McAnerin technical seo

Technical SEOCEO Summit

Speaker: Ian McAnerin, CEO McAnerin International Inc.

Who?

2Copyright 2009 McAnerin International Inc.April 9, 2023

• YOU! (Probably)• In our experience, roughly 60% of

SEO issues can be traced to technical problems.

• Most companies face unnecessary hurdles due to technical issues that can often be fixed in minutes.

Where?


• Problems can be a single critical issue, but more commonly are a combination of several issues.

• Often an accumulation of problems results in an accumulation of distrust for the site as a whole.

Why or How?


• Accident or omission• Deliberately done to accomplish

another goal.• Software bug or hardware glitch• Technical limitation of environment• Political or management decisions.

What?


The Seven Deadly Technical Sins1. Hosting and Infrastructure2. DNS and Domains3. Errors and Redirects4. HTML Validation5. Spider Traps6. Scripting and Objects7. Geolocation / Personalization Disconnect

Hosting and Infrastructure


Small Business = LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

Medium = LAMP or IIS ClusterLarge = IIS ClusterMega = Custom OS: GoogleOS,

DynamoWhy Care?: Slow response times =

site Google doesn’t want to send many visitors to. Also slower indexing.


Multiple Servers• Rotating IP addresses (load

balancing) = many different sites = duplication.

• Edge computing can cause geolocation issues.

• Fix: detect spiders and send to a canonical site version.

Hosting and Infrastructure

DNS and Domains


• www vs non-www versions of sites• Subdomain.domain.TLD/subdirectory

www.mysite.com/stuff• Subdomains and sub-subdomains

(circular dependency)• Multiple DNS servers sometimes not

updated = weird results.

DNS and Domains


Rule of Thumb:• TLD (and ccTLD) for country• Subdomains for language or major

groups• Subdirectories for Topics• language.domain.ccTLD/topic/

page.htm• en.canada.ca/justice/

introduction.htm

Errors and Redirects


• An error page should always respond with a 404.

• Strongly recommended that you use custom error pages for usability, but watch for error codes.

• Error responses are different at directory and page level – test both.



• Fun with error pages: an intelligent error page can solve a lot of problems, such as redirecting old pages.

• Google Webmaster Tools are strongly recommended – need working error page and robots.txt file.

www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.aspOr search “robots.txt generator”



• 301 redirect (Permanent) • 302 redirect (Temporary) • 200 OK



• Parameters:• URL = http://www.ibm.com/

UAG = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

Receiving Header:• HTTP/1.1·302·Found(CR)(LF)

Date:·Sun,·14·Sep·2008·10:11:01·GMT(CR)(LF)Server:·IBM_HTTP_Server(CR)(LF)Location:·http://www.ibm.com/us/(CR)(LF)

• Receiving Header:• HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)

Date:·Sun,·14·Sep·2008·10:11:01·GMT(CR)(LF)Server:·IBM_HTTP_Server(CR)(LF)

HTML Validation


• Search engines strip most HTML code out of a document before parsing, so most HTML validation errors do not affect rankings.

• Exception: Some errors, such as a missing “>”, can kill the indexing of your page.

• Best Practice: always try to validate your code.

Spider Traps


• Spider Trap: Dead ends, such as Word or PDF documents.

• Honey Pot: PR sculpting to the extreme – creates a circular trap.

• Anchor Away: Only the first anchor text of a link on a page counts.

• Infinite URLs: Pages with more than one URL to them – canonical issue.

Scripting and Objects


• Search engines don’t run scripts.• Script that changes look of link = good. Script

that builds link on the fly = bad• Flash is not indexable. (Well, it is, but it’s best

to assume it isn’t). Most AJAX isn’t.• An Iframe is treated as a separate page –

includes are better.• Use a spider simulator (i.e. SEO-Browser, Lynx)

to test site.

Geolocation / Personalization


• A gTLD (.com, .net) is almost always geolocated via IP address

• A ccTLD (.ws, .la, .tv) overrides IP geolocation

• Duplication problem does not affect clearly geolocated sites

• Always declare language and character types on web pages.

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