Below is live coverage of the Duplication, Aggregation, Syndication, Affiliates, Scraping And Information Architecture panel from the SMX West 2012 conference. This coverage is provided by Avi Wilensky of Promedia Corp.
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Avi Wilensky:
5:03:38 pm
Duplication, Aggregation, Syndication, Affiliates, Scraping And Information Architecture (#smx #25C)
We’ll sort through the bewildering world of near duplication due to issues such as manufacturer feeds into your site, syndication to other sites, international sites, aggregation of data sources, boilerplate content, and pagination. How can a well-planned information architecture minimize the search obstacles and how can you best handle unavoidable duplication to avoid PageRank dilution, being classified as “thin affiliateâ€, “thin content†or low quality site by search engines? What’s the best way to implement complex, paginated sites for effective indexing and ranking? We’ll talk through all the options, including rel=canonical, rel=next/prev, noindex, nofollow, faceted navigation, and URL parameters.
Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Q&A Moderator: Corey Morris, SEO Strategist, emfluence (@coreydmorris)
Speakers:
Rudy De La Garza, Manager, Corporate Search Engine Optimization, Bankrate.com
Gabe Gayhart, SEO Manager, PriceGrabber / Experian Interactive (@datguygabe)
Nick Roshon, SEO Strategist, iCrossing (@nickroshon)
Kent Yunk, VP and SEO Strategist, Roaring Pajamas (@kymktg)
We’ll sort through the bewildering world of near duplication due to issues such as manufacturer feeds into your site, syndication to other sites, international sites, aggregation of data sources, boilerplate content, and pagination. How can a well-planned information architecture minimize the search obstacles and how can you best handle unavoidable duplication to avoid PageRank dilution, being classified as “thin affiliateâ€, “thin content†or low quality site by search engines? What’s the best way to implement complex, paginated sites for effective indexing and ranking? We’ll talk through all the options, including rel=canonical, rel=next/prev, noindex, nofollow, faceted navigation, and URL parameters.
Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Q&A Moderator: Corey Morris, SEO Strategist, emfluence (@coreydmorris)
Speakers:
Rudy De La Garza, Manager, Corporate Search Engine Optimization, Bankrate.com
Gabe Gayhart, SEO Manager, PriceGrabber / Experian Interactive (@datguygabe)
Nick Roshon, SEO Strategist, iCrossing (@nickroshon)
Kent Yunk, VP and SEO Strategist, Roaring Pajamas (@kymktg)
Avi Wilensky:
5:03:54 pm
Longest title of any panel in SMX history!
Avi Wilensky:
5:04:34 pm
Nick is up. Talks about unique product pages from retail data.
Avi Wilensky:
5:04:54 pm
Won't do well with boiler plate content. Don't be lazy. Write your own content.
Avi Wilensky:
5:05:18 pm
Think about groupon or woot how they express their brand in the content.
Avi Wilensky:
5:05:46 pm
Look at manufacturer supplied content on Amazon - they add alot more.
Avi Wilensky:
5:06:20 pm
Reviews - make sure its on the page - not in iframe or on subdomain.
Avi Wilensky:
5:06:52 pm
Go social - even on an automated bases.
Avi Wilensky:
5:07:10 pm
Related products: Walmart is good at online too. Customers also bought, etc.
Avi Wilensky:
5:07:30 pm
Drown out the boiler plate content.
Avi Wilensky:
5:07:50 pm
Trust builders - return policies, coupons, pricing policy, nearest stores, bbb logo, etc.
Avi Wilensky:
5:08:20 pm
Photos, Videos, and other Assets.
Avi Wilensky:
5:08:46 pm
Google can tell when using a stock photo or a unique one. Huge opportunity.
Avi Wilensky:
5:09:10 pm
If can't get the images - crowd-source them.
Avi Wilensky:
5:09:42 pm
Insert keywords dynamically across the pages.
Avi Wilensky:
5:10:48 pm
Avoiding duplicate URLs for product pages. 100's or thousands of URLs for the same product. Lots of different attributes. Sometimes better to dynamically refresh rather than changing the URL so you have one product / one URL.
Avi Wilensky:
5:11:26 pm
Use consistent parameters or subfolders, and can block in robots.txt will make life easier down the road.
Avi Wilensky:
5:12:16 pm
Add an HTML link to the canonical version from the duplicate page.
Avi Wilensky:
5:12:41 pm
Watch out for pagination. Use rel next / rel prev. Can be used in conjunction with rel=canonical.
Avi Wilensky:
5:13:07 pm
Going global. Don't do a country selector page. Waste of link equity.
Avi Wilensky:
5:13:29 pm
Easiest thing to do is geo-target in GWT.
Avi Wilensky:
5:13:46 pm
Get local links - those are signals that will help.
Avi Wilensky:
5:14:21 pm
Put country name in the header, footer, title tag. Local address if applicable.
Avi Wilensky:
5:14:52 pm
Regional dialect.
Avi Wilensky:
5:16:12 pm
Gabe from PriceGrabber is up.
Avi Wilensky:
5:17:04 pm
Post Panda SEO. Pricegrabber got hit from Panda.
Avi Wilensky:
5:17:46 pm
Pricegrabber is a comparison shopping engine with over 23m monthly uniques. All powered by 11,000+ merchant feeds.
Avi Wilensky:
5:18:08 pm
Also syndicate the feed to hundreds of partners such as Yahoo, Bing, AOL, etc.
Avi Wilensky:
5:19:13 pm
International sites too. Competing priorities within organization. Each one of these has a unique catalogue.
Avi Wilensky:
5:19:51 pm
Also aggregate deal feeds from the groupons.
Avi Wilensky:
5:20:24 pm
26 channel focused subdomains to try to get the double listings from back in the day. Massive amounts of pagination too.
Avi Wilensky:
5:21:23 pm
Elephant in the room is always Panda. Shit hits the fan, it's Panda.
Avi Wilensky:
5:22:23 pm
The algo started moving towards the review pages where there was more unique content and moved away from traditional pages that drove rankings and business.
Avi Wilensky:
5:23:30 pm
Looked at URLs, keywords, design, existing content optimization.
Avi Wilensky:
5:24:43 pm
Maybe are the top performers just to competitive for them to come back?
Avi Wilensky:
5:25:00 pm
His view is always to optimized towards the head. Long term strategy.
Avi Wilensky:
5:26:15 pm
Plan as if Google is a dog just wanting a biscuit. Google just wants to serve the right content.
Avi Wilensky:
5:26:52 pm
Plan to kill duplication when possible. Redirect strategy or canonical. Redirect is a directive, canonical is a hint.
Avi Wilensky:
5:27:15 pm
Look at priority pages, focus on those with internal linking structure.
Avi Wilensky:
5:29:29 pm
In conclusion: Focus on impact, ease of implementation, readiness.
Avi Wilensky:
5:30:06 pm
Follow Gabe - @datguygabe
Avi Wilensky:
5:30:12 pm
Next up we have Kent.
Avi Wilensky:
5:31:26 pm
Spent 2 years at Ask.com. Hired him because they needed something besides search. Ask has all the questions people asked over 10 years and can sort it and come up with whats most important and popular.
Avi Wilensky:
5:31:58 pm
Brought him in to make some Q and A properties and make them revenue generators.
Avi Wilensky:
5:32:20 pm
Lots of sites doing Q&A - tons of them.
Avi Wilensky:
5:33:02 pm
Infinite number of ways to ask a question on a topic. Infinite number of ways that question can be answered. If you group questions in ways that know which ones are most popular, you can get tons of traffic.
Avi Wilensky:
5:33:43 pm
Can't really use common tools for questions. They are 5+ words. So traditional keyword research is a challenge. But good news is that Ask knew what worked.
Avi Wilensky:
5:35:00 pm
Data acquisition - buy lists, community content, pay for content.
Avi Wilensky:
5:36:03 pm
Free form is a challenge because users love to tell their story (too much content with few keywords).
Avi Wilensky:
5:36:35 pm
Moderated questions improve keywords but take significant resources.
Avi Wilensky:
5:42:50 pm
Follow Kent @roaringpajamas
Avi Wilensky:
5:43:55 pm
Rudy is up last.
Avi Wilensky:
5:44:17 pm
Rudy is the inhouse SEO at bankrate.com
Avi Wilensky:
5:44:50 pm
Talk about IA today.
Avi Wilensky:
5:45:38 pm
IA is a science of deciding what you want your site to do; then making a plan BEFORE marketing, editorial, product and design. Plan before a plan.
Avi Wilensky:
5:47:46 pm
Suggests reading Vanessa's book.
Avi Wilensky:
5:49:48 pm
Define goals. Primary goals, secondary goals. What do you want your audience to view/feel about your business.
Avi Wilensky:
5:52:29 pm
Define personas. Descriptions of groups of people.
Avi Wilensky:
5:55:31 pm
Loves Google Discussions.
Avi Wilensky:
5:55:43 pm
Find conversation and page it a page.
Avi Wilensky:
5:56:09 pm
Hand off a wireframe to design folks.
Avi Wilensky:
5:56:40 pm
Be there for your team, support them, explain areas of creativity. gather influence.
Avi Wilensky:
5:57:17 pm
Make a seat at the table that these decisions are being made.
Avi Wilensky:
6:02:54 pm
That is all.
