SMX Live: Making Data From Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools Actionable

3:58:30 PM Barry Schwartz: We start in two minutes...

4:01:01 PM Barry Schwartz: Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester)
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Tiffany Oberoi, Software Engineer, Google (@tiffanyoberoi)
Myron Rosmarin, President, Rosmarin Search Marketing, Inc.

4:02:31 PM Barry Schwartz: Some funny comments...

4:03:49 PM Barry Schwartz: Tiffany Oberoi, Software Engineer, Google (@tiffanyoberoi) is up first

4:04:05 PM Barry Schwartz:

4:04:16 PM Barry Schwartz: She is short, so no one can see her.

4:04:55 PM Barry Schwartz: She works in search quality, and is directly related to making sure spam reports, etc go into Google Webmaster Tools.

4:05:36 PM Barry Schwartz: google.com/webmasters

4:06:00 PM Barry Schwartz: If Google can help webmasters make better sites, then Google can have better content in their index for their searchers.

4:06:28 PM Barry Schwartz: #1 thing to look at is the message center, google is trying to tell you something...

4:06:56 PM Barry Schwartz: It tells you if your site was hacked, malware, status of reconsideration requests, violations, security updates and crawl errors.

4:08:15 PM Barry Schwartz: Make sure to forward these messages to your email address

4:08:55 PM Barry Schwartz: #2 Analyze your content... You can look at the dashboard, compare what people are searching for vs what your content is...

4:11:12 PM Barry Schwartz: Give information that users are looking for, so look at search queries. do the user queries match content, optimize your content to show up for the right content.

4:11:41 PM Barry Schwartz: 3) Look at the links to your site, you can see the anchor text, who is linking to you, etc.

4:12:34 PM Barry Schwartz: Look at HTML suggestions under the diagnostics section

4:13:18 PM Barry Schwartz: It will show duplicate content issues, meta descriptions, title tags, non indexable content.

4:13:39 PM Barry Schwartz: 4) Submit a Sitemap file

4:14:26 PM Barry Schwartz: 5) Set your geographic target and your preferred domain

4:15:23 PM Barry Schwartz: You can also set crawl rates here

4:15:38 PM Barry Schwartz: 6) Tell Google about your URL parameters, such as dynamic URLs.

4:16:34 PM Barry Schwartz: 7) Let Google help you move your site, change of address tool.

4:17:13 PM Barry Schwartz: 8) Check crawler access, test your robots.txt file, generate a new one or remove URLs

4:18:08 PM Barry Schwartz: 9) Identify and fix crawl errors with the Crawl Errors time.

4:20:08 PM Barry Schwartz: 10) Fetch as Googlebot

4:20:36 PM Barry Schwartz: She also shows the +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools. She siad they are not a ranking factor right now.

4:22:03 PM Barry Schwartz: Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager, Bing (@DuaneForrester)

4:22:10 PM Barry Schwartz:

4:22:59 PM Barry Schwartz: He is showing off Bing Webmaster Tools live.

4:23:52 PM Barry Schwartz: He spends a lot of time not on the dashboard page. If you see cliffs in the page, take notice... SLumps can be bad.

4:24:09 PM Barry Schwartz: You can give third party users access and limited access to Bing Webmaster Tools

4:24:47 PM Barry Schwartz: There are controls in here that can kill your web site, so be careful who you give access to.

4:26:18 PM Barry Schwartz: They have blogs, forums, support email and help pages

4:26:51 PM Barry Schwartz: He then he goes on to the traffic section..

4:27:32 PM Barry Schwartz: The bing traffic report shows if they trust you are on, it shows average impressions, average clicks and so on

4:28:01 PM Barry Schwartz: So your average position shows how much google trusts you for a keyword

4:28:16 PM Barry Schwartz: Is that improving or not?

4:29:53 PM Barry Schwartz: He shows how you can click through from the keyword to the page, so you can get more info

4:30:31 PM Barry Schwartz: He then moves to Crawl tab

4:30:43 PM Barry Schwartz: Shows pages crawled and crawl errors

4:31:30 PM Barry Schwartz: You can of course submit your sitemap here. But you need to have a clean sitemap. Make sure your URLs are clean. 1% threshold.

4:32:46 PM Barry Schwartz: You can control crawl settings, based on time of day

4:34:42 PM Barry Schwartz: There is also a check box to tell Bing if there is AJAX and HTML 5 with hashtag URLs on the site.

4:35:23 PM Barry Schwartz: You can block and remove URLs

4:35:41 PM Barry Schwartz: You can submit URLs as well, but up to 50 per month and 10 per dauy

4:36:25 PM Barry Schwartz: This puts the URL directly into the Bing index, it shows up in seconds in the search results.

4:37:54 PM Barry Schwartz: That is all for Bing

4:38:44 PM Barry Schwartz: Myron Rosmarin, President, Rosmarin Search Marketing, Inc. is next up on how he uses this data.

4:38:56 PM Barry Schwartz:

4:40:07 PM Barry Schwartz: iVillage is allowing him to use their data

4:41:39 PM Barry Schwartz: He looks at webmaster tools as diagnostics, performance and control panel features

4:42:16 PM Barry Schwartz: Performance metric measures how well am I doing. Visitis, keywords, etc.

4:42:37 PM Barry Schwartz: Diagnostics helps you see if something is wrong

4:43:00 PM Barry Schwartz: Control panels gives you controls, inputs, switches and knobs

4:43:28 PM Barry Schwartz: Reporting vs Analysis

4:43:42 PM Barry Schwartz: Reporting is pulling data and making them pretty

4:43:53 PM Barry Schwartz: Analysis is making sense of that data a

4:45:33 PM Barry Schwartz: Diagnostic data

4:46:22 PM Barry Schwartz: Six principles

4:47:19 PM Barry Schwartz: Numbers without something to compare them to don't mean much.

4:47:32 PM Barry Schwartz: Everything is relative

4:48:14 PM Barry Schwartz: He shows samples charts of ivillage stats...

4:49:12 PM Barry Schwartz: The pages crawled per day, slipped in the past month. But over the past 6 months, it increased. At the same time, it took more time to index the pages. There was a 57% increase in the time GoogleBot spent crawling the site. That is a story that didn't look good, but turned out to be a good story.

4:49:37 PM Barry Schwartz: Analyze the data at a level of granularity. It is about the nit and gritty.

4:50:30 PM Barry Schwartz: There were problems with duplicate content issues, according to Webmaster Tools. But about 45% of the problem, was one specific area of the site. Then another 20% was URL duplication. Both were very easy to fix.

4:51:00 PM Barry Schwartz: Pull the data at appropriate time intervals. Weekly is a good time interval for most sites.

4:52:31 PM Barry Schwartz: Download everything... You need more sample of data, so store it all. The data in the tools, the data is around for 5 weeks. Bing is around 6 months.

4:53:36 PM Barry Schwartz: Not everything is a problem... Some things look like problems but are not. Some problems are out of your control and will be fixed without your doing.

4:54:54 PM Barry Schwartz: He gives an example...

4:55:33 PM Barry Schwartz: Since you have limited time and resources, you need to decide what you put your resources towards.

4:55:55 PM Barry Schwartz: He references Panda... maybe you were hit by accident and Google has to fix something...

4:56:01 PM Barry Schwartz: That is all for Myron

4:56:14 PM Barry Schwartz: Vanessa Fox is showing us a couple things...

4:56:19 PM Barry Schwartz:

4:57:50 PM Barry Schwartz: She shows some of her spreadsheeets

4:58:20 PM Barry Schwartz: She matches up the export of WMT data and Google Analytics data

4:58:56 PM Barry Schwartz: They will cluster keywords into groups and then show impressions, CTR, etc. for categories of queries

5:00:07 PM Barry Schwartz: She also shows how she organizes sitemaps by templates and then she shows indexing by sitemaps

5:01:07 PM Barry Schwartz: You can mash up a lot of this data... errors, page speed, indexing, etc. And to see this over time, is nice.

5:02:33 PM Barry Schwartz: Q: Does Bing warn webmasters if their sitemaps are clean... (that was my Q)

5:03:57 PM Barry Schwartz: A: There is no warning, it is not that clear. The larger the sitemap, the larger the variable. There is no error message that says we do not trust your sitemap.

5:06:03 PM Barry Schwartz: People give feature requests...

5:07:01 PM Barry Schwartz: Someone wants an API

5:10:35 PM Barry Schwartz: Google said they currently DO NOT use +1s for ranking purposes despite what others have said.

5:10:50 PM Barry Schwartz: Um, see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1140194 and a lot of blog posts implied they do.

5:11:01 PM Barry Schwartz: Okay, all done. Good night, see you tomorrow.