SMX East 2011 Recap for SEOBook

Another successful SMX East is in the books. From all accounts, the event seemed to go through flawlessly and without a hitch. Kudos to Danny Sullivan, Claire Schoen, and crew as the caliber of speakers, sessions, and attendees was top notch, as always. Judging from the event, search marketing is alive and thriving more than ever before. There was a healthy mix of industry experts, consultants, large corporations, agencies, and small businesses. The sessions covered a broad range of topics from beginner link building fundamentals to more advanced technical SEO sessions covering site architecture, technical coding optimization and everything in between. A huge thank you goes out to the organizers for a job well done.

It seemed there were two themes that surfaced regularly - Panda and Google Plus/+1. Clearly, there are still many webmasters struggling with Panda and how to properly handle content in the new post-Panda world . The search engines are addressing this and giving webmasters and SEO’s more tools and information to organize their websites correctly. After some of the presentations, it seems Google is very dedicated to their Plus and +1 initiatives which will have a large effect on SEO should end user usage continue to increase.

Below are tidbits and takeaways from the conference, from an SEO perspective. Enjoy!

Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging For 2012

Panelists:

• Janet Driscoll Miller, Search Mojo http://twitter.com/#!/janetdmiller
• Topher Kohan, CNN https://twitter.com/#!/Topheratl
• Jack Menzel, Google http://twitter.com/#!/jackm

Microformats where the original snippet format, however, they have been replaced by the new and evolving standard, microdata (which is Schema.org/Google/Bing are developing for and placing resources towards). Some notes from the presentations:

• General consensus is rich snippets can greatly help in getting your content noticed.
• In one example given, Eatocracy added the hRecipe tag to their pages, and immediately saw a 47% increase in their recipes being picked up and indexed into Google (which does support this in their recipe search). Additionally, they saw a 22% increase in their recipe traffic.
• CNN started using Yahoo SearchMonkey / RDFa, and saw a 35% increase in their video content on Google Video search, and saw a 22% increase in overall search traffic.
• Per Google, their studies show that sites w/ rich snippets have a better CTR as well. RV Guha noted, “From our experiments, it seemed that giving the user a better idea of what to expect on the page increases the click-through rate on the search results. So if the webmasters do this, it’s really good for them. They get more traffic. It’s good for users because they have a better idea of what to expect on the page. And, overall, it’s good for the web.”
• Rich snippets only work for one site (no cross site references).
• Sites like LinkedIn and Google Profiles still use microformats. Google has also provided a tool in WMT, but it is a bit buggy and may throw false errors. If you don’t see your snippets show up in the SERP’s, it’s likely caused by longer than preferred latency load times, errors in your code, or a random Google bug - (per Google).
• The current types of rich snippets: reviews, people, products, businesses & organizations, recipes*, events, music

Session - “Ask the Search Engines”

Panelists:

• Tiffany Oberio - Google http://twitter.com/#!/tiffanyoberoi

• Duane Forrester - Bing http://twitter.com/#!/duaneforrester

• Rich Skrenta - Blekko http://twitter.com/#!/skrenta

• One audience member asked how to handle ‘subcategory’ pages that are often created in ecommerce sites such as “Sort Prices $0-$5”, “Prices $5-$25” etc. The question was whether or not to use the “rel=canonical” tag and point the pages back to the main page. The panelists agreed that those pages should be blocked completely and should not use the canonical tag. The Google representative said not only do these pages not add value to the engine’s index, but they also eat up the sites crawl budget.

• If you see the warning "we're seeing a high # of URL's" in Webmaster Tools, most times it's a duplicate content issue.

• One audience member asked if subdomain is considered as part of the main domain?

  • Blekko - no inheritance from main domain
  • Google - "it depends". Sometimes it is inherited, sometimes not.
  • Bing - we look and try to determine if subdomain is a standalone business/website and will get treated differently based on that determination

• One question touched on removing URL’s from Google’s index. Google advised that a removed URL may or may not stay in the index for a period of time, and that to expedite removal of a URL one should use Webmaster Tools remove-url tool

• Duane from Bing was adamant about keeping your submitted sitemap clean. The threshold is 1%. If there are issues in your submitted sitemap >1%, Bing will “lose trust” for your website

• Panelists advised to make your 404 pages useful to the user

• It may not be breaking news, but Bing and Google both said unequivocally - duplicate content does hurt you

• Google commented they are big fans of HTML 5 technology

• At this point it seems Google will crawl a page if +1 is present, regardless of the robots.txt. This could possibly create issues with trying to not crawl certain pages to avoid dup content. More information found here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4358033.htm

• Panelists advised to spend a lot of energy “containing urls” on your website and to be thoughtful about which URLs you are getting out there

• Bing and Google confirmed that “pagerank sculpting” is misunderstood and not effective. For example, if a page has 5 outgoing links and link juice is spread 20% to each of the 5 links, if you nofollow one of the links, the link juice distribution will not become 25% to the remaining 4 links. It will remain 4 x 20%. In essence, you have just evaporated potential link juice

Google Plus and +1

These were hot topics at this year’s SMX East. Multiple sessions covered Google Plus and +1 in depth.

• Speaker Benjamin Vigneron from Esearchvision covered the basics of Google Plus and +1. He noted a +1 to a search result will +1 the PPC ad/landing page, too.
• With PPC, +1 could have a significant effect on Adrank by affecting each of the Quality Score factors including quality of the landing page, CTR, and the ad’s past performance.
• Interesting that Adwords could conceivably add segmenting on all information in Google Plus (similar to FB) i.e. males, ages, etc.
• Christian Oestlien, the Google Product Manager for Google Plus, spoke about Google Plus features and fielded questions. He mentioned Google is testing and experimenting with celebrity endorsements +1'ing and showed an example SERP with a +1 annotation under the search result (for example “Kim Kardashian has +1’ed” Brand X or search result X). He noted Google is seeing much higher CTR with the +1 annotation and that usage for the “Circles” feature is relatively high.
• Google software engineer Tiffany Oberoi was also present on the panel. She noted +1 is NOT a ranking factor, but social search is still of course implemented in search results. She confirmed Facebook likes have no impact on rankings but also noted regarding social signals, “explicit user feedback is like gold for us". She also touched on spam with +1 and said she is currently working with the spam team.

Hardcore Local Search Tactics

Panelists:

• Matt McGee - Search Engine Land
• Mike Ramsey, - Nifty Marketing
• Will Scott - Search Influence

Panelists here gave an encore presentation of the session these folks put on at SMX Advanced in Seattle. The content was excellent and definitely deserved another run through. Here are the notes:

• July 21st, Google removed citations from their Places listings. Sources like Whitespark can be helpful in uncovering citation-building opportunities.
• Citation accuracy is among the most important factors in getting your business to rank in the O or 7-Pack.
• Offsite Citation’s / Data appear to be the no. 1 ranking factor in Places listings.
• Links are the new citations for local in 2011-12.
• Building a custom landing page to link your Places Listing to appears to be a huge success factor. Include your Name, Address, Phone (NAP) in the title tag.
• When trying to understand how users are searching for your client, Insights for Search is a great tool as you can find Geo-targeted data w/ KW differentiation.
• Local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO:
  • Optimize location (local SEO) vs Optimize websites (traditional SEO)
  • Blended search is about matching them up
• PageRank of Places URL does NOT seem to affect Local ranking -(source: David Mihm)

Panda Recovery Case Study - High Gear Media

Speaker Matt Heist from High Gear Media covered their experiences over the past 8 months with recovering from Panda. They eliminated most of their properties completely (301'ed) and pared them down to 7 total sites with 4 being ‘core’: FamilyCarGuide, Motorauthority, GreenCarReports, TheCarConnection.

• High Gear Media believes that premium content will prevail and that Panda will help that.

Raven Tools

We were able to meet up with the friendly staff over at Raven Tools, sit down with them, and learn a bit more about their product. Some upcoming features include:

• A new Chrome Toolbar to complement the current Firefox toolbar.
• Another feature coming is templated messaging for link requests and manual link building, which will include BCC’s back to records.
• Speed is the number one priority right now. They have full-time staff that are solely dedicated to speeding up the system.

Other Notes

• Regarding Panda, one panelist referenced what he called a website’s “Content Performance Ratio” referring to the % of content on a site that is good versus bad.
• Panelists also noted in his experience it takes 3-4 requests on a 404 before search engine believes you and removes it from the index.