April 16th, 2012 @ // No Comments
Search engine optimization for a large company or organization comes with challenges not typically encountered when doing SEO for small business websites. How do you get everyone on the same page, when SEO affects so many people and departments? This article will discuss some of the issues you should consider when performing SEO for a large client.
Eric Enge discussed these issues with Warren Lee, who manages SEO for Adobe’s web properties. The web software company gets 48 million visits a month to its own websites thanks to Lee’s efforts. In Lee’s opinion, knowing what the most common hurdles to SEO are before starting a project can help prevent problems before they occur. They can also help you plan a winning strategy.
The first of these four big challenges, as Lee sees it, is something he calls “cross functional alignment.” It stems from the fact that large organizations tend to separate their functional parts into silos: marketing, HR, production, IT, etc. The SEO team tends to get put in the same silo as either marketing or IT. In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing. The real problem is that these separate silos, while existing within the same large firm, often don’t talk to each other – and SEO, by its very nature, affects many silos beyond its own.
“Given that website, technical, and product marketing decisions all influence SEO performance, teams have an inherent challenge with being strategic and cross functional,” Lee notes. But it’s not just a matter of communicating with these other areas; they must actively work with the SEO, and “most stakeholders do not willingly (assuming they know how) incorporate search best practices into their daily work,” according to Lee.
To get over this hurdle, Lee recommends that SEO teams examine what areas of the organization their work is most likely to affect (and be affected by), and “build relationships with critical partners” within the company. He notes that within a large organization, these may include teams engaged in paid search, site search, social media, digital analysis, IT, web operations, web security, the legal department, product management, product marketing, editing, quality assurance, mobile technology, and remarketing and site testing.
The next challenge Lee discusses is maintaining focus on the critical initiatives. “The solution to finding a balanced level of service is developing a team culture where project priorities are driven by data results and supported by effective training, processes, and communication with stakeholders,” he explained. In short, figure out what data to collect, what numbers will tell you that your initiative has been successful, and what you need to do to get those numbers.
Make sure your team understands how to use your analytics tools and what you’re trying to achieve. Also make sure they’re motivated, and that they’re not losing sight of your goals. It’s easy in SEO to look too closely at the trees and miss seeing the forest. To help your team keep its focus where it belongs, Lee suggests “filtering projects based on the level of impact on the few essentials of SEO: site architecture, internal and external linking, and new or existing content.”
The third hurdle Lee discusses is getting buy-in. I don’t have to tell regular readers of SEO Chat that many companies see plain old SEO as relatively unimportant – and that seems to be especially true of large organizations. Lee notes that research by Rebecca Lieb at the Altimeter Group showed that “SEO is often a low priority and therefore doesn’t receive as many corporate resources as online video, social media, or mobile marketing initiatives.” So how do you get the buy-in you need to get the resources you need?
Lee recommends an essentially negative strategy, perhaps because executives are afraid of bad things happening on their watch. Such fear can provide excellent motivation. “Highlighting past failures or calling out future ones (if changes aren’t implemented) can be incredibly effective at getting buy-in. In particular, showing what competitors are doing that you’re not is a great catalyst,” Lee observes. When you achieve your SEO goals, be generous in sharing the credit for the achievement. “Never take credit for search wins alone, and be mindful to thank others for their support in the wins, and you will find that getting buy-in becomes significantly easier,” Lee explains.
The final hurdle in search engine optimization for large organizations that Lee discusses is balancing search team involvement. Once you get everyone on board with the idea that SEO affects many aspects of a large organization, and get the resources you need to carry out your vision, you need to tell all these people WHAT to do and HOW to do it. Many of them may never have heard of SEO before.
Lee suggests you hold training sessions to teach them what they need to know. Without such sessions, he notes, “the implications of not integrating SEO into business processes like content creation, information architecture, or social media linking won’t be fully understood.” He suggests that you customize the training sessions for specific teams, such as editorial, quality assurance, social media leads, and so forth.
Lee also mentions a number of topics you might cover at these sessions. These include: the importance of natural search engine traffic; the fact that SEO success can’t be achieved by the SEO team alone, but requires the help of everyone who deals with the company’s digital assets; and the importance of interacting with the SEO team before making any changes to the company’s website.
Hopefully, the next time you’re in the position of working on SEO for a large company, keeping these challenges in mind will help you to overcome some of the serious problems you might face. Good luck!
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Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/The-Challenge-of-SEO-for-Large-Enterprises/
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April 16th, 2012 @ // No Comments
Matt Cutts’ statement in March 2012 that Google would be rolling out an update against “overoptimised” websites, caused great turmoil within the SEO community. A few days later thousands of blogs were removed from Google’s index and Matt tweeted confirming that Google had started taking action against blog networks.
Even though thousands of low-quality blogs of low or average authority were manually removed from Google’s index, they weren’t the only victims. For instance, www.rachaelwestdesigns.com, a PR7, DA70 domain was also removed, probably due to the very high number of blog roll (site-wide) backlinks.
These actions indicate that the new update on “overoptimised” websites has already begun to roll out but it is uncertain how much of it we have seen so far.
At around the same time Google sent to thousands webmasters the following message via message via Google’s Webmaster Tools:
In the above statement, it is unclear what Google’s further actions will be. In any case, working out the number of “artificial” or “unnatural links” with precision is a laborious, almost impossible task. Some low quality links may not be reported by third party link data providers, or even worse, because Google has started deindexing several low quality domains, the task can end-up being a real nightmare as several domains cannot be found even in Google’s index.
Nevertheless, there are some actions that can help SEOs assess the backlink profile of any website. Because, in theory, any significant number of low quality links could hurt, it would make sense gathering as many data as possible and not just examine the most recent backlinks. Several thousand domains have already been removed from Google’s index, resulting in millions of links being completely devalued according to Distilled’s Tom Anthony (2012 Linklove).
Therefore, the impact on the SERPs has already been significant and as always happens in these occasions there will be new winners and losers once the dust settles. However, at this stage it is be a bit early to make any conclusions because it is unclear what Google’s next actions are going to be. Nevertheless, getting ready for those changes would make perfect sense, and spotting them as soon as they occur would allow for quicker decision making and immediate actions, as far as link building strategies are concerned.
As Pedro Dias, an Ex-Googler from the search quality/web spam team tweetted, “Link building, the way we know it, is not going to last until the end of the year” (translated from Portuguese).
Carrying out a backlinks audit in order to identify the percentage of low-quality backlinks would be a good starting point. A manual, thorough assessment would only be possible for relatively small websites as it is much easier to gather and analyse backlinks data – for bigger sites with thousands of backlinks that would be pointless. The following process expands on Richard Baxter’s solution on ‘How to check for low quality links‘, and I hope it makes it more complete.
The above process does come with some caveats but on the whole, it should provide some insight and help making a backlinks’ risk assessment in order to work out a short/long term action plan. Even though the results may not be 100% accurate, it should be fairly straightforward to spot negative trends over a period of time.
Data from backlinks intelligence services have flaws. No matter where you get your data from (e.g. Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Blekko, Sistrix) there is no way to get the same depth of data Google has. Third party tools are often not up to date, and in some cases the linking root domains are not even linking back anymore. Therefore, it would make sense filtering all identified linking root domains and keep only those still linking to your website. At iCrossing we use a proprietary tool but there are commercial link check services available in the market (e.g. Buzzstream, Raven Tools).
ToolBar PageRank gets updated infrequently (roughly 4-5 times in a year), therefore in most cases the returned TBPR values represent the TBPR the linking root domain gained in the the last TBPR update. Therefore, it would be wise checking out when TBPR was last updated before making any conclusions. Carrying out the above process straight after a TBPR update would probably give more accurate results. However, in some cases Google may instantly drop a site’s TBPR in order to make public that the site violates their quality guidelines and discourage advertisers. Therefore, low TBPR values such as n/a, (greyed out) or 0 can in many cases flag up low quality linking root domains.
Deindexation may be natural. Even though Google these days is deindexing thousands of low quality blogs, coming across a website with no indexed pages in Google’s SERPs doesn’t necessarily mean that it has been penalised. It may be an expired domain that no longer exists, an accidental deindexation (e.g. a meta robots noindex on every page of the site), or some other technical glitch. However, deindexed domains that still have a positive TBPR value could flag websites that Google has recently removed from its index due to guidelines violations (e.g. link exchanges, PageRank manipulation).
For large data sets NetPeak Checker performs faster than SEO Tools, where large data sets can make Excel freeze for a while. NetPeak checker is a standalone free application which provides very useful information for a given list of URLs such as domain PageRank, page PageRank, Majestic SEO data, OSE data (PA, DA, mozRank, mozTrust etc), server responses (e.g. 404, 200, 301) , number of indexed pages in Google and a lot more. All results can then be exported and processed further in Excel.
Identifying as many linking root domains as possible is fundamental and relying in just one data provided isn’t ideal. Combining data from Web master tools, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer may be enough but the more data, the better especially if the examined domain has been around for a long time and has received a large number of backlinks over time. Backlinks from the same linking root domain should be removed so we end up with a long list of unique linking root domains. Also, not found (404) linking root domains should also be removed.
Once a good number of unique linking root domains has been identified, the next step is scrapping the ToolBar PageRank for each one of them. Ideally, this step should be applied only on those root domains that are still linking to our website. The ones that don’t should be discarded if not too complicated. Then, using a pivot chart in Excel, we can conclude whether the current PageRank distribution should be a concern or not. A spike towards the lower end values (such as 0s and n/a) should be treated as a rather negative indication as in the graph below.
Working out the percentage of linking root domains which are not indexed is essential. If deindexed linking root domains still have a positive TBPR value, most likely they have been recently deindexed by Google.
Adding in the mix the social metrics (e.g. Facebook Likes, Tweets and +1s) of all identified linking root domains may be useful in some cases. The basic idea here is that low quality websites would have a very low number of social mentions as users wouldn’t find them useful. Linking root domains with low or no social mentions at all could possibly point towards low quality domains.
Repeating the steps 2, 3 and 4 on a weekly or monthly basis, could help identifying whether there is a negative trend due to an increasing number of linking root domains being of removed. If both the PageRank distribution and deindexation rates are deteriorating, sooner or later the website will experience rankings drops that will result in traffic loss. A weekly deindexation rate graph like the following one could give an indication of the degree of link equity loss:
Note: For more details on how to set-up NetPeak and apply the above process using Excel please refer to my post on Connect.icrossing.co.uk.
So far, several websites have seen ranking drops as a result of some of their linking root domains being removed from Google’s index. Those with very low PageRank values and low social shares over a period of time should be manually/editorially reviewed in order to assess their quality. Such links are likely to be devalued sooner or later, therefore a new link building strategy should be devised. Working towards a more balanced PageRank distribution should be the main objective, links from low quality websites will keep naturally coming up to some extent.
In general, the more authoritative trusted a website is, the more low quality linking root domains could be linking to it without causing any issues. Big brands’ websites are less likely to be impacted because they are more trusted domains. That means that low authority/trust websites are more at risk, especially if most of their backlinks come from low quality domains, have a high number of site-wide links, or if their backlink profile consists of unnatural anchor text distribution.
Therefore, if any of the above issues have been identified, increasing the website’s trust, reducing the number of unnatural site-wide links and making the anchor text distribution look more natural should be the primary remedies.
Modesto Siotos (@macmodi) works as a Senior Natural Search Analyst for iCrossing UK, where he focuses on technical SEO issues, link tactics and content strategy. Modesto is happy to share his experiences with others and posts regularly on Connect, a UK digital marketing blog.
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/juYNbEnOB_4/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings
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