CTRTard Is Horrendously Offensive And Needs To Be Scrubbed From Google

I’m going to talk about something that hasn’t been addressed on here in a good long while - digital marketing!

Yep, I do have nearly a decade of experience in it, but barely write to you all about it because of story priorities and the fact I want to keep work stuff at work, rather than bring it home.

There was also supposed to be a different piece here… I was lining things up for a piece about what you all think the future of smartphones look like. It’s a fascinating topic that is slowly starting to reveal itself with foldable screens and I was curious what my friends (you guys) all thought. There’s still time to tell me on this tweet.

But this isn’t some elusively titled blog with digital marketing tips that turn out to be nothing more than things you’ve already done, or just plain wrong. No, instead this is a plea to Google.

A significant chunk of my job is calculating CTR values for reports - and rather than use my mental math skills or a calculator, I just look for an auto-calculator via Google search.

Yea, this is rather offensive.

Result number 2 is a calculator powered by (I kid you not), CTRtard.com - if you’ve just read that URL out loud, you may already know what you’re getting into here.

The blog hasn’t been updated in years, and its branding utilises a rather horrifying parody illustration of someone with special needs. To say this insensitive would be a huge understatement.

The fact that something like this - making a mockery (no matter how unintentionally offensive the makers were) of people with mental disabilities - is so high up on Google is not acceptable. The blog itself has not been updated in years, and social media activity stopped a year ago.

It just proves that a system that is supposed to be impartial with information, yet personalised for the correct answers for each user, can very easily be gamed with certain (using the keyword I see in so many digi marketing blogs) hacks.

At the very least (if the creator of CTRtard is reading this), please just drop the illustrations. I get the importance of keeping a URL with high domain authority (it’s why I’ve maintained the utterly strange link structure of New Rising Media in tact, rather than change it), but the ridiculously offensive drawing has no place in modern society.