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Ian LurieIan Lurie is a leading technical SEO expert. But he doesn’t recommend spending a lot of time on fancy optimization techniques. Instead, he urges content creators to focus on their users’ intent and on quality content.
And then do just enough SEO make sure you aren’t hiding your content from Google. Put another way, “Don’t let SEO get in the way of your content.”
Ian and I talked about:
- the importance of taking what Google says with a grain of salt
- how a lot of SEO is just staying out of your own way
- how crafting good content and addressing user intent should guide your SEO efforts
- how to thoughtfully and empathetically contextualize a user’s experience on your site when they arrive via less precise terms than you use – e.g., “We don’t just make X, we also make Y”
- his descent early in his career from the second-least respect profession, law, to the least respected, direct marketing
- the need to improve your content efforts across the board, not just writing SEO-focused long-form blog posts, but also great product descriptions and category pages
- how to turn run-of-the-mill product-catalog copy into compelling content
- how to guide users from your content-marketing content and get them to the real value that your company delivers
- the importance of matching the quality of your content-marketing content with equally compelling product-info pages
- how his “client therapy” work helps align teams
- his approach to client work:
- lots of listening, to discover the biggest issues
- finding the folks who already talk to each other
- using data to measure content effectiveness
- applying data insights to guide change
- another approach – a deep dive into the customer journey with all players in one room
- how he always asks “what’s your plan,” not “what’s your vision”
- the fundamentals of his approach to content creation for SEO:
- follow old-school copywriting rules
- compress your images – Squoosh is a great tool for this
- use the img alt attribute (start with “image:” for screen readers)
- make sure content is written to searcher intent (shopping vs researching e.g.)
- learn about schema – your CMS likely does an OK job with this, but it’s a good idea to verify that with Google’s structured data testing tool
- his assertion that React is definitely an SEO handicap – “This is fact” – Google can render it, but they index it first and render it later
- the importance in SEO of doing things in a way that doesn’t force Google to do extra work – for example, prerendering pages to display simple HTML with a tool like prerender.io
- the concept of “hydration”
- how you should use the nofollow attribute only for paid links
Ian’s Bio
Ian Lurie is a digital marketer with a twenty-five-year intolerance of trendy concepts and bull-poop. Someone told him not to say bull3h!t, so he’s trying really hard not to.
Ian uses both sides of his brain as a content creator, search engine optimization nerd, and data addict.
He speaks at conferences worldwide, including MozCon, SearchLove, Retail Global, and Learn Inbound. He writes everywhere. Seriously, do a search.
Ian founded Portent, a digital marketing agency, in 1995, and sold it to Clearlink in 2017. He’s now on his own, consulting for brands he loves and speaking at conferences that provide Diet Coke. He’s also trying to become a professional Dungeons & Dragons player, but it hasn’t panned out.
You can find him pedaling his bike up Seattle’s ridiculous hills, or send him a note on Twitter or LinkedIn.
He has a TikTok profile, but his kids are embarrassed by it, so we’ll leave that out.
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast Intro Transcript
One of the most common hopes for digital content is that it will show up prominently in Google and other search engines. No one knows more about the technical aspects of search engine optimization than Ian Lurie. You’d think that a self-described SEO nerd like Ian would constantly be tinkering with server-side scripts and other arcane technical practices. In fact, he spends most of his time working with people, helping them craft high-quality content that satisfies their users’ deepest needs.
Interview Transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 55 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really delighted today to have with us Ian Lurie. Ian is a long time digital marketer. Well, actually not just a digital marketer, he is the marketing nerd and he’s established those credentials by being a D&D player since 1978. He’s also been in this business doing digital marketing for 25 years since 1995. He’s known in some circles as the chief marketing curmudgeon and that… He was called that once at Portent, the agency he used to run. But I think that goes back to his being a native of the notoriously kind of rough hewn state of New Jersey. Is that where that comes from, Ian?
Ian:
Rough hewn? Yeah. I like to tell people I’m a completely neurotic East Coast Jew. I think that pretty much rounds it out.
Larry:
That can explain-
Ian:
Just the attitude, the angst, all of it. Yes.
Larry:
Okay. And that’s, yeah. And you’re well known for that. But I think you’re… To my mind, I’ve been following and doing SEO since ’96, so not quite as long as you. But I’ve always perceived you as right up there with the very top echelon of technical SEO people.
Ian:
Thanks.
Larry:
But you also say that like, yeah, great. That’s 20% of what you should be doing with your content. So tell me a little bit. Well, tell me a little bit more about that.
Ian:
So I try to tell content creators, “Don’t let SEO get in the way of your content.” Yeah, SEO is critical. I mean, organic search is still the primary way to bring users to your content. There’s no way of getting around that. But if you as a content creator are putting more than 20% of your brain power behind what I would call deliberate SEO. So thinking about keywords, thinking about content structure, thinking about subheadings, you’re doing something wrong.
I mean we all know that when Google… And I’m going to get in trouble now if Google’s listening to this. But we know that when Google says, “Oh yeah, come on. Just create fantastic content and we’ll find you,” that’s utter horse shit. But they are right in so far as put that 20% in to deliver it SEO. Make sure you’re not getting in your own way and make sure you’re actually picking those terms. After that, let the search engines do their thing. Let them find the really good stuff, because otherwise you’re going to get a hollow victory. You may get a high ranking for a little while, but you’re not going to get the performance you want out of it.
Larry:
Right. Does this come back? I mean the last, I don’t know, 10 years or so of SEO history has been the rise of the kind of the convergence of UX and SEO in that notion of satisfying user intent that Google is paying close attention to that. And I guess you’re arguing that like, well yeah, if you do really good content that’s a much more likely outcome that you’re going to satisfy.
Ian:
Yeah. To me for a content creator, SEO really is a lot about staying out of your own way. Don’t… I see people deliberately or it seems like they are deliberately not writing to the most important keywords. The example I always use is jeans versus denim. Like people who write about denim because they don’t think product is jeans, it’s denim. But, of course, nobody searches for denim. Everybody searches for jeans. Running shoes versus athletic footwear is another really common one. So just don’t do things like that. Don’t write away from important phrases. Don’t put images up that are so badly compressed that your page takes 15 seconds to load on a mobile device. Don’t organize your content and do a layout that’s so bad that people can’t read it, because yeah, UX is important.
And then if you’re building the site, create navigation that actually makes sense. Don’t have hamburger nav on a desktop website. I still do not understand that. That’s a pet peeve of mine. That’s the 20%. That’s staying out of your own way. Then craft really good stuff. Make sure you’re writing to the right topic. Make sure you write to search or intent. So you talked about intent. You can look at the rankings and learn a lot about why people are actually looking for a particular concept. Is this a neat transactional thing? Is it informational? Is it something else? And make sure you create great content to answer that intent. Am I babbling?
Larry:
No, no, no. This is great stuff. And I’m thinking of a dozen questions. One of which would be like that to the extent that you do pay attention to SEO, you want to do it right. Like doing that and what you said about keyword research… Ian, do you know Gerry McGovern? He’s known now as the top task guy. He works with huge enterprises and just usually ends up eviscerating their sites. Taking away 90% of the content so that people can get what they want to do and they’re done. But-
Ian:
I like him already.
Larry:
Yeah, okay. And you would have loved him, but 10 years ago when I first met him about… Yeah, it’s like 2008 I think, he was talking about long tail, because I was really into SEO at the time. And I was really intrigued by his concept of the giraffe neck versus the long tail. He said that you’ll get a lot of traffic with the long tail. But like when people want… As soon as people get to your site, there’ll be up in that giraffe neck. Like you’ll get them there. I think the one he uses, the way you get them there is with cheap fares, and then the way you convert them on the site is something about book travel. Yeah.
Ian:
What I always say is get people to your site using the terms for which they search, and then explain to them the error of their ways. You can correct and redirect after they get to your site. You cannot correct and redirect by somehow trying to climb inside the brains of all the people who are searching for say, running shoes, by only optimizing for athletic footwear. That is a hollow victory at best.
Larry:
I love that. And that reeducation process has got to be content. And that’s it… So how do you make that? How do you flip that? Like you got them there, and you’re like, “Hey, thanks for showing up. And by the way, that was a really stupid search query…”
Ian:
No, I meant… This goes back to my pre-digital marketing days, right? Back when I was doing direct mail and things like that. Let’s just not… Let’s forget about that. I should put a side note. I went to law school and graduated and then went into the only profession, even less respected than law, which would be marketing. And it was direct marketing at the time.
So the thing I always say is, “We don’t just make X, we create Y.” So we don’t just make jeans, we create denim. We don’t just make athletic footwear, we create running shoes. These shoes are meant for runners. You know Mr. or runner person. We don’t just make… Well, we make… We don’t make cars, we make the ultimate driving machine. BMW’s old one. But those are all very common marketing tactics and good ways to tell people, “You know what? No, you’re not being stupid. You’re right. This is what we make. But it’s superior because we think about it this way.” That’s the best way to handle it.
Larry:
Got it. And that kind of gets me thinking about like… Well, for… You’re on your own now. You’re an independent consultant. And I’ll have a link to your website on there so some folks can find you, if they need any help with your digital nerdery. But for 25 years around Portent, an agency that’s still going well, and it grew to become like it’s kind of… A lot of people perceive it as a search focus place, but it’s as much about social and other things now. But that’s all about content. And within content there’s all these kind of… Like just look at marketing content. You have kind of conventional promotional marketing content. Then you’ll have content marketing, what I think of as content marketing content, which is that sort of objective and newsy like, “Hey, we know what we’re talking about. You should pay attention to us,” kind of content.
How does… Do you have a… When you’re writing with search engines in mind, are there… And then the other big one there, and I don’t know how many clients you had at Portent in ecommerce. It’s notoriously difficult to do search engine optimization for ecommerce. So those kinds of product descriptions, marketing content and content marketing content, those are just three kinds of things that figure into that. Are there universal things that apply to all of those? Or do you really focus on the medium as you’re going in?
Ian:
So one of those really annoying sort of professorial things I always say is, “It’s all content.” So we talk about content marketing, but the truth is long-form blog posts, it’s a tiny percentage of what you should be doing, if you’re a content marketer. When it comes to product descriptions, you should learn to write the most kick ass product descriptions you can. And there are ways to do that. And that means making sure your product information answers key questions and talks about key topics and that will help you rank better.
And then you need to have category pages that have great information about those products on those category pages. Those are things you have to think far beyond creating those particular blog posts. Content marketing is not blog posts. Content marketing is taking all the content you produce and upping your game. And that is all effective marketing. Your website is not. If you’re in ecommerce, your website is not a product catalog. That’s one of the things you have to realize, every page, every product on your website, is marketing for that product.
So just having specifications and three bullets and a crappy photograph, that is not marketing. As a content marketer, you have to understand, continuously remind yourself, it is all content. You should be involved in every piece of content that goes on your site, and ideally, every piece of content that goes out there about your products. And then when it comes down to search, if you are thinking that those blog posts and that long-form content is going to help you with search long-term and have the most profound impact, you’re making a big mistake. It’s the content that’s already on your site. It’s the content that… It’s the information about your products.
Now I’m ignoring marketing, right? Because marketers screw everything up. Like we on our own sites, we make a complete shit show of all of it, right? We just pour content out there, and we’re just trying to rank for everything. Portent still ranks number two or something for rolling average. We’re not going to get any clients because we ranked number one or two for rolling average. Right?
Larry:
Right.
Ian:
That is a failure of content marketing. And I wrote that piece, so I can say that. So ignore marketers. For everybody else, it’s about trying to rank for the things that you create.
Larry:
Well, that gets into content strategy. Like what was your intent in doing that? Are you achieving that goal? Like great, there’s this little goal of showing up in the search engine for this obscure term that’s not going to convert any customers. And I think we’re getting to the point, and you also alluded to just churning out content. And marketers agree that it’s like… And I think because so many of us come out of writing professions and journalism and publishing, that’s what we know how to do. But I think we’re getting this point that it better be purposeful and have an intent and not waste your reader’s time.
Ian:
How are you going to take someone from a piece of content you produced as a quote, content marketing, unquote, campaign and get them to the real value that your company delivers? That’s… Maybe that’s the question to ask yourself is, you’ve written this blog post or whatever, and it’s going to generate lots of links. Hooray. People are going to come to that blog post. What’s going to happen to them after that? If you take them from that to a product description, that’s completely third rate, you’re doing yourself a pretty drastic disservice. Plus, that product description should probably have a decent shot at ranking for something too.
Larry:
Right, and that kind of gets into one of the things about content strategy that is a challenge. Like at the… I go to Confab every year and there it’s like you get the sense that a lot of the activities like trench warfare, you’re trying to bust silos and reconnect the product team with the marketing team. And I guess in the campaigns you’ve done… Because like what you just said about, “Okay, great blog posts. Wow, people are fascinated by this topic,” and then you send them to this crummy page. Have you done much work with your clients over your career in aligning people on like, “Hey, if you’re going to spend all this money on me as a marketer, how about if you improve your product pages?”
Ian:
Yeah, I mean I spend a lot of time on “client therapy,” and that sounds very patronizing. I do not mean it that way. Anytime you come in as a consultant to make a change in an organization, there’s going to be a lot of coaching involved, not just doing the work. Yeah, I spend a lot of time on that and there’s not some great template. Every single time, it’s a little different, but you spend a lot of time trying to get those teams together.
Larry:
Yeah. Well, that kind of gets… I think every organization is unique, and each project is bespoke for the client. I assume that’s the case with the work you’ve done. But there’s… It sounds like you have top level, like a typical therapy session. Do you have sort of an approach in helping people?
Ian:
Well, the first session is usually just a lot of listening. You got to hear where the biggest or the biggest problems are as far as getting the teams together and how people feel about the siloing. The second step is finding the people who already talk to each other, because usually they are the doers and figuring out what the best pathways are. Data is often where we can start to coordinate things. So maybe the third session is how you use data to measure effectiveness from say the initial piece of content all the way through a lead. If it’s a SaaS provider or all the way through a sale, how do I know that person A who went to this blog post made a purchase two weeks later? Do we already have the data necessary for that, and if so, how can we leverage that?
And then we look in session five at how you can take a look at that. I think I just missed one. How you can take a look at that data and start to tweak and change things. The other way to do it is just the deep dive. Get everybody in the room. Talk about user journey. Explain to them how it is that, if you want to occur to your customer experience, you’re going to start with that very first touch. Which can be that untargeted or loosely targeted content all the way through completion of whatever it is that they’re trying to do.
Larry:
Right. And then would you start… Do you always start a project with that mapping out that user journey? Does that or-
Ian:
Honestly, no. We rarely get to it. If a client hires us for content strategy, then yes. Usually clients hire us because they want higher rankings. They want to improve conversions, or they just fired their agency. Let’s face it. Those are the three top reasons. At which point there’s quite a bit of education. You want to improve your rankings? “Okay. Let’s take a deeper look at your product descriptions.” For example, your site architecture, what does that have to do with rankings? Well, here’s how it impacts it. “You just fired your agency. How come?” “They don’t have a strategic… They had no strategic outlook.” Well, okay. “Did you let them look at strategy?” Well, “No.” So they might start and go back… There’s a lot of that. It’s rare that we’re brought in to do… That we were brought in to do content strategy at the start.
Larry:
Got it. How frequently is it when you interact with an agency or within organization in your history, are you usually working with the CMO or somebody like that? Or because it seems like a lot of times, especially when you… A lot of content strategy needs to span. Some places the product team and the nav UX group over there with the developers, then all of that and the de-silo-ing and… Have you figured out ways to infiltrate or span those?
Ian:
Yeah. I mean in a smaller organization, you’re probably going to work with the CMO, right? A company of fewer than 50 people. If you get over that, you might eventually end up in the CMOs office. Hopefully not, though, because that means things have gone horribly wrong. Then hopefully you’re working with a Director of Marketing or somebody like that. Whoever the person is, wherever the individual practitioner teams report… So if you’ve got an SEO person or team and a paid search person or team and a content person or team, whoever they report to, that’s the person you want to talk to eventually. That might be a Director of Marketing. But in a bigger organization, the CMO actually touches marketing so rarely that you probably don’t want to talk to them.
If you’re there, it’s because either they don’t want to pay you anymore, they’re going to fire you, or they just fired everybody else and they’re trying to figure out what to do. And let’s face it, in a big organization that’s often the role of the CMO. I don’t mean that as a slap against CMOs. There’s a skill there that I don’t have, but that is not the person to talk to if you’re making changes on the ground.
Larry:
Got it. And the two things about that there was sort of… You ideally want that strategy that you’re implementing aligned with theirs. So there’s a way that leadership, whatever level of leadership you’re working with, you’re inheriting their strategic framework or-
Ian:
Yeah, I mean there’s a little bit of a leap of faith that whoever the person is, whoever the leader is, they are reporting to understands that vision. That’s the other time you don’t want to end up in the CMOs office, which is when the person you’ve been reporting to, your client contact, is so out of sync with the overall organization. Or the CMO is changing their mind so often that you’ve got to go in there and have a sort of a “come to Ian meeting” as I like to call them. And I’ve had many of those, and they are very difficult conversations and I don’t recommend them to anybody. But it’s a conversation where you say, “Look, you kind of got some chaos here. What are you really looking to accomplish? What’s your plan for the rest of the year?” I never say, “What’s your vision?” That’s a terrible thing to ask. “What are you trying to do here?” Like I said, that’s not a great conversation to have.
Larry:
No, I get that. Well let’s flip it around. It’s kind of drop down a level from that. Back to the… I think a lot of people when they see the topic of this podcast, they’ll want to know like, “Hey, what are specific things I can do?” Because there is that… I think of it as like stewardship and kind of due diligence that you don’t want to hide your content by not doing proper technical SEO. So what do you have sort of a checklist that you operate with? Things like from the semantic structure of the page, to the schema stuff…
Ian:
Yes.
Larry:
Tell me a little bit about that.
Ian:
So I start with really old school copywriting, which is no more than five lines per paragraph. No more than three to four paragraphs between subheadings. And that’s just basic content structure. If you follow that, you’re going to generally structure your content better for SEO, because you’re starting to divide your ideas up in such a way that it makes sense. Second thing is compress your images. Oh my God, there’s… It is incredible how… People get tired of me saying this, but they still don’t do it. You need to compress your images and do a really good job of it. Page load speed is definitely a secondary ranking factor. There’s a great tool out there called Squoosh, S-Q-U-O-O-S-H, that Google makes. Fantastic image compression, easy, use it. Make sure images have alt attributes. Make sure those alt attributes start with image: that screen readers understand what they are because you’re improving accessibility. Which if I’m Google is I’m also making a secondary ranking factor.
Make sure your content is written to searcher intent. Go do a Google search on whatever the topic is to which you’re writing. Look at the results. Is it all transactional? ecommerce? Is some of it research-based? Tweak your content and write to that. If people are shopping, you’re going to write something different than if people are researching. Learn something about schema. Hopefully your website is automatically generating the right stuff. You can go to Google structured data testing tool. Paste in any URL of any other posts or piece of content on your site. See what that delivers. Hopefully, it’s already delivering the structure data you want. If not, you’re going to need to go look at schema.org or something like that and put in some embedded schema in the page.
Larry:
Right. And a lot of what you’re talking about kind of gets into the back end, the CMOs.
Ian:
Yeah, and I… No, I just go deep really fast. Sorry.
Larry:
Yeah, no, but I think to me, that’s super fascinating because I think we’re in… I’ve been going to school lately on Gatsby and the whole… Do you know the JAM stack?
Ian:
Yes. And I was just messing with it yesterday.
Larry:
Yeah. Okay, yeah. And that’s an intr… I think and from just a usability perspective, their hypothesis makes sense. Like you have this, React or whatever, JavaScript front end APIs going to the best in category. If you want to do blog, you do this. If you want to do ecommerce, you do that. Tell me, do you see that kind of technical underpinning shifting underneath doing anything for content folks?
Ian:
This is probably not a content thing. React, client-side React is definitely an SEO handicap. And there’s plenty of arguments about that. I’m just telling you, this is fact. All right. You can listen to everybody including Google say, “Ah, it’s fine. No problem.” I’m telling you it is a problem, and I know us content providers can’t do a whole lot about it, but if you turn off JavaScript and you get a blank page, you have a problem.
Larry:
And that’s still the case.
Ian:
Period.
Larry:
Google claims that they’re able to render it.
Ian:
Be very careful. Google claims they can render it. They state that they can index and rank it, but they also state that they do it later. They crawl the page. They index it. They render it later. There is definitely a problem. Google treats client-side JavaScript rendered pages differently. Until they stopped doing that, it is a problem.
Larry:
Is that related to the old cloaking concerns like they need to verify the integrity between that display and –
Ian:
I think it’s just more work and-
Larry:
Oh, for their-
Ian:
And a principle for content providers, by the way, is, “Don’t make Google do more work.” Whatever you are doing with your content, do not do that. Again, that comes back to search or intent and search terms, right? Don’t make Google take more leaps of intuition between what you’re writing and what you want people, the terms from which you want people to find you.
Larry:
Right? Yeah. Don’t make anybody… Well, don’t make them do extra work. And that’s kind of what JavaScript is doing.
Ian:
Yes.
Larry:
Like making them do extra work. And so you would just serve up like, plain old HTML pages. It’s good.
Ian:
I mean, and it’s so easy to just prerender React-generated pages. And again, we’re getting really nerdy on this as well.
Larry:
Well, I think… I don’t mind going there, because I think a lot… There are a number of folks among my listeners who come out of the UX world, the product world, we’re working closely with, they’re either embedded in tech design content teams.
Ian:
Send me furious tweets, and I will send you all the people on all the really smart SEOs and all the people at Google who if you read between the lines… Because understand Google is not a search engine optimization helper company, right? When they have webmaster hangouts, they don’t have SEO Hangouts. So they are not there to tell us how to build sites to rank better. They are here to tell us their capabilities. They are capable of crawling, indexing, and ranking JavaScript-rendered content. They will not rank that content as well as they will rank static content. Also, it is so easy to just deliver HTML pages. If you’re going to use React, please give me a compelling reason.
Larry:
Right? Are there… Now all of a sudden, I’m wondering if there’s a whole aftermarket of top layers on top of React to just render your HTML page.
Ian:
There’s actually a service called Prerender.io that will do it.
Larry:
That will do that for, okay.
Ian:
Now you can also, if you… So this will be angry tweets. If you’re a developer who knows how this stuff really works, it is very easy to prerender content. And I’ve never met a developer who doesn’t know how to do that. So you can prerender it. You can just detect whether it is Google or not, and prerender. Google has said they’re perfectly okay with that. You can do what’s called hydration. So you can… Well, it’s not called hydration. You can use a tactic called hydration where you deliver the most important content on the page server-side. And then you hydrate. You deliver additional content, whatever it might be, like code listings or whatever using JavaScript.
Larry:
That’s on the backend.
Ian:
Yeah.
Larry:
This is back-end lazy loading kind of stuff?
Ian:
Sort of is. It’s sort of yeah, kind of like that.
Larry:
Okay.
Ian:
Yeah. Kind of like that. But even Gatsby, I mean there’s great ways to just prerender the content. Go to the Gatsby website and look at their tutorials. Turn off JavaScript and look at what they’re doing. They are delivering content server side and then the little code snippets are delivered later using JavaScript. That is exactly how they are doing it.
Larry:
Interesting. I will do that. Got open in a browser tab right now.
Ian:
So one of the primary React framework… I can’t remember. I just forgot. It’s like math, but with JavaScript.
Larry:
Oh, JAM stack.
Ian:
JAM stack, JAM stack. One of the primary JAMstack frameworks out there, their site with their tutorials are showing you how to do it that way.
Larry:
Okay. So it’s built right in?
Ian:
Yeah, yeah.
Larry:
Yeah, cool. Well, hey, we’re coming… Getting close to time. About five minutes left. I always like to leave a little room at the end. Is there anything that hasn’t come up as we’ve been talking? Anything that’s on your mind about, especially about content vis a vis SEO?
Ian:
Linking. Sorry.
Larry:
Thank you.
Ian:
Didn’t mean to interrupt you there, but linking. Don’t use nofollow, period, for outgoing links. Just don’t. If you want to get on Twitter and argue with me, I’m @IanLurie on Twitter. I will happily explain it, but nofollow just detonates page rank or whatever you want to call it. It has no positive impact as far as preserving the authority of your website. Yeah, you turn off nofollow. Maybe you send a couple of those to the sites to which you’re linking. If they’re worth linking to, you should probably just not nofollow anyway.
Larry:
Not nofollow in the first place.
Ian:
But you’re actually doing yourself more harm by using nofollow than you are helping yourself by not sending the authority and [crosstalk 00:25:34].
Larry:
Well, this gets right into an area where there’s probably a lot of content creators who are… They read something about like, Oh, if it’s anything like skill… Like if you’re doing a news article about some sketchy organization and you’re like, well I’m going to nofollow that so I don’t get penalized for that. You’re saying even in that case that would-
Ian:
If the link makes sense to your users and you were not being paid for it, do not use nofollow. If you are being paid for the link, you must use nofollow, whether it’s an ad or just a link in your content, because then you are risking a penalty. But if you blind… Also, Google recently said… And this is another thing we have to read between the lines. They may ignore nofollow, if sites do blanket nofollows. So if you just nofollow all outgoing links… This doesn’t include comments. If you nofollow links and comments, that’s okay. But if you blanket nofollow all outgoing links, they may actually just ignore it. Which I totally understand. I mean again, this is not about SEO. This is just-
Larry:
Well, this is good. This gets to discerning Google intent-
Ian:
Yes, yes.
Larry:
Which is kind of the SEO’s life.
Ian:
Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. That’s and you… And you and you have evidence for that. Like, because I’ve seen you present and talk many times. You always have piles of data and things that can back this.
Ian:
I wish I had good evidence for this. All I can do is refer back to all of the things that Google has said, particularly in this last two weeks. It’s been very, very telling. Now, there’s also in 2008 when people started using nofollow to try to control the flow of page rank around their sites. Matt Cutts said, “You should do that.” And then at SMX Advanced here in Seattle, he got on stage and he said, “Actually, that doesn’t work. You shouldn’t do that. It’s bad for SEO.” There was a nerd riot. They were pocket protectors and mechanical pencils flying everywhere. It was, I mean, people just freaked out, and somehow people forgot it after that. But as far back as 10 years ago, Google was saying, “Nofollow is not a good tactic for managing the flow of page rank and authority around the internet.”
Larry:
Interesting. And yet, that’s still on link juice on SEO pages all the time.
Ian:
Yeah.
Larry:
The link juice and flowing that around correctly. Yeah. But it sounds… And back to what we were saying at the very start that, “No, 80% of this is about crafting good content,” thinking about what your user actually needs, not wasting a lot of time on getting… Well, and the thing I’ve always loved about SEO, and from the very first moment I discovered that it was… I think it was even before Danny Sullivan coined the term, I just remember thinking, “Wow, this is the most customer-focused thing ever.”
Ian:
Yep.
Larry:
And so just keeping that relentless focus on the end user, the customer, the reader, the-
Ian:
Don’t overthink it. We are marketers. That’s what I would end with, We are marketers. And I understand as a 20-year SEO, I understand how important SEO is. But you got to come back all the time to the fact that we are marketers. That’s what we’re doing.
Larry:
But that’s your job.
Ian:
Well, thanks.
Larry:
Well, thanks so much, Ian. It’s been a great conversation.
Ian:
Thank you so much. Yeah, this is really fun.
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