Beyond Pandas and Penguins presented by Joel Swaney and Peter Quale

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Beyond Pandas and Penguins: Tac$cs for SEO That Won’t Get You in Trouble Joel Swaney & Peter Quale

Transcript of Beyond Pandas and Penguins presented by Joel Swaney and Peter Quale

Page 1: Beyond Pandas and Penguins presented by Joel Swaney and Peter Quale

Beyond Pandas and Penguins: Tac$cs for SEO That Won’t Get You in Trouble 

Joel Swaney & Peter Quale 

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Introduc9ons 

Joel Swaney Senior Search Manager 

Peter Quale VP of Technical Search Marke9ng 

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Agenda •  What do search engines ask of us? •  What used to work and what not to do? •  What is working today? •  What does the future hold? •  Google & You – Where can you Learn More? •   Q&A 

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The Internet is a big messy place 

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Search Engines are trying to catalog it. 

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They are asking SEO people to help. 

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So basically… we are dorky librarians. 

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What do Google & Bing Ask of us? 

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 ‐ May 2012 

*Netcra@ Domain Survey 

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Google Webmaster Guidelines 

hUp://bit.ly/webmasterguidelines  

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Bing Webmaster Help 

hUp://bit.ly/bingwebmasterhelp  

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Penguin Update 

Panda Update 

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Panda & Penguin 

•  Both designed to fight webspam and reward quality content. 

•  Panda – Feb 24th 2011 – Penalized: –  Ar9cle sites and content aggregators like About.com –  Duplicate content  –  Un‐linked pages 

•  Penguin – April 24th 2012 – Affected 3.1 of English queries, and penalized: –  Sites with large numbers of unnatural links. –  Web pages with liUle‐to‐no content. –  Sites that violated content guidelines. –  Keyword stuffing and sneaky redirects.  

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Penguin Update 

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Google & Bing Likes!  •  Schema Meta Data! •  Sitemap XML! •  Site speed! •  Original content! •  Buzz! 

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Google & Bing Dislikes.  

•  Duplicate content. •  Slow sites. •  Garbage pages. •  Ignored sites. •  Links from “evil” sites. 

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What Used to Work & What NOT to do now 

•  Bulk Back Links •  Content Farming •  Over Op9miza9on •  Keyword Stuffing  

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Bulk Back‐Linking 

•  Incremental increases in back‐links to our own site. 

•  Suspicious big jumps. •  Did move us to page one for several compe99ve phrases. 

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Uh‐oh…. Google Nas9gram. 

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Mysterious Backlinks 

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Bulk Ar9cle Marke9ng  

•  Basically “Paid Links” – a big no‐no. •  Very liUle “Link Diversity” – “chicken recipes” – “chicken recipes” – “chicken recipes” 

•  No one asking the ques9on: “Does anyone want to read this garbage?” 

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Press Releases 

•  Press releases are highly suscep9ble to misuse and spam.  

•  Press releases with merit are s9ll traffic drivers. 

•  MaU CuUs describes a “con9nuum of content, and the quality of that content, and what defines the value add for a user.”  hUp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7sfUDr3w8I 

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Over‐Op9miza9on 

•  Keyword Domains: – Why‐Does‐My‐Dog‐Seem‐Hungry‐All‐The‐Time.com – WhatDoMacaquesEat.com 

•  Op9mized internal keyword‐laden links. •  High keyword density. •  Exact match of 9tles, headers, URL. •  Going beyond a reasonable effort to improve a page. 

•  A perfect site is not always best. 

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What’s Working Today? 

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What’s Working Today? Specialized Op9miza9on 

•  Content – Pages worth reading. – Uniqueness – Reading Level Targe9ng – Sites with images 

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What’s Working Today? Specialized Op9miza9on 

•  Site speed – HTTP Compression –  Image Compression – HTTP Requests 

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What’s Working Today? HTML Templates 

•  Google has to store this data, so we help to keep it small. 

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What’s Working Today? HTML Templates 

•  Code bloat can be a problem. – Minify JavaScript – Reduce the number of included files 

– Use CSS wisely 

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What’s Working Today? Indexability! 

•  Indexability – XML Sitemaps Diagnos9c 

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What’s Working Today? Indexability! 

•  Ideally we know exactly how many pages should be indexed. 

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What’s Working Today? Indexability! •  Monitoring Google & Bing’s Indices 

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What’s Working Today? Responsive Design & Infinite Scrolling •  Flexible templates encourage HTML5 and CSS3. 

•  Infinite Scrolling Speeds ini9al page load 9mes and reduces paging. 

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What’s Working Today? Mobile Search 

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What’s Working Today? Social Widgets! 

•  Google +1’s do affect search rankings. 

•  Choose highly interes9ng and compelling informa9on to share.  

•  Don’t be afraid to use Pinterest. 

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What’s ahead for search? 

•  Google Knowledge Graph •  Facebook Search •  Smartphone/ Tablet Specific Results 

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Google Knowledge Graph   

•  Based in seman9c search •  Currently only for popular culture searches •  Could be expanded in 2013 

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Facebook Search   

•  Basing search rankings on “Likes” and “Reach” 

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Mobile Search Results 

•  Likely to favor local results with relevant map lis9ngs. 

•  Might favor responsive design sites and homepages with click‐to‐call phone numbers. 

•  Likely to become device specific.  –  iPads get different results than Blackberry 

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Where can you learn more? 

•  Google and Bing Webmaster Help pages •  Newish Google Site: Webmaster Academy 

hUp://bit.ly/webmasteracademy 

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Q&A 

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Thank you! 

 Joel Swaney – [email protected]    Peter Quale – [email protected] ‐ @pbq