#Like there was an interview or something that stated the way BH was written was irrelevant to the viewing of 03

[maddiviner]

It’s time for some juicy cryptid gossip!

Everyone has heard of Bigfoot, but what is it, really? A flesh and blood ape, or something even weirder? Today, we’ll be looking at Bigfoot and related concepts.

I wanted to interview Bigfoot himself, but ultimately decided it would be easier and less dangerous just to interview noted Fortean author Josh Cutchin.

Cutchin’s new two-part book series, Where the Footprints End focuses on Bigfoot and some of the weirder phenomena that tend to pop up surrounding this strange and hypothetical critter. This interview features discussion of Bigfoot as well as other interesting phenomena, usually known under the collective heading of High Strangeness...

Eliza: “There’s a lot of people who read my blog and other esoteric sites who really want to experience High Strangeness. There’s running jokes about going out into the forest wearing a red coat and picking berries in mysterious areas, in an attempt to encounter something. Mostly, this is just a joke, but a few people are quite serious about wanting to experience an encounter. Do you believe it is possible (or advisable) to go looking for that kind of encounter?”

Josh Cutchin: “It’s absolutely possible to seek these things out, and probably easier than a lot of us imagine. There are a few different approaches, mostly seeking out locales or altered states of consciousness. A good week’s worth of overnight stays at any ‘haunted’ location will probably yield some good stories, at the very least… then there’re occult disciplines, which I won’t delve into, that seem to have pretty striking results. While not necessarily endorsing it, a healthy dose of psychedelics will induce an altered state of consciousness as well, one which may have residual paranormal effects beyond whatever you encounter on your ‘trip.’

Advisable? That’s another topic entirely. Jeff Ritzmann—who sadly passed away a few days ago—had a method he viewed as successful for contacting the paranormal, but also highly volatile. On its simplest level, his technique involved meditating in any semi-isolated location (you can learn more from his November 2017 interview on Greg Bishop’s Radio Misterioso). Jeff always stressed two things: one, that the contact would come in whatever form you didn’t expect; and two, that this Other, whatever it is, wants that which is stable in your life, that which you value, and you should be prepared to lose relationships, finances, even loved ones.

It’s a sobering proposition.”

Eliza: “In the book, you talk about lures for Bigfoot. You mention that some people leave out gifts for him, often with disastrous consequences. As you mention in many of your books (A Trojan Feast, Thieves in the Night), giving gifts to these sort of entities seems to have a lot of significance and unintended results. What do you think is the root of the gifting fascination with these critters, regardless of what they are?”

Josh Cutchin: “If I had to hazard a guess, it all ties back to man’s earliest attempts to appeal to divine intervention, of burnt offerings and sacrifices. Offering consumables—food, drink, tobacco, et cetera—is a universally-held means of breaching whatever barrier separates us from the gods, the dead, and the spirit world. A direct line of belief can be traced from these older practices to things all of us do, even those not involved in the paranormal… take, for example, leaving cookies out for Santa Claus, or ‘pouring one out’ for a dead friend.”

Eliza: “Do you think that the various phenomenon described in your book, from the classical Bigfoot sightings, to the strange lights, and voices heard in the wilderness could all have the same cause? Or, do you hold the view that we’re dealing with different things that coincide?”

Josh Cutchin: “Some days, I think these topics are separate but overlap in significant ways. Others, I’m convinced they’re all the same thing, wearing different masks. My coauthor Timothy Renner said it elegantly: ‘Bigfoot may be the rarest and most sophisticated version of whatever this phenomenon is.’ I might take that one step further and posit anomalous lights—which are found in every paranormal topic—are the most common, simplest version of whatever the phenomenon is. Truth be told, that may be as close to ‘an answer’ as we get.”

Eliza: “From your books, I learned the difference between the usual “flesh and blood hypothesis” (F&BH) about Bigfoot, versus other perspectives. For readers who are unaware, there’s something of a debate whether Bigfoot is a physical animal, or… something else. Throughout both book, though, I couldn’t help but feel that you believe the evidence points away from F&BH. Would that be accurate to say?”

Josh Cutchin: “I’ve often said that every other discipline of paranormal study has ‘Bigfoot Envy,’ that there is more physical evidence for the existence of bigfoot than anything else in the paranormal. We have immaculately detailed footprints, alleged hair, blood, even droppings. All of it points firmly to a large, undiscovered primate…

… until you start listening to eyewitness accounts. Not every time, but certainly a lot of times there are anomalies that cannot be accounted for from a Materialist/Physicalist perspective, no matter how hard one works backwards from their preferred conclusion. Even some cases cryptozoologists like to cite as supporting the F&BH (like the Fred Beck ‘Ape Canyon’ events) contain outliers like poltergeist activity, abruptly ending trackways, et cetera. The supernatural seems at odds with the physical evidence until one considers that things like psi effects and ghosts—two phenomena we would all agree, if they exist, are intangible—can leave physical changes on our world.

If bigfoot are indeed flesh-and-blood creatures, they are, as Timothy says, ‘masters of evolution,’ with several abilities no other creature on Earth possesses!”

Eliza: “I enjoyed reading the accounts in the second volume of Where the Footprints End, but found much of it unsettling. Do you think that fear is a normal human reaction to High Strangeness, or something more related to existing societal views? I ask this because there’s been some debate amongst my friends about this. Also, many of my readers pride themselves in being comfortable with all kinds of strange things, but that might not well be the initial reaction in many cases.”

Josh Cutchin: “I think it’s probably like swimming with sharks. It’s natural to be terrified of one. Doesn’t mean it’ll harm you (though it certainly could). It’s a natural reaction, and it exists for a reason, for self-preservation. Over time you can desensitize yourself from that fear, maybe even handle the darn things… but there’s always a risk it could hurt or kill you.

I think the shark metaphor is apt, because—while there are undoubtedly a lot of evilly-aligned forces out there—I think most paranormal things are neutral, maybe even disinterested in us, but dangerous by nature. Like sharks!”

Eliza: “Can you imagine a time, in the the future, perhaps, when these sort of things are, in fact, understood by humanity? Do you think we’ll ever figure it out, so to speak? Someday, will Bigfoot and other High Strangeness phenomenon be explainable? Or, perhaps, are these things always going to elude us in their exact nature?

Josh Cutchin: “I think there’s the chance they’ll be accepted, but never understood. I think we’re already on the road to accepting the existence of the paranormal (or, should I more accurately say, re-accepting, since we obviously respected them in our past). But I think the ‘understanding’ part is why they’ve always seemed mysterious, and I think that may well be the part. The paranormal is a birthright for every human being, and an important component of our existence… but we were never meant to understand it. Not in the plane of existence, at least.”

Thanks so much for this interview, Josh! Your work is thought-provoking and as fascinating as it is unsettling!

I think I speak for everyone when I say that this interview helped me to understand High Strangeness and how it relates to other paranormal topics. If you’ve got an interest in the paranormal or High Strangeness, I definitely recommend checking out Cutchin’s books here.

Both volumes of Where the Footprints End are now available in ebook and print. Cutchin has also written books on other, non-Bigfoot aspects of these phenomena. These include Thieves in the Night, a look at supernatural abduction legends, Trojan Feast (about food in High Strangeness encounters) and The Brimstone Deceit (focused on scents and the paranormal).

So, thoughts, everyone? Have you experienced High Strangeness in your lifetime? Do you WANT to experience it? Does it frighten you? My views are mixed...

[asfeedin]

Everything Hreflang with Bill Hunt [PODCAST]

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For episode 193 of The Search Engine Journal Show, I had the opportunity to interview Bill Hunt, President of Back Azimuth, world-renowned speaker, and an international SEO expert.

We talked about what hreflang is, as well as what makes it extremely valuable and complex at the same time.

What is hreflang?

Bill Hunt (BH): It originally started out as just as a meta-tag. Pretend you’re having a conversation with Google.

It’s like, “Hey, Google. I’m glad you found this page you’re on.” Then the tags says, “This page here is for the U.S. (or whatever market page you landed on). Just to let you know, I have these alternative pages for specific language regions.”

You can have a URL in there for the equivalent page for the UK, or Australia, or Spain and then what happens is, is they take that as a signal.

When somebody searches, let’s say in English where your company in the UK, Google will actually swap out .global or the U.S. URL that’s ranking with the one you’ve designated for that market.

That’s essentially what it is – and that in itself is what makes it extremely valuable but extremely complex.

How does it work?

BH: You have to have a designated page for a particular market… That’s where things get complicated.

So in the first wave, you can have a /UK. We all think of that as being the United Kingdom, but it could be that it’s the Ukrainian language.

Or does Google know that UK doesn’t mean, I don’t know, user keys or some other acronym that you have? So we needed something beyond that.

The second piece that we get a lot is people saying, “Hey, I’ve put Google Translate across 13 languages on my site, but Google is not picking those up. Can I use hreflang?”

When you look at it, it’s one page that Google Translate will spin out into X number of languages. So you technically only have one page.

A variation on this which gets creative and confusing is when somebody has, say, an English page and then a Spanish and French, and then they say you can set that the global French or global English, but you can also set it to say this global page in English is equal to the U.S. and UK and Australia.

I think that’s where people are getting creative and getting confused with how to deploy this.

But it is like you said, you have a dedicated page to a language for a market so British English is the proper way to phrase this.

You just want to make sure the search engines know that’s the page you prefer. It works very similarly to rel=”canonical”.

I have a page with tracking parameters.

I don’t want you to index the page.

With the tracking parameters, I want you to use the root version.

It works the same type of concept.

Brent Csutoras (BC): Well, it seems like we’re talking about language, but I think a lot of people interpret and it may be true to interpret it as selecting the page for the country.

Is that different and what is that fine difference?

Because the reason I say that is like what if I actually have a page that’s in English but it’s meant for people in Mexico?

So I have it in English, but I want it to be a different page for people there because it has different philosophies or different tools or different services whatever that might be.

BH: Or it’s just for your office in Mexico and because people in Mexico, a lot of people speak English that makes sense.

By definition hreflang is language. This creates complexities.

So you have an English-language site, but then when you spin out that UK, in theory, you’ve adopted it with switching out Z’s and S’s and things like that to make it…

You might use “lift” instead of “elevator.”

That is explicitly English language for the United Kingdom.

I think this is where people sort of mix this up. They think we’re setting this for the UK, but you’re just simply saying, this is English for the UK.

Back here in Mexico, one, a lot of people would have to say .com/MX/ES. So an English language page for Mexico or even the reverse.

We see this a lot in the United States where we’ve got a .com and then we’ve got it .com/ES and it’s for Spanish-speaking people in the United States.

If it’s in Spanish, Google doesn’t necessarily know what market that is. The reverse in your example for English, it doesn’t know that this is for there.

Now, we can go in and set the /ES, let’s say in your example, in Google Search Console to be for Mexico and it’s just a signal saying that this is a page specifically for Mexico even if it’s in English.

This is where this doesn’t necessarily help all the time because if people are looking for Sony, it’s not really any language so sometimes Google struggles with, “Do I want the U.S. page? Do I want the UK page? Do I want to Mexico page?”

It tries to give the best result and then it may take a secondary signal from hreflang saying, “Oh, okay. For Sony, and they’re in Mexico, let me show the one that they’ve designated for Mexico.”

But it is language-dependent, which creates some problems in itself.

BC: What about when you’re doing hreflang type tags and you’re doing a language but your U.S. site and you’re targeting a U.S. audience. Is it required in that sense?

Because it makes me think that you would want it even for every site so that some of those outside of the country specifically looking for an English site in their country with hreflang, the English version of the U.S. site.

Is that something that people need to think about or is this only for people that are really trying to be outside of the country that they’re operating in?

BH: Let’s take a couple of scenarios.

Scenario one is, is that you got your site. You get a U.S.-centric site.

It could be to straight .com and then you get a site for Australia. It could either be in, com.AU or .com/AU for Australia.

Especially if it’s a .com, Google doesn’t know that that AU means Australia. So if you have one site, let’s just simplify this.

If I have one site – one .com in English, then by effect, that’s a global site.

In that case, if that’s the only site you have, the only language version you have, then you really don’t need an hreflang because there is no language alternative.

How hard is it to implement hreflang?

BH:  The tags themselves are frighteningly easy to implement. This is even stepping back one.

There are three ways you can deploy it.

First method: Use meta-tags

One tag per alternate language plus itself.

So this is the number one problem people make. They’ll say, “Hey, here’s my UK version.” But you have to have yourself in there.

There’s a couple of these celebrity SEOs that have written blog posts that indicate that your canonical tag does that for you.

That’s not true. Google’s debunked that a thousand times.

You have to say this is my English site, this is my UK or my U.S. English language, my UK English language, my Australian English language, and they ought to be in there.

This is the first dilemma with using meta-tags that you’re like Delta Air Lines or IBM, and you’ve got 165 country language combination sites, that’s 165 RSA codes.

Second method: Using XML sitemaps

We can take that code out of the page and put it into the sitemap.

Third method: Putting the tag in the head

Again, it can bloat the head. It is also more resource-intensive and complex.

More Resources:

This podcast is brought to you by Ahrefs and Opteo.

To listen to this Search Engine Show Podcast with Bill Hunt:

Visit our podcast archive to listen to other Search Engine Journal Show podcasts!

Image Credits

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita

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Tags: Bill, Hreflang, Hunt, Podcast

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