Posted by randfish

We’ve been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week’s Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we’ll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren’t just good for SEO, they’re great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

• Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few "clicks" as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
• Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

When is Pagination Necessary?

When a site grows beyond a few dozen pages of content in a specific category or subcategory, listing all of the links on a single page of results can make for unwieldly, hard-to-use pages that seem to scroll indefinitely (and can cause long load times as well).

Clearly, I need to log into Facebook more often…

But, usability isn’t the only reason pagination exists. For many years, Google’s recommended that pages contain no more than 100 links (internal or external) in order to make it easy for spiders to reach down deep into a site’s architecture. Many SEOs have found that this "limit" isn’t hard and fast, but staying within that general range remains a best practice. Hence, pages that contain many hundreds or thousands of links may inadvertently be hurting the access of search engines to the content-rich pages in the list making pagination essential.

Numbers of Links & Pages

We know that sometimes pagination is essential – one page of results just doesn’t cut it in every situation. But just how many links to content should the average category/results page show? And how many pages of results should display in the pagination?

There are a lot of options here, but there’s serious danger in using the wrong structures. Let’s take a look at the right (and wrong) ways to determine link numbers.

In some cases, there’s simply too many pages of results to list them all. When this happens, the very best thing you can do is to work around the problem by… creating more subcategories! It may seem challenging or even counter-intuitive, but adding either an extra layer of classification or a greater number of subcategories can have a dramatically positive impact on both SEO and usability.

There are times, however, when even the creation of many deep subcategories isn’t enough. If your site is big enough, you may need to have extensive pagination such that not every page of results can be reached in once click. In these cases, there are a few clear dos and don’ts.

Do:

• Try to link to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible without breaking the 100(ish) links per page limit
• Show newer content at the top of the results list when possible, as this means the most link juice will flow to newer articles that need it (and are temporally relevant)
• Use and link to relevant/related categories & subcategories to help keep link juice flowing throughout the site
• Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs

Don’t:

• Show only a few surrounding paginated links from paginated URLs – you want the engines to be able to crawl deeper from inside the structure
• Link to only the pages at the front and end of the paginated listings; this will flow all the juice to the start and end of results, ingoring the middle
• Try to randomize the paginated results shown in an effort to distribute link juice; you want a static site architecture the engines can crawl
• Try to use AJAX to get deeper in the results sets – engines follow small snippets of Javascript (sometimes), but they’re not at a point where this is an SEO best practice
• Go over the top trying to get every paginated result linked-to, as this can appear both spammy and unusably ugly

When in doubt, consider the directives you’re optimizing toward – the need for fewer extra pages of pagination, the desire to make the browsing experience usable (many webmasters mistakenly think users will simply give up and search, forgetting that some of us can’t recall the name of the piece we’re looking for!) and the importance of maintaining a reasonable count of links per page. Also note that although I’ve illustrated using 5-10 listings (for graphical space requirements), a normal listings set could be 30-90 links per page, depending on the situation.

Titles & Meta Descriptions for Paginated Results

In most cases, the title and meta description of paginated results are copied from the top page. This isn’t ideal, as it can potentially cause duplicate content issues. Instead, you can employ a number of tactics to help solve the problem.

Example of results page titles & descriptions:

Top Page Title: Theatres & Playhouses in Princeton, New Jersey
Top Page Meta Description: Listings of 368 theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (including surrounding cities).

Page 4 Title: Page 4 of 7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Page 4 Meta Description: Listings 201-250 (out of 368) theatres, playhouses and performance venues in the Princeton, NJ region (inclusing surrounding cities).

Alternate Page 4 Title: Results Page 4/7 for Princeton, New Jersey Theatres & Playhouses
Alternate Page 4: Description: -

Yes, you can use no meta description at all, and in fact, if I were setting up a CMS today, this is how I’d do it. A missing meta description reduces complexity and potential mis-casting of URLs as duplicates. Also notce that I’ve made the titles on results pages sub-optimal to help dissuade the engines from sending traffic to these URLs, rather than the top page (which is made to be the better "landing" experience for users).

Nofollows. Rel=Canonicals and Conditional Redirects

Some SEOs and website owners have, unfortunately, received or interpreted advice incorrectly about employing directives like the nofollow tag, canonical URL tag or even conditional redirects to help control bot activity in relation to pagination. These are almost always a bad idea.

Whatever you do, DO NOT:

• Put a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL. You’ll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren’t worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).
• Add nofollow to the paginated links on the results pages. This tells the engines not to flow link juice/votes/authority down into the results pages that desperately need those votes to help them get indexed and pass value to the deeper pages.
• Create a conditional redirect so that when search engines request paginated results, they 301 redirect or meta refresh back to the top page of results.

The only time I recommend using any of these is when pagination exists in multiple formats. For example, if you let users re-sort by a number of different metrics (in a restaurant list, for example, it might be by star rating, distance, name, price, etc.), you may want to either perform this re-sort using javascript (and employ the hash tag in the URL) or make those separately segmented paginated results rel=canonical back to a single sorting format.

Letting Users Display More/Less Results

From a usability perspective, this can make good sense, allowing users with faster connections or a greater desire to browse large numbers of results at once to achieve these goals. However, it can cause big duplicate problems for search engines, and add complexity and useless pages to the engines’ indices. If/when you create these systems, employ javascript/AJAX (either with or without the hash tag) to make the pages reload without creating a separate URL.

(the Google Analytics interface allows users to choose the number of rows shown, though they don’t have to worry much about crawlability or search-friendliness)

Also remember that the "default" number of results shown is what the search engines will see; so make that count match your goals for usability and SEO.

Additional Resources

• A Gallery of Pagination Examples and Recommendations from Smashing Magazine
• A Farewell to Pagination from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series
• The SEO Pager Plugin for Wordpress is a highly customizable set of options that allows you to create search-engine friendly pagination in Wordpress’s CMS from SEO Egghead

If you have any thoughts or recommendations to share in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

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Posted by Danny Dover

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The proposed SEO best practice for this week deals with explaining what HTTP Status Codes are and why certain ones are important to SEOs. These 3 digit numbers cause all kinds of problems for search engines and SEOs that are related to indexing and redirection. While the resource page linked to below is not as directly actionable as the soon to be released page on redirection, it still serves as a good broad overview of the topic. As SEOs, we would love to hear your feedback on the following areas:

• Are there any tools that you think are essential for beginner SEOs to know about for finding status code errors?
• Are there any important status codes this page leaves out?
• Is there anything specific you would like to see on the redirection page?

Please let us know if there is something we should add, remove or modify to make this page more helpful for beginners.

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HTTP Status Codes

Remember, this page is just a work in progress. We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to improve it. Please feel free to leave your comments below.

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

The analytics ninja is not dead, but with Avinash talking more about SEO analytics and SEOs like Rand talking more about web analytics, 2010 has brought with it increased cross-pollination between analytics experts and SEOs.

This blog post is for the analytics driven, SEO savvy, search samurai looking to implement tracking code best practices and take advantage of some useful Google Analytics plugins.

The focus of this post is on Google Analytics, but many of the concepts are also applicable more generally, no matter what web analytics platform you’re using.

Tracking Code Basics

Asynchronous Tracking Code – Even before the asynchronous tracking code was rolled out, I was a believer in putting the GA tracking code in the header, rather than before the closing body tag, which is where Google recommends placing the tracking code. With the announcement of asynchronous tracking code, which loads in conjunction with the page as opposed to sequentially, however, you can now have your cake and eat it too. You can get the benefit of your data not being compromised by slow page load times and also keep from getting push back from the developer that implements your tracking codes.

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {    var ga = document.createElement('script');    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' :         'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';    ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');    document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);  })();

</script>

Expanding Goal Limitations – Without setting up goals, your GA account is a glorified hit counter. So it’s imperative that you set up goal or eCommerce tracking (if not both). When setting up your GA goals in your analytics settings, you can either use the expanded goals, which allow you to track up to 20 different URLs or engagement metrics per profile. It’s important to realize, however, that you can also set your goals up so you can track hundreds or even thousands of goals. All you have to do is set up a logical hierarchy where the root of your goal URLs trigger your goal events. For us at SEOmoz, this might mean we have a tool run goal event triggered with /goal/tool-run – yet we also have the added granularity down to the individual tool level should we ever want to see which tools are being run the most or to segment traffic based on visitors who ran a particular tool.

eCommerce Tracking – Justin Cutroni did a great job with his series of blog posts that walk through how eCommerce tracking works, installing & setting up eCommerce tracking, explaining why everyone should use eCommerce tracking, & tracking lead gen forms. In addition to eCommerce tracking, not to be forgotten is using SetVar or a custom variable to segment repeat or premium buyers. For example, say your site gets 5 sales from keyword #1 and 5 sales from keyword #2. If sales for keyword #1 are each $800 and sales from keyword #2 are $10 each, you’re going to want to segment that traffic and make on-page optimizations by looking at the on-site behavior of your premium buyers who converted on keyword #1, rather than from keyword #2.  

Custom Variables for Registered & Non-Registered – One of the most powerful aspects of GA is the ability to set custom variable. Custom variables can be set at any of three levels (visitor, session, & page). The Google Analytics help documentation is particularly great, but EpikOne also has a worthwhile description on how custom variables work. The most powerful of these is the visitor level custom variable which allows you to cookie a visitor across multiple sessions. At SEOmoz, we use this to track three different member types: free members, PRO members, & canceled members. We also use custom variables to cookie at the session level.

 
Campaign Tagging & SetAllowAnchor – From widgets to newsletters to signature links in personal e-mails, campaign links should be tagged using the GA URL builder, which gives you tracking parameters that includes multiple, including required _utm values for source, medium, & campaign. In action this looks something like this:

http://www.seomoz.org/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=march-6-2010

When tagging your campaigns be aware that by default GA will only recognize tracking parameters if the string is kicked off by a question mark, which from an SEO standpoint can lead to diffusion of link juice and duplicate content issues. To avoid these issues, we you can kick off campaign parameters with the hash tag and modify your GA tracking code using the SetAllowAnchor attribute, so GA recognizes the hash tag as way to kick off a campaign tracking URLs. To do this, add — pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true); — to your main GA tracking code between the var pageTracker and pageTracker attributes. Or, for additional documentation, read LunaMetrics’ blog post on using SetAllowAnchor, but the code should look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");
    pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
  } catch(err) {}

Tagging Email – One of the most important areas you can apply campaign tagging is e-mail. And though you can get fancy and create a filter that combines email sources you should not have to do this because your campaigns should be tagged to begin with. So definitely follow what the experts say about tagging email campaigns, but I am a huge fan of bucketing your reports by segment and grouping based on conversion goal. For example, at SEOmoz we’re rolling out a number of e-mails ranging from a customer lifecycle welcome series to newsletters to follow up emails after PRO members cancel. Rather than doing one off tracking, our GA tracking is set up in a way that we can aggregate by visitor type. This allows management to quickly look at the all up numbers and see how e-mail is driving each goal area of the business: activation, retention, and re-activation.

And if you use a logical naming convention with your email tagging, such as the one shown below, your marketing team will be able to splice and dice using regular expressions to get a much more granular view of performance for each email format, type, or version:

• Email Format:  Which types of emails are doing best (i.e. newsletters, promotional emails, system notifications, etc.)
• Performance by Email Type: Shows the breakdown of which email types have the greatest volume and/or the lowest click through rates. And thus, where you should place your testing and optimization energy. (i.e. emails sent 1 week after sign up, promos sent in December, etc.)
• Version Number: Allows you to test subject lines and e-mail variants to see which versions are driving the most conversions, engagement, or retention. (i.e. subject line #1, subject line #2, etc.)

Vanity URLs – If you’re running an offline campaign, such as a magazine ad, a business card run or a billboard creative, you’re not going to want to use the long URL builder parameter. As WebShare’s Corey Koberg shows in the below graphic, long URL parameters don’t work for offline. So you’ll likely be much better off measuring offline efforts with a short, easy to remember vanity URL, which, in order to keep your metrics from being skewed as a result of page load times, you’ll want to implement using a 301 redirect, rather than using meta refresh.

Google Analytics Plugins

Though not on the list of must haves for the search samurai, I’m a sucker for a great browser plugin. And as ROI Revolution blogged about, there are a handful of browser plugins for GA that you might find are worth installing. Three plugins I use with varying degrees of regularity are:

Does a Page Have GA?
If you’re checking a lot of pages on your site to see if they have tracking code installed or if you want quick, at a glance reference as to whether or not a page on another site has GA tracking code, Twistermc’s GA? Firefox plugin is a great way to see if GA is installed without having to view the source code. The way it works it works is simple. If a page has GA installed, the bar chart that appears in the lower right hand corner of your browser is illuminated. If the page does not have GA installed, the bar chart is not illuminated.

Which Referring Sites & Keywords Have Changed?
Similar in concept to a custom alerts, the Better GA plugin by Juice Analytics provides a useful way to drill into your referring sites or referring keyword reports and see which sites or keywords have fluctuated the most over the last few days or week.

Better Google Analytics:
Perhaps the most robust GA plugin of all is VKIs studios’ greasemonkey script based plugin, which offers a number of bells an whistles, including page level social media data from sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious (see below),as well as added functionality such as a direct entry field to access your top content report from any other report, direct links to export to Google Docs, and a half dozen or so others.  

For more comprehensive information on Google Analytics, I encourage you to read through Google Analytics’ help documentation or tapping into some of the great web analytics resources available such as Google Analytics’ Official Blog, Webshare’s Blog (their Google Analytics 101 posts are particularly good,) LunaMetrics, EpikOne, & Avinash’s Occam’s Razor – each of which are full of Analytics tips from top-notch experts.

Also, special thanks to David Booth at WebShare for his help with SEOmoz’s implementation of Google Analytics and also for sharing several of the insights included in this post. For more info on GA and GWO, WebShare’s Google sponsored Seminars for Success, which I attended last year, and which the SEOmoz marketing team will be attending here in Seattle on May 12-14th, are among the most educational and best valued around.

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Posted by randfish

Lately I’ve been surprised to hear concerns from a number of SEOs that using the canonical URL tag on the canonical version of the page can somehow cause problems. When I’ve talked to folks about it, there seems to be confusion that only duplicates should use the rel="canonical" specification and the original must remain rel="canonical"-free. This isn’t the case.

Let’s look at a few diagrams to help explain:

This is the standard way rel=canonical is employed. Different versions of a page, whether on your own site, on partner sites, or places you’re licensing content (note: this is an update Google launched on Dec. 17th, 2009) can all reference back to the original to help tell the search engines where to find that piece. However, it’s also perfectly OK to do this:

Looking through Google’s blog post on the subject, this isn’t explicitly stated. However, you can see that even the example website, Wikia, employs this practice on the page Google points out. You can also see Googler Maile Ohye answering a comment on this:

@Wade: Yes, it’s absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". It won’t harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you.

Maile’s got really good advice here. If you run into situations where third parties are referencing your posts and appending strings of data to the URL, it can be really helpful to have the canonical URL tag on these by default. In fact, we’ve worked with many companies recently who found it helpful to employ sitewide as a best practice, just to prevent future iterations or less SEO savvy development from reproducing versions of the page that didn’t contain the rel=canonical and potentially losing link juice / causing canonicalization issues.

One last piece – it’s a really, really good way to make sure Google indexes the http rather than https version of your page (and counts link juice to the proper one). This had historically been a royal pain in the butt for many SEOs, and we’ve heard enough positive stories now to feel confident recommending it.

Welcome to 2010! Hope everyone had a great holiday break

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Earlier this year at SES New York, Guy Kawasaki raised quite a stir when he gave his keynote address regarding his use of Twitter and specifically, his use of ghost tweeters. Although many SEOs disagree with the practice, Li Evans of Serengeti Communications defends him on the grounds of marketing.

Kawasaki’s use of Twitter became a problem when some people discovered that he had ghost tweeters but didn’t disclose it. Although he does disclose now, Evans says people need to understand that Kawasaki is a marketer. With marketing, the message plays one of the most critical roles.

In an interview with WebProNews at the BlogWorld Expo 2009, Kawasaki responded to the criticism of his ghost tweeters by saying: “At the end of the day, the ultimate test is not who tweeted it, as much as, is it interesting.”

According to Evans, the core issue is the expectations of the audience. Ashton Kutcher is an avid tweeter and his followers know it. On the contrary, 50 Cent has other people tweet for him; although it doesn’t make everyone happy, his followers know that he is not tweeting on his own.

In regards to business usage of Twitter, Evans recommends planning a strategy to determine the best way to meet the audience’s expectations. If the expectations involve more than the business can do on its own, make sure to disclose whoever is doing it. Otherwise, the business could lose its credibility.

Do you think ghost tweeting is wrong if you disclose it? What does your audience expect from you?

This year, WebProNews decided to spread a little holiday cheer by finding out what some popular SEOs want for Christmas. Since we pick their brains for information all the time, we wanted to give them a little camera time to share their Christmas wishes.

Interestingly enough, a common wish for many of the SEOs was that Google would get a viable competitor. Other wishes included hopes about real-time search, technology, and more.

From the entire WebProNews family and iEntry Network, we hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and that all the wishes come true!

Posted by Tom_C

This past week saw the launch of Google’s real-time search and quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it’s not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this.

Questions I’d love to see the answer to are things like:

• What triggers real-time one-boxes?
• How long do they last?
• Are they tied to a geographic location?
• Are they tied to a language?

Unfortuantely I think it’s a bit early to have answers to questions like this, so rather than tackle these questions I’m just going to talk a little bit about how you can go about tracking the impacts of real-time search results on your industry.

Does real-time search affect my industry?

The answer is probably yes. For search terms that have hardly any tweet-volume I’ve already seen examples where literally one or two tweets can generate a real-time one-box. Sometimes even for the brand name term. That means that more or less any breaking news in your industry will generate some level of real-time results.

But what about other industries? After all many of us will be working on sites that target keyphrases that people DO tweet about. For us, the focus is on trending search terms. The key thing is to identify the types of keyphrase that might feature real-time search results. The most useful way of doing this that I’ve found is to monitor twitter volume and in particular monitor peaks and troughs in volume. Trendistic will do this nicely for you. The first neat thing from Trendistic is that you can see a long list of hot topics by day in the archive:

The second nice thing from Trendistic is the ability to query individual terms and see when peaks and troughs occured over time, for example here’s a snapshot of the [eagles] term (nice win Eagles!):

By using a service like this you can query the historic search volume and take an educated guess at when real-time search might have been triggered. By doing this for your main search terms you can start to understand things like strange traffic drops or spikes that might have been caused by real-time one boxes hanging out in your SERPs.

What about if you’re actively engaging in twitter though? If you feel like you might have gained a portion of your search traffic from tweets that were appearing in real-time search results then you should think about tracking those clicks.

Tracking real-time search volume and one-box traffic is a difficult problem however and one that isn’t completely solved. That said, here’s a few things that might be of use. Firstly, for anyone seeing #-based Google URLs you can actually track clicks from different parts of the page. Looking at the following real-time search for [nexus one]:

I clicked on two different results, the first one was a ‘real’ result that appeared in the real-time box, that is a page that’s been crawled recently and shows up via Google rather than showing up because Google found the result on Facebook or Twitter etc. With the # URLs at Google in action I saw the following full referral path:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=blog_result&ct=result&cd=11&ved=0CBcQmAEwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccortez.com%2Fhtc-nexus-one-blessed-by-the-fcc-updated%2F&rct=j&q=nexus+one&ei=gComS7LCDZehjAeDwdTOBw&usg=AFQjCNF2939x_yuKVTzL9UlN6m23cw0Kog

Note the "&oi=blog_result" in the referring URL (bolded added, obviously). This let’s you see any real-time traffic that has come via a crawled blog post. After that I clicked on a twittered URL and got the following:

http://www.google.co.uk/url?url=http://bit.ly/7315xj&rct=j&ei=2yomS4y7NYvNjAfQ3qXfBw&sa=X&oi=microblog_result&resnum=9&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CD8QoAQoADAI&q=nexus+one&usg=AFQjCNGWb9DkQaPZd2NGuOg6Th7lWd9hsg

Note both the url=http://bit.ly/7315xj and &oi=microblog_result (again, bolded). This allows you to see both where the click came from (a real-time microblog result, i.e. from a site like twitter or facebook) but also the URL that was twittered (in this case the bit.ly link).

These referring URLs will show up in your server logs but unfortunately won’t show up in Google Analytics (since Google treats these all as search queries and so will just dump them in the same place and only let you see the keyword searched for). To get them to show up in Google Analytics you need to set up a profile to show the full referring URL, such as the filter detailed in part 2 of this post.

Not all users see these # Google URLs however, most are still seeing the old style search?q= Google URLs. From looking at the traffic for sites where we have the appropriate filter set up I’d say somewhere between 5 and 10% of users are seeing these URLs. This means that if you can get this kind of data for a small proportion of your traffic and extrapolate for the other 90% of users. (Btw, does anyone have any more accurate stats on the % of users seeing which search result type? I’ve not seen anything concrete anywhere…)

Of course, looking at the example above we see that a fair amount of traffic from micro blogging servicies actually goes through URL shorteners such as bit.ly. In that case there’s another method you can use to track your traffic. Take a look at the following referral list for this bit.ly URL:

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There seems to be rise in companies bringing their SEO in-house. Jessica Bowman, the Founder and President of SEOinhouse.com, credits much of this trend to the economy. On the plus side, in-house SEO can be very effective since SEO demands a lot of interaction with other people at a business.

The question many businesses face with bringing SEO in-house is: “Where does it fit in the business?” Much to the dismay of marketers, Bowman believes it fits better in the IT department.

An SEO that sits in IT will typically be willing to work with the marketing department. However, most IT departments are not usually as amiable to meet the marketing department’s technical requirements.

In-house SEO involves a tremendous amount of responsibility, especially with the advent of social media and local search. As a result, Bowman often recommends an in-house SEO work with an outside agency as well. An agency provides a senior level of authority that most in-house SEOs do not have. In cases such as this, the agency could act as a mentor and carry between 10-20 percent of the workload.

Posted by randfish

Yesterday night I stayed up way too late authoring a post on Google’s Indexation Cap. Today, despite getting up way too early, I wanted to follow up and answer some of the questions from the comments, Twitter and my email. I think SEOs who read the post rightly asked for more direction in solving this problem – a fair request. Below, I’ve done my best to tackle these problems visually, as I believe we all think about site architecture and crawling issues in a visual structure.

First off, here’s a sample site hieararchy to set down the concept and give the colors I’m using in the following diagrams more context:

Next, I’ve illustrated in a more representative fashion, how those hieararchies might look on a website, and noted the external link potential of each:

In this next piece, I’m trying to explain a very important concept and something that’s frequently misunderstood by SEOs. Once upon a time, search spiders would crawl the web largely recursively – hitting a homepage that had been submitted to its index (remember way back when search engines had submission?!), then crawling in an outward fashion based on the links they discoverd there. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and as we all see with crawl paths (if you’re looking at the requests Google/Yahoo!/Bing make to your domain), multiple entry points are nearly universal and crawling pushes "outward" from those priority URLs. It looks a bit like Minesweeper, right?

Finally, I’ve got a graphic to help understand how to positively approach these problems and solve them.

There are certainly more recommendations that can be provided around these issues, and I look forward to a discussion of them in the comments.

p.s. I covered site architecture and navigation in a good bit of detail at the PRO Training this summer, but I like this image format so much, I think I might re-craft something new for next year. It feels like structuring sites properly is still a big pain point for SEOs (but possibly that’s less to do with lack of knowledge and more to do with lack of influence during the design phase?)

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Posted by great scott!

So what’s the trick?  How do these folks who run around calling themselves SEOs actually know SEO?  Do they just make it up? Is there a class you take somewhere?  This week Rand looks at exactly this question: where do these guys (and gals) learn the stuff they know and how do they stay on top of the ever-changing search landscape to make sure they’re putting forth best practices for their clients and projects?

Watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday to learn where you should focus your efforts if you want to learn SEO. You’ll find it’s not as complicated as you may think. In fact, it’s pretty simple, but not necessarily easy, especially when you start talking about IR and patent analysis, conducting research, collecting and analyzing correlation data, building ranking models, and other fancy strategies. But, as SEO extraordinaire and all-around awesome dude, Dave Snyder, adroitly demonstrated in his recent post about how he got started in internet marketing, hard work, talent, and a little luck are the backbone of success in this industry.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – How SEOs Know SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

p.s. Here’s the original post on Ben’s Ranking Models from the SEOmoz/Distilled London Training Seminar

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