I’m delighted to be part of this year’s Distilled / SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar at Imagination Gallery London, UK – October 19th & 20th 2009. It’s the first time ever this series is coming to London and according to Distilled’s head honcho Will Critchlow, they’re working on bringing the same level of actionable tips and tricks “across the pond”.

If you’re an SEO in the UK you should be seriously considering getting in on this 2 day training course. As SEOmoz puts it:

As always, this is not a conference, it is an in-depth, fast-paced, educational training seminar designed to take your SEO game to the next level. With two full days of candid, no-holds-barred content from leading industry figures, you will walk away a better SEO than when you started.

I think this training series is hitting the UK at the right time. After coming back from SMX Advanced for the second year, I’m still seeing a vast disconnect between the level of truly actionable SEO tips delivered in search marketing conferences in the UK and the more “advanced” conferences in the US. As a speaker at a number of shows, the biggest frustration I feel and pick up from other speakers can often be the amount of time we’re given to get all of our points across. 12 Minutes sometimes isn’t enough. Each of the speakers at this event gets around 45 minutes, which is much more like a real seminar. In case you still need convincing, here’s a review of last years event from David Mihm.

Here are some of the themes for the UK event:

• “Advanced Analytics”
• “Getting SEO Done Against Organisational Odds”
• “News Site SEO”
• “The Right Strategy for Your Organisation”
• “The Limits of Automation”
• “The Rematch” a Presentation Face-Off: Rand Fishkin (0-1) vs. Will Critchlow (1-0)

And here’s the line up:

• Patrick Altoft, Branded3
• Richard Baxter, (That’s me)
• Jane Copland, Ayima
• Tom Critchlow, Distilled
• Will Critchlow, Distilled
• Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
• Ben Jesson, Conversion Rate Experts
• Lucy Langdon, Distilled
• Duncan Morris, Distilled
• Dave Naylor, Bronco
• Rob Ousbey, Distilled

Finally, here’s Will’s “Top 5 reasons to attend”:

1. Rand and I will be going head-to-head in a competitive “presentation-off” as a re-match of the competition I won at SMX London

2. Ben Jesson from Conversion Rate Experts will be showing us all how the techniques they use to improve landing pages and marketing campaigns have added more than $1m to SEOmoz’s bottom line in the past year

3. We have found an amazing venue in the shape of The Imagination Gallery in the heart of London’s West End – near Oxford Street – a treat to visit for Londoners as well as those travelling to be here

4. At under £550, it’s significantly cheaper than comparable conferences and I guarantee you will take away value worth much more than that

5. Fun after-hours events are built in – where you will get more exclusive access to some of the best minds in the industry, networking opportunities as well as a chance to relax over a beer.

When? October 19th & 20th 2009
Where? Imagination Gallery South Crescent, 25 Store Street, London WC1E 7BL

So, sign up now and see you there

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

SEOmoz Pro Seminar – London with Distilled

What’s this got to do with SEO?

Kiva has a very strong, community driven ethos to lending. Groups of lenders form communities or “lending teams”. Here’s Intel’s Lending Team Page.

Open that link and you’ll see that a lending team page links to their member’s individual profile pages. Each individual profile page links externally to the lenders website of choice.

This is not a paid link

I registered on Kiva.org to try to do something useful and get some karma points, not to acquire links. In fact, it wasn’t until my first loan transaction was completed and I went and had a click around to my new profile page that I discovered it was possible to add a website to a profile page. You see, adding a website URL is not part of the registration process on the site. Here’s my profile page.

Would anyone consider this a paid link? I really hope not. For one, the money is lent to an entrepreneur. Kiva.org is a non profit organisation and doesn’t receive money directly – they facilitate its transfer but that’s all. In my mind it’s a simple profile page link, no different to a profile page found on a social media site. The more active you are, the more coverage you receive. That said, I’d be interested to hear your opinions.

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

The beauty of Kiva.org and their profile pages

That “subdomains” button is pretty new – here’s what the the interface looked like according to this post on SEOptimise a while ago:

I don’t think it’s a big deal, though I’m not entirely convinced I know what the button is trying to do:

It looks like it’s a stab at a domain diversity metric – perhaps 142 total inlinks from 24 subdomains to my root domain. According to Linkscape it’s closer to 221 inlinks from 59 FQD’s. Any ideas? I admit, it’s been a long time since I last looked at Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

Yahoo adds a little subdomains button

Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they’re for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don’t have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they’ve essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.

We don’t want the search engines wasting bandwidth crawling and indexing junk pages (especially since the site is monstrous and needs that crawl/index power to flow to the right sections). We also don’t want users to have a bad experience and while the error pages effectively communicate the right message (there’s no results for this query), semantically the pages should really 404.

I started writing a comment on this post but very quickly realised that it was worth a blog post all on its own. I find this subject really interesting in large site architecture SEO so it’s great to have the inspiration to put pen to paper fingers on keyboards. Let me summarise my findings from the excerpt above.

In short:

1) We’re talking about a large website where crawl bandwidth used by search engines is an issue

2) There are a lot of “junk” pages – blank / expired content pages (I’m going to assume there was content available at these URLs once)

3) Some of those junk pages may once have earned links

Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?

When a web page returns a “404 not found” response, the web server is saying the page no longer exists. Do that enough and you’ll quickly see your page drop out of the index of most search engines. Google’s been round the block enough times to see many sites returning 404 errors but I’ve always felt that a large number of 404 errors are the last thing you want if you’re trying to give a an indicator to the search engines on the quality of your website.

Let’s remember that 404 errors stick around for a long time in Webmaster Tools – just because they appear to have dropped out of the index doesn’t mean they’re not being requested and continuing to soak up bandwidth.

Can the total number of 404 errors being returned be some kind of quality indicator to search engines?

Think signal to noise ratio. What if, suddenly, 40% of your indexed pages return a 404 error? What does that say about the way you manage your website? Could a large increase in error state pages give a signal to Google that you’re having problems with your website? Could the total number of error state pages influence crawl rate? I’m not saying that you’ll see your rankings or traffic drop in this scenario, but I am saying that in my opinion, we should avoid 404 errors if there’s an alternative.

An alternative to 404 errors on a large architecture site

Let’s return to the scenario outlined in the SEOmoz post and quotes summarised above. We have a large website with a content churn problem. I define content churn as the process of large amounts of content pages expiring, and subsequently returning 404 errors or large numbers of pages that respond with a 200 response but serve only some or none of the original content, including meta code. I covered this at SMX London 2009 in “Diagnosing Website Architecture Issues“.

Content churn in action

It’s pretty easy to find examples of content churn out in the wild. Particulary in the recruitment and retail industries. Try using the search query: intitle:”expired vacancy” or intitle:”product no longer available” and you’ll see what I mean. Because of obvious SEO and user experience issues, Rand is totally right to seek out a solution for pages like this one:

Solving the content churn and links problem

My advice is, don’t expire the pages and keep the original content live on the site. Of course you have the user experience problem, but you also have a data base full of items, jobs or general content that is in some way relevant to the user’s search query. Build the ability to display related or popular items on the “expired page” – perhaps in the form of a suggestion that keeps the visitor happy and interested in what your site has to offer:

If you’re linking to currently stocked, related items from your expired content pages then the links you’ve earned can pass value to deep sections of your architecture, via the anchor text you’ve specified.

Crawl bandwidth – If-Modified-Since

Has the page not changed for a long time? Are those links you’ve added not changing very frequently? Google’s request header contains the If-Modified-Since header which sends the date and time of the last crawl of that URL. If your webpage hasn’t been updated, then your server can be configured to respond with a 304 not modified response, and all of that crawl bandwidth is saved for another page. If you have a lot of indexed URLs, this could save a fortune in bandwidth costs!

More on If-Modified-Since

If-Modified-Since (Conditional Get) has been ably covered in the SEO, PHP developers and ASP .net developers blogosphere. Here are some resources to find out more:

Http/1.1 Definition at W3.org

Save bandwidth costs: Dynamic pages can support If-Modified-Since – Sebastians Pamphlets

Patrick Sexton at SEOish.com explains: What is a If-Modified-Since HTTP Header?

Google asking us to “make sure” the response is implemented in their Webmaster Guidelines

Conditional GET and ETag implementation for ASP.NET by J.A. García Barceló

The HttpWebRequest.IfModifiedSince Property – the .net Framework class library that Gets or sets the value of the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.

Implementing HTTP 304: Not Modified in PHP

This should keep your development team happy for a while. Good luck!

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

Using If-Modified-Since and better expired content to avoid 404’s

Formatting the drive didn’t remove the app, though eventually I discovered how to remove the U3 Launchpad software from my Sandisk USB drive. In case you don’t need the software either, here’s how:

1) Open the Launchpad menu, and click “Settings”. You need to select the “U3 Launchpad settings” option:

2) Select the “Uninstall” option in the left hand navigation and click “Uninstall U3 Launchpad”

3) Select the restore files option (unless you want to completely wipe the drive)

4) Click “Next”

5) The uninstaller begins the format process

6) And that’s it!

All done, and a remarkably easy process once you realise that the easiest way to remove this software is allow it to run…

Want to re-install U3? I can’t come up with a single reason why you’d want to do this but just in case, Sandisk’s site gives the following advice:

SanDisk’s U3 website features a U3 Launchpad Installer utility that you can use to re-install the U3 Launchpad on the Cruzer smart drive. (http://www.sandisk.com/Retail/DriverDownloads.aspx)

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

How to remove the Sandisk U3 Launchpad

To ease myself back into blogging (and to provide some traffic dropping, Google page penalty based entertainment for SEOgadget readers) here’s the story on what happened:

Comparing the first half of June to the last half of May, overall traffic on the site had dropped by 4.52%.

This was pretty disappointing so I drilled down a little deeper by traffic source, showing a decrease in search engine traffic as the main culprit:

The great thing about Google analytics is how quickly and easily you can drill down to the specifics. Most of us use Google Analytics every day but it’s often only until something a bit unpleasant happens to your site that you really appreciate the beauty of this (free) software.

Drilling down to the keyword level I quickly found the culprit:

Those Virtualbox keywords are from the top of the tail generated by a guide to installing Virtualbox guest additions. “Virtualbox guest additions” is was  my 2nd most popular keyword generating 1500 visits in May 2009. So what was going on?

Comment spam, missed by Akismet. Don’t get me wrong, I think Akismet is amazing, but it can miss some types of comment spam. It’s probably my fault for not adding a verification or a CAPTCHA to my comments are but I don’t enjoy the experience on other blogs personally, so I choose to leave that off.

Here’s a sample of what was on the page: (The following image may offend some readers)

Those links were going to some seemingly bonafide domains that happened to have some very hacked looking, spammy page URLs on them. As you can see, they were left on June 3rd, at 6.10am.

Nearly all of the traffic coming to the Virtualbox post dropped within 24hours and stayed that way until I cleared the comments on Monday 15th June at 7.00am (ish). Here’s the screenshots of the Google.co.uk results:

Before:

After:

Thankfully, the page was reincluded within 24 hours of clearing out the comments. Here’s the timeline of events according to Google Analytics (and Snagit, of course.) – Click to enlarge:

So, the traffic has returned and SEOgadget is comment spam free once more. What did I learn from this? I thought it was interesting to see how quickly the page was dropped from the index and how quickly it ranked after the clean up. 24hours each way, no reinclusion request needed. That’s good to know. I discussed the issue with Adam from work and we concluded that it would be quite interesting to look at whether it was  the words used in the comments or the links used (nofollowed) or a combination of the two. That’s quite an easy test to do…

Just until the cached copy updates, you can see what Google saw just here.

PS – We stayed in Palinuro, Italy at a little farm called Isca Del Donne. Highly recommended!

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop

Needless to say, the reboot didn’t get very far and we were without any visuals for the whole trip. It didn’t say what version they were running but those errors were complaining about the ext2 filesystem. We’re on ext4 now so quite an old setup. In the end, I settled for a very good book. If you have time, I recommend you read it: Belching Out The Devil by Mark Thomas.

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

Linux running on an Airbus A330

Hat tip – Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

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Robots.txt FAIL

Our Speakers:

Damien Bianchi, Regional Director of Client Strategy, Global Strategies International
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative
Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Inc.
Larry Sivitz, Founder/Editor/Search Strategist, Seattle24×7/SearchWrite.com
Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

First up we have Larry Sivitz presenting “using your head about Flash SEO”.

He opens by taking a poll of the number of people using flash elements in their site, more than two thirds of the audience raise their hands. He then asks who is using 100% flash sites and very few people raised their hands.

Larry began by talking about the creator of SiFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) and mentioned Picnik as a indicator of the direction that Flash technology is headed. His next slide covered a “subway map” of all of the different flash technologies and their relationships. Next we see a timeline of the various technologies (starting with the oldest first):

SWFobject
Flash Satay (Nov 2002)
Davidson Flash Headline Replacement – April 2003
InMan Flash replacement – April 2004
sIFR 1.0 – (Summer 2004)
Progressive Enhancement Principles
Unobtrusive Flash Objects – (July 2006)
sIFR 2.0 (spring 2005)
SOFA (2007)
sIFR 3.0 (Feb 2008)
SWFobject 2.2 Apr 2009

Sadly Larry ran out of time, but his history of development of search engine friendly Flash was excellent and I highly recommend you work through that history and check out the latest Flash versions for SEO.

Shari Thurow – Flash and Search, how’s it going these days?

Shari takes a different perspective by talking about the “scent of information” – a concept taken from Information Foraging Theory, by Peter L. T. Pirolli.

“The scent of information: consists of textual and graphic cues that facilitate navigation, orientation, and assessment of content value.”

“Which button should I press for the Lobby?”

The scent of information issue described above is equally applicable to search engines. Users start by searching, seeing your site as a result, and people expect to land on a page where they see the information they expect. with flash, that’s not always the experience a user recieves.

Flash delays, diminishes and distracts from the scent of information. Whenever we design flash elements of sites we have to look out for these types of problem. Shari gives some examples of flash sites “delaying” the scent of information – issues covered:

- Loading screens / “skip intro” actually put users off significantly
- individual files (.SWF appearing in the search results)

- Hidden and Diminished flash usage meaning the content you see in the results may not be what the user actually gets when they click through

Search Usability issues with Flash sites

- Cached link leads searchers to different content
- In Shari’s testing, the impression that users have of a “loading” message in a flash introduction is very poor
- Too many things moving in the design creates noise – how can people navigate around a noisy site?

When you’re doing flash, minimise the loading and ideally, don’t put things on the page that will clash with each other. Users want to be able to control / initaie interaction on a site so be really careful with animated elements in a page. Be aware of “banner blindness” – homepage with large images presented as a banner can put users off and distract them from where you’d like them to click.

Use keyword focused text within Flash elements wherever possible, and use sIFR judiciously, it’s meant for short swaths of display text rather than replacing entire sections.

Damian Bianchi, Global Strategies International

“Flash and search don’t play well together, right?”

We know that dynamic content doesn’t index consitently well – Damian’s presentation is going to focus on indexing problems with SWF’s, and he starts by citing problems with deep links in the SWF becasue of hash tags. Flash historically gets labeled as the problem – but it’s an issue for other technologies too – Ajax, Silverlight etc.

“Deep linking is not there yet” – Mountaindew.com – the common solution for Flash navigation is to use a hash marked URL, so how do you get your site content indexed – what things can you do with your strategy to allow better Flash Search engine accessibility? Check out the hash tags in the Flash navigation in this screenshot (click to enlarge)

Flash SEO Tip: Make a site architecture decision – build 10 unique urls that are HTML based to target your top 10 keywords.

Damian recommends creating separate URLs and calling the same flash object using the “show state” variable. The indexable HTML content should be displayed in the <noscript> tags. Multiple SWF files are ok too. Few extra points raised:

1) Unique URLs = get indexed
2) Push out an XML sitemap to those URLS
3) Give the search engines some content to crawl
4) Allows you to maintain the Flash functionality

In house / organisational tips:

- In house flash developers or agencies – make sure they’re upto speed with the latest practises
- Search should ALWAYS be a part of the project scope
- Ensure your developers are part of the initial planning stages and avoid oversimplyfying the IA decisions
- Justify your strategy and outline the business objectives right at the begining.

Finally, Damian recommended the Adobe Flash Developer Centre – check it out.

Jonathan Simon announced that Google have improved their Flash indexing considerably. There’s a really solid post from Vanessa on Search Engine Land that covers this here. *Recommended reading!

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

Flash & Search: How’s It Going These Days? – SMX Advanced

Adam Audette, Founder, Audettemedia, Inc.
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect, Microsoft

Here’s the overview of the panel:

Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.

On with business. First up, Derrick Wheeler.

Derrick starts up with an overview of how search engines work. He talks us through how a search engine crawler finds and indexes your site. He’s using some pretty cool pointer graphics in powerpoint and though basic, he’s an entertaining speaker.

Derrick explains that we’ll be looking at the process below and learning at what point, SEO’s can find problems and fix them

Crawl, Index, Rank, Traffic Action.

1) Search engine crawls site
2) Search engine indexes site
3) Users perform targeted queries
4) Search engine ranks appropriate site
5) Users click
6) Users take action

Successful troubleshooting requires data. Derrick advises us to keep several lists of keywords and track rankings on all of them on a regular basis. Keep the data so you can keep an eye on your progress and use the data to analyse historical issues to resolve problems.

That was a pretty short presentation and I realise that the format of this session is quite different to the usual. A lot more time will be dedicated to Q&A which is quite cool.

Adam Audette comes on stage.

Site audits are part art, part science. With experience, SEO’s get a “feel” for problems. Adam explains that site audits are extremely work intensive and rely heavily on experience. Problems solving is crucial, basics can be easily taught but it takes time to learn deeply.

After a brief introduction to himself, Adam continues.

SEO Audits are part art. Follow your nose and use your experience to find problems. It requires diligence and trust in yourself and your abilities. Your clients trust you to deliver value.

Part science

Use tools to diagnose, undergo calculations and watch for set factors in your work. Adam presents an entire checklist (there are at least 50 different bullets on this slide).

A framework for site audits:

On page

• domains
• sections and categories
• pages
• media

Off page

• Backlinks
• Social media signals
• Cache dates, indexed pages
• Toolbar pagerank

Marketleap has a tool that shows historical indexed pages.

The Big 4 factors

• URLs
• Site architecture and navigation
• Product level pages
• Site latency (page load times – slow = bad user experience!)

What about deliveragbles?

• Summarise
• Keep it prioritised
• Keep it actionable
• Build in follow up – roadmap your next steps
• “Sizzle” matters – presentation, your work must look professional and authoritative

Adam shows us a screenshot of an audit document with an executive summary covering off all of the problems identified, explaining the problems and summarising the impact of each issue. Typically site audits are large documents that

Some cool tools

• Google searches (eg: inurl: site: etc). Use screenshots of Google SERPs to explain the problems you find
• Use Lynx and SEO-browser.com to see the site the way a search engine crawler does
• “charles” is a latency proxy so you can analyse the performance / page load and response times – (Fiddler for Windows is the same thing)
• Yslow with Firebug
• Check out these Firefox plugins for SEO
• Wave toolbar for accessibility monitoring
• Wget, Linkscape and Audette Media’s Free SEO diagnostics tool (log file based)
• SEMrush

Vanessa comes back on and mentions the IIS SEO Toolkit – check it out. Vanessa begins her presentation.

You really have to dive in to cover off all of your potential issues to find the problem. Vanessa presents a flow chart looking at the process she follows.

Some cool tips links from Vanessa:

• Jane and Robot have checklists and SEO tools. Check out Vanessa’s site here.
• Firefox SEO tools list (already covered above)
• do you really have a problem? Checks like indexed pages might not necessarily highlight a problem.
• Take a benchmark of your top 10 queries and use rankchecker to keep an eye on their positions (keep the ranking URL in the data)
• Use Apache log analyser to see how search engine crawlers are working through your site. Categorise your pages together.
• Latency is not a rankings factor but it is a crawl factor. Check your latency and keep your site page load time low.

Jane covered the common issues you’ll come across with discoverable links in Flash and Ajax based sites. Use Google Webmaster tools to check for problems. She (very quickly) worked through a URL structure checklist, a canonicalisation checklist and a crawl efficiency checklist – she worked through those pages so fast I could barely get round to even reading them! Hopefully Vanessa will publish the list on her blog. Very inspiring idea and I guess the only feedback I can give you in this post is sit down and construct those lists and develop them as you carry out site audits.

Submit multiple sitemaps arranged by category (eg products) and use Google webmaster tools “number of indexed pages” as a more accurate way of getting a sense of how well your site sections are indexed. That’s a nice tip!

Vanessa rounds up with some advice on how to submit a reinclusion request. Don’t file for reinclusion until you’ve actually fixed the issue!

Sometimes you have to look at the SERPs and see what’s there. How are you displaying in the search results?

Q&A

Vanessa took a question about the <noframes> and <noscript>. Vanessa recomended we read this post on Search Engine Land.

Nofollows – an attendee mentioned the problem that Google is advising webmasters to not use nofollow but the SEO speakers are recommending it’s use. Vanessa suggests you “could” use nofollows but wants to check in with Matt before giving her full answer. The background on this is it was a nofollow question on shopping cart URLS. Maile stepped in on this and said that it’s better to disallow urls with robots.txt such as shopping cart URLs that evolve as customers add products rather than using a rel=”nofollow”.

Derrick comes back on stage to discuss Microsoft.com “taming the MSCOM Beast” and gives us a 3 tier framework (components of SEO) – Authority, Content, Structure. He mentioned he may add a fourth tier covering the organisational aspect of SEO.

The biggest challenge for Derrick at Microsoft.com is site structure. He identified his central theme as crawler efficiency. Microsoft have billions of indexed URLs and run at least 10 different content management systems. At this scale, the problems faced are huge. If one CMS has a spider trap, Google might only crawl 1 billion URLs, not 1.4 billion (I’m amazed at the size of their site).

Derrick presented the Microsoft.com SEO framework – a structured diagram encompassing the prioritised order of seo initiatives, programs, and a measurement framework.

Site wide SEO initiatives at Microsoft

1) Duplicate and undesirable pages (billions of pages)
2) Excessive use of redirecst (40% of their urls internally redirect)
3) Improper error handling eg responding with a 200 when it’s actually a 404
4) Structure of subsidiary content – eg: microsoft.com/australia, microsoft.com/en/australia
5) Low quality page titles and meta tags

Microsoft have an incredible framework to manage their site but Derrick discussed that the biggest challenge is getting recomendations actually implemented. 50% of their recomendations don’t get through.

This was a brilliant presentation and it was genuinely tough keeping up with all of the info covered. I recomend you check out Lisa’s site to pull together her notes too!

Post from Richard Baxter's SEOgadget.

Conducting An SEO Audit To Troubleshoot Problems – SMX Advanced

Danny introduces Matt with a brief background and introduction “spam police” and we begin… Matt begins by taking off his t-shirt to reveal a Matt Cutts / Not Matt cuts pair of t-shirts. Cool.

Image credit: Daryl Quenet (thanks Daryl!)

You&A starts out with Matt mentioning the linkbuilding panel and Hamlet’s comments on looking for Google crawl rate as an indicator of the value of a page.

1) How can you tell if you have a Google Penalty

We have different kinds of penalty which you can be informed about on Google Webmaster Tools. If you see a sustained drop in rankings or your site drops out completely, there are lots of forums to get involved with (inc Google Webmaster Central) where you can find out more about how to solve your problem.

Sometimes Google will tell you a little more about a penalty if you reach out to them via the forums in WM central. It’s tough to educate the people who are breaking the rules by accident without helping the spammers, but Google do try.

2) Pagerank sculpting

Why does Google not support this? What Matt / Maile tried to communicate earlier is that you can use the rel=”nofollow” attribute, but you can spend far better time working in other areas of your site. if you have 5 nofollowed links on a page with 10, the old theory that the 5 followed links get the value is less effective thesedays, but you won’t get a penalty. If you’re using nofollow, it’s almost like a band aid. Think about how to link within your site more effectively.

Why is it less effective now? (Danny). Youtube was mentioned because a lot of internal links in Youtube were / are nofollowed. We didn’t want videos featured on the homepage to receive the incredible levels of pagerank from the Youtube homepage and that was a deliberate choice by Google.

What was the change? Initially if you had the 5/10 links scenario, the spread of pagerank was easy to predict. That’s not the case now because of feedback from the “crawl / index” team.

3) How does Google look at buying suspect links and sending them to competitors?

The algorithm is designed so that as much as possible, one person can’t Googlebowl another webmaster by buying bad links and sending them to competitors.

4) The SEOmoz page penalty (CSS penalty) was cited as an example of a penalty – how do you use display;none and ajax

When you write mouseover code, try to avoid custom solutions so the algorithm can recognise and handle common CSS / Javascript text elements that are perfectly white hat. If you want to be safe, look at what other sites are doing and follow those types of solution. Use code libraries and a common approach to your code and you shouldn’t accidentally trip any penalties.

5) Back to PR sculpting – where is the lost pagerank going?

Think of pagerank “evaporating” when you nofollow a link. Think about your architecture and use nofollow sparingly. If you’re a power user then do nofollow register links because the URL isn’t wanted in the Google index. The ways we determine our opinion of pagerank are definitely more sophisticated now compared to the past.

6) Is there any harm in receiving a penalty from an old domain when you 301 it to a new one?

They wouldn’t necessarily pass the old pagerank / authority when something like this happens. When Google detect an effort to clean up dirty old links that can really help in a reconsideration request.You could even tell Google about this by sending in hyperlinks to files showing what you’re trying to do.

7) You want to theme your site in different ways. Does it make sense to link internally with nofollowed links when the themes are unrelated?

No. There’s no reason to add a nofollow in this situation. It’s better to nofollow UGC or content you can’t editorially vouch for.

Duplicate content eg a jobs site. If they syndicate the content out to 10 other sites, do Google penalise that kind of activity?

Within a site, don’t worry about a duplicate content penalty. externally is a different situation. With co-branding, the front end content is essentially the same, you’d be amazed at how many users complain about this when they find the same sites duplicated. Ask yourself why and how you’re adding value to the users. When a user searches and find “cookie cutter” sites, users don’t like it. Typically Google will try to display one good result and then introduce diversity. If the duplicate content issue is bad enough, Google will act accordingly.

9) Paid links – if you have paid links, you should nofollow or use javascript onclicks.

As Googlebot got smarter, javascript started indexing Javascript so Google stopped advising people to use javascript to block paid links. You can use a rel=”nofollow” attribute inside the javascript which is a good way to prevent any paid links penalties. You could redirect via a domain blocked in robots.txt too.

10) Danny examined some of the issues with paid links such as sponsored web cams (Techcrunch) and mentions from authoritative sites to enhance rankings. At this point, my PC ran out of juice so I missed the answer.

Matt did mention this quote from the FTC Guidelines concerning Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising:

§255.5 Disclosure of material connections.

When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience) such connection must be fully disclosed.

So the jist of this message was, that a link should be disclosed if there’s a value in the exchange of a link. His advise was (on a widget / contest example) was don’t make it mandatory to link or receive a link to take part. People choose to link to you because they link your content. do your work so people want to link to you rather than designing content for links.

11) Michael raised a website where he was asked to nofollow links because of the nature of exchange of the products on the site. The Android issue was raised too.

There are lots of people who want their products to be reviewed, the difference is doing it for links rather than just giving a product away because (in this case) Google wanted developers to use their development kit on the Android phone.

12) Dullest.com (What’s up)

Matt wanted to try out a new web host because of traffic / hosting problems. It was a Digg test. Matt 302 redirected his site while he was testing that the new host stood up to Digg’s front page. Matt expected his traffic to plummet but what happened was the rankings went down a little and the traffic dropped by about 25%. Matt was amazed that the site ranked well regardless and promises a blog post on this very soon. The whole re-index to the new domain took only a few days!

And that’s day 1 covered

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Matt Cutts You&A SMX Advanced Day 1 roundup

Chris Silversmith

Audience Targeted Content – target your audience wisely

Campus Area Yellow Pages – superpages.com

For this site, Superpages produced content targeting .edu sites. They took a regular search engine on the site and tuned it to serve results for universities in their corresponding areas.The information featured in the page templates was entirely relevant to the needs of the higher education community. Some examples included:

• Business near campus
• Where to find free wi-fi spots
• Discounts offered to students
• Useful travel resources

Universities linked out to this totally relevant content – multiple links from edu’s to deep areas of their site. Overall that was a huge sucess and most of the links are still there years after the campaign.

Lots of good sources for free content

Public domain

US Government
State Government
Wikipedia commons
Project Gutenberg

Private domain content

Copyrighted work
Permitted partner content
API’s
Flickr

Chris shared an example of refactoring and republishing content found in copyright free areas of the web such as Project Gutenberg. A fantastic example of this was to create a widget that posted extracts from books such as “Etiquette by Emily Post” and the “Sayings of Conficius“. The widget was then distributed via channels such as Widgetbox.

Other ideas for widgets: ratings badges

Superpages ratings generator widget. This activity created 29,000 backlinks. High authority / traffic sites such as Oakland International Airport!

Lottery Data widget also a very good example

The Sayings of Conficus

Some of these myspace widgets may not produce the best quality links, but they do bring traffic and a valued experience for the people that use them.

Widget do’s

Do provide the widget linking to the same site
Creat thematically relevant links
Clear legal terms stating links are included
Provide layout colour options
Keep branding minimal
Provide easy to install code
Promote!

Widget don’ts

Don’t hide links
Don’t link to unrelated sites
Don’t include ads
Don’t force redirects or redirect to other URL’s and domains

Google gadgets

Yellow pages search for business widget on Google gadgets

Patrick Sexton is the grand master of all things widgets http://seoish.com
definitely check his site out!

Hamlet Batista – 4 very powerful tactics to get / find high quality links

1) Choose Google Cache dates over Pagerank

How frequently Google crawls and indexes a page is an extremely powerful way to decide how authoritative a web page actually is. At the end of the day, pagerank updates so infrequently that using the crawl frequency is a great tool. (Matt Cutts confirmed that crawl is prioritised by page authority). Choose a page that you know has been visited frequently by Google.

2) Piggy back on current events

The phrase “3 words after sex” became a popular term after a piece of viral marketing became extremely successful and generated a lot of buzz on Twitter. Soon after, blog posts began cashing on on searches for the term.

3) I missed what this is called – let’s called it “share opinions”

Hamlet added to the “Search Engine Rankings” debate about a year ago which attracted a lot of attention on Sphinn. Later, I posted a follow up post disagreeing (sort of) with the message in the post. Very clever Hamlet, you earned some good links, and thankyou for the shout out in your presentation.

4) Share interesting video content

5) Republish all of your content in media rich files such as flash, word documents etc. The links are treated the same way as they are in the webpage.

That’s about it for day 1 – sadly I missed Arnie Kuenn’s presentation but I have a feeling Lisa at Outspoken Media will have covered that nicely!

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Beyond the usual linkbuilding – SMX Advanced 2009

Duplicate content has long been a worry of the SEO pro. Recently, the search engines introduced a new tool to help combat duplicate content issues: the canonical tag. This session looks and how the tag has been performing for some webmasters plus revisits other duplicate content tools and techniques.

This was a great session, particulary in Q&A session where Matt Cutts came on stage to help out Maile and Nathan. The search engine guys seem really against rel=”nofollow” on internal links!

Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal introduces her speakers, first up:

Jordan Glogau, Enterprise Search and Business Development gives two case studies: 1800Flowers.com and eyeglasses.com

Jordan gave a roundup of the canonical link element and started by introducing what it is and how it is dealt with by the “big three” search engines. Jordan states that the best use of the canonical tag is to revitalise internal discussions about site architecture. The existence of the tag can actually be a good lever to pull if you want to get your internal team thinking about the your site and whether it’s worth pursuing development on a better site architecture.

He took us through 1800flowers.com, an old site with level 1 load balancing and a great deal of duplicate content issues. He showed us how badly the duplicate subdomains had been indexed thanks to the load balancing. His other biggest problem was that noone knew the code for the site anymore! After implementing the canonical tag, they saw a 20% YOY growth in revenue from organic search. They also got rid of the old load balancing meaning there was one single www subdomain.

In summary, Jordan recomended the canonical tag for old sites as an easy way to solve some pretty serious problems, taht would otherwise require a total web site rebuild.

His next case study, eyeglasses.com had very similar problems. The CMS was highly search engine unfriendly and there was a raft of problems introduced by the sort functionality in the product pages. Jordan’s solution was to always default to the canonical on the product pages. There’s an example of how this could be applied in my SMX London presentation here. It’s too early to tell the results for eyeglasses.com but he seemed very confident that he’d see similar results.

Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia, Inc.

Adam opened with a question – how many people in the audience are using the canonical tag? Nearly half the audience are using it!

Adam stated that the canonical tag has the potential to break things. It’s easy to implement, and appears to work and can be used in a variety of ways. Excellent for temporary fixes. He warned us against some of the “bad” points about the tag, particulary that it’s like a “poor man’s” 301.

Adam talked about his URL tool at Zappos very briefly – the message being that you should handle your site with 301s rather than always choosing a canonical tag.

He gave some product page examples where duplicate URLs are created by sort options and subdomains.

Possible link canonical usage:

Duplicate pages with lots of link parameters
Subdomains, eg: reviews.subdomain.com, www.subdomain.com
Multiple versions of the Google directory (looked at search results for “clothing”)

Adam warned us to be extremely careful when implementing the tag, particulary when a page with a canonical tag references a page that 302 or 301 redirects. Great deck, Adam!

Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

Stephan always goes fast!

He starts by telling us that the canonical tag consolidates pagerank. It’s a great addition to the SE arsenal, but it should not be relied upon. Instead a 301 redirect should be favoured.

Use XML sitemaps to declare your canonical URLs and rel=nofollow the non canonical. His general theme is to avoid leakage of pagerank on your site by thinking carefully about nofollows, robots.txt etc. Conditional 301ing was recomended as a big “avoid”.

Northernsafety.com have many non-canonical pages indexed, regardless of the canoical tag on the site. Check out their site index here. Stephan showed us the drill down process of identifying the non canonical version urls in the site index. We looked at possible reasons why the canonical tag was being ignored. It looked like the robots.txt file was a possible cause.

He also took us through Wikipedia’s podcasting page and gave us a run through of why this result is being ignored.

Scenarios covered:

- Excessive pagination
- Next / previous pages
- Keyword rich pathways. Disallow / nofollow all links that use the terms “view all” or price range links and send the pagerank via the keyword rich route eg: category links, brand terms or product names.

Stephan covers the canonical tag in an excellent post here. Definitely check it out.

A really nice point that Stephan made was to avoid tracking parameters such as “&source=” was to include your analytics tracking strings in your URL rewrites. He concluded by taking us through redirect rules for different canonicalization issues such as trailing slashes and covered how to do conditional redirects. Not recommended especially as Maile is on this panel!

Manufacturer supplied copy can be a big duplicate content problem owing to the lack of uniqueness of the content. Stephan covers solutions for this problem and highlights the problems introduced by consumer review plugins such as Bazaarvoice. The unique content is hidden in javascript so you need to fix that problem to “uniquify” your content and make your thin affiliate site appear more unique.

Maile jumped in before Q&A to clarify on the use of the tag – particularly noting that some people are attempting cross domain canonical tagging, which does not work. She also asked for feedback on how the tag is working, as they take the tag very seriously. Finally, she mentioned that using nofollow to reduce duplicate content is not going to work. Stephan disagreed by saying if you nofollow half the links on a page then the others would recieve more pagerank. Nathan added that ranking is more complex than simply adding nofollows and they don’t recommend you spend your time nofollowing links on pages or “pagerank sculpting”. At this point, Matt Cutts jumps on stage!

Matt says, that he agrees with Maile’s comments. A lot of people did experiments with nofollow pagerank sculpting and he pointed out that the results for that approach may be different now as the search engines adjust their algorithms to compensate for overuse of the approach. Matt said that you can use nofollow on links to pages such as “register” but that you shouldn’t put too much time into nofollowing internal links. It’s pretty clear from this conversation that Matt is telling us that this sort of activity just doesn’t make as big a difference as it once could have. The feeling from us in the audience is that the algorithm is smart enough to understand this type of webmaster behavior and that you might not necessarily get the result you’re looking for.

Matt did recommend that the canonical tag is a good way to go with duplication problems associated with some of the scenarios covered by the panel. A great session overall, where the search engine guys really played down the value of a rel=”nofollow” tag.

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Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag – SMX Advanced Coverage 2009

Keyword Research artistry

I walked into the session a little late, but I think I managed to get a great snapshot of the first presentation. Christine Churchill gave a great summary of some useful tools such as:

Tweetvolume

According to the meta description, Tweetvolume is a “Wowza Made Twitter Buzz Tool”. It allows you to monitor the level of mentions of a keyterm in Twitter. It sure makes a pretty screenshot – bookmark the link for some great presentation fodder!

Christine also suggested Viswiki and finding Wikipedia statistices using Wikirank.

Finally, Christine suggested using the related searches functionality in Google search to extend your keyword list. Use the keywords gathered in the results in conjunction with Google Keyword Tool to get the search volumes available for each term:

Gab Goldenberg gave us a nice case study example by showing a picture of a red Ducati motorbikeand asked the audience to discuss (amongst ourselves) all of the different keyphrases we would use to describe it. A very thoughtful way of engaging the audience at such an early hour. Nice touch, Gab.

Amongst some excellent advice, Gab told us to use SEOmoz’s term extractor tool to gather all of the words a page is optimised for. He mentioned that if you were being really sneaky you could scrape that tool (and auto submit to it) to gather a lot of data.

We also got a tip on using competitor sites for top searches data / most popular searches data. Some companies give away free keyword research by presenting their most popular products and searches on their homepage. Grab those lists and generate long tail and related keywords from them. Nice tip, Gab! also, crawl your SEO savvy competitor site maps to get a nicely arranged list of keywords by category.

Taylor Pratt from nFusion gave us some excellent tips on his approach to keyword research, most notably mentioning the different ways to gather research and insight into how people are searching and what language they use. One of my favourite tips was set up a question in Yahoo Answers and watch the language used in the replies. Asking a question in Linked in is also a solid way to approach this. Once you’ve got all of your replies (or enough at least) – take the language used and convert it into keyword lists. Nice.

Search Engine Land have very recently published a keyword research how to guide, which got a mention in the session. Definitely check it out! shaun Ryan expertly writes:

While SEO is a part of our daily lives, the process of digging into keyword research hasn’t gotten any easier. Yet, as we know, keyword research is critical to any SEO effort. While you may find the process of uncovering and selecting the most appropriate keywords for optimizing your site to be fairly painstaking, it doesn’t have to be. Using information from your site’s search box can save you time and provide additional keywords for consideration.

Lisa Barone has covered the “Social Media & Search Marketing: Not The Same Old Stuff” in an excellent post here. Definitely check it out.

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Keyword Research artistry at SMX Advanced 2009

If you want to build a similar Ubuntu setup, and you’re starting from scratch, here are the guides and resources you’re going to need to get going:

1) Install Ubuntu with the Ubuntu installation guide

2) Activate “restricted” drivers for NVIDIA or ATI graphics cards

2) Setup a Conky powered theme by following this post. Conky is the application that allows you to display the clock, CPU temperature, weather, HD activity and a raft of other amazing things

3) Add MAC style buttons by installing AWN (Avant Window Navigator)

4) Run Emerald at startup (the Window decorator extraodinaire)

And that’s it! I can’t stress enough how far Ubuntu has come along in the last year or so. If you haven’t tried it yet, what are you waiting for?

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My new desktop: updating the Compiz Fusion Installation guide

Readair is a wonderfully simple and easy to use platform with the only missing feature being the keyboard shortcuts offered in the browser version of Google Reader. There’s definitely keyboard shortcuts in the development pipeline and you can keep your eye on feature requests and their progress by monitoring the discussion in this Google group.

Installing Readair in Ubuntu

Installing Readair is really easy if you’ve installed Adobe Air already. If you don’t have Adobe Air on your Ubuntu machine, follow these instructions to install it.

When you’re ready download the latest version of Readair from code.google.com and save the .air file on your desktop. In Ubuntu, if Air is correctly installed you should just be able to double click the saved file and ok the installation process from there. Easy.

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Install Readair in Ubuntu for a great desktop RSS experience

You can see from the link in the top right hand corner that the Google homepage is its iGoogle guise.

I’ve never seen an automatic redirect to iGoogle’s homepage before – perhaps this is an attempt to get more users signed up to iGoogle? Note that Jemima was not signed in. Curious…

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Interesting Google homepage variant

Overall, the session was extremely exciting. Here are some key takeaways from the presentation and some tips I gave in conversation during my intro and the Q&A session:

Internal 301 redirects are bad. Internal 302 redirects are just plain stupid

If you really enjoy this kind of stuff, follow me on Twitter for plenty of (hopefully) useful tidbits.  Also check out these presentations – all excellent from: Dean Chew, Lyndon Antcliff, Patrick Altoft and Ciaran Norris. Finally, here’s a brilliant roundup from Molly at Distilled. Really enjoyable reading. See you at the next SMX London!

Update: Here’s another fantastic writeup from Datadial.net – enjoy

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My SMX London 2009 Presentation: Diagnosing Website Architecture Issues

Doing a search in Google reveals absolutely nothing – the domain isn’t in the index, nor does any meaningful result appear that can be considered relative to the campaign.

Curious, I visited the URL. It 302 redirects to Virgin1’s “chuck” homepage:

Here’s the server header response on the URL from httpFox:

What’s the lesson here? It looks like the creative was encouraging users to visit allinhishead.co.uk which, (via a redirect) would expose the viewer to a TV show webpage.

While direct traffic to the domain is correctly handled, it’s more than likely that some of the advertising will create Google search volume for the domain name, which doesn’t rank at all, nor does it produce a result for the Virgin 1 page.

Using a temporary redirect is probably the right way to go, but before you launch a campaign like this, make sure your domain name has a few links and is in Google’s index, or it won’t rank and people like me will get the traffic instead…

Distilled’s Lucy Langdon was examining situations just like this here. Take a look.

Update: The domain now ranks, literally a few hours later. Turns out this blog post had written about it a few days back but it’s taken this long to actually get in the index. Curious.

Another update (19th May 23:00) – Google’s search results were displaying as Chameleon results up until this evening for the search “allinhishead“. Now, the rankings look like this:

But, searching for “allinhishead.co.uk” reveals a top result for the correct domain.

And, the stats look like this:

Ignore the “head of search” result – didn’t spot that until after I’d done the screengrab

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Allinhishead.co.uk (All in his head) TV Campaign

Want to work quickly through a new client’s domain to make sure all their high authority (or most linked to) pages are loading correctly or are being properly redirected?

Analyse your top URLs in sequence, quickly and easily

Install HttpFox and head to SEOmoz’s Labs area*. Do a query on a domain and activate HttpFox:

*I edited out all the text between the search box and the “Displaying 1 to 25 Top Pages” to make a decent screenshot. How did I do that? Ubiquity. But, that’s a different blog post that I’m waiting for Tom to do sometime soon…

Now unclick the “autoscroll” check box and click start. With your top page URLs in view, click a link. A new Firefox tab will open and Httpfox will tell you the server header response straight away. If you’re happy with the outcome, press “Clear” and click the next link in the list.

Here’s something I found earlier:

The 9th most linked to URL on this domain is no longer live and gives a 404 server header response. Low hanging fruit I’d say. Work through your top URL list for your new client, noting URLs to redirect as you work through the list. Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t always report 404 errors like this, which is why this tool combo packs quite a punch in your SEO arsenal.

Searchenginewatch, if you have a few authority URLs in error state available, I can supply a list of domains you could redirect them to?

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Top Page Analysis meets HttpFox – an awesome SEO Tool combo (SEO Tips)