Central Perk

marți, 30 iulie 2013

Where do you stand on this?

Hello, everyone --

If we want Washington to focus on the needs of the middle class and everyone working hard to join it, it's going to take more than a great speech from the President. That's just the honest truth.

So as President Obama lays out his ideas for how we can build on the cornerstones of what it means to be middle class in America, we're asking you to add your voice to his.

Today, he's in Tennessee to talk about what it's going to take to generate good new jobs -- including a plan that simplifies the tax code for our businesses and gives working families a better deal. In the weeks ahead, he'll lay out his vision for education investments to prepare our kids for the challenges of a new century, a path to home ownership for those who work hard, affordable health care that’s there when you need it, secure retirement even for those who aren't rich, and ladders of opportunity so that all of us have the chance to work our way into the middle class.

And if those are principles you support, you need to join this debate as well.

Stand with President Obama in support of a better bargain for the middle class.

In the past week, we've heard from tens of thousands of Americans who've taken time to share their stories with us. They come from every walk of life, but they're united in working to support an economy where everyone who works hard can get ahead.

A man named Michael from Iowa told us that, "Genuine opportunity for those who work hard and play by the rules is an American principle. We have strayed far from that in the past several years, and it's time to get back to it."

Robin from Oregon said, "I have a 10 year old daughter who deserves the opportunity to make a good life for herself. She needs affordable health care, education, and job opportunities to do that and be a vital and contributing citizen."

Anthony from Ohio told us, "I agree that we need to build the economy from the middle out. Working people and their families are struggling to survive and each day that passes is another day that it is harder for the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class to move up the economic ladder. You can do it Mr. President, we believe in you."

These kinds of testimonials have tremendous power. We've seen it time and time again. When real people speak out with the same voice, it focuses the conversation in Washington.

So join us. Stand with President Obama and say that you support a better bargain for American families:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/a-better-bargain/speak-out

Thanks!

David

David Simas
Deputy Senior Advisor
White House
@Simas44

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SEO Finds in Your Server Logs, Part 2: Optimizing for Googlebot

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 07:50 PM PDT

Posted by timresnik

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote a few months ago that goes over some of the basics of why server log files are a critical part of your technical SEO toolkit. In this post, I provide more detail around formatting the data in Excel in order to find and analyze Googlebot crawl optimization opportunities.

Before digging into the logs, itâ€™s important to understand the basics of how Googlebot crawls your site. There are three basic factors that Googlebot considers. First is which pages should be crawled. This is determined by factors such as the number of backlinks that point to a page, the internal link structure of the site, the number and strength of the internal links that point to that page, and other internal signals like sitemaps.

Next, Googlebot determines how many pages to crawl. This is commonly referred to as the "crawl budget." Factors that are most likely considered when allocating crawl budget are domain authority and trust, performance, load time, and clean crawl paths (Googlebot getting stuck in your endless faceted search loop costs them money). For much more detail on crawl budget, check out Ian Lurieâ€™s post on the subject.

Finally, the rate of the crawl â€" how frequently Googlebot comes back â€" is determined by how often the site is updated, the domain authority, and the freshness of citations, social mentions, and links.

Now, let's take a look at how Googlebot is crawling Moz.com (NOTE: the data I am analyzing is from SEOmoz.org prior to our site migration to Moz.com. Several of the potential issues that I point out below are now solved. Wahoo!). The first step is getting the log data into a workable format. I explained in detail how to do this in my last server log post. However, this time make sure to include the parameters with the URLs so we can analyze funky crawl paths. Just make sure the box below is unchecked when importing your log file.

The first thing that we want to look at is where on the site Googlebot is spending its time and dedicating the most resources. Now that you have exported your log file to a .csv file, youâ€™ll need to do a bit of formatting and cleaning of the data.

1. Save the file with an Excel extension, for example .xlsx

2. Remove all the columns except for Page/File, Response Code and User Agent, it should look something like this (formatted as a table which can be done by selecting your data and ^L):

3. Isolate Googlebot from other spiders by creating a new column and writing a formula that searches for â€œGooglebotâ€ in the cells in the 3rd column.

4. Scrub the Page/File column for the top-level directory so we can later run a pivot table and see which sections Google is crawling the most

5. Since we left the parameter on the URL in order to check crawl paths, weâ€™ll want to remove it here so that data is included in the top level directory analysis that we do in the pivot table. The URL parameter always starts with "?," so that is what we want to search for in Excel. This is a little tricky because Excel uses the question mark character as a wildcard. In order to indicate to Excel that the question mark is literal, use a preceding tilde, like this: "~?"

6. The data can now be analyzed in a pivot table (data > pivot table). The number associated with the directory is the total number of times Googlebot requested a file in the timeframe of the log, in this case a day.

Is Google allocating crawl budget properly? We can dive deeper into several different pieces of data here:

Over 70% of Google's crawl budget focuses on three sections, while over 50% goes towards /qa/ and /users/. Moz should look at search referral data from Google Analytics to see how much organic search value these sections provide. If it is disproportionately low, crawl management tactics or on-page optimization improvements should be considered.
Another potential insight from this data is that /page-strength/, a URL used for posting data for a Moz tool, is being crawled nearly 1,000 times. These crawls are most likely triggered from external links pointing to the results of the Moz tool. The recommendation would be to exclude this directory using robots.txt.
On the other end of the spectrum, it is important to understand the directories that are rarely being crawled. Are there sections being under-crawled? Letâ€™s look at a few of Mozâ€™s:

In this example, the directory /webinars pops out as not getting enough Google attention. In fact, only the top directory is being crawled, while the actual Webinar content pages are being skipped.

These are just a few examples of crawl resource issues that can be found in server logs. A few additional issues to look for include:

Are spiders crawling pages that are excluded by robots.txt?
Are spider crawling pages that should be excluded by robots.txt?
Are certain sections consuming too much bandwidth? What is the ratio of the number of pages crawled in a section to the amount of bandwidth required?

As a bonus, I have done a screencast of the above process for formatting and analyzing the Googlebot crawl.

In my next post on analyzing log files, I will explain in more detail how to identify duplicate content and look for trends over time. Feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

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!

The San Francisco Giants Visit the White House

Watch Live

Today at 2 p.m. ET, President Obama speaks on the economy in Chattanooga, TN. Check it out on WhiteHouse.gov/Live.

Featured

The San Francisco Giants Visit the White House

The San Francisco Giants visited the White House today to celebrate winning the 2012 World Series championship, their second in three years. President Obama welcomed the team back to Washington -- and congratulated them on both their win and their ability to make a comeback. “This team faced elimination a total of six times in the playoffs,” the President said. “It’s no wonder that your own fans still refer to Giants baseball as torture.”

Click here to learn more about the event.

Seth's Blog : Next for the hip

Next for the hip

The easiest quick opportunity remains the same: Yuppie Information.

What information can you offer the connected and the curious that they don't already have? This group is not only the most eager group of early adopters around, but they are so digitally connected that reaching them is easier than ever before.

No, it's not going to change the world, not right away anyway. But yes, if you're hoping to quickly work your way up the adoption curve, offering timely information to connected, educated, urban youth is in fact a great place to start.

On the other hand, the green fields and real wins will come from connections, mesh businesses and leadership for groups that aren't as peripatetic or spoiled as the digital yuppies.

• Email to a friend •

luni, 29 iulie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Municipal Bonds an "Outrageous Bargain"? Compared to What? Shifting Sands of Muni Bond Market; Three Bad Assumptions
Carl the Robot Bartender Mixes Drinks and Chats With Customers
Former ECB Chief Economist Warns "ECB Will Soon Have to Support France with Bond Purchases"

Municipal Bonds an "Outrageous Bargain"? Compared to What? Shifting Sands of Muni Bond Market; Three Bad Assumptions

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 12:39 PM PDT

David R. Kotok, Cumberland Advisors Inc.'s chairman and chief investment officer believes Municipals Cheap After Detroit Filing

Municipal bonds are an "outrageous bargain" in the wake of Detroit's bankruptcy filing, according to David R. Kotok, Cumberland Advisors Inc.'s chairman and chief investment officer.

Kotok bases his arguments on a comparison on General Obligation Yields to US Treasuries.

Muni vs. Treasury Yields

More on Munis

In a followup guest post on the Big Picture blog, Kotok offers More on Munis, Detroit, Bloomberg, Whitney & Wilson.

In our recent commentary on municipal bonds and Detroit, we argued in favor of buying the highest-grade AAA tax-free municipal bond It currently yields more than the corresponding taxable US Treasury obligation.

Meredith Whitney, Muni Cassandra emeritus (ae?), weighed in against Munis (FT) and used the Detroit default to say her version of "I told you so." Bloomberg reported both sides of the argument.

Readers may seek Whitney's positions and her history of Muni-forecasting on their own. Our position is clear: do the research and buy the bonds that make sense. There are many of them. This is an idiosyncratic market of $3.8 trillion; painting it with a broad brush is a mistake.

We took the position that the default history of the true AAA-rated tax-free municipal bond has the same default history as the US Treasury bond: neither has ever defaulted.

Remember, we are referring to the natural rating of the bond. We are not referring to those bonds that were insured by various bond insurers and thus elevated to an AAA rating because of the bond insurance. Bonds that were rated AAA only because of the insurance have defaulted, but the underlying ratings of those insured bonds always fell below AAA. No true AAA credit ever needed bond insurance to sell a new issue.

Our bottom line: high grade, tax-free bonds are really cheap and their credit support is improving. Score one for Munis; score zero for Detroit; score evenhandedness for Bloomberg media in reporting. We will leave the Whitney scoring to our readers.

The Muni Market's Shifting Sands

Writer, Mark J. Grant, author of Out of the Box expresses a different viewpoint in The Muni Market's Shifting Sands, a guest post on ZeroHedge.

I began my career in this space. Fresh off my internship I was assigned to cover small banks in Missouri and Kansas and sell them Municipal Bonds. My fondest recollection was of a small bank in western Kansas that said he couldn't buy bonds now because, "There are green bugs in the milo." I had no idea what green bugs were then and wasn't too sure about milo.

Almost forty years later and having supervised the municipal trading/sales and banking areas at four different investment banks I still am on the watch for the green bugs in the milo.

Detroit is now teaching us several lessons and you can feel the sand shifting yet again. The normal credit analysis performed by many money managers is insufficient in my estimation and because of this losses will be taken. The issue here is the pension funds that may have priority over the general obligation bonds. This is made clear, as an example, in the Michigan State laws and I am expecting new laws and new State and Federal regulations to be passed to guarantee this priority. Pensions will trump the bond holders and General Obligation bonds must now be viewed in the light of a subordinated position. This may shift ratings but it will certainly shift the appreciation of risk in Municipal Bonds and will most probably cause them to widen against both Treasuries and other forms of debt.

General Obligation bonds no longer have the first call on assets.

Specifically, if you are analyzing a Municipal credit, you should look carefully at the size of their pension obligations and calculate the ratio for pension obligations divided by their G.O. debt. Then you should examine the unfunded pension liabilities, add them to their pension obligations and divide that number by their G.O. debt. These calculations will help you get a more realistic handle on the risk that you are assuming when buying the G.O. debt of a municipality. It is not enough, any longer, to examine a Municipal credit in the same way that you examine a corporate credit because Detroit is setting a new standard where pension obligations have the first call on assets and General Obligation bonds have been pushed into a secondary position.

The psychology of the Municipal market is also shifting in the sand. It was once a widely held belief that the State would stand behind any large Municipal credit in its domain. Detroit is proving this to be an inaccurate observation. There was even the notion that if the Municipal credit was large and systemic enough that the Federal government might step in to help. Detroit is exemplifying that this was a second mistake in thinking. We are now learning that each Municipal credit is a stand-alone situation which is a break from the traditional thinking of days past.

I think it is true that Municipalities can meander along longer than corporate credits and certainly than mortgage credits because they can increase their taxes and/or increase what is taxed. So the time-line is longer when a credit is in trouble but, if a Municipal credit falls over the edge, the consequences for debt holders have now become more severe. Detroit brings Chicago to mind and then my caution widens as you look at other large cities. Greater care must now be exercised and I would suggest that many of you should begin a re-examination of what you own and whether you wish to keep owning it.

Expect More Fallout

The fallout in Detroit is not over. There will be more Detroits for sure.

However, we have not seen the final ruling from bankruptcy court. To what extent, if any, will courts rule "General Obligation bonds no longer have the first call on assets"?

I don't know and no one else does either. Yet, I suspect that both bondholders and pensioners will take a decent-sized hit. A friend emailed a commonsense point of view earlier today.

"Fairness of the pension level is irrelevant. It's what the debtor can afford. And Detroit can't afford much. In municipalities, as in private employment, the cost of getting a pension package your employer can't afford is ultimately that you don't have a pension package. This will be much tougher than private bankruptcies, though, because the PBGC does not cover municipal employee plans. So the estate of Detroit will have to pay something, because it is intolerable that old policemen and firemen suddenly resort to complete welfare. But it can't pay much. This will be brutal."

Three Bad Assumptions

Kotok points out that no AAA rated GO bond has ever defaulted. OK, but have we ever had a pension crisis before?

Please consider three widely-held assumptions on GO bonds.

Bondholders have first call on obligations
Taxes can always be raised
The state or federal government will bail out the municipality

All three of those assumptions are false. And how many bonds are rated AAA because of those assumptions?

Definition of "Cheap"

The top chart shows that munis are cheap compared to treasuries (assuming no defaults). But does that make them cheap?

This is not a position I endorse, but for the moment let's assume that Kotok is correct. That AAA rated bonds will not default.

Are they cheap? Compared to what?

It depends on the definition of cheap. What if treasuries are not "cheap"? After all, the same chart Kotok showed a few days ago would have shown the same thing at the beginning of May.

10-Year Treasury Yield

Yield on the 10-year treasury rose over 100 basis points since the beginning of May. US treasuries were not cheap then. Thus, the notion of something is cheap compared to something else is a false dichotomy.

At the beginning of May, neither treasuries nor munis were cheap. And what if neither is still cheap? What if the pension crisis shifted the sands? What if widely-held assumptions about AAA and defaults are invalid?

As you can see, it's not as simple as Kotok's "GO's will not default so buy them because they are cheap compared to treasuries" point of view.

Things changed, sands shifted, and right now, we really do not know by how much. So it's quite the stretch, for numerous reasons, to say munis are an "Outrageous Bargain".

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

Carl the Robot Bartender Mixes Drinks and Chats With Customers

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 10:59 AM PDT

Robots are taking on increasingly complex tasks. As a case in point, Carl the robot bartender serves customers at German bar.

He's handy with a shot glass and customers travel from far and wide to admire him at work.

The only strange thing about Carl the bartender is that he's not quite human.

The humanoid robot mixes drinks for guests at the Robots Bar and Lounge in Ilmenau, eastern Germany.

The robot is the creation of mechatronics engineer Ben Schaefer, who has spent 23 years working in the field.

He built Carl from the parts of disused industrial robots from the German firm KUKA.

Writing on the bar's website, Mr Schaefer said his company aims to make humanity in humanoid robots closer to reality and show that 'scenes as in science fiction films are quite possible'.

Carl can also conduct short conversations with the customers who take up the bar's nine seats, though they probably don't sparkle like the drinks because his speech recognition skills and ability to interact are, for the moment, limited.

For now, Carl will be part-tourist attraction and part test-dummy while Mr Schaefer and his team work out how to shake humanoid robotics out of its 'stagnant' state.

Carl-like robots are not about to replace human bartenders en masse just yet, but technology is certainly advancing at breakneck speed.

I find these kinds of articles fascinating.

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

Former ECB Chief Economist Warns "ECB Will Soon Have to Support France with Bond Purchases"

Posted: 28 Jul 2013 11:50 PM PDT

Juergen Stark, former ECB chief economist (who resigned in 2011 over a dispute regarding bond purchases), says in an interview in Handelsblatt "The Euro crisis will worsen in late autumn"

Via Google Translate

A year ago, ECB chief Draghi announced plans to do anything to save the euro. The former ECB chief economist Juergen Stark considers this fatal. He fears that the ECB will soon have to support France with bond purchases.

"I think the crisis will come to a head in late autumn. We are entering a new phase of crisis management, "Stark told the Handelsblatt (Friday edition). After the parliamentary elections in late September that France would increase the pressure on the ECB and Germany. The government bond purchase program OMT should actually be used in Spain and Italy. "But the pressure will be enormous, use the instrument in France. And without that, the country must go to the rescue, "said Stark.

A year ago the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi announced in London to do anything to save the euro. A little later, he presented the plans for the bond purchase program OMT.

Draghi bought the governments in Europe time. "But this time was wasted," Stark said.

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

Damn Cool Pics

The Powerful Effect of Bass [Video]
Only in Alaska
Save Money While Travelling
Tihana Nemcic, The Sexiest Football Coach Ever

The Powerful Effect of Bass [Video]

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 06:39 PM PDT

Only in Alaska

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 06:36 PM PDT

Crazy Things That Can Only Happen In Alaska..

Save Money While Travelling

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 05:46 PM PDT

Tips from Graham Hughes, who traveled to all countries without flying.

Tihana Nemcic, The Sexiest Football Coach Ever

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 05:28 PM PDT

24 year old Tihana Nemcic is a former model but has made the news recently since she has been appointed as the coach of a fifth division Croatian men's football team side, NK Viktorija Vojakovac.

If I was on the team I don't know how I'd keep my eyes on the field.