Welcome back Rankers. We’re rebuilding David Meerman-Scott’s site, davidmeermanscott.com, that’s a site that we work on for SEO, David is a client of ours. It ranks really well for things like “real time marketing” and we’re working with his design team to re-build it and bring it up to date all those sorts of things you do after several years of having a site that you haven’t updated, from a design perspective anyway. What, of course we want to make sure that we do is maintain all it’s fantastic rankings and it’s fantastic keywords. When you go through a site revamp like this or a site refresh inevitably there’s going to be content that you think “Ah, it’s not longer relevant, maybe we should get rid of that piece and put something else up that’s more relevant, that’s more now”. What you need to do before you make any of those sorts of decisions which is the process we’re going through with David now, is have a look at the authority of that content from Google’s perspective. The way that you do that #1 is look at the backlinks. This is a tool that we use, one of the tools that we use, majesticseo and it shows a number of backlinks. You can see here that for David’s site there’s about four and a half thousand different domains linking to his site and of that there’s one hundred and thirty nine thousand in actual backlinks. When you look at the sites that are linking to him, fantastic sites, mashable.com, problogger, chrisbrogan, really high authority sites that are going to give him a lot of link love. What we’re interested in is what are the actual pages that have the most backlinks. Typically your root domain is going to have the most backlinks but what we’re interested in is what pages within the site are going to have the most backlinks. In David’s case because he’s a prolific writer he’s got a lot of ebooks up there, a lot of pdf’s. You can see here that a lot of the pdf’s are getting a lot of backlinks. If you move those pdf’s you can just 301 the old link to where they are, where you’ve moved them. That’s great but our rule of thumb is if you don’t have to move something, don’t. What we’re recommending is taking it out of the navigation if you don’t want the user to get to it, if it’s not relevant. You’ve got all those sites out there (look at me I’ve got a White Board) this might be your ebook, pdf, incidentally Google did a blog post on pdf’s this week which we’ll touch on in a second, but let’s just say you’ve got an ebook, this could be a webpage or anything, and you’ve got all these other sites out on the web or all these other web pages and they’re all linking into this page. For all you know that might be your most authoritative page on the site but you think the content may no longer be relevant, our recommendation would be to, OK if the content’s no longer relevant and you need to bring it up to date, do that write something different but do not change the URL. Keep the URL the same. If you want to take it out of the site navigation do that but make sure that if you have pages like this that you then use these pages to put anchor text in back to the rest of the site, certainly back to the root page and other pages off the root domain. The reason that you do that is because you’ve got an authoritative page so Google’s going to come and see that page a lot because it’s got all these links out here. As the Google bot goes in and discovers these things it will re-crawl that page. You might think “the content’s five years old what does it matter the Google bot’s already found it?” What matters is it may not have found all the backlinks as the Google bot gets more and more powerful at crawling the web. We see this all the time. We’ve got a client this week whose web developer (web developers – don’t you love em?) had put a whole duplicate site of our client up on the web as a staging thing. This is a typically thing that web developers will do, they’ll stage a site. You would hope that most web developers will block the bot from finding those sites and this didn’t happen. We didn’t know and the client didn’t know that this site was in a live environment and it had been there probably for a couple of years but Google only picked it up in the last 2 weeks and then bang the rankings went down. That tells us that the Google bot is discovering things all the time. We’re seeing 404’s now from old pieces of content, 2006, 2005 I’m talking, where Google has picked up these links. It could be from an old forum in my case it was from an old video blogging site from 2005 that Google had somehow found these old pages. It’s because the bot is crawling more and more. You might say ‘well, how relevant is that if those are old links, how relevant is that content?” Who knows! But Google is crawling it, Google is finding those links, so more than ever you need to keep hold of URLs or at the very least make sure you 301 them, but for goodness sake don’t just dump them.
On the subject of PDF’s one of the things that’s interesting on the Google blog post is that it says that sometimes if it can’t determine the title of a PDF it will make it up based on what these other sites or how these other sites are linking to it. It makes good sense for you to take control of that yourself and make sure you’re using a Tool like Adobe, Acrobat or any of these other PDF creation tools to put the Meta data in your PDF’s. We used to say years ago, “why would you do a PDF if you could just do a web page?”. The reason you would do a PDF is because you want people to be able to download it, email it those sorts of things, move it about the web. It can carry authority especially if it’s a technical document. A lot of businesses out there who may be selling specific products of a technical nature might have a tech spec sheet or something like that. Take those spec sheets and put your own backlinks in them and also change the title of them if you’re allowed to of course, if you get permission of the owner of the tech sheet or if it is indeed your tech sheet. This is a PDF that I created years ago and you can see down the bottom that we’ve got a bunch of links in here. That’s not only because it sits on our site but this particular PDF was sitting on a City of Melbourne website and I want those backlinks. So if you’re a member of a local council group and you’re allowed to put a spec sheet up about yourself or a PDF up about yourself in your local area, make sure you have backlinks to your site in it. For what Google’s talking about this week with your Meta data, with your sheets here is that make sure you put a title in here, make sure you put the author in here, probably put some keywords in there. How valuable that is is debatable because Google sees right through people doing keyword stuffing on these sorts of things. Just make sure you use every piece of Meta Data along the way that you can. Put backlinks in and that’s especially true if someone’s downloading your ebook and putting it up in a forum or uploading it somewhere else you’re always going to have those backlinks.
Hopefully that’s helpful, that’s my White Board and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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