Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
Paul Mackenzie Ross A significant dispute between two giants in the web industry has very quickly become public. WP Engine, a popular managed WordPress hosting provider, and WordPress.org, the official home of the WordPress open-source project, have traded blows in the public domain. Background of the Dispute The WordPress CEO, Matt Mullenweg, first raised his concerns in a … Read more
I recently heard a criticism of someone for being “reactive” in their digital marketing role. Tonight I want to stand up for them and offer my wholehearted support because I am 100% behind them being reactive in the work that they do. What is Being Reactive? There are a couple of definitions of the adjective … Read more
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a concept and framework that represents the qualities of a web page. Google’s search quality raters are people who have been trained to look for these elements in web pages that they are assigned to assess. The History of E-E-A-T Originally introduced in 2014, E-A-T was … Read more
The introduction of ChatGPT as probably the first widespread publicly available generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool has been both a blessing and a curse. Firstly, OpenAI triggered an AI “arms race” with Google soon after releasing Bard, and Microsoft, with their huge investment in OpenAI unleashed Copilot. Since then, virtually everything we use in the … Read more
A couple of days ago, a Google Search data leak surprised the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) community. Initially shared by an anonymous source (later identified as Erfan Azimi) and subsequently analysed by SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King, the leak comprises over 2,500 documents detailing more than 14,000 attributes apparently used in Google’s ranking … Read more
If you’ve read any of my articles or blogs where I mention Artificial Intelligence (AI) you’ll be aware of my stance. As with all things tech, AI is a force for both good and for ill. In the right hands and with the best intentions, it’s a wonderful tool. In the wrong hands, it’s a … Read more
Back in 2020 Google reported that its AI tool SpamBrain helped its search algorithms detect 40 billion spam web pages every single day! Now? It seems to be too big a number to report…
TL;DR Generative AI has massively increased the amount of content on the web. Some people have exploited this opportunity to contribute to the sheer volume of content. Others have promoted these exploits, further increasing the reach of these methods. It’s 2008 repeating itself, when then Google CEO Eric Schmidt called the internet a “cesspool” Google … Read more
Only last night I was catching up with a friend, asking him if he’d had any more recent income from his Premium Bonds – After last summer he said he was getting more regular “wins” of £100 a month from his full investment in Premium Bonds. He said he never used to have so many … Read more
Back in 1998 building an accessible website was very different from how it’s done today. You’d open your copy of Notepad, edit the raw Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), save that HTML file, FTP it up to your server, and then test the URL using the W3C tools and presto! You had an accessible web … Read more