Hi all--
As promised, we've got some more notes and Q&A for you from a recent
conference: SES Chicago, which several of us attended earlier this
month. I usually find the Q&A after each session to be the most
informative part of the conference--both because people are getting
real answers that are directly relevant to their situation, and
because it gives me a good idea of the types of questions and problems
that webmasters are facing. So here's the goods:
~ ~ ~
Q: Should I put misspellings in my page so that it ranks well for
misspelled queries?
A: No; it looks unprofessional (how many professional websites have
you seen with a random list of misspelled words? Merrill Lynch? CNN? I
think not). Consistency makes users trust you more. A list of
misspellings may also be considered spam:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66358
Generally you don't need to put effort into worrying about
misspellings, since most search engines will spell-correct when
someone misspells a query. If you're really concerned about it, you
could come up with clever ways to include the misspellings on your
site in a way that's up-front and helpful to users--for example, if
you run a finance website, you could have a page of Commonly
Misspelled Financial Words. Panelists pointed out that even Google
does this: http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html :-) Just make
sure you're not keyword-stuffing them into hidden parts of your pages
in order to manipulate how the search engines see your page(s).
From Danny Sullivan: You could also leverage user-generated content.
User-generated content is usually full of misspellings, but they're
"natural" (they don't make the site owner look unprofessional, since
you're not the one who provided that content, and they probably
weren't deliberately inserted for the purpose of manipulating search
engines).
~ ~ ~
Q: Are there any legal implications of targeting my competitors'
keywords?
A (from Mark Rosenberg of Sills, Cummis, Epstein & Gross P.C.): It's
fine to target the same keywords or phrases as your competitors (e.g.
[financial management] or [investment banking]); but targeting your
competitors' trademarks, or misspellings of their trademarks, may
violate the law (e.g. if Goldman Sachs has [Merril Lynch] on their
site).
[Note: I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not dispensing legal advice, I'm just
passing on what the lawyer on the panel said!]
~ ~ ~
Q: I've heard that reciprocal links are bad, and that paid links are
bad, but are paid reciprocal links okay?
A: If they're meant to manipulate your ranking in search engines,
they're just as bad as reciprocal links or paid links, or any other
type of link scheme designed to affect your ranking.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
~ ~ ~
Q: I provide a feed to Google Product Search that's set to expire on a
certain date, but it continues to be available in web search after
that date. What's up with that?
A: Google Product Search adheres to certain attributes as defined in
their feed protocol (such as expiration_date), but those attributes
are unrelated to web search. Any content (such as a feed) that's
available for crawling could potentially be crawled by Googlebot and
appear in web search results. If you don't want your Google Product
Search feed to appear in web search after it has expired, you should
make that content unavailable to crawlers (e.g. by taking it down,
returning a 404 or 410 HTTP status code, or blocking it in robots.txt)
or remove it from our index by using our URL removal tool.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35301
~ ~ ~
Q: Microsites were really big awhile ago (for providing lots of links
back to your "main site"). Are they still valuable?
A (from Mike Grehan): You need to be careful about building something
that looks like a spam island. Instead of making microsites just for
the sake of the backlinks, spend that time and energy trying to get
solid links to your *real* site.
~ ~ ~
Q: We always hear that content is king, focus on content and links
will come. But what if you're a retailer and your content is super-
boring? How do you sell something boring?
A: Look at Blend-Tec's example. Blenders are pretty boring, right? But
they came up with a cool idea--Will It Blend?--and now people are
emailing their videos to friends and it's very viral and popular. Be
creative. You could also try adding consumer reviews; studies show
they have a very high level of trust right now with users, and people
find them very useful.
~ ~ ~
Q: We're looking for a new CMS (content management system). What
features do you think are most important (from a search engine
optimization perspective)?
A (from Colton Perry, Sage Lewis & Geoff Karcher):
* search-engine-friendly URLs
* the ability to fetch individualized metadata (e.g. you can use a
database to load a different title, meta description, and other
metadata for each page, rather than being forced to use the same
metadata for groups of pages)
* no session IDs in the URLs
* mod_rewrite
* the ability to easily prevent duplicate content
* the ability to hand-optimize anything, if I want (to not be forced
to say "Oh, I can't do x because my CMS won't let me")
* 1 URL for 1 item of content (there shouldn't be multiple URLs that
point to the same content)
* a CMS that allows you as much control/individualizability/quality as
if you'd created the site by hand
~ ~ ~
Conferences this large are often extensively blogged (both during and
after the conference), so you can get lots of the information for free
with a query like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=SES+Chicago+recap
