Garaphernalia 7.5 – Page 13 – Thoughts on podcasting, media and everything else

How I Survived (and Thrived) Under Google Panda

Post author By Gary
Post date 8/18/2011
4 Comments on How I Survived (and Thrived) Under Google Panda

I don’t do anything for SEO. Not only do I not do anything, but I actively advocate doing nothing for bloggers (and only bloggers. I think SEO is really important for some businesses).

After the Google Panda update hit the I didn’t really pay much attention because there wasn’t much I could do about it. Over the last several months there have been other updates from Google all directed at weeding out content farms and putting an emphasis on quality content. During that time I was running around Europe and I didn’t look at the analytics data for my site for several months.

Well, the last few days I’ve been diving back into my analytics and to my surprise, my total search engine traffic has almost doubled since the Google Panda update!! Assuming that August numbers continue on the current path over the next two weeks, my total search traffic will have DOUBLED since the end of 2010.

What did I do to get this increase in traffic?

Nothing.

I didn’t do a god damn thing.

I do not claim to be an SEO expert, but I can guess as to why I would have benefited under Panda and other sites would have suffered. Here are some of the things which might have helped me:

I have good links. I have links from some very high quality sites like BBC.com, TheAtlantic.com, CNN.com, etc. These are HUGE signals to Google that my site can be trusted.
I haven’t pissed Google off. I don’t sell links, I don’t do sponsored posts. I don’t do anything black hat or really even grey hat.
I have real readers. I have over 1000 followers on Google Buzz, 700 on Google FriendConnect and over 14,000 on Feedburner (which is owned by Google). I have a large social media footprint on Facebook and Twitter as well. About 1/3 of my search traffic is people looking for me or my website. My biggest source of traffic is organic traffic of people coming directly to my site. All of these are signals to Google which says “this site is the real deal”. Oddly enough, everything I’ve done to make my site Google-proof I think helps me in the eyes of Google.
I almost never use nofollow links. Why link to something in the first place if you don’t trust it? Too many nofollow links probably smacks of gaming the system. I link freely and openly.
I post only original content. 99% of the images on my site are photos I’ve taken. I don’t republish things from other sites, even if I wrote it. (I have republished a few of my articles on other sites, however).

I’ve done a few site wide changes that will probably help things even more. I’ve improved page load time and fixed how I do titles for blog posts. Again, even those changes aren’t SEO changes per se, they are just good practices for any site.

I think the solution to doing well under Panda is simple: have real readers with real social signals, and don’t try to game Google.

Blogging

Knee Deep In Blog

Post author By Gary
Post date 8/17/2011

I’ve spent the better part of the last 2 days working and fixing stuff on my site. Over time a lot of things have crept up and have made the performance of my site slow. While not perfect, I think I’ve fixed most of the big stuff that was causing problems.

Fixed image loading. I have a very photo intensive site. That isn’t going to change. One of the big problems was that on my front page, I display the last 7 of my daily photos. The problem was, it was loading the 1000px wide images which is shown on the page and displaying it as a 500px wide image. Because we are talking total area, each image was 4x larger than it needed to be. Multiply that by 7 and you have a big problem. My friend Jason made some quick changes that made it only load 500px wide images. Smugmug image resizing made it easy to do. This was far and away the biggest improvement I’ve made.
Moved to W3 Total Cache. I was using WP Super Cache, but W3 Total Cache seems way better. It not only caches files on the server site, but it will also do browser caching and minify your scripts. Unfortunately the aforementioned daily photo script is really fussy and breaks when it is minified, but other than that I have much better caching going on.
Removed scripts. I got rid of a bunch of stuff including the Compete.com and Quantcast analytics scripts. Frankly, they weren’t helping Compete actually calculate my traffic (off by a factor of 4) and no one has ever cared about Quantcast that I know of. I also got rid of the Google FriendConnect widget and the Google Translate widget. Stats showed no one was using the translate tool and I have no idea what FriendConnect is for. I also got rid of the LinkedIn button when I saw I got only 7 visits from LinkedIn over the last month.
Deleted unused code. I had accumulated some code which I had commented out over the years. I figure if I can go a year without noticing it, I probably don’t need it.
Implemented Asynchronous scripting. I’ve noticed several times when I’d try to load a page and it was hanging trying to load Google Analytics or the Facebook widget. I replaced the code so that it loads asynchronously. That means the page wont stop loading to wait for that script to load. This is actually a pretty big deal.
Removed extraneous images. When my site was built, they put a my logo at the bottom. Why? I have no clue. Dumb spot for a logo. It was just another image that had to be loaded on every page. Gone!

I also spent time tweaking my Smugmug site. I set default thumbnails for each gallery, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it really is. Not every image makes for a good, square thumbnail. By picking images which make good thumbnails, I think I made the overall photo site a lot cleaner. I also changed the Smugmug theme and redid my bio at the top of the page.

Using the Google Page Speed tool, I was able to compare my site’s performance vs other big sites. My performance is comparable or better with Mashable, Techcrunch and the Huffington Post. It isn’t perfect but it seems to be well within the range of acceptable performance. It scores an 88 or 89.

I still have some things I want to do to improve performance:

Fix my daily photo script. This thing has been flaky since I got it. If I can fix it, then I can minify my scripts, CSS and HTML.
Tweak the social media buttons. All these Facebook, Twitter Google and StumbleUpon buttons come at a cost. I’m not sure I’m implementing them in the most efficient manner or even in the most strategic manner.
Move background images to Smugmug. The few images my WordPress theme uses are hosted on my blog. There aren’t many and they are small, but it would be more efficient to move them to my photohosting site. It would cut down on bandwidth and http requests for the web server.
Clean up the database. I have a plugin for WordPress I run about twice a year. It will delete the old versions of posts which clog up your database. I need to do that soon.
Institute CSS Sprites. I have no idea how this is done, but it would combine all my background images into one image, cutting down on bandwidth and http requests. This is pretty low on my list as few sites seem to actually do it.

I added a xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml” xmlns:og=”http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/” to my < html > tag, which solved my problem of duplicate titles showing up when I posted a link in Google+.

I also changed the way titles on my posts render. They were showing the name of the blog in each title and I removed that so now it is just the title of the post and nothing else.

I’ve also been going through my Google Analytics data for the first time in months. Actually that is what spurred the performance binge when I realized a full 1/3 of my search engine traffic comes to my front page. I figured if I improve front page performance would give me the biggest bang for my buck.

Even though my search engine traffic is at an all-time high, most of it is from people searching for me. I have only 12 internal pages which get more than 100 visits per month from search engines. Most of those pages are old pages from when I started blogging and tried doing link building for individual articles.

One mention on even an semi-good blog seems to drive more traffic over longer period of time than a good article will drive from Google. I’m still getting over 400 visits per month from my guest post on the Four Hour Work Week site.

I had comments from people about the crazy images I have the bottom of my pages. I switched services from Wahoa to MGID. That got rid of the disturbing images that sometime show up and it also increased my traffic. I get about 300-400 visits per day from them.

Surprisingly enough, one of my best sources of traffic in terms of quality is Lonely Planet. They don’t drive a ton of traffic, but what I get spend a lot of time on my site and they view a lot of pages. I’ve been making an effort to tag my posts correctly so they can pick them all up.

I have a lot more little things to do over the next few weeks.

Blogging

Get featured on Everything Everywhere

Post author By Gary
Post date 8/8/2011
2 Comments on Get featured on Everything Everywhere

Yesterday I launched a new feature on my site with a guest post from Anil Polat and his trip to Northern Iraq.

This is something I’m hoping to make a weekly feature. I’m looking for people with interesting stories to tell. It might be a trip or it might be something more big picture.

I thought of how to best feature other travelers and decided not to do the typical email interview because those have gotten very stale and boring. I might do a few here and there just to mix things up, but I’d rather have people tell their own stories.

Here are the criteria I’m laying down:

You don’t have to be a blogger to participate. Any good story is welcome.
You should have photos available to add to your post. Video is also welcome.
The story doesn’t have to be a travel narrative. It just hast to be interesting. Your latest press trip might not be that interesting.
You should shoot for at least 1,000 words. I will almost certainly reject anything significant shorter than that.
If it smells like an attempt at just getting some keyword stuffed SEO links, I will reject it. Don’t worry, there will be links.
I practice blatant cronyism. If I know you or if you’ve been a frequent commenter on my site, your odds of getting accepted are greater.

Just email me with your idea and we can go from there.

Blogging

How to do Sponsored Posts without selling your soul

Post author By Gary
Post date 8/6/2011
4 Comments on How to do Sponsored Posts without selling your soul

Before I go into a discussion of sponsored posts, which is bound to generate some discussion, I think it best to clarify some terms.

The term “sponsored post” has been usually used in reference to a post which is written and supplied by the company which is doing the sponsoring. All the blogger has to do (and all the sponsor really wants them to do) is cut and paste the article and hit submit.

The company which has been one of the engines behind the sponsored post movement has been Izea.

I don’t think that publishing sponsored posts is an evil thing, but I do think it is unwise for the long term health of your blog. The reason it isn’t wise is that you don’t want to develop a reputation of having your editorial control for sale.

There are however I think ways for companies to provide sponsorship at the post level which are not as onerous. There are two good examples I’ve seen.

The first is with Mashable:

They have a regular series of posts about start up companies. The post is sponsored by Microsoft, but they are not providing the content. I think this is a great example of how company can sponsor a post, or a series of posts, without the blog giving up control over content.

Another good example is a recent post I’ve seen on The Art of Manilness:

Again, they have a consumer brand which is sponsoring the post, but they are not providing the content.

In both examples, there are no links to the sponsor in the actual post. The only links are in the header. The companies which are sponsoring the posts may or may not be looking for an SEO edge, but it isn’t obvious if they are. There are no obvious keywords which are being linked and in both examples the companies are well known brands.

A second example also comes from Mashable. Every week they have a post which thanks their sponsors:

The thing to note with this method is that there is no real content per se, but they also aren’t giving up control. I have also seen Chris Elliott do something similar on his site.

I think we need to develop a new use for the term “sponsored post”. What has been done is really more of an advertorial. You occasionally see those in magazines.

A sponsored post in the literal sense is just what it is: someone sponsoring a post.

I currently have no plans for doing sponsored posts, but if I did I’d use the following guidelines:

I retain all editorial control. Anything that is written will be in my voice. No advertorial posts.
The company has to be one that I’d want to associate myself with. I wouldn’t accept a sponsorship from a company doing apartment rentals in Europe for example.
It should pass an SEO smell test. If it looks and sounds like the company is just interested in a keyword stuffed link, I will not work with them.

I think there is a way for companies to sponsor posts, but it isn’t the way companies like Izea are pushing it. Retain creative control and work with companies you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be associated with.