This document discusses common technical mistakes in SEO. It covers errors related to sitemaps like having 404 errors in sitemaps or forgetting video sitemaps. It also discusses site speed issues like large page load times reducing conversions. Social media and link building mistakes are examined such as not implementing OpenGraph or customizing embed codes. Problems with robots.txt files and over-restrictive firewalls are also summarized. Finally, new technologies like AJAX implementation and responsive design versus mobile sites are evaluated for common pitfalls.

1. Common Technical Mistakes
WILL CRITCHLOW

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Fremdscham
One of those amazing German words that we
have no direct translation for

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I hope this presentation will be entirely
about being embarrassed for other people.
Because of course we wouldn’t make
these mistakes, would we?

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My biggest?
sudo chmod 775 –R /.
Instead of
sudo chmod 775 –R ./

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Sitemaps
Speed
Social
Spiders
Science fiction

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Common
Sitemap Errors

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Not keeping your sitemap “clean”
Duane Forrester, Bing
Some other guy

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Don’t allow 404 errors into sitemap

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https://seogadget.co.uk/check-your-xml-sitemap-errors/

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Don’t forget video sitemap etc

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Priority is relative and only a
suggestion
This goes to 11. There’s
no need for your sitemap
priority to do the same

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Common Site
Speed Errors

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First mistake: not caring

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100ms

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2 frames of a movie

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For reference, that’s here

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To here

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Quarter of a blink (literally)

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1% drop in conversions
[Source: Amazon - http://highscalability.com/latency-everywhere-and-it-costs-you-sales-how-crush-it]

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Here’s Walmart’s version
[Source: http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slides-showing-how-page-speed-
correlates-to-business-metrics-at-walmart-com/]

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It’s not just about server response
time

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Measure “time to first byte” with pingdom
DDoS
1,222 ms

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We’ve had good results with
Cloudflare

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Diagnose quick wins with pagespeed
https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

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Segment site speed with Google
Analytics

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Social and link
building
(technical)
mistakes

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Default widgets don’t link to your profile pages
These widgets don’t link
to your profile
Add regular links as well
to help your profile pages
rank for branded
searches

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Not implementing OpenGraph

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Not implementing Facebook verbs
Image: http://foliovision.com/2011/10/24/searchlove-seo-london-2011-day-one
Mat Clayton is your man for learning about FB integration.
We have videos: http://www.distilled.net/store/sl-winter-2011-
videos/

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Not customising embed codes
• Don’t use standard embed codes within third party
players – no links
• Place custom codes underneath video embed codes
• Use iFrames
• Partial Anchor Text
<iframe
src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/VIDEOID?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"
frameborder="0" width="640" height="360"></iframe><br><span
style="font-size: 12px;">Linkbuilding protips from <a
href="http://www.yourdomain.net/">Brand and partial anchor text</a>
Ensure your embed code will build links back to your site, not the video hosting
company

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Not cross-browser testing your
linkbait
We had one piece where the share buttons were cut off in Internet Explorer.
We’ve also had journalists fail to link to things because they were still using IE6!

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Common Robot
Exclusion Errors

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Know the difference? Read about
REP
Robots.txt
X-robots
Noindex
Nofollow
Response codes

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Monitor your robots exclusion
I use www.serverdensity.com [disclaimer: we invested in
them]

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Monitor for changes to robots.txt

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Spot the accidental inclusion of
noindex

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More SEO monitoring tools and tricks
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-monitoring

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Watch out for over-aggressive
firewalls
[Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smenzel/2297233080/]

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Common
Mistakes with
New
Technologies

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Failing to use AJAX properly
Came across a site
where this was the
entire html after
stripping out js.
No title.
No content.
What is this? 2002
Flash?

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What the #! were you thinking?

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PushState is better

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Obligatory G+ complaint – follow me!
Dear Google. WHAT is
this?

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Responsive design beats m. mobile version

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Avoid splitting link juice / duplication

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But also get more links
This is the
“desktop”
experience I got
when I followed a
link someone else
shared from a
mobile

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rel=canonical
Risky. Didn’t Rand talk about this?

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hreflang – what is rel=canonical supposed to
mean?
[Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tpcom/3246953870/]

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Re-write your visible URL to the
canonical
Do this after your
analytics pageview call

53. Thank You
Any Questions
WILL CRITCHLOW

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Will Critchlow
Founder – Distilled
will.critchlow@distilled.net
@willcritchlow
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