SEO for Google vs Bing is about to start here at SMX. Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Sasi and Janet are in the house. Danny just opened with a terrible Sex and the city 2 joke, and now we’re being pitched to. Really, starting with a pitch? #smx #a1a (more spam shit).
Ok here goes. I’ll edit this down to only the crap that seems to matter. I’m leaving out all the basic stuff that would bore most people.
Sadly, Al Gore is not in the room.
Janet Driscoll Miller: Why should we worry about Bing? It’s going to be a 2 engine world soon. Heat maps show that people look at Google and Bing the same. Bing seems to out perform Google on Pages/Visit and Time on Site according to her metrics.
Big supports .xml sitemaps via the sitemaps.org protocol – however unlike Google Bing doesn’t accept video or news sitemaps. It does support sitemap indexes though.
Google has places for local listing, bing has something similar.It’s called bing local listing center but it doesn’t support this chrome browser I’m using.
She’s claiming that site links in Google and Bing only show on the first result, and Matt Cutts perked up. I think he noticed she’s wrong. Here’s an example query: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fail+pictures&aq=f&aqi=g4g-s1g5&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
In Bing, you can’t edit your site links like you can in Google.
Bing News: has no way to submit your site to their news search. You’ll have to email [email protected] with an RSS feed.
Oh Noes! Cash back is going away in July.
Bing has added a “share this” button right into search results for images (example: polar bears. I’m not sure how crazy I am about this. Who shares something before visiting it? Also, no link love provided – the “share this” feature gives you a Bing URL, not the URL of what you’re sharing.
Cutts got a good chuckle out of the fact that Bing video preview only works on Youtube and not on MSN video. Looks like Bing needs a helping of their own dog food. I hear it’s tasty. Here’s Matt’s Take on the session.
To disable document preview in Bing search results add < meta name =”msnbot”, content=”nopreview” >
Or you can add x-robots-tag:nopreview to your robots.txt file.
Danny is talking about making pages for different search engines. Some people admitted to doing this. It’s not something I’d like to admit in a room of SEO’s.
Rand has a slide up about bringing more science to SEO. I’m all for that,but how successful will that be in an era where roughly 50% of SEO’s don’t think that they need to know HTML. You can check out Rand’s slides here.
So far if I could sum up the Bing/Google strategy in one sentence it would be: Madambakkam Just make an awesome, findable site and don’t worry about the differences.
So glad Rand brought up correlation and causation, as this is where many misguided SEO beliefs come from. It’s also the focus of all those video questions I had answered last month.
Keyword Exact match domains have a very high correlation to top ranking in both Bing and Google. Is the domain that much of a factor? Or is it that an exact match domain can really only be about that topic. Also, achor text to a site like “failpictures.com” would probably just say “fail pictures” giving a substantial boost. (my example, not his… I typed this before he spit his out)
All in all, keywords in domains DO matter – as those of us in spammy activities have known for a while!
Interesting: Keywords in sub-domain have very low correlation to ranking in Bing, but much higher in Google. Factor, or related to the high volume of sub-domain spam out there?
Rand is talking about ALT attributes. Where’s Jill Whalen at? 🙂
Rand’s data shows .org has the highest correlation to rankings, and negative correlation to .edu. WTF? Here’s where correlation <> causation comes in – but I’m willing to bet several SEOs sitting in this room are currently registering .org domains. update: looks like this data is completely skewed by wikipedia since it’s a .org.
Rand said some more stuff about links and anchor text, but I missed it while I was hijacking Matt Cutts google buzz page and discussing shitty seos with Janet Miller on Twitter.
Cutts is speaking now.
Matt says Don’t chase search engines, chase the user experience – because that’s the goal of search engines; to chase search experiences. They just have different methodologies of doing so, but the goal is the same.
Matt says Bing shows Wikipedia more than Google – I didn’t know more than 100% was possible.
Sasi says don’t worry about “bing-like” or “google-like”, worry about “what does the user like?” Don’t do anything specific for search engines (I’m sensing a theme here) do it for the user.
Good question for Sasi: What will happen to yahoo site explorer? Sasi says at the end the SEO experience will be good – but no official details here.
What we DO know is that Bing & Yahoo rankings will be exactly the same – just like the old Google AOL deal.
Idea for next time: Bring a loud buzzer for when people speak.
Time’s up, I hope you found this review helpful. Leave me some comment love and check back later for other live blogs from the session – if I can find a power outlet.
As many of you know, I’m headed out to SMX Advanced in Seattle this week. If you’re trying to catch me, here’s a list of the sessions I’ll be attending. This is just a temporary list though, so I may end up swapping in some more SEM classes in favor of SEO ones. If you want to get in touch with me during SMX you can try 4square (RyanJones) or Twitter (RyanJones) as I’ll be using both frequently. Or, you can try old fashioned methods like email, phone, or text message. All of my contact info is available here (in plain text AND hcard format): ryanmjones.com.
9am-10:15am SEO for Google Vs Bing. I’ll attempt to blog about this, but it’s early so no promises.
11:00 – 12:15 Twitter, Real time Search, & Real Time SEO. I will be live blogging this one too!
12:15- 1:45 (tenantive) Lunch with Google Engineer Maile Ohye
1:45 – 3:00 (tenative) Show me the links: Real Life Link Building (I”m also debating on skipping this for pump up conversions)
3:30-4:45 The Ultimate social media tools session. (although demystifying online attribution also sounds interesting)
5:00 – 5:45 You&A With Matt Cutts. I’m going to attempt to live blog this one as well, so stay tuned!
5:45 – 7:00 Expo Hall Reception. I can’t turn down free drinks and Lisa Barone stalking….
8:00 – ? Bing’s Party at Olympic Sculpture Park. Again, I can’t say no to free drinks. Hoping some fellow ZAAZ employees will crash this one with me
Wednesday
9:00 – 9:45 Keynote with Yusuf Mehdi. High likelyhood of me sleeping through this though as Yusuf just spoke at ZAAZ last week.
10:30 – 11:45 So You Want To Test SEO – Really Hoping Jill Whalen shows up for this one. I’ll bring the boxing gloves. I’ll also be nursing a hangover
11:45 – 1:30 – Lunch with some domainers. Believe it or not, domaining and search have a lot in common.
1:30-2:45 I haven’t decided between Vanessa Fox’s SEO site architecture or Danny Sullivan’s Facebook marketing. I may bounce between them.
3:00 – 4:15 SEO Vets Take All Comers. – The words “powerpoint free” were all I needed to see to sign up for this. This might be another live blog.
6:00 – most likely not going to the SEOmoz party. Mostly because I don’t think they’d let me in!
So that’s my smx schedule. I’ll be tweeting and live blogging throughout the days, so stay tuned for updates. I’d also like to hear what sessions you’re looking forward to attending.
Sure, you’re a busy professional, I understand that. You’ve got lots to say but very little time to actually say it. When you’re struggling to find time to blog, you can’t worry about actually maintaining that blog. WordPress.com, Blogger, Blogspot, and 27 other solutions all seem simple and easy to use, and most likely work great. You don’t have to worry about installing wordpress updates, paying hosting bills, or remembering to renew a domain name, all you have to do is concentrate on writing quality posts.
Except for one problem – you’re losing out on readers, revenue, and traffic!
Just as there are tons of upsides to using a hosted blog platform, there’s tons of downsides too. Here’s 3 quick reasons why you should actually host your own blog on your own domain.
Control. When you host your own blog you’re in control of everything. You can change the layout, the plugins, the content, the domain, and well, everything. Sure it means managing your own backups, but it also means that your data remains intact. As we’ve seen with URL shorteners and recently with Geocities, there’s no guarantee your data will be alive forever. You also give up control of what that site should decide to do with your data if they pull a facebook style privacy fiasco in the future. By hosting your own, you at least control for how long it stays online.
IT Departments Won’t Block You. Yes, the reason I’m writing this post has something to do with disgruntlement toward my company IT department. Most filtering systems today block places like WP.com, Blogspot, etc out of the box. That means if you’re writing about business stuff, many business people can’t read your blog. Think it’s a small amount of people? Think again! I myself work in the office of one of the largest companies in the world and I can’t read techcrunch because they host their stylesheet on WP.com, and that’s blocked.
It Improves Quality. As somebody who was blogging before blog was a word, I often pine for the pre-wordpress days when the only people with blogs were those who know a bit of perl. I’m trying not to sound nostalgic, but there’s something about enduring the hard work of creating a site that makes you strive for high quality content. If you’re paying for the site, there’s that extra bit of incentive to try to make it worth your money. I’m willing to wager that so many blogspot blogs go by the wayside due to lack of personal investment in the blog by the writer.
If you’re going to blog, don’t be a slacker and do it right from the start. Grab yourself a domain name and some hosting, install your platform of choice on it, and start cranking out the quality content. It will not only make you a better writer, but doing things yourself will make you a more experienced IT professional – especially when it comes to familiarity with things like SEO, Programming, Hosting, etc.
Now that Google has launched a secure version of search, it will be interesting to see how searchers react. My guess? I think it’s going to allow people to search more freely. In fact, it might go something like this:
I know you were probably expecting to hear about SEO impications, or how SSL doesn’t pass referer information over to analytics programs, and when is Google going to add options to webmaster tools to help out – but I’ve decided to take the high road and make jokes about killing your spouse instead. Enjoy!
After I performed the test below, Jill Whalen wrote me on Twitter and asked me to perform the same test but using a text link instead of an image link. Despite being pretty sure what would happen, I did the test anyway; mostly in the interest of science.
Here’s what I did: Leaving the image links with alt attributes in place, I added a text link to the footer of the same web pages. In that text link, I used the text “twoeiatl” – which is slightly different than the text I used in the alt attribute. I wanted to keep them separate so that I could measure the two links on their own merits.
Here’s what happened:
When I linked to textsendr.com with a unique term in an image link with alt text TextSendr.com did NOT rank for that term, however the pages with the image link did.
When I linked to textsendr.com with a unique text link, BOTH textsendr.com AND the pages with the link ranked for that term. Check it out here.
I believe this test clearly shows that text links perform better than image links when it comes to on-site navigation. While your page has the ability to rank for ALT text in the images, it appears as if that ALT text isn’t being attributed to the page in the link. As expected, text links actually apply to both the page they’re on, AND the page they’re linking to. When you think about it in context (google bombs come to mind) that makes sense.
It also makes sense from a Google perspective, since text links are seen by users and ALT attributes generally aren’t. If ALT attributes factored in to ranking, it would be easy to abuse them in the same way META keywords were abused in the past.
My Original Test:
A few days ago I noticed a fun spirited debate taking place in Jill Whalen’s 8 SEO myths debunked post. The issue at hand revolved around whether image links with alt attributes are just as good as pure text links. Here’s what Jill said in the post:
SEO Myth #4: You must use text links, not image links.
Nope. Like tables, the search engines have been able to follow and index image links since their very early days. You certainly don’t have to ruin a beautiful website design that uses images for the primary navigation because you think it’s better for SEO. Just be sure to use the same words you’d use in your anchor text links in your image alt attribute text (alt tags), and you’ll be good to go for the search engines.
A few people in the comments took issue with this statement, saying that there are several SEO advantages of using text links over image links with alt attributes – especially when it comes to site navigation.
In the comments, Jill replies to one of the commenters: Many pages rank very highly based soley on the weighting of the alt attribute text pointing to those pages. It’s just like anchor text. Test it for yourself.
I wasn’t involved in the thread, but her comment did actually inspire me to run the test she’s talking about. So I did.
I wanted to test 2 specific things:
Can a page rank for a term solely by having that term in an alt attribute?
Can a page rank for a term solely by having image links with an alt attribute pointing to it?
So, I added links to a couple PR5 webpages that Google crawls daily. This site was one of them and you can still see the link on the bottom of my sidebar. To be specific, I put an image link on dotcult.com and noslang.com pointing to textsendr.com. All the image links had the same alt attribute. The alt attribute (which I don’t want to list here to mess with my test) is the first letter of each word in the sentence: This Word Only Exists In An Alt Attribute.
I then waited a few days so that Google could index and crawl all of the sites and did a search for the term. Here’s the Google results now for that term (passed through a link shortener so that the term doesn’t even appear on here in a link) http://tiny.tw/73
Interestingly, both NoSlang.com AND dotCULT.com show up in the results – Proving that a page CAN rank for terms that are contained in its alt attributes.
Textsendr.com however, does NOT rank for that term though – which I think proves that You can’t rank for a term simply by having image links with alt attributes pointing to you.
Now, I’m pretty sure it’s common knowledge that anchor text in links CAN help you rank for those terms.
I’m glad this test confirmed what I (and the commenters on Jill’s blog) thought was the case – that text links have a much greater SEO effect than image links.
Perhaps, as Jill claims, there ARE cases where it seems a site is ranking based on alt attributes but I think it’s just a case of SEOs confusing correlation and causation. It’s more likely that the terms people use in their alt attributes ALSO appear on those pages and thus the pages rank based on the text, NOT the alt attributes. But, that’s just my two cents. I’d love to hear what other people think.
What better way to spend the first few minutes of my lunch break than to eat some Blackbird Pie. That’s twitter’s new name for their HTML version of tweet screenshots. Now, instead of taking a screenshot, pasting it into ms paint, cropping, saving, and uploading (or using a 3rd party service like tweetshots,) Twitter users can simply use this new feature to include a clickable, copy and pasteable tweet.
This is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while, but it’s still not very useable. Honestly, I was expecting a lot more from twitter. After 10 seconds of playing with it, some issues presented themselves:
1. It’s Not Dynamic at All. There’s nothing dynamic about this. You can’t use it to automatically generate boxes for tweets, and there’s no API. When I first heard of the service I thought “sweet, finally I can embed tweets into an application given only the twitter status ID.” Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Sure, I could use the API to grab all the parts of the tweet and then rebuild their HTML, but I could have done that on my own without Blackbird Pie. I want a way to create these automatically on the fly.
2. The Code is a Mess. Twitter acknowledged this, but it seems like they were rushing because this should have never seen the light of day in its current form. I’m not talking about the sheer amount of code either, I’m talking about the code being broken. It’s got extra </span> tags for Christ’s sake. If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s another widget that spews broken code onto my websites.
3. They don’t play well together. Putting multiple instances of the widget on the same page (like I did below) seems to cause a few formatting and styling issues. When I added the fake Matt Cutts tweet below, it seems to have changed my background above to his funky purple thing.
UPDATE: perhaps the best part of blackbird pie is its ability to put words into peoples mouths:
It’s a good first attempt Twitter, but frankly you rushed it a bit. Tons of people want this feature, and tons of people will use it (as evidenced by it going down several types as I was playing with it,) but it’s nowhere close to what it can truly be. I’m hoping this is just the first step toward making the @anywhere API extremely useful. Stick that pie back in the oven for a bit and let me know when it’s done!
If you’re a fan of the Google Webmater Help Youtube Channel you’ve probably noticed that Matt Cutts has been answering a lot of questions from “Ryan in Dearborn, MI.” To those of you wondering, yes I am that Ryan.
I don’t know Matt at all. I’ve never met him and probably never will – but after watching his first round of videos I realized that “spamming” the questions could be pretty useful. Actually, spamming isn’t the word. Perhaps “seeding” is more appropriate.
I submitted about 10 questions to the latest grab bag, and so far Matt has answered 3 of them. (He’s actually answered about 5 or 6, but just chose a version submitted by somebody else.)
So what was the opportunity I saw? It wasn’t to get Matt to teach me about SEO (my goal is always to experiment and learn based on data) and it wasn’t simply to get my name out there either. I work at an agency, so there’s really no value in me building up a personal brand.
The reason I asked several of my questions was so that I can have somewhere to point people to when they start spouting off about some of the crazy myths they believe about SEO but haven’t put any effort or time into actually testing.
Remember when Matt talked about how load speed could be a factor in ranking and tons of SEOs obsessed about making their pages faster instead of more relevant? That’s why I’m glad he answered a speed question.
One of the biggest problems in our industry is that so many SEOs out there simply don’t test or do research. They lurk in forums and blogs reading all kinds of unsubstantiated theories hoping to find that hidden secret that will vault them to the top of Google without having to actually build a more relevant site. It’s these people that need to watch the Cutts videos.
That’s also why I asked some snarky questions too – and it looks like even Matt couldn’t resist taking some subtle jabs at the SEO community:
While the stated goal of webmaster help is to help webmasters, it’s my view that it can also help to correct SEOs about many of the myths that they’re still spreading.
I’m cleaning out my domain portfolio and am going to get rid of the following domains. If you want one, make me an offer and I’ll transfer it to your GoDaddy account for free. I’m willing to let these go for mere pennies.
BurgerTales.com (was going to be a fast food blog)
CMSbasic.com (we could all use a basic CMS right?)
DontSayLike.com (has a site on it, you can have that too)
Downlifted.com (this term was coined by the freakonomics blog)
Downlifting.com
IHateDNS.com (don’t we all?)
SemanticSelf.com
URLfax.com (a fax service?)
WarcraftScrubs.com (good for making fun of WoW players)
Yugamu.com (means to warp, or be crooked in Japanese)
If you want any of these, they’re yours for $10 OBO Get at me in the comments or on Twitter.
A few years ago while working with openID and hcard at identity.net I wrote a blog post called who supports hcard. In that post I talk about how (just like with openID) everybody wants to be a provider, but nobody wants to accept my hcard when I signup for their service.
According to this list from microformats.org that looks to still be the case. Well over 50 different sites all provide hcard support, but only 4 of them will actually take my hcard information instead of making me re-type it all when I sign up. That’s just sad.
Creating an hcard is easy. Just head on over to microformats and learn the syntax. It’s almost as simple as copying and pasting some span tags around your current content. It took me about 5 minutes to turn RyanMJones.com into a valid hcard.
Reading an hcard is even easier. In PHP it can be done in 4 lines of code. here’s the code. Go try it out.
Hcards and microformats have the potential to both simplify and revolutionize the internet as we know it, but only if people are willing to support both sides; and then take it a little further.
I long for the day when I can simply update my personal website’s hcard and then Twitter, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, and everybody else will see the change and update accordingly. That’s where the true power of the hcard comes into play – yet nobody is willing to step up and harness that power.
But that’s just one of several types of microformats. There’s practically a microformat for everything; and that’s where things get interesting.
I envision an internet in the not so distant future that takes microformats to the next level and applies them to the existing information flow of the internet. Instead of a microformat applied to text, what if I could apply a microformat to a feed?
We have FOAF where I can list friends as I mention them, but what if I could tag my entire list of facebook friends and have it pulled into other applications?
Tons of applications already give me feeds, what if I could do a whateverCard that aggregated all of those feeds into one type of “RyanCard”
Using this new format I could take my picture (gravatar) what I’m doing (twitter) What I’m buying (blippy) what I’m working on (yammer) my friends (facebook) where I’m at (foursquare) my personal information (hcard) employment history (linkedin) and the rest with me wherever I went.
Give me one site that can read microformats and pull all of that data in… then keep it tagged so that other sites can use it.
Or, better yet, give me one site that I can update with all of that information at once and then it will know where to post all of that information.
That’s the future of microformats – but only if the major players in the space are willing to look beyond just offering them and start accepting them as well.
Continuing in the spirit of my post on Why Twitter Bots Are Effective I was doing some prep work for a future presentation and decided to run a few tests.
I got to playing around with a twitter adder called HummingBird and wanted to see how many people blindly follow me back.
I created a new twitter account, uploaded a picture, posted some random crap about SEO that I stole from other people’s accounts and set up the bot.
I told it to auto follow anybody who mentioned “seo”, had over 100 followers, was following over 50 people, had more than 50 tweets, and didn’t have a default image. (I was trying to avoid following bots, and I think it did a pretty good job.)
I let it run for an hour – from about 4 to 5pm. During that time it followed roughly 112 people.
When I woke up in the morning, my Gmail account looked like a mass mail from Twitter. 72 SEOs blindly followed it back!
That’s an astounding 64%! That got me wondering if it was just SEOs, so I did the same thing for they keyword “hockey” and out of around 100 people, I got about 30 followers.
That tells me a few things:
Twitter bots are still extremely effective
SEO people blindly follow at a much higher rate than the rest of twitter.
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