Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2006 - The Premier Conference for Search Engine Marketing & Optimization
Organic Listings Forum
Pose questions to our panel of experts about free “organic” listing issues, plus participate in this session that allows the audience to share tips, tools and techniques. There’s no set agenda, so this is an ideal session to discuss any major recent changes with organic listings.
Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies
Speakers:
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
David Naylor, SEO, Bronco
Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media
Mike Grehan, International Search Marketing Consultant
- They don’t think there are sandbox issues anymore. The engines are constantly “turning the knob” between letting spam in and letting white hat in. The problem with not letting spam in is that white hat gets caught in the mix. If you get links from established sites you are not going to have a problem. Your site has to look natural. If you look unnatural you will get ignored. Look for conduit links… links that connect you to intermediate sites that have links from big sites. Write down 10 reasons why people would link to you. If you can’t do that, then you have a problem.
- ip-delivery.com and fantomaster are the best cloaking tools. It’s all about the ip address collection. You can user agent detect to determine if a browser has Flash capbility or not and then serve up the appropriate content.
- If you are moving to a new domain, do 301’s, notify people to update links and email Google and let them know that you are doing it to make sure you don’t fall through “Google’s ass crack.” Expect a dip when moving. New domain should have a 404 page that has a noindex tag.
- “If you have a 1000 inbound links all from one ip you might be a red neck.” Bruck Clay.
Don’t price your link building by number of links. In that model you can buy a blog spam tool and get thousands. Have a master list of quality sites across multiple industries.
“Would you link to you?”
- Do a search in your industry phrases plus ezine and/or newsletter and buy sponsored links in the newsletter. Then that link will be put in the archives and you will get the link value.
- The title tag goes way beyond search and so it will always be very important. Tag clouds (like del.icio.us) might change the way people search in the future. End user data is going to become much more important. Disney, Yahoo and Google all rank highly for the word ‘exit’. That’s because porn sites link to those sites with the word ‘exit’.
- A person with a state-based basketball site was told to make each state a subdomain or a sub folder. Having individual domains for each state is going to be significantly too much work. It’s preferable to have a main domain and put themes within folders instead of subdomains these days.
- Paying for a directory lisitng in Yahoo is not as good as it once was but it’s still worth doing. Good directories are:
bestoftheweb.com, business.com, yahoo.com. Do a query for “submit your site”, ezine, newsletter and use those places to submit. For dmoz.org, do the submission and move on. Think about things to do offline and then those people will write about your site. If you can’t get into dmoz.org, apply in your city and maybe that person will put you in the correct directory.
- Use twin feeds if you are syndicating content. You write unique content for your site and let others fight over the other content.
- End user data tied to an account (social bookmarking), query sequences, Google analytics, Google checkout, (it’s all about collecting end user data) could potentially become a major contributor to ranking sites.
- Yahoo looks at the keyword tag. It says that you are a “candidate page” but will not help with ranking. Use commas, keep them original, keep them short.
Next up:
Search Engine Q&A On Links
Have questions about links? In this session, search engine representatives provide answers to the audience. Be sure to have prepared yourself by attending other link-oriented sessions earlier in the conference.
Moderator:
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com President of Searchwise
Speaker:
Tim Converse, Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Inc.
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist, Google
TBA, MSN Search
Vivek Pathak, Infrastructure Product Manager, Ask.com
- There is no universal sandbox that everyone goes to. However there are many signal Google uses to determine if something is good or spammy. Garner natural links, make navigation clear, don’t make your site in Flash. Patience is then the best remedy. There is no explicit sandbox in Yahoo either. If you are not showing up at first it might be that you aren’t widely known. Since there is no sandbox there is no technique to get out of a sandbox.
- The descriptiveness of a text link helps the search engines. If users would find something helpful then so would the engine.
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Search engineers use the “smell test”. If something looks spammy, who you are linking to that is going to denote a closer look. If you have a significant number of links from a single directory all to the same page they will probably just pick one.
- If your content is syndicated in something like feedburner, the engine would rather give the link to the original content. But there is nothing the writer that can do other than submit the situation to the engine’s webmaster forum.
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Absolute or relative links. Spiders will unwind relative links into absolute links anyway. So whatever works best for the developer. However, it’s easier to break a relative link and cause a 404. Google gives a stronger push for absolute links… they can be a safer option.
- Cross domain linking with a 302 redirect, it will not be seen as a vote for the page that it redirects to.
- A sitewide link from one domain to another in Yahoo has diminishing returns (it’s not viewed as abusive but will not significantly help). An engine is trying to algorithmically determine what is an authentic vote of confidence. Markers of novelty and authenticity is what they are looking for.
- Having the same link on all of your client sites back to your site (Powered by) is not seen as something that is intentionally malicious and it won’t be ignored. If there are a ton of links that weren’t there before, an engine might see that as something to take action on. If these links appear on different kinds of sites at different times that is decent.
- As long as a title attribute on a link doesn’t “smell bad” it won’t probably significantly help you, but if it’s useful for the visitor then it is a good idea.
- 301 like pages to like pages. Do not 301 a lot of pages to the home page.
- One domain with a lot of content is going to do better than multiple domains with a smaller amount of content. There is a slight bias to larger content sites. In the Windows Vista case, should they create a new domain or role it into the main Microsoft… it depends on what is better for the customer. In most cases, a one page or two page site is not going to be viewed as important. Watch out for creating many many domains without much content all linking back to a single domain.
- Does 301 carry age? Age is one factor of determining value. 301’s transfer pagerank. But not all aspects are carried over. There is going to be time lag. It is your best possible option.
- “noindex follow” is the same as saying just “noindex”. Anything that is done in excess in combination with certain signals can throw a red flag. “How does it look in context to other signals… in combination things can look different.
- If an engine can recognize a paid link the value will not be as much as a link that doesn’t look paid.
- Google is against buying links for the sole purpose of giving pagerank.
- nofollow is still used for discovery but it is not used for link popularity. The link is not treated as a vote. You cannot hurt yourself by using a nofollow link. So the link is still spidered.
- If you feel you are having difficulty with your site sign up for a webmaster central account with Google to see if they have any errors they are showing for your site. Google says they are considering offering more information about links but there is nothing specific now.
I’m currently sitting in a session at Search Engine Strategies called “Meet the Crawlers.” It’s made up of engineers from all the big engines. I thought I’d bullet some of the more interesting comments they have put out:
These are the engineers from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
I’ve always loved this session because the information doesn’t get any better than this. If they say something, it’s pretty much gospel.
- Google, MSN and Yahoo are adhering to a sitemap standard format. But Ask is not currently doing so.
- Having multiple variations of the a url (usually because of session id’s) does not hurt you. The engine simply picks one.
- When rebuilding a site on the same domain, 301 redirect from old urls to new urls, create a new sitemap and submit it, possibly submit the old site map to detect the 301 redirects.
- If people are putting content on your site (such as comments) that have links, wrap the link in nofollow.
- The “site:” search is much more accurate in Yahoo than in other engines(Yahoo said). So if you are seeing bit variations of number of pages between Google and Yahoo, keep in mind that those are just estimates.
- Sitemaps are used as signals to augment the engines’ listings. It is a “hint” but it’s not the be all end all.
- Crawlers used to have an issue with a depth of crawl so they didn’t go many levels deep in sub-folders. But now its not an issue. “Reasonably deep” levels should not be an issue. If it makes sense for a user then it should be fine. Usability is a good proxy for this.
- In Google, don’t worry about having listings in the “supplemental results”. It just takes time. Supplemental is not a penalty and you will get traffic from supplemental results.
- Supplemental results is an extra layer of the Google index. It’s a bit larger and takes a little longer to update. It’s a perfectly normal thing to see some of your pages within supplemental.
- Ask would not comment on whether they will implement something like Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Central. MSN says they are taking feedback on that.
- If you have a shopping cart that has products in HTTP and HTTPS urls, you should tell the engines which version to use via robots.txt and even better… don’t have products in both versions. The engines support indexing HTTPS urls.
- If you have text that describes a flash animation and “gracefully degrades” for someone that doesn’t have flash, you won’t have much of a problem.
- Imagine the crawler as a vision impaired user. Convert your site to play on a browser reader via sound and look at your site through a text-only browser. This will show you very clearly what they see.
One of the especially fun parties this year was at B.L.U.E.S and was put on by:
TrueLocal – Smart Yellow Pages and Local Search Engine
It was completely packed.
If you haven’t checked out TrueLocal yet, give it a look. The premise is that as an advertiser you bid on a zip code and a business category. It starts at $1/month and then you are placed prominently in those kinds of searches. You only pay the monthly fee and aren’t charged a per click fee. It’s pretty innovative.
One of the especially cool parts of TrueLocal is that it’s president is Jake Baillie. He is originally from Cleveland. So, yet again, Cleveland is making a big impact on the search community.
OK. So do something innovative for your business and support Cleveland entrepreneurs. Check out TrueLocal – Smart Yellow Pages and Local Search Engine.
