Below is live coverage of the What's Really Important for Technical SEO? panel from the SMX West 2011 conference. This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick.
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Barry Schwartz:
10:37:27 am
Starting at :45, in about 7 minutes...
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Starting a bit early....
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Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Disa Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn
Speakers:
Greg Boser, SVP of Search Services, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc.
Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants
Todd Nemet, Director – Technical Projects, Nine By Blue
Brian Ussery, CTO, Search Discovery Inc.
Q&A Moderator: Disa Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn
Speakers:
Greg Boser, SVP of Search Services, BlueGlass Interactive, Inc.
Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants
Todd Nemet, Director – Technical Projects, Nine By Blue
Brian Ussery, CTO, Search Discovery Inc.
Barry Schwartz:
10:45:31 am
Vanessa is introducing everyone...
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10:45:42 am
Vanessa starts off...
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Vanessa speller her name wrong!!! HAHAHA HAHAHAHA
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speller = spelled
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Anyway, she is starting off with a case study on crawl efficiency
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Here are some log files, showing how Google fetches pages on their site, including sitemaps
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She shows how bots are fetching sitemaps but not the actual pages... So not much crawl time crawling actual URLs. You would not know this without looking at server log files...
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So they learned from this and did a new analysis after changing the sitemaps...
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So by making a slight modification on how they serve up sitemaps to Google, they saw a lot more traffic from Google...
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10:50:24 am
Anyway, next up is GREG BOSER
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Wissam:
10:51:32 am
barry what was the change?
Barry Schwartz:
10:51:42 am
@wissam the change was restructuring the sitemaps and serving them differently. exactly what, I am not sure. Sorry.
Barry Schwartz:
10:52:39 am
Barry Schwartz:
10:53:12 am
Core Concepts include proper prioritization, proper top level analysis (log files) and Google is no longer "page" focused - overall content is very very important.
Wissam:
10:53:15 am
thank you :)
Barry Schwartz:
10:53:45 am
So true, page level is far gone. Google does stuff a lot on site level stuff...
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10:54:14 am
Boser said even more so since the Farmer/Panda update this is even more true....
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CPR - Content Performance Ratios...
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How well is the content hat you are giving Google is performing right now before we get started...
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Here is how you do the math...
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Total URLs indexed, Total URLs visited = total URLS,
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Browse URLs: 16,676
Browse Visits: 67,884
Category URLs: 109
Category Visits: 6,754
Product Detail URLs: 12,116
PRoduct Detail Visits: 90,642
Pagination URLs: 490
Pagination Visits: 2,421
Browse Visits: 67,884
Category URLs: 109
Category Visits: 6,754
Product Detail URLs: 12,116
PRoduct Detail Visits: 90,642
Pagination URLs: 490
Pagination Visits: 2,421
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10:58:16 am
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Then once you look at content, then look at the link metrics...
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You need to really understand what you are dealing with before starting on the site...
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In this specific site, Pagination is the issue...
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You can use nofollow, noindex, robots.txt to then kind of sculpt the pages for Google...
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There is nothing on the slide about title tags because on large sites, there are other issues you need to address first...
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You need to get a handle on the structure and performance of content...
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In this case, he will trim down the site and get the most important indexed and ranking...
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He also uses canonical tags...
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Make your decisions 100% analytics and metric based. Don't just look at a site and go, it needs XYZ. Make decisions based on analytics...
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11:06:35 am
Greg is done. Next up...
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11:07:32 am
Todd Nemet, Director, Technical Projects, Nine By Blue is now up...
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He wanted to make it interesting without...
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11:09:02 am
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What can you do without this?
* Network
* Web access logs
* Other sources like HTTP headers, domain stuff, etc.
* Network
* Web access logs
* Other sources like HTTP headers, domain stuff, etc.
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11:09:49 am
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Network engineers are really confident...
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11:11:09 am
Ask these guys:
(1) Are you using load balancing round robin? Some solutions can hurt you www www1 www2 etc.
(2) How does the server do health checks
(3)Are there any reverse proxies
(4) Do you do URL rewriting
(5) Can I have log files...
(1) Are you using load balancing round robin? Some solutions can hurt you www www1 www2 etc.
(2) How does the server do health checks
(3)Are there any reverse proxies
(4) Do you do URL rewriting
(5) Can I have log files...
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Lots of technical know hows here, posting the slides...
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Next topic is web access logs...
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He shows a log file entry... One shows IE6 accessing the site and other other is GoogleBot
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He explains all the parts of this log file...
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His company designed a processor for log files...
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The tool they uses makes an excel file with a lot of good data...
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Bot activity, hierarchical view, query pararemeters, reverse dns, http response codes, etc.
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He now shows examples of inefficiencies he found on sites
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He then shares the sitemap issue Vanessa showed earlier...
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Scary one, home page returning a 503 error, this was done by the load balancer....
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11:19:00 am
Duplicate content problems, showing multiple URLs for the same page...
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Sorting causing query parameters, he showed 32 sort by values, all same content, but 32 URLs, etc...
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Lots of Poor error handling... The 404 pages not returning 404 pages...
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Site is not cache friendly
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Ted is done... next up...
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Brian Ussery, CTO, Search Discovery Inc
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- Technical SEO issues
- Path to indexing
- Hosting issues accessibility
- Hosting issues server response
- Host qualigiaation
- Back Speed
- Frontend speed
- Path to indexing
- Hosting issues accessibility
- Hosting issues server response
- Host qualigiaation
- Back Speed
- Frontend speed
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You do not want to block the bots
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Hosting can have an impact...
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Many hosts don't know anything about SEO
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Use Google Webmaster Tools
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11:27:09 am
Changing user agent to detect issues might not show you everything, hosts might do IP based content serving... So a good idea is to use the fetch as GoogleBot in GWMT.
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11:27:30 am
Speed is important also...
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FYI, clicking on the images open larger versions in new window...
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11:29:46 am
Compress your files and support the if-modified-since
Barry Schwartz:
11:30:24 am
Server must respond quickly
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Once you got the URL discovered and content is accessible, make sure the content is unique... Issues include canonical issues...
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11:31:32 am
He uses the Google Store as an example of bad SEO
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Check out this next slide
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Looking at the Google Store in a text based browser
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There are two different Google store web sites and he mocked the UK version...
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google-store.com/ and google-store.com/index.php Two different PR issues
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first has a PR 8 and second has a PR of 6
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11:34:04 am
Vanessa joked, it could have a PR 14
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He then goes into soft 404 issues...
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11:35:53 am
Front end page speed, lots of tools measure a page's speed...
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11:37:13 am
PageSpeed = Load Time
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11:37:23 am
Site performance = load time + redirects
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Technical SEO Checklist:
* Host access
* Host crawl efficiency
* Provide clear path
* Robots.txt
* Unique Content
* Use Google Webmaster Tools
* Host access
* Host crawl efficiency
* Provide clear path
* Robots.txt
* Unique Content
* Use Google Webmaster Tools
Barry Schwartz:
11:38:18 am
now Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants is up
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11:40:08 am
The panelists are now mocking Lisa Barone
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"Kitten without legs.."
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11:40:44 am
The devil in the details is his presentation...
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Why details matter?
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Someone blocked their whole site because they had a block on the staging server and it was moved up to the live server...
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To block staging server, use HTACCES
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He shows more code examples on how to do redirects on several servers
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Duplicate content in CMS and ecommerce systems
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IF you have a site with million of pages, code optimization is really important. Reduce code, it will load faster...
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Watch out for infinite URL spaces, such as calendars that go on forever...
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If all your pages are indexed, you do not need to do code optimization so much
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Submit a sitemap to see from them how many of your pages are indexed, because a site command doesn't work well..
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He says there are tools out there that make sitemaps for you...
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Place your sitemap in your robots.txt file
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MAke sure to have unique titles and meta description and Google will tell you if you have dups there. In Google Webmaster Tools....
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Spelling and typos... Your typos will show up in Google and it can lead to a page not ranking... You can run site wide spell checkers....
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Broken Links: Xenu Link Sleuth does this for you
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External links broken links show up in your error logs...
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Hacking and Malware.... There isn't a great solution for it now but it happens a lot. Normally sites get hacked due to patches not being installed or malware on your developers computers...
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Example...
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Look at the second listing. :) "some party" ....
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Code Validation.. it wont lead to ranking better, leads to better quality, leads to better user experience, etc... but wont change rankings....
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SEO Intangibles... Happy visitors are the ones who will do stuff for you... i.e. link to you, tweets, bookmark, etc...
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So an excellent site will lead to this....
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That is all
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Next sessions in 1.5 hours....
