Talk by Andrew Goodman at SES Conference & Expo in London, February 2012, on 11 Ways To Be Invisible To Search Engines

1. 11 Ways to Be Invisible
to Search Engines
(and irrelevant to real people)
Feb. 21, 2012
@andrew_goodman
#seslondon

2. Search Before 2001
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

3. Search After ~2005
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

4. It’s called a “media mix,” right?
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

5. Forget about Google for a
second… no, really.
 Source: Hitwise. “Upstream visits before HuffPost”

6. It’s the end of SEO
as we know it

7. “Sauter le requin?”
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

8. Where you rank is incredibly important (to
getting a website visitor that is), *and* the
most obvious SEO factors still work
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

9. Personalisation: end of
the “water cooler SERP’s”?
 Source: Enquiro Research

10. Social Signals

11. Search in 2010: fully blended and
personalized. No more “ten blue links.”

12. Search in 2013: Social signals skyrocket in
importance; influencers identified to you

13. Oh yeah…, and this

14. Social Objects and FREE

15. What gets shared? Social objects.
Hugh MacLeod says:
“Note to Social Media Mar-ke-ting Dorks: The hard currency of the
Inter-net is not Face-book “Likes” or Twit-ter “Ret-weets”, as flavor-of-
the-month as they might be. By them-sel-ves, they’re worthless.”

16. What is a social object?
Get creative.
 Going bowling, a charity ball.
 Art. Even if it’s Pamela Anderson pop art.
 A shared “interest” in _____________________ .
 Jesus, choir rehearsals, cookies, Xmas fund drive…
 The latest tablet. In Row 3. Look, point… discuss!
 Your family.
 A protest of the cancellation of a TV show that
dumped 20 tons of peanuts at CBS Headquarters
 Personal, sincere blog posts by a young CEO who
happens to inspire a lot of people (Tony Hsieh)… 2
million followers on Twitter.

17. Contrived social objects? (But all good
info is technically shareable.)

18. “The network is powerful, but the
network needs the node.” So PageRank
has been wildly misinterpreted, to say
nothing of overestimated.

19. FreshBooks: How to be crap
at SEO, and great at “winning”
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

20. Free, free, free. Search is your funnel.
Give more away, wider funnel. The
attention economy: popular = $$

21. 11 Ways to Be Invisible

22. 1. Spare, minimalist,understated
brand. That’s the way to go.
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

23. For now, search tools and even reputation tools
still rely on cues about importance, text for
meaning, and *the ability to get to your stuff*.
(Same goes for users themselves!)
http://freefirezone.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/getoutofjailcc2.jpg

24. 2. Leave info architecture to IT, then
combine with minimalist theory

25. Instead: get (most) everything right

26. 3. Make Your Site Slow
“Despite our
challenges with the IT
department… we are
doing what we can.
They have disputed
some of your claims
and as you know, these
things can take time…”

27. Google Pagespeed Online

28. 4. Throw 500,000 crappy pages at the
index all at once

29. Instead: broaden your view of indexing best
practices…
 Sitelinks, URL removal, weightings, and more…

30. Google Webmaster Tools – links screen
 How many links to internal pages?

31. Google Webmaster Tools – links screen
 What anchor text? Is it a normal pattern?

32. Who cares if this page is indexed?
 (Actually, it does rank on the query for “klotzbach
cleveland”… 55th… 10 spots worse than “Klotzbach
genealogy and family history research”)

33. 5. Hide Stuff and Officially Call Your
Pages “Barrier” Pages

34. 6. Offer bad user experiences when
they arrive
 I came, I puked, I left: the bounce will get you

35. 7. Buy links from a “link vendor” – because
any old link will do
Instead: do real world PR and ask for or incentivize links.
Then, stop actively link building and build diversified
approaches to sharing instead!

36. 8. Focus on elaborate website builds when
you’re local. Try to impress your friends.
 LinkedIn; own website; misplaced effort conveying nothing!

37. 9. Centralize editorial. Don’t train your writers in
SEO, PR 2.0, social media. (Or, do the opposite…)

38. 10. Speak at conferences where
nobody tweets
At #seslondon @andrew_goodman says: to be invisible,
just speak at conferences where nobody tweets

39. 11. Assume you can totally control
what they’re saying about you

40. Comments and feedback: different strokes
for different folks?

41. Top takeaways

42. Don’t reduce everything to one or
two key factors
 Prioritize, but be broad & comprehensive
 Develop a full checklist / scorecard
 “Google likes links” – yes but now what?
 Clickstreams & behavior – uptick in importance

43. >

44. How to fund this?
 Link building? Work on the low-hanging fruit,
then stop
 Move $ from traditional to online (P&G)
 Take an Adwords display network holiday
 Move content production & PR from “top down”
model to “distributed communications”
 Open up, give more

45. Some of my social objects
 “Best of Awards” – HomeStars.com
 Columns for ClickZ
 Book
 And of course… follow me at agoodman on
Google+ to see full version…

46. Thanks!
@andrew_goodman
+agoodman