This is why I'm a fan of direct, delegative democracy. I can't trust a single, specific individual, who was appointed to a position of legislative authority through populism to know jack ████ about information security, medical emergencies, hell; how to dig a ditch. (Guaranteed none would qualify without additional safety training.)

I'd like to a) be able to vote on specific issues, and b) appoint someone I trust to proxy as an expert on specific domains. E.g. Bruce Schneier on infosec.

"as an full"

I am good at Engrish

Could you please add alt text on your images for the visually impaired ?

For instance :

Tweet from Jake Ward
We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6 million total traffic from a competitor.
We got 489,509 traffic in October alone.
Here's how we did it:

We pulled an SEO heist using AI.

1. Exported a competitor's sitemap
2. Turned their list of URLs into article titles
3. Created 1,800 articles from these titles at scale using AI18 months later, we have stolen:
4. 3.6 million total traffic
5. 490k monthly traffic

#ALT4you

raaaaage.

Thanks for shitting up search, asshole. Like it wasn't bad enough BEFORE this.

this you?

(friends don't let friends share alt-textless screenshots.
actual source for previous toot:
nitter.net/jakezward/status/17…
web.archive.org/web/2023112712…)

Can we re-brand them as "misdirection agents"?

The whole point of "search engine optimization" is to con someone to click on their link instead of the one that contains what the searcher was trying to look for.

this only worked because of 2 things:

1) their site/client's site was significantly more authoritative than this competitor. (Either that or the competitor's content was woeful, the only ways new pages could beat old pages so quickly)

2) google isn't yet good enough at penalising AI spam. Mostly because it is only an AI itself, so it has exactly the same shortfalls

Wait a year or two, AI spam content will disappear and the companies who did it at scale will also disappear.

I am mostly baffed by the unit of "traffic"

What is one traffic? A car, a road, a locomotive?

(Also I can assume it means clicks, but just... use clicks???)

yep, but they are clearly bragging about it because the guy's company is selling scam-as-a-service.

Sadly it's only a matter of time before clients start asking us web developers why we are not building them sites that generate thousands of garbage posts per hour, because that's what it takes to make the front page of Google.

Add this to the many "I did this thing that takes other people's effort and makes me money because I'm a greedy piece of shit and capitalism loves people like me." list.

I thought simple news aggregators were shitty enough and then some fuckhead like that dude comes along.

His LinkedIn profile reads like a crypto-bro (honestly, WTF is a "blog-investor").