Who Can You Trust

Posted On: 2014-11-07

Woo Hoo it's Friday and the weather for the weekend is looking GREAT.

And that's about as good as it gets because I doubt that I will be spending too much time outdoors this weekend. We've got new furniture coming and we need to spend quite a bit of time getting ready for that.

It also looks as though we've got a family member moving in with us for at least a few months so we've got to prepare for that too. Even though a lot of that preparation will be mental, because it will change the way we live our life, we still have to clean up the spare room

Who can you trust?
I noticed someone posting the other day that Matt Cutts ... Google's mouthpiece ... is on extended leave and may not ever return to Google.

I guess that's the way life can be if you're a millionaire and, while I'm sure a lot of people will cry tears of blood at his departure, I have to say that I won't miss him in the least. While it has been interesting to listen to what he has had to say over the years I've never taken what he said to be the gospel truth.

I can still remember a few years back when my partner had quite an argument on Twitter with a very well-known female mainstream marketer about whether or not you could believe everything Matt Cutts said. She was very sure that you could while Steve was very sure that sometimes the truth got a little stretched ... or maybe a lot stretched.

And that's the truth ... in fact it came straight from Matt Cutts some months back when he proudly announced that sometimes Google played games and gave webmasters false information just so Google could trick those who tended to wear black hats.

Of course it wasn't only the black hat wearers who were getting tricked ... a lot of ordinary white hat wearers were getting fooled too and it was costing them money ... but Google didn't, and doesn't, care.

So don't always trust what Google has to say about search related topics ... or about anything for that matter. When it comes to search engine optimisation and what will and won't work the only person you can trust is yourself.

Of course that involves the time consuming activity known as testing. You have to test and test some more if you want to know what search engine optimisation really works but that's the price you have to pay for success in this industry.

What can you trust?
Well it seems that you can't trust what might be implied in a name. You might think that anything called BulletProof Security would be pretty secure.

I mean it's name just reeks of security and strength and it's almost impossible not to put your trust in something with a name like that ... especially if you're a WordPress user with little experience in anything much.

However if you did put your trust in the plugin with that name ... if you did use it to keep the baddies out of your website ... then you may be a little horrified to find that it actually had multiple vulnerabilities and it was about as secure as a ripped paper bag.

However all has now been fixed and the plugin may now be as good as its name implies but there is a lesson there for all of us. When it comes to security a name means nothing.

Cloud storage gets blown away
Some months ago someone caught me at a weak moment. They offered me ... and lots of other people too ... cloud-based data storage at a very low fee.

They even provided software that allowed their users to set up the software and then basically forget about it because everything would be done automatically ... and ultimately that all ended the way more cynical people would expect it to end.

It seems that maybe the storage provider wasn't being paid by the guy offering the software and service and so it all got switched off. And that's how easy it can be to lose all your data. It's there one moment and gone the next. One moment you have access to everything and the next moment you don't.

At least if you have been storing it on your own backup system in your office there is some vague hope of recovery if the disk should fail but when it fails in the clouds your chances of recovery are not good.

So who do you put your trust in? Ultimately you should be trusting yourself and your own instincts ... at least to a degree.