Site Architecture for Advanced SEO – #SMX

06/20/2024 11:50 by andrewsho

Ok, here is a poorly formatted liveblogging of this session:

Maile Ohye of Google sez:

Talking about ecommerce issues where we have a site with 158 products but because of filtering there are 380,000 URLs, so Google doesn’t know what to crawl.

Maintain a consistent URL structure
Directories and filenames are case sensitive. http://apple.com/itunes/ & http://apple.com/ITUNES/ are considered to be different URLs
Keeping consistent reduces duplication, facilitates more accurate indexing and simplifies your robots.txt configuration
301s & rel=canonical are crawled much less frequently than 200s
404/410 URLs are crawled less frequently
500 errors are treated as a transient error. Pages not removed from index. We will retry in the near future.
Use standard encodings & key=value (e.g. /product.php?item=nexus-one&category=mobile) v. non-standard
Crawlers interpret standard keys & values.
Use the URL parameter tool with Yahoo & Google Webmaster Tools. Tells bots which parameters are relevant and which they can ignore
Indexing priorities: Googlebot looks for what users will find relevant: URLs with updated content, URLs with unique/important content (as determined by linking signals); Sitemap info and bandwidth considerations
How to increase Googlebot visits: Strengthen indexing signals via uniqueness & freshness. How well the page is lined from your site and other pages on the Web.
Use proper response coes
Serve content reliably
Prevent crawling of unnecessary pages

Now for the Advanced stuff (yay):

Optimize performance: Shopzilla improved conversions by 7-12% just by increasing site speed
Improve long-tail content: unique & fresh content, get links to these URLs
Reduce duplicate content: Choose canonical URLs and be consistent. Include the canonical URL in internal links and sitemap. Use 301 & rel=canonical.
Include microformats & RDFa: Enhances results with rich snippets – ability to include reviews, recipes, people & events.
Use Video Sitemaps

Adam Audette of Audette Media

It’s all about user experience. Users come first and then the SEO.

4 Big Issues with SEO & IA Right Now

Categorization, Search & Browse: Amazon provides key categories on the homepage but as you click into categories you get relevant sub categories and links to important product URLs in the category.
Make Use of Link Relationships
Know Your Internal Link Profile
Content is more important than ever

Giving a 304 unmodified URL signal to the bots will improve crawl efficiency.

Faceted Navigation:
Great user experience but bad for bots

Rewrite facets to pretty URLs based on priority
Place faceted experience in a folder for more control
Append “overhead” attributes (e.g extra parameters) to the pretty URLs; rel=canonical back

Pagination:

Make your View All page the canonical version (and default browse)

Brian Ussery of Search Discovery now going to talk about Image search:

Brands need to be mindful of what shows up for their brand queries in image search.

Image results in universal search varies depending on the size of the searcher’s screen.

Googleboth downloads X(HTML)

Page parsed

Image url discovered

crawled

Classified (photo, face, b&w, adult, etc.)

Indexed

Duplicates identified (tries to find canonical)