Central Perk: 24 iun. 2011

vineri, 24 iunie 2011

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 10:19 AM PDT

This is the second part of a two-part interactive map series on jobs. For part one, please see Interactive Map: Employment History Since 2001 by Job Type (Healthcare, Education, Mining, Construction, Finance, Real Estate, etc)

Part two has a focus on job creation and losses during the economic recovery. Please consider the following interactive map, using Tableau Software, with data courtesy of Economic Modeling Specialists.

This interactive map may take a bit to load. Please give it time on a slow connection.

Note on Economic Modeling Data

"Our data is used by many to research and understand regional employment trends and dynamics. It's composed of comprehensive information on industries, occupations, demographics — as well as things like occupational skills, education, training, and even the names and size of companies in your region broken down by industry.

To do this we link nearly 90 data sources — from federal sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics to state and private sources.

If you've ever worked with this sort of information, you know it can be hard to collect and present. It's also often incomplete and outdated. So we organize the data, bring it up to date, and build software and reports around it so you can put it to use more quickly and effectively"

Jobs Gained or Lost Since Dec 31, 2007
Industry	2008	2009	2010	2011
Health Care	461,860	792,679	1,023,907	1,278,794
Finance & Insurance	323,802	629,082	490,384	444,530
Mining & Oil	195,813	345,116	337,917	422,752
Educational Services	121,337	195,899	236,766	295,498
Government	358,591	451,680	398,853	90,393
Arts & Entertainment	92,418	108,263	77,181	65,855
Management	60,985	25,371	16,323	26,615
Utilities	13,019	20,773	13,771	11,275
Professional	203,493	-107,607	-164,853	-39,124
Agriculture & Forestry	-18,909	-26,033	-33,643	-71,928
Other Services	-30,456	-221,109	-246,875	-82,177
Food & Lodging	71,681	-242,538	-273,658	-145,099
Information	-30,863	-203,185	-299,866	-331,269
Real Estate	-76,068	-232,452	-335,391	-359,874
Transportation	-107,538	-501,697	-559,415	-486,346
Admin & Support	-389,951	-1,226,173	-1,097,484	-774,404
Retail & Wholesale	-428,934	-1,759,253	-1,977,146	-1,854,109
Manufacturing	-478,023	-2,072,959	-2,415,322	-2,290,390
Construction	-612,184	-1,955,402	-2,468,184	-2,519,538
Totals	-269,927	-5,979,545	-7,276,735	-6,318,546

Jobs Gained or Lost vs. Year Ago
Industry	2008	2009	2010	2011
Totals	-269,927	-5,709,618	-1,297,190	958,189
Admin & Support	-389,951	-836,222	128,689	323,080
Health Care	461,860	330,819	231,228	254,887
Other Services	-30,456	-190,653	-25,766	164,698
Food & Lodging	71,681	-314,219	-31,120	128,559
Professional	203,493	-311,100	-57,246	125,729
Manufacturing	-478,023	-1,594,936	-342,363	124,932
Retail & Wholesale	-428,934	-1,330,319	-217,893	123,037
Mining & Oil	195,813	149,303	-7,199	84,835
Transportation	-107,538	-394,159	-57,718	73,069
Educational Services	121,337	74,562	40,867	58,732
Management	60,985	-35,614	-9,048	10,292
Utilities	13,019	7,754	-7,002	-2,496
Arts & Entertainment	92,418	15,845	-31,082	-11,326
Real Estate	-76,068	-156,384	-102,939	-24,483
Information	-30,863	-172,322	-96,681	-31,403
Agriculture & Forestry	-18,909	-7,124	-7,610	-38,285
Finance & Insurance	323,802	305,280	-138,698	-45,854
Construction	-612,184	-1,343,218	-512,782	-51,354
Government	358,591	93,089	-52,827	-308,460

Job Table Notes

Data is as of May 31, 2011
2011 comparison is to December 31, 2010
Job gains in 2011 are higher than reported by the BLS. I see no reason to believe the BLS.
Since December 2007, the economy has lost 6,318,546 jobs
In 2011, the big job gainer is not healthcare but "administration"
Healthcare and Education are the two bright spots throughout the recession.

The 6.3 million jobs lost since the beginning of 2008 is deceptively low. The Economy should have been gaining 1.8 milling jobs a year, not losing jobs. In other words, the economy is down 10 to 12 million jobs from where it should be.

Thanks to Ross Perez at Tableau Software and also to Economic Modeling Specialists for this post.

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

Italian Bank Stocks Plunge, Trading Suspended; Juncker Principle in Action

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 07:13 AM PDT

Italy, the big elephant in the room that the EU does not even see yet, may be waking up. Please consider, Italian Banks Plunge on Debt Concern

Italian banks slumped in Milan trading amid concern the European debt crisis may spread just as lenders face scrutiny from regulators over capital levels.

UniCredit SpA (UCG), Italy's biggest bank, and Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (ISP), the second-largest, led lenders lower, tumbling as much as 8.9 percent and 7.2 percent respectively. Both stocks were briefly suspended after breaching limits on intraday swings. Italian 10-year bonds fell, increasing the additional yield investors demand to hold the securities instead of benchmark German bunds to the most since the euro was introduced in 1999.

"Contagion fears keep re-emerging as long as credible, lasting solutions in Greece are pending," said Christian Weber, a Munich-based strategist at UniCredit.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said today the country's banks are "well capitalized." Speaking at a summit of European leaders in Brussels, Berlusconi said he wasn't worried about Moody's comments about the country's banks.

The European Banking Authority yesterday updated its stress tests to take into account extra trading losses that banks may face on their holdings of sovereign debt from crisis-hit European Union countries including Greece.

Italian banks are also seeking to raise money from investors to bolster capital. Unione di Banche Italiane ScpA (UBI), Italy's fourth-biggest bank, fell as much as 5 percent to 3.628 euros. The lender may struggle to lure buyers to its 1 billion- euro ($1.4 billion) rights offering, which closes today. The bank is offering investors eight new shares at 3.808 euros for every 21 held.

Juncker Principle in Action

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi appears to be following the "Juncker Principle".

Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg PM and Head Euro-Zone Finance Minister says "When it becomes serious, you have to lie".

Italian banks are in a scramble to raise capital even though the prime minister assures us that its banks are "well capitalized."

Actions speak louder than lies.

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

What Changed? Nothing; Bond Market Displays Big Yawn

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 04:51 AM PDT

Those watching the stock market ramp yesterday might be wondering if something meaningful had happened. Nothing did. The EU agreed to give Greece more money, but everyone knew they would anyway.

Let's take a look at sovereign bond spreads to see what they think about the non-news.

10-Year Debt Greece - Yield 16.8%

10-Year Debt Spain - Yield 5.6%

10-Year Debt Ireland - Yield 11.89%

10-Year Debt Portugal - Yield 11.37%

10-Year Debt Italy - Yield 4.94%

In case of differences between charts and listed values, go with listed values. Bloomberg interactive charts are delayed. Listed values are as of 6:40 AM Central 2011-06-24.

Big Yawn

The stock market reacted as if there was news, the bond market put out the big yawn. Greek yields came down slightly, but that is simply reflective of the can-kicking exercise.

Spanish yields essentially did nothing, while Irish and Portuguese yields hit new highs.

Spain and Italy are poised to smack Trichet, the ECB, EU, and the IMF the smack across the face and it's just a matter of time before they do. Meanwhile the action in Irish and Portuguese bonds shows the immense stress did not go away.

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

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 23 Jun 2011 02:05 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

It's here! Google has released Panda update 2.2, just as Matt Cutts said they would at SMX Advanced here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This time around, Google has - among other things - improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are changes to Google's algorithm and are not merely manual reviews of sites in the index, so there is room for error (causing devastation for many legitimate webmasters and SEOs).

A lot of people ask what parts of their existing SEO practice they can modify and emphasize to recover from the blow, but alas, it's not that simple. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses how the Panda updates work and, more importantly, how Panda has fundamentally changed the best practices for SEO. Have you been Panda-abused? Do you have any tips for recuperating? Let us know in the comments!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're talking about the very exciting, very interesting, very controversial Google Panda update.

Panda, also known as Farmer, was this update that Google came out with in March of this year, of 2011, that rejiggered a bunch of search results and pushed a lot of websites down in the rankings, pushed some websites up in the rankings, and people have been concerned about it ever since. It has actually had several updates and new versions of that implementation and algorithm come out. A lot of people have all these questions like, "Ah, what's going on around Panda?" There have been some great blog posts on SEOmoz talking about some of the technical aspects. But I want to discuss in this Whiteboard Friday some of the philosophical and theoretical aspects and how Google Panda really changes the way a lot of us need to approach SEO.

So let's start with a little bit of Panda history. Google employs an engineer named Navneet Panda. The guy has done some awesome work. In fact, he was part of a patent application that Bill Slawski looked into where he found a great way to scale some machine learning algorithms. Now, machine learning algorithms, as you might be aware, are very computationally expensive and they take a long time to run, particularly if you have extremely large data sets, both of inputs and of outputs. If you want, you can research machine learning. It is an interesting fun tactic that computer scientists use and programmers use to find solutions to problems. But basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y. So that was quite nice. Thanks to Navneet, right now they can scale up this machine learning.

What Google can do based on that is take a bunch of sites that people like more and a bunch of sites that people like less, and when I say like, what I mean is essentially what the quality raters, Google's quality raters, tell them this site is very enjoyable. This is a good site. I'd like to see this high in the search results. Versus things where the quality raters say, "I don't like to see this." Google can say, "Hey, you know what? We can take the intelligence of this quality rating panel and scale it using this machine learning process."

Here's how it works. Basically, the idea is that the quality raters tell Googlers what they like. They answer all these questions, and you can see Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts were interviewed by Wired Magazine. They talked about some of the things that were asked of these quality raters, like, "Would you trust this site with your credit card? Would you trust the medical information that this site gives you with your children? Do you think the design of this site is good?" All sorts of questions around the site's trustworthiness, credibility, quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the difference.

The sites that people like more, they put in one group. The sites that people like less, they put in another group. Then they look at tons of metrics. All these different metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that many SEOs suspect come from user and usage data metrics, which Google has not historically used as heavily. But they think that they use those in a machine learning process to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. Find the ones that people like more and the ones that people like less. Downgrade the ones they like less. Upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update.

So, Panda kind of means something new and different for SEO. As SEOs, for a long time you've been doing the same kind of classic things. You've been building good content, making it accessible to search engines, doing good keyword research, putting those keywords in there, and then trying to get some links to it. But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, "What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?" Now we kind of have to think about that.

It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda. The things that they are measuring is not, oh, these sites have better links than these sites. Some of these sites, in fact, have much better links than these sites. Some of these sites have what you and I might regard, as SEOs, as better content, more unique, robust, quality content, and yet, people, quality raters in particular, like them less or the things, the signals that predict that quality raters like those sites less are present in those types of sites.

Let's talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect. Now, it has a first order effect impact, a primary impact. If you can make your design absolutely beautiful, versus something like this where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot. The content isn't all in one page. You cannot view it in that single page format. Boy, the content blocks themselves aren't that fun to read, even if it is not advertising that's surrounding them, even if it is just internal messaging or the graphics don't look very good. The site design feels like it was way back in the 1990s. All that stuff will impact the ability of this page, this site to perform. And don't forget, Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site. So you should try and block those for us or take them down. Wow. Crazy, right? That's what a machine learning algorithm, like Panda, will do. It will predicatively say, "Hey, you know what? We're seeing these features here, these elements, push this guy down."

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, "Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content." Not enough. Sorry. It's just not enough. There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough when it comes to content. If you say, "Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is." You think to yourself, "Hey, I have good unique content." No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I am like, "God, not only is this well written, it's kind of funny. It's humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It's got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don't care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I'd be tweeting about this, I'd share it. I'd send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page." That's what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that's decent. That's pretty good. If they're browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, "Ew, I don't know if I want to get myself involved in that. They've got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I'm not going to get involved." Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.

They are going to be looking at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. Do lots of people from all around the world or all around your local region, your country, visit your website directly? They can measure this through Chrome. They can measure it through Android. They can measure it through the Google toolbar. They have all this user and usage metrics. They know where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on those pages. They know about what happens from the search results too. Do people click from a result and then go right back to the search results and perform another search? Clearly, they were unhappy with that. They can take all these metrics and put them into the machine learning algorithm and then have Panda essentially recalculate. This why you see essentially Google doesn't issue updates every day or every week. It is about every 30 or 40 days that a new Panda update will come out because they are rejiggering all this stuff.

One of the things that people who get hit by Panda come up to me and say, "God, how are we ever going to get out of Panda? We've made all these changes. We haven't gotten out yet." I'm like, "Well, first off, you're not going to get out of it until they rejigger the results, and then there is no way that you are going to get out of it unless you change the metrics around your site." So if you go into your Analytics and you see that people are not spending longer on your pages, they are not enjoying them more, they are not sharing them more, they are not naturally linking to them more, your branded search traffic is not up, your direct type in traffic is not up, you see that none of these metrics are going up and yet you think you have somehow fixed the problems that Panda tries to solve for, you probably haven't.

I know this is frustrating. I know it's a tough issue. In fact, I think that there are sites that have been really unfairly hit. That sucks and they shouldn't be and Google needs to work on this. But I also know that I don't think Google is going to be making many changes. I think they are very happy with the way that Panda has gone from a search quality perspective and from a user happiness perspective. Their searchers are happier, and they are not seeing as much junk in the results. Google likes the way this is going. I think we are going to see more and more of this over time. It could even get more aggressive. I would urge you to work on this stuff, to optimize around these things, and to be ready for this new form of SEO.

Thanks everyone for watching. Look forward to some great comments, questions, feedback in the post. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Video: West Wing Week: "The Receding Tide"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, June 24, 2011

West Wing Week: "The Receding Tide"

Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, President Obama addressed the nation on his plan to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, delivering on a promise he made to the American people in December of 2009. The President also traveled Fort Drum to meet with soldiers and their families, welcomed young elected officials to the White House, and talked to mayors from across the country about job creation and economic growth.

Watch the video

SEO for Your Competition Graywolf's SEO Blog

SEO for Your Competition

Posted: 23 Jun 2011 10:00 AM PDT

In my opinion, SEO for your competition is one of the more underutilized tactics today. You can try to optimize for your competition’s company name, products, or even comparison searches. In this post, I’ll take you through the process and what to watch out for.

Expect whatever relationship you currently have to become much more adversarial than it is now …

Anyone who has done any work in the ORM (Online Reputation Management) space can tell you: until a negative article hits the newspapers or press, there usually isn’t a lot of competition for a company’s name. However, unless the company’s SEO is completely incompetent or the site is invisible to search engines, you will probably never outrank another company for their name. But what you can do is rank in the top ten and get a lot of clicks if your title is compelling enough. Example below:

There are a few points I should bring up at this point. Bear in mind that I’m not a lawyer and not qualified in any way to dispense legal advice. It’s not against the law or illegal to use another company’s name (even if it’s trademarked) on your page. For example, iPhone and Blackberry are both trademarked names; however, I can use them anytime I want. If someone has a legal team and wants to waste time, they can come after me, require that I put on the trademark symbol ™, and credit the trademark to its owner, but they can’t stop me from using it. Additionally, it’s not illegal to use another company’s trademark in your meta tags or titles as long as you aren’t intentionally causing confusion. So, when you word your titles and meta tags, use them in a clear fashion that allows reasonable users and the courts to understand that this is a comparison, not a misrepresentation. Second, a little corporate puffery on your behalf for your company probably isn’t a big deal. However, making false or misleading statements about someone else’s company could be slander or defamation, so choose your words wisely.

: AT&T iPhone vs Verizon iPhone page (click to enlarge)

OK, back to the SEO aspect. If you are going to try and rank for a product you don’t sell, creating a comparison page is an excellent way to convert that traffic. Show the aspects of your product/service and why they are better than the competition. As an example, here’s a page on the AT&T iPhone vs the Verizon iPhone.

This is one of the few SEO instances where putting text in graphics is a good idea. You can make the compelling conversion words or bullet points an image and keep the words for the engines in standard machine and human readable text format.

Another tactic is optimizing for + “sucks” phrases. If a customer is doing that type of search, they are looking to see if they are going to get screwed. That sort of customer is probably deep in the conversion funnel and doing last minute checks to make sure they aren’t making a mistake. Sucks pages are interesting from a legal perspective (again, bear in mind that I’m not a lawyer and not qualified to give legal advice). If you have a “sucks” page, and it represents an honest opinion or is an honest account of a transaction or purchase, it can be negative and still be legal. However, if it is fabricated or embellished with the intent of extorting, blackmailing, trademark-squatting, is slanderous, defamatory, or otherwise created with ill intent or in bad faith, you could find yourself on the losing end of a lawsuit. Sometimes asking something in the form of a question is legally safer than as a statement.

One last point to remember. Once you start to rank, it’s going to be pretty obvious to your competition who is doing it and why. Expect whatever relationship you currently have to become much more adversarial than it is now. Additionally, you should be prepared for others to start building pages around your company name, so you should have a thick skin and not mind a bit of bad karma …

What are the takeaways from this post:

Optimizing for your competition’s company or name or competing product brand names is usually a easy SERP to rank for.
Using the names of others isn’t illegal but be sure and properly attribute the trademark.
There is a difference between an honest criticism and slander and defamation. Know where the line is and avoid it.
Reviews or sucks websites for your competition are subject to higher level of scrutiny and should be honest, real, and truthful.
Do not create, fabricate, or embellish negative reviews.
Avoid making declarative negative statements; instead, use questions.

snippets generated using: SEOMofo Snippet Preview Tool, photo credit: Shutterstock, Photospin,

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