Looking for ways to boost your Google ranking? Speaker Marissa Mayer, the Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, said during one of her speeches, "Have unique useful content. Have sitemaps. Make your site easy to reach with a text-based browser. Give your site a hierarchal structure. Have a single domain with mini-sites within, rather than having lots of sites."
Usability is a Must! Marissa says, "It's a good idea to design sites that are usable from any browser. That's something that Google may be taking into consideration - your cross-browser compatibility." Check out our
Accessibility and Usability forum for more tips!
Googlebot Still Isn’t Perfect. Some of the problems Googlebot has, according to Marissa, are JavaScript, session IDs, too many parameters, dynamic URLs, Splash pages, and frames. Also, if your site requires cookies to deliver content to browsers, then that's a serious problem because the Googlebot can't accept cookies and therefore won’t be able to reach the content.
Froogle. Many of you have probably noticed Froogle results are now appearing at the top of listings in Google. Marissa also mentioned this - which to me says, “If you are selling, get yourself into Froogle now!” Froogle is becoming increasingly important.
An Exclusive Interview. Yesterday, I caught up with Marissa after her presentation. We walked through the hallway together and had a short but exclusive interview as she carried her suitcase outside to catch a taxi to the airport.
I asked, “What should people do if their sites were totally dumped from Google?”
She replied, “If you dropped in rankings, go back and look at who you linked to and who’s linking to you. If any of these people are using spam techniques, they're the reason your site no longer appears on Google.”
“Does this mean that new algorithm somehow measures the ‘neighborhood’ you're linked into more highly?”
Smiling, Marissa told me she couldn’t answer that question, because it’s a direct statement about the new Google algorithm.
We'll take that as a yes. :)
I asked the same question to Derrick Wheeler of
Marketleap, and his response was, “Measure who's linking to you and see who you're linking to. Check keyword density. Check for duplicate content. Check for accidental spam. Don't try so hard to rank well. If you're taking a serious hit and losing money every day consider doing paid inclusion.”
My Take on Search Engine Strategies. There doesn't seem to be a lot of internet.com presence from what I've seen. I haven't found anyone whom I feel I can pull aside and talk to. But I have talked to several people who, like myself, are beginning to get the sense that the value of Search Engine Strategies isn't really there anymore, just because there's a sense of repetition in most of the sessions. Even much of what I've reported to you has been repetitive -- the speakers may be different, but the basic information that I've learned is all pretty much the same. "Get back to the basics." "Don't be so aggressive in Google anymore." I've heard these things so many times that I honestly feel like I could've gotten more information from spending a day reading over Danny Sullivan's articles on
SearchEngineWatch or reading through the content in the
WebProNews archives.
Are three days really necessary? The vendors want to speak and in a sly way present their products, and in order to put it all together they must drag it out for three days. A better idea would possibly be a one day conference featuring a panel of speakers such as Danny Sullivan. People would be able to ask questions and get direct answers from the experts. If you're going to put a conference together do it the way people really want it!
Sure, I’ve gotten lots of business cards and contacts, but I feel that the true value for attendees at conferences such as this is being able to ask direct questions to the presenters. Yes, there has been some interesting stuff but I had to chase people down to get it. Personally, I question value for people like myself. Who should attend Search Engine Strategies? Search engine optimization newbies and people who are just starting out would definitely find a place here, but for me I don't feel I've gotten anything worth this kind of money.