#seo sites

[jyotikumari-wordpressdeveloper]

Complete SEO Services for Your Website

As an SEO expert, I offer a comprehensive range of services, including keyword research, on-page and off-page optimization, link building, and website audit. My goal is to help you achieve higher search engine rankings, increased leads, and overall online success. Contact me now for outstanding results!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[wieqo]

⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ ♥︎ ֵ⃜✟̸̴̢̣͘͜ 🪷 𝜗aliosa °̩̥˚̩̩̥͙°̩̥🍈 ્᭄

[fawnsite]

[annelidist]

if i liked elden ring enough to put in the effort i'd have started populating the wikidot by now. alas

[kraniumet]

I will not feed the discourse warriors 😌 but. genuinely an insane composition hang it in the met

[koreanling]

update on my formalities post from long ago with nice art to help you visualize it more~

i wrote in-depth with a breakdown of each age range to really get into it over here with each person separated out but for now here's the quick easy version!

Quick Breakdown of Korean Formalities

존댓말

polite formal

하십시오체

used with people older/above you hierarchically

especially used with clients, business partners, customers, etc. – people to show respect to

used by news broadcasts and reporters

~ㅂ니다

ex; 합니다, 하십니다

polite informal 해요체

most common and safest speech to use; when you don’t know the person/your relationship

tv show hosts use it

more common with younger generations

~아요/여요/어요

ex; 해요, 하세요

반말

impolite formal 해라체

sort of plain text used in magazines, books, newspapers, songs, etc.

~다/ㄴ다/는다

ex; 한다, 하신다

impolite informal 해체

used with friends, family, people of lower status, or younger than you

ex; 해, 하셔

[yupyupppippi]

absolutely sick of hearing about AI. i know there are actual fantastic uses for tech that falls under the AI umbrella but i never even hear about it bc there's too much noise about scams, theft, bots, and the exponentially increased enshittification of formerly perfectly good products and services

[darktrainer]

Sending big love to all trans pals in the UK right now ❤️

[zvaigzdelasas]

Andersson, from the opposition center-left Social Democrats, suggested Thursday to Swedish outlet Aftonbladet: “Surveillance performed by police officers could be carried out by the military. In addition, there is technical know-how with the military that they could assist with.”[...] Sweden could also ask Norway, Denmark or Finland for additional police support, Andersson added. Sweden’s Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer, from the center-right Moderate Party, finds the idea of deploying the military an “interesting thought,” public broadcaster SVT reported.[...] Defense Minister Pål Jonson, also from the Moderates, said deploying the military was not currently on the agenda. “There are no such plans currently,” he said.

28 Sep 23

After an explosion was reported yesterday in Uppsala, a city 70 km (43 mi) north of Sweden, which killed a 25-year-old woman, the prime minister gave a speech responding to several murders in Sweden. The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson of the center-right Moderate Party, said that gangs are responsible for these continuous murders. He said that the government would change its legislation to address gang violence, via stricter migration and surveillance policy assisted by the Swedish military.[...] Kristersson said the government’s “naivety” and “cluelessness” are the causes, which he said they would correct by denying more migrants entry into the country. “While immigration increases to Europe, it decreases to Sweden,” Kristersson said.[...] Starting on October 1st, Kistersson said there will be a preventive wiretapping measure instituted in Sweden. By the prime minister’s words, it seems as if the police will be able to listen to domestic calls. We were not able to provide more details on this new policy at the time of writing.[...]

On July 1st, 2023, Sweden passed laws doubling the sentence for gang-related crimes and added a law against recruiting children. The prime minister said the government was going to create “search zones” as well, where people will be searched for weapons. He said he had summoned the commander-in-chief of the armed forces to assist the police in these programs. Assisting in internal conflicts is not necessarily a part of the Armed Forces’ duties, which are usually more focused on assisting in international conflict, “to defend Sweden and its territories against armed attacks,” and “safeguarding national sovereign rights and interests in areas outside the territory.”[...] Currently, Sweden is governed by a right-wing coalition majority formed by Kristersson’s Moderate Party and two other right-wing parties. The party with the largest number of votes in Parliament is the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party that wants to “keep organized crime out” via a strict migration policy and is “not afraid to challenge the status quo,” according to their website. The government needs the Sweden Democrats to get a majority in the Riksdag.

29 Sep 23

[behindthewox]

NEMESIS, goddess of revenge

In Greek mythology Nemesis is the name of the goddess of revenge and vengeance. The Romans called her Invidia, which is the latin word for envy. She had two brothers named Charon (ferryman to the dead) and Hypnos (the personification of sleep), and her sister Eris is the goddess of Discord.

What is Nemesis?

In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis the main antagonist is named Nemesis T-Type, nicknamed the Pursuer. He is presumably named Nemesis after the Greek goddess of vengeance. Nemesis T-Type is one of the two greatest of all bio-weapons created by the Umbrella Corporation.

Can Nemesis be good? In Rick Riordan's series Percy Jackson and the Olympians Nemesis is initially portrayed as a bad character, but it is later on pointed out that she is also the goddess of balance. The balance between good and evil is a necessity, and without balance there'd be neither good nor bad. While she's not a typically "good" character and may fall on the "evil" side in many aspects, good would probably not exist without her and the balance she keeps between good and evil.

Is it normal to have a nemesis? Most libraries will probably have a copy of the Agatha Christie novel Nemesis. If you are a main character it is highly advised to have a nemesis, especially if your story is about the fight between good and evil. It is not normal to have a proposed dwarf star from the Sun's extreme outer orbit in your possession. The asteroid in the main belt, 128 Nemesis, is probably best left where it is.

What is going on here?

Are you wondering what the eff I'm going on about? This is a quick example of what an SEO blog post could look like, using the keyword "nemesis" and a bit of googling to find the most commonly asked questions and related searches. The closer you can match what people will search for, the better. SEO blogposts is a new requirement for all sites, calling for 2 blogposts per week using keywords that the Mugs send out each week. The keyword must be used at least 7 times, including headlines. It's a pretty standard SEO structure.

It's tricky to write a good blog post using the SEO requirements, but the point with SEO isn't that the blog post has to be good - it just has to contain certain words a certain number of times. If it feels forced and awkward that's because it is pretty forced and awkward. Admittedly, this example is not a serious attempt at making a SEO blogpost. This is a me making a bad example on purpose to make a point. But I am still following the instructions and meeting (surpassing, actually) all the requirements. As far as SEO goes, it's an excellent example. Some people might even find it somewhat amusing.

SEO - friend or nemesis? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it's all about getting your website or article onto the first page of results on the online search engines like Google. It's a pretty big deal. If someone searches "roleplay forum percy jackson" we'd want World of Olympus to be the top result, right? Without SEO it could easily end up at the bottom of the page and how many people will scroll that far? Not many. SEO is a really big deal.

[NOTE: I am not an expert on this and with only mere hours of research under my belt on such a complicated thing as SEO, it's very possible that my understanding and portrayal of it might not be entirely accurate. If I'm waaay off, please correct me.]

So by following the new blog rules and squeezing in keywords wherever possible, WoX sites will show up on top when people google the keywords? Don't be silly. It'll help a little bit, sure, but the real trick is SEO within the site code and content of the site as a whole. Saying "nemesis" a dozen times in a blog post certainly helps as the numbers add up, but don't expect your SEO-ed blogpost to bring in new users as if you're running paid ads. It's not magic, it takes work and strategic marketing. This is a long game. It will take months of SEO-ing to improve your site's SEO. It's worth doing but it needs to be done right. If your SEO-ed blogposts are as bad as my example, you're gonna lose a lot of respect and reputation in the many months it will take to get actual SEO results. Quantity comes at the cost of quality, especially if you don't have the time and resources to do it well. A lot of sites don't have the capacity to churn out biweekly blog posts right now, especially not with the additional requirement to figure out what this SEO thing is and how to do it without looking… well, desperate and pathetic.

SEO is important and it is worth doing. But at what cost? What is the point of showcasing the site blogs if the content on them doesn't show the best that the site has to offer? My suggestion is this: encourage SEO through support and positive reinforcement, not by force or pressure. This is volunteer work, after all. Take it slow, one step at a time. Be patient and let it take the time it takes. It's not magic and it won't work overnight either way, and if you don't do it right you might end up spending even more time and resources having to correct for it in the long run.

One step at a time. Don't try to run before you've learned to walk.

SEO stats on this blog post H1 x1, keyword x1 H2 x2, keyword x1 H3 x3, keyword x3 Paragraphs x 9 Total word count: 947 (stats excluded) Total keyword count: 16 (out of 7 required)

[redrevelies]

Psd by @miniepsds

Créditos não são obrigatórios, porém são bem vindos.

Like or reblog if you save.

[lovers-instead]

Sapphic YA Book Rec: Good Moon Rising by Nancy Garden

1996 follow-up to Annie on My Mind, this time featuring 2 girls who compete for the lead role in their high school theater department.

Links to download:

Internet Archive (to borrow)

Anna's Archive

Singlelogin.re

LibGen

[wannashiver]

How did you asshole taste mutt ?

like I want more 🤭

[pearl-kite]

Something that I hate about the current state of the internet when trying to learn something is how you'll do a search, click on a link that sounds like it should go to a knowledgeable site, see, oh hey, lots of info! Lots of subsections! I should learn something!

And then you read, and you read, and you want to give up but keep reading just in case, because it turns out that it's saying the exact fucking thing 10 ways to Sunday. Each paragraph is an introductory paragraph to the content they never get to.

A lady paid for her prescription with some silver certificates the other day, and I was curious, so I searched silver certificate value, clicked on a link, and

Did you ever wonder what a silver certificate is worth? It depends on a few things! Guess what, a silver certificate, which you could originally use to exchange for its face value in silver, could be worth more than just the number on the bill. Which ones are worth the most? Keep reading and we'll explain the things that affect it's value even though a silver certificate used to be guaranteed against real silver you can't exchange them any longer but they might still be worth qui

I just wanted a rough average of what a 1954 Silver Certificate might get. Like maybe $1.50? Maybe even $2 entire dollars? Never fucking found out. Every "subsection" was the same shit with different phrasing.

There are sites like this for plants, there are sites like this for antique restoration, for DIY crafts, there are sites like this for everything I've recently just wanted a brief overview of, and while I know they've always existed, it feels like it's gotten exponentially worse in the last year or so. It's all search engines, it's so many sites. I know there are genuine actual hobbyists out there who can ACTUALLY summarize the origin and current values of silver certificates out there, but good luck finding them under all these repetitive, poorly proofread, likely AI vomit that's unfortunately been boosted by competent SEO while the actual honest individuals who want to share knowledge are driven to the bottom of the search results.

[kg-net-klagenfurt]

Thank you to the client for the trust, the KG-Net company in Klagenfurt did SEO Optimization, these are the results of our work. Thank you for your trust: Insektenschutz für Ihr Zuhause - Profi Lösungen (profi-insektenschutz.com) Vielen Dank an den Kunden für das Vertrauen, die Firma KG-Net von Klagenfurt hat SEO-Optimierung durchgeführt, das sind die Ergebnisse unserer Arbeit. Vielen Dank für Ihr Vertrauen:Insektenschutz für Ihr Zuhause - Profi Lösungen (profi-insektenschutz.com)