Newfold Digital, a leading web technology provider that no one has ever heard of but owns a variety of well-known brands including HostGator, Network Solutions, and Bluehost, has acquired Yoast.  Readers may be surprised to learn that Yoast – which most of us know as an SEO plugin for WordPress – is actually a company.  I thought it was just something a college student had put together to make a few extra bucks.

Yoast works by analyzing your page for what it thinks Google wants to see, though of course this is all a bit of black magic.  But for example if you want to rank on the term “coffee” it’ll suggest you also use the terms “roast”, “coffee bean”, “coffee house”, etc.  All I know is that it consistently says we need to improve LEB’s readability because we use impenetrable terms like “Linux”, “virtual machine”, and “network”.

There are about 12 million installs of Yoast and the new owners are a group of venture capital companies that seek to “connect Newfold Digital customers with world-class web presence tools and services to empower online success in a digital world through maximized synergy, unprecedented cloud transintegrative disruption, and agile journeys so readers can deep dive on new paradigms”.  Okay, I made some of that up, but only some of it.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.