Central Perk: 18 mar. 2011

vineri, 18 martie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Canadian and Australian Dollar vs. the Price of Crude; Reflections on the PPI and the Commodity Bubble
Rand Paul on the "False Budget Choice", on Fixing Social Security "In Perpetuity", on Obama's "Abdication in Leadership"
UN Security Council Authorizes No-Fly Zone; Qaddafi Declares Cease-Fire, "Willing to Talk to Rebels"; Military Planning Continues; What's Next?
Risk of Meltdown Decreases as Workers Attempt to Restore Power; NHK Confirms that Water Pumps Have Been Restarted

Canadian and Australian Dollar vs. the Price of Crude; Reflections on the PPI and the Commodity Bubble

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 12:53 PM PDT

Here is a pair of interesting charts showing the correlation between the Canadian and Australian dollar vs. the price of West Texas Intermediate crude.

Australian Dollar vs. Crude

Canadian Dollar vs. Crude

Both the Australian and Canadian dollars have a strong correlation with crude going all the way back to 1997. Should the correlation continue to hold, and there is no reason to believe it won't, then if the price of crude drops, the Loonie and the Australian dollar will both likely drop as well.

Reflections on the PPI

Earlier today someone told me via email that my "silence on the PPI and CPI was deafening".

Actually I have seldom directly commented on the CPI or PPI recently even when the CPI was low.

However, I have commented on commodity prices on many occasions expressing the viewpoint "those looking for inflation can find it in China and India where credit is running rampant".

Commodity prices are set at the margin and China is overheating. When China cools (and it will in my opinion), commodity prices will drop.

Commodity Bubble

People are entitled to believe what they want, but I will side with John Hussman who thinks commodities are in a bubble.

From Hussman Anatomy of a Bubble

In the stock market, I believe that there is indeed a "bubble" component in current prices, but it is not nearly as large as we observed in the approach to the 2000 peak, nor as extreme as we observed on the approach to the 2007 peak. My hope is that investors have learned something. That's not entirely clear, but we'll be as flexible as we can while also being mindful of the risks.

While my view is that bubble components can come and go in the markets, they sometimes become so large and well-defined that they take on a very distinct profile. Such bubbles included the advance to the 2000 stock market peak, the housing bubble, the advance in oil prices to their peak in 2008, the advance in the Nikkei in the late 1980's, and other clearly parabolic advances.

On that note, it's clear to me that we're seeing classic bubbles in a variety of commodities. It is very unlikely that this is simply due to global demand growth. Even with an exhaustible resource, it is a well-known economic result (Hotelling's rule) that the optimal extraction rule is one where the price rises at a rate not much different from the interest rate. What we've seen lately is commodity hoarding, predictably resulting from negative real interest rates provoked by the Fed's policy of quantitative easing.

Fortunately for the world's poor, the speculative dynamic that has created a massive surge in commodity prices appears very close to running its course, as we see very similar "microdynamics" in agricultural commodities as we saw with oil in 2008. That's not to say that we have a good idea of precisely how high prices will move over the short term. The blowoff phase of a bubble tends to be steep, but so short-lived that it affords little opportunity to exit. As prices advance in an uncorrected parabola, the one-sided nature of the speculation typically gives way to a frantic effort of speculators to exit simultaneously. Crashes are always a reflection of illiquidity in two-sided trading - the inability of sellers to find eager buyers at nearby prices.

On the subject of commodities, it's a natural question whether gold falls into the same category as agricultural commodities. After all, gold and other hard assets have an important role as an alternative to money to store value, and it appears clear that the world is monetizing in a way that is unlikely to be fully reversed even if policy makers wish to do so down the road.

In my view, it's not clear that gold is in a bubble here, but it will be important to watch for the earmarks of a classic bubble. Below, I've plotted the price of gold against a "canonical" log-periodic bubble. Already, we're seeing some behavior that is characteristic of a bubble-type advance. A Sornette-type analysis generates a finite-time singularity as early as April, but there are other fits that are consistent with a more sustained advance. If we observe a virtually uncorrected advance toward about 1500 in the next several weeks, the steep and uncorrected advance would imply an increasing hazard probability.

My response to the above was Anatomy of Bubbles; Negative Returns for a Decade Revisited; Is Gold in a Bubble?

I agree with Hussman about the bubble in commodities not only because of the speculation angle but also because of unsustainable growth in China. When China stalls, it will likely take commodities and the commodity producing countries down with it, notably Australia and Canada.

Finally, gold is acting more like a currency than a natural-resource commodity (because that is what it is). It may or may not be immune to a commodity-related selloff, and much depends on the actions of central banks down the road.

Those who insist on a direct quote regarding the recent PPI report, here it is: "Commodities are in a bubble and the PPI is reflective of that bubble."

Of course bubbles can always get bigger. Oil hit $140 in 2008. Perhaps it does again in 2011, but barring a major disruption in Saudi Arabia or Iran, I rather doubt it.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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Rand Paul on the "False Budget Choice", on Fixing Social Security "In Perpetuity", on Obama's "Abdication in Leadership"

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 10:44 AM PDT

Senator Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Senator Mike Lee (Utah) go after both Republicans and Democrats in a segment with Kudlow.

URL if above video does not play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqBGrl-nuT0&feature=player_embedded

Rand Paul on Balancing the Budget

Senator Rand Paul: "I do not think we should shut down government but I do not like either the Democrat or the Republican proposal. Both of them perpetuate enormous deficits. The annual deficit will be $1.65 trillion under the Democrats and $1.55 trillion under the Republicans."

"I did not come to Washington to vote for deficits, I came to balance the budget, and cut federal spending. People at home don't understand what's going on. Up here people think we could never cut $500 billion. At home, when I tell them we are going to cut $500 billion, they say that's only a third of the problem, I want you to cut more"

"This isn't an either-or situation. It's not a Hobson's Choice. There is something in between. It's not either we spend what they want or we shut it down. What if we spend what we have? I'm all for spending about $2.2 trillion, that about what we bring in."

Fixing Social Security "In Perpetuity"

Rand Paul goes on to say that he will introduce a bill that will fix Social Security "In Perpetuity". Details did not come out in the interview.

Rand Paul Accuses Obama of "Abdication in Leadership"

Senator Mike Lee: "We desperately need presidential leadership. So far what we've had from the president is radio silence."

Senator Rand Paul: "I call it an abdication in leadership. I do not think he wants to lead or is willing to lead. I think we can have leaders in Congress who boldly say this is how we fix Social Security, this is how we fix Medicare, and this is how we fix the budget"

Rand Paul Introduces Five-Year Balanced Budget Plan

URL if above video does not play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0vDNmE_M7E

Filling the Leadership Vacuum

I agree with Rand Paul's charge about leadership. I said the same thing a few days ago in Global Crisis in Leadership Nearly Everywhere You Look

It is good to see someone attempt to fill the leadership vacuum, and in a productive manner.

Unfortunately little can happen because of the blockage in the Senate by the Democrats unless Obama is willing to lead, and lead responsibly. He won't.

The sad reality is that none of the Republicans currently running for president in 2012 are willing to do what's needed either.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

UN Security Council Authorizes No-Fly Zone; Qaddafi Declares Cease-Fire, "Willing to Talk to Rebels"; Military Planning Continues; What's Next?

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 09:48 AM PDT

In a 10-0 vote with 5 abstentions, the UN security council authorized a no-Fly zone over Libya. Proving that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was prepared for this in advance Libya Calls Cease-Fire After Britain and France Vow Action 'Soon'

Hours after the United Nations Security Council voted to authorize military action and a no-fly zone, Libya executed a remarkable about-face on Friday, saying it would call an "immediate cease-fire and the stoppage of all military operations" against rebels seeking to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

It was unclear what effect a cease-fire, if honored, might have, but the offer drew some skepticism in the West. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain told the BBC of Colonel Qaddafi: "We will judge him by his actions, not his words."

Mr. Cameron told the House of Commons that the Royal Air Force would deploy Tornado jets and Eurofighter Typhoon warplanes, "as well as air-to-air refueling and surveillance aircraft."

"Preparations to deploy these have already started, and in the coming hours they will move to air bases from where they can take the necessary action," Mr. Cameron said.

The Typhoon is a fighter jet armed with air-to-air missiles for shooting down airplanes, as well as laser-guided bombs for targets on the ground. The Tornado is especially well suited for attacking runways — that was its first combat mission, in the Persian Gulf war, when the planes swooped in to bomb runways in Iraq, facing thick anti-aircraft defenses that shot down several of the planes.

Before the cease-fire was announced, the Libyan leader signaled his intentions in Benghazi. "We will come house by house, room by room," Colonel Qaddafi said Thursday on a radio call-in show before the United Nations vote. "It's over. The issue has been decided." To those who continued to resist, he vowed: "We will find you in your closets. We will have no mercy and no pity."

In a television broadcast later, he added: "The world is crazy, and we will be crazy, too."

Military Planning Continues

Bloomberg reports Qaddafi Cease-Fire Bid Fails to Deter Allies' Military Planning

Western allies pressed on with plans for military action against Libya after Muammar Qaddafi's regime declared an immediate cease-fire and said it was willing to talk to rebels.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who was preparing a set of demands with President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, said he would judge Qaddafi by his actions and not his words.

Cameron told lawmakers the U.K. would "in the coming hours" deploy Tornado and Typhoon warplanes, air-to-air refueling craft and surveillance aircraft to enforce the no-fly zone. After Cameron spoke in London, Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa made the cease-fire announcement in a televised news conference carried by Al Arabiya television.

Cameron told Parliament in London that the UN resolution falls short of giving the authority for regime change in Libya, saying "we have to restrict ourselves" even though "almost every leader has actually said the Qaddafi regime has to go."

Obama called Cameron and Sarkozy last night to discuss enacting the resolution, the White House said in a statement. The three agreed to work closely with Arab and other international partners on enforcing the terms of the resolution and called for an end to the violence against civilians in Libya, the White House said.

Italian newspapers, including Corriere della Sera, reported today that the government would make three bases available to support a no-fly zone -- Sigonella and Trapani Birgi in Sicily and Gioia del Colle near the southern city of Bari.

France's Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier is at its base in the Mediterranean port of Toulon and could be called into service on the mission.

Denmark has committed to sending six F-16 fighter planes to help back the no-fly zone, Copenhagen-based newswire Ritzau reported, citing Defense Minister Gitte Lillelund Bech. Canada will deploy six CF-18 fighter jets, Postmedia News reported, citing unnamed sources.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said in Madrid today he will seek Parliament's approval to deploy air and naval forces to back the UN resolution on Libya and will cede bases in Spain to back the operation.

Turkey, a majority-Muslim member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, does not support military intervention in Libya "for the moment," said Selcuk Unal, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.

NATO member Germany said it wouldn't join any intervention. "German soldiers won't take part in a military mission in Libya," Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said.

What now? What good does it do to bomb runways if Qaddafi does honor the cease-fire? What if the rebels break the cease-fire?

A cease-fire leaves Libya in a divided state. Invading Libya with ground troops is out of the question, at least it should be.

What appeared a few weeks ago would be over quickly, certainly isn't.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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Risk of Meltdown Decreases as Workers Attempt to Restore Power; NHK Confirms that Water Pumps Have Been Restarted

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 12:35 AM PDT

There is a string of good news out of Japan this morning. Bloomberg reports Workers Prepare to Connect Power to Stricken Nuclear Plant

Power may be restored to one of the crippled reactors at Japan's damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant, possibly today, improving the odds that workers can prevent a meltdown and further radiation leaks.

The U.S. military, which is flying unmanned surveillance drones over the 40-year-old power station about 135 miles (220 kilometers) north of Tokyo at Japan's request, said it is "cautiously optimistic" that the damage to the reactors can be contained. The risk of a meltdown has lessened after water was dumped on the site yesterday, said Thomas Graham, chairman of Lightbridge Corp., a McLean, Va.-based nuclear fuel developer, said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

"We're optimistic that we'll continue to progress in this, and that worst-case scenario will never be encountered," Admiral Robert Willard, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, told reporters by telephone from Hawaii. The worst-case scenario would be if the effort to keep the cores of the reactors covered were abandoned, he said.

The possibility of a meltdown is "not off the table, but the more water that goes in there," the less the risk of a meltdown becomes," Graham said. "The reactor situation is definitely not deteriorating as it was and seemingly becoming stable and perhaps becoming more under control."

Water Pumps Have Been Restarted

Mike in Tokyo Rogers reports Success! NHK Confirms that Water Pumps Have Been Restarted

There is no article. Just a news flash at the top of NHK news site. NHK has confirmed that the water pumps have been successfully restarted.

The blue text at the bottom says, "Fukushima #1 Nuclear Plant #3 Reactor: Japan Self-Defense Force has restarted water pumps (at 2:03 pm)"

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

7 Essential Google Intelligence Custom Alerts That Keep Me Sane

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 04:07 AM PDT

Posted by RebeccaLehmann

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

As a data analyst tracking more than 300 websites, the numbers are simply stacked against me. It's hard to give each and every site meaningful attention. Thankfully, the vast majority of these sites don't require active analysis, but I still needed to devise some kind of system that would let me know when something was afoot.

Enter Google Intelligence. One of the fabulous things about Intelligence is that it's a lot more flexible than mere Goal Tracking. Goal tracking has three rigid options and gives you no email love, but Intelligence will send you love notes on just about any condition you can imagine. In lieu of a personal assistant, this lovely little beta is the thing that turns me from a frazzled, overwhelmed lone analyst into an analytics superhero. Well, at least as far as my account managers are concerned anyway. If you're tracking more websites than a single human brain can handle and want to go from zero to hero, the custom alerts described here are a few of the essentials. The numbers and periods should all be adjusted to meet your site's unique needs.

Significant Traffic Drop

If your traffic drops by 50% from the previous month, you definitely want to know about it. I run it as a monthly alert since many of our sites are small enough that traffic is inconsistent from week to week, and with more than 300 clients to track the sheer volume of alerts would be overwhelming, but weekly or daily could easily be appropriate for larger, more consistent sites.
Grab it

Traffic Spikes

Clients don't always run their entire marketing plans by you, but they'll be impressed when you notice that referrals from their local newspaper are suddenly up. We have one client who runs regular Groupons that take their traffic from a couple hundred visitors a day into the thousands. That's good to know, right? Another simply had published a help wanted ad that generated a lot of traffic from applicants who were researching the company. It's a good opportunity to show that you are paying attention and to engage in a little positive reinforcement ("That ad brought you X extra conversions, great job, keep it up!"). It can also be a way to spot trouble. If you use the multiple subdomain code, it is possible to cross-contaminate your sites' data if you're not careful. Such cross-contamination renders as a traffic increase. Yes, we learned that the hard way - and it was a GI alert that brought it to our attention.
Grab it

Significant Drop in Goal Completions

A traffic drop alert isn't going to detect a drop in goal conversions if lack of traffic isn't the problem. This can be a great way to help diagnose broken submission forms, shopping carts, etc. As with the traffic drop alert above, I run this one monthly due to the nature of our clients' sites and to avoid getting overwhelmed with frivolous alerts. You should adjust frequency and percentages to suit your sites. (Note that this alert is built on an advanced segment which combines phone leads with goal completions.)
Grab it

Analytics has flatlined

If nothing else on this list matters to you, grab this one. Most sites will want to run this as a daily alert. It operates on the same principle as the traffic drop alert, but takes the percentage to the extreme. If this one is triggered, it's very likely that something has broken your analytics code. Very handy when you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen and aren't necessarily informed when someone makes change to the site.
Grab it

Spike in Goal Completions

If my goals spike, I want to know. It's not a calamitous event like when they bottom out, but hey, I want to know how it happened! I want to investigate that, and I want whatever caused it to still be fresh in everyone's memories so we can document it accurately and add it to the play book!
Grab it

Significant Drop in Google Referrals

I have two words for you: Farmer Update. The folks at Enrichment Depot posted a "self diagnostic kit" that uses a custom report to check your site for collateral damage, but what if you could automate something that would tell you if you were suddenly negatively impacted by Google's latest shenanigans? This custom alert is based on the premise that if you suddenly drop out of the top Google pages, your Google referrals will also plummet. It starts with an advanced segment that includes only Google referrals, then looks for a 50% drop in visits from that segment. So the next time you wind up on the wrong side of an algo update, or if, heaven forbid, you're penalized out of the blue, Google Intelligence will let you know.
Grab it

Direct Traffic Bounce Rate Over 70%

Sounds awfully obscure, right? But let me tell you, this is a good one. It was inspired by a client who called us in a panic because he thought someone was somehow spamming his site. All of a sudden, direct traffic was sky high and the bounce rate went nuclear - not to mention that the big blue traffic line was skewed beyond all reality. A quick check of the service provider dimension quickly showed that the client himself was the source of all the trouble, and it became clear that somewhere in the setup process we had missed filtering out the client's IP address. He'd gotten the bright idea to set the company's URL as the home page of all the browsers in the office. Long story short, we figured that most people going directly to the site are doing so deliberately and aren't so likely to bounce out, so a high bounce rate could be used as a trigger for further investigation. In the first month we discovered four other clients whose IP filters also were missing, and if anyone else we may have missed gets the "official homepage" idea, we'll catch it early.
Grab it

What are your favorite custom alerts? Please share them in the comments!

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Top 5 SEO Questions from Customers - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 17 Mar 2011 02:05 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Howdy mozzers! This week we have a very special guest on Whiteboard Friday - me! That's right, after filming these videos and posting them on the blog for the past six months, they're finally putting me in front of the camera for your viewing... pleasure... (Well, my mom's viewing pleasure at least. Hi mom!). I'm joined by Cyrus Shepard, another member of the Help Team here at SEOmoz. Our team of six handles all of the account and technical support questions sent in by everyone who uses the site and tools, so as you can imagine we see a lot of the same questions week after week. The Help Team cannot answer SEO questions over the tech support lines, but we do our best to help customers figure out why their site may not be working with our tools.

On this week's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus and I will walk you through some solutions to 5 of the most common SEO problems we see on the Help Team, and I'll also let you know how to change your profile picture (we get asked how to do this a lot!). A word of caution: this video will not be about advanced SEO topics and will, at times, pertain particularly to SEOmoz's site and tools. You may learn a thing or two, but if you feel like you don't need to know why only one of your pages is getting crawled or links aren't getting indexed, please feel free to skip this week! We'll get back to more advanced and general topics next week.

Video Transcription

Cyrus: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. This is Aaron. We both work on the Help Team here at SEOmoz. Today's special topic is "Top 5 Questions from Customers." Aaron and I answer hundreds of customer questions every week from SEOs all over the world. So we thought it was important to talk about some of these issues. So just so you know, a lot of these questions that we're going to be covering today may be considered beginner to intermediate, but even if you are an advanced SEO, you might find some gems in here. So we're going to get started. Aaron will be back in just a little bit to talk about some of these other topics.

The first question we get a lot of is www or non-www? How do you choose what to include in your domain? This is kind of a fun one, right, because everybody starts their new website, they buy the domain, they are getting it set up, and which one do you chose? Or if you have a client, the website is a little bit more established, and they have some canonicalization issues some duplicate content issues. Which one do you chose?

Well, some things you might want to consider is, is it a brand new site, or is it a more established site? If it is a brand new site, it is really up to you. You play around with it in your head. Should I go with RedShoes or www.RedShoes.com? But if it is a more established site and you have a lot of incoming links, you have some things to consider. So, some ways to decide if you should use a www prefix in your subdomain or not, first what subdomain has more links coming into it? Now a good way to determine this is using Open Site Explorer. You can type in each version into the search query and see which one has more incoming links, which one has more domain authority, and pick the one that is more powerful and redirect the other one to reflect that.

Another way to see is what is the website already ranking for? Now a good way to do this is to just type in your brand name into a Google search box. Example, let's say you're Adobe, so you type "Adobe" into the search box. What comes up in Google search? Is it www.Adobe or just Adobe.com. That's a good way to see what you're already ranking for, and you might want to chose that all things being equal.

Finally, this doesn't really determine which one you want to chose, but you might want to look in Google Webmaster Tools and chose your preference. There is a preference in there, set my preferred domain as www or non-www. If you are taking on a new client, you might want to check in their Webmaster Tools to see what that is already set for.

Number two. "I has all the 404s, what now?" Now, first off, that's not how our customers talk, except for maybe a couple of them and we love those customers. But the question is, what do we do about 404s? We get this question all the time, every single week. Well, the most important thing you want to do when dealing with 404s is make sure you know where they are coming from. There are many ways to find the source of 404s.

The idea is you have these incoming links. They are coming into your website or they are internal links, and the pages just aren't there. So one thing you can do, if you have important 404s, the most important 404s you want to fix, is look in Open Site Explorer top pages. It is a tab in Open Site Explorer. You look. These are the pages with the most domain authority coming into them from different sources. If any of those are 404ing, those are probably a priority that you want to address.

Other ways of finding 404s, at least within SEOmoz, is using the web app. If you are running a campaign and it will list 404s in your list of issues, you can actually export your CSV and find the referral link to those. It's a new feature we just added just last week.

Other ways of finding 404s, you can look in Google Webmaster Tools again. They will sometimes list the source of 404s. A great tool that a lot of webmasters know about, Xenu Link Sleuth. It runs on your desktop. It's a free program. You run it and it just gives you lots of fun data about all the broken links on your site and you can make site maps. It's really exciting.

But then, after you know where the 404s are coming from, what do you do to fix the problem? Well, the most obvious thing you can do is fix the source link. If you have a link coming in pointing to a page that doesn't exists, maybe you can reach out to that webmaster and get him to link to the right page. Or if it is on your website, just simply fix it.

But what if you can't control those external links coming in, or you have hundreds of links on your website and they're all broken and it's just too much to fix? Well, in that case, why not just fix the page? You can create a page where the 404 is supposed to be and redirect it, or create a page with all new content. These are really common solutions and will help you take advantage of all that page juice and authority coming into your page.

Third question, "My links aren't indexed." This is a question we get all the time, especially when people are looking at Open Site Explorer, they're looking at Linkscape data, or Google. "I have these links. Why aren't they in the index?" It's not just a problem with SEOmoz. It's Yahoo, it's Google. A perfect example that we hear all the time is, "I built a link. I am in the Better Business Bureau, but you're not showing my link. Google isn't indexing my link."

Well, there are three real primary reasons that this will happen that we address all the time. The first problem is the link is buried in deep layers of navigation. The Better Business Bureau is a perfect example. Huge site, lots of domain authority, right? Dr. Pete wrote a post about this recently, about finding links under lots of deep navigation. If it is buried, if you have to go like 15 layers down to find the link, a search engine might not go that far down no matter how much domain authority there is. If this is your own site that links aren't getting indexed, you might want to put those links a little higher, have a flat architecture with maybe more links, more categories, so that you can get to that link a little faster. A general rule of thumb is, if it is an important link, you want to have it two steps away from the home page. Skip, skip, and search engines are going to be more likely to find that link.

The second common problem we see is very few or low authority links linking into that page. Again, going back to the Better Business Bureau, take a look at some of those links, and sometimes we find there is only one link coming into that page and that's from the Better Business Bureau. If you want search engines to discover your links, you need to build high authority links coming into those, and by high authority I mean links with high domain authority or Moz rank coming in.

Third, you want to think about your link quality. Imagine two different pages, one page all things being equal has three links on it and you know your link is the middle link and it is really clickable. People are going to want to click that link. The second page has 250 links on it, and your link is the bottom in the footer somewhere. If you were a human, which link would you want to click on? Well, obviously, you'd click on the first page. That is the way search engines sort of think. So when you are building links or you are looking at links coming in, use the "would a human click on it" question. If a human would click on it, it is more likely that a search engine will find the link. But if a human probably wouldn't click on it, then the link may not be indexed.

That's all I have for now. We're going to have Aaron talk about a couple more questions in just a minute.

Aaron: Hi, I am Aaron, and I am with the SEOmoz Help Team as well. You saw me earlier. Cyrus introduced me. I would love to talk to you about a few more questions that we get asked a lot over on the SEOmoz Help Team.

First off, why is only one page getting crawled? I see this a lot with the web app. I also see it with Google and other search engines. I am going to go through all the different reasons that that might be happening. If you see something else though, feel free to shoot us an e-mail. Remember that all of these questions are regarding issues or other things that might crop up with the web app or the site or tools. They are definitely SEO related, but we don't answer SEO questions as a general rule over in the Help Team. If you see this in the web app, definitely send us a message. But if you think it is an SEO related question, definitely visit the Pro Q&A.

First off, one thing that we see a lot is robots.txt is overblocking a lot of crawlers, including Roger. Probably not explicitly Roger, but we do see robots.txt blocking. So we might just crawl the homepage and that's it. Another thing that might be happening is the homepage is www or not www as Cyrus talked about earlier. The homepage is www, but all of the links going off of the homepage would actually be to non-www pages. So, you'd end up with one page crawled because there is only one page in that subdomain in the www or whatever subdomain that you're using in the web app.

Another thing involves links. There are a lot of issues that we see with links. Sometimes there are no links on the homepage. Just none. So we have nothing to crawl, and obviously, that would be the reason why we're not seeing other pages in the subdomain. If we can't see it, Google can't see it. Other search engines won't be able to see it.

Another thing is having links that are only in JavaScript or Ajax. That can be a problem for our crawler, because we can't always access those, and sometimes search engines have problems with those too. But generally, for our web app, we like to see links in the standard HTML format.

Another problem is that the homepage might redirect. You might have a 301 or a 302 redirect going to another, maybe a different subdomain or any other URL. That can be a problem for our crawler because we'll get one page and we'll let you know that it is actually a redirect. There is nothing else for us to crawl there. So, if you get that issue, you'll probably see a bar that says 301 redirect just for one page. That would indicate that that is the problem.

Another problem is we see sites that are in all Flash. This doesn't happen as often any more, but sometimes people will make their sites all Flash, especially small businesses. They can look really good, but they are really, really hard to crawl. Search engines are getting better at this, but our crawler at the moment can't crawl them unfortunately. Usability-wise, you might want to reconsider having your site in something more accessible.

Finally, we do see sites that give a 404 code, but it actually has content. This can happen on your homepage. So we'll actually go to the homepage. We see content. It's telling us all about your business or service, but then we look at the http access code and it is 404. So, what you need to do here is go to another tool. We really like using the Moz Bar to find this out. Look at what the code is. If you see a 404, you're going to need to change that http status code to a 200, or if you need to redirect, change it to a redirect. But lots of times, we'll see it as a 404 and that's no good, because then everyone thinks that you don't exist and that's no good. Not for SEO. Not for anyone really.

Another big question that we get lots of questions about is how does on page reporting work? That's a feature of the web app. It is a really cool feature to help you identify low hanging fruit, see where your URLs are for certain keywords. But it can be kind of confusing at first, and it might give you results that you weren't expecting.

For instance, if you add a bunch of keywords such as cats, cat beds, cat coats, all sorts of cat accessories, that's all your keywords, we will take each one of those keywords, find the highest ranked URL in whatever search engine you are using in the web app, and we will let you know where you are ranking for that keyword. It might turn out that cat coats, I don't think I am ranking anywhere for that, but I am actually ranking at TheKittyHood.com/cats. So, if you find out that you're ranking there, even if you didn't intend for that ranking, it is kind of low hanging fruit. That's great. You're ranking for something you didn't even know you were. However, we will also grade that URL for that keyword and let you know how you are doing in terms of on page SEO. In this case, cat cats is not well optimized for /cats, so we give you some suggestions about how to better optimize that URL for that keyword. You might want to add more information about cat coats for instance. That might bring your grade up if you follow our instructions to a B or an A, and consequently instead of having this low hanging fruit that is rankled 37, you might end up being able to push it up to the first page or something higher than 37, since you'll actually start targeting for that keyword. Unexpected results, but very, very favorable.

Finally, number six, the last question that we get a lot of that I thought we might want to touch on is how do I change my profile picture? I know, I know, we all have beautiful pictures of ourselves. I have changed mine several times, not that I am beautiful. I just can never find one that is. The main thing you have to do is go to seomoz.org/users/profile. You can do that from clicking up here and then going to the drop down and saying edit profile or view profile. Then you click the silver edit button that shows up on that page. Then you click the silver edit photo button at the left. Then you click the silver upload button. It is all there on that page, that settings page for your user profile, the public profile. It lets you know, oh you actually need to complete all of these things in order to get extra Moz points. Adding a photograph is a great way to do that. It is really easy. You'll start having an identity on our site. People will love to see your face. I know I sure will.

Thank you for checking this out. I hope this helps some of our customers and helps you rethink some of your SEO if you're using our web app, our tools, or just generally out there on the Net.

See you next time on Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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West Wing Week: "Punching Above Your Weight"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, March 18, 2011

West Wing Week: "Punching Above Your Weight"

West Wing Week is your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This week, Education Month continued, with President Obama asking Congress to fix No Child Left Behind before the beginning of the coming school year. The President also updated the American people on relief efforts in Japan and pledges continued support. The Prime Minister of Denmark, Taoiseach of Ireland, and the Chicago Blackhawks also stopped by.

Watch the video.

SEOptimise

Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes & Tweets?

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 03:06 AM PDT

The short answer, yes.

Recently I decided to run an experiment to find out how Google was treating social signals – so I set up a brand new domain (http://www.yogamatcompare.com) with 0 backlinks and started acquiring likes and tweets to the domain. Today, just a week after registering the domain, the site ranks for 'Indian Yoga Mats' 'Cheap Yoga Mats' 'Yoga Mat Compare' 'Luxury Yoga Mats' and many other keywords, still with not a single backlink (time stamped proof of 0 backlinks here, and here).

Here is a brief timeline and summary of my activity, and number of social signals, with rankings in the table that follows.

Date + Time	Activity	Indexed?	# of Likes	# of Tweets
9/3/2011	Bought domain & set up website	No	0	0
12/3/2011 11am	Acquired first round of ‘likes’	No	35	0
12/3/2011 2pm	Bullied 5 more friends into liking the domain	Yes	40	0
13/3/2011 1pm	Bought 70 likes	Yes	90	0
13/3/2011 6pm	Tweeted the site from @marcus_seo	Yes	110	1
14/3/2011 7pm	Tweeted the site from 3x new Twitter accounts	Yes	114	4
15/3/2011 2pm	Shared link on 3x yoga-related Facebook Pages	Yes	117	4
16/3/2011 11pm	Shared link on 1x yoga-related Facebook Page	Yes	118	4

Rankings (Google.com)

	Yoga Mat Compare	Yogamatc ompare.com	Yoga Mat	Cheap Yoga Mats	Luxury Yoga Mats	Indian Yoga Mats
9/3/2011	-	-	-	-	-	-
12/3/2011 11am	-	-	-	-	-	-
12/3/2011 2pm	-	#1	-	-	-	-
13/3/2011 1pm	-	#1	-	-	-	-
13/3/2011 6pm	#55	#1	-	-	-	-
14/3/2011 7pm	#51	#1	-	-	-	-
15/32011 8am	#9	#1	-	-	-	-
15/3/2011 2pm	#9	#1	-	-	-	-
16/3/2011 11pm	#9	#1	-	#156	#62	#106

Analysis

The first thing that is blindingly obvious is that it took under 3 hours for the website to become indexed after receiving the first round of likes – I am currently testing several other domains and monitoring this duration more closely, but I found that rather impressive.
Secondly, you can see a progressive increase in not only rankings but the variety of keywords ranking, as you would likely see in a normal link building campaign, which suggests that if I were to carry on acquiring more and more likes and tweets I could potentially attain competitive rankings for these keywords (although that is not proven, and in my opinion would not be the most effective method of achieving competitive rankings).
So if there was still any doubt over whether Google uses social signals in their search algorithm, mystery solved – they most certainly do. As for Bing and Yahoo, the test domain is not even indexed yet, suggesting that those search engines are not using social signals quite as strongly as Google are just yet.

My Thoughts:

It is my firm personal opinion that within the next two to three years Google will evolve to return results almost entirely based around our personal social graphs. Personalised Search, social signals as a ranking factor, real-time search results and the recent 'who shared this' snippets in search results have all been steps towards this. With that in mind, it does not surprise me that Google are using social signals as a ranking factor, as the data that can potentially be captured in a 'social' link contains a great deal of contextual information about the person who posted it that a standard 'link-building link' does not.
How does this affect SEO? Right this moment I think it's safe to assume that acquiring likes, tweets and other social signals is a fairly good strategy for not only improving indexation but also rankings.

What do you think?