Has everyone caught the WebProNews interviews with Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts conducted during PubCon? No? Let me catch you up.

During his presentation on the Top Shelf Organic SEO session (alternate coverage available), Bruce made the point that more and more, the future of search marketing is moving toward optimizing for behavior-based, intent-based and blended search. All these increasingly important factors will contribute to the devaluation of rankings as the prime metric for SEOs. What does a ranking mean if SERP placement varies from user to user due to personalized and behaviorally-targeted search results? Instead, Bruce said, SEOs need to switch their focus from rankings to analytics data, traffic, and conversions. The “Ranking is Dead” motto found a lot of word-of-mouth traffic during the conference, and on the final day of PubCon, Mike McDonald of WebProNews was able to sit down with Bruce, letting him share his predictions to the wider audience of SEOs.

Mike then sat down with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team and a Google spokesperson for the search marketing community. Mike asked Matt about his thoughts on whether or not ranking is becoming less valuable and, if so, how SEOs should alter their search marketing efforts. One of my favorite summaries of the two videos, which makes each experts’ points and counterpoints clear, is from Sixth Man Marketing. Go ahead and read that for the condensed version of events. Key takeaways from Matt include his acknowledgment that rankings should not be the end-all-be-all of search engine optimization and that Universal search is very useful for users.

On SEM Synergy today, Bruce further clarified and expanded on his comments at PubCon. In a couple weeks — December 17, to be exact — tune in to SEM Synergy for my interview with Matt Cutts. You better believe we talk about personalized search, Universal search, and algorithm factors that Google could be upping in value next year.

Until then, familiarize yourself with the various opinions that professionals across the search industry have expressed regarding the WebProNews interviews. A conversation thread was started over at Cre8asite Forums. The Milwaukee SEO recognizes the issue of devalued ranking importance as a conversation that isn’t new, but one that should be carefully considered. Joomla SEO looks at how SearchWiki plays into the increasing importance of personalized search results. Rather than the death of SEO, Global Entrepreneur stresses that Bruce’s predictions actually signal the evolution of SEO. And David Harry wants to see research that backs the theory that behavioral metrics and geo-location factors have a weighty affect on personalized search.

Check out SEM Synergy to get the word straight from Bruce. And of course, thanks to Matthew Inman of online dating site Mingle2 for coming on the show to talk about the engaging content that could be more important in the changing search landscape.

SEM Synergy Extras was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

I could not be more excited for this session. Not because this is an easy session to recap, because it’s totally not, but because it’s the very last one and after this one is over, I get to go home.

Brett Tabke has a whole group of search engine reps on the stage right now: Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.; Sean Suchter, VP, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering, Yahoo!; and Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft. Brett’s getting ready to torture them to give up all their secrets.

Brett just called Matt the last man standing. Then the last engine standing. Ouch. He means that everyone else is a new face on this panel, but the truth, she hurts.

Nathan Buggia is up first to give us a Live Search State of the Union. He’s going to reframe Satya’s keynote from this morning in a more technical way. Oh dear.

Relevance is key. They measure internally in a representative sample of query terms with “how good it is?” from all three engines. Are they in the ball park? They’ve found they’re very similar. Some things they do well, some not so good. Freshness is a factor for them.

• Improved crawling performance
• Standardization of Robots Exclusion Protocol rule — MSNbot supports regular expressions in robots.txt
• Sitemaps anywhere — they don’t have to be hosted under your root domain anymore. They use them for canonicalization issues as well as for page discovery.
• “Significant” increase in crawling activity

Their webmaster tools are useful for troubleshooting. You can find reports on:

• 404 errors
• Too many parameters
• Blocked by REP
• Unsupported content
• Malware infected — they won’t allow clicks on malware from Live Search

They can crawl up to two sub-domains and two directories down.

You can do an audit to find all your URLs and all the pages linked to those pages. Once you fix a malware issue, you can request a re-crawl and they’ll get it done in a couple of days.

Ranking:

• Static ranking
• Dynamic rank within site
• Backlinks
• Penalties — and steps to resolution

They provide direct support through their forums. They’ll get back to you within three days.

The adCenter Excel Keyword research tool pulls data from adCenter and from Passport and you should use it.

They’ve studied use patterns and they found there are several: targeted, exploratory to targeted, exploratory to multi-targeted, etc. As a result they’re providing more rich media to try to give more information upfront for the exploratory pattern. This gives you more ways to reach users: products, reviews, links and videos. This is showing up not just in search results but in other products like Hotmail.

Back to Project Silk Road:

• Increase engagement
• Encance your site with Live Search Web results
• Customize 404 error pages with Web Error Toolkit
• Create rich user experiences with Virtual Earth and Silverlight

Generate traffic:

• Optimize your site with webmaster tools
• Deep content partnerships

[Missed the last pillar]

Live Search API: Based on feedback from publishers, they’re giving back control.

• Reorder the results
• Skin results and ads
• Filter out 300 ad providers

Maximum flexibility:

• Unlimited queries (unless you’re a scraper)
• Rich query language (advanced queries like site:)
• Many types of content
  • Web
  • News
  • Images
  • Encarta Answers
  • Spelling
  • Implement all standard protocols (REST, JSON, RSS, SOAP)

Check out: APIs, Webmaster Center, adCenter

Sean Suchter is next for Yahoo!

The main thing they’re working on is getting past the ten blue links, as well as getting past the limited choice.

They’ve gotten a lot of response on their search assist features.

They’re trying to get from “to do” to “done”. They’re trying to get people to the answer, to reduce frustration, and to bring out structured information from the Web. He thinks the music integration feature was cool — full songs off of artist searches.

They’re focused on more information in one search. Drawing out deep links, news information, rich media.

The ecosystem is looking at building a richer, more relevant and more personal search experience. SearchMonkey brings outside in and gives control outside of the core search. What does opening search mean? It’s a clear win for developers, site owners, users and Yahoo. Before, you had ten simple blue links. Afterwards, you get an engaging look at more information that gets you straight to the answers, increases the quality of site traffic, increases usability and fosters loyalty.

They’re continually testing and revising the presentation and testing out different ways to present structured information to provide a better experience.

They have a developer tool to create the applications, pulling data from publishers and sending it to users who can opt in or out.

Some publishers using the application:

• People
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Flickr
• Yelp
• Yahoo! properties

The reverse of this is BOSS. It’s sending data out and opening it up to help with the indexing and the crawling. No matter where you are on the Web, search experiences are relevant, comprehensive and fresh.

Sites using BOSS:

• 4hoursearch: it is very simple and open
• PlayerSearch: focused on sports
• Newsline: timeline-based news information pulled out of the search engine
• Tianamo: …I don’t even know. It’s topographical. Neat.

Last it’s Matt Cutts. His presentation is “State of the Index: What’s going on with Google?”

Google Chrome: wicked fast browser — competition makes everyone better
Android: open-source operating system (He has a Google phone. Jealous.)

• Better machine translation
• Better voice translation
• Google Suggest
• Improving personalization and Universal/blended search

Lots of small things:

• 2001 search index
• Video and voice chat in Gmail
• Ability to track the flu

Google Trends: You can use this to figure out how to target your keywords, compare web site interest.

Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Planner — doesn’t have to be Google ads

2008 Webmaster launches:

• Optical character recognition in PDF docs
• Better crawling of Flash , — this is NOT license to build your pages entirely in Flash
• Mobile will still break

They’re getting better at keyword spam and gibberish. He brings up the 404 link finder in Webmaster Tools and jokes that it’s free links when you get them fixed. He also points out the 404 help page.

• Advanced segmentation on Google Analytics
• On-demand indexing for Google Custom Search Engines — get ten pages re-indexed free immediately
• Webmaster APIs for hosters and Gdata
• Translation gadget for your Web site

Google held three webmaster chats in the last year (700+ people in the last call). They are blogging more and doing more videos. Google added new languages for blogs. Yesterday they released a 30-page beginning SEO guide. Google does not hate SEO.

2009 black hat trends

Jeevesretirement.com — DO NOT GO THERE — was bought by Ask when Jeeves retired, but they didn’t get it renewed. Now it’s a porn site.

He thinks hacking is actually going to get worse — like real illegal hacking. A Googler actually got hacked. They’re getting hacked and linking over to other sites that they’re hacked. Black hat moves toward the outright illegal.

Matt has a complicated example of hacking. You’ll just have to imagine it until he posts it somewhere for me to link to. Did you hear me, Matt? Post the slide.

• SEOs need to decide on risk tolerance.
• Google will keep communicating with webmasters.
• Google will provide tools to help webmasters. They’re working on a tool for canonicalization or preferred URLs.

Q&A

Are you going to change what you present to people in terms of intent?

Sean: Yes.

Matt: There are three types of searches: navigational, informational and transactional. Site links are for the navigational.

Can you send out acknowledgements to reconsideration requests?

Matt: Part of the problem is that you don’t want to tell a spammer that you did or did not catch a problem, so Google doesn’t want to do that. But he says he thought it might be nice to just say “a computer looked at it at such and such time”. They’re looking at that.

Can we get a default SearchMonkey format so that we don’t have to wait for users to opt in?

Sean: They’re trying to test and determine how to auto-on the right things. You need to create the most useful possible added-value apps with your clients so that users can get a better experience. The better that happens, the closer it gets to auto-on.

Matt wants to talk about Rip-off Report. He doesn’t think they’re spam. They only remove for spam or court order. There’s not enough material on Rip-Off Report for him to remove it as spam. If you really hate it that much, get a court order and then they can take action on it. There are free speech and first amendment right issues there. They will take strong action when there is spam but it’s not there yet. They already get enough “Google is just taking them out because they don’t like them” criticisms.

How about a negative link?

Matt says it’s a thought.

Are you guys going to be looking at a way to tell Google News something different than Googlebot?

Matt: You have to prioritize by feedback. [They're going to talk later.]

The cheapest product seems to win in Live Search. Doesn’t that compete with my actually good PPC/SEO links?

Nathan: Those products get in through productupload.live.com. They’re free and he thinks it’s a good feature. [He really did answer the question but I didn't catch it.]

I hear First Click Free is in jeopardy? How do we stay in compliance with that?

Matt: [He explains briefly how First Click Free works.] He thinks they’re at a good balance right now, but the challenge is how do they regulate it. They’re still doing it. They’ve just about finalized their policies for it.

I paid for links. [The entire audience turns to look at him.] All our sites were penalized in Google Webmaster Tools. How much privacy is there? Second question, when are you going to share revenue from BOSS with publishers?

Matt: They have tools where they can pretty much always find the related sites.

Sean: He doesn’t know the details but there are people actively working on the monetization plan. It’s definitely being worked on.

Nathan jumps in to talk about monetization opportunities at Live Search. Poor Nathan, no one cares.

Why is there no way to authenticate that a bot is a bot?

Matt: You can. It’s a kind of a hassle, but it’s a two step process. Search for “verifying googlebot”. It works for all the engines.

Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters – aka: The Search Engine Smackdown was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Three sessions down, three sessions to go. Chris Tolles is moderating this session with speakers Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting; Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz; Roger Montti, Founder and Owner, martinibuster.com; and Greg Hartnett, President, Best of The Web.

Eric Enge is up first. He urges us to think BIG. He cites yesterday’s keynote as an example of a small/medium-sized company that thought big and changed their whole position.

Social New Sites

The first thing to know is that you have to match the demographic of the site’s audience. With Digg, it’s obviously 13 to 24 year old males.

Baiting the social sites is all well and good but ask:

• Did it help the site?
• What is it relevant to?
• What message would it send about your business?

Try for authoritative and unique information. Remember that timing is important.

• Maximize your success
• Interest the audience
• Be authoritative
• Reflect well on your business
• Use titles targeted at BIG search terms
  • Article title
  • Social news submission title

Facebook Ads

A fantasy sports trade site became a media powerhouse. How?

Created great widgets:

• Primarily through Facebook
• Targeted at sports fans
• Had apps targeted at different events

Why is this link building?

As they gained traction, people started talking about them because they had compelling content that was matched to the site they were on, the demographic of their business and they met their business needs.

Rebecca Kelley is speaking next.

Traditional link building sucks. It’s time consuming, repetitive, risky and has low ROI. Obviously though, you need links. (You know the reasons why.)

Strategy one: Find brand mentions and ask for a link.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to find places mentioning “brand name” -linkdomain: -site:

Strategy two: Identify broken inbound links.

[Matt Cutts did a post on this technique.] You can contact those people to update or correct those links.

Strategy three: Take advantage of broken links to your competitors.

• No longer available/no longer offer [keyword]
• Contact site owner and ask them if they want to redirect to you instead
• Contact sites linking to that page and let them know you have a comparable product

Strategy four: Find out who is linking to your competitors and see if there is a reason they’re not linking to you.

Strategy five: Take advantage of confirmation emails.

“If you have a Web site or a blog and you like us, please consider placing a link back to us.” This is scalable strategy that gets you links that are editorial and relevant.

Strategy six: Embed links in widgets, badges, banners, etc.

• Create a quiz, poll or other shareable content
• Offer embeddable tools, programs
• Include a link back to your site

Strategy seven: Create some link bait.

• Brainstorm content and host it on your site
• Promote content via social media sites, forums, blogs, etc. Don’t just assume you have to go to Digg. Your own niche probably has a social news site that you can put content on. Research your sector’s link-worthiness. Discover the big players in your fields, what are they doing right? What can you emulate? Analyze the current trends. The election was a big topic for a while.

Rebecca offers up several tools and blog posts as resources but I can’t actually type that many URLs with any kind of speed. Lisa may have them over at WBP.

Greg Hartnett from Best of the Web steps up to the plate.

Isn’t a directory just a paid link? No way. Pay for placement vs. pay for review. BOTW has a no refund policy. You get the review but perhaps not the link. Neither is it just a link farm. The links are editorial in nature and organized, unlike a link farm.

The real question is how do you find a good directory?

• Have a history
• Contain great resources
• Have populated categories
• Are designed for the user
• Add lots of sites, not just paid submits

Overall, it’s about common sense. Is it a labor of love? Is there commitment? Does it feel right to you?

What kind of traffic can you expect from a directory? It’s not the Digg effect. What you get is targeted, qualified traffic. You can get your site listed multiple times through deep linking. You will need to have relevant content for the category.

Is the Yahoo Directory worth it? He thinks yes, broadly. It’s an aged, trusted domain and a primary hub of Internet mapping.

Is the ODP corrupt? [Hee.] No, they’re not. You might have heard of corrupt editors, people taking bribes, people who are anti-competitive. He’s not saying that didn’t happen. However, a few bad apples doesn’t mean the whole thing is bad.

Most trustworthy directories:

• Yahoo
• DMOZ
• BOTW
• Business.com
• Librarian Internet Index — LII.org (This directory is the hardest to get into.)

How can I ensure I’m going to be listed after paying the review fee?

There’s no guarantee of listing. Follow the rules. Read the directory guidelines and give a good title and descriptions for your listings. Beef up your content.

Where can I submit my blog?

• Yahoo and DMOZ have categories
• BOTW has a category
• Lee Odden has a post on TopRankBlog

Roger Montti starts off by advising people to become an editor at DMOZ in order to get your site indexed. Chris says that’s a good way not to be an editor anymore. Everyone’s a comedian today.

On to the presentation.

There are two main link building initiatives: traffic and link popularity. Use links that you already have to prove authority in your link building.

.Edu links are not special. However, they’re not usually in bad neighborhoods, and in maps of link relationships, they tend to fall outside of known clusters.

.Edus might not be good because: the pages aren’t authoritative, the pages might be a link farm and the pages probably don’t have good links themselves.

Charitable opportunities:

• Sponsor a conference or event to get links
• Search linkdomain:example.com site:.edu sponsors/donors or linkdomain:example.com site:.org sponsors/donors

Pay attention to where a site links. If they only link to .edu or .gov pages, they’re probably not going to want to link to commercial sites.

Roger says that nearly every black hat strategy can be made white hat with nofollow attributes or by rendering the link with JavaScript.

These will bring you traffic but won’t pass link popularity:

• Blog widgets
• Counters
• Calculators
• WordPress themes

Q&A

Chris asks if they’ve seen a shift in how people are willing to get links.

Roger says yes, people want white hat only links because Google is getting better and better at tracking them down. Eric thinks that more people are reporting competitors for spam. Greg thinks the days of “tricking” Google are over. The message of content is king isn’t new, it’s just that it’s becoming the only way to work.

Chris asks the audience how many people think that the presences of links will bring you more traffic, not people clicking on the links but the actual presence. Does PageRank still work?

Greg says a link is a link is a link. On another panel, people were asking if nofollow links still have value. He says, yes. It’s still a link. People can still follow it and come to your site.

Chris asks what the emerging trends are.

Rebecca says that widgets are popular still and they’re still a good way to get links, despite the rash of spammy products out there.

Eric agrees that widgets are a smart way to distribute content. But he says they are not good for link building if you want to pass link popularity. You can still do it but it takes more work.

Roger thinks people are more open to forming relationships now and finding creative solutions using bartering.

What about reciprocal links?

Roger: If you’re linking to a quality site, if a quality site is linking to you, I don’t buy into that leaking popularity.

Greg: Some reciprocal linking is normal.

Rebecca reminds everyone that you need to link out. Don’t worry about leaking link popularity. Greg agrees.

Eric: Think about it from a search engine perspective. You have a crawler and imagine you’ve hit a site that has no outbound links. That looks strange.

Real-World, Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Why are all these rooms so cold? I have my gloves back on again and I’m still shivering.

Carolyn Shelby is our moderator for this session. Speakers are Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com; Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear.com; Jessie Stricchiola, Founder & CEO, Alchemist Media, Inc.; and Gary Kirk, Co-Founder, Technical Director, Rating Room Ltd.

Gary Kirk is up first.

Three basics for a successful site:

• Good, relevant links to your Web site: He’s not talking about that in this session.
• No obstacles to search engine spiders: He’s not talking about this either.
• Content that attracts and converts: This one he’s talking about.

Good content is available for $0 so he’ll be concentrating on that. He’s also focusing on local search because 90 percent of transactions are local.

Why is content king?

Google can’t send valuable, relevant users to your site without it. It’s a vital component in the decision making process for visitors. It doesn’t have to cost a cent, but it is always worth investing time into. You’re the best person to write it because you know your business. It doesn’t have to cost anything because it should all already be in your head. It doesn’t have to be terribly detailed either.

To beat the people above you, you need to look at the top ten results in Google. Local business are up against Yellow Pages, directories, Google Local/Maps, franchises, review sites and others. Sometimes Google does indeed value big sites more, so you’ll have to pick your battles.

The way to do it is through content. You can be more granular. You know your business better than they do. You have a choice between being a provider or being THE provider. Good content on local business Web sites will reassure the visitor “this is the right service provider for me”. When you get a testimonial, don’t just publish it. Tell people what you did in that case by describing the services and process. The best that many non-local competitors can do is to provide a list of potential providers of the service.

Link to testimonials in two ways: with their name and location. This way you will get traffic from location-based searches and from service pages, so you should link with the service you provided.

Most local searches are unique and combine geography (town, country, state, neighborhood, zip code, etc.) with a service descriptor (“plumbing”, “blocked sinks”, etc.). You need to pick the ones that are you target area — don’t pick every query, but all the important ones. Once you have a decent list, take those to Google and do searches to see who your competitors are.

Rewards from local content:

• Conversion from visitor to customer can be remarkable for specific searches.
• Targeting lots of well researched text phrases can and often does work fast.
• Better organic results, often combined with PPC, can reduce overall ad costs.

Marty Weintraub is our next speaker. He engages in a little rant about how his blog vanished. Hee. He’s so energetic.

He reads the session notes. He promises to keep this lily white. Nothing that you wouldn’t tell your mom. Thanks, Marty!

Okay, the assumption is that you have you, your WordPress blog and a grudge.

Set up to publish quick, clean and viral. For this, we’re assuming a primary and secondary publishing system. How do you mashup WordPress into your site? Integrate it to pull in headlines from your blog that will relate to the page content. Make sure you’re publishing cleanly.

If you have existing content + fanatical attitude + half a brain = free content.

Figure out what you do already and who cares about it. What communications already emanating from our company might have viral proclivity if published properly? What if we could get others to champion our content? Email is the greatest social network.

[This all sounds much less amusing than it really is. It is, however, just as schizophrenic as it looks. Wish you were here.]

Good content can come from:

• Media relations
• Investor relations
• Community
• Customer
• Internal
• Human interests
• Public relations

Nuclear “send to friends” degrees of separations. Everyone you know knows someone else. Make them share it.

Believe in “signs of human life”. Mash evidence of it onto PPC landing pages.

Viral means getting everyone else to do your work for you. Vanity bait with your business feed, talk about people you know, about your employee product recommendations, requests of input, link out to non-competitive and complimentary resources.

What’s already going on?

• Owner’s manual updates, product registration
• Any press releases
• Internal procedure and event logistics
• Product recall information and other disasters
• Weekly specials
• Annual report

Tips for content SEO sourcing, SEO success:

• Set up a schedule and stick to it. Example: every Tuesday at 1:00.
• Don’t write the Magna Carta every time.
• List posts are famous for a reason.
• Link out/vanity bait other writers.

Time for a tactic. An experimental tactic. One that was talked about during the SMX Advanced. Oh, it’s the one that Lisa called totally unethical. Hee. The nice part about this is that now I don’t have to recap it. You all know where to find Lisa’s rant about SMX, right? Don’t worry, Lisa and Marty are BFFs now.

Brett Tabke wraps it up. His presentation is called “What if there were no search engines?”

Brett used to work for John Deere and they used to do awesome things online. Then one day the search engine traffic just vanished. What happened? The CMS was throwing 404 errors and there was no way to search. So if the search engines go away, where do you get your traffic?

Google generates 80 to 90 percent of search engine referral, depending on who you ask. Sixty-four percent of Internet users arrive at sites by direct navigation.

Where do you get your traditional traffic? From type-in traffic, from reciprocal link exchanges, strategic alliances. Directories still offer some traffic, but stay away from fake directories, affiliate farms and FFAs, top 100 sites, and awards managers.

[And they whine about nofollow links on Twitter profiles. Am I the only one who thought that was awesome?]

Sources of traffic:

• Press releases and the local paper are low cost alternatives.
• Contests can be good lead generators. You need to do you homework first or you’ll run into legal issues or management issues.
• Awards are old and directed but they still work.
• Guest books are still out there. They tend to work better for female centric sites.
• E-greeting cards are dead in Brett’s opinion.
• Email newsletters still work, but they have a downside: huge commitment, monthly work, labor intensive.
• Send to a friend.
• Kids! They’re great at viral marketing. They swap SMS messages and mention and recommend products.
• Pete and Repeat.
• Usenet and forums. Always check the TOS of sites to see what is acceptable. There is little that is more powerful than a good old profile referral.
• Coupons. Nearly 20 percent of U.S. Internet users have redeemed a coupon online. Sixty percent of Pubcon attendees used a coupon.

[I just noticed that Brett isn't using the official Pubcon PPT template. Branding fail.]

Giveaways are big.
Blogs are great.
Traditional offliners work — classifieds, trade magazines, radio and TV commercials.

The main thing is that once you get people to your site you need to DO something with them. Give them great service. Email, email, email. Speed. Answer quick and give them a real response.

An audience member suggests sending out reminder emails halfway through the month to get people to come read your monthly newsletters.

Mostly Viral Top Traffic Alternatives, or SEO on a Shoestring Budget was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

No fancy intro here, just right to the content. The moderator for this panel is Rand Fishkin. Speakers are super funny Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optimization Architect, Microsoft; Ben D’Angelo, Software Engineer, Google; and Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search. Rahul Lahiri, VP of Search Product Management, Ask, is a might show. Hmm.

Ben D’Angelo is up first. He’s been with Google a little more than three years. I think that means he went to Google straight out of grade school.

What are duplicate content issues? There are actually multiple disjoint problems.

• Duplicate content within your site or sites:
  • Multiple URLs point to the same page or similar pages
  • Different countries (same language)
• Duplicate content across other sites:
  • Syndicated content
  • Scraped content

The guiding principle behind the search engines’ indexing is ONE URL for one piece of content. Why? Because users don’t like duplicates in results. It saves resources in Google’s index, leaving more room for other pages from your site. And it saves resources on their server. [So Ben is telling us to keep duplicate content low to save Google money? Man, that stock price must really be suffering.]

Sources of duplicate content:

• Multiple URLs pointing to the same page
  • www vs. non-www
  • Session IDs, URL parameters
  • Printable versions of pages
  • CNAMEs
• Similar content on different pages
  • Manufacturer’s databases
  • Different countries

How does Google handle this? They cluster like content and pick the best representative. There are variations on this depending on where it is in the pipeline. Different filters are used for different types of duplicate content. In general, it’s just a filter and it’s not going to destroy your site.

The problem comes in when Google doesn’t choose the page you want or makes a mistake in clustering. You need to take back control.

Use 301 redirects for exact duplicates, like tracking URLs, and to solve www vs. non-www issue. You can also address exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools, but that only solves the problem for Google. He demos briefly.

For near duplicates, no index or block with robots.txt. Things like printer pages and site clones should have this.

Domains by country are a little different. Different languages are not duplicate content. Same language, different country? Don’t worry about it — the right one will usually be okay. You can geo-target in GWT or use different TLDs to help Google recognize where the content belongs. Best of all is creating unique content for that country.

Leave out URL parameters if you can. Put that data into a cookie instead.

In Webmaster Tools you can check for all sorts of other problems too, like duplicate Title and Meta data. Fix those things.

If another site has content that duplicates yours, there’s less that you can do.

Duplicate content from syndication should include a link back to your site to make the canonical origin clear. Another option is to syndicate different content than what you publish on your site. If you’re publishing content you have syndicated, manage your expectations.

Don’t worry about scrapers or proxies too much. They generally don’t affect your rankings. If you’re concerned, file a DMCA request or a spam report with Google.

Duplicate content best practices:

• Avoid duplicate content in the first place.
• Generate unique, compelling content for users.
• Don’t be overly concerned with duplicate content.
• Let us know about any issues at the Webmaster Help Forum.

You can always check out the Webmaster Central Blog and check out the Webmaster discussion group.

Priyank Garg is next up. He’s got a sore throat so he’ll be brief. His voice is all scratchy. Aw.

Much of this will be similar to Ben’s presentation — I’ll pull out the Yahoo-specific stuff. Like Google, Yahoo filters at several places in the pipeline. Session IDs and other “content neutral” parameters can really hurt your crawl queue. They might never get to the rest of your content because they’re crawling the same page over and over with a session ID. “Soft” 404 pages can also cause duplicate content problems. Repeated elements (perhaps with just a keyword replace) lead to problems.

Abusive dupes include scrapers/spammers, weaving and stitching, etc.

• Slurp supports wildcards in robots.txt.
• Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to delete URLs or an entire path from the index for authenticated sites.
• Use the robots-nocontent tag on non-relevant parts of a page.
  • Robots-nocontent can be used to mark out boilerplate content
  • Robots-nocontent can be used for syndicated content that may be useful to the user in context but not for search engines.

You can do dynamic URL rewriting in Site Explorer. Tell them which parameters are content neutral for your sites:

• Ability to indicate parameter to remove URLs from site
• More efficient crawl with less duplicates
• Better site coverage as fewer resources are wasted on duplicates
• Fewer risks of crawler traps
• Cleaner URL, easier for user to read and more likely to be clicked
• Better ranking due to reduced link juice fragmentation — it’s equivalent to 301ing all the duplicates back to one URL, saves time because they don’t have to crawl it

Derrick Wheeler is up. Here’s a bit of vintage Derrick for you all: “This crowd is a perfect Web site. You’re all unique. I would crawl, index and rank all of you.” Rand interjects “That’s dirty.” Derrick: “But I wouldn’t click or take action.” Hee.

Final points (he likes to get these done first):

• Consider search engine crawler detection
• Know your parameters
• Link to URLs with parameters always in the same order
• Dig deep into search results for your domain
• Exclude duplicates by robots.txt first, Meta Robot exclusion second, and nofollow link attribute last
• Don’t assume engines can’t follow JavaScript
• Get a regular crawl report of your Web site
  • Request a tab file that includes: referring URL, fetched URL, redirect path with type, landing URL with status code, Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords
  • Open file using Excel 2007, sort by Title then landing URL
  • Review suspect URLs to look for dupes
• Focus on your strengths

Look for spider traps, adding a parameter and creating new pages every time you go back and forth several times.

Make sure that when you’re creating sites for users, you still avoid spider traps. Just because you don’t think the search engines will need to index it, doesn’t mean that you don’t have other pages that the search engines won’t get to because they’re busy with your trap.

Document why you’re doing things. One site removed session IDs for search engines and got 10 million pages indexed. Down the line, someone forgot why it had been done, started giving session IDs to the engines again and their index pages plummeted again.

Look for things that might be causing problems, like dynamic breadcrumbs, based on how someone clicked through the site (Brookstone does this), related products, etc. They might be helpful for users but you’re probably going to get into trouble. Make your internal linking consistent and useful. Some products might be able to live in multiple categories, but you need to make a decision.

Anytime you see related, sort or compare, think “possible duplicate content”. When you see “select region” or “sign in”, think duplicate content. Disallow those pages in your robots.txt. “Email an article”, “send to a friend” — think duplicate content.
Once you screw up the parameter order, it’s hard to fix. Keep it consistent.

Use absolute links, not relative links, especially when switching between http:// and https://. Other people could link to you with https:// as well and you can’t really do anything about that.

Priyank suggests going after the low-hanging fruit. Try the dynamic URLs first so that you can see the benefit right away.

Brent Payne asks: How do you credit a story properly when you’re the Chicago Tribune? Can I get a link attribute or something? Just linking back doesn’t work. Google tells me it’s not a big deal but it is.

There’s not so much that the reps can say to that. They’re trying and he’s already doing the right thing. Poor Brent.

Derrick doesn’t think there is a solution right now. (He also reminded everyone that he’s an in-house SEM, not a search engine representative.)

How detrimental are different link IDs?

Priyank: Every different URL linking to the same content is duplicate content. That’s why you should use dynamic URL rewriting.

Ben: We try to handle that automatically. We might have to crawl the page once but we try to learn which parameters don’t affect the page content.

[Most of these questions are site specific, so I'm skipping them.]

Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Last day! I’m so excited, it’s actually kind of pathetic. All I want to do is go home and watch all the TiVo that’s been piling up. But before I can do that, we have six sessions to get through so let’s not dilly dally.

Today’s keynote is by Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, MSN Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft, which is a lot of commas to have in one title.

He’s got two topics today: the evolution of search, specifically about what they’re doing at Microsoft, and the evolution of services.

Consumer Web ecosystem: Advertisers < -- > Services < -- > Publishers

Services happen at three levels. At the base is a core infrastructure level, above that is an audience level, and finally, an ad platform level. What we’re going to see more of is an increasing opening up of scale.

Evolution of Search

He says this is not keynote-level information, but it gives a base to start from. We get a little bit of a history lesson on how search has changed since the industry began — the changes in the consumer, the market and the search technology itself.

The real question is what’s next? Search is driven by the feedback loop of data. About half of users are doing long research sessions of 30 minutes or more. Half are also resuming previous research. A typical research session might take an hour or more, from research words down through the buying cycle.

comScore did a study where they connected latent behavior with the active behavior. The idea is that search engines need to do things to facilitate task completion.

There are three things that the search engines need to get a deeper understanding of in order to solve this problem: queries, content (beyond text) and actions. They’re having to connect keywords to semantics.

The next evolution of search technology is rich semantics and user experience. For the consumer, what they’ll begin to expect is not merely answers found but tasks completed. To monetize this, the engines will be looking at paid engagement, growing visibility for advertisers and being more proactive in terms of giving the publishers tools.

It’s not just a back end technology that they need, it’s an increase in user experience. They need to figure out the problem of how do you provide a rich experience through a relatively simple interface.

There’s a lot of innovation and testing to be done before they get to this point.

Live Search is focused on:

• Delivering the best search results: The acquisition of Powerset was done so they could apply the natural language processing to the core search. They want to change the definition of relevance. They don’t look just at the text results in terms of delivering the best results — they include images and video in that, too.
• Simplifying key tasks: They are moving from a single query to a session model, defining the difference between commercial and non-commercial domains. It’s a broad definition of definition that includes anything with high user engagement and high user task.
• Innovate in the business model: Live Search’s cashback program is part of this initiative.

He says they’re keeping pace with the leaders in the industry. Aw, so cute.

Satya brings Alexandra Mickel onto the stage for some demos. She does a search for the Bellagio as an image search. They’ve integrated Virtual Earth into image results. There are refinement tools on the side — like Ask’s refinement, but green instead of red.

Image results have an infinite scroll button. Okay, that’s cool.

Travel results include Farecast. Actually, I’m sure that there are people who are using Live that don’t know about Farecast, so this is useful for them.

Product results in general search: Results include images, buying guides, and Sitelinks (or whatever Live calls them) for the Canon Web site. Product search has integrated cashback into it so you can see where you’re going to get a better deal.

…and now we’re looking at Hotmail. That reminds me, I should check my Hotmail so that I don’t lose that account. It’s been a few months. I’m ignoring the rest of this part of the pitch. Something about that weird sidebar they’ve added. Hotmail will forever remind me of high school. I’m getting emails about my reunion again. I have no interest in talking to those girls.

Okay, video search! They have that mouse over playback thing, which is kinda neat. They’re doing integrations of popular TV shows. Hmm, may have to check that out when I can’t get my TiVo fix.

Satya takes back the mic. They release new things every six months, but they are always trying to innovate on relevance. Their Fall ‘08 release is the stuff that Alexandra just showed us. He’d like you to give Live search a shot for just one day and email him your results. I’m not mean enough to include his email here. Comment below and I’ll email him for you!

Now he wants to talk about the cashback program. They’re looking to bring the research mode into the buying mode. The primary purpose of a search engine is to bring you information, so they see cashback as a way to integrate advertising into the research part of the cycle without being jarring.

They measure success in three ways:

• Consumer choice: 30 percent increase in products offered
• Advertiser ROI: eBay improved ROI by 50 percent (and other success stories as well)
• Query growth: 4.5 million unique users per month using cashback, referring 13 percent of total online spending. Live Search ranks as the number one engine by commercial dollars spent per player

All those facts can be found in the press release coming out today.

Live Search’s new release is Project Silk Road, a service for developers and publishers. It is a broad project in the context of opening up and enabling developer and publisher information. [I'm getting lost in all the buzz words.] They have three goals for the project: increase engagement, generate traffic and drive insight.

Their overall goal is to boost agility and control. There’s a whole cloud of technologies they’re using to get to that, including APIs, FAST, Instant Answers, etc. The uber goal is to enable publishers to take advantage of the data and platforms that they have built.

Bringing all that together will enable users and publishers to boost productivity. Using Azure to extend site data into the cloud, FAST and SharePoint services to enable powerful site search.

Today they’re announcing the next generation of APIs: API 2.0 It’s available today from the Live Search Webmaster Center works and that it can find 404 errors for you. No new information here.

The adCenter plugin for Excel is actually good, and if you’re advertising with them, you should go get it. Even if you’re not, it’s got keyword research potential for SEO.

Okay, Alexandra went away again.

Satya says that the keyword intelligence from the Excel tool can help you create a good user experience in your own site. He urges you to sign up for adCenter. I do too. It’s their best product.

And we’re done. No questions? Okay then.

PubCon Keynote: Satya Nadella was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Last session of the day! Yay! The room is pretty empty right now. I think everyone is over in the Five Bloggers and a Microphone session. Lisa’s recapping that one, so you lucky people get to “attend” both through the magic of liveblogging. Over here, we have Jessica Bowman moderating with speakers Laura Dansbury, SEO Manager, CafePress; Marc Cull, Senior Manager, Ecommerce Technology, CafePress; and William Leake, CEO, Apogee Search.

Laura Dansbury is first. She gives us a few stats on CafePress. The gist is they have millions of possible products for customers. They rely on on-site search to get them to the right one.

Search is the voice of the customer. You have three ways to listen and respond: on-site search, SEO and SEM.

Once a customer reaches your page, if the landing page isn’t quite right, they have to either navigate or use the on-site search. On-site search and SEO benefit from the same sort of best practices. Redirect old content to help both. Use features like taxonomy and tag clouds to help users.

You need to measure SEO, SEM and on-site search both independently and comparatively. If your on-site search isn’t converting as well as your PPC, that’s a problem. Same goes with SEO and on-site search. Look for opportunities. You’ll get shared insights.

Make your internal search behaviors act like the general search engines. Suggestions for misspellings make sense to have on both. Develop special features similar to SEM & banner ads. Offer both product and document results in the online store of large corporate sites.

Consider integrating different types of information in your search. Along with products, you should also have images and help and explanations. Be flexible in your AND logic vs. OR logic — graceful expansion is the key.

How can you avoid internal silos that keep paid, organic and on-site goals from each other? Leverage relationships, have regular meetings, and share information across teams.

Aw, Kate Morris should be here. Laura’s using Twilight as an example of multi-purpose landing pages. That’s a bunch of pale people right there.

Marc Cull is up next. Maybe he’ll have more Twilight!

CafePress first approached search through scale, then optimizing, then integration.

Marc talks fast. Slow down and enunciate, dude. I can’t keep up this late in the day.

They have had 40 million unique search terms in the last four years and 2 million unique terms daily. Three of the 2 million terms make up 5 percent of the daily searches. If they can get those three terms, they’re pretty good. Yesterday those terms were “Obama”, “Barack Obama” and “Twilight”. Nice.

Unique terms are only used once on average. The average lifespan of a product on the site is only one hour. It’s not just finding the right page, it’s about finding it at the right time. As a result, they have to publish in real-time. Once a product is added to the site, it’s immediately available in the search.

In order to answer the problem of search, you need to aggregate or segment the traffic.

They use the same landing pages for off-site search as on-site search. It gives them more bang for their buck.

Bill Leake comes in to finish off the day. He’s doing this sans power point. Because he hates bloggers.

Oh heavens, it’s worse than I thought. He’s just traveling through …ooh shoes! We’re on Zappos and using their site search.

He thinks the world is about to change. Google wants to organize the world’s information. La, la, amusing Google bashing. Hee.

Okay, same search for Zappos. This time we’ll use the embedded search in this site box from the SERPs. Lots of blue links. Paid links, too.

Google is taking the search out of your hands even on your own site. It might not deliver the “right” page for your users.

Bill has just gone off the rails entirely.

Every page on your site needs to be ready to stand alone and be a conversion page.

You don’t get to decide anymore where people are coming into the site. You have to be ready to greet your visitors no matter where they’re entering the site.

Bill is now suggesting that Google is trying to chase down old competitors in general search who have retreated into enterprise search. They need to hunt them down and make sure they’re destroyed. Because they can’t be trusted not to do evil.

There really are good points in all of this, but it’s lost in the Google ranting.

Good night, everyone.

The Secret Life of On-Site Search Exposed was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Zero minutes between sessions is not good! Also it’s cold. And my wrists hurt. And other complaints that you’ve heard from me before.

Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs, is pulling double duty today as moderator and speaker. Also speaking is Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI and Ralf Schwoebel Founder & CEO, Tradebit Inc. Ralf is actually presenting in this panel and in another panel this session. Wow. That’s better than Andy Langton, who isn’t here at all.

Ralf Schwoebel is going first, because of the aforementioned doublebooking.

Reasons to move your site:

• More than three downtimes in the last three months
• Scalability
• Operating System change
• Space requirements

Requirements of the process:

• No down-time
• Database integrity
• Within short time frame
• SERPs preservation

Concepts of moving:

• Sudden death: “this domain has moved and your name server doesn’t know — come back later”
• Slow death nameserver switched – both servers deliver the same pages, orders might be messed up.
• New domain – “this domain has moved here…” – redirects, links
• Tunnel view – Reverse proxy setup on old IP to the new one

Prepare the new site — in peace

Edit your hosts file to point to the new server and double-check your set up. There was more on that slide but Ralf is zipping right through. He’s got places to be, after all.

You should test all aspects of your Web application once you move. This includes: Installed mods, language, dynamic pages, database, tools like ffmpeg, file system/OS and drives / storage.

The tough part is moving databases. If you run a larger e-commerce site, you might have a large databse with orders coming in very minute. What now?

• Disable the order process for “maintenance”
• Dump the DB
• Copy and load the dump
• Flip the switch.

For 30 GB, it took 180 minutes. Pretty fast.

For those with no downtime, there’s the slow death method:
After the new server is prepared and up, move the database like described above, change database host in application to remote, change DNS entries

For the tunnel view, switch off the webserver on the old serve, fire up the reverse proxy (Squid, nginx, IP tables, Apache, others), change the DNS entries. Easy-peasy.

Now he’s got to go. Bye, Ralf!

Oh, hey, Andy’s back! Hi, Andy. But before we get to Andy, it’s time for Guillaume Bouchard.

Things to do during the pre-move:

When starting the pre-move, you have to take into account the need vs risk in switching domain names. The first question is do you really need to change the domain name? No, really, do you NEED to change the domain names? Think about this. Is this the brilliant brain child of some marketing exec who has no clue of how the internet works?

Answer: Probably.

Fight to death to avoid weak reasons for changing the domain name. Tell your boss:

• Rankings will inevitably going to drop, temporarily
• Chances are when rankings return, they won’t be as strong as before
• There is a fair amount of work involved
• There is a fair amount of risk that it won’t be done right
• If it’s not done right, rankings might tank for months and months.

There are a lot of steps to taking in switching domain names, and it’s easy to miss one. Seriously, don’t take the risk if you don’t have to.

But if you simply must, here’s some things to consider:

Nature of the move (whole or partial transfer)

• Shifting to a new domain and transferring all content
• Shifting to a new domain and transferring partial content
• Splitting off some content to a new domain for RP or marketing purposes
• Splitting to a new domain and changing URI structure
• Splitting to a new domain and changing content

In each case you would need to do 301s properly.

What to expect in terms of indexing time and rankings:

Indexing time for a new domain after the old site has been redirected:

• Google: one month
• Yahoo: one to three months
• Microsoft: Quick indexing, less than a month

To get rankings back:

• Google two to four months
• Yahoo: one month
• Microsoft: one month

Make sure you’re pointing links at your new page. Seriously.

Registration of the domain and the IP neighborhood.

Make sure it’s really new, not just burned and dumped by a spammer in the past. Do a bit of research. Do the same with your IP neighborhood. Use seoegghead.com to find out what’s hosted on that IP.

Some people recommend registering a domain for at least two years before you move to it. Rand says to post in Google’s webmaster forum. Guilliame thinks that’s pretty much just something that works because he’s Rand. Hee.

The Move:

Before any content is moved to the new domain, TEMPORARILY block search engines from indexing with Robots.txt. Do NOT forget to take it down again later.
Be careful of your database, and test test test. Use comprehensive 301 redirects for each type of content move. And please don’t rush. You only have one chance to do it right.

Post move:

Ask your biggest referrers to update their links to the new site. Launch your new domain with a bang – include press releases and news mentions and linkbait, etc. etc… This is a good time to try for really good new links.

Maintain the old site and 301 redirect for an extended period. Minimum 6 months but he recommended never taking down the 301s.

Andy Langton …is so forgiven for being late. Cutest accent ever. This is the best session. German Ralf, Quebecois Guillaume and English Andy. [girlie happy sigh][*insert jealousy on behalf of the rest of the writers*]

Do 301s still rule the day? Yes.

Even well planned migrations go wrong. The only way to ensure rankings are maintained is not to change them. Cool URIs don’t change, so plan for permanence.

A 301 is a permanent move (check out all the status codes on the W3C site). Use the new URL in the future, not the old one.

301s can preserve ranking signals. It’s more than just links. It’s history and trust and analytics data. That’s all tied into the URL. [Ooh, good point.] Theoretically, a 301 will maintain all those things but it’s no guarantee.

When should you use a 301?

Whenever your URLs that don’t change, change:

• Domain names
• Content into a subdomain (or vice versa)
• Moving pages or files
• To avoid duplication problems

How to implement 301s:

• Best way: mod_rewrite, mod_alias (apache) or an ISAPI filter (IIS)
• On Web server (eg for IIS)
• Via “smart 404 pages”
• Via individual server-side scripts. Not good in bulk.
• Meta Refresh=0 [Google and Yahoo claim it works but the audience here is skeptical of this.]

Best practices:

• The goal is to preserve ranking signals so redirect to same or similar content.
• Don’t chain redirects.
• Avoid blanket redirects (many pages to one page).

At minimum, focus on pages with external links and visitor entry points.

404 or 410 if similar content isn’t available anymore. If you have pages without external links, don’t worry about redirecting those. You can fix any links heading to that page internally.

Monitor impact:

• Crawling activity
• Indexing activity
• Rankings, traffic and other existing KPIs (Web analytics)

Q&A

What if you want to take down a 301?
Andy: Try not to do that.

Is there a danger in having a lot of 301s in an .htaccess file?
Guillaume: Only from a speed standpoint, yes. Use regular expressions to avoid that if you can.
Andy: They’ll probably look at it case by case rather than a numeric limit. It’s more about linking to similar content.

What about changing shopping cart software?
Guillaume thinks that would be even faster than changing domains because Google still trusts it. Submit your XML sitemap and it should be fine.
For a new web site, submit to the social networks, not to try to rank on Digg but just to get a few links and hope you don’t get buried. They get indexed a lot so you’re link will get picked up fast too. Heh.

My new domain is 302ing to my old domain: is that good, bad or indifferent?
Andy: That’s fine. 302 is temporary, it basically just says ‘keep checking back here for the original content.’
Guillaume: It’s not bad but I’d put up a wordpress blog up instead and throw up a few pages of content with a call to action. Get some trust.

How to Move Your Web Site without Chaos was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Back from yet another dismal boxed lunch. Honestly, food shouldn’t be so depressing. Or soggy. Significantly less depressing than lunch? Moderator Joe Laratro and speakers Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts, George Aspland Founder & President, eVision, LLC and Greg Jarboe President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com. Rick Klau from Google didn’t make it.

Bear with me, my computer refused to turn back on after lunch so it had to be punished with a hard reboot. We’re still trying to make up the lost progress.

George Aspland is up first to teach us about optimizing PDFs. His goal is to teach us how to get higher rankings and more click-throughs from SERP listings for PDFs and also how to take advantage of active links in PDFs.

His advice is to use mostly formatted as text. Just like in HTML, search engines can’t read text as an imagine. What you get when you do that is just page numbers being indexed which isn’t useful to rank for anything.

Also, optimize the text in the document. Pay special attention to the headline in a PDF. Like regular results, Google includes snippets from the PDF and puts the words and phrases of the query in bold.

It’s very important to update the Document Title. It’s just as important as the Title tag is on a Web Page. Double check to be sure that you’ve put in a proper Title. If not, it will just choose a title for you from the text in the PDF (usually the first headline), which will not entice people to click-through to this document.

To update the Title in Word 2003, just go to File, Properties and fill in the proper box. It’s better to update your title in Acrobat. Word will put “Microsoft Word” in front of your Title which isn’t optimal.

How to get your PDF indexed: Link to it from one or more pages that already indexed. Simple.

In order to take advantage of active hyperlinks, you have to make them in the first place: For text URLs, format the look of your URLs (Acrobat won’t make it blue and underlined), export/print as PDF, Open with Acrobat Standard or Pro. In Pro: Advanced > Links > Create from URLs.

Adding links gives search engines a way to travel out of the PDF and onto the site. This is good for PDFs that you’re keeping on your site as well as ones that you’re distributing to customers.

You can promote your PDF by linking to it from multiple pages on your site and by getting other sites to link to it too.

Download “Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines – 2008″ from their blog: evisionsem/blog

Greg Jarboe is our next speaker.

His first point is that 30 percent of searches on Google sites aren’t web searches. It’s a percentage that’s only increasing. 15 percent are video searches.

Optimizing .docs

Google News pulls press releases, which are usually given to the wire services as Word docs. It’s time stamped, so recent is better. You would optimize your press release like any other Web page, so use your keywords. Also in Google News, headlines count more than Body copy. The first paragraph is worth more than the last paragraph.

Google Blog Search examines a blog’s title, content and popularity. It indexes blogs by their feeds which will be checked frequently for new content. Blog searches reward recent posts and tend to be indexed faster than regular Web search.

CEO Watch used SEO Samba to optimize their Web site and RSS feeds and saw a traffic jump over time.

YouTube examines dozens of aspects including hits and rating. YouTube gets more searches per month than Yahoo. If you’re not in video, you’re missing out on the second biggest search audience.

What’s different about what they look at:

• Hits
• Comments
• Ratings

You have to have views before you’ll get rankings, and you have to allow comments or it won’t do well.

Universal search incorporates all of the “other stuff” that’s in the 30 percent of other search. It’s not just about optimizing for that 30 percent, it’s about the fact that that 30 percent is creeping into the 70 percent.

Stephan Spencer is next.

More people use Blogger than Movable Type in this audience. Almost everyone uses Wordpress. [Maybe now I can convince IT to change us over to WordPress.]

Big SEO mistakes for bloggers:

• Leaving the Title Tags auto-generated
• Squandering your “crawl equity” by letting pages get indexed that don’t deserve to be.
• Having multiple homes for your blog (www vs non-www).
• Not using Optional Excerpt to minimize duplicate content.
• Not using rel=no follow.
• Overreliance on date-based archives.
• No stability in keyword focus on category & tag pages (fix with sticky posts).
• Suboptimial URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories).
• Only one RSS feed and it’s un-optimized.
• Hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don’t own.
• Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally.

Rejig internal linking structure

• Tag clouds and Tag pages and tag conjunction pages — carefully. With great power comes great responsibility.
• Related posts
• Top 10 posts
• Next & Previous / pagination

Use the Web Developer for Firefox on your pages to spot overuse of links. Also? Use a sticky post on your tag pages so that the first post will always set your keyword theme.

You also need to optimize your Title and URLs. A good headline doesn’t mean you’ll have a good Title tag. Use rel=no follow to direct your PageRank.

Other hints for optimizing your Blog’s:

For your Titles:

• Thin Slicing: make quick decisions, don’t over think.
• Only really works if you’re an expert.
• SEO Title Tags plugin for WP will allow you to mass edit Title tags.
• Name your blog something with good keywords.

Optimize your URLs:

• Shorter URLs get twice as many clicks as longer URLs in the SERPs.
• Subdomains/subdirectories/newdomains? Figure it out from your business rules.
• Rewrite to contain keywords, hyphens not underscores
• Test and optimize

Optimize your anchor text:

• Make the post’s title a link to the permalink page
• Use SEOMoz Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool or BLA
• (tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) to look for links

Minimize Duplicate Content:

• Use Optional Excerpts — paraphrase the post and only put the content on the permalink page.
• Your dates should not be H1 tags
• Use emphasis tags

Optimize your RSS feeds:

• Full text, not summaries
• 20 or more items in your feed
• Multiple feed (by category, latest comments, comments by post)
• Keyword-rich items
• Your brand name in the item
• Your most important keyword in the site container
• Don’t use source tracking parameters.
• Fix your description field

For a bunch of goodies about optimizing your blog, email him at SEO@Netconcepts.com

Q&A

Why would you want to do full text when the scrapers are going to steal it?

Stephan: it’s going to happen no matter what. You’re going to frustrate your core audience with a summary feed. I wouldn’t worry about the scrapers. They can scrape the HTML just as easily. Put a link or a photo in the bottom of your posts so that they’re linking back to you when they repost it.

Does changing the slug 301 the old URL to the new one?

Stephan: Yes. In fact it links from the original to whatever the newest one is, not just to the one right after it.

We already have RSS feeds with information, should we have a blog with that same information?
Greg: Do commentary on the information, not just republish it.
Stephan: Think of your blog as a microsite for those links.

Is there any value in putting current content into a PDF?
George: It creates duplicate content.

Where is the Optional Excerpt?
Stephan: It’s on the update page but you also need to update the template to ‘if it’s not the permalink page and optional excerpt is defined, use it’.

Alternative Discovery & SEO: Feeds, PDFs & Blog SEO was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

There was no passing period between session one and session two. I ended up having to sprint. It wasn’t pretty, folks. But now we’re here with speakers Alexander Barbara CEO, ReidBrown Enterprises, Inc., Jeremy Wright CEO, B5media and moderator Roger B. Dooley, so let’s not dwell on having no time and just get started.

Roger begins by saying dedicated servers are fun and addictive. [I say, like potato chips? Or doll collecting?]

Alexander Barbara is up first. He’s going to talk about when his company hit the tipping point and had to get their own server. Their server was slow and the down time was losing them more money than they were getting credited.

Instead, they wanted a fast site with high uptime. Their server had to have great support and room for growth. The speed was important because ads and analytics are often the last thing to load. They had to weigh the pros and cons of different servers, like:

A “Virtual” private server

• Dedicated meets Shared — lots of people on one server but with root access
• Often oversold
• Resources – $
• Know what you’re getting

Dedicated vs Shared

• 100% resources available (vs. .4%)
• 100% control
• 100% responsibility

They wanted a managed dedicated server. Someone able to migrate sites, update software, troubleshoot and offer phone support. For them the bottom line was that the speed of the site affected revenue.

There are some things you have to do in order to figure out the right server:

• Do a speed check. How many backbones do they have?
• Do an example IP traceroute.
• Also consider database/software vs static.
• Pageviews.

There are alternatives to changing to a dedicated server, though. You can reduce images, JavaScript, etc. You can also optimize your HTML and CSS. Also host your images and video separately. [ED: Don't do that last one. Not good for blended search]

Dedicated is not necessarily:

• More reliable than shared
• Needed for high traffic
• Better for SEO

Questions to ask your potential server host:

• How often do they do back ups and do they have limits?
• Do they have an uptime service level agreement?
• Are they in the data center? Can someone go push a button for you?
• Site uptime monitoring? A decent host should know your site is down before you do.

It’s also a good idea to ask for references. There’s a forum on Webmaster World just for dedicated servers. Find out how old the servers are. The newer the better. Also, what’s the cost and availability of IPs and C-Blocks?

If you’re getting a VPS, know how many instances are on a box. Check to see what your guaranteed amount of RAM is. You’ll need a separate DNS server or it’ll slow you down. And of course, find out if there’s a money back guarantee. Look for someone who is willing to stand behind their product.

For managed hosting: You need to ask, will they compile and install custom software? Is their support 24/7 (and check their response time. Put in a ticket just to check.) Is phone support available?

Those with add on costs: CPanel, WHM, Fantastico, Plesk, etc
Microsoft (IIS / ASP .NET / MSSQL) will require licenses.

No one can guarantee 100% uptime. Not even Rackspace, who is extremely reliable. Keep that in mind when you’re looking.

The bottom line is that you need to find something that meets your needs, which is still cost-effective. Focus on the things that matter to you.

Jeremy Wright follows Alexander. Ooh, confidential non-bloggable information. You wish you were here.

His blog network has gone to 350 blogs on 10 boxes. Servers matter, because what they do is serve content. So uptime is super important.

They went from one server to three servers to many more to a whole buncha lotta. In every case, they hit problems and they kept outgrowing their space.

For them:

• Quality is more important than price — Ask for an RFP, low quality responses there is a clue. They put out a request for RFPs, got 400 responses and found 12 that were worth it. Give them two weeks as a trial. If you don’t like them then, things are only going to get worse.
• Get referrals — but realize that everyone is going to have bad reviews unless they’re a tiny shop.
• Know what you NEED vs what you WANT
• Don’t switch to dedicated too soon
• Go with a larger shop vs a smaller one

Biggest mistakes that they made:

• Didn’t plan for growth.
• Moved to dedicated hosting too soon (could have moved to a large shared hosting account, saved tech $).
• Stayed with bad providers too long (hint: when the power goes out in your data center more than once? MOVE).
• Overpaid for managed hosting when a full-time tech resource would have been cheaper (and then they hired one anyway).
• Didn’t use RFPs until this year to get the best pricing and service they could.

Beyond Dedicated:

Don’t buy unless you have to. Use “lease to own” (almost the same price as dedicated, but with more control and actual long-term $ value). Find (independently of the vendor) similar clients at their datacenters and talk to them. Consider combining forces with another similar-sized company to save $ and share resources.

David Driskill who was scheduled to be here is mysteriously absent so Roger gets to talk. He follows up on Alexander’s presentation by emphasizing the importance of fast page loads. He also suggests that you ask about the internal migration policy is, find out if they’re doing it for you or if they’re just going to leave you hanging. Be wary if your hosting company gets bought.

How do you publish to get RFPs? Jeremy says they post to WebhostingTalk.com, Webmaster World, SitePoint and they issue press releases.

Q&A

How do you determine cost effectiveness?

Alex: For us it was a case of how much were we losing during downtime.

Where can you get tech guys instead of managed?

Jeremy: Search for managed server support. It’s an industry and you can get everything from one guy to the big firms in India. Your hosting company might have references too.

The Big Dedicated Server Payoff was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.