July Boston SEO Meetup Recap

Last night, July 16th, was the July Boston SEO Meetup held at the Arlington Library in Arlington MA. Despite the heat, a great crowd came out to talk about SEO, share client and personal experiences, ask questions and offer expert advice. There was no speaker scheduled, although the Meetup founders are working on getting Tim Carter from Ask The Builder to be next month’s guest speaker. Last night’s SEO Meetup was more of a round table discussion.

Challenge Question 1: A B2B e-commerce site owner was considered moving her site from one platform to another, more user-friendly web design template. She wanted to know if moving her site would impact her SEO in any way.

Some responses included:

• Make sure the name/branding of the old site remains intact on the new. You don’t want to confuse visitors by sending them to a site they weren’t expecting to find.
• The older site is more “embedded” in the web and more trusted by the search engines, so moving to a new domain name would mean losing that trust factor if not done properly.
• A 301 redirect is essential to help keep the history of the site, especially if you move to a new domain name.
• If you are just changing the architecture of the site be sure it doesn’t mess up the user experience. Visitors should not notice any changes.

Challenge Question 2: Can you buy an old domain that has been dormant for some time and salvage the old SEO?

Some responses included:

• The key is to find a site with the right link profile. Most sites will bounce back, although not always as strong as they used to be. You want to find a site that could afford to take a hit but still be a competitive site.
• Be careful if you are trying to build your own private blog network by “site flipping.” If one site gets dinged it could bring the whole network down.

The conversations also drifted towards the differences between white hat and black hat SEO. Once attendee mentioned about paid links, “You can buy the link, it’s just how you buy them.” Many of the SEO professionals agreed that if you are brand new to SEO you should stick to white hat SEO all the way. Even grey hat SEO can be dangerous when you don’t understand where the lines are and it’s not worth the risk to your website. Someone recommended that is you hire an SEO provider to do your link building make sure you know how they are earning those backlinks. Sites that don’t know what is being done in their name could be penalized and they wouldn’t have any idea as to why.

There is no scheduled meeting for August.

Brick Marketing was the food sponsor of the event.