SEO In-house Blog

5 Videos on How to Use the Web Developer Toolbar for SEO

 

To help in-house SEOs (who typically use the Web Developer Toolbar infrequently), we put together 5 Videos on How to Use the Web Developer Toolbar for SEO and show you the type of insights you can glean when you know how to use SEO tools properly.

The Web Developer Toolbar is a vital tool in any SEO’s toolbox.  This Firefox toolbar has been around for years, but we still meet SEOs who do not know how to harness it’s vast SEO powers, or *gasp*, haven’t even tried it at all! 

Learn more about using this and SEO tools like the experts at our 4-day intensive, SEO Accelerator Course.

 

Let us know what you think, and if you know other great uses of the Web Developer Toolbar.

 

 

 

 

In-house SEO Exchange – Why Specific People were selected as Speakers

At the in-house SEO Exchange we have a lot more talking between attendees, rather than speakers. However, we do bring a few of the best in class speakers for an intimate, fireside chat type of discussion. The speakers we have coming up on June 7, 2012 in Seattle are:

 

John Cole, NFL, @JohnTCole -  John is an in-house SEO that rides under the radar, but is lethal to the competition because he excels at execution – a challenge most companies have with SEO. The reason he is coming to the In-house SEO Exchange is because he is ready to talk about something that has wowed me for the last few years – he has increased his salary exponentially and is going to talk about what you need to do to accomplish the same.

 

Jonathon Colman, REI, @jcolman – Jonathon is someone I’ve been watching for a few years now. He’s made some very interesting presentations on his innovative approaches to SEO, he’s not afraid to give up information.  An enterprise-level e-commerce client of ours talks to him regularly.  And then, when someone I respect immensely, out of the blue, emailed to say Jonathan should speak at the In-house SEO Exchange, I knew he would be a great addition to the panel.  What you will enjoy about Jonathon is his willingness and ability to help you solve whatever technical problem you bring to the table.

 

Conrad Saam, Urbanspoon, @ConradSaam – Conrad has spoke on in-house panels with me for a few years now, he’s outside the box, and innovative. But what impresses me most is his SEO data skills – he’s a data slicin’-and-dicin’ master.  If you have a question about how to report on SEO, interpret data or use data to answer a question, Conrad will have a very good answer for you.

 

Duane Forrester, Bing, @DuaneForrester – Duane is basically the Matt Cutts of Bing.  He has a soft spot for in-house SEOs, because he was one, and I know Duane from his old days pre-Bing.  Duane is extremely helpful and will answer any question you ask of him. I like that his answers usually make good quotes to give to the IT department when they want to do something that is inconsistent with SEO.  Duane often comes to speak at the Exchange and usually makes himself available for a bit after his session for 1:1 questions if you have something very focused.

 

There is a room of leading in-house SEOs waiting to help you solve your most pressing SEO challenge. Don’t miss your opportunity to get answers from other people who have walked in your shoes, successfully.

 

Event Guarantee:  If you don’t leave with the answer to your pressing SEO challenge, we will hunt one down after the event. Why wait?

 

When:  June 7, 2012  (the day after SMX Advanced)

Where:  Seattle, WA

 

Get more Information | Register Now

How Google Site Links are Defined – Partially by Offline Processes

Have you ever wondered how Google defines site links? 

We know there are algorithms, but there are also “offline processes.”  In the April 2012 Google Update notes, the following was defined:

“Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users.”

It isn’t clear exactly what “offline processes” are, but knowing they have humans edit web pages, it sounds like there may be humans influencing this as well.  I haven’t seen anything on this, does anyone else know?

 

 

 

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Key Google Algorithm Changes made in April 2012

What it is: Each month Google announces some of their latest updates, a few good SEO gems are always included.

Key Google  April 2012 Changes to Note:

• The index went up 15%, this means there are 15% more documents in Google’s index.
• New index tier, codenamed “cantina”.  There are tiers of different documents, each tier gets indexed at different rates depending on how relevant Google thinks they will be to users. In April 2012, a new indexing tier was added. Not much interesting about the tier, but it is insightful that Google has a method for determining how relevant something is “likely to be to users” and based on that place documents into a specific tier that will determine its rate of indexing. Note, this is about “documents”, not entire websites.  Matt McGee felt this sounds like the old Supplemental index, which we don’t hear much about these days (probably because the “Supplemental Results” label went away in the Google interface.)
• There are enhancements to the classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This means you may need to go back and clean up some of that older, poor quality, keyword-stuffed content that once worked, but can now hold you back.
• There was a signal tweak that allows Google to better surface more authoritative content.
• There was a change to “surface more diverse results” when a search results page is dominated by documents from paginated pages. If you benefited from this in the past, the days are numbered for you to enjoy that. 
• There was a change to help fuel greater domain diversity to “surface content from a more diverse set of domains” – personally, I actually experience the reverse happening lately, it was interesting to see this as a change in April.
• An international change was to make it more likely someone international will find a site in from their local country. This means if you are not doing the right things for international SEO, but rely on international markets, then you need to step up your international strategy.
• If a searcher adds a location to a search, Google is now “more likely to rank the local navigational homepages in the top position, even in cases where the navigational page does not mention the location.”  Some companies benefiting from #1 positioning may start to get displaced by local businesses.
• There was a change in how search terms on a page are scored, but they did not say how it was changed. I suspect it is in line with their desire to penalize keyword stuffing.
• There was a change to make it more likely Google will display text from the beginning of page in the snippets, when that text is particularly relevant. 
• Freshness had three changes related to it:  A change to help find the freshest results, such as breaking news and important new content, the change as a granular one. 
• Another freshness change was to “exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.” This means, you will get more for you money when you stop paying for 10 junk articles and pay someone to write 1 stellar piece each day.
• Autocomplete was enhanced for localized long-tail US queries and local search queries for items such as an address or small business.
• This one isn’t a change, but proof that Google does not like pages that look like 404 pages, but does not return a 404 status code: “We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser, but the text only contains error messages, such as ‘Page not found.’ It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them.”
• EXPECT TITLE TAGS TO BE CHANGED BY GOOGLE:  Google does not only use the page title tag to generate a title for your SERPs listing, they specifically state they use “a variety of signals to generate titles in search results.” The change they made in April “makes the process more efficient, saving tremendous CPU resources without degrading quality” – this means they can now do it more often and faster, which means if you have bad title tags, Google has more bandwidth to rewrite it to what they feel would be better.
•  If there are low quality results for a given search term, then the term is not likely to appear in autocomplete. What is not clear is how often they make the determination of when a term will appear or not appear. This makes autocomplete a little more insightful for keyword research.
• This one is very interesting:  Site Search Links are Generated Partly by Offline Resources, there was an update to the data in Site Search Links.  This happens frequently.

 

 

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Read Matt McGee’s writeup

Read the full list of Google Changes 

Google Penguin 2 weeks Later: Update, Clarifications, Tidbits to Know

What it is: New penguin updates issued 2 weeks after original launch, Danny Sullivan writes about it and clarifies some of the misconceptions.

Why it’s important:  This post clarifies a few things that have been floating around about Penguin.

Key Things to Note:

• Some in the SEO community say it’s not as well executed as other changes, but Google (of course) sees it as a “success”
• Many of the problems being reported as a result of the Penguin update, Google is citing as problems that existed before Penguin update
• There are cases where Google might want to investigate more, but Penguin hasn’t had the same impact as Panda (2011) or Florida (2003). The Penguin updat impacted fewer sites than these previous updates
• Google continues to say that reconsideration requests will not help those hit by Penguin, citing sites who clean up the spam will recover naturally
• If you clean things up, you won’t get an instant traffic lift, you’ll see a lift the next time Penguin is updated. Penguin, like the Panda update, is a filter that is refreshed time-to-time. Penguin is more of a way for Google to tag things as spam.
• It is not clear if is only a site-wide penalty, Google wouldn’t say. But, the granddaddy of SEO, Danny Sullivan suspects that it is a site-wide
• Of those who received one of the 700,000 penalties, many had both manual and algorithmic penalties attached to them over time but they were never revealed.
• Matt Cutts confirmed that an email warning is a precursor to ranking drops. If the site fixes the problem and quickly submits a reconsideration request, it might prevent the drop from happening – so move fast if you get one!
• There is a list of WordPress Plugins that insert hidden links and believed to help fuel the spam that Penguin is addressing.
• Recovery plan:
  • Clean up the spam you have created – on-page and bad links
  • Wait for news of  future Penguin Updates, I know it’s painful, but if you do the crime you have to wait the time
  • If after the Penguin Update traffic does not recover, keep cleaning up and wait for news of an update

 

We have a Penguin report coming out, request a copy:

 

Read the Full Article  from Danny Sullivan