Books & Search Engine Developments

Please note: I wrote this earlier at 5:00 am. I am a non morning, morning person. Which means I’m both miserable yet awake. Also please note, this is probably a really boring tech article so unless for some strange reason you’re really interested in search engine optimizations for websites (in particular coloring books for adults,) you probably want to skip this article altogether. Don’t say you weren’t warned…

These days I’m still trying to figure out search engine optimization techniques and how they have evolved over the course of 20 years. I started out long ago hand-coding websites, eventually moving over to CMS or Content Management Systems such as WordPress simply because it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with all the changing standards. At first, I started out being very interested in developing websites and pages, even going so far as to invent one of the largest websites on the Internet which still runs today. But I quickly shelved the idea of designing websites for a living as it quickly became the next gold rush and too many people entered the field.

One of the major benefits of using a CMS was that you could quickly add content such as discussing new ideas or share images with others before websites such as Facebook came along and streamlined the posting process. In essence, everyone using FB today is using something similar to a blogging system or a CMS of the past, but instead of being widely available to the public and searchable on the general Internet, it’s mostly shuttered behind our own privacy settings to the most intimate of friends and family.

However, a well designed and maintained blogging or CMS still has profound benefits. If we can look past the “blog” or news, about 1/3 of all websites are now built on this type of system. Long gone are most of the hand coders such as myself as we tend to use these systems due to the simplicity. Also, people with little to no hand-coding experience can in theory quickly learn and post content without having to remember repetitive (and new) syntax.

With this new website Hello Charlie, I’ve had to brush up on skills that I mostly abandoned about 12 years ago. Perhaps this is where I diverge from talking coloring books on this website and get into the more technical side of things. In case you’re wondering why you came here for coloring books and are reading this instead, I suggest that you stop right here unless you’re really weirdly interested in developing your own website or how search engines including this website operates. It also perhaps serves as a historical reminder to website design noobs and script kiddies why things (ie. here’s looking at you Hello Charlie Google Feedburner) was ever a thing (I was reading posts earlier from others asking what it was for which made me feel old.)

With much further ado, the search engine landscape has changed in the following ways:

1. Greater emphasis on developing different screen sizes such as mobile-friendly and tablets.
2. Reduced penalty regarding duplicate content on the web.
3. Reduced weighting regarding backlinks aka backlink spam which in simple terms meant linking from another website back to your own, often in the forum of leaving website signatures in comments.
4. Greater emphasis on local search results. This is admittedly an area I have a lot of confusion over and need to investigate further. While I can rank a website very high locally, Engines such as Google now makes it more difficult to track how a site performs internationally. I also used to be able to rank websites in the top spots around the worldwide, but Google has blurred those statistics. If anyone reading this has a suggestion on how to differentiate the two without using a paid service, please let me know.
5. Greater reliance on schema standards, which to be honest is just as confusing as it was 8 years ago. It seems that the categories really haven’t evolved, and the schema website still resembles an illegitimate shotgun wedding stylized child of old school DMOZ mated with W3C and then genetically fused to Wikipedia’s hot mess of a back end. Schema is a behind-the-scenes markup which you enter that tells search engines what your site or website pages are about in order to help it better categorize things. There’s many other benefits to proper schema markup, but that’s a long topic.
6. DMOZ. No longer a thing. It was THE thing. It was a human run directory which listed the who’s who of the entire web. The problem was, even back in the day was trying to get your website listed on there. Often you would submit a website and since categories were often run by absent moderators, who often stuffed their own websites in the categories they wanted, very few people were actually allowing entry. A few of my websites eventually made it in there through finding more obscure means of categorization, which greatly bolstered their price.
7. Google Directory. Not as great as DMOZ and similar in nature, but also done. Finito. Completo.
8. IndexNow replacing the once messier and computationally taxing process of waiting for search engine bots to randomly spider your website for links.
9. Did I say a greater emphasis on new content? Well, that was happening over a decade ago as Google wisely enough determined that most websites were simply static (unchanging) sites that functioned as glorified business cards. Since things evolve, Google determined that it would put greater ranking weight towards websites (blogs are a prime example) that provide unique and fresh content.
10. PageRank is rarely talked about these days, but it still exists quietly in the shadows. Sites with top PageRanks of 10 are typically university, government, and major corporations such as Google and IBM. If you could get one of them to show you some “backlink“ love to your own website, it would be like hitting the lottery. The vast majority of websites rank 0. One of my previous websites ranked about a 9 at its peak, and my previous business probably sat around 5 to give you an idea. Now, at 5, I had about 100 search terms such as “3D” and “3D Illustrations” in the #1 spot worldwide on Google. So a 5 was nothing to laugh about either. It’s really unclear how they are still using PageRank as a factor these days. Perhaps Google has deprecated the term and internally use the term “authority“ or “authoritative” to emphasis the top ranking domains or TLD (top-level domain.)
11. PR Juice or Bleeding (see 10 above) changes. It used to be that sites that linked to yours provided more “PR juice,” which it still does. The more sites which link to you, the higher your site rises in the search engines. The inverse would happen also in that if you linked your website to too many others, you would “bleed” out your ranking, causing you to fall lower in the search engines as a result. So people such as myself were hoarding links to external websites, often by encapsulating URLS to other sites with “nofollow” tags in the code. So you would still see the links as an observer, but in a sneaky sort of way (out of necessity really) you were not giving others as much credit as they might otherwise deserve.
12. Alternative domain names and domain name stuffing. Done. Used to be that you could theoretically buy alternative domain names such as ‘coloring-book-pages dot com’ and ‘coloring-page-books dot com’ then 301 permanently redirect those domains back to your main website. Google and other engines (which I’m certain some still do) use the top level domain name for putting a priority on those keywords. In this example, “coloring, book, books, and pages” along with combinations would automatically rank you almost at the top of those search terms. Well, Google finally is getting smart about this and no longer is adding emphasis to these alternative domain names. Hopefully this will not only level the playing field for other websites, but will also free up domains from domain squatters (to which the only previous way of removing a domain squatter was and is providing proof of trademark—I’ll get into that one later because of course something came up again with Amazon a few days ago.)
13. YouTube becoming the second largest search engine. We often don’t think of it like this. Once upon a time YouTube was a lot of fun, I mean wasn’t owned by Google. Google being Pac-Man, gobbled it up and hasn’t looked back. So now not only are people like myself optimizing sites for search engines, there are some hooks into YT which some of us consider.
14. Podcasts are now a thing. Hard to remember a time when podcasts was just another commonly used term. “What’s a podcast?” Sadly, I’m kind of that old I suppose? Time flies. Podcasts are the more interesting cousin to blogs, without the need for proper grammar. And I say this because grammar is something search engines use to rank your website. If it’s full of typos or poor syntax, it will rank your website pages lower. I’m also trying to figure out a way to convert the current blog postings automatically into voice audio, partially because it‘s nerdy, but also for accessibility.
15. Accessibility. It’s increasingly important. Oh yes. A lifetime ago I was trying to figure out a way for people with difficulties of vision to be able to read a website—some sort of tactile mechanical braille reader. I realized that every website designer was ignoring he blind and had thought long and hard as to how to make things more widely available. Add to this, our population is aging and the people who invented the Internet (think Al Gore,) are to be frank, getting older. Which puts approximately 1/3 (something I read on the Internet but sounds great) of all users in a category with vision and hearing loss. Developers are now finally taking this into consideration partially out of necessity, where it wasn’t as urgent 20 years ago. Engines such as Google (check out Google Lighthouse) are finally starting to put emphasis on readability—items such as font contrast versus background contrast, font size, etc. And it’s starting to rank for those items which is partially why I have an accessibility icon on the left-hand side of my screen (aside from it just being plain considerate.)
16. GDPR compliance, particularly in the EU with a cutoff date which may have passed a few days ago? It essentially forces anyone in EU (and the US serving pages to the EU) to inform visitors that a website serves cookies. Either you agree or disagree. A cookie essentially stores some very basic data such as location, which website you may have traveled from in order to get here, computer type being used such as mobile devices, time on website, which pages you visit, things on your computer such as remembering you on a website so you don’t have to enter login info again, etc. It’s actually very useful information for someone like me as I have this new website and want to track how well it is performing, which countries people are coming from, and what they are interested in reading. By declining cookies, it removes all that information and leaves me in the dark somewhat. It’s not being used for anything malicious on me end. However, advertisers find this information extremely helpful. The GDPR ruling determined that by storing some data on an end-users computer automatically, that the end-user has to accept those terms. Which frankly, I think the ruling is utterly stupid yet semi-insightful. For example, just by using a browser, it should be on the onus of the browser developer to be the one to inform it’s users either as a blanket policy beforehand or individually. I only say this because the vast majority of people have no clue what a cookie is and we‘re all having to click/mash extra buttons every time we visit a new website. Smart TVs are tracking our viewing habits but imagine if you had to choose an “accept“ button every time you flipped through a show on Netflix? But hey, politicians right? Don’t even get me started.
17. Oh what else. AI. Recently Google announced in coded language that they were going to penalize (or rather not rank) content that wasn’t unique. In the history of websites and gaming search engines, one traditional method long before AI and even GPUs was the “article spinner.” I even tried it on a blog briefly as an experiment. What it would do is automatically retrieve articles from other blogs and websites through their RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and automatically enter it in your own website as a “new” article. So you were essentially collating other people’s websites and news and pushing it out on your own, reducing the necessity for additional labor and increasing your laziness factor by magnitudes. The issue of duplicate and similar content being a topic long discussed by Google, this more recent announcement almost sounds similar but comes at an auspicious time. Instead of the article spinners of yore, people are now using AI to completely generate articles almost out of thin air. I’d be lying in saying that I haven’t tried it in a few places in my other blogs, but also even to help out in writing book descriptions and meta data. The difference is that I always end up stripping out and babysitting a lot of that AI generated text content because if you’re somewhat remotely responsible, you have to the current state of AI. While AI is amazing, it’s simply unreliable and if you’re not careful, it reuses certain words, gets content mixed up, and “hallucinates.” But some people are using AI for the modern day version of spinning content which to be frank, has been consistent even before AI. Except AI is a lot, lot faster. Google is hopefully using Bard (or whatever they’re calling it today) to catch and kill those AI spun articles. It’s using AI to combat AI. It’s also not the only company employing similar tactics. Even Amazon became involved in the summer of 2023 to use AI to help combat review spam and who knows what else they might have up their sleeves (although given my history with them I’m starting to wonder.)
18. RSS. RSS or RSS Feeds such as the Hello Charlie feed is a method many blogs and sites automatically employ to inform another site (or even iTunes for example) that you have written or recorded new content. Back in the day, RSS was all over the place. They were even part of some of your torrenting applications to find new highly legal stuff! It was a way to funnel and strip your website of all the meat and potatoes, then push it out somewhere on the other side. This aided in your rankings. It’s still a thing and many people for some odd reason are recommending to disable it, but I’m in disagreement. I say that because I’m monitoring my Search Console on Google and it keeps looking for the RSS feed which I had to reenable. Also, I now have set up the Hello Charlie website blog to also push news out to Google News which is another gigantic collator of website articles which aids in search engine visibility (although this post may be it’s very first test.)

I might be adding to this post later on, but I’m starting to suffer (and quite possibly whatever insane audience is still reading this) from early morning caffeine withdraw talking about all of this technology jargon. People have come here probably looking for coloring books, and instead ended up reading about website search engine developments and optimization.

But like any artist who suffers (or benefits) from ADD or ADHD, you might come to understand that we’re multifaceted and our brains operate in tangential manners, refusing to be pigeonholed (I’ll have to look up the etymology of pigeonholing now.) One minute we’re into pottery, the next it might be coloring books, the next may be Fortnite (which is very tempting to get a fix but I don’t dare,) gardening, and so on and so forth. Blah blah blah. What was the point of this article? Oh yeah—write an article and trigger some search engines to help increase its ranking so I can hopefully sell more coloring books. Yeah that was the point. 

Hey look, squirrel!