8 Easy Steps To Comply with (Canada’s) New Anti-Spam Law
There is a new anti-spam law which requires express consent to send electronic messages. Here are 8 steps to comply.
Post from Arienne Holland on State of Digital
8 Easy Steps To Comply with (Canada’s) New Anti-Spam Law
Digital Dashboards: Strategic & Tactical: Best Practices, Tips, Examples
I’m excited about the power of a well created dashboard. It is a thing of beauty and a source of immense joy. Oh, and of course a critical element for any company’s path to glory. Dashboards are every where, we will look at a lot of them in this post and they are all digital. […]
Digital Dashboards: Strategic & Tactical: Best Practices, Tips, Examples is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
A Nutshell Guide To a Successful Office Move
Joining the Builtvisible team just over two years ago I have always had the exciting task of getting us from A to B with our office moves. In December 2013 we made the decision that we were close to growing out of our lovely Shoreditch High Street office and therefore ready to begin the search […]
The post A Nutshell Guide To a Successful Office Move appeared first on Builtvisible – A Creative Digital Agency.
Forecasting traffic and sales: an introduction
This two-part series will kick-off with quite a high level introduction to the subject of forecasting, covering things such as:
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What is a forecast?
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Why is it important to forecast?
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What challenges are involved in forecasting?
In the next part, we’ll look at some practical tips and examples of how to actually create a useful, insightful forecast.
So, first things first, what is a forecast?
Let’s start with the Wikipedia definition:
Forecasting is the process of making statements about events whose actual outcomes (typically) have not yet been observed.
It is helpful to break this short description down to help us get a more rounded understanding of what a forecast is and what it should aim to do:
‘Making statements about events’: a statement is different from a single figure, the expected outcome of many a forecast (very important, we shall come back to this).
‘About events whose actual outcomes have not yet been observed’: predicting the future. How well is this generally done?
Using two key elements: 1) What we know has happened in the past. 2) What we ‘expect’ to happen in the future and what we ‘know’ will happen in the future.
Why are forecasts important?
Sun Tzu, The Art Of War:
Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.
If you’ve not looked over the horizon, how can you prepare to act?
Forecasting is about knowing what to expect in the future, and goals should be what you would like to achieve in the future. Planning should be a response to forecasts and the first step in achieving your goals.
In short, a good forecast should help you set smart, achievable objectives and give you an understanding of how to achieve them (negotiating known challenges along the way).
Common forecasting pitfalls
As would be expected, predicting future events is not free from difficulties and obstacles.
Here I wanted to highlight two of the common mistakes which can affect the quality and effectiveness of your forecasts:
Mistake #1: introducing too much bias
Whenever a forecast is required, there’s often an underlying motivation which can lead to the accuracy killer known as ‘bias’.
For example, a potential client asks you to forecast how much additional revenue you’ll drive each month until the end of the year.
It’s a brave (but very sensible) soul who provides estimates which could be described as ‘cautious’. This scenario is common and dangerous: over-optimism at the sales stage can very often result in poorly managed expectations and the breakdown of the relationship is on the cards before the project has even begun.
As soon as too much bias is introduced you could make a case for no longer calling what you produce a forecast. Perhaps an ‘idealised vision of the future’ would be more apt.
Bias is such a problem because the nature of forecasting can lead to you making judgement calls about numerous future events: (Will this trend continue at pace or slow down? Will the Christmas uplift be as strong this year? Will the competition remain at the current level?).
There are wide margins within these judgements meaning the forecaster’s incentives start to influence the resulting outcome.
There is a great example of this related to Scotland’s upcoming Independence Referendum. Both sides have made conflicting claims of financial benefits should their side win:
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The Scottish government claims a £1,000 windfall should there be a ‘Yes’ victory
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The UK Treasury claimed Scotland’s residents would benefit to the tune of £1,400/person after a ‘No’ vote
How did they manage to differ in forecasts by £5bn? There are a number key assumptions which fall on different sides of the fence depending who is doing the forecast (nicely summarised here), the key one concerning North Sea Oil revenues.
A £4bn swing difference is introduced because of differing levels of optimism/pessimism, in the projected tax revenue (£6.9bn vs £2.9bn)
Mistake #2: presenting a single data point, not a statement
We all know what a forecast looks like, right?

That was a loaded question.
As we’ve discussed, there are many unknowns and judgement calls involved in understanding our ‘future’. Each one of these will introduce a level of uncertainty and increase the margin for error.
This margin or confidence level is an important caveat which should be included, rather than presenting a ‘single-point’ forecast.

Not only are single-point forecasts less valuable (and in my experience, less actionable), but present a single-point forecast and the first time you miss that target, you could end up in hot water.
Recently, US food giant ConAgra’s market valuation dropped ~$1bn when it failed to hit its forecasted revenue.
An interesting article on Forbes claims that had a range forecast (allowing for best/worst case scenarios) been carried out, this would have prevented the loss in value by preparing the market/shareholders for all eventualities (thus preventing panic or the view that they’d failed to hit ‘targets’).
A range forecast should include a ‘maximum’, e.g. the case where opportunity is fully realised, and a ‘minimum’, e.g. the case where the most pessimistic predictions turn out to be true.
An illustrated forecast may look like this:
The final missing component of our ‘statement’ (which we’ll discuss further in part two) is confidence.
Not just a gut feeling (“I’m totally confident I’ll double your revenues, halve your costs”, etc.), a confidence interval is a statistical measure of how accurate an estimate is.
If a forecast is created as a result of sound statistical methods then it should be possible to put a figure on this to provide further context to what you present as a forecast.
For example, we can say ‘the chart above represents our forecasted revenues with a confidence level of 95%”. In plain English, “we are 95% certain the actual figure will fall between our maximum and minimum”.
Conclusion
The ‘statement’ and accompanying set of figures which make up a good forecast in my opinion can provide us with a very useful starting point for planning to hit our goals.
If our target revenue sits toward the maximum prediction:
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How can we maximise the potential of predicted opportunities?
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Do we need to adjust marketing budgets in particular areas to help boost overall volumes?
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Should targets actually be revised ahead of time to ensure realistic expectations from shareholders/clients/superiors?
If actual figures are below the mean value:
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Can we identify and troubleshoot what is falling below expectation and make a plan to improve?
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Do we need to add additional activities to our existing marketing mix to get back on course?
There are, of course, many more difficulties (not enough data, unknown unknowns, etc.) and complexities to forecasting, but approaching the problem with a clear idea of what the end result should be will be very useful when it comes to overcoming the issues you come across.
Promoting modern websites for modern devices in Google search results
Webmaster level: all A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page’s c…
Get Ahead of Google with Insight into Semiotics
Posted by Isla_McKetta
Write it and they will come. That’s the drum we’ve been beating for a long time now. We optimize our pages and our content to please search engines and cross our fingers and hope that customers will convert.
We can do better.
But to do it, we have to think beyond Google. Yes, you still need to check all your standard SEO boxes to make your site crawl friendly. Then it’s time to stop catering to the bots and start catering to the users instead.
That means we have to—no, we get to—think bigger when we think of SEO. As Rand said in his Whiteboard Friday last week, “SEO is really any input that engines use to rank pages.” That’s why we have to reexamine the way we design, the way we create, and the way we optimize. Most importantly, we’re going to have to reconsider the underlying logic we use to approach all three of those activities as we learn to think of the user first and the bots second.
This idea of blending search and user optimization isn’t new. But when Gianluca Fiorelli called for a shift from semantic to semiotic thinking on State of Digital, he got me thinking about whether semiotics are the next step in earning the audience you want.
What the heck is semiotics?

Semiotics is the study of the creation of meaning. Semioticians look at everything—words, images, traffic lights, kinship structures—and study what those signifiers (signs or anything that signifies anything) mean and how people create meaning from those signs.
Semiotics is composed of three parts: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. When we’re approaching user optimization from a semiotic point of view, we’re shifting from a focus on semantics to an incorporation of all three elements.
Let’s get to know them.
Syntactics (form)
Syntactics (more commonly called “syntax”) is the study of the formal relationship between signs. Think of syntax as dealing with grammatical rules, form, and spatial order. Syntax is why you place “inurl:” before the url in a query instead of after. Syntax can be as arbitrary as the order of lights in a traffic light, but it is unchanging.
In grammar, syntax is why you say “oranges are good” but Yoda says “good are oranges.”
Syntax is so embedded in search these days that we don’t even talk about it, and as long as your code is in the right order and the content on your pages is written for users who aren’t Yoda, you’ve mastered syntax. Hooray!
Semantics (meaning)

Semantics is the study of conventional meaning. Let’s take the word “orange.” It can mean either the fruit or the color.

Whether or not you use semantic markup, search engines are usually capable of reading the context on a page and returning a result for either the fruit or the color, depending on the parameters you entered. Crawlers have been using things like context, synonyms, taxonomy, and information architecture to determine the relevance of search results for a very long time. When Hummingbird came along, the semantic nature of search became more obvious because we could see that Google is looking at queries and not just keywords.
If you’re keeping score, we’re already thinking about and optimizing for two elements of semiotic thinking. And we’ve caught up with the latest algorithm updates. But syntax and semantics aren’t the whole story when it comes to how humans create and understand information.
Enter pragmatics.
Pragmatics (use)

You (and your customers) bring a whole life’s experiences into any interaction whether it’s reading a website or chatting someone up at a cocktail party. Those experiences shape the way you interpret images and words.
For example, if you’re a soccer fan, the way you fell about the word “orange” could be affected by how much you like or hate the Dutch national team whose nickname is “Oranje.”
And if you’re color blind, “orange” could mean any of these colors depending on the exact type of color blindness you have:

“Orange” also has political connotations:

Photo of Orange Revolution courtesy of Wikipedia user Irpen.
The point is that search engines know the dictionary definition of a word. They can even learn about the associations you have by the search terms you enter. But they do not inherently understand (yet) the richness of your personal relationship with a word and the myriad other factors that go into creating meaning for you.
Pragmatics is your opportunity to create a site that engages with all of those connotations in order to create a stronger bond with your customers.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Banana.
Banana who?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn’t say “banana?”
Pragmatics in action
Pragmatics is also a way of describing how complicated our relationship with information inputs is.
Say you see something crazy in your Facebook feed like an article claiming, “Solar Panels Drain the Sun’s Energy, Experts Say.” Your job is to decide whether to share, comment on, or ignore that link. First you have to understand what it means, which in this case is figuring out if it’s good science, bad science, or satire.
Here is the process a human might go through as you use pragmatic interpretations to figure out how not to sound like a dope when replying to this post.
1. Consider the source
The article is from the National Report, which is not a household name. If it was from The New York Times, it might be time to panic, but in this case, you’ll want to dig a little deeper.
2. Evaluate the content

Human thought is remarkably complex and here are just a few of the signs you might consider while trying to make sense of this article:
| Signifier | Conservative? | Parody? |
|---|---|---|
| Name of publication | Seems staunch enough. | Never heard of it, but it sounds a lot like the National Review. |
| Tagline | Lots of people think they’re independent. | But calling it out? |
| Overall look | Clean without spammy ads. | Wait, how do they make money? |
| Endorsers | Conservative darlings. | But if you were going to parody someone… |
| Article title | Fuzzy science? | Too crazy to be real. |
| Source of study | Privately-owned think tanks produce all kinds of results. | Their site has even more crazy “science.” |
| Tone | Straightforward reportage. | Too straightforward. |
3. Check the internet
It seems like this article is probably satirical, but to be safe, you can do what a lot of us do—Google “National Report” (and no, the irony of using to a search engine to prove that human users can make better connections than search engines is not lost on me). And then ask Wikipedia.

You could have made a decision about this article on a syntactic level (the sentences made sense even though the content seemed farfetched). You could even have interpreted it on a semantic level (both Googling the article and the Wikipedia search).
But what many readers need to fully understand this article is the pragmatics of assessing the signs.
So that’s a pretty deep dive just to decide to ignore a Facebook post. But the point is that your customers do this all the time, and the huge number of factors that go into showing us whether we should engage with your site and its content are more than search engines can currently look at.
That’s semiotics. The whole bundle of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. And we’re doing pretty well with two parts of it, but there’s still a lot of opportunity in pragmatics.
Incorporating semiotic thinking into your web design and content
To recap: search engines aren’t sophisticated enough to know what pragmatic associations your customers bring into a search, but your customers are naturally bringing in layers of context, preferences, and life experience. Which means there are many layers on which you can engage with a customer that search engines can’t yet understand.
Here are some examples of ways to use pragmatics to connect with your audience.
1. Use satire or other humor
As with the solar panels article, some stuff on the internet seems too crazy and stilted to believe until you put it in context. The Onion has mastered this (and they have the engagement to show it). Robots don’t get humor, but humans do, and being funny (when appropriate) makes your site memorable.

2. Build a lexicon for your content
Use a lexicon (a list of commonly used words, slang and/or jargon specific to your audience) to understand the (rapidly evolving) way that your customers speak and communicate with them in their own language. Think about your users and what the words you’re using signify for them. Are they hearing the same things you are saying? If not, fix it.
3. Consider culture in your design
Connect with your audience by designing a site that speaks to their ideas of beauty and the way they process information. See how the US version of Shu Uemura’s site is clean and spare like many American sites (or, for that matter, Wyoming)?

Meanwhile the Japanese version showcases more information in a compact space (kind of like downtown Tokyo).

What I love about this example is that the brand aesthetic carries across cultures—only the way that brand is interpreted that changes.
Cultural considerations can include anything from views on gender to perceptions of color. For example, in parts of Asia, purple is associated with luxury, while in the US it’s associated with low prices. Check out this
excellent slide deck by Smith Prasadh to learn more about how differently humans can see the world (and how you can use that to connect with your audience).
4. Capture tangential relationships
Engagement doesn’t have to be about your product. Just take a look at what Emirates, a major sponsor of the World Cup, did in customizing their hero image for each target market. The global English version is pretty straightforward.

Things get more personal for Chilean visitors as Emirates tailors not just the flag, but also the copy (using the English version for consistency).

But the best, most customized version of this campaign is the one created for Brazilians. It’s so tailored, in fact, that I had to look up a couple of things. The stripes on the flight attendant’s cheeks are not the Brazilian flag, but instead represent the colors of the Brazilian team. And “Little Canary” is a nickname for the team.

I’ll bet that Google doesn’t care one single bit about these customizations. Even if they can read the text on the images. But my guess is that Emirates has scored a major goal in terms of customer “team” feeling with this campaign which should increase their direct traffic.
5. Incorporate metaphor into your design
Tired of the same old templates and stock photos? Your customers are too. Use images to evoke metaphor like Austin-based Write Bloody Publishing does here to capitalize on the do-it-yourself feeling of the Wild West.

Think about what makes your company unique and own that story with your design. It will make you stand out from the crowd.
Another way to do this is to reconsider your site nav with an eye toward metaphor. Maybe you’re a game company like 2K Games and you want your customers to feel like they are already immersed in your game, say BioShock, as they interact with your site. The first step would be to build a navigation that encourages that kind of feeling. Have your user enter the site as they would enter Rapture—through the bathysphere. Showcase game add-ons as plasmids. And use cutscenes to hint toward exciting features on the site just as you would in the game.
As long as you don’t throw your SEO training out the window, it’s okay to try something new and see if it speaks to your customers. If it doesn’t, try something else. As Lindsay Wassell said yesterday at MozCon, “The internet rewards innovation. Search engines reward innovation.” Be that innovator.
Those are just a few examples. The opportunity in thinking semiotically as you design, create, and optimize is to engage with your customers on a human level. This naturally builds your brand affinity, which should increase your traffic.
I’d love to hear about how you’re using pragmatics to build nuanced relationships with your customers.
Your mission
Let loose your creative team. No one wants to be an SEO copywriter or an SEO designer. When you’re optimizing a site in any way, think first about the user—the one with the most sophisticated relationship—then make sure that your standard SEO boxes are checked. Anything less is like dumbing down a parallax experience to a simple sketch to make sure Google fully understands it fully.
Now go off and use pragmatics to relate to your customers in such a way that so many customers come to your site and engage in such great numbers that the search engines chase you trying to figure out how you did it. You’ll be prepared if Google’s algorithm ever learns how to account for pragmatics, and it beats you chasing rankings any day.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
SearchCap: Google Quality Raters, International Targeting & AdWords + Google My Business
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Now Link Google My Business And AdWords, Get Account-Level Location Extensions Google is introducing the ability to…
Google Webmaster Tools Adds International Targeting Report to Show hreflang Errors
Google Webmaster Tools has added a new reporting feature to help marketers troubleshoot rel-alternate-hreflang annotations (an attribute that communicates with Google if there are requirements for alternate languages on a web page).
Now Link Google My Business And AdWords, Get Account-Level Location Extensions
Google is introducing the ability to set up location extensions at the account level by linking your Google My Business account to your AdWords account. No longer will location extensions need to be set up separately for each campaign. Formerly called …
Google Posts 63 World Cup Logos Since Start Of Tournament – Here Are 10 Worth A Second Look
The Google Doodle team outdid itself during this year’s World Cup, posting a total of 63 World Cup inspired Google logos from the start of the tournament until yesterday’s final game. To kick-off the FIFA 2014 World Cup, Google posted the above image of Rio De Janerio on its global…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google’s Quality Rating Guide Leaked Again; Here Is Version Five
Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines document has been leaked once again! Version 5.0 was leaked a few days ago, where Google has reportedly completely revamped the guidelines. Jennifer Slegg has documented most of the new guidelines on her blog. You can also read the full new 160 page…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Making Maps App More Competitive With Yelp
Google Maps has updated its app for iPhone and iPad. The new version adds features and content and even makes the app more visually appealing. The new version includes the following improvements: Search results appear with descriptions on the map Easy …
Google Search Censorship for Fun and Profit
Growing Up vs Breaking Things
Facebook’s early motto was “move fast and break things,” but as they wanted to become more of a platform play they changed it to “move fast with stability.” Anything which is central to the web needs significant stability, or it destroys many other businesses as a side effect of its instability.
As Google has become more dominant, they’ve moved in the opposite direction. Disruption is promoted as a virtue unto itself, so long as it doesn’t adversely impact the home team’s business model.
There are a couple different ways to view big search algorithm updates. Large, drastic updates implicitly state one of the following:
- we were REALLY wrong yesterday
- we are REALLY wrong today
Any change or disruption is easy to justify so long as you are not the one facing the consequences:
“Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.” … “Impostor Syndrome is that voice inside you saying that not everything is as it seems, and it could all be lost in a moment. The people with the problem are the people who can’t hear that voice.” – Googler Avery Pennarun
Monopoly Marketshare in a Flash
Make no mistake, large changes come with false positives and false negatives. If a monopoly keeps buying marketshare, then any mistakes they make have more extreme outcomes.
Here’s the Flash update screen (which hits almost every web browser EXCEPT Google Chrome).

Notice the negative option installs for the Google Chrome web browser and the Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer.
Why doesn’t that same process hit Chrome? They not only pay Adobe to use security updates to steal marketshare from other browsers, but they also pay Adobe to embed Flash inside Chrome, so Chrome users never go through the bundleware update process.
Anytime anyone using a browser other than Chrome has a Flash security update they need to opt out of the bundleware, or they end up installing Google Chrome as their default web browser, which is the primary reason Firefox marketshare is in decline.

Google engineers “research” new forms of Flash security issues to drive critical security updates.
Obviously, users love it:
Has anyone noticed that the latest Flash update automatically installs Google Toolbar and Google Chrome? What a horrible business decision Adobe. Force installing software like you are Napster. I would fire the product manager that made that decision. As a CTO I will be informing my IT staff to set Flash to ignore updates from this point forward. QA staff cannot have additional items installed that are not part of the base browser installation. Ridiculous that Adobe snuck this crap in. All I can hope now is to find something that challenges Photoshop so I can move my design team away from Adobe software as well. Smart move trying to make pennies off of your high dollar customers.
In Chrome Google is the default search engine. As it is in Firefox and Opera and Safari and Android and iOS’s web search.
In other words, in most cases across most web interfaces you have to explicitly change the default to not get Google. And then even when you do that, you have to be vigilant in protecting against the various Google bundleware bolted onto core plugins for other web browsers, or else you still end up in an ecosystem owned, controlled & tracked by Google.
Those “default” settings are not primarily driven by user preferences, but by a flow of funds. A few hundred million dollars here, a billion there, and the market is sewn up.
Google’s user tracking is so widespread & so sophisticated that their ad cookies were a primary tool for government surveillance efforts.
Locking Down The Ecosystem
And Chrome is easily the most locked down browser out there.
- Chromium is turning into abandonware, with Google stripping features to try to push people over to Chrome.
- Extensions must be installed from the official store. If those extensions deliver malware, no worries. But if those extensions are not aligned with Google’s business model – they will be banned until a commercial relationship aligned with Google’s business model is established. #censorship
- If someone other than Google changes default search settings, it’s time to reset hijacked settings.
- Chrome is so locked down that Yahoo! is canceling their search toolbar for Chrome to comply with recent Google Chrome policy updates, even as Google distributes toolbars in other browsers. #censorship
Whenever Google wants to promote something they have the ability to bundle it into their web browser, operating system & search results to try to force participation. In a fluid system with finite attention, over-promoting one thing means under-promoting or censoring other options. Google likes to have their cake & eat it too, but the numbers don’t lie.
I am frustrated @JohnMu saying that it will not cost CTR. Either Google lied about the increase in CTR with photos, or they’re lying now.— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 25, 2014
The Right to Be Forgotten
This brings us back to the current snafu with the “right to be forgotten” in Europe.
Google notified publishers like the BBC & The Guardian of their links being removed due to the EU “right to be forgotten” law. Their goal was to cause a public relations uproar over “censorship” which seems to have been a bit too transparent, causing them to reverse some of the removals after they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
The breadth of removals is an ongoing topic of coverage. But if you are Goldman Sachs instead of a government Google finds filtering information for you far more reasonable.
Some have looked at the EU policy and compared it to state-run censorship in China.
Google already hires over 10,000 remote quality raters to rate search results. How exactly is receiving 70,000 requests a monumental task? As their public relations propagandists paint this as an unbelievable burden, they are also highlighting how their own internal policies destroy smaller businesses: “If a multi-billion dollar corporation is struggling to cope with 70,000 censor requests, imagine how the small business owner feels when he/she has to disavow thousands or tens of thousands of links.”
The World’s Richest Librarian
Google aims to promote themselves as a digital librarian: “It’s a bit like saying the book can stay in the library, it just cannot be included in the library’s card catalogue.”
That analogy is absurd on a number of levels. Which librarian…
- tracks people to target ads at them?
- blends ads into their recommendations so aggressively that most users are unable to distinguish the difference between ads and regular recommendations?
- republishes the works of others, offers ultimatums while taking third party content, and obscures or entirely strips the content source?
- invests in, funds & defunds entire lines of publishing?
- claims certain book publishers shall be banned from the library due to nothing other than their underlying business model?
Sorry About That Incidental Deletion From the Web…
David Drummond’s breathtaking propaganda makes it sound like Google has virtually no history in censoring access to information:
In the past we’ve restricted the removals we make from search to a very short list. It includes information deemed illegal by a court, such as defamation, pirated content (once we’re notified by the rights holder), malware, personal information such as bank details, child sexual abuse imagery and other things prohibited by local law (like material that glorifies Nazism in Germany).
Yet Google sends out hundreds of thousands of warning messages in webmaster tools every single month.
Google is free to force whatever (often both arbitrary and life altering) changes they desire onto the search ecosystem. But the moment anyone else wants any level of discourse or debate into the process, they feign outrage over the impacts on the purity of their results.
Despite Google’s great power they do make mistakes. And when they do, people lose their jobs.
Consider MetaFilter.
They were penalized November 17, 2012.
At a recent SMX conference Matt Cutts stated MetaFilter was a false positive.
People noticed the Google update when it happened. It is hard to miss an overnight 40% decline in your revenues. Yet when they asked about it, Google did not confirm its existence. That economic damage hit MetaFilter for nearly two years & they only got a potential reprieve from after they fired multiple employees and were able to generate publicity about what had happened.
As SugarRae mentioned, those false positives happen regularly, but most the people who are hit by them lack political and media influence, and are thus slaughtered with no chance of recovery.
MetaFilter is no different than tens of thousands of other good, worthy small businesses who are also laying off employees – some even closing their doors – as a result of Google’s Panda filter serving as judge, jury and executioner. They’ve been as blindly and unfairly cast away to an island and no one can hear their pleas for help.
The only difference between MetaFilter and tons of other small businesses on the web is that MetaFilter has friends in higher places.
If you read past the headlines & the token slaps of big brands, these false positive death sentences for small businesses are a daily occurrence.
And such stories are understated for fear of coverage creating a witch-hunt:
Conversations I’ve had with web publishers, none of whom would speak on the record for fear of retribution from Cutts’ webspam team, speak to a litany of frustration at a lack of transparency and potential bullying from Google. “The very fact I’m not able to be candid, that’s a testament to the grotesque power imbalance that’s developed,” the owner of one widely read, critically acclaimed popular website told me after their site ran afoul of Cutts’ last Panda update.
Not only does Google engage in anti-competitive censorship, but they also frequently publish misinformation. Here’s a story from a week ago of a restaurant which went under after someone changed their Google listing store hours to be closed on busy days. That misinformation was embedded directly in the search results. That business is no more.
Then there are areas like locksmiths:
I am one of the few Real Locksmiths here in Denver and I have been struggling with this for years now. I only get one or two calls a day now thanks to spammers, and that’s not calls I do, it’s calls for prices. For instance I just got a call from a lady locked out of her apt. It is 1130 pm so I told her 75 dollars, Nope she said someone told her 35 dollars….a fake locksmith no doubt. She didn’t understand that they meant 35 dollars to come out and look at it. These spammers charge hundreds to break your lock, they don’t know how to pick a lock, then they charge you 10 times the price of some cheap lock from a hardware store. I’m so lost, I need help from google to remove those listings. Locksmithing is all I have ever done and now I’m failing at it.
There are entire sectors of the offline economy being reshaped by Google policies.
When those sectors get coverage, the blame always goes to the individual business owner who was personal responsible for Google’s behaviors, or perhaps some coverage of the nefarious “spammers.”
Never does anybody ask if it is reasonable for Google to place their own inaccurate $0 editorial front and center. To even bring up that issue makes one an anti-capitalist nut or someone who wishes to impede on free speech rights. This even after the process behind the sausage comes to light.
And while Google arbitrarily polices others, their leaked internal documents contain juicy quotes about their ad policies like:
- “We are the only player in our industry still accepting these ads”
- “We do not make these decisions based on revenue, but as background, [redacted].”
- “As with all of our policies, we do not verify what these sites actually do, only what they claim to do.”
- “I understand that we should not let other companies, press, etc. influence our decision-making around policy”
Is This “Censorship” Problem New?
This problem of control to access of information is nothing new – it is only more extreme today. Read the (rarely read) preface to Animal Farm, or consider this:
John Milton in his fiery 1644 defense of free speech, Areopagitica, was writing not against the oppressive power of the state but of the printers guilds. Darnton said the same was true of John Locke’s writings about free speech. Locke’s boogeyman wasn’t an oppressive government, but a monopolistic commercial distribution system that was unfriendly to ways of organizing information that didn’t fit into its business model. Sound familiar?
When Google complains about censorship, they are not really complaining about what may be, but what already is. Their only problem is the idea that someone other than themselves should have any input in the process.
“Policy is largely set by economic elites and organized groups representing business interests with little concern for public attitudes or public safety, as long as the public remains passive and obedient.” ― Noam Chomsky
Many people have come to the same conclusion
Turn on, tune in, drop out
“I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out what is the effect on society, what’s the effect on people, without having to deploy kind of into the normal world. And people like those kind of things can go there and experience that and we don’t have mechanisms for that.” – Larry Page
I have no problem with an “opt-in” techno-utopia test in some remote corner of the world, but if that’s the sort of operation he wants to run, it would be appreciated if he stopped bundling his software into billions of electronic devices & assumed everyone else is fine with “opting out.”
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Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Ingress Finally On iOS Devices
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The game is now available for iOS users…