#so far my main takeaway is that there's very little stakes here

[laugtherhyena]

Reading dungeon meshi rn, is this one of those stories that starts chill and slowly builds up an overarching storyline or is it just cooking in a dungeon?

[mean-scarlet-deceiver]

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Edwards exploit?

It's one of my favourite Edward story's next to old iron.

Hmm, sometimes I prefer “Old Iron” myself, at least so far as TVS goes ♥ (that long tracking shot over the bridge is friggin’ gold, man.)

But only in TVS. Story-wise, while both are great, there's just a little extra something going on in this one...

So many people have noticed the similarities between those two stories, of course, and indeed you can throw in Edward’s introductory arc too—this story doesn’t really break new ground in the Edward-proves-himself genre. And with it, the genre is DONE. Okay y'all? DONE. NO MORE. FIND ANOTHER PLOT. YES, SHOW WRITERS OF YEARS PAST, I AM TALKING TO YOU. Nor is the “exploit” really any more impressive than “Old Faithful” and “Gallant Old Engine,” which in RWS actually come before this story, and in which the stakes were higher.

And yet I still feel like “Exploit” is in a league of its own, and judging from its insane popularity I’m not the only one who feels that way.

At least one thing that sets this story apart, something I’ve come to really treasure: The feat is such a group effort. The crew’s contribution in “Faithful” and “Gallant” was mostly to get out once the train stopped, do an examination, and pronounce, Huh. You’re broken. And we're stuck. *awkward pause* Soooo, uhh… whatcha got, hotshot? And it was really all down to Skarloey and Rheneas. Whereas in this story the main character’s willpower alone is not enough, and the crew had to contribute their own talents. More than once, actually. True teamwork. So, like, yes, this is a story about perseverance, it’s a story about beating the odds, but it’s not only about that. This time at least (for we’ve seen that old theme in RWS before—many times) there’s also something about it that moves me in a similar way to the Henry arc.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this story also shows something important about disability. If your only takeaway here is “Edward is an inspiring badass,” it’s not that you’re wrong, but there’s more. Specifically—he could not have done it without help. Even with the help, he could have done it but it would not have necessarily been a triumph. I mean, this could have easily been a story about a stubborn, in-denial old git finally learning his limits the hard way and limping back home, shamed and beaten and probably damn sure never taking another “important train” ever again. In fact it could very easily be this sort of story, given the big engines’ gossip at the beginning and, at the end, good ol’ STH being on hand and proper pissed off about the extreme lateness.

Why isn’t it an L? Apart from the meta that Edward is a ray of sunshine and one of Awdry’s favorites? Mostly it’s because of the passengers—so let’s give them props, too. They had all the power to define this narrative! But instead of being put out and caught up in their own inconvenience when stranded in the middle of nowhere during a wild dark wet rainstorm, they had the sense to notice and appreciate the efforts of engine and crew. Instead of stropping out onto the platform and complaining, they celebrated and thanked everyone. Whether this incident was a disgrace or an “exploit” is really all a matter of perspective. Hell, they literally changed STH’s!

And, of course, we see it as a triumph because of the way Awdry frames it. Do we always see it that way in real life, though? I hope so. I wish we lived in a world where the need for aid and accommodation does not invalidate what we do. I wish we lived in a world where the disabled or old or sick or just the plain not-as-gifted were always respected rather than disparaged due to the fact that it may take them three times as much trouble and effort to accomplish things that are easy to others.

But let’s be honest: we don’t live in that world. We’re a long ways from it. And while there are lots of RWS stories that inspire us to persevere and to press on and to do our best and to never give up… “Exploit” really hits me in the heart because it also portrays how the need for others’ help and for adjusted expectations isn’t shameful at all, in fact it shows me how interesting and impressive it is when people (people and, I guess, the occasional sapient locomotive) work together in complementary ways—not to mention, it portrays how much more exciting life is when we show each other genuine, unstinting grace.

[itsclydebitches]

Rewatching RWBY there's this chilling lack of empathy through the volumes that I used to just wave off. Yang has no empathy for Tai, Blake is just entirely about what Blake needs, Weiss almost kills a woman at a party and her takeaway is 'my dad is mean so I'm going to run away'. Qrow sinks hard into depression in vol. 6 and Ruby's reaction is to yell she's never needed him. No one has EVER helped a civilian. It's so prevelant. Knowing how 7&8 go really changes the earlier writing.

I think there was a great deal of well-written empathy in the early volumes — after all, this cast was designed as the kind, well-meaning heroes — but that care was expressed almost solely within the group itself. Ruby sits by Jaune in the hallway and says "Nope!" to his self doubt. Weiss offers Ruby a hand up after she fails to kill the death stalker. Yang seeks out Blake and gets her to open up about what's bothering her. Now, I want to emphasize that there's nothing inherently wrong with this. It actually makes perfect sense. These are our main characters and they're written as peers co-habiting the same space. Of course whatever emotional growth we get, which automatically includes moments of compassion, would be directed towards each other. Similarly, the dynamics originally introduced — that of teachers and parents — likewise (rightly) puts the burden on the adults to provide the comfort, not the other way around. Port snaps Weiss out of her arrogant mindset. Ozpin reassures Ruby about her leadership worries. Tai is there to support his daughter when she's recovering from a lost limb. That's the natural order of things, so to speak.

The problem, to my mind, begins to occur when the group exits those dynamics. They're no longer students, they're licensed huntsmen. They're no longer kids, but equals who never needed adults in the first place. They're no longer doing things for themselves and their friends on personal downtime, they're doing them for the community at large as a profession (to say nothing of the world-altering war they've insisted on shouldering responsibility for). That's what a huntsmen is meant to be, a defender of the people, not someone who uses that power for personal interests alone. All of this is a huge change from where we started out: cutesy kids going off on comparatively low-stakes adventures because one or more of their teammates are invested, only just beginning to realize that they're signing up for a job where their desires come second (that fireside conversation at Mountain Glenn).

This change invites — demands, really — that the audience read them differently too. Qrow's spiral in Volume 6 is a good example of this. If Ruby is demanding to be treated not just as an equal in terms of maturity and experience, but also as the primary leader of this group, then the viewer expects her to treat her uncle as an equal too, not dismiss his hardship. I've seen numerous fans defend that arc with some version of, "He's her uncle. He's supposed to take care of her. He's failing" but that, according to the show, is no longer the dynamic. Qrow is now just a member of Ruby's team, someone she's responsible for as their leader. It's easiest to see the problem if we switch out Qrow for any of the other members. If Blake developed a drinking problem, do we think Ruby would just shout at her until she magically got over it? If Jaune endangered the group, do we think they'd all be angry about it, rather than trying to figure out the source of what caused the mistake? We don't even need to think hypothetically for that one because we saw it on screen. Jaune attacked Oscar and drove him off, not just threatening him, but arguably endangering the whole team by requiring a search party. Fans have long insisted they had to steal that airship right then because being in Argus was too much of a risk, but if we buy that reading (which I personally don't, but), then that means Jaune made things exponentially worse by forcing them out into that super dangerous city, rather than allowing everyone to stay hidden inside. He made a massive mistake which, according to the logic of Qrow's arc, should be met with frustration, disdain, and eventual demands to get over his anger at Ozpin or ship out. But, of course, he received nothing but concern. Yang was worried about him, not Oscar. The search becomes about his grief for Pyrrha and his team's willingness (as well as Pyrrha's family member) to provide more comfort. Suddenly, the tendency to express care solely towards those within the group becomes a flaw the story won't acknowledge.

And then it spirals. The thing to remember is that no single act here is bad on its own, especially when we consider that yes, we want flawed characters. Rather, it's about the pattern. Ruby is allowed to get mad at Qrow for his behavior and chuck her scroll in frustration. She's human. I'd be crazy frustrated too. However, if Ruby is meant to be written as a caring, sympathetic character, she should not only respond to the situation with frustration, yelling, a refusal to listen, and demands that he follow her lead, no questions asked. We can, and should, acknowledge that Weiss was the victim during that party. Her father was hurting her, the woman was beyond insensitive, Weiss was triggered in regards to a horrific event, and her power acted on its own. However, if we want to write Weiss as a compassionate, mature huntress to-be, she should acknowledge that she nearly killed someone — even an asshole someone — and vow to work on her control because she's not willing to put someone in danger like that ever again. Both of these moments have a "They could have been handled better" response attached to them — the former more-so than the latter imo — but these moments are made far, far worse due to later events in the show, events where the characters are cruel without any justification attached. Weiss didn't mean to attack that woman, but she did mean to ignore Whitely and threaten him with her weapon. So once we see that, it informs our understanding of what came before it. "Oh. The fact that Weiss never reacted to nearly killing someone isn't just a bit of missed potential, it's an early indicator that she... doesn't seem to care. If she endangers people, threatens people... that's fine with her." The group has a right to be frustrated with Qrow. The group did not have the right to magically steal Ozpin's entire life story, assault him, and blame him for the world's problems until he felt his only course of action was to run from them. So when we see that it becomes, "Oh. The fact that the group treated Qrow so poorly isn't just a one-time mistake born of a stressful situation and young adults being out of their depth in regards to alcoholism. They really will just abandon anyone the moment they start making mistakes." Anyone outside of their group, that is.

To say nothing of how all of these moments interconnect. Yang's recovery isn't just about getting used to not having an arm, it's about getting used to having a new one. Weiss' party isn't just about nearly killing someone, it's about not committing manslaughter because someone else stepped in. The Volume 6 arc isn't just about trying to escape with the Relic, it's about trying to get it somewhere safe. Fans frustrated with Ironwood's treatment don't harp on these details out of some desperate attempt to make him look good post-murder spree, rather, they recognize that he's a character that's been around since nearly the beginning, originally written as a good guy, and thus has accumulated a number of key connections with the cast. So when none of those connections are acknowledged during an arc about trust... that makes the group look very uncaring. Yang doesn't care that he gave her the arm, Weiss doesn't care that he saved her from hurting/potentially killing someone, Qrow doesn't care that he's trusted Ironwood for years (in a rival-bros way) and that they've been heading towards him this whole time. And when Ironwood begins to spiral, they don't do anything to try and help him, let alone acknowledge that their own choices, that lack of trust and empathy, had a hand in getting them here. "But it's not their responsibility to fix him!" Isn't it? Even a little? Just as human beings seeing an ally struggling under horrific decisions and circumstances? Sure, they don't have to try... but that doesn't make them look very heroic to my mind. And we can't even shrug that off by simplifying things with, "Well, Ironwood is evil now so who cares about him." They simultaneously don't care about finding Qrow who is missing, then captured. They don't do anything to try and find their missing teammates, with the exception of sending May to do it instead. They don't help the army fight off the grimm. Don't try to make sure Pietro and Maria had portals to escape through. Barely hesitate when the newly resurrected characters goes, "Kill me. That's the easiest thing for everyone." And these are just a few of the big ticket moments. It doesn't even begin to cover all the details we get that paint a picture of, "Wow okay. They just really don't care about people outside the group, huh? I mean, they say they do, in a life-or-death way, but they're not putting forth effort to show it on a daily basis."

And if you pick up on all that, if you acknowledge how much the group has changed based on where they started out, you might wonder when in the world that started. Surely we didn't just flip a switch around Volume 6. So you re-watch early stuff and, sure enough, there are moments that feel like setup for what's to come later. Not intentional setup (quite obviously), but a lack of care towards details across the series that, once the dynamic changed, became far, far more pronounced. Characters should be at least somewhat recognizable from start to finish, especially characters who have only experienced about two years of in-world time, so if we now get to see Ruby blandly commenting on all the people who are dying, or Weiss using her weapon as a means of coercing her little brother into doing what she wants, or Yang and Jaune dismissing Ren until he gives in to their point of view... we're going to look for the beginnings of that behavior early on. As you say, we were able to wave all those little details off due to a number of important factors. Now though? Now they feel like they hold a lot more weight, simply by virtue of that early material proceeding what we have now.

[revolutionary-demosthenes]

Lafayette and Francis Henderson

These images are from Google Books’s snippet view of the book Sales by Parke-Bernet galleries (published 1960.) Parke-Bernet was an auction house that according to Wikipedia was bought by Sotheby’s in 1964. This book is presumably (based on the title) a record of items sold by Parke-Bernet.

I was trying to research Martha Manning Laurens when I came across this, and was immediately intrigued. Francis Henderson, to whom the letter seemed to be addressed, was John Laurens’s son-in-law. 

Did this mean Lafayette was in contact with John Laurens’s descendants?

So I searched up some longer phrases from what I could see in the above images, and found the full letter here. A print (not microfilm) version can be found in Congressional Serial Set, Issue 200.

Lafayette’s full tribute (in a letter to Francis Henderson, November 10th, 1825):

“Having been called upon by the representatives of the late Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens of South Carolina to express my opinion of the merits and services of that distinguished citizen and soldier, I must first return my thanks for the opportunity they give me to pay a tribute to the memory of an heroic companion in arms and bosom friend who as I was not long ago publickly expressing it in his native State, has been an honor to his country an honor to mankind.

The brilliant, devoted, and steady services of Colonel Laurens in our Revolutionary struggle are so conspicuously connected with the history of American independence and freedom that a minute account of his civil military and political career would be superfluous. I shall only observe that, either as the champion of a cause, and the citizen of a country, both of which he loved with enthusiasm-- or as a most valued Aid de camp to the Commander in Chief-- as a gallant leader in the field of action as an intrepid volunteer-- or, also, as a Representative of Congress and by their direction, an organ of the army and head quarters to the Court of France, where pressing matters were to be provided for, and important plans were to be arranged-- he has displayed such eminent qualities and patriotic virtues as must impress every well informed mind with the highest sentiments of admiration and respect. 

‘That his disinterestedness even to carelessness was a trait among his other qualities,’ is a fact known to his surviving to which may be added, that, whenever cause and country were stake this disposition knew no bounds.

So is the memory of our beloved and universally respected John Laurens the worthy son of a venerated patriot, Henry Laurens, entitled to feeling of regard and affection in the hearts of a Republican posterity.”

Okay so my main takeaways:

“bosom friend...” This whole thing is so affectionate and gushing! It really shows how Lafayette still remembered and loved John Laurens several decades after Laurens died.

“The brilliant, devoted, and steady services of Colonel Laurens...” Kind of related, but Lafayette is almost reverential in his praise for Laurens. 

“I was not long ago publickly expressing it in his native State” Lafayette had very recently come back from America, and this implies he spoke about John Laurens in South Carolina. I wonder what he said; could he have perhaps visited Laurens’s grave?

And here’s the more personal letter to Francis Henderson, which is from the Congressional Serial Set 200 I linked above.

“Dear Sir:

As a first answer to your favor from Newport R. I. August 7th, has, no doubt reached you, and as, in consequence of a previous investigation of your claims, you have only applied to me, for what you are pleased to call a certificate of important diplomatic and military services, it now remains for me to send, in time for the session of Congress, a tribute of my personal admiration, love, and patriotic gratitude, for the character of my beloved friend [John Laurens], and for the obligations, which as an American patriot shall ever bind me to his memory. Not knowing whether you are now in Charleston, or on your way to Washington, I take the liberty to entrust this letter to the kind care of the President, who, I am sure, will be glad to forward a correspondence, connected with the merits of one among the best citizens who have illustrated the American character. I request you will offer my affectionate good wishes to his [John Laurens’s] grandson, and believe me with great regard, 

Yours,

Lafayette.”

Lafayette was sending “affectionate good wishes” to Laurens’s grandson, Francis Henderson jr.

The context for all of this is that Francis Henderson was (as far as I can tell from the book I linked) trying to acquire more of the money that was owed to John  Laurens for his time in France. When Lafayette talks about the “representatives” of Laurens, he means Laurens’s family. The details are all in the book, but it does seem Lafayette at least partly wrote his tribute for the congress session.

But this does not lessen the meaning. In fact, that Lafayette cared that much about Laurens’s descendants shows his intense loyalty to John. Also, Lafayette does seem to want to make clear he is grateful for the opportunity to write about Laurens, saying, “I must first return my thanks for the opportunity they give me to pay a tribute to the memory of an heroic companion in arms and bosom friend...”

Something seems really special about this letter and tribute. I think it’s that there's not very much from either Hamilton or Lafayette about Laurens after he died. We have only a little knowledge of Hamilton’s feelings right when he found out about Laurens’s death, and as far as I know, no knowledge of Lafayette’s. But here’s Lafayette, so many years after Laurens died, finally talking about his friend. Still loving him, trying to look out for his descendants, and ultimately remembering him. 

[dear-mrs-otome]

Johann Georg Faust - Story Event Summary

Please be aware I’m NO EXPERT HERE. TAKE THIS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT...I am but a newbie still learning Japanese <3 That said, I hope you enjoy, and see my rambling thoughts at the end because I found this event fascinating.

~~~~

At a cemetery, Leonardo and MC are visiting the grave of one of Leonardo's old friends and reminiscing a bit, when they overhear a priest offering words of comfort to a crying woman and a teenage boy nearby. MC realizes they must have lost a family member, and she makes eye contact with the priest, finding him a bit odd as they stare at each other before the priest returns to his ministrations.

As she and Leonardo begin to leave, the teenage boy approaches them and asks if they've seen his little brother around - the boy seems to have gotten lost. Leonardo and MC assure him they'll look for him so that the youth can go back to their distraught mother. He thanks them and tells them his name is Kevin, and his little brother is Paul.

They find the boy outside the cemetery sitting on a park bench reading, and he says he doesn't want to go back inside and deal with his father's death so they tell him they'll hang out with him for a bit. He asks them about a picture in his book which turns out to be a vampire and she and Leonardo try to explain to him what one is, but they barely start when they're interrupted.

"It's a monster that lives off the blood of people," a voice says. It's the priest from inside, who introduces himself as Father Faust, and he and Leonardo have a back and forth with the boy and each other over what a vampire is exactly - Leonardo saying it's not something to be envied, and that humanity has its merits, while Faust says that eternal life free from suffering and death wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.

They're at an impasse and Faust asks MC what her opinion is, but she can't choose. Both sides have good points, she thinks. Faust laughs off dragging her into a pointless argument and takes the child back inside, leaving Leonardo a bit uneasy in his wake.

~~

In a small church, the youth Kevin is asking for absolution from Faust for his sins, committed out of desperation to feed and support his sick mother and little brother. A cold, dispassionate Faust looks down on the emotional boy and grants it, to his surprise.

~~

After shopping in town, her arms full of apples, MC is walking past the same small church and bumps into someone leaving, spilling her apples everywhere. She and the person she ran into apologize and she recognizes them as Kevin, the youth from the cemetery, but he seems dejected. As she's about to go after him, Faust appears and helps her pick up the apples and takes her inside. She introduces herself properly this time, and asks if its his church, but he says he's just filling in for the sick priest who usually is there.

They have a chat about Kevin and she tries to praise his efforts as a priest, being a relief to so many people, but it only ends up unsettling her a bit with how icy and collected Faust seems, and how he seems to have a lack of compassion for those suffering. He admits that while he carries out the duties of a priest, he has never seen God himself, and she's stunned by his lack of faith but Faust seems to find her surprise amusing. He says that she is something unexpected and worth of studying.

He lifts her chin with his hand. "Would you like to be my guinea pig?" he asks, and she's frozen, her heart thundering...

But just then Leonardo comes in, scolding Faust and pulling her away, clearly unhappy. They go back and forth a bit, with Faust insisting he was only inviting her to church as she seemed interested (a blatant lie). As the two men stare each other down, Faust pushes his glasses up innocently and proclaims he seems to have upset her overprotective guardian.

~~

Outside Leonardo apologizes for overreacting and says maybe Faust was right, maybe he is too protective. Then he's approached by a random townsperson who asks for his help, and he agrees, heading off after them. Just as he's left though, she hears someone screaming about a thief and looks up to see Kevin barreling towards her, cursing and carrying a knife, pursued by a man. She can't get out of the way or stop him, and as Leonardo cries out her name, she braces for impact...and then feels strong arms around her, pulling her safely out of the way.

"As I thought, God saves no one," Faust says, as she's protected in his solid embrace. 

Kevin recognizes Father Faust, and Faust pushes her behind himself to shield her but then the youth is tackled by Leonardo and disarmed. Faust compliments Leonardo on the speed he took down his quarry with, and Leonardo takes Kevin off towards the police station.

MC is upset at the turn of events regarding Kevin, but she's interrupted by Faust demanding to see her arms - and only after he's forced her to take a seat on the side of the road does she realize she's been cut and is bleeding. She's about to start looking for a handkerchief when -

"It looks delicious," Faust says, and she doesn't have a chance to react before he's licking the blood off her arm, the feel of his lips and hot tongue and teeth grazing her skin causing her face to flame. He keeps at it until she can't help sighing, and she thinks how he seems just like a vampire when he stops and asks her to forgive him, saying that he didn't have any disinfectant to clean her with. He tears her ruined shirtsleeve and bandages her properly with it, just as Leonardo shows back up fretting over her.

She tries to thank Faust but before she can he's turned her back over to Leonardo with another quip about her guardian and walked away.

~~

After everything had settled, MC enters a beautiful cathedral on the outskirts of town, and inside is Faust. He seems startled to see her again, and she's pleased he remembers her name when he asks what she is doing there. 

She says she found out where he was and wanted to come by to thank him properly - offering him a basket of baked treats from Sebastian that he finally takes, albeit less than graciously - grumbling that she must have a lot of free time to come around on an errand like that.

She says she also came to tell him how things are going with Kevin, but notes that Faust seems indifferent as she relays the now-happier fate of the family. She pushes him on why he didn't do something to intervene, if he knew from Kevin's confession that they were struggling, and Faust says that helping one person would barely touch the misery that everyone suffers from. His attitude seems so jaded and accepting of harsh realities, as if he doesn't even believe in miracles anymore, she thinks.

Then Faust remarks on how, if a person were a vampire the way that little boy had wished, they'd be free of those sorts of concerns, and she blurts out that he seems to know a lot about vampires.

"And if I said they were real?" Strong arms pull her close and she falls against Faust's chest, and his hands on her clothes makes her think of the sensation of his tongue on her skin. 

"The taste of your blood...I haven't forgotten it," Faust says to her in a low, breathtaking voice. He asks if she has something special running through her veins - her blood smells so intriguing.

Stunned, she asks if he is a vampire, and he offers to study vampires - his fangs and her blood - then he laughs and says he was only joking and that vampires aren't real, angering her. She pushes him away, feeling gullible, and he warns her of the dangers of even human men...and warns her to be careful on her way home as she leaves in a huff, still hyper-aware of the way her skin burned where he'd touched.

~~

The evening of her visit, Vlad comes to the church and says he saw that Faust had a young lady visiting. "You let her go, didn't you?" Vlad asks. Faust scolds him for spying, as Charles is excited at the prospect of a girl coming around, and Vlad points out that she was very cute and even left Faust goodies.

Vlad seems surprised that Faust would let someone like her escape, but Faust only says that catching prey can be a hassle. Then says that he wants her to be a guinea pig anyways, to study carefully, and that she seems to have piqued his interest...

FINIS

~~~~~

OK SO MY THOUGHTS HERE, AKA: WHY THIS WAS SO COOL and how I now have only more questions than answers:

1. I think my main takeaway from this event was the sense that while Faust may be an atheist, or lack faith, it’s less of a true atheism and more the feeling of ‘I am pissed off at God’. The way he mentions that God saves no one, and his jaded sense that there’s no point to helping the suffering of others, it all just felt personal. I was left reading this and wondering...what the heck did God do to you, Faust? 

2. Also, this boy is has cajones that would make any prize steer proud. I can’t believe he made a lollipop of MC right out there, in the open on the side of the danged road ESPECIALLY RIGHT AFTER he’d just seen Leonardo come in and clearly stake his claim to her. He also has no qualms about calling Leonardo out for his over-protectiveness more than once, and basically says he’s made Daddy mad right to his face.

3. He’s going to be a dirty filthy boy and I love it. He pretty much made mouth-love to MC’s arm there, to the point where she was half-moaning, and made plenty of double entendre-style insinuations and passes at her, zero fucks given about her relationship status.

4. He doesn’t seem to be very subordinate to Vlad, despite Vlad clearly being their leader. He scolds his boss for spying and his body language is far from deferential, and the brief glimpse of the trio I got they seem very close-knit and almost more like peers.

5. Letting her go clearly surprised Vlad as being very out of character for Faust. It seems as if the trio have few qualms about feeding off humans, etc, and for Faust to show her any special consideration definitely seems to have caught Vlad’s interest as well.

[rivetgoth]

Okay, the verdict is out, I finally got to watch THREE FROM HELL after anticipating it for ages and I got some thoughtz.

First, some full disclosure, so y’all know where my biases are:

1. I genuinely adore House of 1000 Corpses and I consider The Devil’s Rejects one of my favorite movies of all time. In general I really adore a lot of Rob Zombie’s work — I also loved 31. That being said, he’s been hit or miss in the past and there’s some stuff of his I really detested too, but overall he’s not only impressed me but stood out as the creator of some of my absolutely favorite films. I wanna clarify this because I’ve seen a lot of people write up scathing reviews for this film that literally start with “I HATE ROB ZOMBIE’S MOVIES!!!!!” and that just seems like a really unfair way to approach a review specifically for a sequel. Idk what you’re expecting to get out of it.

2. Speaking of that, I love good horror sequels and some of my favorite movies of all time are specifically sequels. I fall in love with characters and concepts and I love seeing them expanded on in fun ways. I have no inherent negative feelings towards sequels at all.

I say all this to point out that I was genuinely looking forward to this movie without any unfair biases, it didn’t have to change my mind on anything larger than itself, like “convince me that Rob Zombie is a capable film director after all” or “convince me that sequels have artistic merit” or anything like that.

My overall thought, before I explain anything else, is pretty much that I feel like the first half of the film is extremely promising and fun, and the second half of the movie is so bad that I more or less wish I’d just turned it off halfway through and pretended that was the whole film. And, given the fact that so many of the developmental issues with the film that led to its shakiness came from Sid Haig’s declining health, I almost feel like this wasn’t a movie that had to be made at all — at least in this form.

I read one review that pretty much said that for Rob Zombie to revive this series he needed a damn good reason, and he never managed to make that reason clear. And I feel like that’s exactly what my overall takeaway was here. The ending of Devil’s Rejects is pretty much perfect. In order for that to be retconned and expanded upon, something really mind blowing had to happen. In general, even when you’re not taking the risk of retconning an ending of such epic proportions, if a sequel is made to something I want to see it do something new and uniquely memorable in its own right. Devil’s Rejects itself is a perfect example of this; one of the things I completely adore about it is the fact that it expanded upon the very classic retro slasher feel of 1000 Corpses to center the attention on the killers and recreate them as antiheroes with an entirely different tone. Similarly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 stands out to me as one of the great horror sequels, partly in the way it so fearlessly completely shifts it’s tone away from the total frenzied isolation horror of TCM 1 and does something entirely different. Other series try less for “perspective/atmosphere shift” and more for “just go bigger” and that can work too — I think the increasing extremity of gore and complexity of the traps in the Saw series (which I love) is a good example, especially through the first three films which are by far the best as a coherent trilogy.

The WEIRD thing about Three From Hell is that Rob Zombie has clearly proven that he 1) understands the idea of sequels that build upon original films in unique new ways 2) has no qualms being increasingly and shamelessly extreme and shocking and horrific. But instead, I felt like Three From Hell is... jarringly tame, actually, compared to what we got from Rejects. And I mean, in some ways that’s fine, I didn’t necessarily miss the way-too-long graphic rape scene in Rejects, which is a miserable chore to get through in just how sickening it is. But there’s no moment where I felt that we get anything more extreme or intense than what’s seen in Rejects. It all feels like it’s been toned way down, which is bizarre to me. The victims aren’t people we’re sympathetic towards like the traveling musicians we meet in Rejects, and their deaths aren’t particularly gruesome - The majority of the deaths in this movie are “shot in the head” or “stabbed.” That’s it. The climax of the film is extremely similar to the opening shootout of Rejects, with significantly lower stakes and less memorable artistic direction, meaning that one film’s introductory scene is able to create a more intense moment than this one’s entire two hour duration.

The thing is, I feel like the first half of the movie really has potential. There are things I could nitpick — for example I love Richard Brake and I feel like Foxy is fun but flat — but the majority of my complaints would be things that, if the movie had a stronger second half, could easily have been further developed and solved. In fact, the first half of the movie feels like it’s gearing up to pretty much be exactly what I’d want out of a Rejects sequel. It’s weird and engaging and markedly different from its predecessors. It focuses on Otis, Spaulding, and Baby’s survival and arrest after the ending of Rejects, the subsequent trial, and then Otis’ escape and attempt to save Baby (after Spaulding is given the death penalty; more on that later). There’s a ton I love here, mostly Otis and Baby’s relationship being given more time in a really interesting way. The stakes are high and Otis clearly cares about his sister to a degree that feels like a fitting continuation of Rejects’ attempts at showing sympathetic or relatable aspects to these characters that makes them very three dimensional and complex. Bill Moseley is the fucking greatest and his ability to make Otis so completely depraved and unrestrained while also clearly caring about his family is one of my favorite things about the series and this played it up really well. You get the feeling that Otis is genuinely concerned for Baby, even after she’s freed, although it mostly comes out in yelling and deadpan snarking. Baby, meanwhile, gets the beginning of a completely fascinating character arc that included my favorite dialogue and scenes through the entire film as we’re shown that after a decade in prison she’s gone completely off the deep end. She rambles on about being Snow White and saving kittens and cries while hallucinating ballerinas with cat heads. By the time she’s free even Otis is expressing vocal concern for her. We get to meet the first half of the film’s main antagonist, Warden Virgil Harper, who was memorable and fun and felt right at home in the Rejects canon. We got the chance to see him developed into a character you almost start to feel sorry for; he’s cocky, but he clearly has no idea how in over his head he really is. On top of this, the scene when the clown shows up at Harper’s house while Otis and Foxy are torturing him and his friends and family is the best torture scene in the film in the complete absurd awfulness of the clown trying to put on a funny show while everyone is sobbing and a man is bleeding out.

At this point, the movie is going in a direction I totally dig. By the time Baby is finally free and able to reunite with Otis and he’s picking up on how fucked up she’s become, I’m genuinely excited to see how things will develop. It feels like Rob Zombie was setting up a film where we get to explore the siblings’ dynamic in a way that’s new and intriguing but developing from the things people loved in Rejects, which is that perfect blend of “utterly irredeemably despicable people” and “genuinely likable, oddly human characters.” Baby and Otis only really have each other at this point (Foxy is there, but even in the movie itself they allude to the fact that he really barely matters — a bit of a copout of a running gag, but whatever), and Baby actually voices this. It hit me at that moment how all of their family has died, and considering how much family has been a driving force for these characters, they were literally initially introduced in 1000 Corpses as the classic murder family and that’s all been taken from them, it’s genuinely sad. Spaulding’s death feels like it could be the final catalyst for... something to come from this, as that was Baby’s father and such a hugely important member of the Firefly family. We have Otis and Baby, alone (well, accompanied by Foxy) in the late 1980s (also a COMPLETELY not utilized detail), on the run as the country’s most wanted serial killers and trying to cope with the weird scenario of being merciless murderers who’ve had their entire family taken from them.

But we don’t get any of that in the second half. At all. Instead, we have Baby suggesting they all run away to Mexico. They do, winding up in a little hotel in the middle of nowhere full of prostitutes and alcohol. Baby wins a knife throwing contest against some big misogynistic guys. Then Danny Trejo’s character’s unmentioned son shows up (oh yeah; Danny Trejo was here for about 5 seconds, he died early on), has about 3 lines of dialogue, sends in 20 masked luchadors to kill Baby and Otis, they have an extremely long low stakes shootout, and with the help of the second half’s most interesting but still underdeveloped and shockingly unironically sympathetic character they burn Danny Trejo’s son alive and the movie ends. And that’s it. The characters regress even further backwards than their Rejects counterparts. They don’t really do... anything, actually. Otis fucks some women and then lays in bed flirting with them until the luchadors show up with their machine guns. My favorite moment was Otis’ attempts at saving Baby’s life by telling Aquarius (Danny Trejo’s character’s son) to let her go because he was the only one responsible for his father’s death, and they share a brief exchange about family. But that was one interesting moment amidst an extremely stale and low stakes plot separate from anything I care about after the intensity and high stakes present in the previous movie’s climax, and even this movie’s first half. A lot of things are recycled here, like the revenge plot driving the antagonist, but Sheriff Wydell’s descent into righteous insanity in Rejects was given way more time to develop, or a character betraying the Fireflys’ trust, but instead of the extremely memorably shocking, selfish betrayal from Charlie who was a longtime acquaintance clearly considered family (plus he actually attempts to “redeem” himself in the end), this is betrayal from a random hotel owner we do not know or care about. When the credits roll and we see Otis and Baby and Foxy driving away to... somewhere, I don’t even know where they’re going, I’m not even really sure what I’m supposed to feel. I chuckled a little at Baby being allowed to drive after an earlier argument where Otis asserted she shouldn’t, but that was it.

I hadn’t read anything about this movie before watching it, because I didn’t want anything to be spoiled for me. I was really excited for it! I learned that Sid Haig, who of course passed on only very recently (RIP), was dealing with very serious health issues that made him unable to film the movie, when originally the film had been written with the original infamous three - Otis, Baby, Spaulding - as the leads for the whole thing. Rob Zombie wanted to honor him with at least a cameo, knowing that the movie wouldn’t be the same without the Captain, but aside from a brief few minutes of screen time he had to rewrite the whole rest of the film with Spaulding removed. I feel like that’s where a majority of the problems with the movie lie. It’s why Foxy is as flat as he is and it’s why there’s an awkward uncertainty in how to deal with the loss of the Captain as the patriarch and why the whole idea of Otis and Baby’s aloneness is so awkwardly glossed over, like Mr. Zombie noticed the elephant in the room enough to address the turmoil but didn’t want to rewrite the entire movie from scratch to account for one of the most important characters in the franchise (maybe THE most important) being unexpectedly killed off.

Now, I LOVE some films that have been to developmental hell and back and came out as solid movies. In fact, there’s an extremely special place in my heart for films that fought tooth and nail to be made. It inspires me as a creator myself and it’s why indie low budget horror is my favorite genre of movie. I absolutely love seeing creators fight to bring their artistic visions to life against the odds. There are fantastic sequels out there where major actors either died or refused to/were unable to return and the stories were reworked or the actors replaced. I feel like something went wrong here. The moment he realized that Sid Haig would be unable to return, Rob Zombie should have set the whole thing aside and done a total rewrite. Right now, the knowledge of what was going on with Sid Haig behind the scenes makes the movie’s shortcomings go from “poor writing and storytelling decisions” to “genuinely extremely sad.”

One of the things I totally love about the writing of Devil’s Rejects is the way Rob Zombie inserts seemingly random moments that do nothing but add to the overall atmosphere and tone of his world. Random arguments, random character quirks, random shots of random things that simultaneously add a gritty “anything goes” realism as well as a surreal absurd humor. I’m also ALL for disjointed, nonlinear, or otherwise experimental and strange plots with a lot going on in them, I don’t think a big genre shift halfway through a movie is inherently bad. In the past, it’s been Rob Zombie’s fearlessness with experimenting with strange, often shameless storytelling decisions that have made his films so memorable and enjoyable and even inspiring to me. But in Three From Hell, there’s just a sense that everything feels kind of... disconnected and unfinished. It feels like two different movies were trying to be made and neither were fully developed. It just ends up sort of feeling like a kind of sad mess.

[bookofmirth]

I finished reading Dark Age today. Here are my thoughts.

My main takeaway, for those who don’t want to be spoiled or don’t want to read a long rant, is this: Dark Age read very much like what must happen every time Quentin Tarantino and the tv show creators of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are given money to make all of their 12-year-old male fantasies come true. It was an excuse for gore and violence, with only a very thin veneer of justice or honor on the top. In her video review, Piera Forde called this book “one big masturbatory ‘look how great I am’”. I completely agree.

My issues fell into two broad categories: violence and sexism. This got really effing long, and I’m not sorry. I put a cut at least?

Note: I really loved the original Red Rising trilogy. When I reread Iron Gold before reading DA, I liked it and certain characters more than I remember. I’m likely not going to read the last book in this series. I’m not looking for anyone to change my mind or to argue with me about any of these points. Go ahead if you want, but I likely won’t reply.

My main issue with this book was the extreme violence. I read books with violence all the time. I read the original trilogy, obviously. I read more adult books than YA. I’ve read books in which the main plot point is domestic violence. I’ve read books in which the main theme is rape culture. My problem with the violence in DA is that it literally served no purpose, and it was so common and gratuitous that I ended up laughing out loud at the ridiculousness. I loved Sefi originally but this book made me laugh out loud at her death because her lungs were ripped out? Um, ok. Sure.

You can’t have every single moment in a book have the same amount of extreme impact, because all of those moments will cancel each other out. There’s a reason that books build towards climax. This book was all climax, to the point that it was flat.

In the video linked above, she also mentions that the amount of violence meant the stakes were very low. Everyone was constantly losing limbs, eyes, being stabbed in the lung, the stomach, having their face burned off, getting radiation poisoning etc., but miraculously surviving. That made those injuries yawn-worthy, when in any other book, they would... idk, mean something.

There is a difference between a plot being fast-paced, and... whatever this was. It was one big indistinguishable fight scene after another. I grew so bored that the shocking moments lost all of their shock value. I didn’t care when Ulysses was nailed to a tree because at that point, it was just one more example in a long line of moments that were there purely for shock-value. There was little meaning, in terms of either plot or character development. I mean, really. What was the point of that? Is it going to change Victra’s character? Did she need any incentive to kick ass and save her children and find her husband? Was she previously passive in some way? Was this supposed to show us how far Harmony was willing to go? Did Ulysses’s death have any freaking point other than to say “wow, look at how brutal I can make this story!” The answer to all of those questions is a resounding NO, because... nothing changed. We knew what Harmony was capable of. Victra’s story and character have not changed. 

It was um, how do you say... POINTLESS. Much like 95% of the violence in this book. And that’s the thing that pissed me off. Violence is whatever. I don’t look for it in a book, but I’m fine if it happens. There just needs to be a reason, and I don’t mean in the metaphysical “what’s the meaning of life” way. I mean that there needs to be a reason in terms of plot, world, or character. Every time one of these things happened in the book, I came up empty on all three counts. 

Admittedly, I am much more of a character-driven reader than plot. But this... this wasn’t even plot. I mean, what happened? Virginia lost power, and then quickly escaped her captors. Darrow won a battle on Mars, and then got stuck there. Lysander was on Mars and got married (ew). Lyria helped rescue some women and we found out about the space Obsidian people and Volsung Fá. (Which... you don’t need to throw in every single idea you have, Pierce. You already had enough of a political clusterfuck. Why do we have new players in book 5/6?? The fact that the first post I saw on Reddit about his character was pointing out an inconsistency tells me that Pierce bit off more than he could chew and couldn’t keep things straight. Anyway.) None of this needed to take 750 pages. Maybe some people like a battle scene that takes 140 pages to get through (and I don’t see any difference between talking a lot about the battle and then actually having the battle. It’s all still about this one battle.) I’m not one of those people. 

A final note before I move on to my next issue: I don’t care if the violence was “realistic”. If I want realistic, I wouldn’t be reading science fiction. “It’s realistic” is a really shitty yet common excuse for various problematic themes in fiction, which is ironic since it’s... fiction.

My next issue was: sexism! While women have always been “strong” in this series, and I still adore Virginia, Victra, etc., something has been niggling at the back of my mind since the start of the series. There was something off about the incongruity of their strength and the extremely masculine context of the society. And I finally put my finger on it, after getting a couple of female POVs in this book. 

It would be really easy to say that Pierce is a woke feminist because some of the most badass characters in this series are women. It would be really easy to say that hey, because one of the MCs is Virginia, who is arguably the most intelligent of the bunch, who becomes the sovereign, who can more than hold her own in a fight, he must be trying to show that women are equal in this society. Right?

Wrong. Masculinity still rules the day in this series. Femininity is consistently shit on, berated, insulted. Physical inferiority, intellectual inferiority, they are to be avoided at all costs. Emotional awareness or sensitivity have little to no value. And that’s the real reason I know that any feminism in this series is performative and misguided.

Can women be strong? Yes. But they have to do so on someone else’s terms. They have found strength by being like the men in their society, rather than finding strength in their femininity. This is still very much a patriarchy; it’s just one in which women have largely figured out that they must eschew their feminine traits in order to succeed. Do they have feelings? Obviously, or they wouldn’t be people. But when the society as a whole constantly berates anyone who is sensitive, disdains anyone who cares about family rather than personal glory, then it’s still a society based on masculinity, much of it toxic. Just because they have learned to play using the master’s tools doesn’t mean they are equal. 

Is this a problem across the board? Pretty much. It’s basically the Golds who feel that way towards emotions, displays of “weakness”, etc. But even when you look at the Reds, they may be more humble and family-oriented (in the caring sense, not the honor sense), but they are still homophobic and focused on getting their women to breed asap. While the Golds may be the exemplar in terms of promoting masculinity and masking it in equity because women can be masculine too, the other colors have bought into the myth. Even characters who are seemingly asexual, or agender, are still buying into this hierarchy.

The thing that initially kicked off my rage at this book was a combination of the two issues above - violence and sexism. I was really hyped to read this book because we were finally going to get Virginia’s POV. However - it seems like the only reason we had her POV, and Lyria’s, for that matter, was for Pierce to expose himself. There was, again, ZERO REASON for Virginia to have been sexually assaulted when the mob attacked her. If she needed to be deposed, that could have happened in a myriad of ways. But no. It had to turn sexual, because the only way that Pierce can signal to us that he is writing a female character is to make it sexual. 

I did not want Virginia’s POV just so I could get a first-hand view of her assault. Lyria does not need to exist just to show that she can save other women from sexual slavery and human trafficking. Women are more than their sexuality. There is a sense in this book that in order to make women strong, you need to write them like men. Any reference to their sexuality or femininity is a liability, or a weakness. 

As I was writing this rant, I realized that Pierce has made it incredibly hard for me to critique this book while *not* dichotomizing gender into m/f. That’s just another sign of the utter lack of understanding of anything that isn’t incredibly masculine. I’m not sure where this issue is coming from, but... honestly I’m tired of writing this and don’t care enough to unpack the issue. This is one of the 93 books I’ve read so far this year, and I’m ready to move on.

***None of this is to say that people who enjoyed this book are wrong, or bad people, or whatever. These are my opinions, based on my reading experience and interpretation. If you don’t agree with what I’ve said, that’s fine. Go for it. I’m not really looking for a debate, which is why I’m not going onto anyone else’s posts or interacting with fandom unless someone reaches out to me. 

[vohalika]

Thoughts on Ellie

(I don’t even go here, which is why I’m not tagging it. This just bothered me a metric fuckton)

 So from what I understand, a random fresh account under the name Ellie appeared on Rank 4 in Top500 recently. A Contenders Team announce they signed her on. People were suspicious because no one knew who this was or where they came from, there was no real name listed on the contenders page, and someone climbing from 0 to T500 is basically unheard of and almost impossible, especially not knowing who they are.

To prove her existence and female-ness, a girl saying Ellie is her account plays on stream and does so badly. Shitstorm ensues. Ellie resigns. Someone tells someone called Aspen it was a social experiment. The guy who did this is apparently called Punisher. There is an investigation.

From what I understand, this is a drama heavy pro scene to begin with, so I do believe that being “suspicious” of these circumstances would have happened with either gender. Or none. Whatever. The thought process behind “there’s no female player of T500 level who plays these heroes; these heroes wouldn’t be played with an aim bot; it must be a male player pretending to be a girl” is… Well, correct in this case. And that’s the worst part, really. I dislike the general assumption that no female player could do this, with Ellie as her second account or whatever, but that doesn’t matter under these circumstances because that is, literally, what happened. For the most part, at least.

So that’s I think the popular story right now? That the girl behind Ellie’s voice and this Punisher guy (and maybe others?) started this fake account as a social experiment, and then deceived a pro team into signing her on as the first female player ever in Contenders NA. Not in Contenders, there’s a few women playing in Contenders AU.

Like babyporo. Who a day before Ellie sprung fully formed into existence with an SR of 4665 called out the captain of the team that signed Ellie for tweeting “females should not be in my 4500 games 😊 change my mind”.

Where was the shitstorm about that, by the way? Somehow, that didn’t make it into the OW vloggersphere on youtube the same way Ellie did.

Anyway, Ellie happened a day later, Haku, the team captain in question, apologized, his team signs Ellie.

So… I see like, three-ish options here. The people behind the Ellie account saw Haku being a dick, created this fake girl with an SR about 4500, and then were signed on the same team as him out of dumb luck and what started as a (really badly conceived geez) gotcha! Moment spiraled out of control.

Or, these incidents were all entirely unrelated, it started as a “genuine” social experiment to see… What? How much harassment a random female account coming up under suspicious circumstances would receive? How easy it’d be to get signed on a pro team as a woman? How gullible the management behind Second Wind is?

I mean, yay, success, amazing. It’s like all those times men made dating profiles pretending to be women and left after a few days because of all the vile things men were sending them. How about y’all just believe what women tell you instead of pulling shit like this.

The third-ish possibility is that Second Wind was in on this and signed on Ellie because they wanted a PR stunt after those sexist comments to show how not sexist they are. I’ve seen people call this virtue signaling, and, yikes.

So this Punisher guy and the girl acting along are assholes under all of these circumstances. That much is clear. The entire idea is just bad, and throws basically any future female pro player under the bus as well.

But, I mean, what the fuck is wrong with this team? People are now complaining how every man has to go through thorough vetting processes, but look, that woman just got signed on because she pretended to be a woman! Misandry is real!

(Actual take I have heard)

I mean, if that was the case, why aren’t there tons of women already playing in the pro leagues, if apparently sounding like you might possess a vagina is enough to get you signed, no further vetting required?

The official statement says they had no idea who Ellie really was, or rather wasn’t, they don’t ever communicate with their players in person, and there were time constraints. And I guess they have to say that, because if they’d been in on this, my guess is Blizzard would boot their asses right out.

So in the most generous of cases, they were just being extremely careless. Which is even more damning once female players are involved, especially the first one in that Contenders division ever, because there will always be a shitstorm. If this had been a real woman and they’d signed her on under these circumstances without vetting, exposing her to this kind of harassment would have been callous beyond measure. This way, it is also callous and dangerous and irresponsible, don’t get me wrong, but just in general to any future female player trying to go pro.

If they signed her on for a publicity stunt, I mean, that was successful. No such thing as bad press. To distract from Haku’s sexist remarks, well, that was also successful up until basically now.

Or they were complicit in all of this. Maybe they knew all along that Ellie wasn’t real, signed her for the PR, counted on her getting harassed enough so that her dropping out before every playing a single game would be believable; so they’d both be known for being the first NA Contenders team to sign a woman without actually having to sign a woman. Refer to what I said above about being callous and irresponsible, and add to that being colossal dicks on purpose.

And honestly, I kind of believe the latter version is more likely. I really don’t see how a pro organization could be so artificially stupid. If they were the victims of fraud here and only wanted to sign on a good player that happened to be female with the best of intentions, I also hope they press charges, but I really, really don’t think they were.

So. Best case scenario, SW management is full of idiots. Worst case scenario, full of assholes. Alongside Punisher and Ellie. There are no winners here.

And then there’s people whose takeaway from this is that there’s no sexism towards women in the community, all the doxxers and harassers were justified because they were right, harassment only counts when it’s towards women while all the male players getting shit online are being left in the dust, women have been toxic to me in my games too and they never get banned for it while they get men banned for reporting them, and also, congrats, now we will have achieved equality because women will have to be vetted as thoroughly as men to go pro in the future.

Yikes.

So. Something tells me that the women playing on Contenders AU currently were properly vetted already. So was Geguri. Didn’t Geguri also have to play with a keyboard and mouse cam to prove she was actually as good at tracking as she is?

(I know she doesn’t want to be seen as a female player instead of a player and also doesn’t want to be used for these kinds of talks. It is however kind of impossible not to when you are the first of anything, really, and also a really good example for everything, including but not limited to the concept of the glass cliff; something sort of related to the glass ceiling.)

I also stand by the assumption that if there hadn’t been a girl involved in this, we’d all be laughing about a great prank by now.

Maybe Overwatch truly is the one amazing bastion of equality where male and female players are harassed equally, or for some reason, men face more harassment and scrutiny, so any and all experiences from any and all other gaming communities when it comes to women are completely invalid here. That’d be great. That’s not the story I hear, though. I’ve seen babyporo go a little into what it’s like being a female pro player, I’ve seen the drama around Mercy mains, that thing with Geguri definitely happened. For every toxic female player abusing others via comms in-game, I’ve heard of two who don’t dare to speak up during the game for fear of being harassed. Maybe those fears are unfounded; I can say I haven’t been harassed in comms so far. But then again, the ranks I play at are veeery low, so I’m not exactly threatening any male egos by existing there. My games haven’t been very toxic in general, maybe the real toxicity only starts when there’s actually something at stake in the higher ranks.

All of this is anecdotal, though. I have a hard time letting go of what I have heard and seen happening over and over again, but let’s just assume Overwatch is above all that.

That still won’t change the fact that any and all female pro players trying to get on a team now will have to face so, so much more scrutiny, if not by the organizations, then by the community. Now that they’ve been proven right, the mob of assholes – as minor a part of the community at large as it may be – feels validated. There was something to dig up about this female player, so there might be something to dig up about all future female pros, too! What, it’s just being careful at this point, look at what happened with Ellie!

And that is going to make the situation worse for female players. There’s already a bunch of societal hurdles to even get to a point where you’d consider going pro and be considered for a team. Now there will be fewer women who are going to try because with all the scrutiny that is going to follow, it might just not be worth it. We have seen many women crucified by the video game community before; that shit is not exactly encouraging.

[thecloserkin]

book review: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985)

Genre: Sci-Fi, YA

Is it the main pairing: Yes

Is it canon: No

Is it explicit: No

Is it endgame: Kind of

Is it shippable: Emphatically yes

Bottom line: must-read, watch the movie if you can

When I say it’s “kind of” endgame I mean there are nine thousand sequels I haven’t read but as of the end of this novel, yes, they’re together. Not canonically together, not romantically together, yet they are far and away the most important relationship in each other’s lives. They’re on their way to board a generation ship & colonize another planet, so that’s “together” enough for me thanks. I think you can love someone romantically without loving them sexually. One of the reasons children’s books are so ripe for those of us wearing incest-shipping goggles is because all the principals are kids and very young kids have not yet had time to grow apart from their siblings — to put down deep roots with college roommates or colleagues or whatever. I think the oldest major character in this book is like twelve.

John Paul and Teresa Wiggin have three extremely precocious children. Peter, the eldest, washed out of the government’s child-soldier-in-training program because he’s a sociopath who likes to hurt and manipulate people and has zero empathy. Valentine, the middle child, washed out because she has too much empathy. John Paul and Teresa got a special dispensation to have a third child and that child is Ender. For the first six years of his life, the most salient fact about Ender Wiggin is that he is a “Third,” a term of abuse and derision we frequently see hurled at him. There are bullies, Peter foremost among them. And the only one who who loves him unconditionally, who tries (usually in vain) to protect him from Peter, is Valentine.

It gave him something to do while the teacher droned on about arithmetic. Arithmetic! Valentine had taught him arithmetic when he was three.

Awwww just two gifted kids doing coursework way too advanced for their grade level. Only there are three kids, not two. Ender’s primal fear is that he will turn out to be “just like Peter” ie. that he too will enjoy hurting people; the person most able to soothe that fear and instill self-love in him is, of course, Valentine. It’s obviously unfortunate for his psychological development then that Ender passes all the tests and is recruited into the officer training program known as Battle School. There’s an impending alien invasion, you see; it’s a national emergency. So six-year-old Ender is separated from the only person he trusts and thrust into an environment designed to mold him into a killer. The military brass aren’t stupid, either. They see it right away:

“The sister is our weak link. He really loves her.” “I know. She can undo it all, right from the start. He won’t want to leave her.”

And this:

”Your brother hates you because you are living proof that he wasn’t good enough. Your parents resent you because of all the past they are trying to evade.”

”Valentine loves me.”

”With all her heart. Completely, unstintingly, she’s devoted to you, and you adore her.”

Once Ender heads off to Battle School—and that place is the emotional core of this story, just like Hogwarts is the center of the HP universe—the grownups make a conscious decision to isolate him from his peers and prevent him forming any intimate friendships: “He can never believe that anyone can help him out, ever.” Guys I get that Ender is a once-in-a-generation child prodigy but doing that to a six-year-old is tantamount to solitary confinement or sensory deprivation. He’s violently homesick — something I didn’t pick up on when I first read the book as a kid because I was so eager to get to the war games in the battleroom — but home is not a place, home is Valentine. The first night “he could hear several boys whimpering for their mothers or fathers or dogs. Then he could not help himself: His lips formed Valentine’s name.” Oh, dear heart.

He forms bonds with other kids, sure — they wouldn’t be grooming him for leadership if he wasn’t likable — but you know how you can be friends with people selectively, and share only very specific areas of your life with them? Yeah, Ender has superiors and later, subordinates; he has mentors and competitors and nemeses and allies but he doesn’t have anyone who understands him through-and-through the way Val does. Which makes his memory of her assume all the more prominence. He worries that by the time they let him see her again (there is a communications blackout so no letters) she will have changed and their relationship won’t be the same. A not unfounded fear, I think, but look at this:

”Hi,” he said.

”Hi,” Ender said.

”I’m Mick.”

”Ender.”

”That’s a name?”

”Since I was little. It’s what my sister called me.”

He prefers to go by the childhood nickname his sister gave him rather than his “real” name Andrew. When Ender finally makes his first friend at Battle School here is how it goes down:

On impulse Ender hugged him, tight, almost as if he were Valentine. He even though of Valentine then and wanted to go home.

It’s just so clear that Val represents all that is good and pure in the world. When he turns seven, all alone in his bunk and no one to celebrate with, he remembers his last birthday at home:

Valentine baked him a cake on his sixth birthday. It fell and it was terrible. Nobody knew how to cook anymore, it was the kind of crazy thing Valentine would do. Everyone teased Valentine about it, but Ender saved a little bit of it in his cupboard.

The only reason I’m here is so that a bugger won’t shoot out Valentine’s eye, won’t … split her head with a beam so hot that her brains burst the skull and spill out like rising bread dough, the way it happens in my worst nightmares.

There’s a scene where another kid rails against the unspoken Battle School norm that prohibits the kids talking about home and Ender starts crying:

”No, it’s all right,” Ender said. “I was just thinking about Valentine. My sister.”

”I wasn’t trying to make you upset.”

”It’s okay. I don’t think of her very much, because I always get—like this.”

He’s learned to suppress his own feelings because it’s too painful to dwell on how much he misses her. Meanwhile back at the ranch, Valentine celebrates Ender’s eighth birthday alone. The family has moved since Ender left for Battle School, and Valentine wonders:

How would Ender find them here, among these trees, under this changeable and heavy sky?

You have to remember that this whole time she’s been stuck with Peter, who’s convinced all the adults with an iota of authority that he’s turned over a new leaf, that he’s no longer the sadistic little boy he used to be. But Valentine knows better. Peter skins squirrels alive in the woods and stakes them down for her to find.

She couldn’t think of anything so terrible that she didn’t believe Peter might do it. She also knew, though, that Peter was not insane, not in the sense that he wasn’t in control of himself … Peter could delay any desire as long as he needed to; he could conceal any emotion. And so Valentine knew that he would never hurt her in a fit of rage. He would only do so if the advantages outweighed the risks … In a way, she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always, always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

This is such a chillingly perceptive paragraph. The main takeaway is that the separation from Ender has been hard on Valentine too, and the hardest part is that she begins to grow ever closer to Peter, the brother she hates and fears, as the memory of her favorite brother fades. Peter hits her up her with a proposition. He wants to take over the world …. by disseminating political essays on the internet, writing under pseudonyms. And he needs Valentine’s help. Valentine agrees, because if she’s working with him she can curb his worst tendencies right? Haha. One day Valentine is summoned from class to meet with a stranger in uniform. “I’ve come to talk to you in confidence about your brother,” he says, and Val immediately assumes she and Peter have been found out, their aliases penetrated. It takes her a minute to realize it’s her other brother he’s come about. Ender’s performance has taken a nosedive, and they won’t let Valentine see him but they want to pick her brain about what might be troubling him. The audacity! She hasn’t been allowed to see him for three years and they want her to diagnose what’s wrong and tell it to them? Please. Moreover, she’s wracked with guilt over her first impulse, which was to protect Peter’s secrets, not to demand to know what was wrong with Ender:

She felt a deep stab of pain, of regret, of shame that now it was Peter she was close to, Peter who was the center of her life. For you, Ender, I light fires on your birthday. For Peter I help fulfill all his dreams.

to think of her little brother, who was so good, whom she had protected for so long, and then remember that now she was Peter’s ally, Peter’s helper, Peter’s slave in a scheme that was completely out of her control.

Valentine’s disloyalty to Ender is tearing the poor girl apart. If there was any sexual attraction involved this would be a super juicy incestuous love triangle but like I said at the beginning of this review, all these kids are prepubescent and introducing the element of sex would not fundamentally alter the interpersonal dynamics. We don’t get a Peter POV in this book but he’s perfectly aware Val’s always loved Ender best, and Peter may be a monster and incapable of love but surely he’s capable of jealousy?

A letter arrives for Ender at Battle School:

He read four lines into it, then skipped to the end and read the signature. Then he went back to the beginning, and curled up on his bed to read the words over and over again.

This is relatable behavior for anyone who has ever received a long-awaited missive from a loved one and just wants to savor it over and over again. Especially if it’s from the person he loves most in the world whom he hasn’t heard a peep from for three years. Ender being Ender, he parses the letter for signs it’s not the genuine article. He concludes:

It isn’t the real thing anyway. Even if she wrote it in her own blood, it isn’t the real thing because they made her write it.

Ain’t that the truth.

He had no control over his own life. They ran everything … The one real thing, the one precious real thing was his memory of Valentine, the person who loved him before he ever played a game … and they had taken her and put her on their side.

”I sold my brother,” Valentine said, “and they paid me for it.”

When Ender suffers another bout of burnout upon graduating, the grownups are smart enough to ship him back to Earth for an unscheduled leave of absence and to bring him Valentine, who is literally the only reason he wakes up in the morning. They spend a beautiful afternoon on a lake. Valentine intuits the purpose of the visit right away:

”Oh. So I’m therapy again.”

”This time we can’t censor your letter. We’re taking our chances. We need your brother badly. Humanity is on the cusp.”

Can we stop to reflect on how fucked up it is that these jackals are STILL taking Ender and Valentine’s bond — the only true and good thing in these kids’ lives — and bending it to their own purposes?

But she knew that he was glad to see her, knew it because of the way his eyes never left her face.

”You’re bigger than I remembered,” she said stupidly.

”You too,” he said. “I also remembered that you were beautiful.”

Recall that we don’t love people because they are beautiful, people are beautiful because we love them. Though the narrative spends exactly zero words dwelling on Valentine’s appearance, as far as Ender is concerned she is obviously the most beautiful, perfect human being to ever draw breath. She goes to squeeze his knee right where he’s always been ticklish—and finds that he’s seized her wrist in a vice grip. He took self-defense classes in Battle School. Ender says, “I didn’t want to see you … I was afraid that I’d still love you.” If this isn’t a line straight out of a romance novel. I’m not here to ding romance novels, of which I read plenty; I’m just stating the facts: Ender and Valentine are framed as the romantic leads of this story. They spend pages upon pages pining for each other, their decisions are driven by the suite of potential consequences for the other, and their long-awaited reunion is staged with all the trappings of big-R Romance:

And he touched her cheek so gently that she wanted to cry. Like the touch of his soft baby hand when he was still an infant.

Also, everyone and their mom ships it. Even Ender’s commanding officer ships it:

”I may have used Valentine,” said Graff, “and you may hate me for it, Ender, but keep this in mind—it only works because what’s between you, that’s real, that’s what matters.”

Ajdkfjddkjkdf give the people what they want. Okay so Ender defeats the aliens (by accidentally-on-purpose committing genocide but that’s beyond the scope of this review) and the war is over. Valentine comes to him and asks him to LEAVE BEHIND EVERYONE THEY KNOW and GO WITH HER AMONG THE STARS:

”I came because I’ve spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love.”

”While you’re governing the colony and I’m writing political philosophy, they’ll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other’s room and play checkers and have pillow fights.

Let me repeat: Ender and Valentine’s idea of a good time is sneaking into each other’s rooms and having pillow fights. Which is both innocent and potentially—not. It’s a scenario fair to bursting with incest potential, and when he agrees to go with her this is her reaction:

She squealed and hugged him, for all the world like a typical teenage girl who just got the present that she wanted from her little brother.

In my experience teenage girls are notoriously bored by/annoyed by/reluctant to be seen in the company of their little brothers. Not Valentine though, her little brother has always been her favorite person. Their bond is intense enough that I felt obliged to review this book even though it’s def not canon, and even though Orson Scott Card is garbage and a raging homophobe.

[dillenwaeraa]

How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

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

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

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

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

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

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

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

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

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

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

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

Explanation: Why is this happening?

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

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

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

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

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

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

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

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

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

Implications: How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

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

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

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

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

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

[heavenwheel]

How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

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

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

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

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

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

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

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

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

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

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

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

Explanation: Why is this happening?

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

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

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

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

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

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

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

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

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

Implications: How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

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

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

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

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

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

[ronijashworth]

How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

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

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

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

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

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

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

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

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

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

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

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

Explanation: Why is this happening?

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

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

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

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

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

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

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

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

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

Implications: How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

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

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

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

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

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

[donnafmae]

How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domain Authority vs Rankings mean Spearman correlation by ranking position

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

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

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

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

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

Evidence 2: SERPs change when they become high volume

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

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

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

Here’s the picture that then unfolds:

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

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

These two specialist sites have a similarly interesting story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data courtesy of SEOmonitor.

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

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

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

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

Explanation: Why is this happening?

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

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

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

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

The speed with which users interacted with the SERP

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

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

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

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

Implications: How to rank for head terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E.g. “free delivery” in title

E.g. professionally written meta description copy

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

Optimising for rate of return to SERPs:

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

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

Price

Pop-ups etc.

Aesthetics(!)

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

[click2watch]

Boost VC Just Fulfilled a Crypto Funding Pledge 4 Years in the Making

Boost VC has officially backed crypto startup number 100.

With the news, confirmed Tuesday by CoinDesk, the San Mateo incubator has finally fulfilled a funding pledge made all the way back in March 2014, when co-founders Adam Draper and Brayton Williams boldly declared they would invest in 100 bitcoin startups over the next three years.

Though it may have taken a bit longer than planned, the milestone is perhaps a testament to the pre-seed fund, which has maintained a major emphasis on crypto since its earliest days, riding the twists and turns of an industry that has changed greatly in just a few short years.

And that’s reflected in the numbers. Depending on how the deals get counted, Boost VC now says it’s made a little over 100 crypto investments. A few of its companies have pivoted away from crypto over time, so Draper no longer counts those toward the total, even if Boost initially wrote its check with the technology in mind.

To that end, however, Draper told CoinDesk in an interview that the philosophy of the fund hasn’t changed.

“It has always been about building the open financial system of the world,” he said.

But a few pivots aren’t a bearish indicator – that’s the national course of investing. For Draper, the crypto portfolio has been a strong net positive.

“In 2017, we started to feel the potential of what this could be, and now that potential is actually being built,” he said.

He acknowledged that enthusiasm has dwindled among his peers in the venture community, but Boost has been through this before. He promised, “We will be writing more checks, because that’s my favorite time.”

And despite hitting its goal, Boost hasn’t quit seeking crypto deals.

Right now, it wants applications for its incubator, which is just one part of its larger investing program. Applications are open for “Tribe 12” now through the end of October (each group of startups goes into a “tribe,” and this will be the 12th such group).

It’s looking for 20 companies to join a three-month incubator, where they will be provided with housing and office space, entrepreneurship coaching and a check from $50 to $100,000.

Results so far

“It’s been super fun,” Draper said of the ride to 100 companies. “You went from being the crazy one to having a group of people who were all crazy with you.”

When Boost made its 100 investment commitment, he said it attracted all kinds of talented entrepreneurs starved for funding and support to Boost. He said they felt like “a beacon,” attracting this gang of believers together in a basement to imagine a new industry.

Three years later, and it has become a real tech sector, with real stakes in the economy. Draper broke down some of the big takeaways from its pool of investments so far.

Additional rounds of funding have been secured by 45 percent of the companies they backed, while 25 percent of the companies are dead. It’s had five crypto exits: Lawnmower (data), Leet (e-sports), Bitquick (distribution), Bitwall (micropayments) and Clevercoin (exchange). (Lawnmower was acquired by CoinDesk).

Swell Rewards, also exited, but that’s an example of a company that Boost backed as a crypto company but that pivoted away from crypto by the time it sold.

The exits so far don’t necessarily indicate big successes though. Venture capital typically looks at a 10-year time horizon for its bets to pay off. So far, its best investments (companies like Protocol Labs, Aragon, Ripio and Wyre) haven’t even approached an exit, because they are just building and growing.

Boost’s failures, Draper said, resulted in focusing on ideas over founders. When an idea was hot and so it rushed to find a founder who was working on that idea, those deals never worked. Now Boost always picks founders over ideas.

In Draper’s view, he’s always looking for founders that iterate. He wants to see constant iteration on product, getting it closer and closer to the users’ true problem. Also, he wants to see founders constant iterating on themselves, working to become the leader their company needs.

Draper said, “Their reason for being in it needs to be pretty strong.”

From bitcoin to crypto

Close watchers of the space will note that there is one way in which Boost amended its pledge. In March 2014, when Draper committed to making 100 investments, he actually said he’d back 100 bitcoin startups. Since then, a lot of the companies its counting are definitely crypto, but they aren’t necessarily built for bitcoin.

“The idea of 100 bitcoin companies — when we announced we were going to back 100 bitcoin companies — that was insane. That was an insane thought,” Draper said. At that time there really wasn’t a distinction between bitcoin and other kinds of crypto, Draper explained.

“There was bitcoin and these whispers of other things, but everyone was trying to keep people focused on the main one,” he said. “We felt that the industry hadn’t focused enough to support divisions in the ecosystem.”

Draper said that was an era when he watched “early adopters being rejected by venture capital,” he said. “I remember other VCs coming up to me and being like: ‘Is that bitcoin thing still a thing?'”

But then ethereum came along and it offered the ERC-20 smart contract, which opened up a new way for funding starved crypto companies to raise money. “It unlocked this door in everyone’s head that said, ‘Hey maybe there can be more than one,'” he recalled.

So, Boost followed the trend and opened up what it was looking for. Mostly it gets equity stakes in companies it backs, but it has also done token deals, such as for Decentraland. Draper said: “We have really done every kind of deal in the space.”

Right now, it’s focused on getting those very early deals, from very new companies it will bring into its incubator. It really emphasizes the fact that it provides both housing and office space, because unlike a lot of VCs it seeks companies from all over the world.

Half of Boost’s portfolio is international, Draper said, explaining, “Which, just working in the cryptocurrency world, you just have to be.”

It’s also key to get them started in Silicon Valley because, he said, “Our thesis has always been: Entrepreneurs are everywhere but Silicon Valley has an infrastructure for founding a company that’s very, very helpful.”

As for what he’s looking for, he and his partners keep an open mind.

He said:

“We’re looking for the craziest most impassioned people building magic.”

Image via Boost VC Facebook 

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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[othersportsnews-blog]

In some way, Roger Federer keeps pushing the boundaries of greatness

New Post has been published on https://othersportsnews.com/in-some-way-roger-federer-keeps-pushing-the-boundaries-of-greatness/

In some way, Roger Federer keeps pushing the boundaries of greatness

LONDON — He keeps rocketing farther into the tennis firmament. Retains pushing the boundaries earlier what was previously assumed possible in his sport.

Roger Federer‘s file-location nineteenth main victory unfolded under threatening skies here Sunday, but with no trace of difficulties on court. He lost just eight online games against an opponent in Marin Cilic who was hobbled by an injured foot. It took one zero one minutes. From the Swiss, the most memorable emotion came minutes following he gained the very last place with an ace: He sat in his on-court chair, looked into the stands at his assistance workforce, his wife and small children, and cried.

Then he composed himself coolly. In front of an adoring crowd he did what he has now finished much more than any other male in Wimbledon record. He held superior the tournament’s gilded winner’s cup for the eighth time.

Roger Federer became only the next player in the Open up period to get Wimbledon devoid of shedding a established. Gareth Fuller/PA Illustrations or photos/Getty Illustrations or photos

“To mark record here at Wimbledon really suggests a whole lot to me it can be that basic,” Federer mentioned before long following walking from the court. “[But] amusing sufficient, I did not assume that considerably of it all through nowadays, all through the trophy ceremony. I was just pleased that I was capable to get Wimbledon all over again, because it can be been a very long highway. It truly is been challenging at moments … but that’s how it can be intended to be.”

Tricky, certainly. Who could have imagined this kind of a renaissance at age 35? Heading into this year, Federer had not gained a main title considering that a protracted struggle with Andy Murray at Wimbledon five years back again. He’d been shut, suffering via three unpleasant losses in the finals of main tournaments, two at the All England Club. In the fog of this contemporary victory, it is straightforward to ignore very last year, when he endured via the indignity of a tripping-tumble to the Centre Court docket turf as he succumbed in a semifinal defeat. He announced before long afterward that he was leaving the tour for 6 months, a go required to recover his wounds and occur back again with a new viewpoint. But he was assumed by lots of to be finished.

How promptly it all improvements. The 131st Wimbledon is in the publications and his identify is etched all over again on the wall of champions. Exact same as at this year’s Australian Open up, with its epic closing against Rafael Nadal. Exact same as at the huge tour stops in Palm Springs and Miami. Exact same as very last month at Halle, Germany, wherever, just as throughout this fortnight, he did not drop a one established.

“I knew I could go fantastic all over again it’s possible a single day, but not at this amount” he mentioned. “You would have laughed if I instructed you I was going to get two Slams this year. Persons would not feel me if I [had] mentioned that.” Then, he admitted that he, way too, had a great deal of uncertainties. “I also did not feel that I was going to get two this year.”

Now he appreciates. Now, when all over again, we all know.

All through the warm-up, even right before the first meaningful ball was struck here Sunday, Federer appeared even much more energetic and energized than common. He normally appears to be like balletic, motion remaining the essential to his sport. But as he rallied effortlessly with Cilic throughout the five-moment stanza right before the first place, he appeared to be floating. The legs had been contemporary, springy, and light. The plan he’d hatched three months in the past had labored.

If we did not previously know the stakes had been superior, search no more than the emotions that poured from both Marin Cilic and Roger Federer in the Wimbledon closing.

As very long as he is healthier, Roger Federer plans to perform experienced tennis, but even he does not know how considerably lengthier that window will keep on being open.

ESPN provides the essential numbers and takeaways from Roger Federer’s file nineteenth Grand Slam singles title.

2 Linked

In March, Federer famously took however one more depart from the tour. There had been a great deal of naysayers who mentioned he’d damage his possibilities at the All England Club, that he’d lost his edge by stepping away from the grind. He listened to none of them. As a substitute, he played a handful of lighthearted exhibitions, hung for a little bit with his new friend, Bill Gates, and practiced at his Dubai home with a single intention in thoughts: Wimbledon. “I am in that state of mind,” he instructed me throughout an prolonged job interview at the time. By now he was training with Wimbledon balls.

As Federer calm, his most important rivals here had been tearing up their legs, churning via the soul-sapping slog that is the clay-court year. The 28-year-outdated Cilic, for occasion, played sixteen matches throughout the crimson clay swing. He is seven years more youthful than Federer, but every single of individuals matches counts as a entire body blow. They increase up. They wreak havoc on the legs, the back again, the arms, the ft.

At Wimbledon, even as Cilic played a single of the finest tournaments of his existence, there would be even much more blows. A five-setter in the quarterfinals. A demanding four sets in the semis. It can be no surprise that Cilic entered the closing in terrible actual physical affliction. “My thoughts was all the time blocked with the ache,” he would say, describing the blistered, bloodied foot that confined his motion, producing him to be so distraught that he finished up weeping on court as the match neared its midpoint.

Continue to, at the get started of this match, the tall Croatian was going for broke on almost each shot. It labored for a when, right up until Federer displayed the subtle side of his greatness. As a substitute of matching Cilic’s metronomic electric power, Federer, for a instant, muted his sport, turning to smooth, spinning returns, to floaters and sharp angles. All of it labored to toss off his opponent. Following five online games, Federer nudged forward. From there his arm loosened. He started poleaxing groundstrokes. The conclude came promptly.

Who appreciates what this closing would have long gone if Cilic had not been injured. But this considerably we can be absolutely sure of: Roger Federer looked very little like the male who hobbled from these grounds at the Wimbledon fortnight of 2016. He played brilliantly all through, getting to be the first male to get at the All England Club devoid of dropping a established considering that Bjorn Borg forty one years in the past.

In which will Federer conclude up? How far can he go? How lots of much more huge titles?

“I will not know how considerably lengthier it can be going to very last,” he mentioned following the match, his voice dropping just a sliver as he pondered the upcoming. “I have no plan.” But he vowed to push on. The US Open up awaits afterwards this summer. A true likelihood for Grand Slam No. twenty. On into the tennis firmament Roger Federer goes.

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[archiebwoollard]

Strategies You Need To Try in 2017, According to 13 Digital Marketing Experts

Image via Shutterstock.

Has anyone in the history of the world ever kept a New Year’s resolution?

I know I haven’t. But that doesn’t stop me from making them year after year and convincing myself that this will be the year for life-altering change. And then my credit card gets charged for my monthly gym membership and I realize I haven’t been in three months… (Where did the time go?)

The problem is, New Year’s resolutions are frequently impulse decisions — we take on ambitious goals without considering how they fit into our day to day lives.

Similarly, it’s easy to walk away from a marketing article with the intention of implementing X tactic. But without taking a step back and seeing how it fits into your overall strategy, you’re about as likely to actually do the work as I am to actually do my workout.

When we spoke to 13 of North America’s most influential digital marketing experts about their plans for 2017, a lot of them shared plans to take a step back and rethink their marketing strategy from a new perspective — rather than take on more tactics.

Here’s some of what they shared.

Scrutinize then optimize your current channels

You may be open to experimenting with new channels, but how often do you take stock of the ones you’ve been using forever? Why did you start using them in the first place?

The answer may be that you’re using them simply because you always have and don’t know anything else…

When we spoke to our digital marketing experts, many of them shared their plans to pull the plug completely on certain channels so they could focus on experimenting with new ones.

Larry Kim, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Wordstream and Inc columnist, spoke of his experiments with using LinkedIn Ads for lead generation:

Unfortunately it didn’t work because the cost per click was around $10 and very limited ad targeting options (e.g., no remarketing or custom list support).

But there were other channels that worked well:

There were many new channels that we tried out or doubled down on that worked spectacularly well for us – and I wrote them all up, including our approach and the results – the new channels included the use of RLSA, Facebook and Twitter Ads, posting content to Medium, changing our SEO tactics, and experimenting with off-topic content.

John Rampton, CEO of Due, was disappointed in the results from Facebook advertising campaigns, but it’s worth noting that he suspects it may have had more to do with targeting oversights:

In 2016, the most underwhelming marketing tactic we tried were Facebook ads, but I think this was because our target audience of small businesses was not on Facebook searching for business solutions.

Similarly, Moz last year experimented with pumping more money into paid advertising, according to co-founder Rand Fishkin. Moz nearly tripled its advertising budget with Facebook, AdWords and retargeting on various platforms.

Rand’s big takeaway from it all?

Broad targeted advertising is nearly useless. Unless someone has already been to our website, is familiar with our brand and/or is specifically searching for us or a handful of tightly connected search phrases, digital ads produce very little lift in new signups.

Moz has since cut back spend massively and is focused on optimizing its targeting instead.

Jay Baer of Convince and Convert experimented with some free marketing channels in 2016 – notably, cross-posting from his blog to Medium. And while the effort for posting to Medium is minimal, so too have been the returns:

So far, the readership just hasn’t been there. Curiously, I have 53,000+ followers on Medium now, but generate just 3,000-4,000 views across four different posts per month.

These channels may or may not be effective for your audience, but the lesson here is to survey what’s working for you and what’s not.

And then don’t be afraid to kill your darlings (the channels that just aren’t working).

Out with the old, in with the new.

Build genuine relationships with a small group of influencers

It’s easy to get caught up in the dozens of tasks you have to do each day, but if you’re not currently making time to network and build relationships with your peers, 2017 is a great time to start.

It’s the secret sauce of Aaron Orendorff, prolific blogger and Forbes Top 25 Marketing Influencer. Here’s what he told us:

Marketing is not a single player sport. I dug deep on collaboration this year and combined it with unique story angles. This approach created Unbounce’s [highest traffic] post of the year: Clinton vs. Trump: 18 CROs Tear Down the Highest Stakes Marketing Campaigns in US History.

The key to this approach, Aaron explained, is twofold:

First, you have to have killer idea (and, no, “What’s the best blogging tip?” doesn’t count). Second, roll contributions into each other. What I mean is, start with who you know and once you get initial buy-in use their name to get the next one… or just ask if they’ll connect you.

While this personalized approach has worked for Aaron, many marketers are still taking a cold approach, without much success.

Peep Laja of ConversionXL explained that reaching out cold won’t cut it:

I myself get bombarded many times a day with all kinds of requests (“we linked to you/we mentioned you/give me feedback”), and I totally ignore them.

How do you avoid getting ignored? For starters, quit it with the canned messages.

Sujan Patel of digital marketing agency Web Profits explained that if you’re going to reach out to influencers, you should be doing it for the right reasons — to start relationships:

Begin with just five to ten people… choose people who appeal to you on a personal level – people you think you will genuinely get along with. Look for signs that you share the same interests (outside of your work) and sense of humor.

In other words, reach out only if your intention is to build genuine relationships. You wouldn’t ignore an email from an actual friend, would you?

Pair great content with great (dynamic) visuals

Since 2015, the content marketing world has been abuzz with Rand Fishkin’s concept of 10x content — the idea that you pick a topic and set out to create something 10x better than anything currently out there on the subject.

But with marketers everywhere striving to create 10x content, how then can you continue to stand out from the crowd?

For Sujan Patel, the marketers who will stand out in 2017 are those who pay special mind to design:

10x content isn’t new, but what will differentiate content in 2017 and beyond is content that directly incorporates design and formatting, instead of relying on great content in a long-form blog post.

As an example, Sujan shared a piece of content he created for a client: a guide to building a personal brand, where the content is inextricable from the design. He’s found that the time they spent on visuals is really paying off:

We see email optin rates over 25% and huge share numbers and backlinks from this type of content.

Ian Lurie of digital marketing agency Portent has similar plans to emphasize aesthetics in the New Year:

In 2017, I’ll be leaning more towards complex layouts and a greater emphasis on graphics. I’ll also be segmenting by screen resolution.

If the prospect of dialling up your visual content production feels daunting, Nadya Khoja of Venngage has some advice:

I recommend starting out by visiting your top performing content and repurposing it into engaging visuals. You can do this by pinpointing the main takeaways and tips that are highlighted in that content. Use a tool to create the animated graphics or finding a freelancer on a site like Upwork who can quickly transform that information into a compelling video or motion graphic.

Devote more time and tools to understanding your customers’ motives

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the ax.”

Abe wasn’t a marketer, but he would have been an excellent one — in this blog post, Michael Aagaard, Senior Conversion Optimizer at Unbounce, explained why: you should never start a marketing campaign (chop down a tree) without doing your research (sharpening your axe).

That’s why Michael spends so much of his time conducting customer research and understanding the psychology of decision making. But this year, he took it a step further by socializing his findings to the team:

I spent a good deal of time sharing the insights and results internally so more of our employees could see the value in conducting real customer research rather than relying on assumptions or trends.

And Aagaard can’t stop, won’t stop:

In 2017, I’m going to ramp this up even more – both in terms of the hands-on CRO work I do at Unbounce and in relation to educating our employees and our customers.

Steve Olenski, Sr. Content Strategist at Oracle Marketing Cloud, urged marketers to look into mobile data management platforms (DMPs). He explained that they’re a critical part of the modern marketer’s stack because they enable us to better understand customer behavior:

With a mobile DMP, brands can harness and analyze the massive amount of customer data generated by mobile devices — including intent, geolocation, and purchase behavior to better target ads across multiple mobile devices and platforms, from in-app ads on smartphones to mobile web ads and tablet-specific campaigns.

In 2017, commit to collecting more customer information. Because at the end of the day, understanding your audience empowers you to give them more of what they want.

And that keeps them coming back for more.

Be part of the AI and AR conversations

Okay, this one’s a tall order, but it’s one that can’t be ignored for much longer.

Some of the digital marketing experts we spoke to emphasized the importance of keeping your finger on the pulse of cutting edge technology — notably, artificial intelligence and augmented reality.

Today, machine learning systems are being applied to everything from filtering spam emails, to making recommendations for what you should buy or watch (or who you should date).

Unbounce has been investing in applying machine learning to our product — here’s what CEO Rick Perrault had to say:

2016 marked the launch of our effort to apply machine learning to improving conversion results.  We’ve now built machine learning models that can predict conversion rates with reasonable accuracy, and our efforts to create models that provide actionable advice on improving conversion rates are coming along.

Jayson DeMers, CEO of AudienceBloom, has been keeping a close watch on augmented reality, especially after the breakout success of Pokemon Go this year:

AR print ads are starting to catch on, with Macallan Whiskey in Esquire Magazine, and Vespa Scooter ads being standout examples here. Axe/Lynx even took things a step further with an interactive “fallen angel” ad in a busy public location. This is a technology in its infancy that’s finally starting to take off.

Whoever innovates here – and does so quickly, early in 2017 – stands to win big.

While you may not necessarily be able to invest in this cutting edge stuff, the least you can do is keep your finger on the pulse of what others are doing. As these technologies progress, they become increasingly affordable and accessible — and you don’t want to be playing catch up when they become ubiquitous.

Down with New Year’s resolutions

I’d like to encourage you to not make a New Year’s resolution this year.

In 2017, make strategic decisions that will actually bring you results.

Over to you — what new things will you test at work in the New Year?

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 http://unbounce.com/campaign-strategy/expert-strategies-to-try-in-2017/