Interview with Aaron Wall - SEO Consultant and author of the SEOBook

[The Sandman]

The Sandman submitted a new Article:

Interview with Aaron Wall - SEO Consultant and author of the SEOBook

Most forum owners/administrators are familiar with SEO guru Aaron Wall and his extremely successful SEOBook, and those who aren't probably should be. After all, what forum administrator isn't interested in increasing traffic and/or monetization of their forums? To be successful - to build an online presence and thrive against competition - requires an understanding of the way search engines work as they drive traffic to our sites. Things change quickly in the world of search engines - it takes constant updating to stay current. That's the beauty of Aaron's ebook - it keeps up.

I'd like to thank Aaron for participating in this interview with the Admin Zone! Thanks Aaron!


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Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I think that my "About Page" http://www.seobook.com/about.shtml says more than most about pages do. I am just an SEO and internet marketer, though.


What is your educational background?

Two weeks after high school I joined the military. Ick. After about 6 years of that I realized I would rather play on the web. I have attended college as a student, but have guest lectured, and have been offered the opportunity to become an instructor.


Arguably, the one thing that most launched your career in SEO was the publication of your ebook, SEOBook. Where did you the idea to write this book first originate and how did it evolve? Did you expect it to be as successful as it has been?

Thre big factors I noticed were:

• client service based business models generally don't scale very well
• blogs and editorial sites (perhaps unfairly) got a disproportionate amount of link equity relative to their content quality, so I started a blog to ensure I got more links than I deserved
• SEO Books were claimed to be perpetually outdated, so maybe I could create an ebook and update it often

It has been far more successful than I would have guessed it to be. I think being interested in and passionate about the topic is what lead to that.


What did you do before you wrote this book? How did you get from there to here?

After I got out of the military I had another job for 8 months. I quit it when I was making $100 a month off affiliate marketing. I had a few clients as well, but never too many because I was not very good at business when I first got on the web,...

Read more about this article here...

 

[JNudda]

Great interview. Nice job TAZ.

 

[shellspeare]

Great read, plenty of food for thought there.

Thanks!

 

[djbaxter]

Hi, Aaron. I wonder if you could clarify a few points:

I have not dealt with SEO on forums too much, but four things that are worth taking a look at are:

• minimizing duplicate content from alternate archive formattings, printer friendly pages, reply to post links, etc
• using mod rewrite for clean descriptive URLs

1. What do you think is the impact of duplicate content filters for a forum and what are your recommendations for minimizing duplicate content? Won't a decent robots.txt file take care of the "problem"? Given the reality that the worst case scenario for duplicate content is that only one of those URLs will be indexed, why is it even a concern?
   
2. Your comment on mod_rewrite emphasizes two things: "clean" and "descriptive". Not all forums are created equal in this respect. To me, "clean" means eliminate session IDs and multiple parameters for spiders. I've argued repeatedly that vBulletin already does this out of the box and for that reason mod_rewrite is unnecessary and will not help. As for descriptive, again using the example of vBulletin but applicable to other forum software, the average thread title is not especially keyword rich and converting that to so-called keyword-rich URLs is not going to benefit you very much (look at the "New posts" list for any forum you'd care to choose. A third issue with mod_rewite proponents is the insistence, against all current evidence in my opinion, that static (HTML) pages are more better for SEO than dynamic pages. Can you comment on this?

Is SEO necessary for forums? Isn't having lots of good quality content enough?

Some forum owners I know take care of both of the above ideas. In addition some of them add useful tools, write featured editorial content, and other stuff like that to make the site more sticky. The problem with forums is not a lack of content, but more a sea of content, and that the best threads get lost in that noise.

What would you say is the best way to avoid losing those best threads?

There has been a lot of discussion and speculation about Matt Cutts announcement about stepping up the war on link buying and selling. What do you personally see as the fallout from this announcement and how has that changed your SEO strategy? What other Google changes in recent weeks or months have significantly altered your approach to SEO?

The fallout I see is that many people are going to start misusing nofollow, but those who are in the know realize that this scaremongering is only occuring because links work so well to move rankings. My strategy has not changed at all based on the recent scaremongering. Generally I try to create sites that I think are best of class and bolt on viral marketing ideas. It has been what I have been doing for a few years though.

Why do you call this "scaremongering"? Google has never made a secret of it's fight against PR selling and other "link schemes", and my take on this is that they are getting progressively better at detecting and discounting such practices. This is just one more step in an ongoing campaign. Admittedly, it's not a reason for panic or jumping out of windows since it isn't anything new, but in reality anyone who relies on buying links for SEO or selling links to pay the rent is (a) fighting a losing battle, and (b) capitalizing on a short-term solution to begin with. Your comments?

Any comments/suggestions about the SEO (or lack thereof) of the Admin Zone that might be of instructional for other forum administrators?

You 301 redirect those outbound ads... that probably passes out a lot of your link equity.

Can you expand on what you mean by the term "link equity"?

Do you advise a different or additional SEO strategy for MSN and Yahoo? Or is it fair to say that one should optimize for Google and let the other SEs follow along?

You can get a bit spammier with your links on the first two, and their algorithms are a bit more literal. For my best keywords sometimes I make a second more literal page for those two and then have a less literal page that targets Google. Most of my site strategy for SEO revolves around Google though.

Are you talking here about redirecting specific spiders to specific pages, different from what the human visitor will see?

What is your take on the importance or lack thereof of DMOZ today? Google has not apparently updated their DMOZ feeds, other than search, since February 2006. Is the Google Directory dead? What is the role of other directories in today's effective approaches to SEO?

Good directories sell links for far less than they are typically worth (especially when you consider how the web is waking up to the value of links due to AdSense). The top few in each vertical and the top half dozen or so general ones like the Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, JoeAnt, BOTW.org, Gimpsy, and GoGuides are probably worth buying into.

In view of Cutts' recent comments on paid links in general and more specifically how directories are viewed in that context (see How to report paid links: Update, May 12th, 2007), do you see any value at all in the hundreds or thousands of directories based on scripts like phpLD? Do you differentiate at all between niche directories and general all-purpose directories?

What are the most common mistakes you see people make when it comes to their SEO strategy?

Thinking SEO is a cure for a bad business model and bad product.

...or poor content and poor on-page optimization?

 

[hiphopave.net]

A very to-the-point SEO reference guide. Another excellent interview!

 

[downloads]

Really worth to follow the guidelines. But everyone of us would be interested in the present updations of the seobook. As SEO is an ever refreshing act one should be ready to face the challenges.

Thanx TAZ for the excellent interview.

 

[seobook]

What do you think is the impact of duplicate content filters for a forum and what are your recommendations for minimizing duplicate content? Won't a decent robots.txt file take care of the "problem"? Given the reality that the worst case scenario for duplicate content is that only one of those URLs will be indexed, why is it even a concern?

For the most part that will work, but there still is the risk of spreading link equity across two URLs (even if one is blocked by robots.txt someone may still cite that blocked version, and that link equity goes nowhere).

Your comment on mod_rewrite emphasizes two things: "clean" and "descriptive". Not all forums are created equal in this respect. To me, "clean" means eliminate session IDs and multiple parameters for spiders. I've argued repeatedly that vBulletin already does this out of the box and for that reason mod_rewrite is unnecessary and will not help. As for descriptive, again using the example of vBulletin but applicable to other forum software, the average thread title is not especially keyword rich and converting that to so-called keyword-rich URLs is not going to benefit you very much (look at the "New posts" list for any forum you'd care to choose. A third issue with mod_rewite proponents is the insistence, against all current evidence in my opinion, that static (HTML) pages are more better for SEO than dynamic pages. Can you comment on this?

I think vbulletin is ahead of a lot of the other forum software. As far as keywords go, most threads may not be real descriptive, but as long as some percentage are I think that is a gain worth doing, but it does depend on how clearly we communicate and how much the lead moderators are involved with starting some of the conversation.

What would you say is the best way to avoid losing those best threads?

Make best of threads, complement great threads by getting them exposure on an associated blog, sticky some of the how to guides or posts linking to best related posts at the top of related forums.

Why do you call this "scaremongering"? Google has never made a secret of it's fight against PR selling and other "link schemes", and my take on this is that they are getting progressively better at detecting and discounting such practices. This is just one more step in an ongoing campaign. Admittedly, it's not a reason for panic or jumping out of windows since it isn't anything new, but in reality anyone who relies on buying links for SEO or selling links to pay the rent is (a) fighting a losing battle, and (b) capitalizing on a short-term solution to begin with. Your comments?

Even the best products lose without market exposure and marketing. Everyone has to start from somewhere. No market is fair, etc.

Recently someone posted on my blog that buying a Yahoo! Directory listing is dumb because Google is going to stamp out all paid links. That shows how effective the scaremongering is...one of the few links Google recommends is being described as worthless by people new to the field.

The reality of it is that most every link is in one form or another paid...you either pay for it with money, brand building, quality content, social interaction, or some combination of the above.

Can you expand on what you mean by the term "link equity"?

PageRank or equivalent.

Are you talking here about redirecting specific spiders to specific pages, different from what the human visitor will see?

No. I wouldn't do that without disclaimers and warnings and etc. What I was saying is make your normal page focused on Google. If that page is not ranking as well as you would like in the other engines try to make a second more literal page that uses the target keywords more frequently. Call the follow up page something like history of, faqs, q and a, or some other phrase that allows you to have an excuse to have that second page without it seeming too spammy.

In view of Cutts' recent comments on paid links in general and more specifically how directories are viewed in that context (see How to report paid links: Update, May 12th, 2007), do you see any value at all in the hundreds or thousands of directories based on scripts like phpLD? Do you differentiate at all between niche directories and general all-purpose directories?

As far as general directories go, I generally only submit to about 3 or 6 off the start and then I may submit to another dozen a month or two later. If I have an old high trust site I might be willing to go further to gain a bit more anchor text and/or PageRank to help internal pages rank and flow more link equity deeper into the site.

I also submit to a few decent niche specific directories.

...or poor content and poor on-page optimization?

that too.

 

[djbaxter]

Have you seen this study?

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results...

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

• Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
  
• Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect.
  
• Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
  
• Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
  
• Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
  
• The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
  
• It's no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

Does that alter your take on mod_rewrite solutions?

 

[seobook]

Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites.

Some people use URLs as link anchor text...just a few good source links like that with strong anchor text can make a big difference on relevancy

Keywords in the URL improve information scent in the SERPs and increase CTR of a listing. That is why many AdWords ads include a few keywords after the root URL on the URL line.

 

[djbaxter]

Some people use URLs as link anchor text...just a few good source links like that with strong anchor text can make a big difference on relevancy

I would suggest that is pretty rare. Frankly, I just don't see this as a very helpful strategy for forums, especially for vBulletin which already provides good URLs for spiders.

I'm not entirely anti-keyword URLs. I have some directories where the URLs to categories are keyword URLs. I even have a few original articles on a static HTML site that use keyword titles. I don't think those gain much of an edge but it probably doesn't hurt. But in those cases I have very carefully tailored the keyword URLs to correspond to selected keywords, not www.yourforum.com/hi-im.new-here.html or www.yourforum.com/can-someone-help-me.html.

 

[sanjayadhakal]

Thanks for the great Interview....as always !

 

[Namesniper]

Great interview

 

[Red_wolf]

The Sandman when r u gonna to interviewed Me
haha Kidding...Good interview

 

[Swerve1000]

Great interview. Good to get the inside track on things.

 

[projectego]

Great interview! It's really really cool to learn more about the man behind SEOBook.

 

[Bhavesh Ramburn]

Great interview. I got the book and it is massive and really worth it. As I am not used to reading 200+ pages on a computer I printed the whole book and binded it at work. Well in 2 binders as it was too heavy to carry on train.

Very good work on the book. I hope there could be a section forum optimisation other than having unique urls. As table content = not so good.

 

[hiphopave.net]

I read the SEO book. Kind of hard to avoid the ads all over the internet for it. Gotta say Aaron, brevity should be your friend (=p) but really great information there.

I certainly wouldn't mind your expertise taking a pen to resolving duplicate content in VB forums.

 

[djbaxter]

Aaron really doesn't do forums. But the duplicate content issue with vbulletin is pretty straightforward - it's all done via robots.txt:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* 
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admincp/
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /calendar.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /editpost.php
Disallow: /joinrequests.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /member.php
Disallow: /misc.php
Disallow: /modcp/
Disallow: /moderator.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /online.php
Disallow: /printthread.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /sendmessage.php
Disallow: /showgroups.php
Disallow: /showpost.php
Disallow: /subscription.php
Disallow: /subscriptions.php
Disallow: /threadrate.php
Disallow: /usercp.php

User-Agent: msnbot 
Crawl-Delay: 10 

User-Agent: Slurp 
Crawl-Delay: 10

 

[dvduval]

In view of Cutts' recent comments on paid links in general and more specifically how directories are viewed in that context (see How to report paid links: Update, May 12th, 2007), do you see any value at all in the hundreds or thousands of directories based on scripts like phpLD? Do you differentiate at all between niche directories and general all-purpose directories?

For virtually any script there are good examples and bad ones. There are some well maintained directories out there, both general and niche. There are also some that are not very well maintained. The same can be said for forums. What Matt Cutts said was that directories need to have a good review process, and not accept just any link, and that charging for the review process is okay, but alluded to the idea that some other forms of charging customers may not be okay.

 

[seo_consultant]

Great post! I love SEOBook forums, and I am a regular. Thanks Aaron

Joel McLaughlin
seo consultants & search engine optimization marketing