Many years ago one of our community members mentioned they were at an SEO conference where a speaker from Distilled mentioned that SEOmoz had hired them to try to outrank us for seo tools, though they were unable to. At the time I think Moz had around 200 employees, while I had around 2.

How was I able to outcompete at like a 100:1 ratio? At the time I chalked it up to love for SEO. However, if you are self-employed and are hyper-successful that can hide autism quite well.

My daughter recently turned 9 and was diagnosed as being autistic. Years before she was diagnosed formally I thought she might have been a bit on spectrum from an interaction we had. My wife bought some new shoes (from Dr. Comfort no less!) that did not have particularly good grip, and she missed a step on the stairs, breaking a bone in her foot. When I had Giovanna in a wheel chair and we were about to leave Aja came over and I thought she was going to wish her mother a speedy recovery, but instead she asked what button she should press on the iPad playing a game. Upon seeing that I was like … I think she might be a bit on spectrum.

Years later, after multiple other examinations, the same conclusion was a formal medical analysis. After she was diagnosed, I spoke with some mental health people and took an online test recommended by Allison Osborne.

When I took the test I was thinking I bet I score a bit high. Then I saw the results and was like … yup.

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The respondent’s score on the Attention Switching subscale is on the 99.93rd percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 87th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This suggests a preference for predictability and routines, and they may experience increased stress in response to unexpected changes. They might find it challenging to shift focus quickly, impacting their ability to adjust to new activities or interruptions.

The respondent’s score on the Social Skill subscale is on the 99.1st percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 60th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This suggests possible difficulties with social confidence and comfort in interactions, which may lead them to feel less at ease in social situations or less inclined to engage in group activities. They may find social norms unclear or challenging to navigate, impacting their preference for or
enjoyment of social gatherings.

The respondent’s score on the Communication subscale is on the 97.1st percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 27th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This indicates potential difficulties in conversational flow and understanding indirect communication cues, such as tone of voice, body language, or facial expressions. They may find interpreting these social cues challenging, which could contribute to occasional misunderstandings in social exchanges.

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A lot of life experiences made sense when I examined them through the above lens. Like a lot of my jokes tend to be deadpan or plays on words. My wife is a social butterfly, so I seem more colorful and real when I am under her halo. When I am by myself most of the time I prefer to be in my own world thinking and learning, or walking and singing without much talking to other people.

Some of the experiences which are a bit aligned with the above are related to times in the Navy. When September 11th happened my boss and his boss were off the submarine and we were cooling down the reactor plant, then the planes flew into the World Trade Center buildings during the middle of that, so we flipped and brought the reactor plant back online. I think I was the second most junior person in my division but was responsible, so I was leading the division that day. A 4-star admiral was in the engine room and asked the boat’s captain how long until the reactor plant checklist would be completed and I answered „about a half hour, but you are both in the way.“

In retrospect that is pretty absurd, but that’s sort of just how I work when I am locked in on a particular task. The other side of that intense focus is the ability to do things to an extreme degree that most can not comprehend. Like when we did drills I was always given the hardest drill set because I was best at being really aggressive with rapidly raising reactor power while still having it be controlled – like perfectly riding the line of the limit. You can imagine growing power at like a half million or three million percent each minute and keeping it there until the reactor plant is fully up. A person on this page mentioned 9 decades per minute, though our limit on the sub was a bit lower than that.

When you are low in the power range the stabilizing aspects of the negative coefficent of reactivity doesn’t really kick in the way it does when you are higher in the power range. Sometimes there are errors too, like one time my roommate put the air conditioning plant online when we were still low in the power range and I had to shim in the control rods for about a minute and a half straight to offset the impacts of the more dense moderator from the cooling of the plant by the heavy HVAC load.

On the submarine I think there are 7 different copies of the reactor plant control manuals. Some aspects of the manuals are based on limitations from prior plant designs and then they update them periodically over time. I was the person who put all the manual changes in all 7 sets, which made it easy to memorize the changes as they happened. Sometimes during ORSE they would grade you on a drill that you were not allowed to even test on, and then if you did something in a way that would be the logical way to do things you could lose points for not doing the procedure aligned with older way on older ship designs, and then they would update the reactor plant manuals to the way you should do them as you did & lost points for. 😀

The ship also had the ability to run the coolant pumps and arbitrary frequencies to change the submarine’s sound signature. One night while standing watch one of the pumps went offline and I had to switch the pump configuration. If you were in an active war zone the response procedure to this would be different than the response when you are not. This is something you are never drilled on either.

When I joined the Navy I had a 99 score on the ASVAB and then took the nuclear test, which was mostly just math and logic stuff. The test had 80 questions on it and they asked me how many I thought I got right. I said 76 and they laughed at me, saying nobody ever scored that high. Then I explained there were 4 questions left when I got bored and the correct answer was not even listed as an option one of those last four questions and they said „oh you saw that one“ and I was like „yep.“ They then got my test score and it was 76.

The above math stuff was consistent with early childhood. In second grade my teacher would take the workbook away from me because I would do it in advance. After grade school they had me take the college level entrance exam and I was at college sophomore level in math and was only at around my grade level in literature. Thus, as logic might not suggest, I became a writer.

Also, for as horrific as my interpersonal skills are, which rely on socially awkward jokes as like table stakes right after hello, my old business partner who made it to partner at an ad agency before quitting the agency world to work online told me I had the best marketing instincts he had ever seen by someone not actually formally trained. But, me being the fool that I am, I tried to pair him (an eloquent perfectionist who has a keen eye for kerning and monochromatic design) with another one of my friends who tended to do things a bit sloppy but was fast as hell. That did not work out too well. My social awkwardness made me unaware that my range of being able to work with A or B did not mean A and B would work well together. It was only after I engineered that trainwreck that I realized what I did there.

A lot of my marketing knowledge actually came from collecting baseball cards in high school and selling them at flea markets and baseball card shows. One time at a flea market an older guy who was selling cards came by with a fat stack of cash and was like „I am cleaning up“ so then I checked out his layout and approach and instantly got the contextually relevant stuff. The baseball player who was born nearby will sell for above book price, organizing cards by favorite player makes it easy for people to self-select categorizing what they would like to pay the most for, having oddities that are offbeat or weird guarantees having something that a player collector does not yet have, you don’t always need to have the newest products to make sales, being organized was a great way of adding value to product, some cards would sell better at card shows and others would sell better at flea markets, you can predict trends by media coverage and (for example) know that certain players would become widely collected as their media coverage went up after being traded (like Dennis Rodman going to the Chicago Bulls), and on and on.

One time in high school I was sick the same day that another kid named Aaron was sick. He was a year ahead of me in math. Then the next day the math teacher was sick and the substitute teacher gave me the wrong exam. I did a little over half of the test and I turned it in to the teacher because I explained it had to be the wrong exam as it would take me almost the entire period to complete. She asked if I was sure because I had all the answers right so far.

Somehow a lot of my life has been a bit self-organized around autistic stuff without any of it being intentional. I told my friend who was the best man at my wedding about my daughter being diagnosed as on spectrum and he told me the nut does not fall far from the tree, he is on spectrum and is almost certain I am. My lead writer I am sure is on spectrum. When we had an office he was in his own world in a way that our glue player and lead designer were a bit in awe of. He added social charm to situations in about the same way I did. When I showed my head programmer my test results he (who calls me out when I am wrong) was arguing that if anything my answers were completely reasonable to him and his score would be even higher, then he sent me Am I German or Autistic?.

Result: Both. The Wittgenstein Result. German 47%. Autistic 51%.

For the skills I have in math some of the interpersonal skills I have suck because I can get bored or sidetracked. I have always only ever had like a few close friends who really cared for me and then not much of a big circle beyond that. You can always go watch pro sports, live music, or Cirque du Soleil for some inspiration. Though most of life is the boring day to day stuff. Having a consistent routine, trying to be healthy, and trying to get your 20,000 steps a day if you can.

Tokyo is such a great city to walk around.

There are certain actions people take that I would just not estimate were in the realm of human potential. Like historically I thought some large systems of power were highly corrupted through layers of inefficiency and agent-principle problems stacked atop each other, but I simply failed to grasp how some people are absolute pile of shit psychopaths.

The good news for psychopath criminal frauds Christopher Angus and Stella Huh is they are going to get a lot of media exposure in the near future.

The bad news for psychopath criminal frauds Christopher Angus and Stella Huh is the type of exposure they will be getting.

They will be accurately branded as the utter human garbage that they are. I will blog regularly until both of the criminals are rotting in cages where they belong.

Shout out to Karl and Ben from Conversion Rate Experts. Back when we worked together they told me their favorite blog posts of mine were the flame-styled posts. I predict a record fruitful harvest this year. Karl was a former rocket scientist and I am about to blast off soon. I hope Chris and Stella enjoy the ride as much as I will love becoming the captain of their lives.

Time has grown more scarce after having a child, so I rarely blog anymore. Though I thought it probably made sense to make at least a quarterly(ish) post so people know I still exist.

One of the big things I have been noticing over the past year or so is an increasing level of automation in ways that are not particularly brilliant. 😀

Just from this past week I’ve had 3 treat encounters on this front.

One marketplace closed my account after I made a bunch of big purchases, likely presuming the purchases were fraudulent based on the volume, new account & an IP address in an emerging market economy. I never asked for a refund or anything like that, but when I believe in something I usually push pretty hard, so I bought a lot. What was dumb about that is they took a person who would have been a whale client & a person they were repeatedly targeting with ads & turned them into a person who would not recommend them … after being a paying client who spent a lot and had zero specific customer interactions or requests … an all profit margin client who spent big and then they discarded. Dumb.

Similarly one ad network had my account automatically closed after I had not used it for a while. When I went to reactivate it the person in customer support told me it would be easier to just create a new account as reactivating it would take a half week or more. I said ok, went to set up a new account, and it was auto-banned and they did not disclose why. I asked feedback as to why and they said that they could not offer any but it was permanent and lifetime.

A few months go by and I wondered what was up with that and I logged into my inactive account & set up a subaccount and it worked right away. Weird. But then even there they offer automated suggestions and feedback on improving your account performance and some of them were just not rooted in fact. Worse yet, if they set the default targeting options to overly broad it can cause account issues in a country like Vietnam to where if you click to approve (or even auto approve!) their automated suggestions you then get notifications about how you are violating some sort of ToS or guidelines … if they can run that logic *after* you activate *their* suggestions, why wouldn’t they instead run that logic earlier? How well do they think you will trust & believe in their automated optimization tips if after you follow them you get warning pop overs?

Another big bonus recently was a client was mentioned in a stray spam email. The email wasn’t from the client or me, but the fact that a random page on their site was mentioned in a stray spoofed email that got flagged as spam meant that when the ticket notification from the host sent wounded up in spam they never saw it and then the host simply took their site offline. Based on a single email sent from some other server.

Upon calling the host with a friendly WTF they explained to the customer that they had so many customers they have to automate everything. At the same time when it came time to restoring hosting that the client was paying for they suggested the client boot in secure mode, run Apache commands x and y, etc. … even though they knew the problem was not with the server, but an overmalicious automated response to a stray mention in a singular spam email sent by some third party.

When the host tried to explain that they „have to“ automate everything because they have so many customers the customer quickly cut them off with „No, that is a business choice. You could charge different prices or choose to reach out to people who have spent tens of thousands on hosting and have not had any issues in years.“ He also mentioned how emails can be sent to spam, or be sent to an inbox on the very web host that went offline & was then inaccessible. Then the lovely customer support person stated „I have heard that complaint before“ meaning they are aware of the issue, but do not see it as an issue for them. When the customer said they should follow up any emails with an SMS for servers going offline the person said you could do it on your end & then later sent them a 14-page guide for how to integrate the Twillio API.

Nothing in the world is fair. Nothing in the world is equal. But there are smart ways to run a business & dumb ways to run a business.

If you have enough time to write a 14-page integration guide it probably makes sense to just incorporate the feature into the service so the guide is unneeded!

Businesses should treat their heavy spenders or customers with a long history of a clean account with more care than a newly opened account. I had a big hedge fund as a client who would sometimes want rush work done & would do stuff like „hey good job there, throw in an extra $10,000 for yourself as a bonus“ on the calls. Whenever they called or emailed they got a quick response. 😀

I sort of get that one small marketplace presuming my purchases might have been a scam based on how many I did, how new my account was, and how small they were, but the hosting companies & ad networks that are worth 9 to 12 figures should generally do a bit better. Though in many ways the market cap is a sign the entity is insulated from market pressures & can automate away customer service hoping that their existing base is big enough to offset the customer support horror stories that undermine their brand.

It works.

At least for a while.

A parallel to the above is my Facebook ad account, which was closed about a half decade or so ago due to geographic mismatch. That got removed, but then sort of only half way. If I go to run ads it says that I can’t, but then if I go to request an account review to once again explain the geographic difference I can’t even get the form to submit unless I edit the HTML of the page on the fly to seed the correct data into the form field as by default it says I can not request a review since I have no ad account.

The flip side of the above is if that level of automation can torch existing paid accounts you have to expect the big data search & social companies are taking a rather skeptical view of new sites or players wanting to rank freely in their organic search results or social feeds. With that being the case, it helps to seed what you can to provide many signals that may remove some of the risks of getting set in the bad pile.

I have seen loads of people have their YouTube or Facebook or whatever such account get torched & only override the automated technocratic persona non grata policies by having followers in another channel who shared their dire situation so it could get flagged for human review and restoration. If that happens to established & widely followed players who have spent years investing into a platform the odds of it happening to most newer sites & players is quite high.

You can play it safe and never say anything interesting, ensuring you are well within the Overtone Window in all aspects of life. That though also almost certainly guarantees failure as it is hard to catch up or build momentum if your defining attribute is being a conformist.

Kent Walker promotes public policies which advantage the Google monopoly.

His role doing that means he has to write some really bad hot takes that lack context or intentionally & dishonestly redirect attention away from core issues – that’s his job.

With that in mind, his most recent blog post defending the Google monopoly was exceptional.

Force Ranking of Inferior Search Results

„When you have an urgent question — like “stroke symptoms” — Google Search could be barred from giving you immediate and clear information, and instead be required to direct you to a mix of low quality results.“

On some search queries users get a wall of Google ads, the forced ranked Google insert (or sometimes multiple of them with local & ecommerce) and then there can even be a „people also ask“ box above the first organic result.

The idea that organic results must be low quality if not owned & operated indicates 1 of the following 3 must be true:

• they should not be in search
• their content scraping & various revenue shifting scams with their ad tech stack demonetized legit publishers
• their forced rank of their own content is stripping them of the signals needed to rank websites & pages

Whenever Google puts a „people also ask“ box above the first organic result that is them saying they did not know what to rank, or they are just trying to create a visual block to push the organic result set down the page and user attention back up toward the ads.

The solution to Google’s claims is easy to solve. Either of the following would work.

• Have an API that allows user choice (to set rich snippet or vertical defaults in various categories), or
• If the vertical inserts remain Google-only then for Google to justify force ranking their own results above the organic result set Google should also be required to rank those same results above all of their ads, so that Google is demonetizing Google along with the rest of the ecosystem, rather than just demonetizing third parties.

If the thesis that this information needs to be front and center & that is a matter of life or death, then asking searchers to first scroll past a page or two of ads is not particularly legitimate.

Spam & Security

„when you use Google Search or Google Play, we might have to give equal prominence to a raft of spammy and low-quality services.“

Many of the worst versions of spam that have repeatedly made news headlines like fake tech support, fake government document providers, and fake locksmiths were buying distribution through Google Ads or were featured in the search results through Google force ranking their own local search offering even though they knew the results were vastly inferior to Yelp.

If Google did not force rank Google local results above the rest of the organic result set then the fake locksmiths would not have ranked.

I have lost count of how many articles I have read about hundreds or thousands of fake apps in the Google Play store which existed to defraud advertisers or commit identity theft, but there have been literally thousands of such articles. I see a similar headline at least once a month without eve looking for them. Here is one this week for scammers monetizing the popularity of Wordle with fake apps.

Making matters worse, some of the tech support scams showed the URL of a real business and rerouted the call through a Google number directly to a scammer. A searcher who trusted Google & sees Apple.com or Dell.com on Google Ads in the search results then got connected with a scammer who would commit identity theft or encrypt their computer then demand ransom cryptocurrency payments to decrypt it.

After making the ads harder to run for scammers Google decided the problem was too hard & expensive to sort out so they also blocked legitimate computer repair shops.

Sometimes Google considers something spam strictly due to financial considerations.

Their old remote rater documents stated *HELPFUL* hotel affiliate websites should be labeled as spam.

Years later the big OTAs are complaining about Google eating their lunch as well as Google is twice as big as the next player.

At one point Google got busted for helping an advertiser route around the automated safety features built into their ad network so that they could pay Google to run ads promoting illegal steroids.

With cartels, you can only buy illegal goods and services from the cartel if you don’t want to suffer ill consequences. The same appears to be true here.

The China Problem

„Handicapping America’s technology leaders would threaten our leading sources of research and development spending — just as bipartisan voices in Congress are recognizing the need to increase American R&D investment to stay competitive in the global race for AI, quantum, and other advanced technologies.“

We are patriotic, and, but China… is a favorite misdirection of a tech monopolist.

The problem with that is while Eric Schmidt warns it is a national emergency if China overtakes the US in AI tech, Google also operates an AI tech lab in China.

In other words, Eric Schmidt is trying to warn you about himself and his business interests at Google.

Duplicitous? Absolutely.

Patriotic? Less than Chamath!

Who the fuck did this? pic.twitter.com/BD4NKpila6— Girolamo Carlo Casio (Free Twatter) (@INArteCarloDoss) January 19, 2022

Inflation

„the online services targeted by these bills have reduced prices; these bills say nothing about sectors where prices have actually been rising and contributing to inflation.“

Technology is no doubt deflationary (moving bits on an optical line is cheaper than printing out a book and shipping it across the world) BUT some dominant channels have increased the cost of distribution by increasing the chunk size of information and withholding performance information.

Before Google Analytics was „free“ there was a rich and vibrant set of competition in web analytics software with lots of innovation from players like ClickTracks.

Most competing solutions went away.

Google moved away from an installed licensing model to a hosted service where they can change the price upon contract renewal.

Search hid progressively more performance information over time, only sampled data from larger data sets, & now you can sign up for Google Analytics 360 starting at only $150,000 per year.

The hidden search performance data also has many layers to that onion. Not only does Google not show keyword referrers on organic search, but they often don’t show your paid search keywords either, and they keep extending out keyword targeting broader than advertisers intend.

Yesterday’s announcement on match type changes had me crawling through query data this morning. I’m staring at many 2-3 word exact match keywords that are matching to 8-word queries. G thinks ‚deck paint‘ and ‚how do i put paint on my deck‘ mean the exact same thing. CPA is 10x.— Brad Geddes (@bgtheory) February 5, 2021

Google used to pay Brad Geddes to run official Google AdWords ad training seminars for advertisers, so the idea that *he* has to express his frustrations on Twitter is an indication of how little effort Google is putting into having open communications channels or caring about what their advertisers think.

This is in accordance with the Google customer service philosophy:

he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another’s questions.

Those who were paying for ads get the above „serve yourself“ treatment, all the while Google regularly resets user default ad settings to extend out ad distribution, automatically ad keywords, shift to enhanced AdWords ad campaigns, etc.

Then there are other features which would be beneficial and offered in a competitive market that have been deprioritized. Many years ago eBay did a study which showed their branded Google AdWords ad buys were cannibalistic to eBay profits. Google maintained most advertisers could not conduct such a study because it would be too expensive and Google does not make the feature set available as part of their ad suite.

Missing Information

„When you search for local businesses, Google Search and Maps may be prohibited from highlighting information we gather about hours of operation, contact information, and reviews. That could hurt small businesses and local retailers, as well as their customers.“

Claiming reviews or an attempt to offer a comprehensive set of accurate review data as a strong point would be economical with the truth.

Back when I had a local business page my only review was from a locksmith spammer / scammer who praised his own two businesses, trashed a dozen other local locksmiths, crapped on a couple local SEO services, and joked about how a local mover smashed the guts out of his dog. Scammer fake reviewer’s name was rather sophisticated … it was … Loop Dee Loop

About a decade back when Google was clearly losing Google took Yelp reviews wholesale (sometimes without even attributing them to Yelp!) and told Yelp that if they did not want Google stealing their work and displacing them with a copy of it then they should block GoogleBot. Google offered the same sort of advice / threat to TripAdvisor.

A few years before that Google temporarily „forgot“ to show phone numbers on local listings.

After Yelp turned down an acquisition offer by Google & Yelp did a great job making some people aware of how Google was stealing their reviews wholesale without attribution Google bought Zagat & Fromer’s to augment the Google local review data and then sold those businesses off.

This is sort of the same playbook Google has run in the past elsewhere. After Groupon said no to Google’s acquisition offer, Google quickly provided daily deal ads to over a dozen Groupon competitors to help commoditize the Groupon offering and market position.

Ultimately with the above sort of stuff Google is primarily a volume aggregator or has lower editorial costs than pure plays due to the ability to force bundle their own distribution. And they use the ability to rank themselves above a neutral algorithmic position as a core part of their biz dev strategy. When shopping search engines were popular Google kept rewording the question set they sent remote raters to justify rank demotion for shopping search engines & Google also came up with innovative ranking „signals“ like concurrent ranking of their own vertical search offering whenever competitors x or y are shown in the result set & rolled out a „diversity“ algorithm to limit how many comparison shopping sites could appear in the search results. The intent of the change was strictly anti-competitive:

„Although Google originally sought to demote all comparison shopping websites, after Google raters provided negative feedback to such a widespread demotion, Google implemented the current iteration of its so-called ‚diversity‘ algorithm.“

As a matter of fact, part of one of many document dumps in recent years went further than the old concurrent ranking signal to a rank x above y feature which highlights how YouTube can be hard coded at a number 1 ranking position.

Part of that guide highlighted how to hardcode ranking YouTube #1.

If you re-represent content & can force rank yourself #1 (with larger listings) that can be used to force other players onto your platform on your terms. Back when YouTube was must less of a sure thing Google suggested they could threaten to change copyright.

This same approach to „relevancy“ is everywhere.

Did you watermark your images? Well shame on you, as that is good for a rank demotion

And if there are photos which are deemed illegal Google will make you file an endless series of DMCA removal requests even though they already had the image fingerprinted.

Now there are some issues where there is missing information. These areas involve original reporting on local politics & are called news deserts. As the ad pie has consolidated around Google & Facebook that has left many newspapers high and dry.

Private equity players like Alden Global Capital buy up newspapers, fire journalists, and monetize brand equity as they drive the papers into the ground.

If you are sub-scale maybe Google steals your money or hits you with a false positive algorithm flag that has you seeking professional mental health help.

Big players get a slower blood letting.

Google has maintained they do not make any money from news search, but the states lawsuit around ad tech made it clear Google promoted AMP for anti-competitive purposes to block header bidding, lied to news publishers to get them to adopt AMP and eat the tech costs of implementation, did a deal with their biggest competitor in online advertising Facebook to maintain the status quo, charge over double what their competitors do for ad tech, and had a variety of bid rigging auction manipulation algorithms they used to keep funneling more money to themselves.

Internally they had an OKR to make *most* search clicks land on AMP pages within a year of launch

„AMP launched as an open source project in October 2015, with 26 publishers and over 40 publications already publishing AMP files for our preview demo. Our team built g.co/ampdemo and is now racing towards launching it for all of our users. We’re responsible for the AMP @ Google integrations, particularly focusing on Search, our most visible product. We have a Google-wide 2016 OKR to deliver! By the end of 2016, our goal is that 50%+ of content consumed through Search is being consumed through AMP.“

You don’t get over half the web to shift to a proprietary version of HTML in under a year without a lot of manipulation.

So, when Google tells buyers an ad sold for one price and they tell sellers it sold for a lower price, isn’t that just plain old fraud? I mean, on top of the anti-competitive tying and all that, fraud is illegal, isn’t it?— Jerry Neumann (@ganeumann) January 14, 2022