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marți, 24 aprilie 2012

"We Must Tell Our Children"

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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

"We Must Tell Our Children"

Yesterday, President Obama spoke at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about honoring the pledge of "never again" by making sure we are doing everything we can to prevent and end atrocities and save lives.

After being introduced by Professor Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, the President spoke of the importance of telling our children -- and all future generations -- about the Holocaust:

We must tell our children. But more than that, we must teach them. Because remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing. In this sense, "never again" is a challenge to us all -- to pause and to look within.

President Barack Obama tours the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with Sara Bloomfield, museum director, and Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, April 23, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The Real Impact of the Google SmartPhone Crawler (Part 1): Situation Overview

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 02:25 PM PDT

Posted by Suzzicks

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Not everyone realizes it, but Google has been serving different search results to mobile phones than desktop computers for a long time. Beyond that, they serve different results based solely on the handset you are using to search. The differences are often subtle, or focused on the order of Universal Results that are included in the mobile result-set, but Google is algorithmically trying to prioritize content that will work well on the phone that submitted the query, and give less priority to content that might not work on the phone. If you want to compare for yourself, MobileMoxie has a mobile search simulator tool that allows you see the results of one search query across three different phones at a time (cool!)

Now Google has launched a new smartphone crawler, and this will likely push the differences between desktop search and mobile search more into the mind of the average SEO. (Think: “Does Google consider this a smartphone or a feature phone or something else? I don’t know!”)

So let’s see if we can demystify the impact of this new smartphone crawler using some data. This is the beginning of a three-part blog post series, all focused on the new Google smartphone bot. This first post will focus on how it works and what sites will be effected. The next post will focus on how you can optimize your mobile content for the new smartphone bot best by creating effective mobile redirects. The final post will discuss common mis-indexing problems that mobile websites have and review how to protect your mobile content from search engine indexing problems.

Mongoose Metrics published a study that broke down how the top sites in the US are handling their mobile traffic. They divided the QuantCast Top Million sites (most US traffic’ d sites) into 3 categories based on how they were publishing mobile pages: Server-side redirection, JavaScript redirection and what they call ‘cloaking’ or selective serving of HTML assets. The study went deeper, and looked at results for iPhone, Android and RIM requests, but we can just look at the summary for all smartphones, which show the following stats:

For SEO, these results are each unique and relevant; here is why:

Server-Side Redirection

This is a mobile site-architecture strategy that uses two (or more) urls; one for the desktop or primary content, and one for the mobile content; designations can be added for tablets, WAP and other devices as well. The mobile content can be on a mobile subdomain, a mobile subdirectory or a totally different domain, and those decisions can all impact the content’s ability to rank. The mobile urls can be static and optimized urls or they can be temporary dynamic urls, which are usually stuffed with the exact paramaters of the mobile page request.

Until Google’s new smartphone crawler, this mobile SEO strategy relied on the rankings of the desktop pages which automatically redirect to mobile content when requested by a mobile phone OR building independent SEO value for the mobile pages so that they would rank on their own merit. This strategy sometimes also includes joining the mobile pages with their desktop counterparts by using the canonical tag to help share SEO value. What is most relevant for SEO is that that both versions of the page are left crawlable by search engines. This might be important if you target lots of WAP phone searches, which are still sometimes using a separate ‘mobile-only’ Google index and are not affected by the new smartphone crawler. This could also be important if there is a future algorithm shift that puts a stronger emphasis on mobile file size (which could still happen because it is so important for a good mobile user experience).

SUMMARY:

RESEARCH RESULTS FOR SERVER-SIDE REDIRECTION: 52.52% of the QuantCast Top Million Websites in the US may see an immediate user experience benefit from the new smartphone crawler. Once these sites have been crawled by the new smartphone crawler, they will be serving mobile content to mobile users from search results automatically, without their server having to process each of the redirect requests.

JavaScript Redirection

This mobile site-architecture strategy also involves a primary and a mobile url for each page and an on-page JavaScript redirect is included from the desktop page to its mobile counterpart. The strategy actually relies on the FAILURE of the search engines to crawl and execute JavaScript in order to work properly. Frequently this strategy relies 100% on the desktop page to rank well in smartphone search results, and the mobile pages are blocked from search engine indexing in the robots.txt file, to prevent the risk of duplication or confusion in the index. In some cases, this JavaScript is detecting specific phones, and redirecting to landing pages that are just built for those specific phones, which can get very involved, but is great for user experience. Unless the new smartphone crawler begins to execute JavaScript redirects (unlikely), sites that rely on this method will not benefit from Google’s new smartphone crawler.

SUMMARY:

RESEARCH RESULTS FOR JAVASCRIPT REDIRECTION: 2.15% of the top million websites are not going to benefit at all from the new smartphone crawler, but may have already had good results in mobile search rankings without indexing mobile-specific pages.

Cloaking or Dynamic Serving

This mobile site architecture strategy relies exclusively on one url that can display a page with different characteristics, depending on the device that requests the page. What content is served is determined by the server and something that is usually described as a ‘mobilization engine’ or a ‘transcoder.’ These are essentially databases of rules and content at various sizes or stages of degradation that can be sent, depending on the capabilities of the phone requesting the page. With this system, a desktop computer will get the full version of the site, but a mobile phone might be served a similar HTML skin, with smaller components switched in, to replace place of the larger elements that are served to the desktop computer, all on the same url.

A similar but less sophisticated version of this type of mobile publishing can be accomplished using mobile-specific style sheets and media queries to re-render or re-organize the content on the page based on the screen size of the device that it is requesting it (Responsive Design). This strategy uses only one url which might be appealing if you are trying to keep things simple for maintenance or SEO reasons. In both cases, bots will be served content based on the device or browser that they are emulating, so the smartphone crawler would likely (hopefully!) be served a smartphone-friendly version of the page unless the JavaScript is purposely made un-crawlable.

SUMMARY:

RESEARCH RESULT FOR DYNAMIC SERVING/CLOAKING: 45.33% of the QuantCast Top Million websites might be at a disadvantage in terms of bandwidth, user-experience and load-time. All of the dynamic processing is still required by their server to render the page each time there is a mobile page request. They will not likely benefit from Google’s new smartphone crawler, and might now be at a disadvantage, (in terms of the load time of the dynamically generated pages) where they probably had a slight advantage previously.

Mobile SEO is an ever-changing field. The search engines don’t all agree, and still don’t seem 100% sure how to best rank and evaluate mobile search results. Your best option is always to know how things work, keep a close eye on how your sites are ranking and do your own mobile testing wherever you can. Until the smartphone crawler many people were unaware that mobile search results were treated differently from phone to phone. Now you know that testing on your own phone might not be enough; you may have to address the new Google smartphone crawler with some well-planned mobile strategy. Hopefully you can use this analysis to help determine how your site will manage with mobile serving, and still please the new smartphone crawler.

Stay tuned for the next post in this three-post series about the new Google smartphone crawler. It will cover how you can optimize your mobile content for the new smartphone bot best by creating effective mobile redirects, then the final post in the series will review common mis-indexing problems on mobile and discuss how to update your mobile server settings to prevent search engine indexing problems.

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Glenn Jones on Microformats and SEO – BrightonSEO

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 05:53 AM PDT

Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.

Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.

There are three different ways to markup structured data.

Microformats
Microdata
RDFa

Microformats let you markup data with pre-existing attributes. Both Microdata and RDFa are more flexible, as they let you use prebuilt schemas or create your own

Which should you use? Glenn uses microformats most of the time as they're simpler, but they only cover some things. Microdata can be used to describe more unusual objects.

Glenn talked through how to mark-up a Yorkshire pudding recipe using microformats:

You can have a property inside another, such as yield inside the summary.
You can have marked up data within paragraphs of freeform text.
Some properties have parent-child structure. For example, 'ingredient' has the child properties 'amount' and 'name'.
Properties can take data that aren't text, eg has to be an image
Some data are more complex. For example there are many ways to write same date, so you have to use a specific data structure that says what the text means, eg title=”2011-10-27″ when text says '27 Oct 2011'.

Google's Webmaster area has a rich snippet page that tells you how they want you to mark up data, and what's most likely to be pulled into the search results. Not all data are pulled into the SERPs at the moment, but as more may be used in the future it makes sense to mark up as much as possible.

Best thing to do to help is to use Google's rich snippets testing tool – this gives an example of how how it looks your page could look in the SERPs and shows the data it's parsed.

There are compound microformats (microformats with microformats nested inside them). For instance hRecipe can hold an aggregated review and author.

To mark up an author, link all recipes (or articles) to a profile page using rel=author, then link form the profile page to a Google profile with rel=me. See the Google Webmaster Tools help page on authorship.

Does this affect SEO? Google are not telling us – Glenn suspects it does affect ranking but doesn't know.

How does it affect CTR? Paul Bruemmer saw a 30% uplift for rich snippets, while Richard Baxter only saw a 5% uplift. You have to test it yourself: there isn't one figure for everyone.

Audience Question: there's spam going on with microformats, how do you avoid it?

Glenn says it does happen: people will game any technique that affects search listings. It will be the usual cat-and-mouse game between Google and spammers. Microformats are about adding extra semantic data to website, improving way machines can parse information: quality content will win out in the end.

Pierre Far from Google said that if someone's rich snippet spam really affects the SERPs, Google will take their rich snippets out. There's a form to report rich snippet spam. Don't abuse it.

Audience Question: Unlike other attributes, rel=author is tied into Google+, so does it belong to google? Will it be able to tie into other social profile sites to be used by Bing and others?

Glenn hopes Google will become more open, as people are interested in connecting up social media identities.

Seth's Blog : Needs and wants are often confused

Needs and wants are often confused

When people have their basic needs met, it's not uncommon for wants to magically become needs. It's our hardwired instinct to seek to fill unmet needs.

That pays off for any marketer that has persuaded his market that they need what he sells. It backfires when those 'needs' are seen for what they actually are--luxuries.

When you sell a want, you have to work harder, you must seduce the market, because wants are fickle, picky and not easily bullied.

• Email to a friend •

luni, 23 aprilie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Public Unions Bankrupt Illinois: Unpaid Bills Top $9 Billion as Comptroller Reports "State Treading Water"; Mish's Eight-Point "Bold" Plan to Save Illinois
Eurozone Manufacturing PMI Hits 34 Month Low; German Manufacturing Hits 33 Month Low; Orders Drop Steeply Across the Board
Eight of Ten Largest Stocks in Spanish Ibex Index Below Liquidation Value; Madrid Rejects Regional Budgets Representing 32.5% of GDP; Treasury Warns of "Immediate" Intervention

Public Unions Bankrupt Illinois: Unpaid Bills Top $9 Billion as Comptroller Reports "State Treading Water"; Mish's Eight-Point "Bold" Plan to Save Illinois

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 12:54 PM PDT

Governor Pat Quinn rammed through the largest tax hikes in Illinois history last year. On January 13, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn signed off on a 67% hike in personal income taxes and a 46% hike in corporate taxes.

The result is not what the governor thought. Businesses have fled, more have threatened to leave and Quinn responded with sweeteners. Moreover, Illinois pension plans are still the worst funded in the nation, and the state is still struggling to pay bills.

Bloomberg reports Illinois 'Treads Water' as Unpaid Bills Top $9 Billion

Illinois's backlog of unpaid bills has risen to more than $9 billion because of pension costs and falling federal aid, leaving the state "essentially treading water," Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka said.

While revenue grew from higher personal and corporate taxes, "Illinois' financial position has not improved," Topinka said in a report today. The combination of unpaid bills to vendors and Medicaid obligations, estimated at $8.5 billion in January, means payment delays will persist, according to the report.

While tax increases boosted revenue by about $7 billion, or 3.9 percent in the first three quarters of the fiscal year that began in June, the gains were undercut by the loss of federal funding and financing of pension contributions directly, rather than through bonds as in the past two years, Baar Topinka said.

Democratic Governor Pat Quinn has proposed a voluntary 3 percent increase in pension contributions from current employees and a cut in cost-of-living increases for retirees.

"Bold action" is required to save the retirement systems, the governor told reporters in Chicago April 20. In fiscal 2010, Illinois had the lowest-funded state pension in the U.S., with assets equal to 45.4 percent of projected obligations, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Public Unions Bankrupt Illinois

Just where was this "bold plan" when Quinn was running for Governor?

Nowhere in sight. And now he wants "voluntary" contributions. Give me a break.

Illinois is bankrupt and corrupt politicians like governor Quinn, Speaker of the Illinois House, Mike Madigan, and all the union panderers in Chicago ruined the state by giving into "collective bargaining" demands from public unions.

Voluntary 3% contributions by unions is not a "bold plan" and will not do a damn thing. Illinois needs to scrap its defined benefit plans immediately and claw back on promised benefits under threat of default.

Moreover, Illinois needs to scrap prevailing wage laws and end collective bargaining of public unions immediately if not sooner.

Illinois desperately needs a "Bold Plan" before the entire stat looks like Central Falls or Providence Rhode Island, or Detroit Michigan.

Mish's Eight-Point "Bold" Plan to Save Illinois

Immediately kill public defined benefit plans going forward
End collective bargaining of public unions
Scrap prevailing wage laws
Tax at an 85% rate all defined benefits above $80,000
Claw back all pension-spiking
Lower corporate tax rates to previous levels to attract businesses.
Set long-term pension plan assumptions at 5% or the 30-year Treasury rate, whichever is lower (currently 3%).
Default, if necessary on pension benefits above a certain level, whatever it takes to make the state solvent within 10 years, using conservative pension plan assumptions.

The $80,000 cap is s suggested starting point for discussion. It may be higher or lower based on point number eight.

Now that's a bold plan, and a badly needed one at that.

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

Eurozone Manufacturing PMI Hits 34 Month Low; German Manufacturing Hits 33 Month Low; Orders Drop Steeply Across the Board

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 09:55 AM PDT

Today, European data shattered two long held beliefs by Markit and in general, unthinking economists everywhere.

Shattered Myths

European recession would be mild
Germany would continue to diverge from the rest of Europe

Markit reports Eurozone sees stronger rate of decline at start of second quarter

Flash Eurozone PMI Composite Output Index(1) at 47.4 (49.1 in March). 5-month low.

Flash Eurozone Services PMI Activity Index(2) at 47.9 (49.2 in March). 5-month low.

Flash Eurozone Manufacturing PMI (3) at 46.0 (47.7 in March). 34-month low.

Flash Eurozone Manufacturing PMI Output

The Markit Eurozone PMI® Composite Output Index fell to a five-month low in April, according to the preliminary 'flash' reading which is based on around 85% of usual monthly replies. The index fell for the third month in a row to 47.4, down from 49.1 in March, to signal a faster rate of decline of private sector economic activity. Output has fallen seven times in the past eight months.

Output fell at the fastest rates for five months in both manufacturing and services, with the former seeing the steeper rate of decline.

France meanwhile saw output fall for the second month in a row, with the rate of decline accelerating to the fastest since October. Falling manufacturing output was accompanied by a steep deterioration in service sector activity.

Incoming new business fell for the ninth month in a row, registering the steepest decline since October. Manufacturing new orders fell particularly sharply, down for the eleventh month running and falling at the fastest rate since December. New business at service providers fell for the eighth successive month, showing the largest deterioration since October. New business fell at stronger rates in Germany, France and across the rest of the euro area as a whole.

With inflows of new orders continuing to deteriorate, backlogs of work fell across the region for the tenth successive month, declining at the sharpest pace since November. Backlogs fell at similar rates in both manufacturing and services although, while the former saw a slight easing in the rate of decline, the latter suffered the largest fall since September 2009.

The deteriorating pipeline of work led companies to cut staffing levels for the fourth straight month, with the rate of job losses running at the fastest since February 2010.

Eurozone Reality

Markit Finally accepts reality, albeit with a huge understatement "Prospects do not look good."

Really? After 5 months of making silly statements about "short, weak recession" complete with Germany bucking the trend, that is acceptance of reality, sort-of.

As Goes Europe, So Goes Germany and France

As I have been saying for at least six months, the Eurozone recession will be neither short nor mild. Spain, Greece, and Portugal are in outright depressions and Italy may head there.

Take a look at that chart above on the periphery vs. France and Germany. France has now caught up on the downside with the rest of Europe and Germany will follow.

Coupled with a huge slowdown in China, and a feeble and faltering recovery in the US, there is zero chance that France and the vaunted German export machine will decouple from the rest of Europe.

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

Eight of Ten Largest Stocks in Spanish Ibex Index Below Liquidation Value; Madrid Rejects Regional Budgets Representing 32.5% of GDP; Treasury Warns of "Immediate" Intervention

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 08:37 AM PDT

The Spanish hit parade keep right on rolling. Courtesy of Google Translate, please consider a trio of articles forwarded by my friend Bran who lives in Spain.

Madrid Rejects Regional Budgets Representing 32.5% of GDP

El Economista reports Treasury Rejects Budgets Submitted by Catalonia and Andalusia

The Ministry of Finance and Public Administration has returned the draft budget to the regions of Andalusia and Catalonia because it considers its budget rebalancing plan does not fit within the deficit target regions set for this year, 1.5% of GDP.

The newspaper El Pais said today that two of those affected are Catalonia and Andalusia, two of the larger communities, who number between 32.5% of Spanish GDP.

Treasury Warns of "Immediate" Intervention

Going one step further, Treasury warns that Any Autonomy may be Subjected to an "Immediate" Intervention"

Forced Austerity in the regional governments is coming right up.

Spanish IBEX Index

The Spanish stock market has now given back nearly all of its gains since March 2009.

Eight of Ten Largest Stocks in Spanish Ibex Index Below Liquidation Value

Please consider Eight of Ten Largest Stocks in Spanish Ibex Index Below Liquidation Value

The article states it is "ludicrous" that eight of the ten heavyweights trade below their book value.

I suggest book values are inflated and the Spanish banking system is insolvent. Certainly credit default swaps on sovereign debt are not encouraging.

Check out this nonsense by JP Morgan.

"The banking problem is not liquidity, but mainly of confidence," says JPMorgan Pellón mentioning that pointed in recent days that Spanish banks retain about 90,000 million from the program LTRO European Central Bank. Enough money to meet all funding requirements for the remainder of the year.

The balance of mid-cap banks is less oprtimista yet. For example, trades at 0.29 times Bankia the value of its assets and the rest is between 0.4 and 0.5 times.

The banking sector is the one that is suffering the deterioration of its balance sheet, but some utilities and Repsol also find it impossible to trade above its liquidation price. Among the utility companies with greater capitalization is Iberdrola which has a lower book value after the sale of 3.7 percent of its stake ACS take her to make minimum contributions since 2003 this week.

Inflated Book Values, Insolvent Banks

Banks may have LTRO funding but it would be nice if the clowns at JPMorgan would advise exactly how Spanish banks are going to pay back those loans.

The problem is not confidence nor liquidity, but rather solvency. In the absence of further bailouts, many European banks have negative value.

What About the Euro?

Moreover, JP Morgan missed another crucial point, best expressed by the question: What happens in a eurozone breakup when Spain exits the Euro?

Since that is a significant possibility (I believe likelihood), anyone in Spain with any money and any common sense should get their money out of Spain right now.

Capital flight is indeed underway and that flight will continue to pressure Spanish equities until it stops.

Capital controls may be just around the corner.

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

marți, 24 aprilie 2012

"We Must Tell Our Children"

The Real Impact of the Google SmartPhone Crawler (Part 1): Situation Overview

The Real Impact of the Google SmartPhone Crawler (Part 1): Situation Overview