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Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant NoSQL database that is widely used for managing large amounts of structured data across multiple commodity servers. One of the key features of Cassandra is its ability to replicate data across multiple nodes in a cluster, providing fault tolerance and high availability. In this article, we will discuss how to change the replication factor of a Cassandra cluster, and the considerations to keep in mind when doing so.

Introduction to Replication Factor

The replication factor in Cassandra refers to the number of copies of each piece of data that are stored across the nodes in a cluster. When a new piece of data is written to a Cassandra cluster, it is automatically replicated to a specified number of nodes, based on the replication factor. For example, if the replication factor is set to 3, each piece of data will be stored on 3 different nodes in the cluster.

The replication factor can be set at the keyspace level, or at the individual table level. This means that you can have different replication factors for different tables in the same keyspace. The replication factor is set when the keyspace is created and can be modified at a later time.

Changing the Replication Factor

There are two main ways to change the replication factor of a Cassandra cluster −

Using the ALTER KEYSPACE statement

The ALTER KEYSPACE statement is used to modify the properties of an existing keyspace, including the replication factor. The syntax for changing the replication factor using the ALTER KEYSPACE statement is as follows −

ALTER KEYSPACE keyspace_name WITH REPLICATION = {'class': 'NetworkTopologyStrategy', 'datacenter1': 3, 'datacenter2': 2};

In this example, the replication factor is being set to 3 for datacenter1 and 2 for datacenter2. This is a way to set different replication factors for different data centers and this is called NetworkTopologyStrategy.

Using the CREATE KEYSPACE statement

You can also change the replication factor of a keyspace by recreating it with a different replication factor. The CREATE KEYSPACE statement is used to create a new keyspace, and it can be used to recreate an existing keyspace with a modified replication factor.

The syntax for recreating a keyspace with a different replication factor is as follows −

CREATE KEYSPACE keyspace_name WITH REPLICATION = {'class': 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': 3};

In this example, the replication factor is being set to 3. SimpleStrategy is another way to set the replication factor which is the same for all data centers.

Considerations when Changing the Replication Factor

There are a few things to keep in mind when changing the replication factor of a Cassandra cluster −

Increasing the replication factor will increase the amount of storage and network bandwidth required for the cluster.

Decreasing the replication factor will decrease the amount of storage and network bandwidth required for the cluster, but it will also decrease the level of fault tolerance.

Changing the replication factor will require the movement of data within the cluster, which can cause increased write latency and increased load on the cluster.

When changing the replication factor, it is important to make sure that the new replication factor is set correctly, and that the keyspace is properly configured.

When you reduce the replication factor, the existing data on the removed replicas need to be streamed to the remaining replicas. If the cluster is write-heavy during the streaming process, it can cause increased write latency and decreased read performance.

Changing the replication factor should only be done during a maintenance window when the traffic on the cluster is low, to minimize the impact on the performance of the cluster.

NetworkTopologyStrategy can be used when you have multiple data centers and you want different replication factors for different data centers. SimpleStrategy should be used if you have a single data center and the replication factor will be the same for all nodes.

Point to take care of when changing the replication factor in Cassandra

Consistency − Cassandra provides tunable consistency, which allows you to trade-off consistency for availability. Changing the replication factor can have an impact on consistency, as it determines the number of nodes that must acknowledge a write before it is considered successful. When the replication factor is increased, it can improve consistency by acknowledging writes from more nodes. However, increasing the replication factor can also decrease availability by requiring more nodes to be available for writes to succeed.

Node Failure and Data Loss − The replication factor is the key factor in data loss prevention and survival of node failure. When the replication factor is increased, the risk of data loss is reduced as there are more copies of the data stored in different nodes. However, increasing the replication factor can also increase the likelihood of experiencing a split-brain scenario, where different nodes in a cluster have different versions of the same data.

Updating Schema − Changing the replication factor can also have an impact on the schema of a Cassandra cluster. For example, when increasing the replication factor, new columns and tables may need to be added to accommodate the additional replicas. It is important to consider the impact on the schema when changing the replication factor and to update the schema accordingly.

Monitoring − After changing the replication factor, it is important to monitor the cluster to ensure that the new replication factor is working as expected. This includes monitoring metrics such as write latency, read latency, and the number of failed writes. Monitoring can also help identify any issues that may arise as a result of changing the replication factor, such as network congestion or a lack of available disk space.

It’s always important to consider the needs of your specific use case and the potential risks and drawbacks of changing the replication factor. It’s also recommended to do testing and monitoring in a test environment before making any changes in production.

Conclusion

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Checking The Cluster Health In Cassandra

Introduction

Apache Cassandra is a highly-scalable, high-performance distributed database that is designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers. As a result, it’s important to keep an eye on the health of your Cassandra cluster to ensure that it’s running smoothly and that there aren’t any issues that could impact performance or availability. In this article, we’ll go over the different ways to check the health of your Cassandra cluster and what to look for to identify potential issues.

Understanding Cassandra Cluster Health

Before diving into how to check the health of your Cassandra cluster, it’s important to understand what exactly we mean by “cluster health.” A healthy Cassandra cluster should have all nodes up and running, with no dropped or stale nodes. Additionally, there should be a relatively even distribution of data across all nodes, and there should be no issues with replication or compaction.

Using nodetool to check cluster health

One of the most common ways to check the health of a Cassandra cluster is by using the nodetool command-line tool. This tool is included with Cassandra and provides a variety of information about the cluster and its nodes. One of the most useful commands for checking cluster health is nodetool status. This command will show the status of all nodes in the cluster, including whether they are up or down, and how much data they are currently storing.

$ nodetool

status

Datacenter: datacenter1

Status

Down UN

10.0

1.21

256

67.6

456789

abcdef01234567890abcdef0123 rack1 DN

10.0

1.21

256

67.6

456789

abcdef01234567890abcdef0123 rack1

The status command will show the status of all nodes in the cluster, including whether they are Up or Down. In the example above, the first node is Up and the second node is Down. Additionally, the command will show the load and tokens for each node, as well as the percentage of data that the node owns.

Another useful command provided by nodetool is nodetool ring. This command will show the token distribution for the cluster and can help identify if there is an uneven distribution of data among the nodes.

$ nodetool ring Datacenter: datacenter1

Address Rack

Status

State

Load

Owns Token

10.0

rack1 Up Normal

1.21

67.6

9223372036854775808

10.0

rack1 Up Normal

1.21

67.6

3074457345618258603

10.0

rack1 Up Normal

1.21

67.6

3074457345618258602

Monitoring Replication and Compaction

In addition to monitoring the overall health of the cluster and individual nodes, it’s also important to keep an eye on replication and compaction. Replication is important to ensure that data is being properly replicated across all nodes in the cluster, while compaction is important to keep the data on each node organized and efficient.

To monitor replication, you can use the nodetool command nodetool statusgossip which will show the current state of gossip and the replication factor for each keyspace.

$ nodetool statusgossip Gossip active :

true

Thrift active :

false

Native Transport active:

true

Load

1.21

GB Generation

1596282421

Uptime :

s Heap Memory

(

)

606.36

3441.00

Off

Heap Memory

(

)

1.51

Data

Center : dc1 Rack : r1 Exceptions :

Key

Cache : entries

size

4.11

capacity

100

hit rate

0.000

recent hit rate

0.000

save

period

seconds

3600

Row

Cache : entries

size

bytes

capacity

bytes

hit rate NaN

save

period

seconds

The statusgossip command will show the current state of gossip, the load on the cluster, and the generation number. It will also show the uptime, heap memory, and off-heap memory for each node. Additionally, it will show the data center and rack for each node, as well as any exceptions that have occurred.

To monitor compaction, you can use the nodetool command nodetool compactionstats. This command will show the current compaction status for each table in the cluster, including the number of completed and active compactions, as well as the total bytes compacted.

$ nodetool compactionstats pending tasks:

compaction

type

: Major compaction history:

Note − In this example there is no compaction history.

The compactionstats command will show the number of pending tasks, the compaction type (major or minor), and the compaction history for each table.

Real-life examples

A real-life example of monitoring cluster health in Cassandra would be a scenario where you are running a Cassandra cluster that is being used to store user data for a web application. In this case, you would want to regularly check the health of the cluster to ensure that all nodes are up and running, and that there is an even distribution of data across the nodes. Additionally, you would want to check the replication and compaction status to ensure that data is being properly replicated and compacted.

Another example would be for an e-commerce website where the Cassandra cluster is used to store product and order information. In this case, it would be important to monitor the load on each node, as well as the number of completed and active compactions, to ensure that the cluster can handle the high volume of read and write requests from the website.

Conclusion

Monitoring the health of your Cassandra cluster is an important aspect of maintaining a high-performing and available database. By understanding the key metrics to look for and using the tools provided by Cassandra, like nodetool, you can keep a close eye on the overall health of your cluster and identify potential issues before they become a problem. With proper monitoring, you can ensure that your Cassandra cluster is running at its best and your data is always available to your application.

3 Ways Ai Is Changing The Health Insurance Sector In 2023

In this research, we will explain how AI can improve fraud detection, enhance customer service and reduce expenditures in the health insurance sector.

1. Detect fraud more accurately

Health care fraud costs about $300 billion annually in the US. Since health insurance accounts for one-third of healthcare spending, we can roughly say that health insurance fraud costs about $100 billion per year. That’s a significant amount, and as we discussed in our article on insurance pricing, fraud becomes a burden on customers in the form of higher premiums. So effective insurance fraud detection benefits all with the exception of fraudsters.

AI models can be effective fraud detectors and preventers as they automate manual workflows. Health insurers generate a huge amount of paperwork by processing claims. Traditionally, insurers manually review the relevance of claims to determine whether or not they are fraudulent. This was both a time-consuming and inefficient process. According to McKinsey, for every 10 health claims submitted, insurers classify up to 7 as unusual, meaning potentially false or fraudulent, based on company policies. Thus, 70% of the claims are reinvestigated by the insurers.

According to Forbes because of this inefficiency of manual fraud detection, investment in AI-based fraud detection is the top priority of firms. NLP-based models reduce the time required to identify suspicious case claims by 75%. NLP models are feeded by dataset of previous fraudulent claims, and by time become more effective fraud detectors. Thus, they can reduce the unrealistic 70% rate of suspicious cases.

2.Improve customer service

According to Deloitte, up to 75% of customer service requests like simple queries of customers can be automated through the use of chatbots. The economic return is equivalent to a 40% reduction in customer service costs. And companies can free employees’ time with up to 97% by using chatbots. So, the insurance sector can benefit from AI-driven chatbots.

Escaped Exotic Animals Are Changing The Texas Landscape

Asher Elbein is a freelance journalist and fiction writer based in Austin. This story originally featured on the Texas Observer.

That was when the kudu made their move, disappearing through the fallen perimeter fences on the ranch’s border. Native to Africa, the kudu is a brown-and-white-striped antelope species with long spiraling horns. The Y.O. Ranch population was ready for life on the lam. By the time ranch hands managed to repair the fences and conduct an animal count, virtually the whole herd—20 of 26 kudu—had escaped.

Exotic game ranches like the Y.O. Ranch have spread throughout Texas since the 1950s, providing hunters with homegrown safaris and passing motorists with glimpses of the surreal. According to Charlie Seale, executive director of the Kerrville-based Exotic Wildlife Association (EWA), 5,000 Texas ranches now contain at least one exotic animal species. Some of these are small operations; others are huge, like South Texas’ King Ranch, which is the state’s largest at 825,000 acres. Together, they host a population of more than 2 million “Texotics” representing 135 species. The result is a roughly $1.3 billion industry that generates more than 14,300 jobs annually, largely in otherwise struggling rural areas.

Dama gazelle at the Y.O. Ranch Headquarters. Scott Ball

The Y.O. Ranch headquarters sits amid the scrubby hills of Kerr County, along highways lined with cattle fences. Driving there on a brisk January morning, I passed a butcher’s board of native roadkill, but also a surprising share of dead axis deer from India. Past the ranch’s gates, Thomson’s gazelle and zebra, both with their young, grazed alongside longhorn cattle in patches of dry forest.

Before Europeans arrived in the 1500s, the rangelands of Texas were grazed largely by bison and pronghorn. Cattlemen who arrived in the mid-1700s mostly pushed those species out by 1878, replacing them with the nation’s first widespread exotic ruminants—animals like cattle, sheep, and goats—and later enclosing the vast pasturelands in fencing. The biggest livestock in Texas are cattle—the animals that gave the Y.O. Ranch its start.

In its heyday in the 1880s, the property was 566,000 acres, driving some 300,000 cattle up to East Coast markets, said the ranch’s tourism director, Debbie Hagebusch. But in the late 1950s, droughts and unstable livestock markets began to hit ranchers like Y.O. owner Charles Schreiner III particularly hard. So in the 1950s, Schreiner began introducing excess animals purchased from the San Antonio Zoo—axis deer, blackbuck, aoudad—for hunting. In 1967, he and other ranchers interested in stocking exotic game formed a group that would eventually become the Exotic Wildlife Association, a trade association and lobbying arm of the business.

A tour truck is tall enough for visitors to be able to feed the giraffes. Scott Ball

The Y.O. Ranch changed hands and tacked “Headquarters” to its name in 2023. Along with free-range hunting on the ranchland, the property maintains two fenced-in paddocks for guided game tours, allowing wildlife tourists to observe 25 species. In January, Hagebusch, a cheery woman with graying blond hair, piled a friend and me into an ATV and drove us out into the tour paddocks, rattling off facts about the creatures we passed.

“The giraffes are like our celebrities,” Hagebusch said, gesturing to the youngest animal. “Especially this one. She’s a little cookie monster.”

Debbie Hagebusch checks in with a giraffe at the Y.O. Ranch Headquarters. Scott Ball

Onward we went through the paddock, through winter grass and sun-dappled stretches of white stone. Here were the herds of little blackbuck from Pakistan, dark males ushering around harems of tawny does, keeping a wary eye out for competitors. There by the fence line were dignified groups of shaggy, oil-furred waterbuck, native to Africa, eyeing a bevy of calves. “In a zoo environment, they have a baby and they call in the news media,” Hagebusch said, pointing to the young. “Here, it’s such a natural thing. They breed just like they do in the wild.”

Out on the open lands of the ranch, various species of deer and antelope wander freely, available in hunting packages that range from $2,850 (four-horned sheep) to $18,350 (kudu). Only around 10 percent of the animals on most ranches are killed by hunters, said Eric White, the ranch manager. Most of the animals targeted by trophy seekers are older, past their prime breeding age. For ranches like the Y.O., hunting—for both natives and exotics—is both a source of revenue and a management tool: It keeps populations in check, makes room for new bloodlines, and keeps a healthy amount of competition among breeding males.

As attitudes toward trophy hunting hardened in the 1990s, zoos stopped selling their overstock to private ranches, forcing the exotic game business to sustain itself through private breeding. Today, ranchers sell to other breeders through auctions; they also trade animals privately, mixing and matching bloodlines with scrupulous care. This can be pricey: A breeder zebra can cost up to $5,500; an addax comes in between $4,500 and $6,500.

Zonkey (left) and zebra roam the ranch. Scott Ball

For hunting to be economically sustainable, however, exotic animals need to be able to survive and reproduce on their own, without year-round feeding or special breeding programs. Since it’s also expensive to keep food out year-round, it’s to the ranchers’ benefit to make sure their animals aren’t having a disproportionate impact on native vegetation and that they aren’t in direct competition with other species. Seale, the EWA director, lays it out this way: If you have a large population of grass grazers, like cattle, you stock animals that browse on leafy vegetation and new growth, like white-tailed deer, greater kudu, and aoudad. If you have a whitetail hunting ranch, you stock grazers like blackbuck and oryx. (In the Hill Country, everything eats the acorn crop.)

As a result of these concerted breeding efforts, some endangered species are now much more common in their Texas enclaves than they are in their native lands. Antelope like the scimitar-horned oryx, addax, and the elfin dama gazelle are all virtually extinct in the wild. All are found on the Y.O. Ranch Headquarters. “When I first got here [in 1986], we were actually sending blackbuck back to Pakistan,” White says. “We’d catch them off the ranch and take them to an Air Force base in San Antonio, and they’d fly them back to try and establish breeding populations in parks out there.”

The conservation aspect of wild game ranching is something the EWA heavily emphasizes. “You give the animal an economic value. You give the rancher a reason to raise that animal and help it flourish,” Seale says. “Probably one of our most important species that we had was the scimitar-horned oryx, which haven’t been seen in the wild in decades. Here in Texas, our last population estimate was 15,000. That’s a result of being allowed to freely trade, buy, and sell these animals.”

Once stocked, the inhabitants of exotic game ranches occupy the same liminal existence as the native species they share land with: simultaneously managed and wild, fending for themselves behind the protected barrier of a rancher’s fence. But those barriers are not impenetrable.

The nilgai, the second-largest antelope in the world, was introduced onto the King Ranch in 1930 by Caesar Kleberg, its conservation-minded owner. By the 1970s, herds were grazing wild along the highways outside South Texas towns.

In the 1980s, the King Ranch began selling both nilgai hunts and nilgai meat, partially for profit and partially to control their numbers. A one-day hunt now costs $900 per hunter, plus a harvest fee of $1,200 for a bull or $500 for a cow, says Weston Koehler, King Ranch wildlife manager. Today, between commercial hunts, ranch management, and the activities of private leases, around 1,000 nilgai are harvested on the King Ranch per year.

The herd that moves through King Ranch land numbers around 15,000, part of a larger South Texas population of an estimated 30,000. Females can have a range of up to 50,000 acres, slipping under cattle fences and wandering through countless adjoining ranches, borderland parks like the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Reserve and the Sabal Palm Sanctuary, and possibly into Mexico. “They occupy every habitat type out here that we have,” Koehler says. “A lot of these ranches around here probably got their nilgai from King Ranch.”

Nilgai mostly get media attention now as potential vectors of diseases like cattle fever, a nasty ailment that the USDA managed to eliminate from the United States in the 1940s, except for a permanent quarantine zone along the Texas-Mexico border. Nilgai’s nomadic habits take them in and out of this zone at will, and unlike white-tailed deer or cattle, which can be easily treated at feeding stations laced with the anti-tick chemical ivermectin, nilgai are far too wary to come to bait. In an effort to deal with the problem, the USDA has carried out a spring cull of the nilgai population in Laguna Atascosa.

The discussion of exotics often defaults to economic concerns like agriculture or hunting. Yet the actual ecological impact of nilgai on the landscape remains a mystery. Game cameras show that the passageways nilgai open up under cattle fences are used by a diverse range of wildlife, says David Hewitt, executive director of the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, which might help populations separated by fences prevent inbreeding. Beyond that, things get sketchy: Could their grazing on grass and brush influence fire frequency? Could their habit of leaving large piles of droppings in certain spots act as a nutrient-rich nursery to dispersed seeds? And it’s not just the nilgai. The long-term ecological implications of the many new herbivore species in Texas have gone largely unstudied.

One school of thought presents exotics as damaging invaders that crowd out native species. Feral hogs—another animal that got a big boost from hunting ranches—have received plenty of press due to booming numbers and the severe agricultural damage they inflict. In West Texas, ongoing efforts to curtail the aoudad population have been partially driven by a desire to prevent competition when reintroducing native desert bighorn sheep, which were exterminated by hunting and disease in the 1960s. And a 1992 Texas Parks and Wildlife publication warned that species like axis deer and blackbuck could out-compete white-tailed deer when confined to plots of only native vegetation and left unhunted.

Fears of competition between natives and exotics are heightened by the fact that rangelands have been shrinking, not growing. Most of the large Texas ranches have been broken up and sold off, their open spaces nibbled away by development. “That’s the problem we have all over the world with wildlife,” says White, the ranch manager. “When I came to work at the Y.O., it was 62,000 acres. We’re 14,000 acres now. … When you start cutting it up, the ecosystems get cut up.”

Llama at the Y.O. Ranch Headquarters. Scott Ball

But these questions are much more complex than the simple dichotomy of “exotic” and “native” suggests, argues Erick Lundgren, a doctoral student who studies novel ecosystems at the University of Technology Sydney. The discourse around so-called invasive species is relatively new and often functions more as a cultural norm than a scientific metric, Lundgren says. If you choose to ignore where animals come from and study only their practical ecology, there’s often no measurable difference between how they live on the landscape. While introduced species can boom and cause ecosystem-wide changes, so, too, can uncontrolled populations of native species like white-tailed deer, which reshape forests by eating away native vegetation. Both can see massive population declines as well. “We tend to understand those changes by natives as part of structural ecological change, like the loss of apex predators or the habitat fragmentation,” Lundgren says. Why not then extend the same grace to exotic animals?

Modern views of natural systems often overlook the fact that ecology and evolution have a much longer clock than we usually think, says John Rowan, a paleontologist at the University of Massachusetts. Twelve thousand years ago, the North American plains and forests held a megadiversity of herbivores—from the extremely large, like elephants and ground sloths, to those resembling animals found on Texas ranches today, such as deer, pronghorn, elk, horses, camels, llamas, and peccaries. “That large herbivores trample and consume vegetation should come as no surprise to anyone that has spent time on safari in an African savanna,” Rowan says. “In fact, virtually all of Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems were filled with megafauna that did the same. Perhaps the presumed novel effects of introduced herbivores aren’t that novel after all.”

The extinctions that rolled through the continent at the end of the ice age killed off the largest animals and rippled out through the ecosystem. But in a new study, Lundgren, Rowan, and colleagues argue that exotics have the capacity to take on many of the ecological roles once held by vanished beasts. Wild horses, extinct in North America after the ice age, likely dug wells and cleared away old grass, possibly making way for deer and other browsers. Now feral burros do the same; so, perhaps, do the zebras on Texas game ranches. Rooting in the soil by feral hogs or by the wart hogs that are now appearing in South Texas turns over the earth, Lundgren says, helping native plants take up more nutrients—just as enormous, extinct peccaries did in the Pleistocene. In these cases, apparently new species are shaping the landscape in older ways.

But the ice age comparison offers only a vague model, Lundgren says. What’s happening in Texas now is entirely unprecedented: No other ecosystem that we know of in Earth’s history has such a massive assemblage of relatively small-bodied hoofed mammals, without anything larger than a cow. For someone interested in evolution, that’s exciting. “The fact that all these species have started to pop up wild in Texas, and there are these crazy amalgam communities, it’s a really dynamic moment in the evolution of a new North American fauna,” Lundgren says. “It’s just awesome.”

For humans, the cultural line between wilderness and captivity begins and ends at the fence. An exotic inside the fence is contained, an ornament or a potential trophy; to many, an exotic outside is an enigma, a nuisance, a potential invader. But to the animals themselves, the fence barely matters. They’re on the same landscape either way, and subject to the same natural processes. When the rheas raise chicks on the Y.O. Ranch Headquarters, red-tailed hawks and other raptors carry them off. Coyotes—clever, adaptable, and opportunistic—kill a large number of young animals and sometimes adults as well.

And coyotes and suburbanites with ready cash aren’t the only hunters out there. One morning on the King Ranch, Koehler was guiding a hunter toward an open flat amid the thick bushes where they hoped to bag a nilgai. Something bellowed in the distance; brush crashed and tree limbs broke. They set up the guns, assuming a herd was about to break cover. Then five nilgai tore across the flat. A young nilgai the size of a white-tailed deer flew in front of the startled hunters; from behind her a mountain lion darted across and lunged up for her neck. “We watched that mountain lion chase that young nilgai for about 300 yards before they got in the thick brush,” Koehler says. “And there’s no telling what happened after that.”

The Disavow Tool: Is It A Google Ranking Factor?

The disavow tool, now located in your Google Search Console, enables you to tell Google not to count spammy links as part of your link profile.

Following Google’s Penguin update in 2012, toxic links became a huge issue. Sites with link profiles that appeared unnatural ended up hurting a lot of businesses and brands that had dabbled in spammy link building tactics in prior years.

SEO professionals balked at the idea of having to contact someone on the other end of every potentially damaging link to ask for its removal. There were also many reports of extortion (“Sure, we’ll remove that sketchy link, just send us lots of $$$!”)

And although Google initially resisted, the disavow tool was born.

We know unnatural links can negatively affect your search rankings.

So can you improve your search rankings by using Google’s disavow tool?

Let’s answer this question.

The Claim: Disavow Tool as a Ranking Factor

Claims about this range from “use it to protect your rankings” to “we used the disavow tool and rankings skyrocketed.”

The idea is that if you rid your link profile of spam, identifiably paid, and other low-quality links, your organic search rankings will directly benefit.

The Evidence for the Disavow Tool as a Ranking Factor

Reddit and SEO forums are rife with anecdotes about the power of disavowing links.

Here are just a few titles currently coming up on the topic:

How to Use Google’s Disavow Tool For Better Rankings

How to Effectively Disavow Links & Protect Organic Ranking

Disavow Unnatural Links and Improve Your Rankings

Really, that’s about it.

There’s no verifiable evidence that would prove that using the disavow tool tells the algorithm anything about your site.

The Evidence Against the Disavow Tool as a Ranking Factor

Google is careful in its positioning of the disavow tool as a preventative measure against manual action – not a component of the organic ranking algorithm – and says:

“If you have a manual action against your site for unnatural links to your site, or if you think you’re about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines), you should try to remove the links from the other site to your site.

If you can’t remove those links yourself, or get them removed, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your website.”

But as Penguin taught the SEO world, manual actions aren’t the only weapon in Google’s link spam arsenal.

Links are a ranking factor, and the disavow tool can help you clean up that signal.

Still, it’s not a ranking factor on its own and is only useful in cases where the link spam is so egregious Google can’t possibly ignore it on its own.

The Disavow Tool as a Ranking Factor: Our Verdict

Is using the disavow tool a ranking factor?

No. You will not experience any lift in search rankings for using the tool.

Are links a ranking factor?

Absolutely.

Can you positively influence organic rankings by cleaning up the links pointing to your site?

Yes. It’s a matter of reducing any potential negative impact of low quality/spam links; you are influencing an existing ranking factor.

But only in certain cases, and those tend to be few and far between.

If you’ve experienced a manual penalty, cleaning that up is going to stop the suppression of your site in Google search.

Even outside of a manual action, spammy and identifiably paid or otherwise manipulated links could be negatively impacting the algorithm’s assessment of your link profile.

You can actually end up doing more harm than good by disavowing links.

As Google’s John Mueller says,

“Random links collected over the years aren’t necessarily harmful, we’ve seen them for a long time too and can ignore all of those weird pieces of web-graffiti from long ago.

Disavow links that were really paid for (or otherwise actively unnaturally placed), don’t fret the cruft.”

If you do use it and don’t see any results, it could be that you didn’t need to use it in the first place – or, you need to follow up with a reconsideration request.

As Chuck Price recommends:

“The most common misconception is the disavow tool doesn’t work. It does. For a manual penalty, the disavow file works, when used as a last resort. That means that a full fledged and well documented link removal campaign must precede it.

The disavow file, combined with a detailed reconsideration request, is a core component in successfully getting a manual penalty revoked.”

Bottom line: Google does not use your use of the disavow tool as a search ranking signal.

Featured image: Paulo Bobita

Discord Keeps Changing Input Device

Discord is one of the ever-going platforms with millions of active gamers using it as their default place to communicate. However, this does not stop it from having its share of issues. For example, gamers are fed up with Discord changing the input devices. In this post, we are going to see what you can do if Discord keeps on changing the input devices during a session.

Why does Discord keep changing audio devices?

Users reported that Discord keeps changing audio devices, and this is probably due to the PC detecting HDMI as a new audio device and turning it on when the PC switches on after going into the Power saving mode. The same situation is applicable to other similar devices like HDMI cables.

Discord keeps changing the Input device error

If Discord keeps changing the Input device, execute the solutions mentioned below to resolve it:

Use the Don’t show me this sign again option

Change the settings in Discord

Disable the second output/input devices

Delete Discord LocalAppdata

Reinstall Discord

Let’s talk about these solutions in detail.

1] Use the Don’t show me this again option

2] Change the settings in Discord

Discord has its own audio detecting procedures due to which even though the default option is set in Windows settings, it becomes invalid and hence the pop-up appears. However, this whole situation is simply avoidable by going to Discord’s settings and selecting the default device. Here’s how to do the same:

Launch Discord and navigate toward its Settings.

Now, go to Voice settings, and select the Input device and Output device from the drop-down menu.

Now launch Discord, and if it prompts you to select the device, proceed to the next solution.

3] Disable the second output/input devices

Next up, we are going to disable other audio resources, however, this is only recommended in cases, where there is no use for the device in question, otherwise re-enabling the second device for different uses will get hectic. Follow the prescribed steps to do the same:

Open Control Panel.

Set View by to Large icons.

In the Playback tab, find the secondary audio device.

4] Delete the Discord LocalAppdata

If disabling the secondary audio device was of no help, perhaps the corrupted app cache and data are the culprit. An improper or messed-up Discord update is particularly the reason behind this situation. Therefore, we are going to delete the Discord LocalAppData. Here’s how it is done:

%appdata%

Finally, select the Delete option.

Fingers crossed that Discord won’t experience any more mishaps.

5] Reinstall Discord

If none of the above solutions resolves this, consider reinstalling the Discord app. Sometimes the incorrect installation of the app is the cause and will be resolved by installing a fresh copy. So, first, uninstall Discord and then reinstall the app and we can manually uninstall Discord from the Settings app.

Read: Fix Discord Error 1105 on Windows PC

Why does Discord keep messing up my audio?

A lot of users complained about experiencing bad audio quality in Discord, and there can be multiple reasons behind this cause. One of the known causes is Discord’s voice sensitivity option, and some users also reported that enabled Echo cancellation is also contributing to the problem. Therefore, we recommend restarting Discord and disabling both voice sensitivity and Echo cancellation. Apart from this, changing voice channel regions also seem to provide relief to the users.

Read: How to improve Discord audio quality on Windows PC.

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