This post is some time in the making as I have done a little here and a little there. The site review session at PubCon was great and it showed how quickly a site can be picked apart with a few tools. You will find some specifics, but it was hard to keep up with the notes.

The panel was a “Dream Team - the Who’s Who of search.” per the session details and there aren’t to many people that would disagree. When you have Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, and Danny Sullivan giving you advice you better listen. So before I bore you to death here are my notes site by site:

promoportal.co.uk

PromoPortal wanted to know what can we do improve the URL structure. Basically they felt the urls held the site back from ranking. They said there are lots of things controlling the urls and we can’t do a url rewrite with .NET.

Greg started off with a simple solution, get rid of .NET, from there he said that he urls are not ideal, but you can still make the site rank.

From there the basic issue was duplicate content. All of the products are on other sites with the same description. Matt Cutts said that the site needs to focus on why a visitor would go to that site and add some value. Also don’t try and make duplicate content not look duplicate.

stretcher.com

Stretcher - Its a homegrown site that has been online since ‘96, with all the original content. Really happy with our Google traffic but have been blacklisted by Yahoo and want to know how we get off this.

The panel looked into a number of things and really didn’t come up with an answer as to why Yahoo had an issue with the site. Some things that did come up that are worth pointing out; the site gets their content stolen a lot and should use the DMCA to go after the sites that steal the content, next they needed to break up their site map as it had thousands of links…make it useful, and that is it. Like I said Tim from Yahoo couldn’t give an answer as to the issue so not much of use to the owner.

ezrarealty.com

Ezrarealty - We are trying to generate leads off the web (high rise condos focused). He wanted to know what could be done to improve the SEO.

Greg suggested tweaking the titles a bit by adding condos or high-rises. Also make sure the keywords are at the beginning, had the brokerage name first. Tim made a good usability point that the navigation links on the homepage don’t really pop out and there isn’t a good “call to action”.

Then back to the basics, high-level competition so they need a lot more links. Also should add condos term to internal links. Matt was “a little hung up” on the backlinks. The site owner had been part of a linking program and Matt told him that wasn’t a good idea. He also pointed out all of the link exchanges and asked “why bother”. Tim also commented about the about the amount of reciprocal links. Greg gave some tips for finding some links and then said “The real estate market is crap for reciprocal links”. Also talked about how many outbound links they had, over 2000 per MSN…again stop trading links.

From there they moved onto content. The site owner should blog about Vegas and build natural links. There is so much to write about in Vegas, just be creative.

Last point from Greg - In the real estate market it is very obvious when people are stuffing the anchor text.

bodyabcs.com

bodyabcs.com wants to be #1 for San Diego chiropractic.

Todd said to start by putting that in your title tag and then Danny added to use it on your homepage as well. They pointed out more title tag issues. Also Matt said to”ditch the cartoon font”, (please read that again, it’s getting old looking at real estate sites that look like they are targeting 5 year olds)

Todd brought up that the majority of the links seemed to be link exchanges. Greg said to focus on links from local companies anytime you are working in a specific geo location. Matt said that he understand the temptation to trade links, but don’t even bother with the link exchanges. Some places to get local links: article in newspapers, local ezines, local blogs, and associations. Also was told to check out the Google local business center and Yahoo! YP as well.

A warning from Yahoo (sound like AA’s issue?) Be careful when linking to a chiropractor in Florida from your San Diego site because there probably isn’t a reason for it. Then Greg made a little jab at Tim by saying “Is that a decision you guys should really make?”.

realestatelicense.com

realestatelicense.com was doing ok on Google but having problems on Yahoo.

This almost made me fall off my chair. The very first response came from Greg and he said “The first issue is that Yahoo hates the real estate market” (the next part is close as I was laughing to hard to hear it all) But it is a heavily abused industry. It does SEO the way it was done in 1998.

Greg also pointed out that they should remove the Java Script menus.

Tim pointed out that if you have pages in the index you’re not penalized. He asked the site owner are you just not ranking?

realestatelicense.com said That they basicaly have no rankings and the site has been around since ‘98.

Greg asked about backlinks. Tim felt the site looked like a template and could be viewed as very similar across the network. He also wanted more unique content across the site.

Then Matt busted the guy. “Let’s talk frankly. How many sites do you have?” In the end Matt said the guy owned 58+ sites and that he should spend more time creating one good site. Greg then suggested blogging. Take feeds from your blog and put it on the main page so the content is always changing.

Final thought from Matt was to be careful on your cross linking.

compuplus.com

It was the person’s brother in law’s site and he wasn’t an SEO person. It is a very low margin site.

Main issues. Showed that all the direct links to the products are images. There wasn’t even ALT tags. The url structure was a mess. The session id’s could be seen by the bots. Keyword stuffing in the urls, need to make them more compact. Again all descriptions supplied by the manufacturer so they are duplicate content.

Todd had dealt with this in the past and suggested rewriting the most important items first and that it would be a nice increase to traffic even with only rewriting 500 of the best sellers.

Matt actually liked their backlinks, true natural links. The only real issue is on page which is great. Change the url keyword and drop the session IDs. Also try to get real reviews that are unique. Mat said with a few small tweaks it could make a big difference in Google.

hifisoundconnection.com
hifisoundconnection.com has been online for 5 years. Back-end provider and are SKUs are driven dynamically.

Greg said that the url structure was ok, but would have the same issues as we have been describing today. Has a client that blog’s about the unique products they sell and link back to where you can actually buy it. People aren’t always going to enter through the front door.

Homepage issue, when I type in hifisoundconnection.com and it changes to hifisoundconnection.com/Shop/Control/fp/SFV/30046.

Matt liked the Entrepreneur writeup, said to highlight it. Also agreed with Greg that a blog should be added. Gave a couple of examples, What’s a head unit? How do I install something?

Danny found that one he got to some of the internal pages that the only way to get to some pages is through a drop down. Google can’t get to some of your pages.

suddenlyslimmer.com

suddenlyslimmer.com: I am new at this and I just need help.

This site was a mess and still ranked. Not even worth spending time on this as she didn’t even know how to edit any pages other than the homepage. So she had stuffed every keyword in micro text on the homepage. Big mess and she needed to hire someone.

customautotrim.com

customautotrim.com: I’ve had this site since ‘97. I converted it from all static to about 85% dynamic now.

The site had some older sections that had duplicate content. Also the titles where a little long and repetitive. Site owner said some of it was dynamic, Greg said that he needed to control what generates it. Needs to be more specific and shorter.

Danny pointed out that the site could be dominating in Froogle.

Had some small links that looked hidden at the bottom of the page told to clean that up. Also to remember that the Meta Description is important to get click throughs. Matt pointed out to make sure that you can get back to the homepage from every page.

And that’s a wrap…wow that took longer than I thought. Would love any feedback and/or questions you might have.