#me constantly while reading this: *points* social contract theory!

[anthythesis]

the ballad of songbirds and snakes or as I like to call it "10th grade ethics class curriculum: the novel"

[katsucutie]

i hate your guts (m)

pairing: bakugou katsuki x reader genre: smut, humor warnings: smut, swearing (you know the good stuff) overview: class 1-a has this belief that you and katsuki hate each other, though one incident has their minds changed word count: 4.2k author’s note: this was written to fight my writer’s block and i happened to find a psycho-analysis of katsuki which helped somewhat and its quite interesting. anyways...the song choice while writing this was house of cards, also this was written in three days and i tried using any relevant medical terms i’ve learned so far in uni. hope you enjoy!! masterlist | ko-fi

Walking through the azure-rimmed gate you knew the day would be the same. Homeroom for ten minutes then classes back to back with a minor minute break in between, next an oh-so-needed fifty-minute lunch, and finally two classes to end the day. Not that you could complain, heroes in training must earn some type of education.

Though school wasn’t the worst thing invented, you can definitely say occasions in English class were not lackluster with Present Mic as the teacher. Or in math, when Midoriya yells out an inaccurate answer only to be corrected by Yaoyorozu. It's the little moments that bring laughter, or maybe it’s watching someone embarrass themselves in front of a class that's joyful.

And you could never forget the times where Jirou teased Kaminari for short-circuiting.

While all those moments are fun and dandy, 1-A can also be quite the chatterboxes and gossipy, especially when it comes to your feelings towards Bakugou. Believing that your relationship consists of mutual hatred, class 1-A constantly manages to tease both you and the blonde-headed male. Even All-Might manages to separate the two of you during training.

Although you never said anything against the rumors, it's quite humorous to see a school be so wrong in their thoughts. Is it not obvious that the glares the two of you send are not out of anger but endearment? Clearly not to Todoroki who claimed that Midoriya was All-Might’s secret love child, but that's beside the point. Additionally, you’ve yet to hear an accurate hypothesis as to why you and Bakugou would hate each other. Many of the theories revolve around Bakugou’s ‘anger problems’ but honestly, who doesn’t get mad?

Nonetheless, the rumors surrounding your alleged detestation toward the blonde sparked a little prank between you two. Pretending to hate each other until people catch on that you’re dating.

And the joke has been going on for quite a while, four months to be exact. Four months of pretending to hate in front of crowds, yet loving behind closed doors. Four months of experiencing the rush of adrenaline when you sneak around to his dorm room in the late hours of the night. Four months of leaving your friend groups to hang out during lunch.  

Four months of waking up early to walk to class with Bakugou. And don’t forget about four months of the blonde-headed male constantly breaking you away from your thoughts.

“Oi Y/n, break out of that daze and let’s go, we have thirty-minutes before class and I’d like to spend that time not pretending to hate you” Bakugou calls while molding his fingers into yours.

“Oh please, I’m not pretending you know I hate your guts” You smile, leaning into the broad male walking towards homeroom. “Do you think today will be the same?”

“Yes, those idiots could watch us kiss and still think we hate each other, though I can’t complain, their oblivion is better than if they were to pester us about our relationship” he snarks.

Mindlessly nodding in agreement, you and Bakugou wander through the purple-stained floors of U.A., passing by random classrooms, and peering out the glass windows that overlook the campus.

After twenty-five minutes of strolling through the halls, Bakugou and you turn down the corridor leading to class 1-A, while unlocking hands and prepping for your fake and falsely-interpreted loathing glares.

“Today marks day ninety-six of the class believing we hate each other” you whisper.

“They’re hopeless….”

“But if at any point, you want to stop pretending let me know… I wouldn’t mind, jokes are funny but you’re my top priority”

“Is Bakugou Katsuki getting soft on me?”

“No.. shut up-”

“And they're back at it again Ladies and Gentlemen… the feud between Y/n and Bakugou seems everlasting” Kaminari calls sliding open the tall door leading to class 1-A. Way to ruin a cute moment.

“Honestly the two would probably be best friends if they didn’t hate each other, they both like the same things” Oh they wouldn’t believe the interests you two share.

“Yeah, but their personalities are so different, they’re just not meant to be and that’s fine” What a shock your relationship would be then.

“I’m so glad that you’re interested in my ‘relationship’ with Lord Explosion Murder… but I have more important matters to attend to such as earning my education so that I can be a top pro-hero” you remark sliding into your chair. Your comments are never intended to insult your boyfriend, but teasing his choice of a hero name couldn’t hurt anyone.

Waiting for the remaining two minutes for class to start, you check your phone and see a message notification from a familiar contact.

Babe 💗: storage room during lunch?

Quicker than your mind made a decision, your fingers don’t hesitate to press the send button.

You: i’ll bring the key        

----------

Bakugou was a master of three things. Okay maybe more than three, but three traits excel. His talent, his mind, and his ability to use his fingers.

Bakugou’s talent is tremendous and has been able to advance his goals of becoming a pro-hero. He acknowledges that he was born with such an extraordinary quirk, and has a flair for using it. Notwithstanding the male’s breakdown and internal belief that he is inferior to his pre-quirkless childhood friend, Bakugou unceasingly exerts himself to be more than a student with talent.

His mind is magnificent and allowed Bakugou to comprehend multiple topics of interest. Placing third in the class’ midterm exam, it’s evident that he shines in academic settings. And though few peers in 1-A state that Bakugou fails in the social aspect, you claim the opposite. In their eyes Bakugou is brash, however, after spending time with the boy, you have viewed him as self-reflecting, with social skills that others cannot see.  

While brains and talent may all be magnificent qualities of the blonde, nothing beats Bakugou’s ability to use his fingers. Combined with both his talent and his mind, Bakugou has the ability to make both inanimate and living things explode. And that isn’t related to his quirk.

“You’re imagining events that haven’t occurred yet. Am I truly that talented?”

Flushed and blinking in a shocked manner towards the male in front of you, you ask him if his quirk was mind-reading.

“Hmmm… No, but after seeing you so embarrassed I’d love to have such a quirk so that I’d be able to view the thoughts inside that mind of yours, but I was gifted with explosions... You, on the other hand, were blessed with the ability to swap items on your command. A quirk so useful, especially in times like these when I don’t have a key to the storage room”

“Oh please, just admit that you use me to gain entrance into forbidden rooms” You tease, giving Bakugou the janitor’s key to unlock the storage room.

The male chuckles unlocking the door to the storage closet, “Maybe a bit, though you reap the benefits of getting it” Change of thought, maybe he is brash.

Shutting the door behind you two, you finally express your raw emotions towards your boyfriend, engulfing him in a hug.

“I missed you”

“You came over my dorm last night” What an ass, couldn’t he just accept your affection?

“Yeah, but you go to sleep at like eight-thirty, which means I have to leave you dorm before then, and then I’m stuck in my dorm with nobody to talk to until I go to sleep at midnight, that’s about three and a half hours being alone”

“You’re so clingy… it's cute”

“Is there anything else I can do to make you feel less lonely since I go to sleep at like eight-thirty and leave you alone’”

Bashfully looking down at the floor rather than your boyfriend, you mumble your request.

Releasing the hug, Bakugou smirks, poking fun at your diffidence, “With that ask, I don't think you can be shy… Are you sure that's what you truly want?”

Nodding your head you look up to the red-eyed male, taking in his dilated pupils. It's always been him that you’ve desired.

Accepting your form of consent, Bakugou kisses you, enveloping your figure while you sneak your hands around his neck to deepen the embrace. And although the two of you are in a storage closet skipping out on lunch, the feeling of epinephrine dispersing within your bloodstream, inducing fast heart rates, is blissful. A salacious rendezvous with the man you’ve come to love could never hurt anyone… as long as they didn't find out.  

And if one were to catch you two, would they truly stop two aroused students halfway from committing adultery? Would a teacher not be embarrassed if he/she watched as Bakugou hurriedly zips down your green skirt in order to slide his fingers inside of your warmth? Or would someone scamper along hearing the lewd mewls arising from your throat?

“You’re so loud Princess, we have to keep it down or else someone will hear us, okay?”

Yet the person to blame for such noises was Bakugou himself. One could imagine the boy having rough, unmoisturized hands from his explosive quirk, but his inheritance of glycerin allows him to easily travel in and out of you.

“You’re close aren’t you? I can tell. Your walls are contracting at a faster rate and tightening each time I pump my fingers into you. It's really hot too, especially knowing that the world believes you hate my guts when behind the scenes, I rearrange yours”.  

Words cannot describe the pleasure Bakugou exposes you to. A thumb pressed against your clitoris, his middle and ring finger dug past your labia, and you’re unraveling beneath him. He has you under his full control. And how Bakugou feels will determine your release. An untroubled Bakugou can earn you multiple chances of release, whereas the current Bakugou you’re experiencing will rip your attempt at euphoria, despite you being almost there.  

“Katsuki please, I was right there… I’m so close you even said it yourself” You plead, wanting to reach a climax.

“I don’t know… strenuous activities make me tired and I wouldn’t want to upset you with the hour I may fall asleep” Bakugou smirks while tasting his digits, “You taste like caramelized sugar, I wonder where that came about?”

“Suki please, don’t leave me like this”

“It’ll only be for a little while babe, but lunch is almost over, we have to go back to class. I’ll help you out at my dorm alright?”

What more could you do but nod, put back on your skirt, and pretend to hate Bakugou once more in public?

----------

The walk back to class was internally embarrassing. Arousal saturated your underwear, heat filling up between your legs and left you with a foggy mind. You couldn’t imagine pretending to hate Bakugou now when all you could think about was Bakugou hovering above you in his dorm room, aggressively ramming into your hole as you pleaded for mercy. But you’re in school containing students who are not Bakugou to distract you from your misery.

“Y/n pay attention to me, and why do you smell like caramel?” Well shit, is the cat out of the bag?

Looking up at the voice calling, you smile faintly in means of apologizing and mutter an incoherent response to Mina’s question.

“Sorry, and thanks I guess... It might be from the sweets I had during lunch”

“I see, well since you like sugary foods we should go to the bakery today after school, I’m sure the others would like to come too” The pinky bounces brightly.

“I can’t today, sorry! I’m super behind on work and barely understand what's going on in class, let’s go this weekend when I’m free?” What a Lie.

Fortunately, the promise of a raincheck is enough for Mina to back off from the situation and accept your rejection. Today would have been a perfect day to go out with friends, yet the blonde-headed boyfriend of yours decided to be unfair, leaving you to crave his affection. Though, the school day would be over soon enough with only two periods following lunch. And only then would you be able to gain some type of relief.

As if that ideology would be so simple.

Bakugou Katsuki is a man full of pride --rightfully achieved, of course, meaning he knew how and when to push your buttons. Right now being one of those times.

Despite wanting to pay attention in your world language class, Bakugou made it very difficult to do so. Especially knowing that he is the cause of your phone silently vibrating every three minutes in your pocket. He doesn't want you to forget he is the cause of your erotic thoughts. Rather, he’ll keep reminding you that he is controlling your excitement.

However, from the glance across the room, Bakugou didn’t look like the lead in this relationship. His eyes were majorly dilated, with his red iris visually smaller in circumference. Additionally, a prominent cherry hue spread across his cheeks, that one may call flustered from afar. Although, only the two of you understood each other’s physical response towards seduction.

Babe 💗: you look dazed

Babe 💗 : I don’t think that’s the best for someone who wants to become a hero, don't you think?

Babe 💗: this class is so important

Babe 💗: …

Babe 💗 : don’t look at me

Babe 💗: i'm not the teacher

Babe 💗: your so cute trying to ignore these texts

Oh how badly you wanted school to be over

-------------

As the clock hit 2:45 PM, you watch everyone around you hurrying to leave the school and have freedom. And once five minutes go past, 1-A is a semi-empty classroom with two students remaining. Two hormonal, amorous, epinephrine-surged students patiently waiting for their peers to leave the school grounds, so that they can walk to the dorms together in peace.  

Whilst hand-holding may be a shock to onlookers, if they had the capability to read your mind, myocardial infarction would sure to follow. Outstandingly too, if they did not foreshadow the events of you walking within the fourth floor of heights alliance and entering the second room from your left.

“Your room is so homey” You comment. Despite visiting the blonde’s dorm room on multiple occasions, the comforting aura never ceases to relax you.

“I would hope so, I don’t want to be reminded that we’ve been moved from our homes to our school campus in fear of malicious attacks against students”  

“Thanks for that… truly an amazing choice of words” You sarcastically remark. Not everyone needs a reminder of the traumatic incidents students of U.A. have been through, especially when it's clear that students of 1-A (and others) have not received enough therapeutic aid to cope with the events suffered.

One would think that Bakugou of all students would be most affected by trauma, starting from falling victim to the Sludge Villain incident, to being kidnapped by the infamous League of Villains, though he shows the opposite effects. While you cannot see inside the mind of Bakugou and tell if he is extremely traumatized by the incidents and is repressing his memories as a form of coping, you can see what he is physically doing. And at this current moment, you cannot see someone disturbed by his past, but impassioned with the ideas of what is to come.

Tossing your backpack to a discarded corner of Bakugou’s dorm, you throw yourself onto his bed, relishing in the comfort of his bedsheets. You’ve always loved his bed, your favorite moments with him have occurred there. Random naps while cuddling on Saturday afternoon, binge-watching cult-classics after a big exam, or simply having Bakugou’s powerfully built arms wrapped around you like they are now is unforgettable.

“I don’t understand how you’re so built? We go to the same school, attend the same classes and both do athletic training. I mean I’m not complaining because you definitely look good, but it's interesting how my figure compares to yours”

“That's like me asking why you’re so attractive, it's just luck within life, plus I like your figure, it blends perfectly with mine”. A man with such words can only follow with actions that prove it, and the blonde was sure to do so.

Except for when his phone goes off multiple times.

“I think you should check your texts, it may be important”

Halfway sliding off of your body, Bakugou pulls his phone out of his pockets to read his text messages. “It's nothing important, Kirishima just wanted me to join him and the others to go to some bakery since you didn't want to go”

“Oh okay-” Again you were cut off by the sound of his phone going off, however this time, the alert was a long-lasting ring, signaling that Bakugou was receiving a call.

“He’s so persistent, why would I want to go to a bakery when the best dessert is in front of me”

Lightly throwing his phone on the floor of his dorm, Bakugou discards any form of human interaction outside of the bed, focusing his attention on the one he loves.

“You know I really fucking love and care for you?” You do. You fully understand his love for you, from the way his iris shrinks to the rosy pigments formulating on his cheeks when looking at you. And you’ve never once questioned his devoutness towards expressing his adoration for you.

In moments like these, where Bakugou gently strips clothing from your body admiring every crevice, you know the two of you are in love. The boy may come off as an entitled brat, but when push comes to shove, he will bend over backwards trying to make you feel happy.

“You’re so mushy when you're in the feels”

“Oh forgive me for wanting to praise my girlfriend”

“I’m joking, but it is nice to know the feeling is reciprocated”

His silence you took as acknowledgment. ‘I love you too’ was a phrase you didn’t say often, it sounds too forced. Being obligated to say a phrase in return is meaningless when both parties understand each other’s feelings. And it's even more worthless when the actions committed speak louder than words. Bakugou does not need to hear you say ‘I love you’ constantly when he knows you dragging the zipper down of his pants and springing free his cock from the restraints of his underwear means the same thing.

And when you free yourself from the fondling of your boyfriend to meet your lips with the tip of his enraged dick, Bakugou has fallen prey to submission. Having yet to insert the body part into your mouth, you take notice of the male in front of you. Cheeks flushes, head lolled back, visible veins peeking from his sand-colored skin, and light pants as a result of excitement. Hot.  

One kiss to his head and you feel a little twitch. He wouldn’t last long. Understanding that thought you decide to mess with the male, putting half of his length within your mouth and pumping the other half. It was a shame he toyed with you earlier, now he’d face the repercussions. Light squelches filled the quiet air, and Bakugou’s groans got increasingly vocal overtime. The combination forming a sexual melody awaiting to be abruptly paused.

Releasing your lips from the now wet surface of the blonde’s dick, you hear the annoyed groan of the male. “Why’d you stop?”

“I’m sorry were you close?”

“Obviously, but that doesn’t answer my question”

“It’s just that strenuous activities make me tired Suki, and I wouldn’t to make you upset if I accidentally fell asleep”

Tch. The little sound of irritation fell from Bakugou’s mouth, only signaled one thing, rough sex.

“How I’ve come to date such a slutty brat is beyond me. Getting back at me isn’t going to help you in this situation. All you’ll receive is a punishment, though knowing you, you’ll probably enjoy it”  

Although enticed by the proposition, you failed to speak out after being muffled by your boyfriend. Your own skirt which the male had managed to take off earlier now laid scrunched up in your mouth. In addition to that, your arms were now constricted by a gold-rimmed belt.

And while whining in complaint about the new restrictions placed on you, Bakugou alters your kneeling position into one laying beneath him. The primal glare he sends you would signal fear to others, however, you know that the fun is only about to begin.  

Widening your legs apart Bakugou spares no time plunging two fingers into you, stretching the pair apart. Despite being unable to speak, your moans are heard loud enough by your boyfriend to increase his speed. Every sound encouraging the male to continue to berate your walls.

Thinking that the punishment you’ll receive is overstimulation by being one step away from ecstasy, you’re disturbed by the sudden absence of feeling in your core.

“I didn’t say you could come”

Twice today he’d done that. One denial was not enough for him, and that’s when you identified your mistake. Bakugou had the power to reject your advances to climax however many times he’d like. Maybe being a brat today wasn’t the best idea.  

Granted that Bakugou could undeniably be the most ruthless person when it comes to sex, today marked the first time he’d ever advanced into you without warning. The thrusts he implemented assaulting your hole. Even so, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

“My god Y/n, you’re so tight, so perfectly made to take my dick”

“You make it so easy for me to unravel within the warmth of your pussy”

“Fuck I’m so close baby, I’m sure you are too”

He wasn’t wrong. The magnitude of the thrusts presented plus the physical restraints and multiple orgasm denials has sped up your ability to reach a climax. You were a mess underneath the man, hoping that soon he would grant you the gift of release. And by the looks of it, Bakugou would provide you with it soon. His cock inconsistently twitching in your warmth, notifying both you and him that he would come soon.

So when the removal of your gag began, you were not surprised. He was close and needed the extra aid of your uncovered moans to aid him to let go. Bare lewd noises ricocheted from the walls of Bakugou’s dorm, and you became thankful that Kirishima went to a bakery rather than located next door. Though had he been, he would have been overhearing an occasion so pornographic, one would think you’re in the business.

They wouldn’t be fully wrong either. Whilst uploading an adult video while training to be pro-heroes sounds absurd, Bakugou has no problem taping to two of you in the act. It may be the idea of possibly getting the video leaked or a similar exhibitionist-like kink, but the blonde constantly acts to videotape during sex.

“This would be perfect on video. The noises you make before you come are so fucking hot I’d replay them until the end of time”

Yet Bakugou is gravely mistaken. Yes, the noises you exhale are angelic, but compared to the rugged groan he calls while releasing his load in you is divine, and never fails in making you follow suit. So when you recognize that tone in addition to the feeling of warmth coating the inside of your walls, you have no choice but to mirror his actions.

“You’re so perfect” He states, slipping himself from your cunt and delivering pecks to your lips while he unbuckles his belt from your wrists. Post-sex always has Bakugou sappy, but how could you complain.  

Wrapping your freed arms around his neck, you pull the male closer to your embrace while nuzzling your nose into his neck. You felt the rapid pace of his heartbeat begin to slow down.

“Are you guys done, because I still haven’t received a response from Bakugou about if he wanted to go to the bakery or not?” What the fuck.

“Did you not press decline when answering Kirishima’s phone?”

“I thought I did…”

“Is that a no or?”

“Of course it's a fucking no, and don’t tell anyone else what you heard. Why were you even listen-” He hung up.

“You think we can go another day pretending to hate each other?”

“Nope… he definitely told the entire class”

“That's a shame, it was fun having them think I hate your guts”

“Awe how tragic… now get up so we can clean you off, heroes in training don't get UTIs”

How sweet.

----------

The trek to school the next day seemed no different than the past. You woke up early to walk to class with Bakugou and strolled the corridors. Only this time while sauntering into homeroom, nobody greeted the couple at the door, rather class 1-A smiled awkwardly as you held hands walking to your seats. Although you wouldn’t have known the reason for the tension in the classroom had Kaminari not jokingly mumble to Sero that he would’ve never expected the blonde to be an exhibitionist.

“Hm, if I recall correctly, I said not to tell anyone”

“I’m sorry my phone was on speaker when I called you” Great.

[shaymcsudonim]

Malevolency

A rant on psychology and wild speculation on the motives of the Dark Triad.

More under the cut.

(Trigger Warnings for trying to find good qualities of fictional mass-murderers)

The dark triad as Personality Traits, and the Dark Triad’s personality traits.

Part 1: Selfishness, Callousness, Button-Pushing.

I took no psychology classes whatsoever in school, and therefore was completely blindsided when I learned that the phrase ‘Dark Triad’ is a psych term. These three personality traits (self-centeredness, sociopathy, and manipulativeness) are called ‘dark’ because they are thought to be particularly malevolent.

Specifically, as the fandom has already deduced, Black Clover’s Dark Triad has Dante as Narcissism, Xenon as Psycopathy, and Vanica as Machiavellianism.

Like most things in psychology, this strikes me as complete and utter bullshit. Personality traits are just that: traits. A trait is merely a descriptor; it holds no moral value.

Narcissism, for example, means that someone is self-centered. This could mean that someone with this trait is monstrously selfish, since they might only care about their own desires. However, what of someone who cares primarily about their reputation? Or about their own adherence to a moral code? Or an artist who only cares about their art and how it reflects on themselves? Preoccupation with the self doesn’t necessarily equate to positive or negative behavior.

Sociopathy, as the second trait, primarily implies a lack of empathy. But, in all honestly, if someone is only a good person because they can mirror neurons to simulate the feelings of others… then they aren’t really a good person in the first place. Empathy as a morality chain fails when empathy fails, especially when combined with xenophobia. Would sociopathy potentially make it harder to learn helpful social habits? Perhaps. Or, a lack of empathy could lead to a more considered and logical approach in determining what is owed to other people, an approach which would not fail with faltering emotions. After all, Agape, the highest form of love as reckoned by the ancient Greeks, was characterized by the presence of caring and the lack of emotion.

The third trait, Manipulation, is probably the most neutral of the three. After all, being able to read people and predict and/or guide their behavior is a valuable skill for anyone. If a school principal, for example, is skilled at reigning in the behavior of their students, through positive and negative reinforcement, we would call them a ‘Good Leader’ rather than a ‘Manipulator’ but it mostly comes down to the same thing. A con man is a ‘Deceiver.’ A showman is merely ‘working the crowd.’ Social manipulation itself is merely a tool, and can be employed for any ends, moral or immoral.

So, to summarize, the so-called ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits are not inherently moral or immoral, but rather descriptors of various personality styles found among characters of any given archetype.

Part 2: Dante, Xenon, Vanica.

Okay, so I’ve mentioned this before, but the Dark Triad have not met the expectations that I had for them as villains. Specifically, they show more heroic traits than I would have guessed.

That brief flash that we got of Yuno’s infancy in the Spade Kingdom offered a glimpse at the young Dark Trio. Dante, Vanica, and Xenon were high-ranking soldiers who worked together. They’re wildly unpopular, because of their violent methods. Yuno’s parents and those loyal to them hold the three siblings in contempt.

Honestly, I suspect that this might just be garden path foreshadowing. There is an incredibly strong possibility that the Spade Royals are evil. (They sent the Dark Triad to crush a rebellion. Why was there a rebellion? What policies were they rebelling against?)

Not evil in the sense that the King and Queen are outwardly malicious or unkind to most of their underlings, no. And, of course, they both love Yuno and are doting parents.

However, those traits say jack-shit about the Spade-King and -Queen’s moral character.

The fact that the Zogratis siblings are relatively young, that they work together at the same rank despite being related, doing a job they’re absolutely apathetic about with as much gratuitous violence as possible… to me, that hints at some sort of conscripted service.

Clearly the Spade Kingdom is aware of demons, as it mentions that two of the demons from the current arc used to be humans from the Spade kingdom. I would consider it a strong possibility that Nacht learned the Devil Binding ritual in the Spade Kingdom, or at least that the ritual itself is a Spade Kingdom technique.

I bring this up to say this: there is a strong possibility that the Zogratis Siblings were gang-pressed into becoming devil hosts for the benefit of their kingdom, with the threat of their siblings being killed if any one of them rebelled.  

Because, while they certainly seem to have been twisted by their life experiences, the Zogratis siblings show far more compassion than I anticipated, towards each other, towards their enemies, and towards their devils.

When they form their plans to take over the continent, the siblings are able to do so without egos clashing or jealousy over power differentials among themselves (when Vanica, at least, could draw our fewer percentage points of Megicula’s power than Dante could of Lucifero’s). When Xenon saved Dante from Yami, he cradled him in a horrifying bone cage, instead of carrying him by impaling his limbs as he did to Yami and Vangeance. It’s subtle, but I don’t get that undercurrent of hostility towards each other that I expected to see before the time-skip.

When talking to their enemies, Vanica remains relatively hostile, but Dante and Xenon almost seem sympathetic, at times. Dante tells Asta that they should be able to understand each other because they’re both devil hosts, Xenon tells Yuno that he’s not weak, he’s just facing an overwhelmingly strong opponent.

In terms of their devils, we haven’t seen much of how Xenon operates, but Dante and Vanica seem much more cooperative and friendly than I ever would have guessed. For example, Vanica said that she cursed Loropechika ‘for Megicula,’ not in exchange for anything, or under threat, but presumably simply because the demon asked. Not only that, but Vanica doesn’t seem distressed in the least when Megicula possesses her. The two of them even have a friendly conversation, where Vanica explains her desire to change plans, Megicula asks clarifying questions, an accord is reached, and Megicula even throws out a parting compliment. The two of them are clearly drift-compatible, despite their obvious personality differences. In that same vein, Lucifero and Dante speak in a cordial, straightforward manner, though we only see a single conversation between them. (There is also the fact that Lucifero didn’t seek out a different host after Dante was defeated).

And so, this brings to my mind my current theory for why the Zogratis Siblings went berserk and massacred the spade royals and most of the palace guard:

The Dark Triad were considered sacrificial soldiers for the sake of the Spade Kingdom’s prosperity. Their colleagues and superiors viewed them as dead soldiers walking, and treated them with all the courtesy they were thought to deserve (ie none). The Zogratis siblings were isolated and kept under rigid control, to keep them in line.

However, the High Ranked Devils that they hosted reached out to them in genuine partnership, which possibly even turned into friendship.

Various members of the Dark Triad have stated that they’re enacting their plan because they want to fight whatever humans survive in a post-apocalyptic demon world, but I’d bet that a large part of their motives also involve freeing their friends from the afterworld.

Are the Zogratis siblings evil? Yes, I’d say so. After all, good qualities don’t erase their crimes: Dante slaughtered his liege Lord and most of his colleagues, Xenon massacred half the Golden Dawn, and Vanica cursed who knows how many people at Megicula’s behest.

But I expected the Dark Triad to be very different people than they are. I thought that they’d be siblings in name only, constantly fighting and jockeying for power, looking to usurp each other or push each other down.

Instead, they seem to care for each other.

I expected the Dark Triad to be constantly at odds with their demons, contracts held together by duct tape and spite, each only biding their time before stabbing each other in the back.

Instead, they seem to understand the value of teamwork.

And, it’s just, if this is what they look like, when they’ve fallen so far as to work for the virtual extinction of their own species. What were they like before the Spade Kingdom broke them?

I could very well be wrong, but we’ve gotten so little from the Dark Triad’s perspective that something horrific is almost certainly waiting in the wings. 

Especially after Nacht said he didn’t care what their motives were. Nacht hates redemption arcs, and thinks anyone who has ever made a mistake deserves the harshest punishment possible. He seems to think that most of the Black Bulls are irredeemable, describing them in harsh, unforgiving terms, when we know them to be good people. 

And the Dark Triad, while they most certainly aren’t good people... individuals like them don’t usually develop into misanthropic extremists in a vacuum. Something drove them to make the choices they did, and I’d bet that a large part of it had to do with Spade Kingdom Society as it functioned under the Royals. 

We’ll see how the rest of the arc pans out, I guess.

[qqueenofhades]

Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which  is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: January 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of January 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

It seems that Rachel Riley is quite smart at maths but a complete moron at anything else, what with her accusing Noam Chomsky of antisemitism in spite of the fact that Chomsky is a little bit Jewish, before following it up by encouraging her far-right Twitter followers to dogpile onto anyone voicing different opinions to her - which mainly involved a 16-year old girl bearing the brunt of it.  However she wasn’t finished there, as when she was rightly being criticised for encouraging her followers to dogpile onto people she then went whinging to the press about being bullied by left-wing trolls before announcing she needed personal security for when she was attending Countdown tapings, which sounds uncannily similar to the same stunt Laura Kuenssberg pulled a couple of years ago

Starting the year with a bang we had Chris Grayling first try and defend the Seaborne Freight farce by saying he was supporting up-and-coming British business (while omitting the parts about them being owned by the brother of a significant Tory donor, or not having any ships or trading history, let alone the fact the contract wasn’t even put out to tender) and followed that up by claiming the rail fare hikes are entirely the fault of the unions and definitely nothing to do with shareholder dividends or years of rail services taking the piss with fare hikes on January 2nd every year.  Of course, Grayling being Grayling, he also helped out the Britait debate by saying that a second referendum shouldn’t take place because if the result came back in support of Remain it would go against The Will Of The People™ - which apparently said people willingly voting to remain wouldn’t be

It didn't help Grayling that those checking the Seaborne Freight website found that their Ts & Cs were from the template used when setting up a website for a takeaway food outlet, the timetable for services was blank (and, for some reason, in Latin), while their privacy page had forgotten that the fields marked [Business Name] are supposed to be filled with the name of the business using the website

Overly sensitive snowflake Piers Moron Morgan spent a hell of a lot of time and energy yelling from the rooftops how appalling it was that Greggs are selling vegan sausage rolls, which is apparently the downfall of humanity as we know it and definitely not the hourly cry for attention from an attention-seeking lunatic - and while some claimed it was a stunt because he and Greggs share a PR agency, that theory appears to have been ever so slightly undermined by him then spouting off about McDonalds selling vegan Happy Meals

It’s funny how James Goddard demonstrated just how much of a difference a day makes, with him threatening Anna Soubry and Owen Jones on January 7th and bellowing at police officers that if they so much as touched him he’d start a a war...yet on January 8th he was bawling his eyes out on Twitter because his Facebook and PayPal accounts had been terminated

Lying (through his teeth) in front of a tractor Boris Johnson claimed he never mentioned Turkey at any point during the EU Referendum campaign - and when confronted with his numerous comments about Turkish immigrants flocking into the UK if the country voted Remain by Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick, he ran away to hide like an utter coward

Proving that gaslighting is the in thing at the BBC, Director General Tony Hall stated in an interview with the Financial Times that there is no need to discipline Andrew Neil for referring to Carole Cadwalladr as a “mad cat woman” as he had apologised - except for the fact that, while it may be plausible that Neil apologised to the BBC, there has not been a public apology for his comments

Sticking with the BBC, it took just two editions of Question Time before Fiona Bruce showed her true colours as she spent ten minutes making jokes about Diane Abbott (including suggesting that she only became Shadow Home Secretary because she once slept with Jeremy Corbyn) prior to one edition which Abbott was a guest on, and for the remainder of the episode constantly talked over Abbott while letting the other guests speak uninterrupted, including allowing Isabel Oakeshott to not just make a patently false statement but use said patently false statement to attack Abbott.  It wasn’t helped that when the BBC finally got around to admitting fault almost two weeks later, their statement actually said it was a joke - you know, like the school bully tries to claim when they get caught

Oh boy, there were so many triggered manbabies were up in arms about a Gillette advert for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, being a toxic dickhead isn’t any way to behave - to which they responded by acting like a bunch of toxic dickheads throwing a temper tantrum all over social media not seen since Nike featured Colin Kaepernick in an ad campaign

I’m going to assume AnonymousQ1776 thought they were being really, really clever when posting that video clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coupled with their sneering comment that made them sound uncannily like a teenage edgelord who doesn't know what communism is but throws the word around a lot.  I’m also going to assume they weren’t happy when the stunt backfired on them by not only making Ocasio-Cortez look like a normal human being who does normal things, but doing so also reopened the can of worms about what Brett Kavanaugh was up to when he was younger...

Middle England’s favourite edgelord Rod Liddle obviously needed to be extra quote-unquote provocative this month after using his column in The Sun to suggest that what Britain needs is a new political party that represents traditional values - which means neither Muslims nor the entire LGBT spectrum are not allowed

Just when you thought John Humphreys couldn’t sound any more like a pompous windbag with the credibility of a arthritic toad, he only goes to suggest that the Republic of Ireland should rejoin the UK - because who gives a toss about centuries of history or the minor inconvenience of 92% of irish people preferring to remain in the EU when Radio 4′s most jumped-up presenter suggests they swallow their pride and return to the warm chokehold of the British Empire? 

It appeared The Daily Star had a real scoop when they printed an interview with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in which he made scathing comments about the “snowflake generation” and how they were “looking for reasons to be offended” - that is until Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson issued a statement saying that not only did he not say those things, but he also never gave that interview

It seems The Board of Deputies of British Jews never got around to reading The Crucible judging by their going Full Baddiel and accusing Tottenham fans of antisemitism and, in the same statement, said they should follow the model of Chelsea fans - yes, the same Chelsea fans who have subjected Spurs fans to songs about Hitler and gas chambers for decades, who just so happen to be under investigation by UEFA for their anti semitic chanting during a Europa League match against Vidi in December

This month’s worst case of Trump Derangement Syndrome comes from Sarah Huckabee Sanders after she said that God wanted Donald Trump to become President in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network

Lucky for Lara Kollab there’s nothing in the hippocratic oath forbidding being an anti semitic bigot on Twitter.  On the other hand, there certainly was in the employment contract at the hospital she worked at, which is why they fired her

Somehow the British Army paid £1.5m on an recruitment ad campaign that was so successful that it led to members of the army quitting when finding out their photos were used to recruit “Snow flakes" (sic) and “Me me me millennials” - but that didn’t stop Gavin Williamson claiming it was “a powerful call to action” (rather than “bloody patronising”) while James Cleverly mouthed off like an idiot on Twitter in support because mouthing off like an idiot on Twitter is all that somebody who makes their surname fair game on a regular basis like James Cleverley knows how to do

It took a while but Jake Paul finally found a way to reclaim his crown of Most Odious Paul Brother by hitting upon a loot box scheme to encourage his viewers to, in effect, gamble - because apparently he (and Ricegum) only paid attention to the part where the likes of Electronic Arts were making money hand over fist when they were shoving loot boxes in all their games, but didn’t bother listening when various gambling commissions began looking into the practise

To prove my point James Cleverly took it upon himself to take to Twitter and sneer “You do realise that it’s not a documentary” when I, Daniel Blake was airing on TV - because it's better to score points on Twitter than admit that a UN report late last year was damning of the Tory government’s treatment of their less well-off citizens, isn’t it?

Trying to explain away his dickheadishness saw Wayne Hennessey claim he wasn’t doing a Nazi salute in a photo that happened to be taken by German teammate Max Meyer, he was actually waving at somebody - and the reason he had his finger on his top lip wasn’t the well-known mimicry of Hitler’s ‘tache but he was putting his hand to his mouth so somebody on the other side of the room could hear him.  For some strange reason nobody was convinced...

Attention-seeking loon Laura Loomer didn’t learn from the humiliation conga line that was her so-called protest at Twitter HQ judging by her protest against illegal immigration that involved her climbing over the fence around Nancy Pelosi’s property and setting up a stall on Pelosi’s lawn - at which point she appears to have forgotten what she was protesting about and instead kept yelling for Pelosi to respond to her, even though anyone with C-SPAN would’ve told her Pelosi was currently in the Senate

In order to promote her UK tour Azealia Banks thought the best idea was to vomit a long string of invective about the Irish on her social media all because she got irked by one Aer Lingus flight attendant

Can somebody tell Bill Maher that he doesn’t make himself sound more correct every time he regurgitates the “adults shouldn’t read comics” rant he first brought it up in the wake of Stan Lee’s death?  Because it appears nobody has

Out of curiosity, is Gregory Prytyka Jr. still popping over here in an attempt to find material to try and attack me with because they can’t handle the fact I called them out for their tedious shitposting, or have they crawled back under the rock they usually live under?

And finally, harrumphing to himself in a way that everyone can hear (although they wish they couldn’t) is Donald Trump and his banquets that look suspiciously like those given by the megalomaniacal villain of Kingsmen, continuing to throw a diplomatic temper tantrum over a wall he said Mexico would pay for

[bimboficationblues]

I'm technically new to all this political stuff, so I hope you can help me out! - How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad? Why is the US also bad, and how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a "free country" and that we "at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest", etc. I'm very bad with words, I'm just a dumb kid. Sorry for bothering, and thank you. (:

I will answer these questions, but first off, I would say - read, listen, think. Ultimately it’s better if you can develop your own conclusions through a mutual dialogue and learning process with others rather than getting your talking points entirely from others, especially on a social media platform. But if you want resources or recommendations from others, Tumblr can be useful, and I’m happy to provide if you want.

As for answering your questions, it really depends: who is the person you’re talking to, and what do you want out of the conversation? Not everybody has the same interests or concerns or values, and sometimes they’re intractable for whatever reason. So there are other factors that should be taken into account. If you’re just trying to “win” a discussion, I don’t personally think that’s a worthwhile use of time - but if you are trying to convince someone interpersonally or just get better at clarifying your own perspective for the future, that could be valuable.

So, answering your questions under the cut:

How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad?

A) Capitalism stifles human freedom, and does so in both passive and active forms. This seems counterintuitive because capitalism is peddled as the fulfillment of human freedom (by way of innovation and freedom of choice - Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have claimed that so-called “economic freedom” is a necessary condition for political freedoms), so bear with me.

Passive forms: In order to live under capitalism, most people have to work - and for that matter, they have to tailor skills and interests to be rewarded on the labor-market. Furthermore, since capitalism is predicated on the principle of private property, some kind of state is necessary to enforce that principle through the law, and the state and law are blatantly forms of social control (see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism for more info on this). As a Christian myself, this is the essence of idolatry. The capitalist world-system was made by humans, ostensibly to serve human needs, but is both bad at serving those needs in many ways (for reasons to be explained below) and uses us as the fodder for its self-perpetuation! 

And this generates alienation. There is nothing necessarily “wrong” with depending on other people - humans are social creatures and are themselves influenced by the conditions under which they live no matter what those conditions are. But when your labor and the product of your labor benefits others far better than it sustains you, when you are pushed to view all other people as competitors, when you are subjected to various forms of interpersonal and structural domination (detailed below), this produces quite a bit of psychological distress. (Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia touch on these in different ways.)

Active forms: Historically, in order to get people to be wage laborers, they had to be forced to do so - in England, which is generally regarded as the birthplace of capitalist modernity, laws were established to oblige people to work for a certain period and punish them if they didn’t. Similar legislation cropped up in Germany and France. And, of course, there was also the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the abuse and exploitation of indigenous populations throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, the confinement of women to the household for free labor. Though not all contemporary evils are the result of capitalism, they have all been shaped by capitalism. Primordial prejudices and mistreatment of “aliens” has been around for a long time, but anti-black racism and “scientific” racism developed out of the economic functions of slavery and capitalist development; though patriarchy predates capitalism considerably, it has been absorbed and reproduced by capitalism’s dynamics. 

One of the common selling points for capitalism is the voluntary character of the contracts, but again, I don’t think it’s a meaningful choice when your other options are “starve” and “beg.” But let’s grant that people enter into voluntary employment contracts to sustain themselves. Within those contracts, bosses behave like dictators, and this is a pattern of both small businesses and large corporations precisely because they want to get as much work and value out of you as they can in order to make a profit. (Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, while not about interpersonal domination by capitalists and employers, has a great chapter on the subject - “Capital’s Universalizing Tendency.”)

Now, although the standard of living and wages for American workers has been rising for a long time (only recently stagnating despite the growth in productivity, again the result of the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s), we have seen the most brutal forms of exploitation and domination displaced to other places - Southeast Asia, China, India, and Latin America being the most prominent cases. And still, as the article linked above demonstrates, there are lots of forms of interpersonal domination still going on in an American context.

B) Capitalism is anti-democratic. The concentration of wealth into a select few hands, and the associated political and social power that has become attached to greater social wealth, means that wealthier people have greater access to political power and influence. The Koch Brothers are probably the best example of this, though lobbying in general is an expression of this function. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one because I think it’s the least compelling argument personally even though I agree with it, but it is a popular and common one!

C) Capitalism is also fundamentally irrational. I think this is true in the way that we think about value and the way capitalism generates regular crises, but I’ll just use one example.

The convenient thing about money, as both Locke and Marx point out, is that it is potentially infinite unlike other resources. There is the possibility of limitless growth, of maximum expansion - which is why the capitalist mode of production began in Western Europe and the United States and has since spread around the world. (There is, of course, no such thing as limitless growth for anything, except perhaps cancer.) But capitalism takes this possibility as gospel and as a result, will do anything to maximize growth. 

Sometimes those things are good for working people (farm subsidies enabling cheap food - though without those subsidies there would probably be a famine from capitalists not investing capital in food production). More often they aren’t, whether that’s mistreatment of workers, lowering or stagnating wages, destruction of the environment, or outright warfare. Plus, because there is a limit to natural desires or even luxury desires, capitalists have to constantly concoct new desires for us to latch onto, which is why so much money is sunk into advertising.And this is not merely the result of the ethical whims or personal behaviors of individual capitalists (though those do factor in), but the necessary and logical result of a mode of production that has an internal logic of constant, endless reproduction.

Why is the US also bad? how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a “free country” and that we “at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest”, etc.

This is, paradoxically, an easier argument to make empirically but a harder case to sell because American nationalism and American exceptionalism are pretty ubiquitous, and they’ve only gotten more intractable in the past four or five decades. It really depends on what you mean by “bad,” anyway. On one level, the United States is not that different from any other state historically (since they are usually founded through violence and domination) or contemporarily (since they all act in their own geopolitical interests, and that often means fucking other people over undeservedly).

But, on another level: The United States- were built on indigenous and later African slavery- regularly violated treaties or used duplicitous means to gain access to Native American land for investment and expansion purposes- deployed genocidal tactics and sexual violence against Native Americans throughout the expansion process (especially in California and the Southeast)- fabricated a reason to wage war on Mexico to seize territory from it- botched Reconstruction after the end of formal slavery while still allowing black Americans to be abused and exploited and criminalized en masse- had racial policies that the Nazis found inspirational- engaged in imperialist warfare in the Caribbean at the turn of the century- overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii for economic reasons- nuked a Japanese civilian target (TWICE) when their surrender was already in the cards- used its new hegemony to start launching coups against (mostly democratically elected and socialist-leaning) governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile)- held the rest of the world in a hostage situation alongside the Soviet Union by threatening nuclear annihilation- waged war on Vietnam after violating the agreement to allow democratic elections and unification to take place- illegally bombed Cambodia and enabled the Khmer Rouge to gain traction- financed Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union that were the precursors of al-Qaeda- engaged in Iran-Contra, basically the shadiest thing in existence, and failed to deliver any real consequences to the people involved - supported and continues to support dictators (Batista, Saddam Hussein, etc.) as well as death squads (right-wing paramilitaries in Latin America)- has the highest incarceration rate in the world- has massively expanded the surveillance and police apparatuses since 9/11- invaded Iraq under false pretenses and let Islamic State develop out of the chaos

This is just a minor selection. And to top it all off, the Constitution of the United States is designed to make government as dysfunctional and anti-democratic as possible. The powers of the President have been perpetually expanding for a long time, and the Supreme Court is such a shamelessly broken, unaccountable institution that I cannot believe we take it seriously. The Supreme Court’s rulings on free speech have been up-and-down, often determined by war and nationalism, and the social backlash and hostility to political protest every time the United States goes to war suggests that even with the freedom of assembly granted by the Constitution, nationalism takes priority over freedoms.

This post is long enough, but if you (or anyone else) want me to elaborate on anything I’ve said here, feel free to ask.

[startaryat]

So, I just finished Cyberpunk 2077.

A lot of folks are riffing on this game because of the bugs, so I may as well get that out of the way.  Yes, there are bugs.  Yes, they are frustrating.  Yes, I've had to reload once or twice because of one.  Finally, yes, there were some quests I was unable to finish because of them.  In the end, it reminded me of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.  You know what people don't talk about from VtM: B?  The bugs.  They'll get a passing mention, but more people go on to talk about how the game's story riveted them... So...  The story... Cyberpunk 2077 made me realize something rather harsh about the Cyberpunk genre as a whole:  It is VERY racist against the Japanese.  The core of the genre was built when the Japanese looked like an economic powerhouse.  The TV Trope for it is called "Japan Takes Over the World."  In the late 70s, throughout the 80s and early 90s, it really looked like Japan was going to buy everything.  Despite that not looking like the case anymore, the fear people had of a world like that, that global society would be forcefully regressed to having to endure the society of Edo Period for some strange reason, inundates every facet of the Cyberpunk genre.  You can see it in Cyberpunk 2020, the tabletop RPG 2077 is based on.  You can see it in the game's contemporaries, like Shadowrun.  You can see it in the writing of William Gibson, such as Johnny Mnemonic, and even hints of it crop up in The Matrix or Strange Days.  Cyberpunk 2077 hits you with it full-force, as one of the major factions is a Megacorporation that, according to the game's backstory, has largely taken over the world and is very, VERY Japanese, replete with their founder being a WW2 veteran with a chip on his shoulder about the Nuclear Bombs and likes to wear traditional Japanese clothing, adhere to Japanese traditions and looks down his nose at everybody who isn't Japanese.  *sigh*.  You wind up having to deal with his bodyguard some and he's constantly complaining about people's lack of honor or that the food sucks and how much he wishes he was back in Japan, where people are civilized...  Never mind that's not how Japan was at the time the genre got its feet under it...  Never mind that's not how Japan is now... But I digress. The first bulk of the game is the sidequests.  There are all sorts of random fights you can get into, sometimes even saving the random passersby.  The city's police wire you bounties for the thugs you kill and bonuses for resolving the issues ("resolving" here meaning "Loot the bag everybody was fighting over.").  Some also involve a little more searching to find out where the rest of the loot is.  Read the little notes you pick up while doing these, and they help paint the picture of what you just interrupted.  Sometimes you're stopping a mugging, sometimes you arrive just after one.  Sometimes you're avenging a labor union that just got slaughtered, sometimes you're diving into a nearby harbor to pull the loot from a van the bad guys accidentally remote-controlled over the side of the pier. The second bulk of the game is the contracts and gigs, stuff your fixers (people who find you work) hire you to do.  These are dotted all over the map like the random fights.  These missions are often just more hardcore versions of the sidequests, but a few stand out for encouraging better tactical and strategic thinking.  Usually, these will exercise your stealth skills, or your out-of-the-box thinking (such as liberally exploiting your ability to hack the nearby electronics).  Most, though, have a much more decent story attached to them.  A few stand out in my memory...  One, you have to get a recording from a location.  The people who have it are editing it, and others, into essentially a high-tech snuff film.  Worse, it's a father-son operation doing this, and the more you dig into what's going on, the more horrifying the situation.  I normally don't inflict violence on these digital sprites when I'm playing these games, but this time I could tell the old man was clearly stalling for time...  So I shot him.  Reading the note I picked up off of him...  I have no regrets.  Dude contracts a gang to protect him while he edits recordings and distribute the product.  Said gang is a group of people so heavily mechanized, you can barely tell where the body ends and the machine begins.  The note is a recorded conversation between him and one of the gang's leaders, with the gangleader being thoroughly disgusted with the old man's behavior.  Somebody who WANTED to be inhuman was disturbed by this guy's inhumanity.  Chilling. Finally, the game's main stories provide some of the more interesting moments in the game, but then, they should.  Like most games, the main story is where the most effort has gone.  Some of the most fun I have is working with the nomads, helping one get her stuff back (and some revenge on the guy who took it from her), rescuing their leader from a rival gang, even pulling a heist and driving a hover tank.  The other main quests involve getting revenge for a killed contact on behalf of one of her friends and trying to clear the air about the botched job that kicks the whole game off, with each one having its own share of difficult choices and a staggering reminder of the consequences of engaging in such actions.  It's stuff that can actually make you stop and think. There are a couple odd "social" missions that are mostly you talking to some of the people.  The two I found were a doomsayer out near the first Ripperdoc the game introduces you to ("Ripperdoc" read: surgeon who installs your cybernetic upgrades, like a blend of cosmetic surgeon, physician and mechanic) and a talking vending machine that's a little too smart for its own good.  The doomsayer is an interesting interpretation of such a character, with him eventually pointing out that one of his implants has been picking up transmissions, leaving you to infer that he has trouble parsing the information he's getting, so he rants it out to people in what seems like conspiracy theory nonsense.  However, he does send you somewhere to deal with one of the things he's heard...  And you find he's not entirely bonkers...  The talking vending machine, on the other hand, is probably a statement on where talk bots and data collection algorithms are going to lead future advertising, and it's creepy and unusually heartwarming. |And all the while you've got Keanu Reeves talking in your ear, his low tone reminding you of Johnny Mnemonic, his clothing a dark reprise of Ted Logan, his cybernetic arm a reminder of Neo...  Though his pistol handling in the segments where you play through his memories would probably make John Wick shake his head in irritation.  Seriously, could anybody ELSE have played this character?  This was absolutely perfect casting, and Reeves does an excellent job of playing this rocker-turned-mercenary-turned-revolutionary-turned-digital ghost. All in all, it's a fun game.  It's not a massive, revolutionary thing, no, but I enjoyed it all the same.  It had its moments, like Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines did, like Fallout 3 did, like Fallout New Vegas did, like a lot of our favorites do, and like any good piece of media does.  It's not perfect, but I had fun.

[wp-yahoo-style-1042-yahoopa-blog]

The Non-Kim Kardashians of Instagram Want #Ad Regulation

Kim Kardashian West recently posted a photo on her Instagram promoting a tea product, but she didn’t label the post as an advertisement. (Photo: Instagram/Kim Kardashian)

In an Instagram story Kim Kardashian posted this week, she knelt to take a mirror selfie while proudly holding a package of Flat Tummy Tea (a tea cleanse that promises to increase your metabolism and energy while flattening your tummy). “My go-to this summer,” she wrote of the product. The post was clearly an advertisement for the brand, but nowhere on the story did Kim write, “#ad,” “#sponsored,” or “#spon.” Nowhere did she make it clear that she was likely being paid to post that image.

A few days later, Kim’s sister Kourtney Kardashian posted a similar mirror selfie to Instagram, also while holding packets of Flat Tummy Tea. Her caption, though, differed from Kim’s: “#ad Summer vibes on @flattummytea,” she wrote; clearly signaling to followers that the post was part of a contracted deal with the company.

The discrepancy between the two posts — labeling something as an ad, or not — might not matter much to the Kardashians, but it does matter to other Instagrammers. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is paying close attention and making sure ads posted on social pages are appropriately labeled. But when posts made by celebrity influencers are not held to the same FTC standards, it causes confusion for all. Smaller scale influencers in particular, who are trying to get skin in the game, run into confusion with respect to how to avoid legal issues on their own pages. Particularly when someone like Kim seemingly faces no penalty for posting a Flat Tummy Tea ad without the appropriate hashtag.

#ad Summer vibes on @flattummytea ???? Feeling sooo good right now, all the best summers start on detox! (P.S. It’s on sale today, go get yourself a pack!)

A post shared by Kourtney Kardashian (@kourtneykardash) on Jun 21, 2017 at 4:00pm PDT

The FTC requires social media advertisements to be clearly labeled, stating that “material connections” between influencers and brands should be “clearly and conspicuously disclosed.” This is so followers know whether or not what they’re seeing is an advertisement.

The rules surrounding paid partnerships are still nebulous though, and all the ambiguity leaves smaller influencers — the non-Kim and Kourtneys of the world — a little confused about how to disclose promoted products on their pages.

“From the beginning, it’s been a murky topic,” says 24-year-old Erin Ann Cullen who moonlights as an influencer when she’s not working her e-commerce day job. Cullen has worked with roughly 40 brands over the last two years to promote products to her 2,400 or so followers.

I am humbled that @MadeWithCode nominated me as a modern day female superhero! In partnership with @WonderWomanFilm, I was asked to share my superpower with my Instagram community. I believe my superpower is enthusiastic encouragement. I aim to be a person who constantly lifts others up, especially women & members of the LGBTQ+ community. I seek to positively affirm individuals who bravely utilize their voice in these difficult times, inspire others with their unique gifts, & create beauty in different forms. Share YOUR superpower with #MadeWithCode & tag me so I can celebrate your talents too! ????⚡️????????????⚡️???? PS – I shared this photo specifically because I always feel like Wonder Woman in a pantsuit. Also, I wore this rainbow floral set to both @NYFW & the D.C. @WomensMarch. Finally, this photo only exists because my dear female friends helped me that day; @SMLancet rose early in the morning to braid my hair for Fashion Week & @LakshSarkar (a super talented illustrator who everyone should follow!) snapped this photo of me smiling at a model who had just SLAYED on the runway. Women supporting women is my greatest joy & greatest source of power. ???????????? #STYLESILIKE #WONDERWOMANFILM #MADEWITHCODE

A post shared by ERIN ANN CULLEN | STYLESILIKE (@erinanncullen) on Jun 4, 2017 at 8:27pm PDT

“It’s always a concern in the back of my mind. I think most influencers make an effort to follow the rules, but it’s hard to know what the rules even are and if we’re following them correctly. And I make it a priority to tag brands and utilize hashtags, but does the brand I’m working with even know what the FTC guidelines are?”

These guidelines are becoming of more importance as small influencers, or “micro-influencers,” generally a person with less than 100,000 followers, become more attractive to fashion houses and brands for their highly-engaged audiences who fully trust what they promote. HelloSociety, a social media marketing firm, tracks micro-influencer reach, and has found that influencers with fewer than 30,000 followers are incredibly powerful, despite reaching a smaller audience.

Research shows that micro-influencers deliver 60 percent higher campaign engagement rates than bigger fish, and they’re cost effective, being “6.7 times more efficient per engagement” than influencers with larger followings, meaning their followers comment and like more frequently. That often translates to campaign success and sales for the brands involved. It only makes sense then that micro-influencers are desperate to know the rules of the road as they promote brands to their pages.

While micro-influencers remain confused about best practices, the FTC is trying to straighten things out by going right to the top. In April, the FTC sent 90 Instagram influencers and brands letters reminding them to abide by rules requiring them to disclose paid advertisements on the platform. This was done after Public Citizen, a non-profit advocacy group, lobbied the FTC to examine the matter. Letters were sent to brands and representatives for celebrities like Sean “Diddy” Combs, Sofia Vergara, Naomi Campbell, and other A-listers. The hope, we imagine, is that these people would be able to lead by example; of course in addition to being more transparent with their followers.

According to the FTC, the letters mark the first time the organization has reached out directly to “educate social media influencers.” (An FTC spokesperson declined to comment further on the matter, and declined to say whether it was planning on taking punitive action against influencers.)

Legally, nothing’s come of the letters yet but it shows the FTC is serious, and many influencers are relieved that guidelines are set to become more clear. Instagram proactively rolled out a feature to make it easier for influencers to disclose paid posts. The feature allows them to indicate a post is a “paid partnership” along the top of the photo, where the location tag would normally be. It’s not yet available for smaller influencers, though.

While Instagram did not respond to request for comment for this story, The Fashion Law thinks the new changes at Instagram are a way for the platform to cover itself in case the FTC does decide to take punitive action.

“I am not under the impression that the FTC will be the most direct point of enforcement of the use of the new Instagram tags,” Julie Zerbo, founder of The Fashion Law, tells Yahoo Style. “I believe — from reading Instagram’s statements — that Instagram is hoping to step in and help to rectify the widespread problem of non-disclosure or improper disclosure on its platform. It is my belief that this is either because Instagram wants to try to avoid secondary liability.”

There’s no word yet on whether Instagram’s new feature satisfies FTC guidelines.

Regardless of whether celebrity influencers change their disclosure habits, Kyla Brennan, HelloSociety’s founder and chief executive, thinks small influencers should clearly mark their posts as advertisements if they want to keep their followers engaged.

Her theory about follower engagement is rooted in the results of an experiment that HelloSociety conducted about two years ago. The company tested whether labeling an Instagram post as “sponsored” or “ad” negatively impacts user engagement, which the company predicted. As it turns out, there was no drop off in engagement, Brennan says, except for when posts weren’t in line with the influencer’s message.

“This comes down to the core of the whole issue, which is asking whether a brand is a fit for you and your audience. Ask yourself, ‘Does it make sense on my page? Do my followers expect to see things like this on my feed? Do I do a good job of speaking to the partnership?’ You can have ‘#ad’ all over the post and it won’t effect engagement as long as you’re providing value to your audience.”

Most importantly, Brennan says, influencers, big or small, shouldn’t try to outsmart savvy consumers.

“Don’t pull the wool over your followers’ eyes, that’s when you see negative reactions.” And that’s a truth whether your following is as big as Kim Kardashian’s, or a number that’s slightly more manageable than 101 million.

Read more from Yahoo Style + Beauty:

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Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyle and @YahooBeauty.

Alexandra Mondalek is a writer for Yahoo Style + Beauty. Follow her on Twitter @amondalek.

[priceofliberty]

What politics did 2007 pol have? Who would win in a fight 2007 pol or 2017 pol?

2007 me was definitely scrappier than 2017 me, he might win out of sheer determination. Wow, that was ten years ago and I was in my senior year of high school...time sure flies.

At that time, I was not at all into politics. I was living in a very neoconservative household where the news was constantly on the television, even in the background while we were eating dinner. I grew to resent politics (and my father as an extension of that resentment for trying to force his views onto me). I was definitely not a self-proclaimed anarchist at that time. 

By 2007, I was anticipating (with excitement) being able to participate in my first election in 2008. I had just barely scratched the surface of libertarianism because I heard about a guy named Ron Paul whose ideas seemed sound to me. I was of the opinion, even then, that if people weren’t hurting each other then the government should stay out of whatever they were doing. I didn’t do drugs or buy sex services, but I saw the merits of decriminalizing these markets. 

At this point, I had also been working for a little over a year and so I experienced the reality of being taxed firsthand and I hated it. I was trying to save up for college which felt impossible with the hundreds and thousands of dollars being siphoned from my paychecks.

In 2007, I considered myself an “independent,” but registered as a Republican so I could vote in the primaries—PA precludes registered independents from voting in either D or R primary elections. I was always a tad more ‘liberal’ in my worldview than my family, and despite my admiration for Ron Paul and his “eccentric” politics in 2008, I voted for McCain because I was convinced that voting third-party would only ‘give votes to the other guy.’

By that time, though, I was already an advocate of “limited government” thanks to the loud ideas being espoused by Paul and his supporters. I spent some time reading Law (Bastiat), Libertarianism: A Primer, and The FairTax Book (Neil Boortz) and that was when I changed my voter registration from “Republican” to “Libertarian”. Between 2008 and 2012, my reading list grew to include works in political theory, campaign finance & management, as well as some election/political history. I sympathized with the viewpoint that taxation was certainly theft, but I still held on to the belief that people could ‘consent’ to taxation under a social contract—after all, who would build the roads?

I actively campaigned for Paul in 2011 and 2012, but because he lost the Republican primary in PA he wasn’t listed on the ballot. After I realized he was precluded from the 2012 ballot, I hastily switched gears and advocated for Gary Johnson in the last few months of the election. By this point I was already convinced that neither of them were going to win the election, of course, because I saw the same defeatist “don’t waste your vote” attitude being instilled in everyone around me. Still, I held out hope that somehow one of them could pull through and on election day in PA, I voted for Johnson. All the while, I was growing more and more anti-state—it was clear to me that elections were won almost entirely by those with money and connections. When word broke about what had happened in Maine’s primary, though, it became obvious that Ron Paul (and all the third-parties for that matter) never stood a chance in the first place because the Fourth Estate was determined to pander to the Establishment candidates.

By the time the corruption within the 2012 election came to light, I was firmly anti-state. I probably wouldn’t have called myself an anarchist, but I was much more amiable toward anarchism in 2012 than I was in 2008.

Here I am five years later, calling for the state to be dismantled altogether. 

[motivationsuccess]

Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion

Introduction Andy Johns is a name in music that is relatively unknown but Johns is responsible for engineering some of the greatest records by Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Van Halen. Johns passed away in April 2013  without a story in any major news outlet and his work is still largely unnoticed but obviously extremely important to the success of these bands. This is not to say it’s a shame he wasn’t recognized or gloried earlier in his life or at the end, but to put a magnified glass on professionals similar to Johns who experience fulfillment from work that isn’t recognized. Which is odd in a society that screams “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT WHAT IVE DONE!” Over the course of the book, David Zweig, the author, goes behind the scenes with exclusive access into the lives and professions of people like Johns, or Zweig’s own stint in fact checking, to see what they all have in common. Zweig claims there are three traits that organically came to light when he was interviewing potential Invisibles. The traits are Ambivalence toward recognition, meticulousness, and savoring of responsibility (Zweig 2014, p.6). The Invisibles interviewed for this book do not work in mundane jobs; they are highly skilled people who are very critical to whatever field or project they are a part of. They are highly respected by they’re co-workers and most of the time don’t even know it. Usually the Invisibles could have pursued other careers, maybe one with more recognition, but choose to stay in their current position or follow whatever it is they were passionate about. The individual Invisibles are not exclusive but just the opposite of current cultures idea on what a successful, satisfied person entails. Although they are not always recognized for their jobs and most of the time under appreciated, they all have lasting gratification in common. Perfection=Invisibility. Ambivalence to Recognition Jim Harding is in his fifties, has a Nashville accent, and is in the way finding business. This section starts off with Zweig and Harding meeting at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport to tour the recently completed Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal. Harding works for the design firm Gresham, Smith, and Partners where he leads their environmental graphic design group. This group works on creating way finding systems for large complex environments, such as an airport terminal. Harding and his firm are responsible for creating the signs that get people where they need to go through the airports. Harding got into way finding when the field was relatively new, as it still is, when he was in college working for an architectural sign company that had only two partners and he was the only employee. Being the only employee allowed him to learn a little bit about everything when it comes to way finding. Once he graduate college he joined the firm he is still with today. Harding is quoted saying “ultimately” “ if we do our job well, way finding enhances the customer experience without them knowing why or how”(Zweig 2014, p.19). This is contrary to the popular idea of having our work seen. A measure of success is how much it is noticed and you’re credited for it, while in Harding’s case, he lives in the state of his work being seen by the masses but hopefully not pointed out. Harding gets genuine satisfaction out of this. Daniel Paisner, like Harding, rarely has his name on his work but that doesn’t take away from his satisfaction. Paisner is a ghostwriter and has done work for many top celebrities and politicians. Paisner loves writing for the sake of writing and is glad he can do it for a living, but doesn’t need the fame. His goal, he says, is to sit on a plane and see someone reading his book without him or her knowing whom he is and not say anything the entire flight. Ambivalence towards recognition is not something we see on a day-to-day basis, in fact quite the opposite. This type of attitude is not one of purposely wanting to stay in the shadows and never being noticed for whatever type of work they complete, rather it shows the person is not driven by recognition but the work itself. Devotion to Meticulousness Meticulousness is a trait that is directly tied to successful leadership. In the book, Zweig references a study done by Timothy Judge who is a Notre Dame business professor that concluded conscientiousness (defined as being cautious, deliberate is a core trait throughout successful business people).The study involved twenty-six independent studies and found that over all consciousness was the most consistent predictor of leadership effectiveness (Zweig 2014, p. 52). Dave Apel is the Invisible interviewed in this section. Apel is in the creative perfumery business. He studied environmental chemistry in college hoping to work for the EPA or DEP. He took a job with a company called Givaudan and was tasked with bulk-compounding fragrances in a lab instead. He then started crafting his own fragrances to take home. Apel gained a mentor while working with Givaudan and the tiny details of creating these fragrances. Apel's mentor moved on to become a creative perfumist and it was then the idea popped into Apel’s head that maybe that’s what he should do. Eventually he became a perfumist and was tasked with the job of creating Sean Combs (P.Diddy) personal branded cologne while competing with other firms to gain Diddys contract. Apel met with Combs to determine what the scent should be and Combs said Mediterranean. Apel then created a plethora of scents over and over again for Combs until he was satisfied. Finally after listening to Combs’ wants and going through his lab of raw materials, Apel nailed the smell. Escape for Men became the name of the cologne and was known to be the record breaking, number-one-selling fragrance in men’s stores. Apel then worked on five move fragrances for Combs. Although Sean Combs did not sit in a lab and actually create the fragrances, his name will be on the bottle and Apel’s name will not. His meticulousness in finding the right scent is what gained him success and fulfillment. Apel is completely charged by the creative process. Savoring Responsibility Responsibility can be either a blessing or a curse. For Daniel Poon, a chief engineer at a global engineering firm who creates sky-scrapers (by 2020 he will have had hand in 10 out of the 20 tallest buildings in the world), responsibility is an integral part, if not the most important part, of his job. Ultimately, Poon in accountable for anything that happens structurally with these buildings, which is a load of responsibility. Poon, out of all the Invisibles interviewed so far, has the greatest responsibility and it could be argued he holds the highest position out of the group. This is no coincidence. Cameron Anderson a professor from UC Burkley has researched this connection (Zweig 2014, p. 71). Flow and the Power of Expertise with Effort Being in the zone is something that most athletes can relate to. Experiencing a flow state and being in the zone are interchangeable terms to describe the same feeling. We don’t often think about flowing while working but it happens often to Invisibles. Mihaly Csikszentmihayli says flow is when” the ego falls away, time flies, and every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one” (Zweig 2014,p.98). Giula Wilkins Ary is an interpreter for the UN. This is a very hard job to land and one needs to be fluent in three languages and go through a rigorous application, interview and exam process. Giula was offered the job immediately after passing her exam but declined. She was offered the job again in Nairobi but once again declined and finally accepted a job offer in New York in 2007. Not only do you have to interpret what the speaker is saying to the needed language, but also you have to do it in real-time. That mean these interpreters need to understand and process the speakers native tongue while simultaneously figuring out how to relay the message in another language. Obviously this can be extremely mentally tasking. Wilkins Ary says there are times she experiences the flow state and never wants to stop. The only way she can do this is by learning everything about the speakers at any given UN conference, the abbreviations and code words from different countries, what the countries policy is on a given topic, what might cause controversy, and the list goes on. The point is that yes, Wilkins Ary is a phenomenal interpreter, but to gain the flow state she must do all the work to be able to get there. Zweig states that in today’s society pretty good is becoming a shared value (Zweig 2014, p. 100). To gain access into the wonder mental experience of flow state, pretty good isn’t going to cut it. One must put in all the work involved like Wilkins Ary or any one of the other Invisibles to reach this state. As a society, we’ve become pretty good at a lot of things, but not exponentially great. We only see the short end of the stick when it comes to getting into a job field “what is the minimum I can do to get in”. The Invisibles have the opposite idea, “what all do I have to learn about the craft to become excellent at it”. Fame, Success, and the Myth of Self-Promotion For every 10 million videos on YouTube, one goes viral. Historian Warren Susman has a theory that we have shifted from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality. We live in an environment now where everyone feels they constantly need to perform because they are in some sort of limelight. Whether that limelight be Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media outlet you pick, people are becoming entranced in their “profile.” This section of the book is dedicated to questioning the idea of self-branding and promotion. We are being told now that it is crucial to be seen in a positive light on social media and to sell ourselves to our potential employers, but is this always accurate advice? Let’s take a look at Neal Pollack, the up and coming author in the early 2000s. Pollack gains a ton of attention with his book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, that he lands a huge publishing deal. He does a ton of interviews and getting a ton of attention, he lands a few more deals. Most of the deals didn’t sell very many books but that didn’t matter because Pollack was creating a buzz. Eventually his head got so big he tried to pitch Alternadad (one of his books that didn’t do so well) as a movie and then even a whole multimedia empire. What happened? The whole thing busted and Pollack was over selling himself and trying to cash in instead of doing what got him there in the first place, writing. Pollack said ”I spent a lot of years trying to turn myself into a brand because they told us self-branding is a way to success” “But that’s not true”(Zweig 2014 p.119). Zweig goes on to say he is not against self-promotion or branding, but the over promotion and constant need to create hype or buzz that our culture tells us to do. Don’t let self-promotion get in the way of creating substance. Mastery of Craft in Service to a “Front Man” Remember the name Plank I mentioned at the beginning? His actual name is Pete Clements and for the past 20 years he has been the guitar tech along with many other things for the globally known band Radiohead. Zweig follows Plank through a typical workday when they on tour. Plank is not only the guitar tech but maintains and manages all of the band equipment on and off tour, designs the cases for the guitar, conducts the set ups and break downs, and ultimately holds the most responsibility out of several dozen respected touring employees. Plank is the only salaried year-round off tour employee who assist the band in the studio, doing administrative work as well as maintain the storage of equipment, yet listening to Zweig describe his demeanor you wouldn’t think so. He doesn’t act as so bi shot yelling orders around to local crews and people under him, often he actively takes part in the entire process from setting up to breaking down and in the middle he’s changing out the guitars and settings for Thom Yorke, the bands front man. Plank embodies every trait described in this book that relates to Invisibles. He is meticulous, ambivalent to recognition, and savors responsibility. Plank is humble and collaborates extremely well with everyone around. He has been with a globally known band for 20 years yet no one knows his name. Plank likes to melt into the background with the crew and fans. Zweig asked him how he thought the crew viewed him obviously knowing his privileged position; his reply was “ I hadn’t thought about that, really”(Zweig 2014 p. 169). That is someone who works solely for satisfaction after knowing he did everything he could to make the concert run smoothly. Conclusion It’s hard to navigate in today’s world through constant distraction. Some people tell you to “SELF-PROMOTE!” that’s the way to success. Other people say find something that will make you rich, or famous. Invisibles has given us another a whole other concept to think about. That concept is doing the work because we enjoy it. It doesn’t matter if anyone knows you did or if they ever actually see it, what matters is at the end of the day did you go home satisfied and fulfilled with your work? Did you get into the flow state? Were you the real reason someone was able to entertain millions? Did you create a fragrance for the scent itself? At the end of the day we, as a society, need to stop a see what direction majority of us are going in. Sure its ok to dream about being a huge actor, athlete, or business man, but its also ok to dream of being a nuclear physicist who studies and creates theories all day. This book is great for everyone and anyone looking to find satisfaction in their life and career. Managers and employees can take away valuable lessons from what Zweig has to offer in Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in the Age of Relentless Self-Promotion.

Biography of the writer

David Zweig is a writer, lecturer and musician based in New York. His latest book, Invisibles, is about the power of embracing anonymous work in a culture obsessed with praise and recognition. He has released two critically acclaimed albums, All Now With Wings and Keep Going. Both albums charted on college radio playlists and garnered accolades for Zweig, with the press calling him a "symphonic pop prodigy." Zweig's debut novel, Swimming Inside The Sun, a modernist bildungsroman about identity and self-consciousness, was released fall 2009. It quickly gained notice with a rave review from Kirkus calling it a "terrific debut from a talented writer." Zweig has been invited to lecture at universities, academic conferences, and corporations around the U.S. and the world. As a freelance journalist, his pieces have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

you can buy his book here

Buy this book

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[philipfloyd]

How to Outrun Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles But Rank Better Than You

Outranking your competition can be very difficult, especially if your website is rather new. What’s even more frustrating is when you can’t outrank competitors which have spammy backlink profiles. Why doesn’t Google penalize them? Why does it rank you lower than them in the Google search results, even though you play the game by the book?

  Google’s algorithm has evolved a lot over the years. The main purpose of the improvements was to be able to better distinguish natural links from artificially generated links. Unfortunately, although big advancements have been made, top ranking websites with clean link profiles aren’t always the case.

  It probably happened to you (or to someone you know) to run a business in compliance with all Google’s guidelines when it comes to  link building but, at the end of the day, to be dethroned by other sites from the industry with spammy link profiles. So, why is this happening? Let’s find out! 

    Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?

They Built Those Links Long Time Ago

They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)

They’re Still the Best Site Out There

Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet

One Example to Prove Them All

Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well

Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool

How to Submit a Spam Report

How to Outrank Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles

Focus More on OnPage & Technical SEO Factors

Really Step up Your Content Game

Look for Other Keywords to Target

Invest in Advertising

Improve Social Media

Get Inspired from Your Competitor’s Good Links

  If you think I’m going to say that you can still improve your rankings using BlackHat SEO link building tactics in 2019, you’re wrong. But while some complain about their websites being penalized, others have a completely different issue:

  “My competitors have spammy links but still rank better than me.”

  Then, almost every time, the following question follows:

  “What should I do in this case?”

  There’s even an old Reddit thread about this:

    If you’ve been struggling with this issue for a while, then you’ve landed on the right page.

  The short answer to this question is that a spammy link profile doesn’t necessarily mean a website shouldn’t rank well. You see, Google’s (and other search engines) main purpose is to return the best search results for the users, not the search results with the best link profile. There are hundreds of other factors that are taken into consideration by Google when it ranks a website, and although links are still one of the top 3 most important ones, they aren’t everything.

  Google has shown signs of steering away from links. Although links can’t completely be removed from the equation (at least not very soon), other factors, like user interaction, for example, have shown a lot of prominence recently.

  If the top competitors have spammy backlinks but are still ranking good, well, my friend, then the truth is you’ve gotten yourself into a very competitive niche.

  However, there’s still hope. But it’s not going to be easy, nor is it going to be cheap (is anything easy and cheap in digital marketing?). Before we dig into the tips and tricks, let’s better understand what Google has done against link spam over the years, and why.

    Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?

  Ok, so if Google tries so hard to get spammers down, how come some webmasters with such obvious shady link profiles are still ranking well with their websites?

John Mueller from Google tells us that we don’t really know if they got away with it or not.

    However, this often sounds unfair, as those websites clearly have spammy link profiles, but are ranking very well.

  There could be a thousand reasons why this is happening, but I’ll try to provide some clearance with what I think is happening.

  They Built Those Links Long Time Ago

  Back in 2012, the BlackHat industry was thriving. ScrapeBox, GSA, Comment Spamming, Private Blog Networks, you name it. It worked. And people got hooked.

  BlackHat SEO services were expensive because they could also be very profitable. Even big brands got into them as well.

  The ones who suffered most were innocent business owners that had no idea about this. They just signed contracts with SEO agencies to get their websites higher on Google.

  As the word spread, more and more shady things started to happen. It wasn’t a time when search engines provided the best results. And Google didn’t like that, so it took action against it.

  Many of them lost their rankings forever. Some eventually recovered, through complex actions of improvement and link disavowing.

  But some got away with it, and they’re probably still ranking today. Since the algorithm is now supposed to be real time and to ignore spammy links, this kind of makes sense.

    It doesn’t mean they are bad websites or that they still use BlackHat SEO strategies. It could just be that they got away with it. They were lucky.

  They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)

  Sometimes, instead of working on their own websites, people prefer to ‘work’ other websites out, by trying to attract Google penalties to them. These techniques are called Negative SEO Attacks.

  In theory, the process is pretty simple: do BlackHat SEO to another website until Google gives it a penalty. When they drop, you replace the spot.

  Example showing a negative SEO attack happening on Jellyfish’s website

  When you look at a website and see a lot of spammy links, you might say they’re cheating. But although you can analyze a site’s link profile, you have no idea if they disavowed those links or not.

  The Google Disavow tool is really useful, but it’s also one of the smartest moves Google made for improving their algorithm.

  Because they feared the penalty, many webmasters started submitting their spammy links through the disavow tool.

  Sure, it could help you not get penalized, but yet again, it could do nothing. Some even lose rankings after they start disavowing links.

  What the disavow tool might actually do is that it feeds Google thousands of patterns of spammy links. So Google gets smarter and smarter every day. Smart, eh?

  Negative SEO attack patterns are anyway different from shady link building patterns. You might think that’s not the case, but the truth is when people are doing black-hat SEO for themselves, they’re very cautious and try to stay under the radar. On the other side, when they’re framing someone else, they’re too obvious.

  That’s the big downside of negative search engine optimization. If you make it obvious, Google will know it’s a negative SEO attack, but if you don’t make it obvious enough, who knows, your competitor might never get caught and the spam might actually help him rank.

  So although you can see your competitor’s backlinks are reall spammy, you can’t know for sure how Google sees the situation.

  They’re Still the Best Site Out There

  As I said, a spammy link profile doesn’t mean a site shouldn’t be first on Google. This usually happens when all the other sites also have a spammy link profile.

  Google can’t penalize all the websites if they’re all breaking the rules because it wouldn’t have any search results left to return.

  If the top website has been there for years, providing value and good services to its customers, Google will reward it by keeping it there, even though maybe it knows they’re breaking the rules.

  Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet

  Asking why Google doesn’t penalize all the spammers is like asking why doesn’t the police bust all drug dealers. It’s just too many of them, and it’s impossible for Google to catch them all right away. But it probably will, eventually…

  Spamming is still profitable because it works. If you manage to spam under the radar, you might cash in some quick profits. But the frustration of constantly being on the run isn’t a nice feeling.

  If you haven’t done it yet, go ahead and read The Confessions of a Google Spammer on InBound. Once Google finds you, it’s over. And they have to start all over again from scratch.

    Although I want to say that Google will eventually catch everyone… the reality of life is that sometimes bad guys win.

  One Example to Prove Them All

  At first, I tried looking for a lot of examples, but without much success. I tried searching the wedding niche, the flowers niche, but time and time the top ranking websites were actually legit in terms of link building.

  But then I thought to myself… why not payday loans?

  I mean… if there’s a niche there that’s been spammy as hell since forever, it’s definitely this one. Google even has an algorithmic update named after it. And lucky me, I hit the Jackpot (although I couldn’t personally access all the websites; but this could be due to my location).

  So I took a couple of sites from the top and one from the second page (United States/British) and used cognitiveSEO to classify the anchor texts and run the Unnatural Link Detection Tool.

  The results were promising. The big majority of the links are definitely unnatural.

  Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a top ranking website (speedycash.com)

  Another website from a lower set of results shows similar patterns:

  Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a competing website from the second page (cashone.com)

  However, I can easily back up my points made earlier in the article with this example.

  Point no. 1: The sites have been in business for a long time.

  You can easily check when websites were registered. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in business since that date, but it’s a decent indicator.

  These websites were registered over 15 years ago. If the company was doing business back then as well, it’s probably a very legit business with a lot of experience.

  Screenshot taken from bulkseotools.com

  Point no. 2: The links were made a long time ago.

  By checking the link velocity section, we can quickly spot that these websites built links some time ago, but aren’t doing it right now.

  Cashone.com’s link velocity; screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

Mypaydaylonan.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

  The top website seems to be actively building links, but the spike just before 2012 is definitely a lot bigger than the ones happening right now.

  Speedycash.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

  Point no. 3: These websites are still offering good services.

  Although they still look spammy design-wise, one of the websites has over 2,000 reviews on TrustPilot, showing an average grade of 9.1. They could be fake reviews, of course, but yet again, they could not be. I think TrustPilot are doing their best to keep things real.

    Sure, I didn’t analyze one thousand sites, but I hope I made my point. Chances are that most websites in this niche have a significant amount of unnatural links in their link profiles.

  Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well

  I know it’s tempting. I know how you feel. You’ve probably tried everything and they still rank better. But unless you’re trying to go for a hit and run niche site, no. It’s too risky.

  Old sites that did BlackHat stuff in the past might still be ranking well in the Google search results, but new sites doing shady stuff attract a lot more attention. You might get penalized right from the start, losing your chance to ever rank for that keyword.

  Although building a million spammy links might look easy, it’s not. It takes a lot of effort and the learning curve is quite steep. It’s also not cheap. You’ll need advanced tools and thousands of proxies to cover your ass up.

  If you want to beat a BlackHat site the WhiteHat way, then it’s not going to be easy. But the advantage is that you don’t risk anything, and what you build, you build on the long-term.

  Your time is far way spent on other things, such as quality content, improving user experience and relationship building. Instead of pointing our fingers at someone else, we should be taking a look at our own actions, and see how we could improve those.

  Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool

  If you’ve heard about the Penguin Update, then you probably know it’s triggered by spammy links. Although it’s not the only algorithm that penalizes websites with spammy link profiles, it’s definitely the one that took the most spammers down. If you’re planning on some shady link building, then you should look out for flappy walks and orange beaks.

  The problem with the first three Penguin algorithm updates was that although they got better, they were still pretty slow. Google used to gather information over a longer period of time (about 2-3 months) and then roll out a patch that would suddenly impact thousands of websites that broke the rules.

  As of the latest version, Google’s spammy link tracking is now happening in real time. With the Penguin 4.0 update, Google ignores spammy links or penalizes single pages instead of penalizing entire websites.

  This doesn’t mean that websites can’t be penalized anymore. Plenty of users still admit having suffered from Google penalties that affected their entire websites.

  Some experts, such as Rand Fishkin, speculate that Google used this slow mass penalty process to create a fear factor that will determine webmasters to submit their spammy link profiles through the Disavow Tool.

  This tool, launched in 2012, some months after the first Penguin update, enabled users to submit links that they wanted to be ignored by Google. People thought that if they submitted their links sooner, they could avoid a possible Google penalty. Google then supposedly fed the Disavow Tool database to the algorithm and used this to create a real-time version of Penguin, one that better understands link spamming patterns.

  The Disavow Tool also somewhat protects webmasters against negative SEO attacks. If someone built some spammy links to your site you could start disavowing them. However, Google had previously stated that the Disavow Tool isn’t a replacement for removing links and that no reconsideration action will be taken unless users also try to remove some of those links.

    Good ol’ Google! Never fails to surprise you with its tricks, right?

  However, the truth is that using the disavow tool can help you recover from a Google penalty. If you’re ever in that situation, it’s worth a try.

    How to Submit a Spam Report

  Although you can do this, I wouldn’t recommend rushing in. It’s not exactly the same, submitting a spam report does resemble a negative SEO attack because while you could try to outrank your competitor by gaining positions yourself, you’re trying to pull him down instead.

  Think about the things I mentioned earlier:

  What if your competitor just hired a company to do search engine optimization and he has no idea, although he’d probably be against it if he knew? 

  In addition, if you have some shady links yourself, or share some of the backlinks with your competitor, submitting a spam report might attract Google’s attention to your website as well. You’ll see why in a minute.

  Instead of blowing into some other person’s candles, try to make your own candle burn brighter. The truth is, if you had started doing SEO 5 years ago, you’d be ranking now.

  However, if you see a website that tries to steal information from clients and or is involved in any illegal activities ranking on top, then you should definitely submit a spam report, as soon as possible.

  In theory, Google employees should manually review these websites and decide if to apply a penalty or not. Any phishing or malware attempts will surely be banned.

  There are more types of spam reports. Some of the more… dangerous ones, let’s say, anyone can file. This includes Malware, Phishing or Copyright related issues.

  The rest of them, on the other side, will require a search console account (former Webmaster Tools). This means that Google will know exactly who is filing the report. If you ever did some shady things yourself, you should keep this in mind.

  Of course, you could just set up a fake account to set a report, but Google will probably ignore those, otherwise an account wouldn’t be required in the first place.

  How to Outrank Competitors With Spammy Link Profiles

  Even though things aren’t in your favor, you should not give up. There are still things you can do to outrank these types of competitors.

  Actually, the journey is one of the things that makes SEO so interesting: figuring out those things you haven’t thought of before; making a move that provides results; doing it without cheating.

  Outranking a BlackHat SEO feels like gaining more money and power than the Godfather by selling lollipops.

  Focus More on OnPage  and Technical SEO Factors

  I know this might only sound motivational, but you should shift your focus from links to on-page factors. When people say they’ve tried everything, I still have a feeling they were only talking about link building.

  That’s what usually happens when spammy link envy kicks in: you forget about all the other things, like making your website faster, securing the connection with an SSL and improving the overall user experience.

  Here’s what you should be asking yourself:

  Am I really offering the users a good experience?

  One of the hardest things entrepreneurs have to do is jump into their customers’ minds. It’s hard to really see their frustrations and come up with good solutions to solve them. You might’ve heard the phrase “Customers don’t know what they want.” Well, that’s true and it’s exactly the issue! They don’t know what they want so they won’t buy. At least, not until you offer a good solution to the problem.

  If you really want to understand the buyer, just go buy something. You’ll instantly shift into the buyer’s mindset. And that’s exactly what you should analyze for your site if you really want to find solutions and make more sales.

  What’s your conversion rate? Is it satisfying? Where do your users click most of the time? Is it easy for them to understand what’s clickable and what’s not? Are you offering a live support chat? Are they wasting time looking for something? Maybe you should bring it more to the front.

  Am I really trying to solve their problems?

  Many websites out there don’t try to solve a problem. They’re just in because they heard you can make some money online. As long as you’re not focused at all on solving a user’s problem, you can’t really improve your website.

  Is the content really answering their questions? Does it resonate with who they are? Figure it out before you put another word on your pages.

  Is my website better than theirs?

  The website must be prettier, faster and easier to use.

  However, I’m not talking only about design and website performance . There are a lot of other variables which actually come from outside the website:

  Is your brand known at all compared to your competitor’s? Could you really handle all the orders without an issue? How’s your social media engagement compared to theirs?

  Really step up your content game

  Everyone knows that content is King. But an inconsistent King can quickly lose his throne. 

  Consistency has proven itself time after time in the content marketing and SEO industry. We’ve experienced this ourselves here, at cognitiveSEO. That being said, get yourself an editorial schedule ready, and stick to it.

  It doesn’t really matter how much you post. Obviously, the more, the better. But what really matters is that you post on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

  Remember that with quantity, you risk losing quality. To be able to post more often and keep the quality of your content, you’ll have to expand your writing department.

  Think of innovating things in your niche. Analyze your competitors’ content and try to find the content gaps. Set personas for your targeted audience and really dig into it.

  One thing I often recommend to websites, especially if it’s an eCommerce site, is to start blog posting. This can help a lot with building the authority of the domain, as articles and blog posts get shares and backlinks much easier than products. You’ll need a good content marketer for that. Some niches have a hard time coming up with interesting content.

  Here are some next level tips on how to expand your content strategy, even in a really boring niche. It’s not a short video, but it’s worth watching.

    The secret here is finding those questions and objections your clients have that your competitors don’t answer, and answer them! Any gap in the niche that the competition hasn’t filled yet is a great opportunity for you to improve your website.

  Another great thing to do is update your content regularly with new information. You always learn new things about different topics. If you think you have new information you can add to an existing article, never hesitate to do it!

  A great way to improve your content marketing strategies is using the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool & Content Assistant. This set of SEO tools works by analyzing all the pages that rank for that keyword and providing keywords that you should add in order to make your article more relevant.

    Don’t just bulk keywords in. Think of them as topics you haven’t covered before. Add them to relevant places and always keep the end user in mind. If it doesn’t make any sense for the reader, don’t add the keyword at all.

  We’ve optimized our own content recently and the results were promising, providing a 70% increase in SEO visibility.

  Look for other keywords to target

  Keyword research is really important if you want to do well in SEO. Sometimes, if you can’t outrank your competitors on Google, you can try to target keywords that are less competitive.

  Maybe the ones you are targeting right now are not the most relevant for your website and users. Maybe the keyword difficulty is too high for your website’s authority.

  You can try targeting some longtail keywords instead. As you grow, your site will get stronger and will be able to target more competitive keywords.

  Many times, people get stuck trying to rank for that one great keyword. Sure, high search volume keywords are nice, but there are other keywords out there.

  Your spammy competitor can’t be ranking on all of them.

  Don’t waste too much time trying to rank on a single keyword, or you’ll end up overoptimizing and doing yourself harm. You’ll also waste a lot of time and lose opportunities to rank hundreds of other keywords.

  The cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool can provide you with some new keyword ideas that you can start targeting. The ones with more stars are more relevant to your primary searched keyword.

  Snippet from the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool

  Another interesting trick you can do is to use the Site Explorer to find the Top 10-20 ranking keywords for a website. Not so useful if you use it on your own site, but if used on a competitor’s website, you can get new insights you probably haven’t thought of before.

  Snippet from cognitiveSEO’s Site Explorer showing a website’s top ranking keywords

  Another good way is to simply use the basic Google Keyword Planner. However, to get more accurate keyword statistics, you’ll need to spend some money on advertising, using Google Adwords.

  Speaking of Google AdWords…

  Invest in Advertising

  If you’re not moving, you’re staying put. That’s exactly what you’re doing if you’re obsessing over a competitor’s backlink profile.

  If you can’t outrank them and get enough traffic from SEO strategies alone, then you might need to invest in advertising. You can advertise either with Google Ads or on Social Media.

  And did you know that there are ads that help you rank better on Google? Yes, it’s called buying links.

  You can buy links without breaking any of Google’s guidelines by simply nofollowing the links. The secret is to make them site-wide and make it obvious it’s an ad.

  Countless examples prove that nofollow links still provide SEO value. The best thing about it? You can actually use your target keywords in the anchor text!

  If you think it works for you, you might even try using some press releases. Just make sure they are from reputable news sites.

  Make sure you also strengthen your brand if you have enough budget to advertise. Maybe place an image ad as well using your brand logo near the link. Smart ads also have the chance of getting viral, especially in the video field.

  Invest in it the white-hat way, and nofollow those links!

  Improve your social media campaign

  Although social media has been going down as a referral source (and Google has been climbing), it’s still a good idea to invest your time into building a social following. People spend a lot more time on social media than they spend on Google, and you need to be there.

  Your competitors might spend a lot of time building shady links, but they might suck at social media. We don’t know for sure if social signals are a direct Google ranking factor or not, but they can have an impact on organic traffic, which can lead up to more natural links (a real ranking factor).

  Maybe your competitor isn’t doing anything interesting on Facebook. You could, for example, bring something new by building yourself a chatbot. Chatbot marketing works well because the open rates for the messages are really high (up to 90%).

  Get inspired from your competitor’s good links

  The only time you should spend on analyzing the competitor’s links is if you want to spot opportunities for yourself.

  Spending too much time on a competitor’s backlinks profile is a waste. You could instead spend that valuable time to figure out new issues on your website and fix those.

  The reality is that not all the links on a spammy profile are bad.

  Links usually cause higher rankings, but it can also be the other way around. As websites start ranking, they get more organic traffic which can lead to more links being created, as people discover and share your content around. And those are strong, natural links.

  If a site has been ranking #1 for a long time, I bet there are some natural links in their profile as well.

  You can dig for those natural links and try to replicate them. This, of course, if you have a better website. Nobody will link to you if they don’t find the website and the info on it useful.

  You can use the cognitiveSEO’s Unnatural Link Detection Tool to spot this kind of opportunities. Just run the backlink analysis, identify the good links and try to build them or earn them by contacting the owners.

  Access the natural link navigator by clicking on the green bar

Steal your competitor’s natural links

  However, your primary focus shouldn’t be on link building. Stealing your competitor’s links is a great link building strategy, but earning them naturally is an even better one. If you start improving all the things mentioned above, links will start coming on their own.

  Conclusion

  Outranking your competition isn’t an easy job, but it’s often something that needs to be done in the digital marketing world. Shifting your focus from building links to improving other things about your website (such as OnPage SEO and the conversion rate) can make the process less frustrating and a lot more effective.

  Make your website better by adding more relevant content and by analyzing and improving the overall user experience. Try to gain a little traction from other sources of traffic, such as Google Ads or Social Media. Work on your conversion rate optimization and keep your customers happy.

  Try to fill any gaps you can spot in the niche that your competition isn’t yet taking advantage of, and most of all, try to have a better site than they do, not just a better ranking one.

  As Rand Fishkin once said, “F@%# Link Building!”  Start link earning.

  The post How to Outrun Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles But Rank Better Than You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/16910/competitors-spammy-link-profiles/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[krisggordon]

How to Outrun Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles But Rank Better Than You

Outranking your competition can be very difficult, especially if your website is rather new. What’s even more frustrating is when you can’t outrank competitors which have spammy backlink profiles. Why doesn’t Google penalize them? Why does it rank you lower than them in the Google search results, even though you play the game by the book?

  Google’s algorithm has evolved a lot over the years. The main purpose of the improvements was to be able to better distinguish natural links from artificially generated links. Unfortunately, although big advancements have been made, top ranking websites with clean link profiles aren’t always the case.

  It probably happened to you (or to someone you know) to run a business in compliance with all Google’s guidelines when it comes to  link building but, at the end of the day, to be dethroned by other sites from the industry with spammy link profiles. So, why is this happening? Let’s find out! 

    Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?

They Built Those Links Long Time Ago

They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)

They’re Still the Best Site Out There

Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet

One Example to Prove Them All

Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well

Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool

How to Submit a Spam Report

How to Outrank Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles

Focus More on OnPage & Technical SEO Factors

Really Step up Your Content Game

Look for Other Keywords to Target

Invest in Advertising

Improve Social Media

Get Inspired from Your Competitor’s Good Links

  If you think I’m going to say that you can still improve your rankings using BlackHat SEO link building tactics in 2019, you’re wrong. But while some complain about their websites being penalized, others have a completely different issue:

  “My competitors have spammy links but still rank better than me.”

  Then, almost every time, the following question follows:

  “What should I do in this case?”

  There’s even an old Reddit thread about this:

    If you’ve been struggling with this issue for a while, then you’ve landed on the right page.

  The short answer to this question is that a spammy link profile doesn’t necessarily mean a website shouldn’t rank well. You see, Google’s (and other search engines) main purpose is to return the best search results for the users, not the search results with the best link profile. There are hundreds of other factors that are taken into consideration by Google when it ranks a website, and although links are still one of the top 3 most important ones, they aren’t everything.

  Google has shown signs of steering away from links. Although links can’t completely be removed from the equation (at least not very soon), other factors, like user interaction, for example, have shown a lot of prominence recently.

  If the top competitors have spammy backlinks but are still ranking good, well, my friend, then the truth is you’ve gotten yourself into a very competitive niche.

  However, there’s still hope. But it’s not going to be easy, nor is it going to be cheap (is anything easy and cheap in digital marketing?). Before we dig into the tips and tricks, let’s better understand what Google has done against link spam over the years, and why.

    Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?

  Ok, so if Google tries so hard to get spammers down, how come some webmasters with such obvious shady link profiles are still ranking well with their websites?

John Mueller from Google tells us that we don’t really know if they got away with it or not.

    However, this often sounds unfair, as those websites clearly have spammy link profiles, but are ranking very well.

  There could be a thousand reasons why this is happening, but I’ll try to provide some clearance with what I think is happening.

  They Built Those Links Long Time Ago

  Back in 2012, the BlackHat industry was thriving. ScrapeBox, GSA, Comment Spamming, Private Blog Networks, you name it. It worked. And people got hooked.

  BlackHat SEO services were expensive because they could also be very profitable. Even big brands got into them as well.

  The ones who suffered most were innocent business owners that had no idea about this. They just signed contracts with SEO agencies to get their websites higher on Google.

  As the word spread, more and more shady things started to happen. It wasn’t a time when search engines provided the best results. And Google didn’t like that, so it took action against it.

  Many of them lost their rankings forever. Some eventually recovered, through complex actions of improvement and link disavowing.

  But some got away with it, and they’re probably still ranking today. Since the algorithm is now supposed to be real time and to ignore spammy links, this kind of makes sense.

    It doesn’t mean they are bad websites or that they still use BlackHat SEO strategies. It could just be that they got away with it. They were lucky.

  They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)

  Sometimes, instead of working on their own websites, people prefer to ‘work’ other websites out, by trying to attract Google penalties to them. These techniques are called Negative SEO Attacks.

  In theory, the process is pretty simple: do BlackHat SEO to another website until Google gives it a penalty. When they drop, you replace the spot.

  Example showing a negative SEO attack happening on Jellyfish’s website

  When you look at a website and see a lot of spammy links, you might say they’re cheating. But although you can analyze a site’s link profile, you have no idea if they disavowed those links or not.

  The Google Disavow tool is really useful, but it’s also one of the smartest moves Google made for improving their algorithm.

  Because they feared the penalty, many webmasters started submitting their spammy links through the disavow tool.

  Sure, it could help you not get penalized, but yet again, it could do nothing. Some even lose rankings after they start disavowing links.

  What the disavow tool might actually do is that it feeds Google thousands of patterns of spammy links. So Google gets smarter and smarter every day. Smart, eh?

  Negative SEO attack patterns are anyway different from shady link building patterns. You might think that’s not the case, but the truth is when people are doing black-hat SEO for themselves, they’re very cautious and try to stay under the radar. On the other side, when they’re framing someone else, they’re too obvious.

  That’s the big downside of negative search engine optimization. If you make it obvious, Google will know it’s a negative SEO attack, but if you don’t make it obvious enough, who knows, your competitor might never get caught and the spam might actually help him rank.

  So although you can see your competitor’s backlinks are reall spammy, you can’t know for sure how Google sees the situation.

  They’re Still the Best Site Out There

  As I said, a spammy link profile doesn’t mean a site shouldn’t be first on Google. This usually happens when all the other sites also have a spammy link profile.

  Google can’t penalize all the websites if they’re all breaking the rules because it wouldn’t have any search results left to return.

  If the top website has been there for years, providing value and good services to its customers, Google will reward it by keeping it there, even though maybe it knows they’re breaking the rules.

  Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet

  Asking why Google doesn’t penalize all the spammers is like asking why doesn’t the police bust all drug dealers. It’s just too many of them, and it’s impossible for Google to catch them all right away. But it probably will, eventually…

  Spamming is still profitable because it works. If you manage to spam under the radar, you might cash in some quick profits. But the frustration of constantly being on the run isn’t a nice feeling.

  If you haven’t done it yet, go ahead and read The Confessions of a Google Spammer on InBound. Once Google finds you, it’s over. And they have to start all over again from scratch.

    Although I want to say that Google will eventually catch everyone… the reality of life is that sometimes bad guys win.

  One Example to Prove Them All

  At first, I tried looking for a lot of examples, but without much success. I tried searching the wedding niche, the flowers niche, but time and time the top ranking websites were actually legit in terms of link building.

  But then I thought to myself… why not payday loans?

  I mean… if there’s a niche there that’s been spammy as hell since forever, it’s definitely this one. Google even has an algorithmic update named after it. And lucky me, I hit the Jackpot (although I couldn’t personally access all the websites; but this could be due to my location).

  So I took a couple of sites from the top and one from the second page (United States/British) and used cognitiveSEO to classify the anchor texts and run the Unnatural Link Detection Tool.

  The results were promising. The big majority of the links are definitely unnatural.

  Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a top ranking website (speedycash.com)

  Another website from a lower set of results shows similar patterns:

  Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a competing website from the second page (cashone.com)

  However, I can easily back up my points made earlier in the article with this example.

  Point no. 1: The sites have been in business for a long time.

  You can easily check when websites were registered. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in business since that date, but it’s a decent indicator.

  These websites were registered over 15 years ago. If the company was doing business back then as well, it’s probably a very legit business with a lot of experience.

  Screenshot taken from bulkseotools.com

  Point no. 2: The links were made a long time ago.

  By checking the link velocity section, we can quickly spot that these websites built links some time ago, but aren’t doing it right now.

  Cashone.com’s link velocity; screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

Mypaydaylonan.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

  The top website seems to be actively building links, but the spike just before 2012 is definitely a lot bigger than the ones happening right now.

  Speedycash.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

  Point no. 3: These websites are still offering good services.

  Although they still look spammy design-wise, one of the websites has over 2,000 reviews on TrustPilot, showing an average grade of 9.1. They could be fake reviews, of course, but yet again, they could not be. I think TrustPilot are doing their best to keep things real.

    Sure, I didn’t analyze one thousand sites, but I hope I made my point. Chances are that most websites in this niche have a significant amount of unnatural links in their link profiles.

  Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well

  I know it’s tempting. I know how you feel. You’ve probably tried everything and they still rank better. But unless you’re trying to go for a hit and run niche site, no. It’s too risky.

  Old sites that did BlackHat stuff in the past might still be ranking well in the Google search results, but new sites doing shady stuff attract a lot more attention. You might get penalized right from the start, losing your chance to ever rank for that keyword.

  Although building a million spammy links might look easy, it’s not. It takes a lot of effort and the learning curve is quite steep. It’s also not cheap. You’ll need advanced tools and thousands of proxies to cover your ass up.

  If you want to beat a BlackHat site the WhiteHat way, then it’s not going to be easy. But the advantage is that you don’t risk anything, and what you build, you build on the long-term.

  Your time is far way spent on other things, such as quality content, improving user experience and relationship building. Instead of pointing our fingers at someone else, we should be taking a look at our own actions, and see how we could improve those.

  Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool

  If you’ve heard about the Penguin Update, then you probably know it’s triggered by spammy links. Although it’s not the only algorithm that penalizes websites with spammy link profiles, it’s definitely the one that took the most spammers down. If you’re planning on some shady link building, then you should look out for flappy walks and orange beaks.

  The problem with the first three Penguin algorithm updates was that although they got better, they were still pretty slow. Google used to gather information over a longer period of time (about 2-3 months) and then roll out a patch that would suddenly impact thousands of websites that broke the rules.

  As of the latest version, Google’s spammy link tracking is now happening in real time. With the Penguin 4.0 update, Google ignores spammy links or penalizes single pages instead of penalizing entire websites.

  This doesn’t mean that websites can’t be penalized anymore. Plenty of users still admit having suffered from Google penalties that affected their entire websites.

  Some experts, such as Rand Fishkin, speculate that Google used this slow mass penalty process to create a fear factor that will determine webmasters to submit their spammy link profiles through the Disavow Tool.

  This tool, launched in 2012, some months after the first Penguin update, enabled users to submit links that they wanted to be ignored by Google. People thought that if they submitted their links sooner, they could avoid a possible Google penalty. Google then supposedly fed the Disavow Tool database to the algorithm and used this to create a real-time version of Penguin, one that better understands link spamming patterns.

  The Disavow Tool also somewhat protects webmasters against negative SEO attacks. If someone built some spammy links to your site you could start disavowing them. However, Google had previously stated that the Disavow Tool isn’t a replacement for removing links and that no reconsideration action will be taken unless users also try to remove some of those links.

    Good ol’ Google! Never fails to surprise you with its tricks, right?

  However, the truth is that using the disavow tool can help you recover from a Google penalty. If you’re ever in that situation, it’s worth a try.

    How to Submit a Spam Report

  Although you can do this, I wouldn’t recommend rushing in. It’s not exactly the same, submitting a spam report does resemble a negative SEO attack because while you could try to outrank your competitor by gaining positions yourself, you’re trying to pull him down instead.

  Think about the things I mentioned earlier:

  What if your competitor just hired a company to do search engine optimization and he has no idea, although he’d probably be against it if he knew? 

  In addition, if you have some shady links yourself, or share some of the backlinks with your competitor, submitting a spam report might attract Google’s attention to your website as well. You’ll see why in a minute.

  Instead of blowing into some other person’s candles, try to make your own candle burn brighter. The truth is, if you had started doing SEO 5 years ago, you’d be ranking now.

  However, if you see a website that tries to steal information from clients and or is involved in any illegal activities ranking on top, then you should definitely submit a spam report, as soon as possible.

  In theory, Google employees should manually review these websites and decide if to apply a penalty or not. Any phishing or malware attempts will surely be banned.

  There are more types of spam reports. Some of the more… dangerous ones, let’s say, anyone can file. This includes Malware, Phishing or Copyright related issues.

  The rest of them, on the other side, will require a search console account (former Webmaster Tools). This means that Google will know exactly who is filing the report. If you ever did some shady things yourself, you should keep this in mind.

  Of course, you could just set up a fake account to set a report, but Google will probably ignore those, otherwise an account wouldn’t be required in the first place.

  How to Outrank Competitors With Spammy Link Profiles

  Even though things aren’t in your favor, you should not give up. There are still things you can do to outrank these types of competitors.

  Actually, the journey is one of the things that makes SEO so interesting: figuring out those things you haven’t thought of before; making a move that provides results; doing it without cheating.

  Outranking a BlackHat SEO feels like gaining more money and power than the Godfather by selling lollipops.

  Focus More on OnPage  and Technical SEO Factors

  I know this might only sound motivational, but you should shift your focus from links to on-page factors. When people say they’ve tried everything, I still have a feeling they were only talking about link building.

  That’s what usually happens when spammy link envy kicks in: you forget about all the other things, like making your website faster, securing the connection with an SSL and improving the overall user experience.

  Here’s what you should be asking yourself:

  Am I really offering the users a good experience?

  One of the hardest things entrepreneurs have to do is jump into their customers’ minds. It’s hard to really see their frustrations and come up with good solutions to solve them. You might’ve heard the phrase “Customers don’t know what they want.” Well, that’s true and it’s exactly the issue! They don’t know what they want so they won’t buy. At least, not until you offer a good solution to the problem.

  If you really want to understand the buyer, just go buy something. You’ll instantly shift into the buyer’s mindset. And that’s exactly what you should analyze for your site if you really want to find solutions and make more sales.

  What’s your conversion rate? Is it satisfying? Where do your users click most of the time? Is it easy for them to understand what’s clickable and what’s not? Are you offering a live support chat? Are they wasting time looking for something? Maybe you should bring it more to the front.

  Am I really trying to solve their problems?

  Many websites out there don’t try to solve a problem. They’re just in because they heard you can make some money online. As long as you’re not focused at all on solving a user’s problem, you can’t really improve your website.

  Is the content really answering their questions? Does it resonate with who they are? Figure it out before you put another word on your pages.

  Is my website better than theirs?

  The website must be prettier, faster and easier to use.

  However, I’m not talking only about design and website performance . There are a lot of other variables which actually come from outside the website:

  Is your brand known at all compared to your competitor’s? Could you really handle all the orders without an issue? How’s your social media engagement compared to theirs?

  Really step up your content game

  Everyone knows that content is King. But an inconsistent King can quickly lose his throne. 

  Consistency has proven itself time after time in the content marketing and SEO industry. We’ve experienced this ourselves here, at cognitiveSEO. That being said, get yourself an editorial schedule ready, and stick to it.

  It doesn’t really matter how much you post. Obviously, the more, the better. But what really matters is that you post on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

  Remember that with quantity, you risk losing quality. To be able to post more often and keep the quality of your content, you’ll have to expand your writing department.

  Think of innovating things in your niche. Analyze your competitors’ content and try to find the content gaps. Set personas for your targeted audience and really dig into it.

  One thing I often recommend to websites, especially if it’s an eCommerce site, is to start blog posting. This can help a lot with building the authority of the domain, as articles and blog posts get shares and backlinks much easier than products. You’ll need a good content marketer for that. Some niches have a hard time coming up with interesting content.

  Here are some next level tips on how to expand your content strategy, even in a really boring niche. It’s not a short video, but it’s worth watching.

    The secret here is finding those questions and objections your clients have that your competitors don’t answer, and answer them! Any gap in the niche that the competition hasn’t filled yet is a great opportunity for you to improve your website.

  Another great thing to do is update your content regularly with new information. You always learn new things about different topics. If you think you have new information you can add to an existing article, never hesitate to do it!

  A great way to improve your content marketing strategies is using the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool & Content Assistant. This set of SEO tools works by analyzing all the pages that rank for that keyword and providing keywords that you should add in order to make your article more relevant.

    Don’t just bulk keywords in. Think of them as topics you haven’t covered before. Add them to relevant places and always keep the end user in mind. If it doesn’t make any sense for the reader, don’t add the keyword at all.

  We’ve optimized our own content recently and the results were promising, providing a 70% increase in SEO visibility.

  Look for other keywords to target

  Keyword research is really important if you want to do well in SEO. Sometimes, if you can’t outrank your competitors on Google, you can try to target keywords that are less competitive.

  Maybe the ones you are targeting right now are not the most relevant for your website and users. Maybe the keyword difficulty is too high for your website’s authority.

  You can try targeting some longtail keywords instead. As you grow, your site will get stronger and will be able to target more competitive keywords.

  Many times, people get stuck trying to rank for that one great keyword. Sure, high search volume keywords are nice, but there are other keywords out there.

  Your spammy competitor can’t be ranking on all of them.

  Don’t waste too much time trying to rank on a single keyword, or you’ll end up overoptimizing and doing yourself harm. You’ll also waste a lot of time and lose opportunities to rank hundreds of other keywords.

  The cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool can provide you with some new keyword ideas that you can start targeting. The ones with more stars are more relevant to your primary searched keyword.

  Snippet from the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool

  Another interesting trick you can do is to use the Site Explorer to find the Top 10-20 ranking keywords for a website. Not so useful if you use it on your own site, but if used on a competitor’s website, you can get new insights you probably haven’t thought of before.

  Snippet from cognitiveSEO’s Site Explorer showing a website’s top ranking keywords

  Another good way is to simply use the basic Google Keyword Planner. However, to get more accurate keyword statistics, you’ll need to spend some money on advertising, using Google Adwords.

  Speaking of Google AdWords…

  Invest in Advertising

  If you’re not moving, you’re staying put. That’s exactly what you’re doing if you’re obsessing over a competitor’s backlink profile.

  If you can’t outrank them and get enough traffic from SEO strategies alone, then you might need to invest in advertising. You can advertise either with Google Ads or on Social Media.

  And did you know that there are ads that help you rank better on Google? Yes, it’s called buying links.

  You can buy links without breaking any of Google’s guidelines by simply nofollowing the links. The secret is to make them site-wide and make it obvious it’s an ad.

  Countless examples prove that nofollow links still provide SEO value. The best thing about it? You can actually use your target keywords in the anchor text!

  If you think it works for you, you might even try using some press releases. Just make sure they are from reputable news sites.

  Make sure you also strengthen your brand if you have enough budget to advertise. Maybe place an image ad as well using your brand logo near the link. Smart ads also have the chance of getting viral, especially in the video field.

  Invest in it the white-hat way, and nofollow those links!

  Improve your social media campaign

  Although social media has been going down as a referral source (and Google has been climbing), it’s still a good idea to invest your time into building a social following. People spend a lot more time on social media than they spend on Google, and you need to be there.

  Your competitors might spend a lot of time building shady links, but they might suck at social media. We don’t know for sure if social signals are a direct Google ranking factor or not, but they can have an impact on organic traffic, which can lead up to more natural links (a real ranking factor).

  Maybe your competitor isn’t doing anything interesting on Facebook. You could, for example, bring something new by building yourself a chatbot. Chatbot marketing works well because the open rates for the messages are really high (up to 90%).

  Get inspired from your competitor’s good links

  The only time you should spend on analyzing the competitor’s links is if you want to spot opportunities for yourself.

  Spending too much time on a competitor’s backlinks profile is a waste. You could instead spend that valuable time to figure out new issues on your website and fix those.

  The reality is that not all the links on a spammy profile are bad.

  Links usually cause higher rankings, but it can also be the other way around. As websites start ranking, they get more organic traffic which can lead to more links being created, as people discover and share your content around. And those are strong, natural links.

  If a site has been ranking #1 for a long time, I bet there are some natural links in their profile as well.

  You can dig for those natural links and try to replicate them. This, of course, if you have a better website. Nobody will link to you if they don’t find the website and the info on it useful.

  You can use the cognitiveSEO’s Unnatural Link Detection Tool to spot this kind of opportunities. Just run the backlink analysis, identify the good links and try to build them or earn them by contacting the owners.

  Access the natural link navigator by clicking on the green bar

Steal your competitor’s natural links

  However, your primary focus shouldn’t be on link building. Stealing your competitor’s links is a great link building strategy, but earning them naturally is an even better one. If you start improving all the things mentioned above, links will start coming on their own.

  Conclusion

  Outranking your competition isn’t an easy job, but it’s often something that needs to be done in the digital marketing world. Shifting your focus from building links to improving other things about your website (such as OnPage SEO and the conversion rate) can make the process less frustrating and a lot more effective.

  Make your website better by adding more relevant content and by analyzing and improving the overall user experience. Try to gain a little traction from other sources of traffic, such as Google Ads or Social Media. Work on your conversion rate optimization and keep your customers happy.

  Try to fill any gaps you can spot in the niche that your competition isn’t yet taking advantage of, and most of all, try to have a better site than they do, not just a better ranking one.

  As Rand Fishkin once said, “F@%# Link Building!”  Start link earning.

  The post How to Outrun Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles But Rank Better Than You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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How to Outrun Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles But Rank Better Than You

Outranking your competition can be very difficult, especially if your website is rather new. What’s even more frustrating is when you can’t outrank competitors which have spammy backlink profiles. Why doesn’t Google penalize them? Why does it rank you lower than them in the Google search results, even though you play the game by the book?

  Google’s algorithm has evolved a lot over the years. The main purpose of the improvements was to be able to better distinguish natural links from artificially generated links. Unfortunately, although big advancements have been made, top ranking websites with clean link profiles aren’t always the case.

  It probably happened to you (or to someone you know) to run a business in compliance with all Google’s guidelines when it comes to  link building but, at the end of the day, to be dethroned by other sites from the industry with spammy link profiles. So, why is this happening? Let’s find out! 

    Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?

They Built Those Links Long Time Ago

They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)

They’re Still the Best Site Out There

Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet

One Example to Prove Them All

Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well

Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool

How to Submit a Spam Report

How to Outrank Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles

Focus More on OnPage & Technical SEO Factors

Really Step up Your Content Game

Look for Other Keywords to Target

Invest in Advertising

Improve Social Media

Get Inspired from Your Competitor’s Good Links

  If you think I’m going to say that you can still improve your rankings using BlackHat SEO link building tactics in 2019, you’re wrong. But while some complain about their websites being penalized, others have a completely different issue:

  “My competitors have spammy links but still rank better than me.”

  Then, almost every time, the following question follows:

  “What should I do in this case?”

  There’s even an old Reddit thread about this:

    If you’ve been struggling with this issue for a while, then you’ve landed on the right page.

  The short answer to this question is that a spammy link profile doesn’t necessarily mean a website shouldn’t rank well. You see, Google’s (and other search engines) main purpose is to return the best search results for the users, not the search results with the best link profile. There are hundreds of other factors that are taken into consideration by Google when it ranks a website, and although links are still one of the top 3 most important ones, they aren’t everything.

  Google has shown signs of steering away from links. Although links can’t completely be removed from the equation (at least not very soon), other factors, like user interaction, for example, have shown a lot of prominence recently.

  If the top competitors have spammy backlinks but are still ranking good, well, my friend, then the truth is you’ve gotten yourself into a very competitive niche.

  However, there’s still hope. But it’s not going to be easy, nor is it going to be cheap (is anything easy and cheap in digital marketing?). Before we dig into the tips and tricks, let’s better understand what Google has done against link spam over the years, and why.

    Why Do Sites With Spammy Link Profiles Still Rank Well?

  Ok, so if Google tries so hard to get spammers down, how come some webmasters with such obvious shady link profiles are still ranking well with their websites?

John Mueller from Google tells us that we don’t really know if they got away with it or not.

    However, this often sounds unfair, as those websites clearly have spammy link profiles, but are ranking very well.

  There could be a thousand reasons why this is happening, but I’ll try to provide some clearance with what I think is happening.

  They Built Those Links Long Time Ago

  Back in 2012, the BlackHat industry was thriving. ScrapeBox, GSA, Comment Spamming, Private Blog Networks, you name it. It worked. And people got hooked.

  BlackHat SEO services were expensive because they could also be very profitable. Even big brands got into them as well.

  The ones who suffered most were innocent business owners that had no idea about this. They just signed contracts with SEO agencies to get their websites higher on Google.

  As the word spread, more and more shady things started to happen. It wasn’t a time when search engines provided the best results. And Google didn’t like that, so it took action against it.

  Many of them lost their rankings forever. Some eventually recovered, through complex actions of improvement and link disavowing.

  But some got away with it, and they’re probably still ranking today. Since the algorithm is now supposed to be real time and to ignore spammy links, this kind of makes sense.

    It doesn’t mean they are bad websites or that they still use BlackHat SEO strategies. It could just be that they got away with it. They were lucky.

  They Didn’t Build Those Links (Negative SEO Attack)

  Sometimes, instead of working on their own websites, people prefer to ‘work’ other websites out, by trying to attract Google penalties to them. These techniques are called Negative SEO Attacks.

  In theory, the process is pretty simple: do BlackHat SEO to another website until Google gives it a penalty. When they drop, you replace the spot.

  Example showing a negative SEO attack happening on Jellyfish’s website

  When you look at a website and see a lot of spammy links, you might say they’re cheating. But although you can analyze a site’s link profile, you have no idea if they disavowed those links or not.

  The Google Disavow tool is really useful, but it’s also one of the smartest moves Google made for improving their algorithm.

  Because they feared the penalty, many webmasters started submitting their spammy links through the disavow tool.

  Sure, it could help you not get penalized, but yet again, it could do nothing. Some even lose rankings after they start disavowing links.

  What the disavow tool might actually do is that it feeds Google thousands of patterns of spammy links. So Google gets smarter and smarter every day. Smart, eh?

  Negative SEO attack patterns are anyway different from shady link building patterns. You might think that’s not the case, but the truth is when people are doing black-hat SEO for themselves, they’re very cautious and try to stay under the radar. On the other side, when they’re framing someone else, they’re too obvious.

  That’s the big downside of negative search engine optimization. If you make it obvious, Google will know it’s a negative SEO attack, but if you don’t make it obvious enough, who knows, your competitor might never get caught and the spam might actually help him rank.

  So although you can see your competitor’s backlinks are reall spammy, you can’t know for sure how Google sees the situation.

  They’re Still the Best Site Out There

  As I said, a spammy link profile doesn’t mean a site shouldn’t be first on Google. This usually happens when all the other sites also have a spammy link profile.

  Google can’t penalize all the websites if they’re all breaking the rules because it wouldn’t have any search results left to return.

  If the top website has been there for years, providing value and good services to its customers, Google will reward it by keeping it there, even though maybe it knows they’re breaking the rules.

  Google Hasn’t Caught Them… Yet

  Asking why Google doesn’t penalize all the spammers is like asking why doesn’t the police bust all drug dealers. It’s just too many of them, and it’s impossible for Google to catch them all right away. But it probably will, eventually…

  Spamming is still profitable because it works. If you manage to spam under the radar, you might cash in some quick profits. But the frustration of constantly being on the run isn’t a nice feeling.

  If you haven’t done it yet, go ahead and read The Confessions of a Google Spammer on InBound. Once Google finds you, it’s over. And they have to start all over again from scratch.

    Although I want to say that Google will eventually catch everyone… the reality of life is that sometimes bad guys win.

  One Example to Prove Them All

  At first, I tried looking for a lot of examples, but without much success. I tried searching the wedding niche, the flowers niche, but time and time the top ranking websites were actually legit in terms of link building.

  But then I thought to myself… why not payday loans?

  I mean… if there’s a niche there that’s been spammy as hell since forever, it’s definitely this one. Google even has an algorithmic update named after it. And lucky me, I hit the Jackpot (although I couldn’t personally access all the websites; but this could be due to my location).

  So I took a couple of sites from the top and one from the second page (United States/British) and used cognitiveSEO to classify the anchor texts and run the Unnatural Link Detection Tool.

  The results were promising. The big majority of the links are definitely unnatural.

  Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a top ranking website (speedycash.com)

  Another website from a lower set of results shows similar patterns:

  Snippet from the Unnatural Link Detection tool showing a competing website from the second page (cashone.com)

  However, I can easily back up my points made earlier in the article with this example.

  Point no. 1: The sites have been in business for a long time.

  You can easily check when websites were registered. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in business since that date, but it’s a decent indicator.

  These websites were registered over 15 years ago. If the company was doing business back then as well, it’s probably a very legit business with a lot of experience.

  Screenshot taken from bulkseotools.com

  Point no. 2: The links were made a long time ago.

  By checking the link velocity section, we can quickly spot that these websites built links some time ago, but aren’t doing it right now.

  Cashone.com’s link velocity; screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

Mypaydaylonan.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

  The top website seems to be actively building links, but the spike just before 2012 is definitely a lot bigger than the ones happening right now.

  Speedycash.com’s link velocity;  screenshot taken from the cognitiveSEO tool

  Point no. 3: These websites are still offering good services.

  Although they still look spammy design-wise, one of the websites has over 2,000 reviews on TrustPilot, showing an average grade of 9.1. They could be fake reviews, of course, but yet again, they could not be. I think TrustPilot are doing their best to keep things real.

    Sure, I didn’t analyze one thousand sites, but I hope I made my point. Chances are that most websites in this niche have a significant amount of unnatural links in their link profiles.

  Why You Should NOT Build Spammy Links as Well

  I know it’s tempting. I know how you feel. You’ve probably tried everything and they still rank better. But unless you’re trying to go for a hit and run niche site, no. It’s too risky.

  Old sites that did BlackHat stuff in the past might still be ranking well in the Google search results, but new sites doing shady stuff attract a lot more attention. You might get penalized right from the start, losing your chance to ever rank for that keyword.

  Although building a million spammy links might look easy, it’s not. It takes a lot of effort and the learning curve is quite steep. It’s also not cheap. You’ll need advanced tools and thousands of proxies to cover your ass up.

  If you want to beat a BlackHat site the WhiteHat way, then it’s not going to be easy. But the advantage is that you don’t risk anything, and what you build, you build on the long-term.

  Your time is far way spent on other things, such as quality content, improving user experience and relationship building. Instead of pointing our fingers at someone else, we should be taking a look at our own actions, and see how we could improve those.

  Google Penguin 4.0 Update & the Disavow Tool

  If you’ve heard about the Penguin Update, then you probably know it’s triggered by spammy links. Although it’s not the only algorithm that penalizes websites with spammy link profiles, it’s definitely the one that took the most spammers down. If you’re planning on some shady link building, then you should look out for flappy walks and orange beaks.

  The problem with the first three Penguin algorithm updates was that although they got better, they were still pretty slow. Google used to gather information over a longer period of time (about 2-3 months) and then roll out a patch that would suddenly impact thousands of websites that broke the rules.

  As of the latest version, Google’s spammy link tracking is now happening in real time. With the Penguin 4.0 update, Google ignores spammy links or penalizes single pages instead of penalizing entire websites.

  This doesn’t mean that websites can’t be penalized anymore. Plenty of users still admit having suffered from Google penalties that affected their entire websites.

  Some experts, such as Rand Fishkin, speculate that Google used this slow mass penalty process to create a fear factor that will determine webmasters to submit their spammy link profiles through the Disavow Tool.

  This tool, launched in 2012, some months after the first Penguin update, enabled users to submit links that they wanted to be ignored by Google. People thought that if they submitted their links sooner, they could avoid a possible Google penalty. Google then supposedly fed the Disavow Tool database to the algorithm and used this to create a real-time version of Penguin, one that better understands link spamming patterns.

  The Disavow Tool also somewhat protects webmasters against negative SEO attacks. If someone built some spammy links to your site you could start disavowing them. However, Google had previously stated that the Disavow Tool isn’t a replacement for removing links and that no reconsideration action will be taken unless users also try to remove some of those links.

    Good ol’ Google! Never fails to surprise you with its tricks, right?

  However, the truth is that using the disavow tool can help you recover from a Google penalty. If you’re ever in that situation, it’s worth a try.

    How to Submit a Spam Report

  Although you can do this, I wouldn’t recommend rushing in. It’s not exactly the same, submitting a spam report does resemble a negative SEO attack because while you could try to outrank your competitor by gaining positions yourself, you’re trying to pull him down instead.

  Think about the things I mentioned earlier:

  What if your competitor just hired a company to do search engine optimization and he has no idea, although he’d probably be against it if he knew? 

  In addition, if you have some shady links yourself, or share some of the backlinks with your competitor, submitting a spam report might attract Google’s attention to your website as well. You’ll see why in a minute.

  Instead of blowing into some other person’s candles, try to make your own candle burn brighter. The truth is, if you had started doing SEO 5 years ago, you’d be ranking now.

  However, if you see a website that tries to steal information from clients and or is involved in any illegal activities ranking on top, then you should definitely submit a spam report, as soon as possible.

  In theory, Google employees should manually review these websites and decide if to apply a penalty or not. Any phishing or malware attempts will surely be banned.

  There are more types of spam reports. Some of the more… dangerous ones, let’s say, anyone can file. This includes Malware, Phishing or Copyright related issues.

  The rest of them, on the other side, will require a search console account (former Webmaster Tools). This means that Google will know exactly who is filing the report. If you ever did some shady things yourself, you should keep this in mind.

  Of course, you could just set up a fake account to set a report, but Google will probably ignore those, otherwise an account wouldn’t be required in the first place.

  How to Outrank Competitors With Spammy Link Profiles

  Even though things aren’t in your favor, you should not give up. There are still things you can do to outrank these types of competitors.

  Actually, the journey is one of the things that makes SEO so interesting: figuring out those things you haven’t thought of before; making a move that provides results; doing it without cheating.

  Outranking a BlackHat SEO feels like gaining more money and power than the Godfather by selling lollipops.

  Focus More on OnPage  and Technical SEO Factors

  I know this might only sound motivational, but you should shift your focus from links to on-page factors. When people say they’ve tried everything, I still have a feeling they were only talking about link building.

  That’s what usually happens when spammy link envy kicks in: you forget about all the other things, like making your website faster, securing the connection with an SSL and improving the overall user experience.

  Here’s what you should be asking yourself:

  Am I really offering the users a good experience?

  One of the hardest things entrepreneurs have to do is jump into their customers’ minds. It’s hard to really see their frustrations and come up with good solutions to solve them. You might’ve heard the phrase “Customers don’t know what they want.” Well, that’s true and it’s exactly the issue! They don’t know what they want so they won’t buy. At least, not until you offer a good solution to the problem.

  If you really want to understand the buyer, just go buy something. You’ll instantly shift into the buyer’s mindset. And that’s exactly what you should analyze for your site if you really want to find solutions and make more sales.

  What’s your conversion rate? Is it satisfying? Where do your users click most of the time? Is it easy for them to understand what’s clickable and what’s not? Are you offering a live support chat? Are they wasting time looking for something? Maybe you should bring it more to the front.

  Am I really trying to solve their problems?

  Many websites out there don’t try to solve a problem. They’re just in because they heard you can make some money online. As long as you’re not focused at all on solving a user’s problem, you can’t really improve your website.

  Is the content really answering their questions? Does it resonate with who they are? Figure it out before you put another word on your pages.

  Is my website better than theirs?

  The website must be prettier, faster and easier to use.

  However, I’m not talking only about design and website performance . There are a lot of other variables which actually come from outside the website:

  Is your brand known at all compared to your competitor’s? Could you really handle all the orders without an issue? How’s your social media engagement compared to theirs?

  Really step up your content game

  Everyone knows that content is King. But an inconsistent King can quickly lose his throne. 

  Consistency has proven itself time after time in the content marketing and SEO industry. We’ve experienced this ourselves here, at cognitiveSEO. That being said, get yourself an editorial schedule ready, and stick to it.

  It doesn’t really matter how much you post. Obviously, the more, the better. But what really matters is that you post on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

  Remember that with quantity, you risk losing quality. To be able to post more often and keep the quality of your content, you’ll have to expand your writing department.

  Think of innovating things in your niche. Analyze your competitors’ content and try to find the content gaps. Set personas for your targeted audience and really dig into it.

  One thing I often recommend to websites, especially if it’s an eCommerce site, is to start blog posting. This can help a lot with building the authority of the domain, as articles and blog posts get shares and backlinks much easier than products. You’ll need a good content marketer for that. Some niches have a hard time coming up with interesting content.

  Here are some next level tips on how to expand your content strategy, even in a really boring niche. It’s not a short video, but it’s worth watching.

    The secret here is finding those questions and objections your clients have that your competitors don’t answer, and answer them! Any gap in the niche that the competition hasn’t filled yet is a great opportunity for you to improve your website.

  Another great thing to do is update your content regularly with new information. You always learn new things about different topics. If you think you have new information you can add to an existing article, never hesitate to do it!

  A great way to improve your content marketing strategies is using the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool & Content Assistant. This set of SEO tools works by analyzing all the pages that rank for that keyword and providing keywords that you should add in order to make your article more relevant.

    Don’t just bulk keywords in. Think of them as topics you haven’t covered before. Add them to relevant places and always keep the end user in mind. If it doesn’t make any sense for the reader, don’t add the keyword at all.

  We’ve optimized our own content recently and the results were promising, providing a 70% increase in SEO visibility.

  Look for other keywords to target

  Keyword research is really important if you want to do well in SEO. Sometimes, if you can’t outrank your competitors on Google, you can try to target keywords that are less competitive.

  Maybe the ones you are targeting right now are not the most relevant for your website and users. Maybe the keyword difficulty is too high for your website’s authority.

  You can try targeting some longtail keywords instead. As you grow, your site will get stronger and will be able to target more competitive keywords.

  Many times, people get stuck trying to rank for that one great keyword. Sure, high search volume keywords are nice, but there are other keywords out there.

  Your spammy competitor can’t be ranking on all of them.

  Don’t waste too much time trying to rank on a single keyword, or you’ll end up overoptimizing and doing yourself harm. You’ll also waste a lot of time and lose opportunities to rank hundreds of other keywords.

  The cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool can provide you with some new keyword ideas that you can start targeting. The ones with more stars are more relevant to your primary searched keyword.

  Snippet from the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool

  Another interesting trick you can do is to use the Site Explorer to find the Top 10-20 ranking keywords for a website. Not so useful if you use it on your own site, but if used on a competitor’s website, you can get new insights you probably haven’t thought of before.

  Snippet from cognitiveSEO’s Site Explorer showing a website’s top ranking keywords

  Another good way is to simply use the basic Google Keyword Planner. However, to get more accurate keyword statistics, you’ll need to spend some money on advertising, using Google Adwords.

  Speaking of Google AdWords…

  Invest in Advertising

  If you’re not moving, you’re staying put. That’s exactly what you’re doing if you’re obsessing over a competitor’s backlink profile.

  If you can’t outrank them and get enough traffic from SEO strategies alone, then you might need to invest in advertising. You can advertise either with Google Ads or on Social Media.

  And did you know that there are ads that help you rank better on Google? Yes, it’s called buying links.

  You can buy links without breaking any of Google’s guidelines by simply nofollowing the links. The secret is to make them site-wide and make it obvious it’s an ad.

  Countless examples prove that nofollow links still provide SEO value. The best thing about it? You can actually use your target keywords in the anchor text!

  If you think it works for you, you might even try using some press releases. Just make sure they are from reputable news sites.

  Make sure you also strengthen your brand if you have enough budget to advertise. Maybe place an image ad as well using your brand logo near the link. Smart ads also have the chance of getting viral, especially in the video field.

  Invest in it the white-hat way, and nofollow those links!

  Improve your social media campaign

  Although social media has been going down as a referral source (and Google has been climbing), it’s still a good idea to invest your time into building a social following. People spend a lot more time on social media than they spend on Google, and you need to be there.

  Your competitors might spend a lot of time building shady links, but they might suck at social media. We don’t know for sure if social signals are a direct Google ranking factor or not, but they can have an impact on organic traffic, which can lead up to more natural links (a real ranking factor).

  Maybe your competitor isn’t doing anything interesting on Facebook. You could, for example, bring something new by building yourself a chatbot. Chatbot marketing works well because the open rates for the messages are really high (up to 90%).

  Get inspired from your competitor’s good links

  The only time you should spend on analyzing the competitor’s links is if you want to spot opportunities for yourself.

  Spending too much time on a competitor’s backlinks profile is a waste. You could instead spend that valuable time to figure out new issues on your website and fix those.

  The reality is that not all the links on a spammy profile are bad.

  Links usually cause higher rankings, but it can also be the other way around. As websites start ranking, they get more organic traffic which can lead to more links being created, as people discover and share your content around. And those are strong, natural links.

  If a site has been ranking #1 for a long time, I bet there are some natural links in their profile as well.

  You can dig for those natural links and try to replicate them. This, of course, if you have a better website. Nobody will link to you if they don’t find the website and the info on it useful.

  You can use the cognitiveSEO’s Unnatural Link Detection Tool to spot this kind of opportunities. Just run the backlink analysis, identify the good links and try to build them or earn them by contacting the owners.

  Access the natural link navigator by clicking on the green bar

Steal your competitor’s natural links

  However, your primary focus shouldn’t be on link building. Stealing your competitor’s links is a great link building strategy, but earning them naturally is an even better one. If you start improving all the things mentioned above, links will start coming on their own.

  Conclusion

  Outranking your competition isn’t an easy job, but it’s often something that needs to be done in the digital marketing world. Shifting your focus from building links to improving other things about your website (such as OnPage SEO and the conversion rate) can make the process less frustrating and a lot more effective.

  Make your website better by adding more relevant content and by analyzing and improving the overall user experience. Try to gain a little traction from other sources of traffic, such as Google Ads or Social Media. Work on your conversion rate optimization and keep your customers happy.

  Try to fill any gaps you can spot in the niche that your competition isn’t yet taking advantage of, and most of all, try to have a better site than they do, not just a better ranking one.

  As Rand Fishkin once said, “F@%# Link Building!”  Start link earning.

  The post How to Outrun Competitors That Have Spammy Link Profiles But Rank Better Than You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

[letlhogonolotakesuclalaw]

Shelved Memories, Fractured  Relationships, Loss and Healing

It’s a beautiful and sunny Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles. Today will be good day I tell myself. It is a  particularly exciting day because a certain distinguished lecturer from the  University of Free State will be giving a lecture in the history department.  Yes, another South African in LA. I was told that it is going to be an  exciting lecture. The lecture is on the sixth floor of the history  department. I don't know where the history building is and my google maps is taking  me around in circles and I finally sent a text to the Black Grads UCLA group and  someone directs me to the building. I get there and the lecture begins  shortly. Dr Chitja Twala delivers a lecture on Culture activities and  resistance art as tools of the liberation struggle in the Free State, South  Africa, 1970s -1990s. It wasn't a particularly interesting lecture but the  Americans were impressed, I think anything about South Africa impresses them.  

I get a WhatsApp call from my uncle  and I can't answer. I sent him a message to tell him I can't answer and he  says that I should call him after the lecture. I immediately got this sick  feeling in my gut and my gut keeps saying that something is terribly wrong. I  have a look at the time and it is probably passed ten in the evening in South  Africa and he calling me means that something has to be wrong.

 This lecture needs to end so that I can  call him. After the lecture, I call him and he asks me where I am and I tell  him I am walking on campus. He tells me to find a quiet place and sit down.  His tone confirms my suspicions. I tell myself that something is terribly  wrong. I proceeded to the Grad office and go into Sidney's office. She seems  excited to see me and asks about my weekend. I tell her that something is  wrong and I start crying. She closes her office door. I call my uncle. He  relays the story that my mom fell that morning and proceeds to tell me all  the details of that day and then he says "I'm afraid I don't have good  news for you." I'm not sure what he is saying, although I am. I asked  him "what exactly are you saying?" He says "your mom has  passed away". I let out a loud cry. I think my heart stopped for a  minute. I thought I was dreaming. I thought that I was having a bad dream I  was desperate to wake up from. I put down the phone. He calls again. I'm  uncertain how to answer his question when he asks how I am doing, I wasn't  sure myself.

You see the last couple of years of  my mom's life, we had a very complicated relationship. I think it came with  me working. It reminds me of an essay called The Eternal Intern I read in  "We write what we like" edited by Yolisa Qunta. I

 As black people working, we shoulder  and take on a lot of responsibility and for many of us we are our parents’  saving grace, their ticket out of poverty. But sadly, the system works  tirelessly to ensure that we do not truly become that ticket. The system is  not created to allow me to be in full flourish. In theory, my big 5 law  salary after my degree should have been able to take good care of my mother  and her family. All the sacrifices finally paying off, but it didn't. I moved  to Johannesburg, which meant that I had to get a place to stay, a car, buy  working clothing, live in Johannesburg and send money home to my mom and take  care of my sister. I did the best that I can but in many ways it was not  enough. This caused a drift in our relationship. I am a new age person  and my mom is of the older generation, a clash between the generations. I  expressed my discomfort a lot and I felt that she didn't care about me, but I  was completely wrong - I didn't see her point of view. I didn’t see that  I was her ticket to a better life.

 So, when I left for LA I was uneasy,  I felt that there was unfinished business in South Africa and my first two  months, I was uneasy and now I see why I was. She was going to pass away. My  mom and I last spoke two weeks before her passing. It was  a video call. She was happy to see me alive  and well. I was too. I am saddened that when she passed she couldn't call me.  I am saddened that I was many miles away in another country. Her death cut me  deep. I was angry at life for being so cruel. I mean, I had come to LA to  follow my dreams but inadvertently it would mean that this degree would  better her life as well. After my crying, I become the lawyer that I am, and  starting thinking about what is going to happen. I won't lie to you. The Grad  office at UCLA is incredible, within minutes - a flight back was booked (just  changed my initial return flight) and my Professors would be notified of the  horrid news.  But being the lawyer that I am, my first question was  to ask about the contract I signed to be at UCLA, I had many questions about  what happens if I don't come back. I was assured that it should be the least  of my worries.

I messaged my friends in LA and  South Africa and broke the tragic news to them, the number of texts and calls  were overwhelming, my people were showing up for me. I went to my house. I  was never left alone until I made it to the airport the next day. It was  incredible how black people were showing up for me in my time of need. At  embarking on the hardest journey of my life - 27 hours of travelling back to  SA all by myself. It was a brutal and lonely time for me. I cried in  airports, in flights and had to constantly let people know not to be alarmed  if they saw me cry. It was the worst 27 hours of my life. I wrote a lot, I  cried a lot.  I wrote about my grandmother who passed when I was in  grade 11. She was an amazing womxn, who took care of me on her social welfare  - she died while she was in her 50s. I was reminded of the death of my aunt,  who took care of me - her death happened suddenly in her early forties and  now I was flying across the world to bury my mom who died at 50. Who fell and  died at 50. This was all too much to handle. I arrived in South Africa on  Friday morning and had friends come meet me at the airport and sit down and  cry with me. I needed that. To be held close and to be given the space to  cry. The loss seemed insurmountable.  From the airport it was  straight to Kimberley. My uncle - the same one who broke the news - drove us.  While driving, he asked me if I had any dollars with me because he hadn't  seen one. I told him yes and proceeded to show him. It is these moments that  remind me that traveling abroad is an act of revolution. It reminds me of the  words of Koleka Putuma "crossing  oceans is an achievement even for those left behind."

We got to Kimberley, got to my mom's house and the work began. This  was going to be the longest week of my life. I had to plan the funeral of the  womxn who birthed me. It was an incredibly difficult time. Guys, black  funerals are a lot. As the younger generation we need to think of a new way  of grieving and celebrating our loved ones. A week-long of feeding people and  prepare for the funeral by the bereaved is not on. I didn't have many moments  to grieve and mourn the death of my mom. I was too busy running around  ensuring that everything was going well. It was lot. An entire mess. To make  matters worse, I was jet lagged. Waking up at 2am each morning and having to  function until 10pm each time was  cruel  on my well-being but had to be done. It's only by the grace of God that I  managed to do all things. The Bible says

The LORD is close to the  brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. - Psalm 34:18 Some  of the hardest things I had to do was choose the casket she was doing to be  laid to rest in. There is nothing as final as choosing the casket. What rang  in my head was she is gone. Another task was finalising the program. Yoh! Guys!  Finalising her program broke me, I cried.  The preparation gave me some time to think  back. My mom raised me in a shack - this is significant. She opened a spaza  shop in her shack and put me through my primary school and took care of our  needs. My mom taught me about the Pan Africanist Movement - she'd always say  " I am pure PAC". She introduced me to Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and  Stephen Bantu Biko. She was my library, she was a wise womxn with great  ideas. She was not university educated but she was  intelligent.  She always wanted her children to get what she  couldn't. She was an active member in the fight against apartheid. She used  to tell me stories of her fighting the system, her time in detention and when  she was electrocuted more times than I can count. . She was brave. I had  forgotten these things when our relationship soured but during that week I  was reminded of the womxn who gave me life and her  passion for learning. This is why black  womxn will always be it for me. Mosadi  o tshwara thipa ka bohaleng

 There is a song on the album Moya  called Nobanzi. It brought me so much healing. Nobanzi is a song by Khanyisa  Buti, who sings about his grandmother who was in informal trader. This song embodies  the womxn who raised me. 

 The day of the funeral I had barely  slept. It was the longest 4- hours of my life. We saw my mom in her casket.  She looked different but the same. She was resting. She was gone. She was gone.  My little sister and I spoke at the funeral. My little sisters reminded me of  two things mama always used to say "life  is a bitch" and "over my  dead body" and these phrases seemed appropriate for the occasion. We  were standing there over her dead body and life was a bitch for taking her  away so soon. The service went beautifully, mama is resting in dignity. The  dignity that she deserves.

 And how am I feeling? I'm mostly  calm. I am very grateful for the opportunity to have come to South Africa to  bury my mother. I am grateful for all the people that showed up in various  ways. The people who held my heart and prayed with and for me. I am grateful  to have come home to a solid support network. Home has been so healing.  

And now I'm writing this on my  flight back to the US - a decision I didn't take easily. I don't want to go  back. I felt like there was no point for me to go back to LA and finish this  degree.  I am afraid that I won't do well and I wouldn't cope. I'm  afraid to embarrass myself. But I'm going back to honour her memory. I'm  going back because all my achievements belong to the womxn in my life - who  have nurtured me. I wrote this as part of a longer piece when I was traveling  back. 

 Dear Mama,

Now like  your mother and sister, you will never get to see get how all your traumas  have created miracles. 

How your  shebeen and tuck shop money made a dreamer of out of your seed. I will become  your wildest dreams my whole life. For you, your mother and your sister. I am  going back to LA. Afraid, broken and on my way to healing.

 Robala ka  Kagiso Tlhapi. You are deeply loved by me. 

 Your son,

Tlhogi 

[constant----conversations-blog]

The Other Side

(Reposted due to loss of first blog)

As I was in my elective literature class, my professor was droning on about something that I could barely remember now. I was staring off into space and suddenly, something she asked brought me back to focus. She asked “Who are you? Who are you really? Can you tell me, right now without a shadow of a doubt, about who you really are?” After this, she left the class a few minutes of silence to ponder about this question. The faces around me seemed sure enough, yet as the time waded on, I looked around again to see scrunched up foreheads, eyes brought back to the reality of wondering who they really were.

When I thought about this question I was utterly sure of my answers. I’m Angela Torres, id number 11338741, a political science major in DLSU, I’m a cheerleader from the DLSU Animo Squad and Team Pilipinas and..... Well after that the rest was prone to uncertainty. I was certain I liked some kinds of foods, but only on given times, I was certain I was in a relationship, but uncertain about how long it would last, and if I was dating the right gender. I was certain of my social standing and political views, but even that was subject to change. I was not certain at all about my religious views as going into that discussion could leave me stuck in that chair for hours with a scrunched up forehead caught in a conflicting discussion of morality, existence, and rage at the inconsistencies of the institutions of the dominant faith in the country.

My professor had made a point; I could not, without a shadow of a doubt, really tell her who I was. I started thinking if I really had a say in the matter, or if I was shaped by my environment, formed by the influences of my peers, configured by the likes and dislikes of those around me. Was I really an individual, or an individual just part of a larger group, a class cultivated in the upper legions of the society? All these things rushed through my head in a few minutes and boy, it was overwhelming.

(Image taken from: https://www.google.com.ph/search?q=culture+and+imperialism&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5mpbejKzVAhUBnpQKHayJCNIQ_AUICigB&biw=1366&bih=623#imgrc=vwGsYO3YThGxqM:) The reason that we were discussing the issue of our individual identities was due to our analysis on the book Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said. When I first read it at home I got the same reaction that any undergraduate that does not major in literature got: “wat.” But as our professor began to delve and dissect his work further in class, the more I understood the depths that culture and one’s environment has on their identity. In the book, Said writes

“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).”

As our professor analyzed this piece of text further, she mentioned something that will stick with me forever. Once we are born, we enter a social contract (and I thought, okay yes, this is true, much like the varying social contracts we discussed in Political Theory 1). But, this social contract is to keep us from being “the other.” She further explained that this compulsory social contract is done through the things we do everyday: our acceptance of our initial gender from birth, our entrance into the religion our parents chose, our attendance in school to learn the language that we use to communicate with others in society, but the one thing that binds us to this social contract is our compliance and recognition of those in power. In acknowledging who holds power, those who are seen as authoritative figures, we begin to be accepted into identity classes, and the aspects of our identity are both ascribed (our sex, our familial bonds with others) and achieved (social status, political views). She mentions that we give up our freedom of identity in entering this social contract because in complying with this contract, we lessen the chance of become “the other.” The other is seen as the different minorities in society, those who counter the dominant norm.

Why did this stick with me? Because this was the first time I had been aware of the social contract that I had been complying to my entire life. In millennial terms, I had just become socially woke.

Now because I was aware of this different kind of social contract (as others were about safety and protection from the government as they were included in the territory covered by their sovereign, this kind of social contract was about social acceptance), it then begs the question: who is my other? Specifically, I want to answer this question specifically in relation to gender. After all, I’m straight, and while I have been experimental, it’s not something I’ve been loud about since I’ve never had a girlfriend and I’ve never been serious about “girl crushes.” I’m in a great heterosexual relationship and have never faced any backlash for my choice in a partner because my gender choice and sexuality is the dominant one. In this context, I acknowledge my other as those in the LGBTQ+ community with different genders and sexualities.

(Image taken from: https://www.google.com.ph/search?q=lgbtq&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj54peMjqzVAhVGKZQKHcawAWcQ_AUICigB&biw=1366&bih=623#imgrc=VOZp6_a4VVKf5M:) Despite growing up in a religious family with a conservative ideology, I’ve never been homophobic, nor have I ever thought that that kind of relationship and gender choice is wrong. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been exposed to people in the LGBTQ+ community from a young age and have continued to be exposed to it (I have a gay uncle, some of our household helpers are gay, my friends from high school have come out to me). I’ve always thought that it was their choice, and if they were happy and not hurting anyone, who was I to say otherwise, right? But, as that kind of relationship and gender choice was not the norm, it’s sad to say that not everyone views it the way I do. The LGBTQ+ community has had a long history of violence, domination, and marginalization. They’ve been through a grueling road to have the rights they have now, and presently, there’s still a lot to be done. And now we have to ask, how has their identity, their very community of shared identities been marginalized and dominated, especially in the Philippines?

Because the Catholic Church is such a strong socialization agent in a country that is dominantly Catholic, their power and influence is both significant and massive. By having this religion as part of the regular Filipino’s identity, their identity is heavily constructed by the power relations that occur within a dominantly Catholic society. And, in the eyes of the Catholic faith, homosexuality is a sin, and their denouncement of all homosexual acts and those who partake in this lifestyle and personality are automatic sinners, thus making those in the LGBTQ+ community the other.

Through this othering, the LGBTQ+ community has become an object of domination and marginalization on the basis of their gender and sexuality. They have been outwardly subordinated, persecuted, and oppressed by some of the very people who preach every Sunday about loving and forgiving everyone.

Members of the LGBTQ+ community have been subordinated, persecuted, and oppressed by the very labelling of their identity as the other in our society. They are the social deviants of the norm that was established as strictly heterosexual relationships. Their rights to marriage (or even civil union) have been put on the backburner of social issues and have been denied to them. The basic right of expressing their love through lawful ways so that they can share in the rights that married couples do has been denied many times over. The very nature of their relationship has been sullied and dragged through the dirt, one senator (who is overtly religious) goes as far to say that members of the LGBTQ+ community are “worse than animals.” They have faced homophobic slurs, people showing up at their LGBTQ+ Pride walks with signs saying that they’ll go to hell, they’ve faced defamation of character because some people can’t recognize other aspects of their identity, merely stuck on their gender choice. These people have experienced being disowned by and disconnected from their families because of who love. They’ve undergone severe persecution for a feeling they have no control over, an love they cannot deny.

(Image taken from: https://www.google.com.ph/search?q=gay+pride+protest+signs+philippines&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj1ioLdnqzVAhUCmJQKHR0FDGcQ_AUICigB&biw=1366&bih=667#imgrc=Ca6ysK03IKk3gM:)

But, despite all of the subordination, persecution, and oppression, the LGBTQ+ community stays positive, they help out their other members in expressing and staying true to their identity, they’re encouraging and help guide and support each other. In the midst of the marginalization of their shared identity and culture, they stand together, resistant to the powerful dominant ideology of this nation in the hope that one day, they’ll get people in power to recognize their identity as one that should not be marginzalized nor feared.

[antoineadavissr-blog]

Mastery Journal Program Reflection

Pg. 1

   Mastery Journal Program Reflection

By Antoine A. Davis

2/24/17

Final Project: Business Plan

Prof. William Thompson

      Pg. 2 

 The time has finally come for me to end one mastery journey and begin a new 

chapter for another one. This mastery journal was documented from the start of 

my graduate school’s time and experience. Now, I am writing in my mastery 

journal about the very end of end of it with a recap of the last 12 months and all 

of the classes.

 The beginning of month one was Mastery - Personal Development and 

Leadership. In this class I learned how to dig deep within myself to master all 

of my crafts and goals. I had to create a “turning point” video that reflects on 

current event in my life at that present and what my goals was by coming back 

to earn my Master’s degree.

 I also created my very first Tumblr page to share and discuss a few of the topics 

that we worked on, reflect on what we learned, and to promote healthy dialog 

with others. One of those topics was about my personal hero. Another topic I 

did research on was my inspiration paper, which was based on Frederick 

Douglas. Lastly, we work on our Mastery Journal as this would be the common 

trend at the end of all our classes throughout the next 12 months.

  Pg. 3

In month two, the name of this class was Project and Team Management. 

This class showed us how to manage groups of different personalities to 

complete task and projects together. At my current job I hold a management 

position. The reading and lessons taught me team building activities that I 

worked on with some of my classmates.

 Next, I worked on an industry research paper that was geared towards my 

future career field. With this research paper I needed to discuss four topics. My 

career field is Branding and Marketing, and I found a few different topics. At the 

end of this class we worked on our Mastery Journal. We discuss our original 

thoughts about the class and if the class met our expectations by the end of it.

 The third month’s class was Executive Leadership. In this class, I created a 

professional Bio for only the second time. I must say with the guidance of this 

class, my second professional Bio was much better than the first one. One of 

the papers that I had to write about in this class was about personal experience 

with a non-effective decision I had to make at work.

 Another research paper I had to write about was about someone that I felt was 

an effective leader. The person I chose was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because 

of everything he did to make changes for people of color. This same story was 

then converted in to a Pecha Kucha presentation. By the end of this class, I felt 

that I could handle an executive leadership role for a company.

Pg. 4

The next class was by far my most favorite class of them all. The name of this 

class was Business Storytelling & Brand Development. The reason the fourth 

month’s class was my favorite was because it is the field I was to work in as far 

as my career goes. Learning how to tell the story of my own business, while 

also differentiating my brand to build a foundation for my company was 

amazing.

 Learning how the use of colors can attract certain customers to your brand was 

very eye opening. One of the projects I was able to do was a rebranding of a 

product, company, or both. This was a two-part project that started with the 

creative brand strategy of the logos and the name of changing up the 

company’s name. The second part was to create a new Brand Identity Prism 

that helps in the rebranding of this company.

 Then there was my fifth class, Entertainment Business Finance were we got 

down to the Nitti-gritty of total revenue for different companies. We also studied 

and learned how to read and understand annual reports. These reports 

spanned from a 3-year period and the idea was to learn if there was an increase 

or a decrease in profits and spike in spending as well.

 A project that I had to create was called “starting your business.” With this 

project, I had to explain what exactly is my company’s purpose is, what we 

would be doing for our clients, and what we needed to start this business. In a 

later assignment we took this same information and

 Pg. 5

to figure out the how to break even in our investment. I learned that I still 

struggled a bit in learning how to figure out the business financing and I could 

use a lot more work on it.

 The sixth month’s class was Negotiation and Deal-Making. In this class we 

studied a variety of negotiation of contracts. We also studied how to make 

deals when it came to the future of our clients. We also researched the types of 

communication styles that each class member may fall under.

 The more I research other companies’ dilemmas the more I understood how 

critical the negotiation process can be. We watched a video called “Negotiation 

a Raise with Game Theory.” What it was teaching us is that you can use a game 

like chess and its strategy to negotiation a raise for yourself. All in all, there was 

some really good information in this class.

 The seventh class of my mastery journal was Product and Artist 

Management. I did some research on some managers and had to figure out 

their style and traits of management. I also had to give my assessment on if 

these managers did well with their artist or did they fail at their jobs.

 As for the products we had to research, I had to find a few different products 

and analyze if it was managed properly. I also took a look into the review of 

management firms that are

 Pg. 6

considered the “major players.” I took a look at the clients they had, the type of 

work they did for them, and what other type of services they offered as well.  

 As for the eight class on this list, it is Advanced Entertainment Law. We 

learned all of the things that can be considered a trademark. Things like a 

name, a logo, a slogan, a mascot, and characters just to name a few. This class 

also taught me about the different intellectual properties related to my future 

business.

 I learned about the different types of contracts like non-compete agreements, 

nondisclosure agreements, work for hire contracts, etc. I also did research on 

industry liabilities and discuss the three liabilities in my industry. Afterwards, I 

had to come to a conclusion to fix this issue.

 Entertainment Media Publishing and Dist. taught the class how to write and 

seek some type of media publishing. In this class we also build up the type of 

publishing that we were going for. I chose the book publishing deal, even 

though this was not the field I wanted to go in. The book publishing deal turned 

out to be really fun.

  We worked on the different case study based off materials from our readings. I 

worked on figuring out what are the different types of case studies for self-

publishing print-on-demand sites. I had to analyze which of the few I looked 

into would be the best company to go with in the end.  

Pg. 7

 Digital Marketing taught me how under stand search engine optimization 

(SEO), how to use keyword phrase, and how to implement this for your landing 

page or what some might say, your website. Once this was learned I had to 

apply this information to my own landing page. I ended up seeing some vast 

improvement.

 There are also different types of key word phrases. The long three tail phrases 

work the best for your landing page. In the digital marketing world, you have to 

constantly monitor your landing page and your key word phrases to have better 

results. Even adding links to you landing page and/social media accounts can 

bring campaign.

 Business Plan Development is the class that helps sets up the last and final 

class. But BPD also help us all understand what it takes to be a CEO for your 

own company. To be able to make your company standout above the rest. 

While also understanding your strength, and Weakness of your new start-up 

company.

 We also worked on a financial goal for our companies. We had to lay out a plan 

that would end up with three years’ worth of financial revenue. To go along with 

that financial plan, BPD taught us how to write out an effective business plan. I 

also can’t for get about the 1-minute elevator pitch, very good knowledge to 

have.

 Pg. 8

Final Project: Business Plan is the grand finale of my mastery journal. I had to 

record my voice with slide in a Keynote presentation of my 1-minute elevator 

pitch. I also learned how to survive the “shark tank” when dealing with a 

potential investor.

 We learned about obtaining financing for our business through a few different 

sites SBA also known as Small Business Administration. We also learned about 

the leadership styles that should be used for a new start up company. We 

learned and chose which would work best for a new company in the 

entertainment industry.

 My Mastery Journal may be complete for Full Sail University but it is not 

complete for the goal of my own business. This was an amazing journey for me 

and a step that I am glad that I made. There is nothing more fulfilling