16 now iOS 14 launched September 2020. Apple made a change where if you do a search in


An Apple Search Engine? — Whiteboard Friday

iOS default search screen the Siri suggested websites used to be powered by Google's web


index. iOS 14 changed it to Apple's own web index. They've already got a web index and


they've got a page on their website where they tell us about that web index. On that


page I describe how their Apple bot works. They've got a web crawler that for the last


three years or so can already render JavaScript something that took Google 20 years or so


before they had that. So they've got a mature crawler. On that page they also outline their


top search ranking factors, the top five search ranking factors they have and it's things


like links, web page design characteristics which sounds like core web vitals and page


rank. And so the search ranking factors look very similar to Google. They've got a crawler


very similar to Google. On their page they talk about how if you've got no Apple bot


specific rules in your robots.txt file they'll follow Google bot rules. So you can see the


direction of travel. They're trying to crawl the web in a similar shape to Google. But


I think that's a distraction. I think there are several things that they could do differently


if they wanted to build a bigger search engine and we're going to talk about the three differences


I think they could have that would allow them to build a search engine in a very novel way


that would compete with Google in a way that we haven't necessarily fully understood. So


let's talk about that. So the first thing is federated search. Consider how you do a


search on Google. You type in Madrid and it goes and it looks in Google's one giant database.


That database has a web index, knowledge index and all of that stuff. But it's essentially


looking in Google's own singular database. With Apple it's tempting to think okay well


they've got a much smaller web index than Google. They can just go and look in that.


But what I actually think is they'll use a federated search approach. Federated search


is when you delegate a search to multiple different providers and then aggregate the


results. In Apple's case I think they could delegate the search to all the apps on your


device and basically you do a search for Madrid and rather than just looking in the web index


it might say well this Madrid search the intent might be to book a hotel somewhere look in


the hotels.com app. The intent might be to book a flight somewhere look in the Skyscanner


or the Lufthansa app. It might be learn a language, Duolingo. It might be get a travel


guide so you look at the Lonely Planet app. Point being that they would ask all of these


devices and then blend the results from multiple different sources together. But how would


they know what apps on your device can cater to what intents? In 2020 they rolled out a


change to the operating system that allowed apps being installed on your device to register


a list of intents that they can cater to which is very interesting and it seems like 2020


is a year where they started launching a lot of these things and setting up for this potential


search engine. And so you get a search that went to their web index but also searched


through the apps on your device blended those results together. As further evidence that


they will blend these results I managed to reverse engineer the API they use for their


web index and when you do searches you get searched one list of results. You don't get


web results and knowledge results you get one big list of results sorted by relevancy


and it might be news, web, web, maps, whatever. Point being it shows Apple's thinking. They're


concerned more of relevancy than where the results came from and they're happy to blend


them together. Okay so they've got this federated search approach so let's talk about how these


searches can also have custom UIs. So when they rolled out the change to allow an app


to cater to specific intents that app can also tell the phone oh when you're catering


to this specific intent here's a snippet of user interface you can use outside of the


app to cater to that in the best possible way. As an example if you ask Siri to split


a check it understands that the calculator app on your phone can cater to that intent


but it doesn't send you to the calculator app instead it shows a custom UI snippet right


there in the search results where it shows you how to split that check. And so apps being


installed on your phone can say I can deal with this sort of intent and this is the best


way to present that result to users. And it goes one step further at the same time they


also launched app clips. App clips are what Apple describe as small parts of an app. What's


important about app clips is that they get streamed to your device so you can scan a


QR code or click a link and it'll go straight into the app clip. There's no need to install


a full application on your device. App clips are designed to do one small part of what


a full app would do but basically frictionless in loading them up. So an example might be


imagine you arrive in a city you've not been there before you're running late and so you


do a search for scooter and rather than just searching the apps on your device because


Apple have got this database of app clips and they've got almost two and a half million


apps in their app store. They could also serve that intent. So you search for scooter Apple


say yes here's an app clip that can help you with that. You press the button you go straight


into the app it directs you to a nearby scooter you pay for it with Apple pay get an excursion


off you go. This is a mobile native experience. You didn't go to any website you didn't install


an app. Everything happened right inside the search results. So Google have been moving


to this mobile first paradigm but it's still web first with Apple there's potential for


a mobile native experience and this is something that Google could only dream of. What is also


true is that this federated search approach would allow Apple to completely bypass Google's


strengths. Google's strengths are the fact that they got this huge web index and they've


been building that for 25 years or whatever. With a federated search approach Apple could


cater to many of the same intents without needing to replicate Google's web index and


their rankings and all of that magic. So if you're going to build a search engine you


probably also want to be able to personalize results. How Apple going to do that especially


considering that they position themselves as the sort of privacy centric tech company.


So first thing quickly consider the difference between Google Photos and Apple Photos. On


Google Photos they will do machine learning of all of your photos on their servers in


the cloud allowing you to say show me my photos of animals for example. You can also do show


me my photos of animals with Apple Photos but all the machine learning happens on your


device and it shows the two different paradigms. So when you do a search Google will serve


you some personalized search results based on your history or whatever it might be but


it's all happening in the cloud. What I think Apple will do is serve you a list of potential


results from their web index and then user A and user B would see a different subset


of those chosen by their phone using the machine learning on the device which understands your


preferences your history what apps you've got in store etc. Final thing is that in terms


of personalization Apple have a potential advantage here too because with the federated


search approach Apple can do what I call fully authenticated personalization. If you do a


recipe search for a schnitzel recipe on Google you'll get some personalized results but it


will be from the web index. If you do schnitzel recipe search on your device this federated


search approach will allow Apple to look into your private databases. If you've got the


recipe keeper app it will see oh yes you've got a schnitzel recipe in the app I'm going


to pull that out. It might see that your mum sent you a message on Facebook about the best


way to make schnitzel so it will pull that out. This is stuff that Google can't do. Google


can't look behind the curtain into your private databases. Over the last few years I think


Apple have been playing a slow game laying the pieces to move towards this mobile native


sort of experience. So when I first started talking about this research in mid 2022 at


the Search Love Philadelphia conference I predicted that Apple would move the search


field onto the iOS home screen in order to try to change user behavior and push them


towards doing this mobile native sort of search rather than having users go into a web browser


to do a search. And then a couple of weeks later Apple announced they were doing exactly


that and that rolled out in IOS 16 September 22. Apple made it so that the search field


is right there on your home screen now trying to push people towards doing this sort of


search. What that means for us as SEOs is yet to be seen whether they move in this sort


of direction but all the pieces seem to line up. If you've got an app this is definitely


something that you should be thinking about otherwise we should all be thinking about


what this means for us over the next couple of years as Apple tried to shift the user


MozCon 2014 - 06 - Cindy Krum - Mobile SEO Geekout: Key Strategies and Concepts

Hi, everybody. Thank you for the excellent introduction, Cyrus. So like he said, my name


is Cindy Crum. I'm the CEO of a company called MobileMoxie based in Denver, Colorado. We


do mobile marketing consulting and mobile SEO. And I've been doing mobile SEO since


before the iPhone existed. So I've been doing it for a while.


The topic of my presentation or the title is called Mobile SEO Geek Out. And frankly,


I'm ready to geek out. So let's go. I'm going to start easy and get geekier as we go. So


this is the easy stuff. This shows a timeline of Google's growth in traffic as well as the


innovation, the things that they're working on. And what I want you to realize is the


stuff in the most recent years has all either focused exclusively on mobile or has been


like a throwback, a benefit to mobile that they plan to capitalize on in the future.


Google really, really cares about mobile. And that makes sense because mobile traffic


is growing. I don't think anyone walked in this room thinking anything different. Mobile's


taking off. This is a graph that shows traffic by device. And it's just for the travel segment.


So what you can see is the gray, the seasonal kind of desktop traffic over time. But then


the growth of mobile in the green and tablet in the yellow at the bottom.


And so this is just one segment. But Google knows mobile is growing and it's growing really


fast. In fact, it's projected that desktop traffic is either going to flatten out or


start to decline. What that means for you as an SEO is you have to start paying attention


to mobile. If you're not paying attention to mobile, you're going to miss out. You're


already missing out, but you're going to miss out even more.


So this is what we're talking about. Last month at a conference, Matt Cutt was talking


about mobile. And he admitted that Google never expected mobile to grow as quickly as


it has. They just weren't prepared for the growth. And then he said that mobile traffic


has not quite surpassed the number of desktop traffic searches, but he said it will very,


very soon. And that's what this looks like. And that's why mobile SEO is important.


So that makes sense, right? Mobile overtaking desktop. Because the devices are with you


all the time. When you're not at your laptop, when you're not at your computer, when you're


not at your house or your work, you still have your phone, maybe you have a tablet.


And so that's expanding the reach of search into the rest of our lives. When we're out


living our lives and not just sitting at a computer, that's when we use mobile search


the most. And this kind of shows you it plots it out by day.


So you expand your appeal in terms of time and also in terms of use case, right? This


makes mobile ideal for cross-device marketing and for really integrated marketing because


they have the devices and they can interact with TV and with outdoor media and stuff like


that, that the computer just wasn't very good at.


So I've shown you a lot of graphs and charts and frankly they're interesting. But I want


to warn you, if you're getting into mobile, if you're doing research for your company


to see where's the mobile market at, there are a lot of conflicting statistics when you


get into the nitty gritty details about mobile. And the main reason for that is that mobile's


kind of hard to define. Everyone has in their mind what they think of as mobile. But they


never think to question what the researchers think of as mobile. And so I've seen conflicting


stats because they were not including tablets as mobile or they were including tablets as


mobile or they weren't including feature phones as mobile or they were or wearables or web


enabled game systems or whatever. So I want to warn you to be wary of mobile


statistics. Be smart about the mobile statistics. And, you know, take them all with a grain


of salt unless they say exactly what you're looking for them to say and then totally go


with it. Okay. So this is important for SEO. And this


might seem elementary, but I want to go through the differences of how a mobile search result


looks to a searcher. First off, very simple, smaller screen, less results above the phone.


In both of these examples, what you see is a maximum of two results showing above the


fold. The one on the right, one and a half. You don't have the option to rank really low.


You just won't get seen. It's like being on the second page. People like when they're


searching on mobile to click on the first result.


Now that has mixed blessings, but one of the good things about that or one of the lucky


fortuitous things is just that in mobile search, branded searches or what we call navigational


searches where they type in exactly the website they want to go into the search box rather


than the address bar, much more common. So that's good for you potentially.


If you've done the mobile searches and you've checked all of the links, including the indented


results and then in mobile we have a lot more what we call sub sub links. They have an Ajax


expandable arrow and they're very light gray, but you can see it if you're looking really


hard and you click it and it points down. And these indented links obviously are to


help the searcher out so that they don't have to go through the home page if they know what


section of the site they're on and the sub sub links get you even deeper into the site.


The problem is these are kind of hard to control and in the mobile world a lot of the time


desktop results are pulled in. Mobile rankings are very tightly related to desktop rankings.


They're not separate things. And Google will often rank pages that you wouldn't expect


them to rank, pages that you haven't mobilized. Even if you're in responsive design, some


sites will do responsive design for most of their page templates but not all of them.


And it turns out that the ones that they don't do often are critical and show up they get


lots of searches. They drive lots of search traffic. So this is the first thing that I'll


do when I start an audit is I'll expand all the indented links, all the sub links, test


them and see is it a good landing page. These are the pages that you're going to get the


most mobile traffic from because they rank on your branded search. And so you need to


make sure these are all good experiences. If you have a responsive design, one set of


URLs, we'll talk about architecture more later, but if you're using the same URLs for mobile


and desktop and you have a bad experience on one of these indented links, you're going


to have a really high bounce rate on that page coming just for mobile. But it's the


same URL. So it could hurt you in the long run on all devices.


Next, PPC is a big deal. I don't do lots of PPC, but I watch PPC because in mobile the


pay per click rankings really, really push down the SEO rankings. Even ranking number


one isn't good enough because sometimes, well, I mean, it's got to be good enough, it's good


enough. But if there's PPC results there, there could be as many as three at the top


of the page, three at the bottom of the page, and if there's three and they're big with


lots of stuff going on in the PPC result, it can push the first organic ranking totally


below the fold on the mobile result. So you've got to be super careful. Obviously in PPC


most people, you know, they won't be bidding on your brand terms, but you need to be looking


to see if your competitors are bidding on your top non-branded terms, and if they are,


in mobile it could be pushing your results still ranking first, but it could be pushing


it below the fold. So that's a problem. We also see a lot more


universal style results showing up in mobile, and that makes sense from a Google perspective.


They show you images, videos, news, stuff like that, because those results look really


great on mobile phones and they're really touchable, right? They capture your eye, even


if you're only like halfway paying attention because you're driving or something, and they


get the click. So when I look at a mobile optimization campaign,


we look at the option and usually follow the option to push those universals because they're


going to have an easier time ranking in mobile, and when you push like an image result or


a video result, there's less that you're competing against. There's less in those result sets,


and so it's almost like cutting in line. You just don't have to try as hard to get those


to rank well because there's less competition there, but it's great because you kind of


get floated to the top. Awesome. Next, obviously location is a huge deal in


mobile. About a third of the mobile search traffic has a local intent, and so location,


ranking in location, super important, testing your local landing pages, making sure that


the addresses are mapped to the right place, that the phone numbers are clickable, you


have, you know, your pictures of your store, open hours, all that stuff that you would


hear in a local SEO talk, super duper important for mobile, but mobile kind of it's irritating


for me a little bit because you see all these logos, like Google can't figure out where


to put local, they've had Google Places and Google Local and now we have Google Plus for


business, and it's kind of a pin in the butt to keep track of all the rebrandings that


Google does for their local stuff, but it's worth it if you're trying to drive foot traffic.


Now, what you have to remember with local results is this is kind of like what Rand


talked about this morning, they may not click through. It's harder to measure map results


and things like this because people might get exactly what they need from the Google


result without ever getting to your Web page. So you have to kind of keep that in mind when


you're looking at the stats and say, you know what, a lot of the traffic might not even


get to the page, but they're getting to the store. Okay. This one is kind of complicated,


but I'm sure you guys have all noticed that when you do a search on your phone, sometimes


there's desktop results and a bit more rarely there's M. results or mobile results, and


that's kind of confusing, especially if you have a mobile site like an M. and you're like,


hey, where's my M. it's showing the desktop, how do we get it to show the desktop. And


the truth is a lot of the time companies who make mobile websites, M. they don't do a great


job of optimizing their title tags or their description tags. They just forget. They don't


realize that there's such a thing as mobile SEO, so they just don't do it. And so what


Google has done is unless you have really, really great metadata on your M. site title


tags and descriptions, then they'll usually show the desktop results. So they get the


great title tags, they get the great descriptions. But once they've crawled enough times where


they hit the desktop site with the mobile crawler and they see that it's redirected


to an M. page, they'll still ‑‑ what they'll do is they'll show the desktop result,


but they'll do a skip redirect and they'll say this one always redirects here, we know


it. And so they don't even serve your desktop page to wait for the redirect. They actually


straight up serve the mobile page that they know it's going to redirect to to create a


better user experience to create a faster load time on the mobile page. So they're doing


that for you. So don't panic if you have an M. and you don't see your stuff. Make sure,


though, that you're clicking through that it's getting to the right page and that it's


loading very quickly. And you'll know if it hits the desktop and then shows the mobile


URL, then you're not getting skip redirect and there might be a problem. So that's how


you would check that. Something else that Google is doing a lot of,


and this is kind of a mixed blessing, is that they're doing a lot more Knowledge Graph results.


And Knowledge Graph is kind of like Google's version of Wikipedia except they show you


the answer straight in the Google search. And they do this a lot of different ways.


Sometimes they'll do it for currency conversion and you don't have to click through to a Web


page. They'll do it for flight times, company profiles. And this feels a little icky, right?


They're taking your content, they're preventing in a way stopping people from getting to your


Web page. So that's not awesome. But what is awesome


is that Knowledge Graph is really, really likely if it's going to show, it's going to


show at the top. So it's kind of like if you can't beat them, join them, you know Google


wants to show Knowledge Graph style results. You may as well mark up your content so that


they can scrape it and get it because you'll float to the top easier and you'll get more


eyeballs on your page. And this one, it says trusted sources and


then it says activity. What it's also pulling in is it's looking a little bit at QDF and


it's giving you the company profile and then query deserves freshness style, looking for


the newest stuff on the site, in this case, recent blog post.


And it's pulling that in as well because they assume that mobile searchers are time sensitive.


And they usually are. So that's a good assumption. So you've got that to look for.


Next is the kitten, the touchable slide. In mobile we do a lot. There's a lot of strategy


that revolves around making the search results look touchable, look like something that you


want to reach out and touch. And that's often done by putting micro formats and schema.org


markup onto the page. When you do that, you get things like star rankings, you get things


like recipe pictures of a beautiful souffle or whatever, calorie counts, cooking times.


Recipes are a big one. But also you used to get authorship, not so much, or you used to


get the picture, you don't get that anymore. But all of the kinds of markup that you can


use really do show and help drive click through in mobile. Because it doesn't mean anything


if you rank and you don't get the click through. So we're trying to do two things, right? Make


them touchable. Good for mobile. Now, I haven't talked too much about tablets,


because tablets kind of make this a bit more complicated. But what you should realize is


that mobile search results obviously differ from desktop results. They look different


and they're sometimes ordered differently. The same is true for tablets. So you could


have one set of results for desktop, one for mobile, and another for tablet. Now, they're


not going to be wildly different, but they can differ. And the inclusions, the number


of universals, the number of maps, stuff that can all change depending on device. And it's


not just from mobile to tablet, actually. It's actually by device and more specifically


by screen size. And this example, it's the same search, and


I'm going to show you on the next slide how it changes. It even changes from landscape


to portrait. You can see the related searches on the right on this screen, all gone. Down


at the bottom. So that all changes how people are searching. And it's harder to measure,


but it's important to know, important to be aware of.


All right. So let's get a bit geekier. How is mobile SEO as a practice different? What


do I do different during the day than a regular SEO would do? And so there's three kind of


main groups that I organize these thoughts into.


The algorithmic focus for mobile is a bit different. First, you have to realize there


is a mobile crawler that's crawling content as if it was an iPhone 4. And they're ranking


things. It goes to the same index, but a different algorithm is used to rank things when you


do a mobile search. They can detect that you're on a mobile phone and they change things.


Usability, Google is starting to crawl for usability, especially on mobile, because they


want to rank really good mobile experiences. Desktop linkage, how well if you have desktop


and mobile URLs, how well is the desktop able to share its rankings and how well has that


been set up to do it? And then so that's algorithmic.


Strategically, I focus a lot more on the look of the SERP, the look of the search results,


and then getting those micro formats right and compelling and causing people to want


to touch. And then social. Social is a big deal in mobile, obviously.


And then the last is, and this is kind of where I tend to spend most of my time, is


the technical stuff. Mobile is very technical. So I end up doing a lot of technical SEO stuff


on mobile sites because a lot of the time developers have never built mobile sites or


they're using platforms or there's just a lot of technical errors that can happen that


you have to be careful about. So this is kind of how I visualize or I think


about it. In mobile SEO, you either have a multiple URL site where you have M dots, maybe


even T dots, and the desktop, or you have a single URL solution where you're serving


everything from one set of URLs. And in general, the orange piece shows that


a lot of mobile SEO is just creating or maintaining a strong association with the desktop content


that's already crawled and indexed. Beyond that, it is where I spend a lot of time. After


we've got that done, which can be a task, it can be hard, then the nuance comes in getting


the schema and page speed and the usability up.


So here, ooh, back. Here is the secret underbelly of mobile SEO, is I spend so much time spending


and sorting out things like crawler confusion, really inefficient crawls, loads of domain


errors that can be caused by developers or platforms who just don't understand SEO, and


other kinds of problematic indexing. And so mobile SEO is actually less about rankings


per se and more about creating a successful kind of mobile traffic interaction, and honestly,


it's about making sure that you and your brand don't look like a moron on mobile. Just keeping


it real. So let's get into a little bit geekier realm.


We're going to talk about mobile architecture. So this is the easiest kind of architecture


to understand because most of us have seen it and perhaps done it, is having an M dot


with mobile specific pages and having a www with your desktop pages. You can even add


in a T dot if you want for tablet specific pages, but the idea is these are separate


pages on separate domains, and you use what's called user agent detection and redirection


to get people to the right version of the page for the device that's requesting it.


So what will happen is the desktop page is ranking, they click on it from a tablet, the


server sees that they're on a tablet and automatically redirects them to the T dot version corresponding


page or M dot or what have you. And Google's created something to help us tell them when


we're doing this, and they call it bidirectional annotation. And what it means is on the desktop


you set up a tag in your head that says rel alternate and you link to the alternate versions


of the page, so the M dot version from the desktop in the code. And you say, hey, Google,


we have an alternate version of this page, it's mobile and it's right here. And you could


do that for tablet too. If you have a tablet T dot, then you do both of them and you link


to both of those pages. And then on the M dot you link with a canonical tag back to


the desktop version. So you create this marriage, right? You create this thing where they're


both pointing at each other and they're tight, right? It's saying Google, these two go together,


they should be combined. And then they get to share SEO values. So that's great.


The next option that Google started to talk about is called selective serving. And that's


almost the exact same thing. You create two different pages, but you teach your server,


you tell your server to instead of redirecting to a different version of the page, just to


serve a different version of the page on the same URL. If you've been in here a while in


the SEO industry, this might sound a little bit like cloaking. I think it sounds a lot


like cloaking. But Google has okayed this. As long as it's for the user experience and


as long as they're going to be crawling with both crawlers to match up which page is serving


what and they want to see a really, really tight connection between what's on the mobile


page and what's on the desktop page or else you risk penalties, right? So don't do that.


Don't spam. Last option, this is Google's favorite. It's


called responsive design. This is where you have one set of HTML content, one set of URLs,


and you control how the content displays based on screen width using style sheets and media


queries. So stuff grows and shrinks and rearranges itself to fit on whatever device that requests


it. And so this is Google's preference. They've


said it. Now, a common question I get is, hey, we got a call from this platform and


they said they were really good at SEO and that they're really good at mobilizing stuff.


Should we use this platform because it's really cheap and it sounds great? And the answer


is no. Please don't do that. Most of the mobilization platforms have no


concept of SEO, especially advanced SEO and technical SEO techniques, and I have seen


things that would give you nightmares or at least me because I'm an SEO. But they're not


good. So if they do, just if you do have to go with the platform, remember, you're going


to have to do the SEO yourself. Don't trust the platform, especially look for all the


errors that they create. So let's get back to responsive design. Responsive


design is important because it's Google's happy place. Google made all its money crawling


and evaluating desktop pages. So responsive design is the closest they can get to continuing


to do that because they do it well. So that's their happy place. They want to be there.


If you think about it, it's also more efficient on their resources, like their crawlers and


their indexes, their servers, because they only have to crawl it really once and then


maybe another time with the mobile bot, but it's not as important to have the mobile bot


going back constantly. It takes up less space in the index when you don't have to index


two versions or three versions of every page. It's just easier for them.


And also Google's algorithm relies heavily on links and social shares. And it's hard


when you put things on separate URLs for Google to understand when something's relevant based


on a link because if someone's sharing an m.page, then they have to go back and say,


oh, does this redirect from m. to desktop if someone clicks on it from a desktop. It


gets very complicated. Google doesn't want a deal, so they're pushing responsive and


they're saying it's the best. Here's the problem. Responsive design can


be very, very slow, and it's a skill. To build a responsive design site takes more than reading


an article about how to do it. And so a lot of responsive design sites end up being heavier


and slower than the desktop site that they're replacing. And that's a problem when you realize


that now you're having to cram this heavier, slower page onto a mobile phone over a carrier


network. So it can create a bad user experience. So you might do it in the name of SEO, but


then you're creating this horrible user experience on your website, and that's a no-win situation.


You don't want to do it. And so we get into this catch-22. Google prefers responsive design,


but Google prefers fast pages. But Google prefers responsive design, and so you have


to be really careful. So for all of the architecture options that I talked about, it's really,


really important. Google cares about page speed. And it's especially important in mobile,


and I think it's given more weight. Google hasn't come out and said it per se, but it's


given more weight in the mobile algorithm. Just trust me.


So page speed is important because, first off, if you have really slow, heavy pages,


it will slow down the crawler. It will hurt your crawl efficiency. The bots won't get


as much content when they come to your site. Fewer pages are indexed, and they're indexed


less often. It's also just really bad for user experience. You have high site abandonment,


high bounce rates, stuff like that. So people ask me, how do I know which to choose? When


do I choose responsive? And the simple answer is, if you have a simple site, responsive


design is going to be much, much easier to do. If you have a very rich, complex site,


it's going to be way hard, and you have to prepare yourself and make sure you have the


right team ready to do it. So let's dig in here. Let's talk a little


bit more about page speed, because this is super important for rankings and for creating


the conversions that you want. How do we do it? And I've kind of broken things out into


different, sorry, different levels of complexity or geekiness. So this is the simplest thing


to understand, is designing for mobile first. It sounds simple, but if you make your developers


and your designers draw out how the page is going to look on a mobile phone before they


even think about a desktop, they're going to have a much easier time because they're


going to isolate what is critical on the page, and then as they get more and more room, they


can add in the less critical stuff. It's much harder to go from a big, awesome


desktop website and then cram it into a tiny mobile phone screen. So designing for mobile


first is a big deal. There's a lot that's been written about this. Sorry. So that's


level geek. That's pretty easy. Think about mobile first.


Next is removing unnecessary code. And this sounds, again, easy, but I'm not really so


much talking about HTML comments and stuff like that. What I'm talking about is unnecessary


JavaScript and unnecessary style sheets or style sheet processing that has to happen.


Those are what really slow the load speed and make it a bad experience. And I know plenty


of developers who would just link every single style sheet that's present on the site on


every single page. Bad idea. Please don't do that. It's horrible for mobile load time.


Next is just basic stuff. Gzip all your files, including the external files that you request


on the page, and minify it. That just means removing the spaces. And there are tools to


do both of these, make your life easy. It will help make them smaller. But the problem


is you can't gzip images. So you have to save them properly and just save them at a low


level, the lowest you can without affecting the quality of the image or the way it appears.


And also, if you can, don't put separate images. Avoid the big, heavy images. And if there


are small icons and stuff like that, put all of those together in what's called a sprite.


And then that makes it one request instead of many requests, and that will speed up the


load time, too. So let's talk more about round trip requests.


Round trip requests are a big deal, and most desktop developers don't think about round


trip requests very much. But in the mobile world, it's the request, the number of requests


that will slow down a mobile load time more than the file size, usually. And so what we


see is that they if you have if you're used to building for a desktop, you could have


like 100 requests, 100 round trip requests necessary to build a page. The problem is


in mobile, every round trip request is like 200 milliseconds. So every five round trip


requests equals one second of load time. That's the math that Google does, and that assumes


3G, 4G connection. It's not like a slow connection. It's a good connection. So every five round


trip requests, one second. So you have to be really cautious about how


many round trip requests you have. You have to do things like consolidating your CSS.


There's no reason any page needs eight CSS calls. There's no reason any page needs ten


font calls. You need to look at how many times you're going back to the server to get stuff.


Consolidate CSS, consolidate JavaScript. Those bits of code can be put into the same file


so that they become one request. Well, CSS and JavaScript. But all your JavaScript in


one file, all your CSS in one file, if possible. It's usually not. Usually you have to get


to two or three or four. Fine. The other thing that Google cares about more


and more, and this is odd, is they care about the order of the code. They're now telling


Web developers that they should inline their JavaScript and inline their CSS if it controls


the design on the mobile page that happens above the fold on the screen. So you take


it out of the external file, you put it into the page, and that eliminates the round trip


request that was slowing it down. That's different. That's new.


The next thing they want you to go for is the CSS, because those can be downloaded in


parallel. And the last thing they want you to go get for external requests is the JavaScript,


because those block other things from downloading, so you want to get those last. And you want


to defer the parsing of those things until the top of the stuff, the top of the page


above the fold has loaded. So when I talk about inlining JavaScript in


style sheets, it's very different. It's a violation of XHTML guidelines. I know, but


Google says to do it. So you take that code and you don't put it in the body. You put


it where? That's funny. You got to look. It's my favorite slide.


All right. Next level of complexity, we call it Wozniak, is Google has started to care


a lot about your HTTP headers. What's an HTTP header? Oh, my gosh. It goes before the page.


When there's a page request, it goes before the page code, and it prepares the browser


for what it's about to get. And Google's page speed tool has been reporting a lot about


two kinds of caching, browser caching and proxy caching. Browser caching is like on the


phone. It saves backup copies of things you've requested before. Proxy caching is like at


the ISP level, they save things so they can say their network is really fast, so they


send it so it doesn't have to go ‑‑ the request doesn't have to go all the way back


to the server. So it kind of looks like this. The service is blah, blah, blah, and the browser


and the ISP are like, hey, wait, we've already got this. We don't need to wait for you to


send it. We've got it. And that ends up making the page seem faster, even if it's requesting


the same amount of stuff. The last thing, Google has started talking


about the HTTP header, a varies header. And this is something that you can do on any kind


of site that has mobile friendly pages. They want you to set varies colon user agent. And


that's an explicit signal to Google that you have mobile friendly content that you want


to show. And Google is going to see this and say, ah, their content varies based on user


agent. Got it. Usually many sites, especially if you're using gzip, it will already have


varies colon gzip, which just means this page varies based on whether or not you're getting


the gzipped version of the page. So you add comma user agent. It varies based on these


things. That helps caching. The problem is it can sometimes mess up your CDN. So if you


do it, be sure you do it with the blessing of Akamai or CloudFront or whoever you're


using. Don't do it without them or you'll be wasting your money on CDN that's not working.


Second favorite slide. Google cares a lot about user experience. And in the page speed


tool, they've actually included things that have nothing to do with page speed in a beta


label. And they're about mobile user experience. So they don't give these results to desktop.


But they say, look, if you're expecting this to be a mobile page, you need to have appropriate


font sizes and appropriate tap target sizes for a mobile user. It needs to be a good user


experience. So you need to essentially not make your fingers feel like shit and want


to kill themselves. Next. So some companies are saying, hey, we have a really good idea.


We're going to do this thing called single page mobile site architecture that makes the


Web site perform like the app and it's so lovely. And it is lovely. But the problem


is it works a lot like an old school Flash site where they literally use one URL and


then they use JavaScript calls to make everything happen. So when a bot gets to that, if it's


not set up properly, they get the one URL and that's it. They don't rank any inside


pages. So there are SEO guidelines for this. Google hasn't written ‑‑ I say guidelines.


Cindy's guidelines. I wrote them in my head. Not on the Web yet. But Google hasn't written


guidelines. Google hasn't endorsed this. They probably never will. But if you have something


like this, you have to set up what's called a headless browser. That's like the bot without


his head that's knitting. Headless browser that's going to go create these URLs and you


have to make sure that the Web experience that has one URL matches exactly what is getting


indexed when something that can't execute JavaScript crawls the site and then things


should still get indexed. If you're very, very careful, I don't recommend this. It's


not a good idea. Okay. So social. I mentioned social. Mobile


and social are kind of BFF. Most social interaction is going mobile in a big, big way. Less social


interaction on desktop. So you have to pay attention to social. Google has tried to get


the corner on social and it hasn't worked. Google+, lots of people not there. But watch


out what Google's doing with social because it's going to play in and it's super important


on mobile. Now we're kind of in the future. Google's also talking about entity search.


And so they're trying to scrape things and understand things in a more natural way and


disambiguating things like freebase the software and freebase the activity. And so they've


bought this company called freebase, which that's the idea, is entity search, understanding


things and how they relate to other things. And I think that's important for the future


of mobile. Open graph, these got out of order. But open graph is important if you're sharing


things, you need to make sure that they're sharing properly on mobile. And then back


to entity search. So Google wants to understand mostly so they can show stuff in knowledge


graph, but also they're doing a lot more with voice search and hummingbird. Everyone's familiar


with this algorithm update. Focused on natural search queries. And that's really important


to Google, too. So when you put these things together, the voice search, entity search,


knowledge graph, the scraping of schema.org, Google's really trying to own and still really


understand the world and present it in search results.


And so that gets us to an app which doesn't get a lot of play on iPhones but is a big


deal on Android phones because it's preloaded called Google Now, which is kind of their


intuitive digital assistant. It tries to predict what you might search for before you even


search for it. And it's kind of creepy sometimes. But they're trying ‑‑ they're using the


knowledge graph and the entity search eventually to pull in and anticipate what you might want.


And they can see your location. So like every time you leave home, it will tell you you're


15 minutes from home based on our traffic estimates. And you can set location reminders.


Like hey, next time I'm at Target, remind me to get paper towels. And like geographically


it knows when you walk into Target and it goes doo doo doo doo. And they're using this.


It's very heavily focused on voice search. And I think they're using it as a beta for


things that they want to push to Google.com. But it's a mobile app. So it's kind of I think


a glimpse into the future. And that all makes sense when you realize that Google has been


developing wearables like Google Glass. Because those you don't have a keyboard to input things


into. You have to do voice search. And doing voice search when you're wearing Google Glass


makes you look nerdy. So it wants to anticipate so that you don't have to look like a nerd.


I don't really love Google Glass yet. I think Google Glass is kind of like a segue for your


face. But it will get there. I trust that it will get there. So that's it. That's it


for me. Thank you for your attention.


Awesome job. I am a desktop guy. And that was probably one of the best mobile SEO presentations


I've ever seen. So that is awesome. As a desktop guy, though, I couldn't help but notice that


so many things you were talking about were a lot of the same things we preach in normal


desktop search, site speed, schema, everything else like that. So there seems like if you're


implementing good mobile SEO, there's dual benefits there.


Yes, there's definitely dual benefits. But what I usually say for mobile SEO is like


we take all that stuff a little bit more seriously because there's more serious consequences


if you don't have good page speed. You notice it way more on the phone.


So this is more of an observation than a question. In our biannual correlation ranking factor


study that Moz does, the last one we did about 13 months ago, site speed was a factor that


we found some significance in. And Google has said site speed is a regular factor. But


we're measuring desktop search in that correlation study. And maybe mobile is something we can


measure in the future. So I'm going to put you on the spot here. You work with hundreds


of mobile sites. Do you have anecdotal evidence? They're casually observing. When you do speed


up those sites, rank actual improvements in rankings.


Yes. Yes. And I've seen sites that go responsive with a really great team and that get faster.


And that Google does seem to be algorithmically kind of giving them preference. They say it's


because responsive is easier to crawl and index. But we see boosts when sites go responsive,


also when they go faster. It's just easier for them to crawl and index. It's not hard


math. Yes.


All right. Thanks for the talk. One thing that I struggle with is some of the terminology


in the page speed insights tool, like explaining to another marketer or businessperson what


lossless compression is or proxy caching, all that. Are you aware of a guide that would


be for dumb people when it comes to technical that we could explain to other marketers?


So I think the question is help us with Google page speed tool. It's really confusing. Okay.


Yes. It is very confusing. And it talks about a lot of things that most SEOs are not used


to talking about. I'm one of them that's used to talking about it much more. But all of


the Google page speed results click over to details about how to improve the situation.


And things like the lossless compression for images, they actually do that for you in the


Google. So they take your image, they compress it, and they say why don't you just save this


version, we did it for you so that we won't have to flag this one again.


That's amazing. Last question. Normal people want to test their mobile SEO. What are the


best tools out there for analyzing and doing that sort of stuff?


So I'm leaning heavily on Google page speed tool, especially looking at the beta stuff.


Because if they can my philosophy is if they can include it in the Google page speed tool


or anything where you just put in a URL and it gives you a readout, then it's easily something


they could gather in a crawl. And so even if they're not using those things in the algorithm


quite yet, they will be soon. But I think a lot of them are some of the 200 plus factors.


They may be small factors. But Google's been playing with the weighting of especially mobile


ranking factors a lot. And so start there. Mobile Moxie has a tool set. We're in the


process of ramping up and improving the tools.


That is mobilemoxie.com.


Sorry, I had to throw it in there. They're cool. And what else do I use? Well, so Google


page speed has plug-ins too. And that's easier if you're going behind a firewall. But the


plug-ins, the scores, they don't always match. So ignore those scores. Or just write them


down and don't cry about them. Because they change from the iterations of the tools and


the plug-ins. They're kind of weird.


Link Building - The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 6

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


We are back with our final part in the one-hour guide to SEO, and this week talking about


why links matter to search engines, how you can earn links, and things to consider when


doing link building.


So we've discussed sort of how search engines rank pages based on the value they provide


to users.


We've talked about how they consider keyword use and relevant topics and content on the


page.


But search engines also have this tool of being able to look at all of the links across


the web and how they link to other pages, right, how they point between pages.


So it turns out that Google had this insight early on that what other people say about


you is more important, at least to them, than what you say about yourself.


So you may say, I am the best resource on the web for learning about web marketing,


but it turns out Google is not going to believe you unless many other sources that they also


trust say the same thing.


And Google's big innovation right back in 1997, 1998, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page


came out with their search engine, Google was page rank, this idea that by looking at


all the links that point to all the pages on the internet and then sort of doing this


recursive process of seeing which are the most important and most linked to pages, they


could give each page on the web a weight, an amount of page rank.


And then those pages that had a lot of page rank, because many people linked to them or


many powerful people linked to them, would then pass more weight on when they linked.


And that understanding of the web is still in place today.


It's still a way that Google thinks about links.


They've almost certainly moved on from the very simplistic page rank formula that came


out in the late 90s, but that thinking underlies everything they're doing.


Today, Google measures the value of links in many very sophisticated ways, which I'm


not going to try and get into, and they're not public about most of these anyway.


But there is a lot of intelligence that we have about how they think about links, including


things like more important, more authoritative, more well-linked to pages are going to pass


more weight when they link.


That's true of both individual URLs, an individual page, and websites, a whole website.


So for example, if a page on the New York Times links to yoursite.com, that is almost


certainly going to be vastly more powerful and influential in moving your rankings or


moving your ability to rank in the future than if randstinysite.info, which I haven't


yet registered, but I'll get on that, links to yoursite.com.


This weighting, this understanding of there are powerful and important and authoritative


websites and then there are less powerful and important and authoritative websites,


and it tends to be the case that more powerful ones tend to provide more ranking value, is


why so many SEOs and marketers use metrics like Moz's domain authority or some of the


metrics from Moz's competitors out in the software space to try and intuit how powerful,


how influential will this link be if this domain points to me.


Number B, letter B, diversity of domains.


So the different kinds of domains and the rate of link growth and the editorial nature


of those links all matter.


So for example, if I get many new links from many new websites that have never linked to


me before and they are editorially given, meaning I haven't spammed to place them, I


haven't paid to place them, they were granted to me because of interesting things that I


did or because those sites wanted to editorially endorse my work or my resources, and I do


that over time in greater quantities and at a greater rate of acceleration than my competitors,


I am likely to outrank them for the words and phrases related to those topics, assuming


that all the other smart SEO things that we've talked about in this one-hour guide have also


been done.


C, HTML readable links, meaning as a simple text browser browses the web or a simple bot


like Googlebot, which can be much more complex as we talked about in the technical SEO thing


but not necessarily all the time, those HTML readable links that don't have the rel no


follow parameter, which is something that you can append to links to say I don't editorially


endorse this, and many, many websites do.


If you post a link to Twitter or to Facebook or to LinkedIn or to YouTube, they're going


to carry this rel equals no follow saying I don't editorially, I, YouTube, don't editorially


endorse this website that this random user has uploaded a video about.


Okay, well, it's hard to get a link from YouTube, right?


And it contains relevant anchor text on an indexable page, one that Google can actually


browse and see.


That is going to provide the maximum link benefit.


So A, Ahrefs equals, HTTPS, yoursite.com, great tool for audience intelligence.


That would be the ideal link for my new startup, for example, which is SparkToro because we


do audience intelligence and someone saying we're a tool is perfect.


This is a link that Google can read and it provides this information about what we do.


It says great tool for audience intelligence.


Awesome.


That is powerful anchor text that will help us rank for those words and phrases.


There's loads more, right?


There's things like which page is linked to and which page is linked from.


There's spam characteristics and trustworthiness of the sources and all attributes when they're


used in image tags serve as the anchor text for the link if the image is the link.


There's the relationship, the topical relationship of the linking page and linking site.


There's text surrounding the link, which I think some tools out there offer you information


about.


There's location on the page.


All of this stuff is used by Google and hundreds more factors to weight links.


The important part for us when we think about links is generally speaking if you cover your


bases here, it's indexable, carries good anchor text, it's from diverse domains, it's at a


good pace, it is editorially given in nature, and it's from important authoritative well-linked


two sites, you're going to be golden 99 percent of the time.


Many folks I think ask wisely, are links still that important to Google?


It seems like the search engine has grown in its understanding of the web and its capacities.


Well, there is some pretty solid evidence that links are still very powerful.


I think the two most compelling to me are one, the correlation of link metrics over


time.


Like Google, Moz itself produces an index of the web.


It is billions and billions of pages.


I think it's actually trillions of pages, trillions of links across hundreds of billions


of pages.


Moz produces metrics like number of linking root domains to any given domain on the web,


any given page on the web.


Moz has a metric called domain authority, or DA, which sort of tries to best correlate


to Google's own rankings.


Metrics like these over time have been shockingly stable.


If it were the case someday that Google demoted the value of links in their ranking systems,


basically said links are not worth that much, you would expect to see a rapid drop.


But from 2007 to 2019, we've never really seen that.


Metrics fluctuated.


Mostly, it fluctuates based on the size of the link index.


So for many years, Ahrefs and Majestic were bigger link indices than Moz.


They had better link data, and their metrics were better correlated.


Now Moz is, since 2018, much bigger and has higher correlation than they do.


So this is sort of the various tools warring with each other, trying to get better and


better for their customers.


You can see those correlations with Google pretty high, pretty standard, especially for


a system that supposedly contains hundreds if not thousands of elements.


When you see a correlation of 0.25, 0.3 with one number linking root domains or page authority


or something like that, that's pretty surprising.


Second one is that many SEOs will observe this, and I think this is why so many SEO


firms and companies pitch their clients this way, which is the number of new high-quality


editorially given linking root domains, linking domains.


So the New York Times linked to me, and now the Washington Post linked to me, and now


Wired.com linked to me, these high-quality different domains.


That correlates very nicely with ranking positions.


So if you are ranking number 12 for a keyword phrase, and suddenly that page generates many


new links from high-quality sources, you can expect to see rapid movement up toward page


one, position one, two, three, and this is very frequent.


All right.


Obviously, this is not a loan, but very common.


So I think the next reasonable question to ask is, okay, Rand, you've convinced me links


are important.


How do I get some?


Glad you asked.


There are an infinite number of ways to earn new links, and I will not be able to represent


them here.


But professional SEOs and professional web marketers often use tactics that fall under


a few buckets, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list but can give you some starting


points.


The first one is content and outreach.


Essentially the marketer finds a resource that they could produce that is relevant to


their business, what they provide for customers, data that they have, interesting insights


that they have, and they produce that resource knowing that there are people and publications


out there that are likely to want to link to it once it exists.


And then they let those people in publications know.


This is essentially how press and PR works.


This is how a lot of content building and link outreach works.


You produce the content itself, the resource, whatever it is, the tool, the data set, the


report, and then you message the people in publications who are likely to want to cover


it or link to it or talk about it.


And that process is tried and true, has worked very well for many, many marketers.


Second is link reclamation.


So this is essentially the process of saying, gosh, there are websites out there that used


to link to me that stopped linking.


The link broke.


The link points to a 404, a page that no longer loads on my website.


The link was supposed to be a link, but they didn't include the link.


They said SparkToro, but they forgot to actually point to the SparkToro website.


I should drop them a line.


Maybe I'll tweet at them, right, at the reporter who wrote about it and be like, hey, you forgot


the link.


Right?


So the link reclamation processes can be very effective as well.


They're often some of the easiest, lowest hanging fruit in the link building world.


C, directories, resource pages, groups, events, things that you can join and participate in,


both online or online and offline, so long as they have a website, often link to your


site.


And the process is simply joining or submitting or sponsoring or what have you.


Most of the time, for example, when I get invited to speak at an event, they will take


my biography, a short three-sentence blurb that includes a link to my website and what


I do, and they will put it on their site.


So pitching to speak at events is a way to get included in these groups.


I started Moz with my mom, Jillian Musik, and Moz has forever been a woman-owned business.


And so there are women-owned business directories.


I don't think we actually did this, but we could easily go, hey, you should include Moz.


As a woman-owned business, we should be part of your directory here in Seattle.


Great.


That's a group we could absolutely join, get links from.


D, competitors as links.


So this is basically the practice.


You almost certainly will need to use tools to do this, although there are some free ways


to do it.


The simple free way to do it is to say, I have competitor one brand name, competitor


two brand name.


I'm going to search for the combination of those two in Google, and I'm going to look


for places that have written about and linked to both of them and see if I can also replicate


the tactics that got them coverage.


The slightly more sophisticated way is to go use a tool.


Moz's Link Explorer does this.


So do tools from people like Majestic and Ahrefs.


I'm not sure if SEMrush does, but basically you can plug in, here's me, here's my competitors.


Tell me who links to them and does not link to me.


Moz's tool calls this the link intersect function, but you don't even need the link intersect


function.


You just plug in a competitor's domain and look at, here's all the links that point to


them, and then you start to replicate their tactics.


There are hundreds more and many, many resources on Moz's website and other great websites


about SEO out there that talk about many of these tactics, and you can certainly invest


in those, or you could conceivably hire someone who knows what they're doing to go do this


for you.


Links are still powerful.


Okay, thank you so much.


I want to say a huge amount of appreciation to Moz and to Tyler, who's behind the camera.


He's waving right now.


You can't see it, but he looks adorable waving.


And to everyone who has helped make this possible, including Cyrus Shepard and Brittany Muller


and many others, and hopefully this one-hour segment on SEO can help you upgrade your skills


dramatically.


Maybe you'll send it to some other folks who might need to upgrade their understanding,


their skills around the practice.


And I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Technical SEO - The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 5

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome back to our special one-hour guide to SEO Whiteboard Friday series.


This is Part 5, Technical SEO.


And I want to be totally upfront.


Technical SEO is a vast and deep discipline, like any of the things we've been talking


about in this one-hour guide.


There's no way in the next 10 minutes that I can give you everything that you'll ever


need to know about technical SEO, but we can cover many of the big, important structural


fundamentals.


And so that's what we're going to tackle today.


You will come out of this having at least a good idea of what you need to be thinking


about, and then you can go explore more resources from Moz and many other wonderful websites


in the SEO world that can help you along these paths.


First off, every page on a website should be two things – unique, unique from all


the other pages on that website, and uniquely valuable, meaning it provides some value that


a user, a searcher, would actually desire and want.


And sometimes the degree to which it's uniquely valuable may not be enough and we'll need


to do some intelligent things.


So for example, if we've got a page about X, Y, and Z versus a page that's sort of,


oh, this is a little bit of a combination of X and Y that you can get through searching


and then filtering this way, and oh, here's another copy of that X, Y, but it's a slightly


different version, and here's one with Y, Z.


This is a page that has almost nothing on it, but we sort of need it to exist for this


weird reason that has nothing to do, but no one would ever want to find it through search


engines.


Okay.


So when you encounter these types of pages, as opposed to these unique and uniquely valuable


ones, you want to think about, should I be canonicalizing those, meaning point this one


back to this one for search engine purposes.


Maybe Y, Z just isn't different enough from Z for it to be a separate page in Google's


eyes and in searchers' eyes, and so I'm going to use something called the rel canonical


tag to point this Y, Z page back to Z.


Maybe I want to remove these pages.


Oh, this is totally non-valuable to anyone.


404 it.


Let's go here.


Maybe I want to block bots from accessing this section of our site, and maybe these


are search results that make sense if you've performed this query on our site, but they


don't make any sense to be indexed in Google.


I'll keep Google out of it using the robots.txt file or the meta robots or other things.


Secondarily, pages are accessible to crawlers, should be accessible to crawlers.


They should load fast, as fast as you possibly can.


There's a ton of resources about optimizing images and optimizing server response times


and optimizing first paint and first meaningful paint and all these different things that


go into speed, but speed is good not only because of technical SEO issues, meaning Google


can crawl your pages faster, which oftentimes when people speed up the load speed of their


pages, they find that Google crawls more from them and crawls them more frequently, which


is a wonderful thing.


But also because pages that load fast make users happier, and when you make users happier,


you make it more likely that they will link and amplify and share and come back and keep


loading and not click the back button, all these positive things and avoiding all these


negative things.


And they should be able to be fully parsed in essentially a text browser, meaning that


if you have a relatively unsophisticated browser that is not doing a great job processing JavaScript


or post-loading script events or other types of content, Flash and stuff like that, it


should be the case that a spider should be able to visit that page and still see all


of the meaningful content in text form that you want to present.


Google still is not processing every image at the, I'm going to analyze everything that's


in this image and extract out the text from it level, nor are they doing that with video,


nor are they doing that with many kinds of JavaScript and other scripts.


And so I would urge you, I know many other SEOs, notably Barry Adams, a famous SEO who


says that JavaScript is evil, which may be taking it a little bit far, but we catch his


meaning, right, that you should be able to load everything into these pages in HTML in


text.


Thin content, duplicate content, thin content meaning content that doesn't provide meaningfully


useful differentiated value, duplicate content meaning it's exactly the same as something


else, spider traps and infinite loops like calendaring systems, these should generally


speaking be eliminated.


If you have those duplicate versions and they exist for some reason, for example, maybe


you have a printer-friendly version of an article and the regular version of the article


and the mobile version of the article, okay, there should probably be some canonicalization


going on there, right, the rel canonical tag being used to say this is the original version


and here's the mobile-friendly version, those kinds of things.


If you have search results in the search results, Google generally prefers that you don't do


that.


If you have slight variations, Google would prefer that you canonicalize those, right,


especially if the filters on them are not meaningfully usefully different for searchers.


And number four, pages with valuable content on them should be accessible through just


a few clicks in a shallow but thorough internal link structure.


Now, this is an idealized version.


You're probably rarely going to encounter exactly this, but let's say I'm on my homepage


and my homepage has 100 links to unique pages on it.


That gets me to 100 pages and 100 more links per page gets me to 10,000 pages and 100 more


gets me to a million.


So that's only three clicks from homepage to a million pages, and you might say, well,


Rand, that's a little bit, you know, perfect pyramid structure.


I agree.


Fair enough.


But, for example, three to four clicks to any page on any website of nearly any size,


unless we're talking about a site with hundreds of millions of pages or more, should be the


general rule.


And I should be able to follow that through either a sitemap, if you have a complex structure


and you need to use a sitemap, that's fine.


Google is fine with you using an HTML, you know, page-level sitemap.


Or alternatively, you can just have a good link structure internally that gets everyone


easily within a few clicks to every page on your site.


You don't want to have these holes that require, oh, it's, yeah, if you wanted to reach that


page you could, but you'd have to go to our blog and then you'd have to click back to


result number nine and then you'd have to click to result number 18 and then to result


number 27, and then you can find it.


That's not ideal, right?


That's too many clicks to force people to make to get to a page that's just a little


ways back in your structure.


Five.


I think this is obvious, but for many reasons, including the fact that Google considers mobile


friendliness in its ranking systems, you want to have a page that loads clearly and cleanly


on any device, even at slow connection speeds.


Optimized for both mobile and desktop, optimized for, you know, 4G.


Also optimized for 2G and no G.


Permanent redirects.


When you are doing them, right, so this page was here, now it's over here.


This old content, we've created a new version of it.


Okay, old content, what do we do with you?


Well, we might leave you there if we think you're valuable, but we may redirect you.


If you're redirecting old stuff for any reason, it should generally use the 301 status code.


If you have a dead page, it should use the 404 status code.


You could maybe sometimes use 410 permanently removed as well.


Temporarily unavailable, like we're having some downtime this weekend while we do some


maintenance.


503 is what you want.


Everything is okay.


Everything is great.


That's a 200.


Most of your pages, all of your pages that have meaningful content on them should have


a 200 code.


These status codes, anything else beyond these, maybe the 410, generally speaking, should


be avoided.


There are some very occasional rare edge use cases, but if you find status codes other


than these, for example, if you're using Moz, which sort of crawls your website and reports


all this data to you and does this sort of technical audit every week, if you see status


codes other than these, Moz or other software like it, Screaming Frog or a write or these


other kinds, DeepCrawl, they'll say, hey, this looks problematic to us.


You should probably do something about this.


When you are building a website that you want to rank in search engines, it is very wise


to use a security certificate and to have HTTPS rather than HTTP, the non-secure version.


Those should also be canonicalized.


There should never be a time when HTTP is the one that is loading, preferably.


Google also gives a small reward – I'm not even sure it's that small anymore.


It might be fairly significant at this point – to pages that use HTTPS or a penalty to


those that don't.


In general – well, I don't even want to say in general – it is nearly universal


with a few edge cases.


If you're a very advanced SEO, you might be able to ignore a little bit of this, but it


is generally the case that you want one domain, not several.


Allmystuff.com, not allmyseattlestuff.com, allmyportlandstuff.com, allmylastuff.com,


allmystuff.com is preferable for many, many technical reasons and also because the challenge


of ranking multiple websites is so significant compared to the challenge of ranking one.


You want subfolders, not subdomains, meaning I want allmystuff.com slash Seattle slash


LA slash Portland, not seattle dot allmystuff.com.


Why is this?


Google's representatives have sometimes said that, you know, it doesn't really matter


and I should do whatever's easy for me.


I have so many, so many cases over the years, case studies, in folks who moved from a subdomain


to a subfolder and saw their rankings increase overnight that – credit to Google's reps.


I'm sure they're getting their information from somewhere, but very frankly, in the real


world, it just works all the time to put it in a subfolder.


I have never seen a problem being in the subfolder versus the subdomain where there's so many


problems and there's so many issues that I would strongly, strongly urge you against


it.


95 percent of professional SEOs who've ever had a case like this would do likewise.


Relevant folders should be used rather than long hyphenated URLs.


This is one where we agree with Google.


Google generally says, hey, if you have allmystuff.com slash Seattle slash storage facilities slash


top ten places, that is far better than slash Seattle hyphen storage hyphen facilities hyphen


top hyphen ten hyphen places.


It's just the case that Google is good at folder structure analysis and organization


and users like it as well and good breadcrumbs from there.


There's a bunch of benefits.


Generally using this folder structure is preferred to very, very long URLs, especially if you


have multiple pages in those folders.


Last but not least, at least last that we'll talk about in this technical SEO discussion


is using breadcrumbs wisely.


Breadcrumbs are – actually both technical and on-page is good for this.


Google generally learns some things from the structure of your website from using breadcrumbs


and they also give you this nice benefit in the search results where they show your URL


in this friendly way, especially on mobile.


Mobile more so than desktop.


They'll show sort of home, Seattle, storage facilities.


Great.


Looks beautiful, works nicely for users, helps Google as well.


So there are plenty more in-depth resources that we can go into on many of these topics


and others around technical SEO, but this is a good starting point.


From here, we will take you to part six, our last one on link building next week.


How Content Can Succeed By Making Enemies - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Today we're going to chat about something a little interesting, how content can succeed


by making enemies.


I know you're thinking to yourself, wait a minute, I thought my job was to make friends


with my content.


Yes, and one of the best ways to make close friends is to make enemies too.


So in my opinion, I think that companies and businesses, programs, organizations of all


kinds, efforts of all kinds, tend to do really well when they get people on your side.


So if I'm trying to create a movement or I'm trying to get people to believe in what I'm


doing, I need to have positions, data, stories, and content that can bring people to my side.


And one of the best ways to do that is actually to think about it in opposition to something


else.


Basically, try and figure out how you can earn some enemies.


I'll give you a few examples because I think that'll help add some context here.


So I did a little bit of research.


My shared data is from BuzzSumo and my linked data here is from Ahrefs.


But for example, this piece called, There Are Now Twice As Many Solar Jobs As Cold Jobs


in the US.


This is essentially just data-driven content, but it clearly makes friends and enemies.


It makes enemies with sort of this classic old-school Americana belief set around how


important cold jobs are, and it creates through the enemy that it builds around that, simply


by sharing data, it also creates allies, people who are on the side of this story, who want


to share it and amplify it and have it reach its potential and reach more people.


Same is true here.


So this is a story called, Yoga Is A Good Alternative To Physical Therapy.


Clearly did extremely well, right?


Tens of thousands of shares and thousands of links, lots of ranking and keywords for


it, but it creates some enemies.


Physical therapists are not going to be thrilled that this is the case, despite the research


behind it.


This is frustrating for many of those folks.


So you've created friends, allies, people who are yoga practitioners and yoga instructors.


You've also created enemies, potentially those folks who don't believe that this might be


the case, despite what the research might show.


Third one, the 50 Most Powerful Public Relations Firms In America.


I think this was actually from The Observer.


So they're writing in the UK, but they managed to rank for lots and lots of keywords around


best PR firms and all this sorts of thing.


They have thousands of shares, thousands of links, I mean 11,000 links.


That's darn impressive for a story of this nature.


And they've created enemies, right?


They've created enemies of all the people who are not in the 50 Most Powerful who feel


that they should be.


And they've created allies of the people who are in there.


But they also created some allies and enemies deeper inside the story, which you can check


out.


Replace your lawn with these superior alternatives.


Well, guess what?


You have now created some enemies in the lawn care world and in the lawn supply world and


in the passionate communities, very passionate communities, especially here in the United


States, around people who sort of believe that homes should have lawns and nothing else.


Fast lawns in this case.


This piece didn't do that well in terms of shares, but did phenomenally well in terms


of links.


Now this was on Lifehacker and it ranks for all sorts of things, right?


11,000 plus links.


So you can see that these might not be things that you naturally think of as earning enemies,


but when you're creating content, if you can go through this exercise, right?


I have this rule that I've talked about many times over the years for content success,


especially content amplification success, and that is before you ever create something,


so before you brainstorm the idea, come up with a title, come up with a content, before


you do that, ask yourself who will help amplify this and why.


Why will they help?


And one of the great things about framing things in terms of who are my allies, the


people on my side, and who are the enemies I'm going to create is that the who becomes


much more clear, right?


The people who support your ideas, your ethics, your position, your logic, your data, and


want to help amplify that, those are people who are potential amplifiers.


And the people, right, the detractors, the enemies that you're going to build help you


often to identify that group.


The why becomes much more clear too, right?


The existence of that common enemy, the chance to show that you have support and beliefs


and people, that's a powerful catalyst for that amplification, for the behavior you're


attempting to drive in your community and your content consumers.


I found that thinking about it this way often gets content creators and SEOs in the right


frame of mind to build stuff that can do really well.


A few do's and don'ts if you're pursuing this path of content generation and ideation, do


back up as much as you can with facts and data, not just opinion.


That should be relatively obvious, but it can be dangerous in this kind of world as


you go down this path to not do that.


I do suggest that you try and convey a worldview, not necessarily if you're thinking on the


political spectrum of like from all the way left to all the way right or those kinds of


things.


I think it's okay to convey a worldview around it, but I would urge you to provide multiple


angles of appeal.


If you're saying, hey, you should replace your lawn with these superior alternatives,


don't make it purely that it's about conservation and ecological health.


You can also make it about financial responsibility.


You can also make it about the ease with which you can care for these lawns versus other


ones.


Now it becomes something that appeals across a broader range of the spectrum.


Same thing with something like solar jobs versus coal jobs.


If you can get it to be economically focused and you can give it a capitalist bent, you


can potentially appeal to multiple ends of the ideological spectrum with that worldview.


Third, I would urge you to get inputs from notable folks before you create and publish


this content, especially if the issue that you're talking about is going to be culturally


or socially or politically charged.


Some of these fit into that.


Yoga probably not so much, but potentially the solar jobs, coal jobs one, that might


be something to run the actual content that you created by some folks who are in the energy


space so that they can help you along those lines, potentially the energy and political


space if you can.


Some don'ts.


I do not urge you, and I'm not suggesting that you should create provocative content


purely to be provocative.


Instead, I'm urging you to think about the content that you create and how you angle


it using this framing of mind rather than saying like, okay, what could we say that


would really piss people off?


That's not what I'm urging you to do.


I'm urging you to say, how can we take things that we already have, beliefs and positions,


data, stories, whatever content, and how do we angle them such a way that we think about


who are the enemies, who are the allies, how do we get that buy in, how do we get that


amplification?


Second, I would not choose enemies or positions that you can't defend against.


For example, if you are considering a path that you think might get you into a world


of litigious danger, you should probably stay away from that.


Likewise, if your positions are relatively undefensible and you've talked to some folks


in the field and done this dues and they're like, I don't know about that, you might not


want to pursue it.


Third, do not, do not give up if your first attempts in this framing, sorts of framing


don't work.


You should expect that you will have to, just like any other form of content, practice,


iterate and do this multiple times before you have success.


Don't be unprofessional when you do this type of content.


It can be a little bit tempting when you're framing things in terms of how do I make enemies


out of this to get on the attack, and that is not necessary.


I think that actually content that builds enemies does so even better when it does it


from a non-attack vector mode.


Fifth, sorry, sixth, don't forget that if you're getting some haterade for the content


you create, a lot of people when they start drinking the haterade online, they run, right?


They think, okay, we've done something wrong.


That's actually not the case.


In my experience, that means you're doing something right.


You're building something special.


People don't tend to fight against and argue against ideas and people and organizations


for no reason, right?


They do so because they're a threat.


If you've created a threat to your enemies, you have also generally created something


special for your allies and the people on your side, and that means you're doing something


right.


In the early days, I can tell you, back when we were called SEO, Maz, right?


For years and years and years, we got all sorts of hate, and it was actually a pretty


good sign that we were doing something right, that we were building something special.


I look forward to your comments.


I'd love to see any examples of stuff that you have as well, and we'll see you again


next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


What Does It Mean When a Metric Is Correlated with Google Rankings? - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


This week we are chatting about SEO ranking factors and the challenge around understanding


correlation, what correlation means when it comes to SEO factors.


So you have likely seen over the course of your career in the SEO world lots of studies


like this.


They're called something like ranking factors or ranking elements study or the 2017 ranking


factors and a number of companies put them out.


You know, years ago Moz started to do this work with correlation stuff and now many,


many companies put these out.


So people from SearchMetrics and I think Ahrefs puts something out and SEMrush puts one out


and, of course, Moz has one.


And these usually follow a pretty similar format which is they take a large number of


search results from Google, from a specific country or sometimes from multiple countries,


and they'll say, we analyzed 100,000 or 50,000 Google search results.


And in our set of results we looked at the following ranking factors to see how well


correlated they were with higher rankings.


That is to say how much they predicted that, you know, on average a page with this factor


would outrank a page without the factor or a page with more of this factor would outrank


a page with less of this factor.


And so basically in an SEO study they usually mean something like this.


They do like a scatter plot.


They don't have to specifically do a scatter plot in visualization but of the results and


then they'll say, okay, linking root domains had better correlation or correlation with


higher organic rankings in the 10 blue link style results to the degree of 0.39.


And they'll usually use either Spearman or Pearson correlation.


We won't get into that here.


It doesn't matter too much.


But across this many searches the metric predicted higher or lower rankings with this number,


this level of consistency.


1.0, by the way, would be perfect correlation.


So for example, if you were looking at days that end in Y and days that follow each other,


well there's a perfect correlation because every day it's name ends in Y, at least in


English.


Okay.


So search visits, right, let's walk down this path just a little bit.


So search visits saying that that's 0.47 correlated with higher rankings, if that sounds misleading


to you, it sounds misleading to me too.


The problem here is that's not necessarily a ranking factor, at least I don't think it


is.


I don't think that the more visits you get from search, from Google, the higher Google


ranks you.


I think it's probably that the correlation runs the other way around, right?


The higher you rank in search results, the more visits on average you get from Google


search.


And so these ranking factors, I'll run through a bunch of these myths, but these ranking


factors may not be factors at all.


They're just metrics or elements where the study has looked at the correlation and is


trying to show you the relationship on average.


But you have to understand and intuit this information properly, otherwise you can be


very misled.


So let's walk through a few of these.


First off, correlation doesn't tell us which way the connection runs, right?


So it does not say whether factor X influences the rankings or whether higher rankings influences


factor X.


Let's take another example, number of Facebook shares.


Could it be the case that search results that rank higher in Google oftentimes get people


sharing them more on Facebook because they've been seen by more people who searched for


them?


I think that's totally possible.


I don't know whether it's the case.


We can't prove it right here and now, but we can certainly say, you know what, this


number does not necessarily mean that Facebook shares influence Google results.


It could be the case that Google results influence Facebook searches.


It could be the case that there's a third factor that's causing both of them, or it


could be the case that there's in fact no relationship and this is merely a coincidental


result.


Probably unlikely given that there is some relationship there, but possible.


Second one, correlation does not imply causation.


This is a famous quote, but let's continue with the famous quote, but it sure is a hint.


It sure is a hint.


That's exactly what we like to use correlation for is as a hint of things we might investigate


further.


We'll talk about that in a sec.


Three, in an algorithm like Google's with thousands of potential ranking inputs, if


you see any single metric at 0.1 or higher, I tend to think that in general that is an


interesting result.


Not prove something, not means that there's a direct correlation, just it is interesting.


It's worthy of further exploration.


It's worthy of understanding.


It's worthy of forming hypotheses and then trying to prove those wrong.


It is interesting.


Number four, correlation does tell us what more successful pages and sites do that less


successful sites and pages don't do.


And sometimes, in my opinion, that is just as interesting as what is actually causing


rankings in Google.


You might say, oh, this doesn't prove anything.


What it proves to me is pages that are getting more Facebook shares tend to do a good bit


better than pages that are not getting as many Facebook shares.


I don't really care, to be honest, whether that is a direct Google ranking factor or


whether that's just something that's happening.


If it's happening in my space, if it's happening in the world of SERPs that I care about, that


is useful information for me to know and information that I should be applying because it suggests


that my competitors are doing this and that if I don't do it, I probably won't be as successful


or I may not be as successful as the ones who are.


Certainly, I want to understand how they're doing it and why they're doing it.


None of these studies that I have ever seen so far have looked specifically at SERP features.


So one of the things that you have to remember when you're looking at these is think organic,


ten blue link style results.


We're not talking about AdWords, the paid results.


We're not talking about Knowledge Graph or featured snippets or image results or video


results or any of these other, you know, the news boxes, the Twitter results, anything


else that goes in there.


So this is kind of old school classic organic SEO.


Six, correlation is not a best practice.


So it does not mean that because this list descends and goes down in this order that


those are the things you should do in that particular order.


Don't use this as a roadmap.


And seven, last but not least on this, low correlation does not mean that a metric or


a tactic doesn't work.


Example, a high percent of sites using a page or a tactic will result in a very low correlation.


So for example, when we first did this study in, I think it was 2005, right, that Moz ran


its first one of these, maybe it was 2007, we saw that keyword use in the title element


was a strong, you know, strongly correlated.


I think it was probably around 0.2 or 0.15, something like that.


And then over time it's gone way, way down.


Now it's something like 0.03, extremely small, infinitesimally small.


What does that mean?


Well, it could mean one of two things.


It could mean Google is using it less as a ranking factor.


It could mean that it was never connected and it's just total, you know, speculation,


total coincidence, or three, it could mean that a lot more people who rank in the top


20 or 30 results, which is what these studies usually look at, top 10 to top 50 sometimes,


a lot more of them are putting the keyword in the title and therefore there's just no


difference between result number 31 and result number 1 because they both have them in the


title.


And so you're seeing a much lower correlation between pages that don't have them and do


have them and higher rankings, right?


So careful about how you intuit that.


Oh, one final note.


I did put negative 0.02 here.


A negative correlation means that as you see less of this thing you tend to see higher


rankings.


Again, unless there is a strong negative correlation I tend to watch out for these, right, or I


tend to not pay too much attention.


For example, the keyword in the meta description, it could just be that, well, it turns out


pretty much everyone has the keyword in the meta description now, so this is just not


a big differentiating factor.


All right.


So what is correlation actually good for?


We talked about a bunch of myths, ways not to use it.


First one, IDing the elements that more successful pages tend to have.


So if I look across correlation and I see that lots of pages are twice as likely to


have X and rank highly as the ones that don't rank highly, well, that is a good piece of


data for me.


B, watching elements over time to see if they rise or lower in correlation.


For example, we watch links very closely over time to see if they rise or lower so that


we can say, gosh, does it look like links are getting more or less influential in Google's


rankings?


Are they more or less correlated than they were last year or two years ago?


And if we see that drop dramatically we might intuit, hey, we should test the power of links


again.


Time for another experiment, right, to see if links still move the needle or if they're


becoming less powerful or if it's merely that the correlation is dropping.


C, comparing sets of search results against one another.


We can identify unique attributes that might be true.


So, for example, in a vertical like news we might see that domain authority is much more


important than it is in fitness where smaller sites potentially have much more opportunity


or dominate.


Or we might see that something like HTTPS is not a great way to stand out in news because


everybody has it, but in fitness it is a way to stand out.


And, in fact, the folks who do have it tend to do much better.


Maybe they've invested more in their sites.


D, you can – judging metrics as a predictive ranking ability, right?


So essentially when I'm looking at a metric like domain authority, how good is that at


telling me on average how much better one domain will rank in Google versus another?


And I can see that this number is a good indication of that.


If that number goes down, domain authority is less predictive, less sort of useful for


me.


If it goes up, it's more useful.


We did this – I did this a couple of years ago with Alexa Rank and SimilarWeb looking


at traffic metrics and which ones are best correlated with actual traffic and found Alexa


Rank is awful and SimilarWeb is quite excellent.


So there you go.


E, last but not least, finding elements to test, right?


So if I see that large images embedded on a page that's already ranking on page one


of search results has a 0.61 correlation with the image from that page ranking in the image


results in the first few, wow, that's really interesting.


You know what?


I'm going to go test that and take big images and embed them on many pages that are ranking


and see if I can get into the image results that I care about.


That's great information for testing.


And this is all stuff that correlation is useful for.


Correlation in SEO, especially when it comes to ranking factors or ranking elements, can


be very misleading.


And I hope that this will help you to better understand how to use and not use that data.


Thanks.


MozCon 2015 - 09 - Online Personalization that Actually Works with Cara Harshman

Wow, you guys look amazing, I just gotta say that.


All tweeting at your computers.


We're number four global trending worldwide at MozCon hashtag.


Number four trending, that's amazing people, keep it up.


So I'm really glad that Cyrus mentioned the fact that I speak Yoruba because Yoruba people


from the southwestern part of Nigeria are amazing at personalization, in fact.


They have greetings for all different times of day, context and things like this.


So I want to start off by just greeting you all in Yoruba with the greeting for sitting


down, which is Ekujo Ko.


So you would all say, oh, have you heard me?


So should we try it?


Can I greet you and then you all say that back to me?


That would be the best thing ever.


Okay, Ekujo Ko.


Yes, that's amazing.


Okay, awesome.


So I'm really excited to talk about personalization today because it's something that we all experience


online, whether it's ads or something that we've clicked on in the past, haunting us


around the internet as we click around and do our browsing, or websites like Amazon and


Netflix that are doing a really masterful job of personalizing the experience for each


and every one of us.


What I see on Amazon is different from what you see on Amazon and so on and so forth.


But most of us don't have the army of Amazon engineers behind our websites and behind our


marketing.


So how can we, as marketers and our amazing selves, do personalization that actually works?


And I was actually really nervous to pitch this topic because personalization is a really


big word.


I mean, it's 15 letters and six syllables.