#and as you can see i had my own strong biased takeaways from the story

[fruitsofhell]

Goofy ah Forgotten Land essay incoming:

It took me till like a week ago to realize that KATFL writes Elfilis and Forgo as being the same characters and I don't know how to feel about that. I feel Forgo is more interesting as it's own being the way Elfilin is from 'Lis, because I like the idea of them both being these smaller figments of the past self reduced to childish forms representing absolutes of the original. But at the same time, what made me realize that this isn't the game's intention is when I was going to say something about how hollow Elfilis is as a character in comparison to Forgo.

So really, you either make Forgo and Elfilis effectively one character and Elfilin another, negating Forgo of its own identity as a pathetic pitiable beast so that Elfilis continues to have a presence - or you make all three of them seperate characters, and Elfilis loses what they gain as a character from Forgo's motivations.

Elfilis has not a single defined motive for why it attacked the people of the Forgotten Land very much unlike other Kirby villains who can atleast say something like, "power/gain (Magolor), vanity/power (Sectonia), greed (Haltmann), or vengeance (Hyness)". Elfilis and Forgo are often described as invasive species, but what that entails isn't obvious because all we know about 'Lis' evil intentions is from Forgo. But Forgo has its own motivations that exist outside of Elfilis' original wishes - that being its captivity in Lab Discovera, which is very strong on its own.

It adds a very engaging sense of darkness to the legacy of the Forgotten Land, and makes you pity and understand its raw animosity as much as you wish to defend the world from it. The fact that Elfilis was a violent invader rather than just some other alien adds little to its motive, but does add thematic garnish to the idea of how alien life has approached the Forgotten Land. But at the same time, Forgo's captivity is such a strong motivator it really could have stood on its own and still been effective as an alien antithesis to Kirby... Though I admit not as much as what Elfilis is.

Probably to most people that have been reading straight from the games intentions, the former sounds more appealing than the latter. But, probably due to my own stubbornness and bias I really really do love them being 3 seperate entities even at the expense of depth for Elfilis. Because one of my favorite reoccurring themes in this series is vain idealization of the past fucking villains over.

I like this in Taranza's devotion to a Sectonia that no longer exists, Susie to a father that has long since been lost in his own mad schemes to find her, and Hyness obsessing over a very flawed understanding of his cult's past. And I USED TO LIKE the idea that Magolor's obsession with the crown was him, as a *Halcandran* glorifying Halcandra's past relics, but CANT HAVE THAT ANYMORE.

If the Kirby writers don't got me anymore, I guess I'll got myself. I like the idea of Forgo being as seperate from Elfilis as 'Lin is, but while Elfilin is all of their originals innocence, purity, and hope, Forgo is its raw anger and vengefulness. Visually taking Elfilis's soft/mammalian and alien/insectoid motifs respectively, but both distinctly being immature and incomplete states. Elfilis was not just that anger nor just that hope (wherever it came from), and is only the culmination of those two sides, it's a symbol of a self the two can never be on their own - one that Forgo idealizes and one Elfilin avoids.

For the sake of the ending where Elfilin reclaims the last bit of Forgo/Elfilis that is willing to go on, I prefer the mutuality of Forgo and Elfilin moving on together, rather than Elfilin just accepting Elfilis if that makes ANY sense. I just like the way Forgo and Elfilin parallel eachother more than he does with 'Lis? I like the narrative of healing that acknowledges that Forgo and Elfilin are both lost and grieving children, rather than Elfilin abandoned Elfilis who then became Forgo. Like the latter feels oddly possessive and unbalanced.

And as I said in line with past series themes, I kinda like the idea that whatever the fuck Elfilis had going on is irrelevant, just as seeing the faces of the people of the Forgotten Land is irrelevant - all that is relevant is what was left behind. I like the idea that Elfilis cannot really speak for itself anymore as a character the way the people of the Forgotten Land can only speak through their ruins and audio recordings. And as those people left behind a legacy of reclaimed wonder and terrible cruelty, in response, Elfilis left behind one of innocent hope and unbridled anger. I'd prefer to try and piece together what those two opposing visions say of their predecessor than just assume one speaks for them in its entirely I s'pose...

[jechristine]

Thoughts on what happened with Will and Chris last night😅?

So many thoughts! On Twitter I see a lot of people staking out their positions as if there’s one overarching takeaway when really this was a perfect storm of intersectionality. I think that multiple people who think they are arguing are actually correct at the same time.

I can certainly empathize in general with struggling to accept your body as is, and I admire Jada a lot for having to be/choosing to be so public with her own challenges. I will say that Jada’s done great advocating and sharing around alopecia on her own, and I know Willow has publically supported her by shaving her own head, too. The way Jada rolled her eyes and frowned at Chris in the first moment was a masterclass in communicating a clear, strong message that she could have built upon later (and hopefully still will). I’m not a Black women, but it’s not hard at all for me to understand and appreciate sensitivities around Black hair in this culture, too. I 100% understand why Chris’s joke was so offensive and hurtful. Adding to that, it seems like Chris has been pushing the envolope in maybe a mean-spirited way with the Smiths for some time. He does not come out of this looking sympathetic imo.

I think that comedians are sometimes so far up their own asses in their veneration of their often terrible jokes, in the name of supposedly “speaking truth to power” or “free speech” or whatever. The image of Louie CK jerking off at women who didn’t want any part of it has always struck as the perfect image and metaphor for how some of these comedians think of their societal role. Cancel culture sometimes gets a bad rap, but I’m a big supporter of it in general. Chris should for sure have to answer for his speech, as should everyone.

To me, it seems like Will made a rash, emotionally-driven (but not “out of control,” exactly) decision based on issues we can’t know. I think @wetheoriginals was probably correct that stress leading up to the big Oscars moment probably had something to do with it, and of course we’re all human. I feel sad for him, too, that he distracted from what was the zenith of his career so far [edited to add: and that he distracted from the Williams sisters’ celebration of their important story].

Now I’m going to talk about ideas only, and not about Will and his family because I truly don’t know about what’s going on there.

In America we have a national tradition of seeing Black men as violent and scary. Unfortunately and unjustly, any sort of altercation or even slippage from social decorum is going to bring barely submerged racist stereotypes to the surface, and then people with big platforms and egos and unexamined racist biases like Judd Apatow are going to simply use those tropes to explain the world he is seeing. I think these racist wheels would have been set in motion even without the slap, actually, if Will had just shouted “keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth” without even leaving his seat.

And at the same time—

It’s one thing to want to support & defend the people you love. There’s lots of ways to do that and the best ones rely on words imo. That loving, caring impulse, however, can bleed over into, or can be used to justify, something that I think is categorically different and insidious—a sexist idea that somehow a woman’s “honor” belongs to her male partner, too, and his self-worth depends on protecting it in demonstrative, public ways, often in ways that perform a specific version of aggressive, toxic masculinity. Sadly the greatest perceived threat to that “honor” is often the woman herself. Just as stereotypes about Black men’s uber aggressiveness and propensity to violence hurt and sometimes kill Black men, the ideas that undergird male “chivalry” lead to a lot of suffering and the literal death of women of all races. You can draw a direct line in both cases. I really don’t think I’m overstating. (I’m not speculating about the Smiths on this point at all. I’m saying that noxious ideas fester everywhere in our culture and sometimes they don’t cause any explicit harm but often they do.)

[thecoleopterawithana]

Hey there, anon.

First, let me start by saying that I truly appreciate exchanging ideas and debating topics; I believe that’s one of the best ways to reach a deeper understanding, having a lot of different perspectives brought into it. But I’ll only do it if we keep it respectful. And if there’s interest in discussing this issue (and I’m assuming there is because you did send me this ask) we’ll need to first examine our own emotional reactions to it and see if we’re ready to be clear-minded about it. It is only possible to discuss ideas if we’re open to different ones in the first place.

Second, I want to make clear that I won’t try to convince you of anything nor, frankly, is that the point. All that I can do is present the information that we have and then offer my personal reading of it. What your takeaway is, concerns only you. But it is also wise to examine our own motives approaching this exchange; mine is to reach a deeper understanding of these people. If it was only a battle of wills, or each trying to “win” the argument by conquering the other with their strong pre-conceived notions, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be half as enlightening. I’ll proceed in the good faith that we’re all here seeking a greater awareness of other human beings’ inner lives.

And lastly, if we do want to get a look at those inner worlds and emotional landscapes, we have to actually look inside. This means we can’t take every word at face value and realise that every intervenient is dealing with their own complicated feelings, motives and biases; that means the initial subject, the surrounding associates, and finally, even ourselves. The best we can do is develop the critical sense and emotional intelligence necessary to be aware of all these different factors.

So, all preparations done with and guidelines established, let’s actually address your points.

I’ll start providing an excerpt of the Yoko Ono interview you’re referring to:

I ask if she has ever had sex with a woman, or been attracted to them.

“Well, that’s another thing. John and I had a big talk about it, saying, basically, all of us must be bisexual. And we were sort of in a situation of thinking that we’re not [bisexual] because of society. So we are hiding the other side of ourselves, which is less acceptable. But I don’t have a strong sexual desire towards another woman.”

Have you ever? “Not really, not sexually.”

One online satire imagined an affair between Ono and Hillary Clinton.

“It’s great,” Ono laughs. “I mean, both John and I thought it was good that people think we were bisexual, or homosexual.” She laughs again.

What about that old rumor that Lennon had sex with Beatles manager Brian Epstein (which was also the subject of the 1991 film, The Hours and The Times)?

Lennon himself said: “Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.” Later, Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton said Lennon had told him that he had allowed Epstein to “toss [wank] him off.”

“Uh, well, the story I was told was a very explicit story, and from that I think they didn’t have it [sex],” Ono tells me. “But they went to Spain, and when they came back, tons of reporters were asking, ‘Did you do it, did you do it?’ So he said, ‘I did it.’ Isn’t that amazing? But of course he would say that. I’m sure Brian Epstein made a move, yeah.”

And Lennon said no to Epstein?

“He just didn’t want to do it, I think.”

Did Lennon have sex with other men?

“I think he had a desire to, but I think he was too inhibited,” says Ono.

“No, not inhibited. He said, ‘I don’t mind if there’s an incredibly attractive guy.’ It’s very difficult: They would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too. And you can’t find people like that.”

So did Lennon ever have sex with men?

“No, I don’t think so,” says Ono. “The beginning of the year he was killed, he said to me, ‘I could have done it, but I can’t because I just never found somebody that was that attractive.’ Both John and I were into attractiveness—you know—beauty.”

I ask what she makes of the people outside the building, the crowds still at Strawberry Fields.

Ono misunderstands, or mishears (or is simply focused on the last strand of our conversation), and continues to talk about sex.

“I don’t make anything out of it. When you’re not really interested in that sort of sex, you don’t think about it. Both John and I surprisingly were very passive people. Unless somebody made a thing out of it, if they made a move, I wouldn’t even think about it.”

— in Yoko Ono: I Still Fear John’s Killer by Tim Teeman for the Daily Beast (13 October 2015).

You may not believe Yoko. But it is also important to understand if it’s because of her unreliableness as a witness (Yoko is excellent at PR and marketing, and John Lennon is the brand she’s built her life upon) or because of what she’s saying (John Lennon being interested in men). If it’s the first, that’s a reasonable worry, but like I said, you just have to possess the critical sense to be aware that that’s a motivation that is there and examine what she says with that in mind. If it’s the second, there’s a lot more testimony available from people other than Yoko that may help illuminate the matter. One of my favourite sources is John himself. But more on that in a minute.

But let’s go with the first one, for a second. That Yoko is someone with personal feelings, biases and motivations, one of them being that her livelihood depends on the maintenance of her continued association with the John Lennon brand and the fairytale JohnandYoko narrative she’s been promoting since 1968. Why then would she be one of the main voices claiming John’s bisexuality? And she gives us the answer in this interview: “both John and I thought it was good that people think we were bisexual, or homosexual.”

Consider that their image was that of the avant-garde, anti-establishment, bohemian couple. Like Yoko said, it not only generated press but was also very in-brand for people to think they were bisexual. John himself put it on similar terms when he asks himself, on November 1974, “It is trendy to be bisexual and you’re usually ‘keeping up with the Jones’, haven’t you ever… there was talk about you and PAUL…”.

As singer Chuckie Starr told Christopher Andersen [author of Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger]: “[1973] was the glitter era, and everybody wanted to be part of the bisexual revolution.” It’s relevant then to remember that the rock world was full of stars coming out as bisexual during this period: Elton John, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, etc. All four ended up somewhat retracting their statements: Elton John officially came out as gay in 1992, and the other three simply renounced their bisexuality in the 1980s, in the wake of an increasingly conservative culture and public panic over the AIDS crisis.

Now, this is an entirely too complex a matter for me to get into in this post: trying to figure out what was the “truth”, to separate one’s genuine interests from the context of the times. Did the “bisexual chic” being a fad during the 1970s and good publicity for those involved make the experimentations undertaken any less true? Were they faking it for the press or liberated enough to try? Are the take-backs fruit of them having decided that just wasn’t it for them or are they a reflection of what was socially acceptable at each moment? Is it like John and Yoko decided that “all of us must be bisexual. And we were sort of in a situation of thinking that we’re not because of society” or was that just the free-love idealism of the times?

I feel like Yoko’s statements come from that perspective that it’s all about experimentation. Bringing up the famous Norman quote, “From chance remarks [John] had made, [Yoko] gathered there had even been a moment when—on the principle that bohemians should try everything—he had contemplated an affair with Paul, but had been deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality.”

I don’t know if the bohemian ideology was offered by John as a justification, but I suspect these were Yoko’s own rationalizations coming into play, perhaps in an attempt to create an emotional distance in John’s interest in Paul, claiming it was all about the experience and the physicality.

(It also remains frustratingly unclear if the “[John] had been deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality” was part of Norman’s readings, Yoko’s gatherings or of John’s chance remarks.)

Another informative bit is this: “I think [John] had a desire to [have sex with other men], but I think he was too inhibited. No, not inhibited. He said, ‘I don’t mind if there’s an incredibly attractive guy.’ It’s very difficult: They would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too. And you can’t find people like that.”

First, I’d like to point out that while in this interview Yoko says that John never found anyone both physically attractive and emotionally advanced enough to consider having sex with, she did tell Norman that he’d considered having an affair with Paul. So John did find someone like that.

Secondly, I find it extremely revealing of John’s view of sex that he doesn’t consider it enough to be physically attractive, but he’s also seeking mental compatibility and stimulation. This tells me that John wasn’t interested in it merely as bohemian experimentation or just the physical release of a one-off thing. He was actually searching for the qualities necessary to maintain a longer relationship.

I personally think that for John, ideal sex was personal, and an epitomization of intimacy and closeness. (He always was a romantic.)

In interview with Sandra Shevey (June 1972):

JOHN: It’s a plus, it’s not a minus. The plus is that your best friend, also, can hold you without… I mean, I’m not a homosexual, or we could have had a homosexual relationship and maybe that would have satisfied it, with working with other male artists. [faltering] An artist – it’s more – it’s much better to be working with another artist of the same energy, and that’s why there’s always been Beatles or Marx Brothers or men, together. Because it’s alright for them to work together or whatever it is. It’s the same except that we sleep together, you know? I mean, not counting love and all the things on the side, just as a working relationship with her, it has all the benefits of working with another male artist and all the joint inspiration, and then we can hold hands too, right?

SHEVEY: But Yoko is a very independent person. Isn’t it— [inaudible]

JOHN: Sure, and so were the men I worked with. The only difference is she’s female.

SHEVEY: But you didn’t find it difficult to make that transition?

JOHN: Oh yeah. I mean, it took me four years. I’m still not – I’m still only coming through it, you know.

See how for John sex is just an extension of all the other ways to show physical affection, that he had craved while “working with other male artists”? “The plus is that your best friend, also, can hold you without…”; “it has all the benefits of working with another male artist and all the joint inspiration, and then we can hold hands too, right?”

And I don’t know of many outright negations of John being homosexual or having interest in men, but this one, “I’m not a homosexual, or we could have had a homosexual relationship and maybe that would have satisfied it, with working with other male artists” sounds more like an admission to me. Of course he had to throw that “disclaimer” in there after saying “The plus is that your best friend, also, can hold you without…” Without what, prosecution? Because you’re both men? John had to save face; he would have been practically both coming out and declaring his longing for his recently divorced male best friend.

“We could have had a homosexual relationship and maybe that would have satisfied it…” Satisfied what? Satisfied whom? Paul was satisfied. The declaredly unsatisfied one was John.

As for your point that John couldn’t be open to the subject because he was a homophobe, there is the likelihood of internalized homophobia.

Defined by Meyer and Dean in 1998 as “the gay person’s direction of negative social attitudes toward the self, leading to a devaluation of the self and resultant internal conflicts and poor self-regard” and by Locke in that same year as “the self-hatred that occurs as a result of being a socially stigmatized person”, internalized homophobia can make a queer person both hateful of themselves and other LGBQ people.

John himself realised and admitted that his violent conduct when accused of being gay as a young man, was born out of his insecurities about his own sexuality: “And obviously, I must have been un– uh, f– frightened of the fag in me to get so angry at that. You know, when you’re twenty-one, you want to be a man, and all that.”; “I must have had a fear that maybe I was homosexual to attack [Bob Wooler] like that and it’s very complicated reasoning.”

And it soon became apparent that his instances of homophobia, like the rest of his outwards aggressive demeanour, were only posturing.

If you’d like to read more about the topic of John dealing with his sexuality, I’ve recently answered two more asks about it: on the Bob Wooler incident and on the Tony Manero story. For more examples and anecdotes you can always consult the tag.

There are really too numerous examples of John expressing his openness and sympathy with the LGBQ struggle, sometimes including himself in that pain. Some examples are more subtle than others, but it’s there if we ourselves are open to that possibility.

Now, let’s focus on your last point: the people in his life that defended his heterosexuality. We’ll have to afford them the same depth and critical eye, in examining their statements that we’ve been giving Yoko and John.

For Cynthia, I apologize, but I couldn’t find any statement on John being straight, but if one is provided I’d be happy to comment.

As for John’s half-sister, Julia Baird, I do have a quote:

“Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, was a known homosexual. Epstein was always polite and charming. It has been insinuated that John was drawn to Epstein. I believe there was no such relationship between them. John was macho. But if John was a homosexual, it would have made no difference to me. I’ve asked Paul McCartney, who laughed and said: ‘Why not me? I’m handsome.’ Then he said: ‘I was holed up with John in hotel rooms everywhere. There was never a suggestion of anything like that.’ I believe him.”

— Julia Baird, in Boston Globe: Lennon’s half-sister remembers… (2 October 1988).

Again, we have to put ourselves in her perspective. This is a person who contacted with John for some years as a young girl and he obviously made an impression on her; the teddy boy, her cool big brother. It is understandable that she would not want her memory of him threatened. People often cling quite strongly to the idealised image they have of someone.

But her statement that John was macho (and therefore couldn’t be attracted to men), shows how far her understanding goes both of homosexuality and John himself.

So if her image of John reflects only his surface-level projections of a macho tough guy, is fixed on the teenager she knew as a child, and doesn’t go deep enough to realise how soft and insecure he really was, then what can we expect from her assessments on his sexuality (especially considering her view that homosexuality seems to threaten the masculinity of a man?)

And finally, we have Paul.

Paul’s relationship with the subject of John’s sexuality almost deserves a post of its own. [And I had in fact written quite a lot about it in this post before it suddenly closed without saving.] But the multitudes of emotional dynamics and levels of perception going on in there are so numerous that I think a new post really is better suited. I hope to get to it soon. 

But let me just say here that there are a myriad of reasons why Paul would state that to his knowledge John was never gay, and none of them invalidates John actually being attracted to men. If he was or wasn’t is completely up to him, and from his own statements about it and his behaviour that was certainly something that he seemed to be exploring about himself.

Or at least, this is my reading of it. I only can guarantee you that I’ve certainly made the effort to examine all the possible motivations present, including my own. But what you take from here anon is, similarly to John’s sexuality, up to you entirely. 

-

[Note: I’ve answered this ask despite feeling a certain defensiveness from the sender, that I feel translated in a kind of hostility in the language. Maybe this wasn’t the original intention but it was what it felt like to me. Hence the introductory disclaimer that it only makes sense to send an ask if one wants to discuss ideas and hear my opinion on a subject. If there is no openness to have this discussion in the first place, I’ll reserve the right not to respond either. Thank you, and please keep the exchanges ongoing but respectful.]

[neetu-uplifts]

Stop editing your story

Seeing Michelle Obama speak live last night was special. I haven’t had a fan-girl moment this big in a while. Everyone was mesmerized by her story, her realness and her grace. Here are some powerful takeaways from Michelle on “Becoming” that really resonated with me:

1) How men show-up in a young girl’s life sets the bar for the way she’ll interact with men in the future, including what she will and will not accept. I couldn’t agree with that more. My incredible Dad and my brothers, and all my loving guy cousins, showed me through their actions how a man should love, respect and support a woman. That’s why settling is not an option for me. I appreciated how Michelle’s brother loved and protected her but not in a “princess-y you need to be cared for” way but rather in a deeply respectful and empowering way. Her Dad gave her space to grow and never dimmed her feisty-ness. As she said “my parents saw me use my voice and they allowed that fire inside me to stay lit”.

2) Sisterhood is sacred. Michelle spoke about her posse of girlfriends who play a critical role in her life - even one that Barack doesn’t play. According to Michelle: “I LOVE my husband, he’s my best friend but you know when I’m really going through something I need my girlfriends”. I feel blessed to have inspiring, loving and strong women in my life. They are my sisters from other misters. When I’m with them, I can just be all shades of Neetu, I can open up deep to them and know that I’m safe. They are the mirrors who help me see when my eyes are fogged up. Their wins are my wins. Their pain is my pain. Life gets busy but we can’t lose that connection. Make time for the women (or men if you’re a guy) in your life. 

3) When asked why she went as deep as she did in her book, sharing details about infertility and a time when she resented Barack and the marital counselling that her and Barack received, Michelle said it was important for her to talk about the struggles and failures she has experienced in her life. She feels passionately about us discussing failures openly. It’s the best way to show that failure is real, it’s gonna happen to everyone but just because it happens doesn’t mean you give up or that you’ve lost in life. This is particularly important to demonstrate to children. If they don’t ever see failure and understand resilience they have no hope when they fall on their face, which they definitely will. She was talking about growth mindset. I’m inspired to talk more openly about my own personal failures. As Michelle said, “stop editing your story”. Let’s stop only posting filtered pictures when we’re having a good hair day and eyebrows and outfits are on point. Share the raw, unvarnished truth of your story. Embrace imperfection. By doing so, we create a safe space for others to do the same.

4) Writing Becoming is how Michelle owned her story. She allowed us all to see the woman outside of just FLOTUS. Her story touched so many different people, irrespective of age, race, nationality or socioeconomic status. That’s the power of storytelling. It connects people on a deeper level. Michelle encourages us all to authentically tell our story so people can see you for who you are, understand you better and see themselves in you and your story. The risk of not doing so means we’ll always be defined by other people and their biases and expectations. Life is too short to live small. 

How America went from The Obamas to current state is incomprehensible. Sometimes though we have to hit rock bottom before things get really good. Michelle Obama is an exceptional example that hope, goodness and humanity still exists and that we can be the change we want to see in the world. 

[alixofagnia]

Get to know your fellow Reylos meme

This will be fun! Thanks for the tag @emperorren.

Answer these 10 Star Wars related questions, reblog and tag your favorite Reylo blogs to join in!

1) Who is your favorite Star Wars character of the new trilogy (excluding Rey and Kylo)?

Wow, that is so unfair because Rey and Kylo are truly my favorites from the ST so far.

Since TLJ came out, I would say Holdo. I love how she was introduced: you didn’t quite know what her deal was (or if that was all just in Poe’s head), but you gradually understood that there was way more to her than met the eye. Some people think she was a wasted character –because apparently showing up for the first time and then dying in the same movie amounts to a wasted, pointless character (Qui-Gon, hello, is that you? Rogue One squadron, are you there?). But I saw TLJ four times in the theater and every single time people literally gasped into the silence of Holdo’s death.

So, yeah, fuck off.

2) What is/are your favorite quote(s) from a Star Wars movie?

The OT movies were my “stay-home-sick” movies when I was a kid – I played the shit out of those VHS tapes, let me tell you. So, there are a lot of quotes from the OT that are just kind of pure nostalgia for me. I’m not a huge fan of the PT and since dialogue is one issue I take with them, I hardly ever quote them except to mock “she’s lost the will to live” because I find that line so problematic, and I just hate it.

It hasn’t been until the ST that certain lines of dialogue have actually resonated with me, probably because I’m seeing them as an adult. There are a lot of terrific quotes from TLJ, but I gotta let them stew a bit longer. So the two I picked are from TFA:

Maz Kanata: The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead. I am no Jedi, but I know the Force. It moves through and surrounds every living thing. Close your eyes. Feel it… The light… it’s always been there. It will guide you.

My liking this quote probably has a lot to do with Lupita N’yongo’s lovely voice and line delivery, because I remember tearing up in the theater when she started talking about the Force, and I swear to you I was not high. I just think it’s so beautifully spiritual, and when you put it into context with Rey’s journey and Kylo’s journey, or any SW character’s journey, really, it carries this deeply profound message of hope and faith.

The entire bridge scene dialogue, but mostly the moment when Han touches his son’s face:

I know it’s not a quote, but so much is contained in that single gesture.

It wasn’t shock at Han’s skewering that made my breath catch and bring a tear to my eye. It was the utterly heartbreaking grace of his final action. It’s such an unexpectedly visceral reaction and, actually, far more profound than I previously believed Han Solo capable of since he was largely a one-note character over the course of his SW career. This moment has taken on much more depth and meaning since TLJ’s release, in terms of Ben Solo’s arc, and I think it will continue to do so after Episode IX.

3) Do you think Kylo/Ben will survive Episode IX?

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Well, mostly just one.

YES.

As is obvious, Kylo Ren is one of my favorite new characters. That has nothing to do with Adam Driver, whom I had never watched before, and nothing to do with what I knew about the character, which was zero. [Srsly, I was in such an ‘I heart SW’ bubble for TFA that I did not even think about, let alone suspect, his heritage until literally the moment he was talking to Vader’s helmet.]. 

No, it has everything to do, instead, with the complex villain story-line and Byronic heroes. I love complex villainy. I adore Byronic heroes, with their tortured souls and black clothing. OF COURSE I was going to fall for Kylo/Ben. Just a bit.

But he’s also the son of Han Solo and Leia Organa and I love them, too. So, out of loyalty and like the good SW fan I am, I care about their son and what happens to him, and there’s just no hope to be found in Kylo’s death. There’s no good message in it. Even say that he’s “redeemed” or finds salvation or suffers through atonement, fine, whatever. Death is too simple. Vader was not a complex villain. Maybe in his youth he was supposed to be, but after his fall? No. He made his choice, and he chose the wrath and the Dark every day for 20 years until his son came along to rile up the long-buried conflict in his heart. No one conflicted Ben Solo more than Ben Solo himself. He’s his own worst enemy, as we all can be at some point in our lives. 

It’s repeated all the time, so I’ll say it again: 

Star Wars is a saga predicated on hope. 

The message with a dead Ben Solo at Episode IX’s end is simply that of ‘well, you can find a way back from hell, but only if you die’, and that’s really bleak. Yet, it worked for Vader because, in the OT, he was largely an unsympathetic, “more machine than man” character.

Consider: How was Darth Vader going to find salvation and atonement for 20 years’ worth of galactic terrorism and oppression?

Answer: He wasn’t. His crimes were so great and extensive that 10 minutes of “goodness” couldn’t even begin to ease them. Narratively-speaking, his story was complete and it was time for him to meet his end. Character-wise, fueled as he was on hate and anger, and sustained by machinery for so many years, you have to also wonder if Vader wanted to die, ever since the moment he was told that he’d killed his wife and, by extension, his child[ren].

This greatly contrasts with Kylo Ren.

Consider: How is Kylo Ren going to find salvation and atonement for 6 years’ worth of galactic….wait, what?

Answer: The FO as a military and political threat is fairly new. It was not a fully realized organization during the events of Bloodline, though it was (if I remember correctly) in progress in the far regions of space. Ben, aged 23, was still with Luke at this time; he’s 29 by the start of TFA. So, in the span of 6 years, Kylo Ren canonically

destroyed a temple, killing a handful of classmates

started training under a Dark side master

became the leader of a mystery group

killed an old man from his past for withholding information during war time

ordered the mass killing of a small village during war time

interrogated some prisoners during war time

committed patricide during war time

fired on his mom’s ship during war time

killed his abusive master

led a full-scale yet futile attack during war time

tried to kill a projection of his uncle during war time

all while exhibiting acute internal conflict. It’s important to consider the majority of these crimes strictly within their context of war, primarily because it’s in the damn franchise title, but also because it again contrasts with Anakin’s crimes, which were not always within the context/name of war. It’s such a different villain treatment from OT Vader that I think Kylo not only deserves, but demands an equally different resolution. 

Therefore, here’s a much more hopeful message on which to conclude the complex villainy of Kylo/Ben and, thus, the entire Skywalker saga:

You can find a way back from hell, if you live well.

4) What is your favorite scene featuring Rey and Kylo?

Ah, shit.

Well, the throne room battle was amazing and the closest to definitely-on-the-same-page as they’ve ever been to date. But I think I have to say the fourth Force bond scene. Hand making-out aside, this scene truly can be read as merely platonic, which I actually love because it’s another example of how this movie as a whole is so versatile and open for varying interpretations and discourse, for years to come! 

AT THE SAME TIME, I personally feel that the hand touch (from the skin-on-skin contact, which the camera lovingly and reverentially sexualizes, to the forbidden connotation of Cock-block Luke) sent these two really rolling on a romantic trajectory. This scene also won over many viewers, whose previous feelings about Reylo were lukewarm at best and are now overwhelmingly positive. And that’s because of one undeniable thing: 

This is the most emotionally vulnerable we’ve seen either Rey or Kylo.

It’s a major turning point in both their shared interactions and as individual characters. There’s a lot of amazing meta out there right now about Rey and Kylo, articulated far better than what I can produce. So, what I want to quickly add is that, for me, this scene reveals how utterly unselfish they can be with one another. Born from a place of intense, mutual knowing, they offered one another sincere support and reassurance from opposite sides of a political and ideological war. We later learn that this moment of reaching out yielded a shared vision, one where they saw themselves together. 

A key takeaway is that they not only acknowledge this vision as truth, but earnestly –almost desperately– welcome it.

For me, this scene alone transcends the depictions of other cinematic romantic pairings within Star Wars itself, the wider genre of sci-fi, and the scale of big-budget franchises. I know I’m biased, but it’s quite frankly unbelievable how much was established and advanced between Rey and Kylo in two and a half hours of screen time, which they had to share with two other interwoven plot lines. For comparison, we have a good 80-90% of AotC entirely devoted to Anidala, and the most I’ve ever felt for them is a tepid interest because George Lucas and the OT said I had to. Written on paper, the Force connection scenes honestly sound super corny, this one especially. That they’re actually some of the film’s strong points is a testament to the story-telling/directorial abilities of Rian Johnson as well as the chemistry and talent of Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver, of course.  And the great thing is Reylo isn’t even over! Think how much screen time will be devoted to them in IX and what they could do with that! 

This is bound to change upon repeat viewings and/or after IX comes out. But for now, yeah, this is my favorite Rey and Kylo scene.

5) What order did you initially see the saga films in?

I think I was 5 or 6 and I think it was Return of the Jedi first, then A New Hope and Empire (in that order) shortly after. The rest I’ve seen as they’ve been released.

6) If you had a lightsaber, what color would you want it to be?

Maybe like an ice white blue…I’m not much of a lightsaber gal.

7) What are your top 3 favorite Star Wars films?

I’m tentatively going to say Empire, Force Awakens, Last Jedi.

8) Which droid would you most like to own/ have as your sidekick on intergalactic adventures?

What’s that Empire/FO “mouse” droid called? Maybe that one.

9) Which Jedi master would you most like to train under: Luke, Yoda, Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan?

Pfffft. Please. Reylo, obviously.

10) What is your ideal ending for Reylo in Episode IX?

So, I really try not to look at a Reylo ending through rose-tinted glasses. Reylo is a pairing that at this point cannot be taken lightly: it’s dark, it’s deeply complicated, and it’s very imperfect. In other words, it’s an honest, unfeigned pairing and I identify with it so much more because of its mesmerizing humanity.

We inevitably hurt the ones we love; shit happens, people miscommunicate, feelings get hurt. Kylo and now Rey have exercised misguided, even manipulative, behavior toward each other and failed in basic ways to understand and accept one another’s differences despite having shared and attained a powerful moment of clarity in their way forward. People call this ship abusive; I’m not that sorry, but they’re wrong. At worst, it’s unhealthy.

Well, guess what. You can get healthy.

Since I can’t even begin to predict or shape an ending for Reylo, I would just say that I wish for them to be sound in body and sound(er) of mind, and preferably together in some way. I personally want to see that union be romantic, but I will also accept a platonic union. I love and respect these characters so much that, honestly, I just want them to finally find what they’ve been longing and suffering their entire lives for. Now that they’ve at least partially found –and briefly possessed– that, I hope they also find a way to hold on to it in whatever way they can.

So much for not looking at it through rose-tinted glasses.

Tagging:  @maleficentrox; @crez0le; @reylotea; @adambenkyloren; @paper-radio; @violet-is-maybe; @mooshygirl; @dr-porkchop1; @him-e

[septembersung]

Looking at the posts I’ve accumulated so far for #500 reasons and counting, I realized I need to frame the various subjects I’m tackling. I’d rather post more quotes than original posts, but the trouble with a complicated history like the Reformation (and the internet in general) is taking things out of context causes problems. To do this right, we need a clear conceptual framework in which to lay those quotes (and my inevitable commentary on them). So while in my first post I talked about where I’m coming from personally, in this post, call it intro 2.0, let’s lay out some history and approach parameters.

Let’s get the approach parameters out of the way first: 

A) I’m trained in theology, not history, and I’m blogging about this as someone learning, not an expert. B) please charitably correct me (with sources!) if I get something wrong, but C) we should go into this realizing there’s a lot of room for disagreement (as you’ll see if you finish reading this post). D) I always try to represent the source I’m summarizing/working from accurately. That means: D-1) if you disagree with something I say, let’s first go back to the source and make sure I’m conveying it as they said it, and D-2) A good debater should understand the opposing POV so well that they can word their opponent’s argument to the satisfaction of their opponent. If I misrepresent an argument, it is not intentional. Please bring it to my attention and we’ll work it out. 

That said, now we can talk about bias. If we’re going to talk about the Reformation, its causes and effects, how it influenced our civilization and still affects people today - even, yes, all those pesky theological “details” many would say no one cares about and don’t matter anymore! - then we need to ask some pointed questions: Just what do we mean by the Reformation? Whose version of the Reformation and its legacy is correct? What exactly is it, septembersung, that you’re taking issue with and arguing against?

Well, if you ask three historians “what happened,” you’ll get thirty answers...

To a large extent, Catholics, Protestants, and secular historians tell the story of medieval Christianity (i.e., Catholicism) and the Reformation differently. Extremely differently. (There is a lot of overlap in some areas between Protestant and secular approaches, however.) You might think that “facts are facts,” but history isn’t primarily facts; history the story we tell ourselves about facts as we know them. Sometimes an assumption, or a “fact” that’s actually false, or a matter of opinion, or disputed, gets enshrined as truth, embedded in how the subject is approached and handed down, and then everything from that is skewed. (This is an exceptionally important point we will come back to frequently.) 

Everyone has a bias; this is unavoidable. In this context, bias means “where you stand to see the rest of the world.” Everyone has to stand somewhere. What’s important is to be able to identify your bias and see how it affects the story as you’ve received it and as you tell it. And, equally importantly, to differentiate bias, a fact of being an individual human person, from prejudice, which in this context means unfair and probably incorrect negation of a point of view you don’t share. An illustration of the difference: A secular, that is, non-believing, historian writes a history of the Reformation. Their bias is that they are not Christian, neither Catholic or Protestant. Their prejudice is shown in privileging the Protestant side of the story. To pick just three examples of how that prejudice could play out: using slurs against Catholics, the Church, and Catholic beliefs; accepting Protestant claims about Catholicism and Christian history a priori, as factual premise, without investigation or explanation; taking it for granted, as an accepted truth that does not need proving, that the Reformation did the world a favor. Here’s the kicker: this is not an invented example, but a summary of a large swath of writings on the Reformation.

As you know, I’m Catholic; that’s my bias. You should ask yourself: what’s yours? Do you know how it affects what you’ve been taught and the way you perceive history and the world around you? What prejudice might you be participating in that you don’t even realize is a prejudice?

(Sidebar: In addition (and related to) to the bias issue: intense specialization and the ways history as a whole is conceived and taught has led to such an overabundance of “facts” and narratives, particularly about this stretch of history, that there is little cohesion, and simply so much that trying to get a handle on the big picture can be completely overwhelming. You can drown in data and never learn a thing. (I always picture a cartoon child opening a stuffed closet and being buried in toys.) There’s a super good, though technical, layout of this problem in the introduction to Brad S. Gregory’s book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. I’m going to talk about that book a lot.)

The takeaway so far should be: the story of history that we receive varies by which community we’re in and which community delivered the story to us. I am not arguing that no objective truth about the matter exists. Quite the opposite: the first step to finding the truth is recognizing that what has been uncritically accepted as fact is an interpretation based on unreliable ideas. What I would most like to show my readers through this project, especially my Protestant readers, is that the reality and significance of the Reformation has been greatly misunderstood across the majority of communities. It’s pretty unlikely you’ll read my posts and come away deciding to convert to Catholicism. What is possible, and I hope it will happen, that you’ll walk away with a different understanding of Catholicism itself and Protestantism’s role the last 500 years of Christian history.

(Important sidebar: “Protestants” and “Protestantism” can only ever be a generalization. Not only do the vast number of denominations disagree with each other about Christian doctrine, on points big and small, but they have different biases, different understandings of history, different views of Catholicism - you get the idea. Whenever we use the term “Protesant/ism”, we should be aware that is a generalization.)

With all that said: here is a simplified summary of the story of the Reformation as popularly understood. What does that mean? It means this summary doesn’t cover everything, but it does encompass the broad spectrum of “not-Catholic” opinion, including both Protestant and secular views, which vary from each other and among themselves. And, of course, scholars and academia tend to acknowledge more nuance and complexity in the events of history than non-specialists. I spell this out to avoid tiresome arguments that I’m setting up a straw man or objections like “but I don’t believe that/all of that/that in that way,” etc. So as I said: the broad gist of the Reformation story as popularly understood by much of the world today:

The Catholic Church was pure institutionalized corruption. The hierarchy and religious lived immoral lives and oppressed the lay people. The Church was unChristian in deep and significant ways that were harming people. When Luther (et al) realized this, and that what the Church taught as religious truth was just a means of perpetuating its control and corruption, they got up and pushed, and the whole rotten structure came tumbling down. Suddenly the common people had access to the Bible, Jesus, real catechesis, spiritual and political freedom, genuine community, and (to use the modern terms) freedom and agency. There was some resistance, but the populace more or less welcomed the Reformation and joined in enthusiastically. The Reformation was a movement who’s time had come. With the suppression of “priestcraft,” superstitious practices and beliefs, and man-made ritual, the accumulated debris of centuries of ”Romish inventions” was swept aside and Christianity was given a clean slate. With this demolition of the Church, thus (believers would say) true, original Christianity triumphed; all the excess (at best) and demonic distractions (at worst) that led people away/separated people from Jesus was gone. With the demolition of the Church, thus (some believers and the vast majority of secular analyses would say) the road to modern society was paved: separation of church and state, the triumph of the thinking mind/rationality/logic over and against the deadening religious/organized religion influence, the growth of the sciences, freedom, tolerance, pluralism, etc.; the goods and wonders of the modern world exist because the iron grip of the Church was broken. Shedding the past launched us into the future. We’re lucky it’s over and done with and not relevant to us, in our secular society, anymore.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: it’s almost entirely wrong. 

That’s a large chunk of what I’m taking issue with and arguing against.

I can’t guarantee this tag is going to be particularly organized or exhaustive - I decided to do this just a few days ago and, despite being a fast reader, can only cram in so much - but I’m going to examine these kinds of claims (in their originals, please note, not from my general gist summary) through my own writing and through sharing the content of scholars and writers more qualified than myself, to argue for a contrary thesis: Not only is that understanding of Catholicism and Christian history factually incorrect, but the Reformation was not an organic, welcomed event/process but rather a violent uprooting of a strong, loved religious tradition and past that cut Christians off from their heritage, fragmented and splintered society, blew the foundation out of Christendom (society as Christian society,) putting Western civilization on the road to society’s secularization, the marginalization and oppression of religion in the public life, and opened the door to the moral, rational, and political chaos we know today. I will absolutely address issues like “but wasn’t the Church corrupt?” but to a certain extent I don’t think that’s actually helpful until some of the fundamental falsehoods in what is generally assumed about the Reformation have been examined. In addition, as we follow the ramifications of the Reformation down the centuries, we’ll get to talk about politics, American exceptionalism, Dracula and turn-of-the-20th-century English culture (it’s amazingly relevant), and - my personal favorite - iconoclasm and incarnation.

I highly recommend reading Karl Keating’s short article “Not a reformation but a revolution.” (Quotes are coming.) He says it better than I do.

The queue starts tomorrow, Sunday October 1st!

[dillenwaeraa]

How to rank for head terms

Over the last few years, my mental model for what does and doesn’t rank has changed significantly, and this is especially true for head terms - competitive, high volume, “big money” keywords like “car insurance”, “laptops”, “flights”, and so on. This post is based on a bunch of real-world experience that confounded my old mental model, as well as some statistical research that I did for my presentation at SearchLove London in early October. I’ll explain my hypothesis in this post, but I’ll also explain how I think you should react to it as SEOs - in other words, how to rank for head terms.

My hypothesis in both cases is that head terms are no longer about ranking factors, and by ranking factors I mean static metrics you can source by crawling the web and weight to decide who ranks. Many before me have made the claim that user signals are increasingly influential for competitive keywords, but this is still an extension of the ranking factors model, whereby data goes in, and rankings come out. My research and experience are leading me increasingly towards a more dynamic and responsive model, in which Google systematically tests, reshuffles and refines rankings over short periods, even when site themselves do not change.

Before we go any further, this isn’t an “SEO is dead”, “links are dead”, or “ranking factors are dead” post - rather, I think those “traditional” measures are the table stakes that qualify you for a different game.

Evidence 1: Links are less relevant in the top 5 positions

Back in early 2017, I was looking into the relationship between links and rankings, and I ran a mini ranking factor study which I published over on Moz. It wasn’t the question I was asking at the time, but one of the interesting outcomes of that study was that I found a far weaker correlation between DA and rankings than Moz had done in mid-2015.

The main difference between our studies, besides the time that had elapsed, was that Moz used the top 50 ranking positions to establish correlations, whereas I used the top 10, figuring that I wasn’t too interested in any magical ways of getting a site to jump from position 45 to position 40 - the click-through rate drop-off is quite steep enough just on the first page.

Statistically speaking, I’d maybe expect a weaker correlation when using fewer positions, but I wondered if perhaps there was more to it than that - maybe Moz had found a stronger relationship because ranking factors in general mattered more for lower rankings, where Google has less user data. Obviously, this wasn’t a fair comparison, though, so I decided to re-run my own study and compare correlations in positions 1-5 with correlations in positions 6-10. (You can read more about my methodology in the aforementioned post documenting that previous study.) I found even stronger versions of my results from 2 years ago, but this time I was looking for something else:

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

The first thing to note here is that these are some extremely low correlation numbers - that’s to be expected when we’re dealing with only 5 points of data per keyword, and a system with so many other variables. In a regression analysis, the relationship between DA and rankings in positions 6-10 is still 98.5% statistically significant. However, for positions 1-5, it’s only around 41% statistically significant. In other words, links are fairly irrelevant for positions 1-5 in my data.

Now, this is only one ranking factor, and ~5,000 keywords, and ranking factor studies have their limitations.

Image: https://moz.com/blog/seo-ranking-factors-and-correlation

However, it’s still a compelling bit of evidence for my hypothesis. Links are the archetypal ranking factor, and Moz’s Domain Authority* is explicitly designed and optimised to use link-based data to predict rankings. This drop off in the top 5 fits with a mental model of Google continuously iterating and shuffling these results based on implied user feedback.

*I could have used Page Authority for this study, but didn’t, partly because I was concerned about URLs that Moz might not have discovered, and partly because I originally needed something that was a fair comparison with branded search volume, which is a site-level metric.

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

This is actually the example that first got me thinking about this issue - seasonal keywords. Seasonal keywords provide, in some ways, the control that we lack in typical ranking factor studies, because they’re keywords that become head terms for certain times of the year, while little else changes. Take this example:

This keyword gets the overwhelming majority of its volume in a single week every year. It goes from being a backwater search term where Google has little to go on besides “ranking factors” to a hotly contested and highly trafficked head term. So it’d be pretty interesting if the rankings changed in the same period, right? Here’s the picture 2 weeks before Mother’s Day this year:

I’ve included a bunch of factors we might consider when assessing these rankings - I’ve chosen Domain Authority as it’s the site-level link-based metric that best correlates with rankings, and branded search volume (“BSV”) as it’s a metric I’ve found to be a strong predictor of SEO “ranking power”, both in the study I mentioned previously and in my experience working with client sites. The “specialist” column is particularly interesting, as the specialised sites are obviously more focused, but typically also better optimised. - M&S (marksandspencer.com, a big high-street department store in the UK) was very late to the HTTPS bandwagon, for example. However, it’s not my aim here to persuade you that these are good or correct rankings, but for what it’s worth, the landing pages are fairly similar (with some exceptions I’ll get to), and I think these are the kinds of question I’d be asking, as a search engine, if I lacked any user-signal-based data.

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

Notice how everything goes to shit about seven days out? I don’t think it is at all a coincidence that that’s when the volume arrives. There are some pretty interesting stories if we dig into this, though. Check out the high-street brands:

Not bad eh? M&S, in particular, manages to get in above those two specialists that were jostling for 1st and 2nd previously.

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

These are probably two of the most “SEO'd” sites in this space. They might well have won a “ranking factors” competition. They have all the targeting sorted, decent technical and site speed, they use structured data for rich snippets, and so on. But, you’ve never heard of them, right?

But there are also two sites you’ve probably never heard of that did quite well:

Obviously, this is a complex picture, but I think it’s interesting that (at the time) the latter two sites had a far cleaner design than the former two. Check out Appleyard vs Serenata:

Just look at everything pulling your attention on Serenata, on the right.

Flying Flowers had another string to their bow, too - along with M&S, they were one of only two sites mentioning free delivery in their title.

But again, I’m not trying to convince you that the right websites won, or work out what Google is looking for here. The point is more simple than that: Evidently, when this keyword became high volume and big money, the game changed completely. Again, this fits nicely with my hypothesis of Google using user signals to continuously shuffle its own results.

Evidence 3: Ranking changes often relate more to Google re-assessing intent than Google re-assessing ranking factors

My last piece of evidence is very recent - it relates to the so-called “Medic” update on August 1st. Distilled works with a site that was heavily affected by this update - they sell cosmetic treatments and products in the UK. That makes them a highly commercial site, and yet, here’s who won for their core keywords when Medic hit:

Site Visibility Type WebMB +6.5% Medical encyclopedia Bupa +4.9% Healthcare NHS +4.6% Healthcare / Medical encyclopedia Cosmopolitan +4.6% Magazine Elle +3.6% Magazine Healthline +3.5% Medical encyclopedia

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

So that’s two magazines, two medical encyclopedia-style sites, and two household name general medical info/treatment sites (as opposed to cosmetics). Zero direct competitors - and it’s not like there’s a lack of direct competitors, for what it’s worth.

And this isn’t an isolated trend - it wasn’t for this site, and it’s not for many others I’ve worked with in recent years. Transactional terms are, in large numbers, going informational.

The interesting thing about this update for this client, is that although they’ve now regained their rankings, even at its worst, this never really hit their revenue figures. It’s almost like Google knew exactly what it was doing, and was testing whether people would prefer an informational result.

And again, this reinforces the picture I’ve been building over the last couple of years - this change is nothing to do with “ranking factors”. Ranking factors being re-weighted, which is what we normally think of with algorithm updates, would have only reshuffled the competitors, not boosted a load of sites with a completely different intent. Sure enough, most of the advice I see around Medic involves making your pages resemble informational pages.

Explanation: Why is this happening?

If I’ve not sold you yet on my world-view, perhaps this CNBC interview with Google will be the silver bullet.

This is a great article in many ways - its intentions are nothing to do with SEO, but rather politically motivated, after Trump called Google biased in September of this year. Nonetheless, it affords us a level of insight form the proverbial horse’s mouth that we’d never normally receive. My main takeaways are these:

In 2017, Google ran 31,584 experiments, resulting in 2,453 “search changes” - algorithm updates, to you and me. That’s roughly 7 per day.

When the interview was conducted, the team that CNBC talked to was working on an experiment involving increased use of images in search results. The metrics they were optimising for were:

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

The rate at which they quickly bounced back to the search results (note: if you think about it, this is not equivalent to and probably not even correlated with bounce rate in Google Analytics).

It’s important to remember that Google search engineers are people doing jobs with targets and KPIs just like the rest of us. And their KPI is not to get the sites with the best-ranking factors to the top - ranking factors, whether they be links, page speed, title tags or whatever else are just a means to an end.

Under this model, with those explicit KPIs, as an SEO we equally ought to be thinking about “ranking factors” like price, aesthetics, and the presence or lack of pop-ups, banners, and interstitials.

Now, admittedly, this article does not explicitly confirm or even mention a dynamic model like the one I’ve discussed earlier in this article. But it does discuss a mindset at Google that very much leads in that direction - if Google knows it’s optimising for certain user signals, and it can also collect those signals in real-time, why not be responsive?

Implications: How to rank for head terms

As I said at the start of this article, I am not suggesting for a moment that the fundamentals of SEO we’ve been practising for the last however many years are suddenly obsolete. At Distilled, we’re still seeing clients earn results and growth from cleaning up their technical SEO, improving their information architecture, or link-focused creative campaigns - all of which are reliant on an “old school” understanding of how Google works. Frankly, the continued existence of SEO as an industry is in itself reasonable proof that these methods, on average, pay for themselves.

But the picture is certainly more nuanced at the top, and I think those Google KPIs are an invaluable sneak peek into what that picture might look like. As a reminder, I’m talking about:

The speed with which users interact with a SERP (quicker is better)

The rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better)

There are some obvious ways we can optimise for these as SEOs, some of which are well within our wheelhouse, and some of which we might typically ignore. For example:

Optimising for SERP interaction speed - getting that “no-brainer” click on your site:

Metadata - we’ve been using this to stand out in search results for years

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

Brand awareness/perception - think about whether you’d be likely to click on the Guardian or Forbes with similar articles for the same query

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

Sitespeed - have you ever bailed on a slow site, especially on mobile?

First impression - the “this isn’t what I expected” or “I can’t be bothered” factor

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

As I said, some of these can be daunting to approach as digital marketers, because they’re a little outside of our usual playbook. But actually, lots of stuff we do for other reasons ends up being very efficient for these metrics - for example, if you want to improve your site’s brand awareness, how about top of funnel SEO content, top of funnel social content, native advertising, display, or carefully tailored post-conversion email marketing? If you want to improve first impressions, how about starting with a Panda survey of you and your competitors?

Similarly, these KPIs can seem harder to measure than our traditional metrics, but this is another area where we’re better equipped than we sometimes think. We can track click-through rates in Google Search Console (although you’ll need to control for rankings & keyword make-up), we can track something resembling intent satisfaction via scroll tracking, and I’ve talked before about how to get started measuring brand awareness.

Some of this (perhaps frustratingly!) comes down to being “ready” to rank - if your product and customer experience is not up to scratch, no amount of SEO can save you from that in this new world, because Google is explicitly trying to give customers results that win on product and customer experience, not on SEO.

There’s also the intent piece - I think a lot of brands need to be readier than they are for some of their biggest head terms “going informational on them”. This means having great informational content in place and ready to go - and by that, I do not mean a quick blog post or a thinly veiled product page. Relatedly, I’d recommend this in-depth article about predicting and building for “latent intents” as a starting point.

Summary

I’ve tried in this article to summarise how I see the SEO game-changing, and how I think we need to adapt. If you have two main takeaways, I’d like it to be those two KPIs - the speed with which users interact with a SERP, and the rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better) - and what they really mean for your marketing strategy.

What I don’t want you to take away is that I’m in any way undermining SEO fundamentals - links, on-page, or whatever else. That’s still how you qualify, how you get to a position where Google has any user signals from your site to start with. All that said, I know this is a controversial topic, and this post is heavily driven by my own experience, so I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-rank-for-head-terms/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[heavenwheel]

How to rank for head terms

Over the last few years, my mental model for what does and doesn’t rank has changed significantly, and this is especially true for head terms - competitive, high volume, “big money” keywords like “car insurance”, “laptops”, “flights”, and so on. This post is based on a bunch of real-world experience that confounded my old mental model, as well as some statistical research that I did for my presentation at SearchLove London in early October. I’ll explain my hypothesis in this post, but I’ll also explain how I think you should react to it as SEOs - in other words, how to rank for head terms.

My hypothesis in both cases is that head terms are no longer about ranking factors, and by ranking factors I mean static metrics you can source by crawling the web and weight to decide who ranks. Many before me have made the claim that user signals are increasingly influential for competitive keywords, but this is still an extension of the ranking factors model, whereby data goes in, and rankings come out. My research and experience are leading me increasingly towards a more dynamic and responsive model, in which Google systematically tests, reshuffles and refines rankings over short periods, even when site themselves do not change.

Before we go any further, this isn’t an “SEO is dead”, “links are dead”, or “ranking factors are dead” post - rather, I think those “traditional” measures are the table stakes that qualify you for a different game.

Evidence 1: Links are less relevant in the top 5 positions

Back in early 2017, I was looking into the relationship between links and rankings, and I ran a mini ranking factor study which I published over on Moz. It wasn’t the question I was asking at the time, but one of the interesting outcomes of that study was that I found a far weaker correlation between DA and rankings than Moz had done in mid-2015.

The main difference between our studies, besides the time that had elapsed, was that Moz used the top 50 ranking positions to establish correlations, whereas I used the top 10, figuring that I wasn’t too interested in any magical ways of getting a site to jump from position 45 to position 40 - the click-through rate drop-off is quite steep enough just on the first page.

Statistically speaking, I’d maybe expect a weaker correlation when using fewer positions, but I wondered if perhaps there was more to it than that - maybe Moz had found a stronger relationship because ranking factors in general mattered more for lower rankings, where Google has less user data. Obviously, this wasn’t a fair comparison, though, so I decided to re-run my own study and compare correlations in positions 1-5 with correlations in positions 6-10. (You can read more about my methodology in the aforementioned post documenting that previous study.) I found even stronger versions of my results from 2 years ago, but this time I was looking for something else:

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

The first thing to note here is that these are some extremely low correlation numbers - that’s to be expected when we’re dealing with only 5 points of data per keyword, and a system with so many other variables. In a regression analysis, the relationship between DA and rankings in positions 6-10 is still 98.5% statistically significant. However, for positions 1-5, it’s only around 41% statistically significant. In other words, links are fairly irrelevant for positions 1-5 in my data.

Now, this is only one ranking factor, and ~5,000 keywords, and ranking factor studies have their limitations.

Image: https://moz.com/blog/seo-ranking-factors-and-correlation

However, it’s still a compelling bit of evidence for my hypothesis. Links are the archetypal ranking factor, and Moz’s Domain Authority* is explicitly designed and optimised to use link-based data to predict rankings. This drop off in the top 5 fits with a mental model of Google continuously iterating and shuffling these results based on implied user feedback.

*I could have used Page Authority for this study, but didn’t, partly because I was concerned about URLs that Moz might not have discovered, and partly because I originally needed something that was a fair comparison with branded search volume, which is a site-level metric.

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

This is actually the example that first got me thinking about this issue - seasonal keywords. Seasonal keywords provide, in some ways, the control that we lack in typical ranking factor studies, because they’re keywords that become head terms for certain times of the year, while little else changes. Take this example:

This keyword gets the overwhelming majority of its volume in a single week every year. It goes from being a backwater search term where Google has little to go on besides “ranking factors” to a hotly contested and highly trafficked head term. So it’d be pretty interesting if the rankings changed in the same period, right? Here’s the picture 2 weeks before Mother’s Day this year:

I’ve included a bunch of factors we might consider when assessing these rankings - I’ve chosen Domain Authority as it’s the site-level link-based metric that best correlates with rankings, and branded search volume (“BSV”) as it’s a metric I’ve found to be a strong predictor of SEO “ranking power”, both in the study I mentioned previously and in my experience working with client sites. The “specialist” column is particularly interesting, as the specialised sites are obviously more focused, but typically also better optimised. - M&S (marksandspencer.com, a big high-street department store in the UK) was very late to the HTTPS bandwagon, for example. However, it’s not my aim here to persuade you that these are good or correct rankings, but for what it’s worth, the landing pages are fairly similar (with some exceptions I’ll get to), and I think these are the kinds of question I’d be asking, as a search engine, if I lacked any user-signal-based data.

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

Notice how everything goes to shit about seven days out? I don’t think it is at all a coincidence that that’s when the volume arrives. There are some pretty interesting stories if we dig into this, though. Check out the high-street brands:

Not bad eh? M&S, in particular, manages to get in above those two specialists that were jostling for 1st and 2nd previously.

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

These are probably two of the most “SEO'd” sites in this space. They might well have won a “ranking factors” competition. They have all the targeting sorted, decent technical and site speed, they use structured data for rich snippets, and so on. But, you’ve never heard of them, right?

But there are also two sites you’ve probably never heard of that did quite well:

Obviously, this is a complex picture, but I think it’s interesting that (at the time) the latter two sites had a far cleaner design than the former two. Check out Appleyard vs Serenata:

Just look at everything pulling your attention on Serenata, on the right.

Flying Flowers had another string to their bow, too - along with M&S, they were one of only two sites mentioning free delivery in their title.

But again, I’m not trying to convince you that the right websites won, or work out what Google is looking for here. The point is more simple than that: Evidently, when this keyword became high volume and big money, the game changed completely. Again, this fits nicely with my hypothesis of Google using user signals to continuously shuffle its own results.

Evidence 3: Ranking changes often relate more to Google re-assessing intent than Google re-assessing ranking factors

My last piece of evidence is very recent - it relates to the so-called “Medic” update on August 1st. Distilled works with a site that was heavily affected by this update - they sell cosmetic treatments and products in the UK. That makes them a highly commercial site, and yet, here’s who won for their core keywords when Medic hit:

Site Visibility Type WebMB +6.5% Medical encyclopedia Bupa +4.9% Healthcare NHS +4.6% Healthcare / Medical encyclopedia Cosmopolitan +4.6% Magazine Elle +3.6% Magazine Healthline +3.5% Medical encyclopedia

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

So that’s two magazines, two medical encyclopedia-style sites, and two household name general medical info/treatment sites (as opposed to cosmetics). Zero direct competitors - and it’s not like there’s a lack of direct competitors, for what it’s worth.

And this isn’t an isolated trend - it wasn’t for this site, and it’s not for many others I’ve worked with in recent years. Transactional terms are, in large numbers, going informational.

The interesting thing about this update for this client, is that although they’ve now regained their rankings, even at its worst, this never really hit their revenue figures. It’s almost like Google knew exactly what it was doing, and was testing whether people would prefer an informational result.

And again, this reinforces the picture I’ve been building over the last couple of years - this change is nothing to do with “ranking factors”. Ranking factors being re-weighted, which is what we normally think of with algorithm updates, would have only reshuffled the competitors, not boosted a load of sites with a completely different intent. Sure enough, most of the advice I see around Medic involves making your pages resemble informational pages.

Explanation: Why is this happening?

If I’ve not sold you yet on my world-view, perhaps this CNBC interview with Google will be the silver bullet.

This is a great article in many ways - its intentions are nothing to do with SEO, but rather politically motivated, after Trump called Google biased in September of this year. Nonetheless, it affords us a level of insight form the proverbial horse’s mouth that we’d never normally receive. My main takeaways are these:

In 2017, Google ran 31,584 experiments, resulting in 2,453 “search changes” - algorithm updates, to you and me. That’s roughly 7 per day.

When the interview was conducted, the team that CNBC talked to was working on an experiment involving increased use of images in search results. The metrics they were optimising for were:

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

The rate at which they quickly bounced back to the search results (note: if you think about it, this is not equivalent to and probably not even correlated with bounce rate in Google Analytics).

It’s important to remember that Google search engineers are people doing jobs with targets and KPIs just like the rest of us. And their KPI is not to get the sites with the best-ranking factors to the top - ranking factors, whether they be links, page speed, title tags or whatever else are just a means to an end.

Under this model, with those explicit KPIs, as an SEO we equally ought to be thinking about “ranking factors” like price, aesthetics, and the presence or lack of pop-ups, banners, and interstitials.

Now, admittedly, this article does not explicitly confirm or even mention a dynamic model like the one I’ve discussed earlier in this article. But it does discuss a mindset at Google that very much leads in that direction - if Google knows it’s optimising for certain user signals, and it can also collect those signals in real-time, why not be responsive?

Implications: How to rank for head terms

As I said at the start of this article, I am not suggesting for a moment that the fundamentals of SEO we’ve been practising for the last however many years are suddenly obsolete. At Distilled, we’re still seeing clients earn results and growth from cleaning up their technical SEO, improving their information architecture, or link-focused creative campaigns - all of which are reliant on an “old school” understanding of how Google works. Frankly, the continued existence of SEO as an industry is in itself reasonable proof that these methods, on average, pay for themselves.

But the picture is certainly more nuanced at the top, and I think those Google KPIs are an invaluable sneak peek into what that picture might look like. As a reminder, I’m talking about:

The speed with which users interact with a SERP (quicker is better)

The rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better)

There are some obvious ways we can optimise for these as SEOs, some of which are well within our wheelhouse, and some of which we might typically ignore. For example:

Optimising for SERP interaction speed - getting that “no-brainer” click on your site:

Metadata - we’ve been using this to stand out in search results for years

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

Brand awareness/perception - think about whether you’d be likely to click on the Guardian or Forbes with similar articles for the same query

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

Sitespeed - have you ever bailed on a slow site, especially on mobile?

First impression - the “this isn’t what I expected” or “I can��t be bothered” factor

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

As I said, some of these can be daunting to approach as digital marketers, because they’re a little outside of our usual playbook. But actually, lots of stuff we do for other reasons ends up being very efficient for these metrics - for example, if you want to improve your site’s brand awareness, how about top of funnel SEO content, top of funnel social content, native advertising, display, or carefully tailored post-conversion email marketing? If you want to improve first impressions, how about starting with a Panda survey of you and your competitors?

Similarly, these KPIs can seem harder to measure than our traditional metrics, but this is another area where we’re better equipped than we sometimes think. We can track click-through rates in Google Search Console (although you’ll need to control for rankings & keyword make-up), we can track something resembling intent satisfaction via scroll tracking, and I’ve talked before about how to get started measuring brand awareness.

Some of this (perhaps frustratingly!) comes down to being “ready” to rank - if your product and customer experience is not up to scratch, no amount of SEO can save you from that in this new world, because Google is explicitly trying to give customers results that win on product and customer experience, not on SEO.

There’s also the intent piece - I think a lot of brands need to be readier than they are for some of their biggest head terms “going informational on them”. This means having great informational content in place and ready to go - and by that, I do not mean a quick blog post or a thinly veiled product page. Relatedly, I’d recommend this in-depth article about predicting and building for “latent intents” as a starting point.

Summary

I’ve tried in this article to summarise how I see the SEO game-changing, and how I think we need to adapt. If you have two main takeaways, I’d like it to be those two KPIs - the speed with which users interact with a SERP, and the rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better) - and what they really mean for your marketing strategy.

What I don’t want you to take away is that I’m in any way undermining SEO fundamentals - links, on-page, or whatever else. That’s still how you qualify, how you get to a position where Google has any user signals from your site to start with. All that said, I know this is a controversial topic, and this post is heavily driven by my own experience, so I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-rank-for-head-terms/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[ronijashworth]

How to rank for head terms

Over the last few years, my mental model for what does and doesn’t rank has changed significantly, and this is especially true for head terms - competitive, high volume, “big money” keywords like “car insurance”, “laptops”, “flights”, and so on. This post is based on a bunch of real-world experience that confounded my old mental model, as well as some statistical research that I did for my presentation at SearchLove London in early October. I’ll explain my hypothesis in this post, but I’ll also explain how I think you should react to it as SEOs - in other words, how to rank for head terms.

My hypothesis in both cases is that head terms are no longer about ranking factors, and by ranking factors I mean static metrics you can source by crawling the web and weight to decide who ranks. Many before me have made the claim that user signals are increasingly influential for competitive keywords, but this is still an extension of the ranking factors model, whereby data goes in, and rankings come out. My research and experience are leading me increasingly towards a more dynamic and responsive model, in which Google systematically tests, reshuffles and refines rankings over short periods, even when site themselves do not change.

Before we go any further, this isn’t an “SEO is dead”, “links are dead”, or “ranking factors are dead” post - rather, I think those “traditional” measures are the table stakes that qualify you for a different game.

Evidence 1: Links are less relevant in the top 5 positions

Back in early 2017, I was looking into the relationship between links and rankings, and I ran a mini ranking factor study which I published over on Moz. It wasn’t the question I was asking at the time, but one of the interesting outcomes of that study was that I found a far weaker correlation between DA and rankings than Moz had done in mid-2015.

The main difference between our studies, besides the time that had elapsed, was that Moz used the top 50 ranking positions to establish correlations, whereas I used the top 10, figuring that I wasn’t too interested in any magical ways of getting a site to jump from position 45 to position 40 - the click-through rate drop-off is quite steep enough just on the first page.

Statistically speaking, I’d maybe expect a weaker correlation when using fewer positions, but I wondered if perhaps there was more to it than that - maybe Moz had found a stronger relationship because ranking factors in general mattered more for lower rankings, where Google has less user data. Obviously, this wasn’t a fair comparison, though, so I decided to re-run my own study and compare correlations in positions 1-5 with correlations in positions 6-10. (You can read more about my methodology in the aforementioned post documenting that previous study.) I found even stronger versions of my results from 2 years ago, but this time I was looking for something else:

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

The first thing to note here is that these are some extremely low correlation numbers - that’s to be expected when we’re dealing with only 5 points of data per keyword, and a system with so many other variables. In a regression analysis, the relationship between DA and rankings in positions 6-10 is still 98.5% statistically significant. However, for positions 1-5, it’s only around 41% statistically significant. In other words, links are fairly irrelevant for positions 1-5 in my data.

Now, this is only one ranking factor, and ~5,000 keywords, and ranking factor studies have their limitations.

Image: https://moz.com/blog/seo-ranking-factors-and-correlation

However, it’s still a compelling bit of evidence for my hypothesis. Links are the archetypal ranking factor, and Moz’s Domain Authority* is explicitly designed and optimised to use link-based data to predict rankings. This drop off in the top 5 fits with a mental model of Google continuously iterating and shuffling these results based on implied user feedback.

*I could have used Page Authority for this study, but didn’t, partly because I was concerned about URLs that Moz might not have discovered, and partly because I originally needed something that was a fair comparison with branded search volume, which is a site-level metric.

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

This is actually the example that first got me thinking about this issue - seasonal keywords. Seasonal keywords provide, in some ways, the control that we lack in typical ranking factor studies, because they’re keywords that become head terms for certain times of the year, while little else changes. Take this example:

This keyword gets the overwhelming majority of its volume in a single week every year. It goes from being a backwater search term where Google has little to go on besides “ranking factors” to a hotly contested and highly trafficked head term. So it’d be pretty interesting if the rankings changed in the same period, right? Here’s the picture 2 weeks before Mother’s Day this year:

I’ve included a bunch of factors we might consider when assessing these rankings - I’ve chosen Domain Authority as it’s the site-level link-based metric that best correlates with rankings, and branded search volume (“BSV”) as it’s a metric I’ve found to be a strong predictor of SEO “ranking power”, both in the study I mentioned previously and in my experience working with client sites. The “specialist” column is particularly interesting, as the specialised sites are obviously more focused, but typically also better optimised. - M&S (marksandspencer.com, a big high-street department store in the UK) was very late to the HTTPS bandwagon, for example. However, it’s not my aim here to persuade you that these are good or correct rankings, but for what it’s worth, the landing pages are fairly similar (with some exceptions I’ll get to), and I think these are the kinds of question I’d be asking, as a search engine, if I lacked any user-signal-based data.

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

Notice how everything goes to shit about seven days out? I don’t think it is at all a coincidence that that’s when the volume arrives. There are some pretty interesting stories if we dig into this, though. Check out the high-street brands:

Not bad eh? M&S, in particular, manages to get in above those two specialists that were jostling for 1st and 2nd previously.

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

These are probably two of the most “SEO'd” sites in this space. They might well have won a “ranking factors” competition. They have all the targeting sorted, decent technical and site speed, they use structured data for rich snippets, and so on. But, you’ve never heard of them, right?

But there are also two sites you’ve probably never heard of that did quite well:

Obviously, this is a complex picture, but I think it’s interesting that (at the time) the latter two sites had a far cleaner design than the former two. Check out Appleyard vs Serenata:

Just look at everything pulling your attention on Serenata, on the right.

Flying Flowers had another string to their bow, too - along with M&S, they were one of only two sites mentioning free delivery in their title.

But again, I’m not trying to convince you that the right websites won, or work out what Google is looking for here. The point is more simple than that: Evidently, when this keyword became high volume and big money, the game changed completely. Again, this fits nicely with my hypothesis of Google using user signals to continuously shuffle its own results.

Evidence 3: Ranking changes often relate more to Google re-assessing intent than Google re-assessing ranking factors

My last piece of evidence is very recent - it relates to the so-called “Medic” update on August 1st. Distilled works with a site that was heavily affected by this update - they sell cosmetic treatments and products in the UK. That makes them a highly commercial site, and yet, here’s who won for their core keywords when Medic hit:

Site Visibility Type WebMB +6.5% Medical encyclopedia Bupa +4.9% Healthcare NHS +4.6% Healthcare / Medical encyclopedia Cosmopolitan +4.6% Magazine Elle +3.6% Magazine Healthline +3.5% Medical encyclopedia

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

So that’s two magazines, two medical encyclopedia-style sites, and two household name general medical info/treatment sites (as opposed to cosmetics). Zero direct competitors - and it’s not like there’s a lack of direct competitors, for what it’s worth.

And this isn’t an isolated trend - it wasn’t for this site, and it’s not for many others I’ve worked with in recent years. Transactional terms are, in large numbers, going informational.

The interesting thing about this update for this client, is that although they’ve now regained their rankings, even at its worst, this never really hit their revenue figures. It’s almost like Google knew exactly what it was doing, and was testing whether people would prefer an informational result.

And again, this reinforces the picture I’ve been building over the last couple of years - this change is nothing to do with “ranking factors”. Ranking factors being re-weighted, which is what we normally think of with algorithm updates, would have only reshuffled the competitors, not boosted a load of sites with a completely different intent. Sure enough, most of the advice I see around Medic involves making your pages resemble informational pages.

Explanation: Why is this happening?

If I’ve not sold you yet on my world-view, perhaps this CNBC interview with Google will be the silver bullet.

This is a great article in many ways - its intentions are nothing to do with SEO, but rather politically motivated, after Trump called Google biased in September of this year. Nonetheless, it affords us a level of insight form the proverbial horse’s mouth that we’d never normally receive. My main takeaways are these:

In 2017, Google ran 31,584 experiments, resulting in 2,453 “search changes” - algorithm updates, to you and me. That’s roughly 7 per day.

When the interview was conducted, the team that CNBC talked to was working on an experiment involving increased use of images in search results. The metrics they were optimising for were:

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

The rate at which they quickly bounced back to the search results (note: if you think about it, this is not equivalent to and probably not even correlated with bounce rate in Google Analytics).

It’s important to remember that Google search engineers are people doing jobs with targets and KPIs just like the rest of us. And their KPI is not to get the sites with the best-ranking factors to the top - ranking factors, whether they be links, page speed, title tags or whatever else are just a means to an end.

Under this model, with those explicit KPIs, as an SEO we equally ought to be thinking about “ranking factors” like price, aesthetics, and the presence or lack of pop-ups, banners, and interstitials.

Now, admittedly, this article does not explicitly confirm or even mention a dynamic model like the one I’ve discussed earlier in this article. But it does discuss a mindset at Google that very much leads in that direction - if Google knows it’s optimising for certain user signals, and it can also collect those signals in real-time, why not be responsive?

Implications: How to rank for head terms

As I said at the start of this article, I am not suggesting for a moment that the fundamentals of SEO we’ve been practising for the last however many years are suddenly obsolete. At Distilled, we’re still seeing clients earn results and growth from cleaning up their technical SEO, improving their information architecture, or link-focused creative campaigns - all of which are reliant on an “old school” understanding of how Google works. Frankly, the continued existence of SEO as an industry is in itself reasonable proof that these methods, on average, pay for themselves.

But the picture is certainly more nuanced at the top, and I think those Google KPIs are an invaluable sneak peek into what that picture might look like. As a reminder, I’m talking about:

The speed with which users interact with a SERP (quicker is better)

The rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better)

There are some obvious ways we can optimise for these as SEOs, some of which are well within our wheelhouse, and some of which we might typically ignore. For example:

Optimising for SERP interaction speed - getting that “no-brainer” click on your site:

Metadata - we’ve been using this to stand out in search results for years

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

Brand awareness/perception - think about whether you’d be likely to click on the Guardian or Forbes with similar articles for the same query

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

Sitespeed - have you ever bailed on a slow site, especially on mobile?

First impression - the “this isn’t what I expected” or “I can’t be bothered” factor

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

As I said, some of these can be daunting to approach as digital marketers, because they’re a little outside of our usual playbook. But actually, lots of stuff we do for other reasons ends up being very efficient for these metrics - for example, if you want to improve your site’s brand awareness, how about top of funnel SEO content, top of funnel social content, native advertising, display, or carefully tailored post-conversion email marketing? If you want to improve first impressions, how about starting with a Panda survey of you and your competitors?

Similarly, these KPIs can seem harder to measure than our traditional metrics, but this is another area where we’re better equipped than we sometimes think. We can track click-through rates in Google Search Console (although you’ll need to control for rankings & keyword make-up), we can track something resembling intent satisfaction via scroll tracking, and I’ve talked before about how to get started measuring brand awareness.

Some of this (perhaps frustratingly!) comes down to being “ready” to rank - if your product and customer experience is not up to scratch, no amount of SEO can save you from that in this new world, because Google is explicitly trying to give customers results that win on product and customer experience, not on SEO.

There’s also the intent piece - I think a lot of brands need to be readier than they are for some of their biggest head terms “going informational on them”. This means having great informational content in place and ready to go - and by that, I do not mean a quick blog post or a thinly veiled product page. Relatedly, I’d recommend this in-depth article about predicting and building for “latent intents” as a starting point.

Summary

I’ve tried in this article to summarise how I see the SEO game-changing, and how I think we need to adapt. If you have two main takeaways, I’d like it to be those two KPIs - the speed with which users interact with a SERP, and the rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better) - and what they really mean for your marketing strategy.

What I don’t want you to take away is that I’m in any way undermining SEO fundamentals - links, on-page, or whatever else. That’s still how you qualify, how you get to a position where Google has any user signals from your site to start with. All that said, I know this is a controversial topic, and this post is heavily driven by my own experience, so I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

from Digital Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-rank-for-head-terms/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[donnafmae]

How to rank for head terms

Over the last few years, my mental model for what does and doesn’t rank has changed significantly, and this is especially true for head terms - competitive, high volume, “big money” keywords like “car insurance”, “laptops”, “flights”, and so on. This post is based on a bunch of real-world experience that confounded my old mental model, as well as some statistical research that I did for my presentation at SearchLove London in early October. I’ll explain my hypothesis in this post, but I’ll also explain how I think you should react to it as SEOs - in other words, how to rank for head terms.

My hypothesis in both cases is that head terms are no longer about ranking factors, and by ranking factors I mean static metrics you can source by crawling the web and weight to decide who ranks. Many before me have made the claim that user signals are increasingly influential for competitive keywords, but this is still an extension of the ranking factors model, whereby data goes in, and rankings come out. My research and experience are leading me increasingly towards a more dynamic and responsive model, in which Google systematically tests, reshuffles and refines rankings over short periods, even when site themselves do not change.

Before we go any further, this isn’t an “SEO is dead”, “links are dead”, or “ranking factors are dead” post - rather, I think those “traditional” measures are the table stakes that qualify you for a different game.

Evidence 1: Links are less relevant in the top 5 positions

Back in early 2017, I was looking into the relationship between links and rankings, and I ran a mini ranking factor study which I published over on Moz. It wasn’t the question I was asking at the time, but one of the interesting outcomes of that study was that I found a far weaker correlation between DA and rankings than Moz had done in mid-2015.

The main difference between our studies, besides the time that had elapsed, was that Moz used the top 50 ranking positions to establish correlations, whereas I used the top 10, figuring that I wasn’t too interested in any magical ways of getting a site to jump from position 45 to position 40 - the click-through rate drop-off is quite steep enough just on the first page.

Statistically speaking, I’d maybe expect a weaker correlation when using fewer positions, but I wondered if perhaps there was more to it than that - maybe Moz had found a stronger relationship because ranking factors in general mattered more for lower rankings, where Google has less user data. Obviously, this wasn’t a fair comparison, though, so I decided to re-run my own study and compare correlations in positions 1-5 with correlations in positions 6-10. (You can read more about my methodology in the aforementioned post documenting that previous study.) I found even stronger versions of my results from 2 years ago, but this time I was looking for something else:

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

The first thing to note here is that these are some extremely low correlation numbers - that’s to be expected when we’re dealing with only 5 points of data per keyword, and a system with so many other variables. In a regression analysis, the relationship between DA and rankings in positions 6-10 is still 98.5% statistically significant. However, for positions 1-5, it’s only around 41% statistically significant. In other words, links are fairly irrelevant for positions 1-5 in my data.

Now, this is only one ranking factor, and ~5,000 keywords, and ranking factor studies have their limitations.

Image: https://moz.com/blog/seo-ranking-factors-and-correlation

However, it’s still a compelling bit of evidence for my hypothesis. Links are the archetypal ranking factor, and Moz’s Domain Authority* is explicitly designed and optimised to use link-based data to predict rankings. This drop off in the top 5 fits with a mental model of Google continuously iterating and shuffling these results based on implied user feedback.

*I could have used Page Authority for this study, but didn’t, partly because I was concerned about URLs that Moz might not have discovered, and partly because I originally needed something that was a fair comparison with branded search volume, which is a site-level metric.

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

This is actually the example that first got me thinking about this issue - seasonal keywords. Seasonal keywords provide, in some ways, the control that we lack in typical ranking factor studies, because they’re keywords that become head terms for certain times of the year, while little else changes. Take this example:

This keyword gets the overwhelming majority of its volume in a single week every year. It goes from being a backwater search term where Google has little to go on besides “ranking factors” to a hotly contested and highly trafficked head term. So it’d be pretty interesting if the rankings changed in the same period, right? Here’s the picture 2 weeks before Mother’s Day this year:

I’ve included a bunch of factors we might consider when assessing these rankings - I’ve chosen Domain Authority as it’s the site-level link-based metric that best correlates with rankings, and branded search volume (“BSV”) as it’s a metric I’ve found to be a strong predictor of SEO “ranking power”, both in the study I mentioned previously and in my experience working with client sites. The “specialist” column is particularly interesting, as the specialised sites are obviously more focused, but typically also better optimised. - M&S (marksandspencer.com, a big high-street department store in the UK) was very late to the HTTPS bandwagon, for example. However, it’s not my aim here to persuade you that these are good or correct rankings, but for what it’s worth, the landing pages are fairly similar (with some exceptions I’ll get to), and I think these are the kinds of question I’d be asking, as a search engine, if I lacked any user-signal-based data.

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

Notice how everything goes to shit about seven days out? I don’t think it is at all a coincidence that that’s when the volume arrives. There are some pretty interesting stories if we dig into this, though. Check out the high-street brands:

Not bad eh? M&S, in particular, manages to get in above those two specialists that were jostling for 1st and 2nd previously.

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

These are probably two of the most “SEO'd” sites in this space. They might well have won a “ranking factors” competition. They have all the targeting sorted, decent technical and site speed, they use structured data for rich snippets, and so on. But, you’ve never heard of them, right?

But there are also two sites you’ve probably never heard of that did quite well:

Obviously, this is a complex picture, but I think it’s interesting that (at the time) the latter two sites had a far cleaner design than the former two. Check out Appleyard vs Serenata:

Just look at everything pulling your attention on Serenata, on the right.

Flying Flowers had another string to their bow, too - along with M&S, they were one of only two sites mentioning free delivery in their title.

But again, I’m not trying to convince you that the right websites won, or work out what Google is looking for here. The point is more simple than that: Evidently, when this keyword became high volume and big money, the game changed completely. Again, this fits nicely with my hypothesis of Google using user signals to continuously shuffle its own results.

Evidence 3: Ranking changes often relate more to Google re-assessing intent than Google re-assessing ranking factors

My last piece of evidence is very recent - it relates to the so-called “Medic” update on August 1st. Distilled works with a site that was heavily affected by this update - they sell cosmetic treatments and products in the UK. That makes them a highly commercial site, and yet, here’s who won for their core keywords when Medic hit:

Site Visibility Type WebMB +6.5% Medical encyclopedia Bupa +4.9% Healthcare NHS +4.6% Healthcare / Medical encyclopedia Cosmopolitan +4.6% Magazine Elle +3.6% Magazine Healthline +3.5% Medical encyclopedia

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

So that’s two magazines, two medical encyclopedia-style sites, and two household name general medical info/treatment sites (as opposed to cosmetics). Zero direct competitors - and it’s not like there’s a lack of direct competitors, for what it’s worth.

And this isn’t an isolated trend - it wasn’t for this site, and it’s not for many others I’ve worked with in recent years. Transactional terms are, in large numbers, going informational.

The interesting thing about this update for this client, is that although they’ve now regained their rankings, even at its worst, this never really hit their revenue figures. It’s almost like Google knew exactly what it was doing, and was testing whether people would prefer an informational result.

And again, this reinforces the picture I’ve been building over the last couple of years - this change is nothing to do with “ranking factors”. Ranking factors being re-weighted, which is what we normally think of with algorithm updates, would have only reshuffled the competitors, not boosted a load of sites with a completely different intent. Sure enough, most of the advice I see around Medic involves making your pages resemble informational pages.

Explanation: Why is this happening?

If I’ve not sold you yet on my world-view, perhaps this CNBC interview with Google will be the silver bullet.

This is a great article in many ways - its intentions are nothing to do with SEO, but rather politically motivated, after Trump called Google biased in September of this year. Nonetheless, it affords us a level of insight form the proverbial horse’s mouth that we’d never normally receive. My main takeaways are these:

In 2017, Google ran 31,584 experiments, resulting in 2,453 “search changes” - algorithm updates, to you and me. That’s roughly 7 per day.

When the interview was conducted, the team that CNBC talked to was working on an experiment involving increased use of images in search results. The metrics they were optimising for were:

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

The rate at which they quickly bounced back to the search results (note: if you think about it, this is not equivalent to and probably not even correlated with bounce rate in Google Analytics).

It’s important to remember that Google search engineers are people doing jobs with targets and KPIs just like the rest of us. And their KPI is not to get the sites with the best-ranking factors to the top - ranking factors, whether they be links, page speed, title tags or whatever else are just a means to an end.

Under this model, with those explicit KPIs, as an SEO we equally ought to be thinking about “ranking factors” like price, aesthetics, and the presence or lack of pop-ups, banners, and interstitials.

Now, admittedly, this article does not explicitly confirm or even mention a dynamic model like the one I’ve discussed earlier in this article. But it does discuss a mindset at Google that very much leads in that direction - if Google knows it’s optimising for certain user signals, and it can also collect those signals in real-time, why not be responsive?

Implications: How to rank for head terms

As I said at the start of this article, I am not suggesting for a moment that the fundamentals of SEO we’ve been practising for the last however many years are suddenly obsolete. At Distilled, we’re still seeing clients earn results and growth from cleaning up their technical SEO, improving their information architecture, or link-focused creative campaigns - all of which are reliant on an “old school” understanding of how Google works. Frankly, the continued existence of SEO as an industry is in itself reasonable proof that these methods, on average, pay for themselves.

But the picture is certainly more nuanced at the top, and I think those Google KPIs are an invaluable sneak peek into what that picture might look like. As a reminder, I’m talking about:

The speed with which users interact with a SERP (quicker is better)

The rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better)

There are some obvious ways we can optimise for these as SEOs, some of which are well within our wheelhouse, and some of which we might typically ignore. For example:

Optimising for SERP interaction speed - getting that “no-brainer” click on your site:

Metadata - we’ve been using this to stand out in search results for years

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

Brand awareness/perception - think about whether you’d be likely to click on the Guardian or Forbes with similar articles for the same query

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

Sitespeed - have you ever bailed on a slow site, especially on mobile?

First impression - the “this isn’t what I expected” or “I can’t be bothered” factor

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

As I said, some of these can be daunting to approach as digital marketers, because they’re a little outside of our usual playbook. But actually, lots of stuff we do for other reasons ends up being very efficient for these metrics - for example, if you want to improve your site’s brand awareness, how about top of funnel SEO content, top of funnel social content, native advertising, display, or carefully tailored post-conversion email marketing? If you want to improve first impressions, how about starting with a Panda survey of you and your competitors?

Similarly, these KPIs can seem harder to measure than our traditional metrics, but this is another area where we’re better equipped than we sometimes think. We can track click-through rates in Google Search Console (although you’ll need to control for rankings & keyword make-up), we can track something resembling intent satisfaction via scroll tracking, and I’ve talked before about how to get started measuring brand awareness.

Some of this (perhaps frustratingly!) comes down to being “ready” to rank - if your product and customer experience is not up to scratch, no amount of SEO can save you from that in this new world, because Google is explicitly trying to give customers results that win on product and customer experience, not on SEO.

There’s also the intent piece - I think a lot of brands need to be readier than they are for some of their biggest head terms “going informational on them”. This means having great informational content in place and ready to go - and by that, I do not mean a quick blog post or a thinly veiled product page. Relatedly, I’d recommend this in-depth article about predicting and building for “latent intents” as a starting point.

Summary

I’ve tried in this article to summarise how I see the SEO game-changing, and how I think we need to adapt. If you have two main takeaways, I’d like it to be those two KPIs - the speed with which users interact with a SERP, and the rate at which they quickly bounce back to results (lower is better) - and what they really mean for your marketing strategy.

What I don’t want you to take away is that I’m in any way undermining SEO fundamentals - links, on-page, or whatever else. That’s still how you qualify, how you get to a position where Google has any user signals from your site to start with. All that said, I know this is a controversial topic, and this post is heavily driven by my own experience, so I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-rank-for-head-terms/ via http://www.rssmix.com/