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Interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz

There’s a nice interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz about SEO and more over at E-consultancy - riding on the coattails of Rand’s excellent search engine ranking factors doc.

On links:

2. The study still values links very highly, yet I have created pages that rank highly on content alone (on new websites). What are your thoughts on links vs content?

Link popularity is absolutely critical in competitive fields. When attempting to rank for keywords that have 20+ companies all competing for the first page of results, the links you build are going to be more important than the “on-page” factors like keyword use in the title tag and repetition in the body content – anyone can do that.

However, in non-competitive markets or with sites that are primarily focused on getting the “long tail” (those searches that are only performed 1-2X per month, but make up the bulk of all searches), you can do exceptionally well if you simply keep the site clean, usable and valuable. Anyone can rank a page for “blue pigeon artichokes”, but if only two or three users find your site via that search, it’s not a very valuable #1 ranking. Of course, with 5,000 pages of content, each getting only 1-2X search referrals per month, you can still do remarkably well.

3. Is link quality more important than link quantity?

Absolutely. You can find sites in competitive spaces with 50-100,000 backlinks (as reported by Yahoo!, currently the most authoritative source) ranking 5-10 positions behind sites with only 500-1000 links.

The difference is not only page quality (in terms of the actual value of content of the linking pages) but also the quality, reputation and trust that the search engines place in the sites that host the linking pages. 50,000 scraper sites or blog comment spam links aren’t equivalent to 10 or 20 high level links from government, educational or news sites.

You also should consider the value of traffic that’s inherent in links. SEOmoz gets less than 10% of its traffic through search engines, yet receives 500-1000 visitors every day just from referring links. If a link’s sending you traffic, it’s a quality link in my book.

On SEO reading:

11. Who are your favourite thought leaders / bloggers / SEO experts?

I really like the intelligence and careful thought of Bill Slawski (who goes by bragadocchio), Ian McAnerin and Dan Thies. I’m also a fan of some folks who are trying to cross over from IR (Information Retrieval – the academic side of search) into SEO like Dr. Edel Garcia and Xan Porter, who runs the (http://spaces.msn.com/members/search-science/PersonalSpace.aspx) Search Science blog.

As far as bloggers go, I read the usual SEO sites every day – (http://www.threadwatch.org) Threadwatch, (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/) SearchEngineWatch, (http://www.seobook.com) SEO Book and (http://www.seroundtable.com/) Search Engine Roundtable. But, I really enjoy some of the niche bloggers like (http://www.insearchofstuff.com) In Search Of Stuff (humour), Patrick Gavin’s (http://www.linkbuildingblog.com) Link Building Blog and Todd Malicoat’s (http://www.stuntdubl.com/) Stuntdubl.

There’s a ton more in the interview, so be sure to read it if you’re interested.

Basic SEO - TITLE Work

There’s a nice thread at High Rankings about SEO TITLE optimization. It’s good as a refresher for you seasoned SEO veterans out there, and a nice primer for the novices. Some excerpts:

Your Title tags should definitely refect the PHRASES you optimize your page for. I would never optimize a page for just one keyword phrase, so therefore, my titles would never have just one keyword phrase in them.

The title you choose is the First impression any potential customer gets about your site when they conduct a search on any of the engines. You only get one chance to make a good first impression, so use it wisely. In my book Titles are very important, and not just for ranking purposes.

If you want to show up for “inflatable playhouses” then just saying inflatable without it saying “inflatable playhouses” isn’t going to do you very much good.

[Too long?] About 10 or 11 words is good. (IMO)

Cramming the keyword into the title tag makes you look cheap and spammy. So what if it may help you get to number 1 in the SERPs? A lot of things may help you get to number 1. None of them are absolutely necessary.

Good advice.

Tables vs. CSS - An SEO Experiment

Jill Whalen of High Rankings and Dan Thies of Sitepoint are in for a little contest - is CSS better for SEO, or does it not matter? My position is that it does, and I have enough empirical evidence through SEO with CSS to stand by that, but this should be interesting:

If you’d like to know why I don’t agree with Jill & Scottie, aside from actually testing this stuff which is easy enough, you may want to read my article on how search engines work. Pages 5 & 6 will be of particular interest, as is Dr. Garcia’s discussion of the vector space model, if you don’t mind getting tired head from looking at equations.

What Jill & Scottie are suggesting is that search engines would analyze the following two snippets of text and find them exactly equal:

Home About Us Products Services Privacy Subscribe To Our Newsletter! Name Email Copyright 2003-2005 MegaGlopTronInc, Inc. Search term here bla bla bla…

Search term here bla bla bla… Home About Us Products Services Privacy Subscribe To Our Newsletter! Name Email Copyright 2003-2005 MegaGlopTronInc, Inc.

I just don’t believe that’s true. In fact, it is demonstrably not true.

Now the challenge:

Happy to oblige, Jill, test pages are online here and here.

Watch this SERP for the results.

Watching…

Banned Site 301ing as Ammunition

Can you hurt a site with a banned site through a 301? That’s the question posed in a Search Engine Watch thread on the subject:

If you 301 a banned domain to a domain that ranks well and is not banned the banned domain will not hurt the other domain.

If that were the case, then I could get one of my domains banned, 301 it to my competitor and hurt their site and their rankings.

More:

I’ve done it and it doesn’t work.

I’ve also seen the results of some other interesting tests done, like this one:

1.Buy domain. (or use existing domain)

2.Change all the whois information so it has a competitor’s contact details listed.

3.Put the nastiest most spammy pages on it, like pages with 5000 of the same anchor text links that point to that competitor’s site.

4.Let that spammy site sit for a while and get indexed.

The results? It doesn’t hurt the competitor’s rankings, even though the site is “owned” by the competitor and links to their site.

The bottom line is that there doesn’t appear to be anything you can do to hurt a competitor, even if you 301 redirect a banned site to another site.

Looks like a consensus:

I just can’t disagree with.

I know Matt Cutts from Google said at a previous SES in London (2004) in a Q&A session that you can’t really help who links to your site but you can help who you link to so I can only guess the same has to apply.

Though this would be an interesting test…

Foregoing the Linking: An SEOs Story

Via SEOmoz comes this gem from SEO Chat in which an SEO decides to forego the linking for a more on-page focus:

I inherited a stale store site without many links and a low PR. I came to the conclusion early on that trying to jump to Google’s crazy dance was not worth the effort. Links acquisition is dog work — and then you might get penalized (or even dropped) at the end of it. You only have to read the threads on Google Optimization for a few days to see the agony and frustration that’s involved in dancing with Google. And what happens when G wakes up and decides to drop its obsession with links?

It’s true that G has half the searches, just by itself, but the rest together also have half, and they are a lot less weird and idiosyncratic. If you make Y and MSN happy, you make almost all the rest of the also-ran SEs happy.

Writing good content, making every effort to help and guide the visitor around my site, and leading her to checkout with as few difficulties as possible was my first task. That helped conversion and was also a good start on SEO.

Then by choosing my top 3 KW phrases carefully, and doing a minor rewrite of the existing good content to emphasize them without getting (too) spammy, I was able to get all three KW phrases on the first SERP page for Y, MSN, askJ, and Alta Vista. (The other SEs tend to be more like Y than like G, but I haven’t checked them out to see where I am).

He’s right. For “natural” link building that won’t get you in trouble, many times you just need to focus on the content and the links will come. In a sense, good content breeds links, but links don’t breed good content. And even without aggressive link building, you’ll do just fine most times.

Moving Your Site Host or Domain

One of the first thoughts that pops into the head of any SEO when contemplating a site move to another host is, “How will this affect my site in the search engines.” Doing his best to answer this in an SEO-friendly way, Matt Cutts explains how he did it:

Step 1. Find a good web host and sign up for an account.

Step 2: Make a back-up of your site at the new webhost.

Step 3: Change DNS to point to your new web host.

Step 4: Wait for the DNS change to propagate through the net.

Step 5: Once you are sure people or Googlebots are fetching from the new webhost/IP address, you’re done. You can shut down the old site.

He goes in-depth on each of these points, so read the full post if you’re about to make the switch. If you’re moving from domaina.com to domainb.com, however, things can be trickier:

Now let’s talk for a minute about moving from mattcutts.com to someotherdomain.com. All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it. These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later. I have heard some reports of people having issues with doing a 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com. I’m happy to hear those reports in the comments and I can pass them on to the crawl/indexing team, but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so. If it’s really easy for you to wait a couple months or so, you may want to do that; it’s always easier to ask crawl/index folks to examine newer code than code that will be turned off in a while.

Emphasis mine. And good advice. Though that bit about replacing code is interesting. I recommend a 302 as your best bet because of the same reasons Cutts says Google will be updating the redirect code - it doesn’t work as advertised. With a 302, at least, your old rankings will stay while the new ones get picked up. It harks back to Step 5 of his first list: once Google likes the new site, switch to a 301. But it all could be changing…

Blogging and SEO: The “New SEO”

Nick has an interesting post on Threadwatch about the “New SEO,” or what he sees as the fusion of blogging and SEO for a new wave of success for both camps:

I say “new seo”, but it’s not really, as we’re talking about gaining traffic, not gaining traffic specifically from Search engines. There are similarities though:

• It’s all about attention - SEO’s grab it by ranking, bloggers by links on high traffic blogs and word of mouth
• SEO’s tweak titles’ for placement, bloggers for rss click throughs
• SEO’s like clean code, so do bloggers, but bloggers tend to like it more for the sake of it, than SE benefits
• SEO’s write articles for placement, bloggers for contraversy, links, attention - it’s the same thing really…

The list could go on.

The thing is, as SEO get’s tougher and tougher, SEO’s need to learn to do what bloggers do, as the results of whoring for attention are often the same as whoring for links, and bloggers need to learn what SEO’s do, because if they combine what they do with basic white hat SEO techniques, they’ll do far better for traffic.

So, SEO’s and Bloggers, whether either party likes it or not, share much more in common than they may like to think. Those bloggers that can get their heads around SEO, and those SEO’s than can assimilate blogging into their skillsets will reap the benefits.

Die hard SEO’s that shun blogging will suffer eventually, as they’re missing something very important from their marketing mix, and likewise for bloggers that are too pig headed to learn from SEO’s.

If you’ve run a blog, you know the kind of kick it can give you. Then again, you have to (1) run a blog for a reason, (2) love it and (3) blog just about every day. Otherwise, your lack of enthusiasm for your blog bleeds down to your readers (if you have any) and it’s like starting from square one again.

Benefit of a Yahoo! Directory Link

Found a nugget of gold in an innocent enough post on High Rankings about Google updating their webmaster guidelines:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!

The reference to Yahoo is interesting as I thought the Jump text they use would be ignored - maybe not?

That’s what I thought, at least until this comment from Erik:

The outbound links in Yahoo’s directory are cloaked; engines don’t see the long jump URL, only the direct link to the site.

More:

They do it via user agent delivery. If you go to any Yahoo directory page and roll over the outgoing links, you’ll see a long tracking URL that starts with rds.yahoo.com in your status bar.

But if you “spoof” your browser’s user agent (such as by using the PrefBar extension for Firefox or via Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer tool), you’ll see that if your UA is googlebot, slurp, or msnbot (I don’t know about the others), if you roll over the link, you’ll see only the link of the other site, not all the internal Yahoo tracking arguments.

I checked it myself using Firefox’s useful user-agent switcher and, lo and behold, Yahoo! is cloaking the outbound links from the directory.

Link Building Advice

More link building advice, this time a critique from Jill of High Rankings:

1. Only Incoming (non-reciprocal) links - why? Nothing wrong with reciprocals.
2. Links with specified "Keywords" in the Anchor Text - Those are great, but ones without specified anchor text are also good.
3. Links from sites that have PR specified links page - This doesn’t necessarily matter since toolbar PR isn’t accurate or up to date, nor does it have any effect on rankings.
4. Industry relevant pages where links are placed - Also great, but non-relevant links count just as much.
5. Link to your site should not be through a "redirect" script - usually true, but Yahoo redirects your directory link, and many people pay $ each year for those. [Ed. note: No, not really.]
6. No JavaScript links - Agreed.
7. No framed sites - Why not?
8. No flash site links - Why not?
9. No robots.txt exclusions - correct, you don’t want the page your link is on to be excluded from the robots.
10. Exclussion in Robots Tag - Must me no exclusion?
11. No paid links - why not?
12. Links from Pre-indexed Pages only - no idea what that means.
13. Spread your site link across different domains - agreed.
14. No SPAM should be used to solicit links - agreed.
15. No links from Link Farms - agreed
16. No FFA networks - agreed
17. Don’t get links from Blogs - why not? That’s the craziest one yet!
18. No links from PORN, racially prejudiced sites and other sites containing offensive content - what if your site is porn, etc?
19. Full data sheet of links created at the end of each month - helpful
20. Only relevant established links should be counted in the final report - sounds good.

Yes, you can take off your tin-foil link building hat now.

Bad Neighborhoods and SEO

If you follow linking, you’re familiar with “bad neighborhoods.” And if you run good content on your site, you know how quickly your site can get picked up in these neighborhoods by scrapers. A recent thread at High Rankings discusses just this fact. A few comments from Rand of SEOmoz:

I noticed I have at least 10,000 sites if not more that are scrapers linking to a client’s site. The problem is, too, if you’re ranking well for thousands of queries because you run a blog and articles up every day/week, you’re going to get tons and tons of scraper links…

More:

I’ve seen some evidence of the “bad neighborhood” links affecting one of my sites - in Yahoo! particularly. Paid for inclusion to get it looked at by a person and they put it back, but scary for a while and based solely on the inbound links.

Also, in my interview with MSN (at SEOmoz), they noted that if spammy sites point to you, you “look like spam”. Sounded to me like they take those links seriously and don’t buy the “can’t control who links to me” argument.

Countering it with high quality, legit links seems to be a good way to make sure it can’t hurt you long term. Once About.com and Topix and del.icio.us/popular have you on there, and your natural link love is built up, I doubt that bad ‘hoods can throw you down.

Good point. The search engines shouldn’t penalize for links in, but they sometimes do.