Your Life is Driven by Network Effects

Welcome to Conscious Culture, a weekly newsletter full of interesting reads for curious, intelligent people who want to sharpen their minds

Hi everyone,

Thank you for being here this week.

In this week's newsletter you'll learn about:

• Solving the most important problem that you can personally impact
• The spectrum of financial dependence and independence
• The warped self
• your life being driven by network effects
• The process I'm testing to safely remove pages from Google
• The 50-Year Evolution of Walt Disney World in Maps

Feel free to hit reply and let me know what you think.

Interesting Reads

Your Life is Driven by Network Effects

"In short, the networks of human connections in your life create a force that guides you down a path not always fully of your intention, through the mechanism of 100s of small interactions."

Solve The Most Important Problem That You Can Personally Impact

"Picking problems to solve is a function of attention. Wherever and whatever you’re paying attention to is going to reveal problems in that domain to you. Solving such revealed problems is going to absorb you and will reveal even more problems worth solving in that domain."

The Spectrum of Financial Dependence and Independence

"Having control over your time through independence will always feel great when you have it and always be a miserable burden when you don’t."

The Warped Self

"Social media makes us feel terrible about who we really are. Neuroscience explains why – and empowers us to fight back"

Learning

How to Safely Remove Pages From Google Search

One thing I am experimenting with right now is how to safely remove pages from Google.

My Process for Removing Pages Before:

To determine if I should delete a page I would look at a year's worth of organic traffic in Google Analytics. If the page hasn't had any organic traffic then it can probably be deleted.

But before I delete the page I also need to make sure it's not ranking for any keywords or has any backlinks. If it is ranking for keywords then the reason why it's not getting traffic is that our competitor's content has gotten better, so I would suggest improving the content and maybe building links.

Now if the content doesn't rank for any keywords or has any backlinks then I would permanently delete the page by creating a 410 in Yoast. Now I'm using Rank Math because it has more to offer than Yoast, and Rank Math's premium plan is more affordable than the Yoast premium plan.

That was my process before.

My Process Now:

I still follow most of the above, but I have added a step before I create a 410 for safety and to test the impact of my decision before I make it final.

The testing is important for me because before when I made a decision it was final, and I would have to live with what I've done, but now I'm seen more things that make me question my assumptions, so I want to test before I act.

So now, once I have a URL I'm curious about deleting I'll go to Google Search Console and use the URL removal tool to remove the URL from search results. This removes the URL for 6 months, which is more than enough time to test my assumptions and see what impact removing the URL is going to have on the website.

Once the URL is removed, then I will deindex the page. Again this is another safety precaution I'm taking to ensure the URL doesn't show up in the search results.

Once those two things are done I'm looking to see what happens to the website.

• Does traffic decrease, increase, or stay the same?
• Do rankings increase, decrease, or stay the same?

If a couple of months have passed and the website is tanking then it's possible that page was important and if so it's okay because the page is going to come back. I didn't have that luxury of knowing the page would come back before but now I do.

If the website sees increases or if things stay the same then I start the process of 410ing the page because my assumption that the page does not matter is correct.

This process is still in its infancy stages, but I'm excited to see what happens. I put this in learning because it's something I'm learning, and maybe this process can be helpful to you.

Tools and Resources

Rank Math

"Rank Math WordPress SEO plugin will help you rank higher in search engines. Download for free this plugin today to optimize your WordPress website for higher rankings and more traffic."

One reason why I like Rank Math is that it does schema for you. When I worked at an agency, we had to put the schema on the website, with Rank Math you don't have to touch the schema code you just have to input the business information for local business schema which saves a couple of minutes.

Fun Stuff

The 50-Year Evolution of Walt Disney World in Maps

"Historical maps highlight the Magic Kingdom's dramatic transformation from swampland to the biggest theme park in the world."

HeySatoshi

"Come have a chat with the creator of Bitcoin himself!"

• No one actually knows who Satoshi is.

Quote of the Week

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

— Thomas Edison

🎉End

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Also, if you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter.

With gratitude,

Will