Thomas Wictor

I’ve been reading a lot about the dissatisfaction with the really dumb decisions Facebook is making. Let me tell you why we need Facebook. Or at least why some of us need Facebook: The spiders demand it.

And win free e-books!

You can benefit from my absolutely horrible experiences over the past year and half. I’m now an expert on getting search-engine results for Websites and blogs. It’s the art of search-engine optimization (SEO). That’s why you need Facebook.

Search engines have Internet bots that browse the world wide web, indexing sites and blogs. They’re also called spiders. They rank Websites and blogs, which determines how high up in the search-engine results your post or page appears.

I prefer the term spider, so I’ll use that.

These spiders search for specific things on your Website or blog. What they want to know is how important you are. They look to see if your Website or blog has a unifying theme or is just a melange of random thoughts. Web pages and blog posts with keywords in the text that align with the post title and overall theme make the spiders happy.

Spiders are also happy when the Website or blog is hooked up to a Twitter account, a Google+ account, and a Facebook page. This makes the spider think that your Website or blog is REALLY IMPORTANT. Spiders also love outgoing links and internal links. These convince the spider’s two-cell brain that you’re a big cheese whose words must be ranked way up there, far above the puny scribblings of those who haven’t appeased the Web gods.

Just to clarify: the Internet is the interconnected computer networks, while the world wide web is all the documents on the Internet. You access the documents in the world wide web using browsers, and the browsers send out spiders that crawl each document to determine its ranking in search-engine results.

Facebook is now in the business of destroying itself by throttling down the number of people who can see your individual posts. You have to pay Facebook to allow more views, but even that is iffy. My research indicates that boosted posts don’t make a significant difference. The only thing that works is paid ads, which are expensive. As a small-business owner, it’s worth it for me to buy the ads right now. At some point it’ll no longer be cost effective.

I follow the novelist Anne Rice. She has over a million followers, but sometimes only a few hundred are allowed to see her posts. People have lots of ideas about how to get around the Facebook algorithms. Forget it. Facebook changes its algorithms constantly, and it applies different ones to different pages. Don’t even bother.

My Facebook pages exist only to trick the spiders into thinking that I’m a writer of consequence. And it works. Once I began jumping through all the hoops, my search-engine results improved by about 1000 percent. Facebook itself is now worthless as a selling tool, but in conjunction with all the other SEO tricks, I need to have it.

And I’ve made a few friends whose posts I like to read: Tim, Ashley, Mat, Tom, Tony, Tony, Rutger, Ron, Georgia, Stacy…

So I recommend you stick with Facebook until it collapses from all the idiotic, short-sighted decisions being made. We must submit to the will of the spiders.

How to win free e-books

Answer a simple question: What was my mother’s favorite song?

You can find the answer by searching the “News” page. Just put in “mother’s favorite song” and you’ll get the post that reveals it.

After you have the answer, send it to me via the contact form or by PRIVATE MESSAGE on Facebook. Include the title of the song and your e-mail address. With your e-mail address I can send you a Kindle version of either book. Specify which title you prefer.

Chasing the Last Whale is a fictionalized black comedy about love and suicide in contemporary wartime America, and Hallucinabulia is a record of my state of mind during the loss of the Cardinal Ghost, the loss of my career in music journalism, and the loss of my father. Mom was still alive when I finished it. They’re both actually very funny and entirely lacking in self-pity.

What I need now are Amazon reviews. If you’ve read any of my books, please review them on Amazon.

And heed my warning. Mess with the spiders at your own peril. Long before Google and Facebook were even conceived, the earth was nearly destroyed when pitiful humans thought they could influence the primal forces of nature. Click to enlarge.

See? They already knew. “Crawling terror.” You think that’s a coincidence? Please. The spiders must be left alone to do their work. Otherwise we’ll all pay. Look how they made us live in perpetual darkness back then. They could do that again. Anytime. They. Choose.

Accept the spiders. Love the spiders. You don’t want to end up looking like this, do you?