Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich, and YOU overthink SEO!
This time, I want you to take protective measures. Wear a hockey mask and catcher’s mitt, or at least have a pillow handy. This is because I’m about to tell you an SEO trick that is so BLINDING obvious and yet nobody ever, ever thinks of it.
Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, everybody wants backlinks! To quote Moz.com: “Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another.” But they just talk about how important quality backlinks are, not how to get them. Many sites out there pay lip service to this concept, but are vague on how to get backlinks.
I will not be vague. I will be very specific. This blog post is over 2K words long, relax.
Greetings and the usual introduction about how the current news cycle is as nutty as squirrel poop. However, there is light at the end of this tunnel. I see signs of meager improvement. The year 2021 is so far being nicer to us than 2020. Let’s get to brass tacks and bras tax:
If you follow my Twitter feed, I also broadcast my latest work there occasionally. Lately at the geeky fandom beat, I got sick and tired of The Matrix getting a free pass with all the crazy conspiracy theories it’s spawned. If we’re going after the toxic media that poisons our minds, let us include the popular ones. We openly laugh at the spastic static of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but wrap the same bullshit in a leather trenchcoat with cool guns and we literally make a religion out of it.
And nothing appears to be as popular as The Matrix. Between Red Piller Incels and people murdering their parents because they thought they were living in a computer simulation, The Matrix is responsible for indoctrinating people to a level similar to The Turner Diaries. Yet social media does not allow you to criticize The Matrix! The Wachowski siblings are sacred, untouchable cows. You get stoned to death by angry mobs for daring to suggest that they don’t walk on water.
UPDATE: As usual, after I finish my thesis, I find a video with a reasoned scientific argument agreeing with me!
Using the same logic, we could say “there are more ants than people on Earth, therefore the odds are better that we are ants.”
I like that! Let’s insert a jump here before my front page gets overloaded.
Along with my other geeky pursuits, I’ve waddled along in this whole legalized cannabis industry thing. Mind you – you can take it or leave it, God sees my heart – all this time I’ve been blogging cannabis without so much as smoking a single puff of the stuff. I’ve tried a couple CBD vapes and experimented with kratom, that’s it.
Yes, I have partaken of the ganja plant in the past. Yes, I enjoy it, it is very nice. But weed to me is like ketchup; I don’t need ketchup every week to remember what it tastes like. My attitude towards drugs, like my attitudes towards everything else, is different from most and of course, pisses off both prohibitionists and righteous stoners alike.
Anyway, the cannabis news beat has been fraught with peril and wonder. I even mean the “peril” part literally; there is still an unsolved mass shooting at an Aguanga, Riverside County, California, cannabis farm which has yet to produce a lead. Seven people died and nobody cares because they were all undocumented pot farmers at a bootleg facility. The police just shrug.
Pay no attention to Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space in the banner. We’ll circle back to that eventually. By the way, there is no rule 34 of that show, and I demand to speak to the manager of the Internet.
Over at GeekyDomain, we focus a lot on games, movies, comics, and all that, but I proposed that we’d neglected anime and animation in general. We should make up for that with a whole month just devouring animation. There’s so much in that vein that modern audiences just don’t know exists, especially older stuff they might have caught as a kid and half-remembered now. It’s the cure for the winter blahs, I soapboxed, so everybody went along with that.
That got me on an animated kick. First I commemorated Liquid Television, MTV’s groundbreaking showcase, which was a cheery bazaar of shorts, experimental projects, pilots, and episodes of series that could barely be tracked down otherwise. It was the launch point for Aeon Flux, Psychograms, The Maxx, and later Cartoon Sushi and the eventual launch of Cartoon Network. And then I barely had room to discuss USA Network’s Night Flight, a show with very similar DNA.
There’s no shortage of Gen-X kids who wax nostalgic for Night Flight now, but a lot of viewers couldn’t be bothered to stay up at 3 AM watching every random bit of craziness which tracked onto the screen, so they missed bits like Arise!, the Church of the Subgenius “recruiting” film. Let us pause in reverent amazement: In the early 1990s, before Bob J.R. Dobbs became the Internet’s very first meme, when Robert Anton Wilson yet drew breath, there was a Church of the Subgenius special aired on public television. Where ordinary muggles could see it. How we survived that calamity is anybody’s guess.
And that was just the first step of my month-long adventure…
So you might have noticed that this blog lay dormant from about Thanksgiving 2020 through mid-January 2021. That’s typical; I’m too busy at that time of year working for other people’s sites, and then when the holidays come, I want to hibernate, not blog some more.
But now that I’m back to work and reasonably assured that the nation isn’t going to fall…
… I can toddle back to my standard shtick. Over December, I blabbered about a lot of video games, so there’s much to recap!
See, my freelance career revolves around content creation for the web. And a lot of my clients run ads on their site, either as their main revenue or just a sidecar profit stream. A bunch of them also advertise themselves. Generally speaking, I get to work with ad-based content a lot, either taking or giving.
What a lot of people don’t realize is how many kinds of restricted content there are in the world of online advertising. Most ad networks are highly conservative about the kinds of ads they will run. Since we’ve all seen some questionable ads, it makes you wonder about the kind they turn down.
Prohibitions against alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are a given, as well as adult / mature content, content harmful to minors, hate speech, etc. You’ll be happy to know that most major ad networks ban illegal and fraudulent content. These make sense, but there’s others that you’d never think of.
One of my gigs is the cannabis industry, for example, which cannot advertise through regular networks, full stop. Companies that make not just cannabis products, but even accessories, have to turn to specialized ad networks and affiliate programs that cater to their niche. While I was pitching in for the research on that post (I’m also chief site editor there), I came across some of the restrictions, and they remind me of the old “wacky laws” lists that used to post around the old web.
Straight to the point: I care about the environment. I care about climate change. I believe in science.
Do you people also care about the environment? Good, then we are on the same page. We should be friends. But we are not. You are all going to hate me because I’m about to tell you something you don’t like to hear, but you need to hear.
You’ve been going about environmentalism the wrong way!
This makes me angry, nay, fist-clenching furious. Can everybody understand this concept, or have I lost you naive little blueberries already? You can have good intentions, and still do bad things because your method is wrong. Try to sit down and allow that thought to penetrate for a minute before you go on.
I am here today to speak on behalf of all keyboard hacks everywhere. From the lowest SEO rat off Fiverr to the most successful content marketing guru. Every single one of us is sick of flowery writing gig ads.
Let me save you time: If you really want to attract top talent that will actually work for you, the golden ad formula is this:
How Your “Help Wanted” Ad For A Writer Should Look:
PAY – MENTION! THIS! FIRST!
Schedule – Being as flexible as possible helps us cram your project into that five-hour gap in our week.
Topic – WHAT will I be writing? If there’s more to it than just writing, mention duties i.e. editing, social media management, WordPress plug-in slingin’, etc.
Company – WHAT is your business model? What is your mission statement? Essentially, how is my writing supposed to make you money?
Target audience – WHOM will I be writing for? Are they old fuddie-duddies who still own black-and-white TVs? Are they young hip teens? Working-class moms? Entrepreneurs?
This should be easy stuff. You sell something to somebody and now you want a content marketer, don’t you? One of the biggest things that will make us freelance writers skip your ad is if you sound like you have no clue as to any of the above points.
But in the first, most essential place, please spare us these sugary funeral eulogies like this one somebody pitched at me on Linked-In. This is not to reflect on the company. This is just an education in what writers actually think about when they read your ad.
You could say the same for every day of the cursed year of 2020, but my timeline seems to have been particularly dark since reviewing – and being bit by – Cultist Simulator. It was indeed a fit spooky choice for October, which dragged me through the month as I’ve tried to keep up my horror viewing in the middle of everything else.
Is Ignite Cannabis Co. trying to tell us something?
At my stoner DabConnection gig, we’ve become the freelance police of the cannabis industry busting fake brands of THC vape cartridges left and right. But this time I got interested in a real brand managed by an Instagram influencer Dan Bilzerian, though “real” and “managed” are both up for debate. The brand has raised millions in investor funding and squandered millions more with Bilzerian apparently going through the most hysterical public midlife-crisis ever. We’re talking $50 million in 2019 alone!
The below is a post from November 6th, 2011. NINE YEARS AGO AS OF THIS POSTING. It was posted on my old open source blog and got popular enough to get passed around most of the very news sites I talked about in there. Much water has gone under the bridge since then.
I STILL want Dillo! I just gave up and use Lynx for that function now. I couldn’t get Dillo to even compile on a modern system without maintaining it myself. There are thousands of journalists out there that struggle with this same problem every day; they need to get the facts, and all the facts are behind either paywalls or a million popups and autoplaying videos. I wish we just had a blogger’s equivalent of a Press Pass.
I also no longer run any of the below Linux distros. I’m on the Mint bandwagon now. It’s been the default “works out of the box” Linux distro for a few years, but God knows what I’ll have to resort to if Mint gronks.
Anyway, I’m reposting this NINE YEAR OLD post because people loved it and linked to it. Do not be surprised if it is out of date, because it is an old post. Got that?
