the book, which like, I GET it. It would feel really weird if Nicholson!Torrance showed ANY warmth or love to Dan in any way, but still. I mourn book!Jack Torrance every day of my life. (But would Nicholson have been able to pull it off? Probably not. So maybe it’s for the better. Steven Webber, on the other hand, from the miniseries, is MY Jack Torrance.)

And here’s where we start to get to the bad, or the things I have very complicated feelings towards.

Well first of all, there was genuinely no fucking reason to kill off Billy OR Dave. They don’t die in the book! And it’s not a great look that they killed off the two men of color who are on the good guys’ side. It’s as stupid and pointless as killing Dick Hallorann in the Shining. But I guess we gotta continue that legacy right? /s If they wanted to get Billy and Dave out of the way for the final confrontation, there were other ways for them to do it, like they did with Abra’s mom! Crow could’ve just drugged Dave. He still could’ve told Abra that her dad was dead, to manipulate and fuck with her. And hell, Dan could’ve made Billy stay behind, to take care of Dave, or to wait for Abra’s mom to get back and fill her in on what’s happening. They definitely didn’t need to fucking DIE, Mike! You don’t need them to die to raise the stakes, nothing raises the stakes like watching a child be tortured and murdered.

And well, in concept I really like Dan and Abra having their showdown with Rose in the Overlook. And uh, “waking it up.” It makes sense, I mean, he already uses the Overlook ghosts against the Knot in the book, so why not? And I liked that part. I think Dan walking around the hotel went on a little too long, like they just wanted to show off that they rebuilt the overlook set. I liked the continued parallels between Jack and Dan, but again, it highlighted how Dan was different. Like when Dan is on the stairs holding the hatchet, he’s actually playing Wendy’s role, while Rose is Jack in that instance, walking up to him with her arms out, falsely trying to placate him. She has the power in that moment. And her toying with Dan? MM. I liked that a lot. I’m a sucker for whump. And her finally getting destroyed by the Overlook ghosts was SO SATISFYING.

I had kind of thought that Dan would find a way to harness Jack’s spirit and sick her on Rose, and that would be able to be Jack’s redemption, and then Jack would be able to finally move on. It would’ve made sense, since in the book he uses Abra’s momo, but in the movie she’s not really important. Tbh I think that would’ve been the best way to let Dan finally find peace with Jack, to give us something like that moment in the book where Dan sees Jack at the end and Jack blows him a kiss. But whatever, it’s fine. I think the conflict between Dan and Rose as it was was pretty great.

If it ended with that, I would’ve been VERY happy. Maybe there could’ve been a bit of a scare with the hotel trying to possess Dan and Dan being able to fight it off, and Abra and Dan leaving, letting the boiler explode. And then maybe Dan could’ve collapsed from blood loss outside the hotel, giving the audience a bit of anxiety over whether Dan will survive or not. But it didn’t end there.

I take issue with the very premise that the ghosts would be able to possess Dan like they did Jack. Jack had so many weaknesses, more than just the alcoholism. Jack was insecure about everything in his life, his career, his role in his family, his talent of an artist, but Dan doesn’t share those insecurities, just the alcoholism. ALSO Dan’s been sober A LOT longer than Jack ever was. He’s much more skilled at resisting that temptation. Maybe back before Dan hit rock bottom and started fixing his life, I would buy it, but not Dan at this point in his life. ESPECIALLY since they couldn’t get him when he was a kid, when his shining was so much stronger. Why would they be able to get him now? Dan has a lot of similarities to his dad, but he is his own person.

But whatever. Let’s assume that it’s possible for the hotel to possess Dan. I loved that they played out some of the scenes from the Shining novel, because the climax of the Shining has my favorite moments from the whole novel. I gasped when Abra said “You’re not my Uncle Dan. You’re just a mask.” And I ALSO gasped when he said “let’s unmask then,” (or something to that effect) because I thought they were gonna do MY FAVORITE moment from the Shining, when the hotel bashes Jack’s face in with the mallet and we see a different ghost after each hit. As cool as seeing that would’ve been, I’m glad it didn’t happen, cause Dan would’ve been gone after that. And oh god, the hug between Dan and Abra. It hurt. And Abra remembering the boiler, knowing it’s gonna blow.

And well, finally seeing the Overlook burn was VERY satisfying. In a lot of ways this film was both a love letter to Kubrick and a “fuck you” to Kubrick simultaneously. I wish they’d leaned into the “fuck you” side more because honestly, WHY should we keep celebrating him or his films? Especially with the Shining. The pure disrespect he showed to the source material, and to Stephen King, and of course, the way he tortured Shelly Duvall on set.

I think my feelings of betrayal come down to this: I was COMPLETELY blindsided by Dan’s death. I TRULY did not expect Dan to die. I thought that would be departing from the book too much, and honestly I didn’t think King would’ve gone for that. Like, I started to get worried when he got hit in the femoral artery, but, perhaps foolishly, I kept holding out hope that he would be okay. And I know the whole point of the end is that yes, he’s dead, but he’s good, but he deserved to LIVE and die of old age. The Overlook should not have been given the satisfaction of getting him, even if it was destroyed in the process.

I did like that as he died Wendy was there with him, since in the movie she’s the one who actually loved him. But mostly I was in a state of mixed rage and sadness, because Ewan SOLD that performance. He was perfect. He IS Dan Torrance. But I did not come to the theater to watch Dan suffer Jack’s fate. I came to see Dan finally move on from his trauma and embrace his shine!!

Ultimately, It feels like the movie undermined it’s own climax. The whole film was building to Rose’s defeat, which is then COMPLETELY overshadowed by the hotel trying to use Dan to get Abra. It focused too much on the Shining, and forgot that Doctor Sleep is DIFFERENT. Dan is not Jack. Abra is not Dan. There are parallels, of course, but they are different. And why undermine your more interesting villain? The ghosts of the Overlook PALE in comparison to how interesting and engaging Rose is. It was a great nod to fans of the book, and as a book fan I enjoyed it, but I think it made the film weaker.

If Flanagan wanted to do the ending scenes of the Shining, he should’ve just remade the Shining, for God’s sake! And actually, I would’ve liked that very much, Ewan McGregor could make a VERY good Jack, as shown in the scenes when he’s possessed by the hotel. I actually would love to see adaptations of The Shining and Doctor Sleep where the same actor plays Jack and Dan. I think that would produce fantastic performances and really force the actor to highlight the differences between the characters. And anyway, we need a new version of the Shining. Steven Weber and Rebecca Du Mornay are PERFECT in the miniseries but it’s just that, a network television miniseries, and it’s aged pretty poorly. A new Shining remake is gonna happen eventually, if Kubrick’s estate ever gives up those rights.

And finally! They ignored the BEST PLOT TWIST in the book!!!!! That Dan is literally Abra’s uncle! They kinda set it up, too, which is extra frustrating. I wonder if it was present in an earlier version of the script and got cut? I had a sinking feeling that they weren’t gonna do it when Dave was killed, but like, without that reveal, the audience is gonna be left with a lot of questions. Namely, WHY was Abra drawn to Dan? And of course, it’s because he’s her uncle, but in the movie we never find that out. I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up on Cinema Sins or whatever for being a plot hole, which is frustrating, because it’s NOT. It’s just a lazy oversight in the film. I also wished we got to see more of Abra’s parents, and Dan meeting Abra’s mom! But I guess they couldn’t include any of that in the movie since they basically cut Momo out completely. Still, that in itself is frustrating. Abra’s momo is so important to Abra in the book. In general it kinda felt like they elected to focus more on Dan and his relationship to Jack than Abra and her family, when in the book they’re pretty evenly balanced!

It’s frustrating, because the first two acts of the film are nearly perfect. And the third act has a lot going for it too, but it is just not the way to handle the ending, in my opinion.

My final feelings are: Dan Torrance is not Jack. That is the whole POINT of Doctor Sleep. And he did not deserve to burn in that hotel. He deserved to finally live out his life in happiness and with the family he’s built for himself. And that will always upset me.

[thesoulspulse]

Regarding The Forgotten Connection Between Dan and Vlad...

Greetings fellow Phans! Well, if you guys couldn't tell by the title as you guys might have already guessed but this time I wanted to talk about how we often forget that Danny's evil future self, Dan, is also half VLAD. For those of you actually reading my fanfiction this will probably enter into spoiler territory but you know, I've always wondered why Dan didn't vanish that day in “The Ultimate Enemy” episode when Danny's family was saved by Clockwork. I used to think it was because Butch Hartman was planning to bring him back for a rematch which would have been totally epic but instead we got the real disaster which was “Phantom Planet.”

So, at any rate let me ask you lovely people a question. When Clockwork said "You've given everyone else in your life a second chance. Why not you?" don't you think that should include EVERYONE in Danny's life? Including a certain older halfa? Well I do, which is why I've been working on a sort of side tale of another ghosts redemption into the sequel of my other story “Ravenheart,” which is mainly inspired by the fan comics Doppleganger (by phantomtype)  and Legendary Destiny (by krossan).  

Anyways we all know that Danny got his second chance and I guess we all just assumed Vlad didn't need one because that future where his evil side corrupted Danny's ghost half never happened right? Wrong! If anything Vlad only got worse from that moment on and started stepping over the line as I pointed out in two of my other posts. For one thing, he cloned Danny and let who knows how many clones die in the process who I might add are all supposedly half human too. Meaning in an indirect way Vlad was letting a bunch of unstable half human clones die. Unless, and this is only a theory, perhaps the reason why Dani was the most stable out of all of them is because maybe she was the only one Vlad made half human while the other failure's human sides died leaving only these sad incomplete ghosts behind with no will or purpose of their own.

Vlad also threatened Jazz who as we all know is 100% human that really can't hold a candle to Sam and Tucker when it comes to ghost fighting more then half of the time if only because she hasn't known the truth about her brother that long. And in my books those are the two things were probably some of the more truly evil things Vlad has done in the show beside most of his other petty plotting. The whole “Eye For An Eye” thing was really just Danny totally asking for it, sad to say.

Moving on, we know in the alternate future Vlad was in fact trying to save Danny from his misery after losing everyone he loved. After all, with Jack and Maddie Fenton both dead, Vlad also lost his purpose. He couldn't kill Jack, and he couldn't marry Maddie, all Vlad had left was Danny. And seeing as Danny not only lost his parents, but also his only sister and two best friends, there was nothing Vlad could or desired to use a blackmail anymore. He got what he wanted, a son, but it was a bittersweet victory and though we don't know all of the details or how long Danny was living with Vlad before asking him to erase his human side and hopefully emotions from what I can see Vlad didn't feel the need to rub any of it in Danny's face. In fact, Vlad dropped everything, all of his evil plans, all of his plots against the only surviving Fenton to actually help him. So Vlad did care, just as in a way I believe he's always cared but people don't change overnight. Vlad probably still had big plans for the younger half once his human emotions holding him back were dealt with, but Vlad never expected Danny's ghost half to see him as an enemy instinctfully and try to become whole by merging with Vlad's ghost half, thereby not only “escaping” his painful memories still carried by his human half but also taking revenge on Vlad because in some way he probably blamed the man for letting his father die since he KNEW Vlad has always hated the man and WANTED him dead.

The end result became Dan, who was mostly Danny but also to some degree Vlad as well. Thanks to the claws though, his humanity was ripped out on Danny's side of things, leaving only an angry vengeful ghost behind who blamed Vlad and the rest of the world for letting his family die when he had done SO much to save them and never got so much as a thank you in return. Danny probably always felt a little resentful for how hard normal people made his life by putting so much pressure on him to always win, to always be a hero, when in the end, the moment he failed they all abandoned him. That state of mind made it all too easy for Vlad's evil side, the side that was also resentful and thought himself better then everyone else to take over and merge his thoughts and feelings with the unstable ghost half of Danny.

But, going back to what I've seen in the show before with that one device that split Danny's human and ghost half in two I think even then, Dan still had some humanity and I firmly believe he felt it when Jazz confessed that she knew all about his ghost powers. If Dan was really that evil, even when he was caught, I'm sure he could have used his brilliant Vlad-like brain to do away with Jazz first and still cause the accident killing everyone else. Instead, he left her alive and I'd like to think part of him still felt something for her like he does in Krossan's comic and didn't manage to shake off that feeling until the moment of truth when he wanted to secure his future by defeating his younger self and running down the clock. Sure the ghost knocked her out twice and even let some debris fall on his former best friends but he never actually dealt the killing blow himself. And in that future he never killed Valerie either and honestly I think its because he still had feelings for her and not because he enjoyed playing his mind games with the huntress.

Either way, going back to the whole Vlad thing, when he had a chance to stop that horrible future he helped create by killing Danny who was trapped in the future, Vlad showed him mercy. He didn't destroy Danny any more then he has ever actually gone through with killing Jack. That's why I think neither Dan or the current Vlad realize...they're not as evil as everyone thinks. It's sort of like that one quote “Evil Queens are the Princesses who were never saved.” So in this case, “Evil Villains are the civilians that the heroes never saved.” And that is why I believe both Dan and Vlad can still be saved from themselves, especially Dan since the reason he's still around, why he could still exist, is because Vlad might be the one who gives into the darkness one day when he realizes that all he really needed to do to find acceptance and love...was to stop being the villain and start being a man that Danny could actually look up to and learn from as a real uncle or father-like figure.

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 71

When I got back to my mother's, things seemed totally out of control. My mother's moods were over the top. Roxanne and her were at each other like two titans. David had become this ball of aggression and fury that everyone was intimidated by. His moods pretty much dictated how comfortable I felt going to the bathroom at night. It was so bad I was afraid to leave the bedroom. Allison and I just hid in my room together for most of this. We did three things. We talked about Allison's manga story she was working on and her favorite television shows, she talked about her classmates and her school crushes or who was dating who, or I found books to read to her – which I generally had to coerce her to listen, but after awhile she would get invested in the stories and characters like I was. It was still late summer, and I was now twenty years old. I felt too old to be this trapped, living like this. I remember it feeling so weird to know that I was more than two decades old. Being twenty had always struck me as something that would never happen but was at the same time inevitable. I had thought in a way that I would be a teenager forever. It had been the magical age that was promised to happen to me someday, but somehow never did. And then suddenly I was twenty. It always seemed like it meant the merging of youth with a sense of grace that was lacked in your teens, and somehow it was all going to come together for me. And yet, here I was, living in a small fowl room in a pretty gross house with my mother and my family who were all psychos, hiding away from everything and everyone as it all seemed to be a direct threat to what little sanity I felt I had.

My father and Trish had split up a few weeks before the shop was supposed to open. Trish had been conning my father the whole time, and he was trying to make it work, in denial of what was now becoming increasingly obvious. For a time after he kicked Trish out of the shop, he hired this other woman to run things, but she ended up being very unstable and pocketing money as well, eventually acting physically aggressive towards my father and even towards his kids. It seemed my father knew nothing about this business and was afraid to learn. He was essentially a factory worker who for some reason owned the rudimentary supplies to a pedicure spa. And he was too afraid to try. He liked the idea of being a business person, and the idea of branching out into new fields, but ultimately fear won in the end and he shut the shop down. He had sunk fifty thousand dollars into this endevour. It all came to mostly nothing.

What's more, Pullman didn't need another pedicure spa. There were two successful pedicure spas down the road. This entire thing was so unthought out. I couldn't really understand how anyone could be so foolish. But given that he had started, I don't think he should have given up. He gave up before he even tried to make it work for one. Personally, call me competitive or idealistic, but I really do believe he could have made this business work – but it was never about the business. I realized my father, behind his aggressive or forward exterior, was actually someone who felt better when he was being bossed around. He didn't want to be his own boss. Yes, he had some of the personality traits of someone who was independent, but in the end he had fallen in the trap because some strange part of him wanted to be taken advantage of. It hurt his feelings, and yet that was still the lamp that drew in the moth. I thought a lot about that, and it was intriguing and weird. People are really strange. We are often never who we seem to be.

He could have reached into himself, maybe changed what his business would be, perhaps met the right person willing to take the risks needed – someone he wasn't having a relationship with. He didn't try any of these things. He got scared. I told him to stick with it, but I think the whole business and all the work he put into it was just one big reminder of what a dolt he had become. And there was no getting passed that. Strangely, he thought that Allison, David and I saw him as some kind of failure because of the business, which was really weird. I didn't see him as a failure, particularly at the time. I saw him as a fucking jackass for the way he treated me. And it was not true of Allison and David at all. They were twelve and thirteen. They didn't care about economic successes in the least. I personally mostly missed the opportunity to go up to Pullman. It had the best used book store I had ever been in. It was called Bruised Books and it was just down the way. I would go to the shop with him in the fall, and I would go on my own down the road and spend hours reading in the store, listening to the rain outside. I didn't want to be anywhere else. I know it's a played out idea, but when I looked at all the book shelves, I saw worlds opening up before me to save me from everything and anything ugly and mundane. Through books and stories I could be anyone and experience anything.

I bounced a little between my mother's and father's. Honestly, I hated this repetitive nonsense more than life itself and I was beginning to become so invested in my own thoughts I just tried not to think about where I was anymore. I didn't see a way out for myself, without having a lot of emotional and physical support from people, and I knew that wasn't going to happen. I knew somewhere deep down in my mind that in order to get out of this mess, I was going to have to transform and transcend in a way that no words I could ever write or say would ever do justice. To become the kind of person, to remake the person I was would be something akin to magic. I felt like each book I read, and every painful miserable thing I had been through up to that point was driving me closer to having those inner tools, but I felt like some of the change was making me insane. It's something that probably affects soldiers, former drug abusers, slaves – people who have been trapped or had to reprogram themselves in some fundamental way.

There is the kind of survival that happens for the sake of survival. You do what you have to to make it to the next day, to feel okay in the moment. And then you hit a breaking point where that thing doesn't work anymore, and some deep internal functioning just starts shutting down. It's like the death of your soul and you are left with this intense desperation knowing that you have to end everything you have ever done and reinvent who you are, and really know yourself enough to change yourself in this deep seated fundamental fashion that will also kill other parts of who you are, mercilessly. Its the only way to  be free and live a life of meaning. I wasn't there yet, but I felt the inner cogs inside my mind, twisting and breaking away. I was going to have to sacrifice my own skin and do for myself what nobody had ever done for me without any understanding or encouragement. If I wanted to have a life worth living, I had to eventually break out, and in a really big way. I didn't know how, or what life would look like for me on the other side. It was a change I sensed, but did not understand. But some internal pendulum had begun to swing.

My mom was basically at the end of this stage of her life where she drank at the bar or hung out with her friends. I think her heart was finally broken, albeit broken in slow motion by Danny over the course of several years, but broken no less. He officially no longer wanted to have anything to do with her. He would call her to come drink with him at the bar, and then when she showed up he would literally shoo her away like the cruel freak that he was. She would come home in this really forlorn and empty state of mind, and her eyes would be sad. Eventually, with the very small degree of dignity she had left, she stopped answering his phone calls. She worked briefly at a bar again, but when she discovered that the owner was intentionally taking advantage of a drunk man in some kind of gambling scam, she called the person out on it and they fired her, and she decided she was done working at bars in general, tired of serving drunk for the last fifteen years. And, with fifty coming upon her, she felt like she wasn't pretty anymore, or had no more life to live and I think that realization reshaped how she lived. In her confusion and insecurity in the midst of these changes, accompanied by a strange desperate attempt to feel wanted by men, she slept with every patron who had ever inappropriately ogled her or made disgusting jokes about her tits and suggested she sleep with them. She didn't want to do this. She hated these men, and the whole month that she went about the business of doing this was perhaps one of the saddest things I had ever watched a person do.

And when she came home, she shouted at me with a strange violence I hadn't seen in her save when she fought with Maria and when she was hung over or doing dope like she had several years previous. It infuriated me and I wanted to punch her, but it also kind of scared me. I said some things to her I regret during these fights. True, she had attacked me for essentially no reason, finding ways to blame absurd amounts of misery on me, but I remember calling her out on her promiscuity in a heat of anger one night when she was being particularly brutish towards me. I essentially slut shamed her. I had some sort of one liner about how pathetic she was. I thought in my limited angry state that saying she was being a bar slut would make me feel better. But I watched this sad light go out in her eyes with shock and hurt, and I instantly was sorry.  It's not that she wasn't awful to me. It's just that, despite the fact she wasn't a very good mother, I felt like I had crossed boundaries I should not have. She was still a person, and I had no fucking clue what it meant to be in her shoes or how awful she felt. My life was legitimately miserable. I had been robbed of prospect and time and youth. But in many ways, I was still an untested individual. I thought I knew things that I didn't. And seeing that I suddenly had hit home and made her feel even grosser about herself really didn't make me feel as good as my anger had promised me it would. I felt like I had just poured vinegar on a wounded animal.

I tried so hard to just stay away from people. I poured my thoughts into what I was reading. I became intensely obsessed with The Dark Tower, Stephen King series. I read through the second and third book, and then I read those same books to Allison. It was one of the biggest escapes I had up to that point ever found. I was so entrenched in this quest to get to the tower, to get through the desert, and the city of Lud. Following Roland through the worlds was what I lived for. I didn't want to stop reading, as I had sort of suspected that I might kill myself.  Something in me, perhaps that same part of me that was changing, also was becoming very open about the idea that my life might not be worth living. Reading books distracted me from that. As long as I had a book in my hand and some kind of outcome or mindbender at the end of a book, I didn't want to die. I was too curious. But if I stopped and looked at myself, I kind of did want to disappear. I wanted ultimately to have a life. My need to be free had pushed me to that edge. And just having those books to read, knowing that there was more to go, I held onto those books in a deep seated psychological way. I held this notion that at the end, the reason for my very existence would be presented before me.

I recommended the series to Sarah, who also was looking for some big serious way to distract herself from a relationship she no longer wanted to be in, working in a job she hated away from me and her mother in Texas. Her move had not brought her any closer to fame or fortune. It was funny to think that I seriously worried enviously three years previous that I might have to choke down the reality that Sarah had become a famous rock star in Texas and I would be a nobody in Idaho looking at her and Alex posing with their guitars on the front cover of some indie music magazine. But that never did happen. Sarah lost herself, and then found a new self that was equally as lost but somehow bent on getting away. And in a way, it had made Sarah a better person. She seemed to appreciate the kinds of conversations we used to have a whole lot more. And The Dark Tower series was something I could bond with Sarah over, to be able to share my love for the Dark Towers with someone. Of course, I became furious at the later changes in the story by the end (for the sake of any reader who wants to read the series I won't give anything away). It sort of crushed me. I took small breaks between the books in order to process them, and in order to not lose the series too quickly. I needed them in my life, or else I was afraid I might just try to end it all.

My relationship with David had soured. It always hurt. I cherished having good days with him, and I began to feel like his behavior was my fault. He was horrible some days. I had been shutting it off for years, declawing myself psychologically so as not to get invested in the madness of my family. I felt like if I tried to change things, it would only make it worse, and I was probably right. But David was calling my mother a fucking slut, calling Allison (a thirteen year old who in no way was ready to give it up), a fucking slut. He called all women sluts . I couldn't tell if this was something he threw out because he wanted us to feel like sex workers in a literal sense, if he felt like saying it was fun and went with the anger, or if he somehow thought we were having sexual thoughts or throwing out the vibes? I saw it as somewhat contrived, but why it was always sexual would be something I am sure Freud would have something to say about (questionable if he would be right). This one particular morning my mom was trying to make him breakfast, and he was being the absolute worst, calling her a cunt for literally no reason. He woke up in moods and he was basically an insane person. I was laying in my bunk bed, trying everything in my power to just shut down, to find some zen place to hide like always. Suddenly, something violent and raged just burst out of me, and honestly, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was suddenly walking into the living room, going straight up to David, telling him to knock it off. The second he sneered at me with some vindictive comment, I punched him hard in the face. I had not planned this at all. I guess I just couldn't take it anymore. I was tired of being afraid and threatened. David looked shocked, and I think deep down he was holding back tears of hurt. It had never come to this before between us, at least not physically, and I had taken it there – surprisingly before he had. I was so done feeling afraid all the time that I was willing to physically fight to have some control over my life. The kind of verbal abuse he was beginning to use had escalated to a form of violence that I couldn't even breath in anymore. When he called us names, I felt like someone was hitting me and shoving me. I felt like the kind of control he had over the house was violating me in some fashion and turning me into a ball of resentment and fear.

My mother seemed shocked and she tried to yell at me. I argued that he was calling her horrible names for no reason and I had had it and nobody was going to stop me. David was clearly shaken – some contradictory element of him still being a child – and my punching him feeling like yet another betrayal from an adult, but he ended up holding his own he pretended it had not hurt him. So, between yelling at my mom that he had it coming, I turned around and punched him again – since he was now acting as though he and my mother were in cahoots against me. His face was red and I could tell he was about to start sobbing though. A part of that boy I had just punched in the face was the same little soft bouncing baby ball of flubber and happiness I had played with in the living room as a baby, the same little boy I would watch from the window of our house outside pretending to be a knight, or talk about how he had been bullied in school. And knowing I was hurting something innocent, even partially innocent, didn't make me feel good at all. It may or may not have been hard punches and I am not naturally a violent person – but it still didn't feel too good. But the pressure  had finally got to me. If people were going to be hurtful and violent towards one another all the time, then I wasn't going to be able to pretend it wasn't happening. I wasn't that kind of person anymore. This was how I handled it. Some other monster dictator in me was taking matters into my own hands.

My brother started shouting at my mom to help him. My mom started going into a back and forth with trying to bargain with me and telling me to get the hell out of the house. I eventually did, slamming the door behind me. I was enraged. The whole house was quiet after that, at least for a few weeks. I told my dad about what had happened. He didn't say much. I think most people who knew me were a little surprised and were quietly reevaluating who I was. To many people, I seem like someone who has no bottom to what I will sit through or take and it had become something that everyone around me had grown to rely on. But I had found that boiling point, or that bottom line or whatever analogy that fits. I had pretty much sort of broken. Not completely. Obviously I could still sit through most fights. I just felt the twitch of something that wasn't even rage. It was a sort of callous clarity, and once that happened to me, I was beyond reproach. I was willing to escalate the situation as far as it needed to go. I had reached that bottom. My father knew me well enough to know that David had likely had it coming to some degree, and if I had done something like that – I had hit a point of no return. Nobody wanted to take credit for how they had let things fall to begin with. I should never have had to have lived in that situation of being in constant fear and neither should Allison have had to live that way. I had warned my parents to try to give David the help he needed, but nobody had listened. Now, he was twelve or thirteen and I was twenty, and we were both too old to fix things.

To my brothers defense. Punching him wasn't the right thing to do, but to the defense of moral ambiguity, I don't think there was a right thing to do. There had only been cause and effect. I think whatever was causing him to become so awful was something growing in him so hideous and painful, that no young child should ever have to deal with. He was forming severe mental illness, and confusion about the fucked up things he had seen happen to him. David had always at heart been an incredibly honest and sensitive child with more needs than most, and in many ways the dysfunction had caused him to break down. If anything Allison was the tough one, even though people saw her as weak. My parents had been distracted and selfish. Combine this with giving him enormous power and entitlement for being the only son, and the toxic masculinity pressured on him by his father, a resentment for me based on the strange sort of collected and silent way that I found to manipulate the world around me, coupled with perhaps inheriting the biological factors that lead to insanity and intense destructive anger and violence of literally every man on my mother's side and my father's side of the family (save my uncle Steve who seems fairly harmless) David had turned from a sweet boy into something very messed up. Everything that should not have happened to David had happened to him. I am sure just as Allison and I were suffering David was suffering right along with us. But perhaps he didn't have the tools that we had. He dealt with a lot of it alone.

I am not sure that we ever made up, but we sort of reemerged from that fight with at least some semblance of getting along with one another again for the time being, being able to talk and laugh again, it eventually was put back together again in some way. But deep down, I still felt this animosity, because he still was testing his limits every single day. I had offset his behavior a little bit, but he was just revving up to those heightened levels of aggression. I am sure he felt animosity towards me also. Little fights broke out all the time. He would say something terrible to me and walk away, slamming the door. He would refuse to do as I asked of him, mostly chores at my father's request – I was just the messenger. Most of the time they were caused by him becoming completely unstable over a very small statement or a sudden extreme bout of insecurity which caused him to lash out at everyone for no reason. He seemed to think completely harmless statements were meant to be hurtful, and sometimes it was full blown mystery as to what he was even mad about. When he made cruel statements and walked away, as much as I wanted to chase behind him and force him to apologize, he was now just too old to expect that from. And both of our parents liked to pretend that these altercations were meaningless because they really involved being involved and that wasn't something either one was every going to do. My father's great hope was that in the coming year, David would join the football team, accomplishing the dream of being a professional football player in the way my father never had, as my father had been a hippie teen high on LSD everyday (something that is hard to imagine now), and looking back, I think he had wished that he had pursued some conventional basic bro activities, and David was meant to fulfill that role. So in my father's mind, football would fix it. All the mental issues would suddenly be fixed, because you know, football.

One week, while my siblings were away, my mother brought over some friends she had. This was the point where she was beginning to drop all of her old friends, but she was still trying to keep a few. Nobody ever did anything, and sitting around a burn barrel and drinking until one of the married old couples began to have a row with one another was something that had suddenly made my mother feel intensely alienated and I think that for better or worse, she became who she had always secretly had been, throughout her youth as an attractive and distant woman, through her marriages, pretending to be a decent mother, her attempt to write lyrics for a band, her stages of meth use, the bar, her relationship with Danny and her pretend act of playing like she was a biker. It all had been a cover up to the fact that my mother was and is an intensely strange and neurotic creative person and if she ever really said what she was thinking, normal people would head for the hills. And the people she had surrounded herself with were basically clouding her vision and preventing her from being who she was meant to be and doing the creative things she wanted to do and she was seeing this all for the first time and deciding not to go to their burn barrel invitations any longer.

This one night however, she came home with this woman who was a friend of a friend. She was a lesbian, and I was told she did acid twice a week, had been since the seventies. My mom I could tell didn't really want this lady at our house, but felt badly for her, as she was rambling and deeply unhappy about a recent romantic rejection. This woman seemed really out of it. She started looking at me, and eventually came up to me and started telling me I was beautiful and trying to have a heart to heart with me and the truths of the universe and hieroglyphics and astrology and Jesus, at one point confusing Albert Einstein's theory of relativity with the idea that everything was true at the same time and we could fly if we really believed we could, and that fairies and gnomes were real, living outside in our front yard. I reacted as neutrally as I could, trying to not show my amusement of thinking of the dry exasperated expression that Albert Einstein would have listening to this woman's interpretation of his equation, as she played with my hair and talked about how attractive I was. I looked at my mother hoping she would save me if this woman actually tried anything, though I didn't particularly mind if she played with my hair or showered me with compliments. She wasn't really hurting me, and it wasn't like, really openly sexual. I didn't think she was going to go in for a kiss or anything, nor was she really touching me much. I felt kind of bad for her.

My mother, in an attempt to distract this lady, showed this woman some of my artwork, and this lady became entranced by this one thing I did which was sort of psychedelic and a play off some old hippie clothing designs I had seen once. She offered up eighty dollars for this abstract design that I had done. It really wasn't worth eighty at all. I had doodled it for a few hours and I didn't even see it as a real piece at all, but this woman insisted I take the money. I told her the piece wasn't done – and it wasn't.  I felt strange parting with something unfinished. She admired me even more for this, calling me a 'true artist'. She promised to then pay me another one hundred when it was finished. She gave me the eighty upfront. I protested, but eventually gave in. I felt weird taking money for art, but I knew I could always use the cash.

My mother was supposed to bring this woman my art as soon as I finished it, but my mom lost the artwork in a book. Then she found it again, but couldn't find the woman. Then the woman had come looking for me, and I wasn't there. She knocked several times. Basically, by no fault of my own, I feel like I essentially swindled this lady out of eighty dollars because she never ended up getting that piece of art. I would have found her myself, but then my mother closed off all of her old friendships and this woman was kicked out of my mother's previous friend group and I had essentially been given eighty dollars for doing nothing. Still, it was encouraging. Someone had actually paid me for art, and that was definitely a first.

My grandma Marie told my mom she wanted to visit me. She knew I liked to paint, and we had at some point in my visits, had a good conversation about something which had opened her mind up to the possibility of getting to know me a little better. She saw me as one of the 'good' millennials. I think now that she had sort of forgotten about the fact that she perceived that I had stolen her ring (which I swear up and down I did not). My grandmother and I are very similar in that we are both very reflective people who live very much on an intuitive and introverted vibe. We both wanted to find deeper meanings behind the world, both liked poetry and living in a way that was heightened and more meaningful than the mindless lonely day to day grind. There are some very severe differences in how we thought however. My grandma was always looking for rules, and I was generally finding myself to be the kind of person who deconstructed rules for the most part. Still, it felt right. It felt like this was the point in which we were finally going to get to know one another. There are times I feel, when you meet someone, and at least for a time, you two have things to learn from one another, things to share. I wanted to understand her better, coming as I was, to an age where you realize that your parents and grandparents are just people. They aren't the towering untouchable figures you once thought they were.

I believe my grandma Marie always loved me, but she was ultimately a very bitter and abused woman battling intense depression and deep seated anger that she bottled up at all times. She embraced Eastern religious wisdom, some of which I also agree with, but to a degree, even with her strong devotion to her beliefs, in conversations about anything that didn't follow her strict and narrow ideas, I could always see the bubbles lathering up at the surface like she was about to explode. She didn't like the idea of being wrong, ever. So she wasn't someone that anyone was ever totally honest to. She didn't like the way children thought. She saw no structure in it and for this reason we were never close when I was young like I had been with my soft Grandma Betty. She liked me and Allison overall, but now that I was twenty, I think she felt she could find a friend in me. She didn't have any friends anymore, not since Doris had died.

Honestly, I was taken aback and frightened at the idea of being in the house with my grandma. She tended to be very judgmental, and she was very rigid individual. But as it turned out, after my mother had driven me up there to stay, I was actually good at bringing out my grandma's better nature. It involved me letting go and letting her be in control. I didn't try to fight her, and instead I tried to learn from her. At times, I could even get her to smile once or twice or laugh. She generally didn't let herself laugh or be soft. It was sad that she didn't allow herself that. In that sense, even though she moved passed her abusive relationships, and even though she became seemingly independent, I at times felt like being abandoned as a child by both of  her parents and being a beaten ruthlessly when she was a housewife were things she never got over. She was still bitter.

I ended up staying for nearly two months. At first it was awkward. My grandma and I are both really introverted. Her house was calm and serene, with Egyptian art mixed with depictions of rainbow chakras, Buddhas, Moses and Edgar Cayce. I was always afraid I would break something. I tried to make my bed each morning, something I don't normally do. We centered our conversations about her pet Yorkshire terriers with whom I had a love/hate relationship at first. I asked her questions about the paintings on the wall, and the meaning behind her purchases, which eventually lead into deeper conversations. I remember reading the book 'Choke' by Chuck Palahniuk in the living room one day however – something so entirely opposite to her ideas in every sense of the world, full of things she would have found spiritually and physically vile. She asked me what the story was about. I didn't want to tell her it was about a sex addicted conman who fakes choking to get money and condolences from the people in restaurants who save him, and who thinks he from the direct line of Jesus – it seemed like this would offend her, so I made something up on the fly, telling her it was a crime novel.

I can make myself believe anything for a set length of time, and that's for the most part what I did. It was in part to not make her upset. I think she felt very isolated due to her religious beliefs, and rather than throw doubt at her, I really would rather sink into what she thought and believed and just study it and semi believe it for awhile to grasp what these ideas all meant to me, rather than instantly shut it all down or judge it out of hand. I don't really buy reincarnation, and if it is real, then I don't buy her version of it. But it means a lot to people. I studied Christianity, and I had no problem at all studying some other belief system regardless if I believed in it or no. Honestly, I am a nothing when it comes to believing in things. I think human beings are too small to understand anything, and we only ever get small glimpses of the bigger picture, and those glimpses are always personified and go through a process of bad memory and human ego and they come out becoming organized religion. I don't believe in ghosts, even though I can tell you with total clarity that I have seen them. I am not one of those people who says they are spiritual but not religious. I just don't know anything and I am okay with that, and as long as I continue to grow and to question my reality, I feel like that's what is actually important.

We ate grainy bread, cheese, crackers, and hard-boiled eggs. She was very much about the Atkins's diet. She had this job working behind the St. Vincent de Paul's a town over, and we would wake up around six thirty each morning and drive out there. I volunteered working with her and I really loved her job. Basically, we went through bags that people dropped off in the back of the store for potentially being resold. If we found things we liked, my grandma could take it home for free, and this offer was extended to me as well. It was so much fun to go through the bags and pick through it all. You never knew what you would find. Men and boys clothing was always the worst. Most of it was not something that could be resold. It was always dirty and torn to bits. Sometimes you would find men's shirts with blood on them, probably from a bar fight where someone bloodied the guys nose. Some of the bags had animal feces and kitchen garbage in it and everything you can imagine never wanting to put your hand in. It was strange to me that people really thought it was a-okay to bag this stuff up and give it to us. It was interesting for me, the psychology of it. As long as people don't have to see it, they really don't care what the impact is. This goes for how we treat our environment, and animals, and each other. Ocean pollution isn't real to many people, because they don't have to confront it. They don't have to watch their food become slaughtered. Syrian refugees are just a concept, they aren't actual people. We all think we are the main character of life's story, and we aren't. I could see that same mentality when people dropped this stuff off. They gave it to us because they never wanted to look at it again. They wanted new.

Sometimes I would empathize with the people who gave us the bags. You'd find bloody underwear from a teenage girl's bad day at school, and I would sympathize with that teenage girl. I had been her once. She just threw that bloody underwear in the bag to never see it again, or remember the stress of having spent the day without proper women's products. Life isn't always very easy. Sometimes cat urine soaked things were found. It could get awful, but all of it drew me in. These ugly things were horrendous, but they were also very truthful, and very intimate. But then again, most of it was very boring misshapen t-shirts from local businesses that I tired of relatively quickly. Around midday we would eat our crackers and cheese after we washed our hands, and then we would continue going through the stuff until two or three in the afternoon. Everyone who worked there seemed to like me, and they all thought I was fourteen rather than twenty and wondered why I wasn't still in junior high. They almost didn't believe I was as old as I was. I have gotten this frequently throughout my life. I guess it's because I have a round face, or maybe it was how I dress.

My very favorite thing in the whole world was opening up a bag from someone who wore my size and had my same taste in clothes – all of it clean. It didn't happen too frequently, but occasionally it did, and I got to keep whatever I found. Ultimately, though, it was sorting through toys that did it for me. I swear that because I worked back there sorting through all those toys,  I to this day love toys as an adult more than I did when I was a child. I went through so many little trinkets and toys and stuffed animals. Some of it was really unique and strange, some of it was boring and conventional. Even the stuff I didn't want was fun to go through. I kept a lot of stranger toys that I found, broken dolls – and books. These initial finds ended up becoming the exhibition of miscellanies that fill my rooms nowadays. This is where I began to collect.

I have a wide range of books and toys. The rooms I have set up for myself are often so decorated that it hurts people's eyes looking at it. It's almost too much for me to live with myself sometimes. But this was really the start of all that which was about a small tote's worth of toys I found and was able to keep for free. Being able to dig for seven hours a day four days a week for two months through other people's stuff gave me a strong understanding of my own aesthetic taste. It was a rare opportunity for me to even be able to just do this, as I don't even think they allow this at all in regular St. Vinny's, Good Wills, or Salvation Armies. I think at most places, you get into trouble, and probably for good reason. But for whatever reason this St. Vinny's was a completely different story – probably because it was in the middle of nowhere. So long as my grandma didn't take anything that was obviously high priced and easy to sell – as long as she didn't skim too hard, she could take what she wanted for free. They had so much of it. And they didn't pay her very much. It was just enough to supplement her social security a little bit. This was part of the payment.

PART 70 - https://tinyurl.com/ybl6vd7e

PART 69 - https://tinyurl.com/yb7d8van

PART 68 - https://tinyurl.com/y8faedzp

PART 67 - https://tinyurl.com/y9lfdsop

PART 66 - https://tinyurl.com/y87dzx7z

PART 65 - https://tinyurl.com/yb22o6rv

PART 64 - https://tinyurl.com/y98zxljs

PART 63 - https://tinyurl.com/ybosu235

PART 62 - https://tinyurl.com/ybjrvccn

PART 61 - https://tinyurl.com/ybm99k8o

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-60 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far). 

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-60     

[blankrslate07]

1) Hmm, it's a pretty blurry but I think I first watched it back when I was still a kid. Maybe 6-8 years old? I don't remember which episode I first saw though.

2) I've read a lot of fanfics. Most I'm keeping a secret and the ones I don't remember.

3) All of the episodes seen good to me. Except for Phantom Planet. I would have just scrapped it and have a Phantom Siblings bonding three part episodes instead.

4) Again, keeping them all a secret. Though I have been thinking about Jack/Vlad/Maddie lately. If anyone knows any good fanfics about this shipping, feel free to send me the links!

5-8) Neutral to all of them.

9) A great villain and character! Would have loved to see more of his backstory and a happy ending for him (After he gets a well deserve beat down that is).

10) Neither of them.

11) Phantom Siblings (Danny, Dani, and Dan bonding. I am just a sucker for this kind of stories.

12) Jack and Maddie hating their own son for being a halfa and experimenting on him. C'mon, Reality Trip and Phantom Planet showed that they would still love him despite being part ghost. It just seems too OOC for Jack and Maddie to actually hate their own child.

13) I'm more partial to Ghost Hunger.

14) I remember reading some, but I've forgotten them by now.

15) The Phantom Siblings, The Fentons, The Masons, The Foleys, Vlad-

Basically I like the entire cast.

16) Astronaut. I don't think Danny would actually choose becoming the Ghost King, but it's a fun idea to thinker around with. Especially for getting clothes design.

17) To his family. Knowing most of his classmates, they might take advantage of it.

18) Er, I think something between rushing air and haunting moans???

19-20) Haven't read any yet.

21) Maybe either Vlad and Danny, or Danny with any of his enemies.

22) Not much, but I do have one. There's one place that the Infi-Map can enter, but is widely considered a myth. The connection between the Ghost Zone and Human World. It is considered to be a fatal part of the entirety of the Ghost Zone, those who dare find it become forever lost between the two worlds. Yet, is someone manages to overcome it and reach the middle of the connection, it will grant them full control between the barriers of the two worlds. Such as breaking it apart and merging the two worlds, or even sever the link between them permanently.

23) Nope

24) - Dani definitely gets into thieving. Not to Vlad's level, but just enough to get by.

- Collects a lot of souvenir and apparel during her travels around the world. Doesn't have a very good sense of fashion however.

- After getting stabilised, Dani's transformation becomes vastly different. Instead of two rings of light going across her body, she instead turns into green goop and solidifying into her ghost form. Scared her pretty bad the first time she did it.

- Loves to dye her hair in different colours and uses a lot of eye contacts.

25) Dani -

But this mainly for AU reasons.

Ask Game — Phandom Edition

1) When did you first watch Danny Phantom?

2) What’s your favorite fic?

3) If you could canonically rewrite any episode, which would you chose?

4) What’s your favorite ship (if any)?

5) Thoughts about Amethyst Ocean?

6) Thoughts about Gray Ghost?

7) Thoughts about Swagger Bishie?

8) Thoughts about Wes Weston?

9) Thoughts about Vlad?

10) Would you rather wear the striped pants or ‘It’s not gay if he’s dead’ t-shirt?

11) Most underrated fic trope?

12) Most overrated fic trope?

13) Which do you prefer more, ghost hunger or dissection fics?

14) Have you ever read a dissection fic and if so, do you remember your first one?

15) Who’s your favorite character?

16) Would you rather Danny be an astronaut or the Ghost King?

17) Would you rather Danny expose his secret to his family or classmates?

18) What do you think ghost speak would sound like?

19) Thoughts about field trip fics?

20) Thoughts about “season four” fics?

21) Which two characters would you like to swap bodies for a day?

22) Any headcanons about the Infinite Realms?

23) Any headcanons about the A-Listers?

24) Any headcanons about Dani?

25) What song do you associate with [character]?

[20thcentutygeek]

90s Cartoon theme Songs

I grew up in the 90's. By the time my little eyes and ears could comprehend what they were being subjected to, the era of mad animation had already begun. The 1990's were a colourful time, from the acid induced dance music to the sugar and additive-laden neon sweets and drinks. Luckily the animated shows we were given were no different. Accelerating from the successful franchises of the 80's, most of which made money from the toy and merchandise tie-ins, the animation of the 1990's seemed to blast full speed with style, irreverence and a no holds barred approach to the premise of new shows. But no matter which show you loved the most (or simply just watched because you didn't have anything better to do while you eat refreshers and drank panda pop) the first and most resonating taste of a cartoon is its theme. And the 90's gave us some wonderful themes. *Be warned, if you begin looking up some of these themes on youtube it's very likely you will succumb to the endless black hole of intro's. Just as Scott and I did.* The list of catchy choruses, magical melodies and bouncing bass lines are endless. I have a special affinity for theme songs. There is something potent about the tiny snapshot of music purpose-built to set the tone of a show. Each one is like a 30 second score, encompassing the feel, the energy and often the premise of the show to come. Those of you who have stepped foot in Super Shakes will probably have noticed a handful of themes in the shop playlist (In between copious amounts of Seal). So if I took the time to go over every jingle that puts a smile on my face then this would be an incredibly long blog. [Though honourable mentions go to any theme without lyrics such as Doug, Rugrats, Ren and Stimpy; and to superstar composer Danny Elfman] For the purpose of time and sanity I'll instead present to you 3 observations during my time in the infinite back-to-back session of intro videos. So if you are simply a curious party or are in the process of creating your own authentic sounding 90's theme song, keep these in mind. Rule 01: 90's keep it brief Apart from the quality of the animation and the steady decline of muscular He-Men, a new trend also occurred - swifter intros. Just as every comic is somebody's first, the same applies for cartoons with their self contained stories and repeatability. Because of this many 80's shows began with an intro that was in itself a prologue, as is the case of the hilarious and infectious opening to Ulysses 31. [Check it out here - https://youtu.be/OZ4c1X5ene8 ] But once we past the invisible decade barrier, things start to get more straight to the point. Maybe it was because the old style was beginning to feel tired, maybe it was to simply shave an extra minute and a half off the total run time. There is a good chance that it was because as we merged into the era of lunacy and (Ani)maniacs there was no story structure. "Mama had a chicken! Mama had a cow! Dad was proud, and he didn't care how!" Enough said. Rule 02: Ducks have Soul The musicianship behind theme tunes is often passed by. Since most of the themes are over and done with in 30 seconds, a lot of these gems and respective artists don't get to become as recognised as the 30 seconds (or less) of effort that goes in to most modern pop songs. And although there were many thematic changes to soundtracks as time progressed including Guitar riffs getting more fiery and saxophones (unfortunately) dissipating, one trend I did notice was that shows with ducks had a passionate theme that few competed with. Lets begin with Duckula (Which began in the 80's but waddled into the Nine-zero's). Beginning with a dark and spooky backstory and blackened images, all is blasted away once the vocals burst in. I get the impression if the theme was a minute longer we would have some glass shattering vibrato on our hands. At several points there are moments when it is as if the microphone they used cant actually handle the singing. Kudos to the composers for making the very silly premise of this show get glossed over by the energetic theme. From Duck vampires to Duck crusaders, namely DW - Darkwing Duck. This Noire-styled big-billed master of surprise had a hearty theme too. In order to even attempt to replicate the pipes on this performer you have to fill your lungs first. You can just hear the force in their voice as they repeat the title of the show, to the point where when the second verse comes in the whole song seems muted in comparison. But so do many things after you listen to this theme a few times, its hefty. Then in 1996 as if there weren't enough rich vocals and duck centred animations; along comes The Mighty Ducks. Not the rousing live-action family comedy starring a handful of young actors (Including the future Foggy Nelson from Daredevil sporting virtually the same haircut). This is jacked up, colourful, anthropomorphic ducks playing hockey, and the theme is just as mighty. The entire song seems to be shouted and the eager singer can barely get the first sentence finished without adding some vocal flair. The incredible intensity of this theme leaves no doubt about the final statement "Ducks Rock!". This correlation between bombastic birds and soulful songs doesn't end there. A post millennium show Duck Dodgers has a theme performed by none other than world renowned welshman Tom Jones. And if thats not enough, need I mention one of the the most catchy themes of all - a Tale of a rich Duck who famously dives into his vault of Gold coins? I'm sure you can hear it in your head already. [If not click here to develop a tick that makes you "Woo-Oo" impulsively anytime you hear the title of the show - https://youtu.be/9DXo5haNd9M ] Rule 03: Repeat the title as many times as possible It goes without saying that if you want someone to remember your brand, you need them to remember the name. It's quite possible this marketing tactic was discovered in the late 80's. Pick 5 cartoons that ran in the 90's, and sing the theme. (Feel free to do it in your head if you don't want to look like a Freakazoid at the coffee shop). I'd bet that you said the title of the show at least 3 times. Yes it's intended and yes it almost seems silly once highlighted (Try the theme game again with 5 HBO shows; it's very different. I'm betting on 0), but it also puts a recognisable time stamp on our cartoons, a loveable paradigm of silliness. This may have most memorably begun with a group of adolescent-genetically irregular- Japanese covert martial arts practicing-amphibians. Yes Leo, Donnie, Mikey and Raph's unquestionable chant, which although formed in the late 80's ran deep into the hearts, minds, and dreams of 90's kids everywhere. Brought to life by the mastermind of mindless repetition Chuck Lorre (See Two and a Half Men & Big Bang Theory - J-Man), who may have unintentionally begun a more overt tradition for shows created afterwards. Notably Earthworm Jim, W.I.L.D Cats, Hey Arnold and Rocko's Modern Life all follow the formula that shouting the title is key to a good theme. You can see this method working in the Spider-Man cartoon series (Theme co-written by Media Mogul and Power Rangers creator Haim Saban). The words are repeated to the point that the synthesised vocoder chanting goes askew into saying Spider-anything. It's almost as if the singer was exhausted or Joe Perry(Of Aerosmith)'s face melting guitar was tiring them out. I used to think that at one point he was saying Spider-Glider in reference to hobgoblin showing up on screen, but it works for any word you can cram into those syllables. Spider-pamphlet. Spider-burger. Spider-spleen. You get the point. And as if to prove that the musicians and melody makers behind all of these knew what they were doing - See Exhibit B - Bucky O' Hare. The action packed, detailed crammed opening doesn't forget to add the secret sauce; the name Bucky O' Hare is mentioned various times as are most of the other characters. But as we reach the end there is a very self aware moment where after definitely screaming the name several times one vocalist asks the other "Did you say Bucky?" as if they have a quota to fill. Without a beat his colleague replies "I said Bucky." and they both harmonise for a final "Bucky O'Hare!". This not only adds another few name drops to the counter but is a wonderful little giggle at themselves and the absurdity of their job. To sum up, Memory can be measured by recall, recognition and relearning. With the constant barrage of names and vivid images drilled into our heads several times over before we have even seen the show - our capability to recite, recognise and build on our knowledge may explain why 90's shows and their themes were so (literally) unforgettable. - J-Man

(@TheMindofJMan)

[michaelandy101-blog]

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/fifteen-years-is-a-long-time-in-seo/

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately.

Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs.

I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry.

As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry.

I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I have some interesting stories to share with those who are newer to the game.

I’ve racked my brain to try and remember what felt significant at the time, and also looked back over the big trends through my time in the industry, to put together what I think makes an interesting reading list that most people working on the web today would do well to know about.

The big eras of search

I joked at the beginning of a presentation I gave in 2018 that the big eras of search oscillated between directives from the search engines and search engines rapidly backing away from those directives when they saw what webmasters actually did:

While that slide was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I do think that there’s something to thinking about the eras like:

Build websites: Do you have a website? Would you like a website? It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the web, a lot of folks needed to be persuaded to get their business online at all.

Keywords: Basic information retrieval became adversarial information retrieval as webmasters realized that they could game the system with keyword stuffing, hidden text, and more.

Links: As the scale of the web grew beyond user-curated directories, link-based algorithms for search began to dominate.

Not those links: Link-based algorithms began to give way to adversarial link-based algorithms as webmasters swapped, bought, and manipulated links across the web graph.

Content for the long tail: Alongside this era, the length of the long tail began to be better-understood by both webmasters and by Google themselves — and it was in the interest of both parties to create massive amounts of (often obscure) content and get it indexed for when it was needed.

Not that content: Perhaps predictably (see the trend here?), the average quality of content returned in search results dropped dramatically, and so we see the first machine learning ranking factors in the form of attempts to assess “quality” (alongside relevance and website authority).

Machine learning: Arguably everything from that point onwards has been an adventure into machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has also taken place during the careers of most marketers working in SEO today. So, while I love writing about that stuff, I’ll return to it another day.

History of SEO: crucial moments

Although I’m sure that there are interesting stories to be told about the pre-Google era of SEO, I’m not the right person to tell them (if you have a great resource, please do drop it in the comments), so let’s start early in the Google journey:

Google’s foundational technology

Even if you’re coming into SEO in 2020, in a world of machine-learned ranking factors, I’d still recommend going back and reading the surprisingly accessible early academic work:

If you weren’t using the web back then, it’s probably hard to imagine what a step-change improvement Google’s PageRank-based algorithm was over the “state-of-the-art” at the time (and it’s hard to remember, even for those of us that were):

Google’s IPO

In more “things that are hard to remember clearly,” at the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, very few people expected Google to become one of the most profitable companies ever. In the early days, the founders had talked of their disdain for advertising, and had experimented with keyword-based adverts somewhat reluctantly. Because of this attitude, even within the company, most employees didn’t know what a rocket ship they were building.

From this era, I’d recommend reading the founders’ IPO letter (see this great article from Danny Sullivan — who’s ironically now @SearchLiaison at Google):

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”

“Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle [now Google shopping], our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.” — S1 Filing

In addition, In the Plex is an enjoyable book published in 2011 by Steven Levy. It tells the story of what then-CEO Eric Schmidt called (around the time of the IPO) “the hiding strategy”:

“Those who knew the secret … were instructed quite firmly to keep their mouths shut about it.”

“What Google was hiding was how it had cracked the code to making money on the Internet.”

Luckily for Google, for users, and even for organic search marketers, it turned out that this wasn’t actually incompatible with their pure ideals from the pre-IPO days because, as Levy recounts, “in repeated tests, searchers were happier with pages with ads than those where they were suppressed”. Phew!

Index everything

In April 2003, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics and set in motion a series of events that I think might be the most underrated part of Google’s history.

Applied Semantics technology was integrated with their own contextual ad technology to form what became AdSense. Although the revenue from AdSense has always been dwarfed by AdWords (now just “Google Ads”), its importance in the history of SEO is hard to understate.

By democratizing the monetization of content on the web and enabling everyone to get paid for producing obscure content, it funded the creation of absurd amounts of that content.

Most of this content would have never been seen if it weren’t for the existence of a search engine that excelled in its ability to deliver great results for long tail searches, even if those searches were incredibly infrequent or had never been seen before.

In this way, Google’s search engine (and search advertising business) formed a powerful flywheel with its AdSense business, enabling the funding of the content creation it needed to differentiate itself with the largest and most complete index of the web.

As with so many chapters in the story, though, it also created a monster in the form of low quality or even auto-generated content that would ultimately lead to PR crises and massive efforts to fix.

If you’re interested in the index everything era, you can read more of my thoughts about it in slide 47+ of From the Horse’s Mouth.

Web spam

The first forms of spam on the internet were various forms of messages, which hit the mainstream as email spam. During the early 2000s, Google started talking about the problem they’d ultimately term “web spam” (the earliest mention I’ve seen of link spam is in an Amit Singhal presentation from 2005 entitled Challenges in running a Commercial Web Search Engine [PDF]).

I suspect that even people who start in SEO today might’ve heard of Matt Cutts — the first head of webspam — as he’s still referenced often despite not having worked at Google since 2014. I enjoyed this 2015 presentation that talks about his career trajectory at Google.

Search quality era

Over time, as a result of the opposing nature of webmasters trying to make money versus Google (and others) trying to make the best search engine they could, pure web spam wasn’t the only quality problem Google was facing. The cat-and-mouse game of spotting manipulation — particularly of on-page content, external links, and anchor text) — would be a defining feature of the next decade-plus of search.

It was after Singhal’s presentation above that Eric Schmidt (then Google’s CEO) said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”.

Those who are newer to the industry will likely have experienced some Google updates (such as recent “core updates”) first-hand, and have quite likely heard of a few specific older updates. But “Vince”, which came after “Florida” (the first major confirmed Google update), and rolled out shortly after Schmidt’s pronouncements on brand, was a particularly notable one for favoring big brands. If you haven’t followed all the history, you can read up on key past updates here:

A real reputational threat

As I mentioned above in the AdSense section, there were strong incentives for webmasters to create tons of content, thus targeting the blossoming long tail of search. If you had a strong enough domain, Google would crawl and index immense numbers of pages, and for obscure enough queries, any matching content would potentially rank. This triggered the rapid growth of so-called “content farms” that mined keyword data from anywhere they could, and spun out low-quality keyword-matching content. At the same time, websites were succeeding by allowing large databases of content to get indexed even as very thin pages, or by allowing huge numbers of pages of user-generated content to get indexed.

This was a real reputational threat to Google, and broke out of the search and SEO echo chamber. It had become such a bugbear of communities like Hacker News and StackOverflow, that Matt Cutts submitted a personal update to the Hacker News community when Google launched an update targeted at fixing one specific symptom — namely that scraper websites were routinely outranking the original content they were copying.

Shortly afterwards, Google rolled out the update initially named the “farmer update”. After it launched, we learned it had been made possible because of a breakthrough by an engineer called Panda, hence it was called the “big Panda” update internally at Google, and since then the SEO community has mainly called it the Panda update.

Although we speculated that the internal working of the update was one of the first real uses of machine learning in the core of the organic search algorithm at Google, the features it was modelling were more easily understood as human-centric quality factors, and so we began recommending SEO-targeted changes to our clients based on the results of human quality surveys.

Everything goes mobile-first

I gave a presentation at SearchLove London in 2014 where I talked about the unbelievable growth and scale of mobile and about how late we were to realizing quite how seriously Google was taking this. I highlighted the surprise many felt hearing that Google was designing mobile first:

“Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for search on mobile and tablet devices. Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.” — Jon Wiley (lead engineer for Google Search speaking on Google+, which means there’s nowhere to link to as a perfect reference for the quote but it’s referenced here as well as in my presentation).

This surprise came despite the fact that, by the time I gave this presentation in 2014, we knew that mobile search had begun to cannibalize desktop search (and we’d seen the first drop in desktop search volumes):

And it came even though people were starting to say that the first year of Google making the majority of its revenue on mobile was less than two years away:

Writing this in 2020, it feels as though we have fully internalized how big a deal mobile is, but it’s interesting to remember that it took a while for it to sink in.

Machine learning becomes the norm

Since the Panda update, machine learning was mentioned more and more in the official communications from Google about algorithm updates, and it was implicated in even more. We know that, historically, there had been resistance from some quarters (including from Singhal) towards using machine learning in the core algorithm due to the way it prevented human engineers from explaining the results. In 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, moved Singhal aside (though this may have been for other reasons), and installed AI / ML fans in key roles.

It goes full-circle

Back before the Florida update (in fact, until Google rolled out an update they called Fritz in the summer of 2003), search results used to shuffle regularly in a process nicknamed the Google Dance:

Most things have been moving more real-time ever since, but recent “Core Updates” appear to have brought back this kind of dynamic where changes happen on Google’s schedule rather than based on the timelines of website changes. I’ve speculated that this is because “core updates” are really Google retraining a massive deep learning model that is very customized to the shape of the web at the time. Whatever the cause, our experience working with a wide range of clients is consistent with the official line from Google that:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover — assuming improvements have been made — until the next broad core update is released.

Tying recent trends and discoveries like this back to ancient history like the Google Dance is just one of the ways in which knowing the history of SEO is “useful”.

If you’re interested in all this

I hope this journey through my memories has been interesting. For those of you who also worked in the industry through these years, what did I miss? What are the really big milestones you remember? Drop them in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

If you liked this walk down memory lane, you might also like my presentation From the Horse’s Mouth, where I attempt to use official and unofficial Google statements to unpack what is really going on behind the scenes, and try to give some tips for doing the same yourself:



To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you’d like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Source link

[isearchgoood]

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

Posted by willcritchlow

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately.

Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs.

I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry.

As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry.

I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I have some interesting stories to share with those who are newer to the game.

I’ve racked my brain to try and remember what felt significant at the time, and also looked back over the big trends through my time in the industry, to put together what I think makes an interesting reading list that most people working on the web today would do well to know about.

The big eras of search

I joked at the beginning of a presentation I gave in 2018 that the big eras of search oscillated between directives from the search engines and search engines rapidly backing away from those directives when they saw what webmasters actually did:

While that slide was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I do think that there’s something to thinking about the eras like:

Build websites: Do you have a website? Would you like a website? It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the web, a lot of folks needed to be persuaded to get their business online at all.

Keywords: Basic information retrieval became adversarial information retrieval as webmasters realized that they could game the system with keyword stuffing, hidden text, and more.

Links: As the scale of the web grew beyond user-curated directories, link-based algorithms for search began to dominate.

Not those links: Link-based algorithms began to give way to adversarial link-based algorithms as webmasters swapped, bought, and manipulated links across the web graph.

Content for the long tail: Alongside this era, the length of the long tail began to be better-understood by both webmasters and by Google themselves — and it was in the interest of both parties to create massive amounts of (often obscure) content and get it indexed for when it was needed.

Not that content: Perhaps predictably (see the trend here?), the average quality of content returned in search results dropped dramatically, and so we see the first machine learning ranking factors in the form of attempts to assess “quality” (alongside relevance and website authority).

Machine learning: Arguably everything from that point onwards has been an adventure into machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has also taken place during the careers of most marketers working in SEO today. So, while I love writing about that stuff, I’ll return to it another day.

History of SEO: crucial moments

Although I’m sure that there are interesting stories to be told about the pre-Google era of SEO, I’m not the right person to tell them (if you have a great resource, please do drop it in the comments), so let’s start early in the Google journey:

Google’s foundational technology

Even if you’re coming into SEO in 2020, in a world of machine-learned ranking factors, I’d still recommend going back and reading the surprisingly accessible early academic work:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page [PDF]

Link Analysis in Web Information Retrieval [PDF]

Reasonable surfer (and the updated version)

If you weren’t using the web back then, it’s probably hard to imagine what a step-change improvement Google’s PageRank-based algorithm was over the “state-of-the-art” at the time (and it’s hard to remember, even for those of us that were):

Google’s IPO

In more “things that are hard to remember clearly,” at the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, very few people expected Google to become one of the most profitable companies ever. In the early days, the founders had talked of their disdain for advertising, and had experimented with keyword-based adverts somewhat reluctantly. Because of this attitude, even within the company, most employees didn’t know what a rocket ship they were building.

From this era, I’d recommend reading the founders’ IPO letter (see this great article from Danny Sullivan — who’s ironically now @SearchLiaison at Google):

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”

“Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle [now Google shopping], our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.” — S1 Filing

In addition, In the Plex is an enjoyable book published in 2011 by Steven Levy. It tells the story of what then-CEO Eric Schmidt called (around the time of the IPO) “the hiding strategy”:

“Those who knew the secret … were instructed quite firmly to keep their mouths shut about it.”

“What Google was hiding was how it had cracked the code to making money on the Internet.”

Luckily for Google, for users, and even for organic search marketers, it turned out that this wasn’t actually incompatible with their pure ideals from the pre-IPO days because, as Levy recounts, “in repeated tests, searchers were happier with pages with ads than those where they were suppressed”. Phew!

Index everything

In April 2003, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics and set in motion a series of events that I think might be the most underrated part of Google’s history.

Applied Semantics technology was integrated with their own contextual ad technology to form what became AdSense. Although the revenue from AdSense has always been dwarfed by AdWords (now just “Google Ads”), its importance in the history of SEO is hard to understate.

By democratizing the monetization of content on the web and enabling everyone to get paid for producing obscure content, it funded the creation of absurd amounts of that content.

Most of this content would have never been seen if it weren’t for the existence of a search engine that excelled in its ability to deliver great results for long tail searches, even if those searches were incredibly infrequent or had never been seen before.

In this way, Google’s search engine (and search advertising business) formed a powerful flywheel with its AdSense business, enabling the funding of the content creation it needed to differentiate itself with the largest and most complete index of the web.

As with so many chapters in the story, though, it also created a monster in the form of low quality or even auto-generated content that would ultimately lead to PR crises and massive efforts to fix.

If you’re interested in the index everything era, you can read more of my thoughts about it in slide 47+ of From the Horse’s Mouth.

Web spam

The first forms of spam on the internet were various forms of messages, which hit the mainstream as email spam. During the early 2000s, Google started talking about the problem they’d ultimately term “web spam” (the earliest mention I’ve seen of link spam is in an Amit Singhal presentation from 2005 entitled Challenges in running a Commercial Web Search Engine [PDF]).

I suspect that even people who start in SEO today might’ve heard of Matt Cutts — the first head of webspam — as he’s still referenced often despite not having worked at Google since 2014. I enjoyed this 2015 presentation that talks about his career trajectory at Google.

Search quality era

Over time, as a result of the opposing nature of webmasters trying to make money versus Google (and others) trying to make the best search engine they could, pure web spam wasn’t the only quality problem Google was facing. The cat-and-mouse game of spotting manipulation — particularly of on-page content, external links, and anchor text) — would be a defining feature of the next decade-plus of search.

It was after Singhal’s presentation above that Eric Schmidt (then Google’s CEO) said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”.

Those who are newer to the industry will likely have experienced some Google updates (such as recent “core updates”) first-hand, and have quite likely heard of a few specific older updates. But “Vince”, which came after “Florida” (the first major confirmed Google update), and rolled out shortly after Schmidt’s pronouncements on brand, was a particularly notable one for favoring big brands. If you haven’t followed all the history, you can read up on key past updates here:

A real reputational threat

As I mentioned above in the AdSense section, there were strong incentives for webmasters to create tons of content, thus targeting the blossoming long tail of search. If you had a strong enough domain, Google would crawl and index immense numbers of pages, and for obscure enough queries, any matching content would potentially rank. This triggered the rapid growth of so-called “content farms” that mined keyword data from anywhere they could, and spun out low-quality keyword-matching content. At the same time, websites were succeeding by allowing large databases of content to get indexed even as very thin pages, or by allowing huge numbers of pages of user-generated content to get indexed.

This was a real reputational threat to Google, and broke out of the search and SEO echo chamber. It had become such a bugbear of communities like Hacker News and StackOverflow, that Matt Cutts submitted a personal update to the Hacker News community when Google launched an update targeted at fixing one specific symptom — namely that scraper websites were routinely outranking the original content they were copying.

Shortly afterwards, Google rolled out the update initially named the “farmer update”. After it launched, we learned it had been made possible because of a breakthrough by an engineer called Panda, hence it was called the “big Panda” update internally at Google, and since then the SEO community has mainly called it the Panda update.

Although we speculated that the internal working of the update was one of the first real uses of machine learning in the core of the organic search algorithm at Google, the features it was modelling were more easily understood as human-centric quality factors, and so we began recommending SEO-targeted changes to our clients based on the results of human quality surveys.

Everything goes mobile-first

I gave a presentation at SearchLove London in 2014 where I talked about the unbelievable growth and scale of mobile and about how late we were to realizing quite how seriously Google was taking this. I highlighted the surprise many felt hearing that Google was designing mobile first:

“Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for search on mobile and tablet devices. Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.” — Jon Wiley (lead engineer for Google Search speaking on Google+, which means there’s nowhere to link to as a perfect reference for the quote but it’s referenced here as well as in my presentation).

This surprise came despite the fact that, by the time I gave this presentation in 2014, we knew that mobile search had begun to cannibalize desktop search (and we’d seen the first drop in desktop search volumes):

And it came even though people were starting to say that the first year of Google making the majority of its revenue on mobile was less than two years away:

Writing this in 2020, it feels as though we have fully internalized how big a deal mobile is, but it’s interesting to remember that it took a while for it to sink in.

Machine learning becomes the norm

Since the Panda update, machine learning was mentioned more and more in the official communications from Google about algorithm updates, and it was implicated in even more. We know that, historically, there had been resistance from some quarters (including from Singhal) towards using machine learning in the core algorithm due to the way it prevented human engineers from explaining the results. In 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, moved Singhal aside (though this may have been for other reasons), and installed AI / ML fans in key roles.

It goes full-circle

Back before the Florida update (in fact, until Google rolled out an update they called Fritz in the summer of 2003), search results used to shuffle regularly in a process nicknamed the Google Dance:

Most things have been moving more real-time ever since, but recent “Core Updates” appear to have brought back this kind of dynamic where changes happen on Google’s schedule rather than based on the timelines of website changes. I’ve speculated that this is because “core updates” are really Google retraining a massive deep learning model that is very customized to the shape of the web at the time. Whatever the cause, our experience working with a wide range of clients is consistent with the official line from Google that:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover — assuming improvements have been made — until the next broad core update is released.

Tying recent trends and discoveries like this back to ancient history like the Google Dance is just one of the ways in which knowing the history of SEO is “useful”.

If you’re interested in all this

I hope this journey through my memories has been interesting. For those of you who also worked in the industry through these years, what did I miss? What are the really big milestones you remember? Drop them in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

If you liked this walk down memory lane, you might also like my presentation From the Horse’s Mouth, where I attempt to use official and unofficial Google statements to unpack what is really going on behind the scenes, and try to give some tips for doing the same yourself:



SearchLove San Diego 2018 | Will Critchlow | From the Horse’s Mouth: What We Can Learn from Google’s Own Words from Distilled

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger https://ift.tt/31WNCqt #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

[evempierson]

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

Posted by willcritchlow

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately.

Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs.

I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry.

As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry.

I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I have some interesting stories to share with those who are newer to the game.

I’ve racked my brain to try and remember what felt significant at the time, and also looked back over the big trends through my time in the industry, to put together what I think makes an interesting reading list that most people working on the web today would do well to know about.

The big eras of search

I joked at the beginning of a presentation I gave in 2018 that the big eras of search oscillated between directives from the search engines and search engines rapidly backing away from those directives when they saw what webmasters actually did:

While that slide was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I do think that there’s something to thinking about the eras like:

Build websites: Do you have a website? Would you like a website? It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the web, a lot of folks needed to be persuaded to get their business online at all.

Keywords: Basic information retrieval became adversarial information retrieval as webmasters realized that they could game the system with keyword stuffing, hidden text, and more.

Links: As the scale of the web grew beyond user-curated directories, link-based algorithms for search began to dominate.

Not those links: Link-based algorithms began to give way to adversarial link-based algorithms as webmasters swapped, bought, and manipulated links across the web graph.

Content for the long tail: Alongside this era, the length of the long tail began to be better-understood by both webmasters and by Google themselves — and it was in the interest of both parties to create massive amounts of (often obscure) content and get it indexed for when it was needed.

Not that content: Perhaps predictably (see the trend here?), the average quality of content returned in search results dropped dramatically, and so we see the first machine learning ranking factors in the form of attempts to assess “quality” (alongside relevance and website authority).

Machine learning: Arguably everything from that point onwards has been an adventure into machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has also taken place during the careers of most marketers working in SEO today. So, while I love writing about that stuff, I’ll return to it another day.

History of SEO: crucial moments

Although I’m sure that there are interesting stories to be told about the pre-Google era of SEO, I’m not the right person to tell them (if you have a great resource, please do drop it in the comments), so let’s start early in the Google journey:

Google’s foundational technology

Even if you’re coming into SEO in 2020, in a world of machine-learned ranking factors, I’d still recommend going back and reading the surprisingly accessible early academic work:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page [PDF]

Link Analysis in Web Information Retrieval [PDF]

Reasonable surfer (and the updated version)

If you weren’t using the web back then, it’s probably hard to imagine what a step-change improvement Google’s PageRank-based algorithm was over the “state-of-the-art” at the time (and it’s hard to remember, even for those of us that were):

Google’s IPO

In more “things that are hard to remember clearly,” at the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, very few people expected Google to become one of the most profitable companies ever. In the early days, the founders had talked of their disdain for advertising, and had experimented with keyword-based adverts somewhat reluctantly. Because of this attitude, even within the company, most employees didn’t know what a rocket ship they were building.

From this era, I’d recommend reading the founders’ IPO letter (see this great article from Danny Sullivan — who’s ironically now @SearchLiaison at Google):

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”

“Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle [now Google shopping], our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.” — S1 Filing

In addition, In the Plex is an enjoyable book published in 2011 by Steven Levy. It tells the story of what then-CEO Eric Schmidt called (around the time of the IPO) “the hiding strategy”:

“Those who knew the secret … were instructed quite firmly to keep their mouths shut about it.”

“What Google was hiding was how it had cracked the code to making money on the Internet.”

Luckily for Google, for users, and even for organic search marketers, it turned out that this wasn’t actually incompatible with their pure ideals from the pre-IPO days because, as Levy recounts, “in repeated tests, searchers were happier with pages with ads than those where they were suppressed”. Phew!

Index everything

In April 2003, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics and set in motion a series of events that I think might be the most underrated part of Google’s history.

Applied Semantics technology was integrated with their own contextual ad technology to form what became AdSense. Although the revenue from AdSense has always been dwarfed by AdWords (now just “Google Ads”), its importance in the history of SEO is hard to understate.

By democratizing the monetization of content on the web and enabling everyone to get paid for producing obscure content, it funded the creation of absurd amounts of that content.

Most of this content would have never been seen if it weren’t for the existence of a search engine that excelled in its ability to deliver great results for long tail searches, even if those searches were incredibly infrequent or had never been seen before.

In this way, Google’s search engine (and search advertising business) formed a powerful flywheel with its AdSense business, enabling the funding of the content creation it needed to differentiate itself with the largest and most complete index of the web.

As with so many chapters in the story, though, it also created a monster in the form of low quality or even auto-generated content that would ultimately lead to PR crises and massive efforts to fix.

If you’re interested in the index everything era, you can read more of my thoughts about it in slide 47+ of From the Horse’s Mouth.

Web spam

The first forms of spam on the internet were various forms of messages, which hit the mainstream as email spam. During the early 2000s, Google started talking about the problem they’d ultimately term “web spam” (the earliest mention I’ve seen of link spam is in an Amit Singhal presentation from 2005 entitled Challenges in running a Commercial Web Search Engine [PDF]).

I suspect that even people who start in SEO today might’ve heard of Matt Cutts — the first head of webspam — as he’s still referenced often despite not having worked at Google since 2014. I enjoyed this 2015 presentation that talks about his career trajectory at Google.

Search quality era

Over time, as a result of the opposing nature of webmasters trying to make money versus Google (and others) trying to make the best search engine they could, pure web spam wasn’t the only quality problem Google was facing. The cat-and-mouse game of spotting manipulation — particularly of on-page content, external links, and anchor text) — would be a defining feature of the next decade-plus of search.

It was after Singhal’s presentation above that Eric Schmidt (then Google’s CEO) said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”.

Those who are newer to the industry will likely have experienced some Google updates (such as recent “core updates”) first-hand, and have quite likely heard of a few specific older updates. But “Vince”, which came after “Florida” (the first major confirmed Google update), and rolled out shortly after Schmidt’s pronouncements on brand, was a particularly notable one for favoring big brands. If you haven’t followed all the history, you can read up on key past updates here:

A real reputational threat

As I mentioned above in the AdSense section, there were strong incentives for webmasters to create tons of content, thus targeting the blossoming long tail of search. If you had a strong enough domain, Google would crawl and index immense numbers of pages, and for obscure enough queries, any matching content would potentially rank. This triggered the rapid growth of so-called “content farms” that mined keyword data from anywhere they could, and spun out low-quality keyword-matching content. At the same time, websites were succeeding by allowing large databases of content to get indexed even as very thin pages, or by allowing huge numbers of pages of user-generated content to get indexed.

This was a real reputational threat to Google, and broke out of the search and SEO echo chamber. It had become such a bugbear of communities like Hacker News and StackOverflow, that Matt Cutts submitted a personal update to the Hacker News community when Google launched an update targeted at fixing one specific symptom — namely that scraper websites were routinely outranking the original content they were copying.

Shortly afterwards, Google rolled out the update initially named the “farmer update”. After it launched, we learned it had been made possible because of a breakthrough by an engineer called Panda, hence it was called the “big Panda” update internally at Google, and since then the SEO community has mainly called it the Panda update.

Although we speculated that the internal working of the update was one of the first real uses of machine learning in the core of the organic search algorithm at Google, the features it was modelling were more easily understood as human-centric quality factors, and so we began recommending SEO-targeted changes to our clients based on the results of human quality surveys.

Everything goes mobile-first

I gave a presentation at SearchLove London in 2014 where I talked about the unbelievable growth and scale of mobile and about how late we were to realizing quite how seriously Google was taking this. I highlighted the surprise many felt hearing that Google was designing mobile first:

“Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for search on mobile and tablet devices. Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.” — Jon Wiley (lead engineer for Google Search speaking on Google+, which means there’s nowhere to link to as a perfect reference for the quote but it’s referenced here as well as in my presentation).

This surprise came despite the fact that, by the time I gave this presentation in 2014, we knew that mobile search had begun to cannibalize desktop search (and we’d seen the first drop in desktop search volumes):

And it came even though people were starting to say that the first year of Google making the majority of its revenue on mobile was less than two years away:

Writing this in 2020, it feels as though we have fully internalized how big a deal mobile is, but it’s interesting to remember that it took a while for it to sink in.

Machine learning becomes the norm

Since the Panda update, machine learning was mentioned more and more in the official communications from Google about algorithm updates, and it was implicated in even more. We know that, historically, there had been resistance from some quarters (including from Singhal) towards using machine learning in the core algorithm due to the way it prevented human engineers from explaining the results. In 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, moved Singhal aside (though this may have been for other reasons), and installed AI / ML fans in key roles.

It goes full-circle

Back before the Florida update (in fact, until Google rolled out an update they called Fritz in the summer of 2003), search results used to shuffle regularly in a process nicknamed the Google Dance:

Most things have been moving more real-time ever since, but recent “Core Updates” appear to have brought back this kind of dynamic where changes happen on Google’s schedule rather than based on the timelines of website changes. I’ve speculated that this is because “core updates” are really Google retraining a massive deep learning model that is very customized to the shape of the web at the time. Whatever the cause, our experience working with a wide range of clients is consistent with the official line from Google that:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover — assuming improvements have been made — until the next broad core update is released.

Tying recent trends and discoveries like this back to ancient history like the Google Dance is just one of the ways in which knowing the history of SEO is “useful”.

If you’re interested in all this

I hope this journey through my memories has been interesting. For those of you who also worked in the industry through these years, what did I miss? What are the really big milestones you remember? Drop them in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

If you liked this walk down memory lane, you might also like my presentation From the Horse’s Mouth, where I attempt to use official and unofficial Google statements to unpack what is really going on behind the scenes, and try to give some tips for doing the same yourself:



SearchLove San Diego 2018 | Will Critchlow | From the Horse’s Mouth: What We Can Learn from Google’s Own Words from Distilled

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[thanhtuandoan89]

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

Posted by willcritchlow

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately.

Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs.

I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry.

As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry.

I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I have some interesting stories to share with those who are newer to the game.

I’ve racked my brain to try and remember what felt significant at the time, and also looked back over the big trends through my time in the industry, to put together what I think makes an interesting reading list that most people working on the web today would do well to know about.

The big eras of search

I joked at the beginning of a presentation I gave in 2018 that the big eras of search oscillated between directives from the search engines and search engines rapidly backing away from those directives when they saw what webmasters actually did:

While that slide was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I do think that there’s something to thinking about the eras like:

Build websites: Do you have a website? Would you like a website? It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the web, a lot of folks needed to be persuaded to get their business online at all.

Keywords: Basic information retrieval became adversarial information retrieval as webmasters realized that they could game the system with keyword stuffing, hidden text, and more.

Links: As the scale of the web grew beyond user-curated directories, link-based algorithms for search began to dominate.

Not those links: Link-based algorithms began to give way to adversarial link-based algorithms as webmasters swapped, bought, and manipulated links across the web graph.

Content for the long tail: Alongside this era, the length of the long tail began to be better-understood by both webmasters and by Google themselves — and it was in the interest of both parties to create massive amounts of (often obscure) content and get it indexed for when it was needed.

Not that content: Perhaps predictably (see the trend here?), the average quality of content returned in search results dropped dramatically, and so we see the first machine learning ranking factors in the form of attempts to assess “quality” (alongside relevance and website authority).

Machine learning: Arguably everything from that point onwards has been an adventure into machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has also taken place during the careers of most marketers working in SEO today. So, while I love writing about that stuff, I’ll return to it another day.

History of SEO: crucial moments

Although I’m sure that there are interesting stories to be told about the pre-Google era of SEO, I’m not the right person to tell them (if you have a great resource, please do drop it in the comments), so let’s start early in the Google journey:

Google’s foundational technology

Even if you’re coming into SEO in 2020, in a world of machine-learned ranking factors, I’d still recommend going back and reading the surprisingly accessible early academic work:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page [PDF]

Link Analysis in Web Information Retrieval [PDF]

Reasonable surfer (and the updated version)

If you weren’t using the web back then, it’s probably hard to imagine what a step-change improvement Google’s PageRank-based algorithm was over the “state-of-the-art” at the time (and it’s hard to remember, even for those of us that were):

Google’s IPO

In more “things that are hard to remember clearly,” at the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, very few people expected Google to become one of the most profitable companies ever. In the early days, the founders had talked of their disdain for advertising, and had experimented with keyword-based adverts somewhat reluctantly. Because of this attitude, even within the company, most employees didn’t know what a rocket ship they were building.

From this era, I’d recommend reading the founders’ IPO letter (see this great article from Danny Sullivan — who’s ironically now @SearchLiaison at Google):

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”

“Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle [now Google shopping], our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.” — S1 Filing

In addition, In the Plex is an enjoyable book published in 2011 by Steven Levy. It tells the story of what then-CEO Eric Schmidt called (around the time of the IPO) “the hiding strategy”:

“Those who knew the secret … were instructed quite firmly to keep their mouths shut about it.”

“What Google was hiding was how it had cracked the code to making money on the Internet.”

Luckily for Google, for users, and even for organic search marketers, it turned out that this wasn’t actually incompatible with their pure ideals from the pre-IPO days because, as Levy recounts, “in repeated tests, searchers were happier with pages with ads than those where they were suppressed”. Phew!

Index everything

In April 2003, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics and set in motion a series of events that I think might be the most underrated part of Google’s history.

Applied Semantics technology was integrated with their own contextual ad technology to form what became AdSense. Although the revenue from AdSense has always been dwarfed by AdWords (now just “Google Ads”), its importance in the history of SEO is hard to understate.

By democratizing the monetization of content on the web and enabling everyone to get paid for producing obscure content, it funded the creation of absurd amounts of that content.

Most of this content would have never been seen if it weren’t for the existence of a search engine that excelled in its ability to deliver great results for long tail searches, even if those searches were incredibly infrequent or had never been seen before.

In this way, Google’s search engine (and search advertising business) formed a powerful flywheel with its AdSense business, enabling the funding of the content creation it needed to differentiate itself with the largest and most complete index of the web.

As with so many chapters in the story, though, it also created a monster in the form of low quality or even auto-generated content that would ultimately lead to PR crises and massive efforts to fix.

If you’re interested in the index everything era, you can read more of my thoughts about it in slide 47+ of From the Horse’s Mouth.

Web spam

The first forms of spam on the internet were various forms of messages, which hit the mainstream as email spam. During the early 2000s, Google started talking about the problem they’d ultimately term “web spam” (the earliest mention I’ve seen of link spam is in an Amit Singhal presentation from 2005 entitled Challenges in running a Commercial Web Search Engine [PDF]).

I suspect that even people who start in SEO today might’ve heard of Matt Cutts — the first head of webspam — as he’s still referenced often despite not having worked at Google since 2014. I enjoyed this 2015 presentation that talks about his career trajectory at Google.

Search quality era

Over time, as a result of the opposing nature of webmasters trying to make money versus Google (and others) trying to make the best search engine they could, pure web spam wasn’t the only quality problem Google was facing. The cat-and-mouse game of spotting manipulation — particularly of on-page content, external links, and anchor text) — would be a defining feature of the next decade-plus of search.

It was after Singhal’s presentation above that Eric Schmidt (then Google’s CEO) said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”.

Those who are newer to the industry will likely have experienced some Google updates (such as recent “core updates”) first-hand, and have quite likely heard of a few specific older updates. But “Vince”, which came after “Florida” (the first major confirmed Google update), and rolled out shortly after Schmidt’s pronouncements on brand, was a particularly notable one for favoring big brands. If you haven’t followed all the history, you can read up on key past updates here:

A real reputational threat

As I mentioned above in the AdSense section, there were strong incentives for webmasters to create tons of content, thus targeting the blossoming long tail of search. If you had a strong enough domain, Google would crawl and index immense numbers of pages, and for obscure enough queries, any matching content would potentially rank. This triggered the rapid growth of so-called “content farms” that mined keyword data from anywhere they could, and spun out low-quality keyword-matching content. At the same time, websites were succeeding by allowing large databases of content to get indexed even as very thin pages, or by allowing huge numbers of pages of user-generated content to get indexed.

This was a real reputational threat to Google, and broke out of the search and SEO echo chamber. It had become such a bugbear of communities like Hacker News and StackOverflow, that Matt Cutts submitted a personal update to the Hacker News community when Google launched an update targeted at fixing one specific symptom — namely that scraper websites were routinely outranking the original content they were copying.

Shortly afterwards, Google rolled out the update initially named the “farmer update”. After it launched, we learned it had been made possible because of a breakthrough by an engineer called Panda, hence it was called the “big Panda” update internally at Google, and since then the SEO community has mainly called it the Panda update.

Although we speculated that the internal working of the update was one of the first real uses of machine learning in the core of the organic search algorithm at Google, the features it was modelling were more easily understood as human-centric quality factors, and so we began recommending SEO-targeted changes to our clients based on the results of human quality surveys.

Everything goes mobile-first

I gave a presentation at SearchLove London in 2014 where I talked about the unbelievable growth and scale of mobile and about how late we were to realizing quite how seriously Google was taking this. I highlighted the surprise many felt hearing that Google was designing mobile first:

“Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for search on mobile and tablet devices. Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.” — Jon Wiley (lead engineer for Google Search speaking on Google+, which means there’s nowhere to link to as a perfect reference for the quote but it’s referenced here as well as in my presentation).

This surprise came despite the fact that, by the time I gave this presentation in 2014, we knew that mobile search had begun to cannibalize desktop search (and we’d seen the first drop in desktop search volumes):

And it came even though people were starting to say that the first year of Google making the majority of its revenue on mobile was less than two years away:

Writing this in 2020, it feels as though we have fully internalized how big a deal mobile is, but it’s interesting to remember that it took a while for it to sink in.

Machine learning becomes the norm

Since the Panda update, machine learning was mentioned more and more in the official communications from Google about algorithm updates, and it was implicated in even more. We know that, historically, there had been resistance from some quarters (including from Singhal) towards using machine learning in the core algorithm due to the way it prevented human engineers from explaining the results. In 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, moved Singhal aside (though this may have been for other reasons), and installed AI / ML fans in key roles.

It goes full-circle

Back before the Florida update (in fact, until Google rolled out an update they called Fritz in the summer of 2003), search results used to shuffle regularly in a process nicknamed the Google Dance:

Most things have been moving more real-time ever since, but recent “Core Updates” appear to have brought back this kind of dynamic where changes happen on Google’s schedule rather than based on the timelines of website changes. I’ve speculated that this is because “core updates” are really Google retraining a massive deep learning model that is very customized to the shape of the web at the time. Whatever the cause, our experience working with a wide range of clients is consistent with the official line from Google that:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover — assuming improvements have been made — until the next broad core update is released.

Tying recent trends and discoveries like this back to ancient history like the Google Dance is just one of the ways in which knowing the history of SEO is “useful”.

If you’re interested in all this

I hope this journey through my memories has been interesting. For those of you who also worked in the industry through these years, what did I miss? What are the really big milestones you remember? Drop them in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

If you liked this walk down memory lane, you might also like my presentation From the Horse’s Mouth, where I attempt to use official and unofficial Google statements to unpack what is really going on behind the scenes, and try to give some tips for doing the same yourself:



SearchLove San Diego 2018 | Will Critchlow | From the Horse’s Mouth: What We Can Learn from Google’s Own Words from Distilled

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[drummcarpentry]

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

Posted by willcritchlow

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately.

Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs.

I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry.

As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry.

I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I have some interesting stories to share with those who are newer to the game.

I’ve racked my brain to try and remember what felt significant at the time, and also looked back over the big trends through my time in the industry, to put together what I think makes an interesting reading list that most people working on the web today would do well to know about.

The big eras of search

I joked at the beginning of a presentation I gave in 2018 that the big eras of search oscillated between directives from the search engines and search engines rapidly backing away from those directives when they saw what webmasters actually did:

While that slide was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I do think that there’s something to thinking about the eras like:

Build websites: Do you have a website? Would you like a website? It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the web, a lot of folks needed to be persuaded to get their business online at all.

Keywords: Basic information retrieval became adversarial information retrieval as webmasters realized that they could game the system with keyword stuffing, hidden text, and more.

Links: As the scale of the web grew beyond user-curated directories, link-based algorithms for search began to dominate.

Not those links: Link-based algorithms began to give way to adversarial link-based algorithms as webmasters swapped, bought, and manipulated links across the web graph.

Content for the long tail: Alongside this era, the length of the long tail began to be better-understood by both webmasters and by Google themselves — and it was in the interest of both parties to create massive amounts of (often obscure) content and get it indexed for when it was needed.

Not that content: Perhaps predictably (see the trend here?), the average quality of content returned in search results dropped dramatically, and so we see the first machine learning ranking factors in the form of attempts to assess “quality” (alongside relevance and website authority).

Machine learning: Arguably everything from that point onwards has been an adventure into machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has also taken place during the careers of most marketers working in SEO today. So, while I love writing about that stuff, I’ll return to it another day.

History of SEO: crucial moments

Although I’m sure that there are interesting stories to be told about the pre-Google era of SEO, I’m not the right person to tell them (if you have a great resource, please do drop it in the comments), so let’s start early in the Google journey:

Google’s foundational technology

Even if you’re coming into SEO in 2020, in a world of machine-learned ranking factors, I’d still recommend going back and reading the surprisingly accessible early academic work:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page [PDF]

Link Analysis in Web Information Retrieval [PDF]

Reasonable surfer (and the updated version)

If you weren’t using the web back then, it’s probably hard to imagine what a step-change improvement Google’s PageRank-based algorithm was over the “state-of-the-art” at the time (and it’s hard to remember, even for those of us that were):

Google’s IPO

In more “things that are hard to remember clearly,” at the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, very few people expected Google to become one of the most profitable companies ever. In the early days, the founders had talked of their disdain for advertising, and had experimented with keyword-based adverts somewhat reluctantly. Because of this attitude, even within the company, most employees didn’t know what a rocket ship they were building.

From this era, I’d recommend reading the founders’ IPO letter (see this great article from Danny Sullivan — who’s ironically now @SearchLiaison at Google):

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”

“Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle [now Google shopping], our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.” — S1 Filing

In addition, In the Plex is an enjoyable book published in 2011 by Steven Levy. It tells the story of what then-CEO Eric Schmidt called (around the time of the IPO) “the hiding strategy”:

“Those who knew the secret … were instructed quite firmly to keep their mouths shut about it.”

“What Google was hiding was how it had cracked the code to making money on the Internet.”

Luckily for Google, for users, and even for organic search marketers, it turned out that this wasn’t actually incompatible with their pure ideals from the pre-IPO days because, as Levy recounts, “in repeated tests, searchers were happier with pages with ads than those where they were suppressed”. Phew!

Index everything

In April 2003, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics and set in motion a series of events that I think might be the most underrated part of Google’s history.

Applied Semantics technology was integrated with their own contextual ad technology to form what became AdSense. Although the revenue from AdSense has always been dwarfed by AdWords (now just “Google Ads”), its importance in the history of SEO is hard to understate.

By democratizing the monetization of content on the web and enabling everyone to get paid for producing obscure content, it funded the creation of absurd amounts of that content.

Most of this content would have never been seen if it weren’t for the existence of a search engine that excelled in its ability to deliver great results for long tail searches, even if those searches were incredibly infrequent or had never been seen before.

In this way, Google’s search engine (and search advertising business) formed a powerful flywheel with its AdSense business, enabling the funding of the content creation it needed to differentiate itself with the largest and most complete index of the web.

As with so many chapters in the story, though, it also created a monster in the form of low quality or even auto-generated content that would ultimately lead to PR crises and massive efforts to fix.

If you’re interested in the index everything era, you can read more of my thoughts about it in slide 47+ of From the Horse’s Mouth.

Web spam

The first forms of spam on the internet were various forms of messages, which hit the mainstream as email spam. During the early 2000s, Google started talking about the problem they’d ultimately term “web spam” (the earliest mention I’ve seen of link spam is in an Amit Singhal presentation from 2005 entitled Challenges in running a Commercial Web Search Engine [PDF]).

I suspect that even people who start in SEO today might’ve heard of Matt Cutts — the first head of webspam — as he’s still referenced often despite not having worked at Google since 2014. I enjoyed this 2015 presentation that talks about his career trajectory at Google.

Search quality era

Over time, as a result of the opposing nature of webmasters trying to make money versus Google (and others) trying to make the best search engine they could, pure web spam wasn’t the only quality problem Google was facing. The cat-and-mouse game of spotting manipulation — particularly of on-page content, external links, and anchor text) — would be a defining feature of the next decade-plus of search.

It was after Singhal’s presentation above that Eric Schmidt (then Google’s CEO) said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”.

Those who are newer to the industry will likely have experienced some Google updates (such as recent “core updates”) first-hand, and have quite likely heard of a few specific older updates. But “Vince”, which came after “Florida” (the first major confirmed Google update), and rolled out shortly after Schmidt’s pronouncements on brand, was a particularly notable one for favoring big brands. If you haven’t followed all the history, you can read up on key past updates here:

A real reputational threat

As I mentioned above in the AdSense section, there were strong incentives for webmasters to create tons of content, thus targeting the blossoming long tail of search. If you had a strong enough domain, Google would crawl and index immense numbers of pages, and for obscure enough queries, any matching content would potentially rank. This triggered the rapid growth of so-called “content farms” that mined keyword data from anywhere they could, and spun out low-quality keyword-matching content. At the same time, websites were succeeding by allowing large databases of content to get indexed even as very thin pages, or by allowing huge numbers of pages of user-generated content to get indexed.

This was a real reputational threat to Google, and broke out of the search and SEO echo chamber. It had become such a bugbear of communities like Hacker News and StackOverflow, that Matt Cutts submitted a personal update to the Hacker News community when Google launched an update targeted at fixing one specific symptom — namely that scraper websites were routinely outranking the original content they were copying.

Shortly afterwards, Google rolled out the update initially named the “farmer update”. After it launched, we learned it had been made possible because of a breakthrough by an engineer called Panda, hence it was called the “big Panda” update internally at Google, and since then the SEO community has mainly called it the Panda update.

Although we speculated that the internal working of the update was one of the first real uses of machine learning in the core of the organic search algorithm at Google, the features it was modelling were more easily understood as human-centric quality factors, and so we began recommending SEO-targeted changes to our clients based on the results of human quality surveys.

Everything goes mobile-first

I gave a presentation at SearchLove London in 2014 where I talked about the unbelievable growth and scale of mobile and about how late we were to realizing quite how seriously Google was taking this. I highlighted the surprise many felt hearing that Google was designing mobile first:

“Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for search on mobile and tablet devices. Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.” — Jon Wiley (lead engineer for Google Search speaking on Google+, which means there’s nowhere to link to as a perfect reference for the quote but it’s referenced here as well as in my presentation).

This surprise came despite the fact that, by the time I gave this presentation in 2014, we knew that mobile search had begun to cannibalize desktop search (and we’d seen the first drop in desktop search volumes):

And it came even though people were starting to say that the first year of Google making the majority of its revenue on mobile was less than two years away:

Writing this in 2020, it feels as though we have fully internalized how big a deal mobile is, but it’s interesting to remember that it took a while for it to sink in.

Machine learning becomes the norm

Since the Panda update, machine learning was mentioned more and more in the official communications from Google about algorithm updates, and it was implicated in even more. We know that, historically, there had been resistance from some quarters (including from Singhal) towards using machine learning in the core algorithm due to the way it prevented human engineers from explaining the results. In 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, moved Singhal aside (though this may have been for other reasons), and installed AI / ML fans in key roles.

It goes full-circle

Back before the Florida update (in fact, until Google rolled out an update they called Fritz in the summer of 2003), search results used to shuffle regularly in a process nicknamed the Google Dance:

Most things have been moving more real-time ever since, but recent “Core Updates” appear to have brought back this kind of dynamic where changes happen on Google’s schedule rather than based on the timelines of website changes. I’ve speculated that this is because “core updates” are really Google retraining a massive deep learning model that is very customized to the shape of the web at the time. Whatever the cause, our experience working with a wide range of clients is consistent with the official line from Google that:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover — assuming improvements have been made — until the next broad core update is released.

Tying recent trends and discoveries like this back to ancient history like the Google Dance is just one of the ways in which knowing the history of SEO is “useful”.

If you’re interested in all this

I hope this journey through my memories has been interesting. For those of you who also worked in the industry through these years, what did I miss? What are the really big milestones you remember? Drop them in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

If you liked this walk down memory lane, you might also like my presentation From the Horse’s Mouth, where I attempt to use official and unofficial Google statements to unpack what is really going on behind the scenes, and try to give some tips for doing the same yourself:



SearchLove San Diego 2018 | Will Critchlow | From the Horse’s Mouth: What We Can Learn from Google’s Own Words from Distilled

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[whitelabelseoreseller]

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

Posted by willcritchlow

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately.

Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs.

I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry.

As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry.

I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I have some interesting stories to share with those who are newer to the game.

I’ve racked my brain to try and remember what felt significant at the time, and also looked back over the big trends through my time in the industry, to put together what I think makes an interesting reading list that most people working on the web today would do well to know about.

The big eras of search

I joked at the beginning of a presentation I gave in 2018 that the big eras of search oscillated between directives from the search engines and search engines rapidly backing away from those directives when they saw what webmasters actually did:

While that slide was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I do think that there’s something to thinking about the eras like:

Build websites: Do you have a website? Would you like a website? It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the web, a lot of folks needed to be persuaded to get their business online at all.

Keywords: Basic information retrieval became adversarial information retrieval as webmasters realized that they could game the system with keyword stuffing, hidden text, and more.

Links: As the scale of the web grew beyond user-curated directories, link-based algorithms for search began to dominate.

Not those links: Link-based algorithms began to give way to adversarial link-based algorithms as webmasters swapped, bought, and manipulated links across the web graph.

Content for the long tail: Alongside this era, the length of the long tail began to be better-understood by both webmasters and by Google themselves — and it was in the interest of both parties to create massive amounts of (often obscure) content and get it indexed for when it was needed.

Not that content: Perhaps predictably (see the trend here?), the average quality of content returned in search results dropped dramatically, and so we see the first machine learning ranking factors in the form of attempts to assess “quality” (alongside relevance and website authority).

Machine learning: Arguably everything from that point onwards has been an adventure into machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has also taken place during the careers of most marketers working in SEO today. So, while I love writing about that stuff, I’ll return to it another day.

History of SEO: crucial moments

Although I’m sure that there are interesting stories to be told about the pre-Google era of SEO, I’m not the right person to tell them (if you have a great resource, please do drop it in the comments), so let’s start early in the Google journey:

Google’s foundational technology

Even if you’re coming into SEO in 2020, in a world of machine-learned ranking factors, I’d still recommend going back and reading the surprisingly accessible early academic work:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page [PDF]

Link Analysis in Web Information Retrieval [PDF]

Reasonable surfer (and the updated version)

If you weren’t using the web back then, it’s probably hard to imagine what a step-change improvement Google’s PageRank-based algorithm was over the “state-of-the-art” at the time (and it’s hard to remember, even for those of us that were):

Google’s IPO

In more “things that are hard to remember clearly,” at the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, very few people expected Google to become one of the most profitable companies ever. In the early days, the founders had talked of their disdain for advertising, and had experimented with keyword-based adverts somewhat reluctantly. Because of this attitude, even within the company, most employees didn’t know what a rocket ship they were building.

From this era, I’d recommend reading the founders’ IPO letter (see this great article from Danny Sullivan — who’s ironically now @SearchLiaison at Google):

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”

“Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle [now Google shopping], our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.” — S1 Filing

In addition, In the Plex is an enjoyable book published in 2011 by Steven Levy. It tells the story of what then-CEO Eric Schmidt called (around the time of the IPO) “the hiding strategy”:

“Those who knew the secret … were instructed quite firmly to keep their mouths shut about it.”

“What Google was hiding was how it had cracked the code to making money on the Internet.”

Luckily for Google, for users, and even for organic search marketers, it turned out that this wasn’t actually incompatible with their pure ideals from the pre-IPO days because, as Levy recounts, “in repeated tests, searchers were happier with pages with ads than those where they were suppressed”. Phew!

Index everything

In April 2003, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics and set in motion a series of events that I think might be the most underrated part of Google’s history.

Applied Semantics technology was integrated with their own contextual ad technology to form what became AdSense. Although the revenue from AdSense has always been dwarfed by AdWords (now just “Google Ads”), its importance in the history of SEO is hard to understate.

By democratizing the monetization of content on the web and enabling everyone to get paid for producing obscure content, it funded the creation of absurd amounts of that content.

Most of this content would have never been seen if it weren’t for the existence of a search engine that excelled in its ability to deliver great results for long tail searches, even if those searches were incredibly infrequent or had never been seen before.

In this way, Google’s search engine (and search advertising business) formed a powerful flywheel with its AdSense business, enabling the funding of the content creation it needed to differentiate itself with the largest and most complete index of the web.

As with so many chapters in the story, though, it also created a monster in the form of low quality or even auto-generated content that would ultimately lead to PR crises and massive efforts to fix.

If you’re interested in the index everything era, you can read more of my thoughts about it in slide 47+ of From the Horse’s Mouth.

Web spam

The first forms of spam on the internet were various forms of messages, which hit the mainstream as email spam. During the early 2000s, Google started talking about the problem they’d ultimately term “web spam” (the earliest mention I’ve seen of link spam is in an Amit Singhal presentation from 2005 entitled Challenges in running a Commercial Web Search Engine [PDF]).

I suspect that even people who start in SEO today might’ve heard of Matt Cutts — the first head of webspam — as he’s still referenced often despite not having worked at Google since 2014. I enjoyed this 2015 presentation that talks about his career trajectory at Google.

Search quality era

Over time, as a result of the opposing nature of webmasters trying to make money versus Google (and others) trying to make the best search engine they could, pure web spam wasn’t the only quality problem Google was facing. The cat-and-mouse game of spotting manipulation — particularly of on-page content, external links, and anchor text) — would be a defining feature of the next decade-plus of search.

It was after Singhal’s presentation above that Eric Schmidt (then Google’s CEO) said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”.

Those who are newer to the industry will likely have experienced some Google updates (such as recent “core updates”) first-hand, and have quite likely heard of a few specific older updates. But “Vince”, which came after “Florida” (the first major confirmed Google update), and rolled out shortly after Schmidt’s pronouncements on brand, was a particularly notable one for favoring big brands. If you haven’t followed all the history, you can read up on key past updates here:

A real reputational threat

As I mentioned above in the AdSense section, there were strong incentives for webmasters to create tons of content, thus targeting the blossoming long tail of search. If you had a strong enough domain, Google would crawl and index immense numbers of pages, and for obscure enough queries, any matching content would potentially rank. This triggered the rapid growth of so-called “content farms” that mined keyword data from anywhere they could, and spun out low-quality keyword-matching content. At the same time, websites were succeeding by allowing large databases of content to get indexed even as very thin pages, or by allowing huge numbers of pages of user-generated content to get indexed.

This was a real reputational threat to Google, and broke out of the search and SEO echo chamber. It had become such a bugbear of communities like Hacker News and StackOverflow, that Matt Cutts submitted a personal update to the Hacker News community when Google launched an update targeted at fixing one specific symptom — namely that scraper websites were routinely outranking the original content they were copying.

Shortly afterwards, Google rolled out the update initially named the “farmer update”. After it launched, we learned it had been made possible because of a breakthrough by an engineer called Panda, hence it was called the “big Panda” update internally at Google, and since then the SEO community has mainly called it the Panda update.

Although we speculated that the internal working of the update was one of the first real uses of machine learning in the core of the organic search algorithm at Google, the features it was modelling were more easily understood as human-centric quality factors, and so we began recommending SEO-targeted changes to our clients based on the results of human quality surveys.

Everything goes mobile-first

I gave a presentation at SearchLove London in 2014 where I talked about the unbelievable growth and scale of mobile and about how late we were to realizing quite how seriously Google was taking this. I highlighted the surprise many felt hearing that Google was designing mobile first:

“Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for search on mobile and tablet devices. Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.” — Jon Wiley (lead engineer for Google Search speaking on Google+, which means there’s nowhere to link to as a perfect reference for the quote but it’s referenced here as well as in my presentation).

This surprise came despite the fact that, by the time I gave this presentation in 2014, we knew that mobile search had begun to cannibalize desktop search (and we’d seen the first drop in desktop search volumes):

And it came even though people were starting to say that the first year of Google making the majority of its revenue on mobile was less than two years away:

Writing this in 2020, it feels as though we have fully internalized how big a deal mobile is, but it’s interesting to remember that it took a while for it to sink in.

Machine learning becomes the norm

Since the Panda update, machine learning was mentioned more and more in the official communications from Google about algorithm updates, and it was implicated in even more. We know that, historically, there had been resistance from some quarters (including from Singhal) towards using machine learning in the core algorithm due to the way it prevented human engineers from explaining the results. In 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, moved Singhal aside (though this may have been for other reasons), and installed AI / ML fans in key roles.

It goes full-circle

Back before the Florida update (in fact, until Google rolled out an update they called Fritz in the summer of 2003), search results used to shuffle regularly in a process nicknamed the Google Dance:

Most things have been moving more real-time ever since, but recent “Core Updates” appear to have brought back this kind of dynamic where changes happen on Google’s schedule rather than based on the timelines of website changes. I’ve speculated that this is because “core updates” are really Google retraining a massive deep learning model that is very customized to the shape of the web at the time. Whatever the cause, our experience working with a wide range of clients is consistent with the official line from Google that:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover — assuming improvements have been made — until the next broad core update is released.

Tying recent trends and discoveries like this back to ancient history like the Google Dance is just one of the ways in which knowing the history of SEO is “useful”.

If you’re interested in all this

I hope this journey through my memories has been interesting. For those of you who also worked in the industry through these years, what did I miss? What are the really big milestones you remember? Drop them in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

If you liked this walk down memory lane, you might also like my presentation From the Horse’s Mouth, where I attempt to use official and unofficial Google statements to unpack what is really going on behind the scenes, and try to give some tips for doing the same yourself:



SearchLove San Diego 2018 | Will Critchlow | From the Horse’s Mouth: What We Can Learn from Google’s Own Words from Distilled

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://feedpress.me/link/9375/13814660/15-years-in-seo

[lakelandseo]

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

Posted by willcritchlow

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately.

Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs.

I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry.

As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry.

I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I have some interesting stories to share with those who are newer to the game.

I’ve racked my brain to try and remember what felt significant at the time, and also looked back over the big trends through my time in the industry, to put together what I think makes an interesting reading list that most people working on the web today would do well to know about.

The big eras of search

I joked at the beginning of a presentation I gave in 2018 that the big eras of search oscillated between directives from the search engines and search engines rapidly backing away from those directives when they saw what webmasters actually did:

While that slide was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I do think that there’s something to thinking about the eras like:

Build websites: Do you have a website? Would you like a website? It’s hard to believe now, but in the early days of the web, a lot of folks needed to be persuaded to get their business online at all.

Keywords: Basic information retrieval became adversarial information retrieval as webmasters realized that they could game the system with keyword stuffing, hidden text, and more.

Links: As the scale of the web grew beyond user-curated directories, link-based algorithms for search began to dominate.

Not those links: Link-based algorithms began to give way to adversarial link-based algorithms as webmasters swapped, bought, and manipulated links across the web graph.

Content for the long tail: Alongside this era, the length of the long tail began to be better-understood by both webmasters and by Google themselves — and it was in the interest of both parties to create massive amounts of (often obscure) content and get it indexed for when it was needed.

Not that content: Perhaps predictably (see the trend here?), the average quality of content returned in search results dropped dramatically, and so we see the first machine learning ranking factors in the form of attempts to assess “quality” (alongside relevance and website authority).

Machine learning: Arguably everything from that point onwards has been an adventure into machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has also taken place during the careers of most marketers working in SEO today. So, while I love writing about that stuff, I’ll return to it another day.

History of SEO: crucial moments

Although I’m sure that there are interesting stories to be told about the pre-Google era of SEO, I’m not the right person to tell them (if you have a great resource, please do drop it in the comments), so let’s start early in the Google journey:

Google’s foundational technology

Even if you’re coming into SEO in 2020, in a world of machine-learned ranking factors, I’d still recommend going back and reading the surprisingly accessible early academic work:

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page [PDF]

Link Analysis in Web Information Retrieval [PDF]

Reasonable surfer (and the updated version)

If you weren’t using the web back then, it’s probably hard to imagine what a step-change improvement Google’s PageRank-based algorithm was over the “state-of-the-art” at the time (and it’s hard to remember, even for those of us that were):

Google’s IPO

In more “things that are hard to remember clearly,” at the time of Google’s IPO in 2004, very few people expected Google to become one of the most profitable companies ever. In the early days, the founders had talked of their disdain for advertising, and had experimented with keyword-based adverts somewhat reluctantly. Because of this attitude, even within the company, most employees didn’t know what a rocket ship they were building.

From this era, I’d recommend reading the founders’ IPO letter (see this great article from Danny Sullivan — who’s ironically now @SearchLiaison at Google):

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”

“Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle [now Google shopping], our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.” — S1 Filing

In addition, In the Plex is an enjoyable book published in 2011 by Steven Levy. It tells the story of what then-CEO Eric Schmidt called (around the time of the IPO) “the hiding strategy”:

“Those who knew the secret … were instructed quite firmly to keep their mouths shut about it.”

“What Google was hiding was how it had cracked the code to making money on the Internet.”

Luckily for Google, for users, and even for organic search marketers, it turned out that this wasn’t actually incompatible with their pure ideals from the pre-IPO days because, as Levy recounts, “in repeated tests, searchers were happier with pages with ads than those where they were suppressed”. Phew!

Index everything

In April 2003, Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics and set in motion a series of events that I think might be the most underrated part of Google’s history.

Applied Semantics technology was integrated with their own contextual ad technology to form what became AdSense. Although the revenue from AdSense has always been dwarfed by AdWords (now just “Google Ads”), its importance in the history of SEO is hard to understate.

By democratizing the monetization of content on the web and enabling everyone to get paid for producing obscure content, it funded the creation of absurd amounts of that content.

Most of this content would have never been seen if it weren’t for the existence of a search engine that excelled in its ability to deliver great results for long tail searches, even if those searches were incredibly infrequent or had never been seen before.

In this way, Google’s search engine (and search advertising business) formed a powerful flywheel with its AdSense business, enabling the funding of the content creation it needed to differentiate itself with the largest and most complete index of the web.

As with so many chapters in the story, though, it also created a monster in the form of low quality or even auto-generated content that would ultimately lead to PR crises and massive efforts to fix.

If you’re interested in the index everything era, you can read more of my thoughts about it in slide 47+ of From the Horse’s Mouth.

Web spam

The first forms of spam on the internet were various forms of messages, which hit the mainstream as email spam. During the early 2000s, Google started talking about the problem they’d ultimately term “web spam” (the earliest mention I’ve seen of link spam is in an Amit Singhal presentation from 2005 entitled Challenges in running a Commercial Web Search Engine [PDF]).

I suspect that even people who start in SEO today might’ve heard of Matt Cutts — the first head of webspam — as he’s still referenced often despite not having worked at Google since 2014. I enjoyed this 2015 presentation that talks about his career trajectory at Google.

Search quality era

Over time, as a result of the opposing nature of webmasters trying to make money versus Google (and others) trying to make the best search engine they could, pure web spam wasn’t the only quality problem Google was facing. The cat-and-mouse game of spotting manipulation — particularly of on-page content, external links, and anchor text) — would be a defining feature of the next decade-plus of search.

It was after Singhal’s presentation above that Eric Schmidt (then Google’s CEO) said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”.

Those who are newer to the industry will likely have experienced some Google updates (such as recent “core updates”) first-hand, and have quite likely heard of a few specific older updates. But “Vince”, which came after “Florida” (the first major confirmed Google update), and rolled out shortly after Schmidt’s pronouncements on brand, was a particularly notable one for favoring big brands. If you haven’t followed all the history, you can read up on key past updates here:

A real reputational threat

As I mentioned above in the AdSense section, there were strong incentives for webmasters to create tons of content, thus targeting the blossoming long tail of search. If you had a strong enough domain, Google would crawl and index immense numbers of pages, and for obscure enough queries, any matching content would potentially rank. This triggered the rapid growth of so-called “content farms” that mined keyword data from anywhere they could, and spun out low-quality keyword-matching content. At the same time, websites were succeeding by allowing large databases of content to get indexed even as very thin pages, or by allowing huge numbers of pages of user-generated content to get indexed.

This was a real reputational threat to Google, and broke out of the search and SEO echo chamber. It had become such a bugbear of communities like Hacker News and StackOverflow, that Matt Cutts submitted a personal update to the Hacker News community when Google launched an update targeted at fixing one specific symptom — namely that scraper websites were routinely outranking the original content they were copying.

Shortly afterwards, Google rolled out the update initially named the “farmer update”. After it launched, we learned it had been made possible because of a breakthrough by an engineer called Panda, hence it was called the “big Panda” update internally at Google, and since then the SEO community has mainly called it the Panda update.

Although we speculated that the internal working of the update was one of the first real uses of machine learning in the core of the organic search algorithm at Google, the features it was modelling were more easily understood as human-centric quality factors, and so we began recommending SEO-targeted changes to our clients based on the results of human quality surveys.

Everything goes mobile-first

I gave a presentation at SearchLove London in 2014 where I talked about the unbelievable growth and scale of mobile and about how late we were to realizing quite how seriously Google was taking this. I highlighted the surprise many felt hearing that Google was designing mobile first:

“Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for search on mobile and tablet devices. Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience.” — Jon Wiley (lead engineer for Google Search speaking on Google+, which means there’s nowhere to link to as a perfect reference for the quote but it’s referenced here as well as in my presentation).

This surprise came despite the fact that, by the time I gave this presentation in 2014, we knew that mobile search had begun to cannibalize desktop search (and we’d seen the first drop in desktop search volumes):

And it came even though people were starting to say that the first year of Google making the majority of its revenue on mobile was less than two years away:

Writing this in 2020, it feels as though we have fully internalized how big a deal mobile is, but it’s interesting to remember that it took a while for it to sink in.

Machine learning becomes the norm

Since the Panda update, machine learning was mentioned more and more in the official communications from Google about algorithm updates, and it was implicated in even more. We know that, historically, there had been resistance from some quarters (including from Singhal) towards using machine learning in the core algorithm due to the way it prevented human engineers from explaining the results. In 2015, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, moved Singhal aside (though this may have been for other reasons), and installed AI / ML fans in key roles.

It goes full-circle

Back before the Florida update (in fact, until Google rolled out an update they called Fritz in the summer of 2003), search results used to shuffle regularly in a process nicknamed the Google Dance:

Most things have been moving more real-time ever since, but recent “Core Updates” appear to have brought back this kind of dynamic where changes happen on Google’s schedule rather than based on the timelines of website changes. I’ve speculated that this is because “core updates” are really Google retraining a massive deep learning model that is very customized to the shape of the web at the time. Whatever the cause, our experience working with a wide range of clients is consistent with the official line from Google that:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover — assuming improvements have been made — until the next broad core update is released.

Tying recent trends and discoveries like this back to ancient history like the Google Dance is just one of the ways in which knowing the history of SEO is “useful”.

If you’re interested in all this

I hope this journey through my memories has been interesting. For those of you who also worked in the industry through these years, what did I miss? What are the really big milestones you remember? Drop them in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

If you liked this walk down memory lane, you might also like my presentation From the Horse’s Mouth, where I attempt to use official and unofficial Google statements to unpack what is really going on behind the scenes, and try to give some tips for doing the same yourself:



SearchLove San Diego 2018 | Will Critchlow | From the Horse’s Mouth: What We Can Learn from Google’s Own Words from Distilled

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!