SEO
Does Your Page Rank?
Have you received a message saying, “Your web page ranks VERY LOW” with an offer to fix that for you? Or maybe someone in your networking group asked you how your website ranks. Maybe you’ve been hearing about PageRank. One way or another, you might be wondering — just how does your page rank? The…
Facebook Discrimination and You
Facebook is currently being sued for housing discrimination. That may seem like a leap, seeing that Facebook isn’t actually doing any real estate deals, but Facebook does run ads for housing. Canadian lawyers are complaining that Facebook’s employment ads discriminate against older workers. Researchers ran fake Facebook ads to test whether they could manipulate ads…
SEO Telemarketers
I got a call recently from someone who wanted to sell me “search engine positioning.” “You mean optimization?” I asked. No, they told me, this was different. All I had to do was choose a keyword, and I would own the page. Guaranteed. “You mean, like Google Ads?” Oh, no, they said, this wasn’t a…
March 2019 Google Update
Google has confirmed that they made a major update to the algorithm they use to help searchers find information they need online. The update is called the March 2019 Core Update. Will this affect your website? If so, can you fix it? Google’s answer to this question is clear: “There’s no ‘fix’ for pages that…
Autogenerated Content
Robots may take on a lot of jobs, but they can’t write… or can they? We spoke with a company that has software designed to do just that. Suppose you want to generate a lot of product descriptions without the expense of paying a human writer to create them. Maybe you have fitness wearables or…
Health Misinformation and Algorithms
Wired magazine explained how organized groups and campaigns are messing with Amazon’s algorithm in an intentional effort to spread medical misinformation. Since the algorithms that determine what websites show us are not making human, morality-based decisions, they can be tricked into showing people misinformation fairly easily. “They’re engineered to show us things we are statistically…