Dave Patterson

Daily Dose

Daily Dose insights by Dave

• The Digital Dose - April edition · April 2026Convert

  Are you panicking about toxic backlinks?

  SEO tools have us believe that Toxic Backlinks are the digital equivalent of Dutch Elm or Oak Dieback disease. But this isn't exactly true. Look at the example below from SEMRush, with a HIGH Toxicity score.

  What are we going to do?

  a. Ring our client and tell them their website is doomed?

  b. Frantically seek out Google's infamous 'Disavow' Tool?

  c. Hold my heads in my hands and shout "why me?!"

  Actually, it's best to go for option "d" and do nothing.

  Every website has a portion of 'toxic' links, and if you look closely at this distorted graph, only about 10% of the total backlinks are 'toxic'.

  If Google hammered every website with toxic backlinks, there would be nothing left in the search results! Oh, and if you're ever contemplating using the disavow tool... I used that once years ago with a well-performing website, and guess what? It took a hit to its ranking as a result.

  There's a few occasions when you should be worried about toxic backlinks and other effects from previous dodgy SEO practices, or poor web design. If you're unsure, get in touch, and we will give you an honest appraisal of your situation.

  
• The Digital Dose - March edition · March 2026Understand

  Are you being caught out by survivor bias?

  'I never wore a seatbelt when I was a child, and it never did me any harm', a staple of any nostalgic social media group.

  Sadly of course, we don't hear from those who did come to harm! A classic bit of 'survival bias'.

  My favourite, and I think the archetypal 'survivor bias' story, comes from World War II....  

  Engineers analysing bullet holes in returning aircraft to sought to reinforce the spots riddled with holes. A statistician, Abraham Wald, realised a serious flaw in this approach....the planes making it back had survived despite damage in those areas. The real danger came when the planes were hit in the areas WITHOUT hole such as the engines or cockpit; these planes didn't make it back.

  We get caught out by survivor bias all the time: speaking to customers, not 'cart abandoners', reading about successful start-ups, not the myriad of failures; focusing on projects which succeed, not the countless ones which fail.

  Survival bias is one of my favourites when considering user behaviour, but there's plenty more to catch you out from confirmation bias to attribution bias.

  
• The Digital Dose - February edition · February 2026Engage

  Are you listening to users, or just trusting the experts?

  Over the years, I've organised, observed or managed numerous user testing sessions. It gives you a pretty good sense of what will work and what won't, so the temptation is to skip testing and just do an 'expert' review.

  Why bother with user testing at all if you've got 'experts' to hand and its something that's been done many times before?

  Fortunately, my local council helped answer that one. They received feedback that a nearby path was notoriously slippy in icy conditions. So, they dutifully sent along experts, who (as they'd no doubt done a 100 times before) assessed the steps and put some excellent rails on either side.

  Unfortunately, as any actual user would tell you, the steps themselves are, by some quirk of atmospheric thermodynamics (if that's a thing), rarely icy. It's the path just below the steps which is lethal in winter...and needless to say, it still is.

  If you can test, do. It's interesting, insightful and almost always pays for itself many times over.