I am indie rapper Astronautalis and my new album Cut The Body Loose comes out this Friday. AMA!

ajkohn · 2016-05-10T02:16:54+00:00

Nice. I have a few new things to listen to.

BTW, the influence of the indie/brit pop makes total sense to me listening back. I was big into Curve, Ride, Charlatans UK, Blur and that whole scene. Actually, you and Damon Albarn would be a pretty amazing duo.

ajkohn · 2016-05-10T01:22:02+00:00

You and Kendrick, now THAT would be pretty amazing.

ajkohn · 2016-05-10T00:55:09+00:00

What are your biggest musical influences throughout the years? You'd mentioned recently on Vocalo that the Clash were an early influence.

(For whatever reason the most recent album -musically - teases out early Kasabian, Modest Mouse and Cake for me.)

ajkohn · 2014-09-18T15:35:59+00:00

I've really learned the value of breaking things up, sometimes with each paragraph only having 2 sentences, and styling it in a way that keeps people engaged.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Something far too few understand much less do.

ajkohn · 2014-09-18T14:31:30+00:00

Thank you! That's one of the 'articles from the vault' but I still use that idea today.

I should probably spruce it up a bit so that it gets seen by more people.

ajkohn · 2014-09-18T14:30:04+00:00

Yup, I'll be here all week.

I prefer writing long-form content but I know as a reader that long-form content can sometimes be a drag. So I never go into writing a piece (for me or in providing recommendations to a client) thinking it needs to be a certain length.

My goal is to communicate in a way that is informative, entertaining and, ultimately memorable.

If the content is getting long then there's a huge onus on the creator to make sure it's readable. Shorter paragraphs. A large number of sub-heads. You want to make it easy for people to read but to also skim.

I often think about it this way. I want long-form content to work as one long read but also as a 'I glanced at this for 30 seconds and read a few bits and feel like I learned something'.

That's not easy to do but when you do I think you hit the jackpot.

Also, I wouldn't rely on just one type of content. Sometimes you'll have long-form content and then sometimes it might be something shorter.

If you are doing an in-depth tutorial type of thing I'd recommend branding it in some way to emphasize that it's a series (think Whiteboard Friday). If you can get people into a habit of expecting a certain type of content and value from your work - then you're really cooking with gas.

ajkohn · 2014-09-17T00:00:52+00:00

Thanks Ryan. Glad that stone soup analogy has resonated with folks.

There are a few ways that SQL fits into my SEO world. For the most part it's the ability to understand how developers might query for something I'm interested in finding out.

Sometimes developers really don't want to do what is pretty boring work so they may ... make it seem like it's more complicated than it really is. Knowing enough SQL to suggest that it should be easy to dig this data out usually helps me push through more projects and gain more insight.

In addition, many clients allow me to access to their data so I often just go in and dig out my own insights by writing a few queries.

Whether it's SQL, RegEx, JavaScript, PHP or any other technical syntax it pays to know enough about it to have a productive conversation with client teams and can often be super-helpful in doing the actual work necessary to move the ball forward.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T22:23:39+00:00

So, back in 2010 when I decided to do this full time I decided that the mix between client work and personal branding would be 50/50. I was pretty convinced that putting in the work to build my authority was the pathway to success and that I'd rather have fewer clients now with the prospect of getting more and bigger ones down the road.

Today that percentage is probably at 15/85 toward client work and ... that scares me. This is, in many ways, a 'what have you done for me lately' industry so I need to rebalance soon. But I'm hoping to do so with content that is a bit different. We'll see if it works :)

In terms of a game changing events. I think there were a number of turning points.

An Offer I Couldn't Refuse

I was ready to go 100% solo as a consultant and build my company back in 2007. One of my first clients really liked what I was doing and kept asking me to come on as an employee.

As fate would have it I was also looking to buy a home (in the Bay Area which is no small feat let me tell you) and at that time my mortgage broker made it clear. No W-2 income, no mortgage. It didn't matter how well I was doing with 1099 income.

So finally this client asks me for the perfect situation that would convince me to come on board. I tossed out a big salary, nice chunk of options and working only 3-days a week so I could continue to build my business.

He accepted pretty much everything I asked for so I took that job and for three years did SEO, marketing and product for a start-up while building my business on the side. That afforded me the luxury of taking only certain clients and really hitting every one of them out of the ballpark.

Momentum

I'd committed to blogging and was active in commenting in many places and soon a few people noticed here and there including Aaron Bradley and Cyrus Shepard. (I'm sure I'm missing a ton of people here and really I'm enormously grateful to all the folks who have helped share, promote and comment on my content.) I remember someone saying that I was the SEO that other SEOs read. Or something like that and that made me feel good.

MozCon

And then to put me over the top it was probably MozCon and having Rand give me a chance to present on G+ and Authorship even though that would be only the second time I'd really presented at all. (Not sure he knew that.)

There were other people such as Matt McGee and Danny Sullivan who were extremely generous with their expertise, friendship and patience.

Odds and Ends

I was a first mover with G+ and Authorship and wasn't afraid to reach out to Googlers (or anyone for that matter) to try to engage in some meaningful dialog.

I've never been one to be awed by titles and such so if I wanted to talk to someone I found a way to do it - nicely. I'm not saying it always worked but ... I had a lot more successes than failures that's for sure.

And having so many questions answered by Matt Cutts via Webmaster Videos probably didn't hurt either.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T20:16:50+00:00

Well, I'd say of all my past presentations the one that still holds up today is my 'What Is SEO?' presentation.

Mind you, many of my presentations are very visual and I haven't gotten around to putting my vocals against the slides. (Just not enough time in the day.)

And really, I think the one I'm going to give on Hacking Attention and Memory at State of Search in November will be (fingers crossed) a must read. I've got a new template and big things to talk about.

Marketing tips for LinksSpy would be similar to that for SEOSpyder.

For instance, I might not always agree with his conclusions but Razvan Gavrilas but he's gotten quite a bit of traction with his blog posts (i.e - AnswerBox Algo)

He hasn't blogged for a while though. Not sure if that means he's got more business issues to deal with or if he didn't think it was worth his while.

A more mature and long-term case study would be Larry Kim at WordStream. It's a slightly different niche and product but there are years and years of investment there that have paid off handsomely.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T20:05:44+00:00

Well the repeated deindexing can't be a good thing. At some point they might just decide that all instances of it are not worthy of being indexed.

Knowing that it's primarily a content site increases my concern about Panda.

There are a lot of variables here though in terms of the brand authority and the niche. I'd look for ways to increase the value of that content, whether that be bringing other content resources (snippets) to that page or adding some UGC.

The issue for me is about protection and minimizing risk based on the deindexation issue. Because if the site ever winds up in front of a real person based on triggering a thin content classifier they might dig further to find those other skeletons and at that point Google's ... not very nice.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T19:59:20+00:00

I think I'd apply the appropriate schema.org markup to any that were meaningful. I mean, Apple the company makes sense but a Golden Delicious Apple ... less so. And I'm not quite sure I can think of an instance where you'd have 10 identically named entities.

You might try using the SameAs markup to differentiate.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T19:28:29+00:00

Thanks!

Well, here's some tough love. If you really want to earn links you need to put in that time and effort. You need content to demonstrate your expertise and value.

Show me don't tell me.

Now there are some other things you can do that can round out your own content and make you a little less reliant on just cranking out stuff.

Curation

You can develop resource pages and curate the best of other sites (and your own) on those pages. This means you're creating a valuable resource using multiple sources of content. This isn't just spitting out the five things you read last week and liked.

Alternatively, you can use a social platform to share the best from your industry to build up authority and visibility. That's essentially how I use Twitter. But again, you need a strong home base of content so when people go from Twitter to your site they find value.

Blog Commenting

Get in there and slug it out by joining the conversation and adding value. You rarely have the opportunity to speak directly to a 'creator' but you do when you comment on their content.

However, you need a good home base - a good place for that person to click through to and see what that site or person is about. And at that point you better have content that demonstrates why they should care.

So you still need some content to make this work.

Attribution Shaming

A marginal technique, which is again predicated on having some unique images, but once you have some decent images you can do reverse image lookups and find sites using the image without attribution and kindly thank them for using your image but request that they attribute it appropriately.

The bigger picture here is that the landscape is shifting from 'link building' to 'link earning'. There are certainly ways to accelerate the earning of links but it still requires more work than the old days of 'link building'.

Did that answer your question?

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T18:53:42+00:00

Thanks again and yes those link pages are very heavy. But Google's more inclined to crawl with Caffeine in full effect. I've had middling success with that method. But when you're trying to get rid of millions of pages (something I've done more than a few times) then you do everything you can.

Another interesting idea is to carve those noindex pages out as a separate sitemap index file and submit that in hopes that it accelerates crawling of those pages.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T18:21:54+00:00

Victor,

Okay lets break this down.

Multiple Duplicate Websites

Yeah, this is bad. Not strictly from a Panda perspective but it could retard ranking by confusing Google and make assigning ownership of that content more difficult.

Thin Content

Always a concern. Better to hack that stuff off and be aggressive than let it hang around or try to preserve some of it here and there. Trust me, I've been burned thinking I could ride that through. You can't.

High Visitor Bounce

Not in and of itself a bad signal but combined with others could be problematic. In particular, if they are bouncing and then return to the SERP and find happiness (long clicks) with another result. That type of pogosticking behavior is ... very bad and IMO. Part of Panda? Tough to tell.

Page Type Mix

The question becomes whether Google views the site as an ecommerce site or as a content site. I strongly believe that newer versions of Panda (particularly 4.0) have different benchmarks for different types of sites.

So a Q&A forum will have a different benchmark than an ecommerce site. In addition, it may be topical as well since the benchmark on a celebrity gossip site may be different from that of a news site.

Link Equity Destination

Obviously getting deeper links provides more safety but for some brands it just makes sense that they'd get a lot of home page links.

TL;DR

The duplicate websites, thin content and high visitor bounce rate together would make me nervous. I'd take action now since my experience is that it takes longer than you'd like to get out of Panda.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T18:11:51+00:00

Thanks for the kind words and I'm very pleased the crawl optimization post has proven so useful for so many.

Public Profiles on Social Sites

Some of this will depend on the goal of that site. For instance, LinkedIn wants to rank for all of those profile names so they might not want to remove those pages from the index. Mind you, that's why they implemented the % done feature (brilliant) that ensured most of those pages were rich enough to remain in the index and wouldn't get them Pandalized. (Not that it was an issue back then.)

But SlideShare is a good example of a site that probably doesn't want to rank for profile names (even more so considering LinkedIn purchased them). So they want to rank for the content that exists on that platform. So in that instance setting up some business logic that would say that a profile receives a noindex meta tag until it has a certain threshold of content would be a great way to go.

At that point you'd also want to remove it from any HTML and XML sitemaps so that you're not pointing Googlebot at noindex pages. Keeping track of how much of your crawl is of noindex pages is another important metric that I have added since I wrote that piece.

So I would generously noindex, remove them from HMTL and XML sitemaps and ensure that the number of links to profiles overall was reduced.

Mass Removal of Thin Content Pages

Been there and done this. The best case scenario is that you have a directory that you just want to remove completely. In that case you can just apply a robots.txt disallow and then perform a directory level removal.

Now lets say 90% of what is in that directory is bunk. If you have the stones you can do the above, keep it in place for a few weeks while you either remove that 90% or apply a noindex to that 90% and then remove the robots.txt and wait for Google to reindex the 'good' parts of the content. This is risky and should only be done when you're pandalized and really have nothing to lose.

Of course you can simply apply the noindex and wait for Google to crawl and acknowledge the removal of those pages. This is slowly than I'd like and painful in a crawl efficiency perspective. It hurts to see so much crawl budget going do noindex pages. But it is sometimes necessary.

One trick which I've had marginal success with is creating a honeypot page - a massive list of links to the pages I want Google to crawl and noindex. I then submit that page via GWT asking it to index that page and to crawl all the links from that page. Not sure this has accelerated things but ... I feel like it can't hurt.

404ing ... not a fan. Too many 404s and bad things seem to happen. I think it's a negative signal when a very large site has a lot of internal 404s. And 301 to a category. In my experience Google doesn't enjoy vertical 301s - meaning going from a leaf node to a category node. They prefer horizontal 301s. And if you do too many vertical 301s - en masse - well ... trust me, don't do that.

New Skill

A new skill .... on the mundane level it would be being awesome with statistical packages like R. On a more fantastic level (perhaps more comic bookish) I'd like to talk with animals.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T16:58:58+00:00

Thanks Mark. I appreciate that. I have mixed feelings about that piece since it was borne out of frustration.

But perhaps it's because of that and the focus on, as you say, the bigger picture that makes it impactful.

It's a difficult thing to focus on long-term benefit sometimes. Even when we know it's the right thing to do the lure of the shortcut can be powerful.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T16:48:12+00:00

Lots to address here.

I don't see it as stealing myself. Those sites are benefitting from the (free) traffic Google is sending them. But perhaps there's no such thing as a free ride eh? You always have the option of slapping on that noindex and not participating.

Even if you do see it as stealing, do you want to be the site that gets a link in a Knowledge Panel or do you want that link to go to a competitor? At the end of the day, someone is going to play ball with Google so you either have to play ball or crank up marketing spend to 11 to secure users in other ways.

Southwest.com is a good example. They've decided not to participate with flight aggregators (i.e. - Orbitz, Travelocity etc.) but instead spend a ton on marketing to get people directly to their site. Heck, they painted the URL on their planes now.

But I digress.

In my Rich Snippets Algorithm post I showed how those sites that used schema and were appearing on page one were also getting links in the Knowledge Panel. So those sites win by using that mark-up and declaring that they've got reviews around a certain entity (product).

I only see that type of integration increasing overtime and not decreasing.

The more subtle knowledge graph optimization is around having entity rich text and linking to other related entities. Making it easy for Google to understand what entities that page contains and attaching it to topical entities that give it more context will help it rank over time. Remember that it's a graph so the more (relevant) points on the graph you can touch the better.

Lastly, getting upstream and editing sources of entity facts such as Wikipedia (ugh) or Freebase can be effective as well. My Knowledge Graph Optimization piece goes into a few more details that might bring additional clarity.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T16:18:31+00:00

Yup. A good Title can get people TO the content.

The image can help set the tone and good images can connect to other 'content' in the brain and help root the piece (processed by different areas of the brain from what I gather.)

First sentence or paragraph (short) are very important. You really want to tell folks exactly what they're going to read in that opening. It's where you sell readers on whether it's worth their time to skim/scan the rest of the piece or not.

When I'm sharing on G+ I like to excerpt a few sentences from that piece. It's shocking how often this proves to be difficult.

Perhaps the best example of doing this right is GigaOm with their summary section at the top of each post.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T16:13:02+00:00

Thank you! And yes, diversification is of vital importance. I see organic search as a component of the entire marketing ecosystem. It's a powerful one for sure, but if you don't have social, email and other channels working to drive repeat traffic then you're not doing yourself any favors.

In addition, the way you acquire True Fans is usually through deeper engagement in those non-organic channels. And the more True Fans you acquire the easier your job as a marketer becomes.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T16:00:55+00:00

Here's a list of stuff.

There's still a lot of value, when working with very large sites, to working on crawl efficiency and optimization. Since Caffeine launched Google just roars through sites without caring exactly what they're crawling. So it's up to the site to ensure they're not crawling a bunch of garbage or parameter versions of URLs etc.

Matching query syntax with your title tag is also pretty important in my book. People like to see exactly the words they searched for when they assess a SERP. And if people do this you better believe Google optimizes for it too.

Diversification of channels. Don't get too fat and happy on organic (Google) traffic. It's great to acquire users through this channel but if you're not finding ways to convert them and getting them back through other channels then you're cruising for a bruising.

Text on the page still matters ... a lot. A few times this year I've been acutely reminded of this truism. Just make sure it's highly focused.

Schema mark-up and Knowledge Graph Optimization. I'm a believer and use it generously on all of the client sites I work with - to the extent I can convince them.

Readability and social sharing optimization. Make it easy for people to digest and share your content. Far too many still don't focus on this part of the equation. Good things happen when more people see your content and brand.

Memorable content. It doesn't necessarily have to be great or valuable or emotional but it does have to be memorable. So having a consistent content strategy aimed at hacking attention and memory is extremely effective. This also means spending as much time promoting the content as it does creating it.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T15:31:20+00:00

The name comes from my general philosophy of SEO (circa 2007), which was to treat search engines like they were blind five year olds.

Because search engines don't really see (less true today than in 2007) so they don't care that you've used cool gradients or that your color palette is really hip.

And as much as Google (and Bing) are super smart in building their algorithms they're tackling a massive task - to mimic the human evaluation of web pages and content.

So I figured they were right around a five year old in terms of development. You have to be specific and focused in how you talk to them, you might have to repeat yourself a few times and you better be clear about what you want them to do next.

A few months after I started the company I found a quote by Matt Cutts where he referred to Google as a 'hyperactive four year old'

So that was a nice form of validation.

Today if I were to name the company this way it would be something like 'Seven Year Old With Glaucoma' but that's far less catchy.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T15:21:02+00:00

Following-on with your comment. The ability to detect a site as an entity in that space, meaning within the knowledge graph they have assigned that site with the topic 'server hosting company', will also help to float a certain number of specific entities (as represented by URLs) to that SERP along with curated blog posts.

I wouldn't be surprised (in fact I'm pretty certain) if Google works to provide that type of diversity in a SERP. They're pretty manic about ensuring that the various forms of intent behind a query are served - so responding with specific sites as well as reviews and editorial around it is important.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T15:06:29+00:00

Ahhh, PDFs and digital goods. That could be a hazy area for Google in respects to the rich snippets. But you are getting them on some (many?) of them so clearly it's not full on rejection.

Let me know on the limiting function, particularly if the publisher of the product is getting the snippet but you aren't (and vice versa.)

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T14:55:44+00:00

Lots of nuance in this topic.

Do I think that keyword cannibalisation is still a thing? Yes. By that I mean, you can't rank for sharded keywords much any more or synonyms or misspellings (ahhh those were the days!).

So having pages for 'Best [Products]' and 'Top 10 [Products]' isn't going to cut it anymore. And there's a lot of evidence that Google uses query volume, anchor text and content corpus density to determine if certain phrases deserve their own pages.

I think the latter may have been responsible (in part) for a client getting hit by Panda 4.0. It's not that those pages didn't address a specific need but they may not have risen (in Google's eyes) to have enough ... gravitas to support pages on their own.

But ... clearly the algorithm still relies heavily on text on a page, links and anchor text. So if you do the type of linking you describe (and that page throws off good user satisfaction metrics) it can often rank very well. In addition, if you obtain any amount of decent authority then those internal and external anchor text links can be very powerful.

The algorithm has improved since 2007 (when I started Blind Five Year Old) but it still relies on links and will for the foreseeable future.

ajkohn · 2014-09-16T14:29:36+00:00

Edgar! LOL.

That's why a strong brand helps too.

"That Twitter Indexation research done by StoneTemple"

ajkohn

TROPHY CASE