Below is live coverage of the Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging Best Practices panel from the SMX West conference. This coverage is provided by Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick & Keri Morgret of Strike Models.
Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.
Finished
Auto-Refresh: Off
Barry Schwartz:
1:27:57 pm
Starting soon.
Barry Schwartz:
1:28:12 pm
Barry Schwartz:
1:30:31 pm
Vanessa Fox kicks it off
Barry Schwartz:
1:31:02 pm
Barry Schwartz:
1:32:11 pm
First up is Navneet Virk, Director, Optimization, Roundarch Inc.
Barry Schwartz:
1:32:27 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:32:55 pm
Starting with an overview of the semantic web. It’s a way to assign meaning to all the data on the web.
Keri Morgret:
1:34:12 pm
Need for semantic web is helping machines to understand stuff that humans can understand but isn’t as easy for machines to figure out. Phone numbers, sizing of clothes, etc.
Keri Morgret:
1:35:19 pm
Why are we now hearing more about the semantic web since the idea has been around for such a long time?
Keri Morgret:
1:35:54 pm
It’s actually been used in academia for a while now. Why now for business? New technologies like HTML5 Commercial Benefits Machines that need this for their applications
Barry Schwartz:
1:36:10 pm
It is important to focus on this stuff now because of HTML5 markup, things like Siri, adoption by Google and others and web developers love it
Keri Morgret:
1:36:13 pm
Things like Apple Siri can really benefit from schema.
Keri Morgret:
1:37:27 pm
Key Applications Search engines – better understanding web content – smarter and guided search – enhanced result listings
Barry Schwartz:
1:37:44 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:37:46 pm
Browsers and applications: – content driven functionality – browser plugins
Keri Morgret:
1:38:21 pm
Enhanced Data Exchanges – Partner Feeds – Library databases and research Semantic themed apps – Freebase, tripit, Wolfram|alpha, etc.
Keri Morgret:
1:39:12 pm
Schema doesn’t apply to everyone. You need structured data for it to make sense to use schema.
Barry Schwartz:
1:39:26 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:40:41 pm
Three step overview: 1. Identify Structured Data 2. Define Attributes and Ontology 3. Mark-up content
Barry Schwartz:
1:40:46 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:41:35 pm
In identifying structured data: Aggregate and normalized data from various internal and external sources Assign data confidence and impact values. Examples: addresses, etc.
Keri Morgret:
1:41:44 pm
Now doing a case study for Avis.
Keri Morgret:
1:42:30 pm
This was using rich snippets. Wanted to dominate brand and brand + geography. Minimize cannibalization. Have a quick turnaround in terms of revenue.
Barry Schwartz:
1:42:59 pm
Barry Schwartz:
1:43:13 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:43:24 pm
Really interesting picture of their ontology here. Would love to hear more about this, but probably won’t in this presentation.
Barry Schwartz:
1:43:45 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:44:07 pm
They had to examine what had data that was structured, what was already ranking. Didn’t want to do more work on stuff that they already ranked on.
Keri Morgret:
1:44:40 pm
Conditional and neighborhoods were two areas they tried for. Conditional would be searches for car rental without credit card.
Barry Schwartz:
1:44:45 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:45:12 pm
They used a lot of geocode data from bing maps API.
Barry Schwartz:
1:45:34 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:45:51 pm
They had awesome results, with significant volume from “no credit card” and “minimum age” keyword segments. Semantic pages outranked existing site pages within two weeks.
Keri Morgret:
1:46:32 pm
They used a subdomain for these tests.
Barry Schwartz:
1:46:59 pm
Barry Schwartz:
1:47:03 pm
60X ROI!
Barry Schwartz:
1:47:25 pm
Semantic Markup is no longer about competitive advantage, it is about competitive parity
Keri Morgret:
1:48:06 pm
Next up is AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old.
Keri Morgret:
1:48:37 pm
He’ll be focuses on rel author. His twitter ID is @ajkohn
Barry Schwartz:
1:48:38 pm
AJ Kohn, Owner, Blind Five Year Old (@ajkohn)
Barry Schwartz:
1:48:59 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:49:36 pm
36% to 400% higher CTR studies have shown.
Barry Schwartz:
1:49:39 pm
Why should you use rel author? – Higher CTR – More Traffic – More Exposure – More Fans and Followers – PErsonal Branding – Reduce Plagiarism
Keri Morgret:
1:50:28 pm
History of Rel attribute, developed in early 90s. It’s a relationship between two documents/pages.
Barry Schwartz:
1:50:59 pm
He said lets fast forward 10 years and look at KFN, KHTML Friends Network (forward?)
Barry Schwartz:
1:51:12 pm
The problem with this is it was confusing
Barry Schwartz:
1:51:24 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:53:33 pm
There are a TON of ways to verify authorship. Can be confusing.
Barry Schwartz:
1:53:54 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:54:07 pm
Some ways: name and email, Google+ badge, ?rel=author parameter, three-link monte.
Keri Morgret:
1:54:34 pm
The three-link Monte method
Keri Morgret:
1:55:15 pm
First link is a rel=”author” link. He has a rel=”author” pointing to his about page.
Barry Schwartz:
1:55:16 pm
Barry Schwartz:
1:55:39 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:55:44 pm
Second link: rel=”me” link. Use a clean URL for your Google plus link.
Barry Schwartz:
1:56:07 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:56:14 pm
Third link: go to google plus profile, do a rel=”contributor-to”.
Keri Morgret:
1:56:47 pm
There’s a rich snippets testing tool, AJ has a bookmarklet for it.
Barry Schwartz:
1:57:45 pm
Sometimes things do not work, rel collision, confusion between rel author and publisher
Keri Morgret:
1:57:57 pm
AJ’s post about it is at http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/rich-snippets-testing-tool-bookmarklet
Barry Schwartz:
1:57:57 pm
Keri Morgret:
1:58:40 pm
Don’t freak out about the extracted reach snippet data for the page warnings.
Keri Morgret:
1:59:09 pm
How long does it take to show up? It varies.
Barry Schwartz:
1:59:17 pm
There is no way to tell how long it will take to show up
Barry Schwartz:
2:00:05 pm
Keri Morgret:
2:00:10 pm
AJ is now examining the anatomy of this in the SERP.
Barry Schwartz:
2:00:46 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:01:01 pm
You can only see author stats if you login to the account of that author
Barry Schwartz:
2:02:49 pm
Now he talks about AgentRank as a reference to how it might influence your rankings. He likes to call it Author Rank
Barry Schwartz:
2:03:40 pm
Could this be bigger than Panda? He is arguing it might be.
Keri Morgret:
2:04:54 pm
Dennis G is now up.
Barry Schwartz:
2:05:06 pm
Keri Morgret:
2:05:14 pm
Looking at how to be more creative.
Barry Schwartz:
2:05:33 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:06:18 pm
Non English languages Google will not show rel author
Keri Morgret:
2:06:39 pm
he’s seeing google.com with rich snippets for author, but not in google.nl and other foreign Google sites. So his Dutch post snippet shows in google.com but not the other google sites.
Barry Schwartz:
2:07:25 pm
Keri Morgret:
2:07:52 pm
The tool for checking the implementation is not always showing the right information. Check everything!
Barry Schwartz:
2:08:40 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:08:45 pm
He shows my blog post on how people are spamming rich snippets
Keri Morgret:
2:08:46 pm
There is a lot of spam showing up in rich snippets right now.
Barry Schwartz:
2:08:59 pm
http://www.seroundtable.com/fake-google-rich-snippets-14492.html
Barry Schwartz:
2:09:08 pm
He shows some examples of spam
Barry Schwartz:
2:09:17 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:09:23 pm
It’s working but for how long…
Barry Schwartz:
2:10:12 pm
Some sites take reviews from different sites and fake it
Barry Schwartz:
2:10:23 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:10:29 pm
Some hide the code
Barry Schwartz:
2:10:42 pm
Keri Morgret:
2:11:05 pm
Aside from spamming, what creative things can you do?
Keri Morgret:
2:11:52 pm
He’s giving an example of Ugly Christmas Sweaters.
Keri Morgret:
2:12:43 pm
He changed his rich profile picture too often and it was gone for several weeks.
Barry Schwartz:
2:12:52 pm
He changed his profile picture several times over three weeks and he ended up losing his profile pic for a bit and now it is back
Barry Schwartz:
2:13:13 pm
Keri Morgret:
2:13:49 pm
Dennis gives a plug for Vanessa’s book and mentions her website didn’t have a rich snippet.
Keri Morgret:
2:14:18 pm
She just implemented it, too early to get any good data from it.
Keri Morgret:
2:15:20 pm
Not nearly enough book publishers are using rich snippets.
Barry Schwartz:
2:15:54 pm
Barry Schwartz:
2:17:05 pm
Q&A Time — FYI, next sessions an hour and 15. 3:30pm-4:45pm Building Buzz On Facebook: Getting Liked & Shared by Barry Schwartz Making Data From Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools Actionable by Avi Wilensky
Barry Schwartz:
2:17:38 pm
Keri Morgret:
2:17:46 pm
And if that session isn’t of interest, come see me speak on negative keyword research at 3:30. 🙂
Keri Morgret:
2:20:51 pm
For companies, use rel publisher and connect that to your brand page.
Keri Morgret:
2:23:59 pm
Make sure your profile picture on G+ passes a safe search feature in order to show up.
Keri Morgret:
2:27:39 pm
AJ: Google is an omnivore when it comes to data. They’re taking it in a lot of formats. People still trying to figure out what format(s) to use. For small sites, use what you can implement. Larger sites, go for schema.org
Keri Morgret:
2:32:19 pm
No co-authorship right now.
Keri Morgret:
2:33:38 pm
Can you implement a rel author on a press release? Panel isn’t immediately sure, but doesn’t think so.
Keri Morgret:
2:35:04 pm
Rel author on Flickr. People haven’t tried it yet.
Barry Schwartz:
2:36:43 pm
My question was on do pretty people have higher CTR with rel author, see http://www.seroundtable.com/google-authorship-image-optimization-14697.html
Keri Morgret:
2:43:33 pm
It’s the last question, winding this up.