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joi, 14 august 2014
The President Speaks on Iraq and Ferguson, Missouri
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Is that Mind-Blowing Title Blowing Your Credibility? You Decide
Is that Mind-Blowing Title Blowing Your Credibility? You Decide |
| Is that Mind-Blowing Title Blowing Your Credibility? You Decide Posted: 13 Aug 2014 05:18 PM PDT Posted by Isla_McKetta What if I told you I could teach you to write the perfect headline? One that is so irresistible every person who sees it will click on it. You'd sign up immediately and maybe even promise me your firstborn. But what if I then told you not one single person out of all the millions who will click on that headline will convert? And that you might lose all your credibility in the process. Would all the traffic generated by that "perfect" headline be worth it? Help us solve a disputeIt isn't really that bad, but with all the emphasis lately on headline science and the curiosity gap, Trevor (your faithful editor) and I (a recovering copywriter) started talking about the importance of headlines and what their role should be in regards to content. I'm for clickability (as long as there is strong content to back the headline) and, if he has to choose, Trevor is for credibility (with an equal emphasis on quality of the eventual content). What's the purpose of a headline?Back in the good ol' days, headlines were created to sell newspapers. Newsboys stood on street corners shouting the headlines in an attempt to hawk those newspapers. Headlines had to be enough of a tease to get readers interested but they had to be trustworthy enough to get a reader to buy again tomorrow. Competition for eyeballs was less fierce because a town only had so many newspapers, but paper cost money and editors were always happy to get a repeat customer. Nowadays the competition for eyeballs feels even stiffer because it's hard to get noticed in the vast sea of the internet. It's easy to feel a little desperate. And it seems like the opportunity cost of turning away a customer is much lower than it was before. But aren't we doing content as a product? Does the quality of that product matter? The forbidden secrets of clickable headlinesThere's no arguing that headlines are important. In fact, at MozCon this year, Nathalie Nahai suggested an 80:20 ratio of energy spent on headline to copy. That might be taking things a bit far, but a bad (or even just boring) headline will tank your traffic. Here is some expert advice on writing headlines that convert:
Many readers still (consciously or not) consider headlines a promise. So remember, as you fill the headline with hyperbole and only write eleven of the twelve tips you set out to write, there is a reader on the other end hoping butter really is good for them. The headline danger zoneThis is where headline science can get ugly. Because a lot of "perfect" titles simply do not have the quality or depth of content to back them. Those types of headlines remind me of the Greek myth of Tantalus. For sharing the secrets of the gods with the common folk, Tantalus was condemned to spend eternity surrounded by food and drink that were forever out of his reach. Now, content is hardly the secrets of the gods, but are we tantalizing our customers with teasing headlines that will never satisfy? For me, reading headlines on BuzzFeed and Upworthy and their ilk is like talking to the guy at the party with all those super wild anecdotes. He's entertaining, but I don't believe a word he says, soon wish he would shut up, and can't remember his name five seconds later. Maybe I don't believe in clickability as much as I thought… So I turn to credible news sources for credible headlines. I'm having trouble deciding at this point if I'm more bothered by the headline at The Washington Post, the fact that they're covering that topic at all, or that they didn't really go for true clickbait with something like "You Won't Believe the Bizarre Reasons Girls Scream at Boy Band Concerts." But one (or all) of those things makes me very sad. Are we developing an immunity to clickbait headlines?Even Upworthy is shifting their headline creation tactics a little. But that doesn't mean they are switching from clickbait, it just means they've seen their audience get tired of the same old tactics. So they're looking for new and better tactics to keep you engaged and clicking. The importance of trafficI think many of us would sell a little of our soul if it would increase our traffic, and of course those clickbaity curiosity gap headlines are designed to do that (and are mostly working, for now). But we also want good traffic. The kind of people who are going to engage with our brand and build relationships with us over the long haul, right? Back to what we were discussing in the intro, we want the kind of traffic that's likely to convert. Don't we? As much as I advocate for clickable headlines, the riskier the headline I write, the more closely I compare overall traffic (especially returning visitors) to click-throughs, time on page, and bounce rate to see if I've pushed it too far and am alienating our most loyal fans. Because new visitors are awesome, but loyal customers are priceless. Headline science at MozAt Moz, we're trying to find the delicate balance between attracting all the customers and attracting the right customers. In my first week here when Trevor and Cyrus were polling readers on what headline they'd prefer to read, I advocated for a more clickable version. See if you can pick out which is mine… Yep, you guessed it. I suggested "Your Google Algorithm Cheat Sheet: Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird" because it contained a trigger word and a keyword, plus it was punchy. I actually liked "A Layman's Explanation of the Panda Algorithm, the Penguin Algorithm, and Hummingbird," but I was pretty sure no one would click on it. Last time I checked, that has more traffic than any other post for the month of June. I won't say that's all because of the headline—it's a really strong and useful post—but I think the headline helped a lot. But that's just one data point. I've also been spicing up the subject lines on the Moz Top 10 newsletter to see what gets the most traffic. And the results here are more mixed. Titles I felt like were much more clickbaity like "Did Google Kill Spam?..." and "Are You Using Robots.txt the Right Way?..." underperformed compared to the straight up "Moz Top 10." While the most clickbaity "Groupon Did What?..." and the two about Google selling domains (which was accurate but suggested that Google was selling it's own domains, which worried me a bit) have the most opens overall. Help us resolve the disputeAs you can tell, I have some unresolved feelings about this whole clickbait versus credibility thing. While Trevor and I have strong opinions, we also have a lot of questions that we hope you can help us with. Blow my mind with your headline logic in the comments by sharing your opinion on any of the following:
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Lessons from the link penalty removal furnace
Lessons from the link penalty removal furnace |  |
| Lessons from the link penalty removal furnace Posted: 14 Aug 2014 04:50 AM PDT It’s a disappointing fact for many that the primary way we help some sites today is not by creating exciting content to entertain or educate, nor by helping launch an exciting new product or raising brand awareness. Instead we have to remove a manual link penalty applied by Google. Indeed, a whole subset of our industry has evolved to help us undo work that others have sold to our clients or to frantically make edits as Google’s Quality Guidelines change. Here at White.net we’ve helped a range of sites have differing types of manual penalties removed. It’s usually time-, budget- and energy-sapping work, and we’ve learnt a few lessons (sometimes the hard way) in the process. Here are some of my favourite notes from this work. Hopefully, some of these tips will help you next time you’re facing that unassuming notification in Webmaster Tools… Ask the client for any link building records & site log-insJust because we know it as link building, it doesn’t mean your client thinks of it that way. So, the first step, before all else, is to quiz your client or the person in charge of the website’s marketing if you are in-house. Ask them what SEO or promotional efforts were made in the past; not just link building but also guest posting, article submissions, widget creation, banner advertising etc. We want to learn of any promotion or activity on other sites. Understanding what activity has occurred not only helps us analyse the backlink profile, it gives a starting point for finding contact details, log-ins and general access to potentially harmful links. If you’re cleaning up after a paid link building service, getting the reports of the links built is a helpful quick win – these are certain to be links to remove or disavow. Get this information, and get it early to help speed up some of the later elements of the process. Gather *all* the linksWhatever your preferred link tool for most tasks, you need to grab links from as many different sources as possible to build up a complete, workable picture. MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, SEMRush are all sources of backlinks and downloading as many comprehensive reports from these tools as you have access to makes big difference. Of course, webmaster tools information is a must. If you have it, Bing Webmaster Tools is an excellent source, and if you want to see which links are getting you in trouble with Google, working with the links they show you in their Webmaster Tools is imperative. Google says that using only the data from Webmaster Tools is all you need, but I think getting as much data as possible is a safer bet. Hit Google Webmaster Tools mutiple timesHowever, Google Webmaster Tools only gives you a sample of the links to your site that they know of. Even more frustratingly, it’s been reported multiple times that sites have received reconsideration request rejections with example links that were not shown in Webmaster Tools exports. In his very informative write-up of Bronco’s link removal work, Dave Naylor notes that they download Webmaster Tools link exports daily and use use an automated program to compare against previous downloads until they stop finding new links. This is very cool, but you don’t need to worry if this tech is beyond you. We started by simply exporting from Webmaster Tools every day for multiple days and de-duplicating in Excel until we didn’t find new links for several days in a row. Even then, we still check weekly for new links just to be on the safe side until the cleanup work is complete. Use a tool to check the link profileTo manage the scale of many link-analysis projects there’s a range of tools now available to help identify potential issues. We’ve had success using LinkRisk, Link Detox, and URL Profiler. What we have learnt is to use these tools to help spot the patterns of link building that are causing the issues. What we don’t do is rely on them – they are great tools, and boast an ever increasing number of cool features (LinkRisk can be linked with your aHrefs, Majestic and GWT accounts to auto pull in newly discovered links for example, and URL Profiler has a boatload of potential functions away from penalties), and can help classify your profile into manageable chunks… …But, check every linking domain manuallyNo tool can tell you every link that needs removing or is worth keeping with 100% accuracy. There are many exceptions, unique circumstances and false positives (and false negatives, if that’s a real thing). As such, the only way to be sure you are casting an iron-clad removal list is to check each and every linking domain manually. Yeah, this can be painful. And slow. And dull. It is, however, the only way to be sure. Once you’ve established the pattern of spam links it can become quick to categorise each domain as keep or remove – it is then just a matter of scale. We’ve found that by using the tools to help us understand the link building patterns (directories, article submissions, guest posts etc.) and where to start (if using LinkRisk you’d start by checking the Bad, Suspect and Neutral links for example) we get a great head start. But the fastest way to eliminating all harmful links, and retaining genuine ones, is through good-old graft. Write to sites, but only those you’ve a chance of getting a response fromGoogle wants you to clean up your profile, and show sufficient contrition for your crimes by having as many links removed as possible rather than just purely disavowing. They even ask you to wait several weeks between a reconsideration rejection and submitting a new request to ‘give sufficient time’ for removal work. Tim Grice, someone with great expertise on penalty removal , notes here that his preferred method is to disavow all suspect links, and not to try and get links removed. Indeed, here at White.net we’ve seen one example of a site with a horrendous backlink profile (over 3,500 links we recommended removing) simply disavow nearly all their links and successfully get their penalty lifted without removing a single one. It is possible therefore to have penalties removed without the effort to contact all linking sites, and this is a tactic worth considering. However, we have found that the sweet point is to contact the sites you know you can get a potential response from. Once you have examined all linking sites manually it is easy to classify links by the directory, article or link network they belong to. Simply write to one of these, see if they respond, and only write to the others with a positive result (as you’re likely writing to the same person for each network’s sites). That way you can still contact every site, but where it is clear you are not getting a response and there’s tens of sites with the same template, you are not butting your head against a wall. Otherwise, concentrate on contacting other sites where you have a shot of getting a link removed, or nofollowed in the case of sponsored posts, banner ads and so on. Be brutalThis is no time for subtlety. Nor sentimentality or giving the benefit of the doubt. If you can see this link pointing to the domain in question, the chances are your Google reviewer can see it. At this point your site is considered suspect in its activities, so what you think might not look too bad in isolation can absolutely still keep you in trouble. This is a manual review, so you can’t always tell which links they will consider demonstrate you are still trying to be manipulative, so if in any doubt, get rid. Usually, it is clear what pattern of link building has occurred, so you can separate the genuine from the spammy, but err on the side of caution, even though it will sometimes hurt. This is of course not a complete how-to list of removing a Google manual penalty (there’s plenty of those available), but does show the ethos of the successful penalty removal projects we have had. There’s some highly insightful articles that have helped shape our process, such as these thoughts from Chris Dyson and the various writings of Dr Marie Haynes - go check them out. We’d love to hear what lessons you’ve learnt about penalty removal, or if you have had a different experience to us, so share here or let us know via Twitter! The post Lessons from the link penalty removal furnace appeared first on White.net. |
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miercuri, 13 august 2014
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
- Capital Flight From China, One Person at a Time, Via ATM and Bitcoin
- Multi-Pronged Attack on Donetsk Rebels Likely Within Days
- New Yuan Loans and Shadow Banking Collapse in China; Record Bank Deposit Slump
| Capital Flight From China, One Person at a Time, Via ATM and Bitcoin Posted: 13 Aug 2014 12:55 PM PDT In response to New Yuan Loans and Shadow Banking Collapse in China; Record Bank Deposit Slump reader "CF" from Hong Kong who works in China explains how he is pulling every cent he can out of renminbi (yuan) , converting instead to Hong Kong dollars. From "CF" regarding his personal "capital flight" experiences ... Hey Mish,One person at a time adds up if enough do it. And I highly suspect they are. Those in China may wish to consider GoldMoney which has Vaults in Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland and the UK. GoldMoney allows Precious Metals Trading in Hong Kong Dollars, Australian Dollars, and New Zealand dollars , US dollars, and 5 other currencies. For those looking for an EFT, please consider OUNZ. I discuss OUNZ in How Much Gold Should Someone Own? Where and How To Own It? Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
| Multi-Pronged Attack on Donetsk Rebels Likely Within Days Posted: 13 Aug 2014 09:08 AM PDT Donetsk is surrounded and rebels expect a major coordinated attack within days. Here is a map of major military operations by both sides from August 1 to August 10.  click on map for sharper image Legend
The original map is in Russian. I asked reader Jacob Dreizin, a US citizen who speaks Russian and reads Ukrainian, to put the cities and captions in English. The edited map above is what you see above. Click on first link for the original. Jacob writes ... Don't be fooled by the appearance of the site. This is a very well-informed, pro-rebel news and analysis site. You won't find any maps like this in American sources. The rebel-held area is in pink.In a follow-up just a bit ago Jacob commented "Two more Ukrainian combat detachments have been surrounded in the last 3 days or so, since the end of the period represented in that map. Understand that the rebel area functions as an amoeba that is capable of swallowing and liquidating Ukrainian units." If the rebels can mount a counter-attack it will be because of equipment captured and men freed up from the Southern cauldron. Regardless, an all-out surge on Donetsk will take many lives, and destroy the property of thousands. Scars will last for decades. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
| New Yuan Loans and Shadow Banking Collapse in China; Record Bank Deposit Slump Posted: 13 Aug 2014 12:05 AM PDT A major alarm bell just rang in China with the release of July credit figures according to Macro Business Australia. Chinese Credit Just Collapsed and shadow banking with it. Here are a couple of charts. Yuan Loans  New yuan loans were 385.2 bn versus 780.0 bn expected and prior was 1080. Shadow Banking  Aggregate social financing was 273 bn yuan versus 1500.0 bn expected and prior was 1970 bn implying that shadow banking credit contracted 112 bn in the month. Record Bank Deposit Slump Bloomberg reports China Record Bank-Deposit Slump in July Erodes Lending Capacity. China's local-currency bank deposits fell by a record in July, eroding lenders' capacity to extend new credit just as the world's second-biggest economy shows signs of faltering.China Credit Growth Declines Sharply The Wall Street Journal reports China Credit Growth Declines Sharply. China's credit growth dropped sharply in July after surging a month earlier, reflecting Beijing's concern over a rapid buildup of debt in the world's second-largest economy.Expect many more reports like these and dramatically lower GDP growth as well, if China makes any effort to rebalance its economy as I suspect it will be forced to do. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
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