10 Questions on SEO with John Carcutt from MediaWhiz
August 6, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik
In this interview of the PalatnikFactor.com interview series we’ll be talking with John Carcutt, the SEO manager at MediaWhiz and an ex-colleague of mine at MoreVisibility. John is also currently the co-host of Webmaster Radio’s show “SEO 101” and has been in the industry for the past 12 years.
Q: John, thanks for taking the time to do this interview with me. I think, as many people do, SEO is still growing in terms of people getting into it, as well as the demand for it. What do you think is the state of the industry as it is now and going into 2010?
Thanks for asking Pablo.
Well, SEO as an industry is growing steadily. I’m not going to go so far as to say it has been recession proof, but experienced SEOs I know who may have been looking for work in the past year had no trouble finding it.
It’s true that many, many more people are jumping on the SEO bandwagon and the field is starting to feel a bit crowded. The issue is that so many of the new SEOs are just tacticians, it is still rather rare to find someone who’s been in the field long enough to have a real handle on strategy. I’d recommend someone wanting to get into the field to work for someone else or an established firm for a while first, preferably with an old timer willing to and able to share some knowledge.
As for as 2010, the need and desire for SEO is only going to get stronger and the new SEOs are only going to get more experienced. Demand is going to rise faster than the experience and competition for the “cherry” projects is going to get tougher. I’m looking forward to it.
Q: Please give us the John Carcutt point view on PageRank, what it means, and how significant it is to SEO (if at all)?
The main thing PageRank is not is a metric. Do not grade the quality of a linking program by the movement of PR.
First, there are two forms of PR, the “Toolbar PR” and the “Actual PR”. You will never know a page’s Actual PR as Google will never publish it and most likely it is not even the same scale of 0-10 we are so used to. This PR is fluid and changes as often as you build links. This is the PR that affects the rankings of your pages.
The “Toolbar PR” until recently was only updated every quarter or so and is valuable mainly as an indicator. This type of PR is useful to monitor change or quickly evaluate the general strength of a page.
The interesting thing most people don’t understand about PR is that a specific niche or market segment contains a dedicated amount of PR that is distributed throughout the niche. This “amount” can grow and shrink based on the market activity and competition. Matt Cutts has even suggested to us that a specific niche can gain too much PR and the entire amount is reduced impacting almost every site in a niche.
That said, PR is nowhere near as important as is used to be. This is not to say that link building is not important, it is still a major cornerstone of any SEO program. However, don’t rely on PR as the metric to measure link building’s impact.
Q:Given tighter budgets and giving more thought on paid directories like paying yahoo $299 for a link, what paid directories are worth putting your money into?
This is one of those things I have to look at on a per client basis. Some sites may gain from top tier directory listings for others it may not be worth the effort. New sites can get a jump on the deep crawl sometimes if they get listed in these. Existing sites with a decent set of back links may not benefit at all.
Take a look at the budget as well. Can you spend that $299 you might give to Yahoo! on other link building techniques that would give better results based on the market? For example, a local pizza joint may see better results spending that $299 on a few local site listings as opposed to one general pizza listing on Yahoo. It’s a “Bang for the Buck” kind of thing.
Q: What are your most successful link building strategies? (I’m sure the readers will appreciate this but only list what you’d like =) ) Or to rephrase, which link building strategies do you find most effective?
The most effective link building strategy I use is “diversification”. Be creative and use a variety of link build techniques. If you find your using the same techniques over and over again, make yourself do something different to build that next link. Engines look for natural link growth; this by its very natural means the types of links found should be diverse. Don’t get stuck in a link building rut.
Q: What are you favorite SEO tools?
My all time favorite tool is one I have used for SEO Audits for as long as I can remember. It’s Rex Swains “HHTP Viewer” http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html I can’t tell you how many issues this has resolved for me over the years. It’s great for redirect identification, but it also displays the actual code sent by the server to the browser prior to any browser side modifications.
Jon is putting together some great stuff over at Raven-SEO-Tools.com and I am also working with a new tool out of Germany called Search Metrics. Both of these provide great resources for tracking and reporting on SEO.
Q: How do your SEO efforts differ when it comes to optimizing for Yahoo vs. Google
To be honest, not much. Good SEO practices should have you performing similarly on both engines.
If I am seeing vast differences between the two, I know that Google will weigh links more than Yahoo and Yahoo will weigh content heavier than Google. So I can make adjustments based on that.
Q: How do you see this Bing/Yahoo deal playing out for SEOs? Any serious implications or changes?
This is going to depend tremendously on how the integration is actually handled. How much control will Yahoo retain over the actual SERPs. What type and how much data is Bing going to send over to Yahoo. We just don’t know yet. For all we know, Bing could just be the data center and Yahoo would continue to apply its own algorithm to that data. We just don’t know.
The two big questions I have are … What happens to paid inclusion and are we going to lose Site Explorer? It will be interesting to see.
Q: Does Dmoz still hold serious weight?
This goes back to the same issue as we discussed for directories over all. It depends; some pages of that site will provide much more benefit than others. For example, if your category page has 150 listings, it’s not going to pass much link juice at all.
I don’t see any reason not to submit; it’s free and only takes a few minutes once you find the right category. Don’t worry about your listing, as many others often say, Dmoz is “submit it and forget it”.
Q: Due to spamming techniques of link building, many say the algos will go back to rank more based on content than links, how do you see this?
I don’t know who these “many” are, but they need to remember there are plenty of content spamming techniques as well. The algos will continue to contain a wide variety of factors and they will add new ones all the time.
Will content become more important than links? Some people have always maintained that opinion. I see that debate continuing for quite some time.
If you want to talk about changes to the algos, let’s talk about how local factors and real time search are going to change the game. I am already seeing IP based local search factors influencing my SERPs even when I am not logged into personal search. Real time search may end up having a large impact on the algos and what we do as SEOs.
Q: What is the biggest mis-conception of SEO today?
It’s the thought that SEO is an “Add-on” to your site that makes it perform better in the search engines.
More people need to learn and understand (even SEOs) that this process is a business process and should be included at every level of site’s lifespan. SEO is not something you do to your site; it’s something you do with your business.
I guess to put it simply; the mis-conception is that most people don’t think they need an SEO to be involved until they need meta data or some links. The fact is SEOs are needed from the day the site is conceived until the day it is turned off.
Thanks for the questions Pablo, I really enjoyed the conversation.
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Comments (4)
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Micro-formatting is a current trend that is gaining momentum for future SEO factors. It is a very simple addition to your content, but could really help your website move up in the search ranks.
Check out this post on how to begin with micro-formatting your content: http://kungfucash.com/2010/01/future-trends-in-seo-2010-microformatting/
These questions are very effective for me mostly the Yahoo VS Google.
I found your website is very informative and effective to get knowledge about SEO.