SEO Tips from the man who wrote the book on SEO

by Rob Stokes

GottaQuirkers – Today we have something really special for you.
Acclaimed SEO guru Aaron Wall agreed to answer some of the questions we’ve been pondering. Enjoy!

Q). Your thoughts on how links to a subdomain influence the rankings on the primary domain, if at all? Also, what is the best way of connecting the two in the eyes of the search engines?

A). I believe link flow into a subdomain helps establish the trust for the main domain, and believe the opposite is true as well. I think the key to using subdomains effectively is to have a reason to use subdomains that is a logical break in the content. Some examples:

• Let’s say you have another important keyword area you want to compete in, but want to keep it organised and separate from your main site. If it is hidden deep within the bowels of your site, it is harder for people to remember it and view it as its own domain. But set that same idea up as a subdomain and now it has a bit more leverage because you can more easily recycle some of your link sources (like the Yahoo! Directory) and because it is easier for people to remember.
• The break points might be chosen because of different formats (video, audio, etc.), different levels of interactivity (tools, utilities, & software), or different target markets (language, geographic, developers vs. web designers, investors vs. customers, etc.).
• Anytime the content becomes heavily user driven, like with a forum, I think it helps to put that up on a subdomain if it is one piece of your site.
• I also put our SEO training course on its own subdomain because it requires different permissions to access than the regular site.

I think subdomains should typically link back to the main domain. I think the inlinking to the subdomains from the main domain should be proportional to how much you want to promote those subdomains. If you want to give the subdomain a lot of exposure link to it sitewide. If you do not care to give it much exposure then just link to it from one section of the site or from the homepage.

Two more tips with subdomains:

• If a merchant's regular site is boring but they write a really compelling blog it probably makes sense to put the blog on their main site so that link does not have to flow cross site or across from a subdomain to the main domain. Make sure there is something interesting and remarkable on every domain and subdomain.
• Most large companies should use at least 1 or 2 subdomains to help clog up search results for their brand to help drive down any negative feedback that may have otherwise surfaced on brand related search queries.

Q). How does Google index pages with no links to them? We recently ran this experiment and much to our surprise, the page was indexed. Was it the PPC ads? Was it Gmail? Any advice?

A). I think it may come from AdWords (they have to crawl for landing page quality) and it may come from them being a registrar as well. They know when domains are registered. They likely try to crawl many newly registered domains so they can footprint them (thin affiliate, redirect, PPC lander page, real site, etc.). A site with no inbound links can rank for mildly competitive brand & domain name related queries.

Q). Does PageRank shaping using nofollow links actually provide real SEO benefit and if so, what are your suggested best practices?

A). I have not used it enough to say that I have the conclusive answers to it, but I think it can be helpful if done wisely, and liked the way Matt Cutts answered it here:

"Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect.
My analogy is: suppose you've got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.
Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level."

As an extension of what Matt said, my SEO tools section shows over 40,000 natural backlinks in Yahoo! Site Explorer. And your SearchStatus plugin shows nearly 20,000 inbound links. If your team and my team did not create such tools our sites might be stuck at the $100 level rather than getting up to the $300 level. And often it only takes one or two good ideas to really create a big difference and move up to the $300 level. As far as best practices for using rel=nofollow on links, I would say:

• Use it on links pointing to unimportant administrative pages that might otherwise suck up PageRank (shipping, privacy, cart, etc.).
• Do not use it if you are a thin affiliate site and/or are using aggressive SEO strategies, as use of it is a way to tell search engineers that you are indeed aware of SEO.
• Where possibly rely on smart site structuring to flow PageRank to the most valuable pages rather than needing to filter excessively with nofollow.

Q). For multinationals who want to rank well for local searches in each country they operate in, is there an effective alternative to building locally hosted, country specific sites with unique content (because this is a mission!)?

A). If you read the leaked Google quality guideline documents one of them stated that the UK version of Amazon ranking in the US should be deemed as not relevant. For that reason, it is likely beneficial to create local domains for the local markets (and host them locally too, just in case you get any boost out of that as well). If you do not want to create many separate domain names for the different markets you could use subdomains like de.mysite.com and fr.mysite.com to try to rank in those countries. But even in that case you would still want to try to host those locally and get them local links to help get local exposure.

A more short term solution to ranking in international markets might be finding international listing websites that allow you to sell your products or advertise your services on their websites.

Q). If you were to suggest a percentage split between the importance of links vs. on-site SEO in achieving a good ranking, what would it be?

A). I believe it is entirely dependent on topic. And there are a many different ways to look at it too.

• Link strength of competitors - If the competitors are weak you may not need much links or content to get indexed. If you are competing against TechCrunch or other link-rich competitors you are going to need some serious link weight to compete.
• Have lots of content? - If you have a lot of content it may take a lot of link equity to get it all indexed.
• Keyword tail - For some keywords there is a long keyword tail. For other terms (and industries even) there is virtually no keyword tail. If your industry has no tail you may not need a lot of content to compete. In fact, beyond sales copy, the only other type of content you may need in those types of industries is content that acts as a link building magnet, like your SearchStatus plugin has. :)

Straight from the horse’s mouth! Thanks for the insight Aaron – valuable as always.

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