Don’t Forget The Other Type Of Enterprise Search

Don’t Forget The Other Type Of Enterprise Search
http://bit.ly/OhnpIo

As SEOs, we focus on external customers: Getting more people outside an organization to sign up, buy, read, follow and otherwise participate. We don’t invest a lot of effort at helping internal customers: Colleagues at our own company who need help finding critical information, but end up grinding their teeth after 10 minutes lost in the company’s ‘search’ tool.

It’s time for a career tune-up, everybody. As an SEO, you have a lot to offer in the field of enterprise search. Here’s how you can help, and how you can capitalize on internal needs.

Content Collection

Enterprise search systems collect information through content collection, aka content ingestion (which always sounds like a stomach problem to me). This can happen using:

  1. A crawler/spider, just like the search engines we’re all used to;
  2. A direct connection to a source control or document management system;
  3. A host of other Rube Goldberg contraptions I won’t even try to describe.

If your company’s search tool uses a crawler, a useful system requires content visibility. You probably know a thing or two about that, right?

If it uses a direct connection, the biggest issue is content preparation. See the next section.

If your company uses some bizarre technology originally coded on punch cards and later updated using a combination of Fortran and COBOL, it might be time to consider something less… steam-powered. If that’s the case, you can offer a lot regarding current tools and algorithms, and help evaluate replacements.

Content Preparation

Most internal search tools rely on a mix of metadata and raw text indexing. That means everyone providing content to the tool must follow best practices. Otherwise, the search engine can’t accurately index and rank what it finds.

Someone has to go out and teach those best practices: How to write a good document title, a decent summary, and otherwise prep content for indexing.

That’s one more place you can help. A lot. In 20+ years’ work on various intranets, document libraries and filing systems, I’ve seen, oh, let’s say zero organizations that teach that kind of content prep.

Testing & Analytics

Every enterprise search tool includes reporting. You can use this reporting to see which documents get found most often for what queries. You can also use it to test different search results layouts, delivery methods and tweaks to indexing.

The older your internal search tool, the more likely it is that everyone at your company has forgotten where this data lives. Prepare to do a little research. But there won’t be many people better qualified than you to review this search data and draw conclusions about search quality.

Check out query reports and learn what folks in your company most want to find. Find the content that’d best answer their questions. Then, if they queries and the results don’t match (they probably won’t) figure out how to get your search tools in sync.

Getting Started: Don’t Be A Jerk

Some large enterprises have entire teams of information scientists working on internal search tools. Many more buy a search appliance, plug it in, and then promptly forget about it.

Don’t assume one or the other—ask nicely, first. Remember how you feel when a client brings in another SEO who treats you like an idiot? Remember how much you didn’t want to cooperate with them?

You want to avoid that response with the current internal search team. Especially since they’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, and likely know a lot more than you do about search.

Talk to your boss, first. Start with a small idea—something where you can help improve internal search, just a little. If that goes well, you can do more, later. Don’t be pushy.

I just advised you “Don’t be pushy”. Me. The guy once labeled ‘Most likely to start a fist fight in a meditation session.’ Both my cats just snickered at me. So as always, take my advice with a grain of salt.

Prepare For Much Venting

My company is all of 35 people. We’re not an enterprise. But if I ask each person, I’ll get 35 reasons why our internal search tools suck. If and when you start researching current internal search problems, you’ll hear a lot about what stinks, and not much about what works.

Listen and record, but don’t necessarily throw out the current system. No one ever thinks an enterprise search system is good—at best, you can hope they hate it only mildly.

Huh, that sounds a lot like being an SEO. See? You’re more qualified than you think!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Enterprise SEO

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Bing Adds Friend-Tagging To Social Sidebar

Bing Adds Friend-Tagging To Social Sidebar
http://bit.ly/OFAWc4

bing-logoBing has just announced a small tweak to how its Social Sidebar functions — but it’s one that overcomes one of the Sidebar’s true limitations.

The change is this: When using the Social Sidebar, you can now tag up to five Facebook friends with whom you want to share your search results. Before this change, the Sidebar would automatically show a few connections under the “Friends Who Might Know” or “People Who Know” tabs. But you were limited to notifying/asking those suggestions, or to asking all of your friends at once via the “Ask Friends” feature. And that was hit and miss, because there’s no guarantee that Facebook would show your post to the people you wanted to see it.

You can now go beyond the suggestions and avoid having to ask all of your friends by using the “Choose friends to notify” tool.

bing-social-sidebar-update

The new tool isn’t live for me at the moment, but Bing says it has begun rolling out on Bing.com. Stefan Weitz, Bing Director, shows off the new feature in this video.

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Social Search



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NBC Olympics Executive’s Email Wasn’t “Widely Available” In Google

NBC Olympics Executive’s Email Wasn’t “Widely Available” In Google
http://bit.ly/MgiJE0

twitter-new-logo-2012The interwebs are all a flutter over how a critic of NBC’s Olympic coverage had his Twitter account suspended after tweeting the email address of the executive in charge of that coverage. It was private, said Twitter. Public to anyone with Google, said journalist Guy Adams, whose account was suspended. Actually, from what I can tell, it really wasn’t public to anyone with Google.

A Tweet Too Far

Adams is a journalist who works for The Independent. He’s tweeted loudly and proudly against NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, as Deadspin details. But when he encouraged people to email Gary Zenkel, the NBC president overseeing NBC’s coverage, that was a tweet too far.

NBC complained that sharing the email was a violation of Twitter’s rules governing posting private information, including that of “non-public, personal email addresses.” Twitter reacted by suspending Adams’s account.

That surprised Adams, who contacted Twitter PR, as he wrote, saying:

I didn’t publish a private email address. Just a corporate one, which is widely available to anyone with access to Google, and is identical [in form] to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share. It’s no more “private” than the address I’m emailing you from right now

It’s hard for me to write anything negative about Adams, given I — like many — hate NBC’s policy of pretending that the Olympics are happening only during prime time in the United States

I joked on Twitter that the internet needed to buy the rights to the Olympics next time and set them free. It was one of the most retweeted things I’ve ever shared, 155 so far and still climbing.

Not Finding His Email Via Google

Still, I was curious whether Zenkel’s email address really was “widely available to anyone with access to Google,” as Adams claimed. Definitely not, I’d say.

Right now, there’s no problem finding Zenkel’s email address through Google. A search for Gary Zenkel email brings back over 30,000 matches, and you can see his address right in the description of some listings in the first page of results:

But what was the situation before the Zenkel’s email went viral, thanks to the Twitter suspension of Adams? One way to tell is to search for Zenkel’s email address (which we now know) on pages without any mention of Twitter. That brings back exactly one match:

gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com_-twitter-Google-Search-1-600x237.jpg" height="237" alt="" width="600" />

That one match almost certainly wouldn’t have been in the top results for when someone did a search for “Gary Zenkel email” or related queries earlier this week, as I’ll explain more below.

But what if I’m somehow missing out on pages that did have both the email address and the word “Twitter” but which weren’t about the current uproar. After all, plenty of pages have the word “twitter” on them for other reasons.

OK, so here’s another search. In this case, I did a search for his email address from the day before Adams tweeted it going back to 1996:

gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com_-Google-Search-600x476.jpg" height="476" alt="" width="600" />

That brought up six matches. Oddly, it didn’t bring up the match I found before, even though it should have, but don’t get me going about Google searches not operating the way they should.

Speaking of which, of those six matches, at least two of them didn’t appear within these dates, despite what Google says. For instance, it seems like on June 15 (according to Google’s date), Zenkel’s email address appeared in comments on NBC’s own NBC News Facebook page. But if you go to the cached copy, it’s clear that the page was much more recent than that.

I figure at best, we’re looking at about five references that were out on the web with Zenkel’s actual email. As I said, that’s not “widely available,” especially consider that most people who really wanted it probably would have just searched for “gary zenkel email.” These references wouldn’t have risen up over pages that just had the words “Gary Zenkel” and “email” on them.

Instead, they’d have gotten results similar to what I’m showing below, where I’ve date limited the matches and also blocked pages with the word “suspended” on them to make up for Google’s issue in knowing accurate dates:

Of course, Adams also said that the address is “identical [in form] to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share.” Does that mean it was widely available to anyone with Google?

As it turns out, people do apparently use Google to figure out the format for emailing people at NBC. It’s currently a suggestion that Google offers (though it might be a recent one prompted by all of this):

Still, I don’t think this means the address was widely available. The results you get back from that search are pretty cruddy. The NBC contact page certainly doesn’t spell it out. It’s not hard for people who really want to guess at it to know. But it’s not the same as just putting the address out there.

There remains the debate over whether sharing a corporate address is one that’s not personal and therefore not a violation of Twitter’s rules. I’d say no. Just because someone has a work address doesn’t make it not personal. It’s their personal work email.

Like I said, I’m no fan of NBC’s coverage. My wife’s British, and we both would have liked to have seen the unedited Opening Ceremonies. But years of trying to view programs either in the US from the UK (see, Dear BBC America: Would You Please Suck Less?) or shows from the US in the UK (see Watching The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade From Abroad, Showtime’s Web Site: For US Eyes Only) have continuously taught me how inept the television networks are on both sides of the Atlantic — at least to those who don’t understand who the licensing deals they cut work. (See also, Dear Rupert Murdoch: Let’s Talk Piracy & “The Simpsons” and You Can’t Watch SNL’s Hilarious “Downton Abbey” Sketch Legally Online, So NBCUniversal Pirates Itself).

At the same time, I don’t think sharing people’s email addresses is cool. I don’t need a Twitter policy that may or may not prevent it. Common manners should suffice (see also my column this week, Minding your manners when sharing in social media). There are better ways to rally people to protest something than handing out email addresses, phone numbers or real addresses.

Here’s hoping that Adams gets his account restored soon; civility returns even in the middle of the debate and that NBC finds a way to make all parties happy with its coverage. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Legal: Privacy | Search & Society | Top News



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SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 30, 2012

SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 30, 2012
http://bit.ly/MW59np

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Microsoft Explains Removal Of Age And Gender Targeting From AdCenter

    What do you do when you figure out that a lot of self-reported data you’re using to target ads is inaccurate or just plain sparse? If you’re Microsoft adCenter, you remove that targeting capability — in this case, age and gender. In a support thread from last week, a representative gives the reasoning behind a [...]

  • Bing Adds Friend-Tagging To Social Sidebar

    Bing has just announced a small tweak to how its Social Sidebar functions — but it’s one that overcomes one of the Sidebar’s true limitations. The change is this: When using the Social Sidebar, you can now tag up to five Facebook friends with whom you want to share your search results. Before this change, [...]

  • Mobile & The Disintermediation Of Traditional Search

    2012 is the year of mobile. Or is it 2013? Or maybe it was supposed to be 2011. Regardless of the calendar year that we’ll end up attributing the explosion of growth to, the mobile tide has been on the rise for some time. This past April, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a report citing [...]

  • 3 Tips To Manage Complex Paid Search Programs

    When you are managing hundreds of ad groups, it’s easy to neglect certain details; however, the diamonds in the rough can often only be found through account deep-dives. Thus, I’m always looking for the next tip or tool that could speed up and make more efficient my management of large, complex AdWords accounts. Below I [...]

  • Don’t Forget The Other Type Of Enterprise Search

    As SEOs, we focus on external customers: Getting more people outside an organization to sign up, buy, read, follow and otherwise participate. We don’t invest a lot of effort at helping internal customers: Colleagues at our own company who need help finding critical information, but end up grinding their teeth after 10 minutes lost in [...]

  • Google Explains New Link Warnings, Says Don’t Panic But Don’t Ignore

    Confused by the latest link warnings that Google has been sending out? As we covered before, it’s all been pretty confusing. That’s why Google has posted more information meant to calm some worries, though it’s still likely that even after this, some are going to panic. The “Old” Link Warnings: Entire Site Impacted Google’s post [...]

  • Developing Better Search A Key To Facebook’s Future

    During last week’s Facebook earnings call COO Sheryl Sandberg argued that the company could and would compete for marketing dollars “throughout the entire marketing funnel.” That is, from branding and awareness at the “top” of the so-called funnel to “demand fulfillment” at the “bottom.” Below is the quote in broader context: We believe we are [...]

  • For Olympic Medal Count Info, Yahoo Gets Gold, Google Silver & Bing Bronze

    Want to know the how various countries are doing in the London 2012 Olympics? For finding out using a major search engine, I give the gold to Yahoo, with Google narrowly missing to earn silver and Bing getting bronze mainly by virtue of being third in a three contestant race. Ready, Set, Search! Checking for [...]

  • Google Lifts Ban On iAcquire; Company Blogs Of Being Reformed

    iAcquire, banned by Google in late May after allegations of buying links for clients, has now has been restored to the Google index after two months. The company has blogged about the news and changes to its business model. iAcquire never says itself that it was banned over buying links for clients. Instead, it uses [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Related Topics: SearchCap



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Energy Computer, A Review

Energy Computer, A Review
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3 Tips for Landing Page Strategies in 2012

3 Tips for Landing Page Strategies in 2012
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If your online business uses landing pages, you naturally want these to be compatible with the latest search engine algorithms in 2012 and beyond. Much of it is really nothing new, but you need to know what it is in the first place. You also have to build the sort of landing pages that your prospective customers will find enticing. If you use landing pages, then the good news is very much of it is what has been recommended all along. At the same time, it's better to be careful and not assume that you know everything as this attitude can be harmful to your business. Those who think they know it all are the ones who wake up and discover their rankings have dropped. 34dfssfd There is great wisdom with keeping within the boundaries of established approaches with landing page design. Another essential point to consider is that you want everything on your site to be harmonious -so your landing page should match everything else. Maintaining this harmony of design will improve your conversions, as it makes visitors feel more at ease. You will usually get the best results by sticking with landing page designs that are fairly familiar to most visitors. Reversing the background and font colors to look avant-garde or different is not the thing to do. There's also the question of who your visitors will be, so this may not hold true all of the time. But generally speaking, abide by usability factors that are known to work best. Website visitors are much like taking young students on a field trip. Teachers have to make sure that everyone stays together and doesn't get lost. On your landing page, be very clear about what you want from your visitors. This doesn't mean that you should treat them like they're stupid, but you should make everything as easy as possible. If you've ever studied the principles of direct response copywriting, this will all be quite familiar to you. People tend to avoid making decisions on their own and overwhelming them with information and choices only makes it worse. One effective tactic you may want to try is including an extra little message following the call to action area. This can be just about anything but it has to be accurate and truthful. You could restate the guarantee that comes with your product, service or membership. The length of the guarantee is a good bit of information to repeat in this section as well. You should use this section to lessen their fears about ordering. Potential buyers are full of doubts when they are trying to make that all-important decision. This is a universal experience, so you should take steps to make it easier for people. You must ensure that your landing pages are not going to cause any problems. Basically, there are numerous things that you should know about. There are plenty of these things that you may be knowledgeable about, but others will need for you to do a little research. 6346

Locate a Respected Locksmith professional

Locate a Respected Locksmith professional
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Tips and Tricks for New Gardeners

Tips and Tricks for New Gardeners
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Figuring out which gardening tips to follow can be quite a challenge. Sorting through all of the conflicting information that exists can be exhausting and time consuming. Remember, there is more to growing plants than dropping some seeds in some dirt and pouring some water over them. Gardening takes attention. It takes effort and time. Most gardeners eventually realize that, in spite of all of the hard work it takes to grow things, gardening can be very fulfilling. If you've always dreamed of having a garden, use these tips to help you get started! So, for get that you mus to use Oriental Trading for get more ideas..

The first step is to figure out what kind of plants you want to grow-do this before you begin planting seeds. Have you always wanted to grow roses? Do you want to have fresh herbs for your dinner every night? Learn about your chosen plants and flowers before you begin planting so that you can make sure you put your garden together the right way. Different flowers will require different methods of care. Mistakes like over watering can be easily avoided by learning everything you can about your choice of plants ahead of time. Other mistakes that can be avoided include putting the wrong nutrients into your soil In short: you can ensure your garden's success by doing some advance research. Bees are great! Even though you might not like having them around, bees are very important for the survival of gardens. They can spread the pollen from your plants around and help your garden thrive. Your plants need pollen to help them bloom. So, basically, you need to get used to seeing and dealing with bees. Making your garden friendly for bees is also a good idea. Planting tomatillos is a great way to attract bees and to keep them busy pollinating your garden. You want to plant at least one tomatillo plant for the bees to swarm in and around and then, if your family members are also fans of tomatillos plant some more in an another area of the garden for yourselves. You can complement this strategies with How to Use Oriental Trading Coupon Codes content.

Believe it or not, you do not always have to buy seeds for your garden. This is especially true if you want to grow fruits or vegetables. If you want to grow fruit or vegetables, all you need is one of those fruits or vegetables. Most fruits and vegetables contain seeds within them that you can plant to grow more of that same fruit or vegetable. This is a great way to fill a garden with your favorite foods and avoid a trip to the garden supply store.

Gardening is pretty easy to learn. With the right gardening tips you can have your garden thriving very soon! Everybody can learn to grow a garden-it just takes patience and time!

As you put in the time and effort your gardens will continue to grow bigger and more beautiful!

Developing Better Search A Key To Facebook’s Future

Developing Better Search A Key To Facebook’s Future
http://bit.ly/OfudmX

During last week’s Facebook earnings call COO Sheryl Sandberg argued that the company could and would compete for marketing dollars “throughout the entire marketing funnel.” That is, from branding and awareness at the “top” of the so-called funnel to “demand fulfillment” at the “bottom.”

Below is the quote in broader context:

We believe we are very well positioned to compete for advertising dollars throughout the entire marketing funnel, from the very top where companies focus on generating demand, to the bottom where the focus is on fulfilling demand. The majority of the advertising spend that is migrated online to date has been for demand fulfillment, which happens when a customer already has intent to purchase. Search advertising has been the primary driver of this migration. Facebook is also effective at the bottom of the funnel, with gaming being a primary example. But we believe that Facebook also helps marketers build brands and generate demand. This is important because the majority of the $ 600 billion global advertising market is spent on demand generation.

(Emphasis added.)

Right now Facebook doesn’t truly compete for ad dollars in the “demand fulfillment” category. As Sandberg implies this is where Google reigns. But Facebook doesn’t need to directly compete with Google in web search to participate in search revenue or bring the site more fully into the demand fulfillment arena. (Sandberg & Co may be thinking of novel alternatives to search but search is the most direct way in.)

A couple of weeks ago Director of Facebook Engineering Lars Rasmussen, a former Google employee, told the Sydney Morning Herald that it made no sense for Facebook to get into web search. I agree; the company probably wouldn’t compete effectively against Google and it would create problems for Facebook’s relationship with Microsoft.

However search on and within Facebook can continue to improve to the point where it becomes a valuable utility and search revenues start flowing. As Greg Finn pointed out recently, Facebook is already testing sponsored results in site search.

Last week on my personal blog I wrote about Facebook’s Massive, Still-Untapped Local Opportunity. One of the comments to that post was the following: “The problem FB faces is that none of us use it to find local businesses when we need one. So unless FB finds a way to change that, no SMB will ever derive any value from advertising with FB.”

Exactly. One way to change that is to make search within Facebook a real honest-to-goodness tool that people actually use to find things. Once that happens, you’ll see local businesses and brands respond with more content and with search-like ad campaigns. We would also likely see products and product catalogs showing up.

The combination of social signals (Likes) and other content could make Facebook search a compelling tool that people would start to use for all kinds of queries. But that’s all contingent on the degree to which Facebook invests in and develops its own search capability.

It’s not just about revenue. Better site search would make the overall Facebook experience much better. It would lend a kind of “coherence” to the site that’s currently lacking.

In a way it doesn’t matter if Facebook ever does anything with “web search” if it dramatically improves search on Facebook. It will achieve the same result: getting people to use the site when they have “intent to purchase.” Then, and only then, will Facebook truly be in the “demand fulfillment” business.

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Related Topics: Facebook | Features: Analysis



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Internal Linking Strategies for 2012 and Beyond

Internal Linking Strategies for 2012 and Beyond
http://bit.ly/NDCK78

Posted by dohertyjf

Last Friday, I did a Whiteboard Friday called "Smarter Internal Linking." If you have not yet watched it (I do show some graphs and stuff, so you'll probably need to watch and not just listen), I'd recommend doing so first before reading the rest of this post.

The goal of this post is to clear up a few misconceptions that I saw in the comments, and to show you exactly what I mean about sitewides that could be problematic both now and in the near future for over-optimization algorithms and filters.

Footer Links Are Not (Inherently) Bad

One question I saw a few times was about if we should use sitewide footers at all. My answer to this is "absolutely!" Footer links can be awesome for the user experience. Especially in the growing world of mobile surfing of the Internet, there is an increasing need for good navigation at the bottom of websites that allows users to navigate to a place on the site that makes sense, without necessitating scrolling back to the top of the page.

Footer links like SEOmoz's are fine, as they point people to the most important and useful pages on the website. People expect to see them there:

Zappos does this as well, though interestingly they do not have the same footer on the homepage as they do on their category pages (take a look at the homepage and this category to see the difference). They are not overloading you with anchor text and taking you to irrelevant pages from every page, though. Their main footer is large, yes, but contains useful links for the user.

And according to SearchMetrics, their SERP coverage is up and to the right -

The Problem is Scale

Footers like these become an issue when they are scaled out across a full website and also into microsites. This is a common practice for large sites, especially in the travel/hotels/tourism industries.

If this is a normal webpage -

This is an example of a homepage from a major hotels chain -

The architecture looks like this, which is a completely standard architecture -

But if you scale this out to a sitewide section, such as in the hotels site above, then every page becomes like a homepage linking with optimized anchor text. And often these links are irrelevant and don't add value to the user.

Here is an example of interlinking gone crazy -

Microsites/Franchises Can Be Dangerous

I recently came across a site that also has many third-party franchise sites. Each of these sites is built off a template (which is not necessarily an issue) and provides local content specific to the area where the franchise is located. Each of the sites, in my opinion, adds value to the user.

Here is an example layout of those sites, with the problem area (in my opinion) highlighted -

When you take this out to scale, the linking between the sites (and all of the links shown in the microsite example are sitewide) begins to look thus:

Think Taxonomy

The best way to steer clear of these over-linking issues that could and probably will get you into trouble, is to categorize your pages. Inside Distilled, we often talk about these categories as "page types", but basically we're talking about the different levels of the pages on your site. Some examples are:

  • Homepage (a category in and of itself);
  • Category pages;
  • Product pages;
  • Product detail pages;
  • PPC landing pages;
  • Blog posts.

One thought as to how to improve your internal linking, but in an algorithm-update-friendly way, is to interlink between the different levels in ways that make sense. The ultimate best answer would be to create an internal linking schema or algorithm that allows you to link to these pages automatically depending on how you best decide the pages fit.

You'll end up now with linking that looks thus, with all of the pages pointing in being pages in the same geographical category:

Parallel Internal Linking

As I said in the video, it doesn't make sense to link to all of your important category pages from every other category page, as this is bad from a user perspective. If someone is looking for a Washington DC hotel, they're not interested in seeing London hotels probably. If someone is looking for London hotels, they are probably not interested in Orlando hotels, but they might be interested in Paris or Munich hotels.

Now we need to figure out how to segment. To categorize this specific site, I'd use  the following taxonomy:

  • Continent;
  • Country;
  • City;
  • State (if US and applicable);
  • Category or hotel

Then, pattern match the continents, then countries, then cities. If we do this, then your London hotels page could like this way, with links in the sidebar to Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, etc and not links to Orlando and Atlanta -

ccTLD Internal Linking

A tip that I gave in the video is to link between your relevant pages on your ccTLDs (.co.uk, .fr, etc) to the relevant page on the other TLDs. Using this methodology, we end up with the following structure and linking patterns instead of the craziness seen above:

How Do I Test This?

As with any blog post you read, you should take the advice with a grain or two of salt. I don't care who writes it, you need to do your own testing and competitor research to find out what is working and then how you can stay competitive while also not putting your website in danger.

Do Your Competitor Research

I found the principles talked about here by doing a deep dive into how competitors are getting their rankings (this is one factor of many). I found how they are linking and compared that against their traffic to see how it is trending.

You need to do the same. I recommend starting off with your most competitive term and reverse-engineering their strategies, looking specifically at external links, internal links, and content. You might find that you are being beaten because they have superior useful content. Or maybe you'll find that their internal linking is better, and you can learn from their strategies.

Work With Your UX Team or Developer

Now, depending on the size of your company, you might have a dedicated UX team. If you're working on the scale that I am talking about here, you need to have a UX team, even. Get them to help you categorize your pages and levels, and then work with them to create mockups using a tool like Balsamiq (the tool I used for the illustrations here).

Start off NoFollowing Links instead of Removing

Some people in the comments on the Whiteboard Friday recommended starting to test this by nofollowing your excessive internal linking instead of removing links. I think this is a good place to start, on a small sample of your pages, so that you can test the potential gains or losses experienced through these strategies.

Ultimately though, if these strategies work for you, then you will want to create new page layouts so that your categorization can help you effectively interlink. Slapping a no-follow on these links is only a band-aid, as we are also concerned about conversions and not just rankings.


I hope this helps to clarify some of the points I was making in the video. If you have more questions (and I hope you do now), please leave them in the comments!


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