SEO Wars
Monetized or Broken
Google Gone Bad
Are you old enough to remember the miracle of the internet? Are you old enough to remember waiting for the high pitched alien screeches, beeps and belching noises the computer made as the wheel spun letting you know the machine was dialing The World Wide Web? I am.
Though a late adapter to most technology, I was an earlier adapter to the web. All the answers to all my questions, right at my fingertips and free (save the cost of AoL and a second phone line). I was in nerd heaven!
Decades ago now, I stumbled upon a thing called Stumble Upon, that would randomly select fascinating things for me to look at and read. Gone now, morphed into a money making endeavor, that only shows me things it thinks I already like.
Same with Wikipedia, if you clicked on the link above you found them begging for money. Google put this monetizing thing on steroids back in 2007. Google bought a company called DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. This purchase allowed Google to efficiently monetize all searches.
Today I bumped into a truly annoying Google search (having given up on Dogpile, Yahoo, Bing, and Merlot). I wanted to know what is the most searched for word. My Medium stats indicated I was down to 4 views from 2791. Time to do something different I said to myself. Time to take proactive steps. I decided to write an article about searching for hot SEO words.
Step One: Research/Read.
Anything broken on Medium I should be aware of…nope. Just a lot of Whining: No views, blah blah. No readers, boo hoo. No money — one article said (and I paraphrase-’cause I’m not calling anyone out by name on this one.)
“Unhappy? So leave the partner program.”
This thought according to someone is according to Ev, Medium Universe Master. Well, leaving is always an option, now isn’t it. But like a gambling addict I keep dropping articles into the hopper hoping to hit the jackpot! Did I just compare Medium to a Slot machine? Yes I did! I happily allow this one armed bandit to rob my time.
Step Two: Review My Analytics
Well, nigh unto impossible! According to Medium’s algorithms I don’t have enough readers to run analytics that would have any meaningful interpretation. So I do my own assessment. Two stories gained traction, 1k or better in views. These were stories playing with the all important driver of the internet — SEOs.
One was by accident, I used the word Dividend in the title. WOW! What an amazing reaction, my views skyrocketed. Sadly they were mostly external, thus earning me under $2.00. Taking Ev’s advice, I went elsewhere with that story and received a $5.00 Thank you! Thanks, Vocal.media.
The second, I purposefully played with the SEO concept and used words that would trigger views. It worked almost as well as the first article, and earned almost as much money! Oh, joy I have almost enough for a cup of coffee — oh wait, I was paid more by Coffee Times for participating in a challenge and earned an actual cup of coffee.
I took my analytics research to Google-
Hey Google, what is the number one SEO word today?
Results, nothing but ads for SEO tools. I went to page 2 of the search, more ads, page 3, finally an article. YAY! An article about ads with affiliate links to SEO tools. BOO!
Step Three: Fuck with Google’s algorithm
Let us start a revolution and break Google! Pick a totally random off the wall thing to search each day. It is truly fun to see what Google does with that! I haven’t done the empirical work to prove this observation — but since I’ve started fucking with google’s algorithm I’ve gotten fewer annoying ads. My hypothesis is it can’t figure out how to target me anymore! Give it a try!
PS I’ve been doing that to Medium as well — searching for different topics, trying to break the algorithm of only selecting articles it thinks I’d like.
To all you algorithm-addicted-monetizing platforms — what I want is something new!! Bring me flavors I’ve never tasted, thoughts I’ve never had, ideas I haven’t imagined. Bring back my original StumbleUpon. PLEASE.
