seo

Posted by randfish

User experience and SEO: friends or enemies? They’ve had a rocky past, but it’s time we all realized that they live better in harmony. Dispelling the negative myths about how UX and SEO interact is the first step in improving both the look and search results of your website. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about some persistent UX myths that we should probably ignore.

Have anything to add that we didn’t cover? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Video Transcription

“Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to talk a little about user experience, UX, and the impact that it has on SEO.

Now, the problem historically has been that these two worlds have had a lot of conflict, especially like late ’90s, early 2000s, and that conflict has stayed a little bit longer than I think it should have. I believe the two are much more combined today. But there are a few things that many people, including those who invest in user experience, believe to be true about how people use the web and the problems that certain user experience, types of functionality, certain design types of things cause impact SEO, and they impact SEO negatively. So I want to dispel some of those myths and give you things that you can focus on and fix in your own websites and in your projects so that you can help not only your SEO, but also your UX.

So let’s start with number one here. Which of these is better or worse? Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of form fields that you need a user to fill out to complete some sort of a registration step. Maybe they need to register for a website. Maybe they’re checking out of an e-commerce cart. Maybe they’re signing up for an event. Maybe they’re downloading something.

Whatever it is, is this better, putting all of the requests on one page so that they don’t have to click through many steps? Or is it better to break them up into multiple steps? What research has generally shown and user experience testing has often shown is that a lot of the time, not all of the time certainly, but a lot of the time this multi-step process, perhaps unintuitively, is the better choice.

You can see this in a lot of e-commerce carts that do things very well. Having a single, simple, direct, one step thing that, oh yes, of course I can fill out my email address and give you a password. Then, oh yeah, sure I can enter my three preferences. Then, yes, I’ll put in my credit card number. Those three things actually are more likely to carry users through a process because they’re so simple and easy to do, rather than putting it all together on one page.

I think the psychology behind this is that this just feels very overwhelming, very daunting. It makes us sort of frustrated, like, “Oh, do I really have to go through that?”

I’m not saying you should immediately switch to one of these, but I would fight against this whole, “Oh, we’re not capturing as many registrations. Our conversion rate is lower. Our SEO leads aren’t coming in as well, because we have a multi-step process, and it should be single step.” The real key is to usability test to get data and metrics on what works better and to choose the right path. Probably if you have something small, splitting it up into a bunch of steps doesn’t matter as much. If you have something longer, this might actually get more users through your funnel.

Number two. Is it true that if we give people lots of choice, then they’ll choose the best path for them, versus if we only give people a couple options that they might not go and take the action that they would have, had we given them those greater choices? One of my favorite examples from this, from the inbound marketing world, the SEO world, the sharing world, the social world is with social sharing buttons themselves. You’ll see tons of websites, blogs, content sites, where they offer just an overwhelming quantity of tweet this, share this on Facebook, like this on Facebook, like us on Facebook, like our company page on Facebook, plus one this on Google+, follow us on Google+, embed this on your own webpage, link to this page, Pinterest this.

Okay. Yes, those are all social networks. Some of them may be indeed popular with many of your users. The question is:  Are you overwhelming them and creating what psychologists have often called the “paradox of choice,” which is that we as human beings, when we look at a long list of items and have to make a decision, we’re often worse at making that decision than we would be if we looked at a smaller list of options? This is true whether it’s a restaurant menu or shopping for shoes or crafting something on the Internet. Etsy has this problem constantly with an overwhelming mass of choice and people spending lots of time on the site, but then not choosing to buy something because of that paradox of choice.

What I would urge you to do is not necessarily to completely get rid of this, but maybe to alter your philosophy slightly to the three or four or if you want to be a little religious about it, even the one social network or item that you think is going to have the very most impact. You can test this and bear it out across the data of your users and say, “Hey, you know what? 80% of our users are on Facebook. That’s the network where most of the people take the action even when we offer them this choice. Let’s see if by slimming it down to just one option, Twitter or Facebook or just the two, we can get a lot more engagement and actions going.” This is often the case. I’ve seen it many, many times.

Number three. Is it true that it’s absolutely terrible to have a page like this that is kind of text only? It’s just text and spacing, maybe some bullet points, and there are no images, no graphics, no visual elements. Or should we bias to, hey let’s have a crappy stock photo of some guy holding up a box or of a team smiling with each other?

In my experience, and a lot of the tests that I’ve seen around UX and visual design stuff, this is actually a worse idea than just going with a basic text layout. If for some reason you can’t break up your blog post, your piece of content, and you just don’t have the right visuals for it, I’d urge you to break it up by having different sections, by having good typography and good visual design around your text, and I’d urge you to use headlines and sub-headlines. I wouldn’t necessarily urge you to go out and find crappy stock photos, or if you’re no good at creating graphics, to go and make a no good graphic. This bias has created a lot of content on the web that in my opinion is less credible, and I think some other folks have experienced that through testing. We’ve seen it a little bit with SEOmoz itself too.

Number four. Is it true that people never scroll, that all the content that you want anyone to see must be above the fold on a standard web page, no matter what device you think someone might be looking at it on? Is that absolutely critical?

The research reveals this is actually a complete myth. Research tells us that people do scroll, that over the past decade, people have been trained to scroll and scroll very frequently. So content that is below the fold can be equally accessible. For you SEO folks and you folks who are working on conversion rate optimization and lead tracking, all that kind of stuff, lead optimization, funnel optimization, this can be a huge relief because you can put fewer items with more space up at the top, create a better visual layout, and draw the eye down. You don’t have to go ahead and throw all of the content and all of the elements that you need and sacrifice some of the items that you wanted to put on the page. You can just allow for that scroll. Visual design here is obviously still critically important, but don’t get boxed into this myth that the only thing people see is the above the fold stuff.

Last one. This myth is one of the ones that hurts SEOs the most, and I see lots of times, especially when consultants and agencies, or designers, developers are fighting with people on an SEO team, on a marketing team about, “Hey, we are aiming for great UX, not great SEO.” I strongly disagree with this premise. This is a false dichotomy. These two, in fact, I think are so tied and interrelated that you cannot separate them. The findability, the discover bility, the ability for a page to perform well in search engines, which remains the primary way that we find new information on the Internet, that is absolutely as critically important as it is to have that great user experience on the website itself and through the website’s pages.

If you’re not tying these two together, or if you’re like this guy and you think this is a fight or a competition, you are almost certainly doing one of these two wrong. Oftentimes it’s SEO, right? People believe, hey we have to put this keyword in here this many times, and the page title has to be this big on the page. Or, oh we can’t have this graphic here. It has to be this type of graphic, and it has to have these words on it.

Usually that stuff is not nearly important as it was, say, a decade ago. You can have fantastic UX and fantastic SEO working together. In fact, there almost always married.

If you’re coming up with problems like these, please leave them in the comments. Reach out to me, tweet to me and let me know. I guarantee you almost all of them have a creative solution where the two can be brought together.

All right, gang, love to hear from you, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by gfiorelli1

Last year on SEOmoz, I published The Content Curation Guide for SEO, which – even though it is still valid – I thought it needed a fresh addition. Not only does this post update some of the information shared, but it also digs deeper into an aspect of content curation that is actually the most used and, possibly, useful to SEOs and Content Marketers who must deal with more duties than just curation: social media curation.

For that reason, I gave a Mozinar last week about this topic where I explained why it is important to include social content curation in your inbound marketing strategy; how to prepare, organize, execute, and analyze your social curation activities; and what tools to use.

If you missed the opportunity to attend the live broadcast of the Mozinar, you can watch it here.

Joanna Lord does great social content curation on Pinterest! 

Audience Q&A

1. If you have many clients for which you need to curate content, you need to have so many profiles for all the social media accounts etc for their respective industries. Any good tools for managing these and managing mentions and more across all the accounts?

During the webinar, I praised Buffer for their awesome tools. However, its premium version only allows adding up to 12 social profiles and have up to two team members access the accounts. If you are doing social content curation for many clients, it might not be the best tool to use.

In your case, I would possibly use Hootsuite, whose premium plan allows you an unlimited number of admins for social profiles, a much larger number of social networks (Google+ included), and strongly social web platform like Scoop.it, Tumblr, YouTube, and others. 

2. Can you discuss your methods of not repeating content through different forms of social media (i.e. posting the same link on your organization’s Facebook and Twitter accounts)?

Ideally, to obtain the best effect from your social content curation, it is always better to craft the message accordingly to the specific nature of the social media you are going to share it. For instance, not only Twitter, Facebook , and/or Google+ have their own specific characteristics that you could miss using at your advantage with a single “standard” message, but they also present very different user behaviors, even in the case the users are the same in those three social networks.

With platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite, you can easily switch from social to social from within the same platform, which will surely help.

3. How do you stay on top of all this content? I have Google RSS feeds, Pocket, Paper.li newspapers, Flipboard, and more continuously feeding in stories on SEO, PPC, social media, etc. – and it just overwhelms me. How do you a) stay sane, and b) decide what and what not to read/create content about?

Good question! Actually, even if I like to experiment and play with as many tools I can, I don’t use many. To be honest, I use only these ones:

1. Zite, Twitter (the selected people/sites I follow and the list I created), Google+, and the posts/comments in the blog I trust the most (i.e. SEOmoz and YouMoz) for discovering new sources
2. Google Reader as the hub of all the sources I select with time
3. Buffer, for the sharing process, and Bit.ly, Followerwonk, Google+ Ripples, and Facebook Insights for the analysis of my social curation activity

How do I “stay sane” and decide what and what not to read/create content about? Experience sure helps me, because with the passing of time, you learn how to easily recognize if one piece of content is so outstanding you should share it with your audience. But here few tips, which may help you:

1. Don’t read first, but “skim” the posts in your RSS Feed. If the first paragraph (more than the title) makes you want to read more, then there’s a chance that the posts is good and interesting.
2. Put a lot of weight in your sharing decision of the conclusions of the post. The best posts usually have amazing last paragraphs, which not only summarize the thesis of the post and its takeaways, but also make you literally say “WTF!”

4. What should the frequency of shareing blog posts be?

If by blogs we mean social shares, the frequency depends on the social network you are sharing your updates. The most common rule is to not overwhelm your audience with an excessive amount of shared content. For this reason, I am not particularly a fan of automation in social media, even if acclaimed people like Dan Zarrella are praising it. Automation, which is not the same as scheduling, takes away the human touch of a real and thoughtful human social curation, which – with the quality of the content shared – is what makes the difference.

That said, especially if your audience is spread all over the world, it is more than probable that you will need to share the same content at least twice in order to be reach the most of them when they are socially active. Luckily, social networks like Facebook and Google+ ( thanks to their Lists and Circles) offer you to make invisible these “reshares” to that part of your audience, who saw it previously.

5. How do you measure the success of content curation?

I measure it considering the two objectives I always want to reach with my content curation activities:

1. The increment of the number of followers/fans my social profiles
2. The number of the authors of the content I curated who thanks me and, possibly, follow me

Why social content curation

We see it everyday in the SERPs, we see it as being in the background of every Google update of late (Panda, Penguin, EMD), and we see it in people’s buying behavior: trusted brands are the entities of excellence for Google.

This positive attitude of Google toward brands is logical. In fact, people tend to trust more a recognized brand rather than some unknown one.
This is even truer online because brands tend to be considered as a reassuring “lighthouse” within the Internet, which is mostly a confused ocean of information.

Brands like Amazon, REI, CocaCola, Airbnb, and Zappos have a trust advantage that sites as onlinewarehouse.com, outdoors.com, sodabeverages.com, cheaphotels.com, and allkindofshoes.com (any reference to existing sites is purely casual) may have.

The same can be said regarding to people. We naturally tend to consider someone as the trusted reference in a specific niche as we get to know them. For instance, our own Rand Fishkin is a trusted reference in the SEO niche.

Just few examples of thought leaders in different areas, present and past.

As well defined by Forbes: “A thought leader is an individual or firm that prospects, clients, referral sources, intermediaries and even competitors recognize as one of the foremost authorities in selected areas of specialization, resulting in its being the go-to individual or organization for said expertise.”

More over: A thought leader is an individual or firm that significantly profits from being recognized as such.

Thoughtful leadership is the real intangible gold that makes a Brand or a Person a leader in its niche. But none is born a leader.

Throughout the past years, we have understood how inbound marketing (meant as the synergy of SEO, content, and social media marketing) is the correct strategy to use in order to obtain this so dreamt leadership. Content curation, as a facet of content marketing, can be of help in making that objective true.

How to to properly conduct a strategy of social content curation

First of all, you must make sure you’re targeting the correct audience. This section of Followerwonk is a huge help in making that goal possible, and the methodology explained by Peter Bray in this post.

However, while that methodology is useful to understand your potential audience, you also need to understand a second kind of audience: the people who are able to influence the thought leaders in your niche, because nothing is truer – especially for brands in its beginnings – than that it is easier to influence an influencer via the ones who are already influencing them (sorry for the tongue twister).

Once you have determined your audience, you should map it and segment it. After these steps are complete, you can start doing Social Content Curation for real.

How can I find trusted sources of information to curate?

Resource directories and news aggregators

You can use directories like Alltop, where you can find extremely well curated list of blogs for almost any kind of topic.

You can also use curated aggregation sites like Inbound.org or Hacker News in the Internet marketing and technology fields. Sites like those exist in mostly every niche; for instance, www.mortgagenewsdaily.com is news aggregator about mortgage.

Don’t forget about how often news aggregation is conducted via newsletters, especially when it comes to very small and specific niches. Fortunately, you can rely with newsletters aggregators as Smartbrief to dig into these hidden treasures.

Finally, if you are working for an enterprise level company, you can find market content curation enterprise solutions such as Factiva by Dowjones.

Social network personalized suggestions, lists, and groups

Quality resource directories, curated news aggregation sites, newsletters aggregators, and enterprise solutions are perfect for collecting sources, but as time passes and you become more socially active, you should start paying more attention to other sources for discovering new content to curate. A few examples include?

• Twitter Stories
• Linkedin Today
• Slideshare’s recommendations
• Suggested Communities and Google+ suggestions in its Explore section
• YouTube suggestions
• And so on…

As you can see, all kinds of information is based on personalization factors. For this same reason, it is safer not to mix the use of what you are doing on your personal social profiles, or you can literally screw up the quality of the suggestions.

Never forget to log out when letting your kids watching videos on YouTube, or…

A site like Topsy, thanks to its very good internal search feature, is another great source for discovering new content to share with your audience, especially when you must to care also the “freshness” factor of your curation.

Lists, like the ones created by the users on Twitter and Facebook, Groups (FB), and Communities (G+) are usually overlooked. However, they are amazing sources of new and surprisingly good content. They are also an easy way to extend your own audience thanks to the conversations you can create there, and a really easy way of discovering the ones I previously defined as the influencers’ influencers.

The old school (still good) methodology: blogs commenter’s analysis

Personally, this is still the methodology I prefer the most.

It is not scalable and presents many defects in terms of time spent conducting a curation research, but – possibly – it is the best way not only to discover new amazing sources, but also for creating strong relationships with those same sources.

When I was more of a new kid on the block in this industry than I am now, I follwed this tactic. I was able to discover sites like SEOgadget, Distilled, and SEERInteractive, and I also created great relationships with people like Richard Baxter, Dr Pete, John Doherty, Mike King, and many others, all thanks being very active on the SEOmoz community.

How can I organize the sources I have collected?

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure,” Clay Shirky once said. And filter failure happens if you are not able to organize the sources you have collected for performing you social content curation activity.

What I am going to present is my methodology, which I do not pretend is the best one. What I know is that it gives me positive results, and therefore it may be of help to you, too.

The curator’s best friends

Google Reader and Buffer are my best allies when it comes to content curation. I use the Google Reader as the hub of all the sources I have discovered, and Buffer is the tool I prefer for socially sharing my curated content.

When curating content, it is essential to perfectly categorize the main subject of your curation interest in subtopic. For instance, I subcategorize SEO into its different facets:

• Technical SEO
• Local search
• Link building
• International SEO
• Schema, Authorship, and G+
• Etc., etc.

More importantly, you must maintain the consistency of this categorization in every platform you are saving sources; for your Pocket account, Diigo, or your own browser favorites, and not just in Google Reader.

This is how I categorize the SEO and social media topics in Subtopics

How do I curate things? Do you have an example?

The style and tone to use when doing social content curation varies depending on the social networks you are using for these simple reasons:

• Every social platform offers you different “formal” opportunities for sharing content. The character limitation of Twitter is the easiest difference you can list, but others are present.
• The users’ behavior varies a lot from a social platform to another. On Twitter, they tend to prize timely news shares; on Facebook, photos and videos; and on Google+, long forms works usually better than short ones.

What voice to use is something that you learn with the experience and the analysis of the success (or failure) of the curated content you have shared. For that reason, it is important to use shorteners like bit.ly, or to use proprietary tools like Google+ Ripples and Facebook Insights, which allow you to track the life of your shares.

You can find inspiration from people who master the art of curation. Here is a short list of “non-official curators” people and brands, who are indeed doing great social content curation:

• Avinash Kaushik and Mackenzie Folgerson on Google+
• AJ Kohn on Twitter
• Guy Kawasaki and George Takei on Facebook
• Joanna Lord on Pinterest
• Starbucks on Instagram
• YouTube itself on YouTube

What is the best side effect of content curation?

As I have said since the beginning, social content curation should be meant as a content marketing tactic to help you and your brand become a trusted source of information, and eventually a thoughtful leader, in your niche.

Social content curation can also be a great way to break the ice and start creating bonds, relations, and serendipity with other people, that can then result in future occasions for link building, social shares of your own original content, or even collaborations.

In this sense, social content curation is a great “tool” for what it is normally defined as relationship or influencers marketing, as it shares the same purpose: creating trust.

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Posted by carinoverturf

We’re continuing the trend of two index releases each month by bringing you the latest Mozscape index release today – only 15 days after our last release on February 12th! The latest Mozscape index took about 11 days to process, with a fairly significant portion crawled the beginning of February. The crawl data spans about 38 days, so the oldest crawl data will date back to the beginning of January. You can access refreshed data across all of our applications – Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

Our Big Data processing team (Martin York, Douglas Vojir, and Stephen Wood) have been working on some really exciting improvements to our processing code base reducing the length of time processing takes, as well as beginning development on a highly anticipated new Mozscape index feature: 

• The Mozscape index is created in one continuous batch processing pipeline. A massive amount of crawl data is initially downloaded which is first sorted and organized, then the computations and magic are applied. Every so often, files get uploaded in a checkpoint step; just in case something catastrophic happens to the index, we’ll be able to roll back to a fairly recent step.
  
  Recently the Big Data processing team dug through this checkpointing code to see where they could optimize – and they really optimized! The time needed to checkpoint files varies throughout the pipeline, but the longest checkpointing step used to take about 60 hours to complete… With the optimization from Doug and Martin, this step now takes on average 2.18 hours! Holy time savings!!
   
• The first few steps in processing are dedicated to organizing how the work is going to be distributed across the entire Mozscape processing cluster. These files are broken out into what are called shards and then assigned across the entire fleet of machines. Sometimes these shards aren’t always completely full; this means one machine will be all done with work before another machine. Martin revisited this code as well to see what type of optimization could be applied. With the help of our master data scientist, Matt Peters, Martin was able to improve the distribution of work, saving around 25% of time spent processing! 
   
• One feature we hear requested fairly often is including HTTPS crawl data in the Mozscape index. Good news – development on this feature has begun, and we hope to have HTTPS data included in the Mozscape index this summer! 

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

• 82,275,594,589 (82 billion) URLs
• 9,097,532,641 (9.1 billion) Subdomains
• 148,991,416 (149 million) Root Domains
• 829,267,740,331 (829 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.25% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.08% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.92% are external
• Rel Canonical – 15.43% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 73 links on it
  • 62.93 internal links on average
  • 10.33 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google’s US search results:

• Page Authority – 0.35
• Domain Authority – 0.19
• MozRank – 0.24
• Linking Root Domains – 0.31
• Total Links – 0.25
• External Links – 0.29

As you can see from the metrics above, there continues to be an increase of subdomains as we have discovered a small number of root domains that have a substantial number of subdomains associated with them. 

We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you’re ever curious about when Mozscape next updates, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.

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Posted by David Mihm

In its recent report on “Yelp’s Rocky Relationship with Small Businesses,” PBS Media Shift was the latest mainstream media outlet to cover one of the most controversial topics in all of local search: search engines’ filtering of customer reviews.

The topic first came to prominence four years ago in Kathleen Richards’ landmark piece on Yelp’s aggressive sales pitches — or extortion, depending on your perspective and whom you believe. While I was never fully convinced of corporate misbehavior on Yelp’s part, the company hasn’t done itself any favors by continuing to allow its field operatives to use deceptive sales tactics. Despite its best efforts to educate both business owners and everyday users of the site, the poor reputation of Yelp’s salespeople continues to contribute to confusion around review filtering among the small business community. I hope to be able to clear up some of that confusion with this post and offer a few tactical tips to help avoid the frustration these filters can cause.

Why review filters exist

As local search usage among the general public has exploded over the last several years, more and more directories have (rightly) seen reviews as a way to:

• Gauge the offline popularity of a business in their algorithms
• Provide better insight to searchers into the experience at that business
• Increase the “stickiness” of their sites by increasing the sense of community
• Get out of Google’s Panda/Farmer purgatory by adding unique user content

In many ways, Yelp was ahead of its time on all four of these bullet points, and as a result, it had to tackle the inevitable review spam that accompanied its popularity.  

Its answer was arguably the first widespread local review filter: an algorithm for detecting and removing spam or suspicious-looking content.  In Yelp’s own words: 

For those of you who couldn’t quite keep up with Yelp’s version of Micro Machines man, the primary reasons are:

• To make sure reviews are left by actual people (not robots)
• To make sure reviews are left by customers and not just hired third parties
• To make sure businesses don’t leave reviews of themselves

Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, recently gave his own slower version of this rationale in a company-produced video:

How review filters work

While I don’t have any detailed knowledge of Yelp’s review filter specifically, many comparable filters seem to kick into action if any of the following is present in the content of the review:

• Use of extreme adjectives or profanity in the review
• Over-use of keywords in the review
• Inclusion of links in the review

Another criterion that also tends to trigger filtering is a sudden burst of reviews preceded by or followed by a long lull between them.

Some of the more sophisticated review filters, including Yelp’s, take a look at user characteristics, too, including:

• Total number of reviews a user has left on the site
• Distribution of ratings across all of a user’s reviews
• Distribution of business types among all of a user’s reviews
• Frequency of reviews that a user has left on the site
• IP address(es) of the user when leaving reviews

“I Can See the Future of Your Google Reviews”by Margaret Shulock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at blumenthals.com

The algorithms behind review filters are far from perfect, as many readers probably know, and Yelp is far from the only local search engine with a review filter. In fact, Google+ has probably accrued more ire from business owners as a result of its filter in 2012 and 2013 than any other site.  

Unfortunately, these filters frequently:

• Lead to less-informed consumer decisions about the experience at a business
• Remove legitimate reviews, especially from less-sophisticated, less-active customers
• Discourage new users from leaving reviews

All of which leads to frustration from the standpoint of a small business owner.

Avoiding review filters

Yelp is probably the most aggressive of its peers at enforcing its business review guidelines, which also happen to be the most onerous guidelines of any local search engine.  Yelp’s filtering is so aggressive that one in five reviews written on Yelp never shows up on the site!

To sum up those guidelines:

• Don’t ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don’t ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don’t ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.

O ye business owner who disobeys those guidelines, beware!  You run the risk of a public shaming.  

Although Yelp’s guidelines are considerably more onerous than its peers’, Google+ is not far behind in stringency. However, many local search engines are far less prickly about soliciting reviews from customers, or even incentivizing them, and some (including Google) have even engaged in this behavior themselves.

For those who have been caught in the Google+ review filter, Mike Blumenthal has covered your travails par excellence and has authored a most reasonable response. Miriam Ellis and Joy Hawkins have also given excellent advice on this front.  

Review guidelines at major local search engines

Here are direct links to those guidelines at a few of the biggest players:

• Google+ Local
• Yelp
• Foursquare
• Yahoo
• Citysearch
• YellowPages.com
• UrbanSpoon
• TripAdvisor
• Facebook (Guidelines for Page Promotion; to my knowledge, guidelines for reviews have not yet been released by Facebook.)

The review filters of the future

While the search engines may throttle their level of filtering from time to time, the review filter is a local search institution that is here to stay.  

The primary methods of these filters, though, I think will change pretty dramatically. Rather than judging a review by its content or looking at website behavior (e.g. how many reviews a user has left for other businesses), the explosion in smartphone adoption is enabling a couple of far less easily-manipulated criteria to judge the veracity of a review.

• Any local search platform operated by a handset maker (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, …Amazon?) could register the device ID at the time of review and tie it to a bonafide human being.
• Any local search platform that has implemented mobile payment processing (Google, Apple, …Amazon?, any Square/PayPalHere partner) could disable the ability for a user to leave a review of a retail-category business unless he/she had completed a transaction at the storefront.

And even for those platforms without the handset or payment-processing advantage, requiring location-awareness for users of mobile applications prior to leaving a review seems like a no-brainer (which Yelp has already implemented and Google may be well on its way to doing).

For those sites that are more desktop-dependent, widespread adoption of primary social logins (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could lead to a baked-in layer of spam-fighting.  

As Eric Schmidt recently said:

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

In some industries (e.g., DUI law, plastic surgery, psychology), anonymity may be a pre-requisite for any user reviews and these local search platforms may need a Plan B. But for most industries, requiring some sort of verified social profile would solve a lot of problems.

Facebook, of course, has a huge leg up on everyone else based on its knowledge of a user’s social connections. Google+, meanwhile, could look at a user’s activity across Google’s entire range of products (web search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) to stop spammers in their tracks.  

While consumer privacy concerns around these mechanisms for review filtering may arise, many business owners would likely rejoice at a truer, less bug-ridden filtering algorithm and a more accurate and complete representation of their customers’ experience.

Well, that’s enough out of me for this week! How about you? What are some of your strategies for avoiding these dreaded review filters? What other methods of filtering do you see coming to Local Search?

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Posted by Nick Herinckx

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This is a follow-up post to my Advanced Wordpress SEO Mozinar. Thank you so much for those who joined me as we discussed the inherent SEO issues in Wordpress and how to solve them.

Wordpress SEO is an exciting topic, and I received a lot of great questions during and after the Mozinar that I didn’t have time to answer live. As I started to read through your follow-up questions, I realized that a lot of them were about the same topics, so I decided to include responses to these common questions in this post for all to see.

Of course, there are multiple ways to address these issues in Wordpress as it’s such a flexible platform. I chose to focus this post on the solutions I’ve used in the past, but please include your ideas in the comments section of this post so we can all learn from each other.

Proper permalink structure and limitations

During the Mozinar, we talked quite a bit about how you can run into significant site speed issues by having your permalink structure for blog posts start with something other than a number.

In other words, www.site.com/blog/2012/awesome-post/ runs quickly, while www.site.com/blog/online-marketing/awesome-post/ actually results in site speed issues, particularly as your blog grows. This happens because Wordpress has difficulty deciphering where in the database to pull the post from without a number in the first directory. The team at Wordpress have themselves publicly acknowledged this issue on previous Wordpress versions.

A number of listeners were quick to point out, however, that newer versions of Wordpress have actually solved this issue entirely.

Indeed, if you have Wordpress 3.3 or later, you can actually forgo needing to begin your posts with a number and use whatever permalink structure you want! No speed issues to worry about.

I didn’t mention this difference between Wordpress versions on the Mozinar, and want to clear that up here. The best practice for permalinks (if you have Wordpress 3.3 or later) is to use something like /%category%/%postname%/, or even just /%postname%/, as it is both more user-friendly, results in a more logical site hierarchy, and is also can be more SEO-friendly.

Of course, if you haven’t updated Wordpress or are stuck with an older version for some reason (needing expired plugins, significant platform customization, etc.), not starting your blog post URLs (the permalink structure) with a number actually can result in some serious site speed issues. I suggest that either a Wordpress upgrade needs to be completed, or you should consider changing your permalink structure to ensure you have a quick site for users and search engines.

Proper way to change permalink structure

What are the best steps for changing your permalink structure? Maybe you need to maintain and older Wordpress version, and thus need to update your permalink structure due to site speed issues. On the other hand, maybe you just used the default permalink structure when you built your site, but now want to change for SEO or user experience reasons.

Updating your URLs is always a delicate change that requires good planning due to the huge impact this can have on your search engine visibility. We always want to make sure that we 301 redirect old URLs to their new counterparts to not just ensure a good user experience, but to properly communicate the change to the search engines in a way that allows them to attribute rankings and link equity to your new URLs.

Without establishing 301 redirects, you can really harm your search engine visibility.

Wordpress is great in how it allows for easy URL customization due to its very powerful URL re-write controls. Unfortunately, if you change your URL permalink structure, Wordpress implements 302 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, rather than the necessary 301 redirects.

I’ve watched more than a few rankings tank due to this Wordpress quirk, and I don’t want this to happen to you!

Fortunately, there are two solutions that don’t involve you having to get crazy with redirect-rules or 1to1 301 redirects:

Solution #1: Update .htaccess file code

If you’re changing your permalink structure to /%postname%/ (and ONLY if you’re moving to this permalink structure), I recommend updating your .htaccess file to handle the 301 redirects from your old permalink structure to this new one.

I like this approach because working within the .htaccess file is quicker for your Wordpress installation, and keeps your installation from getting bloated with more plugins.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Copy your .htaccess file as backup in case something goes wrong and you need to re-upload the old one
2. Get the .htaccess code snippet you need by scrolling to the bottom of this page on Yoast SEO’s website (I have no relationship with Yoast SEO outside of being a user) and click on the orange button that says “Generate Redirects”
3. Fill out the form fields and click “Generate Redirect” when done to output the proper code
4. Copy this code and place it at the very top of your .htaccess file
5. Change your permalink structure to /%postname%/ from within Wordpress’ interface
6. Verify that the redirects from the old post URLs to the new ones are, indeed, now 301 redirects. You can do this by spot checking a your old URLs with a 301 redirect check tool like the one found here (again, no relationship outside of being a user)

This allows for a quick update to your .htaccess file without too much mess. If it doesn’t work, just change back your permalink structure and re-upload your backed-up .htaccess file.

Solution #2: Use a redirect plugin

If you want to use another permalink structure besides /%postname%/, then a simple .htaccess update is out of the picture.

Instead, I recommend using a Wordpress plugin to give you the control you need to take care of the 301 redirects. Of course, there are numerous 301 redirect plugins available, but I recommend Redirection by John Godley (again, I’m just a user and have no other relationship with Redirection or John Godley).

This plugin automatically 301 redirects URL changes while also allowing for implementation of 1 to 1 301 redirects and even the creation of redirect rules based on regular expressions! All of this from within the Wordpress interface, making it a relatively easy solution for managing a permalink structure transition.

Just install this plugin before changing your permalinks, and then once the change has been completed, verify that the 301 redirects were properly put in place.

Of course, there are multiple other SEO ramifications to consider when changing URL structure (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo for some more discussion on this), but the above solutions should cover how to properly change your permalinks for most Wordpress installations.

Multilingual Wordpress site implementations

This was a very common question I received after the Mozinar, and surrounds the best way to implement multiple languages on a Wordpress installation so that www.yoursite.com/fr/ returns French translations of your content, and www.yoursite.com/de/ returns German translations, for example.

Although Wordpress doesn’t support multilingual sites or blogs out of the box, there are multiple methods for implementing and running multilingual installations. Wordpress provides a detailed overview (including pros and cons) on five different methods to impellent such an installation themselves (just visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Multilingual_WordPress for a list of all available methods), so I won’t rehash all of their great commentary.

Instead, I’m going to review my preferred method for setting up a multilingual site, which is to include all available translations in a single page or post, and then have Wordpress automatically choose which one to display based on the language directory selected (such as /fr/ or /de/).

Solution: WPML plugin

I’ve always used the WPML plugin (no relation outside of being a user) to handle this for the following reasons:

• It allows for easy governance of all of your translated content by allowing all translations to sit within the same post page in Wordpress
• Easy to add new language variations if you want
• Automatically implements the hreflang tags on all pages, reducing any potential duplicate content issues while also following new multilingual SEO best practices
• It allows for the use of language directories, sub-domain or domains, and is thus very flexible and allows for good Google Webmaster Tools setting integration

Just visit the WPML site to purchase and for detailed configuration and installation instructions. Installation is just like any other plugin, and this is the best solution I’ve used for multilingual Wordpress blogs.

There are other ways!

I hope I’ve been able to clear up some common questions about handling Wordpress. I love the platform, but it’s not perfect and requires customization to ensure that’s it’s as SEO friendly as possible.

This post outlines what I typically do to address the topics discussed above, but there are, of course, other ways to make the changes we talked about. Please be sure to comment below and let the community know of ways you’ve been able to address the above topics yourself.

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