SMX Advanced 2008 Show Recap – BOT Herding

Moderator: Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz

Speakers:

Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia
Hamlet Batista, President, Nemedia S.A.
Nathan Buggia, Lead PM, Live Search Webmaster Center, Microsoft
Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo, Inc.
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Evan Roseman, Software Engineer, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

◊◊Michael Gray (GrayWolf), President, Atlas Web Service

Do you air condition your mailbox?, Do you send page rank to your contact form?,

Many sites don’t have much page rank so why send it where it does not help?

Deciding what to sculpt out

• Do you want to rank for your privacy policy, terms of use, or contact us?
• Locations – unless you are multi location business, put your address in footer and sculpt out location pages.
• Company bios – unless you are involved in reputation management, then sculpt them out
• Sitewide footer links, advertising stats, and legal pages don’t need it.

How to sculpt

• NoFollow quick, easy but search engines may look at it as a highly SEOd page.
• JavaScript – old school, currently bots only have limited discovery crawling abilities but this may change in the future
• Form Pages, jump pages,redirect pages – more complex to implement and maintain, search engines currently don’t follow them but this may change

Be Consistent, don’t let them crawl it one way but not another. Always use Robots.txt and meta noindex together in PR sculpting.

Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia

Arguments against sculpting

1. More Control?

2. It’s a distraction

3. Management Issues

4. It’s a band-aid

5. Where’s the user?

6. Open to abuse

7. Too focused on search engines

8. There is no standard

You can go to his follow-up on www.audettemedia.com/nofollow

◊◊◊◊Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

How to minimize duplicate content

Link to the Permalink

E-commerce sites

Se

This presentation is at www.netconcepts.com/learn/bot-herding.ppt. You can read it for yourself!

Hamlet Batista, President, Nemedia S.A.

White Hat Clocking – Six Practical Applications

Why?

Good bad all about intention

When is it practical to cloak

• Content Accessibility
• Search unfriendly CMS
• Rich media sites
• Content behind forms
• Flash or SilverLight

Currently on the Web around 5% have a NoFollow link

Robots exclusion protocol

As always Connections is happy to answer questions and assist you in any way we can to get your e-business up and running over the competition. Contact us at service@ConnectionsIS.com.