Archive for June, 2008

Platform Considerations for the Microsoft Stack and LAMP Stack - Practical tips, tricks, and workarounds for search-friendly architecture.

• Microsoft Stack
  • Including IIS, ASP.Net, Silverlight, Microsoft SQL Server
• LAMP Stack
  • Including Apache, PHP, Ruby, Flash/Flex, mySQL
• CMS Considerations (such as .NET Blog Engine, AxCMS, Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla)

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Colin Cochrane, SEO Analyst and Web Developer, Metamend Search Engine Marketing
Thomas Deml, Senior Program Manager, Internet Information Services, Microsoft
Nikhil Kothari, Principal Architect, Microsoft
Duane Nickull, Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems
Jeff Pollard, Chief Technology Officer, SEOmoz, Inc

Came in late, I will do the best to catch up.  

Jeff Pollard:   Discusses LAMPrelated URL re-writting, URLs, redirects.  The standard stuff.    I assume he is discussing the Apache considerations.

PHP Some versions of PHP have a session id whole that can cause security issues and create problems for your canonicalization efforts.

Send the Correct Response Headers:  Verify the responses and provide user friendly error pages.  

MySQL; may have performance optimization issues.  You should adjust your query_cache and key_Cache.

Is there an easier way?

Use web frameworks to make sure you are friendly to the engines. 

• CakePHP
• Zend
• Ruby on Rails
• Merb

Colin Cochrane:  Counter point to Jeff.

Issues are similar to LAMP stack for MS stack;  URL rewriting, Custom error pages, Meta Data management, etc. 

URL Canonicalization

Missing 301 redirects, doesn’t preserve the Path and Query and case insensitive URLS.  Colin is showing the management console for a domain in IIS.  Lots of issues fixed in II7.   Canonical Character casing …  I will get the slides and update this later 

URL rewriting.  again a huge amount of stuff here, but there are ways to handle this.

Customer Error Pages:  rarely handled well.   Content from a static file needs to preserve the response code.  Request is handled by IIS.   it gets tricky with the execution of a URL.  There is an additional request made.

Intercepting Application errors.  Use HttpModule set eventHandler for Context.Error event. avoid poor error capturing.  

Meta Data management.  Web.Sitemap; Easily extendible with additional sitemapnode attributes. Saves coding when master pages are used. This one page will centralize your management.

Performance:  HTTP Compression rarely used, but should be.  Static and Dynamic resources are your implementation types, but test before going down the dynamic route.  Content expires.   Set the expires HTTP header to minimize requests.  Viewstate.   Keep it underwraps.   It adds no value to the search engine.

Duane Nickull:

Adobe plays nicely with all the stacks.   Can’t force engines to read stuff.   Render stuff out like in PHP.   Open Screen Project:   making Flash, Flex, AIR crawlable.   Shows a site written entirely in flash that is ranking after 3 weeks.   Google is reading inside of the Adobe TV. {Fail didn’t work on stage}.  Cream rises to the top.   Pitched MVMC Multiple views, Multiple clients.  which is a cloaking technique. 

Now he is talking about engine considerations. Nothing new versus the other speakers thus far. 

Nikhil Kothari:  Search engine friendly Silverlight apps.

Standard Microsoft stuff applies.  Indexability, what and where.   What do you want to index? How do you want to get the right search behavior from the engines.   Gives classic web app versus RIAs.   Silverlight wants to restore indexability to RIAs .   Add indexable content. Publish content in line with RIA content.   Design the RIA to consume the content and create a richer presentation.  

Demo time….  Search unfriendly APP built in Silverlight.   How could we fix this?  Shows the bad source for the original page.    Uses ASP.net to render out some alternate content.  Same photos, Same code.   Now the source code has all the detail with sematically correct markup to get the correct SE behavior.  More steps to make content available to the SE.  Builds on alternate content with Javascript.  

Use Sitemaps to help discover other content around the application.   Web development is about patterns.  These patterns serve multiple purposes.   

Q and A:  

When is .Net going to work around the MVC framework?

Nikhil: We already are. It is on codeplex and we are sharing the source code in a completely open way.

Gotta run I will provide more feedback later.

I will be covering the Developer day as much as possible, but I need to recharge my laptop so I am sitting in on the Recession Panel.

Search Marketing & Surviving A Recession - Many expect a recession to hit and no one knows how search will weather it. This session looks at strategies and tactics for those who want to prepare in advance for a worse case scenario.

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Q&A Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Director of SEO, Business.com

Speakers:

Andrew Beckman, President, Location3 Media
Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning
Russ Mann, CEO, Covario
Jon Miller, Vice President, Marketing, Marketo

Andrew Beckman:  Things are not trending in the right direction. Spend will change.

Dave Davies:  We have been impacted, because we are in Canada and the dollar is weak. Most of our customers are in the US.

Russ Mann:  We have seen a increase in business even from manufacturers who are widely impacted by the recession. 

Jon Miller:  I am hopeful, but I am a realist and people are feeling tough times. 

Q1: Are we in a recession?

Dave Davies:  Recession may provide us excellent opportunities

Russ Mann: probably stagflation, but it seems sectors of the economy are not doing well and some are doing really well.   We are experiencing a counter cyclical boom.  

Jon Miller:  not an economist.  We are in the worst possible non-recession. 

Q2: What worries you?

Russ Mann:  with Fortune 500, people are scrutinizing spend more.  Looking to automated solutions to reduce cost of production, etc. etc. etc.

Jon Miller:  If you can track the ROI, there will be more spend but companies with larger companies and deep pockets.  They understand then is the time to Double Down.  More spend from little companies and more big companies.

In a recession, people don’t focus their spend on branding.

Dave Davies: As analytics goes, we are the one form of marketing that has the high value of provability with analytics and the reporting helps.

Q3 Where do you put your first marketing dollar?

Andrew Beckman: Focus on the fundamentals.  Start analyzing your clickstream metrics and then use that for strategies to increase conversion.  Fundamentals of SEO and SEM.

Dave Davies:  Agree whole heartedly. As people are staying and not going out.  People will spend more time research and surfing.  

Russ Mann: Clients say that search is at the center of the marketing spend.  we think they should focus on the research and strategy.  We can’t just be search experts, we have to be business experts.

Jon Miller:  When budgets are tight. You need to look for opportunities to maximize the dollar for the customer.  Customers may not be in the funnel and relationships grow over time.  When you first meet someone you don’t propose.  

Q4 What strategies can help minimize marketers stress

Andrew Beckman:  There are struggles.  SEM has to take the long view when they are used to short term impact.

Dave Davies:  There are basics like the description tag that are your “ad to the world” in the organic side.   Take advantage of the fine touches.

PARTING THOUGHT:   Maximize long term value. Focus on your integrated campaigns and business value.  As a search marketer you should be used to a recession, it happens every 4th quarter when your budget is cut.

Jeremiah’s thoughts:  Interesting session I am really concerned that this industry is not focused on long term, but more on the short and this creates a bad impression.  I think dave and Andrew got it right.  These are long term games and focusing on the basics will pay dividends. 

You & A With Matt Cutts - What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink

5:01 - Danny is getting things kicked off.  I will do my best to track.

Truthyness

Danny: There is a lot of talk going on around truthyness because of the Article that went viral about a fake news story.

Matt Cutts:  There is a difference between a fake story written for link bait written amongst the real news without any disclosure.  No correction, etc.   I didn’t view this as a harmless prank.   If we didn’t do something it would have been irresponsible. 

Some one earlier today said that their job is to get links.  If you have to lie to do it, so be it.  This puts a negative view on the whole industry.  If you are silly enough to say you lied we have to take action.

DS:  If your a small site why not pay for links?

MC:  How many people are willing to let there sites burn to the ground? 

If you are an in-house, you can’t do the kind of things that would risk your portfolio.  Someone said “do what is right for your sites now”  That is not the way to look at it.  Do what is right for your customers in the long term.   Think about Milli Vanilli…  Your Trust and your credibility is a limited commodity.

DS:  Talk about PageRank Scraping.

MC:  Somebody was scraping PageRank and we could tell that some was scraping because it had a signature.  We modified the signals so that  and the guy stopped…

MC:  I love conferences, because it is a ultimate forcing function.  Look at my blog for neat stuff: www.mattcutts.com.   Read the definition from Google on cloaking.  Here is what you need to know about cloaking.  Google corrected some language in their guidelines. 

DS: linkbait and widgetbait, can you clarify what is good or bad.

MC:  There is a spectrum.  Do users know are they informed that the links are there.  Think about webcounter spam.  Does the user know that they will be linking to spamy sites when they post a widget on their site.  Are the links hidden?  How off topic is it?    Did you get a widget from site A but it links to site B?  What is the anchor text?  When people put a widget on their page do people really know who they are linking to?

DS:  Crawling through forms:

MC:  We crawl through forms to discover more content , the hidden web that needs to be surfaced.   Rule of thumb to think about. Would users be annoyed.  That is when we take action.  

DS:  There is this search site called Mahalo, have you heard of it?  Mahalo is nothing but search results.  Why do the results show up in Google?

MC:  Jason Calacanis is really more about content like about.com versus a Microsoft, or Powerset.  

DS: Cloaking and Conditional redirects

MC:  When someone says conditional redirects you should say why is it conditional.   You should fix the site architecture. 

DS:  Penalties;  what about the -6 penalty.  

MC:  In most cases the power is in your hands to change it.   Sometimes people get together and look too hard.  We have seen a lot of spam and we are pretty nuanced view of what is going on.

DS:  What are the timelimits for being in the penalty box.

MC:  There are time limits, and people make mistakes so make the changes and make a reconsideration request. Google has to protect their users.  

DS:  Is it cloaking, is it IP delivery, is it first click free?

MC: First click free applies in the main index now not just news.  Does the user get the same content that googlebot sees.  

Michael Grey : WSJ is showing different stuff than what they show the user.

MC: I will check it out. 

DS:  What you said is significantly different then what we saw a year ago.

MC: WMW implemented First click free.

DS:  How do judge which links are good, not paid?

MC:  We can use manual and algorithmically ways to detect stuff.   There is a foot print and we can see because the person on the other end may not be that subtle.

DS:  if I have Site.com and I start a site2.com  should we have used a subdomain to transfer link equity?

MC:  If it is a good useful link it will help you.   And a useful link will attract its own links.     You need to ask yourself conceptually does it make sense to have one site or one site for each of your products.   Sphinn is a different forum from Search Engine Land.  

DS: I still want you to tell me the answer,

MC: There are a ton of smart people in the audience. Ask three people should you put these on the on one domain or multiple for your topic.   You can get a consensus.

DS: Can I knock someone out by buying links?

MC:  We try very hard to prevent that from happening.  Make a site that is compelling and you will attract links naturally.

DS: Page Rank Sculpting or Siloing.  Does it work?

MC:  If you are doing your architecture right then you don’t really need to worry about it.    Follow Michael grey’s advice that there are other fires to put out first.

People are free to experiment.

DS:  What is it like being the moral compass for SEO?

MC:  People know what the answer is.  You don’t need me in the audience as a straw man. 

DS:  Your like the law.   You say this is what is right or wrong for Google.

MC:  I try to think what is right or wrong for customers.  Have you seen Danny do a Matt Cutts impersonation? 

Buying Sites For SEO - Forget the debate over buying links. How about buying entire web sites to gain success in search. This session looks at how to find the gems out there, criteria to consider, ways to negotiate and how to best leverage your new purchase. Tips, tricks, success stories, and painful lessons learned will be shared.

Moderator: Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Q&A Moderator: Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple

Speakers:

Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI
Todd Malicoat, Internet Marketing Consultant, Stuntdubl
Jeremy Schoemaker, CEO, Shoemoney Media Group
Jeremy Wright, CEO, B5 Media

Jeremy Schoemaker couldn’t make it but pre-recorded a session.

Jeremy Schoemaker

Buying domains for money.  There are lots of sites out on the web with expired domains, that government, military, edu sites link to.   He built a spider to find these sites.   Back in 2004 we were dominating a lot of niche markets with expired domains. 

They would register the domain and the set up the site they wanted and then burnout the site.  Jeremy thinks the reason for this is the age of the links, not the age of the domains.  Sites like this are dying off.   I used a Joe Liberman 2004 campaign site and I created a blog for Joe Liberman.  After converting the site to a consumer intented site it dropped out of the index.   Doing this = bad.

Buying for branding as a keyword domain is a good thing that is probably low risk. Example … fighters.com.

Stephan: Tip a guy was trying to low ball a price for a URL and contacted the owner directly using domain tool and went around moniker.

Jeremy Wright: 

Jeremy is giving us some insight into their blogging company.   We (b5media) buys sites for revenue potential.   They look at traffic, uniqueness, revenue, feed subscribers, etc.

They have a blog evaluator tool.   Example Valuations…. to fast for me to explain, but basically, he is sharing the details of the offer that he would have made to acquire the blog.

• Always verify traffic. 
• Don’t believe potential
• Don’t deviate from your playbook, but include flexibility
• Avoid personalities.
• Watch out for inflationary schemes.
• Buy early, buy often, admit failure quickly.

We believe in networks, ad networks, consolidations.   They are interested in ad networks, partnerships, content models and major blogs.  

Jeremy talks fast

Gab Goldenberg

Buying sites for SEO is like climbing Mt. Everest.   Talking fast, not much in the deck.  I will try and catch valuable items.

Do your research

Use site: search

Protect your investment

Create a trust. 

The value you are buying is the domain.

Todd Malicoat

Stuff not to do.  The information is really valuable.  Carlos told Todd a joke.  What is orange and looks really good on a hippy… FIRE. 

Finding a old sites: 

Think like an old site and use creative queries and automation to help you find the old site.

Contacting Site owners:

• Be Credible
• Be Brief
• Be Lucky

Valuating a Site

A site is worth a dollar more than what you are willing to pay for it.  Put time into only really great domains. More bad hippy jokes:  How do you starve a hippy:  Hide is fathers credit card under a bar of soap.  These speakers are harsh.

Disclaimer: I work for a search engine and I am not going to speak definitively on this topic.  I will still say stick to the basics and  be careful. Don’t do nefarious things.   I thought that Jeremy Wrights focus on the business building and purchasing for real potential was brilliant and probably much less risky.

Stephen Spencer has been going through some case studies.  I am too tired to do the whole Q and A.

Search spiders and bots are pretty stupid when the come to your web site. If you don’t guide them, they’ll generate duplicate content issues, miss important pages in favor of junk, not realize where existing content has moved to and have other problems. This session looks at some advanced techniques in herding bots, when IP delivery can be what hat and how search engines view cloaking issues today.

Moderator: Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz

Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee

Speakers:

Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia
Hamlet Batista, President, Nemedia S.A.
Nathan Buggia, Lead PM, Live Search Webmaster Center, Microsoft
Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo, Inc.
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Evan Roseman, Software Engineer, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Tamar gave me this idea. Copy and paste from SMX Advance Itinerary.

1:33 The engines have an announcement at the end.

Michael Grey - Why don’t people air condition their mailbox?

When you move into a new house you already spent your money, and it takes a while to move up to Central air.   But why don’t you air condition your mailbox.   Bot herding is like this.  You need to send your Pagerank to places in your site where the page rank needs to go.  Don’t send it to your contact us page.   Funnel it to the places that make the most for your business.

Deciding what to Sculpt out?

Who wants to rank for contact us or privacy policy.   Locations, not interesting, Bio’s sculpt them out, unless you are managing reputation.

How to sculpt?

Michael advocates:

• No Follow — quick and easy
• Javascript — bots don’t crawl it, but may change in the future.
• Jump pages and redirect pages, form pages.  

Always use robots in conjunction with with other techniques.

Some people say this is something you shouldn’t have at the top of list.   Michael disagrees,  “Take care of your fires, then do it”  for new sites do it now.

1:42  — Nathan Buggia asked the crowd the if they have seen measurable increase in traffic from the bots?

Crowd says yes.

Adam Audette

Counter points to Michael greys presentation.  Adam has slowed down the use of nofollow except on overhead pages.  * arguments against.

1. More control? : SEO’s don’t know enough to actually control the internal page rank. We don’t know how much a link is worth.   Don’t know how much it fluctuates.   
2. It’s a distraction :  making great content is more important.  it can mask other issues. 
3. Management headaches :  Rules, etc.  Gives you a big case of the mondays.
4. Band-aid : not addressing the underlying causes.
5. Where’s the user?  :  Lots of PR to float mediocre pagees.  More power to authority domains.  The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer
6. Open to abuse :  You can think of all sorts of ways to abuse this.   not a question of how, but when.  Then how will the engines react.  Automated filtering of heavily nofollowed pages.  Way to focused on Google. Targets PageRank
7. too focused on the engines.
8. There is no Standard : the engines each have their own view of robots.

SEO is the balance between what is right for the user and what is right for the engines.   This may tip the scale to the engine. 

Rand just gave a statistic that I totally didn’t catch.

Stephen Spencer 

Duplicate content and how to herd the bots away.

Duplicate content is rampant on blogs… you need to herd the bot to the canonical URL or permalink versus an excerpt or some other syndication.  Use a headshot or signature line to prevent hijacking of the  content. 

E-commerce sites also have rampant dups . Selectively append tracking codes.   Pagination creates many pages that sing the same song to the search engines.  Do lots of testing, because there are lots techniques for eliminating this problem. 

PagRank leakage –  If you think that Robots.txt disallow, you are probably leaking rank.  Stephen, wants you to URL re-write.   Stephen moves really fast and is taking about Regular Expression writing.  

Now we are taking about mod_rewrite rules.  Sorry to fast to capture.

Use rewrite rules versus the redirect directive.

Now he is talking about conditional redirects. We don’t encourage this, but I will remain silent.  Just use at your own risk.

Rand — cracks joke “how to get on matt cutt’s bad side.”

Hamlet batista -  White Hat Cloaking: Six Practical Applications

• Cloaking is about intention.  
• Weigh the risks vs the rewards
• Ask permission
• Cloaking vs. IP delivery.

When is it practical?

• Content accessibility
• Memberships
• Site Structure improvements
• Geolocation/ip delivery
• Multivariate testing

Scenarios

1. Proprietary CMS that is not SEO friendly :  You can fix problems that are very complex
2. Flash Websites, Silverlight, or other rich media : present the text to the user
3. Membership sites :  Snippets of content are shown to the engine, but the user still has to sign in.
4. Sites that require massive site structure changes to improve index penetration
5. Geolocation -  Robots seay this is ok.
6. AB or multivareate testing.  

How do you cloak?   Do you think I should share this????  I don’t.  

Hamlet is being cut off by rand.

Priyank from Yahoo is making an announcement from the three engines.

Robots Exclusion Protocol.  What is the standard?  The search engines are working together on a standard and are proud to share that we are making it standard.   There is uniform functionality so you can count on the engines to respect.   You can read more at the Live Search Webmaster Blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2008/06/03/robots-exclusion-protocol-joining-together-to-provide-better-documentation.aspx

There are optional directives each engine supports, but these are limited to specific functionality within each engine.  

The engines wanted to launch this at the same time to help show consistency across the board.