Diagnosing Issues

A Path to Improvement

Daily # of Visitors for Example.com (000’s)

For this social networking

company, this much traffic came from

search

Houston… do we have a problem?

Where’s superbowl.com?

Would you click this link?

Is this what your website looks like to the 100M smart phone users?

(if you’re vans.com, then yes!)

Identify Problems

• Sudden traffic drops

• Not getting traffic where you expect

• Content in SERPs does not look appealing

• Customers have bad click-through experience

Step 1: Get the data

Step 2: Find the Cause

Crawling

Ranking

Index

Query Parsing

Dynamic Ranking

However…

Many Advanced Diagnostics

• Site Moves– Redirects– New domain issues– Content changes

• Dynamic URLs– URL rewriting– Managing parameters– Moving session information to cookies– State management

• Duplicate Content– URL canonicalization– Exact vs. approximate dups– Dynamic content

• Other issues– Geographic location

Diagnostic Checklists and Resources

• Search Accessibility Checklist• Search Discoverability Checklist• Diagnostic Tools

janeandrobot.com

Off Page Assessment

Example: Global Scholar

site: search– 148 pages indexed– 57 are from /blog

college tutoring and homework help

Global Scholar

Google 107 6

Yahoo 62 26

Live Search 64 3

On-Page Assessment

• Links not accessible with Javascript off• URLs don’t change for new pages• Title tag has no keywords• Many images have no ALT tags• Home page canonicalization problems• No H1 tags

<select name="ctl00$Content$ctlSearchDropdownBox$ctlSearchDropdownSubject$cboSearchFacet" id="ctl00_Content_ctlSearchDropdownBox_ctlSearchDropdownSubject_cboSearchFacet” style="width:180px;">

Questions

Site Reviews

Where to next?

http://janeandrobot.com http://ninebyblue.com

http://webmaster.live.com http://google.com/webmaster http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

http://SearchDeveloperDay.com