#SMX West 2014 Recap: Meet the Search Engines

Danny Sullivan (Founding Editor, Search Engine Land), Matt Cutts (Distinguished Engineer, aka Head of Web Spam, Google), and Duane Forrester (Senior Project Manager, Bing) held an entertaining and informational “Meet the Search Engines” session at SMX West. The PowerPoint-less open forum format allowed for 90 minutes of solid conversation and question answering. The three gentleman had a great rapport and there was a lot of friendly banter between them.

Danny, Matt, and Duane pause for a selfie before their session

Here are some of the topics discussed:

• Matt discussed that Google is working on the next generation of Panda. It’ll be softer. It’s still a ways away, but it’s in process.
• If you’re doing something shady in regard to mobile SEO, you’re likely to be dinged. Make sure everything you’re doing well with mobile is fixed if/when there are issues.
• Google will continue to crack down on link networks
• Don’t be alarmed if it looks like traffic coming from Google relative to IE 8 drops in the near future. As IE 10 comes out, traffic data will be focused on IE 9 and 10, so IE 8 traffic may appear poor, but it’s just part of the transition process and will be amended shortly.
• When asked about if the interaction of the knowledge graph changed how they do stuff, Matt noted the carousel is often handy because explore more. When a tool works well, people use it more. When you make search engines faster, people make more searches. All this data is useful.
• “Would a penalty from an old site follow you to a new one?” In an ideal world, you shouldn’t allow spammers to avoid detection. Whether someone is using redirects, Google wants to know what the duplicate sites and are and whether they’re a duplicate of a spammy site or whether they’re legit.
• In regard to gTLDs (generic top-level domains – these would be domains that feature words other than “com” after the dot in the URL. i.e. .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, .org, etc.) and the notion that having one can automatically help with SEO, Duane explained that that is not the case. They are useful when they’re useful – if you do it right and build a business, sure, you’ll be fine. But if you get them just to do the wrong things with them, the search engines take action. If you think because you have seo.guru you’re going to rank well, you’re not. It doesn’t suddenly make you more relevant.
• On the other side of that, monitor your own brand and be sure someone doesn’t utilize it with an unfavorable gTLD. For example, .sucks is a viable option, so someone could easily procure yourcompany.sucks if they get angry. It’s worth it to spend the small annual fee to own those kinds of domains.
• Duane recommends starting down the right path from the very beginning of developing a site. Ask yourself how you’re thinking about what you’re doing – you shouldn’t be asking yourself about shortcuts or what tools you can use to better manage your site. Start down the right path from launch – sit down with engineering and make sure everything is properly set up from the get-go so you don’t have to go back to them later and need them to make numerous changes.
• Danny inquired about embeddable content with a link back scheme, such as the recently-available Getty images. Matt said they look at these instances on a case-by-case basis and are able to easily discern if the links are spam or not. This means, for Getty, the images are perceived more like a widget. They’re trying to be useful. So, the widget link might not count as much, but Getty won’t be penalized in any way for having all these new links back to their site.

Matt Cutts talks JavaScript at SMX West click here

• Bing has email support and they actually do read all inquiries, although sometimes it takes a few days based on what else is going on. Visit bing.com/webmaster and reach out via the “customer support” link. If you reach out and don’t hear back in a few days, shoot Duane a tweet!
• For mobile sites, Matt notes that both mobile friendly and responsive design sites are fine, but there are bad practices. If there are many redirects to the homepage, for example, that would raise a red flag.
• Google doesn’t relay all the signals involved with identifying spam sites since then the spammers would know how to play the system. They can provide guidance, but not specifics, for this reason.
• A focus shouldn’t be directly on link building for SEO: it should be to put up consistently valuable content. Google’s goal is to show and reflect things they already deem high quality. Really, ask yourself how to make something compelling or excellent over how to merely acquire a link. Doing the opposite is putting the cart before the horse.
• For example, sites that provide original research and thoughts on a topic naturally do really well. Providing a unique service and doing things better than anyone else are effective ways to gain traction. Think about how to be addictive. “Great content” is the tag word but there are lots of ways to do that. If you provide information of value, it’ll come back to you.
• Know which words matter and which don’t. The word “the” doesn’t necessarily matter, but “of” does since it usually specifically relates two things.

Up-Close @ SMX West: Time To Think About Life Beyond Google

With algorithm updates happening more frequently than ever and Google continuously working to keep searchers on the result page, companies need to make a conscious effort to broaden their marketing efforts and move beyond Google.

In the “Life Beyond Google: Diversifying Your Efforts” session at SMX West 2014, the speakers showed us how to do just that. While there were a ton of great tips, three main themes stood out:

Focus on the Customer

Our customers are consuming content in a variety of ways that don’t include search engines and it’s up to us as marketers to give them the content they want, where they want it.

According to, Ted Ives, Owner of Coconut Headphones, this really boils down to the notion of “What are we going to communicate to whom, and how?” To figure out the answer to those questions, there are three things to focus on:

• Message
• Channel
• Audience

By understanding your audience, you can start crafting your message and identifying the channels to place that content.

Ives suggests starting with a content marketing process. Decide on what type of content you’ll be creating, where you’ll be promoting it, and how you can make the content creation process routine. Be sure to design the process with realistic expectations. After all, it doesn’t make sense to come up with a process that can’t actually be executed by your team.

Once you have that process in place, start by creating one core message that can then be used in different ways. Ives gave a great example of creating a whitepaper and then repurposing it into a webinar, podcast, blog post series, newsletter, tradeshow presentation and more.

Don’t think you have the resources for all of that? Ives pointed out that you only need your thought leaders involved in the original piece. Once you have that piece to build off of, utilize your junior people to create the next phases of content.

The best part of this process is you have now created a number of content pieces that can be shared across multiple platforms with multiple audiences.

By using this method, you naturally diversify your marketing.

Build Relationships With Influencers

With the advent of social media there is a huge opportunity to expand your reach beyond Google. However, just throwing some content up on social media networks isn’t going to do it.

Eric Enge, Owner of Stone Temple Consulting, says the key to success beyond Google is establishing brand authority and reaching influencers. The company you keep defines you even on the web, so it’s important to align yourself with the right people. When an algorithm update occurs or Google stops showing your site, the relationships you have built in other places are going to be what’s sending you traffic.

Building relationships with influencers is easier said than done, right? You don’t just suddenly become best friends with people you meet online. Relationships take time and higher valued relationships take more effort. You have to get to know them, interact with them, offer them value and build up trust. Enge says to climb the ladder one step at a time. Get in front of them often, go deeper than “check this out,” and give them something they haven’t seen.

He also notes that content is key. Great content is “a gift to social media” and will be the backbone of your success so make sure your social and content strategies are aligned. Know the type of content that does well on each platform and know the type of content your influencers (and audience) like on each platform. For example, images tend to do much better on social than a standard link. Create images that add to your content and can be shared on Twitter or Google+.

Brands must become authorities and influencers are the key to this.

Act Like The Stock Market

As mentioned earlier, we live in an unpredictable time when it comes to Google. Updates are occurring often and having major effects, sites are being pushed below the fold and data is disappearing [not provided]. What can you do about this?

Joshua Moody, Lead Enterprise Digital Marketer, 97^th Floor, says to act like the stock market. Mitigate risk by diversifying your traffic sources.

Start by going social and thinking visually. Social postcards, or micrographics, are short powerful graphics that can be shared all over the place. Moody says that they are using them for a number of clients and they share extremely well on social. They can be pinned, used as Twitter cards, or integrated into Open Graph tags for Facebook. People will also display them on their own sites, creating links to the main site.

SlideShare can also add social value. An old piece of content sitting around can be repurposed into a SlideShare and promoted on your blog, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Moody also recommends becoming a part of communities that already have traffic. Buzzfeed for example, had 941 million pageviews in the past 30 days. Imagine if you could even get a part of that? Apparently you can. The Buzzfeed community allows anyone to sign up and start posting. If your post gets enough traffic and shares, it may be promoted to home page, which is where the real results come from, according to Moody. Even 5% of total views can translate into huge amounts of referral traffic. The key is to create robust, picture/gif heavy posts.

Becoming part of different communities and placing your brand in a variety of places decreases your risk for disaster and opens you up to new audiences.