Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

 On the back of all these interviews, I thought what better chance to share a little empathy (considering how tough the interview process can be at times!) and a couple of observations that might help SEO folk prepare for the opportunity of their dreams!  So here goes; a few ideas to help get you SEO interview fit…

Prepare and plan ahead

An easy area to start the preparation process is by getting a few gazillion responses to typical SEO interview questions – firstly, to highlight academic understanding of the area, and secondly demonstrating technical and experiential understanding.  Constructing those thoughts/experiences and putting them in to some sort of order and shape can really help to answer questions comprehensively.
I think sometimes SEO’s learn and talk about SEO as if it was a dictionary of industry terminology to be recited at each and every opportunity.  Really, it’s about the application of technical and creative ideas.  This really shouldn’t be underplayed in my opinion as this is where the true value to your employer and/or clients is derived from.

Practice Articulating SEO

Developing the previous point further, try practising explaining previous work and complex areas of SEO. When you know something in your head, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can articulate it in layman’s terms to less knowledgeable – something that SEO’s have to do on occasions when speaking with clients.  Taking this further, can you then build on this layman’s explanation and then provide additional higher-level detail?  It’s certainly worth practising if you’re not used to doing this already.  Maybe even consider chatting those SEO interview questions through with a friend to see how well you can communicate some complex areas in an engaging way.
I consider myself fairly competent at talking about SEO, but recently I stumbled over the explanation of the process of tokenising a web page by search engines.  I could visualisation what it might look like and explain the process in detail but not summarise it at an entry-level SEO training session.  I was, however, kindly helped by a non-SEO colleague who reiterated my stumbling explanation with the anecdote that it could be that a search engine captures the key elements of the page / meaning of a page in the Times newspaper and condenses it down to a column or headline in the Sun newspaper…a clear, succinct explanation that people can relate to.
One of the things that we encourage across the SEO team at MEC is that all team members must regularly run training sessions for other members of the Interaction team.  This, we have found, has really helped their confidence in clearly communicating complex issues in SEO and search marketing in general.

Read the latest

There is nothing worse than someone saying that great SEO consulting requires keeping up-to-date with the latest SEO news and developments, and then not be able to demonstrate that they, the interviewee, do this themselves.  Nothing worse than shooting yourself in the foot now is there?!!
When reading though, don’t simply passively read – test and apply what you are reading – where are the opportunities?  Remember the 5 bums on rugby posts image (5 W’s sat on a big H) which stand for: what, why, when, who, where and how?
As a result, this should give you a much rounded and analysed opinion around these topics, provide you with a stronger view of what you are reading, who’s writing it, where it can be applied to your websites, etc, etc…

Company’s blog

When preparing for an SEO job interview, a little understanding of what’s big on the agenda for the company in question, and where you might fit in could be a great start.  Asking a few questions about the history of activity and upcoming marketing plans for the company or clients might be great area to cover off too.  That said, there are a whole lot of questions to ask to see whether the role would be suitable to you…

Show an interest: prepare some questions

I’d expect a whole lot of information to be shared by the interviewer themselves, but asking questions helps to show real interest in the role, and the potential for you to confirm that the role is indeed right for you.  As SEO activities by teams around the UK are likely to differ quite wildly, it’s certainly a great opportunity to learn about the team, how broad or clearly defined their roles are, and of course how you might fit to what currently exists.  
If asked a question on current SEO affairs, then to turn it around and ask the interview for their opinion too – this can be a great way to provide more of a two-way conversational format to the process, and get a feel for their thinking too. After all, you don’t want to be stuck in a new role thinking what ridiculous procedures and management are in place now do you?!

Every SEO is unique

People interviewing SEO’s in the UK are quite likely to meet a huge diversity of people with different experiences and stories to tell, so make sure you make clear where you can add your own areas of expertise.
So for instance, have you got experience in the sector that you’ll be working in?  Do you have your own blogs, affiliate sites, highly sociable online?  What can you bring to the role from a previous career (e.g. PR, offline marketing, IT, etc)?  Put all these areas to the top of your mind before meeting your interviewer, and make sure you show them all off!

Wild Card

One of my favourite questions that I like to ask candidates, which has given me some great answers previously, is asking whether there is anything that the candidate has prepared for the interview that they haven’t had a chance to cover off from the areas covered in the interview.
The idea behind this question is that SEO candidates aren’t like typical marketing role candidates or IT candidates.  The SEO industry has such a diverse range of entry points so that in itself means that people’s experiences and talents are going to be far more diverse.  As such, this should help to capture some of these extra little bits.

Different roles

Prepare appropriately to demonstrate the competencies that you can apply to the role!  Of course preparing for an SEO job interview can vary quite a lot if you are going for a graduate role, an SEO Exec role to a more managerial role.  Again they can differ depending on whether the role is more focused on analytics, link-building or account management?  Unsure about the role, give them a call in advance of the interview – a great way to show confidence and initiative in the role you are interested in.
Tips for SEO interviews, feel free to leave a comment!  :)

Link: Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan : Part 1

Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining KPIs

Last week I spoke at PubCon South on the Analytics Strategy panel on the topic of social media. This is something I’m very passionate about and during my preparation for the presentation I uncovered some scary statistics.

According to a survey conducted by BazaarVoice in 2009, on average businesses have no idea what their ROI is on any type of social media activity:

                    

Here are a few of the lowlights highlights:

• 53% of respondents are unsure about their return on Twitter
• 50% are unsure about the direct value of LinkedIn
• 50% are not sure how to measure the impact on business metrics from blogs

And yet, companies now-a-days have no problem investing thousands of dollars into social media marketing even if they have no idea if they’ll profit from it. Why have companies gotten so lazy when it comes to marketing spend?

Part of the problem is they aren’t properly analyzing their data. Social networks are giving us more and more insight into visitor and performance metrics, but most of us aren’t properly setup to find actionable insights on the campaign’s performance.

This series of posts will explain how to properly setup your social media strategy so that you can make better-informed decisions, understand your ROI and adjust your strategy according to the numbers.
Let’s get started. Before you do anything else, you need to have a clear understanding of what your goal will be and how you will measure the success of your social media strategy. In other words, we need to define KPIs.

There are a couple of guidelines you should follow when definining KPIs:

• Choose metrics that actually translate into business context (e.g. sales, new leads, customer satisfaction, customer interaction, etc.)
• Define more than just attention metrics
  (You want to look at more important metrics than just your fan/follower count)
• Define KPIs that are actionable
  (How does knowing what your retweet reach is help you adjust your Twitter strategy?)
• Create specific KPIs for each social network and specific elements of your website

 The most important guideline above is to define actionable KPIs. Obviously these types of KPIs are going to be unique to your business, but here are a few examples of what I would consider good actionable KPIs:

• Number of people in a specific location who follow your company on Twitter
• Reduction in sales cycles
• Reduction in support costs
• Increase in product reviews
• Product improvement suggestions from [specific social network]

Now that we have your KPIs established, we need to configure your analytics.Now lets walk you through that process in part 2 of Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan.

 Source:
Creating a Social Media Analytics Action Plan – Part 1: Defining KPIs

Types of Site Changes That Can Affect SEO

Types of Site Changes That Can Affect SEO

Organizations make many changes that they do not think will affect SEO, but they have a big impact on it. Here are some examples:

• Content areas/features/options added to the site (this could be anything from a new blog
  to a new categorization system).
• Changing the domain of your site. This can have a significant impact, and you should
  document when the switchover was made.
• Modifications to URL structures. Changes to URLs on your site will likely impact your
  rankings, so record any and all changes.
• Implementing a new CMS. This is a big one, with a very big impact. If you must change
  your CMS, make sure you do a thorough analysis of the SEO shortcomings of the new
  CMS versus the old one, and make sure you track the timing and the impact.
• New partnerships that either send links or require them (meaning your site is earning new
  links or linking out to new places).
• Changes to navigation/menu systems (moving links around on pages, creating new link
  systems, etc.).
• Any redirects, either to or from the site.
• Upticks in usage/traffic and the source (e.g., if you get mentioned in the press and receive
  an influx of traffic from it).

When you track these items, you can create an accurate storyline to help correlate causes with effects. If, for example, you’ve observed a spike in traffic from Yahoo! that started four to five days after you switched from menu links in the footer to the header, it is a likely indicator of a causal relationship.

Without such documentation it could be months before you notice the surge--and there would be no way to trace it back to the responsible modification. Your design team might later choose to switch back to footer links, your traffic may fall, and no record would exist to help you understand why. Without the lessons of history, you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.

Factoring Time into SEO

Factoring Time into SEO

We all know that it takes time for your rankings in the SERPs to change. Although they do fluctuate frequently, long-term improvements in your SERPs rankings take time to produce.

Some time needs to pass before the Search Engines are confident you deserve increased rankings. Things that can happen during the days, weeks or months before you see some real results include:

• Increase in aggregate traffic – if more unique visitors are landing on your website, then that means there’s a bigger trend of searchers looking for you, therefore your website is more relevant, so the more traffic you have, the more you’re seen as authoritative
• Increase in links pointing to external pages linking to you – this has a snowball effect because you receive more link juice from one link linking to you when other websites are linking to the page that’s linking to you (hope that wasn’t too confusing)
• Increase in the amount of clicks from searchers – search engines have a general idea of the percentage of clicks the #1 position for a keyword should get (i.e. the #1 result should be getting 40% of clicks, while #2 should get 20% – arbitrary numbers), so when there’s an imbalance of clicks (if the #2 result starts getting 40% of clicks while the #1 result receives 20%), the results in the SERPs are re-ordered (the #2 result would be bumped up to #1 to see if it can maintain the 40% of clicks it has been receiving)
• Increase in age of domain – as your domain ages, and you continue to renew your domain for at least a few years until expiration, your website’s authoritativeness increases because it’s an older source of information
• Increase in age of backlinks – as the age of the backlinks pointing to you increase, search engines believe that your website is more authoritative because the links serve as past proof that your website is worth checking out. While search engines love fresh content, they also highly respect older content

Source: Factoring Time into SEO

A New Age For Search Marketers

We are in the midst of the largest algorithmic changes to Google’s relevancy since the Florida Update of 2003, and perhaps even the largest change for how marketers approach search since Google and Inktomi revolutionized the concept of citation based rankings. The interesting part of this change is that it is not focused on one concept, but rather several, that mixed together change the face of search as we move into the new year.

What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure. This new “Search-o-morphis” brings factors into play which include site usability, site mobility, the presence of the site socially and also more and more offpage factors which go beyond traditional linking.

• Personalized Search Changes
• Real Time Search
• Growth of Android and Personalized Mobile Search
• Social Search
• Bing Growing into legitimate option 2

These concepts individually have an effect, but combined they leave search relevancy heading in a direction that will leave SERPs looking far different than they did in 2009.

Looking at the way these changes are making search as a whole move, SEOs are going to have to focus on two new concepts in their marketing plan in 2010:

1. Social Media
2. Mobile Search

Why is social media so important? Well, since social media is such an all encompassing metric, let’s look at one aspect of social media : the sharing of information.

In 1998, links were important in the Google Citation algorithm because links were the way that people shared information and gave recommendations online. In 1998, in order to link to something, you usually had to hardcode a link in the HTML of your website. Doing so could take minutes to code, and hours to FTP via dial up, and if someone put that much time into linking to a site … well, that site must be of value, wouldn’t it have?

With blogging, things changed. Blogging came into the forefront in 2003 with Google’s acquisition of Blogger.com and ultimately Google’s launch of AdSense; which monetized blogs and led to a new economic culture of self publishing. With anyone having the ability to launch a blog with the click of a button, any novice now had the ability to link. Links are easier to achieve, easier to manipulate and much more valuable, since the link is no longer the voice of few, but the voice of many.

Enter microblogging and socially networked sharing, with Twitter and more predominantly Facebook. If Twitter is to an HTML link what Facebook is to mass blog linking. This analogy means basically that in my opinion, Twitter will hit its early adopter plateau while almost anyone will join Facebook, connect with friends and share information with others.

What’s our point?

Our point is that if Google is to still work off of a citation based algorithm based on relevant conversations and suggestions of websites using keywords, then the engine is going to have to catch up to the world of social media. Because bloggers don’t just blog anymore, they share thoughts and relevant information on Twitter and Facebook. If Dave’s mom reads something interesting, he’ll share it on Facebook. If Loren’s wife runs across a great recipe, she may tweet it out. Hence, microblogging.

If blogging has become microblogging, then linking should become micro-linking (ie. URL Shorteners).

If Google fails to incorporate social media signals via Twitter & Facebook sharing, TinyURL’s and other conversations … then they would be ignoring the direction of the Internet.

10 reasons people criticize SEO

10 reasons people criticize SEO

SEO is a polarizing subject. Bring it up in the company of the tech set and chances are you'll get a debate not unlike one you might get when talking about religion and politics.

A lot of the criticism of SEO is misplaced while some of it isn't. When addressing SEO criticism, it helps to have an understanding of why critics are so skeptical. Here are top 10 reasons.

1. They don't know what SEO is. While the phrase 'search engine optimization' seems pretty straightforward, it's pretty obvious that many of the most ardent SEO critics don't really know what SEO is. Case in point: Derek Powazek's recent attack on SEO equated botnets and hacking attempts with SEO, a clear indication that Powazek didn't really know what he was talking about.


2. They had a bad experience. There's plenty of SEO snake oil out there and a bad experience with an SEO snake oil salesman could easily lead someone to believe that SEO itself is a scam. People throw the baby out with the bath water all the time and SEO in particular is no exception.


3. They're listening to the wrong people. It's easy to form a bad opinion of just about anything if you listen to the wrong people. Just as in social media, there are plenty of people in the SEO world who promulgate myths, misstate facts and make sweeping proclamations. These things aren't always done intentionally but the harm is done regardless. Unfortunately, the people who are most apt to do these things are often the ones who have the time to hog the spotlight and are most visible to newbies.


4. They're jealous. If the competition has great SERPs thanks to its SEO efforts, and you don't, it's convenient to criticize the competition's use of SEO. After all, you're better than the competition so any competitor who appears more prominently in the SERPs must be scheming, right?


5. They're lazy. SEO is hard work. From learning the basics to staying abreast of the latest trends to actually applying your knowledge in practice, SEO, like most things worthwhile, requires hard work and an investment of time. Out of all the people who criticize SEO, how many do you really think have actually made a reasonable effort to see what SEO can do for them?


6. They already have great SERPs. It's completely possible to obtain great SERPs without making a dedicated SEO effort or being an expert SEO. That's because so many of the important aspects of good SEO (content, information architecture, design) aren't exclusive to SEO. So someone who has acquired great SERPs but who didn't consciously focus on SEO has good reason to ask what all the SEO hoopla is about.


7. SEO seems too complicated. SEO is a nuanced field and in many areas, there are no black and white answers. Much is unique to individual circumstances and there's also a lot of myth and misinformation that needs to be sifted through. This can easily deter someone.


8. They experienced failure. There's no magic formula when it comes to SEO and results aren't realized overnight. For the impatient, a lack of instant results can serve as the foundation for SEO skepticism.


9. They're master link builders. What's one of the fastest ways to acquire new backlinks? Write an inflammatory post calling SEO a scam. Oh the irony!


10. They're full of nonsense. A lot of the people who criticize SEO don't really believe what they say. Take Jason Calacanis, for instance. He's said some pretty mean things about SEO yet his company, Mahalo, is basically an SEO play. And uses some pretty aggressive tactics at that.

Have I missed anything? What rationales have you seen behind SEO criticism?

9 Tips For Ecommerce SEO's

9 Tips For Ecommerce SEO's

The below tips are especially for search engine optimizers (SEOs) actively working in the ecommerce field. Hopefully you can make use of these, and maybe even provide some tips of your own in the comments (or on your blog).

With that out of the way, let’s focus on these 9 Tasty Tips for Ecommerce SEOs, shall we?

1. Implement a recommendation engine

The king of upselling has always been Amazon.com (they don’t need any more links, so I won’t bother), a site that pretty much invented the idea of displaying recommendations during the browse and purchase processes. Recommendation engines can be extremely powerful. If you aren’t using them yet, make sure you put this on your radar for 2010 planning.

There are a few key things to remember for SEO with functionality like this, especially how the feature will be coded on the site. If it’s built on javascript, that could pose problems with search engines. While googlebot can crawl through javascript, it’s not guaranteed and certainly won’t provide the benefit of plain text links; Bing’s bot (still msnbot as far as I’m aware) and Yahoo! Slurp are also important to cater to and don’t follow javascript yet.

You’ll also want to ensure the recommendation engine is making use of definitive product URLs and not creating its own “variety” as the recommendations are generated. Depending on business requirements, you may want to build this in-house or look to a third-party solution. Either way, this is a large project requiring a lot of resources—but it’s worth it. Why? Just look at this:

A company we work with recently launched a recommendation engine and saw the following performance improvements after launch:

• Pages per visit (PPV): +20.1%
• Time on site: +2.8%
• Bounce rate: -5.9%
• Conversion rate: +4.8%

Pretty extraordinary results from adding recommendations to the site! This client is a large brand with an already healthy sales process, so your mileage may vary.

2. Add related links

With a lot of pages to work with, related linking can be huge for SEO. At the enterprise scale, SEO is really about leveraging large amounts of pages efficiently, and using that scale to advantage. Related linking accomplishes that very well, but can be an intensive feature to implement and manage (there are several third-party resources for this, including TextWise, SLI Systems, and others).

The king of related linking has always been Shopping.com, a site that was using this to advantage years before it caught on (thanks to their extremely sharp SEO at the time, Aaron Shear).

The idea behind related linking is to accomplish at least 3 major goals:

• Flatten the site, thereby making it easier for crawlers to access URLs from many different points. Think of this as opening more doors for spiders to traverse a site.
• Relate and categorize products and categories together, thereby making it easier for crawlers to understand how URLs can potentially be grouped together. Think of this as putting signs on the doors to other, possibly related, doors for spiders to follow.
• Provide human visitors with links to related products and categories, thereby aiding the navigation process.

Using related linking well can offer a huge advantage in areas beyond SEO, because users love them too! Related linking can be used alongside or separately from recommendations, and is highly recommended for ecommerce sites--especially large ones.

3. Correlate entry page to bounce rate

Here’s a great tip for SEOs working in analytics, with a hat tip to Brian Kalma who pointed me in this direction: generate search traffic reports to show you the search term alongside the corresponding entry page. You can then analyze the bounce rate of that term and page combination, and find where relevance needs to be improved.

The idea here is to ask, What organic traffic terms are bringing visitors to the wrong page? Knowing that, you can either optimize the page for relevancy, or figure out if a conversion issue is causing problems.

This is literally a gold mine of opportunity for the hard-working SEO! But it’s not something that you can accomplish over night. After you’ve created the ability for your analytics reports to generate the right data points (easier said than done), you’ll then need to analyze that data and finally begin to chip away at the large number of projects this analysis will create as outcomes.

4. Be a speed demon

Dealing with hundreds of millions (or billions) of pageviews a day is nothing out of the ordinary for enterprise sites. Ecommerce sites can get pounded with traffic, and require advanced content delivery network (CDN) solutions such as Akamai and Limelight. While these are important (actually, essential), what’s also important is ensuring your pages are loading lightning fast!

While Google in particular doesn’t use page load time as a factor in its ranking algorithms, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact SEO or isn’t important. Site latency can have ramifications in SEO in at least the following areas:

• Crawling efficiency. As a spider crawls the site and performs typical GET/RESPONSE requests, the content needs to be served without excessive delays and without any 5xx server errors. Slow-loading sites can hinder the crawl by serving pages too slowly, which can adversely influence indexing and ultimately even impact rankings.
• User response. A slow-loading page is as dead as a non-existent page. On the web, we want it fast and we want it now, and if we can’t get it now we hit the back button. Google certainly, and Bing probably, look to user satisfaction as a prime concern. A user who searches, clicks a result, then quickly returns to the search engine result page (SERP) and clicks on another result sends a strong signal about a page that is surely recorded. Think of this occurring many thousands of times and you can predict the outcome: the page will be pushed lower in the SERPs, or if it’s a serious error such as a 5xx, removed from the index altogether.

Have your development team look into techniques to speed up the site, and continually audit site load time.

5. Find and kill duplicate product URLs

Here’s some low fruit to pick: ecommerce sites are especially bad at having multiple versions of product pages. Normally we can find these with site: and inurl: search operators. Pay careful attention to the product level URLs, as this is usually the area duplicate content creeps in (through faceting and sorting of URLs, or through tracking or cookie information appended in the query string). It’s also an area that can cause major negative impact on search rankings. Each product page should have one single, authoritative URL.

Duplicate product pages cause the following issues (at least):

• Page dilution in the search indices. It’s not uncommon to find sites with dozens or even hundreds of product duplicates; with Google crawling and indexing a finite number of pages (domain dependent, of course), this is critical to resolve.
• PageRank split in the link profile. Duplicate pages can attract links on their own, too, and these need to be consolidated to maximize a product URLs external links.

To find duplicate product URLs, do some quick searches in Google like the following:

1. site:mydomain.com inurl:productID
2. site:mydomain.com intitle:"my product name"

You’ll have to click on the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link to see all the duplicates (this adds filter=0 to the query string in the URL). After you find them, here are your options (in order of preference for SEO, and intensiveness to implement):

• Best but highly intensive: Re-structure your URLs so they don’t create duplicate content. This may mean a complete overhaul of the URL format and is not recommended in 99% of cases. However, in very serious situations this is the long-term goal, even if you have to get there via other short-term fixes.
• Second best and moderately intensive: 301 redirect duplicate versions to the authoritative version. This is always a good option, however it requires more resources and is sometimes not do-able on ecommerce sites sorting products by season, style or special promotion. Also, redirects cause latency on a site (a point often overlooked by SEOs).


• Third best and lightly intensive: Use the link canonical meta tag to relate duplicates with a single, authoritative version. Next, use Google and Yahoo! parameter removal tools in their web consoles to pull out parameters that aren’t needed. This is the least desirable option because it doesn’t really fix the underlying issue, it only places a band-aid on it. Still, it’s better than nothing, and it requires very few resources in comparison to the above methods.

6. Run your own scheduled crawls and audits

If you’re an in-house SEO, set a crawler loose on your pages regularly. Xenu can be a good option, however it doesn’t scale for large sites and won’t stand up at the enterprise level. web Link Validator is better in this department. However, there are unique advantages to either having a custom crawler created or to use the services of an outside agency. The idea here, and the benefit, is to continually monitor the site for changes and new content pushes to ensure nothing creeps in that will stab you in the back (like the creation of 25,000 302 redirects from out of stock items).

Google’s webmaster console is fantastic (I also recommend using Bing and Yahoo!’s tools, which are good but not as comprehensive). Google’s tool acts very much like a crawler you would use on your own, but in my experience only shows “indications” of issues, and therefore acts best as a pointer for further investigation with other tools

7. Brag about your successes

This may sound odd, but you need to hear it: brag! That’s right, brag. If you don’t tell anyone about your successes, do you just expect them to discover them on their own? You can’t quietly do your work expecting for everyone to notice how amazing you are. You have to stand up and say, “hey! check this out, we made the front page of Digg! We got some new rankings! We’re building links like crazy!” or whatever you can brag about.

You provide reporting and benchmarking, I’m sure, but be sure to share what you’ve done outside of those formal procedures. Brag to your managers and even the C-levels about link building successes, wins with rankings and social media, traffic increases, and even specific projects that you’ve recently undertaken or completed.

8. Leverage landing pages

Landing pages are like little hubs that tie entire categories (and even sections) of a site together. For large ecommerce sites, having custom and high-quality landing pages created enables web teams to:

• Create excellent user experiences


• Control the number and type of links on a page (not to mention their location)


• Control the ‘flow’ of a site from the category to product level


• Aggregate content such as custom-tailored copy, links, reviews, product shots, promotions, and navigation elements into a single page

9. Stay creative

I’ve saved the best one for last, because I really like the number 9. Top ecommerce sites do one thing very well: they cater to their customers. They innovate, they contribute value. Creative thinking is required in SEO, because SEO best practices can only get you so far.

Continually aim to keep new projects on your agenda. It’s not enough just to stay caught up with damage control. Keep an open mind. Stay away from “latest fad” type of SEO tips and other rubbish. Creative ideas can drive a lot of traffic and attention, regardless of SEO benefits. And always remember, as Bob Massa says, “Search engines follow users.”

Courtesy: Search Engine Land.