Mediaboss Marketing

In a recent webmaster Q&A session at SXSW, Googles Matt Cutts briefly discussed some changes Google is making that will level the playing field between smaller, mom and pop sites and overly optimized sites, as bigger companies have a lot more money to spend on SEO.

Former Googler Vanessa Fox, who happens to be the creator of Webmaster Central, wrote an interesting blog post about it, which we discussed in another article about how the changes sound like they fall in line with Googles greater philosophy of providing high quality sites (which is what the Panda update was all about).

We reached out to Fox for some additional insight, as hers is particularly unique given her background.

I dont think this is part of Panda, Fox tells WebProNews. Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes/introduces new signals/etc. every year. Panda is just one of many. Google just doesnt name each one (and of course, not all of them are as impactful).

She notes, as she hinted at in her own post, that Cutts may have been simplifying things for a non-search audience (SXSW isnt a search conference like SES or SMX), and says that its possible this isnt a new anything, but instead is just tweaking of existing signals that look for things like keyword stuffing and link exchanges.

Last week, Cutts pointed to the audio. Today he points to a full transcript:

If youve listened to or read what was said, youll notice that the whole thing was in response to a question about mom and pops, which might make you wonder if brand is a significant part of whats at play.

I dont think its about just mom and pop vs. big brands, Fox says. Lots of big brands dont know the first thing about SEO. I think (total guess on my part) the sites that will be negatively impacted are those that focus on algorithms and build content/sites based on the things what they think the algorithms are looking for. The kind of sites where someone didnt say I want this page to rank for query X. How can this page best answer what the searcher is asking about X but instead said I want this page to rank for query X. How many times should I repeat X in my title, heading, content on the page, internal links

I think its still useful (and not negative) to make sure the words that searchers are using are on the page, but some sites go well beyond this and get so caught up in what they think the algorithms are doing that they forget to make sure the content is useful, she adds.

As far as sites that will see a positive from this, I think it will likely be both small sites (B&B in Napa that titles their home page home vs. an affiliate site that sells wine gift baskets) and large brands (sites that use a lot of Flash), says Fox. I think foundational SEO practices (like those I describe in my article) will continue to be beneficial for sites.

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New Google Changes: Really A Matter Of Mom And Pop?

Perhaps anti-SEO is a little strong, but as previously reported, Google is working on making SEO matter less. At a recent SXSW session, Googles Matt Cutts discussed (without a lot of details) some changes Google is going to be making to level the playing field for mom and pops, in terms of how sites can gain visibility in search.

Normally, we dont sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something weve been working on in the last few months, and hopefully in the next couple months or so, or you know, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it, said Cutts. And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, over-optimization or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.

Update: Vanessa Fox offered some additional observations to WebProNews. >>> Click here to read the article.

So thats the sort of thing where we try to make the websitethe Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who dont do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever theyre doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area, he continued. So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on itwe have several engineers on my team working on that right now.

Naturally, many webmasters and SEOs are wondering just what all of this will mean for SEO going forward. Combine that, with a reported strategy of Googles to greatly expand its direct answer results, which could also slow traffic to some sites.

Vanessa Fox, the former Googler who built Webmaster Central, offers some perspective in a blog post.

A lot of people have asked me what this means for those who include search engine optimization as part of their marketing mix, says Fox in the post. Some are worried that Google will begin to penalize sites that have implemented search engine optimization techniques. My thoughts? I think that some site owners should worry. But whether or not you should depends on what you mean by search engine optimization.

Interestingly, she compares Googles approach to what the company has been doing with the Panda update, in that its about separating high-quality, useful pages from pages that were just a collection of words about a particular topic.

Matt talked about finding ways to surface smaller sites that may be poorly optimized, if, in fact, those sites have the very best content, Fox says. This is not anything new from Google. Theyve always had a goal to rank the very best content, regardless of how well optimized or not it may be. And I think thats the key. If a page is the very best result for a searcher, Google wants to rank it even if the site owner has never heard of title tags. And Google wants to rank it if the site owner has crafted the very best title tag possible. The importance there is that its the very best result.

One great point that she brought up is that Cutts was not speaking at a search conference, when he was talking about this. Its a different audience, in which he may not have gotten as specific about certain things with, as he may have at a conference like SMX Advanced.

Original post:
Google Webmaster Central Creator Talks Google’s “New” Google Changes

Earlier this week, I wrote about my disappointment that granular data (the number of URLs reported, the specifics of the errors) was removed from Google webmaster tools. However, as Ive been talking with Google, Ive discovered that much of this detail is still available via the GData API. That this detail was available through the API wasnt at all obvious to me from reading their blog post about the changes. The post included the following:

And led me to believe that the current API would only provide access to the same data available from the downloads from the UI. But in any case, up to 100,000 URLs for each error and the details of most of what has gone missing is in fact available through the API now, so rejoice!

The data is a little tricky to get to and the specifics of whats available varies based on how you retrieve it. Two different types of files are available that provide detail about crawl errors:

(Thanks toRyan JonesandRyan Smithfor help in tracking these details down.)

What this means is that different slices of data are available in four ways:

What youre able to see about each error is different based on how you access it.

Eight CSV files are available through the API (you can download them all for a single site or for all sites in your account at once as well as just a specific CSV and a specific date range), but this support is not built into most of the available client libraries. Youll need to build it in yourself or use the PHP client library(which seems to be the only one that has support built in). The CSV files are:

For the topic at hand, lets dive into the crawl errors CSV. It contains the following data:

This file does not include details on crawl error sources (but that is available through the crawl errors feed, described below).

It appears that thecrawl errors feedrequest code is built into theJava andObjective Cclient libraries, but youll have to write your own code to request this if youre using a different library. You can fetch 25 errors at a time and programmatically loop through them all. The information returned is in the following format:

Originally posted here:
Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors: How To Get Detailed Data From the API

2012 Laurence Olivier Award Nominations Announced; Matilda The Musical Leads with 10

By Mark Shenton 15 Mar 2012

The nominations for the 2012 Laurence Olivier Awards saw the RSC's production of Matilda the Musical, which has already announced its intention to open on Broadway in 2013, lead the way with ten nominations in the maximum possible categories for a musical, including a collective nomination for its four young actresses who share the title role as Best Actress in a Musical.

Also recognized with multiple nominations were Ghost the Musical, which begins performances on Broadway March 15, and the National's production of London Road, which returns this summer.

On the plays front, there was another shared nomination, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller nominated together for Best Actor in a Play for the roles they alternated in the National's Frankenstein. The National's production of One Man, Two Guvnors, still running at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and The Ladykillers, running at the Gielgud through April 14, received five nominations each.

The nominations were announced in an event held March 15 at London's May Fair Hotel, which for the first time were also broadcast live online. They were announced by the 2011 Laurence Olivier Award winners Nancy Carroll and Roger Allam.

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The BBC will be giving the awards extensive live uninterrupted coverage on television (via the Red Button), on Radio 2 and online, with red carpet coverage from 5:30 PM London time and the ceremony starting at 6 PM. There will also be a simultaneous event held in New York at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall. It will take the form of a brunch (from 11:45 AM ET) and live relay of the ceremony from London (from 1 PM ET) for an invited audience of U.K. and U.S. theatre stars and professionals and special guests.

In a press statement, Mark Rubinstein, president of the Society of London Theatre, commented, "We are thrilled to announce the incredibly talented list of nominees for the Olivier Awards 2012 with MasterCard. It is truly representative of our diverse world-class London theatre across both the commercial and subsidised sectors, which continues to delight thousands of Londoners and visitors every day."

For more information on the Olivier Awards, visit http://www.olivierawards.com.

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2012 Laurence Olivier Award Nominations Announced; Matilda The Musical Leads with 10

Sometimes some of my readers here complain that I do not cover Bing enough. The truth is, it really isn't my fault, it is Bing's fault. 🙂

Why? Well, this site is very niche in that it only covers topics found in forums and social media areas. We figure, if the SEO/SEM community isn't discussing it, it likely is not worth being covered here. Things at the top of the mind of SEMs are often discussed in forums and social settings - the rest is all just "news."

So why is it Bing's fault they aren't covered too much here? Well - they do a horrible job, recently, keeping their Bing Forums clean and on topic. Just check out the Webmaster section, it is filled with spam or check out the indexing section. It has been like this for at least a month or more. It is almost impossible for me to find good threads in forums filled with spam.

So I check in on the forum every morning and see this stuff and I leave - hoping that the next day it will be cleaned up and never is.

In fact, I felt that Duane's post on mobile SEO URL structure was important, so I made my own thread about it at the forums. No responses because the place is a spam fest.

So much so, people at WebmasterWorld are complaining about the spam in the Bing forums.

Bing, I want to cover you more - please help me.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Original post:
Spammers Flock To Bing Webmaster Forums