Bill Slawski, an SEOs “SEO”

Bill Slawski, an SEOs “SEO” passed away; and his contributions to SEO will be missed.

He was truly a pioneer.

His site, “SEO by the Sea” was a monster of a site – entirely dedicated to Google Algo changes and patent investigation.

Basically, he was like an old-school sleuth detective who was a genius at dissecting Google Algo Patents. His site went offline and fortunately called just died away, but his hosting provider will keep making sure that his website is accessible even after it went offline since the hosting fees were no longer being accepted.

Bill’s site is renowned as one of the SEO’s most reliable sources for information on search engine patents. The website has been used as a reference by SEO tools and professionals for a very long time and will do so in the future; using the site as a reference.

He conducted research, examined, translated, and wrote on Google- and search-related patents and algorithms, including information retrieval, PageRank, TrustRank, and modern techniques (machine learning, the Knowledge Graph, entities).

His website went offline a few months after his death as a result of the payment not being accepted. Naturally, Bill’s demise prevented him from making the payment, and the website immediately went down.

SiteGround Stepped Up

The hosting firm chose to respond to the site after learning about it from the SEO community after it went offline.

The hosting firm, SiteGround, declared on Twitter that it has “reactivated the service” because “we feel that the blog offers substantial value for the SEO community.”

That’s huge.

Massive respect to SiteGround.

I’ve had a few beef’s with SiteGround over the years but I must say, they’ve always responded and been fair.

Once I mistakenly renewed a monthly package that expired and I ended up paying for a year package. If the folks at SiteGround had followed the letter of the law based upon their own terms of service then they had no reason to refund me – but they did.

When you combine my mini-experience with the way they immediately sorted out Bill’s site says that indeed they’re a solid company ethically – and for that, I’d definitely continue hosting with them in the future.