By Joshua Tyler | update
Independent publishers helped create the Internet. Once we made it big and everyone wanted to hop online, other forces quickly hijacked it, leveraging the work of the independents and independent publishers have been fighting a desperate battle for survival ever since. I am, and they are losing.
Who are independent candidates against? You are about to find out.
What is an independent publisher anyway?
Independent publishers take many forms. This may be an organization dedicated to testing and evaluating air filters. Or you might find a group of guys watching classic video games. It could be a travel guide, a series of fitness tips, a fan site dedicated to the love of pencils, a site full of DIY home improvement ideas, or a blog that pokes fun at ugly celebrity photos. It could also be a site with a really silly name like Giant Freakin’ Robot. The subject does not matter.
An independent publisher is a website or group of websites that creates any type of content. The site must have a sole owner, and that sole owner must be heavily involved in day-to-day operations. They cannot be part of or affiliated with any large corporation or conglomerate.
This means no investors who buy a website and then sit back and collect cash while other people do all the work. No golfing salesmen who spend their days hobnobbing and networking to find deals or investors for their “brand.”
This does not mean that the site owner should do all the work themselves. An independent publisher may have no employees or hundreds. The size of the publisher doesn’t matter; What matters is who they are looking at and what their intentions are.
Intention is the key. Are you trying to create a real publication with real readers? Or is it to dump the site and get as much traffic and money as fast as you can before starting another? Independent publishers are in it for the long haul, with their own site or sites. No hovering and burning.
What really makes a publisher independent is their ability to come up with their own ideas. An independent does not use an algorithm to determine everything they publish. They don’t base their business around copycatting what other publishers are doing in a cynical bid to steal their traffic. They are not looking for the perfect keyword or planning to set up a way to use parasite SEO to drive people off the internet and into their coffers.
More than anything, being an independent publisher means being you own Ideas they and their team (if they have) should express them in any way they see fit.
Enemies of independent publishers
Now that you know what they are, you should know that independent publishers are disappearing. They are going out of business by the hundreds, and for a reason. They have enemies. This is what the enemy is.
Major platforms
There was a time when independent publishers and major Internet platforms had similar goals and worked in harmony.
When social media first appeared, it was independent publishers who promoted it, forcing their most loyal readers to sign up for their social pages. Unfortunately, once social media got big enough and had all the readers, they stopped distributing freelancers’ posts and instead sent their readers to Big Brand X.
Now something similar has happened with Google. I have already written a lot about this, if you want to read it, go here.
Niche sites
Calling something a “niche site” was initially meant to indicate that it was an independent publisher whose site focused on a small topic. Those days are gone. The term has been co-opted by churn-and-burn spammers who use a “niche site” to legitimize themselves. Real niche sites are suffering from them and may stick to calling themselves “independent publishers” from now on.
These particular site parasites make their living by stealing ideas from publishers and then flooding the internet with black hat tactics to opt for their traffic. They create dozens, sometimes hundreds, of small generic sites, which they burn down, and extract as much money as possible from the Internet. When one of their sites is caught, they discard it like used Kleenex and move on to another site.
All of this is done by pretending to be independent publishers and creators of specific content to trick both readers and Google into thinking their specific site is legitimate. It is not. They are destroying the Internet by using energy and ideas stolen from independent publishers.
Big brands
Niche spammers have created widespread confusion as a money-making tactic. Big brands have positioned themselves as the solution to this dilemma if only all platforms would let them own the entire internet.
I recently wrote a detailed guide explaining how big brands work to destroy independents. Read it and be prepared for their attacks.
The SEO industry
Search engine optimization experts make a living by calling themselves the independent publisher’s best friend. When a publisher is in trouble, they’re always there to lend a hand… as long as you’re willing to pay them.
Except they’re not your friends. Their industry only exists as long as Google is seen as a level playing field. When people find out that this is not the case, they will also think that the SEO profession is a scam.
SEO’s main job is to protect Google’s reputation, their entire business depends on it. Whether they actually help you is irrelevant because all SEOs force clients to pay upfront and usually make them sign a waiver admitting that whatever the SEO does is not possible. is
Does SEO work? There are a few legitimate SEOs helping local small businesses figure out how to get their site listed on Google Maps. These SEOs should be appreciated if they are genuinely helping your grandma’s local clothing store find customers while charging a very reasonable price with guaranteed results. But also, your grandma can probably hire a web developer to set up a WordPress website for her and install a plugin that does the same.
Most SEOs are not helping your grandmother. Most SEOs are targeting online publishers with scams, killing them, and then insulting those same publishers to get in Google’s way. What they do may have mattered a few years ago, but a strong case is made that, for most websites, SEO no longer exists and Google has adjusted its algorithm to ignore it. what is SEOs are no better than fortune tellers (some of whom really believe they can predict the future) and should probably have some useful things handled by web developers.
If SEO works on a site and that site increases its traffic, the SEOs claim that their optimizations were responsible.
If SEO works on a site and traffic drops, they blame the site and walk away.
They have no way of knowing what helps and what doesn’t. Recovery of the site they are taking credit for can happen without their intervention. Since there are no identical copies of the same site at the same time with all the same conditions, there is nothing to act as a control, and therefore no way to test or verify any of their claims. There is no method.
GIANT FREAKIN Robot Google has banned Shadow four times in the last two years. Now it has been fixed four times. In all four cases, no changes were made to the site prior to restoration.
If an SEO was hired and changes were made, they would take credit for these four receipts. How would anyone know the difference?
The SEO industry takes money from independent publishers and gives nothing back. They are the enablers of the big platforms and are usually also the people behind the spammy sites I warned you about earlier. They use your data to help big brands steal your traffic, your energy and your ideas. While pretending to be your best friend.
