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forestwater87 · 3 years

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How did you become a university Librarian? Did you do an English degree? Sorry if this is a weird question it just really interests me as I’m not sure what to do when I’m older

Eeee I got really excited about this question!

Okay, the fun thing about librarianship is that all roads can lead to it: as long as you get an ALA-approved (assuming you’re American; if you aren’t I cannot help you) graduate degree you can do just about anything for undergrad. English majors are extremely common, just by the nature of who’s into the job, but literally it doesn’t matter; in fact, weirder and more specialized degrees can actually help in certain jobs, because they give you a ton of background info and qualifications than most of your contemporaries have.

I fell into it because I worked at a library in high school and fell in love with the environment, and when I realized I’d rather die than work in publishing (my previous life’s goal) I gravitated toward library school. I knew from the beginning that I’d need a Master’s -- and a very specific one at that -- so mostly my undergrad was just “grab a foundational degree and have fun with it.” That was really freeing, honestly. I had a ton of fun in undergrad.

Now, if you, Anon, were interested in getting into librarianship I’d have a handful of recommendations. These are all based on my very American experience, and there are probably smarter people than me with better advice but I’m the only one on this blog so heeeeerrreeeee we goooooooooo!

Undergrad

You need a 4-year degree. Full-stop. It doesn’t matter what kind, but you gotta have one to get into grad school.

Like I said, you can do just about anything for an undergraduate degree. Most of the time English is the BA of choice, because librarians love them some books, but some far less common ones that I think would be hugely helpful to a hopeful librarian would be:

Computer Science: Oh my god you need at least a baseline competency in computers/technology please you don’t have to code but you need to be able to turn a computer on and navigate just about any website/office application on just about any device at the very least you need to know how to Google

Business/Marketing: Particularly if you want to work in public libraries, where a bunch of your funding comes from begging politicians and convincing taxpayers to donate/vote to give you money

Law: If you want to be a law librarian

Medical . . . whatever, I don’t know what fields of medicine there are: If you want to work in a hospital or other medical library

History or Art History: If you’re interested in archives or museum librarianship

Education: School librarians in my state require you to be a certified teacher, and no matter what kind of library you end up in, you’ll end up teaching someone something a decent amount of the time

Communications: You’ll be doing a lot of it. Public speaking, too

Spanish/ASL/any not-the-common language: Hey, you never know what your patrons speak

Literally fucking anything I promise it doesn’t matter what you major in you will use it in a library at some point

Just be aware that you will need more than an undergrad degree. You’ll need probably 2 years of postsecondary schooling (more for certain types of librarianship), so get yourself comfortable with the idea of college.

If you’re like me (please don’t be like me), you might toy with the idea of getting a minor or two/double majoring to round out your skill set. Honestly I’d encourage it if you’re comfortable with the workload and have the time or money; like I said, there are no skills or educational background that won’t come in handy at some point. I promise. We see it all.

Along those lines, a wide expanse of hobbies can be hugely helpful too! You never know when your encyclopedic knowledge of Minecraft will be useful to a patron, but it absolutely will be.

Graduate School

All right, you’ve got your lovely little Bachelor’s Degree, maybe in something weird and esoteric for the fun of it . . . now you’re off to do more school!

It’s a bit complicated, because there are a handful of different titles an appropriate degree could have; my school called it “a Master of Science in Information Science” (MSIS), but other schools might just go with “Master’s of Information Science” (MIS), “Master’s of Library Science” (MLS), “Master’s of Library and Information Science” (MLIS) . . . it’s a mess.

What you need to do is make sure the degree is approved by the American Library Association, who decides if a program is good enough to make you a librarian in the States. (Again, if you’re not American, good luck.)

Here’s a list of ALA-accredited programs and the schools that offer them.

The nice thing is accreditation has to be renewed at least every few years, so that means your program is always updated to make sure it’s in line with national standards. I’m not promising you’ll learn everything you need to be a librarian in grad school (oh my god you so won’t not even close hahahaha), but at least in theory you’ll be learning the most up-to-date information and methods.

(I’m curious to see how things have changed; when I was in school from 2015-17, the hot topics in library science were makerspaces (especially 3D printing), turning the library into the community’s “third space,” and learning how to incorporate video games into library cataloging and programming. No idea if those are still the main hot-button issues or if we’ve moved on to something else; I imagine information literacy and fake news are a pretty big one for current library students.)

Anyway! You pick a school, you might have to take a test or two to get in -- I had to take the GRE, which is like the SATs but longer -- almost certainly have to do all that annoying stuff like references and cover letters and all that, but assuming you’re in: now what?

There are a couple options depending on the school and the program, but I’m going to base my discussion around the way my school organized their program at the time, because that’s what I know dammit and I will share my outdated information because I want to.

My school broke the degree down into 5 specializations, which you chose upon application to the program:

Archives & Records Administration: For working in archives! I took some classes here when I was flirting with the idea, and it’s a lot of book preservation, organizing and caring for old documents and non-book media, and digitization. Dovetails nicely into museum work. It’s a very specific skillset, which means there will be jobs that absolutely need what you specifically can do but also means there aren’t as many of them. It makes you whatever the opposite of a “jack of all trades” is. You’re likely to be pretty isolated, so if you want to spend all your time with books this might be a good call; it’s actually one of the few library-related options that doesn’t require a significant amount of public-facing work.

Library & Information Services: For preparation to work in public or academic (college) libraries. Lots of focus on reference services, some cataloging, and general interacting-with-the-public. You have to like people to go into library services in general, heads up.

Information Management & Technology: Essentially meaningless, but you could in theory work as like a business consultant or otherwise do information-related things with corporations or other organizations.

Information Storage & Retrieval: Data analytics, database . . . stuff. I don’t really know. Computers or something. Numbers 3 and 4 really have nothing to do with libraries, but our school was attempting to branch out into more tech-friendly directions. That being said, both this and #3 could definitely be useful in a library! Libraries have a lot of tech, and in some ways business acumen could be helpful. All roads lead to libraries; remember that.

Library & Information Services / School Library Media Specialist: This was the big kahuna. To be a school librarian -- at least in my state -- you need to be both a certified librarian and a certified teacher, which means Master’s degrees in both fields. What our school did was basically smushed them together into a combined degree; you took a slightly expanded, insanely rigorous 2-2.5 years (instead of the traditional 1.5-2) and you came out of it with two degrees and two certifications, ready to throw your butt into an elementary, middle/junior high, or high school library. Lots of focus on education. I started here before realizing I don’t like kids at all, then panicked and left. Back in 2017 this was the best one for job security, because our state had just passed a law requiring all school librarians to be certified with a MSIS/MLS/whatever degree. So lots of people already in school libraries were desperately flinging themselves at this program, and every school was looking for someone that was qualified. No idea if that’s changed in time.

No matter what concentration you went in with, you automatically graduated with a state certification to be a librarian, which was neat. You didn’t automatically get civil service status, though; for some public libraries you need to be put on a civil service list, which means . . . something, I’m not entirely sure. It involves taking exams that are only available at certain times of the year and I gave up on it because it looked hard.

No one did more than 1 concentration, which is dumb because I wanted to do them all, but it takes a lot of time and money to take all the classes associated with all of them so I personally did #2, which was on the upper end of mid-tier popularity. School library and database services were far and away the most popular, and literally no one did the business one because it was basically useless, so library and archives were the middle children of which the library one was prettier.

THAT BEING SAID! Some forms of librarianship require a lot more education. A few of those are:

Law librarians: At least in my state, you gotta be a certified librarian and have a J.D. This is where the “big bucks” are -- though let’s be real, if you want to be a librarian you have zero interest in big bucks; reconcile yourself to being solidly middle-class and living paycheck-to-paycheck for the rest of your life or marrying rich -- which I guess is why it requires the most work.

School librarians: Like I mentioned, depending on the state you might need two degrees, and not all schools smush them into one. You might need to get a separate Master’s in education.

College librarians: Now, this depends on the college and the job; some colleges just need an all-access librarian, like mine. I didn’t need to specialize in anything, I just showed up with my degree and they took me. (Note: these sorts of entry-level positions tend to pay piss. Like, even more piss than most library gigs. Just a heads-up.) However, if you’re looking to get into a library of a higher-end university, you might be asked to have a second Master’s-level or higher degree just to prove you’re academic enough to party at their school. (Let’s be real, Harvard is almost certainly gonna want someone with a Ph.D. at the very least. That’s just how they roll.) Alternatively, the position might be for a specialty librarian, someone in charge of a field-specific library or field-specific reference services; if you’re being asked to head up the Science & Engineering Library at Masshole University, it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll be bringing a degree in engineering or some sort of science to the table. Colleges have so many different needs that predicting what kind of experience/education you should get is a bit of a challenge. Good luck. Some schools will help you out a bit with this; my grad school had dual degree programs where you could share credits between the MSIS and either an English or History Master’s so you could graduate with both in less time. I . . . started this, and then panicked at the thought of more school/writing a thesis and bailed, but it’s great if you’re into that idea!

What’s the point of the Information/Library Science degree?

You have to have the degree. If you don’t have the degree, you don’t get the job and you don’t make-a the money. Resign yourself to getting a Master’s degree or you’re gonna be bummed out and unemployed.

In terms of what you learn? Well, obviously it depends on the program, but I found that a lot of what I learned was only theoretically related to what I do on a daily basis. My instructors were lovely (well, the adjuncts anyway; the full-timers really didn’t want to be there and wanted to be off doing research and shit), but every library is so idiosyncratic and there’s such a massive umbrella of jobs you could get in one -- god, I didn’t even get into things like metadata services, which I learned basically nothing about in grad school but are super important to some positions -- that it’s hard to learn anything practical in a classroom.

However, besides the piece of paper that lets you make-a the money, there are two important things you should get from your grad school education:

Research skills: My god, you’re going to be doing so much research. If you’re a public librarian, you need to know how to Google just about anything. And if you’re a college librarian, being able to navigate a library database and find, evaluate, and cite sources . . . I mean, you’re going to be doing so much of that, showing students how to do that. Like a ridiculous amount of my day is showing students how to find articles in the virtual library. Get good at finding things, because much like Hufflepuffs, librarians need to be great finders.

Internship(s): Just about every library program will require an internship -- usually but not always in replacement of a thesis -- and if the one you’re looking at doesn’t, dump it like James Marsden in a romantic comedy. Internships are hugely important not only because they look good on a resume and give you some of those delicious, delicious references, but they are a snapshot of what your job is going to look like on a day-in, day-out basis; if nothing else, you’ll learn really fast what does and doesn’t appeal to you. As I mentioned, I wanted to be a school librarian for about half a semester. You know what changed my mind? My class required like 40 hours of interning at schools of each level. Being plopped into that environment like a play you’re suddenly acting in? Super helpful in determining whether or not this shit is for you.

What else should I learn, then?

Besides how to research basically anything? Here are some useful skills in just about any library:

Copyright law. Holy shit, do yourself a favor and learn about publishing/distribution laws in your state. Do you wanna show a movie as a fun program? You need to buy a license and follow super specific rules or it’s illegal! Does an instructor want to make copies of their textbook to give to the students? Make sure you know how much they can copy before it’s no longer fair use! Everything in my life would be easier if I’d taken the time to learn anything about copyright. I did not, and now I’m sad. (I lost out on a job opportunity because they wanted the librarian to be particularly knowledgeable in that kinda thing, and I was very not.)

Metadata and cataloging. In theory, you should learn this in grad school, but I was only given the bare basics and it wasn’t enough. Dublin Core, MARC-21, RDF -- there are so many different kinds of metadata schema, and I took a 6-week class in this and still don’t understand any of the words I just used in this sentence. But basically, to add items to a library catalog you often need to know how to input them into your library’s system; to an extent that’ll be idiosyncratic to your library’s software, but some of it will be based on a larger cataloging framework, so familiarity with those is very useful.

Public speaking and education. You’re gonna do a lot of it. Learn how to deal.

General tech savviness. Again, we’re not talking about coding but if you can navigate a WordPress website? If you know how to troubleshoot just about any issue with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc.? If you can unjam printers and install software and use social media you’re going to be a much happier person. At the very least, know how to google tutorials and fake your way through; your IT person can only do so much, and a lot of it is probably going to fall on you.

Social work, diplomacy, general human relations kinda stuff. You’re going to be dealing with all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, with every political view, personal problem, and life experience under the sun. You need to get very good at being respectful of diversity -- even diversity you don’t like* -- and besides separating your own personal views and biases from your work, you’ll be much better equipped to roll with the punches if you have, for example, conflict resolution training. Shit’s gonna get weird sometimes, I promise. (Once a student came in swinging around butterfly knives and making ninja noises. You know who knew how to deal with that? Not me!)

Standard English writing and mechanics. It’s not fair, but in general librarians are expected to have a competent grasp on the Standard English dialect, and others are less likely to be appreciated by the general populace. Obviously this differs based on your community and environment, and colloquialisms are sometimes useful or even necessary, but as a rule of thumb it’s a good call to be able to write “properly,” even if that concept is imperialist bullshit.

*I don’t mean Nazis. Obviously I don’t mean Nazis. Though there is a robust debate in the library community about whether Nazis or TERFs or whatever should be allowed to like, use library facilities for their own group meetings or whatever. I tend to fall on the “I don’t think so” side of the conversation, but there’s a valid argument to be made about not impeding people’s access to information -- even wrong or harmful information.

Any other advice?

Of course! I love to talk. Let’s see . . .

Get really passionate about freedom of information and access: A library’s main reason for existing is to help people get ahold of information (including fiction) that they couldn’t otherwise access. If you’re a public librarian, you have to care a lot about making sure people can access information you probably hate. (If you’re an academic librarian it’s a little more tricky, because the resources should meet a certain scholarly threshold, and if you’re a school librarian there are issues of appropriateness to deal with, but in general more info to more people is always the direction to push.) Get ready to defend your library purchases to angry patrons or even coworkers; get ready to defend your refusal to purchase something, if that’s necessary. Get ready to hold your nose and cringe while you add American Sniper to your library collection, because damn it, your patrons deserve access to the damn stupid book. Get really excited about finding new perspectives and minority representation, because that’s also something your patrons deserve access to. Get really excited about how technology can make access easier for certain patrons, and figure out how to make it happen in your library. Care about this; it’s essential that you’re passionate about information -- helping your patrons find it, making sure they can access it, evaluating it, citing it . . . all of it. Get ranty about it. Just do it.

Be prepared to move if necessary: One of my professors told us that there was one thing that would always guarantee you a job that paid well -- this was in 2016 but still -- that as long as you had it you could do whatever you wanted. And that was a suitcase. Maybe where you live is an oversaturated market (thanks for having 6 library schools in a 4-hour radius, my state). Maybe something something economic factors I don’t really understand; the point is that going into this field, you should probably make peace with the idea that you’ll probably either end up taking a job that doesn’t make enough money or struggle a lot to even find one . . . or you’re going to have to go where the jobs are. It’s a small field. Just know that might be a compromise you have to make, unless you can get a strictly remote job.

Read: This sounds stupidly obvious but it’s true! Read things that aren’t your genre, aren’t your age range; patrons are going to ask you for reading advice all the goddamn time, especially if you’re a public librarian, so the more you can be knowledgeable about whatever your patrons might ask you about, the easier your life will be. If you’re considering librarianship you probably love to read anyway, so just ride that pony as hard as you possibly can.

Learn to be okay with weeding -- even things you don’t think deserve it: You are going to have to recycle books. You’re going to have to throw away books. You’re going to have to take books out of the collection and make them disappear in some fashion or another. There are a lot of reasons -- damage and lack of readership are big ones -- and there’s no bigger red flag to a librarian than someone saying “I could never destroy a book.” That kind of nonsense is said by people who’ve never had to fit 500 books onto a shelf built for 450. Archivists are different, of course, as are historians, and everyone should have a healthy respect for books both as physical objects and as sources of information, but you’re going to have to get rid of them sometimes, and you’re just going to have to learn how to do that dispassionately.

Have fun! No one gets into this because they want money; if you want to be a librarian, or work in any library-adjacent field, it’s because you really care about the values of librarianship, or the people in your community, or preserving and sharing as great a wealth of information as possible. Your job will often be thankless and it’ll sometimes be exhausting. There will be times where it’s actually scary. And unless you’re rich as balls, it will make you stare at your student loans and sigh with despair. (You may be living in your parents’ basement while you sigh at your loans because you can’t afford to live on your own, for an example that has zero relevance to any authors of this blog, living or dead.) I can’t tell you if it’s worth it -- though you’ll probably find out pretty quickly during your internship, because that’s what internships are for. All I can say is that I love it, and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

#ask forest #libraries #librarianship #information science #career advice #education advice #oh my god this is long #i have a lot of feelings okay?#there is no way on earth anyone will read all of this #if you do tell me bc i will not believe it #Anonymous

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ramblings-of-a-mad-cat · 4 years

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If you have sent me an Ask in the last thirty-six hours or so, This post is for you.

I was almost entirely done with answering all your beloved messages, when Tumblr decided to crash. Lost all the paragraphs of my rambling (which is why I’m no longer taking chances and am typing this on Google Docs) and even worse, the Asks seem to have been eaten by Tumblr’s great void. They’re gone, and nothing I’ve tried seems to work to get them back. Thankfully, I’m fresh off of responding, so I’ll try to summarize with one big epic post. Apologies for the inconvenience and unusual style, blame the Tumblr Overlords.

WARNING: If you don’t read the data-mines and don’t want spoilers, do not go beyond this point. This mainly concerns The Quidditch Cup.

There were a couple of Asks about Ismelda, someone talked about the head-canon that she’s secretly blonde and dyes her hair. Which I agree with, and really like. It would tie in to how Ismelda saw Penny as being no different from her sister. It would be a sign of her trying to spite her parents and distance herself from her family, to the point of even looking like them. I also think it would echo with Beatrice and how she changed her look to reinvent herself and be less of a “Mini Penny.” Another message was talking about her parents, wondering why they would ever visit her at Hogwarts given how they were portrayed. After all, they’re not about to be the next Ethan Parkin, are they? Not going to turn around and be well-meaning, but oblivious. I think it’s far more likely that they would visit her sister at Hogwarts, and it would be pure chance that Ismelda was there at the same time - if there was indeed any overlap where both sisters were at school. But that’s the real question of the hour - just what is the sister like? After all, it’s not her fault that she’s the favorite, right? Newt Scamander was estranged from his brother, who was engaged to his ex-girlfriend. From that description alone, we might think he was awful, but he wasn’t. Theseus was genuinely caring, he just didn’t know how to connect with Newt. We might have a similar situation on our hands here. Or, who knows, the sister might be the “Dudley” to Ismelda’s “Harry.” She was compared to both Emily and Penny, if memory serves. But until such a time that we meet her, we have no way of knowing who she’s really more like. Psst, Jam City, you getting this down? This would be a great TLSQ, to have Ismelda come face to face with her sister. Could perhaps end with, oh I dunno, befriending her? Just a thought…

I saw another Ask talking about how Beatrice would go back and forth between MC and Jae during their detention and how adorable it was to see her all flustered and excited, how it looked like she was gushing to MC “He’s so dreamy” and things of the like. It’s making me wish they would come back to this sub-plot because it’s funny as hell and a good way, again, to tie in Ismelda. She also fancied someone she had no chance with, she was also jealous of another person. (Chiara might not actually have a thing with Jae, but if memory serves, Beatrice is shown to be jealous of them talking anyway.)

There was an Ask that talked about punching Barnaby’s father in the face. Or at least, the idea of doing so. But regrettably, he is in Azkaban and it cannot be done. Well, maybe not by MC, but someone who was already there could do it. New head-canon, Sirius decked him on his way out. It happened, I don’t make the rules.

@guppygirl I read the first chapter of your fic! Do you know what you’ve done to me, do you know how many feelz it gave me to see Rowan alive and well and acting so sweet? You nailed their character and I love the inclusion of their parents! Maya’s reactions make just want to give her a hug. Everyone should check out the fanfic on her page, seriously!

I believe there was an Ask lamenting that the Festival TLSQ didn’t come out this week, and believe me friend, I’m right there clowning with you. It seems like every week now, we think, “Okay, this time it will come out, they can’t delay it anymore.” And we’re always wrong. Here I am just starting to worry that my far-fetched theory about them shelving it until next year because it’s no longer “seasonal” isn’t so far-fetched after all…

But the vast majority of messages that were lost were, as I’m sure you can guess, about the data-mined House Cup for Season 2. I wrote a lot about it and I do indeed have some thoughts and feelings.

Before I get into anything else, can I just say...that first scene with Ethan where he meets MC. I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever dislike Skye. All it ever takes is one vulnerable moment to erase any doubts and have me back in her corner. And you cannot tell me that Ethan knowing everything about MC because “Isn’t this the best mate you always talk about?” Didn’t melt your heart or at least give you feelz. Think back to how hurt Skye was when MC befriended Rath - to the point of snapping a broomstick in half. This is just proof of what I’ve been saying. She has no social skills and hardly any friends. Of course she sees MC as her bestie. The poor thing, oh my god, it’s adorable...

Ethan Parkin….I’m not a fan, even now. As I heard, he’s not as bad as we all feared he would be. He definitely has his moments. Still...he’s still pretty annoying. Ethan is basically a less obnoxious version of Lockhart, who actually has the talent to back it up. But I didn’t like how he involved himself in the practice and took over deciding who should be leader. Seriously, if he knows the game this well then he should know we already have a leader assigned. That’s what a Captain is. He was quite rude to Orion and while his pressuring Skye might have been inadvertent, it was still his fault. He’s also an extremely violent Quidditch player, which I’m not a fan of (Although apparently Penny is? The fuck?) I get that he would never cross the line into cheating, but I’m not impressed by how he lied. Didn’t give his team credit. And seriously...is cheating morally inferior to harming another player in a “legal” way? I guess it’s just a Quidditch culture thing, but I’m not here for it.

Orion’s reaction to Ethan, though? God I loved it. He took everything completely in stride, had the maturity to say that no, he was happy to learn from a Quidditch master. His concern wasn’t about his ego, it was about Skye’s feelings. Because once again, he’s the only one with the empathy to realize what she might be going through. Orion’s response was measured and thoughtful and god, I love him so much. Side note: Were they seriously debating whether or not keeping Ethan around to learn his mystery move was worth it, even if it was stressing Skye out? My dudes, this is the exact same mistake you made during the Rath TLSQ. Involving someone who doesn’t need to be involved, just for the sake of a potential advantage in a meaningless sports game, regardless of how much it will hurt someone who is supposed to be our friend. Screw that.

Folks were talking about Erika Rath. Someone brought up how hilarious it was in a previous chapter to see Andre actually tell her to be quiet, and for her to do so. And yeah, I agree. It’s a testament to how close their friendship must really be (Sorry, Depressed Erika Anon) I mean, most people wouldn’t dare say that to her. And I don’t think she’d have such a calm and passive reaction to just anyone. It’s unconventional, but their relationship is a sweet one. Overall, they’re involving Rath more and I’m quite glad of it. Seeing her proud of MC is heartwarming. Seeing her become more of a main character is great - I mean, she is one of the main four, after all. Face Paint Kid is a background character, as much as I love him. Penny is only here to develop Skye, and Andre is only here to develop Rath. There was also an interesting comparison made between her and Ethan, about how they both play pretty violently. Still not a fan of this. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that I’m mostly indifferent to Rath. But I’m coming around on her.

This was a lovely place to cap off Skye’s character arc. Seeing MC stand up to Ethan (although I wish you could be firm without having to say that stupid “You’re off the team, Parkin!” line) was especially cathartic, and it’s clear that Skye appreciates it. She’s happier by the end, and has actually communicated with her father. I would sincerely like it if Season 3 focused on, say, Murphy a little more. He hasn’t gotten any development since the first half of Season 1. Even Orion got some development in this TLSQ. But...make no mistake, we’re not done hearing about Skye. I know that no one wants to hear this, but...they slipped in that line about her wishing she could play Rath. She still hates her. That hasn’t been resolved. Oh well, at least it’s an opportunity to further flesh out Rath. There’s also the possibility that, if they do give focus to Orion, it might be that Season 3 is his last hurrah. I hope he stays for the entire story, but even if they don’t want to confirm character ages...he could very well graduate. If he does, there’s going to be a story-line about choosing his successor. And again, I know that nobody wants to see this happen, but...the only candidates who matter in the story are MC and Skye. So they could be pitted against each other again. But I hope that won’t happen.

Curse you, Tumblr. Oh well, it should be safe to send in Asks again because I’m quite literally going to copy them onto a Google Doc from now on just to be safe. If I missed out on one that you sent in, please feel free to let me know or re-send it. I’ve also seen people taking screenshots of their Asks and then responding to the picture instead of just responding outright. Might do that too...thank you for your patience, this has been a doozy.

#Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery #Fandom Asks #HPHM Quidditch #HPHM Datamines #Skye Parkin #Ethan Parkin #Orion Amari #Erika Rath #Murphy McNully #Ismelda Murk #Barnaby Lee #Beatrice Haywood

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droneseco · 3 years

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AGM M7: The Unsmashable Anti-Smartphone

AGM M7

7.50 / 10

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Smartphones complement modern living. Their bright touch input displays bring endless media sources from hundreds of apps right into our pockets. If smartphones are less robust and have shorter battery lives than the mobile phones that preceded them, the trade-offs seem worth it.

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The AGM M7 begs to differ. At first glance, it seems like the anti-smartphone. A rugged brick that harks back to the pre-smartphone era with big touch buttons, a replaceable battery that lasts 4 days, and an IP 69k rating all for just shy of $100.

However, this phone isn't a complete throwback, as it features a modified version of Android 8.1, and its color display is also a small touchscreen. Oh, and it also has a massive 3.5-watt speaker on the back.

The AGM M7 is a strange but wonderful, loud and unbreakable, semi-smart phone, but is it right for you?

AGM M7: First Impressions

The defining feature of AGM phones is their rugged, almost unbreakable design, and the M7 is no different. For its form factor, it is large. At 14 cm tall it's a hair shorter than a Google Pixel 4a, but it's almost 2cm thick. It's chunky.

This size accommodates big, tactile buttons and a textured, easy-to-grip exterior. You also get a user-definable button on the left side along with a top-mounted LED torch - which makes it a much more practical prospect than regular smartphone flashlights.

Glass screens can still be a point of failure for rugged phones, so a smaller area of glass overall is probably an advantage for the M7. It does have cameras, but we'll come back to those later, as the defining feature is the 3.5-watt rear speaker. I've never seen anything like this on a phone before, but the prospect of a super loud ringer that can be heard even over machinery or foul weather will be a draw to many.

The battery compartment is well designed. After removing the cover, you are presented with another composite plastic seal protecting the battery, which is removable.

Removable batteries in a rugged phone are something to get excited about, but it does also come with a problem that we'll cover later in the review.

It's Android, but Not as You Know It

The paired down version of Andoird 8.1 that comes with the M7 supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and use as a hotspot for other devices. It also features versions of WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, Skype, and Zello, along with some stock apps for calendar, clock, sound recording, and an FM radio. There is no play store, so what comes on the phone is what you get, and some things work a little better than others.

Unusually for an Android device, you can't sign in to your Google account, making it hard to bring contacts with you and sync the calendar without using a USB connection or storing data on your SIM card.

This is likely a product of the simplified Android build, but outside of that things like connectivity and setup feel identical to standard android.

How Rugged Is Now?

The AGM is IP69k rated, which means it is completely sealed from dust ingress, waterproof up to 2 meters underwater, and capable of taking drops of up to 2m. It's also functional from -20C to 60C.

In drop tests the M7 was solid. It took a few scrapes and a small dent to the speaker grate, but the phone never flinched or restarted when dropped. The battery cover would fly off sometimes, but the second cover kept the battery safe and in place.

The phone also survived being "forgotten" in a lake, used as a mud shovel, and being thrown around by a rampaging toddler for the best part of a day.

The phone also claims the MIL-STD-810H standard, which sounds fancy but doesn't actually have anything to do with the military directly, and is so unregulated that it's a meaningless metric of toughness.

However, it's not really an issue, as AGM takes ruggedness seriously. It's the hallmark of their phones and once again it seems like they've nailed it. This phone would survive things that I would not.

What's Good About the AGM M7?

On the surface, the AGM M7 is a simple phone designed to have a good battery life, take an absolute beating, and make a lot of noise. It does all of these things perfectly, and a phone that feels like a pre-smartphone era handset with WhatsApp, Skype and the Zello push-to-talk app (with the side button as transmit by default) is a good fit.

The top-mounted LED is bright and its position makes it an actually useful torch compared to other phones. Even when locked, a long press of the zero key toggles the torch, and the keypad is useable even with thick gloves.

The speaker is very loud, doesn't distort even at high volumes, and gives as close to a rounded sound as is possible for something this size.

The charging dock is a useful addition, though it is an optional extra available for a further $9.90 from AGM, and my M7 came with a fairly decent set of budget waterproof Bluetooth headphones made by JBL and AGM in tandem. I'm not sure if these come with every purchase, but it was a nice touch.

What's Bad About the AGM M7?

The Camera. In general. Low-quality cameras paired with low-fidelity color screens were little more than a gimmick when they emerged over a decade ago, and this is no different. It could be functional as a way of taking quick notes in good lighting, but nothing more.

The removable battery is a great idea and I applaud AGM for making it work in an IP69k rated phone. The only problem is that there doesn't appear to be any way to get spare batteries from AGM. They aren't listed on their website, and their EU aftersales website gives a 404 error. I'm sure that AGM will be able to provide them but at the time of recording this review, I haven't received a reply to the email I sent to the service team - though it has only been a few days.

No Play Store or Google account integration might seem a bad thing to you, but in fairness, the M7 does advertise this fact on the purchase page. The M7's failings don't come from what it lacks. Instead, they are the product of poorly integrating what is there. I'm not fully convinced that the smarter elements of this phone went through much development at all.

You Can Browse, But You Won't Enjoy It

When mobile phones initially began adding basic browsers to their firmware, they were a nice idea in principle, but functionally near unusable. Fifteen years on, the M7 falls into this trap for different reasons.

The browser works for basic searches, and you can even log in to your email services, watch YouTube, and enable desktop mode for logging into various services. The issue here is the screen. It's just too small and low resolution to really work. Pair with that the fact that the browser requires frequent use of the touch screen to access some buttons and selections, and it quickly becomes something you'd only use in a real pinch.

The same is true of the TikTok and Facebook apps: fine ideas in principle but not much fun to use with the small screen and keypad combination.

Demon Texters of the 90s Will Be Disappointed

Typing, in general, is painful on this phone. Now I'm sure some of you are thinking "of course it is, it's a keypad." That's fair.

But, to people of a certain age, keypad typing was the norm. When I was a teenager a seemingly revolutionary technology called T9 predictive texting made writing messages much faster. Instead of picking each letter individually, you could tap each letter key once, and the phone would predict words from the possible letter combinations and put them in place, allowing you to change it after the fact when it got it wrong.

The M7 does have word suggestions, but they pop up after the fact and it doesn't have any single keypad pressing input. I'm aware that this may not be an issue to some folks - T9 was popular for a relatively small slice of time, some older folks never adopted it, and some younger folks won't have even heard of it.

I can only assume this was the case in the AGM team, as when comparing the typing user experience with phones released 20 years ago, it is a massive step backward and a missed opportunity. T9 emulation for Android already exists, I don't know why it's missing here.

If there is one general flaw to this phone, it is the implementation of Android it uses. It is clearly still biased towards the touch screen and the keypad suffers as a result. This is no problem when using the M7 like an old-school mobile phone, it just makes the smart elements feel a little clunky overall. The thing is, once you've settled your expectations, even these seemingly glaring flaws don't matter much.

Criticizing elements of the M7 doesn't change the overall experience - one I did not expect to enjoy but thoroughly did, and still do.

AGM M7: The Verdict

It became clear while making this review that a phone with one foot in the mobile phone era and one in the smartphone era is never going to be able to stand up to either one individually, especially sitting at the $100 price point.

After a couple of days, the flaws were mostly forgotten, and this hybrid monster of a phone began to make sense. It's not going to replace a smartphone, and I'm not even convinced it would make a good phone for non-tech savvy folks or the elderly, but I'm still using it, and I think it comes down to what the M7 offers.

For some folks, limitations are liberating. We've grown accustomed to always having the digital world in our grasp, and it can be especially difficult to drag yourself from it when you are a freelancer with no concept of a healthy workday!

For the 9 days I reviewed this phone, I carried my smartphone turned off as well just in case I needed it. It turns out I didn't, and after day 3 I didn't even miss it. The AGM M7 takes away everything, then adds back a few things you need. Yes the Tiktok and Facebook integrations are clunky and yes the browser and text input is a mess, but it's functional enough to use in a pinch.

I've loaded albums onto into the memory that I meant to get round to listening to years ago, actually selectively downloaded podcasts rather than just listen to whatever is just there. I have relatively quickly let go of the feeling that I need to document every interesting aspect of life with photos I'll likely never even look at again.

It's nice to not worry about battery life, it's nice to know I can just throw it in my pack and head out riding, running, or even wild swimming, and know that not only will the phone be ok, but that checking emails, Slack or wasting time on Reddit aren't even viable options despite having a fully connected Android phone with me.

It's not a retro throwback, but it's not quite a smartphone either. The AGM M7 is unique, and for some people, it represents the balance they desire. I've no idea if AGM had this in mind when they threw this insane combination of features into a phone - but it works for me.

AGM M7: The Unsmashable Anti-Smartphone published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

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wikimakemoney · 3 years

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SEO in 2021: 7 Factors you Should Prepare For

2020 was a year full of anxiety and uncertainty. There was so much going on around the world that it also affected the way how people search. With the year 2020 now ending, it is now time for us to look forward and prepare for what’s to come in 2021.

It is no secret that SEO is an ever-changing game. From the words of Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s Head of Search: “Search is never a solved problem”. That is why Google continues to innovate and we SEOs should do the same.

2021 is going to be an exciting year for SEO and the best time to optimize is now. Here are the things that you should prepare for SEO in 2021.

Optimizing for Core Web Vitals and Page Experience

Google’s announcement of the two new ranking factors, Core Web Vitals and Page Experience, last May was one of the biggest announcements they had in recent years. They then announced in November that these two new ranking factors will be integrated into the algorithm by May 2021.

Most of the things that make up Page Experience are already part of the current algorithm. What Google did is take all of these ranking factors such as speed, mobile-friendliness, security, etc., and group them together to have a holistic view of what provides users with the best user experience.

The other ranking factor, Core Web Vitals, is made up of three metrics namely: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These three metrics deal with the overall performance of a webpage such as how long does it take before a user can interact with the page or how long does it take for the largest image to load. According to Google, the Core Web Vitals will continue to evolve throughout the years but for now, these three metrics are where SEOs should focus on.

For a full guide on each metric of the Core Web Vitals and Page Experience, check out these guides that we have published:

Core Web Vitals Guide

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

First Input Delay (FID)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Page Experience

Search Intent is More Important than Ever

Search intent is not a new concept to SEO but 2021 is really the time where you should go all-in on it. One of the reasons why Google continues to dominate the search market is its consistent drive to accomplish its goal of providing users the most relevant search results and it has always been that way.

For Google, content is king and I believe it will always be king. But writing content for the sake of ranking for a target keyword is meaningless anymore. The focus of Search Intent is to provide content that is actually relevant to users. This gives meaning and purpose to creating content because many are tired of hearing the generic advice to create “high-quality” content all the time. So what is search intent and what type of content should you produce?

It is quite a simple concept to understand but can be difficult to execute. Search intent is the reason behind a user’s search. A better way of explaining it is with a question: “what does the user expect to see when they search this keyword”.

Search intent also has 4 types: informational, transactional, commercial, and navigational.

The question now is how do you know what is the right intent of a specific keyword. Well, ask Google. Search for the keyword you are targeting and check what Google is rewarding. The next step is to produce a better article than what your competitors have.

Going into 2021, search intent should be the focal point of any content strategy. Gone are the days where articles that only have keyword density in mind dominate the search results. Users should always benefit from content that they get from Google and so we SEOs should always keep in mind what’s good for users.

Video Content

Last October 2020, Google launched a video on its official YouTube channel highlighting the improvements that they made in search throughout the year. One of the highlights is how Google is now able to automatically tag and identify key moments on videos using AI without creators having to manually tag them.

This helps users save time when searching. When they click on a video from the search results, instead of having to scroll through the whole video, Google automatically directs them to what they are looking for.

According to Google, this will affect 10% of the search results by the end of 2020 and we can expect that they will continue to work on this in the coming year.

You can upload videos on your website and other platforms but YouTube is still the way to go if you want to utilize video content in the search results. According to a study, 83% of videos in the search results are from YouTube. It is not surprising considering YouTube is owned by Google.

Still, video content on YouTube is not yet explored by many digital marketers and it should be something that you should look into in 2021. It is clear that searchers prefer visual results more and more and with Google’s AI making it more convenient for them, traffic from video results is becoming more valuable and a better way of engaging with your target audience.

BERT Affects all Searches

When Google introduced the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, better known as BERT, back in 2019, SEOs were quick to try and find out how to optimize for it despite BERT only affecting 10% of search results that time. I also published an article regarding how BERT affects SEO and I highly suggest that you check that out as well.

In 2020, Google announced that BERT now affects 100% of English search results. However, take note that BERT is not a ranking factor or algorithm. BERT is a technique used by Google to better understand what a user is searching for in a specific query.

Experts and Google say that there is nothing really to optimize for because it does not affect how Google index and rank pages. But one thing to take note of is that BERT can be related to search intent. Since Google is able to understand user queries better, that means content that best answers the user’s query will be rewarded more. My advice, do not overthink how BERT will affect your website because it won’t. Instead, focus on creating content that has the right search intent with BERT in mind.

Game Changer: Passage Indexing

Passage Indexing was also one of the biggest announcements by Google in their Search on 2020 video that took the attention of the SEO industry. Basically, Google is now able to index passages/snippets of an article in the search results if it is related to a user’s query despite not being the main topic of the article.

This is another innovation by Google using its advanced AI. Many were confused on how it will affect Google’s crawling and indexing but Google made it clear that they will still index the whole page it’s just that their AI is now able to focus on different parts of the content, not just the main subject.

This is big news because it means there are more opportunities to rank for when writing an article, especially long-form content. I mentioned in the article summarizing Google’s Search in 2020 that optimizing for passage indexing is similar to how you would optimize for Featured Snippets. The idea is to properly segment your content to make it easier for Google to understand and index.

Although passage indexing will only affect about 7% of search results by next year, I predict that it will be big in the years to come.

Subtopics

Google is looking to further diversify search results for broad terms using their advanced AI to understand subtopics. It was also announced in the Search in 2020 YouTube video and was briefly explained.

When a user searches for a broad term for example “computer”, Google is now able to understand relevant subtopics related to computers such as gaming computers, office computers, computer peripherals, etc. then serve it to the user.

This gives more importance to the use of the topic cluster model. I highly recommend that you read the guide we published for the Topic Cluster Model to help plan your content strategy for next year.

Optimizing for Rich Results

It’s 2021 and no, structured data is still not a ranking factor but properly marking up your pages with schema is important as ever. Google is pushing more and more rich results in the search results and they are easily stealing the spotlight from the regular blue links we are accustomed to.

Rich Results are visually improved and more interactive search results in Google. Generally, Google uses structured data markups on pages to pull up data for rich results. Marking up your pages with schema markup will not guarantee that you’ll appear in rich results and technically, structured data is not required for you to appear in rich results, but marking up your pages boosts your chances.

The benefits of appearing in Rich Results are the same with Featured Snippets – higher click-through rate. And similar to Featured Snippets, you don’t necessarily have to be the top 1 in the search results to appear in rich results.

As of writing, these are the structured data types that are eligible for rich results in Google:

Article

Book

Breadcrumb

Carousel

Course

COVID-19 Announcements

Critic review

Dataset

Employer Aggregate Rating

Estimated Salary

Event

Fact Check

FAQ

Home Activities

How-to

Image License

Job Posting

Job Training

Local Business

Logo

Movie

Product

Q&A

Recipe

Review Snippet

Sitelinks search box

Software app

Speakable

Subscription and paywalled content

Video

Google will continue to update this list as they are also working with Schema.org to improve structured data on the web. You should frequently check Google’s documentation on structured data to keep updated.

Key Takeaways

If you notice, half of what I talked about are things that were mentioned are related to Google’s AI technology and features. However, at the end of the day, users are the most important and everything that you do should be beneficial to them if you truly want to be successful for SEO in 2021.

I believe that 2021 will be an exciting year for SEO and also a busy year with all the new innovations we’ll have to think about and optimizations we’ll be doing. While there are factors that are highlighted such as those that I talked about in this article, keep in mind that SEO should always be holistic. You can focus and prioritize these new things that are to come in 2021 but do not leave other SEO factors behind.

source http://wikimakemoney.com/2020/12/22/seo-in-2021-7-factors-you-should-prepare-for/

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anthonykrierion · 3 years

Text

SEO in 2021: 7 Factors you Should Prepare For

2021 is going to be an exciting year for SEO and the best time to optimize is now. Here are the things that you should prepare for SEO in 2021.

Optimizing for Core Web Vitals and Page Experience

For a full guide on each metric of the Core Web Vitals and Page Experience, check out these guides that we have published:

Core Web Vitals Guide

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

First Input Delay (FID)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Page Experience

Search Intent is More Important than Ever

Search intent also has 4 types: informational, transactional, commercial, and navigational.

Video Content

According to Google, this will affect 10% of the search results by the end of 2020 and we can expect that they will continue to work on this in the coming year.

BERT Affects all Searches

Game Changer: Passage Indexing

Although passage indexing will only affect about 7% of search results by next year, I predict that it will be big in the years to come.

Subtopics

This gives more importance to the use of the topic cluster model. I highly recommend that you read the guide we published for the Topic Cluster Model to help plan your content strategy for next year.

Optimizing for Rich Results

As of writing, these are the structured data types that are eligible for rich results in Google:

Article

Book

Breadcrumb

Carousel

Course

COVID-19 Announcements

Critic review

Dataset

Employer Aggregate Rating

Estimated Salary

Event

Fact Check

FAQ

Home Activities

How-to

Image License

Job Posting

Job Training

Local Business

Logo

Movie

Product

Q&A

Recipe

Review Snippet

Sitelinks search box

Software app

Speakable

Subscription and paywalled content

Video

Key Takeaways

SEO in 2021: 7 Factors you Should Prepare For was originally posted by Video And Blog Marketing

#Video And Blog Marketing

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allfullofhope · 4 years

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Tech That Will Change The World

His parents were promised flying cars, jetpacks, and passenger trips to the moon. They ended up with iPhones, video calls, and an endless database that could be accessed from all corners of the world. the long term is lower than the human imagination, suggesting that the retro view of the long term looked more like what you see in The Jetsons than to what you see, but that doesn't mean we're not in an imaginary moment Living World

While the dream of a flying car continues, we probably won't see anything so bold in our lives. Here are 4 things that the masses are likely to affect our world tremendously in the coming decades.

The future is then: technology that can change the earth

1) Driverless cars

The hum of the machines that put the car in a car is instantaneous everywhere, with constant headlines from mega-corporations, including Ford, Tesla, and Google, who invest a lot in revolutionizing short-distance travel. The impact of driverless vehicles is huge and not yet fully understood, but one thing is certain: they come, probably long before you think about it.

The effects of autonomous vehicles will likely be felt first in the area of driving and shipping trucks. By eliminating the need for human drivers and the risks associated with drivers who often work 14- to 16-hour shifts, trucking could become a more efficient way to transport goods across our roads. While the industry would suffer significant job damage, this could lead to falling prices for consumers around the world.

Of course, with every technological answer there are questions: some analysts wonder what will happen without the constant flow of organ donors coming from car accidents and what these cars can benefit from. While self-driving cars raise some interesting philosophical questions, the economic and safety benefits of these machines are too tempting to withstand. Check out Tesla to be an important thought leader during this field.

The future is then: technology that can change the earth

2) Work automation

Like driverless cars, automation is almost a major economic disruptor. Of course, disconnecting factory workers with robots is not exactly an idea of replacement, but progressive automation should continue exponentially.

At the moment, much of the world's automated work is out of sight and out of mind, but there is good reason to believe that industries like the Service will be severely affected in the next 10 years. Next time you're on a McDonald's, keep an eye out for interactive screens instead of teen rooms. It's unclear how far automation will go, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to look for careers that are safe for machines, such as planning and safety. The future is then: technology that can change the earth

3) video game

In the spotlight, video games are rapidly shifting from meaningless entertainment to art and sport through innovations like Twitch and a growing specialization in quality storytelling. But those who change the game of truth, the form of the immersive video game may be available. Imagine a video game that looks almost as good as the world, one that feels that everything from dragon-riding to space travel is as realistic as going to the grocery store.

Sci-fi writers have been celebrating this concept for years, but now companies like Oculus and Sony are making great strides in the land of video games. It's a favorite for immersive marketing and non-photorealistic video games right now, but the long run time should keep completely new worlds at our fingertips. While the implications of video games are somewhat more cerebral than those of automation, the odds are endless. Even the transport forces of the video game could deepen and change our cultural pillars, such as movies and television. The future is then: technology that can change the earth

4) All solar Everything

Despite the widespread belief that global climate change could also be a Chinese hoax and not an existential threat, the increase in alternative energy is another inevitability. The sun is already the simplest battery in the galaxy, the question is that thanks to its power to refuel all the technologies we have covered during this text.

Solar panels have existed for a short time, usually appearing in giant cultures in the middle of the desert or on the roof of their strange art master. But we are finally reaching a certain level of discount on the target, where solar could be cheaper than gas and coal in the next ten years. Huge problems remain like grid implementation and power transmission, but cleaning solar power certainly makes it something to look for.

After all, the goal is always to squeeze the solar panels so small that it could cover your car or phone (without a driver) without hurting your eyes. Imagine a life where a sunny day makes jumping into the gas pump an opportunity.

Of course, technological progress is not linear. Like diets, panaceas come and go (remember, if the Segway would revolutionize how we're doing?), but some data remains. The greatest capacity for human development is to create tools that support our development.

The economic revolution saw the birth of a super-efficient work that we have improved since then. Computers were once the size of refrigerators, and humans checked the moon curiously.

Now technology seems to be changing faster than ever. Many of our large everyday institutions, from Facebook to iPhone, barely existed a decade ago, and no one could have imagined that a young child would create a service at Harvard that would be employed by nearly two billion people. But that doesn't mean we can't look at technology long-term or make polite conjectures with excited optimism. Whatever comes back, one thing is for sure: our future technology has the potential to strengthen millions, if not billions, of lives.

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siva3155 · 4 years

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300+ TOP SEO Interview Questions and Answers

SEO Interview Questions for freshers and experienced :-

1. What is SEO? SEO is the abbreviated form of “Search Engine Optimization”. SEO is the process of changing the position of a website or a web page in a search engine’s search results (Organic or Natural results). 2. Explain different Types of SEO? Primarily two types of SEO are being sporting in practice – Off-Page SEO and On-Page SEO. Off-Page SEO is the method of earning backlinks from other websites in order to enhance the ranking of the site. This method include various method of SEO including Blog posting, forum, article submission, Press release submission, classified and miscellaneous. On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing a website which includes on-site work such as writing content, title, description, Alt tag, Meta tags as well as ensuring web-page’s code and design which can be indexed and crawled by search engines properly. 3. Explain SEO Techniques? Two types of seo techniques are there: White Hat SEO Black Hat SEO (Negitive Seo) 4. What is On Page Optimization? On-page optimization is one of the types of SEO that refers to factor that gives outcome to a website or web page ranking on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). On-Page Optimization means controlling a webpage by you or by your page coding. Some of the examples are HTML Code, Meta Tags like Meta Title, Description, Content Quality, Keyword Density, Outbound Links, Image Alt tag etc. 5. What is Off Page Optimization? Off Page Optimization is also one of the types of SEO that are not controlled by the page coding. Examples of Off-page optimization Link building, Blog posting, Image Sharing, Document Sharing, Video Sharing, Info graphics submission, Increasing Page Rank and Page Authority, Article submission, Getting high quality links from relevant sites etc. 6. What is Page Rank or PR? Page Rank is a rank that has been provided by Google for each and every Webpage. This Rank ranges from o to io. This Page Rank is calculated by an Algorithm used by Google Web Search Engine. PR of a web page is based on the number of backlinks that received from other high PR webpage. 7. What is a Back Link? Back link means incoming links to a website or webpage. Inbound links are always better than outbound links. Those links are also known as incoming links, in links, inward links etc. Getting backlinks from high PR and relevant site is always good. In links from .org, .edu sites would increase your website or webpage ranking on SERP. Do-follow links are better than No-follow links. 8. What are Out Bound Links? An outbound-link (OBL) or outgoing link is a link from your website or webpage to another website or webpage. 9. What is a Keyword? Keyword is a word used or searching through Search Engines in order to get results related to your searched query. 10. What is Keyword Density? Keyword density is the percentage density of a keyword or phrase available on a webpage compared to the total number of words on the page. It is one of the important ranking factors for search engines to display a webpage on the SERP. Providing junk keywords on a page would decrease the ranking of a webpage.

SEO Interview Questions 11. What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is a clickable hyperlink that is also known as link text, link label and link title. The keyword contained in the anchor text would increase the ranking of a webpage that receives the incoming link. 12. What are Organic Results? The page views come directly through SERP and not through any Off Page Optimization is known as organic results. 13. What is Google bot? Google bot is the search bot software used by Google to index a webpage. Crawling, Caching and indexing of a webpage happen through this Google bot by collecting details from that webpage. 14. What are meta tags? There are several Meta tags used in HTML but the top four tags that are used for SEQ are Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords and Robot tags. 15. What is Meta Title? Title is the most important factors for a good SEO of a webpage. These tags should be located within head section. These tags should tell some useful information about that page. A good title tag should contain 60 characters. These titles would appear on the SERP for your website along with the Meta description of that page. Google won’t penalize your page if it contains title with more than 60 characters and it skips the remaining characters. If a web page doesn’t contain title tag means Google would select the Hi tag as title or it will provide the title by its own. Always write title tag for the page and not for SEO, if you stuff keywords in you title then Google won’t rank your webpage. 16. What is Meta Description? A description tag should describe a webpage and it should contain keywords but don’t stuff all the keywords. Meaningless description would affect your webpage. A description tag should contain 150 – 16o characters. If you provide meaningless or empty description, Google would take the description from the content available in that page. 17. What are Meta Keywords? In early days Meta keywords are the least important tag for Search engine like Google. But it is an easy way to tell our important keywords to search engine. Meta keywords should contain less than 250 characters. Now Google won’t consider Meta keywords as one of the ranking factor. 18. What is White Hat Seo? White Hat Seo is one of the techniques that a Search engine always likes. Usage of SEO techniques, tricks and tactics by following search engine rules and regulations, algorithm and policies are known as White Hat SEO. 19. What is Black Hat Seo? Black Hat SEO or Negative SEO is a common term for doing SEO Spamming Techniques. Usage of SEO by not following policies and regulations of search engine is called as black hat seo. Some of the black hat seo techniques are : Providing Low Quality content or duplicate content on the page Getting backlinks from spammed or adult sites. Giving keyword stuffed content on the page with background color Getting too much backlinks from a single page with different anchor text that targets a single page of your website. Cloaking Google Bowling etc 20. What is difference between crawling and caching? Crawling is the one time activity while caching is the repetitive activity. 21. What is Indexing? Indexing is the process by which Google or other search engine store our website info in their database. 22.What is robots.txt? If we want to block some data from search engine then we used this file. This file must be uploaded on root server. This is the first file which is crawled by search engine first. 23. What is the different method to control the robot? There are main three different method which we have uses to control the robot for our website 1. Robots.txt 2. Robots Meta Tag 3. Rel= nofollow 24. What is the method to content optimization? There are so many way by which we can optimize our content. Here i will suggest some things which is necessary to know. Keyword density in content Keyword Proximity Keyword Prominence Keyword Proximity 25. Can you please suggest the type of keywords? I will suggest you some most important type of keywords:- Primary Keywords Secondary Keywords Branded Keywords Non Branded Keywords Seasonal Keywords 26. What is the difference between targeted page and Landing Page? Page which we have targeted to rank the page known a s targeted page and the page which has ranked called landing page. 27. Can you please suggest the meaning of Call to Action? There are so many things which we have used to increase the CTR of our page known as Call to action for more info you can contact me at [email protected] 28. What is the difference between Spiders, Robots and Crawlers? A spider, also known as a robot or a crawler, is a program that follows, or “crawls”, links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine indexes. 29. What is the difference between SEO and SEM? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEO provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while SEM involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising. 30. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics? Wikipedia is an established authority! As such, it is referenced by huge numbers of other documents with relevant text associated with links back to Wikipedia. 31. What are out bound Links? An outbound-link (OBL) or outgoing link is a link from your website or webpage to another website or webpage. 32. What is the difference between search engine marketing and Internet marketing? Search Engine Marketing is specific to marketing your brand/service/products through search engines. It can be in the form of organic search results where landing pages are aimed for higher ranking, or in paid search results, where ads are aimed to display at maximum exposure for targeted keywords at minimal cost possible. Internet marketing covers a broader range of channels. It includes search engine marketing, email marketing / EDM, social media, and so on. 33. What is your favorite SEO website/blog, and why? This is an open ended question. There were some that I were looking for but I was also hoping someone would tell me a few that I didn’t know about. SeoMoz, Analytics.Blogspot.com, GoogleWebMasterCentral.Blogspot.com, InsideSearch.Blogspot.com and Search Engine Roundtable are a few good ones. There are actually a lot more. 34. What is Pagination in SEO? Pagination is the practice of dividing a piece of content into different pages while at the same time allowing Google to better understand the important pages to be indexed. Read the Google’s advice on using the pagination. 35. What are top SEO ranking factors? Quality of content on the webpage, quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domain authority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and average time on the webpage. 36. How to achieve good CTR in PPC? Here are few things that need to be kept in mind for CTR Target your ads to right audience Select correct keyword matching See that you target your ads by location and language Create different Ad Groups for different search phrases/keywords Calculate how much you can afford for the day Test your ads on daily basis, change if you don`t get any response from users Give google users a good reason to click your ad 37. What is pay per click? Which internet marketing model does it follow? ‘Pay per click’ , also known as ‘cost per click’ is a form of internet advertising which is used for directing traffic to websites. In this advertisers pay the site owners or publishers for the ads being viewed or click. Pay per click introduces a simple strategy of marketing in which an advertiser pays the website for publishing his advertisement and getting people to view it by clicking it, the more the views are for the advertisement, better is the revenue generated by the website from advertisement. Generally ‘pay per click’ is used by advertisers on keyword phrases relevant to their target markets. Content sites generally charge a fixed amount per click rather than using a bidding system. ‘Pay per click’ advertisements are commonly displayed on websites and search engine results.‘Pay per click’ is an approach that differs from the ‘pay per impression’ methods used in television and newspaper advertising. 38. Where do you put your robots.txt? Search for it in Google In Webmaster Tools The root directory of your domain or subdomain(s) In the folder you want to disallow 39. Did you know what is the difference between targeted page & landing page? Page which we have targeted to rank that page known as targeted page and the page which has ranked in search engine called landing page. 40. What is google Sandbox ? Google Sandbox is an imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified time period until they establish themselves of being displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links within a short period of time. 41. What is LSI ? LSI stands for latent semantic indexing.It is data retrieval technique. 42. Which Important factors makes Off Page Optimization better ? In Off Page Optimization there are some important factors like Article Submission Press Release Blog Writing/posting/creation Classified Submission Social Media 43. Which Important factors makes ON Page Optimization better ? In On Page Optimization there are some important factors like: Title Tag Meta tag Keyword Sitemap Images Internal linking Bread crimp. 44. What are webmaster tools? Webmaster tools is free service by google where we can check all the details like indexing data,daily user, stats, search query,CTR and XML sitemap. 45. Who is Matt cutts ? Matt cutts is the head of Google web spam team. 46. Do you know about latest update in SEO ? Yes Sir i know about latest updates in SEO: Panda penguin 47. What’s special in XML Sitemap and where do you submit that? That is a file which list all the pages of website in XML format designed for SE’s. Here we can give the crawlable frequency and also we can define the priority of all the web pages (1.0, 08. 065 etc). This can be submitted in Google Webmaster tools. 48. Can you name the SEO blogs that you regularly read? Search Engine journal Search Engine Land MOZ SEO Smarty Jimboykins 49. What is your idea about page rank and how it’s calculated? Let me first tell about the calculation behind that. Google says that page rank calculation formula is having more than 2 lakh variables. I am sure that following things are the main factor, Internal Back Links External Back Links Domain Age Apart from this, number of visits, bounce rate, CTR etc may be a factor in calculating the page rank. Page rank is just a metric from Google which defines the quality of the page. Moreover we do have many other targets like keyword position, quality traffic and conversions. In my vision, I am having very least importance to page rank. But I am crazy about getting full green PR tool bar for my blog. 50. What is Search Console? Why do you use Search Console . Search Console web tool that is provided by Google for Analysis the website and provides all information about occur any types of event such as any robots regarding error, Sitemap regarding error, Indexing regarding information and many more. It tells about what’s going on the site this time, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and 1 years structured data of all information of website. If any problems on site then Google send a message on the webmaster tool.we can know the problem on the site and remove the occur errors. so it plays a vital parts for all website. For more Information Visit the webmaster tool website here : https://search.google.com/search-console and log in your email id which you create for website. 51. What is cloaking in SEO? Clocking is method that have two different content for a separate URL. is is done for instance ranking of the site. it means, we get different content on site but search robots get different content on site. For example. if any body want to tell about the adult information ,or any illegal information on website, the write content for visitor about Adult or Illegal but tell the robots through good Keyword phrase or good anchor tag title tag or meta tag. because robots search the content through these. but visitor got wrong information about wishing result.Now you understand well with this example. 52. What is Google Bombing? Google bombing is practice of create a thousand of links for website that help to page ranking. it contain low quality link through Sub domain, low page rank link, and other adult links, it is done for comical and satirical purpose by some Special Group or organization. but is not good for website. After sometime Google banned like these link. it is also a black hat seo, because the links comes from unrelated keyword phrase or different theme website. 53. What is link farming in SEO? Link farming is a technique that is done by A special group of websites that is developed for give link purpose to other website. it means it is a collection of links only, not Any detailed content on the website.it is done by some Automatically generated link (java script) that occur automatic if any visitor visit the site. it is done by hand to by a group. it is done for instance ranking of the site, but is not good for Organic search. Search engine penalize like these link. so avoid this type technique. 54. What is keyword Stuffing in SEO. Keyword stuffing means there are many keywords are used on website content for the ranking purpose. it is not good for Seo organic search result. After some time we penalized by Search engine. So we should use less keywords phrases compare to Content. it is also a example of Black hat seo. 55. What Is Link Building? Explain Its Types And Which One Is Good? The process of getting links from other relevant sites that points your website called link building. Link building in seo improves website ranking on search engine result pages (serps). The main purpose behind to do link building is to get top ranking on top search engines that can deliver huge traffics and crowd for a target website or web-pages . In the early days when seo was just started initially, there were basically three types of link building: One Ways Link Building Or Artificial Link Building Two Ways Link Building Or Reciprocal Link Building Three Way Link Building Or Link Exchange But nowadays in this emerging digital marketing world it has changed almost a lot and today’s latest link building strategy does matter for getting high quality and most trusted backlinks to get top ranking on search engine result pages. e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Link Creation Link Request Link Attraction For more detailed info about latest link building in seo, just click on it. 56. What Is Google Panda, Penguin, EMD, Hummingbird & Payday Loan (Spam) Algorithms? Google Panda, Penguin, EMD, Page Layout, Hummingbird & Payday Loan are Google’s pagerank algorithms that vary often by Google itself to deliver expected search queries on its searches. Explain it separately with their purposes and effects on search results on Google steps: Google Panda: Rolled out in Feb 2011 and went global in April 2011 with purpose of lower the websites ranking of low quality & thin websites to return high quality websites rank on its search engine result pages (serps). Websites with high ad-to-content ratios and copied contents are considered as low quality sites. It affects 12 percent of search results. Google Penguin: A webspam update in April 24, 2012 by Google and given the code name Penguin update that includes spamming factors such as keyword stuffing, un-relevant contents or links, number of artificial links etc. It affects 3.1 percent of English search queries. EMD: Exact Match Domain updates introduce by Google in Sept. 27, 2012. It was basically for anchor text optimization. According to EMD, low quality exact match domains are not going to rank on Google search engine result page. It affected only 0.6 percent of English search queries on Google’s search results Payday Loan: Google Payday Loan also known as Spam algorithm is for spammy query results at its searches. It is specifically for spam tactics or factors such as link building and spammy queries e.g. – Viagra, porn etc. Payday loan updates were took place by Google on June 11, 2013 with impacts of 0.3 percent of US queries. Page Layout: On Jan 19, 2012 Google has launched page layout algorithm for too much ad-space above the fold of websites. With too much of heavy ads above the fold can be penalized or their ranking may goes own. The total impact was less than 1 percent on Google searches. Hummingbird: Google unleashed this hummingbird algorithm on Sept. 26, 2013 on its 15th birth anniversary by claiming that Google search results can be more natural and in direct way in terms of understanding user intent at searches. Hummingbird update is the first major update since 2001, said by Amit Singhal, Google’s Search Chief. It affects 90 percent of websites ranking on searches globally. 57. Differentiate Organic, Natural & Ethical SEO. There is no difference between organic and natural seo except ethical. Organic or natural seo is to get quality traffic via ranking and its natural approach on serps. Ethical seo is the process or techniques for search engine optimization and marketing using strategy, steps, technique or process defined by search engines like Google. It is also known as white hat seo. 58. What is Google Sandbox? This is the place where the fresh and less authoritative sites were kept for a certain time period, till their establishment in the search results. This may happens due to the building of so many links within a short time span. 59. What are the limitations of title and description tags? Title tag can be normally between 50-68 characters and Meta description tag can be around 140 – 150 characters. 60. How will you increase the Pagerank of a page? To increase the page rank of your webpage, you must build more backlinks from high page rank websites and authority sites. 61. How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website? I usually apply the web standards from the W3C while optimizing the webpage, which help that site to get more points from Google to improvise page rank. 62. What is 301 redirect? It is a kind of process to redirect the user from an old page URL to a new page URL. 63. What is Cross Linking? It is considered as one of the best strategy that can come in handy to yield high search engine rankings, by leveraging several domains owned by you. 64. What is Blog? why it is Important for Website? Blog is Very Important for Website, It is also like as website, We can say that blog is Sub site . We can share about our site and our view with user, It is just like electronic Diary where we save on line line data. We can share our knowledge and though before friends and all people of the world. Search Engine Also give performance of our blog if it is useful for other . Content should note be copy from other site. Two famous website for blogging 1. Blogger 2. Word Press. Other many site provide to create blog free. you can visit here The Top list of blogging Websites here. and create you own blog . 65. What is Classified Site? Why it is Important? Classified sites are just like platform or place for advertisement ,when we want to Advertise our site our business site on net then it is very useful. User visit on site directly or indirectly from it. it is instant useful for site, we can see link or tittle of our site in Google search easily by it. but is is not durable, after some days or some month it is automatically deleted. but mention not it is very very useful for website or business. Some Classified website are following—- Olx.com, Quickr.com, Indiabackpage.com, classified.com, craigslist.com, etc. 66. What is Article ? Why it is Necessary for SEO? Article is such a topics that Explain in depth of any Special Subjects. It describes in fresh and unique information. it explain about 400 to 600 words. it is very important for SEO point of view. It is always useful for Website page rank. it helps because Google gives credit to new and fresh content . Article is such a thing that fill this problem. We should write article in 4 -5 paragraph. The word which is used should be grammatically correct. The meaning of article should be clear view of specific topics. We should submit Article in high pr site because it shows instance improvement 67. What is Press Release? Why it is Important for SEO or website? Press Release is just instance New about your website. Anything you update on your website, you can tell your visitors about your updated product or content through press release. So we can say that press release such a content that describe the latest new about specific product or event or news. It is very useful for SEO point of view. because you introduce the visitors of your newly lunched product or other things. It helps to rank of site because it is new content for Google and unique for Search Engine. we should always write press Release New Message about our products or website, content should be 400- 600 words. it should be grammatically correct and use Simple language because all visitor can reads well and understand well what to say. 68. Tell me One URL short links site name ? http://www.bitly.com 69. What do you know about Adsense? Adsense is a web program conducted by Google that enables publishers of content websites to cater text, rich media, image, video advertisements automatically which are relevant to content of website and audience. These advertisement are included, maintained and sorted by Google itself and earn money either by per-click or per-impression basis. 70. Can you define Adwords? Adwords is referred as the main advertising product of Google which is useful to make appear your ads on Google and its partner websites including Google Search. This Google’s product offer PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising which is a primary module and incorporate a sub module CPC (Cost Per Click) where we bid that rate that will be charged only when the users click your advertisement. One another sub module is CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impression) advertising where advertiser pay for a thousand impression on flat rate to publisher. In addition it also includes website targeted advertising of banner, text and rich-media ads. Moreover, the ad will appear especially to those people who are already looking for such type of product you are offering as well as offer to choose particular sites with geographical area to show your ads. 71. If the meta robots tag has a value of “no index, no follow” what does it mean? It means the search engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page. 72. Who is Rand Fishkin? Rand Fishkin is the CEO and Co founder of MOZ, the most popular seo software in the world. He started the informative “White Board Friday” series for explaining the concepts related to Seo and search engines. 73. How does Google Plus helps in Seo? Google Plus helps the promoted web pages to get plus ones which are considered as genuine votes by Google. More plus ones helps to enhance our search engine rankings. Moreover,it helps to get high rankings in personalized search results where our friends can see the web pages shared and promoted by us. 74. What is the difference between clicks and visits in Google Analytics? Clicks indicates the number of times any user clicks on an ad while visits indicates the number of unique sessions each visits create. 75. How will you plan an Seo strategy for a website already affected by Penguin update? Penguin update deals with scanning through the link profile of a website. I will scan the links pointing to the site using tools like ahrefs and prepare a list of low quality links. I will make every effort to get those links removed like emailing the webmaster. If somehow, I am unable to remove some links then I will use the disavow links tool to devalue the remaining links from harming the site. Apart from this, I will plan a link bait strategy to get some high authority links in order to increase the reputation of the site. This will surely help a site to recover from the effects of the Penguin update. 76. What do you think about the latest algorithm update from Google? You must follow industry blogs and be updated about the SEO trends. So when you are asked about the latest algorithm update, you should talk about your views on what kind of sites/ search queries got affected, how it compares to the previous update which was rolled out and so on. Here is a scenario. Assume the latest update rolled out was the Penguin update and the one before that was panda. You could say that Penguin update was mostly targeted at low quality content and not about links as the Panda update was. It hit heavily on content farms and thin content pages. 77. How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site? With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch, Open Site Explorer, Backlink finder etc. 78. What is the difference between SEO and SEM? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEO provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while SEM involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising. 79. What is a Pizza Box in terms of Google? Google server comes in a standard case which is commonly known as “Pizza Box”. 80. When you see a site for the first time to SEO, what are your first steps? With this question, the interviewer is interested in how you approach tasks – and in what order. When it comes to a task like this, everyone is going to have their own opinions and preferences on what should be done in what order – so there aren’t really any right or wrong answers. Think about what order you’ve completed this task in before – and try to think of reasons that would justify this order. This answer should tell the interviewer a lot about how you approach tasks and how you work – which should help them to work out if you’d be a good fit for their company. 81. What’s the keyword density and how that is calculated? Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. It is calculated in the following way. (Targeted keyword/Total no. of words)*100. Also we must consider that the keyword density includes the page content as well as the page code while doing the percentage calculation. 82. Should the keyword density calculated in parts of words or in total? There can’t be a direct answer to this question. The SEO professional must be extremely instrumental while calculating the keyword density. Though it’s suggested to have the keyword in full, we must not ignore the part keywords and other semantic keywords while this calculation is on. 83.Can I jumble the positions of words in side the keyword phrases? Does it make the word a new keyword? No you should not jumble the keyword. This makes a new keyword, which can’t have the searches we are expecting. So this practice should be avoided at any cost. 84. Should the keyword density check cover the code area? While you are calculating the number of times repeation the code area should be taken into consideration. 85. What is LSI? How does that work and what’s the relevancy of LSI in SEO? LSI means Latent Semantic Indexing. This is owned and used by Google. The search engine tries to associate certain terms with concepts while indexing web pages. For example, Paris and Hilton are associated with a woman instead of a city and a hotel, Tiger and Woods are associated with golf. Google has been using this concept to determine suitable ads for its AdSense service for some time now. It seems that Google is now also using this concept to improve the quality of its search results. If Google uses this concept in its ranking algorithm (which is very likely though the complete traces have not yet found out) then its advisable that you don’t focus on a single keyword, but on a set of related keywords with your search engine optimization activities. 86. What’s keyword stemming? Keyword Stemming is a useful tool for web pages and search engines. The process of keyword stemming involves taking a basic but popular keyword pertaining to a particular website and adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization to make the keyword into a new word. This particular process allows a website to expand upon the number of variable options, which can help a website get more traffic. Words that are a product of keyword stemming can expand in either direction, or even add words to the phrase, making the possibilities limitless. 87. Keyword relevancy, keyword proximity, keyword density etc. What do you mean by them? Keyword Density: It is combination of the number of times a keyword or keyword phrases,in proportion with other words, appears on a web page. Keyword Proximity:It refers to the distance in space as measured in within the keywords as well as the phrases including the keywords without repetition and with contextual relevance. It measures the closeness between two keywords. Keyword Relevancy: Keyword Relevancy encompasses a large area of potential confusion. Simply put, your “keywords” must be relevant to the contents, or “theme” of your web page. Keyword relevancy and analysis in choosing keywords that is matching the content of the web page is important to your success with the search engine. When selecting the keywords you have to be more specific as there is better chance of getting targeted traffic. 88. Tell me something about yourself? You should brief your interviewer about your family, your educational background and your work experience. 89. What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it? Google recently had the Penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. Penguin update had penalized websites which had a spammy backlinking profile and returned more semantic results. Semantic results were based on the relationship between words present on the search query. Penguin trusted sites that had original and good content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links. 90. What all verticals have you handled in your SEO career so far? Verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far- this may include education, real estate, IT, travel, Shopping, jobs etc. 91. What do you understand by the Panda update? The Panda update was done to improve the quality of search results in Google. Panda update also known as the farmer update was done to eliminate content farms which provided less user friendly experience. It used machine language scalability as one of the important metrics for judging relevancy of a web page. All the focus was transformed on the user and now quality content , proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and videos, content to ad ratio all mattered more after the Panda update. You need to optimize your site for better clickthrough rate and a less bounce rate. 92. What is Google Sandbox in SEO? Google Sandbox is an imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified time period until they establish themselves of being displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links within a short period of time. 93. What is the difference between on page seo and off page seo? On page seo means optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managing robots.txt etc. Off page optimization means optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social media promotion. 94. How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file? .htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com . The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url. 95. What is keyword stemming in SEO? Keyword stemming is the process of finding out the root word from the search query. A query having the word “ playful” would be broken down to the word “play” with the help of stemming algorithm. The search results returned would be having the word ” play” in it. 96. What is PPC? PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of advertising methodology in which the advertiser pays for every click on their ads. Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertising called Adwords. 97. What do you know about the Florida update? Florida update happened on November 16th 2003. This update applied stemming, maintained local rank, penalized over optimized sites by applying filter etc. In short, it modified the search results before presenting it to the user by applying filters. 98. What are the limitations of title and description tags? Title tag can be between 50-68 characters and meta description tag can be between 140-160 characters. 99. Does Google uses keyword tags? No, Google does not make use of keyword tags. 100. What do you understand by Cloaking? Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines. 101. Explain meta tags? HTML meta tags are usually referred as tags of page data which sits between opening and closing head tags of a document's HTML code. Actually these are hidden keywords who sits in the code. These are invisible to visitors but are visible and readable by Search Engines. 102. What is press release for SEO Expert? Press Release is related to a specific action or event which can be republished by distinct medium of mass-media including other websites. It should be simple, short and professional. It conveys a clear message or information. 103. What are articles for SEO Expert? The articles are concerned with a specific topic or event and are highly oriented towards an opinion instead of information. An article is supposed to be more oriented towards showing up opinions, views and idea. Generally, it is written by a third party or expert of any specific field. 104. What is Off-page SEO? Off-page SEO is the method of earning back-links from other websites in order to enhance the ranking of the site. This method includes various method of SEO including Blog posting, forum, article submission, Press release submission, classified and miscellaneous. 105. What is On-Page SEO? On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing a website which includes on-site work such as writing content, title, description, ALT tag, Meta tags as well as ensuring web-page's code and design which can be indexed and crawled by search engines properly. 106. Explain different techniques used in Off Page SEO? There are lots of techniques used in Off-page SEO work. Major Techniques are: Social Bookmarking Blog Post Article Post Press Release Submission Forum Posting Yahoo Answer Blog Comment Deep link Directory Submission Regional Directory Submission and all that. 107. What are the distinct types of SEO practice? Primarily two types of SEO are being sported in practice: Off-Page SEO On-Page SEO. 108. What is Google? Google is the world's largest and renowned search engine incorporating about 66.8%(approximately) of market share. It was introduced in 1998 by students of Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The unique algorithmic ranking system is considered as its key of success. Besides Google Mail services there are various worthy and useful tools are being offered absolutely free which include Blogger, Feedburner, YouTube, Google Plus, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Adword, Analytics and many more. 109. Explain some major commonly used search engines? Google Yahoo Bing Ask Aol Search Wow WebCrawler MyWebSearch Infospace Info 110. What is Search Engine? Search Engines are very critical key element useful to find out specific and relevant information through the huge extent of World Wide Web. SEO Questions with Answers pdf Download :: Read the full article

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ageloire · 5 years

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How to Strike a Balance Between Relying on AI and Emphasizing a Human Touch

The emergence of AI technology is the result of evolved human thinking. And, in some ways, it’s become one of the biggest technology game changers of this generation. However, without being very cautious and aware of the dangers—and significance—of combining human interaction with artificial intelligence, we could head down the wrong path.

Personally, a substantial barrier I’ve faced in my life is properly managing my time. At first, I was obsessed with learning the ins and outs of Google Calendar. As brilliant as Google is, the brand has to keep things relatively simple: Everybody who uses a Google product expects, and needs, to be completely comfortable with it. There can’t be a steep learning curve.

When we were building Calendar, one of our goals was to help people become more thoughtful. To do that, the app has to use AI to collect existing data to create reminders of important events, moments, or tasks. This can significantly help enhance the relationships between the user and the important people in his life.

At the same time, AI won’t automatically know the difference between meaningful and meaningless details people share with the user. You might have had a conversation with someone who mentioned a big event coming up, but you still have to manually input that information. In a less obvious scenario, someone could have just earned a promotion or lost a loved one. The typical calendar application isn’t going to create a reminder to send a congratulatory note or condolences in these unexpected circumstances.

AI to Scale

If we relied solely on AI, we’d miss out on chances to build and maintain meaningful connections. However, without AI, it would be difficult to scale and optimize relationships—there’s a reason we have a standard social circle of 150 people.

This example is both a key and a hint as to how marketers should approach AI in different ways. AI needs to be used as a catalyst to connect us with more people on a human level, scaling personalization or helping us identify ways to interact with others that we may not have previously seen.

In marketing, it’s vital to gain trust and engage people, so they want to buy from and advocate for you. Therefore, scaling through AI can be an asset. But when there’s a chance to add a human connection, we have to leap at the opportunity.

Creating a Balance Between AI and Humans

How can you balance AI technology with human interaction? Here are just three ways to achieve that goal.

Create a mix of technology and humanity.

We’re already experiencing this transformation in our daily lives — if you have a question about a return policy or the weather, you interact with AI technology to get this information easily and quickly. But what if your question is more specific or requires smarter suggestions? AI can only go so far.

We still strive for human interaction. After all, we’re social creatures. AI can’t connect with us emotionally. And, as amazing as the technology is, AI doesn’t have all the answers. For example, let’s say you received a package with a damaged product. A chatbot may be able to provide the basics regarding the company’s return policy. Understandably frustrated, you want to interact with an actual person who can empathize with you and correct the situation. A more “human” AI shares your information with the customer service rep, so you don’t have to repeat yourself.

We’ll continue to see this evolve. You can record your meetings, enabling AI to use the information discussed to make smart suggestions for your next meeting. It may suggest when, where, and whom to schedule. AI could also help you develop an agenda and book the meeting. You, however, are still responsible for making sure the meeting is productive and isn’t a waste of time. AI and humans must work together in harmony, not simply focusing on replacing roles and responsibilities.

Important decisions still require a human touch.

Self-driving cars are a great example of humans still needing to, well, take the wheel. Each vehicle still has a driver just in case the machine has reached its limits or gets confused. Similarly, if you’ve ever called a call center, you’ve likely had your question transferred to a human operator because the machine couldn’t understand you.

With your calendar, AI technology may notice that you work on a specific task at an exact time on certain days. As a result, it will automatically generate a recurring block for you, making you unavailable and issuing a reminder. But what if an emergency pulled you away from that task, and everything else on your calendar had to get pushed back? The intelligent calendar doesn’t know that, proceeding as normal. You’re going to have to manually update your calendar, so conflicts don’t arise throughout the rest of the day.

Chatbots, for example, can help guide us in making financial decisions or planning our schedules. But would you trust a machine to plan your retirement or automatically fill in your entire year? Of course not.

AI technology should be an asset that helps us make smarter, more informed decisions. In the end, it can’t have the final say — the tech simply isn’t trained to handle new situations. For important decisions, a human touch is still needed.

Trust in the power of intuition.

I recently watched a movie called “Upgrade.” In a key scene, the lead realized the automated car was taking a different route home. His gut immediately told him something was wrong. To avoid spoilers, I’ll just say his gut was picking up on clues his mind might have ignored.

As useful as AI technology is and will continue to be, it can’t replace our inner voice. Whether it’s knowing you’re in a dangerous situation or sensing someone isn’t trustworthy, there’s no amount of technology that can replace our gut instincts. Why have your calendar set up a meeting with someone you believe isn’t legit? AI can be used to make suggestions and enhance our lives, but it’s ultimately on us to use our past experiences to respond to certain situations.

We’ve learned, as we continue to develop our product, that we need guidelines that permit a human connection at any moment. People want that human-to-human connection, and the more you exclusively use AI, the more that’s taken away. AI technology has its limits, and that’s where the human touch has to take over.

The post How to Strike a Balance Between Relying on AI and Emphasizing a Human Touch appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from Marketo Marketing Blog https://blog.marketo.com/2019/04/how-to-strike-a-balance-between-relying-on-ai-and-emphasizing-a-human-touch.html

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shadyb00ts · 7 years

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Persona 5 - A Review

I should probably preface this by saying that the screenshots I’m using for this review are not my own, since Atlus has extremely strict policies about sharing footage of this game; PS4 Share features are completely unusable. The ones I do have, I got off of Google.

I should also probably mention that this is my first Persona game; I never played the previous titles, so I’m not biased towards the franchise in any way and I had no idea what to expect going into it.

I was originally pretty iffy about getting this game, despite my love for JRPGs. I think I was a little worried about the micromanaging aspects and the deadline system. After Lightning Returns, I sorta avoided games with deadlines and limited time since I didn’t want to deal with the anxiety that comes with it. I like playing games at my own pace, and I also like to completely see EVERYTHING a game has to offer, and games with a limited time system obviously means you’ll have to miss out on certain things unless you follow a strict point-by-point guide that somehow lets you do all the things. From what I saw of this game, it seemed like it would be stressful having to manage social stats, relationships with people, a school life, etc, all while being a magical thief that literally steals hearts.

So yeah, this game was definitely an impulse buy for me and, truth be told, I don’t regret it for a second. I got totally taken for a ride.

The first thing you should know if you plan on playing this game is that you need to have a lot of free time on your hands. This game is such a time sink that I basically lost track of the days. Once you’re in, you are IN. You immediately become attached to these characters and basically live out your life as this unnamed protagonist, raising various social stats such as knowledge and charm to name a few, maintaining strong bonds with the people around you, tackling high school life including getting pop quizzes and doing exams. It can be pretty overwhelming the first time around, at least probably if you’re a newcomer to the franchise like me. I even got a game over very early in the game cause I procrastinated too much and was met with the deadline. I overestimated how much time I actually had to do the stuff I wanted to. It takes a while to get into the groove of this game, but once you know where everything is, you start planning what you want to do, which skills you wanna develop and people you want to spend time with. It can be a lot to deal with, but it does feel rewarding when you max things out and learn to become more efficient.

The story, for a JRPG, is pretty impressive. You play a regular young Joe Shmoe who got unfairly tried for standing up to a shady powerful man and is now labeled a delinquent. He gets sent under the care of a cafe owner for probation and becomes a student in Shujin Academy where he ends up stumbling upon some weird shit, forms friendships with various other young misfits and they form the Phantom Thieves, a group of kids who seek to change the hearts of criminals and horrible adults so they’ll grow a conscience, own up to their horribleness and redeem themselves. That’s all I want to say about the story since I don’t want Atlus to sue me for posting spoilers. But like I said, I was extremely impressed by the story in this game, especially being a JRPG. I say that because, let’s be honest, JRPG stories are normally very predictable and endlessly cheesy. Of course, this game has those moments where it’s so clear how Japanese and Anime the game is from how the characters speak and whatnot, but there were a lot of points in the story where I genuinely had no idea what to expect and certain plot twists I didn’t see coming.

Not to mention pretty much all the characters were very interesting and likable that it’s so easy to form attachments to each of them. Well, except for the protagonist, of course. I’m not sure what it is with JRPGs but it’s very often in games like this where the protagonist is completely mute and not even the slightest bit interesting. Maybe it’s so that it makes it easy for you to put yourself in their shoes, but I was never a fan of that. I prefer protagonists that have their own voice and distinct personality, so I personally wouldn’t mind if more Japanese games started taking a page from Western games when it comes to this kind of stuff rather than just have milquetoast, blank protagonists. That’s one gripe I have in regards to the story elements. Another big one is how empty and meaningless a lot of the dialogue choices really are. Oftentimes you’d see two or three options that basically consist of different versions of saying the same thing. And as far as I can tell, the options don’t really have any lasting effects either. If you’re a dick to somebody, they won’t remember you were a dick. A lot of the options also give you the illusion of choice; the game makes you think that there’s a decision to be made when really there’s only one outcome anyway. These things are basically my biggest problems with the game; it lacked weight when it came to the protagonist and the dialogue system. (Oh yeah, you also can’t be gay, which I was a little salty about but eh, I guess I’ll let it slide. It probably would’ve been too much to expect anyways.)

But enough of that, let’s get to the good part; the combat system. You have no idea how much I adore turn-based combat in JRPGs. I haven’t had this much fun with a JRPG since World of Final Fantasy and Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, which are pretty similar to Persona 5 now that I think about it. I loved the hell out of the combat in this game and also the Persona collecting and creating. It did a great job of teaching you how everything worked and letting you differentiate between the skill types, Persona types, etc. Unlike the real-world aspects of the game that overwhelmed me, I was able to digest the combat system pretty quickly. Fusing Personas to create new, more powerful ones is also a lot of fun, I find. I could spend an hour or two just in the Velvet Room alone fusing and strengthening Personas, filling up the Persona Compendium (gotta catch ‘em all, after all). So yeah, honestly I don’t think I have anything bad to say about the combat system. It’s extremely enjoyable and easy to get used to.

By the way, I have to say that this game is one of the most visually intriguing games I’ve ever played. Stylish is honestly the perfect word to describe it as a whole. Everything is constantly moving and the transitions between battles especially are just cool as fuck. The dungeon designs and especially the Persona designs are something to behold. It all just looks sooooo damn good. I’m always so excited when making new Personas cause I can’t wait to see what they look like. I also get very excited whenever it’s time to go to a new dungeon--or Palaces, as they’re called in-game. Each one has its own unique setting and theme depending on the person in charge of it. It was all just so.... cool. I know I sound lame right now, but I swear to god I don’t know what else to say about it, I was just so thoroughly impressed by this game’s style and aesthetic.

Oh yeah, and I rarely talk about the music in games, but the soundtrack meshes perfectly with the overall look and feel of the game. I found myself humming and singing along to the songs after a while, and they got stuck in my head afterward. As far as the English voice acting goes, I also liked it for the most part. Of course there are some cringey parts, that comes with the territory, but overall I think the VAs did really well. I think I recognized a couple of their voices, too.

I spent around 80 hours in my first playthrough of the game, and with all the stuff that carries over from that save data to a New Game+, my experience with this game is far from over cause there’s still so much I haven’t seen from it even despite the amount of time I’ve spent on it. It is a HUUUGE game with a lot of content, so you definitely have to keep that in mind before buying.

I think I’ll give this game a solid 8/10. Next to World of Final Fantasy, I think this is the best JRPG I’ve played in a long while. I do have some problems with it, and it probably isn’t for everyone; if you’re not really a fan of JRPGs then I’m not sure how much you’d enjoy it. It’s not as action-oriented as, say, Final Fantasy XV, so if you’re looking for something more FFXV-ish then it would probably be wise not to get this game. But if you love turn-based combat, monster collecting and micromanaging the life of a high-schooler, this is right up your alley. All I can say is that this won’t be my last Persona game, that’s for sure.

#persona 5 #game review #jrpg #ps4 #review #jrpg games #persona

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carlostom420 · 4 years

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Trends in Ecommerce in 2020

As we enter

The second 50% 2020, Dan Barker examines the key trends which can be set to model ecommerce, and how retailers can answer them.

The first

Half of 20 20 has been eventful for ecommerce. Of course technical invention has progressed: Shopify launched a marketplace, Google relaunched organic product listings, Facebook introduced'shops', and also thousands of different alterations. But a lot of this first 50% 2020 was shaped by a disease called after 20-19.

The effects

Of'SARS2' on ecommerce really are tough to overstate. Tens and thousands of businesses sold on the web for the very first time. Millions of transactions that could normally took place in stores changed on the web. Ecommerce went from'high priority' for many retail businesses to'the priority'.

Some Categories of retail jumped out of being 10 20 % on the web, to 100 percent online.

Entire Countries' retail engines were retained ticking , by virtue of the ability to buy online.

Some areas

Of ecommerce have fought -- particularly in some aspects of fashion, travel, events.

For most Retailers, the ecommerce station has allowed them to flourish. By DIY stores, to dwelling exercise businesses, directly to organizations like Tesco, have been more than 90 percent for ecommerce earnings in May 2020 versus the prior year.

As we proceed Into the next half of the calendar year, it's likely more people will likely be shopping in stores yet again; a lot people will go back to working at the least aspect of this time in offices; many of us could be tightening our belts. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that ecommerce will return again to the level that it was in prior to March 2020.

This informative article Analyzes seven regions where retailers and ecommerce businesses may add focus, so as to flourish from the next half the year.

Suggestion 1: Data & AI

That is a Bit of a cheat really, as (firstly) it's 2 elements, and (secondly) both data and AI have been hyped always for at least a couple of years. There are some differences that this year.

'Data' is

Something that's always talked about as having elevated importance. Generally speaking there is normally a whole lot more data around ecommerce compared to conventional retail, and the theory is that it's a competitive edge. The reason it's a little Additional importance now Is That a Lot of regular company patterns have changed

Your Customers are acting differently.

Your Suppliers are behaving otherwise.

Your Competitors are behaving differently.

For

Example: You might have budgeted a particular PPC spend per month at the onset of the year, also had a sensible assumption of how many new customers & just how much revenue that would bring each month -- most probably on the basis of past year's amounts plus the issuer you would expect from your level of growth.

But later Panic buying, physical retail getting shut for months, clients of varying financial equilibrium, and competitions either leaning into extra demand or driving efficiency where there's a shortage of demand, it's likely your PPC economy has changed enormously. And that same factor applies across every marketing station.

Whereas

Many retailers guide their actions and aims on the grounds of designs in years past each one the patterns have changed. In some cases, change shifts to a degree it is difficult to even guide on the basis of what happened a couple weeks ago. So focusing on data could be the perfect approach to succeed along with your trading plan, your marketing plan, your buying plan, your customer experience strategy.

Customers than ever are buying online at the moment. If your competition is using data to quantify their behaviour and answer this, and you're not, that gives them a terrific opportunity to acquire new customers at this strange moment & service them long into the future.

Amazon in

The west, also JD.com, Alibaba, along with many others from the east, are built on principles of data driven merchandising, product recommendations, fitting clients with all the services and products they are most likely to purchase. In the event that you can cause the capability to make use of data better for the short term at a similar manner, it protects you from others amassing your customers, and may have a material impact in your own likelihood to be successful from the next half of the year.

The 2nd Part of this is'AI'. AI is one of the nebulous terms which was hyped for most decades. Just a little like'the year of cellphone', which was hyped for about ten years before it immediately engulfed everything once everybody had stopped talking about it'the entire year of AI' is just one of these things that has been discussed about as on the cusp for the last few years.

And, only Such as'the year of mobile','''the year of AI' (or perhaps'the entire year of Machine Learning') ostensibly came and engulfed us a couple of years ago without many really realizing:

Many Display ads that you see around the web are placed infront of you simply because of machine learned calculations.

Google's Ads engine -- that the fuel behind the firm's revenue -- has transferred increasingly more toward AI tools (whether or not they serve as they are tagged is just another matter)

Twitter, Facebook, And all of the other major societal networks use machine learned systems to determine what you -- a reader -- will and won't see. We question'freewill' generally, however there is no freewill on societal media marketing: what we view is guided by robots.

Amazon have Managed to develop an advertising business from almost no to $4bn from the last quarter of 2019, fundamentally through the ability of machine-learned systems.

In many Cases, machine learning is used to perform relatively simple tasks:

Showing a Customer the merchandise they truly are most likely to purchase, instead of random items from the 10,000+ SKU catalogue.

Ranking Your group pages to maximise your likely gross margin yield.

Categorizing Customer service requests to accelerate lifetime for the CS staff.

Estimating Propensity to purchase, to inform your CRM campaigns.

I.e.: The Nebulous, and sometimes meaningless, talk to'AI' has been replaced by (at least now) its results: algorithms & processes built into programs, to gently improve your results, built ontop of most of the major platforms, baked right into ecommerce platforms, or enabled by third party sellers who could plug in a types of straightforward customer-experience tweaks into your own systems.

In case You're Able to jump beyond the hype, and implement a number of these tools in specific locations, we're now at a point where you're able to attain the work of classes of folks using simple'AI' tools.

Factor 2: Digital abilities

Digital Skills have changed the world over the previous 50 decades. A few of the planet's top richest people made all their money through digital technology (Jeff Bezos,'' Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg), and also the other six have a massive reliance on it from Warren Buffett and his investments to Bernard Arnault and his luxury empire.

It reveals US Ecommerce for a percentage of overall retail sales. As you can see, in a single eight-week period up to the end of might, ecommerce had increased by the same level because it had done over the entirety of their prior ten decades.

Every day

There's really a fairly major story at the press extending this tendency:

Inditex, Zara's parent company, announced they are closing 16% of stores and focusing that cash and effort on ecommerce.

DPD -- that the Logistics firm -- in the UK announced they are recruiting 6,000 more visitors to help with ecommerce shipping requirement later.

The UK

Government has announced their plan to upgrade the country's'digital strategy', and it appears that fundamentally means'trying to grow people's digital skills).

Efforts in The past to'grow digital skills' have regularly been'pushed', attempting to push a boulder uphill; in this scenario, that the boulder is rolling the other method, and we're hurrying to grab onto it. Across many industries,'digital skills' is going to be in greater demand than there is supply, but in retail -- where requirement for'digital trade' has grown so fast -- this shortage is already observable, especially for experienced individuals who've been there and done that, and also understand whether spending a couple of million on a major job will genuinely reap rewards, or even only be a waste of resource and time.

The occupation Economy is at a state of flux, together with some terrific people, in unlucky sections, looking around for new jobs. And remote working was normalized. Combine the two of those, and it means organizations will get talent to help them grow further, and if they are prepared to continue in partial remote mode, this gift might be 100 or even 1000 or even 10,000 miles out of their HQ, as opposed to within an hour commute.

Factor 3: Personalisation

You will find Some businesses where personalization doesn't matter: In case you are simply selling a lean amount of SKUs, there's not much it is possible to effortlessly customize. If you are selling largely via Amazon, or Google Shopping ads, then you don't need to be concerned much about personalization, as their calculations take action for you.

However, should Your stock is only a couple hundred products or whatever above, matching your clients with these services and products they're most likely to buy is probably the easiest method of raising the chance that they'll buy from you in just about any given visit to your website.

If a site

Sells 100,000 services and products, setting 10 products at random facing an individual provides you a very large probability of showing them items they are not interested in. Slimming down to the 10 products they are more likely to purchase based on the credit history, exactly what other users have bought in their context, lowers the chances of showing them'the wrong' product in order to avoid annoying themand give them an opportunity to purchase.

And whereas At a single point, adequate customization tools were confined to larger retailers, now they truly are abundant, and easy to use, and simple to launching -- simple enough that ecommerce websites could have some thing better than their present system within a few months, perhaps within fourteen days.

Suggestion 4: Competing with Amazon

On the Last couple of decades, if you were at a'plan day' to an ecommerce business, you'd very likely observe the language'Competing With Amazon' to a flipchart sooner or later. Usually that's from the point of view of this question:"In a world where Amazon is present, and also a person will find us all of our competitors immediately, what's the purpose inside our new?"

Based To Alexa.com, which used to be separate but has been bought by Amazon themselves, the main website -- Amazon.com -- is the 14th most visited site on the web. An normal user on a given day spends nine minutes and 21 seconds on the site. Amazon fairly gradually climbed their advertisements firm 41% to a $4.8 billion thing at Q4 of 20-19 -- a firm nearly as big as British Airways -- chiefly by drastically bumping up the sum of sponsored product views round their own assets.

Many more Customers are purchasing online at the moment, and a lot have formed customs around Amazon. Speaking very broadly speaking: Even the 'informed' an individual, the less they're very likely to compare a few sellers, and also a lot more likely they'll only go'Amazon automatically'. You only have to look at how many Amazon deliveries arrive in your way vs every other company to have an idea how much Covid-19 has impacted the greatest online retailer at the country's degrees of demand.

If Amazon Is the default option for the merchandise types, and also you don't make compelling reasons for customers to purchase from you, and it's likely you will have a harder and harder time, either through losing customers into themthrough paying them advertisements fees to clearly show your services and products to their customers.

Potential Options for generating that competitive advantage comprise:

1. BrandSome Customers may buy a pair of TOZO T10 ear buds because Amazon's algorithm pushes them the most challenging, but many will actively hunt out Bose, or Airpodssimply because they understand and trust the new.

It's

Unlikely you will become Apple or Bose instantly, but it's not been simpler or more economical to convey your brand, and gain a competitive advantage. Building a new takes years, however shoving forward the best components of one's new on your internet site and your product attributes on the others' sites usually takes only a couple of hours.

2. MissionIf

Customers are adapting to the mission of one's company, there's a good chance they'll buy from you rather than simply taking the default option of Amazon.

A pleasant Example of the is ArenaFlowers.com: They've removed single usage plastics from their deliveries (actually their paper is created from recycled blossom waste)that they plant a shrub for each and every arrangement, also donate 1 to 2 women's aid, and cover all staff a Real Living Wage. Their job is to improve lives in communities across the Earth, and you also may send exquisite flowers, and align yourself with and support that assignment, by simply buying from their website.

At a time

When customers are more sensitive to the way they spend their money, which causes they align to (you only have to check out the movement to discontinue particular brands advertising on Facebook to see signs of this), even if you get a positive mission, it is sensible to ensure customers understand it.

3. ContentWhile

Amazon do invest alot in articles, few see your website with any intention aside from a transactional purchase. Being an authoritative content source inside your category can be an obvious way to create in customers before they reach the final transaction stage. Together with Google pushing featured snippets more heavily, and lots of'newly ecommerce by default option' clients willing to take to fresh providers, H 2 is a good time to spend some time on pushing forward'articles' if you aren't able to.

4. Customer experience

I remember

Once talking with someone fairly high up in Amazon. He asked"do you really know why people buy from Amazon?" I can't recall my answer, but his top 3 factors were'Logistics','Customer Support','Choice and Selection'. While price and selection are all various things, the initial two here are fundamentally about assuring smooth client experience. Should Amazon believe'customer experience' is their number 1 and number 2 factor, and you also want to take on themit should be in your radar as one variable.

5. HabitMany People Buy from Amazon out of utter dependence. We've trained ourselves to test first for any given product. It's equally possible for additional ecommerce organizations to build in'habit' elements. For example: ASOS grew to prominence depending on the strength of'brand new' styles. Consumers would check back every day to check out new releases. Boo-hoo followed with the identical strategy, and has a enormous crowd of routinely daily blog checkers.

Regardless of 'newness', there are a variety of strategies to boost the custom of visiting your site regularly, or visiting it when a particular product jumps into your potential customer's mind; putting some focus on this is likely to take a time, however likely not heavy price.

6. Product exclusivity

Even if you Sell via Amazon, there's no need to set your whole catalogue on there. Even when you simply hold back new launches for a few days from Amazon, and factor into your launching apps, to try and draw clients directly.

7. Convenience & locality

For those who can Build in convenience, or even a tie to a reachable physical place, and then you have a bonus Amazon does not.

At a time

When so many folks are spending more on the web, and where Amazon may be your dominant biz in many categories, thinking through some of those aforementioned may only take a few hours, and may reap reward that compounds over months and years.

Factor 5: Reacting to changing customer behaviour

Like I've

Said during, among the larger changes today is that customer behavior has changed a great deal compared to'normal' times. That distinguishes itself in several ways, however Some of the important ones can be divided into'short term' and'long term' modifications:

Short Term, There are lots of customer behaviour changes. You need to learn those for your customers better than any article, and also working to execute in a means that takes them under consideration now, and to morrow and then week may also bring short term results. Only a Couple of those more universal changes within ecommerce include:

Category shift

You will find Regular shifts in which categories are purchased at the moment. From weights and home fitness equipment and fabric masks and plastic shields... into DIY products. Staying on top of the, and forecasting it as best you can into the foreseeable future, can bring very good outcomes.

In most

Sectors, some product categories possess'trended', along with many others fallen flat. Ecommerce includes a enormous advantage here vs stores, and this is really one of those places that can have a huge impact: From saving cash spent on product categories that will not sell in 2020, to leaning into trends that suddenly spike beyond reality, there are constant opportunities .

Openness to New manufacturers

Where Clients are buying products they do not routinely purchase each month or week, and a few are switching into internet vs offline, there's an opportunity to open up them to your own brand -- something they truly are likely much more open minded to than at that time when they could simply drop in to B&Q to select one up of your competitors' services and products.

Returns sensitivity

Many

Customers don't need to queue for the postoffice. On larger white goods, it's not possible to reunite any (providers simply not needing ). As a result, many clients are much more sensitive to returns service and policies at the moment

Long-term, Additionally, there are some big changes. I would expect they'll contain:

Ecommerce Automatically

As already Mentioned, whereas earlier some one could have opted to drive 20 miles to go into John Lewis, for the foreseeable future many may elect for JohnLewis.com rather than I.e., there is much greater interest in ecommerce solutions, and that expansion would be always to a extent among less savvy buyers.

Price sensitivity

There Was Likely much higher economic uncertainty on the horizon. Many brands are flooded with stock (particularly within fashion), and also suppliers themselves are copied with a lot more stock. In theory that leads to a'perfect storm' of ignoring. For instance: boo-hoo are currently upto 70 percent off + an extra 20 percent; John Lewis are on up to 70 percent clearance.

All these are Predictable: As soon as stores shut, you might predict with 10 minutes thought this would happen. Either retailers could lock upward stock till 2021 (costly out of the warehouse point of perspective ), or negotiate with providers to take back stock (hard to handle logistically) or might attempt to spur earnings together by blowing off at some time.

These are Simple instances, but hopefully illustrate that there are predictable changes on the list of inconsistent right now, also there will remain to the remainder of 20 20. Putting in enough opportunity to call themplan them around puts you in much better stead than drifting with this season's wave.

Factor 6: Protecting from recession

There is

Plenty of talk of'choppy waters' on the horizon, and many companies also have sadly bumped into rocks . Ecommerce businesses Aren't completely protected from this, but there are some components that offer a Bit greater durability naturally:

Ecommerce Businesses tend to focus more toward customer loyalty than entirely offline retailers -- building connections with customers, as opposed to only expecting those clients to arrive waiting for you. The capacity to predict purchase, and respond if reality differs from your forecast, me an you are able to steer with substantially greater certainty.

Having Relationships with clients also lets you react quicker: If suddenly all your VIPs are nolonger buying, you can create an assumption in what that means and fix; or also literally phone each one of them up.

Ecommerce Can also run to much shorter time scales. Whereas measuring the ramifications of a television campaign on a group of regional stores may take weeks/months to get any meaningful data and publication the following round of advertising spots, quantifying a PPC report's impact within an ecommerce site is fundamentally instant. That can be taken for granted, but at an occasion where price sensitivity can be really a huge dilemma, being ontop of all your marketing and advertising channels' pay is important, and tracking for changes 'brand new customer conversion speed','cost per newly gained customer', and so on to help steer.

On the Supply-side, ecommerce companies may also act with a bit more agility. Stock is much simpler to handle in one central warehouse than a group of stores, also replenishment much quicker. This simplifies moving into especially large marketing classes.

A few of the

Activity you might look at to'protect from downturn' may be obvious -- such as buying in low priced things to take into account increased price sensitivity, or focusing on your own fixed cost arrangement to safeguard cash in the event of unpredicted need. Some of it maybe less obvious: examining different models, as an instance, extending your principal business.

As one

Obvious illustration of the -- H&M Group largely sell their own brands in-store. A while ago they launched a'evaluation' brand socket, ostensibly an internet TK Maxx competitor. Initially it was in Sweden, however within the Covid19 lock-down period they will have also launched it in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. You can look at Afound.com.

This may be Coincidence, or it may be H&M Group understanding that the channel is going to be flooded with stock that's been locked up in stores, and a simple means to produce value from this would be always to develop a fresh socket, by which they may use lots of their pre-existing processes and skills to answer customer requirement, and also perhaps clear some of their very own inventory.

Factor 7: Know the implications for your overall customer experience approach

This really is A Wrapup of those other'factors', but is important to consider in a level, in addition to in granular containers. A whole lot of the elements above are about'customer experience', and also to achieve improvements in overall client experience it's sometimes a lot easier to have a look at matters in terms of one's general customer experience plan.

To distill Some of the major trends you could want to simply take in to account when considering your CX plan:

There is a Much higher proportion of retail demand online right now. This will likely soften just a bit, but will continue in the future, unquestionably far above the percentage it had been prior to the coming of Covid-19.

You will find Increased expectations around customer-experience, marginally fueled by Amazon as well as other larger retailers subsidizing experience through lower profits, or during volume.

There is a Current raised sensitivity to ecommerce organizations' assignments, or worth, or perhaps the way that they perform business, even though price is actually a really essential factor, a few clients do genuinely desire to get from businesses whose values fit their world view.

There is High need for those skills to get ecommerce directly. That is twinned using a new approval of a far greater amount of remote working, and a continuing flow of people onto the career market with semi-transferrable skills from internet travel, hospitality, etc.. That hasn't been fully plotted on however, therefore there's a chance for those adding skills earlier to their own teams to benefit.

Most of the Above could be seen as challenges, but can also be viewed as opportunities.

20 20 has Been a disorientating year for most people, and also a difficult year thus far for many.

The first

Half included a lot of hard-to-forecast shift. The 2nd half is likely to become full of modification, but in theory it has greater predictability compared to first half, and this brings another chance for ecommerce.

Ecommerce Is at a hugely blessed position: Safe just a little vs off line retail, in demand by consumers, more nimble, nevertheless largely able to use one of societal bookmarking and lock down, with a demand for gift which means somewhat better job security, and an OK flow of fresh entrants into industry from adjacent sectors that have been harder hit.

There Was Still wonderful challenge for most businesses in ecommerce, plus some of greater Ecommerce companies will reap the maximum, but thinking through where you are At the context of your goals, and the opportunities available for your requirements among

The above seven factors, can hopefully bring a slightly less jarring, more Predictable, and much more positive next half the season.

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sheminecrafts · 4 years

Text

Facebook won’t ban political ads, prefers to keep screwing democracy

It’s 2020 — a key election year in the U.S. — and Facebook is doubling down on its policy of letting people pay it to fuck around with democracy.

Despite trenchant criticism — including from U.S. lawmakers accusing Facebook’s CEO to his face of damaging American democracy — the company is digging in, announcing as much today by reiterating its defence of continuing to accept money to run microtargeted political ads.

Instead of banning political ads, Facebook is trumpeting a few tweaks to the information it lets users see about political ads — claiming it’s boosting “transparency” and “controls” while leaving its users vulnerable to default settings that offer neither.

Political ads running on Facebook are able to be targeted at individuals’ preferences as a result of the company’s pervasive tracking and profiling of internet users. And ethical concerns about microtargeting led the U.K.’s data protection watchdog to call in 2018 for a pause on the use of digital ad tools like Facebook by political campaigns — warning of grave risks to democracy.

Facebook isn’t for pausing political microtargeting, though. Even though various elements of its data-gathering activities are also subject to privacy and consent complaints, regulatory scrutiny and legal challenge in Europe, under regional data protection legislation.

Instead, the company made it clear last fall that it won’t fact-check political ads, nor block political messages that violate its speech policies — thereby giving politicians carte blanche to run hateful lies, if they so choose.

Facebook’s algorithms also demonstrably select for maximum eyeball engagement, making it simply the “smart choice” for the modern digitally campaigning politician to run outrageous BS on Facebook — as longtime Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth recently pointed out in an internal posting that leaked in full to the NYT.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s defence of his social network’s political ads policy boils down to repeatedly claiming “it’s all free speech, man” (we paraphrase).

This is an entirely nuance-free argument that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen expertly demolished last year, pointing out that: “Under this twisted logic if Facebook were around in the 1930s it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his solution to the ‘Jewish problem.’ ”

Facebook responded to the take-down with a denial that hate speech exists on its platform since it has a policy against it — per its typical crisis PR playbook. And it’s more of the same selectively self-serving arguments being dispensed by Facebook today.

In a blog post attributed to its director of product management, Rob Leathern, it expends more than 1,000 words on why it’s still not banning political ads (it would be bad for advertisers wanting to reach “key audiences,” is the non-specific claim) — including making a diversionary call for regulators to set ad standards, thereby passing the buck on “democratic accountability” to lawmakers (whose electability might very well depend on how many Facebook ads they run…), while spinning cosmetic, made-for-PR tweaks to its ad settings and what’s displayed in an ad archive that most Facebook users will never have heard of as “expanded transparency” and “more control.”

In fact these tweaks do nothing to reform the fundamental problem of damaging defaults.

The onus remains on Facebook users to do the leg work on understanding what its platform is pushing at their eyeballs and why.

Even as the “extra” info now being drip-fed to the Ad Library is still highly fuzzy (“We are adding ranges for Potential Reach, which is the estimated target audience size for each political, electoral or social issue ad so you can see how many people an advertiser wanted to reach with every ad,” as Facebook writes of one tweak.)

The new controls similarly require users to delve into complex settings menus in order to avail themselves of inherently incremental limits — such as an option that will let people opt into seeing “fewer” political and social issue ads. (Fewer is naturally relative, ergo the scale of the reduction remains entirely within Facebook’s control — so it’s more meaningless “control theatre” from the lord of dark pattern design. Why can’t people switch off political and issue ads entirely?)

Another incremental setting lets users “stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience from a list.”

But just imagine trying to explain WTF that means to your parents or grandparents — let alone an average internet user actually being able to track down the “control” and exercise any meaningful agency over the political junk ads they’re being exposed to on Facebook.

It is, to quote Baron Cohen, “bullshit.”

Nor are outsiders the only ones calling out Zuckerberg on his BS and “twisted logic”: A number of Facebook’s own employees warned in an open letter last year that allowing politicians to lie in Facebook ads essentially weaponizes the platform.

They also argued that the platform’s advanced targeting and behavioral tracking tools make it “hard for people in the electorate to participate in the public scrutiny that we’re saying comes along with political speech” — accusing the company’s leadership of making disingenuous arguments in defence of a toxic, anti-democratic policy.

Nothing in what Facebook has announced today resets the anti-democratic asymmetry inherent in the platform’s relationship to its users.

Facebook users — and democratic societies — remain, by default, preyed upon by self-interested political interests thanks to Facebook’s policies which are dressed up in a self-interested misappropriation of “free speech” as a cloak for its unfettered exploitation of individual attention as fuel for a propaganda-as-service business.

Yet other policy positions are available.

Twitter announced a total ban on political ads last year — and while the move doesn’t resolve wider disinformation issues attached to its platform, the decision to bar political ads has been widely lauded as a positive, standard-setting example.

Google also followed suit by announcing a ban on “demonstrably false claims” in political ads. It also put limits on the targeting terms that can be used for political advertising buys that appear in search, on display ads and on YouTube.

Still, Facebook prefers to exploit “the absence of regulation,” as its blog post puts it, to not do the right thing and keep sticking two fingers up at democratic accountability — because not applying limits on behavioral advertising best serves its business interests. Screw democracy.

“We have based [our policies] on the principle that people should be able to hear from those who wish to lead them, warts and all, and that what they say should be scrutinized and debated in public,” Facebook writes, ignoring the fact that some of its own staff already pointed out the sketchy hypocrisy of trying to claim that complex ad targeting tools and techniques are open to public scrutiny.

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technicalsolutions88 · 4 years

Link

It’s 2020 — a key election year in the US — and Facebook is doubling down on its policy of letting people pay it to fuck around with democracy.

Despite trenchant criticism — including from US lawmakers accusing Facebook’s CEO to his face of damaging American democracy — the company is digging in, announcing as much today by reiterating its defence of continuing to accept money to run microtargeted political ads.

Instead of banning political ads Facebook is trumpeting a few tweaks to the information it lets users see about political ads — claiming it’s boosting “transparency” and “controls” while leaving its users vulnerable to default settings that offer neither.

Political ads running on Facebook are able to be targeted at individuals’ preferences as a result of the company’s pervasive tracking and profiling of Internet users. And ethical concerns about microtargeting led the UK’s data protection watchdog to call in 2018 for a pause on the use of digital ad tools like Facebook by political campaigns — warning of grave risks to democracy.

Facebook’s algorithms also demonstrably select for maximum eyeball engagement, making it simply the ‘smart choice’ for the modern digitally campaigning politician to run outrageous BS on Facebook — as long time Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth recently pointed out in an internal posting that leaked in full to the NYT.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s defence of his social network’s political ads policy boils down to repeatedly claiming ‘it’s all free speech man’ (we paraphrase).

In a blog post attributed to its director of product management, Rob Leathern, it expends more than 1,000 words on why it’s still not banning political ads (it would be bad for advertisers wanting to reaching “key audiences”, is the non-specific claim) — including making a diversionary call for regulators to set ad standards, thereby passing the buck on ‘democratic accountability’ to lawmakers (whose electability might very well depend on how many Facebook ads they run…), while spinning cosmetic, made-for-PR tweaks to its ad settings and what’s displayed in an ad archive that most Facebook users will never have heard of as “expanded transparency” and “more control”.

In fact these tweaks do nothing to reform the fundamental problem of damaging defaults.

The onus remains on Facebook users to do the leg work on understanding what its platform is pushing at their eyeballs and why.

Even as the ‘extra’ info now being drip-fed to the Ad Library is still highly fuzzy (“We are adding ranges for Potential Reach, which is the estimated target audience size for each political, electoral or social issue ad so you can see how many people an advertiser wanted to reach with every ad,” as Facebook writes of one tweak.)

The new controls similarly require users to delve into complex settings menus in order to avail themselves of inherently incremental limits — such as an option that will let people opt into seeing “fewer” political and social issue ads. (Fewer is naturally relative, ergo the scale of the reduction remains entirely within Facebook’s control — so it’s more meaningless ‘control theatre’ from the lord of dark pattern design. Why can’t people switch off political and issue ads entirely?)

Another incremental setting lets users “stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience from a list”.

But just imagine trying to explain WTF that means to your parents or grandparents — let alone an average Internet user actually being able to track down the ‘control’ and exercise any meaningful agency over the political junk ads they’re being exposed to on Facebook.

It is, to quote Baron Cohen, “bullshit”.

Nothing in what Facebook has announced today resets the anti-democratic asymmetry inherent in the platform’s relationship to its users.

Facebook users — and democratic societies — remain, by default, preyed upon by self-interested political interests thanks to Facebook’s policies which are dressed up in a self-interested misappropriation of ‘free speech’ as a cloak for its unfettered exploitation of individual attention as fuel for a propaganda-as-service business.

Yet other policy positions are available.

Still Facebook prefers to exploit “the absence of regulation”, as its blog post puts it, to not do the right thing and keep sticking two fingers up at democratic accountability — because not applying limits on behavioral advertising best serves its business interests. Screw democracy.

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computer-basics · 4 years

Link

It’s 2020 — a key election year in the US — and Facebook is doubling down on its policy of letting people pay it to fuck around with democracy.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s defence of his social network’s political ads policy boils down to repeatedly claiming ‘it’s all free speech man’ (we paraphrase).

In a blog post attributed to its director of product management, Rob Leathern, it expends more than 1,000 words on why it’s still not banning political ads (it would be bad for advertisers wanting to reaching “key audiences”, is the non-specific claim) — including making a diversionary call for regulators to set ad standards, thereby passing the buck on ‘democratic accountability’ to lawmakers (whose electability might very well depend on how many Facebook ads they run…), while spinning cosmetic, made-for-PR tweaks to its ad settings and what’s displayed in an ad archive that most Facebook users will never have heard of as “expanded transparency” and “more control”.

In fact these tweaks do nothing to reform the fundamental problem of damaging defaults.

The onus remains on Facebook users to do the leg work on understanding what its platform is pushing at their eyeballs and why.

The new controls similarly require users to delve into complex settings menus in order to avail themselves of inherently incremental limits — such as an option that will let people opt into seeing “fewer” political and social issue ads. (Fewer is naturally relative, ergo the scale of the reduction remains entirely within Facebook’s control — so it’s more meaningless ‘control theatre’ from the lord of dark pattern design. Why can’t people switch off political and issue ads entirely?)

Another incremental setting lets users “stop seeing ads based on an advertiser’s Custom Audience from a list”.

It is, to quote Baron Cohen, “bullshit”.

Nothing in what Facebook has announced today resets the anti-democratic asymmetry inherent in the platform’s relationship to its users.

Facebook users — and democratic societies — remain, by default, preyed upon by self-interested political interests thanks to Facebook’s policies which are dressed up in a self-interested misappropriation of ‘free speech’ as a cloak for its unfettered exploitation of individual attention as fuel for a propaganda-as-service business.

Yet other policy positions are available.

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/302YfGS via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

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sualkmedeiors · 5 years

Text

How to Strike a Balance Between Relying on AI and Emphasizing a Human Touch

AI to Scale

Creating a Balance Between AI and Humans

How can you balance AI technology with human interaction? Here are just three ways to achieve that goal.

Create a mix of technology and humanity.

Important decisions still require a human touch.

Trust in the power of intuition.

The post How to Strike a Balance Between Relying on AI and Emphasizing a Human Touch appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from https://blog.marketo.com/2019/04/how-to-strike-a-balance-between-relying-on-ai-and-emphasizing-a-human-touch.html

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anthonykrierion · 4 years

Text

10 SEO Horror Stories: Scary Tales from SEOs

It’s that time of the year where people in costumes roam the streets, children can eat candy all they want, and creepy tales are told all over the world. But of course, it’s not just about ghosts and monsters. Us SEOs have our own “Halloween” moments that give us scares and nightmares.

I asked SEOs on Reddit to share their SEO horror stories and it was a ride reading all of them. While some are relatable, some are horrible, right out of an SEO’s darkest fears. Check out these stories from the folks at r/SEO.

The Website Redesign

Mass Noindex

Bad Sales

The Classic Panda Update

Ajax Murder

SEO Karma

Yellow Pages

The Lovely Visitors

Banned from Facebook

Forgotten Landing Pages

The Website Redesign

From Reddit user: Obio1

“SEO Horror story” is another way of saying “website redesign”. Right?

A website redesign should not be as scary as it sounds, but in the wrong hands, it can lead to an absolute disaster. The SEO and website developer should always be aligned when a website is undergoing a redesign. You would never want a beautiful website with no visitors.

Mass Noindex

From Reddit user: imdblars (Lars from Damgaard Digital)

I had a client whose web developer noindexed the site when updating and developing new stuff. First time I experienced this the rankings were like the red wedding episode of Game of Thrones.”

Noindex is your best friend if you want to keep unimportant pages from the search results but putting noindex in the whole website? That is just a horrible misuse of it.

Bad Sales

From Reddit user: thedecanus (Dean from Daysack Media)

My old boss sold local SEO to 3 different skip hire companies all within spitting distance from each other. They were all from the traveler community so as not to be messed with by any means. We got all three businesses to the top of the SERP’s but 2nd and 3rd place used to call up complaining Long story short, one company (#3) found out, threatened us, told #2 and they both drove over 200 miles to our offices with baseball bats.

Lucky, that got resolved without any violence – the two companies stopped using us and I’m pretty sure the guy at #1 never found out.

I have met a lot of SEOs who take clients that are direct competitors with each other and 100% it turns into a disaster. Just don’t do it.

The Classic Panda Update

From Reddit user: kris99 (Krzysztof from Pulno)

One of the sites I was a co-developer dozen years ago was in the top 20 domains hit by Panda/Farmer update and lost 90% of its visibility in one day. As I remember it was a loss over 100k unique users a day.

This one is a real classic. I remember when it was initially released back in 2011. Thousands of websites had the same experience as this losing a huge amount of traffic overnight. Definitely not a good memory.

Ajax Murder

From Reddit user: Ann_Yaroshenko (Ann from Jet Octopus)

AJAX allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging data with a web server. This means that it is possible to load parts of a web page without reloading the whole page. Despite Google engineers have significantly improved rendering of JavaScript for Googlebot, AJAX got its bad SEO reputation.

About the website:

Real-estate website 1M+ pages 4,5 M monthly visits

What was done?

We analyzed log files to see where the crawl budget was spent. Logs showed that Googlebot sent 38 M requests during the month. 23,5M (!) requests were wasted on ajax content.

What recommendation we gave:

1. Check content that is provided on AJAX and evaluate whether it is worth being shown in SERP.

2. Close content that provides no value in robots.txt for Googlebot.

Key takeaway

Before closing AJAX content in robots.txt, consider carefully what content is there. You can accidentally block the part of your webpage and the content can become meaningless for bots

This one is quite technical but it’s terrifying and it’s a story you can learn from. When you have a website with a million pages or thousands of pages, you would want to have that crawl budget spent on important pages.

SEO Karma

From Reddit user: milosmudric (Milos from SEO Brainiac)

Were hired by a client, we managed to rank him number one in the country for one of the most expensive services and two not so expensive. Somehow we had an insider information that they had around 2 sales per month for this expensive service and after our campaign, they had 4-6. So they definitely had the ROI after a couple of months, but they were not satisfied, so they fired us and hired another agency (They didn’t even know about Analytics, and they were looking me like I’m ghost when I told them that they must have had more calls for those 3 services. They couldn’t believe I knew…). So, the new company suggested redesign (probably because that was the only thing they knew how to do), Totally changed the content, all the page elements, without any redirection, etc. They lost all their rankings and traffic.

Still, for me, it was more a comedy than horror :)

This one is also a classic. An impatient client who switched to a different agency and totally messed up. Karma strikes fast in the SEO world.

Yellow Pages

From Reddit user: emuwannabe (Rob from Purpose Driven Promotion)

They poach clients with unrealistic promises and never deliver.

I’ve won back a few clients from them over the years. In fact, I just got another back this month after being away for about 12 months. HE spent about $300/month and you know what he got for it? A placeholder page that says “future home of BUSINESS NAME” he’s almost broke now – hasn’t had a new client in months he told me.

BUT he’s willing to come back to me because he knows I can deliver. He was all over page 1 for dozens of searches – many in top 3. All that went away with YP

This is more of a redemption story, but SEOs look at businesses that pay a huge amount of money for directories with horror. Luckily for them, we SEOs are here to help.

The Lovely Visitors (Fictional)

From Reddit user: AtomicMandark

I’m on google analytics, checking my website’s traffic. Even if it only has a few people visiting it, I’m really happy that my website has visitors. But there’s one weird thing I’ve noticed – 1 new user is added every week. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I allot time every week to go out and try to meet at least 1 person that’s willing to listen to me ramble on about my website.

This has been happening around a year now. Ever since I settled in my house, I always kept up my habit of going out every week. And historically speaking, the 1 additional user every week hasn’t stopped.

I found a way to check where the users are coming from. I won’t go into detail how I found out, but I’m gonna do it right now…

That’s weird.

Most of my site’s traffic comes from the same place… It’s my house. But I shouldn’t be considered as a new user since I’ve always visited my site. Is someone breaking into my house every week just to check my website? That’s absurd.

That’s why I checked what my CCTVs recorded

The hallway camera is broken? It doesn’t matter. There’s only one room at the end of the hallway – my basement.

Here’s the thing, the basement is where I take the people I meet every week. Once they wake up as I cut into their bodies… I tell them the story of how I created my website from scratch. I can’t help it. I’m so proud of my website and I want more people to know. It doesn’t help that they scream every time I tell my story. Cutting off their tongues doesn’t seem to shut them up. But at least I got to tell them my story.

They were all so lovely. But they always died while I told them my story. They couldn’t be the visitors, right? That’s impossible. But if they are… I guess telling them my story worked.

This one is fictional but I love the creativity in the story, it was a roller coaster ride. Pageviews from the dead? No thanks.

Banned from Facebook

From Reddit user: hanouaj

Kept posting links to my website in many Facebook groups until Facebook completely banned the posting of any link to my website in whole Facebook.

Social media is one of the easiest ways for websites to get their name out there. For most new websites, it’s their main source of traffic. Getting your domain completely banned from the biggest social media platform in the world is just pure terror.

Forgotten Landing Pages

From Reddit user: lalapranpriya

A client had an epiphany that it would be fun to delete all the landing pages of the site. When we asked their development team about it, they suddenly had selective amnesia.

Landing pages are critical for any SEO campaign. Having a disconnect between SEOs and web developers is already scary but deleting the landing pages from existence? What a nightmare.

Key Takeaway

All SEOs have their own stories on the horrifying experiences they’ve had whether it’s a broad core algorithm, bad links, and penalties. We all can relate to them. At the end of the day, these horror stories give us valuable lessons that can further improve our work as SEO professionals.

Do you have an interesting story to tell? Leave a comment below and share it with us!

10 SEO Horror Stories: Scary Tales from SEOs was originally posted by Video And Blog Marketing

#Video And Blog Marketing

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