Enterprise SEO Chaos - SMX Advanced 2016

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The Fun And Challenges Of Enterprise SEO
ENTERPRISE SEO CHAOS

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Every Little Thing Is A Big Issue

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Because Everything Is Done On A Huge Scale

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IBM has ~378,000 employees and operates in over 170 countries.
Enterprises Are HUGE!

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Collaboration Is The Key

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So Is Education

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There’s So Much Opportunity

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Everything Has To Work Together

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This Is How It Really Is

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There’s A Lot Of People

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You Can’t Do Everything Yourself

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Changes Happen Slowly

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You Have To Set Expectations

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Did we buy a cell phone company?
Why Don’t We Rank For “Mobile”?

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That = optimize those 500k pages
You Can Do That By Tomorrow Right?

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Enterprise Practices

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“Cute name that no one will ever search for”
We Should Call This Product:

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Wrote Confusing Marketing Jargon

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It’s Not Official If It’s Not A PowerPoint

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And It Better Have A Visual

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Bring It Up And It’s Your Problem To Fix

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Whose Job Is It To Do That?
Who Has Access To That?
Is Anyone Doing That?

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Our Standards Say What? Who Updated Those?

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<meta name="keywords"
I Really Have To Write Meta Keywords

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Doing Things In The Wrong Order

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Meetings For An Internal Link?

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Have to fight for internal links, and good luck getting one group to
canonical or redirect a page to another.
Internal Competition For Keywords

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Duplicated Efforts

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Meetings In General

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Focus On One Thing At A Time

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And Moving Forward

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Without Fixing Things Left Behind

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Consultants

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They Can Do A Lot Of Harm

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Everyone’s An Expert

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Automated Reports

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No Real Insights

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Big Promises

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IBM Doesn’t Rank For “blah”
But XXX, an IBM Company ranks for “blah”
They Don’t See The Whole Picture

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Like keywords in the URL are the most important ranking factor.
Bad Information

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Installing Google Analytics will increase rankings.
Weird Things

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You Want To Make That Full Size Hero Image 2x The Size?

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What’s Next, 10x Hero Images?
Hey, it worked for content.

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Like orange is the best color for a CTA, and suddenly every CTA
needs to be orange.
They Say One Thing To The Right Person

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Some Are Good

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The Problems With An Enterprise Website

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Or it’s wrong
Remember, Everything Has To Work Together

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Various Numbered Subdomains (Different Servers)

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Which is okay, if the redirects, internal linking, and canonicals are
all set properly and the page doesn’t move.
Our Last Hop To Numbered Subdomains Uses A 302
302

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And CDNs

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Migrate, Reverse Proxy, ???
Bringing A Domain In

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Each have their own problems.
Multiple CMS Systems & Hard Coded Pages

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200 Status Codes Instead Of A 404

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Masking Unfriendly URLs So They Fit In The Architecture

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Anyone Ever Tried Deploying HREFLANG Alternate Tags
Across Multiple CMS Systems?

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HTTP, HTTPS, m., trailing slash, without a trailing slash, index
pages, URL parameters. I’ve seen 24 versions of the same page.
So Many Versions Of A URL

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No Canonicals
Canonicaled to homepage
Copied a page without changing
Trailing slash issues
Index page issues
Typed the canonical wrong
HTTP/HTTPS issues
Canonical Issues

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And m. paths
One CMS Made All Links Relative, Including Canonicals

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I’ve seen as many as 14 hops.
Wow The Redirect Chains

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Made The Menu With JavaScript

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Developers Love Angular

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So Many URL Parameters

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http://ohgm.co.uk/host-a-website-inside-robots-txt/
And We Didn’t Put A Website In Our Robots.txt

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This prevented hundreds of thousands of pages from being
indexed.
Single URL Parameter Setting In Google Search Console
Was Set To Pagination

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HTTP, HTTPS, WWW, WWW-##, subdomain., m., each folder, etc.
How Many Profiles In Search Console?

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How Many 404’s In Google Search Console?

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One Of Our Internal Tools Only Added Data From One…

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We Could At Least Throw Some 418s
Google.com/teapot

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Redirected Wrong In Every Possible Way

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Redirected To One Version, Canonicaled To A Second,
And Internally Linked To A Third

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Redirected An Entire Domain To A Single Page

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Redirected All To Homepage

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Who Remembers Blekko?
Failed To Redirect

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“I Put In Redirects For Those 35 Pages”
Well, you got 14 right.
People Don’t Always Check Their Work

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Failed To Bring Over Content

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Stripped Good Content Down To One Paragraph

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Just Remember…

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Because Everything Is Done On A Huge Scale

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Spell Everything Out

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Constantly Educate

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