4 ms·

SEO Advice from Someone Not Selling It (Some Contrarian)

58 points by epi0Bauqu 18y ago

jrockway 18y ago
SEO tips seem a lot like black magic to me. Nobody ever explains why, and nobody shows any data... they just say things you are supposed to believe. I find this annoying. (I have never focused on SEO, and my website always comes up for terms that I expect it to come up for.)
- epi0Bauqu 18y ago
  I'd be happy to say more (why, data, etc.) on anything in particular. The post was already getting a bit long, which is why I left it at that. There is some why in there already though.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    I was mostly interested in this one: "Use directories instead of subdomains."
    - quilby 18y ago
      I am pretty sure that this is because Google sees different subdomains under the same domain (ie. a.example.com, b.example.com) as different websites, and so if you got a link to a.example.com, maybe a.example.com's pagerank would improve, but example.com's pagerank will not improve. This is why choosing one main domain for you website (either www.example.com or example.com) and 301 redirecting all requests from the one not chosen to the chosen one is recommended.
      - sachinag 18y ago
        This is true. This is why we decided to set it as http://blog.dawdle.com http://blog.dawdle.com instead of http://www.dawdle.com/blog http://www.dawdle.com/blog . We have some freelancers that want to write about gaming in general (so they might get a callup to get paid), so it's editorially independent, and the blog can pass independent PageRank to the main http://www.dawdle.com/ http://www.dawdle.com/ domain. The point is: don't automatically just shove everything in subdirectories; think about if you want your subdomains to have independent PR or not - it might make sense in certain situations.
    - randfish 18y ago
      On subdirectories vs. subfolders, see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdom... - essentially, it's about benefiting from the authority/trust/link metrics assigned to a root/sub domain rather than starting a new one.
      - jrockway 18y ago
        Like I said, I'm interested in data, not speculation. Reading this is like reading a review of a power cable that makes your speakers sound better. People can convince themselves of anything they want to.
- patio11 18y ago
  The "why" inevitably boils down to "we have found this to be effective while black-box testing a constantly changing algorithm developed by an adversarial company with many, many more engineers on staff than we have". I show data, occasionally. Most people think it is competitively sensitive.
- rgrieselhuber 18y ago
  The people selling black magic tend to use techniques that end up getting them busted in the long term. But there are some things that are just good practices from an SEO perspective and have nice usability and accessibility benefits. There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)
  - azanar 18y ago
    There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-) Not just directed at rgrieselhuber so much as the whole community, what would you say are the predominance of such companies relative the whole SEO market? My experience so far has suggested a vast number are just floating on borrowed time until someone busts them, but I'll be the first to admit my sampling might be biased.
    - rgrieselhuber 18y ago
      From what I've seen, the industry as a whole tends to get a bad rap from the people doing stupid stuff. My experience comes from working with global brands so it's probably skewed, but there is real business value to be derived from doing a few things right.
    - wheels 18y ago
      I end up having a lot of people ask me "SEO" questions which basically just amount to understanding PageRank and the basics of Google's ranking-fu. What I've seen is that the desire for SEO comes from and ok place -- people just seeing page ranking as black magic and wanting someone to demystify it. Nerds tend to take for granted understanding the basics of web search. A surprising number of people in the web world have no basic grasp of the concepts, but still know that showing up in search results is important for them.
randfish 18y ago
I left a comment on Gabriel's blog, but if you're a startup building a site and doing SEO, be careful not to take all of this advice, particularly #9 and #13, but #6 is also not entirely wise. p.s. Yes, technically I fit into the "someone selling it" category, but I also despise misinformation on this subject. p.p.s. sachinag - your assessment of "independence" due to being on a subdomain and use of "pass PageRank" isn't accurate either. All pages pass PageRank, and PageRank is not limited to "independent domains." There are other link weighting factors that certainly do apply to separate "root domains" but the logic you're trying to apply isn't going to help get better rankings in the way you suggest.
- patio11 18y ago
  #13 (write less pages and less text to conserve ranking potential) is directly contrary to both the truth and my experience. The more content I add to my website, the better it ranks in aggregate and the better the front page ranks in particular. If you want I can even show you a graph of amount of content versus traffic as a result of Google. Let me spoil the surprise: it fits n * (# pages) ^ (1 + y). Your pages do compete against each other in some narrow senses: for any given query, you'll typically be capped at two results in the SERP (results page), so if you had a third best option on your site it gets left out in the cold. However, pages on your website are (and should be treated as) comrades in arms. The more links my page on, e.g., Jane Austen bingo cards collects, the more trust my domain will have and the more juice that individual page will pass to the literature category its in and the other page it links to. This helps me rank both the other literature pages (which have scant anything to do with Jane Austen) and also the almost wholly unrelated, e.g., Easter bingo.
  - epi0Bauqu 18y ago
    As I said in the blog comments, I realize #13 conflicts with #10 & #11, but who ever said it couldn't :) ? It's all about your SEO goals & priorities. Sure, in general, the more content, the more Google traffic you are going to get. I'm not really disputing that. All I'm saying is if you take away stuff, the ranking that is left will be concentrated on what is left on the page. For example, take the situation where you really convert on one key phrase and not much on anything else. In that situation, you really want to concentrate on that term and you probably want to strip out things that don't help you rank on that term. This advice becomes most useful on the homepage/landing page itself. In any case, I've noticed it and wanted people to be aware of it, because it isn't that obvious. I'm not saying you should do it or that it is universally true--probably not; after all, what in life is...?.
rms 18y ago
Also see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee... Finally there are many degrees of so-called black magic and it's paranoid to suggest that Google is instantly onto all of them and will inevitably penalize your site. I would be happy to answer questions by email on this topic.
- epi0Bauqu 18y ago
  It's no secret that I'm paranoid about getting penalized, mainly because I don't want to repeat that unfortunate experience.
kiba 18y ago
At my wiki, I don't try any SEO tricks at all. I just write a lot of content and focus on submitting to social news site and post my wiki on in certain forums to get feedback. Eventually, I just stop doing them. Eventually, the search engine traffic just overtook the organic traffic that I have built over the years. I still don't know why search.live.com show up consistently as the #1 referrer to my site even though it is completely about FOSS.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  It's referral spam that Live's crawler sends out. Google analytics appears to block it, Clicky and numerous other analytics programs do not.
  - epi0Bauqu 18y ago
    Do you know the exact cause? I see this too and it is just plain weird.
    - eli 18y ago
      Google "MSNPTC". Last I checked, nobody could understand it, but it's a weird bot. I had it hammering one of my sites with bogus referrals. Many hits per second. I just blocked it. (ModSecurity is a fantastic Apache module for blocking bots, attacks, and all manner of junk, btw)
njharman 18y ago
"Beware of nofollow links." Is the end all be all search? Is it not worth trying to drive direct, actual traffic(as opposed to search engine referrals) to your site. If I provided service "foo" or consulted on "foo" I'd love to have links to my articles/sites in the citations and or external sites list on the "foo" wikipedia article.
boundlessdreamz 18y ago
#9 is not great advice. Sitemaps will not affect your ranking for any term ever. If you are looking at Sitemaps as a tool for better ranking, then you are doing it wrong. Sitemaps help is discovery. If some of your pages are not crawled or just poorly crawled sitemaps can help in that regard. If those pages have good content then you may rank well. The ranking benefit of Sitemap is just a side effect.

58 points by epi0Bauqu 18y ago

SEO tips seem a lot like black magic to me. Nobody ever explains why, and nobody shows any data... they just say things you are supposed to believe. I find this annoying. (I have never focused on SEO, and my website always comes up for terms that I expect it to come up for.)

epi0Bauqu 18y ago
I'd be happy to say more (why, data, etc.) on anything in particular. The post was already getting a bit long, which is why I left it at that. There is some why in there already though.
- jrockway 18y ago
  I was mostly interested in this one: "Use directories instead of subdomains."
  - quilby 18y ago
    I am pretty sure that this is because Google sees different subdomains under the same domain (ie. a.example.com, b.example.com) as different websites, and so if you got a link to a.example.com, maybe a.example.com's pagerank would improve, but example.com's pagerank will not improve. This is why choosing one main domain for you website (either www.example.com or example.com) and 301 redirecting all requests from the one not chosen to the chosen one is recommended.
    - sachinag 18y ago
      This is true. This is why we decided to set it as http://blog.dawdle.com http://blog.dawdle.com instead of http://www.dawdle.com/blog http://www.dawdle.com/blog . We have some freelancers that want to write about gaming in general (so they might get a callup to get paid), so it's editorially independent, and the blog can pass independent PageRank to the main http://www.dawdle.com/ http://www.dawdle.com/ domain. The point is: don't automatically just shove everything in subdirectories; think about if you want your subdomains to have independent PR or not - it might make sense in certain situations.
  - randfish 18y ago
    On subdirectories vs. subfolders, see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdom... - essentially, it's about benefiting from the authority/trust/link metrics assigned to a root/sub domain rather than starting a new one.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      Like I said, I'm interested in data, not speculation. Reading this is like reading a review of a power cable that makes your speakers sound better. People can convince themselves of anything they want to.
patio11 18y ago
The "why" inevitably boils down to "we have found this to be effective while black-box testing a constantly changing algorithm developed by an adversarial company with many, many more engineers on staff than we have". I show data, occasionally. Most people think it is competitively sensitive.
rgrieselhuber 18y ago
The people selling black magic tend to use techniques that end up getting them busted in the long term. But there are some things that are just good practices from an SEO perspective and have nice usability and accessibility benefits. There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)
- azanar 18y ago
  There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-) Not just directed at rgrieselhuber so much as the whole community, what would you say are the predominance of such companies relative the whole SEO market? My experience so far has suggested a vast number are just floating on borrowed time until someone busts them, but I'll be the first to admit my sampling might be biased.
  - rgrieselhuber 18y ago
    From what I've seen, the industry as a whole tends to get a bad rap from the people doing stupid stuff. My experience comes from working with global brands so it's probably skewed, but there is real business value to be derived from doing a few things right.
  - wheels 18y ago
    I end up having a lot of people ask me "SEO" questions which basically just amount to understanding PageRank and the basics of Google's ranking-fu. What I've seen is that the desire for SEO comes from and ok place -- people just seeing page ranking as black magic and wanting someone to demystify it. Nerds tend to take for granted understanding the basics of web search. A surprising number of people in the web world have no basic grasp of the concepts, but still know that showing up in search results is important for them.

randfish 18y ago

I left a comment on Gabriel's blog, but if you're a startup building a site and doing SEO, be careful not to take all of this advice, particularly #9 and #13, but #6 is also not entirely wise. p.s. Yes, technically I fit into the "someone selling it" category, but I also despise misinformation on this subject. p.p.s. sachinag - your assessment of "independence" due to being on a subdomain and use of "pass PageRank" isn't accurate either. All pages pass PageRank, and PageRank is not limited to "independent domains." There are other link weighting factors that certainly do apply to separate "root domains" but the logic you're trying to apply isn't going to help get better rankings in the way you suggest.

patio11 18y ago
#13 (write less pages and less text to conserve ranking potential) is directly contrary to both the truth and my experience. The more content I add to my website, the better it ranks in aggregate and the better the front page ranks in particular. If you want I can even show you a graph of amount of content versus traffic as a result of Google. Let me spoil the surprise: it fits n * (# pages) ^ (1 + y). Your pages do compete against each other in some narrow senses: for any given query, you'll typically be capped at two results in the SERP (results page), so if you had a third best option on your site it gets left out in the cold. However, pages on your website are (and should be treated as) comrades in arms. The more links my page on, e.g., Jane Austen bingo cards collects, the more trust my domain will have and the more juice that individual page will pass to the literature category its in and the other page it links to. This helps me rank both the other literature pages (which have scant anything to do with Jane Austen) and also the almost wholly unrelated, e.g., Easter bingo.
- epi0Bauqu 18y ago
  As I said in the blog comments, I realize #13 conflicts with #10 & #11, but who ever said it couldn't :) ? It's all about your SEO goals & priorities. Sure, in general, the more content, the more Google traffic you are going to get. I'm not really disputing that. All I'm saying is if you take away stuff, the ranking that is left will be concentrated on what is left on the page. For example, take the situation where you really convert on one key phrase and not much on anything else. In that situation, you really want to concentrate on that term and you probably want to strip out things that don't help you rank on that term. This advice becomes most useful on the homepage/landing page itself. In any case, I've noticed it and wanted people to be aware of it, because it isn't that obvious. I'm not saying you should do it or that it is universally true--probably not; after all, what in life is...?.

rms 18y ago

Also see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee... Finally there are many degrees of so-called black magic and it's paranoid to suggest that Google is instantly onto all of them and will inevitably penalize your site. I would be happy to answer questions by email on this topic.

epi0Bauqu 18y ago
It's no secret that I'm paranoid about getting penalized, mainly because I don't want to repeat that unfortunate experience.

kiba 18y ago

At my wiki, I don't try any SEO tricks at all. I just write a lot of content and focus on submitting to social news site and post my wiki on in certain forums to get feedback. Eventually, I just stop doing them. Eventually, the search engine traffic just overtook the organic traffic that I have built over the years. I still don't know why search.live.com show up consistently as the #1 referrer to my site even though it is completely about FOSS.

fallentimes 18y ago
It's referral spam that Live's crawler sends out. Google analytics appears to block it, Clicky and numerous other analytics programs do not.
- epi0Bauqu 18y ago
  Do you know the exact cause? I see this too and it is just plain weird.
  - eli 18y ago
    Google "MSNPTC". Last I checked, nobody could understand it, but it's a weird bot. I had it hammering one of my sites with bogus referrals. Many hits per second. I just blocked it. (ModSecurity is a fantastic Apache module for blocking bots, attacks, and all manner of junk, btw)

njharman 18y ago

"Beware of nofollow links." Is the end all be all search? Is it not worth trying to drive direct, actual traffic(as opposed to search engine referrals) to your site. If I provided service "foo" or consulted on "foo" I'd love to have links to my articles/sites in the citations and or external sites list on the "foo" wikipedia article.

boundlessdreamz 18y ago

#9 is not great advice. Sitemaps will not affect your ranking for any term ever. If you are looking at Sitemaps as a tool for better ranking, then you are doing it wrong. Sitemaps help is discovery. If some of your pages are not crawled or just poorly crawled sitemaps can help in that regard. If those pages have good content then you may rank well. The ranking benefit of Sitemap is just a side effect.