#i just noticed how much our urls look alike

[deathschallenger]

someone said vampire werewolf bride situation. i said yes. // @deathsconsort

this has to be some sort of cosmic joke, he's dressed in a tuxedo standing in front of a preacher with his best friends beside him. except he's never imagined himself married. dead? well, more dead? yeah. on a battlefield? definitely. but fuckin' standing in front of a preacher with a satin ribbon around his neck as he fights the urge to flee.

ironically, he doesn't want to flee out of concern for himself. but out of concern for the woman he's to wed. he's seen her a few times. the sort of woman that prince's got to marry, people like rhysand, even bastards like azriel. the kind of woman who marries vampires who carry themselves like royalty. not the kind of woman who marries the turned bastard of a whore and her customer.

this line of thinking has his fangs extending, pricking at the soft flesh inside his lower lip. a deep breath. a breath that brings to his nostril the overwhelming scents of humanity. this was a fair trade they'd said. one of their women, for one of the advisors of the vampire court.

azriel's affection lay elsewhere, and honestly no one could make him do anything he didn't want to do. and rhysand? well after his last fifty years, he'd deserved a break. so. cassian had volunteered. sure maybe he wasn't a catch. but he had position. he'd take care of her. and he knew he'd never force this bride into anything she didn't consent to.

his single rule and insistence had been, she consents to this wedding, this marriage.

and, he'd been surprised when she had.

now she's walking down the aisle, a vision in white and lace. her silver ice eyes shining through the veil. he can feel that gaze. he can feel the hidden claws beneath her skin as she takes his arm. they haven't given him just a human bride. they've given him a she wolf.

rhysand scents it at the same time cassian has made his realisation, but his eyes shift to his friends. an infinitesimal shake of his head. there's a reason. there's a reason she's here. there's a reason she agreed to this. and rhysand steps back.

the vows go as vows do. and all cassian remembers is the words he finaly murmurs.

' i do. '

and hers in return.

[rpbetter]

I often see multis post that they want to make a new muse, at the same time as they're backed up on threads and asks, and they get their followers to "enable" them to make that muse in the post replies. What is your take on this? Is it a they-can-do-what-they-want situation, or is it reasonable to be annoyed when I see this? Or both?

Hey, Anon!

Both.

I mean, as usual, this is my opinion of an opinion-based matter. This isn't an equation that has an objectively right to wrong scale, it isn't actually hurting any living person or thing. But...it is incredibly annoying and can be hurtful.

They can totally do what they want, and much of the nature of genuine creativity is exactly that - the allowance of doing whatever you so desire. It's something I support rather adamantly, but it's also something I support trying our best to do responsibly and without being hurtful to anyone in a hobby that involves more than ourselves.

This isn't deciding to write another fic when you've not finished the previous four or five that others were interested in, or never finishing any of your original fiction, but continually starting new projects. While others might be enjoying those things as well, you didn't agree to interact with them. They're audience members, not participants.

When others are participants in a hobby that has to work both ways, it's different. Your actions do affect other, real human beings.

So, I totally feel like you've a right to be annoyed every time you see that happening. I do. I tend to unfollow people who do that repeatedly, as we're not pursuing the hobby in the same way. I'll argue all day that someone has a right to their, sometimes literally, eighty-plus muses they never develop or stick to, but that doesn't mean I want to engage with them as a writing partner.

For those of us who want long-term writing partners with the same, well-developed muses, this kind of thing just is annoying. As is everything else that comes with it.

As in...

They're constantly posting "talk me out of adding x" as code for "talk me into writing x."

No one actually wants to be talked out of it, which was probably more obvious to everyone else here than it was me for a little while lmao I tend to take things rather literally. This was, as one can imagine, not appreciated! Telling someone in total earnestness, "I really don't think that's a good choice. You're always saying how overwhelmed you are and just dropped multiple threads yesterday, so adding another muse is going to make you feel worse eventually. Don't do it! :)" is so not what they were looking for. As was evident by the return meltdown over how they could do what they wanted, like I said they couldn't or had any authority over what they're doing with their time.

It's an obnoxious bit of pandering for a foregone conclusion.

Have you ever seen anyone who posts that sort of thing not pick up that muse? I haven't. I've only seen muns who are legitimately on the fence about it asking others in private conversations or testing out the muse decide against it. The thing that makes this incredibly irritating is the attention-seeking and need to validate something they must know isn't a great choice, otherwise, they'd just do it. They're aware that they're behind on drafts, asks, and other things - aware that this is maybe a dick move when they owe everyone already. So, they're seeking "permission" with full knowledge that multiple mutuals are going to hop on that post with encouragement, even some of the ones being messed over by this choice.

It puts people in a bad situation.

Some of those people genuinely don't care, they just want to interact with any muse, and I'm going to be awful and say it - they don't care about totally interchangeable muses and have them themselves. That's fine, this isn't a problem for them. It is for the mutuals who are hoping that maybe if their writing partner gets into this new muse, they'll get a reply to their threads with that energy, or that they'll stick to this one and they can have consistent interactions with them. It is for the mutuals who feel pressured to respond positively because they fear not responding at all will make them seem like bad rpers.

One more thing playing into the counter logic excuse for shitty behavior of "it's just a hobby" is one more thing too many, and it does exactly that.

No one wants to be accused of being remotely too invested in RP anymore, of taking it too seriously, or having any emotional investment in muses, stories, or muns. Not accepting every choice someone makes that negatively impacts you with a grin on your face while you dump confetti on them for it just isn't a comfortable option for a lot of muns anymore. Honesty isn't a comfortable option. While the other option isn't either, it seems better than that mutual noticing you're the only writing partner who didn't hop onto that post with support any of the multiple times they reblogged it. It's only a hobby in which everyone can do what they want until what one wants clashes. Then, you're getting a callout for being addicted to RP.

And the way it tends to clash most is in having expectations of others. Ones that would be totally normal in any other hobby requiring interaction with other people.

Like not overburdening yourself at the expense not only of yourself but those on your "team." That's what is being done when someone knows they cannot keep up with themselves, but continues to add to the situation with new muses.

Not only are you no longer getting responses already while they're intending to add even more to their overflowing plate, you'll be dropped again when they have to "fresh start" their blog because they're burned out.

I have to put that in quotations because I don't know how it's a fresh start when you keep everything but the blog layout the same. All the muses and all the behaviors, including adding a new one despite not having the time or interest necessary to do so, is inevitably maintaining the problems that led to burnout. Dropping every thread, changing the URL, a new blog layout, new aesthetics, isn't fixing the issue even if it temporarily reinvigorates the mun.

The mun is definitely doing things that are not helpful to them, it's stressful and upsetting to experience burnout, but it's at least that mun's choice. Both to do it and to become defensive over fixing it, thus, never fixing it. It isn't anyone else's choice to be repeatedly dropped or ignored, though...unless they just keep sticking around for it.

Again, we're supposed to respect everyone's choices. That's fine when it really works that way, when it is truly everyone. But it's not an acceptable decision to see a multimuse of twenty or more muses and say that's your limit, that you've experienced too many muns who are serial muse-adders not being able to keep up with themselves, so you don't interact with these blogs. If one feels that way, they had better not put it in their rules or ever be upfront about this as a reason, when one is demanded, for not following back or interacting.

It's not acceptable to see a writing partner adding another muse after they've owed you for months, just wiped their inbox, and keep expressing being overwhelmed/behind and become annoyed. Let alone dropping them or explaining to them why you are doing so.

The only "acceptable" course of action is hoping that they totally forget you exist so you can quietly slip away.

I don't feel like that's especially fair or mature. It certainly isn't helping the communication problem we absolutely do have here in the RPC when only one party is allowed to communicate without fear of being labeled, rather ironically, as a bad RP partner.

While this problem seems to be most prevalent in more casual RPers, it's certainly not isolated there. I feel like it's necessary to say that I've had muns I both interacted with and were simply on my dash alike who were not on that more casual side who went from being multis to being muse collectors. Once they hit over fifteen of them or so, they stopped even bothering to try to refrain from picking up at least one muse from every new piece of media they consumed or were inspired by.

It was more annoying because they had been capable of writing truly unique characters they stuck to, and even if they were, with full and upfront admission before interaction, slower to respond, those responses were well worth any wait for the quality of writing and storytelling going on. That's so much worse than someone who was always at a lower skill level as a writer, didn't have a good grasp on characterization, and wasn't especially dedicated to anything. It's depressing and disappointing, but it's also not what you think you're getting into when trying to carefully pick who to write with. Like everyone else, my time to enjoy this hobby is far from twenty-four-seven as well. It's important to me to try to choose muns I'll work out with well so that neither of us is wasting the other's time. And that's what it feels like - the investment of time was a waste because their hobby became adding infinite muses, or rather, the idea of muses.

So, yes, while it is fully everyone's right to write what and how they want to (even if it amounts to not writing at all), it'd be nice if we were all as committed to doing so in a way that was adult enough to respect commitments we've made to each other as we are, as a RPC, to losing our minds when someone merely drops the words "commitments" or "respect."

For the inevitable muse-collectors running across this:

Fiction is inspiring! That doesn't mean you needn't be inspired by anything, just that picking up or creating a whole other muse might not be the best way to follow this inspiration.

If you're considering another muse, but you find yourself already behind and/or overwhelmed? Try one of these instead:

create a plot based on it! Write up the idea and put it in your wanted plots/wishlist tag. Bring it up to partners you think might be interested in it as well, or seek out a crossover from that fandom

make it a new verse for an existing muse! This is as close as you get to creating a new muse without actually doing so, and in many ways, it takes even more creativity. How is your muse different in this AU than they are in canon, how are they the same? In the ways that they are the same, what similar events but done in a way that is natural/logical to this universe have happened to maintain that? Get really creative!

for either/both of these, make some moodboards and aesthetics with that energy while you're waiting on someone to take you up on these new things. Answer some HC asks or tag games using your new verse, or write an independent HC for the verse or plot

talk to writing partners who already love that muse about their new verse/your desired plot! No, not pressuring talk, just normal conversation between friends, but maybe they will be interested in starting a thread

simply be inspired to include some aspect of what you liked in an existent thread. A particular scene you could pull ideas from, the overall mood of a film, or the way something was written in a book - include that in your replies somehow! RP is creative writing, be creative

There are so many, honestly more organic, directions to take inspiration than bluntly adding a new muse. Especially when you're already overburdened, not holding up your end of replies, and/or not able to portray each muse as their own character properly.

Sometimes, it's not just not a great idea to add a whole new muse, and that's alright. There seems to be a serious problem with fomo going on with this whole issue, too. You're not going to miss out if you do not immediately add this character to your multi, and you're never going to fully keep up with what is trending anyway. Do it because you still want to write this muse in four months instead, they're obviously not going anywhere if that's the case, and they'll be a better developed, interesting portrayal for that.

And people do have a right to be annoyed when they feel sidelined by you seeing a shiny object and repeatedly pandering for validation in dropping them for it. Particularly if you're a mun who, further, expects everyone to be just as interested in every new muse you make as the last. As in, you're annoyed when you keep creating muses no one is falling over themselves to interact with, guilting, shaming, or outright demanding that this new muse is interacted with before they have access to the previous ones.

They don't have a right to be mean you to, but they have a right to be annoyed and to drop you. They even have a right to politely decline explaining this to you if they feel unsafe, or to politely explain it to you before they move on.

Absolutely everyone's right to pursue RP and every facet of it as they so please, but no one else has to like what you're doing.

If this response grates on some of you out there? Consider the other options you have, how you might be making others feel, and that it's actually completely okay to tell yourself no. You won't perish if you tell yourself no to taking on a new muse when you, honestly, should not! It'll be okay! Maybe, you just need to evaluate if there is another muse, or more than one, you should remove before adding one. Maybe, you just need some time to reorganize how you reply before you add this one. "No" when told to yourself can simply mean "no, not right now, it isn't a good time/situation."

[thrillridesz]

Could you ship tbz members with your mutuals? (Seeing this everywhere so I thought why not pass it to you!)

ahh i’ve been seeing this everywhere as well!! i’ve actually done this awhile back but since i’ve gained a lot of new mutuals since then, i’ll just give it a go once more ^^

i may or may not have put too much thought into this oops 🤭

sangyeon +  @moondustaeil @aveluant1a

talking to amber feels like i’m talking to a trusted older sister ngl. she's one of the people i’d turn to for an honest opinion or some much needed advice on stuff and i value her insights very much. she's also very mature in their thinking which is what i think sangyeon would appreciate a lot as the leader of a group of 11 (10) other boys who are always constantly on crack.

as for yu, she gives me very gentle and calm vibes seriously. she’s strikes me off as a hard worker from our conversations and she is very dedicated to her writing which i believe sangyeon would love in a person. i can already imagine him just staring at her work, with a look of affection and admiration in his eyes 😆

jacob + @ihearttbz

riane is an absolute angel to talk to and i love our conversations tgt because it’s always so easy to talk to her and i feel like i can tell her a lot of things i normally wouldn’t tell anyone else. she’d pair very well with jacob and just be that couple that everyone loves and adores, the really sweet couple that people just love to hang around with 💞

younghoon + @chaoticdeobi

um was it really going to be anyone else other than bea? XD younghoon as we know is a pretty shy person and bea to me, seems like the opposite of that. in their case, i think the phrase ‘opposite attracts’ is applicable! bea’s enthusiasm and liveliness is something younghoon would definitely find to be very charming, prompting him to come out of his shell very quickly when he’s around her. i believe whatever he lacks, she makes up for it and vice versa

hyunjae + @bobagyu @kpophours

rose is just so random and funny sometimes which is honestly just like hyunjae to a tee, they’re just so like each other in a way! i get the feeling that rose may be a little unsure of herself sometimes ( which she shouldn’t ) and i think hyunjae would be a great fit because he would definitely be able to help her become more confident while she can probably teach him to be a little less tough and be more vulnerable to his own feelings.

anna is an extremely bright and outgoing person from what i can tell from our conversations. i think that would complement well with hyunjae’s loud and larger than life personality and they would a 100% be that couple that everyone just asks to tone it down but secretly love having them around because they’re just so intriguing and fun to have around 💫

juyeon + @jyeonvoir

elsie has these very calm vibes and i’ve mentioned this before but she gives mad older sister vibes as well. she’s gentle and soft, very much like juyeon and ngl i may be just a little intimidated by her at first but after getting to know her, she’s actually super friendly and nice! she and juyeon would make a lovely couple and i can totally imagining them just chilling on a rainy night, watching Netflix while he wraps his arms around her in a warm embrace.

kevin + @2hyunjae​ @mae-gi-writes​

luna imo is pretty quiet for the most part but once you talk to her, she’s actually pretty fun to talk to! she’s also artistically inclined ( also have you seen her calligraphy skills? they’re insanely good omf ) which i think kevin would appreciate a lot as an artist himself! i feel like he can bring her out of her shell and when he does, he’d just be enchanted by her lovely personality and did i just write a fluffy fic prompt?? o.o

mae is JUST. SO. CUTE. my biggest kevin stan out there, you would be a great match for kevin i just know it. your enthusiasm and your meme vibes would complement kevin perfectly! she’s incredibly supportive and lively which is definitely something i think kevin would look out for in a partner. i can 100% see him with someone who’s just like mae in the future 💓

chanhee + @tidalstorm​

something about ros to me screams vogue and classiness and when i think of her, i feel like she’s super bougie? maybe im wrong but that’s how i feel! i get the same vibe around chanhee as well and her really cute personality i feel will mesh well with chanhee’s seemingly harder personality? they’re just very alike to me in terms of vibes!

changmin + @fluffytbz​ @sankyeom​

having talked to rosie, i can tell you that she’s one of the easiest people i’ve talked to on tumblr so far. she’s also such a sweet person and her vibes are really similar to changmin’s come to think of it? lovable but with a tiny hint of shyness? that’s changmin and rosie! i know we always see changmin smiling since that boy basically exudes happiness but i feel like there’s got to be a special kind of smile, the soft kind that speaks volumes of his feelings that he reserves for those he loves and i feel like that person could be rosie. does that make sense?

talking about belle is like talking about a role model to me >< i still fangirl sometimes but that’s beside the point. belle has such warm vibes that changmin would have loved! i feel like he’s not someone who likes to make his feelings know and he’d rather just be happy in front of the camera all the time but i think with belle, he would definitely be able to let his guard down around her. there’s just something about her that wants to make ppl trust her instantly 😋

haknyeon + @atbzkingdom​

dee is an absolute sweetheart which is just what hak needs. she can be level headed and mature when the situation calls for it but she can also have fun and be wild which i think hak would appreciate a lot in a partner! he’s been through a lot so i feel he may need someone who he can feel comfortable around to tell his secrets to and since dee is trustworthy like that, he’d feel at ease around her 😌 

hyunjoon + @tbzwurld​

ok i’ll be honest. i was kind of intimidated by bee when i first started talking to her. there’s something about her that just makes her whole vibe so powerful and just radiate such dominant energy ( not in that way ) but yes, she just seems so cool to me and the vibes she gives off to me is exactly the vibes hyunjoon gives me as well. once you get to know her though, she’s actually so sweet?? and kind?? and amazing?? idk why but to me, she’s what i think would be hyunjoon’s ideal type ✨

sunwoo + @minfuwa​ @jopping-to-my-kpop​​ @mjlkau​

although i haven’t rly talked much to iris ( but i really want to >< iris can we be friends pls ) iris has this sort of charm that i can’t quite put my finger on. it’s a certain type of charm that i associate with sunwoo? like there’s a certain appeal which they both have in common! from our very little interaction ( hopefully we can change that ), i get that she has a vibrant personality that would make everyone just love to flock to her and befriend her. ngl when i think of sunwoo, i think of her sometimes! maybe this is a signal from the universe idk 👀 

yo ok emma is just like super cool ok? idc what tf you have to say, she’s cooler than you and me and everyone else combined. her swag is just out of this world and i think her effortlessly cool persona is something that sunwoo would just be completely enthralled by. she's also a very reliable friend who i am so glad to have gotten to know bc hell, even i’m attracted to her personality so how can sunwoo not be? actually, sunwoo would love her personality! they both exude such badass but soft vibes it’s almost unreal 💙

anie has a very surprising personality imo! my first impression of her was really cute and sweet so imagine my surprise when she reveals that darker side of her >< i really like the duality though ngl and i think sunwoo would too! he’d just be so fascinated by her and just want to get to know her more and as he learns more about her, he’s just going to end up falling deep in love without realising until one day he’s like “fuck, i’m an idiot in love without even noticing it.”

eric + @heartyyjeno​ @lovely-kpop-writer​​

alesha is just a BIG ball of floof and i love her omg she's such a supportive and caring friend, it’s unreal. her enthusiasm to me, is on par with eric and if he’s the energy boy, she’s the energy girl for sure. they’d be that couple that just goes around hyping everyone up and everyone would just LOVE them! i know i would and if anyone disagrees, i’ll fite you >:(

jasmine my love!!! this girl here is just so incredibly lovely just like her url suggests and honestly, she’s one of the ppl who are most significant in my tumblr journey because her love for people is just so heartwarming? she’s always friendly and kind which is what eric would love in his future partner.  jasmine is just so PRECIOUS istg ❣️

[adhd-demetri]

First things first, love the new url, it's super you. Second are you working on the story for your oc? I actually want to read more on it -Jane

Yep and after thinking about it, if you have a twilight oc, message me and I'll add them into the story :) but this is it so far. Consider this a free sample

~Breaking news~

Things are getting pretty wild in ohio near cowan lake campgrounds. Two coyotes and wolf have been spotted in the area roaming around together wrecking havoc and panic. Biologists are baffled by the sudden appearance of a wolf in ohio with what is supposed to be their enemy.

No one knows where the trio came from but police and wildlife officials are urging people to haze them away and for parents of pets and children alike to keep a sharp eye on them.

Witnesses say they have been seen near dumpsters and trash cans tearing open bags of uneaten food-

-Click-

Demi turned off his phone as he took a bite out of a sub he and his mate had dug out of the dumpster. He snickered at the thought of him, his little brother and his mate 'wrecking havoc' over simply digging in dumpsters for goodies people through out. Like phone chargers, towels, clothing, sleeping bags and even small one person tents with easy fixes.

People are so wasteful. Throwing away perfectly good treasures. Oh well, they were now theirs.

Casper walked up behind him and threw down a tent that he just patched up. It was a cheap green and beige 4 person tent that had a hole in the roof of it. It wasn't nothing special truthfully.

"What do you think? Nice patch work right?" He said looking very proud of his work. Demi turned around and ran his fingers over the the patch, inspecting the delicate stitching and the vinyl that protected them from wear-and-tear.

"Looks good Cas, can't imagine why someone would get rid of this for a easy fix!" He shrugged, oh well. It now belongs to his younger brother.

As he got up from the forest floor, he dusted off the leaves and dirt that clung to the back of his pants. Grabbing the tent, he headed to Caspers car that was parked by an abandoned entrance way that led to overgrown trails leading to their little hideout.

"Hey alex. Check it out, Cas fixed you a tent. Now you can go camping with us instead of sleeping in the car." He said giving his 10 year old little brother the now fixed up tent.

Alex was sitting in the back playing mario kart tour on his phone. He glanced down quickly and laid his phone down. He picked up the tent bag and looked at its contents. His baby blue eyes started to widen with excitement.

"Th-this is for me? My own tent? Wow this is so cool!" The little blond was practically jumping up and down in his spot with pure joy and happiness radiating off of him. He was so happy to have his own tent finally.

"Yup, tonight Cas and I can teach you how to put it up and when we leave, take it down. Sound good?"

"Yes! Thank you thank you thank you!!!!" He suddenly slammed into Demi with a tight hug. Demi patted his head and pulled the excited child off of himself.

Alex went back to playing his game. Demi went back and sat on the ground to join Casper in the small clearing while he was redoing the zipper work on one of the sleeping bags. Casper nearly had this one finished up and planned on giving it to Alex since it had Kion and other lion guard characters on it. Casper concentrated as he worked on stitching the zipper to the sleeping bag.

"Soooo Alex loved his tent. Thank you for fixing it up for him."

"No problem. Seemed better than sitting in the car ya know? Oh hey look I finally got it stitched. You know these zippers are so hard to fix now a days." He said zipping up the bag and admiring his work.

He looked up and noticed the sun was starting to paint the sky in a beautiful array of oranges and pinks mixed with some purples and blues. The air felt slightly cooler than it did before.

Demi rolled his eyes and simply smiled.

He knew it was time to get going and head back to the campgrounds.

Casper followed right behind him and started up his car. They headed back to Cowan Lake campgrounds tenting area.

"Hey alex! Buckle up bud!" He yelled getting back up and getting into the car to leave.

The ride there was quite relaxing as the trio was simply jamming out to some music on their way to the campgrounds. They didn't have a care in the world it seemed.

They finally made it back to their spot. Alex quickly hopped out along with his tent and claimed a spot right next to where Demi and Casper's tent was. He started to pull everything out of the make shift bag that he had stuffed it in previously.

Demi quickly got out and ran to him. He didnt want Alex to lose anything.

"Hey bud slow down, We still got to help you put it up. Cas you want to get the fire going? We can roast some shmellows and some hot dogs. I'm starved!" Demi quickly started unraveling the tent and pulling out the poles, laying them nice and neat.

While they did that, Casper started up the fire. It roared to life after a few moments of poking and prodding it with fiery paper. He grabbed all the goodies, the roasting sticks and a mini table from his car.

The sun sunk down below the trees as the beauty of the moon rose to the sky. She bathed the area in a soft ghostly white glow.

Meanwhile Alex and Demi finally got his tent all nice and set up. It looked a little worn down but it was definitely still usuable.

"Hey who wants shmellows? We got some dogs that need roasting too!" Cas called out to Demi and Alex. He laid out the marshmallows and chocolate along side the hotdogs, gram crackers and bread. Alex and Demi joined him by the cozy fire grabbing a few bits of food and wolfing them down like ravenous animals.

Demi shushed him real quick. He didn't want to disturb others and cause any unnecessary commotion. The last time that happened didn't end well .... for the other person that is.

Around them other campfires crackled and popped while kids and couples alike told stories and roasted foods. Some saying goodnight while others stayed out.

"So when the fire goes out, do you two want to go on a run? I'm pretty sure that stupid Cullen family is out hunting and I do NOT want him near our area." Demi asked Casper and Alex.

Casper thought about it for a moment and mouthed I dont care while shoving a hotdog in his mouth. Alex simply shook his head yes as he ate a burnt gooey marshmallow.

"Yeah it's a full moon tonight! And I haven't ran with you guys in forever!" Alex shouted a tad bit to loud grabbing the attention of a few nearby campers.

"Let's wait till 10. Most of the other campers will be asleep and in their tents by then. It would be the perfect time to slip out." Demi said leaning into his mate's embrace.

No one screams at his little brother for being excited.

"Yeah, it has been awhile hasn't it? It's about time we run and get a good idea of how big our territory is too if this is our permanent home." Casper said.

Demi nodded in agreement as he got up. He went to his and Casper's tent and stripped down to just his incredibly warm out pants. He didn't care if these pants got destroyed while shifting. They've been through so much and it was time to finally to get rid of them.

Casper got up from his spot and joined Demi in the tent. He wrapped his arms around Demi's midsection, pulling him into a warm hug.

"So when you want to head out love?" He whispered.

They both sat down on their makeshift bed. Minutes passed as they simply stayed still together.

A sense of euphoria enveloped him. What a lovely feeling it was.

He got up quickly, peeking out of the tent entrance way.

Neither wanted this moment to end.

His little brother crossed his mind. He left him out there by the fire by himself!

Hide and seek

Thankfully the fire was dying since no one was paying it any attention.

His brother was lying down on the grass. His headphones over his head and his hand tracing the stars as he sang a familiar song quietly. His head bobbing in sync to the beat.

Reason and rhyme

Grand and glorious

Living the dream

yours and mine

~ Euphoria!

As he sand the last part, his arm fell to his side. A smile was spreading across his face as he lost himself in his own little world of euphoria.

Demi felt his body shift quickly. Thankfully his pants were worn enough to not make hardly any noise. Brown, orange and white fur littered from his skin quickly.

The feeling of happiness and joy could be felt radiating from him once again.

Demi sighed to himself, grateful his brother was ok.

"Everything alright love?"

"Yeah, just got worried about Alex but he's fine. He's in his own little world right now."

"I can tell. I can feel it from here."

Demi went back and sat down. He searched for his phone to check the time.

9:57 PM

All of the other campers were asleep by now. The only ones awake at this point was the trio.

Casper's body morphed as well. Silvery gray fur with white swirls that resembled a starry galaxy painted his skin. His body shifted and the shorts he had were ripped quickly.

And just like that, a coyote that could blend in with the autumn themed environment stood before Casper.

The air swirled around Demi. With it, The smell of wet leaves and smoke with sugary delights. Demi inhaled the savory scents before making his way to the child that was still relaxed on the grass.

And just like that, a wolf stood above Demi in the 10 person tent.

Giving his mate a quick nuzzle, Demi slowly crept outside the tent. He didn't want to wake anyone or draw attention to himself. He still had to get Alex into their tent.

Demi nudges Alex with his snoot, urging him to get up. Alex realised it was time and ran to his brother's tent as there would be no room to shift in his own.

Soon after a small blondish white coyote pup came out. His ears and tail were probably the most unique feature both the wolf and coyote have ever seen.

Casper ran out of tent to give Alex some privacy.

'So Cas, did you hear what they said about us on the news? They think we are trouble makers!

Just were the ears attach to the head, Alex's fur was a shiny metallic gold color. His tail was the same way.

He jumped up into the air and started to run a tad bit. The excitment seemed to rub off on Demi. He too started to jump around with his little brother. Together their energy seemed to wile them up even more.

With a burst of energy, the trio took off onto the road. Demi and Alex yipped along the way down the road. Casper's tongue lulled out of his mouth while he ran.

Alex on the other paw didn't want to go digging like his older brother. He was more interested in the playground that was close by and the toys that had been abandoned there as well.

Ha! Can you believe that? Let's give them real trouble!'

Cas nodded in response. He started to slow down as they approached the dumpsters. The overwhelming smell of garbage that has been marinating all day under a scorching hot sun wafted around the trio.

Demi charged ahead of them. He loved digging in the trash, all kinds of goodies people would throw out for no reason was calling his name!

He chased after his brother though.

[pokecommunitycenter]

Hi Dash !! It’s Time to Meet a Member of the RPC !!

Ditto would like to introduce... Dun Duuuuuun !! 

It’s Jason ♡ !! Though some of you may know them as @haematophiliac​ !!

Established in Spooky October of 2018, they’ve been around the RPC for a good long while as a Team Rocket Scientist OC, but here’s a looksee at some things you may have not known !! Ditto hopes you enjoy getting to know the writer just as much as Ditto did !!

♡ Interview... START !!

Ditto would like you to introduce yourself a little bit. The url you go by, maybe how you picked it. Was it a joke at first that you just stuck with, does it have significant meaning?

The username is what people would call a lover of blood. I started Jax in … 2018? Octoberish and he had the common username including Rocket in it and I decided to pick a theme more fitting to him. Eventually I settled with the current one as it fits him as a blood obsessor to put it bluntly. I mean he likes blood, works around a lot of it and all that so it just… Well, stuck!

Was there something about Team Rocket in general that drew you in? Over other ‘evil’ organizations, Rocket is considered the OG & probably largest. But, over Plasma/Galactic, what made you choose Rocket?

I’ve always been a Rocket fan. I started in the Pokemon fandom (can you call it a fandom back then) in 1998 when I was only eight by watching the anime. You could say that Rocket started my love for bad guys actually! I used to adore Jessie and James so much. They were just so fun, funny and adorable. Maybe I had a crush on one… Ahem! But yes, as a kid I fell for the trio (I didn’t forget loveable Meowth there!) and ever since then I’ve been a fan. I love all the bad guys mind you but Rocket holds a special place in my heart. Just always been like that.

A bonus question !! Did any characters from the original Anime / Franchise…  help you develop Jax at all?

A good question but Jax actually was inspired by a character I role played in a completely different fandom. I mean you cannot compare them - Jax is a human with so many faults and the other character is… Well, a plain old monster. But when I first made Jax I put little bits of the old character into him, such as formal speaking and love for blood. He started pretty much as a clean slate. I evolved him over the first few weeks.

Do you think that, because you play a character that is not a ‘good guy’ or as you put it, a monster, that people that may not know you well find you hard to approach?

Indeed so. Though I only speak of experience in the past here! When I played my full out monster in another fandom, people would tell others they were actually scared of me on an OOC level. Needless to say I’ve spoken to many people who were scared and helped them realise that it is just a muse I play. When it comes to Tumblr I find the fandom much more open and less afraid? Though I don’t know for certain because people could be afraid for all I know and I just don’t know. I hope I’m approachable enough anyway!

So then !! To help the part community that may not know you well, or might be a little hesitant because you play a blood loving bad guy, what are some things that you may have in common with everyone? Do you have a favorite pokemon? Or a region that just was WACK & you loved it so much? What’s on that most repeated playlist you got? Or maybe a few movies that you really love?

I read every blog’s rules and I’ve noticed that a lot of people are socially anxious. Which to be fair… I am too! I get nervous around people I don’t know and aahhhh, well, I’m in the exact same boat. We all start as strangers and all it takes is one foot forward to break that ice but, like others, I do find that first step very intimidating. I’m just your average nerd to be fair haha. As for my favourite Pokemon? Sneasel! I fell in love with that little critter after watching the Celebi movie when it came out. Favourite region would be Hoenn. I just have fond memories of it I guess as a Ruby fan. It was the first game my battery ran out of energy on. My music is too horrific for anybody’s ears if that’s what you mean hah. And movies? … … Digimon the movie (1+2+3 in Japan and just the first (all three combined) in UK and presumably other places too).

As someone who feels that weird wiggle when trying to step out of your comfort zone to make friends. Do you have any advice for people that want to get to know you better? Or, reaching out to people in general?

When reaching out to me - or anybody else - I find the best approach can be a simple hello. It instantly shatters that ice between two people. Like… Many of us are afraid to simply say hello. But if you manage to break that first bit it’s amazing! If you don’t there is always another day. Conversation can escalate from a mere hello. Or even reply to an open post if serious or funny! That first step is the hardest indeed but things get easier after that first hurdle. The worst someone can do is walk away and then perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be. Everybody has friends in the end and making more is great.

That said. We all know how the Poke RPC has its ups, & its downs. Sometimes both happen in one day. LOL. There is always room for growth though, & Ditto believes that everyone can work together to make that happen. Is there anything you would like to see change in the community?

Everything in life will come with ups and downs, it’s just how things go. We can all work through things however. If something bad happens there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. As a community it is great we can all work on whatever needs addressing. I understand some people rather turn a blind eye depending upon the situation. We all should work on what makes us comfortable. Nonetheless, if I could change one thing I’d change anon hate. Argh. That’s one thing that gets under my skin. We, as a community, should be open to criticism and praise alike and nobody should need to harass another person anonymously. If someone has a disagreement then they should tell the person. Only that way can they work on the issue. But then again there is needless anon hate without true purpose behind it and that makes me sad. But nobody is perfect and sometimes people will rear their ugly side. Yet when anon hate has popped up it has been utterly overwhelming to see everybody support each other with kindness!

Ditto wonders, do you think anon hate may… slow down, or go away, if it was ignored instead of responded to when received? Most times, the people that feel the need to do hurtful things to others is for response. The attention received whether it is good or bad.

I think it’s highly dependent upon the situation. As someone who has received hate in the past (not on Tumblr mind you) I found that even ignoring people doesn’t work. Yet every case is different. Some do it for response, some do it to just get under someone’s skin. We can’t tell which however. If, say, it is needless hate then to ignore it would be the best option, even reporting it to Tumblr’s staff. But if in the situation something needs defending like a misconception then it could be a good idea to clear the air. Keyword could though. I’ve learned that people will get ideas into their mind and battle for it rather than accepting what is truth. In those cases a good air clearing is good and then to ignore any further.... Jabbing could be best. But if people feel the need to respond they should have the freedom to, as well as the freedom to ignore it.

Is there anything you’d like to pass on to those in the RPC that receive anon hate? Maybe a word of advice, or just something supportive to remember if it ever happens?

Well, as long as someone isn’t breaking any rules, doing something bad OOC or whatever- Actually I was going to say they should keep going and doing their thing. And yet I feel the need to mention that all people make mistakes in their lives. Anon hate is a bad way to go. The person on the receiving end of a message is a person too. They have feelings and thoughts and a life also. If you ever receive anon hate then just remember that there’s someone sending it and perhaps they don’t realize their mistake. That isn’t to say it’s justified. Just that people do indeed forget there are real people involved. … I think I word things bad! I mean… Anon hate is wrong, end of. But it is so easy to forget that real people are sat to read it. If you ever get anon hate then it is best to ignore it. That spark could evolve into a full blown fire and make you worse off. Hm, I forgot my train of thought but in the end we all need less hate and to just enjoy ourselves. People tend to send hate from bad experiences with the person or disagreements if right or wrong on either side but words are just words on a screen. They can say all they want to you but you are you. You are a person who deserves a life and love and no mere text on a monitor - Or phone screen! - can ever truly harm you.

Ditto thinks you did a fine job. We all take time to find words in our own ways, & no one has the perfect ones all the time. So please do not worry about wording things. It takes some practice sometimes, when you’re put on the spot !! 

Ditto would like to wrap up with something uplifting & super positive. After your time here in the Poke RPC, what are some of your favorite memories? Things that make you stick around, or just enjoy seeing go on? Give Ditto a little insight ( & the RPC too ) on what makes you happy to be here.

I have a vast array of good memories. Mainly ones of that first move of saying hello to someone or just that first interaction. Then again you’re asking someone with a bad memory! I truly just enjoy seeing people having a good time, enjoying their time here. When people are comfortable enough to do crack threads, that’s something that makes me smile. For instance the RPC could have been super strict and look down upon anything not considered serious and yet there everybody is just having fun! I enjoy watching people get along all in all. When new relations are formed, plots explored, the crack-like threads that ensue. Dash commentary is always a favourite. It shows someone isn’t afraid to get involved. I like it when people aren’t afraid. As I said, we’re all humans with lives and just watching people have fun makes me smile, even if I’m not involved. And of course, being involved in things makes me happy too, to just be included :D

A big Thank You !! to Jason for allowing Ditto to take some of their time for this interview. 

Ditto hopes everyone has a good Monday !! 

See you next week for the next Community Interview. ♡

[sansanficrec]

Q&A  with ladytp

Grab a glass of wine and get to know @ladytp!

How long have you been writing fanfiction?

I actually went back to the folder of my first posted fanfic, and it was almost 6.5 years ago, September 2012… That was my first ever creative work I wrote as well, as I started quite late – being already adult, established professional and all that. So never too late to start, one doesn’t have to have grown up writing!

Did you write before that?

No I didn't - unless scientific publications are counted as 'creative' writing (well, to be honest, sometimes there was an element of creativity when trying to make one's data make sense, LOL!)

How long ago did you join Tumblr?

To be precise (as I like to be!) I joined March 1st 2013 – so almost six years ago… But it took me four months to make my first post (an awesome music video about ASOIAF and GoT), being initially a ‘lurker’ to observe and learn. I migrated there from Livejournal when things started to quiet down there – like a moth I was drawn to bright lights, moving images, and more of my fandom content!

What is the meaning behind your username?

My username is from the Livejournal times as well, as when I joined it, I didn’t grasp the significance of one’s url or username and just picked the first one that came to mind when filling in the details: “lady” and my initials. D’oh! Luckily I have been able to successfully have the same name in other platforms as well, which is great – it is easier than have many different names. I am also glad that it is not fandom specific, as my interests are many and varied…

What was your first fandom? First pairing?

Definitively ASOIAF – that was my introduction to the whole cultural phenomenon of ‘fandom’, devouring fics and joining communities (yeah, I am so far behind of everyone else – I used to have a life, LOL!). Sansan was my first ship, but I also had a brief period when I was very interested in Daenerys and Jorah (this was before I saw the show). Even though the show had a big negative impact on Sansan experience for me (not due to Rory, I hasten to add – but the storylines), it has still stayed my OTP in a sense that I feel most comfortable about writing them and their dynamic still fascinates me above anything else.

How/when did you first notice (or start to ship) Sansan?

My story is very typical; first reading their interactions after the Hand’s Tourney, then the scene of the Battle of the Blackwater – and I was hooked. Googling and finding fics, Livejournal communities and all the metas…no getting back from there! I mean; it is so blatantly obvious that I wonder who can read the books and NOT get the vibes??

Is there a SanSan fic you’re particularly proud of?  Chapter? Paragraph?  Plot?

Hmmm…’Which one of your children you love the best?’, in other words – always a difficult question! I guess I am still the proudest of “The Triangle”  It was one of my early fics, it was a long-fic, and it was about the subject I had been fascinated with for years and years; the complicated Arthurian relationship between 3 people who loved each other for different reasons (Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot in the original, Sandor, Sansa and Jaime in the fic). Chapter-wise I am very happy with the last chapter of the “Kiss of the Blade”, as hard as it may be for some due to the character death implied. It has melancholy but also beauty, I thought when I wrote it. Plot-wise I am excited and happy about my current WIP “This Time, We’ll Do Better”, as although it has some common trope elements, I think they have somewhat cool applications and it is nice to write something more plot-orientated for a change!

Any comments you’ve received that stick out, even now?

I have to admit that again, “The Triangle” inspired some absolutely wonderful comments, probably because of its unusual premise. Towards the end, and especially with people who had read it in one go long after it had been completed, there were some wonderful convos going back and forth. I especially enjoyed the ones where people either told that they had had some reservations starting it, but then ended up really enjoying the fic, or the ones where they might have had some queries and doubts and questions, leading to a mutually fruitful and eye-opening discussions on both sides. Those conversations really blew my mind!

Do you use a beta?

I have had the privilege of working with two wonderful betas, of which I am eternally grateful. The first one was wildskysheri / wildsky, whom I “met” via Livejournal, and who betaed for me for “The Triangle”, “A Chance Encounter” and “A Premediated Reunion”.  She taught me – a non-native English speaker/writer – so much about writing and what to pay attention to and what to look out for. I owe her so much! After our ways parted amicably as she moved on to other things, I was without beta for a long time, not really actively looking for one, but when my path crossed with the lovely @hardlyfatal, I have once again had the pleasure of getting my words scrutinised by someone knowledgeable, making them better on “This Time, We’ll Do Better”. I honestly can’t speak highly enough for a beta who can make any writer and fic so much better!

Are there tropes/styles/genres you struggle with?  Any that are almost too easy?

I do struggle a bit writing babies and children, and hence haven’t written much about them… I don’t generally care for modern AUs either and would struggle to write a full story in a modern times – although who knows, maybe in a right setting, replicating the high stakes situation of the canon, it could work. Haven’t tried so can’t say for sure! Very fluffy genre is also something I don’t feel particularly comfortable with, nor anything where the characters are very young. And porn without plot is neither a genre I relish. The most comfortable genres for me are the slow-burns, where mature people interact with each other in a mature way (whatever that means…). First realisations of feelings, hesitancy, and all that. I also do like plot-driven stories that have a start, middle and ending. I am all open for fake marriage, bed-sharing, ‘there was only one room at the inn’ kind of genres – any kind of ‘forced’ situations where the characters are obliged to spend time together!

When you start a fic, do you know where it will end?  Or do you figure it out along the way?

There have been fics along both scenarios – some were started at the spur of the moment, with only vague ideas of where and how far they would go (”The Prophecy” comes to mind, which I started as a random holiday scribbling – and repeatedly apologised and updated my chapter number as it grew and grew and grew…). And there were the ones where even at the end I couldn’t decide what the ending should be, so I wrote two (for example “Past Was Such A Long Time Ago“). But for most I would have some idea about the ending at the start, and for some I would gain it somewhere early along the way. So yeah, it varies!

Do you have any rituals/conditions for ‘getting in the mood’ to write?

I mostly write over the weekends when I have more time, after getting up and having breakfast, reading my emails and checking on Tumblr and doing all the routine stuff one does – and then I open my doc and start writing… With my internet radio blasting on the background on some jazz or lounge or classic channel. I find it hard to write during the weeks after getting back from work and being distracted by mundane home things and TV and such.

Have you ever had writer’s block?  Any tips for overcoming it?

I did have a period well over a year ago when I felt I had ‘lost my mojo’. It was largely to do with the way the Game of Thrones show had progressed and changed the characters so much that I couldn’t recognise them anymore, and my initial inspiration of writing about them consequently suffered. Especially as the show canon started to take over the original book canon so strongly in many platforms, including fics. The way I got over it was to distance myself from the show and partly, unfortunately, also from the fandom (so largely focused on show). I had a nice break, didn’t read many fics, focused on books and generally took a step back. Then I challenged myself to write a new type of story, a plot-focused ‘action & adventure’ story instead of romance focused only. That inspired me to write again, and I have been riding on that inspirational wave ever since with my latest long-fic WIP!

Aspirations of publishing one day?

No, not really. It is a tough world out there, especially as writing has become more reachable to many people who previously might not have even considered it (yay, fanfic and other forms of creative writing and platforms encouraging it!), and publishing world is awash with submissions and self-published stories alike. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect that wanting to become published would take much more effort and determination and will than what I have for now, as for me this is a lovely hobby, nothing more.

What are your other hobbies?

My absolutely biggest hobbies are food and wine. I have loved cooking, eating and learning about food and wine for most of my life and it’s really important for me. Cooking meals ‘from the scratch’ from their base ingredient is what I love, as well as learning to master new techniques, new cuisines and difficult recipes. When I travel, food is one of the main drivers for that too, and holidays are largely built around restaurants, regions, cuisines and wineries. Holidaying in wine regions and wine tasting is the favourite kind of holiday! Yet I also love everyday cooking – the beauty of this as a hobby is that I get to do it every day and can challenge myself, be inspired by it and practice it all the time!

As for other hobbies…not really… I follow the transformative artform that is WWE, especially Dean Ambrose, and love visiting historical sites and reading about history, but that can hardly be called an active hobby… I also make some photo and video edits for fun, but lately my writing has taken much of the time I used to dedicate to that. Yet I feel that what I have is enough – I have no desires for an active life with lots of different hobbies and activities.

Any tips for writers looking to post their first (or second, or twentieth) fic?

I hope this doesn’t sound too harsh, but it would be really cool if even those who write only for ‘shits and giggles’ would do some basic formatting and language checks… Things like how to indicate dialogue, spacing between paragraphs and when to apply them, and of course, basic grammar. There are nowadays so many websites advising about those things, as well as free tools (for example Grammarly), that they are accessible to every person with access to sites posting their stuff – and a simple Google search is your best friend. I recommend this because ignoring those things may easily drown even the most amazing story in these times of fic over-abundance.

Other than that, write the stories you would like to read yourself, and the scenarios you would like to see in the canon. Study the writing style of the writers whose stories you admire and see if you could pick up a trick or two from them (but not plagiarizing, naturally). And if you can, get a beta – it is not absolutely necessary, but would give you a second opinion and advice from a trusted person. Oh, and give yourself a break between writing and final editing – ideally have a buffer of chapters in a draft phase before starting to post, so whenever you write something new, you can afford to let it rest for a while before getting back to it with fresh eyes. And have fun!

Anything you’d like to say to writers in general?

Don’t get hung up on statistics or comparisons. Think why you are writing – is it because everyone does it and you feel you should too, or because you truly enjoy it, or because of the stories themselves, or because you have an internal urge to do it, or it is part of your social networking activities… all are valid reasons, but once you define what they are for you, the easier it is to focus on it and the satisfaction it gives to you.

Anything you’d like to say to readers in general?

If you like a fic, don’t be shy about commenting, as it truly means so much to the writers… Even simplest comment is gratefully received. If you feel like wanting to pass on constructive criticism, first ensure the writer welcomes it, then formulate it in the politest possible way with positivism thrown in as well (and of course, make sure it is actually constructive). Marvel the choices and abundance of fic availability and acknowledge what a joy it is to live in this time and age when all that is possible. Enjoy!

Anything you’d like to say to the SanSan fandom in general?

Do not give up hope – Game of Thrones is over soon and we can get back to canon content, hopefully soon with The Winds of Winter. Whatever the further story of Sandor and Sansa is there, we know how important it has been already and nothing can take that away!

Read LadyTP’s SanSan here!

Read LadyTP’s full library here!

[marinobosco]

Instagirls

Two girlfriends for life in a friendly Instagram competition over who’ll get more likes with photos getting ever more daring

My life so far is picture-perfect. I work really hard to make it so. So does Maya. She’s my classmate, my best friend since we learned how to walk and collided wobbling into each other in the parkette beside our building. We ended on our butts, giggling and drooling happily. We’ve been inseparable ever since, all through primary school and now high school. We sit next to each other, we dress alike, we talk alike, we finish each other’s sentences, we even think alike. But, we don’t look alike.

We started as two chubby toddlers, but soon I shot upward and Maya expanded horizontally. We were unusual pairing—I was skeletal, lanky scarecrow, Maya a short and round snowball. We would have been torn to pieces by mean tongues of our classmates, but for the fact that we were also equipped with sharp tongues and quick minds, a trait no one expected from ungainly bodies like ours. Best yet, we always stuck together. Our peers quickly learned that attacking one of us meant fending a counter-attack from both. We easily outwitted the lot by complementing each other, building on each other’s thought, a thing we learned playing together. Physically, with my long legs I could outrun and catch most of the boys and girls in the class, and with her size Maya could wrestle down the strongest of them. So, after initial strength-measuring challenges, we were left in peace to grow into adolescence and were never bullied again.

The Summer after grade 6 things started changing. Maya went to spend the Summer at her aunt’s in Canada. She came back taller and leaner. Her breasts grew and she was wearing a bra. She was still big, but now more voluptuous than chubby. I had pretty much stayed the same. The only thing I developed was nearsightedness, so now I had to wear glasses which made me look like a daddy-long-legs with huge eyes. My breasts in contrast to Maya’s looked like I had goosebumps, all flat except two embarrassingly pointy nipples. Throughout that school year and the following ones changes continued. Maya’s legs toned nicely, her butt rounded up, her breasts kept growing, her face lost the childhood’s chubbiness and became heart-shaped with a set of full lips under a small, straight nose and coal-black eyes. Boys who never noticed her before, except when they had to go around her, started turning after her. I was her spidery sidekick, still skinny, long-limbed and mostly flat. My breasts decided to test the atmosphere one at a time and very shyly. I wore baggy sweaters to hide them, which made me look even skinnier.

When we started high school, we got cell phones as our parents failed attempt to keep us under control. With cell phones we discovered Instagram. On Instagram everyone can be someone, especially if they’re female. Maya’s followers count jumped tenfold when she posted a photo in wet bathing costume, the photo I took. My numbers grew slower, but I learned that certain way of bending makes my butt look followers-worthy. It started as a joke, friendly teasing and competition who will get more views. Then it got more serious. I thought Maya has it easy with her now perfect body and photo model’s face. I had to work for it. I learned how to make the most of the flattering light with makeup, sunglasses, hats. But, it wasn’t enough. Maya seemed to get thousands of new fans with a smiling portrait. I became more daring, in all ways: I’d balance on the railing of the balcony, topless but turned away from the camera so that Instagram’s decency rules weren’t violated. Every morning Maya greeted her followers with a picture from the bed and some witty remark. I did the same, although after carefully applying foundation to cover the blemishes on my face and arranging hair in artful disarray. Last month she almost broke Instagram with a picture in the bath, bubbles positioned strategically around the smooth curve of her breasts and gathering between her thighs; to match that I climbed naked atop a crane on an abandoned hotel scheduled for demolition.

Today we decided to do a photo together on the hill just outside the town. The south side of the hill is a dramatic cliff cut into the rock as if a giant shaved it off with a very sharp knife from the top all the way to the sea. Just next to the sea rows of jugged rock like teeth gape ready to chew off those who step carelessly, or lose purchase trying to climb the cliff. At the top is a narrow natural ledge. We hike from the other, gentler side of the hill to the ledge, strip to bikinis and lean back-to-back for a pose on the ledge over the dramatic drop and foaming waves. We’re snapping selfies, changing poses, turning this way and that, knowingly showing our best angles, moving around each other, leaning into each other. Then we start live streaming and fans react immediately. Our screens are filled with floating hearts, praises, flattery and requests: show the leg, let us see the cleavage, you are both gorgeous… As we twirl I squint blinded by the sun, my foot twists on a rock and I stumble into Maya. She catches me, always the steadier one, and props me up, laughing. Then she makes a step back for the better angle, into nothing…

Please, feel free to share the url to this post, but note—this short story is ©2018 copyright by Marino Bosco. It can not be re-used, re-published and no parts of it can be used in any form without the author’s written permission.

[griseovis]

SUPER IMPORTANT PSA.  

I hoped to avoid this, but it appears as if it’s unavoidable.

I don’t want to call this a callout post because the point of this is to prevent others from becoming involved in similar situations with this particular person. So, instead, this is an official cautionary post informing people of the behavior of user tax//idoitis. Although they keep changing their url a lot because they have a notable tendency to do so, you can always discover what it is by looking at the tag pilgri//mbound ( a former url of theirs ). I warned them I’d have no choice but to do this if they kept visiting my blog, and they did precisely that.

I met this individual back in Summer / Fall of last year. They discovered my multimuse blog and approached me. We started writing and everything seemed okay. Until it didn’t. Eventually, odd things started to occur. For instance, another user accused them of stealing their OC’s backstory and they ( the problematic person ) came to me about it. Not knowing I’d find myself in the shoes of the accuser / victim months later, I comforted them but pointed out the fact that they didn’t respond as well as they could have to the accusation by further pestering the accuser. This recent situation has made me 100% sure that accusation was correct, by the way. Anyhow, after that, they then started doing odd things regarding me. For instance, changing their url to resemble mine. When I approached them to address the matter, they even revealed an awareness of the potentiality of me being made uncomfortable by the change prior to making it and after. As is their tendency to do, they “apologized” but tried to justify it. They did end up changing their url to something else, but the conscious creation of the problem and the manner in which they handled it didn’t sit well with me at all. Not too long thereafter, they did something else that basically served as the final straw and I told them we needed to part ways. We did go our separate ways. Or so I thought. It should have ended there.

As you can guess, it didn’t. Someone followed my multi not too long ago and the mun inquired about writing together. As mentioned in my rules, I’m terrible at recognizing people. I always treat the mun of a new blog / a blog I’ve never interacted with before as if they’re a new person / a stranger. Unless they tell me otherwise ( which most usually know to do ) or I just so happen to get lucky and recognize them. So, especially since they ( deliberately ) made themselves seem like someone I’d never interacted with before, I assumed this was someone new. They said they were interested in interacting with my Rey, so I directed them to this blog. Something I now deeply wish I hadn’t done. They followed and for a good amount of time, it was just silence. I hadn’t followed back because they hadn’t approached. When they did, I browsed their blog to try to get a good understanding / awareness of their writing style. I needed to figure out whether our styles were compatible. I noticed something odd that made me backtrack and decide against interacting with this person. Not only were they incorrectly using fundamental words such as its and it’s, but they were using complex words that I use but haven’t seen anyone else us. They were also incorrectly using those words. Like wielding a sword without having had any practice at all or really understanding how to use it. Typically, those who aren’t native English speakers but write in English stick with what they know and they use proper grammar. Their writing is smooth, comprehensible, and tasteful. At least, this is the case with those I’ve written and met. Yes, native and non-native English speakers alike make mistakes. However, there is an enormous difference between the occassional blunder and consistently making the exact same mistakes. Also, combining poor grammar with complex words ( when used incorrectly at that ) is jarring. Something is fundamentally wrong with that, but it’s difficult to sufficiently put it into words. In any case, I politely declined and told them our styles were incompatible. To which, they said they understood. At that point, they could have mentioned I’d written with them in the past, but they didn’t. Why? I strongly believe it’s because they remember I told them in the past we couldn’t interact and were trying to manipulate my perception so that I’d unknowingly write with them again. Unknowing in the sense that I’d be under the impression I was writing with someone else. Anyhow, I thought we were done and that that would be the end of that. I blocked, because what I saw on their blog sent off warning flags in my mind. It was the natural assumption, but I failed to realize there’s nothing natural about this situation or what they’re doing.

Skip ahead several days later and I receive an anonymous message from this same person. Once more, pretending to be someone aside from the roleplayer I’d interacted with in Summer / Fall. Saying they were the same person I told no just days ago from then, they said that ’ while they understand I’d declined due to incompatible writing styles, they were asking if I’d reconsider’. What exactly did they understand? From where I stand, they merely acknowledged that I said ‘no’ but decided to disregard it. This is the point where I should mention that they have nothing against disregarding the wishes of others. They’re not against showing disrespect and justifying it. If that weren’t enough, this same person sent that message on anon because I blocked them. Instead of bothering to respond to a message that would have forced my hand in responding publicly, I made a PSA under a read more. This person deliberately went on to the blog, clicked the read more, read the PSA, and wrote an indirect response to it on their blog that basically treated my post as a callout post, which it wasn’t. Nowhere at all - neither in the post itself or in the tags - was their url mentioned. At that point, I installed a tracker that a good friend here recommended. I mentioned the situation, and guess what happened? Apparently, this person has made 50+ visits to my blog underneath around 12 or more IP addresses over the past week alone. Since I’ve been blocking IP addresses of theirs as they’ve come along, they’d had to somehow make a plethora of IP addresses to bypass the blocks as if they see it all as some game. If that isn’t unsettling and intrusive behavior, I don’t know what is. Since this mess is becoming ridiculously exhausting and tiring, I decided to message them and resolve things civilly. Turns out, they have no shame about sending that pushy message. They tried to justify it. In that same conversation, they made a false accusation about me despite not having a shred of proof at all and then revealed who they were. They only mentioned then that we’d written before. When I suggest parting ways with someone, I don’t mean come back in a number of months and I’ll give you another chance. I mean stay as far away as possible for the sake of my health and happiness. Regardless, they said they’d stop visiting my blog, but then blocked me for some reason.

Guess what they did this morning? Not once, but multiple times under two new IP addresses did they visit before I had to get up and leave for work. I took a moment to politely ask them to stop from a different account, but they blocked. The person is incapable of guilt, shame, and regret.

In summary, this isn’t a traditional callout post, but rather a cautionary post to other people since no one deserves to go through this. I’m not saying don’t interact with them. The decision is yours to make, of course. I just want people to be aware of the kind of trouble they might encounter should they decide to interact with them. Odds are, given their growing track record of stalking my blog, they’ll inevitably seek out this post and read it unfortunately. It’s just a matter of time. Also, this blog of mine isn’t the only one they’ve been “visiting” too much either. 

Here are just some of my receipts. Ironically and unsurprisingly, the problematic person stopped by the blog while I was putting this together. Although it probably doesn’t make much of a difference since they keep inventing new IP addresses, I’ve blocked out the IP addresses. As you can imagine, having to see this each day is infuriating. 

[iapislazuli]

how aquamarines and lapis lazulis might be related: a theory

so, if youve been following me for a while, you probably know that lapis lazuli is my favorite steven universe character (heck, considering my url, im guessing even people who DONT know me can figure that out) 

being someone who cares WAY too much about lapis, i couldn’t help but notice that yeah, alright, there are a LOT of similarities between her and aquamarine. and these similarities seem to go deeper than appearance, too! so im thinking theres no way these two gem types ARENT related. since (as im writing this) its 5:30 AM and i have nothing better to do, lets talk about some THEORIES, under a cut of course. 

at first, lapis lazulis similarities to aquamarine confused me. there is no reason for these two gems to be so similar. why? because in steven universe, they take their gem facts VERY seriously. gem characters who are this similar in appearance (I.E. jasper and amethyst), in addition to having some related in-universe role, usually also have some correlation in real-life, such as jaspers and amethysts both being quartzes IRL and both being super-soldiers in the show.

lapis lazuli is a semiprecious metamorphic rock, composed mostly of lazurite, lazulite, pyrite, and calcite. aquamarine is a blue variation of beryl, with a composition mostly of beryllium aluminum cyclosilicate. so in other words, not at ALL like lapis lazuli. so it makes no sense, right? aside from color, these two stones are nothing alike, so their counterpart gem characters shouldn’t be so similar.

BUT THEN, i realized something. and this is where we get into the theories.

PART 1: Aquamarine is an Era 2 Gem

you might remember in “Too Short To Ride”, we learned that peridot is an era 2 gem, meaning she is newer than the crystal gems. going off of what is stated in other episodes, its safe to assume that era 2 started sometime after the crystal gem rebellion. 

pearl knows about topazes and aquamarines, which means they have been around since era 1, but i think the two we know (and love?) are era 2 variants of them. 

era 2 gems don’t care about the rebellion, the crystal gems, or anything related to that. this is likely due to the fact that none of them were present for it, so it lacks personal value to them. you can tell this by comparing jasper’s reaction to seeing stevens shield (which very clearly has rose’s symbol on it) to aquamarine’s reaction: 

jasper, a known era 1 gem and participant in the war, is shocked, immediately recognizing the symbol for whose it is and what it stands for. aquamarine doesn’t mention the shield at all, merely acting annoyed that steven is trying to interfere with her mission (*cough* a lot like some OTHER era 2 gem we know). lack of reaction from topaz (who for sure saw the shield multiple times) can lead us to assume she is era 2 as well.

seems to be that era 2 gems are small. okay, topaz is pretty big, but shes a fusion AND (probably) a soldier, so she gets exempt from this rule due to having probable cause for being big. there is a reason for this, leading to the next part.

PART 2: Homeworld is Running Out of Resources

this one is more (as peridot would say) objective fact than theory, since its outright stated, but bear with me here. homeworld is running out of resources to make gems. which means it makes sense that era 2 gems, on average, are smaller than era 1 gems. additionally, it also gives reasoning for any gem who doesn’t have reason to be big (such as soldiers or bodyguards, like topaz) to be made small, to save those precious resources.

peridot, who is an era 2 gem, is hilariously short (the same size as a “defective” era 1 gem, amethyst), but has technological enhancements to make her appear to be average gem height, as well as help her perform her role of technician. this furthers the idea that aquamarine is an era 2 gem: man she is absolutely TINY. and you wanna know what ELSE she has?

BOOM. tractor beam wand. tiny size and a technological enhancement to help her perform her role, she seems for sure to be a product of era 2′s lack of resources. speaking of which, what IS her role? we know she is a high-ranking gem (her attitude, outfit, and seemingly personal connection with the diamonds certainly gives her this impression), but what on earth is she meant to do? a look at lapis lazulis might help answer this question... 

Part 3: Lapis Lazulis are Probably Really Wasteful to Resources

as mentioned before, the stone lapis lazuli itself has a hopelessly complex composition: it takes FOUR different minerals (each of which could probably be considered their own gem) just to make this dang thing. 

Peridot’s monologue in “Too Short To Ride” implies that gems with powers are taxing on resources to make. this would explain why era 1 gems seem to have a whole pantheon of superpowers, while era 2 gems get just one or two if they’re lucky. so, what we’re getting from this is stronger / more powers = takes a lot of resources to make. 

lapis lazulis, as stated in the diamonds’ song in “That Will Be All” are terraformers. this means, a single lapis lazuli has enough hydrokinetic power to reshape entire worlds, because that’s their role in gem society. lapis’ debut in mirror/ocean gem sure seems to support this, she forms the entire ocean into a space elevator, with a cracked gem. if we go based on the more powers = more expensive idea, then lapis lazulis would for sure cost more than a pretty penny’s worth of resources to make for this reason alone (not even factoring other lapis abilities, like the memories and the water wings).

judging that in “The Answer”, we see what appears to be our very own lapis in Blue Diamond’s court, possibly with other lapises, we can figure that lapis lazulis’ tremendous powers rank them pretty high in the homeworld hierarchy. maybe to keep them complacent, so they wont use their terraforming power against the diamonds? who knows.... 

Part 4: Okay, but what does all this mean?

so, to recap: we know that both aquamarine and lapis lazuli are high ranking blue gems with water wings, close connections to the diamonds, and a deceivingly innocent or dainty appearance. one gem type has only thus far shown era 1 variants, and is decidedly wasteful to resources that started to run out in era 2. the other gem type, or at least the era 2 variation of them we are familiar with, is more economic to produce, and has a technological enhancement that allows them to easily lift and move large objects.

lift and move extremely large objects, you say? like, objects up to the size of a five-gem fusion? you know, like, a task you would probably need to carry out while reshaping a planet to fit the will of the diamonds? but this power isnt built in to your being, so it could easily be revoked in the case of disobedience? all wrapped up in a tiny, resource-efficient package? 

oh yeah, thats what i mean by all this: there are no era 2 lapis lazulis, they got axed from the kindergartens at the end of era 1 for being wasteful and their role is instead filled by the repurposed era 2 aquamarines. 

there are still probably a good handful of lapises and era 1 aquamarines around, of course, and the similarities between these two, if any, are yet to be seen. i might be totally wrong about this since aquamarine is such a new character (and lapis is still pretty mysterious despite being one of the first introduced gems), but whatever the case may be, im excited to hopefully learn more about gems and homeworld in the upcoming Wanted event! 

[geeksperhour]

via Screaming Frog

Speed has long been an official ranking factor, but with the introduction of the Core Web Vitals (CWV), many an SEO might have noticed the ominous Pass/Fail assessment within PageSpeed Insights.

While these metrics aren’t yet used in Googles algorithm, I saw so many URLs failing, it got me wondering. How many well-ranking URLs end up passing the assessment?

2,500 keywords, 20,000 URLs, and just as many graphs later, I may have found the answer.

TL;DR – Across 20,000 URLs:

First Input Delay (FID) on Desktop is negligible with 99% of URLs considered good. And 89% for Mobile.

43% of Mobile and 44% of Desktop URLs had a good Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

46% of Mobile and 47% of Desktop URLs had a good Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Only 12% of Mobile and 13% of Desktop results passed the CWV assessment (i.e. considered good in all three metrics).

URLs in Position 1 were 10% more likely to pass the CWV assessment than URLs in Position 9.

  Methodology

As Core Web Vitals are evaluated on a per URL basis, I took 2,500 keywords across 100 different topics, scraping all the first-page organic results of each. In total I ended up with about 22,500 URLs. This was duplicated for both mobile and desktop results.

These where then run through the SEO Spider connected to the PageSpeed Insights API, gathering the necessary PSI & CrUX data.

A couple of caveats:

All results were scraped from a search in Berkshire, UK.

No rich result URLs where included.

10th position is excluded as so few SERPs had 10 organic listings, making the sample size considerably lower.

A handful of results had featured snippets. These are classified as position 1 but may not be the ‘true’ 1st position.

Some sites appeared across multiple rankings (e.g. Wikipedia)

Several URLs could not be analysed in PSI for various reasons.

A Bit on Core Web Vitals

For anyone reading who might not be aware of Core Web Vitals – they’re three metrics Google will use to judge page experience. And will become an official ranking factor some time in 2021.

Why? To help push the web forward, encouraging site owners to provide better experiences for users – Aaaand likely helping Google to render the web a bit quicker and more efficiently at the same time. Win-Win.

They’re recorded using real user metrics (rUM) from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). (Google search may also use lab data where CrUX is not available, but the analysis below focuses on rUM). PageSpeed Insights (PSI) then reports on the 75th percentile of this data (25% slowest loads), and classifies them by the following thresholds:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

To pass the Core Web Vitals assessment, a URL needs to be considered ‘good’ in all three metrics.

What Did the Data Highlight?

As suspected only a small proportion of sites ended up passing the CWV assessment – shock! From our list of URLs, only 12% mobile and 13% desktop passed the CWV assessment.

Excluding those without rUM brought this to 23% and 24% respectively.

What’s more interesting is looking at individual pass rates for each ranking position:

URLs in Position 1 had a pass rate of 19% on Mobile and 20% on Desktop. Moving from 1st to 5th saw a 2% decrease per position. The remaining results from 5-9 flattened out to a pass rate of around 10% on Mobile and 11% on Desktop.

So what’s going on here? Have CWVs been a top-secret ranking factor all along?

Very unlikely, but perhaps not far from the truth. From what I’ve noticed it tends to boil down to two aspects-

A major part of the CWV assessment focuses on load speed, which we know is already a ranking factor. Therefore, logic would suggest that quicker sites may rank slightly higher and end up passing the assessment in turn.

However, Google continually comments that speed is a minor factor. Instead, I suspect sites ranking in the first 1-4 positions tend to be better optimised overall. With targeted, rich, and user-friendly content. All while loading this information more efficiently.

Breaking Down the Vitals

We can also view the individual metrics on a more granular level. The following table shows classification across the whole URL sample:

First Input Delay

The FID is negligible, with 89% of Mobile and 99% of Desktop URLs within the good threshold. Averaging at around 56ms on Mobile and 13ms on Desktop.

When comparing against position we get much less of a correlation:

Largest Contentful Paint

LCP saw 43% of Mobile and 44% of Desktop URLs considered good. This averaged out at 3.13s for Mobile and 3.04s for Desktop.

When compared against position, we can see a slight trend. But only 0.14s difference between 1st and 9th:

We can also see this reflected in the pass rates (considered good) for each position:

Cumulative Layout Shift

The CLS pass rates were much higher than I anticipated. As this is usually where we see most sites fail. CLS had 46% of Mobile and 47% of Desktop URLs considered good. This averaged at a CLS of 0.29 on Mobile and 0.25 on Desktop.

This also saw less of a correlation against position, though 1st and 2nd tended to be slightly lower:

When looking at individual pass rates by ranking, we can see a decline in the percentage of ‘good’ URLs as the position moves down the SERP.

First Contentful Paint

Lastly, while it’s not a CWV I also extracted the FCP from CrUX data as another measure of speed. This saw an average of 2.19s on Mobile and 1.99s on Desktop.

While relatively unchanged on desktop, mobile saw a slight increase in load times by position. But only 0.10s between 1st & 9th:

What Can You Take Away from This?

Well, not a whole lot… (sorry). This is still a farily small sample, and Core Web Vitals are not an official ranking factor just yet and won’t be till 2021. Meaning their true impact is yet to be seen.

But if you do happen to load up PageSpeed Insights and see the disheartening ‘fail’ message. Fear not, you’re in good company with most other sites.

Will passing the assessment immediately boost your rankings? Probably not. Should you strive to pass it anyway? Definitely.

Regardless of how much ranking benefit speed and CWV’s provide, having your pages as quick, responsive, and stable as possible is great for users and search engines alike.

If you’re looking to make improvements, PageSpeed Insights is a great place to start. And you can easily grab data across your entire site with the SEO Spider and steps here.

The post How Many Sites Pass the Core Web Vitals Assessment? appeared first on Screaming Frog.

[wjwilliams29]

Google’s 2018 Updates So Far And How They Already Impact Your Website

I wish I knew earlier about this Google update! is something many site owners or marketers say on a daily basis. Moreover, it would be heaven on earth if we also knew how all those Google algorithm changes, be they official or unnamed updates, should be dealt with.

  Most times, we get to see how rankings fluctuate, traffic drops, and still, we don’t know what to do. What’s more, we always think it’s us who made a mistake and, therefore, got downgraded. This blog post will both prove you’re wrong and agree with you. Plus, we’ll teach you what every change Google made so far in 2018 is doing to your site and how you can improve your marketing and SEO moves.

    Early 2018 Google Updates

Offering a Very Slow Experience Will Get Websites a Downgrade in Rankings

A Search Console Year-Plus of Data Adding

A Google-Backed Twitter Account Meant Solely for Search News

Switching from HTTP to HTTPS Gets Mandatory

“People Also Search For” Box

Chrome Tidies Up Messy URLs When Shared

Search Console Crawl Limits Changed

Mobile-First Indexing

Multifaceted Featured Snippets

The Relevancy Update

Google’s Mobile Friendly & Rich Results Tools Now Read JavaScript Sites

“Mentioned on Wikipedia” Carousel in Search Results

New AdWords Features

Conclusion

  After a year like 2017 with significant algorithm changes and updates, Google doesn’t seem to want to settle down. Danny Sullivan, the officially-appointed ombudsman from Google, made it clear that they do various minor updates daily plus some more serious ones during the year: We do some type of focused update nearly daily. A broad core algorithm update happens several times per year.

  Those would be focused, yes. We also have lots of updates focused on specific little things each day that go into the core algorithm. This is a broader general change to the core algorithm.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 12, 2018

  Guess this is how we could explain the hectic fluctuations in various Google algorithm monitoring tools. Webmaster and marketers alike often felt overwhelmed by the density and frequency of these ranking fluctuations and tried to interpret their activity, correlating their analysis and findings, and reaching a conclusion or providing an educated guess until Google would have officially confirmed them.

  Screenshot taken from cognitiveseo.com/signals

  Google likes messing around with people’s website traffic and site owners’ feelings – it sort of gives people mixed feelings regarding Google: both love and hate.

  Many updates or changes in the way Google’s algorithm works is given by an interesting paradigm skillful webmasters know how to read. And that is the one provided by Barry Schwartz, the update guru of our digital marketing world:

  When you have both signals, SEO chatter, and tools start lighting up, it is a good sign something major changed in the core ranking algorithm with Google search. barry schwartz Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com

    1. Early 2018 Google Updates

  The 2018 updates pace is pretty aggressive, one might say, while March seems to have been the busiest month in terms of changes and ranking fluctuations. We’re not talking officially announced updates here, but only the SERPs activity as seen in forums and Google algorithm updates tracking tools. 

  Talking about Google-confirmed updates, it’s quite seldom for Google to officially confirm updates; it only happens several times a year. As a result, many updates that impacted websites across the world wide web might not be named and talked about as much as those regarded as significant by the Googlers. A fit example would be the March 7 one, widely known as a core algorithm update meant to reward “the under-rewarded sites”, as some webmasters would say. It has greatly impacted traffic and rankings while also needing a longer time span than usual.

  The specifics of Google’s algorithm will always remain under wraps. sam gowing Writer at Fifty Five and Five @_SamGowing / fiftyfiveandfive.com

  However, even when Google does give official statements about one update or another, they are quite evasive when it comes to confirming or guide users through. Maybe that’s why Barry Schwartz often says: “The answer, according to Google, is really nothing”.

  Whenever site owners or fellow marketers want to dig more into what it looks like being an algorithm change, they turn to Barry Schwartz, as the go-to high-quality source regarding monitoring, researching, analyzing, and dissecting Google both confirmed and unconfirmed updates. Even though Barry’s posts often start as being speculative, they’re nonetheless worth checking them out and following him as they usually get confirmed later on either by fellow webmasters or by the Google team itself.

    Either way, be the update Google-confirmed or unconfirmed, bearing a name or not, impacting websites over a shorter or longer period of time, it’s clear that there are fluctuations and while some sites might see drops in traffic, others might notice gains. As a consequence, both the lucky and the unfortunate sites should neither rub their gain in, nor lose confidence, but stick to building great content that makes searcher want to return to your page.

  There’s no “fix” for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 12, 2018

  Without further ado, we shall talk about the 2018 Google updates that happened so far, focusing on those that were Google or webmasters-backed and already influenced the traffic and ranking flow of many websites.

  2. Offering a Very Slow Experience Will Get Websites a Downgrade in Rankings

  This update happened in the first month of 2018. Usually, December comes with a good share of inactivity, but this last December 2017 proved to be quite busy, were we to look at all the updates that have rambled on the Google streets: the Google-confirmed Maccabees updates that made a target out of some celebrity sites as well, knowledge graph updates, SEO starter guide update, extended meta description space, rich results testing tool new release and many more.

  Mobile Page Speed as a Ranking Factor source: seroundtable,com

  Getting back to our sheep, January 18 was marked by a Google-official announcement that regarded a page speed update scheduled to come into effect this July (we’d better hurry and make the right changes to our site, don’t we?). Google said this is a new ranking algorithm designed to lower the SERP position of some mobile pages that deliver a really slow experience to the end user. 

  Therefore, here we have it: a brand new, officially-announced Google ranking algorithm: page speed. Starting July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for all mobile searches.

  Slow mobile pages that will get hit by this update will most likely not be notified in the Google Search Console given that this is an algorithmic thing, not a manual action. The good news, though, is that Google forecasted their actions to hit only a small percentage of pages presenting the slowest loading time and therefore a handful of queries. Schwartz, too, thinks this update is not very disruptive given that a page would have to be super slow to really get hit by this major update.

  To be clear, there is no ranking boost for being fast, just a downgrade for being really slow. berry schwartz Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com

  How this Google update impacts you

  Apart from what we’ve previously said above – that it won’t impact the traffic and rankings lest you provide (at least) a reasonably satisfactory and fast experience to your users (which comes pretty obvious),- some webmasters raised a question: what comes first – canonical URL or AMP URL? This comes after many started worrying on how big of an impact will this update cause on their sites.

    If a page’s canonical page is very slow but the AMP URL is very fast, will Google use the AMP or the mobile URL for measuring speed and ranking the page? Although, in theory, Google uses the canonical URL regardless whether there’s a desktop or mobile page involved and they have an AMP URL, Google confirmed that since the AMP URL is provided and is mega-fast, then no downgrade in rankings will take place. Berry’s answer is this:

  The answer is AMP for speed will be what Google uses for this algorithm, not your canonical URL because that is what is being served. But for other signals, like content, links, etc, Google will use the canonical mobile URL. Confused? Yeah, thought so.” berry schwartz Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com

  What’s more, many Google users confuse this new speed ranking update with the Mobile-First Indexing update – they’re independent from one another, so don’t mingle them.

  Last but not least, this January/July major ranking update will not boost the rankings of those pages that are fast, but only downgrade those that are extremely slow.

  3. A Search Console Year-Plus of Data Adding

  This update seemed to drive people crazy after Google: digital marketers and webmasters alike were very happy to learn that starting on January 8, the search giant released a new version of their Search Console with 16 months of stored data. 

  It's here! Google officially announces the new Google Search Console: "We are now starting to release this beta version to all users of Search Console" with many updates including 16 months of data in Search Performance – Thanks @googlewmc ‍ https://t.co/W0DNDFexxu pic.twitter.com/mCPV8EvaMz

— Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) January 8, 2018

  Today's Search Console launch is the start in the biggest revamp of this tool in 12+ years. Excited to get your feedback on it! https://t.co/2VS8faUHLl

— Elliott Ng (@elliottng) January 8, 2018

  Besides Google Search Console Beta getting live for everyone with 16 months of stored data in the Search Performance report, Google also added various enticing new features to this version, such as an updated Index Coverage report (alerting you when bumping into new issues and helping you monitor their behavior), and a changed AMP status and Job Posting report.

  How this Google update impacts you

  Everybody can now understand how to optimize their site for Google, given how simple everything is (or at least it seems). In addition, having an extended period of data storage, you can now deploy more in-depth analysis of long-term trends that might impact more than one year. You will be able to work with really actionable data and make a wiser decision regarding your website and the overall user experience.

  source: webmasters.googleblog.com

  Also very important is the fact that the Google team intends to make this Google Search Console updating process a long-term one, hence they will continue adding new features and changes to their version. As a consequence, the Google team is asking for continued feedback – after all, how do you think the new GSC version got launched?

  4. A Google-Backed Twitter Account Meant Solely for Search News

  Danny Sullivan, Google’s public search liaison, decided to create a brand new Twitter profile meant to inform, guide, explain, and be in contact with all Googlers and users and announced it on January 26. Most of us already got those from following Danny’s profile but he found it more suitable to deliver messages regarding Google search on an entirely new profile and spare his following of Star Wars and Star Trek tweets, should they be interested mostly in the search side.

    How this Google update impacts you

  While this isn’t really a Google algorithm or ranking update, it still counts as a smart move meant to benefit all of the Google fans out there. I myself am quite thankful for this twist of events and seek to follow the Google SearchLiaison profile as closely as possible.

  Why, you might wonder. Well, simply put, as Berry Schwartz is the primary source to check when it comes to Google updates in general, such is the new Google SearchLiaison profile the go-to source of information when it comes to every search-related thing, explanation, debate, or piece of news. 

  5. Switching from HTTP to HTTPS gets mandatory

  This security-centric turn comes to prove once again the Google really cares about the user experience and trust websites provide to their visitors. Similar to the page speed update  mentioned earlier, Google announced on February 9 that starting July 2018, websites should have an SSL addition to their site and provide an HTTPS-backed experience to their users, or else they’ll be punished.

  source: searchenginejournal.com

  How this Google update impacts you

  This HTTP-to-HTTPS issue is twofold: first, it’s for your own good and safety to use HTTPS instead of HTTP (“S” actually comes from “security”), two, Google will straightforwardly warn your visitors that your website is not safe browsing, leading to a pretty high bounce rate.

  source: searchenginejournal.com

  Given that Chrome holds a good browser version market share of 50% worldwide, we can say this update will impact many web owners. Therefore having a protruding notice in the Omnibox warning users that your website is “Not secure”, might increase bounce rate and take a toll on advertising impressions, affiliate links, and e-commerce overall sales. Here’s a list pointing out how many Chrome users there are and the impact level this update might have on various regions and countries, should website not switch to HTPPS.

  source: searchenginejournal.com

  Switching to HTTPS might be a bit difficult but it pays off. Most web hosting providers already provide this service for free or manage to give you HTTPS certificates at a rather low cost. So you have no excuse postponing this as money shouldn’t really be a problem.

  6. “People Also Search For” Box

   This Google change got live on February 13 and got fully implemented on desktop search already. Somehow, it’s similar to “people also ask” section except that this one directs people to other SERPs.

  Anyone else seeing this behavior in #Google‘s serps? Different look than before and they appear after clicking on the link then coming back to the serps. @rustybrick @jenstar #SEO pic.twitter.com/YVMbCsMHio

— Sean Van Guilder (@seanvanguilder) February 13, 2018

  How this Google update impacts you

  The new look is one search refinement meant to benefit organic results. Should you not qualify for a keyword entered in a search query, Google could lead visitors to your site when offering them variations of the first query. Or the other way around: if you focused on optimizing your page content and used both short and long keywords that might answer to a vast array of queries, you might appear twice in SERPs.

  Google showing 'People also search for' suggestions when we click through to a result and then go back. @JohnMu has said before that click data doesn't affect rankings, but this suggests it's at least monitored. Seen this before @rustybrick @randfish? #SEO pic.twitter.com/65hwz6jIxI

— Glass Digital (@GlassDigitalLTD) February 13, 2018

  7. Chrome Tidies Up Messy URLs When Shared

  Starting February 19 this year, Chrome v64 cuts off unnecessary tails and the end of an URL when sharing it using the URL streaming “Share” in Chrome. 

  Berry Schwartz had a feeling that this new feature is tied to the canonical page URL. AMP has similar sharing features in order to deliver an easy-to-use and relevant URL. 

   How this Google update impacts you

  Besides the impact we’ve mentioned above, the one with using and delivering a usable URL, there are two more consequences to this update. 

  On one hand, having the original URL trimmed when shared could be a little annoying, given that when it opens the page, it would load only the top of the page and lose the specific location it had when attached to, say, the anchor text.

  On the other hand, who knows, maybe this feature will become really useful at some point in the future.

  8. Search Console Crawl Limits Changed

  One major update from Google happened on February 19 when the giant search engine radically changed the Search Console crawl limits due to spam and abuse.

  Although there’s only a small percent who could abuse the system, it happened nonetheless and the team had to take action.

  The Search Console limits per option changed:

  Before: Crawl only this URL submits only the selected URL to the Google for re-crawling. You can submit up to 500 individual URLs in this way within a 30 day period.

After: Crawl only this URL submits only the selected URL to the Google for re-crawling. You can submit up to 10 individual URLs per day.

  Google Search Console also changed numbers here:

  Before: Select Crawl this URL and its direct links to submit the URL as well as all the other pages that URL links to directly for re-crawling. You can submit up to 10 requests of this kind within a 30 day period.

After: Select & Crawl this URL and its direct links to submit the URL as well as all the other pages that URL links to directly for re-crawling. You can submit up to 2 of these site recrawl requests per day.

  How this Google update impacts you

  Barry Schwartz thinks this update might not be such a big deal to white-hat SEOs who don’t use this tool so often, given that a submission for indexation normally happens on a limited basis. But it might block some spam and unnatural activity from black-hat users.

    9. Mobile-First Indexing

  This Google update birth story is quite a soap opera. Once upon a February 22 day, webmasters and digital marketers alike gave a shoutout to a big announcement Google made at PubCon regarding a new ranking algorithm. Gary Illyes from Google announced onstage that the search engine webmaster team intends to roll the mobile-first index for more sites in the following weeks. 

  Announcement – In the next month and a half or so, Google is moving a LOT of sites to mobile first.@methode #Pubcon

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 21, 2018

  The mobile-first indexing update didn’t come into effect until around March 26, as John Mueller didn’t give an exact date regarding the full start. Those monitoring fluctuations in Google rankings and traffic couldn’t tell either when exactly this updated started given the quite lengthy period of activity. What’s more, it almost gone completely unnoticed as there were few to no sites to signal their new ranking position from which to determine whether they were hit by this update or not.

    How this Google update impacts you

  To best explain this update and what it does to your site,  we could say that mobile-first indexing points out to Google’s attempt at indexing and ranking your website from a mobile point-of-view, when applicable. That is, should you have a mobile-friendly website, Google would index and rank your mobile version first. When I said “when applicable” it meant that Google will treat the world wide web this way only when bumping into sites that follow the best practices required by mobile-first indexing, therefore wouldn’t impact the other websites that didn’t check this aspect on their list. At least for now.

  We evaluate each site individually on its readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the best practices and transition the site when the site is ready. google search developers.google.com

  This update is a global and multilingual rollout, thus it’s meeant for everyone and will impact everyone.

  It's global – across countries & languages.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) March 27, 2018

  Regardless if your website is ready from a mobile-friendliness standpoint or not, optimizing and having mobile-friendly content is still relevant in marketing strategies that seek to make the website perform better in SERPs. Given there is a vast array of ranking signals that may influence your position in search, you might deliver content that is not necessarily mobile-friendly or is slow-loading. Having said this, optimizing your website for mobile would set your marketing strategy on fire, so you should definitely not postpone it. 

    N.B.: This update is mobile-first indexing, not mobile first index, where the primary index is still the desktop one, this one only being added to the core one.

    10. Multifaceted Featured Snippets

  A new form of featured snippets was released on March 1 and it’s meant to answer queries that might be driven by more than one need and search intent.

  Last month, we shared how Google would be displaying more than one featured snippet, when deemed useful. This is now rolling out live on mobile and will eventually come to desktop over time. More here: https://t.co/b2u4T9RvUW pic.twitter.com/ENJFa8ppkE

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 28, 2018

  Google said they intend to provide more than one featured snippet for queries that might serve or have several potential intentions or purposes associated. This is one more step forward in what Google is trying to better understand the users and update it’s AI algorithm to deliver the best and the most satisfactory result possible. 

  How this Google update impacts you

  Having a Google update such as multifaceted featured snippets is great news for both site owners and content marketers. This means that more sites will get the chance to be featured on position 0 in SERPs. 

    Site owners will have a double shot at ranking high in search while content marketers’ efforts of optimizing their content in order to be featured up there, will finally be rewarded. 

  On the other hand though, I sense this update might be a bit nagging to the user, given that this will only get the page more crowded than it already is. 

  11. The Relevancy Update

  On March 9, there were some unnamed updates, yet online marketers knew how to interpret them and realize how big it was. while inquiring Google webmasters. John Mueller from Google confirmed in a Webmasters Hangout that these updates had to relevancy:

  The updates that we made are more about relevance where we’re trying to figure out which sites relevant for certain queries and and not so much quality overall. It doesn’t means its a bad sign, we may just be finding that your site isn’t relevant for these particular queries. john mueller Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google @JohnMu

  How this Google update impacts you

  Marie Haynes and her team investigates several site that got hit on March 9 and noticed similarities among most of them. Many of the victims were relatively big brand who lost rankings on their articles, which , on a closer look, showed signs of duplicate content in regard to other sites’ content. This clearly pointed out the fact that Google intends to sift sites that don’t raise up to the standard of providing helpful, useful, and unique content on their pages.

  This is not an update pointing to who is bad and who is good – but they rather seek to refine their answers to people’s queries – hence, they want to give the good answer not just the one that ranks for it. MARIE HAYNES Blogger @Marie_Haynes / hiswebmarketing.com

  Seeing a drop around March 9 might show you were hit by this relevancy update. Getting downgraded doesn’t necessarily mean that your content is awful, but because Google saw one or more of your competitors being more qualitative than you.

  Should you start optimizing your content and trying to fix everything so to see results as soon as possible won’t help you on the spot. When refining your marketing strategy, start with a site audit, read the Quality Raters’ Guidelines very carefully, and ask someone who’s close to you but unfamilliar with your website to compare you with your competitors and tell you what they see, and last but not least, cut off from duplicate content.

  12. Google’s Mobile Friendly & Rich Results Tools Now Read JavaScript Sites

  If Google has a hard time reading JavaScript Sites, then this update comes as a great surprise and a piece of great newson March 10. Tom Greenaway from Google, at Google I/O 2018 said that Google approaches indexing and ranking of JavaScript pages very differently than non-JavaScript ones.

  In more human words, the Googlebot might have issues indexing and rendering the contents of a JavaScript page and might need to do it in more than one wave. Hence, Javascript powered website in Google are deferred until the fit resources to process that content.

    And yet, Google worked their mobile-friendly and rich results rendering tools to be able to work with sites built in JavaScript language. In more technical words: 

  Those tools can now both show the screenshots for JS-based sites, rendered DOM, show JavaScript errors and stack traces as seen by the Googlebot’s web render service. The tools will show rendered HTML, the console log, exceptions, and stack traces. berry Schwartz Founder at Search Engine Roundtable @rustybrick / rustybrick.com

  How this Google update impacts you

  Well, from now on, websites built in JavaScript will be readable from a mobile-friendly standpoint, while also appearing in rich snippets when somebody would enter a query from the mobile phone. Websites will double, if not triple their visibility, rank higher, and get increased traffic to their sites. This update is pretty much self-explanatory. 

  13. “Mentioned on Wikipedia” Carousel in Search Results

  Many website owners complained about Google not mentioning where the carousel info was taken from so the switch is quite significant. Google added on April 11 a new featured to their carousel and is visible to both mobile and desktop end users. 

  source: seroundtable.com

  When clicking on the carousel, it leads you not to the brand site but to the actual Wikipedia page of that brand or product.

  How this Google update impacts you

  It’s still not clear to what kind of searcher this carousel appears or in what country, yet one thing is clear. Big brands or websites that got featured in Wikipedia doubled their chances of appearing in Google SERPs. 

  What’s more, some searches trigger a featured snippet instead of a carousel, hence this is quite an intricate update. 

  14. New AdWords Features

  Starting early this year, Google added new AdWords features almost every month: January, March, April, and May. In January, Google started allowing advertisers to add, edit, or remove keywords while they’re busy doing something else. Also, users have now the chance to quickly identify and name Display ads issues from the Overview page and find out more about every impression shift in search results. March had its fair share of new features, while April and May showed low activity with only one update each, April promising the chance of getting an insider look into keywords that aren’t showing ads together with an explanation, plus “get more done in less time”.

  source: support.google.com

  How this Google update impacts you

  All these AdWords updates are meant to positively impact your advertising efforts and help you learn more from an environment you’re so much expecting results. Google’s aim is to allow you get deeper insight from your data in order to make the right selling decisions.

  Conclusion

  The updates that got launched so far in 2018 had to do a lot with user experience:

Google wanted pages to load fast (page speed), not have intrusive ads, lacking mobile optimization, and be relevant.

Even though, as Schwartz names them, many ranking fluctuations didn’t point out to a heavy or core update and were more some sort of “hiccups”, one thing is sure: Google is set to make their search engine as human as possible and as smart and cunning as a human being. 

  Every month, there has been a lot of chatter, debate, educated guesses in forums such as WebmasterWorld, Black Hat Forums, Google forums, as proved by the tools that monitor Google’s changes that mainly affect traffic and rankings (cognitiveSEO, SERPmetrics, Mozcast, Advanced Web Ranking, Accuranker, Algaroo, RankRanger, SEMRush). 

    Overall, we can expect more from Google as the time passes. Should you want to be ready for the upcoming updates or just fix your websites as much as you can for the ones that come into effect this July – page speed update and switching from HTTP to HTPPS -, make sure you read this post. 

  Google has one love and one heart: their users, and that’s why they’ll continue focusing on mobile that’s on the rise lately, improved user experience (UX), and richer and more relevant content experiences. 

  User experience will continue to be in the spotlight and more specifically will be driving users to spend less time in the search results and more time on websites with the richest content experiences. victoria doherty Digital Marketing Executive at blubolt / Victoria Doherty

  The post Google’s 2018 Updates So Far And How They Already Impact Your Website appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

[lawrenceseitz22]

How the Mobile-First Index Disrupts the Link Graph

Posted by rjonesx.

It's happened to all of us. You bring up a webpage on your mobile device, only to find out that a feature you were accustomed to using on desktop simply isn't available on mobile. While frustrating, it has always been a struggle for web developers and designers alike to simplify and condense their site on mobile screens without needing to strip features or content that would otherwise clutter a smaller viewport. The worst-case scenario for these trade-offs is that some features would be reserved for desktop environments, or perhaps a user might be able to opt out of the mobile view. Below is an example of how my personal blog displays the mobile version using a popular plugin by ElegantThemes called HandHeld. As you can see, the vast page is heavily stripped down and is far easier to read... but at what cost? And at what cost to the link graph?

My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed. So what happens when the mobile versions of sites become the primary way the web is accessed, at scale, by the bots which power major search engines?

Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index raises new questions about how the link structure of the web as a whole might be influenced once these truncated web experiences become the first (and sometimes only) version of the web Googlebot encounters.

So, what's the big deal?

The concern, which no doubt Google engineers have studied internally, is that mobile websites often remove content and links in order to improve user experience on a smaller screen. This abbreviated content fundamentally alters the link structure which underlies one of the most important factors in Google's rankings. Our goal is to try and understand the impact this might have.

Before we get started, one giant unknown variable which I want to be quick to point out is we don't know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots. Perhaps Google will choose to be "mobile-first" only on sites that have historically displayed an identical codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of Googlebot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not only to go "mobile-first," but in fact to go "mobile-only."

Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale

For this brief research, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I would then crawl two levels deep, spoofing both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of Googlebot. With this data, we can begin to compare how different the link structure of the web might look.

Homepage metrics

Let's start with some descriptive statistics of the home pages of these 20,000 randomly selected sites. Of the sites analyzed, 87.42% had the same number of links on their homepage regardless of whether the bot was mobile- or desktop-oriented. Of the remaining 12.58%, 9% had fewer links and 3.58% had more. This doesn't seem too disparate at first glance.

Perhaps more importantly, only 79.87% had identical links on the homepage when visited by desktop and mobile bots. Just because the same number of links were found didn't mean they were actually the same links. This is important to take into consideration because links are the pathways which bots use to find content on the web. Different paths mean a different index. Among the homepage links, we found a 7.4% drop in external links. This could mean a radical shift in some of the most important links on the web, given that homepage links often carry a great deal of link equity. Interestingly, the biggest "losers" as a percentage tended to be social sites. In retrospect, it seems reasonable that one of the common types of links a website might remove from their mobile version would be social share buttons because they're often incorporated into the "chrome" of a page rather than the content, and the "chrome" often changes to accommodate a mobile version. The biggest losers as a percentage in order were:

linkedin.com

instagram.com

twitter.com

facebook.com

So what's the big deal about 5–15% differences in links when crawling the web? Well, it turns out that these numbers tend to be biased towards sites with lots of links that don't have a mobile version. However, most of those links are main navigation links. When you crawl deeper, you just find the same links. But those that do deviate end up having radically different second-level crawl links.

Second-level metrics

Now this is where the data gets interesting. As we continue to crawl out on the web using crawl sets that are influenced by the links discovered by a mobile bot versus a desktop bot, we'll continue to get more and more divergent results. But how far will they diverge? Let's start with size. While we crawled an identical number of home pages, the second-tier results diverged based on the number of links found on those original home pages. Thus, the mobile crawlset was 977,840 unique URLs, while the desktop crawlset was 1,053,785. Already we can see a different index taking shape — the desktop index would be much larger. Let's dig deeper.

I want you to take a moment and really focus on this graph. Notice there are three categories:

Mobile Unique: Blue bars represent unique items found by the mobile bot

Desktop Unique: Orange bars represent unique items found by the desktop bot

Shared: Gray bars represent items found by both

Notice also that there are there are four tests:

Number of URLs discovered

Number of Domains discovered

Number of Links discovered

Number of Root Linking Domains discovered

Now here is the key point, and it's really big. There are more URLs, Domains, Links, and Root Linking Domains unique to the desktop crawl result than there are shared between the desktop and mobile crawler. The orange bar is always taller than the gray. This means that by just the second level of the crawl, the majority of link relationships, pages, and domains are different in the indexes. This is huge. This is a fundamental shift in the link graph as we have come to know it.

And now for the big question, what we all care about the most — external links.

A whopping 63% of external links are unique to the desktop crawler. In a mobile-only crawling world, the total number of external links was halved.

What is happening at the micro level?

So, what's really causing this huge disparity in the crawl? Well, we know it has something to do with a few common shortcuts to making a site "mobile-friendly," which include:

Subdomain versions of the content that have fewer links or features

The removal of links and features by user-agent detecting plugins

Of course, these changes might make the experience better for your users, but it does create a different experience for bots. Let's take a closer look at one site to see how this plays out.

This site has ~10,000 pages according to Google and has a Domain Authority of 72 and 22,670 referring domains according to the new Moz Link Explorer. However, the site uses a popular WordPress plugin that abbreviates the content down to just the articles and pages on the site, removing links from descriptions in the articles on the category pages and removing most if not all extraneous links from the sidebar and footer. This particular plugin is used on over 200,000 websites. So, what happens when we fire up a six-level-deep crawl with Screaming Frog? (It's great for this kind of analysis because we can easily change the user-agent and restrict settings to just crawl HTML content.)

The difference is shocking. First, notice that in the mobile crawl on the left, there is clearly a low number of links per page and that number of links is very steady as you crawl deeper through the site. This is what produces such a steady, exponential growth curve. Second, notice that the crawl abruptly ended at level four. The site just didn't have any more pages to offer the mobile crawler! Only ~3,000 of the ~10,000 pages Google reports were found.

Now, compare this to the desktop crawler. It explodes in pages at level two, collecting nearly double the total pages of the mobile crawl at this level alone. Now, recall the graph before showing that there were more unique desktop pages than there were shared pages when we crawled 20,000 sites. Here is confirmation of exactly how it happens. Ultimately, 6x the content was made available to the desktop crawler in the same level of crawl depth.

But what impact did this have on external links?

Wow. 75% of the external, outbound links were culled in the mobile version. 4,905 external links were found in the desktop version while only 1,162 were found in the mobile. Remember, this is a DA 72 site with over twenty thousand referring domains. Imagine losing that link because the mobile index no longer finds the backlink. What should we do? Is the sky falling?

Take a deep breath

Mobile-first isn't mobile-only

The first important caveat to all this research is that Google isn't giving up on the desktop — they're simply prioritizing the mobile crawl. This makes sense, as the majority of search traffic is now mobile. If Google wants to make sure quality mobile content is served, they need to shift their crawl priorities. But they also have a competing desire to find content, and doing so requires using a desktop crawler so long as webmasters continue to abbreviate the mobile versions of their sites.

This reality isn't lost on Google. In the Original Official Google Mobile First Announcement, they write...

If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.

Google took the time to state that a desktop version can be better than an "incomplete mobile version." I don't intend to read too much into this statement other than to say that Google wants a full mobile version, not just a postcard.

Good link placements will prevail

One anecdotal outcome of my research was that the external links which tended to survive the cull of a mobile version were often placed directly in the content. External links in sidebars like blog-rolls were essentially annihilated from the index, but in-content links survived. This may be a signal Google picks up on. External links that are both in mobile and desktop tend to be the kinds of links people might click on. So, while there may be fewer links powering the link graph (or at least there might be a subset that is specially identified), if your links are good, content-based links, then you have a chance to see improved performance.

I was able to confirm this by looking at a subset of known good links. Using Fresh Web Explorer, I looked up fresh links to toysrus.com which is currently gaining a great deal of attention due to stores closing. We can feel confident that most of these links will be in-content because the articles themselves are about the relevant, breaking news regarding Toys R Us. Sure enough, after testing 300+ mentions, we found the links to be identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and, subsequently, they showed up in both versions of the crawl.

Selection bias and convergence

It is probably the case that popular sites are more likely to have a mobile version than non-popular sites. Now, they might be responsive — at which point they would yield no real differences in the crawl — but at least some percentage would likely be m.* domains or utilize plugins like those mentioned above which truncate the content. At the lower rungs of the web, older, less professional content is likely to have only one version which is shown to mobile and desktop devices alike. If this is the case, we can expect that over time the differences in the index might begin to converge rather than diverge, as my study looked only at sites that were in the top million and only crawled two levels deep.

Moreover (this one is a bit speculative), but I think over time that there will be convergence between a mobile and desktop index. I don't think the link graphs will grow exponentially different as the linked web is only so big. Rather, the paths to which certain pages are reached, and the frequency with which they are reached, will change quite a bit. So, while the link graph will differ, the set of URLs making up the link graph will largely be the same. Of course, some percentage of the mobile web will remain wholly disparate. The large number of sites that use dedicated mobile subdomains or plugins that remove substantial sections of content will remain like mobile islands in the linked web.

Impact on SERPs

It's difficult at this point to say what the impact on search results will be. It will certainly not leave the SERPs unchanged. What would be the point of Google making and announcing a change to its indexing methods if it didn't improve the SERPs? That being said, this study wouldn't be complete without some form of impact assessment. Hat tip to JR Oakes for giving me this critique, otherwise I would have forgotten to take a look.

First, there are a couple of things which could mitigate dramatic shifts in the SERPs already, regardless of the veracity of this study:

A slow rollout means that shifts in SERPs will be lost to the natural ranking fluctuations we already see.

Google can seed URLs found by mobile or by desktop into their respective crawlers, thereby limiting index divergence. (This is a big one!)

Google could choose to consider, for link purposes, the aggregate of both mobile and desktop crawls, not counting one to the exclusion of the other.

Second, the relationships between domains may be less affected than other index metrics. What is the likelihood that the relationship between Domain X and Domain Y (more or less links) is the same for both the mobile- and desktop-based indexes? If the relationships tend to remain the same, then the impact on SERPs will be limited. We will call this relationship being "directionally consistent." To accomplish this part of the study, I took a sample of domain pairs from the mobile index and compared their relationship (more or less links) to their performance in the desktop index. Did the first have more links than the second in both the mobile and desktop? Or did they perform differently?

It turns out that the indexes were fairly close in terms of directional consistency. That is to say that while the link graphs as a whole were quite different, when you compared one domain to another at random, they tended in both data sets to be directionally consistent. Approximately 88% of the domains compared maintained directional consistency via the indexes. This test was only run comparing the mobile index domains to the desktop index domains. Future research might explore the reverse relationship.

So what's next?: Moz and the mobile-first index

Our goal for the Moz link index has always been to be as much like Google as possible. It is with that in mind that our team is experimenting with a mobile-first index as well. Our new link index and Link Explorer in Beta seeks to be more than simply one of the largest link indexes on the web, but the most relevant and useful, and we believe part of that means shaping our index with methods similar to Google. We will keep you updated!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[swunlimitednj]

How the Mobile-First Index Disrupts the Link Graph

Posted by rjonesx.

It's happened to all of us. You bring up a webpage on your mobile device, only to find out that a feature you were accustomed to using on desktop simply isn't available on mobile. While frustrating, it has always been a struggle for web developers and designers alike to simplify and condense their site on mobile screens without needing to strip features or content that would otherwise clutter a smaller viewport. The worst-case scenario for these trade-offs is that some features would be reserved for desktop environments, or perhaps a user might be able to opt out of the mobile view. Below is an example of how my personal blog displays the mobile version using a popular plugin by ElegantThemes called HandHeld. As you can see, the vast page is heavily stripped down and is far easier to read... but at what cost? And at what cost to the link graph?

My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed. So what happens when the mobile versions of sites become the primary way the web is accessed, at scale, by the bots which power major search engines?

Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index raises new questions about how the link structure of the web as a whole might be influenced once these truncated web experiences become the first (and sometimes only) version of the web Googlebot encounters.

So, what's the big deal?

The concern, which no doubt Google engineers have studied internally, is that mobile websites often remove content and links in order to improve user experience on a smaller screen. This abbreviated content fundamentally alters the link structure which underlies one of the most important factors in Google's rankings. Our goal is to try and understand the impact this might have.

Before we get started, one giant unknown variable which I want to be quick to point out is we don't know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots. Perhaps Google will choose to be "mobile-first" only on sites that have historically displayed an identical codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of Googlebot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not only to go "mobile-first," but in fact to go "mobile-only."

Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale

For this brief research, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I would then crawl two levels deep, spoofing both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of Googlebot. With this data, we can begin to compare how different the link structure of the web might look.

Homepage metrics

Let's start with some descriptive statistics of the home pages of these 20,000 randomly selected sites. Of the sites analyzed, 87.42% had the same number of links on their homepage regardless of whether the bot was mobile- or desktop-oriented. Of the remaining 12.58%, 9% had fewer links and 3.58% had more. This doesn't seem too disparate at first glance.

Perhaps more importantly, only 79.87% had identical links on the homepage when visited by desktop and mobile bots. Just because the same number of links were found didn't mean they were actually the same links. This is important to take into consideration because links are the pathways which bots use to find content on the web. Different paths mean a different index. Among the homepage links, we found a 7.4% drop in external links. This could mean a radical shift in some of the most important links on the web, given that homepage links often carry a great deal of link equity. Interestingly, the biggest "losers" as a percentage tended to be social sites. In retrospect, it seems reasonable that one of the common types of links a website might remove from their mobile version would be social share buttons because they're often incorporated into the "chrome" of a page rather than the content, and the "chrome" often changes to accommodate a mobile version. The biggest losers as a percentage in order were:

linkedin.com

instagram.com

twitter.com

facebook.com

So what's the big deal about 5–15% differences in links when crawling the web? Well, it turns out that these numbers tend to be biased towards sites with lots of links that don't have a mobile version. However, most of those links are main navigation links. When you crawl deeper, you just find the same links. But those that do deviate end up having radically different second-level crawl links.

Second-level metrics

Now this is where the data gets interesting. As we continue to crawl out on the web using crawl sets that are influenced by the links discovered by a mobile bot versus a desktop bot, we'll continue to get more and more divergent results. But how far will they diverge? Let's start with size. While we crawled an identical number of home pages, the second-tier results diverged based on the number of links found on those original home pages. Thus, the mobile crawlset was 977,840 unique URLs, while the desktop crawlset was 1,053,785. Already we can see a different index taking shape — the desktop index would be much larger. Let's dig deeper.

I want you to take a moment and really focus on this graph. Notice there are three categories:

Mobile Unique: Blue bars represent unique items found by the mobile bot

Desktop Unique: Orange bars represent unique items found by the desktop bot

Shared: Gray bars represent items found by both

Notice also that there are there are four tests:

Number of URLs discovered

Number of Domains discovered

Number of Links discovered

Number of Root Linking Domains discovered

Now here is the key point, and it's really big. There are more URLs, Domains, Links, and Root Linking Domains unique to the desktop crawl result than there are shared between the desktop and mobile crawler. The orange bar is always taller than the gray. This means that by just the second level of the crawl, the majority of link relationships, pages, and domains are different in the indexes. This is huge. This is a fundamental shift in the link graph as we have come to know it.

And now for the big question, what we all care about the most — external links.

A whopping 63% of external links are unique to the desktop crawler. In a mobile-only crawling world, the total number of external links was halved.

What is happening at the micro level?

So, what's really causing this huge disparity in the crawl? Well, we know it has something to do with a few common shortcuts to making a site "mobile-friendly," which include:

Subdomain versions of the content that have fewer links or features

The removal of links and features by user-agent detecting plugins

Of course, these changes might make the experience better for your users, but it does create a different experience for bots. Let's take a closer look at one site to see how this plays out.

This site has ~10,000 pages according to Google and has a Domain Authority of 72 and 22,670 referring domains according to the new Moz Link Explorer. However, the site uses a popular WordPress plugin that abbreviates the content down to just the articles and pages on the site, removing links from descriptions in the articles on the category pages and removing most if not all extraneous links from the sidebar and footer. This particular plugin is used on over 200,000 websites. So, what happens when we fire up a six-level-deep crawl with Screaming Frog? (It's great for this kind of analysis because we can easily change the user-agent and restrict settings to just crawl HTML content.)

The difference is shocking. First, notice that in the mobile crawl on the left, there is clearly a low number of links per page and that number of links is very steady as you crawl deeper through the site. This is what produces such a steady, exponential growth curve. Second, notice that the crawl abruptly ended at level four. The site just didn't have any more pages to offer the mobile crawler! Only ~3,000 of the ~10,000 pages Google reports were found.

Now, compare this to the desktop crawler. It explodes in pages at level two, collecting nearly double the total pages of the mobile crawl at this level alone. Now, recall the graph before showing that there were more unique desktop pages than there were shared pages when we crawled 20,000 sites. Here is confirmation of exactly how it happens. Ultimately, 6x the content was made available to the desktop crawler in the same level of crawl depth.

But what impact did this have on external links?

Wow. 75% of the external, outbound links were culled in the mobile version. 4,905 external links were found in the desktop version while only 1,162 were found in the mobile. Remember, this is a DA 72 site with over twenty thousand referring domains. Imagine losing that link because the mobile index no longer finds the backlink. What should we do? Is the sky falling?

Take a deep breath

Mobile-first isn't mobile-only

The first important caveat to all this research is that Google isn't giving up on the desktop — they're simply prioritizing the mobile crawl. This makes sense, as the majority of search traffic is now mobile. If Google wants to make sure quality mobile content is served, they need to shift their crawl priorities. But they also have a competing desire to find content, and doing so requires using a desktop crawler so long as webmasters continue to abbreviate the mobile versions of their sites.

This reality isn't lost on Google. In the Original Official Google Mobile First Announcement, they write...

If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.

Google took the time to state that a desktop version can be better than an "incomplete mobile version." I don't intend to read too much into this statement other than to say that Google wants a full mobile version, not just a postcard.

Good link placements will prevail

One anecdotal outcome of my research was that the external links which tended to survive the cull of a mobile version were often placed directly in the content. External links in sidebars like blog-rolls were essentially annihilated from the index, but in-content links survived. This may be a signal Google picks up on. External links that are both in mobile and desktop tend to be the kinds of links people might click on. So, while there may be fewer links powering the link graph (or at least there might be a subset that is specially identified), if your links are good, content-based links, then you have a chance to see improved performance.

I was able to confirm this by looking at a subset of known good links. Using Fresh Web Explorer, I looked up fresh links to toysrus.com which is currently gaining a great deal of attention due to stores closing. We can feel confident that most of these links will be in-content because the articles themselves are about the relevant, breaking news regarding Toys R Us. Sure enough, after testing 300+ mentions, we found the links to be identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and, subsequently, they showed up in both versions of the crawl.

Selection bias and convergence

It is probably the case that popular sites are more likely to have a mobile version than non-popular sites. Now, they might be responsive — at which point they would yield no real differences in the crawl — but at least some percentage would likely be m.* domains or utilize plugins like those mentioned above which truncate the content. At the lower rungs of the web, older, less professional content is likely to have only one version which is shown to mobile and desktop devices alike. If this is the case, we can expect that over time the differences in the index might begin to converge rather than diverge, as my study looked only at sites that were in the top million and only crawled two levels deep.

Moreover (this one is a bit speculative), but I think over time that there will be convergence between a mobile and desktop index. I don't think the link graphs will grow exponentially different as the linked web is only so big. Rather, the paths to which certain pages are reached, and the frequency with which they are reached, will change quite a bit. So, while the link graph will differ, the set of URLs making up the link graph will largely be the same. Of course, some percentage of the mobile web will remain wholly disparate. The large number of sites that use dedicated mobile subdomains or plugins that remove substantial sections of content will remain like mobile islands in the linked web.

Impact on SERPs

It's difficult at this point to say what the impact on search results will be. It will certainly not leave the SERPs unchanged. What would be the point of Google making and announcing a change to its indexing methods if it didn't improve the SERPs? That being said, this study wouldn't be complete without some form of impact assessment. Hat tip to JR Oakes for giving me this critique, otherwise I would have forgotten to take a look.

First, there are a couple of things which could mitigate dramatic shifts in the SERPs already, regardless of the veracity of this study:

A slow rollout means that shifts in SERPs will be lost to the natural ranking fluctuations we already see.

Google can seed URLs found by mobile or by desktop into their respective crawlers, thereby limiting index divergence. (This is a big one!)

Google could choose to consider, for link purposes, the aggregate of both mobile and desktop crawls, not counting one to the exclusion of the other.

Second, the relationships between domains may be less affected than other index metrics. What is the likelihood that the relationship between Domain X and Domain Y (more or less links) is the same for both the mobile- and desktop-based indexes? If the relationships tend to remain the same, then the impact on SERPs will be limited. We will call this relationship being "directionally consistent." To accomplish this part of the study, I took a sample of domain pairs from the mobile index and compared their relationship (more or less links) to their performance in the desktop index. Did the first have more links than the second in both the mobile and desktop? Or did they perform differently?

It turns out that the indexes were fairly close in terms of directional consistency. That is to say that while the link graphs as a whole were quite different, when you compared one domain to another at random, they tended in both data sets to be directionally consistent. Approximately 88% of the domains compared maintained directional consistency via the indexes. This test was only run comparing the mobile index domains to the desktop index domains. Future research might explore the reverse relationship.

So what's next?: Moz and the mobile-first index

Our goal for the Moz link index has always been to be as much like Google as possible. It is with that in mind that our team is experimenting with a mobile-first index as well. Our new link index and Link Explorer in Beta seeks to be more than simply one of the largest link indexes on the web, but the most relevant and useful, and we believe part of that means shaping our index with methods similar to Google. We will keep you updated!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2JzUCPZ via SW Unlimited

[mariasolemarionqi]

How the Mobile-First Index Disrupts the Link Graph

Posted by rjonesx.

It's happened to all of us. You bring up a webpage on your mobile device, only to find out that a feature you were accustomed to using on desktop simply isn't available on mobile. While frustrating, it has always been a struggle for web developers and designers alike to simplify and condense their site on mobile screens without needing to strip features or content that would otherwise clutter a smaller viewport. The worst-case scenario for these trade-offs is that some features would be reserved for desktop environments, or perhaps a user might be able to opt out of the mobile view. Below is an example of how my personal blog displays the mobile version using a popular plugin by ElegantThemes called HandHeld. As you can see, the vast page is heavily stripped down and is far easier to read... but at what cost? And at what cost to the link graph?

My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed. So what happens when the mobile versions of sites become the primary way the web is accessed, at scale, by the bots which power major search engines?

Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index raises new questions about how the link structure of the web as a whole might be influenced once these truncated web experiences become the first (and sometimes only) version of the web Googlebot encounters.

So, what's the big deal?

The concern, which no doubt Google engineers have studied internally, is that mobile websites often remove content and links in order to improve user experience on a smaller screen. This abbreviated content fundamentally alters the link structure which underlies one of the most important factors in Google's rankings. Our goal is to try and understand the impact this might have.

Before we get started, one giant unknown variable which I want to be quick to point out is we don't know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots. Perhaps Google will choose to be "mobile-first" only on sites that have historically displayed an identical codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of Googlebot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not only to go "mobile-first," but in fact to go "mobile-only."

Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale

For this brief research, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I would then crawl two levels deep, spoofing both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of Googlebot. With this data, we can begin to compare how different the link structure of the web might look.

Homepage metrics

Let's start with some descriptive statistics of the home pages of these 20,000 randomly selected sites. Of the sites analyzed, 87.42% had the same number of links on their homepage regardless of whether the bot was mobile- or desktop-oriented. Of the remaining 12.58%, 9% had fewer links and 3.58% had more. This doesn't seem too disparate at first glance.

Perhaps more importantly, only 79.87% had identical links on the homepage when visited by desktop and mobile bots. Just because the same number of links were found didn't mean they were actually the same links. This is important to take into consideration because links are the pathways which bots use to find content on the web. Different paths mean a different index. Among the homepage links, we found a 7.4% drop in external links. This could mean a radical shift in some of the most important links on the web, given that homepage links often carry a great deal of link equity. Interestingly, the biggest "losers" as a percentage tended to be social sites. In retrospect, it seems reasonable that one of the common types of links a website might remove from their mobile version would be social share buttons because they're often incorporated into the "chrome" of a page rather than the content, and the "chrome" often changes to accommodate a mobile version. The biggest losers as a percentage in order were:

linkedin.com

instagram.com

twitter.com

facebook.com

So what's the big deal about 5–15% differences in links when crawling the web? Well, it turns out that these numbers tend to be biased towards sites with lots of links that don't have a mobile version. However, most of those links are main navigation links. When you crawl deeper, you just find the same links. But those that do deviate end up having radically different second-level crawl links.

Second-level metrics

Now this is where the data gets interesting. As we continue to crawl out on the web using crawl sets that are influenced by the links discovered by a mobile bot versus a desktop bot, we'll continue to get more and more divergent results. But how far will they diverge? Let's start with size. While we crawled an identical number of home pages, the second-tier results diverged based on the number of links found on those original home pages. Thus, the mobile crawlset was 977,840 unique URLs, while the desktop crawlset was 1,053,785. Already we can see a different index taking shape — the desktop index would be much larger. Let's dig deeper.

I want you to take a moment and really focus on this graph. Notice there are three categories:

Mobile Unique: Blue bars represent unique items found by the mobile bot

Desktop Unique: Orange bars represent unique items found by the desktop bot

Shared: Gray bars represent items found by both

Notice also that there are there are four tests:

Number of URLs discovered

Number of Domains discovered

Number of Links discovered

Number of Root Linking Domains discovered

Now here is the key point, and it's really big. There are more URLs, Domains, Links, and Root Linking Domains unique to the desktop crawl result than there are shared between the desktop and mobile crawler. The orange bar is always taller than the gray. This means that by just the second level of the crawl, the majority of link relationships, pages, and domains are different in the indexes. This is huge. This is a fundamental shift in the link graph as we have come to know it.

And now for the big question, what we all care about the most — external links.

A whopping 63% of external links are unique to the desktop crawler. In a mobile-only crawling world, the total number of external links was halved.

What is happening at the micro level?

So, what's really causing this huge disparity in the crawl? Well, we know it has something to do with a few common shortcuts to making a site "mobile-friendly," which include:

Subdomain versions of the content that have fewer links or features

The removal of links and features by user-agent detecting plugins

Of course, these changes might make the experience better for your users, but it does create a different experience for bots. Let's take a closer look at one site to see how this plays out.

This site has ~10,000 pages according to Google and has a Domain Authority of 72 and 22,670 referring domains according to the new Moz Link Explorer. However, the site uses a popular WordPress plugin that abbreviates the content down to just the articles and pages on the site, removing links from descriptions in the articles on the category pages and removing most if not all extraneous links from the sidebar and footer. This particular plugin is used on over 200,000 websites. So, what happens when we fire up a six-level-deep crawl with Screaming Frog? (It's great for this kind of analysis because we can easily change the user-agent and restrict settings to just crawl HTML content.)

The difference is shocking. First, notice that in the mobile crawl on the left, there is clearly a low number of links per page and that number of links is very steady as you crawl deeper through the site. This is what produces such a steady, exponential growth curve. Second, notice that the crawl abruptly ended at level four. The site just didn't have any more pages to offer the mobile crawler! Only ~3,000 of the ~10,000 pages Google reports were found.

Now, compare this to the desktop crawler. It explodes in pages at level two, collecting nearly double the total pages of the mobile crawl at this level alone. Now, recall the graph before showing that there were more unique desktop pages than there were shared pages when we crawled 20,000 sites. Here is confirmation of exactly how it happens. Ultimately, 6x the content was made available to the desktop crawler in the same level of crawl depth.

But what impact did this have on external links?

Wow. 75% of the external, outbound links were culled in the mobile version. 4,905 external links were found in the desktop version while only 1,162 were found in the mobile. Remember, this is a DA 72 site with over twenty thousand referring domains. Imagine losing that link because the mobile index no longer finds the backlink. What should we do? Is the sky falling?

Take a deep breathMobile-first isn't mobile-only

The first important caveat to all this research is that Google isn't giving up on the desktop — they're simply prioritizing the mobile crawl. This makes sense, as the majority of search traffic is now mobile. If Google wants to make sure quality mobile content is served, they need to shift their crawl priorities. But they also have a competing desire to find content, and doing so requires using a desktop crawler so long as webmasters continue to abbreviate the mobile versions of their sites.

This reality isn't lost on Google. In the Original Official Google Mobile First Announcement, they write...

If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.

Google took the time to state that a desktop version can be better than an "incomplete mobile version." I don't intend to read too much into this statement other than to say that Google wants a full mobile version, not just a postcard.

Good link placements will prevail

One anecdotal outcome of my research was that the external links which tended to survive the cull of a mobile version were often placed directly in the content. External links in sidebars like blog-rolls were essentially annihilated from the index, but in-content links survived. This may be a signal Google picks up on. External links that are both in mobile and desktop tend to be the kinds of links people might click on. So, while there may be fewer links powering the link graph (or at least there might be a subset that is specially identified), if your links are good, content-based links, then you have a chance to see improved performance.

I was able to confirm this by looking at a subset of known good links. Using Fresh Web Explorer, I looked up fresh links to toysrus.com which is currently gaining a great deal of attention due to stores closing. We can feel confident that most of these links will be in-content because the articles themselves are about the relevant, breaking news regarding Toys R Us. Sure enough, after testing 300+ mentions, we found the links to be identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and, subsequently, they showed up in both versions of the crawl.

Selection bias and convergence

It is probably the case that popular sites are more likely to have a mobile version than non-popular sites. Now, they might be responsive — at which point they would yield no real differences in the crawl — but at least some percentage would likely be m.* domains or utilize plugins like those mentioned above which truncate the content. At the lower rungs of the web, older, less professional content is likely to have only one version which is shown to mobile and desktop devices alike. If this is the case, we can expect that over time the differences in the index might begin to converge rather than diverge, as my study looked only at sites that were in the top million and only crawled two levels deep.

Moreover (this one is a bit speculative), but I think over time that there will be convergence between a mobile and desktop index. I don't think the link graphs will grow exponentially different as the linked web is only so big. Rather, the paths to which certain pages are reached, and the frequency with which they are reached, will change quite a bit. So, while the link graph will differ, the set of URLs making up the link graph will largely be the same. Of course, some percentage of the mobile web will remain wholly disparate. The large number of sites that use dedicated mobile subdomains or plugins that remove substantial sections of content will remain like mobile islands in the linked web.

Impact on SERPs

It's difficult at this point to say what the impact on search results will be. It will certainly not leave the SERPs unchanged. What would be the point of Google making and announcing a change to its indexing methods if it didn't improve the SERPs? That being said, this study wouldn't be complete without some form of impact assessment. Hat tip to JR Oakes for giving me this critique, otherwise I would have forgotten to take a look.

First, there are a couple of things which could mitigate dramatic shifts in the SERPs already, regardless of the veracity of this study:

A slow rollout means that shifts in SERPs will be lost to the natural ranking fluctuations we already see.

Google can seed URLs found by mobile or by desktop into their respective crawlers, thereby limiting index divergence. (This is a big one!)

Google could choose to consider, for link purposes, the aggregate of both mobile and desktop crawls, not counting one to the exclusion of the other.

Second, the relationships between domains may be less affected than other index metrics. What is the likelihood that the relationship between Domain X and Domain Y (more or less links) is the same for both the mobile- and desktop-based indexes? If the relationships tend to remain the same, then the impact on SERPs will be limited. We will call this relationship being "directionally consistent." To accomplish this part of the study, I took a sample of domain pairs from the mobile index and compared their relationship (more or less links) to their performance in the desktop index. Did the first have more links than the second in both the mobile and desktop? Or did they perform differently?

It turns out that the indexes were fairly close in terms of directional consistency. That is to say that while the link graphs as a whole were quite different, when you compared one domain to another at random, they tended in both data sets to be directionally consistent. Approximately 88% of the domains compared maintained directional consistency via the indexes. This test was only run comparing the mobile index domains to the desktop index domains. Future research might explore the reverse relationship.

So what's next?: Moz and the mobile-first index

Our goal for the Moz link index has always been to be as much like Google as possible. It is with that in mind that our team is experimenting with a mobile-first index as well. Our new link index and Link Explorer in Beta seeks to be more than simply one of the largest link indexes on the web, but the most relevant and useful, and we believe part of that means shaping our index with methods similar to Google. We will keep you updated!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/2Ez5MAT

[christinesumpmg1]

How the Mobile-First Index Disrupts the Link Graph

Posted by rjonesx.

It's happened to all of us. You bring up a webpage on your mobile device, only to find out that a feature you were accustomed to using on desktop simply isn't available on mobile. While frustrating, it has always been a struggle for web developers and designers alike to simplify and condense their site on mobile screens without needing to strip features or content that would otherwise clutter a smaller viewport. The worst-case scenario for these trade-offs is that some features would be reserved for desktop environments, or perhaps a user might be able to opt out of the mobile view. Below is an example of how my personal blog displays the mobile version using a popular plugin by ElegantThemes called HandHeld. As you can see, the vast page is heavily stripped down and is far easier to read... but at what cost? And at what cost to the link graph?

My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed. So what happens when the mobile versions of sites become the primary way the web is accessed, at scale, by the bots which power major search engines?

Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index raises new questions about how the link structure of the web as a whole might be influenced once these truncated web experiences become the first (and sometimes only) version of the web Googlebot encounters.

So, what's the big deal?

The concern, which no doubt Google engineers have studied internally, is that mobile websites often remove content and links in order to improve user experience on a smaller screen. This abbreviated content fundamentally alters the link structure which underlies one of the most important factors in Google's rankings. Our goal is to try and understand the impact this might have.

Before we get started, one giant unknown variable which I want to be quick to point out is we don't know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots. Perhaps Google will choose to be "mobile-first" only on sites that have historically displayed an identical codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of Googlebot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not only to go "mobile-first," but in fact to go "mobile-only."

Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale

For this brief research, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I would then crawl two levels deep, spoofing both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of Googlebot. With this data, we can begin to compare how different the link structure of the web might look.

Homepage metrics

Let's start with some descriptive statistics of the home pages of these 20,000 randomly selected sites. Of the sites analyzed, 87.42% had the same number of links on their homepage regardless of whether the bot was mobile- or desktop-oriented. Of the remaining 12.58%, 9% had fewer links and 3.58% had more. This doesn't seem too disparate at first glance.

Perhaps more importantly, only 79.87% had identical links on the homepage when visited by desktop and mobile bots. Just because the same number of links were found didn't mean they were actually the same links. This is important to take into consideration because links are the pathways which bots use to find content on the web. Different paths mean a different index. Among the homepage links, we found a 7.4% drop in external links. This could mean a radical shift in some of the most important links on the web, given that homepage links often carry a great deal of link equity. Interestingly, the biggest "losers" as a percentage tended to be social sites. In retrospect, it seems reasonable that one of the common types of links a website might remove from their mobile version would be social share buttons because they're often incorporated into the "chrome" of a page rather than the content, and the "chrome" often changes to accommodate a mobile version. The biggest losers as a percentage in order were:

linkedin.com

instagram.com

twitter.com

facebook.com

So what's the big deal about 5–15% differences in links when crawling the web? Well, it turns out that these numbers tend to be biased towards sites with lots of links that don't have a mobile version. However, most of those links are main navigation links. When you crawl deeper, you just find the same links. But those that do deviate end up having radically different second-level crawl links.

Second-level metrics

Now this is where the data gets interesting. As we continue to crawl out on the web using crawl sets that are influenced by the links discovered by a mobile bot versus a desktop bot, we'll continue to get more and more divergent results. But how far will they diverge? Let's start with size. While we crawled an identical number of home pages, the second-tier results diverged based on the number of links found on those original home pages. Thus, the mobile crawlset was 977,840 unique URLs, while the desktop crawlset was 1,053,785. Already we can see a different index taking shape — the desktop index would be much larger. Let's dig deeper.

I want you to take a moment and really focus on this graph. Notice there are three categories:

Mobile Unique: Blue bars represent unique items found by the mobile bot

Desktop Unique: Orange bars represent unique items found by the desktop bot

Shared: Gray bars represent items found by both

Notice also that there are there are four tests:

Number of URLs discovered

Number of Domains discovered

Number of Links discovered

Number of Root Linking Domains discovered

Now here is the key point, and it's really big. There are more URLs, Domains, Links, and Root Linking Domains unique to the desktop crawl result than there are shared between the desktop and mobile crawler. The orange bar is always taller than the gray. This means that by just the second level of the crawl, the majority of link relationships, pages, and domains are different in the indexes. This is huge. This is a fundamental shift in the link graph as we have come to know it.

And now for the big question, what we all care about the most — external links.

A whopping 63% of external links are unique to the desktop crawler. In a mobile-only crawling world, the total number of external links was halved.

What is happening at the micro level?

So, what's really causing this huge disparity in the crawl? Well, we know it has something to do with a few common shortcuts to making a site "mobile-friendly," which include:

Subdomain versions of the content that have fewer links or features

The removal of links and features by user-agent detecting plugins

Of course, these changes might make the experience better for your users, but it does create a different experience for bots. Let's take a closer look at one site to see how this plays out.

This site has ~10,000 pages according to Google and has a Domain Authority of 72 and 22,670 referring domains according to the new Moz Link Explorer. However, the site uses a popular WordPress plugin that abbreviates the content down to just the articles and pages on the site, removing links from descriptions in the articles on the category pages and removing most if not all extraneous links from the sidebar and footer. This particular plugin is used on over 200,000 websites. So, what happens when we fire up a six-level-deep crawl with Screaming Frog? (It's great for this kind of analysis because we can easily change the user-agent and restrict settings to just crawl HTML content.)

The difference is shocking. First, notice that in the mobile crawl on the left, there is clearly a low number of links per page and that number of links is very steady as you crawl deeper through the site. This is what produces such a steady, exponential growth curve. Second, notice that the crawl abruptly ended at level four. The site just didn't have any more pages to offer the mobile crawler! Only ~3,000 of the ~10,000 pages Google reports were found.

Now, compare this to the desktop crawler. It explodes in pages at level two, collecting nearly double the total pages of the mobile crawl at this level alone. Now, recall the graph before showing that there were more unique desktop pages than there were shared pages when we crawled 20,000 sites. Here is confirmation of exactly how it happens. Ultimately, 6x the content was made available to the desktop crawler in the same level of crawl depth.

But what impact did this have on external links?

Wow. 75% of the external, outbound links were culled in the mobile version. 4,905 external links were found in the desktop version while only 1,162 were found in the mobile. Remember, this is a DA 72 site with over twenty thousand referring domains. Imagine losing that link because the mobile index no longer finds the backlink. What should we do? Is the sky falling?

Take a deep breathMobile-first isn't mobile-only

The first important caveat to all this research is that Google isn't giving up on the desktop — they're simply prioritizing the mobile crawl. This makes sense, as the majority of search traffic is now mobile. If Google wants to make sure quality mobile content is served, they need to shift their crawl priorities. But they also have a competing desire to find content, and doing so requires using a desktop crawler so long as webmasters continue to abbreviate the mobile versions of their sites.

This reality isn't lost on Google. In the Original Official Google Mobile First Announcement, they write...

If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.

Google took the time to state that a desktop version can be better than an "incomplete mobile version." I don't intend to read too much into this statement other than to say that Google wants a full mobile version, not just a postcard.

Good link placements will prevail

One anecdotal outcome of my research was that the external links which tended to survive the cull of a mobile version were often placed directly in the content. External links in sidebars like blog-rolls were essentially annihilated from the index, but in-content links survived. This may be a signal Google picks up on. External links that are both in mobile and desktop tend to be the kinds of links people might click on. So, while there may be fewer links powering the link graph (or at least there might be a subset that is specially identified), if your links are good, content-based links, then you have a chance to see improved performance.

I was able to confirm this by looking at a subset of known good links. Using Fresh Web Explorer, I looked up fresh links to toysrus.com which is currently gaining a great deal of attention due to stores closing. We can feel confident that most of these links will be in-content because the articles themselves are about the relevant, breaking news regarding Toys R Us. Sure enough, after testing 300+ mentions, we found the links to be identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and, subsequently, they showed up in both versions of the crawl.

Selection bias and convergence

It is probably the case that popular sites are more likely to have a mobile version than non-popular sites. Now, they might be responsive — at which point they would yield no real differences in the crawl — but at least some percentage would likely be m.* domains or utilize plugins like those mentioned above which truncate the content. At the lower rungs of the web, older, less professional content is likely to have only one version which is shown to mobile and desktop devices alike. If this is the case, we can expect that over time the differences in the index might begin to converge rather than diverge, as my study looked only at sites that were in the top million and only crawled two levels deep.

Moreover (this one is a bit speculative), but I think over time that there will be convergence between a mobile and desktop index. I don't think the link graphs will grow exponentially different as the linked web is only so big. Rather, the paths to which certain pages are reached, and the frequency with which they are reached, will change quite a bit. So, while the link graph will differ, the set of URLs making up the link graph will largely be the same. Of course, some percentage of the mobile web will remain wholly disparate. The large number of sites that use dedicated mobile subdomains or plugins that remove substantial sections of content will remain like mobile islands in the linked web.

Impact on SERPs

It's difficult at this point to say what the impact on search results will be. It will certainly not leave the SERPs unchanged. What would be the point of Google making and announcing a change to its indexing methods if it didn't improve the SERPs? That being said, this study wouldn't be complete without some form of impact assessment. Hat tip to JR Oakes for giving me this critique, otherwise I would have forgotten to take a look.

First, there are a couple of things which could mitigate dramatic shifts in the SERPs already, regardless of the veracity of this study:

A slow rollout means that shifts in SERPs will be lost to the natural ranking fluctuations we already see.

Google can seed URLs found by mobile or by desktop into their respective crawlers, thereby limiting index divergence. (This is a big one!)

Google could choose to consider, for link purposes, the aggregate of both mobile and desktop crawls, not counting one to the exclusion of the other.

Second, the relationships between domains may be less affected than other index metrics. What is the likelihood that the relationship between Domain X and Domain Y (more or less links) is the same for both the mobile- and desktop-based indexes? If the relationships tend to remain the same, then the impact on SERPs will be limited. We will call this relationship being "directionally consistent." To accomplish this part of the study, I took a sample of domain pairs from the mobile index and compared their relationship (more or less links) to their performance in the desktop index. Did the first have more links than the second in both the mobile and desktop? Or did they perform differently?

It turns out that the indexes were fairly close in terms of directional consistency. That is to say that while the link graphs as a whole were quite different, when you compared one domain to another at random, they tended in both data sets to be directionally consistent. Approximately 88% of the domains compared maintained directional consistency via the indexes. This test was only run comparing the mobile index domains to the desktop index domains. Future research might explore the reverse relationship.

So what's next?: Moz and the mobile-first index

Our goal for the Moz link index has always been to be as much like Google as possible. It is with that in mind that our team is experimenting with a mobile-first index as well. Our new link index and Link Explorer in Beta seeks to be more than simply one of the largest link indexes on the web, but the most relevant and useful, and we believe part of that means shaping our index with methods similar to Google. We will keep you updated!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/2Ez5MAT

[mercedessharonwo1]

How the Mobile-First Index Disrupts the Link Graph

Posted by rjonesx.

It's happened to all of us. You bring up a webpage on your mobile device, only to find out that a feature you were accustomed to using on desktop simply isn't available on mobile. While frustrating, it has always been a struggle for web developers and designers alike to simplify and condense their site on mobile screens without needing to strip features or content that would otherwise clutter a smaller viewport. The worst-case scenario for these trade-offs is that some features would be reserved for desktop environments, or perhaps a user might be able to opt out of the mobile view. Below is an example of how my personal blog displays the mobile version using a popular plugin by ElegantThemes called HandHeld. As you can see, the vast page is heavily stripped down and is far easier to read... but at what cost? And at what cost to the link graph?

My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed. So what happens when the mobile versions of sites become the primary way the web is accessed, at scale, by the bots which power major search engines?

Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index raises new questions about how the link structure of the web as a whole might be influenced once these truncated web experiences become the first (and sometimes only) version of the web Googlebot encounters.

So, what's the big deal?

The concern, which no doubt Google engineers have studied internally, is that mobile websites often remove content and links in order to improve user experience on a smaller screen. This abbreviated content fundamentally alters the link structure which underlies one of the most important factors in Google's rankings. Our goal is to try and understand the impact this might have.

Before we get started, one giant unknown variable which I want to be quick to point out is we don't know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots. Perhaps Google will choose to be "mobile-first" only on sites that have historically displayed an identical codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of Googlebot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not only to go "mobile-first," but in fact to go "mobile-only."

Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale

For this brief research, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I would then crawl two levels deep, spoofing both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of Googlebot. With this data, we can begin to compare how different the link structure of the web might look.

Homepage metrics

Let's start with some descriptive statistics of the home pages of these 20,000 randomly selected sites. Of the sites analyzed, 87.42% had the same number of links on their homepage regardless of whether the bot was mobile- or desktop-oriented. Of the remaining 12.58%, 9% had fewer links and 3.58% had more. This doesn't seem too disparate at first glance.

Perhaps more importantly, only 79.87% had identical links on the homepage when visited by desktop and mobile bots. Just because the same number of links were found didn't mean they were actually the same links. This is important to take into consideration because links are the pathways which bots use to find content on the web. Different paths mean a different index. Among the homepage links, we found a 7.4% drop in external links. This could mean a radical shift in some of the most important links on the web, given that homepage links often carry a great deal of link equity. Interestingly, the biggest "losers" as a percentage tended to be social sites. In retrospect, it seems reasonable that one of the common types of links a website might remove from their mobile version would be social share buttons because they're often incorporated into the "chrome" of a page rather than the content, and the "chrome" often changes to accommodate a mobile version. The biggest losers as a percentage in order were:

linkedin.com

instagram.com

twitter.com

facebook.com

So what's the big deal about 5–15% differences in links when crawling the web? Well, it turns out that these numbers tend to be biased towards sites with lots of links that don't have a mobile version. However, most of those links are main navigation links. When you crawl deeper, you just find the same links. But those that do deviate end up having radically different second-level crawl links.

Second-level metrics

Now this is where the data gets interesting. As we continue to crawl out on the web using crawl sets that are influenced by the links discovered by a mobile bot versus a desktop bot, we'll continue to get more and more divergent results. But how far will they diverge? Let's start with size. While we crawled an identical number of home pages, the second-tier results diverged based on the number of links found on those original home pages. Thus, the mobile crawlset was 977,840 unique URLs, while the desktop crawlset was 1,053,785. Already we can see a different index taking shape — the desktop index would be much larger. Let's dig deeper.

I want you to take a moment and really focus on this graph. Notice there are three categories:

Mobile Unique: Blue bars represent unique items found by the mobile bot

Desktop Unique: Orange bars represent unique items found by the desktop bot

Shared: Gray bars represent items found by both

Notice also that there are there are four tests:

Number of URLs discovered

Number of Domains discovered

Number of Links discovered

Number of Root Linking Domains discovered

Now here is the key point, and it's really big. There are more URLs, Domains, Links, and Root Linking Domains unique to the desktop crawl result than there are shared between the desktop and mobile crawler. The orange bar is always taller than the gray. This means that by just the second level of the crawl, the majority of link relationships, pages, and domains are different in the indexes. This is huge. This is a fundamental shift in the link graph as we have come to know it.

And now for the big question, what we all care about the most — external links.

A whopping 63% of external links are unique to the desktop crawler. In a mobile-only crawling world, the total number of external links was halved.

What is happening at the micro level?

So, what's really causing this huge disparity in the crawl? Well, we know it has something to do with a few common shortcuts to making a site "mobile-friendly," which include:

Subdomain versions of the content that have fewer links or features

The removal of links and features by user-agent detecting plugins

Of course, these changes might make the experience better for your users, but it does create a different experience for bots. Let's take a closer look at one site to see how this plays out.

This site has ~10,000 pages according to Google and has a Domain Authority of 72 and 22,670 referring domains according to the new Moz Link Explorer. However, the site uses a popular WordPress plugin that abbreviates the content down to just the articles and pages on the site, removing links from descriptions in the articles on the category pages and removing most if not all extraneous links from the sidebar and footer. This particular plugin is used on over 200,000 websites. So, what happens when we fire up a six-level-deep crawl with Screaming Frog? (It's great for this kind of analysis because we can easily change the user-agent and restrict settings to just crawl HTML content.)

The difference is shocking. First, notice that in the mobile crawl on the left, there is clearly a low number of links per page and that number of links is very steady as you crawl deeper through the site. This is what produces such a steady, exponential growth curve. Second, notice that the crawl abruptly ended at level four. The site just didn't have any more pages to offer the mobile crawler! Only ~3,000 of the ~10,000 pages Google reports were found.

Now, compare this to the desktop crawler. It explodes in pages at level two, collecting nearly double the total pages of the mobile crawl at this level alone. Now, recall the graph before showing that there were more unique desktop pages than there were shared pages when we crawled 20,000 sites. Here is confirmation of exactly how it happens. Ultimately, 6x the content was made available to the desktop crawler in the same level of crawl depth.

But what impact did this have on external links?

Wow. 75% of the external, outbound links were culled in the mobile version. 4,905 external links were found in the desktop version while only 1,162 were found in the mobile. Remember, this is a DA 72 site with over twenty thousand referring domains. Imagine losing that link because the mobile index no longer finds the backlink. What should we do? Is the sky falling?

Take a deep breathMobile-first isn't mobile-only

The first important caveat to all this research is that Google isn't giving up on the desktop — they're simply prioritizing the mobile crawl. This makes sense, as the majority of search traffic is now mobile. If Google wants to make sure quality mobile content is served, they need to shift their crawl priorities. But they also have a competing desire to find content, and doing so requires using a desktop crawler so long as webmasters continue to abbreviate the mobile versions of their sites.

This reality isn't lost on Google. In the Original Official Google Mobile First Announcement, they write...

If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.

Google took the time to state that a desktop version can be better than an "incomplete mobile version." I don't intend to read too much into this statement other than to say that Google wants a full mobile version, not just a postcard.

Good link placements will prevail

One anecdotal outcome of my research was that the external links which tended to survive the cull of a mobile version were often placed directly in the content. External links in sidebars like blog-rolls were essentially annihilated from the index, but in-content links survived. This may be a signal Google picks up on. External links that are both in mobile and desktop tend to be the kinds of links people might click on. So, while there may be fewer links powering the link graph (or at least there might be a subset that is specially identified), if your links are good, content-based links, then you have a chance to see improved performance.

I was able to confirm this by looking at a subset of known good links. Using Fresh Web Explorer, I looked up fresh links to toysrus.com which is currently gaining a great deal of attention due to stores closing. We can feel confident that most of these links will be in-content because the articles themselves are about the relevant, breaking news regarding Toys R Us. Sure enough, after testing 300+ mentions, we found the links to be identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and, subsequently, they showed up in both versions of the crawl.

Selection bias and convergence

It is probably the case that popular sites are more likely to have a mobile version than non-popular sites. Now, they might be responsive — at which point they would yield no real differences in the crawl — but at least some percentage would likely be m.* domains or utilize plugins like those mentioned above which truncate the content. At the lower rungs of the web, older, less professional content is likely to have only one version which is shown to mobile and desktop devices alike. If this is the case, we can expect that over time the differences in the index might begin to converge rather than diverge, as my study looked only at sites that were in the top million and only crawled two levels deep.

Moreover (this one is a bit speculative), but I think over time that there will be convergence between a mobile and desktop index. I don't think the link graphs will grow exponentially different as the linked web is only so big. Rather, the paths to which certain pages are reached, and the frequency with which they are reached, will change quite a bit. So, while the link graph will differ, the set of URLs making up the link graph will largely be the same. Of course, some percentage of the mobile web will remain wholly disparate. The large number of sites that use dedicated mobile subdomains or plugins that remove substantial sections of content will remain like mobile islands in the linked web.

Impact on SERPs

It's difficult at this point to say what the impact on search results will be. It will certainly not leave the SERPs unchanged. What would be the point of Google making and announcing a change to its indexing methods if it didn't improve the SERPs? That being said, this study wouldn't be complete without some form of impact assessment. Hat tip to JR Oakes for giving me this critique, otherwise I would have forgotten to take a look.

First, there are a couple of things which could mitigate dramatic shifts in the SERPs already, regardless of the veracity of this study:

A slow rollout means that shifts in SERPs will be lost to the natural ranking fluctuations we already see.

Google can seed URLs found by mobile or by desktop into their respective crawlers, thereby limiting index divergence. (This is a big one!)

Google could choose to consider, for link purposes, the aggregate of both mobile and desktop crawls, not counting one to the exclusion of the other.

Second, the relationships between domains may be less affected than other index metrics. What is the likelihood that the relationship between Domain X and Domain Y (more or less links) is the same for both the mobile- and desktop-based indexes? If the relationships tend to remain the same, then the impact on SERPs will be limited. We will call this relationship being "directionally consistent." To accomplish this part of the study, I took a sample of domain pairs from the mobile index and compared their relationship (more or less links) to their performance in the desktop index. Did the first have more links than the second in both the mobile and desktop? Or did they perform differently?

It turns out that the indexes were fairly close in terms of directional consistency. That is to say that while the link graphs as a whole were quite different, when you compared one domain to another at random, they tended in both data sets to be directionally consistent. Approximately 88% of the domains compared maintained directional consistency via the indexes. This test was only run comparing the mobile index domains to the desktop index domains. Future research might explore the reverse relationship.

So what's next?: Moz and the mobile-first index

Our goal for the Moz link index has always been to be as much like Google as possible. It is with that in mind that our team is experimenting with a mobile-first index as well. Our new link index and Link Explorer in Beta seeks to be more than simply one of the largest link indexes on the web, but the most relevant and useful, and we believe part of that means shaping our index with methods similar to Google. We will keep you updated!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/2Ez5MAT