LIVE BLOGGING FROM AGILE SEO MEETUP
John Borkowski, September 10, 2012
On behalf of WebiMax, thank you for joining the Agile SEO Meetup featuring SEO experts Bill Slawski and Chris Countey.
7:08pm - Chis Countey speaking toward Google Authorship
7:12pm - "Google is the referee in the world of SEO"
7:12pm - "Deliver quality content, or it will be susceptible to algorithm changes."
7:14pm - "If your competitors are optimizing for certain keywords and you're not, you're left out."
7:14pm - "If your domain isn't even indexed anymore, you have a LONG way to go!"
7:14pm - "Banned domains, unnatural link building, Panda update, and the Penguin update are all working against you if you're conducting black-hat SEO."
7:15pm - "On-site SEO Playbook: Maximum Indexing Crawling, Unique Page Titles, URLs, File Names, Code Architecture, Microdata, Authorship, and Trust signals and Page Speed."
7:17pm - "If you don't put in a Meta Description, Google will decide what should go there. Take away their ability to assume."
7:20pm - "What are you competitors doing off-site? We MUST make sure we are building links the proper way. Will other people want to read this?"
7:21pm - "Having your business listed in credible directories, such as Chamber of Commerce, is fine. Directories such as 123business is wrong!"
7:25pm - "Check out Ian Laurie on Twitter, great insight and knowledge and you'll laugh all day."
7:26pm - "Ross Hudgens @RossHudgens is another valuable source for link building and competitive analysis."
---- Bill Slawski takes the stage ----
7:28pm - "I told my parents I was here to talk about 'crawling' tonight --- they didn't quite get it!"
7:28pm - "There are 3 main aspects to a search engine. It crawls, indexes them, and shows them to searchers."
7:28pm - "Robots when they first came out, people started writing programs to interact with them and abuse them."
7:30pm - "Martijn Koster developed the Robots.txt protocol."
7:31pm - "Important web pages have a high backlink count, have a high PageRank, and are in or are close to the root directory for sites."
7:34pm - "Most crawlers will not only be Polite, but they will also hunt down important pages first."
7:35pm - Search Engines filed patents on how they might crawl and collect content found on Web pages."
7:38pm - "IBM came out with a patent for link merging to distinguish between the amount of different backlinks on a webpage."
7:39pm - "If they see content structures, they might say 'this is different, we may count as 2 independent links as groups'."
7:40pm - "We know Search Engines crawl, we don't know how well they crawl."
7:40pm - "Search Engines like it when there is only 1 URL per page and you can set this up to be different URLs per page. This makes a difference!"
7:42pm - "What happens when you have an E-commerce page with over 50 links per page? The Rel="prev" and rel="next" page is here to help associate these pages together.
7:44pm - "This also works well for article pages, an article that is broken up amongst multiple pages. This tells Google these pages are together."
7:45pm - "The Rel="hreflang" tells the search engine that these are the same pages, they're just in different languages. We see this on multilingual pages including FedEx, UPS, United Nations, and so on."
7:49pm - "XML Sitemap's are a way to create alternatives for search engines to crawl web pages. These can be discovered without having the crawler physically crawl your web pages."
7:50pm - "Use Canonical links, remove 404s, Validate with an XML Sitemap Validator."
7:50pm - "Crawling versus XML Sitemaps. Google said they were discovering content on webpages faster with XML's versus crawling."
7:51pm - "Yahoo came out with a patent not too long ago saying 'we're going to crawl social media'."