With Google’s upcoming site speed ranking factor, I’ve been looking at every way to make my sites faster. One of the biggest wins has been enabling gzip compression. This compresses your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before sending it to the browser, reducing file sizes by 60-80%. The implementation is straightforward if you have access to your server configuration. I’ll walk through how I did it and the impact it had.
Google recently announced that site speed would become a factor in their search ranking algorithm. This is a big deal for webmasters and I wanted to get ahead of it. I’ve been working on optimizing my sites to load faster, including compression, caching, and reducing the number of HTTP requests. The results have been promising – my page load times have dropped significantly and I’m hoping this will translate into better search rankings when the change rolls out.
I recently migrated my paper airplanes site to a new domain and was worried about the SEO impact. The good news is that it looks like the migration is working. Google has started indexing the new domain and my rankings are slowly recovering. The 301 redirects seem to be passing authority properly. It’s still early days but the signs are positive.
Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me.
I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:
So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.
I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:
I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of a las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way) there is a link to Yahoo! local.
The link is not “no followed” and points to Yahoo local’s las vegas steakhouse page which is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.
Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page all 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages. I’m going to keep an eye on this one.
This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk.
The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.
I essentially had 5 points:
I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.
So probably one of the worst things that has happened to me online ever happened 2 weeks ago… my site was hacked. I hadn’t upgraded the version of adlogger I was using on the site and someone inserted some malicious code which then took over my site redirecting any visitor to a pure adsense page.
Google spotted this and took action which utterly decimated my website traffic but I wholeheartedly applaud Google for doing… 100% the right thing to do and interestingly they spotted the issue at essentially the same time as I did and removed it from the site so great job by them!
The one thing that does frustrate me about this is that Google funded the hacker. It’s obviously terrible I got hacked and I have revised my processes to hopefully make things better but it’s doubly terrible that hackers are now funding themselves via Google AdSense… Given the experience I have in this marketplace through my affiliate work over the years it is also clear that people don’t do this unless they are getting away with it, so Google can’t be taking the money from them fast enough to dissuade them from doing this… that’s the only way it works.
Brand keyword bidding is big business and it’s becoming bigger. For anyone in the internet marketing industry it’s crucial to watch this trend and esp the decisions Google is making around it.
Within the affiliate industry brand bidding initially was a quick way to make a buck. In 2003-2005 affiliate managers were often slow to realize affiliates were making money for essentially no work. Even now many affiliates use a combination of geo-targeting and day parting to work around affiliate managers and get away with brand bidding.
As that loop hole was closed and brands took their brand name bidding in house worldwide and affiliate networks policed out the majority of the affiliates doing brand bidding Google made two changes which made brand names far less lucrative for them in many countries (esp. the UK). Google stopped allowing multiple ads for one website to appear on the same search result and Google also allowed companies to claim their brand so that no one else could bid on it (in the UK). On April 4th Google changed this second policy and that angered a lot of brand owners in the UK.
Two things make this policy change an excellent way for Google to make money: 1) Branded search made up 76% of searches in the UK in 2007 according to some studies. 2) Having only one person bidding on their own brand can result in their bid being as low as $0.01 – just adding another person into the auction can push that up tremendously giving a huge boost in Google revenue.
I can’t really decide what to think about the way Google is acting here. Would it be fair for companies who sell NorthFace clothing not to be able to bid on the word NorthFace? On the other hand is it fair that Google essentially extorts brands to spend in some cases $100k’s a week to simply ensure that someone who was looking for them comes to their site?
This little post is just a thought starter BUT as an internet marketer it is crucial you have to have a branded search strategy covering both SEO and SEM. Google won’t let you get away without it.
Using Stumbleupon buttons on my paper airplanes site was an interesting idea that I tried a few weeks back. It seems to be working pretty well. Below you see the graph of traffic I am getting from Stumble over time from the last big stumble spike (following which I added the stumble button).
For November (i.e. not including the spike in october) Stumbleupon now makes up 10% of my site growth and approx. 1% of all site traffic. I have a fair few ideas for how to boost this source of traffic even more and am really keen to give it a go soon!!!
