Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Yesterday, I live blogged the Microsoft Live Search Searchification Day for Search Engine Land. Todd did some live blogging too. We both somehow managed to type actual words you find in dictionaries despite being in a room where no beverages — even coffee or diet coke! — was allowed.

I was blogging live and blogging Live and yes, we mocked our Microsoft friends a little about that branding, because even though the name changed a long time ago, mocking that just never gets old.

I have lots more to say about that when I’m not about to get on a plane, but for now, I only have time for links. I have also been continuing my people search series for Search Engine Land. I wrote about Spock last week and will be posting the next in the series shortly. I’ve also been talking on the Zillow blog about the NY Times opening up and how I’m speaking at the SMX Local and Mobile conference next week.

And if it seems like I’m just stealing writing I’ve already done to make it seem like I’m writing now, all I can say is remind you that I was allowed very little coffee yesterday and it takes a while to recover from that. I’m drinking some now, so I have confidence that I will overcome this non-caffeinated setback in no time.

It’s possible that at the Google Dance a few weeks ago I may have impersonated a Googler. (I couldn’t help it! They’re so fun to impersonate!) I met Scott Jones, who runs jonestshirts.com. He asked me about his site and I did a quickie review, pointing out things I liked and didn’t and showing him how he could use webmaster tools.

Recently, he asked me a few questions in blog comments, and while I started answering him there (as did a few others), things were getting long enough that I thought my answer would be worth doing a blog post about. I love how so much conversation and useful information happens in my comments (particularly about music and I still owe you all a post about how much I liked the stuff you suggested to me).

When I looked at his site originally, my quick mad dash thoughts were:

• Use of “tshirts” in the domain was good, and should help get good anchor text.
• Use of keywords in the copy was good, although he might be overdoing it a little in terms of making it useful copy for visitors. He could also beef up the descriptions of his best selling items.
• He should make sure that he’s not using stock manufacturer descriptions, since anyone else who sells those same shirts would have those same descriptions. Search engines (and visitors too) look for unique content that sets a site apart and makes it more useful than anything else out there.
• The content and navigation are still available with javascript and images disabled, so bots can get to them, which is great.
• The use of keywords in the URLs, and lack of noisy parameters is good.
• He should do some keyword research to see how people most often search for wholesale t-shirts. Is it [wholesale shirts]? [Bulk tshirts]? Something entirely different?
• The site is primarily B2B so he should look at not only search traffic, but at the directories and other types of sites that businesses might use to look for wholesale t-shirts. Can he talk to those sites and get links and reviews from them?
• He should look at the other sites who are ranking for the keywords he cares about to see what they offer to visitors. What is it about those sites that makes them relevant and valuable for the query?

We also looked at his webmaster tools account to see what queries he’s currently ranking for. There’s lots he can do to capitalize on what’s listed there. And we looked at his links and found that it’s one area he can definitely improve to help out his rankings.

In the comments, he said:

One of your comments on my site was that you liked the page urls like jonestshirts.com/tshirts. well, a lot of my other pages just had random numbers assigned from my site builder so last week I changed a lot of them to things like /ladiestshirts and /youthtshirts. Googlebot accessed my site yesterday and now for my main term of wholesale t-shirts, I dropped from about # 11 to somewhere in the 200s. I posted this issue on the webmaster tools forum but I just wanted to ask you too since you seem to know a lot about this topic. I know you’re busy and you might not get a chance to get back to me but any thoughts or advice would be totally appreciated!

When people say that they dropped in ranking, I always try to find out more about what’s going on. For one thing, what URL used to rank highest? Is it the same URL that is now ranking in a lower position? Also, sometimes people find association where it may not exist, so it’s worth digging deeper. In this case, I asked him:

Did you do a 301 redirect from the old number-based URLs to the new word-based ones? Also, was the URL that was returned in the search results for “wholesale t-shirts” one of the URLs that you renamed?

He said:

Vanessa, I did not do a 301 redirect. I guess I was thinking that since the old URLs still work that it would be ok. The site builder that I use has a redireict tool that I can use. I will have to find out if it uses a 301 or not. Do you think that once I implement the redirects that my ranking will be back to where it was or what would the process be? Also, the search result for that term was pulling up one of the newly named pages and it wasn’t my home page. What do you make of that? You are the coolest for responding to me! you seriously rule.

First, I obviously don’t rule, because look how long it’s taken for me to put together this blog post. But also, when you change your URL structure, you should definitely 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones for a few reasons:

• You don’t want to have to maintain multiple versions of the same page. One’s going to get out of date and before you know it, you’ll have an embarassing web 2.0 page when everyone else is on web 5. Or web 2.4. I’m not really sure how we’re incrementing the numbers.
• Search engines will see those pages are duplicate content and will sort out for themselves which one to show in search results. They’re unlikely to want to show both.
• You’re splitting link credit and anchor text (both internal and external) and neither page will ever rank as well with both of them out there as one page would alone, with all links pointed its way.

  We should not forget the lessons learned from Highlander. There can only be one. You run across another and you just have to chop off its head, um, HTML, and absorb all that link power for the one true URL. (Todd would like me to clarify that I mean the first movie and not the crappy sequels. And obviously that’s what I mean, although I might watch the crappy sequels if they happened to come on TNT or something while I was lounging around on my couch some Sunday. But who among us wouldn’t?)

The other thing about Scott’s response is that one of the new pages is ranking highest for the query, which means that something has likely happened to the page that used to rank. And that could be completely unrelated to whatever is happening with these new URLs. It sounds like it used to be his home page that ranked. So, I checked that out.

As for your home page not ranking, it looks like the problem is that your home page is no longer indexed at all.
http://72.14.253.104/search?&q=cache:www.jonestshirts.com

It loads ok and you don’t seem to be blocking it with robots or a meta tag, so I’m not sure why it dropped out. You might check your webmaster tools account and see if anything is listed on the summary page regarding home page access and if the URL is listed in the web crawl errors. It’s possible your host was blocking the Googlebot IP when Google last tried to crawl the page or that your server was down. The crawl errors page should have this listed, if so.

And JLH noted that:

It sure would help to link to your home page on your own site. Home links to http://www.jonestshirts.com/wholesaletshirtshome which is also not indexed at the moment. Was that a recent change?

It turns out that this is one of those layered onion things, although possibly not those blooming onions that Spike on Buffy liked, more like when you’re making soup and you’re chopping an onion and you’re sobbing so hard that the tears are making the soup a little salty and you’re thinking, is this onion chopped yet? But no, it’s a pretty big onion and all those tricks about running water and lighting a candle and humming just don’t seem to be doing the trick. The real solution is just just keep chopping ’til the soup is ready. So, I kept chopping away.

But I bet we could all use a break before diving into this, so let’s relive Spike and Andrew’s conversation about blooming onions:

ANDREW: You sure you don’t wanna stop and pick up some burgers or something, you know, road trip food?
SPIKE: It’s not a road trip. It’s a covert operation.
ANDREW: Right. Right. Gotcha. I - I bet even covert operatives eat curly fries. They’re really good.
SPIKE: Not as good as those onion blossom things.
ANDREW: Ooh, I love those.
SPIKE: Yeah, me, too.
ANDREW: It’s an onion… and it’s a flower. I - I don’t understand how such a thing is possible.
SPIKE: See, the genius of it is you soak it in ice water for an hour so it holds its shape. Then you deep-fry it root-side up for about 5 minutes.
ANDREW: Masterful.
SPIKE: Yeah. Tell anyone we had this conversation, I’ll bite you.
ANDREW: Right.

Yeah, that was a pretty good episode.

Back in the comments, Scott said:

By the way, you asked about http://www.jonestshirts.com/wholesaletshirtshome. This is the home page, it is just another instance where I used the “custom page url” feature in order to get more keywords into the url. This is one that I changed several months ago though. Let me know what your thoughts are on that. Should I make it so my home page is just the domain? or should I keep the custom one and do a 301 redirect? Or, since it has been this way for a while already, should I just leave it as is?

This is when I decided Scott deserved his own blog post, rather than just comments. I did indeed tell him that keyword-rich URLs are the way to go, but that’s not the only factor to consider. A URL like /tshirts.html is better than /12345.html for several reasons. It’s more useful for visitors. It might help search engines know what the page is about. It can jumpt start the external anchor text you’re looking for.

But the home page? I think that’s better off resolving to the domain, in this case, www.jonestshirts.com. As before, if you do have other URLs for your home page, you should 301 redirect everything to one URL, and for the home page, I would keep things simple and do all of that resolving back to the domain. Make sure all internal links are to that one URL and encourage external linking to do the same.

Scott came back later to say that his rankings had returned (he is, in fact, #6 for [wholesale tshirts], and that the 301 redirecting might be problematic to do. This leads to a few simple tips:

• Rankings always fluctuate and that will only continue to heat up as the search engines are able to reindex more quickly and tweak their algorithms more often, so don’t panic. Always carry your towel. Etc.
• If you’re watching your rankings for particular keywords, make note of the specific URL that’s ranking to help you troubleshoot things later if your rankings dip. It might not be a ranking issue at all. It might be a technical problem with that particular page.
• A lot of SEO is about on-page and off-page copy, and while I wouldn’t call any of that easy, the much more difficult, and often even more vital part of SEO is the technical site architecture. Can you implement 301s? Do the URLs have too many parameters? Can search engine bots get to the site, or are pages hidden behind things like forms and javascript? Are you blocking everything with a robots.txt file?

  One of the first things we added to webmaster tools (way before it was even called that) was the crawl errors report. Many site owners see indexing problems and immediately assume a penalty or think that if they just squeeze one more keyword in their title, everything will be fine. But sometimes, the real story, once you peel back those onion layers and get through the tears, is that search engines couldn’t technically access the page.

Does anyway else have any ideas that might help Scott? Or seen any good movies on TNT?

I’ve been really interested in people search lately, likely as a tangential wandering from my endless love/hate relationship with social networks. I’ve been talking about people search sites and my struggles with them, as well as the bigger ideas around being identifiable online here on my blog, but I’ve now tangentially wandered right off the site and started writing about people search elsewhere.

The September issue of Information Today magazine includes an article I wrote on using social networking sites for search (typically people search). Information Today is aimed at information professionals, notably librarians. I’ve got an article coming up in the October issue on using people search engines for research purposes. As it’s an honest-to-goodness print magazine, you have to either buy the magazine in an actual store or buy the article online to read these.

I also started a series on people search for Search Engine Land. And if you call in the next ten minutes, access to that is free all free! Heh. I’ll be profiling individual engines in the coming weeks, so watch for that if you’re interested in the new wave of stalking, um people searching.

SEOmoz just posted a quiz to test your mad SEO skilz.

It’s [almost, er, etc.] completely wrong.

And I say that with the utmost affection for a certain yellow-shoed person who’s coming to my house later for Buffy night. I get the idea. Basic SEO principles exist that anyone operating in the online space should know. The trouble is that SEO is art as much as science, and to top it all off (like those little sprinkles on top of cupcakes), things are always changing. Even the basics change.

Sure, you should always create a usable site, with compelling and unique content, and you should do keyword research and use those keywords in places like title tags and headings, and if you block your entire site with robots.txt, it’s unlikely to ever get indexed. And try to get a few links if you can. Some things don’t change.

But you’ll find quotes from me all over the place about how search engines don’t crawl javascript, yet I’ve seen evidence lately that they might be starting to, at least a little. And nofollow didn’t exist a couple of years ago. I bet meta keywords even used to work.

It’s impossible to know everything about SEO because some things aren’t hard and fast rules. You also have to pay attention the trends, see what works, keep evolving your tactics. And anyway, I would bet that there’s no one person who even knows 100% about how a search engine handles each step of the crawling/indexing/ranking process. Even those within the search engines don’t know all the parts to to the process. Yes, even him. Go ahead, ask him. I’ll wait. He’ll tell you the same.

But why is this quiz so wrong? Too many of the questions go beyond the science and into the art of SEO, where things are fluid and changing and open to interpretation. The quiz is more accurately a test of how much of your personal SEO philosophy matches that of SEOmoz. Like a match.com compatibility test. You and SEOmoz, sitting in a tree. Romantically optimizing title tags.

For instance, which is less useful and accurate: Alexa traffic toolbar data or Google toolbar PageRank data? I posit that it’s not a cut and dried answer. (Cut and dried? Where did that come from anyway?)

What’s the best way to avoid internal duplicate content? Block redundant versions from crawlers? Maybe. Unless those versions have a lot of links, in which case you might be losing a lot of link credit.

Does internal linking help raise the PageRank of internal pages? Well, maybe. Or maybe it just helps the discoverability of those pages and the PageRank comes naturally by virtue of being part of the site. It’s impossible to know because Google doesn’t publish PageRank numbers. You can’t really experiment to find out. (And now we can debate about whether you can use the toolbar PageRank numbers to experiment with something like this. And then once we’re done debating, things will probably change anyway.)

When should you leave the meta description of a page? Er, never? OK, I suppose if you are unable to create unique ones for every page, it doesn’t make sense to have the same one everywhere. But this whole idea of leaving it off when the page is targeted at long tail queries makes no sense. Or at least, it’s definitely more of an up for debate topic than a fundamental truth of SEO. How many disparate long tail terms are you targeting on that one page anyway? If you can’t come up with a description that fits the entire page, shouldn’t you just create multiple pages anyway for each completely separate topic? And if you do shove a bunch a bunch of unrelated stuff together on one page and the meta description isn’t relevant for queries that return that page, search engines are going to use relevant text from the content rather than the meta description anyway. Existence of a meta description tag doesn’t prevent other content to be used as the snippet instead when that would be more useful.

And then there’s the geeky side of me that says: HTTP server response that indicates a file no longer exists or isn’t working? For one thing, the same HTTP code isn’t used for both. For another thing, I know the answer they’re going for is 404, but that’s not right in either case. 404 means doesn’t exist. It’s 410 that means no longer exists. And “isn’t working” could mean anything! Is the server not working? Was the request bad? I wouldn’t be so particular, except I did sort of write the book, er help topic about it. Also, did I mention that I’m really geeky? I even have a favorite HTTP status code.

And then we get to the question that made me decide to do this blog post.

When launching a large amount of new content on a new or existing domain, the best way to release content for crawling and indexing is:

I got it wrong.

And the correct answer, when explaining why I was wrong…

…quoted me.

I answered All at once - to allow the spiders to find the content and digest it in their preferred format. But apparently the quoted me said Over time, in multiple smaller sized chunks.

Huh.

But here’s the thing. That quote was about using a 301 to move existing content. I did indeed recommend doing that slowly for a number of reasons. You want to make sure you’ve impelemented the 301 correctly. The moving pages might experience a short-term dip in indexing in ranking and you might not want that to happen to your entire site at once. You want to be able to pinpoint problems and not troubleshoot your entire site architecture.

That quote was not at all about creating all new content. Add as much of that as you want! All at once! Well, unless you’re creating millions of pages of autogenerated content! That might look suspicious! (Just saying.)

However, I admit that at least one of the questions has a black and white answer. There is no apparent search engine rankings benefit to having a keyword-matched domain name (eg www.example.com for keyword “example”). FALSE. Otherwise, I’d get traffic from searches other than porn.

Edit: My title, of course, is meant to be hyperbolic and over the top and well, easily identifiable as purposely linkbaity (er, and funny). I have a strange sense of humor. I also like potato chips in sandwiches. We all have our oddities. However, I have gone back and slightly edited the title in case it comes across as unduly harsh. I’m not saying all the answers are wrong; It’s that I feel the quiz tends to ask the wrong kinds of questions — questions that have debatable rather than black and white answers. There are more fundamental concepts in SEO that don’t have these shades of gray. One thing that’s great about the particular questions asked though is that they’ve started a dialogue about those topics. And not only about the topics in the quiz, but about the larger topic of search engine optimization as an art, trial and error, and ever-evolving. So in that sense, perhaps the quiz was [almost] completely right.

1. The web is a really big place.
2. It even includes pages about more than one person named “Vanessa”.
3. While you don’t want to write an entire essay in your search query, the more specific you are, the better the search engines will know what you’re looking for.
4. And they’ll give you the page you want, rather than this site, which despite ranking #1 for “vanessa nude”, does not contain the pictures you are looking for.
5. Including the person’s last name will narrow things down a bit.
6. No, I’m not going to link to the query for you.
7. Or to the photos.
8. Or approve all of your comments, wherein you are all helpfully sharing where to find the real deal.
9. It’s rather charitable of you to want to help each other out like that though.
10. Sweet, really.

This post brought to you by a recent Disney actress-related scandal, which has caused the traffic on my site to more than quadruple in the two days since the news broke. Sadly, I don’t think any of the visitors are actually looking for me. Possibly there is a lesson here about capitalizing on current events, writing about the subject matter, and monetizing in creative ways. But it’s a sunny day at the beach, so there’s really just no time.

The big news is that Facebook is opening up. It’s revolutionary! But what about our privacy?!

First, it’s not new. These profiles already show up in the search results (not “in a few weeks” to give everyone time to fix their privacy settings). But they’re unlikely to rank for a name search unless there’s not much else out there that’s relevant.

But also, how underwhelming can you get? This is the same information that you could always get from doing a Facebook search, only now you can potentially get that information from the much noisier major engine search results that are likely to include information about you that’s much more private than your name and whatever picture you’ve chosen to upload to your profile.

If you have profiles on just about any other site out there, those are already in search results and are showing lots more information than your name and picture — and it’s likely information you want shown, like your web site. Facebook’s announcement would be a little more interesting if they actually did what they are claiming and let us control our public search listing by allowed us to choose what parts of our profile — beyond our name and picture — could be viewed.

Of course, now I’m just complaining about the same old thing I always do. I want permission management. I want my limited profile options to be more granular. I want Buffy on the air again. I want a goldfish.

The one thing that Facebook gives away (and this isn’t new either) is your friends list. It’s odd that they don’t show any of the profile information that every other site in the world displays, but they give away your friends, which almost no other sites do. This is easily fixed. In your search privacy settings, uncheck the box that says “View your friends list”. And in your profile privacy settings, change the Friends viewing option to “only my friends”. The only way to keep your friends from viewing your other friends is by setting them to view your limited profile and then turning the friends option off there.

If you care about privacy of your Facebook information, you might consider the network you’re in too. By default, everyone in your network can see everything. I’m in the Seattle network. That’s a lot of people. If you’re in your work network, you may not have added your boss as a friend, but she may be able to see everything anyway.

Speaking of seeing everything, if you poke someone who isn’t your friend, that pokee can see everything in your profile for a week. I guess this is so you can poke someone you think might be your friend — only you can’t tell because you can’t even see the person’s web site! — so that person can check you out and say, oh I should add this person as my friend. Or something like that. By default, anyone you send a message to who isn’t your friend can see everything also.

And about those messages, if you don’t want everyone in the entire world to message you, you can go to the search privacy section and uncheck “Send me a message”.

As an aside, I like that one of the options for deactivating your account is “Facebook is resulting in social drama for me.” The sheep throwing, it just gets to be too much.

David Payne just pointed out in comments that rumors are going around that Anthony Stewart Head might be getting ready to start working on a new Buffy spin-off called Ripper. Coincidentally, someone on my team stopped by earlier today to tell me the same thing. Apparently my occasional interest in the show about the little blonde girl with the pointy stick has been noticed.

1. We have been teased with this spin-off for years, along with other potential Buffy spin-offs, and we’ve been horribly and painfully disappointed every single time.
2. However, this does sound promising so I am willing to hold out hope once again.
3. Even though I’m sure those hopes will be dashed like those teeny fine china teacups that only hold like three sips of tea if you were to hurl them of a really tall building onto concrete. After making sure innocent bystanders below would not be hurt, of course.
4. I know I keep saying my Buffy site is almost ready for its relaunch, but it’s true! Stay tuned for an overwhelming array of Buffy goodness. I know. You can’t wait. I can tell.
5. Anthony Stewart Head’s character Giles (aka Ripper, hence the name of the spin-off) has always been my favorite, from way back when he was in those Taster’s Choice commercials. Which is one reason I started watching Buffy in the first place.
6. If you need to brush up on Ripper while you wait for the the spin-off to never materialize, you should watch Halloween, followed by The Dark Age, from Buffy season two. And then you should watch Band Candy, from Buffy season three. You really should just go watch them anyway. They’re all excellent episodes. I have the DVDs if you need to borrow them. (Wouldn’t those links be better if they went to my own Buffy site?)

After traveling practically non-stop for six months, I took a break from from the ziplock bags and the public partial stripping and the coffee roulette (will it all be decaf once again?) and went on a road trip for a couple of weeks instead. I’ve since made up for it though. I’ve visited the lovely airports of Long Beach, Seattle, Chicago, JFK, Newark, San Jose, Orange County, and LAX since then.

During my flying hiatus, Natala and I went to the Alaska MVP Gold lunch. Yes, we have been mocked ever since. But yes, we had a very good time and will go the next one too. If they invite us back. We may have been just a wee bit vocal, what with the whole experience of being denied boarding of our plane and ending up on stand by for an entirely different airport and finally getting on that stand by flight, albeit in middle seats. With my cats. It sucks to be stuck in an airport with cats. You really want to get them to their destination as quickly as possible. You know my cats are the picture of perfection and goodness though, so of course, they made it through just fine. We found at at the lunch that we were caught up in a test that went a bit awry in that the ticket counter agent wasn’t testing as much as implementing. We forgave them in the end. So did the cats.

It only made sense that we went to the lunch and told Alaska about all the stuff that we liked and didn’t, since we tell our friends often enough. And it turns out our friends don’t actually care about that stuff as much as you might think. Crazy! Fortunately, at Gnomedex, we met someone who is as Alaska-obsessed as we are and in fact was at the same lunch! Which means we aren’t the only geeky fliers. OK, so maybe it’s just the three of us.

The lunch was a good example of how to keep your best customers coming back. Even if they don’t always have perfect experiences, giving them a forum to talk about that, acknowledging your missteps, sharing plans to fix them, and asking for feedback all help keep recurring customers recurring.

It’s lesson that anyone with customers of any kind can take from our geeky lunch. Don’t pretend you’re perfect if you’re not. Your customers aren’t dumb. Ignoring mistakes just makes it seem like you are either clueless or don’t plan to do anything to make things better and hope problems just goes away on their own. Of course, gathering up your best customers and reminding them of what you’ve done right and are planning for the future isn’t a bad plan either.

If you can’t meet with your customers in person, you can still keep them posted and get feedback. A blog is great to keep everyone informed, and comments or a discussion forum lets customers stay involved. Alaska had employees from just about every department from the lunch, so if anyone had a question about anything, someone was there to answer it. You should do the same with your blog and forums. Get employees from across the company involved.

So what about those delays in getting bags? They’ve reduced the time, but agree it’s still crappy and are working on it. Of course, my method of dealing with this is not to check bags. And if I absolutely have to, I follow Natala’s brilliant tip. Just go hang out in the board room for 20 minutes or so. They’ve got wireless, wine, snacks… It’s a much better place to wait than baggage claim.

Delays at Long Beach? Often because they don’t store parts for the 737s there. Who knew? If you went to the lunch, you would!

I also recently learned the value in writing down where I park in the airport garage. As it turns out, walking down aisle after aisle isn’t as exciting as you might imagine.

So share information about both your successes and your mistakes. Ask your customers for their feedback. And listen. Hey, it’s like getting free consulting from those who know your customers better than anyone.