5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links — Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Are you using internal links to their full potential? Probably not. Luckily, Cyrus is here with five tips to help you boost your internal linking strategy — and your site performance — in this brand new Whiteboard Friday.

Resources for further reading:

• Should SEOs Care About Internal Links?
• Internal Linking Best Practices

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard, and today we are talking about internal links. Specifically, five SEO tactics to maximize your internal links.

I love internal links. There are a lot of guides out there, internal link best practices — they explain everything. This is not that video. This is not that guide. Instead, I want to show you ways to maximize your internal links for maximum SEO gain, because I see a lot of people who don't leverage their full power, and they think internal links simply aren't as powerful. 

But first, a story...

So I have some specific tactics for you to try and employ, and we'll get into those in a second. But first, to demonstrate internal links, I want to start with a story, a story which shows some of their potential power. It's a story of a single link here at Moz that we employed several months ago. 

We have a page on Domain Authority. If you Google "Domain Authority," it's typically the very first result. Back in January, we added a single link to the page. We had just launched a new tool, SEO Domain Metrics, and we wanted to add a link from our existing page to our new page. So we did. The link said "Check your Domain Authority for free," and we added it. Within weeks we saw some interesting metrics, not on the page that we linked to, but on the page that we linked from.

We also included an image on the page to draw attention to the link. Bounce rate instantly went down 33%. Why? People were clicking the link. They wanted to check their Domain Authority. Pages per session went up 33%. So when people were visiting this page, they were visiting more pages pretty much because of this link and the accompanying image.

Session duration was up 10%. So people were spending 10% more time on Moz after they visited this page. Within a few weeks, traffic to the page that we added the link to was up 42%, and it has sustained that traffic increase ever since January when we added that link. Of course, the page that we linked to we added links from all over the site.

Traffic on this page has risen exponentially, and it's now one of the top pages on Moz, probably not all because of this link, but the cumulative efforts of many of those links. So why did that link work so well and why do we think that the link helped improve those page metrics? So here's the thing that most people don't get about internal links.

1. Engagement 

Number one, strive for engagement. When you add internal links to your page, it gives people the opportunity to visit other relevant pages on your site, thereby improving your engagement metrics. That's when you know that your internal links are working when you improve engagement. If you're just adding SEO links for SEO value and there's no engagement change, are you really adding value?

No. So you want to go after engagement. There are some technical Google reasons for this. Google has several patents that we've discussed over the years — reasonable surfer. There's a patent called User Sensitive PageRank. Through these patents, Google describes how they want to count links that people actually click.

If people aren't clicking on your links, should they really count? So Google has several processes in place to sort of measure what people are clicking or what they might click and actually pass more weight through those links. So you get help with the engagement, but you also pass more link signals through those links that people are actually clicking.

Now think about where you might be putting your internal links now. Are you putting them at the bottom of the page, like in a related post? Is anybody clicking those widget links? Maybe not, probably not. Look at the top of this post, the top of this page. I'm going to add some links about internal linking at the very top of the post. Do you think people are going to click those links?

You bet they are. There's a good chance you're going to click one of those links after you watch this video. Or maybe you clicked on it before you watch those videos. So we would expect those links to pass more value than adding those links further down on the page or in a widget or something like that. You can tell your internal links are working and have value when you see your engagement metrics start to move.

So that should be the number one measure or standard of if your internal links are valuable and are working for you. Pursue engagement, number one rule. 

2. Extreme topical relevance

Number two tip, extreme topical relevance. Now people say, yes, you should link to topically relevant pages. I like link to extremely topically relevant pages.

So whenever I publish a new page, I look for the other pages on my site that are very topically related, and I make sure to interlink them appropriately so I can get the right rankings boost to the right pages that I want. There are other Google technical reasons for this too. We talked about reasonable surfer and user sensitive PageRank. Well, Google also has something they patented called Topical PageRank, and that means that links that are more topically relevant pass more value.

Links that are less topically relevant pass less value. You can also look at your engagement metrics to see if these links are topically relevant because people generally don't want to click less topically relevant links. So a couple of tips for finding your most topically relevant pages on your site. For example, for Domain Authority, I might look at all the other keywords that that page ranks for in positions 2 and 10, which means they rank highly but they're not quite number 1 and I want to boost the rankings.

I want to find other pages on my site that also rank for those keywords. So I would use a query like this, and I'll put the code in the transcription below. I would search on my site, site to moz.com, search for my keyword "Domain Authority," and I would exclude the page that I'm actually looking for, so:

site:moz.com domain authority -inurl:/domainauthority

Google will give me a list of other pages on my site that rank for Domain Authority, excluding this, and I know those might be good link targets to link to my page to help it rank for those terms. We have some other resources on that as well if you search around and I'll link to:

Harnessing the Flow of Link Equity to Maximize SEO Ranking Opportunity

3. Add context

Third tip, don't just add links, add context to your links.

One thing that a lot of people do, that I hate seeing, is when they add a link to a page, they'll just find a piece of relevant text and they'll add a link to it and that's it, without adding any relevant context or anything else like that. In my experience, it's much better if you add context around a link. Google's freshness patents talk about the amount of change in a document.

When they just see a link, they might ignore just a simple link added. But if you add text, if you add image, if you add context around a link to help draw people's attention to it, to help give some relevant signals to Google, that link, in my experience, is much more likely to pass value than simply adding a link and linking some existing text.

So always add context to your links. 

4. Make every link unique

Number four, can you believe we're at four out of five? Number four, make every link unique. Now a lot of people in SEO they talk about link ratio. Should you use exact match anchor text or partial match anchor text? What should your ratios be? I think that's far too complicated.

I think much easier is just simply make every new link you add unique. Make it natural. Use natural words. I tend to avoid exact match anchor text completely. That way I get to avoid something that's very easy to do, which is over-optimization. If you're a new site with not a lot of authority, Google has processes in place to detect over-optimization when they think that you're trying to manipulate your rankings.

So make every link unique. Use natural words. Don't worry about ratios and things like that. If you follow my advice, I would generally avoid exact match anchor text on internal links. Other people may give you different advice though. 

5. Trim low value links

Finally, tactic number five, you may consider trimming your low value links, and this is another technical reason.

This is a type of old PageRank sculpting. The idea is every page has a certain amount of PageRank. If you include lots and lots of links on your page, the value that Google is able to pass through each link is diminished. It's diluted. So you sometimes may want to eliminate the low value links. So what do I mean by a low value link?

Links that are not engaging and not relevant. People are not clicking them. If they're not engaging and they're not relevant, there is simply no point to include them on the page if they're not being actually helpful. 

Conclusion

All right. So those are my five tips for getting the most power of your internal linking. If you have any other tips that you'd like to share with the community, we'd love to hear about them in the comments below.

Hope you enjoyed this video. Best of luck with your SEO.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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United Kingdom Falls into the Wind Trap

In order to get net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, has pledged that offshore wind will power every home by 2030. Johnson got suckered into believing that offshore wind was cheaper than coal and natural gas and could power 100 percent of the U.K. grid. It is difficult to believe that the leader of the U.K. could expect that an intermittent technology such as wind could power the entire U.K. grid with electricity storage still being uneconomic. Under a carbon free scenario, storage batteries will be in competition with batteries for electric vehicles. And, since China dominates the battery supply chain and the materials needed to produce them, it is unlikely that storage batteries will be economic any time soon. Western nations are also presented with the dilemma of becoming entirely dependent upon China for the provision of their energy futures.

In August, California found that its reliance on wind and solar resulted in rolling blackouts when solar production was reduced by a third from smoke arising from wild fires and wind resources were slack. In 2016, a storm triggered a state-wide power outage in South Australia, which is the leading producer of wind power in Australia. South Australia, like California, also relies on imports from neighboring regions when solar and wind production are limited. Last year, parts of southern England experienced a blackout after a lightning strike triggered a cascade of disconnections in less than a second, cutting off power to four hospitals and disrupting hundreds of train services.

Coal and natural gas power plants currently are used to help keep the electric grid stable. These technologies can be ramped up or down to manage grid frequency. Because it is impossible to adjust the frequency output of wind and solar, grid stability and resilience are reduced.

Close Calls on Power Shortages

In the middle of October, Britain’s electric grid was threatened by low wind output. National Grid, the country’s grid operator, warned “unusually low wind output” and a series of power plant outages would squeeze the network, leaving it with less back-up power than normal. It was estimated that the share of wind-generated power in the electricity mix would drop to as low as 9 percent and 10.5 percent, before returning up to 51 percent.

This was the second scare the country had in a month, as it leads the world in offshore wind energy. In mid-September, National Grid warned that its “buffer” of power reserves had fallen below 500 megawatts and it could need to call on more power plants to help prevent a blackout.

Costs for Grid-Balancing

During the national lockdown earlier this year from the coronavirus pandemic, the U.K. network had extra power. One weekend, the grid operator had to spend £50 million ($64.7 million) to pay power producers—including surplus wind and solar farms—to stop generating power. National Grid spent almost £1 billion ($1.29 billion) on extra interventions to prevent blackouts during the first half of the year and also paid the owner of the Sizewell B nuclear plant to halve its generation output because of all the renewable energy they were producing when it wasn’t needed.

In 2002, before widespread wind deployment in Britain, National Grid’s charges for grid-balancing services totaled £367 million ($481 million). This year, they were forecast to be £1.478 billion ($1.913 billion) before the coronavirus struck—3 times the amount prior to renewable deployment. Reduced electricity demand now results in the balancing costs reaching £2 billion ($2.6 billion)—4 times higher than the cost before renewable deployment.

Offshore Wind is Expensive

Although new-generation wind turbines are larger and initially have better load factors, an analysis has found their performance degrades more rapidly than anticipated. Compared to the government estimate of £2.16 million ($2.83 million) per megawatt for offshore wind, the actual cost came out to £3.99 million ($5.22 million)—almost twice as much, excluding an enormously expensive floating wind farm project, which, when included, pushes the average cost to £4.49 million ($5.88 million) per megawatt.

U.S. States Pushing for Offshore Wind

Not learning from the U.K. experience, states from Virginia to Massachusetts along the Atlantic seaboard are pushing for offshore wind development and are awaiting final permits.

Massachusetts has a mandate to build 3,200 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2035. Wind power will be carried to the mainland by underwater cables, with the cost passed through to households and businesses. New Jersey regulators selected Ørsted, a Danish energy company, to build giant wind turbines 15 miles off the coast of Atlantic City that will generate 1,100 megawatts of offshore wind. This is part of Governor Murphy’s commitment for 7,500 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2035. Connecticut has plans for 2,000 megawatts by 2030. Maryland has approved two wind farms off the coast of Ocean City. New York’s mandate is for 9,000 megawatts by 2035with the first ones built off the coast of Long Island. Virginia’s State Corporation Commission approved a project to construct 12-megawatts of wind turbines 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. The state’s goal is for 2 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2028.

Conclusion

As unreliable and expensive as offshore wind is, the U.K. and U.S. states are making big commitments in the politically-fashionable technology. This is another example of offshoring, as most of the developers are not U.K. or U.S. firms. The U.K. has been forewarned that blackouts may result from too much reliance on an intermittent technology, and California is already showing the problems that political forcing of the technology is causing. Clearly, the United Kingdom is seeing huge costs to balance the grid when demand is down due to COVID and the costs of the offshore wind farms are more than the government is touting in its plans.

The post United Kingdom Falls into the Wind Trap appeared first on IER.

Bidding the Paris Agreement Adieu

With the wheels having been set in motion more than three years ago, the United States officially exited the Paris climate agreement on Wednesday, November 4, 2020.

The Institute for Energy Research has covered the agreement since its conception and has an extensive well of analysis on Paris that can be viewed here.

Among the primary points IER has presented over the years are:

• The Paris Agreement will not achieve its stated global warming mitigation goals through the commitments on paper;
• the commitments on paper, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, are unlikely to be met and lack meaningful enforcement;
• and the Paris Agreement permits the continued expansion of reliable energy deployment in some countries, like China, while restricting its use elsewhere, such as in the United States.

IER recommends the following articles as a Paris primer:

• Clarifying Paris, Part 1 by Robert Murphy
• Clarifying Paris, Part 2 by Robert Murphy
• The Paris Agreement’s Beijing Problem by Jordan McGillis
• Energy Freedom vs. Paris Agreement by David Kreutzer

The following audio-visual resources may also be of use:

• Policy Priorities: The Paris Climate Agreement by Jordan McGillis
• Ramifications of U.S. Withdrawal from Paris Climate Agreement from Voice of America

The post Bidding the Paris Agreement Adieu appeared first on IER.

Carbon Tax Update, November 2020

This month’s update will focus entirely on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s October 15 notice of proposed policy statement on carbon pricing. FERC will accept comments on this proposed policy statement through November 16 at ferc.gov. Comments can be identified by Docket No. AD20-14-000.

The commission seeks to clarify jurisdiction
FERC, October 15, 2020

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) today proposed a policy statement to clarify that it has jurisdiction over organized wholesale electric market rules that incorporate a state-determined carbon price in those markets. The proposed policy statement also seeks to encourage regional electric market operators to explore and consider the benefits of establishing such rules.

“As states actively seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within their regions, carbon pricing has emerged as an important, market-based tool that has wide support from across sectors,” FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee said. “The Commission is not an environmental regulator, but we may be called upon to review proposals that incorporate a state-determined state carbon price into these regional markets. These rules could improve the efficiency and transparency of the organized wholesale markets by providing a market-based method to reduce GHG emissions.”

Today’s proposal finds that regional market rules incorporating a state-determined carbon price can fall within the Commission’s jurisdiction over wholesale rates. However, determining whether the rules proposed in any particular Federal Power Act (FPA) section 205 filing do fall under FERC jurisdiction will be based on the specific facts and circumstances.

Danly dissents in part
American Public Power Association, October 16, 2020

FERC Commissioner James Danly concurred in part and dissented in part from the policy statement.

“I dissent in part because I believe that the issuance of a policy statement on this subject—a wholly discretionary act—is unnecessary and unwise,” wrote Danly.

He said he was concurring “with that part of the policy statement noting that we have jurisdiction to entertain section 205 filings that seek to accommodate state carbon-pricing policies, which is a fundamental principle that cannot be doubted.”

With respect to his concern that the Commission should not exercise its discretion to issue a policy statement, Danly noted that he expressed similar concerns in his recent dissent to FERC Order No. 2222 requiring RTOs/ISOs to promulgate rules to accommodate distributed energy resource aggregators.

In that dissent, he questioned the Commission’s seizure of authority at the expense of the states and advocated that FERC should allow RTOs and ISOs to develop their own DER programs in the first instance. “[T]hen the question of the Commission’s jurisdiction will be ripe,” he wrote in the Order No. 2222 dissent.

Danly noted that FERC’s proposed policy statement does not mandate that RTOs/ISOs adopt carbon-pricing accommodation regimes, saying he agrees that the Commission should not issue such a mandate.

“Instead, the policy statement ‘encourages’ RTO/ISO rule changes. Without seeing a proposal, the Commission predetermines that any such proposal will be within the Commission’s jurisdiction and ‘would not in any way diminish state authority,’” the Commissioner wrote.

“That may well turn out to be true, but I would have waited until we had an actual 205 filing before us rather than pre-judging the issue based on unstated assumptions about how such programs might work,” Danly said.

“It is easy to imagine any number of RTO/ISO carbon-pricing proposals that would violate the Federal Power Act by impermissibly invading the authorities reserved to the states.”

Danly also took issue with the policy statement’s assertion that incorporating a state-determined carbon price into RTO/ISO markets could represent another example of the type of program of cooperative federalism that the Supreme Court noted with approval in FERC v. the Electric Power Supply Association.

“There is no program. This is instead a non-binding, blanket dismissal of potential jurisdictional concerns,” Danly said.

As to the substance of the policy statement, Danly concurred. “I cannot do otherwise. The policy statement amounts to little more than a statement of fact: section 205 of the Federal Power Act has not been repealed and the Commission therefore has jurisdiction to entertain section 205 filings that seek to accommodate state carbon-pricing policies. Surely, that need not be stated.”

And to the extent the Commission “feels the need to ‘clarify’ the fact that we have the power to accept just and reasonable tariff revisions that are designed to include mandatory state charges in energy and capacity market offers, I am hard-pressed to identify a more settled area of Commission law.”

IER’s Take

Read in the most optimistic light, this statement establishes that FERC will respect the authority of the states to determine their own environmental policies, that FERC will not proactively institute carbon prices, and that it will reject rules that amount to cross-border taxation.

But read in a more pessimistic light, this statement is an invitation to a back-door carbon tax. What else are we to make of FERC choosing to “encourage RTO/ISO efforts to explore and consider the benefits of potential Federal Power Act (FPA) section 205 filings to establish (carbon pricing)”?

This does not bode well for electricity users.

“The commission’s press release includes five questions about what information FERC should consider if a carbon pricing rule is proposed under Section 205 of the [Federal Power Act],” said Travis Fisher, president of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council. “Not one question is about impacts on consumers, and that is unfortunate, given that the FPA is fundamentally a consumer protection statute.”

Left unclear is what will happen when states don’t want other states’ carbon taxes affecting their electricity markets. Utah, for example, has already expressed this concern. If states start withdrawing from interstate markets, will that not undermine FERC’s mission of promoting interstate wholesale markets?

The statement raises more questions than it settles, which is why Commissioner Danly rightly implied it adds little value.

For more context, read last month’s update here and the JD Supra recap here.

The post Carbon Tax Update, November 2020 appeared first on IER.

Top 10 Changes That Impacted Google My Business in 2020

Posted by ColanNielsen

2020 has been a busy year for Google My Business (GMB). Since January, Google has launched new features, fixed bugs, and had to adapt to the global pandemic.

At Sterling Sky, we think it’s important to keep track of all the changes that happen in the local search space in general, and that impact GMB specifically. So far in 2020 we are up to 54 changes.

As you can tell, changes that impact Google My Business came at a fast pace — and at high volume — in 2020. In this post, I highlight the changes I think were most important in each month of this year, so far. For an exhaustive list of all the updates that have been made, check out this timeline.

January: Google posts borked — hello, 2020!

Foreshadowing things to come, GMB started off the year with a major issue in their Google Posts feature. Google Posts were getting rejected left, right, and center.

At first, it appeared to be a bug in the system. We were further confused when Google stated that everything was “working as intended”, but the Google My Business Forum was still flooded with users complaining that their Google Posts were being rejected, and not just for a single reason:

And then Google announced that they resolved the issue. Was it truly “Working as intended”? Likely not, but the issues have, indeed, been resolved.

This hiccup made it tough for SEOs who offer Google Posts as part of their service offerings to do their work, and it would have been even more difficult for software companies that connect to Google’s API and offer multi-location Google Posts.

When one of GMB’s products fail, it’s on us as SEOs to clearly explain what’s happening to our clients. Staying on top of GMB bugs, and being able to articulate them, is a critical component of the modern local SEO tool belt.

February: Google adds “suggested categories” for GMB Products

February saw the first of many visible changes to the GMB dashboard when Google added “suggested categories” to the Products section. As of today, we still don’t know if this specific addition impacts ranking, but they still appear in the business profile on mobile, so they can impact conversions. In addition, we do know that adding actual GMB Products does not impact ranking.

March: Google launches several COVID-related features

March saw the beginning of GMB allocating a large percentage of their support resources to the healthcare verticals that were impacted most by COVID-19. To complicate things further, Google disabled the GMB Twitter and Facebook support options.

In addition to allocating resources to healthcare verticals, they began launching specific GMB features to help businesses adjust and communicate their current state of operations to their customers. Some of these initial features included:

1. Shutting off the ability for businesses to receive new reviews and Q&A
2. Adding the option to report a location as “Temporarily Closed”
3. Disabling new photos uploaded by customers
4. Adding a COVID-19 Google Post type

These features have done a great job helping businesses through the pandemic, and give SEOs another venue to offer value by implementing them for our clients in a proactive manner.

For instance, the COVID-19 Google Post type appears higher up in the business profile, compared to regular Google Post types, which gives us the opportunity to offer businesses an effective way to give their message an increased level of visibility.

April: GMB adds telehealth appointment and COVID links

April concluded with GMB adding several new website link options to the dashboard. The two main link options that were added are the “COVID-19 info link” and the “Telehealth info link”:

Here’s how they look live on mobile:

We dug into Google Analytics for the example above. The COVID links, in addition to being a useful way to communicate new protocols, also drove traffic and conversions.

May: Google confirms April/May local ranking fluctuations were bugs

In November 2019, we described the local ranking algorithm as the “most volatile” we had seen it to date. The ranking fluctuation was so great that we named the algorithm update that was happening “Bedlam”.

When we started to see strikingly similar volatility in the local search results in April 2020, we jumped to the conclusion that this was another local algorithm update. However, Danny Sullivan confirmed that it was a bug this time around:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just wanted to update. Thanks for the examples. They helped us find a bug that we got resolved about about two weeks ago, and that seems to have stabilized things since.</p>— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) <a href="https://twitter.com/dannysulli... 28, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Several of our clients who saw major ranking fluctuation told us that the real-world impact on their business was palpable. When their rankings dropped, they immediately felt it from a revenue perspective, and when their rankings moved back up, revenue went back up as well. I can only guess that the amount of revenue lost and gained due to this bug, across all businesses, was astronomical.

June: GMB adds “more hours” option

In June, GMB included a new set of hours that a business can add to their locations to indicate when they are open for special circumstances. Some of the “more hours” options appeared to be a response to the pandemic, such as “senior hours”. I suspect that this feature will be available long after the pandemic is over.

SEOs can add value for their clients by proactively setting this up. Some bigger chains such as Wal-Mart are already doing a great job utilizing this feature. Here are some examples I’ve found in the wild recently:

July: Google adds ability to flag user profiles

This is one of my favorite new features from Google this year. They now provide the option for any user to flag a user profile. This new feature is ideal when you want to report a reviewer’s profile that is engaging in clearly fake reviews.

Before this option became available, the only way to report an entire user’s profile was to send an email to Local Guides support.

The important thing to remember is that this feature is only available from the Google Maps App. Here’s how it works:

1. Open the Google Maps app.
2. Find a contribution from the profile that you’d like to flag.
3. Tap on the user name of the profile.
4. Tap the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner.
5. Choose “Report profile”.

August: GMB adds performance metrics to direct edit experience

The GMB direct edit experience has been around for a while now. (Ben Fisher did a great job covering it recently.) It’s a useful way for GMB page managers and owners to make edits to the listing directly on Google search, and not have to go into the GMB dashboard.

What GMB added to this feature in August was the ability to see performance metrics (GMB Insights) directly in Google search as well. What I like about this feature is that you can go back and get data from a six-month window, and as of today, you can only go back three months inside the GMB dashboard.

Here’s how you find the performance metrics. Please note that this feature is not available to all businesses yet. Google typically rolls out new features in phases. As Google gathers data on this rollout, and if it is being adopted well, I imagine we will see this rolled-out to 100% by early 2021.

Perform a branded search for the business that you manage and select the “View profile” button.

Next, you need to select “Add a highlight”. This used to be labeled as “Promote”:

After that, select “Performance”:

And finally, after selecting the performance option you will be able to view your insights data.

September: COVID-related health and safety attributes launch

The pandemic influenced several new GMB features such as the “temporarily closed” option and COVID-19 Google Post type, which we have already covered. I think the most significant feature related to COVID-19, however, was the launch of the coronavirus-related health and safety attributes, which were launched in September.

Google seems to be adding more attributes to the list as time goes on, but here is what they have added as of today. You can select these under the “Info” tab inside the Google My Business dashboard.

These attributes are powerful because they are highly visible in multiple places. You can see them on both mobile and desktop, and in both Google Maps and Google search.

Here’s what they look like in the wild:

October: New “preview call history” module in GMB dashboard

As of the beginning of October, I started seeing a module inside the GMB dashboard called “Preview call history BETA”. It’s not entirely clear what the final feature will look like, but experts have been weighing in over at the Local Search Forum.

Here’s what we know so far based on feedback from Google as well as members' feedback from the Local Search Forum.

1. It’s currently US only and opt-in.
2. No transcription or call recording.
3. Call logs remain for 45 days.
4. There is a whisper message telling the owner that the call originated from Google.
5. The number displayed to the caller will be the forwarding number.
6. This may interfere with off-site call tracking via GMB, so use cautiously if you’re using a call tracking strategy.

So what? November, December, and 2021

Like Bowie said, “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes”. When it comes to Google My Business, you can expect the changes to keep coming as we complete 2020 and move on to 2021.

As for my future predictions, where Google My Business is concerned, I see guidelines opening up to include additional business models as a result of the pandemic, and due to the shift that businesses have had to make from an in-person, brick-and-mortar operation to online service.

Telehealth is a prime example. Google has been adding several GMB attributes that a business can select to indicate that they offer online services. Currently, the guidelines say you need to make in-person contact with customers to qualify for a listing. At the very least, Google has opened this rule up temporarily during the pandemic to accommodate this new health model. So the question is whether or not this will continue into the future once the pandemic is over. I think they will.

And with that, remember to turn and face the strange, and embrace Google My Business in all of its constantly changing glory.

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Plugged In Podcast #62: David Kreutzer on Fighting Privilege and Defending Markets

Dr. David Kreutzer, IER’s Senior Economist, joins the show to discuss the ramifications of ‘climate justice’ programs and the undue amount of influence wielded by ‘green’ lobbyists.

Links:

• More from Dr. Kreutzer on this issue

• More on Public Choice theory

• Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure

• Follow Dr. Kreutzer on Twitter

• The latest analysis from Dr. Kreutzer

Institute for Energy Research · #62: David Kreutzer on fighting privilege and defending markets (11-3-20)

The post Plugged In Podcast #62: David Kreutzer on Fighting Privilege and Defending Markets appeared first on IER.

Biden’s Energy Plan Pushes Green Jobs—But He Has Already Failed There

Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden’s energy plan touts that his energy and climate agenda will create ‘clean’ energy jobs. His website states:

“We need millions of construction, skilled trades, and engineering workers to build a new American infrastructure and clean energy economy. These jobs will create pathways for young people and for older workers shifting to new professions, and for people from all backgrounds and all communities.”

What Biden does not tell you is that he has already tried to develop green jobs and failed miserably. On February 17, 2009, Biden and then-President Barack Obama signed their $787 billion stimulus legislation, emphasizing its green-jobs provisions. Biden, as point man on the bill, promised it would create over 5 million jobs. The intent was to create a new, “clean energy” economy and “green jobs.” The plan was to invest $150 billion over 10 years that would advance a “clean-energy” economy built around biofuels, hybrid cars, low-emission coal plants, and renewable sources such as solar and wind. Sound familiar?

On September 30, 2011, Obama/Biden’s Department of Labor issued the first of four reports on the Green Jobs Program. The first report was titled “Recovery Act: Slow Pace Placing Workers into Jobs Jeopardizes Employment Goals of the Green Jobs Program.” Its findings were:

• Nearly three-fourths of the way through, only 61 percent of the target level of participants had  signed up for training;
• Job placement was only 10 percent of the target level; and
• Only 1,336 participants retained employment for at least 6 months–just 2 percent of the targeted employment retention of 69,717 participants.

On October 12, 2012, a follow-up report was issued titled, “Recovery Act: Green Jobs Program Reports Limited Success in Meeting Employment and Retention Goals as of June 30, 2012.” The results were:

• Over 20 percent of certificates and degrees went to recipients who had only one day of training;
• About half of those completing the Green Jobs program received five or fewer days of training;
• Between 24 percent and 44 percent of the employment outcomes could not be documented; and
• The number of trainees who entered employment was less than 40 percent of the target.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produced the other two reports. Using BLS data, the low growth in green employment resulted in a redefinition of what constituted a “green job,” with the following outcomes:

• The largest green-jobs category was “janitors and cleaners, except maids and housekeeping cleaners,” which had 56,700 green jobs–nearly 10 times as many green jobs as in “civil engineers,” which has the highest number of green jobs in the “architecture and engineering occupations” super-category.
• The septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry had 33 times as many “green” jobs as did solar electricity utilities.
• There were more green jobs selling used merchandise, as in thrift stores, than in engineering services.

Even the new redefined green jobs did not reach the 5 million promised in February 2009. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, the Obama/Biden Administration identified nearly 2.7 million green jobs and most were bus drivers, sewage workers and other types of work that do not fit the “green jobs of the future” that Obama/Biden promised.  Most of them were pre-existing jobs which were simply re-characterized by the government apparently in an effort to boost the numbers of “green jobs.”

Conclusion

Biden is promising to repeat the Obama-Biden legacy of failed green jobs, but this time he intends to spend much more taxpayer money in what will again likely be a failed enterprise. He plans to spend $2 trillion that could be better used to assist the economy in its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown. Meanwhile, his proposals to wring fossil fuels out of the U.S. economy where they supply 80 percent of the energy supply would be hugely disruptive to the jobs of millions who owe their livelihoods to U.S.-produced energy. Americans need to recover from the pandemic, return to jobs, and feed their families. Being retrained for clean-energy jobs is far from their minds as the holiday season approaches and families want to participate in traditional festivities and afford to put food on the table and gifts under the tree for their loved ones.

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