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joi, 14 august 2014

The President Speaks on Iraq and Ferguson, Missouri

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The President Speaks on Iraq and Ferguson, Missouri

This afternoon, President Obama updated the nation on two issues that he's been monitoring closely over the past several days -- America's military operations in Iraq, and the situation in Ferguson, Missouri.

The President first noted the progress the U.S. has made in carrying out targeted military operations in Iraq, saying that the situation on Mount Sinjar has "greatly improved and Americans should be very proud of our efforts." He then pivoted to the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, acknowledging the tragic shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown and the police clashes with protestors in the city.

"Now is the time for healing," the President said. "Now is the time for peace and calm on the streets of Ferguson. Now is the time for an open and transparent process to see that justice is done."

Watch the President's full statement here:

Is that Mind-Blowing Title Blowing Your Credibility? You Decide

Posted: 13 Aug 2014 05:18 PM PDT

Posted by Isla_McKetta

tantalus

What if I told you I could teach you to write the perfect headline? One that is so irresistible every person who sees it will click on it. You'd sign up immediately and maybe even promise me your firstborn.

But what if I then told you not one single person out of all the millions who will click on that headline will convert? And that you might lose all your credibility in the process. Would all the traffic generated by that "perfect" headline be worth it?

Help us solve a dispute

It isn't really that bad, but with all the emphasis lately on headline science and the curiosity gap, Trevor (your faithful editor) and I (a recovering copywriter) started talking about the importance of headlines and what their role should be in regards to content. I'm for clickability (as long as there is strong content to back the headline) and, if he has to choose, Trevor is for credibility (with an equal emphasis on quality of the eventual content).

credible vs clickable headlines

What's the purpose of a headline?

Back in the good ol' days, headlines were created to sell newspapers. Newsboys stood on street corners shouting the headlines in an attempt to hawk those newspapers. Headlines had to be enough of a tease to get readers interested but they had to be trustworthy enough to get a reader to buy again tomorrow. Competition for eyeballs was less fierce because a town only had so many newspapers, but paper cost money and editors were always happy to get a repeat customer.

Nowadays the competition for eyeballs feels even stiffer because it's hard to get noticed in the vast sea of the internet. It's easy to feel a little desperate. And it seems like the opportunity cost of turning away a customer is much lower than it was before. But aren't we doing content as a product? Does the quality of that product matter?

The forbidden secrets of clickable headlines

There's no arguing that headlines are important. In fact, at MozCon this year, Nathalie Nahai suggested an 80:20 ratio of energy spent on headline to copy. That might be taking things a bit far, but a bad (or even just boring) headline will tank your traffic. Here is some expert advice on writing headlines that convert:

Nahai advises that you take advantage of psychological trigger words like, "weird," "free," "incredible," and "secret" to create a sense of urgency in the reader. Can you possibly wait to read "Secret Ways Butter can Save Your Life"?
Use question headlines like "Can You Increase Your Sales by 45% in Only 5 Minutes a Day?" that get a reader asking themselves, "I dunno, can I?" and clicking to read more.
Key into the curiosity gap with a headline like "What Mother Should Have Told You about Banking. (And How Not Knowing is Costing You Friends.)" Ridiculous claim? Maybe, but this kind of headline gets a reader hooked on narrative and they have to click through to see how the story comes together.
And if you're looking for a formula for the best headlines ever, Nahai proposes the following:
Number/Trigger word + Adjective + Keyword + Promise = Killer Headline.

Many readers still (consciously or not) consider headlines a promise. So remember, as you fill the headline with hyperbole and only write eleven of the twelve tips you set out to write, there is a reader on the other end hoping butter really is good for them.

The headline danger zone

This is where headline science can get ugly. Because a lot of "perfect" titles simply do not have the quality or depth of content to back them.

Those types of headlines remind me of the Greek myth of Tantalus. For sharing the secrets of the gods with the common folk, Tantalus was condemned to spend eternity surrounded by food and drink that were forever out of his reach. Now, content is hardly the secrets of the gods, but are we tantalizing our customers with teasing headlines that will never satisfy?

buzzfeed headlines

For me, reading headlines on BuzzFeed and Upworthy and their ilk is like talking to the guy at the party with all those super wild anecdotes. He's entertaining, but I don't believe a word he says, soon wish he would shut up, and can't remember his name five seconds later. Maybe I don't believe in clickability as much as I thought…

So I turn to credible news sources for credible headlines.

washington post headlines

I'm having trouble deciding at this point if I'm more bothered by the headline at The Washington Post, the fact that they're covering that topic at all, or that they didn't really go for true clickbait with something like "You Won't Believe the Bizarre Reasons Girls Scream at Boy Band Concerts." But one (or all) of those things makes me very sad.

Are we developing an immunity to clickbait headlines?

Even Upworthy is shifting their headline creation tactics a little. But that doesn't mean they are switching from clickbait, it just means they've seen their audience get tired of the same old tactics. So they're looking for new and better tactics to keep you engaged and clicking.

The importance of traffic

I think many of us would sell a little of our soul if it would increase our traffic, and of course those clickbaity curiosity gap headlines are designed to do that (and are mostly working, for now).

But we also want good traffic. The kind of people who are going to engage with our brand and build relationships with us over the long haul, right? Back to what we were discussing in the intro, we want the kind of traffic that's likely to convert. Don't we?

As much as I advocate for clickable headlines, the riskier the headline I write, the more closely I compare overall traffic (especially returning visitors) to click-throughs, time on page, and bounce rate to see if I've pushed it too far and am alienating our most loyal fans. Because new visitors are awesome, but loyal customers are priceless.

Headline science at Moz

At Moz, we're trying to find the delicate balance between attracting all the customers and attracting the right customers. In my first week here when Trevor and Cyrus were polling readers on what headline they'd prefer to read, I advocated for a more clickable version. See if you can pick out which is mine…

headline poll

Yep, you guessed it. I suggested "Your Google Algorithm Cheat Sheet: Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird" because it contained a trigger word and a keyword, plus it was punchy. I actually liked "A Layman's Explanation of the Panda Algorithm, the Penguin Algorithm, and Hummingbird," but I was pretty sure no one would click on it.

Last time I checked, that has more traffic than any other post for the month of June. I won't say that's all because of the headline—it's a really strong and useful post—but I think the headline helped a lot.

But that's just one data point. I've also been spicing up the subject lines on the Moz Top 10 newsletter to see what gets the most traffic.

most-read subject lines

And the results here are more mixed. Titles I felt like were much more clickbaity like "Did Google Kill Spam?..." and "Are You Using Robots.txt the Right Way?..." underperformed compared to the straight up "Moz Top 10."

While the most clickbaity "Groupon Did What?..." and the two about Google selling domains (which was accurate but suggested that Google was selling it's own domains, which worried me a bit) have the most opens overall.

Help us resolve the dispute

As you can tell, I have some unresolved feelings about this whole clickbait versus credibility thing. While Trevor and I have strong opinions, we also have a lot of questions that we hope you can help us with. Blow my mind with your headline logic in the comments by sharing your opinion on any of the following:

Do clickbait titles erode trust? If yes, do you ever worry about that affecting your bottom line?
Would you sacrifice credibility for clickability? Does it have to be a choice?
Is there such thing as a formula for a perfect headline? What standards do you use when writing headlines?
Does a clickbait title affect how likely you are to read an article? What about sharing one? Do you ever feel duped by the content? Does that affect your behavior the next time?
How much of your soul would you sell for more traffic?

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Lessons from the link penalty removal furnace

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:50 AM PDT

It’s a disappointing fact for many that the primary way we help some sites today is not by creating exciting content to entertain or educate, nor by helping launch an exciting new product or raising brand awareness. Instead we have to remove a manual link penalty applied by Google.

Indeed, a whole subset of our industry has evolved to help us undo work that others have sold to our clients or to frantically make edits as Google’s Quality Guidelines change.

Here at White.net we’ve helped a range of sites have differing types of manual penalties removed. It’s usually time-, budget- and energy-sapping work, and we’ve learnt a few lessons (sometimes the hard way) in the process.

Here are some of my favourite notes from this work. Hopefully, some of these tips will help you next time you’re facing that unassuming notification in Webmaster Tools…

Ask the client for any link building records & site log-ins

Just because we know it as link building, it doesn’t mean your client thinks of it that way. So, the first step, before all else, is to quiz your client or the person in charge of the website’s marketing if you are in-house. Ask them what SEO or promotional efforts were made in the past; not just link building but also guest posting, article submissions, widget creation, banner advertising etc. We want to learn of any promotion or activity on other sites.

Understanding what activity has occurred not only helps us analyse the backlink profile, it gives a starting point for finding contact details, log-ins and general access to potentially harmful links. If you’re cleaning up after a paid link building service, getting the reports of the links built is a helpful quick win – these are certain to be links to remove or disavow. Get this information, and get it early to help speed up some of the later elements of the process.

Gather all the links

Whatever your preferred link tool for most tasks, you need to grab links from as many different sources as possible to build up a complete, workable picture.

MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, SEMRush are all sources of backlinks and downloading as many comprehensive reports from these tools as you have access to makes big difference. Of course, webmaster tools information is a must. If you have it, Bing Webmaster Tools is an excellent source, and if you want to see which links are getting you in trouble with Google, working with the links they show you in their Webmaster Tools is imperative. Google says that using only the data from Webmaster Tools is all you need, but I think getting as much data as possible is a safer bet.

Hit Google Webmaster Tools mutiple times

However, Google Webmaster Tools only gives you a sample of the links to your site that they know of. Even more frustratingly, it’s been reported multiple times that sites have received reconsideration request rejections with example links that were not shown in Webmaster Tools exports.

In his very informative write-up of Bronco’s link removal work, Dave Naylor notes that they download Webmaster Tools link exports daily and use use an automated program to compare against previous downloads until they stop finding new links. This is very cool, but you don’t need to worry if this tech is beyond you. We started by simply exporting from Webmaster Tools every day for multiple days and de-duplicating in Excel until we didn’t find new links for several days in a row. Even then, we still check weekly for new links just to be on the safe side until the cleanup work is complete.

Use a tool to check the link profile

To manage the scale of many link-analysis projects there’s a range of tools now available to help identify potential issues. We’ve had success using LinkRisk, Link Detox, and URL Profiler.

What we have learnt is to use these tools to help spot the patterns of link building that are causing the issues. What we don’t do is rely on them – they are great tools, and boast an ever increasing number of cool features (LinkRisk can be linked with your aHrefs, Majestic and GWT accounts to auto pull in newly discovered links for example, and URL Profiler has a boatload of potential functions away from penalties), and can help classify your profile into manageable chunks…

…But, check every linking domain manually

No tool can tell you every link that needs removing or is worth keeping with 100% accuracy. There are many exceptions, unique circumstances and false positives (and false negatives, if that’s a real thing). As such, the only way to be sure you are casting an iron-clad removal list is to check each and every linking domain manually.

Yeah, this can be painful. And slow. And dull. It is, however, the only way to be sure. Once you’ve established the pattern of spam links it can become quick to categorise each domain as keep or remove – it is then just a matter of scale.

We’ve found that by using the tools to help us understand the link building patterns (directories, article submissions, guest posts etc.) and where to start (if using LinkRisk you’d start by checking the Bad, Suspect and Neutral links for example) we get a great head start. But the fastest way to eliminating all harmful links, and retaining genuine ones, is through good-old graft.

Write to sites, but only those you’ve a chance of getting a response from

Google wants you to clean up your profile, and show sufficient contrition for your crimes by having as many links removed as possible rather than just purely disavowing. They even ask you to wait several weeks between a reconsideration rejection and submitting a new request to ‘give sufficient time’ for removal work.

Tim Grice, someone with great expertise on penalty removal , notes here that his preferred method is to disavow all suspect links, and not to try and get links removed. Indeed, here at White.net we’ve seen one example of a site with a horrendous backlink profile (over 3,500 links we recommended removing) simply disavow nearly all their links and successfully get their penalty lifted without removing a single one.

It is possible therefore to have penalties removed without the effort to contact all linking sites, and this is a tactic worth considering. However, we have found that the sweet point is to contact the sites you know you can get a potential response from. Once you have examined all linking sites manually it is easy to classify links by the directory, article or link network they belong to.

Simply write to one of these, see if they respond, and only write to the others with a positive result (as you’re likely writing to the same person for each network’s sites). That way you can still contact every site, but where it is clear you are not getting a response and there’s tens of sites with the same template, you are not butting your head against a wall. Otherwise, concentrate on contacting other sites where you have a shot of getting a link removed, or nofollowed in the case of sponsored posts, banner ads and so on.

Be brutal

This is no time for subtlety. Nor sentimentality or giving the benefit of the doubt. If you can see this link pointing to the domain in question, the chances are your Google reviewer can see it. At this point your site is considered suspect in its activities, so what you think might not look too bad in isolation can absolutely still keep you in trouble.

This is a manual review, so you can’t always tell which links they will consider demonstrate you are still trying to be manipulative, so if in any doubt, get rid. Usually, it is clear what pattern of link building has occurred, so you can separate the genuine from the spammy, but err on the side of caution, even though it will sometimes hurt.

This is of course not a complete how-to list of removing a Google manual penalty (there’s plenty of those available), but does show the ethos of the successful penalty removal projects we have had. There’s some highly insightful articles that have helped shape our process, such as these thoughts from Chris Dyson and the various writings of Dr Marie Haynes - go check them out.

We’d love to hear what lessons you’ve learnt about penalty removal, or if you have had a different experience to us, so share here or let us know via Twitter!

The post Lessons from the link penalty removal furnace appeared first on White.net.