Search Engine Marketing Blog

What does “noydir,noodp” mean?

matthewdiehl — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:02:48 +0000

Anonymous asks: What does “noydir,noodp” mean?

The noydir and noodp are Meta Robots commands that instruct search engine bots on how to handle the usage of data for your site in the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project/DMOZ Directory.

The noydir command corresponds to the Yahoo! Directory and the noodp command correlates to DMOZ.

noydir Explained
When a site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory there is a title and description associated with that listing. So, Yahoo! started showing that title and description as the linking text and snippet text in the search engine results page (SERP) whenver that website would show up (most commonly only the homepage). The noydir command overrides this functionality and gives control back to the website owner to control the linking and snippet text in the SERPs via the Title tag and Meta Description tag on their website. By regaining this control you can adjust those fields whenever desired.

noodp Explained
The same functionality goes for the noodp command. However, this is directed at Google. Google partnered with ODP to power the Google Directory so if you website was listed in DMOZ then Google would pull that listing information as the linking and snippet text in the Google SERPs. The noodp overrides that functionality and give you control back.

Implementation
The most common implementation is to do both commands simultaneously as in your question like such:
(content field order does not matter)

They can also be listed separately as such:

You can also direct the commands to the specific bots as such:

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Google’s New SERP UI Fail

matthewdiehl — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:32:37 +0000

A little background: In November 2009, Google began testing a new look for the search engine results pages (serp). The largest change in this first test was adding the “Options” to the left side of the page from it’s relatively hidden location in a link at the top labeled “Show Options…”

Beyond this change they tightened up the spacing of the page so their is less scrolling and removed some junk a the bottom to improve the appearance of the bottom search box.

Now, Google has begun a second round of testing the new UI with another added feature that is directly targeted at local search. Google now clearly show your location on the serp and allows users to change it. This new functionality appears to the very right of the top search box:

This functionality is great from an SEO testing perspective. It allows you to see how local results are being displayed to local users. So, when a client across the country calls to bitch about something, you can spot check the organic listings as if you are actually at their location. Again, great on the organic side.

However, where this new feature completely fails is on the paid search side. See example below:

In this example I changed my normal location of Lexington, MA to Orlando, FL (highlighted with blue box). You can see that the organic listings, especially the map had been updated to reflect my new location (green boxes and arrow). But, what was not updated was the paid listings (red arrows and boxes). The driving factor behind the paid listings are the campaign settings in Adwords specified by the advertisers to target within a geographic location. I have clear identified that my location has changed or that I am looking for results in another location. So, wouldn’t the paid listings want to reflect this change as well?

With the new location functionality, paid advertisers will eventually be missing out on impressions of targeted consumers. So, big FAIL on Google’s part.

If you want to test the UI for yourself find instructions on forcing the test in your browser here: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021746.html (I recommend making the change in a secondary or tertiary browser)

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Prepare for Powered by Bing Partnerships

matthewdiehl — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:15:06 +0000

Bing is the “rising star” in the US search engine market. Microsoft’s revamped search engine that launched in 2009 and replaced their existing Live search engine has been slowly adding market share, gaining on rival engines Google and Yahoo!. However, this will all change as Microsoft Bing continues to push forward to two key “Powered by Bing” partnerships.

The first of these, that is widely publicized, is their partnership with Yahoo!. This deal, which has recently been approved by the US government, has Yahoo! stepping out of the search engine business and relinquishing their search results pages to Bing. Even though searches will still be conducted on Yahoo! the results will be from Bing (both organic and paid). This Powered by Bing partnership is slated to take effect during 2010 before the holiday season at the end of the year (US only). This move will give Bing an immediate ~150% increase in search engine market share in the US.

The second of these is there partnership with Facebook. Microsoft has had a minority share in the company since 2007 and has began powering Facebook’s “search the web” functionality since 2008 (then with Live and now with Bing). This partnership will be another key element in the search market share as Facebook continues to grow it’s search numbers. In January 2010, Facebook had 395 million search queries performed by Facebook users. So, lets roll that up into Bing as well since they are powering Facebook. This adds another 25% increase in search volume for Bing.

Now lets take a look at the numbers: when you add Bing’s partnerships with Yahoo! and Facebook to its meek 10 to 12% market share it quickly jumps to somewhere in the 25 to 30% range.

So, have you been preparing and grooming you Bing results to take advantage of this?

If you are currently monitoring positions in Yahoo! vs Bing and Bing is outperforming Yahoo! results you may be in good shape as this partnership takes affect. However, if you are on the other side of the spectrum then you are only lining your site up for a potential catastrophic failure when the search results change. For those of you who are not monitoring Bing at all, now is not a bad time to get started!

Here are a couple places that you might want to start reading to get information on the Bing search engine:
Bing Webmaster Center Blog (especially their SEM 101 series)
Webmaster World – Bing Search News

Get to work!

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Ethics of Directing Consumers to Search

matthewdiehl — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:14:06 +0000

When evaluating the ethics of search engine optimization techniques the most commonly known terminology to identify tactics is to see if they fall into one of three buckets: White, Gray or Black hat tactics (and in some cases a potential 4th comes into play asshat).

An emerging trend (backed by Rand Fishkin here and opposed by Jennifer Laycock here) is to direct consumers to the search engines to perform a search you rank highly for and to have then click it to enter your site.

A simple example of this might be: visit www.google.com and search for “Coke” (from Jennifer’s post above). This simple form could easily be incorporated into offline media where you have only a short span of time to impress on the consumer what you would like them to do.

However, they can also be incorporated into online media (such as email marketing) where you can have a longer term of engagement. An example that could be used in an email could be: search “spacely sprockets t-shirt” in Google and click our companies website to find a hidden code to receive an additional 10% off your order or even provide the link to the search results http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=spacely+sprockets+t-shirt with the instructions following the link (just to cut out a step).

Now, as Search Engine Marketing Professionals we are very much aware of the changes to Personalized search that Google has recently made where tracking all searches and clicks are no longer limited to logged in users but applied to all users (unless you opt-out). A majority of search engines users are completely unaware of these changes and do not understand that what they click on now can dictate what they see later.

So, by directly telling potential consumers to search a specific keyphrase and click a website, it sets cookies for that consumer that the search results in Google should lean favorably to that site in the future. And as I said, a majority of search engine users have no idea this is happening.

Rand Fishkin views this as opportunity.

Jennifer Laycock views this as an unnecessary step in the process of getting consumers to your website.

Neither is wrong in their views but what I would like to offer up is: Is this ethical or not?

When looking at it, should this technique be promoted as a common best practice to help favorably promote a site in the search results on a personal level? Or, should it be frowned upon as too manipulative of the algorithm for taking advantage of the search engine users that just don’t understand how their search results are compiled?

My Stand
This is a technique that I just cannot endorse as a best or even good practice within SEO techniques. It is a backdoor, manipulative approach of undermining how personalized search is supposed to work at improving the results on an individual level by choice. The use of directions telling consumers exactly how to interact with the SERPs eliminates that choice. I do not think this is how the SEO industry should be portrayed. We already receive enough flack from idiots who just don’t understand and shady companies that drag our industry through the mud.

Where do you stand on this?
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
Thanks for your input.

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Future of SEO with HTML5

matthewdiehl — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:47:48 +0000

The future of SEO (search engine optimization), I feel, may lie in the hands of the latest HTML coding standard – HTML5.

HTML5 as we know is just around the corner. Browser support for the latest version of HTML is already rolling out and can now be run on Chrome, Safari and IE (with Chrome frame installed). And, developers have already started jumping on board to begin playing around with some of the new functionality the largest push being the YouTube HTML5 beta test that is currently going on.

I however would like to point out two other examples of where HTML5 is already being utilized and discuss how this is great from an SEO perspective.

The first I came across in a Mashable article from two weeks ago. A developer named Guillermo Esteves had re-created the open Star Wars scrolling text sequence using HTML5. Here is the video:

From the video you really can’t tell that this is HTML5 which is the best part! You first think this has to be flash or some other RIA running the scrolling text but I encourage you to check out the source code of the page where the Star Wars text is coming from: http://www.gesteves.com/experiments/starwars.html?nouacheck=1

Here is a screenshot of the section of code that is really what makes this great for SEO:

Yes, that is actually text in the code. Text that search engines love and feed off of. This Star Wars scrolling text sequence breaks ground on a new rich media that is truly SEO friendly. You can give your users a visually rich experience and have your search engine rankings too!

The second I came across via Twitter from a Joe Hall tweet about a new HTML5 video player that is in development by a Switzerland-based group of web & i-Phone developers called Jilion.

HTML5 is going to bring video to a whole new level with its own set of video tags that will allow web developers to no longer need flash-based video players. However, JavaScript and CSS will still be used extensively to create video players like the one I am reviewing but they are still a step-up in the amount of CPU strain, load time and portability from flash.

Here is the section of code I want to highlight for HTML5 video being SEO friendly:

Yes, that is it. Clean, simple code and the search engine will love it. This will help bolster the number of videos that search engines are already aware of and allow websites/business to easily take advantage of universal video search. I want to point out, that under HTML5, video sitemaps for anyone publishing video to their site will become critical to making sure all of your video content continues and gets indexed properly by the search engines.

HTML5 is making it’s final pushes to become universally accepted in all browsers. However, development of HTML5 pages is underway and it is forging new paths in creativity, usability and accessibility. On top of that, HTML5 is shaping up to be incredibly search engine friendly and will power SEO strategy moving forward in this coming decade.

If you have any other examples of HTML5 bring used share them below especially any that you think have a positive impact on SEO and coding.

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Google “gets” 302 Redirects (after 2 years)

matthewdiehl — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:42:54 +0000

One of the benefits of working with a variety of clients who’s websites come through the door in a variety of states (of disarray) is that you get to see when the search engines do strange things. And by strange I mean really really obscure things that probably have a 1 in a trillion chance of happening while someone is actually monitor a website. Today is one of those days and it boils down to redirects.

Redirection issues are a very common problem faced by many websites. A redirect that returns a status code of 301 is the most search-friendly as it informs the crawlers of a permanent move of the pages. The other status code is a 302 redirect that is known as a temporary redirect and is not recognized as an optimal approach to handling redirection.

Google, for a long time, has said that it prefers the 301 redirect over the 302. However, today, I noticed Google finally “getting” a 302 redirect that a client had since March 2008 (like I said really obscure stuff). This 302 was setup well before our engagement had started with the client and getting the proper 301s in place has just not happened yet (even though advised, developer issues).

Currently, tracking of both the old and new URL was in place because the old URL was still in the SERPs. The appearance of the old URL is due to the fact that 302 temporary redirects are in place and not 301 permanent redirects.

In the most recent Google data the new URL had gained significant rankings for top keyphrases that it previously had not ranked for. Simultaneously, the old URL lost all of its top rankings for the same keyphrases that the new URL had just picked up. This was not a 1 to 1 swap there were 1 or 2 position differences in the rankings but it was clear as day that the new URL was ranking highly and the old URL had been dropped.

The 302s are still 302s and no other major architectural changes have taken place on the site. The only thing that has changed is time. It has been 22/23 months since the 302s had been setup. So, did Google upgrade the 302s to a faux 301 just because they have been around for so long?

Now, this isn’t the case that we start running around praising 302s as perfectly fine from an SEO standpoint. Stick with 301s as the quickest solution to informing the search engines of structural changes on a website (unless you don’t mind the nearly 2 year wait for you the proper URL to show up in the SERPs).

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Caffeine Update on the Horizon?

matthewdiehl — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:28:46 +0000

The Google Caffeine Update was first introduced subtlely to us back in August 2009 via this post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog where testing of some new search infrastructure was underway and being code named Caffeine.

After a short period of testing Google shutdown the Caffeine Sandbox Evironment and let everyone know that:

…Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center.

Which was confirmed by Matt Cutts at November’s Webmaster World PubCon in this slideshow (see slide 30):

Also, released was the Google’s Caffeine Update would not go live on all data centers until after the holidays. For everyone this meant not until after the mega online shopping season surrounding the end of December holidays (Christmas, etc.). There were a few grumblings that Caffeine was live on a few more data centers in early January and even more data centers at the end of January but these turned out to not be anything related to Caffeine.

So, here we sit (February 1st 2010) well over a month since “the holidays” and still no official notice from Google that Caffeince has been pushed live to all data centers or a more concrete plan of when it will be pushed.

There has been much speculation and analysis on what the Caffeine update will mean for the search results. One thing that the update is surely intended to do is impact the speed in which Google serves the results by changing the underlying infrastructure but of course Google is always concerned with relevance. Built into the Caffeine update will be a number of ranking algorithm changes that will potential impact a number of sites out there.

During the Sandbox experiments many SEO experts began posting their thoughts on what Caffeine would change. Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com suggested it would:

an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text

perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names

perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

Vanessa Fox a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land also weighed in on the Caffeine Update but final concluded that

…but my guess is that it likely does what Google search does, but better. And the foundational elements of having a crawlable infrastructure and compelling content remain.

A broad spectrum of other primary SEO outlets have commented that the Google Caffeine update will also focus on a couple additional primary adjustments including:

Site speed, referring to the load time of your site being more important that it currently is

Social presence, referring to your site’s appearance in links on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

So, as the clock continues to tick on the “after the holidays” launch of the Google Caffeine update everyone still has their eye on the horizon looking for any glimmer that the update could be coming and praying that their site is not devastated by any algorithmic updates that come along with it.

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Bing Wants Your Feedback

matthewdiehl — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:06:03 +0000

Bing has started to show a simple feedback form in some of the different verticals on the site. They are only looking for you to answer two questions:

Did you find what you were looking for?

Want to tell us more?

Here is how it appears collapsed:

Here is how it appears expanded:

So far it has been seen on Video searches , Bing Twitter and Bing Reference.

Seeing them somewhere else? Let everyone know.

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Where to Find “Old” Seesmic Desktop RT Functionality

matthewdiehl — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:38:43 +0000

As many people are updating to the latest Seesmic Desktop software today one of the major changes was the inclusion of the new Twitter retweet functionality. At first glance this appears to have replaced the “old” RT function that works outside the Twitter retweet methods but Seesmic has mearly moved it to a new location.

Here is where to find the “old” Seesmic Desktop RT functionality:
1. Hover over a profile pic
2. Click the “more” button
3. Click the “quote message” option

Thank god they didn’t totally scratch it from the app considering the Twitter retweet functionality is not winning anyone over (still).

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What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

matthewdiehl — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:29:00 +0000

David S. asks:
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

The short answer:
SEO (search engine optimization) impacts the organic/natural listings on the search engine results page (SERP)
SEM (search engine marketing/paid search/PPC) impacts the sponsored listing areas on the SERP

Below is a picture showing those two areas marked off:

Detailed differences between SEO & SEM:

SEO is a process of adjusting both on-site and off-site elements that are known to impact the search engine’s ranking algorithms. The ranking algorithms give the search engines the ability to evaluate websites for their relevancy to a user search query. Now, there are some 200 – 300 different factors that make up the ranking algoirthms and no one individual knows them all. However, experienced SEO professionals will have a solid understand of the key ranking factors and what will positively impact them.

Also, with SEO, you will commonly hear people say that SEO is free. Well, its not. When a search engine user clicks on your listing in the organic/natural results that click does not directly cost you money but with SEO all of you costs will be associated with the work it took to achieve that position in the listings and the cost it will take to maintain that position. SEO is a continual process of trying to improve or maintain your positions as the search engines will commonly change their ranking algorithms (in 2009 Google pushed over 540 search quality improvements which is ~1.5/day).

SEM, which people often interchange with the PPC (pay-per-click) acronym or often referred to as Paid Search, is the method of utilizing a search engine advertising program to get ads for your website included in the SERP for keyphrases in the Sponsored Link/Listings area. These ads are specifically controlled by you (or an account manager) to say exactly what you want.

The difference here with SEM vs. SEO is that when your ads are clicked in SEM you are paying per click. So, each time your ad appears there is a dollar value you have placed on that ad you are willing to pay if a qualified search engine user clicks it. This cost varies greatly depending on the competition in your niche, your ad, the keywords you are bidding on and your website (to name a few). With SEM, the amount of traffic you can drive to your website site is directly proportional to the budget you have allocated to pay for clicks.

In conclusion, SEO & SEM are vastly different and when I am talking to businesses about search engine marketing as a whole I suggest a combined approach. There are benefits to both. They also compliment one another by filling-in gaps in your search engine marketing strategy that the other does not cover.

Thanks for submitting you question!

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