
SEO tricks from Patio11 - dikbrouwer
http://melmiranda.com/post/12529167823/seo-tricks-from-patio11-aka-patrick-mckenzie
======
nikcub
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.

~~~
mkuhn
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.

~~~
nikcub
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.

~~~
mkuhn
I guess <http://www.addthis.com/> kind of does this and has a "fallback"
option to integrate many services.

Mobile is definitely a problem but the mobile version of the website makes
that solveable for the most popular devices.

~~~
tijs
I guess it's a matter of taste but i find the addthis button bar rather
horrible to look at. Plus it does not have nearly the feature set that Nic is
looking for. I agree there's a product there.

------
ghayes
"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
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.

------
mechanical_fish
Ooh, look, an on-topic location to ask Patrick questions. ;)

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.)

~~~
randfish
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.

~~~
patio11
What Rand said. #include <ndaed_client_anecdote.h>

~~~
davidw
So you think it's worth the move to example.com/blog even if you already have
an established blog.example.com?

~~~
randfish
That's been my experience. Not only will the blog's pages rank better by being
on the main domain, they'll also help the rest of the site's content rank
better by bolstering that location's authority.

That said, I don't want to suggest this is always true all the time or that
Google/Bing never group subdomain authorities together, just that we've seen
inconsistency and thus I'd recommend keeping them together.

------
eps
> _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.

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

~~~
irahul
What about this one <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/>

That doesn't look that good looking to me.

~~~
chc
Fortunately, you are not Patrick's target audience. He didn't say it had to
make the design community swoon; just that it has to convey professionalism
and draw your intended users in. I would bet the Bingo Card Creator website
accomplishes these goals just fine for his core audience of middle-aged
schoolteachers.

Also, that site has not gotten a lot of attention for a while. His focus
nowadays is on the much more attractive Appointment Reminder.

~~~
irahul
> He didn't say it had to make the design community swoon; just that it has to
> convey professionalism and draw your intended users in.

That is a "no true scottsman" fallacy.

When someone says design matters, it means having a pleasant design. BCC's
design is not something that can be considered good. It still does business -
that's great, but "it does business -> hence it has good design" doesn't hold.

~~~
anjc
"""When someone says design matters, it means having a pleasant design"""

'Pleasant' to who? Myspace's design is/was pleasant to teenagers, for example.
So surely design is tied closely to the audience. If the goal is, let's say,
making money, and the site has been A/B tested extensively and this 'design'
makes the most money from its audience, then it's presumably the best design.
There are so many anomalously successful website designs that ye can't just
say it's about 'pleasantness', unless your audience are graphic designers.

~~~
mattmanser
You're morphing the meaning of design that was conveyed in the article:

 _A good looking, well designed website will convey credibility and
professionalism. Even if you’re just two guys coding at a Starbucks, you can
look like a big, well-known brand. Invest in design._

BCC does not convey credibility and professionalism and is not good looking.
It doesn't look like a Starbucks brand, it looks like some guy in his bedroom
put it together.

appointmentreminder.org, on the other hand, does follow that advice.

So either Patio11's ignoring his own advice, the author misinterpreted it or
Patio11forgot to add 'tailor to your market', which BCC might be.

~~~
anjc
Sorry you're right, i did change the meaning (even though i read the article
:S).

In that sense you're totally right, BCC doesn't convey credibility, it looks
like a landing page, and personally, i'd immediately go off the site if it was
a product i was looking for because it _looks_ scammy to me. It works though,
apparently, is all i meant.

------
blauwbilgorgel
>> 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...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-indexation)

[2] [http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-
plus...](http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus-as-an-
identity-service-or-digital-signature/)

~~~
anjc
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.

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
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.

~~~
anjc
I wasn't disagreeing with you, but so far as i can see, nearly all of the
benefits you listed are marketing ones, which twitter is practically essential
for these days.

In terms of marketing a product, indexation and discovery aren't critical
issues, even if it's nice SEO to be able to control it in such a fashion, but
i can't see evidence of ranking being affected by tweets.

Thanks for the info re .edu and mention-values, makes total sense.

------
iaskwhy
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...

------
kevinburke

        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.

~~~
melissamiranda
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.

~~~
anjc
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..

------
a5seo
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.

~~~
randfish
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.

~~~
anjc
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?

------
hugorodgerbrown
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
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.

------
melissamiranda
Seriously Patrick, it was awesome to have you here. You were voted as the most
helpful speaker at 500 we've had so far in the batch. Thanks!

~~~
kschua
and thanks to you too for writing this so that those of us who don't have the
benefit of being there can learn as well :)

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

------
xpose2000
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...

~~~
patio11
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
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?

~~~
patio11
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.

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
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.

------
danmaz74
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.

~~~
anjc
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.

------
frankacter
@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.

~~~
melissamiranda
No recording that I'm aware of.

~~~
frankacter
Thanks. Any idea if the deck is available anywhere?

------
arthurgibson
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
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.

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

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

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

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

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

------
debasish83
Nice article

~~~
courtneypowell
Great talk Patrick! I love the pic from dinner in you blog Melissa!

------
renraw
Awesome! Thanks :)

------
tchae
Patio11, thanks for coming!!!

