SMX East 2015 Resume

1. SMX East 2015 Recap A short resume of the presentations from the panel “The Latest In Advanced Technical SEO” at SMX East 2015. SMX East is the largest search engine marketing expo and conference. It is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into SEO and SEM tactics. Let's take a look at some useful advice on how to tackle complex SEO technical issues. Problem 1: Thousands Of Pages Missing From Google SERPs Even companies like IBM may experience some problems with their SEO. Christine Smith, the IBM's Search Marketing Technical Lead, presented a case study about an indexation issue with the self-support site of the company. Thousands of pages became de-indexed for no apparent reason. They were not appearing in the search results, which led to a major loss of traffic. The experts at IBM were perplexed by this, and they made SEO technical checks to try to figure out the problem. The result was the following: • Pages/URLs resolved correctly. • Canonical tags and URLs were correct. • Redirects working properly. • Robots.txt not blocking anything. What the team noticed was that only 10 percent of the sitemap URLs were showing in the results. The experts regenerated the sitemaps, which led to an improvement of the Sitemap URL indexation to 60 percent. However, there was no Google referral traffic improvement. They then contacted Google to get some help. Google checked some of the missing URLs and found they were last visited by Googlebot five months before the problem occurred, and were marked as duplicates. Google did not give a list of all affected URLs, so the IBM team could not figure out why so many URLs were flagged as duplicates when they were unique.

2. IBM team sent a reconsideration request in Google Search Console, and they hoped that the pages would soon be revisited. A month later, the issue was resolved. Traffic bounced back, but it was hard to tell what was the reason for that. Maybe it was the reconsideration request, or perhaps a normal re-crawl of the site? Maybe the improved sitemaps? Or maybe something else? The other important question is - what caused the issue? IBM team believes it was perhaps the following: • Bad site maintenance redirect or faulty redirect • Typical server response during outage: • 302 redirect to a maintenance page • Or 404 or 500 or 504 HTTP response Smith gives advice how to prevent similar problems in your company - just do site maintenance the right way. When the site is down, serve a 503 Service Unavailable HTTP response. You should do this only during planned outages. Be sure not to serve a 200 or 301 HTTP response when the site is not working because pages could be de-indexed. Presentation - Thousands of Pages Missing From Google SERPs...And How to Prevent the Problem!​ Presentation b​y Christine Smith

3. Problem 2: How to visualize SEO technical issues to clients? The second interesting SEO problem was presented by Ian Lurie. He is founder and CEO of Portent Inc. He gave an interesting idea how to present SEO technical issues to customers, which he has already tested. He suggested to use data visualisation such as Forced-Directed Diagrams. This kind understand and comprehend. The tool could be used not only as a teaching but also as a diagnostic tool. Lurie drew attention to the potential issue that creation of diagrams may cause - CPU abuse. You have to be sure that your computer is high-powered, and no other apps are running. He provided a step-by-step guide for the whole process of the visualization. Just take a look at the presentation below. visualisation of would be easier to Advanced SEO Visualization: Force-Directed Diagrams For Teaching & Analysis Presentation by Ian Lurie SMX East is a must-attend event for all marketers who want to keep up with latest SEO and SEM strategies. Speakers are selected because of their knowledge and experience, and you can be sure that you will receive the most valuable information. Read the original article at: ​http://4jvms.com/smx-east-2015-recap/