SEO Vets Take All Comers (SMX Advanced 2010)

On this panel:

  • Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal
  • Greg Boser, President and CEO, 3 Dog Media
  • Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
  • Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
  • Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
  • Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
  • Stephan Spencer, VP of SEO Strategies, Covario

I’m glad that Danny Sullivan is moderating this one. This is my favorite panel of the entire conference circuit.

  • “We have 300 or 400 years of experience on this panel.” – Danny Sullivan
  • “My name is Greg, and I’m as old as dirt. Almost as old as Bruce (Clay).” – Greg Boser
  • “I’m Bruce Clay, and you’ve all probably been to my site.” – Bruce Clay

Talking points:

  • Is it open season on javascript links? Well, kinda, now that Google is looking for them and crawling JS to find paid links.
  • Supposedly, Mayday went after the longtail. It’s more of an algorithm change that goes after spam, specifically longtail pages that they refer to as “content farms”. This probably happens to sites that have a lot of links to the homepage, but not many links to deeper URLs in the site. They are not necessarily content farms, but they are not as authoritative or relevant as other sites.
  • Greg Boser: “External links are the key.”
  • Sugarrae noticed that where product pages dropped out of the rankings due to Mayday, category pages replaced them. And a lot of it has to do with how you link internally.
  • Danny: “Is Matt Cutts a damn liar?”
  • Stephan just gave the audience a way to determine if Matt Cutts is lying.
  • Todd: Who cares if Google is tracking your bounce rate. People are leaving.
  • Bruce: There is no PageRank evaporation from NoFollows.
  • Bruce is upset that CNN won’t link to his site. 🙁
  • Bruce says CNN publishes a million articles a month. There’s no way they can SEO the content once it’s been launched. The best way to do SEO is at the point of creation. You have to teach them SEO so they can embed it in their processes.
  • Now Vanessa is going on and on about crawl caps.
  • Greg: Ratio of total pages to traffic’d pages – that’s an important number. You can improve the performance of the pages that are showing up in Google by excluding the crawling of the crappy pages. And then start going after the poor performing pages one by one.
  • Is the site: on Google very reliable? It seems to be broken. One day it shows 380k. Then the next day it shows 50k. Then the next day it shows 110k. What’s the deal? The panelists say that most google operators are unreliable.