Deck from my speech at SES London 2015. Covering: + Key factors in defining your SEO architecture + The Perfect Setup + Real World Examples

2. SEO Site Architecture
Tomas Vaitulevicius
Rightmove
@earnedmarketing
Lessons learned whilst talking one of the top 10 UK websites, Rightmove, from the
bottom of page 1 to ranking #1 for over 70% of target search terms

3. Google and SEO experts are promoting the idea that now SEO is all about brand
building, UX, Social, PR et al. making it seem that technical SEO will take care of itself…

4. Google has been improving but site
architecture matters and will matter
for the foreseeable future.
In my experience, streamlining of our SEO architecture played a huge role in growing
our SEO traffic from 1.5 million to 20 million visits a month

5. I see technical SEO as a multiplier – if the rest of your SEO strength factors are
equal to 0, I’d focus elsewhere, but…

6. 1,000+
pages
Incremental
revenue
opportunity
100+
linking websites
…if you have some good quality content, have already gained some online authority and
see further opportunity in SEO, I’m certain technical SEO can contribute to your growth

7. SEO Architecture Factors

8. Search Demand
Topic Coverage
“Destinations”
Site Sprawl /
Thinness
Link Juice et al.
Crawl / Indexation
Budget

9. The ongoing pivot of SEO towards general brand building and inbound marketing is
pushing the discussion of Link Juice (and the underlying PageRank) to the fringes…

10. …which I find schizophrenic when Moz’s own Ranking Factor survey says that some 40%
of our rank-ability depends on link related factors

11. “PageRank or PR(A) can be
calculated using a simple
iterative algorithm, and
corresponds to the principal
eigenvector of the normalized
link matrix of the web.”
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual
Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
I also feel that the iterative nature of the PageRank algorithm is still misunderstood by
our industry

12. “Essentially, all models are
wrong, but some are useful.”
George E. P. Box, 1987
Granted, Google has built in a lot of extra complexity into their PageRank over the years,
but even the rudimentary model of Link Juice flow has got valuable lessons to teach

13. Home
Search
Product
Imagine we have a site with these 3 pages and links between them indicated by the
arrows

14. Home
Search
Product
0.85
0.72
1
1
0.85
0.72
And let’s say 1 unit of Link Juice / PageRank arrives to our Homepage. Link Juice will
propagate roughly as shown (this model is taken verbatim from Matt Cutt’s talk in 2009)

15. 0.85
1
Home
Search
Product
1
0.85
However, in real life one-way link funnels, like on the previous slide, don’t exist. It’s
more likely that we would have an internal linking structure like the above

16. 0.85
0.36
1
0.36
Home
Search
Product
1
0.85
0.36
1.36
Now the 0.72 units of Link Juice previously flowing from Search page to Product page
gets split and half of it goes to Homepage. This is the essence of the Iterative algorithm

17. 0.85
0.36
1
0.36
0.31
0.31
Home
Search
Product
1
0.85
0.36
1.36
1.67
1.16
As fresh Link Juice iterates through our architecture, decreasing with every iteration due
to the ~15% dampening factor, Link Juice accumulated on our pages slowly increases

18. To save us from needing to calculate the iterations manually, I’ve built the simple tool
above where we can set up a website and get the calculation of Link Juice growth for
our Homepage over 20 iterations of the algorithm model

19. http://www.earnedmarketing.com/pagerank-simulator/
After 20 iterations Link Juice accumulated on our Homepage comes up to 2.93

20. 0.85
0.36
1
0.36
0.15
0.31
Home
Search
Product
1
0.85
0.36
1.36
1.51
1.16
Contact
0.15
0.15
The interesting thing is that we can now modify our website setup and see what effect
that has on our Link Juice flow. Let’s imagine we decided to add a Contact/Order page,
and to reduce our form abandonment we removed all outbound links from this page

21. +42%
http://www.earnedmarketing.com/pagerank-simulator/
With the quick tweak to the setup above we find out that now only 2.06 units
accumulate on our Homepage. Said differently - we could increase Link Juice on our
Homepage by 42% by replacing the Contact page with an equivalent AJAX functionality

22. The Perfect Setup

24. Traffic
Potential
& Topic
Coverage
Top of Class
Content &
Authority
First and foremost, the perfect SEO setup is a balance between our desire to cover as
many topics (search terms) as possible and our ability to provide top of class content

25. Destinations for
Topics
destination
Every topic should have a dedicated, optimized destination which matches well the
underlying user intent

26. No Extra
Destinations
or Links
All unnecessary Destinations (unique pages / URLs) and Links drain our Link Juice,
consume Social and Usage metrics, eat into our Crawl / Indexation Budgets and could
contribute to our Panda risk levels

27. Internal Linking
Architecture Proportional
to Opportunity and
Competition
Finally we need internal linking architecture which helps Google find and index our
Topic Destinations as well as provide them with adequate amounts of Link Juice

28. Real World Examples

29. • Referrer Parameters:
rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-
49626173.html?backListLink=%2Fproperty-for-
sale%2Ffind.html%3FlocationIdentifier%3DPOSTC
ODE%255E4274522
– HTTP Referrer
– LocalStorage
Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)
We used to have millions of unnecessary Destinations within our architecture due to
referrer being passed around via URL parameters. We now use HTTP Referrer and in
places LocalStorage. Millions of unique URLs gone from our ecosystem

30. • Tracking Parameters:
rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-
46902629.html?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=t
raffic_provider
– Tracking redirect loop
– _setAllowAnchor()
Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)
Tracking URL parameters create millions of duplicate versions of real Destinations. This
can be replaced with tracking redirect loops or, in GA, with hash parameters

31. • Supplementary Content:
rightmove.co.uk/fees-
apply.html?property_id=165467654
– Link back to the site (still potential Panda risk)
– Nofollow / disallow (burns most Link Juice)
– Noindex / canonical (consumes Crawl Budget)
– AJAX
Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)
Supplementary information can be implemented as new Destinations. We can improve
this by using “band-aids”, but we can fix this completely by moving over to AJAX

32. • Supplementary Functionality:
rightmove.co.uk/property-
details/print.html?propertyId=47812940
– Print Stylesheet
rightmove.co.uk/addtoshortlist.html?property_id
=47812940
– POST to Property with 302 Redirect
– AJAX
Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)
Supplementary functionality can also be implemented as new Destinations, but there
are much more SEO friendly ways of achieving the same user experience

33. • Cleaning up Footer:
– iFrame + robots.txt + window.top.location.href
rightmove.co.uk/resources/search-bar.html
– We don't need them
plc.rightmove.co.uk/investors/
– Only needed on homepage
rightmove.co.uk/this-site/terms-of-use-and-
privacy-policy.html
– Combining pages
Cutting Down on Links
Unnecessary links leak or divert Link Juice that should instead strengthen Topic Destinations. We
considered cleaning up our footer using a blocked iFrame container, but instead used less
manipulative methods to remove tens of millions of links from our internal link graph

34. Breadcrumb
Nearby and Popular
Internal Linking Architecture
Breadcrumbs and “Nearby and Popular” functionality lets us provide more Link Juice to
our most important Destinations and at the same time provide useful user features

35. SEO Architect Technical Knowledge
If you enjoy technical SEO and want to stay on top of the game. Here’s the technical
knowledge you should seek to acquire on your road a “Rockstar SEO Architect” status

36. In closing... if your website / business model / user proposition looks like this

37. No amount of technical tweaking will save you

38. However, if you have an attractive user proposition

39. Investing in technical SEO can provide a great boost to your business and help you reach
your full potential