Get Your Page to Be Number One: Tricks Worthy of Penn and Teller
May 7, 2020
The DarkCyber research team has been examining SEO or search engine optimization in the time of Covid. The work has uncovered some interesting and quite unusual information.
Examples range from “Adapting Your SEO Strategy to Soften the Impact of COVID-19 on Organic Traffic” to “10 ways SEO Will Lead Companies Through COVID-19 Business Recovery.”
Even HP is manufacturing devices to help deal with the Covid crisis. IBM is putting the capable Jeopardy-winning Watson in the hand of Covid researchers. Plus Tesla is allegedly making medical devices. These are Covid crisis virtue signals with alleged substance.
But manipulating content to “soften the impact of Covid” and “business recovery.”
These two headlines underscore the intellectual black hole of search engine optimization. SEO’s informing idea is that one can shape content and index that content so that the content becomes number one in a Google search page.
But what if the content is incorrect, misinformed, or just plain wrong? What happens if SEO does not work?
Well, one can buy Google AdWords. There’s the magic link.
A good example of what’s in these articles which are hooking their ideas to the pandemic can be found on YouTube. Navigate to How to Get My Website on the First Page of Google. What’s displayed? Here’s the screenshot:
Yep, hustling a time-honored business practice.
This essentially sums up the knowledge value of SEO in a time of Covid. Very professional, informative, and just maybe a big hustle in our opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2020
Looking more SEO info? Watch for our special Xenky.com page. In the meantime, you may find these stories useful:
SEO Hustles: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2020/05/04/seo-let-us-hustle-everyone/
Covid surfing: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2020/05/06/virtue-signaling-a-covid-short-circuit
Marketing to doctors in the midst of a pandemic: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2020/05/06/unusual-medical-marketing/
LAPD Shutters Predictive Policing During Shutdown
May 7, 2020
Police departments are not immune to the economic impact of this pandemic. We learn the Los Angeles Police Department is shutting down its predictive policing program, at least for now, in TechDirt’s write-up, “LAPD’s Failed Predictive Policing Program the Latest COVID-19 Victim.” Writer Tim Cushing makes it perfectly clear he has never been a fan of the analytics approach to law enforcement:
“For the most part, predictive policing relies on garbage data generated by garbage cops, turning years of biased policing into ‘actionable intel’ by laundering it through a bunch of proprietary algorithms. More than half a decade ago, early-ish adopters were expressing skepticism about the tech’s ability to suss out the next crime wave. For millions of dollars less, average cops could have pointed out hot crime spots on a map based on where they’d made arrests, while still coming nothing close to the reasonable suspicion needed to declare nearly everyone in a high crime area a criminal suspect. The Los Angeles Police Department’s history with the tech seems to indicate it should have dumped it years ago. The department has been using some form of the tech since 2007, but all it seems to be able to do is waste limited law enforcement resources to violate the rights of Los Angeles residents. The only explanations for the LAPD’s continued use of this failed experiment are the sunk cost fallacy and its occasional use as a scapegoat for the department’s biased policing.”
Now, though, an April 15 memo from the LAPD declares the department is ceasing to use the PredPol software immediately due to COVID-19 related financial constraints. As one might suppose, Cushing hopes the software will remain off the table once the shutdown is lifted. Hey, anything is possible.
Cynthia Murrell, May 7, 2020
Enshrining Good Enough: Code Regression Testing
May 7, 2020
One of DarkCyber’s research team forwarded me the PDF of “Measuring the Cost of Regression Testing in Practice: A Study of Java Projects Using Continuous Regression Integration.” Note: this may require you to pay to access this PDF.
The paper is narrow and written for engineers who have some involvement in making sure that the button one taps delivers the expected result. DarkCyber is deeply skeptical of software today. Consider the Windows 10 updates, the Apple OSX updates, and the less thrilling nuclear power plant issues; for example, “Most NE Nuclear Power Offline Due to Timing Fluke and Problem.”
The point is that software has bugs, and fixing these is expensive. Despite the claims of the artificial intelligence start ups, humans are needed. Machine intelligence is an admission that there are humans behind the scenes. Imagine that!
I want to cut to the conclusions of the study. Here’s an edited version:
Regression testing is widely used and widely studied. Despite this, it is not always clear that the benefits of having fewer faults in the program are outweighed by the cost of writing, maintaining, and executing regression tests….We studied 61 Java-based projects that use Travis CI. We found that 18% of test suite executions fail and that 13% of these failures are flaky. Of the non-flaky failures, only 74% were caused by a bug in the system under test; the remaining 26% were due to incorrect or obsolete tests. In addition, we found that, in the failed builds, only 0.38% of the test case executions failed and 64% of failed builds contained more than one failed test. Our findings contribute to a wider understanding of the unforeseen costs that can impact the overall cost effectiveness of regression testing in practice.
Translating: Don’t fix some bugs. Too expensive and the software will be “good enough.”
Net net: Get used to increasingly flawed software. For more coverage of “good enough” in the context of SEO, click this link.
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2020
Google Australia: Whose Head Is in What Logical Pouch?
May 6, 2020
I spotted this story in my UK news stream this morning (May 6, 2020 at 0600 am): “Google Is Like a Poster in the Newsagent’s Window for Publishers, Tech Giant Says.”
Is this argument reminiscent to those of the first year high school debaters offer?
The write up reports with truth and accuracy that Google Australia’s managing director said:
“Publishers provide posters with headlines for newsagents to display in their windows to help draw customers to buy papers. In contrast, Google Search sends readers from Australia and all over the world to the publishers’ sites for free [Silva’s italics] – helping them to generate advertising revenues from those audiences and convert them into paying subscribers.”
The original Google blog post is at this link for now.
The write up noted:
Guardian Australia revealed last week that negotiations for the voluntary code had stalled over three main factors: the media’s access to data and notice of ranking changes, and stonewalling by Google and Facebook on payment for content.
The issue is that old school publishers have watched their world change. Google wanted to index information and really was not keen on paying for that action.
Due to the regulatory environment which allowed Google to do what it wanted for the last 20 plus years, it is clear that Google has the upper hand.
Australia wants money to keep its “old school” news businesses alive. Google doesn’t want to pay; Google’s business model is predicated on giving indexed information away in order to attract advertisers who want their message displayed when a person searches for something.
The model has worked well. Maybe it is not the integrated, diversified money machine that the Bezos bulldozer has rolled out, but Google does produce revenue, certainly more than “real” news outfits.
Google, in an alternate reality, might license the right to index “real” news, display ads when those results are displayed, and share — yes, share on an equitable basis — the revenue the Google system generates from the content.
Sure, and pigs can fly.
Google is doing some word painting. But this time, maybe the company is putting its Googley head in its sticky marsupial pouch. There Google can tell itself and others that its indexing of news content is just like a poster in a store front’s window.
But Google, with some help from Amazon, has put most of the store fronts out of business. Facebook is keeping people occupied with its social service.
Google is just providing a service. For free too. Plus, Google doesn’t sell ads on the Google News service. Is the reason that Google could not figure out how to do this without igniting yet another firestorm over its approach which is reminiscent of the activity described in “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” Instead of wolves, Google is going after publishing wallabies, creatures ill equipped to deal with the digital war machine:
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
Will the legal eagles in Australia buy the Google argument? Will a regulator explain that consuming news wallabies is prohibited? Will Australia set a precedent for others in the Five Eyes’ group? Will Google’s lawyers prevail at a time when no one really seems to care about the business practices of de facto US monopolies?
DarkCyber is not certain. Google has been masterful is slipping away from problems. But the argument that Google is the digital equivalent of an A4 printed posted taped to a window of an increasingly rare newsstand is remarkable.
Does Google have its head in its pouch? This is indeed possible. Google does not want to recognize that the attitude toward the fun and cheerful company has changed.
Why not ask Amanda Rosenberg? She may have some insight into metaphorical arguments offered by the Google.
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2020
The Cost of High School Science Club and Its Management Method
May 6, 2020
I read in Forbes, the capitalist tool, “Google’s Top Quantum Scientist Explains In Detail Why He Resigned.” The write up is an interview with a a high profile expert in quantum computing. His name? Dr. John Marinis. The interview contains a number of interesting factoids plus some PR, but that’s the norm today.
DarkCyber noted this statement by the former Googler:
I think it was hard on people in the group to focus on quantum supremacy because it meant they couldn’t work on other things they wanted to do, and most importantly, we could fail. And it seems tension comes with focus.
I use the phrase “high school science club management method” to describe how a group of young men and women who are usually exceptional in math and science behave in a club formed and run by themselves. There may be an adviser, but that person is in my experience a former member of a high school science club.
The club is insular, operates with considerable freedom because other people are “stupid,” “don’t get it,” or are “wasting time on silly things.”
Google has become one of the foremost proponents of the HSSCMM, and the efforts of the Google CFO attest to the difficulty of reigning in the spending in a science club management environment.
Observations:
- The quote from the quantum expert underscores Google’s inability to tolerate focus.
- IBM (a content marketing fog machine) and Google found themselves squabbling about quantum supremacy.
- The HSSCMM essentially forced a focused and talented wizard to quit.
Net net: Google’s management method generates revenue but if the cost is a loss of talented specialists, what’s that say about the efficacy of the high school approach?
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2020
Virtue Signaling: A Covid Short Circuit
May 6, 2020
One of the DarkCyber team sent me a link to “COVID-19 & SEO: Why SEO Is More Important Now Than Ever.” The impact of the article was, “Befuddlement.” The phrase “more important than ever” assumes that search engine optimization was important in the first place.
I have long held the belief that online advertising vendors used search engine as mechanism to drive ad sales. Based on the research for Google Version 2: The Calculating Predator, it was clear that manipulating content could cause the “clever” Google PageRank method to boost pages with minimal intellectual value. Therefore, if you can’t stop weaponized, shaped, or malformed information, what is the benefit of search engine optimization?
The shift coincided with some of my work for the world’s largest source of Web indexed content. By encouraging SEO via an “ambassador” to SEO conferences, online advertising could be positioned as an essential service.
A new Web site is posted. The content is indexed and boosted in the search results. Then over time, the ranking of that “new” site begins to slip down the results page. Nothing the SEO expert does has an impact on the lost results. The customer becomes frustrated and may try another SEO expert. But the site is now essentially not findable.
What’s the solution?
The fix is to purchase online advertising and then traffic returns. Is this magic?
No, it illustrates an aspect of misinformation that gets little purchase in today’s world.
The article “COVID-19 & SEO: Why SEO Is More Important Now Than Ever” illustrates the effort optimization experts expend trying to get a free boost on ad supported “free to use” Web indexes. The word “covid” is lashed to SEO. The argument, noted above, is that SEO is important.
I circled this passage in the write up:
While ecommerce businesses are seeing unmatched results from SEO at the moment — Adobe reports an almost 200% increase in toilet paper purchases alone — companies outside the ecommerce sector are still benefiting from their investment in SEO.
This is interesting logic. Adobe is a word which is used to locate information about Photoshop and other applications. The bound phrase “toilet paper” is a word used frequently on Amazon. (Amazon attracts more product searches now than Google.) But the statement ignores the fact that similar interest in toilet paper occurred in Russia. Perhaps something about the product is causing the searches? Is that something a factor other than SEO?
The search engine optimization sector uses whatever words are needed to generate a boost. Then when the customer finds the SEO less effective, the customer is softened up to buy online ads.
The free Web search systems are under increasing pressure to generate financial returns. This means that the claims of SEO will pay off for those who sell online ads. When the SEO ministrations fail to work, what’s a company to do?
Answer: Buy online ads. Those are going to work.
Why’s this important? Three reasons:
- The symbiosis between SEO and online advertising is not widely discussed.
- Content, even if it is wonky, is needed to give the illusion that an online indexing system is timely and comprehensive. They are neither timely nor comprehensive, but those are separate topics.
- Companies are becoming more and more desperate to make sales. That means that high value information is going to get lost in the barrages of dross.
Are there examples of this activity? Yes, there is the high profile issue between what’s displayed, what’s available, and what’s shown. Navigate to “How Google Search Results Shape, and Sometimes Distort, Public Opinion – and Why You Should Care.”
And there are other examples as well. Take a look at LinkedIn and run a query for “search engine optimization.” You will find a number of experts. At least one of these experts uses an alias. Why? Who is this? We’ll try to answer these questions. Watch for our new feature about SEO deception.
Remember this assertion:
No matter your industry, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented your business with a slew of challenges and difficult decisions, especially when it comes to how you’ll market your company. Compared to other marketing options, SEO offers far more stability and security. It’s a great option for businesses focusing on long-term growth during tenuous times.
One question: “Are the statements accurate?” or are they the shibboleths of the hustler.
Looking for our search engine optimization hustling coverage, click this link.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2020
Looking for more SEO fancy dancing, read this DarkCyber story at https://wp.me/pf6p2-gdY
An Amazon AWS Would You Believe…
May 6, 2020
I am not sure if this is content marketing, PR, or horse feathers. IndiaTV published “At Over $40 billion Annual Run Rate, Amazon Web Services Growing Faster Than Ever.” Here are some factoids from the “real news” write up:
- Amazon will have a “super annual run rate of more than $40 billion” from AWS
- AWS now spans 76 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.
- Amazon does cyber security: “Amazon Detective automatically collects log data from a customer’s resources and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build interactive visualizations that help customers analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities.”
- “AWS has also announced the general availability of Amazon Augmented Artificial Intelligence (Amazon A2I), a fully managed service that makes it easy to add human review to machine learning predictions to enhance model and application accuracy by continuously identifying and improving low confidence predictions.”
And the biggie:
AWS helped power the NFL’s first ever remote draft — the most watched ever, reaching more than 55 million viewers total.
Will IBM and HP get the message? Google and Microsoft have.
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2020
Unusual Medical Marketing
May 6, 2020
One of the DarkCyber team alerted me to a blog post titled “Top 19 Ways to Attract More Patients to Your Medical Practice.” In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the evening news, online news reports, and podcasts are buzzing about Covid19. The idea that medical professionals need to escalate their marketing efforts is an interesting one.
What are the recommendations? Here’s a selection of seven ideas. Please, consult the original essay to learn the other 12. Our comments about the item appear in italics following the information from the expert in medical marketing.
- Create contests. The idea is unusual. Based on my experience with doctors, nurses, and intermediaries like “doc in the box” operations in Kroger, the free time available to think about a contest may be limited. What will the winner receive? A co-pay waiver? An appliance for a broken ankle? A coupon good for $20 percent off a lab test.
- Get active in Social Media. Most of the health care professionals with whom I have knowledge are not eager to post content on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or other social media sources. The likelihood of the information being used in the event of an insurance fraud, Medicare integrity issue, or malpractice exists. Perhaps some health care professionals post. There are images of nurses and physicians in coronavirus treatment facilities. These may be legal time bombs. Our suggestion is to ask an attorney first.
- Email your patients once in a while. In the city in which the DarkCyber team members live, communications from physicians are intermediated through a combine of health care providers or from a corporate entity. Emails move through specific channels in order to minimize issues with HIPPA, legal issues, and security. Again: Check with an attorney before spamming, using a proxy, or putting into the Internet’s memory a comment which may be problematic for regulatory authorities.
- Be Adaptable. The idea of adaptation is important. However, in a regulated sector, protocols must be followed. The physician or nurse who wanders off the reservation and is discovered as a protocol violator can face penalties. These range from losing a license to a fine or worse. Adaptation in quite specific frames of reference is important. Losing track of a particular frame of reference can be problematic.
- Get plenty of online reviews. What does “plenty” mean? Many physicians — particularly independent physicians providing plastic surgery type services to wealthy clients — may find patient reviews a double edged sword. A good review is, by definition, better than a damning review. A bad review may be evidence in another patient’s malpractice case. Corporate health care providers face internal and other restrictions on their posting about procedures. We are repeating, but checking with an attorney may be prudent.
The other 19 tips to get up to 30 new patients a week presents a problem on three fronts:
First, in today’s medical climate, generating business for a health problem may be perceived as unprofessional. In some cases, the virus is providing sufficient demand. There is no data in the write up to draw a direct link between search engine optimization and social media and new patients. Without data, the implication and overt statements are difficult to believe.
Second, health care professionals face numerous challenges. These range from regulation to burn out, from excessive paperwork to the challenge of keeping pace with medical information germane to their work. In today’s climate, convincing medical professionals to embrace marketing may be a difficult sale. The attention bandwidth of many medical professionals goes offline when computer centric double talk is the meat of the conversation.
Finally, the implication that the 19 recommendations will deliver new patients is a checklist easily applied to other business sectors. The ideas are not customized, not tuned to the regulatory climate, and not in touch with the new normal for medical treatment.
Net net: The ideas may create more problems, increase costs, and present a larger attack surface for patients pursuing malpractice claims against the advertising health care professional. The blog post may be a hustle, not a help.
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2020
Want more SEO fancy dancing? Read this DarkCyber story https://wp.me/pf6p2-gdY
Amazon from JEDI to Black Eye?
May 5, 2020
Who knows who lies today? Facebook executives remain baffled about user privacy and Cambridge Analytica? Google forgets that it has data about salaries? An Amazon executive explains a reality different from the world in which third-party resellers operate? Bleach, well, not relevant.
“House Panel Demands That Bezos Testify on Whether Amazon Misled Congress” has a catchy subtitle too:
The move marks the greatest escalation to date in the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust probe of Silicon Valley.
The basic idea is to put the driver of the Bezos bulldozer at one of those semi-gloss tables in a room used for hearings and sometimes other things. A group of elected officials will then ask questions, usually prepared by assistants. Each question typically nests within a polemic or a statement designed to get the elected official back in the fund raising game.
Here’s an interesting statement from the write up. The “Nadler” referenced is Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.):
Nadler railed against tech giants like Facebook and Amazon during a private fundraiser in February, warning that the power they possess “cannot be allowed to exist in society.” Nadler added that confronting concentration of power in the U.S. “means breaking up all the large companies,” though he did not specify which firms should be split apart.
The digital monopolies have been doing their thing for a couple of decades. Soon the driver of the Bezos bulldozer will appear and explain what the reality is.
And what is the reality? The Washington Post presents one view. Prime members have another. Third party resellers presumably have their perception as well.
Amazon moved from JEDI to a black eye.
No doubt Mr. Bezos’ view will be interesting. Maybe he will Amazon Chime in?*
—-
* Chime is Amazon’s video conferencing systems which let’s people work together, simplified.
Stephen E Arnold, May 5, 2020
Google Recommendations: A Digital Jail Cell?
May 5, 2020
A team of researchers in at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin have closely studied filter bubbles (scientifically called “confinement”) on YouTube. While the phenomenon of filter bubbles across the Web has been a topic of study for several years, scientists Camille Roth, Antoine Mazieres, and Telmo Menezes felt the role of the recommendation algorithm on YouTube had been under-examined. In performing research to plug this gap, they found the dominant video site may produce the most confining bubbles of all. The team shares their main results in “Tubes and Bubbles: Topological Confinement of Recommendations on YouTube.” They summarize:
“Contrarily to popular belief about so-called ‘filter bubbles’, several recent studies show that recommendation algorithms generally do not contribute much, if at all, to user confinement; in some cases, they even seem to increase serendipity [see e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Our study demonstrates however that this may not be the case on YouTube: be it in topological, topical or temporal terms, we show that the landscape defined by non-personalized YouTube recommendations is generally likely to confine users in homogeneous clusters of videos. Besides, content for which confinement appears to be most significant also happens to garner the highest audience and thus plausibly viewing time.”
The abstract to the team’s paper on the study describes their approach:
“Starting from a diverse number of seed videos, we first describe the properties of the sets of suggested videos in order to design a sound exploration protocol able to capture latent recommendation graphs recursively induced by these suggestions. These graphs form the background of potential user navigations along non-personalized recommendations. From there, be it in topological, topical or temporal terms, we show that the landscape of what we call mean-field YouTube recommendations is often prone to confinement dynamics.”
To read about the study in great, scientific detail, complete with illustrations, turn to the full paper published at the PLOS ONE peer-reviewed journal site. Established in 2012, The Centre Marc Bloch’s Computational Social Science Team enlists social scientists alongside computer scientists and modelers to study the social dynamics of today’s digital landscapes. If you are curious what that means, exactly, their page includes an interesting five-minute video describing their work.
Cynthia Murrell, May 5, 2020
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
