This newsletter is about growth; in life and business. You have to move through darkness, to emerge into the light.

First - sorry I am a week late with this edition.

In this edition:

• The Great Clappening

• Black Hat Opsec

• $BOME

• The Big Lie

The Seeker ⭖ Quaestor Lucis

"Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of the truth." - Einstein (Supposedly)

Maybe you’ve been living under a rock? If so, Google dropped a core update last week, and Twitter went insane. Tales of entire GSC accounts getting de-indexed, influenzas getting targeted, build-in-public SEOs getting spanked-in-public, sites gone, moneys gone, manual actions, spam penalties. If you’re not new around here, you’ll know this is really nothing new.

The lesson? Be incredibly paranoid and protective of your income streams. Do not embarrass the Citadel, do not give them any breadcrumbs to follow (whether you are white hat or black), do not reveal any domains, DO keep all your sites silo’d away from each other in separate GSCs, GAs, hosting, etc.

And above all: learn to view the Powers That Be for what they really are; massive power structures beholden only to their shareholders. They do not care about your content site, or your business.

To simplify further and perhaps more usefully: Search is just a traffic source. Use it, they will use you.

Start here for some Opsec black hat paranoia - H/T @tehseowner:

The Dungeon News

• Yukinari and I had our first space, discussing the March Updates, and more. We had a great group of speakers, including Zeshan (got a Manual Action account-wide, sorry bro), Connor Showler, Safak, ScaleWithBrown, and more. Here’s the recording.

• RUSH is CRUSHing it with his Niche Index follow along. “Site 1 (programmatic) jumped from 700 to 12k indexed pages.” - meanwhile, inside the same FA, @IDID is crushing local Pay Per Call offers.

• We hit 600 members this week in the Dungeon, with vibrant conversations happening in a wide range of topics: SEO, local R&R, crypto & DeFi, and a lot more.

The Sovereign - Solana Degen’s Running The Numbers

Getting involved in crypto this cycle is 100X easier than the last bull run.

This week, we witnessed millionaires being minted on Solana from investments in the $100s - yes, a few hundred dollars aped into the right meme coins on Solana could have netted you millions. Of course, this is mostly 100% pure luck, being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people and being in the right alpha groups. In other words, it’s pure gambling.

$BOME - Book of Meme - ran to a 1.26 billion dollar market cap in less than 48 hours. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is cooked btw, not investment advice.

We haven’t seen a feeding frenzy like this since 2021, and now, with all the action on Solana, it’s easier, faster, and cheaper than ever before.

Sending a DEX transaction on ETH during the last bullrun could cost you upwards of $500 per swap at the peak, now, on Solana, swaps can cost you .0003 per swap, and the ecosystem around it has grown exponentially and made it 100X easier to get involved.

I’m using BONKbot on Telegram (ref link) right now to easily manage trades, find emerging tokens and pools to trade, manage MEV risk, and a lot more.

The Year 2050

This section explores any and all thoughts I have about the future.

• Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, exposed the big lie - your content is not owned by you. When mega-corp’s like Google and OpenAI use your content to train their systems, it’s “the open Internet”, when you do it to build your tiny business, you’re a spammer. For more proof, witness the SERPs: when Google published mass AI content (SGE), it’s progress, if you do it, your sites are rekt.

FFS - stop pretending these companies are benevolent overseers shepherding us into some golden future - Going forward, treat these companies as they treat you: use ‘em, lose ‘em, and move on, as they will do the same to you.

Respice Finem - Look To The End

• There are watchers everywhere, remember that, unless you own the traffic source, your traffic isn’t safe. If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s to not reveal your sites, offers, or campaigns - snitches are everywhere, stay safe.

• Content is NOT king, traffic is king - content is the Jester - he wants to keep you engaged, looking the other way, while the court schemes behind your back. Point is, worry less about creating helpful content, that was always a Psyop - worry instead about traffic.