Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

Tuesday’s sessions at SMXEast in New York continued with “Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices Edition.” Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land moderated, and notes from the presentations and Q&A with Google, Yahoo!, and Bing include:

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.

• If you need to bring your site offline for temporary maintenance, what’s the best way to do it? Return a 503 with a helpful message. Google will later recrawl the URL. Google will not index the content of the 503 (the preexisting content will be available in search results).
• How do you help bots crawl your site more efficiently with if-modified-since? Respond when appropriate with 304 “Not modified.”
• Which file(s) might be good to disallow from crawlers? individual login pages and calendars
• What action(s) can reduce load time (and thus increase user happiness)? order the external scripts and CSS on your pages efficiently (external scripts load serially – all other loading is blocked -  **stylesheets above external scripts allow parallel loading – much faster)** compress images
• What is the possible result of this implementation of “other-language” versions of a page using rel=”canonical”? This can be a problem if a french searcher is searching for a site. She’ll still see english version.

Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft

• Secure Your Website – no one talks about it. Everyone takes it for granted.
• Spammers target spiky queries that follow popular events and capitalize on the popularity to make money. They hack popular sites, use the link, and then spam the queries that target those queries.
• Blogs and forums are user-generated content, which makes them nonsecure and vulnerable if not secured/monitored regularly.
• Links on hacked pages may lead to a fake malware page which actually loads viruses if you click for the antivirus.
• Forums and blogs are spam magnets.

Q&A with Maile, Sasi, and Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo! Inc.

• Using javascript to fool the search engines is a recipe for disaster.
• Safest to use text links.
• In bing, linking out is NOT part of the algorithm.
• Google and bing never supported the keywords tag. Yahoo, within last 3 months, doesn’t support keywords tag. They were NEVER a major ranking factor of the search engines.
• Good ranking factors: GOOD TEXT, informative and unique, content should make sense. KEYWORDS in the title tag, in the page itself (body copy), (in past – higher on the page was helpful), presence of the words in the links or near the links that lead to your page.
• How to move a website to a new domain without affecting its rankings: webmaster central blog – best practices for moving your site, webmaster tools – change of address; 301s
• Javascript & ability to executive has been a long time coming and they are treading lightly to ensure no negative side effects. only certain types of events are found to be safe.
• Canonical tag transferrs all link properties — it’s true.
• Whatever the 301 will do for you, the canonical will do for you.
• If you change hosting, it doesn’t matter – it won’t affect your rankings unless your hoster is slow. It doesn’t matter what your backend is if your structure is the same.
• Display none by itself isn’t blackhat, but it’s walking a thin line.
• Anytime that money is changing hands, you’re safest using nofollow.

I think it’s great that reps from the big-3 search engines took the time to come answer questions from Internet marketers. It makes it easier to play by the rules when you get additional opportunity to learn what the rules are!

Stacey Morgan Smith is the director of search engine optimization for Northern Virginia Internet Marketing Company NetStrategies. With over 14 years’ experience as an editor and proofreader, she brings a different viewpoint to SEO. Along with the rest of the NetStrategies team, she can help you increase your leads from search!