This is a really interesting question and, in essence, asks what reading comprehension actually is. Beck et al. (1997) argued that it has historically been viewed as the extraction of information from the text and that this was assessed by the asking of questions AFTER reading.

1) My Stan Lee story happened when I was in 5th grade. I was visiting NYC with my Dad and had read the address for Marvel in the comics I read constantly. I begged my Dad to take me and to his credit he did. And guess what? It was just an office.

2) We were down in the lobby and I was kind of crushed. I don’t know what I expected, The Thing and the Yancy Street Gang to be sitting around smoking cigars? Anyway, my Dad was taking a beat to figure where we were going next and a guy came up to us.

3) He was wearing a white shirt and tie and said to Dad “Is he disappointed because. The Marvel offices were just offices?” My Dad said yes and then the guy who had gray around his temples and a mustache said “hold on a second” and opened one of those office mailboxes with a key.

4) He then handed me a thick stack of EVERY SINGLE MARVEL COMIC COMING OUT THE NEXT MONTH. “Here you go. Keep reading Marvel comics” he said and then walked off. I left in a daze and about 15 minutes later it hit me “Gray around the temples, mustache... That was Stan Lee!”

5) Later when I wrote on the Ant Man movie I told Kevin Feige the story, the year, look of the guy etc and Kevin said “That’s exactly the kind of thing Stan would do and he would have been there then. That was him.” Rest In Peace Stan Lee and thank you for the comics.

@curaffairs The author doesn't know enough about search to have written that article and the reason he's having those problems is AI algos like Rank Brain and Google's attempts to use natural language processing nothing to do with SEOs.

1/x

YMYL is not evaluated at the site level, but the query level.

Again this is on Google, not SEOs because they want to surface better sites.

And those devaluations are part of Core Updates which SEOs like me recover sites from.

2/

Featured Snippets are not optimized for - you can use certain HTML to be pulled in one but there is no definite use case where Featured Snippets are shown or that your site's will show for it. Also doesn't always come from the #1 result.

& that's Google not the SEO.

3/

Also there are many times when an SEO doesn't want their site in the Featured Snippet cuz it doesn't result in a click to the website. But we have no control over what Google pulls as Feature Snippets except to put in a meta tag to exclude us from them

4/

And Neil Patel is not an SEO. Most senior level SEOs see him as nothing more than a scammer because reportedly he's ripped them off by stealing their content and articles and passing them off as his.

5/

A quick primer on the #MorganWallen fallout for country radio:

To those stations that have pulled Wallen's music: You've done more than I expected the country industry to do at all. That matters.

But you have taken only the *first* step here. You do not get to now act as though you've washed your hands of a problem that is bone-deep.

This is, as our friend @AndreaWillWrite has noted, a moment for action. Not for hashtags or vague social media posts about how "this" is "not who we are."

Because you, country radio, know damn good and well that it is who "we" are. And it always has been.

So now you have giant racist sized holes to fill in your playlists.

What you do *not* do right now is fill those holes with other white dudes. Particularly not other white dudes you know are exactly like Chucklefuck McMullet but just haven't been caught on video.

You do *not* fill those holes in your playlist with callow calls for "unity" or bridging a "great divide" that come from white dudes who benefit most from the status quo because you, country radio, protect them at the expense of literally everyone else.