In the world of big brands and sites, SEO practices become part of a laundry list of developer tasks, often far beneath the threshold of serious attention. While folks in our industry have learned the detriment of ignoring the search engines' guidelines for crawling & ranking, in the world of the Fortune 1000's, there are hundreds of disbelievers. Thus, it's a great time to re-visit some common SEO mistakes.
- Un-Spiderable Navigation
From Flash links to Javascript calls to drop-downs and search box interfaces, there's dozens of sites that fall victim to a lack of crawling due to their spider un-friendliness. - Disregard for Relevant Keywords
Out of the Fortune 500, I'd estimate that only a scant few dozen are actually implementing proper keyword research and targeting - the rest leave it to a "creative ad writer" to determine page content and title tags. - Flash & Image-Based Content
In addition to navigation, the content that's most critical to search engines is frustratingly hidden in files that spiders can't see. Despite the promises from years ago that engines would eventually be able to spider Flash content (or read text in images), it seems we're still many years away. - URL Cannonicalization Problems
With "print friendly" versions, different navigation paths in the URLs leading to the same page and plain-old duplication for the heck of it, "canonical content" is going underappreciated. - Content Distribution & Partnerships
Along with cannonical issues on their own sites, many large owners of web content license it out to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of sources. The only thing more damaging than having six versions of content on your site is having six versions of it on six other big, powerful sites. - Cookie or Session-Variable Requirements
Big sites that don't build content access systems for spiders are asking for trouble - if even a spider has to have a cookie drop to pass through, someone else will be getting your traffic. - Controlled-Access to Content
The NY Times, Economist and Salon.com don't see nearly the link popularity growth of their more generous competitors. Even when you let the spiders through, requiring membership of paid-access means that far fewer visitors will bother to link. - Multiple Site Creation
Rather than launch projects behind their root domain, big companies seem to take pride in releasing 6 new websites every time their ad agency changes the campaign slogan. Somebody's never heard of the sandbox...
One of the most fascinating people I met at the recent Pubcon was a "search proxy architect" whose job is to work with big brands' unfriendly sites and create alternate pages for search engines to crawl and index. Basically, it's an advanced form of cloaking that the engines tolerate, largely because they'd rather be able to spider the content from these sites than to have it removed from the index. I had no idea the extent to which this practice is used, but apparently, this "ethical cloaking" is much, much more common than you might think. Sadly, I can't post the examples I know of, but if you've got some, feel free to share in the comments.
So, next time someone asks you about whether cloaking is white-hat or black-hat you can tell them... "it depends."
I work inhouse for a large online publisher and we face the challenges that Rand has described on a daily basis.
Usually, there are two factors that create an environment for these SEO mistakes to thrive in.
1. Lack of SEO buy-in from senior management - while most developers I encounter at least understand the basic benefits of SEO, the higher up you go in the food chain, the more likely they are to have misguided or zero SEO knowledge. Unfortunately, usually the guys at the very top decide what projects get the green light and which causes should be championed. Without senior management onboard, you will find it extremely difficult to drive anything more than bite-sized portions of search optimization. Get them onboard however, and they can cut a swathe through the office politics and departmental red tape to get SEO happening across the site.
The difficulty in preaching to the ignorant and deluded usually means one of our first jobs is to educate not only the worker bees but the managers too - & the most effective educational tool is still competitive analysis. Nothing gnaws at a executive more than a " gets 200% more traffic than us because they did this and this...".
2. Lack of ownership - because most of these sites do not have the luxury of starting from a clean slate, we typically have to turn a bloated Frankenstein cobbled from multiple sites written in multiple languages into providing a seamless search-friendly experience. The company may have an army of developers but they all have different roles and work on different areas, so who exactly does the SEO? How much dev time is allocated to SEO? What projects get deprioritized for SEO? Who has ownership of SEO? How does SEO fit into the regular workflow?
The big companies that can answer these questions are far and few between but rest assured, we do exist :)
I disagree. It depends on the industry, but the number of tail referrals will almost certainly dwarf the number of users arriving directly or through branded referrals.
For all of the thousands of people going directly to the home page of a LL Bean, AA or Wal-Mart, there are millions more that are looking for something specific - maybe a deep red woman's turtleneck or perhaps a red dot sight matte scope (try searching for the LL Bean and Walmart results for those products on Google). If these companies don't connect their products with potential buyers, others will do it for them.
I agree to both the points. I SEO a big stock photo agency - we have over a million images to be indexed, their HTM's,more than 900 folders,so on and so forth. And i came in after the whole structre was set up and running.
I just managed to find that out of 1 million pages, 6 lakhs are in supplemental index, and the site uses jscript for navigation.
Now, the best part. The management who decides on what project to green signal is not very sure on how much importance is to be given to SEO and when to applyit at what time...blah blah.
Difficult situation here. But i think this is a worst case scenario - you have a huge monster to tame, and he is not willing to at the moment.
Though i manage a rank 6 on google my bottleneck is to get all the optimization practices to the management brains -silly it may sound to them.
Thanks for raising this point shor.
Cheers!
And yet most of the big brand name companies keep getting a top position on Google, despite their SEO flaws. Hmmmm.
jcohen
There's more to it than just that. Certain things have "rock star factor"; that is to say that if someone Googles Christina, odds are that they're looking for the pop star, and so it's in Google's best interests to make sure that that site comes up number one, rather than Christina from Skegness. In this instance, rock star factor comes in to play, and Google (somehow - maybe human editing, maybe algorithmic) sorts out who's the "real" site that needs to be number one.
Hence you're not going to outrank Ms Aguilera for her own site.
The interesting question is how it is decided who a "big brand" is. 1) the algo alone determines it by analyzing popularity, authority, etc. an if you have certain things right you can do what you want (like if you got so many links from authority websites you can have fun with cloaking, ...) 2) handmade corrections.
What do you guys think?
Why you ask....well let Search Engines WEB explain....
Big brands almost always dominate the SERPs even with Bad SEO - and most people search for them by brand name anyway.
Big brands can always outbid anyone on PPCs and often do.
Big brands are almost always written about by High TRUSTRANKED online news sites - often times adding a link to their homepages at the bottom of those articles....
and, of course, when a PR statement is release - it is voraciously consumed in mere hours by the competative media and viral marketing. :-?
Yes, Big brands do make sloppy SEO mistakes - and boy ain't well all lucky they do
More 2, with 1 running it out. There are trusted sites and they are entered into 2. Then the algors run with those values already set in stone.
3 years on and many of these mistakes are still being made.
And for the next 10-15 will stay so. If the Internet will survive.
Of course the spiders can't index graphical content in Flash files but at least Google is indexing some text.
I don't know how extensive it is yet and I am certainly not condoning the use of Flash for content :-)
I think the most tragedic mistake is the javascript menu, though lot webuser create site map with static html links.
What would happen with them if the site map would not have been developed?;)
"Search Proxy Architect"
That is an interesting title, although it is something we do a lot here at Virante. Many of our clients have established large portals with proprietary software. With established sites and architecture, it is a lot easier to build a searchable subdomain that rebuilds and reforms formerly non-indexable content than to manipulate the existing software.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the article. On the point, "Content Distribution & Partnerships", do I understand that you do not recommend not sharing content with other sites? We are working on few articles and I got some requests to publish these articles on different sites. I thought that sharing these articles with other site can provide link backs from those sites to my site.
Very good article, Rand. But I don't agree on the point "Content Distribution & Partnerships" either. We publish articles periodically and two weeks after publishing them on our own site, distribute them to a network of around 20 other sites. We get very valuable links back from them (one of the sites is Microsoft Portal for Spain) and, as an added value, are present in more of the first results. If someone searches for "marketing inmobiliario en internet" (real estate marketing in internet) which is one of our most important keywords, in Google, for example, eight out of the first ten results are my articles either in my own site or in others' but I get the contact anyway.
Yeah I agree with you that many brand site done that kind of mistakes, i.e. they lost my visitor also.
A quick review of the Fortune 500's Top Ten (2006)
Exxon-Mobil Walmarts General Motors Chevron Ford ConocoPhillips GE Citigroup AIG IBM
reveals a home page design disaster except for Chevron (3 minor errors) and (IBM 1 javascript error). I would imagine that web page optimization would reveal the same.
There are only 25 Top 1,000 Fortunes listed in North Carolina, all of which are more than a 3 hour drive from my humble adobe, 15 listed in Washington State.
I'd assess that they can just about do anything that they want (they do anyway) and without the help of web designers and SE marketers.
What's the keyword for "IBM", for example. The keyword(s) for Walmart is "feature" (and walmart).
Unlike this article, personally, my focus is on the small, small enterpreneurs. However, the same "disbelievers" are bountiful. I mention "SEO" or good design practices and they disappear.
... and I know why.
I'm thinking of changing my marketing to "I'll design any carpediem your lil o heart desires as long as you pay for it ... and you'll be back tomorrow after no one sees your web site".
Kind regards, Al Toman
I propose that tactical SEO doesn't matter much for big brands and the lack of it doesn't hurt them significantly. These firms have spent years building their brands and are already in the minds of most consumers of their wares.
At the end of the day, a favorable search engine position is simply a means of awareness in an effort to drive web site traffic. Since the big brands already achieve that by virtue of successful branding, why worry too much about the finer elements of SEO?
No doubt some marginal or incremental business is forfeited for lack of proper SEO but droves of people still go to LL Bean.com, American Airlines.com and Wal-Mart.com, SEO or not.
I agree with Dave Goodwin, for the most part. If you've got a really powerful brand, SEO becomes much less important, because people who search for you are almost always going to be searching on your company name. Because of that, the only thing you'd need to be concerned about that would involve a need for organic SEO would be reputation management -- you certainly don't want [company name]sucks.com to show up above [company name].com on searches for [company name].
Regarding whether this sort of cloaking is white- or black-hat, there was a discussion back in June at SEW that dealt with what the NY Times is doing. I believe it's cloaking (and I believe it's wrong), but the consensus that most of the people there came to was that it's ok to do this, and because it's ok, it isn't cloaking. That seems to me like backwards logic, though.
Strange news to hear about the "white-hat cloaking". I wonder what makes it an advanced form of cloaking - any special techniques? And what does it depend on if it's white-hat or not?
It’s true that we can’t say cloaking is white-hat or black-hat and we can tell them as... “it depends”
People of big brands’ can only do this as they don’t depend on only search engine traffic. When it comes to small brand sites can’t experiment with cloaking, because it works today in Google and other search engines but may not tomorrow... and I feel it’s a kind of spam techniques to get in top.
I say be genuine will certainly take every one to successes.
Rand ... with the "sandbox" you reminded me of an SEO joke ...
When your son asks you if he could play in the Google sand box … you tell him that it doesn’t exist. And if he does play in it you’re afraid you won’t see him for the next 8 months.
Nice...