the frequency a kenny chung blog

Google offices
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The internet has been abuzz the past week over a 10-page anti-diversity “manifesto” written by recently terminated Google employee James Damore. On the surface, the uproar seems reasonable, but I’m going to argue that it’s for the wrong reasons.

I’ve ruminated on whether or not to address this topic, because it’s clear that the writer’s firing has resulted in a chilling effect (within and without Google). I’ve considered the consequences of having current or future employers reading these thoughts, but at the end of the day, this is a mass comm blog and I believe this is a media issue. That said, of course everything I write here reflects my own personal opinions. I cannot emphasize that enough.

Here’s my main gripe with the coverage around this story – the media carelessly ran away with it, throwing nuance and context to the wind, all so it would fit more neatly in a black and white narrative.

How many people reading these stories are aware of the source of the manifesto? I would assert that it’s the minority. That’s because click-hungry journalists would have you believe that the former Googler unsolicitedly sent this 10 page document to his entire team/company. And that’s simply not true. The reality is he posted it on a private internal Google Group meant to discuss “controversial” ideas openly, and invited feedback/criticism. The author included footnotes and embedded links to abstracts to support his points. You can read it in full context here: https://diversitymemo.com/. Journalists copied/pasted portions in plain-text, stripping it of its context, making the content seem more unsubstantiated (to their credit, Vice was one of the few to post the entire memo unedited).

The overuse of the term “manifesto” is also inherently problematic. Unless you’re following UK politics, it’s a term most commonly associated with communists or serial killers/mass murderers. As of today, we’re coming up on 1,000 individual articles that refer to it as a “manifesto” within their headlines (and that’s not counting those that only do so in the body copy):

Google News results for James Damore Manifesto
Google News screenshot, accessed Aug 11, 2017

I want to make it clear that I am not tacitly endorsing the creation of such a document or the ideas therein (in fact, there are many logical fallacies and conclusions to which the jump was a bit too far). It’s also been years since my last sociology and evolutionary biology courses, so I won’t fact-check the citations either. I’m not saying that tech doesn’t have gender inequality and harassment issues (Uber has provided us with more than enough examples). But I am making the point that if someone posts a working version of a dissenting opinion that others disagree with on a safe space meant to discuss such ideas, then the most logical next step would be to debate the validity of those statements and provide evidence to the contrary. Present compelling counter-arguments such that the author can revise his thesis (and maybe ultimately change his way of thinking). Instead, what Googlers did was violate their non-disclosure agreements to share the document publicly, much to the detriment of the author and to Google as a company.

This is extremely bad timing for Google.

It would be ill-advised to ignore the larger Google context. At the moment, the Department of Labor is investigating Google for a purported gender pay gap. The 3,300 word manifesto ends with a criticism of Google’s internal biases with regard to hiring. Other commentators have posited that Google fired Damore because if they hadn’t, their inaction could be used against them in future discrimination lawsuits. It may seem farfetched, but the logic holds water – an employee writes about Google’s biases; Google takes no action, which could be construed as an implicit acknowledgement of said biases.

The media echo-chamber of pitchforks certainly forced Google’s hand to take immediately action. What would’ve otherwise been a confidential and internal matter became a national one.

I’m not an HR specialist, and neither are you (probably).

What’s most important is what happened behind closed doors when Damore was fired. Was it solely the manifesto that led to his firing? Or was there a pattern of violating anti-discrimination laws? He was a senior engineer after all, and presumably had influence on who was hired. The thing is we don’t know, so it’s difficult to say whether or not his firing was justified, based on what’s been presented in the media. In either case, it seems like he might pursue legal action against Google.

But let’s also get one important thing out of the way:

This is not a free speech issue.

Far too often, people conflate “freedom of speech” with a guaranteed right to say anything in all situations. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech means that the government cannot censor citizens, within specific confines (e.g. you cannot endanger others in exercising your speech).

Where the lines blend is when Google states companywide that their goal is to foster “a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.” The next sentence in the announcement goes on to say that any opinions need to fit within their Code of Conduct.

But here’s the rub – in the manifesto (a part that many journalists don’t include in their stories), the author includes a caveat that you cannot judge individuals based on generalized gender trait differences. This point is made several times in varying language. Nowhere does the author say that women are inferior employees (a talking point parroted by many pundits). I will note that there is one bullet where he mentions Google’s hiring practices with regard to “diversity” hires lowers the bar, but it’s in conjunction with a private internal link so it’s not possible to determine how that point was substantiated (and if it’s focused on gender, ethnicity, or both). To paraphrase, his thesis is that due to societal influences, men generally seek more leadership roles and the way these roles are positioned is not as appealing to a plurality of women. I’m not going to argue for or against the merit of these statements (or their logic), but they’re definitely valid topics for debate. Except they weren’t debated, which is the key problem.

A leaked survey of 282 Googlers showed that only 30% thought the document shouldn’t have been created:

On diversity hiring.

Quotas are a touchy subject. One of my previous employers sought to reach gender ratios, seemingly irrespective of supply and demand and the overall pool of candidates. I didn’t agree with that approach then, and I still don’t think it’s fruitful now.

The system I do believe in is actively including more diversity candidates in the consideration set, which would mathematically increase your quantity of diversity hires without artificially increasing the rate (given similar levels of proficiency and qualifications).

The topic of quotas also touches upon a separate issue that’s been in the news lately – Asian Americans taking issue against affirmative action. I won’t comment on the validity of that argument either as it would be a much longer essay, but it’s safe to say that a lot of people are against quota systems that exist for the optics of diversity. It seems we may be reaching an inflection point on the practice, for better or for worse.

Back to public shaming.

I’ve written about social media outrage before. Jon Ronson (author of the 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed) likens social media to the new town square, where you can pin scarlet letters on people and ruin their lives. The book also ironically includes a chapter about using SEO for reputation management within Google results.

I believe this whole manifesto situation is just the latest on the long list of examples where the public has crucified an individual, egged on by the media.

And that’s why I chose a purposefully sensationalistic title on this blog post. It seems that in an attention-deficit, hair-triggered, social media-empowered world we find ourselves in, the most offensive thing is to have a nuanced opinion. If I’ve pissed off both sides of the debate, then I’ll happily accept that badge with pride.

Note: The majority of this post was written before Google CEO Sundar Pichai was meant to host a town hall discussing diversity within the company. The meeting was cancelled due to online threats.

It’s been a while since I’d been to an SEO meetup (it seems like all of the big players stopped running them), so I was delighted to see a great panel sponsored by Yext. There were a few good industry friends, as well as other talented folks. The full lineup was:

  • Mike King, Founder & Digital Marketing Consultant at iPullRank.com
  • Matt Ramos, Product Manager at LocalVox
  • Rhea Drysdale, CEO at Outspoken Media
  • David Minchala, SEO Manager at Yodle

There was a ton of great information, especially about personas and personalization. Below is my liveTweet coverage of the meetup:

If you’re running a large agency that can’t write localized content for every region, it makes sense to broadly define which topics you should cover (either based on current performance or what the top ranking sites have) and then have subject matter experts write specific local content. This is far better than just repurposing the same content for every region.

Paid search can tell you very quickly if people are actually searching for a specific topic in a region.

Sometimes, curating content provides enough value for Google to rank your site well. However, you must, must, must provide some sort of value otherwise you risk duplicate content penalties.

Track users throughout their customer journey so you can better attribute eventual conversions. Each touchpoint should have specific goals that lead to the main site conversion. Optimizing for each touchpoint allows you to help move consumers along.

The above should actually say “consumer life cycle”. Depending on your industry, you may want to track users throughout their anticipated cycle of use to see when potential dropoffs occur.

Browser fingerprints allow you to identify specific users, or specific subsets of users. If you track specific groups over time and set page values, it will help you refine your conversion path and user goals.

This is a good one. If your client doesn’t know what their KPIs should be, find out what their boss is judged on, and start from there. Very good advice for any type of marketing initiative.

Three of the four panelists agreed that the next big thing in SEO is personalization. Google will be able to show and tell you what you need before you tell them. Google Now is an example of this.

August 31st, 2013
according to

Those of you with YouTube accounts will be familiar with this popup below:

Using your real name on YouTube

It’s destructive (stops any YouTube playback), annoying (it will come back in a week or two even if you hit the “I don’t want to use my full name” button), and it’s creating clutter.

What I mean by this last point is that even if you don’t want to connect your YouTube account to your Google+ account, you can choose to keep your old username. Except, that actually creates a new Google+ account for that username. So then you’d end up with two Google+ accounts, one dedicated to YouTube.

I understand that Google wants more of our data, and more activity on their social network. But this just rubs me the wrong way and seems to be an overly-insistent and heavy-handed vehicle for going about this.

I’d like to preface this blog post by saying that I’m usually the first to poke fun at SEOs who blog about the “search impact” of every little thing that Google does, whether it’s changing a font, repositioning items slightly in the SERP, or whatever the case may be. So in order for me to get riled up over something they do, it has to be huge. And this recent update to Google Analytics is nothing short of huge.

To quote this Google Blog Post:

When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic.

Under the clearly cop-out guise of protecting user privacy, Google is going to start not reporting on organic keywords that logged-in users search. Isn’t that the whole selling point of Google Analytics? If not, it’s definitely a major one- the ability to see how users reach your site and how you can better position yourself in the space to garner more clickthroughs.

Google Control All The Data
Visual Approximation of Google Engineers

I especially take issue with the last line I quoted above: Google says that this will only affect a minority of organic traffic. B-U-L-L. Think about it for a second. Who’s most likely to use SSL? Or to put it even more broadly, who’s most likely to be logged into their Google accounts when searching? First on the list are net savvy people who work in the cloud and rely on Google and Google Apps services (including companies who run on Apps). Think about the repercussions of a tech content site not being able to see how admins or webmasters are reaching their resources. You also have people on local networks who are most likely to use SSL- probably the majority of college students on a shared network. That is definitely a key demo. And maybe this one slipped past people’s radar, but in order to do anything with an Android phone, you need to be logged into your Google account! So every single Android user will have their keywords stripped as well. Is Google trying to make us hate their mobile OS and its users?

So what’s an SEO to do? Not much to do, really. We can storm Mountain View with our pitchforks, but Google is stubborn, especially when it comes to PR- and soundbyte-friendly topics such as “user privacy”. Let’s face it- Google’s plan is to have more people use their services and to be logged in indefinitely (take the ubiquitous “+You” bar, for example). Given enough time, Google will have everyone logged in whenever they search, and then they’ll also control all of that query data.

Talk about having your cake and eating it too.

Looks like Google is rolling out a new right hand sidebar to provide concise summaries of programming and script-related queries.

Notice that in the Javascript example, the right side AdWords listings are pushed down. Very interesting to see where Google’s priorities are.

As usual, this is being rolled out in phases (or being tested). I’m currently seeing this in Firefox 5 but not Chrome.

Below are some examples for SWFObject, jQuery, noscript and Javascript (click to enlarge).

New Google Sidebar - Javascript

New Google Sidebar - jQuery

New Google Sidebar - noscript

New Google Sidebar - SWFObject

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