Nine By Blue » Office Hours

October 19, 2011 Office Hours

Blair Brown — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:49:11 +0000

Today on Office Hours Vanessa discusses how people are both happy and unhappy with Google at the moment.

She offers a recap of Google Panda developments saying that they are using different algorithms to evaluate different websites. She describes this update as different from those of the past because instead of occurring once every 6 weeks there are 3 or 4 changes within a couple of weeks. Vanessa describes the bottom line of Panda as being focused on quality, content, usability of the site, and engagement.

Vanessa then goes on to describe the qualities of a good navigational path structure.

Articles and links mentioned during the show:

Google To Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default With SSL Search

Google Analytics Gains “Napoleon March” Flow Visualization Charts

Recording of this episode coming soon!

September 28, 2011 Office Hours

Blair Brown — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:59:52 +0000

On this episode of Office Hours Vanessa opens the chat room to answer the question about important books on advertising in the age of Google then continues by talking about interesting integrations between journalism, search and social media.

Vanessa continues with discussion around the new updates with Google News. She sites the interesting fact that searchers click on news stories 4 billion times a month and from that 1 billion clicks come from Google News and 3 billion are from web search. How does this effect Facebook, WordPress and other content output?

Vanessa wraps up the conversation with talk of Google Plus which is currently at 43 million users while Facebook has 800 million the trend seems to be to add Google Plus in addition to Facebook rather than cancelling your Facebook account. What is the future of Google Plus? How will the launch of its business friendly adaptation effect its numbers.

Books Mentioned:
ZMOT by Jim Lacinski
Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer By Bryan Eisenberg
Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Articles Mentioned:
Google News Launches ‘Standout’ Tag for Feature Content
Amazon ‘Fire’ Android Tablet Undermines Google

Look for Vanessa’s second book due out April of 2012 with all new updated statistics, additional information on social media and a deeper dive into searcher personas and workflows.

Hear the podcast of this episode here.

September 21, 2011 Office Hours

Heather Champion — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:41:42 +0000

Vanessa starts us off by addressing pagination since this has been a hot topic in the last year. How does it work? How should we use it? Google had new options for this? Great! Vanessa covers the basics about rel=”next” and rel=”prev”, article pagination vs ecommerce pagination, and the cases where you just want page one to rank no matter what.

Having problems with WordPress pagination using rel=”next” and rel=”prev”? You’re not alone. Read what Joost has to say, and install his plug in.

Vanessa wraps up the show with deets about penalties and how Google’s reconsideration requests are changing.

Articles mentioned:
Google Provides New Options for Paginated Content
Questions about Pagination from the Google Webmaster Central Forums
Pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev”
Reconsideration Requests get more Transparent

Hear the podcast of this episode here.

July 27, 2011 Office Hours

Heather Champion — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:51:48 +0000

Google announces Panda 2.3, which is the first time that sites have seen a comeback. Vanessa talks about the common thread that she see’s in sites that have come back.

Bing has confirmed that they are supporting Google’s crawlable AJAX Standard. The conversation continues about page speed, content readability, keyword density, and the point of ranking in the first place.

Articles Mentioned:
Official: Google Panda 2.3 Update is Live
I’m Feeling Lucky
Bing Now Supports Google’s Crawlable AJAX Standard

Listen to the entire episode on Webmaster Radio

October 14, 2010 Office Hours

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:32:41 +0000

Vanessa recaps SMX East- touching on Local Search, Rich Snippets and Facebook’s social data being indexed in Bing.

Articles mentioned:

Should Local Restaurants Care About Local Search?

Google Search now supports Microformats and Adds Rich Snippets

Bing: Now with Extra Facebook: See what your friends like

Listen to the entire episode on Webmaster Radio!

Sept 9, 2010 Office Hours

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:32:44 +0000

Vanessa takes questions about international SEO, before diving into a conversation about Google Instant that launched yesterday. Vanessa hypothesizes that people will find what they are looking for faster because it’s easier to get to what they want, but it’s not going to change searcher intent.

Articles mentioned:
SEO is Dead and/or irrelevant with Google Instant
Google Instant could be a brilliant breakthrough… or another flop
Google Instant Impact on Search Queries

Listen to the whole episode on Webmaster Radio.fm

August 26, 2010 Office Hours

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:35:13 +0000

Vanessa talks about best practices for pagination URL structure and duplicate content issues with printer versions of said paginated articles.
She also dives in to backlinks and Pagerank before talking about Glee.

Links mentioned:
preventing duplicate content issues with print versions of content
Somebody added 120k backlinks to my site…and my PR went from 6 to 1 that month
6 ways to replace Yahoo’s Link Linkdomain Search
All New Bing Webmaster Tools

Listen to the whole episode on Webmaster Radio.fm

August 19th 2010 Office Hours

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:38:28 +0000

Vanessa talks about the Google algo change and how it affects brand names in search.

Then, Vanessa takes lots of questions from the chat room on TLDs, blocking bad links and if “>>>>” in your title tags hurts your rankings.

Articles Mentioned:
Google Treating Brand Names in Search Terms
Google Search Results Dominated by One Domain
Could this change to the Google algorithm give big brands a leg-up, or does Google have another agenda?

Listen to the entire episode on Webmaster Radio.

August 5, 2010 Office Hours

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:33:54 +0000

Vanessa is super stoked because she got a tweet from the bridge here in Seattle. This launches her into a lecture about how important social media is and how quickly it can raise awareness. In this case, the government owns the twitter account, and so there is no monetary value in tweeting, but instead they are taking advantage of technology to better serve the communities.

Vanessa takes questions about language links, TLD’s and geographic restrictions, crawl errors, and touches again on the rollout of Bing results in Yahoo searches.

Listen to the entire episode on WebmasterRadio.fm

July 22 2010 Office Hours

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:54:31 +0000

Yahoo says 25% of their results are now powered by Bing, so Vanessa digs into some questions she has. She talks about how time sensitive, spam and movie queries are handled in Bing as opposed to Yahoo, and then of course, comparing those to Google. Yahoo has said they plan on controlling the UI of the search results and just pulling in Bing’s results. Vanessa walks us through some tests to analyze just how well Yahoo is doing.

Vanessa touches on consolidating link value with a canonicalization tag, Sitemaps, and the new Bing Webmaster Tools.

Articles mentioned:

Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore

All New Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools

Listen to the entire episode at WebmasterRadio.fm