SES London 2012 - Andrew Goodman - 11 Ways To Be Invisible To Search Engines

11 Ways to Be Invisible to Search Engines

(and irrelevant to real people)

Feb. 21, 2012 @andrew_goodman

#seslondon

Search Before 2001

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Search After ~2005

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It’s called a “media mix,” right?

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Forget about Google for a second… no, really.

Source: Hitwise. “Upstream visits before HuffPost”

It’s the end of SEO as we know it

“Sauter le requin?”

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Where you rank is incredibly important (to getting a website visitor that is), *and* the

most obvious SEO factors still work

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Personalisation: end of the “water cooler SERP’s”?

Source: Enquiro Research

Social Signals

Search in 2010: fully blended and personalized. No more “ten blue links.”

Search in 2013: Social signals skyrocket in importance; influencers identified to you

Oh yeah…, and this

Social Objects and FREE

What gets shared? Social objects. Hugh MacLeod says: “Note to Social Media Mar-ke-ting Dorks: The hard currency of the Inter-net is not Face-book “Likes” or Twit-ter “Ret-weets”, as flavor-of-the-month as they might be. By them-sel-ves, they’re worthless.”

What is a social object? Get creative.

Going bowling, a charity ball. Art. Even if it’s Pamela Anderson pop art. A shared “interest” in _____________________ . Jesus, choir rehearsals, cookies, Xmas fund drive… The latest tablet. In Row 3. Look, point… discuss! Your family. A protest of the cancellation of a TV show that dumped 20 tons of peanuts at CBS Headquarters Personal, sincere blog posts by a young CEO who happens to inspire a lot of people (Tony Hsieh)… 2 million followers on Twitter.

Contrived social objects? (But all good info is technically shareable.)

“The network is powerful, but the network needs the node.” So PageRank has been wildly misinterpreted, to say nothing of overestimated.

FreshBooks: How to be crap at SEO, and great at “winning”

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Free, free, free. Search is your funnel. Give more away, wider funnel. The attention economy: popular = $$

11 Ways to Be Invisible

1. Spare, minimalist,understated brand. That’s the way to go.

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For now, search tools and even reputation tools still rely on cues about importance, text for

meaning, and *the ability to get to your stuff*. (Same goes for users themselves!)

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2. Leave info architecture to IT, then combine with minimalist theory

Instead: get (most) everything right

3. Make Your Site Slow

“Despite our challenges with the IT department… we are doing what we can. They have disputed some of your claims and as you know, these things can take time…”

Google Pagespeed Online

4. Throw 500,000 crappy pages at the index all at once

Instead: broaden your view of indexing best practices…

Sitelinks, URL removal, weightings, and more…

Google Webmaster Tools – links screen

How many links to internal pages?

Google Webmaster Tools – links screen

What anchor text? Is it a normal pattern?

Who cares if this page is indexed? (Actually, it does rank on the query for “klotzbach

cleveland”… 55th… 10 spots worse than “Klotzbach genealogy and family history research”)

5. Hide Stuff and Officially Call Your Pages “Barrier” Pages

6. Offer bad user experiences when they arrive

I came, I puked, I left: the bounce will get you

7. Buy links from a “link vendor” – because any old link will do Instead: do real world PR and ask for or incentivize links. Then, stop actively link building and build diversified approaches to sharing instead!

8. Focus on elaborate website builds when you’re local. Try to impress your friends. LinkedIn; own website; misplaced effort conveying nothing!

9. Centralize editorial. Don’t train your writers in SEO, PR 2.0, social media. (Or, do the opposite…)

10. Speak at conferences where nobody tweets

At #seslondon @andrew_goodman says: to be invisible, just speak at conferences where nobody tweets

11. Assume you can totally control what they’re saying about you

Comments and feedback: different strokes for different folks?

Top takeaways

Don’t reduce everything to one or two key factors

Prioritize, but be broad & comprehensive Develop a full checklist / scorecard “Google likes links” – yes but now what? Clickstreams & behavior – uptick in importance

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How to fund this?

Link building? Work on the low-hanging fruit, then stop Move $ from traditional to online (P&G) Take an Adwords display network holiday Move content production & PR from “top down” model to “distributed communications” Open up, give more

Some of my social objects

“Best of Awards” – HomeStars.com Columns for ClickZ Book And of course… follow me at agoodman on Google+ to see full version…

Thanks! @andrew_goodman +agoodman