The term “social search” is starting to creep up more and more in online conversations, but what is it? WebProNews caught up with Johanna Wright, the Director of Product Management for Google Web Search, to get an explanation on what the phenomenon really is.

According to Wright, social search is a beta product for both Web and image search that Google launched in January.  In other words, Google takes published content from a user’s social network and ranks it as relevant to other users in that same network.

Wright gives an example that if her friend, who is also a writer, writes a article about the iPad and if she searches for an iPad, the article will show up in her search results since it is relevant to her.

Although she does not believe social search will have a strong impact on marketers, she does offer tips for marketers and publishers. She says:

-    Make good content that people want to read and follow
-    Follow webmaster guidelines
-    Use webmaster tools to make sure your site is indexed in Google

In addition, if your site is social, Wright suggests marking it up using Google’s social graph API code that comes from code.google.com.

Since Google Buzz is also raising hype, are the two connected? In response, Wright says, “I think that Google Buzz and social search are a great way to marry key components of Google, the company, in a way that’s great for users.”

Most people that start a blog would like it to turn profitable at some point, but how does it happen? WebProNews recently spoke with blogging legend Darren Rowse of ProBlogger about what bloggers can do to make money.

First of all, bloggers need to look at their blog long-term.  So often, people think that they can make money instantly, but it could actually take years.

Having a profitable blog also involves finding the right niche.  It needs to be something that you are interested in and have a passion about. In addition, Rowse suggests that you determine how monetizable your niche is. To do this, you could search for your topic in Google and see if it is something advertisers would consider.

To keep visitors coming back to your blog, you must also choose a niche that will keep you writing for a long time. How often should you write? While it depends upon your area of content, Rowse does point out that, “every post you write is a doorway into your site.” For some bloggers, this could mean 365 opportunities if they write a post everyday. However, bloggers should not post for the mere reason of having new content every day. He says the content should always be useful.

On another note, how effective are blogs due to the recent Twitter craze? Although some blogs have shifted to shorter formats, Rowse says there is also a shift that is moving back toward longer content on blogs since people want more than 140 characters.  Emphasizing that blogs and Twitter are valuable tools for each other, he says specifically, “It’s an ideal world for a blogger… people want more and you’re able to give it to them through a viral communication like Twitter.”

Posted by richardbaxterseo

Today’s post is inspired by a brilliant question that came up recently in Q&A. The question was based on targets and objective setting for SEO’s and it went something like this:

"What metrics should an SEO’s monthly objectives be based on?"

Having spent a good portion of my SEO career managing SEO teams in-house, this question really reminded me how interesting the topic of organisational SEO can be, and how underserved it is on all but a few SEO industry blogs. In this in-house SEO focused post, let’s take a look at general KPIs for people and teams who do SEO.

Search Engine Visibility (Rankings)

While the value of measuring individual search engine rankings is a topic under frequent debate in our community, achieving consistently high rankings for target keywords is ultimately the reason we’re all doing SEO. In competitive markets, particularly, there will be key phrases that SEO teams will be expected to show progress towards gaining rankings for. Making search engine visibility a targeted metric provides a way for the SEO team to focus on the overall performance of the site in question. There are, however, two problems to solve with search engine visibility as a metric, the measurement of rankings and choice of keywords to be monitored.

In my previous in-house role we developed a keyword selection methodology based on data from Hitwise UK, our own analytics platform and the Google Keyword Tool. As travel SEO’s, we knew that demand would change seasonally for certain destinations and their corresponding keywords. Using a little historical knowledge of our industry and plenty of data, we would always have a clear idea of seasonal demand for the top 200 industry terms.

Measuring rankings on a daily basis allowed us to calculate a percentage based visibility score. What was really fascinating about the whole process was that because the keyword selection methodology remained consistent over a long period of time, we were able to compare visibility scores in year on year increments. As the activities of the SEO team continued to succeed, overall visibility increased from around 60% to 85% over a few years.

If you’re interested in developing a similar methodology, you could consider using Advanced Web Ranking to capture rankings data and calculate the visibility score. The beauty of having a search engine visibility score as a KPI is that the metric acts as a key driver for all SEO based activity. Ultimately, as an SEO Manager you have to evaluate how all of your actions contribute to improved visibility, and therefore traffic.

Search Engine Traffic

Many companies in competitive niches will make use of models to predict traffic levels for the coming year. If you’re lucky, a business analyst will take care of the production of the model itself, leaning on your SEO expertise to help predict how forthcoming trends and planned initiatives may impact overall traffic levels on the site. Your role, as an SEO Manager or in-house SEO is to achieve those traffic levels through maintaining and growing search engine visibility, deploying technical SEO enhancements to grow all important traffic in the long tail and of course, building links!

Link Building

There’s no doubt that link building is critical to search engine visibility and traffic levels on your site, so it might make sense to create volume targets for a link builder. Unfortunately, deciding exactly how many links a link builder can build is a complex and frequently restrictive process because output depends on the person, the market and the method of link acquisition chosen.

In my last in-house role, I found that creating small, seasonal link building projects for my team based on a few key phrases per person worked extremely well. Giving your link builders the creative freedom to design their own strategies based on their own projects and the resources available to them can yield far more valuable results in the long term. The KPI, therefore, may be measured on our new friend search engine visibility on the terms selected by the link building project.

Conversion

Getting the opportunity to have an input on your site’s conversion rate is a wonderful opportunity to learn a new skill, or improve an existing one! A word of caution, though – only sign up for KPI’s that you can control or heavily influence. In the case of conversion you’ll need a lot of business wide buy in and commitment to conversion rate optimisation projects. If you don’t have the tools or support for that, conversion might not be a great primary KPI to be assigned.

Personal Development Goals

As a search engine optimisation practitioner, you’ll have spent a fair amount of time learning your trade and perfecting your skills. When you’re managing an SEO team, don’t forget that it’s a good thing to assign some personal development time for each of your staff. I used to set a target of one presentation a quarter on a subject of choice (SEO related, of course). I still think the personal development targets are the best KPI’s of all. If you’re learning, you’re having fun.

Of course, every organisation is slightly different and you may have different KPI’s to the ones above. Tell us about them in the comments below!

This is a post by Richard Baxter, Founder and SEO Consultant at SEOgadget.co.uk – a niche UK SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish

We’ve been hearing some requests lately for some really advanced, expert-level content, and this post is here to deliver. I’ve built up a short list of topics that deal with more cutting edge SEO, and if there’s interest in this series, I’ll try to make it a regular part of the blog. These tactics aren’t black or gray hat (we’re not advocates of that kind of thing), but they’re very specific in use and tend to be at the opposite end of the "low-hanging fruit" basket.

The first in the series touches on a common SEO problem – determing if a link has value and how much. This tactic isn’t low effort, so it should only be employed when the link or link source is particularly critical.

Testing Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much)

Scenario: You’ve found some potentially valuable, but possibly suspect link sources. These could include things like a seemingly high quality directory that requires payment or a site you’re worried may have aroused Google’s ire for one reason or another. The need for a credible answer applies anytime you’re unsure whether a link is counting in Google’s rankings and need to know.

Tactic: Find a page that’s already in Google’s index and a somewhat random combination of words/phrases from that page’s title and body for which it ranks in position #3-10. For example, with the query – http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+presentation+morning+entitled+link, my blog post from last week on Link Magnets ranks #3. The query itself is not particularly competitive and the pages outranking it don’t have the exact text in the title or domain name (a critical part of the process).

If I now place a link with the exact anchor text from another page (like the blog post you’re reading now), e.g. new york presentation morning entitled link, I should be able to see, once this post is indexed by Google’s spider, whether it passes link juice. The result will be positive if the page moves up 2-4 positions in ranking and I can be fairly assured that the link is indeed "Google-friendly." With that knowledge secure, I can change the anchor text and/or repoint the link to the desired location. I don’t simply use the anchor text I want initially because with competitive queries, a single link may not make enough difference for the ranking impact to be visible and I don’t want to waste my time/money/energy.

(Metrics displayed in the SERPs via mozbar)

Special Requirements: To make the testing work, you’ll need to be able to repoint the link, change the anchor text or 301 redirect the linked-to page (though the last of these is the least desirable, since 301s lose some link juice in the process and good anchor text is so valuable for ranking in Google). Also, here at SEOmoz, we don’t recommend buying links, so while this tactic could be applied to that process, remember that manipulative links may later be devalued, wasting all that time and effort you spent acquiring them.

Results: With this technique, you can not only get a yes/no answer to questions about whether the link passes ranking value, but a rough sense for how much (depending on the position change – this can be a good reason to use pages that rank in the #7-10 range). Do take care to record the ranking positions of all the pages in the results and leave the test running for 1-2 weeks (longer if there’s very fresh results ranking for the query). If you don’t, other factors may conflate to hide the true results.

I’m looking foward to your feedback about this technique – and let us know if you’re interested in seeing more of this advanced/edge-case content on the blog, too. Below, I’ve listed the topics I could tackle in future "Advanced" level posts.

• Hosting Pages on Third-Party Sites
• oDesk/Mechanical Turk for Content Development (and Link Research)
• Email Marketing for Search Personalization
• Modifying Product/Business Naming Conventions
• Spiking Search Volume and Capitalizing on QDF
• Protecting Inter-Network Links & Domain Acquisitions from Devaluation

p.s. If you do like this kind of thing, I’d also suggest:

1. Register for SMX Advanced: Seattle or SMX Advanced: London – both are quite good and SEOmoz will be sending speakers to both. You can use the code SEOmoz@SMX for a 10% discount to either event.
2. Check out the SEOmoz Expert Training Series DVD, which just launched last week. The video alone will get you pretty excited
3. PRO members should check out our libraries of tips, video content and webinars.

I’m in Tampa, then Miami this week, but will finally return to Seattle for some much needed time in the office next Monday. Until then, blogging, commenting & email may be a bit slow from me.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by jennita

Whew! The Spring conference season is in full swing, and the mozzers are coming soon to a city near you. You’ll find us anywhere from Charlotte, NC to Munich to Singapore in the next couple months. The coolest part is that we’re attending and speaking at some conferences for the very first time. It feels good to get out and stretch a bit! Plus, the developer in us will be attending conferences like Chirp and CCGrid 2010 which will both enhance our geek factor!

As always, if you’re attending any of these events, please say hello! We may never get to know you if you don’t wave, nudge, or kick us. Ok, you really shouldn’t kick Joanna, she’d probably pull a ninja move on you. Included in the list below are both SEOmoz employees as well as associates. Come… take a peek and join us!

SMX Toronto – April 8-9

You definitely don’t want to miss SMX Toronto! Not only will Gillian be moderating several panels, but she is also organizing a Search Spam Party (of PubCon notoriety). RSVP now!

April 8	1:50pm – 2:40pm	Link Building Strategies and Ranking Tactics
	6:00pm – 7:30pm	SMX Search Spam Party
April 9	8:30am – 9:35am	What’s Next In Search: The Crystal Ball Panel

---

PubCon South – Dallas – April 13-14
20% discount tickets. Get ‘em while they’re hot: rc-2080720

We have quite the crew heading to PubCon South this year. As always, PubCon has tons of great sessions and speakers to knock your socks off. We’re excited to be speaking and attending this excellent conference with gusto.

Check out where to find Gillian, Joanna and Kate Morris:

April 14	11:30 am – 12:45pm	Gillian	2010 – SEO
	4:15pm – 5:30pm	Joanna	Competitive Intel
April 15	10:15am – 11:30am	Kate	Social Media Landscape: Hot Tpoics and Trends
	2:55pm – 4:10pm	Kate	Advanced PPC Management

---

Chirp – San Francisco – April 14-15

Twitter is having a first ever developer conference, called Chirp. Nick will learn about their new ad platform (hopefully) and what they’re doing with their API. This is super interesting to us for both our tools and our API businesses. Sounds like an awesomely, geekified conference! Be sure to say hello to Nick if you’re there.

---

SMX Sydney – April 22-23

We’re all quite excited about SMX Sydney this year (ok we are every year… but still). This year Danny will be helping run the Developer Day (filling in for Vanessa Fox) as well as speaking about using rich applications and search. Gillian will also be speaking at this power-packed event on post-click optimization.

 

April 22	3:55 – 4:20pm	Gillian	Checkout Process Optimisation
	5:00 – 5:30pm	Gillian	The Long Table
April 23		Gillian	Keynote Session – The State Of The Search Union
	10:30am-2:30pm	Danny	Developer Day (the sessions in blue)

---

Pacific Conference – Singapore – April 27-28

"This will be my first time at Pacific Conferences. I’ll be running a power-packed two day workshop that covers everything from the basics of search marketing to integration of social media into marketing plans and tracking ROI from the multitude of search marketing opportunities available to us. I’ll be sharing the stage with Dennis Yu, CEO BlitzLocal, who will be covering PPC, Facebook advertising, social media marketing, and more. In truth, I expect this will be one of the most valuable conferences in the region this year. If you’re in the area, don’t miss this one!"
- Gillian

You can still get a 20% discount on your ticket by mentioning this blog post when you register.

SEMPO event planned, too. Stay tuned for tweets with specifics on a SEMPO event to coincide with Pacific Conference Singapore.

---

SAScon – Manchester, UK – April 28th

Two of our esteemed associates, Tom Critchlow and Richard Baxter will be speaking at SAScon. Reading over the session topics and seeing the list of speakers, makes me jealous I won’t be attending!

April 28	11:15am – 12:00pm	Tom	Black Hat/White Hat – does it matter any more?
	2:30pm – 3:15pm	Tom & Richard	Advanced Link Building Panel

---

Pacific Conference – Hong Kong – April 29-30

"If you miss the Singapore Training event, you can catch us in Hong Kong the same week! Dennis and I will provide the same presentation. Again, if you go to only conference in the region this year, come to Pacific Conference. This will be one amazing show."
- Gillian

---

Search & Social Spring Summit – Tampa – May 3-4

The Search & Social Spring Summit is pretty much the place to be in May! Really… Florida in May just sounds like perfection! Plus with topics like "Outsourcing Secrets: Cut Costs & Spend More Time on the Beach" and "In-House SEO : Tactics for Managing Multiple Sites & Headaches" it will definitely be hot! Lindsay and I will be attending and blogging from the event. [Plus I get to meet the Wassell babies YAY!]

---

Conversion Conference West 2010 – San Jose, CA – May 4-5

May 4

2:00 – 3:00pm

Gillian

Spiders Versus People – SEO & Conversion

---

International Search Summit – Innovations – London – May 13-14

May 13

11:50am

Gillian

The State of Search in India

---

A4U Expo Munich – May 18-19

"I was so surprised by the depth and breadth of the speakers and presentations at A4U Expo London, I’m really looking forward to being a part of this conference in Munich. Focused on affiliate marketers’ needs, this conference covers everything from SEM to SEO, analytics, and on page optimization. Our friends at Distilled will be there and Ben Jesson who helped us with our own conversion rates will sharing secrets. I’ll be speaking on the convergence of Local-Mobile-Social marketing and how to grab this tiger by the tail."
- Gillian

May 18	2:30pm – 3:30pm	Gillian	Local – Social – Mobile: The Power Triumvirate of 2010
	4:00pm-5:00pm	Tom	Data Feed SEO & Advanced Site Architecture
May 19	10:30 – 11:30am	Jane	Link Building for Highly Competitive Markets

---

eMetrics & SMX London – May 17-18

Both eMetrics and SMX London are happening at the same time, in the Grand Connaught Rooms, Covent Garden. You can get a combo pass for both conferences, then you don’t have to decide between the two! Sounds like the best of both worlds to me.

May 17	10:30am – 11:45am	Rand	SEO Ranking Factors In 2010
May 18	1:15pm-2:30pm	Will	Top Ten Customised Search Analytics Reports

---

CCGrid 2010 – Melbourne – May 17-20

Chas will be attending the 10th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing. It’s a great opportunity to be exposed to new ideas/methods in high performance distributed computing. (That’s geek talk for kick butt!)

---

Search Exchange – Charlotte, NC -  May 17 – 19

Search Exchange will consist of keynotes and panel discussions on search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay per click advertising, and web analytics.

"I am so excited for Search Exchange, its the first conference of its kind down in Charlotte. It’s tackling the trifecta of marketing channels–organic, paid and social. Not to mention the lineup is top-notch with industry all stars like Chris Winfield, Rae Hoffman, and Chris Brogan."
- Joanna

May 18	1:30-2:45pm	Joanna	The Latest Social Media Tools From The Experts
May 19	10:00-11:20am	Joanna	Landing Page Optimization Tactics
	1:30-2:45pm	Kate	Measuring PPC Campaigns

---

International Marketing Conference Copenhagen – May 19-20

Gillian will be speaking on New Social Media Oppportunities.

---

We look forward to seeing you on the road! Oh, and just for fun I thought I’d throw in a wordle image based on this post. Enjoy!

 

Joanna’s photo courtesy of Andy Beal

Danny and Tom’s photos courtesy of foliovision.com.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Press Release: For Immediate Release
1 April 2010

MELBOURNE, Australia. (April 1, 2010) – ProBlogger, the web’s #1 Blog Tips site, today announced that it has been acquired by Google.

This acquisition will be a part of Googles extension of the ‘Blogger’ brand and a precursor to their new professional blogging suite of applications – ProBlogger.

“Blogging continues to grow in popularity, not only for personal use but by entrepreneurs and businesses around the world. Once seen as a ‘fools game’ – blogging has now grown up.” said a Google representative today. “Google’s new professional blogging suite, ProBlogger, will put an amazing array of tools into the hands those wanting to take their blogging to the next level.” said a Google representative today.

“What better brand to align these new tools with than ProBlogger, a blog that has consistently produced blog tips for professional bloggers for just under six years.”

“Some have called me a ‘fool’ for even considering selling ProBlogger,” said founder of ProBlogger Darren Rowse, “but I’d be a fool not to allow the ProBlogger brand to be developed by one of the world’s most innovative companies. I’m excited to see where Google will take ProBlogger going forward.”

The acquisition of ProBlogger will allow Darren to concentrate on his other projects including his main site – Digital Photography School – and an upcoming project – FoolsMedia.

Darren Rowse will remain a part of ProBlogger over the next 331 days where he plans to to begin a series of posts entitled ‘331 days to Build an Even Better Blog’ – a follow up to the successful 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

About ProBlogger

ProBlogger is a blog about blogging. Kinda sad really but not as sad as having a blog about Tweeting… or a book about blogging… that’d be sadder! ProBlogger was founded by Darren Rowse on September 23 2004. Since that time Darren has published 5,356 posts and the blog has received 178,448 comments. A Foolish endeavour? Maybe – but perhaps not as foolish as this press release!

Tags: April Fools

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

ProBlogger Acquired by Google

Share This

Late last week I spent a fascinating hour with Holly Becker from decor8 – an amazing interior design blog that is read by over 35,000 readers a day.

Today I’d like to share that interview with you as an example of a blogger who has made a living from blogging by building a niche focused blog.

decor8 has opened up many doors of opportunity for Holly. She makes a full time living from the blog (and also employs a regular columnist as well as her husband to run the back end) and it has led to other exciting possibilities including a book deal.

In this podcast interview Holly:

• shares the story behind starting decor8
• gives insight into how she keeps coming up with fresh content ideas
• shares what type of posts work best at drawing in readers to comment
• talks about her decision to bring on a regular columnist
• reflects on dealing with negative comments
• answers the question of ‘what is a conversion’ for you when a reader hits your blog
• share how she’s built her readership
• reveals how she makes a full time living from her blog
• talks about her other ventures, including her ‘blogging your way’ e-course and up coming book

I love hearing stories like the one Holly shares because it’s yet another example of a blogger who makes a good living her blog (and it’s not a blog about making money on the internet!). I also loved chatting with Holly because she’s all about enhancing the lives of those who read her blog by producing a high quality and inspiring blog.

The interview is just on 51 minutes long so grab a cup of coffee and sit back to enjoy Holly’s insights on blogging!

here’s the podcast:

While you’re listening check out her blog and enjoy!

PS: you can grab the mp3 of this interview for later here – Interview with Holly

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Interview with Full Time Blogger – Holly Becker from decor8

Share This

Twitter has a new analytics tool to add to its repertoire. At SXSW, Eric Fleming and Dr. John Grohol launched Review’d and WebProNews was there to get the scoop.

The new tool allows users to find out what people are saying about them on Twitter, which ultimately, allows them to discern positive opinions from negative opinions.

Review’d provides a very simple dashboard that gives users information on celebrities, specific keywords, products, brands, and more. The co-founders told WPN that the tool does not offer complex analytics but instead, gives users actionable information that people and businesses can utilize.

To check out how the tool works, users can visit here for a free 30-day trial. The co-founders said to expect many improvements over time.

Plenty of people spend their days moving from one screen to another, consuming information whenever possible. BuzzVoice tries to plug the holes – time spent in the morning commute, for example – but letting users listen to the Web’s top news and blogs.

John Atkinson, the cofounder and CEO of BuzzVoice, explained to Abby Johnson at SXSW, “People have compared it to a Pandora for news and blogs.” BuzzVoice has about 1,600 different blogs on tap, too, so the selection is impressive.

As for how to use BuzzVoice, device compatibility shouldn’t pose much of a problem. It’ll work with MP3 players (including the iPod), the iPhone, Macs, and PCs; would-be multitaskers can pretty much just grab their nearest piece of electronics and go.

Then here’s one interesting detail about where BuzzVoice is heading: Atkinson said that a real-time radio widget, currently in private beta, will be released to publishers.

This should ensure the selection of blogs available through BuzzVoice grows even larger in the near future.

Posted by Tom_C

There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ – it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge – all you need is:

• A verified Google webmaster central account
• Google Analytics
• Excel

If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Laurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).

Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.

Step 1 – Download the internal links

Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:

Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":

This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note – for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).

Step 2 – Grab your landing pages from Google Analytics

This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics – go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.

Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).

Step 3 – Put both sets of data in excel

Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel – I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:

Step 4 – Vlookup ftw

Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:

Note – that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.

Step 5 – Categorise your urls

Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:

If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.

Step 6 – Pivot table Excel Ninja goodness

Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:

It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:

And:

Step 7 – Combine the two pivots

Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:

Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.

Conclusions

25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic

So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ‘search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight – afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.

Update: Patrick from Branded3 has just written a post on this very topic – Patrick’s approach using separate XML sitemaps for different site sections is well worth a read and complements what I’ve written about here very nicely.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Newer Posts »