sâmbătă, 13 iunie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Illinois Politicians Play Chicken With Taxpayers Over Budget

Posted: 13 Jun 2015 12:23 PM PDT

In Illinois, nothing happens in the legislature unless House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton give the green light for legislation to pass.

Both Madigan and Cullerton want massive tax hikes and both are beholden to unions. Badly needed legislation on pension reform, municipal bankruptcy laws, and workers' comp is currently held up in the legislature awaiting action.

Madigan wants tax hikes before any reforms pass. Of course if there are tax hikes, there will not be reform.

These cartoons by Eric Allie for the Illinois Policy Institute adequately depict the current setup.

Budget Balancing Act

Playing Chicken With Taxpayers

Signup for the Illinois Policy Institute Newsletter including cartoons.

Budget Impasse

Madigan and Cullerton passed an Illinois budget that is $3 billion in the hole. Given Illinois budgets always contain sleight-of-hand tricks and overly optimistic revenue assumptions, one can be sure the real deficit is higher.

Governor Rauner rightfully refused to sign the budget. Technically it would be unconstitutional to do so. The Illinois constitution requires a balanced budget. It never is of course, but this time no one even pretended it was balanced.

Madigan is playing a game of chicken with Rauner as funding for schools will dry up in August unless a budget is passed.

Legislators don't care because they passed a continuing resolution allowing them to be paid without a budget.

Whom to Blame?

The Chicago Tribune writer Dennis Byrne hits the nail smack on the head with Blame Rauner? Come on.

Mostly blame House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton (both Democrats) and their deep-pocket contributors, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and other public employee unions. Their incessant and greedy demands for more, more and more have forced government to borrow more, more and more to a point approaching bankruptcy.

Champions of the middle class, downtrodden and huddled masses? Hardly. These very Democrats are hypocritically robbing the schools, hospitals and social service providers of billions and billions of dollars that must instead go into pensions and debt service.

For example: An astonishing quarter of every dollar that Chicago earns from taxes, grants, fines and fees goes to pay for employee pensions, according to Marc Joffe, a bond market analyst and principal consultant at Public Sector Credit Solutions.

On the state level, pension and interest payments gobble up 10 percent of all revenues, according to Joffe. Those billions could have gone a long way to help the most needy.

The unions will try to sell the idea that they aren't responsible for the more than $100 billion that's owed to the pension funds. They'll argue that if the government had not raided the funds to pay for normal operations, we wouldn't be facing this crisis.

In a way that's true, but here's the rub. First, the pensions are unreasonably generous; if they were more realistic, more reflective of what is normal in the private sector, we wouldn't have had to put so much money in the funds to begin with.

Second, without those diversions, the state would have spent less on schools, health and other essential services. Teachers unions always complain that not enough money is being spent on schools; but without the diversions, the schools would have had received even less. Are the teachers saying that the money should have gone first to their pensions and not the schools?

The public employee unions act as if the fault lies elsewhere. But when the money was being diverted into operations instead of pensions, where were the union leaders? They were tossing union money (i.e., the members' money) to those very same politicians, mostly Democrats, who were raiding the pension funds for other purposes. And passing inflated budgets that forced them to borrow.

Bingo!
Unless reform comes first, the Illinois legislature will squander the money just as it has always done.

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Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

SEO Myths Busted – One week on

Posted: 11 Jun 2015 04:40 AM PDT

Myths. They’re everywhere, and they range from those that crop up in everyday life (cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis) to the downright odd (Tom Jones insured his chest hair for $7 million). Try as we may we can’t escape these falsehoods, and unfortunately it’s no different in the world of digital marketing.

myth
1. A widely held but false belief or idea:
‘keyword research is all about choosing big volume keywords‘

Last week we launched our new resource: ‘SEO Myths Busted by the Experts & You!‘, aimed at creating a space where we can collate all the industry myths we discover, and attempt to debunk them once and for all.

So, one week on, I wanted to explain the reasons behind the piece, as well as its hopefully exciting future!

The inspiration

We had the idea of creating content around SEO myths a while ago, and the inspiration for the piece originated from the website uxmyths.com, which presents 34 myths, as well as explanations for why each of the statements are in fact just myths. The site does a great job of simply presenting these myths to the user, and I personally found them to be a great learning resource. This got me thinking.

As the saying goes, “practice what you preach”, so instead of creating just another blog post, or putting together another ebook, we decided to approach the task of myth busting in a whole new format. Instead of just using our own knowledge, we decided to get in contact with a number of industry experts, and ask them for their own SEO myths – who better to ask than our peers with experienced minds!

Inspiration for the design came from the posters that were designed and created for the UX Myths project. The main poster presented each myth in different sized boxes, and each myth has its own poster, that includes explanatory copy. So we took the inspiration of the core poster, and applied it to our design, in turn working in our own interactive features, such as the more popular myth being in the bigger box, as well as the added Twitter handle, image, and total share count.

Of course, the overarching inspiration for this whole project is to share this curated expert knowledge with the rest of the industry, with the hope that we can start putting these myths to bed, or at least educate those just starting out in SEO.

Future wise, we don’t want to give away too much, but we’re certain that you’ll be seeing more of our SEO myths project. We will also be releasing some more myths on the page soon and hopefully on a fairly regular basis, as well as the ability to download each myth as an awesome wallpaper for your computer, or even your office wall, so keep your eyes peeled!

Fancy seeing your own myth on our board?

If you feel you have a myth that you want to share with the community, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email on bobby [at] white.net. As you may have seen from the piece, we’re looking for roughly 120 words to help put your myth to bed. We can’t guarantee that every myth will make it up to our board, but if we like it we’ll get in touch with you.

Come and join the conversation over on Twitter with @whitedotnet, or myself, @bobbyjmcgill. Alternatively leave a comment in the box below; we’d love to hear what you think of our SEO myths project, or on a myth that grinds your gears!

The post SEO Myths Busted – One week on appeared first on White.net.

7 Ways You Might Have Botched Your Rel=Canonical Implementation

Posted: 28 May 2015 08:13 AM PDT

I confess: when I’m carrying out a technical audit on a website I basically act like I’m running a police investigation. I know that there will be mysteries to solve, and it’s my job to find the clues that will lead me in the right direction.

And with the right tools in hand, I’ll usually sniff something out when I get to the strange occurrences of rel=canonical.

What is rel=canonical?

In a nutshell, rel=canonical is a way to clean up duplicate URLs on a website. I know what you’re thinking, it would be much easier if duplicate content just didn’t exist at all. This would make my job all sunshine, rainbows and flowers rather than the sweat and tears it generally involves, but this is the real world and duplicate content is sometimes unavoidable.

This is especially true when it comes to ecommerce sites which pose some of the most complex mysteries for SEO forces all across the nation. The way that many of these sites present information or products to users means that some pretty wacky things can happen to the URL – all designed to provide the most relevant results to users through the use of parameters.

Guides for beginners

Moz has a great guide on canonicalisation which I’d urge you to read if you’re new to the concept, as the purpose of this blog post is to guide you with proper implementation rather than a full explanation of what it is.

Alternatively you could shimmy on over to the blog of Matt Cutts; he wrote a post in 2009 called “Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes” which is just as relevant today as it was back then.

Make sure to revisit this post when you’re familiar with the topic as you’ll find it much more valuable then!

Rel=canonical: The good, the bad and the ugly

If I’ve captured the attention of your inner geek, sit back as I share some of my recommendations for rel=canonical best practice. The reality is that I’ve seen lots of cases recently where issues have gone undetected for far too long, and I want you to be able to check that you’re not being taken for a ride by your own website.

The source of duplicate content

The first thing you’re going to need to do is identify the culprits that are causing duplicate content. My preferred sidekick for this job is the ever-dependable Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

Once you have performed a crawl, you should be able to use the overview report on the right-hand side of the tool to give you a quick insight into where issues might be occurring. Is it showing results for duplicate page titles, URI or meta descriptions? If so, these may indicate where there are duplicate pages which all share the same content and meta data. Use this a starting point for deeper investigations by manually visiting each version and checking out the source code of each.

Scroll down to the ‘Directives’ folder to see what is being acknowledged by the tool in terms of canonicalisation for more quick hints. Although it’s from the main ‘Directives’ tab in the top navigation where you can really start drilling down into individual issues. At this point you may start to spot strange occurrences that require a bit of manual investigation. Or a lot.

But then it does help to know what you’re actually looking for. Here are the common causes for why multiple URLs can load the same content:

A product has dynamic URLs as a result of user search preference or user session
Your blog automatically saves multiple URLs when you publish the same post in multiple sections
Your server is configured to serve the same content for the www / non-www subdomain or the http/s protocol

Example 1 – a product has dynamic URLs as a result of user search preference or user session

Example 2 – the blog automatically saves multiple URLs when you publish the same post in multiple sections

Example 3 – the server is configured to serve the same content for the www / non-www subdomain or the http/s protocol

Overcoming duplicate content issues

When these issues occur, it’s important to choose a preferred URL for indexation by search engines. This is where the rel=canonical link comes in.

As a side note, there are other ways you can do this, including using 301 redirects, indicating how search engines should handle dynamic parameters, etc. but this is deserves a post of its own, something I’ll come back to in the near future.

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a great summary of rel=canonical:

“Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines about your preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It's supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you'd like displayed in search results.”

The whole purpose of indicating a preferred URL with the rel=canonical link element is so that search engines are more likely to show users your chosen URL structure as opposed to any duplicates. It is important to remember that rel=canonical elements can be ignored, especially when there are conflicting instructions, making accurate implementation all the more important.

Implementation

Check out this example from the Google Webmaster Central blog; it sums up correct implementation pretty well:

Suppose you want https://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/ to be the preferred URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content. You can indicate this to search engines as follows:

Mark up the canonical page and any other variants with a rel=”canonical” link element.

Add a <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of these pages:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome” />

Have you got rel=canonical implementation right?

Whilst the concept of rel=canonical is easy enough to understand, it’s the implementation that can cause strange occurrences that require investigation (and probably a headache or two along the way).

There are some common mistakes that webmasters and SEOs make when it comes to rel=canonical, although there are some excellent blog posts and guides out there already which may prove immensely helpful for you. Start off with 5 common mistakes with rel=canonical from the Webmaster Central Blog, and then read through Yoast’s rel=canonical: what it is and how (not) to use it.

To help you avoid the common mistakes, I’ve put together a helpful list of 7 things you should remember when implementing rel=canonical. You can refer back to this blog post, or grab the PDF version here: PDF of rel=canonical guide

7 Things To Remember When Implementing Rel=Canonical

Why are these considerations important?

Specify only one rel=canonical link per URL

When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored! This can occur with some SEO plugins that insert a default rel=canonical link, so be sure to understand what plugins you have installed and how they behave.

Use an absolute URL

It’s possible to insert a relative URL into the <link> tag, but this almost certainly won’t do what you want it to. A relative URL includes a path that is “relative” to the current page. This means you need to add in the lot, including http:// (or https://).

Don’t canonicalise a paginated archive to page one

You will risk some content not being indexed if you specify that page-one is the preference. Put it this way, are the other pages duplicates of page one? It’s highly unlikely.

Add rel=canonical link to the <head> of the HTML document

Rel=canonical designations in the <body> are disregarded, so it’s best to include the tag as early as possible in the <head>.

Watch out for self-referencing conflicts

If your site can load on both http and https versions, check that you don’t have an automatically generated self-referencing rel=canonical. This could mean that both https://www.example.com/red-dresses and http://www.example.com/red-dresses are denoted as the preference.

Rel=canonical specified link should work, so no 404s!

It’s fairly obvious that you want the search engines to index URLs that provide actual value and a positive experience to users…

Use trailing slash/non trailing slash preference consistently

It helps if you pick a preference for use across the site to minimise the chances of referencing a URL in this way; ensure it is included in all internal links and within the rel=canonical tag element.

Bonus: Twitter and Facebook honour your rel=canonical links

This is something I learned from the Yoast blog post referenced above. He has put it quite eloquently, so I’ve included it here for your reference:

“If you share a URL on Facebook that has a canonical pointing elsewhere, Facebook will share the details from the canonical URL. In fact, if you add a like button on a page that has a canonical pointing elsewhere, it will show the like count for the canonical URL, not for the current URL. Twitter works in the same way.”

Now it’s your turn to get on the case and investigate whether your own site has any of these issues with rel=canonical. I’d love to hear if you uncover any hidden culprits, and I’m also happy to put on my investigator hat to answer any questions you may have on the topic too – please leave me a comment below or get in touch through Twitter.

Hopefully we can then utter a collective “case closed”, and move our focus to other technical issues instead!

The post 7 Ways You Might Have Botched Your Rel=Canonical Implementation appeared first on White.net.