Google Authorship is Dead (or is it . . . .)

Posted on September 4, 2014 at 4:59 pm.

Last week, John Mueller over at Google announced authorship would no longer be shown in search results. In case you forgot, authorship was the nifty gizmo that made your picture appear in the SERPs next to content you wrote. Or at least, it did until this past June when Google removed the photo and just left your name.

Here’s what Google Authorship looked like in its glory days:

And here’s what it looks like with the removal of authorship:

boo boo! Sad Trombone . . .

Why did Google (say they) got rid of authorship?

In their analysis of authorship, Search Engine Land cites two reasons. First of all, a low adoption rate by authors. Not many authors were implementing authorship code, suggesting that many content providers weren’t interested in it or didn’t understand how to use it. Secondly, a low value to searchers. Although authorship was originally intended to provide users with another indication of the validity of your content, it turns out that seeing your pretty face wasn’t really helping decision making.

Why do (we think) Google got rid of authorship?

Generally at Mockingbird, we take most of what Google says at face value. BUT – – – let me uncharacteristically offer a contrarian view: Google got rid of authorship because we (the scummy, spammy) SEO industry transformed it from a positive quality signal into a spammy marketing tactic. Especially within legal – where social media marketing consultants and SEO hacks desperate to demonstrate some tangible benefit to their clients went overboard with authorship. Remember how FindLaw spammed authorship by attributing blog posts from old clients to their new clients? Hardly a legitimate quality signal and FindLaw wasn’t the only one. My take is that it is highly possible that Google has removed the tangible benefit of authorship (that ego-boost of your picture right within the results that made lawyers salivate and social media marketing something to do) but has quietly held on to the concept of author rank. Getting rid of “authorship” is going to remove (some) of the low quality signals that SEOs foisted into the author rank concept.

What does this mean?

Thankfully for website owners, Mueller says, “removing authorship doesn’t seem to reduce traffic to sites,” so you shouldn’t be too concerned on that front. However, folks in the SEO community have been spending time and energy on this since 2011, when authorship was first introduced.

Authorship was always about much more than the silly little picture . . . and for our clients we’re staying the course – building the authority of individuals.

The Pigeon Mess . . .

Posted on August 1, 2014 at 4:56 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Last Thursday, Google quietly released a new algo update targeting improved search results that had a local component (i.e. almost all legal related searches). Note that Pigeon impacts both local and natural searches – so the reach for law firms is very significant. The early results are in to Pigeon and they aren’t pretty.

Here’s why:

Pigeon Favors Directories Over Law Firms

Like the most recent Panda algo update, Pigeon seems to have favored directories over the actual businesses in these directories. There is widespread agreement among local search geeks – Mihm, Blumenthal, Shotland and more that directories have indeed benefited. Andrew Shotland noted a 5-10% traffic increase for some of the directories he works with following Pigeon. Counterpoint: I pinged the guys at Avvo who didn’t acknowledge anything dramatic.

I should note that this direction continues to surprise me. Cutt’s has often made comments to the contrary so I see the possibility of a large reversal in the horizon (although I’ve been envisioning it unsuccessfully it for a while.) It is highly possible that Google’s focus on “brands” and the rewarding of brands in search results is to explain – i.e. the Avvo’s and FindLaw’s of the world have established brands while branding for law firms, especially small law firms is essentially impossible – especially as a computer would view a “brand.”

There’s also an argument (and I think a good one) that this update is a hastily rolled out response to Yelp’s recent sniveling about anti-trust . . . Pigeon, which rolled out just two weeks after the leaked TechCrunch article has very directly benefited Yelp.

Shake-up of Local Results in a Bad Way

In many cases, mapped results have changed almost completely. We’ve also seen the reduction of the frequency and sized of mapped results – i.e. some formerly mapped results don’t deliver at all and some seven packs have been replaced by three packs. I had one attorney call me insisting that his claimed Google profiles were no longer appearing and yet some unclaimed satellite offices had suddenly shown up in the mapped results.

Remergence of SPAM Results in Local Pack

Michael Ehline at the Circle of Legal Trust noted that Avvo was now showing up as a local personal injury law firm in Los Angeles. I dug in and found what looks to be an old spam tactic – piggybacking a local company to the strength of a large, relevant domain to win in local results. This is more widspread than this example – the travel site, Expedia is now a small hotel on Madison Avenue in New York . . . . at least according to Google maps.

I looked further into the los angeles PI example and found the following result. Note that both Avvo and Lawyers.com are listed as a mapped business for the “los angeles personal injury attorney” query. Also note that neither of them have a physical address and both of them have the identical phone number (which incidentally, you may not be shocked to learn, does NOT in fact ring to my old friends in Seattle.) Also note both of them (and Farar & Lewis) are keyword stacked with “Personal Injury Lawyer” in the name of the business . . . . another rudimentary local search no no.

You’d think that Google local results, with the focus on things like NAP consistency might be able to algorithmically detect that two different business within the same result have the exact same phone number. Apparently not. Ehline insists that this result didn’t exist before Pigeon – and I tend to believe him. The only thing he fears more than the Government removing his AR-15 is the Google removing his rankings. While clicks go through to the appropriate directory, the phone number doesn’t – a quick search on that number brought me to an instagram (yuk) account that was associated with . . . . a los angeles motorcycle accident attorney:

Hope you are proud of yourself, Attorney Robert Brenner – but don’t expect this flood of new business to last, after which it may well dry up forever. This is an old spam technique (and I won’t encourage it by telling you how) that Google’s quality update (read: Pigeon) re-enabled. Good job MountainView. This is why I believe Pigeon to be a hastily launched response to Yelp’s whinings and I would expect more turmoil as they work to (hastily) improve upon it.

How We Replaced PPC with SEO and Saved $30,000

Posted on July 24, 2014 at 8:43 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

These are the results I love to share. Back towards the beginning of the year, I spoke with someone who was concerned about high PPC budget – she was spending roughly $2,500 monthly on Adwords and weren’t sure if the spend was paying off. In looking at the site’s performance it became clear that the client had most of her eggs in a poorly structured, untargeted PPC basket AND the site seemed to be grossly underperforming in SEO.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve turned her traffic upside down . . . . resulting in PPC savings of roughly $30,000. While traffic is down about 15%, we’ve replaced the PPC spend with (free) SEO traffic and restructured an unprofitable advertising spend. Here’s how:

Step 1: Assess PPC ROI

We did a thorough business review of her PPC campaign – to assess just how much business the spend generated and calculated what her cost per client was for this channel. (It was really bad.) Armed with 8 weeks of eye opening data, we drastically cut the Adwords budget and launched a (small) Bing campaign at the same time . . . with CPC’s roughly 90% lower than her original bids. Take note: PPC is never the only answer. If you look really carefully, you’ll see that we never entirely did away with PPC – its still bumping along, delivering a small trickle of traffic from both Adwords and BingAds – – – generating business at a very low cost per client (read: extremely high ROI).

Step 2: Fix SEO Problems

Once we dug in, we found the client’s site had some major SEO problems and while they took some time to fix – roughly 3 months – the changes resulted in a 400% increase in her natural search traffic – essentially replacing the traffic drop from cutting the PPC budget. Interestingly, even if the SEO hadn’t been borked we still would have killed the PPC campaign as it was literally costing her more than she was making from the clients.

Step 3: Slowly Dial Advertising Back Up

Moving forward – now that we have solid business tracking (so we can ID cost per client by each marketing channel) we’ll slowly dial her PPC campaign up so her margins reflect her business objective: ie. cost per client makes business sense. We can also explore additional advertising venues and measure them on their ability to hit these cost per client benchmarks.

The net result? The client is now bringing in roughly three times the business with the same marketing spend. AND she could cut off her SEO spend and unlike and advertising spend, the traffic would continue.

The End of Google Authorship as We Know It

Posted on June 30, 2014 at 6:53 pm.

Written by Jon Lanman

Last week, Google’s John Mueller announced a huge shift in how Google Authorship will be displayed in search results going forward. If you’re familiar with Google Authorship you’ll know it as the fancy mug shot that get’s featured next to your search results, like so:

There’s more to authorship than having your face plastered next to search results. But, since it’s inception in 2011, SEO experts have mainly toted Authorship as a way to increase the click-through rate on your results. This is based on eye tracking studies that suggest images attract people’s attention, and lead them to more often click. Following the clicks, lawyers rushed to implement authorship across their sites. And, as usual – as more people took advantage of Authorship, Google decided to flip the switch on those abusing the feature. In December, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that they were rolling back author images by around 15%. And now they’ve announced that author images will be removed from search results entirely… no longer will your faces grace the SERPS.

Is this the Absolute End of Authorship?

In my opinion, author images are a very small part of Google’s underlying goal for creating authorship – and more specifically, Author Rank (which spent them all of .25 second to name). While Google’s never explicitly said this, I believe the original creation of Authorship was to do two things:

To recognize thought leaders and factor their authority into Google search algorithms.
Promote the Use of Google +

Since search engines were created people have been gaming them to increase their own visibility. The tactics have changed, but the game remains. First people stuffed their website footers with lists of keywords. Then people started purchasing links and participating in link exchanges from unrelated websites. When that didn’t work they started spinning content and publishing it across multiples websites with links back to their own. All of these things Google hates. Why? Because anyone can do this. Anyone can stuff keywords. Anyone can buy links. Anyone can get their image in the SERPS. But none of these things indicate quality. None of these things indicate that you are a good lawyer, or that you are knowledgable in your practice areas. None of these things suggest you have credibility. In order to build credibility you need to first share your knowledge and expertise. For many lawyers this first means simply writing content for your site, and answering the common questions you hear on a daily basis in your practice. But maybe you also teach classes on your legal practice areas. Maybe you submit articles to legal journals. Maybe you engage with local media to give insight regarding local laws. All of these things suggest that you are an authority in your legal field. If you are building a reputation within your community, Google wants to take that into account in the search results. And, that’s what Google’s Author Rank is really about. The inclusion of author images on the SERPS caused a lot of people to sign up for Google+, and authorship. Now that author images cease to exist, don’t forget about Google’s Author Rank, which still remains. This will most likely continue to develop and play a role in Google’s search algorithm. So, what can you do to stay ahead of the curve?

Serve your audience/potential clients by creating and contributing QUALITY, content.
Setup a Google+ account and make sure you have Authorship setup for any site you contribute articles or content to.

It’s worth mentioning that #2 is almost worthless if you ignore number one and continue to engage in “old school SEO”, like buying links. And, if you’re still doing that (we know many of you are), stop now.

How to Buy A Top 10 Attorney Award (and Link) from The American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys

Posted on June 11, 2014 at 6:41 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Got another call from a client . . . a big client with lots of lawyers . . . asking me about one of his brand spanking new attorneys who has just been bestowed an award as a Top 10 Personal Injury Attorney in his state by The American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys.

My clients question?

“I’m not sure I really get this, he’s not even a top 10 attorney in our firm, let alone the entire state.”

The nomination came along with the request to send a check for $275 within the next month and information on where the AIPIA site should link to.

American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys

So, I thought I’d do some digging on the esteemed American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys. According to their site, they have pretty stringent requirements for admittance, so it was odd that a wet-behind-the-ears, unpublished, unrated, unknown junior associate had made it past this evaluation gauntlet.

Very few Attorneys can display our “10 Best” Badge on their website or Plaque in their office. AIOPIA has a stringent and multi-phased Selection Process which begins with peer nomination and ends with final approval by our Board of Regents.

Having had some experience with manufactured awards during the early days of Avvo, this started to smell familiar. (No word on exactly who sits on this vaunted Board of Regents.)

The award list pages for attorneys who have made it through the AIPIA’s stringent process does include a few firms (along with some followed links). Here’s New York for example (note that if there are still slots available, you too can be considered for Top 10 status, hurry and get those nominations and checks in . . . )

So exactly who/what is the American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys (and do you think they’d accept yours truly on their Board of Regents)? The “About Us” page didn’t offer much beyond self congratulatory marketing copy:

Membership is an exclusive honor and extended only to those select few who have reached the top of their profession while doing so with the client’s satisfaction being of the most paramount importance.

Blah Blah Blah

Maybe their office location will be a little more insightful . . . so I fired up Google Street View and found the headquarters of the American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys located . . .

Great – you can presumably celebrate with a congratulatory cheeseburger and coke next door if you pick up your plaque in person. And don’t worry if you aren’t a PI lawyer . . . located within that same UPS store, you can find the American Institute of DUI/DWI Attorneys as well. Perhaps they’ll soon create The American Institute of Legal SEO Consultants and I too can have a Top 10 Badge.

The Link Ramifications

This might seem like an easy way to buy links(and a plaque), but . . . .

These types of sites are exactly what searches engines look for algorithmically – domains with no authority (both American Institute pages have Page Rank of zero) containing pages with nothing but lists of businesses with followed links. I can’t promise that these specific sites would trip a search engine red flag, but I’d steer all of my clients away from something like this.

I’ll let you guys ruminate on the ethical ramifications of these awards . . . .

UPDATE: The National Academy of Personal Injury Attorneys

Oh this gets even better. Someone just forwarded me a link to The National Academy of Personal Injury Attorneys. Are these two vicious competitors? I don’t think so – the NAPIA is built on the exact same website platform, with the exact same award structure (Top 10 and Top 10 Under 40) and essentially the same nomination and vetting process as the AIPIA. Are they located in the same UPS store as The American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys? Nope – the NAPIA is housed in virtual office space on K Street, a short 5 minutes from the headquarters of the AIPIA Headquarters/UPS Store.

I’m off to take a very hot shower and gargle some bleach.

The Attorneys ATM – SPAMMY SEO Marketing

Posted on May 29, 2014 at 4:38 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

I was doing a backlink check on a law firm site today and ran into link SPAM at a level so rudimentary and flagrant that I was incredulous that it was still around. This SPAM is so basic, it might serve as a good lesson on how SEO’s manually diagnose toxic links . . . .

I found a a link to a DUI law firm’s site . . . on the domain CaliforniaSpinalInjuryLawyer.com. As the frim was neither in California nor in spinal injuries, this started to smell a little fishy – as did the Title Tag, which had nothing to do with California or Spinal Injuries:

DUI – DWI, Criminal, Personal Injury, Accident, Bankruptcy, Divorce, Workers Compensation (workers comp) Immigration Attorneys Lawyers

Hmmm – looks like a low end directory – linking out primarily to a small number of DUI lawyer websites. The Footer tells me this a directory from a company called The Attorneys ATM – who provides “law firm internet marketing” (nice anchor text), but apparently didn’t know how to remove the placeholder text for Example Website Article 1 and 2.

Let’s click through and discover more . . . Well, lookie here – some information on backlinks and how to rank in very high in the search engines: This isn’t going to blow you away, but the anchor text heavy links in the directory all pointed to clients of . . . .

wait for it . . .

don’t tell me you guessed already . . .

The Attorneys ATM. How do I know? Because the footers say things like this:

Guaranteed Law Firm Internet Marketing by The Attorneys ATM

A little more sleuthing and I found another Lawyer Directory by our friends at The Attorneys ATM, and then another and another and another . . . I could go on:

Fake Backlinks and What This Means for “The Attorneys ATM” Clients

If you don’t understand the significance of what I’ve described above let me simplify: Search Engines use links as an indicator of quality content and therefore rank sites with lots of links well. Fake links (also called toxic links) like the ones above are used to artificially boost search engine rankings. When the search engines discover these toxic links – they may chose to not only ignore them but actually demote the site – causing inbound traffic to crater and inbound phone calls from prospects to essentially disappear. Toxic links are the primary target of the search engine penalty called Penguin. The example above is so egregious – a bunch of copied sites with instructions on the importance of backlinks all linking back to a single provider – that I’ll buy you a steak dinner if the clients of The Attorneys ATM haven’t seen a huge drop in traffic due to Penguin. Unfortunately, recovering from a Penguin penalty is expensive, uncertain and takes a very long time.

My industry has done a good job earning its place at the bottom of the ethical barrel. Unfortunately it is frequently our clients who suffer. Caveat Emptor.

FindLaw Websites Crushed by Panda 4

Posted on May 23, 2014 at 5:31 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

On Tuesday, I posted about Google’s roll-out of Panda 4 – an algorithm update targeting spammy, thin, duplicative content and postulated that this was going to really shake up the legal industry. It turns out, that was an understatement. Early results are showing that this algo update has had the largest ever impact across the legal industry.

The algo changes start with my friends in Eagen, Minnesota at FindLaw (and unfortunately, probably many of their website clients).

FindLaw.com Decimated by Panda 4

I was curious to see what happened to FindLaw’s traffic after Panada 4 rolled out, as the legal SEO industry has been vocally critical of Google for seeming to turn a blind eye to FindLaw tactics that flagrantly flaunt search engine best practices. To date, none of the algo updates or Penguin penalties seem to have had a massive or persistent impact on either the FindLaw site or their law firm clients’ websites. The early data suggests that has changed drastically with Panda 4:

Check out the massive drop in the past few days – FindLaw plummeting to traffic levels lower than they’ve seen in many years. Why did this happen? Attorney, Damon Chetson described it best (and foreshadowed this week’s impact of Panda) in a post from January: FindLaw Getting Penalized for SEO Abuse.

“FindLaw was “good” at creating a lot of content, most of it junk, that it could repackage and sell across websites and markets.”

This type of pervasive, thin, low quality content across a network of sites is exactly what the Panda algo updated was designed to detect and push users away from.

What Happened to Avvo?

After I saw this massive hit FindLaw’s traffic, my next stop was to check out Avvo. (Full disclosure – I’m still a shareholder in Avvo, so I’m hardly writing from a dis-interested perspective here.) Turns out Avvo didn’t get hit. At all. The Alexa graph below shows business as usual for Avvo.

In fact, legal marketer Shelly Fagin is reporting on some impressive gains for Avvo.

I’m seeing Panda 4.0 bumped down lots of lawyers positions for Avvo which now has a top SERP in most all our major search terms.

And the data I’m tracking suggests Shelly is entirely accurate. Below you’ll see a sampling of ranking data on 1,500 different highly competitive head terms (like “Seattle Divorce Lawyer”) and the changes in incidence in Top 3 ranking for both FindLaw and Avvo. While FindLaw’s appearance in the top 3 results has dropped by 44%, Avvo exploded by 210% and they are now dominating FindLaw on these highly converting (i.e. prospects making phone calls to lawyers) terms.

These changes are a big deal for the legal industry as a whole. In 2006, I was part of a small group of people trying to use the web to bring consumers closer to the legal profession. Just eight years later – it looks like Avvo not only joined the big leagues, but is now the only major player left standing – martindale.com and lawyers.com have long been relegated to traffic irrelevance and now with Panda 4, FindLaw has joined them.

What to Expect If You are Advertising on Avvo or FindLaw

If the data above is indicative of FindLaw and Avvo’s performance overall, advertisers are going to start seeing a huge change in return on investment for their marketing spend. As both Avvo and FindLaw essentially monetize their SEO performance as ads – I’d predict inbound traffic and call volume from FindLaw is going to crater. And if the data is correct (and the trend holds) I’d anticipate Avvo advertising rates to increase in about 3 months.

FindLaw Lawyer Websites Hit by Panda 4

My bigger concern is not really with the FindLaw domain overall, but their law firm clients who may have been negatively impacted by the tactics employed by their provider. Did FindLaw website clients get hit too? This is a little harder to diagnose, as most attorney sites are far too small to register on traffic reporting sites like Alexa. BUT . . . anecdotally the answer seems to be yes. Here are two data points:

1. FindLaw’s Pre-SEO’d Websites Hit

The day before the announcement of Panda 4, I wrote a post about FindLaw’s pre-built, pre-SEO’d sites . . . essentially websites being sold to Lawyers that were already ranking for highly competitive terms. Seems like many FindLaw lawyer websites have disappeared entirely. The examples I used – longislanddwilawyer.org, and lasvegas-duilawyer.com – which ranked on the first page for their respective key terms “geo _ dwi/dui lawyer” at the beginning of the week are no longer to be found in the search results. Hand checking in on many other FindLaw sites shows the have disappeared too. In a post today, A to Z Lawyer Marketing reports:

Well google just unveiled Panda 4.0 and it took FindLaw’s entire low quality network with it. Hundreds of FindLaw sites have vanished from the SERP.

2. Forum Comments

Forum comments on the FindLaw’s Pre-SEO’d Websites Post anecdotally corroborate the data above:

If you suspect your FindLaw website has been hit by Panda . . . despair. But just for a little while. Then think about what makes Panda tick – that thin, recycled, low quality content. Getting out of a Panda penalty is hard (and expensive) but is achievable. Check the stipulations of your FindLaw contract and thank your lucky stars this isn’t a Penguin issue where recovery is a much fuzzier, much harder, much more expensive. If you are considering finding a new website or SEO provider, check out the FindLaw Jailbreak Guide.

Panda 4.0 Update – Lawyers Edition

Posted on May 21, 2014 at 4:58 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Did your front desk phone stop ringing suddenly today?

Yesterday Google announced the launch of Panda 4.0 update – an update designed to further strengthen the quality of content they drive users to. (Read that backwards: Google is taking even more aggressive steps to filter out sites that deliver low quality garbage content.)

While this is an on-going roll-out, some results are already in and they are striking.

Alan Bleiweiss (as far as I’m concerned the web’s best Forensic SEO auditor) shared the Google Analytics data below showing just how massive an impact Panda can have on some sites. What’s interesting in this case – its a client dealing with multiple algo penalties that has now cleaned up their act and under Alan’s guidance is played the game correctly and is seeing a massive upside from the Panda 4.0 roll-out.

What Panda 4 Means For Lawyers

The legal industry is probably one of the worst offenders when it comes to low end content – driven heavily by the “content content content” call that was drummed by the SEO industry eager to sell lawyers blogging platforms and posts. Given the extent of what we’ve seen from people like Alan and the incredibly heavy buzz this has generated among SEO geeks, I’d expect to see a very heavy impact to the legal industry. Legal marketer, Shely Fagin has already reporting a heavy improvement in rankings for Avvo (this has NOT been confirmed by my old friends at Avvo, but frankly doesn’t surprise me as from my past experience I know they have a huge commitment to quality content.)

What to Do

Strap in and watch your Google Analytics account. If you’ve been outsourcing content abroad, spinning content, paying anyone less than $20 a post, or have content developed by one of the big box providers – I’d be very concerned. Make sure you know how to generate a filter to look only at “non-paid search traffic” (image below) and look for big changes. I generally recommend patience – but this is a big shift and unfortunately you might now being paying the price for a hiring a low quality vendor.

WordPress Hacked: A case for a Managed WordPress Host

Posted on April 11, 2014 at 5:12 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

We push WordPress as the only acceptable platform for legal websites. There is a downside: WordPress’s ease of use has led to widespread adoption. And with popularity comes hacking. WordPress is notorious as a target for hacks. A hacked WordPress site is quickly rendered almost invisible (with the exception of highly branded queries) to search engines as they proactively steer users away from a sites that are out of the site owner’s control.

Here’s an example for the branded query “sostrin law office”:

“This site may be hacked.”

This warning is the kiss of SEO death for a site. In fact, searches for “criminal defense los angeles” didn’t return this site within the first 100 results, even after I had visited it. Its a good looking site, with good content but I suspect is utterly invisible to search traffic.

We’ve had one client who came to us with a hacked WordPress site – their search traffic had essentially flatlined, the phone stopped ringing and their PPC spend had exploded by 300% as even branded search queries weren’t returning their site, so existing customers were clicking on their PPC campaign just to get the phone number. Disaster. For this firm, we were utterly unable remove the malicious code after three different attempts and were forced to rebuild their site entirely from scratch.

The Answer: Managed WordPress Hosting

There are a few hosting companies that have sprung up to help site owners minimize the hacking risks of using WordPress – this is called Managed WordPress Hosting. In short – this is the process of a)automating frequent backups b)automating updates to the most current WordPress version and c)eliminating WordPress plug-ins that are vulnerable to hacks. We use WP Engine and they also happen to offer stupendous customer service. While more mainstream hosting providers have started offering Managed WordPress hosting, I’d strongly recommend working with a company that focuses exclusively on the platform – Pressable (formerly ZippyKids) also has a strong reputation.

Managed WordPress is More Expensive

With basic plans coming in around $30 a month (at least 300% more than standard mass hosting solutions), Managed WordPress hosting is more expensive. But this is one situation where you get what you pay for – I’m pretty sure Sostrin Law Offices would be happy to increase their hosting budget right now.