Specifically what Matt Cutts said about domain clustering was [emphasis mine]:

We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from some people about that if I go down three pages deep I’ll see a cluster of several results all from one domain. We’ve actually made things better that you’re less likely to see that on the first page and more likely to see that on the following pages. And we’re looking at a change which might deploy which would basically say that once you’ve seen a cluster of results from one site then you’d be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google search results.

 

And that has been good feedback that people have been sending us. We continue to refine host clustering and host crowding and all those sorts of the things. But we’ll continue to listen to feedback and see what we can do even better.

Thanks to Ross for transcribing the video.

There appears to be changes in the number of results from a single root domain shown for a particular query. It doesn’t seem to be showing up consistently in all countries though.

Site Search Edge Case

You’ll most easily notice this when you perform a site: search against a domain. It’ll limit the results to 3 pages and show between 28 and 30 results before it gives you the omitted results statement. The consistent part is 3 pages, but the exact numbers vary in the high 20′s.

For example, here is a site:amazon.com search.

This “omitted results” prompt usually shows when you dig deep enough that the indexed URLs start to become duplicate, near duplicate, or relatively low value. However, now it appears to be truncating at 3 pagination pages, regardless of the site’s authority or information architecture. It doesn’t appear on sites with < 30 pages, but seems to show on anything from 30+ to something the size of Amazon.com.

This is a new change that appears to be tied to anti-clustering of domains. It also applies to domains with heavy subdomain usage, like tumblr.com.

The filtering appears to be controlled by the omit results filter parameter “filter=” with a setting of 1 or 0.

For example, the URL to repeat the site: search without the omitted results is:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:amazon.com&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS504US504&biw=1248&bih=731&filter=0

Domain Filtering in SERPS

The site: search appears to be an edge case of what’s occurring. I tested heavy brand queries that would have few other domains to show outside of the primary brand’s domain.

A search for “seomoz mozscape update” shows 29 results from SEOmoz.org and stops after page 3. This pattern persists across a number of domains.

Example searches:

• imdb actors inurl:imdb.com
• pinterest quote inurl:pinterest
• iacquire mike king inurl:iacquire.com
• seomoz rand fishkin inurl:seomoz.org
• bigfishgames walkthrough inurl:bigfishgames.com

However, the filter= parameter disables the anti-crowding effect, and not just when prompted at the end of search pagination.

It disables it broadly, as the filter is active on all searches by default.

For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=seomoz+mozscape+update

will limit results from seomoz.org at page 3, showing other domains beyond that.

Here is the top of page 4 with domain filtering active (no added parameter).

However, using the filter parameter will show seomoz.org past page 3.

https://www.google.com/search?q=seomoz+mozscape+update&filter=0

(You’ll notice the addition of &filter=0 at the end, disabling the omit feature, which appears to control the anti-clustering)

Here is the top of page 4 with domain filtering disabled.

Actually, it shows all SEOmoz.org results until page 6, and even then, most of page 6 is the SEOmoz.org domain. Even on page 20, I’m seeing mostly SEOmoz.org results.

This appears to be applied more broadly as well. However, there appears to be two different parts to the anti-clustering. The first applies to page one results. Even with the filter is disabled, there is still a decent degree of diversity, depending on how broad the term is and if there are other relevant domains for the term. However, once you click past page one, the diversity appears to fall off. This is where the second, newer, filter is playing a role.

An example of this is “seomoz whiteboard friday” where SEOmoz.org holds 8 of the 10 results on page one and none of page two with the filter active. Once the filter has be deactivated by setting the parameter to zero, SEOmoz.org holds the first 19 positions.

Ways Google May Handle Domain Clustering

My guess is that Google is solving domain clustering by:

1. Promoting a diversity of domains, especially on page one and two.
2. Leveraging site links to minimize real estate of one domain. The filter parameter appears to affect sitelinks as well.
3. Adding this new filter that more explicitly minimizes content from domains already seen.
4. Creating a type of hard limit at pagination 3 that will not show any more from a domain past that page.

This new hard limit makes sense for usability. If a user has already seen the top 10 to 30 most relevant URLs from a particular domain, there is a good chance that domain doesn’t have their answer, especially if they take the step to click to page 4 and beyond. The one edge case where the logic seems flawed is the site: search. In that case, the user is explicitly searching for content from a specific domain.

Some of the primary channels outside of the app store for driving app installs:

• Ad Networks
• App Discovery Platforms
• Traditional Search
• Social Media
• Cross Selling
• Incentivized Ad Networks

Many publishers use tactics like email lists and social to maintain and nurture a growing base of mobile consumers. These are highly effective at pushing audiences around to new apps, but many businesses still heavily rely on ad networks, incentives, and cross sells to acquire new users. Others may rely on PR, review sites or a hopeful featuring. If everything aligns, you may be able to get into top listings, driving organic awareness and driving down cost per install.

And while some app developers have looked into organic discovery through ASO, many are ignoring classic SEO to capture demand that exists in Google. This leaves a lot of opportunity, because users acquired from search are typically highly targeted, carrying some of the highest monetization ratings. The cost model for acquiring from search is also effective, driving down the cost per install over time.

The Disconnect in App Discovery

Outside of ad networks, a lot of app discovery is still dependent on navigation inside of the app store ecosystem.

Source: Standing Out in the Sea of Apps Mozinar

Less than 20 percent of discovery is being generated from search/referrals outside of the app store. In a world where search can drive 30% to 70% of traffic to sites on the web, I suspect this is due to a disconnect (and from my experience, it’s proven itself to be). Search is responsible for 20% not because it only holds 20% of the demand, but because it’s under invested in as a channel (similar to the PPC vs. SEO demand disconnect).

This is better represented by comparing the relative value vs. volume of different channels.

When it comes to user quality, search outperforms all paid channels and outperforms social in most cases. However, it’s responsible for a tiny portion of installs by volume (4%). I find it concerning that social platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, however large they are, drive 5.5 times more installs than search.

Is ASO Losing Its Effectiveness?

Over the last year, companies have seen value in implementing basic ASO. This is because, like the early days of SEO, few competitive apps were taking the time to research and optimize for keyword search. However, the landscape is changing  What happens when all major apps in a niche implement ASO? The competitive advantage is lost as keywords become more contested.

When this differentiation by optimization becomes a level playing field, rankings fall back on usage and download metrics. The question will then become: how do we drive more installs outside of the app store? For many, this means increasing spend on ad networks.

This situation is approaching.

Source: Have you changed your app title yet? by MobileDevHQ

The number of apps using some form of ASO has increased 3X in 2.5 months. The competitive advantage of keywords in titles is going away in some markets as it becomes a requirement to compete.

This can be seen in its reduction in effectiveness.

Over time, the search mechanics for app discovery will become more sophisticated  It’s likely that app search will not stay verticalized. General search engines, like Google, may move into this space more. They already have an application search that is effective. They could more easily implement factors like reviews, sentiment, link analysis, content analysis and authority. In the case of the iOS App Store, they lack factors like downloads, on-going usage, uninstalls, in app purchases, and revenue. However, as the app market place grows, the need for more sophisticated discovery and search will grow. If search in app stores becomes more sophisticated, then ASO will become ever evolving like SEO.

Capturing the Demand from Web Search

Huge opportunities for mobile apps still exist in SEO. I wrote a post a few months ago about a simple tactic that lead to a seven figure increase in revenue. It looked like this.

This came from driving organic search traffic to mobile apps after discovering areas of opportunity both us and our competitors were ignoring.

The tactic was simple:

1. Find a keyword with intent for mobile apps
2. Build a landing page
3. Acquire inbound links to increase ranking

Where is the Opportunity?

In short, a lot of places. However, there are some apps genres that are more profitable than others. My experience is in games.

Source: Apple vs. Android: How Have They Compared in 2013? by MobileDevHQ

When doing keyword research some of this opportunity is easily missed. Keep in mind that tools like Google’s Keyword Tool provide estimated values as a 12 month average. This hides areas of opportunity in markets that are rapidly growing.

In the graph above, the red line shows the average value of the graph in blue. The current value of that graph, for example, is 5 times larger than the average.

This is important to note when mobile app markets look like this.

And this.

Many of these verticals are relatively uncontested.

In both of these examples, there is an opportunity for an app developer’s website to rank in the top three results. I’m giving specific examples that include mobile terms, but these type of opportunities exist on broader terms as well.

These are the types of opportunities that have 6 and 7 figure annual revenues behind them.

Over time, I expect mobile app search will become more complex as we better understand the relationship between the different ecosystems. At the same time, improved conversion tracking, through tools like HasOffer, will help us better understand traffic – even though mobile conversion tracking has a way to go before it works effectively for web SEO. However, even without complete clarity, there is a lot of opportunity for mobile app developers to leverage inbound marketing strategies to drive awareness, installs, and ultimately more revenue.

This post has been in the making for years. This isn’t a recent itch that’s crept up on me. If I’m honest, it started the day I sat in my uncle’s office creating a Cool Boarders 2 cheat code website on Angelfire when I was about 11 years old. Ever since then, I’ve had a passion for building stuff. My family nurtured this. I was effectively groomed to be an entrepreneur one day.

Building something of my own has always been the goal. And I ready to go after it.

I didn’t think it was going to happen this year, and it almost didn’t. After returning from London, I was approached about a job that would move me to London. I absolutely loved London. I spent days emotionally struggling with the idea of uprooting my life and starting over, once again.

It didn’t work out. That’s a good thing though. The event helped set the emotional groundwork to help me do something that scares me. Starting my own business.

What Next?

I don’t have anything to announce yet, but it should be coming soon.

I am accepting clients. Feel free to get in touch here. I’d love to talk to you. Or you can just email me at justin [at] justinbriggs [dot] org. I’m looking forward to doing client work again.

I’ll also be writing, and hopefully presenting, more than I have in the last year and a half. I love writing, so I’m looking forward to having more to share.

However, sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that there is value in the same SEO we’ve been doing for years. I’ve had a reminder like this recently that I’d like to share (well, within reason… I can’t share all the details).

Here is the broad match traffic from one keyword phrase (includes filter).

That represents a million dollars lift in revenue for a product line.

How was it done?

Step #1 – Find keywords sending traffic, but there isn’t a dedicated landing page. Pick a single keyword from that list that has strong (and broad) traffic and a product line behind it.
Step #2 – Make a single page, target it, slap the products on it.
Step #3 – Build internal links to it by adding links on content you can control.
Step #4 – After some red tape, get page linked to on a valuable internal page you don’t control.
Step #5 – Redesign / relaunch page for better CRO.
Step #6 – Acquire links from 20 domains.

Some days I really love SEO.

Tactically plugging holes may not be as sexy, but it can be valuable.

Demands for Content are Growing

This progression creates a problem for SEOs. There is a skill gap that exists across a lot of individuals. I think this is linked to the identity crisis we’re going through as an industry. What are we good at? What is our role? What exactly do “SEOs” do in the ever expanding umbrella of “Inbound Marketing”? And why do we keep doing guest blog posts when we know better?

I think this is tied to two issues.

1. Doing better has a high cost of entry (budget, time, resources, and skill).
2. We often don’t know how to create the stuff we’re recommending.

SEOs can create guest posts in isolation and with little budget. Therefore, this kind of tactic becomes prevalent.

Creating the kind of content we all strive for requires copywriters,  photographers, creative directors, graphic designers, videographers, statisticians, marketer researchers, back-end programmers or front-end programers. Creating great content these days requires at least 2 or 3 of these skills to create the content in isolation. Otherwise, content needs to leverage external resources or other team members. This means scope creep, increased costs, and increased time to implement.

This skill gap is dangerous, because we run the risk of becoming glorified project managers.

Many of us can’t execute what we’re recommending.

So in my presentation at SearchFest, I played on the phrase “Technical SEO” to talk about how we should be talking more about being technical in our execution of SEO outside of “Technical SEO”. “Technical SEO” is a subset of SEO with its roots in on-site SEO. As an industry, we learned the skills of front-end code and server configuration. This made sense when on-site SEO played a larger role in the success of organic search. However, the world has changed and continues to change. These days, we should be equally concerned about learning the skills required to execute the style of content we’re recommending. This could include a wide range of skills, but I’d like to speak about the technical side of these skills.

Low Effort, High Impact

A content strategy can be differentiated by tactically being able to create high impact content with relatively low effort (time and cost). One way to do this is to leverage technical skills, libraries, and frameworks to mitigate a significant portion of the heavy lifting.

A low effort, high impact piece of content is something that:

1. Has an awesome affect on performance.
2. Has a minimal chance of being devalued in future updates.
3. Can be created by a single person.
4. Creates differentiated content.

This can be achieved via technical leverage.

Technical skills are like any tool, in that they can multiple the output of a given unit of effort. The awesomeness of content can be lifted significantly by the application of relatively simple technical tools. For example, both OKTrends and Trulia Trends are given credit for having exceptional content. Both of these sites go after interesting topics, with great writers, but more than that, they’ve managed to differentiate themselves through the use of relatively simple pieces of JavaScript and visualization libraries.

This content can be intimidating for beginner or immediate programmers, but my hope with the rest of this post is to help significantly lower the barrier to entry for creating technical content. My hope is to empower (and encourage) people with a number of tools they can use to step out of the habit of content like static infographics and guest posts.

Most importantly, you don’t have to be good at coding to be successful at this.

The Interactive Infographic Challenge

To hold myself accountable to the same challenge, I set a goal to sit down on a Sunday and in one day build an interactive infographic from scratch, all by myself, using tools I wasn’t familiar with. I could not leverage our engineers or designers.

I wanted to know what I could learn to build, not just what I could project manage.

The goal was not to create the best piece of content, but to build a proof of concept. I gave myself a hard time restraint to build it.

In four hours, I created this interactive infographic.

(Click image to see full graphic)

(Click image to see full graphic)

The graphic, although simplistic, is a demonstration of quickly putting together an interactive infographic based on D3 (data-driven documents) graphs. It leverages Bootstrap.js, Google Web Fonts, and Interactive D3 graphs using NVD3.

Bootstrap.js

The framework of the infographic was built using Bootstrap.js. The power of Bootstrap.js is that it does a ton of heavy lifting for you. If you’re not great at JavaScript or CSS, you can leverage Bootstrap.js to quickly implement a wide range of features.

For example, it includes: tooltips, buttons, collapes, typeaheads, dropdowns, tabs, progress bars, nav bars, tables, and much more. These features can all help differentiate a piece of content.

One of the more valuable features is its grid based scaffolding system. Think of a page broken up into 12 columns, like an Excel sheet. Each of these columns is a span of one. If you want a two column design, you only have to define a span of 4 and a span of 8. You can find a wide range of examples in their documentation.

For example, here is the code for a two column design.

<div class="row">
  <div class="span4">...</div>
  <div class="span8">...</div>
</div>

Creating a landing page, content piece, or microsite is exceptionally easy when leveraging a framework like Bootstrap.js.

Creating the framework for the interactive infographic was simple. Getting started only required a few lines of code.

You’ll see the following code in the page’s source.

<link href="assets/css/bootstrap.css" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="assets/css/drinking.css" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="assets/css/bootstrap-responsive.css" rel="stylesheet">

<body>
   <div class="container-narrow">
     <div class="jumbotron">
       <h1>Online Gaming &amp; Drinking</h1>
       <p class="lead">How many people enjoy having a few beers or some wine, perhaps even a cocktail, while gaming?</p>
     </div>
     <hr>
     <div class="row-fluid">
       <div class="span12">
         <div class="chart-area">

On lines 1 to 3, you’ll see 3 stylesheets linked in the head of the document. Lines 1 and 3 give you access to Bootstrap.js’ functionality, while the drinking.css file includes my additional customizations. Bootstrap.js wasn’t fully leveraged here, but I wanted to introduce it as the features could be used to easily implement more complicated layouts.

I hope to do follow pieces where I explore the features more broadly.

The rest of the framework included a few simple lines of CSS code.

body {
    padding-top: 20px;
    padding-bottom: 40px;
    background-color:#F9F2E7;
  }  

/* Custom container */
  .container-narrow {
    margin: 0 auto;
    max-width: 700px;
  }
  .container-narrow > hr {
    margin: 30px 0;
  }

  /* Top Header */

  .jumbotron {
    margin: 60px 0;
    text-align: center;
  }
  .jumbotron h1 {
    font-size: 60px;
    line-height: 1;
    color:#8FBE00;
  }

  /* Graph Area */

  .chart-area {
    margin: 30px 0;
    text-align: center;
  }

And with that, we had a basic framework with a number of CSS tools to leverage.

Google Web Fonts & Colors

The next step is getting the design in place.

A quick hack for non-designers:

About 90% of design can come down to typography and a good color scheme (and maybe a few good images). If you can nail typography selection and pick a good color scheme, you can fake your way through “good design”.

To find a good color scheme, check out sites like COLOURlovers. You can look through user submitted color palettes, which come with “loves”, comments, and views. These metrics allow you quickly sort through submissions. You don’t even need an eye for color, let these crowdsourced metrics be your guide.

For my graphic, I picked fresh cut day for my colors.

Because I can’t design, I decided to keep it minimalistic and to rely heavily on fonts and colors to handle my “design”.

If you need help with a font, there are a large number of them available via services like Google Web Fonts and Typekit.

If you need help selecting fonts, there are posts available where bloggers with design skills much better than mine do font pairings. I took their recommendation and used Lobster and Cabin.

The technical implementation of these fonts is simple as well.

To get access to these fonts, you only need to link the stylesheets in your header.

Once this has been done, the font becomes accessible for you to use in your CSS.

h1 {
    font-family: 'Lobster', Georgia, Times, serif;
    font-size: 70px;
    line-height: 100px;
}
p {
    font-family: 'Cabin', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
    font-size: 15px;
    line-height: 25px;
}

That’s all it took to complete the design work.

I now have a framework, a nice color scheme, and two paired fonts to use for the content’s text.

Data-Driven Documents (D3)

<link href="assets/nvd-src/nv.d3.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<script src="assets/lib/d3.v2.js"></script>
<script src="assets/js/nv.d3.js"></script>
<script src="assets/nvd-src/models/legend.js"></script>
<script src="assets/nvd-src/models/pie.js"></script>
<script src="assets/nvd-src/models/pieChart.js"></script>
<script src="assets/nvd-src/utils.js"></script>
<script src="assets/nvd-src/models/multiBarHorizontal.js"></script>
<script src="assets/nvd-src/models/multiBarHorizontalChart.js"></script>

<div class="pie"><svg id="drinkmen"></svg></div>

$(document).ready(function(){
  var drinkmendata = [
      {
          key: "Yes",
          y: 61.56
      },
      {
          key: "No",
          y: 38.44
      }
  ];

  var drinkwomendata = [
      {
          key: "Yes",
          y: 40.86
      },
      {
          key: "No",
          y: 59.14
      }
  ];

var chart;

nv.addGraph(function() {
      
var width = 700,
          height = 250;
      
      var colorgroup = d3.scale.ordinal()
          .domain(d3.range(2))
          .range(["#40C0CB", "#AEE239"]);

chart = nv.models.pieChart()
        .x(function(d) {
          return d.key }
          )
        .y(function(d) {
          return d.y }
          )
        .margin({
          top: 0, right: 0, bottom: 0, left: 0}
               )
        .values(function(d) {
          return d }
               )
        .color(colorgroup.range())
        .showLegend(false)
        .width(width)
        .height(height);

 d3.select("#drinkmen")
        .datum([drinkmendata])
        .transition().duration(1200)
        .attr('width', width)
        .attr('height', height)
        .call(chart);
      
      chart.dispatch.on('stateChange', function(e) {
        nv.log('New State:', JSON.stringify(e));
      }
                       );
      
      return chart;
      
    }

#2 CraftMap

What makes this graphic so creative is the source code. Here is the HTML and text used to create this content piece.

<p class="dingbats">qMpRRRRRRFwMJpFJpeMsrFttMppprFpppypMFuBBB</p>

That’s the whole infographic.

What appears to be random characthers are converted to symbols / icons using the Dingbat font and are positioned on a per character basis using Lettering.js.

#6 JavaScript slider for interactive graphs

OKTrends is complimented for the interesting and data intensive posts that they use to publish. In addition to sharing amazing insights, they created content that was unique in its interactivity. I thought it would be useful to package up some of this functionality. In their post about the biggest lies told in online dating, they used a clever interactive slider that changed graph data based on age.

A quick peak into the source code shows that this is a very simple image swap script. I pulled out all the pieces needed to replicate this, which you can see in action here. (Move the slider above to the right and left to change the graph)

This script works by taking a folder of images named 18 to 54 and changing the file’s name when you move the slider. The slider handle and scale are simple images offset by a z-index. And it has a preload to prevent lag/flicker when swapping images. It’s a really simple system to replicate.

Here is the full source:

<html>
  <head>
    <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.1.0/prototype.js" type="text/javascript">
    </script>
    <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/scriptaculous/1.8.3/slider.js" type="text/javascript">
    </script>
    <style>
      /*
      
      The code used for graph sliders on OKTrends.
      
      Example:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/

      <3 OKTrends
      
      
      */
      .track {
        background-color: #fff;
        position: relative;
        height: 0.5em;
        cursor: pointer;
        z-index: 0;
        width: 474px;
        margin-top: 2px;
      }
      .handle {
        background-color: none;
        background-image: url('http://akcdn.okccdn.com/blog/older_lover/slider_pointer.png');
        position: absolute;
        height: 19px;
        width: 15px;
        cursor: move;
        z-index: 2;
      }
      .label {
        text-align:left;
        font-size: 13px;
        
        font-family: calibri, verdana;
        color: #4e4a35;
      }
      img.no_display {
        display:none;
      }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="slider_container" style="margin-bottom:40px;">
      
      <img id="map" src="http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/lies/income_slides2/18.png" style="margin-top: 10px;">
      
      <div id="track1" class="track" style="margin-left:10px;">
        <div id="handle1" class="handle">
        </div>
      </div>
      
      <div class="label" style="margin-left:10px;">
        <img src="http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/lies/scaleD.png" >
      </div>
      
	</div>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      
      var mySlider;
      var ext = ".png";
      var root_dir = "http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/lies/income_slides2/";
      var num_images = 54;
      
      window.onload = function() {
        mySlider = new Control.Slider('handle1' , 'track1',
                                      {
                                        range: $R(18,num_images),
                                        sliderValue: 1,
                                        onSlide: function(v){
                                          var img_name;
                                          var dir_name;
                                          
                                          
                                          // map slider value to img names
                                          img_name = v;
                                          img_name = Math.floor(img_name);
                                          
                                          
                                          $('map').src= root_dir + img_name + ext;
                                        }
                                        
                                      }
                                     );
        
        mySlider.setValue(18);
      }
        
        
        
        
    </script>
    
    <script>
      
      function preLoadImages() {
        
        var str;
        
        for (var i = 17; i < num_images; i++) {
          
          var img_index = i + 1;
          
          str = "<img src='" + root_dir + img_index + ext + "' class='no_display'/>";
          
          
          
          document.write(str);
        }
        
        
      }
      
      preLoadImages();
      
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

#7 jQuery Gender Toggles

One creative use of jQuery on OKTrends is the use of gender icons to toggle and compare data for male and females. Comparing data, graphs, and tag clouds between two different sets of entities is a simple content type. Male and female comparisons are easy examples, but this could include years, brands or even people. OKTrends used this type of toggle to compare tag clouds of interests in their post about the real stuff white people like.

Replicating this is simple. Try it out here.

The code is simple as well.

<html>
<head>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
  $(window).load(function(){
    $('#toggle > span').click(function() {
      var ix = $(this).index();
      
      $('#left').toggle( ix === 0 );
      $('#right').toggle( ix === 1 );
      
    }
                             );
  }
                );
</script>
<style>
/*
Code to replicate gender toggle on OKTrends

Example:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/

<3 OKTrends
*/
#right { display:none; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="left">Male Content</div>
<div id="right">Female Content</div>

<p>Use icons below to toggle between men and women.</p>
<p id="toggle">
<span><img src="img/male.png"></span>
<span><img src="img/female.png"></span>
</p>
</body>
</html>

More to Being a Technical SEO than Technical SEO

As the demands of SEO grow, there is value in rethinking what we mean by “Technical SEO”. Being successful in a world of complex, and often interactive, content means closing the skill gap and pushing ourselves rapidly out of our comfort zones.

[And I'd like to say thanks to SearchFest for having me out and for the room full of individuals kind enough to listen to what I had to say. SearchFest this year was one of the most enjoyable events in my career, not really for the content (although that was great), but because of the amazing people (and supporting community) down in Portland.]

My hope is to do something a little bit different. I’ve written philosophically about how to get links, but let’s talk about some real links, and how they were acquired.

The last few months have included a lot of calls to action for the industry, like Tom Critchlow asking us to stop sharing other industries’ content as examples of what we should do. We have a bad reputation in this industry, but seek inspiration by pointing to other’s content. And more recently, the amazing Jonathan Coleman asked us all to do a bit better. And while I do agree that this industry should be striving to present more strategy, I think we could do more to increase the transparency on the tactics we’re already using. I feel like growing into broader strategy, without first coming to terms with our tactics, may leave audiences less equipped to execute them. I think this is why strategy presentations can leave a bit to be desired, because often they’re idealistic mashups of work done by other industries.

Let’s do a bit better. Let’s out ourselves a bit.

Before I start, I get to work with a great group of guys on our inbound marketing team, who should all get some credit. We work with a lot of teams across the company, but these are the guys that are in the trenches day to day. Together, we manage SEO, content, social media, and community management across 10 different languages.

Jump Into On-going Conversations & Make A Statement

After seeing these awesome sketches on Huffington Post, Conor and I felt this same message needed to be made in the gaming industry. Around the same time, Anita Sarkeesian setup up a Kickstarter about Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.

The internet assholes came out in full force and harassed Anita, really putting the role of women in gaming under a microscope. At Big Fish, we work hard to make games for women without ‘girling it up’, so I felt this was a great topic to address.

Girls play core games, but unfortunately they’re often sexualized or used as prizes.

Well, f’ that.

We reached out to the artist of the sketches and hired her to design female fashion designs that were inspired by highly masculine video game characters. We didn’t want to “girl it up”. We didn’t want it to be a series of cosplay outfits. We wanted to personify the badass nature of characters like Bowser, Duke Nukem, and Master Chief.

As two men working on this project, we didn’t want to build this thing in a bubble. Our artist was a female geek, but it needed more input. We went to the experts. We went to GeekGirlCon.

This year my team sponsored GeekGirlCon. We were a sponsor their first year, but this year the sponsorship nearly slipped through the cracks because the owner of the project transferred teams internally. I made the case for my team taking over the project. We decided to show ROI on the event our way, by connecting it to content.

After we drafted our first colored sketches of the designs, I asked the president of GGC out for lunch. At the end of the lunch, I pulled out some folded up sketches from my pocket to show her what I was working on.

I got her feedback on the concept and the drawings, which I took right back to my team. She shared the idea with the GGC team and they formally backed our content piece and helped us promote it.

Their support and feedback was instrumental, but I think we ended up acquiring more links for GeekGirlCon than our own site (not a bad thing, because our goal was to support the cause). They were kind enough to publish it on GGC.com (Link #1, DA 58) and shared it with their audience on social. The whole project ended up receiving links from over 100 different domains, and I’ll cover some of the others in this post.

Sponsor & Support An Event

Sponsorships are a common in the SEO space. Typically, the practice is to use advance search queries to find sites that accept sponsorships and spend a bit of money for a link. Of course this works, but try to step up your game. Support causes like Child’s Play, which seeks to improve the lives of children in hospitals through video games (Link 2, DA 80). Or old school video game events, like Mario Marathon (Link 3, DA 56), a fan run fundraiser that donates directly to Child’s Play Charity. As someone who has a Hylian Crest tattoo on my forearm, I can stand behind sponsorships like that.

Then step it up even more.

My team sponsored GeekGirlCon, which of course meant we got a sponsorship link (Link #4, DA 58), but let’s do some #RCS also. Not only did we support the event monetarily and with a content/outreach strategy, but we also wanted to step up the expectation for booth space at the event. As SEOs, we had no idea what we were doing, making for some really stressful days, but our team culture is JFDI, and do it well.

Not bad for a couple of SEOs. The relationships we built with geeks, influencers, social media users, and editors here have been enormous. And the chance to directly engage with your customers, both adults and kids, is invaluable.

I spy @justinrbriggs at the @bigfishgames booth at @geekgirlcon – so good with kids! #ggc12

— Jonathon Colman (@jcolman) August 11, 2012

Why settle for dropping links on sponsorship pages when you can build brand engagement like this?

#RCS

Create Making of Videos

If you’re building something, creating something, or releasing a new product, there is someone out there who wants to hear how. Posts like the one you’re reading right now exist because people are interested in the who, what, and how of creating something. Expose this content.

That’s exactly what we did with the launch of one of our mobile games. While reviewing a series of assets we created, I recommended that we leverage a making of video and pairing it with an interview. We would use this to do outreach to a top tier gaming website. The result? This article on IGN about the golfer vs. gopher conflict (Link 5, DA 94).

Create April Fools Content

Creating cotent around holidays is a fairly typical tactic, and every major holiday you’re sure to see a flood of holiday theme infographics (I’m guilty of this as well). One holiday that’s a lot of fun to brainstorm is April Fools Day. This year before April Fools, the mobile game Draw Something was huge, and after a few brainstorming meetings lead by Ryan O, our marketing team ended up creating Mime Something – “The latest game senstation no one is talking about!”

The thing that really set this apart was the polish of the Mime Something design.

It was all tied together with some clever copy.

Can’t draw your way out of a wet cardboard box? Neither can we. With Mime Something, anyone can play – no artistic skill required!

No undo button? No problem! Just get up off the floor and try to nail The Lean again. Your friends will love watching you throw out your back!

Ready to take your miming to the next level? Snazz up your routine with fabulous accessories from the Prop Shop.

Stop giving life the finger! Let your body do the talking and download Mime Something today.

“The game is so good it left me speechless” – E. Decroux

It was full of fun easter eggs, including pictures and names of employees around the company. Projects like this are fun, because they’re great for building internal exposure inside of a larger organization. It gets people excited about content creation. We picked up some coverage from USA Today (Link 6, DA 98), GeekWire (Link 7, DA 83) and Venture Beat (Link 8, DA 92).

Bring In People With Influence or Credibility

Bringing influencers or those with credibility into a project is a great way to create additional coverage. Mark Johnstone talked at SearchLove and showed an infographic I created about zombies (Link 9, DA 99) where I pulled in a neuroscientist at Berkley to provide the concept behind the science of the zombie brain. The creation of this piece was very similar to some concepts discussed by Ross Hudgens in his presentation Link Building by Imitation, which talks about stealing complex context and simplifying it for consumption. This is what I did when I came across the amazing answer to this thread on Quora about ways to survive the Zombie Apocalypse.

This same idea was applied to our Geek Chic piece. When we created the Geek Chic fashion designs, we knew we had a hit on our hands, because the artist already had a highly engaged audience. Her original Avengers designs went hot on Tumblr, making its way to Huffington Post, organically. With a bit of polish and push from SEOs, we knew it could go further. The other benefit of bringing in influencers is that they can share with their audiences. She shared our piece on her Tumblr (Link 10, SD mR 3.76) as well, where it received 62 likes and reblogs. I stopped keeping track, but some variation of the design was posted on Tumblr blogs hundreds of times.

Just Ask an Editor

There is a lot of conversation about building relationships, not links, which isn’t bad advice, but it can paint the picture that cold outreach to an editor or blogger doesn’t work. If your content is good, and your outreach is authentic and passionate, you don’t need a pre-existing relationship to get coverage  I shared my thoughts on this in my post on content-based outreach for link building, and even provided an in-depth answer in the comments on how to find editors you don’t know and target them, even if it’s a cold outreach.

This approach can help smaller companies beat out the larger PR contact lists that larger competitors might have. This was the theme of my Effective Link Building presentation I gave last year.

Sometimes, if you want a link, all you have to do is email them a link to your content (Link 11, DA 87).

Track Usage of Your Graphics

Tracking footprints and image embeds for URLs that haven’t linked to you is a great way to claim easy link opportunities. A little over a year ago, I wrote about using the Scraper Chrome extension to quickly prospect link opprotunities, and followed up in my 18 link building tools post on how you can use it, along with Screaming Frog, to automate the process evaluating coverage that doesn’t include links.

That’s exactly the type of process used to get this link on Fling Girl LA (Link 12, DA 30). They wrote up a great interview with the staff at GeekGirlCon and decided to use one of our fashion designs in the image for the post.

We were excited to have our work showcased, so we just reached out and asked if they could attribute the image.

There have been a lot of great posts that have been written on this topic, including Adam Melson’s post on Link Opportunities Using Just Your Logo, Jason Stinnett’s post on how to use Google’s Search by Image for Link Building, or Geoff Kenyon’s detailed guide to finding sites that don’t link.

Quirky Job Ad

Sometimes a link is as simple as a fun job ad. Just like products like Canned Unicorn Meat and the Dream Man Arm Pillow are great content, as well as products, a clever job ad can get picked up. As part of a project, Conor put up an ad for our team to hire a Paranormal Investigator.

Big Fish is seeking a talented Paranormal Investigator to work with our Studios team and help them understand the mysteries of the spirit realm. Paranormal Investigator works within a team that provides a scientific investigation into paranormal phenomena. Successful applicants will train our Studios Team in paranormal investigation techniques and use of equipment along with discussion in emerging theories of paranormal research.

Skills, experience and educational requirements:

• 2+ years of ghost hunting or related research experience
• Ability to operate EMF detectors, ION detectors, Geiger counters, IR cameras, Tri-Field meters, Gaussmasters and other ghost detection devices effectively
• Proficient working with Mediums/Demonologists/Spiritual Leaders.

The ad was picked up on sites like Escapist Magazine (Link 13, DA 85) and Doubtful News (Link 14, DA 47).

Start a Scholarship

At Big Fish, we release a new game every day, sometimes releasing more than one, meaning we release over 370+ games every year for the PC. Many of these games get ported to iPhone / iPad, Android, and Mac, and many more are localized into 9 other languages. The way to keep this kind of content velocity is to partner with a large number of great game developers.

So when my team presented the idea of creating a scholarship to target college students interested in game development, who would become future developers, the idea was loved. That’s not to say it was quick to implement. We went through legal, finance, PR, and executive approval. We worked through operational items likes rules, processes, and the team that would evaluate the applications.

We weren’t sure how well it would do, so we didn’t invest significantly in the polish of the design, but next year we hope to expand the program.

The problem with scholarships in SEO is that people spam them to death to chase .edu links, with little thought about the relevance or value it brings your company. Don’t do this. We specifically included many departments, and pushed it up to the senior management level, to make the buy-in more holistic. The good news is that university departments are becoming more savvy as a result of being spammed with requests, increasing the barrier to entry for scholarship programs. We placed a BBB badge on the page to improve our placement rates.

A few links came from sending out a company wide email about our new scholarship. We have a number of employees who are alumni or have relationships with various universities. A few people forwarded our email along.

A bit of outreach muscle can really help get the word out, but the links can come in naturally. The scholarship has been picked up on high school and college websites, like Princeton, UTM (Link 15 DA 85), Clemson (Link 16, DA 87), and EDCC (Link 17 DA 68). Over 110 schools have linked to our scholarship and we’re on pace to receive hundreds of applicants by the deadline date.

Share With Those With Clout

Part of my process for launching an outreach campaign starts with an early, pre-launch, brainstorm of personas, sites, and verticals. This is to identify who we’ll be outreaching to, the story we’ll be telling, and how we’ll do it. We get together as a team and start by throwing personas and stories on a board (which we later refine).

Conor brainstorming outreach personas

We strive to find more unique approaches to launching content and some verticals require a bit of clout. In this case, one approach is to reach out  to individuals in a niche. We did this when we reached out to staff at GGC, but you can also reach out to subject matter experts who can help spread your message. Other’s sharing your story can often be more powerful than your own outreach emails, and can lead to additional coverage (Link 17, DA 70).

Create Content Around Engaging Topics

When we created the Geek Chic artwork, we did it to make a statement about the role of women in video games. We jumped into another engaging topic when we published an environmental inforgraphic (put together by an agency). Although we felt we were just sharing interesting facts and data, it sparked a number of debates about our intent and the nature of digital downloads vs. purchased games.

It kicked off a conversation on Reddit. The coverage on Kotaku was viewed 14,600 times, received 132 comments. Although neither of these linked back, they kicked off great, highly engaged, conversations. The topic was very divisive.

This divisive topic lead to a broad range of coverage, like a post on sustainablog (Link 18, DA 73), Living Green Mag (Link 19, DA 51), Inside Games JP (Link 21, DA 71),  and 4Players.de (Link 22, DA 73).

We saw a lot of international coverage on the graphic, so I a did an interview with a print French gaming magazine to talk more about my views on videos games and the environment – allowing us to leverage online content for international PR.

Make Online Content Tangible

As part of our content strategy around GeekGirlCon, we printed off posters to give away to people who visited our booth, as well as bloggers and editors.

While at GGC, I was able to meet the amazing Jill at The Mary Sue in person and give her a physical poster of our art work. We hung out and talked for a while, and we now follow each other on Twitter. She covered it on The Mary Sue (Link 23, DA 82), which was the perfect audience for the content, and it was picked up on Mashable (Link 24, DA 97) as a result.

Build Processes Into PR

Outside of projects directly managed by my team, we work closely with other teams internally, such as PR, to assist, education, and build processes to improve link acquisition. The natural coverage you receive as a result of creating great products and getting press around it, is one of the most scalable ways to acquire a diverse set of links from high domain authority sites. However, a few missteps can cost you a lot of links.

We had such a problem when we announced the launch of a new game streaming app without a dedicated landing page. The problem is that coverage on the story had no place on our domain to reference when writing about it. Most coverage cited the Bloomberg article, which had the most authoritative information on the app. This wasn’t a big concern, until Apple removed the app from the App Store a few days after its launch.

The story took off, getting coverage all over the internet.

In the week that followed, I found over 200 unique domains that wrote about the story. 87% of those domains linked to the Bloomberg article and not to BigFishGames.com. A hard lesson, but it also provided a lot of ammunition to change processes, allowing the SEO team to be included in all announcements and product launches moving forward. We’ve created processes that require all major announcements to require a land page, or blog post, to cite. Since then, our PR team has transformed into a link acquisition machine.

When we launch products like Unlimited, we’re able to pick up links from sites like gigagamers (Link 25, DA 40), Massively (Link 26, DA 94), and TechCrunch (Link 27, DA 97). Many news/launch stories don’t have to be individually pitched, outside some of the early stories, but if PR isn’t working with our team to ensure that a linkable URL is created and placed in releases and pitches, link opportunities can be lost.

Like the app removal opportunity,  you can’t always predict news that will follow your news. After the announcement of our service, Gaikai, a streaming game service, was bought out by Sony for $380 million. This kicked off a whole new set of stories about cloud gaming, but this time our team had recommended creating a sneak peek blog post that could be cited around the story of our launch, and we picked up a handful of links we might have lost otherwise. Not only that, but we followed up answering customer’s questions in comments, releasing additional information not found elsewhere, picking up a few additional stories.

It’s important to note that Big Fish has provided some clarity by way of SEO Coordinator Conor Murphy on the issue of their current download service’s future. After our initial report, many of you were concerned at the potential that there would no longer be a choice to use Big Fish Games as you normally had. At the time, we had phrased the news as Big Fish’s “move” to the cloud, and apologize if that caused any confusion.

- Gamezebo (Link 28, DA 72)

Conor extended this policy by revising the game release process on games to allow “pre-launch” pages to be created for games that are being marketed before launch. This process allows the product’s page to be created by our platform before the product is available. We can place promotional material at this URL, so that links built before the game’s launch are pointing at the URL where the game will ultimately live. So when Games.com exclusively published one of our game trailer (Link 30, DA 89), we were able to get a direct link to the game’s soon to be product page.

Custom Asset & Interview

One of my favorite tactics, that I mention as often as I can, is leveraging custom assets and interviews. This is especially powerful for seeding content campaigns, because you can get top tier sites to cover your story, kicking off a flood of traffic and social shares to capitalize on. By reaching out to a site before launch, you are able to offer an editor the ability to scoop the story. You can time your launch to publish together. In addition, you’re providing access to content that nobody else can get their hands on. This early access, paired with a series of unique assets, is a good way to work with an editor.

When we published our Geek Chic piece, I worked with the artist and the president of GeekGirlCon and connected them with an editor. They both provided exclusive interviews about the project, which really helped build a story and authority around the campaign. This two part interview was paired with a custom set of assets. The content being published was a large one piece asset, but we took the original high-res art pieces and created 12 individual images sized to fit the layout of their site. This all came together as this great article on Wired (Link 31, DA 99).

(I’m going to sneak in a quick trick here. When you get published on a top tier site, keep an eye on how their recommendation and popularity mechanisms work. Are they based off views? Engagements? Comments? Understanding how these systems work can increase the shelf life of a piece of content on their site by keeping it visable longer. For example, if the homepage of a site is automated to a degree by content’s popularity, you can use StumbleUpon ads to drive high volumes of traffic at the URL keeping it placed high on the homepage, increasing the exposure from that site’s audience.)

This interview + asset tactic is one of my favorites, because in the last 5 years, I’ve had 100% success with it. I was even using it back in 2009 when I was working on the launch of the new Backyard Burgers website. We picked up a story on devot:ee (Link 32, DA 61) by putting together an interview with a developer on the project and another story on BurgerBusiness (Link 33, DA 45) by putting together an interview with their marketing manager.

Keeping It In The Family

Let’s follow Jonathon Colman’s advice, and commit, but let’s keep it in the family. Let’s not just share content created by ad agencies and talk about how it’s what we should be doing.

I’ve been presenting for about 4 years now (a little over 2 years professionally in SEO). It’s horrifying, but I love it.

It’s not the audience that stresses me. It’s the content.

I think every person who has an opportunity to speak should let the anxiety run deep (you can always tell the presenters who don’t).

I’m privileged to have the opportunity to have the undivided attention of hundreds of people for the better part of an hour. People are there to listen, to learn, to be motivated and to be entertained. Forget the fact that the people paid nearly a thousand dollars to attend, or that they may be spending thousands more to travel and put themselves up at a hotel for days. Of course they want you to deliver, but more importantly, you have a platform to deliver.

An opportunity to cherish. I didn’t always have this opportunity.

Check out these images from my Facebook that I uploaded in 2009.

Fanboy pic of Rand (sorry to be a creeper). Playing cards with Kate Morris of Distilled. Matt Cutts killing me in a game of Werewolf by convincing people I’m a blackhat. Meeting Aaron Wall and shaking his hand. Listening to Todd Friesen and Vanessa Fox. I had lunch with Rae Hoffman. I saw my first link building presentation, which was Wil Reynolds. I believe he talked about monitoring Twitter to give away ACs to people who complained about their office being hot. And in Vegas, I saw Todd Malicoat speak on his steps for launching linkbait. Those two presentations were huge influences on me.

I remember sitting awkwardly at networking events and in session rooms, nobody really all that interested in talking to me. Jen Lopez at SEOmoz, and a few other people, knew me from Twitter. (By the way, Jen is one hell of a community manager. I still remember her saying hi to me.) When I uploaded these images to Facebook (I was such an excited geek), I had no idea I’d know personally, or have at least met, all of the people in the photos in a year.

I remember these people and presentations every time I present.

There is something amazing about being able to personally connect with a collective room, but even more important, is the chance to influence change in people’s lives, the industry, and even the internet. Considering my audience is often filled by professionals who shape the face of content, social media, community, and technology on the internet – this time is enormously valuable.

It’s impossible for me to take this for granted.

The morning of any presentation, and again in London, I reflect on the tattoo that sits on my left forearm. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a Hylian Crest, from the video game Zelda. This symbol is tied to my roots, which I’ve written about before.

For a period of time as a kid, I lived in police protection, similar to a witness protection program. It’s a program for mothers and children from abusive households. I lived here, with other families, because my father may have ended up killing me, my sister and mom otherwise. Countless days of awkward dinners with strangers and no going outside. You disappear. The police won’t even take action when your extended family contacts them because you’ve gone missing. As an adult, I’ve driven past this home, knowing the secret protection it provides behind those covered windows. The day my family got out was on Christmas Eve. The following morning, I headed over to my neighbor’s house where I saw my friend playing a video game he got for Christmas. That game was Zelda: A Link to the Past, but he never let me play it. I spent the next several months talking about this game. Eventually, someone gave me the game as a gift. It was given to me by a police officer named Danny, who was the officer who arrested my father. I spent the next few months, an entire summer, escaped into the world of Hyrule. A pleasant, and fond, memory in an otherwise dark time. Memories of innocent happiness. A period I plan to never forget.

I made this impossible to forget. When I moved to Seattle and got a job at Distilled, I got a tattoo of the crest from Link’s shield on my left forearm, where I see it every morning. It’s there to remind me of where I’ve been and where I am now.

This is why I cannot sleep before I present. I don’t want to forget. I strive to never become complacent. Blog posts, presentations, slide decks, projects, and jobs conjure that bright eye kid who flew to Seattle with two suitcases two years ago. I might not be changing the world, but these were the skills I was given, and I’m going to pull myself, family, friends, and colleagues up with me.

So as I sit eating breakfast in London (seriously, London, wow), talking to Rand and Partrick, who lives in Japan (how cool), my tattoo reminds me that I was once a young boy from Springfield, TN, who grew tobacco with my grandpa as kid. Or that in 2009, I took my first plane flight as an adult to SMX in New York. These common interactions with people at conferences are always slightly emotional for me.

Remembering this has been a secret to my success.

It has literally taken me around the world.

When I think life is bad, it puts it in perspective. When I have drama at work, it makes me laugh at its insignificance. When I’m scared, it tells me not to be. When I want to sleep, it tells me to grab some coffee and keep at it for a few more hours.

So if I can share some advice from my life, it would be to keep treating everything like it’s your first. Remember the kid that set you down this path. Present like it’s your first time, every time. Create content with a purpose. Stay grounded. Cherish the breakfast with strangers in London. Keep stressing. Have sleepless nights. Once in a while, care so fucking much about something, that you can’t shut off. Keep your triggers close, so you never forget. This is my secret weapon.

And when you get lucky (and boy did I), give it back. Pour your life back into the system, so that others can pull themselves up as well.

You should be doing the same with your content.

By tackling metrics like COCA, ARPU and LTV, SEO can be used to monetize demand in a way that pure traffic chasing can’t.

Retargeting Basics

Retargeting is the practice of putting your message in front of lost prospects. It’s typically done through forms of paid advertising, such as display ads, which follow a user around the internet.

To demonstrate the power of retargeting, here are some stats that Joanna Lord shared in her retargeting presentation in 2011.

• “More that 95% of visitors who browse a retailer’s site do not complete a transaction in their visit.”
• “Retargeted consumers are nearly 70 percent more likely to complete a purchase as compared to non retargeted consumers.”
•  “Retargeted customers spend, on average 50% more than those served with non-retargeted banner ads.”

Retargeting With Content

The same philosophy can be applied to inbound marketing. Behaviors after a site visit can trigger demand, leading users back to search. Keyword demand exists at all stages of the consumer journey, at stages pre- and post-conversion. Using content to retarget customers can amplify the work you’re already doing. It shouldn’t replace your top of funnel tactics or the content you’re creating for links and social metrics. In combination with those strategies, it can decrease your CPAs and increase the ARPU / LTV of your organic search visitors.

The goal of content retargeting is to define a persona of someone who has done something that implies intent, then create content that will target the demand that action will generate.

Example of Retargeting With Content

At Big Fish, we leverage a content strategy that helps retarget customers, while also improving their gaming experience. We publish 7 to 10 games a week, most of which are available via a freemium model. Players can download games for free and try it for one hour. If a user likes the game, they can continue on, purchasing the full game. This generates a lot of prospective customers. Our most avid players may purchase many games each month or week.

This model generates two unique sticking points:

1. A player gets stuck or frustrated in a game during the first hour of play. As a result, they never purchase and experience the full game. If they’re a prospective customer, they’ll never become a first time customer. If they’re a current customer, they’ll have a bad experience and never purchase the game.
2. A player gets stuck or frustrated in a game after they have purchased the game. This is a more unfortunate experience, because you want everyone to enjoy the game play. This can turn someone away from gaming or prevent them from progressing through the game to get to their backlog of other games they’d like to play. The faster they can move through games, the more games they can consume and enjoy.

These two potential events generate a “retargeting” opportunity. A stuck gamer may head to Google and search something like “gargoyle eye in the abandoned garden” because they just can’t find the gargoyle’s eye in a hidden object game. This is an opportunity to get in front of them again with a piece of content.

Unfortunately, our “content” is locked in the form of an exe file.

We’ve approached this by writing end-to-end games walkthroughs. So far, we’ve written 583 walkthoughs, which accounts for over 200 days of straight gameplay. This makes up 3,500,000 words of content with annotated screenshots.

This is content that only targets searchers who have already started playing one of our games. It’s solely a bottom of the funnel strategy.

Recently, we’ve taken these walkthroughs and translated them into both German and French, accounting for about a million words of translated content and counting.

Secondary Effects of the Content

This content reaches farther than a search strategy. Customers use walkthroughs to make purchase decisions. Customers link to walkthroughs in our forums, where users discuss and help each other with gameplay. Walkthroughs also reduce customer support costs when customers contact us for game help. In instances where we don’t have walkthroughs, a CS rep may sit down and play through a game to find a solution.

Finding Opportunities for Bottom of Funnel Content

The best way to discover opportunities like this is to work closely with customers. My team manages social media and community management in addition to SEO, which helps a lot. This primarily consists of an active Facebook and forum community. Outside of product, the team we work more closely with is customer support. They do really awesome stuff like this.

Tips for Finding Content Ideas

1. Talk to your CS, social media, product marketing, and research teams. They’re going to know about content opportunities you’ll never consider. They talk to customers daily, understand what makes customers unhappy, know where sticking points exist, and understand why customers go away.
2. Ask your CS team if they have any internal wikis or on-boarding material. These are often full of information they’ve never considered crafting as consumable, and indexable, content. If people are calling in about it, they’re searching for it.
3. Understand how your customer uses your product and the sticking points. We do this through regular game beta testing, surveys, and in-person usability studies. Few things will change your perspective of search more than watching a customer use your product through a one-way mirror.
4. Look at your internal search logs. There are all kinds of gems hidden in there.
5. Look at searches in your KB / help articles. Looks for gaps in that content.
6. Regularly survey your customers. After I took over social, I turned my attention to the forums. We ran a survey with our users there and the feedback was invaluable. It provided us with a lot of insights we hadn’t considered and provided me with ammunition to help make a case for a range of product and content ideas.
7. Pretend everyone coming to your site is already buying and the acquisition problem is fully solved. Think about the type of content that will either keep them buying or enjoying your product more fully.

A Near Zero-Sum Market

Search is simultaneously a long-tail system, allowing for a near infinite number of possibilities, and a hit-based market due to limited shelf space created by searcher behavior. On a keyword specific level, the hit-based market shows as user behavior keeps most searchers from moving far beyond the first page of results.

In this search market, a near zero-sum game is produced in two ways. First, traffic is split across a number of results, creating a number of winners and losers all sharing a piece of the pie. Granted, it’s not a perfect zero-sum, as users can bounce and return to the results. Additionally, Google creates a near zero-sum game by selecting a limited number of URLs for a particular domain. Again, this isn’t perfect, as there are various search verticals, site-links, and domain crowding in some SERPs. However, the typical behavior of selecting only one or two URLs to show leads to the zero-sum problem that creates keyword cannibalization. If one URL wins, all of the other URLs competing for visibility lose.

In a simple model, only one URL from your site can receive traffic, while competing for attention against 6 to 9 other results. This problem exists for both paid and organic search, as only one URL is going to get the traffic (a generalization).

These mechanics set the stage for strategic conflicts for a company looking to do business online.

Revenue Maximization By Resolving Cannibalization

Let’s step back and look a common example.

If you’re a bookstore, you release multiple editions of books in a time gated manner that helps you maximize revenue. The earlier hardback edition of a book can be sold at a higher price to less price sensitive customers. For example, hardcore Harry Potter fans who will wait at midnight for early access to the last book in the series are less sensitive to price. There is a group who is more than willing to pay this cost so they don’t have to wait for the paperback release.

At the higher cost P1, there are Q1 potential customers. Roughly Q1 times P1, or the area under the curve, will give the revenue at this price point. This Q1 is also a proxy of the potential conversion rate at this price point.

However, look out to the right of the column to all that white space. That is unrealized revenue potential. There are a number of customers who are unwilling to buy the book at the original hardback price point.

By releasing the paperback, at a lower price point, we can realize a greater amount of revenue by expanding out to Q2. At the new P2 price point, there is a larger number of customers willing to buy the book. This green area is incremental revenue available simply through the process of time gating and changing the consumption model. The core product, the content of the book, didn’t change.

In the graph above, the red area is additional revenue gained that could have been lost if the book was released as a paperback, at the lower price point first.

This model can go even further if it’s expanded out to an even cheaper consumption model, such as an electronic edition, like the Kindle or NOOK. (Granted these devices have higher entry costs, but once in the market, they allow access to a relatively lower cost, lower friction option.) Another example is Netflix streaming in the movie industry, which time gates with movie theaters, followed by DVD releases, followed by online download and streaming options.

This new model continues to maximize revenue by extending further out, capturing more area under the curve. (Granted, there is more at play here, such at different profit margins, potential cannibalization of revenue, paradox of choice, and different consumer tastes, but I’m keeping it simple.)

Over time, the revenue for the product may look like this.

Each incremental gain in revenue is realized each time a new price point or consumption model is introduced.

However, the mechanics of the search market place, as I described above, has the ability to break this model and prevent revenue maximization.

Search Induced Opportunity Cost

The nature of both the URL selection by Google and the nature of searcher’s decision making introduces both choice and scarcity. As a result, opportunity costs exist in instances of keyword cannibalization. The selection of a URL by Google and searchers means another URL (and its corresponding product) will not be selected.

In the bookstore model, it looks like this. Only one product URL appears in search results.

This can generate a problem for competing products or divisions. The growth of one division, that may compete on keywords with another division, means making an opportunity cost decision between the two divisions at a macro strategy level.

In our demand example above, this can cause the following problem (simplified of course).

The opportunity cost means traffic is being driven to the URL with only one product, at one price point. This is affecting conversion rates and is minimizing the shelf space of other product lines.

Once a bookstore releases its paperback edition, it may not fully experience the improved conversion rate and revenue maximization because the traffic is still landing on the hardback URL, at the higher price point. This can also play out by traffic only landing on the paperback edition, preventing access to the additional hardback revenue highlighted in red above. Although this is less of a risk, as the hardback edition is typically time gated.

For example, at Amazon, the owners of Kindle division may need to compete with the owners of the traditional book business for traffic, because both divisions are targeting the same keywords. Opportunity cost decisions are having to be made on where to spend paid search budget and where to drive traffic internally. (Amazon has done a relative good job resolving this with upsells and cross promotions on product pages.)

This makes keyword cannibalization a much larger strategic question for a company doing business online. With only one URL capable of capturing traffic, the Kindle division may have to take a backseat to the traditional book business. In organizations with thin margins, cash flow issues, or a high degree of risk aversion, keyword cannibalization can lead to division struggles / failures when not properly resolved.

However, it also means some organizations with a better understanding of search can have a competitive advantage against organizations squandering away traffic.

Granted, search is not the only channel online.

Equity Dilution

This opportunity cost extends across teams making decisions about where to invest marketing resources, especially if they exist at multiple URLs. Putting on your ranking equity hat, the problem starts to look like this.

Ranking equity is split across multiple URLs. The hardback URL may have significant external equity as it received the bulk of the marketing push at launch. It’s a challenging decision for an SEO to shift marketing efforts to the paperback URL, as the hardback URL already has the bulk of the equity. An SEO looking to increase revenue, improve conversion rates, and lower CPAs now has to outrank themselves on the work they did before. Long-term the paperback version may sell more units and get featured more prominently across the site, giving it more internal ranking equity. When Google makes the choice on which URL to present, it may not canonical these products to one URL. As a result, the hardback URL may enter the search marketplace with its equity, dumping the value built up on the various other URLs.

The hardback URL is now competing with 3rd party sites at a lower ranking potential. The result is that problems are compounded. Not only is the product receiving less traffic than it could, but traffic is landing on a URL that is not the most effective URL for converting the traffic. As sales of the hardback edition reach the maximum number of sales possible at its price point, the results of marketing spend will diminish, increasing CPAs.

One way of resolving this is to canonical the equity to one URL.

By condensing the equity of this product into one URL, it increases its ability to rank and capture traffic, effectively shifting out the PPF curve and helping to minimize cannibalization created by having multiple options on one page. And as the sales of the hardback edition hit diminishing returns, the incoming traffic can continue to be monetized at the lower price point. This extends SEO traffic out along the demand curve, allowing a larger number of customers to purchase the product at variable price points.

How Businesses Are Solving For This

Walmart

Walmart hasn’t resolved this problem, but has a bit of a band-aid solution in place. A search for “harry potter deathly hallows book” leads you to the hardback version of the book. When you arrive to the page from search, or a recommendation engine, the page loads a “People Who View This Item Also View” box at the top, which often features additional versions of the product, such as the paperback. However, it doesn’t seem to load when the page is accessed directly. If this bit of pseudo cloaking wasn’t in place, traffic landing on this page would only have immediate visibility to the higher $19.21 price point, instead of the $9.69 price point. This creates two problems. The first is that the paperback edition is receiving limited shelf space in search, affecting potential revenue maximization. The second is that the book’s equity, including links, reviews, content, and social shares are diluted across two URLs. This reduces the site’s ability to rank against competition reducing the top of funnel traffic coming in.

Overstock

The Overstock result for the same Harry Potter keyword has a larger problem. The organic result goes to the $46.95 audiobook with no visibility to the paperback or hardback editions. I’m willing to guess there is conversion drop off and lost sales happening here, as the hardback and paperback editions are $19.03 and $10.09 respectively.

Gamestop

Gamestop has a partial solution. The problem described in this post exists in the game industry by way of various console versions. This can create an IA nightmare when attempting to prioritize the right game. Gamestop resolves some of this problem by creating collection pages, such as this one for Assassin’s Creed III. This creates a “canonical” URL, which is used in internal links and features various platform versions. However, the problem still exisits, because when you search for “Assassin’s Creed III game” the PS3 version ranks #10. You can tell by comparing it to one of the Xbox versions that ranking equity, such as social metrics, are diluted across multiple URLs.

Gamespot

Gamespot’s team should be applauded for their solution. A solution that leaves them performing relatively well in search. The same search for “Assassin’s Creed III game” leads to a canonical Assassin’s Creed III URL . This is the definitive URL for the game and is platform agnostic. A number of tabs across the top drill into platform specific views of the game, such as the Xbox URL. However, a SEO will quickly notice this URL’s social share buttons have the exact same number of social shares as the canonical, platform agnostic URL. The platform specific URLs canonical using both the rel canonical tag and by having a canonical URL to share with social buttons across all versions of the game. They even define a canonical shortened URL in the Open Graph URL tag. This helps consolidate ranking equity into one URL.

Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble team has a strategy similar to Gamespot’s. If you arrive to their product page, such as this one for Catching Fire, it is typically the hardback edition’s URL. However, this is a unified page that can swap calls to actions and pricing using parameters. For example, the canonical URL has a CTA and price for the hardback, with an upsell for the NOOK version. However, by passing a parameter to the URL, the hardback CTA falls off leaving a primary call to action for the NOOK version. However, the number of reviews and the social shares on the page are the same. This is because this parameter URL for the NOOK, audio, and paperback editions all canonical to the primary URL. They do this with the Open Graph URL, the rel canonical, canonical content, and through canonical social share buttons. Like Gamespot, they’re consolidating ranking equity into one URL.

Solving Beyond SEO

Although the examples above can be presented as technical SEO challenges only, they can play larger strategic roles in business and marketing planning. Companies like Barnes & Noble can use their established footprint in book title search results to grow their NOOK business. They can do this without creating differentiated pages, minimizing marketing spend opportunity costs. Or companies like Netflix were able to use their imperfect solution of a singular movie page on their movie subdomain, which can drive traffic to both their DVD and streaming businesses. A differentiated DVD and streaming page could have cannibalized each other for the same keyword. Some companies struggle, such as Best Buy, who don’t have a solid solution. They seem to link to and spend ad money against search result pages, allowing other domains to gain substantial traction in search against them, despite their 92 domain authority and 40,000 linking domains.

The examples above can continue to maximize the area under the demand curve by using intelligent systems that learn consumer behavior and apply it to one canonical URL. This can help selectively price the same source of traffic in a way that maximizes revenue. A customer with no historical data may be more prone to purchase at a lower price point, while a logged in user with a history of purchasing NOOK or Kindle books may be more likely to convert on that call to action. A user who has purchased every copy of Harry Potter may be more interested in purchasing the hardback edition than the paperback. A system like Barnes & Nobles’ can further CRO their traffic by swapping their product CTAs based on learned behavior, but keeping it at one canonical URL, so situations of keyword cannibalization and macro level opportunity costs don’t arise.

Nobody should be surprised by Cutts’ comment. The writing has been on the wall for a really long time. I wrote a post back in December called “Keep Your Infographics In Check”, to talk about why I felt this was on its way.

The Why vs. The How

One item we should be careful about is using Matt’s comments about “why” they want to devalue infographics to conclude “how” they plan to devalue them. I’ve seen a number of comments about how Google can’t fact check or gauge quality at scale, and even comments that boldly claim that infographics can’t get devalued at all.

Link spam analysis is a topic I’m very interested in, and have written at length about it. One thing about webspam analysis is that it’s not an exact science. They don’t have to get it “just right”. They just have to find a way to devalue with a degree of certainty, with a classifier that improves search quality just enough that they’re satisfied.

Panda and Pengiun are good examples of this. The why it was done, and the how it was done, were very different. Google cannot directly gauge content quality at scale, but they can find a lot of signals that serve as proxies, test them against a sample of quality rated examples, apply some machine learning and scale it out (Panda). All it takes is finding a set of signals that determines a measurable improvement in the direction they would like.

Always think of spam analysis in language such as “likely to”, “probability”, and “degree of certainty”. Panda did not have to completely remove content to be effective, it only had to find enough signals within a degree of certainty to shift content down a few positions down across a large set of longtail keywords to effectively drop a site’s visibility and increase searcher satisfaction.

Looking at What Cutts Did Say

“infographics can be created and that represent an OK form of promotion, but the challenge is that as soon as I say something like that, people are going to use this as justification to do whatever it’s they want to do.”

Google spam control is just as much a PR machine as it is a technical machine. Don’t read too much into Google not wanting to call infographics a good strategy. They have to avoid encouraging them. That doesn’t mean they think they’re all bad.

“infographics you create will do better if they’re closely related to your business”

We’re talking increased relevance scrutiny when crawlers discover an infographic embed pattern. We know they can do this (even if it’s not perfect). They can turn up the dial when they encounter infographic-like content.

“there is reason to believe that the link is more about the barter to get the infographic than a real endorsement of your site”

This could be a philosophical stance from Google on the relative value of links. Footer links mean less than content links, links closer to the top may count more, and site-wide sidebar may be indicative of paid links. Google doesn’t have to determine the intent behind every one of those subtypes, just prove statistically that when those types are devalued, search quality goes up. A footer link may be a great editorial link, but it’s just more effective to profile all footer links as lower value.

If Cutts is discussing it publicly, they’ve likely done some tests already to show that when these types of links are devalued, search quality goes up. Matt tweeted about the infographic plague back in December. I doubt they simply shelved the issue since then and are just now considering it.

The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.

This is the kicker. Take a look back in SEO history at issues like widgetbait. When Oatmeal’s site was dinked for widget embeds, this is the comment Matt Cutts left.

Replace the word widget with infographic.

I’d look out for this to be the type of behavior they really come after.

How Might They Devalue?

Portfolio Diversification

Not only can a profile be judged in aggregate by the percentage break down of your link profile, but the relative value of individual links, and new incoming links, can be gauged against both your current profile and distribution of new inbound links.

To demonstrate mass estimation:

(The example is an exaggeration to a degree.)

Above are two sites with very different link portfolios. Site One may be a lead generation site that is heavily propped up on infographic links, with very little brand equity, while Site Two is a more legitimate site with a more diverse portfolio.

An inbound link, from an infographic, to Site One may have its link value reduced based off the degree of backlinks that come from infographic sources already. This helps minimize the likelihood that a site is going to rank for a term not because it’s the best in the market, but because it’s the best at producing linkbait. That site’s skill is content production, not the value the rest of the site provides to users.

However, Site Two has a defensible profile. The distribution of link sources provides corroborative signals that it may include inherent value beyond its content generation. In that circumstance, search engines can feel more confident that the content of its infographics is more factually accurate than Site One.

It can be said that Site One’s content might be more factual, and even better, than Site Two’s. However, that doesn’t really matter. Site One doesn’t have the signals to backup its breath of expertise in the vertical.

I also believe, although I have no evidence, that links can be retroactively reevaluated. If Site One’s link profile increases trust / brand signals, the links Google was uncertain about at first look may go up in value.

For Site Two, an infographic devaluation is also trivial, while for Site One, it would be catastrophic. You always want to be in the position of Site Two, where no specific tactic devaluation can take out your business.

This type of devaluation is also similar to Truncated PageRank evaluation. If you calculate a domain’s authority without infographic links and divide that by the overall domain authority with infographic links, you get a ratio that’s indicative of that site’s dependency on a tactic. The closer that ratio is to zero, the less likely your site is to have used infographics as a manipulative link building tactic.

Commercial Anchor Devaluation

It’s safe to guess that Google is going to apply its exact match, commercial anchor text classifiers with heavier scrutiny on infographic footprints. We’ve seen this growing for several years, and more recently with Penguin. There are a number of papers from Google where that talk about evaluating a term’s commercial value and its likelihood to be spammed.

If you’re using infographics to sneak exact, and potentially phrase match, anchors of highly valuable keywords, I could see those devalued.

Irrelevant Embedded Links

The next big item they’re likely to devalue is when an infographic is being used deceptively. This was the concern with widgets back in 2008, and Matt Cutts language in his recent interview mirrors this concern.

A “Safe” Infographic

The infographic above is relatively “safe”. The degree of devaluation should be less significant. The infographic properly cites itself, linking back to its original source page. The ALT attribute used is the title of the infographic, which closely matches the content found on the other end of the link. The secondary link is a branded link, back to the homepage of the website that created it.

A “Risky” Infographic

The infographic above is inherently more risky. It’s pushed the degree of relevance, links to a page where the infographic cannot be found, using a commercial ALT text that matches the keyword targeting on the “money” page. Following that is a “Via” link that uses commercial anchor text to the homepage or another highly valuable page, which is also highly targeted for the keyword.

This pattern is pretty easy to match.

Degrees of Risk

It’s worth mentioning that there are degrees of risk and degrees of devaluation. The first example above might still be devalued based of Google’s philosophical stance that infographic links should count as lesser citations, in the same way they consider footer links to be lesser citations. The second example is going to be the type of thing they’ll want to devalue to a significant degree.

It’s also worth mentioning that infographics that 301 redirect the linked to URL after a period of time, reposting the infographic up at a new URL, could end up on the chopping block as well.

Infographic SpamRank & Co-Citation

This type of analysis is so simple, yet classic, and has the ability to be devastating to a lot of infographics. Search engines can build a list of infographic submission sites, which are effectively article content farms with infographics, and crawl out from that point.

Like this paper where Microsoft used forums to let web spammers expose themselves.

That list of sites you hammer away at every time you launch an infographic – Google can build that list too.

Once Google has identified a set of offending infographics, that have been rated negatively by quality raters, they can crawl out from that list and find common co-citations of places that post low quality infographics. These sources may have their ability to pass value to infographics reduced, and the infographics mentioned in these sources could have their ability to garner equity from other sources (even if trusted) minimized.

We’ve seen them do this with article directories and web directories.

So What Next?

It’s good to spend time thinking about how they might devalue infographics, instead of simply saying “they can’t” or “make good content”. Because A) I’m not going to bet against Google on a long enough time-frame (and I like to risk mitigate) and B) well, obviously.

With an idea of how they might do this in mind, we can start to think about how to adjust tactics to mitigate future and current risk, while helping to improve the future effectiveness of the tactic.

#1 Start to Diversify Now

If your profile is significantly comprised of infographic backlinks, I’d press pause and spend the next few months using every other tactic in the book that looks nothing like infographic links.

This should A) minimize the likelihood that your infographics will ever get devalued, B) keep your site from falling over if they do. A 10% dip hurts a lot less than 60%.

#2 Stop the Risky Execution

This is such obvious advice, I hate writing it. However, I know at least one person reading this has linked their infographic to a page the infographic isn’t on, or has 301 redirected their infographic, or launched an infographic on a non-commercial site with embed code going to a commercial site, or has stuffed exact match anchor text into the “Via” link.

All of those are pretty shady.

Sidenote: I’m not disapproving of particular tactics. I don’t have a stance. The people who know what they’re doing will keep on keeping on. No judgment. However, for the few who are just good enough to be dangerous, this could hurt you.

#3 Shift Your Relevance

Start being more critical about how well an infographic’s topic relates to the website. I’m guilty of this. I’ve gone after topics just because I knew I could get links, not because it was relevant.

If a site’s link portfolio is robust, trustworthy, and relevant enough, it can likely withstand a small number of off-topic content pieces that help increase domain diversity, but don’t get too carried away.

#4 Read This Post

I’m not going to spell it out, but read this post.

#5 Make Soup

Go watch this video from Kris Roadruck and listen to his analogy on making soup. It’s not about the perfect carrot, it’s the perfect combination. Don’t use infographics for your hardcore commercial anchors, use them for your domain diversity, brand equity, and social signals.

#6 Lead With Quality Citations First

Many link builders start their infographic campaigns by hammering that list of 25 to 100 sites they can submit to via forms, or pay a fee to get listed on. The very first sets of links start to follow a discernible pattern.

My advice for every infographic is to identify a list of high quality sites that you would like to get placed on. Then go read my post on Content-Based Outreach. Work through that list one by one, investing time, to get someone to agree to placement in ADVANCE of your publication. The very first set of signals will come from high quality sources. Also, if you work on these relationships in advance, and incentivize the coverage through items like customizations, time-gating, and interviews, you can negotiate link placement in a way that does not use a standard embed. They can write them in as editorial links.

Treat infographics like a PR consultant would, not an SEO.

#7 Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

• Print it as a poster and give away.
• Chunk it up into smaller consumable infographics to use in different ways.
• Chunk it up and write guest posts featuring parts of the infographic. A lot of blogs may have never seen it, so from their perspective, you’ve simply created great images as part of a more robust post.
• Use it as leverage in a guest post pitch, and include the link in the body copy of a guest post.
• Use it as the basis of building relationships for resource content. “We created this great infographic, but as a follow up we created this great resource piece of content.” – sneak in the infographic link as part of the resource pitch.
• Pair with other types of outreach, such as giveaways and contests.

The goal of all of this is maximizing the number of non-infographic-type links to the infographic.

#8 Avoid the Infographic Directories / Blogs (or grab them last)

Don’t depend on infographic sites for links. These types of sites care less about exclusivity or getting an infographic after it’s gone “hot”. Having an infographic start here can actually hinder the success of an infographic because more reputable sites don’t want to publish content that’s already been published many other places.

If Google does relative link valuation, you want Google to gauge these links as additional links to a piece of content that already has authoritative links pointing to it.

In addition, simply listing yourself here places you in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a great reputation. This is something a site with existing brand equity can withstand, but could be harmful to a less authoritative site.

Keep Doing Infographics

Infographics are great ways to create content that is easy to share and digest. They also carry a lot of value outside of embed links. Even with devaluation, they will never become valueless.

As a tactic, it may become less effective for those who use them in very particular ways, but for those who use them as a content strategy, social strategy, brand strategy, or domain diversity strategy, nothing really changes. Google’s philosophical stance may mean they have less value passed per link, but that doesn’t mean no value passed.

If the content is good, and your readers enjoy the content, then forget about Google.

The secondary benefits are more than worth it.