1. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Bot Herding presented by Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts

2. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Duplicate Content Mitigation  Dup content is rampant on blogs. Herd bots to permalink URL & lead in everywhere else (Archives by Date pages, Category pages, Tag pages, Home page, etc.) with paraphrased “Optional Excerpt” –Not just the first couple paragraphs, i.e. the tag! –Requires you to revise your Main Index Template theme file: if (empty($post->post_excerpt) || is_single() || is_page()) { the_content(); } else { the_excerpt(); echo " Continue reading » "; }

3. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Duplicate Content Mitigation  Include sig line (& headshot photo!) at bottom of post/article. Link to original article/post permalink URL! –http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2008/06/03/syndi cating-your-articles/ –http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2008/05/brand- yourself-with-photo-sig-line

4. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Duplicate Content Mitigation  On ecommerce sites, dup content also rampant: –Manufacturer-provided product descriptions, inconsistent order of query string parameters, “guided navigation”, pagination within categories, tracking parameters  Selectively append tracking codes for humans w/ “white hat cloaking” or use JavaScript to append the codes –REI.com used to append a "vcat" parameter on all brand links on their Shop By Brand page (see http://web.archive.org/web/20060823085548/www.rei.com/rei /sales_and_events/brands.html)

5. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Pagination  Not only creates many pages that share the same keyword theme, also very large categories with thousands of products result in hundreds of pages of product listings not getting crawled. Thus lowered product page indexation.  Herd bots through keyword-rich subcat links or “View All” link or both? How to display page number links? Optimal # of products to display/link per page? Test!

6. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com PageRank Leakage?  If you’re using Robots.txt Disallow, you’re probably leaking PageRank  Robots.txt Disallow & Meta Robots Noindex both accumulate and pass PageRank –Meta Noindex tag on a Master sitemap page will de-index the page but still pass PageRank to linked sub-sitemap pages  Meta Robots Nofollow blocks the flow of PageRank –http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt- cutts.shtml

7. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Rewriting Spider-Unfriendly URLs  3 approaches: 1)Use a “URL rewriting” server module / plugin – such as mod_rewrite for Apache, or ISAPI_Rewrite for IIS Server 2)Recode your scripts to extract variables out of the “path_info” part of the URL instead of the “query_string” 3)Or, if IT department involvement must be minimized, use a proxy server based solution (e.g. Netconcepts' GravityStream) – With (1) and (2), replace all occurrences of your old URLs in links on your site with your new search-friendly URLs. 301 redirect the old to new URLs too, so no link juice is lost.

8. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com mod_rewrite – the Foundation for URL Rewriting, Remapping & Redirecting  Works with Apache and IBM HTTP Server  Place “rules” within.htaccess or your Apache config file (e.g. httpd.conf, sites_conf/…) –RewriteEngine on –RewriteBase / –RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)/?$ /get_product.php?id=$1 [L] –RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)\.htm$ /webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10001&c atalogId=10001&langId=-1 &categoryID=$1&productID=$2 [QSA,P,L]

9. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Regular Expressions  The magic of regular expressions / pattern matching –* means 0 or more of the immediately preceding character –+ means 1 or more of the immediately preceding character –? means 0 or 1 occurrence of the immediately preceding char –^ means the beginning of the string, $ means the end of it –. means any character (i.e. wildcard) –\ “escapes” the character that follows, e.g. \. means dot –[ ] is for character ranges, e.g. [A-Za-z]. –^ inside [] brackets means “not”, e.g. [^/]

10. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Regular Expressions –() puts whatever is wrapped within it into memory –Access what’s in memory with $1 (what’s in first set of parens), $2 (what’s in second set of parens), and so on  Gotchas to beware of: –“Greedy” expressions. Use [^ instead of.* –.* can match on nothing. Use.+ instead –Unintentional substring matches because ^ or $ wasn’t specified

11. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com mod_rewrite Specifics  Proxy page using [P] flag –RewriteRule /blah\.html$ http://www.google.com/ [P]  [QSA] flag is for when you don’t want query string params dropped (like when you want a tracking param preserved)  [L] flag saves on server processing  Got a huge pile of rewrites? Use RewriteMap and have a lookup table as a text file

12. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com IIS? ISAPI_Rewrite!  What if your site is running Microsoft IIS Server?  ISAPI_Rewrite plugin! Not that different from mod_rewrite  In httpd.ini : –[ISAPI_Rewrite] RewriteRule ^/category/([0-9]+)\.htm$ /index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=$1 [L] –Will rewrite a URL like http://www.example.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS& Category=207 to something like http://www.example.com/category/207.htm

13. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Implementing 301 Redirects Using Redirect Directives  In.htaccess (or httpd.conf), you can redirect individual URLs, the contents of directories, entire domains… : –Redirect 301 /old_url.htm http://www.example.com/new_url.htm –Redirect 301 /old_dir/ http://www.example.com/new_dir/ –Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com  Pattern matching can be done with RedirectMatch 301 –RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.+)/index\.html$ http://www.example.com/$1/

14. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Implementing 301 Redirects Using Rewrite Rules  Or use a rewrite rule with the [R=301] flag –RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC] –RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,QSA,R=301]  [NC] flag makes the rewrite condition case-insensitive

15. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Conditional Redirects  Conditional 301 for bots – great for capturing the link juice from inbound affiliate links  Only works if you manage your own affiliate program  Most are outsourced and 302  (e.g. C.J.)  By outsourcing your affiliate marketing, none of your deep affiliate links are counting  If Amazon’s doing it, why can’t you? –(Credit to Brian Klais for hypothesizing Amazon was doing this) –http://tinyurl.com/5ubc28

16. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Status Code 200 for humans

17. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com 301 for all bots. Muahaha!!

18. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Implementing Conditional Redirects Using Rewrite Rules  Selectively redirect bots that request URLs with session IDs to the URL sans session ID: –RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} PHPSESSID RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot.* [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^msnbot.* [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Ask\ Jeeves RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,L]  Utilize browscap.ini instead of having to keep up with each spider’s name and version changes

19. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Error Pages

20. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Error Pages  Traditional approach is to serve up a 404, which drops that error page with the obsolete or wrong URL out of the search indexes. This squanders the link juice to that page.  But what if you return a 200 status code instead, so that the spiders follow the links! Then include a meta robots noindex so the error page itself doesn’t get indexed.  Or do a 301 redirect to something valuable (e.g. your home page) and dynamically include a small error notice  (Credit to Francois Planque for this clever approach.)

21. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com URL Stability  An annually recurring feature, like a Holiday Gift Buying Guide, should have a stable, date-unspecified URL –No need for any 301s –When the current edition is to be retired and replaced with a new edition, assign a new URL to the archived edition  Otherwise link juice earned over time is not carried over to future years’ editions

22. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com URL Testing  URL affects searcher clickthrough rates  Short URLs get clicked on 2X long URLs (Source: MarketingSherpa, used with permission)

23. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com URL Testing  Further, long URLs appear to act as a deterrent to clicking, drawing attention away from its listing and instead directing it to the listing below it, which then gets clicked 2.5x more frequently. –http://searchengineland.com/080515-084124.php  Don’t be complacent with search-friendly URLs. Test and optimize.  Make iterative improvements to URLs, but don’t lose link juice to previous URLs. 301 previous URLs to latest. No chains of 301s.  WordPress handles 301s automatically when renaming post slugs  Mass editing URLs (post slugs) in WordPress – announcement tomorrow in Give It Up session

24. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Yank Competitor’s Grouped Results from Google page 1 SERPs  Knock out your competitor’s second indented (grouped) listing by directing link juice to other non-competitive listings (e.g. on page 2 SERPs, or directly below indented result’s true position)  First, find the true position of their indented result by appending &num=9 to the URL and see if the indented listing drops off. If not, append &num=8. Rinse and repeat until the indented listing falls away. Indented listing is more susceptible the worse its true position.

25. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com This isn’t really #3

26. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Nope, not yet

27. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Gone! It’s true position was #9

28. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com SEO the title of #12 to bump it up to page 1 – it will be grouped to #2. Then link to #11 and bump it up to page 1 to knock #4 to page 2

29. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com More Things I Wish I Had Time to Cover  Robots.txt gotchas  Webmaster Central tools (www vs no www, crawl rate, robots.txt builder, Sitemaps, etc.)  Yahoo's Dynamic URLs tab in Site Explorer   If-Modified-Since  Status codes 404, 401, 500 etc.  PageRank transfer from PDFs, RSS feeds, Word docs etc.  Diagnostic tools (e.g. livehttpheaders, User Agent Switcher)

30. © 2008 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Thanks!  This Powerpoint can be downloaded from www.netconcepts.com/learn/bot-herding.ppt  For 180 minute long screencast (including 90 minutes of Q&A) on SEO for large dynamic websites (taught by myself and Chris Smith) – including transcripts – email seo@netconcepts.com  Questions after the show? Email me at stephan@netconcepts.com