Now I’ve found a way to help them at a startup-friendly price! Starting next week, February 27th, I’m offering a SEO Startup Bootcamp, just for Seattle startups. We’ll all meet once a month for 12 months. The bootcamp is segmented into three parts (four months each). Each segment begins with a three hour workshop, where we’ll go over the topics for the quarter and everyone will get the related playbooks and set up. The following months in the segment we’ll meet for hour-long workshops to dive into the topic of the month. In between, everyone can stay in touch with a private discussion forum and get customized, daily reporting, analytics, and diagnostics from our Blueprint software.

Space is very limited, so if you’re interested, sign up now by emailing bootcamp@ninebyblue.com.

Download the PDF for all the program details and pricing.

“The idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.

So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO—we handle that—and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whatever they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now…”

 [And later after talking about the positives of SEO] “Absolutely there are some people who take it too far. What we’re mindful of is when someone says, “We’re White Hat. We continue to do the right thing, and we see the Black Hats who are over optimizing or going too far, and they seem to be doing too well.” So we’ve been working on changes to try to make sure that if you are a White Hat or if you’ve been doing very little SEO that you are going to not be affected by this change. But if you’ve been going way far beyond the pale, then that’s the sort of thing where your site might not rank as highly as it did before.”

A lot of people have asked me what this means for those who include search engine optimization as part of their marketing mix. Some are worried that Google will begin to penalize sites that have implemented search engine optimization techniques. My thoughts? I think that some site owners should worry. But whether or not you should depends on what you mean by search engine optimization.

AS I’ve talked about and written about over and over (notably in my book and most recently in my article about Clay Johnson‘s talk about SEO killing America), SEO means lots of different things to lots of different people. When I talk and write about SEO and when we work with clients here at Nine By Blue, I mean:

• Using search data to better understand your audience and solve their problems (by creating compelling, high-quality content about relevant topics to your business)
• Understanding how search engine crawl and index sites and ensuring that your site’s technical infrastructure can be comprehensively crawled and indexed

But the definition of SEO is a continuum. Some of it is clearly spam. But there’s a gray area of SEO that’s not exactly spam, but it’s really not those two bullets above either.

For instance, I’ll look at a page and see a bunch of keyword-rich links in the footer. “Does anyone click on those?” I might ask. “Nah, those are just there for search engines”. I go to conferences and hear people debating keyword density percentages, how many times a keyword should be repeated in a title tag, how to get links that “appear” natural. At some point, search engine optimization goes beyond making sure pages are as useful as possible for the target audience and that the site is crawlable and becomes a game of guess the algorithms.

Anyone who’s read or heard me before knows that I’m not an advocate for algorithm chasing. Historically, I’ve had this view because I don’t find it productive. Algorithms change hundreds of times a year. Signals differ for individual queries. The goal is always to extract all of the data on the web and show the very best page for searchers. So why not just invest time in making sure all of your content is extractable and are in fact the very best pages?

Now, there’s another reason to follow this strategy.

The type of algorithm changes Matt talked about in this SXSW session remind me a bit of how Google described the Panda algorithm. Panda wasn’t about spam. It was about separating high-quality, useful pages from pages that were just a collection of words about a particular topic. This seems similar, like yet another way of discerning that. At one point in the session, Matt said:

“We’re always trying to best approximate if a user lands on a page, are they going to be really, really happy instead of really, really annoyed? And if it’s the sort of thing where they land on a page and they are going to be annoyed, then that is the sort of thing that we’ll take action on.”

Matt talked about finding ways to surface smaller sites that may be poorly optimized, if, in fact, those sites have the very best content. This is not anything new from Google. They’ve always had a goal to rank the very best content, regardless of how well optimized or not it may be. And I think that’s the key. If a page is the very best result for a searcher, Google wants to rank it even if the site owner has never heard of title tags. And Google wants to rank it if the site owner has crafted the very best title tag possible. The importance there is that it’s the very best result.

Matt talked about this later:

“We tell people over and over again, “Make a compelling site. Make a site that’s useful. Make a site that’s interesting. Make a site that’s relevant to people’s interests… all of the changes we make, over 500 a year, are designed to try to approximate if a user lands on that page, just how happy are they going to be with what they get? So if you keep that in mind, then you should be in good shape no matter what.”

He also mentioned making Googlebot smarter, which is more an evolution of what they’ve been working on for years: being able to extract content from JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, images, forms… We’ve seen this in the last year with smarter handling of paginated content, for instance. (I wrote about the pagination tags Google supports here, but my post was based on a Google video and blog post where Maile Ohye mentions that if you don’t implement the tags, Google will use patterns from your site to try and create paginated clusters for you.)

Another thing to keep in mind about how Matt described this upcoming change is that he wasn’t speaking at a search conference. The audience was at least in part non-SEOs. He introduced himself as the person in charge of catching those who try to cheat Google. He was talking to people who (based especially on the question that triggered Matt’s  comments) were coming from the perspective of thinking of the type of SEO that’s really about reverse engineering algorithms.

Matt first talked about the benefits of SEO. He said to think of SEO like a coach who helps to present yourself better. He said that Google wants to level the playing field so that all content has a chance to compete equally. And when he talked about the kinds of techniques that this algorithm would look for he said they were looking for abuse: too many keywords, too many link exchanges. He contrasted what the algorithm was looking to flag to “great content”.

In particular, Matt said the following in support of SEO:

“The way that I often think about SEO is that it’s like a coach. It’s someone who helps you figure out how to present yourself better. In an ideal world, though, you wouldn’t have to think about presenting yourself and whether search engines can crawl your website. Because they’d just be so good that they can figure out how to call through the Flash, how to crawl through the forums, how to crawl through the JavaScript, how to crawl through whatever it is…

A lot of people seem to think that Google hates SEO. That’s definitely not the case…

 We even made a video about this. If you do a search for webmaster videos, we’ve made something like 400 videos. And we made one specifically to say Google does not hate SEO, because SEO can often be very helpful. It can make a site more crawlable. It can make a site more accessible. It can think about the words that users are going to type whenever they come to a search engine and make sure that those words are on the page, which just makes the site more user-friendly.

So the same sorts of things you do to optimize your return on investment and how well something spreads virally or socially is the exact same sort of stuff that often works well from a search engine perspective. So there is a ton of stuff that is fantastic to do as an SEO, it just makes your content more crawlable and more accessible.“

This isn’t the oft-heralded death of SEO. But it may be the first nail in the coffin of those who go beyond SEO and lose track of creating the best possible content for their audiences.

When I was at Google, I realized that organizations needed education and data about how to operate within our searching culture, and that’s why I was so passionate about building Webmaster Central. Post-Google, I’ve remained passionate about that (it’s why I wrote Marketing the Age of Google — you don’t write books to get rich!) and Nine By Blue has been all about helping organizations improve their sites’ technical architecture and overall content and audience engagement strategy to better take advantage of unpaid search.

But it’s not enough. Organizations need a methodology: a clear process. You need comprehensive education and resources, in-depth training, and you need data – both to measure your search efforts and to pinpoint what issues to tackle first. I talked to and looked at specific issues for literally thousands of site owners while I was at Google, but post-Google, I’ve had the opportunity to dive in much deeper with companies and begin to understand the obstacles that go well beyond 302 redirects where 301s should be and keyword research that shows searchers are looking for “cute cat videos” when the site is full of “cute kitten videos”.

Companies have silos and have to find ways to work together well. Technology departments need to know not only what issues exist, but how to prioritize them within the larger needs of the organization. Is fixing that 302 redirect more important than fixing the broken checkout button on the shopping cart? (Well, probably not.) What is the impact? How do we change the process so that we don’t have to keep fixing the same problem every launch?

The idea behind the name Nine By Blue is that organizations can take numbers (the amazing amount of data available online) and mix in a bit of color (you are looking to connect with real people after all) and build something real and long-lasting that both your audiences and search engines love. Our new logo (created by our haiku-writing graphic designer, Ally) reflects that.

We’ll continue to help organizations improve site architecture and content strategy, but we’re now focusing more time on providing comprehensive educational resources and training, helping organizations improve process, and on providing data. We’ve developed custom reporting that incorporates data from server logs, search engine webmaster tools, and analytics to both monitor progress and identify key obstacles to search success. You need a search blueprint and to that end, we’ve developed a methodology for incorporating search into an organization and for helping you determine ROI and prioritization.

Our first step is launching this site. Watch the learning center as we begin building up resources there. And if you’re interested in training or checking out our reporting, please let me know! Here at Nine By Blue, we’re excited about the changes, and we hope that you join us change the world of search engine optimization so that it becomes integrated in development, marketing, and product strategy.

Oh Steve. That’s not what makes search engine optimization work. That’s not what true search engine optimization is at all. Here’s what makes search engine optimization work and why Google Instant isn’t the death knell.

• Everyone searches. Google said today that they get 1 billion searchers a week. People search a lot. So it’s important to be visible in search if you want to connect with your audience.
• A big part of SEO is ensuring that your technical site architecture can be crawled and indexed by search engines and the content can be extracted. If the infrastructure isn’t search-friendly, your pages may not be available in the index for searchers to find.
• Another big part of SEO is understanding the needs of your audience: what their problems are, what they are looking for, what tasks they are trying to accomplish, the language they use. Search data is awesome for finding these things out and better building products and content.

But the biggest misunderstanding of Rubel’s post is that SEO is about optimizing for a single query and that everyone saw the same results until now. In reality, searchers have been seeing different results for a really long time. Personalized search in particular has been increasing over time, causing everyone to see something different. And Google Suggest has also been around forever, so the idea of prompting refinements as the searcher types a query also isn’t new.

Sure, searchers may tweak their queries in real time, but they aren’t going to fundamentally change what they’re looking for. If I’m looking for a restaurant in Seattle, I’m not going to see results for “relaxing vacations in Mexico” and decide to go to Cabo instead of out to dinner.

I’ve always advised looking at audience needs and building a site that addresses them holistically rather than fixating on ranking for a single keyword phrase. And that strategy continues to be a sound one in light of Google Instant. Rubel says it will make “optimizing virtually impossible”. But the reality is that building valuable sites that meet searcher needs will only continue to grow in importance.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

I was in a meeting a few days ago and someone asked if it was true that for SEO purposes, a page should have as few outbound links as possible. I said outbound links were fine, great even! And then talked a bit about how it’s a bad idea to build pages for nuances in the search engine algorithms anyway, as hundreds of signals exist and they’re changing all the time. Oh, he said. We’ve been talking about implementing the canonical tag. We probably shouldn’t do that then. And I realized, how would a developer know that the canonical tag is awesome and the meta keywords tag isn’t? That you shouldn’t worry about keyword density but you should put important keywords in your title tag?

Recently, someone sent me an “SEO optimization report” for their site that came from automated software that guaranteed top ten rankings in 90 days. Some of the advice was good (use unique title tags), some was harmless (improve your Flesch readability ease score), and some was just crazy talk. Below is a bit of the crazy.

“You should increase your keyword density. You can do this by removing some text.”

This whole notion of keyword density has been around forever, but here’s what it really boils down to. How is your potential audience looking for this content? Put those words in your title tag, H1, and somewhere on the page. And use those words as anchor text in internal links to that page. If other sites link to the page using that anchor text, even better! It’s bad enough when people try to get the “right” keyword density by nonsensically repeating the same words over and over on a page, but removing other text? That’s just sad.

“Keywords in the HTML comment tags help a good ranking in Google.”

Um. Not really.

“Some search engines penalize sites if the terms from the meta keywords tag don’t appear in the body of the page.”

Well, first, search engines (in particular, Google) ignore the meta keywords tag. And also, this statement isn’t true.

“Your page includes the meta Google-Site-Verification tag twice. Search engines could regard it as a spamming  attempt and might decide not to index your web site.”

Wow. I assume this is simply a case of automation going awry and whoever wrote this software doesn’t actually think that having two verified Google Webmaster Tools accounts will cause Google to remove the site from the index. But even so, having duplicate meta tags of any kind doesn’t cause Google or Bing to flag the site for spam. I mentioned this was all about the crazy, right?

“Some search engines don’t accept submissions with capitalized letters in titles or meta tags.”

Maybe someone more familiar with old school directories can weigh in on where this comes from. But recommending that your title tags not contain capital letters? This may be automated software, but someone manually wrote that message.

“Some search engines rank sites lower that are hosted at free hosting providers.”

No.

PS – Creative use of bold won’t actually help. And question marks in URLs are just fine.

Until today.

Now when I do that search, the tool is nowhere to be found.

Instead, I find the Google AdWords landing page, a bunch of articles on other sites about the keyword tool, and the UK version of the tool.  Huh. What’s up with that? (I don’t even see a paid search ad for it.)

Google recently completely revamped the tool and as part of that, changed the URL. The old URL was https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool. Now, when you (or Googlebot, if you are not you, but instead, a search engine webcrawler looking to update your index) access that URL, you get a 302 redirect to https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272&stylePrefOverride=2#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS. And a captcha.

When I look for that URL in Google, I see it’s not indexed, although at least I see a paid search ad for the tool.

Of course, that URL doesn’t show up in part because it’s not a permanent URL. If I try to access inurl:https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer, I also get the keyword tool, via a set of redirect that leads to this URL: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?&stylePrefOverride=2&__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS.

Which is actually the same URL with the parameters in a different order. Although things don’t look much better in the Google index when I search for any URL that begins with https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer.

Let’s look a little more closely at those redirects. The source code of https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
var jsRedirect = true;
var url = "/select/Login?aw3=true&dst=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer&frag=search.none%21ideaType%3DKEYWORD%26requestType%3DIDEAS";
window.location.assign(url);
</script> </body> </html>

Which then leads to this (HTTP response edited to show the vital components for this example):

https://adwords.google.com/select/Login?aw3=true&dst=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer&frag=search.none%21ideaType%3DKEYWORD%26requestType%3DIDEAS

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/um/StartNewLogin?aw3=true&dst=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer&frag=search.none%21ideaType%3DKEYWORD%26requestType%3DIDEAS

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=adwords&hl=en_US&ltmpl=regionale&passive=true&ifr=false&alwf=true&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fadwords.google.com%2Fum%2Fgaiaauth%3Fapt%3DNone%26ugl%3Dtrue

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/um/gaiaauth?apt=None&ugl=true&pli=1&auth=DQAAALUAAAAMl8-Jos-ywfDoe9g9erkG4klYT-fzYde8k9MEQMmOkonqCalB_LbFISNUgDOMGnoAZkaofqL2ZGwAbwAwV8-rQ6dGM9XnEjgrwUJsc9l_S-0NFsPz0om6ExrJSZf8lQnKJkASgaEqE7SGWbCpcMYd_qihOdzJVvGH0P7_jopql3FQJ5vGT6PuazK260Z2hXVAxy3eyEICPHqe7R9LvLrjbM1fHZLgquTrd6dMYIN64iMDKvShFg_rXfjonOCj6jo

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/um/gaiaauth?apt=None&ugl=true&pli=1

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/select/gaiaauth?__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272&stylePrefOverride=2&30Login=true&url=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?&stylePrefOverride=2&__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Perhaps Google has a few things to add to their SEO report card:

• If possible, keep the URL the same when you change content.
• If that’s not possible, don’t use a JavaScript redirect to move the URL.
• Also don’t use a 302. Use a 301.
• Don’t redirect multiple times.
• If that’s not possible, keep the number of redirects under 5.
• Googlebot can’t fill out a captcha.
• If you don’t show up at all in organic search, a paid search ad for the name of your product can be helpful.

Confidential to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool team: If you’re not sure if your URLs are being crawled, check the crawl errors section of Google Webmaster Tools. It’s got this great “URLs not followed” report that may provide some helpful information.

Confidential to everyone else: You can find the Google AdWords Keyword Tool here.