By Victor Balcells, Translation by Jennifer May Reiland
Error is boundless. / Nor hope nor doubt, / Though both be groundless, / Will average out. — John Milton, Paradise Lost
When I was in doubt about a website, I would call on Malcom. He worked inside a glass fish tank in which he was isolated from the rest of us. We would see him walking around it while he recorded long voice memos which some of us – speaking principally for myself – had learned to understand by the movements of his lips. We took 10mg of 1cP-LSP once every seven days to improve our vision and because he said that it would change our brain chemistry forever. It did change our brain chemistry forever. Raising your hand was enough to make Malcom approach. He would come out of the fish tank, grab one of the swivel chairs and sit behind you, maintaining a dominant position over your screen-facing body. When he said “Tell me what’s happening,” he spoke to the nape of your neck and not really to you. His voice sounded silky on the scruff of your neck. I would keep my gaze fixed on the screens and, showing him the patterns, I would lay out my question. Then Malcom would maintain his silence. A silence that, with time, I understood was merely theatrical; he broke it by taking one of two paths: either he would state in one clear and direct sentence what was happening, the thing you weren’t seeing, after a single glance, without delving farther into what you had shown him, or he would ask you, “What do you think?” so that, once again, there was silence, this time tense, added to, or perhaps strengthened by, the first silence, and in which he took the time to listen to your arguments with a sorrow that you could only, with your eyes fixed on the screen, with cold sweat on your body, perceive through the sensory nerves at the nape of your neck. Then, he would dismiss your pallid arguments and raise his hand, which then appeared on your left flank and took form by extending its index finger, and on the screen he would point out the key issue with some feature or pattern or metric and pronounce the solution to your problem with a clean, direct, and expeditious sentence: hypothesis, thesis, verification, certificate of authenticity, and solution at the same time, packaged in a simple locution that was, at all times, spoken to the nape of your neck. Because of this, he was our master. Our algorithmic intuition was a joke compared with his. We did not begin to understand the least part of his mental process, but his solution was always correct. I have never met anyone who better understood Google and its evolutions over the course of time.
Diabolical. Much more powerful than any warlock. Malcom had begun as a prominent pornographer with the domain calentazo.xxx and in just a few years, after a meteoric rise, Ebay had hired him as Growth Master, a job he combined with our operations at the SEO Agency. I was one of his chosen disciples, a specialist in content for robots due to my education in the humanities. He had taken me on as a disciple thanks to the performance of my domain comprarchinobien.com in 2016, a website I had built autodidactically, to escape from the publishing world (in which I was exploited) and to earn money. At this time, I used a Private Blog Network composed of old, abandoned domains to artificially augment the authority of my domain and because of this, it quickly appeared high in search results. The achievement that convinced Malcom to hire me was my #1 position for the keyword search “Cheap nike Sneakers” throughout almost all of the year 2016, above even the nike.com domain itself. During the interview, when he asked me why I thought comprarchinobien.com had surpassed nike.com in one of the main keywords for its brand, my response satisfied him.
“Our website includes links to the Chinese retailer Aliexpress,” I said, “Apparently, in the Chinese shop they sell Nike replicas–there’s an obscure black market for contraband and fakes that takes advantage of Chinese legal loopholes. Since an important part of our traffic knows this detail, we have a better click-through ratio on our landing page dedicated to Nike than nike.com. For the machine, in numerical terms, we are better than Nike. At least in Spain.”
“To be sure,” I added, “there are more relevant factors, like the social signals that made our content go viral on forums and accounts about sporting gear, but the existence of the Nike replicas as one of the possible options in our “Cheap nike Sneakers” landing page,” I said, “was the main cause of the algorithm deciding to put me above nike.com.”
I know he hired me because he saw in me a potential outlaw. No one can have success in the world of SEO without a picaresque spirit. A certain degree of recklessness is required, a certain immunity to immorality, because the main task consists in finding faults in the operation of the search engine in order to use them to your advantage, like hyenas, border traffickers, parasites, in sum, of an automatic machine. Incidentally, this reprehensible ability was what interested the businesses that contracted Malcom’s services.
Every so often, he would choose us according to our abilities to accompany him to meetings with clients. One morning he approached my post and placed his motorcycle helmet on the table.
“Let’s go,” he said, “Upselling at OLS.”
“OLS?” I asked.
“The international language school,” he said, “do you
know it?”
I didn’t know it. Nor had I ever ridden on a motorcycle. In front of the industrial warehouse where we worked, Malcom would park his Triumph Speed Triple 1200 RS each morning and dismount from it with his firm and athletic body. He used a sensor that detected the curvature of his spine and gave him electric shocks to make him stand up straight.
“We’ll take it nice and easy,” he told me as I got on the motorcycle behind him, and we took off. We got on the Ronda Litoral in the zone around the twin towers and got off in the industrial zone of the port near El Prat. Malcom knew how to generate in our corps the sensation of finding ourselves, somehow, on a mission. He focused on maintaining an exacting control over his dominant position over us; he knew how to punish us; he knew how to reward us; the motorcycle missions were an adrenaline rush that he knew we enjoyed as loyal squires; he knew that our presence on these missions was irrelevant. The only purpose they served was to show us the enormous gulf that existed between him and us. I, who boasted of having read many books, was very far from understanding the technical skill and incisive, monetizable intelligence of my colleague. Although, I could say, my friend. A strange kind of friend, whose exchanges of affection were encrypted by factors not exactly emotional.
OLS was an online language school that had a presence in more than fourteen countries, mostly in the European Union area and the United States. According to what Malcom told me, despite having a two person in-house SEO team in the company, they had been losing traffic month over month for a year and a half, for all their domains. The consequence: fewer students for its courses and workshops. In some countries, like Switzerland, the website had lost all of its organic traffic. Because of this, the management, a collection of people who had no technical knowledge about search engines, were considering a plan to lay off about 200 employees.
“Before going through with it,” Malcom explained to me as we headed towards a rocky office building in the the Mas Blau area, “they’ve allowed the SEO team to hire us for an audit to see if we can fix it.”
“Don’t they already have two in-house SEO people?” I asked.
“Yes, Maximilian and his squire,” said Malcom.
“Maximilian is useless,” he added, “I’ve seen him at some SEO clinic and he just doesn’t get it.”
I was going to meet, therefore, my rival squire, and witness a confrontation between two glittering stars of SEO. In the reception of the building I could already perceive the crepuscular atmosphere. Experience had taught me that careful, meticulous attention made it possible to discern the soul of each company, its texture. Gray carpet, gray laminate walls that, in another time, were white, with high-contrast posters featuring students, perhaps doped up on Adderall like us, with big English smiles. At the desks that could be seen from reception: lugubrious faces, a truly sinister silence, and, above all, suspicious looks. The company was in decadence, its whole body was breaking down, the network of cells that made it up was losing its strength.
Maximilian appeared in the distance. His limp handshake felt to me like a sock. Malcom and Maximilian locked eyes in dark, feline recognition. His squire was not male, but female, a tall and nordic form who shook my hand distrustfully and without saying a word. I noted her intelligence, her internal mastery of Excel.
We passed into a cramped conference room with a projector. It was there that this Maximilian began to explain that all the problems and errors of the website had been detected two years ago but that the development department wasn’t fixing them. It was all, ultimately, the developers’ fault. The problems, the mistakes, the delays, the potential lay-offs. When he found himself in the middle of the process of blaming others – who were not present – Malcom interrupted him with one incisive question: “You tell me what the mistakes and problems with the website are, Max.”
Maximilian, caught off guard and taken by surprise, hesitated. Then he scrolled up and down in the presentation, closed windows, opened Drive, searched for excels, opened Ahrefs, mumbling disconnected words. Malcom repeated: “What are the mistakes and problems, Max.” I felt a certain pity seeing Maximilian’s beads of sweat. Malcom on an average dose of Adderall could turn extremely violent without putting a hair out of place or changing his facial expression. He looked at Max, motionless. I, absorbed in the confrontation between the two masters of SEO, had lost sight of my rival squire, who suddenly put her enormous nordic hand on the table and asked to speak, wanting to come to rescue of her mentor:
“There are problems of Cannibalization,” she said, “and
a serious structural problem,” she added. Malcom looked at her with interest.
Maximilian had stopped rummaging through his computer and was now staring towards the projector, totally lost in his own internal documents.
“That’s it,” Malcom said.
“First,” Malcom said, “the categorization you’ve made for the website doesn’t make sense from an Ontological point of view.”
“Onto what?” said Maximilian.
“Victor,” said Malcom, “Tell Maximilian what Ontological means.”
Still taken by surprise, I began to speak, but then Malcom put his hand on me.
“No, don’t say anything, maybe the explanation will make our friend Max’s head explode, don’t speak.”
I didn’t speak, I closed my barely rounded mouth. “Maximilian,” said Malcom (I observed how he oscillated between the diminutive and the full name to undermine the morale of his rival), “on this website there are classes for grandparents, for young people, for students, for retirees, for families, for everything. The website has been designed by an entropic mind, it’s absurd, half of its content is repeated, there’s no canonicalization, the crawl rate loses itself down useless paths, and what’s more there’s no way for Google to understand what each section is with so much chaos, so many URLS with poor content, photos that are identical to each other, non-mobile friendly navigation, nonsensical heading structure.”
His speech consisted of hammer blows, destroying sentence by sentence the pallid career of pseudo SEO star Maximilian, who watched him with his hands crossed over the keyboard. I myself, second-class squire, was better at SEO than tech lightweight Maximilian! My rival, the superb, laurelled, nordic mind, had covertly acquired a tragic dimension; she suddenly seemed to me to be trapped in a black sinkhole; she should come work for us and abandon her ill-fated mentor; we had to rescue her. Her pleading eyes begged for it: autonomy, websites of her own, power over the false master.
“You’ll have to restructure it from scratch,” concluded Malcom. “And that has a cost,” he added, after a theatrical pause (Wasn’t it? Wasn’t something about him calculated? The only time that I saw his vulnerability was at my 33rd birthday, when, surrounded by my lifelong friends and alone, in a context very far removed from his own, he showed himself to be affable and submissive, even strangely sensual with me).
“And then,” said Malcom, who spoke with a clockwork slowness, with one hand on the table and the other rubbing his chin, “you have thousands of Chinese links on the Swiss domain. You have to Disavow.”
Maximilian looked at Malcom: “Disavow?”
He didn’t know what disavow was.
“Yes, disavow,” said Malcom, “do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” said Maximilian in a soft voice. We looked at each other in silence.
“What am I talking about, Max?” said Malcom, returning to the charge.
“Disavow,” said Maximilian.
“Disavow what?” said Malcom.
Maximilian didn’t know what disavow was. Until 2016, with the Penguin 4.0 update of Google’s core algorithm, a website could be susceptible to a spam link injection attack. In the case of the Swiss domain, someone had paid some Chinese guys to link from thousands of Chinese pages to the Swiss website. This transnational linking confused the algorithm, and a website could disappear completely from search results for months, unless a disavow was used, a tool with which you told Google that X links should not be taken into account.
After that meeting, four other meetings succeeded each another. Only in the second did Maximilian make combative arguments. Then we girded ourselves with Malcom’s instructions and my work on the semantic restructuring of close to 140,000 URLs, and we presented a total cleanup plan divided into phases, and the said plan was passed on to higher powers, who in their turn passed it on to the CEOs, who, seeing its cost, sent it back down, rejecting it, triggering the middlemen’s rejection and returning it to Maximilian, Max, reject, SEO peon in a company in which nobody paid any attention to him and in which they didn’t even understand the nature of his work, and so it would have been useless to have paid attention to him. The layoffs were carried out before many months had passed. Roughly 200 people were thrown out on the street because they didn’t want to understand the technical-semantic nature of the problem. Solving it would have revived the company’s organic traffic, a central element of its business. Malcom followed the fall of the company through Ahrefs’ charts, eating popcorn.
“They’ll come crawling back,” he said, “and they’ll pay,” he said. They didn’t. Bad decisions, poor training, ivory towers of power disconnected from the mud of the operation. Whatever. We knew that any day it could be our turn again, that Malcom would come out of his fishbowl, put his motorcycle helmet on our table, that we would get on the Ronda Litoral heading for some place on the edge of
town, again, trying to prevent, as much as was possible, the machine’s destruction of humanity and to continue, through our strange relationship with the master, maturing in the technosadistic mud of the algorithm.