The annual IRCE 2011, Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition takes place June 14th – 17th in San Diego, CA. The 2011 IRCE theme is “E-Commerce Shifts Into Overdrive—the Race Is On”. The SEOtool demo is free for attendees of the conference and will demonstrate how e-retailers can use SEO tool to help their online business increase traffic, leads and sales.

Internet Retailer Chicago 2010 (IRCE) just ended and there was an underlying concern with some of the retailers we met with at the show.  Traffic for SOME general retailers who sell thousands of products and SKU’s from a variety of manufacturers is down – sometimes considerably.  Invariably, we would ask the client if they have seen a substantial drop in traffic for their product/item pages from organic search – and the common answer was “Yes! How did you know?”  This is a direct result of the “Mayday Update”.

If your business pulls item and product descriptions directly from a manufacturer and serves that exact content on your product pages, with literally no unique enhancements, then you are likely a victim of the Google MayDay update.  A retailer has to create a unique value proposition and consumer experience for their own brand — and not merely regurgitate the manufacturer’s information to the human visitor.

Watch the following video from Matt Cutts, Google Webspam Engineer, which gives a high-level overview of the MayDay Update:

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

•    This is an algorithmic change & a deliberate update that has been tested & vetted by Google
•    It’s permanent & not temporary — helps Google assesses which sites are the best match for long-tail queries and offer value to the human visitor
•    MayDay has nothing to do with Caffeine Update — completely independent
•    Add great content & make your site an authority at the product detail level (aka “long tail”)
•    Over 400 changes per year to Google algorithms (quality changes, tweaks, adjustments, etc)

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Invest the time, energy and resources into tweaking your Meta tags and product descriptions for these long-tail page types so that they are unique to your business and not an exact duplicate from the manufacturer – which is most likely shared by your competitors.  Uniqueness and market differentiation appears to be a fundamental factor in the Mayday update — where Google is showing preference to those retailers who have their own unique value proposition and unique product descriptions that adds value to the human visitor.  Think about duplicate content and how that is occurring across your site, your competitors and the manufacturers of the products you sell.  It can be equated to the thin-affiliate model – the original source of content wins while the “copycats” are often omitted from the main index.

Programmatically tweaking and thus scaling your unique product &/or SKU descriptions is a great way to move your site back in the right direction, if you’ve seen a considerable drop in Google organic traffic — primarily for long-tail keywords.  By leveraging a powerful SEO technology, you can extract all your pages and then begin scaling your product-page template optimization at a database level — combining formulas with manual optimization.  Do you facilitate on-page product ratings or product reviews from your customers?  Does your CMS intelligently cross-promote similar products the customer may wish to purchase?  These are all ways to ensure uniqueness at the product-page level.

As we’ve discussed in the past, long tail keywords are most heavily influenced in SEO by relevant, unique on-page and site structure elements.  “Head” or “Mid-Tail” keywords are influenced by unique, relevant on-page attributes but heavily influenced by external and internal anchor text links.  You have to differentiate yourselves — or fall victim to the permanent algorithm updates of MayDay.

In Part 1, we highlighted some of the key takeaways from the Enge-Cutts SEO Interview as it related to Crawling, Indexing & PageRank.  In this Part 2, we will visit some of the primary SEO answers from Google regarding duplicate content, 301/302 Redirects, use of the rel=canonical tag, faceted navigation, Session IDs.  As you will quickly see, or may have already realized, SEOtool not only identifies these types of problematic, site-wide SEO issues but also provides actionable metrics for SEO execution!  Sit back, enjoy the summary and feel free to leave a comment and participate in the discussion!

Part 2: Duplicate Content, Redirects, Site Navigation & SEOtool’s Application to Automated SEO Analysis

Topic: How to Best Handle Duplicate Content

My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the architecture upfront…….If you are not able to do a 301 Redirect, then you can fall back on rel=canonical……..But if (webmasters) are able to fix in the site architecture, that’s preferable to patching it up afterwards with a 301 or a rel=canonical…….to call (rel=canonical) a poor man’s 301 is not a bad way to think about it.

It goes without saying that for separate websites, duplicate content can be a significant deterrent in organic rankings.  More specifically, for internal site duplicate content, the number one way to avoid ranking problems is to structure your site architecture in a way that forces your pages to serve preferred URLs.  Thereafter, a 301 then use of rel=canonical is the next level of defense.  SEOtool not only identifies site-wide and page-specific duplicate content (titles, descriptions, H1s, etc) but it also objectively evaluates the use of internal redirects (301/302) to ensure proper directives are given to search engines for maximum SEO benefit.

Topic: Sites that use Session IDs

Don’t use them.  Not just from a search engine point of view, but from a usability point of view as well.  Users are more likely to click on links that look prettier, and they are more likely to remember URLs that look prettier………if you can get by without Session IDs, that’s typically best………multiple versions of pages would get indexed with different Session IDs.  It’s always best to care of it on your site so you don’t have to worry about how the search engines take care of it.

Again, duplicate content and usability become a major factor with Session IDs.  It is critical that site owners fix the problem at an architectural level and serve to both search engines and users, unique relevant content that doesn’t cause confusion or duplicate versions of the same page living under different URLs.  SEOtool is designed to unearth such conditions, while our hands-on, expert SEO consulting provides relevant solutions for both short & long-term benefit to organic rankings.

Topic: Faceted Navigation, URL parameters and Site Hierarchy

Faceted Navigation in general can be tricky…..you want each page of content to have a single URL if you can help it…….you can make it so that the hierarchy of how your think things should be categorized is enforced in the URL parameters in terms of position……this can help some search engines discover the content a little better.  It is also weird on the search engine side if we have to click through seven or eight layers of intermediate faceted navigation …… each of those clicks is an opportunity for a small percentage of the PageRank to dissipate.

Faceted navigation can almost look like a bit of a maze to search engines……..that can be tricky in terms of the algorithm determining the value add of individual pages….limit the number of lenses or facets by which you can view the data…..that can be helpful and reduce confusion…..if there are a large number of pages that we consider low value, then we might not crawl quite as many pages from that site……reduce the amount of multiplied paths and pull it back towards a more logical path structure.

Bottom line, if your website is overly complex and provides too many options to both the user and search engine, odds are you are going to have a difficult time being competitive, including organic search.  It’s critical that websites allow search engines to get directly to unique, relevant content and avoid layers upon layers of navigation or sorting filters (category, price, size, color, quantity, etc).  While these are important options, enforcing architecture rules that serve only one URL for the type of content found is ideal.  SEOtool is able to aid website owners in identifying problems with such multiplicative pages, or duplicate content — leading to specific strategies to fix such problems through our consulting.

Every now and then, the search industry gets some very useful and definitive answers from the leading search engines — the Cutts-Enge interview is one of those times.  There is no question that link building and social media are competitive trump cards for online advertisers in very competitive search markets —- but this extensive interview confirms that website architecture and site-wide content practices continue to strongly influence rank order and a search engine’s ability to not only crawl and index pages, but also algorithmically rank content.

If your business seems to have hit a glass ceiling in natural search or has seen its organic traffic on the decline — contact us today to learn more about the significant benefits SEOtool can yield and the actionable metrics it can provide to your business through ongoing, automated SEO analysis.

Eric Enge recently interviewed Matt Cutts (Google’s SEO mouthpiece & head of webspam), successfully getting answers and confirmation on how Google handles things such as crawling & indexing, redirects, poor site architecture, and duplicate content — to name a few.  Below, we will recap key takeaways and provide commentary on how SEOtool identifies these issues and gives website owners specific details on SEO issues native to their site(s), its architecture and on-page optimization.  This blog post is Part 1 of 2 in our analysis of the interview transcript.

Part 1: Crawling, Indexing, PageRank & SEOtool’s Application to Automated SEO Analysis

Topic: Duplicate Content’s Impact on Crawling & Indexing

Typically, duplicate content is not the largest factor on how many pages will be crawled, but it can be a factor. My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the site architecture upfront.

Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that’s why it looks like it has less good content……..the fact that you had duplicate content and we discarded those pages meant you missed an opportunity to have other pages with good, unique quality content show up in the index.

If you can reduce your duplicate content using site architecture, that’s preferable.

There is a strong, recurring theme straight from Google’s mouth — focus on your site architecture, both at a site-wide and page-level — this is the sure fire way to avoid crawling, indexing or duplicate content problems — and the place to strike gold in your competitive landscape!  SEOtool was designed with that exact vision in mind — to remove the guess work and hunches of ongoing SEO site analyses through machine-driven, objective analysis at an architecture & on-page level.  This interview 100% validates what SEOtool was built to do and IS DOING for current clients!

Topic: PageRank Distribution & Sculpting

Site architecture, how you make links and structure appear on a page in a way to get the most people to the products that you want them to see, is really a better way to approach it than trying to do individual sculpting of PageRank on links.

I feel like if you can get site architecture straight first, then you’ll have less to do, or no need to even think about PageRank Sculpting.……in my experience, PageRank Sculpting has not been the best use of peoples’ time.

Noticing any redundancy here?  Site architecture is the primary theme of the interview!  Google recommends you focus energy on perfecting your site architecture for PageRank distribution & consequently crawling potential (see below) — rather than sculpting PageRank via nofollow or other tactics.  Again, SEOtool is THE cream of the crop from a SEO Site Architecture analysis platform!

Topic: Crawling Theories vs. Reality

There isn’t really such a thing as an indexation cap.

The number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank.

There is the concept of host load. The host load is essentially the maximum number of simultaneous connections that a particular web server can handle……..Your site could be on a virtual host with a lot of other web sites on the same IP address. In theory, you can run into limits on how hard we will crawl your site…….that can then set some sort of upper bound on how many pages we are able to fetch from that host.

Following a SEOtool analysis, we’re able to identify not only PageRank distribution across the site, but also where the website inherently has crawling and structural issues that could hinder a search engine’s ability to fetch & index important, unique pages.  The custom consulting we bundle into the SEOtool subscription can identify any structural issues preventing the optimal rate of crawling (or PR flow), host load issues that may exist for your site, including bad neighborhoods, cross linking issues and other factors at an IP or DNS level — but even more importantly, give you and your team specific solutions to resolve your greatest SEO deficiencies and ranking problems!

In Part 2, we’ll recap and connect the dots on duplicate content, redirects, site navigation and how SEOtool unearths these issues via actionable metrics.

It’s a gratifying, motivating and humbling feeling when independent & authority sources (like Cutts & Enge) validate what you’ve built and the vision you have for client-driven innovation.  The interview between Eric Enge & Matt Cutts could not have been a stronger validation of SEOtool and the consultative approach we take with our clients!

If you would like a demo of SEOtool, please contact us to learn more.

If you’re a search engine optimization consultant, advertising or marketing agency, or just a web site owner that knows a thing or two about seo, then chances are you’ve heard a lot of buzz in the industry about automated seo. Over the past 6 months I’ve heard about no less than 1 new startup promising to deliver on the promise of fully automated seo per month, no joke. Honestly, some of the promises I’ve heard are quite laughable. Before I tell you why they’re laughable, I’d like to show you some of the promises these new seo vendors are making. They vary from being completely clueless to bordering on fraudulent.
This one is just downright ridiculous. Anyone promising you to do everything for you without you having to know anything about what they’re doing is simply a scam. If it’s too good to be true then it probably…

“…is an automated SEO service which promotes your site in search engines with no previous knowledge required”

This one leads you to believe all you have to do is download their plug-in and your rankings will begin to automagically increase. I’m surprised they didn’t claim their software has the ability to read your mind too. Interestingly, I couldn’t find their company name in any patent searches I did, not cool. But they don’t stop there, they actually rip off Google’s logo style for their own logo, talk about shady!

“Follow a simple account configuration and download of our patent pending SEO plug-in technology. Automatic improvement in search engine optimization ranking.”

This one uses a lowbrow method of focusing on crappy searches that the least qualified prospects are typing in and then generating a ton of equally crappy pages to target those crappy users, all in all, its a crap fest.

“…automated way to collect traffic that no one can focus on…”

This next claim shifts focus from collecting garbage organic search engine traffic to building up a ton of links without lifting a finger, smelling more and more like snake oil from the seo days of old. I love the pitches that make Google look like a big bully that needs a beating, classic manipulation of those who know how to do nothing besides pedaling other people’s products.

“…complete SEO Newbie Bullies Google By Building thousands of Backlinks On Auto-Pilot With No Outsourcing Or Link Swapping!”

I’m going to wrap up the ridiculous quotes with another seo software that claims to automate seo and when you dig into it you see that they’re focusing on a tiny area of seo, ranking reports, that doesn’t really require automation to begin with.

“Takes keywords that you provide and searches Google to see where your site places within the search results. Doing this manually can be time consuming for a large number of keywords and when you start SEO your site may not be listed high at first.”

What does all of this mean?

Well for starters, there is a lot of misinformation in the seo industry, particularly in the area of automated search engine optimization. Most of the companies I’ve quoted above are preying on those that don’t know any better and will only perpetuate the black eye the industry has been given by those guaranteeing rankings and delivering nothing. With so much interest by venture capitalists these days in the automation of seo, we here at SEO Tool feel its critically important to begin educating the industry on what is and is not possible through automation.

Let me know if you’re interested in getting a list of the seo companies I quoted above then and we’ll get you the names and urls of all of them immediately. My next post will go into detail about the overall structure of seo automation and will include the 2 key areas of optimization as well as the technology pillars each of those 2 areas requires in order to actually automate key seo processes.

Not to be a bubble burster, but if you haven’t guessed already, you cannot automate every area of seo. We are no less than 10 years away from automating 95% of seo, but there are some interesting companies working on the components that future automation will depend on and we’d like to think that we’re on of those innovators, only time will tell.