Below is live coverage of the Ask The SEOs panel from the SMX West 2011 conference. This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick.
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.
Finished
Auto-Refresh: Off
Barry Schwartz:
2:31:43 pm
Starting soon.
Barry Schwartz:
2:33:09 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:34:31 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:35:00 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:35:23 pm
* Greg Boser, SVP of Search Services, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc.
* Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
* Todd Friesen, Director of SEO, Performics
* Stephan Spencer, Founder of Netconcepts, Co-author of The Art of SEO
* Jill Whalen, Founder and CEO, High Rankings
* Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
* Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
* Todd Friesen, Director of SEO, Performics
* Stephan Spencer, Founder of Netconcepts, Co-author of The Art of SEO
* Jill Whalen, Founder and CEO, High Rankings
Barry Schwartz:
2:35:34 pm
That is our panelists and it is open Q&A
Barry Schwartz:
2:37:56 pm
Danny mocks Vanessa as sounding weirdly like Google but not from Google.... Stephan added once you get implanted by the Google Implant, you can't remove it.
Barry Schwartz:
2:38:25 pm
Danny introduced Bruce as making a chart that no one needs. good joke
Barry Schwartz:
2:39:04 pm
Todd was introduced as someone who had a lot of jobs
Barry Schwartz:
2:39:34 pm
Todd said he has more offices in more countries than Bruce, cause Bruce said he has offices in 5 continents
Barry Schwartz:
2:40:00 pm
Greg is blueglass now, he has less offices than Bruce and Todd
Barry Schwartz:
2:41:12 pm
Owner of I told you this in 1996, Jill has been representing the white hat way for ever... She has one office and it is in her house...
Barry Schwartz:
2:41:39 pm
The man who introduces you to loop holes you are afraid to use, Spencer
Barry Schwartz:
2:42:31 pm
Q: What happened with the Panda update?
Barry Schwartz:
2:43:10 pm
Vanessa said I spent 25 hours writing this article read http://searchengineland.com/the-farmerpanda-update-new-information-from-google-and-the-latest-from-smx-west-67574 and http://searchengineland.com/your-sites-traffic-has-plummeted-since-googles-farmerpanda-update-now-what-66769
Barry Schwartz:
2:43:48 pm
Greg said they are making site wide judgements about site quality... IF you have large volume of content that is shallow with little link support, you won't rank as well anymore for ever longer tail stuff...
Barry Schwartz:
2:44:06 pm
Greg said Google is calling content spammers
Barry Schwartz:
2:45:23 pm
If you have low quality content that is perceived that way by Google, then the best thing to do is noindex the page and when you add more content to the page, then remove the noindex.
Barry Schwartz:
2:45:40 pm
Vanessa said Maile from Google told her that
Barry Schwartz:
2:46:41 pm
Jill said a lot of the sites she saw hit by this had content hidden behind a tab... it wasn't bad stuff, but she saw that... Also a lot of stuff that are the merry go round sites, u think you'll buy it from the site but there is no way to buy it from the site....
Barry Schwartz:
2:48:22 pm
Bruce said Google added a feature on "reading level" (well he didn't know what it is called) under the advanced search
Barry Schwartz:
2:48:56 pm
I broke that story on reading level, here it is http://www.seroundtable.com/google-reading-level-search-filter-12625.html
Barry Schwartz:
2:49:13 pm
Anyway, I disagree with Bruce on this but...
Barry Schwartz:
2:49:41 pm
Google wants corroborating signals, if it is high quality content, it gets links, gets tweeted, goes on facebook, etc....
Barry Schwartz:
2:49:52 pm
Stephan said that...
Barry Schwartz:
2:50:45 pm
Greg, the big pic take away is understanding footprint modeling.... Matt said they give sites to their manual team and then engineers look at the patterns and they build algoritms to target them...
Barry Schwartz:
2:51:27 pm
They actually did that, they hired teachers to figure out how to do the "Reading Level" search feature....
avi:
2:53:20 pm
Wasn't searchwiki about voting up results and people didn't like it?
Barry Schwartz:
2:53:53 pm
@Avi, yes, and that wasn't the first time they had a way to like results... They had two methods prior to searchwiki :) so this is the 5th way
Barry Schwartz:
2:54:11 pm
They are talking about Google should give a way to like results...
Barry Schwartz:
2:54:57 pm
Danny said, it comes back to, "Do you have good content?"
Barry Schwartz:
2:55:54 pm
Q: Are there trends that will become important in the future that are not currently a common SEO practice?
Barry Schwartz:
2:56:52 pm
Greg: More is good is no longer true. There is only so many hours in the day crawling the web. So Google only wants the good stuff. So think about what you produce and if it is worth producing it.
Barry Schwartz:
2:58:19 pm
Spencer: Internal linking structure will be more fluid instead of a static sitemap. More dynamic intelligence driving what are the links on the various levels of the site. Correlate that to your top keywords to pages...
Barry Schwartz:
3:00:05 pm
Bruce: We are going to see a shift industry where we need a better understanding of every query as it relates to architecture. More about user behavior, personnas, location of searchers, query intent changes, etc....
Barry Schwartz:
3:00:41 pm
Bruce adds, also understanding devices...
Barry Schwartz:
3:01:41 pm
Jill, go back to the basics, make the best site for the query... do hard work.
Barry Schwartz:
3:02:41 pm
Todd: SEO is slowing down and becoming more thoughtful as compared to the past. You can't just release millions of pages overnight. You can't build 10,000 links with the same anchor text anymore.... You need to understand the model of the vertical.
Barry Schwartz:
3:03:57 pm
Vanessa and Greg fight
Barry Schwartz:
3:05:18 pm
But this convo is a bit off the path of the question
Barry Schwartz:
3:05:53 pm
Greg says he dissects web sites from links to pages before starting on a new web site
Vanessa said you don't need to do that
Vanessa said you don't need to do that
Barry Schwartz:
3:06:53 pm
Danny moves us on to a new Q
Barry Schwartz:
3:08:41 pm
hmm, or not...
avi:
3:09:17 pm
pretty intense
Barry Schwartz:
3:09:51 pm
How can I overcome a negative 50 penalty? (everyone laughs)
Barry Schwartz:
3:10:05 pm
Greg: I love the negative 50 where they still have sitelinks
Barry Schwartz:
3:10:17 pm
http://www.google.com/search?q=negative+50+penalty
Barry Schwartz:
3:10:41 pm
Greg, not sure if they do it anymore, but when they did, it was funny, they move you down 50 spots but you'd still have sitelinks
Barry Schwartz:
3:11:00 pm
A result on page 5 doesnt have sitelinks
Barry Schwartz:
3:11:11 pm
To fix it, clean it up and submit a reconsideration request.
Barry Schwartz:
3:11:22 pm
Todd adds, to clean up, it normally means multiple things...
Barry Schwartz:
3:14:04 pm
When you do reconsideration requests, the worst thing you can do is not be truthful to the SEO helping you and then lying to Google also.
Barry Schwartz:
3:14:36 pm
Side note: I submitted a fun Q, hope Danny picks it, all these SEO questions are boring me...
Barry Schwartz:
3:15:01 pm
Jill said you can't get penalized that bad without knowing what you did...
Barry Schwartz:
3:15:48 pm
Bruce said he had two fortune 500 companies come to him with a -50 on two major keywords... What they found out that one division went out to buy links... So it hurt everthing on the main site.
Barry Schwartz:
3:17:33 pm
Stephan said the Webmaster Tools team doesnt have as much power to unpenalize sites as someone in Matt's team
Barry Schwartz:
3:17:51 pm
Vanessa asked to clarify how that works, and she worked at Google and built the reconsideration request form...
Barry Schwartz:
3:18:22 pm
Vanessa said it is unlikely a Google spam guy can remove a penalty, you still need to go through the reinclusion form...
Barry Schwartz:
3:18:44 pm
When you file the reconsideration, it goes to the spam team.
Barry Schwartz:
3:19:41 pm
If you can't have a server return a 404 error, what do you do?
Barry Schwartz:
3:19:48 pm
Greg said, get off the web. :)
Barry Schwartz:
3:20:13 pm
It isnt easy but you can do it, Vanessa said.
Barry Schwartz:
3:20:28 pm
If a site is penalized, can you just change the URL or redirect it?
Barry Schwartz:
3:21:30 pm
Greg, Some penalties do pass via redirect and some don't... The thing is, you never want to submit a reconsideration request unless you know you spammed Google.
Barry Schwartz:
3:22:42 pm
Danny mocked my question!!!
Barry Schwartz:
3:24:14 pm
What works on bing vs google type of Q
Barry Schwartz:
3:24:31 pm
Greg said there is a gap, things that dont work in Google really work well in Bing...
Barry Schwartz:
3:24:45 pm
But you don't want to drop your Google stuff, so you need to make decisions...
Barry Schwartz:
3:26:02 pm
Vanessa: Bing can't crawl Flash, Google can. Canonical supported in Google, not so much with Bing.
Barry Schwartz:
3:28:03 pm
Greg said you can go after each, one site for bing and one site for google.
Barry Schwartz:
3:28:09 pm
It is not a long term strategy
Barry Schwartz:
3:28:50 pm
They will each give their top tips soon...
Barry Schwartz:
3:30:32 pm
Spencer's Tip: Don't show up at a gun fight without a sword. My take on that is that you don't show up without very power SEO technology. The tools are only as good as the operator but the operator is also only as good as the tool.
Barry Schwartz:
3:32:01 pm
Jill: Don't believe anything that people tell you. Test it yourself. Every site is different...
Barry Schwartz:
3:34:01 pm
Greg: Start spending time understanding corroborative signals. Example is the Chrome toolbar extension.
Barry Schwartz:
3:36:09 pm
Todd: Have your organic search people talk to your paid search people. Have the data flow between SEO and PPC and back and forth...
Barry Schwartz:
3:37:50 pm
Vanessa: A lot of SEO was about links but there is a shift towards user experience. You can see a lot of this data in Bing/Google Webmaster Tools, such as CTR and so on...
Barry Schwartz:
3:39:37 pm
Bruce: Search results page is changing a lot, more items competing for those top ten. He has seen examples that only 4 of the 10 were web results. He sees that continuing. Local is huge.
On page is now going to be on site.
User exerpeince also...
Above all, SEOs are flying blind but you really need to like your analytics team. You have to know and trust your numbers.
On page is now going to be on site.
User exerpeince also...
Above all, SEOs are flying blind but you really need to like your analytics team. You have to know and trust your numbers.
Barry Schwartz:
3:39:50 pm
That is all folks! SMX West is now complete.
Barry Schwartz:
3:40:00 pm
Oh wait... Danny giving his tip...
Barry Schwartz:
3:40:24 pm
For good SEO, get good on Twitter and Facebook... Social signals are going to be important.... it is the new link building...
Barry Schwartz:
3:40:34 pm
Now, Good bye. Thanks for reading!
