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luni, 13 ianuarie 2014

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President Barack Obama holds a baby in the air while talking with patrons during a stop for lunch at The Coupe in Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

How to Create a Prioritized SEO Action Plan

Posted: 12 Jan 2014 03:17 PM PST

Posted by Kristina Kledzik

If you spend a few hours on any SEO blog, you'll learn all about how to review a website, identify SEO problems, and propose solutions. But proposing solutions alone doesn't get them fixed. Clients and managers will be much more likely to implement your recommendations if you propose clear, concrete action plans that prioritize steps based on expected cost and benefit. It's helpful to include a spreadsheet at the end of each audit that looks something like this:

A five column table probably doesn't look too intimidating, but when you get down to it, there's a lot of work involved in arriving at the right piece for each column, so I want to go over each step thoroughly (letters correspond to columns on the table):

Writing concrete actions
Prioritizing recommendations
Identifying resources needed
Estimating costs
Compiling pieces for final ranking

A. Writing concrete actions

The difficult part of our job is figuring out the what and the why, so we often leave off the time consuming yet simple last step: how. For example, many SEO reports might something like this:

We crawled your site and found a number of broken internal links that are creating 404 errors and losing PageRank. By checking your internal links and correcting any broken links, you will retain PageRank, increasing rankings across the site, and create a better experience for your visitors.

That covers what the problem is and why you should fix it, and broadly outlines what you should do to fix the problem. But imagine that you're a web developer who read that report: did someone just tell you to spend days clicking all the links on your site looking for 404 errors?!

As experienced SEOs, many of you reading this probably jumped slightly in your seats. No, you did not just ask them to manually go through the site - there are so many tools that can do that for them! Just run a Screaming Frog crawl and look for 404 errors! But the truth is, as knowledgeable as web developers are, there are many tips and tricks of SEO that they don't know about. Even if they do know about Screaming Frog, consider how much more helpful this report is:

We have compiled a list of all broken links across the site, their location, and their anchor text. We recommend that you review these and either remove the link or find an appropriate live page to direct visitors to.

Without this last step, you're relying on a savvy web developer to do the manual labor for you. With this last step, you're allowing the project manager to pass on your solution to an intern and forget about it. Even if it technically costs the company more to pay you for those 15 minutes of work than their developers, it prevents mistakes and dramatically increases the chance of the work actually getting done.

Whenever you're creating an action plan, don't stop at high level solutions. Outline the steps it will take to complete the plan, and do as many of the steps as you can yourself.

B. Prioritizing recommendations

This step is vital, yet rarely included. As easy-to-implement as your actions may be, passing on over 20 actions to any group may seem overwhelming. Where do they start? What will get them the most traffic for their efforts?

If your client or manager wants traffic or revenue estimations, that'll take some time (and deserves its own forecasting blog post). But most clients I've worked with are fine with a high/medium/low scale.

What counts as high, medium or low? I've ranked the most common issues that I find while reviewing clients' sites from largest impact to least. Just be sure to modify the final high/medium/low ranking based on how widespread the problem is.

1. Penalties

You probably already knew this, but: always fix penalties first.

If your site is under penalty, any other SEO fixes will have less of an impact. And there's always the worrisome possibility that the penalty will lead to bigger/worse penalties (i.e. an algorithmic penalty could lead to a manual review, a manual penalty could lead to a manual review of other issues, an unresolved penalty could receive harsher punishment).

Clients and managers are much more willing to invest in regaining traffic they once had than making changes to get more traffic. If you can spot and prove a penalty, it should be easy to identify value lost and how much more they will gain from unpenalized rankings than they will lose from fixing the problem.

1a. Manual penalties

Manual penalties typically cause results to drop a set number of places in rankings. To check for a manual penalty, search for the site's brand name. If it isn't ranking #1, you probably have a manual penalty on your hands. To remove a manual penalty, you'll have to submit a reconsideration request with Google. Lewis Sellers put together a great post detailing how to do this thoroughly (otherwise, your request will be denied).

1b. Algorithmic penalties

Algorithmic penalties still get the "high" prioritization, but are usually less severe than manual penalties. Unlike manual penalties, algorithmic penalties won't knock your rankings evenly across keywords, but you'll see an overall drop in organic search traffic.To identify an algorithmic penalty, look through Moz's handy log of algorithm changes to find which changes Google implemented right before or during the site's organic traffic decrease. They include links to articles, which should help you find a solution for the penalty.

Note: There's a difference between algorithmic penalties and changes. A penalty is when Google's algorithm determines that you have done something against the rules and ranks your sites' pages lower than they would otherwise rank. Fix the core issue, and your site can start to rank well again. But when algorithms change, there's no way to "regain" lost traffic. The landscape has just changed.

Here's an example: if your site is getting less traffic because Hummingbird answers the query above search results, there's nothing you can do or fix to get your traffic "back." Instead, you have to be a marketer rather than an SEO. What's the site's core strength? How can you move your efforts towards more fruitful channels?

1c. Potential penalties

Unsurprisingly, potential penalties should be prioritized below active penalties, but make sure that you handle them before other recommendations.

What do I mean by "potential" penalties? If you notice keyword stuffing, doorway pages, or unnatural links, but don't see any proof of current penalties, it's only a matter of time before your site takes a hit.

These are much harder to convince website managers to invest in. They are spam tactics that are most likely paying off, so fixing them will take time and effort and may very well hurt organic traffic. That said, it's incredibly important that you fix them as soon as possible. It's much harder to recover from a penalty than it is to prevent one. Plus, as an SEO you may very well lose respect (or your job!) if you let a penalty hit while you're on duty.

2. Pages that don't rank

Broken links, incorrect redirects, or low quality/seemingly duplicate content will often cause Google to miss pages or ignore them completely. Site owners often incorrectly assume that this has to do with keyword targeting when they can't find their page for a relevant search term. But there's nothing that content can do to make up for not being in the index in the first place.

2a. Poor link structure

Most commonly, a page won't make it to Google's index because:

There are no links to it
There are supposed to be links to it, but they're broken
There are 302 redirects to it, so the original URL stays in the index
There is one link to it at the bottom of a 3,000 word article with 300 exit links
Navigation is 100% JavaScript that loads text after the page is loaded, so Google can't read it

In all of these cases, Google either can't find the page or doesn't think that it's important enough to add to its index. This is easy enough to fix on a one-off basis, but you don't want to have to keep checking for lost pages.

The best way to make sure that all pages are found is to build a solid navigational structure that links to all pages on the site so that you're not relying on body links for content to be found.

2b. Duplicate or extremely low-quality content

If Google thinks that a page contributes nothing to the world wide web, it may choose not to rank your page unless you search for the URL explicitly. Historically, this would happen when a page had almost no content (less than 50 words) or was very clearly keyword stuffing, so always make sure that a missing page is readable and has enough text content that Google can understand its meaning. You can check to see what Google can read on a page by loading Google's cache of a page, in the text-only version.

You're more likely to run into duplicate content issues, though. If Google finds two pages on the web that have nearly identical content in the body of the page, Google will choose one page as the "original" and ignore the rest. To check to see if you have duplicate content, copy a long string of text from a page and search for it in quotes.

You or your client may have accidentally kicked your own content out of the search index if you:

(Ecommerce sites) Shared product content by taking the manufacturer's description. In this case, add your own review or work to encourage visitor reviews. Google will not punish you if only a portion of your page is duplicate content.
(Content-based sites) Syndicated your content on more authoritative sites without getting a rel="canonical" back to your page. If you have done this in the past, reach out to get those canonical tags, and make sure to make that a standard part of all syndication.
(International corporations) Shared content aimed at different countries. This is a bigger issue, so check out Kate Morris's recommendations around international SEO.

Note: If you find duplicate or low-quality content that still is ranking, fixing it is still a high priority. It means that the page has enough authority to overcome the issue, but if you create unique, valuable content, the page will do much better in search engine results pages.

3. Confusing content

As smart as search engines are, they're still machines that try to match searchers' queries with your content. Pages are most likely to rank well when they make it clear which questions they're answering, by clearly focusing on one to two subjects per page, and using a similar vernacular to searchers' queries.

3a. Keyword targeting

Most keyword research posts I read start from nothing, assuming that you have a topic in mind but haven't written content yet. The truth is, most of us are editing content that's already live, so it's more about verifying that the text was written well than it is about coming up with a list of target keywords.

The first step to verifying keyword targeting is reviewing a page and figuring out what questions it's answering. Then ask yourself, "if I had this question, how would I search for it?" Write up a thorough list of possible queries, both based on the words that are already in the page's text and other words that you think are relevant. If you're an in-house SEO, look through forums and other user-created content to move away from your internal speech patterns. Cyrus Shepard wrote an awesome ebook on identifying keyword groups that should help you with this.

Next, search for those terms in Google Keyword Planner. Do they get traffic? Does the keyword planner recommend similar, but more popular keywords?

If the content is very different from what people are actually searching for, this is a high priority issue. Google understands synonyms, but it doesn't rank them as well as direct matches. If the content is not ideally targeted, this is still a good recommendation, but it's a lower priority.

3b. Topic cannibalization

Even if each of your pages is perfectly targeted, you may find that you're targeting the same queries with multiple pages. In SEO, we've typically covered this topic with "keyword" cannibalization, but with Google working to understand meaning more than individual words, the problem really comes in when you have two pages that both apply to the same queries, and Google thinks your site should only occupy one results place.

When you review pages for keyword targeting, make sure that you don't end up with the same list of keywords for multiple pages. If you do, consider combining them for one stronger page (301 redirects, please!).

4. Other technical issues

Once you've made sure that your site isn't being penalized, all pages are indexed, and content is understandable, other issues are much less pressing. Prioritization of those issues has more to do with how extreme the problem is, and how many pages are effective. Run through Geoff Kenyon's complete Technical SEO Audit Checklist to identify these issues, and prioritize accordingly.

C. Identifying resources

It's fairly easy to identify the general department that will handle an action, but slapping up "Dev Team" for all HTML-related changes might not be the most efficient allocation of resources. Action plans are much more helpful when you start by learning about all available resources to make sure you assign tasks correctly, make sure that you include all resources needed on the spreadsheet, and understand a bit about their workload and work speed.

Know All Available Resources

If you're in-house, this probably isn't an issue.

If you're a consultant, though, you have a very limited view of resources available. Unless you directly ask for a list of internal teams, tools, and agencies, you'll usually only hear about the internal teams that do high-level work, like the content team, web development team, and creative team. But what about the interns, the tools, the outside agencies?

When you mis-assign work to a more in-demand team, team members will often recognize that an intern or tool can do the work and hand it off accordingly. But busier teams take longer to get to projects, so you'll end up waiting weeks for the dev team to clean up broken links, only to have developers had the project off to an intern the second it lands on their to-do lists.

To be as efficient as possible, make sure that you assign tasks to the department or team member who will be able to work on it as fast as possible and/or for the lowest cost. You don't necessarily need to know of all employees and their skills, just make sure that you have a comprehensive list before you assign them yourself, or ask an employee who knows the lay of the land, like a project manager, to go through your list with you.

Include all needed resources

Many SEO recommendations seem very technical, but require a bit of writing or design work. When you add action items like "rewrite page titles," or "move this link into the top navigation," you're asking for more teams to be involved than just the development team.

In these cases you have two options: do the writing or design work yourself (which makes your recommendations very actionable; I do this often myself) or make sure that you identify all resources needed and include them in the spreadsheet.

Understand how quickly resources can complete tasks

This is a tricky step, because no one will tell you that, say, their design team is slow. It's better to ask questions about past projects: Last time you designed a new navigation, how long did the brainstorming take? Are employees often interrupted from their long-term goals to complete short-term assignments?

Information like this will help you select resources and estimate cost. Going back to the example of fixing broken links, the web development team may be able to fix them programmatically, but they might not get around to it until next month, and it'll take them a day to write the code. Meanwhile, there may be an intern who is quick and efficient and has free time right now. Many teams (especially developers) like to take the most "efficient" route, but your organic traffic will do much better if you complete tasks as quickly as possible rather than as efficiently as possible.

D. Estimating cost

I used the word "cost" here because money is the most universal way to compare effort spent between employee involvement, outside resources, and tools. However, most SEO recommendations require manual labor, often carried out by in-house workers, in which case companies may be more used to measuring in terms of time to implement or effort. Your "cost" will make much more sense if it's in the same format that they're used to seeing.

Again, most companies are happy with a scale of high/medium/low, but if you have enough experience with the company, more precise estimates will make it easier to prioritize actions.

E. Prioritizing SEO actions

The final prioritization decision should take into account all of the pieces above, plus the company culture and goals.

Notice that I didn't say SEO goals. You should prioritize SEO actions that compliment all goals for the company, including (but not limited to) SEO goals. If the content team is already rewriting product pages, start on keyword targeting before you worry about reworking the navigation. Integrating SEO wins into current projects is one of the best ways to minimize budget.

In addition to explicit goals, you should also think about what will make your team and management feel that the project has been successful. If you're working with an agile team that's used to quick wins and/or a company that is skeptical of the value of SEO, you should start with easy-to-complete tasks that turn the needle immediately. If you're working with a company that takes a bit more time to complete projects, you may want to start them on big plays right away, to make sure they get maximum SEO value for the few projects they're able to complete. As brilliant as you may be, you won't retain clients unless they see the wins.

Is all this effort worth it?

Yes. Being a consultant or an employee requires much more than simply doing your job; you will look a million times smarter if you're more effective. Plus, your coworkers/clients will love you for it.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Seth's Blog : Who are your customers?

Who are your customers?

Answering, "anyone who pays us money," is a cop out.

Almost as bad is describing your customers by demographics. It's only a little interesting to know that they are, on average, 32 year old, white, male, lacrosse fans.

No, what we need to know is:

What do they believe?

Who do they trust?

What are they afraid of and who do they love?

What are they seeking?

Who are their friends?

What do they talk about?

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duminică, 12 ianuarie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

When Will Interest on US National Debt Exceed $1 Trillion? When Will the Fed Hike Rates?

Posted: 12 Jan 2014 08:37 PM PST

With all the talk of tapering and expected hikes in interest rates by the Fed, inquiring minds are likely interested in what happens to interest on the national debt if the Fed ever does hike.

I asked ny friend Tim Wallace to graph that idea. The Following charts from Wallace provide a clear answer.

In these charts we make the assumption that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is accurate in its assessment of future budget deficits.

Neither Wallace nor I believe those estimates, nor do we believe the Fed is going to be in a position to tighten when they suggest they might, but here are the charts for discussion.

National Debt Trendline

Projected Interest at Various Rates

Hidden Agenda

The current blended rate of interest on the national debt is a mere 2.4% according to the CBO.

The "optimistic" projection of $668 billion assumes the rate will stay below 3.1% through 2020.

With that in mind, please consider the Fed's 'hidden agenda' behind money-printing.

One of the most important reasons the Fed is determined to keep interest rates low is one that is rarely talked about, and which comprises a dark economic foreboding that should frighten us all.

Let me start with a question: How would you feel if you knew that almost all of the money you pay in personal income tax went to pay just one bill, the interest on the debt? Chances are, you and millions of Americans would find that completely unacceptable and indeed they should.

But that is where we may be heading.

But isn't it fair to ask what the interest cost of our debt would be if interest rates returned to a more normal level? What's a normal level? How about the average interest rate the Treasury paid on U.S. debt over the last 20 years?

That rate is 5.7percent, not extravagantly high at all by historic standards.

Do the math: If we were to pay an average interest rate on our debt of 5.7 percent, rather than the 2.4 percent we pay today, in 2020 our debt service cost will be about $930 billion.

Now compare that to the amount the Internal Revenue Service collects from us in personal income taxes.

In 2012, that amount was $1.1 trillion, meaning that if interest rates went back to a more normal level of, say, 5.7 percent, 85 percent of all personal income taxes collected would go to servicing the debt. No wonder the Fed is worried.

The above article did not show the charts, but we just did.

Shifting Goalposts

Really think the Fed is going to hike? They know they can't, and the Fed is disingenuous as to why.

A year ago the Fed was discussing 6.5% as a trigger point.

In December, the Wall Street Journal noted the Fed's Shifting Unemployment Guideposts

Now, in the wake of a massive collapse in the labor force in which unemployment rate just dropped to 6.7% it's easy to understand why the goalposts shifted.

The Fed pretends its interest rate policy is about a dual mandate of jobs and GDP growth.

The above charts show the real reason for the shift: the Fed is in a box of its own making and it has no freaking idea how to get out of the box.

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

Google Strikes Back in Patent Wars; Decades Long Litigation; Return to the Beginning Fistfight

Posted: 12 Jan 2014 03:07 PM PST

Google wants to avoid "patent wars" but realistically speaking, what else can one call the massive "race to acquire patents"?

While pondering that question, please consider Google catches up in technology patent wars

Google was awarded nearly 2,000 patents in the US last year, almost double the number of all previous years combined, catapulting it into the top ranks of technology companies building stockpiles of legally-protected innovations.

The rapid growth, revealed by an analysis of patent office filings, is the latest sign of the internet search company's attempt to buttress a weak position in the smartphone industry's patent wars. It also highlights a race to stake out promising new technology markets, as fields such as "wearable" computing become the next frontiers for growth.

"Our hope is to avoid a war," said Allen Lo, Google's chief patent lawyer. "Hopefully we can learn from the smartphone litigation."

Google ranked only number 21 based on issued patents in 2012 and was not even in the top 50 in 2011, according to an annual ranking compiled by IFI Claims, a patent research company.

The jump partly reflects new products such as the Google Glass "smart" glasses and its development of driverless cars, said Mr Lo. "We're right at the cutting edge of newer areas we want to protect," he said.

Google was assigned 1,920 patents in 2013, according to a review of the US Patent and Trademark Office database. Based on IFI analysis of the previous year's data, it is likely to finish in the top 10, ahead of companies such as General Electric and LG Electronics.

The patent race among industry leaders has threatened to overwhelm smaller technology companies, forcing them to mount their own acquisition campaigns to defend themselves.

Patent experts warn that the quality of a technology company's patents, rather than volume, is the most important issue affecting its legal defences. Apple has won the upper hand in its US legal battles against Samsung despite having a far smaller patent portfolio.

However, the sheer quantity of patent holdings also helps deter attack and has led to an intellectual property arms race.

Decades Long Litigation

You cannot avoid a war you are in.

Realistically, the hope is not to avoid a patent war, but rather an expensive litigation war.

In the "finally shake hands department", a Decades-Old Rambus Litigation Against Micron For RDRAM Tech Reaches Settlement this past December.

Similarly, C/Net reports Rambus bags last major litigation target Micron.

Micron Technology has finally settled with Rambus on DRAM memory patents, agreeing to pay up to $280 million over a period of seven years.

According to the agreement announced Tuesday, Micron can use any Rambus patent for the manufacture of "specified integrated circuit products."

The agreement requires quarterly royalty payments to Rambus over the next seven years capped at $10 million per quarter or $280 million during the initial term, the two companies said in a statement.

"This was our last major outstanding litigation," Rambus CEO Ron Black said in a conference call Tuesday. The two companies have been sparring for more than a decade.

As part of the settlement, Micron and Rambus have settled all outstanding patent and antitrust claims. The agreement also covers Japan-based Elpida, which Micron acquired earlier this year.

Rambus has settled with, or aggressively sued, every major player in the memory chip industry over the last 14 years.

Rambus has a long and convoluted history of lawsuits and legal action. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission dropped its antitrust case against the company after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an FTC appeal. This followed an appeals court decision that threw out the FTC's findings that Rambus intentionally withheld its patent plans from a standards body, which later sanctioned certain Rambus technology that is found in many PCs and servers around the world.

As DRAM standards evolved, Rambus has alleged that more and more patented Rambus inventions were being utilized and shipping in products.

The genesis of many of the legal proceedings was a Rambus claim that SDRAM and subsequent DDR memory types infringed Rambus patented inventions.

Return to the Beginning Fistfight

I have lost count of the huge number of verdicts that have been won, lost, and reversed between Rambus and other companies over computer memory patents.

Going back to the beginning, I recall a near fistfight incident between Rambus and Micron executives. My memory was correct.

A quick search for "Rambus Micron CEO Fistfight" located this September 2000 article: Micron, Rambus chiefs nearly came to blows.

Earlier this week we reported on first Micron, then Hyundai taking legal action against Rambus, so upping the ante on the continuing dispute over patents on double data rate (DDR) and synchronous DRAM memory.

Those legal actions have churned up heady debates on boards such as Silicon Investor and Raging Bull, no doubt prompted by people worried more about whether they're out of pocket than the technology per se.

And the debate has also churned up ancient (March 99) memories of a party held at Dan Niles' San Francisco home, where, according to The Street, Rambus CFO Gary Harmon and Micron CEO Steve Appleton nearly got into a fist fight over support for the RIMMs.

One telling statement in the piece on The Street is well worth re-airing. Harmon is quoted as saying that by March 2000, Micron would be giving Rambus its whole-hearted support.

Instead, Micron and Hyundai are taking Rambus to court, Intel has conceded that DDR is important for its Pentium 4, while stalinised benchmarks seem to suggest that those long on Rambus may well have been right.

This story has got everything, it seems, apart from sex. Unless, that is, you know differently, and want to slip us the details for our forthcoming book, tentatively called The Rambus Affair™

That is precisely the kind of war that Google hopes to avoid. And to avoid litigation fistfight wars, it instead engages in a more civil war of patent acquisition.

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

Seth's Blog : Less vs. more, give vs. take

Less vs. more, give vs. take

You could build a company dedicated to paying your employees ever more. Or you could build a company based on the strategy of paying them ever less.

You could create a business based on the idea of charging your customers the lowest possible prices, or you could set out to figure out how to charge them as much as possible.

Your organization could depend on ever increasing the amount of choice and privacy you give your users--or you could work daily to reduce them.

You could protect your users from interruption or you could decide to profit from interruption.

You could fight daily to tell those that are listening the truth, or you could fight daily to spin your story to have it seen as the truth.

It's tempting to view each of these extremes as merely an alternative to compromise, but compromise isn't a goal, it's a temporary tactic. Where are you headed?

We move the center when we become extremists in our goals.

Every day, we push against the status quo and make difficult choices. Every day, we seek to increase one metric at the expense of the other. The architecture of the successful organization depends on choosing and embracing these extremes.

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sâmbătă, 11 ianuarie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

48.6% of Spaniards Aged 18-24 Would Take Any Job, Anywhere, for Low Wages; Ikea Spain Gets 100,000 Applicants for 400 Jobs; Walmart, McDonalds Comparison

Posted: 11 Jan 2014 05:49 PM PST

In contrast to McDonalds' workers in the US demanding $15 an hour wages, Almost half of young Spaniards accept any job, anywhere, despite low salary

48.6% of Spaniards aged 18 to 24 said they would accept any job, anywhere and even with a low income. 84.9% felt very or fairly likely to have to work on what is available, 61.7% considered it equally likely to have to go abroad, and 79.2% said they need to study more. Despite this, an overwhelming majority (80%) are convinced that, at least in the near future, will have to be financially dependent on their family.

Future is Black

Young Spaniards recognize enjoy the benefits of the welfare state far more than their parents, except as regards stability and security. They are also convinced that their children will live much worse than them.

Frustrated Expectations

Only 20% of young people believe things will improve in the next two or three years, compared to 36% who think it will get worse. Moreover, nearly three in four young people (71%) considered likely to find little or no work in the coming year.

Ikea Spain Gets 100,000 Applicants for 400 Jobs

Also via translation from El Economista, please consider Ikea Spain Gets 100,000 Applicants for 400 Jobs

The Swedish multinational Ikea will have work to select staff for a store in Valencia because 100,000 people submitted applications to fill 400 jobs.

Ika received a total of 100,000 job applications through a web page offering. In the first 48 hours of processing, Ikea received 20,000 applications.

The store, which will open in summer, will have a staff of 400 employees and also generate about 80 indirect jobs to cover services such as security, transport and cleaning, among others.

Walmart, McDonalds Comparison

To be fair, there is a major difference between McDonalds' employees and Spaniards seeking jobs.

The McDonalds' employees demanding higher wages have jobs. Those seeking jobs, don't.

However, every McDonalds' employee knew their wage when they were hired. Like Spaniards willing to accept low wages, they took the jobs anyway.

1 Million McDonalds Applicants

I cannot find anything recent on McDonalds, but on April 28, 2011, Bloomberg reported "McDonald's and its franchisees hired 62,000 people in the U.S. after receiving more than one million applications, the Oak Brook, Illinois-based company said today in an e-mailed statement. Previously, it said it planned to hire 50,000."

Walmart 23,000 Applicants for 600 Jobs

On November 19, 2013 NBC Washington reported Walmart to Open First D.C. Stores Dec. 4

Walmart's H Street and Georgia Avenue locations will open Dec. 4 at 8 a.m. Both the 103,000-square-foot Georgia Avenue store and the 74,000-square-foot H Street location will feature fresh produce, a deli, organic food items and a full-service pharmacy.

The stores will hire a combined 600 associates after combing through the more 23,000 applications its received from potential employees.

The arrival of Walmart has not been a smooth one. Both stores were on the verge of never opening after the retail giant threatened to pull its plans if Mayor Vincent Gray signed a living wage bill.

The Large Retailer Accountability Act, known colloquially as the "Walmart Bill," would have required the company -- and other big-box retailers -- to pay its employees a minimum of $12.50 an hour.

Gray vetoed the bill in September.

Minimum wage in the District currently stands at $8.25 an hour.

Reflections on Living Wages

Take a poll of those employees. I bet 100% of them are happier to have a job at $8.25 an hour vs. no job at some presumed "living wage" that they would not get because there were no jobs.

Of course, now that they have a job and should be happy, some union activist is going to try to convince them they shouldn't be happy.

The Real Problem

Other than a couple of like-minded Austrian bloggers, no one has bothered to complain about the real problem: The Fed pumping money supply like mad, while holding interest rates low.

Five Results

Prices rising faster than wages
Grossly distorted income inequalities
Non-existent price signals
Interest rates that encourage hardware and software solutions to eliminate employees
Equity and bond market bubbles

I blasted the Fed regarding these issues early Friday.

For details and truly educational reading, please see Money as Communication: A Purposely "Non-Educational" Fallacious Video by the Atlanta Fed.

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

Spaniards Expelled from Belgium for Abusing Illegal Immigrant Social Aid Handouts

Posted: 11 Jan 2014 12:53 PM PST

What would happen if the US suddenly kicked out illegal immigrants for abuse of free handouts and social aid?

Belgium did just that. The numbers are small, but the point is that it happened at all.

Via translation from Libre Mercado, please consider Spaniards, among Europeans expelled from Belgium's abuse of social aid programs.

The Aliens Office of Belgium withdrew permission of residence to 323 Spaniards in 2013 because they no longer meet the requirements, such as having an employment contract, being a student or have become self-employed, and thus prevent impose burdens exaggerated to the coffers of the Belgian Social Security. Spanish rank third in number of expulsions, behind only Romanians and Bulgarians.

In total, Belgium expelled a total of 2,712 European citizens for these reasons over the past year. This represents an increase from 2012, when it withdrew permission for 2,407 people to stay in the country.

European citizens have the right to freedom of movement within the territory of the European Union, but must meet certain requirements during your stay at a home outside the Member State.

The Belgian Foreign Office explained that the main reason for removing these permissions have to do with "unreasonable burden on the social system" involving these citizens, by not complying with the conditions required to Europeans.

Not only does this happen in Europe, it happens in spite of alleged freedom of movement clauses for Eurozone nations.

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

luni, 13 ianuarie 2014

Photo: Baby Force One

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