Doug Pace - Bayshore Solutions COO
By: Doug Pace – Bayshore Solutions Executive Team
My Experience at SMX West in Santa Clara, California – Day Three
There is something about being in Silicon Valley that makes you want to be more innovative. I have been trying to identify what causes this – is it the people, is it the style, is it the international flavor, or is it the fact that recycling is very prevalent? There really is no one single reason, it’s just the overall attitude presented by the entire area. On my last day at SMX West, there were some really interesting Online Marketing discussions and presentations.
Ask the Search Engines
This session was interesting as the crowd got to ask a representative of each main search engine company direct questions. The best way to share this is with the question and a summarized answer:
1. Is it bad for SEO if your site is 100% HTTPS? No, actually Paypal’s HTTPS site shows up higher than their regular site. Make sure to be consistent though.
2. Should you set non-html content to NO CACHE? – You can in the robot.txt and in the HTTP headers, but it really does not matter.
3. How can I change dates on my blog in Google’s index? You really can’t, but try including dates in bylines and meta description tags.
4. What is the status of Ajax search results? They will tell you where you rank, but not all browsers support – this may be going away.
5. What is being done with domain authority (why is Wikipedia first in most search results)? Google returns Wikipedia less than other search engines do. Domain authority is only one factor of the search algorithm.
6. How about Flash? Google can index and Bing is experimenting – but it’s still not good so just stick to using only flash elements.
7. Will no cache/no archive pages negatively affect you? No.
8. What about sub domains and main domains – will they both show up? Yes, but don’t go crazy with them.
9. What’s up with Google Caffeine? Caffeine is more of an infrastructure update rather than an algorithm update. It has been rolled out to one datacenter and will slowly be rolled out to others.
Social Media and Reputation Management
Remember that the goal of online reputation management is to push the negative items down the page. 40% of adults 30 and older use social sites. Of these users, 37% have contributed to a story, responded to a blog, commented on news, etc.
Here is one presenter’s basic methodology:
1. Local Business Listing – claim and optimize (getlisted.org)
2. Use the website and expand
3. Increase internal site links and indented results
4. Wikipedia – create your listing from an IP that is not yours
5. Get in the News! – press releases
6. Profiles – Better Business Bureau, Indeed, Hoovers, crunch base (www.knowem.com)
7. Get Social – remember to lead the headline with the name of the company (this is not PR, you don’t need fancy headlines)
8. Broad Monitoring (whostalkin.com, trackur, and scoutlabs.com)
9. Build Positive Assets – Linkedin, Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, flickr, blogs, branded domains (bayshoresolutionsinfo.com; bayshoresolutionsvideos.com; bayshoresolutionsnews.com), cross link all assets and use traditional SEO techniques
The second presenter was a representative from a ratings site that talked about handling inbound issues:
1. There are 3 types of reputation posters – Nutjobs (just hate for hating), Pigs (have a vested interest), and Fans. You should only engage with fans – and make them raving fans!
2. If you get a legal threat – be polite and always respond
3. Always respond to Better Business Bureau inquiries- they understand and mainly want to see that you respond
4. Go Public – they presented an Intuit case study: Intuit sent a cease and desist to Mint on Mint’s usage claims. Mint leaked the letter to the press, they got incredible PR and back links, Intuit bought Mint for $174 million
And that’s all I have for my SMX West experience. Any questions or comments? Feel free to post it here and I’d be glad to answer! Thanks for reading my three-part SMX West series.
Doug Pace is Chief of Operations for Bayshore Solutions.