iWebEarth

Next week is going to be a humdinger. If you’re in the Bay Area, here’s what I think you should do:

- Attend Google I/O. If you’re a developer, trust me, I think you’ll get something out of the conference. Just check out the list of sessions, for one thing. The price is $400, but if you have a student ID the price is only $50. Need an extra incentive? I’ll be doing a site review session so you can tell your website and get a review and advice about your site. I plan to bring along several smart folks from my team to help on the panel. I really think this conference will be worth your while.

- Is $400 (or even the $50 student rate) too much to pay? Then come to WordCamp 2009 in San Francisco on Saturday, May 30, 2009. It costs $25 that includes a T-shirt and lunch. I’ll be speaking at WordCamp as well.

- Maker Faire is next weekend (May 30 & 31st). I love Maker Faire, so I’ll be there to soak up the fun. If you’re a geek in the Bay Area, you don’t want to miss Maker Faire–again, trust me on this.

Bonus recommendation: If you’re willing to look two weeks out instead of one week, SMX Advanced will be in Seattle on June 2-3, 2009. I think there’s only ~50 tickets left, so I’d sign up soon. I’ll be there and I’m really looking forward to it. Danny Sullivan will repeat our You & A session where both Danny and the audience ask me questions.

I think each of these events should kick butt in slightly different ways, so I hope you can make it to some of them. If you can make it and you see me, walk up to say hello and chat a little bit!

Posted by great scott!

This week’s Whiteboard Friday addresses everybody’s new favorite topic: Google’s “new” treatment of nofollow and how it creates a massive reservoire of lost link juice.  Everybody under the sun has written about this (SEOmoz included) in the last couple of weeks, so we decided to do a little roundtable (squareboard?) pow-wow on how best to deal with the problem.

Rand is joined by Nick Gerner, Ben Hendrickson, and Lindsay Perkin-Wassell to discuss possible solutions for pluging this nofollow leak.  The video is a bit longer than usual, but it’s an important discussion. Those of us who have seen great results with nofollow-based PageRank sculpting now need to consider what impact (if any) this new announcement will have on our sites and those of our clients, so let’s commence the weighing of options…

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – How Do We Plug the Nofollow Leak? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Technical note: There was a slight problem with the tape that mangled the first few seconds of Rand’s introduction, hence the abrupt opening. You may also notice some strange compression artifacts due to the same problem. Also, since I didn’t have enough individual mics for everyone, the sound is a little bit worse than usual…my apologies. -Scott

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Posted by randfish

There are some very different schools of thought out there regarding 404 error code pages. Some SEOs recommend:

• Never allowing them – 301′ing every error page back to the home page or an internal category level page to preserve the maximum amount of link juice (in case someone links to a broken URL)
• Letting any erroneous/mistyped URL 404.
• Something in between – 301 some kinds of 404 pages and not others.

I’m generally in this last group. I think there are times when it pays dividends to let a URL 404, both for accessibility and search engine reasons. I also don’t think it’s intuitive or semantically accurate to 301 every 404 page on the site – it certainly pays to build great custom 404s (good piece with examples on that here), but to simply have your homepage appear when a URL is mistyped or a link breaks doesn’t send the right message to users or search engines.

When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page:

A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this)
B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic
and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach

It’s OK to let it 404.

Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they’re for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don’t have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they’ve essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.

What to do?

Our conundrum contained a few critical elements. We don’t want the search engines wasting bandwidth crawling and indexing junk pages (especially since the site is monstrous and needs that crawl/index power to flow to the right sections). We also don’t want users to have a bad experience and while the error pages effectively communicate the right message (there’s no results for this query), semantically the pages should really 404. Finally, of course, we don’t want to waste any of that precious link juice that’s flowing to some of them.

The solution turned out to be a compromise – we’d 404 the pages, but keep track of those that earned links and any substantive level of traffic and try to build better experiences for those pages (sometimes a 301 to a sub-category page, sometimes to a results listing and sometimes we’ll actually add content to those pages and make them resolve). We hope that this lets us have our cake and eat it, too.

We’d love to hear your thoughts around 404s and SEO in general, as well as on this specific scenario (and others like it). 1000s of SEOs are smarter than 2

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