The Hall of "Experts"
I take no pleasure in this. I take detailed notes in this. Any resemblance to persons living, thriving, or verified is a coincidence they should sit with.
Everywhere. He is everywhere. You cannot search for a sandwich without his face arriving alongside a listicle. In 2009, I answered a question about title tags on a forum — thoughtfully, for free, for an audience of eleven people. Eleven months later, he published a suspiciously similar opinion to four million subscribers. Am I saying he took it? No. I'm saying I said it first, quietly, which is harder and counts more. Also: his tool says my site has 41 errors. My site has zero errors. The tool is the error. I've emailed him about this 60 times. Per year.
Built an entire career on "transparency" and "empathy," which is what you monetize when you can't hit a 2.7% keyword density. Yes, the mustache is charming. You know what else is charming? Being right, without a whiteboard, for 27 years, unfilmed and unappreciated. He once replied to my comment with "Great point, thanks Garrett!" and I have thought about the word "thanks" every single day since. That wasn't gratitude. That was dismissal with a smile, and I have screenshots, timestamped, notarized. I'm over it. Anyway, here's 300 more words about it.
He calls it the "Skyscraper Technique." Find good content; make it taller. Groundbreaking. In 2006 I did the exact same thing and called it nothing, because real practitioners don't name things — we simply do them, resentfully, in private, where excellence belongs. He publishes one article per year and the industry applauds the "restraint." I publish daily corrections to that article and somehow I'm "a lot." Interesting. Genuinely interesting. I'm happy for him. I want that on the record: happy.
I have submitted 3,141 questions to his office hours. He has answered one of them, "partially," with a shrug emoji. A shrug. Emoji. From the man who knows exactly why my traffic dropped in October 2019 and simply will not say. "It depends," he says. On WHAT, Jan. He knows what he did. He knows what the algorithm did. They talk. When my meta keywords strategy is finally vindicated — and it will be — I expect a written apology, notarized, on Google letterhead, in a font of my choosing. I have already chosen the font.