SEO tricks from Patio11

So, about that whole "subdomain" thing, as mentioned in this article. The problem in SEO is that separate subdomains accrue separate Google scores, correct? So if I was to serve my whole site from a third-tier domain, like "www.example.com", that would be okay? Provided I were not foolish enough to also put stuff on "example.com" and "other.example.com" and expect links to that content to contribute to the reputation of "www.example.com"?

Basically I'm looking for confirmation that the classic old "www" prefix is okay, if used carefully. (Lots of people hate it for aesthetic reasons, and I used to agree with them, and then I had to dig into the rules for DNS CNAMEs, and the terrifying results have made me fall in love with "www" again. Unless you tell me it's bad, in which case I guess I'll just have to take to drink.)

bmelton• 15 years ago

I'm not Patrick, and hopefully he'll chime in to answer as well, but one thing to note is that you CAN specify the preferred URL (e.g., www.example.com or just example.com) in Google's Webmaster Tools[1] to let Google know which one you prefer.

Obviously, if you set it to be just example.com, don't have all your promotional materials link to the other, and somewhat less obviously, please be aware that what you set as preferred for Google doesn't necessarily mean squat to Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista or whomever.

I'm not as qualified to touch on the rest, but thought this might be at least a little useful.

[1] http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

randfish3• 15 years ago

Yes, you're totally cool to use either site.tld or www.site.tld. I'd recommend using a 301 redirect of one to the other (Google and Bing are pretty good at automatically canonicalizing these, but not perfect).

The trouble comes when you segment content to subdomain.site.com. The domain authority engines assign to a root domain may not always pass to all the subdomains, so you end up with subpar rankings to what you could earn.

As an example, we launched the Beginner's Guide to SEO on guides.seomoz.org and moved it after a few months to www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo (where it currently lives). It had earned tons of links prior to that move, but the day after the 301 back to the main domain (away from the guides subdomain), it jumped to #1 rankings for all sorts of terms, including "seo guide" (recently got beat out by Google's SEO guide and is now #2). This was a good illustration of the power of keeping content in a single sub/root domain location for us.

patio114• 15 years ago

What Rand said. #include <ndaed_client_anecdote.h>

franze• 15 years ago

one other thing why www is good for SEO. shitty URL parsers. lets say you make a press release. there is a high chance that www.example.org gets automatically parsed into a clickable link (sometimes it's nofollow, sometime it isn't) - on the other side, there is a high chance that example.org does not get parsed into a clickable link, so you would have to write http://example.org to make sure that it get parsed into a link, which is just ugly - and - most of the PR stuff are reluctant to do.

some URL parsers have caught up to non-www domains if you have a .com domain, but try it with an .io domain. it fails most of the time.

that means there are some interesting hipness tradeoffs

  * if you have a cool .io domain
  * you should have an uncool www

on other thing about non www domains. journalists always get it wrong: whatever you do, whoever you pitch, as soon as you end up in a big and might print newspaper (that also has a website) you will see your domain with www again.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

> Google and Bing are pretty good at automatically canonicalizing these, but not perfect

I have been meaning to blog this - this leads to cloaking exploits. For eg. Google will figure out the shorter canonical link for a domain. So if you have www.lakers.com redirect to lakers.nba.com Google will treat 'lakers.com' as the canonical link and rewrite all the search results.

This can be exploited by registering a shorter domain and then pointing it to the real site, then waiting for Google to redirect it. For eg. Fred Wilson noticed that the guy who owns avc.com was redirecting to his blog. He thought the guy was being a good samaritan, until I pointed out that it was a cloak attack and he was trying to jack all of avc.blogs.com's Google juice.

You can avoid this by not letting Google or Bing setting the canonical and by specifying it with a rel='canonical' link or using Webmaster Tools. Do you know anything else about this Rand or have you seen it in the wild?

bambax• 15 years ago

But if your blog is hosted by a third party (say Posterous), having blog.domain.com is very easy to set up, but domain.com/blog isn't? (Is it actually even possible at all?)

bodegajed• 15 years ago

I think Google is smart enough to identify the www and without. Because it is now smart enough to identify bad grammar and spelling.

On the other hand, I think I disagree with the buying a new domain to target an exact match. That will just give signal to Google that it's a new domain and it was unnaturally optimized.

richardw• 15 years ago

On your last point: If true, that would mean a temporary hit but over time it would provide a permanent benefit. Great tradeoff.

A user searching for exactly what your website is offering, using the words that make up your website url, should at the very least have a strong opportunity to arrive at your website. If Google did anything else it would offer an opportunity for Bing et al.

ednc• 15 years ago

The exact match domain 'trick' died in early 2011 updates. Prior to that I had done exactly what the article suggested - Exact Match Domain, 3-5 page site with optimized keywords, and boom the site would be on page 1 with no backlinks in 2-5 weeks.

Today this does not work if there is any competition at all for a word. (I've still seen it work for long tail terms with no competition).

Long story short - you need good content to rank well :-)

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Thanks to everyone for the excellent replies.

joshu• 15 years ago

Whoa, patio11 is in Mountain View? Want to get lunch?

melissamiranda12• 15 years ago

He's back in Japan now. He was here about a week ago.

louhong• 15 years ago

Thanks for the summary and write up - incredibly useful. Thank you!

a5seo• 15 years ago

I agree with all these points, except with respect to Twitter. There is one case where I have seen Twitter impact SEO and that's in getting a new URL indexed fast, and in local SEO... Lots of tweets about a local-related page from people whose (legit) accounts are located in the same region seem to help for local keywords.

randfish3• 15 years ago

Yeah. Have to agree with you here. I just tested this recently , getting a few hundred retweets of an obscure URL ranking on page 4 for an obscure term and it moved to page 2 within a few days. I suspect Google may not be getting Twitter data directly (or getting it as fast as when they had the direct relationship), but, at the very least, there's a strong second-order impact between pages earning lots of tweets and getting ranked.

Our latest public post on this is here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings but we'll continue to test and try to get more definitive answers.

anjc13• 15 years ago

Is that 'second order impact' not tied to the public doing the link building for you, outside of twitter? E.g. blogs, reddit, etc, rather than Google actually putting ranking weight onto info in tweets?

melissamiranda12• 15 years ago

I think Patrick was referring to traditional page rank and general search results as opposed to local or news.

dools• 15 years ago

Yeah Twitter absolutely rocks. I recently had a post tweeted by both @AndrewWarner and @smashingmag [1] and it's now on page one for the search term "testing website" (when done on google.com.au). While the Twitter links were fresh it was page 1 on google.com, too an showing up as "news". This is a relatively new post with virtually no other inbound link juice on a site with not much other link juice and only PR of 3.

[1] http://www.decalcms.com/page/Testing_your_website_before_lau...

xpose2000• 15 years ago

This is pretty sound and basic SEO if you want to spend your time making dozens of very basic wordpress blogs about particular topics to grab some easy money.

Nothing wrong with this if you have time on the weekends, heck this could even be a fulltime job as the income will slowly climb.

However, this 'trick' is quite old, but probably new to some people...

melvinram• 15 years ago

Doing the basics extraordinarily well is usually what makes all the difference.

patio114• 15 years ago

The motivation for the audience at 500 Startups is less "In your spare time, start blogging about [red men's shoes] and try to sell $0.50 a day of AdWords clicks about it" and more "As one thing in your marketing arsenal, create systems and processes to mass-produce quality content about the market addressed by your SaaS application, scaling your userbase from the few hundred people you had at launch to something closer to the 200,000 your friendly neighborhood bingo sideproject has, show your user adoption graph to investors, create lots of value, and ideally end up rich."

wmf• 15 years ago

This part sounds like cargo cult black magic: "This works for .com (.edu, .org) domains, but not for non-US TLDs like .co or .ly." Does Google really discriminate based on TLDs?

kevinburke2• 15 years ago

yes - some TLD's are known spam havens. see co.cc, for example.

patio114• 15 years ago

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: yes, Google certainly treats the Big Three differently than it does .co or .ly. I don't have specific evidence of them discriminating against .co/.ly, but the evidence that they discriminate for EMDs in the Big Three is overwhelming and undeniable.

blauwbilgorgel3• 15 years ago

Is this not a bias? As in: It only looks like Google discriminates for the Big Three, because they are so abundant?

I've heard from official sources like below that Google doesn't discriminate on TLD. There are my sites and Googlers who use ".info" TLD in a legit and well-ranking manner.

Where this "evidence" does play a role, is in spam/made for Adwords-sites. It is reasonable to assume that a .co or .ly will get more attention, to combat spam/made for Adwords sites that try to use Keyword-In-Domain tricks to outrank legit companies.

But if you are not making Keyword-In-Domain Made-For-Adwords sites, you have nothing to worry about (at least as for Google discrimination).

It is mostly _users_ who discriminate for a .com. If Google ranks website.ly in the top 5, but its users don't click on the result, in fear of spam or low-quality, then your rankings might suffer.

Matt Cutts interview on DomainRoundtable.

  "For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a 
  .net, .us, .info, etc. 

  He said that TLD doesn’t matter -- that’s the way Larry 
  and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The 
  algorithm doesn’t care where the page is located, it’s 
  all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the 
  end of answering this question he did admit that they 
  might have started to look at particularly cheap (and 
  spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs or they might 
  start considering TLD in their algorithm if they’re not 
  already doing so."

So it is still good to advice against .io and witty domain names (portfol.io), but not for the reason of Google discrimination.

I am reminded by statements like: "For better ranking, claim your domain for 5+ years". Just because Google gives extra attention to domains with a low expiration date, because they correlate with spammy/get-rich-quick sites, doesn't mean that spam on a 5+ years registered domain is ok, or that simply claiming a domain for 10 years, somehow signals quality to Google.

You only have to worry about registration dates, when you know that you deliver low-quality content and you don't want to be found out soon.

anjc13• 15 years ago

Does Google still give weight to the .edu domain? It'd surely be unhelpful to proper meritorious rankings seeing as it's one of the first strategies SEOers will use?

palomonox• 15 years ago

What percentage of Mexican men perform oral sex on their wives

pace• 15 years ago

oh yes. they do. just check in google webmaster tools the respective setting and help files. there're just dozens of TLDs which rank internationally incl. the blockbuster .com .org and .net. first we had the fancy .io domain but switched quickly to a .com -- traffic has been exploding since then

ghayes• 15 years ago

"Github, Slideshare, Tumblr are fantastic, but don’t give them your link juice. Put your content on your own domain. "

Love this. There's no reason you can't host the write-up for your github projects / gems on your own domain, and make a much prettier and more intuitive documentation for your code than what you can do with markdown and no pictures. As an example, look how nice VowsJS (http://vowsjs.org/) does this. It makes me excited to clone their module and use it in my project. More people should be doing this!

handzhiev• 15 years ago

But you can get one-way dofollow links by placing some of your code on Github. It can make sense, just needs some carful planning.

kevinburke2• 15 years ago

    Use Google Adword’s keyword tool to come up with keywords and write pages that 
    speak to those topics. 
    If you’re a productivity app, write a page for 
    “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in 
    Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on.  Rather than automating it or having the CEO 
    or head marketing guy write everything, 
    you want to define a process such that a freelancer 
    or team member can create content 
    responsive to those keywords with a consistent level of quality.

This is really cutting it close to violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines for quality and originality on each page.

melissamiranda12• 15 years ago

The content should be high quality. This is why I mentioned the story of eHow and what a terrible thing it is, and why Patrick said "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create content in a fashion that scales while simultaneously ensuring that the user experience of consuming your content remains good"

He specifically told us not to create crap content.

anjc13• 15 years ago

The amazingly high quality of your content will be irrelevant if the keyword density on your page is one that Google deems to be low quality.

"""If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on."""

^ That type of thing is pretty risky if it's one of your big strategies..

eps3• 15 years ago

> Design Matters. A lot.

This is a common sense, but I have hard time reconciling patio11 saying that with an actual appearance of his projects. Preaching without practicing takes away a lot credibility from a preacher even if the advice is reasonable.

melissamiranda12• 15 years ago

Look at his main site: http://www.kalzumeus.com/. It's quite good looking and well designed.

irahul4• 15 years ago

What about this one http://www.bingocardcreator.com/

That doesn't look that good looking to me.

frankacter2• 15 years ago

@dikbrouwer: Was the talk recorded, if so is there a youtube link?

@patio11: could you make your presentation / slide deck available for those of us who were not fortunate enough to attend in person.

melissamiranda12• 15 years ago

No recording that I'm aware of.

frankacter2• 15 years ago

Thanks. Any idea if the deck is available anywhere?

nikcub4• 15 years ago

At Techcrunch when we removed the share buttons average traffic to each post dropped 20-25%. We saw no jump in number of blog links, or tumblr's, or anything else.

The buttons suck - we knew that a lot of users hated them (it adds 4 * 20 additional HTTP requests to the main page), but they were worth too much traffic to do away with. Social network referrals likely surpass search engine referrals for a lot of blogs and web sites. They have steadily become an important web traffic navigator.

If somebody can figure out how to make those share buttons prettier and more efficient there is probably a product in that. I would guess that most blogs would love to drop the grid of share buttons that can be found on every post.

Otherwise I totally agree with not going for subdomains. We setup each property on a separate domain and initially had some on subdomains. The subdomains didn't rank at all and didn't help our PR or SEO. As soon as we switched each property to a separate domain our search referrals rocketed. For eg. you can now find a crunchbase link within the first 5 results for the name of a startup, while similar records for posts that lived on subdomains wouldn't rank at all. We had around a dozen different domains and frequently linked between them (for eg. each post would have multiple crunchbase links), and it worked really well for search ranking (search engines are ~40% of crunchbase traffic, IIRC) It shouldn't be like that, but it is.

mkuhn2• 15 years ago

Its nice how the 4*20 requests problem has been solved during the redesign. Now the individual Buttons are only loaded if someone really wants to use them and is hovering over the dummy buttons.

I found that quite nifty and unobtrusive. A smart solution to the problem.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

It is much better than having two clicks (which I had prototyped), but the prob is that a lot of portable devices don't have 'hover' - so I don't know if it falls back on anything in that case.

There is a product here - package the buttons together so they only load once, hide them in some way by default, and provide a bunch of analytics. Lots of blogs and websites would pay for that - the current solutions for social button analytics are really bad, or non-existant (you need to know things like click-through rates, which share options are most popular, autohiding some for users who never use them, detect if the user is logged in for each service, how many followers/likes/retweets etc. each user gets from a share so you can identify 'power sharers' etc.) - I don't think that exists.

You can't just keep adding more and more buttons for each social service, and there are some people who will only use, for eg. delicious or pinboard and there are no buttons for them.

rmc5• 15 years ago

At Techcrunch when we removed the share buttons average traffic to each post dropped 20-25%. We saw no jump in number of blog links, or tumblr's, or anything else.

One thing I'm learning about SEO, is that you have to know your audience. This means you should know what they are searching for, and optimise for that. Likewise if your audience is a big user of twitter (which TechCrunch's audience would be), then use that to your advantage.

pbiggar• 15 years ago

Before the big redesign a while back, Mozilla's "memshrink" effort used Techcrunch as a metric because of how much memory it used. Between the buttons, the ads, and the other embeds, techcrunch was a massive massive memory hog on Firefox.

tolas2• 15 years ago

I completely agree that /blog was better than blog subdomain in the past, but this article has me convinced that google now treats them the same.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganiz...

Am I wrong?

dfischer• 15 years ago

Wow this is an excellent find and it sounds right. They had something as arbitrary as "pets.example.com" counting for "www.example.com" so then "blog.example.com" should surely be the same as "www.example.com" and "example.com"

Can anyone clarify?

gujk3• 15 years ago

If you could, how much would you charge someone to "subscribe" to "buy off" the share buttons for their pageview? Same question goes for ads.

If the price isn't too high, someone should just start selling crapblockers that make everyone happy. I guess the challenge is that you can't price a crablocker until after you've inundated someone with crap for measurement purposes.

iaskwhy• 15 years ago

On the subdomains topic, on one of my sites I went the subdomain way for languages. Example: www is for english, de is for german, fr is for french and so on. The reason I did this is because I wanted Google to index the sites properly, in the right language. So if you go to google.fr and search for some of its keywords you would see the french version and not the english one. I'm just not sure how Google behaves but my feeling is that if all your languages are on the same domain (without any difference on the URL) then it will always display the english one by default (assuming it's the default one, obviously). Can anyone enlighten me?

It's been working for me but I notice the english version (which is the default one, www, but not the one with most visits) is not working as good as the other languages so I'd say juice is not shared between subdomains, like Patrick said. Still trying to figure out what's the best solution...

danmaz74• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, I have to agree on much of the advice.

Especially, I just hate how much google gives credit to the terms which are in the domain name. Why is having been able to register a "good" domain first such an important signal about site relevance? On many searches the first page is full of "keyword.com" "keyword.net" "keyword.it" websites that were only made for SEO and Adwords and have no usefulness.

anjc13• 15 years ago

This is something Google are surely working on, or, i hope they are. As much as the topic of SEO fascinates me, when it's successful it can be so deleterious to the quality of results. Google search is practically useless, for many searches that i'd do which i'd imagine are common enough.

blauwbilgorgel3• 15 years ago

>> Twitter links has no SEO juice

Besides using Twitter to:

- build your network and following,

- Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions

- Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1]

- Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2]

- Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author profiles. Not all these feeds have the "nofollow" property.

The last one is also relevant to the statement: "Wikipedia doesn't matter for link juice". There are many copies of Wikipedia on university domains, where they don't employ nofollow (For study about web crawling or natural language processing). Or people rewriting Wikipedia articles and adding the references without nofollow. A nofollow link can transform into a dofollow link.

>> Don’t use the keyword meta tag.

Exactly, but do use its fine on-page alternative: Microdata keywords: http://schema.org/WebPage

If only for internal usage: Writing down the keywords for a page, keeps you focussed. If you don't mind giving this information to your competitors (there are tools to find out these keywords anyway, if not already obvious), do experiment with microdata keywords.

[1] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-index...

[2] http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus...

orionlogic• 15 years ago

I agree with Schema.org. Use that extensively in your website. You get more pixel space in Google SERP's by microformatting your content.

anjc13• 15 years ago

They never said it doesn't have marketing juice, they're just talking about link building i presume. So surely it'd be better to focus on more solid SEO strategies than link building on no-follow sites and hoping that somebody mirrors it somewhere. Do .edu links even have any ranking weight anymore? It's probably one of the most abused link building schemes there is.

blauwbilgorgel3• 15 years ago

They are talking about Twitter having no link juice.

With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following).

Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy.

Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little more intelligently, would have you connecting with other webmasters and linkerati: People who can add (Twitter) links to their sites, for example when they blog about the topic of your tweet, or submit it to Hacker News.

There are valid reasons to ditch Twitter: if your produce content just for ranking, instead of your users, and you lack a brand, because you have a keyword-in-domain.net, then Twitter will be very ineffective. No one wants to follow or engage with a non-brand, with highly optimized content.

If you have a brand and produce interesting content, you'll shoot yourself in the foot, if you ignore Twitter.

>> Do .edu links have any ranking weight anymore?

I don't know, I am unable to measure their value (lack control groups with the exact same linking profiles)

There is good reason to believe there is something like "proximity to authority". Taking a seed set of quality websites (Stack overflow, Wikipedia, a lot of .edu domains) you can calculate the distance/similarity of your site to this seed set and measure your own quality and authority.

If this is a solid measure, then the .edu TLD alone might not give a free pass. It matters if the .edu is deemed authoritative or not and to what degree. A link from cnn.com can be more authoritative, relevant, contextual and so provide more ranking weight, than a link from a random university student page that happens to end in ".edu".

A nofollow link always caries mention-value. For a smart search engine just a relevant mention of, for example "SEOmoz", could attribute a vote to http://seomoz.org . Also an added benefit of mentions is the increased "search results estimate" for your brand or product. Some people give more trust to companies that have more results in the index, especially when comparing companies.

melissamiranda12• 15 years ago

Right. Twitter is great for distributing a link, but having your link on twitter.com is not going to help you rank for Google search results.

What does work is people seeing your link on Twitter and posting it around the internet.

arthurgibson• 15 years ago

People should realize he is just telling you how to build a good website, remove any mention of SEO from this article and you will see my point.

yesbabyyes• 15 years ago

Build a good website, as in adding lots of "content" with [your product] for [Healthcare|Pets|Education|Halloween]? That doesn't sound like building a good website -- to me, it sounds more like spam.

hugorodgerbrown• 15 years ago

Am I alone in finding the following quote profoundly depressing: "It cost Patrick $8.95 to buy [halloweengiftcards], $100 for a writer to make 5 pages of content, and he made thousands in sales."

Ditto "If you’re a productivity app, write a page for “increases productivity in Healthcare”, another for “increases productivity in Education”, “lowers cost in Healthcare”, and so on."

This kind of seo-engineering just seems so desparate, as if SEO is the be-all and end-all of running an online business.

Whatever happened to having a site that obeys all the normal 'rules', and provides valuable information / services / products to your target audience. They'll find it.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I find that pretty annoying when I'm looking for tools, but I do think it works, with varying degrees of shadiness. Some companies completely rebrand a product as if it were custom-designed for an area, taking their Foo Software and making it Foo Software for Healthcare, when in fact that's a lie and it wasn't customized for healthcare at all (and certainly not based on any knowledge of the area or research into its practices). Maybe users don't notice, and even if they do, sometimes you can mitigate it by just giving refunds freely to the users who complain, and keeping the money of those who don't.

An even scammier version of that is to rebrand software you didn't even make, like take VLC and rebrand it as customized video software for $whatever, when indeed you've done no customization for anything.

dpritchett• 15 years ago

This seems incredibly idealistic. Patrick is providing relevant and valuable products to people. If this $110 investment in a halloween-themed variant to his site brought thousands in sales, then clearly not everyone was "finding it" where it was seasonal bingo content.

chc3• 15 years ago

People were looking for Halloween bingo cards, Patrick provided them in the most obvious place. In what way is that not providing valuable information/services/products?

JeffL• 15 years ago

Where is a good place to hire someone to write 5 pages of content for $100?

barry-cotter• 15 years ago

Email me and I'll get back to you. Or elance.com, vworker.com or odesk.com

macoughl• 15 years ago

As someone who has been in the SEO industry a long time I can tell you that some of this is terrible/spammy advice...

Buy KW rich domains and pay some copywriter to crank out 4-5 pages?! Are you serious?

Twitter has no SEO Value?...just so you know...the SE's came out and said that authoritative tweets absolutely have value....While they don't pass "juice", they can help you in the SERPs

I'd hold off on that hug if I were you...

muyuu• 15 years ago

There is nothing about SEO (and SEO only) that isn't spammy.

SEO tricks from Patio11

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