Content warning- This article contains little to no witchy weirdness but instead addresses the dark art of search engine placement, and why I’d rather put my faith in people over bots. If you’re bored with same, take a break this week. I’ll be back to the weird next time.
I’ve been on the internet so long I remember when the Information Superhighway was a one-lane goat track. Before AOL. Before Compuserve. When the sound of that modem re-connecting mid-sentence made your teeth itch. Does anybody out there still know what 9600 baud means?
Humor to the side, I have spent a good deal of time and resources exploring or exploiting innovations in technology and communications.
When the “worldwide web” grew out of the morass of interconnected library computers, and the first search engines were struggling just to deliver indexes in near real time, there was not any serious discussion of ranking or optimizing. All data was equal, and relevance was based purely on content. If you were looking for tofu recipes, you got tofu recipes. All the tofu recipes, in no particular order.
Roll forward a decade or so, and both bandwidth and processor speeds had jumped dramatically. No longer were websites solely the dominion of corporations. Individuals could own and operate their own bully pulpit on the internet, and the age of the web log arrived (rapidly abbreviated to blog, because tldr)
This was the start of Web 2.0. Shortly thereafter Twitter gave us the micro-blog, and the rest is history.
Corporations rapidly seized on the potential of this “lite” media to go hard and direct to customers (without realizing that it allowed the customers to go hard and direct right back at them) . The web, which before had been something of a niche space, became very loud and very crowded.
And so in order to “serve the public demand” search engines began to be more selective in how they indexed and ranked information. Because, well, if you provide better results than the other guy, then more people will use your system.
And if more people use your system, you become something of the standard, or at very least a dominant factor and then you can start charging for the privilege of showing up on top of those rankings.
And eventually your brand name even becomes a verb.
Hence we got what was termed “paid” versus “organic” ranking. Paid ranking is what we called advertising back in the old radio-tv days. Organic was called “word-of-mouth”.
Word-of-mouth works this way. Your friend says that Zippy Cola is better than Brand X (I’ve always wondered what Brand X tastes like). So you try Zippy Cola and like it, and tell another friend, who tells another and another.
This was the Social Media Marketing pitch.
Zippy Cola was going to find somebody with a lot of friends (an influencer) and ask them to try Zippy. Big risk, if they hated it, but if they dug it, well, then all of their friends (followers) would likely try Zippy as well.
So becoming an influencer became a thing1My thoughts on that subject are at least another article in itself, but that’s now a legit career aim.. Glad I don’t have to worry about the burden of that.
Meanwhile, the cost of handling larger and larger virtual populations was draining that startup capital at FaceySpace and Instatoot and Youhoo. So they followed Megalomania’s strategy of charging folks to be seen more frequently when people were looking at things.
Now. what motivates a company (large or small) to go for paid advertising when the medium itself is geared toward word-of-mouth? Well, put simply, word-of-mouth needs to stop working so well.
And so The Algorithm was born, and a whole industry sprang up to analyze, teach and ultimately beat The Algorithm.
So what happened? They changed it. And they keep changing it, only giving lip service to the changes “improving the user experience”.
I’m going to let you in on a secret2Okay, maybe not that much of a secret.. The Algorithm is a myth. It’s a rigged game.
The Algorithm exists for the sole purpose of making the social media platform money by charging you to beat The Algorithm.
The social media companies are constantly refining their systems because people who don’t pay to advertise are beating the system. Non-advertisers are actually able to reach their target market without paying. And that’s just not profitable.
The social media companies are just that. They are corporations with stockholders (some of whom aren’t even soulless robber barons). They exist to make a profit. They are obliged to generate revenue to pay back that startup capital, to pay current stockholders dividends for the use of their money, and to pay the numbers of people worldwide employed to run, maintain, and improve those systems.
The internet in it’s infancy was supposed to be about the free and open exchange of ideas.
But nobody wanted to pay to build that, because you can’t make any money off free.
While the bones of the thing were publicly funded, the real momentum came with the influx of businesses looking to exploit this new resource for profit. So FaceySpace and Instatoot and Youhoo and Megalomania are no different, they’re just bigger, and richer, and more specifically able to control the flow of information.
Anybody see Citizen Kane? We’re not dealing with anything new here. Frankly, I’m surprised Hearst Corporation doesn’t have its own giant social media gorgon. But then Sears never saw Amazon coming either.
Now, I am by nature an anarchist. That is, I just don’t believe that anyone should have authority over everyone else.3 This is not the same as “anarchists” who historically want violent revolution and social upheaval so that they can create a perfect world by putting themselves in authority over everyone else.
And to that end, I do not cede my authority to the likes of FaceySpace, Instatoot, Youhoo, Megalomania, or their wholly owned subsidiary companies, agencies, organizations, henchmen, thralls, toadies, and serfs. I have paid for my own space on the interwebs, and I have educated myself in the creation and maintenance of websites and the running of my little webstore.
I naturally rankle at the implication that I need to put in various meta-tags, utilize complex analytics, and PAY various and sundry other companies to better situate my little corner of the web in the top five Megalomania results4 In fact the free WordPress plug-ins that I use for such things tell me this post is absolutely miserable at attracting attention..
Call me crazy, but I still believe in word-of-mouth as the best method to reach new customers and offer my humble wares to those who are interested in my special brand of weirdness. So, while I may employ some free, automatic, and general tools to push this blog onto the search engines, I have decided that I am not altering my personal style of writing, or fretting if I have the right number of keywords, or if I am posting to Instatoot at the right time of day with the proper #hashtags.
I’m gonna be me, because that’s the whole reason I’m here.
I have found my tribe, as the cool kids say these days. And I am confident that the people who dig my work, my writing, and my weirdness, will tell others who would like it as well.
And, frankly, that’s enough for me. I would rather work with a small group of appreciative people than run a giant company where I never know what the customer is thinking and waste fortunes trying to guess it.
So don’t expect to find me on the top of the search engines. I’m not the glitzy store on the high street. I’m that quirky little shop in the back alley where people “in the know” go.
Thanks for reading this, and your continued support and friendship. I realize this is something of a diversion from the strange and unusual. I hope you found it useful.
Next time I’ll be back to our regularly scheduled weirdness. Promise.