Search Engine Optimization: October 2010

Sunday, October 24, 2010

SEO Book.com

Posted: 24 Oct 2010 03:02 AM PDT

Some sites have seen pretty drastic drops in Google search traffic recently, related to indexing issues. Google maintains that it is a glitch:

Just to be clear, the issues from this thread, which I have reviewed in detail, are not due to changes in our policies or changes in our algorithms; they is due to a technical issue on our side that will be visibly resolved as soon as possible (it may take up to a few days to be visible for all sites though). You do not need to change anything on your side and we will continue to crawl and index your content (perhaps not as quickly at the moment, but we hope that will be resolved for all sites soon). I would not recommend changing anything significantly at this moment (unless you spot obvious problems on your side), as these may result in other issues once this problem is resolved on our side.

An example of one site's search traffic that was butchered by this glitch, see the below images. Note that in the before, Google traffic is ~ 10x what Yahoo! or Bing drive, and after the bug the traffic is ~ even.

Not that long ago I saw another site with over 500 unique linking domains which simply disappeared from the index for a few days, then came right back 3 days later. Google's push to become faster and more comprehensive has perhaps made them less stable, as digging into social media highlights a lot of false signals & often promotes a copy over the original. Add in any sort of indexing issues and things get really ugly really fast.

Now this may just be a glitch, but as Tedster points out, many such "glitches" often precede or coincide with major index updates. Ever since I have been in the SEO field I think Google has done a major algorithmic change just before the holidays every year except last year.

I think the reasons they do it are likely 3 or 4 fold

they want to make SEO unpredictable & unreliable (which ultimately means less resources are spent on SEO & the results are overall less manipulated)
they want to force businesses (who just stocked up on inventory) to enter the AdWords game in a big way
by making changes to the core relevancy algorithms (and having the market discuss those) they can slide in more self promotion via their vertical search services without it drawing much anti-trust scrutiny
the holidays are when conversion rates are the highest, so if they want to make changes to seek additional yield it is the best time to do it, and the holidays give them an excuse to offer specials or beta tests of various sorts

As an SEO with clients, the unpredictability is a bad thing, because it makes it harder to manage expectations. Sharp drops in rankings from Google "glitches" erode customer trust in the SEO provider. Sometimes Google will admit to major issues happening, and other times they won't until well *after* the fact. Being proven right after the fact still doesn't take back 100% of the uncertainty unleashed into the marketplace weeks later.

Even if half your clients double their business while 1/3 lose half their search traffic, as an SEO business you typically don't generally get to capture much of the additional upside...whereas you certainly capture the complaints from those who just fell behind. Ultimately this is one of the reasons why I think being a diversified web publisher is better than being an SEO consultant... if something takes off & something else drops then you can just pour additional resources into whatever is taking well and capture the lift from those changes.

If you haven't been tracking rankings now would be a great time to get on it. It is worth tracking a variety of keywords (at various levels of competition) daily while there is major flux going on, because that gives you another lens through which to view the relevancy algorithms, and where they might be headed.

Friday, October 22, 2010

AboutUs Weblog

Our Office Plant Covert Op
Raising Our Game: New AboutUs Data Center
Fix Broken Links to Save Link Juice

Our Office Plant Covert Op

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 04:30 PM PDT

The fabulous Nyco organized an office plant love and tenderness party! We are not showing before pictures, only after pictures. We hope the plants forgive us and prosper.

Raising Our Game: New AboutUs Data Center

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 10:45 AM PDT

Moving your entire production site to a facility located 175 miles away – while aiming for zero down time – is a challenging enterprise. In late August we did exactly that, migrating AboutUs.org from a hosting provider in Seattle to one a mere mile from our Portland office.

There are a few ways to manage a complex move with zero down time. We chose to build a parallel site with new equipment.

The simple route would have been to make an identical copy of the site we were running in Seattle, and install it in Portland. Instead of taking that easy path, we decided to seize the day and take advantage of a few opportunities the migration presented to us. We updated or upgraded almost every piece of software, and switched from a CentOS Linux platform to Ubuntu Linux Server. Our site has always run entirely on open source software.

The old site had a complicated infrastructure, including Memcache, Solr, RabbitMQ and various other pieces that we were able to eliminate in the move. We now run on 12 new servers from Silicon Mechanics: a MySQL database master; three MySQL database slaves; three Ruby on Rails application servers; two Sphinx search servers; and three Xen virtual machine hosts.

All of these new servers needed to be set up identically; we knew we were going to be adding hardware over time, and wanted to diminish the cost of managing all of this equipment. I am the only full-time systems administrator managing 30 systems, supporting the main site application, and supporting the development team.

To this end, the second component of our move was to unify our systems and software configuration management. This guarantees that we can replicate any server at any time from scratch, and can get new systems up and running in a matter of minutes. We are a Ruby and Ubuntu Linux shop and thus I chose Chef, from OpsCode, which is open source, implemented largely in Ruby and has good support for Ubuntu. This has been an invaluable tool to guarantee the repeatability of our configurations and systems.

Chef also helped a lot when we needed to build a number of Xen virtualization servers running on top of Ubuntu, which does not support Xen. We now have a Chef recipe that will run on a clean Ubuntu server and turn it into a Xen host on demand. Chef has allowed us to manage the new site in a way that never would have been possible in the old Seattle infrastructure.

While these were some of the more interesting aspects of our move, the main goals were:

to locate the physical servers where I can put my hands on them directly
to improve site performance
to increase reliability of the network layer

We are now happily located in the Lightpoint data center in downtown Portland, three miles from my house and one mile from our office. Rather than the single uplink from our Seattle location, we are now served by redundant links from Level 3 and Time Warner (TW Telecom).

Critical to the migration is the fact that the new location is just four milliseconds over fiber from the Seattle location. This allowed us to continue running from the Seattle database master until the entire site had been moved to Portland.

Lightpoint’s excellent network service has run without a hiccup since our relocation, something we were not used to in our previous facility. Server-side site performance has improved by 50 percent since July, due to a combination of better hardware, better connectivity, better configuration, a slimmer application stack, and strong support from the AboutUs development team toward improving the site application itself. Best of all, I am no longer fighting nightly fires that impact our visitor experience.

We managed the move with zero down time, and even managed to cut over to the Portland infrastructure a few days early when our Seattle provider was hit with a denial of service attack. We are continuing to look for opportunities to build on the gains we banked with the move.

Fix Broken Links to Save Link Juice

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 10:00 AM PDT

You’re redesigning your website to make it more usable for people and more easily found by search engines. Those are worthy goals. But if you’re changing any URLs on your website — the web page addresses — you’d better make sure you track down every link to every important new page, and change it. Otherwise your site visitors will get the dreaded 404 error message: Page not found.

AboutUs guest author Michael Cottam tells you how to conserve your hard-won link juice in his newest article about classic search-engine optimization (SEO) errors that even experienced web designers can make.

Michael is a Portland SEO consultant who’s advised clients in many different industries. His articles covering some technical aspects of SEO add to the wealth of advice about online marketing for business owners in the Learn section of AboutUs.org.

Are there any online marketing topics you’d like us to cover? Email me at Aliza@AboutUs.org and tell me what you’d like to learn.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

AboutUs Weblog

AboutUs Linking

Posted: 20 Oct 2010 11:00 AM PDT

Linking is easy on the AboutUs wiki, so we’ve set up a LinkingGuide to help folks understand what types of linking that are the community standard here at AboutUs.

Basically it is like this, if you are editing the AboutUs wiki page XYZ.com – it is cool to link to the XYZ.com website from there. However it is not considered constructive to link a different website, say FGH.com. If you mention FGH.com in the course of providing information about XYZ.com, then we ask that you use an internal WikiLink to the AboutUs wiki page about FGH.com.

example: [[FGH.com]] = FGH.com

Linking to different websites other than the one you are on, looks like spam to us. That is because an AboutUs page about a website is about that website. (Social Media links, like facebook, twitter, etc. are ok)

If you are writing an article on your expertise, or creating a list on a topic you know – or even when you’re editing your own personal page, and you want to link externally, we encourage you to use the LinkPair template for any website you mention. LinkPair creates both an internal wiki link and an external (visit) link:

{{LinkPair|Google.com}} = Google.com (visit)

Many times that was insufficient, because you never called the website XYZ.com – and you never call it that, you call it XYZ.

I figured out today some long lost knowledge! How to label these links:

{{LinkPair|Google.com|Our Google Overlords}} = Our Google Overlords (visit)

Template fun!! see more templates you can use on AboutUs (visit).

Entrepreneurs Foundation Guides AboutUs Community Program

Posted: 20 Oct 2010 09:30 AM PDT

Last week, I met with Lisa Sloan, president of Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest, and community service Wonder Woman.

EFNW, which recently merged with Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, helps its member companies give back to the community. AboutUs is a member of EFNW, having already contributed stock to the foundation. That's one of the main things EFNW does – it holds a member company's stock until the company is acquired or goes public. Then the foundation contributes that stock to the nonprofits designated by the company.

Simply put: If your company is overwhelmed by the task of starting a service initiative, EFNW to the rescue! And, in a charitable double-whammy, if your company hits the jackpot, nonprofits of your choice benefit. Cha-ching!

So, I sat down with Lisa. I told her that our CEO, Ray King, wants to find ways for our employees to use their unique talents to benefit Portland.

I found out that EFNW makes giving back to the community so, so easy. Lisa told me EFNW will design an employee survey to find out what our interests and passions are, and will give us recommendations based on the results. Instead of management dictating what kind of community work we'll do, our involvement will come out of what we all really care about.

But wait, there's more. EFNW will also give us a calendar of community events, reach out to groups we want to work with, and provide all the forms we need to run a good community service program.

I'm really excited about getting our new charitable efforts up and running – and really happy that there's a professional group in town that can help us leap the walls of red tape in a single bound!