the best seo platforms for large scale sites

MARCH 3, 2015

SEO Platforms for Large Scale Sites

Michael Nguyen

Director, SEO

@dyn4mik3

searchmarketingexpo.com

@dyn4mik3 #SMX #14a

Obsessed with scaling / automating SEO platforms.

• 10+ years in the industry

• Lead SEO for Connexity (previously Shopzilla)

• Technical SEO

• Large Sites

• Big Brands

Michael Nguyen

Director, SEO


@dyn4mik3 #SMX #14a

• Too big to fit in your head.

Examples:

• Networks of sites

• Sites with thousands – millions of pieces of content

• Enterprise sites

• Long tail businesses

Large Sites

What is “large”?


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Large Sites = Big Problems


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Millions of Products or Items


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Duplicate Content & Canonical

Issues


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Crawl Efficiency


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Shifting Inventory


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Shifting Search Demand


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Discovery Optimization Problem


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• Organize Content Better

• Surface Important Content

• Improve Content Value

Make It Easier for Users to Find

Content


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Checklist


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Identify Valuable Content

Figure out what pages / products are valuable and

optimize around that data.


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Keyword Research

Make sure you are using natural language and not jargon.


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Site Architecture

Manually create a Taxonomy with the help of Information

Architects and Keyword Research.


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Content for Category Pages

Manually create content for landing pages to merchandise

products / content.


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Flag Duplicate Content

Audit content and map duplicate to a canonical URL or

removal.


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Enforce a Canonical URL

Audit content and map duplicate to a canonical URL.


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Temporary: Keep it up

Deal with Stale Inventory

Audit content / products for removal and canonicalization.

Permanent: Redirect or 404


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• <link rel=“next”>

• <link rel=“prev”>

• <link rel=“canonical”>

• <link rel=“nofollow”>

• robots.txt

Deal with Pagination & Facets

Create rules for managing crawl and technical SEO.

Control the crawl.


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Promote High Quality Content

Remove the junk. Market the good. Be selective.


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Build Category Linking Support

Link to categories & subcategories in all key areas

(homepage, global nav, sitemaps, etc).


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Cross Link Everything Relevant

Flatten the crawl architecture by linking across deep

pages. Remember links come in from anywhere.


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Awesome. Done.


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Not So Fast.


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Dealing with Change

Inventory and businesses change. Not a one time deal.


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Doing it Manually Does Not Scale

Too much to cover. Many variables to manage.


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The Answer = Automation

Scale your operation with technology and process. Build a

platform for SEO.


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How to Automate


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Identify Routine Tasks


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Start Small

Automate very small tasks to start.


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Improve Operational Efficiency

Focus on speeding up processes.


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Test and Validate

Double check that the platform works the way you expect.


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Automation Cycle

Human Cyborg Robot


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Keep in Mind the Bigger Picture

Always be thinking about the overall platform.


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Great SEO Platforms


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Make the Core Product Better


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Enable Testing and

Experimentation


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Leverage Big Data


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Combine Data and Expert

Intuition


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Examples


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Data Gathering

Stop doing it by hand.


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Dynamic Content Management

Variable based touchpoints.


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Product Recommendations

Great for spreading link value and indexing deeper

content.


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Related Searches

Useful for targeting category / generic concepts.


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Page Scoring

KPI based evaluation of content.


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Duplicate Content Classification

Ensure that you only promote your most useful content.


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Backlink Classification

Easily audit large amounts of backlinks.


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Crawler & Log Based Auditing

Flag issues before they are a problem.


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Tips & Lessons Learned


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Get to Good Enough


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Get Value Out of Each Step


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• Crawling: Deepcrawl / Botify

• Analytics: GA / GWT

• SERPs: AuthorityLabs

• Links: Linkdex / Moz / Majestic

APIs Are Your Friends

Offload tasks and data gathering.


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• Keyword Data

• Relevancy Scores

Utilize Internal Search Engine

Use a search engine to understand search engine

concepts.


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• Many SEO “problems” are answered in other fields of expertise

• Open source tools: Mahout, Hadoop, HBase

Leverage Data & Search Science

Tap into other sources of knowledge.


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• Log everything

• Track key metrics

• Analyze later

Instrumentation is Important

You need to know what is going on.


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Feedback Loops

Build a way to learn from the data that is gathered.


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Future of SEO


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• As SEOs we need better platforms and tools.

• Create your own or partner with experts to build it

yourself.

Data + Marketing + Product +

Tools


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SEO Platforms

Force multipliers for SEOs.


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