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vineri, 13 ianuarie 2012

Making It Easier to Do Business in America

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, January 13, 2012

Making It Easier to Do Business in America

Right now, every entrepreneur who needs to do business with the government has to navigate a maze of overlapping agencies and deal with competing bureaucracy.

Today President Obama announced a new plan to change all of that: entrepreneurs will be able to go to just one department, visit one website, and call one phone number -- making it easier to do business in America.

Learn more about how the President is making it easier for American businesses.

West Wing Week: "Insourcing: Bringing Jobs Back to America"

This week, the President visited the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, welcomed this year's NBA Champs -- the Dallas Mavericks -- addressed the EPA, announced a new Chief of Staff, and introduced the White House's Insourcing Initiative.

Watch the video and get a behind-the-scenes look at the President's week.

More Bang for Your Buck: Maximize New Links on Old Pages - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 01:11 PM PST

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

We know that different links pass wildly different values for SEO purposes. Sometimes you build links that shoot your website to the top of the rankings, while other links are worse than worthless. The value of a link varies according to different factors, including:

Internal vs. External Links
Authority and Trust of the Linking Domain
Position of the Link on the Page
Alt Attributes vs. Text Links
... and many other ranking factors.

What happens when you build new links on old pages? Often when link prospecting, we SEOs look towards older, high-authority pages for link targets. Do these links pass the same value as links from brand new pages? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, I discuss why Google may treat these links differently, and provide 3 solid strategies for maximizing the value of all your new links, on all types of pages.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. I'm an SEO Consultant. I'm also an associate here at the world-famous SEOmoz. Today we're talking about links. Now this is a little advanced SEO, but it's such a simple concept and so fundamental, it's going to change the way you look at your link prospecting in the future.

Here's a situation. You're dying to get this link. You've got this new page and you want to get a link to it. So you've got this old page sitting around on your site. It's got plenty of authority. It's got high PageRank. It's perfect. It has a lot of incoming links. And so you just put a little link to your new page.

You're really excited. You wait a few weeks and nothing really happened. You don't see the boost in traffic. It's kind of like you didn't even do anything.

This works for external links as well. You've been link prospecting, and you find this great old page that you want to get a link from. The webmaster agrees and he puts a little link. Again, you wait and nothing really happens.

I've noticed this over the years, and I've talked to other link builders who have noticed this phenomenon, that links from old pages don't always seem to have the oomph as a link from a brand-new page. We're wondering is there anything that you can do about this.

A guy by the name of SEOWizz, Tim Grice, who is over in the U.K., did a study about this. I'll link to it in the post below. He built a bunch of old links on old pages, and he built a bunch of similar new links on new pages. He compared the two. He compared the boost in rankings between those two, and what he found was this exact same thing, that the old links that he built just didn't raise his rankings as much as the new links he built. He concluded that old links just weren't worth it anymore.

SEOWizz: Old Content Links vs. New Content Links

Source: Links In Old, Crawled Content Don’t Pass Weight

What do we mean by an "old page" when we talk about these old pages? From a technical, Google definition point of view, we're talking about something that has been previously crawled and indexed by Google. Stale content, by stale we mean content that hasn't been updated in a long time. It was written and it just stayed that way. There are no new blog comments. It has just been for two or three years the same way it was written. And old links. So this old page, all of the links that it got, it got years ago or months ago, and there are no new links coming in. That's what we're talking about when we talk about an old page. If it doesn't meet these definitions, then it's a new page.

Why would this happen? Why would Google care if it's an old page or a new page? We don't know exactly, but we do have some hints from some patent filings that Google has filed, specifically, Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update. It's been filed over and over again in different variations throughout the years. It's kind of like the manifesto of how Google runs its search engine. It's well worth a read. I'll also link to that in the content below.

Basically, in there, there are a couple of paragraphs in that most recent patent filing that talk about scoring a document based on the amount of change in a document. What Google is trying to do here is ignore minor edits. If you are making just a small link on that page, that qualifies as a minor edit. Google wants to ignore that because that could look kind of fishy, kind of scammy, kind of like you are doing some link manipulation or maybe you're buying links.

"In order to not update every link's freshness from a minor edit of a tiny unrelated part of a document, each updated document may be tested for significant changes... and a link's freshness may be updated (or not updated) accordingly. "

- Google's US Patent Application

What Google is looking for is not so much what changes, but how much changes and how many parts of the document change. This leads to a few solutions as to how we can address this problem of the old links in the new pages.

Now, I want to be clear. These links still pass value. Should you be building these links? Absolutely, but we want to make sure that we're getting as much oomph out of them as completely possible.

Let's look at some solutions to make sure that we're getting as much value out of these new links and old content as we possibly can. The first idea is that if you're going to update the link, it's a good policy to update the content around the link. Don't just change or add a little text link at the bottom of the page. Why are you adding that link? That's what Google is asking. Why is this changing? If you're changing the paragraph, the content, the surrounding text around that, that means this is new information, this is worth paying attention to, and Google is going to pass much more value from that link.

While you're updating that, don't forget the title tag. If you're updating the content, this is a perfect time to re-eval your title tag. That's another freshness signal that Google is going to use in order to evaluate how important this change is and how significant it is.

If you're building external links, this is on an old website, it used to be a broken link, and you convinced a webmaster to update it to point to your site, don't just have them update the link. Give them some information about your site. Give them as much content as you can to add to his content so that content gets updated as well. The more changes, the more significant the change, the fresher this is going to appear and the more that little link is going to count. It's going to start to look just like a fresh link in the eyes of the search engines.

What if you can't control this? What if that webmaster says, "No, I'm just adding a link," and you can't really get him to update any of the content? Well, you still have some options. The main one you can do is take that old page that you don't control and start building new links towards it. That way, the link to your site is going to count a little bit more because that page is going to appear fresher in the eyes of the search engine. Just build some third-party links - they're called bank shots in the link building world - and that's going to pass more value. They do a tremendous job of helping that link seem more relevant.

On the same token, social signals. If you start tweeting, sharing, getting this page shared in your social circles, those are going to be more freshness signals for Google to look at. It's going to appear more fresh.

And D, all of the above. Do whatever you can to make this old page as fresh as it can be and get as much relevance out of that link that you possibly can.

The final option would simply be to just build a new page. Get new pages and new links, diversify your link profile. Regardless, we want you to get as much value out of all the links that you build.

That's it for today's Whiteboard Friday. If you're a link builder, if you have experience with this, please share your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Next week on Whiteboard Friday: We'll be covering Google's "Search Plus Your World" and what it means for search marketers.

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Goodbye To An Old Friend: Marketplace

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 02:45 AM PST

Posted by caseyhen

The SEOmoz Marketplace, born in early 2007, passed away peacefully in January 2012. Cause of death: Old, out-dated code, 5 year old design, manual spam maintenance and was ridden with unfixable bugs. The Marketplace lived a very full life and helped many people find their perfect SEO job, while giving companies a place to show their stuff. Our dear Marketplace was loved by all and spammed by many.

A service is being held in his honor today, here on the SEOmoz blog to bid farewell to our good pal. Please feel free to say a little something in the comments, and let Marketplace know just how much you cared.

Wait... What?

When it comes to our Marketplace, let's be honest, we haven't put our best foot forward lately. When it made its first appearance back in 2007 it was a great addition to our site and for our community. As we have grown, the Marketplace always seemed to be one area of our website that was neglected and as you can see from the screenshots below it's a few design revisions behind. Today we are announcing that the Marketplace will be closing its doors next week.

But don't fret! We will be keeping our Recommend List (the most visited page in the Marketplace) and will give it a brand new look and feel. Over the past few weeks we've worked on puttiing together a comprehensive list of companies we recommend. There is some amazing talent out there! More details about getting on the recommend list will be included when the new list is released.

A Look Back

Over the years, the Marketplace did its job (hehe get it.. job.. ok nevermind) well but recently it has fallen into despair a bit. Not only is the design old, but it has put a strain on other systems, causing the site to slow down. The current Marketplace wasn't built to scale with the growth we have seen in the past couple years, and we're feeling the strain now. For example, there are pages that do not paginate, pages that don't cache, database queries that are not optimized, and additional pages that open our website to attacks. Take a peek at the amazing transormation it has seen in the past 4-5 years (aka none).

Marketplace 2007/2008

Marketplace 2012

Along with the design that hasn't changed, the code that powers the Marketplace is outdated and tired as well. The system has many bugs that cause things not to work and provide a poor user experience that we are not proud of. Currently our resources are strained building an amazing product for the community and sometimes things need to get cut. In the future we hope to add additional features into our user profiles that our users can use to promote themselves but we have yet to decide what will get done.

The Marketplace was also a very well known place to spam and without a process of detecting that spam it became a very labor-intensive process that we have a problem keeping up with. Our Marketplace was meant for a place to list your internet marketing company but it seemed that one of our favorite many plumbers found it a great place to spam also.

Alternatives

In place of our Marketplace we are encouraging you to utilize Linkedin. Post your job on your company page and then you are welcome to share it in our SEOmoz group.

A Note About "Old" Q&A

On another note, for those members who have been around for a while will remember our original Q&A system. We will also be making a change to the way that old system works. Currently those questions are all publicly available but will be removed from public view along with the Marketplace. The top viewed questions will be migrated over to our new system and the other questions will be removed in 6 months. If you are a long time member and have questions you would like to keep, please copy them into a safe place as they will be removed in 6 months. All of your old questions can be found here.

Final Note

We would like to thank everyone who has participated in the Marketplace and would love to hear any success stories that you have had there. Additionally, if you have other great resources that may help community members find work, please leave those suggestions in the comments.

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SEOptimise

What Signals Are Google Sending About Image Search?

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 05:21 AM PST

In recent months, Google has made a distinct effort to publicly communicate the small changes they have been making to their algorithms. In a bid to appear more transparent, Google has published monthly updates on its blog with regard to these changes. With special attention on these updates, and taking into consideration yesterday's big social search announcement, this post ponders the signals being sent to us around Google Image Search.

The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:

"Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web." It would appear that by Google is trying to reduce issues of duplicate content by making sure the same image doesn’t appear twice.

It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.

In December's post, Google mentioned:

"Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often."

A month earlier, Google announced its freshness update to search, which prioritises recent, relevant and timely results. Joe Crowther, of Metro news site explains, “The quicker you get the image up the better. Google tends to assume that the first to break a story or image is the source. As the story develops, it will re-adjust, dependent of other signals”. As image search succumbs to the freshness update, we can deduce that Google is continuing to include image search within all its major algorithm updates.

Last week, Google announced 30 subtle algorithm changes. This 'monthly series' instalment was different to any previous one due to Google publishing the codenames attached to each change. In its newfound approach to communication, Google mentioned three updates specific to image search.

"Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename "simple"] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages."

This update is rather reflective of the Panda update, which favours high site quality.

"Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename "leaf"] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results."

SEOptimise’s Matt Taylor explains the possible implications of this for an SEO campaign: "When Google rolls out something from the main search to image search that wasn't there previously, it may be possible to spot patterns on what Google deems as spammy by noting which sites disappear from the search results. If you notice images from your site disappear from the image search, this gives you an indication that Google thinks you are spammy".

"Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename "matter"] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you'll tend to see images with larger full-size versions."

The improvements to image size present opportunities for ecommerce sites. Bigger images will rank better, and if these sites have good size images of their products, they may be able to pull traffic from image search for products that may be difficult to rank for normally.

These changes not only signal that image size is now important, but also that the quality of a landing page (or the page on which the image sits) determines how an image is ranked. Along with added spam detection, all these updates point to a "cleaning up of image search".

Yesterday Google announced its "+1 Your World" project, which confirms and further enhances Google personalised search for users based on their social circles. Search queries will now deliver results from the anonymous web and results from the user’s own personal networks (providing that the information has been shared with that user). Image search will be no different. However, the personal image results will only be truly useful depending on the information that is attached to the images. Images posted with the original JPEG filename will not rank well in personal search, just as you would expect in a public search.

This update strengthens Google's previous attempts to clean up web images by rewarding well classified image information. It is apparent that Google Image Search is being targeted with algorithms that reflect the ideas behind the major Google algorithm update, which would suggest that this area of Google’s business is becoming more important.

Seth's Blog : Your voice will give you away

Your voice will give you away

It's extremely difficult to read a speech and sound as if you mean it.

For most of us, when reading, posture changes, the throat tightens and people can tell. Reading is different from speaking, and a different sort of attention is paid.

Before you give a speech, then, you must do one of two things if your goal is to persuade:

Learn to read the same way you speak (unlikely)

or, learn to speak without reading. Learn your message well enough that you can communicate it without reading it. We want your humanity.

If you can't do that, don't bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.

• Email to a friend •

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Slovenia, Back in Recession, Scrambles to Avoid Economic Crash
Retail Sales Up Scant .1% in December, Core Retail Sales Decline; Chart of Retail Sales Adjusted for Population Growth and Inflation
Year-Over-Year Gasoline and Petroleum Usage Charts; Shares Decline as Chevron Warns of Weaker 4th Quarter Earnings

Slovenia, Back in Recession, Scrambles to Avoid Economic Crash

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 08:58 PM PST

Slovenia, like Hungary is on the brink of fiscal disaster. Unlike Hungary, Slovenia is in the Eurozone.

The Guardian reports Slovenia scrambles to avoid economic crash as Zoran Jankovic, leader of largest party, fails to form a government to deal with debt issues.

Slovenia was on Thursday scrambling to convince international lenders that it can avoid following Hungary's footsteps, after the leader of the country's largest party failed to form a government.

MPs rejected the centre-left Zoran Jankovic as new prime minister, despite calls for a new government to deal with the country's increasing debt and threats of a further cut to its sovereign debt rating.

Slovenia, which was the first post-communist country to join the euro in 2007, was downgraded A1 from Aa3 in December by ratings agency Moody's. Officials fear that political uncertainty and reliance on exports to the EU will trigger a further downgrade and a steep rise in borrowing costs. The country is already being forced to borrow at rates above 7%.

Jankovic, whose Positive Slovenia party gained the most votes at a snap election in December, needed the support of at least 46 out of 90 parliamentary members but only managed to gain the support of 42.

The president and members of parliament now have up to 14 days to nominate new candidates with Janez Jansa, head of the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party, the second strongest party in parliament, the most likely to win.

In 2007, not long after it joined the euro, the European Central Bank warned Slovenia that a prolonged spending binge risked an economic crash.

The country, which has a population of 2 million, was badly hit by the global crisis and its economy shrank by 8% in 2009. After a mild recovery in 2010, recent data showed that another recession was possible, as the economy contracted by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2011.

Jansa, who was prime minister from 2004 to 2008, has pledged to cut the budget deficit, speed up privatisation and selectively raise the retirement age.

Slovenia's political crisis started in September, when parliament ousted the centre-left government of prime minister Borut Pahor over internal coalition squabbles and its inability to enforce reforms that would speed up economic growth.

All of the main credit agencies have cut Slovenia's ratings since September and put it on a negative watch. Fitch said last week that Slovenia needed to form a new government urgently and come up with a plan to narrow its budget deficit to maximise its chance of averting another rate cut.

There is absolutely no way to prevent a massive European recession nor is there any way to prevent various economies like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, and Hungary from outright economic crashes.

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

Retail Sales Up Scant .1% in December, Core Retail Sales Decline; Chart of Retail Sales Adjusted for Population Growth and Inflation

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 09:22 AM PST

Following all the glowing retail sales reports for Christmas, the actual numbers reported today show a mere .1% rise. Excluding autos which rose 1.5%, retail sales actually declined.

MarketWatch reports U.S. retail sales rise scant 0.1% in December

Sales at U.S. retailers increased 0.1% in December, the government said Thursday, in a report that bucked expectations of stronger sales during the holiday period.

"Apparently, all those reports of a robust holiday shopping season were made by people too much into the holiday spirits as retail sales did not surge in December," said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors, Inc.

Electronics were touted as one of the strongest sectors for holiday shopping. But the Commerce Department's data showed a 3.9% monthly decline at electronic stores.

Sales at online retailers, another supposed holiday hotspot, fell 0.4%.

Sales at the nation's malls were lower in December. Sales at general merchandise stores fell 0.8%, including a 0.2% decrease at department stores.

Excluding a 1.5% rise in motor vehicles sales, retail sales for the month fell 0.2% — much weaker than the 0.3% gain expected.

Sales at gasoline stores fell 1.6% in December. Excluding autos and gasoline, sales were flat on the month.

So-called "core" sales, which exclude autos, gasoline, and building materials, fell 0.2% in December. This was the one and only drop in core sales seen during 2011.

Some Retail Sales Components

Retail Sales +.1%
Core Retail Sales -.2%
Gasoline Store Sales -1.6%
Electronics -3.9%
General Merchandise -.8%
Autos +1.5%
Furniture +1.0%
Building Materials and Hardware +1.6%
Leisure, Sports, Hobbies, Reading -.4%
Health and Personal Care +.6%
Food and Beverage -.2%
Restaurants and Bars +.7%
Non-store outlets and online stores -.4%

Retail Sales Adjusted for Population Growth and Inflation

Doug Short has some interesting charts in his report Retail Sales: A Disappointing 0.1% in December

The Retail Sales Report released this morning shows that retail sales in December were up 0.1% month-over-month (but the Census Bureau notes that the statistical confidence range is ±0.5%). That was well below the Briefing.com consensus forecast of 0.4% and Briefing.com's own expectation of 0.5%.

The charts below give us a rather different view of the U.S. retail economy and the long-term behavior of the consumer. The sales numbers are adjusted for population growth and inflation. For the population data I've used the Bureau of Economic Analysis mid-month series available from the St. Louis FRED with a linear extrapolation for the latest month. Inflation is based on the latest Consumer Price Index. December retail sales adjusted accordingly rose 0.1% month-over-month but only 2.4% year-over-year, far less than the 6.5% nominal YoY increase.

Consider: During the past 20 years, the U.S. population has grown by 23% while the dollar has lost about 39% of its purchasing power to inflation. When we adjust accordingly, the rebound in retail sales from the bottom in April 2009 merely gets us back to the per capita spending of December 1999, over twelve years ago.

Retail sales have been recovering since the trough in 2009. But the "real" consumer economy, adjusted for population growth is still in recession territory — 7.0% below its all-time high in January 2006.

Considering the massive 50% off entire store sales that it took to clear merchandise in December, this may have been the last gasp of this economic "recovery".

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

Year-Over-Year Gasoline and Petroleum Usage Charts; Shares Decline as Chevron Warns of Weaker 4th Quarter Earnings

Posted: 12 Jan 2012 08:32 AM PST

Here is the latest chart from Tim Wallace on gasoline and petroleum usage.

click on chart for sharper image

Wallace writes...

Hello Mish

Chevron is reporting weaker than expected results.

As we discussed earlier I was expecting this one due to the obvious disconnect on gasoline prices and petroleum futures. Gasbuddy has a great site for seeing this one coming when you lay the gas prices on the petroleum graphs.

Tim

Chevron Warns of Weaker 4th Quarter Earnings

MarketWatch reports Chevron warns of weaker fourth-quarter results

Chevron Corp. CVX -2.52% said late Wednesday it expects fourth-quarter earnings to come in "significantly below" its third-quarter results. In its interim quarterly report, Chevron said earnings from its "upstream" exploration and production business will be comparable to its third-quarter results while earnings from its "downstream" refining and marketing operations are likely to fall from the previous quarter's results to break-even. The San Ramon, Calif.-based oil company blamed weak refining margins and refining volumes for the downbeat earnings outlook. The company is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter results on Jan. 27. Chevron shares fell as much as 2% to $105.61 in after hours trade.

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

vineri, 13 ianuarie 2012

Making It Easier to Do Business in America

More Bang for Your Buck: Maximize New Links on Old Pages - Whiteboard Friday

More Bang for Your Buck: Maximize New Links on Old Pages - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

SEOWizz: Old Content Links vs. New Content Links

Wait... What?

A Look Back

Alternatives

A Note About "Old" Q&A

Final Note

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Seth's Blog : Your voice will give you away

Your voice will give you away

More Recent Articles

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

vineri, 13 ianuarie 2012

Video Transcription

SEOWizz: Old Content Links vs. New Content Links

Wait... What?

A Look Back

Alternatives

A Note About "Old" Q&A

Final Note

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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