#ooh i found a website with a ton of different kinds :)

[sk3l3t0n444]

i would like to sit in the fetal position and cry at the moment

[0ffgun]

Alright so!! I got some requests from people for me to make a post with tips on how I self-study my languages, so here we are! It’s not perfect and everyone studies differently, but I hope some of these tips can help you out.

Personally I study Korean & Thai so this list is aimed at those but a lot of the study tips are pretty general and can be applied to whatever language you’re learning. 

I’m an energetic puppy in human form - I simply CANNOT sit still and study for longer than 20 minutes before getting insanely restless and distracted, so I tend to only actually sit down and actively study once a week. If you’re expecting something clever and insightful this is absolutely the opposite of that... I basically trick myself into learning! So here is my silly little guide, let’s go!

General Tips:

★ Get ridiculous with sticky notes. Seriously, do it. If you’re just starting out and don’t know the words for all of those household objects then go ahead and scribble them down on those post its and stick them EVERYWHERE. It might drive your family members/roommates crazy but hey... you’re doing it for a good cause, right?

★ Don’t rely on romanization too much - if your language has its own writing system, focus on that using as much as you can. Romanization seems helpful but in the long run you’ll rely on it too much. It’s better to get familiar with the native writing system asap!

★ Pick out a word/phrase of the day and write it somewhere you’ll see it often. I have a whiteboard in my room that I’ll scribble a few phrases onto and then every time I walk past it, I’ll say them. Or if I’m not gonna be home all day then I write something on my wrist and glance at it throughout the day! This one is the most fun because when people see it they’re like “ooh that looks pretty!” or “ooh does it mean something deep and profound?” when in reality you have the phrase I like cheese written on your arm and it never stops being entertaining. Bonus points if someone native to that language reads it and looks at you like you’re crazy.

★ Say the words in silly voices. It sounds weird but if you’re sitting there repeating words (like the word banana, for example) from an app in a monotone voice you’re definitely less likely to remember it than if you’re yelling out “BANANA!!” in an opera voice or squeaking out “b an a n a” dramatically as you let go of Jack’s hand and let him sink into the ocean. 

★ Don’t isolate vocabulary. Learning new words is great, but it’s useless and you’re more likely to forget it if you don’t learn to use it in a sentence. 

★ Keep a diary! One of the absolute best ways to practice your writing and improve your skills is to just jot down a few things every now and then. It’ll be rusty and you won’t have much to say at first and will definitely keep needing that dictionary every 2 seconds, but after a few weeks you’ll really notice the difference. Buy pretty pens and stickers to motivate yourself to write in it! It’s also fun to do this around people who can’t speak it as they’ll look at it in awe and you can show off when in actual fact your writing is usually a clumsy scribbled “today I snacks eat and go sleep” but hey what they don’t know can’t hurt and it’s always fun to look like a genius.

★ Talk to your pets in that language. They’re not going to judge you, they actually don’t even care what you say as long as you say it in that entertaining pet voice. I don’t have any friends that speak Korean or Thai so the majority of my speaking practice is hurled at my dog. If you don’t have a pet, then plants or stuffed animals work perfectly too!

★ Listen to language podcasts while you do household chores, heck if you’ve gotta do something boring, might as well yell foreign words while you do it!

★ Change your phone settings to your target language. That way you’re literally forcing yourself to use it, and it becomes second nature and you pick up key words so quickly. Only do it if you know how to get back into your settings and change it back if you have to... or else you’re stuck and lost. 

★ Listen to music and sing a lot. Just scream those lyrics! A little off-key screeching never hurt anybody!

★ Get comfortable with numbers. They’re something that is dominant in ALL languages and you’re going to use them on a daily basis. Start with learning how to count to ten and get comfortable with it, and then go higher. Once you’re used to numbers individually, make it harder. I used to get my mum to write out 10 random numbers between 1 to 10,000 in the morning and I would translate them, and then I would do the same for myself in the evening. After a while you get quicker at them and before you know it you don’t have to awkwardly translate them in your head anymore, the numbers are just there ready in your brain.

★ Don’t only watch dramas! Watch more natural stuff too - variety shows, vlogs, instagram lives... anything where people are just chatting like they normally would do. That way you’re subconsciously learning more casual speech patterns and casual language too!

★ Don’t just study at home! Always make sure you have a dictionary handy (like on your phone, for example!) and keep your brain busy while you’re out and about. Buying some groceries? Try to name everything in the fruit and vegetable aisles and if you don’t know the name of something, look it up! You’re more likely to remember vocab this way as your brain has a situation to associate it to.

★ Be mean and make yourself work for things you normally do - check your horoscope on a regular basis? Read it in your new language instead! Want to check out the weather forecast? Do it the hard way.

★ Don’t feel like studying? Not in the mood? Then don’t do it! Instead put on your favourite show in your study language of choice. Not every study session has to be a hard one. Just relax and watch a foreign movie! You have no idea how much your brain picks up without you even noticing, chilling out and watching a drama absolutely counts as studying. Don’t force yourself to study if you’re not feeling it, you’re more likely to learn if you’re having a good time.

Advanced Tips:

★ Get keyboard stickers - if your new language has a different alphabet and you use your laptop to study it a lot then you’re definitely gonna need these! You can buy them SUPER cheap on ebay!

★ Change the language on your Netflix account and get ready to binge watch your faves! If you change your profile language to the one that you’re studying, you’ll notice that a lot of the shows available will now show subtitles in that language too. If you’re pretty advanced then now is probably the time to drop your native subs and start watching with the original subtitles in the original language.. good luck! 

★ Play Pokemon. When the latest Pokemon games started coming out with Korean language options I JUMPED at the chance - what better way to study than to just laze around playing video games? This is great for any other kinds of games you can snatch up in your target language too.

★ Read a favourite book in your new language. A common one is Harry Potter! It’s pretty much available in every language at this point and it’s a story you probably already know, which means you never get too lost because you know the plot already.

Resources:

Here are a bunch of apps and things that I use for studying that I find super helpful (and all of these are free!)

Drops (for Thai and Korean - available in both the apple store and the google play store)  - I use this app every single day without fail. It’s brilliant for expanding your vocabulary (there are TONS of languages available on there too!) HOWEVER: It only lets you study for 5 minutes and then you have to wait around 9-ish hours before you gain another 5 minutes to work with unless you want to pay for more. But honestly? That’s a good thing. You only need 5 minutes of vocab study before your brain wants to dissolve into mush anyway. I get up, do my morning stuff (usually just involves rolling around and blinking in confusion before grabbing a coffee) and then sit and do 5 minutes of drops, and then by the evening my 5 minutes have replenished and I do it again. Rinse and repeat, and you’ll be learning more words in a week than you even realise!

Duolingo (I use this for Korean, there is currently no Thai option) - This app is fantastic. I don’t recommend it for beginners as it should be used as more of an aid alongside your natural studies, rather than as a study resource itself. This app expects you to already know the basics so I’d dig into this one once you’re starting to get a little comfortable with your language!

Naver Dictionary (for Korean) - I use this every single day! Not only does it help me when I need to find a certain word, it also gives me lists of example sentences which is PERFECT and super helpful when I’m trying to memorize words!  And for Thai I use Thai-English Dictionary (I can only find it in the Apple store sadly) and that’s incredibly handy too, I wouldn’t be able to cope without it! I also use this website as a Thai dictionary when I’m not on my iPad!

Talk To Me In Korean (for Korean) - This has been a core element to my Korean studies. They have tons of lessons available on their website, they do regular YouTube videos (usually only 5-10 mins long, perfect for just a mini casual study session!) and they also sell textbooks and do podcasts too. If you learn best from textbooks then these are by far my favourite ones I’ve found, give them a try! They’re not too pricey.

Lingodeer (for Korean) - It’s cute, it’s friendly and it’s helpful!! I learned a bunch of new phrases using this one and it’s perfect for casual study!

Memrise (for Korean) - Fantastic if you’re a beginner! There are tons of languages available on here too. Although, there are only 3 levels in Korean so I got through this one pretty fast. 

Eggbun (for Korean) - An app that encourages you to learn using a texting format! I haven’t really used it much but I have friends that have said it’s really useful!

Ling (for Thai and Korean) - This one was pretty good, once again though I wouldn’t use it if you’re a beginner, it’s probably a lot more helpful if you know the basics before you attempt this one! I’ve only used it for Thai but there’s a Korean option you could try checking it out!

Mondly (for Thai and Korean) - This app is cheeky and it wants your money. You get a bunch of free lessons to start with which are GREAT but that’s it. Then it reduces you to one free lesson a day but honestly? Still useful so go ahead and use it. They also have speaking practice available too!

Thai2English (for Thai) - This website is an absolute LIFESAVER!! If I’m ever browsing and come across a sentence that just throws me, I simply copy and paste and this legend of a website just breaks it down for me word for word.

Extra Korean links:

Children’s books in Korean

Learning Korean through fairytales - a textbook used in Korea for children who are learning to read, it’s helpful as a Korean language learner too! You get a little story and then it’ll ask you questions about what you just read. 

TOPIK previous exams - these are so good for practice and if you want to get a general idea of what academic level your Korean skills are at. 

Learning to type in Hangul - this one was fun and I now type Korean pretty comfortably on my laptop so if you know you’re gonna be typing a lot, I recommend this program!

[prandstg]

Third Year of University

The third and final year of university was quite the handful. With Covid-19 forcing us all to stay at home we lacked many of the resources and had to make due with what we had at home. Originally this blog post was supposed to be on a personal website, but for reasons currently unknown to me, my website just doe snot work anymore, so here we are!

Advanced Project

One of our tasks we had to do is create an Advanced Project. Due to current circumstances. and the aforementioned lack of physical resources that were all at the university, I decided to recreate sound for a retro style game, since it did not directly involve creating music and/or sound by physical means. Furthermore, I decided to go with a video game instead of say, a music album, or an EP, or something like that, since my focus is on the video games industry.

So I set out to find a video game I would want to recreate the sound for. It took me a while to find something I would be content with. I ended up using “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past” as my source material. So I began to acquire a video clip of this video game, and proceeded to create a list of all the sound effects I would need to recreate in order for this to work. Some sound effects that would work nicely I had already in my possession, saved to my hard drive in my sound library. Those are sound effects from a previous project with similar intent, giving me a nice head start already as I acquired a few sounds from that. 

Following that I then proceeded to create new sound effects. The digital audio workspace, or DAW for short, that I use is Ableton Live 10. Using the in-built synthesizer I set out to create new sound effects fitting a retro game from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or SNES for short) era. Whilst I had great success with some sound effects, I had troubles with others. Specifically, I had troubles with the sounds for the swinging of a sword, a door unlocking, and footsteps going up and down a flight of stairs. 

I was not sure how I would be able to circumvent these troubles, and therefor decided to review the methods I was using. After looking into other games. to be precise video games that have retro style, but are in fact modern era video games, I realized that due to lacking the knowledge and skill for the time being, to create such very specific sounds and effects, that I had to use a different approach. So, I ended up dropping my attempt at re-creating sound effects from the SNES era, and rather focus on the here and now. For the sound of the sword swinging I ended up using the sound of a knife sliding across a hard surface, and then manipulated the sound. I first lowered the pitch of the sound sample, and then proceeded to reduce the bit-depth, which more or less means reducing the quality of the sound itself, until it sounded like something that would in in a retro-style game of the modern era. I proceeded to do the very same for the footsteps going up and down a flight of stairs. In the case of the footsteps, I got my hands on a sample of a pair of boots walking on a stone surface, which I gave the same treatment as the sword. As for the sound of a door unlocking I acquired a sound effect of two pieces of metal banging and sliding against each other, once more giving it the same treatment as mentioned before. 

The only thing that was left to do was create music. I was unsure at first how I wanted to approach the music for the game. I wanted to give it my own style, but still at the same time I wanted to make it fit at least somewhat, so I did not want to make it too contemporary. What I ended up using in the end was simply three built in instruments from Ableton Live 10. The first was a drum rack, the second one a nasal voice that sinds “Aahs” and “Oohs”, and the third one being a brass ensemble. The way I made those all sound like they belong in a retro/retro-style game was by giving them all the same treatment as my sound effects previously mentioned. I decreased the bit-depth of each one of those virtual instruments, and I also used an equalizer to remove all the low-end, aka all the bass from the each of the instruments, since making the instruments lower quality they can drone quite a lot if there is base within them. 

Finally it was time to edit it all and that was quite the chore for multiple reasons. Firstly there were a lot of small sound effects very quickly one after another in quick succession, taking a long time to line all the sound effects up correctly for them to fit perfectly where they are supposed to be. Another issue was that for some reason some times the video would not load from certain spots so I had to scroll back far enough so that the video would play again so that I then could place the sounds where they belong. Overall it was a very arduous task to do, that proofed less difficult, but more so extremely tedious, but in the end I managed to do it.

It was quite some long and hard work, but in the end it paid off, as I got to see a full five minute video of my hard work, being able to admire what I did, and finding it to be a job well done. I look back at the work now, happy that I did it, and happy about the way I did it, enjoying the fact that such hard work made a final product that I like myself for once as well.

Research Project

Sticking with my theme of “The Legend of Zelda” I decided that for the research paper that we were supposed to create I would look into the aspect of how the original “The Legend of Zeda: Link’s Awakening” and the remake that was released in 2019 differ. To do so I decided that it would be first prudent to take a look at each game. I decided to first start off with a general overview of both games, having a bit of a closer look at the limitations of the original console the game was released on, namely the Game Boy. Having studied it a bit it turns out that the Game Boy has massive limitations especially in regard to music and sound, having only 4 different channels available at any given time, meaning the game boy can only produce 4 different sounds at the same time. 

Realizing that I had a closer look at the music that Link’s Awakening has, and realized that indeed it only ever has two “instruments” playing at the same. One giving rhythm and also doubling as the bass, and one that is the leading melody of each song. It turns out that most sound effects do not interrupt the music, but mostly each other, if too much is going on at once sound wise, then sounds will cut out, not so the music however except for a few examples which I found quite interesting. 

Another aspect I ended up looking into was nostalgia. I realized that nostalgia is another big aspect that I should look into when it comes to comparing two games that are the same. In essence I realized that nostalgia is an important feeling when looking at the remake of a game, especially a game that is originally as old as this one. After all there are around 18 years difference between the original game and the remake, leaving a huge gap between the two. And as somebody who played the original on their Game Boy Color all happy and excited, because it was just such an extremely magical and wonderful journey as a child. As such it was important to me on a personal level that the remake felt just as magical. 

Therefor I decided to do some research into the nostalgia, which turned out the be quite insightful, finding some interesting sources talking about different forms of nostalgia, something I had not even considered. Within was explained that there are different forms of nostalgia, created and experiences in different ways, depending on what kind of game it is. It ended up giving me a more detailed and clearer insight into what exactly is going on in regard to the nostalgia within the new version, the remake. of the game, and how it ties the two games together. 

I then proceeded to pick the two games apart in detail, especially when it comes to the sound design, having a specifically close look at the bosses and mini bosses within the games, as they offer the most characteristics of the game, being the most imposing but at the same time most unique beings, so much so that even with the limit sound capacity of the Game Boy, they all have their very own special sounds they make, giving a great opportunity to cross reference the two to have a closer look at how the new version of the game handles all of these things. In the end it felt like sound wise the remake was essentially taking the original game and using it as a foundation to build upon to make it something contemporary. 

This task was by far the hardest, having to do a ton of research and taking a deep dive into both games, taking in everything and then in detail write about it. It took a long time and a lot of effort and patience, but I am happy with the end result I achieved with it. 

Professional Practice

One of the main things I had to do for professional practice was to create a show reel/demo reel. At first I thought I would have to create a bunch of new mini projects to get something together for it, but I decided not to do so. Instead, I decided I would take all the projects from the past three years of university and compile them into a three minute video. I wanted to give a full and true image of th spectrum of things I am currently capable and incapable off, not only to be true to whomever is seeing it, but also to be true to myself, to have a reminder just what exactly my errors are, so I can work on them, so by the time I release my next demo/show reel, I can show off just how much I have improved, not just to others, but myself as well. 

Doing a 5-year plan right afterwards was a massive help in that regard, making me realize just what kind of goals I should aim for, giving me a nice step-by-step guide fully created by myself to have a view into the future what I could and should do to further myself. It was a fun and interesting task, opening my eyes to the possibilities. 

Lastly I had to do an assessment, not only explaining my demo reel in depth, but also forcing me to do some research into the current state of the games industry, which gave me quite a lot of insight into just how much the games industry has grown, and how much more important it has becoming, opening my eyes to how big the challenges ahead of me are, but also giving me confidence that I can do it if I just work hard on it. 

Overall, it has been extremely stressful with everything that has been going on, but I am also extremely grateful for having gotten the opportunity to go and study at a university, and given the opportunity to learn all the things I have.

[thesunnyshow]

Name: hi, i am nyx  Age: 20 years old Writing Blog URL(s): jungcity.tumblr.com | v-asl.tumblr.com 

Nationality: filipino Languages: english, filipino Star Sign: pisces! MBTI: infp-t Favorite color: white accentuated by silver Favorite food: it’s sweet and spicy chicken garlic!! Favorite movie: hmmm, it’s prolly flipped because that movie was so cute :,)  Favorite ice cream flavor: rocky road!! Favorite animal: it’s gonna be cats!! although i love lions so much because of narnia :,( Coffee or tea? What are you ordering? coffee :,) Go-to karaoke song: i don’t sing agskh the world would end if i would 

What has been one of the biggest factors of your success (of any size)? i think it’s me writing about jaehyun??? since he’s the king of fanfiction, especially in ncity nowadays. 

What fandom(s) do you write for?  nct + wayv

When did you post your first piece? three days ago!! that would be august 4 i guess???

Do you write fluff/angst/crack/general/smut, combo, etc? Why? i don’t really much write fluff since i don’t have any idea how to write a good fluff!! :( this has been an issue every time i write some au’s. so im always ending up writing and focusing more on angst. it’s the genre i know best. well, crack… it’s hard to make the readers laugh when you can’t even make their tooth ache from sweetness with your fluffy writings. :( smut… i don’t write smut explicitly any more. i’m more on the suggestive side rn. 

Do you write OCs, X Readers, Ships...etc  i write OC’s especially when im writing a series!! to diversify my writing. but i usually am on the x reader side. ships? not that much. 

Why did you decide to write for Tumblr? uhm, back in 2017, i was searching for some website where i could publish my works. ive always been a tumblr-girl since i am that wanna-be-aesthetic kinda person :D then i had found that i could write and publish on tumblr so yeah that’s pretty much why i am on this app rn

What inspires you to write?  ooh, music has been a great help for sure!! whenever i don’t feel like writing something, i always listen to music and the idea would flow like a river. classic poems helps, too. :)

What genres/AUs do you enjoy writing the most?  supernatural!au’s, fantasy!au, medieval!au. i feel like it’s easier to write something out of pure fantasy. i have a hard time writing modern!au’s since i lack the humor and the knowledge for modern slangs. 

What do you hope your readers take away from your work?  ooh, i always always always am careful with the way that i craft all my works. i try to feel what my characters feel to give them a certain validation. i put my shoes on the scenarios i have in mind even though i haven’t yet experienced everything ive written. and i do love writing strong female characters, whether it’s oc’s or female readers. that’s my main priority whenever i write. and i want them to know that girls could do just as much everything boys could. women are powerful. 

What do you do when you hit a rough spot creatively?  i read a lot to get back on my foot. i also try to re-read my past works so i’d be inspired to better my writing on my current draft.

What is your favorite work and why? Your most successful?  my favorite work is the one i’m still writing rn, which is entitled 505. it’s a hendery fic in which he is a bandit and the female reader is a sacristan. it’s my fave since i relate myself so much to the female reader. :) my most successful one is the childhood best friends!au taeyong x female reader. it’s about to reach 600+ notes i guess? and im so grateful of all the feedbacks i got from it. 

Who is your favorite person to write about?  it’s jaehyun and hendery :) 

Do you think there’s a difference between writing fanfiction vs. completely original prose?  character wise, perhaps. since you already have a face value in fanfiction, but in an original prose, you would have to craft everything from 0. 

What do you think makes a good story?  a good story is something that doesn’t romanticize the bad things going on in the world. a good story is something that is emphatic to the hardships of others. a good story is something that gives comfort to those who are in the dark. a good story is something that boosts the hearts of the readers and makes them feel things!! 

What is your writing process like?  first, i think of a plot! (this happens oftentimes when im washing the dishes) when i have the plot, i think of the ending. when i have the ending, it’s time for me to device a fitting title. and the plot would develop from then on. 

Would you ever repurpose a fic into a completely original story?  i don’t think so… this is scary. since some people think of fanfics as delusional works from delusional authors. it’s kinda sad. 

What tropes do you love, and what tropes can’t you stand?  i love love love enemies-to-lovers trope!! one that i couldn’t stand and do my best to not read is probably… hmm… no, i love all tropes!! i just love e-t-l most!

How much would you say audience feedback/engagement means to you?  it means a ton. since it could really boosts me up. heavy sigh. it’s the best thing when you write something— the feedbacks. even though it’s a simple reblog with the ‘#ATKSHSKSHSKAHAKSGAHGEGSJA’ or ‘#myfave’. i would smile like an idiot whenever i read it.

Dream job (whether you have a job or not)? i want to be a successful writer someday!

If you could have one superpower, what would you choose? teleportation!! 

If you could visit a historical era, which would you choose?  ancient greek + victorian era

If you could restart your life, knowing what you do now, would you?  yes!! im so hell deep in indecision right now so i want to restart to make everything right

Would you rather fight 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken?  100 chicken-sized horses!!

If you were a trope in a teen high school movie, what would you have been?  enemies-to-lovers trope agsksj LOL

Do you believe in aliens/supernatural creatures?  YES!!! perhaps they are lurking somewhere here on earth and we don’t know it yet ;)

Fun fact about yourself that not everyone would know?  oh… i don’t really know what to write. i don’t give much attention to my personal details agsksj

Do you think fanfic writers get unfairly judged?  yes!! ugh, there’s this recent issue wherein stan twt called fanfic writers as freaks. and it broke my heart. i mean, most fanfic writers get inspirations from their idols and that shouldn’t be a bad thing. we aren’t delusionals as one might think. we are simply doing our craft. 

Do you think art can be a medium for change?  yes!! our country’s hero ‘jose rizal’ had somehow stirred the nationality of the people back in the old days because of his writings. i do believe that art changes things!! it has the ability to pierce the heart of the people.  

Do you ever feel there are times when you’re writing for others, rather than yourself?  yes. i feel this whenever im writing smut. i mean, let’s be real, your works would do better once you’ve included some steamy smut scenes in it. when i was writing my first fanfic after three years, i didn’t think that i’d ever include smut. but the fear of not getting feedbacks crept up in me, so i forced myself to write some sexy scenes. i know that’s like… weird. but i’m trying not to dwell on feedbacks any longer. and i also have decided not to write explicit smut anymore. honestly, i feel better now that i don’t force myself to do something that i think would please others rather than me.

Do you ever feel like people have misunderstood you or your writing at times?  uhm, as far as i can remember, nope— still hasn’t felt that way. :)

Do your offline friends/loved ones know you write for Tumblr?  yes!! my best friends irl knows about it. my sister knows. my parents are also aware of my passion in writing, and they do know that i write. but where and what, that remains obscured from them :D 

What is one thing you wish you could tell your followers?  that it’s okay to be vulnerable. it’s okay to make mistakes. it’s okay to fail sometimes. it’s okay to feel things. because like a good book, there is always a character development and you have the pen to write your own version of happy endings. 

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who might be too scared to put themselves out there?  i’ve been there: the scared and conscious part. but one thing i would say is, you have to dare yourself!! you won’t know how your writing would have impacted so many lives and touch the hearts of people if you won’t grab your pen or your gadget and start your draft. 

Are there any times when you regret joining Tumblr?  nope, there aren’t. the community has been lovely to me ever since i started writing. :,)

Do you have any mutuals who have been particularly formative/supportive in your Tumblr journey? yes!! oh my god. i’d like to take this opportunity to thank my mutuals who’s done me nothing but kindness— @legendnct (hannah), whoo!! you know how much i love you, right? thank you for always being there to listen to me. :) @cloudysuh des, since day one you’ve supported me. i couldn’t ask for more. thank you for the never-ending praises, keyboard smashes, for the tags, and for always boosting me up. @bohoes georgie, you know i love you. since 2017 you’ve been with me— praising my works and supporting me. thank you. @cherr-e cherry!! thank you!! for teaching me how to better my writing. i hope endless happiness for u and please take care. @writermoon hello my babe!! thank you so much for reading my works with such vivid imaginations. i love you. @jaeyongf amy!! the bestest person :,) thank you for always leaving me feedbacks!! thank you for being kind to me. thank you for always supporting me. i love you guys so much and let’s be mutuals for a long time!! 

Pick a quote to end your interview with: 

“If the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.” — Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

[comicteaparty]

Art Resources

Check out this plethora of art-related resources archived from Comic Tea Party’s Art Resources Channel!

RebelVampire

starting this channel off with @Kabocha 's site http://www.shooting-stars.org/ lots of fantastic brushes and materials to use for both photoshop and clip studio(edited)

https://inkarnate.com/ - a nifty site for creating maps. while there is a pro version, the free version still has a lot of features if you just need a map for personal use to reference for your stories.(edited)

https://bodykunposeoftheday.tumblr.com/ - lots of pose photos of the SH Figuarts Body-Kun figures. really great if you want to get some anatomy and pose practice in!(edited)

http://blog.studiominiboss.com/pixelart - if you're a fan of pixel art, this is a hugely great collection of tutorials by Pedro Medeiros. it's got everything from process explanations, animation tips, shading, and more.(edited)

http://terawell.net/terawell/ - Design Doll, a great 3d program solely focused on doll posing. learning to pose the dolls can be a bit of a learning curve, but it can be fantastic if you really need a specific pose reference.(edited)

http://www.yeoldemapmaker.com/ - another map making website. this one is a lot better for interiors, especially if what you want is to just understand the base layout of a room for reference.(edited)

https://www.textures.com/ - a good site for textures. you have to make an account to download them, unfortunately. however, theres tons upon tons of them. for comics they should be safe, but would recommend checking terms for other things.(edited)

Kabocha

Free Software: I have not personally tested all of these programs. Download at your own risk. indicates that I have used it. Pixia: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/mighty/knight/index.html Artweaver: https://www.artweaver.de/en (has paid version) Medibang Paint: https://medibangpaint.com/en/ Krita: https://krita.org/en/ MyPaint: http://mypaint.org/ (Pressure does not work properly on Surface devices newer than the Surface 3) SmoothDraw: http://www.smoothdraw.com/sd Paint.Net: https://www.getpaint.net/ GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/ Pinta: https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/ Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/en/

RebelVampire

https://nattosoup.blogspot.com/ - If you aren't familiar with Becca's blog yet, it's really great. while there is an emphasis on watercolor and traditional art supplies, theres honestly just great information all around. processes, supply reviews, and so on!

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

http://leifandthorn.com/2018/07/resources-for-making-webcomics/ - resources I've collected over the years. Mostly art stuff (fonts, color harmony, body types, etc), plus some help with website accessibility and some general webcomic podcasts.

Desnik

This is not a free resource so I hope it's okay, but in just a couple of days poring over the first two pages of this book, I'm really feeling a difference in the elasticity of my character's poses. It doesn't get bogged down by medical terminology and sorts parts of the body by 'landmark' instead: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23580472-anatomy-for-sculptors-understanding-the-human-figure

this is speaking as someone who has multiple years of figure drawing practice from life...I wish this book had been out much earlier, it's just amazing

JaSketch

https://www.calligraphr.com/en/ Here’s a free to use website that turns your handwriting into a legit text font, and it works too!

keltyzoid!

speaking of fonts i've actually made a few that are free to use. there's a couple of webcomics i know of that use them. should can i post them?

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r8wmj4kp2566jbn/AACCrP70zPVLr8h2f5F4d6BIa?dl=0

they're free, no license or credit necessary

kayotics

this is a pretty basic level "how I do comics" but i like to reference these how-to's from Mad Rupert sometimes as a refresh on comics: http://mynameismad.tumblr.com/post/163801383099/hello-in-case-you-havent-heard-the-sakana

lonelytuatara

for any fellow photoshop users who wanna get better at perspective, this video's been really helpful for me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upxBGNcryRs

Delphina

Really helpful Twitter thread about effective paneling! https://twitter.com/h0lysarthole/status/1117464886123089921

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Install old versions of Adobe products for free: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs2-product-downloads.html?promoid=19SCDRQK There are terms & conditions, but the programs don't actually check if you fulfill them. It's up to you to know how much money you've given them, and what you're ethically clear to download in return.

Kabocha

If we're talking about Image Editors, a not-free alternative is Affinity Photo, which is reasonably priced. (I'd look for it to go on sale, but $50 for a perpetual license isn't bad at all!) https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ Their indesign competitor is in free Beta right now, too: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/

Paint.net also still exists: https://www.getpaint.net/

https://www.patreon.com/posts/26834357 In the meantime, here's a post for alternatives to adobe.

https://twitter.com/robochai/status/1124044195092672515

JUNK

https://blog.reimenayee.com/graphic-novel-outline-onion-method/ neat

Hey, I'm sure everyone already knows, but clip studio is on sale for $25 right now! It is (imo) one of the best programs out there for making comics! https://twitter.com/clipstudiopaint/status/1169159411304210432?s=19

MJ Massey

if you're looking for a new display tablet, I found this useful site with tons of tablet reviews! They're organized by size and look at several different brands http://brad.site/reviews/wacom-cintiq-alternatives.html

Attila Polyák

How to draw good looking lightning/electricity! https://www.facebook.com/leesartandmore/photos/a.1370091679712083/2411389295582311/?type=3&theater

seetherabbit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk

DaeofthePast

Free to use comic font http://purastik.net/ames/e.html

MJ Massey

If you haven't watched Jake Parker's videos, I highly recommend them. They are very informative AND relaxing and encouraging https://www.youtube.com/user/jakeparker44

MJ Massey

GESTURE DRAWINGS! They're important for art practice, especially if you are looking to improve your forms! https://www.quickposes.com/en is my favorite. It has a feature where you can set it to show you different photos every 30-300 seconds to practice gesture drawing!

mariah (rainy day dreams)

Just saw this on Twitter. Haven't actually gotten a chance to look at it closely, but I thought other people might also want to take a look https://twitter.com/Worstwizard/status/1183475129084329984?s=09

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

https://twitter.com/noahbradley/status/1185286707819827201?s=09

Attila Polyák

Loads of useful facebbok stuff I meant to post a long time ago, but never got around doing it: https://www.facebook.com/AikaLockheart/photos/a.413147142066258/2235198713194416/?type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=472362883489284&set=a.130547804337462&type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/geektower/photos/pcb.1089341477902964/1089341267902985/?type=3&theater

MJ Massey

picking pens! From Jake Parker himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNgYvTI09XE

MJ Massey

for anyone who likes podcasts, I enjoy 3 Point Perspective, particularly their most recent episode on building an online store and making sales https://open.spotify.com/episode/2twCBBjRWZlmzbvWkRoARG?si=N7PiY3UoTJCzq0zZovXsdg

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

Here's a good reference generator: https://line-of-action.com/

SAWHAND

Hope this counts as a resource, here's a list of Best Comic Covers in a given month by Paste magazine, it goes up to June 2019. It was really helping me get ideas for covers! https://www.pastemagazine.com/search?t=Best+Comic+Book+Covers&m=Galleries

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

This is great!

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Ooh, yeah, those are great.

I did a redraw where I added another 7, for shots that aren't in the original that I also get a ton of use out of: https://www.deviantart.com/erinptah/art/29-Panels-That-Always-Work-748887838

carcarchu

ooooh https://twitter.com/cathygjohn/status/1216093817734139904?s=20

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/ClipStudioTips/status/1217058241613651969

renieplayerone

This may have been shared before but i am a HUGE fan of SenshiStock. Their references are so good and ive used their stock photos for a ton of studies and practice too https://twitter.com/SenshiStock

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/celesse/status/1219674655663042561

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/dankelby/status/1220254171049418752

mariah (rainy day dreams)

https://kingofooo.tumblr.com/post/161105648449/by-storyboard-supervisor-erik-fountain-a-few

Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§

https://twitter.com/ImRachelBradley/status/1216042005698174977?s=19

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/cyanparade/status/1229450046480867328

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

@Feather J. Fern This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEvMHRgPdyk

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

@Javi An oldie I still find useful for learning how to draw people: https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-drawing-the-head-hands/mode/2up

Nutty (Court of Roses)

https://twitter.com/Lowtwait/status/1232479451721502725

Artem Ficta (Ring Spell)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlh4PO-ISCA

video that looks into this current humble bundle pack

looks kind of interesting

doomedfrgarden

I'm not sure if Borodante's Over-Paint series has been posted here (I didn't see it, but I don't have my glasses so I can't promise a thorough search), but his digital painting tips have been incredibly helpful and inspiring to me, so I hope it helps someone else here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDKgohjbwY8&list=PL26-CxnLWOfD_h42yjpO44dPAo3-pijgb&index=23

Feather J. Fern

Found something that explains Bleed for comics. https://makingcomics.spiltink.org/pgtemplates/

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

A soft-shading demo I made for@Feather J. Fern & @Artem Ficta (Ring Spell) Sorry this took so long to complete! https://youtu.be/Cyc9EVissw0

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/hanari0716/status/931463182354227201

Mei

For people like me who mess up their bleeds and have to fix them in post, I had this lying in my bookmarks! https://twitter.com/TheDamnThinGuy/status/1190321427314032646?s=20

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

There are lots of guides to tangents, and here is one I like a lot! http://curiousoldlibrary.blogspot.com/2011/10/schweizer-guide-to-spotting-tangents.html

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/Sasquatchiix/status/1236987090874667008 This is a visual novel zine but section 2 on resources actually has a lot of cross-over in terms of usability for comic creators, check it out if you feel like testing out some new tools! Update - I read through the articles now and I actually really recommend checking them out too for advice when it comes to story-writing and how to lay it all out(edited)

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

Want to share this with you all! https://creatureartteacher.com/product/fundamentals-of-animation/?fbclid=IwAR0ahSOtdTBPmi0cHQlBpyMK7RveLZXptqcLrFX559KQMOkp-oLjGG9JA_0 Fundamentals of Animation Course Aron Blaise a big disney animator, has an animation Course that take you through the princibles of animation. This course is free for a limited time if you want to learn about animation!

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

Really cool video I found about pricing your commissions: https://youtu.be/pN4P82Y_3k0

carcarchu

a handy tool for those who work in clip https://twitter.com/2TooToo2/status/1243101802435727360

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I'm not sure if this is the right channel, but I'm going around shouting about how Adobe users can get two months free because of the pandemic this morning. Here's an article about how to do it! https://www.creativebloq.com/news/adobe-payment-holiday?fbclid=IwAR108UH-2fQfvQzyc2STIHZh9H7LOzr1xvOoLPM_7pylHNoQ9isvMDT4wRw

I also made a tweet for easy sharing if you don't want to type your own. https://twitter.com/RainyDayMariah/status/1243573425697742848?s=20

Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§

https://twitter.com/metalsorcery/status/1247930202073829377?s=19 This is a survey to answer for webcomic creators to get their work featured in this newsletter! Open to every one!

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

@Miranda (Into the Swell) This one's pretty good: https://www.deviantart.com/theinkyway/art/Manga-Studio-5-Clip-Studio-Paint-Brush-Pack-619455926

carcarchu

@Miranda (Into the Swell) this is my ultimate fave http://fav.me/d7s799d

carcarchu

this is handy reference image account that only posts pictures of suits and mundane things https://twitter.com/madarameBK

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Follow Art of Webcomics (on Twitter) which help independent creators host a site and share your page updates: https://series.artofwebcomics.com/(edited)

carcarchu

https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1725189 a handy sfx brush for clip studio paint that can help save some time with your process (it's got various effects built in the brush itself so you don't have to have several stroke layers to achieve the effect) it costs 2 dollars

SaltySalmonella

I made an SFX (sound effect) booklet for comic artists who are having difficulty visualizing sounds for their comics. It's free to download on Gumroad! https://gumroad.com/SaltySalmonella#VOZQM

Elliot

https://twitter.com/nicparris/status/1253710231781036043

CoppertheCarutor

I'm not sure if this goes in writing or art resources because it's art based, but the focus is on using colors to aid the story, but I thought this was a pretty neat video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXgFcNUWqX0&feature=emb_logo

mariah (rainy day dreams)

I was looking up some moonlight tutorials for an illustration last night. Figured I'd share~ https://tips.clip-studio.com/en-us/articles/1684

https://www.deviantart.com/ryky/art/MOON-easy-tutorial-399161176

carcarchu

https://youtu.be/LokpJy7KHpE Shilin talks about her thought processes when laying out her comic panels

carcarchu

some free flower assets for clip https://assets.clip-studio.com/ko-kr/search?user=miyage3&order=new

carcarchu

Reimena Yee did an interesting thread on the visual language used in comics https://twitter.com/reimenayee/status/1263755464853995521(edited)

sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead)

yess I was hoping someone would put that up here!!! such a good resource

that reminded me of the 22 panels that always work, something I've been trying to utilize more when I get stuck working: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/22-panels-that-always-work-wally-woods-legendary-productivity-hack/

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

It's so reliable, last year I was able to recreate the whole thing using only pre-existing panels from Leif & Thorn. (Then added another row because there were a few other shots I keep coming back to...) https://leifandthorn.com/comic/erin-ptahs-29-panels-that-always-work/

(Note, there's a horizontal scrollbar under the image, since I uploaded the big version.)

DaeofthePast

found this tutorial/tips on drawing scars that I found useful https://jetfeather.tumblr.com/post/163383759536/i-have-a-hard-time-drawing-scars-how-do-you-do

carcarchu

For those who suffer from pain while drawing: https://twitter.com/lost_paw/status/1271540123688210433

Evil_Chippy (My Hero!)

https://twitter.com/Darchala/status/1272257378881175552?s=20

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

@Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§ Here's the brush pack. The one I used is called "Pensona": https://www.deviantart.com/theinkyway/art/Manga-Studio-5-Clip-Studio-Paint-Brush-Pack-619455926

carcarchu

How to draw a lot of books https://twitter.com/yoshida_seiji/status/1200432951671939073

carcarchu

Mentorship directory for this interested in that kind of thing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vfcr_F0utixw7D-rsbUoId1kwU2Ee_c_jXy2r5df-Jc/edit?usp=sharing

shadowhood {SunnyxRain}

https://www.lackadaisy.com/exhibit.php?exhibitid=333 A fun tutorial on drawing expressions

carcarchu

A really comprehensive look into the panel border tool in clip https://professorfaf.tumblr.com/post/178927411355/comic-paneling-tools-in-clip-studio-paint Great for beginners but even if you're already acquainted with them it's helpful for finding out things you may not have even realized

Krispy §[Ghost Junk Sickness]§

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED289uthfNQ&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1ka0j6gwtFcj5aXS8wIj-zpgwaYiI2ncP-g4Tn6hL0h4VFa-rKn6MM_1Q this is my old illustration instructor who did a tutorial on watercolour if anyone was interested in the medium! her stuff is so vibrant and solid, and i was so happy to have her as my old prof!

CoppertheCarutor

Light bounce! https://twitter.com/KikiDoodleTweet/status/1276565894051753984?s=19

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/Ghadaaax/status/1277158331761807360 helpful tips!

cAPSLOCK (Tailslide)

Colorist K Michael Russell has been streaming nightly as he colors pages from comics he's working on, while giving tips and insight into his thought process: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCps08eOJfFRm00TE5LStIIg

carcarchu

Advice on how to utilize speedlines https://youtu.be/Y_3Rbjn_0r0

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

I just have to plug this amazing program here: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/ It's basically a replacement program for Adobe inDesign, but waaay cheaper. If you're like me and have sworn off Adobe, I highly recommend it. I've been messing with it all day to begin setting up my first volume for print, and I love it so far, especially after trying other budget publishing softwares. Can't recommend it enough.

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

hii! https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m8yv10gevqv2x5s/AACVoWTvK-B7qB1yRGUZadB5a?dl=0 Here is a little gallery of fat bodies!

carcarchu

world building tool thing https://www.worldanvil.com/artist i haven't tried it out yet but it looks interesting!

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/soteikat/status/1285036231592558592 takie made some free to use comic resources!

carcarchu

https://twitter.com/aeipathea/status/1285048061518061569

carcarchu

it is a website that shares dimensions for things. Helpful for referencing proportions https://www.dimensions.com/(edited)

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

I don't necessarily agreed with everything they said, but it's still a good video, and I definitely agree with many of the points they brought up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZQKeHnKK90

Especically the "stop drawing _" advice

I dealt with that a lot in school

[nedmallory]

Weird question but do you recommend a chrome book for like studying and work like that bc I’ve heard they can be slow

Hey, not weird at all! I just got mine mid March, but I haven’t noticed it being slow at all! My laptop completely died on me during midterm season and I had a ton of papers and online exams to do, so my plan was to just use this in the meantime and return it to best buy as soon as my work was done and then I could buy an actual laptop. I obviously decided to keep it. I would recommend using a Chromebook for schooling, but only if it’s not going to be your primary device at home like it is mine (if you spend a ton of time on it, anyway)

First off, before I go into pros and cons (no false sense of hope here… under the cut I’ll tell you everything I love about it and everything I hate or get annoyed at), I should mention I’m using the Samsung Chromebook Plus 

All in all, I LOVE my chromebook. It’s got its flaws, but most of them have easy fixes. I hope this full length article helps you decide what to do! If your main concern is getting you through school/work, I say go for it! 

8/10 would recommend! I’d love to say 10/10, but there are enough flaws that I can’t in good conscience tell you to go get yourself a chromebook knowing it does some real stupid stuff.

Pros:

lightweight - seriously, I spent all day on campus carrying my Dell around in my bookbag and I’ve never been one to have back problems but carrying it around all day hurt. Sometimes I’d literally just abandon my bookbag (with my laptop in it) in the hall in one of the academic buildings while I went to find something to eat all the way across campus. Like, seriously. According to google the UCF campus is 1415 acres. I don’t even feel weight from my Chromebook while I’m walking campus with it in my bag.

Convenience - It’s essentially half laptop, half tablet. You’re getting the best of both worlds. Google play store (so you can play games and use the device as an e-reader) but you also get the internet at full capacity rather than the dullness of a mobile browser.

Stylus apps - This stylus was a lifesaver for me last semester. I had college algebra last semester, and with math I’m always wasting a ton of paper, so I bought a whiteboard I could carry around with me but it took up too much space at the desks in classrooms. With a Chromebook, Google Keep (note taking app) is built in. when I didn’t feel like wasting space (and dropping my calculator, pen, eraser, markers, board) I could just pull up my stylus apps on half my screen and my math modules on the other half.

Also, have you seen my newer editing attempts? Working with just my finger on this device was already pretty good, compared to on my phone. But using the stylus helped me to get a clearer view of everything I was erasing and more wiggle control

Quick boot up time - In the manual, it claims that the chromebook boots up in 10 seconds. I’ve found that it takes about half that time to start up

2 in one - it does have 360 mode, so you don’t have to use it as a laptop all the time. In tablet mode, you get all the essential uses you get in laptop mode (except the ability to split the screen) plus you can use emojis on the touchscreen keyboard that pops up

Apple Music - On my samsung tablet, I can’t access apple music (the app shows up, but I can’t download it). On chromebook, I can. No itunes though, which is a bummer, but I don’t really need it.

Easy streaming - Watching Netflix/Hulu is such a breeze. I haven’t experienced any buffering issues like i constantly did with my last laptop

Amazing touchscreen - With my Dell laptop (which, again, gave out on me) my touch screen often had meltdowns or prevented my touchpad from working. Seeing as how Samsung has essential experience in touchscreen development, I’m not shocked that I’ve never had an issue with this touchscreen

Have trouble remembering urls? no more - Built into the computer, you have what appear to be google (and other brand) apps, but they’re actually shortcuts that take you directly to their respectful websites. Google drive (which is also built in through the files app), Lookout, Google Maps, Weather Channel, etc. I don’t use them, but it’s such a great gesture.

Memory - I use a lot of space and I haven’t even begun to run out yet! There’s also a slot for external memory (an SD card like what you’d insert into your phone something I wish Apple would do instead of making me pay for more storage every month. Unfortunately for me, this doesn’t work for apps. It’s only so that you have another storage method for your files. After my previous laptop died I lost all my running club pics, so with this chromebook, I have the option to just go ahead and save them directly to my SD card so that doesn’t happen again. It’s kind of like using a flash drive for safe keeping except, ya know, it’s not a flash drive replacement.

It’s made to fit YOU - If you don’t want someone to get into your files, they can’t. You sign in with your google account, but you CAN create additional user accounts (which includes a guest account)

Resetting the computer is easy! - You can’t go wrong. Your options are

restore default settings

COMPLETELY wipe the computer of all info (the option you’d choose if you wanted the get rid of the computer, so it’s essentially… factory reset)

Virus control - While there’s no harm in buying yourself an antivirus program, you don’t necessarily need it with Chromebook because google’s actively fighting off viruses for you. I started out using antivirus programs before I realized I didn’t need it. I haven’t had any issues at all with the security of my computer, with or without any kind of protection

Cons

Limited keys - You have to make sure you remember key combinations to perform certain tasks. For example, at first I thought I couldn’t get caps lock on this computer. To do that, it’s alt+search key. scroll to the top of the page? alt+ctrl+up arrow. screenshot in laptop mode? still can’t remember which symbol matches up with that one.

Ctrl Alt…. What? - You don’t have control alt delete anymore. The task manager apparently can only be accessed through settings, which if your chromebook freaks out on you either wait for it to settle down or shut it down are your only two options. Which brings us to con #3.

Freaking out - Lately I’ve been noticing that if I have too many apps open at once, my chromebook will stop funtioning properly for a couple minutes and it’ll do one of two things

shut all my apps down without warning

system reboot

Google Print - It wants to hijack your printer, but I refuse to give google access to store info from my printer. I have my Canon hooked up to my chromebook, but I won’t allow google access to it. They’re basically asking to save the info of everything you print to their servers and your printer will only be available for devices you allow access to your google print account (can’t be set up from chromebook anyway).

USB C ports - Okay admittedly I do like these ports, It serves as the charging port, so you can charge the computer on either side. You can also use it as a normal USB port so long as you find devices with the usb c tip BUT this means you need to buy an adapter if you want to use HDMI or a flash drive/other devices that use usb 2.0/3.0 ports

Speaker location - They’re on the bottom, so as long as you’re not covering them up, your audio should be pretty decent

Google Chrome - What I LOVED about using Chrome on actual laptops was that you could have several different user profiles under the same google email on your browser. I had 2. One for my personal multi fandom tumblr, and the other for my marrish tumblr accounts. That way I could just switch windows to change tumblr accounts. You can’t do that on Chromebook. You’d need to create different accounts for your log in screen… which… is it really worth creating new emails? (says the girl who creates a new email everytime she wants to get a new free trial) Now my only option is to use 3 different devices for different tumblr accounts (I just created a choices safe main blog so I can actually find choices posts without doing a ton of searching, so I need an extra layer now)

Microsoft Office/One Drive - Who’s that? We don’t like her apparently. Seriously. You can’t have microsoft office, because all downloads come from the play store. If you like the mobile version of Word, congrats! This system is a winner for you! If not, you can always use the online version on Outlook’s website if you use that. Don’t even THINK about trying to download the one drive app. Seriously, it doesn’t work on Chromebook. I’ve been trying to sign into it since I first bought this laptop. Only when I looked at the horrible reviews last week did I realize I’d NEVER be able to log into the app.

Also streaming - There’s this god awful sound that sometimes plays when streaming on the CBS website. It usually isn’t there, but I gave up on watching SWAT (sorry shemar and criminal minds, I still love you) because I never know if this’ll be the moment when that screeching will begin. It only happens on the CBS website though (while it’s hooked up to my tv)

Ooh speaking of hooking up to my tv - HDMI sucks. that’s all. I hate the border that surrounds the chromebook’s visual. And if you’re watching videos that already aren’t full screen? Good luck streaming comfortably.

Digital Textbook app used for UCF - Okay so we use Yuzu for digital textbooks at my uni and I can’t figure out how to get the app to let me in. Pretty sure that’s the app’s fault though. You have to sign in through a mobile browser to use the app, but the chromebook uses a full capacity desktop browser so I CANT log into the app. I have to use the online version if I take my chromebook to school with me instead of my actual tablet. So whether or not this is the chromebook’s fault is a bit iffy.

Here are some photos for proof if you need to see what you’d be signing up for!

Nobody can….

Instead of a “start” menu… we have a search menu. The top bar shows your most recently used apps. 

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

100 Years review

Today I have a very special review, a review no one could have ever seen coming. You could even say that this review is ahead of its time… this is a review of a movie that, technically, should not be out for another hundred years. I am, of course, talking about the Robert Rodriguez film that is written by and stars John Malkovich, 100 Years. It is a film made with the help of Louis XIII Cognac, and the film’s creation was inspired by the hundred years it takes to make a bottle of said cognac. The film was locked in a vault and kept behind bulletproof glass, and said vault would only open on the day of the film’s premier in 2115. Very few alive could ever hope to see this film…

UNTIL TODAY!

You see, an anonymous leaker who was part of the filmmaking process uploaded the film to a file sharing website, and after watching it, I simply have to give my opinion on this movie. 100 years from now people will look back at this review and say “Oh man, Michael Ford totally called this. Why didn’t we listen to him?” And my descendant who will be running this blog and posting movie reviews, or maybe it will still be me as a supercomputer cyborg uploading movie reviews via my mind, will laugh. A link to the film will be provided at the end, but I may have to delete the link in the near future.

The plot is actually hinted at in the teaser trailers, which shows three very different futures that could come about, from a utopian society to a dystopian wasteland. The plot is very hard to explain without seeing it for yourself, but it concerns three separate timelines and the main character, played by John Malkovich, and his attempts to unify the timeline to create an entirely perfect world. It’s sort of like Southland Tales, but it makes marginally more sense. Can Malkovich do it, or is he going to end up destroying the universe?

Now, I have to say that Robert Rodriguez can be a good director when he sets his mind to it, and he mas made tons of great films, such as the Machete and Spy Kids movies and Desperado and Sin City. Those films all had unique visual styles, you could easily identify those films… this one though, ooh boy. I think it was pretty ambitious to try so many different kinds of styles, but I think it makes the film tonally all over the place. The use of Smell-O-Vision in particular is pretty egregious, as I did not have the scratch and sniff cards they’ll surely hand out at the theaters when this comes out, robbing me of the experience. The flash animation they used for some of the 2nd future sequences was also pretty awkward, and it seems for that section they got the audio director for Johnny Test in, because every single movement is followed by a whipcrack, including John Malkovich’s flopping penis. Oh yes, we’ll get to that shortly. Also, I have to say that the jungle sequence was rather lackluster, especially since all the monkeys in it were stock CGI images. Still though, there were SOME good sequences with good visual style. I think it was a rather bold and artsy move to have the end credits play over a black and white unsimulated bukkake involving the film’s entire cast and crew nutting all over the lead actress, who plays John Malkovich’s love interest (I’m leaving the name anonymous, if you want to know who it is, I will link the movie file at the end, but I’m sure this actress who has starred in such films as The Hunger Games and X-Men: First Class would not like this information getting out in her lifetime). I also particularly liked the scene which was animated like a comic book where John Malkovich used his prehensile armpit hair he got from a genetic modification serum to strangle a mutant camel, which was shot much like it was in comic book panels; this worked a lot better than it did in Ang Lee’s Hulk movie.

Still though, Malkovich’s performance is rather unconventional, to say the least. The fact he wrote his character to have a thirteen inch penis is rather telling of what the character will be like, and sadly, he remains pantsless for much of the movie. I believe this may be an homage to Marlon Brando refusing to wear pants on the set of Apocalypse Now… or was it The Godfather? Honestly, I’d believe it if someone told me Brando NEVER wore pants on set. Seems like something he’d do. Anyway, even if it is an homage, it is very odd and oblique one, and it does nothing to change the fact that John Malkovich really needs to do some manscaping. Guy has more bush than the White House in the early 2000s. I guess his character is okay and heroic, and Malkovich does a decent job, but his bizarre writing is really hard to describe. It’s like if David Lynch wrote Southland Tales after ingesting a dozen pixie sticks. It’s just… awkward.

The amount of camel-riding scenes is also absurd. There are at least twenty scenes in which characters ride camels, including a rather egregious scene where they ride camels through several movies, including Troll 2, Gigli, and Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. This last one is the only one portrayed in a positive light, and it even features a cameo from a CGI hologram tapdancing Ricardo Montalban, which I found exceedingly tasteless and rather jarring. The appearance of a hologram William Shatner to beat down the hologram Montalban while reciting the entire script of the second Star Trek film in reverse on fast forward was also rather unsettling. Though perhaps nothing is as unsettling as the villain of the film: a giant plastic statue of Iggy Azalea that randomly quotes passages of scripture with the words out of order and who farts dolphins. Her goal is to flood the universe with poorly rendered pictures of bagels, overthrow the government of every nation on Earth, and end all life as we know it. Much like the real life Azalea, this villain has no idea what she’s doing half the time, and mostly exists to look disturbing.

Really, I could go on forever, but I won’t. This film is an utterly, hilariously incoherent mess. I frankly don’t understand why Rodriguez and Malkovich thought this was a good film to seal away for future generations; we’re already leaving the world in a shitty enough state for the future, do we really need to leave behind our shitty movies too? This film is crap, but there are moments of brilliance and there is a tacky, trashy hilarity to it. Really, I recommend going to this link and watching it for yourself; I guarantee you’ll enjoy yourself at least a little.

[reporthers]

Q&A: Sruthi Pinnamaneni of Reply All

Sruthi Pinnamaneni invited me into her home in Brooklyn almost a year ago for this interview. At that time, I had been toying with the idea of a ReportHers podcast but didn’t have many audio skills to speak of back then. I recorded the interview and then spent the next year paralyzed, too afraid to post it. I was convinced that it sounded terrible and it was all my fault. There’s mic handling noise, a room echo and some terrible plosives. I cringe listening to it. And I edited it back then in Premiere Pro, a video editing program, because that’s all I had access to at the time.

Anyway, it turns out that comparing yourself to someone as talented as Sruthi is a bad idea. Instead, you should aspire to make work like hers. Aspiring leaves space to learn and make mistakes.

So, here is the interview, recorded at Sruthi’s kitchen bar. I had to edit it in Pro Tools as one combined track because I no longer have access to Premiere Pro, and I lost some of the original files in a shift to a new computer (ugh). But let’s maybe let the content overshadow the audio quality. Sruthi’s was a pretty interesting interview.

—

ReportHers: What was the first story that you were like, ‘This is an interesting scene. I want to record it.’

Sruthi Pinnamaneni: I was studying broadcast journalism at Columbia, which means TV news and documentary stuff. I found out about this girl, she was in high school up in Harlem and she was a dancer. People were talking about how she was doing this incredible African dance stuff and performing. She was deaf and so I wanted to do a story about her. Then I met her teacher and really the story became about the relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher was this incredibly forceful, passionate woman who really believed in this girl and there were moments when I just spent time with them where you were like, ‘Ooh. Is she going a little too far? She’s pretty strict with her.’ But at the same time maybe that’s what the girl needed.

I just shot tons of footage with them. I would just follow them around in class, outside of class and just keep shooting. That was, for me, the first time I felt a sense of, when you get to melt into the wall and you’re really just a part of the scene and just observing the people that you’re filming and trying to understand their relationship and trying to understand kind of the larger story of what was going on. I feel like that’s the first time I had that addictive feeling that you get.

RH: How many stories are you working on at once and how do you stay present in multiple stories over time?

SP: It’s hard because it’s simultaneously a gift and also a punishment to be able to work on a story as long as you need to. Because everybody really just wants to keep working on a story and never to finish it, especially me. So generally I’m working on at least two stories that are bigger, longer-term stories that I’m reporting and then a couple of stories that I’m helping somebody else produce, so either an outside reporter or somebody at Reply All, maybe Alex or PJ.

There’s one story that we finish a couple months ago that I started working on when like the first day I started at Reply All. It was a PJ story and it was funny because like it took two years to complete and that entire time I’d been working on other things, and you always knew that there was a story at the back of your brain that you’re like, I really want to finish that story. But some things just take time. The thing we’ve learned is to let stories sit for a while. So you work on something intensely, or I work on something intensely for a few weeks and then I kind of give it a break and then I work on it again. Generally once a story has been put on our schedule, like we know this is the day that we want to put this out, then I will turn all my attention to that.

It’s hard for me to really finish two stories at the same time so generally in the last month I’m one hundred percent focused on one thing and just trying to get all the pieces together.

RH: How long on average would you say you work on a story?

SP: I don’t have an average. There are stories that I’m really proud of that I reported that I finished in ten days. And then there’s a couple stories that I’ve produced with PJ or Alex where we’ll record it on Thursday one week and then it’s out the following Wednesday. Those are great because somehow you know when you start a story there’s a certain amount of energy and curiosity you have and to finish making the story in a compressed amount of time, you keep that energy. Whereas when you hold on to a story for a long time, often you really start to doubt it. You wonder, what’s the story? I don’t remember. Is this really a thing? You kind of you lose a lot of the original surprise So that’s been the challenge with the stories we’ve sat on here for a while.

The average, I have everything from two years, to one year, to like five days, so the average is really, I have no idea.

RH: Can you talk about the evolution of the show in the couple years that it’s been at Gimlet?

SP: I think the technology angle was always a bit of a skinny tether, you know. For me what a Reply All story is, it really comes down to a certain aesthetic, like a certain feel. It’s a certain looseness that still takes a lot of work to create. It’s never been the technology angle. I think different people at Reply All feel more or less strongly about the tech stuff. We are about to do stories where if we’re really just interested in the thing then well we’re going to do it. And I think that will always upset certain people, but I think a lot of our audience started to recognize that there’s more to Reply All than our so-called technology angle.

I’m perfectly happy to be in the tech bucket. I feel like that’s a nice place to be. There’s tons of great stories in there but I feel like we’ve all grown as journalists in the last few years and if there’s something that we’re really interested in then we’re not going to let that hold us back.

RH: The show to me feels more like it’s a show about being human, which I think is why it’s so compelling

SP: There’s a feeling that you have when you’re doing mindless surfing, like falling into a rabbit hole on the Internet, where you start off with one question and then it takes you to a different question, which pulls you into a totally different question. And it’s this really delicious feeling of falling. I think that’s really what we want the show to be. You can say it’s about the Internet but really we want it to be the feeling of the Internet.

RH: That makes me think of the piece you did about the woman, Hope, who had a medical mystery and the way you reported out that story, it wasn’t like you did all this reporting and then you structured the story with a beginning middle and end. You brought us along with the phone call with Jill, was it? At the New York Times.

SP: Lisa, Lisa Sanders.

RH: Right, Lisa Sanders. We were kind of along with you for the reporting. Can you talk a little bit about that story and how was part of the decision making process of how you would tell the story?

SP: So that one was such a joy to produce, also because that was one of the few that took me ten days from beginning to end. And it started when I’d seen this news article about this website called CrowdMed. In the news article they said this website has an 80 percent rate of success diagnosing people who’ve had no luck through the medical establishment. I found that statistic to be kind of mind blowing to the point where I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure, like, is that real? What does that actually mean to diagnose somebody who hasn’t been diagnosed by these other more formal means? So I reached out to the company. I looked at a few cases that they had in their solved column and I got the contact information for this woman, Hope.

I said to her right off the bat, I don’t know if this story’s going to work. I just want to hear what happened to you. We’ll see, no promises. I didn’t do a pre-interview. I don’t usually do pre-interviews. I just called her up. It was it was such a janky connection. I think I called her on Skype and made her record herself using her iPhone. She was just a beautiful storyteller, one of these people that it took a little bit of wrangling right at the top just to make sure she told the story in a linear way. Most people, but especially people have had long-running medical issues, they tend to really skip through facts because they’re used to abbreviating everything. So she was like, ‘Yes, it started on this day and I had this problem, that problem.’ And I was like, ‘No, slow down. I just want to feel everything that you felt as it happened to you.’ So I had to kind of hold her back a few times. But once she got that rhythm she really just stuck to it. I was riveted. I was like, ‘Go on. What next?’

RH: This was all in the first phone call?

SP: Oh yea. First phone call. The entire time I was like, I don’t know what she’s recording. I don’t know if her phone is dead. I was so petrified because the Skype line was unusable. It was way too crackly and the whole time I’m like, she’s going to send me the recording and it’s going to be just shit and you’ll never get this again. It only happens the first time. So we talked for three and a half hours like that. I kept making her save the conversation on her phone. It was just this heartbreaking story and she was just this amazing, wonderful person. She told it the way you hear it [on the episode].

The way she told the story was, she had this thing and then nobody could figure it out and then she went to CrowdMed and she got this answer and her problems seem to have gone away. So I was like, oh great. Story’s done, with the beginning, the middle and the end. There’s some writing that needs to be done just to patch it all together. But then – I can’t remember why. Why did I call Lisa Sanders? Why did I email Lisa Sanders? Oh right. I was trying to understand the biology of the thing. So I went to the medical science library in New York and I was like looking at different books about muscles and conditions. I had emailed Lisa Sanders just saying, ‘Hey, here’s a story. I’m curious what you think.’ She wrote back this kind of emergency e-mail saying, ‘Hey, this could be something very serious that was missed.’ So I asked Hope to get this test and immediately my whole story, which had this very convenient ending, was just thrown up into the air.

I had a moment where I went to, I think, Tim Howard who is our executive producer, and said I don’t think the story is done. Like, I don’t think we should air it. I don’t even know what it is anymore. And he loved it. He loved that there was confusion and doubt. Any time where most people would kill stories because they seem unresolved, Tim has this wonderful gift where he just leans into discomfort. And he’s like, ‘Great. You thought you had an ending and now you don’t. That just makes the story so much more interesting.’ And so we interviewed Lisa with Hope and then we basically ended with Lisa telling her to go and get this test. And then thankfully it turned out – we did an update on the story – and it turned out that she did not have the thing that Lisa was worried about. All is well.

RH: So is that uncertainty with how stories are turning out something that you have always been somewhat comfortable with, to just have faith in the process? Or is that something you’ve developed at Gimlet?

SP: I’ve always been really stubborn. I think most people who work with me on stories, even before I came to Gimlet will say that I tend to do a lot of interviews. I tend to keep pushing at things. If there’s somebody who doesn’t want to talk to me, I tend to keep trying and emailing them or calling or showing up, and say, ‘Hey, are you sure? Here’s a good reason to talk to me.’ So I think all of that has been put to good use at Gimlet. Whereas before, maybe it was a lot of spinning wheels, here stories can go in directions that you just didn’t expect and that is all for the best.

I think it’s very uncomfortable to be a reporter and think you have a certain ending and at the last minute have the bottom fall out from underneath you. But are Reply All, at least I feel like I have the support with the whole team where they can really step in and help me find a way to turn that non-ending into an ending. Or find ways to articulate why that makes a story a better story.

RH: If you don’t know how a story is ending, or for this example where you thought you had an ending and it completely changed, how are you deciding how to structure these things?

SP: We often tell stories in a pretty linear way. This is the way we discovered it, this is how the story moved on, and this is the point at which it ended. So as long as you keep that reporter perspective I think it’s pretty straightforward. An example is the boy in photo story, the one that I worked on with PJ for two years. We had certain questions and confusions at the very beginning of that story and it was important to tell it so that the listeners were always with us at that point in time. That, I think, buys you a lot at the end because they’re with you at the moment where it ended for you. You don’t have to make any big conclusions. It’s like, if they’re if they’re in your head at that moment, they understand the thing that you see. You don’t have to say, ‘This is a story about blah blah blah.’

RH: You’re not artificially being like, ‘This is the bow I want to put on it.’

SP: Yeah, exactly. The reporting is the story. The challenge is then to not be so meta about the thing. We have to be really careful in stories. How much are we talking about, I mean the boy in photo [story] is a great example where a huge part of the story was PJ’s discomfort in following this random person from the Internet who really just wanted to be left alone. And having me and Tim kind of push him into following him. But you can’t talk about that too much because then it’s a story about a story. I hope we are humble enough to know that just talking about what we’re feeling at any given moment does not a story make. You can use that for a second but then it has to quickly move on.

RH: This is sort of a little bit of a technical question. If you were out in the field, how would you create a little studio if you had to?

SP: I’ve done this before Reply All. I have a very thick duvet, which every radio producer should own, and I sat in my closet and I would record all my narration. As a freelancer without access to a studio, that’s how I did it. It was totally fine. Now I just record interviews out in the field but I’ve never had to record narration outside. I could do it. I could stick to my blanket method. The problem is you have to make sure – especially when you’re doing a long episode, most of the stories I’ve done are over thirty minutes that’s a lot of tracking – and so you have to make sure it all matches in terms of sound. Tracking an 8-minute story is super easy under the blanket. Thirty minutes, you probably might want to get one studio and stick to that one studio.

RH: What was your set up under the blanket?

SP: I had to have a headlamp so I could see my script if it wasn’t on my computer. Oh I didn’t used to have my computer because it would make an annoying fan noise so I’d print out my script to get a headlamp, sit under my duvet, sweat profusely. So I’d have to come out for air every now and then and just do it. I would do it differently, honestly, now if I had to do it. It’s so helpful to have a friend track you. One of the things at Reply All, we almost have another producer in the room. So they can tell you like, ‘Hey, do it again,’ or ‘More conversationally,’ or like ‘Close the computer and just tell me what you want to say.’ So if you want that level of support then get a bigger duvet or maybe even phone in a friend so they can tell you how you sound.

RH: Do you mean get a bigger duvet so your friend can be under it with you?

SP: I know. It’s a ridiculous idea. You know Meghan Tan from the Millennial [podcast]? She has a system, which I think is pretty brilliant, where she has a photo of her best friend with a martini glass, I believe, and she sticks it in the room in the closet where she records. And so when she’s tracking she’s like talking to her friends

RH: I think that’s all the questions that I have. Thank you so, so much for your time I appreciate it so much.

SP: Thank you.

[p3ac3l0v3mus1c]

“How many times are you going to put yourself through this?” “I knew someone that went through years of treatments and when they stopped trying it finally happened.” “When is enough enough?” “Why spend so much money to have a kid when you can adopt one?” “We care more about you and your health than a baby.” “God has a plan.” “You just have to stay positive.” “It will happen when it happens.” “At least you have your health. There are worse things in life.” They say that infertility is common, that so many women go through this process just like me, so you’d think that the sensitivity in people’s comments would have adjusted accordingly. I cannot be the only woman tired of hearing these comments constantly. We see mantras and inspirational quotes all the time about never giving up on something you want, but women are told daily by friends and family to give up on their dreams of having a baby. We are told daily not to compare apples to oranges, and yet we are told to trust someone blindly because someone they knew once had a different experience. It’s crazy to me how many people think they know any better than a doctor which has studied this field for years. Adoption. How is that always everyone’s answer for everything? I’m not at all saying that it’s not a good option, but it isn’t for everyone. They’ve made adoption so expensive and tedious to accomplish, sometimes it is just as expensive, if not more so than these treatments to have our own child. But not only that, look at all these people offering up adoption as they post selfies with their babies, and they ooh and awe over how much their child looks like them and acts like them. Does it make women that experience infertility so horrible for wanting that? What, because we can’t have our own how dare we do not jump at raising a child that may grow up to long more for their biological parent than us? Isn’t that terrifying? What about the horror stories we hear about parents who are set to adopt and fall in love with this child, but another biological family member comes to claim the child? And can I say I am so sick of people telling me they worry more about my health than a baby? Seriously, do you think a doctor would allow me to keep going if they felt my health was in danger? If I stop now, my mental health would be so far into shambles; it may be better that I keep trying because at least then I know I haven’t given up. This journey sucks, and anyone going through the process will obviously have good days and bad days. We will have days when we want to scream and cry, and there will be days that we are positive and anxious. It’s silly to think anytime there is a bad day we should be told to quit or worse, “you can’t be negative.” That is unrealistic. Everyone has a bad day, and if you don’t allow us those emotions, we will explode. I know firsthand that if you don’t let yourself cry sometimes, you’ll find yourself screaming in the kitchen over two tablespoons of parsley.

So that’s my rant, let’s go back and start this story from the beginning. It’s June 2016, I am 25 years old, been married about eight months and I’m laying in a hospital bed being told I am having yet another miscarriage. At this point in my life, I am young, thinish and relatively healthy but yet here I am looking at my sixth miscarriage. The nurse in the emergency room tells me there is no reason someone my age should be having this much trouble getting pregnant and tells me to reach out to my OB/GYN. So I schedule an appointment to get everything checked out. My husband and I go to the doctor, later that month, and get all kinds of tests done. He has to fill a cup, and I have to give a bunch of blood and have a pelvic exam. Once it’s all said and done, I am basically told I am too fat to carry a child because of my family’s history with diabetes but no worries, my husband is “as fertile as they come.” So I think to myself, “no big deal! I can lose weight, that’s easy enough.” So I do, in just five months I drop nearly 60 pounds (mainly by cutting out the multiple liters of mountain dew I was drinking daily). I feel great, and I am totally confident that we will have a baby now because that was my only issue…or so we thought. So we go back to the doctor, and she’s impressed by how much weight I have dropped. She wants to start me on some hormones, and a timed intercourse schedule to ensure we get the results we are hoping for. Spoiler alert, the medications she put me on cause weight gain, and I put on a ton of weight pretty quickly. So now I am eating right, and working out constantly but these medications just continue to cause me to “balloon up” as someone so eloquently pointed out to me and naturally this is causing me a lot of stress. But we proceed forward with the medications, and we get pregnant! Yes, we went in for our first beta test to check our HCG levels and were told we were pregnant! But the fun part about HCG levels?

The doctor wants to see them double every 48 hours, so two days later we go back, and sure enough, they had plummeted. Now all of a sudden they’re telling us we are going to miscarry again. We go through the whole process multiple times over a year with the same result every time. It starts putting a serious strain on our marriage, and my mental health. Naturally, everyone at this point is telling us it isn’t worth trying anymore but giving up was not an option for us. So I started doing some serious research, and come to find the treatment we’ve tried over and over again is not recommended more than two to three times at most. Angered by this information, I needed a second opinion, and I began researching fertility clinics in the area.

It’s now August of 2017, and I’ve stumbled across Spring Creek Fertility. On their website, it had mentioned a doctor referral, but I was dead set on seeing them, so I sent them an email explaining the last couple of years and requesting an appointment. They agreed to see me, and we set up my first appointment. I was filled with hope once more. After my first appointment, we ran all kinds of tests to see what was going on. Here starts the laundry list of problems, none of which was my weight. We were told I had a deficiency in all kinds of important vitamins and methyl folate. Easy enough, take a few different vitamins and swap out some of the failed hormones for different prescriptions, we were filled with excitement and all but planned for a baby because surely with all of these adjustments we were going to have our baby finally. December of 2017 we started our first intrauterine insemination (IUI) cycle. With this cycle we were instructed to take a shot of ovidril in my stomach, it was the first time we had to do our own injection with the fertility treatments.

I was so nervous, but I remember thinking the shot would make it a sure thing so I took a picture of the shot beforehand and sent it to my closest friends with the caption, “finally the medication that will change my life.” Boy was I naïve. Just days before Christmas we went in for our first beta test. I took the whole day off of work so I wouldn’t miss the phone call with results. I took the day to pamper myself and relax. I was filled with joy! I had taken multiple pregnancy tests at home that showed a positive result, and I was just waiting for them to call and say “you’re pregnant!” I waited all day impatiently, checking my phone every few minutes and finally they called and said my numbers indicated there may have been a pregnancy, but there isn’t one now. They apologized like everyone does when they’ve just given you bad news. “I’m so sorry, do you have any questions? Okay, so sorry.” I was devastated. I couldn’t understand how it was so hard for me to get pregnant and stay pregnant. I thought the doctor said all I needed was some vitamins and a little push. What the hell?

We decided to take a break from all of the worrying and ovulation tracking; maybe time was all we needed. So from for the first seven months of 2018, we took a break. We went to parties, concerts, festivals, the ocean; you name it. We just needed to take a break from devastation, but by May I was itching to try again. I felt like we were running out of time because I wasn’t getting any younger and my health wasn’t getting any better.  I called Spring Creek and asked what our next steps would be. They suggested in vitro fertilization (IVF) as our next steps. After some research, this seemed to have the highest success rate and be the most expensive option. I called our insurance to get all the information, and we began saving and looking at loan options. Come July we had a few thousand dollars’ worth of meds and a page long schedule of appointments. But like before, our hope was restored, and we were confident that this would be it. I found an IVF support group on Facebook and read so many success stories of first time IVF patients. SURELY THIS ONE WAS IT. We followed every guideline to a T. Like clockwork every day we’d drop everything to take shots and monitor or levels closely to make sure we got everything right. I had to drive down to Dayton three times a week for nearly a month, but it would all be worth it when I finally held my baby. Every ultrasound and blood work came back great; we were filled with optimism.

We had our egg retrieval; they retrieved 20 eggs! Later that evening the doctor called and said 12 of the 20 eggs fertilized, and while we felt a little uneasy about losing eight eggs, we figured 12 was still great. Five days later, the doctor called and said that only three of the 12 eggs fertilized made it to blastocyst. Essentially this means of the 20 eggs they retrieved, only three of them became usable embryos. Naturally, I was terrified by this news. Out of 20 eggs, only three of them made viable embryos? Would the three that survived even be good? We did everything right, and only three made it. But, everyone in the world reminded me, “it only takes one.”

Here comes August of 2018. Transfer month. Now starts more meds, more injections, more appointments, definitely more stress. But wait! You can’t stress, how dare you stress? Don’t you know stress won’t help anything? Sure I do. But tell me how anyone in the history of the world does not feel any amount of stress while spending their life savings on a medical treatment which makes their hormones go haywire, makes them feel sick and tired, and only have a success rate of like 40%? So, “don’t stress,” is a nice sentiment but it helps no one. If anything it just pissed me off and added to my stress. Google is a bitch, by the way. For the love of God, stay off of Google by any means necessary, it will do nothing but intensify the stress and anxiety of this whole process. But ‪August 29th‬ finally came, and we headed to Spring Creek to transfer our embryo. Dr. Groll told us everything looked perfect and went perfectly and it was perfect. We were so thrilled. We were officially pregnant until proven otherwise (PUPO).  Every day after that point every little twinge, and tingle must’ve been a symptom, or so they devil google lead us to believe. I became obsessed with peeing on home pregnancy tests starting just five days out. They were positive, so bring on the joy and excitement. You would think, after the bout with the IUI home tests that I would’ve learned, but again let’s revisit the explanation of stress and hormones.

September 10th, 2018: beta day. I took the whole day off of work, I knew from last time that I would not be able to focus on anything but my phone. I drove to Dayton to get my blood draw, and then off to Columbus I went. I stopped to visit my mom’s grave (because doesn’t all of this journey sound like so much fun without a girl’s mom?) and went to lunch with a friend. The entire time I stared at my phone. Every time it rang, I jumped. I was hoping that they’d call while I was with my friend because somehow my excitement turned to worry and I had a feeling it wouldn’t be a good phone call. But hours went by, they didn’t call, and I needed to head home. I made it about a half hour away from the support of a friend, and my phone rang. My levels were not good. It was happening again. What in the actual eff? I cried the entire way home and cried even harder when I got home. Why wasn’t anything working?! At this point, people and “friends” were literally telling me that I “signed up for anguish.” I did not sign up for anguish. I was already anguished; I signed up for hope and faith and a miracle. Why was that so hard for my “people” to support?

A week later, I went in to see Dr. Groll, and he explained what he felt went wrong. He made some adjustments to our treatments and pretty optimistically said let’s move forward for October. I felt like it was really fast, but if the doctor who I had found through research to be one of the top-ranked doctors in the country thought we should move forward then who the hell was I to question him? So we prepared to start over in October. Now, to backpedal a little bit, I mentioned earlier that I had joined a support group on Facebook. Through this group of 70,000 plus members worldwide, I found a girl going through the same part of this process AT THE SAME CLINIC and she and I were scheduled for the same day in October. This was a massive weight off of our shoulders. It was a wonderful experience to feel like I had a partner in all of this, someone who knew exactly what kind of crazy was going on in my head, stomach, and ovaries. This cycle was so much easier, every time I felt unsure or negative, I messaged her and vice versa.

October 23rd, 2018 rolled around, and I woke up so excited to meet my fertility buddy. I wasn’t even nervous about the transfer anymore. I felt like it was a good thing. Maybe staying out of my head would help. When Sean and I got to the clinic, she was there all looped up on the Xanax the clinic had prescribed us each to take. Hugs were given, pictures were taken, and stories were exchanged. Almost forgot we were there to transfer another embryo. Sean and I were called back to a room, vitals were taken, and yet again, everything went perfect. The embryologist had us laughing as we saw a “spirited” embryo dance around prior to the transfer and we left the clinic feeling overwhelmed with love, both from finally meeting our fertility partners and seeing a good looking embryo. Let the two-week wait begin. This time I made it till 8 days past the transfer before I caved and peed on a damn home pregnancy test. What was wrong with me? Again, all of my tests were positive, and I was filled with impatience and joy for my upcoming beta test.  The morning of the beta test, I drove to Dayton and waited outside the clinic for them to open. I was the first one there. I was so excited because this one would somehow be different. My partner showed up, nearly in tears. She was positive she was going to start her period, and this would be it for her. Her doubts weighed heavy on me. For her, this was her last shot. She was ten years older than me, and this was her last embryo. I ended up more concerned for her beta result than mine, and I think that actually helped me. The clinic called and I could hear the nurse smiling through the phone. “You’re pregnant! You’re definitely pregnant!” I was floored. This one took, and I knew it would. I waited and waited for my partner to message me her results, I didn’t want to exclaim my good news until I knew she was okay. Finally, I asked her, and wouldn’t you know it; she was pregnant too! It was a miracle.

That night, Sean and I actually went out to celebrate our wedding anniversary, and we were on cloud nine. I remember making sure to order a virgin daiquiri because would you look at me, I am pregnant! A few days later we both went back for another beta, and my partner messaged me that her numbers were fantastic; she was still pregnant. Clearly, we were in this together, so I danced around with excitement while waiting for my good call, but it never came. The clinic called, and the nurse started the call with, “it’s not good news. I’m so sorry.” What the hell? Why? What do I have to do? Let the tears ensue. We are now down to one. One left. “It only takes one.”

A couple weeks later I go yet again to see Dr. Groll. He again suggests we roll right into the next transfer. I don’t know. At this point, my family and three of my closest friends have repetitively told me to stop trying. “Don’t waste your last embryo.” “How many times are you going to put yourself through this?” “ why don’t you focus on the family you have and getting your weight under control?” No one believed that I could have a baby. The people I sought as my greatest support system had lost all faith in this journey. I sat at home and cried most nights, went through a lot of beer. Several nights I drank till I blacked out, and one day I went to the hospital and told the nurse that I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought of harming myself. I felt alone and defeated. But we had one stinking embryo left.

December 17th, 2018: transfer day. We went in for an operation and secretly transferred the last embryo while we were there. The most significant difference, I had lost all faith in this process. I literally felt no excitement at all because in my head I had convinced myself that everyone else was right and I just wasted my last embryo. But I followed all the rules, and I waited to test and on December 26th, 2018, the day before beta, I took the day off of work to lay at home and have a total meltdown. I at this point told some of my friends that I had transferred my last embryo and I sobbed as I told them that it was all for nothing because this one did not work. Damn hormones, I was literally hyperventilating with fluids flowing from all orifices on my face because I was so sure we spent our savings and time and hopes on a pointless journey. The next morning I drove to Dayton for my blood draw. I waited for my call, fully expecting the bad call. The clinic called and the nurse sounded very neutral. This was unusual. “Marya, your HCG was a 10.10. We consider anything over a 10 a pregnancy, so you are pregnant, but we are going to stay cautiously optimistic.” Cautiously optimistic. What in the hell does that even mean? How do you tell someone to stay optimistic but cautious when it comes to whether or not they’re going to be a parent? I told my husband that we were pregnant, but I wasn't holding my breath, but to my surprise, he was so sure this one was it. He is never sure; he is always on the defense! Maybe it felt different for him? Four days later I drive back to Dayton, and we do more blood work.  It was New Years Eve so I was busy as can be. I came home and started doing housework, successfully keeping my mind off of things. At this point some of my friends and my fertility partner is messaging me asking about my numbers, noticing how late it was I called the clinic. Did I miss the call? I got their “after hours” voicemail. I lost it. How could they close without calling me? So now I am pacing back and forth through my living room, calling the clinic over and over. Finally, they call, turns out they had closed, so they shut their phones off, but they were still calling patients with their numbers. “I’m so sorry sweetie; your number went down.” SHIT! I knew it. “Your number was 18.8.” Wait…I asked what the number was again; she said 18.8 and I explained to her that my number four days ago was 10.10. I heard papers shuffle in the background, “you’re right, but in four days it should’ve at least doubled. It doesn’t look good sweetie, but we will stay cautiously optimistic and continue meds.” Freaking cautiously optimistic. At this point I am irritated. I am bummed out by my numbers, and I decide to turn to that support group for stories of hope. I posted that I was worried about my numbers being so low and that my doctor told me to be cautiously optimistic and asked if anyone else had a similar story which ended successfully. The responses were horrifying. Multiple women commented that there was no way this would be a viable pregnancy. They told me it was a chemical and they were shocked my doctor had me continue meds. I was in tears. Sean yelled at me to get off of the group, told me what good is a support group that shoots down any desperation of hope. At this point, I am waking up every morning and peeing on a home pregnancy test. The goal is to see the test line darken every day.

So each morning I would pee in a cup, and dip my test strip and then wait for it to dry so I could tape it to my test page and compare. Every day it looked a little darker. Sean continued to proclaim his confidence in this cycle. January 2nd, 2019 I went in for more blood work. They called, my number was 31 even. It nearly doubled, and can you guess what they said? Cautiously optimistic. I was so annoyed; my number almost doubled in 48 hours! Why did we still need to be cautious? Why couldn’t they just tell me it would all be okay? But we continued on, peeing daily on the strips and praying it kept rising. January 7th, 2019, I went in for more blood work.  The clinic called and told me my number was 136. Surely a job that great means we are safe, but they said they really wanted to watch us closely and you guessed it, stay cautiously optimistic.  So we wait four more days and do more blood work, all thee meanwhile peeing on the strips and seeing that line just get darker and darker. At this point, even I am positive it will all be okay. The lines are dark as dark can be, and my number has been steadily rising. Sure enough the clinic calls and my number is 282.4 and we are ready for our first ultrasound. Now at this point, my number is low but the doctor is thinking it was just late to implant because my number lines up with about a week behind where I should be. Sean is already proclaiming that it is a boy because “he is a grower and not a show-er.” Hope is restored. We are so happy and excited to see the baby, we are literally just counting down the days at this point. I couldn’t wait to hear the heartbeat. We’ve come so far, at this point we are nearly 8 weeks pregnant. I had started seeing a bunch of ads on Facebook for a heartbeat monitor, you know because they tailor those ads to whatever you’ve been doing online and I’ve already told you that Google is the devil and I apparently have no self-control. So one of my pregnant friends and I get to talking about those apps and how they couldn’t possibly work but she tells me that her doctor recommended an app that actually does work but usually not ‪until 9-10‬ weeks. No will power remember, so I download the app and I am messing around not expecting to hear anything. I’m just sitting in my living room with my phone against my belly, listening to a whole bunch of static scream through the speakers and all of a sudden I hear a fast galloping sound. I stop moving my phone and look in surprise, the phone is registering a heartbeat. I am losing it. Now the 16th couldn’t come fast enough.

What seems like an eternity later, it’s finally the morning of our ultrasound. Sean took the day off because he did not want to miss this. We were 100% convinced we had already heard the heartbeat so we weren’t even nervous, just anxious to see our little bean. So Julie, the nurse practitioner, comes in and starts the scan. We sit silently as she looks all over the uterus with a look of concern growing on her face. I look at Sean, he is just staring at the screen intensely with a blank expression on his face. I can feel my heart beating out of my chest and I try to swallow what feels like a bowling ball. Julie stops the scan and says she needs to go grab Dr. Groll from an egg retrieval he was doing to have a look. As she walks out of the room, I look at Sean. He just sits silently and motionless. I am fighting back tears, because everything is going to be okay, maybe it’s just too early to see anything. Dr. Groll comes in and starts the ultrasound, he scans the uterus slowly. The silence in the room is deafening. After a forever long silence, Dr. Groll says, “it looks like we have the gestational sac here in the middle of the lining. I think that is the fetal pole there, but it’s kind of hard to see because we have some fluid around it. It’s measuring really small, but it might just be a little late to implant. Let’s just get another HCG and stay cautiously optimistic. We will do another ultrasound ‪next Monday‬ but we will really need to see some growth by then and we should ideally see a heartbeat by then.” Cautiously. Freaking. Optimistic. I am so sick of that phrase. Cautiously optimistic sounds like don’t get your hopes up but we know you’re going to. Later that day they call me and my HCG is 694. Still going up, what the heck baby? Why are you scaring me like this? I felt like I had no control over anything. I pretended I was not scared, because Sean didn’t look scared. Everything is fine, we are still cautiously optimistic so I am not frightened or worried. And yet, while making dinner I ripped Sean’s head off about not having two tablespoons of parsley. Parsley, a spice that mainly adds color, and I ended up sobbing for an hour over two stinking tablespoons.

Four days later, I decided to go do something for myself and get my nails done. The day before we had a blizzard, so first I must spend 40 minutes wiping my car off. Once my car is wiped off, my back is a little sore but I ignore it and get into my car to leave. My car won’t budge. So I get out and grab a shovel, I flip the shovel over and use it to kind of kick some snow off the back tires. I am not dumb enough to actually try and shovel. As I am kicking away this snow, a sharp pain starts in my left side and follows up my back. I try to stand up straight, maybe I moved funny. The pain gets worse. At this point I am now in tears and reaching for my phone to call Sean. There is no way I am making it inside. I am currently laying down in tears, hyperventilating because the pain is intense and I am confident this can’t be good for this pregnancy.  My husband tries to get me to the emergency room, but our cars are still stuck. He calls an ambulance, and now the panic is real. I have EMTs trying to give me pain meds, I’m yelling that I am an IVF patient and I don’t want meds. They keep asking how pregnant I am and I am explaining the situation, but they won’t really listen. After hours in the ER, they’ve taken urine and performed an ultrasound. The doctor comes in to tell me that I must be miscarrying because my HCG has gone down to 1039. I told her my HCG was previously only 694 so 1039 would be going up, but she says well we didn’t see anything at all on the ultrasound so you’ll need to follow up with your fertility doctor to check for an ectopic pregnancy. We were pissed. First of all, what about my back? I still couldn’t move on my own, and really if you’re concerned about an ectopic you don’t just send me home.

The next day we saw Dr. Kantitis, Dr. Groll’s partner, he wanted to do an ultrasound and check on the growth of the baby. Within seconds he found the gestational sac, and it looked bigger. He said it was still small but it definitely looked bigger. We felt relieved. We didn’t need more blood work because the hospital tested that the night before, but he said we’d check again ‪in 3 days‬. Somehow I felt like that tiny bit of growth reassured my faith that it would all be okay. We’ve now made it 8 weeks and our number is still going up, the sac got bigger, through every hurdle in 10 weeks, we prevailed. This would not be different. At this point all of our naysayers were calling the baby a little fighter, and telling us not to lose faith. January 24th, 2019, Sean was unable to get off of work, and so I went to the ultrasound alone. I told the nurse that it would be characteristic of my kid to wait till daddy can’t come to make waves. She chuckled and told me she really hoped that was the case. Dr. Karnitis walked in, followed by another nurse. She is one of my favorites, and she comes in with a supportive pat on the back before the scan begins. He starts the scan, and slowly pans across the uterus. “Oh no,” he pauses, “oh no this does not look like good news.” I am still staring at the screen, I am not going to cry. “Your husband was very interactive, that’s very good. He was very observant of the growth of our sac. I’m going to print him a picture of our sac here. It has gotten visibly smaller. The baby probably died a few days ago, but your uterus looks beautiful. I think it’s trying hard to hold on to that baby and protect it.” I made a comment at this point, but I couldn’t tell you what I said. I think I kind of blacked out. Debbie, the nurse, walked over and hugged me and told me she so sorry. Everyone is so sorry. I felt a teardrop against my face, and I prayed they didn’t see it because that would be the give away that I had stupidly gotten my hopes up, but they must’ve seen it because Dr. Karnitis reached to hand my the tissues and just kind of looked down at the floor. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Your uterus looks perfect, we got that formula right. That uterus is ready for triplets. I’m sorry, you did everything, but sometimes the embryo is just not good.” At this point I am full blown crying, and I really just want to get dressed and leave, but now I need to go do blood work. I carry the ultrasound picture of my dead baby with me to the lab to get my blood drawn. I am trying not to make eye contact with anyone because I will not allow myself to cry in front of anyone else. They cannot know that I wasn’t cautious with my optimism. HOW THE HELL DO YOU STAY CAUTIOUS WHEN YOU’VE PRAYED FOR A CHILD FOREVER? I leave the clinic, and text my husband. He says he's so sorry. Everyone is sorry. I’m tired. I just want to go sleep.

On my way home, the roads are terrible but I am driving without caution. Since I am so bad at caution. I am driving and a truck in front of me in going so slow, there is no way around and I just start screaming. Now I am crying and screaming, and I pass a cop and notice I’m definitely going over the speed limit. So I slow down, I take a breath, and I just sit in silence the rest of the way home. I thought I was driving to work, but somehow I ended up at home in the shower. I had already showered that morning, but I needed another one I suppose. I laid in the shower until the water was cold, and for some time after. When I got up, I toweled off, and walked to my bedroom. I woke up three hours later. I took another shower. Our last embryo was dead inside of me. I felt dead inside of me. I don’t want to face anyone. I still don’t. Because when someone hears that I am mourning the loss of a child, yes even at 10 weeks pregnant it is a loss of a child, the questions and opinions will start. “How many times are you going to put yourself through this?” “I knew someone that went through years of treatments and when they stopped trying it finally happened.” “When is enough enough?” “Why spend so much money to have a kid when you can adopt one?” “We care more about you and your health than a baby.” “God has a plan.” “You just have to stay positive.” “It will happen when it happens.” “At least you have your health. There are worse things in life.” It was another 6 days before they were ready to schedule the d&c, but the day before my appointment while at a concert I sat alone in a public bathroom stall covered in my own blood because I began to pass the baby on my own. I panicked at the sight of what looked to be legs and feet. I sat sobbing in a bathroom stall, unsure of what to do, who to talk to...why is it that with infertility, women must suffer alone in silence or face all these insensitive comments and questions?

[pet-diary]

Hello, I will be applying to graduate school next fall. I want to go for either school psychology or clinical mental health. What was it like taking the psych GRE, what is graduate school like, and do you have any tips? Anything will be appreciated, I'm low-key having a nervous breakdown trying to figure this and my life out.

I’m actually not in grad school yet! Just getting ready to apply next year after I graduate with my BA in the fall, and I’ll be taking a GRE prep course this summer, and the GRE test before the fall semester starts. Sorry if my posts seem misleading lately! I’m just really interested in following other people who have gone on this journey I’m about to embark on, so I’ve been talking about it a lot lately. :O (I’m scared too!)

I do have a little advice though, based on things I’ve learned from doing my own research into grad school. And I’ll link some blogs below that might be helpful.

Some things I’ve learned:

Many psych grad school programs only require the general GRE test (verbal and quantitative), but not the psych test. You can find out the specific requirements on the program’s website. I’d suggest checking into this before you take the test so you don’t end up taking on more than you need to.

The program websites should also include statistics about who they accept, what kind of scores those people get on their GRE, and stuff like that. Should help you know where to aim! You can also see how well your GPA will stack up against people who got into the program.

These sites are great for getting a general overview of different psych jobs and what you need in order to get into the right career track: https://www.bls.gov/ooh, https://www.onetonline.org, http://www.apa.org/careers/resources/index.aspx, http://www.apa.org/education/grad/index.aspx. I found them helpful when comparing different routes.

You should know what you want to do before you get started on applying. It’s a competitive field and many applicants already have experience in their chosen interest by the time they apply for a PsyD/PhD. It won’t be like undergrad where you can change your major midway through (someone correct me if I’m wrong about this! Also, I’m sure there is flexibility within the program, and especially later on in what career paths you take… But in general it seems like you’re supposed to know who you want to work under and what you want to focus on well before applying).

This forum: https://forums.studentdoctor.net. Super intimidating posts but I’ve found some helpful advice on there if it doesn’t just burn you out before you even begin (use caution! lol, there’s some high achieving people on there).

If you want to do clinical psych (I do too, btw!) you will want to get research experience before applying if possible. You will also want to know who you want to work under (who’s lab) and what you want to study, questions you want to answer. I’ve even seen some professional interviews from my Careers in Psych class that suggested you get your work published in journals before applying because some people will already have that!… So intense, I know! :S I actually have no idea how some people already have that in undergrad… I’m not sure if that’s common or not.

If you have any professors in undergrad that you feel you click with, ask them for advice. They might be able to give you a letter of recommendation when the time comes. Having work experience letters of rec is good (especially if relevant) but prof ones are important too, depending on the program. You might be able to find out what kind of letters of rec the program is looking for by attending an info session or asking advisors or other students.

If your school has a course for getting internships or experience in the field, take the opportunity! You can get all kinds of things out of that, letters of rec, experience hours, research experience, connections, advice. It’s great!

Explore the resources your school has to offer. For example, my school has webinars about grad school every so often. They have a career focused site with tons of advice and resources from letters of rec to resume/cv building and even search networks for finding jobs and internship ops. Another great thing they offer – FREE GRE PREP COURSES. These classes can cost $400-1500 (rough est. Idk), so this saves you a TON of money and will help you get a better score on the GRE. My school offers a free online self paced prep course under Princeton Review if you’re a student, so I’m taking that this summer.

Plan everything out and know what you’re getting yourself into.

If anyone has any advice, corrections, or more suggestions please chime in! I’m also interested in finding out this stuff. :)

Blogs:

Here’s some blog networks that focus on either psych or graduate school (or both!). I’ve found some great blogs to follow through these links:

http://gradblrchallenge.tumblr.com/participants

https://psychgradnet.tumblr.com/pgnetworkmembers

https://psychblr-network.tumblr.com/psychblrs

@therapy101​ - Great advice on this blog about grad school (check the tags)

Hope this helps! :) Sorry for responding kinda late, I wanted to find some more resources for you. I’m low-key having a nervous breakdown about this stuff too btw, lol.

[fluffi]

so should i reply in tiny font or just regular font?

hybe should do better in spreading out the comebacks of the groups under them :/ they're already at a huge advantage, might as well use it strategically. AHA streaming mvs is so convenient for a multi. the filler vids i could use in between could be mvs from the other groups that i stan. also you know what, i still haven't watched a single final performance bc im waiting for a friend to watch with me :D

i have a chinese movie recommendation in case you want something to cry over. i still love its ost and it's been months since i watched it. i'm not sure if you watched it already but more than blue. i've never cried over a movie as much as i cried for that one. the angst *chef's kiss*. i'd do anything to wipe my memory of it and watch it again for the first time.

also sungchan is mc-ing in inkigayo every sunday! and honestly, what the hell is nct hollywood :D but a part of me thinks it's just going to be a bunch of asians living in america like johnny that'll be a part of it. just a hunch tho. imagine having all 4 units coming back in a year with like 1 unit per quarter of the year. i'm not sure if sm even has the money to do this, especially when they filed bankruptcy recently.

and i've seen a lot of twitter memes saying taro's ghosted stans T_T alexa play ghosting by txt T_T sm come on give him smth to do, you're wasting talent.

the mall didn't burn down entirely (like from the outside it looked fine). the ventilation system caught fire so it was more internal—ceilings and all that. covered things with soot(?) and ashes so the entire mall was closed for nearly 2 years. and hey, i've experienced a school fire too back when i was younger. i, too, thought it was nothing but a fire drill until i saw the charred remains of the buildings behind our school : D thankfully, no one died.

the new nct track is for a samsung commercial AHAHA it's funny because nearly everyone uses apple TT_TT and the mv screams neo culture tech tho (well as it should lmao). yes, i was talking about that part in hot sauce but yes, it grew on me too.

ateez really know how to do a performance. they put the standard so high for me when it came to performing. their facial expressions and overall stage presence just impresses me. it's been a while since i've seen idols draw me to them by those standards.

ah, the long stan list! good luck in getting through it and i hope you do have fun as you go :] (also you can check out aurora by ateez and whiplash by tbz. the songs popped up in my head as i was typing this reply, you might like them)

ohhhh, what was the pd48 scandal? i don't watch survival shows so i don't know any of the stuff going on. would you care to elaborate? about their disbandment :(( i hope you're okay now tho! are the other girls still debuting in new groups? anyone eyeing an acting career instead of being an idol?

YES, A PATTERN IN THE BIASES (if you count an analysis of two ppl as a pattern, that is.) because it's the same pattern i have for my biaswreckers :D jake & seungmin, not only do they have the same animal to represent them, they have the same 'golden retriever' type of personality that just makes you go all soft. ygwim ;n; i wish i could elaborate but both boys just devastate me in the same level and my friends pointed out that they were quite similar in some aspects.

jaemin used to send really long bbl messages :< like if there was anything he loved most it was nctzens and it was obv in his messages. speaking of dream, album repackage news today! idk what to feel bc my hot sauce albums haven't even arrived yet :D + i'm dead br0ke.

how do you even manage to read 30k TT__TT i cant handle long fics bc of my attention span :D also, yes, i found the user now, i'll check if i'll like their works soon. <33

YES YOU SHOULDVE BEEN THERE T_T what a day that was. i think seungmin is still sweet and active in bbl. not a single cent goes to waste with him. also i think i'll post the drabble some time this month.

and oml seungmin vs jake :o let's see how that goes O.O XDD

clickity-clackity AHAH do you have a mechanical keyboard? :c i wanted one too but i haven't got around to saving up for one. but yes indeed, typing asmr v relaxing \m/

sunny hyuck day, fullsun sunday, fullsunday T_T feels were very strong that day. i kept seeing edits on my twt tl and i would just s o b : D i've only stanned nct for a year but i've seen him grow so much i just wanted to crie i love him sm :') yk my mom didn't cook spaghetti for my birthday, but she cooked for hyuck's? : D

and i checked ur recs blog and indeed, full of nct T_T

also have i mentioned that your desktop thing amuses me so much HAHAH i got confused for a sec if i had twt opened or tumblr. plus, i've been wanting to mention that i noticed that our mobile themes are opposites. black and red, white and blue. it's cute XDD <3

help, people have been telling me that our asks are long but i highkey love it. i added a ‘keep reading’ for the mobile users though, sorry in advance hh.

honestly, both works. tiny font saves space but regular font does more justice for my poor eyes haha. its your call!

hybe comebacks :( yeah enhypen got lucky because they came back right before cb season so they got three wins (yay)! on the bright side, txt just got their first win and bts has six wins, so it all works out i guess. omg yes, the streaming thing is perfect. i stan like 20 groups so i have a never-ending cycle of filler mvs and its always so helpful. ooh for the final performances - you wont regret watching any of them! literally wild, kingdom's budget and talent are wild.

ooh, I don't watch any cdramas lmao. i want to but i can barely finish kdramas. if its a movie ill watch it! ive never heard of more than blue but ill check it out <3 where can i watch it?

yes yes i have just realized that sungchan is yujin's co-mc! i watched their special stage (which is literally adorable) and was today years old when i realized that the dude is sungchan pls. nct hollywood was so unexpected and i still have mixed feelings about it now. LMAO JUST ASIANS LIVING IN AMERICA...help. that would be interesting (?) but the concept reminds me of those horrendous awesomeness tv shows. lets hope sm pulls this off well and proves me wrong. lmao all 4 units coming back would probably happen, but i hope none of them get overworked :( i constantly feel like mork lee has four clones :'( also...sm filed bankcruptcy??? dang, what happened?

ugh omg yeah shotaros talent is seriously being wasted in the basement right now. as for fires, scary T-T i wasnt that fazed by them until the australia wildfires happened, and i learned about the consequences of fire and got really scared. its good that the entire mall didnt burn down though! although its weird that no one is opening it :( schools really need to tell us the difference between drills though, it might be dangerous for those rebellious kids.

yeah i just realized that the nct track is an endorsement which partly explains why i cant listen to it. the mv's visuals are stunning!! the set and people are so gorgeous aa i cant

oh yeah im not an atiny but i have acknowledged since 2020 that they have one of the best, if not the best stage presence and expressions on stage for 4th gen. i think their only worthy competitor would be stray kids actually. theyre truly one of a kind and all of them are cute especially that yeosang guy. i will definitely check out your song recommendations though!

oof the pd48 scandal is extremely complicated. to condense it in a few statements: all of the girls' rankings have been rigged since the very beginning and it was rumored that they already had their end group before the show even started. it was like this for pf48 and pdx101 (group x1) which was why x1 disbanded within a month of debuting, and izone were on hiatus for like 4 months. im not the best at explaining stuff like this haha, but i think you get it. you can check out yt or search up 'pd48 scandal', a ton of articles and videos. as for new groups, nothing has been made clear yet. theyve only made instagram handles for now and appeared on variety shows haha. as for acting career, hyewon was supposed to do acting but was forced to join pd48 so maybe she'll continue acting afterwards? nothing is confirmed yet!

lmao two similarities, its okay it counts. ah, true, i can see their similarities now that youve mentioned it, as well as how jeno is kind of like that. however, i am currently attached to jaemin so we'll see what happens from there hehe. i swerve easily.

jaemin on bubble grr, that would be a whole experience. from the bare minimum of vidoes ive seen for him wbk jaemin is so whipped for czennies. ah yes repackage! i saw the post on instagram and went to the comments to see everything screaming ‘iM bROke!’ and it was lowkey hilarious lmao. kpop is really trying to suck our money T-T.

ope the longest fic ive read is like...40k words i think? and it was by jeonginks. ill read anything eiko produces lmao, theres always so much substance in her work. ooh, tell me what you think of luvdsc’s stuff, i just finished binging their entire masterlist lmao.

seungmin vs jake yeah, i havent been catching up on skz enha content because im still obsessing over the dreamies but when that saga is over then im going to focus on my ults lmao (which might include dream soon, hehe).

yes yes i have a mechanical bluetooth keyboard that i use to connect to my computer! it literally sounds amazing lmao, its only 10am here but i feel like im going to doze off from the clickity clackitys already. i cant wait for you to get one! tell me when you do, we can match hehe.

hyuck is an aodrable brat please. hes like the best comedian of nct at this point, so hilarious and filled with variety i love him. he rose up my bias list pretty fast too. LMAO YOUR MOM IS SO COOL I LOVE HER ALREADY. if only my mom would cook for my ults’ borndays.

yes my rec blog is a mess right now, ill organize it soon haha.

omg thank you and yes my website theme is one-of-a-kind. even i get confused when i open it or edit it, and i constantly get comments about it. also i just realized our opposing theme colors and i love it! its adorable.

[angelagiles18]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264

Click on the video above to watch Episode 264 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: should be going live right? Welcome, everybody to the day before Thanksgiving 2019. It’s Episode 264 of Hump Day Hangouts. We are all here. And I will put in a quick suggestion. You’re watching this live put a question on the page. I think everyone’s already headed out for the travel plans. We got a few questions. But we’re going to go through those and then we all are heading out to do our things too. So you got a question? By all means, get it on the page. So we can help you out today. Before we head out and do our Thanksgiving stuff. So real quick, though, let’s take a minute and say hello to everybody. We got everyone here. So Bradley, what I guess one How are you doing into what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Bradley: First, I’m doing very well. Second, let me mention real quick. Yes, what Adam just said is true, guys. We’re happy to cut out early today on Hump Day Hangouts. But we are here as always, so you know if you’ve got questions, post them otherwise, soon as we run out of questions, we’re out. So, but I’m doing quite well. You know, by the way, if anybody missed out on the Google Ads branding course, wow. It’s turned out really good. And now it’s been edited the three-hour-long webinars now been edited into like 15 lessons for that’s just session one. We’re going to do the next session on December 9th. So I don’t think you can get the early bird special anymore, but we might have something on Friday, maybe. We’ll see what happens on Friday right. Lastly, as far as for Thanksgiving I got my daughter for five days actually just got back from picking her up. She’s downstairs so she didn’t have to listen to me talk about marketing for the next hour. But it’s good because I’ve got our for five days and we’ve got two different Thanksgiving dinners planned one tomorrow, one on Saturday. And just looking forward to taking a few days off and spending it with my daughter. How about you? What are you doing?

Adam: I’m headed out to pick the unfortunate time to head to the beach. We’re going to Big Sur if anyone’s familiar with that. It’s a lot of forests. A lot of really scenic areas right on the beach there on highway one California. It’s probably a couple like an hour, hour and a half southwest of Santa Cruz. But we got a massive storm coming on the west coast of the US has been dumping rain. So I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Bradley: Oh man. Good timing, huh?

Adam: Yeah, we might be doing. I don’t know a turkey on Coleman stove.

Chris: What? camping outside?

Adam: Well, we got a little cabin, but it’s just kind of more of a structure than a like full-on cabin. So we’ll see how it goes. I may have a story for you guys next week. If I make it back live. So Hernan, how about you, man? What’s, uh, what are you doing for a living in Buenos Aires?

Hernan: We don’t do that. I’m happy to see you guys eating turkey and all that stuff. So I’m excited. I’m really excited to be here. And I have my friend humpy wood here. What’s he saying? You’re a kinky MF. Oh, yeah. If you go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday there’s going to be some good stuff coming up daily deals. Don’t miss it including that stuff that Bradley did he always over-delivers like a crazy person. And you know it’s really really good stuff so go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday to get your stuff and invest in your business and instead of like getting a new TV that you don’t even need.

Adam: definitely and I was gonna say you Hernan we’ve had I’m looking right now I just hopped in to look at the stats event 262 people go so far you can go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday right now. And we’ve got three free training videos that haven’t been seen one of them is brand spanking new that nobody has ever seen. So we’ve got that up, but that’s coming down at midnight tomorrow. So if you haven’t gone over there, by all means, head over there. If you’re watching this after the fact after Friday, that’s too late. That’s all right. You got two days to get over there and check it out. Let’s see

Bradley: Chris, what the hell are you doing over there, man?

Adam: Yeah. Chris How you doing and how’s your microphone

Chris: I wanted some attention you know like you taking too long guys. So yeah, like I’m pretty good here. happy that I don’t have to eat boatloads of foods. I enjoyed Thanksgiving last year while I was on a cut and it pretty much destroyed me. Let’s call it that way through me back two weeks so I’m happy that I can pass on that experience this year. And yeah, enjoy the cold weather in Austria like I’m super excited because it’s snowing.

Adam: Wow. Ooh, nice. Hopefully, don’t get any sound here. I’m trying to bring up something all right. Marco. I guess yeah, let’s get the Costa Rica weather update and what are you going to be up to for the next few days?

Marco: No Thanksgiving in Costa Rica. We don’t celebrate it. But I mean to all of you who celebrated hope you have a great time. I hope your table is full and that you have lots of blessings on the table. Not just for Thanksgiving, but for the rest of the year. So yeah, by all means, enjoy it now. I’m working on my charity webinars. Every year, which I do something for charity. And last year went over really well. I did four webinars. And we just had a ton of people attend. And, you know, I’m known when it’s about the kids. I’m known to give away a lot of knowledge that maybe shouldn’t go out, but I don’t care. It’s for the kids. And if you donate, you can come to the webinars, I’ll drop the donation link on the page. And anyone who wants to donate, go there and make a donation or go find me to one of the Semantic Mastery of the free group. Go to my page, right Marco Benavides. I’m on Facebook and all of the instructions are there on what you need to do to it. Turn the live webinar. Things are a good man. So when things are good, it’s good to give

Adam: most definitely most definitely yeah and be doing a little bit of that it’s good to just a general I do try to do some reflection around this time of year and think about you know, hey I’m joking about going out and being cold in the rain but it’s my choice to do it. I’m glad you know for the things I’ve got and for having not only you guys as partners, but also you know, being able to converse with people help other people out on Hump Day Hangout, so we’ll talk about this more at Christmas we got some good stuff coming up too. But we’ll concentrate on this week we got some cool Black Friday stuff coming up so like said in her non did go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday, and then that will automatically roll over training goes away midnight tomorrow, but then we’re going to have some just killer deals coming up at 12:01 am starting Friday. I’m pumped. I’m getting excited.

So we’re real quick. I want to say though if you’re new to semantic mastery, you’re in the right place. We’re going to get to some questions here shortly. You can come here every week, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, and you can ask your questions ahead of time, which we highly encourage just keep it to one question. I know it’s tough sometimes but people start writing paragraphs and we have to skip if there are too many questions because we want to make sure we’re fair and get to all the questions. But then the next step would be grabbing the battle plan if you want step by step processes for getting results, things like your age domain or you got a new website you’re putting up or a YouTube channel or whatever it is you want to do go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com pick it up, it’s a steal, we put in a ton of awesome bonuses is a value bomb. And after that, if you’ve got clients and you’re wanting to grow your digital marketing agency or business, then come join us in the mastermind go to mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for everyone that likes saving time, that’s me, right and if you want to not only save time to get things done very very well the first time go to mgyb.co originally this stuff started out as are done for you services and things like syndication networks are always drives tech stuff we had we had certainly taught about and you could still buy the courses if you want to understand the real nuts and bolts and maybe have someone do it for you. But if you want it done quickly, and you want it done professionally had the mgyb.co, you can check it out. And we’ve added on link building, press releases, all sorts of awesome stuff, which there might be some Black Friday stuff going on. But we’ll hold off on that until Friday. So other than that, guys, do we have anything else that we want to cover?

Bradley: I don’t think so. I’m ready to answer some questions. Get the hell out.

Adam: All right. humpy says yes.

Hernan: Humpy’s cursing since today’s gonna mute myself and that Bradley dude thing.

Bradley: All right, let’s do it. All right, let me grab the screen. Sweet You guys should be seeing my screen now. Correct?

Adam: Correct. Alright.

Can You Delete A Subdomain And Redirect It To The Root Without Passing A Penalty?

So it looks like Dustin Bay was the first one up. He says if I get a penalty on the www. domain, so is the subdomain with www as the subdomain, can I delete the subdomain and redirect it to the root without passing the penalty? No, not if you’re just doing a straight redirect, you can’t do that it will pass the penalty. So, or is it better to just delete www without redirecting it and installing the site on the root? Yeah, you can I mean, you could do that because essentially, well, I think about that. Marco, what say you because I know with www a lot of the times will be. It’s still treated as a subdomain but just installing it on the root because some people will have maybe linked to you whatever’s causing a penalty, let’s see, I’ve got to admit or not there is whatever is causing the penalty could also cause it. Remember, people, if they linked to the root domain version of it, if you had your domain setup on www and they were canonicalized to each other, or they auto redirected from your root domain to the www dot version or whatever, then it if people built links to it without www in the domain, then it’s still going to be pointing links back to the root domain, even if you remove that, you know, reinstall the site on the root domain, if that makes sense. So I know if you just did a redirect from the www subdomain to the root domain and then kind of pushed the installation of the site onto the root and lost the www it would still pass the penalty. So what’s the best way to go about that Marco?

Marco: Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this question really hard and think Okay, so how, how would I do this because I’ve just lost my dub dub. And if I did any, as you said, any link building to it, because you still going to have, it depends on the penalty, right? But you’re still going to have a ton of links coming to the dub dub dub, especially the way we teach it. Because we use all variations of the URL right? When we link building, so you’re going to lose that you’re going to lose anyone who’s still and there are people who still type out www. and then the address, right, there are still people who do that. Now, you are going to pass a penalty be 301? Yes, no question. Now, what if? What if, right, so I’m just thinking like, this is theory, guys? I don’t I hardly ever do this unless I tested but this is theory. And this is something you could try. What have you said that that subdomain to no index nofollow and then have Google crawl it? I’d go into Search Console, have Google recrawl and see what it said to no index, no five And then three or one it to the non dub dub dub version or even HTTPS version right to the non www and then everything is redirected again to the HTTPS, you might lose the penalty with with with a couple of jumps and with that with a no-index nofollow on the subdomain that’s causing the problem.

Now, what’s the problem? I mean, how did they get a penalty? How do you know that it was kind of like, was it a manual? Because a manual, if you remove whatever it is that offending Google, you can request for reconsideration. So it all depends on what kind of penalty. Like why not it’s even hard to get a link penalty. Right? Because Google just doesn’t pay attention to links that aren’t relevant. Or if you’re really talented, then you send millions of links, then you get and you do get an unnatural link, you could get that. But it’s usually manuals that you get. So trying to think it through, you may, you may not pass a penalty if you do a double hop, or it might, it might take time for it to catch back up. So you’re going to have to test on this and see, but by all means, move it to the non-www. And remember that any links going to that you lose that once you remove that www, if it doesn’t get redirected, so you’re going to have to read redo all of those links, especially if you had some really powerful links coming through there. That’s what I would recommend trying again, theory. I haven’t done this. I haven’t ever tried it. But in theory, if Google sees that it’s knowing that’s nofollow, then there’s no reason for that website to be penalized anymore.

Hernan: Yeah, right. Can you real quick? This is more like a question. Can you read direct? I guess you could, like you could read direct a subdomain outside of the route and then back into the route, you could like, yeah, you know, like, so as to clean it up.

Bradley: I was gonna, I was going to suggest, you know, something that would be a little bit more elaborate because I’ve done something similar in the past, where not specifically what I’ve done it to an external domain and then redirected the external domain back to the domain that had the penalty, but just on a different subdomain or you know, a different subdomain entirely. But here’s what I was thinking might also work. Again, this is theory, but it would be putting inserting Google in the middle of it, which could absolutely reduce or, you know, eliminate any negative, you know, link equity from point coming back through, something you might consider would be like creating a G site mirrored to what the original site was. So you have the same page structure and all of that, linked from the subdomain, redirect all of that on a page by page basis to the G site and then from the G site, you can have the pages that are built with the link linking back to your root domain, right? It’s a mirror of the site anyways. Or you can even iframe those pages into the G site pages if that makes sense. So that you’re pointing any negative link equity that’s come through that. That might be why you’ve got a penalty to the G site, which we already know, the G site will clean that up and won’t penalize itself. So you’d actually be passing page rank to your money site pages on the new domain, whether its root, the root domain or whatever, different subdomain, whatever, but it would be filtering through the G site. I don’t know. I’ve never actually said I’ve done that with an external domain before but not with a G site. What do you think Marco about that?

Marco: You know, I’m really liking that, especially if you can map out your custom domain, right? The www version over to Google so that stays but you still have the G site underneath, right? Right. And that that’ll filter out any other. Yes, this is guaranteed that’ll filter out any penalty that could have. Which, but if we’d have to see what the penalties you guys, you don’t tell us what the penalty is that we can’t really give you the advice, or the answer that you need. But yeah, I mean, again, in theory, you get three on one that penalize subdomain that www, which is a subdomain, to a G site, which links over to the root where the new site was built, and it can all be the same content and Google won’t give a shit.

Bradley: That’s it, right? I mean, that’s, that’s what I would do. Because again, you’re putting an SEO shield between the penalty in your domain, right? I mean, that’s what we’re talking that’s what we talked about the SEO shield. Go check it out on MGYB and you’ll if you don’t already know what we’re talking about, and now you’re basically doing that you’re inserting part of that shield in between the penalty and the domain. So check it out and try.

What Is The Best Way To Add A YouTube Video To A Website And Maintain Site Speed?

Greg’s Up next, he says, Is there a preferred way to add a video from our YouTube channel to our website page and maintain site speed my site pages load in around one second. And I don’t want that to slow to two or three seconds as a result of adding videos. My goals are to increase time on my site, have specific videos, keep visitors on specific pages, increase views on the videos and improved website ranking by adding videos but not slow down page load times. Any suggestions? Yeah, they have lazy load plugins. You can also I know there’s some way to code that into but I know there’s if it’s a WordPress site, they have lazy load plugins that will lazy load images. And they also I’m pretty sure will lazy load iframes or whatever. So videos I’m pretty sure that you can also lazy load those which means it will allow the page to render entirely before it will start to load the images or the external iframe such as a YouTube video. Any other subject The only other I mean obviously if you use a CDN, but a CDN, I’m not sure I don’t think a CDN affects the loading speed of iframes. Because those are external sites, right? It’s just a tunnel to an external site. But CDN a content delivery network would still allow your page itself to load incredibly quick. The iframe would still be would load as slowly as you don’t have control over that the speed at which the iframe loads, that makes sense. Mark, do you have any suggestions for that

Marco: lazy load suggestions is perfect. I would say don’t be too anal about paint speed, because it’s one of over 200 factors. And we don’t know how much of a factor it is. Everything else considered. And since we teach PageSpeed, doesn’t really matter. Nothing, nothing matters. This is the three pillars, that it’s foundational principles, what we teach activity, relevance, trust and authority and how we build that up. So if you go from one second to 2.2 seconds or whatever, doesn’t matter, it’s not going to matter to anybody, especially Someone coming and they see the video, you have it in a prominent place where the person can watch the video, they’re going to wait for that video because they want to watch the video. You’ve driven them to your pace. Now if it’s taking a ton of time to render, that that might cause a big deal, but you can just do it lazy load and and have it render after the page loads and and you’re good to go.

Hernan: Yeah, There’s never like there’s there’s not a good reason why you shouldn’t be using a CDN anyways. CloudFlare being free, you know, or something like that. So you should be using it anyways. So,

Bradley: yeah, yeah, I mean, it’ll help to load the page quicker and also will load the page from multiple servers or, you know, from multiple locations. So, and also helps in case something happens where your site goes down. For whatever reason, people can still view the pages that kind of because they’re cached. So there’s a lot of good reasons to have a CDN. It’s good for security. There’s a lot of reasons for that. But it will help the page itself to load quicker. Again, it’s not going to help the iframes to load any faster because those are external sites. It’s just a tunnel to an external site within your web page, right? So you don’t have any control over that. But you can control at which point does that load so that you can tell that like, again, with a lazy load plugin, you’re basically telling the page to render before it will start to load any external iframes essentially embeds so okay. Try it and see.

Oh, let’s see. Tom says Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks, Tom. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. Fitz. What’s up Fitz? He says on Marcus charity. Is he going to give a 30 minute call if they donate a certain amount to his charity this year?

Marco: No, this year I’ve decided to match donations dollar for dollar.

Bradley: Very cool. Okay. So there you go. Fitz. Adams got the black friday special there and we’re almost out of questions guys, which were only 20

Hernan: Sorry, sorry, Bradley. But I think Adam I’m not sure if he’s here because he needed to start driving but I think that we have a deal in the Black Friday deal that we’re doing that if you spent x you get you get some consultant time would meet with us like now with me but without

Adam: Hernan’s going to come to your house and have Thanksgiving dinner.

Hernan: Okay, give Yeah, I’m gonna cook the turkey.

Adam: And it was about say we should make it the other way. We could be like, yeah, you get an hour with Hernan you just got to go to him. So right,

Hernan: she need to fly down here. And then I yeah, we do that from Monday 3pm to 4pm and then you go back, you know, fly up another nine hours or whatever.

Adam: But um, but yeah, I wonder like a deal that we’ve got both for Semantic Mastery and mg y b, depending on you know, if you’re spending your money in both places, that’s great. And we can certainly work something out but we’ve got I don’t want to give it away but I will Go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday on Friday or over the weekend. And yeah, you’ll be able to see what you can do there. MGYB also gonna have a great promo and depending on how much you spend you can get consulting time with the team for free as a bonus Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah, So bottom line, go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday update that daily because the deals galore going to be there and one of them will include some consulting time with Bradley one on one. And you’d like to get like, I know. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Yeah. You’re all over and kiss your wife and then roll over the other way and kiss me. Well, it says pumpkin or become pie for Thanksgiving which will benefit my SEO the most well, I don’t know which will benefit the SEO but both pumpkin and pecan pie for God’s sakes, it’s Thanksgiving.

Hernan: So right when choose.

Bradley: That’s right. Lastly, Greg says it looks like we’re going to run out of questions. Which means we’re all going to get the hell out of here and go enjoy it with their families. Greg says thanks, guys will check out the lazy low plugin I do I do own and use SEO ultimate plugin from Jeffrey Smith. Good choice, Greg, by the way that’s coming very, very soon. The Pro version is coming out if you’re in the mastermind, you get access to that a hell of a lot sooner I can tell you that. But I’m really looking forward to that being launched guys. And if you are a member, I think of the ultimate plus version that you get grandfathered in at least a some licenses. I’m not sure how that works. But it’s a good choice. Neither either way, Greg, and it’s going to get better. I promise you that. There might even be a way to make them work together. Well, yeah, possibly. And that looks like it guys. So unless you got something else you want to talk about. Let’s wrap it up.

Marco: You know, if they have conflicting plugins, which we did, then all you have to do is let us know with the new version coming out, and we turn it over to the developer and the developer will take care of I mean, this is going to be fully supported that’s that’s why it’s a paid version of the plugin there is a programmer that’s behind this a developer with it. There’s a whole team behind the pro version of the plugin Plus we’re in the middle of all this too and we always take care of the people who use our products and services.

Bradley: Yeah Thanksgiving. Go Yeah, very happy Thanksgiving.

Hernan: Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I’m really I just want to say I’m really thankful for you guys for coming in asking questions. And you know, joining the group, the free the paid, really thankful for all of the support throughout this year. I’m really thankful for my partners here. So yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.

Adam: Before we go, sorry, one that I started to stomp on that Hernan and I feel the same way obviously, but I want to say something. I had three different calls yesterday. Three different people potential clients in and all of them had no firm plans for Black Friday. If you run a business where you have some sort of contacts with your potential clients or clients, do yourself a favor, write an email, send people out. If nothing else, you can always send them out a good faith or goodwill email saying, Hey, here’s all the cool deals in the industry that I found, you know, help them out. If you’ve got things you could do, or you have for sale, maybe it’s a product I service that you could offer a discount on, you know, send it, it’s not just about Oh, you’re just raking in the money. But you know, people are expecting it. I’m looking, you know, we create offers, but I’m also looking for deals over the Black Friday weekend. So, you know, don’t don’t think just because you don’t own like a physical goods store or something that you can’t get in on this. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do. And create some goodwill, you know, amongst your network. So do it. Very cool.

Bradley: Very cool. All right. Let’s wrap it up then guys. We will see you all next week. Happy Thanksgiving once again.

Bye, guys. Yeah, run. Bye everyone. Bye bye

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264 published first on your-t1-blog-url https://ift.tt/1WMpNvB December 05, 2019 at 10:29PM Semantic Mastery https://ift.tt/2YeHIxM

[beyondvapepage]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264

Click on the video above to watch Episode 264 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: should be going live right? Welcome, everybody to the day before Thanksgiving 2019. It’s Episode 264 of Hump Day Hangouts. We are all here. And I will put in a quick suggestion. You’re watching this live put a question on the page. I think everyone’s already headed out for the travel plans. We got a few questions. But we’re going to go through those and then we all are heading out to do our things too. So you got a question? By all means, get it on the page. So we can help you out today. Before we head out and do our Thanksgiving stuff. So real quick, though, let’s take a minute and say hello to everybody. We got everyone here. So Bradley, what I guess one How are you doing into what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Bradley: First, I’m doing very well. Second, let me mention real quick. Yes, what Adam just said is true, guys. We’re happy to cut out early today on Hump Day Hangouts. But we are here as always, so you know if you’ve got questions, post them otherwise, soon as we run out of questions, we’re out. So, but I’m doing quite well. You know, by the way, if anybody missed out on the Google Ads branding course, wow. It’s turned out really good. And now it’s been edited the three-hour-long webinars now been edited into like 15 lessons for that’s just session one. We’re going to do the next session on December 9th. So I don’t think you can get the early bird special anymore, but we might have something on Friday, maybe. We’ll see what happens on Friday right. Lastly, as far as for Thanksgiving I got my daughter for five days actually just got back from picking her up. She’s downstairs so she didn’t have to listen to me talk about marketing for the next hour. But it’s good because I’ve got our for five days and we’ve got two different Thanksgiving dinners planned one tomorrow, one on Saturday. And just looking forward to taking a few days off and spending it with my daughter. How about you? What are you doing?

Adam: I’m headed out to pick the unfortunate time to head to the beach. We’re going to Big Sur if anyone’s familiar with that. It’s a lot of forests. A lot of really scenic areas right on the beach there on highway one California. It’s probably a couple like an hour, hour and a half southwest of Santa Cruz. But we got a massive storm coming on the west coast of the US has been dumping rain. So I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Bradley: Oh man. Good timing, huh?

Adam: Yeah, we might be doing. I don’t know a turkey on Coleman stove.

Chris: What? camping outside?

Adam: Well, we got a little cabin, but it’s just kind of more of a structure than a like full-on cabin. So we’ll see how it goes. I may have a story for you guys next week. If I make it back live. So Hernan, how about you, man? What’s, uh, what are you doing for a living in Buenos Aires?

Hernan: We don’t do that. I’m happy to see you guys eating turkey and all that stuff. So I’m excited. I’m really excited to be here. And I have my friend humpy wood here. What’s he saying? You’re a kinky MF. Oh, yeah. If you go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday there’s going to be some good stuff coming up daily deals. Don’t miss it including that stuff that Bradley did he always over-delivers like a crazy person. And you know it’s really really good stuff so go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday to get your stuff and invest in your business and instead of like getting a new TV that you don’t even need.

Adam: definitely and I was gonna say you Hernan we’ve had I’m looking right now I just hopped in to look at the stats event 262 people go so far you can go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday right now. And we’ve got three free training videos that haven’t been seen one of them is brand spanking new that nobody has ever seen. So we’ve got that up, but that’s coming down at midnight tomorrow. So if you haven’t gone over there, by all means, head over there. If you’re watching this after the fact after Friday, that’s too late. That’s all right. You got two days to get over there and check it out. Let’s see

Bradley: Chris, what the hell are you doing over there, man?

Adam: Yeah. Chris How you doing and how’s your microphone

Chris: I wanted some attention you know like you taking too long guys. So yeah, like I’m pretty good here. happy that I don’t have to eat boatloads of foods. I enjoyed Thanksgiving last year while I was on a cut and it pretty much destroyed me. Let’s call it that way through me back two weeks so I’m happy that I can pass on that experience this year. And yeah, enjoy the cold weather in Austria like I’m super excited because it’s snowing.

Adam: Wow. Ooh, nice. Hopefully, don’t get any sound here. I’m trying to bring up something all right. Marco. I guess yeah, let’s get the Costa Rica weather update and what are you going to be up to for the next few days?

Marco: No Thanksgiving in Costa Rica. We don’t celebrate it. But I mean to all of you who celebrated hope you have a great time. I hope your table is full and that you have lots of blessings on the table. Not just for Thanksgiving, but for the rest of the year. So yeah, by all means, enjoy it now. I’m working on my charity webinars. Every year, which I do something for charity. And last year went over really well. I did four webinars. And we just had a ton of people attend. And, you know, I’m known when it’s about the kids. I’m known to give away a lot of knowledge that maybe shouldn’t go out, but I don’t care. It’s for the kids. And if you donate, you can come to the webinars, I’ll drop the donation link on the page. And anyone who wants to donate, go there and make a donation or go find me to one of the Semantic Mastery of the free group. Go to my page, right Marco Benavides. I’m on Facebook and all of the instructions are there on what you need to do to it. Turn the live webinar. Things are a good man. So when things are good, it’s good to give

Adam: most definitely most definitely yeah and be doing a little bit of that it’s good to just a general I do try to do some reflection around this time of year and think about you know, hey I’m joking about going out and being cold in the rain but it’s my choice to do it. I’m glad you know for the things I’ve got and for having not only you guys as partners, but also you know, being able to converse with people help other people out on Hump Day Hangout, so we’ll talk about this more at Christmas we got some good stuff coming up too. But we’ll concentrate on this week we got some cool Black Friday stuff coming up so like said in her non did go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday, and then that will automatically roll over training goes away midnight tomorrow, but then we’re going to have some just killer deals coming up at 12:01 am starting Friday. I’m pumped. I’m getting excited.

So we’re real quick. I want to say though if you’re new to semantic mastery, you’re in the right place. We’re going to get to some questions here shortly. You can come here every week, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, and you can ask your questions ahead of time, which we highly encourage just keep it to one question. I know it’s tough sometimes but people start writing paragraphs and we have to skip if there are too many questions because we want to make sure we’re fair and get to all the questions. But then the next step would be grabbing the battle plan if you want step by step processes for getting results, things like your age domain or you got a new website you’re putting up or a YouTube channel or whatever it is you want to do go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com pick it up, it’s a steal, we put in a ton of awesome bonuses is a value bomb. And after that, if you’ve got clients and you’re wanting to grow your digital marketing agency or business, then come join us in the mastermind go to mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for everyone that likes saving time, that’s me, right and if you want to not only save time to get things done very very well the first time go to mgyb.co originally this stuff started out as are done for you services and things like syndication networks are always drives tech stuff we had we had certainly taught about and you could still buy the courses if you want to understand the real nuts and bolts and maybe have someone do it for you. But if you want it done quickly, and you want it done professionally had the mgyb.co, you can check it out. And we’ve added on link building, press releases, all sorts of awesome stuff, which there might be some Black Friday stuff going on. But we’ll hold off on that until Friday. So other than that, guys, do we have anything else that we want to cover?

Bradley: I don’t think so. I’m ready to answer some questions. Get the hell out.

Adam: All right. humpy says yes.

Hernan: Humpy’s cursing since today’s gonna mute myself and that Bradley dude thing.

Bradley: All right, let’s do it. All right, let me grab the screen. Sweet You guys should be seeing my screen now. Correct?

Adam: Correct. Alright.

Can You Delete A Subdomain And Redirect It To The Root Without Passing A Penalty?

So it looks like Dustin Bay was the first one up. He says if I get a penalty on the www. domain, so is the subdomain with www as the subdomain, can I delete the subdomain and redirect it to the root without passing the penalty? No, not if you’re just doing a straight redirect, you can’t do that it will pass the penalty. So, or is it better to just delete www without redirecting it and installing the site on the root? Yeah, you can I mean, you could do that because essentially, well, I think about that. Marco, what say you because I know with www a lot of the times will be. It’s still treated as a subdomain but just installing it on the root because some people will have maybe linked to you whatever’s causing a penalty, let’s see, I’ve got to admit or not there is whatever is causing the penalty could also cause it. Remember, people, if they linked to the root domain version of it, if you had your domain setup on www and they were canonicalized to each other, or they auto redirected from your root domain to the www dot version or whatever, then it if people built links to it without www in the domain, then it’s still going to be pointing links back to the root domain, even if you remove that, you know, reinstall the site on the root domain, if that makes sense. So I know if you just did a redirect from the www subdomain to the root domain and then kind of pushed the installation of the site onto the root and lost the www it would still pass the penalty. So what’s the best way to go about that Marco?

Marco: Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this question really hard and think Okay, so how, how would I do this because I’ve just lost my dub dub. And if I did any, as you said, any link building to it, because you still going to have, it depends on the penalty, right? But you’re still going to have a ton of links coming to the dub dub dub, especially the way we teach it. Because we use all variations of the URL right? When we link building, so you’re going to lose that you’re going to lose anyone who’s still and there are people who still type out www. and then the address, right, there are still people who do that. Now, you are going to pass a penalty be 301? Yes, no question. Now, what if? What if, right, so I’m just thinking like, this is theory, guys? I don’t I hardly ever do this unless I tested but this is theory. And this is something you could try. What have you said that that subdomain to no index nofollow and then have Google crawl it? I’d go into Search Console, have Google recrawl and see what it said to no index, no five And then three or one it to the non dub dub dub version or even HTTPS version right to the non www and then everything is redirected again to the HTTPS, you might lose the penalty with with with a couple of jumps and with that with a no-index nofollow on the subdomain that’s causing the problem.

Now, what’s the problem? I mean, how did they get a penalty? How do you know that it was kind of like, was it a manual? Because a manual, if you remove whatever it is that offending Google, you can request for reconsideration. So it all depends on what kind of penalty. Like why not it’s even hard to get a link penalty. Right? Because Google just doesn’t pay attention to links that aren’t relevant. Or if you’re really talented, then you send millions of links, then you get and you do get an unnatural link, you could get that. But it’s usually manuals that you get. So trying to think it through, you may, you may not pass a penalty if you do a double hop, or it might, it might take time for it to catch back up. So you’re going to have to test on this and see, but by all means, move it to the non-www. And remember that any links going to that you lose that once you remove that www, if it doesn’t get redirected, so you’re going to have to read redo all of those links, especially if you had some really powerful links coming through there. That’s what I would recommend trying again, theory. I haven’t done this. I haven’t ever tried it. But in theory, if Google sees that it’s knowing that’s nofollow, then there’s no reason for that website to be penalized anymore.

Hernan: Yeah, right. Can you real quick? This is more like a question. Can you read direct? I guess you could, like you could read direct a subdomain outside of the route and then back into the route, you could like, yeah, you know, like, so as to clean it up.

Bradley: I was gonna, I was going to suggest, you know, something that would be a little bit more elaborate because I’ve done something similar in the past, where not specifically what I’ve done it to an external domain and then redirected the external domain back to the domain that had the penalty, but just on a different subdomain or you know, a different subdomain entirely. But here’s what I was thinking might also work. Again, this is theory, but it would be putting inserting Google in the middle of it, which could absolutely reduce or, you know, eliminate any negative, you know, link equity from point coming back through, something you might consider would be like creating a G site mirrored to what the original site was. So you have the same page structure and all of that, linked from the subdomain, redirect all of that on a page by page basis to the G site and then from the G site, you can have the pages that are built with the link linking back to your root domain, right? It’s a mirror of the site anyways. Or you can even iframe those pages into the G site pages if that makes sense. So that you’re pointing any negative link equity that’s come through that. That might be why you’ve got a penalty to the G site, which we already know, the G site will clean that up and won’t penalize itself. So you’d actually be passing page rank to your money site pages on the new domain, whether its root, the root domain or whatever, different subdomain, whatever, but it would be filtering through the G site. I don’t know. I’ve never actually said I’ve done that with an external domain before but not with a G site. What do you think Marco about that?

Marco: You know, I’m really liking that, especially if you can map out your custom domain, right? The www version over to Google so that stays but you still have the G site underneath, right? Right. And that that’ll filter out any other. Yes, this is guaranteed that’ll filter out any penalty that could have. Which, but if we’d have to see what the penalties you guys, you don’t tell us what the penalty is that we can’t really give you the advice, or the answer that you need. But yeah, I mean, again, in theory, you get three on one that penalize subdomain that www, which is a subdomain, to a G site, which links over to the root where the new site was built, and it can all be the same content and Google won’t give a shit.

Bradley: That’s it, right? I mean, that’s, that’s what I would do. Because again, you’re putting an SEO shield between the penalty in your domain, right? I mean, that’s what we’re talking that’s what we talked about the SEO shield. Go check it out on MGYB and you’ll if you don’t already know what we’re talking about, and now you’re basically doing that you’re inserting part of that shield in between the penalty and the domain. So check it out and try.

What Is The Best Way To Add A YouTube Video To A Website And Maintain Site Speed?

Greg’s Up next, he says, Is there a preferred way to add a video from our YouTube channel to our website page and maintain site speed my site pages load in around one second. And I don’t want that to slow to two or three seconds as a result of adding videos. My goals are to increase time on my site, have specific videos, keep visitors on specific pages, increase views on the videos and improved website ranking by adding videos but not slow down page load times. Any suggestions? Yeah, they have lazy load plugins. You can also I know there’s some way to code that into but I know there’s if it’s a WordPress site, they have lazy load plugins that will lazy load images. And they also I’m pretty sure will lazy load iframes or whatever. So videos I’m pretty sure that you can also lazy load those which means it will allow the page to render entirely before it will start to load the images or the external iframe such as a YouTube video. Any other subject The only other I mean obviously if you use a CDN, but a CDN, I’m not sure I don’t think a CDN affects the loading speed of iframes. Because those are external sites, right? It’s just a tunnel to an external site. But CDN a content delivery network would still allow your page itself to load incredibly quick. The iframe would still be would load as slowly as you don’t have control over that the speed at which the iframe loads, that makes sense. Mark, do you have any suggestions for that

Marco: lazy load suggestions is perfect. I would say don’t be too anal about paint speed, because it’s one of over 200 factors. And we don’t know how much of a factor it is. Everything else considered. And since we teach PageSpeed, doesn’t really matter. Nothing, nothing matters. This is the three pillars, that it’s foundational principles, what we teach activity, relevance, trust and authority and how we build that up. So if you go from one second to 2.2 seconds or whatever, doesn’t matter, it’s not going to matter to anybody, especially Someone coming and they see the video, you have it in a prominent place where the person can watch the video, they’re going to wait for that video because they want to watch the video. You’ve driven them to your pace. Now if it’s taking a ton of time to render, that that might cause a big deal, but you can just do it lazy load and and have it render after the page loads and and you’re good to go.

Hernan: Yeah, There’s never like there’s there’s not a good reason why you shouldn’t be using a CDN anyways. CloudFlare being free, you know, or something like that. So you should be using it anyways. So,

Bradley: yeah, yeah, I mean, it’ll help to load the page quicker and also will load the page from multiple servers or, you know, from multiple locations. So, and also helps in case something happens where your site goes down. For whatever reason, people can still view the pages that kind of because they’re cached. So there’s a lot of good reasons to have a CDN. It’s good for security. There’s a lot of reasons for that. But it will help the page itself to load quicker. Again, it’s not going to help the iframes to load any faster because those are external sites. It’s just a tunnel to an external site within your web page, right? So you don’t have any control over that. But you can control at which point does that load so that you can tell that like, again, with a lazy load plugin, you’re basically telling the page to render before it will start to load any external iframes essentially embeds so okay. Try it and see.

Oh, let’s see. Tom says Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks, Tom. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. Fitz. What’s up Fitz? He says on Marcus charity. Is he going to give a 30 minute call if they donate a certain amount to his charity this year?

Marco: No, this year I’ve decided to match donations dollar for dollar.

Bradley: Very cool. Okay. So there you go. Fitz. Adams got the black friday special there and we’re almost out of questions guys, which were only 20

Hernan: Sorry, sorry, Bradley. But I think Adam I’m not sure if he’s here because he needed to start driving but I think that we have a deal in the Black Friday deal that we’re doing that if you spent x you get you get some consultant time would meet with us like now with me but without

Adam: Hernan’s going to come to your house and have Thanksgiving dinner.

Hernan: Okay, give Yeah, I’m gonna cook the turkey.

Adam: And it was about say we should make it the other way. We could be like, yeah, you get an hour with Hernan you just got to go to him. So right,

Hernan: she need to fly down here. And then I yeah, we do that from Monday 3pm to 4pm and then you go back, you know, fly up another nine hours or whatever.

Adam: But um, but yeah, I wonder like a deal that we’ve got both for Semantic Mastery and mg y b, depending on you know, if you’re spending your money in both places, that’s great. And we can certainly work something out but we’ve got I don’t want to give it away but I will Go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday on Friday or over the weekend. And yeah, you’ll be able to see what you can do there. MGYB also gonna have a great promo and depending on how much you spend you can get consulting time with the team for free as a bonus Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah, So bottom line, go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday update that daily because the deals galore going to be there and one of them will include some consulting time with Bradley one on one. And you’d like to get like, I know. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Yeah. You’re all over and kiss your wife and then roll over the other way and kiss me. Well, it says pumpkin or become pie for Thanksgiving which will benefit my SEO the most well, I don’t know which will benefit the SEO but both pumpkin and pecan pie for God’s sakes, it’s Thanksgiving.

Hernan: So right when choose.

Bradley: That’s right. Lastly, Greg says it looks like we’re going to run out of questions. Which means we’re all going to get the hell out of here and go enjoy it with their families. Greg says thanks, guys will check out the lazy low plugin I do I do own and use SEO ultimate plugin from Jeffrey Smith. Good choice, Greg, by the way that’s coming very, very soon. The Pro version is coming out if you’re in the mastermind, you get access to that a hell of a lot sooner I can tell you that. But I’m really looking forward to that being launched guys. And if you are a member, I think of the ultimate plus version that you get grandfathered in at least a some licenses. I’m not sure how that works. But it’s a good choice. Neither either way, Greg, and it’s going to get better. I promise you that. There might even be a way to make them work together. Well, yeah, possibly. And that looks like it guys. So unless you got something else you want to talk about. Let’s wrap it up.

Marco: You know, if they have conflicting plugins, which we did, then all you have to do is let us know with the new version coming out, and we turn it over to the developer and the developer will take care of I mean, this is going to be fully supported that’s that’s why it’s a paid version of the plugin there is a programmer that’s behind this a developer with it. There’s a whole team behind the pro version of the plugin Plus we’re in the middle of all this too and we always take care of the people who use our products and services.

Bradley: Yeah Thanksgiving. Go Yeah, very happy Thanksgiving.

Hernan: Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I’m really I just want to say I’m really thankful for you guys for coming in asking questions. And you know, joining the group, the free the paid, really thankful for all of the support throughout this year. I’m really thankful for my partners here. So yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.

Adam: Before we go, sorry, one that I started to stomp on that Hernan and I feel the same way obviously, but I want to say something. I had three different calls yesterday. Three different people potential clients in and all of them had no firm plans for Black Friday. If you run a business where you have some sort of contacts with your potential clients or clients, do yourself a favor, write an email, send people out. If nothing else, you can always send them out a good faith or goodwill email saying, Hey, here’s all the cool deals in the industry that I found, you know, help them out. If you’ve got things you could do, or you have for sale, maybe it’s a product I service that you could offer a discount on, you know, send it, it’s not just about Oh, you’re just raking in the money. But you know, people are expecting it. I’m looking, you know, we create offers, but I’m also looking for deals over the Black Friday weekend. So, you know, don’t don’t think just because you don’t own like a physical goods store or something that you can’t get in on this. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do. And create some goodwill, you know, amongst your network. So do it. Very cool.

Bradley: Very cool. All right. Let’s wrap it up then guys. We will see you all next week. Happy Thanksgiving once again.

Bye, guys. Yeah, run. Bye everyone. Bye bye

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264

Click on the video above to watch Episode 264 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: should be going live right? Welcome, everybody to the day before Thanksgiving 2019. It’s Episode 264 of Hump Day Hangouts. We are all here. And I will put in a quick suggestion. You’re watching this live put a question on the page. I think everyone’s already headed out for the travel plans. We got a few questions. But we’re going to go through those and then we all are heading out to do our things too. So you got a question? By all means, get it on the page. So we can help you out today. Before we head out and do our Thanksgiving stuff. So real quick, though, let’s take a minute and say hello to everybody. We got everyone here. So Bradley, what I guess one How are you doing into what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Bradley: First, I’m doing very well. Second, let me mention real quick. Yes, what Adam just said is true, guys. We’re happy to cut out early today on Hump Day Hangouts. But we are here as always, so you know if you’ve got questions, post them otherwise, soon as we run out of questions, we’re out. So, but I’m doing quite well. You know, by the way, if anybody missed out on the Google Ads branding course, wow. It’s turned out really good. And now it’s been edited the three-hour-long webinars now been edited into like 15 lessons for that’s just session one. We’re going to do the next session on December 9th. So I don’t think you can get the early bird special anymore, but we might have something on Friday, maybe. We’ll see what happens on Friday right. Lastly, as far as for Thanksgiving I got my daughter for five days actually just got back from picking her up. She’s downstairs so she didn’t have to listen to me talk about marketing for the next hour. But it’s good because I’ve got our for five days and we’ve got two different Thanksgiving dinners planned one tomorrow, one on Saturday. And just looking forward to taking a few days off and spending it with my daughter. How about you? What are you doing?

Adam: I’m headed out to pick the unfortunate time to head to the beach. We’re going to Big Sur if anyone’s familiar with that. It’s a lot of forests. A lot of really scenic areas right on the beach there on highway one California. It’s probably a couple like an hour, hour and a half southwest of Santa Cruz. But we got a massive storm coming on the west coast of the US has been dumping rain. So I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Bradley: Oh man. Good timing, huh?

Adam: Yeah, we might be doing. I don’t know a turkey on Coleman stove.

Chris: What? camping outside?

Adam: Well, we got a little cabin, but it’s just kind of more of a structure than a like full-on cabin. So we’ll see how it goes. I may have a story for you guys next week. If I make it back live. So Hernan, how about you, man? What’s, uh, what are you doing for a living in Buenos Aires?

Hernan: We don’t do that. I’m happy to see you guys eating turkey and all that stuff. So I’m excited. I’m really excited to be here. And I have my friend humpy wood here. What’s he saying? You’re a kinky MF. Oh, yeah. If you go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday there’s going to be some good stuff coming up daily deals. Don’t miss it including that stuff that Bradley did he always over-delivers like a crazy person. And you know it’s really really good stuff so go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday to get your stuff and invest in your business and instead of like getting a new TV that you don’t even need.

Adam: definitely and I was gonna say you Hernan we’ve had I’m looking right now I just hopped in to look at the stats event 262 people go so far you can go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday right now. And we’ve got three free training videos that haven’t been seen one of them is brand spanking new that nobody has ever seen. So we’ve got that up, but that’s coming down at midnight tomorrow. So if you haven’t gone over there, by all means, head over there. If you’re watching this after the fact after Friday, that’s too late. That’s all right. You got two days to get over there and check it out. Let’s see

Bradley: Chris, what the hell are you doing over there, man?

Adam: Yeah. Chris How you doing and how’s your microphone

Chris: I wanted some attention you know like you taking too long guys. So yeah, like I’m pretty good here. happy that I don’t have to eat boatloads of foods. I enjoyed Thanksgiving last year while I was on a cut and it pretty much destroyed me. Let’s call it that way through me back two weeks so I’m happy that I can pass on that experience this year. And yeah, enjoy the cold weather in Austria like I’m super excited because it’s snowing.

Adam: Wow. Ooh, nice. Hopefully, don’t get any sound here. I’m trying to bring up something all right. Marco. I guess yeah, let’s get the Costa Rica weather update and what are you going to be up to for the next few days?

Marco: No Thanksgiving in Costa Rica. We don’t celebrate it. But I mean to all of you who celebrated hope you have a great time. I hope your table is full and that you have lots of blessings on the table. Not just for Thanksgiving, but for the rest of the year. So yeah, by all means, enjoy it now. I’m working on my charity webinars. Every year, which I do something for charity. And last year went over really well. I did four webinars. And we just had a ton of people attend. And, you know, I’m known when it’s about the kids. I’m known to give away a lot of knowledge that maybe shouldn’t go out, but I don’t care. It’s for the kids. And if you donate, you can come to the webinars, I’ll drop the donation link on the page. And anyone who wants to donate, go there and make a donation or go find me to one of the Semantic Mastery of the free group. Go to my page, right Marco Benavides. I’m on Facebook and all of the instructions are there on what you need to do to it. Turn the live webinar. Things are a good man. So when things are good, it’s good to give

Adam: most definitely most definitely yeah and be doing a little bit of that it’s good to just a general I do try to do some reflection around this time of year and think about you know, hey I’m joking about going out and being cold in the rain but it’s my choice to do it. I’m glad you know for the things I’ve got and for having not only you guys as partners, but also you know, being able to converse with people help other people out on Hump Day Hangout, so we’ll talk about this more at Christmas we got some good stuff coming up too. But we’ll concentrate on this week we got some cool Black Friday stuff coming up so like said in her non did go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday, and then that will automatically roll over training goes away midnight tomorrow, but then we’re going to have some just killer deals coming up at 12:01 am starting Friday. I’m pumped. I’m getting excited.

So we’re real quick. I want to say though if you’re new to semantic mastery, you’re in the right place. We’re going to get to some questions here shortly. You can come here every week, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, and you can ask your questions ahead of time, which we highly encourage just keep it to one question. I know it’s tough sometimes but people start writing paragraphs and we have to skip if there are too many questions because we want to make sure we’re fair and get to all the questions. But then the next step would be grabbing the battle plan if you want step by step processes for getting results, things like your age domain or you got a new website you’re putting up or a YouTube channel or whatever it is you want to do go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com pick it up, it’s a steal, we put in a ton of awesome bonuses is a value bomb. And after that, if you’ve got clients and you’re wanting to grow your digital marketing agency or business, then come join us in the mastermind go to mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for everyone that likes saving time, that’s me, right and if you want to not only save time to get things done very very well the first time go to mgyb.co originally this stuff started out as are done for you services and things like syndication networks are always drives tech stuff we had we had certainly taught about and you could still buy the courses if you want to understand the real nuts and bolts and maybe have someone do it for you. But if you want it done quickly, and you want it done professionally had the mgyb.co, you can check it out. And we’ve added on link building, press releases, all sorts of awesome stuff, which there might be some Black Friday stuff going on. But we’ll hold off on that until Friday. So other than that, guys, do we have anything else that we want to cover?

Bradley: I don’t think so. I’m ready to answer some questions. Get the hell out.

Adam: All right. humpy says yes.

Hernan: Humpy’s cursing since today’s gonna mute myself and that Bradley dude thing.

Bradley: All right, let’s do it. All right, let me grab the screen. Sweet You guys should be seeing my screen now. Correct?

Adam: Correct. Alright.

Can You Delete A Subdomain And Redirect It To The Root Without Passing A Penalty?

So it looks like Dustin Bay was the first one up. He says if I get a penalty on the www. domain, so is the subdomain with www as the subdomain, can I delete the subdomain and redirect it to the root without passing the penalty? No, not if you’re just doing a straight redirect, you can’t do that it will pass the penalty. So, or is it better to just delete www without redirecting it and installing the site on the root? Yeah, you can I mean, you could do that because essentially, well, I think about that. Marco, what say you because I know with www a lot of the times will be. It’s still treated as a subdomain but just installing it on the root because some people will have maybe linked to you whatever’s causing a penalty, let’s see, I’ve got to admit or not there is whatever is causing the penalty could also cause it. Remember, people, if they linked to the root domain version of it, if you had your domain setup on www and they were canonicalized to each other, or they auto redirected from your root domain to the www dot version or whatever, then it if people built links to it without www in the domain, then it’s still going to be pointing links back to the root domain, even if you remove that, you know, reinstall the site on the root domain, if that makes sense. So I know if you just did a redirect from the www subdomain to the root domain and then kind of pushed the installation of the site onto the root and lost the www it would still pass the penalty. So what’s the best way to go about that Marco?

Marco: Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this question really hard and think Okay, so how, how would I do this because I’ve just lost my dub dub. And if I did any, as you said, any link building to it, because you still going to have, it depends on the penalty, right? But you’re still going to have a ton of links coming to the dub dub dub, especially the way we teach it. Because we use all variations of the URL right? When we link building, so you’re going to lose that you’re going to lose anyone who’s still and there are people who still type out www. and then the address, right, there are still people who do that. Now, you are going to pass a penalty be 301? Yes, no question. Now, what if? What if, right, so I’m just thinking like, this is theory, guys? I don’t I hardly ever do this unless I tested but this is theory. And this is something you could try. What have you said that that subdomain to no index nofollow and then have Google crawl it? I’d go into Search Console, have Google recrawl and see what it said to no index, no five And then three or one it to the non dub dub dub version or even HTTPS version right to the non www and then everything is redirected again to the HTTPS, you might lose the penalty with with with a couple of jumps and with that with a no-index nofollow on the subdomain that’s causing the problem.

Now, what’s the problem? I mean, how did they get a penalty? How do you know that it was kind of like, was it a manual? Because a manual, if you remove whatever it is that offending Google, you can request for reconsideration. So it all depends on what kind of penalty. Like why not it’s even hard to get a link penalty. Right? Because Google just doesn’t pay attention to links that aren’t relevant. Or if you’re really talented, then you send millions of links, then you get and you do get an unnatural link, you could get that. But it’s usually manuals that you get. So trying to think it through, you may, you may not pass a penalty if you do a double hop, or it might, it might take time for it to catch back up. So you’re going to have to test on this and see, but by all means, move it to the non-www. And remember that any links going to that you lose that once you remove that www, if it doesn’t get redirected, so you’re going to have to read redo all of those links, especially if you had some really powerful links coming through there. That’s what I would recommend trying again, theory. I haven’t done this. I haven’t ever tried it. But in theory, if Google sees that it’s knowing that’s nofollow, then there’s no reason for that website to be penalized anymore.

Hernan: Yeah, right. Can you real quick? This is more like a question. Can you read direct? I guess you could, like you could read direct a subdomain outside of the route and then back into the route, you could like, yeah, you know, like, so as to clean it up.

Bradley: I was gonna, I was going to suggest, you know, something that would be a little bit more elaborate because I’ve done something similar in the past, where not specifically what I’ve done it to an external domain and then redirected the external domain back to the domain that had the penalty, but just on a different subdomain or you know, a different subdomain entirely. But here’s what I was thinking might also work. Again, this is theory, but it would be putting inserting Google in the middle of it, which could absolutely reduce or, you know, eliminate any negative, you know, link equity from point coming back through, something you might consider would be like creating a G site mirrored to what the original site was. So you have the same page structure and all of that, linked from the subdomain, redirect all of that on a page by page basis to the G site and then from the G site, you can have the pages that are built with the link linking back to your root domain, right? It’s a mirror of the site anyways. Or you can even iframe those pages into the G site pages if that makes sense. So that you’re pointing any negative link equity that’s come through that. That might be why you’ve got a penalty to the G site, which we already know, the G site will clean that up and won’t penalize itself. So you’d actually be passing page rank to your money site pages on the new domain, whether its root, the root domain or whatever, different subdomain, whatever, but it would be filtering through the G site. I don’t know. I’ve never actually said I’ve done that with an external domain before but not with a G site. What do you think Marco about that?

Marco: You know, I’m really liking that, especially if you can map out your custom domain, right? The www version over to Google so that stays but you still have the G site underneath, right? Right. And that that’ll filter out any other. Yes, this is guaranteed that’ll filter out any penalty that could have. Which, but if we’d have to see what the penalties you guys, you don’t tell us what the penalty is that we can’t really give you the advice, or the answer that you need. But yeah, I mean, again, in theory, you get three on one that penalize subdomain that www, which is a subdomain, to a G site, which links over to the root where the new site was built, and it can all be the same content and Google won’t give a shit.

Bradley: That’s it, right? I mean, that’s, that’s what I would do. Because again, you’re putting an SEO shield between the penalty in your domain, right? I mean, that’s what we’re talking that’s what we talked about the SEO shield. Go check it out on MGYB and you’ll if you don’t already know what we’re talking about, and now you’re basically doing that you’re inserting part of that shield in between the penalty and the domain. So check it out and try.

What Is The Best Way To Add A YouTube Video To A Website And Maintain Site Speed?

Greg’s Up next, he says, Is there a preferred way to add a video from our YouTube channel to our website page and maintain site speed my site pages load in around one second. And I don’t want that to slow to two or three seconds as a result of adding videos. My goals are to increase time on my site, have specific videos, keep visitors on specific pages, increase views on the videos and improved website ranking by adding videos but not slow down page load times. Any suggestions? Yeah, they have lazy load plugins. You can also I know there’s some way to code that into but I know there’s if it’s a WordPress site, they have lazy load plugins that will lazy load images. And they also I’m pretty sure will lazy load iframes or whatever. So videos I’m pretty sure that you can also lazy load those which means it will allow the page to render entirely before it will start to load the images or the external iframe such as a YouTube video. Any other subject The only other I mean obviously if you use a CDN, but a CDN, I’m not sure I don’t think a CDN affects the loading speed of iframes. Because those are external sites, right? It’s just a tunnel to an external site. But CDN a content delivery network would still allow your page itself to load incredibly quick. The iframe would still be would load as slowly as you don’t have control over that the speed at which the iframe loads, that makes sense. Mark, do you have any suggestions for that

Marco: lazy load suggestions is perfect. I would say don’t be too anal about paint speed, because it’s one of over 200 factors. And we don’t know how much of a factor it is. Everything else considered. And since we teach PageSpeed, doesn’t really matter. Nothing, nothing matters. This is the three pillars, that it’s foundational principles, what we teach activity, relevance, trust and authority and how we build that up. So if you go from one second to 2.2 seconds or whatever, doesn’t matter, it’s not going to matter to anybody, especially Someone coming and they see the video, you have it in a prominent place where the person can watch the video, they’re going to wait for that video because they want to watch the video. You’ve driven them to your pace. Now if it’s taking a ton of time to render, that that might cause a big deal, but you can just do it lazy load and and have it render after the page loads and and you’re good to go.

Hernan: Yeah, There’s never like there’s there’s not a good reason why you shouldn’t be using a CDN anyways. CloudFlare being free, you know, or something like that. So you should be using it anyways. So,

Bradley: yeah, yeah, I mean, it’ll help to load the page quicker and also will load the page from multiple servers or, you know, from multiple locations. So, and also helps in case something happens where your site goes down. For whatever reason, people can still view the pages that kind of because they’re cached. So there’s a lot of good reasons to have a CDN. It’s good for security. There’s a lot of reasons for that. But it will help the page itself to load quicker. Again, it’s not going to help the iframes to load any faster because those are external sites. It’s just a tunnel to an external site within your web page, right? So you don’t have any control over that. But you can control at which point does that load so that you can tell that like, again, with a lazy load plugin, you’re basically telling the page to render before it will start to load any external iframes essentially embeds so okay. Try it and see.

Oh, let’s see. Tom says Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks, Tom. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. Fitz. What’s up Fitz? He says on Marcus charity. Is he going to give a 30 minute call if they donate a certain amount to his charity this year?

Marco: No, this year I’ve decided to match donations dollar for dollar.

Bradley: Very cool. Okay. So there you go. Fitz. Adams got the black friday special there and we’re almost out of questions guys, which were only 20

Hernan: Sorry, sorry, Bradley. But I think Adam I’m not sure if he’s here because he needed to start driving but I think that we have a deal in the Black Friday deal that we’re doing that if you spent x you get you get some consultant time would meet with us like now with me but without

Adam: Hernan’s going to come to your house and have Thanksgiving dinner.

Hernan: Okay, give Yeah, I’m gonna cook the turkey.

Adam: And it was about say we should make it the other way. We could be like, yeah, you get an hour with Hernan you just got to go to him. So right,

Hernan: she need to fly down here. And then I yeah, we do that from Monday 3pm to 4pm and then you go back, you know, fly up another nine hours or whatever.

Adam: But um, but yeah, I wonder like a deal that we’ve got both for Semantic Mastery and mg y b, depending on you know, if you’re spending your money in both places, that’s great. And we can certainly work something out but we’ve got I don’t want to give it away but I will Go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday on Friday or over the weekend. And yeah, you’ll be able to see what you can do there. MGYB also gonna have a great promo and depending on how much you spend you can get consulting time with the team for free as a bonus Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah, So bottom line, go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday update that daily because the deals galore going to be there and one of them will include some consulting time with Bradley one on one. And you’d like to get like, I know. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Yeah. You’re all over and kiss your wife and then roll over the other way and kiss me. Well, it says pumpkin or become pie for Thanksgiving which will benefit my SEO the most well, I don’t know which will benefit the SEO but both pumpkin and pecan pie for God’s sakes, it’s Thanksgiving.

Hernan: So right when choose.

Bradley: That’s right. Lastly, Greg says it looks like we’re going to run out of questions. Which means we’re all going to get the hell out of here and go enjoy it with their families. Greg says thanks, guys will check out the lazy low plugin I do I do own and use SEO ultimate plugin from Jeffrey Smith. Good choice, Greg, by the way that’s coming very, very soon. The Pro version is coming out if you’re in the mastermind, you get access to that a hell of a lot sooner I can tell you that. But I’m really looking forward to that being launched guys. And if you are a member, I think of the ultimate plus version that you get grandfathered in at least a some licenses. I’m not sure how that works. But it’s a good choice. Neither either way, Greg, and it’s going to get better. I promise you that. There might even be a way to make them work together. Well, yeah, possibly. And that looks like it guys. So unless you got something else you want to talk about. Let’s wrap it up.

Marco: You know, if they have conflicting plugins, which we did, then all you have to do is let us know with the new version coming out, and we turn it over to the developer and the developer will take care of I mean, this is going to be fully supported that’s that’s why it’s a paid version of the plugin there is a programmer that’s behind this a developer with it. There’s a whole team behind the pro version of the plugin Plus we’re in the middle of all this too and we always take care of the people who use our products and services.

Bradley: Yeah Thanksgiving. Go Yeah, very happy Thanksgiving.

Hernan: Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I’m really I just want to say I’m really thankful for you guys for coming in asking questions. And you know, joining the group, the free the paid, really thankful for all of the support throughout this year. I’m really thankful for my partners here. So yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.

Adam: Before we go, sorry, one that I started to stomp on that Hernan and I feel the same way obviously, but I want to say something. I had three different calls yesterday. Three different people potential clients in and all of them had no firm plans for Black Friday. If you run a business where you have some sort of contacts with your potential clients or clients, do yourself a favor, write an email, send people out. If nothing else, you can always send them out a good faith or goodwill email saying, Hey, here’s all the cool deals in the industry that I found, you know, help them out. If you’ve got things you could do, or you have for sale, maybe it’s a product I service that you could offer a discount on, you know, send it, it’s not just about Oh, you’re just raking in the money. But you know, people are expecting it. I’m looking, you know, we create offers, but I’m also looking for deals over the Black Friday weekend. So, you know, don’t don’t think just because you don’t own like a physical goods store or something that you can’t get in on this. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do. And create some goodwill, you know, amongst your network. So do it. Very cool.

Bradley: Very cool. All right. Let’s wrap it up then guys. We will see you all next week. Happy Thanksgiving once again.

Bye, guys. Yeah, run. Bye everyone. Bye bye

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264

Click on the video above to watch Episode 264 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: should be going live right? Welcome, everybody to the day before Thanksgiving 2019. It’s Episode 264 of Hump Day Hangouts. We are all here. And I will put in a quick suggestion. You’re watching this live put a question on the page. I think everyone’s already headed out for the travel plans. We got a few questions. But we’re going to go through those and then we all are heading out to do our things too. So you got a question? By all means, get it on the page. So we can help you out today. Before we head out and do our Thanksgiving stuff. So real quick, though, let’s take a minute and say hello to everybody. We got everyone here. So Bradley, what I guess one How are you doing into what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Bradley: First, I’m doing very well. Second, let me mention real quick. Yes, what Adam just said is true, guys. We’re happy to cut out early today on Hump Day Hangouts. But we are here as always, so you know if you’ve got questions, post them otherwise, soon as we run out of questions, we’re out. So, but I’m doing quite well. You know, by the way, if anybody missed out on the Google Ads branding course, wow. It’s turned out really good. And now it’s been edited the three-hour-long webinars now been edited into like 15 lessons for that’s just session one. We’re going to do the next session on December 9th. So I don’t think you can get the early bird special anymore, but we might have something on Friday, maybe. We’ll see what happens on Friday right. Lastly, as far as for Thanksgiving I got my daughter for five days actually just got back from picking her up. She’s downstairs so she didn’t have to listen to me talk about marketing for the next hour. But it’s good because I’ve got our for five days and we’ve got two different Thanksgiving dinners planned one tomorrow, one on Saturday. And just looking forward to taking a few days off and spending it with my daughter. How about you? What are you doing?

Adam: I’m headed out to pick the unfortunate time to head to the beach. We’re going to Big Sur if anyone’s familiar with that. It’s a lot of forests. A lot of really scenic areas right on the beach there on highway one California. It’s probably a couple like an hour, hour and a half southwest of Santa Cruz. But we got a massive storm coming on the west coast of the US has been dumping rain. So I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Bradley: Oh man. Good timing, huh?

Adam: Yeah, we might be doing. I don’t know a turkey on Coleman stove.

Chris: What? camping outside?

Adam: Well, we got a little cabin, but it’s just kind of more of a structure than a like full-on cabin. So we’ll see how it goes. I may have a story for you guys next week. If I make it back live. So Hernan, how about you, man? What’s, uh, what are you doing for a living in Buenos Aires?

Hernan: We don’t do that. I’m happy to see you guys eating turkey and all that stuff. So I’m excited. I’m really excited to be here. And I have my friend humpy wood here. What’s he saying? You’re a kinky MF. Oh, yeah. If you go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday there’s going to be some good stuff coming up daily deals. Don’t miss it including that stuff that Bradley did he always over-delivers like a crazy person. And you know it’s really really good stuff so go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday to get your stuff and invest in your business and instead of like getting a new TV that you don’t even need.

Adam: definitely and I was gonna say you Hernan we’ve had I’m looking right now I just hopped in to look at the stats event 262 people go so far you can go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday right now. And we’ve got three free training videos that haven’t been seen one of them is brand spanking new that nobody has ever seen. So we’ve got that up, but that’s coming down at midnight tomorrow. So if you haven’t gone over there, by all means, head over there. If you’re watching this after the fact after Friday, that’s too late. That’s all right. You got two days to get over there and check it out. Let’s see

Bradley: Chris, what the hell are you doing over there, man?

Adam: Yeah. Chris How you doing and how’s your microphone

Chris: I wanted some attention you know like you taking too long guys. So yeah, like I’m pretty good here. happy that I don’t have to eat boatloads of foods. I enjoyed Thanksgiving last year while I was on a cut and it pretty much destroyed me. Let’s call it that way through me back two weeks so I’m happy that I can pass on that experience this year. And yeah, enjoy the cold weather in Austria like I’m super excited because it’s snowing.

Adam: Wow. Ooh, nice. Hopefully, don’t get any sound here. I’m trying to bring up something all right. Marco. I guess yeah, let’s get the Costa Rica weather update and what are you going to be up to for the next few days?

Marco: No Thanksgiving in Costa Rica. We don’t celebrate it. But I mean to all of you who celebrated hope you have a great time. I hope your table is full and that you have lots of blessings on the table. Not just for Thanksgiving, but for the rest of the year. So yeah, by all means, enjoy it now. I’m working on my charity webinars. Every year, which I do something for charity. And last year went over really well. I did four webinars. And we just had a ton of people attend. And, you know, I’m known when it’s about the kids. I’m known to give away a lot of knowledge that maybe shouldn’t go out, but I don’t care. It’s for the kids. And if you donate, you can come to the webinars, I’ll drop the donation link on the page. And anyone who wants to donate, go there and make a donation or go find me to one of the Semantic Mastery of the free group. Go to my page, right Marco Benavides. I’m on Facebook and all of the instructions are there on what you need to do to it. Turn the live webinar. Things are a good man. So when things are good, it’s good to give

Adam: most definitely most definitely yeah and be doing a little bit of that it’s good to just a general I do try to do some reflection around this time of year and think about you know, hey I’m joking about going out and being cold in the rain but it’s my choice to do it. I’m glad you know for the things I’ve got and for having not only you guys as partners, but also you know, being able to converse with people help other people out on Hump Day Hangout, so we’ll talk about this more at Christmas we got some good stuff coming up too. But we’ll concentrate on this week we got some cool Black Friday stuff coming up so like said in her non did go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday, and then that will automatically roll over training goes away midnight tomorrow, but then we’re going to have some just killer deals coming up at 12:01 am starting Friday. I’m pumped. I’m getting excited.

So we’re real quick. I want to say though if you’re new to semantic mastery, you’re in the right place. We’re going to get to some questions here shortly. You can come here every week, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, and you can ask your questions ahead of time, which we highly encourage just keep it to one question. I know it’s tough sometimes but people start writing paragraphs and we have to skip if there are too many questions because we want to make sure we’re fair and get to all the questions. But then the next step would be grabbing the battle plan if you want step by step processes for getting results, things like your age domain or you got a new website you’re putting up or a YouTube channel or whatever it is you want to do go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com pick it up, it’s a steal, we put in a ton of awesome bonuses is a value bomb. And after that, if you’ve got clients and you’re wanting to grow your digital marketing agency or business, then come join us in the mastermind go to mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for everyone that likes saving time, that’s me, right and if you want to not only save time to get things done very very well the first time go to mgyb.co originally this stuff started out as are done for you services and things like syndication networks are always drives tech stuff we had we had certainly taught about and you could still buy the courses if you want to understand the real nuts and bolts and maybe have someone do it for you. But if you want it done quickly, and you want it done professionally had the mgyb.co, you can check it out. And we’ve added on link building, press releases, all sorts of awesome stuff, which there might be some Black Friday stuff going on. But we’ll hold off on that until Friday. So other than that, guys, do we have anything else that we want to cover?

Bradley: I don’t think so. I’m ready to answer some questions. Get the hell out.

Adam: All right. humpy says yes.

Hernan: Humpy’s cursing since today’s gonna mute myself and that Bradley dude thing.

Bradley: All right, let’s do it. All right, let me grab the screen. Sweet You guys should be seeing my screen now. Correct?

Adam: Correct. Alright.

Can You Delete A Subdomain And Redirect It To The Root Without Passing A Penalty?

So it looks like Dustin Bay was the first one up. He says if I get a penalty on the www. domain, so is the subdomain with www as the subdomain, can I delete the subdomain and redirect it to the root without passing the penalty? No, not if you’re just doing a straight redirect, you can’t do that it will pass the penalty. So, or is it better to just delete www without redirecting it and installing the site on the root? Yeah, you can I mean, you could do that because essentially, well, I think about that. Marco, what say you because I know with www a lot of the times will be. It’s still treated as a subdomain but just installing it on the root because some people will have maybe linked to you whatever’s causing a penalty, let’s see, I’ve got to admit or not there is whatever is causing the penalty could also cause it. Remember, people, if they linked to the root domain version of it, if you had your domain setup on www and they were canonicalized to each other, or they auto redirected from your root domain to the www dot version or whatever, then it if people built links to it without www in the domain, then it’s still going to be pointing links back to the root domain, even if you remove that, you know, reinstall the site on the root domain, if that makes sense. So I know if you just did a redirect from the www subdomain to the root domain and then kind of pushed the installation of the site onto the root and lost the www it would still pass the penalty. So what’s the best way to go about that Marco?

Marco: Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this question really hard and think Okay, so how, how would I do this because I’ve just lost my dub dub. And if I did any, as you said, any link building to it, because you still going to have, it depends on the penalty, right? But you’re still going to have a ton of links coming to the dub dub dub, especially the way we teach it. Because we use all variations of the URL right? When we link building, so you’re going to lose that you’re going to lose anyone who’s still and there are people who still type out www. and then the address, right, there are still people who do that. Now, you are going to pass a penalty be 301? Yes, no question. Now, what if? What if, right, so I’m just thinking like, this is theory, guys? I don’t I hardly ever do this unless I tested but this is theory. And this is something you could try. What have you said that that subdomain to no index nofollow and then have Google crawl it? I’d go into Search Console, have Google recrawl and see what it said to no index, no five And then three or one it to the non dub dub dub version or even HTTPS version right to the non www and then everything is redirected again to the HTTPS, you might lose the penalty with with with a couple of jumps and with that with a no-index nofollow on the subdomain that’s causing the problem.

Now, what’s the problem? I mean, how did they get a penalty? How do you know that it was kind of like, was it a manual? Because a manual, if you remove whatever it is that offending Google, you can request for reconsideration. So it all depends on what kind of penalty. Like why not it’s even hard to get a link penalty. Right? Because Google just doesn’t pay attention to links that aren’t relevant. Or if you’re really talented, then you send millions of links, then you get and you do get an unnatural link, you could get that. But it’s usually manuals that you get. So trying to think it through, you may, you may not pass a penalty if you do a double hop, or it might, it might take time for it to catch back up. So you’re going to have to test on this and see, but by all means, move it to the non-www. And remember that any links going to that you lose that once you remove that www, if it doesn’t get redirected, so you’re going to have to read redo all of those links, especially if you had some really powerful links coming through there. That’s what I would recommend trying again, theory. I haven’t done this. I haven’t ever tried it. But in theory, if Google sees that it’s knowing that’s nofollow, then there’s no reason for that website to be penalized anymore.

Hernan: Yeah, right. Can you real quick? This is more like a question. Can you read direct? I guess you could, like you could read direct a subdomain outside of the route and then back into the route, you could like, yeah, you know, like, so as to clean it up.

Bradley: I was gonna, I was going to suggest, you know, something that would be a little bit more elaborate because I’ve done something similar in the past, where not specifically what I’ve done it to an external domain and then redirected the external domain back to the domain that had the penalty, but just on a different subdomain or you know, a different subdomain entirely. But here’s what I was thinking might also work. Again, this is theory, but it would be putting inserting Google in the middle of it, which could absolutely reduce or, you know, eliminate any negative, you know, link equity from point coming back through, something you might consider would be like creating a G site mirrored to what the original site was. So you have the same page structure and all of that, linked from the subdomain, redirect all of that on a page by page basis to the G site and then from the G site, you can have the pages that are built with the link linking back to your root domain, right? It’s a mirror of the site anyways. Or you can even iframe those pages into the G site pages if that makes sense. So that you’re pointing any negative link equity that’s come through that. That might be why you’ve got a penalty to the G site, which we already know, the G site will clean that up and won’t penalize itself. So you’d actually be passing page rank to your money site pages on the new domain, whether its root, the root domain or whatever, different subdomain, whatever, but it would be filtering through the G site. I don’t know. I’ve never actually said I’ve done that with an external domain before but not with a G site. What do you think Marco about that?

Marco: You know, I’m really liking that, especially if you can map out your custom domain, right? The www version over to Google so that stays but you still have the G site underneath, right? Right. And that that’ll filter out any other. Yes, this is guaranteed that’ll filter out any penalty that could have. Which, but if we’d have to see what the penalties you guys, you don’t tell us what the penalty is that we can’t really give you the advice, or the answer that you need. But yeah, I mean, again, in theory, you get three on one that penalize subdomain that www, which is a subdomain, to a G site, which links over to the root where the new site was built, and it can all be the same content and Google won’t give a shit.

Bradley: That’s it, right? I mean, that’s, that’s what I would do. Because again, you’re putting an SEO shield between the penalty in your domain, right? I mean, that’s what we’re talking that’s what we talked about the SEO shield. Go check it out on MGYB and you’ll if you don’t already know what we’re talking about, and now you’re basically doing that you’re inserting part of that shield in between the penalty and the domain. So check it out and try.

What Is The Best Way To Add A YouTube Video To A Website And Maintain Site Speed?

Greg’s Up next, he says, Is there a preferred way to add a video from our YouTube channel to our website page and maintain site speed my site pages load in around one second. And I don’t want that to slow to two or three seconds as a result of adding videos. My goals are to increase time on my site, have specific videos, keep visitors on specific pages, increase views on the videos and improved website ranking by adding videos but not slow down page load times. Any suggestions? Yeah, they have lazy load plugins. You can also I know there’s some way to code that into but I know there’s if it’s a WordPress site, they have lazy load plugins that will lazy load images. And they also I’m pretty sure will lazy load iframes or whatever. So videos I’m pretty sure that you can also lazy load those which means it will allow the page to render entirely before it will start to load the images or the external iframe such as a YouTube video. Any other subject The only other I mean obviously if you use a CDN, but a CDN, I’m not sure I don’t think a CDN affects the loading speed of iframes. Because those are external sites, right? It’s just a tunnel to an external site. But CDN a content delivery network would still allow your page itself to load incredibly quick. The iframe would still be would load as slowly as you don’t have control over that the speed at which the iframe loads, that makes sense. Mark, do you have any suggestions for that

Marco: lazy load suggestions is perfect. I would say don’t be too anal about paint speed, because it’s one of over 200 factors. And we don’t know how much of a factor it is. Everything else considered. And since we teach PageSpeed, doesn’t really matter. Nothing, nothing matters. This is the three pillars, that it’s foundational principles, what we teach activity, relevance, trust and authority and how we build that up. So if you go from one second to 2.2 seconds or whatever, doesn’t matter, it’s not going to matter to anybody, especially Someone coming and they see the video, you have it in a prominent place where the person can watch the video, they’re going to wait for that video because they want to watch the video. You’ve driven them to your pace. Now if it’s taking a ton of time to render, that that might cause a big deal, but you can just do it lazy load and and have it render after the page loads and and you’re good to go.

Hernan: Yeah, There’s never like there’s there’s not a good reason why you shouldn’t be using a CDN anyways. CloudFlare being free, you know, or something like that. So you should be using it anyways. So,

Bradley: yeah, yeah, I mean, it’ll help to load the page quicker and also will load the page from multiple servers or, you know, from multiple locations. So, and also helps in case something happens where your site goes down. For whatever reason, people can still view the pages that kind of because they’re cached. So there’s a lot of good reasons to have a CDN. It’s good for security. There’s a lot of reasons for that. But it will help the page itself to load quicker. Again, it’s not going to help the iframes to load any faster because those are external sites. It’s just a tunnel to an external site within your web page, right? So you don’t have any control over that. But you can control at which point does that load so that you can tell that like, again, with a lazy load plugin, you’re basically telling the page to render before it will start to load any external iframes essentially embeds so okay. Try it and see.

Oh, let’s see. Tom says Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks, Tom. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. Fitz. What’s up Fitz? He says on Marcus charity. Is he going to give a 30 minute call if they donate a certain amount to his charity this year?

Marco: No, this year I’ve decided to match donations dollar for dollar.

Bradley: Very cool. Okay. So there you go. Fitz. Adams got the black friday special there and we’re almost out of questions guys, which were only 20

Hernan: Sorry, sorry, Bradley. But I think Adam I’m not sure if he’s here because he needed to start driving but I think that we have a deal in the Black Friday deal that we’re doing that if you spent x you get you get some consultant time would meet with us like now with me but without

Adam: Hernan’s going to come to your house and have Thanksgiving dinner.

Hernan: Okay, give Yeah, I’m gonna cook the turkey.

Adam: And it was about say we should make it the other way. We could be like, yeah, you get an hour with Hernan you just got to go to him. So right,

Hernan: she need to fly down here. And then I yeah, we do that from Monday 3pm to 4pm and then you go back, you know, fly up another nine hours or whatever.

Adam: But um, but yeah, I wonder like a deal that we’ve got both for Semantic Mastery and mg y b, depending on you know, if you’re spending your money in both places, that’s great. And we can certainly work something out but we’ve got I don’t want to give it away but I will Go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday on Friday or over the weekend. And yeah, you’ll be able to see what you can do there. MGYB also gonna have a great promo and depending on how much you spend you can get consulting time with the team for free as a bonus Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah, So bottom line, go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday update that daily because the deals galore going to be there and one of them will include some consulting time with Bradley one on one. And you’d like to get like, I know. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Yeah. You’re all over and kiss your wife and then roll over the other way and kiss me. Well, it says pumpkin or become pie for Thanksgiving which will benefit my SEO the most well, I don’t know which will benefit the SEO but both pumpkin and pecan pie for God’s sakes, it’s Thanksgiving.

Hernan: So right when choose.

Bradley: That’s right. Lastly, Greg says it looks like we’re going to run out of questions. Which means we’re all going to get the hell out of here and go enjoy it with their families. Greg says thanks, guys will check out the lazy low plugin I do I do own and use SEO ultimate plugin from Jeffrey Smith. Good choice, Greg, by the way that’s coming very, very soon. The Pro version is coming out if you’re in the mastermind, you get access to that a hell of a lot sooner I can tell you that. But I’m really looking forward to that being launched guys. And if you are a member, I think of the ultimate plus version that you get grandfathered in at least a some licenses. I’m not sure how that works. But it’s a good choice. Neither either way, Greg, and it’s going to get better. I promise you that. There might even be a way to make them work together. Well, yeah, possibly. And that looks like it guys. So unless you got something else you want to talk about. Let’s wrap it up.

Marco: You know, if they have conflicting plugins, which we did, then all you have to do is let us know with the new version coming out, and we turn it over to the developer and the developer will take care of I mean, this is going to be fully supported that’s that’s why it’s a paid version of the plugin there is a programmer that’s behind this a developer with it. There’s a whole team behind the pro version of the plugin Plus we’re in the middle of all this too and we always take care of the people who use our products and services.

Bradley: Yeah Thanksgiving. Go Yeah, very happy Thanksgiving.

Hernan: Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I’m really I just want to say I’m really thankful for you guys for coming in asking questions. And you know, joining the group, the free the paid, really thankful for all of the support throughout this year. I’m really thankful for my partners here. So yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.

Adam: Before we go, sorry, one that I started to stomp on that Hernan and I feel the same way obviously, but I want to say something. I had three different calls yesterday. Three different people potential clients in and all of them had no firm plans for Black Friday. If you run a business where you have some sort of contacts with your potential clients or clients, do yourself a favor, write an email, send people out. If nothing else, you can always send them out a good faith or goodwill email saying, Hey, here’s all the cool deals in the industry that I found, you know, help them out. If you’ve got things you could do, or you have for sale, maybe it’s a product I service that you could offer a discount on, you know, send it, it’s not just about Oh, you’re just raking in the money. But you know, people are expecting it. I’m looking, you know, we create offers, but I’m also looking for deals over the Black Friday weekend. So, you know, don’t don’t think just because you don’t own like a physical goods store or something that you can’t get in on this. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do. And create some goodwill, you know, amongst your network. So do it. Very cool.

Bradley: Very cool. All right. Let’s wrap it up then guys. We will see you all next week. Happy Thanksgiving once again.

Bye, guys. Yeah, run. Bye everyone. Bye bye

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264

Click on the video above to watch Episode 264 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: should be going live right? Welcome, everybody to the day before Thanksgiving 2019. It’s Episode 264 of Hump Day Hangouts. We are all here. And I will put in a quick suggestion. You’re watching this live put a question on the page. I think everyone’s already headed out for the travel plans. We got a few questions. But we’re going to go through those and then we all are heading out to do our things too. So you got a question? By all means, get it on the page. So we can help you out today. Before we head out and do our Thanksgiving stuff. So real quick, though, let’s take a minute and say hello to everybody. We got everyone here. So Bradley, what I guess one How are you doing into what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Bradley: First, I’m doing very well. Second, let me mention real quick. Yes, what Adam just said is true, guys. We’re happy to cut out early today on Hump Day Hangouts. But we are here as always, so you know if you’ve got questions, post them otherwise, soon as we run out of questions, we’re out. So, but I’m doing quite well. You know, by the way, if anybody missed out on the Google Ads branding course, wow. It’s turned out really good. And now it’s been edited the three-hour-long webinars now been edited into like 15 lessons for that’s just session one. We’re going to do the next session on December 9th. So I don’t think you can get the early bird special anymore, but we might have something on Friday, maybe. We’ll see what happens on Friday right. Lastly, as far as for Thanksgiving I got my daughter for five days actually just got back from picking her up. She’s downstairs so she didn’t have to listen to me talk about marketing for the next hour. But it’s good because I’ve got our for five days and we’ve got two different Thanksgiving dinners planned one tomorrow, one on Saturday. And just looking forward to taking a few days off and spending it with my daughter. How about you? What are you doing?

Adam: I’m headed out to pick the unfortunate time to head to the beach. We’re going to Big Sur if anyone’s familiar with that. It’s a lot of forests. A lot of really scenic areas right on the beach there on highway one California. It’s probably a couple like an hour, hour and a half southwest of Santa Cruz. But we got a massive storm coming on the west coast of the US has been dumping rain. So I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Bradley: Oh man. Good timing, huh?

Adam: Yeah, we might be doing. I don’t know a turkey on Coleman stove.

Chris: What? camping outside?

Adam: Well, we got a little cabin, but it’s just kind of more of a structure than a like full-on cabin. So we’ll see how it goes. I may have a story for you guys next week. If I make it back live. So Hernan, how about you, man? What’s, uh, what are you doing for a living in Buenos Aires?

Hernan: We don’t do that. I’m happy to see you guys eating turkey and all that stuff. So I’m excited. I’m really excited to be here. And I have my friend humpy wood here. What’s he saying? You’re a kinky MF. Oh, yeah. If you go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday there’s going to be some good stuff coming up daily deals. Don’t miss it including that stuff that Bradley did he always over-delivers like a crazy person. And you know it’s really really good stuff so go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday to get your stuff and invest in your business and instead of like getting a new TV that you don’t even need.

Adam: definitely and I was gonna say you Hernan we’ve had I’m looking right now I just hopped in to look at the stats event 262 people go so far you can go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday right now. And we’ve got three free training videos that haven’t been seen one of them is brand spanking new that nobody has ever seen. So we’ve got that up, but that’s coming down at midnight tomorrow. So if you haven’t gone over there, by all means, head over there. If you’re watching this after the fact after Friday, that’s too late. That’s all right. You got two days to get over there and check it out. Let’s see

Bradley: Chris, what the hell are you doing over there, man?

Adam: Yeah. Chris How you doing and how’s your microphone

Chris: I wanted some attention you know like you taking too long guys. So yeah, like I’m pretty good here. happy that I don’t have to eat boatloads of foods. I enjoyed Thanksgiving last year while I was on a cut and it pretty much destroyed me. Let’s call it that way through me back two weeks so I’m happy that I can pass on that experience this year. And yeah, enjoy the cold weather in Austria like I’m super excited because it’s snowing.

Adam: Wow. Ooh, nice. Hopefully, don’t get any sound here. I’m trying to bring up something all right. Marco. I guess yeah, let’s get the Costa Rica weather update and what are you going to be up to for the next few days?

Marco: No Thanksgiving in Costa Rica. We don’t celebrate it. But I mean to all of you who celebrated hope you have a great time. I hope your table is full and that you have lots of blessings on the table. Not just for Thanksgiving, but for the rest of the year. So yeah, by all means, enjoy it now. I’m working on my charity webinars. Every year, which I do something for charity. And last year went over really well. I did four webinars. And we just had a ton of people attend. And, you know, I’m known when it’s about the kids. I’m known to give away a lot of knowledge that maybe shouldn’t go out, but I don’t care. It’s for the kids. And if you donate, you can come to the webinars, I’ll drop the donation link on the page. And anyone who wants to donate, go there and make a donation or go find me to one of the Semantic Mastery of the free group. Go to my page, right Marco Benavides. I’m on Facebook and all of the instructions are there on what you need to do to it. Turn the live webinar. Things are a good man. So when things are good, it’s good to give

Adam: most definitely most definitely yeah and be doing a little bit of that it’s good to just a general I do try to do some reflection around this time of year and think about you know, hey I’m joking about going out and being cold in the rain but it’s my choice to do it. I’m glad you know for the things I’ve got and for having not only you guys as partners, but also you know, being able to converse with people help other people out on Hump Day Hangout, so we’ll talk about this more at Christmas we got some good stuff coming up too. But we’ll concentrate on this week we got some cool Black Friday stuff coming up so like said in her non did go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday, and then that will automatically roll over training goes away midnight tomorrow, but then we’re going to have some just killer deals coming up at 12:01 am starting Friday. I’m pumped. I’m getting excited.

So we’re real quick. I want to say though if you’re new to semantic mastery, you’re in the right place. We’re going to get to some questions here shortly. You can come here every week, just go to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, and you can ask your questions ahead of time, which we highly encourage just keep it to one question. I know it’s tough sometimes but people start writing paragraphs and we have to skip if there are too many questions because we want to make sure we’re fair and get to all the questions. But then the next step would be grabbing the battle plan if you want step by step processes for getting results, things like your age domain or you got a new website you’re putting up or a YouTube channel or whatever it is you want to do go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com pick it up, it’s a steal, we put in a ton of awesome bonuses is a value bomb. And after that, if you’ve got clients and you’re wanting to grow your digital marketing agency or business, then come join us in the mastermind go to mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for everyone that likes saving time, that’s me, right and if you want to not only save time to get things done very very well the first time go to mgyb.co originally this stuff started out as are done for you services and things like syndication networks are always drives tech stuff we had we had certainly taught about and you could still buy the courses if you want to understand the real nuts and bolts and maybe have someone do it for you. But if you want it done quickly, and you want it done professionally had the mgyb.co, you can check it out. And we’ve added on link building, press releases, all sorts of awesome stuff, which there might be some Black Friday stuff going on. But we’ll hold off on that until Friday. So other than that, guys, do we have anything else that we want to cover?

Bradley: I don’t think so. I’m ready to answer some questions. Get the hell out.

Adam: All right. humpy says yes.

Hernan: Humpy’s cursing since today’s gonna mute myself and that Bradley dude thing.

Bradley: All right, let’s do it. All right, let me grab the screen. Sweet You guys should be seeing my screen now. Correct?

Adam: Correct. Alright.

Can You Delete A Subdomain And Redirect It To The Root Without Passing A Penalty?

So it looks like Dustin Bay was the first one up. He says if I get a penalty on the www. domain, so is the subdomain with www as the subdomain, can I delete the subdomain and redirect it to the root without passing the penalty? No, not if you’re just doing a straight redirect, you can’t do that it will pass the penalty. So, or is it better to just delete www without redirecting it and installing the site on the root? Yeah, you can I mean, you could do that because essentially, well, I think about that. Marco, what say you because I know with www a lot of the times will be. It’s still treated as a subdomain but just installing it on the root because some people will have maybe linked to you whatever’s causing a penalty, let’s see, I’ve got to admit or not there is whatever is causing the penalty could also cause it. Remember, people, if they linked to the root domain version of it, if you had your domain setup on www and they were canonicalized to each other, or they auto redirected from your root domain to the www dot version or whatever, then it if people built links to it without www in the domain, then it’s still going to be pointing links back to the root domain, even if you remove that, you know, reinstall the site on the root domain, if that makes sense. So I know if you just did a redirect from the www subdomain to the root domain and then kind of pushed the installation of the site onto the root and lost the www it would still pass the penalty. So what’s the best way to go about that Marco?

Marco: Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this question really hard and think Okay, so how, how would I do this because I’ve just lost my dub dub. And if I did any, as you said, any link building to it, because you still going to have, it depends on the penalty, right? But you’re still going to have a ton of links coming to the dub dub dub, especially the way we teach it. Because we use all variations of the URL right? When we link building, so you’re going to lose that you’re going to lose anyone who’s still and there are people who still type out www. and then the address, right, there are still people who do that. Now, you are going to pass a penalty be 301? Yes, no question. Now, what if? What if, right, so I’m just thinking like, this is theory, guys? I don’t I hardly ever do this unless I tested but this is theory. And this is something you could try. What have you said that that subdomain to no index nofollow and then have Google crawl it? I’d go into Search Console, have Google recrawl and see what it said to no index, no five And then three or one it to the non dub dub dub version or even HTTPS version right to the non www and then everything is redirected again to the HTTPS, you might lose the penalty with with with a couple of jumps and with that with a no-index nofollow on the subdomain that’s causing the problem.

Now, what’s the problem? I mean, how did they get a penalty? How do you know that it was kind of like, was it a manual? Because a manual, if you remove whatever it is that offending Google, you can request for reconsideration. So it all depends on what kind of penalty. Like why not it’s even hard to get a link penalty. Right? Because Google just doesn’t pay attention to links that aren’t relevant. Or if you’re really talented, then you send millions of links, then you get and you do get an unnatural link, you could get that. But it’s usually manuals that you get. So trying to think it through, you may, you may not pass a penalty if you do a double hop, or it might, it might take time for it to catch back up. So you’re going to have to test on this and see, but by all means, move it to the non-www. And remember that any links going to that you lose that once you remove that www, if it doesn’t get redirected, so you’re going to have to read redo all of those links, especially if you had some really powerful links coming through there. That’s what I would recommend trying again, theory. I haven’t done this. I haven’t ever tried it. But in theory, if Google sees that it’s knowing that’s nofollow, then there’s no reason for that website to be penalized anymore.

Hernan: Yeah, right. Can you real quick? This is more like a question. Can you read direct? I guess you could, like you could read direct a subdomain outside of the route and then back into the route, you could like, yeah, you know, like, so as to clean it up.

Bradley: I was gonna, I was going to suggest, you know, something that would be a little bit more elaborate because I’ve done something similar in the past, where not specifically what I’ve done it to an external domain and then redirected the external domain back to the domain that had the penalty, but just on a different subdomain or you know, a different subdomain entirely. But here’s what I was thinking might also work. Again, this is theory, but it would be putting inserting Google in the middle of it, which could absolutely reduce or, you know, eliminate any negative, you know, link equity from point coming back through, something you might consider would be like creating a G site mirrored to what the original site was. So you have the same page structure and all of that, linked from the subdomain, redirect all of that on a page by page basis to the G site and then from the G site, you can have the pages that are built with the link linking back to your root domain, right? It’s a mirror of the site anyways. Or you can even iframe those pages into the G site pages if that makes sense. So that you’re pointing any negative link equity that’s come through that. That might be why you’ve got a penalty to the G site, which we already know, the G site will clean that up and won’t penalize itself. So you’d actually be passing page rank to your money site pages on the new domain, whether its root, the root domain or whatever, different subdomain, whatever, but it would be filtering through the G site. I don’t know. I’ve never actually said I’ve done that with an external domain before but not with a G site. What do you think Marco about that?

Marco: You know, I’m really liking that, especially if you can map out your custom domain, right? The www version over to Google so that stays but you still have the G site underneath, right? Right. And that that’ll filter out any other. Yes, this is guaranteed that’ll filter out any penalty that could have. Which, but if we’d have to see what the penalties you guys, you don’t tell us what the penalty is that we can’t really give you the advice, or the answer that you need. But yeah, I mean, again, in theory, you get three on one that penalize subdomain that www, which is a subdomain, to a G site, which links over to the root where the new site was built, and it can all be the same content and Google won’t give a shit.

Bradley: That’s it, right? I mean, that’s, that’s what I would do. Because again, you’re putting an SEO shield between the penalty in your domain, right? I mean, that’s what we’re talking that’s what we talked about the SEO shield. Go check it out on MGYB and you’ll if you don’t already know what we’re talking about, and now you’re basically doing that you’re inserting part of that shield in between the penalty and the domain. So check it out and try.

What Is The Best Way To Add A YouTube Video To A Website And Maintain Site Speed?

Greg’s Up next, he says, Is there a preferred way to add a video from our YouTube channel to our website page and maintain site speed my site pages load in around one second. And I don’t want that to slow to two or three seconds as a result of adding videos. My goals are to increase time on my site, have specific videos, keep visitors on specific pages, increase views on the videos and improved website ranking by adding videos but not slow down page load times. Any suggestions? Yeah, they have lazy load plugins. You can also I know there’s some way to code that into but I know there’s if it’s a WordPress site, they have lazy load plugins that will lazy load images. And they also I’m pretty sure will lazy load iframes or whatever. So videos I’m pretty sure that you can also lazy load those which means it will allow the page to render entirely before it will start to load the images or the external iframe such as a YouTube video. Any other subject The only other I mean obviously if you use a CDN, but a CDN, I’m not sure I don’t think a CDN affects the loading speed of iframes. Because those are external sites, right? It’s just a tunnel to an external site. But CDN a content delivery network would still allow your page itself to load incredibly quick. The iframe would still be would load as slowly as you don’t have control over that the speed at which the iframe loads, that makes sense. Mark, do you have any suggestions for that

Marco: lazy load suggestions is perfect. I would say don’t be too anal about paint speed, because it’s one of over 200 factors. And we don’t know how much of a factor it is. Everything else considered. And since we teach PageSpeed, doesn’t really matter. Nothing, nothing matters. This is the three pillars, that it’s foundational principles, what we teach activity, relevance, trust and authority and how we build that up. So if you go from one second to 2.2 seconds or whatever, doesn’t matter, it’s not going to matter to anybody, especially Someone coming and they see the video, you have it in a prominent place where the person can watch the video, they’re going to wait for that video because they want to watch the video. You’ve driven them to your pace. Now if it’s taking a ton of time to render, that that might cause a big deal, but you can just do it lazy load and and have it render after the page loads and and you’re good to go.

Hernan: Yeah, There’s never like there’s there’s not a good reason why you shouldn’t be using a CDN anyways. CloudFlare being free, you know, or something like that. So you should be using it anyways. So,

Bradley: yeah, yeah, I mean, it’ll help to load the page quicker and also will load the page from multiple servers or, you know, from multiple locations. So, and also helps in case something happens where your site goes down. For whatever reason, people can still view the pages that kind of because they’re cached. So there’s a lot of good reasons to have a CDN. It’s good for security. There’s a lot of reasons for that. But it will help the page itself to load quicker. Again, it’s not going to help the iframes to load any faster because those are external sites. It’s just a tunnel to an external site within your web page, right? So you don’t have any control over that. But you can control at which point does that load so that you can tell that like, again, with a lazy load plugin, you’re basically telling the page to render before it will start to load any external iframes essentially embeds so okay. Try it and see.

Oh, let’s see. Tom says Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks, Tom. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well. Fitz. What’s up Fitz? He says on Marcus charity. Is he going to give a 30 minute call if they donate a certain amount to his charity this year?

Marco: No, this year I’ve decided to match donations dollar for dollar.

Bradley: Very cool. Okay. So there you go. Fitz. Adams got the black friday special there and we’re almost out of questions guys, which were only 20

Hernan: Sorry, sorry, Bradley. But I think Adam I’m not sure if he’s here because he needed to start driving but I think that we have a deal in the Black Friday deal that we’re doing that if you spent x you get you get some consultant time would meet with us like now with me but without

Adam: Hernan’s going to come to your house and have Thanksgiving dinner.

Hernan: Okay, give Yeah, I’m gonna cook the turkey.

Adam: And it was about say we should make it the other way. We could be like, yeah, you get an hour with Hernan you just got to go to him. So right,

Hernan: she need to fly down here. And then I yeah, we do that from Monday 3pm to 4pm and then you go back, you know, fly up another nine hours or whatever.

Adam: But um, but yeah, I wonder like a deal that we’ve got both for Semantic Mastery and mg y b, depending on you know, if you’re spending your money in both places, that’s great. And we can certainly work something out but we’ve got I don’t want to give it away but I will Go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday on Friday or over the weekend. And yeah, you’ll be able to see what you can do there. MGYB also gonna have a great promo and depending on how much you spend you can get consulting time with the team for free as a bonus Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah, So bottom line, go to semanticmastery.com/blackfriday update that daily because the deals galore going to be there and one of them will include some consulting time with Bradley one on one. And you’d like to get like, I know. You know what I’m saying?

Bradley: Yeah. You’re all over and kiss your wife and then roll over the other way and kiss me. Well, it says pumpkin or become pie for Thanksgiving which will benefit my SEO the most well, I don’t know which will benefit the SEO but both pumpkin and pecan pie for God’s sakes, it’s Thanksgiving.

Hernan: So right when choose.

Bradley: That’s right. Lastly, Greg says it looks like we’re going to run out of questions. Which means we’re all going to get the hell out of here and go enjoy it with their families. Greg says thanks, guys will check out the lazy low plugin I do I do own and use SEO ultimate plugin from Jeffrey Smith. Good choice, Greg, by the way that’s coming very, very soon. The Pro version is coming out if you’re in the mastermind, you get access to that a hell of a lot sooner I can tell you that. But I’m really looking forward to that being launched guys. And if you are a member, I think of the ultimate plus version that you get grandfathered in at least a some licenses. I’m not sure how that works. But it’s a good choice. Neither either way, Greg, and it’s going to get better. I promise you that. There might even be a way to make them work together. Well, yeah, possibly. And that looks like it guys. So unless you got something else you want to talk about. Let’s wrap it up.

Marco: You know, if they have conflicting plugins, which we did, then all you have to do is let us know with the new version coming out, and we turn it over to the developer and the developer will take care of I mean, this is going to be fully supported that’s that’s why it’s a paid version of the plugin there is a programmer that’s behind this a developer with it. There’s a whole team behind the pro version of the plugin Plus we’re in the middle of all this too and we always take care of the people who use our products and services.

Bradley: Yeah Thanksgiving. Go Yeah, very happy Thanksgiving.

Hernan: Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I’m really I just want to say I’m really thankful for you guys for coming in asking questions. And you know, joining the group, the free the paid, really thankful for all of the support throughout this year. I’m really thankful for my partners here. So yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.

Adam: Before we go, sorry, one that I started to stomp on that Hernan and I feel the same way obviously, but I want to say something. I had three different calls yesterday. Three different people potential clients in and all of them had no firm plans for Black Friday. If you run a business where you have some sort of contacts with your potential clients or clients, do yourself a favor, write an email, send people out. If nothing else, you can always send them out a good faith or goodwill email saying, Hey, here’s all the cool deals in the industry that I found, you know, help them out. If you’ve got things you could do, or you have for sale, maybe it’s a product I service that you could offer a discount on, you know, send it, it’s not just about Oh, you’re just raking in the money. But you know, people are expecting it. I’m looking, you know, we create offers, but I’m also looking for deals over the Black Friday weekend. So, you know, don’t don’t think just because you don’t own like a physical goods store or something that you can’t get in on this. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do. And create some goodwill, you know, amongst your network. So do it. Very cool.

Bradley: Very cool. All right. Let’s wrap it up then guys. We will see you all next week. Happy Thanksgiving once again.

Bye, guys. Yeah, run. Bye everyone. Bye bye

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 264 published first on your-t1-blog-url