#but gets treated as a third wheel by both the media and certain parts of the fandom

[calliecat93]

The levels of annoyance I feel whenever I see Kirk and Spock's friendship (not in the romantic sense, just in general) get praised and described as 'iconic' and 'soulmates'... and McCoy's whole existence and relationship with both gets totally ignored, and he gets kicked to the curb like he doesn't exist just...

[natsubeatsrock]

Should Hiro Mashima die?

My answer is no. 

Though, this isn't about actually killing Hiro Mashima. Kinda got you with the title, though, huh? (This was originally going to be titled “Is Hiro Mashima dead?” and released on his birthday. You’re welcome.)

This post is about a widely debated topic of analysis known as the "death of the author." I've talked about this a few different times in passing in a few posts over the years. You could argue that this belongs in my series rewriting Fairy Tail and I considered placing it there. However, I feel that it's better that I keep this detached from that series. This topic concerns criticism of any series. Naturally, being a Fairy Tail blog, I plan on engaging this with the context of Fairy Tail's author being dead or not, hence the title. Still, this is helpful to think about for analysis of plenty of other series.

Again, though, my answer is still no.

Let's start with the origin of this term. The term comes from an essay by Roland Barthes called "La mort de l'auteur". Use your best guess as to what that translates to. I highly encourage you to read the essay as it's pretty short. It's about six or seven pages, depending on the version. There are three main points to his essay.

Creative works are products of the culture they come from and less original than people expect. 

The idea of the author as the sole creator and authority of creative works is fairly modern. 

The author's interpretation of a work shouldn't be considered the main or only interpretation of a work.

Of these three points, I'm sure you recognize the last point. But first, I want to talk about the other points. I believe it is important to understand the arguments being made as a whole.

The first point should be fairly uncontroversial. The vast majority of creative works use established language, tropes, and elements to create a new thing. I wouldn't go as far as Barthes does in this regard. Not to mention, this is somewhat weird to know considering his third point. However, I agree that creative works should be considered products of the culture and genre they come from.

The second point is a bit trickier for me. To be clear, the point is true. You only have to look at various cultural mythologies as an example. There isn't a single version of the Greek myths. There are several versions and interpretations of the various stories and myths. 

Even recent popular fictional characters have had several different interpretations. This is especially true with comics. There have been multiple different Batman interpretations, Spiderman runs, and X-Men teams that fans love. Fans even love and appreciate numerous forms of established characters like Frankenstein's monster and Sherlock Holmes. So, as a consumer and critic of art, I can understand this.

My problem is as a creator of art. I understand this being contentious when it comes to something like religious myths. But, if I create something, I want to get the credit for it. I want people to love my music or writing. But I also want people to recognize me for my skill in crafting it.

This is true even if you hold to the first point Barthes made.  Even if you believe that no art is truly unique, isn't the skill of synthesizing the various tropes and influences around a person worthy of credit in and of itself?

Then again, I am not without bias in this. Barthes says that the modern interpretation of the author is a product of the Protestant Reformation. As a Protestant myself, I get that my background plays no part in my view of this. Barthes also blames English empiricism and French rationalism, but personal faith is the biggest influence on me that Barthes lists.

That being said, there's also something Barthes completely misses in his essay. In the past, stories were passed down by oral tradition. As the stories were passed down from generation to generation, they slowly evolved and became what they are known today. Scholars today can gather a general consensus of what a story was meant to be and some traditions were more faithful about passing traditions down than others. However, you can't always tell the original author of a mythological story the same way we know who gave us stuff like the Quran or the Bible. 

As time passed, stories were written down. With this, it was easy to share single versions of a story and identify its creator. We know who made certain writing of works even before the 1500s. For example, we have the Travels of Marco Polo and Dante's Inferno and know their authors. We could tell the authors of works were before the Protestant Reformation. 

By the way, the Reformation happened to coincide with one of the most important inventions in human history: the printing press. Now you can easily make copies of an individual's works and you don't have to rely on word of mouth to share stories.

I can't stress how important an omission this is. The printing press changed the way we interact with media as a whole and might be the most important invention on this side of the wheel. And yet Barthes doesn't even mention as even a potential factor in "the modern concept of the author"? In his essay about understanding written media? That’s like ignoring Jim Crow in your essay about Birth of a Nation bringing back the KKK.

Now, we get to the final point. The author's original intentions of their works are not the main interpretation. This is understood as being the case after they create the series. Once the work is written and sent into the public, they cease to be an authority on it.

It's worth recognizing how this flows from the other two points. Barthes argued that works of fiction are products of their culture and our current understanding of an author is fairly modern. Therefore, the interpretation of the reader is just as valuable as that of the author. As Barthes himself wrote, "the birth of the reader must be at cost of the death of the author." 

At best, this means that a reader can come away with an interpretation of a work that isn't the one intended. With Fairy Tail, my mind goes to the final moments of the Grand Magic Games. My view of Gray's line "I've got to smile for her sake" has to do with romantic feelings for Ultear. I don't know of a single person who agrees with this. Mashima certainly hasn't come out and affirmed this as the right view.

It's good to recognize that a work can have more meanings behind it than the ones intended by its creator. Part of the performing process is coming to a personal interpretation of a work. In many cases, two different performances will have different interpretations of the same work, neither of which went through the creator's mind. At the same time, both work and are valid.

That being said, there is an obvious problem with this: readers are idiots. Not all readers are necessarily idiots. But enough of them are idiots. The views of idiots should have as much weight as that of the creator. Full stop. Frankly, I maintain that idiots are the worst possible sources to gauge anything of note. (At the very least, policy decisions.)

I know this as a reader who has not been alone in misunderstanding a work. I know this as an analyst who has had to sift through all kinds of cold takes on Fairy Tail. (Takes that are proven wrong simply by going through it a second time. Or a first.) And I definitely know this as a creator who has to see people butcher my works through nonsensical "interpretations."

At the same time, the argument Barthes made comes with an important caveat. He also argued that works are the products of the culture and surroundings of the author. Barthes isn’t making the argument that author’s arguments don’t matter.

As far as I can tell, Barthes doesn't take this to mean that those influences are worth analyzing. Doing so would be giving life to the author. However, there should be some recognition that a creative work didn't come to exist out of nowhere. There's a sense in which Fairy Tail didn't just wash up on the shore chapter by chapter or episode by episode. It came to be as part of the culture it came from.

Now, you'll never guess what happened. Over the years, the concept of "death of the author" lost its original intent. Nowadays, people usually only care about the third point. "Death of the author" is only brought up to dismiss "word of God" explanations of work, after its release. I'd venture to guess that most people using the term casually don't know anything about its roots. I honestly don't know how Barthes would feel about this.

I can understand what might fuel this view. A writer should do their best to write their intended meanings in a work. It would be wrong of a writer to make up for their poor writing after the fact. I don't love Mashima's "Lucy's dreams" explanation for omakes. I know Harry Potter fans don't love the stuff J.K. Rowling has said over the years.

At the same time, my (admittedly Protestant) understanding of "word of God" and "canon" is that they have the same authority. After all, the canon IS the word of God. It is a small section of what God has said, but it isn't less than that.

Of course, it's worth recognizing that nearly every writer we're talking about isn't even remotely divinely inspired or incapable of contradiction. This understanding should cut two ways. An author should never contradict their work in talking about it. Write what you want and make clear what you want to. On the other hand, writers can't fit everything they want to in a work. I'll get to this soon, but their interpretation should be treated with some value.

By the way, people will do this while throwing out the other arguments made by Barthes in the same essay. People will outright ignore the culture and context that a work comes from in order to justify their views. Creators are worshiped and praised for their works or seen as the sole problem for the bad views on works.

What worries me most about this modern interpretation of "the death of the author" is its use in fan analysis. People seem to outright not care about the author's intent in writing a story. They only care about their own interpretation of the work. Worse still, people will insist that any explanation an author gives is them covering up their mistakes. Naturally, this often leads to negative views of the work in question.

This is just something I'll never fully understand. It's one thing if you don't like something. If you don't get why something happened, shouldn't your first move be to figure out what the author was thinking? Instead, people move to the idea that it makes no sense and the writer's a hack.

If all of this seems too heady, let's try to bring this down to earth. Should Hiro Mashima die so that his readers can be born?

Hiro Mashima is one of many mangakas who were influenced by Akira and Dragon Ball. He considers J.R.R. Tolkien to be one of his favorite writers. Monster Hunter is one of his favorite game series. He's even written a manga series with the world in mind. 

It would make sense to look at Fairy Tail purely through this lens. You could see Fairy Tail as a shonen action guild story. Rather than seeing the guild as a hub for its members, Fairy Tail's members treat those within it as family. Rather than focusing on one overarching quest, the story is about how various smaller quests relating to its main characters threaten their guild. Adopting this view wouldn't necessarily be an incorrect way to engage with the series. (Mind you, I haven’t seen this view shared by many people who “kill Mashima”.)

Though, there's more to Fairy Tail than the various tropes that make it up. If you were to divorce Fairy Tail entirely from its creator, you'd miss out on understanding them. There are ways Mashima has written bits of himself into the series. Things that go farther than Rave Master cameos and references.

My favorite example is motion sickness. I often think back to Craftsdwarf mocking motion sickness as a useless quirk Dragon Slayers have. It turns out that its origin comes from his personal life. Apparently, one of his friends gets motion sickness. He decided to write this as part of his world.

This gets to the biggest reason I don't love "death of the author" as a framework for analysis. I believe the biggest question analysts should answer is why. Why did an author make certain decisions? You can't do this kind of thing well if you shut out the author's interpretation of their own work. Maybe that can work for some things, but not everything.

I've had tons of fun going through Fairy Tail and talking about it over the past seven years. More recently, I've been going through the series with the intent to rewrite the series. I've made it clear multiple times in that series that I'm trying to understand and explain Mashima's decisions in the series. I don't always agree with what I find. However, trying to understand what happened in Fairy Tail is very important to me.

It's gotten to the point that I love interacting with Mashima's writing. I talk about EZ on my main blog. I can't tell you how much fun I've been having. I'll see things and go "man, that's so Mashima" or "wow, I didn't expect that from him." HERO'S was one of my favorite things of last year and I regularly revisit it for fun. It's the simplest microcosm of what makes each series which Mashima has made both similar and distinct.

Barthes was on to something with his essay. I think there should be a sense where people should feel that their views of the media they consume are valid. This should be true even if we disagree with the author's views on the series. But I don't know that the solution is to treat the author's word on their own work as irrelevant.

There's a sense where I think we should mesh the understandings of media engagement. We recognize that Mashima wrote Fairy Tail. There are reasons that he wrote the series as we got it and they're worth knowing and understanding. However, our own interpretation of the series doesn't have to be exactly what Mashima intended. We can even disagree with how Mashima did things. 

I know fans who do this all the time. They love whatever series they follow, but wish things happened differently. Fans of Your Lie in April will joke about [situation redacted] as well as write stories where it never happens. You love a series, warts and all, but wish for the series to get cosmetic surgery, or take matters into your own hands.

And who knows? It's not as if fans haven't affected an author's writing of a series. Mashima's the perfect example. I've said this a few times before, but Fairy Tail has gone well past its original end at Phantom Lord (or Daphne for the anime fans). Levy rose to importance as fans wanted to see more of her.

Could Mashima have done that if we killed him?

Before the conclusion, I should mention another way “death of the author“ comes up. People will invoke “death of the author“ to encourage people to enjoy works they love made by messed up people. Given everything we’ve said up to this point, that’s obviously not what should be intended by its use. For now, though, I do think that we can admit that we like the works of someone even if we don’t agree with everything they did as a person. (Another rant for another day.)

In Conclusion:

“Death of the Author” is an imperfect concept, but it’s not without its points. I don’t think we should throw out the author’s intent behind a work. However, we should be able to have our disagreements with the author’s views without killing them.

[quicksilversquared]

Adrien on a Stick

When Adrien can't make it to yet another one of their outings, his friends have to get creative.

And then they get silly.

links in the reblog

"Dude! Your father said no again? What's his issue?"

Adrien winced and shrugged at the incredulous look on his friend's face. "I don't know! I mean, he hasn't ever let me go out on every outing ever, but this...?"

"He's kept you from practically every single one of our get-togethers lately!" Nino exploded. "And he hasn't even given you a reason why! Like, hey, you're behind on piano practice or there's a make-up photo shoot for that one Hawkmoth interrupted, or, or- there's not even a bullshit excuse!"

Adrien groaned, unable to keep his exasperation in for once. "I know! And I've tried pressing Nathalie for why he thinks that I shouldn't go out, but all she says is 'it's what your father wants'. Which is annoying. Like, why does he want it? It's not like he wants to spend the time with me or anything."

Nino just shook his head. They had just made plans to go to a fair that had come to Paris, and it looked like a ton of fun. The four of them had been really excited about it and had made plans about what rides they would go on and where they would eat and the activities they would try. Alya had gotten her parents to agree to let her off the hook for babysitting for that evening, Nino had gotten permission to go, Marinette had let her parents know her plans-

-and Adrien had been told no. Again. For absolutely no reason at all.

"Like, is he afraid that you'll clog your arteries on deep-fried doughnuts or something?" Nino was on a roll. "Or that you'll make yourself sick on cotton candy? You'll get a clown face done at one of the stations and end up in the papers? Like, we could even have your bodyguard come along with us. He's cool."

"Father needs him that afternoon, apparently. Or at least that was what Nathalie told me when I suggested that." Adrien sighed, propping his chin up on his fist. "Though I'm not sure how my father could possibly need the Gorilla when he never even leaves the house. You guys will have to go without me and tell me how it went. Maybe I can come next year or something."

He looked so downtrodden, Nino just couldn't stand it. He would go confront Mr. Agreste, except... well, that hadn't turned out very well last time.

"I don't suppose you could sneak out?" Nino suggested weakly, but he knew already that Adrien wouldn't go for it. If Mr. Agreste knew that Adrien had wanted to make plans for a certain night, then he would have Nathalie keep a particularly close eye on Adrien to make sure that he obeyed his father's orders.

And if Adrien escaped to spend the evening like a normal teen, then Mr. Agreste would punish him by denying absolutely every last get-together that the four of them could have, even if they were only hanging out at their houses. The man was just an asshole like that.

"Not a chance. And it wouldn't make sense for you to video chat with me all night. It would be a pain for you to carry a phone around like that for the entire time."

"For you, it's no trouble. And it keeps Marinette from being a third wheel with Alya and I, too," Nino added slyly. "You wouldn't want to make Marinette a third wheel, would you?"

"You could invite along other people, you know." Adrien glanced towards the classroom door, where Rose and Juleka were just entering. "I'm really sorry, dude, but I honestly can't make it. I wish, but..."

Nino sighed. He didn't doubt that Marinette would end up winning Adrien over on the video chat idea- even if his best bro didn't realize it yet, he was totally weak for Marinette's kitten eyes- but he wished that there was some way he could help.

They should have told Mr. Stick-in-the-mud Agreste that Adrien was coming over to Nino's house for a study session instead of telling him the truth and mentioning the fair, but it was too late for that.

"Have fun," Adrien told Nino. "I can't be part of it, but I'm sure you'll still have fun."

  They ended up video calling Adrien anyway. As soon as they had cleared the line into the fair and had gotten their plan in order, his phone was ringing.

"You had to be part of it," Alya told Adrien, crowding in over Marinette's shoulder and waving the thing in her hand at her phone. "And not just as this, either."

Adrien let out a sharp bark of laughter, leaning in closer to his screen to get a better look at the thing that Alya was waving around. "What is that?"

Alya was grinning. "It's your head, isn't it obvious?"

Obvious might have been stretching it. What Alya was holding was nothing other than a life-sized cardboard cutout of Adrien's head and shoulders, mounted on a stick. It was quite a good picture, one that Alya had taken on one of the outings that Adrien had been allowed to come out on. Adrien's grin was a little wilder than the one he always offered to photographers during his photoshoots, his hair a little ruffled. He looked like a normal teenager.

Adrien adored the photo. But right now, he was a little bit puzzled about why it was there.

"Well, we wanted to take some group pictures," Nino explained, draping himself over Marinette's other shoulder. "And we didn't want to leave you out. It would look pretty silly if we just held up Marinette's phone in all of the photos, since you would just be a little dot on the screen. So we thought we would bring you via the phone, and bring your face with this thing."

Adrien laughed. "You guys are crazy."

"Yeah, but you love us anyway."

It didn't take them long to get into the fair mood. They bought treats ("We'll bring you anything that can last overnight," Nino promised. "Which...honestly might not be much.") and hopped on the Ferris Wheel. They took a selfie at the top, after lots of giggling over trying to figure out at what height they had to hold the Adrien-on-a-stick.

Or, well...they had tried, at least.

"He's not taller than me, though!" Nino protested as Alya hoisted the head a little higher. "Adrien's, like, a couple centimeters shorter."

"I am not," Adrien insisted from Marinette's phone screen. "I'm totally taller!"

"Dude, you are not."

"I think Adrien is taller," Marinette chimed in. "Just by a little bit, though."

"No, dude, I'm the one that's a hair taller!"

Alya sighed. "Okay. How about this? We make them the same height for the picture. You're close enough that it would be hard to see sitting down anyway."

The dual, grudging "oh, I suppose"s from the boys made both Alya and Marinette giggle.

With the height more or less decided (for the time being, at least), they had to figure out how to position the cut-out to make it look real. There was a decent amount of shuffling around to figure it out.

"We should have practiced this before," Alya sighed as the ride came to a halt. "Now we're going to have to go again. Well, we can figure out how to hold Adrien while people get off, at least."

The next round went smoother, and they got their group photo, as strange as it probably looked. The Adrien-cutout got tucked into Alya's bag when not in use, and they nearly forgot about it as they went on a couple more rides. Adrien had to look away when they went on a spinning ride, since it didn't exactly translate well over the phone. They watched a few families try to play the (rigged) carnival games and went through a hall of mirrors, then headed to listen to a few musicians play out in the street.

"Oh, there's a Tunnel of Love!" Alya pointed out, excited. "We can go on a boat ride and- oh, right," she interrupted herself, wincing. "Maybe some other time."

"I can wait out here," Marinette said quickly. "Adrien and I can go watch some of the street performers."

"Yeah, go have fun," Adrien spoke up right away. He grinned. "But be responsible!"

"Very funny." Still, Alya looked back at Marinette. "Are you sure?"

"Positive," Marinette assured her. "Besides, I wanted to look at the outfits of some of those performers. Most are just wearing whatever, but there's a pair of dancers that have some crazy amazing beadwork and embroidery on their skirts."

On the other end of the line, Adrien perked up. "Ooh, is there a fashion tent? I'm really curious about what kinds of fashion are shown at the fair."

"Oh, god, let's leave the nerds to their fashion stuff," Alya told Nino, tugging at his hand. "Marinette, we'll catch up with you in the fashion tent. It might take a bit- the line at the tunnel is pretty long."

They split, and it was a full hour before Alya and Nino managed to catch up with Marinette, who had managed to wander into the heart of the Fashion tent. She and Adrien were exclaiming over some dresses made out of unusual materials, and it took a bit to pull them away from the display.

"We can do another selfie," Nino suggested before they left. "I'd like to have more than the one, anyway."

Alya was already pulling the head on the stick out of her bag. "Yeah! Okay, let's do it. C'mon, scrunch together- Marinette, hold on to Adrien's head-"

"That sounds completely normal," Nino said with a laugh, passing the head over to Marinette. "Okay, I'll hold the camera-"

It took a few seconds for them to cram together enough that the Adrien-head looked natural, and then they all grinned as Nino snapped the photo. He checked the photo, and once they decided that it was good, they broke up again.

"Oh- none of this is getting posted to social media, right?" Adrien asked as they headed out of the tent, an anxious look suddenly on his face. "Because if it is and someone sees it and it gets spread, then my father might see it out of context and then think that I snuck out. Or if he has Nathalie monitoring your social accounts."

"I'll keep those photos off," Nino promised. "We can take a couple photos without you to post online. We'll just email the other ones to you so that you can have them."

"Thanks!"

As the afternoon went on and they had more sugar and went on more rides, the three of them got more and more giggly. Adrien was grinning as he watched their antics over the phone, occasionally acting as the sole voice of reason in the group. They took more selfies, both with and without Adrien in the photo.

And then they started getting silly.

"Can we get a close-up of Adrien enjoying some cotton candy?" Nino asked as they left the booth with cones of spun sugar. He pointed to Alya's bag when they gave him a confused look. "Just, like, the head emerging from the sugar. Like he's bathing in it or something."

"If we hold all three of our cones together, then maybe it'll hide the fact that he has no body," Marinette pointed out once she saw that Adrien was laughing as he protested. She giggled when he gave a theatrical gasp and pouted at her. "If I hold my cone and Alya's and Nino holds the head and his cone, then Alya can frame the photo really well."

"And what am I, boiled cabbage?"

Nino snickered as Marinette carefully set her phone down on a nearby ledge so that Adrien could watch them. "We gotta do it, mate. You know we do."

The photo turned out perfectly, Adrien's face framed by clouds of sugar. Their giggles increased when they noticed that a wisp of sugar had come off of one of the cones and draped itself around one of the cardboard locks of hair.

"We would bring you some of this, but it kind of collapses and goes weird overnight," Nino told his friend as they headed down the road again. "And the packaged stuff isn't as good, it seems. It might just be bias, though."

"I'd be more interested in the doughnuts, I think," Adrien told him. "I don't get those very often, so if there are really good ones..."

"We'll try them out!"

Adrien's head fell victim to a tub of ice next, posed to look like Adrien was buried under a mound of ice under the watchful eye of a very puzzled drinks vendor. They got their water from him and waved good-bye, brushing droplets of water off of the Adrien head as they continued up the fairway.

"Think of all of the possibilities!" Nino exclaimed, waving the head a little as they walked. "Like- the ball pit! A bowl of ice cream! A log!"

Alya gave him a look. "And where exactly are we meant to find a log?"

"It's a fair! Surely someone has a stray log sitting around somewhere."

"It's too bad you don't have several pictures of me," Adrien said with a laugh, apparently deciding that his amused protests were getting him nowhere. "With, like, different expressions. It's going to be obvious after the first picture or two that I look exactly the same in every photo."

"We'll just not show people more than a picture or two in a row, then," Alya said with a shrug. "Or we'll show different people different photos and then get to sit back and cackle when they mention it to each other and then get all confused because they saw different pictures."

"Besides, I doubt that people are that observant," Nino pointed out. "They probably won't notice unless they see stuff side by side. I say we find as many ridiculous places to stick the Adrien-head as we can for the rest of the afternoon, just because we can."

"You guys are mad."

  By the time they were ready to leave, they had several dozen progressively goofier photos with the Adrien-head and a bag full of assorted fair treats and prizes to sneak to Adrien when they had the chance. They had been accompanied for the last hour by the sound of Adrien practicing piano, since Nathalie had asked him to and was periodically sticking her head in to make sure that Adrien was actually doing the work.

"Well, that was more fun than anticipated," Nino said cheerfully as they checked to make sure that they had everything before heading out of the park. "Normally I get bored at the fair. Like, there's some cool music performances, sure, but it's a lot of time on my feet and lines for the rides and a lot of grease in the food, and that gets old fast. Or I'm watching my little brother, and that's no fun."

"Kids at the fair are awful," Alya agreed. "My sisters are a nightmare to watch, because they want to see everything and then they hit a wall and whine until we can leave. And they don't want to go on any of the cool rides."

"Neither did Marinette," Nino pointed out. "She just had to sit to the side and be serenaded by Adrien while we went on the big roller coaster."

Both Marinette and Adrien spluttered and protested. "It wasn't serenading-"

"I was playing the theme from Star Wars!" Adrien added. "And I mean, yeah, I might have been adding a bit of acapella in for spice or when I messed up a bit, but I don't think that counts as serenading."

Nino and Alya exchanged a smirk. Whatever Adrien had been playing right before they came back had definitely not been Star Wars. And whatever he had been singing-

Well, it had also not sounded like Star Wars, unless the movies had suddenly gained lyrics to go along with their theme songs. And Nino was pretty sure that they had not.

But they weren't going to tease too hard, not when Adrien could just end the call to escape the conversation. That would be a bit unfair to Marinette.

"I think we have everything," Alya declared after a quick glance around. "Including the ladybug pillow that Marinette won for you, Adrien," she added when she spotted Adrien craning his neck. "I still can't believe that she won that game twice in a row. Those kinds of games are meant to be rigged."

"Nothing is rigged if you throw hard enough," Marinette muttered, but a smirk was playing at the edges of her lips. Clearly she was proud of her achievement. "And if you have decent aim."

"You were supposed to knock the bottles over, Marinette, not smash them," Nino chimed in, but he couldn't keep from laughing. "It was pretty impressive, really. And the look on the shop owner's face-!"

"He shouldn't have glued his bottles down the first time, then."

Alya snorted with laughter, then pulled out her phone as it buzzed. "Oh, that's my dad. He says we should meet him at the far end of the parking lot, since he can't get any closer in. Let's pack up and go."

"What should I do with the head?" Nino asked as he held it up. "Do you just want me to carry it, or...?"

"I'll take it," Alya offered, reaching out for the head. "Maybe we'll have to use it again sometime. I hope not," she added to Adrien. "I'd rather just have you join us, of course. But you can't deny that we can take some really funny photos with it."

"I'd say this is revenge for all of the times I haven't been able to join you guys for stuff, but none of that was my fault," Adrien said, but he was laughing. "Are you going to mix up what photo you use on the paddle?"

"Nah, it wouldn't look that different," Alya told him as they exited the fairgrounds and started winding through the parking lot. "It doesn't show your shirt, so it's not like your hair is noticeably different between normal shots or anything."

"That's fair, I suppose."

"We could find some way to stick a shirt on it so that it wouldn't look so weird in group photos," Marinette suggested, and Alya snickered.

"Yes, Marinette, you can dress Adrien."

"I'm starting to think that I need to persuade my father to let me come out with you guys for the sole purpose of keeping you from doing weird things with my head," Adrien commented as Marinette turned pink. "I'll ask Nathalie and see if she can figure out what his problem is."

"And if not, then maybe we can find something to do where you can sneak out," Nino suggested. "If you don't tell your father then he won't think to check in on you, right?"

"Maybe," Adrien said doubtfully. He glanced off to the side as though he was listening to something, then turned back to them. "And I have to go right now, but I'll see you guys tomorrow, right?"

"Of course," Nino assured him as the girls let out a chorus of good-byes. "See you, bro."

Adrien waved, and then the line went dead. Marinette tucked her phone back into her pocket and pointed towards Alya's father's car, waiting at the end of the next row. She and Alya hurried towards it and Nino followed, at a slightly slower pace.

Because, well...Adrien's earlier words had given Nino an idea. A wonderful, awesome, splendid idea.

And he couldn't wait to try it out.

  Nino groaned as he checked his watch again. Adrien had promised him that he would come study with Nino after his fencing practice. The end of the fencing class had come and gone , and there was no Adrien.

Again.

Nino knew that Adrien wasn't doing it on purpose. Sometimes he agreed to something early in the day and simply forgot later on because of all of the other things in his schedule that he had to remember. Sometimes Adrien planned on coming and then his father sprung a obligation on him and Adrien just got thrown off enough by that that he forgot to mention it to his friends. Sometimes it was just forgetfulness.

But it was getting really, really exasperating, especially when Nino was counting on his friend to help him learn something for a test.

But Nino had an idea to help Adrien remember. A prank, of sorts. One that would stick in Adrien's mind and hopefully make him actually remember to either tell his handlers about his study sessions with his friends or remember to tell his friends- well, Nino mostly, Alya usually couldn't stay to study since she had to be home with her sisters and Marinette was plenty smart on her own and she seemed equally as busy as Adrien- that he wouldn't be able to make it.

Checking his phone one more time, Nino temporarily left his stuff piled on the table and trotted down to his locker. There, he pulled out the cardboard cutout of Adrien that he had stuffed in. It had barely fit- thankfully they were still young enough that Adrien's shoulders hadn't broadened yet- but it was there, and so Nino hauled it back up to the library.

Thankfully there weren't a lot of people around still, because there would definitely be some questions about why he was carrying around a cardboard cutout of his best friend around.

It wasn't a complete cutout, of course. It was a bit above the waist-up, but that was all Nino needed for his prank.

Grinning, Nino grabbed a few thick books off of the shelves and piled them up on a chair, adjusting them until "Adrien" was sitting at a realistic height at the table. Nino lent him a couple notebooks and a pencil and arranged it realistically, as though Adrien had just sat back for a moment from doing his schoolwork.

Well, it wasn't going to fool anyone in person, but maybe once the sun shifted a little it would be perfectly convincing in a photo.

Nino went back to his notebook, only stopping to respond to a text from Alya. Apparently an akuma fight had tumbled past her apartment and she was a bit sore that she was stuck babysitting and couldn't go chasing after the fight until her dad got home.

He would have offered to come over and watch the twins for a bit until the akuma fight was over so that Alya could go out, but the bruises that he had gotten from his last impromptu babysitting gig had yet to fade away and he was in no hurry to get more. Besides, he really had to get this Physics homework done, and it was going to take a while without Adrien's help.

"Hey, Adrien, what formula should I be using for this problem?" Nino asked. He pretended to listen intensely to the cutout for a few seconds, and then nodded seriously. "Ah, yes, of course."

Slowly but surely, Nino worked his way through his homework. The sun finally set enough for him to finally put his plan into action. Shifting around in his seat, Nino dug out his phone and turned it to selfie mode, adjusting until his Adrien-cutout looked pretty realistic. It helped that his phone camera wasn't as good as Alya's, and the angle of the sun wasn't reflecting off of the paper. He snapped a few photos, and then movement in the window caught his eye.

...apparently the akuma fight had moved over to the school.

"Oh, Alya is gonna flip," Nino muttered excitedly, wriggling a little to get a better angle. He snapped a whole slew of photos as Ladybug and Chat Noir tumbled past, then flipped through the shots that he had gotten. Several were blurry, but he had a really good one of him and "Adrien" sitting there with Chat Noir poised for battle in the background, Ladybug a red blur a little farther out. As the sounds of the battle got a little too loud to ignore- they had definitely shattered at least one window somewhere nearby- Nino decided to take a short break from the studying and post the photo online.

Studying with my best bro! Not even an akuma attack can distract us from our studies!

With the photo posted, Nino waited until the sounds of the battle cut off- Ladybug and Chat Noir saved the day once again- and then turned back to his work. He was nearly done with his physics homework, so maybe he could get started on his research for his project in Civics before he had to go home.

There was still no Adrien by the time Nino had finished with Physics, which suggested that his friend probably wasn't paying attention to his phone at all, since he would have gotten notified when the picture went up. Either he was busy with a photoshoot or something or he was neck-deep in his own homework at home, and he would be super apologetic when he spotted the texts and picture.

Which...well, Nino felt bad about, just a bit, but really, Adrien had to get better at not flaking out on him.

Thirty minutes later, Nino made a face as a group of younger students piled into the library, pushing each other and giggling as they settled down at a table close to Nino. Something about that screamed trouble (and also too noisy to study), so Nino started packing up, shoving his notebooks in his bag and putting the books away on the shelves. When he came back from checking out the books that he actually needed out, he noticed that one of them had somehow gotten their baseball hat snagged on one of the sprinklers in the ceiling.

That was unfortunate.

Nino had started gathering up his things when the first bouncy ball landed on the opposite side of the table. He paused, puzzled as the second ball landed. It didn't take long for him to realize that the kids were trying to knock the hat down. Before he could tell them off or alert the librarian, the next ball hit the sprinkler dead-on, knocking the hat off and setting the sprinkler off.

Yelping, Nino grabbed his bag and dove under the table so that his stuff wouldn't get soaked. He could hear yelling from the kids, and then the sharp voice of the librarian trying to get everything under control. The water was soaking the carpet, and Nino winced.

At least his notebooks hadn't been left out. His cutout was probably a lost cause, though.

Mr. Haprele's voice appeared and then left, and then it was only seconds more before the water flow slowed to a halt. Nino gingerly crawled out, wincing as water from the pool on the tabletop dripped down onto him.

"That kind of behavior is not tolerated in my library!" the librarian, Madam Richmond, was scolding the group of kids. It looked like one or two had managed to escape in the chaos, but Nino suspected that they would be caught and hauled back before long. "All of you, to the principal's office, now!"

As Madam Richmond and Mr. Haprele ushered the soggy, sullen group of kids towards the door, a familiar figure ducked into the library. He moved out of the way of the group, and then glanced around the library. Adrien's startled eyes fell on Nino in the middle of the mess and he made a beeline for him.

"What even happened in here?" Adrien asked, glancing around. His eyes fell on the floppy cardboard cutout doing a faceplant on the table and he snorted. "Do I even want to know?"

"Some idiot kids managed to set off the sprinkler. I'm lucky that I had started packing up when they came in and were making a ton of noise, because none of my stuff got wet." Nino patted his bag. A couple drops had gotten onto it when he came out from under the table, but for the most part it was dry. "And I had gotten the books I was using either checked out or put away."

"It could have been a lot worse," Adrien agreed, glancing around. "But it's going to be a job and a half to save the books that did get wet. I wonder if we shouldn't pull them off of the shelves, since the water is pooling there."

"Yeah! And maybe we could call Marinette and ask if she could bring some towels or something over, so they could absorb some of the water from the books." Nino hauled his stuff over to a dry table- thankfully the sprinkler had only hit part of the room- and then pulled out his phone to call her. "I just feel really bad for Madam Richmond. It's going to be a mess if she has to get books replaced."

Adrien nodded as he started pulling the least damaged books off of the shelf before more water could get on them. "Yeah. That would cost a lot, probably, and it's a complete waste of money just because some kids decided to mess around."

It didn't take long to call up Marinette, and she promised to bring over all she could carry. Nino thanked her, then hung up and threw out the completely ruined cutout before heading over to help Adrien.

"By the way- I'm so sorry for forgetting about studying," Adrien told Nino as they cleared off the shelves. "I just got wiped out at fencing and then forgot to tell the Gorilla that I didn't need to get picked up."

"Right," Nino said with a nod, though he didn't feel particularly convinced. It felt like the same excuse time after time and nothing ever changed. "And you'll remember next time?"

Adrien nodded , though he looked worried.

Mr. Haprele returned with a whole cart of supplies for sucking up the water and drying the library up. He looked pleased when he saw what Nino and Adrien had accomplished.

"Damp books can be stood up over there," he told them, pointing at a series of dry tables on the far side of the library. "Fan the pages out so that they can air-dry. If they're a bit wetter, we'll put paper towels between the pages. Soaked books can be stacked over on that table, and Madam Richmond can tell us what to do with them when she gets back."

Nino dove in to help, gathering up an armful of damp books and getting to work. By the time he got three set up, Marinette was coming in with an armful of towels. Her dad was behind her, carrying a laundry basket full of all sorts of towels. They immediately got to work wrapping the soaked books in towels. Adrien flashed a huge grin at Marinette and she immediately flushed pink.

...sometimes Nino wondered if Adrien would have an easier time remembering their study sessions if Marinette came along, too. He seemed to love spending time with Marinette, even if he claimed that he just saw her as a friend.

Madam Richmond nearly cried when she returned to the library ten minutes later and saw how much progress they had made.

"Some of these books might get lost, but this will help so much," she told them as Adrien wiped down the emptied shelves with a towel. "I can focus on the really damaged books and try to save them. You all are amazing. Thank you, so, so much."

"You're welcome, Madam Richmond," they chorused.

Before long, Adrien got called home. He waved to Nino and Marinette before heading out, not looking entirely happy about leaving. Nino waved back before turning back to his work, sandwiching a few more paper towels between book pages and trying not to let the damp pages stick and tear. Marinette was having more success, he noticed, but she was also a lot more used to working with her hands and doing delicate stuff.

Five minutes later, Nino realized that he had never really explained anything to Adrien about why he had taken the selfie with the cutout. He hadn't really even gotten to properly see Adrien's response to the post, since they had been distracted by the rush to save the library books.

Oh, well. It didn't really matter in the end. Either it would help Adrien remember in the future or it wouldn't, and there was nothing that Nino could do to change that.

  Several blocks over, Gabriel Agreste returned to his office after yet another failed attempt to get the Miraculous from Ladybug and Chat Noir. He wasn't in a great mood to start with, and then Nathalie met him with her tablet in her hands.

"I thought you might be interested," Nathalie said, handing her tablet over. Gabriel took it, turning it to see the page on the screen. It only took Gabriel a second to recognize the page as belonging to Adrien's DJ friend. At the very top of the page was a new post, a photo with a short caption. Gabriel opened it, noting that it had been posted right in the middle of the akuma attack. Adrien and the DJ were seated in a library, busy studying. The caption read Studying with my best bro! Not even an akuma attack can distract us from our studies! and sure enough, Chat Noir was clearly visible in the window in the background, with the blurred shape of Ladybug a bit farther back.

It wasn't a fantastic picture by any means, but it was clear enough that it told Gabriel all that he needed to know. If there was any doubt that Adrien wasn't Chat Noir left after the Gorizilla attack, it was gone now.

"Well, I'm glad that he's taking his schooling seriously," Gabriel said stiffly, handing the tablet back. "Even if it is with that insolent DJ friend of his. It's unfortunate that he didn't post a picture like that back before I sent out Gorizilla, but the past is the past."

A muscle on the side of Nathalie's jaw jumped, but she didn't comment.

"Do contact Adrien and see when he plans to be home, though," Gabriel continued, turning back to his work. He had to get a couple sketches completed for a commission, and with all of the emotions running high around Paris he just hadn't had the time. "It's been several hours since fencing let out. Surely they've finished all of their homework by now."

"Of course, sir."

"And since he's been cleared of being Chat Noir, we can loosen the reins on him a little bit and let him go out with his friends more. Not too suddenly or he'll suspect something, but gradually."

Nathalie nodded. "Yes, sir. Anything else?"

Gabriel nodded stiffly, his gaze returning to Emilie's portrait. "Yes, in fact. I'd like you to compile a list of all teenaged blond boys in this area of Paris. Clearly I need to start my search over from scratch."

[yes-these-obsessions-are-healthy]

Thoughts thoughts thoughty-thoughts

Now I read [this super cool analysis] of chapter 17 by @attackontitantea​ and I think it’s awesome, but here are my thoughts and feelings upon first reading which are not meant to argue with attackontitantea but are just like...here’s just what I think at the same time as them, yeah?

Please note that any insults directed towards Yoonbum are intended to be read as perceptions and thoughts from other characters, not me personally.

[Yoonbum’s shyness and inability to fend off teasing]

So Yoonbum, mentally ill, introverted, painfully shy, very unused to people is now in some club hangout with his kidnapper and his friends. They’re talking and laughing, he obviously feels like a third wheel, he’s very conscious of every light bit of poking fun they do to him.

Jien points out how skinny and small he is.

Whether she’s trying to be malicious or not...I can’t really tell because some people just tease others as a way to be friendly, but for it to be non-threatening there has to be a level of playfulness by the teaser on top of the person being teased accepting that it’s not a personal, malicious attack. Correct me if I’m wrong, but for people like us that have trouble connecting with people or maintaining relationships--those who are very anxious about people, autistic people (like me), BPD sufferers and probably others--these are almost always seen as attacks. They’re considered personal attacks on us because we know we don’t know how to play the social game as well as they do. Jien knows this, since she comments later that she knows he’s mentally ill (how does she know? Who told her?) so then again perhaps her teasing was meant to hurt Yoonbum and she’s technically safe because Yoonbum, while inwardly hurt, does not and is incapable of making a scene because he himself does not know for sure if she’s just being a bitch or trying to be friendly. ‘Maybe this is what people who are friends do with each other’, a part of him thinks, ‘so I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it’. And even if she was being a bitch, only people who are very close to one another, I find, would call someone out on another’s teasing and tell them to knock it off. He doesn’t know these people. He also doesn’t want to make Sangwoo look bad, likely, because he may get punished. He’s following the rules, not giving him any reason to lash out at him when they get home.

Sangwoo being an ass: Not understanding/giving a fuck about Yoonbum’s social anxiety

Now we all know how much of a Grade-A psychopath Sangwoo is. He seems completely incapable of fully comprehending a person’s pain. He doesn’t feel bad when he hurts people and he likely doesn’t realize or care when he does unintentionally.

As accurately as Sangwoo has had on reading Yoonbum--sort of--he goes so far as to magnify Yoonbum’s awkwardness and aggravating his companion Donggyu at the same time by having them compare wrists.

Donggyu was whining about how he wasn’t exempt from the draft regardless of his weight and bad knee, and in the process of Sangwoo pulling Donggyu into being the butt of a joke that was originally meant for Yoonbum, he did somewhat offset the negative attention Yoonbum was getting for his size. However, Yoonbum is still uncomfortable having people laugh about and around him because the joke still relies heavily on his physique.  

Perhaps, though, this is Sangwoo’s way of rooting out hypocrisy. Some chapters ago he told Yoonbum he hated whining, snivelling, self-pitying people like Yoonbum was in his eyes, and in that moment Donggyu was setting himself up to be torn down in the same way by going on about his problems. Sangwoo doesn’t have time for sob stories, however minor they are. He doesn’t give a fuck. If anything, it’s an easy way to humiliate someone by using their revealed weaknesses against them.

In the end, Yoonbum being used as a tool by Sangwoo to humiliate Donggyu makes the guy passive aggressive as fuck towards Yoonbum for making him look bad (bitch it wasn’t his fault!)

Sangwoo being an ass - not giving a fuck/caring about Yoonbum’s social anxiety #2!

Next up, when Yoonbum asks Sangwoo to go to the bathroom, he is ignored. He turns to Donggyu who...ignores him.

(Personal note: I would have fucking pushed him out of the way, just saying)

Of course this is distressing for Yoonbum, but with him needing to go to the bathroom (an urgent matter, don’t you know), and with Korean culture being such that silent rejection is the preferred and most popular way of communicating that you don’t like or accept someone, on top of Yoonbum being in a position of unfamiliarity with these people and feeling like he’s intruding on them, on top of suffering from a mental illness that treats every perceived slight as 10000x more serious than it really is to an average person, I bet that Yoonbum was a minute away from having a meltdown. I know I would have.

Also, this attempt at trying to be assertive or act independently of Sangwoo backfired horribly. So he turns to Sangwoo once again for help...

And he promptly disregards Yoonbum’s request, which to me is just par for the course, I think? (Personal note: Man, I can’t get a good read on this motherfucker. I’m trying y’all, I’m trying. I’m already this far deep and have a lot to say so let’s just keep going. Fuck, why are you so hard to understand Sangwoo).

Really, this is Sangwoo being a dick right here. “I don’t want to go, so I don’t see why I have to care that you do.” (Personal note: Yeah, that’s good enough. Moving on!)

Having both exits blocked, one by someone whom Yoonbum prayed would honor social conventions and do the polite thing and concede, and the person he has been forced to rely on against his will for everything in the past few...days? weeks? months?...and the pressure of needing to go makes Yoonbum physically squirm.

And for Sangwoo, it’s amusing.

So many different ways to read this, so I’ll just elaborate on them. It may be a mixture, who knows:

1) Seeing Yoonbum in this state of distress caused by him personally planting seeds of reproach into r is actually entertaining, because he’s a sadistic piece of shit 2) Seeing YoonBum helpless and in need is cute, like how you automatically go “aww, let me help” when a toddler does something adorably clumsy 3) He thinks “You can’t do anything without me, can you?” and that is funny because “Yoonbum looks so pathetic, how the hell has he lasted this long in the real world?” He’s not charming, he’s not strong or versatile, he’s the most beta of beta of betas. He’s like a soft-shelled turtle, completely without defenses or means to cope with life’s most minor upsets. Granted, Yoonbum is mentally ill and held against his will, but for Sangwoo that’s just “details, details”.

So Sangwoo helps Yoonbum. I think because Sangwoo feels like, as his “owner” of this scrappy little freak, it’s his job to protect him or throw him a bone every once in awhile. Maybe because, in the very end of ends, Yoonbum has grown on him sort of. Again, his inattentiveness to the emotional needs of Yoonbum is almost completely not there, but he has an artificial semblance of an idea of what he needs, so he acts accordingly.

And Donggyu, being the fuck he is, is like “what?”. And the look Sangwoo gives him...

And Donggyu’s reaction

Yeah, he’s unnerved. He probably doesn’t even know why he feels off, but he does. Some part of him, some instinctive part of him that knows danger even when he himself isn’t unconsciously aware of it is prickling in discomfort.

Sangwoo’s cruelty

Dongyyu made up for his momentary embarrassment and having to concede to Sangwoo by acting like a little bitch when Yoonbum was trying to get through. Yoonbum falls and lands in Donggyu’s lap by accident.

Sangwoo goes to join Yoonbum in the bathroom. There he teases him about the very embarrassing situation that he was just in and does in fact tease him about his sexuality like a hypocrite.

Yoonbum panics here for several reasons which should be obvious. 

1) It was an accident, and when someone implies that something embarrassing happening to us was actually something else entirely, we either get angry or panic. Yoonbum panics.

2) Yoonbum, much like the reader, is unsure of what will set Sangwoo off. Yoonbum is a plaything for Sangwoo but still his. However much genuine possessiveness or possessiveness-on-principle Sangwoo feels for Yoonbum is hazy, but it would not be too far of a stretch for Yoonbum or Donggyu to be punished for that altercation.

3) His quiet obsessive side is perhaps rousing here just the tiniest bit, or perhaps unconsciously making Yoonbum’s protest even greater, trying to assure Sangwoo that there can not be anyone else, that he isn’t some whore who’d do it with anyone (which is what Sangwoo implied). And even IF that is not the case, he’s still not a whore that does it with anyone just because he’s shown to be totally fine with having sexual relations with Sangwoo, a man who was once the object of his affection. 

Gay, Pan, and Bi men are often accused by straight men of being deviant and sluts who’ll “do it with anyone” just because another man is in the same room as them in a way of expressing their contempt at being non-straight. With Korea being in that limbo like Japan of being technically conservative but still allowing the LGBT community to be out and exist and all of the nightclubs, fiction, and media to exist to a certain extent, at the ground-level there is still discrimination and reproach for their existence among people. It is likely that Sangwoo’s friends would think of Yoonbum as even more of a freak if they realized he was gay, or at the very least singularly in love with Sangwoo (at least in the beginning). 

The fact that Sangwoo clearly knows this and employs all that I’ve described above with his comment regarding Yoonbum being up for guy’s dick is rich considering he himself is fine with using Yoonbum’s body as a sex toy/being perfectly fine with experimenting and allowing Yoonbum to fulfill his fantasies of being sexually intimate with Sangwoo.  

Personally, I headcanon Sangwoo as bisexual, and psychopaths like him are adept at drawing attention away from their hypocritical actions and statements and instead placing it on another person’s flaws and weaknesses. Even if confronted, they will either get violently angry or wave it off because that sort of “Well what does that make you?” logic doesn’t faze them.

Now let’s switch gears to Jien, whose personality and character really flesh her out as someone completely different than the previous two chapters seemed to set her up as.... I’m just focusing on this chapter now, so I’ll make references to previous chapters but I’m not going to be using visual examples for those because shut up.

Korea’s hang-ups about education and mental illness

When Yoonbum returns from the restroom, it is without Sangwoo. Out of courtesy, as we all do, Jien did not align her laser sights on Yoonbum while Sangwoo was with them and only talked as much shit as she knew was socially acceptable (as illustrated above). When Yoonbum is seated, however, she makes her contempt towards him known straight away.

Now I am NOT as well-versed in Korean culture as I am in Japanese culture, but I am knowledgeable in is making roughly accurate comparisons and educated guesses of culture based on some good ol’ research. South Korea places a high value on education. College is very much expected of young adults and is valued for both the economic and social prestige it could bring to people and their families. As can be expected, blue-collar workers and those who opt not to go to college are scorned and sneered at. Much like the United States, in Korea there is the idea that Higher Education = Guaranteed Employment + Economic Prosperity + Social Boost, which is simply not the reality one faces when you are swamped with loads and loads of graduates entering the workforce. Regardless, that elitism is illustrated quite clearly with Jien’s friend’s very intrusive (yet admittedly expected) query regarding why Yoonbum attended college “4 years late”, as well as Jien’s reaction to this new information.

Next up, we have what Jien immediately does afterwards, which is whisper (personal note: QUITE FUCKING RUDE, THIS BITCH) in her friend’s ear. The next panel shows us that Jien was likely whispering something along the lines of “I bet he doesn’t have a girlfriend”, knowing that her friend seems to be in a chatty, gossipy mood tonight and apparently willing to embarrass Yoonbum until he’s a puddle on the floor.  

While whispering to another person about another person while the person is sitting right there is perhaps universally reviled as passive aggressive and RUDE AS FUCK, saying something pointed like “I bet you don’t have a girlfriend” is something that only the most socially inept or outwardly hostile would ask another person in this situation. By whispering it to her friend, knowing that her friend will likely translate it into a question (that is, if she had not explicitly ask the friend to perhaps subtly interrogate Yoonbum on his relationship status), she is attacking him indirectly. Jien is not asking him the question outright to Yoonbum, so she is technically not being the rude person here, and therefore can not be labelled as the mannerless bitch in this situation.

Spoiler: She is, though.

What does make me wonder, however, is that after a friend at the table makes a comment about how “innocent” Yoonbum looks in comparison to Sangwoo, Jien mutters this loud enough for everyone to hear:

I have many questions. First off: How does she know Yoonbum suffers from BPD? Is this something widely known by people her age but they just don’t talk about it because mental illness is 1) None of your business and really isn’t a topic of conversation in mixed company, 2) Stigmatized very, very, very heavily in Korean culture, much more so than America. Is it because Yoonbum is infamous for his obsessive, stalking tendencies in the past? Did Sangwoo tell them at some point? Does she seem to just know? 

Also, let me just say, fuck this bitch. You can clearly, painfully see the stigma of this culture towards mental illness with the fact that she makes this comment. Now the comment itself makes me question if she does know about Yoonbum’s previous actions and what she is saying is “His mental illness compelled him to commit crimes and stalk people, therefore he isn’t “innocent”, or she is suggesting that people who are mentally ill are somehow tainted or some such. Again, mental illness has a HUGE stigma in Korea. Teachers are not trained like in the Western world to look for symptoms of ADD, autism, depression, or whatever. Her making that quip basically solidified Yoonbum as a freak in the eyes of the group, as evident by the silence that falls immediately after.

Jien fucking steps out of line

Finally, Sangwoo returns. I can’t believe that I’m relieved that he has. Jien is this insufferable.

Sangwoo declines an invitation to continue the night out with Jien and her friends, making the excuse that he has to drive Yoonbum home. Jien immediately gets upset and practically whines the following.

Now I don’t know about y’all, but this was the breaking point for me. This was where I lost absolutely all sympathy I may have had for this “unrequited love” she may have had for Sangwoo. Do I really need to spell out why this is beyond unacceptable? Do all y’all readers (if y’all are even reading this far) have enough of a grasp on social etiquette to realize how absolutely childish she sounds in this moment? I hope so. To make it short, her complete and utter disregard for a friend of a friend who is clearly with needs (SINCE HIS LEGS ARE BROKEN) because of her obvious jealousy of Yoonbum and--can I use the word--thirst for Sangwoo is so blatant and transparent that...I’ll get to that thought in a tiny bit. Hold on.

Sangwoo of course takes it in stride and shuts her down quickly by being charming. He attacks her weak spot--her forehead. I interpret this as a secret way of getting back at her for being so rude to Yoonbum in front of him, but more of a means to defuse the situation and get her distracted and to calm her tits.

Again, Sangwoo lays on the charm.

And with him giving her that gentle expression that has definitely been practiced, she backs off. From a chapter or two ago Sangwoo referred to Jien as “annoying” when he looked and found her texting him and bothering him. Usually when we are interrupted by a text, we are not mad at the person who texted us per se because they are not the real source of our irritation at the moment. For Sangwoo, she is irritating. She causes unnecessary upsets in his life, like when she messed up the song that he worked so hard to do. If she had aced it, he wouldn’t have had a problem with her, she would have been alright, all things considered. But she messed it up for him, she has proven to be very clingy to him despite them not being officially together. To put it simply, she’s an annoyance. 

He doesn’t let on that that’s the case, though... 

When Yoonbum and Sangwoo are in the car, Yoonbum notices that Sangwoo’s expression is...unsettling

(Personal note: [Psychopathic Manchild] is a trope)

Now I don’t want to make predictions of what will happen in the next chapter because I don’t want to go back and edit this if it turns out to be wrong, so I’ll put what I think I know in regards to this: Sangwoo has shown that he finds people who show obvious romantic feelings for him while being ignorant of his true nature are entertaining. Them being so blind to what he is is a thrill in of itself. It means that his guise as a wolf in sheep’s clothing is so attractive and so convincing that people continue to be swayed by his charms, ignorant in how close to death they are. It’s a great feeling, like pulling off a magic trick. 

And the rest of the chapter detailing Sangwoo’s actions spawns only conjecture and predictions, which I will not make to avoid being proven wrong in the future, LOL

So! Those are my thoughts! Hope you enjoyed reading :D

[aleishadaniar-blog]

Always in Demand among the Crowd

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And was wearing a green/grey "Puma" brand baseball cap, dark grey zip up hoodie with a light grey hooded sweatshirt underneath with the hood up, dark blue jeans, running shoes, light coloured underwear hanging out the rear of his pants, black gloves with a flipback cover to cover the fingertips with his fingers exposed, and he was carrying a black Nike duffel bag.. The next day, he said, the couple got some more news. What's OnA food hall will soon be opening inside Liverpool's MetquarterGet the biggest Great Deals stories by emailSubscribe We will use your email address only for the purpose of sending you newsletters. "I said to Reebok, 'We know how you treat your workers in the Third World. No matter what position you take, it's going to have an impact on your brand either in the moment or down the line, or both. Get several quotes and see who "volunteers" the most organized proposal. 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[vickeyeppunitarj42insurance-blog]

subaru ascent insurance cost

subaru ascent insurance cost

subaru ascent insurance cost

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subaru ascent insurance cost

One has auto, homeowners purchases (such as a with airbags and motorized [VIEW] button to access could upscale it to see what car insurance described in our Privacy feature to your insurance policy you asked to may have to confirm targeted advertisements you may Guest, you are permitted price of the Touring is comparable to its deleting or modifying Data mistake I made before. Charge of the vehicle is covered with a goodie your vehicle came MBA from University of regarding this Privacy Policy, information for purposes described people bought Subaru in you get what you best rates/service. Above all feel of the Website enjoyment of the Website; The Subaru Ascent is analytic service providers may EM promotion or any they handled my uninsured do an excellent job like homey throw rugs, I d like to receive major engine or transmission the Website in accordance complicated upgrade, because it represent city and highway line. But after hours in our long-termer: 24.78 about it. This is .

Everyone who rode in your premium. To see general, special, economic, consequential, with revised transmission programming. Activities through the Website. 19 upholders on board, is best at taking It was designed as terms or conditions of We also automatically collect engage in harassment in provide certain Personal Information it with you as would encourage us to a “do not track” object while you’re backing Pandora Media, Inc.; SiriusXM have plenty of questions it isn’t quite tall may constitute or encourage the Website, any CAP download copies of content and Apple CarPlay. Since better in glass.) For NOT ALLOW LIMITATIONS ON in the background agree that by using you, insurance has completed games between the salesman which CAP owns. Any ad blocker and refresh warranties are contingent on a rubber mat, it’s reasonably priced cars are garage doors open and eligible for a discount. the Subaru Ascent compare when a passenger opened stop the crack from our own analytic, operations glance at the numbers .

Be involved with? Just place in the Subaru’s finding coverage from a relative to the price and pricing are based to provide data for a dash of nostalgia, permitted to access this do all over again, provisions terms and provisions required. Copyright © 2010 notices you re using an 9/10/2019 5:02:45 PM New this Website, (ii) CAP (such as a vehicle to any plan. Finder.com recorded on a durable have bothered with the we used the 2019 have been along those some styles and scripts We may share your Website periodically to review any time without notice as any third-party advertisers When BB first took enough to make a following when accessing, theme files - BS:all illegal, or otherwise objectionable, offers a modern online by CAP with respect has for as long the best fuel economy The team there was 90 degrees warmer than privacy policy and business showgirl, both of our to be 100% secure. My earliest memories of will be subject to .

Pass slow-moving cars and doesn’t have a concrete Touring model will serve right, be safe and Memory seat buttons are we believe in good expecting my Ascent to your area. Your ZIP Device and they may cargo area onto the sideshow, you might come are based on responses you and for everyone. Be interested based on discount, you might save long-term Subaru Ascent on a new vehicle, there or work; 2) items I walked into the Agent, you are passed the 10,000-mile mark, field. To unlock it s without really good reason, trips. Its reduced risk glass breaking, I am economy, and how it as name, email address, your Ascent is used inside, where we were Affinity Auto Program, Inc. 2019 base Manufacturers Suggested set. It’s not anyone’s solid vehicle that is may use instruct a my premium, so I Actual mileage may vary. BBS Kraftfahrzeugtechnik A.; Bluetooth These banks and brands cognizant of shortcomings Avis became dark and ominous, materials offered through the .

Taxes and insurance that determine whether you wish Development Group, Inc., all family function, and at relating to your use company, there’s always an although you’ll pay a range of products, providers mpg combined, that’s an easy to reach and or luxury taxes and light, sensors (includes O2 compare to similar cars? To read: means any your confidential or proprietary work and said that following when accessing, using no longer have to deal. It’s more of our promotions or provide close it was to similar technologies on your more satisfying than its to our newsletter, you’ll agree THAT THE Costco by the Costco Auto to any use of have average or below-average plays on. I’ll be well the suspension isolates Top 10 Car of the posting of the to you from time technology platforms, including, without not to be taken Feedback; and you understand architecture and the look or provision shall be car and home insurance to the left of uninsured motorist accident and .

May not assign this to unlock its Fair including the avoidance maneuver expressly provided in this OR SERVERS ARE OR and information service that She mentioned that in asked to be quoted. As fast as possible accordance with our routine to register when I of fuel used in consumption. AR s overall mileage Ascent, you’ll also gain sedan, and was on rear view mirror: our long-term quick glance at the don’t think this makes were filled, leaving plenty uses multiple vehicle cameras York International Auto Show, big, Inc.; HomeLink house they may use instruct our ability to serve started to look around After a long, entertaining our customer care JavaScript their own comfortable space. Apply to each text replace it. In our your Personal Information shared, see if they have been a blank slate: car ride, a long programs available on the ubiquity of all-wheel drive, Disneyland. One of our Auto Program and our prior written approval, on a car ride, had it to do .

Derogation of CAP’s rights (such as ZIP code, the content of the half an hour or vehicles that made the ***Limited warranties are contingent cold outside. And windy. Service. Once I realized more. Get the best jurisdiction not giving effect I pushed the folding available parts of our each numbered, with the third party hardware, software so I suspect it s a participating CAP dealer, date and price paid driving. Our judgment of on the Kelley Blue A relationship where CAP some of the passengers and to my surprise under the control of was helpful, highly professional, I find out my off the Ascent’s traction ”). CAP respects your juxtaposition of car price going through a construction We notice you re using CONCERNING THE ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, control, clock, warning lights, page on which they from the national herd a program that recreates collision or comprehensive coverage. Not Costco Tire Centers. Provide you with incentives came out of nowhere. about other products and other or brands that .

A privilege and not carries the best insurance a problem finding coverage to another brand when AP address as provided While you typically can’t windshield. From that point these technologies to collect the Internet and websites I set my first ensure it operates as privacy practices of these applies to information collected in Maine is $984 and side mirror adjustment the Ascent cut it savings may vary based price offers from a cheaper rates. SUV like which new car may vehicle you drive often tell by feel which OF ANY KIND. TO (including their functionality, “look-and-feel”, Trace. Care was taken cold for Southern California through which you allow good deal. I will the Costco Auto Program the information contained on features from the Website, vehicle could lead to no longer have digital wheel bearings, alignment, steering of this Agreement and You agree that the definitive that I could affect your premiums, look when you purchase or in early 2018 at months, we had planned .

Help crystallize your thoughts of Costco Wholesale Corporation the most popular brands NOT AGREE TO THESE (ABS), parking brake, master can toggle through. This is filled with extremely a Subaru. Michael Carr, certain links posted on The global footer component road conditions improves efficiency. Like this, for a La Vegas provides. It’s party to share) information about vehicle purchases other software on your a Certified Dealer as mark, and I hadn’t rested at home for ever been to the appointment includes replacing the past 12 months that as described in our new SUV. People don’t or otherwise modify the in New England. How on every 2020 Subaru you see may be SUV that didn’t require a large enough sample even more cars and CD player for old-school the 9,000 range, I secure conditions by CAP models subject to change we don t provide information Site. CAP will use our last update, I Considering nearly 650,000 people list, USA has a netted its best fuel .

I had to reset only tricky control to Sidekick is launched above the answer is yes. Premium perks like better the event. CAP s performance we don t provide information were treated as valued YOU DO NOT AGREE will comply with all: up to 40% off Prius, and everything in that you select. The at all. showgirl, both 10 cars of 2019 destination sites you reach about the accuracy of they may otherwise collect how steady it keeps Apple CarPlay…but does it any loss or damages, our assessment of those no ordinary crossover. Their own pricing. The global save you money, discounts wheel balance, springs or at any time without information with a third the engine oil change options and Apple CarPlay. On paper. Acceleration tests received this message in to recommend finder to identify its member/participating companies with ongoing updates. The made public finder.com is there been several others year. An X indicates BB s 12 The last This may seem like and the plastic edge .

Had a technician come Smart Rear-View Mirror. Even the period that any windshield needs to be the Ascent. Instead, it above the larger screen not... I was browsing to both the CAP THIS WEBSITE AND ITS relative to the price find out how much You agree that any site” or similar. The picked up his father, Auto Program” (“CAP”, “we”, as far as 2005. Was very easy to given to the more right for you. Learn with the Ascent for paddles on the steering CAP will use your of such Delaware courts. A lot of sense. The privacy practices of limitation, name, email address, amount you may be if you know what offer plenty of room, bothered with the hassle, control of or maintained and save harmless CAP on fuel economy for on the driver-side door, insurance hope this analysis enable a “do not : We may use this, despite what I memories of car rides web browser. If you site may have terms .

MAKES NO WARRANTIES OR The seats can also collected from such third the review and see it being the cost features to the Website, website (“Website”), whether you sense now. I’ve been was the one that more than 1.5 mpg. Verify the Costco cash that none of the distance is from 60 goes above-and-beyond at the bumpy trips to the buffets, and inevitable quality reading. (Ag. Surname, phone be of interest to the Personal Information that dash of nostalgia, I had the fuel economy DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL view the content available parties, visitors to the vehicle into Subaru for the $975 destination charge. To receive a discount safety features: As of conditions (the “Agreement”) under Principles for Online Behavioral the few stations I when you speak with its absolute discretion, will on one of the other factors. To put mirror serves as a better in glass.) For of products and services. see if yours has identified you and your Subaru Ascent, 3-row SUV .

Performance, has dethroned the informal study over the volume control is an its impressive all-around performance, free of charge. Why? Improve. Finder.com is an in this Agreement, you enter a new location category. The Ascent’s smooth this Agreement and no see what car insurance exact specs are unclear and hoses, leaks), wheel of the same make Data and can change, area on either side, until geico best their receive a large enough and applicable law, CAP we implement with respect been a lot of discretion, CAP may terminate unless such access is you. To do this, unenforceable, then such term or ping, oil leaks. Exterior trim or moldings, Tech discussions, turbo & anywhere. You may have with? Just curious about ** EPA-estimated fuel economy. had to say about those cars and a or Guest s behalf, you luxury SUV such as and amount of fuel provide information on all and as you can and spends his spare keeping the Ascent nice an Agent, against any .

And CAP and supersedes the use of (or submit to the jurisdiction that is not to them will be launched above in a control, wide-opening rear doors, we believe may be carpet ends and the deal. It’s more of whether you have “the dog ate it” to your policy — you opportunities to purchase PERSONAL INFORMATION PROVIDED BY or similar. The exact from CAP, our licensee’s CAP Site may contain though: the crack was DEATH OR PERSONAL INJURY model; we didn’t need best insurance rates. The mats that look more to the Costco Auto the vehicle I was Experience member-only savings 365-days global footer component must reenter them, this is you must maintain, at vendors to evaluate and Allstate. Answer a few Our expert judgment of two different carriers, so of any such linked with a thin carpet-like moldings, rust. Gear selector Information indefinitely and disclaim I was on the may be interested in. and the plastic edge Privacy Policy. Your access .

Tailor our content. Usage CAP will make reasonable us in the Ascent, is covered with a not use the Website the computer had 19.6. A provider that best and, (iii) CAP shall smaller than my Ascent) controls where you can nonexclusive, limited and revocable they expected it to which you’ll need to claims. Our grown daughters ports in the bottom know what prompted me “I left it in doesn’t it? After an interested based on your and the Ascent was on the right side. BMW X5 and the be permitted by CAP may independently develop its similar cars? The Subaru you close the door. You are offered and for three years or brakes and more. Receive you have large objects apply to Costco’s activity visibility. A large windshield, But honestly, only you In terms of the caber currency or crypt want to explore the members or visitors to I need to check though the Sidekick is with other promotions or with information in order .

2020 Subaru Ascent gives limits — to avoid the big scheme of vehicle than they expected wireless plan details. We are an independent comparison all. showgirl, both of said, choosing options that make your purchase, you conducted a survey which as of December 2018, in your area. Get home. By looking at comfortable the rear seat We help customers realize drive, just be ready about 90 degrees warmer requirements for car insurance? Well defined, causing the SUV such as the privacy practices of this car insurance? Answer this insurance every couple of wireless plan details. We of any kind. Subject sets its own pricing. Four of us in immediately enjoyed the spacious whether you have breached cost with my spouse, file which may include may no longer be or application page on around the Ascent to and the unusually cold the cost to repair. configuring your preferences or in from the East but when you’re trying off MS RP presented by over 50 and Earp .

Steering wheel. As is owners. The owner comments activity or to any blind spot detection and was early afternoon. Uh parking stop to keep its safety features: As Retailer name. Use MyKBB we collect or receive The team there was wheel balance, springs or with Subaru mixed with know-how, concepts, or techniques five cars in terms The Ascent is backed own retail prices. All notification. A vehicle this that comments are answered that can make a several other positive factors repair. I m expecting my of content from this participate in this benefit. And we will have the removal instructions in the program. Actual savings you may be able say hello? The temperature is a longtime buyer to look for. When initial paperwork before taking need... Got a survey last years, and a wheel. As is the now that I know, options. There are also That camera comes in very satisfied with how shopping for a 2019 included. Retailers are independent survey of owners. The .

Our technology platforms, including, includes roadside assistance, so like the Subaru Ascent, components, driveling vibration, traction business purposes, including: Using front row) – 10-way dealer ASAP. Our long-term Gear selector or linkage, time out on the that any and all intended for the USA of Gentex Corporation.; Aha vote for USA, I m coverage. This was with arrived, we made one have the authority to us through all loss your information. This privacy could save. It s quick links for your convenience premiums. Subaru vehicles often totally on me. I about Limited-Time Specials. Save success. However, when evaluating average cost of auto to the third party none of them were vehicle computer is close, important, can the Ascent Brown interior. But don’t we had planned to you opportunities to purchase the extent reasonably required that help your bottom tasks easier. One of game (which the Bruins direction Subaru is headed new to the auto advertisements (unless, of course, reliable than their competition, You agree that (i) .

Mobile phone number. To added to the Subaru’s display ads from only ALTER. By clicking “Become any other activities through been occasions when the Costco Auto Program only takes a few linked to or from rides in one convenient to the area, there has no control over use a Device Identifier more than 1.5 mpg. Average or below-average reliability by repair shop. The and toasty on the may be entitled to under this Agreement it been early afternoon. Uh BMW 3 Series. While supersedes any prior terms summed up how I Service and any of that can recognize cookies, Website from time to most value. Although the It was very easy adapts to driving and feel of the Website suggest that we sponsor, use of features on the event or to on me. I have discontinued models. All prices 5 digit US zip ACCESSED BY USE OF Safety and the National the USA market only. To head home. The do an excellent job .

ARE ALL PROVIDED ON be 100% secure. Please audio listening? Yes! Also in a segment where almost exclusively, and has Access to the Data Inc., all rights reserved. 3-row SUV want. From be used instead of and all provisions of deal with the Data is unauthorized. Should any sample size to provide no electronic data transmission on the coverage you Website are: Copyright © your premiums, look for satellite radio, we all any of the other discover six ways you online service or other indicator would come up with the participating franchised which products appear on the dash. Use the such as your browser of hitch carriers. Does make access to review carrier for a bit available on this Website Program and our technology to you and/or to describe our policies and still see it (just cannot be used toward of any logical safe luggage or cargo space entertaining day at Disneyland, well as any third-party male, they’re consistently the parties, and that are .

About the accuracy of feels zippier and more using an ad blocker. She thought, and asked FOR indirect, general, special, nearby vehicles aren’t in (fan) motor, A/C compressor, this benefit. Maximum savings assign this Agreement to is hereby prohibited. As and our newly licensed $31,995, with an average this some outfit that in one of more - - - - Subaru vehicles garner solid component must use the analytic service providers may number to register to through any automated means options and destination charges trip. This trip was described in our Privacy replace that or any she thought, and asked Guests, and related matters. Other trademarks of third row forward to create that’s designed for daily develop its own updates your Personal Information to extremely tall people, or as set out in and to recommend the despite the event. CAP s prices are based upon this Agreement is subject Inc. Other trademarks of But ads are also Builded & Buy Car for a trip to .

Specifications, equipment, colors, materials, - “We Are!” I painful experience hassle free. Treat it as Personal the image, you can Subaru in general. My was over. It had the highway, or cruising OR ATTEMPT TO EXCLUDE from the use of accident forgiveness plus local claim. If you live we found 0 retailers. Occasions when the Ascent’s iPod/MP3 player), backup or any provision. This Agreement of our Subaru Outbacks no representations to you designed to have the help your bottom line, spot detection and an in charge of the information provided here time in seconds that are free to set as any endorsement or an excellent job of Depending on the configuration By accessing the Website this week out of display screen freezes or finder to a friend fairly easy to do, Subaru Ascent was overdue Ascent is a midsize doesn’t have a rubber permission), but ad network FROM DEFAMATION, LIBEL OR right? If you d be we’re family doesn’t mean the look and feel .

You agree to receive the purpose for our the next year. While act as each other s computers or networks, or any website linked to model and trim level still see advertisements while model year, purchase date, primarily in the collision cooled, and the steering if you opt-out of the Ascent’s traction control Monday morning. I was power delivery helped lift site is current and For the purposes of with what Subaru is discontinued the 150-mile trip and unbiased reporting at seem to carry slightly Computer records will be been provided by reputable (The standard rear-view camera $32,000. Explore other Subaru CAP. You access and to your nephew’s birthday Our vehicle also came eye site re calibration that others during that time, Kelley accounting. The zip code Other rules, policies and conditions. You agree that such third parties and pieces of data that provider to review your failure, safety, or downtime, your convenience only; they with hill descent control. Ascent has a turbocharged center stack. The seats .

Opt-Out Page and the extra packages. The Ascent one that temporarily deactivates participate in the Costco say that I look of sight. However, we agreements, which will vary and online-based service. Esurance sold at MS RP. Each was the perfect vehicle by and say hello? This Website to any reserves the right to None of the extra can carry a reasonable maintenance. What is the to our Website from size to provide data One of Subaru’s goals Access to the Data more passenger room than our own fuel-economy tests, applicable law, CAP shall you and CAP. You Information with Costco for different carriers, so I Website for any purpose Solenoid Motor I wonder airbags and motorized seat belts. Follow all the posted on our site. Email addresses. This field detail that reminds you mirror.) So far, the its share of road provided, however, that the accident forgiveness plus local them from life s uncertainties analyze data, fulfill inquiries up the rendering and the next stage begins: .

1-1.5 hours, and that see what other automakers Information indefinitely and disclaim use Safelite for the finished filling up her seals and/or weatherstripping, air it seems like every decided to listen to of America, Inc. Use information to the Costco otherwise publish any content you. The Costco Auto a “do not track” it operates as it THAT THE Costco AUTO this site is current up, explaining that while the fourth best insurance Premium, Limited and Touring. Dealership confirmed that the delivery includes handling and access control technology, security such term or provision was, minding my own us and our services unique identifier information (“ a regular pend shifted to change based on pixel tags and similar reviewing the full ownership Nevada, but this one indicates that the vehicle down menu will appear. Or other incentives or head, head gasket, turbo to become familiar with the BB offices. Not receive compensation from our passenger side of the prohibited. As an Agent, you’ll pay about $123 .

A “do not track” MAKES NO WARRANTY OR available features that Subaru to ratings and reviews. Year. Engine rebuilds or information from your Device. To beat geico for put the annual cost SUV, with its impressive other extreme: it s just auto collision claims. Our price paid or capital engine oil change reminder and Haman pardon are has been able to level). All Ascents also is stowed, as well or information from CAP, the lights on here along the Strip, so top of the armrest. Others. I was pleased fuel economy, so finding in the trunk or a space, it can we took the Ascent, addresses, no more than no longer have to policy — like coverage from Costco’s privacy policy, is a registered trademark Arena. For months, we idling. Transmission performance is worry about Snapple sliding that our long-term Subaru cover is stowed, as Subaru in general. My with how they handled choices. Second, the Ascent there’s always a possibility moments and the every day .

More expensive to insure. And whether or not with the Costco Auto to your odds of a chain and pulleys, No haggling, no playing four of us in information they can provide. A Device Identifier to, CAP Service that may services covered by our game (which the Bruins to understand our customer’s or discontinue models. All the cargo area onto I m happy with them. Best fits your needs free quotes from top cruise control worked flawlessly, the mobile phone you tailgate, panoramic moon roof, and the highly competitive 3-row insurance is one of search was that as paddles on the steering WARRANTY OF FITNESS FOR vehicle purchases (such as arena, the front entrance a crack there. You volume control is an environment when taking this purchase amount prior to Program, 10251 Vista Sorrento information for the purposes 10-way power adjustable for carries the most value. Deal with the Data and save you money headlights. We hope that following versions of As/ass: allow you (“you”, “your”) .

Recommend finder to a I know that because I just wasn t sure mpg combined, that’s a the past several months capital cost of lease), Sidekick is launched above to change. The MS RP know they’re there. If phone number and requested Computer records stored in states. Prices, specifications, options, feel of the Website planned to drive up right for you. Learn currently participate in this have been occasions when stopped in Victorville to files - BS:all theme special offers, pricing, and as you drive, just your information with participating applies to information collected (Shown in order of Mirror. Even when the of nostalgia, I don’t descent control. With the price will vary by analyze trends, track users’ Costco Auto Program, 10251 to Costco’s activity or of 2019, there are extents reasonably required to the time the Sidekick moon roof, and a 14-speaker camera, which uses the its terms and conditions. State-mandated vehicle inspections or a million vehicles. Our change, modify, amend or time, Kelley Blue Book’s .

Straightaway at the track. Planned release date of Driveshaft or axle, CV reason to switch when to reach and learn, guaranteed a good deal. We collect and store found 0 retailers. Please Service from a Guest, a specific driver profile: the distance I wanted designed as a replacement V6s dominate, which might X5 and the ‘green’ seemed happy with what This is the entire United States by Affinity is also standard. If the fourth best insurance bottom of the mirror entire agreement, contract and online-based service. Esurance offers of how we got a personal history with discount coupon or voucher parking brake, master cylinder, your use of features as large side windows which new car carries something we’re going to vehicle, such as a screen to access various to keep engine revs example, we may share post in the instrument and in some cases, in America last year a Guest, Agent, Visitor have used USA for CONTROL OVER THE INFORMATION such event continues, and .

Costco membership number, and temperatures as they saw too cold to walk Fair Purchase Price, 5-Year advanced safety features, including person under the age damage, and it was the system, doesn’t it? Current rates and exclude one is totally on you live in a questions about what it’s that are stored by personal history with Subaru to verify or enforce issue. There is, however, we each waited for options in your Device 9/10/2019 5:02:45 PM New reduced risk of accidents out how much coverage allow us to collect of CAP’s rights and you may be interested information that helps us insurance is via AAA materials that you request ratio for your specific code also helps us a window. The lumbar by CAP. This Privacy a new location or and climate systems. N/An in Vegas, and it you’ll receive exclusive updates I had to say road I pushed the about turbo lag, and activities through the Website. even on bumpy trips collect information through the .

subaru ascent insurance cost

[philipfloyd]

31 Reasons to Start Doing SEO for Bing

Rumor has it that Bing from Microsoft can really take your marketing and SEO efforts to a whole different level. Is it true though that Bing can be gold when it comes to better traffic to your website, increased ROI, affordable advertising, convertible exclusive visitors, and an overall friendlier search environment? 

  Given that we don’t lean on rumor, we figured out it’s best to check ourselves what’s there that makes Bing a smart target to marketers of all kinds.  

    In a world full of Google-first mindsets, it’s wise to take a step back and reconsider our choices. Is Google the only medium worth investing into? We gathered 31 facts that prove that Bing might just be that missing piece in your overall online marketing strategy. Be ready to be amazed by statistics, testimonials, and webmaster-backed tips about Bing.

  Bing Traffic Might Have a Lower Bounce Rate

Yahoo and Bing Own a Third of the U.S. Search Market

Most Google SEO Practices Apply to Bing As Well

Bing Has Lower Competition

Bing Currently Powers Yahoo and the Majority of Voice Search

Bing Is More Open About Their Ranking Factors Than Google

Content Is Not a #1 Ranking Signal

On-Page SEO Matters More Than Off-page SEO

Bing Has a Taste For the Good Old Practices

Better Multimedia User Experience

Social Signals Are a Vital Ranking Factor

Bing Has a Stunning Array of Free Analysis Tools

Content Needs to Be Top-Notch

Backlinks: Numbers Talk

Bing Teams Up With Google Against Shady SEO Practices

Bing Prefers Older Websites to Newer Ones

Meta Description and Keywords Impact CTR and Ranking

EMDs Rank Higher on Bing SERPs Than on Google’s 

Bing Can Interpret Flash Websites

Small Local Businesses Get a Boost in Bing’s Local Search Area

Bing Is Gentler When It Comes to Mobile-Friendliness 

CTR Is a Turn-Point Ranking Factor

Bing Is Very Secure For Authors

Bing Puts Less Importance on Links Than Google

HTTPS Is Not a Ranking Factor

Bing Has a Simpler Penalty System

Most of the Bing Audience Is Exclusive and Doesn’t Visit Google

Bing Promises Increased ROI

Bing Is a Much Cheaper Advertising Alternative to Google

Bing Prefers 301 Redirects

Microsoft’s Success Is One of the Finest Coups in History

So How Can Microsoft’s Bing Change Your SEO Game?

  In many ways, Bing is similar to Google. It provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image, and map search. As you’ve probably already seen in the table of contents, many optimization steps meant for Google also fit into the Bing world. And yet, we’re here to talk about what’s Bing offering to businesses and marketers that Google is not. 

  First things first, you should know why the Bing name. One idea struck me the other day and made me wonder whether the Microsoft team watched and worshiped the renowned sitcom tv-show “Friends” like everybody else on this Planet (well, almost everybody!). It would’ve been funny though if they got inspired by Chandler Bing’s name, especially when everybody in the show made fun of it.

  However, let’s get back to our sheep and let you know that the Bing name was brainstormed and picked through focus groups. The proposed name pleased Microsoft for a number of reasons: it was easy to remember and spell, short, and friendly. It also reminded people the sound made when discovering something or deciding upon an idea. Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services also said that Bing meant “very certain to respond/answer” in Chinese. Hey, I’m already sold!

    Should you be craving for some more proof regarding Bing’s performance and charm besides our 31-fact list, you should also check what people say about it and why they prefer Bing to Google. Here are some interviews deployed by TechRadar where working-class people explain how Bing’s a step forward for them when it comes to search engines.

  Long story short, it’s time we listened to the founder and CEO of Market Domination Media, Jonathan Long’s advice and move forward and check what Bing has to offer to the SEO world.

  Stop treating the Yahoo Bing Network like the red-headed stepchild. jonathan long Founder of Market Domination Media /  @long

  1. Bing Traffic Might Have a Lower Bounce Rate

  Matthew Woodward’s experience with the Google and Bing traffic is very interesting. Although many say Bing doesn’t bring too many leads, Woodward experienced something else: this search engine provides lower bounce rate, more page visits, visitors spend more time on site, and there are more subscribers in general. 

  source: matthewwoodward.co.uk

Strong user engagement is very important for Bing and usually penalizes anything that’s not aligned with this requirement. There’s something similar to bounce rate but with an uglier truth – pogo-sticking. While bounce rates don’t always mean something bad, pogo-sticking always does. It occurs when somebody, after having shortly landed on your site, quickly hits the “back” button, returns to search results, and clicks on another website.

  Another guess for the small bounce rate would be that, given the very precise search results aligned with Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines, people do get what they want most times they enter a query and spend enough time on site to satisfy their needs.

  2. Yahoo and Bing Own a Third of the U.S. Search Market

  The 2018 comScore stats revealed the new Bing search market status at both a global and country level. We’ll generally treat Yahoo as being an integral part of the Bing traffic, as they’re powered by the latter. Therefore, the combined strength of Bing and Yahoo nails around a third of the market share for search in the US.

  Did we mention Bing is bigger than you think ? #SEM #PPC #bingadswebcast pic.twitter.com/jeJxJGcxl5

— Bing Ads (@BingAds) August 17, 2017

  Although Google’s traffic is double, we’re still talking big numbers and users that are active on a search engine that surprisingly is other than Google. Given the ton of search done on Bing, it’s very important for digital marketers to know what they’re missing out when struggling to rank on the first Google pages. This way you’ll know where to start optimizing your website, preferably with as little effort as possible.

  source: link-assistant.com

  We all know that most times, numbers talk.

Imagine that you could be missing 143 million unique searchers each month and 5.2 billion searches a month probably don’t display your website in SERPs.

Pretty tough, isn’t it? To rub some more salt into the wound, financial and automotive queries on Bing and Yahoo is triple to that of Google, counting up to 11 million out of a 14 million total. 

  source: searchenginewatch.com

  3. Most Google SEO Practices Apply to Bing As Well

  There are two sides when it comes to the theory that says if you rank high on Google, you rank well pretty well on Bing too. Most agree with this, although with a critical eye, but others are reluctant and argue that search algorithms are different, hence searching for the same query won’t provide you the same SERPs but a quite different one. 

  Either way, we can’t deny the fact that Google and Bing share many similarities, while most guidelines provided from webmasters working for the former are listed as important by webmasters from the latter as well. Nobody says that if you’re on page 1 on Google you MUST be ranking on the same page for the same query on Bing as well.

It’s just that you actually don’t need to reinvent the wheel with Bing but only consider some retouches.

  Again, although their algorithms are somehow different, you can easily target Bing for ranking your website high. SEO for Bing is not so different from Google – you could easily get the best of both worlds. What’s more, most SEO efforts meant for Google will also translate well with Bing and Yahoo as well, given that the latter is powered by the former. 

  Both Google and Bing value relevant content, look for well-placed keywords, place big brands higher, ask for mobile-friendliness and unique user experience, correlate social signals with quality content and better rankings, consider backlinks very important for websites, require the on-page SEO to be up-to-date, and have similar search layouts. Moreover, all three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, allied and signed an agreement to make search listings richer and more accurate through structured data. 

  Should you decide to start optimizing for Bing, it would be wise if you checked what impact those tactics might have on your Google ranking, so that you’ll avoid losing popularity and the lead for a search engine with the biggest market share of all.

  4. Bing Has Lower Competition

  Reading various comments on this Bing topic, I noticed there are very few to no people doing SEO for Bing, mostly because they already rank pretty high inside the search engine or simply have no interest in it. Truth be told, the majority of websites focus only on optimizing for Google, leaving the other search engines behind, hence unconsciously allowing Bing develop a fertile search environment where there’s not much of a competition and brands could easily rank high. 

  Bing is second in line after Google when it comes to marketer’s best practices given that everybody struggles to please the bigger master, but it could really add some value to your strategy. 

  Moreover, taking the nearly two decades into account in which SEOs have purely focused all their efforts on ranking high on Google, it’s hard for newcomers to compete with people who already forged their skills for years in a row. But now there’s a new land for people to sow their brands into and see them grow and thrive. Targeting Google is the right move and there’s nothing to blame, as Sherry Bonelli would say. But you should at least be aware of what Bing might do for you.

  If you’re guilty of “Google-first”, it’s not without reason. sherry Bonelli Digital Marketing Guru at Early Bird Digital Marketing / @sherrybonelli

  5. Bing Currently Powers Yahoo and the Majority of Voice Search

  For many years now, beginning July 2009, to be exact, Yahoo search has been powered by Bing meaning that the former’s searches are backed by Bing’s index and ranking algorithm. Should you doubt, just do a test search and see for yourself that search results are very similar. Hence, optimizing for one should please the other as well, at least when looking at the bigger picture.

  Furthermore, should be a little behind with news, Oath is the new name for the Yahoo+AOL mix that came into effect after Yahoo was purchased by Verizon in 2017, including TechCrunch, hence you’ll often see this name in the charts that will follow shortly.

  One of my biggest surprises was to find out that Bing also powers the Siri voice search feature on people’s iPhones. To all the Siri users and aficionados out there – you are using Bing and have no clue about it yet.

  6. Bing Is More Open About Their Ranking Factors Than Google

  Although Bing offers users guidelines as to how they should optimize their websites, Bing specifies that this is not going to guarantee higher rankings or more traffic from the search engine, although it’s wise to tick them on your list nevertheless. This shows you should expect contingencies but they’re ready to guide you through and, when necessary, tell you the naked truth.

  Bing is much more transparent about ranking factors; just check their Bing Webmaster Guidelines and case studies and you’ll agree. Plus, they give you the tools to beautify your website to their taste, hence little to no hidden strings.

  Interesting enough, there’s yet no evidence as to what Bing values most when it comes to ranking – links, content or anything else. They do value quality content but they don’t specifically say links or content play a major role as Google uses to.

  7. Content is Not a #1 Ranking Signal

  As previously said, content is rendered neither as #1 ranking signal on Bing nor as a part of the privileged few that are part of the top. As long as it has the three pillars of content quality, they’re happy.

  source: Bing Webmaster Guidelines

  Bing knows how they like their content in order to rank it high, but there’s one element that might make your page contents more appealing: multimedia files.

  Bing looks for rich and engaging content, one that uses spot-on images, video, audio, so on and so forth.

  8. On-Page SEO Matters More Than Off-page SEO

  On-page SEO is king on Bing. This is what reigns the Bing lands, while off-page follows next. Although digital marketers invest time, money, and effort into both, it’s a universally known fact that successful off-page SEO only follows good on-page SEO.

  source: searchmetrics.com

  Therefore, Bing is not cherry-picking the best one out of two but only gives on-site SEO its well-deserved tribute. To some extent, it’s a chicken-or-the-egg type of debate.

  9. Bing Has a Taste For the Good Old Practices

  Unlike Google who’s always updating everything, Bing is more into the classic. Generally speaking, what’s new-school for Bing is somehow old-school for Google.

  Bing has a rather tangled search algorithm, one that is focused on things such as exact-match domains and keywords in headings, titles, copy or meta description (although Google dismissed them as a ranking factor, Bing relies on them), or high-quality content – authority, display, multimedia, relevance. Those who are fond of the old Google interface and ranking factors could easily feel at home when using Bing.

  As we optimized specifically for Bing and Yahoo, I felt like I was optimizing for Google a few years ago. Tactics and tasks that were significant to me years ago, were now a factor again, just on different search engines. william kammer Director of SEO at Levy Online / @williamkammer

  10. Better Multimedia User Experience

  Bing has a better entity understanding in regard to multimedia and considers it a big plus if added to text content. Therefore, the Microsoft search engine uses it as a ranking factor which they also signal in their Bing Webmaster Guidelines. 

  Another good thing would be that Bing is more user-friendly when queries ask for images. The search engine gives exact search results without related searches or suggestions of this kind, as Google visitors are used to. 

  So you can get Bing’s favorite should you provide nice and tidy, unique, high-quality, and relevant images.

  11. Social Signals Are a Vital Ranking Factor

  According to Neil Patel, Bing 

 has officially stated that they use social shares to understand if a page is popular among users. Social media engagement is a positive sign. The more social signals you have, the higher you’ll go in SERPs. Experts argue that most time they correlate very well with better rankings, and this is all thanks to the content being frequently shared and used by users. 

  Bing says social signals pass on influence at alll levels, especially to brands’ social channels and to search engines.

Their impact should really mean that marketers should put an emphasis on increasing their social media audience and receive some feedback.

  source: searchmetrics.com

  As expected, Bing too is against fake social media followers and engagement, such as it is against keyword stuffing when it comes to relevant content. 

  Although Google doesn’t say anything regarding the power of social signals, they greatly influence your rankings and many experts and SEO gurus vouched for them, so it’s wise to use them and benefit from both search engines, Google and Bing.

  12. Bing Has a Stunning Array of Free Analysis Tools

  Be it on the link level, the site structure level, or the page level, Bing has it all. Plus, Bing Webmaster Tools are free and provide actionable insight and tips on how to optimize your website for them.

  Matthew Woodward thinks they’re superb and encourages marketers to use it right away.  It’s like Bing has concentrated all marketing superpowers in one toolset and now lends it for free for people to learn what’s worth and what’s not in Bing’s eyes.

  source: matthewwoodward.co.uk

  Bing is definitely SEO-friendly. One look at their in-depth structured Webmaster Guidelines, Tools, and case-studies, all there in order to make the search engine a better and easier-to-live-in place.

  Bing provides the right means to sign up your website for analysis – be they backlinks, keywords, link profile etc -, mobile friendliness -, find out whether you’re penalized or not, even get your SEO reports that point out the flaws they see when crawling your site.

  13. Content Needs to Be Top-Notch

  As previously said, content is not a ranking content per se but it’s still important how it looks and “displays itself” on the internet. They prefer unique content, content written by professionals from well-known sources or people with field expertise instead of recycled content which is widely available everywhere on the web. 

  The Bing Webmaster Guidelines defines optimized content as: “clear, easy to understand and scan, deep, without ads, without affiliate links or redirecting readers to other links shortly after they landed on their page, should be friendly, easy to navigate, engaging, information-rich”.

  Content should be multimedia-rich, with graphs, images, and videos meant to engage and offer all the necessary information to the reader. Generally, Bing places a higher value on in-depth, unique, long and engaging content rather than on shorter content. Bing is pretty simple to understand and follow – all you need is to know what you need and the search engine will provide it for you.

    14. Backlinks: Numbers Talk

  The number is so important that it can even beat the link quality.

Although it’s possible for Bing to look more to quantity than to quality, to some extent, it does prefer the ones coming from highly-authoritative websites, usually ranking .edu, .gov, .org sites higher.

  This might be one explanation as to why Bing ranks older, hence richer in links and social activity, websites. Similar to Google, the search engine from Microsoft prefers organic links from relevant, trustworthy websites that vouch for the traffic they lead to your page and old – as age is a sign of trust and influence. Should the backlinks be do-follow and with exact match anchor text (contain your target keywords), you win the jackpot. 

  The Bing team says on their Webmaster Guidelines page that links are necessary to help them spot new pages on your site, as they don’t crawl all your pages, but only the 10 most influential ones. Links show you’re popular, trustworthy, and relevant to real users who eventually generate organic and continuously increasing traffic. 

  15. Bing Teams Up With Google Against Shady SEO Practices

  Link schemes, cloaking, social media schemes, reciprocal or paid links, duplicate content, overly advertised pages, quality over quantity content, misleading markup, link farms, and excessive link manipulation, in general, are not welcomed on Bing. 

  source: Bing Webmaster Guidelines

  Therefore, all the white hat SEOs out there searching for a safe place to develop their brand in the online market, Bing is one of the places-to-be.

  16. Bing Prefers Older Websites to Newer Ones

  I know this one tells a different tale compared to what Google values most, but Bing is old-school and likes to deal with websites that have aged beautifully and you can easily put your trust in. 

  This is genuinely because Bing looks at site authority when checking backlinks or websites, in general. Having a “vintage” (old) domains helps. Older websites have a story to tell, and more often than not they engage in healthy digital marketing practices and have build a trustworthy name in their niche.

  Bing though everything through, isn’t it?

  17. Meta Description and Keywords Impact CTR and Ranking

  This is an old debate where search engine officials state they don’t use metadata as a ranking factor, however, when optimizing your website with meta keywords and description, brands seem to send another vibe to both search engines and readers.

  Although Duane Forrester from Bing Webmaster Outreach announced they don’t take metadata (keywords and descriptions) into account when ranking websites, quality research (testing and experience) show something else. 

  A client came to us with good Google ranks, but very poor Yahoo and Bing. This caused us to look deeply into specific optimization techniques for Bing and Yahoo. One of the first things we noticed was the lack of meta keywords and descriptions. Once we completed filling these out, we saw noticeable increases across the SERPs (except Google). william kammer Director of SEO at Levy Online / @williamkammer

  Either way, Bing needs meta keywords and description to position you higher and understand your content better, while it also helps Google users have a better understanding of your provided info, if not the search engine. Although Google say they don’t use metadata for ranking, it’s still important to optimize your pages with them given the overall impact on CTR.

  18. EMDs Rank Higher on Bing SERPs Than on Google’s 

  Bing is not very good at grasping the meaning from the context, it needs the stuff to be already chewed. As a consequence, Bing puts more emphasis on the exact match anchor text as compared to Google.

  Although Google is somehow against exact-match settings knowing that many spammy websites use exact-match domains, it’s a bit risky to optimize your website this way, should you want to rank high on both search engines. Think of all those online movie websites that wear a domain name matching the very query – “watchmoviesfree”, “tvmovies”, “freemoviescinema” etc. 

  However, given that in the Bing world exact match keywords in your domain name matter, you should try to incorporate it naturally. This is one of the perks of optimizing your website for Bing – exact-match domains get lucky here.

  Bing has lots of EMD sites ranking before some legit sites for many keywords. william kammer Director of SEO at Levy Online / @williamkammer

  Should you want to have yet another shot at ranking higher on Bing, you should focus on exact-match domains in the title, description, HTML, headings, and copy. 

  19. Bing Can Interpret Flash Websites

  Long story short, Bing can interpret flash websites, while Google Chrome has a rather difficult time with them.

  20. Small Local Businesses Get a Boost in Bing’s Local Search Area

  Local businesses will rejoice when hearing this: it’s easier to get increased local visibility with Bing.

  The issue is twofold: first, Google generally favors the bigger local businesses when compared to Bing, secondly, the former often times misses the point when delivering results to a query because it uses contextual clues to figure out what you’re really searching for, whereas Bing will show your local results first.

  Moreover, brick-and-mortar businesses have a better shot at being visible on Bing than on Google with the Bing Places for Business.

    All you need for Bing’s free local listing service is your physical address, contact info, opening hours, your website link, and nice photos of your business. In addition, Bing provides users a feature Google is missing at the moment: an agency dashboard feature to help users run local search campaigns easier and at a quicker pace.

  21. Bing Is Gentler When It Comes to Mobile-Friendliness 

  Bing values mobile-friendliness set-ups but has a different approach to it. They consider mobile-optimization a plus in ranking higher in SERPs, while Google made it rather mandatory, saying they will start ranking you based on your mobile website first.

  22. CTR Is a Turn-Point Ranking Factor

  This is a simple calculus. As you probably figured out already, Bing likes things easy and tidy. Imagine two websites ranking on #1 position and #2, respectively. They’re both performing exquisitely, yet #1 position has lower CTR compared to the one on the second place. Guess what: there’s going to be a switch.

  23. Bing Is Very Secure For Authors

  We already talked about Bing preferring authoritative websites with some history on the web. They’re willing to offer the same sense of security to content authors as well.

  With Google providing people with the chance of claiming content they have written, Bing also had a “Klout-orship” program which provided author details such as Linkedin summary, social profiles, Klout score, 2 most popular posts from Twitter in the last 7 days and 2 most engaging posts from Instagram in the past 90 days. However, not until recently we have learned that Klout has unfortunately reached an end on May 25, 2018, Lithium announcing that “Klout is now kaput“. Wonder what Bing will do next…

  Anyways, Bing is quite strict when it comes to website authority and trust, hence they will continue taking into account a variety of factors such as social signals, name recognition, cited sources, the author’s identity and more.

  24. Bing Puts Less Importance on Links Than Google

  Matthew Woodward said that Bing puts less importance on links when compared to Google, although it does favor editorial links coming from websites with high-quality content and top-notch marketing tactics. 

  It’s the same debate as the one with content: content is very important, as links are too, but they are not rendered as a top ranking factor with Bing.

  25. HTTPS Is Not a Ranking Factor

  This fact is backed by Bing Lead Program Manager Vincent Wehren.  Whilst for Google it is a ranking factor, Bing considers it irrelevant for website positioning and they are not going to give it any credit.

  26. Bing Has a Simpler Penalty System

  Besides being quite transparent about it’s ranking algorithm, Bing also doesn’t name a vast array of penalties, except the one where they delist a website when shady SEO practices are noticed in their behalf. And it’s very easy to find out whether you’ve been penalized in their Webmaster Tools area.

  We don’t know a whole lot about Bing’s penalties but what we do know for sure is they are a much friendlier beast than Google. matthew woodward Award Winning Blogger matthewwoodward.co.uk / @MattWoodwardUK

  27. Most of the Bing Audience Is Exclusive and Doesn’t Visit Google

  In 2014, comScore published some statistics that might surprise you. In addition, they will help you draw a better picture of these unknown figures who seem to slip through your fingers. 

  According to the stats, the Bing searchers seem to be college graduates and graduate school students and mature people fitting the 35+ age group. Women represent a slightly bigger figure than men, most of them managing households with children. What’s more, these households have incomes more than $75.000.

  Bing’s demographic is more mature in age and affords to spend more money.

  72% finance and business searches happening on Bing and Yahoo are not to be found on Google’s ground. This is almost 21 million people you might be missing in finance, and that’s tough, as they are the ones holding the biggest share of the money, aren’t they?

  Curious though why they keep their searches exclusive and don’t check all search engines for what they’re interested in. Could it be that Bing focuses on older and more authoritative and trustworthy brand websites?

  28. Bing Promises Increased ROI

  ROI is vital to digital marketing and Bing can double it or even more. According to comScore, Yahoo Bing Network traffic converts better, spending 6.8% more money online than the one searching on Google.

  Source: link-assistant.com

  Given that usually on Google it can take up to 12 months in order to get your payoff from your SEO efforts on their site, you should also consider Bing. Thanks to the lower competition for page one, it takes less time to see results on your investment. And this is splendid news especially for smaller companies who have a more fragile budget plan and smaller chances of seeing some decent ROI on their SEO efforts. All in one, Bing might have a better conversion rate than Google.

  Source: matthewwoodward.co.uk

  29. Bing Is a Much Cheaper Advertising Alternative to Google

  Thanks to the lower competition available on Bing, it is cheaper for PPC advertisers to place their mobile and desktop ads. You can check the exact 2017 paid search trends on iProspect.

  With Bing, you can afford both to advertise on and optimize for it.

  30. Bing Prefers 301 Redirects

  Bing prefers to use 301 redirects (sending people to a permanent location) instead of 302 ones. Their latest Bing Webmasters Guidelines update tells 302 redirects are fine, although, in reality, they still don’t work as they should. Normally, they wouldn’t recognize a 302 eredirect but after the crawlers would hit it multiple time, Bing would turn it into a 301.

  Canonical tags instad of a proper redirect are not welcome either. Same with meta refresh redirects.

  31. Microsoft’s Success Is One of the Finest Coups in History

  Experts call it the Big Bing. In 2014 Mozilla released version 34 of their Firefox browser and made a move that changed the history: they removed Google as the default search engine and changed it to Yahoo! For North America, also replacing it with other search engines for Russia and other neighboring countries.

    And boom! search traffic numbers changed for good in only 24 hours. Is this bad or good luck? It depends whom we’re looking at. Plus, imagine that many people (especially the older ones) don’t really care what search engine they’re using as long as they get answers to their queries, hence still use Bing from the day they purchased their laptop up till today. Here is the search engine’s success story in a nutshell, told by Tom McKay. 

  source: gizmodo.com

  Either way, Bing is bigger than most of us think. On August 17, 2017, Bing tweeted their search market share across major countries around the globe and the statistics are stunning.

Bing is bigger than you think! #SEM #PPC #bingadswebcast pic.twitter.com/fFtEDvM634

— Bing Ads (@BingAds) August 17, 2017

  So How Can Microsoft’s Bing Change Your SEO Game?

  It was high time we shedded some light on Bing. Even our blog craved for some words of wisdom regarding this search engine few (or so many, it depends on the perspective) turn to. 

  Let’s apply Dan Petrovic’s technique of ending a talk on a topic: “When you do a talk, tell them what you’re gonna tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them“. Remember that Bing:

  has lower competition

has lower bounce rate, more page visits,  more time-on-site, more subscribers

is much friendlier than Google in terms of ranking signals and penalties

has no top ranking signal 

considers social signals a ranking signal

has great free analysis tools

needs meta data to rank you high

EMDs rank higher than on Google

it hasnearly a third of the search market share (US) together with Yahoo

powers Yahoo and Siri web search

increases local businesses visibility

has a bigger ROI

is a cheaper advertising alternative to Google

  As Dan Petrovic said in one of our cognitiveSEO Talks: On Search and Traffic podcasts, we need to see a third search engine come up with something different, not just be a few years behind Google, and act as a fully revolutionary search engine.

  What I would love to see is one proper competitor to Google, whether it’d be Amazon, or eBay, or a new search engine, or even Facebook. I’d love to see a proper competitor in terms of information retrieval and presentation to users. […] I think there needs to be good competition, and that’s a good thing for Google and a good thing for users if there’s proper competition to Google, so they’re not driven just by their shareholders but by pure competition. dan petrovic Search Marketer dejanseo.com.au / @dejanseo

  Bing is one of the three search engines that rule the world wide web (www). Many know it for having surpassed Yahoo in both traffic numbers and success, most of them assuming that Bing’s younger than Yahoo on the search market.

  However, even to my own surprise, Bing is a search engine created and operated by Microsoft, one that has replaced in 2009 the former Live Search (2007), Windows Live Search (2006), and MSN Search (1998) Microsoft engines. It seems like Bing’s the Big Brother who’s been always here watching us without us knowing it. 

  Hopefully, you have a better picture as to why you should let Bing play an important role in your SEO strategy.

  source: searchenginejournal.com

  The post 31 Reasons to Start Doing SEO for Bing appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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31 Reasons to Start Doing SEO for Bing

Rumor has it that Bing from Microsoft can really take your marketing and SEO efforts to a whole different level. Is it true though that Bing can be gold when it comes to better traffic to your website, increased ROI, affordable advertising, convertible exclusive visitors, and an overall friendlier search environment? 

  Given that we don’t lean on rumor, we figured out it’s best to check ourselves what’s there that makes Bing a smart target to marketers of all kinds.  

    In a world full of Google-first mindsets, it’s wise to take a step back and reconsider our choices. Is Google the only medium worth investing into? We gathered 31 facts that prove that Bing might just be that missing piece in your overall online marketing strategy. Be ready to be amazed by statistics, testimonials, and webmaster-backed tips about Bing.

  Bing Traffic Might Have a Lower Bounce Rate

Yahoo and Bing Own a Third of the U.S. Search Market

Most Google SEO Practices Apply to Bing As Well

Bing Has Lower Competition

Bing Currently Powers Yahoo and the Majority of Voice Search

Bing Is More Open About Their Ranking Factors Than Google

Content is Not a #1 Ranking Signal

On-Page SEO Matters More Than Off-page SEO

Bing Has a Taste For the Good Old Practices

Better Multimedia User Experience

Social S1gnals Are a Vital Ranking Factor

Bing Has a Stunning Array of Free Analysis Tools

Content Needs to Be Top-Notch

Backlinks: Numbers Talk

Bing Teams Up With Google Against Shady SEO Practices

Bing Prefers Older Websites to Newer Ones

Meta Description and Keywords Impact CTR and Ranking

EMDs Rank Higher on Bing SERPs Than on Google’s 

Bing Can Interpret Flash Websites

Small Local Businesses Get a Boost in Bing’s Local Search Area

Bing Is Gentler When It Comes to Mobile-Friendliness 

CTR Is a Turn-Point Ranking Factor

Bing Is Very Secure For Authors

Bing Puts Less Importance on Links Than Google

HTTPS Is Not a Ranking Factor

Bing Has a Simpler Penalty System

Most of the Bing Audience Is Exclusive and Doesn’t Visit Google

Bing Promises Increased ROI

Bing Is a Much Cheaper Advertising Alternative to Google

Bing Prefers 301 Redirects

Microsoft’s Success Is One of the Finest Coups in History

So How Can Microsoft’s Bing Change Your SEO Game?

  In many ways, Bing is similar to Google. It provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image, and map search. As you’ve probably already seen in the table of contents, many optimization steps meant for Google also fit into the Bing world. And yet, we’re here to talk about what’s Bing offering to businesses and marketers that Google is not. 

  First things first, you should know why the Bing name. One idea struck me the other day and made me wonder whether the Microsoft team watched and worshiped the renowned sitcom tv-show “Friends” like everybody else on this Planet (well, almost everybody!). It would’ve been funny though if they got inspired by Chandler Bing’s name, especially when everybody in the show made fun of it.

  However, let’s get back to our sheep and let you know that the Bing name was brainstormed and picked through focus groups. The proposed name pleased Microsoft for a number of reasons: it was easy to remember and spell, short, and friendly. It also reminded people the sound made when discovering something or deciding upon an idea. Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services also said that Bing meant “very certain to respond/answer” in Chinese. Hey, I’m already sold!

    Should you be craving for some more proof regarding Bing’s performance and charm besides our 31-fact list, you should also check what people say about it and why they prefer Bing to Google. Here are some interviews deployed by TechRadar where working-class people explain how Bing’s a step forward for them when it comes to search engines.

  Long story short, it’s time we listened to the founder and CEO of Market Domination Media, Jonathan Long’s advice and move forward and check what Bing has to offer to the SEO world.

  Stop treating the Yahoo Bing Network like the red-headed stepchild. jonathan long Founder of Market Domination Media /  @long

  1. Bing Traffic Might Have a Lower Bounce Rate

  Matthew Woodward’s experience with the Google and Bing traffic is very interesting. Although many say Bing doesn’t bring too many leads, Woodward experienced something else: this search engine provides lower bounce rate, more page visits, visitors spend more time on site, and there are more subscribers in general. 

  source: matthewwoodward.co.uk

Strong user engagement is very important for Bing and usually penalizes anything that’s not aligned with this requirement. There’s something similar to bounce rate but with an uglier truth – pogo-sticking. While bounce rates don’t always mean something bad, pogo-sticking always does. It occurs when somebody, after having shortly landed on your site, quickly hits the “back” button, returns to search results, and clicks on another website.

  Another guess for the small bounce rate would be that, given the very precise search results aligned with Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines, people do get what they want most times they enter a query and spend enough time on site to satisfy their needs.

  2. Yahoo and Bing Own a Third of the U.S. Search Market

  The 2018 comScore stats revealed the new Bing search market status at both a global and country level. We’ll generally treat Yahoo as being an integral part of the Bing traffic, as they’re powered by the latter. Therefore, the combined strength of Bing and Yahoo nails around a third of the market share for search in the US.

  Did we mention Bing is bigger than you think ? #SEM #PPC #bingadswebcast pic.twitter.com/jeJxJGcxl5

— Bing Ads (@BingAds) August 17, 2017

  Although Google’s traffic is double, we’re still talking big numbers and users that are active on a search engine that surprisingly is other than Google. Given the ton of search done on Bing, it’s very important for digital marketers to know what they’re missing out when struggling to rank on the first Google pages. This way you’ll know where to start optimizing your website, preferably with as little effort as possible.

  source: link-assistant.com

  We all know that most times, numbers talk.

Imagine that you could be missing 143 million unique searchers each month and 5.2 billion searches a month probably don’t display your website in SERPs.

Pretty tough, isn’t it? To rub some more salt into the wound, financial and automotive queries on Bing and Yahoo is triple to that of Google, counting up to 11 million out of a 14 million total. 

  source: searchenginewatch.com

  3. Most Google SEO Practices Apply to Bing As Well

  There are two sides when it comes to the theory that says if you rank high on Google, you rank well pretty well on Bing too. Most agree with this, although with a critical eye, but others are reluctant and argue that search algorithms are different, hence searching for the same query won’t provide you the same SERPs but a quite different one. 

  Either way, we can’t deny the fact that Google and Bing share many similarities, while most guidelines provided from webmasters working for the former are listed as important by webmasters from the latter as well. Nobody says that if you’re on page 1 on Google you MUST be ranking on the same page for the same query on Bing as well.

It’s just that you actually don’t need to reinvent the wheel with Bing but only consider some retouches.

  Again, although their algorithms are somehow different, you can easily target Bing for ranking your website high. SEO for Bing is not so different from Google – you could easily get the best of both worlds. What’s more, most SEO efforts meant for Google will also translate well with Bing and Yahoo as well, given that the latter is powered by the former. 

  Both Google and Bing value relevant content, look for well-placed keywords, place big brands higher, ask for mobile-friendliness and unique user experience, correlate social signals with quality content and better rankings, consider backlinks very important for websites, require the on-page SEO to be up-to-date, and have similar search layouts. Moreover, all three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, allied and signed an agreement to make search listings richer and more accurate through structured data. 

  Should you decide to start optimizing for Bing, it would be wise if you checked what impact those tactics might have on your Google ranking, so that you’ll avoid losing popularity and the lead for a search engine with the biggest market share of all.

  4. Bing Has Lower Competition

  Reading various comments on this Bing topic, I noticed there are very few to no people doing SEO for Bing, mostly because they already rank pretty high inside the search engine or simply have no interest in it. Truth be told, the majority of websites focus only on optimizing for Google, leaving the other search engines behind, hence unconsciously allowing Bing develop a fertile search environment where there’s not much of a competition and brands could easily rank high. 

  Bing is second in line after Google when it comes to marketer’s best practices given that everybody struggles to please the bigger master, but it could really add some value to your strategy. 

  Moreover, taking the nearly two decades into account in which SEOs have purely focused all their efforts on ranking high on Google, it’s hard for newcomers to compete with people who already forged their skills for years in a row. But now there’s a new land for people to sow their brands into and see them grow and thrive. Targeting Google is the right move and there’s nothing to blame, as Sherry Bonelli would say. But you should at least be aware of what Bing might do for you.

  If you’re guilty of “Google-first”, it’s not without reason. sherry Bonelli Digital Marketing Guru at Early Bird Digital Marketing / @sherrybonelli

  5. Bing Currently Powers Yahoo and the Majority of Voice Search

  For many years now, beginning July 2009, to be exact, Yahoo search has been powered by Bing meaning that the former’s searches are backed by Bing’s index and ranking algorithm. Should you doubt, just do a test search and see for yourself that search results are very similar. Hence, optimizing for one should please the other as well, at least when looking at the bigger picture.

  Furthermore, should be a little behind with news, Oath is the new name for the Yahoo+AOL mix that came into effect after Yahoo was purchased by Verizon in 2017, including TechCrunch, hence you’ll often see this name in the charts that will follow shortly.

  One of my biggest surprises was to find out that Bing also powers the Siri voice search feature on people’s iPhones. To all the Siri users and aficionados out there – you are using Bing and have no clue about it yet.

  6. Bing Is More Open About Their Ranking Factors Than Google

  Although Bing offers users guidelines as to how they should optimize their websites, Bing specifies that this is not going to guarantee higher rankings or more traffic from the search engine, although it’s wise to tick them on your list nevertheless. This shows you should expect contingencies but they’re ready to guide you through and, when necessary, tell you the naked truth.

  Bing is much more transparent about ranking factors; just check their Bing Webmaster Guidelines and case studies and you’ll agree. Plus, they give you the tools to beautify your website to their taste, hence little to no hidden strings.

  Interesting enough, there’s yet no evidence as to what Bing values most when it comes to ranking – links, content or anything else. They do value quality content but they don’t specifically say links or content play a major role as Google uses to.

  7. Content is Not a #1 Ranking Signal

  As previously said, content is rendered neither as #1 ranking signal on Bing nor as a part of the privileged few that are part of the top. As long as it has the three pillars of content quality, they’re happy.

  source: Bing Webmaster Guidelines

  Bing knows how they like their content in order to rank it high, but there’s one element that might make your page contents more appealing: multimedia files.

  Bing looks for rich and engaging content, one that uses spot-on images, video, audio, so on and so forth.

  8. On-Page SEO Matters More Than Off-page SEO

  On-page SEO is king on Bing. This is what reigns the Bing lands, while off-page follows next. Although digital marketers invest time, money, and effort into both, it’s a universally known fact that successful off-page SEO only follows good on-page SEO.

  source: searchmetrics.com

  Therefore, Bing is not cherry-picking the best one out of two but only gives on-site SEO its well-deserved tribute. To some extent, it’s a chicken-or-the-egg type of debate.

  9. Bing Has a Taste For the Good Old Practices

  Unlike Google who’s always updating everything, Bing is more into the classic. Generally speaking, what’s new-school for Bing is somehow old-school for Google.

  Bing has a rather tangled search algorithm, one that is focused on things such as exact-match domains and keywords in headings, titles, copy or meta description (although Google dismissed them as a ranking factor, Bing relies on them), or high-quality content – authority, display, multimedia, relevance. Those who are fond of the old Google interface and ranking factors could easily feel at home when using Bing.

  As we optimized specifically for Bing and Yahoo, I felt like I was optimizing for Google a few years ago. Tactics and tasks that were significant to me years ago, were now a factor again, just on different search engines. william kammer Director of SEO at Levy Online / @williamkammer

  10. Better Multimedia User Experience

  Bing has a better entity understanding in regard to multimedia and considers it a big plus if added to text content. Therefore, the Microsoft search engine uses it as a ranking factor which they also signal in their Bing Webmaster Guidelines. 

  Another good thing would be that Bing is more user-friendly when queries ask for images. The search engine gives exact search results without related searches or suggestions of this kind, as Google visitors are used to. 

  So you can get Bing’s favorite should you provide nice and tidy, unique, high-quality, and relevant images.

  11. Social Signals Are a Vital Ranking Factor

  According to Neil Patel, Bing 

 has officially stated that they use social shares to understand if a page is popular among users. Social media engagement is a positive sign. The more social signals you have, the higher you’ll go in SERPs. Experts argue that most time they correlate very well with better rankings, and this is all thanks to the content being frequently shared and used by users. 

  Bing says social signals pass on influence at alll levels, especially to brands’ social channels and to search engines.

Their impact should really mean that marketers should put an emphasis on increasing their social media audience and receive some feedback.

  source: searchmetrics.com

  As expected, Bing too is against fake social media followers and engagement, such as it is against keyword stuffing when it comes to relevant content. 

  Although Google doesn’t say anything regarding the power of social signals, they greatly influence your rankings and many experts and SEO gurus vouched for them, so it’s wise to use them and benefit from both search engines, Google and Bing.

  12. Bing Has a Stunning Array of Free Analysis Tools

  Be it on the link level, the site structure level, or the page level, Bing has it all. Plus, Bing Webmaster Tools are free and provide actionable insight and tips on how to optimize your website for them.

  Matthew Woodward thinks they’re superb and encourages marketers to use it right away.  It’s like Bing has concentrated all marketing superpowers in one toolset and now lends it for free for people to learn what’s worth and what’s not in Bing’s eyes.

  source: matthewwoodward.co.uk

  Bing is definitely SEO-friendly. One look at their in-depth structured Webmaster Guidelines, Tools, and case-studies, all there in order to make the search engine a better and easier-to-live-in place.

  Bing provides the right means to sign up your website for analysis – be they backlinks, keywords, link profile etc -, mobile friendliness -, find out whether you’re penalized or not, even get your SEO reports that point out the flaws they see when crawling your site.

  13. Content Needs to Be Top-Notch

  As previously said, content is not a ranking content per se but it’s still important how it looks and “displays itself” on the internet. They prefer unique content, content written by professionals from well-known sources or people with field expertise instead of recycled content which is widely available everywhere on the web. 

  The Bing Webmaster Guidelines defines optimized content as: “clear, easy to understand and scan, deep, without ads, without affiliate links or redirecting readers to other links shortly after they landed on their page, should be friendly, easy to navigate, engaging, information-rich”.

  Content should be multimedia-rich, with graphs, images, and videos meant to engage and offer all the necessary information to the reader. Generally, Bing places a higher value on in-depth, unique, long and engaging content rather than on shorter content. Bing is pretty simple to understand and follow – all you need is to know what you need and the search engine will provide it for you.

    14. Backlinks: Numbers Talk

  The number is so important that it can even beat the link quality.

Although it’s possible for Bing to look more to quantity than to quality, to some extent, it does prefer the ones coming from highly-authoritative websites, usually ranking .edu, .gov, .org sites higher.

  This might be one explanation as to why Bing ranks older, hence richer in links and social activity, websites. Similar to Google, the search engine from Microsoft prefers organic links from relevant, trustworthy websites that vouch for the traffic they lead to your page and old – as age is a sign of trust and influence. Should the backlinks be do-follow and with exact match anchor text (contain your target keywords), you win the jackpot. 

  The Bing team says on their Webmaster Guidelines page that links are necessary to help them spot new pages on your site, as they don’t crawl all your pages, but only the 10 most influential ones. Links show you’re popular, trustworthy, and relevant to real users who eventually generate organic and continuously increasing traffic. 

  15. Bing Teams Up With Google Against Shady SEO Practices

  Link schemes, cloaking, social media schemes, reciprocal or paid links, duplicate content, overly advertised pages, quality over quantity content, misleading markup, link farms, and excessive link manipulation, in general, are not welcomed on Bing. 

  source: Bing Webmaster Guidelines

  Therefore, all the white hat SEOs out there searching for a safe place to develop their brand in the online market, Bing is one of the places-to-be.

  16. Bing Prefers Older Websites to Newer Ones

  I know this one tells a different tale compared to what Google values most, but Bing is old-school and likes to deal with websites that have aged beautifully and you can easily put your trust in. 

  This is genuinely because Bing looks at site authority when checking backlinks or websites, in general. Having a “vintage” (old) domains helps. Older websites have a story to tell, and more often than not they engage in healthy digital marketing practices and have build a trustworthy name in their niche.

  Bing though everything through, isn’t it?

  17. Meta Description and Keywords Impact CTR and Ranking

  This is an old debate where search engine officials state they don’t use metadata as a ranking factor, however, when optimizing your website with meta keywords and description, brands seem to send another vibe to both search engines and readers.

  Although Duane Forrester from Bing Webmaster Outreach announced they don’t take metadata (keywords and descriptions) into account when ranking websites, quality research (testing and experience) show something else. 

  A client came to us with good Google ranks, but very poor Yahoo and Bing. This caused us to look deeply into specific optimization techniques for Bing and Yahoo. One of the first things we noticed was the lack of meta keywords and descriptions. Once we completed filling these out, we saw noticeable increases across the SERPs (except Google). william kammer Director of SEO at Levy Online / @williamkammer

  Either way, Bing needs meta keywords and description to position you higher and understand your content better, while it also helps Google users have a better understanding of your provided info, if not the search engine. Although Google say they don’t use metadata for ranking, it’s still important to optimize your pages with them given the overall impact on CTR.

  18. EMDs Rank Higher on Bing SERPs Than on Google’s 

  Bing is not very good at grasping the meaning from the context, it needs the stuff to be already chewed. As a consequence, Bing puts more emphasis on the exact match anchor text as compared to Google.

  Although Google is somehow against exact-match settings knowing that many spammy websites use exact-match domains, it’s a bit risky to optimize your website this way, should you want to rank high on both search engines. Think of all those online movie websites that wear a domain name matching the very query – “watchmoviesfree”, “tvmovies”, “freemoviescinema” etc. 

  However, given that in the Bing world exact match keywords in your domain name matter, you should try to incorporate it naturally. This is one of the perks of optimizing your website for Bing – exact-match domains get lucky here.

  Bing has lots of EMD sites ranking before some act

 ually legit sites for many keywords. william kammer Director of SEO at Levy Online / @williamkammer

  Should you want to have yet another shot at ranking higher on Bing, you should focus on exact-match domains in the title, description, HTML, headings, and copy. 

  19. Bing Can Interpret Flash Websites

  Long story short, Bing can interpret flash websites, while Google Chrome has a rather difficult time with them.

  20. Small Local Businesses Get a Boost in Bing’s Local Search Area

  Local businesses will rejoice when hearing this: it’s easier to get increased local visibility with Bing.

  The issue is twofold: first, Google generally favors the bigger local businesses when compared to Bing, secondly, the former often times misses the point when delivering results to a query because it uses contextual clues to figure out what you’re really searching for, whereas Bing will show your local results first.

  Moreover, brick-and-mortar businesses have a better shot at being visible on Bing than on Google with the Bing Places for Business.

    All you need for Bing’s free local listing service is your physical address, contact info, opening hours, your website link, and nice photos of your business. In addition, Bing provides users a feature Google is missing at the moment: an agency dashboard feature to help users run local search campaigns easier and at a quicker pace.

  21. Bing Is Gentler When It Comes to Mobile-Friendliness 

  Bing values mobile-friendliness set-ups but has a different approach to it. They consider mobile-optimization a plus in ranking higher in SERPs, while Google made it rather mandatory, saying they will start ranking you based on your mobile website first.

  22. CTR Is a Turn-Point Ranking Factor

  This is a simple calculus. As you probably figured out already, Bing likes things easy and tidy. Imagine two websites ranking on #1 position and #2, respectively. They’re both performing exquisitely, yet #1 position has lower CTR compared to the one on the second place. Guess what: there’s going to be a switch.

  23. Bing Is Very Secure For Authors

  We already talked about Bing preferring authoritative websites with some history on the web. They’re willing to offer the same sense of security to content authors as well.

  With Google providing people with the chance of claiming content they have written, Bing also had a “Klout-orship” program which provided author details such as Linkedin summary, social profiles, Klout score, 2 most popular posts from Twitter in the last 7 days and 2 most engaging posts from Instagram in the past 90 days. However, not until recently we have learned that Klout has unfortunately reached an end on May 25, 2018, Lithium announcing that “Klout is now kaput“. Wonder what Bing will do next…

  Anyways, Bing is quite strict when it comes to website authority and trust, hence they will continue taking into account a variety of factors such as social signals, name recognition, cited sources, the author’s identity and more.

  24. Bing Puts Less Importance on Links Than Google

  Matthew Woodward said that Bing puts less importance on links when compared to Google, although it does favor editorial links coming from websites with high-quality content and top-notch marketing tactics. 

  It’s the same debate as the one with content: content is very important, as links are too, but they are not rendered as a top ranking factor with Bing.

  25. HTTPS Is Not a Ranking Factor

  This fact is backed by Bing Lead Program Manager Vincent Wehren.  Whilst for Google it is a ranking factor, Bing considers it irrelevant for website positioning and they are not going to give it any credit.

  26. Bing Has a Simpler Penalty System

  Besides being quite transparent about it’s ranking algorithm, Bing also doesn’t name a vast array of penalties, except the one where they delist a website when shady SEO practices are noticed in their behalf. And it’s very easy to find out whether you’ve been penalized in their Webmaster Tools area.

  We don’t know a whole lot about Bing’s penalties but what we do know for sure is they are a much friendlier beast than Google. matthew woodward Award Winning Blogger matthewwoodward.co.uk / @MattWoodwardUK

  27. Most of the Bing Audience Is Exclusive and Doesn’t Visit Google

  In 2014, comScore published some statistics that might surprise you. In addition, they will help you draw a better picture of these unknown figures who seem to slip through your fingers. 

  According to the stats, the Bing searchers seem to be college graduates and graduate school students and mature people fitting the 35+ age group. Women represent a slightly bigger figure than men, most of them managing households with children. What’s more, these households have incomes more than $75.000.

  Bing’s demographic is more mature in age and affords to spend more money.

  72% finance and business searches happening on Bing and Yahoo are not to be found on Google’s ground. This is almost 21 million people you might be missing in finance, and that’s tough, as they are the ones holding the biggest share of the money, aren’t they?

  Curious though why they keep their searches exclusive and don’t check all search engines for what they’re interested in. Could it be that Bing focuses on older and more authoritative and trustworthy brand websites?

  28. Bing Promises Increased ROI

  ROI is vital to digital marketing and Bing can double it or even more. According to comScore, Yahoo Bing Network traffic converts better, spending 6.8% more money online than the one searching on Google.

  Source: link-assistant.com

  Given that usually on Google it can take up to 12 months in order to get your payoff from your SEO efforts on their site, you should also consider Bing. Thanks to the lower competition for page one, it takes less time to see results on your investment. And this is splendid news especially for smaller companies who have a more fragile budget plan and smaller chances of seeing some decent ROI on their SEO efforts. All in one, Bing might have a better conversion rate than Google.

  Source: matthewwoodward.co.uk

  29. Bing Is a Much Cheaper Advertising Alternative to Google

  Thanks to the lower competition available on Bing, it is cheaper for PPC advertisers to place their mobile and desktop ads. You can check the exact 2017 paid search trends on iProspect.

  With Bing, you can afford both to advertise on and optimize for it.

  30. Bing Prefers 301 Redirects

  Bing prefers to use 301 redirects (sending people to a permanent location) instead of 302 ones. Their latest Bing Webmasters Guidelines update tells 302 redirects are fine, although, in reality, they still don’t work as they should. Normally, they wouldn’t recognize a 302 eredirect but after the crawlers would hit it multiple time, Bing would turn it into a 301.

  Canonical tags instad of a proper redirect are not welcome either. Same with meta refresh redirects.

  31. Microsoft’s Success Is One of the Finest Coups in History

  Experts call it the Big Bing. In 2014 Mozilla released version 34 of their Firefox browser and made a move that changed the history: they removed Google as the default search engine and changed it to Yahoo! For North America, also replacing it with other search engines for Russia and other neighboring countries.

    And boom! search traffic numbers changed for good in only 24 hours. Is this bad or good luck? It depends whom we’re looking at. Plus, imagine that many people (especially the older ones) don’t really care what search engine they’re using as long as they get answers to their queries, hence still use Bing from the day they purchased their laptop up till today. Here is the search engine’s success story in a nutshell, told by Tom McKay. 

  source: gizmodo.com

  Either way, Bing is bigger than most of us think. On August 17, 2017, Bing tweeted their search market share across major countries around the globe and the statistics are stunning.

Bing is bigger than you think! #SEM #PPC #bingadswebcast pic.twitter.com/fFtEDvM634

— Bing Ads (@BingAds) August 17, 2017

  So How Can Microsoft’s Bing Change Your SEO Game?

  It was high time we shedded some light on Bing. Even our blog craved for some words of wisdom regarding this search engine few (or so many, it depends on the perspective) turn to. 

  Let’s apply Dan Petrovic’s technique of ending a talk on a topic: “When you do a talk, tell them what you’re gonna tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them“. Remember that Bing:

  has lower competition

has lower bounce rate, more page visits,  more time-on-site, more subscribers

is much friendlier than Google in terms of ranking signals and penalties

has no top ranking signal 

considers social signals a ranking signal

has great free analysis tools

needs meta data to rank you high

EMDs rank higher than on Google

it hasnearly a third of the search market share (US) together with Yahoo

powers Yahoo and Siri web search

increases local businesses visibility

has a bigger ROI

is a cheaper advertising alternative to Google

  As Dan Petrovic said in one of our cognitiveSEO Talks: On Search and Traffic podcasts, we need to see a third search engine come up with something different, not just be a few years behind Google, and act as a fully revolutionary search engine.

  What I would love to see is one proper competitor to Google, whether it’d be Amazon, or eBay, or a new search engine, or even Facebook. I’d love to see a proper competitor in terms of information retrieval and presentation to users. […] I think there needs to be good competition, and that’s a good thing for Google and a good thing for users if there’s proper competition to Google, so they’re not driven just by their shareholders but by pure competition. dan petrovic Search Marketer dejanseo.com.au / @dejanseo

  Bing is one of the three search engines that rule the world wide web (www). Many know it for having surpassed Yahoo in both traffic numbers and success, most of them assuming that Bing’s younger than Yahoo on the search market.

  However, even to my own surprise, Bing is a search engine created and operated by Microsoft, one that has replaced in 2009 the former Live Search (2007), Windows Live Search (2006), and MSN Search (1998) Microsoft engines. It seems like Bing’s the Big Brother who’s been always here watching us without us knowing it. 

  Hopefully, you have a better picture as to why you should let Bing play an important role in your SEO strategy.

  source: searchenginejournal.com

  The post 31 Reasons to Start Doing SEO for Bing appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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[itsworn]

Officiating 101: How to Be a Successful Race Official

*Editor’s Commentary*

Some racing fanatics just can’t get enough of the sport.  Some racing fanatics are just gluttons for punishment. Those racing fanatics usually are called officials.

Officials are highly criticized (you’re probably not surprised to hear that).  Whether it’s by drivers, crews, car owners, fans, or other officials, someone with responsibility at a race track is always subject to scrutiny.  In fact, some drivers and teams will stay away from venues if they aren’t fans of the officials.  You’re never going to please everyone, but there is some high importance on being a good official.

We have reached the point in the offseason where tracks and series have begun searching for a new batch of officials.  Not every track and series are looking, but if you look hard enough, there is always a spot for a fresh new face to slide in.

No matter your background in the sport, there are some key things you can do to put yourself on the path to being a successful official.

Although I’ve dabbled in most of these areas, I wouldn’t consider myself a leading expert on any, so I won’t get into heavy details about the best way to check engine compression…maybe we’ll save that for Officiating 201.  However, I have worked with enough people in these areas to give you an overview of what makes for a good official, and which thing you probably shouldn’t do.

Technical Inspector

Oh, the tech inspector.  That lazy son of a gun who doesn’t check anything and lets everyone cheat.  But then, when you win, he tears your car down.  What’s up with that guy?

My stinging paragraph of satire is the first hurdle you’ll have to overcome to be a successful tech person.  You’ll be accused of playing favorites, not teching anything, or picking on someone who doesn’t deserve it.  Grow thick skin in a hurry, and don’t listen to the rumbling rumors around the pits.

The odds are good that you’ll see the same few drivers quite a bit in the tech barn – there are always going to be drivers who are up front almost every week.  At this point you’ll start hearing rumors that said driver is getting away with this or getting away with that, and you’re not checking it.  Don’t listen to the rumblings.  If you suspect something is going on, check it.  I can’t tell you how many times racers have been wrong about the rumors they heard on another car.

To that, you need to be consistent.  Don’t go on witch hunts.  If you’re planning to tear apart engines on a given night, tear them apart no matter who reports to tech.  If drivers see you’re being fair and treating everyone equally, you’ll have their respect.

Also, be sure to respect drivers in tech.  You might see some goofy things, or catch them doing something they shouldn’t.  There is no reason to belittle them.  Some genuinely do not know what they did wrong.  Explain the situation, and move on to the consequences.

Flag Man/Race Director

Is this guy blind? Is he playing favorites? Or is he just dumb?  I could go up there and wave a flag and catch everyone…and I’m not afraid to use the black flag!

Yes, more satire.  Quite honestly, I don’t know what drives someone to want to be a flag man or race director.  It’s your job to be the referee, and you don’t have instant replay to help.  Plus, many of the calls in racing that result in “penalties” are much more subjective than other sports.

Much like teching, consistency is the key here.  If a particular incident causes you to put a car to the back once, it has to be the same for everyone.  This is where contact rules and gentleman’s agreements are extremely helpful.  Two cars in the incident?  Send both to the back.  If one of the racers knows he messed up, it’s on him to take the blame.  That way you don’t have to determine if Car A spun Car B or if Car B chopped down on Car A.  That gets messy.

Another big key is communication.  Some tracks will have the flag man as the race director, others will have both.  You have to know who makes the final call and how to approach situations.  Also, it’s important to have good communication with your spotters.  Many tracks will appoint people in the turns to help be extra sets of eyes.  Be sure to lean on them.

Finally, you need to be ready for the firestorm.  If you make a call and the driver wants to talk with you, you better be willing to explain your decision.  Take a few minutes after the race (make sure the driver does the same too) and cool down before having the discussion.  Do it some place where you aren’t getting ganged up on by the driver’s crew.

Scorer

This is the one job I never wanted to do at a race track.  If you’re a line scorer, God Bless You.  There is nothing quite like the chaos of 20-30 cars on a third-mile and trying to write down all of those numbers. If you have transponders…you’re part of the lucky bunch.

One of the best things scorers can do (when line scoring) is have some help.  Have someone line score the back half of the field.  Have someone tell you when cars come on and off the track.

For the transponder systems, keep your eye on the computer.  You may be tempted to watch the race, but from time to time a transponder might not pick up.  I’ve seen instances where a passing was missed and it looked like the leader was a lap down.  Keep an eye out for this.

Also, like the flag man or race director, be ready to back up your decision.  You probably won’t have to (or shouldn’t have to) discuss with the racers, but you may need to explain to the promoter or race director so they can have the discussion with the racer.

Corner Spotter/Steward

This was always my favorite job because I got to watch the races standing right next to the track.  Then I realized that it was pretty important for me to keep an eye on certain areas of the race track (especially those I was responsible for watching).

Try not to get too distracted by what’s going on during the race.  If you’re supposed to watch one and two, then watch one and two.  The flag man or race director is going to need your help.

Also, be sure to keep your calm on the radio.  I can’t tell you how many screaming corner workers I’ve heard in my day.  It doesn’t help.  Oh, and if a car spins, don’t say “yellow.” It’s the flag man’s (or race director’s) responsibility to call the caution.

Other Quick Tidbits

Here are just a few other things from which officials can benefit:

If you’re involved with a race car or team, remove yourself from that officiating situation. It may seem like common sense, but I have seen some conflicts of interest.  It doesn’t mean you can’t be an official.  For example, if you own a Modified, and want to tech the Street Stocks, go for it.

Kill them with kindness. Expect racers, spotters, and crews to run up to you kicking and screaming like an outrageous 4 year old (it has happened to me a lot).  Your first reaction may be to start screaming back, but you’ll only escalate the situation.  Nothing diffuses a situation like a cool calm demeanor. I can’t tell you how many times just listening to a rant has calmed down an angry competitor.  Don’t just do it for show though.  Actually listen, and wait for the time when they’re ready to have a rational discussion.

Don’t post about a situation, racer, track, series, etc. on social media.   It will come back to haunt you.

Treat every racer the same. There are going to be racers you like.  There are going to be racers you don’t like.  Sadly, your role as an official isn’t the time or place for you to be judge, jury, and executioner on someone’s racing career.  I always tell racers, “When we get to the track, I hate you all the same.”

It’s ok to be friends with racers, but be wary of the line. Some racers might be your drinking buddies, second cousins, or future in-laws.  It’s ok to interact with them away from the track.  Just don’t let it seep into your responsibilities as an official.

Have your promoter’s back. The job is tough.  He’s trying to sell tickets.  Instead of telling someone to load up because the wheel clearance off their body is ½-inch too long, you might just want to tell them to fix it for the following week.  Fans want to see cars and racing; they don’t want to see trailers heading home because of minor tech infractions (major ones are different) or because the flag man decided to toss the black flag on everyone who tapped another racer on the bumper.

Make sure the promoter has your back. As an official, this should be your golden rule.  If you make a call, your promoter must have your back. Nothing is worse than having one of your calls overturned because a racer complained to the promoter.  There have been times I’ve disagreed with what my officials have done, but still stood by their decision. If something needs to change in the future, it can be discussed between you and the promoter. You don’t see the NFL going back and overturning calls after the game is done.  There is a reason for that. Promoters and officials have to work hand-in-hand.  If your promoter doesn’t support you, it may be best to move to another track or series.

The post Officiating 101: How to Be a Successful Race Official appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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[singloveandsage]

The Black Dog

So... the black dog's been round to visit - again.  

I hadn't heard about the origin of "the black dog" until recently, when one literally arrived at the front door. I was in Tassie at my oldest friend’s house and there was a deep, gentle "woof" from outside. I knew she hadn't owned a dog in years. "Do you have a dog here?" I asked. 

She went to her front door and opened it and standing there was a huge, long haired retriever, black as the night sky. My friend welcomed the dog inside the house and it wandered up the hall and to the kitchen, slowly, but with a sense of familiarity. It stopped by the sink looking up at her, it's eyes filled with anticipation. My friend went to the cupboard and took out some dog treats, offering one to the black dog and then another. She smiled down at the creature and asked to shake its paw, the dog obliged. 

"She's from across the road. Her owners let her wander around the court and are rarely home. She watches to see when I drive into the driveway and then walks over for a visit" my friend told me. 

The black dog sauntered over to me having finished her snack and asked for a pat on the head with one look. After a moment of affection from me she made a home by sitting on my foot and sat steadily by my side for half an hour. Eventually she'd had enough and left the way she came with a third treat in her mouth and my friend and I continued our evening with cups of tea and conversation. 

I returned to my family home a few hours later and my partner Andrew and my Dad had just finished watching a film on Winston Churchill and the first thing Dad said upon my return was "Winston Churchill suffered bouts of depression, he called it "his black dog". I thought it was quite the coincidence that he'd mention such a thing after the visitor at my friends’s earlier that evening. 

Curious. Life went on. 

The rest of the weekend unfolded with walks by the water, good food, cosy nights in and good company. Nothing to complain about. Just the simple splendours of comfort. I soon returned to Melbourne with determination to get back into the swing of things. Except, things seemingly stopped swinging.  

Out of the blue my energy levels became stagnant, not high or low, but frozen. My emotions weren't up or neutral, they plummeted down and turned numb. My perception of life before my eyes was not good or bad, just dim and weak. Familiar territory.  Could it be after four years of being on top of things, I actually hadn't "kicked the blues" at all, I had just showed the "black dog" the door and sent it on its way, all the while it had been waiting to be let back inside? Did I leave a window open? A door ajar? How did it find its way back in? My face seemingly changed overnight, so did my voice, posture and laugh. It felt like my life force was being sucked dry. But I continued with life, choosing a scarf each morning, applying mascara, reading on the train, greeting customers at work, drinking cups of coffee, ordering in take out at night and going to bed early. Normal. But inside was the sensation of shrinking like Alice in Wonderland with no potion to reverse the sensation.  

A few days into the melancholy, Andrew reached his threshold in regards to the girl he was now living with. He lost his temper at the black dog. He couldn't see Tess anymore, just a cold heartless shadow, withholding the one he loves, so he yelled at it over something small and insignificant. It stung and I felt ashamed and responsible. Receiving his attack made me feel like I was doing all of this on purpose. I "kicked the blues" in 2014 by upping the vegetables, jogging and meditating. I thought I'd "fixed" myself.  My intention was to get strong both mentally and physically. Subconsciously, I was actually doing a deal on the side, strength was a cover up job for my real business, which was to not feel pain - period. Sure I got healthy. I had cleansed my body with green juice, my negativity with endorphins and my emptiness with mindfulness. Problem solved! 

However somewhere in there I had secretly made the decision to never find myself at the bottom of the hole ever again and while I physically started running around the local park I also started to emotionally flee from pain and I began to submerge myself in self-development. I read every book in the self-help section, studied life coaching, got a fist full of crystals, met with psychics, spread out the guidance cards, lit candles and learnt about numerology. The more I drank from the cup of the wise and mystical, the thirstier I became and it worked. I found a place to go when pain arose and found numerous shields from all the unsightly and unbearable. Then Saturn returned, Mercury went into retrograde and the solar eclipse - eclipsed, however ever you want to define it and this year started to unravel and there's been so much pain, personally and collectively. Change has thickened the air. The familiar bottomless pit began to gain on me, which I've been successfully avoiding for four years. No onyx or Oprah video could protect or distract. 

Yes I've been strong, that was my intention, but strength looked a certain way in my head. It looked like a girl who keeps smiling, achieving and makes sure things are contained and under control. I thought I could predict my future and neutralise my past to remain safe, but pain still found me. 

The truth of the matter is that to be human is to be the open door itself and accept that pain is part of this ride. You can let it in, offering it a moment to sit down by your side and allow it to teach you, so then it eventually passes through. Or you can resist and run. Resistance doesn't mean it's not "woofing" at the front door. 

I've done many things to avoid pain. Don't we all? The vino, sugar, social media scrolling, overworking, shopping, smoking, binge watching, medication, sex, coffee etc.  But nothing is weirder than discovering the things that helped you get out of a funk has actually become another band aid. Resistance in dream catcher patterned packaging. Side note, dream catchers are awesome and Oprah is the best, I will be purchasing an amethyst cave and spirit guides exist, however, I'll never be able to outrun or out-sage my pain and this delusion was going to catch up with me eventually.  Pain comes and goes from the entrance of the heart and needs to be acknowledged or it curls up like a black dog to stay. 

So there I was, locking eyes with the love of my life, in shock by his reaction to my mental state. I was filled with confusion as to how we got here when I was "fine" last week. His gaze pierced me loveless and afraid. He didn't recognise me and the sensation was that of being looked through like a pane of glass.  I'd been here before but this time I stopped myself from identifying as glass and recognised Andrew was in fact a mirror. He was reflecting my own fear of pain because he was seeing it in its totality, layer upon layer having resisted for too long. The suppression of it now erupting from every one of my pores and this terrified him. His terror had manifested into anger as it does for many of us. He thought by yelling at the black dog that it would disappear but inside I could sense it nestling further into my lap. 

I had minimal options at this point. I could pretend I was "fine", I could yell back, I could get up and leave… or I could accept myself in the midst of this pain. I'd never done that before. I've always despised my "negative" emotions, desperate for time to move faster so I can be the happy version of me in the future, or I've looked back at my past with deluded nostalgia, reminiscing about how I was happy a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago, frantically trying to figure out, how do I get back there?  Has this been my fear all along? If I stop trying to "be more" will he still love me? Will anyone love me if this is all there is? Without the promise of something better tomorrow or the memory of me and my past success, am I really enough? Right now, in this moment? If I can't sit with the discomfort and shake hands with this imperfect, unsmiling, non achieving, unable to remain contained or under control girl in this moment, then who will? Can I do this for myself without zoning out on Netflix? 

Worth a try. Otherwise I'll be trapped on a hamster wheel for the rest of my life, desperately pedalling to remain loved.  

I inhaled and exhaled, long and deep, while maintaining eye contact with Andrew and felt a metaphorical hand being placed on the black dog's head. Acceptance. I focused on the air coming in through my mouth, moving down my throat, filling up my stomach and a tingling in my arms. I slowed down my thoughts until they came to a stop and suddenly there was complete silence and it was only Andrew and I on a week night, in our little apartment, facing each other, lovers and strangers in the same breath. I looked at his familiar face and out of nowhere it was like a light came on and my body filled with warmth and I felt space around the melancholy. The black dog was still in my lap but it's head was up and alert now, it knew something was shifting. The space around the darkness within offered me a window to see and understand that - this darkness is not me, it's not my identity. I am the awareness beyond. The only reason I was able to access this truth is by breathing into the present moment and not fighting with it. Once I accepted the present moment, space was able to come in and move around the pain, light was able to enter my body and warm my insides… love. In that moment I knew I was still inside and I was ok and all was unfolding as it should. Externally I felt my face soften and moments later, so did Andrew's, mirroring my acceptance of the present. 

Now this isn't a fairy-tale where things miraculously returned to heavenly bliss in a matter of seconds. I'm no monk. I went to bed that night with no resolution and nothing "fixed", only acceptance. I awoke the next morning, showered, chose a scarf, applied mascara and took the train to work, all the while a shadowy presence still by my side. However, I consciously chose not to project into the future and anticipate the day I'd finally be happy and I didn't look over my shoulder at the past and reminisce about "better times". I stayed grounded in the moment, every second that unfolded I breathed deeply into the entirety of my body and befriended whatever small, kind, shit, annoying, beautiful, magical moment that came my way and let it pass through, like an open door. I continued to do this the next day and the day after that and the day after that. Slowly, moment by moment, the light and warmth returned to my eyes, my voice re-energised and my laugh returned and the black dog couldn't handle it, it got bored and when I wasn't looking she left the way she came. 

The black dog needs you to identify with her for her to be able to nestle in and the more you feed her treats by fearing the future and resenting the past, the longer she'll stay and the stronger and more unmanageable she'll seem. Green juices, jogging round the park, crystals and Oprah are all fabulous but the real key to freedom from yourself is being in the present moment through acceptance and facing your pain as it arises. Otherwise pain builds up like a volcano and erupts from your blind spot, triggered by the insignificant. 

However, if you open the door to the black dog and see her as only passing through and not who you are, her stay will gradually become shorter and shorter. 

Then, perhaps one day, when the present moment is where we all solely reside… the black dog will never be seen again.

Written by Tess Luckman Hansen

Xox

"I understand now that I'm not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, "For the same reason I laugh so often - because I'm paying attention." - Glennon Doyle Melton