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.
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