BC: How many are awake? Just checking. We're not really sure that everybody is awake. And mostly, just so you know, that half of the room we can't see. Because there's a spotlight behind you so well, kind of vaguely people-ish. All right. We've done this session a number of times. And every time, it's a unique session because we never have any idea what kind of questions are going to come up.

The intent of the session. No, it's true. The intent of the session is really to answer questions. The entire process is controlled by you. And whatever questions you ask are the kind of questions we're going to take. What we ask is that if you have a question that is very specific to your site, that's the kind of thing you rush to the stage after the presentations.

We don't really have presentations because it's Q&A. Everybody has your review cards, right? Because there are no presentations, you're obligated to circle tens. Questions? Just do it now. Get it out of the way. It works great. Because, you know, the presentations are great. The three of us have been friends almost forever.

Like, twenty years, probably. And all of us have our own backgrounds and different kinds of careers. But we've all been in the field. As I said, 20 years, we're going to introduce ourselves, and then we're pretty much open for questions. You start.

SS: Okay. Hi everybody, I'm Stephan Spencer. I'm the co-author of this beast of a book. Thanks for the water.

DF: Thank you.  

SS: Look at that. Is this intimidating, or what?

DF: It's mostly pictures—lots of room for coloring.

SS: You do not. Get a free book now. Who wants a book? Like, who really wants a book? Like, enough to, like, come and get it? Like, don't all rush the stage at once. There's a secret. Yeah, there you go. You're welcome. Yes, it is going to make you overweight with your luggage. But more importantly,

DF: Stephan doesn't have to take it home.

SS: In fact, who else? Now, who wants one? I actually have a bunch. So, in the end, I'll give them out. I have 25. And I also have this one, which is really easy to carry. Google Power Search. This one's all about how to find anything on Google. So, The Art of SEO is really the Bible of SEO, but wouldn't you all want to use Google more efficiently?

Find stuff like Forrester Research Reports for free, which are normally thousands of dollars. Confidential business plans. All sorts of stuff. It's all at your fingertips if you know the right Google searches. That's what that book was about. And the other book, also an O'Reilly book that I, unfortunately, didn't think to bring with me, is Social E-commerce, and that's all social media related for driving online sales.

And Zach there contributed something to that. Yeah, it's a good book. So anyway, I'm an author. But I'm also an SEO expert. I have been in this game since the 90s. And let's see, I founded NetConcepts in 1995 and then sold that in 2010. And I've been doing solo consulting for the last seven years after selling that agency. And I love SEO. It's a passion of mine. That's a bit about me.  

BC: Okay, I'm Bruce Clay. I've been doing SEO since January of 96. For those of you who don't remember, that is when Al Gore invented the internet. Right? It is three years older than Google. That goes way back; I've been operating an agency more than a sole consultancy.

I have offices on four continents, and we're bigger than a breadbox. But our expertise is top three. We focus on ranking. Clients are big and small. We do SEO, PPC, and social media content. We have a comprehensive training course, which is up to four and a half days on SEO. It's a classroom course, and we have tools.

And really, what we're starting to do is we're offering Q and A opportunities, just like this is an ask me anything. We sell small blocks of 10 hours over six months, and you can ask any question at any time. If you want to test things before you release it, you want to just get a sanity check.

You want to ask a tough question. That's us. We can answer those kinds of things as part of that program. We're in pretty good shape there. If you have questions, certainly feel free to ask.

DF: All right. My name is Duane Forrester. Bruce failed to note this, but Bruce is also an author. So there you go.

BC: I have three books

DF: And I am an author. Unfortunately, I lag behind my comrades here because I've only published two books, not multiple books. Let's see, I worked at Caesars Palace for a while in marketing, then I got into sports betting online from there, wrote a book Microsoft called, and ran the SEO program at MSN for about four or five years, I think.

Then I flipped over to the search engine side and worked a lot with the engineers inside the engine; I built, launched, and ran webmaster tools for Bing. I don't know what else. I worked with you for a while. Now, I work for a tech company based here in New York, although I'm on the West Coast. It's a company called Yext, and there is its location and data management information, that's about it.  

BC: Okay, any questions? Let me ask you a question. How many of you are using WordPress? A bunch of you. Okay.  

DF: So that's good to know. 70% to 80% of the room. That's good.  

BC: By the way, Google announced that 72% of all new websites in the last two years were WordPress. So yeah, WordPress is going to be there. We can talk about that. How many people have perhaps a question about HTTPS? Does anybody care about secured? Just a couple.

SS: Nobody cares about security.

BC: Yeah, secured doesn't count. Alright, who wants to go first? Somebody has a question.  

DF: And you guys do know that you came to a session called Ask Me Anything, right? So we have expectations of you.  

I was wondering how I can speed up my website. It's very slow.  

DF: More gasoline. More gasoline, more flame.

SS: So, HTTP/2. PHP 7, that's the latest version of PHP.

Are those embedded in WordPress?

SS: No, they're not embedded in WordPress. They're at the server level. You'd have to talk to your web host about making sure that you're running the latest version of PHP. And then HTTP/2, there's a great article by Patrick Stox about HTTP/2. It's on either Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land. So, check out that article for more details on HTTP/2.

Do you have any suggestions of people that we could hire out to do that? Any recommendations?

SS: Yeah, the guys who made W3 Total Cache and W3 Edge, you can hire them to server tune your WordPress site. You give them root-level access, and then they'll do all sorts of magic. It's not cheap. And they'll only do it for WordPress servers, not for any other CMS.

BC: But aside from the server, you still have the things that are within your own website. Image sizes, in particular. One of the biggest problems people have is that they're actually hosted in the wrong environment. They're in a shared hosting environment with a thousand other people. Domains on the same server. You can move your server and your domain to a different server.

DF: It sometimes is the theme that you're on. Because a lot of times, the designers of the themes do not understand the implications. Sometimes they just don't care. And you'll take it in because it's a super easy way to get the look and feel you want. But you know, the code is not loading in the right order, and it is not caching things where it should be.

And I know from my time at the engine, and Google has stated this, like, you know, using conditional get and caching things really helps. It makes a difference. The other thing I'm going to say is that I love Stephan's idea here about hiring these guys and doing the server tuning. And for the life of me, maybe one of you guys will remember my own hostname is EscapingMe, but I used to have a dedicated server at GoDaddy; I had that for about a decade because I wanted to control everything.

And then I finally just said no. I don't need to pay that much every month, so I moved over to another host. Now, the name of the host is EscapesMe, for some reason, but it's the company that Third Door Media uses. Third Door Media is the company that runs Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, these guys.

The reason I mention these guys is that they have an $11-a-month program for hosting WordPress. You pay $11 per domain, and it's all right there. They do all of that mechanical stuff in the background. They are focused on high performance and speed as a natural scenario.

SS: Is that WP Engine?

DF: No. I guarantee you that it will hit me like a brick when we wrap up this session. And, like, I'll fall over in the hallway. If you see me lying on the floor out there, you'll know the answer came to me. But look for hosting providers that focus on these kinds of things.

And, you know, again, you can pay them to help out with those things or a lot of these hosting providers; I think WP Engine will focus on this as well; they just do it as a natural byproduct.

Yeah. And you can mess that up by picking a bad theme. You know, you do have to pay attention to those things.

BC: I want to make sure everybody understands that speed is important because it is a component of the algorithm. As you get into more mobile environments, it becomes more and more of a component. For every second, at least according to stats, that you add to your page load time, you lose 10% of your traffic stick, they bounce, they go away, that money. Speed matters a lot.

SS: Yeah, what Bruce is saying is that this is important for conversion. Which we all care about, not just SEO. I mean, that's important too. If you get paid traffic primarily, you do not want a website that is slow-loading. You're just throwing money down the tube.

DF: Yep. I mean, Google is on record. Bing is on record. Speed matters. Right? And they have separate mobile indexes. The expectation in mobile is vastly different because they have to contend with all of the normal stuff like the network that you're on and the traffic in the room, and your website needs to be blazingly fast. And the company name is Tiger Technologies. That's the name of the host. Yeah, Tiger Technologies.

BC: Now I'm going to duck that brick.

DF: Yeah, exactly. It's floating around somewhere.

To add to that question, we're a publisher. We have ad-heavy pages. With video right now being such a big thing and mobile, obviously 80% of our traffic, that impacts latency on the page as well. So, any advice on how to, I guess, from a code perspective, plug them in and fix it?

DF: So there's no easy solution to this, right? And you've got competing. I had this at MSN, right? It's like ad revenue, time on site, engagement. And then I'm fighting the SEO battle over here, and there's no easy answer. It is an unholy alliance to get to the best possible scenario.

There are compression technologies you can use. Do you guys use, like, an embedded kind of proprietary video server, or do you just plug-in YouTube or something like that?

No, we're actually using Brightcove right now.

DF: Okay. So take a look around at all of the products because some of them are much better than others. For the love of Mike, do not turn on autoplay, just throwing that out there, right?

As a general consumer of the internet who hates that, you do get a little bit of latitude because the engines understand when you're a publisher, and you're in a vertical, they understand what the norm for the vertical is, right?

You might get a pass because you're slower than, say, my personal website, which is ad-free. But the problem with that is you're compared against your peers. And that does nothing. It may help you slightly with the algorithm, but it does nothing to protect you from consumer engagement. And that's another part of the algorithm we can just as easily drag you down.

And so, you know, you still have to fight the battle, essentially. I'd be looking at, you know, okay, test these things in real life and find out which one has given us the best time, performance, and cost. You may find out that the middle-priced object is actually the better value for you because it loads so much faster than your rankings will come up, and everything else, you know, you drive more revenue, and it's worth it at that point.

SS: Yeah. Use a couple of tools to check that and make sure that the speed is really zoom in. GT Metrics is one, Webpagetest.org is another, and also Page Speed Insights from Google. As far as resources, there are two great books by Steve Souders. He's the guy who invented the YSlow plugin.

Letter YSLOW. Which is a great tool. You should check that one out as well. That was while he was at Yahoo. Then he got stolen away by Google. And that's where he created PageSpeed Insights. He has two great O'Reilly books. One is called Even Faster Websites. And the other one is High Performance Websites.

One's more kind of to target it to the server-side optimizations. And one is a little bit more towards the client side, but there's a mix of both in each book. Those are great resources. You want to do stuff like minifying JavaScript and paying attention to the order of the CSS and JavaScripts that are loading on the page and all that. There's a lot to it. There are whole books on it, literally. So you want to pick those up. 

BC: And don't forget, HTTP/2 is a performance tool. It's awesome. It allows concurrent loading of your events in files so that instead of loading 5 at a time, it'll load 20. It really helps. Is there another question?

This is kind of related to the speed thing again, but when you talk about industry norms, do you have a tool or process that can give a benchmark, or is it keyword-specific? And you just see who's showing up like a keyword.

DF: It's actually vertical-specific within the engine, and that's not data they share. You can imagine that breaking news is generally a more important concept than a new toy that's being released for children at Christmas time.

While the toy is incredibly important to those kids, in the general scheme of the internet, it is not deemed to be as important as breaking news would be. And so that vertical in news, there's see, if I can remember these, you're going to have news, you're going to have images, you're going to have video, you're going to have entertainment personalities, and there are several other verticals that the internet gets cut by at the search engine.

Within those, they will have their own norms. And it's not information that gets shared outside the engine. When I was at Bing, I asked about that. I was like, "Can we actually tell businesses what we're focusing on?" The answer was "No. Hell no, we do not share that information." It's a resource application scenario, right? 

There are a lot of news sites. There's a lot of processing that goes into it, especially now with the focus on fake news. There are a lot of resources inside the engine. We're talking about human beings.

We're talking about bandwidth. We're talking about servers. All of these things are hard costs to the engine. And verticals that run ads that return on that investment. And when you get off into smaller areas, smaller areas of the internet that have less of that focus. The resources are less populated across those spaces. Unfortunately, there's no benchmark for that, at least not official data from the engines themselves. 

SS: Yeah, and speaking of the news vertical, you need to have accelerated mobile pages amp.

DF: Oh, yeah, absolutely, although you can pretty much amp anything now, as I understand it.

SS: Yeah, you should amp up e-commerce sites.

DF: Yeah, totally. Where it makes sense, right? Like, I have a personal blog, and I might publish it once every six months. It doesn't really make sense for that blog to be amped. But if you've got news and you're in a vertical where you're supplying news, that amped. And it's not a nice to have today, it's if you don't have it, you stand out and you're left behind.  

SS: Who knows what amp is? Awesome.

DF: Okay. Do we want to cover it just for everybody else?

SS: I think we should probably move on.

DF: Okay. If that's a question. Next question.  

I wanted to know what your take is, I mean, we use Magento platform for e-commerce. Wanted to know your take as far as having one site which is responsive versus having two sites, you know, mobile and desktop and on the server level. You know, customers would be diverted to the right platform.

BC: Yeah. The easiest answer is to listen to Google. And Google says responsive. When you have multiple sites, there's only one reason to have multiple sites: if the audience is that different. If the purpose of people using your site on a desktop is entirely different from the way they care about your site on a mobile device, then perhaps it can be different.

Under normal circumstances, Google is looking for a uniform single site. Now, even responsive sites can have some problems. But I think the core of the problem is this Mobile First Index that Google's threatening to release sometime in the next year. The Mobile First Index basically says that Google is going to spider your site as a mobile device.

And whatever you give to that mobile device from your server that is all that is going to be indexed. If you have desktop information, and on a mobile device, you suppress it, you don't print it or have it available for the desktop, and that information is lost. It does not get indexed any longer. The desktop index is going to go away; the mobile index is going to replace it; the concept is that responsive will solve that for you rather than have multiple entries in an index.

It gets far more complex when you're trying to handle duplicate content and things like that.

SS: There are actually three ways to serve content to mobile devices. One is responsive, and the other is dynamic serving, where the URLs don't change, but the HTML code does. With responsive, that's what you have; you don't have a separate mobile site at MDOT or something.

Yeah, so if you have the same URL, so dynamic serving, and you're serving up different HTML, then you run the risk of Google not picking up the version that you want, which has more stuff, more content, and more functionality for desktop users. Google's not going to see it when they switch to mobile-first indexing.

You want to move towards responsiveness. In the meantime, while you're still running dynamic, one of the biggest mistakes I find in most websites that are running dynamic serving situations is they forget to put the very header in the HTTP headers. So you have to specify that we're varying by user agents, a very colon user agent, in the HTTP server headers.

That just gives Google a heads-up that you are not doing some nefarious cloaking situation, that this is above-the-board dynamic serving, and that you're not trying to pull a fast one on Google.

DF: Yeah. And you want to make sure you do that. If other websites in your vertical start doing a similar thing, and then one or two of them actively start cloaking, Google then starts looking at everybody with this pattern and asking if they are all cloaking.

And you, you do not want the mathematics of the algorithm making a determination that, in fact, that industry is now about cloaking, and they just, that's it. You'll walk in one day, and you will see a huge drop in everything. You'll wonder why. And it could take you months to get it sorted out. You may not get any official flag from Google. You might not know what happened. There's a level of protection you want to get from that as well.  

BC: Let me give a very similar scenario: dynamic loading. This was a site that was trying to do AB testing. They took all the source text, and in certain cases, they would keep the text basically hidden and put active images over it.

You can click on the images to go to the same links that were in the text. What they did was keep it on the actual page—just hide the text behind the images. Google has also disallowed all their pay-per-click ads. Yeah, their pay-per-click ads all got shut down because they were cloaking their desktop versions.

SS: So that technique's called CSS image replacement and it's risky. Very risky.

BC: Don't do it.

DF: Yeah. That means that there's a big website that you can keep it in. Here's the deal, right? Because I used to work directly with eBay and directly with Amazon.

SS: No, repeat his question.

DF: Would you let me?

SS: Okay, go ahead.

DF: No, I'm about to repeat the question. Okay?

SS: Repeat the question.

DF: Repeating the question, it was stated that there are large companies like eBay, and I'm going to add Amazon to this pile, which is actually doing things like MDOT and so on. And this is the point that I wanted to add to all of this if you want one.

It eliminates confusion about URLs. I mean, we've all had the experience where we're looking at something, we share that, whether it's from a mobile device or, you know, your tablet, you share it out, and then someone clicks on it on a desktop, and they get a different experience because they're taken to the MDOT page.

And that is not good. At the search engine level, there were weekly phone calls with Amazon to deal explicitly with the volume of duplicate URLs that the Amazon system creates. EBay is the same thing: just a different phone call and different people in the room. You don't want to go down that path. Now, when you have the weight of those domains, some things will go in your favor, right?

Some problems are figured out. I'm gonna guess that you don't have that weight. Things are figured out by the mathematics at that level. And it's not that they are loved; you are not the scenario. It's a scale solution issue. So, if you took Amazon and its results or eBay and its results out of the search results, either at Bing or at Google, users of those two search engines would immediately look at those search engines and say, "This is bullshit. Where's eBay? Where's Amazon? This is wrong."

You cannot make that change. You cannot take that out of that set of results. Unfortunately, it does then require human intervention to go in and make everything play nice on the back end. You really don't want humans intervening in that stuff at the engine.

You just want the algorithm to pass you through and do the right thing. So, for me, a direct answer is one site: go down that path. Do we have a question in the back?

SS: You might have seen Duane was flashing a tat. You should show that off.

DF: So, we had a diversity day at the office last week, and one of the gals who works with us does henna. And so I can you guys actually see that there's something on the back of my hand?

A funny thing happens if you leave the henna on the back of your hand in its dense form, you don't wash it off after 15 minutes, and you leave it for two hours. It just goes black and stays that way for a while. It's funny. I freaked my wife out, you know, sent her the photo, and she was like, "Please tell me that's not permanent."

And I said, "Oh, it's a commitment. Two weeks." So, yeah, I'm not, you know, this is, this is actually a robot. It's a robot. I had a guy it was at Qatar Center on Friday night. This kid comes walking by, and he looks at me, and he's like, "Ola, Inc. That is so cool." I was like, "No, it's not a jailhouse tat man." It's just henna.

BC: Okay, question.  

You said that, excuse me. You said that Google wants uniformity between a mobile website and a desktop. Kind of like one authoritative thing. Is it okay if, on mobile, if you like to hide an image that would appear on a desktop so that the mobile page maybe loads a little bit faster?

BC: Historically, you don't hide anything. Google, as many of you probably have heard, when they spider your site, they actually run through a headless browser. They actually execute all your JavaScript. They don't parse it. They run it. They own Chrome.

DF: Yeah. Chrome is a headless browser.

BC: It's a headless browser. And when Google spiders your page, they're actually rendering it as if it were a browser. And they get that source code, the DOM, they get it, and then they parse that to see if you're doing anything deceptive. So, if you have things that are hidden and that are not able to be brought forward, that is spam.

The answer to your question is do not hide it. Now you can selectively exclude it, but you should not ever hide anything or shouldn't place things behind other things without a way to activate it.

DF: It's a slippery slope and it's based on intent and your intent may be faster page load time better experience for the consumer and that's fantastic.

That is where your intent should be. The execution might let you down, or other factors might come into play that the engine is aware of that you may not be considering, and then the engine takes a dim view of it. So, you know, it's really responsive everything is there. Everything is visible. That's the best way.

SS: Yeah, you might show a different version of the same image that loads faster and is a little smaller.

DF: Smaller, less resolution, you know, that kind of thing. And you know, just to be clear, that actually takes more work on your end, right? Because you've not only got to take that one image, but then you've got to take that image, you've got to downsize it, you've got to take the resolution out of it, you've got to save it, you've got to reference it in its own location.

It does take more work to make that happen. But in the long run, it's a process, and once it's up and running, it's repeatable. And it is a better solution.

BC: Okay, next question.

Hello, I have a question about HTTPS. We have a non-e-commerce site that has been around for about 10 years. So, we've got a lot of Google search positions referencing our HTTP site. About a year ago, we got an HTTPS certificate because we heard that it helps with Google search ranking.

So my question is, we have the HTTPS stuff out there, the site works on it, and it's all great. We don't reference it anywhere. Should we make an effort to point everything over from HTTP to HTTPS, and if so, how can we do that without jeopardizing our current placement in Google?

BC: Okay, I'll start. I interviewed Google on exactly that topic, and what they originally said was that HTTPS is only a tiebreaker. Now, in my opinion, in an algorithm, it might be a tiebreaker, but at trust, it isn't. Yeah. Obviously, trust is a big part of expertise, authority, and trust as an evaluation mode.

I would go to HTTPS. Now, my site is very much like yours. It's heavily informational. I have 9,000 pages on my site. If you haven't gone there, you probably should. 9,000 pages, and it didn't need to be secured. So I went secure and saw that I had either a slight boost or no loss in rankings.

Certain keywords did go up a little bit, but it was probably tiebreaker stuff. Now, over time, I expect the dial to be turned up. Now, there's a reason, I think, this is my personal view. I think that spammers who own 10,000 domains are not going to buy 10,000 certificates. So, over time, it is sort of a signal that you're serious about your website.

Therefore, there is a mechanical advantage to saying I'm not a spammer. And I think that HTTPS does that. The process of going to HTTPS is far more complex than people give credit to it. And people forget things. For instance, you forget that once you go to HTTPS, you have to reload your disavow files.

Because it's different, you forget that if you have a blog and the blog refers to images and those images are on remote websites, if it's not HTTPS, you have a problem. So, there are a lot of different things you have to pay attention to. Dot the I, cross the T. On my own site, even though I knew what I was doing, it still took two weeks.

Just to get rid of the little nuances. You include a JavaScript that references a file. You have to get in and change all your JavaScripts. There's a lot of work to do for an HTTPS migration, and I'd encourage you. We have a big post on our site about it. You can just search and look at it, but it actually tells you how to do it.

So, once you have the HTTPS site up and everything's functioning, do you, In your HT access file, do you redirect everything over to the HTTPS, or how do you get Google to know that it's out there and that's at you should be using?

DF: And to Bruce's point, like, you're in Search Console, you're going to be submitting new information, and when you do this, you essentially initiate a re-crawl, and Google knows about it instantly.

Their domain name registrar they have access to the backend. So anything you do, they're going to see it pop immediately. There's another great resource back, I think, in June of 2016. Hang on a second, June. Maybe it was April, April of 2016 when Wired Magazine did an extremely in-depth article on their process for going HTTPS. They documented everything and put it out there for everyone because, to Bruce's point, this is not a simple process.

I once bought a security certificate. Has anyone done this? Like it took me a month to figure out what I owned. And a month after that, I still had no concept of A, what to do with it, or B, how to really access it. It was just a mystery. And then several years later I let it lapse. And this is a decade ago when it didn't really matter.

That was fine. Google, though, has a lot of pressure on it, and by extension, as well. And so we're going to see more of this. I know at the beginning, Stephan alluded to this as if there was a little bit of a bump given if you went secure, and that's kind of the carrot on the stick.

But really that's not sustainable and it's not going to net out to changing your world movement. by implementing this. But what is going to happen is you're going to see, and Google's already been making these noises, of moving toward a totally secure world. And they claim they have their reasons for it.

There's the actual reason and the publicly available, sound reason. They generally map to each other, but one will have a lot more information behind it that you don't get. Part of the reason that that's going to be important to them is that, as a huge company and a growing company, they face scrutiny from governments.

And part of the way they protect themselves is to get in front of areas that make them look like they're protecting consumers and businesses. Because that allows them to lobby and forestall legislation that forces them to do something. And so if they can force businesses to go secure and they can claim that win, that's something that allows them to push off legislation that would force information out of them.

They are loath to give out the information, so it's easier to force it on you guys and make you guys jump through flaming hoops.

SS: So, he asked a question about whether we should set up redirects. Let's address the difference between 301 and 302 because there's a lot of mythology about this. And the best practices have actually changed. So, 301 has historically been the redirect for SEO, but that is no longer the case. Now, 302 does pass PageRank as well as 301s now. That's been confirmed by Google.

DF: I confirmed it several years ago at Bing.

SS: And, yeah, and not only that, this is critical. When you use a 302 instead of a 301, the context of the link, the anchor text and other signals besides the page rank get transferred for a longer period of time than a 301. So, 301 evaporates those contextual signals after a short period of time, within weeks or months, and then a 302 is ongoing. It seems to be indefinite.

DF: Yeah, they let it perpetuate, you know, and I mean it's, you know, the 301 is a permanent redirect, and the 302 is a temporary will return, and yet it's working to our advantage right now.

SS: Yeah, so switch your 301s to 302s. This is critical, and Christoph Cemper did a large-scale study. He's the founder of Link Research Tools and presented this at SMX East last year.

And that was the talk of the conference. Is really fascinating study. So 302 instead of 301. I had a client switch, a site that they had acquired and was set to a 301 to redirect everything to their main site for six months.

And I told them about the study coming out. I told them, "Let's switch to a 3 0 2." They went for it, and they got a rankings boost. So even if you've been doing a 301 for a while, let's say it was a site that you acquired and it's redirecting to your main site, you can still reap benefits from this.

DF: But don't tell anyone.

SS: Outside of this room. Yeah.

BC: Next question.

All right, let's say you have a client who comes to you and is stuck between maybe five and 15 in the search results in a very competitive space. They already have a high DA PA, high linking, and websites going back to them. They're very authoritative, and they've done most of what you already said.

What would you guys then do to get that site to rank higher in the surge results beyond what's already been discussed and the basics of SEO that most people know?  

BC: Okay, I'm going to try this first. On most sites, based on what tools you use, you see different things wrong. For instance, for speed, if you run page speed, it'll tell you to fix all these things.

Then, if you go over to the web page test, it'll tell you different things. You change those different things, and your page speed score improves, even though they didn't tell you about them. That's the same thing about a website. So, many times, it's a perception of what I have done, how I have done it, and then new eyeballs.

You can always find things that can be done to a site. For instance, for word games—everybody knows games—we optimized addicting games. They're now number one out of 3.4 billion. It only took two years. So patience is a part of it, and you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

A lot of it is tiny changes, but if somebody is going to rank number one, you can also rank number one. You just have to be the least imperfect. You have to be better than them.  

DF: So there's like, you can kind of plan your attack on this stuff where if you watch who's in number one and you look at where their strengths are, you kind of nibble around the edges, and you build your strengths in the areas that they may be ignoring or aren't so good in, or that you have a natural affinity to.

And over time, and this is that kind of window, right? Where you're building your authority with the engine, and the engine is saying, "Okay, you know, we've got a guy in number one who's been there for five years, that's a solid answer. When we put them in front of consumers, they're happy with us." And then another part of the algorithm is saying, "Yeah, but you know, this guy down here, number five like he's making the right now noises, right? Sites are coming along, and all the boxes are checked off. And when we test him in these positions, like people respond, right?"

They click on that, and you kind of just feed that from around the edges. And then one day, your content, you may have updated something on the page, added a new image, something small, that one page suddenly for a competitive term is right in that mix one to three, and you will struggle to understand.

What did I do that did that? Because I want to do that on all my pages. And it was a cumulative, very small layer of work that happened across everything. Suddenly, the engine said, "Yeah, you know what? You're as good as who we had in number one." And they'll swap that out. And then you own the space.

SS: So, I have a different opinion.

DF: I'm sorry, man, you're screwed. It's the end of you. Sell the business.

SS: It's not about small cumulative changes, in my opinion. It's about really moving the needle with stuff that's outcome-focused instead of activity-focused. So, when you're outcome-focused, most SEOs are activity-focused.

It's like, well, this is a best practice, you know, and they've got 200 things to tick the boxes on, you know, on this huge checklist. The problem with that is many of those things aren't going to move the needle. They're just not important. For example, meta descriptions don't even figure into the rankings algorithm.

That's a second-order activity. You may never get to that, and that's okay. If you think of it like, "I have a whole bunch of arrows in my quiver, and I can shoot to aim for the bullseye. If I hit the bullseye, if I hit my outcome, I've done it. Why do I need to reuse the rest of the arrows?" So, if your outcome is that I want to get to number one for this super competitive keyword, just go for it.

Go after the highest-value activities that will really move the needle. And something like high PA and high DA, so page authority and domain authority, is, I think, I don't want to offend Moz because they're great folks. Their score is weak, and it's easy to be gamed. And I don't put any weight on it.

So when you get spammers talking about links that they'll sell you, they talk about PA and DA because it's easily gamed. You want to look at trust flow from Majestic. You want to look at LRT Trust and LRT Power Trust as well. Majestic also has citation flow, but trust flow is more important.

You want high trust, and remember that many of these metrics are on our logarithmic scale. So the closer to a hundred or ten, depending on the size of the scale, it's logarithmically a bigger deal, like a Richter scale, right? So you have a 50 out of a hundred, and you think, wow, that's amazing.

That's pretty good for a typical website. I have a personal blog that's in the forties. Cool. Thanks a lot. That's a really good trust flow, really good. And I like the fact that it's higher trust than authority or higher trust than importance, right? So, the trust flow is higher than the citation flow.

That means it's skewing towards more trust than importance. I like to see that. And if you spot that, okay, I had high PA and DA, but that was masking what was really going on. I don't have nearly the kind of trust that the 1 listings have. Let's work on that. Let's move the needle.

Big time with some amazing campaign that goes viral that targets the linkerati, the, the 

influencers as far as Google's concerned, who have all the trust, all the authority, and like come out strong out of the gate with something amazing, remarkable, worth remarking about, you know, and Seth Godin defines it. So, we get a ton of awesome links. That, I think, is going to crush it for you.

And just a kind of follow-up to that. When doing research on the competition, it's obvious they're buying backlinks, and you can see where they're doing that, whether it's through EDU websites and sponsorships and whatnot. What is the value of those links?

I know it's not going to be recommended by, obviously, experts in the world, but it's what other sites are doing to rank where they are ranking. So, what are your thoughts on that?

SS: That is a house of cards. All it takes is one competitor turning them in, and they're done. I was working with Giftcertificates.com as a client, and out of nowhere came Findgiftcards.com. And they were spamming the heck out of Google to take the number one position—actually, number one and number two back in the day. It's like, what the heck? So I reverse-engineered where they were getting all that link authority from and found it.

They were doing some stupid hit counter thing and then sticking keyword-rich links in that hit counter for people who are just, you know, oblivious webmasters using that hit counter. They submitted a spam report, and they were just obliterated.  

BC: One thing to carry that forward is that usually, spam is not detected by Google. It's detected by your competition and reported to Google. That's where a vast majority of the spam is detected.

If you think that you are able to fly under the Google radar, you may, but your competition, if they want your spot, will just report you, anyhow. So just understand the radar is really low.

SS: And you need to check your own links, too, because negative SEO is real, and it can really hurt you. So, use Link Detox, which is a great tool from Link Research Tools. It will triage your links, find the toxic ones, the suspicious ones as well, and then you have to hand check the suspicious ones to see whether they're toxic or not.

And then you go after the whole process of, you know, contacting the webmasters, asking them to remove the links. You know, you can use Pitchbox for that, for doing outreach to the webmasters who are, you know, like hurting your, your link reputation, and then those that you can't get the removal, you just submit a disavow file.

BC: Right, so we have a full flowchart and process and everything for basically link pruning. You can look for link pruning on our site, and it, it's a full article about how to get rid of bad links.

SS: My recommended, my recommended approach, sorry, I'll shut up quickly here, is to use link research tools and Pitchbox because they are so tightly integrated through APIs. I mean, their best buddy is the two founders, and it's just a seamless solution for Pruning links for removing sketchy links.

DF: So I'm just gonna wrap this quickly on this point, right? Make sure your house is in order before you submit to the engine and essentially point out someone else's flaws. Close to 40% of all submissions that the teams were seeing at Bing when the site that reported, because naturally, when you point out your competitor and say, shame on them, of course, objectivity dictates that we also take a look at you and say, okay, like, is this just you bellyaching or is there something legitimate?

In almost 40% of those cases, the websites that were submitted had problems of their own. And, like, you don't get points for submitting something really bad, and then, you know, you're told, "Oh, that's okay, you get a pass on this, right?" No. You are now subject to the exact same scenario. And that happens all the time at Google.

SS: Well, unless you're a big brand.

DF: I mean, well, it depends.

SS: Chanel or something like totally mine, but even then, they can get away with a lot.

DF: Yeah, they can, but even then, not that, they would sometimes make an example, you know, they made an example of BMW, five or seven years later, a decade ago, you know, but it's still they went after a known brand, and it hurt them, but you want to clean up your own house. Oh, now everyone has questions. They're like, oh my god, we're like under 10 minutes.  

SS: By the way, if you do want a book, some of you came in late. I have 25 books. We won't take time until the end of the session when it finishes. If you guys text this number, you'll show me the text. I'll give you a book until I'm out.

I got 25. So here's the texting, and you get all sorts of great freebies, too, like an SEO best practices checklist, a Hiring Blueprint, and a BS detector you can use when you're interviewing potential agents.

DF: My BS detector is going off right now. What's the number?  

SS: 33444. That's the shortcode. Then, the keyword you're going to type in is ASE2017.

Okay, so 33444. The keyword is ASE2017. It runs together in all caps. Okay, next question.

Okay. It's been reported that video traffic will be 80% of web traffic soon. We're looking to up our video game, so what's most important to consider in terms of SEO?

DF: Okay, one more time. Okay. I know video traffic is going to be a big deal.

Yeah. So, what should we consider in terms of SEO? To respond. It seems really binary right now. A lot of folks are just saying, like, optimize your page, your video titles, and things like that. That's not like future proof.

DF: No. And you know, I'm going to pull a little bit from something Stephan said here earlier, and it's this concept of, I like to think of it as knowing where the customer is going on their journey and producing content that leads them through you on that logical path. So you're attached to that. When you do that, you will future-proof content, and you will put yourself in a better position to be more relevant and authoritative in the long run.

But the reality is that in terms of actually optimizing video, it's well known. The best practices are out there; follow those for the moment, but it's back-to-page speed on your website. That is where the focus has to be. And we don't have a clear answer. We don't have video platforms or embeds right now that support the fastest possible experience.

Those two things are just, you know, opposite to each other at the moment. They'll get there eventually. We're starting to see that 5G is going to be coming online shortly in America. That will actually have an impact, and we will be able to get better speeds, faster speeds, all of that information, uh, all of that, That data will come through whether it's a video or, you know, a photo gallery or whatever won't really matter anymore.

But that's going to take years to roll out. It's going to take years for consumers to have the hardware that supports that enables them to actually manifest a good experience whether you're optimized or not.

SS: You guys want some video SEO tips? Alright, let's do it real fast. YouTube is the number two search engine, so we'll focus on it. Here's what we're going to do: First, we're going to do some keyword research, YouTube-specific keyword research. Who knows that you can use Google Trends and specify YouTube where it says web search? Just go and select YouTube search. Who knew that? Okay, almost nobody. Awesome. So, use that to do your keyword research on what people are typing into YouTube.

Next up, you want to, here's some tactical stuff, first of all. Of course, the title tag, or the title of the video, needs to have that important keyword and put it towards the beginning of the title and the description lead off or have in the first sentence or so the URL, even though that's a no followed link, this is going to get you some direct click-through traffic, not a ton, but if it's below the show more, then nobody's going to click that and see that to make sure that the URL, which will become clickable.

Next, you can upload foreign language translations if you have an audience, that is, let's say, in the U.S., and you want some Spanish-speaking folks, and you want to come up with Spanish queries on YouTube. You can upload a foreign language translation, and then they can watch it with the captioning, the translation, and all that is searchable.

You can go into the caption file. It's created in English, and all the typos are fixed because it's a mess. Who knew that you could go in and change that? Yeah, that's awesome, and it's all searchable content. Let's see, another thing that you want to shut off is the ability for people to see your metrics.

Where you look at the captions, you click on that pull-down thing, and one of the options is to show the metrics, which show whatever it's called metrics, analytics, or whatever. You can see that in your competition; you don't want your competitors to see that in you, like the trends of your increase in views and all that.

Watch time is the most important metric for YouTube. So you really want to have a compelling video that, and by the way, this isn't a tip for Facebook. So, a little bit off-topic, but don't just, don't drop a link to a YouTube URL on Facebook because that'll get buried by the Facebook ad rank algorithm because they don't like YouTube.

It's the enemy, right? So you want to upload natively a big difference and make that video very short and punchy—or not short necessarily—but have the Facebook video really get right to the point and without audio. If it's compelling, you can see what people are saying. There's action happening around.

Like if you do a Facebook live or YouTube live and you're like moving around and stuff's happening in the background, people watch that for longer. So just a few things.

BC: One thing you should understand is that unlike what is normally considered for a desktop search, a video can have a 90-character title and a 5,000-character description. Those give you the ability to actually be far more descriptive. As mentioned, YouTube is the second greatest search component outside of Google. And Google owns it. Many times, what we find is that by optimizing videos and getting them in there, especially with closed captioning, they will also show up in web searches. So, it isn't just a video search. It'll show up when you do a regular Google web search. Your video will show up in the mix. We have time for one more.

DF: Who absolutely needs a question answered?

SS: So we've got two people. Who's going to get it?

BC: And just to be fair to everybody, we're used to doing these conferences. We've each, I think we've all done over a hundred conferences probably, or more. Two hundred. So afterward, if you wish to come up with a specific question, write a question on your business card and give it to us, and we'll follow up with you after the conference.

We're not opposed at all to doing that, or you can stand here and ask us questions, and we'll be glad to answer them. There's a keynote that starts 15 minutes after the end of our session. Nobody wants to go to that, so you can stay and ask questions.

SS: Larry's going to really appreciate that. And remember, and this is on film too, so.

BC: Larry's a good guy. Tens across the board, right?

Question. Yes. Hi, I have a question. How do small businesses compete in terms of getting an SEO? I mean, getting backlinks from major publications? I know I tried Harrow and other places. And others, but it's impossible to get for small businesses where there are three or four people in the company.

SS: You're talking about mainstream media?

Mainstream media, tarot, and everyone like us were trying to get backlinks through infographics, doing amazing, spending 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, even hiring SEO companies that said we're going to get you 500 links or 300 links, and at the end of the day, it's an, you know, it's ending up in zero.

So, a lot of promises that SEO companies make do not, you know, become real. And how do small businesses know what, you know, what to look into getting an SEO company that this fits? Constantly promising and showing a great company, like, you know, taking some big brand and then showing that this is what we got.

Well, we got to finish this fast because we're on time. So I'll quickly say that try and get on TV. I've cold-called TV producers and get on TV. I did 11 TV appearances last year, and those are great links. It's great for authority building and a kind of celebrity positioning to get on TV, such as local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. And also, like, I got a client just a couple of months ago into the Denver Post, and what we did was I had my client contact the journalist as a follow-up to an article he had published just within the last two weeks that was spot on to the topic related to my client.

In the first version, I had him send me the draft before he sent it to the journalist. Thank goodness, because it was terrible. It was like a mini press release. I was like, "No, back to the drawing board." And then, when he sent it back, it was perfect. This is, you nailed it. He sent it to the journalist; it was a great conversation.

They had a grand opening that the journalist sent another colleague to, and they covered it. They had a full-page article in the newspaper as well as on the website. So rapport building and relationship building are the name of the game. I mean, that's how PR professionals do it: They've got this big rolodex of people with whom they nurture those relationships. So, you have to leverage the relationship building in order for this to go.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of what Stephan is saying is so true, and it is somewhat easy to get on television because the producers of those shows are looking for people who are actual subject matter experts. So, if you let them know who you are and what your subject matter expertise is, you will get a call.

You've got to be ready to get up at three o'clock in the morning, answer that phone call, and be there 45 minutes later for a taping. If you say "No," you'll never get another call, but it does work. Harrow, I love it. It's beaten to death now, and it's still good. It's still useful. I still reach out from time to time, but getting chosen by that person, I think you have a better response rate with what Stefan's talking about, which is showing the active following and interest in what that journalist is doing and then showing them more value on that topic.

And they may not be interested in it, but if you show that you're worthwhile and valuable, you'll get the call at some point, and you will be that expert voice.  

BC: Okay, we're at time. Remember, everybody has to circle 10s because we would like to be invited back again. Come on up, rush the stage. Apparently, there are some books or something up here. If you have any questions, ask away.