#its impact still lands to this day no matter how many times I’ve heard quotes from the speech

[jubileepizza]

I still remember watching children of earth ep 5 when it first aired, Gwen’s address to the camera about the doctor turning away in shame from humanity, cut with clips of children being dragged from their homes, has to be one of the most chilling episodes openers in television history

[arctic-comet]

Osblaineweek2021, Day 2: Prose

I love book quotes. Looking at quotes is one of my favorite ways to to inspire myself to write more fic.

Here’s a small collection of book quotes (and recs!) of where I’ve “found” June and Nick.

This post contains spoilers for the following books/series:

- Lover Mine by JR Ward

- The Wrath and The Dawn duology by Renée Ahdieh

- A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas

Lover Mine by J.R. Ward

Summary:

John Matthew has come a long way since he was found living among humans, his vampire nature unknown to himself and to those around him. After he was taken in by the Brotherhood, no one could guess what his true history was- or his true identity. Indeed, the fallen Brother Darius has returned, but with a different face and a very different destiny. As a vicious personal vendetta takes John into the heart of the war, he will need to call up on both who he is now and who he once was in order to face off against evil incarnate. Xhex, a symphath assassin, has long steeled herself against the attraction between her and John Matthew. Having already lost one lover to madness, she will not allow the male of worth to fall prey to the darkness of her twisted life. When fate intervenes, however, the two discover that love, like destiny, is inevitable between soul mates.

It's basically a paranormal love story between two warriors. He's really young (although he's actually a reincarnation of a very old vampire warrior, but he doesn't know that), and she's like 300 years older than him. In this book, she's been raped and abused by a guy who also used to bully him. She escapes, but he saves her life. She's hungry for revenge and wants to die after achieving that goal, but of course eventually changes her mind. In the end he actually serves her rapist to her on a silver platter so that she can kill him (sound like anyone we know?). He literally holds the guy down while she kills him.

They're my ultimate favorite ship in this series, and IMO their relationship eventually develops into one of the strongest ones. This series is a bit of a hit-or-miss for most people, because the language and the writing style are pretty ridiculous in all seriousness. If you decide to read this, I recommend starting the series from the beginning because John and Xhex meet for the first time several books before this one, LOL.

Here are some of the quotes that make me think of Nick and June:

“Besides, the story of the two of them was written in the language of collision; they were ever crashing into each other and ricocheting away—only to find themselves pulled back into another impact.” ― J.R. Ward, Lover Mine

“As his ears rang and his heart broke for her, he stayed strong against the gale force she let loose. After all, there was a reason why here and hear were seperated by so little and sounded one like the other. Bearing witness to her, he heard her and was there for her because that was all you could do during a fall apart. But God, it pained him to see how she suffered.” ― J.R. Ward, Lover Mine

“...the only thing that had tethered her to the earth had been him and it was strange, but she felt welded to him on some core level now. He had seen her at her absolute worst, at her weakest and most insane, and he hadn't looked away. He hadn't judged and he hadn't been burned. It was as if in the heat of her meltdown they had melted together. This was more than emotion. It was a matter of soul.” ― J.R. Ward, Lover Mine

The Wrath and the Dawn duology by Renée Ahdieh

Summary:

One Life to One Dawn. In a land ruled by a murderous boy-king, each dawn brings heartache to a new family. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, is a monster. Each night he takes a new bride only to have a silk cord wrapped around her throat come morning. When sixteen-year-old Shahrzad's dearest friend falls victim to Khalid, Shahrzad vows vengeance and volunteers to be his next bride. Shahrzad is determined not only to stay alive, but to end the caliph's reign of terror once and for all. Night after night, Shahrzad beguiles Khalid, weaving stories that enchant, ensuring her survival, though she knows each dawn could be her last. But something she never expected begins to happen: Khalid is nothing like what she'd imagined him to be. This monster is a boy with a tormented heart. Incredibly, Shahrzad finds herself falling in love. How is this possible? It's an unforgivable betrayal. Still, Shahrzad has come to understand all is not as it seems in this palace of marble and stone. She resolves to uncover whatever secrets lurk and, despite her love, be ready to take Khalid's life as retribution for the many lives he's stolen. Can their love survive this world of stories and secrets?

This is a young adult fantasy romance, and basically, Khalid is a lot like Nick. He’s made mistakes that he needs to own, but at the same time he’s forced to commit atrocities he doesn’t want to do. He hates himself and doesn’t believe himself to be worthy of love, and yet he falls in love with Shazi. He's viewed as the villain of the story by everyone aside from Shazi and a few other characters until almost the end of the 2nd book.

“I love you, a thousand times over. And I will never apologize for it.”

―Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn

“It’s a fitting punishment for a monster. to want something so much—to hold it in your arms — and know beyond a doubt you will never deserve it.”

― Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn

“When I was a boy, my mother would tell me that one of the best things in life is the knowledge that our story isn't over yet. Our story may have come to a close, but your story is still yet to be told.

Make it a story worthy of you”

― Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn

“In that moment of perfect balance, she understood. This peace? These worries silenced without effort? It was because they were two parts of a whole. He did not belong to her. And she did not belong to him. It was never about belonging to someone. It was about belonging together.”

― Renee Ahdieh, The Rose & the Dagger

“A boy who'd thrived in the shadows.

Now he had to live in the light.

To live . . . fiercely.

To fight for every breath.”

― Renee Ahdieh, The Rose & the Dagger

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

Summaries:

Book 1

Feyre's survival rests upon her ability to hunt and kill – the forest where she lives is a cold, bleak place in the long winter months. So when she spots a deer in the forest being pursued by a wolf, she cannot resist fighting it for the flesh. But to do so, she must kill the predator and killing something so precious comes at a price ... Dragged to a magical kingdom for the murder of a faerie, Feyre discovers that her captor, his face obscured by a jewelled mask, is hiding far more than his piercing green eyes would suggest. Feyre's presence at the court is closely guarded, and as she begins to learn why, her feelings for him turn from hostility to passion and the faerie lands become an even more dangerous place. Feyre must fight to break an ancient curse, or she will lose him forever.

Book 2

Feyre survived Amarantha's clutches to return to the Spring Court—but at a steep cost. Though she now has the powers of the High Fae, her heart remains human, and it can't forget the terrible deeds she performed to save Tamlin's people. Nor has Feyre forgotten her bargain with Rhysand, High Lord of the feared Night Court. As Feyre navigates its dark web of politics, passion, and dazzling power, a greater evil looms—and she might be key to stopping it. But only if she can harness her harrowing gifts, heal her fractured soul, and decide how she wishes to shape her future—and the future of a world cleaved in two. With more than a million copies sold of her beloved Throne of Glass series, Sarah J. Maas's masterful storytelling brings this second book in her seductive and action-packed series to new heights.

Fantasy romance with explicit sex scenes, and book 2 is a lot better than book 1. Our main character Feyre falls for a really boring fae guy, but also meets the hottest guy she’s ever known. The first guy of course isn't the real love interest (this is a twist this author loves to do). They all end up as prisoners, and the 2nd guy saves her life when the 1st one is totally useless. He also makes her hate him as he does it because he has to. After getting out, she tries to make her old relationship work, but it doesn’t, and guess who swoops in?

I do see some Nick in Rhysand (in addition to his role in the love triangle). They’re both traumatized and prefer to keep a lot of their feelings to themselves. I also see some of the same selflessness in both of them. Rhysand wants Feyre to choose him because she loves him, but he’s willing to accept that she may not, and doesn’t tell her that they’re pretty much destined to be together (it’s a supernatural thing, and he will suffer a lot if she decides she doesn’t want him).

“Everything I love has always had a tendency to be taken from me.”

―Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“It took me a long while to realize that Rhysand, whether he knew it or not, had effectively kept me from shattering completely.”

― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“Regardless of his motives or his methods, Rhysand was keeping me alive. And had done so even before I set foot Under the Mountain.”

― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“Because," he went on, his eyes locked with mine, "I didn't want you to fight alone. Or die alone."

― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“He thinks he'll be remembered as the villain in the story. But I forgot to tell him that the villain is usually the person who locks up the maiden and throws away the key. He was the one who let me out.”

― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“And I wondered if love was too weak a word for what he felt, what he’d done for me. For what I felt for him.”

― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“I was his and he was mine, and we were the beginning and middle and end. We were a song that had been sung from the very first ember of light in the world.”

― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

[halothenthehorns]

All in the Family

Chapter 9: The Potions Master

"Oh this is perfect!" Peter burst out with surprised laughter the moment he'd caught his breath back from the stone room spinning about. "Slughorn's office, couldn't have asked for better!"

"What were you two talking about over there?" Sirius demanded with a slight pout, rubbing furiously at his head and so looking more cross-eyed than anything when he saw Regulus nodding appreciatively at their surroundings as well.

"Where are we?" Remus noted as he began looking around in detail, stretching and sitting up with a small frown.

The office wasn't designed to have eight random students be plopped into it, and those were the most obvious at first. James had landed in the chair with such force he toppled it over, sending the robes that had been hanging on the back to pool beneath him but doing nothing to cushion the fall. Evans had landed hard on the desk and upset a bottle of ink, while the other six had simply crashed to the ground in the little available walking space, Alice nearly in the fireplace with a hateful mutter, "this isn't feeling any better every time!"

They all got to their feet though with more winces to see what Remus meant, and found the not so subtle signs. The desk took up the majority in a spacious room, so it looked more menacing than any office they'd been in. The walls were lined with jars full of pickled things, Lily immediately identifying four of them. They were clearly somewhere in the dungeons with no natural lighting, the place echoed with almost as much emptiness as the immense hall before.

"I think we're in Snape's office?" Regulus said, having to dig the book out from under the desk and flipping to the next chapter.

"What do you mean he got an office?" Sirius scoffed.

"Do you expect them to give him a cupboard when he became the Potions teacher?" Remus rolled his eyes for that one.

"Or how about asking, so we're really traveling through time?" Frank muttered clearly to himself. The Dursleys house before had been ominous but still something outside their world, this was a place in their school that should not exist yet.

"Next chapter's all about him, so it looks like we'll find out," Regulus inserted when he read as much, and even Alice and Frank couldn't garner up any kind of good mood at the idea of this, but at least their slight grimaces were kind to the other four making exaggerated, pained expressions.

Lily simply looked radiant, wondering if she could convince the little Black to give this chapter up, but he was already going.

The start wasn't as bad as they would have thought, listening to Harry go through his classes for the first time was something they all knew well so it was much like their experiences with the last few chapters. It came to no one's surprise gossip was following Harry around, and James at least was excited to hear, whether intentionally or not, of Harry trying to get into that forbidden room just to find out himself what was in it, and they all had a good laugh at the bits Filch made an appearance in.

Most of the classes were as unmemorable as their own firsts after so many years, the only highlight being they all laughed at McGonagall still showing off to the first years, though she'd switched from a cow as in their year to a pig this time.

The Marauders couldn't help but give a mocking laugh to the idea it had taken Harry so long to get down to the Great Hall without getting lost, while Frank made a face in sympathy for the kid as it had taken him a week.

Lily couldn't help a pleased smile that Hagrid was still giving Harry such attention even in school, though she wasn't quite sure what the motive was for this considering Harry clearly now had a friend. She tried to tell herself she was acting paranoid, but it wasn't helping her feelings of unease grow worse when Regulus got to the last class.

For once, James wasn't paying much attention to her, especially her growing frustration at someone other than him for once as he watched his friends. Sirius was shuffling his feet with guilt the moment Snape appeared properly in full detail, but at least Remus was frowning at him rather than avoiding looking at him.

"I thought you two had cleared the air on this?" He muttered, unsure how much of a wasted effort that was and if he was going to be heard anyways.

Clearly thinking of the same, Remus chose his words carefully, "we, made our grievances clear, and it, ah, made some other things come out that we needed to talk about-"

"Look Remus," Sirius' impatience pushed through Remus' awkwardness, "I did a stupid thing, and I apologize. Now you are very well aware I didn't mean it, and clearly it's had no impact on this gits life," he finished with disdain when Regulus just kept dishing out the snide comments from Snape in this future.

Remus nodded his agreement to this, giving him an awkward smile and James hoped they were done lingering on this already. "Was that really all it took for you two?" He couldn't help but mutter in exasperation, but honestly he was more than happy seeing the two smiling at each other again, he just wanted things back to normal.

It helped that Peter chose that moment.

Nothing so grandiose as some of their setups they'd done in the past, but Peter wasn't doing this to impress anyone either. He just hadn't quite decided Sirius needed to be let back into the fold without some kind of revenge, so in perfect synchronization as if they'd planned it, he and Regulus raised their wands and intentionally combined two perfect spells that had a pipe line above Sirius temporarily dump down onto him.

There was a blast of icy cold water that sprayed only him, and then it was repaired as suddenly as it had started, leaving Sirius apparently one who'd rolled around in half cleaned seaweed on its way to the lake.

"Thank you Wormtail," Sirius said as it continued dripping down him, he even had to spit a bit of it out of his mouth before he could continue, "for finally getting that over with."

"You knew I was going to do that?" Peter protested.

"You are many things my friend," Sirius rubbed carefully to get a particularly slimy chunk of green out of his eyes, "subtle is not one of them."

Peter raised his hands in surrender but went over and offered Sirius the robes which he gratefully accepted to start wiping at his nose.

When he sneezed and a bit more flew out, Lily couldn't suppress it anymore and burst out laughing.

James looked over wildly and found her leaning up against the farthest shelf, her face bright red and holding her sides.

"Oh, so you do think we're funny?" He eagerly jumped at the chance to parlay with her in such a suddenly good mood.

She didn't answer for a moment even as her giggles subsided, nor did she plan to as she'd rather swallow that nasty concoction rather than admit why she'd laughed so hard.

It should have been impossible, it certainly made no sense to her to hear the way Sev was treating a kid, no matter who Harry looked like. She'd been growing steadily more outraged at the treatment of these children, and the blow he'd dished out to Neville just now in making it his and Harry's fault for a potion exploding was honestly the worst thing she'd ever heard any person do, let alone her best friend!

She'd wanted to scream, she wanted him in her face right this second to explain that this was all just a cruel idea of a joke and he was going to turn into that kind and attentive friend she knew so well any second, she'd had so many things building up in her for a solid few minutes that when she'd watched a genuine act of merriment even being played out amongst idiots who caused her more grief than anyone, she'd finally released it all.

Potter seemed to realize he wasn't going to get a response, so finally sighed and turned back away to continue smiling and laughing with his mates like old times while Alice sidled up to her again, holding her nose but frowning for a wholly other reason. She stood awkwardly there though, unsure how to reach out to Evans this time and offer anything when honestly the lot of them were just seeing more of the same Snape they saw every day, hearing those nasty rumors of the rest of the friends he hung out with. Frank hadn't said anything to her, but she could tell he was uneasy about Evans and much she associated with those nasty pre-Death Eater's just like the rest of the school.

"I don't suppose it helps at all he's treating all the kids like this, not just Potters," she tried anyways.

"Nope," Lily's icy, one word answer was enough that Alice got the mood and left her to stew in silence and sidle back over to Frank, who was scowling hatefully at this all as well.

"If Potter doesn't dunk his head in a vat of boils when we get back I will."

"Frank, that's not like you," Alice reprimanded quietly as she took his hand.

"Well I think it's high time I should be like that," Frank took her hand quickly and gave it a squeeze as he kept hearing what Neville was going through. "I've been growing sick for ages watching all these bullies run the school, now it turns out one of them's going to be given a position of power by Dumbledore himself and he's still abusing it. I've been saying for ages I want a way to fix this Alice, got to start somewhere."

"Turning into the monster only creates another," Alice quoted with a heavier frown.

"What would you have me do then?" he sighed, easily backing down from the threat as he looked to her bright amber eyes. They hadn't even realized they'd both wanted to be Auror's last year when he'd offered to study their OWL's together, each finding out it was the others desire as well only at the beginning of this year and they'd started dating that night. It was a purpose that they were sure would have drawn them together no matter what in the end, a fight they knew they were going to get involved in with the coming war and looking to meet it head on.

"What you always do Frank, use your head," she tried to chuckle, though it didn't last long as Regulus described Harry's mores mood upon going to Hagrid's, it admittedly hadn't been the best end to his first week.

Yet they were all caught off guard by Harry easily piecing together what they honestly hadn't given much thought to. What was Dumbledore moving around that was so important then? Regulus was so involved thinking about it, it still didn't occur to him to give them warning when he finished.

[bobbystompy]

91 Quotes I Enjoyed From 2020

Below are my favorite quotes from 2020. Though most occurred throughout the year, some took place before but were encountered during.

1) “You don’t have to be new to make new.” - Rick Rubin

2) “He put the beat on and go to sleep then wake up with a verse.” - The Lox

3) “Every opinion is bad.” - Blink-155

4)

(via Twitter)

5) “At the start of every disaster movie, there’s a scientist being ignored.”

6) “Be brave enough to suck at something new.”

7) “Comedy is the only job you can have where you can use everything you know” - Robin Williams via Dave Chappelle

8) “What’s the worst swear word where you live?” - Josiah Hughes

9) “Cookies are a really great way to get everybody to like you for a short period of time” - YSAC

10) “The worst dancer at a wedding is the one who’s not dancing.” - John Mulaney

11) “I never saw the end of the tunnel. I only saw myself running out of one." - Kobe Bryant

12) "A good movie begins as you're walking out of the theater" - Ethan Hawke

13) “When I was young and starting in cinema, there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart which is, 'The most personal is the most creative.’ That quote was from our great Martin Scorsese.” - Bong Joon-ho

14) “Run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow” - River Phoenix via Joaquin Phoenix

15) “Thank you -- I will drink until next morning.” - Bong Joon-ho

16) “Men will bury their emotions for decades and then take it all out on children tubing while they drive the boat.” - @krauter_

17) “They help you with the dumb face stuff, but they don’t tell you how to fix it” - Adam (Nate’s friend), on having older sisters

18) “We all had our connections, but it’s not the details themselves that matter, it’s the feeling behind them. There are a million coming-of-age tales. Lady Bird’s secret sauce is how deeply its creator gave a shit. The older I get, the less I care about anything but the sense of a filmmaker’s personal connection to the material. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, what genre it is, or whether it’s genre at all. I only really care that it feels like something the filmmaker had to tell me, and that it was that filmmaker in particular who had to tell it. It has to answer the ‘why are you telling me this’ question, and not just why are you telling me, but why are you telling me.

Lady Bird is a movie that feels like only Greta Gerwig could’ve made. And it’s only because it’s so specific to her that it can be so meaningful to so many people.” - Vince Mancini

19) "I have cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns. But I do not feel lonely now.” - Bernie Sanders

20) “Ever hear a Beatles song you haven’t heard before?”

21) “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.” - Charles Bukowski

22) “You shouldn’t have to hear a band to know if they’re good or not” - Josiah Hughes

23) “I was raised by OGs.  Some of you were raised by IG.  I understand.” - Ice-T

* * *

[Here is where I note the line of demarcation that was the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the US, pushed forward by Tom Hanks’ announcement, the NBA and NCAA shutting down, and, then, the nation itself.]

* * *

24) “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Vladimir Lenin

25) "Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious." - Peter Wehner

26) "Epidemics have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact." - Anne Applebaum

27) “A funny thing about quarantining is hearing your partner in full work mode for the first time. Like, I’m married to a ‘let’s circle back’ guy — who knew?” - Laura Norkin

28) 

(Jojo Rabbit)

29) “The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. - Deadwood: The Movie

30) “All bleeding stops eventually.” - Deadwood: The Movie

31) “Our Father, which art in heaven… / Let him fucking stay there” - Deadwood: The Movie

32) “It’s like a power outage, but we still have power” - Ryen Russillo, on the pandemic

33) “Whenever Sox baseball returns, it’ll be weird to not have Farmer on the call any more. The relationship between a fan and longtime announcer is always built in the little moments. One afternoon, he’s the soundtrack as you clean the garage. On another night, he’s your bookmark for the game as you stand in line for churros or walk down the ramps at Sox Park to try for better seats in the 100 level. A voice like Farmer’s becomes so familiar that you only really notice when it’s no longer there.” - Kevin Kaduk, on the passing of Ed Farmer

34) 

(via Twitter)

35) “In my songs, I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message” - John Prine

36) “Observe everything. Admire nothing.” - Generation Kill

37) “Trump, by that definition, has always been a wartime president -- always willing to sacrifice people he doesn’t know to things he only sort of cares about” - David Roth

38) "Whenever they speak Michael Jordan, they should speak Scottie Pippen." - Michael Jordan

39) "Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach." - Hunter S. Thompson

40) “Airlines sending me “we’re in this together” emails. When my suitcase was 52 pounds I was on my own.” - Mike Dentale

41) “Sometimes you can be the worst source of your own story” - Ryen Russillo

42) “Family is not necessarily blood, but instead who you would bleed for.”

43)

(via Twitter)

44) "This is the deal that Jordan made, knowingly or unknowingly — that he would trade everything he had for everything he wanted. And then, when he won all those things, he found that he had nothing but that.” - David Roth

45) “I’m brand loyal, but the brand doesn’t matter” - Caitie Miller, on why she doesn’t like generic peanut butter

46) “NOBODY shitposts Gene Hackman!!” - Mark Dehlinger

47) “When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with—that is when he picks up a boomerang.” - G.K. Chesterton

48) “You can be appalled forever, but shocked only once.” - Jeff Weiss, on early Eminem

49) “Whether I’m pessimistic or optimistic, the fight’s the same” - David Simon

50) “Freedom can never be completely won, but it can be lost.” - Bernard Simon

51) “Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands.” -Kareem Abdul Jabbar

52) “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist -- we must be anti-racist.” - Angela Davis

53) “Start as close to the end as possible” - Kurt Vonnegut, on creative writing

54) “You can’t stay woke all the time — that’s insomnia.” - Dr. Cornel West

55) “No, I get it. I’ve dated a lot of Geminis.”

56) “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” - John Krakauer, Into The Wild (via Tyler Keller)

57) "I couldn't show them my For You because it's pretty much just lesbian stuff and depression memes" - Maggie Loesch, on showing TikTok to her coworkers

58) "It's 1 a.m. in Slovakia and I've already had one bottle of wine and I don't know how long this press conference will go, so good luck to me." - Marian Hossa, following his NHL Hall of Fame announcement

59) “All I want in life is to go on an Anguilla group trip” - Mandy Gilkes

60) “You miss old friends when you don’t see them, but you miss them more when you do.” - Chuck Klosterman

61) “The only way to appreciate the present is to pretend it’s already the past.” - Chuck Klosterman

62) Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth, oh, never mind You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth Until they've faded, but trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back At photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now How much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked

(”Everybody's Free [To Wear Sunscreen]”)

Second time that essay’s been quoted on this list.

64) "I mean, it's just human nature to suck up to the people above you, crap on those beneath you, and undercut your equals” - Brian, Family Guy

65) “You never quit a job. You quit a manager.” - Brian Bedford

66) “All the pictures in my house are of people I’m not friends with” - Tracy Cunningham

67) “In order to leave something behind, you have to leave.” - Dr. Herman, Grey’s Anatomy

68) 

(via Twitter)

69) “You can obsess about death if you don’t have to obsess about dying.” - Brendan Kelly via “White Noise”

70) “If it’s right to do, it’s wrong to wait.” - Andy, doorman 

71)

72) “When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.” - Ruth Bader Ginsburg

73) "America is mostly people who’ve never left their state saying we have the best country in the world." - Billy Wayne Davis

74) “A writer is someone who knows at least 80% of their writing sucks.” - Gabe Hudson

75) 

(via Twitter)

76) “You’re dead twice” - Brendan Kelly

77) “Perfect is the enemy of good” - Voltaire (via Zach Lowe)

78) “I don’t want to be a savior, I want to be a mirror.” - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

79) “I get bad Twitter FOMO but not real life FOMO. That just goes to show I need to get off the Internet.” - Josh Thomas

80) “Is there anything you love in life that you engage with seriously that you don't also engage with humor?" - Sam Sutherland, on his relationship with Blink-182

81) “My favorite genre of music is my friends' bands" - Josiah Hughes

82) “Let’s fall in love like both our parents aren’t divorced.”

83) “Seabiscuit may be the only earthling that was on both sides of the stamp.” - Brendan Kelly

84) “There’s no shame in coming in second, except in, like, wars.” - Family Guy

85) “I feel like I experience writer’s block 100% of the time, and when I do write, I have impostor syndrome.” - Phoebe Bridgers

86) “We teach based on what we most need to learn.” - psychologist on Grey’s Anatomy

87) “Having too many choices is the leading cause of stress” - Grey’s Anatomy

88) “I think we've all gravely underestimated the extent to which this year has changed all of us, permanently” - Kelli Maria Korducki

89) 

(via Twitter)

90) “I wonder if people understand why they don’t have polio” - Sandra E. Garcia

91) “Ending songs is terrible, so let’s keep singing” - Dave Hernandez

[distase]

Dear Esther. I sometimes feel as if I’ve given birth to this island. Somewhere, between the longitude and latitude a split opened up and it beached remotely here. No matter how hard I correlate, it remains a singularity, an alpha point in my life that refuses all hypothesis. I return each time leaving fresh markers that I hope, in the full glare of my hopelessness, will have blossomed into fresh insight in the interim.

Dear Esther. The gulls do not land here anymore; I’ve noticed that this year they seem to shun the place. Maybe it’s the depletion of the fishing stock driving them away. Perhaps it’s me. When he first landed here, Donnelly wrote that the herds were sickly and their shepherds the lowest of the miserable classes that populate these Hebridean islands. Three hundred years later, even they have departed.

Dear Esther. I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been here, and how many visits I have made overall. Certainly, the landmarks are now so familiar to me that I have to remind myself to actually see the forms and shapes in front of me. I could stumble blind across these rocks, the edges of these precipices, without fear of missing my step and plummeting down to sea. Besides, I’ve always considered that if one is to fall, it is critical to keep one’s eyes firmly open.

Dear Esther. The morning after I was washed ashore, salt in my ears, sand in my mouth and the waves always at my ankles, I felt as though everything had conspired to this one last shipwreck. I remembered nothing but water, stones in my belly and my shoes threatening to drag me under to where only the most listless of creatures swim.

Level 1: The Lighthouse

Donnelly reported the legend of the hermit; a holy man who sought solitude in its most pure form. Allegedly, he rowed here from the mainland in a boat without a bottom, so all the creatures of the sea could rise at night to converse with him. How disappointed he must have been with their chatter. Perhaps now, when all that haunts the ocean is the rubbish dumped from the tankers, he’d find more peace. They say he threw his arms wide in a valley on the south side and the cliff opened up to provide him shelter; they say he died of fever one hundred and sixteen years later. The shepherds left gifts for him at the mouth of the cave, but Donnelly records they never claimed to have seen him. I have visited the cave and I have left my gifts, but like them, I appear to be an unworthy subject of his solitude.

At night you can see the lights sometimes from a passing tanker or trawler. From up on the cliffs they are mundane, but down here they fugue into ambiguity. For instance, I cannot readily tell if they belong above or below the waves. The distinction now seems banal; why not everything and all at once! There’s nothing better to do here than indulge in contradictions, whilst waiting for the fabric of life to unravel. There was once talk of a wind farm out here, away from the rage and the intolerance of the masses. The sea, they said, is too rough for the turbines to stand: they clearly never came here to experience the becalming for themselves. Personally, I would have supported it; turbines would be a fitting contemporary refuge for a hermit: the revolution and the permanence.

When you were born, your mother told me, a hush fell over the delivery room. A great red birthmark covered the left side of your face. No one knew what to say, so you cried to fill the vacuum. I always admired you for that; that you cried to fill whatever vacuum you found. I began to manufacture vacuums, just to enable you to deploy your talent. The birthmark faded by the time you were six, and had gone completely by the time we met, but your fascination with the empty, and its cure, remained.

Those islands in the distance, I am sure, are nothing more than relics of another time, sleeping giants, somnambulist gods laid down for a final dreaming. I wash the sand from my lips and grip my wrist ever more tightly, my shaking arms will not support my fading diaries.

Donnelly’s book had not been taken out from the library since 1974. I decided it would never be missed as I slipped it under my coat and avoided the librarian’s gaze on the way out. If the subject matter is obscure, the writer’s literary style is even more so, it is not the text of a stable or trustworthy reporter. Perhaps it is fitting that my only companion in these last days should be a stolen book written by a dying man.

The mount is clearly the focal point of this landscape; it almost appears so well placed as to be artificial. I find myself easily slipping into the delusional state of ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to everything here. Was this island formed during the moment of impact; when we were torn loose from our moorings and the seatbelts cut motorway lanes into our chests and shoulders, did it first break surface then?

When someone had died or was dying or was so ill they gave up what little hope they could sacrifice, they cut parallel lines into the cliff, exposing the white chalk beneath. You could see them from the mainland or the fishing boats and know to send aid or impose a cordon of protection, and wait a generation until whatever pestilence stalked the cliff paths died along with its hosts. My lines are just for this: to keep any would-be rescuers at bay. The infection is not simply of the flesh.

They were godfearing people those shepherds. There was no love in the relationship. Donnelly tells me that they had one bible that was passed around in strict rotation. It was stolen by a visiting monk in 1776, two years before the island was abandoned altogether. In the interim, I wonder, did they assign chapter and verse to the stones and grasses, marking the geography with a superimposed significance; that they could actually walk the bible and inhabit its contradictions?

We are not like Lot’s wife, you and I; we feel no particular need to turn back. There’s nothing to be seen if we did. No tired old man parting the cliffs with his arms; no gifts or bibles laid out on the sand for the taking. No tides turning or the shrieking gulls overhead. The bones of the hermit are no longer laid out for the taking: I have stolen them away to the guts of this island where the passages all run to black and there we can light each others faces by their strange luminescence.

I quote directly: “A motley lot with little to recommend them. I have now spent three days in their company that is, I fear, enough for any man not born amongst them. Despite their tedious inclination to quote scripture, they seem to me the most godforsaken of all the inhabitants of the outer isles. Indeed, in this case, the very gravity of that term – forsaken by god – seems to find its very apex.” It appears to me that Donnelly too found those who wander this shoreline to be adrift from any chance of redemption. Did he include himself in that, I wonder?

Dear Esther. I met Paul. I made my own little pilgrimage. My Damascus a small semi-detached on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. We drank coffee in his kitchen and tried to connect to one another. Although he knew I hadn’t come in search of an apology, reason or retribution, he still spiralled in panic, thrown high and lucid by his own dented bonnet. Responsibility had made him old; like us, he had already passed beyond any conceivable boundary of life.

I threw my arms wide and the cliff opened out before me, making this rough home. I transferred my belongings from the bothy on the mount and tried to live here instead. It was cold at night and the sea lapped at the entrance at high tide. To climb the peak, I must first venture even deeper into veins of the island, where the signals are blocked altogether. Only then will I understand them, when I stand on the summit and they flow into me, uncorrupted.

I would leave you presents, outside your retreat, in this interim space between cliff and beach. I would leave you loaves and fishes, but the fish stocks have been depleted and I have run out of bread. I would row you back to your homeland in a bottomless boat but I fear we would both be driven mad by the chatter of the sea creatures.

I find myself increasingly unable to find that point where the hermit ends and Paul and I begin. We are woven into a sodden blanket, stuffed into the bottom of a boat to stop the leak and hold back the ocean. My neck aches from staring up at the aerial; it mirrors the dull throb in my gut where I am sure I have begun to form another stone. In my dreams, it forms into a perfect representation of Lot’s wife, head over her shoulder, staring along the motorway at the approaching traffic, in a vacuum of fatalistic calm.

This hermit, this seer, this distant historian of bones and old bread, where did he vanish to? Why, asked the farmers, why asked Jakobson, why bother with your visions at all, if you are just to throw your arms up at the cliff and let it close in behind you, seal you into the belly of the island, a museum shut to all but the most devoted.

He still maintains he wasn’t drunk but tired. I can’t make the judgement or the distinction anymore. I was drunk when I landed here, and tired too. I walked up the cliff path in near darkness and camped in the bay where the trawler lies beached. It was only at dawn that I saw the bothy and decided to make my temporary lodgings there. I was expecting just the aerial and a transmitter stashed in a weatherproof box somewhere on the mount. It had an air of uneasy permanence to it, like all the other buildings here; erosion seems to have evaded it completely.

The vegetation here has fossilized from the roots up. To think they once grazed animals here, the remnants of occupation being evidence to that. It is all sick to death: the water is too polluted for the fish, the sky is too thin for the birds and the soil is cut with the bones of hermits and shepherds. I have heard it said that human ashes make great fertilizer, that we could sow a forest from all that is left of your hips and ribcage, with enough left over to thicken the air and repopulate the bay.

I dreamt I stood in the centre of the sun and the solar radiation cooked my heart from the inside. My teeth will curl and my fingernails fall off into my pockets like loose change. If I could stomach, I’d eat, but all I seem capable of is saltwater. Were the livestock still here, I could turn feral and gorge. I’m as emaciated as a body on a slab, opened up for a premature source of death. I’ve rowed to this island in a heart without a bottom; all the bacteria of my gut rising up to sing to me.

I have become convinced I am not alone here, even though I am equally sure it is simply a delusion brought upon by circumstance. I do not, for instance, remember where I found the candles, or why I took it upon myself to light such a strange pathway. Perhaps it is only for those who are bound to follow.

Level 2: The Buoy

Dear Esther. I have now driven the stretch of the M5 between Exeter and Bristol over twenty-one times, but although I have all the reports and all the witnesses and have cross-referenced them within a millimetre using my ordnance survey maps, I simply cannot find the location. You’d think there would be marks, to serve as some evidence. It's somewhere between the turn off for Sandford and the Welcome Break services. But although I can always see it in my rear view mirror, I have as yet been unable to pull ashore.

Dear Esther. This will be my last letter. Do they pile up even now on the doormat of our empty house? Why do I still post them home to you? Perhaps I can imagine myself picking them up on the return I will not make, to find you waiting with daytime television and all its comforts. They will fossilise over the centuries to follow; an uneasy time capsule from a lost island. Postmarked Oban: it must have been sent during the final ascent.

Dear Esther. I have found myself to be as featureless as this ocean, as shallow and unoccupied as this bay, a listless wreck without identification. My rocks are these bones and a careful fence to keep the precipice at bay. Shot through me caves, my forehead a mount, this aerial will transmit into me so. All over exposed, the nervous system, where Donnelly’s boots and yours and mine still trample. I will carry a torch for you; I will leave it at the foot of my headstone. You will need it for the tunnels that carry me under.

Dear Esther. Whilst they catalogued the damage, I found myself afraid you’d suddenly sit up, stretch, and fail to recognise me, I orbited you like a sullen comet, our history trailing behind me in the solar wind from the fluorescent tubes. Your hair had not been brushed yet, your make-up not reapplied. You were all the world like a beach to me, laid out for investigation, your geography telling one story, but hinting at the geology hidden behind the cuts and bruises.

I have found the ship’s manifest, crumpled and waterlogged, under a stash of paint cans. It tells me that along with this present cargo, there was a large quantity of antacid yoghurt, bound for the European market. It must have washed out to sea, God knows there are no longer gulls or goats here to eat it.

There must be a hole in the bottom of the boat. How else could new hermits have arrived?

It’s only at night that this place makes any sluggish effort at life. You can see the buoy and the aerial. I’ve been taking to sleeping through the day in an attempt to resurrect myself. I can feel the last days drawing upon me – there’s little point now in continuation. There must be something new to find here – some nook or some cranny that offers a perspective worth clinging to. I’ve burnt my bridges; I have sunk my boats and watched them go to water.

The buoy has kept me lucid. I sat, when I was at the very edge of despair, when I thought I would never unlock the secret of the island, I sat at the edge and I watched the idiot buoy blink through the night. He is mute and he is retarded and he has no thought in his metal head but to blink each wave and each minute aside until the morning comes and renders him blind as well as deaf-mute. In many ways, we have much in common.

I’ve begun to wonder if Donnelly’s voyage here was as prosaic as it was presented. How disappointed not to have found the bones of the holy man! No wonder he hated the inhabitants so. To him, they must have seemed like barnacles mindlessly clinging to a mercy seat. Why cling so hard to the rock? Because it is the only thing that stops us from sliding into the ocean. Into oblivion.

An imagined answerphone message. The tires are flat, the wheel spins loosely, and the brake fluid has run like ink over this map, staining the landmarks and rendering the coastline mute, compromised. Where you saw galaxies, I saw only bruises, cut into the cliff by my lack of sobriety.

I don’t know the name of the wreck in the bay; it seems to have been here for several years but has not yet subsided. I don’t know if anyone was killed; if so, I certainly haven’t seen them myself. Perhaps when the helicopter came to lift them home, their ascent scared the birds away. I shall search for eggs along the north shore, for any evidence that life is marking this place out again. Perhaps it is me that keeps them at bay.

I remember running through the sands of Cromer; there was none of the shipwreck I find here. I spent days cataloguing the garbage that washes ashore here and I have begun to assemble a collection in the deepest recess I could find. What a strange museum it would make. And what of the corpse of its curator? Shall I find a glass coffin and pretend to make snow white of us both?

Why is the sea so becalmed? It beckons you to walk upon its surface; but I know all too well how it would shatter under my feet and drag me under. The rocks here have withstood centuries of storms and now, robbed of the tides, they stand muted and lame, temples without cause. One day, I will attempt to climb them, hunt among their peaks for the eggs, the nests, that the gulls have clearly abandoned.

I had kidney stones, and you visited me in the hospital. After the operation, when I was still half submerged in anaesthetic, your outline and your speech both blurred. Now my stones have grown into an island and made their escape and you have been rendered opaque by the car of a drunk.

I have begun my ascent on the green slope of the western side. I have looked deep into the mountain from the shaft and understood that I must go up and then find a way under. I will stash the last vestiges of my civilisation in the stone walls and work deeper from there. I am drawn by the aerial and the cliff edge: there is some form of rebirth waiting for me there.

I have begun my ascent on the windless slope of the western side. The setting sun was an inflamed eye squeezing shut against the light shone in by the doctors. My neck is aching through constantly craning my head up to track the light of the aerial. I must look downwards, follow the path under the island to a new beginning.

I have begun to climb, away from the sea and towards the centre. It is a straight line to the summit, where the evening begins to coil around the aerial and squeeze the signals into early silence. The bothy squats against the mount to avoid the gaze of the aerial; I too will creep under the island like an animal and approach it from the northern shore.

When I first looked into the shaft, I swear I felt the stones in my stomach shift in recognition.

What charnel house lies at the foot of this abyss? How many dead shepherds could fill this hole?

Is this what Paul saw through his windscreen? Not Lot’s wife, looking over her shoulder, but a scar in the hillside, falling away to black, forever.

When they graze their animals here, Donnelly writes, it is always raining. There’s no evidence of that rain has been here recently. The foliage is all static, like a radio signal returning from another star.

In the hold of the wrecked trawler I have found what must amount to several tons of gloss paint. Perhaps they were importing it. Instead, I will put it to use, and decorate this island in the icons and symbols of our disaster.

Cromer in the rain; a school trip. We took shelter en masse in a bus stop, herded in like cattle, the teachers dull shepherds. The sand in my pocket becoming damper by the second.

The bothy was constructed originally in the early 1700s. By then, shepherding had formalised into a career. The first habitual shepherd was a man called Jakobson, from a lineage of migratory Scandinavians. He was not considered a man of breeding by the mainlanders. He came here every summer whilst building the bothy, hoping, eventually, that becoming a man of property would secure him a wife and a lineage. Donnelly records that it did not work: he caught some disease from his malcontented goats and died two years after completing it. There was no one to carve white lines into the cliff for him either.

Inventory: a trestle table we spread wallpaper on in our first home. A folding chair; I laughed at you for bringing camping in the lakes. I was uncomfortable later and you laughed then. This diary; the bed with the broken springs – once asleep, you have to remember not to dream. A change of clothes. Donnelly’s book, stolen from Edinburgh library on the way here. I will burn them all on the last morning and make an aerial of my own.

When the oil lamps ran out I didn’t pick up a torch but used the moonlight to read by. When I have pulled the last shreds of sense from it, I will throw Donnelly’s book from the cliffs and perhaps myself with it. Maybe it will wash back up through the caves and erupt from the spring when the rain comes, making its return to the hermit's cave. Perhaps it will be back on the table when I wake. I think I may have thrown it into the sea several times before.

Three cormorants seen at dusk; they did not land. This house, built of stone, built by a long-dead shepherd. Contents: my campbed, a stove, a table, chairs. My clothes, my books. The caves that score out the belly of this island, leaving it famished. My limbs and belly, famished. This skin, these organs, this failing eyesight. When the battery runs out in my torch, I will descend into the caves and follow only the phosphorescence home.

My heart is landfill, these false dawns waking into the still never light. I sweat for you in the small hours and wrap my blankets into a mass. I’ve always heard the waves break on these lost shores, always the gulls forgotten. I can lift this bottle to my ear, and all there ever is for me is this hebridean music.

In a footnote, the editor comments that at this point, Donnelly was going insane as syphilis tore through his system like a drunk driver. He is not to be trusted – many of his claims are unsubstantiated and although he does paint a colourful picture, much of what he says may have been derived directly from his fever. But I’ve been here and I know, as Donnelly did, that this place is always half-imagined. Even the rocks and caves will shimmer and blur, with the right eyes.

He left his body to the medical school and was duly opened out for a crowd of students twenty-one days after his passing. The report is included in my edition of his book. The syphilis had torn through his guts like a drunk driver, scrambling his organs like eggs on a plate. But enough definition remained for a cursory examination and, as I suspected, they found clear evidence of kidney stones. He is likely to have spent the last years of his life in considerable pain: perhaps this is the root of his laudanum habit. Although its use makes him an unreliable witness, I find myself increasingly drawn into his orbit.

What to make of Donnelly? The laudanum and the syphilis? It is clearly not how he began, but I have been unable to discover if the former was a result of his visiting the island or the force that drove him here. For the syphilis, a drunk driver smashing his insides into a pulp as he stumbled these paths, I can only offer my empathy. We are all victims of our age. My disease is the internal combustion engine and the cheap fermentation of yeast.

Jakobson’s ribcage, they told Donnelly, was deformed, the result of some birth defect or perhaps a traumatic injury as a child. Brittle and overblown it was, and desperately light. Perhaps it was this that finally did for him, unable to contain the shattering of his heart. In halflight, his skeleton a discarded prop, a false and calcified seabird.

They found Jakobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. He’d struggled halfway down the cliff path, perhaps looking for some lost goat, or perhaps in a delirium and expired, curled into a claw, right under the winter moon. Even the animals shunned his corpse; the mainlanders thought to bring it home unlucky. Donnelly claims they dragged it to the caves to thaw out and rot, but he is proving an unreliable witness.

They found Jakobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. His fingernails were raw and bitten to the quick; they found the phosphorescent moss that grows in the caves deep under the nails. Whatever he’d been doing under the island when his strength began to fail is lost. He’d struggled halfway up the cliff again, perhaps in a delirium, perhaps trying to reach the bothy’s fire, before curling into a stone and expiring.

They found Jakobson in early spring, the thaw had only just come. Even though he’d been dead nearly seven months, his body had been frozen right down to the nerves and had not even begun to decompose. All around him, small flowers were reaching for the weak sun, the goats had adjusted happily to life without a shepherd and were grazing freely about the valley. Donnelly reports they hurled the body in fear and disgust down the shaft, but I cannot corroborate this story.

This beach is no place to end a life. Jakobson understood that, so did Donnelly. Jakobson made it halfway back up the cliff. Donnelly lost faith and went home to die. I have the benefit of history, of progress. Someone has erected an aerial to guide me through these black waves, a beacon that shines through the rocks like phosphorescent moss.

Climbing down to the caves I slipped and fell and have injured my leg. I think the femur is broken. It is clearly infected: the skin has turned a bright, tight pink and the pain is crashing in on waves, winter tides against my shoreline, drowning out the ache of my stones. I struggled back to the bothy to rest, but it has become clear that there is only one way this is likely to end. The medical supplies I looted from the trawler have suddenly found their purpose: they will keep me lucid for my final ascent.

Level 3: The Caves

Did Jakobson crawl this far? Can I identify the scratches his nails ruined into the rocks? Am I following him cell for cell, inch for inch? Why did he turn back on himself and not carry through to the ascent?

From here, this last time, I have understood there is no turning back. The torch is failing along with my resolve. I can hear the singing of the sea creatures from the passages above me and they are promising the return of the gulls.

Donnelly did not pass through the caves. From here on in, his guidance, unreliable as it is, is gone from me. I understand now that it is between the two of us, and whatever correspondence can be drawn from the wet rocks.

Donnelly’s addiction is my one true constant. Even though I wake in false dawns and find the landscape changed, flowing inconstantly through my tears, I know his reaching is always upon me.

It was as if someone had taken the car and shaken it like a cocktail. The glove compartment had been opened and emptied with the ashtrays and the boot; it made for a crumpled museum, a shattered exhibition. I first saw him sat by the side of the road. I was waiting for you to be cut out of the wreckage. The car looked like it had been dropped from a great height. The guts of the engine spilled over the tarmac. Like water underground.

They had stopped the traffic back as far as the Sandford junction and come up the hard shoulder like radio signals from another star. It took twenty-one minutes for them to arrive. I watched Paul time it, to the second, on his watch.

There is no other direction, no other exit from this motorway. Speeding past this junction, I saw you waiting at the roadside, a one last drink in your trembled hands.

I’m traversing my own death throes. The infection in my leg is an oilrig that dredges black muck up from deep inside my bones. I swallow fistfuls of diazepam and paracetamol to stay conscious. The pain flows through me like an underground sea.

If the caves are my guts, this must be the place where the stones are first formed. The bacteria phosphoresce and rise, singing, through the tunnels. Everything here is bound by the rise and fall like a tide. Perhaps, the whole island is actually underwater.

I am travelling through my own body, following the line of infection from the shattered femur towards the heart. I swallow fistfuls of painkillers to stay lucid. In my delirium, I see the twin lights of the moon and the aerial, shining to me through the rocks.

In my final dream, I sat at peace with Jakobson and watched the moon over the Sandford junction, goats grazing on the hard shoulder, a world gone to weed and redemption. He showed me his fever scars, and I mine, between each shoulder the nascency of flight.

When I was coming round from the operation, I remember the light they shone in my eyes to check for pupil contraction. It was like staring up at a moonlit sky from the bottom of well. People moved at the summit but I could not tell if you were one of them.

This cannot be the shaft they threw the goats into. It cannot be the landfill where the parts of your life that would not burn ended up. It cannot be the chimney that delivered you to the skies. It cannot be the place where you rained back down again to fertilise the soil and make small flowers in the rocks.

I will hold the hand you offer to me; from the summit down to this well, into the dark waters where the small flowers creep for the sun. Headlights are reflected in your retinas, moonlit in the shadow of the crematorium chimney.

This is a drowned man’s face reflected in the moonlit waters. It can only be a dead shepherd who has come to drunk drive you home.

Level 4: The Beacon

The moon over the Sandford junction, headlights in your retinas. Donnelly drove a grey hatchback without a bottom, all the creatures of the tarmac rose to sing to him. All manner of symbols crudely scrawled across the cliff face of my unrest. My life reduced to an electrical diagram. All my gulls have taken flight; they will no longer roost on these outcrops. The lure of the moon over the Sandford junction is too strong.

I wish I could have known Donnelly in this place – we would have had so much to debate. Did he paint these stones, or did I? Who left the pots in the hut by the jetty? Who formed the museum under the sea? Who fell silently to his death, into the frozen waters? Who erected this godforsaken aerial in the first place? Did this whole island rise to the surface of my stomach, forcing the gulls to take flight?

I sat here and watched two jets carve parallel white lines into the sky. They charted their course and I followed them for twenty-one minutes until they turned off near Sandford and were lost. If I were a gull, I would abandon my nest and join them. I would starve my brain of oxygen and suffer delusions of transcendence. I would tear the bottom from my boat and sail across the motorways until I reached this island once again.

Of fire and soil, I chose fire. It seemed the more contemporary of the options, the more sanitary. I could not bear the thought of the reassembly of such a ruins. Stitching arm to shoulder and femur to hip, charting a line of thread like traffic stilled on a motorway. Making it all acceptable for tearful aunts and traumatised uncles flown in specially for the occasion. Reduce to ash, mix with water, make a phosphorescent paint for these rocks and ceilings.

We shall begin to assemble our own version of the north shore. We will scrawl in dead languages and electrical diagrams and hide them away for future theologians to muse and mumble over. We will send a letter to Esther Donnelly and demand her answer. We will mix the paint with ashes and tarmac and the glow from our infections. We paint a moon over the Sandford junction and blue lights falling like stars along the hard shoulder.

I returned home with a pocket full of stolen ash. Half of it fell out of my coat and vanished into the car’s upholstery. But the rest I carefully stowed away in a box I kept in a drawer by the side of my bed. It was never intended as a meaningful act but over the years it became a kind of talisman. I’d sit still, quite still, for hours just holding the diminishing powder in my palm and noting its smoothness. In time, we will all be worn down into granules, washed into the sea and dispersed.

Dear Esther. I find each step harder and heavier. I drag Donnelly’s corpse on my back across these rocks, and all I hear are his whispers of guilt, his reminders, his burnt letters, his neatly folded clothes. He tells me I was not drunk at all.

From here I can see my armada. I collected all the letters I’d ever meant to send to you, if I’d have ever made it to the mainland but had instead collected at the bottom of my rucksack, and I spread them out along the lost beach. Then I took each and every one and I folded them into boats. I folded you into the creases and then, as the sun was setting, I set the fleet to sail. Shattered into twenty-one pieces, I consigned you to the Atlantic, and I sat here until I’d watched all of you sink.

There were chemical diagrams on the mug he gave me coffee in; sticky at the handle where his hands shook. He worked for a pharmaceutical company with an office based on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. He’d been travelling back from a sales conference in Exeter: forming a strategic vision for the pedalling of antacid yoghurt to the European market. You could trace the connections with your finger, join the dots and whole new compounds would be summoned into activity.

There were chemical diagrams on the posters on the walls on the waiting room. It seemed appropriate at the time; still-life abstractions of the processes which had already begun to break down your nerves and your muscles in the next room. I cram diazepam as I once crammed for chemistry examinations. I am revising my options for a long and happy life.

There were chemical stains on the tarmac: the leak of air conditioning, brake fluid and petrol. He kept sniffing at his fingers as he sat by the roadside waiting as if he couldn’t quite understand or recognise their smell. He said he’d been travelling back from a sales conference in Exeter; he’d stopped for farewell drinks earlier, but had kept a careful eye on his intake. You could hear the sirens above the idling traffic. Paul, by the roadside, by the exit for Damascus, all ticking and cooled, all feathers and remorse, all of these signals routed like traffic through the circuit diagrams of our guts, those badly written boats torn bottomless in the swells, washing us forever ashore.

When Paul keeled over dead on the road to Damascus, they resuscitated him by hitting him in the chest with stones gathered by the roadside. He was lifeless for twenty-one minutes, certainly long enough for the oxygen levels in his brain to have decreased and caused hallucinations and delusions of transcendence. I am running out of painkillers and the moon has become almost unbearably bright.

The pain in my leg sent me blind for a few minutes as I struggled up the cliff path: I swallowed another handful of painkillers and now I feel almost lucid. The island around me has retreated to a hazed distance, whilst the moon appears to have descended into my palm to guide me. I can see a thick black line of infection reaching for my heart from the waistband of my trousers. Through the fugue, it is all the world like the path I have cut from the lowlands towards the aerial.

I will drag my leg behind me; I will drag it like a crumpled hatchback, tyres blown and sparking across the dimming lights of my vision. I am running out of painkillers and am following the flicker of the moon home. When Paul keeled over dead on the road to Damascus, they restarted his heart with the jump leads from a crumpled hatchback; it took twenty-one attempts to convince it to wake up.

A sound of torn metal, teeth running over the edge of the rocks, a moon that casts a signal. As I lay pinned beside you, the ticking of the cooling engine, and the calling from a great height, all my mind as a bypass.

I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I have been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come together.

If only Donnelly had experienced this, he would have realised he was his own shoreline, as am I. Just as I am becoming this island, so he became his syphilis, retreating into the burning synapses, the stones, the infection.

Returning to my car afterwards, hands still shaking and a head split open by the impact. Goodbye to tearful aunts and traumatised uncles, goodbye to the phenomenal, goodbye to the tangible, goodbye Wolverhampton, goodbye Sandford, goodbye Cromer, goodbye Damascus. This cliff path is slippery in the dew; it is hard to climb with such an infection. I must carve out the bad flesh and sling it from the aerial. I must become infused with the very air.

There are headlights reflected in these retinas, too long in the tunnels of my island without a bottom. The sea creatures have risen to the surface, but the gulls are not here to carry them back to their nests. I have become fixed: open and staring, an eye turned on itself. I have become an infected leg, whose tracking lines form a perfect map of the junctions of the M5. I will take the exit at mid-thigh and plummet to my Esther.

The stones in my stomach will weigh me down and ensure my descent is true and straight. I will break through the fog of these godforsaken pills and achieve clarity. All my functions are clogged, all my veins are choked. If my leg doesn’t rot off before I reach the summit, it will be a miracle. There are twenty-one connections in the circuit diagram of the anti-lock brakes, there are twenty-one species of gull inhabiting these islands , it is twenty-one miles between the Sandford junction and the turn off for home. All these things cannot, will not, be a co-incidence.

Bent back like a nail, like a hangnail, like a drowning man clung onto the wheel, drunk and spiraled, washed onto the lost shore under a moon as fractured as a shattered wing. We cleave, we are flight and suspended, these wretched painkillers, this form inconstant. I will take flight. I will take flight!

He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all. He had not drunk with Donnelly or spat Jakobson back at the sea; he had not careered across the lost shores and terminal beaches of this nascent archipelago. He did not intend his bonnet to be crumpled like a spent tissue by the impact. His windscreen was not star-studded all over like a map of the heavens. His paintwork etched with circuit diagrams, strange fish to call the gulls away. The phosphorescence of the skid marks lighting the M5 all the way from Exeter to Damascus.

Blind with panic, deaf with the roar of the caged traffic, heart stopped on the road to Damascus, Paul, sat at the roadside hunched up like a gull, like a bloody gull. As useless and as doomed as a syphilitic cartographer, a dying goatherd, an infected leg, a kidney stone blocking the traffic bound for Sandford and Exeter. He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all; all his roads and his tunnels and his paths led inevitably to this moment of impact. This is not a recorded natural condition: he should not be sat there with his chemicals and his circuit diagrams, he should not be sat there at all.

I have dredged these waters for the bones of the hermit, for the traces of Donnelly, for any sign of Jakobson’s flock, for the empty bottle that would incriminate him. I have scoured this stretch of motorway twenty-one times attempting to recreate his trajectory, the point when his heart stopped dead and all he saw was the moon over the Sandford junction. He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all, and it was not his fault, it was the converging lines that doomed him. This is not a recorded natural condition, the gulls do not fly so low over the motorway and cause him to swerve. The paint scored away from his car in lines, like an infection, making directly for the heart.

A gull perched on a spent bonnet, sideways, whilst the sirens fell through the middle distance and the metal moaned in grief about us. I am about this night in walking, old bread and gull bones, old Donnelly at the bar gripping his drink, old Esther walking with our children, old Paul, as ever, old Paul he shakes and he shivers and he turns off his lights alone.

I have run out of places to climb. I will abandon this body and take to the air.

We will leave twin vapour trails in the air, white lines etched into these rocks.

I am the aerial. In my passing, I will send news to each and every star.

Final monologues

Dear Esther. I have burnt my belongings, my books, this death certificate. Mine will be written all across this island. Who was Jakobson, who remembers him? Donnelly has written of him, but who was Donnelly, who remembers him? I have painted, carved, hewn, scored into this space all that I could draw from him. There will be another to these shores to remember me. I will rise from the ocean like an island without bottom, come together like a stone, become an aerial, a beacon that they will not forget you. We have always been drawn here: one day the gulls will return and nest in our bones and our history. I will look to my left and see Esther Donnelly, flying beside me. I will look to my right and see Paul Jakobson, flying beside me. They will leave white lines carved into the air to reach the mainland, where help will be sent.

Dear Esther. I have burned the cliffs of Damascus, I have drunk deep of it. My heart is my leg and a black line etched on the paper all along this boat without a bottom. You are all the world like a nest to me, in which eggs unbroken form like fossils, come together, shatter and send small black flowers to the very air. From this infection, hope. From this island, flight. From this grief, love. Come back! Come back...

[neverreallythoughtaboutthefuture]

I made this video after reading @roguepythia’s emotional and very heartfelt response to having watched “Pacific Rim Uprising” for the first time, hoping to cheer her up a bit, by gently reminding her that no matter what people choose to take away from the original, or what they do with the characters, it can never take anything away from what was, and very much still is.

Yes, I will never quite forgive them for how they chose to “continue” the original characters’ stories, either. Mako, most of all, but also Newton.   He’s probably not the worst offense, all things considered, because there could eventually be a way out of it (assuming they make a 3rd one).  But I know a lot of neurodivergent people who strongly identified with him (while, as an adult with ADHD, oddly enough the one whose behavior reminded me the most of my own was Raleigh), and Guillermo Del Toro himself had told the actor that, since his character left such a profound emotional impact on the fandom, he was dropping the idea of what they finally went with (trying to avoid spoilers is so hard!  Lol!). Also, they removed any mention of Raleigh that could have given fans some sense of closure (especially in relation to Mako) in the very off-chance that a) there’s a 3rd one and b) Charlie Hunnam will still be interested / available. It almost felt like they included original characters from the first movie simply to ensure a sense of continuity, while not being interested in who they are, nor what they represented and symbolized in that universe, and for people in the fandom. Still, I remain confident that it won’t prevent people who deeply connected with Guillermo Del Toro’s original movie from fully enjoying, appreciating, and loving what, to me, will forever remain a masterpiece, and up until this day the greatest movie of all time! This fanvid is thus dedicated to those of you who fell in love with a young boy – his loss carved deep into his skin – who, when faced with the strength, resourcefulness, and potential of another human being, chose to value her goals and dreams, use his pain to help her overcome her own, and in doing so allowed her to help him heal and save himself.

A young girl with kaiju-stained hair, carrying her little red shoe in her hands – filled with the powerful drive to fight back against the monsters that tried to take her heart from her – who, when faced with someone who’d lost his own will to fight and believe in himself, allowed him to connect with her own, share her goals, become responsible for her (as the more experienced co-pilot), and readily accepted and valued his support and guidance, while accompanying each other on their respective and shared journeys.

 A young woman who – by being willing to rely on him the same way he used to rely on his big brother to guide him – ended up putting that young man in a position of having to make the conscious choice of sacrificing his own chances of survival to keep the one he’d chosen to become responsible for safe.  

Yancy didn’t die because Raleigh failed to save him.  And even if there had been time for him to decide which one of them would live or die, chances are that, had his little brother’s fate been in his hands, Yancy would still have chosen to keep Raleigh safe.

“Anyone can fall.” Bad things happen to good people. Life is unfair, and rarely is it about what one does or doesn’t deserve.

Things are simply what they are, you do the best you can do with the resources and the opportunities you have, ideally while trying to find some balance between your needs, skills, objectives, and those of the other people around you.

To me, this quote was at the very core of the message I took from the movie.  

Beyond Mako and Raleigh’s own stories, I also fell in love with all the parallels that could be drawn between Raleigh and Chuck, Mako and Chuck (who, in many ways, possessed many of both Raleigh and Mako’s character traits and issues, but was paired with a father that didn’t know how to properly help his son address and manage them), Herc and Stacker, Newton and Hermann, Raleigh and Newton, etc.

And yes, through it all, we were offered scenes that were splendidly filmed (I could watch the rain fall on Mako’s umbrella, just before she adjusts it to reveal herself to the audience for the first time while Stacker and Raleigh’s helicopter is landing all day!), treated to one of the most amazing movie theme and score I’ve ever heard…

Not to mention the absolute joy of watching those giant robots facing off with giant monsters! But those were the icing on the cake rather than the core of the movie to me. 

End of the day, it’s not the Jaegers that had me in awe, and turned “Pacific Rim” into my favorite movie of all time…  It was the Drift between co-pilots, and the way emotional empathy and trust between a group of people and misfits with various backgrounds, cultures, stories, traumas and issues was shown to be the most effective way for humanity to vanquish its monsters.

It was how the movie ended up with a “main lead” in a very strong supportive role, that merely contributes to the success of the mission by choosing to get involved with the skills and resources he has, rather than being the big hero of the story with something unique that couldn’t have been done by anyone else but him.

It was how the whole movie was presented as this great human mosaic with flawed and complex characters that people could easily related to – heroes of the story rather than hero of the story – in a world filled with heart and symbolism.

And sadly, after watching “Pacific Rim Uprising”, where suddenly a bunch of cadets are randomly thrown into Jaegers without us ever having been given a chance to learn more about them (ex: what motivated them to join the post-war efforts with the PPDC…  What connects them to their given co-pilot(s)?  How do they relate to each other?)…

I found myself echoing Hannibal Chau after the credits, and wondering: “Where is my goddamn (little red) shoe?”

I am now very much in the process of coming to terms with the fact that, what made me hopelessly fall in love with Guillermo Del Toro’s movie in the first place apparently wasn’t what the people that were ultimately put in charge of the sequel perceived as being the most important for it to succeed (and doing videos as a coping mechanism).

Is it to say “Pacific Rim Uprising” is a terrible movie?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps if it had been my first introduction to that universe, and I didn’t know any of the previous characters and the Drift, I would have enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed watching “Jason X”, or “Piranha 3D”!

But I made the mistake of falling in love with an Australian father and son duo, that have such trouble showing each other affection outside of the Drift that, all the love they can’t directly express each other, they express towards their dog.

It’s all those little details that made the first movie so fascinating and more and more exciting to watch with each renewed viewing! Sadly, I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t the type of audience the sequel had in mind. 

Hence why I can’t say that “Pacific Rim Uprising” is “bad” for what it aimed to be this time around.   Nor do I wish to imply that “Pacific Rim” can’t be enjoyed as mindless “big robots v.s. monsters” entertainment, too. 

Or, you know, anywhere in the spectrum between “dumb fun” and “deserves an Oscar”.

I don’t think there’s ever a right or wrong way to enjoy a movie. 

Just that the way I personally enjoyed this one didn’t seem to carry on in the sequel at all.

It is what it is. Anyone can fall.  Or rise, depending on what you like.

Yes, I am disappointed that I couldn’t find my little red shoe in the new installment.

But, on the plus side, it has inspired me to reconnect even more strongly with the original, revisit some of my writings, feelings, and thoughts about those characters, etc.

All things considered, I’m definitely good with that!

[thesydneyfeminists]

Joss Whedon and Vee: It’s Complicated

By: Vee H.

Here’s the thing, I have a confusing relationship with Joss Whedon. If we were “Facebook official” (does anyone still call it that, or have I just revealed my true spiritual age of 105?) our relationship status would be “it’s complicated”. It didn’t used to be like that; as a teenager, I probably would have said my favourite tv show was Buffy The Vampire Slayer, with its spin-off, Angel, in second place. I fell in love with a premise that Whedon certainly did not create (one girl in all the world, blah blah) nor was he the best at executing it. Whether it was the characters he’d created, the actors playing them, the witty scripts and storylines – or a mix of all of these things, I was hooked. I staunchly defended the show, and by proxy, Whedon himself, from any harsh criticisms, and overlooked anything that now, as a 32-year-old, stands out as (and I hate using this word) problematic. I followed him from Buffy; to Angel, Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog, Dollhouse (look, I skipped Firefly for some reason, I’ve tried dipping a toe in but space cowboys aren’t for me, it seems), and that’s not to mention the movies he had a hand in (not an exhaustive list) – The Cabin in the Woods, The Avengers and The Avengers Age of Ultron. I was loyal, if Whedon’s name was attached, most likely, I was all in. There was something comforting and familiar about his humour, the way he told his stories – all of them laughably simple but layered to make them more complex. Like Shrek and onions.

So maybe you’re wondering where I took a left turn, jumped off the Joss Whedon Fan Train, as it were. Admittedly, it was a slow process, it wasn’t just a running leap off into the unknown post-Whedon world. A few years after Angel ended, some things circulated in the Buffy and Angel fandoms, rumours of how he treated his favourites, and those who had fallen out of favour with him. One of those people being Charisma Carpenter. In 2009 at a convention, a fan asked her how she felt about Cordelia’s last story line in Angel and how the show changed after her departure. While she didn’t explicitly come out and say the exact reason, she hinted that Whedon had been mad at her for making certain life decisions that would directly impact the vision he had for his show. Rumours have long since abounded that, in short, he punished her for falling pregnant. Obviously, no one but Carpenter and Whedon know the true story and at the time of hearing it, I took it with a grain of salt, but that seedling sat in the back of my mind and began to grow. After all, it explained a lot about the fourth season of Angel, and why the character of Cordelia made a complete 360. It was here that my relationship with Whedon started to sour, I began to question how someone who was so outspoken and publicly proud to be a feminist, could treat a woman that he had worked with for nearly a decade like that.

With that knowledge in mind, it was hard not to view some of the dialogue and plot points in his media a little differently, this is only one small example, but looking back, there is way too much slut shaming going on in Buffy to the point where Faith (my favourite character in the whole series, don’t @ me, I’ll defend her until I die) is seen as a lesser person than everyone else, because other female characters (Willow, Cordelia and Buffy herself) have branded her as a “cleavagey slutbomb”. Sure, ok, she goes and kills a bunch of people but they focus on her being slut much more than a psychopath – and I feel the need to point out that we only actually saw her sleep with one person (Xander) by the time the slut shaming actually started, and not that we should count, but Faith only slept with three people (Xander, Robin, and Riley in Buffy’s body) in the whole course of the show. And she killed four humans. Which means in Joss Whedon’s world, if you’re a woman, having sex is a worse crime than murder. Not exactly a feminist message.

Cut to just last year, when Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, came out with a heartbreakingly honest account of just what went down in their marriage. Details of his infidelity, gaslighting and emotional manipulation came spilling out of her, and sure, you could argue she was an embittered ex-wife, wanting to hit him where it would hurt the most, but it’s interesting to note that Whedon himself has never actually outright denied or refuted these claims. And ok, infidelity does not strip you of the right to call yourself a feminist, but as written by Clementine Ford “it's about how he absolved himself in a letter sent to Cole after his infidelity had finally been exposed, blaming the women he cheated with, calling them "beautiful, needy, aggressive young women" who "surrounded" him.” It’s about how he used his feminist badge as a shield, claiming he was raised feminist so he just liked women better, or how he claimed in a letter to Cole, and I quote, “in many ways I was the HEIGHT of normal, in this culture. We’re taught to be providers and companions and at the same time, to conquer and acquire — specifically sexually — and I was pulling off both!”

With all of these things in mind, I started to see Whedon’s feminism as what it likely is; performative, a way to excuse his behaviour, a safeguard to hide behind as if to say, “oh no, I am not like other men at all, although I may act as other men do and fully accept my privilege as a cis-het white male, I’m different. Because I’m a feminist so when I do these terrible things to women, it’s ok, because I love, respect and support women.” Maybe he truly believes he’s a feminist, publicly, he flies the flag very well, and there’s no denying he’s profited from this label, heralded as a great feminist hero, an ally to women everywhere. It’s only when you start to scratch the surface, peel back the layers of the Shrek-onion, do you start to see him for what he (in my mind) really is. A dudebro playing at being the nice guy, someone who says all the right things but whose actions don’t quite match up, in fact, they crumble under any real scrutiny (for further proof of this, go read the leak of the Wonder Woman script, allegedly by Whedon. If you can make it through the whole thing, I’ll buy you a coffee – hell if you can make it through the first 10 pages).

Where does that leave Joss and I then? I admit that I’m conflicted, in a culture that has moved more and more towards “cancelling” people I’m the proverbial fence sitter. I acknowledge that there are people, media, etc that are problematic (the dreaded word) and I think everyone has the right to decide whether or not to consume said media. And for myself, personally, I endlessly flip between the two schools of thought. I won’t watch anything new with Johnny Depp, nor anything from Woody Allen, for example, but I have gone back (since Amber Heard spoke of her abuse at his hands) and watched some of Depp’s older movies. Some people have told me that they disagree, that even watching his older stuff is wrong, that I should ban all forms of Depp media from my life otherwise I am giving him my tacit approval, and that’s their choice and their right, but I suppose I’m still working out where I want to draw the line. I (maybe naively and incorrectly) believe that I can view a piece of media and know its flaws, or the flaws of the person behind it, but still somewhat enjoy it for what it is, or the story it’s telling.

Maybe that’s where I am with Whedon, somewhere in between, neither in the black or the white, somewhere in the shades of grey, because that’s how life is sometimes. I don’t think he’s a fully bad person, nor do I think he’s a fully good person. I think he’s human, and humans are inherently flawed. And maybe that feels like a cop out, but it’s all I have to offer right now. My view of him will never be as it once was, and thus my viewing of the media he has created and produced will likely reflect that. Re-watching Buffy and Angel has become a different experience; I’m no longer blindly swept up in the twists and turns, the witty repartee between characters, but instead viewing through a different lens, one where I question what message he's really trying to send, what his true intentions are. Instead of laughing at every single joke, they never quite land right with me anymore, my childish naivety gone, replaced with the simmering anger of a woman who wonders why sexist jokes and judgements are supposed to be funny, why the rape of a female character is an excusable plot device to teach men a lesson. It’s exhausting to second guess someone I don’t even know, but this is the brave new world that a combination of his behaviour and my own feminist journey has left me in. These days, I wouldn’t ever say “I love Joss Whedon”, like I would’ve back in my teenage years, more likely you’ll find me saying “I loved Buffy but God it’s weird to watch as an adult”.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

Sources:

http://oranges8hands.tumblr.com/post/117924895453/charisma-carpenter-transcript-on-being-fired

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_igTbXKPck

https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/clementine-ford-why-joss-whedons-treatment-of-exwife-kai-cole-matters-20170821-gy16lx.html

https://indiegroundfilms.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/wonder-woman-aug7-07-joss-whedon.pdf

Image sources:

Yahoo.com

tenplay.com.au

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 3rd November 2019

I apologise for how late this will probably end up being posted, but we have a big week to talk about, with EIGHT new arrivals, two from Selena Gomez, three from Kanye West and two appearing here in the top 10 so I’m just going to get through everything as soon as possible to the best of my ability, although this week has several...mishaps on the BBC page to say the least, so I’ll try to correct them if I can, and I have had to wait for my week of non-stop Weezer listening to end or for me to accidentally slip up and listen to something else so I could actually write about the new arrivals here.

Top 10

Interestingly, none of the nonsense that this chart week ensued seems to appear in the top 2 or shake the #1 at all, as “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I is at its fifth consecutive week at the top of the UK Singles Chart.

“Ride It” by Regard featuring Jay Sean – well, it’s actually a remix of a Jay Sean single but just let me relish in the fact Jay Sean is on the charts again – isn’t moving either at number-two, the runner-up spot.

The first impact that we can see at the top level of the charts is the debut at #3 for Selena Gomez’s first US #1 “Lose You to Love Me”, which the BBC has interestingly misspelled as “Loose You to Love Me”, her 13th UK Top 40 hit, fourth top 10 and highest-peaking song ever, after “It Ain’t Me” with Kygo peaked at #7. We’ll talk more about Selena Gomez’s two new arrivals later.

Thanks to Gomez, Post Malone’s “Circles” is down one spot to number-four.

At number-five is Ed Sheeran with “South of the Border” featuring Camila Cabello and Cardi B, down three spots this week to number-five.

We have our second new arrival within the top 10, at number-six, “Follow God” by Kanye West from his ninth studio album, JESUS IS KING. He has several songs debuting here in the UK Top 40 this week, so we’ll talk more in-depth about his mini-album bomb later on, but this is his 44th UK Top 40 hit, which is crazy impressive, and his 20th top 10.

At number-seven, boosted up 11 spots by an Ariana Grande remix, is Lizzo with “Good as Hell”, making it officially her biggest song in the UK and her first top 10 hit, as well as Grande’s 16th.

Up two spaces to number-eight this week is “Memories” by Maroon 5.

Down two spaces from last week, we have Dermot Kennedy at number-nine with “Outnumbered”.

Finally, at #10, to round off the top 10, we have Lewis Capaldi’s “Bruises” down four spaces from last week.

Climbers

Naturally, there aren’t many climbers here because of the album bomb and influx of new arrivals, but we do have some unfortunate boosts for “hot girl bummer” by blackbear up five spaces to #25... and that’s all.

Fallers

Fallers on the other hand... we could split this up into genre, actually.

For pop, rock and EDM, we can start with “Lights Up” by Harry Styles deservedly flopping six spaces down to #17, then continue with “10,000 Hours” by Dan + Shay and Justin Bieber down 12 to #29, “Higher Love” by Kygo and Whitney Houston down eight to #31, “Sorry” by Joel Corry featuring uncredited vocals from Hayley May down 10 to #32 and finally “Don’t Call Me Angel” by Ariana Grande featuring Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey down 13 to #39 – but that’s not all.

For hip hop and R&B, we have “HIGHEST IN THE ROOM” by Travis Scott down seven to #12, “Be Honest” by Jorja Smith and Burna Boy down five to #14, “Professor X” by Dave down seven to #21, “Take Me Back to London” by Ed Sheeran featuring Stormzy and remixed by Sir Spyro featuring Aitch and Jaykae down nine to #28, “Playing Games” by Summer Walker down nine to #33, “Ladbroke Grove” by AJ Tracey down 10 to #35 and finally, “Taste (Make it Shake)” by Aitch down nine to #39... but again, that’s not all.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

We have no returning entries but we sure do have a lot of dropouts, some of them genuine hits such as “Strike a Pose” by Young T & Bugsey and Aitch out from #36 and “Beautiful People” by Ed Sheeran featuring Khalid out from #39, hits that never really hit the landing with the British general public but have been on the middling section of the charts for a while and could easily rebound like “Motivation” by Normani out from #27, “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo and remixed by DaBaby from #31, “frick, i’m lonely” by LAUV and Anne-Marie out from #32 and “Lalala” by Y2K and bbno$ and remixed by Carly Rae Jepsen and Enrique Iglesias out from #37, as well as some genuinely premature drop-outs such as “Graveyard” by Halsey out from #29 and finally, “47” by Sidhu Moose Wala, MIST, Steel Banglez and Stefflon Don out from #38. Now, finally, after all that time spent on stray UK Top 40 observations... let’s talk about Kanye.

ALBUM BOMB: Kanye West – JESUS IS KING

On October 25th, Kanye released his ninth studio album, JESUS IS KING, after missing several release dates and changing name from YANDHI. Kanye, a now born-again Christian, makes a “gospel” album free of any explicit lyrics, accompanied by a short film of the same name. It features an all-star guest list of vocalists and producers, including frequent collaborators Ant Clemons, Benny Blanco and Mike Dean, the reunion of legendary rap group Clipse, trap beat-makers Pi’erre Bourne and Ronny J, and smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G. Obviously, it went #1 in the US, #2 here, but to mixed reviews – now, I won’t be focusing on the politics that surround the album and I am not very knowledgeable of religion so I cannot really comment on much beyond my understanding of Christianity and arguably more importantly, the lore of Kanye West. Mark Grondin of Spectrum Pulse already quoted more Bible quotes in his album review than I could remember digits of pi, and several people, like DeadEndHipHop, Sean Cee and even Anthony Fantano, whether you like them or not, have made several in-depth discussion videos about whether West’s sudden revelation is a genuine moment for the rapper, a mental breakdown or a cash-grab. I’m here to discuss the music... but even that’s not very good. I wrote a very lengthy review for the album two days after it came out (And before it went through an additional few fixes for mixing quirks, sigh) which will be linked here if I remember, and overall, it was disappointing, a light 4/10 and easily the worst record in West’s discography. Regardless, let’s talk about the debuts here.

#20 – “Closed on Sunday” – Kanye West

Produced by Kanye West, Angel Lopez, Brian “AllDay” Miller, Federico Vindver and Timbaland – Peaked at #17 in the US

Features uncredited vocals from the Sunday Service choir and A$AP Bari(?)

The most memeable yet also one of the most detestable tracks on the album, this is his 45th UK Top 40 hit. “Closed on Sunday” was one of the few tracks set to fail off the pure concept, as the biggest issue with most songs on JESUS IS KING is the lack of development or complete mishandling of great ideas, to the point where there basically is no effort to, you know, write a song here. “Closed on Sunday” is essentially one verse split into half due to a flow switch at the midpoint, and despite a runtime of only two minutes and 32 seconds, it drones on endlessly, with a solemn guitar melody leading into what could sound like a pretty cool, dark ballad, built up by the choir vocalising in harmonies that sound actually pretty great but then the 808s come in and ruin any sense of harmony. Kanye comes in with some of the worst mixing I’ve ever heard vocals have, especially on an album with the budget Kanye has, with a lot of background noise and I can even hear the buttons pressed on the phone or other device Kanye is using to record at about 0:38, which signals a drastic change in how the vocals are mixed, but it’s still shoddy and allows them to have some pretty severe clipping during the “chorus”, until a sudden shift where a turgid beeping sound works as a pathetic excuse for you know, an actual synth, and until now, Kanye’s vocals have not had reverb or Auto-Tune added onto them, so his vocals being drenched in effects actually sounds great here... but he still has a sore throat and sounds like he’s struggling here, although unlike “God Is” and just about the entirety of 808s & Heartbreak, where it adds to the emotive performance, Kanye sounds bored and with no choir backing him like they could have been, the release here just isn’t as cinematic as it could be and it just sounds like a melodramatic Kanye aimlessly spouting random Bible motifs over 808s without taking his daily Dequadin lozenge... and there are no drums... ever. Oh, and A$AP Bari comes in at the end to shout “Chick-fil-A”, abruptly interrupting the beat’s natural progression and making it clear as day that the album is unfinished. Also, speaking of those lyrics, should you really be comparing YOURSELF to a fast food restaurant that donates charity to anti-LGBT hate and pressure groups? That’s not very Christ-like, Ye. It probably wouldn’t matter if they didn’t either, because a thinly-veiled Taylor Swift reference (Yes, I know the Bible mentions “snakes” and “vipers” as much as reputation does, but the two aren’t on good terms so it’s no coincidence in my opinion) and calling God your “number-one with the lemonade” don’t exactly make you sound like a wordsmith. Oh, and A$AP Bari, the uncredited vocalist on the outro, pleaded guilty to sexual assault earlier this year, which again doesn’t exactly sound like a Christ-like thing to be supporting either... but I digress. The version he performed on Jimmy Kimmel with a genuine choir backing him and a brass band is miles ahead of this, so don’t bother with this version, or better yet, don’t bother with this monotonous crap at all.

#19 – “Selah” – Kanye West

Produced by Kanye West, E*vax, BoogzDaBeast, Federico Vindver, benny blanco and Francis Starlite – Peaked at #19 in the US

Features uncredited vocals from the Sunday Service choir, Ant Clemons and Bongo ByTheWay

Now, I’m slightly more positive on his 46th UK Top 40 hit, “Selah”, the opening track (Aside from the short “Every Hour” interlude / intro track which is only Sunday Service) of JESUS IS KING, yet that might actually make it more frustrating and it’s easily the track I come back the least to because overall, it’s actually pretty uninteresting and doesn’t have a true “hook”. It starts with some cloudy synth noodling that sounds kind of cool with the subtle strings but then Kanye comes in with some pretty awfully-mixed vocals that is incredibly unprofessional, teasing his fans for wanting YANDHI, and saying it was coming before “Jesus Christ did the laundry”, and quoting John 8:33 to excuse his “Slavery is a choice” comment, which he’s been trying to respond to the backlash to for about a year and a half now, failing each time. Also:

Pour the lean out slower

Hold up –that ain’t Christ-like. The explosions of marching band drums come in in a similar fashion to “Feel the Love” off of KIDS SEE GHOSTS, and then honestly the bridge, which is insanely repetitive but builds up tension perfectly with Ant Clemons and the Sunday Service choir repeating “Hallelujah” incessantly with distant guitar strings, handclaps and sudden pitch shifts reflecting the change in Kanye’s mindset and the intensity soon becomes a lot more ramped up from now on, finishing the bridge with a pretty beautiful vocal line that the 808s hilariously harmonise with. Then, Kanye comes back in with a verse co-written by Pusha T, and you can REALLY tell, and it’s still awfully-mixed, when there’s no true excuse. He’s drowned out by the bursts of drums and bass as well as the choir’s recurring vocal sample. The best part of the song soon kind of fizzles out in a chaotic outro, in which fireworks literally go off while Kanye screams nonsense as well as “Yeezus” which isn’t exactly Christ-like, but it sounds insane and honestly a tad odd and unfitting for the album, which is supposed to be an uptempo Christian rap album? While there are parts of this song I don’t approve of, especially Kanye, who ruins pretty much every song he’s on... on his own album, this is pretty tolerable, albeit somewhat contradictory lyrically and far from my favourite Kanye track. At least there’s some grandiosity and emotion here.

#6 – “Follow God” – Kanye West

Produced by Kanye West, BoogszDaBeast and Xcelence – Peaked at #7 in the US

I should be thankful for the grandiosity and emotion behind “Selah”, because this sure doesn’t have any of that. How the HELL does this have three producers? How on Earth does this album have 11 people on the mixing and mastering and yet this still sound like absolute gutter trash in my headphones? “Follow God” is easily the least interesting song on the JESUS IS KING album, and that’s pretty impressive for a record that contains the song “Water” with Ant Clemons, yet it’s the biggest and I don’t see why at all. There straight-up isn’t a chorus by any meaning of the word, or its many synonyms, and its dated production almost resembling 90s hip hop in the soul sample from 1974’s “Can You Lose by Following God” by Whole Truth and the genuine 90s groove and funk that is somewhere here in the beat, doesn’t exactly make it sound like a catchy trap banger that would reach the US top 10 in 2019, but it’s there. It’s called by many fans a spiritual successor to 2016’s “Father Stretch My Hands” from The Life of Pablo but other than using the lyric “Father, I stretch my hands”, I don’t see it, mostly because the 2016 effort doesn’t actually have much relation to Christianity outside of the beautiful gospel choir harmonising with Caroline Shaw on the bridge of that single. In fact, that song does a better job at flipping Christian rap on its head – it’s a two-part trap banger featuring verses from Desiigner and lines about... bleached posteriors. This song on the other hand is only one minute and 44 seconds, with one badly-mixed and distorted verse from Kanye that is as repetitive as the mind-numbing recurring “Yeah” vocal sample and prone to making me roll my eyes with its one verse and the... outro of sorts. But since this beat is so minimalistic, surely he wants us to hear what he’s saying, right? Well, no, probably not, because not only is his “wordplay”(?) and half-rhymes embarrassing, but I have so many questions to raise to this drum pattern. I want to interview the 808 and the kick drum and ask what the heck they think they’re doing.

People really know you, push your buttons like type-write

That’s not a sentence. “Like type-write”? Excuse my brief, unsubtle blasphemy, but Jesus.

Every single night, right? Every single fight, right?

The ‘i’-based rhyme scheme here is cool in concept and he finds his way around it pretty well, in a fast-paced rap flow that I actually really like, but it reeks of laziness, especially since not only does he completely abandon the rhyme scheme 55 seconds in but – yes, I counted – his verse is 69 seconds, that’s one minute and nine seconds. To put into perspective, Rick Ross’ verse on “Devil in a New Dress” off of Kanye’s 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one minute and 28 seconds, only twenty seconds longer than this one, and it includes ten times as much clever wordplay, story-telling, interesting flow switches and bars that are really epic, making the song feel really celebratory of sorts actually – and that’s without the epic guitar solo that precedes it. What a fantastic song. On the other hand, this song is substance-less and Kanye says very little of anything despite how much he crams into every bar in the rapid yet sometimes pretty awkward flow. What he’s supposed to be discussing is his situation with his father and how when he was yelling at him and having a massive argument and fall-out, Ray West told him, it wasn’t Christ-like, leading to a revelation and possibly becoming the catalyst for the already-kickstarted Christian rebirth. Surely, his dad and God are the two most important men in his life, right? Then why does this feel passionless and boring? Why doesn’t this feel genuine? Fellow Christian rapper NF, a white rapper who makes bland piano-lead pop-rap with sung hooks, would call this flavourless, dull and more importantly, grey. It doesn’t feel blue and gold like he wants it to as he uses the colours to imply royalty, luxury and loyalty to God on the album cover and lyric video. This doesn’t show loyalty. You made this in five minutes, Kanye. You made this on a whim because you had an idea and you ran with it but you had no idea on how to actually develop it into something interesting or even listenable. What part of this shows royalty, luxury and a rich, graceful connection with God? This sounds cheap and gross, and frankly incredibly disappointing from such a talented artist. I haven’t even gotten onto the rest of the song, man, and I don’t even want to. “Decimal” doesn’t rhyme with “wrestle”, Kanye. “Wrestlin’ with God, I don’t even want to wrestle”? That’s the deepest you want to go into your confusion and conflict between Christianity and fame? That’s pathetic, as is the random screaming at the end of this track for quirky or emotive bonus points. There’s nothing lifelike or Christ-like about your lifestyle, Kanye West. Get some help.

NEW ARRIVALS

#34 – “Nice to Meet Ya” – Niall Horan

Produced by Julian Bunetta – Peaked at #9 in Ireland and #83 in the US

Sorry to any of the Niall Horan fans who crashed his website when this single was announced, but I have considerably less to say about the rest of these new arrivals than I do about Kanye West and/or Jesus Christ. I have to talk about them regardless of if I have anything I can actually add, and this one is one I’ve actually already heard since I watched the MTV EMAs and he performed it. I thought nothing of it initially, but this is the Irishman from One Direction’s comeback single after his debut studio album Flicker. This is Horan’s third UK Top 40 hit and first since 2017’s “Too Much to Ask” which peaked at #24, and I did not expect this shift to late 90s and early 2000s dance-rock, but I am definitely not complaining. It starts with a catchy piano line that’s pretty Robbie Williams-esque, then the drop comes in and it is killer. The sleek synths decorating the rock drums in a lot of slickness that you wouldn’t expect out of such a meek stage presence add to the chorus pretty well, but the best part of that chorus is the distant pitch-shifted vocal sample yelling in the background, making it feel even more industrial which again is out of character for Niall, the quiet, shy folk boy, but he definitely has the charisma to pull off this type of swaggering, stomping pop rock anthem, and he proves that in the sing-along bridge, where even his murmuring hums stand out, and while he’s drowned out by the cool bassline and drum pattern most of the time, his vocal delivery really is the highlight of the song, even if that is equally vintage and in a way, pretty nostalgic for the era it replicates. Funnily enough, it has the same lack of care for organised structure that “Lights Up” by Harry Styles had just two weeks ago, but the careless, reckless groove of this song works a lot more in Horan’s favour than Styles’. Just saying.

#27 – “Orphans” – Coldplay

Produced by Rik Simpson, Dan Green, Bill Rahko, Max Martin, Angel Lopez and Federico Vindver – Peaked at #14 in Scotland

Coldplay, with their most recent upcoming album Everyday Life, are getting pretty experimental. It’s an hour-long double-album kept a secret until a month before it is set to release featuring a track list full of songs that have odd stylisations like “BrokEn” and share song names with Arabic poems. “Arabesque”, the B-side to “Orphans”, is a storm of nu-jazz trumpets with a Fela Kuti-inspired breakdown and uncredited guest vocals from Stromae, as well as profanity, which is a first for the band. I’m not surprised at all that one didn’t kick off but we are instead left with their 24th UK Top 40 hit and first since “Something Just Like This” with the Chainsmokers peaked at #2 in 2017, “Orphans”, which is a lot tamer of a track to say the least. That doesn’t mean it’s any worse though. It starts with a kids’ choir singing before we get into a tropical rock jam with a funky bassline that I wouldn’t be surprised if Flea wrote, it’s that tight. Chris Martin sounds as focused on Christianity as he did on the Avicii album earlier this year, directly name-dropping Heaven in the first verse, and then joining in with the nonsense words that the vocal samples had been repeating prior to the verse. The chorus is pretty reminiscent of arena rock, specifically “Paradise” I feel as it has that same nasal falsetto but in a lot more palatable fashion, mostly because this actually has groove and you know, a pulse. Yeah, this is pretty great, and I love the bridge of purely the mythical guitar and Chris Martin’s ethereal vocals. Something I didn’t notice on initial listen is how that the song is about a girl, Rosaleem, during the Damascus bombing in Syria from last year (That’s what the nonsense words and sound effects are all about), who is greeted by angels who talk to her about what Heaven will be like, which is “almond and peach trees in bloom” but also a place for her dad to get drunk and talk with his friends so he can feel young again. That’s actually pretty deep subject matter, and together with Niall Horan, I’m glad we can have some fantastic rock on the charts again. “Arabesque” is the better of the two Coldplay songs though.

#26 – “Look at Her Now” – Selena Gomez

Produced by Ian Kirkpatrick – Peaked at #7 in Slovakia and #27 in the US

Man, those last two songs were so powerful and organic, I almost want some disposable garbage to review next. It’ll just be easier. Oh, we have two Selena Gomez songs and a new AJ Tracey single to cover? Perfect, that’s just what I asked for! Yeah, this is Selena Gomez’s 14th UK Top 40 hit and it is awful, but not even close to as offensively bad “Closed on Sunday” or “Follow God” are. It’s just a mistake on all fronts. The passionless vocal samples drowned out in the background that peters out by the verse and the nothingness of the synths and a glitchy beat that abruptly kicks itself out of the mix every other second, as well as Selena Gomez’s weak, whispery vocals don’t exactly scream “passionate, boasting kiss-off” to me. The chorus is absolutely PATHETIC, if it even exists at all – I mean, it’s just a bunch of different sound effects Selena Gomez made pretty much, with her rhythmically humming as if that’s an excuse for an actual chorus with some unintelligible, stuttering and sometimes whispered repetitions of the song title as well as several “W-w-w-w-wow”s that add very little to the song and seem pretty pointless. This is mixed well for the most part, despite the synths clipping at times and Selena’s vocoder-ed ad-libs in the second chorus being way louder than anything else in the mix, but I have no idea what the composers of this song were thinking. What a trainwreck. It almost sounds like glitch-pop to be honest, it’s chaos, and if it were marketed as that maybe I’d appreciate it more, but if this is supposed to be a genuine brag to Justin Bieber asking him to see what he’s missing, he might as well have dated a robot. I think a RateYourMusic user summed it up best: “This is so monumentally mediocre that it barely even exists.”

#22 – “Floss” – AJ Tracey featuring MoStack and Not3s

Produced by The Elements and AJ Tracey

AJ Tracey is a British rapper who had his break out this year and he released his self-titled debut studio album back in February, but it now has a deluxe edition, with five extra songs, this being one of them. I wasn’t exactly impressed with the album as it’s mostly pretty bland Americanised trap fluff with only some promising elements of dancehall (“Butterflies” with Not3s and remixed by Popcaan), grime (“Horror Flick”) and UK garage (“Ladbroke Grove”, one of my favourite songs of the year) propping up whenever AJ sees fit, but it’s 48 minutes so these moments can’t carry the whole track listing. Lucky for us, he’s increased that runtime to just over an hour and included a couple more boring trap songs to listen to. Joy. This is AJ’s seventh UK Top 40 hit, MoStack’s eighth and Not3’s sixth. This song relies on a pretty sweet falsetto vocal sample under a surprisingly energetic trap beat, with some pretty nice steel pans and cowbells in addition to the skittering hi-hats and 808s. AJ Tracey is pretty okay here, but I feel with these lyrics and beat he could have gone for a faster and more impressive flow than what he brings out here. I’m still in love with his “bling-blaow” ad-lib though. MoStack is embarrassing as always, with an oddly-mixed verse and sometimes off-beat flow, with the most obvious difference between him and AJ being that there aren’t any ad-libs or multi-tracked vocals, which is mostly the same with Not3s’ non-existent and actually pretty unnecessary bridge (He should have just added to the final chorus, though his last few bars sound nice). Mo does have a pretty funny line about how you wouldn’t be able to notice him on CCTV and would confuse him with Dave though. This is better than I expected, but still nothing of interest to me. Sorry.

#3 – “Lose You to Love Me” – Selena Gomez

Produced by Mattman & Robin and FINNEAS – Peaked at #1 in the US

Now, much like Coldplay, Selena Gomez also released two lead singles, however both charted and they are drastically different to Coldplay’s, quality-wise at least. This is supposed to be the big massive smash ballad hit that hit #1 in the US, becoming her first ever song to reach that peak, but I can’t bring myself to care, because honestly, this is one of her least interesting singles she’s ever released. Out of all of her songs, including some I actually like such as “It Ain’t Me” and “Same Old Love”, this seems like one of the most unlikely #1s yet it tugs at our heartstrings with the pianos from FINNEAS, Billie Eilish’s brother and producer, and it’s about how Justin Bieber dumped her with wordplay revolving around “purpose” – wow, it’s almost like she’s talking about Justin Bieber’s ALBUM, Purpose! Ugh, her mind! Okay, I’ll stop mocking her fanbase and the general public, because this really isn’t a bad song. Selena Gomez can’t sing, so through thinly-veiled Auto-Tune, the producers cleverly multi-track her vocals to create a grand, powerhouse chorus out of the repetition of “To love, to love, yeah” and because it’s a pop ballad, the vocals can be breathy and untrained and it’s fine, right? It’s a ballad, it doesn’t need to be perfect, and hence we can take advantage of the complete lack of singing talent this person has. I don’t know, it just seems so cliché and predictable to me. You can only tell it’s a FINNEAS beat once the second verse hits and the synths get jerkier with the bass wobbles, and he usually has a pretty signature sound, so yeah, that’s the best way to put it. Or, perhaps, this song is also so monumentally mediocre that it barely even exists.

Conclusion

Again, I’m sorry this is out so late but it was a big ordeal to write, especially due to all the Kanye songs. I’ll try and get the next one out a lot sooner, I assure you, but there’s an album bomb this week too, so we’ll see about that. Anyways, the Best of the Week is going to Coldplay for “Orphans”, who just barely edged out Niall Horan, who gets the Honourable Mention, with “Nice to Meet Ya”. Worst of the Week should be obvious, in fact, it’s not going to a song, it’s going to three songs, all by Kanye West. “Saleh” isn’t all that bad, but JESUS IS KING was such an immense disappointment that I think he should be crowned Worst of the Week based on not only “Closed on Sunday” or God forbid “Follow God”, but also on principle alone. The Dishonourable Mention is going to Selena Gomez for “Look at Her Now” for being hilariously misguided in the production area, Jesus. I’m going to wrap this week up with a Top 40 ranking of the whole chart on Twitter, which I’ll try to do bi-weekly, no guarantee, so follow me there @cactusinthebank for more musical ramblings and shoddy attempts at humour, and I’ll be seeing you here again next week. Peace!

[tainghekhongdaycomvn]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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!

xem them tai https://ift.tt/2o9GYfe Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky xem thêm tại: https://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond https://ift.tt/2CahJky Bạn có thể xem thêm địa chỉ mua tai nghe không dây tại đây https://ift.tt/2mb4VST

[isearchgoood]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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!

via Blogger https://ift.tt/2MLXSx1 #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

[tracisimpson]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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!

[lawrenceseitz22]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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/2LM7YZz via IFTTT

[swunlimitednj]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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/2LQw5X4 via SW Unlimited

[seocompanysurrey]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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 The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/10219152

[ericsburden-blog]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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!

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

[whitelabelseoreseller]

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand

This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph

How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page

If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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 The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/10219152