Leofinance SEO Challenge

Now that things are starting to be updated on the Leofinance.io UI, it is time for us to take a look at what we can do as a community to help make Leofinance one of the most successful web3 applications there is.

Of late, a few are writing about the idea of trying to do some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help the push forward.

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is defined as follows by Wikipedia:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.[1] SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search,[2] news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As we can see here, the idea is to generate organic traffic which is the only way to see big numbers. While having people access the site directly by using a bookmark or direct link is helpful, the real gold is in the organic traffic. This is generated by the search engines. Of course, as we know, the king of this realm is Google.

The most successful sites receive a large portion of their traffic from organic sources. How often have you done a search on something and gotten a link to Wikipedia, Forbes, or YouTube? It is obvious these sites rank very high in terms of many general and/or specific terms.

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Source

So if we want to give Leofinance a leg up towards the level that we believe it can be at, organic traffic is vital.

Leofinance's SEO Advantage

While it is hard to know exactly what will rank, there is something that can be leveraged on Leofinance.

Many of the sites that rank well do so through user added content. This does a couple different things. To start, it created a dynamic site that is always changing. Search engines do not like websites that are static. Dynamic sites reflect what is taking place right now, scoring better with the search engines.

The second advantage that a site like this has is the wide variety of content that is added. This can seem like a disadvantage since it might appears we are "all over the place". However, since we are not going to rank high on terms such as "finance" or "cryptocurrency" any time soon, we have the opportunity to hit on some less searched after terms.

@forexbrokr wrote an article a couple days ago detailing Andrei Jikh’s crypto portfolio in 2021. Why was this done? The reason was not because there is an overwhelming interest in this person's cryptocurrency portfolio. Instead, it was realized that Andrei Jikh appeared to be sending some traffic Leofinance's way. Thus, writing an article about it only strengthens this site's ranking on that term.

It seems a lot of this is bumping into some keywords that enables us to rank well in the search engine. The more diversified the topics that we cover, within the financial and cryptocurrency arena, the greater the chance that we get Leofinance ranking.

What Is The Leofinance SEO Challenge

This is a call out to all members of the Leofinance community. Here is something that we can each do on a daily basis to assist in the progress of this ecosystem.

Basically, this is not an overnight process. Search engines are designed not to be gamed. There are a lot of smart people writing the algorithms to ensure that the best results (so they claim) come up.

Longevity is a major component. This is not something we can do anything about. Each day passes 24 hours at a time and the release date of Leofinance.io is what it is. Hence, we need to focus upon what we can impact.

That is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Each article we put up can contain a few tidbits that will help it be "more friendly" to the search engines.

Therefore, this is a challenge to each person to spend the next year enhancing each article for optimization. This means taking a bit more time with each article adding a few things that can help out. We need not to focus upon where we are now but, rather, July of 2022.

Right now, the Leofinance development team is hard at work adding more features to the UI. We are seeing a lot being incorporated with each new update. For this reason, the community needs to do its part.

How Do We Enhance Leofinance SEO?

To start, we need to mentioned a couple of members: @forexbrokr and @hitmeasap. Both of these have been dropping a lot of hints in @leomarkettalk in an effort to get us to enhance what we are doing on here.

Therefore, follow these two accounts since they are now dropping posts related to this topic as well as writing optimized posts themselves.

That said, we do have a few suggestions that might help out.

  • Use Headers such as what was done here
  • Bold or italicize some keywords
  • Link to other Leofinance.io articles related to the topic
  • Link to external sites that are relevant
  • Add comments that are appropriate to the keyword in the article, further emphasizing it
  • Make a bullet-point list such as this
  • Write articles that are at least 1,000 words long

From what was dropped by the two users highlighted, these are some things that can help an article to be better optimized.

SEO Drives Organic Traffic

It seems we are dealing with a "chicken or the egg" situation. A higher ranking site will generate more traffic. At the same time, an increase in traffic leads to a better ranking site.

Hence the dilemma of how to get things rolling in the right direction.

Here is where we all can assist. By focusing each article on Search Engine Optimization, we will start to drive more organic traffic to Leofinance.io. The goal is to get thousands of hits per day from this source. That will help to increase the ranking, helping the site to rank higher on the search engines.

This is also a call out to the membership to support those who are taking the time to optimize their articles. Anyone who is doing this is showing his or her commitment to Leofinance.

It is our community so it is our responsibility to get this done.

Perhaps we can go after terms like finance and cryptocurrency a year from now. In the meantime, we need to do all we can to move up the rankings with whatever terms we can move into.

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.


If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and rehive.

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Bang, I did it again... I just rehived your post!
Week 64 of my contest just started...you can now check the winners of the previous week!
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Having just returned to Hive after a long hiatus, I'm a bit confused about all these different user interfaces. Are they competing with each other? If so, why? What does LeoFinance offer in its UI that is different or better than the other UIs? Are there any links you could share that would help me get a grasp on this? Thanks!

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They are not competing at the Hive level since they all feed to the #blockchain. Hence, whatever is posted from any of them ends up there regardless of the interface.

Where it is different is in the tokens. Through #hive-engine, many have their own token. For Leofinance it is the LEO. Hence, one can focus upon specific communities (and content) while standing out. It is far easier to get seen on Leofinance than it is on hive.

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Let me try and make some distinctions for you.

The Hive blockchain:
By publishing content to the decentralised Hive blockchain we are able to achieve data ownership on our own accounts and censorship resistance.

This is because no matter what, our data like the text we write in blogs, is always forever published to the blockchain and linked to our account.

Nobody can take that away and that is the biggest selling point of Hive.

Different Hive front-ends:
Front-ends are the domains that display the content publicly like leofiance.io, peakd.com or hive.blog.

These are privately owned, privately hosted gateways to the content and as a result, are subject to laws and standards.

While your content will always be on the blockchain itself, you can be censored from a front-end if you don't meet these standards.

Every front-end will have different standards and be subject to different laws depending on where they're hosted so if you don't like 1, just move to/create another.

SEO happens at the domain level:
In terms of SEO, Google doesn't care that we are all publishing content to the Hive blockchain and only sees us as competing domains.

So when working on SEO, we have to focus separately on each domain.

What the domain owners can do, is make sure that they've included in their front-end's code, something that tells Google which version should be viewed as the 'original'.

This is called the canonical and even though you see the post duplicated across multiple domains, it won't incur a penalty because the code tells Google which is the original version. (LeoFinance has this setup).

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As far as I know canonical links are included by all major front ends. There was a big fuss during steemit days, when it 'stole' traffic from the other front-ends (or even private blogs), by setting canonical links to their own site even if the content wasn't created with their interface.

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Those suggestions are all very simple to implement. If we could get a huge number of authors incorporating them in their articles I think the net effect could be very positive for #LeoFinance.

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That is what it is going to take.

The point of the article was to get people:

  • thinking long-term
  • starting to do the simple things that can make a different in SEO.

Like your comment, a bold and a hashtag doesn't take long but really adds to what is taking place, especially if it is tied to the keywords the article is targeting.

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Why 1,000 words? The going rate for ranking articles is 300 words+ Not many people real 1,000 word articles anymore which is why this was reduced down on the SEO level.

One thing I wish we could do is alt tag images some how.

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(Edited)

One thing I wish we could do is alt tag images some how.

You can with both markdown and HTML on your posts...

EXAMPLES


Markdown method:

![Taskmaster4450 Banner](https://images.hive.blog/DQmXEv6MvKTCurBzSdbKjWzFadJwfJfJfmA2We9EwD5q5Vb/screen_vision2025_1.png)

Taskmaster4450 Banner


HTML method:

<img src="https://images.hive.blog/DQmXEv6MvKTCurBzSdbKjWzFadJwfJfJfmA2We9EwD5q5Vb/screen_vision2025_1.png" alt="Taskmaster4450 Banner">

Taskmaster4450 Banner


Is this helpful @bitcoinflood? Any other assistant you may need with formatting, I will be more than happy to assist if I am able.

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Great share Sarge!

To include alt tags in my images, I use the markdown code that you've shared here.

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Why 1,000 words?

Going based upon what I was told. If that is not true, then I stand corrected. I was told the sweet spot was between 1,000-1,500 words.

What do you mean by alt tag?

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Images can be ranked within search as well by providing alt tags. Alt tags are meta data for images which allow readers (those who are blind) to know what image is there and what it's showing. However it's also used for image search on google etc. So if I searched for an image for Cub DeFi if it had that alt tag my image would most likely show up on that search. Not sure if it would be possible though with how crypto works.

h1 tags are important ## h2 tags after that for supporting keywords the # h1 tag is what search engines pull for the title. Going to be improving my own articles here starting today with some of these changes.

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To further explain what you said above about H1 and H2 to whoever reads.

Don't use H1 (# in markdown) inside the post if you want to optimize for search engines. As you said, H1 is for the title of the article, and that's something the platform controls (peakd, hive.blog, leofinance, etc.).

Inside the post, use H2 (## in markdown) for the most relevant sections, and go from there down.

If you use H1, the crawler might be confused about the title of the post. If you check the most relevant blogs on SEO (or other high ranked websites), you will see H1 is for the title, H2 is for the most relevant (top-level) sections.

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I was told the sweet spot was between 1,000-1,500 words.

This is what most people believe, because it has "always been like that".

Whatever you search for on Google is likely to show top results for anything that is more than 300 word long articles though.

In theory, it should be easier for Google to understand what your content is about if you write longer articles rather than shorter, but anything above 300 words seems to be fine in terms of rankings.

While my personal recommendation is still to go for longer rather than shorter articles, it doesn't necessarily have to be 1000+ words. What's more important is the "meat". What information you share and how you present it (optimize it).

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There's no doubting that Google prioritises longer-form content.

I would always recommend writing longer, well-structured posts (broken up by subheadings to make them easier to read), rather than multiple short posts.

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A quick Google search also provides a result from Yoast, which suggests that there is a higher chance of rankings in Google if a blog post contains over 1000 words.

They also state:

“For regular posts or pages we advise writing more than 300 words. Why is that? Well, a higher word count helps Google to better understand what your text is about. And, generally speaking, Google tends to rank longer articles higher.“

Yoast, Search Engine Journal and Backlinko found clear correlations that a text that has an average word count of 1449 ranks better than all other pages.

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I talked to hitmeasap and he asked me to bring back the seobot.

I will update the code to be compatible with HF25 and bring it back soon..

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continue to publish constantly following all Google guidelines, write interesting articles that can't be seen anywhere else, eventually you will rank the frontend higher, this is what happened with Hive and little by little it is ranking well.

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What is ranking for Hive? Is it #hive.blog or #Peakd?

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Whenever I'm Googling Hive content, I actually find the ecency versions rank best.

Whatever they're doing, they're doing well.

(Although it's annoying that they somehow manage to automatically change all internal leofinance.io links to the ecency version, as well as removing the 'posted using LeoFinance' link at the bottom.

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(Edited)

Although it's annoying that they somehow manage to automatically change all internal leofinance.io links to the ecency version, as well as removing the 'posted using LeoFinance' link at the bottom.

@Khal needs to take a look if he sets canonical links for leofinance posts (and only for them). If two front ends both set canonical links for the same post, the indication is ignored.

EDIT: Looks like they are set.

EDIT2: The other thing I can think of is that ecency has a better reputation score than leofinance. Which makes sense, because it is a general front-end, so there's a higher activity. About removing the link to leofinance at the end, it's their choice what they do on their own front-end.

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About three months ago I have made a post on the SEO strategy for the #pob platform. There is a need to have some value of dollar vote as well for the post to become visible. You can refer my post here


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As you know, SEO is focused at the domain level.

So while we are all Hive communities, the SEO for proofofbrain.io is completely separate from SEO for leofinance.io.

If the POB community doesn't see the value in what you're trying to do, you're always welcome to come across and help us out on LeoFinance.

Drop by the daily @leomarkettalk thread and let us know what you think :)

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@forexbrokr thank you for the message. I am a sports journalist and was attracted to the #hive due to sportstalk. I never had any interests in finance per se. But I would definitely like to be a part of any community initiative that is taking place. I would be more than happy to support the SEO initiatives.


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I think you missed out on making sure links and images have relevant words instead of leaving it blank. 1,000 words seems like a tough hurdle and I don't know if I can really do that. I can try to do the rest though as I am in general doing them already.

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I think you missed out on making sure links and images have relevant words instead of leaving it blank.

I am confused by this. What do you mean here? I am not following.

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(Edited)

He means that one should use the keyword(s) in the link text, and not drop the link directly. On images, the image "text" (the part you include between []) can be edited to include keywords as well. Same for videos.

Here's something that helps... I believe. If we set this 1000 words as a threshold (probably a good one), we have to keep in mind search engine crawlers don't make distinction between the main post and comments. Or they might, but putting slight emphasis on comments, because they show engagement and because they are less likely to be optimized for search engines. So, if a 300 words post generates another 700 words in well written comments, that's still 1000.

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(Edited)

Yep @taskmaster4450le, image alt tags are important.

This is just text that describes the image and if you can include the keyword, then it helps.

Sarge has shared the markdown code for image alt tags in his comment below.


search engine crawlers don't make distinction between the main post and comments

This is something that doesn't get mentioned a lot.

To the Google crawler, text in the code is text.

Headings, the body, comments, text hidden under drop downs etc etc is all the same and can be optimised.

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Well the answer was already given but sorry for the late reply. The extra text that doesn't show up in the text when you descript the specific images/videos matter.

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You don't have to write 1000 words, but just keep in mind that Google will always prioritise long-form content.

Generally, the longer your posts, the better. Just break them up with subheadings to make them easier to read and you'll be looked upon more favourably by the Google algo.

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I just did a quick Alexa rank check of Leofinance just before you made this post and the results are not good!

I know if we work together as a community, the results can change in the next 90 days or so, thanks to the hard work of @hitmeasap and @forexbrokr.

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No the Alexa ranking is not very good. It dropped down of late also.

I am not sure the likes of Google use Alexa as the ranking but I am sure they have ways of putting #leofinance down in the ranks.

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I appreciate the mention. I'm glad you've picked things up and seem to be willing to learn and implement some things going forward. :)

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Alexa rank shows how much traffic is going to that site.

So it's not that the SEO quality of our content has dropped off, but just the overall traffic has gone down.

This could be due to a number of factors.

An Alexa rank that trends up is obviously a good KPI metric within our site's SEO strategy, but as it's just all traffic, it doesn't reflect SEO results specifically.

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Alexa rank shows how much traffic is going to that site.

Alexa rank is also kind of deceiving. Because data is collected from people who have Alexa toolbar installed and active in their browsers. And I assume the majority of people don't.

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Oh wow, I am guessing I am never going to have one optimized if I need to write over 1000 words! That is pretty hefty for me. I might be able to do it, but it would be mostly just incoherent rambling. It would be cool if they had a channel in the Leo Discord where they posted the daily SEO keywords or something like that.

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That is a really cool idea. You should pitch it to those Discord folks, or do it one better. Make a post titled...

SEO: Leo Finance Keyword Of The Day.

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That would be cool if I were smart enough to know what the keyword should be! It needs to be someone who knows what they are talking about!

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I was talking about you shilling the idea through a post. May garner some interest.

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SEO: Leo Finance Keyword Of The Day.

This would likely not be a good idea. The same keyword(s) coming from multiple posts of the same domain during a short interval of time (a day), would probably penalize all posts using it or it will have no beneficial effect, in any case.

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Well that idea got shut down quick. 😏

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I'd say we are way too small fry and unorganised (so in Google's eyes, that's natural lol), to be penalised for this.

Encouraging topics/keywords and internal linking to similar evergreen content on our domain should definitely be encouraged.

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It seems like the idea for now is to get as much out there as possible, to try to do as many things as we can. We are so small that we need it all to try and get any recognition.

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Your idea above about access to Google Analytics and Search Console is very useful. This way things won't be done almost blindly, and effects can be observed. Otherwise we might end up doing more harm than good.

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This is a good idea, but needs to have a strategy behind it.

For example, if we have a leofinance.io blog that already ranks on page 2 for a keyword, then we can encourage the community to create related posts that all link to that original ranking URL to try and push it onto page 1.

The easy wins are achieved by helping the older post that already ranks, move up.

To do:

  1. @hitmeasap can help compile a list of LeoFinance blogs that are ranking on page 2, that we can try to elevate to page 1.

  2. We then encourage the community to write related posts (over time) that link to that original, trying to move it up the rankings.

--

Another way is to try and create evergreen content from scratch.

This is pretty much what I'm trying to do with @crypto-guides.

For anyone else reading this, I post a template that includes subheadings that you can use as a writing prompt on your own blog.

Just anywhere in their own blog, I encourage them to include a link to the original guide template.

That templaye will eventually get turned into a 4000+ word edited, optimised epic such as the finished Hive Guide.

If you want to get involved, the Polygon guide is still unfinished.

As this is done over weeks and takes weeks longer for Google to even index our content, we shouldn't be penalised for spam.

It's not spam, it's natural content creation.

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I am with you. I am glad that you responded and I encourage @bozz to make the post I suggested. Commenters may have some positive insights on how such a project could be incorporated with the already ongoing SEO efforts.

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The idea of writing articles to try to help push Leofinance from page 2 to page 1 is a great idea.

We can do that.

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There's only so much we can do manually and we need to get Khal on board.

Khal needs to create guest user permissions for Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

We need that data to create some simple reporting and tracking Google Sheets to monitor progress.

All we need is a Google sheet that shows:

  • Target keywords
  • Our URLS that rank
  • What position those URLs ranked today
  • What position those URLs ranked 1 month ago
  • What position those URLs ranked 2 months ago

That will find all the URLs that are at the top of page 2 that we can optimise and lift.

Easy low hanging fruit that you will see results from.

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Yup, linking to the post could work, to some extent, IF the posts where the links are made from are not considered junk by the algorithm (in which case it will lower the rating). Also commenting on the said post might work as I believe the algorithm gives a slight bonus to posts with high engagement, although this is speculation on my part, and not something I have experience with.

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I think that criteria is down on the list. But doing the other things help. Having a lot of the same keywords constantly targeted repeatedly can only help.

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See, I wouldn't even know where to begin unless I had some kind of game plan to follow. That is why I liked the idea of a daily keyword.

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I think it appears that starting with Headers is the first thing we all can do.

Along with trying to highlight words such as SEO.

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You don't have to write over 1000 words, but just keep in mind that longer-form content is better for Google.

If you think you're rambling, then just split it up with subheadings and suddenly your rambling becomes readable, structured thoughts that Google likes ;)

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Thanks for the tips!

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If you want to optimize for search engine crawlers or spiders as they are also called, you should add different headers. An H1 tag ("# in front of your text") makes the text size large and it is usually the title of the post. An H2 tag ("## in front of your text") is a subheader of the H1 tag. An H3 tag is a subheader of the H2 tag and so on. From H1 to H6. Each header becomes the subheader of the next.

This is from my seo mini-series I published ~8 months ago. You can find it here if you are interested:

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Indeed SEO could help push this ecosystem much more. Maybe the UI could be enhanced with some SEO tooltips or something alike to help improve amateurs like myself.

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