Below is live coverage of the Making Data From Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools Actionable panel from the SMX East 2011 conference.
Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.
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Barry Schwartz:
3:58:30 pm
We start in two minutes...
Barry Schwartz:
4:01:01 pm
Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester)
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Tiffany Oberoi, Software Engineer, Google (@tiffanyoberoi)
Myron Rosmarin, President, Rosmarin Search Marketing, Inc.
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Tiffany Oberoi, Software Engineer, Google (@tiffanyoberoi)
Myron Rosmarin, President, Rosmarin Search Marketing, Inc.
Barry Schwartz:
4:02:31 pm
Some funny comments...
Barry Schwartz:
4:03:49 pm
Tiffany Oberoi, Software Engineer, Google (@tiffanyoberoi) is up first
Barry Schwartz:
4:04:05 pm
Barry Schwartz:
4:04:16 pm
She is short, so no one can see her.
Barry Schwartz:
4:04:55 pm
She works in search quality, and is directly related to making sure spam reports, etc go into Google Webmaster Tools.
Barry Schwartz:
4:05:36 pm
google.com/webmasters
Barry Schwartz:
4:06:00 pm
If Google can help webmasters make better sites, then Google can have better content in their index for their searchers.
Barry Schwartz:
4:06:28 pm
#1 thing to look at is the message center, google is trying to tell you something...
Barry Schwartz:
4:06:56 pm
It tells you if your site was hacked, malware, status of reconsideration requests, violations, security updates and crawl errors.
Barry Schwartz:
4:08:15 pm
Make sure to forward these messages to your email address
Barry Schwartz:
4:08:55 pm
#2 Analyze your content... You can look at the dashboard, compare what people are searching for vs what your content is...
Barry Schwartz:
4:11:12 pm
Give information that users are looking for, so look at search queries. do the user queries match content, optimize your content to show up for the right content.
Barry Schwartz:
4:11:41 pm
3) Look at the links to your site, you can see the anchor text, who is linking to you, etc.
Barry Schwartz:
4:12:34 pm
Look at HTML suggestions under the diagnostics section
Barry Schwartz:
4:13:18 pm
It will show duplicate content issues, meta descriptions, title tags, non indexable content.
Barry Schwartz:
4:13:39 pm
4) Submit a Sitemap file
Barry Schwartz:
4:14:26 pm
5) Set your geographic target and your preferred domain
Barry Schwartz:
4:15:23 pm
You can also set crawl rates here
Barry Schwartz:
4:15:38 pm
6) Tell Google about your URL parameters, such as dynamic URLs.
Barry Schwartz:
4:16:34 pm
7) Let Google help you move your site, change of address tool.
Barry Schwartz:
4:17:13 pm
8) Check crawler access, test your robots.txt file, generate a new one or remove URLs
Barry Schwartz:
4:18:08 pm
9) Identify and fix crawl errors with the Crawl Errors time.
Barry Schwartz:
4:20:08 pm
10) Fetch as Googlebot
Barry Schwartz:
4:20:36 pm
She also shows the +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools. She siad they are not a ranking factor right now.
Barry Schwartz:
4:22:03 pm
Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester)
Barry Schwartz:
4:22:10 pm
Barry Schwartz:
4:22:59 pm
He is showing off Bing Webmaster Tools live.
Barry Schwartz:
4:23:52 pm
He spends a lot of time not on the dashboard page. If you see cliffs in the page, take notice... SLumps can be bad.
Barry Schwartz:
4:24:09 pm
You can give third party users access and limited access to Bing Webmaster Tools
Barry Schwartz:
4:24:47 pm
There are controls in here that can kill your web site, so be careful who you give access to.
Barry Schwartz:
4:26:18 pm
They have blogs, forums, support email and help pages
Barry Schwartz:
4:26:51 pm
He then he goes on to the traffic section..
Barry Schwartz:
4:27:32 pm
The bing traffic report shows if they trust you are on, it shows average impressions, average clicks and so on
Barry Schwartz:
4:28:01 pm
So your average position shows how much google trusts you for a keyword
Barry Schwartz:
4:28:16 pm
Is that improving or not?
Barry Schwartz:
4:29:53 pm
He shows how you can click through from the keyword to the page, so you can get more info
Barry Schwartz:
4:30:31 pm
He then moves to Crawl tab
Barry Schwartz:
4:30:43 pm
Shows pages crawled and crawl errors
Barry Schwartz:
4:31:30 pm
You can of course submit your sitemap here. But you need to have a clean sitemap. Make sure your URLs are clean. 1% threshold.
Barry Schwartz:
4:32:46 pm
You can control crawl settings, based on time of day
Barry Schwartz:
4:34:42 pm
There is also a check box to tell Bing if there is AJAX and HTML 5 with hashtag URLs on the site.
Barry Schwartz:
4:35:23 pm
You can block and remove URLs
Barry Schwartz:
4:35:41 pm
You can submit URLs as well, but up to 50 per month and 10 per dauy
Barry Schwartz:
4:36:25 pm
This puts the URL directly into the Bing index, it shows up in seconds in the search results.
Barry Schwartz:
4:37:54 pm
That is all for Bing
Barry Schwartz:
4:38:44 pm
Myron Rosmarin, President, Rosmarin Search Marketing, Inc. is next up on how he uses this data.
Barry Schwartz:
4:38:56 pm
Barry Schwartz:
4:40:07 pm
iVillage is allowing him to use their data
Barry Schwartz:
4:41:39 pm
He looks at webmaster tools as diagnostics, performance and control panel features
Barry Schwartz:
4:42:16 pm
Performance metric measures how well am I doing. Visitis, keywords, etc.
Barry Schwartz:
4:42:37 pm
Diagnostics helps you see if something is wrong
Barry Schwartz:
4:43:00 pm
Control panels gives you controls, inputs, switches and knobs
Barry Schwartz:
4:43:28 pm
Reporting vs Analysis
Barry Schwartz:
4:43:42 pm
Reporting is pulling data and making them pretty
Barry Schwartz:
4:43:53 pm
Analysis is making sense of that data a
Barry Schwartz:
4:45:33 pm
Diagnostic data
Barry Schwartz:
4:46:22 pm
Six principles
Barry Schwartz:
4:47:19 pm
Numbers without something to compare them to don't mean much.
Barry Schwartz:
4:47:32 pm
Everything is relative
Barry Schwartz:
4:48:14 pm
He shows samples charts of ivillage stats...
Barry Schwartz:
4:49:12 pm
The pages crawled per day, slipped in the past month. But over the past 6 months, it increased. At the same time, it took more time to index the pages. There was a 57% increase in the time GoogleBot spent crawling the site. That is a story that didn't look good, but turned out to be a good story.
Barry Schwartz:
4:49:37 pm
Analyze the data at a level of granularity. It is about the nit and gritty.
Barry Schwartz:
4:50:30 pm
There were problems with duplicate content issues, according to Webmaster Tools. But about 45% of the problem, was one specific area of the site. Then another 20% was URL duplication. Both were very easy to fix.
Barry Schwartz:
4:51:00 pm
Pull the data at appropriate time intervals. Weekly is a good time interval for most sites.
Barry Schwartz:
4:52:31 pm
Download everything... You need more sample of data, so store it all. The data in the tools, the data is around for 5 weeks. Bing is around 6 months.
Barry Schwartz:
4:53:36 pm
Not everything is a problem... Some things look like problems but are not. Some problems are out of your control and will be fixed without your doing.
Barry Schwartz:
4:54:54 pm
He gives an example...
Barry Schwartz:
4:55:33 pm
Since you have limited time and resources, you need to decide what you put your resources towards.
Barry Schwartz:
4:55:55 pm
He references Panda... maybe you were hit by accident and Google has to fix something...
Barry Schwartz:
4:56:01 pm
That is all for Myron
Barry Schwartz:
4:56:14 pm
Vanessa Fox is showing us a couple things...
Barry Schwartz:
4:56:19 pm
Barry Schwartz:
4:57:50 pm
She shows some of her spreadsheeets
Barry Schwartz:
4:58:20 pm
She matches up the export of WMT data and Google Analytics data
Barry Schwartz:
4:58:56 pm
They will cluster keywords into groups and then show impressions, CTR, etc. for categories of queries
Barry Schwartz:
5:00:07 pm
She also shows how she organizes sitemaps by templates and then she shows indexing by sitemaps
Barry Schwartz:
5:01:07 pm
You can mash up a lot of this data... errors, page speed, indexing, etc. And to see this over time, is nice.
Barry Schwartz:
5:02:33 pm
Q: Does Bing warn webmasters if their sitemaps are clean... (that was my Q)
Barry Schwartz:
5:03:57 pm
A: There is no warning, it is not that clear. The larger the sitemap, the larger the variable. There is no error message that says we do not trust your sitemap.
Barry Schwartz:
5:06:03 pm
People give feature requests...
Barry Schwartz:
5:07:01 pm
Someone wants an API
Barry Schwartz:
5:10:35 pm
Google said they currently DO NOT use +1s for ranking purposes despite what others have said.
Barry Schwartz:
5:10:50 pm
Um, see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1140194 and a lot of blog posts implied they do.
Barry Schwartz:
5:11:01 pm
Okay, all done. Good night, see you tomorrow.
Sam:
5:11:15 pm
Thankx GN
