Central Perk

marți, 29 octombrie 2013

Quick Guide to Scaling Your Authorship Testing with Screaming Frog

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 04:12 PM PDT

Nearly all of us have used Screaming Frog to crawl websites. Many of you have probably also used Google's Structured Data Testing Tool (formerly known as the Rich Snippet Testing Tool) to test your authorship setup and other structured data.

This is a quick tutorial on how to combine these two tools to check your entire website for structured data such as Google Authorship and Rel="Publisher", along with various types of Schema.org markup.

The concept:

Google's structured data tester uses the URL you're testing right in their own URL. Here's an example:

When I enter this URL into the testing tool...
http://www.contentharmony.com/tools/
...the testing tool spits out this URL: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.contentharmony.com%2Ftools%2F&html=

We can take advantage of that URL structure to create a list of URLs we want to test for structured data markup, and process that list through Screaming Frog.

Why this is better than simply crawling your site to detect markup:

You could certainly crawl your site and use Screaming Frog's custom filters to detect things like rel="author" and ?rel=author within your own code. And you should.

This approach will tell you what Google is actually recognizing, which can help you detect errors in implementation of authorship and other markup.

Disclaimer: I've encountered a number of times when the Structured Data Testing Tool reported a positive result for authorship implementation, but authorship snippets in search results were not functioning. Upon further review, changing the implementation method resolved the issue. Also, authorship may not be granted or present for a particular Google+ user. As a result, it's important to note that the Structured Data Tester isn't perfect and will produce false positives, but it will suit our need in this case, quickly testing a large number of URLs all at once.

Getting started

You're going to need a couple things to get started:

Screaming Frog with a paid license (we'll be using custom filters which are only available in the paid version)
One of the following: Excel 2013, URL Tools for Excel, or SEO Tools for Excel (any of these three will allow us to encode URLs inside of Excel with a formula)
Download this quick XLSX template: Excel Template for Screaming Frog and Snippet Tester.xlsx

The video option

This short video tutorial walks through all eight steps outlined below. If you choose to watch the video, you can skip straight to the section titled "Four ways to expand this concept."

Steps 1, 2, and 3: Gather your list of URLs into the Excel template

You can find the full instructions inside the Excel template, but here's the simple 1-2-3 version of how to use the Excel template (make sure URL Tools or SEO Tools is installed before you open this file or you'll have to fix the formula):

Steps 123 - Using the Excel Template

Step 4: Copy all of the URLs in Column B into a .txt file

Now that Column B of your spreadsheet is filled with URLs that we'll be crawling, copy and paste that column into a text file so that there is one URL per line. This is the .txt file that we'll use in Screaming Frog's list mode.

Step 4 - Paste into TXT File

Step 5: Open up Screaming Frog, switch it to list mode, and upload your file

List Mode, Activate!

Step 6: Set up Screaming Frog custom filters

Before we go crawling all of these URLs, it's important that we set up custom filters to detect specific responses from the Structured Data Testing Tool.

Custom Filters for Screaming Frog

Since we're testing authorship for this example, here are the exact pieces of text that I'm going to tell Screaming Frog to track:

Authorship is working for this webpage.
rel=author markup has successfully established authorship for this webpage.
Page does not contain authorship markup.
Authorship is not working for this webpage.
The service you requested is currently unavailable.

Here's what the filters look like when entered into Screaming Frog:

Customize All The Filters! Or at least these 5...

Just to be clear, here's the explanation for each piece of text we're tracking:

The first filter checks for text on the page confirming that authorship is set up correctly.
The second filter reports the same information as filter 1. I'm adding both of them for redundancy; we should see the exact same list of pages for custom filters 1 and 2.
The third filter is to detect when the Structured Data Testing Tool reports no authorship found on the page.
The fourth filter is to detect when broken authorship is detected. (Typically because either the link is faulty or the Google+ user has not acknowledged the domain in the "Contributor To" section of their profile).
The fifth filter contains the standard error text for the structured data tester. If we see this, we'll know we should re-spider those URLs.

Here's the type of text we're detecting on the Structured Data Tester. The two arrows point to filters 3 and 4:

Your Authorship is Broken

Step 7: Let 'er rip

At this point we're ready to start crawling the URLs. Out of respect for Google's servers and to avoid them disabling our ability to crawl URLs in this manner, you might consider adjusting your crawl rate to a slower pace, especially on large sites. You can adjust this setting in Screaming Frog by going to Configuration > Speed, and decreasing your current settings.

Step 8: Export your results in the Custom tab

Once the crawl is finished, go to the Custom tab, select each filter that you tested, and export the results.

Export!

Wrapping it up

That's the quick and dirty guide. Once you export each CSV, you'll want to save them according to the filters you put in place. For example, my filter 3 was testing for pages that contained the phrase "Page does not contain authorship markup." So, I know that anything that is exported under Filter 3 did not return an authorship result in the Structured Data Testing Tool.

Four ways to expand this concept:

1: Use a proper scraper to pull data on multiple authors

Screaming Frog is an easy tool to do quick checks like the one described in this tutorial, but unfortunately it can't handle true scraping tasks for us.

If you want to use this method to also pull data such as which author is being verified for a given page, I'd recommend redesigning this concept to work in Outwit Hub. John-Henry Scherck from SEOGadget has a great tutorial on how to use Outwit for basic scraping tasks that you should read if you haven't used the software before.

For the more technical among us, there are plenty of other scrapers that can handle a task like this - the important part is understanding the process so you can use it in your tool of choice.

2: Compare authorship tests against ranking results and estimated search volume to find opportunities

Imagine you're ranking 3rd for a high-volume search term, and you don't have authorship on the page. I'm willing to bet it would be worth your time to add authorship to that page.

Use hlookups or vlookups in Excel to compare data from three tabs: rankings, estimated search volume, and whether or not authorship is present on the page. It will take some data manipulation, but in the end you should be able to create a Pivot Table that filters out pages with authorship already, and sorts the pages by estimated search volume and current ranking.

Note: I'm not suggesting you add Authorship to everythingâ€"not every page should be attributed to an authorâ€"e-commerce product pages, for example.

3: Use this method to test for other structured markup besides authorship

The Structured Data Testing Tool goes far beyond just authorship. Here's a short list of other structured markup you can test:

E-commerce product reviews and pricing
Rel Publisher
Event Listings
Review and price markup on App Listings
Music Snippets
Recipes
Business Reviews
Just about anything referencing schema.org, data-vocabulary.org, and similar markup.

4: Blend this idea with Screaming Frog's other capabilities

There's a ton of ways to use Screaming Frog. Aichlee Bushnell at SEER did a great job of cataloging 55+ Ways To Use Screaming Frog. Go check out that post and I'm sure you can come up with additional ways to spin this concept into something useful.

Not to end on a dull note, but a couple comments on troubleshooting:

If you're having issues, the first thing to do is manually test the URLs you're submitting and make sure there weren't any issues caused during the Excel steps. You can also add "Invalid URL or page not found." as one of your custom filters to make sure that the page is loading correctly.
If you're working with a large number of URLs, try turning down Screaming Frog's crawl rate to something more polite, just in case you're querying Google too much in too short a period of time.
When you first open the Excel template, the formula may accidentally change depending on whether or not you have URL Tools or SEO Tools installed already. Read the instructions on the first page to find the correct formula to replace it with.

Let me know any other issues in the comments and I'll do my best to help!

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!

Seth's Blog : Room at the top

Room at the top

There’s always a spot for the best in the market.

Not the most expensive, but the one that most ideally suits the needs of those that care.

It's easy to get lost in the chaos of mediocre, of discount, of close and cheap. But if you're the best, among the people who care to find and talk about the best, no market is too crowded.

The hard part is figuring out what 'best' means.

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luni, 28 octombrie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Food Inflation in India Hits 18.4%; RBI Expected to Hike Rates; Pause Before Rupee Collapse?
Expect to Be Paid in Spain? This Year? By the Government? Then Take a Haircut!
NSA Monitored 60 Million Phone Calls in Spain; Drowning in Useless Data; Hello NSA!
Pettis: "Abenomics Likely to Fail in Medium Term, Debt Matters"

Food Inflation in India Hits 18.4%; RBI Expected to Hike Rates; Pause Before Rupee Collapse?

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 07:51 PM PDT

As food inflation in India soars out of sight, Yahoo! Finance reports India expected to raise interest rates, roll back rupee support

India's central bank is expected to raise policy interest rates for the second time in as many months on Tuesday to fight stubbornly high inflation, while rolling back further emergency measures put in place recently to support the slumping rupee.

Despite the risks to an already sluggish economy, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is forecast to lift its policy repo rate by 25 basis points (bps) to 7.75 percent, according to 29 of 41 economists polled by Reuters.

"Given that food price inflation is at a 38-month high, there is a risk that it could spread to generalized inflation expectations," said Samiran Chakraborty, head of research at Standard Chartered in Mumbai.

Annual food inflation accelerated to 18.4 percent in September, its highest since mid-2010, pushed up by prices of vegetables including onions and stirring public discontent ahead of national elections which must be held by next May.

While the central bank looks set to raise its repo rate, it is likely to cushion the blow to credit markets by further unwinding liquidity tightening measures implemented this summer as it struggled to shore up the tumbling rupee.

The rupee slumped to record lows in August, at one point sliding some 20 percent for the year, on concerns about the country's gaping current account and fiscal deficits, and as global investors dumped emerging market assets for fear the U.S. Federal Reserve was set to start tapering its massive stimulus program.

The RBI had jacked up the MSF by 200 bps in July as the rupee sagged. It rolled back 75 bps of that at its September 20 review and another 50 bps earlier this month. The combination of a repo increase and further MSF cuts would restore the gap between the two rates to its usual 100 bps.

The rupee closed on Monday at 61.52 to the dollar, down 10.6 percent on the year, after stabilizing in recent months on the back of India's support measures as well as the delay in the Fed's expected winding-down of its stimulus.

"The strategy will be to continue on the path of dismantling the extraordinary measures taken during the rupee crisis. I don't think he (Rajan) will be ultra-hawkish and will emphasize that growth is a concern and that also needs to be tackled," said Abheek Barua, chief economist at HDFC Bank.

The headline wholesale price index (WPI) unexpectedly hit a seven-month high in September of 6.46 percent as food prices surged, while the consumer price index jumped an annual 9.84 percent, spurring expectations for another rate hike.

Rupee vs. U.S. Dollar

Pause Before Rupee Collapse?

With consumer prices rising at nearly 10% annualized, and food inflation over 18%, a hike to 7.75% is hardly tight economic policy. Moreover, India's property and stock market bubbles are both still going strong.

Supposedly the RBI wants to maintain "growth". But what growth is that? Supposedly real growth takes into account inflation, but I am hard pressed to believe it.

Regardless, this dam may be about ready to collapse, even if India's stock market hits new highs in nominal terms.

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

Expect to Be Paid in Spain? This Year? By the Government? Then Take a Haircut!

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 03:47 PM PDT

Here's an interesting post about service providers in Spain, owed money and interest by the government. Via translation from Cinco Dias, please consider Providers Who Want Payment This Year Have to Accept a Haircut

The Delegate Commission for Economic Affairs gave the green light to the last phase of the plan to settle the commercial debt.

€6.5 billion has been allocated to settle unpaid debts to suppliers for outstanding bills prior to December 31, 2011.

The last phase corresponds to unpaid accrued invoices between January 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. Early estimates suggest that the total could exceed €14.0 billion.

The problem is that the government only has additional €1.7 billion in the current year to meet those debts. The remaining money will be paid starting January 1, 2014 and shall come primarily from Treasury reserves and surpluses that have accumulated in the various issues of bonds and notes recent months.

The government has chosen to prioritize payments to those companies that have major problems or liquidity needs. The Ministry of Finance and Public Administration has reached an agreement with the five big banks (Santander, BBVA, CaixaBank, Popular and Sabadell) to companies that want to get their invoices paid at a discount in December.

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

NSA Monitored 60 Million Phone Calls in Spain; Drowning in Useless Data; Hello NSA!

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 11:16 AM PDT

Is there anything the NSA is not monitoring?

That's the question of the day as I note the Financial Times article NSA monitored 60m phone calls in Spain, say media

The US National Security Agency secretly monitored as many as 60m phone calls in Spain in just one month, Spanish media reported on Monday.

The reports, in the El Mundo daily newspaper, are based on information supplied by Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower. They refer to the period between December 2012 and January 2013, and again highlight the sheer volume of phone traffic monitored and recorded by the NSA. Spain has about 47m inhabitants.

The documents also revealed that the surveillance was carried out by one of a network of secret US mobile phone listening stations that extends around the world, with manned posts – often in diplomatic missions – in European cities including Berlin, Frankfurt, Rome, Milan, Paris, Geneva and Madrid.

Ms Merkel is sending intelligence chiefs to Washington to seek answers this week. The White House's own internal review of the National Security Agency is due to provide Mr Obama with an interim report in the week starting November 11.

Drowning in Useless Data

A friend of mine writes

The NSA is currently drowning in data. The approach of grabbing all transmissions is futile. Computer programs to sort through it are futile as well.

For example, this email will probably be caught in the NSA web, simply because of references to the NSA. Because of my frequent international travel which is undoubtedly logged, this email will make it past another filter. Because of my circle of friends in DC, this email may pass another filter.

Because Mish is likely monitored and because I copied someone who frequently visits China, all three of us are likely monitored.

Finally, given this email passed a number of programmatic filters, a human being might actually be reading the entirety of this conversation.

Hello NSA!

Hello NSA agent ... How you doing? Having a good time sorting through useless data, day after day, after day, and wasting taxpayer money in the process?

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

Pettis: "Abenomics Likely to Fail in Medium Term, Debt Matters"

Posted: 28 Oct 2013 01:01 AM PDT

Michael Pettis, at China Financial Markets, discusses Abenomics, Japan's shrinking (for now) current account surplus, debt, and interest rates in an interesting email. From Pettis ...

Abenomics in Japan is likely to put upward pressure on the national savings rate in Japan (but not necessarily on the household savings rate). This implicitly requires that over the next two or three years Japan run a higher current account surplus. In a world struggling with excess capacity and insufficient demand, pressure to increase the Japanese current account surplus is likely to result in higher unemployment – either abroad, if Japan's trade partners do not take steps to protect themselves from the counterbalancing deficits, or at home if they do.

It may seem a little quixotic to worry about a surging Japanese current account surplus just now when in fact Japan's external balance has declined substantially and is surprising analysts on the downside.

As I discuss in the first two chapters of my January book, "The Great Rebalancing", currency depreciation does not affect the trade balance directly by changing relative prices. It does so indirectly by changing the relationship between savings and investment.

As production rises relative to consumption, the difference between the two – the national savings rate – must also rise. This means that as the yen depreciates, the consequence is likely to be an increase in the Japanese savings rate.

But it doesn't end there. Japan seems to be taking other steps to force up its domestic savings rate. Here is last Tuesday's Financial Times:

Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, pledged to press ahead with the first increase in sales tax for over 15 years despite objections from some of his closest advisers, gambling that measures to address the country's massive debts would not hinder his attempts to jump-start the economy.

The increase in the consumption tax, part of the proceeds of which will be used to increase infrastructure investment, will accomplish many of the same results as the deprecation of the yen. A consumption tax, like a tariff, is effectively a kind of back-door currency devaluation, with a slightly different mix of losers among the household sector and winners among the producing sector.

By boosting production and reducing consumption, however, it automatically forces up the national savings rate in the same way as does currency depreciation.

So far, this all looks like an attempt by Abe to increase Japanese competitiveness and so increase its total share of global demand, but not by increasing Japanese productivity, which is the high road to growth, but rather by reducing the real Japanese household income share of what is produced. This effectively means Japan will be growing at the expense of its trading partners. As the Japanese become less able to consume all they produce, the excess must be exported abroad.

If the world were in ruddy good health, we might not worry too much about policies aimed at Japan's pulling itself out of the mess created in the 1980s, but with the whole world struggling with weak demand and with country after country trying to reduce domestic unemployment by selling more abroad – effectively exporting unemployment (with Germany in particular hoping to resolve the European crisis not by increasing its net domestic demand, as it should, but rather by forcing German surpluses outside Europe) – there is a real question in my mind as to how successful the Japanese program of Abenomics is likely to be if it implicitly requires a burgeoning trade surplus.

Expect Higher Unemployment

If Japan forces up its savings rate, and assuming that we are unlikely to return in the next few years to a credit-fueled consumption binge, the only way the world can respond to a structural forcing up of the Japanese savings rate is either by higher unemployment outside Japan or, if Japan's trade partners take steps to protect themselves from higher Japanese trade surpluses, higher unemployment inside Japan.

Enormous Debt-Servicing Cost

Japan is struggling with an enormous debt burden, and perhaps this explains why Tokyo is so eager to engage in policies that force up the Japanese savings rate. As long as more than 100% of Japanese borrowing is funded by domestic savings (if Japan runs a current account surplus it must be a net exporter, not importer, of capital), it doesn't have to rely on fickle foreigners, who might not be satisfied with coupons close to zero, to fund its enormous debt burden.

But the debt burden creates its own very dangerous source of trade instability. To understand why, we need to consider what happens to interest rates in Japan if nominal growth rates rise.

In Japan, interest rates are currently very low, close to zero. With total government debt amounting to more than twice the country's GDP – which puts it among the most heavily indebted governments in the world – it is not hard to see how low nominal interest rates benefit Japan. With interest rates close to zero, there is very little cashflow pressure on the government from servicing its debt.

Real vs. Nominal Interest Rates

Some people might argue that nominal interest rates do not matter. We should be looking at real interest rates, they would argue, and with Japan's having experienced deflation for much of the past two decades, real interest rates in Japan are high and the nominal rate is largely irrelevant.

This is true, real interest rates do matter, but it doesn't mean that nominal interest rates do not. In fact both real and nominal interest rates matter, albeit for different reasons. Real rates matter for all the obvious reasons – they represent the real cost to the borrower in terms of a transfer of resources from the borrower to the lender. But nominal rates also matter because they effectively determine the implicit amortization schedule of principal payments.

When the nominal rate is zero or close to zero in a deflationary environment, in other words, interest is effectively capitalized in real terms. In fact, whenever the real rate exceeds the nominal rate, as it has in Japan for much of the past two decades, the cashflow cost of servicing the debt is lower than the real cost, and the difference is effectively converted into real principal and deferred. In real terms, in other words, Japanese debt is growing by the difference between the real rate and the nominal rate, and this effectively represents a reduction in the cashflow cost of servicing its debt.

When nominal interest rates are positive and higher than the real rate, however, there is effectively an acceleration of real principal payments. This means that as long as nominal rates are very low, the real cost of servicing the debt is low and the principal payments are postponed, with some of the interest even being capitalized. As nominal rates rise, however, the real cost of servicing the debt during each payment period consists of interest plus some real principal.

This is just a long, perhaps pedantic, way of pointing out that even if the real interest rate in Japan declines, debt servicing is likely to be much more difficult as the nominal rate rises. Japan might be paying a lower real rate, but it is also implicitly paying down principle, instead of capitalizing it. Tokyo would need a significant increase in revenues, or a significant decrease in expenditures, to cover the cost.

So what would force Japan to raise its nominal interest rate? In principle the nominal interest rate should be more or less in line with the nominal GDP growth rate. If it is higher, growth generated by investing capital is disproportionately retained by net savers (including mainly the household sector). There is, in other words, a hidden transfer of resources from net borrowers to net savers.

If the nominal lending rate is lower than the nominal GDP growth rate, as is the case in China today and Japan during the 1980s, the opposite occurs. There is a hidden transfer from net savers to net borrowers, and because net savers are mainly the household sector, this will put downward pressure on the household share of income even as it gooses investment growth. This hidden transfer has been at the heart of the rapid economic growth that typically occurs in financially repressed economies during the earlier stages, and is also at the heart of the investment misallocation process that typically occurs during the later stages. We have seen this very clearly in China.

Will Tokyo Raise Interest Rates?

Japan is trying to generate both positive inflation and real GDP growth, so that it is trying urgently to raise the growth rate of nominal GDP. What happens if and when it is successful? For example let us assume that Japan's GDP is able to grow nominally by 4-5% a year – what will happen to the nominal Japanese interest rate?

Tokyo can either raise interest rates in line with nominal GDP growth rates or it can keep them repressed. In the former case, debt-servicing costs would soar, ultimately to 8% of GDP or more. This would create a problem for Tokyo in its ability to service its tremendous debt burden. It would need a primary surplus of around 8% of GDP just to keep debt levels constant, and it is hard to imagine how such a huge surplus would be consistent with nominal GDP growth rates of 4-5%.

If it were to raise income taxes it would create a huge burden for the household sector and almost certainly force up the national savings rate by forcing down the household share of GDP.

On the other hand if, in order to make its debt burden manageable Tokyo represses interest rates to well below the nominal GDP growth rate, it is effectively transferring a significant share of GDP from the household sector to the government in the form of the hidden financial repression tax. This is what Japan was doing in the 1980s, with all of the now-obvious consequences.

Japan's enormous debt burden was manageable as long as GDP growth rates were close to zero because this allowed both for the country to rebalance its economy and for Tokyo to make the negligible debt servicing payments even as it was effectively capitalizing part of its debt servicing cost. If Japan starts to grow, however, it can no longer do so. Unless it is willing to privatize assets and pay down the debt, or to impose very heavy taxes of the business sector, one way or the other it will either face serious debt constraints or it will begin to rebalance the economy once again away from consumption.

As this happens Japan's saving rate will inexorably creep up, and unless investment can grow just as consistently, Japan will require ever larger current account surpluses in order to resolve the excess of its production over its domestic demand. If it has trouble running large current account surpluses, as I expect in a world struggling with too much capacity and too little demand, Abenomics is likely to fail in the medium term.

Perhaps all I am saying with this analysis is that debt matters, even if it is possible to pretend for many years that it doesn't (and this pretense was made possible by the implicit capitalization of debt-servicing costs). Japan never really wrote down all or even most of its investment misallocation of the 1980s and simply rolled it forward in the form of rising government debt. For a long time it was able to service this growing debt burden by keeping interest rates very low as a response to very slow growth and by effectively capitalizing interest payments, but if Abenomics is "successful", ironically, it will no longer be able to play this game. Unless Japan moves quickly to pay down debt, perhaps by privatizing government assets, Abenomics, in that case, will be derailed by its own success.

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

Seth's Blog : Naming tool of the year

Naming tool of the year

When it's time to name your project, you probably want to find a domain for it. And, alas, all the obvious and most of the silly dot com choices were taken a very long time ago.

Time for wordoid.

Scroll down on the left, put a short word in the 'pattern' box and off you go.

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Search News from the Future

Posted: 27 Oct 2013 04:21 PM PDT

Posted by Reinhart

Citizens of Moz, I come to you at a most desperate hour. I've just returned from London, Distilled's international headquarters, and I've been patiently awaiting this moment to share some potentially niche-shattering news with you all.

I don't quite know where to begin, so I'll just say it: You see, the stories are all true. Will Critchlow is a wizard. I know, it's common knowledge that nearly all Englishmen are wizards, I've seen Harry Potter too. But Mr. Critchlow is a wizard with a most peculiar and exciting gift: that of clairvoyance. He can see the future!

And no, I don't mean in a Steve Jobs/Carl Sagan/George Orwell futurist kind of way either. I mean he quite literally has a translucent, viridian ball of crystal sitting on his desk that divines that which has yet to transpire! I wouldn't have thought anything of the object upon first glance, but one night I came back to the office to grab my misplaced jacket to low mutterings, frantic typing, and wisps of smoke coming from the other side of the room. I dove into the bean bag room so as not to draw his attention and waited patiently, shaking with dread but with a fully piqued curiosity.

I couldn't make out what he was chanting and I don't think I would have been able to translate the Latin anyway. After about 30 minutes of this I heard him pack up his things and leave. I'm normally more of the craven type when it comes to adventure, but something that night pressed me to snoop around my boss's desk for the truth.

The smoke and emerald glow dissipated as I shuffled some papers around. The smell of ozone lingered in the air. Nothing looked too out of the ordinary: the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, a Post-it note with a hastily scrawled and circled "Fire Phil Nottingham: Oct 31"... wait... this news clip read... 2016? Maybe he was just tired and mistakâ€" 2020?! What was I looking at here?!

What I'm about to reveal may shock or even scare some readers, but I believe it is essential that the Moz community hear it nevertheless. I may lose my jobâ€"nay, I may be turned into a toad with a dreadful cockney accentâ€"but it will have all been worth it to bring this knowledge to you all. My interpretations may be shaky at best, but the headlines were as clear as day: These are digital marketing news items from the future!

You may never get a better chance to peek behind the tapestries of time as you do now. So read on, friends, and be brave.

Term "mobile" removed from Analytics, Google's vocabulary

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" April 14, 2015 â€" A term commonly used by webmasters, digital marketers and industry analysts may not be so common after today. Over the weekend, Google removed the term "mobile" from all of its web products, including Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and the company's AdWords tool set.

"Mobile has been a deprecated term for some time now," the search giant explained in a corresponding blog post. "The lines between where and when we view our various screens have been blurred beyond parsability. All web-based content can be viewed on any device these days and thus it makes little sense to refer to all non-traditional desktop visitors as 'mobile.' "

The web is very close to becoming truly device-neutral largely thanks to thoughtful webmasters, CMS development teams and device manufacturers who have all come together to deal with the issue of rendering content from multiple angles. Data on device type, screen size, and other metrics is still readily available throughout Google's suite of webmaster tools. [...]

Voice searches now constitute 28% of all queries

AUSTIN, TX â€" June 29, 2020 â€" Search engine corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have traditionally held on tight to their data, offering limited info on global search trends, but a recent study conducted by the University of Texas has unearthed compelling evidence that shows almost a third of all search queries are now conducted via voice search.

The nation's only "Professor of Search," Dr. Pete Meyers of the University of Texas explains the results of his institution's study:

"They called me mad back in 2013, but voice searches now constitute a huge chunk of the search pie. Several years ago we would have found it laughable to be walking down the street talking to our devices, let alone talking to our devices within our home. But with the advancement of voice recognition software and the nearly ubiquitous nature of the hardware to back it up, today we're estimating that voice search makes up almost a third of all search queries, and that number seems to be on the rise."

A few of the major contributing factors to the ascendancy of voice search include web-enabled automobiles, home appliances, [...]

Traditional television advertising revenues wane as new year begins; YouTube, Twitter and Facebook post record annual reports

NEW YORK, NY â€" January 1, 2019 â€" Google's video platform, YouTube (GOOG) along with social networks Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB), posted record gains in 2018 as social and video advertising revenues shattered forecasts and industry expectations. Analysts speculate that this was due in no small part to the transference of advertising spends on traditional television media. When FB and TWTR first hit the stock market, many buyers felt the social networks needed to prove themselves in the competitive world of media advertising, but as the multi-billion dollar industry of traditional television advertising continues to crumble amid stiff competition from a la carte alternatives like Netflix and Amazon, more marketing budgets are now trickling down to companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google's AdWords platform.

"Television is evolving and has been for some time," says Will Critchlow, founder and president of the world's foremost digital marketing agency, Distilled International. "Companies want to get their products in front of consumers, and those consumers are now watching television online. They're doing everything online." [...]

Netflix introduces video, text advertisements for streaming content

LOS GATOS, CA â€" January 16, 2019 â€" Earlier this month we saw reports that television advertising revenues were waning in the new year. Today we can report that some of those dollars will most certainly be spent on Netflix's streaming video platform. The company issued a press release this morning indicating that the company, for the first time in its history, will now display advertisements before many of their most popular original programs such as Arrested Development, Orange is the New Black, and the much-anticipated final season of House of Cards. Advertisements will be similar to those seen on YouTube, Hulu, and other video sites.

"With the amount of quality content and general media access we're collecting, we have no choice but to find revenue from other sources if we want to remain at the $9.99 price point we set in 2015," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on an investor conference call yesterday. [...]

Google cracks down on fake, purchased +1s

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" February 1, 2017 â€" For the first several years of the social platform's life, Google Plus seemed a joke to many. Comparisons were made to MySpace and other defunct social platforms, and G+ was often called "a graveyard" as it faced competition from the already-established Facebook. But since that time, the network has shown some real staying power with the full faith and credit of Google Inc. behind it. To that end, in late 2016 we reported on Google's announcement that plus ones, Google's own brand of "Likes," would help determine the order in which documents appeared in its search engine results pages. This move forced webmasters everywhere, for big and small companies alike, to reconsider the social platform for conducting regular business. Since then, various scams have been created to generate fake or paid "+1s" for sites who want quick and easy exposure in Google's search engine. While this practice has been effective for some, it is not sitting at all well with the search giant.

Today, Google announced a crack-down on those sites which it has determined to have been generating fake +1s. The process should be easy enough for Google as it has access to all of its users' account data and history. One well known Google representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, cut straight to the point, asking "What were they thinking?" in reference to marketers who've been attempting to game Google's algorithm. "As if we haven't been aware of fake Google plus accounts since Plus's inception?... [...]

Panda and Penguin now refresh daily

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" July 22, 2016 â€" Five years ago, Google launched a pair of systems designed to keep poor content out of its search engine's results and combat questionable citation building tactics. The former is known as the "Panda" update and the latter, "Penguin." Until this week, the two algorithms have been updated on unpredictable schedules based on when the massive amounts of data required to make proper determinations about the quality of a website and its internet-wide citations were parsed. This would result in periodic "refresh" days, where webmasters who engaged in deceptive marketing practices would brace themselves for potential losses of traffic to their webpages. These updates would traditionally occur four or five times per year. Last Monday, Google announced that they've dedicated additional resources to these systems and are now able to parse the same data sets many times faster than before, meaning that these updates will now essentially occur in real time.

"Our users don't want clean and relevant answers three months from now, they need them immediately," declared a Google representative at an industry conference in San Diego... [...]

Google removes "organic keywords" tab from analytics

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" October 31, 2020 â€" [...] and for those who don't remember, Google used to give webmasters access to what was known as "keyword data," allowing them to make better decisions about their sites' development and what their users' intent might be when visiting. In the fall of 2013, Google denied access to almost all of this organic data by encrypting all searches generated through Google.com. Today, Google took it a step further and completely removed the "Organic Keywords" tab from its popular web analytics program.

"We've been meaning to do this for some time now," said a senior Google representative, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We're very concerned about our users' privacy, and that's why we started to deny access to sensitive data such as search queries. We know our users don't want webmasters knowing what they're searching for, and we want to respect that."

Later in the same conversation, the same Googler said with a grin and a chortle, "There'll always be keyword data in AdWords." Adopting a sing-song tone, one might have quoted Arrested Development's timeless one-liner, "There's always money in the banana stand."

In other news, Google added a new tab to analytics titled "ASL," which includes less-sensitive data about users such as age, sex, location, weight, and sexual preference [...]

Cutts: Given today's technology, page speed a "deprecated metric" for determining site quality

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA â€" October 31, 2022 â€" For as long as there have been websites, there have been slow websites. In past generations, particularly in the 2000s and 2010s, internet users have been frustrated with delay times and unresponsive pages. Because of this, Google has made several attempts to help webmasters create more efficient sites, and has also taken measures to ensure that particularly slow sites do not register as frequently in their search results. But technology has come a long way since the days of 4G and 5G wireless networks.

Matt Cutts, the long-time head of Google's anti-spam team, addressed a group of fledgling digital marketers this weekend at SMX 2022 saying, "Given the bandwidth speeds of today's internet service providers, we're no longer using page speed as an indicator of 'site quality,' as this metric is now almost completely deprecated. In the past it made sense to devalue a site that took 10 to 15 seconds to load, and thus provided a negative experience for Googlers. But with today's 7G Quantum LTE-X technology, the difference between page load times are negligible, almost instant and ultimately irrelevant.

"Does anyone else remember 4G LTE? How about 2G? [Expletive], I'm old."

So, there you have it. That's all I found in Will's office that fateful night. Leave a comment and wish me good tidings if you be so bold. Though as a soon-to-be-toad, I may have a difficult time responding to your queries.

Photo: POTUS, Cheesecake, and Cute Kids

Photo of the Day

Photo: POTUS, Cheesecake, and Cute Kids

President Barack Obama greets customers during a stop at Junior's Cheesecake and Desserts in Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)