Lately, I’m noticing the content-related opportunities are glaring. It’s like they are practically jumping off the page and slapping me in the face.

The technical SEO opportunities, however, are often subtle. Then I’ll do a quick competitive analysis, and bam! – I have a pretty solid list of SEO items for a potential client’s website. But we can’t stop there. Nope. Not in 2012.

Today, nearly every potential client that I investigate has what I like to call ‘SEO baggage’. Maybe they were Pandalized. Perhaps it was Penguin that got them. Or maybe both. Maybe it was neither. I’ve also seen a lot of sites that got hit by unpublicized updates and/or manual actions.

No matter what happened – I’ve got to take into account every thing they have ever done in terms of SEO, link building, content strategy, etc… From my perspective, that is a little unfair, but that is the way it is.

Stanley Spadowski, SEO Account Janitor

SEO baggage is pretty much unavoidable these days. You will encounter it, so you might as well get used to it. It’s just part of the game now.

In some weird way, I see this as very analogous to relationships and dating. Do I want to start a relationship with this person, knowing that they have all of this baggage? In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. It just depends what you are willing to put up with. Did I just write that? Yes. Yes, I did. #LOL

If you were to avoid potential clients based on the fact that they got hit by a Google update, you would be eliminating a lot of potential clients.

So you’ve gotta keep an open mind, and you’ve gotta learn how to audit historical SEO campaigns.

We have to go from being SEO Account Managers to SEO Account Janitors - because apparently it’s now our job to clean up someone else’s crap!

The work of an SEO Account Janitor is not glamorous. However, the work is critical. In the words of my favorite movie janitor of all time:

Sometimes you just hafta take what life gives ya, ’cause life is like a mop and sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and bugs and hairballs and stuff… you, you, you gotta clean it out… But if that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, you can’t give up. You gotta, you gotta stand right up. You, you gotta run to a window and say, “Hey! These floors are dirty as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more! - Stanley Spadowski in UHF

That’s some inspirational stuff right there. I have a feeling Stanley would make a great SEO.

How do I audit a client’s historical SEO strategies? Well, I’m glad you asked!

Here are a few of the things that I do when I start the historical SEO auditing process:

1.  Audit The Link Profile

Get accounts with SEOmoz, MajesticSEO and AHREFs. This should be a no-brainer. These sites will let you download so much data about links. When it comes to Google Penguin, you need to know everything about your client’s link profile. That goes for external links and internal links!

Using these tools, download all the data you can get about external links. Create a master list of links and look for anything odd, such as exact match anchors appearing a little to frequently.

MajesticSEO has a graph that will let you see the historical growth of backlinks to any URL. Use that tool to see if there was anything out of the ordinary about your client’s link growth over the past months and/or years.

For example, in the following graph, you’ll see a site that acquired over 1 million links in 1 year. Awesome marketing or awesome link-building campaign? You decide!

BTW, if you’re looking for a link profile audit tool, also check out http://removeem.com.

2.  Audit The Content

To make it really simple, I tell people that Penguin is about links and Panda is about content. If you can’t pin a drastic drop in organic traffic on Penguin, maybe you can pin it on Panda.

To diagnose any drops, you’ll obviously need access to your client’s analytics data. Because Penguin and Panda updates are so well documented, you will probably be able to line up a traffic drop with a Panda or Penguin update. If you find that Panda was responsible for drops in organic traffic, my recommendation is to look at the site’s organic traffic by Landing page URL.

It’s likely that when investigating the site, you probably noticed issues with content. But you can use your client’s analytics data to prove it. Drill down to organic search traffic by landing page URL, and then sort by visits. Export the entire list. You will probably find that a large percentage of URLs got little-to-no traffic in the past 4 weeks.

If you see that 40% of your site’s pages have not gotten any traffic in the past 6 months, I recommend either adding valuable content to those pages or deleting those pages altogether. Obviously, Google does not think those pages have much value. If there are enough of them, they can pull down the site’s overall authority. And maybe that’s why Panda got upset with the site.

Another way to get an idea about historical content is to use the tools over at SEMrush.com. They monitor rankings for 95 million keywords each month, and they have a nice little graph that shows how many keywords any given site ranked for (in the top 20 on Google).

Here is an example of a site that went from 5 million keywords ranking in the Top 20 on Google to just over 2.5 million.

Historical Trends: Keywords Ranking in Top 20

That massive drop happened in March/April 2011. Hmmm… I wonder what update that was? ;)

It’s not perfect data by any means, but it can give you an idea of how well your client’s site was ranking over the past couple of years.

For example, if you see a domain ranking for 5,000 keywords for a year and then all of the sudden in March-2012 it drop to 1,000, you could get an idea of which Google update caused the drop.

3.  Request Marketing & IT/Dev Project Calendars

Tools and data can only tell you so much. If you were hit by a Google update, you’re probably going to see it in the organic search data. That will give you a starting point on that front.

Regardless of penalties, you need to find out as much information as you can about content strategies, link building strategies, PR strategies, social media strategies, and all other forms of inbound marketing that occurred over the years. Marketing Directors can be your best source of information.

Do your best to get a marketing timeline and an editorial calendar from them. You will want to be aware of any major promotions, new products, discontinued products, press releases, media exposure, etc… This information could potentially help you explain any odd data trends.

Also, be sure to request the IT/Dev department’s project calendar. Technical, on-site changes can often cause issues, especially on the content side. I have seen issues where a 10,000-page site now has 1,000,000+ million unique URLs. And it was all due to a small update to how parameters are added to URLs. I have also seen rel-canonical tags misused in ways that are extremely detrimental to organic traffic.

Overall, you really need to get a good idea of any major technical changes made on the site in the past few years. Just be sure to play nice with IT/Dev – you will likely need their help to make changes to the site in the future!

Well, I hope those tips will help you on your journey. As SEO Account Janitors, we’re all in this together. Good luck!

I tried to give Roger (@SEOmoz) a hug. #YOLO

SMX Advanced is my favorite conference of the year. Hands down. The sessions are always memorable, and I get to see a lot of the SEO “old timers” – you know…the SEOs who have been in the game for at least 10 years, which is like 70 years in Internet time.

In conclusion, SMX Advanced is awesome, and this year’s conference was everything I thought it would be.

By now, I’m sure you have probably read all the SMX Advanced recaps, so I’m not going to bore you with another recap. However, I am going to let you know about a few of my favorite moments and anecdotes from SMX Advanced 2012.

Ranking Reports In 2012

During the ‘Surviving Personalization with Google & Bing’ panel, Rhea Drysdale scared the hell out of me by reminding me how Google uses everything in their arsenal to determine who we are.

Who are our Gmail contacts? Who are we connecting with on various Google properties? Which of our accounts are linked? Oh sure, it’s all so Google can personalize my search experience, but sheesh! I’m starting to wonder if Google knows me better than my own family does.

During the Q&A part of this session, someone from the audience asked something along the lines of “With personalization heavily impacting today’s Google rankings, do you still use ranking reports (as a primary metric of success)?”

All of the panelists (@rhea, @aimclear, @aaronfriedman) answered “No.” But then the follow-up question went something like this: “How do you explain that to your clients?”

At this point, the entire room laughed out loud. Because, seriously! Ranking reports are not what they used to be, but it’s not like we can stop providing them to our clients.

In fact, in terms of reliable, consistent data, ranking reports are pretty much worthless. And it’s all because of personalized search.

Two people sitting in the same office on the same IP in the same town can search for the same keyword and get remarkably different SERPs. And on Google, it’s been like this since late-2009.

However, most of us SEOs still deliver ranking reports on a weekly and/or monthly basis because rankings are still seen by many as a metric to be used when judging the success of an SEO campaign. And honestly, how would it sound for an SEO to say “I don’t pay much attention to rankings any more.” Oh, the irony!

Obviously, the next question was, “Well, if you don’t look at rankings as a metric of success, what metrics do you look at?” Each panelist offered their opinion, but I think Marty summed it up best when he said: “I look at traffic and conversion.” Boom. That is some solid advice right there, so let it sink in.

To be clear, I just paraphrased that entire conversation, so don’t quote me directly on any of this. Furthermore, please don’t run off and tell your friends that the Rhea, Marty, and Aaron don’t monitor rankings for their clients and/or find value in ranking reports. That is clearly not the case.

The point was that, in a world of personalized search results, keyword reports are becoming less and less of a reliable metric to focus on when judging your SEO campaign.

Google Plus, +1′s And AuthorRank

During the ‘Ask the SEOs’ panel, every one of the panelists was dropping knowledge. I know it’s summertime, but make no mistake – school was in session!

At one point, the panelists got to talking about Google+, +1′s as a ranking factor, and AuthorRank. Bruce Clay reminded everyone that that +1′s are a ranking factor if the person who +1′d a site is in your circle. I’ve heard Bruce mention that at other conferences. I think he was the first one to state the fact so concisely. But it’s certainly true.

Vanessa Fox chimed in and remind us that, according to Google’s official blog post, the +1 will be looked at as a ranking signal. And then Danny Sullivan said,” I don’t care what Matt says – I see the evidence with my eyes.”

That’s funny. And so true. If you’re not trying to build an audience on Google+, you need to start because it clearly has the potential to impact your organic rankings.

An interesting nugget in this conversation came from Greg Boser, and, surprisingly, no one really expanded on it. Danny asked the panel if AuthorRank could reflect positively on the authority of a site as a whole. Of course it can. A few panelists mentioned the higher clickthrough rate of search results with a thumbnail.

Greg mentioned that he doesn’t even notice the domain if there is a picture next to the result. And then he said that if you wanted to, you could potentially hire a lot of authoritative bloggers and use their trust and authority to drive traffic to your site. It’s a really great point.

In a time when visual content is king, Google has opened the door to using highly authoritative and trusted bloggers to drive more trust, authority, and ultimately, organic search traffic to your website.

Hiring well-known bloggers based on their authority and audience is not a new strategy. A lot of sites have done that for a long time. But now that we have Google+ and a +1 button, there is more incentive to use this strategy, as now it can have a much bigger influence on organic rankings and traffic.

You & Bad Links

The You & A hour with Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts is awesome. Those two dudes have such a great on-stage chemistry, and they both get it. They understand the SEM/SEO game, and over the years they have really turned this session into something special. Honestly, it’s probably the main reason that I go to SMX Advanced each year.

Early on in the discussion, Danny asked Matt about the Penguin updates. There has been some confusion in the industry about the nature of emails from Google to webmasters. Matt said that if you get an email, you’ll know the penalty was due to a manual review rather than an algorithmic penalty. Matt said that less than 10% of the 700,000 emails that went out in Webmaster Tools were related to unnatural links.

In fact, when they polled the audience about Penguin, the majority of the audience had actually seen an increase in traffic from the Penguin update. But Google had to turn up the heat on people who were violating Google’s policies.

The part that I remember most was when Matt said that if you receive an email from Google and you do nothing about the bad links, you will eventually be penalized. Then Matt got to the topic of link removal. He said that they want to see an “earnest, good faith effort” to remove those bad links.

Matt described a situation where a webmaster, who had very little control over the bad links to his site, was actually sending Google the screenshots of his link removal requests to sites with bad links pointed at his site. Now that’s how you show Google some honest effort, right?!

During the Q&A part of the session, I sent in a question that Danny actually read. I basically asked: “Be honest with us…if we get hit by Panda and Penguin, should we just get a new domain and start over?”

After a big laugh from the crowd, Matt surprisingly said, “Yes. In some cases.” Wow. I never want to be in that boat, and I’m really glad I never have been. I’ll stay on the white hat path, thank you very much.

One Last Note About Penguin

In the ‘Ask the SEOs’ session, the panelists all agreed that everyone needs to do an audit of their inbound link graph and clean up any and all bad links. Even if you survived the first two Penguin releases, you are not immune to future updates. In the words of Greg Boser: “Take it as a warning to dig through your closet and get rid of your bad links.”

Well, that’s all I got. I’m already looking forward to SMX Advanced 2013. I hope to see you there!

Editors postscript: updated story to address confusion in Cutts’ statement about link warnings in WMT.

“Just when you think you have all the answers, I CHANGE THE QUESTIONS!” – Rowdy Roddy Piper

I mean, seriously! Google is like the Rowdy Roddy Piper of the Internet. Remember back in 2011 when we had all the answers to SEO?

All we had to do was create content, build links, and make sure our site(s) had all the SEO basics implemented, and we got results. Those were the days, and now those days seem like a very distant memory.

Google is on a roll this year. It’s almost easier to ask: What hasn’t Google done in 2012?

This year, we’ve seen the recent over-optimization/webspam algo update (aka Penguin 1.0 & 1.1), the ongoing Panda updates (3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 & 3.6). On top of that, the all-out annihilation of private blog networks, the devaluation of exact match anchor text, Search Plus Your World, the Venice update, the Knowledge Graph.

But wait, that’s not all! We’ve also seen an increasing number of publicized updates each month via Google’s official blog (ex. April’s 52-pack), and the most recent SEO scandal: the de-listing of SEO agency iAcquire for paid link building. And that’s just the updates that come to mind off the top of my head.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Google killed Google Places pages and re-Place’d (pun intended) them with Google+ Local pages.

It’s almost too much to keep up with. In fact, if I could have a super power, I’d want it to be the ability to stop time like Zack Morris did with his signature ‘Timeout!’ move. It would be awesome to be able to freeze time – just so I could keep up with all of Google’s changes and updates each day!

"52 Google updates in April? Timeout!" - Zack Morris, linkbuilder

There really is no rest for the weary. As Google is making multiple updates every day across several of its properties, it’s very important to stay on top of them. At the same time, you’ve got to do work!

You could spend an entire day reading theories about a Penguin update that you ultimately have no control over in the shortrun.

The truth is that spending all your time worrying about and researching Penguin and Panda is not going to move you forward with your sites and/or clients.

The best way to move forward as an SEO is to create. Creation keeps the Internet alive and thriving, and ultimately, it keeps us all in business.

That being said, I really want to share my thoughts on a few recent SEO news items.

1. Google Delists iAcquire

This is by far the wildest event in recent SEO industry history. Google has never delisted a major SEO agency for paid link building. It sent shockwaves through our industry, and iAcquire has already announced the end of their naughty paid link building ways.

Sadly, iAcquire has been pretty beat up lately, and it’s not completely fair. It’s not like the only thing they do is buy links. Yes, that was a part of their toolset, but to reduce that agency to just a bunch of blackhat link builders…well, that is simply not fair. And it is definitely not a precise description of their agency.

On one hand, the outing of iAcquire taught us all a great lesson. It showed us just how far Google will go to enforce its rules. On the other hand, the outing of iAcquire was depressing because it showed me that SEO’s will come out of the woodworks to throw the first stone.

It’s also upsetting to me that we live in a world where companies will deny any wrongdoing and then throw their SEO agencies under the bus at the sign of any negative publicity. Lastly, I think it really sucks that Google would kick iAcquire while they were already down.

The writing is on the wall: Google has launched a massive attack on ALL paid links and ALL paid link building methods. Many of the link building methods that you might consider “white hat” actually fall under the umbrella of ‘paid link building’.

If you have a link builder on staff, you might want to re-evaluate their methods. Things like directory submissions, blog networks, article marketing, forum signatures, and good old-fashioned paid links are likely putting your site at risk.

For many of us, this paid link issue gets hairy when we take on a new account because we are now ultimately responsible for the client’s entire history of link building. Who knows what the previous SEO’s and link builders did. And what about the link building efforts 2, 3 or even 5 years ago? It is imperative that we get very familiar with our clients’ link profiles.

With Google targeting unnatural link profiles, I predict that 2012 will the year where more and more SEOs begin sending emails that contain the message “Please remove the link(s) from your site to my site.” It’s already happening.

2.  Google Updates: Panda & Penguin

When people ask me about Panda and Penguin, I tell them the short answer is: Panda is about content; Penguin is about links. Another way to look at it is that Panda targets on-page factors, and Penguin targets off-site factors. And yet, another way to look at it is that Panda targeted low-quality content, and Penguin targets low-quality link profiles. Admittedly, these statements grossly over-simplify both updates.

I have read so much about Panda and Penguin over the past few months, I’ve probably forgotten more than I can remember. And really, a lot of the information out there is 100% speculation. However, it’s pretty clear that Panda is looking at the value of your site’s content to a search visitor.

Penguin, on the other hand, appears to be more focused on your off-site SEO and the aggressive use of optimized anchor text, internally and externally. If you were hit by Penguin, the first place you need to look is your external link profile. The second place you need to look is any internal links. If you are using super-aggressive onsite and/off-site linking methods to manipulate your search rankings, Penguin will likely notice.

Further, because Penguin is an algorithmic update (and not a penalty), you could potentially take down a lot of “bad” links, but you probably won’t recover until the next Penguin update.

If you think that you were hit by Penguin, I recommend building a few links to your site with diversified anchor text. Stay away from exact match anchor text. If you quickly recover your rankings, then you probably were not hit by Penguin. Don’t forget that Penguin was released very close to a Panda update.

Furthermore, many SEOs have noticed updates just before Penguin (April 24th) and just after Penguin. Google didn’t say anything about those other 2 updates (scary!). Also, don’t forget about April’s 52-pack of publicized changes. It really is tough to know why a site loses rankings these days.

In any case, if Penguin is about low-quality links, it could take a while to clean up and recover, especially when you take into account the years of link building before you took over an account. If you think link building takes time, just wait until you have to do a link removing campaign. If only there was an ‘Undo’ button for links!

If you think that you got hit by Panda, start investing more time and effort into your content, keeping visitors on your site longer, and doing anything and everything you can do to build, nurture and engage your community of visitors and customers.

A lot of it comes back to usability and value. For longterm success, your site needs to excel in both of those areas. And a lot of that comes back to basic marketing.

3.  Google’s Knowledge Graph & Schema.org

John Cena's Knowledge Graph box in the Google SERPs

Because this is getting to be a long-winded post, I’ll keep this part short for now and possibly come back to in a future post. You’ve probably been noticing the Knowledge Graph box in the SERPs, and the thing that I love about it is the direct links to websites located near certain pieces of information in the box.

Take this screenshot for example. I’m sure celebritynetworth.com is enjoying some additional traffic by having a direct link to their site on the search term ‘john cena’. That keyword gets 800,000+ exact match global monthly searches. Now that would be a great link to have earned the hard way!

Launched nearly a year ago, the Schema.org protocol looks like it will be very important in the future of search. Google hasn’t given any specifics of how or if it is using schema.org markup in the Knowledge Graph box, but it’s only logical that the all search engines will begin looking for this type of structured data on webpages.

If you haven’t already, I recommend planning a schema.org timeline and strategy for your site. Now, let’s get out there and mark up all of our sites!

On top of those changes that they have publicly documented, we are also seeing additional SEO-specific updates by Google. We’ve had a “page layout algorithm” update, Panda updates and even a bug in Google’s system that caused sites to accidentally be delisted.

Now, there’s a Penguin in the mix. Pandas, Penguins and bugs – Oh my! It’s like I’m at the zoo. And a zoo is pretty much what the SEO world feels like right now.

Also in the mix was the Matt Cutts announcement about a penalty for overly-optimized sites. And then a few weeks later, we started hearing more and more about ‘negative SEO’, which is essentially the process of sabotaging someone’s organic search rankings by generating tens of thousands of “bad” links to their website.

That is really sad, but apparently, there is evidence that it can work (although some people predict it will only work in specific situations, such as sites that already have suspicious link profiles). Yeah. Let that sink in. SEOs targeting SEOs. It makes me sick.

If you remember the good old days, you remember when Google would make one big change every once in a while. Rarely was it several major changes at once, and algorithm updates that had massive SEO implications were even more rare. The infrequency of major algorithm updates made it much easier to identify and measure the impact to rankings and all other metrics.

The best SEOs would figure out which factors changed and/or which factors had received more or less weight and then adjust their sites accordingly. This is not the case today. Lately, SEO is more like an gun fight where the dust never settles.

All Is Fair In The Land Of SEO?

Do you see that? Is Matt Cutts launching another algo update?

As I mentioned earlier, SEOs are now living in a zoo, where every day feels like an adventure in controlled chaos. And with ‘negative SEO’, we’ve got a situation where SEOs are basically trying to eat each other. So instead of a zoo, maybe it’s more like Jurassic Park.

With Google’s Panda and Penguin updates affecting so many sites, I’m paranoid that my sites might be next.

One moment, I’m seeing a minor fluctuation in my traffic, and it’s like I’m hearing the footsteps while staring at the water rippling in the cup on the dashboard. Then, I feel like I’m riding in the jeep with Jeff Goldblum as we try to outrun the tyrannosaurus rex. And I’m a white hat! I’m the good guy!

I’m building fresh, quality content. I’m spending hours and hours researching market trends and creating value for my site’s visitors. I’m *not* buying thousands of links on private blog networks. Rather, I’m spending time contacting webmasters of websites related to my niche to advertise and build contextual links that make sense for my site.

I’m active on the social media front. I’ve invested in usability, information architecture and landing page optimization. But none of that matters because lately it seems like Google is targeting blackhat SEOs, but in the process they are affecting whitehats and blackhats alike.

I can’t help but think that there have been quite a few false positives related to Panda and Penguin. In fact, it must be a high number, as Google created a form to complain that your site was unfairly targeted.

Google may be targeting spammers and blackhats, but they are also inadvertently chasing people who actually care about their websites’ value, content, and overall marketing campaign. Google shows no sign of slowing down.

In that classic scene from Jurassic Park, the T-rex chases the jeep for awhile and then gives up. I can only hope that Google does the same. At least give us a chance to catch our breath.

Don't move! He can't see us if we don't move.

So we’re living with Panda, Penguin, and all the other updates going live every week. Sometimes I think I’d feel safer if I just didn’t move. Maybe Google won’t see me if I don’t do anything at all. But I can’t do that. I’m not going to live like that. But I will be smarter about everything that I do and recommend.

So where do we go from here? Below are some tips for moving forward and getting settled on your piece of land in the SEO zoo.

Link Building

If you are managing SEO and link building for a big brand, I recommend ceasing all paid link building campaigns. I’m sure I’ll take some heat for that recommendation, but I just can’t recommend paid link building to big brands right now. It’s just too risky at this point in time.

If you have a knowledgeable, experienced link builder working for you and you haven’t been slapped by Google in any of the recent updates, then you are probably okay.

However, it’s still a big risk, especially when you consider what you are risking. But if you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket and if you must insist on maintaining some form of paid link building, here is my advice:

• Stop building exact match anchor links.

According to pretty much everyone, this is the biggest red flag in the land of links. If all of your links say ‘blue widget’ because you want to rank for ‘blue widget’, then Google will eventually punish you. It’s just not natural to have all of your links be exact match anchor text. You should be diversifying the anchor text, focusing more on links that mention your brand and less on links that mention non-branded keywords.

Don’t balk at links that say Read More, Here, or www.yourdomain.com. Having these types of links will make your link graph look more organic (pun intended).

• Make your link building consistently inconsistent.

For example, if you have a budget of $2,000/month, then you are probably building a set amount of links each week or each month. And when Google looks at your link growth, what they’ll notice is that your link count is growing by the same number each month.

This type of is link velocity is unnatural, especially if you’re buying all the links from one network. It’s easy for Google to notice this type of paid link growth because Google is smart. So be more like a MLB pitcher: throw some fast balls and some change-ups. Don’t make it easy for Google to find a pattern in your link growth.

• Diversify the quality (read: PageRank) of the sites you are buying links from.

If you are only buying links on sites with PR1 and higher, it is easy for Google to detect because that is unnatural. Obviously, you want to get links from sites with PR here and there, but don’t strictly focus on that factor.

Be very selective in your paid link placement. Diversify your paid link portfolio. Go for a range of sites that are big, small, popular, unpopular, no PR, higher PR, etc. Also, don’t be afraid to buy nofollow links. Don’t ignore potential links from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, as you get more selective, be ready to spend more on links.

• Buy a site/blog instead of buying links on a site/blog.

Buying a blog can be a much more effective use of your money in the long run. You’ll get a lot more value than just the links, and you won’t run the risks of being penalized for buying paid links.

• Find all the free links that you already have.

Get familiar with your 404 reports, log files, and broken internal links. Check Webmaster Tools. Look for any indication of internal and/or inbound links pointing to inactive URLs. Look for links that are being 302 redirected to a final URL. Also look for URLs that are going through multiple redirects. Make sure all links are finding their ways to your active pages without passing through 302 redirects or some sort of redirect chain.

When I’m beginning a new SEO campaign, it never ceases to amaze me how many broken links I find in Webmaster Tools accounts. Sometimes the numbers is in the thousands. These are free links! These are free links that you earned! Make sure they are 301 redirected to active URLs!

Creating Content

Because paid links are a little too risky for me right now, I’d recommend moving the majority of any paid link budgets over to the budget for content creation. And when it comes to content creation, here are some of the ways you can spend money to add unique content and value to your site:

• Write how-to guides
• Develop infographics
• Dust off the old corporate blog and start publishing new content on a daily basis
• Build microsites
• Build new landing pages
• Create a buying guide for your most popular product categories
• Write weekly press releases
• Create video reviews of your products

The thing about great content is that it will generate links. But more importantly, great content will add more value to your site’s visitors. Just be sure to promote your new content. Encourage your visitors and customers to share your content and products.

In the end, you may be surprised that you get more bang for your buck with rankings via content creation than paid link campaigns. Also, the lessons you learn with content are priceless. It can really help to educate entire businesses about what their website visitors are looking for, enjoy, dislike, prefer, etc. You can use that information to make your site better overall.

Obviously, I could also include an entire section in here about the importance of being active on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. But I’ll leave that to the social media folks.

I could also write a how-to guide outlining the importance of AgentRank and setting up the rel=author and rel=me tags for all your authors and contributers, as a recent study reported that 17% of SERPs are showing author integrations. But this post is already getting too long. So maybe I can write about that next time.

"That's right, Sam Neill. I would make an awesome SEO." - Jeff Goldblum

In the meantime, hang in there. Be smart. Be cautious. If you can, wait for some of the dust to settle before you make any moves that could in any way risk your search rankings.

As Jeff Goldblum puts it in the movie: “I’m simply saying that life, uh, finds a way.”

As an SEO living in the days of Pandas and Penguins, I, too, will find a way.

Remember that in the end, Jeff Goldblum makes it out of Jurassic Park alive.

So if you’re stuck and needing help making a decision about your SEO campaign, just ask yourself: What would Jeff Goldblum do?

I mean, “Holy haberdashery, Batman!”. March 2012 was one for the history books! But now it’s all over. There’s nothing to be scared of any more. Pretty soon everything will be back to business as usual. Or will it? Dun..Dun.. Dunnnn!!! 

All of the recent Google news leaves me wondering: Where the heck do we go from here? Panda 3.4 is out. Google has killed/is killing paid link networks.

Google also announced recently that they might rewrite your title tags if they choose to. Furthermore, Google is making it very clear that their priorities are all about Google+ and social media. I guess the only recourse we have now is to:

1. Build an awesome website.
2. Build brand recognition, authority and trust.
3. Produce great content – all the time, every day.
4. Implement SEO basics & advanced strategies (on-site).
5. Build links, but avoid paid link networks.
6. Track everything!
7. Test to optimize conversion and implement changes as necessary.
8. Repeat.

Wait a minute. That list hasn’t changed in years!

Obviously, I’m leaving some important items out of that list, but that is basically the same SEO game plan that we have been talking about for a while now. To me, the most ironic thing about the latest-and-greatest SEO news is that there are still a lot of massive e-commerce websites struggling with these traditional, old school SEO strategies.

For example, many of you reading this are with me in having worked with “big brands.” These websites have a multitude of visitors and customers. They get a ton of traffic. They pump a lot of money into marketing their brand.

Big brands are active in SEM and social media, and they have great products/services and, hopefully, stellar customer service. And business is looking pretty good for them  right now. While some of these big brands are going about their business, doing the best they can to optimize their complex sites, plenty of these giants haven’t even heard of rel-author, schema.org, or other new SEO-related terms.

Many of these sites have not been “hit by Panda’. They have not been penalized for link building because they never attempted to buy links. Many of these sites are too big and too bureaucratic to get the buy-in for advanced SEO strategies, so they have never really done anything risky or aggressive (in terms of SEO). Or their budgets are tight. Or their platform makes it “impossible to change anything.” Or the person who managed SEO just left. The list of “or” options goes on and on.

For whatever reason(s), some big brand websites are not succeeding at modern/advanced SEO strategies. And even if they are getting some of the modern-day SEO items implemented, they are failing at various aspects of traditional SEO as well. Of course, they all have an SEO agency of record…because ignoring SEO would obviously the dumbest thing ever, right?

Even if they are getting most of it right, I’m always surprised to find some SEO Easter eggs when I do some basic digging.

Big Brands Still Have Massive Opportunity In Search

Personally, I love working with big brand websites because there is a massive potential for growth. And here’s why:

• Big brands tend to score high in all the various domain metrics: PageRank, brand trust, website authority, domain history, etc…
• Google favors large brands. Implementing SEO basics on Fortune 1000 websites typically yields impressive results – and quickly!
• These websites get a lot of traffic, and that gives me a lot of data to work with for analyzing SEO changes, as well as any additional conversion-related tests I may want to run.

Now enough of the theoretical. Let’s take a look at what some real “big brand” retailers are missing the boat on SEO:

1. SonyStyle (store.sony.com) does not have a robots.txt file.
2. The UrbanOutfitters.com robots.txt file does not list a URL location for their sitemap file.
3. LLBean.com’s category page for Men’s Footwear has over 50 H tags, and the page header Men’s Footwear is contained in an H2 rather than an H1.
4. The Avon shop (shop.avon.com) does not have an H1 tags on the product names on product pages. Furthermore, it appears that the 3 big <head> section tags (title, description, keywords) have been duplicated on every page on the site. That can’t be good. It almost looks like someone has turned off their SEO tags. Is there a switch for that nowadays?
5. HomeDepot.com begins its breadcrumb trail with ‘Home’. I guess I could listen to an argument as to why they don’t make their first breadcrumb link be ‘Home Depot’. I bet they probably want to rank #1 for the word ‘home’, so I won’t say they are doing it wrong. However, OfficeMax is doing it wrong by using ‘Home’ in their breadcrumbs.

You could spend an hour looking at the top 10 brands in any category, and find similar, and even more SEO-detrimental issues. Now, to be fair, most of these sites are doing quite a lot right in terms of SEO. But, there are always a handful of changes that never get made. Why not take the time to get these basics in order?

What Are Easy SEO Wins For Websites?

A few other basics that are getting missed, and that you should check your own campaigns for:

1. Searchbot access to important pages via robots.txt
2. Alt tags on category and product pages
3. Open Graph tag implementation
4. Rel-canonical tag implementation
5. Possible duplication of title tags, meta description tags, and/or meta keywords tags
6. Accidental use of noindex and/or nofollow directives on important pages
7. Correct use of 301 redirects
8. Updated XML sitemaps

To check these items on a regular basis, I use a variety of tools and even some manual checking. Here are a few of my go-to automated tools:

• Xenu Link Sleuth & Screaming Frog SEO Spider I recommend crawling your sites once a week and storing the information on your local hard drive, as well as a backup source. It’s a great way to analyze all of the SEO basics, from title tags to Alt attributes to rel-canonical tags. Having a weekly history of the entire site in a CSV file can also be very useful if you are trying to diagnose when any major site issues arose.
• SEOmoz Tools If you have a pro subscription to SEOmoz, make sure you are using the allotted number of campaigns for your account. SEOmoz will crawl your site on a weekly basis and report any potential SEO-related issues.
• In-house, proprietary tools I use a variety of automated tools to analyze XML files, HTTP header status codes, title tags, URLs submitted in XML sitemaps, detecting presence of robots.txt file, etc… Notifications are sent to me if anything major changes are noticed. These tools often alert me and my team to changes made to the site – changes that often affect the SEO campaign. And in most cases, our automated tools catch the changes before the clients do.

Get The Basics Right, Then Push Forward

The other day, I told someone that I’m an SEO. And their response was, “Oh. I get a lot of emails from people like you.” Pretty funny, right? But it’s true.

A lot of the SEO items I’ve mentioned in this post are easy to check for, and a lot of industrious, entrepreneurial SEOs out there have written programs to analyze sites and then shoot out automated emails with details specific to website owners. It’s not my preference for lead generation, but it clearly got this guy’s attention. And it works in part because a lot of the SEO basics are still un-optimized or under-optimized — even on the complex websites for major brands.

As we all struggle to keep up with the changes and shifts to our livelihoods. I know Google stole plenty of my time and patience during March. But, through the new opportunities and shifting tides, it is key to ensure your SEO basics are still implemented correctly. With a quick review to your sites, you may be surprised at the “little things” that need to be addressed. Often cleaning up a few of these basics will improve your rankings sitewide.

If Google sees that a blog post has a ton of Likes, +1’s and Twitter mentions, Google is probably going to think that the blog post is relevant and authoritative as well as a valuable contribution to the respective topic discussed in the post.

Even if Google wasn’t using those metrics in their organic algorithm(s), having high numbers in those little buttons on a blog post can really have an impact on getting extra clicks from people who would have not necessarily clicked on the link to the story. It’s like a testimonial. I mean, if 875 people have Liked that post, I should probably check it out, too, right? It’s called ‘social proof’ – and social sharing buttons can help you build it for your brand.

As I’m surfing through websites, I’m often wondering to myself: which sites are implementing these social buttons for optimal results?

We’ve all heard of conversion optimization and website testing related to orders and transactions, but I imagine there are ultra-aggressive conversion optimization specialists out there testing the placement of social media buttons.

Yep. That’s right. I’m talking about conversion optimization and website usability testing that isn’t focused on dollars but rather on Likes, +1’s and Tweets. If social media metrics affect SEO rankings and other forms of free traffic, then I guarantee that people are out there testing the optimal placements, colors, font sizes, etc…

Even if there are some websites out there experimenting with social badges, it’s easy to see that not everyone even has a good grip on how to best incorporate them into a website.

So now I am on a mission. No – Jake and Elwood – not a mission from God. I’m on a mission to find the perfect social sharing badge implementation. I doubt that I’ll ever find the perfect setup, but there are a lot of websites that get really close.

In this post, I’m going to walk through some of the most popular blogs and discuss how they are using social sharing buttons in a way that facilitates easy sharing, liking, subscribing.

The Homepage

When it comes to homepages, I am always surprised by how many ecommerce sites don’t have a Like button, a Tweet button or a +1 button for their homepage. We know that those things matter for SEO and for building social proof, so why aren’t websites implementing them on the homepage? It’s crazy!

Most major news sites are no better, but maybe they have a reason not to shoehorn social sharing buttons into a layout that is already full of dozens of recents news stories.

Like with everything else in SEO, there is always a balance between SEO theory and website look and feel.

from Mashable.com

There are, however, a lot of websites that are doing it right. Personally, when it comes to social media badges, my favorite blog homepage is Mashable.com. They have so many social buttons on the page – it’s like they are trying to beat me over the head with just how popular they are. And it works. I don’t know if it would work for every site, but it certainly works for them.

The Sidebar

The sidebar sharing widget is a very important element on today’s content-rich websites. It gives visitors the opportunity to follow, +1, Like, and subscribe to the site’s social profiles and feeds. If you run a blog, you really need to have one of these.

from Mashable.com

One of my favorite social sharing sidebar widget is found on Mashable.com. It’s got all the popular profiles represented: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, RSS, StumbleUpon, as well a link to view all subscription options.Furthermore, Mashable found a way to also promote their mobile apps in the widget.

The Mashable widget may not be ideal for everyone, as it takes up a lot of real estate.

In that case, my second favorite sidebar social widget is the one found right here on SearchEngineLand. It doesn’t feature as many buttons and options, and because of that, it’s not as tall. It really lets you save some space while still promoting your most important social profiles.

from SeachEngineLand.com

Along with the sidebar widgets mentioned above, there are also sidebar widgets related to Likes and Recommendations. Here are 2 examples, one from latimesblogs.latimes.com and another from huffingtonpost.com:

from LATimes.com

from HuffingtonPost.com

What I really like about these social widgets is that they display the current Likes and Recommendations for each article. As mentioned earlier, those numbers can often instill a sense of confidence in the article’s popularity. If the numbers are really high, it’s like I might feel left out if I don’t click on the story to at least check it out.

Taken in aggregate, it’s very possible that adding this feature to a sidebar could possibly increase your average visitor’s time on site by a significant amount. And who knows – maybe that visitor will also click the Like, +1, or the Tweet button, effectively helping grow the numbers even more!

In the same vein, websites like TheDailyBeast.com have also included a sidebar widget that streams their most recent Twitter activity:

from TheDailyBeast.com

If you look for sidebar widgets on your favorite sites, you’ll most definitely find them. Most of the ones that I have seen have obviously been custom designed for the site.

I’m noticing that more and more of them are being built with a tabbed browsing feature, such as the one just to the right of this text. Not to brag or anything, but SearchEngineLand.com has a great sidebar widget that features the Most Commented, Most Liked, and/or Most Tweeted articles currently on the site. Pretty awesome, right?

Your best bet is to take what you know about your visitors and create a widget or two that will work best for them. All you really need is something that will facilitate sharing, Liking, and clicking.

The Blog Post

If you have a content-rich website, you know blog post is everything. It’s your content. It’s the value proposition of your website. It drives your organic traffic. It keeps you Panda-proof. You are counting on your content to be seen and shared, and social media buttons can help make that happen. Therefore, it is essential that you have an effective placement for your social sharing badges.

Currently, there are a few popular placement options for social media buttons:

• Below the headline
• At the end of the post
• Floating/Hovering in the left margin

The Headline

On many of today’s top blogs, you will notice social share buttons just below the headline. In some cases, such as TechCrunch.com and Guardian.co.uk, you will see the share buttons to the left or right of the headline area. These options are very common today, especially on the most trafficked blogs.

from Techcrunch.com

from Guardian.co.uk

Sites like Buzzfeed.com and HuffingtonPost.com are taking it a step further and adding subscription buttons for the author’s Facebook and Twitter profiles:

from BuzzFeed.com

from HuffingtonPost.com

In my opinion, it’s is a very forward-thinking move. These sites are embracing the new era of personal branding, and, ultimately, they are providing even more incentive to their staff to write awesome, shareable posts.

Not only is the author writing because it’s their job, but they now know that a little extra effort on their part can lead to more followers on their personal Twitter and/or Facebook profiles, and further stand out in the SERPs when rel=auth is implemented.

If you take away anything from this post, I hope you take away the idea to really beef up your author information and social sharing options at the top of each post on your own blog.

The End of the Post

Many blog posts now feature the social sharing buttons at the top *and* at the bottom of the post. It only makes sense, right?

A visitor is probably not going to scroll back to the top of the page when they have finished reading the article, so make it easy for them to share by place additional social media buttons at the end of the post. It’s so simple, it’s genius! BoingBoing.net is a great example of this. Their setup is very straightforward and clean:

from BoingBoing.net

Note: For many of the options discussed so far, there are several popular WordPress plugins that can get you started. Here is a quick list:

• AddToAny
• ShareThis
• AddThis
• Socialize

Floating Options

It seems these days there is a hybrid approach to everything. I love it. Don’t like option A or option B? Well, how about we mash them together and create option AB? And wouldn’t you know – someone did with social sharing buttons on blog posts!

Just check out what Mashable.com does on their posts:

from Mashable.com

I think this floating set of social badges is really fun. If you’re running a WordPress blog, there are a couple of popular plugins that will create this rail-style icon set: ‘Digg Digg’ and ‘Sharebar’. Digg Digg also lets you create a fixed position for the buttons if you want that layout.

The major advantage to this social button setup is that the buttons are always in view for the reader, so you don’t need buttons at the top and bottom of the post. In fact, in many cases, this hovering list of social badges can help to reduce clutter.

Other Ways To Promote Sharing

Before I wrap things up, I’d like to point out two additional strategies that I’ve come across in the past year or so.

Let’s start with Twitter ‘Web Intents’. The main thing that I like about it is that it lets users Tweet directly from your site.

For example, you could link a sentence from inside your post, and when a visitor clicks on the link, a box opens up with the sentence pre-loaded in a text field – ready to be tweeted! The concept is really cool, as it adds another dimension of interaction for users on your site. For a quick explanation of how it works, check out this post from HighTechDad.com.

Finally, I found this gallery over at NationalGeographic.com, and I was immediately drawn to the implementation of Facebook Like buttons for each image.

from NationalGeographic.com

If you have a website that features picture galleries, you should check out doing something similar. Furthermore, it could also be a great way to have a contest. Just tell people that the picture with the most Likes by a certain date and time will win. ;)

And to wrap it all up, I’d like to leave you with a quote from Steve Jobs:

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”

Personally, I wish everyone would take the same attitude when creating their social media buttons.

In the past few years, my interest in SEO has accelerated even more, as the SEO industry has expanded to include everything from social media and conversion optimization to reputation management and a myriad of specialized tools that seemingly measure every click ever made on the Internet.

To make things even more fun, we have gone from traditional SEO, which specifically looks at organic traffic, to inbound marketing, which involves driving free traffic from any and all possible sources. People can’t help but get mesmerized by ALL THE FREE TRAFFIC!

While I still wake up every day and get super-duper excited about optimizing my clients’ sites/media/businesses, I often find myself reminiscing about the old days of SEO.

For me, the past 10 years will be remembered as the Golden Age of SEO. It really was an amazing era. Basically, everyone was following a simple, straightforward list of SEO best practices.

For most of my e-commerce clients, the 7 Keys to SEO success were:

1. Write optimized title tags
2. Write optimized meta description tags
3. Write optimized H1 tags (page headers)
4. Optimize internal navigation (main nav, breadcrumbs, sidebar nav, footer links, etc.)
5. Optimize and utilize any content unique to the site (blogs, videos, PDFs, forums, etc.)
6. Grow/buy some links (and be smart about it!)
7. Over-communicate with your client(s)

Don’t get me wrong: there were a lot more than 7 steps in an SEO campaign.

But from 2000-2009ish, if you followed those 7 steps, you were probably very successful at whitehat SEO for e-commerce websites. It worked like a charm.

I reversed negative year-over-year organic search sales trends for several massive brands. I had numerous clients that experienced 100%+ year-over-year growth in organic search traffic during the holidays. I could pretty much take any e-commerce website to higher levels of organic traffic and revenue. In fact, it was not atypical to see ROI in the area of 50:1.

But, alas, these SEO strategies were not unique to me. These methods worked for a lot of SEOs. Back in those days, everyone could win at SEO. It truly was a golden age. And in my opinion, Google was begging for better SEO for all websites.

After all, better SEO makes things easier for Google, and it helps them find and return more relevant results. Even Google was enjoying the growth of marketing directors pumping more and more money in SEO.

During the Golden Age of SEO, you could go to any number of search conferences and listen to some of the world’s best SEOs publicly brag about whitehat and grayhat methods that worked. Bloggers were also posting about whitehat and grayhat SEO methods that worked.

At the same time, everyone was handing out new methods for free, the team at Google Analytics was really pushing hard to make their product competitive with the most popular third-party tracking software, such as Omniture and Coremetrics (both of whom were also taking tracking and analytics to new heights of customization and granularity). It was a time when successful methods were being shared freely, and it was getting progressively easier to provide extremely detailed reporting to clients.

It was also a great time to be an SEO account manager at a search agency. I could write an SEO audit, work with the client’s in-house development team or third-party design agency, schedule all my recommendations into their IT calendar, and communicate with clients via highly-detailed reports. Clients knew that SEO took time to deliver results, so it was perfectly fine to make small gains each month and keep my clients satisfied and happy.

Over the course of the campaign, all of those small wins would add up to big results! And as I worked with the various teams, I effectively taught the basics of SEO to everyone I worked with. Sometimes people get bored with their jobs, so learning new stuff was fun for them. And I like to teach, so it worked out really well for both parties.

Sure there were some difficult aspects of being an SEO during this time. For example, it was a pain having to fight for resources from the development teams to get my recommendations implemented. Another tough issue was working with clients who did not have accurate organic search data. But all in all, basic SEO strategies worked, new SEO methods were freely shared, and search data was getting more comprehensive and easier to obtain (and it was getting more granular!).

And Then… The SEO Game Changed

In 2009 (or so), I began to notice SEO going underground. Remember those SEO conference bragging sessions I mentioned earlier, where the experts would share their secret strategies? Well, those started turning into Q&A sessions and site reviews. And remember all those bloggers who were writing about whitehat methods that worked for SEO? Well, those wells dried up…and some of them just started going full-on blackhat.

Also, the market was getting more and more saturated with SEOs. Almost all notable e-commerce websites were now doing SEO. At the same time, Google was changing universal search to include local results, news results, shopping results, video results, image results – all of these results were now taking up prime spots in the SERPs.

Then, social media really hit, and the next thing we knew, we were seeing real-time results in the SERPs. It was complete and total convergence of all things Internet.

Today, we are surfing an Internet where nearly everyone is doing SEO. When I look at the Top 30 results for pretty much any keyword, I see 30 websites that are doing SEO with some level of expertise. I see shopping results, news results, social results, image results, and social results that have all been optimized for that keyword. It’s very competitive out there.

Furthermore, companies that design platforms and content management systems have also embraced SEO. Most modern CMS and platform backends have areas dedicated to SEO settings and features, meaning that most new websites come with standard SEO best practices out of the box. This means that a lot of companies who are not actively “doing SEO” now have websites with basic SEO strategies in place.

Also, e-commerce VPs and marketing directors are more knowledgeable about SEO, as many of them have experience with SEO agencies. It’s not out-of-the-ordinary for new clients to bring up rel-canonical tags, rel-author tags, the open graph, and 301 redirect strategies – during our campaign kickoff calls. The times really have changed!

And how about today’s data? On one hand, we have lost some data. Yahoo shut down SiteExplorer. Google Analytics is now withholding organic search keyword data from logged-in visitors. (see, 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers).

But on the other hand, there are so many great resources for SEO-related data: SEOmoz, SEMrush, MajesticSEO, RavenTools, AHREFs, AuthorityLabs…the list goes on and on. Sure, these are paid tools and services, but so what?

Data-based decision making makes the SEO world go ’round. So we’ve got to have data. Those services are very helpful for competitive analysis, link building, checking rankings in the SERPs, site monitoring, etc. – I would have loved to have all of these tools 10 years ago!

On the social media optimization side of things, there are social media analytics and monitoring services popping up left and right.

So here we are in 2012: Everyone is doing SEO. Every market is competitive. Google and Yahoo are taking data away from us while new SEO tools and softwares are launching every day. And for most SEOs, the role of an SEO has expanded to that of an inbound marketer. It’s not enough to only know about strategies that drive traffic from search engines.

Nowadays, if you want to compete as an SEO expert, you need to stay up-to-date with local SEO, mobile SEO, social SEO, and anything new on the horizon.

Further, the economy of the past 4-5 years has changed the demands of clients. Showing small wins every month is not enough. Cash-strapped clients are cutting marketing budgets, and many of them are all looking at SEO as a way to get the best bang for the buck. And they want awesome results in the first month. As an SEO in 2012, I’ve got to deliver big results – yesterday!

It really is a fascinating time to be in the SEO business. There have never been so many different ways to drive free traffic to your websites. Perhaps I misstated before.

Perhaps *this* is the Golden Age of SEO. We’re smarter as marketers. Our clients are smarter with their budgets. We’ve been around the block a few times. We know what works, and the Internet seems to be changing faster than ever before (Google SPYworld, Twitter Brand Pages, Pinterest, etc..). It’s challenging. It’s always required effort and a smart approach. It’s not easy. But SEO is still SEO. It’s about content. It’s about links. It’s about connectedness. It’s about data and, most importantly, about driving results.

Let’s enjoy this age!

Featured image from istockphoto, used under license.

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There are several tips and varied opinions on mobile SEO out there, and until recently, neither Google nor Bing have been very clear about mobile indexing best practices, especially regarding mobile indexing and smartphones. My goal is to offer up some of the most current best practices and research from the world of mobile SEO.

Judging by some of the forums and discussions out there, this topic is anything but resolved, and there are some heated opinions. Please let me know in the comments if I have missed any techniques and/or tips that have worked for you.

First, we need to discuss how mobile sites are served to mobile searchers. One of the most popular methods is to create a user-agent detection at the server level.

If the user-agent is a desktop computer, serve the desktop version of your site. If the user-agent identifies itself as coming from a phone, a tablet, an iPad or anything that is mobile, serve that user the mobile version of your site.

I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t that cloaking? Nope. Don’t believe me? Just ask Matt Cutts. In this video, he’s pretty clear about it not being a cloaking issue (read: if you do it correctly).

The most common way of implementing user-agent detection is to place the mobile version of your website on a subdomain such as m.domain.com. Whenever a mobile searcher is directed to one of the pages from www.domain.com, a server-side 301 redirect will send them to the corresponding page at m.domain.com. (By the way, in the video I referenced earlier, Matt Cutts says that it’s a good idea to use this type of setup.)

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it other ways. Here is a list of other options I have seen companies use for mobile websites:

• Subdomains:
  • m.domain.com
  • mobile.domain.com
  • touch.domain.com
  • wap.domain.com
• Other TLDs:
  • domain.mobi
  • domainmobile.com
• Directories
  • www.domain.com/m
  • www.domain.com/mobile

SearchEngineLand.com detects the user-agent and if it matches a mobile user-agent, the visitor will see a mobile-themed version of the site – but the URLs don’t change. The URLs are the same for desktop visitors and mobile visitors, and at the bottom of each page, the visitor can choose between viewing the regular version of the site or the mobile version.

This strategy is also great for indexing and PageRank, as there are no other unique URLs for the mobile version of the site. (Yes, I still pay attention to PageRank even though it makes a lot of SEOs LOL. Whatever. Don’t hold it against me.)

The only thing you need to be clear on is which method is best for you, in terms of technical feasibility and even in terms of analytics and tracking. There is no *right* way to do it, and there are pros and cons for each method. Pick the one that works best for your company’s situation, and don’t look back.

The next question is: How do you let Google and Bing know about the mobile version of your site?

Here are a few key tips:

1. Verify Your Mobile Site In Google & Bing Webmaster Tools

This works for mobile sites on their own TLD or subdomain, and it’s very helpful for getting data specifically about the mobile site.

2. Build & Submit A Sitemap Of Your Mobile Website’s URLs To Google & Bing

Google has specific criteria for mobile sitemaps:

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
	<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">	
		<url>
			<loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
			<mobile:mobile/>
		</url>
	</urlset>

The only real distinction here is the addition of the <mobile:mobile/> tag. Otherwise it is very similar to a typical XML sitemap. For more information on mobile sitemaps, please check out this post from Google’s WebmasterCentral blog.

3. Mobile Searchbots & Robots.txt File Considerations

Some webmasters and SEOs are noticing their desktop sites URLs in the mobile SERPs and their mobile URLs in the desktop SERPs. It is not happening all the time, and on the mobile side of things, it’s pretty standard nowadays.

However, for SEOs who want complete control over user-experience and/or branding, these blended search results are a headache, especially if they don’t have user-agent detection and a redirect configured.

Some of these SEOs go as far as blocking Googlebot from their mobile site and blocking Googlebot-Mobile from their desktop site. Here’s how that looks in the robots.txt files:

• Desktop site: http://www.domain.com/robots.txt

  
  User-agent: Googlebot
  User-agent: Slurp
  User-agent: bingbot
  Allow: /
  
  User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
  User-Agent: YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2
  User-Agent: MSNBOT_Mobile
  Disallow: /
  

• Mobile site: http://m.domain.com/robots.txt

  
  User-agent: Googlebot
  User-agent: Slurp
  User-agent: bingbot
  Disallow: /
  
  User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
  User-Agent: YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2
  User-Agent: MSNBOT_Mobile
  Allow: /
  

First off, how many of you knew that each search engine has its own mobile bot? Pretty cool, right?

To be clear, I do not recommend using this strategy of restricting bots. It is important that Googlebot has access to your mobile site and that Googlebot-Mobile has access to your main site.

My main reasoning: it’s probably not a good idea to block Googlebot from anything that you want indexed, even if it is a mobile site and even if the mobile SERPs are determined by Googlebot-Mobile. And it’s definitely not a good idea to block Googlebot-Mobile from your main site, as desktop URLs are still showing up a lot for searches on mobile devices.

Furthermore, trying to tell Google how to do their job (i.e. which results to show for any given search in any given setting) is a little arrogant, and ultimately it’s a waste of time.

It reminds me of back in the day when people used a meta tag to try to tell Google when to re-visit and/or re-index a URL. Yeah. Good luck with that.

Also, if you block Googlebot, get ready for an ‘unhealthy site status’ message in your Google Webmaster Central profile.

Finally, I’d like to point out two great quotes on this topic:

• Googlebot, our crawler, must crawl your site before it can be included in our search index. – Jun Mukai, Software Engineer, Mobile Search Team at Google (source)
• Don’t block the mobile site from being returned in desktop or smartphone results, as it’s relevant to more than just the search engine’s mobile index. – Bryson Meunier (source)

Recent News Regarding Mobile Searchbots

Google recently announced additional smartphone user-agent strings for Googlebot-Mobile:

• Feature phones Googlebot-Mobile:
  • SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
  • DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
• Smartphone Googlebot-Mobile:
  • Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Well, well, well. It appears Google is aiming to improve user experience on mobile search. I am very happy to see them doing something like this because there are a lot of mobile search marketers out there with specific needs and questions regarding mobile SEO, and some of the more specific issues are still a little cloudy. I don’t think this is the end of the discussion. In fact, in many ways, it is just the beginning.

4. Link To Your Mobile Site From Your Main Site & Vice Versa

For my penultimate mobile site indexing tip, I’m going to go old school on you. If you want URLs from a subdomain indexed, link to them from the main site. Linking between your main site and your mobile site will help with the crawling and indexing of the mobile site.

5. Begin A Link Building Campaign…But For Your Mobile Site

Because Google dominates market share for mobile search and because Google makes links such an important factor in their search algorithms, it’s a good idea to get external links to your mobile site. I’d start with mobile directories. Bryson Meunier has a list of mobile directories that will help get you started.

In your mobile SEO journey, be sure to check to see if your mobile site is being indexed and/or showing up in Google Mobile Search. I like to check to see what types of results are showing up for various search keywords and phrases at http://www.google.com/m/.

It’s a good idea to get familiar with the layout of mobile SERPs, and it will give you the chance to see how Google displays your site.

Well, that is mobile site indexing in a nutshell. Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below. I’m looking forward to the ongoing discussion.

Article image from Shutterstock, used under license.

First, they gave us meta data. Then they took it away (as a ranking factor). Now, search engines are once again asking us for meta data. His tone did not indicate any type of excitement about the Schema.org announcement or the use of the tags as an SEO strategy.

Other panelists commented on how the Schema.org tags could lead to additional code bloat, and in the end, none of the panelists recommended re-coding your entire site with the new Schema.org tags, as there was very little empirical evidence to support using Schema.org tags as an SEO strategy.

That’s a lot like where we are right now with HTML5. While people have been writing about HTML5 for several years, no one is out there providing evidence about the effects of HTML5 on organic traffic or really even SEO in general.

In fact, none of the well-known SEO blogs or writers are even discussing HTML5 very often, and those writing about HTML5 are all saying the same thing.

What HTML5 Can Offer

• Brings several improvements in usability and user experience
• Has several new tags that will help developers classify important content
• Is awesome for sites rich in media (audio & video)
• Is an amazing alternative to Flash and Silverlight
• Is SEO-friendly when it comes to website crawling and indexing
• Is going to be heavily used for mobile apps and games

So, survey says: HTML5 will someday make everything better. But that someday is not here just yet.

Most bloggers/writers fail to mention an important point: to date, none of the popular Internet browsers fully support all of the features and codes in HTML5. To be clear, today’s browsers will render HTML5, but there are still many aspects of HTML5 that are not fully supported by or compatible with all Internet browsers.

Google & HTML5

On May 22, 2010, Google created a Googledoodle tribute to the Pac-Man video game. It was an animated logo that was also a playable version of Pac-Man. The logo was created with HTML5, and it had a Flash option for browsers that didn’t support HTML5 at the time. I’d bet that the Pac-Man Googledoodle was most Internet users’ first experience with HTML5 and its capabilities.

Personally, I thought it was exciting. For me, it provided a tangible glimpse into the future of the Internet, website browsing, mobile applications and games, and website functionality. On the SEO sides of things, it opened up my imagination even more, and it got me thinking about all the potential that HTML5 would have in the realm of SEO.

But how would Google use HTML5 for SEO? Would Google provide any advantages to websites moving to HTML5?

In a post from Oct-2010, Barry Schwartz brought up HTML5 and Googlebot. Barry cited a Google Webmaster Help thread where Googler JohnMu implied that Google will “wait and see” and “adapt” to HTML5 as it grows in popularity:

In general, we work hard to understand as much of the web as possible, but I have a feeling that HTML5 markup is not yet as widely in use (and in use correctly) that it would make sense for us to use it as a means of understanding content better. As HTML5 gains in popularity and as we recognize specific markup elements that provide value to our indexing system, this is likely to change, but at the moment I would not assume that you would have an advantage by using HTML5 instead of older variants.

While that thread is over a year old, it says a lot about Google’s disinterest in providing any SEO advantages for websites using HTML5. If any of my clients are thinking about moving to HTML5 strictly for the SEO benefits, at this point I don’t think I’d recommend it as an SEO play. I would recommend HTML5 for other reasons, but not strictly for SEO…at this point in time.

If HTML5 is so much better than HTML4, when are we supposed to use it? And when will HTML5 help with my SEO strategy? Those are great questions. I’m glad I asked.

How SEO Benefits From HTML5

I do not want to create the impression that HTML5 is bad for SEO.

For some websites – especially those heavily reliant on Flash – SEO is a godsend. If you have a site that is nothing but Flash, you will definitely see benefits to switching to HTML5.

First and foremost, searchbots will be able to crawl your site and index your content. All of the content that is currently embedded in animations will be readable to search engines. In basic SEO theory, this one aspect of HTML5 will do wonders for your website’s ability to drive organic search traffic.

Another benefit of using HTML5 is that it tends to generate buzz (read: links). On Monday, Facebook launched their long-awaited HTML5 iPad app. Pandora recently launched a new version of their music player in HTML5. Gaming platform Zynga recently launched 3 new HTML5 games that will run on mobile browsers.

More and more stories are being written every day about websites re-launching HTML5 websites and/or HTML5 features. Being on the leading edge of new technology is great for users, but don’t forget about the link-building, press-generating aspects of such moves. It’s all about inbound marketing, right Rand?

Finally, from a usability perspective, HTML5 has the ability to transform how users interact with websites. Websites that are rich in media stand to gain the most, as there are several new elements in HTML5 that allow for easier audio and video streaming, particularly on mobile platforms.

By now, we are resigned to the fact that the iPhone and iPad will never support Flash. But that’s okay – because now we have HTML5! Developers can now embed audio and video without having to worry about browser compatibility and/or platform capabilities.

New Tags For HTML5

For quick reference, here is an HTML5 cheat sheet. If you are familiar with HTML, a lot of the tags look very familiar.

However, there are a few tags I would like to point out, as they will likely be critical to the SEO success of HTML5 websites:

• <article> specifies an independent block of content. The contents of an article tags should be entire self-contained. A blog post or new article could be wrapped in an <article> tag, for example.
• <section> specifies a subsection of a block of content, such as an <article>. If a blog post was broken into several sections by subheaders, each section could be wrapped with a <section> tag. Just as books have chapters, blocks of content can have section.
• <header> could server two purposes: (1) to specify the header of a page or (2) to indicate the header section of a self-contained block of content (an <article>). <header> tags might contain navigation, branding or the document headline.
• <hgroup> is used to wrap a section of headings (<h1> through <h6>). A great example would be an article with both a headline and subheadline at the top:

  <hgroup>
       <h1>Main Headline</h1>
       <h2>Article tagline or subheading</h2>
  </hgroup>

• <footer> is a bit like the <header> tag. It could specific the <footer> of an entire HTML document or the footer of an <article>. This may contain things like footer navigation or meta-data about an article (author, data, etc)
• <nav> is mean to enclose site navigation. This can be used anywhere: main site navigation, previous/next article links, or pagination.
• <aside> is for content related to the parent element in which is resides, but not strictly part of the main document. In other words,
• <video> is for video content. Its purpose is to provide a cross-browser compatible way to display video.

Final Thoughts On HTML5

If you are thinking that HTML5 can help with code bloat, you are correct. However, when we combine HTML5 with Schema.org tags, there is actually the possibility for more code per page. Such is life. The Web is getting massive, and there is a mind-boggling amount of content out there.

So when Google and Bing decide that they need more meta data because their super-sophisticated searchbots and index warehouses cannot possibly sort through all the content on the Internet, I say we should help them. And at the same time, why not be nice to our website’s visitors by making websites more fun and easy to use? HTML5 can help us achieve both goals.

Sure, a lot of SEOs will push the boundaries to test the algorithmic weight placed on the new HTML5 tags. Then search engines will constantly update their algorithms to adjust to shortcuts and strategies that SEOs find in HTML5.

You know, it actually sounds a lot like the last 15 years in the SEO world. Except now we don’t have to talk about indexing Flash anymore. Knock on wood.