So here’s the the pilot episode of a new wonderful series. Basically I go around with a camera and challenge SEO practitioners to a game of ‘Yes, No or SEO’. It’s one minute of SEO related questions, and the interviewee is not allowed to say yes, no or SEO of course. Here’s Jon Quinton, a new recruit at SEO Gadget:
Me: Jon?
Jon: Yes…
#FAIL
More to come at Think Visibility this weekend I hope.
SEO Ninja, Social Media Guru, Rankings Wizard
I see these words in your Twitter bio and I while I won’t take a personal dislike to you, I just think it’s lazy. What you’re basically doing is inflating the importance of your profession by giving it a mystical quality.
This sort of statement is typically interpreted by those who make it as just a bit of fun. However, it more than likely going to cause the people who you need to influence (clients, fellow workers), all the more baffled by the apparently mysterious ways of all things digital. It also causes is a contradictory disconnect of client and apparent guru, because it implies the client can’t possibly know what you’re talking about – because it’s magic.
If you think you are a guru, think about it: you are not. You are as much a guru in marketing as the print guys are about their media. You are as much of a guru as the milk delivery man is an expert in delivering milk. Sure you have experience in something, but please let’s drop the mysticism (which conversely means you have some sort of ancient wisdom – difficult in social /search).
You’re all marketers. Get over the fact that you can look at Google Analytics and make the graphs rise, or that you can make connections and ‘engage’ (meaning?) with a fanbase. There is no mysticism in this but understanding what you’re doing.
Stop thinking that old media is dead and you’ve seen the light. It isn’t, you haven’t. Get integrated.
We still work in a fairly unbalanced industry. I don’t think the masculine (oh yes they all are) additions to job titles help.
The askamum.co.uk site has been hit by Panda and search traffic dipped since April 2011. I was called to look at it in November 2011. In January we put out a release that was felt would correct a huge amount of duplication and crawl errors. It did – the release certainly consolidated the main site, but a significant problem remains – the forums.
The forums are an out of the box solution called Star Community – written in asp.net. I’ve taken the crawl report and pages in the folder /Community/ cause well over 90% of errors. In absolute terms that’s near 100,000 of them. It appears the forums are dragging the rest of the site down.
The forum drives hardly any keyword traffic – maybe a puny 100 visits a month.
Now as far as I can see there are a few solutions to this problem. Listed below.
I’m not sure about this, as Google still detects links that point to folders blocked by robots.txt. It also counts them as an error in Webmaster Tools. It would be a very cheap solution though. The duplication would be solved by the next crawl.
Despite this caveat, I’ve decided to do it in the interim, since we have very little to lose.
This is an option, but we’d lose over 1,000,000 comments and the legacy of users. There isn’t a huge amount of value in the user comments, but it could kill a lot of repeat visits again as users have their history wiped out. We’d have to change this when the site moves platform anyway, which is on the horizon.
This one seems the most difficult and most expensive. Because Star Community is licensed software, it’s also more difficult than just changing the code. We could sort out pagination through using JavaScript, but then there’s a rabbit warren of other ways to find low value pages.
Had anyone ever faced a Panda related issue like this one – particularly using forum technology? I’d love to have your feedback.
