BotifyCONNECT 2018: Global Botify Community Collaborates on Internal Linking and International SEO

27th September 2018Kevin Bartley

At our latest BotifyCONNECT, Botifyers and our diverse enterprise clients came together to discover killer insights about linking strategies, international SEO, and other important search optimization topics.

BotifyCONNECT gives our rapidly growing global community a chance to converse with fellow enterprise SEOs, pose questions, and share insights about the biggest topics in search optimization today.

BotifyCONNECT was held simultaneously for all of our international offices, in Paris, New York City, and London. Here’s a recap of all the events!

BotifyCONNECT London: Two for One Seminar Tackles Internal Linking & International SEO

BotifyCONNECT London was held in combination with Croud, the premier global marketing agency. The event was filled with relaxed networking and robust conversations on search optimization, followed by a joint presentation focused on the latest strategies for internal linking and international SEO.

Mark Thomas, VP of Customer Success at Botify, and Adam Harris, Head of SEO at Trainline, used hard data to examine the key factors that influence internal linking in 2018. Both of them proved several key SEO concepts, backed up by with real KPIs from billions pages analyzed by Botify, including:

• Page depth matters – 58.2% of pages less than 4 clicks from the homepage are crawled, while only 31.5% of pages more than 8 pages away are crawled.
• More inlinks, higher rankings – Pages with 10+ inlinks rank at least 2 spots higher than pages with 3 or less inlinks.
• Diversity of anchor text skyrockets traffic – Sites with 10 – 5 distinct anchor texts have 50% more active pages than sites with 0 – 5.
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Andy Cooney, Commercial Director at Croud, explored how to navigate the complex world of international SEO, including how to understand search behavior and the SEO landscape in different markets, the importance of taking a cross-channel approach to international SEO, and how to build localized landing pages and other content at scale.

After the presentations, everyone went out for a round of golf at Urban Golf and had a few more drinks!

BotifyCONNECT Paris: Roundtable Discussion Uncovers the Truth About Internal Linking in 2018

Botify Paris hosted a roundtable discussion with some of the leading voices in enterprise SEO, including Emmanuel de Vauxmoret, General Manager, Eskimoz and Charlotte Prevost-Gosselin, SEO Director, Prisma Media. Botify brought our own expert, Benjamin Bussiere, Director of Professional Services, who relayed hard data from our platform to substantiate many key findings.

The three of them dissected the different approaches to strategic internal linking and how to optimize each type. Ascending, descending and horizontal navigation were at the forefront of the discussion. The group answered questions such as:

• What linking strategy should you adopt when launching a new website?
• How do you revamp the internal linking on an existing website?
• How should you manage tags, paginations or facets for the maximum SEO impact?
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The roundtable concluded with an open ended talk about how hot topics such as JavaScript and the mobile-first index affect internal linking. Afterwards, there was a casual networking session that continued the conversation around linking and SEO.

New York City: Experts Show How to Use the Botify Methodology to Deliver Bottom Line Results

NYC BotifyCONNECT was the final event of the day. After some casual networking, Frank Vitovitch, VP Professional Services, Botify and Upasna Gautam, Manager, Search, Ziff Davis lead the wide-ranging discussion.

Frank demonstrated how to use the Botify Methodology – from crawling, to rendering, to indexing, to ranking, to converting – to maximize ROI for a linking strategy. He proved several fundamental SEO inferences, including:

• More inlinks, higher crawl frequency – Pages with 90 – 100 inlinks are crawled 100% more frequently than pages with 0 – 10 inlinks.
• Google crawls sitemaps more for JS-dependent sites – On average, Google crawls the sitemaps of JS dependent sites 32 times a month, but only 11 times per month for plain HTML websites.
• Greater number of inlinks equals higher rankings – Pages with 190+ inlinks rank in position one 50% of the time; those with 0 – 10 inlinks rank in position one 20% of the time.
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Upasna unveiled a specific Botify use case about news articles that weren’t getting indexed fast enough on a publishing website she manages. As it turns out, Botify showed that the article pages had low crawl frequencies and weren’t getting crawled fast enough to ensure speedy indexations.

Her workaround entailed placing the articles in a chronological news feed on the homepage, which was getting crawled quickly (almost once every 4 minutes). The result was that the articles ended up getting crawled and indexed almost immediately.

Get Ready for the Next BotifyCONNECT!

The audience for our most recent BotifyCONNECT was global, and the ideas were, too. Thanks to all the customers, team members, and enthusiasts who made this meeting of the minds possible! We couldn’t have done it without you.

The latest BotifyCONNECT represented a broad cross section of our rapidly growing community. The event saw some of world’s best enterprise SEOs, teaming up to tackle the top issues and opportunities in search optimization today. And we can’t wait to do it all over again in the coming months.

See you at our next BotifyCONNECT – December 6th, 2018! Stay tuned on our Twitter and Facebook for more details.