Webmaster Center blog

Webmaster Tools Markup Validation Tool

Duane Forrester — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:19:00 GMT

Earlier this week, folks using their Bing Webmaster Tools would have noticed a new tool slipped into the mix. On the "Crawl" tab, you can now find a link to the Markup Validation Tool. This tool is a great way to understand if the added code is actually going to be readable, as intended. While the markup code being inaccurate will not cause your page to render any differently in most cases, having the syntax incorrect can affect our ability to use the data as you intend. Now you can easily check URLs for valid markup code from inside your webmaster tools account.

The tool scans for the most common markup languages, and will display them if they are properly implemented:

When you enter a URL into the tool, the system will scan the URL and show the data we've found, when it is implemented correctly.

If you scan a page which does not have any markup installed, or where the markup is not installed correctly, you will see an error message.

If you are experiencing errors when using the tool to check your markup installation, please reference the links provided above to ensure you are using the code as intended within the parameters specified for each language.

Moving content? Think 301, not rel=canonical

Duane Forrester — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:31:00 GMT

Whether you've decided to move your website to a new domain or you're moving content within a current website, it's important to know how to protect the trust value your current content has with the engines. Over time, links get built, content ages and acquires trust. You don't want to walk away from that if you can help it. Why start over when most of that value can be transferred to the content's new location?

The solution to your problem is the 301 redirect. This redirect is referred to as the "permanent" redirect. Its cousin, the 302 redirect, is the "temporary" redirect. Basically the 301 tells us to please follow the link to find the new home for the content. The 302 on the other hand, tells us the content has moved temporarily, but will return to its original location. Since, in this example, we know you've moved the content permanently, the 301 is the redirect you should use. We've covered this in more detail in a past post.

One big questions folks often have at this point is how much of the value is passed to the new URL. A valid question, and one with a simple answer. Most of the value is passed.

We cannot pass all of the value because, like it or not, that new URL is, well, ...new. We do still need to see many of the usual signals firing to help us close the gap back to the original, full trust value for the content. So, as you watch your stats, you will see a drop in the traffic graph as you work through a transition period. There's no hard and fast rule on how long this transition period lasts, but it usually measured in months or less.

This past week at a conference someone had a question and asked if they could use a rel=canonical in place of a 301. They argued that since the rel=canonical passes value similarly to a 301, it should do the trick.

The answer to the question is...no. You should not use a rel=canonical in place of a 301 redirect. The rel=canonical is designed to help manage duplicate URL issues. It is not a true 301 signal to the engines, though it can pass value similar to the way a 301 does. Implementing a 301 redirect is tough to mess up. It either works or it does not, and when it does, it passes value. We recently encountered a website that had so botched implementing its rel=canonicals that it essentially would lead to all of their pages, save one, being stripped of value and de-indexed over time.

Luckily they've found and fixed the issue, but the fact remains. If you need to move content, the 301 is your friend.

Come meet Bing at SMX West and SES NY

Duane Forrester — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:28:00 GMT

It's conference season again, and we're looking forward to see folks at the shows again this year!

If you're planning to attend either the SMX West event, or the SES NY event, here are discount codes for each event.

SMX West : SMX10Bing will snag you a 10% discount

SES NY : 20Bing will snag you 20% off

If you want to hear what we have to say, we encourage you to join us at the following sessions.

SMX West - booth #406

Feb. 28 - 9AM - 10:15AM

Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Personalize With Social Connections (#smx #11B)

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land (@dannysullivan)
Q&A Moderator: Michelle Robbins, Director of Technology, Third Door Media, Inc. (@MichelleRobbins)
Speakers: Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester)

Feb. 28 - 10:45AM - 12:00PM

Getting Personal, Part 2: How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography (#smx #12B)

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land (@dannysullivan)
Q&A Moderator: Michelle Robbins, Director of Technology, Third Door Media, Inc. (@MichelleRobbins)
Speakers: Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester); Jack Menzel, Product Management Director, Search, Google (@jackm)

March 1 - 2:30PM - 3:30PM

Ask The Search Engines – Open Q&A Forum (#smx #34A)

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land (@dannysullivan)
Q&A Moderator: Ryan Jones, Sr. SEO Strategist, Team Detroit (@ryanjones)
Speakers: Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester); Tiffany Oberoi, Software Engineer, Google (@tiffanyoberoi)

SES NY - booth #1106

Same as last year we're looking to hear from you. Bring your questions, concerns and input. We'll be taking notes, answering questions and trying our best to make sure we hear your message.

Swing by the booth on the expo floor anytime. ...and keep your eyes open to this blog post. We'll update the speaking engagements as we finalize them.

Things you should avoid

Duane Forrester — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 06:45:00 GMT

As you go about working on your websites, optimizing things and managing your social media programs, it’s easy to lose track of information, or overlook something. In this post we’ll take a look at some things you want to avoid doing. It may also be worth taking a look through your site and your programs to make sure you’re not doing any of these things moving forward.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the process where you determine who the visitor is coming to your website, then show content depending on who that visitor is. Typically, the system detects a search engine crawler, and swaps more search-friendly content in place for them. Human visitors would then see a different content page. Taken to the limit, the content is completely different. This is an obvious problem for the engines, as we expect to see the same content as anyone else would. Showing us one piece of content and other visitors a different piece of content is misleading. You want to avoid this.

Link buying

It’s no secret that inbound links play a role in ranking. It’s also no secret that we don’t want you buying links. There are a lot of services out there pitching this service, and calling it anything but “link buying” these days. The bottom line is this: you are taking a big risk if you are buying links.

If we discover the link is purchased, at best we’ll simply ignore it and not pass any value, which is what happens in most cases. This is still pretty bad for you, though, as you paid money for something that now gives you no value. At worst, if it gets to be problematic for us, we’ll take action against the sites involved.

Link farms

Links to your content should grow organically. Link farming essentially involves a network of sites which all link to your content. On paper this would seem to create the impression that a bunch of sites now link to your content. In reality, we see link farms and dismiss their value. Again, you’ve paid money and will receive no value for it. Given “link farms” are typically deemed to be more problematic than random buying of links across websites, you want to avoid associating your domain with these sorts of places. Read more about building links the right way in this article.

Three-way linking

Site A links to Site B. Site B links to Site C. Site C links to Site A. This may seem to be preferable to reciprocal linking, but it’s not, really. Reciprocal linking can not only introduce us to your newest content or site, but can also deliver direct traffic to your website. True, it doesn’t carry the same value as a straight one-way link, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Three-way linking is often an attempt to avoid being seen building reciprocal links. Don’t sweat reciprocal links and avoid three-way linking.

Duplicating content

We recently wrote and in-depth post on article site sourced content. Duplicating content is a pretty simple concept. You’re posting content which already appears somewhere online. Using articles from third-party sources, copying and pasting from another source and using standardized product descriptions for items you’re selling all fall into this category. Your content should be unique and not appear anywhere else online. Building unique content takes work.

Another form of duplication can happen when you fail to manage permutations of your URLs. When you attach a tracking code to your URL, for example, you create two versions of a URL, both of which will return the same content. You can help guard against this by managing the issue through the use of the rel=canonical attribute.

Like farms

Like farms are similar to link farms. In this instance, you’re essentially trying to manipulate the “likes” you receive by agreeing with others to like each other’s’ content. These types of approaches are very obvious to a search engine, and we simply ignore the data we see. It wastes your time and does nothing to help your rankings. Read more here about like farms (and link farms, too).

Auto-follows

Using an auto-follow service to help grow the number of followers you have on Twitter is another dead end. You essentially end up following as many people as follow yourself. To Bing this looks non-authoritative. If, however, you have 4,000 followers and follow only 100 people yourself, this reflects a situation that many people want to hear what you have to say; a sign of authority. Learn more about what it takes to be an authority here, and how to grow your social following the correct way, here.

The thin content approach

Thin content can describe many approaches to producing content. To help you understand what it is, we’ll explain how to produce content which is not “thin” in nature. When producing content, your goal should be to provide deep details. Enough information that anyone who arrives on your website would need no further sources to feel they have everything they need to understand what they were searching for.

We covered how to build quality content in a previous article, so check that out for more information. Just remember to avoid trying to take short cuts when you produce content. The search engines need good quality content to return worthwhile results for searchers. If you fail the quality content test, you simply won’t rank and drive traffic.

The Future of Search & Social

Duane Forrester — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:13:06 GMT

Ever wonder what’s behind the merging of social signals into search? Not too long ago, all SEOs had to worry about were the old standbys: title tags, links, content, etc. Today, and in the future, social signals play a larger part in ranking, so what’s an SEO to do?

Why it’s happening

This is fairly easy to explain. While most folks like to point to the rise of Facebook and Twitter (and other social sources) and say their growth has forced search to integrate social signals, the deeper answer is based in more mundane science. Psychology.

Most savvy marketers are keen observers of human nature and behavior. The search engines are no different. We watch what people do and see if those behaviors will lead us to understand search patterns on a deeper level. With so many people sharing so much about themselves socially, it was inevitable that we’d be able to use this data to help us refine search results.

Look further, though, and you’ll see that beyond sharing more about themselves, people use social connectivity to help them make decisions. Most people, for example, will hold off on making an online purchase until they’ve “talked to a friend”. Think of your own actions. When finding a great deal on something online, do you immediately take out your credit card, or do you bounce the idea off someone first? While the answer is largely dependent on a bunch of factors, larger purchases fall into the category of “bouncing off a friend”.

Now, what if, while you’re performing those searchers, and finding the results, your friends were along for the ride? What if you could see in real time their thoughts on the subject? This is part of the reason why you see Facebook results inside the Bing SERP results. Helping you complete your task faster means bringing your friends along while you search, effectively giving you their vote on any topic in real time. This can have a big impact on whether you purchase something now, or wait until talking with someone.

Keep in mind these examples tend to work when generalized across many, many searchers. There will always be exceptions to this thinking, and I’ll submit that most in the search industry fall into the exception category. We tend to search differently than your average citizen.

Another example of social supporting search is the refinement of crowd-sourced opinions. Today it’s much easier to see the accumulated results of “likes” and “tweets” as they pile up the numbers, indicating a kind of popularity. Even those new to a topic can see that an article with 100,000 likes must have something going for it.

And while the obvious, visual signals of this popularity may come and go in the SERP results, the effect of those gains in exposure certainly can influence how an item ranks. Given no other signals for a new piece of content, a strong social signal can help your item get noticed and possibly take an early lead in rankings, allowing other signals to accumulate and either support or refute the assigned rankings. That’s right, just like a big hit of social exposure can help you rank, a lackluster result can leave us wondering if you should be ranking.

This doesn’t mean you need to panic if every tweet or post doesn’t suddenly go viral. There’s also the long term effect of interacting with your followers, the links they spread on your behalf, the consistency you show and so on. And let’s not forget that there are still a ton of other factors to weight in before you’re ranked, so don’t sweat the slow starters.

What to do

Be engaged. Easy to say; time consuming, all-encompassing and life altering to put into action. The simple truth is that if you want to get the most out of social and the benefits it can have on search, you need to invest in it. You need to build a relationship with followers where you deliver quality items to them, and they remain loyal to you because you’re the best. No easy task, as you’re going to need to experiment with topics, post types, link structure, time of day, day of week, tone, the type of hook you use and so on (ego, humor, controversy, etc.).

This is not something that happens overnight, so as you’ve heard so many times, create a plan. Execute that plan and stick to it for a while. If you are diligent, you will build a social following and become a resource to those following you. What a good example of how to get it right? Guy Kawasaki nails it time and again. Short, simple, catchy tweets. Each with a link to highly interesting, useful items. He runs an 8 hour cycle, ensuring 3 tweets a day for each item, which means pretty much everyone has a chance to see his posts at least once. He has a team that helps him manage this, but the path is pretty clear and the results speak for themselves.

The benefits are many

It’s easy to rat-hole and get stuck thinking SEO, 24/7. How does social benefit my SEO work? It’s important work, though you should approach social with a broader view. Social can help the engines find your content; it can spread links to your content widely. It can encourage followers to build actual links to your content, which directly helps your SEO efforts. And beyond all of that, let’s not forget that social can drive a lot of direct traffic to your website under the right circumstances.

On top of all that, there’s the longer term, more subtle benefits of how you or your business is perceived. As you grow that social footprint and prove to followers that you are a go-to resource that word spreads to others who may never have heard of you. Friends love to tell friends about cool, new, useful things they find online. Get your social program right and that cool, new, useful thing they share could just be you.

It’s easy to see why social factors into the world of search so heavily. And this trend will continue as the next generation of socially-savvy users are poised to share even more information online that we ever did. This will lead to more refined search results, greater personal relevancy and searchers finding what they want faster. Social is here to stay for all the right reasons.

Looking back on 2011

Duane Forrester — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:48:00 GMT

2011 is almost in the history books, so now seems like a great time to take a look back over the year and remember what we’ve been up to here at Bing Webmaster Tools. First hand it’s easy to see how quickly a year can slip by. Being inside a search engine is an amazing place, and this year saw solid growth for our Webmaster program. We covered a lot of ground attending conferences all around the US, met a ton of folks face to face and brought an entirely new depth to our Webmaster tools. Let’s take a look at some of the work, improvements and new tools launched this year.

Traffic Reports Depth

Early in the year saw us adding more information in the Traffic reports. This includes the new detailed traffic stats feature. We are showing much more information to the webmasters including:

• Average impression and click positions for their top 100 queries
• The specific pages showing up for a particular query, including their impressions, clicks, CTR, average impression and click positions, and position details.
• Their top 100 pages including their impressions, clicks, CTR, and average impression and click positions.
• The specific queries showing up for a particular page, including their impressions, clicks, CTR, average impression and click positions, and position details.
• Trending over time for their top 100 queries.

These additions made it easier for Webmasters to see which phrases were driving traffic, and to which pages on their websites that traffic was going.

HTML5

Around this same time, maybe a little earlier, we addressed the need to install Silverlight to view the reports by moving the tools to HTML5. With this move, we made it easier for users to interact with our reports and saw report load times slightly improve as well. This move meant our reports were now viewable in all modern browsers and on smart phones as well.

Crawler control

Users asked loud and clear for ways to control the crawler, so in addition to the usual avenue open via your robots.txt, we built a tool that allows you to easily drag and drop a graph to set the crawl rate specific to your website. It’s as simple as creating the crawl patter you want. This means it’s easy to tailor our crawling efforts to times when your bandwidth is least affected. Telling us to stay away during peak business hours, and visit when everyone is asleep is as easy as clicking your mouse. We added a checkbox for you to let us know if we’d encounter AJAX URLs along the way, and there is an option to simply let us figure it all out for you.

The times shown were all GMT, so we added a layer to display your server time relative to GMT, hopefully making it easier to understand when your peak business hours hit, and allowing you to build a control graph around those hours.

Index Tracker

Our Index Tracker tool received a thorough backend rewrite, improving coverage, performance, depth and latency. When these improvements released, even brand new websites saw all of their data as the Bing index held it. No longer having to wait 48+ hours meant Webmasters could understand what Bing was actually indexing and how it was performing much faster.

User Permissions

We introduced user controls and permissions. Site owners could now grant admin, read / write, or read-only access to other users for their site using their existing verification code. This made it much easier for businesses to manage their accounts, share access and control who could turn the knobs and pull the levers. This layer of control allowed businesses to manage account ownership and access at a new level, ensuring, as employees moved around, access and control of these tools remained in hand.

Sitemaps

We enhanced the Sitemap UX by showing not only user submitted sitemaps, but all sitemaps we know of. We also expanded the types of feeds we accept enabling folks to submit Atom, RSS and xml.

User Experience & Communications

Working to make it easier to navigate inside the tools, we added a second layer to the tabbed navigation, which you see when logged in.

In an effort to improve communications, we enabled the ability to tell us where to email you and what to email you. If there was an alert appearing inside your account for malware, as an example, you can now opt to receive an email alert to the address of your choice. This made it much easier to know when something was happening.

Block URLs

Our “Block URLs” feature got a backend overhaul to include more built-in safeguards, helping to protect webmasters from accidently blocking large numbers of URLs. While the control is still in your hands, there are added layers of checks on our end that prompt confirmations before actions take place.

Improved speed

We did some work on how we cache all of your website data, as well, resulting in a dramatic drop in latency from, in some cases 5 seconds for a report to load, to 400 milliseconds for the same report now. That dramatically improved the performance of reporting.

Know more, faster

Later in the year, we expanded user email communication preferences and controls. It’s easy to stay up to date on the latest announcements and alerts applied to your account. You can set frequency preferences, select options on which alerts you want notifications for and set a dedicated email and contact number.

Expanded Crawl Details

The expansion of Crawl Details meant you would now see all URLs attributed to header codes and notations made. This was a great step forward to understanding which URLs Bing was having issues accessing, and makes it much easier to understand if any high value URLs are being seen by us in ways you’d like to change.

URL Normalization

To help you manage parameters in a more in depth manner, we expanded the number of parameters you could assign us to manage from 25 items to 50. This made it easier for larger and older sites to manage legacy URLs.

Webmaster Account Verification

This was one folks were asking for all year, and we managed to get it in with one of our Fall releases. Being able to verify a website via a DNS change. Past choices included adding a snippet to your <head> code or uploading a dedicated XML file to the root of your site, and both options remain as valid ways to verify your domains. This third option will allowed you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain as well.

adCenter CPC Integration

In an effort to help businesses understand how they can easily expand their inbound traffic, we began showing CPC data from adCenter inside your Webmaster accounts. When looking at Traffic data, to the left of the keywords you now see CPC amounts associated with those keywords in adCenter. This is an excellent way to understand the practical cost of driving more traffic through paid search, and can help in targeting keywords you perform well for in organic search, thereby increasing your business’s footprint on the search results page.

We met with thousands of people face-to-face, and we’ve spent time with everyone from single person businesses, to startups and large brand names. It’s been a solid year of gathering feedback and working to improve our products. We’re looking forward to more of the same in 2012, with you telling us what you need most from us.

It has been an incredibly busy year for the small team here at Bing Webmaster Tools. We’re excited for 2012 and meeting even more folks at the shows. Keep your eyes open for more updates and new tools as we make our way through 2012. Above all, thank you for supporting Bing Webmaster Tools as we continue to grow and improve.

9 Things You Need to Control

Duane Forrester — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:25:00 GMT

When building or managing a website, it almost goes without saying that you need to be in control. You need to be able to make changes to certain elements if you home to optimize the website properly. Let’s take a look at nine items you should be sure are firmly within your control when you start optimizing a website. And we’re not just talking search engine optimization here. Think broader than that. Think of truly building a better, more useful website, for both the engines and your visitors.

Rel=canonical

Being able to tell the engine which version of your URL you’d like to have attributed as the original is pretty useful. This handy command can help you build value on the version of the URL that matters most to you, and help combine value attributed to many version of the URL into one location, helping boost the rank of that one, original version of the URL.

The tough part here is usually getting the code installed on each page, and of course, each instance needs to point to one selected URL for this to work. We’d rather you didn’t use the rel=canonical to cover issues where your CMS needs work. If the CMS is causing instances of duplicate URLs to occur, you should fix the problem. We see increasing usage of the rel=canonical across huge numbers of pages on large websites. While we don’t really like this, either, we can work with it, as we understand the need to balance the workload and the returns.

The bottom line, though, remains that you need to be able to manage the rel=canonical, and if you don’t have control over when its deployed, which URLs they point to and when it is used, you need to work it out.

Robots.txt

Seems like a no-brainer, this one, but so many websites remain without a robots.txt file. In some cases it’s a purely missed opportunity, or the site owner is unaware of what a robots.txt file is. In other cases, though, it’s the inability to place a file on the root of your domain.

Regardless of the blocker, the robots.txt file is one of the most important files you can place on a web-server. Given it is the location search crawlers reference to understand how to interact with the website, it’s a pretty powerful document. If you do not have access to place your robots.txt in the correct location, you need to understand why this control is lacking. Then solve the problem.

Sitemap.xml

This is another file missing from a huge number of websites today. Another important file the search crawlers look for. One that is referenced inside the robots.txt mentioned above, and one which can help get more of your pages into the search index. Overall, it’s almost as important as the robots.txt file, and if you cannot place these files in a location the crawlers can find, you need to fix this issue.

This file typically lives on the root of the domain, but for larger websites, where multiple files may exist to capture all of the URLs present, maybe only a sitemap directory file is on the root. Whichever your case, it’s important he crawlers can find it, and if you cannot access the root on your server to place files there, it’s a missed opportunity.

Rich Snippets

Marking up your content has been around for a few years now, and with the launch earlier this year of www.schema.org, the major engines have made a clear statement there is value in marking up your content. By embedding these elements in your page code, we can extract information more accurately and use that information to provide increasingly richer search results. You are credited as the source for the data used. This is important work for sites seeking to differentiate themselves from the pack as we move into 2012.

Websites need to balance the future value versus the workload to implement, and still need to keep in mind that implementing these elements won’t immediately increase rankings. This works helps us better understand relevancy.

What’s important here is planning for the work and ensuring you have buy in across your organization.

Title, Description, Alt Tags, etc.

Managing your title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, etc. is still important. All these basic, on page/technical seo factors add up to help us understand what your content is relevant for. The bottom line with these items is you need to be able to manage them. If you cannot change these elements on a per-page basis, you lack needed control. We only mention three here, but you can think of all of them.

That meta description you don’t care to alert and let appear across all you pages? While writing unique ones for each page won’t suddenly vault your pages to number 1 in the rankings, it can make the difference between a searcher clicking on your result in the search results or not. Think of the meta description as the “call to action” then, when read by a searcher, tells them why they should click your result. Better to have your words appearing in our search results than random text we take from the page because your meta description was low quality.

We use the meta description as an example, but the same level of thought should be applied to all of your on page optimization efforts.

Content

This might seem pretty obvious, but with so many website still aggregating content or using article services to build out pages, its worth mentioning. We talked about how to build good content a little while back and the value of “article-site content”, but we still see websites trying to get ahead in the rankings by basing their websites on a thin content model. Such sites are often very polished looking, and while may provide value in aggregating a lot of items in one location, they still aren’t adding anything new and unique to the conversation. A website designed primarily to hold affiliate links that get the user off the website quickly and into a shopping cart on another website is an example of a thin content website, though not the only example. Affiliate links on a website can be completely useful, but when the content on the site is duplicating that from the original website, there’s simply no reason why that thin content site should outrank the real deal.

Control as applied to content means you can influence the creation of quality content on the website. If the website is not producing unique, quality content, it won’t last long in the search results.

Verification access

This is pretty straight forward. You need to be able to place the verification code in place to use webmaster tools. This oculd be in the form of embedding a tag in the <head> cod eof your webpage, or by a notation added in the DNS for the website. No matter the option used, you need to have access to make this happen, and if you do not have that access, you lack the control needed to then be able to access some of the richest data about your website online – our webmaster tools data.

UX improvements

If you don’t have a website your visitors love, you’re missing an opportunity. Get cracking on a user experience review and see where you’re bleeding users. By staying tuned in to what users like and dislike about your website, you can make the myriad small changes needed to field a UX-winning site. And if you keep visitors happy, they share you more often with friends, netting you more links. Visitors are also more likely to come back to you again in the future if they like the site and find it easy to get what they’re after.

It might seem like a small thing, to focus on the user experience, but that UX directly influences the happiness of visitors and the engines can see that in how they reach to your site when they see it ranked in search results. If you don’t have input on UX improvements, you need to push. This is an important aspect of optimizing any website.

Social sharing integration

This almost goes without saying, but we still see so many websites not involved socially with their visitors. Social isn’t going away folks, and while it does take work, skipping social integration is a missed opportunity. People share what they like with friends. If you have social sharing icons embedded in your pages, you are much more likely to get shared by visitors. At the very least, you need to cover this angle. Get the buttons embedded into your pages so your visitors can share you content with their friends and followers.

The next step is to engage with them socially by having conversations. That is entirely within your control.

These nine items are not in any order and aren't meant to cover every single thing you need to be in control of, but should at least get you started down the right paths. And remember, control may mean many things ranging from you making the actual changes to you exerting influence over others who do the work. In the end, though, if your job is to optimize the website, you need to be in control of the things that influence your website.

Getting flagged as malware? Some insights.

Duane Forrester — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:31:00 GMT

Malware. Just mention the word and watch people cringe in fear. No one likes it and most seek to even avoid saying the word out loud, lest they be stricken by something nefarious. The topic should not be taken lightly, as getting infected with malware can have dire consequences. From your brand being tarnished to identity theft, nothing involving malware is a joke.

Which is why it’s taken so seriously by the search engines.

In fact, you’ll notice, inside your Bing Webmaster Tools account, we even post alerts to you if we think your site is associated with malware in some way. The next step, announced last week, is to send you email alerts when we flag a URL on your site for malware, making sure you have the best chance possible of seeing this important information as fast as possible.

To get the alerts via email, make sure you’ve enabled your account to receive emails. When you log into your account, look to the left and you’ll see the SETTINGS > Preferences option – click this and you’ll see the information below. Make sure to fill in an email address you frequently check, otherwise we will email the LiveID associated with your account. These emails do you no good if they go to an account you don’t check.

You have to explicitly check the box stating you would like to receive communications from Bing Webmaster tools. Our privacy policy is handy, but the nuts and bolts are that we won’t be sending you advertising and we won’t share the email with anyone.

Tell us the frequency of emailing you’d like to see, then be sure to select the types of alerts you want to be notified of from the list provided. Finally, hit the Save button at the bottom. You can change these settings at any time.

Now, if we see malware associated with your website, you’ll receive not only the alert message inside your tools account, but we’ll also send an email to the account you provided.

Why we flag for malware

The answer might seem obvious, but the reason we scan sites for malware is to protect searchers. It won’t do us any good to send searchers to a formerly trustworthy site to have the searcher’s computer infected with malware. That is very bad for business. In fact, we will even go so far as to remove a listing from the index if that’s what it takes.

Some instances of being flagged for malware aren’t so clear cut, however. From time to time we encounter scenarios where the site itself is trustworthy, but something the site is associated with, such as an advertising network, may have been flagged for malware. If your “partner” still has the issue, we’ll flag your listing to ensure searchers remain protected. If the ad network, in this example, has cleaned up the issue, the flag may still trigger (and thus an alert appears), but we’ll leave the result in the index as we know the threat is passed and the alert from an older instance.
Now, it’s often not as simple as something being infected or not. While offending code can be easily removed, we have to gain trust again, which is never easy. If the offending code can be easily removed, it can just as easily be placed back in when we reinstate links within a result.

What this all boils down to is if you’re seeing a malware alert in your account, don’t panic. It may not in fact be your site that is infected. It may be a service you’re using to port something into your website, like the ad network mentioned above.

The point is you needn’t panic, but you should investigate. If you see the warning, and know your own site is clear, check the Search results. Are you still appearing there? If yes, you can ratchet down the anxiety another level. But get started investigating on what’s causing the flag, and don’t forget to look to service providers you are connected with. Being flagged for malware for a short period of time will generally not interfere with your ranking, as we understand it’s usually not a webmaster’s fault.

Step one, though, is to make sure you’re able to get the email alerts. Sign up for an account, enable the functionality and we’ll keep you looped on anything we find.

Bing Webmaster Tools Fall Updates

Duane Forrester — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:20:00 GMT

We’ve spent the better part of a year now hitting the shows, running surveys and holding focus groups. Along with the information we captured direct from the webmaster community through those sources, there is the daily flow of inbound suggestions and, yes, items needing to be fixed, that we can draw insights from. Today we’re rolling out the latest features and updates, most of which come directly from user feedback. You spoke, we listened, worked and are now delivering.

Continuing our commitment to help publishers do more on Bing, today we’re announcing our biggest updates since Honey Badger, by focusing on three areas: To share more data, to increase transparency and to bring you more useful tools.

To start with, we’re expanding Crawl Details information. This means we will be showing you all inbound links to a given URL regardless of the heading. So anything listed under the 300, 400 & 500 codes will, by URL, display inbound links to the URL. As well, any URLs listed under the Robots.txt and Malware headings will also share data the same way. You are now no longer limited to just seeing inbound links which point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.

Active email alerts will be expanding. If we place an alert in your account for Malware, you’ll get an email. If we would like to access more of your content, more deeply, we may send you an email asking you to review your crawl settings. If you’ve got them turned down, slowing us down, this is a chance to increase the crawl rate and for us to get more of your content, faster. The setting will remain under your control, but we’ll email the suggestions.

We’re going to be placing URL Normalization suggestions inside your Webmaster account now, too. They will all be disabled by default, allowing you to choose which, if any, elements you want to incorporate into the controls. We realize that with this increase in information, some sites may hit limits and be forced to choose which elements to include for normalization while leaving others out, so we’re also increasing the number of query string parameters that can be normalized per site from 25 items to 50 items. This doubling means you can place many more items in the system for normalization. As always, though, we encourage websites to find ways to fix any canonicalization issues at the source.

Our Index Explorer tool is now being populated with deeper data about your website. As we continue to expand our depth and share, we will continue to update data for domains. Your most visual clue to this change will be in the Traffic Data appearing within the Index Explorer tool.

With this round of updates, we’re also enabling DNS verification for domains in your account. Past choices included adding a snippet to your <head> code or uploading a dedicated XML file to the root of your site, and both options remain as valid ways to verify your domains. This third option will now allow you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain as well.

For the final enhancement, we’re integrating data from adCenter inside your webmaster tools accounts. Specifically, when viewing Traffic data and looking at the keywords which drove traffic to your site, you’ll notice an Avg CPC column on the left now, with more details in a floating pane to the left of that.

The normal traffic data remains as usual to the right, across the page, and you can sort as before. This new feature allows you to quickly see keywords, and associated CPCs, helping you plan your marketing efforts more effectively. Clicking on “Buy this keyword” takes you towards your adCenter account, where you can login and complete the process.

These features are available now in your Bing Webmaster tools.

Want to be an authority? Here’s how…

Duane Forrester — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:07:05 GMT

Everyone wants to be an authority. Everyone wants to be acknowledged for their, well, knowledge. Everyone wants the increased ranking and traffic that comes when an engine sees you as an authoritative resource. But so few actually plan a path to success, thinking instead that blasting everything they find across Twitter and auto-following everyone will boost their numbers and get them recognized as an authority.

Let’s take a look at what it really takes, shall we. And when we’re done here, I encourage folks to add to the list of items, actions and approaches noted as there are bound to be some points missed here, though this will serve as a solid starting point.

Knowledge

Be honest here. If you only just started learning SEO, paid search marketing or social media marketing, simply repeating your last lesson doesn’t make you an authority. To develop into an authority takes experience. There’s a certain “been –there-done-that” which enables seasoned pros to anticipate future changes and roll with the punches. That comes with years of experience, not months of experience. That comes with having run your own websites and watching them succeed and fail. All that experience, that hard won knowledge, contributes to you being an authority.

Community

To be an authority usually means others in your community recognizes you as such. This doesn’t just apply to the SEO community, either. I’m sure even florists and locksmiths have their own yearly conference where the best of the best are celebrated. Being recognized by your peers takes time. First you need to hit the radar. Then you need to prove you’re contributions are valuable. Then you need to continue those valuable contributions. Hopefully any pot-holes you step in along the way won’t be too deep, lest they derail you. Making mistakes is not an issue, just own them and try to move forward. Your experience will help stabilize you in rough waters.

Your work

This needs to speak for itself. Don’t worry if you first work is on your own website. Don’t fret that no one has ever heard of the domain you work on. We all started exactly there at one point. No one was born to this industry, we all learned by doing and even today precious few useful training resources exist in a formalized sense. True, there are a lot of online resources, but trying finding an SEO course to study at your local university. A place your next employer will likely contact when verifying your resume. So make sure you keep track of your work, the success and learning moments, both. This is the stuff you’ll need to have handy to prove to an employer you’re an authority. Sure, they never heard of that last domain you worked on, but you increased traffic 700% and that’s what counts – you’re good at your job.

You as a resource

Others look to you for advice. This is where others reach out to ask your opinion on things. A simple version of this in action can be seen in Twitter accounts. No need to even follow people to see it, either. Take a look at the following/follower ratio of folks claiming to offer expert services. Are they roughly equal? It’s a safe bet they’re using an auto-follow feature to boost follower counts. True authorities have numbers skewed to many more followers than following. No, this “rule” isn’t carved in stone, but check some of the accounts of people you know are authorities. Notice a pattern?

Sharing

First off, no one became an authority without sharing what they know. For people to feel you’re an authority, they need to hear your thoughts. So share. Share wide and far. The world is a big place and almost every point of view can gather a following online. Don’t be afraid that by sharing you give away secrets and others can beat you. In fact most of what you’ll tell people will cement your authority in their mind while they will fail to act on your advice. You’ll also find that other people are more willing to share with you when they see you sharing with others.

Study

Take the time to look through data, watching for interesting trends or points others aren’t speaking about. Bring these ideas forward. Sure, some will be duds, but that happens to everyone. Those items you point out that do take hold, however, elevate you in the minds of those seeing the idea for the first time.

Authority – engine-style

Its generally held that when an engine assigns deep links to the content of your website, you’re an authority. And while this is more or less true, the engine seeing you as an authority happens well in advance of those links appearing.
As you produce useful content, we try to match that useful content against queries. If the actions searchers take indicate they are pleased with your content as a solid resource, then we try you again the next time. This testing happens a lot. Hundreds of thousands to millions of times, depending on query volumes and content matches.

We watch the patterns of interaction and soon enough, those resources that searchers seem to be particularly pleased with start to float to the top. We’re not just talking click-through-rates here, either. We’re talking the entire signal-set that influences ranking at work here.

Do you have unique, useful content? Check.
Do you produce new content frequently? Check.
Do you have a solid history? Check.
Do you have trustworthy links pointing at your content? Check.
Do you have an active social presence? Check.
Do people retweet and like your social content? Check.

…and so on down through the long, long list of signals it goes. The bottom line is that when the engine decides your authority is growing, you start ranking higher more often. In most cases your first clue is increased traffic. And at this stage both you and the engine are happy. You’re getting traffic and the engine is showing authoritative resources to searchers, making the searchers happy.

So, if there is a top-tip for becoming an authority, it’s to share. You can’t fake the other elements for very long, so don’t try. The surest, straightest path to getting the search engines to see you as an authority is to have others consistently tell us you are an authority. We’d love to just take your word for it, but, ah… some might take advantage of that.

Articles and syndicated content - help or hindrance?

Duane Forrester — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:13:00 GMT

Dictionary.com shares this meaning of “syndication” (see #8) when used as a verb: to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places: Her column is syndicated in 120 papers.

In most cases, being syndicated is seen as a positive thing. You’ve hit the big time, you’re in demand, people what to hear from you. All good signs you’ve made it. Naturally syndicated content on the Internet, when exposed to search, causes some ripples to form in the fabric.
As the author of the content, you don’t have much to worry about. Your deal is to write and then be seen across a range of websites. The websites, however, have some cause for concern, as the engines are unlikely to simply rank the same article highly over and over, just because that article appears on a different domain.

The author my face the issue that their own website is constantly outranked by more widely known domains (think of popular news websites). In the big picture, though, this is a small concern. In fact, if you’re a syndicated author with work appearing across a range of online properties, chances are good you’re not allowed to post that same content on your own website anyway. That alone negates the problem for the author around their content being wrapped up in a duplicate content battle with a higher profile website showcasing the same content. The higher profile website may outrank the author simply because it is more popular. If users prefer the trusted news website over the author’s own website, the news site will have more links, greater traffic and will end up, in the long run, outranking the author’s own website. Now, don’t go running to the hills thinking popularity = outright rankings. I’m drawing a broad picture here – it shouldn’t shock anyone that highly popular websites tend to outrank lesser known websites.

The smart move for the author in this scenario is to leverage their relationship to build links from those popular websites back to their own. They should work to include a link to their own website in any “BY:” line or bio posted on the site using their content. This is old-school guest blogging at it’s very best, in fact. The author’s own site not only gets a boost from the inbound links, but will see direct traffic, allowing the author to build a loyal following of direct readers that last beyond their syndication agreement.

Now, all this information is great, I know, but let’s get to the meat of the matter here. Using syndicated articles on your own website. After all, many folks online are not the authors, but the syndicated location using the authors’ content.

I’m going to set aside the “legalities” side of this discussion, as this is a search blog, not a legal blog. We can work from the understanding that any time you are using someone else’s content on your website, its being done so with permission. This post also takes the view we’re talking about content that is openly crawlable, not behind a login and intended to be indexed and ranked.

Now, the idea of using articles as content on a website has exploded over the last few years in popularity. Article sources are seemingly everywhere and are viewed as a quick way to get content to build out a site on an almost endless number of topics. Prices vary for the content, and in most case, the old axiom of “you get what you pay for” seems to hold true. The article sites often allude to their articles being able to “help with your SEO”, and some even make the claims outright. They are playing off the idea that depth of content matters to the search engines, and while depth of content certainly can play a role in determining your value to a searcher, it’s not the only signal.

In fact, one item often overlooked in an article website’s marketing material is the fact that the content they serve up is usually duplicate in nature. Unlike a popular author who is syndicated across major news sources online, almost anyone can be syndicated through article websites. The main point often glossed over, however, isn’t where an author may be syndicated. It’s whether the content is unique. Unique as in “appearing in one location only”. The truth is, that on any popular topic, a decent article will likely be used by many websites. The article sharing site is happy to have multiple websites looking to use the article. They receive a piece of each payment for usage. Or they receive a link back from every site using the article. In either case, they benefit from that article being spread far and wide.

The author can benefit for exactly the same reasons as the article website. In fact, the one who doesn’t get the intended benefit is the end-user website who was simply seeking content to build out their site. That link points their users to an often unrelated service, so even that outbound link holds little value to visitors of the website. Any payments they made to the article site won’t necessarily pay dividends in helping their rankings.

And let’s not forget those unscrupulous consultants and agencies who will charge a client for creating content for them, only to raid the cupboards of an article site, then tell the client the content is unique. Happens every day, sadly.

To a search engine, duplicate content simply shows there is an issue somewhere. It could mean the CMS needs to be tweaked to cure a duplicate URL issue. It could mean a lack of interest in producing unique content, instead thinking that buying content from other sources will work and the engines won’t notice.

Setting aside the duplicate content issue, you’ll often find that articles from services lack basic things like proper punctuation, proper grammar and even, sometimes, the proper syntax, leaving the item nearly unreadable. Publishing something like this on your website raises quality flags for the engines. Worse, if visitors to your website see lack luster content, thin content or unreadable content, they’ll signal their displeasure by simply leaving you for another website.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the engines see the Internet not as a series of linked object, viewed in series, but as a blanket, viewed in its entirety, all at once. This means we can, and do, see instances of duplicate content wherein the same article is used across multiple websites. The bottom line here is using articles from a service, unless they are verifiably unique, is risky. At best such articles won’t hurt and your visitors may still feel they’re useful. At worst everyone from the engines to your users will lose faith, causing your rankings to plummet.

Before anyone heads for a ledge, we’re not talking about the use of one or two articles here or there. We’re talking about bulk use of articles comprising the majority of a site’s content. No, there is no “tipping point”. If there were, we wouldn’t be able to share it as the goal here is to help folks understand the value of producing quality content, not to define the edge of the shortcut.

Ask yourself this as a test: “Is most of my content unique? Did I create it? Does it appear anywhere else on the Internet?” If you answered anything other than “Yes, yes and no”, you have some work to do. Understand, some types of content are exempt. Things such as specifications for an item will, by their very nature, end up duplicated. Quotes often surface in many locations. That’s not an issue for anyone. Unless it’s the only content on your page, but then you have a thin content issue.

Search is a complicated business. Sweat your content. Make it good, make it unique and make it easy to find. Taking shortcuts through article services can often lead to the engines simply ignoring you. Avoid the pain and invest in creating your own deep, unique content. That combo wins every time.

…and if you’re looking for a way to figure out if your content is unique or not – or even if others are using your content, here’s a simple test:

copy a portion of a paragraph, or a random sentence (more is better)
head to Bing's home page and slip what you copied into the search box
hit the button and see what comes back

As noted above, there are legitimate instances when content will end up duplicated across websites, but if you take a random sample from your content that you believe to be unique, and it turns up on other pages, it’s worth investigating further. It could simply be someone quoting you, so nothing to worry about there. It could be someone copying your content, and you might want to follow up on that. Or it could be the content is from an article service and has been used on other sites, not just yours.

Managing redirects – 301s, 302s and canonicals

Duane Forrester — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:14:00 GMT

Almost every website will reach a point when they need to implement redirects. Whether it’s because you moved content around, or you’re moving to a new domain, redirects can help you keep the traffic flowing, pass the value URLs have been assigned by the engines and help keep bookmarks working for your loyal visitors.

You don’t need to fear implementing redirects, but you should understand which is best to use and their limitations. Let’s take a look at the most common redirects.

The 301 redirect defines a redirect which tells the search engine the content has moved permanently to a new location. This is preferred as it clearly states the intent to move and instructs the engine to transfer any value the URL has accrued from the old URL to the new location. It’s important to know that the 301 redirect does not pass all of the value from an old URL to a new one. The new URL does need to build its own level of trust with the engines, which is why we won’t simply transfer full value to new URLs.

The 302 redirect defines a redirect which states the content has moved temporarily and will return to its original URL shortly. This redirect will still move people to your content, but the engines are essentially being told to hold their assigned values on the original URLs and wait for the content to return to the original URL. This is not what you want. Be careful when requesting redirects be implemented, and clearly define that you need to have a 301 in place. Otherwise, you can lose value from your original URLs, leaving your new ones to struggle on their own.

Heads up now, as this is where we give you a peek under the hood and insights as to how Bing thinks of 301 and 302 redirects. While the information above is technically correct, sometimes the real world forces us to make compromises.

We are always cautious about the information we find on websites, as from past experience we know to watch in case you’ve made an error. We sometimes see 301s changing destination each time we crawl them. In such cases, even though a 301 is in place, we tend to view them as 302 redirects. The flip side to this is that we sometimes see 302s which are always linking to the same destination each time we crawl them, acting more like a 301 redirect. So our system may think about them more like 301s as we continue to crawl them again and again.

You can obviously help us by providing the right redirection. That’s always best, but this does mean that if you have a large number of 302 redirects currently in place, you can move on to other work as we’ll figure them out.

Next up, let’s take a look at the rel=canonical element, what it does and how to use it properly.

It’s important to understand that a rel=canonical is not a true redirect. There has been a lot written that it’s “basically like a 301 redirect”, which can be misleading. The purpose of the rel=canonical is to help the engines understand when an individual URL is essentially a duplicate of another. The rel=canonical element does suggest to the engine that any value assigned to the duplicate URL be assigned to the original URL, though. This is similar to how the 301 functions, which is the origin of the over-simplification noted above.

The biggest difference between the two is that while a 301 redirect physically moves a visitor to the new URL, the rel=canonical does not physically move anyone anywhere.

Something else you need to keep in mind when using the rel=canonical is that it was never intended to appear across large numbers of pages. We’re already seeing a lot of implementations where the command is being used incorrectly. To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages, yet correctly across a few others on your website.

A lot of websites have rel=canonicals in place as placeholders within their page code. Its best to leave them blank rather than point them at themselves. Pointing a rel=canonical at the page it is installed in essentially tells us “this page is a copy of itself. Please pass any value from itself to itself.” No need for that.

We do understand that doing work at scale requires some compromises, as it’s not easy to implement anything on a large site page by page. In such cases, leave the rel=canonical blank until needed.

Getting back to redirects before we wrap up this post, if you’re starting a new website, keep in mind you’ll need to control the redirects if you move domains. This is important when considering whether to start your site on a hosted service like Blogger or Wordpress. Be sure to understand whether the service will turn on redirects for you if you choose to leave their service for your own, stand-alone domain. Most won’t.

The same thinking applies to services offering to optimize your pages on-the-fly by interrupting the request, rewriting the code and presenting a cleaner URL or even an entire page. Such services work by placing themselves between the requestor (say, a search crawler) and your server. You don’t need to do much, as their system will give you clean URLs on the fly. The trouble for you can begin if you ever choose to leave behind their services. At which point the URLs the search engines have indexed are coming from your service provider's servers, not your own. If you turn theirs off, you lose the value assigned to those URLs. Your own URLs will be seen by the engines as brand new, forcing them to start over in the hunt for rankings. All links built to your website are actually pointed to the clean URLs on the service’s severs, not your own, so all direct links cease to exist as well, so this breaks bookmarks.

Now, any links pointed to your root domain will remain intact, but that doesn’t help the rest of your content and pages.

Redirects are small things that can wield a lot of power. Be sure to do your research so you understand not only what will happen when you turn them on, but how it will work as well. This is one area you don’t want to guess at. Ask your IT staff or consultants to clearly explain what type of redirect they’re going to implement, how it will work and which URLs will be covered.

For large redirect projects, you’ll need to get dirty and redirect all that you want to keep the value from. There’s no simple way around this. Skip mass redirects to a single page, as most won’t end up passing value, and remember: keep all redirects pointed to pages which are relevant to the original. Skipping this step negates the value.

As a closing thought, be sure not to stack redirects. Doing so almost ensures we won't pass the value through to the end.

How to build a social following

Duane Forrester — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:12:44 GMT

With social playing such an important role today in your overall online marketing efforts, it’s important to get things right the first time. As the old saying goes, first impressions matter. Getting a do-over in today’s face-paced online business environment is tough, especially when everything you do is recorded, archived and essentially available to anyone willing to search almost forever.

Now you might be tempted to blast straight ahead in your quest to grow followers and friends. Maybe you’ve heard that these data points matter to the search engines, and you’re looking for the fastest way to thousands of new fans? Well, slow your roll my friend. The surest way to develop the right type of followers and friends is to deliver the goods. No shortcuts.

Delivering the goods means impressing people enough that they want to connect with you. Bring people value and they will follow. From the dawn of time this axiom has been true and it remains true in the glare of social’s spotlight as well. As you prove your value to people, they will follow you, friend you, spread your word and recommend others join the crowd as well. If you WOW these people every day, they will remain loyal and help boost your profile online.

I won’t lie to you – this takes work. It takes time. It takes dedication.

If you’re tempted to take a shortcut, think of this. What good are fake friends? How much value do false followers add? The answer here is … none. You see, it’s not simply the number of friends or followers you have that signals value to a search engine. It expands to include patterns and volume of sharing. Retweets count, as do shares, Likes, etc. False friends that have been paid to “Like” something or fake followers on Twitter don’t show patterns of behavior that look normal. They look spikey and abnormal, so we simply ignore them.

The bottom line here is if you pay a service to provide a boost to your numbers, it’s going to be a waste of money. Fake friends don’t share your posts. They don’t retweet your tweets. They don’t click on your links. They simply cost you money and offer no return.

The Mechanics of Building a Following

Let’s take a look at what it requires to build a following on social spaces. This list is broad, but applies to almost all social spaces online today.

Build a plan – sit down and write out a plan around how you plan to approach engaging via social media. Figure out why you’re engaging, who you’re planning to engage with and what value you will bring them. Part of your plan needs to include a schedule for your postings as well.
Choose your handle wisely – for most this is an easy step as the account is tied to a business. Avoid the temptation to use your personal account, however, as information you share personally may not interest your business followers. Don’t sweat it if you cannot secure the handle you want most. Simply select another reasonable handle and get focused on your work.
Get started and don’t stop – remember that plan mentioned above, well, here is where you put it to work. By planning what you will share in advance, it dramatically speeds up your process of publishing content and reduces the amount of work you need to do. Writing posts, finding links and building tweets become much faster if you remain focused on your planned topic. Knowing exactly when you’re going to post helps plan your day or week so you can easily build the content.
Be consistent – plan for vacations, holidays and time away. Your followers want to hear from you, and you have to remain reliable for them. Nothing hurts your relationship with followers like random posts and proving you’re unreliable.
Bring value – skip jokes of the day, skip positive affirmations and skip posts about your lunch. People following you have agreed to trade their time for something of value. You will need to test posts to determine what “value” is, but a safe starting point is something with a link to useful content. Bring your followers useful content and they will remain loyal. Bring them useless information and they will stop paying attention. A “no post without a link” policy is a reasonable starting point for fresh posts/tweets.
Be responsive – if people reach out to you directly, respond. Thank them for retweets and sharing your information. They didn’t need to share, but felt what you posted was valuable enough to send to their friends and followers. Respect that and acknowledge it.
Limit the selling – if all you do is send messages selling your product or service, people will quickly tune out. While you may feel that 25% discount on your product is value, if that’s all you communicate about, people will tune out. It’s fine to mention your product when relevant, or to even schedule posts about your own product, but be sure to balance that with other information which is not focused around selling your product.
Track your links – when shortening URLs for sharing, be sure to use a service that allows tracking of clicks on those URLs. This will help you understand what items people are actually clicking on, allowing you to fine tune what you deliver, focusing on only successful patterns.
Install social sharing icons – be sure to install social sharing icons on your own website. Making it easy for visitors to your website to share you content can dramatically increase how far and fast your content spreads socially.

While this list isn’t exhaustive, it should get you started. Social is about relationships. It’s about forming the relationship based on value and respect. The good news is anyone can apply the steps above to their own product, service or website. Just be sure to remember that as with all good things, building a social profile and following takes time. Avoid the temptation to take shortcuts, invest your time wisely and you’ll find success.

Link farms and Like farms – don’t be tempted

Duane Forrester — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:11:00 GMT

With our very busy lives, it’s easy to be tempted to engage in tactics that would seem to create efficiencies for us. Signing up for, or paying for services which appear to take the pain out of critical tasks like managing your social program properly, or building links to your content may seem like a smart move, but be warned. You may be setting yourself up to fail in the long run.

What is a link farm?

Simply put, a link farm is a service which builds links to your content. Usually, they do so from within a network of known websites. The network is formed often with the sole purpose of gathering a number of locations from which to point link at a client’s website. The client sees a report detailing all of the websites that the link building program is obtaining links from, and the webmaster feels better as the number of links increase. A smaller variation on this theme is the three-way link exchange. Site A links to site B. Site B links to site C. And site C links to site A, completing the triangle.

Companies offering link building services will rarely, if ever, tell you they are operating a link farm, so be very careful when you opt to sign on for any link building programs. Remember, it’s your domain that can be harmed, not theirs. And what do you get for the hard earned money you’ve spent on such services? Well, most times you get a lot of links from unrelated sites pointed at you. After all, no network of websites being used to build links is as broad as the entire Internet itself. Thus, some topics will be a closer match to the websites inside a network, while others will only be loosely related.

If you remember that we want to see links between related websites, this alone should be enough to steer you away from questionable link building tactics. But there are more hard lessons to be learned.
All those links pointing to you may suddenly appear, which is an obvious giveaway to the engines that something is less than organic here. People don’t suddenly build thousands of links to one website overnight. Or, more specifically, that can happen, but it’s usually accompanied by other signals such as a trending topic in the news, social media programming, etc. The bottom line is we can see sudden bursts of new links for what they may be – spam. And what happens at the end of the month when you’re sitting in the meeting explaining how you spent thousands of dollars on link building efforts and yet there has been no change in search traffic. Worse, if the tactics employed by the service you hired were seen as problematic by us, it could have hurt your ranking efforts. It’s worth keeping in mind that any company offering link building services is doing so to many clients at once. This is great if they are reputable. If they are less-than-reputable, however, we see their repeated tactics at play and may opt to take action against the domains involved. Since that includes your domain, you could be hurt. In most cases, the vast majority, we simply opt to ignore the value of the links and move on. You still net no gains, but you also get no big penalties.

What is a like farm?

It should be obvious that a like farm is simply the social equivalent to a link farm. Amazingly, though, people think this approach works. The rationale being that is social signals matter to search, they can ramp up the volume of the “like” signal in Facebook, causing a related boost in rankings. The logic may seem fine, but when you recall that we can see sudden explosions of links as spammy, it’s easy to understand how we can see sudden explosions of likes as spammy as well. To be fair, there’s more to it than that.

Anyone could suddenly “go viral” and accumulate a lot of likes very quickly, so we look beyond just like/time to find patterns. And if there is one thing a search engine is good at, its seeing patterns online. Like farms tend to be built around a core network of accounts. You pay someone to like your site, content or whatever, and they go out across their network and like you. Its artificial and we know it. Organic likes rarely follow obvious patterns. In fact, if there’s a pattern to organic liking, it’s one built around chaos. Like farms, however, no matter their size, end up looking obvious by comparison. In the image below, you can see what an accumulation of likes look like to us when graphed. In the first image, we see a like farm in action. A limited number of accounts all engaged in communal liking of each other’s content.

In the second image, the difference is clear. You can see how the sharing of the content and liking of the content began at a number of locations and spread organically from there. The red dots represent the origin of a like, then the blue dots show friends from each red dot liking the item as well. When you see it as a graph, it’s very obvious the differences between organic and like farm activity.

In most cases, if we spot like farm activity, we simply ignore the signal. Again, you may have paid for a service which is bringing you no value in boosting your search results. This also points out why it is so important that you manage your social media program. At the very least, if you are outsourcing the management of your social program, you need to keep an eye on things. Short cuts can add up eroding any value you were trying to achieve.

The ideas presented above are meant to be broad. I’m sure there are examples when having a network of the same people liking your content can be beneficial, but broadly speaking, we don’t value those signals as highly as normal, organic social growth. Same can be said for links. Having more links can drive direct traffic to your website, which is fine. Just don’t count on them to always bring value to your ranking efforts as well.

If you take one thing away from this post, please take away that quality wins. Quality links, from quality websites. Quality social signals from a quality program. You may think you’re saving time with short cuts such as link farms and like farms, but be assured, our short cuts are much faster. We simply ignore the results of spammy tactics. Invest your time and money in a quality-centric approach and you’ll have much more success.

18 things you need to know about SEO

Duane Forrester — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 21:46:00 GMT

Let's take a look at some of the bigger ticket issues folks should focus on when optimizing their websites. This list is not meant to cover everything, but to focus in on some of the more important aspects you should look at addressing. The first part of this list is presented in a rough order of importance based on getting work done. In many case, you'll find your own circumstances won't allow your focus and investments to match this list. Don't sweat it. This list represents the ideal for a freshly planned website, prior to being built out. If your circumstances slide you in at random points in this list, don't worry about it. The point is this is a solid place to start from. As opposed to, say... investing time in a link buying program, or in a social "liking" scheme.

Crawlability

If a crawler can’t access your content, the content won’t be indexed by search engines, nor will it be ranked. Enable and use XML sitemaps with a low error rate to build trust with search engines. Make sure your website navigation is clean and strive for a simple, search-friendly URL structure. This means the URL is keyword rich and avoids session variables or docIDs. We suggest you use robots.txt files to instruct the crawlers on how to interact with your webpage and more easily find your content.

Site Structure

Provide a site structure with strong functionality, which helps encourage link building. Linking to both trusted outside sources and internal content shows a search engine you care about users getting the best data around their query. In addition, HTML sitemaps ensure a good user experience and help search engines discover all your pages and content.

Content Hierarchy

When you plan your website’s content hierarchy, take care in aligning your content with what searchers are looking for and their intent during their journey on your URL. Basic keyword research can also help you understand how searchers are interacting with search engines, and can help craft your content strategy. Also avoid placing links and content inside rich media applications, such as Flash and Silverlight, which make it almost impossible for crawlers to find and read the content. Just gotta have your rich media? Not to worry. Make sure a solid downlevel experience exists and we'll still find your content.

On-Page Factors

Follow a few simple guidelines for the area inside the code of your webpage denoted by the <head> tag. Each <title> should be short, about 65 characters, and unique to the page. Include the keyword you’re targeting for that page near the beginning of the title. The <meta description> tag can be longer and should also contain the keyword or phrase you’re targeting. All content should be unique to every page and be based on keyword research. Don't worry about investing time discussing whether the <h1> tag outweights the value of a proper <alt> tag. Invest your time in producing better content. Splitting hairs doesn't move your rankings nearly as much as excellent content.

Content Production

Content is king, but not all content is fit to rule. What the engines seek is compelling, unique content. And while we judge what "compelling" means to a degree, what's more important is how searchers react to your content when we show your webpage to them in a search engine results page (SERP). Your job is to create content so compelling that visitors to your site feel no need to look elsewhere to have their needs met. The worst approach leaves you to seem "thin" in your approach. This essentially means you aren't really providing content of value. An example of this would be a website aggregating content from multiple sources on one page. Such an approach amounts to little more than a links page related to the query entered. While you may be tempted to say, "But that helps the searcher by bringing everything they need into one location", remember that that's the search engine's job. We bring the results back so the user can click on links to find the content. Adding yet another layer of clicking by showcasing thin-content links pages doesn't help the search find what they seek faster. From the SERP page to the searcher's goal, these types of pages add another click layer, making the task completion process longer, not shorter.

When you build content, ask yourself if you've answered the need the searcher expressed. Now ask, if you've covered any related topics that come obviously to mind. Ask yourself why your webpage stand out. Why is your webpage better than all the rest? What does your content bring forward that others miss?

This is why content from articles or syndication cannot stand alone and rank successfully. Unique content brings forward elements that others may miss, which is why that content outranks others targeting the same phrase.

Link Building

When you build links, work to get targeted keywords inserted into the anchor text to boost relevancy for the targeted search term. This increases a link’s perceived value to both users and search engines. Encourage links to your page by integrating social network icons which allow visitors to easily share your page. More eyes on your page can increase the odds it will be linked from an outside source. And remember that inter-linking between your own domains can look like a spam tactic. The best way to get links, though, is to provide excellent, unique content. You should avoid services which claim to be able to build you a number of organic links for a fee. Often they claim things like "Get 100 organic links in 7 days for under $50!". We can assure you the value of almost every one of those links will be pretty much zero. Whether the link comes from a spammy website, or we simply see a repetitive pattern, we'll discount the value you were hoping to obtain from the links leaving you out money with no gains to show in the rankings.

Things we love

Beyond the items listed above, here are a few items we love to see websites doing. While none on their own will vault you to the top of the rankings, they remain best practices you should look to engage in. These are not in any order of priority:

RSS feeds - get them up and running and keep them clean. By following your feeds, it's easier for the engine to get your latest content. This means we see it faster, so indexing, ranking and showing in the SERPs can happen faster. Want to really impress Bing? Get into your Bing Webmaster account and insert your RSS feed URL into the sitemap submission flow.
Mark it up - check out the ideas presented at www.schema.org. This jointly supported protocol (Bing/Yahoo/Google) enables you to "mark up" your content, essentially embedding tags into your page code to help us better understand your content. This can range from videos to images, recipes to geolocation information. Lots of tags are supported today, so hit the schema.org site to see what's applicable for you. Again, this helps us better understand your content, and the better we understand it, the more likely we are to be able to return you for matches to queries.
Wonderful UX - sites that have an excellent user experience tend to rank better. Why? Because people like them. Yes, it is that simple. While you need to work on a lot of signals to be successful in search, you also need to find a balance. Page load times are a perfect example. Some sites take this one signal to the extreme, paring down their site to an absolute minimum hoping PLT will vault them up in the rankings. The trouble with this approach is that by removing things from the page to speed page load times, you erode the user experience in most cases. While machines calculate page load times in fractions of a second, humans are much more forgiving. Stay focused on pleasing your human visitors first and foremost. You shouldn't ignore PLT, but taking PLT from 1/2 second to 1/4 second will be largely lost on your visitors. The engines will appreciate it, but if you had to remove content or functionality to save the 1/4 second load time, now your UX for the humans has suffered. Balance, ...with humans first.
Social love - manage social or social will manage you. That's a fact, Jack. Plan your approach to social carefully and execute consistently. Build your presence so that followers see you as an authority and a resource. Again this is a balancing act, but one you can get attuned to quickly enough. Just make sure you bring value to your followers consistently. People like links in their inbound tweets and wall posts - don't disappoint them. Fill your social program to the brim with value and folks will love you. Pssst...we see all this happening and it helps us determine the sentiment surrounding your pages, products and services. Good is good, bad is bad. Even if you’re not active socially, you still need to monitor social spaces to understand what others are saying about you. Are happy shoppers spreading the good word about you? Are unhappy shoppers telling their stories to the world? These are things you need to know.

Before we wrap up, how about a few things you should avoid?

cloaking
link buying
like farms
link farms
three-way linking
duplicating content
auto-follows in social media
the thin content approach

This post is not meant to contain every topic you should be looking at when optimizing your website. In fact, this would only be a very short subset of such a list. Hopefully this will help folks get focused in some key areas, though.