Below is live coverage of the SEO: Hot Topics and Trends panel from the PubCon 2011 conference.
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Barry Schwartz:
11:29:16 am
Starting in a minute.
Barry Schwartz:
11:31:12 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:31:47 am
Stephan Spencer, Jill Sampey, Greg Boser
Moderator:
Andy Beal
Barry Schwartz:
11:32:01 am
Jill Sampey is up first
Barry Schwartz:
11:32:51 am
The five things that piss her off...
Barry Schwartz:
11:33:17 am
(1) Canonicalization : It is a hint and people do blanket implementation.
Barry Schwartz:
11:34:06 am
The purpose of the tag is to get rid of dup content, instead use the rel prev and next pagniation stuff or the noindex tag
Barry Schwartz:
11:35:35 am
(2) Fluid Interactions: Using JavaScript for speed and user experience but you need to design for the user but build for the spider. Use selective graceful degradation
Barry Schwartz:
11:36:24 am
(3) Local - make sure to use microformats, enable local store publishing access such as blogs, promos, sponsors, etc. Also set up Google Places and Bing Local
Barry Schwartz:
11:37:11 am
(4) Exact match title tags, there is not so much to gain here anymore.
Barry Schwartz:
11:37:37 am
(5) Exact match anchor text, didn't work since 2008.
Barry Schwartz:
11:38:13 am
Greg Boser is next up.
Barry Schwartz:
11:39:24 am
Focus on three trends in the last year
Barry Schwartz:
11:39:44 am
(1) Site Quality vs Page Quality... Google is no longer "page" focused.
Barry Schwartz:
11:41:15 am
He gives an example of sites that are no spammers but do get hit by the Panda update
Barry Schwartz:
11:41:36 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:43:09 am
Docstoc has 26 million pages in Google. But there is no way 26 million pages are sending them traffic in Google. They have an AdSense partner program, what happened is AdSense spammers can get a new account via docstoc and there are forum threads from black hat forums with links to them.
Barry Schwartz:
11:44:15 am
People are submitting bad words to docstoc to rank for those terms. 210,000 documents that target 'viagra'
Barry Schwartz:
11:44:28 am
see https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adocstoc.com+viagra
Barry Schwartz:
11:44:51 am
You need to understand the concepts of content performance
Barry Schwartz:
11:45:05 am
Do you know your site's content performance ratio?
Barry Schwartz:
11:45:13 am
It all started with the Google Sandbox
Barry Schwartz:
11:45:29 am
Taking the time to understand how your current content is performing is critical
Barry Schwartz:
11:45:45 am
Make sure you prioritize the content you want Google to index
Barry Schwartz:
11:47:11 am
Most of the issues you find are caused by duplicate, near duplicate stuff, pagination issues, etc.
Barry Schwartz:
11:48:08 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:48:54 am
You can use 301s, even Webmaster Tools parameter exclusions
Barry Schwartz:
11:49:10 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:49:14 am
Room is packed
Barry Schwartz:
11:49:32 am
Barry Schwartz:
11:49:41 am
(2) Human Engagement Signals are important
Barry Schwartz:
11:49:59 am
Google acquired PostRank proves it
Barry Schwartz:
11:50:28 am
Plus, Google rolled out Google +
Barry Schwartz:
11:50:37 am
Social web is changing the web's link map
Barry Schwartz:
11:51:51 am
Human Engagement is the new PageRank
Barry Schwartz:
11:52:25 am
Build a consistent engagement signal to your content and develop links from pages/domains with consistent engagement signals
Barry Schwartz:
11:54:20 am
3: Backlink diversity is key: The brute force method is dead.
Barry Schwartz:
11:54:41 am
No exact match!
Barry Schwartz:
11:54:57 am
Synonyms and related phrases but don't be too obvious
Barry Schwartz:
11:55:13 am
Branded partial matches, the company name should be the highest percentage of links to your site.
Barry Schwartz:
11:57:24 am
Google's related searches feature helps you mine these anchor text ideas
Barry Schwartz:
11:59:40 am
Stephan Spencer is last up
Barry Schwartz:
12:00:46 pm
Barry Schwartz:
12:00:55 pm
Google and Bing index more than html files, so get links from PDF files, etc.
Barry Schwartz:
12:01:43 pm
LinkResearchTools.com he loves it
Barry Schwartz:
12:02:44 pm
He demos some of their tools
Barry Schwartz:
12:04:27 pm
The tool shows you the types of sites linking to your site, theme, set up, etc
Barry Schwartz:
12:04:41 pm
You can look for weird things in your link profile.
Barry Schwartz:
12:04:51 pm
Competitive link analysis and so on
Barry Schwartz:
12:05:28 pm
Mentions without links, etc.
Barry Schwartz:
12:09:54 pm
Some 3rd party sites nofollow links, like YouTube, Wikipedia, but those pages can rank high fast for keywords.
Barry Schwartz:
12:10:17 pm
Optimize for high rankings in YouTube, it is a very popular search engine, #2
Barry Schwartz:
12:11:04 pm
Voot.net tracks your search rankings and other engagement metrics in YouTube
Barry Schwartz:
12:15:34 pm
He gives a bunch of youTube optimization tips, using titles, creating transcripts, translations, etc.Â
Barry Schwartz:
12:16:20 pm
Did you know people can burn sites by buying links?
Barry Schwartz:
12:16:40 pm
Keyword tips: youtube suggest, ubersuggest and soovle
Barry Schwartz:
12:20:01 pm
That is all