Archive for February, 2010

SEO Q & A – AJAX & Javascript options for search

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Here’s another quick question I got from a friend at Cisco:

Q:

Hey Lawrence,

I have another SEO question for you that you can use in your blog since I am considering the use of AJAX on my site but want consider the SEO impacts.

For example, using AJAX to load page content dynamically helps with the user experience and reduces bandwidth on my site but it will dramatically decrease my page views and won’t be SEO friendly since search engines will only crawl 1 page vs crawling 4 different pages (assuming I have 4 tabs on my page that I plan to use AJAX to load the HTML content dynamically instead of forcing a page refresh)

I understand I could at least insert content in my HTML using

tags and hide them until the user clicks on my tab so the content will be there for search engines but I would rather want my individual pages to be indexed rather than just 1 page.

I know there is a delicate balance between being user friendly and trying to boost page views because you want banner ad impressions. I understand we had these issues at RottenTomatoes.com so wanted to glean any more insights you have.

Thanks,
XYZ
—————

A:

Hey XYZ,

Sounds like you’ve summarized the 3 options well: 1. 4 pages with unique URLs, 2. 1 Page w/ 4tabs that are SEO friendly (content in HTML) and 3. 1 Page w/ 4tabs that are not SEO friendly (Content in Javascript/AJAX).

I really can’t advise you from an SEO standpoint to decide between 1 & 2 or 1 & 3. If 2 or 3 is opted for, I will say that 2 is always the better option for search. Your comment about wanting 4 pages indexed instead of 1 is not necessarily beneficial. Traffic comes from ranking not indexing. And it’s better to have 1 page that ranks in the top 5 or 10 than 100 pages that are indexed but are not in the top 20 or 30.

Also when speaking of ‘page views’ you are comparing 100K visitors to your 4 pages vs. 100K visitors to your 1 page – for example. But the truth is that to have one strong, topically focused page, rich in content can have much more traffic than 4 not so tightly focused pages. So in truth, it would be more like 10K visitors to your 4 pages vs. 100K visitors to your 1 page. And in this more likely scenario, which architecture will give you more pageviews? I’d say the 100K to your one strong page- the pageviews will come from them clicking to other parts of the site, that’s all.

Some other notes:

Page load times are a factor in Search Ranking.
Don’t forget to use all your on-page best practices, repositioning relevant content near the top of the HTML using css if needed.
Focusing internal and external links to one page provides more authority to that page rather than diluting it to 4 pages.
When Search Traffic & Page-view Metrics are spoken about in the same breath, it usually means that no one has created a clear strategy for either.

Hope this helps! :)

Thanks and best regards,

Lawrence Touitou

What am I UP 2? (follow me on twitter!)

http://twitter.com/SEOWOBorders

…response from XYZ:

Thanks Lawrence. I think I’m going to go with #2.

SEO Q & A – Google Penalization & Climbing out of the sandbox

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Here’s another great question I got from an old friend through facbook. He writes,

LT

i need your advice. I have a couple of web sites I developed with a friend.
One of them http://www.druglib.com/ was penalized some months ago and dropped to less then half of it’s traffic. It was growing uite nicely until then.
We were at almost 300K visitors/month at the peak.

It’s coming back but slowly.

Any idea why this could be?

I love your posts btw.

Thanks
xyz.

And here’s my 10 cent answer…

Read the google webmaster tools (GWT) guidelines for why you would be penalized. Associations with/Links to less-than-reputable sites or joining a link farm or doing kw spamming are very easily detectable by google. See if you can pin point the source of the loss to better diagnose. Is it loss from all search, or just google. Is it your kw rankings that have dropped? Has you site been up more than a year so you can check %YOY stats?

Just don’t do any black hat stuff and provide you market with as much great content as possible and you’ll be in good standing. There is a way in GWT to ask for reconsideration of your site if and only if you determine that Google has penalized it.

That’s all I can offer without really knowing your site, link associations and analytics. Hope this helps.

(Always get as much information as you can into a problem before asking an SEO. Like this question, most of my answers to Q&A questions are done without looking at the site.)

Written by Lawrence Touitou-

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Lawrence Touitou brings you the best SEO tools, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the best, SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.

SEO Q & A on nofollow’s – plus alternatives

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Today I got a great SEO question from a long time colleague that moved on from Fox Interactive where we worked together on RottenTomatoes.com. He Writes,

Hey Lawrence,

How are you? I hope the SEOWithoutBorders venture is doing well.

BTW, I am launching a directory of users and one of my categories would be technology bloggers and would love to add @seowoborders to my directory since I want thought leaders on topics such as SEO. Are you OK with me adding you to my site?

One question for you as I’m optimizing my site for SEO. I learned from you that maintaining link juice is very important so I am no-following almost every external link but I was thinking that I should remove nofollows for external sites that I link to that are relevant to my page.

For example, I will have a page on some movie star. This page will contain links to the star’s official site, to their twitter profile page, to their Facebook fan page, to their IMDB page. I would think that I should NOT nofollow these links since these links directly relate to my page and help boost my Google pagerank. What are your thoughts?

HI xyz (anonymous)!

Sounds like your in deep – which is great. Glad you found a home to use all your talents. Yes, you may add me to your directory if you like, no prb. On your question, the ‘nofollow’ no longer has any value for SEO link sculpting. That is, you can no-longer use a no-follow tag to INCREASE the value of the remaining outbound links or the page that they are linking from.

So the only way to ‘preserve’ link juice to your page(s) is to reduce the total amount of links from that page. (This is what I advised IGN to do which is why it looks (a little) cleaner.) So you may have to create sub pages where those links reside. For example, if you need to link out to 10 external sites, it would be better to create a page called, ‘partners’ from the home page and then from that page, put the 10 partner links so that you only have 1 link off of the home page instead of 10.

The other way is to create links in a technology that SEs don’t read – i.e. javascript.
So again, do not bother with ‘nofollows’ anymore. A robust external linking strategy, even if outsourced, will bring much greater returns for authority, ranking & traffic!

Hope this helps! Best, LT

(This is a great question. I’d like to post this question on my blog if I may…)

On 02/16/10 10:38 AM, xyz wrote:
——————–

Written by Lawrence Touitou-

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Lawrence Touitou brings you the best SEO optimization, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the best, SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.

Knowledge is power! If so, why are so many companies failing in SEO?

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

I’ve heard it said in the last few days: “People are getting smarter and corporations are getting dumber.” Why? I thought about it and this is what I came up with…

We live in an age of unprecedented information available to us – SEO realted and otherwise – with more and more, moving faster and faster each day. When we think of something, a word, a song or articles about marketing, management whatever, a plethora of information is at our fingertips faster than we could go to the library or hire a consultant just 20 years ago. So much so that learning institutions have a hard time keeping up and staying relevant with the times.

So if knowledge or information is power, and we have an over-abundance of it, why then are so many companies – small & large – not keeping pace with the amount of information out there. Why are many failing in one way or another? I.e. Missing their mark when it comes to creating the right Kewyword Mix, Creating consistent On-Page footprints, Getting a robust linking campaign going, reaching sales/conversion goals, creating a culture conducive to profitable business and meeting revenue goals?

When I studied Physics back in University we learned P=VI. (Power equals Voltage times Current.) Current is information. Voltage is the impetus to deliver that information. It is the combination of these two, that is truly powerful. That is,

Information + Implementation = Transformation.

(Some see knowledge as an end gave. The physical laws of the universe don’t.)

Companies that fail, spend a lot of time placing importance on information, having the best tools and people who keep up with the latest trends in their fields. They go to trade shows to garner more information. Yet most who attend these as employees – and I know this feeling well – sigh, as they know that the culture, management or internal process of the company that they work for can not, or is not open to creating, processes that would allow them to make practical use of this newfound knowledge. The company has no means or impetus to implement the things that they paid the employee to learn. Happens all the time. But alas, the networking and parties at conferences are great! :)

But today companies are tightening up and I believe want to be more efficient in a leaner economy where budgets are getting pitted against results. Companies that have strategy, a plan and a clear method of implementation. I.E internal processes and people that support that strategy are the ones that will consistently win. Those that don’t, typically don’t because they haven’t acknowledged the need to transform and change with the times. I.e. Only trees that bend in the wind remain standing. And the bigger the company, the more important (and challenging) this is.

(Notice that while information is a readily quantifiable thing, implementation can be more difficult to gauge because it requires structure, method, people and performance measurement.)

So it’s really not how much you know. It’s how quickly and efficiently you can take basic information, like SEO Best Practices, and implement it. If you focus on the whole picture, you’ll be sure to lead the pack!

Written by Lawrence Touitou-

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Lawrence Touitou brings you the best SEO tools, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the best, SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.