tom critchlow - data feed seo & advanced site architecture

Data Feed SEO & Advanced Site Architecture

A4uexpo Europe, Munch 2010

Tom Critchlow

Head of Search Marketing, Distilled

> tom.critchlow@distilled.co.uk> twitter.com/TomCritchlow

> www.distilled.co.uk> www.distilledconsulting.com

Tom Critchlow

Tom is a search geek, ninja poet, poker playing, maths loving, data geek. He’s responsible for all search marketing at Distilled.

The Affiliate Penalty

The “Affiliate” Penalty

Two big causes of the “affiliate” penalty:

1) Algorithms

2) People

Unique Content Matrix

Unique Content, Low Trust

Strong site, unique content

Non-unique Content, low trust

Strong site, non-unique contentU

niq

enes

s

Site Strength

Unique Content SpectrumU

niq

enes

s

Site Strength

Case Study

“Welcome visitor, please find out selection of [insert product] below, we have [number of products] items. We think you’ll like them!”

User Generated Content

“User” Generated Content

User “Generated” Content

Mozenda

Building quick & dirty SEO Tools

A Cheat Sheet & Inspiration

By Will Critchlow, www.distilled.co.uk. First published: www.seomoz.org

APIs (more on programmable web)

AdWords – Keywords

Alchemy – Structured data & text

Bing – Search, news, spelling

Evri – Sentiment and popularity

Face.com – Face detection

Facebook – Social graph

Google Analytics – Visitor data

Hostip – Geo data

LinkedIn – Professional data

Pingdom – Website uptime

Postrank (1, 2, 3) – real-time & influence

Rapleaf – Social media profiles

Twitter – Real time and social

... And of course:

Linkscape – Links

YQL – Yahoo! Query Language

select * from html where

url=“<url>" and

xpath=“<xpath>“

select * from html where

url=“<url>"

select * from feed where

url=“<url>”

select * from search.web where

query = “<query>"

xpath (more examples)

/foo – the element „foo‟

//bar – all elements „bar‟

foo/bar – all bar elements children of foo

foo//bar – bar arbitrary levels below foo

foo/*/bar – bar grandchildren of foo

foo/* - all children elements of foo

foo/@bar – bar attribute on foo

foo/[@bar] – foo with bar attributes

foo/[@bar=baz] – where attribute=baz

Python

Since Python is the language of Google App

Engine, here is how you can use YQL easily

within Python:

Download source – extract to yql folder

within your application

import yql

y = yql.Public()

result = y.execute(“<yql

query>”)

Crawlers / Scrapers

Mozenda

80legs

Google App Engine

Amazon Web Services

Human Touch

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Smartsheet (interface to Mechanical Turk)

oDesk

Sources Magic Horsepower

Data (more on infochimps)

Data.gov – US government data

Data.gov.uk – UK government data

Delicious list – from Peter Skomoroch

Google Public Data - Directory

Guardian – content and data

World Bank – finance, health, etc.

80legs – prepackaged crawl data

User Generated “Content”

• External search queries

• Internal search queries

• Tags

• Testimonials

• FAQs/Support emails

Differentiate YourselfTitle

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Manipulate & Clean Your Data

“Kingston DataTraveler 101 USB flash drive - 4 GB – Cyan”

“Kingston USB memory stick 4gb”

vs

Of Course, Links Always Win

http://www.seobook.com/black-hat-seo-case-study

Manual Reviews – aka “Hand Jobs”

Check out the quality raterguidelines

“Add value to users”

“Relevant”

These are subjective!!

Information Architecture

What Perfect IA Looks Like

Check it out: http://seogadget.co.uk/solving-site-architecture-issues/

Define Your Keyword Niches

Look at the user search path – define your categories to match the search volume.

Single keywords are for losers:http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/long-tail-keyword-research

Pagination is bad – never do it

Zzzz.Ugh.

Never visited

Yawn.

Footer Links Are Bad

Footer links can penalise you! Bad for users bad for SEO.

Make a user friendly architecture.

Information Architecture Rules

• Flat architecture

Close to homepage

<100 links / page

• No pagination

• No footer links

• Make category/sub-category pages user friendly

• ??????

• Profit

Cross Linking Internally

Advanced: Algorithms

Figure out a scoring algorithm for your pages based on popularity, search volume and current ranking position. Use this algorithm to direct links internally.

Diagnosing IA Issues

Use separate XML sitemaps

Xenu is your friend

Secret Sauce

Query Deserves Freshness:

Microformats:

Resources

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture

• http://seogadget.co.uk/solving-site-architecture-issues/

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools

• http://www.mozenda.com

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/leveraging-mechanical-turk-odesk-elance-craigslist-for-seo

• http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Googles-Quality-Rater-Guidelines-Leaked/

• http://strategizer.wordtracker.com/

• http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/using-multiple-sitemaps-to-analyse-indexation-on-large-sites/

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xenu-link-sleuth-more-than-just-a-broken-links-finder

• http://microformats.org/

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshness

Thanks!