joi, 31 mai 2012

Web Directory Submission Danger: Analysis of 2,678 Directories Shows 20% Penalized/Banned by Google

Web Directory Submission Danger: Analysis of 2,678 Directories Shows 20% Penalized/Banned by Google


Web Directory Submission Danger: Analysis of 2,678 Directories Shows 20% Penalized/Banned by Google

Posted: 30 May 2012 02:14 PM PDT

Posted by Kurtis

Hi, my name's Kurtis and I'm relatively new here at Moz. My official title is "Captain of Special Projects," which means I spend a lot of time browsing strange parts of the web, assembling metrics and inputting data in Google Docs/Excel. If you walk past my desk in the Mozplex, be warned, investigating webspam is on my task list, hence you may come away slightly traumatized by what you see. I ward off the demons by taking care of two cats and fondly remembering my days as a semi-professional scoundrel in Minnesota.

Let's move on to my first public project, which came about after Google deindexed several directories a few weeks ago. This event left us wondering if there was a rhyme to their reason. So we decided to do some intensive data collection of our own and try to figure out what was really going on.

Research All the Directories

We gathered a total of 2,678 directories from lists like Directory Maximizer, Val Web Design, SEOTIPSY.com, and SEOmoz's own directory list (just the web directories were used), the search for clues began. Out of the 2,678 directories, only 200 were banned – not too shabby. However, there were 340 additional directories that had avoided being banned, but had been penalized.

We define banned as having no results in Google when a site:domain.com search is performed:

Blogfare Site Search

We defined penalized as meaning the directory did not show up when highly obvious queries including its title tag / brand name produced the directory deep in the results (and that this could be repeated for any internal pages on the site as well):

Pegasus Directory Search

As you can see above, the directory itself is nowhere to be found despite the exact title query, yet it's clearly still indexed (as you can see below by performing a domain name match query):

Pegasus Domain Search

At first, the data for the banned directories had one common trait – none of them had a visible toolbar Pagerank. For the most part, this initial observation was fairly accurate. As we pressed on, the results became more sporadic. This leads me to believe that it may have been a manual update, rather than an algorithmic one, or at least, that no particular public metrics/patterns are clear from the directories that suffered a penalization/ban.

That is not to say the ones left unharmed are safe from a future algorithmic update. In fact, I suspect this update was intended to serve as a warning; Google will be cracking down on directories. Why? In my own humble opinion, most of the classic, "built-for-SEO-and-links" directories do not provide any benefit to users, falling under the category of non-content spam.

Some directories and link resource lists are likely going to be valuable and useful long term (e.g. CSS Beauty's collection of great designs, the Craft Site Directory or Public Legal's list of legal resources). These are obviously not in the same world as those "SEO directories" and thus probably don't deserve the same classification despite the nomenclature overlap.

Updated Directory List!

In the midst of the panic, a concerned individual brought to my attention that “half of our directories were deindexed” and wanted to know when we would be updating our list. If by half he meant 5 of the 228 we listed were banned and an additional 5 just penalized, then I’d have to agree. ;-) In any case, our list is now updated. Thanks for being patient!

Let's look at the data

We've set up two spreadsheets that show which directories were banned and/or penalized, plus a bit of data about each one. Please feel free to check them out for yourself.

SEOmoz Directory List

Directory Maximizer, Val Web Design, & SEOTIPSY Directory List

Additional Data Analysis

Given the size and scope of the data available, we're hoping that lots of you can jump in and perform your own analysis on these directories, and possibly find some other interesting correlations. As the process for checking for banning/penalization is very tedious and cumbersome, we likely won't be doing an analysis on this scale again in the very near future. But we may revisit it again in 6-12 months to see if things have changed and Google's cracking down more, letting some of the penalties/bans be lifted or making any other notable moves.

I look forward to your feedback and suggestions in the comments!

p.s. The Mozscape metrics (PA, DA, mozRank, etc) are from index 51, which rolled out at the start of May. Our new index, which was just released earlier today, will have more updated and possibly more useful/interesting data. If I have the chance, I'll try to update the public spreadsheets using those numbers.


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May Mozscape Index Update:164 Billion URLs

Posted: 30 May 2012 09:39 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

It's that time once again! Mozscape's latest index update is live as of today (and new data is in OSE, the mozBar and PRO by tomorrow). This new index is our largest yet, at 164 Billion URLs, however that comes with a few caveats. The major one is that we've got a smaller-than-normal number of domains in this index, so you may see link counts rising, while unique linking root domains shrink. I asked the team why this happened, and our data scientist, Matt, provided a great explanation:

We schedule URLs to be crawled based on their PA+external mozRank to crawl the highest quality pages. Since most high PA pages are on a few large sites this naturally biases to crawling fewer domains. To enforce some domain diversity the V2 crawlers introduced a set of domain mozRank limits that limit the crawl depth on each domain. However, this doesn't guarantee a diverse index when the crawl schedule is full (as we had for Index 52).

In this case, many lower quality domains with low PA/DA are cut from the schedule and out of the index. This is the same problem we ran into when we first switched to the V2 crawlers last year and the domain diversity dropped way down. We've since fixed the problem by introducing another hard constraint that always schedules a few pages from each domain, regardless of PA. This was implemented a few weeks ago and the domain numbers for Index 53 are going back up to 153 million.

Thankfully, the domains affected should be at the far edges of the web - those that aren't well linked-to or important. Still, we recognize this is important and thus are focused on balancing these moving forward.

Several other points may be of interest as well:

  • Last index took nearly 13 weeks to process, this one's only 7 weeks. This means relatively fresher data, though not as fresh as we'd like. The oldest information will be from February and the newest from mid-April.
  • Of all the URLs on which data was requested in the last month, this update has data for 88.56% of them (this is only very slightly lower than last index's 88.80%) 
  • This index still has very high correlations with rankings. Below are a few samples of Spearman correlations with higher rankings in Google.com (US):
    • Page Authority (PA) - 0.38
    • Domain Authority (DA) - 0.26
    • URL MozRank (mR) - 0.20
    • URL MozTrust (mT) - 0.22
    • Linking Root Domains to the URL - 0.29
    • Total # of Links to the URL - 0.22

This bit is important: Next index, we're going back down to between 70-90 billion URLs, and focusing on getting back to much fresher updates (we're even aiming to get to updates every 2 weeks, though this is a challenging goal, not a guarantee). The 150 billion+ page indices are an awesome milestone, but as you've likely noticed, the extra data does not equate with hugely better correlations nor even with massively higher amounts of data on the URLs most of our customers care about (as an example, in index 50, we had ~53 billion pages and 82.09% of URLs requested had data). That said, once our architecture is more stable, we will be aiming to get to both huge index sizes and dramatically better freshness. Look for tons of work and improvements over the summer on both fronts.

Below are the stats for Index 52: 

  • 164,569,893,828 (164 billion) URLs
  • 1,222,033,252 (1.22 billion) Subdomains
  • 117,444,355 (117 million) Root Domains
  • 1,784,256,496,532 (1.7 trillion) Links
  • Followed vs. Nofollowed
    • 2.57% of all links found were nofollowed
    • 64.91% of nofollowed links are internal
    • 35.09% are external
  • Rel Canonical - 11.33% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
  • The average page has 85.12 links on it
    • 74.38 internal links on average
    • 10.74 external links on average

Feedback is greatly appreciated - this index should help with Penguin link data idenitification substantively more than our prior one, and the next one should be even more useful for that. Do remember that since this index stopped crawling and began processing in mid-April, link additions/removals that have happened since won't be reflected. Our next index will, hopefully, be out with 5 or fewer weeks of processing, to enhance that freshness. We're excited to see how this affects correlations and data quality.


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Recovering from an Over Optimization Penalty - A True Story

Posted: 30 May 2012 04:08 AM PDT

Posted by NickEubanks

As almost anyone reading this post already knows, April 24, 2012 marked a big day in the search industry. Once the initial Penguin update was rolled out (please believe me this is only the beginning and there is much more to come) the SEO industry, as we know it exploded in a flurry of fear and satisfaction. 

For those of us that had sites get hit (I'll admit I had several sites dinged by this update) what started out as anger quickly turned to fear and curiosity. Many industry publications jumped the gun and, in my opinion, began publishing tips and processes on how to 'recover from Penguin,' when the truth is, as mentioned by Ian Howells in his recent SEO Podcast, it's really too soon to tell the full effects of these algorithm updates and anyone out there preaching is really just speculating. The best information I have seen thus far is from The HOTH, and that is DON'T PANIC, and BE PATIENT. 

I did, however, have a real life experience where one of my sites, my own personal blog, got hit for what I am now almost sure was over optimization, and I was able to recover. What's really interesting to me is that my site, nickeubanks.com, got hit at all... let me explain. My personal site is low traffic, low importance. I do not build links to it, I do not monetize it, it really just exists to serve as my digital resume and a place for me to openly ramble or rant when I feel like it. 

The Penguin Smack

Here is a screen shot of Google on Friday May 18, 2012. After a friend of mine reached out to me to ask if I had taken my site down (of course he didn't just go and check the domain :P) I asked him what he was searching for. He mentioned he had typed in some words in the title from what he could remember and my name - which should be more than sufficient to generate a SERP with my post(s). It did not. Instead this is what he was seeing:

Google SERP 05-18-12

With Inbound.org starting off the list, it was page after page of places that linked to my post - but not the post itself. My immediate reaction was fear that somehow my site was sandboxed. So to check I did a  quick search for the full post title in quotes and there it was... what does this mean? That my site was penalized... but for what? As I mentioned before I don't do any active linking, advertising, and the site has slim to no traffic. My first thought was that I might have been a victim of Negative SEO. I logged into Webmaster Tools and pulled down my indexed Google back-link profile, which I have put into a public Google Doc here so you can see it. Upon review you'll see this is a pretty natural back-link profile, even with some links from some pretty authoritative websites... at this point I am scrambling for answers...

What The Hell is Going On!?

I was racking my brain to think of what it could possibly be that was causing my site to be buried in the SERP's, especially for posts that have a lot of natural links, social signals, and are full of unique, well written content (note: I didn't write most of the content in these posts). 

I reached out to my buddy Mark Kennedy, as among the Philly SEO crowd he is certainly one of the most passionate SEO's I have ever met. He had the same line of thinking that I did and immediately hit up ahref's looking for spam-links or clues. Nothing. His next suggestion was to pour over any recent changes I made to the website. I reviewed some of the CSS changes and couldn't find any messy code or mistakes that may have warranted the site to be dinged (Did I mess up my headers? Did I botch a declarations statement?) Nothing.

The only thing I could think of was to really take a closer look at my links, so I started inspecting each of the sites that was linking to me. During this process I stumbled across my old blog from college, 23Run.com. Here are the Google indexed links from 23Run. As you can see there are 77 of them, which out of my total indexed link profile, is roughly 11%. 

I went to 23Run.com to take a closer look at how my site was linked:

Over Optimized Anchor Text

I Had to Change This

And there it was... right in line with the Pengiun post from Microsite Masters showing sample data from their analysis, I had over 10% of my links over-optimized for anchor text. So I made this quick change:

Natural anchor text

How Long Will I Have to Wait?

And then needed to gauge about how long it would take for Google to crawl my site and index these changes, so I took a quick peak at my average crawl rate in Webmaster Tools:

Nick Eubanks Dot Com May 2012 Crawl Stats

and seeing that my average crawl rate was 59 pages, but my low was 24, I decided to give it the weekend and check back on Monday May 21, 2012. When Monday's production activity calmed down, sometime in the early afternoon, I decided to run the query again and alas;

Resurrection!

Post-Penguin-Google-SERP_Fixed

It is still ranking underneath Inbound.org, which is a bit strange, but it's back!

Furthermore, the post is back to ranking for more broad terms, such as 'fresh insights nick eubanks' as you can see below:

Google SERP Restored

Conclusion & Takeaways

Plain and simple, over-optimized anchor text can be dangerous. What was once the holy grail of SEO, getting links with your target keywords in the anchor text, is now something that requires careful planning and attention.

My advice is to develop your link profile to not look natural, but to be natural. If your anchor text is 'over optimized', you run the risk of being penalized, so make the effort and put in the time to naturalize your links. Try to replace anchor text links with naked URL's or at the very least more natural anchor text - try to think about these links in the same sense of someone who doesn't know you, finding your page or post and creating a link organically; most likely it won't be your target keywords but your name, page/post title, or a more generic link text such as read more, learn more, etc.

I hope my real-life example proves useful and helps, in any small way, to dispel some of the speculation out there. Thanks for reading.


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Omar Epps's First Summer Job

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, May 31, 2012

 

Omar Epps's First Summer Job

Summer Jobs+ is a call to action for companies and organizations across the country to find opportunities for young people, and employers have committed to providing over 300,000 opportunities so far. If you're looking for a job this summer, be sure to check out the Summer Jobs+ Bank to find summer employment opportunities near you.

A summer job can mean more than just a paycheck, it's a chance to gain skills and a sense of responsibility that can last a lifetime. Check this video of actor Omar Epps (well known these days for his role as Dr. Eric Foreman on the TV show "House") talking about his first summer job delivering pizzas in Brooklyn. Then use the Summer Jobs+ Bank to find your summer job.

Watch as Omar Epps shares his first job:

Omar Epps' first job

In Case You Missed It

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

President Obama Signs Renewal of the Export-Import Bank
American exports are up. To keep the momentum going, President Obama signs a renewal of the Export-Import Bank.

State and District Education Leaders Collaborate to Transform the Teaching Profession
Last week state and district education leaders met at in Cincinnati, Ohio to discuss labor-management collaboration.

President Obama Awards the Medal of Freedom
The Medal of Freedom is highest honor awarded to civilians in the United States.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:30 AM: The President and The Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

11:30 AM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:10 PM: The President and The First Lady meet for lunch with Former President George W. Bush, Former First Lady Laura Bush, President George H.W. Bush, Former First Lady Barbara Bush and family members

1:25 PM: The President and The First Lady welcome Former President George W. Bush and Former First Lady Laura Bush for the official unveiling of their portraits; The Vice President, Former President George H.W. Bush and Former First Lady Barbara Bush will also attend WhiteHouse.gov/live

3:00 PM: The President meets with Secretary Geithner

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Backlink Diver v1.1 Beta 2 released

Hi,

We released Backlink Diver v1.1 beta 2 and we're inviting you to test it.

In this version we added the ability to use proxy servers for checking the pages for Google index and PageRank. In the powerful built-in Proxy Manager you can create numerous proxy lists and test proxy servers for validity and anonymity.

We also changed the work of the "Detect PageRank" and "Check Indexed' options. Now Backlink Diver does not detect PageRank automatically while checking the pages for backlinks. This makes the program functionality more flexible because you can load any list of URLs and check them for PageRank and/or Google index without the verification for backlinks. Plus, you can toggle a proxy list and check the PR and Google index only through proxy servers.

In fact, you get 4-in-one tools: Backlink verifier, PageRank checker, Google index checker and Proxy list checker.

The v1.1 beta 2 also includes many internal fixes which improve and optimize the program work.

You can download Backlink Diver v1.1 beta 2 at this page:


You can find the tutorials how to use proxy servers in Backlink Diver here:


As always, we appreciate your suggestions and bug reports on our User Forum http://www.justlan.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=27

Thank you for your time!

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G-Lock Software
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Seth's Blog : Getting serious about experimentation

Getting serious about experimentation

Here's what doesn't work: hacking around and ignoring what doesn't work.

Here's what also doesn't work: doing your best with your work and then dismissing the elements that don't work as experiments.

The best experiments are experiments on purpose. They are done with rigor and intent. They are measured. They are designed to either fail or create an approach that can be scaled.

Great experimenters measure their results. They probe. They fail on purpose. And when they find something that works, they hand the knowledge over to operators and executors who can scale their work.

You don't get to call it an experiment after it fails.



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miercuri, 30 mai 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


10-Year Treasury Yield Lowest Level in 60-Years; Spain 10-Year at 6.66%, Italy 10-Year 5.93%

Posted: 30 May 2012 03:48 PM PDT

Curve Watchers Anonymous is noting a record low yield on 10-Year US Treasury Notes.



click on chart for sharper image
The above chart shows the monthly close except for the current month. 

$IRX 3-month discount rate : Brown
$FVX 5-year treasury yield : Blue
$TNX 10-year treasury yield : Orange
$TYX 30-year treasury yield : Green


CNBC reports US 10-Year Treasury Yield Hits Record Low of 1.62%
The benchmark U.S. Treasury yield fell to its lowest level in at least 60 years on Wednesday as worries of contagion from Spain's ailing banks raised bids for low-risk investments.

Yields on 10-year notes sank to a record low of 1.62 percent, down sharply from 1.73 percent in late U.S trading on Tuesday.

The 30-year bond yield fell to 2.71 percent, its lowest level since October, and down from a yield of 2.84 percent in late U.S. trade on Tuesday.
Spain Record High Spread to Germany

Spain 10-year bond yield hit 6.7%, a record spread vs. Germany, before settling at 6.66%.

Italy 10-year bond yield hit 6.01% then settled at 5.93%.

Yield on the 10-year German bond hit a record low of 1.27%.

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



Good News in Wisconsin: Governor Walker Leads Barrett 52%-45% in Recall Poll; Union-Busting is a "Godsend"

Posted: 30 May 2012 01:25 PM PDT

I have good news to report in Wisconsin. 

The recall election for Republican governor Scott Walker will take place on June 7. Polls show Walker Leads Barrett 52%-45%.
Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker leads Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by 7 percentage points in the state's June 5 recall election.

Walker widened his edge over Barrett, 52 percent to 45 percent, in a replay of the 2010 governor's race, according to the poll released today by Milwaukee's Marquette Law School. The school's May 16 survey had Walker up 50 percent to 44 percent.

Walker, whose curbs on public-employee collective bargaining last year provoked the recall campaign, received a 51 percent approval rating while 46 percent disapproved. Next week's vote is only the third ouster election of a state chief executive in U.S. history.
Union-Busting is a "Godsend"

I commend governor Walker for killing collective bargaining of some public union workers in Wisconsin. Here are the results of Walker's efforts:

  • Taxpayers are better off.
  • School kids are better off
  • Class sizes are down
  • Struggling school districts now have a budget surplus

For details, please see Union-Busting is a "Godsend"; Elimination of Collective Bargaining is the Single Best Thing one Can do for School Kids

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


EU Throws Spain Two Deathlines; Spanish 10-Year Yield Tops 6.7%; ECB Rejects Madrid Ponzi Refinancing Scheme

Posted: 30 May 2012 10:57 AM PDT

ECB Rejects Madrid Ponzi Refinancing Scheme

The markets are reeling in the wake of rejection of Spain's Ponzi Recapitalization Scheme by the ECB according to the Financial Times.
A Spanish plan to recapitalise Bankia, the troubled lender, by indirectly tapping the European Central Bank for cash, was bluntly rejected as unacceptable by the ECB, European officials said.

Madrid had floated the unorthodox idea over the weekend of recapitalising Bankia by injecting €19bn of sovereign bonds into its parent company, which could then be swapped for cash at the ECB's three-month refinancing window, avoiding the need to raise the money on bond markets.

The ECB told Madrid that a proper capital injection was needed for Bankia and its plans were in danger of breaching an EU ban on "monetary financing," or central bank funding of governments, according to two European officials.

The ECB's rebuff appeared to toughen Madrid's insistence that the only solution to a crisis that is pushing its borrowing costs close to unsustainable levels is for the ECB to become a government lender of last resort.

Senior government officials in Madrid argue that bailouts in Portugal, Greece and Ireland have been catastrophic and Spain will not compromise on its refusal to accept a similar form of intervention.
Lifeline or Deathline?

Reuters reports EU throws Spain two potential lifelines
The European Commission threw Spain, the latest frontline in Europe's debt war, two potential lifelines on Wednesday, offering more time to reduce its budget deficit and direct aid from a euro zone rescue fund to recapitalize distressed banks.

EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said Brussels was ready to give Spain an extra year until 2014 to bring its deficit down to the EU limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product if Madrid presents a solid two-year budget plan for 2013-14, something it has committed to do.

Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said tighter euro zone integration could include a joint bank deposit guarantee scheme to prevent a bank run and euro area financial supervision, saying the mood had changed since member states unanimously rejected a joint deposit guarantee fund only months ago.

"In the same vein, to sever the link between banks and the sovereigns, direct recapitalization by the ESM (European Stability Mechanism) might be envisaged," the report said.

Permitting the ESM to lend directly to banks would require a change to a treaty in the midst of ratification by member states that might come too late for Spain's needs. Spanish premier Mariano Rajoy backs the idea but Rehn appeared cool to it.

"Direct disbursements to banks are not foreseen as such in the treaty, and therefore this is not an available option ... in terms of direct recapitalization," Rehn told reporters.
I have no clue how Reuters came up with the title of lifelines. One proposal is impossible because it involves treaty changes. The other proposal, higher taxes and more austerity measures, looks like a deathline.

Spanish unemployment is at 24.1% and rising and youth unemployment is 51%. Spain's Revised Budget Deficit is 8.9% and rising not shrinking.

To go from 9% to 3% how many more jobs will have to go? What will happen to tax receipts? What will happen to prime minister Rajoy if he puts such a program in place?

Rajoy knows he cannot implement such an offer, and the ECB cannot or will not do what Spain wants.

The bond market reflects this shift. Yield on the 10-year Spanish government bond is up 21 basis points today to 6.65%, having touched the record high of 6.7%.

The only solution to this mess is Spain leaving the Eurozone. Please see Spexit Before Grexit? Six Reasons Spain Will Leave the Euro First for further discussion.

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


Spexit Before Grexit? Six Reasons Spain Will Leave the Euro First

Posted: 30 May 2012 08:15 AM PDT

Interest rates on the 10-Year Spanish bond touched 6.7% today after the ECB shot down prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Ponzi plan to recapitalize banks.

The Spanish banking condition is in such precarious shape that Matthew Lynn of Strategy Economics proposed 'Spexit' Will Come Before a 'Grexit'.
"The euro debt crisis, like any really spectacular geo-economic event, is spawning its own special vocabulary" said Matthew Lynn of Strategy Economics on Wednesday.

We can now add Spexit to a list which includes Merkozy and Grexit, and Lynn believes the chances of Spain leaving the euro are now higher than those of Greece leaving.

"The Spanish are a lot more likely to pull out of the euro than the Greeks, or indeed any of the peripheral countries" said Lynn.

"They are too big to rescue, they have no political hang-ups about rupturing their relations with the European Union, they are already fed up with austerity, and there is a bigger Spanish-speaking world for them to grow into," said Lynn.

"One in four Spanish households now have no bread-winner. Retail sales are falling 10 percent year-on-year. Yet the prescription from Brussels and Berlin is precisely the same as it has been for every other country struggling with the euro. Endure a deep recession. Let unemployment rise. Allow wages to fall until you claw back competitiveness," he said.
6 Reasons Spain Will Leave the Euro First

On MarketWatch Matthew Lynn gives 6 Reasons Spain Will Leave the Euro First.
The Grexit, short for Greece finally giving up on the single currency, has been trending for the last few weeks. And coming up next: the Spexit.

In Greece, people have just about put up with it — until now. So have the Irish, the Portuguese, and the Italians. The Spanish won't. Here's why.

One: Spain is too big to rescue.

Two: Spain has tired of austerity already. Remember, the protests against cuts began in Madrid a year ago with the "indignados" movement, which started sit-ins across major cities in 2011. The protests spread from there to Greece, and other euro-zone countries. The austerity had hardly even begun, yet already it has provoked strong opposition.

Three: Spain has a real economy. The Greeks understandably feel nervous about life outside the euro zone. They don't really make anything. Spain is a successful economy with a perfectly respectable industrial base – its export to GDP ratio is 26%, similar to the U.K., France or Italy. Only last week the Japanese car-maker Nissan announced a major new investment there.

Four: Spain is politically secure. For many countries, euro membership is more about politics than economics. The Greeks stay in because it locks them into Europe (rather than being part of the Turkish sphere of influence). Latvia wanted in because it made it part of the EU rather than being dominated by Russia. For the Irish, it is about separating themselves from Britain. The Germans stick with the euro because the EU still represents a break with its troubled past.

Five: Spain has bigger horizons. The Spanish economy looks partly to Europe. But it looks just as much to the booming Spanish-speaking economies of Latin America (and indeed the huge Hispanic market in the U.S.). Rather like the U.K., Spanish business has always looked to the global rather than the European market. Why tie yourself to a failing project when there are much bigger opportunities out there?

Six: The debate has already started. There is already a serious discussion underway in Spain about the future of the currency. Plenty of mainstream economists and pundits are arguing that the real problem is the euro, and Spain will only recover once it gets the peseta back. The taboo has been broken. That isn't true in Greece, where even the far-left Syriza party still clings to the idea that it should stay in the euro.
Debate in Spain

Proving point number six above, El Economista picked up on the story in Comes Spexit: Spain's Euro exit before Greece?

If prime minister Rajoy refuses a bailout by the Troika, what other options does Spain have? Is another puppet government like we saw in Greece and Italy coming up?

The sooner Spain sees the light and gets out of the euro that is strangling it, the better off Spain will be.

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


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