marți, 23 august 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Linkscape Updates and Wireframes/Feedback on New Task List PRO Feature

Posted: 23 Aug 2011 06:39 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

As you may have seen, Linkscape has just updated with a brand new index crawled primarily in early August. This means there's new data in the web app, in Open Site Explorer, the Link Intersect tool and the mozBar (note: the new Firefox 6 caused a bunch of issues w/ our toolbar displays, so it will be another week or so before it's re-compatible with this version).

In Linkscape's previous index, we focused a bit more on crawling large, powerful, important domains more deeply at the expense of some smaller, low mozRank sites on the fringes of the web. This time, we're trying to compromise a bit with an index that's a bit more balanced - it's still quite large; 51 billion URLs (vs. prior index sizes in the 38-42 billion URL range), but contains more unique root domains - 98 million vs. 91 million in the prior index.

As always, we'd love your feedback on this index's quality and value for competitive analysis / link building. Oh, and BTW, for those of you interested in link building with Linkscape data / Open Site Explorer, I'm giving a webinar on that topic this Friday, so sign up!

Here are the latest Linkscape stats:

  • 51,494,511,857 (51.5 billion) URLs
  • 592,299,695 (592 million) Subdomains
  • 98,626,331 (91.6 million) Root Domains
  • 399,327,725,405 (399 billion) Links
  • Followed vs. Nofollowed
    • 2.25% of all links found were nofollowed
    • 58.82% of nofollowed links are internal, 41.18% are external
  • Rel Canonical - 10.12% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
  • The average page has 78.03 links on it
    • 65.09 internal links on average
    • 13.21 external links on average

I've only run a few reports so far, but my sense is that there's a reasonably good balance here, though, of course, I'd still love to get a larger index and hope to achieve even more significant growth on that front over the next few months. If you ever find a link we're missing or something you expected that we didn't have, please let us know.

I also have an upcoming feature of PRO that I can share today, and I'm pretty excited about it. The feature is currently called "task list" and it's part of how we're planning to make the SEO process and the data inside campaigns more actionable and useful. Here's a wireframe (note: not a screenshot!):

PRO Task List Wireframe

The idea is to give marketing professionals working inside the app a list of potential "to-do" items. Obviously, we may not always know what's on your plate, but from the weekly crawl, ranking analyses and on-page reports, we can often get a sense of some good priorities. Along with these, we want to add a list of common tasks that every SEO may want to engage in with a campaign/site. You can see some examples of that in the wireframe above, but we'd also love to get your feedback/suggestions.

To that end, we've got a survey on the task list you engage in as a professional marketer, and we'd love to get your input here.

Thanks a ton - and feel free to add any color or additional ideas in the comments below!

p.s. One more item - the anchor text tab in Open Site Explorer will be showing data from last index for a couple weeks, as we encountered some processing issues of anchor text in this index. We hope to have that fixed soon.


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What's the Toughest SEO Gig You've Ever Had? I'll Start.

Posted: 22 Aug 2011 01:30 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

I recently spent a few days in New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey, and got to meet with great friends at consulting firms. One conversation in particular stuck with me regarding the hardest project they'd worked on in the last few years. It got me thinking that I should share a few of my most challenging SEO projects, and see if the community had stories they could share, too. I learned a lot in my short chat on the subject, and I'm hopeful that will translate here on the web, too.

Thus, my top 3 "toughest" SEO projects over the last decade were:

  1. The "I Just Want PageRank 10"
    It's hard to believe in 2011, but in 2005, Moz really did have a client who's entire goal was increasing toolbar PageRank. He was a very wealthy individual who fretted over his PageRank score in comparison to a rival's organization in the same sphere. We were able to grow it from 6 to 8 with mostly white hat stuff (yes, even I used to dabble with link buying back in the day), but when he continued pressing for a PageRank 9, we gave up and sent him to a link broker. We provided very stern, very aggressive warnings that this could hurt his traffic or even make Google penalize the PageRank score, but he wanted all the options and did end up spending a small fortune on paid links. To my knowledge, the PageRank score never went above 8/10, and of course, since he wasn't doing any keyword targeting to speak of and didn't care about traffic, the value of those links was virtually nil.
    _
  2. The "Breaking Out of the Sandbox"
    One of my first few SEO consulting clients, starting in 2003, was a commercial lender in Seattle. I did very old school SEO for them (not knowing any better, and really learning the practice as I went along), jamming anchor text and links wherever I could. Unfortunately, this was right around the time of Google's "sandbox effect," which a Googler explained to me once as "an artifact of something else we created." For nearly 18 months, I fought against the sandbox, earning #1 rankings for nearly every term in MSN search and Yahoo! (which, at the time, had much more significant market share), but page 10+ on Google. Then, suddenly, one morning, we were #1 across the board in Google, along with a number of other sites that also "popped out." One odd element of the sandbox was that Google seemed to release sites en masse, similar to the Panda updates this year. We celebrated heavily, the company started getting customers and over the next few years, we paid off a lot of nasty debt.

    But, I remember most that every day and every night, I did virtually nothing but crawl the web (manually - there weren't any tools like OSE or Link Intersect) and try to find link opportunities of any kind. I hadn't really discover the power of inbound marketing, and the social web was nearly non-existant outside of blogs + forums, which I used heavily. Walk to work. Build links. Walk home. Think about other places to get links. Eat dinner in a crappy, old 500 sq ft. apt. with Geraldine. Build links until 2am. Get up. Do it again. I sometimes wonder if we hadn't broken out whether I'd have career at all today.
     
  3. The "Linkbait that Brings Customers"
    Later in my career - around 2007 - we had a client that wanted to invest heavily in linkbait, but wasn't quite sold on how the process worked. To be fair, neither were we. We'd seen plenty of examples of linkbait being very successful in driving links, which then drove great search rankings and more high quality traffic (vs. the typically more high-bounce-rate visits to linkbait pieces) and on occasion, we'd had success with a linkbait piece that did get email addresses or trials of a product. But, this was in the housing/real estate field, and those consumers are very research-heavy. It's hard to get a first-time visitor from any channel to fill out an application or leadgen form in that world, but this was the project, so we executed the best we could.

    Needless to say, it failed. Of 3 linkbait content attempts I recall, 2 generated some decent links and 1 was a real success, but only from a links perspective. The customers never appeared, and the client left, unsatisfied. If I recall properly, we refunded half of the cost and lost money on the deal overall (we hadn't charged enough in the first place, honestly), but wanted to preserve a positive relationship. Lesson learned - create realistic expectations and don't agree to a project that goes against the laws of marketing.

Of course, there have been (and still are, though I only provide consulting pro bono and through Q+A, now) plenty of other big challenges, but these ones stand out in my mind. I also asked some folks on Twitter and Google+ and received some terrific responses, highlighted below:

You can read the Google+ thread here and see Twitter replies here (at least for the next hour or two). I'd love to continue the conversation and the sharing in the comments. I'm flying back to Seattle tomorrow, but will try to be in the comments. I've also got a post coming tomorrow AM on a new Linkscape update.


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Data: Identify Yourself Authoritatively for More Followers

Posted: 22 Aug 2011 10:25 AM PDT

Posted by danzarrella

For more data on social media and busting of unicorns-and-rainbows social media myths, be sure to register for the Science of Social Media webinar that is being held on Tuesday, August 23rd at 2:00pm EST. This webinar is actually going to be certifed as the largest online marketing seminar ever by the Guinness World Records folks.

The easiest social media myth to bust is “don’t call yourself a guru.” Proponents of this myth argue that self labeling yourself as an expert makes you sound pretentious. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But the data clearly shows that telling your audience why they should listen to you absolutely works to increase your reach.

When I first started analyzing Twitter account data, one of the first things I noticed is that a surprising number of accounts don’t include profile pictures, bios or homepage links. But when I looked at the number of followers accounts with and without those things have on average, I found huge differences.

It may sound pretty obvious, but users who’ve taken the time to identify themselves with a bio, picture and link tend to have many more followers than those who haven’t taken that time. The above graph shows the effect of including a photo, but the effect is the same with bios and links. In real life and in social media, if I know who you are, I’m much more likely to listen to what you have to say.

Taking the identify yourself suggestion a step further, I analyzed common words found in Twitter bios. I found that users who included authoritative words like “official,” “founder,” and the dreaded “guru” tended to have more followers than the average Twitter user.

Once I know who you are, if you’re someone important I’m even more likely to want to hear what you have to say. If you’ve founded a company or authored a book, I’m interested in what you think.

Social media isn’t that different from the offline world. Introduce yourself, tell us who you are and why we should listen to you.  


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