big site seo triage (blueglassx)
DESCRIPTION
How to drill down into big-site index and crawl problems fast, and the tools to try to solve those problems (by Dr. Pete - BlueGlassX 2012)TRANSCRIPT
Big Site SEO Triage
Dr. Peter J. MeyersMarketing ScientistSEOmoz
Are you a real doctor?
Why I’m a believer…
My philosophy…
KeywordDensity*
*just kidding
My philosophy…
Q: Is there a dupe content penalty?
My philosophy…
A: I don’t give a shit.
I. Look at the damned site
Your top 2 SEO tools
Scope out the architecture
Navigate the main links
Quick-count internal links
Check for pagination
Scan search filters, sorts…
II. Drill down quickly
Master the basics
Expert’s handiwork
Amateur’s handlesswork
Two useful combos
site: + intitle:site: + inurl:
Quick duplicate check
site:example.comintitle:”unique phrase”
Spot-check URL parameters
site:example.cominurl:page=
Spot-check the architecture
site:example.com/menu
Real-world example
11M - site:example.com8.4M - site:example.com/shop6.7M - site:…/shop inurl:option
How reliable is site:?
(a) site:seomoz.org(b) site:…/blog(c) site:…/blog intitle:spam
Experiment results…
(a) 67,700 – 114,000(b) 4,580 – 8,650(c) 40 – 40
Don’t forget the basics
þ Robots.txtþ HTTP headersþ HTML headers
III. Bring in the firepower
GWT – HTML Improvements
GWT – Index Status (Advanced)
I. Main pagesII. CategoriesIII. Products
GWT – Tiered XML sitemaps
Screaming Frog – URL parameters
SF – Track bad internal links
IV. Choose your weapon
+ Don’t need dev access+ Good for prevention - Still can be dangerous - Bad for removal
Robots.txt
+ Extremely flexible+ Fairly easy to reverse - Occasionally ignored
Meta noindex
+ Still very powerful+ Impact users + search - Difficult to reverse - Google can get suspicious
301 redirects
+ Fast and powerful+ Very flexible - Easy to screw up
Rel=canonical
+ Low-risk option+ Allows pages to rank - Difficult to implement
Rel=prev, Rel=next
Rule #1 for page-level cues
They can’t see whatThey don’t crawl
+ Requires no site access - Inconsistently applied - Google-specific
GWT parameter handling
Technical SEO isn’t dead
Thank You!
Dr. Peter J. [email protected]@dr_pete