Post of the Week
Kevin Indig - Internal Link Building on Steroids (Tech SEO Boost )
I really found this deck fascinating from Kevin Indig. He has developed a True Internal Pagerank (TIPR) model, which combines internal and external pagerank. He explains how to build your own model, and some recent optimisation successes he's had using it.
Tech
How To Use Scroll Depth Tracking, Adjusted Bounce Rate, and Average Time On Page As A Proxy For User Engagement and Content Quality
Glenn Gabe covers three methods for measuring user engagement and quality; scroll depth tracking, adjusted bounce rate and average time on page.
Technical SEO in the wild: Real-world issues and fixes
Barry Adams describes some real-world tech issues he's came up against and proposes some ideas to troubleshoot and fix them. This a great technical post, which will hopefully provide you with some scenarios that haven't cropped up before.
Here's what happened when I followed Googlebot for 3 months
Here's what happened when I followed Googlebot for 3 month...they decided to unfollow Search Engine Land (Sorry...Not Sorry).
Anyyywaaays, this is another smashing post from their blog by Max Cyrek, who has recently ran a 3 month long experiment to understand what Googlebot can and cannot see, what kind of links it visits and its impact on SEO.
Hiring
What to do before and after your biggest client leaves?
An insightful post by Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive recommending 10 things to do before and after your biggest client leaves. Sadly, there aren't enough posts like this which describe the realities of running, or even being part of an agency. It's refreshing to hear Wil be so transparent about their challenges, and using his experiences to help out other folk in the industry!
Well..I had a bloody fabulous time at the UK Search Awards on Thursday. Although we lost out to some great campaigns and people, the organisation of the event was impeccable, and I had such a laugh!
Enough about me. There's a lot of great links this week from some usual suspects. The post by Glenn Gabe on proxy metrics for user engagement and content quality, is super important I think. We often hear 'build quality content' branded about, but it's subjective bullshit without understanding intent, and building a framework to measure it.
As a basic example, if we have a mortgage calculator and a guide about getting your first mortgage, content quality will have to be defined individually, and thus measured in different ways. For the guide, scroll depth tracking could be a good way to measure how users engage with the content, and an indicative metric of value. For the mortgage calculator, understanding whether visitors fully use the calculator, or take action after using the calculator may be more important.
If your definition of content quality is the same for everything, which I often see, ie. 'we need to add more words onto the page' - you'll end up with a 500 word intro for a mortgage calculator nobody can see above-the-fold.
Ramble, ramble. Show me the links...
Andrew Charlton