Today is Tuesday, December 04, 2007. This makes it day two of Search Engine Strategies Chicago. It’s 11:42 A.M and I just finished enjoying a brilliant hour of discussion on “Organic Listings”.

The Organic Listings forum/panel was moderated by Danny Sullivan. The panelists were Mike Grehan, Mark Rosenberg, and Erica Schmidt.

Apart from the keynote by Seth Godin this morning, the Organic Listings forum is the only full event I’ve been able to get to so far. And have no doubt, SES Chicago has already been well worth the visit. Needless to say… these next few days are going to be highly valuable and I look forward to learning as much as possible.

I’m trying to type this while listening to the current forum (Big Site, Big Search), so I’ll just touch on the basics of the Organic Listings Forum.

The following is a list of the questions asked that I found most important for what I do in SEO and internet marketing.

Question One
This wasn’t so much a question as it was a revelation in one of Google’s struggles to bring timely and relevant information when it comes to search strings related to direct products.

The gentleman who asked about his site painted a picture of major problems with traffic fluctuations. The website he works with is Shoplocal.com. Apparently the site is seeing traffic go from well over 100,000 visits per day one day to 5,000 the next. He was curious to see if it had something to do with “revolving products”.

When I say revolving products, I mean the site will compare product sales on a local level. For example, if you’re looking for an ipod in Chicago, the site might give you the latest deal from both Best Buy and Circuit City. The problem is, once the deal ends the page remains online and the search engines continue indexing it as if the content never changed.

It was established this wasn’t the problem with traffic fluctuations, but the question remained… why would irrelevant results remain in the index? And not just remain, but rank VERY well.

The keywords Danny Sullivan used to bring up a page on Shoplocal are “chicago ipod”. Sure enough, a shoplocal page came up as the #1 result. But, this page is no longer relevant or useful because the product on sale is no longer on sale and has vanished from the page.

This tells me that Google is still showing extremely outdated and irrelevant results, and has yet to figure out a way around it. Good for the user? I think not.

Question Two
Q: Is the new trend in using no-follow to pages such as “contact us”, “site map”, etc, relevant?
Mike Grehan made a great argument about no-follow. His premise is that the no-follow was designed to link to pages that you don’t trust or would prefer not to give “link credit” to. So, in his words, why would you not want bots to follow these internal links?

Question Three
Q: Should we still be concerned about keywords in meta tags?
Danny Sullivan reminded the crowd that Google pretty much ignores keyword meta, but other engines such as Yahoo and a few smaller sites still read them and recognize them.

Question Four
Q: What is the value of the root domain vs. the sub-domain?
This discussion has been tossed around in conversations I’ve been involved in for several years now. In fact, it’s still a big discussion in the blogging realm because a lot of bloggers are using yourname.blogspot.com or yourname.wordpress.com. Many suggest it would be far better to break away from those sub-domains on other sites and move over to a hosted yourdomain.com.

Interestingly enough, an employee for Discovery.com happened to be in the audience and Danny Sullivan decided to pull up the Discovery site and take a look. The current Discovery domain re-directs to a sub-domain, which is the Discovery channel itself.

The reasoning for this re-direct is because Discovery had originally wanted to create a web portal back when the portal idea was hot and happening. But, they later found out that the majority of the users who land on Discovery are looking for the channel, not a general portal.

Unexpectedly, Danny Sullivan and the rest of the panel readily agreed that all of Discovery’s “sub sites” should be on their own domain. For example… www.animalplanet.com.

Of course, this would take an overwhelming amount of programming and hassle to move the content from the main Discovery site and create hundreds of thousands of 301 re-directs, so it was agreed that Discovery was probably doing fine without it.

But it did go to show that having independent domains for “sub families” or “sub-products ranges” might be a better direction to move in.

Plenty more to come throughout the day!