Sneaky SEO Shenanigans Suck
23 February 2024 | 3:36 pm

Earlier this week I came across a post on Mastodon:

Toot from @clive@saturation.social regarding online product reviews

Of course I had to read the article. I read reviews quite a bit. I know you shouldn’t trust them, but I do it anyway. The article shared in the post, How Google is killing independent sites like ours, does an excellent job explaining the situation and putting things into perspective:

  1. Searching for reviews will net you poorly written articles and listicles.
  2. The reviews appear on websites that many would deem trustworthy, like Popular Science or Rolling Stone.
  3. Many of the sites break Google’s rules.
  4. Google is doing nothing about it.

If you run a legitimate site providing expert reviews, you cannot stand up against the SEO of these publishing companies. The HouseFresh article uses the example of trying to find an air purifier, and I’m not about to repeat their experiment with other products; we all know what will happen.

The article also links to the very interesting How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results (2023 Edition) from Detailed.com.

Look at this infographic!

Detailed.com Infographic
The 16 Companies Dominating Search Results

The report notes:

The 16 companies in this report are behind at least 562 individual brands which get traffic from Google each day.

Combined, Semrush estimates they pick up around 3.7 billion clicks from the search engine each month. An average of 6.5 million monthly clicks per site.

What to do?

What… to… do?

You may be familiar with a browser extension called uBlacklist. It is a search filter for Google and other search engines. It removes results from the page based on a blocklist. The blocklists are .txt files. I can make a .txt file!

So I did.

In fact, I made 16 of them. And then I made a 17th.

I put them here:

16 COMPANIES FILTERS

Now you too can subscribe to these lists, and if you see any mistakes let me know.

Just install the browser extension (see the link above) and copy the SUBSCRIBE links. The official document shows you how to do it.

Then search!

Before you ask, yes, this is just for fun and spite. Some of these sites were already on my list of avoidable sources: sites like Make Use Of and CNET that are notoriously bad at recommending anything other than the latest Samsung or Apple product.

While preparing these files, it surprised me just how many similar sites were in fact subsidiaries of the same parent company. It also surprised me that some of these massive media companies were unknown to me. Not once have I ever heard of Hearst or Recurrent or PMC. It was like an epiphany, the pieces fell into place, my eyes opened. Search results are crap because companies like these have been gaming the SEO system with their keywords and other shenanigans.

So, I will filter them out. I do wish the extension worked with Mojeek.


Quickly importing events using Khal
2 February 2024 | 9:07 am

I keep a little file on my computer. It synchronizes with my other devices using Syncthing. The file is called useful-commands.md. Basically, if I ever had to spend more than 5 minutes figuring something out, I keep the commands in that file.

Problem

I have multiple employers that have all, for some reason, decided to not only use the same planning software, but to hide the link to the calendar. This is an option, one of the employers has activated it, the others chose not to because:

If we activate the iCal link, nobody will download the app.

Yep. They have all paid (the same developer) to make an app using their branding and colours to inform students and professors of their schedule.

Stupid.

I can still see my schedule online, though. And, as it turns out, when you export your schedule as a PDF each event is listed like this:

DD.MM.YYYY HH:MM HH:MM Class (Group)

This is extraordinarily convenient because Khal—a CLI calendar program that synchronizes with CalDAV calendars—uses that format for adding new events, so I only need to copy and paste each event into the terminal:

$ khal new 27.02.2024 08:45 10:15 Class (Group)

That is awesome. But, if you need to do this 120 times per semester, it gets old fast.

That is why, in my useful-commands.md, I have this noted:

# How to... use khal to add a list of classes
file="lessons.txt"
while read -r line; do khal new $line; done < $file

This is my reminder to copy all the events to a .txt file and loop through the list of lessons and make Khal add them.

explainshell.com can break it down if you like that sort of thing. I just copied things I found around the web and modified them to my need.

Since I will be importing these events, I can also add a description for each one while I’m at it. So, I make a tiny modification on each line:

27.02.2024 08:45 10:15 Communication Skills (Group S3) :: Public Speaking Evaluation

Running the commands takes little to no time, even with hundreds of events.

After, I force it to synchronize with

$ vdirsyncer sync

and it is added to my shared calendar for my partner to see.


Happy Birthday Blog
27 January 2024 | 11:00 pm

The first post I made to this blog was on 2021-01-28. That was three years ago.

Since then, I have made around 60 posts. The intention to write more was there, but time and inspiration were not on my side.

Nonetheless, I feel that the past three years have been a success.

This is a blog. It serves no commercial purpose. It is made with free software and hosted on a free service. (note to self: make a donation to codeberg) I have no idea how many people have ever read it. Even if 10 people have read something I wrote, I am happy. I don’t want to be an influencer, I am not a certified expert on anything, and I consider most of my hobbies a little dull. I like it that way!

How then has this blog been a success?

It let me express myself. It doesn’t paint a picture of who I am; it is more of a doodle. An honest one, mind you.

Over on the stats page, there is a word cloud that is somewhat representative of how I would describe my interests, because the biggest words in the cloud are:

  • technology (but not really anything specific),
  • education (because I am a professor),
  • digital privacy (it is one of my personal obsessions),
  • and things like Linux and Pandoc (because those are tools that make my life easier).

Best of…

I know that some people have read things from my blog. They even sent me kind words via email about what they liked, disliked, and disagreed with.

If we count that engagement alone, along with maybe some mention on Mastodon, my best guess as to a “BEST OF” for this blog are (in no order):

And, much to my surprise, I’ve received two emails thanking me for a post about making an invoice with Pandoc

Finally, I’ve received no less than 10 requests to write sponsored articles. Strangely enough, they all decide to retract their request when I answer. This is the email that I use when I respond:

Rates for Sponsored Content

Product review with photos and links:

  • Basic 300–500 words: €90
  • Detailed 500–800 words: €120
  • In-depth 800–1000+ words: €200

Sponsored content will include a “disclaimer” or note informing the reader that the content they are reading was requested by the company. Transparency is key, but rates will not be revealed.

I do not use X (Twitter), Meta (Facebook, Instagram). I may share the review on Mastodon, depending on the product or service.

My favourite things to write about

If I had to narrow the focus of this blog, I simply would not. A blog that takes on a singular focus is great. Give me a blog that is 100% music or 100% gadgets and I won’t complain. I could probably stick to one thing 80% of the time, but I am so infrequent when it comes to blogging that I would end up breaking my own rule after a month or two.

As much fun as I had writing about different phones (see here, here, and here) I could not just do that. In fact, one of those companies, Crosscall, even let me beta test an unreleased model for several months. Did I write about it? The thought didn’t even cross my mind. If you are interested, though, the STELLAR-X5 is fast and fluid in all the right ways.

I would like to write more about education, but as a non-researcher with only 17–18 years of experience in higher education, mostly private, my main thoughts have already been laid out, i.e., students are less adept with technology now, the digital experience is hindering instead of helping, AI and LLMs are going to fuck things up. My students are not clamouring to learn how to write prompts or be taught lessons that were planned by OpenAI’s carbon footprint chatbot.

Blogrolls and Collections

This little blog is part of a few collections, blogrolls, and webrings. It is also indexed by some search engines.

Obviously, Google can find it, as well as the Bing-based metasearch engines. I am very happy to see it on Marginalia. The info page is fun.

Marginalia
Similarity is a measure of how often they appear in the same contexts

All of those links are somewhere on my blog, so it isn’t like we are that similar. I do like seeing the landing page for the developer of Privacy Browser www.stoutner.com, the Mojeek Blog, a fedi contact (Hi Joel!), and Scott Nesbitt’s Random Notes (I do follow their Open Source Musings blog too) on the same page as mine, because they deserve some of your attention.

(unfortunately, the blog is still in the queue for the ooh! directory)

Should I set goals?

The #100daystooffload idea is tempting. But, it has taken me 3 years to write 60 odd posts. I don’t think I would set such a high goal. Maybe 2 a month? We’ll see how that goes. Place your bets: will I have posted 24 times in the next 365 days? I don’t know how to calculate odds, so maybe no bets.

Finally, an easy goal: changing the appearance. I think I would be very content with using one of the minimalist Hugo themes, preferably one with no JavaScript. Maybe I will switch to something that isn’t Hugo? Who knows.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Blog!

🎂🎂🎂



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