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wrongfullythinking · 3 years

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Twitter and the “Public Forum”

There is a very large looming legal question about whether or not social media sites, such as Twitter, are “Public Forums.” Most would agree that they are not... at least... not yet. But the question is... should they be?

First, a look into why it matters.

In a public forum, all First Amendment protections apply. So you can say any number of very objectionable things (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12634874511090553174) and be protected. In a private forum, this is not so. I can kick you out of my house for wearing an Abercrombie shirt, and you have no Free Speech/Expression reason to contest my staggeringly good decision-making.

Second, the public forum cannot be policed for any content that may be stated. This is why if you go to reserve time at a public park, you don’t have to tell the Parks and Rec department what your event is for. Just things like how many people, how long the event will last, etc. This is well-established and well-backed by many years of precedent.

Finally, there is the very serious matter of personal liability. In certain circumstances, officials can be held personally liable if their policies deliberately and knowingly infringe upon Bill of Rights protections (most often First Amendment protections). This means that you could literally sue for the property and assets of a person. (Also, this is why those of us who own either physical property [like a house] or intellectual property [like a book] buy “Umbrella Coverage” from insurances... I recommend State Farm, but that’s totally irrelevant and I’m not getting any kickbacks for that shill =P.)

But hang on... so if the government owns a billboard and rents it out to whomever can pay, can I rent it and post a naked lady?

You could try, and you might win! What you can’t do is post something obscene. And yes, whether or not a naked person is obscene is staggeringly controversial. There’s a 3-part test from the Burger court, a host of vague terms like “average person” and “contemporary community standards,” and “lacks serious artistic/literary/political/scientific value.” And then there are protections for children, a whole separate piece, as well as child pornography, which is always classified as obscene... except when it is not, like in the cases of naked cherubs in church windows. So, confused yet? We’re off topic, but I make this point to explain that even in public forums, where First Amendment rights are fiercely protected, there are still outstanding issues of content censorship.

So, is Twitter / Facebook / Tumblr a public forum?

At this point, the answer is no. They are privately controlled by companies, not owned by the feds or states or local municipalities, and thus can make almost any policy they want. The idea here is that the free market dictates the life or death of these platforms... and that idea tends to hold true! Tumblr itself is a good case-in-point, because it has lost millions of dollars in value due to bad leadership decisions, and at least partially because of censorship. There are countless examples of others... I remember when Yahoo! was the primary search engine of the internet and Xanga was the biggest blogging platform. While you can still Yahoo, I’m not sure there are more than a few hundred people on Xanga, if it still exists in any useful format. So, since places like this are subject to the free market, and thus can die... they should be allowed to make all the good or bad decisions they want about their content. Or at least, that is how the theory runs.

But really... ARE they subject to the market? Now we’re getting into the really interesting territory. If Facebook shut down tomorrow, would it be a problem? Maybe, but life would continue. But if Google shut down tomorrow? Well, millions of schoolchildren are in GoogleClassrooms right now, so that would certainly be a problem. It would at least cause massive disruption... and Facebook shutting down would cause some disruption. Likewise, Twitter controls so much speech that instead of publishing headlines from Newspapers, newspapers publish headlines from Twitter! The 14-year-old looks at that line like “well, duh” and the 44-year old reads that line like “wow, we’ve come a long way,” and the 84-year-old reads that line with just a sad headshake.

So, now we’ve joined one of the most controversial points of the last 20 years... the Fannie Mae “Too Big to Fail” problem. Basically, a set of banks and big mortgage companies (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) made a bunch of bad decisions in about 1995 - 2008. [As an aside, whether or not Fannie Mae {technically, the “Federal National Mortgage Association”} is actually a company comes up as an issue... it originated as a government program, but is today a publicly-traded company and has been since the late 60s, though it was delisted from NYSE and is only traded off-exchange]. And the government had to step in. You can read all about that issue at another time, the bottom line is that actually Fannie Mae has paid back more than it borrowed, but there was a ballooning of the debt ceiling by over 800 billion. Some people care about the national debt, some don’t, and again, not the subject of this commentary. The point is that it set a very odd precedent, whereas a company could make extremely bad decisions and then the burden would be placed on the taxpayers to fix their decision, because the company itself was a part of so many people’s lives. Would social media fall under this guidance? Unlikely, and I think we would all run from state-sponsored social media... but hey, what do I know.

So... get to the point. Should they be public forums, or not?

My two cents always comes down against censorship, especially censorship by entities that don’t have my best interests at heart... so basically, everybody else. I think that it is so easy to self-censor the internet at the personal end (for example, by installing filters and blocking services for objectionable content), that companies should not be unilaterally making these decisions, especially if those companies want to be venues for mass public communication.

Let’s go with another example... let’s say you wanted to call up your buddy and have a nice long phonesex session. Good for you. Or just chat with them about the latest Dr. Doe video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXgT8WXaPUY), because enthusiasm is important. Would you be okay with Verizon telling a robot to monitor your call, and then automatically hang up if you said “penis” too much? Or “Trump”? Or “Black Lives Matter?” What about “Nazi,” “Rohypnol,” “Mary Jane,” “negritos” [I’ve got your back, Mr. Cavani], “snowbunny,” or “Insane Clown Posse”? I think most people would be upset about any of those, and they would rightfully tell Verizon that they will find another provider. So Verizon doesn’t do that, although it could. But Twitter does do that. And the availability of another Twitter is in question. Will something succeed Twitter? Absolutely. But right now, Twitter is under no market pressure, so it is succeeding at taking off its platform any number of conversations that it probably should not be policing.

There’s also a social-justice side of this. So, let’s say that we all decide Twitter is a bad platform and move to something else. And that something else costs us 10$ a month. I wouldn’t notice this fee. Others would. So that’s an access issue. Or, let’s say that some people start migrating to a new platform, and they only tell their friends about it. That’s okay, right? Absolutely... but imagine that college student who is trapped at home in a pandemic right now who cannot get any viewpoints outside of what her parents approved of, and previously used Twitter to explore and challenge her upbringing. If she doesn’t get an invite to the new platform, is she just lost?

And that brings up the Pandemic. Many, many common public forums have been shut down due to the pandemic. This alone has caused serious controversy (see: BLM protests on crowded streets where state governors participated, while those same governors implemented executive orders enforcing 6-foot distancing in churches and stores), so the argument for Twitter censorship “but you have many other public forums!” is tough to substantiate during the COVID-era. And this is a HUGE problem. Historically, taking away public forums is always an early move of totalitarian regimes. Taking away rights to assembly and speech follows soon after. We’re now in Phase 2 there... and our governors keep assuring us it is temporary... while at the same time, encouraging Twitter to take off any viewpoints they don’t like, under the guise of “false or misleading information.” Soon, they start moving into the schools, and that leads to...

SCIENCE!!!

So, to talk about what rigorous debate means, we need to understand a bit about Science. And specifically, the philosophy of science, what scientific discourse looks like, and why review and critique are parts of the scientific process.

Point 1: “Scientific consensus” is hogwash. Yes, we all agree that the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun itself moves, but beyond that, there isn’t much scientific consensus. If you see an article that starts with the phrase “Expert say,” you can go ahead and close your browser window right there. The rest is bull****.

Point 2: The limits of science are boundless. Any specific scientific paper is, by necessity and the peer review process, very strictly bounded. “Whether or not a vaccine is efficient” is an entirely different paper than one titled “Whether or not 80-year-olds with lung cancer should get the vaccine,” and both of those are different than “How the US should achieve herd immunity, and if it is even possible for COVID-19 before significant mutations cause current immunizations to be ineffective,” and all three of those are different from “Do we need to vaccinate our cats from COVID in order to reach herd immunity?”

Point 3: There is no “finalized” science. The answers are never finished. What is “cutting edge” science today is out-of-date tomorrow, barbaric and backwards by the end of the year, and grounds for an abuse lawsuit by the end of the decade. The best examples of this are from Psych treatments.

Point 4: I get very worried when anybody starts to censor scientific content... especially those without any qualifications. Okay, so this one is a personal sentence (note the “I”), but I’m going to go ahead and guess that Twitter robots and interns flagging posts don’t have any idea the difference between sensitivity and specificity, the background as to why the FDA has never approved an mRNA vaccine previously, the difference between statistical and clinical significance, and how to read a limitations section. The people who are qualified to do so are peer reviewers... and in the case where those fail (which happens!), the rest of the writer’s peers. And we do that. Anything published is open to critique, which leads to the final point, that...

Point 5: Critique and Review are THE MOST IMPORTANT PARTS of scientific publishing. If a piece is published without review, it is called an “opinion” and not science. Even more worrisome than the censoring of unpopular papers is the censoring of the opinions of scientists on the papers of their peers. Should someone publish a paper where I believe they overstretched their claims, it is a HUGE part of my job to call that out. For an agency like Twitter to be able to say “you don’t have the right to say that they overstated their claim, because expressing a concern about a vaccine is against our Terms of Use” is a very big problem for science.

The flipside is that you get into the part where now a company can, through its policy, dictate what science gets done. For example, lets say I wanted to examine an unpopular question... and I’m a social scientist, so there are plenty of those, but say I wanted to do something semi-controversial but apolitical. I’ll say my research question is “How do the happiness of those in committed multi-year polyamorous relationships compare to the happiness of people in similar economic and social situations but in closed marriages where additional intimate partnerships would be viewed as grounds for relationship termination?” There are plenty of ways I could conduct this study and I’ll spare you my methodological musings, but safe to say there are platforms who would not want me to publish my results. And that’s fine.

But let’s say that I did publish my results, and a commenter took to Twitter. And their response was “I read your paper, and I see your conclusion that those in committed multi-year polyamorous relationships score no differently on a happiness scale than those in the closed marriages. However, I disagree with your use of this scale, because it was tested on populations of retirees, and most of the people in your sample are in their late 20s or early 30s.”

That is an EXCELLENT and VALID critique. And let’s say that Twitter was heavily into the social justice and had a policy that said “you can’t say negative things about polyamory.” And they deleted this person’s comment. Now, Twitter has interfered with the scientific process. That comment IS PART of the dialogue and that dialogue is part of Science. Yes, there are other places that those comments could be made, and not be censored... but we should not be encouraging that censorship ANYWHERE. And Twitter has vastly overstepped the line on this point. Random Twitter employees have no business removing professional critiques about a study, even if there are other platforms for those critiques.

Other Thoughts

1) Generally, you can’t prohibit meetings in a public forum based on prior behavior. Thus, “X group was violent in the past” is not a reason to prohibit X group from accessing a public forum for speech. So there’s no saying “Proud Boys were violent once, so no Proud Boys on Twitter” if it were to be declared a public forum.

2) I’m really not aware of any large precedents for taking a private company and declaring it a public forum. That may seem redundant (obviously, if there was precedent, this wouldn’t be such a hot-button issue), but it bears specific mention.

#twitter #public forum #legal #science

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sciencenewsforstudents · 5 years

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A week after two large earthquakes rattled southern California, scientists are scrambling to understand the sequence of events that led to the temblors and what it might tell us about future quakes.

A magnitude 6.4 quake struck July 4 near Ridgecrest — about 194 kilometers northeast of Los Angeles — followed by a magnitude 7.1 quake in the same region on July 5. Both quakes occurred not along the famous San Andreas Fault but in a region of crisscrossing faults in the state’s high desert area, known as the Eastern California Shear Zone.

The San Andreas Fault system, which stretches nearly 1,300 kilometers, generally takes center stage when it comes to California’s earthquake activity. That’s where, as the Pacific tectonic plate and the North American tectonic plate slowly grind past each other, sections of ground can lock together for a time, slowly building up strain until they suddenly release, producing powerful quakes.

For the last few tens of millions of years, the San Andreas has been the primary origin of massive earthquakes in the region. Now overdue for a massive earthquake, based on historical precedent, many people fear it’s only a matter of time before the “Big One” strikes.

But as the July 4 and July 5 quakes — and their many aftershocks — show, the San Andreas Fault system isn’t the only source of concern. The state is riddled with faults, says geophysicist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif. That’s because almost all of California is part of the general boundary between the plates. The Eastern California Shear Zone alone has been the source of several large quakes in the last few decades, including the magnitude 7.1 Hector Mine quake in 1999, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994 and the magnitude 7.3 Landers quake in 1992 (SN Online: 8/29/18).

Here are three questions scientists are trying to answer in the wake of the most recent quakes.

Which faults ruptured, and how?

The quakes appear to have occurred along previously unmapped faults within a part of the Eastern California Shear Zone known as the Little Lake Fault Zone, a broad bunch of cracks difficult to map, Hough says. “It’s not like the San Andreas, where you can go out and put your hand on a single fault,” she says. And, she adds, the zone also lies within a U.S. Navy base that isn’t generally accessible to geologists for mapping.

But preliminary data do offer some clues. The data suggest that the first rupture may actually have been a twofer: Instead of one fault rupturing, two connected faults, called conjugate faults, may have ruptured nearly simultaneously, producing the initial magnitude 6.4 quake.

It’s possible that the first quake didn’t fully release the strain on that fault, but the second, larger quake did. “My guess is that they will turn out to be complementary,” Hough says.

The jury is still out, though, says Wendy Bohon, a geologist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Washington, D.C. “What parts of the fault broke, and whether a part of the fault broke twice … I’m waiting to see what the scientific consensus is on that.”

And whether a simultaneous rupture of a conjugate fault is surprising, or may actually be common, isn’t yet clear, she says. “In nature, we see a lot of conjugate fault pairs. I don’t think they normally rupture at the same time — or maybe they do, and we haven’t had enough data to see that.”

Is the center of tectonic action moving away from the San Andreas Fault?

GPS data have revealed exactly how the ground is shifting in California as the giant tectonic plates slide past one another. The San Andreas Fault system bears the brunt of the strain, about 70 percent, those data show. But the Eastern California Shear Zone bears the other 30 percent. And the large quakes witnessed in that region over the last few decades raise a tantalizing possibility, Hough says: We may be witnessing the birth pangs of a new boundary.

“The plate boundary system has been evolving for a long time already,” Hough says. For the last 30 million years or so, the San Andreas Fault system has been the primary locus of action. But just north of Santa Barbara lies the “big bend,” a kink that separates the northern from the southern portion of the fault system. Where the fault bends, the Pacific and North American plates aren’t sliding sideways past one another but colliding.

“The plates are trying to move, but the San Andreas is actually not well aligned with that motion,” she says. But the Eastern California Shear Zone is. And, Hough says, there’s some speculation that it’s a new plate boundary in the making. “But it would happen over millions of years,” she adds. “It’s not going to be in anyone’s lifetime.”

Will these quakes trigger the Big One on the San Andreas?

Such large quakes inevitably raise these fears. Historically, the San Andreas Fault system has produced a massive quake about every 150 years ago. But “for whatever reason, it has been pretty quiet in the San Andreas since 1906,” when an estimated magnitude 7.9 quake along the northern portion of the fault devastated San Francisco, Hough says. And the southern portion of San Andreas is even more overdue for a massive quake; its last major event was the estimated magnitude 7.9 Fort Tejon quake in 1857, she says.

The recent quakes aren’t likely to change that situation. Subsurface shifting from a large earthquake can affect strain on nearby faults. But it’s unlikely that the quakes either relieved stress or will ultimately trigger another earthquake along the San Andreas Fault system, essentially because they were too far away, Hough says. “The disruption [from one earthquake] of other faults decreases really quickly with distance,” she says (SN Online: 3/28/11).

Some preliminary data do suggest that the magnitude 7.1 earthquake produced some slippage, also known as creep, along at least one shallow fault in the southern part of the San Andreas system. But such slow, shallow slips don’t produce earthquakes, Hough says.

However, the quakes could have more significantly perturbed much closer faults, such as the Garlock Fault, which runs roughly west to east along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. That’s not unprecedented: The 1992 Landers quake may have triggered a magnitude 5.7 quake two weeks later along the Garlock Fault.

“Generations of graduate students are going to be studying these events — the geometry of the faults, how the ground moved,” even how the visible evidence of the rupture, scarring the land surface, erodes over time and obscures its traces, Bohon says.

At the moment, scientists are eagerly trading ideas on social media sites. “It’s the equivalent of listening in on scientists shouting down the hallway: ‘Here’s my data — what do you have?’ ” she says. Those preliminary ideas and explanations will almost certainly evolve as more information comes in, she adds. “It’s early days yet.”

#science #scied #sciblr #quakes #seismology #San Andreas

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jbuffyangel · 6 years

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I questioned whether or not I was going to type anything up about the Timeless cancellation, but since I had been posting about it while we waited for news I thought it’d be a little weird if I didn’t respond to NBC finally making a damn decision.

I’m going to preface this by saying this is not a “Ra-ra let’s save our show!” post and if that’s the frame of mind you’re in then it’s probably better to bypass this one. I just need to purge my thoughts because this show’s fate has consumed my brain for too long. I’m hoping some of this will comfort some fans, but I also recognize that I’ll probably tick some people off too.

This sucks. Plain and simple. I am so sorry Clockblockers. This one hurts and I know so many of you worked tirelessly on Twitter tweeting your support for the show. I don’t want anyone to think the reason Timeless didn’t get renewed is because the fandom didn’t do enough or there wasn’t enough fan support online. That’s not what happened. Fans did absolutely everything they could and, in my opinion, went above and beyond for this show.

I know networks love to say “fans saved the show” but one of my problems with that statement is implies it’s somehow the fans’ fault if a show is not “saved.”

This always boils down to money. I know many of you are probably thinking “duh” right now and I also recognize that attitude sounds very cynical. But the thing is... I am very cynical about this particular topic.

Networks enjoy looking like the fairy godmother when they choose to renew bubble shows or pick up cancelled ones and always credit the fans for saving it. It sounds better than “We can still make money off this show.” And sure, fans do have impact. Social media does have impact. Buzz matters. To deny that is silly and ignores the evolving way a show’s success is measured. That said, I firmly believe fan support is seldom, if ever, the deciding factor. Networks do not renew unprofitable shows because fans like it or are vocal online. There is no difference between Timeless fans, Brooklyn 99 fans or Lucifer fans. In my opinion, Timeless had the most vocal and longest running campaign. And yet here we are. But don’t feel bad Clockblockers. This wasn’t in our control. It’s not our fault.

Am I mad? Eh. Not really. It’s more sad for me at this point. I was so fed up with the never ending vortex of NBC’s indecision that I’m almost relieved we are out of it. Why do I think it took so long? I do think NBC and Sony were trying to make a deal. I don’t think they were at the table every day, but I want to believe the back and forth was ongoing until the decision was made. I also think Sony and creators were trying to make deals with other networks or streaming companies. I also think NBC was trying to wait out fans and let the roar of support die down online. #dicks

One of my frustrations with the Timeless renewal last year was I felt the announcement and subsequent story surrounding the renewal was a lot of PR fluff. It was a great story saying fans saved the show in three days, but what didn’t get reported on very much at the time is that after NBC canceled Timeless, Sony came back to the table with a very big check. Sony owned Timeless and NBC paid a licensing fee to air it. In order to secure a second season, Sony gave NBC 50% ownership of Timeless. Then, they cut production costs by A LOT and the show benefited from a land tax credit. That’s how the show was made profitable again. That’s how NBC and Sony made the deal last year.

I feel like I read somewhere that NBC’s 50% of the profits was advertising, while Sony’s piece of the pie was streaming rights and international sales. Don’t quote me on that though. I’ve been researching and reading on Timeless for a loooong time, primarily because this stuff interests me, but articles are starting to muddle together. However, if that is accurate, that could explain why NBC was so focused on live ratings.

Yes, I know the Nielson system is archaic, but it’s the system we got. The Big Four are becoming less dependent on advertising for profits because people are not watching as much live TV anymore. Everyone has had to branch out and find other ways to make money (Hello streaming). However, live ratings still determine ad buy rates and advertising is still the primary source of income for network television. (I do not include the CW in this. They have a different business model.) When a show drops 40% in live ratings it means the network cannot charge Tide as much to air a commercial. This makes the show less profitable and renewal less likely. It is always about the money. Again, I’m sure many of you are saying “duh” but I appreciate you allowing me to purge.

Not that NBC did much to help Timeless succeed their second season. They put a family friendly show on at 9c/10 pm on Sunday night. There was a long break in between Season 1 and Season 2. NBC did very little to promote Timeless’ return and that continued while the show aired. So, it’s not all that shocking ratings dropped another 40%. I wouldn’t be surprised if 40% of the audience didn’t even know the damn show was on again. I don’t know why networks set up their own shows to fail, but they do. And by networks I mean NBC and Fox.

Networks are also moving away from airing shows owned by other networks. The predominant trend is to air shows produced in house. NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox all have their own production studios. Sony has their own production studio but they don’t have a network to air their shows. So, Sony is struggling to sell shows right now. A lot of their pilots were not picked up for the 2018-2019 season. There’s a lot of factors I’m sure, but I think licensing fees are at play. People aren’t watching live TV as much anymore and therefore networks are not able to charge advertisers as much. If the profitability potential is less from the outset then networks want a bigger piece of the pie. So, instead of paying extremely expensive licensing fees they are simply airing shows they own. This is just my theory. My point is simply Timeless had an uphill battle that wasn’t necessarily all about ratings.

I’ve been seeing a lot of comparisons between the shows that were renewed or “saved” versus the ones that were cancelled. I think this is always a slippery slope because these are not apples to apples comparisons. The one I am hearing a lot about is Brooklyn 99, so I’ll just quick toss out my thoughts on that. Brooklyn 99 aired on Fox, but NBC owned the show. NBC sold Brooklyn 99 to Fox before Andy Samberg (their big SNL star) joined the pilot. Greenblatt said he regretted letting the show get away. So, the way I look at it Brooklyn 99 was never canceled. NBC was going to pick it up. They were just waiting to pounce.

Do I think Timeless will get picked up by another network or streaming company like Netflix or Hulu? I was very hopeful of that while we waited to hear on NBC’s decision. To be honest, I’ve always thought Timeless would be a better fit on Amazon or maybe even the History Channel. It works great as short episode series similar to The High Castle (which airs on Amazon). Hulu also owned the streaming rights to Timeless, so I thought it’d be an easy pick up for them too.

Yeah. I was wrong. I have very little hope of that now. The biggest shock to me wasn’t Timeless’ cancellation. I was anticipating that. The biggest shock was the talk of the two hour movie by Kripke and cast. It seems the two hour movie is Timeless’ best bet, which means the creators and Sony have already reached out to other networks and streaming sites like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix and were turned down. Even the movie sounds like a long shot.

Sony and the creators are encouraging fans to campaign again only to direct their efforts at Hulu and Netflix now.

Yeah, this annoyed me. It’s not like the Clockblockers’ efforts were secret while they campaigned loudly at NBC to pick up the show. Hulu and Netflix can see the online chatter just like everyone else. If the fan enthusiasm wasn’t “enough” to convince them Timeless is worth picking up, I don’t understand how tweets directed at Hulu and Netflix are suddenly going to change their mind. This is the disingenuous part of the “fans can save the show” for me. Whatever numbers Hulu and Netflix had is what made them pass on show. It sucks but it is what it is.

Before anyone starts yelling “Yeah but what about Lucifer?” at me - I don’t know what numbers these streaming companies look at. However, Netflix already has a deal with the WB which owns Lucifer. My bigger point is, Kripke wouldn’t be talking a two hour movie if the streaming company options hadn’t already been exhausted.

Would I love to be wrong? YES. Maybe they are trying to keep the buzz going to get the two hour movie made, but again I don’t think “buzz” will be the deciding factor with that either. Maybe the streaming websites left the door open and the creators & Sony are trying to capitalize on it. I don’t know. But at this point I am tired of seeing these people get the fans’ hopes up by selling this illusion of control. There’s very little in fans’ control. Yes, I acknowledge again this sounds cynical but I’ve danced this dance too many times. I’m old, tired and cynical about this process. I’m okay with it. If you are not - FANTASTIC. Do your thing. This isn’t a post telling fans to stop campaigning. This is just me... venting.

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with the quality of Timeless. It was a great show. It checked off so many boxes. Funny, socially aware and relevant, amazing cast chemistry, wonderful ships (no matter which one you loved), historically accurate and informative (you LEARNED watching this show), emotional and so much more. I wanted more seasons.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that we get a movie because I HATE when shows end on a cliffhanger. There should be a law against writing cliffhangers for shows on the bubble. The writers always think the cliffhanger will stop the executives at the network from canceling the show and it never does.

Alright enough ranting. Whatever the business reasons or factors that went into this decision in the end it doesn’t really matter. It still sucks. But I guess the way I’m looking at all of this is Season 2 was a bonus for me and I’m thrilled we got it. Timeless was an amazing show that I will miss and it will join the long list of shows I have loved and were canceled long before they should have been. Mostly I’m just thankful to the cast and crew for the many hours of entertainment.

#timeless #timeless renewal #timeless meta #nbc #ratings #ratings meta #clockblockers #timeless fandom

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forlawfirmsonlymarketing · 4 years

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Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Negative SEO can hurt your website and your work in search, even when your rankings are unaffected by it. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, search expert Russ Jones dives into what negative SEO is, what it can affect beyond rankings, and tips on how to fight it.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

All right, folks. Russ Jones here and I am so excited just to have the opportunity to do any kind of presentation with the title "Defense Against the Dark Arts." I'm not going to pretend like I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but anyway, this is just going to be fun. But what I want to talk about today is actually pretty bad. It's the reality that negative SEO, even if it is completely ineffective at doing its primary goal, which is to knock your website out of the rankings, will still play havoc on your website and the likelihood that you or your customers will be able to make correct decisions in the future and improve your rankings. Today I'm going to talk about why negative SEO still matters even if your rankings are unaffected, and then I'm going to talk about a couple of techniques that you can use that will help abate some of the negative SEO techniques and also potentially make it so that whoever is attacking you gets hurt a little bit in the process, maybe. Let's talk a little bit about negative SEO.

What is negative SEO?

The most common form of negative SEO is someone who would go out and purchase tens of thousands of spammy links or hundreds of thousands even, using all sorts of different software, and point them to your site with the hope of what we used to call "Google bowling," which is to knock you out of the search results the same way you would knock down a pin with a bowling ball. The hope is that it's sort of like a false flag campaign, that Google thinks that you went out and got all of those spammy links to try to improve your rankings, and now Google has caught you and so you're penalized. But in reality, it was someone else who acquired those links. Now to their credit, Google actually has done a pretty good job of ignoring those types of links. It's been my experience that, in most cases, negative SEO campaigns don't really affect rankings the way they're intended to in most cases, and I give a lot of caveats there because I've seen it be effective certainly. But in the majority of cases all of those spammy links are just ignored by Google. But that's not it. That's not the complete story.

Problem #1: Corrupt data

You see, the first problem is that if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, what's really going on in the background is that there's this corruption of data that's important to making decisions about search results.

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

For example, if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, it is going to push you over the limit of the number of links that Google Search Console will give back to you in the various reports about links.

Pushes out the good links

This means that in the second case there are probably links, that you should know about or care about, that don't show up in the report simply because Google cuts off at 100,000 total links in the export. Well, that's a big deal, because if you're trying to make decisions about how to improve your rankings and you can't get to the link data you need because it's been replaced with hundreds of thousands of spammy links, then you're not going to be able to make the right decision.

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it. You can get the data for more than 100,000 links pointing to your site. You're just going to have to pay for it. You could come to Moz and use our Link Explorer tool for example. But you'll have to increase the amount of money that you're spending in order to get access to the accounts that will actually deliver all of that data. The one big issue sitting behind all of this is that even though we know Google is ignoring most of these links, they don't label that for us in any kind of useful fashion. Even after we can get access to all of that link data, all of those hundreds of thousands of spammy links, we still can't be certain which ones matter and which ones don't.

Problem #2: Copied content

That's not the only type of negative SEO that there is out there. It's the most common by far, but there are other types. Another common type is to take the content that you have and distribute it across the web in the way that article syndication used to work. So if you're fairly new to SEO, one of the old methodologies of improving rankings was to write an article on your site, but then syndicate that article to a number of article websites and these sites would then post your article and that article would link back to you. Now the reason why these sites would do this is because they would hope that, in some cases, they would outrank your website and in doing so they would get some traffic and maybe earn some AdSense money. But for the most part, that kind of industry has died down because it hasn't been effective in quite some time. But once again, that's not the whole picture.

No attribution

If all of your content is being distributed to all of these other sites, even if it doesn't affect your rankings, it still means there's the possibility that somebody is getting access to your quality content without any kind of attribution whatsoever. If they've stripped out all of the links and stripped out all of the names and all of the bylines, then your hard earned work is actually getting taken advantage of, even if Google isn't really the arbiter anymore of whether or not traffic gets to that article.

Internal links become syndicated links

Then on the flip side of it, if they don't remove the attribution, all the various internal links that you had in that article in the first place that point to other pages on your site, those now become syndicated links, which are part of the link schemes that Google has historically gone after. In the same sort of situation, it's not really just about the intent behind the type of negative SEO campaign. It's the impact that it has on your data, because if somebody syndicates an article of yours that has let's say eight links to other internal pages and they syndicate it to 10,000 websites, well, then you've just got 80,000 new what should have been internal links, now external links pointing to your site. We actually do know just a couple of years back several pretty strong brands got in trouble for syndicating their news content to other news websites. Now I'm not saying that negative SEO would necessarily trigger that same sort of penalty, but there's the possibility. Even if it doesn't trigger that penalty, chances are it's going to sully the waters in terms of your link data.

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

For example, if you have any kind of user-generated content on your site, like let's say you have comments for example, even if you nofollow those comments, the links that are included in there might point to things like malware. We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

Unfortunately, in some cases, there are ways to make it look like there are links on your site that aren't really under your control through things like HTML injection. For example, you can actually do this to Google right now. You can inject HTML onto the page of part of their website that makes it look like they're linking to someone else. If Google actually crawled itself, which luckily they don't in this case, if they crawled that page and found that malware link, the whole domain in the Google search results would likely start to show that this site might not be safe. Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

All of this really boils down to this concept of FUD — fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You see it's not so much about bowling you out of the search engines. It's about making it so that SEO just isn't workable anymore.

1. Lose access to critical data

Now it's been at least a decade since everybody started saying that they used data-driven SEO tactics, data-driven SEO strategies. Well, if your data is corrupted, if you lose access to critical data, you will not be able to make smart decisions. How will you know whether or not the reason your page has lost rankings to another has anything to do with links if you can't get to the link data that you need because it's been filled with 100,000 spammy links?

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

This leads to number two. It's impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost. It could be duplicate content. It could be an issue with these hundreds of thousands of links. It could be something completely different. But because the waters have been muddied so much, it makes it very difficult to determine exactly what's going on, and this of course then makes SEO less certain.

3. Makes SEO uncertain

The less certain it becomes, the more other advertising channels become valuable. Paid search becomes more valuable. Social media becomes more valuable. That's a problem if you're a search engine optimization agency or a consultant, because you have the real likelihood of losing clients because you can't make smart decisions for them anymore because their data has been damaged by negative SEO. It would be really wonderful if Google would actually show us in Google Search Console what links they're ignoring and then would allow us to export only the ones they care about. But something tells me that that's probably beyond what Google is willing to share. So do we have any kind of way to fight back? There are a couple.

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

Chances are if you've seen some of my other Whiteboard Fridays, you've heard me talk about canonical burn pages. Real simply, when you have an important page on your site that you intend to rank, you should create another version of it that is identical and that has a canonical link pointing back to the original. Any kind of link building that you do, you should point to that canonical page. The reason is simple. If somebody does negative SEO, they're going to have two choices. They're either going to do it to the page that's getting linked to, or they're going to do it to the page that's getting ranked. Normally, they'll do it to the one that's getting ranked. Well, if they do, then you can get rid of that page and just hold on to the canonical burn page because it doesn't have any of these negative links. Or if they choose the canonical burn page, you can get rid of that one and just keep your original page. Yes, it means you sacrifice the hard earned links that you acquired in the first place, but it's better than losing the possibility in the future altogether.

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution. You can imagine that my content might say "Russ Jones says so and so and so and so." Well, imagine surrounding "Russ Jones" by H1 tags and then surrounding that by a span tag with a class that makes it so that the H1 tag that's under it is the normal-sized text. Well, chances are if they're using one of these copied content techniques, they're not copying your CSS style sheet as well. When that gets published to all of these other sites, in giant, big letters it has your name or any other phrase that you really want. Now this isn't actually going to solve your problem, other than just really frustrate the hell out of whoever is trying to screw with you. But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

The third one, the one that I really recommend is Link Lists. This is a feature inside of Moz's Link Explorer, which allows you to track the links that are pointing to your site. As you get links, real links, good links, add them to a Link List, and that way you will always have a list of links that you know are good, that you can compare against the list of links that might be sullied by a negative SEO campaign. By using the Link Lists, you can discern the difference between what's actually being ignored by Google, at least to some degree, and what actually matters. I hope this is helpful to some degree. But unfortunately, I've got to say, at the end of the day, a sufficiently well-run negative SEO campaign can make the difference in whether or not you use SEO in the future at all. It might not knock you out of Google, but it might make it so that other types of marketing are just better choices. So hopefully this has been some help. I'd love to talk you in the comments about different ways of dealing with negative SEO, like how to track down who is responsible. So just go ahead and fill those comments up with any questions or ideas. I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday. Video transcription by Speechpad.com

https://www.businesscreatorplus.com/defense-against-the-dark-arts-why-negative-seo-matters-even-if-rankings-are-unaffected/

#googlesearchranking #localseo #onlinemarketing #dailydoseofmarketing

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douglassmiith · 4 years

Text

Will There Be Internships This Summer?

May 21, 2020 11 min read

Cecelia Nancarrow had gotten all her ducks in a row for a sought-after internship this summer with manufacturing and retail giant Hormel Foods. The 21-year-old Kansas native and incoming senior at Kansas State University — where she studies sales and data analytics and is a member of the school’s National Strategic Selling Institute — had been chosen for a temporary relocation to Dallas, where she’d be learning some real-world wheeling and dealing at one of the Austin, Minnesota-based corporation’s numerous satellite offices. But as her junior year neared conclusion and travel plans were booked, a public health emergency came crashing down, instantaneously upending the very opportunity she’d been compiling credentials for. In Nancarrow’s telling, she didn’t waste any time feigning disbelief.

“Almost immediately, I didn’t even consider the fact that my internship would not be cancelled,” she recalls matter-of-factly in a phone interview from her home in Manhattan, Kansas. “Restaurants, hotels, hospitals — those would be my customers. So as soon as all of those shut down, I was thinking, if all these places are going to be closed for the remainder of the summer, I have no idea how I would be able to do my job.“

As it turned out, Nancarrow was one of the lucky ones. Hormel, a publicly traded company with dozens of globally recognized brands under its auspices ranging from SPAM to Skippy, was able to marshal its resources and repurpose the geographically sprawling internship program as more of a centralized virtual experience. Nancarrow and her cohort will ultimately be staying in place, but Hormel has equipped them all with computers and quickly strategized ways to remotely simulate everything from orientation to networking opportunities with executives and clients.

“Many of these interns had accepted jobs in October, so as you can imagine, they were quite anxious to understand what the future looks like,” says Amy Sheehan, Hormel’s director of talent acquisition, who oversees the internship program, in a phone interview. “So we worked with our leadership team and said, ‘What does this look like? Is it feasible? Could we still give these interns a virtual experience knowing that it’s so important to our pipeline and filling our needs each year?'”

Fortunately for Nancarrow, the answer turned out to be yes, albeit with a delayed start of June 15, “to give all the teams more time to figure out exactly how it’s gonna work,” she explains. The flip side is that for many of her friends and peers, similar programs, just like sleepaway camps and other summer extracurriculars, have been put on indefinite hiatus. And as a result, the future of student internships — historically both a rite of passage and real entree into building career prospects and contacts — rests in an uneasy purgatory.

Related: Where to Intern If You Really Want to Be an Entrepreneur

Pamela Nashel Leto can empathize. After more than 20 years working for New York-based music publicity house Girlie Action, where she repped diverse clientele such as My Morning Jacket and Wyclef Jean, Nashel Leto struck out on her own this spring with a new firm, Siren’s Call. Interns have always been an essential, if perhaps taken-for-granted, fixture of the music industry ecosystem, and Nashel Leto had intended to avail herself of one or two in the coming months. But right as she was set to open Siren’s Call’s Manhattan office for business, lockdown orders took hold. The artists she made a living promoting could no longer tour, appear on late-night shows or do in-store performances, and surging unemployment meant less disposable income for people to spend on music — period. Nashel Leto was forced to focus on the walls closing in and couldn’t afford to think about helping young hopefuls get a foot in the door.

Siren’s Call PR owner Pamela Nashel Leto has had to press pause on internships for her just-launched firm.

Image Credit: Siren’s Call PR

“I had planned on hiring interns,” she laments in a phone interview from her home in Bayonne, NJ, which has been doubling as Siren’s Call’s HQ for the past two-plus months. “For a music PR firm, a lot of my [intern] work would be based around maintaining my social media, but if I’ve never actual met my intern in person and can’t personally supervise him or her, I’d feel uncomfortable giving them such direct access to my business accounts. It’s sad, because I’d love to just be able to virtually hire people and have trust in them enough to have them work from their house or dorm, but it’s important for me to actually know somebody in real life.”

Consequently, Nashel Leto will likely shift responsibilities normally delegated to interns over to her small staff of employees. That redistribution of tasks has become duly necessary at Champaign, Illinois-based independent record label Polyvinyl, which works hand-in-hand with Nashel Leto promoting one of its cornerstone acts, eclectic indie troupe Of Montreal. Polyvinyl has decided to halt hiring interns for the summer and likely into the fall, despite the fact that some of its full-time staff already works remotely from different parts of the country.

“We’ve always felt one of the biggest benefits to our internships is sitting bird’s-eye view at not only a small record label, but just a small business,” explains Polyvinyl co-founder Matt Lunsford, speaking by phone from Champaign. “They’re absorbing everything that’s going on at our small company, even if they’re working on a typical intern-like task, like research. I feel like there’s not a very obvious way to replicate that without someone physically being present.”

Polyvinyl Records artist Jeff Rosenstock, in the days when bands were touring and interns were helping promote.

Image Credit: Amanda Fotes

While Lunsford has the ability to, as he puts it, “pick up the slack and spread the work out to the departments that would have the interns, or put some of that work on pause or do it later,” he also recognizes that, long-term, continuing to defer intern-recruitment is in no one’s best interests. Among him and fellow upper management, “The consensus is, if this is ongoing for more than this calendar year, then we would probably be inclined to take the time to figure out some sort of plan that would involve making the internships more virtual or maybe coming up with something completely unique so it could be envisioned as virtual from the very beginning.” (Nashel Leto, for her part, says that, “When a vaccine is out there and I work from an actual office again, I can hire some interns, but doubt that will be possible until 2021.”)

Related: Every Entrepreneur Should Be An Intern First

But what about an operation for which there is inherently no substitute for on-site support, like working the land on a multi-acre spread of field and forest? That’s the conundrum for Unadilla Community Farm in upstate Otsego, New York. This is the seventh year that the farm and educational center has taken applications from interns from all over the world for what its mission statement characterizes as “an immersion into a rural, off-grid sustainable way of life.”

Unadilla has been acknowledged as an essential business since lockdown orders took hold in New York in mid-March, and it is also seated in a county that has been permitted to gradually reopen for some non-essential business by Governor Andrew Cuomo. Still, with participants typically arriving from all over the country and various continents, and safety precautions like social distancing a standing prerequisite even in areas of lower infection, this year’s program — while moving forward — has had to make some concessions.

“The difference this year is we are only accepting interns from the U.S.,” clarifies Greta Zarro, Unadilla’s co-owner and internship coordinator, speaking by phone from the farm. She adds that accepted applicants have also been asked to quarantine at home for 14 days before arriving, and “then once everyone is here, we all quarantine here and don’t have to leave the property, so we’re lucky in that sense.” (One accepted participant delayed his arrival after feeling ill prior to his departure. He tested negative, and then quarantined for two weeks before leaving.) They’ve also “worked to improve our sanitation and hygenic practices,” Zarro says, and will be making their own soap and sanitizer on the premises.

Field trips to other farms and related networking events have been postponed, but there will be some virtual webinars and workshops in their stead. Zarro’s optimistic that even in its somewhat compromised state, the program will reap all its intended rewards. “It’s not going to be 100 percent the same,” she begins. “There’s typically an element where they get to essentially work on another farm for the afternoon and see another operation, but overall, the program is still relatively intact.”

Interns and staff enjoying the literal fruits of their labor on Unadilla Community Farm in upstate New York.

Image Credit: Unadilla Community Farm

If anything, as more traditional internship opportunities have ebbed, enthusiasm for what Unadilla offers has flowed. “What’s been interesting is we’ve actually seen an increase in applications,” Zarro remarks. “People are starting to plant gardens and trees and realize, ‘Wow, we need to be more self-sufficient,’ and that’s the primary thing we’re teaching.”

For companies like Hormel, the jury’s still out on whether its swiftly reconstituted arrangement will feel as close to, or even better than, the real thing. The one advantage across the board for both employers and interns is that this generation of students is wired for digital adaptation and distanced communication in a way none of its predecessors could fathom. That comfort level with all things virtual may help bridge the disconnect that leaves Hormel’s Sheehan in a precarious place of waiting for results and Polyvinyl’s Lunsford reluctant.

“When you think about what they’ve been thrown into with their classroom settings, they’re already used to this,” Sheehan reasons about student interns’ malleability. “It’s not so foreign to them.”

Nancarrow confirms that her age group is, by and large, apt to be less daunted by this sudden shift than perhaps even the higher-ups who recruited them. She’s even come around to see how this could be a unique crash course in the way business is going to be conducted down the road, and as a result of our current crisis, maybe much sooner than that.

“The world is moving to be so technology-focused,” she says. “I am definitely going to need to learn how to communicate in a virtual format. Having this opportunity this summer may not be ideal or what I had originally planned, but it’s going to be extremely beneficial for myself and everyone else in my generation.”

More pressingly, Nancarrow is hopeful that this unforeseen hurdle will be duly taken into account when she and her classmates — whether their internships have been modified or canceled outright — come out the other side: “I’m fairly confident a lot of business are going to be extremely understanding that my generation, as well as the ones around me, kind of lost out on that internship opportunity and be able to look past that and see our potential anyway.”

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/will-there-be-internships-this-summer/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/will-there-be-internships-this-summer

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laurelkrugerr · 4 years

Text

Will There Be Internships This Summer?

May 21, 2020 11 min read

Related: Where to Intern If You Really Want to Be an Entrepreneur

Siren’s Call PR owner Pamela Nashel Leto has had to press pause on internships for her just-launched firm.

Image Credit: Siren’s Call PR

Polyvinyl Records artist Jeff Rosenstock, in the days when bands were touring and interns were helping promote.

Image Credit: Amanda Fotes

Related: Every Entrepreneur Should Be An Intern First

Interns and staff enjoying the literal fruits of their labor on Unadilla Community Farm in upstate New York.

Image Credit: Unadilla Community Farm

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/will-there-be-internships-this-summer/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/05/will-there-be-internships-this-summer.html

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riichardwilson · 4 years

Text

Will There Be Internships This Summer?

May 21, 2020 11 min read

Related: Where to Intern If You Really Want to Be an Entrepreneur

Siren’s Call PR owner Pamela Nashel Leto has had to press pause on internships for her just-launched firm.

Image Credit: Siren’s Call PR

Polyvinyl Records artist Jeff Rosenstock, in the days when bands were touring and interns were helping promote.

Image Credit: Amanda Fotes

Related: Every Entrepreneur Should Be An Intern First

Interns and staff enjoying the literal fruits of their labor on Unadilla Community Farm in upstate New York.

Image Credit: Unadilla Community Farm

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/will-there-be-internships-this-summer/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/618952865749385216

0 notes

scpie · 4 years

Text

Will There Be Internships This Summer?

May 21, 2020 11 min read

Related: Where to Intern If You Really Want to Be an Entrepreneur

Siren’s Call PR owner Pamela Nashel Leto has had to press pause on internships for her just-launched firm.

Image Credit: Siren’s Call PR

Polyvinyl Records artist Jeff Rosenstock, in the days when bands were touring and interns were helping promote.

Image Credit: Amanda Fotes

Related: Every Entrepreneur Should Be An Intern First

Interns and staff enjoying the literal fruits of their labor on Unadilla Community Farm in upstate New York.

Image Credit: Unadilla Community Farm

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/will-there-be-internships-this-summer/

0 notes

isearchgoood · 4 years

Text

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Posted by rjonesx.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

But what I want to talk about today is actually pretty bad. It's the reality that negative SEO, even if it is completely ineffective at doing its primary goal, which is to knock your website out of the rankings, will still play havoc on your website and the likelihood that you or your customers will be able to make correct decisions in the future and improve your rankings.

Today I'm going to talk about why negative SEO still matters even if your rankings are unaffected, and then I'm going to talk about a couple of techniques that you can use that will help abate some of the negative SEO techniques and also potentially make it so that whoever is attacking you gets hurt a little bit in the process, maybe. Let's talk a little bit about negative SEO.

What is negative SEO?

The hope is that it's sort of like a false flag campaign, that Google thinks that you went out and got all of those spammy links to try to improve your rankings, and now Google has caught you and so you're penalized. But in reality, it was someone else who acquired those links. Now to their credit, Google actually has done a pretty good job of ignoring those types of links.

It's been my experience that, in most cases, negative SEO campaigns don't really affect rankings the way they're intended to in most cases, and I give a lot of caveats there because I've seen it be effective certainly. But in the majority of cases all of those spammy links are just ignored by Google. But that's not it. That's not the complete story.

Problem #1: Corrupt data

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

Pushes out the good links

Well, that's a big deal, because if you're trying to make decisions about how to improve your rankings and you can't get to the link data you need because it's been replaced with hundreds of thousands of spammy links, then you're not going to be able to make the right decision.

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.

You can get the data for more than 100,000 links pointing to your site. You're just going to have to pay for it. You could come to Moz and use our Link Explorer tool for example. But you'll have to increase the amount of money that you're spending in order to get access to the accounts that will actually deliver all of that data.

The one big issue sitting behind all of this is that even though we know Google is ignoring most of these links, they don't label that for us in any kind of useful fashion. Even after we can get access to all of that link data, all of those hundreds of thousands of spammy links, we still can't be certain which ones matter and which ones don't.

Problem #2: Copied content

Now the reason why these sites would do this is because they would hope that, in some cases, they would outrank your website and in doing so they would get some traffic and maybe earn some AdSense money. But for the most part, that kind of industry has died down because it hasn't been effective in quite some time. But once again, that's not the whole picture.

No attribution

If they've stripped out all of the links and stripped out all of the names and all of the bylines, then your hard earned work is actually getting taken advantage of, even if Google isn't really the arbiter anymore of whether or not traffic gets to that article.

Internal links become syndicated links

In the same sort of situation, it's not really just about the intent behind the type of negative SEO campaign. It's the impact that it has on your data, because if somebody syndicates an article of yours that has let's say eight links to other internal pages and they syndicate it to 10,000 websites, well, then you've just got 80,000 new what should have been internal links, now external links pointing to your site.

We actually do know just a couple of years back several pretty strong brands got in trouble for syndicating their news content to other news websites. Now I'm not saying that negative SEO would necessarily trigger that same sort of penalty, but there's the possibility. Even if it doesn't trigger that penalty, chances are it's going to sully the waters in terms of your link data.

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

You can inject HTML onto the page of part of their website that makes it look like they're linking to someone else. If Google actually crawled itself, which luckily they don't in this case, if they crawled that page and found that malware link, the whole domain in the Google search results would likely start to show that this site might not be safe.

Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

1. Lose access to critical data

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

3. Makes SEO uncertain

It would be really wonderful if Google would actually show us in Google Search Console what links they're ignoring and then would allow us to export only the ones they care about. But something tells me that that's probably beyond what Google is willing to share. So do we have any kind of way to fight back? There are a couple.

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

The reason is simple. If somebody does negative SEO, they're going to have two choices. They're either going to do it to the page that's getting linked to, or they're going to do it to the page that's getting ranked. Normally, they'll do it to the one that's getting ranked. Well, if they do, then you can get rid of that page and just hold on to the canonical burn page because it doesn't have any of these negative links.

Or if they choose the canonical burn page, you can get rid of that one and just keep your original page. Yes, it means you sacrifice the hard earned links that you acquired in the first place, but it's better than losing the possibility in the future altogether.

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.

You can imagine that my content might say "Russ Jones says so and so and so and so." Well, imagine surrounding "Russ Jones" by H1 tags and then surrounding that by a span tag with a class that makes it so that the H1 tag that's under it is the normal-sized text.

Well, chances are if they're using one of these copied content techniques, they're not copying your CSS style sheet as well. When that gets published to all of these other sites, in giant, big letters it has your name or any other phrase that you really want. Now this isn't actually going to solve your problem, other than just really frustrate the hell out of whoever is trying to screw with you.

But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

By using the Link lists, you can discern the difference between what's actually being ignored by Google, at least to some degree, and what actually matters. I hope this is helpful to some degree. But unfortunately, I've got to say, at the end of the day, a sufficiently well-run negative SEO campaign can make the difference in whether or not you use SEO in the future at all.

It might not knock you out of Google, but it might make it so that other types of marketing are just better choices. So hopefully this has been some help. I'd love to talk you in the comments about different ways of dealing with negative SEO, like how to track down who is responsible. So just go ahead and fill those comments up with any questions or ideas.

I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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camerasieunhovn · 4 years

Text

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Posted by rjonesx.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is negative SEO?

Problem #1: Corrupt data

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

Pushes out the good links

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.

Problem #2: Copied content

No attribution

Internal links become syndicated links

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

1. Lose access to critical data

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

3. Makes SEO uncertain

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.

But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

gamebazu · 4 years

Text

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Posted by rjonesx.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is negative SEO?

Problem #1: Corrupt data

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

Pushes out the good links

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.

Problem #2: Copied content

No attribution

Internal links become syndicated links

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

1. Lose access to critical data

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

3. Makes SEO uncertain

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.

But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

xaydungtruonggia · 4 years

Text

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Posted by rjonesx.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is negative SEO?

Problem #1: Corrupt data

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

Pushes out the good links

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.

Problem #2: Copied content

No attribution

Internal links become syndicated links

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

1. Lose access to critical data

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

3. Makes SEO uncertain

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.

But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

noithatotoaz · 4 years

Text

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Posted by rjonesx.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is negative SEO?

Problem #1: Corrupt data

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

Pushes out the good links

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.

Problem #2: Copied content

No attribution

Internal links become syndicated links

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

1. Lose access to critical data

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

3. Makes SEO uncertain

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.

But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

localwebmgmt · 4 years

Text

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Posted by rjonesx.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is negative SEO?

Problem #1: Corrupt data

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

Pushes out the good links

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.

Problem #2: Copied content

No attribution

Internal links become syndicated links

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

1. Lose access to critical data

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

3. Makes SEO uncertain

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.

But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

thanhtuandoan89 · 4 years

Text

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Posted by rjonesx.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is negative SEO?

Problem #1: Corrupt data

Pushes you over data limits in GSC

Pushes out the good links

Increased cost to see all your data

The other big issue here is that there are ways around it.

Problem #2: Copied content

No attribution

Internal links become syndicated links

Problem #3: Nofollowed malware links & hacked content

There are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that don't get really talked about a lot.

Nofollowed malware links in UGC

We know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.

Hacked content

Of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

1. Lose access to critical data

2. Impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost

3. Makes SEO uncertain

How do you fight back against negative SEO?

1. Canonical burn pages

2. Embedded styled attribution

Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.

But sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.

3. Link Lists

I would love to hear them. Thanks again and I look forward to talking to you in another Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes