Pubcon Las Vegas SEO
A Pubcon conference was held recently in Las Vegas and included a site review session featuring key players from Google, Microsoft, and Bing including Matt Cutts, Derrick Wheeler, and Nathan Buggia. While multiple sites were reviewed with the usual intermediate/advanced recommendations being pointed out, there were a few note worthy issues that came up which I’d like to highlight.
Keyword stuffed footer links are potentially harmful: The Chief of Webspam at Google pointed out that multiple uses of keywords in anchor text, particularly in the footer, can be construed as being potentially manipulative. I always run across sites with a ton of sidebar or footer links which contain potentially spammy. I would link to one but I don’t want to reward them with link juice 
. Most of the time these sites have an extremely large footer with upwards of 10,20,30+ links. Yahoo has also come out and previously stated that removing potentially “spammy” footer links will have a positive impact on rankings. Additionally, some sites which are “sandboxed” or penalized because of manipulative footer links.
Website load times can effect organic rankings: Matt made it a point to communicate that website load times can have a positive impact on rankings. He also pointed out that sites will not be penalized for having slower load times. The idea of website load times effecting organic rankings mirrors the engines’ desires to deliver the most relevant results as well as a good user experience. Website load times not only effect SEO results, but can have a lasting impact on other metrics such as bounce rate. A recent study was conducted by Akamai that outlines user opinions and behavior regarding webpage load times. The results were very surprising. A user in 2009 expects a site to load twice as fast it did in 2006. Additionally, almost 50% of users surveyed expect a site to load in less than 2 secs. Now here’s where the bounce rate factor comes into play. 40% of will bounce from a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Over 50% of shoppers surveyed claim fast page load times are important to their loyalty to the site.
In conclusion, avoid repetitive use of keyword anchor text in your footer and make sure your site loads in a timely manner. It doesn’t matter if your ranking #1 for a competitive keyword, if your site take too long to load, you won’t see the desired outcome out of that visitor. This is especially relevant to E-commerce sites.
Have “spammy” footer links worked for you? Do you think all this hoopla about page load times is nothing but a waste of time? Feel free to post your comments or email them via webmaster at SEO lair dot com.
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- Ways To Reduce Your Web Page Load Time
- Seo For Beginners: Keyword Density
- Showing Success Outside Of Core SEO Metrics
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Sounds like it’s time to get rid of the el cheapo shared hosting and buy a dedicated server. Get rid of spammy footer links? NEVER
I think load times are definately a factor – it’s all about user experience with G. If a site can’t serve up content fast enough or not at all that isn’t good user experience and could potentially be detrimental to your serps.
Well he is saying they won’t be affected if they are slower but they won’t get a boost like the ones that are faster. Sounds like double talk to me. It makes sense for us to concentrate on quick load times.