Business is down, you’re desperate, and then you get a friendly email from a stranger, claiming they work with all your allies and competitors, and that they boosted their rankings on Google and Bing. They want a nominal one time fee of $5,000 and only $500 a month for miscellaneous maintenance. Adjusting for how much money they think you have, of course. It’s a boondoggle, a scam, smoke and mirrors.

Their entire business is based on cross marketing. Once they bait one, they’ll use them to market to others. “All these competitors can’t all be wrong,” you may think to yourself. Their forte is creating reports and customer service, if they are “good” they’ll install random useless plugins on your wordpress site or print out some excel reports from semrush. None of it makes a difference, all of it gives the appearance of accomplishing something… a boondoggle.

There may be some small benefits to adding a keyword here or there to your website… nothing a $100 an hour upwork freelancer from india couldn’t tell you in 30 minutes. Nothing you couldn’t learn from a quick read of Google’s SEO document. Think about it from Google’s perspective, should a company that’s been in business for 15 years, gets lots of backlinks and lots of “good” clicks on their search page be ranked first? Or should a company that’s relatively new, has very few backlinks from reputable sites and doesn’t regularly post viral content be listed first? The most useful result should and will be listed first, regardless of meaningless meta tags, keywords and calls to action you put on your page. See how algorithms work for an interesting summary of how modern computer algorithms think.

The people you normally depend on for their expertise may not speak up, they may see it as a fight not worth fighting. If they know anything about politics, they know not to pick fights unless they need to. Everyone is surrounded by yes men, to a degree. So how can you protect yourself when you’ve already pulled the trigger on SEO consultants, or if it’s a train you can’t stop? It’s simple, track them. Use serps, semrush or the free keyword position Tool to get reliable position checks. Make a spreadsheet and put it on a high visibility location. If you can’t be bothered, and you’re already paying 5 digits for SEO, invest ~$100 dollars in semrush or serps to keep them in check automatically.

Keep your eyes open.

Inspired by some offers T&D PowerSkills and ISPC received.

Imagine running a blog on Drupal… then imagine running that blog on May 21st, 2018. Around that time an automated cryptomining zero-day exploit ran wild across millions of Drupal sites. There is no automated way to upgrade Drupal, so any security patches need to be applied manually. To make matters worse, many of the patches available would not work on versions less than a year old. On top of that, even if you patched Drupal, you could not ascertain the state of your blog without rebuilding it… something I suspect most independent installations are not capable of doing quickly.

Contrast that to this statically rendered node based Hexo page whose security relies entirely on Gitlab’s management of docker, their nginx proxy servers and Cloudflare. At the core of what I manage, there lie only markdown, html and javascript files, which can be rebuilt with the latest dependencies with the click of a button.

I’ve run this blog for over 2 years without ANY changes to the code. It works. It has practically no security concerns of any kind. It’s fast because it’s simple. It’s responsive and supported well by everything from an 8k display to a smartwatch. This is a better starting ground than “smart” dynamic websites. To be clear, I can still do analytics, comments and send things to a database.

That said, Hexo is not the future… real web apps are… and in that front vuepress is leading the charge. Once it matures to the point where adding comments and theming is easy… I’ll consider migrating. I reckon that will take 2 years. This code base will be about 4 years old then, and 5 years is the industry standard for “maintainable” code.

Until then, this site will still be up, for a total expense of $12 a year, including exclusively, the cost of the domain.

If you prefer Android’s flexibility over iOS’s heavily walled garden, you have a few options to appease your friend’s eyes and save them from the jarring puke inducing 80’s green bubbles. First off, both of these require a MacOS computer. They work by proxying the accessibility notifications to your phone, and then using accessibility API’s for iMessage to text back. Neither of these hide the fact that you don’t have your phone number connected to iMessage.

The most difficult part of both of these is accessing them outside your home network. If you know how to port forward, you’re all set. If you don’t have WiFi at home, you might be able to remote SSH your port to a server. See http://www.zenspider.com/ruby/2011/11/ssh-tunneling-via-osx-s-launchctl.html

AirMessage

AirMessage is available on the play store and has a far simpler installation routine. It’s far better maintained. It’s one caveat is it will run on your android 24/7 giving it a substantial standby battery hit. Roughly 15% depending on your phone usage.

Pros: Easy install, available from Play Store Cons: Heavy on battery. Closed source.

WeMessage

We message was developed as a pet project by Roman Scott, he open sourced it and paid for a FireBase server to keep it up. For some reason it was taken down from the Play Store and he has moved on to other projects. https://github.com/RomanScott/weMessage

Pros: Uses firebase for negligible battery usage. Open source. Cons: Requires more advanced configuration. Not well maintained.

Self suffering is infinitely nobler than the suffering of others. – Gandhi

In relation to Google’s quest to build the perfect team.

The foreword is this, In a Google study, teams of 3 people were tasked with creating product proposals. Google found that teams composed of people who knew each other and got along well produced objectively worse proposals, even though they were confident about them. On the flip side, having one stranger as uncomfortable as that sounds, ended up producing significantly better work, despite the team being less confident about it’s quality.

Those results are a reminder that our intuition is flawed and we are predictably irrational.

Instead of attempting to make everyone happy by going along with bad ideas, argue and present evidence for a better way, while being open to the very likely possibility that you are not completely right. Making everyone happy is counter productive, that’s why in the current US culture, you must consider who you are talking to, even if they are in a position where they “should” handle input well. If they value the end result more than company politics, present unpopular ideas you know will make a better product. If instead they are stubborn feeling oriented people, you’ll have two options. Risk losing their support and argue why there is a better way; Or prepare them for the proposal. The latter is not the most noble way to better process, but the former may be risky, as the people worth presenting ideas to, are often people you want to keep on your side.

This is a common theme of engineering ethics. The need to raise your voice when a valve is broken. The need to raise your voice when you are unqualified for a high risk task. The need to refuse to sign off on a dangerously faulty product. Like sharks who need to keep swimming to survive, the future of your company is risked when company politics are more important then the product and dissenting voices are stimied, propagating chilling effects that compound the problem.

There are some who say that you no longer need a website because, Facebook is taking over the world. Facebook has become the biggest walled garden of content, much of which is not public and therefore only accessible in Facebook. This “darkweb” phenomenon has made it “the” web destination site, right after Google. So, why do websites still matter?

Some of us can’t use Facebook 24/7

Facebook at work is usually frowned upon or even BLOCKED. This leaves a very important part of the population unable to access the content you’ve laboriously placed on Facebook.

Flexibility

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You are special, your content is too. There is something to be said for constraint as in, It’s often hard for contractors to say no to misguided ideas. However, when that power is used correctly, you can end up with a far more competitive product, one that you can’t afford to be without.

Discoverability

In general people Google for information first. People expect you to have a website, Facebook is still an optional second for many businesses. Even in markets where a Facebook page is expected, it is not expected that you’ll have ALL your content there.

Integrations

Integrating third party tools into your Facebook page such as a Pinterest button, a VR Tour, a live chat system, or any integration with competing services is not always possible. For instace, it’s widely known that Facebook penalizes youtube videos posted on Facebook. These are not a limitations you’ll find in a typical website.

Analytics and Privacy

Many larger businesses are quite conservative about their data. As such, asking clients to handover their data to Facebook before interacting with you is quite a high bar. Not to mention that Facebook is one of the most frequently blocked services by corporate firewalls. Facebook’s statistics are also notoriously inacurate, counting video and page views for people who scroll by their timeline.

In short, your website should be the number one priority when it comes to getting your image, brand and message across in a way that meets your business goals. It should serve as a jumping point from which your content spreads across NextDoor, Pinterest, SnapChat, Twitter and of course, Facebook.