I am embarking on a series of interviews to cover enterprise SEO. This week I am publishing an interview with Brent Payne of the Tribune Company. In it, we explore some of the unique challenges of SEO for a major national network of news properties, as well as some of the unique solutions to the problems that Brent encounters.
Josh Cohen Interview: Comment Here
11/15/2009 by 3 Comments
In this interview with Josh Cohen of Google News, we go into a lot of detail on the inner workings of Google News. Perhaps the most interesting bit of information was confirmation that Google uses click data as a ranking factor for Google News. If the Google News team is using it, it seems likely that the web team is using it as well. This is something that has been long suspected, but I am not sure I have seen it confirmed before.
We also cover other aspects of what Google News requires, and how it can be an important way that sites who publish news oriented content can obtain visibility for themselves. Check it out!
The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links
11/8/2009 by 43 Comments
The impact of a few deep links appears be greater than what you might first expect. In today’s post I am going to explore why that may be the case, and how to leverage it. First let me go into my theory on the matter. For this example, let’s assume we have a high PR home page (PR7, 8 or 9). Let’s say it has 3 layers of content, consisting of an upper layer (categories), a 2nd layer (sub-categories) and a 3rd layer (detailed content).
If we apply the traditional PageRank algorithm, even the 2nd layer and 3rd layer pages should be somewhat competitive because they receive of PageRank from the rest of the site, but there are a lot of times when this does not seem to happen. It looks like the domain authority and trust is not distributed across a site in the same manner as pure PageRank. My theory is that this is caused by a filtering mechanism, which restricts the way that the lower layer pages on a site can accumulate the trust and authority of the domain.
Perhaps the page has a potential amount of link juice it can receive from its own domain, but if the page does not get any links on its own, then not all of that link juice is credited to the page. Here is an illustration showing what I mean :
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When you get a deep link to a 2nd layer or 3rd layer page, our testing at STC shows that it has a much bigger impact than you might expect. Even a relatively low value link seems to bring large benefits to the ranking and traffic potential of the page, beyond what you would expect the value of the link to be. This may be because in addition to the link juice of the link, it also enables more of the link juice available to the page from the domain to be passed through, as shown here:
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And as you add more links the affect becomes more pronounced, as shown here.
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Summary
Chances are the the actual algorithms that result in the behavior we have observed over time are actually quite different in concept from what I have outlined here, but this mental model of the value of a deep link does work for our purposes. When you have a 2nd, 3rd, or deeper layer page that you want to push in the rankings for competitive terms, you don’t necessarily need to get it hundreds of links. Just a few links will provide the page with benefits on a much larger scale than you might otherwise think.
The Art of SEO
10/30/2009 by 11 Comments
One of our clients forward me an email message yesterday. The subject of the email was: “Fwd: Your Amazon.com order has shipped (#102-2280136-1739409)”. I scratched my head when I saw it, wondering what it could possibly be. Then I opened the email and saw these wonderful words:
“FYI, your book is now shipping 
Look forward to reading it”
Sweet!
You can order your own copy here.
SEMPO Mobile White Paper
10/19/2009 by Leave a Comment
Recently SEMPO released a white paper on the mobile market. The paper references data from comScore which shows tremendous growth (what a surprise!). The comScore data reveals that in May of 2009 more than 64.2 million in the US accessed the mobile Internet, a significant uptick from 36.8 million users from January of 2008, or a Neilsen study that showes 42.5 million users in July of 2008. This is a full 28% of US wireless subscribers, and 30% of all desktop Internet users.
Mobile advertising related to search is seeing some nice growth too. In the US, the Kelsey Group indicates that $39 million in mobile search advertising in 2009 is expected to grow to $2.3 billion in 2013. On reason for this, according to Noah Elkin, a Senior Analyst at eMarketer who is also on SEMPO’s Emerging Technologies Committee, is that mobile environments have higher click through rates due to less clutter and higher relevance. In addition, mobile searchers are often “in market” and closer to a decision point.
One of the factors helping drive this growth is the advent of the iPhone. The improved web browsing offered by the iPhone form factor has made the web much easier to access. This shows itself in the data presented in the SEMPO white paper as well, where iPhones represent about 20% of the smartphones available on the market, yet searches performed on iPhones represent 36.9% of all mobile searches.
My personal opinion is that at some point voice search becomes a big factor. According to Mr. Elkin voice based search is still a niche environment, because the quality is not high enough, and it is still too slow. Speech recognition algorithms do require a lot of processing power, and this is still not readily available in a smartphone. Over time it will become available though, and the notion of simply speaking your search command is pretty compelling.
What excites me about all this is that it represents yet another new frontier. There are many challenges ahead that need to be addressed, and people will need help with that. In addition, new brands will emerge from those that that capitalize on this new environment. If you missed the last gold rush, another one is underway. While pundits have been predicting the year of mobile to be next year many years, 2010 may finally be the year when it happens.
The white paper discusses a significant set of recommendations on what marketers should do to position themselves for the mobile environment. It is a challenging environment with many unique factors, including the lack of a consistent form factor or operating system. Check out the SEMPO paper to see how you can prepare to capitalize on this new emerging opportunity.
Interviewed by Richard Baxter
10/18/2009 by Leave a Comment
While I am known for interviewing lots of different people I recently got interviewed by Richard Baxter of SEO Gadget. In it, I speak about how I got started in SEO, and my favorite interviews. Richard also does a great job on an ongoing basis on the SEO Gadget blog. Check it out!
