#but that scraping it for text tweets was impossible

[lorephobic]

i understand that scraping all of barry's social media is probably the most parasocial & insane thing that i've ever done but also all of the hurdles that i've run into in this project where i've hit a dead-ended reddit thread telling me that something isn't possible and no one's ever found a workaround just make me feel so hopeless. i know that not everybody is a data hoarder but i feel like. as a... community of people sharing the web. as a fandom. as a society. preserving media (even and especially digital stuff) should be easy and accessible and the fact that it's not is devastating, sure, but also terrifying. are you not all terrified of the impermanence of this place. does it not keep you up at night. it could all be gone tomorrow. how do we live with that.

[keyofw]

I know it's no longer a novel observation how the entire internet is enshittified now but it's still shocking that so many of the things we depend on had such a sudden and marked decline in quality.

Google results are mostly ads. Facebook is 90% ads, 10% domestic terrorists. Twitter is... well, not Twitter and it's only good for Nazis to yell at each other in the hopes they make .0004 cents per tweet. Instagram is ads. TikTok is misinformation central. YouTube serves forty-seven ads per second of videos watched.

Every news article is behind a paywall, and some of them are just AI-text garbled from someone else's much better article, also behind a paywall.

AI art has made it impossible to find images you want. It's also exploded the use and potential use of misinformation. Your data is now being fed to generative AIs to make cheap slop that only makes information harder to find and source.

Everyone wants you using their app instead of a web browser so that you aren't allowed to block the 3,487 ads per page that have to load.

Amazon is full of fake or low-quality dupes of the things you actually want to buy. Netflix and other streaming services are raising prices, cutting available shows, and erasing the existence of shows in order to avoid paying writers. Art hosting sites such as DeviantArt allow your work to be scraped for NFTs and generative AI without your consent or any form of compensation. Spotify has demonetized over 80% of their tracks and pays the rest astoudingly low, worse than the other streaming services which also underpay.

Everything is a subscription service which means not only are you paying for the same product in perpetuity but you never technically own any tool you use and your right to use it can be revoked at any time. Everything has to be a "smart" product so when the business inevitably folds and/or the servers shut down, your product no longer works. Hope it's not something you need!

Every company no longer accepts phone calls but routes you through a series of automated messages until finally dumping you off to an overworked and underpaid person who has no power to help you. Speaking of phones, you can't use them for calls. There are so many robocallers and scams that no one in their right mind picks up the phone anymore. Texts are going the same way. No one wants to dig through 100 scam messages to find the one from the person they actually want to talk to.

It's all just the inevitable end result of capitalism. It doesn't have to be this way. But there needs to be regulation, and fast, or the "Dead Internet Theory" will no longer be a fringe theory.

[nostalgebraist]

How should we assess the performance of generative ML models like GPT-3 and DALLE-2?  What baseline should we compare them to?

The two popular baselines are “humans” and “earlier ML models.”

Here’s another one, which I think is potentially useful: search engines.

----

Imagine taking someone from 1980, teleporting them into the present, and showing Google Images to them.  They’d be amazed, wouldn’t they?

Until very recently, no one had that kind of instant access to a world’s worth of pictures.  And not only can it show you a picture of almost anything, you can tell it what you want to see, and a picture of that thing will appear!

(At least sometimes.  Sometimes it doesn’t quite work, but even then, you can usually see what the machine was “thinking” when it chose the images it did.)

Now, imagine showing DALLE-2 or Imagen to this person.  The reaction would be pretty similar.

Indeed, most of the gap here was closed by Google Images, not by the generative models.  In 1980, you couldn’t access pictures of anything by typing descriptions.  If you wanted a picture of something, you had to go out into the physical world and hunt for it.

In 2015, you could type a description of almost any picture (that plausibly exists) into Google Images, and it would show you a picture like that.  From the vantage point of 1980, this is basically an image generator.

Sure, the images have to already exist in the world (and on the web, and in Google’s index of the web).  But that’s a weak criterion.  There are billions of images on the web.  Have a new idea (from your perspective), go looking for that idea on the web, and often you’ll find it already there, waiting for you:

Back before we had global access to the written opinions of morons, this was a rhetorical fallacy: the straw man. Making up a bad argument in order to refute it was generally considered unhelpful, since the purpose of discourse is supposed to be to reach some kind of truth, not to show how good you are at discoursing.

It’s unnecessary to refute an argument nobody believes. But with 316 million monthly active Twitter users and 500 million tweets a day, somebody out there believes whatever. It’s the old saw about monkeys and typewriters. If you want to be right for a few hundred words, just think of an awful argument and search for the Twitter user who expressed it.

When we use DALLE-2 or Imagen, we come to them with eyes already jaded by Google Images.  So we mostly ask them to make really weird stuff, stuff that would probably not already exist somewhere on the web.

A time traveler from 1980 would not have our biases, and might be confused by our narrowness of focus.  Yes, DALLE-2 can generate things that Google Images cannot “generate.”  But Google Images can “generate” so much just by itself.

Much the same goes for text-generating models.  In 1980, you could not find any kind of text you wanted just by typing out a description of it.  In 2015, you could (usually).  From the vantage point of 1980, Google Search itself is already an impressive “conditional text generator,” not really so different from GPT-3.  (Except the text usually makes more sense.)

----

DALLE-2 and Imagen were impossible in 1980 for the same reason that Google Images was impossible in 1980: the modern web did not exist.  These models are trained on massive web scrapes -- the exact same stuff you’re searching over when you use Google Images.

To make it possible to train these models, we had to first make it possible for a single person to access billions of pictures with associated text.  For the models to exist, their training data must exist first.  But if the training data exists, then you have it too, and you can search over it as an alternative to using the model.

The models do two things: they imitate their training data, and they “fill in the gaps” in it.  (Some things really aren’t on Google Images, but sometimes DALLE-2 can still make them for you.)

Using search as a baseline subtracts out the first of these things, concentrating only on the second.  Search is already powerful.  What do the models add on top of that?

As a way to evaluate models, asking “how does this model compare to searching over its training data?” has the interesting property that it automatically gets harder as the training data grows.

It subtracts out the growing “power” of the training data itself.  The model doesn’t just have to improve with more data, it has to squeeze value out of the new data that wasn’t “already there” to be found using search.

[patchessolostan]

vertigo

a snippet of a dnf fic i’m kinda working on. 1.8k, canon-ish

Isn’t it strange, how sometimes, certain smells can inspire old feelings, can awaken memories that seemed to be forgotten? The delicate pathways in our brains weaved together in unintended ways, so tight and durable, and yet completely slipping past our radar.

For example, love, to George, smells like oranges.

It’s one of his first ever memories: a Christmas morning two decades ago, the faint tickle of his wool sweater, the subtle warmth of the sun spilling down his back. And his mother’s hands, skin soft and unmarred, neat, rounded nails digging into the orange, carefully peeling it and then splitting its tender flesh. It’s hazy at best, but the smile on her face, his father’s laughter, the sweet juice spilling past his lips—they’re as clear as day still.

He thinks there’s no amount of time that could fade the memory of that warmth from his chest.

 So, perhaps George should’ve known his fate since the day Dream told him his shampoo is orange scented.

But then again, who's to say he would've wanted to change a single thing?

 “I’ll wear the brightest blue clothes I have,” Dream promises, and George can hear the grin in his voice. He always can, whenever the topic of George’s approaching visit comes up. “So much blue, you’ll want to vomit when you see me.”

“That seems counter-productive,” George answers, giggling when Dream sighs dramatically.

“Fine,” he relents when George quiets down. “It’ll be a mild headache. I’m sure you can deal with that.”

I think I could deal with anything, as long as I get to meet you, George thinks, and despite his fluttering heart and shaking hands, he doesn’t say it.

“I hate you both. This is unfair,” Sapnap speaks up after staying silent for five solid minutes while they talked about the upcoming trip. George practically jumps and starts giggling again. “It is so unfair, you both suck, and I’ll fucking block you. Try me.”

“Oh no,” Dream wheezes out, and the sound of both his and George’s laughter easily conceals Sapnap’s muttered insults and protests.

“C’mon,” George says eventually. “At least you know how he looks like. I’m crossing the ocean to meet a fucking stranger.”

“...fair enough,” Sapnap agrees, and Dream just wheezes harder.

George bites his lip before letting his grin fully unfurl as he stares down at his fidgeting fingers.

I’m meeting him.

He wants to scream. Instead George just gently smacks his forehead on his desk.

 Ever since the plans get made, the ticket bought (Dream insists on paying, despite George’s half-assed protests), time seems to move both incredibly fast and insanely slow.

Still, soon enough there’s only a week left to his flight. And yet... George feels like every waking hour takes three more to pass. And it’s not like he can waste the hours away by sleeping, like before.

Now every time he lays down and closes his eyes, all George can think of are warm arms around him. All he can see in his mind is that still blurry face and a mess of dark blonde hair. That wheezy laugh in his ear, the Hello, George that Dream will inevitably whisper, so close that his breath will brush past his skin and set George alight from inside out.

It's already driving George crazy, and he's still almost 7 thousand kilometres away.

 He packs his bag, and then pulls it apart while looking for a charger, and packs again, and again, and again, in a seemingly never-ending cycle of anxious fidgeting.

He starts planning three different videos at once and scrapes two of them once he's almost done.

He turns Twitter notifications off, and tries to keep his phone face down on the desk, but as the date creeps closer, it's getting harder and harder. Somehow, he seems to spend even more time talking to Dream, even if before it seemed almost impossible.

Despite his big words, Sapnap isn't actually upset. In fact, he's possibly just as excited as George, which he finds hilarious and annoying at once. And though Dream seems to agree with George, he doesn't try to calm neither of them down, instead just feeding the flames.

Surprisingly, the trio manage to keep the meetup plans from fans; that’s not to say that they don’t sense a new kind of tension between them. Every worried, questioning donation and tweet is hard to ignore, with the way George’s tongue itches with impatience.

For now, it feels too fragile, too private to share, at least until he plants his feet on the Florida soil, until he hears Dream laugh in real life and watches the way his face lights up in real time.

 And then, as if no time at all has passed, it's here.

 Tomorrow, Dream texts in lieu of goodnight. George flops over in his bed a few times, legs uncomfortably tangled in the sheets, bottom lip between his teeth.

Tomorrow, he answers, and it feels like a promise.

George curls his fingers around his phone, pushing it under the pillow, and then buries his face under it too, cheeks hot from the force of his smile.

That night is full of fitful, anxious sleep, and when George wakes, it’s with a start. He jumps up and stumbles out of bed in panic.

It's so quiet in the apartment—too quiet, too still, like the world itself has paused. His heart is racing as he scrambles through the sheets for his phone.

Did he oversleep? Did he miss the alarm? Did he even set an alarm? The memories of last night are hazy, and George thinks his heart will push out into his throat when his fingers finally brush against glass.

All breath rushes out of him when the screen turns on, a clear 6:41 AM on his lockscreen.

He's fine. The anxiety pulls back, leaving George's muscles weak and sleep-tired, so he slumps on the ruffled sheets.

Thought I overslept, almost had a heart attack, he sends to Dream, fully expecting him to laugh at his expense when he finally wakes up.

To George's surprise, the message gets read immediately.

I would’ve called you :), comes through, and before George can answer, Dream writes again.

I’ll have to call a cab for us. Haven’t slept since yesterday.

George huffs out an amused breath.

Would be a shame to kick the bucket right after meeting you, he replies and closes his eyes, placing the phone on his chest.

Now that the panic from before has subsided, another takes its place, slowly rising up and overtaking his pliant body like a tide.

There it is, the final dance, the last conversation where George can’t imagine the face behind the words; it’s just as frightening as it is thrilling. It’s bittersweet on his tongue, a piece of rotten fruit in his mouth.

He can’t help but wonder—what if it changes everything? What if it’s nothing like he expects? What if Dream realizes he can’t stand George when he can’t just leave the call?

George’s not a kid, he’s not all that naïve, and he’s well aware that people who work perfectly when there’s an ocean between them, can clash horribly once they share personal space. Life isn’t a fairy tale where everything works out perfectly, with a happy ending for everyone tied up in a neat bow.

His phone vibrates, scattering the restless thoughts, and George opens his eyes, pausing for a moment before finally lifting it.

At least I’d die a happy man.

He stares at his phone for a while, heart fluttering so hard, George barely manages to breathe in.

Perhaps he’s stupid enough to believe in good endings anyway.

 //

 Anxiety, however, smells like sweat and gasoline.

It didn’t always, but now George doesn’t think he could ever be in an airplane and not remember this day. Sitting in a packed airplane, left leg jumping up and down, fingers tightly gripping his elbows, as George stares through the window and waits for the plane to take off. Begging, pleading his mind to change gears, think of anything else but the upcoming moment.

A child whines behind him, some lady argues with the flight attendant, the doors close, the engine starts, and then UK is just a smear of colours underneath him.

He leans back and lets time and space run its course.

 The Orlando airport is a mess of sounds and lights that grate on George’s groggy mind as he slowly makes his way to the baggage claim. His phone is quiet, and he can’t help but keep glancing at it, knowing full well there’s no answer to his short I’m here.

Fear firmly grips his throat in a fist, a cruel voice whispering dreadful forecast, no matter how hard George tries to not listen.

He’ll take one look at you, and he’ll see, it promises as George waits for his suitcase to show up. He’ll figure it out, now that there’s no screen to hide behind. And he’ll be disgusted. He’ll ask you to leave.

Dream wouldn’t, George wants to argue; but then again. Just how well does he know Dream?

This is the first time he’ll see him, and they’ve known each other for years now. There could be a stranger behind the screen, one not as kind and wonderful as the Dream he’s used to. One that would—

“George?”

The all-too-familiar voice stops George in his tracks, and his muscles lock up, brain painfully blank as he worries his bottom lip.

Eventually, perhaps after way too long, George turns around.

And there he is.

 He’s wearing a navy t-shirt and blue jeans, just as promised, and his smile is so wide it takes up half of his face, and George can’t tear his gaze away from it. He knows he should be exploring the face that’s brand new to him, committing all the features to memory so even weeks later, they’d be perfect and fresh.

And yet, it’s those peach-pink lips he can’t stop staring at, like some stereotypical fool.

“Dream?” he whispers, though his feet don’t dare to move.

“I knew I should’ve worn something brighter,” Dream says. His voice is light, and happy, and he’s coming closer, and George can’t quite breathe in, his chest seized in an iron grip.

He wants to answer with a quip, a joke, the way he could when it was just the two of them in a Discord call, but he realizes any words would be followed by tears; and that’s just not the way to make a first impression.

So, George stays quiet and lets his suitcase drop when Dream wraps his arms around him.

Dream is so warm. The cotton of his shirt is soft underneath George’s palms. He smells like summer, like citrus fruit and the ocean, and George almost instinctively buries his nose in his shoulder.

Dream’s breath stutters near George’s ear.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he whispers, lips brushing over George’s skin and sending waves of heat and cold down to his toes.

“Me too,” he answers, and pulls his best friend even closer, feeling complete and safe for the first time in a long, long while. “Me too.”

[to-read-or-not-to-read3088]

70+ disabled, neurodiverse and chronically ill authors COLLAB

This post is in collaboration with several other bloggers whose links are included here:

Artie Carden

Anniek

Hi! It’s been a while since I posted anything, but this post has been a month in the making. I have twenty books by twenty authors for my part in this collaboration, and you can check out the other parts of the collab with the links at the top of the post.

I haven’t read some of these books but almost all of them are on my to be read pile, and I did extensive research to make sure I got this right, but please let me know if there are any mistakes or if anything needs to be corrected.

1. Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee

📷

Meet Cute Diary follows Noah Ramirez who thinks he’s an expert on romance. He must be for his blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem. All the stories are fake. What started off as the fantasies of a trans boy who was afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe. Noah’s world unravels when a troll exposes the blog as fiction, and the only way to save the Diary is to convince everyone that the stories are true, but he doesn’t have any proof. That’s when Drew walks into Noah’s life, and the pieces fall into place. Drew is willing to fake date Noah to save the Diary. But when Noah’s feelings grow beyond their staged romance, he realises that dating in real life isn’t the same as finding love on the page.

The author, Emery Lee, is a kid lit author, artist and YouTuber hailing from a mixed racial background. After graduating with a degree in creative writing, e’s gone on to author novels, short stories and webcomics. When away from reading and writing, you’ll likely find em engaged in art or snuggling with cute dogs.

Emery Lee is nonbinary, and uses e/em pronouns, and e’s debut book, Meet Cute Diary, features a side character who is also nonbinary (and asexual!). Emery is also neurodivergent, and frequently speaks about what its like being a writer with adhd on twitter.

Meet Cute Diary is a book I only discovered last month, when it was published, but I’m excited to read it. It has representation of all kinds, and I love any book that has even a little mention of an asexual character because its so rare to see.

2. Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

📷

At Niveus Private Academy money paves the hallways, and the students are never less than perfect. Until now. Because an anonymous texter calling themselves Aces, is bringing two students’ dark secrets to light. Devon, a talented musician, buries himself in rehearsals, but he can’t escape the spotlight when his private photos go public. Chiamaka, head girl, isn’t afraid to get what she wants, but soon everyone will know the price she has paid for power. Someone is out to get them both. Someone who holds all the aces. And they’re planning much more than a high school game.

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, is the author of the instant New York Times and IndieBound bestseller, Ace of Spades, billed as ‘Get out meets Gossip Girl’. Entertainment Weekly has called it “this summer’s hottest YA debut”. She was born and raised in Croydon, South London, and Faridah moved to the Scottish Highlands for her undergraduate degree where she completed a BA in English Literature. She has established and runs and mentorship scheme for unagented writers of colour, helping them on their journey to get published. Faridah has also written for NME, The Bookseller, Readers Digest and gal-dem.

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s book is one that I pre-ordered months in advance, after discovering that I actually really liked this sub-genre of YA, and although I still haven’t read it yet (sorry!), I’m still super excited to dive into it. From what I hear, it has some gay rep, which we all know by now is something I seek out in my books.

3. Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses by Kristen O’Neal

📷

Priya has worked hard to pursue her pre med dreams at Stanford, but a diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease during her sophomore year sends her straight back to her loving but overbearing family in New Jersey and leaves her wondering if she’ll ever be able to return to the way things were. Thankfully she has her online pen pal, Brigid, and the rest of the members of “oof ouch my bones,” a virtual support group that meets on Discord to crack jokes and vent about their own chronic illnesses. When Brigid suddenly goes offline, Priya does something very out of character; she steals the family car and drives to Pennsylvania to check on Brigid. Priya isn’t sure what to expect, but it isn’t the creature that’s shut in the basement. With Brigid nowhere in sight, Priya begins to puzzle together an impossible but obvious truth: the creature might be werewolf – and the werewolf might be Brigid. As Brigid’s unique condition worsens, their friendship will be deepened and challenged in unexpected ways, forcing them to reckon with their own ideas of what it means to be normal.

Kristen O’Neal is a freelance writer who’s written for sites like Buzzfeed Reader, Christianity Today, Birth.Movies.Death, LitHub and Electric Literature. She writes about faith, culture, and unexplained phenomena. Her debut novel, Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses is based on her own experiences with being chronically ill. Kristen has two autoimmune disorders and “a number of other problems and issues” with her body. According to her website, she is doing much better than she used to, but still has flares somewhat regularly.

I cannot describe the feeling of seeing a published book with the best group chat name I have ever seen. Oof ouch my bones is absolutely something that I would be part of if it really existed, because its just such a mood, and funny at the same time. I pre ordered this book too, but like all the others, I still haven’t gotten around to reading it. I’m super excited about it though and cannot recommend it enough.

4. Only Mostly Devastated by Sophie Gonzales

📷

Will Tavares is the dream summer fling – he’s fun, affectionate, kind – but just when Ollie thinks he’s found his Happily Ever After, summer vacation ends, and Will stops texting Ollie back. Now Ollie is one prince short of his fairy tale ending, and to complicate the fairy tale further, a family emergency sees Ollie uprooted and enrolled at a new school across the country. Which he minds a little less when he realises it’s the same school Will goes to…except Ollie finds out that the sweet, comfortably queer guy he knew from summer isn’t the same one attending Collinswood High. This Will is a class clown, closeted – and to be honest, a jerk. Ollie has no intention of pining after a guy who clearly isn’t ready for a relationship, especially since this new, bro-y jock version of Will seems to go from hot to cold every other week. But then Will starts “coincidentally” popping up in every area of Ollie’s life, from music class to the lunch table, and Ollie finds his resolve weakening. The last time he gave Will his heart, Will handed it back to him trampled and battered. Ollie would have to be an idiot to trust him with it again. Right? Right.

Sophie Gonzales was born and raised in Whyalla, South Australia, where the Outback Meets the Sea. She now lives in Melbourne, where there’s no outback in sight. Sophie’s been writing since the age of five, when her mother decided to help her type out one of the stories she had come up with in the bathtub. They ran into artistic differences when five-year-old Sophie insisted that everybody die in the end, while her mother wanted the characters to simply go out for a milkshake. Since then, Sophie has been completing her novels without a transcript. Sophie Gonzales tweets about her experiences with ADHD on her twitter.

Only mostly devasted is one of the few books on this list that I’ve read. I read the whole thing in one sitting because I just couldn’t put it down, which is weird because I normally don’t read contemporary at all. I have recommended this book to literally everyone I know, and even bought my best friend a copy to convince her to read it.

5. The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd Jones

📷

Seventeen-year-old Aderyn ("Ryn") only cares about two things: her family, and her family's graveyard. And right now, both are in dire straits. Since the death of their parents, Ryn and her siblings have been scraping together a meagre existence as gravediggers in the remote village of Colbren, which sits at the foot of a harsh and deadly mountain range that was once home to the fae. The problem with being a gravedigger in Colbren, though, is that the dead don't always stay dead. The risen corpses are known as "bone houses," and legend says that they're the result of a decades-old curse. When Ellis, an apprentice mapmaker with a mysterious past, arrives in town, the bone houses attack with new ferocity. What is it that draws them near? And more importantly, how can they be stopped for good? Together, Ellis and Ryn embark on a journey that will take them deep into the heart of the mountains, where they will have to face both the curse and the long-hidden truths about themselves.

Emily Lloyd-Jones grew up on a vineyard in rural Oregon, where she played in evergreen forests and learned to fear sheep. After graduating from Western Oregon University with an English degree, she enrolled in the publishing program at Rosemont College just outside of Philadelphia. She currently resides in Northern California.

Another book on my to be read pile that I’m super excited to read, but still haven’t gotten around to. This one features disability rep, but because I haven’t read it, I don’t know much more, sorry guys.

6. Mooncakes by Susanne Walker and Wendy Xu

📷Nova Huang knows more about magic than your average teen witch. She works at her grandmothers' bookshop, where she helps them loan out spell books and investigate any supernatural occurrences in their New England town. One fateful night, she follows reports of a white wolf into the woods, and she comes across the unexpected: her childhood crush, Tam Lang, battling a horse demon in the woods. As a werewolf, Tam has been wandering from place to place for years, unable to call any town home. Pursued by dark forces eager to claim the magic of wolves and out of options, Tam turns to Nova for help. Their latent feelings are rekindled against the backdrop of witchcraft, untested magic, occult rituals, and family ties both new and old in this enchanting tale of self-discovery.

Suzanne Walker is a Chicago-based writer and editor. She is co-creator of the Hugo-nominated graphic novel Mooncakes (2019, Lion Forge/Oni Press). Her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine, and she has published nonfiction articles with Uncanny Magazine, StarTrek.com, Women Write About Comics, and the anthology Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability. She has spoken at numerous conventions on a variety of topics ranging from disability representation in sci-fi/fantasy to comics collaboration.

Wendy Xu is a Brooklyn-based illustrator and comics artist. She is co-creator of and currently draws the webcomic Mooncakes. Her work has been featured on Tor.com, as part of the Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion exhibit permanently housed at the Chinese Historical Society of America, and in Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology. She occasionally teaches at the Asian American Writers Workshop and currently works as an assistant editor curating young adult and children’s books.

Suzanne Walker suffers from hearing loss, something that she wrote into her graphic novel, Mooncakes, making Nova hard of hearing. I read this in a few years ago as an advance reader copy for Netgalley and it was honestly one of the best graphic novels I have ever read. The main characters are Chinese American, queer AND magic, which is an amazing combination of representation.

7. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

📷

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone… A convict with a thirst for revenge A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager A runaway with a privileged past A spy known as the Wraith A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.

Leigh Bardugo is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of fantasy novels and the creator of the Grishaverse (now a Netflix original series) which spans the Shadow and Bone Trilogy, the Six of Crows Duology, The Language of Thorns, and King of Scars—with more to come. Her short stories can be found in multiple anthologies, including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her other works include Wonder Woman: Warbringer and Ninth House (Goodreads Choice Winner for Best Fantasy 2019) which is being developed for television by Amazon Studios.

Leigh grew up in Southern California and graduated from Yale University. These days she lives and writes in Los Angeles.

In the acknowledgements section of Six of Crows, Bardugo reveals she suffers from osteonecrosis and sometimes needs to use a cane; this was a source of inspiration for one of the story's six protagonists, master thief and gang boss Kaz Brekker, who uses a cane.

I read Six of Crows a few years ago and I really loved it. I’m not going to pretend I managed to finish the whole Grishaverse series, because I haven’t even gotten close yet, but it really showed Kaz’s struggles with his disability, and his mental health. This is part of a duology, and the duology is part of a large series of books with another duology and trilogy, but Six of Crows can be read without reading the others.

8. Hyperbole and A Half by Allie Brosh

📷

This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative--like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it--but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So, I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book: Pictures Words Stories about things that happened to me Stories about things that happened to other people because of me Eight billion dollars* Stories about dogs The secret to eternal happiness* *These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!

Allie is an American blogger, writer and comic artist best known for her blog in the form of a webcomic Hyperbole and a Half. Brosh started Hyperbole in 2009 and told stories from her life in a mix of text and intentionally crude illustrations. She has published two books telling stories in the same style, both of which have been New York Times bestsellers. Brosh lives with severe depression and ADHD, and her comics on depression have won praise from fans and mental health professionals.

Another book on my tbr that I just haven’t gotten around to but really want to.

9. The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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What if you aren’t the Chosen One? The one who’s supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death? What if you’re like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world, and sometimes you just must find the extraordinary in your ordinary life. Even if your best friend is worshipped by mountain lions...

Patrick Ness, an award-winning novelist, has written for England’s Radio 4 and Sunday Telegraph and is a literary critic for The Guardian. He has written many books, including the Chaos Walking Trilogy, The Crash of Hennington, Topics About Which I Know Nothing, and A Monster Calls. He has won numerous awards, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Booktrust Teenage Prize, and the Costa Children’s Book Award. Born in Virginia, he currently lives in London.

Patrick Ness has written about OCD and anxiety in at least two of his books, inspired by his own experiences with the two disorders and how it affects him (The Rest of Us Just Live Here & Release)

10. Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire

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Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children No Solicitations No Visitors No Quests Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else. But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children. Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world. But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of the matter. No matter the cost.

Seanan lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.

Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the "marginally." It probably doesn't help that she has so many hobbies.

Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.

Seanan McGuire has an invisible disability due to herniated disks in her spine. She is slowly coming to terms with this, and talks about it occasionally on her twitter, and about the struggles she faces.

I loved this book, and so did my best friend. We both read it in one sitting and talked nonstop about it afterwards. Although short, its filled with amazing characters, plot, and representation (asexual character!!)

11. Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan

Each year, eight beautiful girls are chosen as Paper Girls to serve the king. It's the highest honour they could hope for...and the most demeaning. This year, there's a ninth. And instead 📷of paper, she's made of fire. In this richly developed fantasy, Lei is a member of the Paper caste, the lowest and most persecuted class of people in Ikhara. She lives in a remote village with her father, where the decade-old trauma of watching her mother snatched by royal guards for an unknown fate still haunts her. Now, the guards are back and this time it's Lei they're after -- the girl with the golden eyes whose rumoured beauty has piqued the king's interest. Over weeks of training in the opulent but oppressive palace, Lei and eight other girls learns the skills and charm that befit a king's consort. There, she does the unthinkable -- she falls in love. Her forbidden romance becomes enmeshed with an explosive plot that threatens her world's entire way of life. Lei, still the wide-eyed country girl at heart, must decide how far she's willing to go for justice and revenge.

Natasha Ngan is a writer and yoga teacher. She grew up between Malaysia, where the Chinese side of her family is from, and the UK. This multicultural upbringing continues to influence her writing, and she is passionate about bringing diverse stories to teens. Ngan studied Geography at the University of Cambridge before working as a social media consultant and fashion blogger. She lives in France with her partner, where they recently moved from Paris to be closer to the sea. Her novel Girls of Paper and Fire was a New York Times bestseller. Natasha has a heart condition, and talks about her struggles with her health, and gives updates on her health and her books on twitter.

I’ve heard a lot about this book, but for trigger warning reasons it sadly isn’t on my to be read list. Everything I’ve heard about it says its an amazing book though, and the cover is beautiful.

12. Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde

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Three friends, two love stories, one convention: this fun, feminist love letter to geek culture is all about fandom, friendship, and finding the courage to be yourself. Charlie likes to stand out. She’s a vlogger and actress promoting her first movie at SupaCon, and this is her chance to show fans she’s over her public breakup with co-star Reese Ryan. When internet-famous cool-girl actress Alyssa Huntington arrives as a surprise guest, it seems Charlie’s long-time crush on her isn’t as one-sided as she thought. Taylor likes to blend in. Her brain is wired differently, making her fear change. And there’s one thing in her life she knows will never change: her friendship with her best guy friend Jamie—no matter how much she may secretly want it to. But when she hears about a fan contest for her favourite fandom, she starts to rethink her rules on playing it safe.

Jen Wilde is the YA author of QUEENS OF GEEK, THE BRIGHTSIDERS and GOING OFF SCRIPT. She writes unapologetically queer stories about geeks, rockstars, and fangirls who smash the patriarchy in their own unique ways. Her books have been praised in Teen Vogue, Buzzfeed, Autostraddle, Vulture and Bustle. Originally from Australia, Jen now lives in NYC where she spends her time writing, drinking too much coffee and binging reality TV.

Researching for this collab was the first time this book popped up on my radar as something I might be interested in reading. Jen Wilde, the author, is herself autistic and suffers from anxiety, which gives the narrative “authenticity that is lacking in similar books” according to socialjusticebooks.org.

13. The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli

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Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love—she’s lived through it twenty-six times. She crushes hard and crushes often, but always in secret. Because no matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her to woman up, Molly can’t stomach the idea of rejection. So, she’s careful. Fat girls always have to be careful. Then a cute new girl enters Cassie’s orbit, and for the first time ever, Molly’s cynical twin is a lovesick mess. Meanwhile, Molly’s totally not dying of loneliness—except for the part where she is. Luckily, Cassie’s new girlfriend comes with a cute hipster-boy sidekick. Will is funny and flirtatious and just might be perfect crush material. Maybe more than crush material. And if Molly can win him over, she’ll get her first kiss and she’ll get her twin back. There’s only one problem: Molly’s co-worker Reid. He’s an awkward Tolkien superfan with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there’s absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right?

Becky Albertalli is the author of the acclaimed novels Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (film: Love, Simon), The Upside of Unrequited, and Leah on the Offbeat. She is also the co-author of What If It's Us with Adam Silvera. A former clinical psychologist who specialized in working with children and teens, Becky lives with her family in Atlanta.

Becky Albertalli has generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), and has spoken about it in several interviews, which you can find online. She has also written several characters in her books who also suffer with anxiety. Her first book, Simon vs the Homosapien’s Agenda (or Love, Simon), is the only book of hers that I have read so far, and I loved it. It was the first contemporary book that I read and actually enjoyed.

14. Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth

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Cyra is the sister of the brutal tyrant who rules the Shotet people. Cyra’s current gift gives her pain and power—something her brother exploits, using her to torture his enemies. But Cyra is much more than just a blade in her brother’s hand: she is resilient, quick on her feet, and smarter than he knows. Akos is the son of a farmer and an oracle from the frozen nation-planet of Thuvhe. Protected by his unusual currentgift, Akos is generous in spirit, and his loyalty to his family is limitless. Once Akos and his brother are captured by enemy Shotet soldiers, Akos is desperate to get his brother out alive—no matter what the cost. Then Akos is thrust into Cyra's world, and the enmity between their countries and families seems insurmountable. Will they help each other to survive, or will they destroy one another?

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, the Fates Divide), The End and Other Beginnings collection of short fiction, and many short stories and essays. Her first book for adult audiences, Chosen Ones, is out now. She lives in Chicago.

Veronica Roth suffers from anxiety, like a lot of the authors on this list, and talks about it in interviews. A quote from one: "I've had an anxiety disorder my whole life, so I've been to therapy on and off throughout, before books and after books. I went back and tried to talk through some of the things I was feeling and experiencing, and it was helpful."

I’ve never read any of her books, not even the hugely famous Divergent trilogy, though they’ve been on my radar for years. I’d love to get into her books at some point, but it might take me a few years.

15. How to be Autistic by Charlotte Amelia Poe

📷An urgent, funny, shocking, and impassioned memoir by the winner of the Spectrum Art Prize 2018, How To Be Autistic by Charlotte Amelia Poe presents the rarely shown point of view of someone living with autism. Poe’s voice is confident, moving and often funny, as they reveal to us a very personal account of autism, mental illness, gender and sexual identity. As we follow Charlotte’s journey through school and college, we become as awestruck by their extraordinary passion for life as by the enormous privations that they must undergo to live it. From food and fandom to body modification and comic conventions, Charlotte’s experiences through the torments of schooldays and young adulthood leave us with a riot of conflicting emotions: horror, empathy, despair, laugh-out-loud amusement and, most of all, respect. For Charlotte, autism is a fundamental aspect of their identity and art. They address the reader in a voice that is direct, sharply clever and ironic. They witness their own behaviour with a wry humour as they sympathise with those who care for them, yet all the while challenging the neurotypical narratives of autism as something to be ‘fixed’. This is an exuberant, inspiring, life-changing insight into autism from a viewpoint almost entirely missing from public discussion. ‘I wanted to show the side of autism that you don’t find in books and on Facebook. My story is about survival, fear and, finally, hope. There will be parts that make you want to cover your eyes, but I beg you to read on, because if I can change just one person’s perceptions, if I can help one person with autism feel like they’re less alone, then this will all be worth it.’ Charlotte Amelia Poe is a self-taught artist and writer living in Lowestoft, Suffolk. They also work with video and won the inaugural Spectrum Art Prize with the film they submitted, 'How to Be Autistic’. Myriad published Charlotte's memoir, How to Be Autistic, in September 2019.

Another book I didn’t know about until researching for this post, but I really want to read it because I haven’t read many books about autism, and practically none of them were actually written by someone who actually is autistic. Charlotte uses they/them pronouns.

16. Ask me about my Uterus by Abby Norman

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For any woman who has experienced illness, chronic pain, or endometriosis comes an inspiring memoir advocating for recognition of women's health issues In the fall of 2010, Abby Norman's strong dancer's body dropped forty pounds and grey hairs began to sprout from her temples. She was repeatedly hospitalized in excruciating pain, but the doctors insisted it was a urinary tract infection and sent her home with antibiotics. Unable to get out of bed, much less attend class, Norman dropped out of college and embarked on what would become a years-long journey to discover what was wrong with her. It wasn't until she took matters into her own hands--securing a job in a hospital and educating herself over lunchtime reading in the medical library--that she found an accurate diagnosis of endometriosis. In Ask Me About My Uterus, Norman describes what it was like to have her pain dismissed, to be told it was all in her head, only to be taken seriously when she was accompanied by a boyfriend who confirmed that her sexual performance was, indeed, compromised. Putting her own trials into a broader historical, sociocultural, and political context, Norman shows that women's bodies have long been the battleground of a never-ending war for power, control, medical knowledge, and truth. It's time to refute the belief that being a woman is a pre-existing condition.

Abby Norman’s debut book, ASK ME ABOUT MY UTERUS: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, was published by Bold Type Books (Hachette Book Group) in 2018, with advance praise from Gillian Anderson, Lindsey Fitzharris, Jenny Lawson, and Padma Lakshmi.

The book was praised by The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times, The Irish Times, Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, Book Riot, Toronto Star, ELLE, Health Magazine, Undark Magazine, BUST Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Ms. Magazine, BBC Radio 5, and other international media outlets.

​In 2019, the paperback edition was published in the U.S. and the Korean translation in Seoul (Momento Publishing/Duran Kim Agency).

​Her work has been featured in Harper’s, Medium, The Independent, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. Interviews and profiles have been seen and heard, including NPR/WNYC, BBC, Anchor.fm, The New York Times, Playboy, Forbes, Glamour, Women’s Health, and Bitch Magazine.

Abby Norman suffers from endometriosis, which was a large part of why she wrote her book, and why she advocates so hard for fellow patients at conferences such as Stanford University’s Stanford Medicine X and the Endometriosis Foundation of America’s medical conference and Patient Day. She is

Abby has served on technical expert panels including the National Partnership for Women and Families’ CORE Network (Yale University), the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid, The Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR), and Health Affairs.

​In 2019, Abby contributed to a paper addressing research gaps and unmet needs in endometriosis published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

This book is definitely one I will be adding to my to be read list, as someone who (unfortunately) also has a uterus, it is important to be informed. And Abby sounds like such a badass who wrote a whole book about her chronic illness to help others with the same condition.

17. Stim: Autistic Anthology by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

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Around one in one hundred people in the UK are autistic, yet there remains a fundamental misunderstanding of what autism is. It is rare that autistic people get to share their own experiences, show how creative and talented and passionate they are, how different they are from media stereotypes. This insightful and eye-opening collection of essays, fiction and visual art showcases the immense talents of some of the UK's most exciting writers and artists - who just happen to be on the spectrum. Here they reclaim the power to speak for themselves and redefine what it means to be autistic. Stim invites the reader into the lives, experiences, minds of the eighteen contributors, and asks them to recognise the hurdles of being autistic in a non-autistic world and to uncover the empathy and understanding necessary to continue to champion brilliant yet unheard voices.

Lizzie (Hux) Huxley-Jones is an autistic author and editor based in London. They are the editor of Stim, an anthology of autistic authors and artists, which was published by Unbound in April 2020 to coincide with World Autism Awareness Week. They are also the author of the children’s biography Sir David Attenborough: A Life Story. They can be found editing at independent micropublisher 3 of Cups Press, and they also advise writers as a freelance sensitivity reader and consultant. In their past career lives, they have been a research diver, a children’s bookseller and digital communications specialist.

I wasn’t even aware that there was an anthology out there by an autistic author, about autism, but now that I do I need to read it.

18. Chimera by Jaecyn Bonê

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Creatures unlike you've imagined before! Welcome to a world where myths and legends collide to create a new breed of monster. Savage and soulful, these monstrosities combine to form the mighty Chimera. In this anthology, talented writers weave 10 tales of fantastical beasts. Featuring stories by: Matt Bliss Jaecyn Boné Alexis L. Carroll Chris Durston Dewi Hargreaves Stephen Howard Samuel Logan Vincent Metzo Braden Rohl Michelle Tang

Jaecyn is a queer, non-binary, disabled Asian-American writer and digital artist fascinated by faeries.

Most of their writing involves wlw romance and faery-inspired creatures. Their first novel, Farzana's Spite is a 10-year-old work in progress and the first novel in The Faerth series. Other works include The Killing Song (novel) and Colour Unknown (short), both of which are also part of the Faerth universe.

Jaecyn's art can be described as a neorealistic pop art style with cel shading. They began their digital art journey with a 5-year-old refurbished iPad using their finger as a stylus and immediately fell in love. They do digital download commissions as well as sell prints of their artwork.

Jaecyn is the Co-Editor in Chief of the Limeoncello Magazine, an online Own Voices literary magazine which debuted its first issue on March 21st, 2021.

When not writing, drawing, or chasing after their two children, they can be found either gardening or practicing their ukulele.

None of Jaecyn Boné’s books are published yet as they are still in the stage of querying, but they contributed to the above anthology, along with nine other authors. I had no idea that this anthology existed, and now I’ll be closely following this author to see when their books get published!

19. Forest of Souls by Lori M Lee

Sirscha Ashwyn comes from nothing, but she’s intent on becoming something. After years of training to become the queen’s next royal spy, her plans are derailed when shamans attack 📷and kill her best friend Saengo. And then Sirscha, somehow, restores Saengo to life. Unveiled as the first soul guide in living memory, Sirscha is summoned to the domain of the Spider King. For centuries, he has used his influence over the Dead Wood—an ancient forest possessed by souls—to enforce peace between the kingdoms. Now, with the trees growing wild and untamed, only a soul guide can restrain them. As war looms, Sirscha must master her newly awakened abilities before the trees shatter the brittle peace, or worse, claim Saengo, the friend she would die for.

Lori M. Lee is the author of speculative novels and short stories. Her books include PAHUA AND THE SOUL STEALER (Disney/Rick Riordan Presents), FOREST OF SOULS and the sequel BROKEN WEB (Page Street), and more. She’s also a contributor to the anthologies A THOUSAND BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS and COLOR OUTSIDE THE LINES. She considers herself a unicorn fan, enjoys marathoning TV shows, and loves to write about magic, manipulation, and family.

Lori struggles with anxiety, and the common symptoms like fatigue but she doesn’t let this stop her writing amazing books. I read Forest of Souls earlier this year, and it was seriously one of the best books I’ve ever read. I loved the magic, the characters, the world building. Everything about it, including the plot twist ending that had me losing my mind at 2am, was just so unlike anything I had read in any other fantasy before.

20. A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A Brown

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For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of Ziran. But when a vengeful spirit abducts Malik’s younger sister, Nadia, as payment into the city, Malik strikes a fatal deal—kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran, for Nadia’s freedom. But Karina has deadly aspirations of her own. Her mother, the Sultana, has been assassinated; her court threatens mutiny; and Solstasia looms like a knife over her neck. Grief-stricken, Karina decides to resurrect her mother through ancient magic . . . requiring the beating heart of a king. And she knows just how to obtain one: by offering her hand in marriage to the victor of the Solstasia competition. When Malik rigs his way into the contest, they are set on a course to destroy each other. But as attraction flares between them and ancient evils stir, will they be able to see their tasks to the death?

Roseanne “Rosie” A. Brown was born in Kumasi, Ghana and immigrated to the wild jungles of central Maryland as a child. Writing was her first love, and she knew from a young age that she wanted to use the power of writing—creative and otherwise—to connect the different cultures she called home. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a Bachelor’s in Journalism and was also a teaching assistant for the school’s Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House program. Her journalistic work has been featured by Voice of America among other outlets.

On the publishing side of things, she has worked as an editorial intern at Entangled Publishing. Rosie was a 2017 Pitch Wars mentee and 2018 Pitch Wars mentor. Rosie currently lives outside Washington D.C., where in her free time she can usually be found wandering the woods, making memes, or thinking about Star Wars.

Roseanne is another author that struggles with anxiety and wrote one of her two main characters with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), despite it being a fantasy. I don’t even think I can name a fantasy that had a character with anxiety represented so well. This was a book I read around the same time as Forest of Souls, and I loved it. The cover was beautiful, the characters were brilliant, and I just loved the world building, the magic, and the plot. It was just different to the usual fantasy books I read, and I enjoyed the variation so much I’ve had the sequel pre ordered almost a year in advance.

So, this was my 20 books by 20 chronically ill, disabled or neurodiverse authors list. Blurbs and synopsis were compiled between Goodreads and author websites, and bios were found either on Goodreads, author websites or on amazon author pages. All the information about their chronic illnesses, disabilities or neurodivergence was found online, where they had either explicitly said it or written about it, but if I have something wrong, please let me know so I can fix it!

If you have any other suggestions or know any other books and authors that should be on this list, please let me know and I’ll do my best to add it to the list as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading 😊

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS & STUDIES - APRIL 2019

Welcome to CindyLouWho2′s periodic roundup of news, tutorials and studies from the world of ecommerce, content marketing & social media. This is my first time posting this news here on my new Tumblr account, so please let me know how the format is working out; I want to make it as readable as possible. I am working on making the links a little more obvious; I may have to change templates to do that. 

Sorry it is so long this time. I am working on getting it back down to a post once every 10 days at most, but it might take me til May to get back on track. 

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Google core algorithm update started March 12; early winners & losers here and here, among other info about the update.

Also, Google accidentally de-indexed some pages last week, & they are still working on fixing it.

Etsy phone support finally available to everyone (if you speak English, of course).

Amazon no longer requires Marketplace sellers to keep their prices elsewhere the same or higher as on Amazon.

Worldpay, one of Etsy’s payment providers, sold to FIS for $35 billion.  (Etsy also uses Ayden for some of their payment processing.)  

TOP ETSY NEWS

Last week, Etsy sent emails to non-US sellers, telling them that their refunds for the overcharging that has been going on since October 2018 will be issued by the end of the day, June 30th (or earlier). It doesn’t mention when they will stop overcharging, though. 

Etsy held Investor Day on March . You can view the slides that went along with the presentations, and there is a short summary of the search info discussed here. CEO Josh Silverman then did an interview with CNBC (video only), which is summarized here. 

There was an Etsy podcast on search questions (links to recording, and transcription), but it didn’t have any new info. 

They’ve also released their spring & summer trends report, with a podcast & transcript, as well as a lengthy pdf file with keyword data (I will be summarizing that separately). 

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz) is doing a series of 10-minute Whiteboard Friday presentations on learning SEO basics, with both video & transcripts included in the links.  Remember, some of these things do not apply to Etsy shops, but can apply to your website, depending on the coding.

Part 1, SEO strategy;  It assumes some knowledge of marketing terms, but the SEO part is definitely intro-level

Part 2, keyword research.  Long tail: “20% of all searches that Google receives each day they have never seen before.”

Part 3: satisfy searcher needs. 

Part 4:  optimizing through keywords & other elements.

And Moz’s Beginners Guide to SEO is finally fully updated. (Some parts are more technical, so stick to the on-page stuff if you are really new to this.) 

Chrome now offering the ability to select privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo as your browser default. This should increase DDG’s slice of traffic if Google continues this.

Google released its Webspam report for 2018. 

Hmm, wonder why I would come across SEO tips for Tumblr this edition?  🤔

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA 

(includes blogging & emails)

19 call-to-action phrases you should be using on social media (infographic)

10 tips for more clicks on your social media posts

US social media expansion has plateaued, but podcasts’ popularity continues to grow. 23% of US homes have a “smart speaker” (Alexa etc.); 56% have a tablet. Smartphone ownership has also levelled off. 

Related - most Americans dislike/do not trust social media.

3 tips for great social media content (infographic), & 4 more tips for writing social media posts.

Email marketing stats that show its impact. If you don’t already have an email list, it is time to start one. After all these years, it still works!

Instagram beta-testing checkout within the app; US brands only for the moment.

Facebook was storing your passwords in plain text & many employees had access.  “My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords.”

Did you know you can remove your last name from your public Facebook profile? (Plus 12 other Facebook facts & tricks)

Create great pins on Pinterest.

Pinterest files for IPO; admits that Google changes last year hurt it. 

Backgrounder on short video sharing site TikTok.

Twitter Analytics has an events page that tips you off to annual events you may want to tweet about/around, under the Events tab in your Analytics.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Beginners’ guide to cost per click (CPC) ads - includes Google, Facebook, & Instagram.

Facebook & Instagram ad costs have rocketed since the site-wide outages on March 13.

Facebook’s advice on optimizing your Facebook ads.

Google fined by EU for blocking other ads. 

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

Ecommerce reports in Google Analytics (for websites, not Etsy shops). 

5 Instagram analytics tips.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Microsoft considers competing with Shopify.

eBay states it uses artificial intelligence (AI) pretty much everywhere on its site, as do most big sites.

eBay adds Google Pay as a payment option.

Half of US households will belong to Amazon Prime this year.  “Amazon Household, a program that allows different members of a single household, including teens, to have their own log-in for shopping and viewing of Prime content, was specifically cited by eMarketer as a factor driving adoption.”

Shopify is ending its MailChimp integration; interesting article here. “Mailchimp wrote a blog post stating that it asked Shopify to remove the Mailchimp integration from the Shopify marketplace. Mailchimp’s reasoning behind the move was due to the new term requiring partners to send back any data collected “on behalf of the merchant” back to Shopify. According to Joni Deus, director of partnerships at Mailchimp, that data (in Mailchimp’s eyes) doesn’t belong to Shopify.”

This is seen as a battle for data, a lot of which flows through APIs (APIs are how third party tools integrate with websites, like Etsy & label providers such as Shippo & Pirate Ship).

Square improves a bunch of ecommerce tools including social media integrations.  They bought Weebly a year ago, & are using that to make changes to Square Online Store and Square for Retail.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Tone is key to good customer service. I like the bit about answering apparently stupid questions - making the customer feel stupid (even if 99% of readers would agree the question was stupid) is usually not a good approach. But it can be hard to weed out negative tone. Other good quotes: “Directing the conversation away from the negative aspects and focusing instead on the proposed solution helps customers accept the situation and reduces the odds that they will be upset.” and “It almost doesn’t matter how good the news is; if it comes after “actually,” I feel like I was somehow wrong about something.”

Figuring out what motivates your customers.

Ecommerce customer service 101. 

MISCELLANEOUS (INCLUDING HUMOUR)

Facial recognition software is scraping the photos you post online to improve their software. “Despite IBM’s assurances that Flickr users can opt out of the database, NBC News discovered that it’s almost impossible to get photos removed. �� There may, however, be legal recourse in some jurisdictions thanks to the rise of privacy laws acknowledging the unique value of photos of people’s faces. Under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, photos are considered “sensitive personal information” if they are used to confirm an individual’s identity. Residents of Europe who don’t want their data included can ask IBM to delete it. If IBM doesn’t comply, they can complain to their country’s data protection authority, which, if the particular photos fall under the definition of “sensitive personal information,” can levy fines against companies that violate the law.

In the U.S., some states have laws that could be relevant. Under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, for example, it can be a violation to capture, store and share biometric information without a person’s written consent. According to the act, biometric information includes fingerprints, iris scans and face geometry.”

Cookie warnings are getting really complicated in some jurisdictions. 

Microsoft killed Clippy again.

American drunk shopping continues to increase.

Posted April 8, 2019. 

[michaelandy101-blog]

5 Creative Ways to Use Social Media Data as a Source for Your Content

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/5-creative-ways-to-use-social-media-data-as-a-source-for-your-content/

5 Creative Ways to Use Social Media Data as a Source for Your Content

Creating powerful, newsworthy, and informative content is the goal, but it can be hard to achieve if it’s not data-driven.

After creating content for seven years, our team fully believes that having data as the driving element in your content campaign is the differentiator between good content and newsworthy, link-worthy content.

Coming up with creative sources for your data-driven content can be difficult sometimes, especially if what you want to examine with your content can’t be revealed through a survey methodology or an existing data set.

There are hundreds of sources of data you can use to shape your content, but the type of data I’m focusing on today can be collected from scraping publicly available information from social media platforms.

Social media platforms offer something unique that other data sources cannot. When you scrape a social media platform with intention, you have the opportunity to acquire massive amounts of information from real people, in a matter of minutes.

With the right analysis, this information can glean insights into your topic of choice that the public wouldn’t have otherwise known. Any new, surprising, or controversial information you infer from the analysis will have journalists begging to take the exclusive and cover your content marketing campaign for their publisher.

In this post, I’m going to share five examples of social media scrapes that earned top-tier publisher press, and why they worked. But first — what does social media data scraping mean, anyway? 

What is social media data scraping?

Social media data scraping is a methodology that incorporates third-party technology to automatically scrape data from a website such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

By using third-party data scraping tools such as Octoparse or Parsehub, you’ll receive your data in a neat excel package that will then allow you to analyze it however you wish.

Popular aspects to analyze with social media data sets include conducting a sentiment analysis, analyzing volume and frequency of certain words or symbols, and looking at patterns of individual words with location data.

Next, let’s dive into how you can use the data you scrape as inspiration for future content. 

How to Use Social Media Data as a Source for Your Content

1. Peruse Instagram to come up with fun content ideas.

In our first example, we’ll look at a content campaign called #SexiestLocations on Instagram.

The execution of this project was fairly simple: our research team collected over 4 million posts on Instagram that contained the hashtag #sexy. They then analyzed the posts that included a geolocation tag. From this, they were able to glean the “sexiest” countries in the world, as well as U.S. states.

Safe to say, publishers ate it up.

While it’s actually impossible to truly learn what the sexiest place in the world is (sexy is a subjective term) our team produced a fun campaign for our client that used geo-bait to appeal to light-hearted online sites, like Glamour, E! Online, Women’s Health, and Elite Daily.

2. Explore Twitter to learn more about a pressing topic.

In our second example, we’ll look at a campaign covering a much different topic: college drinking habits.

In this methodology, rather than exploring Instagram, the team analyzed Tweets from Twitter instead. The researchers looked at tweets within a 1.5 mile radius of the center of small, four-year colleges and universities that included the keywords “drunk,” “drinking,” “alcohol,” “booze,” “beer,” or “wine.”

There are official rankings that come out every year that pit universities in America against each other for the top “party school” in the nation. This project speaks to this notion in a new way, by looking to data from Twitter to back up those claims.

This campaign speaks to the ongoing conversation about the problem and prevalence of dangerous levels of college drinking in America. Again, using geo-bait and highly targeted digital PR outreach, this campaign was able to earn coverage at the Huffington Post, Adweek, Elite Daily, and BroBible.

3. Don’t overlook niche social platforms, like Yelp.

You don’t just have to stick to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram when creating content from social media data. There is a world of niche community platforms that can give you so much unique, interesting information that you can’t find anywhere else.

For instance, this content example uses popular restaurant review platform Yelp to glean insights about Americans’ dining preferences. What are the most popular cuisines in different cities across America? Using Yelp’s Fusion API, this study analyzed more than 120,000 restaurants in the U.S. with their ratings, pricing, and restaurant categories.

Yelp turned out to be a treasure trove of solid data. This visualization shows viewers the most unique restaurants for each city, the number of restaurants, and more. From this, you can see that Boston has more bagel restaurants than other cities, per capita.

This project saw a lot of success very quickly — once the exclusive went live on the Temple University section of ULOOP, it quickly syndicated to other U.S. university sites and earned over 100 pieces of unique media coverage.

4. Analyze tweets for advanced textual insights.

There are times when using a Twitter scrape just isn’t enough, and you need external analysis. In one of the coolest uses of Twitter data I’ve seen, a campaign called “Most Powerful Women” does just that.

IBM Watson Personality Insights is a free online tool by IBM that allows you to analyze text for prevalence of character traits. Typically you might use this tool to analyze speeches that people have given, or articles they’ve written. In the absence of that, you can use their own personal Twitter timeline to get samples of their writing.

The study sought to find out what the similarities and differences are between some of the top 100 “most powerful” women in the world. From Oprah to Queen Elizabeth, the takeaways gleaned from this study are numerous.

The exclusive to this project went to Bravo, a site that often covers powerful women for their audience, anyway.

For those of us who want to be powerful women too, we can learn which traits will take us all the way to the top, based on the most common traits shared by these famous and powerful women.

5. Conduct a survey for more actionable insights.

In my final example, we’ll look at #AdAnalysis, a campaign that combines an Instagram scrape methodology with a survey of 1,000 Americans to derive fascinating insights on the topic of influencer marketing on Instagram.

The campaign researchers sought to answer a few questions: What types of photos are popular for advertisements, and which demographics respond to promoted posts the most positively?

The first question was answered with a data scraping, and the second was answered with a survey.

Combining the two methods of research allowed the campaign to offer more well-rounded and actionable insights to journalists and news publishers.

This campaign earned coverage for our clients’ desired niche with placements on Adweek, eMarketer, MarketingProfs, and Tech.co.

Best Practices for Scraping Social Media for Content Marketing Campaigns

After producing over a hundred social media scrape campaigns over the past seven years, we’ve learned first-hand what types of social media campaigns excel during digital PR outreach.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Yelp all have their unique benefits and can offer valuable insight into topics across the spectrum.

In this post, I walked through five campaigns that used social scraping as a methodology. All three campaigns represented diverse subject matter: college education, sex and relationships, food, leadership, and advertising. This methodology can clearly be used across all verticals — for nearly any brand in any niche.

Here’s some tips to keep in mind when producing content with a social media scrape.

Hashtags are typically subjective, so keep projects lighthearted in nature in order to earn major coverage.

Stay away from using social scrape methodologies to talk about things that are scientific or close to health topics — people looking for health advice should get information from licensed professionals.

Make sure that no matter the topic, whatever you produce contributes to an ongoing conversation.

Exercise caution when combining newsjacking and the scrape methodology, because trending news topics can become old very quickly if you don’t earn coverage immediately.

Happy scraping!

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[abangtech]

Improving Financial Sentiment Analysis with Machine Learning & Proxy Servers – Finance Magnates

Proxy servers can be used not only by IT-developers, they are also useful in the financial industry, namely in financial sentiment analysis. Let me explain.

In finance, data is ever so important: it provides insight and helps to make better decisions. Financial data is all around us, so the most successful companies are those which

The Most Diverse Audience to Date at FMLS 2020 – Where Finance Meets Innovation

know how to gather it, and

know how to interpret it.

An important subset is sentiment data — information on how people perceive the given product, event, idea, etc. The fundamental categories here are “perceive positively” and “perceive negatively”.

Until recently, sentiment data wasn’t quantifiable: It was impossible to measure people’s sentiments precisely. With the advent of natural language processing and machine learning, however, this task has finally become attainable.

In this article, we’ll explore how you can utilize sentiment analysis and web scraping to make better financial decisions.

Overview of sentiment analysis

Even the best industry professionals cannot keep up with all the latest news, reports, updates, and rumors. This data often drives the decision to, say, buy or sell the given company’s stock. Here’s a typical example: 

Amid growing concerns about COVID-19, the government of Country X decides to use video conferencing instead of holding in-person meetings.

Video Conferencing Software Y is one of the most popular video conferencing solutions on the market, so the markets are expecting Software Y to acquire a plethora of new users.

Software Y’s rise in popularity is reflected in its stock price. 

The scenario above borrows heavily from Zoom’s recent success, which can be illustrated by the following chart:

investing.com

To a certain degree, the process of analyzing this data — news, reports, updates, and rumors — can be automated

. Upon noticing a headline like “Coronavirus: Zoom Video to hire 500 new software engineers as usage surges”, this software would act according to the guidelines we provided (e.g. buy Zoom stock.)

Tesla’s stock jumped 2.5% after Tencent said it amassed a 5% stake in the electric car maker. Ocwen jumped 12% premarket after disclosing it reached a deal with New York regulators that will end third-party monitoring of its business within the next three weeks. In addition, restrictions on buying mortgage-servicing rights may get eased. Cara Therapeutics’s shares surged 16% premarket, after the biotech company reported positive results in a trial of a treatment for uremic pruritus.

Another great example is the recent tweet of Elon Musk: “Tesla stock price is too high imo”.

This has decreased Tesla’s stock price. Notice the dip on the 1st of May:

investing.com

The system that makes sentiment analysis possible is called natural language processing (or NLP for short.) As their name suggests, NLP algorithms are designed to analyze the meaning behind texts in natural (i.e. human-made: English or Chinese) languages. 

Although building and implementing an NLP system takes a lot of resources, the benefits make this endeavor worthwhile:’

The algorithm boasts superior reaction time: it executes commands in mere milliseconds and works 24/7.

It also offers scalability: Its “expertise” can be applied to — given enough computing resources — every source of financial data.

How does sentiment analysis work?

Every text has a certain attitude, either positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of the given text (in most cases, of individual phrases and sentences) via splitting it into individual words (called tokens), determining their attitude, and then determining the overall attitude of the target text.

This principle may seem confusing, so let’s play around with this technology ourselves.

Python programming language has an NLP-focused library called NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit). This website features an interactive implementation of NLTK’s sentiment analysis algorithm. Try inputting different sentences to see how the algorithm perceives them.

Let’s test the following sentences:

“This project is a great tool for processing raw data.”The algorithm determines that this text is positive.

“This project will change the tech landscape.” The algorithm determines that this text is neutral.

“This project failed to live up to its potential.” The algorithm determines that this text is negative.

Shortcomings of sentiment analysis algorithms

Previously, we used sentences with rather straightforward meanings in the interactive prompt: Words like “great” and “fail” usually mark the entire context. What about something more complex? Let’s try it out. 

Let’s take this phrase as an example: “The automobile industry has seen better days.” The algorithm determines that this text is neutral.

These examples show that traditional NLP algorithms have a hard time parsing implicit meanings:

Nuanced phrases,

Idioms,

Metaphors, etc.

Enhancing sentiment analysis with machine learning

This is where machine learning comes to rescue: We can train an ML algorithm on countless examples to make it “understand” the text’s context. Here’s a blueprint for such a project:

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FBS CopyTrade Became the Best Application for Copy Trading in 2020Go to article >>

Collect a dataset that focuses on financial sentiment texts.

Mark up each text’s sentiment.

Build a sentiment analysis model that is optimized for “financial language”.

The basis for a machine learning algorithm lies in huge volumes of data to train on: In our case, the algorithm would analyze news headlines and social media captions to try and see the correlations between texts and the meanings behind them. Given enough training material, the algorithm can “learn” (hence the name, machine learning) about the context around the given text.

David Wallach, the creator of various financial data scrapers, echoes the shortcomings of traditional (non-deep learning) algorithms:

One main objective of this project is to classify the sentiment of companies based on verified user’s tweets as well as articles published by reputable sources. Using current (free) text based sentiment analysis packages such as nltk, textblob, and others, I was unable to achieve decent sentiment analysis with regards to investing. 

For example, a tweet would say Amazon is a buy, you must invest now and these libraries would classify it as negative or neutral sentiment. This is due to the training sets these classifiers were built on. For this reason, I decided to write a script (scripts/classify.py) that takes in the json representation of the database downloaded from the Firebase console (using export to JSON option) and lets you manually classify each sentence.

We now see the importance of data in the sentiment analysis workflow. But how can we acquire it?

Overview of web scraping

In the term “sentiment analysis”, the “analysis” part refers to understanding the data — and the NLP algorithms we’ve explored earlier in the article can do just that. Web scraping, on the other hand, allows us to actually obtain the data to analyze.

Vladimir Fomenko, founder & CEO of Infatica.io

This term refers to the process of extracting and organizing data from websites. 

How does web scraping work?

Web scraping is possible thanks to the way that websites organize data. Each website element — text, link, image, dynamic functionality, and so on — belongs to its respective category, denoted by standardized HTML tags. 

A web scraper can navigate these elements with ease, locating and saving the data you need to gather. 

NLP applications in FinTech

For example, Stocker, software for scraping financial data, follows the processes we outlined above: 

It generates google queries, grabbing the latest articles that focus on a particular company.

Then, it parses the articles for information, trying to detect whether important pieces of information are positive or negative.

We can also use sentiment analysis in other areas:

Credit score analysis. Software product called LenddoScore can process the data available about the applicant online: This may include their social media profiles, browsing behavior, browsing history, and other markers. The software then rates the borrower’s creditworthiness.

Contracts analysis. JP Morgan has implemented a plethora of machine learning algorithms for numerous tasks. The company tested an NLP algorithm designed for contract analysis — and it has managed to save 360,000 man-hours in a year.

Customer service. Chatbots, the trendiest technology of the last few years, are powered by NLP algorithms. Financial institutions often pride themselves in offering great customer experience — and scaling their support via chatbots is a great way to do it. 

Using proxies to ensure that your analysis runs successfully

Most websites don’t allow web scraping for various reasons. Here’s a typical example: a price aggregator tries to collect price data from multiple e-commerce businesses. Once this data is published on the aggregator website, potential customers will see that Vendor M offers the best price. To prevent this, other vendors may restrict scraping their websites whatsoever.

Upon receiving a request to their website, they try to detect whether it comes from a genuine user or from a web scraping bot. While the genuine user gets a pass, the bot gets blocked.

However, it is possible to circumvent these anti-bot systems: using proxies, you can make your scrapers appear as real users.

Out of all the numerous proxy types, residential proxies are the optimal solution: as their name suggests, they allow your scraper to appear as a real user, a resident of the country you selected. This enables you to bypass anti-scraping systems.

Conclusion

Every trader decides which type of analysis to use and which trading techniques to implement. But to my mind, improving financial sentiment analysis with AI and proxy servers is the new word in trading. 

Vladimir Fomenko is the founder & CEO of Infatica.io, a global peer-to-business proxy network

Source

The post Improving Financial Sentiment Analysis with Machine Learning & Proxy Servers – Finance Magnates appeared first on abangtech.

from abangtech https://abangtech.com/improving-financial-sentiment-analysis-with-machine-learning-proxy-servers-finance-magnates/

[shirlleycoyle]

Algorithms Have Nearly Mastered Human Language. Why Can’t They Stop Being Sexist?

Teaching computers to understand human language used to be a tedious and imprecise process. Now, language algorithms analyze oceans of text to teach themselves how language works. The results can be unsettling, such as when the Microsoft bot Tay taught itself to be racist after a single day of exposure to humans on Twitter.

It turns out that data-fueled algorithms are no better than humans—and frequently, they’re worse.

“Data and datasets are not objective; they are creations of human design,” writes data researcher Kate Crawford. When designers miss or ignore the imprint of biased data on their models, the result is what Crawford calls a “signal problem,” where “data are assumed to accurately reflect the social world, but there are significant gaps, with little or no signal coming from particular communities.”

Siri, Google Translate, and job applicant tracking systems all use the same kind of algorithm to talk to humans. Like other machine learning systems, NLPs (short for “natural language processors” or sometimes “natural language programs”) are bits of code that comb through vast troves of human writing and churn out something else––insights, suggestions, even policy recommendations. And like all machine learning applications, a NLP program’s functionality is tied to its training data––that is, the raw information that has informed the machine’s understanding of the reading material.

Skewed data is a very old problem in the social sciences, but machine learning hides its bias under a layer of confusion. Even AI researchers who work with machine learning models––like neural nets, which use weighted variables to approximate the decision-making functions of a human brain––don’t know exactly how bias creeps into their work, let alone how to address it.

As NLP systems creep into every corner of the digital world, from job recruitment software to hate speech detectors to police data, that signal problem grows to fit the size of its real-world container. Every industry that uses machine language solutions risks contamination. Algorithms given jurisdiction over public services like healthcare frequently exacerbate inequalities, excusing the ancient practice of shifting blame the most vulnerable populations for their circumstances in order to redistribute the best services to the least in need; models that try to predict where crime will occur can wind up making racist police practices even worse.

BIAS FROM THE MACHINE

The first step to fixing a sexist algorithm is admitting it’s not “broken.” Machine bias is human bias, and it can start polluting the data before the decision-making code even starts to run. The selling point of machine learning is that it teaches itself, to varying degrees, how to learn from the data it is given.

“You don’t tell an NLP the grammatical rules of the language explicitly,” said Ran Zmigrod, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Cambridge who specializes in “debiasing” these models.

Instead, Zmigrod explained, the code uses training data to identify the language’s important rules, and then applies those rules to the task on a smaller, more focused dataset. One way a model might do this is with Markov chains, which estimate how closely associated two elements are by seeing how well the presence of one predicts the presence of the other. For example, it checks whether having “homemaker” in a text correlates with the word “she.”

If that just sounds like a fancy way of running the numbers, it’s because that’s exactly what it is. “People see machine learning as something supernatural, but I just view it as a very elaborate statistics,” Andrea Eunbee Jang, a research intern at the Montréal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), told Motherboard.

Jang is part of a project at MILA that, last year, developed a taxonomy for all the types of gender bias found in NLP datasets. The programmer masculinity problem, according to Jang, is a prime example of a “gender generalization,” or an assumption based on over-valuing of gender stereotypes. “In machine learning in general, data will be tailored for the majority group,” Jang said. Added fellow researcher Yasmeen Hitti: “If the text the model is based on has only seen male programmers, it will assume that the programmer you’re typing about is also male. It just depends on what it’s seen before.”

SEXISM, EMBEDDED

Though projects that scrape new data from Twitter and YouTube have begun to dot the academic landscape, the traditional “ground truth” datasets used to build NLPs come from free collections—like the e-book archives at Project Gutenberg, collections of movie and restaurant reviews translated to plain text for machine learning applications, and dictionary entries. These huge piles of sentences are chosen to represent a range of language forms, but not necessarily a range of perspectives.

The term “ground truth” comes from meteorology and refers to trustworthy data that comes straight from the source, often acting as a reality check for information that relies on remote-sensing technology. For a scientist tracking a hurricane with a Doppler radar, the storm chaser taking pictures on location holds the ground truth, proving that the radar’s readouts can generally be trusted. The problem arises when, in machine learning, the ground truth is already skewed––like if a storm-chaser called in 80 percent of hurricanes with male names, but only recognized 50 percent of Katrinas and Irmas.

With NLPs, the complexity of language gives bias an additional opportunity to worm its way in to the results. In order to teach their systems to read, developers often borrow supplementary datasets that contain extra information about how words are used, known as “word embeddings.” Projects like Word2vec supplement the text being studied with minute insights about what words are most like what other words, which helps algorithms produce language that follows rules even more subtle than grammar: the rules of meaning.

Essentially, word embeddings find parallels in usage, according to María De-Arteaga, a Carnegie Mellon researcher specializing in machine learning and public policy. “Word embeddings are very popular, especially when you don’t have much data,” De-Arteaga told Motherboard.

Embeddings are the reason Google search is so powerful and chatbots can follow a conversation––their insights into how words are used by real people are fundamental to a NLP’s understanding of a language. But those insights––the data contained in Word2vec and other word embedding datasets––are also trained on old books and movie reviews, and sometimes tweets. An algorithm that turns to embeddings to understand the real world is still encumbered by the biases of every human voice represented in that data.

“If you want to use word embeddings to analyze how women have been represented in the meaning, then the presence of that bias is actually useful,” De-Arteaga said, “but if you’re saying you’re using it as a dictionary, as your ground truth, then you’re considering bias as truth.”

De-Arteaga’s recent projects focus on limiting the skewing power of word embeddings in different contexts––for example, by using “fairness constraints” to force the model to take away points for accuracy when it relies too much on stereotypes. Another approach she’s tried: “scrubbing” the data, or completely removing gender-linked aspects of words from the dataset before analysis. Both scrubbing and fairness constraints help reduce sexist outputs, but not enough, says De-Arteaga.

MORE PRONOUNS, FEWER ASSUMPTIONS

Ran Zmigrod is part of a new cohort of researchers searching for fairness in the training data itself––including in the ground truth. His group at Cambridge manipulated their algorithm’s training data on purpose by toying with their ground truth to represent a less sexist world. Essentially, they pick out every sentence in the corpus that contains gendered language and double it with different pronouns––so for every sentence in the corpus like “He is a programmer,” the model adds “She is a programmer” to the data as well (Zmigrod is still working on the gender-neutral version). The result is a gender-balanced corpus that is based on a different world than ours, but produces a remarkably fair result. “We’re not generating new ideas,” insists Zmigrod; “we’re just changing the gender of the corpus. Unless you’re specifically trying to look at gender in the text, the changes we make won’t matter to the result.”

Fixing gender imbalance in datasets is only one of the many interdependent efforts to address the injustices propagated by machine learning applications. De-Arteaga says it’s impossible to know which job placement services are using which kinds of language processing systems, but the influence of these programs already affects the hiring market as a whole. Outside of applicant tracking, it’s hard to measure the impact of biased NLPs, especially because machine learning applications can seem so opaque to anyone outside the AI field.

One overlooked cause of that opacity is the fact that known debiasing methods are especially weak in languages with grammatical gender––like Spanish, which puts neckties and women in the same grammatical class ( la corbata; la mujer) in contrast to, say, dresses and men ( el vestido; el hombre). The whole NLP field is absurdly English-centric, but gender debiasing approaches are especially hard to translate. The models wind up having to choose between gender balance and correct grammar, which means they’re useless either way.

A key exception to that is Zmigrod’s approach, which has shown promise in gendered languages like Spanish and Hebrew, though it takes a lot of processing power to keep up with all the standard gendered articles and endings, let alone new pronouns to describe nonbinary or gender-neutral identities.

Attempts to regulate the use of NLPs containing bias––that is, all of them––may be somewhere on the distant political horizon. But until then, it’s possible that the best way to intervene in a biased pipeline is to start with the researchers themselves. Yasmeen Hitti and Andrea Eunbee Jang of MILA initially came together as part of the AI for Social Good summer lab, which takes aim at machine learning bias by bringing women researchers onto AI projects early on.

Hitti, Jang, and fellow researcher Carolyne Pelletier are now deep in the data-mining phase of their current project on gender generalizations, but they’re also looking ahead to new ways to build justice into the pipeline.

“In our paper, we talk about […] two genders, male and female, but we also consulted with non-binary activists to see if our model could be adapted to their needs,” explained Pelletier. “But it’s not that different. When you think about it, sentences like ‘A programmer must always carry his laptop’ are biased against both she programmers and they programmers.”

Finally, there is the source of the data: human bias. “Our goal is to train models [to be less sexist], but maybe in the end, it’s easier to train a human,” Hitti told Motherboard. “We’re spending a lot of time trying to teach the machine, but we have intelligence, too. Maybe we could put a little effort into being more inclusive.”

Algorithms Have Nearly Mastered Human Language. Why Can’t They Stop Being Sexist? syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[lindasharonbn1]

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield, as SEOs, when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce… Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach, but use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)

Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites

Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords

Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content

Thin affiliate pages

Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)

Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them

Reducing the number of ads

Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)

Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)

Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords

Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions

Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make an essential difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

Save

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http://ift.tt/2q058Xf

[mariathaterh]

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield, as SEOs, when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce… Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach, but use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)

Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites

Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords

Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content

Thin affiliate pages

Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)

Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them

Reducing the number of ads

Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)

Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)

Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords

Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions

Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make an essential difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

http://ift.tt/2q058Xf

[elenaturnerge]

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield, as SEOs, when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce… Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach, but use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)

Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites

Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords

Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content

Thin affiliate pages

Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)

Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them

Reducing the number of ads

Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)

Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)

Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords

Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions

Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make an essential difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

http://ift.tt/2q058Xf

[janiceclaudetteo]

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield, as SEOs, when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce… Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach, but use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)

Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites

Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords

Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content

Thin affiliate pages

Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)

Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them

Reducing the number of ads

Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)

Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)

Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords

Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions

Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make an essential difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

http://ift.tt/2q058Xf

[miettawilliemk1]

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield, as SEOs, when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce… Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach, but use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)

Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites

Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords

Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content

Thin affiliate pages

Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)

Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them

Reducing the number of ads

Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)

Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)

Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords

Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions

Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make an essential difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

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[rodrigueztha]

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield, as SEOs, when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce… Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach, but use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)

Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites

Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords

Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content

Thin affiliate pages

Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)

Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them

Reducing the number of ads

Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)

Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)

Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords

Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions

Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make an essential difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

http://ift.tt/2q058Xf

[lindasharonbn]

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve

Why Thin Content Still Ranks as a Top SEO Issue to Solve was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It struck me the other day, while I was reviewing a client project with one of our SEO analysts, that the old problem of thin content is still an insidious revenue killer for many websites.

Or put another way, until you have content worth ranking, do not be surprised if you don’t rank well.

By way of example, the client, a B2B lead gen site for industrial parts, is receiving 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. We’re seeing these stellar results after many months of work that focused heavily on fixing thin content — until content was improved, the traffic suffered!

By focusing on improving content quality, our client is seeing 150% more traffic this year compared to last and getting a record number of inquiries. (click to enlarge)

Then looking at some mobile and newer sites reminded me that low-quality or “thin” content remains a serious problem for many websites, whether they know it or not. A majority of sales inquiries are sites with this problem.

“What a powerful weapon we wield, as SEOs, when we help a site raise its content quality.” -Bruce… Click To Tweet

SEO changes set the right course for a site, but content improvements give it long-term lift.

Why We’re Still Concerned with Thin Content Long After the 2011 Panda Update

Thin content is not a new search engine optimization issue.

It was February 2011 when Google introduced the first Panda update, which targeted low-quality sites and lowered their rankings. In addition to the algorithmic hits from Panda, countless sites have received manual actions penalizing them for having “Thin content with little or no added value.”

Google has only elevated the importance of quality content since then.

An unconfirmed update in early February and the Google Fred Update on March 7 both targeted low-quality content.

Sites that got hit by Fred included content-driven sites with heavy placement of ads, according to reporting by Barry Schwartz. These sites “saw 50% or higher drops in Google organic traffic overnight.”

Besides the algorithms, Google has an army of people reviewing sites manually for signs of quality. Periodically, Google releases its Quality Rater Guidelines, a document used to train these quality raters to spot low- vs. high-quality content. If you’ve gotten a manual action notice or warning in Google Search Console, you have a quality rater to thank. (Or not.) I unconditionally recommend that you read this entire document from Google!

The search engines clearly intend to keep ratcheting down their quality tolerance. The recent updates and penalties further stress the need for websites to fix thin content without delay.

“You cannot afford to ignore thin content on your site and expect to survive.” -Bruce Clay Click To Tweet

Solutions for Thin Content

Identifying thin content on a site is crucial to SEO health, yet it’s only the first step.

Once thin content is diagnosed on your site (whether by a Google manual action notice or through an SEO audit), you need a strategic plan for fixing it. And if you’re uncertain, then your content is probably low quality, too terse, or likely both.

The trick is knowing WHICH strategy is right to fix your unique situation.

The solution has to address your site’s situation uniquely, taking into consideration the scope of the problem AND the resources available to you to do the work.

Remove or Improve?

Site owners often react to the news that their sites have many thin content pages with a surgical approach: Cut it all out!

Removing or no-indexing low-value pages can fix thin content problems some of the time, enabling a site to get back on its feet and start regaining lost rankings with minimal time and effort. For instance, Marie Haynes cites one Panda-penalized site that recovered by removing a forum it had hosted, accounting for several thousand low-quality posts that were separate enough from the main site content to be easily detached.

However, removing content can have a negative SEO effect instead. Cutting off whole sections of a site at once could amputate the legs the website needs to stand on, from an SEO perspective.

Another approach is to simply elevate the quality and depth of the content. It is hard to be a “subject matter expert” in only a few words. And if your content is written poorly, then you gain no love from others — the kiss of death for content.

We prefer this latter approach, but use both at the same time quite often.

@Marie_Haynes Thin content: make it better, make it … thick, and ADD more highQ stuff. @jenstar @shendison

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) October 7, 2015

If the pages hurting your search engine rankings (for being low quality) are also the ones supporting your keyword relevance (for having keyword-containing bulk content), then you’re stuck. You have little choice but to keep the content, improve its quality, and perhaps add more content readers will appreciate.

Finding a Way to Improve Thin Content — Affordably

For this client’s site, we took the content-improvement approach.

The types of thin content we found on their website included:

Product pages with minimal text (just one or two sentences with a few bullets)

Pages whose content had been scraped and indexed on many third-party sites

Image alt attributes lacking text and/or keywords

Autogenerated title and meta description tags that often lacked targeted keywords

Your site may have similar issues, or may contain other types of thin content. Google’s support topic on thin content lists these common forms:

Automatically generated content

Thin affiliate pages

Content from other sources (example: scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts)

Doorway pages

Fixing these content problems may involve any or all of the following:

Removing pages or no-indexing them

Reducing the number of ads

Adding at least a few sentences of original text (on filter-category pages, for example)

Inserting relevant content from a database (in small doses)

Revising title and meta tags to be unique and contain appropriate page keywords

Adding original text in image alt attributes and captions

Rewriting the page entirely

Our client’s site contained a manageable number of pages (less than 500), so we started chipping away.

The SEO analyst first clarified the silo structure of the site, and then prioritized pages for revision starting with the top-level pages for each silo. In batches of 10 or so at a time, pages were rewritten and reviewed, passing back and forth between the client and the BCI analyst. Important products got brand-new full-page descriptions. Information pages were rewritten with thorough explanations. In all, we fattened up about half of the site’s pages.

The strategy worked. Among the SEO services we provided to this client, by far the higher quality content is yielding the biggest wins. The search engines and site visitors are eating it up, with vastly improved rankings, traffic and leads.

Why Your Thin Content Solution Must Be Your Own

If you have an enterprise site with millions of pages, or an ecommerce site with thousands of products, you might be thinking this approach would never work for you.

And you’d be right!

It’s often simply impossible to rewrite each individual page manually on a large website. Yet quality content is a non-negotiable for SEO. Even large sites have to find a way to fatten up or remove their thin content.

Maintaining quality content requires an ongoing investment to maintain rankings — but each site’s specific strategy has to be practical and affordable to implement.

A Prioritized Approach

First, we look for what’s causing the thin content. A template might be producing non-unique meta tags, for instance. The business may be duplicating pages on other domains. A CMS might be building empty or duplicate pages. Whatever the issues are, we try to identify them early and stop the bleeding.

Next, we prioritize which pages to tackle first. It’s worth the effort to hand-edit content on the most important pages of even the largest sites. This priority list should include the home page, the top-level landing page(s) per silo, as well as the most trafficked and highest-ROI product pages. Putting creative energy into making these pages unique and high quality will pay huge SEO dividends.

It’s also crucial to look at competitors’ sites. Even if your content is technically clean and unique, is it as high quality as theirs? Remember that “thin content” can be a relative term, since Google is going to choose the highest quality results to present to a searcher.

More and more often, we include some sort of content development along with our SEO services. As we found with the industrial parts site, fixing thin content can make an essential difference.

A parting comment: If nobody would share your content, then it is not good enough.

If your site has thin content or other SEO issues, contact us online or give us a call at 1-866-517-1900.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

http://ift.tt/2q058Xf