BC: Okay, we appreciate your taking the time to get here. Somehow, it always seemed to me that 10 o’clock in the morning was not first thing, but I forgot this is Vegas. 10 o’clock is the first thing. One of the things that the show is pretty excited about is these feedback forms.

So I want to describe it to you and help you out. What you do right now is circle 10s, which makes it really easy for you later. 

They do collect them when you leave, but the part that’s important to you is that you get to write a free-form comment about the session. But if you give them your name and email, apparently, you go in a drawing to get a free ticket, a free VIP ticket to the next one. That’s folks. All you have to do is fill out the form. So they’re pretty strict about us reminding you to please all fill out the form.  

SS: About the 10 parts, that was an ad-lib, I think.

BC: No. Sean specifically said that. No, I think they specifically told us to tell you to circle the tens. I think anybody that gets up at 10 o’clock in the morning or to circle 10, because it’s easily representative. It’s 10 a.m. It seems

DF: I don’t go with that. Just circle the 10. Yeah, we’ll take it from there.  

SS: You could write in the comments; I’d give a hundred if there were a hundred.

BC: Okay. Loosely connected, I am the moderator of the session. I am Bruce Clay. we’re going to introduce ourselves. We’ll start with a question. But this is an ask us anything session. Now, the way that works is you get to ask us a question, ideally not specific to a particular website. If that’s what you want, come up afterward.

We’ll gladly talk to you. But things of general SEO, curiosity, nature, things like that, announcements, things that you heard or didn’t hear—now all three of us—I will start by just saying we’re all white hat people. We do not do black hat stuff at all, and we haven’t in a very long time. 

So, I’ll describe myself Bruce Clay; my company is Bruce Clay Inc. At bruceclay.com, of all things, we just passed our 20th anniversary doing this stuff on January 2nd, so we’ve been around a long time. I have offices on five continents. We focus on almost everything related to Internet marketing. I have three books. I think this podium has a total of 12 books or something like that between us.

We are all well-known in our industry. I’ve been around for a very long time. Ask us anything. Next is Duane.  

DF: Good morning. Is everyone ready? Okay, first off, text all your friends and tell them this is the best session ever and that they suck if they don’t run over here. You can go ahead and do that in the background.

My name is Duane Forrester. I actually did work with Bruce now. I’ve been there for, what, two and a half months now? Yeah. Prior to that, I worked at Microsoft. I ran the webmaster tools program and the outreach program for Bing worldwide. Then, prior to that, it was SEO at MSN, and prior to that, I was into online gambling.

That’s kind of where I grew and learned everything. And then, prior to that, Caesars Palace was my stomping ground. I’ve written some books on blogging and conversion optimization, and I’m happy to be here and answer whatever you guys want to throw up.

SS: I’m Stephen Spencer, and I’ve been around in the SEO space since the 90s as well. I, too, have some books, but I actually brought mine. So I’m going to give some away. This is the big boy right here. Thousand pages. That’s called The Art of SEO. I brought a few copies to give away to the best tweet. Tweet some stuff from this session, like some really cool stuff. We’re going to drop some knowledge bombs.

DF: That’s wrong.

SS: Wait, what?

Df: That’s wrong.

SS: Oh, you’re talking about the quote where we quoted you or something?

DF: You need a copy of the book. There are photos of cats. Yeah.  

SS: I happen to like Business Cat. He’s really cool. Okay, so we got that. And so start tweeting. And then I have Social E-commerce. I got, I think, only one copy of this one to give away. This is all about using social media for online sales. And there’s even a chapter dedicated to affiliate marketing. And Zac Johnson provided some material for that chapter.

Thank you, Zach. And then this one, it’s the easy read. So if you don’t like to read a lot of heavy stuff, like my friend, Amy Africa, who’s in the industry, tells me that this book is better than Ambien, and I’m not sure if that’s a compliment. I will take it as one, but yeah. And so this one is all about how to be a power user of Google.

It’s called Google Power Search. How to find anything, like I’ve found confidential business plans and marketing plans, forced to research reports that cost thousands of dollars, all just with clever Google queries. Even I’ve found credit card number files with expiration dates. Not that I’ve used it for anything, but it was a proof point that everything is on Google if you know how to find it.

Those are my three books, all published by O’Reilly. I founded an agency in 1995 called NetConcepts, which was a really cool agency with offices in three different countries. I went, and about four years into running my business, I got this idea to move to New Zealand. I thought, “Oh, I could do this internet thing from anywhere,” and you know what?

You can. So, I did it and was able to grow the business. We had some. I thought I was throwing the dice here, right? I’m moving halfway around the world. I got clients like Bird’s Eye and stuff, big brands who are clients. I don’t know if they’re going to stick around. If the founder moves halfway around the world, they do, and we grew, and it was awesome.

We had an office a block from the beach in New Zealand, and then we set up an office in Beijing, China. So then I sold that agency, NetConcepts in 2010 to Cavario. They got bought recently by Dentsu Aegis, which owns iProspect. So, yeah, that’s my history.  

BC: So all three of us have been in the search space for a very long time. We obviously write and answer questions. We all speak at conferences—a lot, a dozen to 20 a year, something like that. We’ve been around a long time. We’ve been here multiple times. We’ve been around and around. I’m going to start with one question, just to prime the pump.

But the way we’d like to do this is, initially, once we get going, if you have a question, certainly there are multiple ways to do it. But if you’re at the back, you might. You need to use the mic; otherwise, you can yell it out, and I’ll repeat the question back. Then we’ll just take a turn answering them, ideally getting them all going.

Initial question: This is an affiliate conference. What do you think is happening in search over the next six months to a year, and how are the changes really impacting everybody in the room?  

DF: I have one word for you, it’s usefulness. That is probably the single biggest thing that’s going to impact across search and not in a traditional way. When people think about SEO and search marketing, they tend to think about the simple little things like title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, content on the page, and this kind of stuff. Not confusing, simple, but easy to implement, right? So there’s a lot of complexity there. But they’re relatively well known, relatively straightforward.

This morning, did anybody see John Mueller from Google talking about capital letters and URLs? I nearly threw my phone across my hotel room because I couldn’t believe that asinine topic was something anybody needed to talk about. There are actually people who think putting a capital letter into the keywords in the URL will help them rank better.

Now, if this is where your head is, you’re in the wrong space. Seriously, you need to rethink things. And this is why. When you guys do a search for something and look at the results, you almost instantaneously know whether the result you’re looking at is even on the right path for what you’re trying to accomplish.

This is intrinsic to human beings. Right now, there is a difference between us and the top layer of AI. We have this ability to instantaneously understand, whereas even the highest level of AI still needs to churn through all of this information and may not come to the right conclusion. But, the search engines are trying to get the best result in front of a human that resonates with the human.

And what they’ve finally realized, and they’ve finally grown their systems to, is this concept of usefulness. Does anybody have FAQs and Q&A stuff on their website? Stuff like that. Okay. So, this is the basis for figuring out how to be useful. All right. The concept is pretty simple. I have a product and what might be related to it.

Typically, in business, you would look at this and say, “If I don’t sell it, I won’t show it or talk about it because that’s related to competition in some way.” No, that’s not the way to look at this. The way to look at this is if I can capture you and keep you with me and prove to be useful to you, Not only will I net the sale from that, but I get repeat visits.

The search engine sees this pattern of behavior and responds by ranking those pages higher. Even if you have the poorest SEO on your webpage or no SEO applied, you still may find yourself ranking high because you deliver what the search engine wants, which is the best possible experience for their searcher.

That’s what they’re looking for. So usefulness? It’s a simple concept. People need to wrap their heads around it, and it allows you to go. What else can I do? Everything you do, you ask yourself, What is the next step? What is the next step? What is the next step? And if you build sites like that and experiences like that, you will start to win more frequently.

SS: Alright, I’ll piggyback a little bit on that, and then I’m going to talk about artificial intelligence. A website is something you do, not something you view. If you’re building websites that are going to be passive, not really interactive or engaging, you’re dead on arrival. Engagement metrics are going to be increasingly important in search, social, and all aspects of Internet marketing.

Really get into that and make it not just useful, but I’d say remarkable. When I say remarkable, I’m saying remarkable as something worth remarking about. That’s Seth Godin‘s definition of remarkable from the purple cow, right? It’s got. It doesn’t have to be the best, most interesting, most useful, most humorous or whatever piece of content or video or website whatever.

It has to have something worth remarking about. Then you’re on to something. Let’s talk for a moment about artificial intelligence because that’s changing the game. Now, over 15% of search queries in Google are determined by machine learning.

It’s called RankBrain. Now, expert systems and artificial intelligence are going to become so ubiquitous with search that we’re not going to be able to talk about specific individual signals anymore. It’s not going to be like, “Okay, we need to put a keyword in the URL because there isn’t one. We need to put a keyword in the title tag.”

It’s not going to be that simplistic anymore. So building something that has real value and is remarkable, worth spreading, worth telling your friends, revisiting and so forth is essential. Artificial intelligence is going to be so ubiquitous that this idea of reverse engineering the Google algorithm is just going to be impossible.

The only thing that can reverse engineer an algorithm as complex as artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence. In fact, AI for AI geeks is the real definition or the acronym that actually stands for autonomous intelligence. How are we going to distinguish? Like there’s a Turing test where you try to guess whether it’s a computer or a human that you’re talking to, and if you can’t tell, that algorithm has passed the Turing test.

Imagine when you can’t distinguish these different human entities from Silicon or quantum computing-based substrates. You can’t tell the difference. It’s not artificial anymore. It’s just autonomous. So, wrap your mind around that. So this is really all about thinking about some easy wins and some looking fruits and all that, too, while always looking ahead.

It’s not like you can’t drive your car on the freeway. It’s 65 or 80 miles an hour, and it will not crash if you aren’t paying attention to it hundreds of yards into the future. So we need to be paying attention to what’s going to happen in three to five years, not just what’s in the next six months.

In the next six months, we can do some stuff to build powerful, high-authority links through outreach using tools like Pitchbox and get some great, important, authoritative, trusted links, but that’s not the end game because that’s only going to give us an impact for a period of time until the artificial intelligence algorithm takes over completely, and it’s a 100%. And then links aren’t nearly the game, the end game anymore.  

BC: All right, so logically, what we’re proposing is that the concept of future research is important to everybody who wants to have organic rankings and receive traffic. The algorithm has been immune to reverse engineering for a very long time.

Google claims to have 200 variables in the algorithm, but the algorithm’s weighted averages are balanced based on each keyword’s intent. So, if this keyword is shopping, the algorithm might actually be different than if the research is informational. So, if you have an infinite number of keywords and 200 variables in an algorithm, multiply them together, and you have an infinite number of algorithms.

As a result, we haven’t been able to reverse engineer an algorithm in a very long time. As an industry, I think the best we’ve ever been able to do is study where the search engines are going. And try to get into our practices, that kind of stuff first. Plus, pay attention to what the search engines are actually rewarding right now.

Do they no longer reward links or do they? Are there penalties for this where there used to be reward? and what has shifted and how has it shifted? And how do we as webmasters generally build a website that is going to survive the test of time? Because you’re not going to want to spend the energy to put in SEO to have it die in a year and have to invent some new way of doing it.

You want to be on the straight and narrow, know where you’re going, keep looking a year to two to three years out, and just keep your eye on the ball. If you don’t, you’re going to end up with wasted effort in the SEO space. Now, one or the other, just. Comments and this may open up some questions.

We all recognize that clicks are really on the first page. Some 90% of all clicks are on the first page of Google. We know that Google is in the business. How many people believe Google is in the business of making money? Okay, a couple of you. So they make money. How much do they make on organic results? None.

The reason for organic is people keep coming back, but they don’t make money on it. So I think Google’s a couple of years out. They’re gonna be looking at ways to make money on that page. Everybody agree? Plus, we have mobile. Plus, we are able to segment it now into 20 some 1000 cities that are big enough to have local presence on a local level for local businesses, an equalizer, if you will.

One of the things that we have to pay attention to when we’re starting to think about SEO is what it takes to succeed. How do we do it? How do we do it effectively within the project’s value and budget? Otherwise, you could hire 20 people and have them sit there doing SEO all day.

How do we do it effectively, and how do we make it work for us in our region on the device appropriate to our client? Do we know the persona of our users? Have we targeted correctly? Are we moving forward with the right kind of usability for that audience? All of that is really where SEO is going in the future.

All right. What I’d like to do is open it up. See if there are any questions or if you’re all just sitting there now saying, “Oh my God, I got to redo everything.” Any questions? Raise your hand. Anybody. And we’re totally okay. If you guys want to just get in line up, that’s cool. Queue-up is good. Or if you just want to sit and yell, that’s fine. We’re good at yelling.  

Hi guys. Thank you. my name is Mindy from Mindy Joy Media. I’m a publisher. I have a few blogs. first of all, is there a hashtag you want us to use for the tweets?

BC: Ah, good question. It’s ASW16. Okay. So, just the standard one. Okay.

SS: And my Twitter handle is SSpencer.  

So my question is, I know that writing engaging content and shareable content is my number one priority, and that’s the best thing I can do. But also, as a blogger, I’ve heard that there’s so many, from the technical side, there’s so many things I can do on the back end to try to boost my SEO, make sure all my images are renamed instead of being image 1 or image 2, so that sort of thing.

Is there any, is any of that relevant anymore? Should I be spending my time doing that? And if so, what are the main things that I should be doing from that standpoint right now?

SS: Wow, that’s a great question. I’ll frame it up a little bit, and then I’ll let my colleagues here take over. There are two ways of looking at anything, whether it’s SEO or any other form of online marketing or just business, and that is being outcome-focused or activity-focused.

So many people are activity-focused, particularly in SEO. What they’re doing is they’ve got this big to-do list, and everything under the sun is on there. It’s a quote-unquote best practice. Therefore, they’re going to add it to their list. And it could be something that doesn’t move the needle at all or very little.

Something like, for example, optimizing the meta description. Which sounds like a no-brainer. Oh, it, yeah, it’s used in the snippet that’s displayed in the search listing. But in actuality, Google does not use it in the rankings determination. So why would you focus on that as a similarly important thing as optimizing your title tag, for example?

When the title tag does influence rankings, the meta description does not focus on the things that move the needle for you. So, you first have to come up with a goal. What’s the goal? What’s the outcome? What’s the act? What’s the center of the bullseye? The target you’re trying to hit.

All right, so you think about it like this. You have all these different activities that you could do. And they all are best practices. They all, in an ideal world, should be done. But, if each of these activities is like an arrow in your quiver, and if you can hit the bullseye, that outcome, let’s say it’s doubling your organic traffic in the next six months.

Okay? I just made that up. If that’s your goal, and you’ve already doubled it two and a half months in, with three of the arrows in your quiver—three of the major activities that were your best shot at making the difference—why would you use up all the other arrows? Oh, I haven’t gotten to the meta descriptions yet.

Why? It’s just a waste of your time and focus. Instead, come up with a new, bigger, more audacious goal. And a new set of activities and a new set of arrows and start working on that one. I’m not a big fan of going through and spending a lot of time renaming all your images or redoing all your meta descriptions. Figure out what the outcome is first, figure out then what your big strategies are, the things that are really going to move the needle and the other stuff is nice to have, but it’s not critical, and you may never get to it, and that’s okay.

DF: Yeah, there are a couple of things I want to add to this. I’ll pick on the meta description, for example. Stephan calls it out, and there used to be a time, even just a few years ago, when I was an adamant proponent of getting your meta descriptions correct. You do not want the search engine guessing at what should be in that space.

And there’s a reason why. That’s actually a call to action when people look at the organic search results, right? You can put the keyword in there. It’ll get bolded, it catches their attention, it tells the reader what to do. But this starts to break down on a number of levels. One, the reader’s not reading. They’re scanning.

If you get this wrong or the engine feels that what you’re doing might be a little too much, they’ll just ignore it and pick something else. In which case, you’re screwed. Now, does anybody have one of these? This is called an Intelligent Telephonic device. Okay? And the reason that this is so important is because,

SS: Wait a minute, is that an iPhone? What? Former Bing internet guy. Evangelist.

DF: I knew this was going to happen as soon as I came on stage in 2016.

SS: You did bring it. You did. Show the whole audience.

DF: Okay. 30 seconds on this, right? I am an adamant Windows phone user. I am an adamant Windows phone supporter. The reason this is important is because I have had, in the last four months, 6+, the biggest, baddest iPhone you can get.

I have had the Android Nexus 6, the biggest, baddest Android you can get, and I have had the flagship Windows phone. By far, the flagship Windows phone has the best user experience. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the best app experience. And for the record, I have a new 950XL en route to my home, as you pick on me. So there.

Your meta description sucks. The reason that is so important is because about a year ago, desktop searches fell behind mobile searches for the first time in history, and it’s never going to go back. Ever. This bullseye, this man on my left is talking about, is your bullseye, mobile. Serving this community of people.

So now, who’s rocking WordPress? Who’s hand-coding HTML? Yeah, really? Okay, so I stopped hand-coding HTML about 4 years ago, moved all of my personal websites over to WordPress and then started using the Yoast SEO plugin because it’s super easy to work with, and Yoast is actually a buddy of mine.

But it is good, it is quality. The reason I say this is you can go ahead and do these things. So if you want to rename your file names, and that becomes muscle memory, and you have a quick, easy workflow for it, there’s still value in that, okay? Those keywords attached to the image will be useful in helping to identify experiences like this.

You’ve got to remember with the mobile experience, it’s much more pared down. The impetus to get the correct answer at the top of this stack puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the search engines to get it right. Which is why there is so much investment in things like artificial intelligence. It’s why thinking about the algorithm is just not a good use of your headspace anymore.

You have to think about the end user, how you engage them, and what you do with them. Images and videos are all still pretty important, but ultimately, what I end up telling people is that Stephan paints this beautifully. We’ve all got these lists of to-do items. So at Microsoft, we have a prioritization stack that everybody learns, and the way it works is it goes P0 through P3, we’ll say.

There are P4s and so on, but you’ll understand this in a minute. P0 is something happened. I ripped my jeans this morning, I need new pants. That’s a P0 problem to solve. Okay? P1, I’m running low on clean socks, I need to get to the laundry in the next two days. P1 problem. P2 problem. Ah, one of my shirts is wrinkled, the other one’s not. There you go.

P3 problem. I wish I’d brought a ball cap with me. I may never get to the point of solving the ball cap problem. It’s on the list. But it’s really not that important. So, everything you guys are thinking about, you need to prioritize in this stack. And then you need to look at it and say, does it get me toward my goal?

When you create this matrix, what happens really quickly is that you start seeing this little curving arc where everything cuts off, and you immediately know anything that’s below the arc, you’re not going to put time into it. And so if there’s no return on it, it’s just not up here; it’s not a highly prioritized item.

And with our situation today, and the knowledge that we all have that’s available on the direction of engines, you want really good telltales on Wikipedia. There is a page for Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft on all of the acquisitions the companies make. And this is very telling because you will see Google, or Alphabet, making acquisitions in very specific technology sectors. They are buying the leader in that technology, and you can very easily draw a straight line between voice recognition and the leader in that area, and them owning it, where it’s going to show up.

It’s incredibly insightful to look at these things and see what they’re doing. With Alphabet, it’s going to start to get a little bit muddy. I saw it this morning. I saw this great flow chart. I don’t want to call it a flow chart, but it was a kind of here’s what Alphabet is up to in 2016 in the areas that they’re influencing.

It makes it easier to focus on it. What is fascinating about it is that Google has not been a search company for decades; it’s an advertising company. people seem to think of them as a search company, and they think of that because they’re called a search engine. They are a monetization engine.

That’s essentially what they are. And so every time you’re thinking about doing something that appeases that, you need to think about where that money’s coming from. And that’s the consumer. So if you can appease the consumer, you will attract the engine. it is always going to be that way now.  

BC: Okay, so I’m going to try to spin it a little bit differently. I agree everything as said. Most of the people probably in this room are not number one for all of the terms you want. You’re all winners, but you’re probably not number one. and as the search engines look at websites, they’re finding it more and more difficult to believe that any one website could possibly be a subject matter expert at the level of being in the top three out of millions of results for a hundred keywords.

Or a thousand keywords. It’s very difficult for any one website to be that degree of expert. So, we’re likely to see that over time, the search engines will become increasingly finicky about whether it is usable. Is it not usable? Is it informative? Is it authoritative? Is it expert? Is it maintained? And by the way, don’t forget to maintain.

If you put up a website and you haven’t been maintaining it, if you put up a website and even though your information to you is the best information in the world, if the search engine doesn’t see it as expert or authoritative, and you don’t have the support of other websites, they’re not going to think for that particular set of keywords that you are worthy of being in the top three out of a million or ten million.

That is the biggest problem. And for those of you here, I think that the situation is that you probably don’t rank well enough organically. A big part of the problem is that you’re your own worst enemy, and that is a big part of your initial SEO. While you make this list of things that you might want to do, your P0s are really important.

If you cannot solve the barriers to the search engine, even giving you a second thought, don’t think SEO. You have to be recognized by the search engine as a subject matter expert, and you cannot be your own worst enemy. Most of our projects start by fixing the things that the customer has done wrong for a long time.

And they don’t even know they’ve done them wrong. We just get, they are their own worst enemy. We spend a lot of time fixing the things just so that the search engine can honestly evaluate whether they’re worthy or not. Because you’ve probably got a lot of things that are your, you are your own worst enemy.

One of the things that’s coming up is that search engines understand synonyms. For years, people have built separate pages for every synonym. The search engines are now going to consider that spam. You have 20 pages, all with a derivative of the same word: you’re evil. You weren’t before, but you will be this year.

Understand that’s a problem. You have bad link profiles. Understand that’s a problem. Google is going to be taking mentions where people would actually mention your site or your company but not be linked to it. They’re going to give that buzz value, and you are going to actually see the ranking impact by the fact that they mentioned you even if they don’t link to you.

Now, all of that is changing this year and probably pretty quickly. I’m just going to spin it a little bit that the P0 priorities on the list have to be addressed. You cannot be your own worst enemy.  

DF: I was just going to say, so an interesting point that Bruce brings up here is this notion of non-linked attribution and boost in rank.

That is something. Are you guys all prepared for the time when links don’t matter anymore? That’s a question that you have to take away and start asking yourself because right now, a lot of this is built around, I’m going to create excellent quality content that’s going to engage with people, and I know a percentage of those people will end up developing links for me.

Like, you know, intrinsically, because you correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not buying links. So, this is generally how link buildings are approached today. The problem with this is that notion, that value that you think you’re getting. The engines are actively looking to move away from that. And if you and I or any of us are talking in the hall, and I mention a website, and you trust me or think I have any clue whatsoever, then that reflects positively on the website.

The business, the product, whatever it is. Google and Bing are moving toward that same kind of notional understanding, where they will literally look at someone and say, “Hey, you know what? There are all of these mentions out there of these guys. A hashtag, for example.” That’s a positive reflection on you.

However, do not confuse this with the concept of PR. You are not going to artificially get yourself in there by going to a PR news service and blasting press releases out there. That is a bad signal. That is not something that you want to be doing. But you absolutely want people raving about you. So the question ultimately is, how do you get them to rave about you? You’ve been flapping so hard like you’re going to take flight.

BC: You should come up and talk to us, I think, in general. Let me paraphrase this for everybody before we try to answer it.

DF: I have a great idea. I’ll get back to you on this.

BC: Fundamentally, 200 domains, thinking about migration, going to WordPress, you are very well ranked, and it drives traffic to your entire business; I think you ought to be terrified.

Does anybody here ever do a migration? And was it smooth? Okay. Yeah, there’s a lot to it, and you have to be very careful about it. But if you have 200 domains that perform well and are specific to a topic, you’ve already survived the EMD, exact match domain issue. You probably now have to worry about your content.

DF: Okay, you should sell me DUI.com, cheap,

SS: Yes you could be a subject matter expert on that particular area of crime or legal whatever, but do you have to have a separate domain for that? No. You could have a subdirectory, or you could have a subdomain. It doesn’t have to be a separate domain. In fact, I think you’re spreading yourself too thin if you start launching sites on dozens of these 200 domains. I don’t think it’s a good use of your time and attention. So that was a good call.

DF: I’ve got two ideas for you here, okay? One, you grow the main website and you become authoritative in these areas. Because you law is one of those areas where you can actually be authoritative in multiple areas, right?

I used to run a Jeep website, build off-road Jeeps, and be authoritative in Jeeps. I was mildly authoritative in Land Rovers. I had no authority whatsoever for Chevy Corvettes. So even if there was something interesting about it and I blogged about it, I never ranked for that. But if it had anything to do with Jeep, I was in the top three for a decade.

You can do that, okay? I have two ideas for you. One, stay consolidated, dive deep in these areas, track and test rigorously to figure out what’s giving you any kind of return on value, and then prioritize based on that stack. That gives me another idea. And then, as you build this out, set up a scenario where you’re selling off those other domains at a high value, so you’re setting up a revenue income from those.

Maybe look at leasing them to people. And then I’m going to give you guys this one. It was told to me by, Oh, I can’t remember his name now. It’ll come to me as I’m saying it, I think, the way you prioritize the work that you do on your website. Okay? Take all the URLs and put them in a spreadsheet.

Pretty straightforward, right? So when you have them in the spreadsheet, you look at every single URL and determine the value of the individual URL to your business. Now, whether that’s capturing an email address, you assign a dollar value to it. If it’s an actual conversion page, you assign a dollar value to it.

Then, you resort to the entire spreadsheet based on the highest to lowest value. And those are the pages that you focus on first. Those are the ones that you look at. In some cases, they’re gonna rank well, and you’ll learn lessons from them that you can apply in other areas to boost rankings. In some cases, you’re going to uncover stuff like Bruce is talking about where your own worst enemy because, hey, look at that, you’ve got a brand new folder, you launched it prior to that in testing, you blocked it in Robot TXT, nobody thought to unblock it in Robot TXT, and it’s a dead end right now.

You can just clean that out of your own way. So that’s a good approach. However, an idea specific to some of the stuff you work on is to create an app that uses the accelerometer on everybody’s phone. And use that just on in the background gathering information to track their general patterns and behaviors, especially around driving and then set up alerts on it where you get to reach out to them and say, “Hey, we’ve noticed in the last month on six occasions you’ve driven to a point where you’ve actually had to hit the brakes extremely hard. Were you almost in an accident?”

And then provide resources on that. Some of those people will actually get in accidents. Reading your post. It doesn’t matter what got him there. There’s only so much I can do to solve the earth’s problems.  

BC: That’s a cool idea. Another question right there.

DF: Are you plagiarizing? Okay. Yeah. If those are like 17 percent unique, they’re going to be fine. And that answer was total bullshit. No. There’s no actual number, okay?

SS: I was about to rip into you.

DF: Just let me be clear about this, okay? There’s no actual number on this. This is a common problem in the e-commerce space. Yeah, because everybody’s a member of it. Does anybody here belong to any affiliate programs?

What the hell are the rest of you doing here? Okay. So the record will reflect everybody put their hand up cause we’re at an affiliate summit. But this is a common thing: you sign up for the program, and you get the product. Okay. So, with the approach that I just described, we’re number 15. Awesome.

Thank you. The approach I just described for figuring out where the value is on the website will go a long way to helping you discover what you need to focus on. Because what you’re going to find is that on website A, product A is like the money leader. On website B, it’s product Q, which is the money leader.

And between those two websites, you can make those pieces unique and actually get the value out of it. Or, this could also be a case where there’s a combination happening, where you literally get into that quagmire of consolidation.  

SS: Duplicate content is a big issue and has been so for a while with SEO. Google’s pretty smart at figuring out duplicate content in terms of, let’s say, you have multiple country websites. you have the hreflang tags set up and so forth, and Google’s going to figure out, especially if you’re using like and geographic targeting inside of Google Search Console; Google’s good at figuring out that these aren’t duplicates competing with each other.

This one’s for the Australian market, this one’s for the New Zealand market, and this one’s for the U.S. market. Also, with mobile versus desktop, if you have a separate mobile site, some people can misconfigure it and get it wrong, but if you configure it, you’ve got bidirectional linkages between the mobile and desktop sites.

The desktop site points to the mobile site with the rel-alternate and tag, and then the mobile site points back to the desktop site with a rel canonical tag. Google knows that these are, associated sites and only the desktop site should show up in the search results if the canonical tag is being obeyed.

Now you can have situations where let’s say that you are using the same data feed as a whole bunch of other distributors or affiliates or what have you, and 17% different, oh I’m gonna change this word and this, right? Because of the way Google search engines work in general. At least, this maybe an antiquated way to describe it, but it’s a better way to describe it than percentages.

So there’s a, think of it like a five or six-word window, and we’ll call it a shingle. And you run these shingles across two different pages that are possibly duplicates, right? Determine how many of these shingles are in common now if you move a paragraph to the top that was at the bottom. Most of the shingles still have a common.

Therefore it’s still duplicate content. If most of the shingles are still uncommon, it’s duplicate content. So I’m oversimplifying. But it is a much better model to think about, mental model, than just like what percentage is unique and what, how much more content do I need to add, to augment. It’s not as simplistic as that.

Think more in shingles, and you’ll be in a better position. So my advice to you would be to paraphrase as much as possible, augment and add as much as possible, and really make it useful. There are comparison search engines that have still survived because they’re adding lots more value. There are ones that are, like, done because Google has decided to rank them.

And you don’t want to be in that position. You want to add lots more value. Yelp, for example, adds tons of additional value, and it’s all user-generated content. There are ways of outsourcing the effort to your user base, but you have to be substantially better than everybody else.

BC: Yeah, I think if you add something that nobody else has to every page, something that isn’t all over the place, that’s a value add, and that would help. Next question.  

DF: Hey, we might be able to do a lightning round. A lightning round.

SS: Lightning round, that’s a good idea.

DF: Not for you guys, for us. We need to get faster.

BC: We have approximately 10 minutes, so we’ll try to give you a 30-second answer for everything that comes after this. How’s that? And if it isn’t enough, come see us. Interesting.

SS: You have a phone call from your iPhone there.

DF: Oh, and it’s coming from Las Vegas. Who’s spamming me?

Local search. Okay. So local has changed dramatically over the years. It used to be very straightforward, the 7 stacks, 3 stacks, whatever, mixed with the map and the desktop results. Now, it is much more about this location that’s being broadcast by the device and the understanding of where I am in relation to something.

I think what’s most important about this is that you have a clear value proposition. Experience to whoever’s engaging with you in that experience. There has to be a reason to get them to come to you. And that works best when that user is within about a mile of an actual business itself.

This one’s always a split one because it applies to some businesses but really not to others.  

BC: Yeah, we’ve run into lengthy discussions just among ourselves about mobile and how to address it. It’s somewhat of an equalizer. You have to have a presence. There are a lot of things to go into being locally well-ranked, so it’s a long topic. There are actually conferences on nothing but mobile. Yeah, so yeah, it’s a very large topic. I am happy to talk to you afterward.

DF: She’s doing it twice now with her hand up. She’s twice. You’re next. Go.

SS: Okay, are you using dynamic serving, a separate mobile site, or a responsive design? Separate mobile site. Okay. Which is a dying thing, by the way. Yeah. Responsive or dynamic serving is really the right way to go.

In terms of site maps, you’re talking about mobile site maps. So, first off, your site maps aren’t going to boost your ranking. They’re just going to boost discoverability. Okay. Which may lead to more pages being ranked. second, if your site maps aren’t clean and up quickly, the engines don’t bother. They just go fetch on their own. Okay. Honestly, if you can’t do near real-time site mapping, it’s a waste of resources.

Yeah, there’s another factor with this, right? So your sitemap needs to be fresh and ready when they come by. You need to determine when the engine comes by. There is a, think of it like money. There’s a certain investment they will make in any given website. If you’re CNN, they’re going to invest almost the full dollar of resources in crawling, scanning, and indexing.

This is called Crawl Equity. And so, if you’re the average website, your crawl equity might be somewhere around a nickel. And therefore, it may take a week or 10 days before the crawler comes back to get to you. But when they get there, you need to make certain that what they find is clean.

So at Bing, we had a threshold of 1% error in a sitemap. Now, the error looks like if we click on a URL and it returns anything other than a 200 OK code, that’s considered an error in the sitemap. Alright? So, 1 in 100 URLs. Can you clean your sitemap? Can you update it and keep it clean fast enough? Don’t know. I can tell you; crawl happens really fast, though.

BC: I would say you’d want it to connect to things that are within your website on the same theme to develop a theme-based expertise. It can’t be one page. Google has actually gone to the point of saying if you have one page and one page only on a topic, you’re not an expert. Let’s just understand you have to look at how you integrate it into the overall hierarchy of the existing website.

You need to make it findable. If the search engine can’t find it, it doesn’t matter. So it has to be findable, and I think it would be nice if there was mention of it socially.

DF: Yeah, I’m gonna toss social onto that pile, too, right? The minute you publish, that’s when your work starts. Because now you gotta get out there and market that shit. You gotta get people talking about it, get people engaged with it, and To a degree, any press is good press. So whether people agree with or disagree with what you’ve written, that’s fine. It’s conversation. You’re fine as long as you can keep it somewhat on track.

SS: Okay. So, I’m going to add that social piggybacking here is timing. So, let’s say that you submitted it to Reddit from a power user account. I’m talking about one with a lot of link karma, right? So somebody who’s in the Sentry Club, I have a staff person who has over 100,000 link karma points on Reddit. So, she’s a major influence on Reddit.

Timing is really important. Trying to submit something to Reddit at 3 a.m. on a Saturday is not a good time. So when you publish, it is important. When you submit it to Reddit and so forth, from which account do you have topic pages and establish that authority, as Bruce was saying?

So, the New York Times is an example of a topic page with an article about Iraq. The first occurrence of Iraq is linked to their topic page on Iraq. And then when you go there, that article about Iraq is one of the articles featured related posts, right? So there’s a YARP, yet another related post plugin. There are other plug-ins that do related posts; you definitely do a good job with that. Yeah, lightning round. Okay. We’ll go here.  

DF: Not me. Yeah. So this is an interesting one. My approach to something like this would be if you’re not going to eat what I’m cooking, then I’m going to start disguising it. So these inspirational style posts that you’re putting up that they’re resonating with people, I’d be looking for ways to seed. So rather than say, here’s a product that made my life better while I was on the road doing my nomadic stuff, I would be looking at it and saying, I’m doing this because I’m looking to find self, and this is what it means to me.

And here’s what I’m learning along the way. And it can be difficult out there. And you know what? This has made it easier. This has made it easier. This has made it easier. And from there, see if anyone engages with those as a part of the inspirational flow. Then go back and target the ones that were engaged with and say, Hey, a bunch of people were interested in this particular object.

I figured I’d talk about it. And then every time you do one of these inspirational things, it’s getting engagement with it. You remind people that you talked about this product that changed your life, right? that’s okay to do.

SS: You could also do topic pages on those different products and services, right? So just like the New York Times has an Iraq, page, a topic page, you could have one where articles, blog posts, and, do you do a podcast as well? Okay. Do a podcast because that’s going to give you a lot more, link worthiness and buzzworthiness. It’s great. I have two podcasts, both are doing really well.

They’re in iTunes new and noteworthy in various categories. One is in the overall iTunes, which is new and noteworthy. By the way, they’re MarketingSpeak.com and GetYourselfOptimized.com, so check those out. A little plug there. But that’s such a great thing to have a podcast, and then you have an additional vehicle to reach your audience and, like through iTunes,  

DF: Oh, plug the USB into the USB port.

SS: Yeah. My favorite, podcast. Mike is the road podcaster, and I’ve got the arm for a snowball. What?

BC: Yeah, whatever. Okay, folks, we have less than a minute. I think we have some books to give away. If you have questions, rush to the stage.

SS: So if you tweeted, come up afterward, and we’ll figure out who gets books. And, in fact, you know what? Everybody’s going to get a digital book. O’Reilly, yeah, O’Reilly’s an awesome publisher. Write down this URL, and you’ll get it: they’ve created a landing page just for you guys, so you can get a free copy of whichever of the three books you have to pick one of them, of my three books.

So you go to O’Reilly, OREIL.LY/S2016, and you’ll get a free copy of the three books. Okay, so O’Reilly, OREIL.LY/S2016, so 2016. And then if you also want to become an affiliate of them, they’ve created another URL. They have conferences, not just books that they sell, so you can make a lot of money selling conference seats.

As an affiliate, so that’s O’Reilly, OREIL.LY/ VIP in all caps, affiliate. Affiliate is lowercase. So, the VIP affiliate is the special landing page for that. And, yeah, O’Reilly’s awesome. Check out those free books. But you’ll get a physical copy if you have a good tweet. So come up afterward, just now, and we’ll hand those out.

BC: Remember, the score was 10 out of 10. You could actually write 11 in if you wanted to. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks, guys.