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vineri, 18 martie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

7 Essential Google Intelligence Custom Alerts That Keep Me Sane

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 04:07 AM PDT

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.

As a data analyst tracking more than 300 websites, the numbers are simply stacked against me. It's hard to give each and every site meaningful attention. Thankfully, the vast majority of these sites don't require active analysis, but I still needed to devise some kind of system that would let me know when something was afoot.

Enter Google Intelligence. One of the fabulous things about Intelligence is that it's a lot more flexible than mere Goal Tracking. Goal tracking has three rigid options and gives you no email love, but Intelligence will send you love notes on just about any condition you can imagine. In lieu of a personal assistant, this lovely little beta is the thing that turns me from a frazzled, overwhelmed lone analyst into an analytics superhero. Well, at least as far as my account managers are concerned anyway. If you're tracking more websites than a single human brain can handle and want to go from zero to hero, the custom alerts described here are a few of the essentials. The numbers and periods should all be adjusted to meet your site's unique needs.

Significant Traffic Drop

If your traffic drops by 50% from the previous month, you definitely want to know about it. I run it as a monthly alert since many of our sites are small enough that traffic is inconsistent from week to week, and with more than 300 clients to track the sheer volume of alerts would be overwhelming, but weekly or daily could easily be appropriate for larger, more consistent sites.
Grab it

Traffic Spikes

Clients don't always run their entire marketing plans by you, but they'll be impressed when you notice that referrals from their local newspaper are suddenly up. We have one client who runs regular Groupons that take their traffic from a couple hundred visitors a day into the thousands. That's good to know, right? Another simply had published a help wanted ad that generated a lot of traffic from applicants who were researching the company. It's a good opportunity to show that you are paying attention and to engage in a little positive reinforcement ("That ad brought you X extra conversions, great job, keep it up!"). It can also be a way to spot trouble. If you use the multiple subdomain code, it is possible to cross-contaminate your sites' data if you're not careful. Such cross-contamination renders as a traffic increase. Yes, we learned that the hard way - and it was a GI alert that brought it to our attention.
Grab it

Significant Drop in Goal Completions

A traffic drop alert isn't going to detect a drop in goal conversions if lack of traffic isn't the problem. This can be a great way to help diagnose broken submission forms, shopping carts, etc. As with the traffic drop alert above, I run this one monthly due to the nature of our clients' sites and to avoid getting overwhelmed with frivolous alerts. You should adjust frequency and percentages to suit your sites. (Note that this alert is built on an advanced segment which combines phone leads with goal completions.)
Grab it

Analytics has flatlined

If nothing else on this list matters to you, grab this one. Most sites will want to run this as a daily alert. It operates on the same principle as the traffic drop alert, but takes the percentage to the extreme. If this one is triggered, it's very likely that something has broken your analytics code. Very handy when you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen and aren't necessarily informed when someone makes change to the site.
Grab it

Spike in Goal Completions

If my goals spike, I want to know. It's not a calamitous event like when they bottom out, but hey, I want to know how it happened! I want to investigate that, and I want whatever caused it to still be fresh in everyone's memories so we can document it accurately and add it to the play book!
Grab it

Significant Drop in Google Referrals

I have two words for you: Farmer Update. The folks at Enrichment Depot posted a "self diagnostic kit" that uses a custom report to check your site for collateral damage, but what if you could automate something that would tell you if you were suddenly negatively impacted by Google's latest shenanigans? This custom alert is based on the premise that if you suddenly drop out of the top Google pages, your Google referrals will also plummet. It starts with an advanced segment that includes only Google referrals, then looks for a 50% drop in visits from that segment. So the next time you wind up on the wrong side of an algo update, or if, heaven forbid, you're penalized out of the blue, Google Intelligence will let you know.
Grab it

Direct Traffic Bounce Rate Over 70%

Sounds awfully obscure, right? But let me tell you, this is a good one. It was inspired by a client who called us in a panic because he thought someone was somehow spamming his site. All of a sudden, direct traffic was sky high and the bounce rate went nuclear - not to mention that the big blue traffic line was skewed beyond all reality. A quick check of the service provider dimension quickly showed that the client himself was the source of all the trouble, and it became clear that somewhere in the setup process we had missed filtering out the client's IP address. He'd gotten the bright idea to set the company's URL as the home page of all the browsers in the office. Long story short, we figured that most people going directly to the site are doing so deliberately and aren't so likely to bounce out, so a high bounce rate could be used as a trigger for further investigation. In the first month we discovered four other clients whose IP filters also were missing, and if anyone else we may have missed gets the "official homepage" idea, we'll catch it early.
Grab it

What are your favorite custom alerts? Please share them in the comments!

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Top 5 SEO Questions from Customers - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 17 Mar 2011 02:05 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Howdy mozzers! This week we have a very special guest on Whiteboard Friday - me! That's right, after filming these videos and posting them on the blog for the past six months, they're finally putting me in front of the camera for your viewing... pleasure... (Well, my mom's viewing pleasure at least. Hi mom!). I'm joined by Cyrus Shepard, another member of the Help Team here at SEOmoz. Our team of six handles all of the account and technical support questions sent in by everyone who uses the site and tools, so as you can imagine we see a lot of the same questions week after week. The Help Team cannot answer SEO questions over the tech support lines, but we do our best to help customers figure out why their site may not be working with our tools.

On this week's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus and I will walk you through some solutions to 5 of the most common SEO problems we see on the Help Team, and I'll also let you know how to change your profile picture (we get asked how to do this a lot!). A word of caution: this video will not be about advanced SEO topics and will, at times, pertain particularly to SEOmoz's site and tools. You may learn a thing or two, but if you feel like you don't need to know why only one of your pages is getting crawled or links aren't getting indexed, please feel free to skip this week! We'll get back to more advanced and general topics next week.

Video Transcription

Cyrus: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. This is Aaron. We both work on the Help Team here at SEOmoz. Today's special topic is "Top 5 Questions from Customers." Aaron and I answer hundreds of customer questions every week from SEOs all over the world. So we thought it was important to talk about some of these issues. So just so you know, a lot of these questions that we're going to be covering today may be considered beginner to intermediate, but even if you are an advanced SEO, you might find some gems in here. So we're going to get started. Aaron will be back in just a little bit to talk about some of these other topics.

The first question we get a lot of is www or non-www? How do you choose what to include in your domain? This is kind of a fun one, right, because everybody starts their new website, they buy the domain, they are getting it set up, and which one do you chose? Or if you have a client, the website is a little bit more established, and they have some canonicalization issues some duplicate content issues. Which one do you chose?

Well, some things you might want to consider is, is it a brand new site, or is it a more established site? If it is a brand new site, it is really up to you. You play around with it in your head. Should I go with RedShoes or www.RedShoes.com? But if it is a more established site and you have a lot of incoming links, you have some things to consider. So, some ways to decide if you should use a www prefix in your subdomain or not, first what subdomain has more links coming into it? Now a good way to determine this is using Open Site Explorer. You can type in each version into the search query and see which one has more incoming links, which one has more domain authority, and pick the one that is more powerful and redirect the other one to reflect that.

Another way to see is what is the website already ranking for? Now a good way to do this is to just type in your brand name into a Google search box. Example, let's say you're Adobe, so you type "Adobe" into the search box. What comes up in Google search? Is it www.Adobe or just Adobe.com. That's a good way to see what you're already ranking for, and you might want to chose that all things being equal.

Finally, this doesn't really determine which one you want to chose, but you might want to look in Google Webmaster Tools and chose your preference. There is a preference in there, set my preferred domain as www or non-www. If you are taking on a new client, you might want to check in their Webmaster Tools to see what that is already set for.

Number two. "I has all the 404s, what now?" Now, first off, that's not how our customers talk, except for maybe a couple of them and we love those customers. But the question is, what do we do about 404s? We get this question all the time, every single week. Well, the most important thing you want to do when dealing with 404s is make sure you know where they are coming from. There are many ways to find the source of 404s.

The idea is you have these incoming links. They are coming into your website or they are internal links, and the pages just aren't there. So one thing you can do, if you have important 404s, the most important 404s you want to fix, is look in Open Site Explorer top pages. It is a tab in Open Site Explorer. You look. These are the pages with the most domain authority coming into them from different sources. If any of those are 404ing, those are probably a priority that you want to address.

Other ways of finding 404s, at least within SEOmoz, is using the web app. If you are running a campaign and it will list 404s in your list of issues, you can actually export your CSV and find the referral link to those. It's a new feature we just added just last week.

Other ways of finding 404s, you can look in Google Webmaster Tools again. They will sometimes list the source of 404s. A great tool that a lot of webmasters know about, Xenu Link Sleuth. It runs on your desktop. It's a free program. You run it and it just gives you lots of fun data about all the broken links on your site and you can make site maps. It's really exciting.

But then, after you know where the 404s are coming from, what do you do to fix the problem? Well, the most obvious thing you can do is fix the source link. If you have a link coming in pointing to a page that doesn't exists, maybe you can reach out to that webmaster and get him to link to the right page. Or if it is on your website, just simply fix it.

But what if you can't control those external links coming in, or you have hundreds of links on your website and they're all broken and it's just too much to fix? Well, in that case, why not just fix the page? You can create a page where the 404 is supposed to be and redirect it, or create a page with all new content. These are really common solutions and will help you take advantage of all that page juice and authority coming into your page.

Third question, "My links aren't indexed." This is a question we get all the time, especially when people are looking at Open Site Explorer, they're looking at Linkscape data, or Google. "I have these links. Why aren't they in the index?" It's not just a problem with SEOmoz. It's Yahoo, it's Google. A perfect example that we hear all the time is, "I built a link. I am in the Better Business Bureau, but you're not showing my link. Google isn't indexing my link."

Well, there are three real primary reasons that this will happen that we address all the time. The first problem is the link is buried in deep layers of navigation. The Better Business Bureau is a perfect example. Huge site, lots of domain authority, right? Dr. Pete wrote a post about this recently, about finding links under lots of deep navigation. If it is buried, if you have to go like 15 layers down to find the link, a search engine might not go that far down no matter how much domain authority there is. If this is your own site that links aren't getting indexed, you might want to put those links a little higher, have a flat architecture with maybe more links, more categories, so that you can get to that link a little faster. A general rule of thumb is, if it is an important link, you want to have it two steps away from the home page. Skip, skip, and search engines are going to be more likely to find that link.

The second common problem we see is very few or low authority links linking into that page. Again, going back to the Better Business Bureau, take a look at some of those links, and sometimes we find there is only one link coming into that page and that's from the Better Business Bureau. If you want search engines to discover your links, you need to build high authority links coming into those, and by high authority I mean links with high domain authority or Moz rank coming in.

Third, you want to think about your link quality. Imagine two different pages, one page all things being equal has three links on it and you know your link is the middle link and it is really clickable. People are going to want to click that link. The second page has 250 links on it, and your link is the bottom in the footer somewhere. If you were a human, which link would you want to click on? Well, obviously, you'd click on the first page. That is the way search engines sort of think. So when you are building links or you are looking at links coming in, use the "would a human click on it" question. If a human would click on it, it is more likely that a search engine will find the link. But if a human probably wouldn't click on it, then the link may not be indexed.

That's all I have for now. We're going to have Aaron talk about a couple more questions in just a minute.

Aaron: Hi, I am Aaron, and I am with the SEOmoz Help Team as well. You saw me earlier. Cyrus introduced me. I would love to talk to you about a few more questions that we get asked a lot over on the SEOmoz Help Team.

First off, why is only one page getting crawled? I see this a lot with the web app. I also see it with Google and other search engines. I am going to go through all the different reasons that that might be happening. If you see something else though, feel free to shoot us an e-mail. Remember that all of these questions are regarding issues or other things that might crop up with the web app or the site or tools. They are definitely SEO related, but we don't answer SEO questions as a general rule over in the Help Team. If you see this in the web app, definitely send us a message. But if you think it is an SEO related question, definitely visit the Pro Q&A.

First off, one thing that we see a lot is robots.txt is overblocking a lot of crawlers, including Roger. Probably not explicitly Roger, but we do see robots.txt blocking. So we might just crawl the homepage and that's it. Another thing that might be happening is the homepage is www or not www as Cyrus talked about earlier. The homepage is www, but all of the links going off of the homepage would actually be to non-www pages. So, you'd end up with one page crawled because there is only one page in that subdomain in the www or whatever subdomain that you're using in the web app.

Another thing involves links. There are a lot of issues that we see with links. Sometimes there are no links on the homepage. Just none. So we have nothing to crawl, and obviously, that would be the reason why we're not seeing other pages in the subdomain. If we can't see it, Google can't see it. Other search engines won't be able to see it.

Another thing is having links that are only in JavaScript or Ajax. That can be a problem for our crawler, because we can't always access those, and sometimes search engines have problems with those too. But generally, for our web app, we like to see links in the standard HTML format.

Another problem is that the homepage might redirect. You might have a 301 or a 302 redirect going to another, maybe a different subdomain or any other URL. That can be a problem for our crawler because we'll get one page and we'll let you know that it is actually a redirect. There is nothing else for us to crawl there. So, if you get that issue, you'll probably see a bar that says 301 redirect just for one page. That would indicate that that is the problem.

Another problem is we see sites that are in all Flash. This doesn't happen as often any more, but sometimes people will make their sites all Flash, especially small businesses. They can look really good, but they are really, really hard to crawl. Search engines are getting better at this, but our crawler at the moment can't crawl them unfortunately. Usability-wise, you might want to reconsider having your site in something more accessible.

Finally, we do see sites that give a 404 code, but it actually has content. This can happen on your homepage. So we'll actually go to the homepage. We see content. It's telling us all about your business or service, but then we look at the http access code and it is 404. So, what you need to do here is go to another tool. We really like using the Moz Bar to find this out. Look at what the code is. If you see a 404, you're going to need to change that http status code to a 200, or if you need to redirect, change it to a redirect. But lots of times, we'll see it as a 404 and that's no good, because then everyone thinks that you don't exist and that's no good. Not for SEO. Not for anyone really.

Another big question that we get lots of questions about is how does on page reporting work? That's a feature of the web app. It is a really cool feature to help you identify low hanging fruit, see where your URLs are for certain keywords. But it can be kind of confusing at first, and it might give you results that you weren't expecting.

For instance, if you add a bunch of keywords such as cats, cat beds, cat coats, all sorts of cat accessories, that's all your keywords, we will take each one of those keywords, find the highest ranked URL in whatever search engine you are using in the web app, and we will let you know where you are ranking for that keyword. It might turn out that cat coats, I don't think I am ranking anywhere for that, but I am actually ranking at TheKittyHood.com/cats. So, if you find out that you're ranking there, even if you didn't intend for that ranking, it is kind of low hanging fruit. That's great. You're ranking for something you didn't even know you were. However, we will also grade that URL for that keyword and let you know how you are doing in terms of on page SEO. In this case, cat cats is not well optimized for /cats, so we give you some suggestions about how to better optimize that URL for that keyword. You might want to add more information about cat coats for instance. That might bring your grade up if you follow our instructions to a B or an A, and consequently instead of having this low hanging fruit that is rankled 37, you might end up being able to push it up to the first page or something higher than 37, since you'll actually start targeting for that keyword. Unexpected results, but very, very favorable.

Finally, number six, the last question that we get a lot of that I thought we might want to touch on is how do I change my profile picture? I know, I know, we all have beautiful pictures of ourselves. I have changed mine several times, not that I am beautiful. I just can never find one that is. The main thing you have to do is go to seomoz.org/users/profile. You can do that from clicking up here and then going to the drop down and saying edit profile or view profile. Then you click the silver edit button that shows up on that page. Then you click the silver edit photo button at the left. Then you click the silver upload button. It is all there on that page, that settings page for your user profile, the public profile. It lets you know, oh you actually need to complete all of these things in order to get extra Moz points. Adding a photograph is a great way to do that. It is really easy. You'll start having an identity on our site. People will love to see your face. I know I sure will.

Thank you for checking this out. I hope this helps some of our customers and helps you rethink some of your SEO if you're using our web app, our tools, or just generally out there on the Net.

See you next time on Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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West Wing Week: "Punching Above Your Weight"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, March 18, 2011

West Wing Week: "Punching Above Your Weight"

West Wing Week is your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This week, Education Month continued, with President Obama asking Congress to fix No Child Left Behind before the beginning of the coming school year. The President also updated the American people on relief efforts in Japan and pledges continued support. The Prime Minister of Denmark, Taoiseach of Ireland, and the Chicago Blackhawks also stopped by.

Watch the video.

SEOptimise

Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes & Tweets?

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 03:06 AM PDT

The short answer, yes.

Recently I decided to run an experiment to find out how Google was treating social signals – so I set up a brand new domain (http://www.yogamatcompare.com) with 0 backlinks and started acquiring likes and tweets to the domain. Today, just a week after registering the domain, the site ranks for 'Indian Yoga Mats' 'Cheap Yoga Mats' 'Yoga Mat Compare' 'Luxury Yoga Mats' and many other keywords, still with not a single backlink (time stamped proof of 0 backlinks here, and here).

Here is a brief timeline and summary of my activity, and number of social signals, with rankings in the table that follows.

Date + Time	Activity	Indexed?	# of Likes	# of Tweets
9/3/2011	Bought domain & set up website	No	0	0
12/3/2011 11am	Acquired first round of ‘likes’	No	35	0
12/3/2011 2pm	Bullied 5 more friends into liking the domain	Yes	40	0
13/3/2011 1pm	Bought 70 likes	Yes	90	0
13/3/2011 6pm	Tweeted the site from @marcus_seo	Yes	110	1
14/3/2011 7pm	Tweeted the site from 3x new Twitter accounts	Yes	114	4
15/3/2011 2pm	Shared link on 3x yoga-related Facebook Pages	Yes	117	4
16/3/2011 11pm	Shared link on 1x yoga-related Facebook Page	Yes	118	4

Rankings (Google.com)

	Yoga Mat Compare	Yogamatc ompare.com	Yoga Mat	Cheap Yoga Mats	Luxury Yoga Mats	Indian Yoga Mats
9/3/2011	-	-	-	-	-	-
12/3/2011 11am	-	-	-	-	-	-
12/3/2011 2pm	-	#1	-	-	-	-
13/3/2011 1pm	-	#1	-	-	-	-
13/3/2011 6pm	#55	#1	-	-	-	-
14/3/2011 7pm	#51	#1	-	-	-	-
15/32011 8am	#9	#1	-	-	-	-
15/3/2011 2pm	#9	#1	-	-	-	-
16/3/2011 11pm	#9	#1	-	#156	#62	#106

Analysis

The first thing that is blindingly obvious is that it took under 3 hours for the website to become indexed after receiving the first round of likes – I am currently testing several other domains and monitoring this duration more closely, but I found that rather impressive.
Secondly, you can see a progressive increase in not only rankings but the variety of keywords ranking, as you would likely see in a normal link building campaign, which suggests that if I were to carry on acquiring more and more likes and tweets I could potentially attain competitive rankings for these keywords (although that is not proven, and in my opinion would not be the most effective method of achieving competitive rankings).
So if there was still any doubt over whether Google uses social signals in their search algorithm, mystery solved – they most certainly do. As for Bing and Yahoo, the test domain is not even indexed yet, suggesting that those search engines are not using social signals quite as strongly as Google are just yet.

My Thoughts:

It is my firm personal opinion that within the next two to three years Google will evolve to return results almost entirely based around our personal social graphs. Personalised Search, social signals as a ranking factor, real-time search results and the recent 'who shared this' snippets in search results have all been steps towards this. With that in mind, it does not surprise me that Google are using social signals as a ranking factor, as the data that can potentially be captured in a 'social' link contains a great deal of contextual information about the person who posted it that a standard 'link-building link' does not.
How does this affect SEO? Right this moment I think it's safe to assume that acquiring likes, tweets and other social signals is a fairly good strategy for not only improving indexation but also rankings.

What do you think?

Seth's Blog : Coughing is heckling

Coughing is heckling

The other night I heard Keith Jarrett stop a concert mid-note. While the hall had been surprisingly silent during the performance, the song he was playing was quiet and downbeat and we (and especially he) could hear an increasing chorus of coughs.

"Coughs?," you might wonder... "No one coughs on purpose. Anyway, there are thousands of people in the hall, of course there are going to be coughs."

But how come no one was coughing during the introductions or the upbeat songs or during the awkward moments when Keith stopped playing?

No, a cough is not as overt or aggressive as shouting down the performer. Nevertheless, it's heckling.

Just like it's heckling when someone is tweeting during a meeting you're running, or refusing to make eye contact during a sales call. Your work is an act of co-creation, and if the other party isn't egging you on, engaging wth you and doing their part, then it's as if they're actively tearing you down.

Yes, you're a professional. So is Jarrett. A professional at Carnegie Hall has no business stopping a concert over some coughing. But in many ways, I'm glad he did. He made it clar that for him, it's personal. It's a useful message for all of us, a message about understanding that our responsibility goes beyond buying a ticket for the concert or warming a chair in the meeting. If we're going to demand that our partners push to new levels, we have to go for the ride, all the way, or not at all.

• Email to a friend •

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joi, 17 martie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Coordinated G-7 Yen Intervention in Progress; Currency Interventions Never Work
Earthquake Shortens Day by 1.8 Microseconds
Humorous Video: How Japan Explains Radiation to Kids; Heroic Workers Hit Radiation Limits; Spent Fuel Danger Outweighs Reactor Threat
Shrinking Labor Pool Means Shrinking Demand For Housing

Coordinated G-7 Yen Intervention in Progress; Currency Interventions Never Work

Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:47 PM PDT

Inquiring minds are once again watching central banks intervene in the forex markets. Please consider Yen falls after G7 deal, further downside seen

Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said Japan agreed with central banks of the United States, Britain and Canada as well as the European Central Bank to jointly intervene in the currency market, the first joint action in over a decade.

The dollar jumped nearly 3 percent on the day to as high as 81.48 yen, extending a rebound from a record low of 76.25 yen plumbed on Thursday. The selloff in the previous session came after a break of the 1995 record low of 79.75 triggered a cascade of automatic sell orders in thin trade.

The yen has climbed steadily since last week's earthquake, as Japanese and international investors closed long positions in higher-yielding, riskier assets such as the Australian dollar, funded by cheap borrowing in the Japanese currency.

Expectations that Japanese insurers and companies will bring money home to pay for claims and reconstruction also contributed to the yen's strength.

Some analysts doubted any intervention would be effective, given past experiences by the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank.

"Intervention is no panacea. Everyone knows it. Japan has a much bigger credibility problem and that'll weaken the impact," said David Gilmore, a partner in FX Analytics in Essex, Connecticut.

"I don't think we've seen the low in the dollar/yen. There's still a lot of carry trade exposure. The world is really levered up on this."

Yet, other analysts said intervention may be more effective this time than it was in September when Japan spent $26 billion to weaken the yen but failed to ensure a lasting dollar rally.

"This entire move can be pinned down to speculative positioning rather than any repatriation flows," said Lee Hardman, currency economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

"Since it is speculative, intervention in this case should work and clear out some of the long yen positions."

Currency Interventions Never Work

Several people asked me to comment on this. I am not sure what I can add given my stated position that "currency interventions never work".

However, to add some color, I will say this is an act of desperation as well as a sign of hubris by central bank clowns to think they are more powerful than the markets.

Short of complete self-destruction, no one can defeat the primary trend. They can slow it down, or temporarily buy some time but not reverse it.

That said, central banks certainly can enhance the current trend. Indeed, asinine policies by the Greenspan Fed certainly made the housing bubble much larger than would have happened otherwise.

Thus, there is always a slight chance that by accident, central banks step in at precisely the right time (as a trend is about to reverse on its own accord), giving the appearance of intervention success.

Could this be one of those rare instances central bankers step in at the right time? I suppose so.

Nonetheless, as I said just yesterday in Wild Moves in Yen; Best Move for Japan is to Not Intervene; Yen Hits Record High; Carry Trade Blows Up, the best thing for central banks is to leave this alone.

Best Move for Japan is to do Nothing

Currency intervention has not worked ever. Pray tell what good did it do Japan to throw $25 billion at the Forex market in September?

The answer is none.

History has proven time and time again that fighting currency trends is futile. Thus, the best thing Japan can do with the Yen is to not do anything at all. Yet, foolish cries for intervention still persist.

If that gap fills quickly with no intervention from the Bank of Japan, the blast higher is quite likely to be an exhaustion gap, signifying the end of the trend.

Clearly the jackass central bankers did not listen. Thus we have a completely distorted chart as shown below.

Yen 20-Minute Chart

click on chart for sharper image

Hallelujah?

Is this a trend change? How the hell does anyone know? I don't. What I do know is the G-7 intervention has distorted the market, potentially sending false signals that cannot possibly do any good.

However, if you want a guess, we have seen the highs for this move in the Yen.

Moreover, and ironically, my bet is we see intervention in the reverse direction in years to come as Japan struggles to fight rising inflation with a debt-to-GDP ratio ill-equipped to handle interest rate hikes to stabilize the Yen.

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

Earthquake Shortens Day by 1.8 Microseconds

Posted: 17 Mar 2011 02:14 PM PDT

Space.Com has some interesting tidbits in How the Japan Earthquake Shortened Days on Earth

A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth's spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

A microsecond is a millionth of a second.

"By changing the distribution of the Earth's mass, the Japanese earthquake should have caused the Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds," Gross told SPACE.com in an e-mail. More refinements are possible as new information on the earthquake comes to light, he added.

The scenario is similar to that of a figure skater drawing her arms inward during a spin to turn faster on the ice. The closer the mass shift during an earthquake is to the equator, the more it will speed up the spinning Earth.

The initial data suggests Friday's earthquake moved Japan's main island about 8 feet, according to Kenneth Hudnut of the U.S. Geological Survey. The earthquake also shifted Earth's figure axis by about 6 1/2 inches (17 centimeters), Gross added.

The Earth's figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis in space, which it spins around once every day at a speed of about 1,000 mph (1,604 kph). The figure axis is the axis around which the Earth's mass is balanced and the north-south axis by about 33 feet (10 meters).

"This shift in the position of the figure axis will cause the Earth to wobble a bit differently as it rotates, but will not cause a shift of the Earth's axis in space – only external forces like the gravitational attraction of the sun, moon, and planets can do that," Gross said.

This isn't the first time a massive earthquake has changed the length of Earth's day. Major temblors have shortened day length in the past.

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile last year also sped up the planet's rotation and shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. The 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004 shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds.

See the article for more details including a map of all the aftershocks.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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Humorous Video: How Japan Explains Radiation to Kids; Heroic Workers Hit Radiation Limits; Spent Fuel Danger Outweighs Reactor Threat

Posted: 17 Mar 2011 11:20 AM PDT

Here is a brief update of recent nuclear reactor news from Japan, some of it on the lighter side including a look at naturally occurring radiation from bananas and Brazil nuts, and a humorous video of "Nuclear Boy" used to explain radiation to kids in Japan.

Japan Churns Through 'Heroic' Workers Hitting Radiation Limits

Bloomberg reports Japan Churns Through 'Heroic' Workers Hitting Radiation Limits

More workers were drafted for the frontline of Japan's biggest nuclear disaster as radiation limits forced Tokyo Electric Power Co. to replace members of its original team trying to avert a nuclear meltdown.

The utility increased its workforce at the Fukushima Dai- Ichi plant to 322 yesterday from 180 on March 16 as it tried to douse water over exposed nuclear fuel rods to prevent melting and leaking lethal radiation. Levels beside the exposed rods would deliver a fatal dose in 16 seconds, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear physicist for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety instructor.

An hour's exposure in some areas equates to half the annual maximum level, said John Price, a Melbourne-based consultant on industrial accidents and former safety policy staffer at the U.K.'s National Nuclear Corp.

"They have an access time of 10 to 25 hours at the most," Price, 60, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "At that rate, you are going to go through workers very fast."

Radiation exposure levels are measured in millisieverts. Exposure totaling 100 millisieverts over a year is the lowest level at which any increase in cancer is evident, according to the World Nuclear Association in London. The cumulative maximum level for nuclear workers was increased to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts by Japan's health ministry on March 15.

"Once they have reached that limit, they can't go in the plant anymore," Price said. "You shouldn't be doing that sort of work ever again."

"What we are seeing now is, really, heroics," said Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp., a nuclear consultancy in McLean, Virginia.

The on-site team is likely foregoing sleep and food, and working with minimal light as levels of radiation rise, according to Gennady Pshakin, a former International Atomic Energy Agency official.

"They are like the Spartans, standing up against all that's thrown against them," said Pshakin, who has worked in the nuclear industry for 40 years, referring to the people of ancient Greece who fended off military attacks for centuries. "They are probably working on thin air," he said by phone from Obninsk, the site of the world's first nuclear power plant.

High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japanese Plant

The New York Times reports High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japanese Plant

Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan's nuclear crisis, military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on spent fuel rods at the country's stricken nuclear power station late Thursday after earlier efforts to cool the rods failed, Japanese officials said.

The Japanese efforts focused on a different part of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 140 miles northeast of here, from the reactor — No. 4 — depicted in Washington on Wednesday as presenting a far bleaker threat than the Japanese government had offered.

The decision to focus on the No. 3 reactor appeared to suggest that Japanese officials believe it is a greater threat, since it is the only one at the site loaded with a mixed fuel known as mox, for mixed oxide, which includes reclaimed plutonium.

Western nuclear engineers have said that the release of mox into the atmosphere would produce a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site. The Japanese authorities also expressed concern on Wednesday that the pressure in the No. 3 reactor had plunged and that either gauges were malfunctioning or a rupture had already occurred.

After the military's effort to cool the spent fuel atop the reactor with fire trucks, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said it was too early to assess the success of the attempt.

Mr. Nishiyama also said that radiation of about 250 millisievert an hour had been detected 100 feet above the plant. In the United States the limit for police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers engaged in life-saving activity as a once-in-a-lifetime exposure is equal to being exposed to 250 millisieverts for a full hour. The radiation figures provided by the Japanese Self-Defense Force may provide an indication of why a helicopter turned back on Wednesday from an attempt to dump cold water on a storage pool at the plant.

Danger of Spent Fuel Outweighs Reactor Threat

The New York Times reports Danger of Spent Fuel Outweighs Reactor Threat

Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of highly radioactive fuel rods from nuclear reactors is now coming back to haunt Japanese authorities as they try to control fires and explosions at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants — Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while Chinese nuclear reactors send them to a desert storage compound in western China's Gansu province. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the power plant.

Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves. The electric utility said that a total of 11,195 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site.

That is in addition to 400 to 600 fuel rod assemblies that had been in active service in each of the three troubled reactors. In other words, the vast majority of the fuel assemblies at the troubled reactors are in the storage pools, not the reactors.

Now those temporary pools are proving the power plant's Achilles heel, as the water in the pools either boils away or leaks out of their containments, and efforts to add more water have gone awry. While spent fuel rods generate significantly less heat than newer ones, there are strong indications that the fuel rods have begun to melt and release extremely high levels of radiation. Japanese authorities struggled Thursday to add more water to the storage pool at reactor No. 3.

Four helicopters dropped water, only to have it scattered by strong breezes. Water cannons mounted on police trucks — equipment designed to disperse rioters — were deployed in an effort to spray water on the pools. It is unclear if they managed to achieve that.

Nuclear engineers around the world have been expressing surprise this week that the storage pools have become such a problem. "I'm amazed that they couldn't keep the water in the pools," said Robert Albrecht, a longtime nuclear engineer who worked as a consultant to the Japanese nuclear reactor manufacturing industry in the 1980s and visited the Fukushima Daiichi reactor then.

Very high levels of radiation above the storage pools suggest that the water has drained in the 39-foot-deep pools to the point that the 13-foot-high fuel rod assemblies have been exposed to air for hours and are starting to melt, he said. Spent fuel rod assemblies emit less heat than fresh fuel rod assemblies inside reactor cores, but the spent assemblies still emit enough heat and radioactivity that they must still be kept covered with 26 feet of water that is circulated to prevent it from growing too warm.

Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made the startling assertion on Wednesday that there was little or no water left in the storage pool located on top of reactor No. 4, and expressed grave concern about the radioactivity that would be released as a result. The spent fuel rod assemblies there include 548 assemblies that were only removed from the reactor in November and December to prepare the reactor for maintenance, and may be emitting more heat than the older assemblies in other storage pools.

Even without recirculating water, it should take many days for the water in a storage pool to evaporate, nuclear engineers said. So the rapid evaporation and even boiling of water in the storage pools now is a mystery, raising the question of whether the pools may also be leaking.

Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator who worked 13 years at three American reactors, said that storage pools typically have a liner of stainless steel that is three-eighths of an inch thick, and they rest on reinforced concrete bases. So even if the liner ruptures, "unless the concrete was torn apart, there's no place for the water to go," he said. ...

I cannot assess the accuracy of any of the claims made by Gregory Jaczko. However Tokyo Electric disputes claims by Jaczko. Moreover, Japanese officials are particularly upset with the evacuation area set by US officials at 50 miles while theirs are set at 12 miles, a radius Japan considers more than sufficient.

"Recriticality" the New Buzzword

Tokyo Electric said this week that there was a chance of "recriticality" in the storage ponds – that is to say, the uranium in the fuel rods could become critical in nuclear terms and resume the fission that previously took place inside the reactor, spewing out radioactive byproducts.
Mr. Albrecht said this was very unlikely, but could happen if the stacks of pellets slumped over and became jumbled together on the floor of the storage pool. Tokyo Electric has reconfigured the storage racks in its pools in recent years so as to pack more fuel rod assemblies together in limited space.
If recriticality occurs, pouring on pure water could actually cause fission to take place even faster. The authorities would need to add water with lots of boron, as they have been trying to do, because the boron absorbs neutrons and interrupts nuclear chain reactions.
If recriticality takes place, the uranium starts to warm. If a lot of fission occurs, which may only happen in an extreme case, the uranium would melt through anything underneath it. If it encounters water as it descends, a steam explosion may then scatter the molten uranium.

In short, if the water in the storage ponds is gone, no one seems to be able to explain it. There are conflicting reports as to whether the water is gone and how much, as well as conflicting reports as to whether or not water itself without boron may in some cases do more harm than good.

I am certainly not qualified to sort this out, I can only present the various opinions as I see them, ignoring the ones that are obviously hype, as best I can.

How Japan Explains Radiation to Kids

On the lighter side of the news, Japan uses videos of "Nuclear Reactor Boy" and "poop" to explain radioactive toxicity. I picked this video up from Mike in Tokyo Rogers. Those not speaking Japanese will have to follow the captions.

URL in case above inline video does not play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aH2-MhEko&feature=player_embedded

Inquiring minds may also wish to consider Radiation in Tokyo Same as Eating 1.5 Bananas.

Wikipedia explains the Banana Equivalent Dose

A banana equivalent dose (BED) is a concept to place in scale the dangers of radiation by comparing exposures to the radiation generated by a common banana.

Radioactivity is measured in disintegrations per second (dps), in Curie (Ci), or in Becquerel (Bq). Radiation dose equivalent is measured in Roentgen equivalent man (rem) or in Sievert (Sv).

Many foods are naturally radioactive, and bananas are particularly so, due to the radioactive potassium-40, or 40K they contain. Bananas are radioactive enough to regularly cause false alarms on radiation sensors used to detect possible illegal smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.

A medium sized banana contains about 450 mg of potassium. 0.0117%, or about 53 μg of this being 40K. 53 μg of 40K produces 14 radioactive decays per second (dps), or 0.00037 μCi of radiation. If the banana is eaten, the dose equivalent is about 0.01 mrem. 0.01 mrem is equivalent to 0.1 μSv.

A radiation dose equivalent of 100 μSv (10 mrem, or 1,000 BED) increases an average adult human's risk of death by about one micromort – the same risk as eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter, or of smoking 1.4 cigarettes.

Comparison to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl

After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the NRC detected radioactive iodine in local milk at levels of 0.74 Bq/l (20 pCi/l), much less than an equivalent quantity of normal banana. Thus a 12 fl oz glass of the slightly radioactive milk would have about 1/75th BED. However, radioactive iodine is exceptionally dangerous to children as it concentrates in the thyroid.

Following the Chernobyl disaster, levels of caesium-137 increased by more than tenfold throughout Europe, and wild mushrooms in the area contained radiation with up to an effective dose of 20 μSv/kg[8]. Thus, eating 1 kg of these mushrooms would have given the same dose as about 200 bananas.

Other foods

Nearly all foods are slightly radioactive. All food sources combined expose a person to around 0.4 mSv (40 mrem or 4,000 BED) per year on average, or more than 10% of the total dose from all natural and man-made sources.

Some other foods that have above-average levels are potatoes, kidney beans, nuts, and sunflower seeds. Among the most naturally radioactive foods known are Brazil nuts, with activity levels that can exceed 444 Bq/kg (12,000 pCi/kg).

Fears of radiation hitting the US are way overblown.

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

Shrinking Labor Pool Means Shrinking Demand For Housing

Posted: 17 Mar 2011 08:52 AM PDT

Here is an interesting set of charts on labor pool statistics and housing courtesy of my friend Tim Wallace. First consider a chart of various civilian population numbers.

Civilian Population, Workforce, Employment

click on chart for sharper image

Points to Consider

The civilian population is steadily rising. However, none of that increase in recent years is looking to buy a home.
Those not in the labor force are not looking
Those unemployed are not looking
Those afraid of losing their job are not looking
Those in a house and underwater are not looking
Those just out of school and deep in school debt are not looking
Those facing retirement may be looking to sell or downsize
Mortgage standards are much tighter for those who are looking

New Home Sales

click on chart for sharper image

Those struggling to understand why home sales are so bad and why they are unlikely to improve much soon, need only consider the previous set of bullet points.

Annualized New Home Sales to Civilian Labor Force Ratio

click on chart for sharper image

Tim Wallace writes ...

Hello Mish

The numerator in the above chart is the government-reported number of new homes sales annualized from the monthly report. I track it all year long.

I then chart new home sales against the jobs report number for current people in the labor force.

I use the annual data for the preceding years and the current month data for the current year. I use not seasonally adjusted data because I am always looking year on year.

I do this report for two reasons:

I believe the labor force is the pool for new homes, and as there is no growth. In fact, there is shrinkage.

I also see new homes as a way of increasing labor demand. As there are few new homes being produced I do not see an increase coming in the labor market. Thus, the two negatives feed each other.

People do not realize how much of our economy depends on the housing market.

Think of 1,000,000 homes sold in the mid '00's at an average of $290,000 each and you have $290,000,000,000 in GDP.

Today we are down to $200,000 homes and 284,000 of them. That is $56,800,000,000 in GDP, a decrease of $233,200,000,000 plus whatever multiplier, if any, you want to assign to that.

Thanks Tim!

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