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3 Quality Signals That Help Content Rank Higher in SERPs
In Google, beauty is in the eyes of crawlers. They look at everything from your text to your meta tags to your style sheets. Here are three strategies to make that picture even better to boost your search rankings. Continue reading
The post 3 Quality Signals That Help Content Rank Higher in SERPs appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
More than Mascots: It’s Time to End Cultural Appropriation of Native Americans in Sports
No matter the sport, fans’ love for the game—and for their favorite team—runs deep. That love fuels family traditions, community rivalries and hours of tune-in time. It’s also a love that’s central to American culture. But what happens when that sense of connection comes at the expense of a culture or heritage that has endured centuries of harm in the name of Americana? For many Native Americans, the appropriation of sacred symbols and propagation of stereotypes have been par for the course in American sports at professional, collegiate and K-12 levels. But many of today’s fans are saying it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Fans applaud the shift away from the appropriation of Native American culture as mascots. In fact, a recent Nielsen Fan Insights survey in collaboration with IllumiNative found that 46% of respondents believe teams are doing the right thing by changing their names and stopping the use of culturally insensitive mascots. For example, after years of pressure, the Washington Football Team finally retired the use of its former name and logo in 2020. The Cleveland Indians made a similar move at the start of the 2019 baseball season when it stopped using its former mascot, Chief Wahoo.
But 45% of fans want sports teams to do more than just stop using culturally insensitive mascots and names. They want them to end the appropriation of Native American culture as well, citing the harm it does to the community and the damaging emotional effects on Native Americans. And much of the appropriation starts in school sports, which the American Psychological Association says establishes an unwelcome and oftentimes hostile learning environment for American Indian students that affirms negative images/stereotypes that are then promoted in mainstream society.
The response to evolving consumer sentiment is also evolving, as the Cleveland Indians took their stance a step beyond retiring its old mascot when it announced in December of last year that it will change its name, which is perceived as more neutral in nature than its former mascot. The phased evolution of the team’s persona reflects how consumers have shifted from intolerance about offensive mascots to intolerance about any cultural appropriation at all.
In some instances, sports organizations and teams had good intentions, using Native American culture and mascots to honor the community. Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), founder and CEO of IllumiNative, explains that what is intended as an honor can often have a demoralizing effect. “Native Americans are the only group being used as sports mascots, depicting our Native American communities not as people, but as ‘other’. It’s dehumanizing and objectifying.”
Not only do fans recognize that sports mascots are the primary means by which Native American cultures are represented on television, 50% of respondents in our recent survey acknowledged that options to see Native American culture or people are represented on TV were limited—especially in contemporary roles and not just historical context. Outside of team names and logos, Native peoples’ share of screen stands at just 0.27%—a figure about one-sixth the presence of Native Americans in the U.S. population today. Increased news coverage has broadened awareness of ongoing policy issues such as voting access and land rights, but when audiences seek out scripted content on TV that includes Native Americans, representation of Native American talent in lead roles is less than 1% in multiple TV genres:
More needs to be done to expand representation of Native Americans on their terms. And when it comes to championing social issues, sports are leading the way. Nielsen Sports Managing Director Jon Stainer says the changing tide is another opportunity for pro sports teams: “Sports fans want more from the teams they love—beyond watching their favorite teams play their best, fans want their teams to represent their values. The racial reckoning in the U.S. has created a greater awareness, and sports fans expect their favorite teams to stand up for underrepresented communities and take a stand against cultural appropriation of Native Americans.”
Trading cultural appropriation in sports for the visibility that Native Americans deserve—representation that is defined by and not dictated to Native peoples—is a long overdue way to truly honor this underrepresented population.
Google on What’s Going on With FAQ Rich Results via @sejournal, @martinibuster
John Mueller was asked if FAQ structured data still produces rich results. He explained the fine tuning process for search results
The post Google on What’s Going on With FAQ Rich Results appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How to Attract Backlinks to Your Law Firm Website via @sejournal, @xandervalencia
Link building is important for Law Firm SEO. Check out 40 tried and true ways to drive links to your law firm website.
The post How to Attract Backlinks to Your Law Firm Website appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How to Improve SEO With User Experience Factors via @sejournal, @martinibuster
Focus on User Experience to meet the needs of searchers. It improves organic search marketing performance, helping websites rank well on the SERPs.
The post How to Improve SEO With User Experience Factors appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
The team discusses how Twitter feeds will soon be full of larger images, Yelp’s new features for advertisers, and YouTube’s new tools for creators.
The post Twitter Changes Image Crop & More Digital Marketing News appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How to Use The Inverted Pyramid for SEO Copywriting via @sejournal, @jasonhennessey
The Inverted Pyramid is used in journalism to hook readers and create more engaging articles. Learn how to use it in SEO copywriting.
The post How to Use The Inverted Pyramid for SEO Copywriting appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How to Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for SEO via @sejournal, @vandernickr
Learn what to look for in a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to support your SEO goals, what they cost, common issues in implementation & more.
The post How to Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for SEO appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Keep ‘Em Guessing (and More Lessons From Content We Love)
This week in content marketing, the Morning Brew shows how to perk up reader interest. A content creator whips up a handy resource for B2B writers and experts. And a new studio from Neutrogena puts its best face forward with an award-winning documentary. Continue reading
The post Keep ‘Em Guessing (and More Lessons From Content We Love) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Offering Hope, Not Funding Hate
For more than a year, the negative rhetoric against China as the source of the COVID-19 virus has resulted in increased verbal and physical attacks against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. As the world learned to navigate the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans increased as the virus spread. While activists and allies have ramped up their efforts to fight the hate, one of the immediate calls for action was to end the use of racist terminology in media that continues to fuel dangerous consequences in real life.
The harmful effects of this language (e.g. “China virus,” “Wuhan plague”) are widespread, as a new analysis from Nielsen highlights that Asian stereotypes, conspiracies over the origins of COVID-19, and offensive terminology against Asian Americans are thriving in digital content. While media has a clear role to play in disrupting anti-Asian racism, so too do brands. As a result of the digital ad serving process, brands are unintentionally funding hate speech. Without insight into where their ads are appearing, brands can easily become associated with offensive content and keywords. In an increasingly digital media landscape, brands need to protect themselves and stop inadvertently monetizing content that puts AAPI communities at risk.
Amid the increase in harmful narratives, advertising has largely remained business as usual. To better understand how prevalent brand exposure to hate speech is, Nielsen conducted a study leveraging artificial intelligence to identify more than 1,200 website URLs containing hate speech against people of Asian descent. Once we isolated the offensive content, we identified thousands of ad occurrences.
Source: AdVerif.AI, 01/01/2020-04/01/2021
From there, we identified more than 250 impacted ad campaigns in the first quarter of this year alone. These campaigns ran on URLs where brands, including household names, were adjacent to content that featured the use of racist, disparaging, stigmatizing, and xenophobic terminology and conspiracies related to coronavirus origins, Asians and China.
Source: Nielsen Digital Ad Intel, Q1 2021, Digital Display and Digital Video ad spend by select categories on websites with at least one detected instance of anti-Asian hate speech.
From news reporting to op-eds, the terms and subjective language connecting blame for the novel coronavirus to Chinese and Asian people has stained media coverage on-screen and online.
Reference to “China Bioweapon” peaked in 2021
Content that spread “Blame China” was still in use in Q1 2021
Source: AdVerif.AI, 01/01/2020-04/01/2021
Despite the impact of this terminology being used, this content still shows up on some of today’s most visited news and information websites. And brands remain exposed as a result.
Source: Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, Q1 2021 Unique Audience, Computer Only; Nielsen Digital Ad Intel, Q1 2021
In the first quarter of 2021, ad campaigns from a dozen Fortune 500 companies and at least 66 brands were found adjacent to content including anti-Asian hate speech.
Source: Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings, Q1 2021
Our analysis of identified hate speech in the first quarter of 2021 found that the use of this language actually increased in March from January and February, given the anniversary of most of the U.S. lockdowns in March 2020.
Read as: 98 site urls were identified in March 2021 that used anti-Asian hate speech.
Read as: 42 site urls were identified in Q1 2021 that promoted the “China lab” conspiracy in their coronavirus coverage.
Source: AdVerif.AI
Looking deeper, the more frequent terms center on blame, distrust and malice towards China, their people and their government. Nearly one-third of the hate speech in March 2021 came from just one site, which collected more than $100,000 in digital ad spend from three top advertising categories.
Source: Nielsen Digital Ad Intel, Q1 2021, Digital Display and Digital Video ad spend across websites with at least one detected instance of anti-Asian hate speech.
As the Senate approved the anti-Asian hate crimes bill with bipartisan support, this signal of unity brings some hope that legislators will do their part to prevent further violence against Asian Americans. While the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism estimates anti-Asian hate crimes have increased 150% over the past year, ad spend in digital content with hate speech declined overall in first-quarter 2021. There is hope that further awareness will prevent the advertising industry from monetizing content that fuels hate.
What Brands Can Do Right Now
U.S. consumers across the country are standing up and demanding accountability from government and business to take action. It’s not just a matter of corporate social responsibility, it’s a matter of brand safety. For advertisers, brand safety is about more than a stagnant list of terms. Brands and their advertising partners should be in constant review as language emerges that is harmful to a community—and to their brand. And ad servers must consider how changes in rhetoric can be reflected in their algorithms. It’s time to rethink how and where ad campaigns are showing up, ask for accountability from digital ad placement partners, and build protective barriers to prevent placing ads in content with hate speech.
Visit our Asian American community page to learn more about the Asian American population and breaking stereotypes.
Nielsen Digital Content Ratings (DCR) custom desktop reach analysis of top news domains provided to AdVerif.AI to be flagged as publishing content that included anti-Asian hate speech in 1/1/2021-3/31/2021.
Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) custom analysis of advertisers that ran desktop impressions on URLs that included hate speech during 1/1/2021-3/31/2021.
Nielsen Ad Intel custom analysis reviewed National Digital Display and National Digital Video advertising spend within 1/1/2021-3/31/2021 on the sites identified for using anti-Asian hate speech.
AdVerif.AI is an artificial intelligence company providing ad verification solutions for advertisers, publishers as well as ad platforms and backed by the Nielsen Innovate Fund. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning the proprietary AdVerif.AI technology is able to train a model that can identify content featuring anti-Asian terms related to COVID-19. The collaboration with AdVerif.AI allowed for training an algorithm to distinguish from content reporting on the issue of hate speech vs. propagating messages of hate, conspiracy or stigma. The resulting model was then used to evaluate the Top 300 news, information, and news aggregation sites based on Digital Content Ratings monthly unique audience for January 2021. Each page on those sites was then evaluated on the likelihood that it contains hate speech, returning a list of top “offending pages” by assigning a score based on presence of hate speech, subjective language, false information, etc. Each page is further evaluated by the model to identify the advertiser(s) and ad platform serving the ads providing a point-in-time view of ads placed in offending content based on a US IP address.