Favorite Tidbits from PubCon 2009

Posted by jennita

It has been a couple weeks since PubCon and yes, it’s taken me this long to recuperate! Bare with me here as I reminisce about my favorite tidbits over the 3 days of sessions. PubCon does an amazing job of putting together a schedule that covers a multitude of tracks and topics. Which usually means that I often end up with a case of “session envy.” You know, when you’re sitting in a session and you start to see tweets about how great another session is. It doesn’t even mean that the one you’re in is bad, it’s just that you want to be in two places at once.

Many people were live blogging the event and obviously there have been quite a few recaps of PubCon as well. I realize I’m a little late to the game.   But, let’s get to the good stuff! While there were many great speakers and presentations there were a couple that stood out to me. What I was looking for were answers to questions that we often get either through comments on the blog or through Q & A. With that said, these are my favorite take-aways from PubCon 2009.

Day 1 – How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?

This was a great session, full of valuable information. The biggest takeaway for me, came from  Bruce Clay. He took the road of sticking to a very specific topic, image and video content and explained how to get them indexed.

Since these are topics that come up quite a bit in Q & A I was excited to get some specific information on interesting ways to index images and videos. Thanks to Virginia Nussey over at Bruce Clay sending me the actual presentation (woot!).

Case Study – Indexing Images

The first thing Bruce spoke about was a case study they did involving getting images with text indexed. Here are the steps they took:

• Take a newspaper article
• Scan it to create a jpg
• Include that image into a PDF
• Submit that PDF to Google
• Search for info in the article as a PDF and the article is found.

So what happened? Well the PDF was indexed AND the text from the image was also indexed. Take a look at this SERP.

Obviously this isn’t going to work for you in all cases, but it’s an interesting way of getting images indexed and could be useful in a number of scenarios.

Case Study – Indexing Video

Next, Bruce went through another case study where they got a video indexed. Here are the steps they took.

• Take a Video
• Run it through our processor
• Edit the text transcript and save with the image
• When playing the video, search for words
• Jump into the Video

You can see this most clearly at Google audio indexing in the Labs section. Do a search for “economy” then notice how it shows you where in the video the word “economy” is spoken. I can see this being the wave of the future. How awesome would it be to have your videos come up in a search for words that were spoken within the video. Yea, pretty cool.

What I really liked about this presentation was that the information was displayed as a case study. If you read SEOmoz often you know how much we like to test theories out and put them to action. And although indexing images and video in this way may not be new to everyone, it’s new to some people and could be a great way to enhance your sites.

Day 2 – SEO/SEM Tools

This was seriously one of my favorite sessions. The speakers (including Rand) had a ton of great information but the one that really stood out to me was Jim Boykin of We Build Pages. He gave away some really great tips but the one I liked the most had to do with how to find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. Here are the steps to take:

• Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Enter in the URL of your competitor’s sitemap
• check box for ” Include other pages on my site linked from this URL”
• When you get results, Change “Match Type” to “Exact Match”to see actual searches and volume for specific phrases.

Obviously not only does this help with checking out which keywords your competitors are focused on, but it can also help you make sure you’re site is also focusing on the right keywords.

Day 3 – The Search Engine Smackdown

For me the third day was my favorite. I actually wanted to attend every session in the first slot. I ended up watching the first part of the Link Buying session and the second part of the site review with Matt Cutts. I have to admit also that I loved the fact that the PubCon team programmed Matt Cutts doing a site audit at the same time as the Link Buying session… pretty darn ingenious if you ask me! Rand posted information about the site review, so I wont go into detail but it was a great session.

Although I think the best part came after the session when Matt took to shaving Evan Fishkin’s head due to a bet they made while at the SEOmoz Werewolf party earlier in the week. And although that alone was pretty great, I loved the fact that while Matt was shaving Evan’s head, people were asking him questions and he was answering as if it were a regular Q & A. Here’s a short clip of the shaving!

Ok, ok back to the Search Engine Smackdown. I should admit that I debated whether I should head back to the hotel after a long 3 days or go to the final session, and I’m glad I went! These are the topics I found most interesting… and yes they’re all from Matt Cutts.

Google Social Search
Here’s the information straight from the site:

Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”

To see even more social content you can click the “Show options” link at the top of the results page and then click on the “Social” link.

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about social search.

I can see myself using this quite a bit. Most of my job is about “social searches” in general,so this one is right up my alley! It was a fun find for me.

Testing for Speed

As Rand mentioned in his post, Google representatives have mentioned several times that page load time is important and Matt himself said at this session that although they haven’t used speed as a ranking factor in the past, that they’re thinking about adding it in the future. He gave some resources on how to check the speed and ways to make it faster.

• http://code.google.com/speed/ - Ways to clean up your site’s speed
• webpagetgest.org – Let’s you input a URL, select test location and other configuration options, then test!
• http://code.google.com/closure/ - a JavaScript compiler

Wrap it up

I’m sure if you follow me on Twitter you know quite well how I feel about Vegas. I really wish there was a good way to clone myself so I could attend multiple sessions at once. With up to 7 tracks going on at the same time, it’s difficult to pick one. In the end PubCon was a hit, and it was great to meet many of our SEOmoz members and see some old friends. See you again next year!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Google Link: Command – Busting the Myths

Posted by randfish

I’m a big Google fan – my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I’ve even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I’m shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven’t realized this.

Here’s what Google themselves have to say on the matter:

You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page URL.

To see a much larger sampling of links to any verified site in Webmaster Tools:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Your site on the web, click Links to your site.

Note: Not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal.

Here’s what Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) had to say in a video on the subject:

The short answer is that historically, we only had room for a very small percentage of backlinks because web search was the main part and we didn’t have a ton of servers for link colon queries and so, we have doubled or increased the amount of backlinks that we show over time for link colon, but it is still a sub-sample. It’s a relatively small percentage. And I think that that’s a pretty good balance, because if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks for any website then spammers or competitors can use that to try to reverse engineer someone’s rankings.

Google themselves is telling us not to pay too much attention to the link command, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping folks. Let the myth busting commence.

Myth #1 – The Google Link Command Returns Accurate Numbers

Nope. Not even close. Google themselves say the numbers aren’t accurate and that they’re showing a small sub-sample. The numbers show this as well. Check your link counts with the Google link command vs. the number inside Google’s Webmaster Tools (when you verify your account, you’ll see them shown). Here’s the stats for SEOmoz, for example:

Google’s link command claims 1,590 links. Let’s see what Webmaster Tools says:

Hmm… 381,403 seems slightly larger than 1,590. In fact, the link command is showing me 0.4% of what Webmaster Tools says exists. Running this analysis on another few domains that we have access to in Webmaster Tools, I saw numbers ranging from 0.1% to 4.4% (meaning there’s not even any consistency between in the percentage of links from the two counts).

Myth #2 – The Google Link Command Returns Important Links

Tragically, a long time ago (pre-2004), Google did show only important links via the link: command, which created the myth that exists to this day. In fact, the links shown in the link: command have no particular importance or relevance. They are truly a random sample, including links that are nofollowed, links from pages that have had PageRank penalties applied to them as well as links that do pass link juice and value.

Myth #3 – The Google Link Command Returns Links in Some Kind of Order

No one in SEO has been able to show any ordering of any kind in the Google link: command’s results. Important, well-known websites may be listed on page 2 or page 20 of the results, and it is likewise with spam, scrapers and low quality sites that Google’s likely not counting. In Site Explorer and the web results, Yahoo! appears to do some type of ordering, tending to show more important links, pages and sites before less important ones (though not with great consistency). Unfortunately, many SEOs suspect that, should Microsoft’s deal to power Yahoo! with Bing results go through, Yahoo! is unlikely to maintain their own web index (and thus, link, linkdomain and site explorer will be gone).

As exemplified above, Google appears to be very random indeed when showing link: results.

Myth #4 – The Google Link Command Returns a Numerically Representative Count of Links

This is possibly the myth that’s most disturbing of all, primarily because so many operators in the SEO field belive it and track the link: command count as a reliable, useful metric. Nothing could be further from the truth – and here’s some data to help back it up:

Root Domain	Google Link: # (external + internal?)	Yahoo! Linkdomain # (external only)	Linkscape Count (external only)
Yahoo.com	3,650	331,000,000	201,681,667
Recovery.gov	7,550	328,000	155,780
Facebook.com	165,000	567,000,000	116,748,934
Real.com	11,400	4,600,000	5,596,165
Adobe.com	51,200	124,000,000	78,550,468
Reddit.com	18,300	128,000,000	29,071,291
Twitter.com	224,000	515,000,000	132,528,763
Salon.com	12,300	3,420,000	1,535,342
SEOmoz.org	1,590	957,000	486,405
NYTimes.com	7,990	21,200,000	12,884,758
TurkeyDayRun.com	3	68	22
Ninme.com	539	42,000	3,149
Burgerking.com	942	106,000	23,761
Alaskaair.com	1,010	44,000	38,358
Smashingmagazine.com	8,730	1,130,000	592,054
Smithsonian.org	4,860	25,700	14,545

I collected the data above spur of the moment, so I won’t try to claim great statistical integrity. However, looking at Google’s link: command results, the best I can say is that Google has some relationship to the others within 1-2 orders of magnitude, though they may be directionally inaccurate much of the time as well. Just look at the NYTimes.com for example – Google claims they have 2/3rds the links that Salon.com has, yet Yahoo! and Linkscape agree that, in fact, NYTimes.com has 6X+ Salon.com’s link total.

These are not numbers you want to hang your hat (or any crucial business decisions) on.

Myth #5 – The Google Link Command Tracks Accurately Over Time

Unfortunately, I don’t have data points I can show, but our observations over time indicate that Google’s link count in Webmaster Tools might rise, along with the Yahoo! and Linkscape link counts, yet the Google link: command will show lower numbers. The reverse is sometimes also the case. Without directional consistency, even when compared against their own counts, it’s very hard to take the Google link: count seriously.

Myth #6 – The Google Link Command is Up to Date

Most SEOs & webmasters have noticed that the Google link: counts update infrequently, inconsistently and most often in correlation with toolbar PageRank updates (another data point I’ll need to takcle in a future post). These updates from Google occur every 2-10 months with little warning about when they’re coming or have happened. If you watch sites like closely, they’ll report many of these as they occur.

---

The next time someone tells you their Google link: command numbers as a metric for SEO, competitive analysis or anything else, make sure they read this post. Google’s not nearly as up-front with the information as they should be (honestly, removing the link command would save so much time and effort for poor site owners who get needlessly confused), but hopefully as a community, we can help build more awareness around this issue.

Do you like this post? Yes No

A week worth of treats for SEO geeks

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope you are well and getting well into another week in the trenches. As is the case with most conferences, things were a bit slow out there as the PubCon effect was in full swing. ut have no fear as they’re always good for an announcement or two (Matt had a few interesting ones). Over the last week he spoke about Cafeine going live, page load speed as a ranking factor and the web rchive block as a spam signal (kinda WTF on that one in this corner)

Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we?

Catching a buzz in the new year

This week it was a stand off between Matt Cutts…and well, Matt Cutts, for the story of the week (for me at least). While news of page load speed being a new ranking signal did pique my interest, methinks that news of Cafeine going live in the new year is more comment worthy for the moment.

Here’s the thing, people are always talking about this ranking change, that indexation level change…which has been more than a little irritating. For the more seasoned among us, there is a long list of major named changes that you’ve already been through; some more influential than others.

This is much more relative to the Big Daddy update which was more about infrastructure than search quality really. With this one, it is best to keep in mind that it is mostly about the processing power.

Think about the new signals such as social search, deeper personalization, crawling upgrades, greater spam detection and the like. Any changes we see that affect actual rankings/referrers is to be seen in the near future; ENALED by the upgrade. Don’t start looking for immediate affects…this one will be long term (Matt posted about it here – and for those that missed it, the original Matt interview on it)

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents -

Talk of the town

SEO Dojo voted #1 Training Community – ok yea, I am gonna toot my own horn on this one, but hey it’s not everyday one gets to see such a passionate response from the gang. Not only did we actually get some free bootie from Lee… but the outpouring in the comments of the original poll were wonderous and humbling – my Dojo geeks rock!

Site speed may soon affect Google rankings – WTF? This is a VERY interesting development that we’ve been talking about over the weekend in the Dojo. Oh, and before peeps go crazy, this really can’t be a heavily weighted signal, so don’t get anal – m’kay? (also on SEL)

Calculating The True SEO Costs Of Major Site Changes – looks at the many problems that can arise from major site changes. While it seems second nature to most SEOs, I can tell you that MANY of the problems I inherit are from clients that lost rankings due to site changes… so it’s always worth highlighting once more.

Rich Snippets: A Golden but Missed Opportunity to Enhance Search Engine Listings – is a post from Paula Allen (via BC) which once more looks at the world of microformats. If you remember, that was our top story last week. Start learning this stuff my friends.. their value continues to grow for a balanced program.

The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links – was an interesting post from Eric Enge which puts forth a hypothesis on the value of deep links. It is an interesting idea that was worth thinking about. If I had to find any flaw, it would be the assertion of using the ‘original PageRank model’. One thing we DO KNOW… is that the current one is a far flung cousin of the original PageRank; much has changed in the last 10 years.

Top tips from PubCon 2009 – yes, it is true that we didn’t talk much about PC this week, but I generally don’t find much from conferences of real interest. That being said, this short round up has some goodies for those that missed it.

Why Some Sites MUST Block Archive.Org – is a post from Michael that is a must read as I was also kind of taken aback by Matt’s comments. In the end, while still kind of sketchy, they are now saying it is a secondary factor once a spam bot digs deeper. Still, kinda odd…

Using Noarchive to Remove Your Cache; What’s the Impact? – is from (one of my fav white coat SEOs) Richard Baxter who decided to muck about with the NOARCHIVE tag to see what effect it may have on site rankings… Want to know what he found? Then be sure to go read it… hehe…

The most sexy browsers screw your analytics – was from everyone’s favourite mystery man Sebastian X. It seems that both Chrome AND Safari aren’t passing along referrer stirngs… which as U might imagine, can be a nightmare for your analytics (especially as adoption of Chrome rises). Spread the word and help Seb fight the good fight wontcha?

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents -

---

Search Geek Central

Search Stuff NY Times and RDF – Science for SEO Bing Launches Wolfram Alpha Collaboration & Several New Search Features Google Rich Snippets Coming To Smaller Sites?, Search Engine Roundtable Launching Facebook Results – Cuil Blog Multiple-Topic Streaming Results – Cuil Blog

Social Search Why I’m NOT Drinking The “Real-time Local Search” Kool-Aid Real-Time Search Makes Move Into Mobile – MediaPost Taptu and OneRiot Team Up to Offer Realtime Mobile Search – Alt Search Engines Real Time Search Coming to Mobile – Marketing Pilgrim

Local SEO Australia’s Google Maps Easter Egg – Search Engine Roundtable Get a keyword stuffed Google Map listing with a virtual office thrown in for free! – Mike Blumenthal Protecting Your Brand On The Online Yellow Pages - Google’s New Map Data is REALLY Old – Matt McGee Generic vs Local TLDs: Some data, some thoughts, and some pretty graphs – Distilled Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents

Videos Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: November 13, 2009 – Search Engine Roundtable Interview with Larry Kim WordStream Founder (and Part II) – Small Biz Answers Cutt’s Corner Can I use “nofollow” in JavaScript? Snippets and Titles

Weapons How Inaccurate Google’s SITE: Operator Is and How to Fix It Search Engine Journal Analyzing Short & Long Keywords Using Google Analytics – SEL Ranking tool round up – Word Stream Audit your site with the IIS SEO Toolkit - Blog Storm Using Xenu Link Sleuth to Find Broken Landing Pages – SEOptimise Rank Tracking across Hundreds of Search Engines: Rank Tracker, Search Engine Journal

SOSG Alerts The ComicSeeker – is a vertical search for the comic geeks out there!

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents -

---

Search Patents

Google Estimating confidence for query revision models

Microsoft Look ahead document ranking system Providing search results for mobile computing devices Document clustering based on entity association rules Query-based snippet clustering for search result grouping Method of speech recognition using hidden trajectory Hidden Markov Models

Yahoo User query data mining and related techniques

---

/end SOSG session

Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents -

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

A week worth of treats for SEO geeks

3 SEO Browsers to Evaluate on-Page SEO

SEO browsers are designed to highlight features of a web page pertinent to the work of SEO. This way, it helps you browse sites the way an SEO should or possibly the way that Google would.

We have picked 3 popular browsers to evaluate, each of them having similar features.

Domaintools SEO browser

It gives us information concerning:

• Whois record (also NS server and IP server history)
• Site profile (SEO score, meta tags, Alt tags, relevancy score for the meta tags, word count and number of linked words, number of images and number of links as well as related sites)
• Alexa and Compete scores
• Search engine preview
• Registration details
• Server stats
• Similar domains
• IP

This tool gives a fair bit of information off the back of the Whois record. It is probably the best tool to use if you want to focus on server and registrar information. It is quite thin on the ground as far as pure SEO information is concerned though, but it does give you links through to other tools if you want to see a spider view for example of use the W3C validator. It does give you basic information such as meta tag stats, number of images and some stats on the body of text. One interesting offering is the “SEO Score” that it assigns to a site. The SEO Score does not use PageRank or any Off-page factors, but it does use On-domain links, Off-domain links, and No-Follow links. There is no actual formula for this score but they say:

“Our goal is to allow everyone to accomplish a 100% score. If no obvious html optimization methods exist and everything looks good we will be giving it a 100%. We will be picky about the obvious things like completing Title tags and h1 tags, webmasters should be using these. We are very hard on frames and lag of alt tags.”

The idea is to help people understand where they can improve in their site. If you have a score of 20% for example, it’s pretty clear that you’ve missed out some obvious opportunities to optimise your site. With a high score in the 90’s you can safely say that you’ve pretty much covered everything. Beyond that it’s hard to make much use of it because it doesn’t actually tell you where the missed opportunities are. They do say that the scoring algorithm is in beta, but the info on this is from prior to 2007 if you read it. Their plans for the future include this “We will fetch all pages on your site and calculate PageRank according to the Standford Whitepaper. Then display the results in a bulk layout and allow for downloading of the results.” I’m not really sure what has and has not been implemented but it is going to be hard to calculate PageRank seeing that the value depends on a damping factor that only Google really knows and that the PageRank scoring method has changed since it’s implementation some 14 years ago. I don’t really know how useful it would be anyhow.

Spiderview

• Spider view
• Meta data report
• Robots.txt
• Lists all internal links
• Status code
• Lists all external links
• Number of words

This one doesn’t give an overwhelming amount of information but it does have the advantage of actually crawling and listing all of the links in and out of your site. This is a nice touch and really helps web professionals in figuring out what a site looks like structurally speaking. Out of the 3 tools on show here, it offers the least amount of information about the site for SEO purposes. It is more a crawler tool rather than a complete SEO tool really. It would be nice to not have a long list of links but rather a better display of this information. Humans aren’t good at detecting patterns in long lists of data.

SEO Browser

It has both a basic and advanced mode, so this review is for the advanced mode. It gives information covering:

• Meta data (meta tags, alt tags)
• Text to page weight ratio
• Load time, page size
• Number of words
• Number of images
• Robots.txt
• JavaScript elements
• Frames
• Cookies
• Number of links external and internal
• IP
• Google analytics presence or something else
• Response code
• Spider view

Extra tools include the:

• w3c validity checker
• DNS info via intodns
• HTTP viewer
• Link checker
• Duplicate content check
• Quantcast clickstream reporting
• Source code view

This tool is pretty cool because everything is made available on one big page, which means that if you;re looking over a handful of sites, you can do it quickly without having to skip to another page or another tab or something. It has a lot of useful information on display and will help anyone to identify problems and things they could improve on in their site. It also have links out to a number of other very useful tools as well. Out of the 3 tools, it’s the one that covers the most important SEO statistics for me.

Conclusion

All 3 tools have very different strengths. Using only one of them would be a shame, because the other 2 have lots of offer as well. DomainsTools is perfect if you want server and Registrar info for example rather than a code perspective. SpiderView is excellent to use for it’s crawler and allows you to take a look at the site structure (albeit not in a very user friendly way) and SEOBrowser is the bees knees you want to quickly give a site an SEO health check. All of them could be improved, but then all of them are free so as they say “There is no silver spoon”.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

3 SEO Browsers to Evaluate on-Page SEO

Google Analytics Now Tracks Feed Item Clicks

Google Analytics has just added AdSense for Feeds and Google Feedburner data to the items it monitors and analyzes. So, if you are using either of the two tools for feed advertising, you can now see how far your ad implementation are doing in terms of item clicks. Google Analytics will even provide you with additional information that may help you understand who Feedburner gives more traffic to your sites.

If you’re using AdSense for Feeds of Google Feedburner, the new feature will also help you classify links through tagging the source as – “Feedburner”, the medium as the channel by which feeds are sent, that is either as “feed” or “email.” The content of your feeds will of course be classified as the actual endpoint application in which users are viewing your feed contents. This could either be through Google Reader, Yahoo mail and others.  You can see this data on your Google Analytics account under All Traffic Sources view.

If you have enabled item click tracking on your Google Analytics Account, your item URLS are being automatically tagged with the Google Analytics parameters.

If you haven’t sign up for Google Analytics, now is perhaps the best time to do it. Things can get pretty exciting with RSS feed advertising.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Analytics Now Tracks Feed Item Clicks

« Previous Page — Next Page »