Given at Pubcon Virtual 2020 on Thursday, October 15th by Keith Goode, Sr. SEO Strategist at IBM. Whether the culmination of several big changes on your site results in a massive loss of link equity or one small change breaks your canonical tagging, working on a large enterprise site has its share of dangers and pitfalls. With 20,000 hands in the mix, whether coding or writing content, each one can be a single point of failure or be part of "death by 1,000 cuts." In this session, Keith Goode will go through examples of site failures that have rocked large sites, how they were diagnosed and the fixes put in place to repair the damage. He'll also cover how you can monitor for small and large changes alike and treat them before they impact the site negatively. Lastly, he'll walk through his revised position on democratization and how he's modified his training to be more relevant to the disciplines of his students.

1. Fail at Scale
Large Enterprises and the
Challenges of In-House SEO

2. Keith Goode
Position: Sr. SEO Strategist, IBM
Experience:
• 20+ Years in Online Marketing
• 10+ Years of Experience in In-House SEO
• Previous Employers: AMD, HomeAway,
Dell, seoClarity
• Appearances: Pubcon, SMX West, Digital
Summit, Advanced Search Summit
• Follow: @keithgoode

3. Some Light Housekeeping
* Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are my own. No forward-looking statements regarding
IBM have been included. None of IBM’s secret sauce has been revealed. Statements made in this
presentation have not been tested by the FDA.

4. Problem
Arrogance

5. At Pubcon Austin 2020, I Presented This
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6. Innovation Spurs Brand Spurs Links
• The presentation was titled “SEO Whales: Inside Large Enterprise
Sites”
• My Key Takeaways were:
• As a company, brand and reputation are the most valuable things for search
efficacy.
• Democratization and enablement will go a long way to aligning your
organization.
• What a difference two months make?
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7. Ranking and Traffic Losses
• The next month, the
Analytics team contacted
me to ask why we would
be seeing traffic losses
• I noticed a corresponding
loss in ranking starting in
December
• Had the whale run
aground?
Organic Keywords in Ahrefs
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8. Massive Loss in Backlinks
January 2020 September 2020
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9. Previously, that number was 1.9B backlinks. What
happened?

10. The Silver Bullet Mentality
An SEO Industry Problem

11. Algo Watch
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12. As a large enterprise website, if you’re
doing legitimate SEO, a single algorithm
update (or Google hiccup) shouldn’t
hurt your site…for long.

13. It isn’t a single silver bullet you
should be worried about. You’re
more likely to suffer from Lingchi,
death by a thousand cuts…

14. … and many of those cuts are
self-inflicted.

15. Understanding the Background
Historical Context to the Big Link Loss

16. Technical SEO Doesn’t Always Happen When You Want it to or
When It’s Most Convenient

17. We Had Been Chasing Three Bandits for a While
video.ibm.com
spammers
IBM
Community
spammers
Old numbered
server sub-
domains
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18. Old Numbered Servers
• We wanted to consolidate sub-domains and reduce the need for
cross-sub-domain content
• We wanted to optimize the crawl for Googlebot
• We wanted to retire old servers
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19. Video Spammers
• Old uStream.tv
accounts had been
largely neglected
• These were posting
promises of free
downloads to
movies but linked
off-site
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20. Whack-a-Mole Spammers
• We addressed these when
Google made us aware of them
• But these were being posted
faster than we could resolve
them
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21. Community Spammers Were of Particular
Concern
• Soundly and justly called out
online
• The problem appears to be
across the board for large sites
• Blackhat SEO agencies were
selling links from our site
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22. 22
A Simple Google Search Revealed How Bad It Was

23. User Account Tactics
• Building user profiles and selling
links for specific subject matters
• Links are sold as “contextual
links,” which tend to carry more
weight than navigational and
footer links
• “Mark Gallaher” linked off to a
few different sites, who had
presumably purchased links to
their content
23
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24. • Moderate active areas of IBM Community that allow creation of profiles or
blog posts and comments
• Identify spammy accounts, suspend (noindex) their accounts and all their
contributions
• Close all inactive communities, redirecting to main IBM Community
homepage
• Implement the “ugc” link attribute for all user-generated links:
• <a href=“URL” rel=“ugc”>Anchor Text</a>
• More information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
Our Team’s Recommendations Were Complex
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25. Their Solution Was Simple
• There is no reason at all to allow HTML in the user profiles
• Turn off HTML in user profiles
• Scrub all HTML out of existing user profiles
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26. The Problem
• Number servers were retired
• Video accounts were closed down
• HTML capabilities were removed from Community accounts
• All within a two-month span
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27. 1.6 Billion Spammy backlinks lost is still 1.6 Billion backlinks lost.

28. 3-Month Window of Big Losses in Ranking

29. Where Big Sites Fail
The 1000 Cuts that Eventually Hurt Us

30. 1000 Cuts of Neglect
• Comments sections
• User accounts
• Forums
• Video posting
• All of these can and do fall prey
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31. 1000 Cuts of Budget and Priority
• An automated, intelligent
redirect functionality in backlog
• We should’ve dedicated staff to
mitigating spammy links
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32. 1000 Cuts of Time
• Work or Meet – You Can’t Do
Both
• Compliance Training
• Executive Updates
• Standing Meetings
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33. 1000 Cuts of Unaligned…
• Executives and Product Owners
• Subdomain work-arounds
• Work that falls outside of
standards
• Work that isn’t sufficiently QA’d
• Writers
• Directionless and marketing-speak
writing
• Developers
• Non-standard implementation
• Exacerbation of Core Web Vitals
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34. Fixing the Problem
How Can Projects and Organizations Align with Best Practices in SEO

35. Space Out Releases that Impact SEO
• Release
• Wait
• Measure and
• Allow for a Natural Correction
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36. Yes, Democratize … But…

37. Pitfalls of a One-Size-Fits-All Enablement
• General SEO Training to the
entire organization is worthless
• Best Case: Attendees leave
feeling like they learned
something but will forget
everything
• Worst Case: They’ll think they
know SEO and will get it Wrong
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38. Customize Training for Each Discipline
Crawling
• Googlebot
• Barriers to
Success:
• No Nav Links
• Not in Sitemap
• Robots.txt
Disallow
• Content in
JavaScript
• Orphaned
Pages
• Robots
“Nofollow”
Indexing
• Stored @
Google
• Barriers to
Success:
• Robots
“Noindex” tag
• Excessive
Duplication
(bad canonical
tag)
• Innaccurate
Localization
• Text isn’t
readable
Ranking
• PageRank
• RankBrain
• Organic SERP
• Barriers to
Success:
• No relevance
• Slow Page Load
• Not mobile
responsive
• No internal
links
• No external
links
• No Keyword
Use
Useful
Responses
• Instant Answer
• Knowledge
Graph
• Barriers to
Success:
• No Structured
Markup
• No Schema
• Lack of
relevant, easy-
to-follow
content
Technical/Systemic Technical/Project Content-Related

39. Seek Executive Support and Build Standards
• Either fight 20 different
department heads by yourself,
or
• Get the highest level executive
on your side to give you
authority over those heads
• Implement rigorous standards
for:
• Content
• Development
• PR and Promotion
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40. Resolution
How Has the Recovery Gone?

41. Stabilizing and Steady

42. Key Takeaways
1. Do Not Neglect Any Portion of Your Site
2. Monitor Your Backlink Profile Closely
3. Align Your Organization to Being SEO Aware

43. But More Importantly
Stop Hurting Yourself

44. Thank You!
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