February 20th, 2008 Jason
I am not going to SES London this week, but I will be going to the post-con party organized by LondonSEO.
I am not going in part because, thanks to the exchange rate and hotel expenses, it costs about as much to go to SES New York next month, so I’m doing that instead. I lose the European focus, but gain the larger event. So, see you there.
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February 4th, 2008 Jason
We’re off on a serious linkbuilding campaign for a couple of our sites in Q1, and I’ve been boning up on the current opinions about the process.
It’s interesting that SO MUCH of what counts as SEO these days seems geared either towards mom and pop sites (start a blog, make widgets and funny videos, get eight million links), or to bloggers wanting to make a buck out of AdSense (use digg, use stumbleupon, whatever, get eight million links). I’m not saying that common linkbuilding strategies WON’T work for a big corporate site, but I think the game is different. For one thing, there’s going to be a whole lot more at stake any time somebody in marketing gets an idea to do a silly video or a widget that might be a valid bit of linkbait, and it’s going to take a whole lot more buy-in to get it done.
But there’s loads of considerations in a simple linking campaign as well, and what I’m particularly considering at the moment are free directories.
Directory links are recommended, and a dime a dozen. Or less, since there’s so many free sites out there. So, given a target of x number of links in x weeks, go for the low-hanging fruit, right?
I’m pretty skeptical.
First off, some of our sites are pretty powerful already. Is there really going to be a return on getting a link in that free directory? For our smaller brands, there may be value to free directory listing simply in building visibility, but our focus, first and foremost, must absolutely be to protect the brand, and thus we need to be extra diligent in how we source those links.
So, I’ve been driving the team to do really do their research on a directory before submitting for a link.
Really, these are all valid questions that anyone doing link development for any site should be considering. Are free directories worth it?
The relevance question is a huge one. We can be way better about finding opportunities than a listing of free directories (and in fact we are…). Anybody can find a list of free directories and claim 20 new links in a month. What else can we do?
To that end, I’ve also been doing a lot of reading to get my head back in the flow to start really pushing them to get creative, and here’s a few linkbuilding articles that I’ve found particularly worth the read in the last week or so.
There are of course loads more out fantastic articles out there, and I’ll probably add to this list as I keep going.
What else can we do? Well…there’s loads, but that’s another post.
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January 30th, 2008 Jason
It’s all too easy, isn’t it? Without a routine or specific ideas to keep posting about, letting the priority of posting slip is about as hard as cracking a beer on a hot day.
However, I do have a pair of genuine excuses, one being a weeklong trip to Egypt, followed hard upon by a creeping death of a cold that has kept me on the couch and substantially incapable of thought for the last three days.
A real-life example of a situation where having a set of articles pre-written and post-dated to automatically publish would have been a nice, nice thing.
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January 19th, 2008 Jason
After my own attempts at hacking together a solution, it turns out Thomas Purnell has gone ahead and done a proper update to his Twitpress plugin, making it work where I hadn’t bothered to (yet.) Primarily, he added in some checks to make sure the POST was completed to the database prior to sending the tweet, an issue which was causing me all kinds of aggravation and one I really had no desire to dive into.
As I discuss in my previous post, the ability to have a post here automatically propagate out to my Twitter feed and to Facebook is fantastic, and with Twitpress handling permalinks properly it’s a done deal. Potentially nefarious SEO uses notwithstanding (grin), I’m mighty pleased by this.
Thanks Tom!
Also, I’m on vacation for a week starting tomorrow, and while I have several things in draft mode, nothing is ready to be auto-publishing while I’m away…though I may post-date one or two things.
Posted in Facebook, Twitter, geek, plugins | No Comments »
January 17th, 2008 Jason
Nice envy-making article in the Seattle P-I yesterday about Google’s new offices in Fremont. Dog-friendly, waterfront offices in one of the best parts of town. Lava lamps. Kayaks. The Red Door tavern.
I used to work across the street from there. Adobe is a half-block down the street. The offices were until recently occupied by Getty Images. With Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, RealNetworks, Expedia, and countless startups in the region, there’s no denying that Seattle is still second only to Silicon Valley in the tech industry…the argument perhaps being whether, considering cost-of-living and quality of life, Seattle is really first these days.
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January 13th, 2008 Jason
A weekly roundup of articles I found interesting and useful in the last 7 days.
Week 2 of 2008:
Wikia launches:
The much-touted launch of Jimmy Wales’ stab at user-generated search results. Is it really an SEO free-for-all? Only time will tell.
Graywolf on Wordpress SEO
Michael takes a great look at how to maximize the keyword benefit of your post titles, post slugs, and page names.
Self Made Chick
Self Made Chick talks about blogging in first person. A particularly useful post as I ‘find my voice’ here, but the rest of her blog is great as well. It probably resonated more with me this week than it might normally as I’d just been talking with a friend about ways she could get a little extra income for herself, and SMC has some great first-person experience doing just that.
AdSense changes the rules
Google announced changes to the AdSense referral program, and there’s lots of interesting commentary going ’round about it. Problogger calls it flat out stupid, while Andy Beard rationalizes and then looks at exploiting it, and Bruce Clay offers a very reasonable opinion: it is bad business to alienate your best customers. I couldn’t agree more.
Posted in Week in Search, links, seo | No Comments »
January 12th, 2008 Jason
In a fit of self-propagation, I set about this week to explore making Wordpress post to my Twitter any time I update.
I found a basic, but functional, plugin called Twitpress, which does exactly what I wanted. Except…I’m also using the All In One SEO Pack, which rewrites page URLs into an SEO-friendly format. (Really, a must-have plugin.) Twitpress by default will tweet the stock version of a post URL:
http://RelevantText.com?p=24
instead of the format I want to show:
http://RelevantText.com/making-the-most-of-server-errors-20080111/
Now, I know that a)Twitter links are nofollowed, so this doesn’t really matter for the spiders, and b)Twitter also automatically turns long links into tinyurls, but it still bothered me (more on why in a minute). So, I set about to fix the plugin.
After reading through what the plugin code was doing, I surfed through the WP database tables a little bit, and discovered that I needed to change one line in Twitpress. Hooray!
In the twitpress.php code, replace line 85:
$proto = str_replace("[link]", get_option('home')."?p=".$postID, $proto);
with
$proto = str_replace("[link]", $post->guid, $proto);
‘guid’ is a field in the wp_posts table, if you care.
Bingo. I’m very pleased with myself.
So why, you may ask, do I care about how the links look in Twitter if they aren’t spiderable? Because I’ve also installed the Twitter App on Facebook, so any time I update Twitter, my Facebook status updates as well…which means the link is then being pushed out along the newsfeeds of all my contacts there. The link is still not spiderable, but it is potentially much more likely to get seen, followed, and possibly linked to. Through the tinyurl redirect, it now goes to the right version of the URL, and when people subsequently link to the post, I want them using the right one. This, I think, will help that along.
Jan 14 Update: After my initial excitement, I’ve discovered that this is still slightly buggy – notifications occasionally appear on twitter with the p= URL, and sometimes with no URL at all. This seems to only happen when a post is first published, and not when later edited, but I’m not clear why, as the ‘guid’ field is populated with the first publish of a post. So, this is cool when it works, but I’m still looking at it.
Posted in Facebook, Twitter, geek, php, plugins, seo, site, wordpress | No Comments »
January 11th, 2008 Jason
Nobody thinks twice about planning for and dealing with 404 errors on their website. It’s going to happen, right? Not because you didn’t properly redirect when you moved a page or something, of course! But you expect that somebody will mistype a URL someday, and you plan for it and have your fancy or funny 404 page in place on launch day.
I was reminded today that people often don’t deal with 500 server errors at all, but on a large dynamic site these errors are just as bound to happen as 404s, and they’re far more troublesome. They are unpredictable, untrackable (unless you want to trawl through server logs, which I for one don’t), and harbingers of doom for your site because more often than not, they are indicators of something very bad going on behind the scenes…and you can bet your AdSense check that if a user sees them, a search spider does, too. When a spider hits a server error, it’s usually dead in the water, and that spells disaster for your rankings.
The good news is, it’s actually not too hard to deal with them properly.
One of my large corporate sites was having some massive issues with server response time last year, and as a result we were seeing a significant uptick in the number of 500 errors being reported in Google WMT’s crawl stats.
For the most part, it seemed like simply backing up and reloading the page usually got past the error, but GoogleBot isn’t going to do that. We really had no way of knowing just how pervasive the problem was, but we knew it was affecting the user experience, and clearly killing GoogleBot on a regular basis. While the technology group worked on the backend issues, we stemmed the problem from the front end by creating a custom error page to display any time a 500 error occurred.
The criteria were minimal:
Fortunately, both .NET and Apache make it very easy to define a custom page to display when a server error happens.
In Apache, it’s dead simple – add a line to your .htaccess file like this:
ErrorDocument 500 /friendly500.html
(the nice thing here is that you don’t need to tweak the server config file, which you probably can’t do if you don’t manage your own servers…)
Microsoft servers are a little more involved. For a friendly error page in .NET, IIS tells yout to edit the web config file to include this code:
<customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="errors/friendly500.html">
</customErrors>
As noted here on Techrepublic, you may define different pages for different errors:
<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="errors/ErrorPage.aspx">
<error statusCode="400" redirect="errors/friendly400.html" />
<error statusCode="401" redirect="errors/friendly401.html" />
<error statusCode="403" redirect="errors/friendly403.html" />
<error statusCode="404" redirect="errors/friendly404.html" />
<error statusCode="408" redirect="errors/friendly408.html" />
<error statusCode="500" redirect="errors/friendly500.html" />
<error statusCode="503" redirect="errors/friendly503.html" />
</customErrors>
The page can have either an .aspx or .html extension, but keep in mind that if the server is having problems there’s no sense in trying to deliver another dynamic page. Keep it static.
One caveat : IE will try to display a friendly error message of its own, unless the error page is over 512k, so put some text on it.
As our existing 404 page is essentially a sitemap, we quickly realized that we could simply duplicate it as ‘error.html’ and with a few text changes, use that. Users now get a friendly “Oops!” message, and spiders and users alike have a variety of useful links enabling them to continue navigating the site instead of going elsewhere.
Results?
A snapshot report from Google WMT in July showed 218 server errors that happened during their crawls in the previous two weeks. Today, there are none listed at all. (To be fair, the tech guys have been doing loads of work to make things run better as well, and credit where credit is due.) But we can also now see in our statistics that regardless of what GoogleBot is seeing, the error page has actually loaded…um…let’s just say “rather a lot” this month so far, and we can now start assembling solid numbers of how much the server issues are affecting the user experience and to argue for even more improvement work on the backend.
Posted in geek, seo | No Comments »
January 6th, 2008 Jason
The plan is to do a weekly roundup of articles I found interesting and useful in the last 7 days. Holidays and guests and travel this week, so just a few links for week 1 of 2008:
Google Operating System: Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages
One of many articles on the subject which probably caused the most stir this week. I even contributed my own two bits about whether ‘new’ equals ‘better’ at Google now.
DomainTools blog: Lazy webmasters cost their employers millions of visitors
Whether it’s laziness or thoughtlessness, I’m running into this all the time. From the user POV, making a site work both with and without ‘www’ is just a no-brainer (and, frankly, I want people to anticipate my mistypes.)
On the other hand, from the SEO POV, it’s a pain in the ass if there’s subdomains or alternate spellings creating duplicate content issues that I don’t know about. But, letting our domain management service profit from our parked domains is also a huge wasted opportunity.
Problogger.net: Using stumbleupon to get on the radar of other bloggers.
A useful reminder that the best results are not instant results.
10e20.com: Top 50 search and social media happenings for 2007
Of course loads of people did ‘end of year’ posts; this one was particularly exhaustive and includes a number of small but significant events. Definitely a good collection, with loads of links that are worth a read.
Posted in Week in Search, links | No Comments »
January 2nd, 2008 Jason
An interesting question on the Google Operating System blog, related to my post about Google’s quick indexing: does the new hi-speed indexing mean that newer pages are being artificially weighted to rank higher?
The argument is that a brand-new page won’t have a bunch of backlinks pointing to it, so there’s no reason it should appear near the top of the SERPs directly after being indexed…unless Google is giving greater importance – at least temporarily – to newer content.
Maybe it’s only true for whatever they currently identify as ‘hot topics,’ but it’ll be worth watching. I may try a little experiment to document later today or next week; I’ve certainly seen Google give a nice big boost to a newly indexed page before it fell off into a more stable position. If, by interpreting ‘more recent’ content as ‘more relevant’ content, Google has slipped up here, it’s only a matter of time before the blogspammers start capitalizing on it by simply posting more crap more frequently to maintain consistent high rankings.
Posted in Google, seo | No Comments »