#also disclaimer once again this isn’t targeted at anyone or in response to any post just someth ive been thinking abt lol

[booksandpaperss]

whenever there are multiple ways a scene or storyline could be analyzed that make about the same amount of sense I am always always always going to buy into the more interesting and compelling option writing wise unless proven otherwise by the show bc literally why would I not?? yes this is about mike’s monologue.

[scripttorture]

You likely don't follow Dream Smp but there was just a reveal that one person (Character A) is torturing another (Character B, former villain, now in prison) for info on necromancy while the warden of the prison gave CA the equipment to do it and is ignoring CB's screams for help. And half the fandom is trying to justify it with "oh, CB deserves it for threatening to kill a child, killing (1/2)

another child (who he then revived, not justifying /that/ though) and manipulating/abusing the latter." Not only that, but so many people are telling off anyone who pointing out how messed up it is (and don't worry, the story itself so far is showing that it's messed up and won't work) with "it's just fiction, get over it." Like I am legit concerned over how many people are claiming it's cathartic and the character deserves it for their actions. Rant over I guess (2/2) (Dream smp anon) And I forgot to add that this character was /already/ being tortured; he has been in complete solitary confinement for upwards of 2 months and is being starved) and was actively self-harming and destroying items in his cell in a bid to get the warden to come replace them (looking for social interactions, even if it was negative) and people STILL thought that wasn't "enough of a punishment"

-

I have no idea what this show? Comic? Piece of media is but I’m happy to give my opinion on the general situation and use of violence in fiction*.

 But I’m not here to take sides in fandom wars and the aim of this blog is not to tell people they can’t write about violence or abuse. It’s to make people think about how it’s used in stories and hopefully create something that’s more realistic and respectful to real survivors.

 At the end of the day the reason I’m interested in fiction is because it effects our perception of real survivors. When so much of our popular media is unrealistic in ways that demean survivors that has an effect. I want to remind people that while the violent acts we write about are fiction, similar acts are happening to real people today.

 Torture survivors are real. They’re human and they deserve respect.

 Here’s the thing Anon, the people you’re mad at are real too. And the characters that sparked this are not.

 There’s nothing wrong with having a strong emotional respond to fiction. There’s nothing wrong with getting frustrated with how pigheaded or outright bigoted fandom can be. But it is worth questioning whether responding to this kind of thing is worth it.

 Arguments over fictional characters can become extremely heated and result in real world harm. And so long as you’re engaging with stuff in a purely fictional context… well I think the chances of being dismissed, belittled etc are significantly higher. (Note however that being dismissed and belittled still happens when you’re dealing with torture in the real world.)

 This is not fair. That does not change other people’s responses or the cultural climate.

 I will be blunt; if you are writing and reading in English the majority of fans you deal with will be Western and white. I have personally found this intersection very likely to treat violence as something purely fictional. I have found them unlikely to consider torture as a reality unless they are prompted to.

 And from my side of things that prompting is often like dropping an anvil on someone’s foot during the conversation.

 Believe me I get it. It is infuriating to see real, deadly torture techniques interpreted as harmless. It is hurtful seeing torture victims blamed for their own suffering. This happens on the news as often as it does in fandom so the fact these feelings are being set off by something fictional doesn’t make a lot of difference. Because these arguments are used in the real world against real people.

 Seeing torture apologia touted as this weeks hot take is something you are allowed to be mad about. I’d be a hypocrite if I said otherwise.

 But educating other people is hard work and you are talking about a piece of media aimed at children. You are probably talking to children. If you’re a teenager yourself it might be hard to hear it put like that.

 It’s still true.

 If you really want to have these conversations in your fandom then you need to centre the reality. Underestimating or dismissing the damage solitary confinement and starvation do to people is serious because it props up real world systems of abuse. Because it justifies ‘tough’ sentences to level of isolation that leave people mutilated by their own hand, or unable to function in society. Or dead. Because it leads to doctors ‘prescribing’ diets used in death camps.

 Here’s the thing, talking about that reality to children is a fraught process. Especially when they’re children who don’t have any experience of seeing this stuff. And unless you’re their parent or teacher educating them is not your job.

 Sending them down an internet rabbit hole that leads to photos of real injuries, real torture, real mass graves… I think that has the potential to go very badly.

 Enjoying something and then discovering that the fandom is toxic is unpleasant. But my impression is that’s the problem here: the fandom interactions are leaving you feeling like shit.

 Disengage.

 You do not need the fandom to enjoy uh… whatever Dream smp is. You do not need their permission and if the fandom is a negative space for you, you are allowed to leave.

 If some of these people are your friends then by all means try to privately explain why their words hurt you and use this blog as a resource. But ask yourself how much you want to be friends first because that is a long painful process that might not work.

 Torture apologia is everywhere and fixing it is going to take decades.

 Accept that you can not control other people’s actions. Accept that some people will always be assholes.

 If seeing torture apologia hurts you then… you probably need to find a piece of media without torture to enjoy. Because apologia is so present that I think that’s the only way to completely avoid coming across it in fandom.

 Once again I understand. I’ve volunteered to be bombarded with this stuff every day. It is upsetting. It is also embedded our global culture and the popular media exported to every single nation on the planet.

 Constantly being confronted with it and stewing in that anger and hurt is unhealthy.

 Step back. Do something else for a while. Take a look at this post I made last week. You might find some of the advice on dealing with these feelings helpful.

 You can not make people care. Hopefully most of the people you’re talking to will grow and learn and become more compassionate people. But you can’t force that process.

 And you don’t have to deal with their bullshit while they’re still growing.

 Shouting at other people isn’t always helpful and it isn’t activism. If you want to do something constructive there are a lot of organisations that would gladly accept your money and your time.

 Here’s a couple that seem relevant:

Just Detention

Solitary Watch

The World Food Programme

Amnesty International

 I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*I asked a friend to explain what Dream Smp is and I’ll be honest I still don’t understand it. But hey I got an idea of the target audience which helps. Please don’t explain Minecraft to me any more let me rest.

[thewritershelpers]

Improving Your Writing when English Isn’t Your First Language (mega-ask)

As you can see above, we've gotten more than one question about writing, improving your writing, and even publishing in English when it's not your native language. First off: that's awesome. To anyone writing or even consuming in a language that's not your first, kudos to you.

You can google any variation of this question and get different articles with a ton of the same advice, and some with conflicting advice. Not only have I compiled the most commonly repeated information, but I've also reached out to people on our Discord server and others for their personal experiences.

I'll start off by listing concise versions of the advice and then expound on them further on in the article. Remember that we are not experts on your writing and that everyone learns in different ways and at different paces. These are in no particular order.

-be patient

-practice

-get feedback from native sources

-don't undermine yourself to your audience

-Grammarly

-research

-don't get discouraged

Be patient

That's first because, well, duh. Patience is so important for both yourself and your writing. Writing is hard enough of a passion without the added difficulty of doing it in a language that doesn't come naturally. In the world of literature, writing/publishing in your non-native language isn't just a matter of translating words. It requires translating of ideas, concepts, and even cultural norms, which is why just slapping it into Google translate won't work.

Part of the reason for the advice of having patience, too, is that writing in your native language needs to take time. It doesn't really matter how fast you can whip out 20 pages of a first draft--it'll still be a simple first draft. Writing is a craft that requires not just love and passion but time. So what if you need a little bit of extra time--or a lot of extra time--because you're accomplishing a feat most don't even think about attempting?

Next is to practice.

That goes hand in hand with what I said about being patient. Again, writing in and of itself is all about practice and doing it daily (not that I'm an expert on getting that done, but you know). But when it comes to practice another language, there are different ways you can do that. You can reach out to native speakers (for English, there are going to be so many people willing to help, even just in our community! you just need to ask) and practice having conversations or ask them to look over your work. Practice by turning on your favorite movie or TV show in English with subtitles in your native language. Watch videos on YouTube, find a Spotify playlist/podcast, in your target language. There's also plenty of people who have done what you're trying to do who have shared their experiences and what helped them on those same platforms.

Get feedback from native speakers

This is a bit of an expansion on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph. In my experience, and from what others have shared, writing in a non-native language can be pretty clinical. Writing with figurative language or in metaphors won't be as easy or come as naturally as it does in your own language. Things like idioms and even pop cultures reference aren't always going to translate even if you have the exact words. That's where native speakers come into play. If they're willing to look over your work, whether as a friend or in an editorial position, they can give you advice about whether the wording in one spot sounds clunky or if a phrase doesn't make sense or if there're synonyms for what you already used to help convey your message even stronger.

Don't undermine yourself

This is something that I personally am saying. It's not mentioned on any of the linked sites, and no one I talked to said it. But as someone who is a native English speaker (and even has a degree in it) I think this is super important. This point goes towards native English speakers/writers, too. Don't undersell yourself and undermine your work to the audience before they have even picked it up. Disclaimers are different, and it all comes down to the words you use and how you use them. Let your readers know, whether it's people on AO3 or a literary agent, that English isn't your first language. Let them know concisely that they may find some basic errors--but stop there. Don't grovel. You have nothing to apologize for, especially once you've given that warning (those is it really a warning? what's so dangerous or scary about a few mistakes?). You're writing is not going to be any less of an accomplishment for a few grammatical errors, or mistranslated phrases, or even typos. I've seen so many mistakes in published works that it's kind of ridiculous. But if you put something out there for someone to read and in the same breath say "I don't know that this is worth reading" I'm going to need extra convincing to pick it up. *kicks soapbox away*

Grammarly

*NOT sponsored*

Grammarly is a wonderful tool that you can use, for FREE. It not only (with the free version) helps correct spelling and grammar, but can also help point out the tone you're writing with. For example, right now, Grammarly is telling me that this writing sounds mostly informative--which it's meant to be--and a little appreciative and friendly. When sending emails I've had it tell me that it sounds formal (which I was going for), and I've also had it not say anything because the text was a different kind of writing (like when I'm proof-reading something being posting it on AO3...). I honestly don't know what else it helps with once you've paid because I've been happily using the free version for about 3 years now.

Research

Don't be afraid to pick up a book, or head to the library, or pull up Google. Research is paramount to writing anyway, let alone once you're doing it in another language. Your research options are limitless and can include your mutuals on social media as well as those dictionaries that translate from one language into another. Research can also include (in my humble opinion) binge-watching/reading your favorite things...in English. In four years of university, one of the most frequently said things was to improve your writing 1) write every day and 2) read every day. You're never going to learn from worrying or overthinking, and you're also never going to learn from just doing DuoLingo (that's more conversational than literary anyway).

Something a member of Discord specifically said in relation to research was to look at morphology, at the roots of words (and root words). Morphology is, in linguistics, looking at how words are formed. For example, let's look at "biology". There are parts to this word that each has a different meaning, that formed together created a new/elevated meaning. "ology" means the study of something, and bio means life. So biology is, simply, the study of life. Once you've got those basics of things like "ology" under your belt it'll become easier to not just translate words but the concepts (if this works with your learning style).

Last but not least, don't get discouraged.

Writers of all kinds get discouraged when writing in their native language. Even those of us who speak English as our first language make mistakes worth discouragement (you will never know how many typos were corrected by Grammarly as I wrote this all out the first time). English is not an easy language. It's not the hardest, but it's far from easy (learning another language isn't easy regardless of what languages are involved). This is a post from someone who is a non-native English speaker but you would never know unless they told us.

While researching for this, I found some articles/blog posts that said mostly the same thing, and are where I got some of the information

This one is from a native English speaker giving advice

This one is for writing for non-native English readers, but still has good advice

And finally this one is a blog post (I think) from someone who is a non-native English speaker!

In specific response to some of the asks:

English, like any other language, changes. It's a very dynamic language, actually, and from region to region, there will not only be different accents but different frames of reference. 1950 isn't so far back in time for the English to be drastically different from what is spoken today, but I'm in the USA and you're asking about Oxford. English in England has very different nuances, even more so than you would get between California and Texas and New York. This is a link to the Oxford English Dictionary list of words that became more common in the 50s. However, this is a generalized list, not specific to any English-speaking country let alone region or city. If you're wanting to look at how to convey the accent of people from/in Oxford, there are videos on YouTube of people speaking in different accents so that you can have an idea, a comparison, at least in your own mind. With the 50s it's going to be more just thinking really of what words and lifestyles and things weren't around yet; cell phones didn't exist yet. Here's another link to some stock images of Oxford in the 50s. Remember, this time was very close to WWII so there'll be lingering effects of that, especially in England.

About fight scenes and curses, there's a ton of resources on that. If you just search "fight" on our page, you'll get a ton of posts answering that question. Also, here's a link to a superb and excellent source on writing fight scenes. When it comes to curses...just watch Rage Quit on YouTube, or spend a while on TikTok. If you want to dive right in just Google "English curses" and there'll be YouTube videos, entries on Urban Dictionary, you name it.

When it comes to publishing, once you've gotten your manuscript is a perfect time to have a native-speaking friend look it over. Whether editing is their thing or not, they'll be able to help with the things that are really obvious. I don't have any experience publishing in a different language, though, so there might be other resources along the different stages to help you. Some general publishing advice I've gotten: when wanting to publish fiction, literature, start small. Start with short stories in literary journals, online and in print. You really can't make much headway with large publishing houses without a literary agent and it'll be easier to attract one if you have evidence that you can write, and write well enough people want to read it. When it comes to poetry, just start submitting. Get familiar with the process, and educate yourself on things like simultaneous submissions and a good rejection. Publishing is an ever-changing game that isn't cut and dry in any language or country. We can't tell you what's best, but my advice is to go with your gut and try your best. Don't be afraid to try again, too.

Everyone overthinks their writing. Or at least, everyone I know who writes does. Honestly, in my opinion, if you're not overthinking at least a little bit, you're not worried enough. You will never be able to fully know whether you've explained or described enough. A good chunk of the experience is up to the readers, so you have to leave them some wiggle room for imagination. But that doesn't mean you have to cheapen your story or short-change your characters. You mention specifically that you're POC, which I'm gonna guess also means that your characters will be POC. It's never too much to specify the race/ethnicity of your characters, even in a fantasy work. How you go about writing those descriptions might need to change but it's kind of like chocolate chips, in my mind: you decide those things with your soul.

So, there you have it. A ridiculously long way to say: you're awesome, you do you, practice, love yourself and your writing, and don't be afraid to put yourself out there (in any way).

(images read:

Anonymous said: Im writing a book based in Oxford in 1950s. how was the language different from now. I am not from an English speaking country at all. Never been outside my country either. And Im going to write a book based in England in English

Anonymous said: Hi there, I’m a writer for almost 3 years now but since English isn’t my first language I get discouraged easily if things I write come off strange to myself. Do you maybe have any advice for me, on how to motivate myself and not comparing myself with native English speakers? Thank you in advance!

Anonymous said: Hello! I starting to work on this shortfic but it’s been really hard. It’s like I’m trying to building a house alone and with my bare hands. Even though I’m already used to write in mother tongue. Any advice for non-english speaker trying to write their first story in English?

Yaelburstine said: Hi. Do you have any tips about how to write a good fight scene and curses that people speak English get cus’ it’s not my first language

gyger said: I am not a native english speaker, but most of the books I read are in english and I generally prefer writing in english as well. However, I am worried about making mistakes that I can’t recognize myself. I have no idea how good my english is to a native english speaker, plus some things are easier to write in my native tongue (such as dialogue). I’m also worried about publishing, since that definitely would be easier in my country than abroad. How do I decide what language to choose?

Anonymous said: As a POC writer and English as their second language, I overthink all the writing I do. I feel like I don’t describe my ideas thoroughly or my character descriptions are vague or not good enough. I’m currently working on a YA novel but I plan on writing a YA fantasy novel but I feel like my lack of vocabulary and grammar structure makes me give up on finishing my book. Is this normal for native English speaking authors or is this considered a language barrier thing? Thanks! Love your blog!

Thank you for your questions, and for your patience as we do our best to answer them.

-S

[whenrockwasyoung19]

It’s Time to Talk about a Bespectacled Elephant in the Room

I’ve been in the Beatles fandom for 8 and a half years. I have had a Beatles blog for the entirety of those 8 and a half years, and I have watched as discourse about these four men evolve. The discourse inside and outside the fandom has become so toxic that I don’t think I can engage with it in the same way that I could before. Let me explain. 

When I entered this fandom 8 and a half years ago, it was in 2012, quite an infamous year in tumblr history. That was the pique of “”cringey”” fandom culture. The Beatles fandom was as steeped in fandom culture as any other fandom. I know this because I was part of two of the top of fandoms at the time, Doctor Who and Sherlock. Believe me, I have seen cringe. 

The fandom at the time was totally aware of the John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s flaws as individuals, but most fans tended to simply enjoy Beatles fandom as if it were the 60s. Some might call it ignorant bliss. If you asked me at the time, I’d have said it was self-aware ignorant bliss--if that even makes sense. At the time, there wasn’t a person with a Beatles icon who hadn’t heard the line “John Lennon beat his wife.” Everyone knew it, but everyone also knew the real story, and so everyone just made peace with it. As a result, people didn’t think about every bad thing the Beatles ever did on a daily basis. It was more like a once-a-month kind of thing. Otherwise, fandom discourse was quite fun and relaxed. There were no shipping wars, no one fought over who was the best Beatle, everyone gushed over the Beatles wives, and we all just had fun with fics and fan art. 

Of course, in this period, people engaged in conversations about one bespectacled Beatles problematic behavior. These conversations usually came from outside of the fandom. It was usually randos coming into the tags or into someone’s ask box and ranting about John Lennon’s violent behavior. Some of it came from within the fandom. Some people really didn’t like John and gave others shit if they listed John as their favorite Beatle. A lot of the discourse boiled down to: ‘hey, I see you like John Lennon. You should know that he beat his wife. And now that you know that, you should feel bad about ever liking him in the first place.’ And the response was often, ‘Actually, John Lennon didn’t beat his wife. They weren’t even married at the time. And also he didn’t beat her, he slapped her once in the face, and then never did it again.’ No one’s minds were changed. The fans had made their peace, and the antis came off as cynical and pretentious. 

When Dashcon happened, and Tumblr took a hard look at its cringey fandom culture, the Beatles fandom evolved as well. The fandom became, frankly, less fun. It no longer felt like a group of people who found the Beatles decades after the 60s and were fangirling like it was 1965. There was still some of that left, but a lot of it kind of faded. So, most fandom interactions were reblogging pictures of the Beatles from the 60s and various interview clips and quotes. But the barrage of antis never really went away, and the response didn’t evolve. 

Then, the advent of cancel culture came on. I always waited for the Beatles to get, like, officially canceled, but I also felt they were uncancel-able at the same time. Let me explain. I have been a Beatles fan primarily in an online space, rarely engaging with fans in real life. But I have met fans who are life-long Beatles fans, people who are a lot older than us and who’s fandom isn’t tied to the internet. They don’t give a shit about any of our discourse. They may or may not have heard it before, but they seem totally indifferent to all of it. I’m sure most of them have never heard ‘Mclennon’ before. These are the people that flock to see Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in concert (and pay astronomical prices for it). These are the people who go to record shops and buy vinyl. These are the people I run into at flea markets who buy up all the Beatles merch before I can even arrive (true story). So, the Beatles will never be canceled because there will always be people who love the Beatles and don’t engage with online discourse. Rarely said, but thank god for Gen-X. 

As cancel culture took over the internet, fandoms changed. It’s not as noticeable in fandoms without problematic favs. For instance, I’m also steeped in the Tom Holland fandom, and that boy is a little angel who has done no wrong. No one has discourse about the unproblematic boy who plays an equally unproblematic character. But in fandoms with ‘problematic favs’ the mood has shifted. I’m also in the Taron Egerton fandom. Taron Egerton, for those who only follow me for my Beatles stuff, is a genuinely sweet and kind person who has had zero scandals in his six year career. There were some rumblings when he was cast as Elton John, and some people took issue with the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay man. This discourse seemed to die quickly as a whole lot of straight people played gay people in that same year (Olivia Coleman as queer Queen Anne, Emma Stone as her queer lover, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury). Why jump on this boy who at the time was still technically on the rise. He’s not exactly the same target as someone like Scarlett Johansson who has her pick of roles. Taron doesn’t have quite that some power in Hollywood, and I think most people made peace with the fact that this was a big role for him, and it’s not really fair to take that away from him. So, all in all, the closest thing to a scandal was something that died pretty much on arrival. 

That was until this summer when everything changed. When George Floyd was murdered, celebrities flocked to social media to mourn his loss. Taron’s social media account was silent. For weeks, Taron said nothing about Black Lives Matter or Floyd’s death. This caused outrage in the fandom. Many raced to defend him, starting a hashtage #IstandwithTaron. Others sought to tear him down and anyone who supported him. The kind of mania this one incident caused tore through an otherwise peaceful fandom. What I saw was two sides in a total panic. The antis were people who once had faith that Taron was a good person and were now questioning that. Andthe defenders were people who desperately wanted him to be a good person and were afraid that he wasn’t. In essence, both sides could feel Taron about to get canceled. The defenders wanted to stop it, the antis wanted to ride that wave. 

What this long drawn out Taron example is meant to convey: is that cancel culture has put fandoms on edge. One’s fav has to be perfect, otherwise it can jeopardize the existence of the entire fandom. I’ll admit, I was afraid that I’d be some kind of pariah for standing by Taron through all of this. My actions were to basically reason with the antis but still defend Taron. I defend him mostly because I felt that his silence was the result of a needed social media absence and that trying to shame him back onto social media was an invasion of privacy. But I was genuinely afraid that he would get canceled, and the fun of the Taron fandom would be lost. 

In the Beatles fandom, it often feels like the Beatles, mainly John, have already been canceled. I see this coming from two different sources: antis from outside of the fandom and antis within the fandom. The outside antis are just the same as the ones from 2012. These are people who like to drop in that John Lennon beat his wife, posting this in the tag (which violates an ancient tumblr real by the way--no hate in the tags). 

The antis outside the fandom speak to a larger anti-John Lennon sentiment online. I see references to John Lennon ‘beating his wife’  on Tiktok and twitter. The tone of anti-John Lennon posts has shifted. Before, it felt like the antis were being smug but also argumentative. They wanted to have a conversation about this bit of info they read on Reddit with no context. Now, “John Lennon beating his wife” is practically a meme. It’s a running joke online that John Lennon was a wife beater. I can’t look on my instagram explore page because every so often a John Lennon beats his wife meme will pop up amongst the other, normal, memes.

This change in discourse suggests that the internet has just accepted this as fact now. I should note that back in 2012, it seemed as if few people knew this fact. The fandom knew it, and these random antis knew it, but few others did. Now, because of how common these memes are, it seems to be widespread knowledge.

Consequently, the Beatles fandom, who used to ward off attacks from antis, seems to have given in. I recently saw a post from a Beatles blog (had the URL and icon and everything) that confessed they felt guilty for listening to the Beatles, and I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed in the fandom. People tend to put disclaimers in posts about John or even all four that John is an ‘awful man.’ It seems like the self-aware ignorant bliss has completely gone away. Occasionally, I still see posts joyously talking about Mclennon or reblogs of old photos from the 60s. But the culture has shifted. 

Online, it no longer feels comfortable to be a Beatles fan. It feels like you have to own up to 8 decades of mistakes by four men you’ve never met. And, I should note, this is kind of how it feels to be a fan of anything right now. Taron is not canceled today, but he could be tomorrow. It’s this pervasive feeling of guilt that the person you’re supporting may or definitely has or is doing something wrong.

I’ll admit this uncomfortable feeling has expanded into other parts of my fandom life. I listen to their music, and I feel elated--the way I always have. Then, I get these intrusive thoughts which sound like all the worst parts of Twitter combined. It wasn’t always like this. Back in 2012, when I knew almost nothing about them, I saw them as four young men who were full of happiness, love for another, and talent. Back then, listening to their music was exciting and joyous. Sometimes, I fear that I can never feel that way again. Next year, when I finally go to Liverpool, will I be filled with excitement or guilt? 

I say all this for a few reasons. One, I love John Lennon. I appreciate all the good he did for the world not just as a musician and an artist but also his advocacy and charity work. I love him, and a part of me will always love him, but observing the change in discourse has enlightened me as a historian. Part of my job is to observe people’s legacies, and John’s is perhaps the most interesting legacy I’ve ever observed. When he died, he was hailed as a saint. But tall poppy syndrome set in, and the antis started. This culture grew and grew to the point where it seems to, at least among the younger generation, taken over the sainthood. 

But as a historian and a fan, I have never seen the saint or the devil. I’ve only seen the man, the incredibly flawed man. The thing that these antis never understand is that John Lennon was painfully aware of his own flaws to the point where it made him all the more self-destructive. In essence, his past mistakes caused him to make additional mistakes. But John, aware of his own flaws, always tried to change and was often successful. I’ve talked about this before, but John demonstrated that he was capable of being a good person, like properly so, again and again. After he struck Cynthia, he never hit her again. His shortcomings as a father to Julian weren’t repeated with Sean. He worked on his drinking, his drug addiction, and his anger, trying to overcome those demons till the day he died. By all accounts, the John Lennon that died in 1980 is not the John Lennon who struck Cynthia Powell at school. That John Lennon was living a cleaner, healthier life. He was a better father to both his sons by that point, and was trying to repair his relationship with Julian. He was a good husband to Yoko and saw himself living a long and happy life. 

John Lennon cannot and should not be boiled down to just his flaws. It’s one thing as a fan to acknowledge that John is a flawed human being (news flash: they all are), but he is also much bigger than that. 

So once again, why am I writing this long, rambling post, once again talking about John Lennon’s virtues? Because if I can’t engage with healthy discourse about the Beatles and John Lennon, then I can’t engage with discourse on the topic at all. So, I probably will post less Beatles stuff because I find it hard to go through the tags or even my dash (well, I can’t really go through my dash anymore for other reasons I’m not going to get into right now). If any of my followers have noticed a lot of Taron posts lately, it’s not just because I love Taron, it’s because Taron’s  tag is pretty much the only location on tumblr I feel 100% comfortable in. Any foray into John or the Beatles tags becomes uncomfortable and guilt-ridden quickly. 

So, I probably will post less about the Beatles until I can find a blog or a tag that doesn’t give me bad vibes. My fandom will likely outgrow tumblr and the internet. I have a ton of Beatles books; maybe I’ll rely on those. I am doing official scholarly research on them now. Maybe that will be my outlet. I’m sorry if I post less about them now, but it’s really for my own well-being. 

[out-of-this-dimension]

The Test of Fear - Andross’s Perspective

I was thinking about the infamous Test of Fear earlier today and why it’s designed the way that it is.  I would say Adventures suffers from both Rareware thinking hard into its lore and simultaneously leaving a lot of plotholes or just weird gaps without any explanation-- be it oversight or just the fact that the game went through developmental hell. One of these sort of weird holes is why the Test of Fear is designed the way it is designed.  After all, if you were to create a Test of Fear... wouldn’t you want to target in on an individual’s fear to truly test them?

Under cut, because LONG.

The main focus of the Test of Fear is, unsurprisingly given the setting...

... dinosaurs.  Which both makes sense and doesn’t make sense at all.  After all, I think just about anyone would be afraid of dinosaurs snapping at their face and lunging at them.  But the test seems... oddly generic.  Maybe that’s intentional.  Maybe the Krazoa aren’t powerful enough to delve into one’s innermost thoughts to discover their deepest, truest fear?  I’m... actually not convinced of that at all.  I think the Krazoa definitely could see what Fox is afraid of the moment he entered the shrine.

Before I continue, disclaimer: I think there were rumors that Fox’s prototype counterpart, Sabre, was scared of dinosaurs and that is why the Test of Fear is designed in this fashion.  However, I’ve never seen any solid proof of that being a thing within the game’s beta stages.  If this was true somehow, I’d have a lot of questions about how Sabre was able to tolerate Tricky’s presence, much less get through the game’s events without having multiple mental breakdowns.  That being said, I’m pretty sure Krystal was the one that did the Test of Fear anyways in the game, not Sabre.  Facing General Scales would make more sense for her character arc.  I’m not sure how much of the test changed between DP and SFAdv.

Moving on.

Other than the dinosaurs and fire jets (which are almost a dime a dozen on Sauria’s surface), there’s two things that stand out to me about the Test of Fear.  The first is obviously General Scales, who picks Fox up like he’s nothing.

General Scales’s appearance makes me think the test is different for everyone who takes it.  After all, if, say, an individual a thousand years ago had to take the test, General Scales probably wouldn’t be as scary because they wouldn’t know who he is.  Remember: They never claim Krystal or Fox are “chosen ones” who are the only people that can be possessed by Krazoa.  General Scales has a Krazoa the entire game.  It’s anyone with a heart of pure good or pure evil.  So, really, anyone with that quality could bring the Krazoa back from their shrines.

Back on track. To Fox, General Scales is... arguably a little more scary because at that point in the game, Scales had bested Fox once at CloudRunner Fortress a la spy robots shocking Fox into unconsciousness while the General continued to take over the fortress.   

And then there’s Andross’s cameo in the Test of Fear, which you could argue might not be part of the test at all but the actual appearance of Andross watching Fox from the shadows.  And that leads me to my theory... We don’t really... know if that’s actually Andross or part of the test, which is something I didn’t really think too hard on until today.  There’s some evidence that makes me think Andross is actually not an illusion:

For starters, he doesn’t show up in any of the other tests.  Not even the Test of Combat.  He doesn’t even show up during parts of the game outside of the shrines or in the palace except for the beginning and end.  

He shows up only after General Scales is introduced, which ups the ante in the test.  It’s clear the Krazoa started with the dinosaurs first because while they do appeal to natural, instinctual fear, they don’t hit home as much as General Scales in particular.  The next step after General Scales (or a “lesser” villain) would be... Andross, really, who is the big bad for all of Fox’s adventures up until this point. (You could argue Pigma as he’s responsible for James’s death but note at how the series never really seems to pit Pigma against Fox... it pits Fox against Wolf and Peppy against Pigma.  You could maybe argue Wolf but I don’t see him as any worse than Scales because I don’t think it’s canon that Fox ever loses to Wolf).

Although we don’t see the perspective of the dinosaurs lunging at Fox, we do see the perspective of General Scales as he’s swooping down to grab Fox-- meaning that just because the player sees the perspective, it doesn’t mean that the perspective is from a real person.  We only see Andross’s perspective for a split second-- it could very well be a fake perspective.

But he could also be actually there, and this is the evidence for it:

He doesn’t interfere with the Test at all and seems to be passively watching as a bystander.  The laughter in the background if Fox fails could arguably be his.  I’d have to check the laugh audio versus Scales’s VA, however, because it could be Scales laughing.  He could also not be wanting to interfere because he wants Fox to win the Krazoa Spirit.

Andross could be showing up because he wants to see Fox be afraid-- this is actually quite in character for him, even as a ghost form.  I’m not... entirely sure how he would have gotten to the shrine but you could wave it off as “Andross is a ghost, he can do what he wants”.  Alternative but same basic idea -- he’s watching Fox because he wants to keep track of his progress.

His presence isn’t necessary to the test being completed.  After General Scales roars in Fox’s face, the test kind of... just ends.  He doesn’t pop out, he doesn’t try to scare Fox.  He evidently just disappears and isn’t shown again until the game’s ending.  I actually think this might’ve been an oversight on the developer’s part.  The one-and-done flash over to Andross’s perspective with no payoff feels like something was supposed to be there but was unfortunately cut.  

In all honesty, I’m on the fence as to what I believe.  Part of me actually wants to think that Andross was an illusion at that point because I find that so much more interesting that him just happening to swing by at that particular moment.  But I’m not entirely convinced that’s the case.  

Anyways, post your thoughts if you have any on this... frankly infuriating challenge in SFAdv.  I don’t know about you guys but as a kid, this test absolutely frustrated me and I quit the game several times because I couldn’t beat it.  Nowadays, I still freak out but it usually only takes me a few tries. :P  

[21stcenturyteapot]

Rape Culture Roulette – Every Woman’s Daily Game

Presented by Charles Webster on the 12th of September, 2019 at:

Jeppe high School for Boys, Kensington, Johannesburg

St Davids Marist Inanda, Johannesburg

DISCLAIMER: this speech is an accurate reflection of most of what I said. Because I speak partly from notes and partly from the heart – the speech changed slightly and readers who were there may notice some differences.

WHO AM I?

I am you. I wore the blazer for five years (or one like it), and I know what is said in boys’ schools. I am not here to tell you you’re all rapists. But I am here to tell you that we can all contribute to rape culture.

I’m also husband to a wife, and a father to two daughters, and I care enough about their safety and their happiness to have stayed up until 2am to figure out what to say to you guys, to wake up at 4am to drive to the airport for an hour, to take a flight from Durban to Johannesburg to be here today.

This is not a game - but I’d like to start off by talking about a game. RUSSIAN ROULETTE Have you ever heard of Russian Roulette? (Show of hands)

Okay - so, most of you. As you know it’s a simple game. You take a revolver with six chambers, put a cartridge into one of them. You spin the cylinder and snap it shut. Then you hold the gun to your head and pull the trigger. If you’re lucky, you get one of the five empty chambers. If you’re not so lucky…BOOM.

What if I said to you that every morning, in order to go out into the world and live your normal life, you have to play Russian Roulette? 

I have owned a gun, and anyone who’s ever done any serious shooting knows that the first rule of handling a firearm is that you treat every gun as if it’s loaded – even if it isn’t.

So, if you’re wise and your self-preservation instinct is intact, you’d rightly tell me that #gunsaredangerous. You’d tell me I’m crazy, that my expectation is totally unfair, and that there’s no way you’re going to play Russian Roulette just in order to have the privilege of going out into the world and living your life.

But what if I responded to your hashtag and said, but #notallguns are dangerous… would that make you feel better about the demand? Would it change the fact that even though you’re probably not going to get the chamber with the live round in it, there’s still a scarily high chance that you will? Does it change the fact that you have to treat every gun as if its loaded, even though you know in your head that #notallguns are?

RAPE CULTURE ROULETTE

Now, let’s imagine a new game. I call it: “Rape Culture Roulette”, and here’s the thing - women have to play it.

Every. Single. Day.

If they want to exist in the world, if they want to walk out of their front doors in the morning and go out to school, to work or to relax, they have no choice.

How does it work? So if you’re a woman, you wake up in the morning and in the gun that you are forced to hold up to your head, there are not six chambers, but (let’s say) a hundred. These hundred chambers are the hundred men that a woman might encounter during the course of a typical day.

Her husband or boyfriend, father, brothers, the newspaper seller on the corner, the guy selling coffee at the convenience store, two or three guys in the cars around her at every intersection on the way to work, twenty or thirty male colleagues, another fifteen or twenty at the restaurant where she’s having lunch… you get the picture. Some of the chambers have cartridges in them, and some of them are empty. The empty chambers represent the guys who behave appropriately towards her. Let’s be generous and say it’s the majority – sixty or seventy of them, who fall into this category.

The chambers with cartridges in them represent all the guys who, sadly, do not. Let’s start off big. There’s one chamber with a rapist in it. Then four or five chambers of guys who might catcall her as she walks past. Then there’s a chamber with a woman beater, and then half a dozen who rub up against women as they pass them in the elevator or the passage. Ooh, here’s a bad one – this next chamber has a murderer, but the next twenty aren‘t as bad – they contain a couple of guys who tell tasteless rape jokes, and another eighteen who just laugh at them, or say nothing. Then maybe half a dozen who refer to their mates as “pussies” when they do something that isn’t supposed to be done by a “real man”, and a few guys who mansplain to women, don’t listen to them, and talk over them in meetings. Again – you get the picture. As an article by Eusebius McKaiser in the Mail and Guardian said just a few days ago: “A woman is not safe at home. She is not safe at the tavern. She is not safe at the post office. She is not safe at work. She is not safe at the club. She is not safe walking from the tavern to her home. She is not safe walking to the post office. She is not safe from the guns of her boyfriend that were supposedly bought to keep them both safe from strangers. She is not safe when she encounters a stranger. She may be even less safe when she is with someone she knows intimately. She is not safe when she is with an official working for the state. She is not safe when she is drinking with men she has known all her life. She is a continued target of predatory men who have no regard for her intrinsic dignity and rights to bodily and psychological integrity. Which is why each South African woman has asked this week: “Am I next?”[1] Every day, women wake up, and as they go about their days, they pull the trigger – not once, but every time they meet a man. I need to stress again, here, that this isn’t a choice. Women, to live their lives, have to go out into a world where they take a risk with every man they meet – and I’m not talking about strangers. IT ISN’T STRANGERS Yep, I’m even talking about husbands, father, sons.

But let’s start with a few statistics: “According to the Rape Crisis Centre (in Cape Town)… it is estimated that 40% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime and only 8.6% of rape perpetrators are convicted.”[2]

That’s nearly half of South African women. Are you surprised that women wake up in the morning and wonder whether they will be next? I ask you to put yourselves in that position and think about how your life might feel and be different if that were your reality.

But back to my point – it’s not strangers they mostly have to be worried about. In fact, the opposite is true.  To quote the Rape Crisis Centre again, “Unfortunately, most people believe rape only occurs in dark alleyways. But Rape Crisis Centre’s new campaign indicates the truth is closer to home. The campaign aims at highlighting that approximately 68% of rape survivors know their rapist. They have had their trust broken in the workplace, home and [in their] communities.”[3]

So there definitely won’t be a rapist in every woman’s day, every day, but over the course of their lives, South African women have to wake up to the daily knowledge that they have a chance of being one of those four out of every ten women who will be raped. My daughters have asked me more than once if I think they have a chance of making it through life without becoming victims.

WOMEN CAN DO VERY LITTLE ABOUT IT

If you’re thinking women can solve the problem by being wise about where they and learning to defend themselves:

My first response is  - are we really no better than this, guys? Men aren’t mindless animals, and shouldn’t be expecting women to take responsibility for the fact that men refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. We are better than this, guys. Are we really unable to control ourselves at the merest sight of a bit of leg, or an exposed tummy?

I don't care if a woman is walking down the streak stark naked, she's still not asking for rape or unwanted contact. There's a difference between women choosing to dress the way they want to, and men not taking responsibility for their sexual impulses.

My second response is that it really doesn’t seem to matter what women do. As this powerful exhibition demonstrates, they don’t have to dress sexily to get raped.

IMAGE: JENNIFER SPRAGUE They don’t have to go specific places, or drink alcohol or do specific things to get raped. Because statistically it’s mostly men they know and probably trust who rape them. In any case, almost half the time, victims are children. A Timeslive headline in 2018 proclaimed: “Children victims in 42% of all rape cases recorded.”[4] Old women get raped. Nuns get raped - even babies get raped. Are we going to blame their clothes and their drinking habits, too?

In the meantime, every single day, women are quite likely to encounter some guy licking his lips at them in the traffic, or some guy following them in his car as they walk home from the shop (which has happened to my wife more than once). Some middle aged guy propositioning them for sex outside the toilets in the shopping mall (which happened to my one daughter – to get rid of the guy she had to resort to asking him loudly and publicly if he wanted to see her dick, and pretend to start unbuttoning her trousers – because men like that rely on women being worried about “causing a scene”). Then there’s the guy at a live music venue who got a little a little bit too touchy-feely with my other daughter at a show. He only left her alone after I spoke to him – twice. In fact, the number of times I go out with my wife or my daughters where some creep doesn’t look at them inappropriately, touch them without consent or make suggestive remarks is frighteningly small.

A PRISONER’S PERSPECTIVE Maybe you think having someone making remarks isn’t so bad – maybe you’re thinking, as a guy, that you’d quite enjoy it if women did that to you, and that it’s actually quite a compliment.

So let’s introduce some perspective into the conversation. I want you to imagine that you are in prison. You’re a brand new inmate… you’re not a murderer but maybe you committed some kind of white collar crime like cheating on your taxes or defrauding a business partner.

I want you to understand that you are now in a world where you are being looked at as someone’s potential bitch. Someone’s pieces of ass. And that someone is twice your size and ten times as tough. They want power over you, and to relieve their sexual urges – and you are powerless to stop them.

I asked women on my Facebook timeline to send me comments they’d like to share with 100 young men if they had the chance – and here’s one of them. She talks about: “The system that he would have no say in… the people who had power over him who were often corrupt and not 'fair' in their dealings, being at the mercy of the very real threat of both physical and sexual violence all day, every day, the fact that nowhere and no-one is actually 'safe', and the feeling of being powerless to do anything about it....and the people in your life who are present (family and friends who can visit you there) but have no real understanding of what it's like and can leave whenever they want to, or not think about it whenever they want to, because it doesn't directly affect and impact them.” Here’s another: “The sexist jokes, the locker room talk - these are not harmless talk. Imagine a scenario where you're in prison, from pretty much any movie or TV show you can think of. Imagine you're now the target of those kinds of jokes and locker room talk from someone physically stronger than you, and/or in a position of more power than you.” The bottom line is – how would you feel if the gorilla in cellblock D was looking at you and licking his lips while commenting about the shape of your butt, or grabbing his crotch at you? Here’s the key message:

You shouldn’t be saying or doing anything to women that you’d be uncomfortable with someone big and scary, in prison, saying or doing to you.

CONSENT IS A THING

We really need to talk about consent. I hope you understand, in the light of my prison scenario, why consent is important. (Watch this Youtube Clip for more) If you want to talk about rape culture you have to start with consent. I find it noteworthy that consent is very important when other people do things to us, but is somehow less important when we are the people doing things to others. Because let’s face it, guys, the kind of pussy you’re referring to when you go “kss, kss!” as a girl walks past is not a cat, and I don’t think you’d enjoy the guy from cellblock D crowing like a rooster when you walk by because he is keen on your cock.

I want you to think about the guy in cellblock D, and ask yourself whether “not saying no” is the same as saying yes. If you’re alone with him in your jail cell and he’s about to do things to you that you don’t like – would you be quiet because you’re actually keen – or would it be because you’re hoping he won’t murder you as well as rape you? Unless somebody is active and enthusiastic about their consent – it’s not consent.

A comment I got from a female friend on this topic was: “A guy I knew once groped a friend of mine in a bar, and couldn't (at all) understand why she wouldn't welcome him touching her boobs, obviously this is a pleasurable thing. He’s a guy, she’s a girl – what’s the issue? I asked how he would like it if a big guy walked up and grabbed his crotch, just out of nowhere? He got the point.”

ABOUT RAPE CULTURE So you ask what real harm a rape joke can do? Or a catcall? As my prison story shows, when it comes from someone who has the power to act on it, it suddenly becomes very real, and very frightening.

Rape culture is not about saying every man who catcalls is a rapist. “Rape culture is a sociological concept for a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality.”[5] Think about casual sayings about “throwing like a girl” or “fighting like a girl.” On some sports fields now you’ll hear players talking about a “Rapist’s Touch” – which is used for a player “with a first touch of the ball that is so horrid that it goes immediately to the opposite team or out of play.”[6]   Maybe some of you are sneering at me under your breath. “What a pussy!”, you might be thinking - another great example of using women’s bodies as the standard by which to insult people. This is rape culture. Sexist attitudes to gender that make women property, or make them inferior, or degrade their bodies as tools with which we insult each other.

So sure – catcalling isn’t the same as rape. An unwanted remark about her appearance isn’t the same as rape. Talking over her at the party, or disregarding her opinion about where to go out to isn’t the same as rape.

But we’re contributing to a culture where…

In a million ways…

In a million places…

At a million times…

…women are told they are unworthy and inferior – in ways we’d never accept as men.

We are talking about disrespect.

Here’s the key to today’s message for you. The message that doesn’t only prove that you don’t have to be a rapist to contribute to rape culture, but should also spur you to act when you hear you mates talking about women, or acting towards them, in certain ways:

Not all disrespect of women ends in rape, but all rapes start with disrespect.

Women live in precisely the kind of world that prison would be to you. The kind of world where half the population is superior to you in terms of physical strength, and where that half of the population has grown up in a society that largely still thinks of women as possessions. A world where that half of the population is sexually attracted to you, and you could be the means of satisfying their urges.

You think I’m talking rubbish with regard to women being possessions? Tell me, then, why women are still “given away” by their fathers on their wedding days? Look it up, guys – the tradition comes from a time when women were used like sacrificed like pawns on a chessboard. They were traded for power to cement allegiances between kingdoms. I’ve told my daughters already – nobody must ever ask me if I’m giving them away on their wedding days. I don’t own them.

But let’s find a more everyday example. Why is it that millions of men around the world who approach women will only leave a woman, if she gets a friend to pretend to be her partner, or point out her wedding ring or her partner? What is it that makes so many of us think that women don’t have the right to say no because they’re simply not interested?!

WOMEN OWE US NOTHING

In four-in-ten world where women have to play Rape Culture Roulette on a daily basis, I’m telling you now, guys… women owe you precisely nothing.

They don’t owe you a conversation because you’ve done them the “honour” of being nice to them. They don’t owe you a smile. They don’t owe you a phone number. They don’t owe you sex because you’ve bought them a meal. And they shouldn’t have to tell you more than once that they’re not interested – nor should they have to explain why. And if you are lucky enough to have someone show an interest in you, they are not obliged to follow through with sex – they have a right to say “no”, or “stop” at any time. I don’t care if you’re lying on the bed next to her, and you’re both naked. For you to insist, and continue with sex beyond that point, is rape.

FEMINISM

Every man should be a feminist. I can imagine the eye rolling that’s going on. I can hear the comment about how feminists are man haters, how “Feminazis” are unreasonable and actually want to walk over men. And I’m sure there are such people – but let me tell you that the tiny minority of feminists who think that way are a convenient excuse for those who want to write off feminism as a whole.

For those of you who haven’t studied feminism, and I talk to a lot of feminists – the massive, overwhelming majority of feminists are simply people who want equality for women. Feminism simply means being a decent human being.

Now – I have a question for you. This is the Facebook post that led to me being here today:

MEN: ARE YOU PART OF THE PROBLEM?

If your pride is more important to you than women fearing for their lives because of how common rape and murder are, you’re part of the problem.

If being offended by generalisations and responding with #notallmen is more important to you than addressing the reasons those generalisations are necessary in the first place, you’re part of the problem.

If you’re fragile you expect women to be ‘nice’ about how they deal with the bullying, rape and murder men inflict on their sisters, then you're part of the problem.

If you’re not spending time thinking about how you are privileged because you don’t have to half of the world’s population as a threat to your life until they prove otherwise, you’re part of the problem.

If you say or do things to women you wouldn’t want a large man to say or do to you in prison, you’re part of the problem.

If you’re not calling out other men when they treat women as objects for their personal gratification, you’re part of the problem.

If you’re not making the effort to understand consent, and that women are equal to men in moral value and legal rights, you’re part of the problem.

If you call women “sluts” for the same things that get men labelled as “studs”, you’re part of the problem.

If your response to a woman being groped, cat-called or receiving other unwanted sexual attention is that “boys will be boys”, you’re part of the problem.

If you ask what a woman was wearing or why she was drinking or was in a particular place when she was harassed or raped, you’re part of the problem.

If your expectation is for *women* to educate you, or for *women* to do the speaking out (when they’ve been trying to do so and getting beaten and killed for their efforts since time immemorial), you’re part of the problem.

DOING NOTHING IS DOING SOMETHING There’s a quote that was used by John F. Kennedy once – though nobody actually knows who said it originally. It goes like this: “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing.” In a world where our society is so damaged that four in ten South African women will be raped in their lifetimes, the default setting is horrific. Doing nothing in the face of that is the same as doing something – because silence is assent. What can you do? 

You don’t have to be an activist and stand up here like me. You can make sure that you’re not the one catcalling or laughing at rape jokes. You can make sure you call out your mates who do. If you’re worried about getting beaten up, walk away from the conversation to make your disapproval plain – end friendships if you have to.

It’s a funny thing – in a country where forty percent of women get raped, every women knows someone who’s been raped, and every man who cares enough to ask or be involved, knows a woman who’s been raped. I know several. Yet, somehow, we men know very few rapists.

We seem to have raised generations of men who are emotional children.

It’s time for men to:

Grow up. 

Stand up. 

Speak up.

Rape culture is everywhere: understand what it means before you whine about “#notallmen” or “not being a rapist”. Sexism is ingrained into (even western) society. Fight for equality – be a feminist. Not because “every woman is someone’s wife, daughter or sister” - women are not defined by the way they relate to men.

Do something because women are also humans - and deserve the right to the same basic freedoms and safety you have (in most cases) never had to give a second thought. And if you did - it was most probably because another *man* was threatening it. Do something because in world of Rape Culture Roulette, where four out of every ten South African women will be raped in their lifetimes, and where forty percent of those who are raped are under-age children, and only a tiny minority of rapists get convicted, doing nothing is doing something.

Because a world in which women can live free of fear is a better world for you as well, if you care enough to recognise the fact.

[1] https://mg.co.za/article/2019-09-06-00-the-chain-between-words-and-violence?fbclid=IwAR0PUCeQ1B1nHBHnz6FdRS9fZAMgBQ2uUq6oM0YwL0XnJMUqgBcwb0jC9mg#.XXO7WvA3vwQ.facebook

[2] https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/rape-is-often-perpetrated-by-a-familiar-face-19917092

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-05-16-children-victims-in-42-of-all-rape-cases-recorded/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture

[6] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rapist%20Touch

[freedom-of-fanfic]

you seem to have some level of interest in voltron and the current fandom, while also having a seemingly good understanding of fandom history more broadly, so a question from someone with limited fandom exposure and only from tumblr, where it feels impossible to understand the grand scheme: what is the voltron fandom like, compared to other/past fandoms? are we large? more minor-dominated? is anti culture abnormally prominent? is there more or less meta? any thoughts on where we fit appreciated.

These questions are very interesting to me. Answers are from my personal experience only/reading I’ve done, though, and mostly anecdotal.

disclaimer/caveat that tumblr - web 2.0 in general - really changed how fandom looks in general to a degree that’s hard to explain. It raised its visibility to the rest of the world. it raised fandom’s internal visibility by giving lurkers the ability to run blogs without speaking up (just resharing the works of others) and by eliminating personal control over how far blog content spreads. I think it made fandom bigger than it used to be. and I think it was in just the right time and just the right place to sweep a lot of young people up into fandom just as internet access was becoming faster, more widespread, and more unsupervised/common for even young participants.

is voltron fandom large?

it’s hard to gauge the size of fandoms, particularly when there’s no central community with members to count or some such. It’s certainly active. klance is consistently among the most frequently used ship tags on tumblr and sheith frequently places as well (the two most popular ships in the fandom). In only 18 months, VLD fandom has produced 33,000 fics on AO3 alone - never mind other fanfic sites like wattpad and ff.net. Not counting multi-canon brands (Marvelverse, DCU, etc), VLD places 16th on a list of all fandoms by number of fanworks (on AO3). that’s … way active. ridiculously active.

compared with other fandoms, I’d say that its volume of activity to (likely) number of participants is high. For a cartoon that doesn’t air on network television, it also seems decently large (but this is merely speculation). However, it’s quite dwarfed by the megafandoms generated by live action movies (Star Wars, MCU, etc), which are usually spurred on by constant canon additions like cartoons and comics and books.

but for fun, and in a not remotely scientific way, let’s take a stab at the size of VLD tumblr fandom with some numbers-producing tumblr-based vld fan content.

the vld discourse survey, advertised on tumblr, has almost 1900 responses now. 554 of the responses are from people who count themselves as antis (about 30% of the fandom.) almost exactly double that number (~1100 people) signed the anti-run petition demanding character ages from March 2017, which was also advertised on tumblr.

let’s extrapolate, then, that if antis are representative of the response rate of all of vld tumblr fandom (I would guess pro shippers were less likely to respond, if there was a difference: in my experience antis are eager to get counted and shippers are not), half of the vld tumblr fandom took the discourse survey. that makes ~3,800 people who are actively participating in vld fandom via tumblr. (other active vld fan gathering sites are on 4chan, twitter, amino apps, and discord channels, with overlap between sites.)

is voltron fandom more minor-dominated? 

questions like these always get me wondering so I ran some actual numbers on this:

assuming this survey is accurate to fandom demographics - which it isn’t, because self-selecting surveys never are*, but it may have a rough correspondence - about 42% of the vld fandom is composed of people 17 and younger, whereas about 58% are 18 or older.

about half the fandom - 49.6% - are of an age to potentially be in US high school (14-18 years old), and about 40% of fandom is potentially the ‘normal’ ages for undergrad college (18-22 years old). 25% are of post-grad age or older (22+).

I’d guess this fandom has a high number of young members compared to fandoms for live action movies or comic books. But compared to other cartoons, I would speculate that VLD fandom has a higher percentage of older fans due to the show being a reboot of an older series, designed to appeal to anime fans (skews older than american animation fans), draws on the (LoK)Avatar audience due to being the same studio & part of the same creative team (older teens/young adult audience), and not airing on network television (smaller young audience). 

*if anyone is underrepresented it’s probably older fans, who are more wary of fandom survey results being misused and have less presence on tumblr compared to younger fans.

is anti culture abnormally prominent? 

yes. yes it is.

once again consulting the vld discourse survey (it has a pretty large response pool, okay?), 1 out of 3 vld fans consider themselves anti-shippers. (again: as a self-selecting survey these numbers may not be accurate, and I would guess antis are overrepresented, but still.)

I speculate this is because anti-shipping principles were peculiarly suited to ‘support’ klance and attack competing ship sheith. as 4/5ths of antis say klance is their primary ship, and sheith was the original target of anti-shipping (the rest came afterwards in response to claims of hypocrisy), this seems to be a likely motive for young klance fans who felt uncomfortable with sheith or jealous of perceived sheith support to slip headfirst into anti-shipping as a whole.*

(and vld anti-shipping is made up mostly of the youngest fandom members. the majority of 13-17 year old fandom participants are anti-shippers; the majority of 18+ fandom participants are pro-shipping. 64% of all anti-shippers are 13-17 years old and 32% are college-aged. the average age of neutrals falls between anti- and pro- shippers; pro-shippers are about 40% college-aged, 30% high schoolers, and 30% 23+.)

I also think the prominence of anti-shipping in vld fandom spurred the growth and popularity of anti culture in other young fandoms. it’s now somewhat normal for fandoms to have an anti-fandom ready to fight them from inception.

to be clear: vld fandom didn’t start anti-shipping, just made it more well-known as a phenomenon due to how widespread it is. and anti-shipping - which is mostly American, like English-speaking vld fandom - has its roots in more widespread cultural issues like the authoritarian movement in America/the West, Christian Dominionism, poor education,radical feminist ideology, mra/gg/4chan/alt-right argument techniques, and the extreme partisanship that web 2.0 promotes and exacerbates.

*anti-shippers will say this is reducing the important stuff they protest to a ship war. but no matter what antis believe they stand for now, it’s hard to deny that a lot of pro-klance antis got their start because of liking klance and hating sheith - you know. ship war material! - and looking for a way to justify their feelings. (you’re allowed to hate sheith and like klance without being an anti, by the way.)

does voltron fandom have more or less meta (comparatively)?

vld fandom is surprisingly alive with meta. this fandom loves to take canon apart down to its bones, making theories about future events, ship manifestos, character analyses, and more - and fandom spreads it around, too. meta can get hundreds - thousands - of notes. it’s quite beautiful.

this may be the silver lining of the prominence of anti-shipping. anti-shipping - shame culture, really - makes fandom hesitant to take creative risks because the chance of being harassed and shamed for doing something wrong feels high. people write less fic with risky premises, draw less fanart that isn’t fluff/neutral-toned, etc, because everything you do you also have to defend.

but man, it really makes the meta scene amazing. being forced to constantly prove that xyz has a canon basis, or isn’t problematic, or that a character did or didn’t do something, or explain why you like or don’t like x - or, if you haven’t had to actually argue, having to constantly think about it - has really whetted vld’s fandom’s appetite for meta - dissecting canon to find and share hints of weird story theories or future romantic interaction. 

and because meta directly references the text for its content, I think it’s the most accepted kind of fanwork in vld fandom. after all, you got it from canon. if you’re going to debate on anything, it’s as likely to be the canon itself as the meta.

hope you enjoyed this vld fandom snapshot. :)

[finsterhund]

tired and weak

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to bounce back.

I don’t know if I’m stable or functional right now.

I am no longer spending days weeping, getting the violent psychotic meltdowns or other overtly physical symptoms but I don’t think I’m okay.

But I can’t keep myself shut up not doing any of the things I like to do online because isolating myself is not helping me. I only did it because my psychotic episode was causing me to hurt my friends. I did this for them, but it’s not helping me beyond cutting off things that my psychosis could latch onto. It is more than capable of doing it on its own.

I am coming to terms with how my situation is not healthy, it is not sustainable, and it is not safe.

I feel that I am not safe and I do not have anyone I can trust. That my environment is unhealthy and is continuing to retraumatize me and that I am not receiving adequate care.

I am unable at this time to tell how much of this is delusion and how much is that people in my life are actually a danger to me. Psychosis is like that. But things have been getting clearer on many relationships and issues.

My roommate told me that he is going to be writing a letter to the landlord to try and convince them that I need to get my service dog and if that works I wouldn’t need to take it to court. But I can’t tell if that’s just an empty promise. I feel like I am being told what I want to hear in an effort to keep me under control. That I am being satiated just enough so I don’t get violent or kill myself. But that my environment is never going to improve in its current state.

There’s been a lot of empty promises. And with my psychosis makes the already difficult issues impossible to navigate.

I am very disabled. I know I type really well and talk a big game, all bark and no bite though basically. Truth is I am unable to take care of myself. And with covid and me being high risk I don’t know if I am capable to put myself into a new situation/environment where I can thrive at this time. I am at the mercy of whoever I can find as a guardian. This is not healthy, and is something that I cannot yet find an escape from. All that it seems I can do is hold on and wait until an opportunity presents itself, to submit to the freeze and fawn response until I’m able to make my move. A move I will need support that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around to make.

Obviously “cringing and waiting” isn’t something that severe mental illnesses are going to be play nice with. And this is why I am unstable.

I must stress that I am not an independent. I am not functional in society as an independent. And even with my service dog this may stay the same financially. I am stunted, slow, whatever gentle word you want to call mental retardation. And that on top of debilitating mental disorders and trauma disorders prevents me from functioning on my own.

I cannot have a job. I cannot leave the house by my own. I have a learning disability surrounding numbers, time, math, etc. I am slow enough that it is extremely difficult for me to go about daily adult tasks that most people take for granted. My physical body being shit just ads to that and makes me slow in an equally useless and infuriating way.

It is very easy to take advantage of me. And the combination of me being a dependent when combined with that is dangerous for my health.

I will be making a doctor appointment for the explicit purpose of getting a note to try and pressure the landlord. I know that once me and my service dog are a working team more opportunities to become more independent and to get myself out of this situation will be presenting themselves. But nothing can happen immediately, yet at the same time I am suffering from things not being resolved immediately.

I am living in a way that is constantly exposing me to stress and pain. And I have acknowledged I need to get out of it but don’t yet have the means to know how.

I do have friends who may be capable of helping, but the virus has put a roadblock on that help for now.

Things like moving, programs for people with disabilities, hospital visits, etc. have all been made impossible by the virus.

I have ruled out moving back in with my mother. Even though she has improved and I definitely see her as a victim of abuse and living with undiagnosed mental illnesses of her own it just is not safe for me to live with her.

The only thing I can do now is make the effort to try and protect myself from the things that are hurting me emotionally that I am currently incapable of getting away from.

And trying to push towards my dog.

Everything else is waiting for things to be capable of changing.

I have pinpointed what I believe triggered this week’s psychotic break. Residual trauma from the first Christmas spent knowing the holiday killed Zippy, combined with frequent exposure to traumatic stimuli and unhealthy power dynamics, financial and social stress, as well as an increased lack of support regarding being invalid.

I am not in a healthy situation.

I began to sniff out bad people with the intent to keep track of them to make sure they weren’t planning to hurt me. This is the same maladaptive strategy I have been using to make sure my birth father wasn’t planning to kill everyone at my mom’s house way back when. In reality, exposing myself to the evil culture of bad people is not helping me psychologically. And I am powerless to actually kill them like I wish I could. But I felt like I had some level of control knowing their every move after I have no control in the situations I am spending my daily life in. It’s like drinking a poison so you can ignore a gunshot wound. I wish I could treat the wound, but drinking the poison makes me forget about it for a while. Both are unhealthy, but the act of creating a new problem makes it easier to ignore the initial one that I have no ability to change. At the cost of my rapidly fraying mental stability.

My environment is not one that I can control. And it is not one that I can currently fix or leave.

For my safety I am not capable of going into detail about certain people and their effect on my health. Being a dependent means that this directly can threaten me at an already vulnerable time.

I need to get out of my current situation, but am incapable of doing so. This has caused an extreme amount of stress to build up to the point that my antipsychotics weren’t enough to keep me safe. I was told that even being on anti psychotics you can still experience episodes and down periods. Which is scary to think about.

But I have no avenue to change this situation at this time.

I do not know if I am fit to hold communications with people right now. I will not be returning to social groups until I am told explicitly that it is okay to do so. By my primary care physician, by my psychiatrist, and by the people I socialize with themselves. But I will now state that anyone may come to me with the explicit understanding that I don’t know if I am rational or mentally safe right now. You will be communicating with me at your own risk and understand that I may still be experiencing heightened amounts of unreality and delusions.

I am no longer experiencing violent symptoms. I have made the steps to prevent myself from doomscrolling and keeping tabs on my abusers. But I understand that I am not above the possibility of lapsing back into doing this.

I am now on my pain meds again. Being off them for an extended period of time was likely contributing to my psychological pain despite these meds themselves not being addictive, the relief they give me might have been.

I am currently only with 3 dolars in my bank account and 5 dollars cash. I will be getting paid in 12 days. I should have enough food to last me this long. It is stressful, but I was already anticipating this situation to happen at this time.

I am extremely sorry for allowing my delusions and sickness to hurt innocent people. It was not my intent to cause pain to others. Whilst I would like to explicitly remind people that my mental illness directly influences how I perceive reality and this can make it impossible to tell if I am justified in my actions at times, it still doesn’t make up for the pain it may cause in the process.

Friends have expressed pain at me saying that I am not recieving help and nobody is helping me despite them trying to support me online.

Please understand that I appreciate the energy you are sending my way, but I am explicitly venting about my living situation that you nor I have any way of fixing. In the future to help my friends not feel like I am ignoring their attempts at helping me I have created this disclaimer that I will be putting on posts about situations that online friends cannot help or change. I hope this will alleviate the pain of your efforts not solving my problems.

I appreciate everything people try to do for me, even if my mental illness makes me not see it at the time. I understand it is very difficult to be close to someone who doesn’t perceive reality properly all the time, and I may not always show it when I am being helped due to one issue being immediately replaced by another, but I do appreciate.

I have been told that despite me being clingy that I tend to push people away and isolate myself when I am hurting. This is because I was abused and treated badly for expressing clinginess. This included targeted stalking when I was still a minor. My brain had it beaten into me that if I was clingy towards people they would hate me and not want to be my friend. As a result I experience clinginess by violently wishing I could be close to them while trying to hide that from them and give them space. If anything this presents itself as persecutory jealousy. It is something I am trying to stop doing.

I also apologize for friends trying to do things with me, encourage me, socialize with me, and me being too exhausted to appreciate or join in. This is equal parts my distress at my living situation, my mental health, and my physical health. I spend most of my life far too exhausted to consistently socialize except for manic periods where I am desperate to do so. Again, the solution to this issue is post-covid changes to my living situation and the resources I have access to.

The point that I think sums this up though is that I cannot keep living like this. I will continue breaking down, I will continue having episodes, and I will continue lashing out. Violence is and always has been my answer to fear in situations I cannot change or leave.

I don’t know if there’s a way to fix this during covid, but I KNOW there isn’t an immediate way to fix this before I get my service dog.

Additionally: I do not want to be institutionalized, being trapped in a psych ward when you are not explicitly a danger to yourself or someone else will only make you worse, and calling police for “wellness checks” on disabled people who have ugly/scary mental illnesses will get them killed. Please understand that the system itself will not help me. I need to find a different solution. This unfortunately does involve jumping through hoops that I cannot at this time.

Again, I would like to state that I will be trying to return online, but I will not be engaging with people who haven’t explicitly come TO ME until my doctor, my psychiatrist, and those people themselves, let me know that I am allowed to do so. Please be advised that I may not currently be in a safe place mentally.

I will be trying to interact with art and media that I enjoy with minimal social contact with people outside of those who have come to me and are okay with that. Stressful things i will make every attempt to ignore.

[michaelandy101-blog]

The Ultimate Guide to Email Design and 13 Best Practices

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-email-design-and-13-best-practices/

The Ultimate Guide to Email Design and 13 Best Practices

By 2022, the number of email users around the world is expected to hit 4.3 billion.

Among all of those users are members of your target audience, a.k.a. quality leads and prospects you can work to reach and convert via email.

To ensure your emails stand out and grab the attention of these audience members, your email design needs to be on point.

In this guide, we’ll talk about what email design is, cover 13 best practices, examples of successful email design, and offer some tools you may be interested in experimenting with. Let’s get started.

Email Design

Email recipients often scan information and abandon emails that don’t offer them value or simply appear to be too dense. That’s why having great email design is so important — it’ll help you capture the attention of, and engage, your email recipients. 

What is email design?

Email design is the process of strategically designing and creating an email that resonates with your business’s target audience, specifically your current email subscribers and customers.

Your email design should be attention-grabbing, aesthetically-pleasing, and on-brand, among other things — let’s dive into those things next with these 13 best practices for email deign.

Email Design Best Practices

Craft a strong subject line.

Write an attention-grabbing pre-header.

Be concise.

Keep your email on-brand.

Think about your layout.

Personalize every email.

Incorporate unique visual content.

Don’t be afraid to use emojis.

Use a responsive design.

Optimize your email with calls-to-action.

Add an “unsubscribe” button.

A/B test your design.

Design an email signature.

1. Craft a strong subject line.

Your email subject line is the first thing anyone sees when you send them an email. It’s the brief statement that’s supposed to pique the interest of your recipients. It should capture their attention so they want to open your email and continue reading.

Here’s what a subject line looks like in your email inbox:

Here’s what a subject line looks like in your mobile device’s email inbox:

A great subject line will have these characteristics:

Grab the attention of your readers in as few words as possible (remember: less is more).

Provide value for the recipient that makes them want to open the email.

Summarize what recipients are going to read and/ or see once they open the email.

2. Write an attention-grabbing pre-header.

Your email pre-header is a preview of what the email is about, similar to the meta description of a web page. It’s the second thing recipients see.

Rather than rewriting the first sentence of your email, you can customize the pre-header to provide an inside look into what your recipients are about to read in your message.

Here’s what a pre-header looks like in your email inbox:

Here’s what a pre-header looks like in your mobile device’s email inbox:

3. Be concise.

How many times throughout the day do you find yourself opening an email thinking, I can’t wait to sit down and take the next 5-10 minutes to really dive into this email from Business X!

If you’re anything like me, your answer is likely rarely or never.

Give email recipients the information they want and need from you without getting into the weeds. This will show them you value their time which has the potential to help you improve email subscriber retainment.

4. Keep your email on-brand.

When your email recipients open your message, they should know the email was sent from your company. Meaning your email should be branded.

To keep your email on-brand, consider using the following tactics:

Use a tone in your emails that complements your other content and marketing materials (like your website and social media).

Incorporate the same colors and fonts that you use in your other branding and marketing materials.

Include your logo, a link to your website, links to your social media accounts, and calls-to-action (CTAs) that are relevant to your products or services. This is a great way to increase brand awareness while also boost conversions.

5. Use the layout to enhance your email’s user experience.

Nobody wants to read a cluttered and unorganized email — this makes recipients feel overwhelmed and can lead to increased abandonment.

Instead, organize your layout with user experience (UX) in mind — meaning, leave empty/ white space and strategically place your written and visual content so it’s organized and easy to consume and navigate.

6. Personalize every email.

When you customize an email and tailor it to your recipient, it’ll feel more thoughtful, professional, and personal. Email personalization also helps you humanize your brand. This touch helps you foster a relationship between your business and email recipients and boost retention rates.

7. Incorporate unique visual content.

If recipients open an email and only see paragraphs of information, it’s likely going to be difficult to hold their attention and keep them interested in your message. Rather, incorporate on-brand and engaging images, videos, GIFs, animations, etc. to break up the written content and create a memorable experience.

And speaking of incorporating creative and unique visual content in your emails, let’s talk emojis.

8. Don’t be afraid to use emojis. 🧡

At first, emojis may seem like an unnecessary or unprofessional addition to an email. While this may be a fair assumption, it’s actually untrue in a number of scenarios.

In fact, when you add emojis to your email subject line and/ or email copy, you can increase your open and click-through rates. But remember: When using emojis for marketing purposes, make sure you know the meaning and connotation of the specific one(s) you incorporate. 😃

9. Use a responsive design.

A responsive design means your email changes format to fit the screen it’s being viewed on, whether it’s on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Recipients will be able to read your emails with ease no matter where or how they’re viewing them. By incorporating a responsive design, you’ll be able to enhance UX and improve email retention across all devices.

10. Optimize your email with CTAs.

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are used to convert your email recipients. For instance, you can use a CTA to get recipients to follow you on social media, visit your website, chat with a sales rep, or become paying customers.

CTAs should be visible, enticing, and clearly show why they’re valuable to click. Additionally, you might choose to personalize your CTAs to tailor them towards specific recipients — this tactic has been proven to increase conversions.

11. Add an “unsubscribe” button.

Email marketing is highly effective as long as you’re providing relevant content to your recipients. The unfortunate but true reality of email marketing is that your recipients and customers change over time — especially as your business grows and evolves. Therefore, your content may not always be relevant to certain audience members.

For this reason, allow your recipients to leave (or unsubscribe from your emails) on a good note so they can remember your business in a positive light — who knows, they may need your email content, products, or services again in the future. To do this, simplify their lives with an easy-to-use and visible “unsubscribe” button.

In addition to offering a better experience for users, you’re actually required by law to add that unsubscribe button.

According to the Federal Trade Commission and CAN-SPAM Act, you’re legally required to include a “clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt-out of getting emails from you in the future”. Meaning, that unsubscribe button isn’t an option.

(If you need some inspiration, check out these effective unsubscribe pages.)

12. A/B test your design.

Similar to most marketing efforts, email design is an iterative process. You might determine you need to make changes and updates to get the most out of your email design.

Whether it’s modifying your CTA, colors, images, layout, or tone, don’t be afraid to A/B test designs to determine which one works best in terms of ability to reach, resonate with, and convert the greatest number of recipients.

13. Design an email signature.

Great email signature design is another way you can establish a professional and personal feel over email. Email signatures shouldn’t just include your name — they should contain other defining and memorable characteristics about you, your role, contact information, and company.

Here are some specifics you can include in your email signature:

First and last name

Contact information (and secondary contact information)

Job Title / Role

Company Name

Link to your meeting calendar

Social media links (e.g. LinkedIn profile)

Pronouns

Photo

Industry disclaimer or legal requirements

And here’s a free email signature generator tool to help you design your signature.

A great way to streamline the process of working on and incorporate all 13 of the above best practices is to use email design tools and software.

In fact, many of the best practices we reviewed will come up naturally while you’re designing, writing, and planning your messages with email design software.

Email Design Tools

There are a number of email design tools with a wide range of capabilities (some completely unrelated to email design!) — here are some popular examples.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot’s Email Marketing software allows you to create, design, personalize, and optimize all of your emails. You don’t need any IT or coding knowledge, and you can easily customize mobile-friendly emails. The software allows you to A/B test emails to determine which designs work best.

2. BEEPro

As a BEEPro user, you can design responsive emails in just minutes. Smart design tools provide you with a quick way to format your emails and ensure your layout complements your content. You can also customize and save various email design templates so your messaging and branding is consistent.

3. MailChimp

With over 100 templates offered, MailChimp allows you to customize your email design for your target audience. If you’re someone who does have coding experience, and you want to take your design a step further, MailChimp offers you the ability to code your template as well.

4. Stripo

Stripo requires no HTML knowledge to create and design professional email templates. All of their pre-made templates are responsive so readers can easily view them via any device. You can also sync your current email service provider (ESP) with the software to access all of your email and contact information from a central location.

5. Chamaileon

As a collaborative email builder, Chamaileon gives you the ability to invite members of your team to collaborate on your designs. The software ensures your emails will have a responsive design and automatically comes with over 100 pre-made templates to customize for specific recipients.

Email Design Examples

Let’s take a look at some successful email designs to inspire your work.

HubSpot Marketing Blog

HubSpot sends subscribers Marketing Blog emails every day. These include a few blog marketing-related articles to read and learn from. If recipients choose, they may also subscribe to HubSpot’s Sales Blog and Service Blog emails.

The emails are branded so readers immediately know who the email is from and what it will include. To make the daily emails engaging and unique, they include previews of the articles and an occasional quiz.

Starbucks Rewards

Starbucks customers and members may have seen this email, or something similar, in their inbox before:

The email complements Starbucks’ marketing and branding, and there’s plenty of white space separating the written information from the engaging imagery. And the CTA that recipients can click on to activate the offer is clearly placed.

Vital Proteins Email Design

Although Vital Proteins’ email design contains many images and a lot of information, it’s neatly organized so it doesn’t feel overwhelming to recipients. The email’s colors, font, and visuals are on-brand and feature the company’s products.

There’s an obvious CTA that redirects recipients to their Instagram page — in turn, this type of CTA helps the company increase their follower count and brand awareness on the social platform.

Get inspired with 15 free and downloadable email templates designed for marketing and sales with previously written copy to save you time.

Grow Better With Really Good Email Design

With great email design, you’ll reach and resonate with your audience members more effectively, allowing you to grow better. Eye-catching and impactful emails will help you build long-lasting relationships and convert more people into paying customers and brand advocates. So, begin designing your emails while keeping the best practices and examples we reviewed in mind.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August, 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Source link

[tainghekhongdaycomvn]

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[ { "@type": "Person", "name": "President-elect Donald Trump", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump", "http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "US", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Inauguration Day", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233" ] } ]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

Appendix

Spotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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!

http://ift.tt/2q13Myy xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm t���i: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update http://ift.tt/2DwHaMR Bạn có thể xem thêm địa chỉ mua tai nghe không dây tại đây http://ift.tt/2mb4VST

[byronheeutgm]

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[ { "@type": "Person", "name": "President-elect Donald Trump", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump", "http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "US", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Inauguration Day", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233" ] } ]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

AppendixSpotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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!

http://ift.tt/2mXRXp5

[fairchildlingpo1]

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[ { "@type": "Person", "name": "President-elect Donald Trump", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump", "http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "US", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Inauguration Day", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233" ] } ]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

AppendixSpotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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!

http://ift.tt/2mXRXp5

[christinesumpmg1]

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[ { "@type": "Person", "name": "President-elect Donald Trump", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump", "http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "US", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Inauguration Day", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233" ] } ]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

AppendixSpotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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!

http://ift.tt/2mXRXp5

[rodneyevesuarywk]

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[ { "@type": "Person", "name": "President-elect Donald Trump", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump", "http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "US", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Inauguration Day", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233" ] } ]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

AppendixSpotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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!

http://ift.tt/2mXRXp5

[dainiaolivahm]

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[ { "@type": "Person", "name": "President-elect Donald Trump", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump", "http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "US", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Inauguration Day", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233" ] } ]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

AppendixSpotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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!

http://ift.tt/2mXRXp5

[kraussoutene]

An Investigation Into Google’s Maccabees Update

Posted by Dom-Woodman

December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).

The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).

Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.

Hmm.

Time to check the obvious

I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.

My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.

Dodgy links & thin content

I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.

(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)

Index bloat

Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.

Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:

However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.

In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.

The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.

Appendix help link

Poor user experience/slow site

Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.

Appendix help link

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Nope, no ads at all.

Appendix help link

The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?

Internet theories

Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:

The Maccabees update is mobile-first related

Nope, nothing here; it’s a mobile-friendly responsive site. (Both of these first points are summarized here.)

E-commerce/affiliate related

I’ve seen this one batted around as well, but neither applied in this case, as the site was neither.

Sites targeting keyword permutations

I saw this one from Barry Schwartz; this is the one which comes closest to applying. The site didn’t have a vast number of combination landing pages (for example, one for every single combination of dress size and color), but it does have a lot of user-generated content.

Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.

Working through Search Console data

We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.

There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.

And this finally got me something useful.

The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):

Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.

In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.

Are you sure it’s a Google update?

You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.

Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.

How am I trying to fix this?

The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.

And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.

No-indexing the user generated content

This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.

I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.

Making better use of the Schema.org "About" property

I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.

Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.

For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.

[ { "@type": "Person", "name": "President-elect Donald Trump", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump", "http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "US", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30" ] }, { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Inauguration Day", "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration", "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233" ] } ]

The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.

You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.

Combining informational and transactional intents

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.

This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.

Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.

Final thoughts

I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.

My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.

Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.

Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?

AppendixSpotting thin content & dodgy links

For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.

For dodgy links:

Take a look at something like Searchmetrics/SEMRush and see if they’ve had any previous penguin drops.

Take a look into tools Majestic and Ahrefs. You can often get this free, Majestic will give you all the links for your domain for example if you verify.

For spotting thin content:

Run a crawl

Take a look at anything with a short word count; let’s arbitrarily say less than 400 words.

Look for heavy repetition in titles or meta descriptions.

Use the tree view (that you can find on Screaming Frog, for example) and drill down into where it has found everything. This will quickly let you see if there are pages where you don’t expect there to be any.

See if the number of URLs found is notably different to the indexed URL report.

Soon you will be able to take a look at Google’s new index coverage report. (AJ Kohn has a nice writeup here).

Browse around with an SEO chrome plugin that will show indexation. (SEO Meta in 1 Click is helpful, I wrote Traffic Light SEO for this, doesn’t really matter what you use though.)

Index bloat

The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.

If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.

Poor user experience/slow site

This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.

If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.

For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.

I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.

Overbearing ads or monetization?

Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.

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!

http://ift.tt/2mXRXp5