The Billy Lee SEO Policy

It is the policy of the Billy Lee Pontificator to not pay SEO fees (bribes?) for the “privilege” to appear in the search results of a web-service like Google.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is deployed, it seems to me, like hacker ransom-ware to try to force blog-site administrators to pay fees. Unless they pay fees, administrators can sometimes experience a drop in viewer hits on their sites.

The Billy Lee Pontificator does not pay SEO fees.

For sites like the Pontificator, these fee demands are a good thing. By ignoring them, the Billy Lee Pontificator takes advantage of the machinations of search-engine companies like Traffic Power — now banned by Google — to make it unnecessary to password-protect our content.

Anyone who knows us and our site location still has the unencumbered access demanded by our readers. But pervasive SEO subscriptions by other blog-sites overwhelm malicious web-surfers who might visit our site by chance. We don’t have to password-protect our articles in order to remain public. (See the Billy Lee Privacy Policy.)

NOTE: 2019, May 5 Due to a dramatic surge in attacks on websites following the 2018 elections, the Pontificator has decided to aggressively defend its site-integrity by partnering with SiteLock and Bluehost, which together deploy the best-in-class techniques to ensure that our site is safe, secure, and protected from miscreants.

Common-sense and a desire for simple fairness compel us to remind Google (and a few others) not to acquiesce to the temptations of SEO hawkers nor adopt SEO policies and fees as their own.

Internet surfers who use a billionaire’s search engine to screen their searches and censor their access to content are not the kind of readers the Pontificator wants to attract to their site, anyway.

Billy Lee values democracy and hopes our readers do, too. Alas, Google and two or three other search-engine companies dominate and control internet search results. Web surfers don’t have much of a choice.

We hope companies like Google continue to work to keep the internet neutral and fair. One way might be to ban SEO marketers and their products altogether.

The Billy Lee Editorial Board

Random Reads:

Images & Pics Policy

It is the policy of TheBillyLeePontificator.com to place in articles and pages only those images and pictures which belong to Billy Lee or are in the public domain. When Billy Lee started his blog on January 17, 2014, he used the blog as a kind of personal scrapbook. For most of the first year he illustrated his articles with images he downloaded during Google Internet searches. Since Google didn't identify which images were proprietary and which were public, it is possible some images on this web-site may belong to individuals who might not want them used by Billy Lee. The Editorial Board is asking any individual who finds a proprietary image on this blog-site to contact us through the Reader's Comments section at the end of the article where the image appears, so that we may identify and remove it. Comments referring to an image will be read by Billy Lee but not published. TheBillyLeePontificator.com...

The Billy Lee Privacy Policy

Since going live in January 2014, theBillyLeePontificator blog-site has been successfully attacked three times -- once by bots representing, ostensibly, disgruntled gays; once by people upset about some essays we posted which defended gay marriage (protestors intimidated Billy Lee into shutting down his site for six weeks -- it's a complicated story); and again during the 2016 presidential contest after Billy Lee endorsed Hillary Clinton. Hackers took down the site and an anonymous person threatened Billy Lee's life in a private video message forwarded through Twitter. Site stats suggest that the threat originated somewhere inside the Ukraine. Despite fear, we hardened our site and continued publishing. Our intention is to keep theBillyLeePontificator.com website public. Anyone should be able to read an article or post a comment on our blog. That's the fun of open discussion, isn't it? We can argue with one another in a safe place, where we are respected&...

FINAL THOUGHTS

TIME TO DIE I sinned against the man I loved who died. I thought I'd have more time to sigh; Delay the time when silence became the lie. Time passed us by---an ally to our crime That lives inside when all loves die to make us cry and cry and cry. Who knows why? Love makes time for us to die. I've failed at everything in life. What I learned is that it is possible to fail at everything and still find some happiness from time to time. I blame many failures on my own incompetence and bad choices. But also, people hate me. It doesn't matter how much a person knows or how capable they are; unpopular people don't do well. People have pulled the rug out from under me many times; I never seem to be alert enough to anticipate what bad thing is coming next and how to avoid it. I've never been able to tell who my friends are, or who those folks are whose kindness is a mask they wear to disarm and humiliate me. At age twelve, I found myself one weekend-day carefully sweeping out the...

Welcome

Welcome! to The Billy Lee Pontificator, or as the ancient Egyptians might have phrased it; EE EE OOH EE ER ANEE EE (welcome to my writing tablet!) I have no idea what I'm doing, but I hope my blog-site can be a place where family and friends will visit to pontificate freely about whatever is on our minds. My vision is one where contemplation, reflection, and carefully crafted logic will live side by side with wild ideas and misspelled verbal excesses. I hope my posts will get the brain juices flowing and inspire folks to add comments to befuddle, enrage and confuse anyone who reads them. And while we're on the subject, if some reader writes an article and wants to post it somewhere, please consider e-mailing it to me to post here, on my blog. What I'm saying is, people have an outlet to post more than 142 words if they need it -- where they won't be crowding out pictures of babies and birthday parties. If you have something short and sweet, but longer than a tweet,...

Vacation Policy

VACATION POLICY Until further notice, our entire staff of dedicated employees, sycophants, and apple-polishers will take their annual vacations during the month of June and the first half of July. This policy includes the Editorial Board. Vacations will be unpaid. For the benefit of those in our organization who are hard of hearing, let me repeat. VACATIONS ARE UNPAID !!! It should be apparent to all but the most disgruntled that the unpaid nature of these vacations is more than compensated for by the generosity of their duration. Billy Lee Notice to readers: During the Pontificator Staff vacation period, folks may continue to visit our site and post comments. Please allow up to six weeks for comment approval.

The Billy Lee Process

Over two million people write and publish blogs on a regular basis in the United States. Each writer has their method and process. Some make a living from their blogs. They operate wide-open sites and try to boost readership to sell ads or products. Others restrict access by requiring membership and a pass-code to get in. They operate like fraternities or secret clubs. My blog is wide open, but I don't sell ads or products. My focus is about sharing ideas and absurdities for fun. As long as I have a readership of two people I'm going to continue. I should mention that not long after I launched my blog a swarm of Asian bots from the women's apparel industry attacked my site, so I've had to add two minor restrictions. First, each comment is reviewed before posting---to make sure it's from a real person; and, second, we make sure comments are written in English or French, the two languages I can read. Otherwise, everyone comments freely. If your c...

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