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We’re now into Day 2 of SMX Sydney and I finally have power so can get back into the live blogging.

Greg Grothaus from Google’s web spam team is up now to talk about Real Time Search. Greg starts by talking about Real Time Search and shows examples of what it looks like. He says events like the Iceland volcano are perfect examples of how RT search is relevant. People who are tweeting from airports about flight delays etc.

Challenges to RT Search

- Speed

- Volume

- Relevance

What makes a relevant query? Things like:

- was that an earthquake?

- did a celebrity just die?

- is Greg’s talk worth going to?

Relevant Query Signals

- model of query frequencey spikes

- modell of update frequen cies

- language models

- spam bot traffic models

If you want to see trends in RT Search, go to Google Trends.

Relevant

- regular / frequent updates, stuff that matters

- unique content: RT less interesting than original

- updates point to useful links

- followers matter less than interaction

- Content, not hashtag soup #OMG #SMXrocks #mytweets #readthis #omnomnom

Gave the example of a power outage in Palo Alto, where people have no PCs so pull out their phones and do searches in Google for “power outage Palo Alto”. Google RT Search can show them instantly information the cause of the outage etc, therefore RT search is very relevant.

Get Indexed

- make sure your tweets FB Buzz are public

- blogs – rss feed, ping API

- websites – use an XML sitemap (see sitemaps.org), specifically <lastmod>, <changefreq>

Social Search

- type in a search query and you can see what people are talking about right now about that subject.

Social Media Impact

- Global web usage is up, up, UP

- Australia has the highest time per person social media usage In.The.World. 7 hours per week??

- The impact of social media can no longer be denied and marketers need to be paying very close attention.

- Your customers are interacting more with their social network.

- Less about optimizing your content, more about getting your users to write/communicate about your brand or products.

- Think of Google Trends – use the information to your advantage.

Gillian Muesigg – CEO of SEOmoz is up now to talk about checkout process optimization.

[Editor note - I probably got more out of this session than any other at SMX Sydney 2010. Gillian is a dynamic speaker and her industry knowledge makes you question how your existing online sales procedures EVER worked before you heard her speak].

Landing pages. Don’t focus on what doesn’t work, focus on what DOES work. For example – if your child gets 4 A’s and a D on their report card. Don’t focus on the D, look at how they achieved the A’s.

Look at the big boy’s sites e.g. Amazon. They’re getting it right. Copy them.

Successful landing pages use Black or Red. Those are the colors we see first. We don’t read green, blue, or yellow. Humans see baby’s faces, then other faces, then other items. Use human images, people respond better.

Showed eBay page – focus is on price and time left in auction and buy it now. Images of the product! Make it clickable so you can see the product in detail. Buy It NOW works much better than Buy It.  Use Red with White because red with black can be seen as same color by those who are colorblind.

Clarity

- Bookstore or library
- What do you want me to do?
- When?
- Where?
- How often?

Send me to the checkout NOW says Gillian. I’m in a hurry. Dog needs walking, Kids are crying. I just wanna buy and get out. Help me do this.

Ask for the MINIMAL amount of information possible.

Gillian showed the SEOmoz landing page that scrolls FOREVER. They hate it, but it works. The long sales page CAN work. Company who developed this was Conversion Rate Experts.

Add a countdown to make it seem like a limited offer.

Separate your traffic.

Give people the ability to save their session in case they’re not quite ready to buy right now.

Email me if…. very powerful. Gives you rights to spam….er… CONTACT the customer later.

Use Game Dynamics – e.g. free shipping if you purchase more than one item.

30 day return policy is ok BUT 60 day return policy means 30% less returns!!

Get it Once – make it easy as possible for people. Get their info so when they return you have their data.

hiconversion.net – small data sets

Gillian mentioned Conversion Rate Experts (Stephen Pavlovich). [These are the guys who optimized the SEOmoz Pro landing page so successfully].

PERMIT people to visit your home page from your landing page, but don’t ENCOURAGE it.

Make the contact details easy to find. Make the HELP button easy to find.

Make people feel they are in control of the shipping and handling – reduces their risk and increases their trust.

* photo of Gillian from SMX Singapore courtesy of SearchMarketingGurus.com

Now Marty Weintrub is talking about transcient PPC campaigns.

Marty starts by saying that Sydney is blowing his mind, especially coming from Duluth, Minessota.

Real World Transient PPC Mash Up Scenarios

He says transcient PPC campaigns are like “Whack a mole” game.  Working for a large corporate is Cluster _uck. So many depts to go through

- partitioned strategy and channel tactics

- SEO cppc PR, ORM, social

- Easy to ruffle feathers

What is a transicent PR Incident?

- positive and negative short-lived incidents

Key is to Minimize Damage and Maximize Benefits, says Marty.

Wow, have realized I have no hope of keeping up with live blogging now at the rate Marty is moving through the slides. Will abandon live blogging this and update this post with the benefit of Marty’s slide deck later.

Greg Grothaus from Google is talking now about Search Engine Penalties.

Yes, Google promotes some web sites and demotes others. We sometimes penalize web sites for spam, but most of the penalties we apply relate to malware and spyware etc. rather than spam.

Greg says they update the ranking algo 500+ times a year and that number is rising.

What is NOT Spam?

- improvements to a site’s architecture

- adding relevant keywrods

- offering high quality info

- normal pr and marketing

- editorial linking to pages

What IS Spam?

Sites Positioned Above Mine

- Actually, it’s anything that violates Google’s quality guidelines. Greg then defined Black vs White hat.

“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines”. “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Spam According to Google:

- Hidden text/ links

- sneaky redirects

- schemes to artificially boost links

- off topic kws or kw stuffing

- duplicate content

- misleading content

Examples to Avoid

1) Cloaking -  IP delivery is acceptable if you’re delivering different information to different users. If you’re delivering different info to Googlebot vs real people, then you’re in trouble. If users FROM Google see same thing as Google, then chances are you’ll be ok.

2) Sneaky Redirects -

3) Mad Lib Spam – doorway pages, keywords stuffing

4) Poor Quality Links -

5) Paid Links – Google is ridiculously good at  spotting paid links.

6) Using Links – people linking to you is ok. Paid advertising links is ok. But make sure the links help uses and are relevant.

Bad links don’t have quite the bad effect on ranking that people think they do.

Google now alerts webmasters via W/M Tools if they are being penalized / banned. Even if you don’t receive that email, if you *think* you might be penalized, feel free to submit a *reinclusion request* via W/M tools. Google staff will take a look and make a decision. DON’T submit your reconsideration request until you’ve fixed the probs you think are causing the penalty.

Preventing Spam on Your Site

- hacked sites

- comment spam

- link injection

These lead to:

- unhappy users

- bad reputation

- lost traffic

- dangerous malware

Preventing spam on your site

- Use a Captcha e.g. kitten Captcha or 3+5=?

- Avoid hacking. Already compromised? Here’s how to tell:

1) Try a query like: site.example.com. au viagra

2) Look at your pages with CSS and Javascript disabled for any hidden content

3) Use Google’s W/M tools to see which queries users use to find your site.

Check your analytics for unusual queries – look at your W/M tools dashboard for top kws. If you’ve been hacked, you might see random queries like *viagra* there.

Preventative Measures

- keep your 3rd party software up to date with patched version

- use secure passwords

- if fixing a compromised site, do a clean sweep, reinstalling everythying from scratch and remove any backdoors

- escape all inputs you accept through web forms to avoid SQL injection and XSS attacks

- Skipfish web application security scanner – new automated tool from Google

- GreenSQL database firewall

Greg said that you should use Rel=canonical where possible, provided you don’t overdo it and have hundreds of pages redirecting to a single URL.

Brent told the story about how his link network was penalized and he had to wait until the issue was discussed in Webmaster World and a Reinclusion Request was submitted before the penalty was listed.

Greg stated that affiliate links shouldn’t be impacting a site too much in terms of penalties.

Somebody asked Greg about the loss of PageRank via 301 redirects, quoting Matt Cutts stating there is some loss of PR. Greg made the point that it may just be that it takes googlebot time to follow the 301s and re-index the site, so you may just be witnessing real time PR lag.

Next up is Brent Payne of the Chicago Tribune. Brent trains hundreds of journalists each year to make sure they understand how to write with search engines in mind.

Search Engine Ranking Factors, breaks down to :

Popularity

Authority

Relevance

On page/offpage/linktext/URL = main categories for ranking

So Brent reminds us there is no penalty, only a filter. Your first *penalty* is not appearing on the first page of Google!

Parameter Handling

- Use GG W/M Tools – has parameter handling option in Webmaster Tools now.

- 301 Redirects

Brent says the Tribune has a tool to do 301s/canonicals automatically. They have 50 different domains with 50 different goals so sometimes there will be duplicate content. That can cause issues for Google and so instead of 1 article being filtered, ALL articles are filtered out. To fix that, canonical tags should’ve been used.

Remember, says Brent, the pages need to be very similar for canonicals.

Sub Domains / Sub Directories

Via Matt Cutt’s blog, Google says not a huge difference, except if targeting different countries – then use sub-domains (Brent showed example question I asked in the comments!)

Domain Authority

Subdomains on Separate IP Blocks

Brent asked Google whether separate IP blocks make a difference to ranking. Response was “LOL Brent, that’s a new level of obsessing”. Brent found that quite interesting.