This article was published on the website of Santa Barbara Newsroom, an experimental project launched by a group of journalists.
Anyone who still doesn’t believe that the Internet is the great equalizer ought to meet Patrick Sexton.
A homeless man in Isla Vista, Sexton sleeps on a mattress tucked inside a thorny bush. He works at a recycling station in a parking lot behind the Isla Vista Market, and says he has a fifth-grade education.
The story he tells of his past is filled with worldly travel, unlikely triumph and blood- and alcohol-stained tragedy. He says that following a two-year stint as a humanitarian-aid worker in war-torn Africa, he careened on a downward spiral into homelessness. If Sexton’s past is difficult to verify, his present is considerably less so.
The 36-year-old drifter has created one of the world’s most prominent online guides for improving Web site rankings on the Google search engine. He works on the site not with his own computer, but from a UCSB library terminal.
To be sure, the title of his online guide, feedthebot.com, isn’t exactly a household name. (http://www.feedthebot.com/) But in Internet circles, it has attracted considerable attention for its ability to help people create sites that will pop up more prominently in a Google search.
In the egalitarian world of the Internet, the prized asset of a high search-engine ranking can’t be purchased with money. Big corporations that simply pay Google a bundle of cash receive only a mention on the side of the screen, not a favorable ranking on the search itself.
Good placement in the actual results must be earned, by following the ever-evolving dictums of Google.
Among the Google guidelines spelled out in feedthebot: “Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” Under each guideline is a page of text written by Sexton telling people how to comply, and how to tell whether a site complies.
“Five years ago, Web sites were made with design in mind,” Sexton said on a recent sunny day last week, while helping a fellow homeless man pour a sack of empty beer cans into a barrel. “Now an enormous factor is … do search engines understand it, can they comprehend what it’s about?”
Sexton practices what he preaches. His Web site has attracted a fair number of unique visitors – 50,000 since it was launched five months ago. He’s also been publicly praised on the blog of an Internet-world celebrity, the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts.
More impressive, though, are his own rankings on the Google search engine. To get an idea for his mastery of the mysterious-but-widely-used-device, go to Google and type “Google Webmaster Guidelines” in the search engine. (The quotes are not necessary.)
The search produces roughly 1.1 million hits. The top two are from Google itself. Ranking third is Sexton’s Web site. Now try typing “Webmaster guidelines” (again, no quotes). This generates about 17.5 million hits. Feedthebot.com is No. 7. Typing “Google guidelines” produces about 57.4 million hits — that’s almost double the number of people living in California. Feedthebot is No. 6.
“You don’t need a whole bunch of money for marketing, if you do your site well,” said Sexton, who said he’s been living in Isla Vista for about two months. “I could have been a corporate executive with millions of dollars, or I could have been a homeless dude at the library.”
AN ADVENTUROUS LIFE
At first glance, Sexton doesn’t look homeless. He’s relatively young, and appears to be in good health. His beard is well trimmed; his demeanor is professional. He makes good eye contact, is socially graceful, and seems, for practical purposes, normal.
A closer look reveals slightly dirty fingernails –no doubt partly from his line of work – a few careworn wrinkles around the eyes, and a pack-a-day smoking habit. He also says he has trouble remembering portions of his past.
Still, his appearance and affable nature belie the traumic life story he tells.
A native of Portland, Ore., Sexton said he became a ward of the court when he was in fifth-grade due to an abusive situation. In those days, he said, kids who lived in state-run group homes were denied access to public schools.
He never attended middle school or high school. Instead, he went to bookstores – Powell’s in Portland – and read voraciously about the topics that fascinated him, namely math and physics. He said he eventually emancipated himself from the state system, and got his GED. A couple years later, he landed a job fighting forest fires in Northern California.
Sexton said he attended Nassau Community College in Long Island, N.Y., where he studied math, biology and physics. Sexton said he moved to Italy at age 19. He didn’t return to his native United States for another 12 years.
In Italy, he worked odd jobs – such as “hauling cement in bags on my back” – and painted as an artist.
By and by, he became acquainted with a group of humanitarian-aid workers. At first, he admits, his attraction to the line of work wasn’t entirely altruistic.
“They were young, exuberant, heavy drinkers,” he said. “The women were beautiful. I remember thinking, ‘I like this humanitarian-aid stuff.’”
THE HORRORS OF WAR
Eventually, through that group of friends, Sexton said, he landed a fulltime job as a logistician for Save the Children International. He was stationed in Sierra Leone in Western Africa, where bloody wars fought by children are waged over diamonds. Logisticians in such situations try to run normal offices in abnormal conditions.
“You have to have offices, yet you have no electricity, so you bring in generators and satellite phones,” he said.
Sexton said that from 1999 to 2001, he worked at a shelter for recovering child warriors, who needed protection from the local residents, whose moral clarity was blinded by a raging thirst for vengeance.
The experience was devastating, he said.
A short-story writer, Sexton authored a piece that juxtaposes the horror of an explosion that sent him and some children flying off the ground with his attempts to keep them calm by making them laugh.
“You watch a cart filled with fruit lift up. You don’t know you are off the ground until you crash back down onto it. Dust is everywhere and the wall with a mural you noticed isn’t there anymore. … You put out your cigarette, walk like Charlie Chaplin and make dead children smile.”
Sexton said the story won first prize in a Canadian non-fiction writing contest called True Life Story.
In 2001, he said, a bloodthirsty mob stormed Ogo Village, flipping over cars, and murdering children.
In another short story, Sexton recounted how, when holding a dying boy’s chest to stop the bleeding, he saw that a guerrilla organization called the “Rebel United Front” had branded its initials on the boy’s chest.
“My hands covered the ‘U,’ and I didn’t see the ‘U’ until after he was dead,” he wrote.
Santa Barbara Newsroom attempted to verify his affiliation with Save the Children, but the U.S. office in Connecticut had no records of his employment. A clerk in Connecticut tried the Italian office, but hadn’t received word back as of press time.
THE SLIDE INTO HOMELESSNESS
Sexton says he quit the job and fell into a deep depression that he medicated with booze. He moved to France. Using the considerable amount of money he’d saved on the job, he started getting drunk. Toward the end of 2001 or the beginning of 2002, he said he became so destitute he went to the French government and asked to be “re-patrioted,” which basically means they purchased a plane ticket for him to return to the states.
His memory of that phase of his life is blurry. For no particular reason, he said, he decided to go to Miami.
“The first thing I remember is me being in Miami at the airport and I just started crying,” he said.
At the time, the United States was in the midst of the craze for laying down high-speed Internet cable, widely known as DSL. For a while, Sexton said he made good money connecting people’s modems to the high-speed Internet in several states. But he grew tired of the job and moved back to Portland, where he reconnected with an old friend, he said.
Sexton said it was in the basement of his friend’s house that he started reading about Web sites, links and search engines. In 2002 or 2003, Sexton said he moved to Hawaii, where he stepped up his efforts to educate himself about Web sites.
ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL WEB SITE
A savvy shoestring-budget traveler, Sexton said he also created a Web site called Twizi.com, in which he gives reviews of youth hostels around the world, complete with photos. http://www.twizi.com/hostels.htm
This Web site, too, has found success. Sexton said Twizi.com earns him between $300 and $500 a month in advertising. He uses this money to travel so he can review more hostels. It was such a tour that took him to Isla Vista from the Los Angeles area about two months ago.
In Isla Vista, he said he has had some problems with the I.V. Foot Patrol, who tend to shoo him out of his outdoor sleeping quarters. Indeed, records show that on March 26, a 36-year-old Patrick Sexton received a misdemeanor citation for “prowling” on private property on El Colegio Road just before midnight. A statewide background check turned up no other criminal records.
On the issue of money, Sexton doesn’t sugarcoat his intentions. Like most people, he would eventually like to make a fair amount of it.
“Do I want to make money? Abso-friggin-lutely,” he said. “I don’t think money’s evil.”
He said he is trying to build readership on his Feedthebot site, and one day may start posting ads, as he does on Twizi – but for more money.
To anyone wanting to start a successful Web site, Sexton offers a simple piece of advice: Make it useful. As an example, he mentions the unlikely topic of Herpes.
“It sounds weird, but if somebody were to find out they had Herpes, they probably wouldn’t ask their co-workers about it,” he said, adding with a chuckle that no, he doesn’t have the sexually transmitted disease. “They probably wouldn’t ask a cashier.”
As a result, it’s a topic that is bound to generate a lot of interest on the Internet.
But to create a Web site that attracts thousands of hits, a creator likely would need to abide by the Google guidelines. That’s where Sexton comes in, providing helpful tips that could improve a Web site’s position in search reseults.
Sexton said he has reason to believe his site about search engines will become even more useful as more Webmasters seek to improve their rankings. This would help him achieve his goals in life.
“I’m not looking to have an office-type job,” he said. “I don’t like wearing suits, or even casual office attire. … My goal is absolutely to accumulate wealth and to live in a situation where I’m no longer homeless.”
In the age of the Internet, where the merit of information still trumps shiny shoes and firm handshakes, his dream could be realized with a few more clicks of the keyboard.