inbound.org technical seo audit

© 2015 Red Cardinal Limited Inbound.org Technical SEO Audit

Version: 0.1 – CLIENT CONFIDENTIAL Page - 1 - of 51

Inbound.org

Technical SEO Audit

1 June 2015

Prepared By: Richard Hearne <[email protected]> Red Cardinal Limited http://www.redcardinal.ie

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.redcardinal.ie/



Table of Contents 1 Amendment History ................................................................................................................................. - 4 -

2 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. - 5 -

2.1 Purpose of this document ................................................................................................................. - 5 -

2.2 Associated documents ...................................................................................................................... - 5 -

2.3 Audience ............................................................................................................................................ - 5 -

2.4 Methodology ...................................................................................................................................... - 5 -

2.4.1 Tools Used ................................................................................................................................... - 5 -

3 Executive Overview – Audit Results ......................................................................................................... - 7 -

4 Inbound.org Technical SEO Audit ............................................................................................................ - 8 -

4.1 General Site Navigation ..................................................................................................................... - 8 -

4.1.1 Explore Hubs Please ................................................................................................................... - 8 -

4.1.2 Where Am I? .............................................................................................................................. - 10 -

4.2 Significant Technical SEO Issues ..................................................................................................... - 10 -

4.2.1 Canonicalization ........................................................................................................................ - 10 -

4.2.2 Load More, Pagination and Infinite Scroll ................................................................................ - 11 -

4.2.3 404 Handling ............................................................................................................................. - 12 -

4.2.4 XML Sitemaps ............................................................................................................................ - 12 -

4.2.5 HTTPS Secure Site ..................................................................................................................... - 13 -

4.3 Site Section & Template Audits ....................................................................................................... - 14 -

4.3.1 Header Element ........................................................................................................................ - 14 -

4.3.2 Category/Hub Listing Template ................................................................................................ - 16 -

4.4 Article Template .............................................................................................................................. - 21 -

4.4.1 The User Experience ................................................................................................................. - 21 -

4.4.2 The SEO Aspects of the Article Template ................................................................................. - 25 -

4.4.3 The Elephant in the Room - Thin & Scrapped Content ............................................................ - 26 -

4.5 Members .......................................................................................................................................... - 28 -

4.5.1 Member Discovery & Navigation .............................................................................................. - 28 -

4.5.2 User Profiles .............................................................................................................................. - 32 -

4.6 Jobs .................................................................................................................................................. - 36 -

4.6.1 “Sorry, there are no jobs to see here.” ..................................................................................... - 36 -

4.6.2 Deliver More Value, Focus on Quality ...................................................................................... - 37 -

4.6.3 Template Audits ........................................................................................................................ - 37 -

4.6.4 The Missing Link – Companies? ................................................................................................ - 43 -



4.7 Groups ............................................................................................................................................. - 45 -

4.7.1 Groups Homepage .................................................................................................................... - 45 -

4.7.2 Group Page ............................................................................................................................... - 45 -

4.7.3 Create Group Page .................................................................................................................... - 46 -

4.8 Exclusive Inbound.org Content ....................................................................................................... - 47 -

4.8.1 Inbound 50................................................................................................................................ - 47 -

4.9 Schema.org ...................................................................................................................................... - 50 -

5 Concluding Thoughts ............................................................................................................................. - 51 -

5.1 Prioritised Recommendations......................................................................................................... - 51 -

Table of Figures Figure 1 Proposed Explore Wireframe ....................................................................................................... - 9 - Figure 2 View More ................................................................................................................................... - 11 - Figure 3 Global Header ............................................................................................................................. - 14 - Figure 4 Login and Signup ........................................................................................................................ - 14 - Figure 5 Category/Hub Listing Template .................................................................................................. - 16 - Figure 6 Proposed Hub Template ............................................................................................................. - 19 - Figure 7 Proposed Hub Template - User Logged In ................................................................................. - 20 - Figure 8 Article Template Audit ................................................................................................................ - 21 - Figure 9 Proposed Article Template ......................................................................................................... - 22 - Figure 10 Proposed Discussion Template ................................................................................................ - 24 - Figure 11 Members - Filter Feature Modal ............................................................................................... - 30 - Figure 12 Members - Filter Feature .......................................................................................................... - 31 - Figure 13 Proposed Member Profile Template ........................................................................................ - 33 - Figure 14 Sorry, there are no jobs to see here ......................................................................................... - 36 - Figure 15 Sorry, there are no jobs to see here, Again .............................................................................. - 36 - Figure 16 Jobs - Single column Layout ...................................................................................................... - 38 - Figure 17 Jobs - 2-column Layout ............................................................................................................. - 38 - Figure 18 Jobs - Single column Layout Audit ............................................................................................ - 39 - Figure 19 Jobs - 2 column Layout Audit .................................................................................................... - 41 - Figure 20 Company Job Lisitings Template .............................................................................................. - 44 - Figure 21 Inbound 50 Update ................................................................................................................... - 48 -



1 Amendment History Version Issue Date Reason/Description of Change Author Initials

0.1 01/06/2015 Produced draft version of document. RH



2 Introduction Red Cardinal Ltd. has been commissioned to perform a technical SEO audit of the Inbound.org website.

2.1 PURPOSE OF THIS DOCUMENT This document describes the findings of the performed audit, including details of all discovered SEO issues, alongside proposed technical remedies and suggested strategies to transform any found weaknesses into opportunities.

2.2 ASSOCIATED DOCUMENTS Document Name Description Author

2.3 AUDIENCE The audience for this document is as follows:

Name Role Sign off / Review

Sam Mallikarjunan Inbound client point-of-contact Review/Sign-off

2.4 METHODOLOGY This audit was conducted on the Inbound.org website over a number of weeks during May 2005. The audit itself comprises multiple layers of analysis incorporating both manual and automated processes to appraise the Inbound.org web property from. The overall methodology applied combines 2 disciplines Search Engine Optimisation and User Experience – in order to develop outcomes that work well for users as well as search engines.

2.4.1 Tools Used The following tools were used to complete this audit:

Automated crawl analysis: DeepCrawl (www.deepcrawl.com), Botify (www.botify.com) and Screaming Frog (www.screamingfrog.co.uk);

Keyword/ranking Analysis: SEMrush (www.semrush.com);

Web traffic and site usage: Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/);

Crawl/indexation data: Google Webmaster Tools (www.google.com/webmasters/), Google Web Search (www.google.com).

Automated crawl analysis of Inbound.org serves two primary purposes:

1. Determine technical and architectural issues that would otherwise prove difficult to discern at scale, and;

2. Identify internal content issues at both granular and aggregate levels.

http://www.deepcrawl.com/

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

http://www.semrush.com/

http://www.google.com/analytics/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

http://www.google.com/



Analytics and indexation data is utilized to pinpoint advanced technical issues. Meanwhile, manual inspection of problem page templates enables the identification of very specific issues not easily discerned from automated analysis techniques. Finally, keyword and ranking data analysis assists with indentifying which tactics are and are not delivering value to the site so that prescriptive action can be taken accordingly.



3 Executive Overview – Audit Results It’s been very interesting getting to know Inbound.org over the time of this audit. As someone working in online marketing for 13 years it’s refreshing to see many user names I’m familiar with posting and interacting on the site. It’s also been very interesting to see just how much content there is, and how a lot of it actually does interest me, even though I’m neither a content or inbound marketer per-se. Does Inbound.org suffer from lots of SEO issues? Yes. The site has substantial problems. The good news is that many of these problems are technical in nature, and can be fixed by your developers. Even better news is that many of these technical issues are “fix once, scale everywhere” type fixes where a solution in one function or template will scale across the entire site. The foremost technical issues relate to malformed and suboptimal URLs and the misconfiguration of the canonicalization feature, both of which lead to massive crawl inefficiency and suboptimal indexation. On the architecture and design front we also encounter significant issues. The site currently creates a vast quantity of low quality, duplicated, and empty content. The cause of this tends to lie in the production of pages where no pages are needed. Many of the proposed solutions involve redesign and re-orientation of key site sections, and where possible I try to combine both SEO and UX to strike a balance between user and search. My goal is to make content more accessible without the need for multiple navigational clicks. I’m trying to bring content up in the overall architecture as I feel this will help both your rankings and your users. So you will find multiple wireframes throughout this document which visualize my ideas about various page templates. There will be quite a substantial body of work to redesign and rebuild front-end templates, but I feel this work is both necessary and worthwhile. The overall architecture is reasonably sound. However I am proposing a substantial elevation and focus on Tags/Hubs (these are one and the same for the purpose of this exercise). The Explore page will change to focus on Hubs, and the Hubs themselves will receive additional content to help increase their relevance and better target the keywords they relate to. In terms of taxonomy I will question the gap that exists between the key entities promoted through the site: articles, members and jobs. The missing element that links all of these is companies, and I feel that this would make a very strong difference to your site overall if better linkage between the current entities existed. However, adding companies and then relating them to all other entities would be a considerable undertaking, and it would be unwise to recommend anything beyond investigating the feasibility of this change. By far the most difficult problem to resolve, and an inherent feature of all sites such as Inbound.org, is that content tends to be duplicated from third parties, and of course search engines don’t particularly like duplicated content. I try to propose various ways to increase the quality of the content, including changing how users post material, and techniques for expanding the unique content, such as user comments and other Meta data, on article pages. But certainly in the age of quality-based algorithms such as Google’s Panda and their ilk, duplicate and low quality content is no website’s friend, so improving overall quality is an absolutely necessary goal. I hope this document lives up to expectations, and I look forward to working though your questions and offering assistance to work these changes through.



4 Inbound.org Technical SEO Audit The results of the audit are delivered below, together with advised prescriptive actions and suggested

tactics and strategies.

4.1 GENERAL SITE NAVIGATION The taxonomy used on the site fits well with the content published, and rarely was I presented with content that didn’t seem to fit well at its current location. However on multiple occasions I found myself needing the Back button to reverse out of a navigational turn I didn’t expect. More details on navigational quirks will be delivered when each major template is analyzed. However, it’s important to meet user expectations with navigation, and not to surprise users with counter-intuitive navigational structures and features.

4.1.1 Explore Hubs Please We discussed the Explore page on a call, and it’s clear that this page does not work well for users. I think the issue with this page may be quite simple – people generally like to explore specific topics. The Explore page pitches content types primarily, followed by trending discussions (which are already included on the homepage), and finally a small subset of tags (topics) as an afterthought under the title “Find areas that interest you the most”. This title is prophetic – this is exactly what users expect and want from a page called “Explore” in my opinion. I strongly suggest that the Explore page is reorganised so that the main focus becomes the 42 tags/hubs that currently exist. The page can retain links to the filtered views by content type (currently main focus of page), but relegate these views beneath the Tag navigation. I feel topic pages have become a very good search tactic in recent times, as search engines try to present users with varied content around specific short tail keywords. Certainly some of the highest trafficked sites on the web these days in the informational space receive considerable traffic to topic pages, and focus considerable energy on sustained internal linkage to their topic hubs in order to increase the authority of their topic pages. By switching the internal focus from content types to content topics, and optimizing the Hubs within the site for relevant keywords I believe Inbound can greatly increase their organic reach. I also believe that an expansion of tags/topics to cover more marketing-related terms should also be considered over time to increase the number of keywords that can be targeted in this way. A wireframe mock-up appears below:



Figure 1 Proposed Explore Wireframe



4.1.1.1 Hubs vs. Tags

When posting a story users are asked to select at least one “tag”. When surfing the site users view items with a particular tag by visiting a “hub”. While I personally like the “Hub” name used, there may be a disconnect between the terms used, and such disconnects generally result in confusion. It may simply be a case of better aligning the overall navigation with tags/hubs, as opposed to focusing on content types.

4.1.2 Where Am I? On occasion it is difficult to find one’s bearings when navigating the site. There is no breadcrumb indicating the current location, and quite often clicking to a sub-page, e.g. followers from a profile, or members from a group, results in disorientation as you try to understand where you are in relation to where you’ve come from. Recommendations: Employ a breadcrumb throughout the site at all times. Breadcrumbs are great not only for usability by giving instant awareness to users of their location, but also help with overall SEO by ensuring all pages relate upwards to the homepage correctly Where tabs are used, e.g. Group pages, ensure that they are appropriate for the pages they appear on. Clicking through to the members list from any Group page is a good example of where tabs are entirely misplaced.

4.2 SIGNIFICANT TECHNICAL SEO ISSUES The following issues are problems which affect either the site in its entirety, or large sections of the site.

4.2.1 Canonicalization “Canonicalization” refers to a technique that signal to search engines the preferred URL of any given resource. Canonicalization was introduced by major search engines to help websites to avoid problems with content duplication and link equity dilution. Inbound.org includes a canonical tag in the header of all published pages. There are a number of issues with the current implementation:

1. The canonical values are generated from the URL requested. Thus the value parsed to the

canonical tag on each page is generated directly from the requested URL. So rather than correct

issues such as malformed URLs and duplicated resources the current implementation reinforces

them, e.g.:

a. http://inbound.org/in/MaryGreenIM presents a canonical value

“http://inbound.org/in/MaryGreenIM”;

b. http://inbound.org/in/marygreenim presents a canonical value

“http://inbound.org/in/marygreenim”;

Both of the above URLs resolve the same page, but rather than the canonical values helping search engines to determine the correct URL they instead present mixed signals.

2. In cases where a query string is present in the URL, this is being stripped from the canonical

value published, e.g.:

http://inbound.org/in/MaryGreenIM

http://inbound.org/in/marygreenim



a. http://inbound.org/in/MaryGreenIM/shares/latest?&per_page=30 presents a canonical

value “http://inbound.org/in/MaryGreenIM/shares/latest”;

This is a site-wide issue, and when combined with other SEO-related issues discovered on Inbound.org, the mishandling of canonicalization is highly likely to be producing significant inefficiencies in the crawl and indexation of the site. Implementing a robust and effective canonical feature should ensure that the correct URLs and content are present in major search engines, and that limited crawl budget is not wasted on marginal content. Recommendations: It is recommended that URLs should resolve only on lower-case URIs, and any URI containing upper-case characters should be 301 redirected to the lower-case equivalent. Canonical values should be derived from slugs in the database rather than requested URIs, and additional rules should be incorporated to ensure query strings are properly handled. Using an automated auditing tool such as Botify.com (www.botify.com), which audits your site at preset frequencies, would help greatly monitoring site integrity.

4.2.2 Load More, Pagination and Infinite Scroll Given the importance of list-views as a primary navigational method throughout the site, it’s important that list series are accessible to crawlers. Is it equally important that internal navigational structures are optimized to spread link equity in an effective and efficient manner. The current list view implementation across both Category and Hub archives is more likely doing damage than good to the overall search engine visibility of the site. The chief antagonist in this regard is the View More button used on the list view template:

Figure 2 View More

The issue is that no crawl path is offered which search engines can crawl to access content beyond the initial view. This limits the number of articles crawled via Category or Hub pages to the most recent 30 items displayed in the initial state. Providing an alternative crawl path for search engines is the prescribed method1 for making infinite scroll content accessible to user agents that don’t scroll (or click on “View More” buttons). Note that this issue in some ways interacts with the canonicalization problem outlined above – since series sub-pages will likely include a query string they would also incorporate an incorrect canonical pointing at the root page of the series.

1 See Google recommendations http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-

friendly.html

http://inbound.org/in/MaryGreenIM/shares/latest?&per_page=30

http://www.botify.com/



Recommendations: An audit of this template is contained in S4.3.2, and this will include further details on best practices on handling SEO and infinite scrolling. However, below are some important considerations. An alternative path for search engines need not align entirely with how content is served to users within the infinite scroll variation. For instance, users may receive the first 30 items on the initial view, with an added 30 items loaded each time the scroll arrives at the breakpoint, whereas search engines could be server the first 30 items in initial view, and then be served 100 or perhaps 200 items in each subsequent page. This would greatly reduce the crawl depth for any given series. The alternative path for search engines should include a “noindex” robots META tag in all sub-pages. This will ensure that sub-pages within any series are crawled but not indexed. They should also include a clear link back to the root page of the index so that link equity also passes back to this page. The anchor should be the series name. The SEO goal of linking back up is to rank the root of a series by not wasting equity on sub-pages. Finally, the rel=”prev/next” links should be added to the head of all pages within a series to help search engines identify the entire set contained within the series.

4.2.3 404 Handling The automated crawls of the site turned up an issue where the “404 – Page Not Found” template is being returned, but the HTTP status code is 200 instead of the correct 404. Some examples of these are listed below:

http://inbound.org/%5C%5C/in/pointblankseo

http://inbound.org/in/twitter.com/sturge87

http://inbound.org/in/sarahhewy/i-resources.co.uk

http://inbound.org/in/cgstrom/www.clearpivot.com

http://inbound.org/in/Not%20Applicable

http://inbound.org/digest

http://inbound.org/groups/invite/183

http://inbound.org/%5C%5C/in/patrickcoombe

This should be fixed so that the correct response code is always presented.

4.2.4 XML Sitemaps Utilizing XML sitemaps to indicate site content to search engines is a simple and scalable way to increase the crawl and indexation of key site content. Unfortunately some of the sitemaps submitted to Google appear to include errors, while the document count for others looks suspect. The total number of pages submitted is 4328, while Google reports 2160 have been indexed. Meanwhile, Google reports a total of 280K pages indexed in total. Based on the number of articles and members it can safely be assumed that Google is indexing URLs that are not required. Recommendations:

http://inbound.org/%5C%5C/in/pointblankseo

http://inbound.org/in/twitter.com/sturge87

http://inbound.org/in/sarahhewy/i-resources.co.uk

http://inbound.org/in/cgstrom/www.clearpivot.com

http://inbound.org/in/Not%20Applicable

http://inbound.org/digest

http://inbound.org/groups/invite/183

http://inbound.org/%5C%5C/in/patrickcoombe



Fix all XML sitemaps2 ensuring that all relevant content is dynamically updated within the relevant XML file i.e. all articles, posts etc. and the root pages of all series (paginated groups).

4.2.5 HTTPS Secure Site It is probably worth suggesting moving the site entirely over to HTTPS. Given recent progress with HTTP2 there is very little downside technically from delivering all content over an encrypted connection, and due to the specific content (in particular, no third party ads) carried on Inbound.org there should be no negative implications of moving to HTTPS. To give an example of how this might make life easier for site producers: currently the Sign Up page at https://inbound.org/signup is canonicalized to http://inbound.org/signup. Searching Google for [inbound.org signup] returns the non-secure sign-up page, which does resolve. Allowing user to sign-up over non-HTTPS connection is a security risk since their details can easily be sniffed by third parties.

2 See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en

https://inbound.org/signup

http://inbound.org/signup



4.3 SITE SECTION & TEMPLATE AUDITS A page-by-page audit follows below in order to identify the key issues introduced by templates used throughout the site.

4.3.1 Header Element The header element included on every page across the site introduces both SEO and user experience issues. Basic features accessed via the global header element are generating substantial problems related to crawl-efficiency and dilution of link equity across the site.

Figure 3 Global Header

4.3.1.1 Login and Sign-up Features

Login and Sign-up are vital features on most sites, and generally do not create many SEO problems. However, in the case of Inbound.org these 2 features introduce an extremely unhealthy number of unique URLs which must be crawled and processed by search engines. The magnitude of this problem is estimated at between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 unneeded URLs generated solely through the Login and Sign-Up features. These URLs are generated due to a unique redirect parameter which is appended to the Login/Sign-Up features on every page published. Taking the example page “Confessions of a Google Spammer” page and clicking “Login”:

Figure 4 Login and Signup

http://inbound.org/post/view/confessions-of-a-google-spammer

This modal is included globally, and includes 2 GET URLs and 1 form POST URL:

https://inbound.org/authenticate/connect_twitter?redirect=[current-URL];

https://inbound.org/signup?redirect=[current-url];

POST: https://inbound.org/authenticate/check?redirect=[current-url].

The GET URLs create significant problems for the site since they must be crawled by search engines in order to ascertain their content. This is a very serious waste of crawl budget, but thankfully it can be fixed very easily with a modest update to the modal HTML. Meanwhile, the POST URL represents less of a problem for the site, but good practice would recommend removing the redirect value from the POST URL, and instead place it inside a hidden form input.

Recommendations:

1. Change the “Sign in with Twitter” link to a form button, passing the redirect URL via a hidden

form input;

2. Update the Login form so that the redirect URL is passed via a hidden form input;

3. Update the “Sign up” link to a form button, again passing the redirect URL via a hidden form

input.

Completing the above should remove at least 1,000,000 unneeded URLs from the crawl path of search engines, and allow future crawls to focus on higher value content. Note: While all “Sign up” URLs are canonicalized to http://inbound.org/signup, search engines treat this as a signal which they may or may not process, and such processing is dependent on crawling each alternative URL to determine the canonical settings and content they contain. Ideally these URLs no longer exist, and ergo this problem disappears.

4.3.1.2 Minor Issues with Header

The HTML for the logo and tagline in the masthead is as follows:

<a href="http://inbound.org/" class="navbar-brand">

<img src="/assets/sites/inbound/img/logo.png" />

The Community For Marketing Professionals

</a>

The simple omission here is the ALT text on the actual logo, which should include “Inbound.org”. Recommendations:

1. Include “Inbound.org” as the ALT text of the masthead logo image:

<img src="/assets/sites/inbound/img/logo.png" alt="Inbound.org" />

Alternatively, the tagline can be output as:

Inbound.org The

Community For Marketing Professionals

2. (UX) reduce the size of the search input until the user requires this feature:

https://inbound.org/authenticate/connect_twitter?redirect=%5bcurrent-URL

https://inbound.org/signup?redirect=%5bcurrent-url

https://inbound.org/authenticate/check?redirect=%5bcurrent-url

http://inbound.org/

http://inbound.org/assets/sites/inbound/img/logo.png

http://inbound.org/assets/sites/inbound/img/logo.png



3. (UX) Increase the margin between buttons in the header to improve their accessibility, especially

from mobile and touch devices.

4.3.1.3 Navigation Breadcrumbs

Some templates include a breadcrumb element, while others do not. Breadcrumb patterns support both usability and SEO when properly implemented, and in my opinion should be included on all pages below the root page of the site.

4.3.2 Category/Hub Listing Template This is the primary template used throughout the site, and was discussed in S4.2.2. The template is used on both Category and Hub pages to list article archives, and the image below highlights some of the major elements within the page:

Figure 5 Category/Hub Listing Template



The numbered elements in the image above are discussed in terms of the User eXperience (UX) and SEO (SEO) problems they create:

1. (UX) The New Post button is not context aware, so regardless of where the user is located within

the site the Submission Form has no context. It may be worth considering pre-populating the

item type (e.g. Discussion, Image etc.) and/or tag based on whether the user was viewing a

particular item type or hub when they click the New Post button. The outcome would be that

users adding new content from the Analytics Hub would have the Analytics tag auto-populated

on the Submission Form at http://inbound.org/submit.

Recommendations:

Add context to the Submission Form so that content type and tags are auto-populated based on

users’ locations when they click New Post;

2. (UX, SEO) Users may expect that the Trending, Top and Latest links relate to the current view –

clicking Trending while viewing a Hub would show you the trending storied within that hub –

whereas in fact they relate to the top level of the site. Clicking Trending while viewing the SEO

Hub takes the user away from this hub, whereas the expectation may be otherwise. From an

SEO perspective the ability to filter the view at the category and hub level may have benefits in

terms of creating more click paths to deeper content. Additionally, the group of 5 links relate to

2 groups of actions – the first three links are filters on views, while the later 2 are views

themselves.

Recommendations:

Distinguish between filters and links to top levels, while allowing users and search engines to

access both Hub and filtered Hub content;

3. (UX) The Subscribe features may confuse users since “subscribe” is used in many places to refer

to different actions. It’s also notable that only one of the options actually results in a

subscription – the email button.

Recommendation:

Change to the label used in this section may make it clearer what the action is – “Subscribe to

Inbound.org”;

4. Utility Links – nothing to see/say here ;)

5. (UX) This element has multiple functions – it indicates the current number of votes for an item,

while also allowing users to Vote, Comment and View the current discussion:

There are 2 potential UX issues with this element. The element containing the number and

upward pointing chevron has low contrast, and given its relative importance to how the site

works it may be worth testing design tweaks to give more visual importance to this element. The

second UX issue is the label “Share comment” – sharing and commenting are 2 distinct actions,

and the label should read “Comment” to reduce potential confusion.

Recommendation:

Test alternative designs for the main button. Update the comment button label;

http://inbound.org/submit

6. (UX) The item title uses a low contrast colour scheme, especially for viewed items. A simple

improvement may be to use darker font colours to increase their overall contrast against the

white background.

Recommendation:

Test higher contrast font colours for key elements;

7. (UX, SEO) There may be a valid SEO argument for removing the live links to member profiles

below posted items on the list view. The reasoning is that removing said links will allow more

weight to pass to posts, which then include live links to the posting members’ profiles. However,

there may be a valid UX reason to leave these links in place, and data from Google Analytics does

indeed show that users visit profile pages from the homepage of the site.

Recommendation:

None – it may be appropriate to revisit in future however;

8. (UX) The comment count element has low contrast, using a grey font on white background.

Increasing the contrast may result in easier fixation on this element and lead to higher

interaction with the comments, which in turn will lead to more interaction with the underlying

Post Page;

Recommendation:

Test higher contrast font colour for comments count and icon;

9. (SEO) The View More element has by far the greatest impact on how search engines crawl and

index content published via this template. The template utilizes a variation of the “infinite scroll”

pattern, although new content is loaded not on a scroll action but on a user interaction with this

button. There is no alternative HTML path to retrieve or view the items listed on subsequent

pages. This means search engines can only view items listed on the initial view. This substantive

flaw in the site architecture is discussed is S4.2.2 at length and should be remedied.

Recommendations:

The View More element should incorporate an alternative click path offering paginated results

for search engine crawlers. The paginated subpages should be marked-up with “noindex” robots

tags and rel=”next/prev” link elements in the <head> element. An increase in the number of

posts per view on paginated subpages will also be beneficial, with 50 or even 100 posts per view

significantly reducing the overall number of paginated pages requiring crawl (this could be

implemented only for search engines, with humans still seeing a lower number of new posts with

each “scroll”).

Additionally, consider implementing a more user-friendly infinite-scroll that does not require

user clicks.

4.3.2.1 Adding More Content to Archive Template

By their nature the archive pages do not include very much content beyond the article title and various Meta data related to the article itself. One potential way to increase the textual layer within the archive pages is to add a short excerpt. This is not to be confused with “extract” of the linked article, and instead the excerpt would be a short hand-written overview of the article that the user would enter when the article is added to Inbound.org. This is discussed further in S4.4.3 below.



4.3.2.2 Increasing Context for Hub Pages

Hub pages also use the template just discussed, and with the proposal discussed earlier regarding increasing the prominence of Hubs within the site it’s appropriate to mention potential ways to improve the template to add more relevance to each Hub. Currently there are 42 Hubs, and with a small number of highly focused topics it should be straightforward to create well-written introductions for each that incorporate relevant keywords. The introductions can be displayed to all logged-out users, and hidden from view when a user is logged-in. Here is the proposed wireframe template:

Figure 6 Proposed Hub Template

When the user is logged in the hub description can be hidden from view, either entirely or using a show/hide feature:

Figure 7 Proposed Hub Template - User Logged In

4.3.2.3 SEO-Friendly Sub-pages

Since logged in users will have the “infinite-scroll” experience, and search engines will crawl paginated sub-pages it is possible to introduce some further SEO-friendly tactics for sub-pages:

1. As noted previously, sub-pages should incorporate rel=”next/prev” link mark-up, combined with a

“noindex” robots value in the <head>;

2. The heading included on Hub pages, e.g. “Blogging Articles”, should become a live link on all sub-

pages which points to the top-level of the hub;

3. Pagination pattern can be more SEO-friendly than might be the case if it was built with UX in

mind. Given the depth of articles belonging to some hubs I would suggest using a pagination

pattern used by many high velocity fora. I fly quad copters, and one site I use frequently is

www.rcgroups.com. Some threads there span thousands of pages, and the pagination pattern

smoothes links over large numbers of paginated results very nicely:

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2280074



4.4 ARTICLE TEMPLATE The Article template presents some very interesting issues from both UX and SEO perspectives.

4.4.1 The User Experience Starting with the user experience – this template is a very busy and somewhat chaotic assembly of information and action elements:

Figure 8 Article Template Audit

Elements bordered with blue indicate informational items, while those wrapped in green indicate action points. The unambiguous take-away from this page analysis is that actions and informational elements



lack coherent grouping, and discerning what’s what on the page must be a struggle even for seasoned users. Below is a proposed wireframe which eliminates distractions, and groups related actions into smaller more refined areas on the page:

Figure 9 Proposed Article Template

The key changes are as follows:

1. The article tagline includes indications of the number of comments and up-votes, with in-page

links to each’

2. The main CTA (“Continue Reading”) and the article length indication (“2 minutes”) are closely

aligned to offer relevant information at the click point;

3. Primary actions “Continue Reading” and social share buttons are grouped for easy access;



4. Superfluous content – the quote on yellow background, and the email subscription input – are

removed3;

5. The comment form is moved below the comments thread (this may be contentious, especially

when articles receive a high number of comments), and a link “Add Your Comment” added next

to the comment counter;

6. Comments are elevated to narrow their proximity to the article body, and therefore form a more

obvious continuation of the main content. Users are also more likely to engage when they can

see a clearer path to achieve this;

7. The Up-Vote details list is moved below the comments, and an added Up-Vote button is included

so that now 2 points exist within the page where users can up-vote an article;

8. Finally, there are alternative actions that users can take at the foot of each article, those being:

a. View latest articles in Hubs (based on tags of current article);

b. View next article in primary Hub.

3 These can of course be retained, but I would advise moving them towards the end of the article template after

the comment form;



In the case of a discussion page, the proposed new article page would be identical, with one small change to the main CTA (since there is no external article to visit):

Figure 10 Proposed Discussion Template

4.4.2 The SEO Aspects of the Article Template Some years ago Google introduced “block-level analysis”. This allowed them to understand various elements within your page, notably to identify common boilerplate items such as navigation, mastheads, footers, and importantly the body area. Over the past 2 years Google has steadily progressed from extraction and towards full render of pages to better understand their content. This progression has also opened the door to various “quality” algorithms which assign quality-related scores to pages. I suspect that, if not now then some time in the near future, Google will identify pages with weak UX attributes, and demote those in its search results. The current Article template would be a very good candidate for a negative response from such an algorithm in my opinion. It is also highly likely that Google measures and utilizes SERP bounce-back rates to derive a quality proxy which may be used for ranking purposes. If so, then improving the overall UX, combined with more user options around and after the article may help offset the bounce rates observed. Adding additional internal links to related articles, and tag Hubs should also help with overall site-wide SEO. Recommendations: Update the Article template to increase usability and follow-through activity by users.

4.4.2.1 Nofollow Comment Links

It is noticeable that some user’s comment links are assigned a rel=“nofollow” attribute, while others are not. This is a common practice, but the audit identified some internal links also being nofollowed. This is a bad practice, and further refinement of this feature to avoid internal links being assigned the nofollow attribute should be carried out. Recommendation: Never assign the nofollow attribute to internal links.

4.4.2.2 Mark-Up Analysis

Based on the mark-up used for the article body of many Post items it’s clear that the editor being used is not generating well structured HTML. This issue may not be widespread, but having well structured mark-up is always advisable, especially when automated agents need to extract and understand your content. Here’s an example of a subheading and 2 paragraphs of text from a recent story:

Well structured mark-up would resemble:

<h3>Percent Share by Industry</h3>

Every marketing conference over the past few years has focused on the importance of

social media. The general recommendation is to continue to make social a part of everyday

operations, and to always think social first whether on mobile or desktop.

While 75% of homepages are linking to social media, it’s interesting to note the

industries both above and below the average.

While unlikely to have any great impact on overall SEO, using standards-compliant HTML is more likely to lead to better extraction and understanding of your content.



Recommendations: Investigate if the output of the editor used to create content can be upgraded to produce more compliant HTML output.

4.4.2.3 Page URLs, Titles and META Descriptions

The page URL, title and META description are derived from the shared article’s title and the user-entered description. This unfortunately enables some rather suboptimal outcomes:

1. Extremely long page URLs and titles are generated, e.g.:

a. http://inbound.org/discussion/view/hi-everyone-i-m-scott-stern-i-m-the-founder-and-

chief-strategist-at-red-stripe-strategy-a-chicago-based-marketing-consultancy-for-small-

businesses-generally-i-help-small-businesses-develop-their-overa

b. http://inbound.org/question/view/why-when-i-try-to-submit-article-1-below-does-

inbound-org-say-it-s-already-been-submitted-and-redirect-me-to-http-inbound-org-

articles-view-three-ways-social-media-tools-are-failing-you-which-is-a-sub

c. http://inbound.org/quote/view/6-hours-agopublic-we-ve-been-doing-lots-of-work-to-

clean-up-the-visual-design-of-our-search-results-in-particular-creating-a-better-mobile-

experience-and-a-more-consistent-design-across-devices-as-a-p

2. Some extremely short META descriptions are produced, e.g.:

a. “N” - http://inbound.org/articles/view/are-you-best-placed-to-solve-your-own-google-

penalty-the-media-image-blog

b. “R” - http://inbound.org/articles/view/the-avengers-of-content-marketing

c. “O” - http://inbound.org/articles/view/local-seo-checklist

A better practice here is process long strings before they are used within page templates, and develop alternatives to parsing extremely short strings into elements such as META descriptions. Recommendations: Update the New Post form so that titles are limited in length. Where a title is imported from external sources ensure that it is truncated before it is added to the page title. It may be more appropriate to remove the META description entirely from the Article template, thus allowing Google to generate the snippet from the page content. As discussed shortly – try to change user behavior so that short descriptions of articles are no longer published.

4.4.3 The Elephant in the Room - Thin & Scrapped Content By its very nature Inbound.org facilitates the duplication of content from other sites. Often posts include only a brief extract from the linked article, while sometimes the article page appearing on Inbound.org will include only the title of the linked page and a single word “Discuss” for the summary. Duplicate and thin content are regarded as low quality content by search engines. Such content, in extremes, can lead to significant SEO damage via penalties and other algorithmic downgrades. This is a difficult problem to battle, especially for linked articles. However, increasing the content quality can be achieved in a number of significant ways, some of which are discussed below.

http://inbound.org/discussion/view/hi-everyone-i-m-scott-stern-i-m-the-founder-and-chief-strategist-at-red-stripe-strategy-a-chicago-based-marketing-consultancy-for-small-businesses-generally-i-help-small-businesses-develop-their-overa



http://inbound.org/question/view/why-when-i-try-to-submit-article-1-below-does-inbound-org-say-it-s-already-been-submitted-and-redirect-me-to-http-inbound-org-articles-view-three-ways-social-media-tools-are-failing-you-which-is-a-sub



http://inbound.org/quote/view/6-hours-agopublic-we-ve-been-doing-lots-of-work-to-clean-up-the-visual-design-of-our-search-results-in-particular-creating-a-better-mobile-experience-and-a-more-consistent-design-across-devices-as-a-p



http://inbound.org/articles/view/are-you-best-placed-to-solve-your-own-google-penalty-the-media-image-blog

http://inbound.org/articles/view/are-you-best-placed-to-solve-your-own-google-penalty-the-media-image-blog

http://inbound.org/articles/view/the-avengers-of-content-marketing

http://inbound.org/articles/view/local-seo-checklist



4.4.3.1 Changing User Behaviour

Changing what users post is probably the best way to improve the overall quality of Article pages. Deploying a hard lower limit on the number of words required in the summary would certainly remove any future “Discuss” posts. Requiring additional content besides the automated extract would also be a useful feature to deploy Suggesting via guidelines and/or the interface how users should frame quoted extracts from the linked article can also help change behaviour. Indicating to users that they should include a brief introduction before the extract appears, and follow the excerpt with a conclusion detailing why the article is of interest may elicit the desired outcome. This could also be tied to the minimum word count discussed above. Formatting the content extracted from the linked article (automatically pulled in when user enters an URL) might also help to shape how users submit content. Adding optional fields in the “Share an article” form for “What do you like about this article?” and “Why you think others should read” or similar might introduce some additional content which is unique and useful. Rewarding users who post more content around linked article extracts via Karma points and badges may also induce the desired outcome. Recommendations: Increase the amount of unique content around linked article excerpts via changes to the New Post interface. Illicit desired behaviour via Karma rewards and badges.

4.4.3.2 Adding More Supporting Content to Increase Quality

The most obvious additional content that can supplement thin/scrapped content is of course user comments. Updating the overall Article interface to increase the probability of users posting comments was one of the goals of the redesigned wireframe included in S4.4.1 above. By increasing the proximity of the comments and comment form to the main content more users should interact, thus producing more unique content to otherwise thin-content pages. Details of other articles posted by the same user, or in the same Hub, could also be added to the page to increase content volume, and offer more alternatives to users who wish to discover more. This is a tricky undertaking since this content is not itself unique, however it can add value to the page by increasing user utility which in turn can lead to better user engagement and higher overall usage. Recommendations: Where possible engage users so that more comments are left on Article posts. Consider showing a “recent comments” elements on the site to raise awareness of, and increase overall user interaction with comments. Consider adding paths to more related content, e.g. other posts from the same author or in the same Hub, in order to raise content volume and provide more navigational options to users.



4.5 MEMBERS The member profile area of the site represents by far the largest number of unique URLs discovered via automated crawls. It presents very significant challenges, and produces some of the most problematic SEO issues that came to light during the audit. These issues are discussed further below.

4.5.1 Member Discovery & Navigation Displaying a large data index such as the Members list on a web front-end is challenging. Doing so and also maximising the SEO potential of this content is extremely difficult. Notwithstanding these general difficulties, it’s clear that the current Members area is sub-optimal for search engines, and likely users also. There are a number of significant improvements that can be introduced to make the Members section work harder from search and UX perspectives, and these are discussed below.

4.5.1.1 Canonicalization (Again)

The Members area consists of very large series of paginated content, and the earlier discussed site-wide issue of mishandled canonicalization affects nearly every sub-page since query strings are used throughout these series. Related to the canonicalization issue, it’s generally accepted to be good SEO practice to index only the root page of archives/series so that ranking signals can be focused on the top-most page of an archive/series. This is achieved by adding a “noindex” robots META tag to all but the very top level pages in each series:

http://inbound.org/members

http://inbound.org/members/all/top

http://inbound.org/members/all/new

Rel=”prev/next” link elements should be implemented on all pages within each series so that automated crawlers can easily identify sibling within the series. Finally, all sub-pages should clearly link back to the top-level page using the archive/series name as the anchor text.

4.5.1.2 Member Records per Page

Based on the current ~42K active members, and 48 members displayed per page, there are ~900 paginated results required to view all members. Increasing the number of records to 100, 200 or 250 would reduce the required pagination considerably without too much performance overhead. However, the UX of any increased record count should be considered (e.g. adding pagination links at head and foot of record table). Note: Some images used in avatars are large files, and running all avatar images through a process to standardise them would be good for users and servers alike.

4.5.1.3 Pagination Pattern

The current pagination pattern includes only 2 previous, 2 successive, and the first and last pages. This results in a click depth of approximately 450 clicks to get from the homepage to the median result page. There are more efficient pagination patterns that reduce click depth, such as the suggestion made in S4.3.2.3, and it is advised to look at implementing a new pattern across the site. Note also that the “Page 1” link within the pagination always returns a different URL to the top level page in the nav:

http://inbound.org/members

http://inbound.org/members/all/top




http://inbound.org/members/all/new?&per_page=


This should be rectified in all pagination patterns.

4.5.1.4 New Feature: Filter by Skill

Given that skills can be used within the search feature, and search itself is not accessible to search engines, it makes sense to provide a filter that can be crawled and indexed. This should introduce new, shorter crawl paths to many profiles, and offer users a new way to view member details without relying on internal search. The filtered results pages will also have search value since they can be optimised with introductions for each skill, e.g.:

Find Analytics Experts & Professionals on the number #1 Inbound Marketing resource –

Inbound.org. These are the analytics professionals currently identified on Inbound.org.

There are 28 skills listed in the Dev database, and these can easily be accommodated within a modal element which is fired by clicking on a filter button (see S4.5.1.6 for proposed wireframe).

4.5.1.5 New Feature: Filter by Country/Location

This feature is dependent on whether location data is reliable stored in the database. Based on the data in the dev DB I’m not sure this will be feasible, but it may be possible to add filters at the country level assuming the number of countries is not excessive to fit in the UI. If all countries need to be included my suggestion is that a modal is used to load an iframe where the user can select a country. It may then be feasible to add city-level filters, but care should be taken that as granularity is added to this feature the risks of duplication increase. Furthermore, it may also be possible to combine skills and location to provide cross filtering options, and again increased content routes to users (and, of course, search engines). I can see that there may be some SEO value in having a page indexed which lists all “Branding Experts in Texas”. However, this would need considerable care in order to avoid duplication and other potential SEO pitfalls.

4.5.1.6 New Feature: Filter by Name

This is a very simple alphabetical filter applied to the surname of users. This offers yet another crawl route to find user profiles, and may also be useful to users. Again I would suggest loading this via a modal similar to the previous 2 features. In a slight change to how the previous 2 filters would work, I would propose that all alphabetical listings, including the top level pages, be “noindex”ed. Below is a proposed mock-up of how filters might work.

http://inbound.org/members/all/new?&per_page




Figure 11 Members - Filter Feature Modal



Figure 12 Members - Filter Feature

If it is decided to implement user profile filters we should discuss the finer details to ensure this is done

is an SEO-optimal way.



4.5.2 User Profiles Each user has a Profile containing a number of subpages. This structure likely makes good sense for very highly active and engaged users, but unfortunately the majority of users are not highly active or engaged. The specific SEO issues related to the user profile implementation are:

1. Every Profile includes a minimum4 of 10 sub-pages, many of which are empty, duplicate, or of

low quality. Based on roughly 42K active users, this equates to at least 420K pages generated to

hold user profile content;

2. When combined with the Login/Sign-Up issues outlined in S4.3.1.1 we can see that these 42K

User Profiles generate a further ~840K unique Login and Sign-Up URLs which need to be crawled;

3. Many profile pages have little or no indexable content, and the magnitude of this - and low

quality content - is extreme;

4. Canonicalization misconfiguration problems result in incorrect and duplicate canonical values

and content being presented to search engine crawlers5.

Given the above, User profiles are likely generating upwards of 1.2M unique URLs which need to be crawled, processed and indexed. This is a serious waste of crawl budget, a massive dilution of internal linking weight, and – given the volume of low quality content – probably sends a strong negative quality signal which could be damaging Inbound.org’s ability to generate organic traffic. For these reasons a number of actions are urgently required to reduce the level of low quality content associated with this section of the site.

4.5.2.1 User Profile Consolidation

The first recommendation combines UX with SEO, with the dual goals of:

1. Providing more meaningful content to users when they visit a profile page; and,

2. Reducing the number of pages and URLs which must be crawled by search engines to extract

profile information.

To this end a new profile page proposal is detailed below.

4 Some sub-pages use paginated result sets of 30 items per page, thus active users can have more sub-pages under

their profiles than less active or inactive users. 5 This is the same issue reported in S4.2.1, and is a site-wide problem. However it seems particularly prevalent in

profiles since it appears users like to camel-case their usernames.



Figure 13 Proposed Member Profile Template



The main changes are as follows:

1. The body area and sidebar area in the current design have been swapped. The simple UX

rationale for this is that within the current design static content occupies the most important part

of the page, while dynamic updating content – which is likely of more interest to users – is

relegated to the right hand sidebar column. It’s a simple swap that positions content based on

relative importance, and at the same time provides more space for the larger data set;

2. The “Portfolio” tab6 has been replaced by the “Skills” element in the right hand sidebar.

There’s probably a good argument to change the on-boarding process to make it clearer to users

where the “About Me” content they provide will be displayed, and to ask users to provide details

on their skills;

3. The biggest proposed change is that user activity is now implemented in a stream, which

appears in the main content area of the page. A filter option is also provided allowing users to

view “All Activity” or any single Activity type. This change will allow for the removal of all

remaining tabs containing the user’s Shares, Comments and Upvotes. There may be technical

challenges to making this work, but if at all possible my advice is to implement any solution that

removes the need for separate pages for user activities. If this is not possible I suggest adding a

“noindex” robots tag to all profile sub-pages;

4. Top Follower and Followed users are also featured in the static area sidebar. “View All”

links from these elements will navigate to the current Follower and Followed pages. The current

Follower and Followed pages should be assigned the “noindex” robots META tag as they have

little SEO value;

5. A regular pagination pattern is provided for search engines (when appropriate), and swapped

out with the same infinite scroll/Load More pattern proposed for Category/Hub pages. All

subpages in the activity series will be served with a “noindex” robots META value, rel=”next/prev”

link tags, and a clear link back to the first page of the series. Based on stats provided by Jim

having 50 updates on the initial view would likely include activity from 80-90% of registered users

without the need for pagination, leaving only 10-20% of user profiles requiring paginated results

to display all activities.

If the above proposal is accepted then it is likely appropriate to redirect current User Profile sub-page URLs to the User Profile index page. This will be dependent on whether users have historically linked to these pages. Additionally, it may be possible to fire the proposed filter view options via a hash appended to a profile URI, e.g.:

http://inbound.org/in/jordiinbound/portfolio#shares,

http://inbound.org/in/jordiinbound/portfolio#comments,

http://inbound.org/in/jordiinbound/portfolio#upvotes etc.

Recommendations: Implement a new User Profile template which consolidates profile sub-pages, and focuses on user activity. Where possible remove sub-pages. Allow search engines to crawl, but not index, paginated results of user activity.

6 As per Jim’s data, this feature has been used by only 317 Inbound users.

http://inbound.org/in/jordiinbound/portfolio#shares

http://inbound.org/in/jordiinbound/portfolio#comments

http://inbound.org/in/jordiinbound/portfolio#upvotes



Incentivize users to add content to their profiles, and update the on-boarding process so that users understand where their About Me input is displayed. Consider allowing users to endorse others as a means of generating more unique keyword-rich content on User Profiles (similar to LinkedIn).



4.6 JOBS The Jobs section of the website represents the single revenue-generator, and therefore considerable time has been applied to look at the SEO factors holding Inbound.org back, and the SEO tactics employed by highly ranking sites targeting similar keywords.

4.6.1 “Sorry, there are no jobs to see here.” There are many SEO issues present in this section of the site, most of which also appear in other sections of the site. But by far the biggest SEO killer observed in the Jobs section is:

Figure 14 Sorry, there are no jobs to see here

Figure 15 Sorry, there are no jobs to see here, Again

These pages are textbook examples of what Google in particular does not want to return to users. What’s more, the proliferation of pages such as these throughout the Jobs section, when combined with similar issues in the Users section, may be causing damage at the site level. Many of Google’s recent quality-based algorithm updates can be assumed to apply thresholds across a site whereby if a tolerance is breached a dampening factor may be applied to reduce that site’s overall visibility. The possibility that Inbound.org is, or could be, affected by quality factors is reasonably high in my opinion. Oddly, the site-wide canonicalization issues discussed previously may be a saving grace for the site since all URLs containing query strings are canonicalized to their query string-less equivalents, and this may actually be providing a level of protection. So how can the issue of low quality Jobs content be fixed?



4.6.2 Deliver More Value, Focus on Quality With limited inventory within the Jobs section, it should be feasible to present a really great user experience without ever presenting users with messages such as those displayed above. Generating pages where no inventory is available should be avoided at all costs, and this key to ensuring both users and search engines find quality content in the Jobs section. Selective insertion of links within the sub-navigation only when job listings are available, combined with proper 404 removals of pages where no jobs are currently available, is the correct way to handle that situation. The Jobs section currently appears to be in some flux, with one template in use on the root and job category archive pages, while a very slick single-column design is in use on the city listing archive pages. From this point they will be referred to as the 2-column and single-column templates respectively.

4.6.2.1 Internal Filter Navigation

Both the single- and 2-column templates introduce some filtering options. The newer single-column introduces job category filters which are applied over the current city filter, while the 2-column template offers independent filters for cities and job categories. The problem these filters introduce is that they are available regardless of whether a valid result is available or not. Recommendations: Only render filter links when these filters will result in a non-null result set. Where no results exist for a given filter either hide or disable the filter link in the navigation. Additionally, where a request is received whose reply is a null result set return a 404 response. This should ensure that null-result pages are never indexed, or are indexed only temporarily. As a side-note, a simple URL pattern that avoids the need for the “?where=” query is to pattern match around something similar to the following:

/jobs/marketing-jobs-in-[location] – all jobs in location;

/jobs/[category]-jobs-in-[location] – category jobs in location;

/jobs/[category]-jobs – category jobs in all locations;

However, it’s unclear why “marketing” is used as the root category description in the single-column template, while also being a job category under this level? Are all jobs marketing jobs, and if not is there a particular reason the root pages are being identified as “marketing” jobs?

4.6.2.2 Providing Indexable Content in Archive Pages

When analysing similar sites that rank well in Google for “marketing jobs in [location]” terms it’s clear that a common theme applies to virtually all the top-ranking sites: they all include substantial text excerpts alongside each job, or other significant text on the page related to the search term. With the one exception of CraigsList.com, this was common across all sites ranked 1-10 for the terms analysed. Recommendations: Include an excerpt from each job with each listing on the archive templates (single-column and 2-column) to increase the relevance of the archive pages.

4.6.3 Template Audits Below are reviews of the templates used in the Jobs section from both an SEO and UX perspective.



4.6.3.1 Single-Column Layout Archive

This landing page is very well designed. The focus is pulled by the large headline, and the clear flow of gaze from headline through tagline and to job listings is well thought out. However, this template then falls down due to the large CTA “View more” which is an obvious fixation point for visitors, especially when there are few job listings on the page:

Figure 16 Jobs - Single column Layout

Worse still from a UX perspective, clicking the CTA takes the user to:

Figure 17 Jobs - 2-column Layout

This is simply the same information in a different template. The large CTA is somewhat less of an issue when there are multiple jobs listed, although several other issues exist which should be rectified. The full page is reviewed below:



Figure 18 Jobs - Single column Layout Audit



Notes:

1. Clear headline and subheading;

2. Good tagline further reinforcing the main subject;

3. (SEO) Job listings lack supporting content, and the addition of excerpts from the actual listing text

should help build relevance for the page;

Recommendations:

Incorporate ~20-30 words of each Job description into the listings;

4. (UX, SEO) Main CTA lands user on similar page, which has no more listings than previously

viewed. This results in a bad user experience, and delivers thin and duplicate content to search

engines;

Recommendations:

Remove this CTA and add buttons to each Job listing so that these become the focal point on the

page;

5. (UX, SEO) this section claims to include “companies hiring marketers in [location]”, however the

companies listed appear to be based purely on location rather than job listings. Many of the

resulting company pages show the message “Sorry, there are no jobs to see here.” This again

results in a poor user experience, and more importantly adds links to non-existent content;

Recommendations:

Only show a company listing page if a company has open job listings, or if/when better company

profile pages are built allow users to navigate to these from here (an update to the heading of

this section would be required to clarify where the user is going however);

6. Filter links for job categories by location would appear to offer a good way for users to refine

their view, but sadly, again, these links can often lead to “Sorry, there are no jobs to see here.”

Recommendations:

Hide or disable category links if the result would be a null set of items.

7. (UX) Note this page lacks a way to “Post a job”, and this should perhaps be added as a secondary

CTA;

I like the aesthetics of this template a lot, and I imagine it could rank and perform well if better content and a sharper focus of converting visits to applications are added.



4.6.3.2 2-Column Layout Archive

This template is I believe the older version of the template discussed above:

Figure 19 Jobs - 2 column Layout Audit

Notes and contrasts with single-column template:

1. (UX) The strongest CTA on this page is “Post a job”. While that may generate revenue, it’s

probably not the ideal focal point since the goal is to get users to apply for jobs;

2. (UX) Clear title and number of job postings, however there seems to be some discrepancy since

the 1-column template lists 8 jobs in SF? There’s also a bug when no listings are available – it

shows “(1-0 of 0)”;

3. (UX, SEO) Again we have job listings without supporting content, and continued use of this

template will necessitate adding job excerpts to build more contextual weight on the page;

4. (UX) A simple but effective point-of-contact and reassurance feature. This might be worth adding

to the single-column template;



5. (UX) Search feature – this is missing from the single-column template, and having a search

feature available to users is probably wise;

6. (UX, SEO) Job category filters are not context-aware – these links do not retain the current

location so when clicked from a location page the next page no longer retains that location. The

other serious issue with these filter links is that they can result in “Sorry, there are no jobs to see

here.” This needs to be avoided at all costs;

7. (UX, SEO) Location filters – these links take users to the single-column layout archive discussed

previously. Similar to job category filters, these links can result in users arriving at null result

sets, and in such cases the links should be removed or disabled;

8. (UX) Why is the utility column located on the left in this template, but in the Members template it

is placed on the right?

I am working under the assumption that the single-column layout is an update to this template. Therefore I haven’t added many recommendations here, instead highlighting some of the issues so they can be avoided in future.



4.6.4 The Missing Link – Companies? As discussed on one of our phone calls, it seems odd that the semantic link between registered users of Inbound.org and the entities placing jobs has not been established. Company listings within the Jobs section are simple entities, and no relationships exist between these simple entities and site users who may work for these companies. Being able to link users to their employment entities would certainly enable far more related content to be published on user and company profiles, boosting relevance and increasing internal linkage across the site. From the perspective of the Jobs section increased content related to each job could be published automatically, applicants would be able to identify registered Inbound users working for the company, and the semantic relationships between all these entities would be classified. There is a lot of potential to filling this gap, most importantly around building member profile data over time which can be used to build unique and compelling content. I can see countless touch points within the site where knowing the relationship between users, companies and job listings could provide added value:

1. Inbound members whose company has open job listings could have site promos for those jobs

appear on their profiles and any articles they post;

2. Links to Inbound members who work for an company advertising a role on Inbound could be

linked from those Job posts, allowing prospective recruits to view content from company staff

and potentially make contact via Inbound;

3. Company pages can list all Inbound members who are also staff. Company pages can also show

latest shared content from their staff on Inbound;

4. All Articles can include a link to the company page of the posting member.

From a company point of view, having a controlled presence on Inbound.org will offer many advantages, not least a marketing platform from which to present themselves. Company Pages could also become a revenue generating function similar to job notices. Recommendations: Investigate the requirements and costs of implementing company entities which relate to users and job postings. This is likely a very significant change which should be carefully considered.



4.6.4.1 Company Job Listing Pages

This is the current “Company Page” on Inbound.org. Users click on a recruiting company’s name in a job listing or job post to view all jobs listed by that company:

Figure 20 Company Job Listings Template

These pages present quite serious issues for both users and search engines:

1. (SEO) Due to the site-wide canonicalization bug none of these pages will be indexed correctly.

These pages are all driven by a query string which is stripped from the canonical value set in their

head section;

2. (UX, SEO) Nowhere on the page does it indicate that you are looking at a filtered view for jobs in a

given company;

3. (UX, SEO) Filters provided below the Search Jobs form (truncated in above image) are impractical

as they do not conform to the context of the page;

4. (UX, SEO) there are no details related to the company on the page, and there is likely a

tremendous opportunity to build out Company pages which include background information on

the company, location and contact information, details of Inbound members who work or

worked at the company, links to Inbound content shared or written by company employees etc.

Recommendations: Build out custom Company template which delivers a better user experience and more related content for search engines to index. Never present Company pages with no content.



4.7 GROUPS The Groups section of the site presents far fewer major SEO issues, with most problems being related to templates used throughout the site. Many of these issues have been discussed previously, and a thorough review is compiled below.

4.7.1 Groups Homepage The Groups homepage does a pretty good job of presenting available Groups and latest content to users. With 48 Groups listed, and a maximum of 3 recent articles per group, the page includes a maximum of 180 links to lower pages, which is entirely reasonable from an SEO perspective. However there a small number of SEO and UX deficiencies which should be addresses:

1. (UX, SEO) The page includes a search feature, but the addition of sorting options might present

alternative and practical ways to discover Groups. Any sorting options should implement

previous recommendations around series sub-pages not being indexed and linking back to the

parent page of the series;

2. (UX, SEO) Pagination is a feature which has presented itself previously, and again in the Groups

section issues arise:

a. Unneeded folders are appearing in the pagination URLs -

http://inbound.org/groups/all/top?&per_page=48 – which produces content duplication

issues;

b. The pagination includes 48 Groups, but there may be a case for increasing this number

and displaying the latest 2 posts from each Group rather than 3;

3. (SEO) Canonicalization of paginated results strips out the query string, resulting in all sub-pages

being canonicalized to http://inbound.org/groups/all/top. Ideally when canonicalization is

corrected all sub-pages in the series will include a robots “noindex” META value combined with

rel=”next/prev” link tags;

4. (UX) Private Groups could use a better indicator than the small low-contrast padlock and “Private”

label. Increasing the visibility of this feature may help users better identify when a Group is

private;

5. (UX) The link at the foot of each Group element reads “View [X] more discussion/s”. There is

actually a big whereby a Group with 2 discussions will show those and then “View 1 more

discussion”. There are no more discussions, and the more appropriate label for this link is “View

all [Y] discussions” since the link takes the user to the full list of discussions in the Group;

Recommendations: The Groups section is reasonably well optimized currently, and the small issues discussed are relatively minor. Fixing these will certainly help overall however.

4.7.2 Group Page The Group page lists all articles/posts within a group. This page uses a very similar template to the Category/Hub Listing Template discussed in S4.3.2. The SEO and UX issues overlap considerably between these templates, with a small number of new issues due to minor differences in the page:

1. (SEO) The “Login to Request Invite” button includes a redirect URL, and should be fixed as per the

issue described in S4.3.1.1;

http://inbound.org/groups/all/top?&per_page=48

http://inbound.org/groups/all/top



2. (SEO) The “Hot”, “Latest” and “Top” tabs present duplication issues, especially in Groups with less

than 30 discussions. These sort pages and their sub-pages should all be given a robots META

value “noindex”, and again rel=”prev/next” links should be added to all series pages;

3. (UX, SEO) The “View More” pattern was discussed previously in S4.3.2. In addition to the

requirement to provide alternative paths for search engines, this feature should also be updated

to do that it is not displayed when no more Articles are available;

4. (UX, SEO) A breadcrumb pattern should be included;

5. (SEO) where results are paginated across multiple sub-pages the recommendations remain the

same regarding how to handle sub-pages:

a. Robots “noindex” for all sub-pages;

b. Rel=”next/prev” for all pages in series;

c. Link back to root page of series from all sub-pages with the series name as the anchor

text;

6. (UX, SEO) The Members widget in the sidebar links to an All Members page if needed (i.e. too

many members to display in widget). This page should be set to “noindex” for SEO purposes, and

the “Hot”, “Latest” and “Top” tab links should be removed since they likely confuse users rather

than assist when displayed in this context.

4.7.3 Create Group Page I suspect this page should actually be placed behind a login instead of being publicly accessible:

http://inbound.org/groups/create

http://inbound.org/groups/create



4.8 EXCLUSIVE INBOUND.ORG CONTENT A small number of standout content pieces were discovered during the analysis. These pages were not found via browsing, but instead via Google search (SEMrush.com data).

4.8.1 Inbound 50 By far the most interesting content piece discovered is the “Inbound 50” found at http://inbound.org/top/blogs. This content can work so much harder for Inbound.org with some small, but impactful changes to how it is published and promoted.

4.8.1.1 Direct Navigation

The Inbound 50 piece cannot be found in the main navigation, although it can likely be classified as a page of distinct importance and interest to the target audience. Recommendations:

1. Add Inbound 50 as a link to the main navigation and/or from the Explore page.

4.8.1.2 Sorting Options & Content Targeting

The Inbound 50 allows users to sort by the various metrics incorporated in the application. These sorting options introduce a number of SEO issues:

Identical introductory content is provided regardless of the sorting metric;

URLs include unnecessary key/value strings - e.g. “limit=50” - and while these values can be

updated to affect changes to the results, this option is not available to users via on-page controls.

The key/value “page=1” is also unnecessary;

The Overall Score sort metric is identical to the initial view, but is published on a different URL;

Incorrect canonicalization signals (see next sub-section).

Recommendations:

1. When users sort by the various metrics include alternative headlines and introductory text to

target more relevant keywords:

http://inbound.org/top/blogs



Figure 21 Inbound 50 Update

2. Remove all unneeded key/value pairs such as “limit=50” and “page=1”. Only include page values

for sub-pages of the list;

3. Update the Overall Score metric header link to point at the root Inbound 50 page URL;

4.8.1.3 Canonicalization

The Inbound 50 includes a number of subpages as well as multiple sorting options to view the data. The canonical value set for all subpages regardless of sort options is: <link rel="canonical" href="http://inbound.org/top/blogs" /> In effect this signals to search engines that all of the subpages should be treated as copies of the Inbound 50 parent page. This is suboptimal, as both sorting options and subpages will contain substantial differences to the initial parent page. Recommendations:

1. Update canonical values for each page to the most appropriate value, excluding all unnecessary

key/values in each URL;

2. Introduce “rel=prev/next” links in the header of each page (where applicable) to help search

engines identify, crawl and index (again, where applicable) subpages in each series;

3. Ensure that all table header metric links point at the root URL for each metric, i.e.:

http://inbound.org/top/blogs,

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=follower_count,

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=facebook_fans,

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=buzz,

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=search_authority,

Note also that the table header metric links on subpages all include the current subpage,

whereas it may produce a better user experience to reset these links to instead point at the root

page for each metric;

4. All subpages in each sort series should include a “noindex” robots META value;

5. The subheading on all subpages should be a live link to the parent of the relevant sort option, so

on http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=follower_count&page=2 the subheading “The Top 50

Marketing Blogs by Twitter Followers” should be a live link to

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=follower_count;

4.8.1.4 Minor UX/SEO Tweaks

These are minor suggestions that may help with both UX and SEO of the Top Blogs application:

1. If the data is refreshed weekly then it will probably be more impactful to include the last update

date as shown than simply mentioning this in the introduction text;

2. Allowing users to UpVote this content may help drive increased interaction, and the introduction

of an UpVoted By list of users linking to User Profile pages will help drive more internal linking

to deeper content.



http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=follower_count

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=facebook_fans

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=buzz

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=search_authority

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=follower_count&page=2

http://inbound.org/top/blogs?order=follower_count



4.9 SCHEMA.ORG A site like Inbound.org practically screams out for the addition of Schemas. While it papers initial attempts have been made to add “WebPage” Schema mark-up to pages, there are schemas for almost every entity that appears on Inbound.org:

Articles: https://schema.org/Article, together with https://schema.org/BlogPosting,

https://schema.org/NewsArticle and https://schema.org/TechArticle include most aspects of

articles published.

Questions: https://schema.org/Question

Comments: https://schema.org/Comment, https://schema.org/upvoteCount

Members: https://schema.org/Person, https://schema.org/jobTitle,

https://schema.org/Organization (for employer), https://schema.org/location

Jobs: https://schema.org/JobPosting

Events: https://schema.org/Event

Company: https://schema.org/Organization, https://schema.org/Corporation,

https://schema.org/employee

With increasing support for JSON-LD7 it is easier than ever to add Schema.org data to web pages. Combining this with the increased integration of semantic relationship in search engine results pages, it’s clear that introducing increased machine-readable data into Inbound pages should have benefits over time. Recommendations: Implement schemas within all key templates which have include clear entities. Explore JSON-LD as a technique to speed up the implementation of data schemas.

7 http://json-ld.org/

https://schema.org/Article

https://schema.org/BlogPosting

https://schema.org/NewsArticle

https://schema.org/TechArticle

https://schema.org/Question

https://schema.org/Comment

https://schema.org/upvoteCount

https://schema.org/Person

https://schema.org/jobTitle

https://schema.org/Organization

https://schema.org/location

https://schema.org/JobPosting

https://schema.org/Event

https://schema.org/Organization

https://schema.org/Corporation

https://schema.org/employee



5 Concluding Thoughts The difficulties of maintaining large sites are well-known, but the additional problems associated with sites which primarily curate other websites’ content is a particularly are particularly acute. The many SEO and UX issues identified include technical problems which can be fixed by your developers, and non-technical problems which will be more difficult to remedy. Changing user behaviour around how they post content to the site will not happen overnight, indeed if at all. However, fixing the issues identified should be viewed as an opportunity for Inbound.org. Doing so should result in better organic traffic, and a superior experience for users of the site. Many of the issues require small tactical changes to remedy, while others are at a strategic level of SEO and will likely require substantial bandwidth and time to implement. Below some of the recommendations made throughout this report are ranked in terms of priority.

5.1 PRIORITISED RECOMMENDATIONS The main areas that show most promise are:

1. Fix the technical issues outlines in S4.2 – most especially the way series pagination and

canonicalization are applied should be fixed site-wide. Developing the requirements for these is

quite trivial (I’m happy to help if they are not clear from the document), and implementing a well

optimised solution for each which can be used across the site will help greatly with SEO;

2. Remove redirects from all URL, Optimise all Query String URLs – to maximise crawl efficiency

it’s vitally important that non-content driving parameters are not passed with URLs. In particular

changes to Login, Sign Up with Twitter, Request Invite (Groups) should be changed to forms to

avoid created unnecessary URLs. Combining these updates with an effective XML sitemap

process should help greatly in getting the right URLs indexed;

3. Update Series Templates to make them search engine friendly – Ensure that any series is

fully accessible to search engines, and optimise sub-pages in all series with “noindex”,

rel=”next/prev” and optimized links to the parent root of the series;

4. Pay particular attention to UX – many templates, especially Articles and Jobs, exhibit glaring UX

issues. Given how Google is increasingly adding user-related metrics to its algorithms, it’s more

important than ever to present a good user experience to visitors;

5. Extend Schema.org implementation – where possible looks at implementing further schemas

within related templates. Check into JSON-LD use for this;

6. Try to increase the amount of unique quality content on the site – analyse how users post

articles, especially to third party sites, and try to elicit more content from the poster instead of

relying on extracted (scraped) content from the linked article;

7. Update navigation so that quality content can be found – proprietary content such as

Inbound Top 50 should be accessible via the navigation. If you have it, flaunt it;

8. Consider new entities within the mix – perhaps the biggest proposed change, and the change

that would create the largest overhead to implement, is the introduction of Company pages and

the relationship between Members, Companies and Jobs. However, adding this new layer could

help advance internal linking and general UX by magnitudes in the opinion of this writer.

inbound.org technical seo audit

Marketing

technical seo audit

client confidential

general site navigation

https secure site

site section template

table of contents

infinite scroll

amendment history