Everything in the search industry is continually changing: Google is rolling out new algorithms, tools, and products; Bing is partnering with Facebook in ever more interesting ways; SEO toolsets are being forced to change their approach; and techniques used by SEOs are continually being re-visited to test their validity.

Yet, there’s a paradox that exists amidst this feverish pace of change: classic, boring, “old SEO” is still what works best.

Now, before you publicly flagellate me for sounding off with such sacrilegious puffery, please continue reading.

Signs Of Evolution

There are, no doubt, some striking developments in search. Primarily the result of Google’s relentless pursuit of innovation (in the quest to seek ever higher profits while delighting users, a balance they teeter on from time to time), the search we see today may resemble that of 2010 superficially, but it is a different animal.

Google’s shopping blend is now paid, PLAs account for nearly 30% of non-brand paid search for e-commerce sites, Panda and Penguin dwelt a one-two punch to short-term SEO and paid links, and we see glimpses of the future in authorship, Google+ and the Knowledge Graph.

The Knowledge Graph, in particular, certainly points to a future far different in how Google may score pages.

Google is increasingly seeking to understand entities and their aspects.

Ranking Entities & Their Aspects

RKG has seen the influence of Google’s a priori knowledge of people, places, and things (known as entities) on Web search results. These entities have certain aspects associated with them. These aspects can be used to inform how a SERP is built, a method of ranking beyond the classic PageRank model of webpages and links.

For example, we know that Blake Mycoskie is the founder of TOMS Shoes, has a non-profit, is married, is a Christian, etc. Influencing a search result for a Blake Mycoskie query is made much more difficult if Google understands certain realities about him, because rather than just trying to shuffle results up and down the page with link tactics, SEOs would, in fact, have to change reality to change the SERP. This has serious ramifications for online reputation management work, notably for celebrities.

Social Search

Bing continues to be the leader in integrating search and social media, pulling data from nearly every major social network in a ‘separate but integrated’ presentation. Why doesn’t Bing get more attention for this? For one thing, it’s hard to change deeply conditioned habits.

There’s another problem, too, with their strategy: no one actually knows if integrated search and social media have value. There’s a lot of interest in the theory, but the practical application of combining search and social media is still nascent. We haven’t seen if the users care. (It’s mostly us marketers who are excited.) Yes, Bing has increased marketshare, but it’s still just a few ticks over 16%.

Google takes a very different approach to search and social integration. Rather than embrace the social Web and partner with Facebook and others, Google+ represents a proprietary “social layer” that pervades Google search results and integrates with all of Google. Google+ is Google, and Google is Google+.

I grant that Facebook’s Graph Search is very cool, but no one’s sure what it will become. Signs point to the potential for a disruptive approach to search as we know it or, at least, a useful tool if you’re looking for single women nearby who enjoy getting drunk and like men. Only kidding…

Facebook has serious data and there is immense power in Graph Search for marketers. But, the powerfully revealing queries one can perform on Graph Search help to illuminate a whole universe of unsolved problems with social search.

80% of iOS6 traffic is hidden for our SEO clients.

Mobile

Mobile is increasingly playing a big role in the future of search. In fact, global mobile traffic is nearing 15%; roughly 20% of our clients’ traffic is now mobile. With varied behaviors based on the device, smart marketers need to be thinking in ever more sophisticated ways about how to serve content on smartphones, mobile phones and tablets. And, guess what, Google just changed the game on that for paid search, while the iOS6 hidden traffic problem is still not widely known by SEOs.

The Old Stuff Works

The acceleration of mobile is actually a very good example of how so-called old SEO techniques remain especially relevant today. The complexity around handling mobile content and SEO is not trivial.

Google lists useful documentation covering three basic approaches. Technical SEO expertise is key in order to successfully understand and deploy any of these approaches. And beyond that, it takes technical SEO to understand when a Google best practice could potentially create a sub-optimal user experience for your site.

Technical SEO remains the foundation of quality, comprehensive organic work. In this era of less is more SEO, our teams consistently move the need for companies by getting their house in order: pagination, duplicate content, faceted navigation, internal linking, mobile sites and site search are a few of the major technical areas needing attention. This is important work that most every large online business can justify.

Panda’s classification of Web content has magnified the need to create compelling, engaging content that users find valuable. While the emerging field of content strategy is new and exciting, the idea of building great content is nothing new. After all, Bill Gates proclaimed that content is the key back in early 1996.

Bill Gates saw content as the key in 1996.

Social media has the potential to drastically change the game of SEO (and with it, online marketing). Social media is powerful and here to stay. However, just when it changes the game of SEO is anyone’s guess.

In fact, links remain the single most important off-page ranking factor for Google (as Matt Cutts has insinuated). SearchMetrics’ study of ranking factors placed backlinks second only to Facebook Shares. While on the surface, this seems to suggest the influence of Facebook metrics over Google’s ranking factors; deeper thinking makes it apparent that popular content — which tends to gather more links — is also correlated with high Facebook activity. SearchMetrics’ conclusions are very much in line with those of experienced SEOs: links are still gold.

It must be granted that Bing’s approach to ranking pages marks a clear distinction from Google’s, specifically in how they are actively using social signals in their algorithms. We’re encouraged by Bing and their innovation and hope it leads to increased adoption and marketshare for Bing.

Back To The Future: Panda & Penguin

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates fundamentally changed the game for SEOs. Panda handily demolished thin content and the strategy of scaling infinite thin, poor-quality pages supported by an authoritative domain. Penguin cleanly discounted many manipulative links. The irony of these two massive updates is the way in which they reinforced the “old SEO” approach so many of us never stopped believing in.

Panda made high quality content and happy users matter more for SEO. Penguin made relevant, topical and useful links matter more than anchor-text stuffed spam. Ready the flux capacitor for 2009 because that’s pretty close to where we were back then, too.

SEO At A Crossroads

There’s a paradox in our work today: what’s coming is amazing (Knowledge Graph, Graph Search), what’s here is changing more rapidly than ever (authorship and rel publisher), and what’s always worked still works.

That’s why it’s called sustainable SEO. Much of the SEO industry suffers from “shiny new object” syndrome, always curious about the Next Big Thing. I don’t blame us for it. Things change so rapidly, it’s a bit of a professional ailment. We just need to remember: the more things change the more they stay the same.

I’d love to continue the conversation at SMX West. I’m speaking on three panels: Getting Ahead with Google+, Is Link Building Still Crucial? and Pagination & Canonicalization for the Pros. Come find me and let’s discuss.

More relevant reading:

• Old SEO Tools vs. New SEO Tools, Matt McGee
• Old vs. New SEO, Shari Thurow
• Super Valuable Old Stuff, Wil Reynolds

I’ve written and presented often on pagination for SEO. Why so much attention on this subject?

The reason is simple: it can be a big, hairy deal for sites. It’s right up there with faceted navigation as one of the most problematic crawling and indexing issues for large-scale SEO. It’s a tactic (actually a set of tactics) that our teams are continually evolving, testing, and refining.

So it was “double prizes” when Google announced the HTML 5 element rel next/prev for pagination.

3 Overall Tactics For SEO Pagination

There are three primary tactics that we use for SEO pagination:

• Classic Method (using noindex)
• View All Method
• Rel Prev/Next Method

Each of these is detailed below.

Classic Pagination for SEO: Using noindex

I’ve already detailed this technique in full, so I’ll skip the nitty gritty. The important thing to realize is that using this method does not directly transfer any equity from a series of component pages to the primary, canonical page. Rather, as component pages get crawled and link back to the canonical page, that equity is (hopefully) transferred as a second-order effect.

We would generally not recommend using this method for pagination today, except for fringe cases. It’s perfectly fine and will not hurt a site; on the contrary, it will greatly help a site that has SEO pagination problems. But, there are now even better methods as we’ll discover.

The classic SEO pagination method uses noindex but does not directly consolidate equity.

View All Method

The most elegant method is to utilize a View All page. In this approach, all component pages rel canonical back to the View All.

There are a few requirements for this approach:

• The View All must load quickly; at least 3 seconds end-to-end. Maile Ohye pointed out at SMX West that even if load times are excessive, if the page can load progressively the user experience will not suffer as much (since content will be viewable on the page immediately).

At SMX West, a few folks complained when I mentioned 3.5 seconds as the maximum load time tolerable for View All pages. The truth is, this is a “real world” goal and while not ideal, reflects the actual load times that we see on large sites.

Just take a look at these ‘last mile’ load times on US retail sites to get an idea of what latency looks like out there. It’s not particularly pretty, but more than anything demonstrates the opportunity these sites have.

• 

  Site latency reports from Google Webmaster Tools

  Our analysis of 20 top ecommerce clients showed an average load time of just over 4 seconds. The fastest site was averaging 2 second load times, an exceptional result in this set. But it was more common to see load times above 3 seconds and well into the 4 second range. While the average load time was 4.2 seconds, the slowest site loaded in over 9 seconds!

Another requirement for the View All method is to ensure all products, or items, that are included on the component pages are featured on the View All itself.

This ensures that there won’t be anything left out of the crawl, as pages annotated with rel canonical tags will not necessarily have links within their HTML crawled. It will also ensure there is a relevant match between what is being folded together in the paginated series.

View All method elegantly passes link equity to the canonical

The benefits of this approach are two-fold:

1. Users tend to love view all pages. In our experience and testing, pages with a lot of products or items all featured at once convert much higher than landing pages with a smaller selection of products. But the pages need to be fast.
2. All component pages in the series transfer their equity to the View All in a fairly direct fashion.

Also something to be aware of: Google will attempt to use your View All page by default, all things considered, when there are no other proactive signals in place. Be aware of this and take steps to control the SEO experience proactively yourself.

The Rel Next/Prev Method

The most current technique for SEO pagination makes use of the HTML 4/5 link element rel=”next” and rel=”prev”. The specifics of this implementation are well detailed in this Google support page, so let’s focus on the benefits and results.

It’s been our experience (especially with e-commerce clients) that it can be difficult to get a View All implemented as the canonical and default page. Merchandising teams don’t always like them; they don’t make holiday or seasonal specials as easy to manage; advanced landing pages can be better looking and UX and content teams often prefer them; they can make spotlighting certain products more difficult; and many other reasons.

Because of these challenges, rel next/prev is often an excellent method for handling pagination.

The benefits of this approach are as follows:

1. All component pages share their equity with the series. What does this mean? Basically, when page 9 of a series gets a link with rich anchor text, that equity is shared across the series with all the other pages. That’s a good thing.
2. However, using rel next/prev doesn’t prevent a component page from displaying in search results. So while these pages will “roll up” to the canonical (or default) page 1, they could still fire at search time if the query was relevant for that specific page. At SMX West, Maile assured us that it would be a very rare thing for that situation to occur. But it could occur.
3. Because of this, an additional recommendation (strictly as an optional step) is to add a robots noindex, follow to the rel prev/next component pages. This would ensure that component pages would never fire at search time.
4. Finally, all rel next/prev pages should also have a self-referencing rel canonical tag. In cases where tracking IDs are appended to a URL, these rel canonical tags will ensure no duplication and equity leak occurs.

Ensure implementation of rel next/prev is thorough

Conclusion & Pagination Recommendations

SEO pagination needs to be recommended situationally (like so much of SEO). Here are my recommendations:

1. If you have a fast loading View All page, and that page contains all the products and/or items included across the component pages, use this method. All component pages rel canonical to the View All, and it becomes your default ranking page in SERPs. It’s elegant, simple, and efficient. It will also best pass equity from each page to a single, canonical URL.




2. If you don’t have a quality View All, or your company doesn’t want to use that as the canonical URL, implement the rel next/prev methodology instead. This method will consolidate signals across the series, rather than concentrate them on a single URL; however, the end result should be the same, if implemented well: the canonical, ranking URL (normally page 1) will be given the equity. There is a substantial benefit in using this method over the classic noindex approach: equity is actually transferred to the series itself.
   
   Remember, the classic method does not directly pass any equity – there are no signals to do so – rather it achieves the same ends by opening up the crawl of component pages and keeping them out of the index and from competing with the ranking URL. Be aware that with rel next/prev, component pages can still fire at search time (although unlikely). You can optionally use a noindex, follow as well to avoid this. Ensure all pages have self-referencing rel canonical tags.




3. There are edge cases where the classic noindex method of SEO pagination is still viable. These are in situations, for example, where it’s important to address Bing consistently along with Google (Bing does not yet support rel next/prev), or when HTML 4/5 elements are not yet ready to be deployed at an organization. In cases like these, the classic noindex method is still a good option.

No doubt this will change again, but here’s the latest for your SEO campaigns. Best of luck and please let me know in the comments your experiences and insights.

Updates: Google’s Maile Ohye has recently published a video on pagination and SEO. Be sure to check it out. Vanessa Fox also covers the details in her thorough treatment of the topic, Implementing Pagination Attributes Correctly for Google.

Earlier this month, we released the RKG Digital Marketing Report with this in mind. Our goal is that it serves as a credible benchmark for advertisers who don’t enjoy the luxury of viewing results across multiple sites with multiple channels each. In our report, we offer our insights and data for paid search, SEO, and Facebook, as well as comparison shopping engines and multi-channel attribution.

We’ve covered the big trends, but we also tried to uncover some subtler ones, a few of which we think you’re unlikely to see anywhere else.

Generally, RKG’s Q4 results are directionally in line with the emerging consensus out there on the higher level metrics. We saw paid search spend growth accelerate in Q4 to a 31% year over year rate, up from 21% in Q3.

A significant increase in click-through rates was the primary driver, while cost-per-click actually fell 1.4% Y/Y. With revenue per click increasing modestly, our advertisers enjoyed an 8% increase in return on ad spend.

Paid search growth on Google was even more impressive, with ad spend up 39% Y/Y on a 46% increase in clicks. Click-through rates on Google were 26% higher than in the fourth quarter of 2010, speaking to Google’s efforts and ability to drive more and more users to the paid listings through appealing new ad formats and tweaks to existing ones. CPC fell 5% on Google though, and that may give some pause.

Increased mobile traffic, which has lower click costs, is certainly a contributor here, but we also have to consider what ultimately enables higher CPCs: higher revenues per click. We only see RPC increasing 2.6% Y/Y on Google in Q4 and that serves as a significant constraint on CPC.

Google’s Product Listing Ads format, which migrated to AdWords and shifted to a CPC model in the Fall of 2010, generated 8% of Google spend for the quarter and, for some advertisers, represented a larger traffic segment than Bing and Yahoo combined.

Even though we see Bing and Yahoo making some strides, our figures for them seem to be a little more pessimistic than those we’ve seen elsewhere. In Q4, our combined spend for the two engines was down 6.1% Y/Y, an improvement from an 8.7% Y/Y decline in Q3.

Our revenue per click was roughly 23% higher though, allowing CPCs to rise 12% while our advertisers took home a 10% higher ROAS. Click-through rates did improve on Bing and Yahoo, but not to the same extent as we saw on Google.

At least part of the problem for Bing and Yahoo is a continuing decline in traffic from its search partners. Last fourth quarter, Bing and Yahoo generated over 28% of their traffic from partners, but that has fallen steadily to 21% in Q4 2011. This helps advertiser revenue per click, but if adCenter is unable to deliver much additional ad inventory for subsequently raised bids, we see our ROAS increase, rather than volume.

It’s important to point out that we are now comparing to post-Search Alliance numbers and, given that the Alliance appeared to hurt Yahoo traffic at the time, we would expect a growth rate improvement for that reason alone.

Also, there may be some upside to these numbers as our analysis factored out brand keyword performance to limit the impact of extrinsic variables like offline media buys. Unfortunately for advertisers, we saw brand CPCs soar on Bing and Yahoo.

In the end, we see Google increasing its dominance it paid search, taking nearly 87% of clicks. On the organic side, we see Google with an 84% share, giving us all a couple more reasons to scratch our heads at comScore’s figures. Google is losing some of its advantage in CPCs commanded, but again, mobile is factor here and Bing and Yahoo have almost no mobile share to speak of.

Speaking of mobile, by the end of the quarter we saw traffic from smartphones and tablets generating over 14% of paid clicks, but for the entire quarter, mobile share was just under 10%. This was right in line with our organic search figures which also pegged mobile at 10%.

Tablets are the major driver here — even though the “mobile” moniker may be inappropriate for them — and we saw tablets overtake smartphones in December. The iPad remained dominant with a Google-esque 88% share of PPC tablet traffic, but the Kindle Fire was able to carve out a solid niche for itself with nearly 4% of tablet traffic after Christmas.

While Facebook garnered increased attention and budget dollars from marketers, it largely remained a growth opportunity given the sheer scale of its traffic and its grasp on its users’ time online.

For our SEO clients, Facebook generated a little under 4% of referral traffic in Q4. Those running Facebook ads found that they were able to generate an average of 90% of their unique impressions on Facebook from paid activity.

As we move deeper into 2012, the importance of social media, particularly to SEO, looks like it will only grow by leaps and bounds. Google’s Search Plus update may have been as controversial as it was significant, but don’t expect Google to back down on this one, and if they can finally play nice with Facebook and Twitter, things will really get interesting.

On the paid search side, we are seeing the major Q4 trends continuing into the new year with strong spend growth fueled by CTRs giving advertisers a solid return on their investment.

Fundamentally, pagination is an interface problem. A computer should have no problem processing hundreds (if not thousands) of items on a single URL. But people can’t read that much stuff, and long scrolling pages can be a poor user experience.

Here’s where user experience and search engines have a face off, and the user wins: enter pagination.

Historically, we have handled this problem several different ways. Like so much with SEO, the specific implementation depends on a number of factors. We typically use a combination of the following tools:

• rel=”canonical” tags
• meta robots noindex
• parameter handling tools
• robots.txt (rarely, it’s a sledgehammer)
• making pages unique (title, meta description, URL)

Today we can add to this toolset:

• rel=”next”, rel=”prev”

One area that has changed recently is our understanding (through testing, and messaging from Google) of how crawlers interact with pages tagged with rel canonical. Quoting from my article about Maximizing SEO Product Visibility,

“We have traditionally operated on the assumption that URLs annotated with rel canonical wouldn’t be fully crawled. In other words, links within pages wouldn’t be followed, anchor text and PageRank would not be passed, and the URL would simply be ‘soft 301′d’ to its canonical target. However, that may change based on the latest information from Matt Cutts. …

“Cutts recently said that links on pages annotated with rel canonical would still be crawled, based on the overall PageRank of the URL, among other factors. From this information, it appears rel canonical is a totally separate (i.e., distinct) process from crawling. …

“There is a fairly big ramification of this in how pagination is treated. Our methods for handling it typically employ ‘noindex, follow’ on paginated URLs (2, 3, 4, etc.), and no use of rel canonical except to self-reference in cases of duplicate URLs; certainly, no use of rel canonical to reference page 1, since that would prevent links on deeper pages to get crawled.”

No doubt some of that may now change with the introduction of rel next and prev. In fact, we’ve already begun testing use of rel canonical in concert with meta noindex.

Background On SEO & Pagination

Issues with pagination seem to occur most frequently on e-commerce sites, although the problem can pop up on publishing and information sites, too. Typically, we recommended companies default to their “View All” page for visitors. We’ve seen time and again that customers shopping online want to see all the inventory in front of them, at once.

This is why well-crafted search result pages perform so strongly and usually have a conversion rate that surpasses category landing pages with copy, images and more formalized layout. I was happy to see Google echo this advice recently when they announced their preference for View All pages in search results.

However, clients don’t always like this recommendation. First, it can cause latency, especially on large sites with hundreds (if not thousands) of products or items in a category. Second, merchandising and political interests are at play.

Having control over which products are featured on a category are important to these folks, and in some ways, the “View All” takes away this control, making it more of a level playing field for the products rendered. As always with SEO, the business needs take precedence, and recommendations must be catered to the specific situation.

Our Approach For SEO Pagination Problems

Now that rel=next and rel=prev are supported (which is awesome), our testing has begun. We don’t yet know how well this is working, but we will soon. In the meantime, we’re continuing to recommend the following strategy:

1. Create a View All page (it isn’t necessary to make this the default view)
2. Link to the View All from category- and product-level URLs. Messaging can be simple, something such as “view all products.”
3. Here’s where we differ from Google: add a “meta noindex, follow” to the View All and all the pagination URLs. This effectively pulls them from the indices. (Note: We may revisit this strategy and modify it based on the success of rel next/prev and Google’s desire to feature View All URLs in their indices.) Additionally, add rel=”canonical” annotations to these URLs.
4. Ensure paginated URLs are made unique: URL, page title and meta description. Why? Because this helps differentiate them and send quality signals. Google should then give more weight to the pages (and their links) if not only the content (e.g. the products listed) is unique, but also the structure of the pages.
5. Add the View All and the paginated URLs to your XML sitemaps to ensure crawling. These can be removed after a period of time.

Our SEO solution for pagination, category and product level.

Our SEO solution for pagination, product or item level.

This has worked very well for our clients. The result is that the default category URL (in essence, page 1) ends up ranking best for its targeted terms. Potential duplication is solved, and extra pages are removed from the indices, keeping things clean.

There are potential downsides, too. For one, pages annotated with meta noindex still need to be crawled, so it does nothing for crawl efficiency on very large sites. The second problem is that, with rel next/prev, this strategy (while successful so far) probably will need a refresh.

Finally, there is some concern that using meta noindex and rel=”canonica”l in tandem could cause issues, since the two signals are technically in conflict. Meta rel canonical says, “Soft 301 this to the canonical version and pass all scoring factors.” Meta noindex says, “Crawl this but don’t feature it in search results.”

However, judging by Cutts’ recent comments, those processes are actually separate and distinct. Therefore, they shouldn’t be in conflict. We’ll keep testing.

What are you seeing out there? I look forward to your comments and experiences.

I often hear questions about the brass tacks of search marketing campaigns: how is reporting handled? What happens when we engage, how does the on-boarding process work? When can we expect to see all of our #1 rankings? (Wish I was kidding about the last one!)

There is no right way to on-board a new SEO client (I’ll focus on SEO exclusively), but there are certainly best practices and procedures that we’ve learned and evolved over years of doing this stuff. Bringing a new client on board, especially during the kick-off call – is a prime opportunity that is often squandered or minimized by SEO teams.

It’s understandable: on the agency side, new clients are on-boarded regularly. But on the client side, the process can seem strange, confusing, and awkward. It’s yet another difference between agency and in-house roles.

The on-boarding process is designed to build expectations with the client, set goals and timelines, learn historical practices, pain points, and important roles, and establish relationships.

Long-term engagements are truly about great relationships, and when you’re on the agency side, that means great customer service. I absolutely prescribe to the mantra Marry Your Clients.

But, as they say in the financial sector, it all starts on day zero.

The marketing functions that created awareness, the sales processes that cultivated the lead, even the operational functions in accounting, all need to flow and function as smoothly as possible.

Even more importantly, they need to reflect a unified, consistent message. Each touch point is an opportunity to WOW the prospect and turn them into an advocate for the agency, more than “just a client.”

The worst thing SEO teams can do when on-boarding a new client is to go through the same tired, rote, tedious kick-off call routines.

For the important people on the call (normally upper management or executives, along with development leads and project managers), this is valuable time. The time spent here can literally set the tone for the entire engagement.

That said, I’ll concede that much of the relationship is formed more slowly and consistently through the daily interaction of account managers and consultants running strategy for their clients.

Differentiation Through Operational Efficiency

One of the most surprising aspects of SEO on big sites, is that every company has a website (or multiple websites) with problems that need fixing.

Severe SEO issues are prevalent on every site from Amazon to Zillow. It’s not whether there are opportunities for SEO on these sites, it’s identifying what the opportunities are.

This opens up an interesting solution from the consulting or services point of view. While innovative strategy and big ideas are what’s “sexy” and can add real, unique value much of the time, the brass tacks often work best when and where opportunity allows.

I’ve written before about how SEO Best Practices Are Bunk, and I stand by that mindset, but it’s startling how much SEO 101 work still needs doing out there.

Agencies and consultants that can identify these quick win solutions and prioritize them accurately, benchmark performance, work with companies to implement them, track the performance lift, and report back to management about the success of the work, are providing signficant value.

This is obvious stuff, but it’s surprisingly hard to do. It’s startling to realize that companies can grow their SEO channel rather markedly just by getting the little things right, and consistently applying the effort.

It really all comes down to stellar project management. SEO is about execution, not just ideas. Ideas are only sparks – even the best ideas are nothing without implementation.

3 Ways To Maximize The On-boarding Process

• Value the kick-off call as important time with senior decision makers. Don’t squander it talking about analytics access. Save the operational stuff for email.
• Treat the on-boarding process as a fluid part of the sales process. The relationship has already begun with the sales team, and it should fluidly transfer to the client services team. The client experience starts on day zero.
• Smooth, professional operational functions and project management are strong differentiators and provide real value.

I’ve often been attracted, over the years, by the allure of in-house work (in contradistinction to agency work) for the seeming luxury of focusing on a single company and set of sites (or even a single site).

While I’ve never held a full time in-house position (having always been on the consultant or agency side of the fence), my work at Zappos has closely resembled that of an in-house SEO.

So while I haven’t been an in-house SEO full time, I’ve stood in those shoes and looked from that desk chair, so to speak. Combined with our work at AudetteMedia with large and leading companies in many industries, I’ve come to know the challenges for both the in-house and agency roles.

Please note that these thoughts are confined to the SEO discipline and its inherent workflow and processes. However, many of these points will translate to other channels, particularly paid search.

The In-House SEO

The primary strength of the in-house SEO role is that of focus. As a single person (normally) in charge of a company’s organic search channel, the SEO manager must have laser focus on her site’s strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. She must also closely watch a key set of competitors.

In this work, the in-house SEO develops a tuned eye for the SERPs she cares about and the key competitors she’s working against. She comes to know the baskets of terms that matter, the particularly fruitful techniques and tactics working in her industry, and the benefits of head and tail SEO strategies.

Equally as important, the in-house SEO understands the company. She knows how to get resources, who the key development people are, who to befriend on content teams. She knows who can make on-page changes and modify meta data (which might be different people).

She’s either working with internal SEO tools already (especially as they relate to the site’s particular CMS or platform) or is building business cases to earn the resources for those tools. She can navigate the landscape of the company and traverse the oftentimes thick murk of bureaucracy and internal politics.

At the enterprise level, the in-house expert is a master of leveraging assets. Internally, that means training merchandising, content, PR and social media teams. Externally, that means working with best-of-breed analytics and agency firms that support her overall SEO strategy and direction.

The primary weakness of the in-house SEO role is that of myopia. Not in the sense of a lack of imagination, but in a pervading nearsightedness that’s almost inescapable. The in-house is so deeply immersed in her industry, her company, and her sites, that she can’t see the forest for the trees.

Even worse, she becomes out of touch with where the industry is trending. What’s working for other companies at this level? She oftentimes needs affirmation from an outside source. Enter the agency or consultant.

The Agency SEO

The primary strength of the agency SEO role is that of breadth. The best agencies work on many different sites in diverse industries and categories, all at once. They have large teams and know the benefits of project management. They are accomplished SEOs primarily because of the diverse set of challenges continually presenting themselves.

Upon that bedrock, they build a breadth of experience by rolling out tactics and strategies and then seeing them to fruition. They take those lessons and build upon them, continually, and at a very rapid rate when taking their total client profile into account.

The best agency SEOs are thought leaders. They are teams rather than individuals, and as such benefit from the collaboration of many different minds at once, all working on overlapping projects. The agency SEO team is distinct in its size, quite often, from the sole SEO manager or relatively small in-house team. Agencies often have 4-6 people on a project, and that number can be twice as large for significant client accounts.

Agencies understand the climate that exists at companies, and how best to build business cases that appeal to the decision makers. They have access to large sets of data across multiple categories.

When Google makes an algorithm change, they’re usually the first to know, because they see trends reflected in 40, 50, or 100 different client sites. Agencies often have very bright people on staff looking at macro strategies and trends, and because of their larger footprint, agencies normally have more industry relationships than the in-house SEO does.

Above all, agencies know what works, what doesn’t, and how to prioritize various tactics and strategies for a company to have the highest impact. They know this because they’ve done it before, many times, and much of the guesswork has been removed.

The primary weakness of the agency SEO role is that of shallowness. They simply cannot achieve the depth of knowledge about a particular site and company that an in-house person can. Agencies, especially great ones, are often spread thin and wide. Furthermore, the best and brightest minds in the agency oftentimes do not work directly on client sites.

The SEO Consultant

A word needs to be said in acknowledgement of the single consultant. For the in-house SEO, there are advantages inherent in working directly with a consultant. Some of the agency’s strengths are also the consultant’s, particularly as it relates to breadth, keeping up on trends, and access to data. But there are weaknesses, too, particularly as it relates to bandwidth. An individual consultant can only take on so much work, and great ones are always in strong demand. This can translate to the consultant charging very high rates.

The SEO Dream Team

Excellence in SEO comes from continual work, and integrating that work into the very fiber of a company. SEO touches everything. It needs an evangelist within the company to network, drive execution, and close the loop on reporting to management.

At the enterprise level, the SEO manager cannot do this alone. She needs support, she needs an agency to do some of the heavy lifting, to support and drive strategy, and sometimes, even to be the voice of opposition against trenchant company policies. Agencies can be the “bad guy” when it’s warranted.

If I were to construct the SEO dream team for an enterprise-level company, it would certainly include not only an SEO manager, but a whole team of SEOs and a director-level position as well. I would lean on an outside agency, one focused on absolute excellence and with a proven track record. I would advocate for SEO analytics tools such as Brightedge, SEO Clarity, Conductor, or Matrix, and I would attend every search conference I could. The in-house needs conferences even more than the agency does, because it can give them valuable insight into what others are doing in the industry.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

Competitive analysis will always be fundamental to search engine optimization. SEO, by nature, is a competitive pursuit: a site climbs the ranks on the backs of other sites, and there’s only room for one URL at the top. Because of the large amount of money at stake, and the dramatic increase in CTR a top position grants, every SEO professional worth their salt will undergo deep competitive analysis if they hope to compete. It is a cornerstone of the work.

And yet, some companies are tempted to push it even further and engage in risky strategies and competitive sabotage in order to get an advantage.

It is not a leap to say that Google has both created and enabled the popularity of this practice. I am not making judgements, simply stating fact.

For years, Google has pushed for its users to issue spam reports, and recently they’ve made submitting spam reports even easier while proactively requesting them at times.

Some outspoken opponents have denigrated this practice as Google policing the Web. While that certainly has an element of truth, the whole picture is not quite so tidy.

Rather than police the Web, Google would seek to police its index. The problem, it seems, is that Google’s index has become more or less synonymous with the Web.

Old Guards & SEO Outing

The old guard of SEO – some of the early professionals when the industry was still comparatively small a few years back – has always practiced according to a certain code. Outing competitors for shady practices was wrong, they said, it undermined the profession. It introduced a corrosive element to SEO as a marketing channel. Outing other SEOs deteriorated the perceived quality of the service and helped create a market for lemons.

Part of search marketing’s evolution has been the natural rise of SEO from webmasters, programmers, and affiliates, to a more corporate and business-like core. Sure, there are still lots of the old guard still practicing out there as well.

As SEO has grown and its constituents have become diversified, the closely held moral codes have begun dissolving. With this has been the play of upstarts such as Digital Due Diligence who bring high-profile SEO outing to the mainstream press. My prediction is that this practice will become more prevalent in the coming years.

Money & Morality

With a distinct moral component this issue can be quite polarizing, and most of the folks I talk to fall in one of two camps. They either feel it is flat-out wrong and against their principles, or they feel it is a legitimate competitive technique.

For me, outing another company’s SEO practices falls outside of the ethical and efficiency standards that I feel comfortable working in. Accordingly, my policy is to never engage in the practice.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of good, bad, and downright ugly SEO. And yet I have never submitted a spam report on a competitor. I feel my time is best directed on giving our clients the best possible service and recommendations. While submitting a spam report takes relatively little time, it takes focus off the core of what we’re trying to do. It puts too much focus on competitors. Much like Facebook’s ugly attempted PR smear on Google, petty spam reports take your eye off the ball and are not time well spent, in my experience.

As for straight outing a competitor publicly, that is an abysmal practice that could over time contribute to a market for lemons effect in SEO. Additionally, it is disrespectful and insensitive to the realities professional SEOs face.

Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, unless an SEO technique is illegal, immoral, hurts the web, and/or harms users, it’s more or less valid.

While Google has to a large extent made their business interests a moral issue, SEO is not about morality. It’s about money. And SEOs are working hard out there to make companies (or themselves) money practicing tactics that work. It’s still early in the game (relatively speaking), and it’s still in some sense the Wild West.

Evolving SEO Accountability

However, I do feel a higher level of accountability is in order. As a whole, SEO has grown lazy. Its grown fat on links as a free pass to ranks. Its grown fat on domain authority as a free pass to ranks. There are exceptional SEO consultants and agencies doing great things, but they are rare. The bell curve largely features middle-of-the-road practitioners doing fairly rote work and cashing their checks, with little creativity. And worse, there are SEOs doing harmful things and putting companies at undue risk.

Outing, in some sense, helps this. It pushes the field to improve and catch up, or fall behind. But it must be done right. While I absolutely do not agree with the recent outing of the flower industry to the New York Times, the company behind that story writes a compelling piece defending why due diligence is good for SEO. Any attempt to create information symmetry in the space is welcome, but not at the expense of SEO as a whole.

The Future Of SEO Is Shining White

Get ready for the next wave, because it’s coming. Can you imagine a time when your link profile is a competitive advantage, not only because of its obvious SEO value, but because it contains no paid links a competitor can out? Can you see the value in having a squeaky clean SEO footprint that no competitor could prey on? Be ready, because in the future competitors will not only report you to Google, they’ll report you publicly.

Every algorithmic change and evolution of the Web reinforces the value of white hat SEO. Every time. It is the only sustainable, long-term, and quality approach to SEO, if you care about those things.

How I Feel About Competitive Analysis & SEO Outing

My company, AudetteMedia, engages in due diligence on behalf of its clients. However, we follow an ethical standard as follows:

1. Respect the Work of Others. Above all else, we respect the work of other professional SEOs and know it was executed with the company’s best interest in mind. That point of view could change once research into a site has been undertaken. But it’s the point of departure.
2. Never Disclose Competitors Publicly.We are not interested in giving mainstream media fuel to create buzz and pageviews. We are not interested in creating buzz for ourselves by outing other companies.
3. Business is Business. Ultimately, SEO is about business. It’s not about morality. We don’t presume that our principles and ethics should apply to other search marketers.
4. Competitive Insight is Confidential. Beyond outing to the press or in public, competitive insight and analyses are not for outside eyes. It is confidential information to be used for SEO purposes.
5. Rare is the Perfect Site. Most sites have some sort of baggage to account for. Legacy paid links, media buys that appear to pass manipulative PageRank, thin or spammy content, there are many examples.

Conclusion

While I hope that this phase of SEO outing passes, I’m quite sure it won’t. We are embarking on yet another new chapter in SEO, and, combined with the Panda change, it will take many months to see how it ripples across the Web.

“What’s up with Google now, post-Panda/Farmer/whaddayacallit? What am I supposed to be doing for SEO?”

(Usually accompanied with a deep sigh, aggressive hand gestures, and/or grimacing.)

It All Started With Caffeine

“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale.” – Carrie Grimes, Google

If we look back a year ago, when Google rolled out Caffeine, which was (and still is) unprecedented in search, it was this infrastructure change that allowed for the dramatic algorithm improvements we’ve seen recently.

Caffeine was not an algorithm change but instead a massive improvement to the freshness of Google’s index and its ability to crawl and then index content nearly in real time.

But closely timed with these changes was the Mayday update, which specifically focused on returning quality results for long-tail queries. Ecommerce sites were impacted, as were any sites with an architecture built around item-level URLs standing on thin content and separated by several clicks from higher-authority pages (like home pages, major categories, or any URL with authority and unique content).

Then came Panda/Farmer. While Mayday appeared to hit a relatively small portion of the total query space, the latest version of Panda has a much stronger impact, hitting about 12% of all searches. As distinct from Mayday, which focused on long-tail quality and authority (penalizing shortcuts such as simply matching keywords to queries), Panda focuses on concepts such as quality, authority, trust and credibility, and also incorporates user signals.

So why does Caffeine matter so much? It seems that Caffeine, at least in part, has enabled these evolutions in the algorithm, through its ability to index such a massive portion of the web. Carrie Grimes from Google again:

“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”

In order to rank URLs appropriately, they must be in an index (after being crawled and fetched). These are distinct processes with their own sets of algorithms. Caffeine represents a new model in search, whereby the largest modern day index of the web has been created, in order to model the data accurately and rank pages based on content and social signals, as well as the PageRank equation signals Google has built its search engine upon.

What Does This Mean For SEO?

It has been common practice for many years to monitor overall site indexing in each of the major engines (mostly focusing on Google, naturally). Sites that weren’t being indexed deeply would need specific tactics to push that number up, and sites well indexed would be monitored closely to ensure that was sustained.

What’s different post-Panda is that indexing, as a metric or signal, is no longer viable, simply because Google seems to want everything it can get in its index. The index is not a signal of anything, anymore, except that Google has the URL in its databases.

We’ve seen several large sites which were impacted by Panda, and in each case, indexation remained fairly flat while traffic from Google organic search plunged 50% or more.

In her piece on Google confirming Mayday impacts the long-tail, Vanessa Fox reported:

“I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before.”

This is precisely what we’re seeing with Panda, as well.

Recommended SEO Approach For Panda

While most of what works now, has always worked, there is at least one important change.

The SEO model has changed with Panda in that, rather than getting as many URLs as you can indexed, you now want only your highest-quality, most important URLs indexed. Consistent signals should be sent as to which pages are most important:

1. Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals (rel canonical, robot exclusion, internal link profile, XML sitemaps)
2. Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed and well optimized
3. Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary URLs from the index
4. Build internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages (strong mozRank, unique referring domains, total links, are example metrics)
5. Build high-quality external links via social media efforts

Pay special attention to number 3 above. If your properties have low-quality or significantly duplicative content, it is best to remove those URLs from the indexes. Even a site with some high-quality content and lots of thin or low-quality content could see traffic deterioration because of Panda.

The new SEO, at least as far as Panda is concerned, is about pushing your best quality stuff and the complete removal of low-quality or overhead pages from the indexes. Which means it’s not as easy anymore to compete by simply producing pages at scale, unless they’re created with quality in mind. Which means for some sites, SEO just got a whole lot harder.

Additional Reading

• Just What User Behavior Data Does Google Use to Influence Search Rankings? SEOByTheSea.com
• Google Told You So SEOmoz
• What Google’s Latest Changes Mean For SEO AudetteMedia
• Why Quality Is The Only Sustainable SEO Strategy SearchEngineLand

Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal conceded that there are signals in the latest algorithm update that can be gamed. (Any algorithm can be gamed.) What are they? It will take time, but eventually some of them will be discovered.

If quality, credibility, and authority can all be algorithmically identified, then certainly they are based on distinct sets of factors that in sum create signals.

Things such as density of advertising, author names and titles, address and phone information, badges and memberships in known organizations, content density, the quality of a site’s link profile, maybe even W3C compliance (although that’s a stretch) are all potential areas to investigate. This advice is not just for the gamers, these are areas where high-quality, white-hat SEOs should be looking, too.

We are coming upon a graduation of sorts for SEO that will continue to bring various disciplines together: information architecture, user experience, even web design are all important in regards to SEO and how a site is scored.

How a site “feels” to a visitor, the credibility it portrays, these are areas that design plays an important part in, an area that John Andrews was already talking about at SearchFest in 2010.

Above and beyond the granular tactical stuff we SEOs are obsessed with, we need to figure out what users want, because that’s where Google is going. Chasing users, not algorithms, will have the best long-term influence on a site’s rankings.

After all, Google (and any search engine) is basically a means to an end, a way to capture audience share (the users) who depend on search to find good information. I’ve been saying exactly the same thing for about 10 years, and it’s more true now than ever.

What Link Metrics Translate To Higher Rankings?

The conference season is in full swing and I’ve spoken at a couple recent ones: SearchFest, where I presented on link building with Rand Fishkin, and at SMX West where I presented with Vanessa Fox, Dennis Goedegebuure and Tony Adam on enterprise SEO.

Building presentations is always a great exercise, because it forces you to distill your thoughts into actionable, quality information for conference attendees. I love the process and I really enjoy speaking at these shows.

My SearchFest presentation sought to communicate the following four points to our audience:

1. Traffic yield of the URL

While “people” need keywords to find what they’re looking for, keywords are just a proxy for the people who use them. As SEOs, we tend to obsess on keywords… after all, they’re where the money is. Right? Sort of. Keywords are a means to an end, they are bait on a hook. The hook is your quality resource which will attract and retain them. And that resource is best signified for SEOs by one thing and one thing only: the URL. In SEO, the URL is where all the value is, not the keywords.

Ranking reports are becoming even more meaningless than ever. Google appears to be throwing random results back for IPs and/or user agents that appear to be scraping for rankings. This creates a lot of noise and problems as reports are built for clients.

What matters is not the ranking (funny though how Google reports on “average rank” in Webmaster Tools), but the total traffic yield of the URL.

What is the traffic quantity in total keyword searches? How much volume do those searches have, how much traffic does the URL see? And what is the quality of traffic, such as bounce rate (hopefully low), average time on site or pages per visit, and conversion rate (hopefully those are high).

That is much better information than a ranking report. All this said, ranking reports are not going away because there is far too much education yet to be done on the client side. Ranking reports are comfortable, they are what’s always been used to track SEO success. That needs to change.

Getting back to the above point, the URL is where all the value is stored. Page scoring factors and many other criteria are rolled up into the URL, which is stored as a distinct field in the search engine databases.

2. Preserving the power of URLs

This is why it’s absolutely critical that URLs are preserved. Well-aged URLs will score best, unless they’re in News and QDF searches. Redirects greatly hamper SEO success. Any redirect.

Recent experiences have shown a great deal of equity loss when using 301s, and in some cases, a rel canonical tag appears to work better to transfer equity. The idea that one can “store” internal PageRank to be used later with a 301 is what basically introduced the equity rot that is occuring with permanent redirects now.

I still recommend using a 301 when you can. It’s the best possible way to permanently move content. Just be open to rel canonical, because it’s quite powerful and can be a very strong signal for Google at this time. It’s also well adopted across the web. Bing also supports it, but reports are mixed how well they’re using it.

3. Looking beyond links

It’s not only about links. However, especially prior to Panda Farmer, links tend to brute force top rankings on competitive SERPs (when overall domain authority, or the “wikipedia effect,”, doesn’t hold sway).

I took the time to analyze several competitive SERPs to see what factors really mattered when it comes to links: is it sheer quantity, unique domains, page-specific links, diversity, or anchor text? In my analysis, the biggest four factors were domain authority, total domain links and unique domains, page-specific links and uniques, and matching anchor text.

However, it was interesting to note that in several cases, prominence of exact-match anchors seemed to be very common in positions 7-10, possibly indicating up-and-coming competitors pushing hard for rankings using heavy anchor matching. Stronger competitors were benefiting from a more cohesive link strategy that also focused on sheer quantity, especially quantity of unique referring domains.

The below image shows the link profile for the SERP ‘marketing automation’ in unique referring links and matching anchor text. Can you find the Wikipedia entry? Bet you can.

4. Link factors in search algorithms

There are many link factors that could (and should) be taken into account by any algorithm. These include (at least):

• Recency (are links “come and go,” have there been a lot or very few links recently, etc
• Transience (do links disappear after a time)
• Anchor text (how much exact match is there)
• Context (is the link contextual)
• Relevance (how related to the site’s content is the link)
• Prominence of placement (is the link in a spot that maximizes its CTR, or is it lower left or in a footer)
• Other links on the page (what quality are the other links on the page, and how well do they match)
• Trends (what is the trend of links over time)
• Co-citation (what kinds of links point to the page)
• Frequency of linking (how frequently do the domains exchange links)

While the above is a fairly exhaustive list of link factors, in our analyses we’ve found time and again that there are basically 4 link factors that tend to influence performance:

1. The domain authority of the ranking URL
2. The quantity and diversity of links into the domain
3. The quantity and diversity of links into the URL
4. The amount of matching anchors

(“Diversity” here meaning the amount of unique referring domains.)

There are always exceptions, and in fact, every SERP is unique. Additionally, it’s impossible to isolate link scoring outside of on-page factors; rankings are more complex than links. But the result of link analyses tend to show the above factors.

How To Achieve SEO Sustainability

In industrial strength SEO, quality and scale must hold sway. On-page strategies, internal linking, and off-page strategies in social and link development, should always emphasize quality and scalable techniques.

As we’ve found with the latest Google algorithm shift, when quality and the user is kept in focus, performance can withstand even dramatic algorithm adjustments. The name of the game in SEO is change, but by keeping focused on users and not algorithms, negative consequences can be minimized.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep an eye on what the engines are doing. On the contrary, I recommend studying the algos like a hawk! It’s essential to know what’s happening and why. Just don’t build your SEO strategy around the algorithms. Build your SEO strategy around your users.

My job is to bring the best SEO strategies and ideas into an organization. Luckily for me, I have an entire team at AudetteMedia that includes skilled account and project managers, so I can blunder around with a lot of ideas in my head and not worry too much about how they’re organized.

But SEO is a unique discipline and requires very unique project management (PM) skills. Here are a few areas that make SEO uniquely difficult for project managers:

1. SEO touches more areas of an enterprise business than most any other channel. Marketing, development, user experience, taxonomy, public relations, social media, branding, and even legal are all impacted, involved, or indirectly influenced by SEO tactics and strategies.
2. SEO is successful when it is elastic and flexible. Strategies change rapidly.
3. SEO is difficult to track and report on, difficult to monitor effectively, and can be slow to show results.
4. SEO projects can sometimes take a very long time.

In my experience, working on SEO campaigns with multi-billion dollar enterprises, the project manager role is always essential, but usually not given nearly enough attention.

I have worked with some awesome PMs before, and sadly, I’ve worked with some pretty stinky ones, too.

All too often, the less skilled PMs will compensate by using a ham-fisted, brute force approach, even resorting to a generally pugnacious attitude to “get things done” at the expense of other teams.

SEO needs skilled project managers. In time, we’ll see this field develop and hopefully evolve into dedicated SEO project managers in the future. But we need skilled project managers that know SEO, because SEO is uniquely challenging and requires specific knowledge and experience.

Here are some reasons why project managers are uniquely important in SEO:

1. They must take the often ambiguous “action items” of SEO teams and capture actionable next steps.
2. They must traverse across departments, sometimes across departments they rarely interact with in unison (development and public relations, for example).
3. They must “speak the language” of stakeholders and the SEOs; this can be extremely challenging.
4. They must be able to comprehend and summarize complex ideas and strategies in reasonably simple terms.

What are your experiences with project management in the enterprise?

Here are some other excellent resources:

• Project Management for SEO – SEOmoz
• Tips for Effective SEO Project Management