miercuri, 22 august 2012

Q&A From E-Commerce SEO: Fix and Avoid Common Issues Webinar

Q&A From E-Commerce SEO: Fix and Avoid Common Issues Webinar


Q&A From E-Commerce SEO: Fix and Avoid Common Issues Webinar

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 08:01 PM PDT

Posted by Everett Sizemore

 

Mozzers just can't get enough of e-commerce. On July 31st, Everett did a webinar for us about tips and tricks for making your e-commerce sites SEO-friendly. As attendees had a ton of questions -- not all of which we could answer in our limited time together, we wanted to make sure they all were answered.
 
Because Everett's super generous with his time and knowledge, he went through the many questions left unanswered. While we suggest checking out Everett's webinar, anyone running an e-commerce shop can definitely find some great tips and advice in his answers. Time to start loving those product pages like never before! This post is a follow-up to answer some questions attendees had during the recent e-commerce webinar.
 
 


Q: In terms of bounce rate, what do you do if a product is temporarily out of stock?

A: This is a great question because it ties into what to do with out of stock products. My recommendation is to keep the page up and serve the 200 status code with an “out of stock” message instead of removing the page. However, if the product is being discontinued, then you want to redirect that page to the parent category. Given that user-experience is so important (especially when it comes to keeping visitors from clicking back to the SERPs), you should do more than just show an “out of stock” message. Some ideas include:

  • An alert signup form that sends an email when the product comes back in stock.
  • An estimated date when the product will be back in stock, and the ability to back-order it.
  • Show related products (e.g. This is out of stock, but you may also want to check out these other items).

Q: We are planning on migrating from a Zen Cart site to a Magento Cart. Are there any other tips you have before developing a new site?

A: Develop a plan on what you’re going to do about the layered navigation. A work-around I linked to in the slides is Amasty’s “Improved Navigation for Magento” which you can learn more about here.

You can also use the SEO Suite Ultimate Magento Extension or the SEO Suite Pro Magento Extension extensions to handle rel canonical tags and robots meta tags, which aren’t currently default features for Magento. I also recommend looking into this extension as a workaround for tracking multiple steps in a single-page checkout process.

There are a ton of general e-commerce tips included in the webinar, like content on category pages, that would apply to a new site.

Q: Everything Google does is designed to keep people on Google and clicking more of their ads. Do you have any proof of pogosticking and rankings, other than the ability to block a site in google if you bounce back to Google quickly? Why should we get penalized for referring traffic back to them?

A: No, I do not have any proof that someone clicking to your site and then clicking the back button without viewing any other pages is bad for rankings. It would be great if someone has some empirical data on this, but it is an obvious signal that they didn’t like what they found there, so I feel confident in advising my clients to keep that to a minimum. I might rephrase that as: “Everything Google does is designed to get the searcher to their desired goal with as few steps as possible.” Referring someone back to them so they can then click on the next result down from you adds two extra steps, which is why Google may not think that is a desired outcome.

Q: Can you clarify whether or not category names should be in the URL?

A: I think categories should be in a category folder and products should be in a product folder, but you shouldn’t include categories in the product URL. In other words, the set up might look something like this:

http://www.domain.com/category/widgets/ (top level category)
http://www.domain.com/category/widgets/blue-widgets/ (sub category)
http://www.domain.com/product/super-blue-widget/ (product page)

If you are to put a category in the product URL, you often end up with multiple non-canonical URLs for every product, such as:

http://www.domain.com/widgets/super-blue-widget/
http://www.domain.com/widgets/blue-widgets/super-blue-widget/
http://www.domain.com/widgets/super-widgets/super-blue-widget/

In this case, all three of the above URLs would go to the same product page.

Some people prefer a totally flat architecture in which everything is off of the root, but I don’t think that is logical. For one thing, it precludes you from doing some useful diagnostic searches on Google, such as (site:domain.com inurl:product) to find out how many product pages are indexed. Others feel that having the category keywords in the product URL gives them an advantage. Perhaps there is a slight advantage in terms of keywords in the URL, but I feel that is eclipsed by the disadvantages, including those above and the fact that you would be making product pages several more directories deep in the architecture.

Q: How do e-commerce sites optimize for countries? (For example: a Canadian company selling a product to Canadian visitors, when American sites still outrank them.)

If your business is located in Canada, the site is hosted in Canada. you are using a .ca TLD, your customers are located in Canada, and the spelling is Canadian – you should have a big advantage over U.S. sites for searches from within Canada whether on Google.com or Google.ca if all other factors are equal. The problem is that other factors are never equal. If you have all of the above based covered and are still being outranked by U.S. sites, it may come down to their having a better site, better links, more brand recognition and authority in the space, better on-page optimization, and so on.

In terms of having a site that sells to customers in multiple countries, especially if you are using the same content but change certain things like prices, shipping info, and possibly some spellings, you should look into the “rel="alternate" hreflang="x” tag in combination with geographically targeted pages, as discussed here.

Q: Is it wrong to use the format http://www.site.com/category-x/product-x/ rather than just using http://www.site.com/product-x/?

Yes and no. I do not recommend putting categories in product URLs for reasons discussed above, but I also recommend putting products inside a product folder, though I am much less adamant about that than I am about the issue of categories in the product URL.

Q: What is your recommendation of shopping carts? Do you have any preference like Magento, bigCommerce, or Volusion?

I don’t know a lot about bigCommerce specifically, but I would recommend Volusion if you’re OK with being on a Microsoft-IIS server (which many SEOs are not because they are more comfortable working in a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) environment). Magento is also a great platform once you implement the fixes discussed in an earlier answer above.

It really is tough to recommend one e-commerce product over another. They all have their pros and cons, some of which are going to be more or less important to different people. To some, a Software as a Service (SAS) arrangement is great because they don’t have developers of their own and need the support. For others, it is just tying their hands when they want to customize their store. For some, cost is the major factor, while others might see features or flexibility as the most important things to consider.

Q: I have reviews on my product pages, but these reviews are also contained in a separate location on the site. What would be the best way to handles these?

Great question! On one hand, you want that unique, useful content on your product pages, especially on a site with manufacturer supplied content. On the other hand, product review pages are a great way to get long-tail traffic from earlier on in the buying cycle. Depending on how much control you have over the review system, you could approach this in several different ways.

Preferably you would look to Amazon.com as an example of how to handle this. Put the first few comments on the product page and, once they reach the max (say, 3 to 10) they would start moving over to the reviews page, which could be in a reviews folder or on a sub-domain. You could decide which reviews show up on the product page by those that are found most useful by other visitors if you have that kind of engagement. Otherwise, you could base it on the most recent, or a variety of star ratings, or some other factor. I wouldn’t just show the highest rated ones because shoppers may be turned off if they see what you’re doing.

I wouldn’t show the reviews that are on the product page on the review page as well. The link on the product page should say “see more reviews” rather than “see all reviews” for that reason.

You may not be able to do the “best” thing for all sorts of reasons. I had to robots.txt block the reviews.domain.com subdomain on a site once because there was no way to keep that content from not duplicating what was on the product pages, and I couldn’t even put a robots follow,noindex meta tag on them. We left a good chunk of reviews on the product page and still allowed visitors to access the “see all reviews” page even though it wasn’t indexed. That situation worked out really well.

Q: Could you go over the point you make about creating absolute links versus dynamic links? How do you not make absolute links?

There is a scalability problem of “hard coding” links to product pages from other pages on the site, such as from other product descriptions. For a few of your “main” products that aren’t getting discontinued any time soon it can be manageable and helpful. But if you make a habit of hard coding links like that and then a year later lots of those products start getting discontinued, you’re now in the business of monitoring 404 reports or spidering your site to find and fix broken links all the time. By doing your product interlinking dynamically, as in “automatically” like with a Related Products area, you can typically avoid the time-consuming hassle of removing links because those products will no longer show as “related” or “popular” if they are taken off the site. If you only have a couple dozen or fewer products in the first place, you can pretty much ignore this advice.

Q: What is your recommendation for surplus paginated pages that once contained products, but for whatever reason there are fewer products now?

My recommendation is to let them 404. So, if you had 66 pages of pagination on Tuesday and then some products were taken off the site and now you only have 65 paginated pages then …/?page=66 would return a 404. The example site I used for this was showing the same content on page 66, 67, 68… as it showed on page 65. Other common issues with this type of thing is a “soft 404” page that doesn’t show anything, or has an error message for the user, but gives a 200 status code in the http header response, which tells search engines that the page is still there.

However, someone contacted me after the webinar and said he handles these with a 302 (temporary redirect) to the last existing page in the set. So in the example above page 66 would 302 redirect to page 65 until more products were added. I think this is a fantastic solution, but my only concern would be if page 66 never came back. That’s ok with one or two pages, but if you’re talking thousands of them across the entire site you may be better off just having them removed from the index.

Q: Do you recommend linking to products from the homepage, or just linking to the category?

Your category links will probably be contained in the site-wide navigation, though I think links contained within the main body section of the page are given more weight. I would advise linking to some of your top products from the homepage, as well as a few category links if they are more important than others. As you probably know, given the nature of your question, the homepage is usually your strongest page and has the most page-rank / authority to pass on to other page. Thus you should link to whichever pages on your site to which you want to pass on the most page-rank. I don’t believe in any “rule” that says you can only put this many or that many links on a page, but I do try to remember that every new link you add reduces the amount of page-rank that can be passed on through the other links.

Q: Regarding "not provided": does that mean you think there is enough randomness in the data that we know to conclude that the same conditions exist in the data that we don't know?

The data you have the ability to see can tell you some things about the data you can’t see. The more data you have, the more you can trust it to tell you something about the data you can’t see because the greater the sample size the more reliable your deductions are likely to be.

For more on this read, I recommend reading AJ Kohn’s post on Blind Five Year Old.

Q: If we have a small amount of products, would it be okay to flatten completely?

Yes. It is “ok” for anyone, but preferable for diagnostic reasons (or if you want to easily segment XML sitemaps, etc…) to have products in a /products/ folder. However, if we’re talking fewer than a dozen or two products, I see no reason why you couldn’t just have them off the root.

Q: Would it be harmful to put the content below the products in the category page as long as it's still useful for the user in order to not push the products below the fold?

I won’t say it would be “harmful” but I don’t see how it could be really “useful” to the user way down there either. I do understand your concern, however, and want to stress that I don’t recommend putting much content on category pages. We’re talking a sentence or two, not a big paragraph. Going back to your question though, I haven’t see any evidence of the “below the fold algorithm” affecting content on e-commerce sites. It seems more to be aimed at advertising that pushes all of the content below the fold.

Q: Should I use a 404 redirect, or just send the 404's to the homepage in Magento?

I don’t like to redirect users to a 404 page. I like to show the 404 response code and message on the URL they were trying to access. Redirecting them to the home page is especially troublesome because 1) it is a poor user experience that could confuse a lot of people, and 2) you lose the ability to capture 404 data that will help you fix broken links and salvaged page-rank from external links that might be going to pages that no longer exist. When you have a page that no longer exists that 301 redirects to a page that exists, which returns a 200 status code that is still a form of a “soft 404.”

Q: I have a buyer's guide page (with great content) ranking much better than a product category page for the keyword of our product category. We want our product category to show first. What can we do to make this happen?

Having some content on your category page should help. Even two short lines of text will go a long way to improve category page rankings. However, it still might not be enough to outrank a content-rich buyer’s guide if they are both targeting the same keywords. Then you might run into the issue that someone reading a buyer’s guide and someone shopping on a category page are at two different points in the buying cycle and probably wouldn’t be typing the same keywords anyway.

Let’s look at it this way: Google wants to return results that put the fewest amount of clicks between the searcher and their goal. A category page is by definition an intermediate step. Google would MUCH rather just send them straight to the product page. However, if the user isn’t performing a query with the clear intent that they want to see a specific product (e.g. best lawn mowers, lawn mower store, buy lawn mowers, zero-turn mowers, heavy-duty weed wackers…) then a buying guide or category page IS the destination most suitable to the query. In this case, “best lawn mowers” would probably be a great query/intent match for a buyer’s guide, but the others would be good matches for a category page.

Q: What number of products are manageable for a view all page? 100? 200? What do you suggest for steps to plan, test, and then implement a view all?

I don’t know the answer to this question, though I suspect that more than 100 is pushing it. I think it might depend a little on what your users prefer (every site will have different users who like to shop in different ways) and how fast the page loads. Test the load time of your View All pages (all categories, as some have more products than others) and make sure they are relatively fast compared to the average site. Google provides that info here. Of course, post-implementation, pay attention to rankings and conversion rates.

As I mentioned in the presentation, I haven’t had much luck with View All Canonical, though I’ve heard other shave. I prefer just using rel next/prev.

Q: Are press releases a good option for building backlinks to my product pages?

It depends on how you distribute them and whether your products are worth press coverage. If you are asking if distributing a press release on PRNewsWire, PRWeb, or some other distribution service saying that you have a new product, then the answer is probably not.

If you want to learn how to do PR the right way check out this post from Chris Winfield.

Q: Can you 301 redirect page 67 to page 66, if page 66 is the last page in the paginated content?

Great question! I would rather 302 that since it would probably be a temporary redirect.

Q: What would you consider to be too many categories? 2? 3?

I don’t have any rule or opinion about how many categories is too many. It all depends on the nature of your business. A site that sells everything like Amazon is going to have a lot of categories. A site that sells only bedroom furniture probably wouldn’t have more than five or six top level categories.

If you are referring to how many levels deep the taxonomy should go, I’d try to keep it at two or three subcategories and rely on filtering or facets to further whittle down the results.

Q: The inclusion of something like /products/ in the URLs allows you to easily isolate product pages in Analytics, which is great for product-specific performance tracking. Is it not worth using a single generic category for product pages?

I think we’re on the same page here, but we might be using different terminology. I wouldn’t call the /products/ directory a “category” but I agree that having it allows you to more easily isolate product pages for many different purposes.

Q: In your Volusion example, I noticed the URL had abc124.htm which seemed to be a product id as opposed to name. Do you like product ID in URL's or does that pollute the URL?

I would prefer just to have the product name in the URL, but if you do put the product ID in there it would be good to separate it from the name by a dash (e.g. productname-1234 instead of productname1234).

Q: How big of a problem is it if you have similar content on your product pages but the content is unique to your site (different variations of your own custom product)?

The more unique you can make that content, the better. If it is just color or size variations, I would use product variant selectors instead of a totally new product page. If they are different enough to require their own page and SKU, then you will just have to be creative in your copywriting. Sometimes it helps to have multiple copywriters work on it since one person could end up being repetitive after awhile if they are writing about similar products.

But to answer your question, I think it is a significant problem if you have a lot of content that seems very similar, even if it is unique to your site.

Q: How do you feel about redirecting (301) expired products?

I feel like that is a good idea. The only problem is when huge enterprise level e-commerce sites have thousands of products expiring every quarter and the volume of redirects gets into the hundreds of thousands, which could potentially cause some site performance issues in terms of load time. In that case, I would rather let the ones without external links just 404 since you wouldn’t be losing any page-rank and wouldn’t be linking to them internally.

Also, I try to avoid redirecting them to other product pages since you’ll end up with multiple redirect hops after awhile when the new product expires. I’d rather send them to the parent category page.

Q: Can the crawlers see contents behind the javascript in the collapsible example provided?

The content isn’t behind javascript in those examples. The content is in the source code on the page. The javascript just controls the page display.

If you put the content in the js file, or or some other file and had the js file or inline javascript call in that content to display then you could have some issues, though Google specifically has gotten pretty good at seeing even that.

Q: Suggestions to increase crawlability for a site with AJAX rendered search results?

I would not rely on search results for crawlability. I would rely on a logical taxonomy and solid architecture using category pages. Google is a search engine and they don’t want to send their users to another set of search results because that is not a good user experience. I know some e-commerce platforms use search pages as categories, but I typically advise their clients to create category/department pages instead.

For a deeper explanation, check out this great post about creating craw-friendly AJAX sites using pushState().

Q: Do you have any tips for generating product page meta data for thousands of products in a way that's more flexible that just plugging in "product name" for the title, description, etc.? I know some platforms use Tags, but that seems a little clunky as well. Have you seen anything work well for this?

It all depends on what information you have available in the database. Get an output of all of the data fields available for products along with maybe 100 – 1,000 examples to start. Then you can just begin mixing and matching like people do with those refrigerator magnets to create something that makes sense and is useful to searchers. I like including prices, manufacturers, model numbers, size, color, etc… But every site is going to be different so I can’t really give a single answer here.

One thing to look out for is the odd description that doesn’t make sense. Your Frankenstein meta description may work for “most” products but if you have a significant number that don’t work well with that automation, perhaps because the fields you chose aren’t applicable to all products, then it could be a problem. Combining things like is/are with singulars and plurals could be an issue too. For example:

Our [PRODUCTNAME] is just [$]! …
Makes sense with: “Our Sony Camcorder is just $19.95!...
But not with: “Our Rewritable DVDs is just $10.99!...

I also like to have lots of variations so they don’t seem repetitive. You wouldn’t use the same format like that on ten-thousand products. When in doubt, the first couple of sentences from the product description is usually a safe bet.

Q: Have you seen any penalties from hiding a large percentage of a page's content with collapsible jQuery functionality? I've been cautious with this and have tried to keep the total amount of content that could be collapsed below a certain threshold percentage.

I haven’t seen any, but I suppose it could happen if you go overboard.

Q: What is the best way to prevent the same product from having multiple categories? Also, would it be beneficial to remove category name from the URL when you click on the product from a specific category? How about choosing one main category for each product?

This is why I suggest not putting categories in product URLs. Only choosing one category per product could work on some sites, but could severely limit you on others and may not be a great user experience or a good way to keep your average order volume high.

Q: With large e-commerce sites, do you find that using xml sitemaps can have a large benefit for SEO?  e.g., more pages indexed, more traffic etc

Yes, more pages indexed, especially if there is a deep taxonomy.

Q: Are you saying linking to the same page twice on a page does pass more link juice, or that the second link doesn't get counted?

The second link doesn’t get counted. BUT… I was suggesting a way around this by using a named-anchor link, as discussed here

Q: How do you deal with different models of the same product (different color ipods for example)?

I’d prefer to deal with these using product variants that are selected on a single product page instead of having separate product pages if possible.

Q: For a site that has over 15,000 products, wouldn't it be better to have some type of granular URL (instead of everything being dumped in one tree, i.e. product/)? Would that allow for segmented site maps and provide a more accurate categorization?

Great question. If you can do this without having more than one URL per product, and still having the freedom to add a product to more than one category, then maybe I would consider it.

Q: I am currently dealing with a client with around 30,000 products and he has an algorithm that uses same description but places the appropriate item keyword where needed. What are your thoughts regarding duplicate content and e commerce products? Do you have any recommendations or do I simply need to create 30,000 unique descriptions?

See the notes on slide 17. One thing you could try is having dozens of different types of descriptions applied randomly to the products so at least you don’t have 30,000 that follow the same pattern. Just make sure that once the pattern is applied to a product it stays that way, rather than being randomly assigned one for each time it is called up from the database.


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The SEOmoz YouTube Contest - Winners!

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 02:59 AM PDT

Posted by RuthBurr

Earlier this month we launched our YouTube channel. To celebrate, we announced the “One Tool or Tactic, Two Minutes” contest, challenging the SEOmoz community to create a two-minute video highlighting their favorite tool or tactic.

For those who might have missed it, here’s the original YouTube contest post.

The Videos

We were thrilled with the response we got. You guys got creative: we had everything from simple Whiteboard-Friday-style standups to screencasts of tool use to cartoons and fully produced mini-movies.

We also learned a lot about what everyone's focusing on these days. We received a ton of submissions in the Content Marketing and Social Media categories, just a few in the Email/Outreach category, and none at all in the APIs or Google Updates categories (I guess everyone’s finally tired of talking about Panda and Penguin?).

When we first launched the contest, we decided that if there were no submissions in a category, we would name more than one winner in another category so there would still be 9 winners. Even with the ability to have a “tie” in a category, we had so many great submissions that we couldn’t keep the winners to 9.

So without further ado, here are the TEN winners of the SEOmoz YouTube contest. You can see the videos on our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/moz. We got lots of requests to see the runners-up too, so in a few days we'll show you the videos that almost made the cut as well.

The Winners

Content Marketing – TIE!

Link Building

Social Media - THREE WAY TIE!

Analytics

SEO Secrets

Email/Outreach

Conversion Rate Optimization

In addition to being featured in this post and on our YouTube channel, the winners will also receive some awesome SEOmoz swag!

The Runners-Up

  • Content Siloing by Laurent Bourrelly of LaurentBourrelly.com
  • SEO Secrets: First in Google by Markus Allen of Marketing-Ideas.org
  • How to Don't Be Evil by Intrapromote

The editorial team had such a blast watching all of the videos you guys submitted - we love seeing your bright shiny faces and hearing you talk about SEO. We'll definitely be providing more opportunities for you to submit video content in the future, so stay tuned!


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The President at the Podium

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, August 22, 2012

 

The President at the Podium

In an unscheduled visit to the White House briefing room on Monday, President Obama took questions from reporters and discussed a big new announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services:

"Today, HHS announced that thanks to the health care law that we passed, nearly 5.4 million seniors with Medicare have saved over $4.1 billion on prescription drugs. That’s an average savings of more than $700 per person," he said. "This year alone, 18 million seniors with Medicare have taken advantage of new preventive care benefits like a mammogram or other cancer screening at no extra cost."

The President also spoke about growing the economy and helping responsible homeowners. Find out what he had to say.

President Barack Obama holds a press conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Aug. 20, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama holds a press conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Aug. 20, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

Assisting Iranians in Need
The United States is making it easier for individuals to contribute to earthquake relief efforts in Iran.

It’s Go Time for the Presidential Innovation Fellows
Tomorrow, August 23, the White House will welcome the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, top innovators from outside government who will work with top innovators inside government to create real and substantial changes to benefit the American people, save taxpayers money, and help create new jobs.

First Lady Michelle Obama Hosts First-Ever Kids' State Dinner
Surprise guest President Obama "crashes" the formal luncheon the First Lady held for 54 budding chefs in the East Room.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

12:05 PM: The President participates in a roundtable discussion with teachers

12:40 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event

1:15 PM: The Vice President attends a campaign event

1:50 PM: The President departs Las Vegas, Nevada en route New York City

3:00 PM: The Vice President delivers remarks at a campaign event

5:00 PM: The Vice President attends a campaign event

6:05 PM: The President arrives New York City

7:35 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event

9:45 PM: The President attends a campaign event

11:35 PM: The President departs New York City

12:30 AM: The President arrives Joint Base Andrews

12:45 AM: The President arrives the White House

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Seth's Blog : Tattoo thinking

Tattoo thinking

A tattoo is basically forever.

You should think pretty hard before you get one, because it's largely an irreversible decision.

Just about every choice you make with your project and your career, though, doesn't last forever. And the benefit of taking a risk is significantly higher than it is with a tattoo. A landing page, a pricing move, a bit of copy--they don't last much more than a day, never mind a lifetime. Higher benefits, lower risk, what are you waiting for?

So go ahead and act as if your decisions are temporary. Because they are. Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson and fix what doesn't work. No sweat, no need to hyperventilate.



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marți, 21 august 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Spain Predicts 4.3% Increase in Tax Revenues, Actual Results are 3.5% Drop; Proposed "Solution" is More Tax Hikes

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 04:40 PM PDT

Spain has been devastated by round after round of tax hikes. Another one is on the way. Via Google-translate, please consider this non-modified translation of government shuffles new tax increases to reduce the deficit
Never two without three. The brutal tax increases approved by the Government of Mariano Rajoy in late 2011, increasing the income tax and the tax on savings , among other figures, and the recent increase launched last July, with the increase in VAT , Taxes -special rate you could add soon a new tax hike to reach the deficit target of 6.3% of GDP set for this exercise. This, with an eye on a country's total bailout, whose application could occur next September.

Before formalizing the request for assistance, the government wants to make sure you are ready to meet the deficit target, and for that "is likely to take much more drastic measures they currently have," reveals a member of the Government, on Monday reported the newspaper El Pais. Among these, it weighs a new tax increases and a freeze on state pensions.

"The evolution of expenditure, with the cuts we have made, we have more or less clear, we do not know is how the revenues are going to go," admitted to the Government. In the first half of the year things did not go well: overall, tax revenues fell by 3.5% annual rate, far from expected for 2012 (increase of 4.3% per year).

The Ministry of Finance will report to the Executive on the development of tax collection during the summer months, and "if revenues continue to fall, probably will have to return to raise taxes and cut spending again, although here and can hardly play more ", added the sources. Specifically, in its editorial, the paper notes that Prisa Economy Minister Luis de Guindos, thinks "there is no room for further cuts in spending," which means that additional adjustments would have to come from the side of income.

Thus, the government may choose to remove the shelter deduction retroactively (about 6,000 million euros) or relief for contributions to private pension plans (2,000 million); impose verd penny and not only gas, but also to fuels; Excise reraise (alcohol, snuff ...) or implement new environmental taxes, and more. It is not ruled out anything.
Spain's economy minister says "there is no room for further cuts in spending", a position I believe is preposterous. However, my position does not matter.

What does matter is Spain is in an economic downward spiral and tax hikes will make matters worse. Sadly that is the primary option on the table. 

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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ECB Printing Press Door Is Open

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 09:39 AM PDT

Every day I get links from Spain, Italy, Germany, and Australia. The first three frequently cause problems. Translation from German is particularly difficult.

For example, a Google-translated headline on Welt Online reads ECB chief demonstrates German banker.

A cyberspace friend, "EM" writes Google has a tough time with much in this one - title boils down roughly to "Draghi holds Bundesbank President Weidmann Up To Ridicule".

Clearly that is an entirely different meaning.

Also from the same article, a Google-translated paragraph reads "Thus, the investor inclined saw with great astonishment, as at the last ECB press conference Jens Weidmann by Mario Draghi and the Portuguese Vitor Constancio, the vice president of the ECB, namely the ridiculousness was abandoned. An absolute rarity in the history of the ECB."

Here is a better translation from "EM".

"Thus, the willing investor saw with great astonishment at the last ECB press conference Jens Weidmann was held up to ridicule by Mario Draghi and the Portuguese Vitor Constancio, the vice president of the ECB. An absolute rarity in the history of the ECB."

The point of the article was the increasing isolation of Weidmann, up to the point of open ridicule by the president and vice-president of the ECB.

With the help of Bran from Spain, Andrea from Italy, and "EM" from Germany I can frequently provide much better translations of foreign articles than I could otherwise. Of course, articles from Tony and others from Australia and Canada are appreciated but require no translation.

Official Denial

The key point of the Welt Online story is the increasing isolation of Weidmann, including an official denial by the Bundesbank.

Consider this quote from yesterday as reported by Bloomberg. ...

"Nobody should try to create the impression that the Bundesbank or its president are isolated," German ECB Executive Board member Joerg Asmussen told the Frankfurter Rundschau in today's edition.

Mish Translation: "The Bundesbank and its president Jens Weidmann are without a doubt isolated and essentially ignored. The printing press door is open and the presses ready for operation."

However, there are a few open questions as follows.

Open Questions

  1. When Draghi fires up the presses
  2. Speed at which he prints
  3. How much gold and silver rise in response

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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Part II - Robots to Rule the World? Taking All Jobs? Replace Women?

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 12:55 AM PDT

In part I of Robots to Rule the World? Taking All Jobs? Replace Women? I took a deep look at numerous robot and computer technologies that are displacing workers at a rapid pace.

Will Robots to Rule the World?

Right now it appears that way. Manufacturing may be returning to the US, but automation has eliminated the human workers.

And it's not just manufacturing. For example, consider, JCPenney to Eliminate All Checkout Clerks, Instead Using RFID Chips and Self-Checkout.

If that idea catches on for major retail stores, tens-of-thousands of jobs will vanish. Will anything replace those jobs?

Two Viewpoints

What follows is a pair of widely-differing viewpoints from an email exchange with a couple of friends regarding technology and robots. One friend talks about a collapse of society, the other sees unimaginable numbers of jobs in industries we cannot even conceive of now.

Collapse of Society

One friend writes ...
When the vast bulk of production and services can be produced and delivered by computers, robotics, smart systems, and ubiquitous computing devices with only a small fraction of the human labor force we have today, we have no choice but to devise a system of income creation and distribution radically different than we have today or face unprecedented scale of labor underutilization, loss of purchasing power, collapse of the economy, and the risk of systemic societal collapse.
Unimaginable Numbers of Jobs in Unimaginable Industries

In response a second friend commented ...
10 and 20 years from now, there will be jobs we cannot even conceive of now. Just as today there are jobs and industries no-one could conceive of 20 years ago. Only 70 or 80 years ago, about 70% of the population worked in agriculture. Today not even 2% of the population works in agriculture and it produces an output that is an order of magnitude greater. This is the very definition of economic progress - to free up people from the drudgery of manual labor, so they have the time to do things that add far more value to our world.

When the car was invented, all industries concerning the horse and horse-powered transportation practically disappeared, except for the remnant that still exists today to serve the horse leisure industry.  Should we have opposed the invention of the car? Luddite visions of increasing automation destroying jobs forever and ever all rely on a fundamental fallacy, namely that the economy is static. The economy is however not static, but highly dynamic. If the Luddite version of history were correct, we would all be better off if we were still living in pre-stone-age conditions. After all, the invention of the first tool surely destroyed a number of stone-age jobs.

My assessment is also highly personal. Not even one of the jobs I am doing today would be conceivable without the inventions of the past 20 - 30 years, i.e. the PC, the internet, modern software, cheap electronic devices of all kinds, , free information at my fingertips, and so forth.

Sure, I could in theory do all I am doing now in some kind of variation that would take much more effort, cost hundreds of times more money, and I would entirely depend on the kindness of middlemen willing to market my output.

Since the internet has enabled me to get to know all those who hire my services today. I would be forced to do some sort of uninteresting provincial work, forever constricted by the fact that I could only afford a very limited version of the machinery that is at my disposal today.

My health does not allow me to engage in many tasks. I would be totally useless as a farmer. So when you tell me how modern technology destroys jobs, I must point out that it has created all of mine.
Case for Optimism

I completely understand both viewpoints but side with the second with a caveat about government and Fed interference in the free market.

I too am biased by personal experience. I made a living at computers for 20 years, then remade myself out of necessity. I could not have done it without the internet.

As a side note, if anyone told me at high school graduation that I would be writing for a living and have an international audience I would have responded they were out of their mind.

Looking back a couple of decades, the internet, and PC revolution created millions of jobs.
Currently, technology is at a saturation point of sorts where further advances generally cost jobs.

Yet, I believe that some new technology will eventually come along that will again create enormous numbers of jobs. I strongly suspect it will be energy related.

In the meantime, however, until something does come along, we are in a creative destruction phase in which technological advancement destroys more jobs than it creates.

Unfortunately this current phase can last quite some time, perhaps even a decade or more. Those looking for jobs now do not have a decade, and the wait is extremely painful.

Case for Pessimism

Technology cannot be stopped, and advances will lead to a new source of jobs eventually, but governments, fractional reserve lending, and Keynesian madness are making a mess of things now.

The irony is the cheap money the Fed supplies (allegedly to create jobs), instead creates huge incentives for companies to shed workers while brutally punishing savers on fixed incomes.

Robots are not inherently cheap. However cheap financing can make them seem so, even to the point of encouraging outright malinvestment to shed workers.

Conclusion

The case for pessimism is not that robots will rule the world, taking all the good jobs that humans need, but rather all the cries for the government and the Fed to "do something" leads to trade wars and other inept policy decisions setting back the global economy for a prolonged period.

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


Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Classrooms Around the World

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 12:19 PM PDT

Julian Germain has been capturing the inner lives of schools around the world, from England to Nigeria to Qatar, in his large-scale photographs of schoolchildren in class. Here are some snapshots of students and classrooms from around the globe.

Bangladesh


Brazil


Russia


England


Japan


Cuba


Nigeria


Rural England


England, Expensive College


Netherlands


Qatar


Bahrain


Argentina


Peru


USA


Nigeria


Taiwan


Cuba


Netherlands


Yemen


Amazing Body Transformations - Part 5

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 10:25 AM PDT

All these people have proved that stunning body transformations can become the reality once you make efforts to stay fit and healthy. Get inspired by this collection of people who completely changed the way they look.

Previous Part:
Amazing Body Transformations - Part 1
Amazing Body Transformations - Part 2
Amazing Body Transformations - Part 3
Amazing Body Transformations - Part 4











































































Masters of Tax Evasion [Infographic]

Posted: 21 Aug 2012 09:14 AM PDT

How come that a big company like Apple pay a very low tax despite of having a vast amount of profit each year? Is there really a tax evasion here? Well, check the infographic below and see what's happening.

Click on Image to Enlarge.


Via: Mastersdegreeonline


Need Your Heart, Dubstep

Posted: 20 Aug 2012 08:10 PM PDT



The amazing dubstep of Marquese Scott has been featured in commercials for Coke and Peugeot, but it takes a few more minutes of air time to truly appreciate his talent.

Here's another incredible video of his unearthly style.




British Couple Had 22 Wedding Ceremonies Around the World

Posted: 20 Aug 2012 07:06 PM PDT

This couple from UK travels around the world in their camper van and searches for cool locations to have a wedding ceremony. They've already taken vows in 22 different places and still have 8 ceremonies to go. At the end of their trip they plan to choose one favorite location and get married there officially.



Didsbury West Manchester


Costa Rica


Peru


Seattle


Hollywood


Ecuador


Colombia


Las Vegas


Salvador


A Canadian ranch wedding in Banff


Belize


Nicaragua


Mexico


Quebec


Honduras


Hawaii


Colombia


Vancouver, Canada






On the Mexican Coast


Guatemala



Source: 2people1life Via Dailymail