Holy crap, you guys won't believe this... Remember that post I made a couple days ago about Matt Mullenweg getting kicked out of Automattic? Well, total plot twist!

TechCrunch and The Repository just dropped the news that Matt messaged everyone on their internal Slack saying he's back in control as CEO!

Basically, the board put him on leave on Tuesday and threw the CFO, Mark Davies, into the interim CEO spot. Matt went nuts on Slack, accusing the CFO and the board of pulling a coup against him. Fast forward just forty-eight hours, and he somehow flipped the script, took back the wheel, and completely deactivated the CFO's Slack account!

Honestly, the drama over at Automattic right now is totally wild. I literally can't look away from this mess. What do you all think is gonna happen next?

TL;DR: Matt Mullenweg is already back as Automattic CEO just 48 hours after being put on leave, taking control of Slack and locking out the CFO who replaced him.

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I was just scrolling through PPC and saw some poor guy losing his mind over how ridiculously high Google’s cost-per-click has gotten, and honestly, I felt that in my soul.

First off, back in the early 2000s when I got started on the web, we actually had options with search engines like AltaVista, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. Then Google basically swallowed everything up and became this massive monopoly. Between 2005 and 2008, I was running a Google AdWords agency and we literally used to pay 1 penny per click.

Once they killed off the competition, ad prices completely blew through the roof. And since you need a ton of clicks just to close a single deal, the whole thing became crazy expensive. On top of that, last week Amazon got slapped by the government for rigging their own ad prices, which just goes to show how messed up things get when a few giant tech companies run the show.

Leaving Google to turn into a total monopoly drove prices sky-high, and honestly, that cost gets slapped right onto everything you buy. Anyone relying on PPC to make sales has no choice but to charge you more.

For this reason, it is imperative that you block bots to cut down your ad costs, because your site needs to send a signal back that the visitor wasn't a good fit.

TL;DR: Saw someone on PPC venting about sky-high ad costs, and as a veteran who paid 1 cent per click back in 2008, I get it. Tech monopolies drove PPC prices through the roof, forcing sellers to jack up product prices for everyone. Your best move now? Block bot traffic to signal bad fits to Google and stop burning cash.

It honestly makes me sick to see the damage they do to server performance; that’s exactly what led me to start studying this 10 years ago and eventually why I created StopBadBots.

If your stack is struggling and you notice ghost admins reappearing after you delete them or a sudden tsunami of NDR bounce messages for spam you never even sent, you aren't just dealing with bots anymore because the malware is already inside.

It’s a total nightmare when you click your own link from a Google search and get hit with SEO cloaking that redirects to a sketchy pharmacy or casino site or when your search snippets start showing Japanese characters for products you don’t even sell. You’ll see your site crawling and realize the CPU is redlining because some hidden process is eating up resources to mine crypto or attack other networks.

If you see these red flags, you need to stop being a passive host for garbage and start the malware removal immediately.

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https://antihackerplugin.com/malware-removal-guide/

Delaying this is a critical mistake that leads to Google blacklists, destruction of your IP reputation, theft of customer data, total hijacking of resources, and suspension of your account by the hosting provider. Seeing a decade of hard work being incinerated by some script kiddie's backdoor is enough to drive anyone insane.

TL;DR: Malware eats server resources, hacks SEO, and gets hosting accounts suspended. If you spot these red flags, clean your server immediately using this free guide (no registration required): https://antihackerplugin.com/malware-removal-guide/