Expert Technical Review of Your Website

Session Intro: This session will bring together experts who will use all of the information and tactics learned throughout the day and apply them to detailed site reviews of the code and infrastructure of sites submitted in advance by the audience.

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include Evan Roseman, Software Engineer at Google, Mohit Srivastava, Co-Founder of Faves.com, Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft Webmaster Center, and Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect of Microsoft.com at Microsoft.

This session will include actual case studies. First example is Faves.com. Wanted to capture long tail keyword searches so distributed long tail content across many linkable pages. Tried to make sure not to have duplicate content but some fallover is okay.

They used enhanced image search within Google Webmaster Central which help to drive additional long tail traffic. Include a relevant image on each page to take advantage of this.

They also had a branding problem Was called bluedot.us in which users were confused over the .us name. Faves.com is more in line with what they actually offer. They 301 redirected every URL to its counterpart of new domain. They made sure old and new site maps were verified with Google. They also attempted to reclaim links that were pointing to old domain.

The effect of domain/brand name change initially was drop in traffic and rankings but eventually came back. No drop in pages indexed though. Some of the things they did was to contact Google employee through a friend, posted to Google Webmaster Central, implemented SEO best practices and then waited 100 days (time it took to rebound).

Now Vanessa is going to go through some live sites. I am going to try to post some nuggets out of what was discovered to improve/fix the sites that were represented.

1. HealtheCareers Network - long URLs, incomplete parameters, required cookies, half cold fusion/half asp, no site map, and lots of 500 internal server errors were just some of the problems with this site.

2. Disney.com - Flash site so when disabling Flash and JavaScript, you see nothing. No content and no links to any html content. Google cache shows nothing but title. Also seem to be cloaking, not showing ads to Goglebot. Remedies - provide indexable content, submit site map to indexable content. Also don't use "all Flash" but CSS, DHTML and Flash elements.

3. BodyWork U - Two primary audiences with no call to action items. Site also looks like directory from home page. Way too many links on home page. Also blog is irrelevant. Looks more related to SEOs than bodywork and massage. Site also has duplicate title tags as well as title tags that are very similar. There are lots of internal server errors. Panelists claimed crawling site was very slow like server is lagging. Panelists praised their 404 error page.

While this session was more of a live review of sites then "presentation style," you can easily see that there are many problems that can plague sites, even ones of the caliber of Disney. It truly demonstrates that there is a bright future for SEO and SEM services!