#i know it’s been like 4 months since i made an original ml post
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Currently obsessed with the idea of 18-19 year old Adrien, Kagami, and Nino sharing an apartment together
Hawkmoth still hasn’t been caught yet, and Adrien is still Chat Noir, but now instead of just being able to slip because no one was watching him anyway, he has two roomates who love and care for him very much and he appreciates it so much but “hmm you guys I need to go, climb out the window, because I forgot to water my shoes,, ok bye see you later!”
Nino and Kagami know each others’ secret identities and they think that they’re a secret alliance of superheroes teaming up to protect Adrien
Nino has started some kind of music business and it’s actually going really well, meanwhile Adrien and Kagami are both like working at McDonalds, and everyone expected them to hate it because they’ve been super rich their entire lives so being thrown into customer service must be a nightmare, but instead they’re both so happy?
Adrien’s like “yes! I get to actually talk to other people at work!! My coworkers are super nice and i get to hang out with people my age!! My boss actually cares about me!!!” And Kagami’s like “wow this is so much easier than training and studing nonstop and I’m not even yelled at very much!” And Nino is like “hey guys I think I need to fight your parents”
Speaking of which, Kagami and Adrien offer each other a lot of emotional support on the whole “we are actually doing fine and we do not owe our parents anything” thing
They weren’t kicked out or anything, their parents just literally did not believe that they would be able to survive living on their own, so they’re still kind of just waiting for them to come crawling back, meanwhile they’re all just chilling and eating pizza together while they watch old movies and laugh
The love square is still being a disaster in the best way possible, ladynoir bffs, marinette sometimes visits their apartment and brings them random baked goods, it’s great. Also Marinette thinks that Adrien and Kagami MIGHT? be dating (they’re not) but it’s too awkward to ask at this point, so she’s trying to subtlely figure out if they are dating, and then is like “wait why do i care i like chat noir instead now” and two seconds later she’s like “nevermind i lied i do care”
It’s not really jealousy at this point, she’s bffs with Kagami even more than the other two, but she still,, just want to know,, if they’re together or not
Alya and Nino are still together but Alya’s just living on campus at her college, she visits almost every weekend though, and she’s become super close friends with Kagami by now, they watch movies together and bake and just hang out
They have board game night and Nino keeps beating Kagami at checkers and they get super competitive and Adrien just watches because it’s so entertaining
Also Kagami and Nino both play the violin and they practice together sometimes and Kagami features in some of Nino’s music
Adrien is taking a few physics classes online but mostly he’s just trying to hang out and learn how to be human and live a semi normal life (he’s still chat noir though lol)
Kagami finds out that Adrien has a crush on Ladybug and starts trying to set them up, it goes badly, then Nino joins in and it goes even worse
Kagami and Adrien are just really happy?? A lot of the time?? They just really appreciate having a kind of normal life
They also romanticize the heck out of the tiniest normal things, Adrien is like “!!!! Nino! Look!! I’m doing dishes! I’ve never done dishes before!!! This is so cool!!” And Nino is very supportive of his overly excited friend
Also Nino is having so much fun because like,, these two amazing idiots make literally everything so much more fun,, and also they’re some of his best friends and it’s like a sleepover with his bffs every single day
I have to stop at some point but this has been stuck in my head for literal months so if this gets popular I’ll probably make a part 2 with more of my ideas about them
#ml#miraculous ladybug#adrien agreste#nino lahiffe#kagami tsurugi#i know it’s been like 4 months since i made an original ml post#i’ve been busy yelling about my love for avatar
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@galahadwilder (AO3)
Galahad is a large poster on Tumblr (I’m actually surprised when I refresh my dash and the first post isn’t from him). On about 111 works total, he has 95 works for Miraculous Ladybug only! The others are mainly from the DCU. Many of them all are WIPs, but hey! Who doesn’t have WIPs?
Here’s my Top 10
(because I have to stop, eventually...)
Wisdom Teeth: Words:7605 - Chapters:7/7
Summary: Adrien FaceTimes Marinette while high on painkillers after wisdom tooth surgery, and lets something slip that he really shouldn’t have.
What I liked: Marinette driving Adrien insane :)
Personal Space : Words:6342 - Chapters:3/? - Updated:2020-10-25
Summary: Adrien Agreste was never taught to say no. Never allowed to have boundaries. So when someone finally pushes too far, Ladybug is left with a partner in pain, a crush in need of the kindness he’s never received...And a former idol she needs to murder.
What I liked: Marinette going into bodyguard mode, Adrien’s friends opened minds, DJWifi banter over the phone. Can’t wait for next chapter!
Inconceivable : Words:2537 - Chapters:3/? - Updated:2019-07-19
Summary: There are two things of which Gabriel Agreste is absolutely certain. The first is that there is no such thing as a soulmate. Everything he knows about both science and magic claims it impossible. The second thing is that his son somehow, infuriatingly, has a soulmate anyway.
What I liked: Gabriel POV, Gabriel actually having good intentions towards his son, Sabine plotting with him, credible explanations for canon
Notes to Self: Words:22911 - Chapters:16/? - Updated:2019-10-23
Summary: Adrien finds out midway through Oblivio that his assumption was wrong, and that Marinette is NOT his girlfriend. So he decides to do leave a message calling himself out for failing to properly appreciate the most incredible person he’s ever met. Now, having been confronted with his mistakes, Adrien has realized that he has a lot to make up for—and a girl who needs to know exactly how much she means to him.
What I liked: I think I’ve read this fic 3 times now, and can’t be bored of it. Adrien figuring out he was in love with Marinette from day 1, Oblivio-Adrien calling himself out, Tom and Sabine’s open mind about their super-heroing. Bonus: Kagami wanting a polygamic relationship and Adrien admitting looking at Luka’s butt 😂
Officiated: Words:7562 - Chapters:9/? - Updated:2020-04-28
Summary: The aftermath of an Akuma attack leaves Ladybug and Chat Noir legally married.
What I liked: mostly the originality of the akuma. The fic might update, but it also feels complete. You won’t be stuck on a cliffhanger.
Children of War: Words:8295 - Chapters:7/? - Updated:2019-05-03
Summary: Something dark is coming to Paris, and Master Fu has been lying to Adrien and Marinette. What happened to the previous Team Miraculous? And how did Marinette's aunt Bridgette really end up in a mental hospital?
What I liked: Gabriel’s intentions to save Paris, the integration of the Quantic Kids, the strong angst. Can’t wait for more!
Sick Days (series): Works:2 - Complete: No
Summary: Adrien comes home after a long photoshoot to find Marinette Dupain-Cheng asleep in his bed, running a horrific fever. What is she doing there, and how did she get into his house without setting off any alarms? (And why does she keep mumbling his name?) / Marinette’s cold is passing, but the embarrassment is not—they may be dating, and they may be partners, but she still can’t keep it together around Adrien the way she can around his alter ego. Which is a problem, because he’s caught her cold—and the absolute lack of filter that came with it.
What I liked: the delirium shenanigans (read Out Sick by @sweetsweetsweetie if you like that too), the Dupain-Chengs actual A+ parenting. Please, Galahad, don’t abandon this fic!!
Wingman: Words:11211 - Chapters:10/12 - Updated:2019-08-06
Summary: Hawkmoth's Akuma have been acting strange lately--every single one has been an obsessive LadyNoir shipper, much to Chat's horrific embarrassment. Ladybug hasn't noticed, but Chat can't quite get over the fact that Hawkmoth seems to have redirected his supervillain antics to setting him up with the girl of his dreams.
What I liked: The humoristic scenes (Nath scolding Gabe was my favorite), Gabriel trying to parent properly, Nathalie caring for both Agrestes. “I swear this fic was supposed to be a comedy”
The shirt: Words:16503 - Chapters:20/? - Updated:2019-10-22
Summary: On a cold night in January, Chat Noir lends Ladybug his jacket--only to find Marinette wearing it to class the next day. And that's just the beginning of the trouble.
What I liked: the fluff over the fluff, Chloé working on her redemption, the post-reveal banter, "Tell... my father... he's a diiiiiiick..."
We Break Things Down Just to Build Them Back Up Again: Words:7916 - Chapters:5/? - Updated:2019-11-05
Summary: Adrien promised he'd have Marinette's back, but no matter how badly she needs him, he won't take any kind of action to protect her—or, for that matter, himself. When Marinette discovers WHY he finds it so impossible to stand up to bullies, she resolves to put aside her crush to help him escape his abusive household. But the less she thinks about Adrien, the more she thinks about a different blond boy in her life—and the more time she spends taking care of Adrien, the more he starts to see her as more than just a friend...
What I liked: Marinette’s mom friend override, Adrien’s hurt to comfort (even though Chat’s part is yet to come), Tom telling Adrien he’s proud of him, and Adrien’s reaction to that just made me cry. I’m craving for moooooooooore!!!
Honorable mentions:
Moving Forward (series): Works:2 - Complete: No
(I already wrote a rec. about this one. Read it here)
I’m Your Heating Pad (And Other Uses for a Cat Boyfriend): Words:3045 - Chapters:1/1
Memories: Words:1110 - Chapters:1/1
Waking Nightmare: Words:1667 - Chapters:1/1
The One I Depend On: Words:1420 - Chapters:1/1
Next to me : Words:3033 - Chapters:1/1
I know what you did in the cat-acombs : Words:4869 - Chapters:1/1
Stress Relief: Words:3407 - Chapters:4/?
It’s Just a Nickname: Words:4552 - Chapters:7/7
The Future Lands Soft: Words:6043 - Chapters:8/?
Overworked and Overwhelmed: Words:4628 - Chapters:1/1
All's Fair in Love and War (And Turnabout's Fair Play): Words:4835 - Chapters:3/4
Futures Trading: Words:1651 - Chapters:1/1
Kitty Missed the Message: Words:3351 - Chapters:2/2
Broken Masks: Words:3320 - Chapters:2/?
We Are Miraculous: Words:6543 - Chapters:5/?
The Agreste Letters: Words:13809 - Chapters:14/?
Before and After: Words:21192 - Chapters:14/20
I’ve been reading non-stop since my previous Fic of the month special.
I have many regrets in life, but reading Galahad’s fics wasn’t one of them!
Thanks for so much work and efforts! I really love the variety, originality and consistency between the fics, even if they have different stories. I really love the hurt to comfort too, and how many mental troubles and disorders are depicted.
Please read, share and leave kudos on his works!
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If you know ML writers you’d like to shout out, or are a ML writer yourself, please contact me!! @clawsout83
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Top Ten OP Posts of the Year!!!
(Courtesy of Jet Black Code)
1. Answer 21, Tag 21 (19 May 2019, 146 notes)
Technically does not deserve the honor. @findmeinthevoid tagged me in this challenge, and I ended up breaking the post off. So really, this should be hers. (Except I think she also reblogged it from somewhere else)
2. Tony Awards 2019 BMC Gripe (30 April 2019, 92 notes)
I kinda regretted making this text post after the fact, but I stand by my point that Be More Chill should have been more overtly recognized by the Tony Committee besides the parody they did during the ceremony.
3. My Cursed AU Contribution to the ML Fandom (15 March 2019, 50 notes)
I’m genuinely proud people saw this. It was honestly just a random thought that came into my head. I mean, cut out enough of the murder-y bits of Phantom, keep the kids’ ages, and don’t ever ever bring “L*ve N*ver D*es” into it, and you got yourself a mix-and-match of all kinds of neat relationships.
4. My First (And Only) Original Icon (18 March 2019, 38 notes)
(I might have to alter it, The Spine no longer has his dorsal heatsink protrusions...)
But really, I’m shocked I was able to do this so quickly, and I’m really happy how it turned out.
5. Superhero Alix Concept (11 February 2019, 30 notes)
It was kinda messily-done, not well-thought-out, and Bunnyx kinda rendered it obsolete. It was fun to work on, though, even if it did help me discover I have no eye for human proportions. And I saw someone like it just a couple days ago, so the fact this is still being circulated is... something, I’m not sure what. It was originally supposed to be in this AU I planned (not very well), but I don’t know if I’ll ever actually finish any of that. Never know, though.
6. Autism Month, featuring Nathaniel (1 May 2019, 25 Notes)
Aw sweet, this made it on! I had a lot of fun with this, and I will defend my Autistic!Nath headcanon to the end. I once again have difficulty with human shapes (is that an autism problem? who knows?), but I still ended up really liking the look of it.
7. The Arcana Project Masterpost (2 September 2019, 18 Notes)
Once again, I’m a cheater. Literally all but one of the notes came from me reblogging and updating the links when @thebigpapilio and I updated the project. But anyway, this was a fun project to do, if it was a bit hard to follow at times and I struggled with the deadlines. It was great to throw caution to the wind for once and write up a storm of one-shots like that.
8. Marc Appreciation Week, Chapter 1 (13 January 2019, 16 Notes)
My first published fic. And if I’m honest, the one I’m the most proud of, artistically. It’s because of this I met the kind @findmeinthevoid and became mutuals with @kathisbeingdumb. I was just a nervous fanboy, and to see the positive, affirming response something I wrote gave people... I still feel all fuzzy from it.
9. Marc Appreciation Week, Chapter 2 (14 January 2019, 15 Notes)
^^^
10. Julerose July 2k19, “First Kiss” (2 July 2019, 14 Notes)
I honestly planned to do more for that month, but I got sidetracked with other projects. Anyway, I enjoyed working on it a lot, and doing a lot of sappy, flowy things with words (Yay, words! Words is fun!)
BONUS: TFW you’re cleverer than Hawk Moth (29 December 2018, 19 Notes)
Since I joined late in November last year, I only have 8 original posts from 2018, and only two of them have notes. One was my first post (liked by a bot), the other was this: I realized the ML Writers missed an opportunity for a pun. Anyway, adding it onto here, since it was less than a year ago, and the note count would otherwise put it on the list.
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Conversation With Taj Bourgeois On Selling Their Paintings Online For A Living
Marius Larsson: So first of all how long have you been selling paintings? About 2 years now?
Taj Bourgeois: Yeah I quit my job driving taxi in December so a little over 2 years. I had a week where I made negative $70 and that was that. I had to do something different.
ML: What made you think you could make it as an artist, and how did you initially get started?
TB: I didn’t think I could make it lol, but also felt like it might be my last chance to give it my all. If I didn’t at least try once in my life I was concerned I’d feel like a hypocrite if I were to tell my daughter to follow her dreams. Pretty much I just posted on Facebook “Would anyone like to commission a painting?”. I got five responses, one of which was for $600. Honestly I don’t know if I would’ve felt the drive to commit if it weren’t for that, but also my strategy was and has been basically to just make paintings everyday, so people would see I was taking it seriously and in turn take me seriously.
ML: And had you been painting much prior?
TB: I had made like 7 or 8 paintings in the months leading up to it, so people were aware what I was getting into and I guess displaying some level of skill. Prior to that I hadn’t really painted since around the time my daughter was born in 2012.
ML: What kinds of things did you start off painting?
TB: In 2012 or in the months before doing it full time?
ML: Tell me about 2012, why you took a break for 4 years and then what got you back into it in 2016.
TB: When I found out I was going to be a father I had been in college for just a couple semesters taking random art classes. I was just there for the school loans... ya know.. didn’t want to get a job. Anyway I was in a painting class, and it was pretty much my first time painting. I watched the Basquiat documentary “The Radiant Child”, and it made me think about painting in a very different way. A few months after my daughter was born and I won a couple awards for paintings I did for the college’s annual art show. Then I enrolled at the Pacific Northwest College of Art for the Fall semester, but by that point I was learning about hundreds of artist’s on my own time, and was becoming inspired to try all kinds of things other than painting. I felt I did so well that semester that I decided college wasn’t going to be a good use of time or money, so I dropped out and just followed my train of thought for the next 4 years which led back to painting.
ML: How did it lead back to painting?
TB: I had been driving taxi for a year and a half, and during that time I felt more and more disconnected from any of my previous modes of art making. I was pretty much sitting in the cab making memes and digital collages. Toward the end the collages I was doing started to become more refined, and I started thinking about the merits of painting the imagery I was putting together. The first thing I painted after all that time was an image of flaming goose which was a meme that had been going around. I decided to painted it very large. It was just something I thought would help test the waters again, and also something I figured I’d like to have on my wall. Of course painting a giant meme is going to get a good response online, so I did a couple more, and then painted some scenes from photos, and then from my imagination. Tried to paint the collages I had made but didn’t quite feel right to try to change their medium.
ML: Ok so you had a few commissions and then what? You’d post your paintings for sale and people just kept buying them?
TB: Yeah although the first 6 months were pretty rough. In April I only made $500, so I was cutting it close, but I was still in the mindset that most artists have, which is like their art has some mysterious value to it and should be expensive, but then I realized it would make more sense if I took it more seriously as a job and charge by the hour, so I started painting more small funny stuff. Like for me it made more sense to sell a bunch of little humorous $50 pieces than cross my fingers on a $300 piece cause it would take me the same amount of time to do 6 of the $50 ones. It wasn’t until around 6 months that I made my first piece that multiple people wanted, and so what I did was make it multiple times, and that’s when things started to pick up.
ML: And what was that piece?
TB: It was spider man on the floor of an art museum looking up at a painting of a goofy fish with a human face, and spider man is saying in a thought bubble “That Painting Looks The Way I Feel!” It was originally from an old comic and spider man had been looking at some kind of parody Picasso portrait, but you know with memes pieces get replaced, and the mood changes. The fish’s face was a better mood than the Picasso probably.
ML: How many paintings had you made by that point?
TB: Around 70, but had sold maybe 20
ML: What materials were you using?
TB: During the taxi days I was in the store (Fred Meyer) and saw this canvas that house painters just lay on the floor to catch the paint drips, and I was like damn 4x15ft for $13? I should get some in case I feel up to making some big paintings someday, but I have always been such a frugal person that it wasn’t until I saw the apple barrel brand paints that I was like damn ok lemme just buy a couple of every color and see if I’m into this. I also bought a gallon of white house paint to “gesso” the canvas. I still use this method on big pieces, and can always stretch later, but lately have been buying a lot of canvas already prepped and stretched.
ML: So do you only sell through Facebook and Instagram?
TB: Yes oddly enough that’s like 95% of sales. A few every now and then from irl shows where I live here in Portland (Oregon).
ML: I want to go back to something for a second. You mentioned you started painting in 2012, but then you won a couple awards a few months later. How old were you. How did you excel so quickly considering you said you hadn’t painted prior and what were those painting?
TB: I was 24. I think painting is one of those mediums where “ability” is far more subjective than most things. You can view enough of it without trying it yourself to the point that when you do try you’ll already have a grasp of it. I have been interested in painting my whole life, so picking up the brush I already had thousands of hours of experience just thinking about it ya know, so like with that show at the college I knew I wanted to make something big and bold. So I cut myself a 4x7ft canvas and ended up making this multi-colored deer looking straight ahead with sort of hypnotic gaze. That was a people’s choice award, and the other got me a scholarship offer, but for that one I basically had just copied Twombly lol.
ML: How would you describe your style today?
TB: Hmm I try not to, cause I try all kinds of stuff. I feel my technical skill level is mediocre but maybe my creative level is high? Different people are going to appreciate different things, and I’ve always been more interested in what the painting depicts over how it’s made. I mean skill aside I think most paintings are pretty umm I want to say “derivative” haha are people still using that word in serious? I’m having fun though, staying curious, and I think that comes across. What’s the point of describing my “style” anyway?
ML: I’m curious about how you view your own work.
TB: I view my own work with my own eyes lol. I view my art like a loving father or maybe more like an observer, a bird watcher? No, ok I think I understand this question now. My approach to painting is often like a mix of writing, drawing, and making memes. Often I have the idea and it doesn’t really matter how I get there unless the technique is the content itself as with a lot of abstract art. Like, I will entirely base a painting on a sentence describing the image itself with little concern about how i will make it. Like “a shuriken stuck in the back of a smiling man”, so I’ll paint some sky, a fence, some grass, blue jeans, man has no shirt, shuriken, blood, he’s holding a beer, he’s smiling alright i did it… nice. That’s one way I view my work as a route to an image. I used to do this all the time before painting. I have an art book from 2015 where I used this method a lot like I’d write down ideas, and then go out and make them happen. Some elements of the end result were arbitrary although I always tried to have good composition and quality documentation. I didn’t think of myself as a photographer though I certainly was and was good at that aspect too, but it was more the means to document my performance, sculpture, installation… sentence made real. I also view a good portion of my paintings as elaborate pages ripped from children’s books that don’t exist (yet) and they’re filled with weird cute characters I never really had any intention to keep making in the first place, but I’m still doing it for some reason maybe because I like the idea of an overarching narrative, but mostly I think cause they give me a deep nostalgia for illustrations in picture books I saw as a kid or like panels from graphic novels.
ML: That answer is all over the place! I guess that’s what i get for asking such a broad question, but there’s a lot to work with there. Tell me about being a Father. You said it was kind of the catalyst to start making art. How do you think it’s affected your work?
TB: Naturally it changed everything. Before my daughter was born I was just so much more aloof, timid, uncertain about making anything. I’d spend so many days just floating around “hanging out” drinking, smoking etc. Maybe I’d draw a little, write a little, play some music, but always felt like I was just killing time waiting for something to happen, and then it did. Suddenly I felt obligated to be at home most of the time, ya know, like a good dad. Other than that I was still in school making the most of it for the short time being. So for that first year I was either home with her or at school. I was just making stuff every day all the time, and it became an insatiable habit especially once I started sharing it online. Yeah honestly I felt the pressure was on. Like I had waited too long to pursue my passions so I had to make up for lost time. I’ve been addicted to making and sharing things everyday ever since. As for my daughter’s influence, yeah I love watching her grow and the things she makes inspire me as well. I’m a bit of a romantic when it comes to modern art and its mythos. I still vibe off what picasso said about how it took him his whole life to paint like a child, so I feel really grateful to work with her. I have literally thousands of her drawings stacked all over the place. She’ll sit down and do fifty drawings in an hour so I’ve gotten a white board lol. Also like I mentioned before it was kind of insane of me to quit my job to become a painter, like I have a kid, rent, bills, a car, and I’m just going to suddenly start painting happy devils to pay for all that? Well, yeah it felt like my last chance to make my dreams a reality. I just wanted to be able to say I did my best and tried to make it work, for myself, and to be a role model in that sense as well. So far so good.
ML: There seems be a big disparity between artists who make a living off their work and artists who don’t, and what I mean is that when you think of an artist making a living off their work you usually think either they have gallery representation, some kind of branding, or business making the same kinds of things again and again, and yet you seem to have been able to find some middle ground and do all of those things without a business, a degree, or a gallery. What’s it been like overall/how is it going?
TB: I still got my foodstamp card haha, but to be honest things are better than ever. I don’t know I just keep at it every day. My belief has been that if I just keep making stuff the right people will notice. I’ve never submitted my work anywhere or asked for opportunities. I let them come to me. I just want to make the art not deal with the other stuff. If a big gallery wants to make money off me they most certainly will but for now I’ve just been doing small independent spaces, and cafe’s which bring in a little extra money but pretty much all my sales are online where I talk to every single person directly. The most surprising thing has been how many people are interested given that I have less than 5,000 followers/friends. To me that’s a pretty good sign that as my reach grows so will opportunities and I’ve been going hard these past two years. I think I’m just going to be making bigger, better things as more people become interested. I don’t know any artists doing it this way or any way really. I’m not sure Portland is the place to make it happen, but god bless the internet! Getting a college degree makes no sense whatsoever except for becoming a teacher, and I think we know how that’s playing out these days, so I’m just grateful to be doing what I’m doing even though teaching would be pretty cool. Technically you don’t need a degree to teach you just need people who want to learn.
ML: One thing that seems to have helped you gain momentum is the price of your pieces. I don’t think I’ve ever followed an artist pricing their work so low that wasn’t just really kitschy stencil art or something. I see some of your pieces for $600 that I’d see in a gallery for $6,000 no doubt, but then I see a great deal of $50 pieces. What made you decide to price your work this way? Has it changed over time?
TB: Yeah and it’s always the “artists” that comment on the prices being too low which is ironic cause usually all you ever hear from the average person is mocking how ridiculously high the price of art is generally. Basically I think other artist’s scoff because they’re projecting their insecurity regarding the real value of art, and maybe a little envious they can’t let go of their own pieces as though the abstract painting they made in a few hours should be worth thousands when they could be making a dozen similar pieces in a single day. But um yeah I pretty much think of my stuff as like $30-$50 an hour and really like that’s fucking amazing for a job. Yeah idk I have worked some shitty jobs, and it doesn’t make sense thinking that my work should be above what a person like myself can afford in the first place. When I first started though I still had the mysterious art value notion and was pricing things around $200 that I’d price $70 now, and didn’t sell much at first. It wasn’t until I started doing smaller pieces and gauging my time that I started selling a lot more and trying a lot of different things. It’s not like i’m making art specifically about making money but I can understand why people are so interested in this aspect. I don’t think it’s very common huh. When I first started I tried to justify it as a performance piece called “The Painter” haha. I used to title all sorts of things in my mind as a means to cope with the daunting reality of the situation “Working Construction”, 2014. Even during some of the lowest points I think it helped me maintain the peculiar sense of an artist identity I didn’t want to let go of even if I was letting go of everything else like “Burning All My Journals & Paintings″, 2015
ML: Haha what is that last one about?
TB: Around the time I stopped living with my wife and moved into my own place I decided to not bring much along with me. I think the title is self-explanatory.
ML: I’m wondering if you could talk about any reoccurring themes or characters in a lot of your paintings like the blob fish or spicy boys.
TB: Ya know I think most everything just comes to me on a whim and if it works out or holds my interest I’ll keep playing with it. I guess blob fish and spicy boys are like representative of the comedy/tragedy masks or something. I think I’ve simplified a lot of themes in my paintings just so I can keep the flow going. I’m looking forward to spending more time and space on pieces in the future and elaborate on certain things I’ve wanted to express but didn’t know how to put into words.
ML: How so?
TB: Well, for example. Sometimes I will paint something I’ve seen in my mind, like, dreamed or hallucinated, but not often because a lot of the time I feel I can’t do it justice even though a lot of my stuff is very much informed by these things that I don’t exactly control. It’s like I take video stills from the internet except they’re from my mind, and the screenshot is something I only had to opportunity to view briefly, but even with a split second hallucination I will think about it for weeks and often will just paint its most basic components. Anyway I’m gearing toward eventually elaborating on the more complex ones because lately I have had some visions that have come to the forefront of my interest. Hopefully will get to them after a few more pet portrait commissions haha.
ML: What do you mean by hallucinations? Is your inspiration mainly inspired by dreams or do you mean drugs as well?
TB: Most things I just write down as interesting ideas to play with, but I guess I don’t want to get too much into talking about drugs. However there have some recent experiences I’ve had with substances like dmt and the things I saw during that I have been thinking about ever since. So right now I’m just trying to get to the end of commissions and then give my attention to some new projects. Have a show in March. Don’t know what I’ll do for it, but certainly no shortage of ideas.
ML: Where do you see yourself going or where would you like to go, and any other thoughts on painting/selling/art in general?
TB: I want to go to the top haha. Well in most ways things are better than ever, and I’m incredibly grateful and I can certainly tolerate having things going at this pace at least another year, but would like to make more serious/invested work that I’m really proud of, get some more money and attention and access to better time/space/materials. At this point though even if I had to get a day job I feel I’m completely committed to doing this work. It’s pretty much how I gauge my self-worth for better or worse. Just hope I can find my groove within the process and better understand myself, inspire others, and I wish I had something more insightful to say, but at the moment I’m a bit preoccupied hustling and just having fun with this upcoming show. Thank yaaaa.
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The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking
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Text
The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
https://ift.tt/2XUAD76
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Text
The Best-Laid Plans: Can We Predict Anything About 2021?
Posted by Dr-Pete
I've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can:
The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021?
What do we know?
Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely.
Mobile-only indexing (March)
Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021.
If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank.
Core Web Vitals (May)
While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ...
Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with our existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Many of these page experience signals already impact ranking to some degree, according to Google, so the important part really boils down to Core Web Vitals. You can get more of the details in this Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus, but the short version is that this is currently a set of three metrics (with unfortunately techie names):
(1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how quickly the largest, visible block of your page loads. It is one view into perceived load-time and tries to filter out background libraries and other off-page objects.
(2) First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how much time it takes before a user can interact with your page. "Interact" here means the most fundamental aspects of interaction, like clicking an on-page link.
(3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures changes to your page layout, such as ads that appear or move after the initial page-load. I suspect the update will apply mostly to abusive or disruptive layout shifts.
While these metrics are a narrow slice of the user experience, the good news is that Google has defined all of them in a fair amount of detail and allows you to track this data with tools like Google Lighthouse. So, we're in a unique position of being be able to prepare for the May algorithm update.
That said, I think you should improve site speed and user experience because it's a net-positive overall, not because of a pending 2021 update. If past history — including the HTTPS update and mobile-friendly update — is any indicator, Google's hope is to use the pre-announcement to push people to make changes now. I strongly suspect that Core Web Vitals will be a very minor ranking factor in the initial update, ramping up over a period of many months.
Passage indexing/ranking (TBD)
In October 2020, Google announced that they were "... now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages." They later clarified that this wasn't so much passage indexing as passage ranking, and the timeline wasn't initially clear. Danny Sullivan later clarified that this change did not roll out in 2020, but Google's language suggests that passage ranking is likely to roll out as soon as it's tested and ready.
While there's nothing specific you can do to harness passage ranking, according to Google, I think this change is not only an indicator of ML/AI progress but a recognition that you can have valuable, long-form content that addresses multiple topics. The rise of answers in SERPs (especially Featured Snippets and People Also Ask boxes) had a side-effect of causing people to think in terms of more focused, question-and-answer style content. While that's not entirely bad, I suspect it's generally driven people away from broader content to shorter, narrower content.
Even in 2020, there are many examples of rich, long-form content that ranks for multiple Featured/Snippets, but I expect passage ranking will re-balance this equation even more and give us increased freedom to create content in the best format for the topic at hand, without worrying too much about being laser-targeted on a single topic.
Core algorithm updates (TBD)
It's safe to say we can expect more core algorithm updates in 2021. There were three named "Core" updates in 2020 (January, May, and December), but the frequency and timing has been inconsistent. While there are patterns across the updates, thematically, each update seems to contain both new elements and some adjustments to old elements, and my own analysis suggests that the patterns (the same sites winning and losing, for example) aren't as prominent as we imagine. We can assume that Google's Core Updates will reflect the philosophy of their quality guidelines over time, but I don't think we can predict the timing or substance of any particular core update.
Googlebot crawling HTTP/2 (2022+)
Last fall, Google revealed that Googlebot would begin crawling HTTP/2 sites in November of 2020. It's not clear how much HTTP/2 crawling is currently happening, and Google said they would not penalize sites that don't support HTTP/2 and would even allow opt-out (for now). Unlike making a site secure (HTTPS) or mobile-friendly, HTTP/2 is not widely available to everyone and may depend on your infrastructure or hosting provider.
While I think we should pay attention to this development, don't make the switch to HTTP/2 in 2021 just for Google's sake. If it makes sense for the speed and performance of your site, great, but I suspect Google will be testing HTTP/2 and turning up the volume on it's impact slowly over the next few months. At some point, we might see a HTTPS-style announcement of a coming ranking impact, but if that happens, I wouldn't expect it until 2022 or later.
When will this end?
While COVID-19 may not seem like a marketing topic, the global economic impact is painfully clear at this point Any plans we make for 2021 have to consider the COVID-19 timeline, or they're a fantasy. When can we expect the pandemic to end and businesses to reopen on a national and global scale?
Let me start by saying that I'm not a medical doctor — I'm a research psychologist by training. I don't have a crystal ball, but I know how to read primary sources and piece them together. What follows is my best read of the current facts and the 2021 timeline. I will try to avoid my own personal biases, but note that my read on the situation is heavily US-biased. I will generally avoid worst-case scenarios, like a major mutation of the virus, and stick to a median scenario.
Where are we at right now?
As I'm writing this sentence, over 4,000 people died just yesterday of COVID-19 in the US and over 14,000 globally. As a data scientist, I can tell you that every data point requires context, but when we cherry-pick the context, we deceive ourselves. What data science doesn't tell us is that everyone one of these data points is a human life, and that matters.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of viable vaccines, including (here in the US and in the UK) the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines. These vaccines have been approved in some countries, have demonstrated promising results, and are in production. Here in the US, we're currently behind the timeline on distribution, with the CDC reporting about 10 million people vaccinated as of mid-January (initial goal was 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020). In terms of the timeline, it's important to note that, for maximum effectiveness, the major vaccines require two doses, separated by about 3-4 weeks (this may vary with the vaccine and change as research continues).
Is it getting better or worse?
I don't want to get mired in the data, but the winter holidays and travel are already showing a negative impact here in the US, and New Year's Eve may complicate problems. While overall death rates have improved due to better treatment options and knowledge of the disease, many states and countries are at or near peak case rates and peak daily deaths. This situation is very likely to get worse before it gets better.
When might we reopen?
I'm assuming, for better or worse, that reopening does not imply full "herd immunity" or a zero case-rate. We're talking about a critical mass of vaccinations and a significant flattening of the curve. It's hard to find a source outside of political debates here in the US, but a recent symposium sponsored by Harvard and the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that — if we can adequately ramp up vaccine distribution in the second quarter of 2021 — we could see measurable positive impact by the end of our summer (or early-to-mid third quarter) here in the US.
Any prediction right now requires a lot of assumptions and there may be massive regional differences in this timeline, but the key point is that the availability of the vaccine, while certainly cause for optimism, is not a magic wand. Manufacturing, distribution, and the need for a second dose all mean that we're realistically still looking at a few months for medical advances to have widespread impact.
What can we do now?
First, let me say that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Many local businesses were decimated, while e-commerce grew 32% year-over-year in 2020. If you're a local restaurant that managed to stay afloat, you may see a rapid return of customers in the summer or fall. If you're a major online retailer, you could actually see a reduction in sales as brick-and-mortar stores become viable again (although probably not to 2019 levels).
If your e-commerce business was lucky enough to see gains in 2020, Miracle Inameti-Archibong has some great advice for you. To inadequately summarize — don't take any of this for granted. This is a time to learn from your new customers, re-invest in your marketing, and show goodwill toward the people who are shopping online more because of the difficulties they're facing.
If you're stuck waiting to reopen, consider the lead time SEO campaigns require to have an impact. In a recent Whiteboard Friday, I made the case that SEO isn't an on/off switch. Consider the oversimplified diagram below. Paid search is a bit like the dotted gray line — you flip the switch on, and the leads starting flowing. The trade-off is that when you flip the switch off, the leads dry up almost immediately.
Organic SEO has a ramp-up. It's more like the blue curve above. The benefit of organic is that the leads keep coming when you stop investing, but it also means that the leads will take time to rebuild when you start to reinvest. This timeline depends on a lot of variables, but an organic campaign can often take 2-3 months or more to get off the ground. If you want to hit the ground running as reopening kicks in, you're going to need to start re-investing ahead of that timeline. I acknowledge that that might not be easy, and it doesn't have to be all or none.
In a recent interview, Mary Ellen Coe (head of Google Marketing Solutions) cited a 20,000% increase during the pandemic in searches from consumers looking to support local businesses. There's a tremendous appetite for reopening and a surge of goodwill for local businesses. If you're a local business, even if you're temporarily closed, it's important to let people know that you're still around and to keep them up-to-date on your reopening plans as they evolve.
I don't expect that the new normal will look much like the old normal, and I'm mindful that many businesses didn't survive to see 2021. We can't predict the future, but we can't afford to wait for months and do nothing, either, so I hope this at least gives you some idea of what to expect in the coming year and how we might prepare for it.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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yungbud
Yungbud
dubai-cleaning-com
شركات تنظيف بدبي
kuroosmikasavolleyball
Certified lover of Kuroo Tetsurou
woofleskun
【 Aɴɢsᴛʏ Cʜɪʜᴜᴀʜᴜᴀ 】
arcticdarkness
Arctic Darkness