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SEO in the Lab

2 Episodes

47 minutes | 2 years ago
3. Interview w/ Jamie Alberico, Arrow Electronics
Resources: Jamie Alberico on twitter: https://twitter.com/Jammer_VoltRandom, fun facts about Jamie:She wrangles in 4-6MM products, 7 languagesHer spirit animal is UrsulaAnd she’s made a flame thrower!Our Technical SEO Speaking/Panel at Engage Google reps talking about not using rel next/prevJamie’s Lighthouse articleExplained, Exclamation EpisodeColabs: https://colab.research.google.com/Anaconda (a Python package manager)Starbuck’s user journey mapsKevin Indig’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kevin_IndigArticle Alexis was referring to: https://www.kevin-indig.com/user-intent-mapping-steroids/Video Game Goat Simulator reference Timestamps: Note: Add 15 seconds for intro. [0:00] Intros[1:10] How do you deal with having so many product lines? – Step back and look as an ecosystem (set up rules, breaking up sitemaps, etc.)[2:58] Working embedded within dev team – Helpful for: launching new code bases, features – More interconnected team [4:00] Origin story as a writer, forming a front-end team, journey to be more technical side[7:00] What makes our products different? <- The data team implements[9:00] Origins of “@Jammer_Volts”[11:25] How do you learn technical SEO? – Being curious and questioning (I’m seeing behavior that’s different. What is happening?) – Being able to ask any question [12:30] Any tips on working with developers? Resolving conflicts? – must clearly define what you want – learning to speak the same language – documenting issue appropriately – don’t bother people in deep concentration (if it’s not a priority) – tip: ask to stand in on a stand-up meeting[18:20] How have things changed? – figuring out complex problems – freedom to fail – play with code (Give Google Colabs a shot)[20:20] Relationship with eCommerce and search?[24:00] Speed vs. UX – Look on #s of elements on the pages – Talk about recipes (and having fluff content) – Keep intent in mind/ user-first [28:00] Answer questions directly[29:00] User journey – Friction points are real[32:30] What do you need to do to be one of the best in eCommerce SEO? – Try to buy a product without using search – Using your own site’s hierarchy to find the product[35:30] Dealing with c-suite – Tip: talking in less technical terms – Tip 2: Speak in $$[38:30] Can an SEO sit in a boardroom?[41:30] Nuggets of advice: 1. Buy something on the website (many varieties of tasks in here) 2. Understand how products come on and off your site–tangent–[44:40] 3. Understand the user flow and ecosystem (many elements in here) My favorite Jamie quotes: “SEO is a reflection of your overall site health, it impacts all other mediums, we’re just the ones that can see it.”  “Sometimes when you pull on a thread, it causes more problems than it solves. So sometimes having an awareness of how this one thing affects the ecosystem can help.”“You can’t buy something that doesn’t exist, and if you can’t Google it – does it exist?”“(As a technical SEO) my customer is a search engine, it is googlebot”“Experience what it’s like to wait 11 seconds to load a page”“A website is a window into how a business runs”“We use search engines as a mirror to understand a reflection of site health”“A bug can truly be a feature, it’s all in how we handle it.” Transcript Note 1: Add about ~15 seconds to timestamps to account for intro. Note 2: If you see notice any major errors, please reach out to seointhelab [at] merkleinc.com, we tried our best to stay true to the vocal version. [00:00:00] Alexis Sanders: Hello. Hello. And welcome back to SEO in the lab today. I have Jamie Alberico with me. Thanks so much for coming in, Jamie. [00:00:08] Jamie Alberico: Thank you so very much for having me. It’s really good to chat with you again. [00:00:12] Alexis: Yes. I’m so excited. I loved your speech at Engage, and I’m just so excited to get this next forty minutes to sink with you about some cool technical SEO concepts. [00:00:23] Jamie: It was a lot of fun being on the panel with you. I love that we have the tech SEO panel, we’re in this really beautiful ballroom and it was two women representing. [00:00:32] Alexis: So true. And that guy with the plaid shirt. I don’t remember your name, sir, but I remember you. All right. Awesome. For our listeners, would you mind giving yourself a bit of an introduction? [00:00:44] Jamie: All right. My name is Jamie Alberico. I live in Denver, Colorado. Fun Fact, my name means “usurper elf king.” That is true. I am the SEO product owner for Arrow Electronics, which means I wrangle four to six million products in seven languages. [00:01:03] Alexis: That’s it. That’s all you do just on a daily basis. (Lol) It’s pretty much… [00:01:07] Jamie: It’s pretty low key, it’s very chill, you know? (lol) [00:01:10] Alexis: Like, how do you, How do you even like manage that? How do you deal with having so many different product lines? [00:01:17] Jamie: You can’t do it on a one off basis. You’ve got to step back and look at the system as an ecosystem. So how do we create systematic rules in play that say, “All right, this new PLP has no translations available in these languages. How do we keep answering the user’s requests and getting them through there? What do we do when we sunset products? How to even break up our sitemaps?” So initially we had, you know, six million products in a site map on every night it rebuilt, and it shuffled in order. So I’m just joining this team. I’m trying to understand why is there this gap in our product index coverage? Indexation… I dare you, Barry, … (lol) [00:02:01] Alexis: First line, throwing down the gauntlet. (lol) [00:02:07] Jamie: For those of you who don’t know if you say indexation three times, it’s like a Beetlejuice effect for Barry Adams. He will appear. It is called in index coverage and we had a significant gap in it for our electronics so I’m going through the site maps and then realizing this site map is different every time. What is happening here? So worked with my dev team. I have been lucky enough for the majority of my career to be embedded with dev teams to break it out by product line. So now, you know, we have nine hundred forty product lines while our six million products fall into those. [00:02:40] Alexis: who’s also a technical SEO that’s embedded within a development team. Do you find that that system works well for a technical SEO and do you have a component that is a more content heavy side? [00:02:58] Jamie: Yes, I am lucky enough to have a content SEO team who handles, you know, building our new content, identifying gaps, places that we can reach more people who are looking for what we offer. But being embedded with a dev team, especially when it comes to, you know, launching new code bases, migrations, new features, every piece of that, when you have the ability to sit down and talk with your devs and go, “Hey, my JavaScript boot-up time is really heavy here,” (mine, like on a page, I’m personifying a page.) (Lol) “How do we go ahead and get this down? What cashing elements can use? It’s It’s really effective because you have the ongoing feedback back and forth and there’s not that dis-connective “I’ve put a ticket, and I’m gonna hope for the best.” [00:03:42] Alexis: Definitely, definitely. I like the idea of having those two different teams closer and more intimately tied to the source. I feel like that’s an interesting model, and one that’s newer. In the past, have you ever worked with any other companies that did something similar? Or is this kind of also a newer concept for you as well? [00:04:00] Jamie: My first in-house SEO job I started as a marketing SEO and it was I was primarily focused on this blog on this education center, but I monitored all the pieces and there was a point where wow, my top keywords just dropped 23 spots. What’s going on? Oh no, and my index is bleeding out. I’m losing forty thousand pages a week and by digging into that, began to work more and more with the developers. Eventually we formed a front-end team. So SEO, UX, the developers, our QA team. We were all on one team together. It’s the first time I got an experience with a team build like that. But I found that because we were so interconnected, because we all had different insights and knowledge. Having the team work together is a single, cohesive unit to produce the best product. [00:04:51] Alexis: And do you think that’s a direction, a strong direction for a lot of e commerce companies that they’re heading into, to more specialized areas of SEO? [00:05:01] Jamie: I really hope they are. I really hope that people can take an approach of SEO isn’t just about organic traffic acquisition. It’s a reflection of your overall site health. This is impacting all other mediums we’re just the ones that can see it. [00:05:16] Alexis: Definitely, definitely. And in researching your resume, (which is awesome, by the way), I found that you did a lot of CRO work before, you have a background in writing. What was your journey like to be more on the technical side of things? [00:05:30] Jamie: Ah, so the trick here is to graduate college during a recession, and while your pondering life. Because all kind of longer than normal and hear where this is going to explain to their student loan officer, I want to pay you and I want to eat. How do we work this out? You being to find a way to take that English degree and put it to some frame of use? For me that started off as blogging. I was actually a blogger outreach manager. I was one of those people that I now ignore in my LinkedIn inbox. This is pre-penguin. We didn’t know any better. [00:06:05] Alexis: It was okay back that… (lol) [00:06:07] Jamie: Yeah, it was OK, you know, Listen, thing about her field is it constantly adapts. It’s constantly evolving everything you know, like R. I. P. Well, next and previous… [00:06:19] Alexis: I was actually wondering how you felt about that. [00:06:21] Jamie: It makes sense. It truly does. If we look at the use of technical signals when they’re not correct, correctly implemented or there’s just difficulty with the code going ahead in acknowledging and consolidating that it makes sense to go, “No.” [00:06:34] Alexis: Yeah, I guess too Like the first page is the most important page, typically in those type of sets, right? [00:06:42] Jamie: I do, you know, if we’ve got any Ecommerce site that has a product line made of sixty thousand products, which is a world I live in, it would be great to be able to break this down and have them be more specific and more relevant. Like what makes these sixty thousand products different from each other? [00:06:57] Alexis: Yeah, and do you find it a challenge doing that? Like that might be more of your content team too, But like… [00:07:03] Jamie: No, it’s actually our data team that handles that. (Cool!) Because, this is the thing about being in this place with dev teams is I get to work with architects and get to work with devs I get to work with developers. All these aspects, it’s very much like any form of machine learning: You get good clean data in, get good cleaned data out. Yeah, so identifying, now, I assume that so and so controls this. Well, time to just take a step back, and analyze some assumptions, sit down, have a cup of coffee with me, like ‘Oh, I misunderstood. What’s your rules here?’ But now I know, and now I know the next person I need to talk to. [00:07:42] Alexis: Now I know you’re really actually very important. So about that email last week, just throw it in the trash. (lol) [00:07:51] Jamie: I like to think that I don’t underestimate people’s importance. I’m sure I’ve not included a smiley face where I should have and it came off a little to direct, but we do our best and we learn and we grow. [00:08:01] Alexis: Have you ever watched that Explained episode on exclamation points on Netflix? This is very specific. So Netflix has this show from Vox, which is called Explained, and they have a whole episode about the exclamation point, and you as a writer, you might be more informed about this, but apparently for many years the exclamation point has been considered useless by writers. There’s, like, no point. It’s like nobody uses that ever. And they talk about the rise of the exclamation point as, starting with marketing, but then actually being attributed to linguistically, women being in the workplace. Yeah, you need a way to soften your message, but at the same time be able to express your thoughts out and it was really interesting. So you saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t add a smiley face.’ I was like… [00:08:47] Jamie: That’s really some genuine feedback I’ve received. (Oh, really?  Sigh… ) Oh, sometimes your emails come off as too direct. And to be honest, I’ve often wondered in scenarios like that, if my male counterparts have received that same kind feedback. [00:08:59] Alexis: Oh they definitely haven’t. There’s no way they have. () [00:09:05] Jamie: Hey, you will really directing this email. And you made someone over here cry? Why? [00:09:08] Alexis: You said exactly what you wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s tough. [00:09:10] Jamie: We were talking about how I got into SEO. We’ve moved into a beautiful tangent. [00:09:15] Alexis: On this tangent, I want to ask you another kind of tangential question about you. So what does @Jammer_Volts mean? I know that’s your handle and I’m like, really curious. [00:09:32] Jamie: Literally very little. back in the day In a past life, I had a custom prop shop, so we had our booth at the very first ever comic con we made. A lot of people went into this cosplay outfits and they would paint a Nerf gun. And we always thought I was a little bit well like, alright, I guess it gets the job done. An this shop’s goal was that we’re going to make something that is functional that shoots a fireball. Yeah, we were the people who want the –? that would shoot fireballs and used an antique jewelry box to case them in. I doubt any of the pop culture cons or comic cons would let you in with them. But the idea was, here’s your piece of authenticity, here’s something that makes this world a little bit more real. See, it didn’t last very long, but it was a fun adventure. And my partner was professor Volts. I was, Jammer Volts, cause I had all the communications and Jammer refers back to like World War two radio communications. It’s also a Derby term. So I apologize to every Derby girl out there who’s like “you’re not a jammer, why are you using that?” I wouldn’t know any better. I’ve had this name a long time. I would love to do Derby. I’ve got elbow talents. Let’s do this. [00:10:58] Alexis: You could reach her at @Jammer_Volts on Twitter. Awesome. So cool. That’s actually like an amazing story for a handle. So that’s awesome. Okay, cool. So one of the questions that I get a lot is how do you learn Technical SEO? And I feel like you as someone who’s gone through this process, what are some resource is that you’ve learned from and found really useful? [00:11:25] Jamie: You learn from being curious and questioning. I can honestly say most of my career, most of my success has been from taking a step back from assumptions of how a process works of how, you know, this piece of data gets here, and going: “I’m seeing behavior that’s different. What is the gap between these?” And being willing to be the dumbest kid in the room has been my greatest strength because it lets me ask dumb questions. And then I can come to understand, oh wait, transaction means something different to you when you’re referring to server hits. And for me, it means an Ecommerce transaction, identifying that Codex and even finding the words for things knowing, Ah, this has a name? [00:12:17] Alexis: Definitely. So do you think that listening and being able to question is… almost like your weapon? [00:12:24] Jamie: That is my superpower. [00:12:27] Alexis: That’s a good one, like that’s actually a really, really good superpower. So if you would have an actual superpower. What would it be? Do you know? (lol) [00:12:34] Jamie: I would have the ability to teleport. [00:12:38] Alexis: Oh my gosh that would be such a nice one. Okay, so you obviously work with developers a lot. Any tips, tricks, thoughts on, like what it’s like to work with developers and getting them to do what you want them to do? And maybe even, I’m interested, too in like, how do you resolve conflicts when they’re very resistant to what you want? How do you get them to come around to your side or like when to back down? [00:13:02] Jamie: Absolutely. There tends to be two frames of thought, and I actually worked as an advocate to get the marketing SEO side to begin adding Jira tickets. Jira’s a fantastic way of managing your backlog and getting things moving, prioritized. It was a running joke for a while that our lovely head of SEO at the time, his name was Brad. He would just send me tickets that were like “Website broken. Please help” So it’s became, “Let’s have a conversation about what information’s valuable.” Developers are very literal. They want to give you the product that you want, but unless you clearly defined that it’s a big gap. So part of it is learning to speak the same language. It’s learning. Okay, What does the ticket process look like? when I put a ticket in, what human would I have a conversation with? Because, typically, business analysts are involved and they help get additional information. I’m pretty notorious for when I first joined teams, over-documenting like, “Hey, I found a substantial issue. I’m going to bring it to the table. Do you have questions. Can we hold them until I get through the first 23 pages of this? And then we can get to explore the supporting Excel books, and we can examine this further.” So really making a case, letting them reproduce it, showing them with a diagnostic tool, exactly what is the problem and what the goal is. (Definitely.) And I’ve worked in teams where they called the Dev Pod the “shark tank,” because everyone was afraid to go in there, you’d eaten alive. Developers, a lot of times are wearing headphones with nothing playing, and it’s a social cue of ‘I am in a complex thought process, and I’m not able to have a conversation right now.’ So part of it’s going to be acknowledging how important the issue you’re facing is. Is the site literally on fire? Okay, if it’s not going ahead and interrupting someone who’s working in a complex process, who is going to have to take 20 minutes to get back to where they were once they stop, may not be worthwhile. So how do you take something like a ticket format layout for all those critical pieces and then have that conversation? So the first thing I would advocate to any SEO’s out there who are a little bit scared of your dev teams, ask to sit in on stand up. This is the morning meeting where devs, they’re going to go, ‘This is what I’m working on. This is where I’m blocked. This is what I’m working on next.’ Start there. Just be a fly on the wall. It’s okay not to be able to contribute immediately, but you’re going to learn a lot. And once you understand how to speak that language, getting what you are asking for done effectively will become easier. [00:15:44] Alexis: Definitely. I love that idea of, like, almost going in, infiltrating, be a spy or something. [00:15:50] Jamie: Be the dumbest kid in the room. Own it. [00:16:00] Alexis: We could accept it, embrace. That’s awesome, though, because I’m sure eventually, like I’m sure you found that you’ve graduated throughout the ranks and now you’re probably one of the smarter people in the room. I’m sure there’s some really smart people you work with [00:16:09] Jamie: There’s still on a regular basis. Moments where I’m like Jeff, “I have no idea what you’re saying right now.” I’d like to come, I like to say, Jeff, Dream-crusher last-name. He frequently comes to me and goes, “Hi, this thing that you want to fix, this thing you want to change? Well, you’re pulling on a string.” So a lot of times, really, I’m sure many SEO’s out there have gone: This is the stupidest thing. Why have we done it that way? Why won’t you just do it this way? Well, that comes down to fundamental architecture, and sometimes when you pull on that thread, you’re going to release a lot more problems you’re going to solve. So having the awareness of how this one thing you want to change in the ecosystem will impact other pieces, will impact other teams initiatives, is critical for you to be successful in these large environments. [00:17:00] Alexis: Definitely. Yeah. You don’t want like a full yarn ball going out everywhere, creating a mess. (lol) [00:17:05] Jamie: It’s going to anyways, it’s gonna happen. (lol) [00:17:10] Alexis: One day you will. One day you will bring a site down too. [00:17:16] Jamie: And that’s still there running joke. It’s not your until you break it. [00:17:19] Alexis: I guess that’s true. I have broken one too many sites in my day, not obviously our clients’ sites, but… [00:17:28] Jamie: In full transparency. I’ve been working in a friend’s sites and, you know, doing may have been in the HTaccess file, and I’ve been, you know, just writing the mod rewrite so it could go ahead and resolve all versions to preferred, and accidentally taken down their site. Because I want it done right next day. Yeah, that’ll do it. And it’s like keeping your composure when they ask: What are you doing this weekend? Well. bringing their site back. (lol) [00:17:00] Alexis: Everything’s Fine. Everything’s great. Yeah, Let’s Why don’t you two talk for, like, two minutes? Yeah, that’s great. Let me just put my headphones in for a second. (lol) [00:17:00] Alexis: I feel really thankful that I got into SEO very early on. I mean, relatively speaking, starting in 2008, caffeine was 2006. Google’s finally on everyone’s radar. We were Ask Jeeves anymore, but because it was so unknown and it gave me a lot of freedom to fail. [00:18:14] Alexis: Definitely. What do you feel like are some of the things that have changed within the industry since you started? Do you feel like there’s been like a huge shift? [00:18:25] Jamie: There’s textbooks now! (lol) I’ve had people ask me, How did how did you learn? What classes did you take them like old boots on the ground and a prayer in my pocket?  (lol) It was, I don’t know, but I figure it out. You know, a lot of complex problem solving and being willing to sit down with people and being willing to sit outside, you know, a CTO’s office for two hours, and wait patiently because something was important enough. [00:18:52] Alexis: Yeah, definitely. Oh, my gosh, I can only imagine. So I know that one of the things that I’ve always felt about working for an agency is the coolest part is you get to see a ton of different complex problems that different groups have in different industries, and I feel like you’ve almost got that through going through different jobs, seeing different types of things, working with, like particular sites. I think that’s like you said, Learning on the job is probably one of the most important things that one can do. [00:19:19] Jamie: And you know, if you’re limited, a lot of it’s hard because you don’t have the access to that type of thing. I remember I was. I was lucky enough to work with the Google Analytics product owner in getting enhanced eCommerce in when it was first a thing. And it was really tricky because there were no sites out there that already had these types of things. We were white listed for it. It was a beta. Well, it was It was amazing data to take advantage of. It took it like a year for them to put up the demo-store so you could go ahead and look at this sandbox testing ground. I think Google has embraced that as well. You haven’t gotten a check out Colabs yet or, you know, begun using colab workbooks and your Google drive to start playing around with code. I highly recommend it. It’s that freedom too fast. [00:20:04] Alexis: Yes. Yeah, And it’s really cool, because I’ve always felt I don’t know if you felt this and your experimentation with programming that the worst part is the set up [00:20:13] Jamie: Oh, getting your libraries, right? Please kill me now. Actually, Hamlet Batista shared out a great way just over coffee and chatting at Tech SEO boost. Great conference guys. The only tech SEO conference out there. Thank you, Paul and search Catalyst Team. But he was like, Hey, here’s how you export all of your library dependencies when you share. [00:20:34] Alexis: That’s like thank you. [00:20:35] Jamie: So one of my biggest challenges was not only setting it up, but I’m making it so someone else could use it on far smarter minds and myself, like Hamlet have gone ahead and figured this out on our sharing that information. [00:20:46] Alexis: Yeah definitely, and there’s always a lot of people with python will use something like Anaconda. But if you go in blind or, I don’t know, positive optimistic, you’re like, Oh, like, let me download the newest python, Python three, and then, you know, it’s like No, no, no, no, no. They designed it on python 2.7. You’re like, Well, what’s the difference? Nothing works. (lol) [00:21:06] Jamie: That was our big difference. Very, very big difference. But that’s why those Colab research workbooks are so great because you’re working in a python notebook that gives you that same interface as Anaconda does, where you can run each segment, you can identify your break points. You can rework it [00:21:24] Alexis: definitely, and you could do some pretty intense stuff in there like some pretty intense machine learning stuff. So pretty cool, pretty cool, great tip. Having worked in eCommerce and Technical SEO, What do you see as the relationship between eCommerce websites and search? [00:21:40] Jamie: You can’t buy a thing that doesn’t exist. And if you can’t Google it does it exist? And then we have Amazon as Google’s largest competitors because they’re so effective at selling. And if we really dig deep into the bones of how eCommerce is set up and you start looking at what data are we even sending in our product seats? Because chances are I’m using that same data in my structured data markup. How can we learn from these other tools? So a lot of collaboration with the channel manager, the person who’s sending out that product feed to Amazon, to Google, to any other of the page search partners. They have a lot of insight that we can gleam. But it’s that willingness to go. I want to learn about your world. I’m going to sit here on be the be the dumb kid for a second and I’m going to come out a lot better for it. [00:22:29] Alexis: So talking about the dumb kid, I have a question for you. What does “SEO as a function of product mean?” You mentioned that in an earlier conversation we had once and I was like “What does that mean?” (lol) [00:22:43] Jamie: Oh that one time we talked intensely for like, two days with way too much coffee. (lol) I know that when it comes to how a report in my current position, my customer is a search engine, it is Googlebot. It is primarily Googlebot because, you know, we have a JavaScript heavy site. We’re working towards moving to more server-side rendering, at least for those critical components. So international search engines are a bit more adapted at picking up what that content means. Personally and persistently on a mission to improve performance, I really encourage anybody out there who was working with an international site. Go travel abroad and don’t rely on your 4G WiFi (if you can). You pick up a SIM card from one of the local shops, pop that thing in and experience what it is like for you to spend 11 cents to load a page and stuff. [00:23:40] Alexis: and suffer… (lol) [00:23:44] Jamie: It’ll be five minutes of your life, eleven cents of your dollar. How apt are you at that moment of like yeah it is worth buying. Wonder how long their cart process is. Oh, I’ve gotta register. How much more likely are you to back off? [00:23:57] Alexis: So how do you balance? I’m always curious with us for e commerce sites. What is there any internal logic on: How do you balance the experience with speed and how do you know when to start focusing on one or the other? [00:24:09] Jamie: Speed is the experience. It’s is the foundation of it. [00:24:12] Alexis: Yeah, that’s the tough part too, is they are kind of like the same thing. But then again, there’s always the optimization of the actual experience itself. So… [00:24:15] Jamie: Define for me optimization. (Alexis note: She’s level setting right now! See advice in action! Way cool!) [00:24:20] Alexis: So like, let’s say, for instance, you know what you want to have with your website experience. But maybe, not necessarily as fast as it could be physically, getting like a minimal, viable product ready. Your code works, everything’s good, but then it’s not as efficient as it could potentially be. [00:24:39] Jamie: Look at the number of elements in the page, is something I would advocate for. There is a great Think with Google piece that just came out in the last year. It talks about the number of elements and image on the page. And where is that sweet spot for conversion. And it is not that you can’t have these functionalities. This is where we begin to look at our user centric key performance indicators (KPIs) on those are things like time to first contentful paint. Yeah, that is one of those metrics in Lighthouse. It’s a very obscure thing to try and understand what it means. The thing I came here for, I can see. No one cares about content that they can’t see loading. So when you even look at the UX, when you look at the experience of your page, keeping in mind that user. What is the reason they came here? It’s like it’s become a little bit of a trope now, but you go and try and read the recipe online. You’re like, “I don’t care about your second cousin’s wedding Can I just find out how to makes muffins please.” (lol) But keep that in mind. Alexis: So true, like the intent of a website and why you’re going, there is more important to consider. So I guess I like your idea of coming at it from a user-first perspective because I think sometimes, like I think there’s a quote on one of the Google training’s. I’m pretty sure you did the certification, too, but (because I saw you had done it), but basically it says the smallest site is a site with no resources on it, right? And at the same time, like you have to have something to get that experience going, right? [00:26:11] Jamie: And it has to be worthwhile. If your content is good enough, when I get to the bottom of the article, I promise you I’ll click on that follow-up link. If what you’ve provided to me is of enough value and engaging, I will go out and click that CTA. You do not need to put an overlay on my screen and stop what I came here for like ‘Hey do you like me yet? You’re coming off a little thirsty? Okay, interstitial thirsty, knock it off.” [00:26:47] Jamie: And a website is a window into how our business runs on. If business’ push to get more email sign ups is more important than why I came here as a user, the resource I came here for, that shows that this is not a user-first company, and there are plenty of companies out there. [00:27:04] Alexis: I love that analogy of a website is a window to a business. That’s so beautiful. And I think I actually, I think it’s 100% true across the board. You think about it. And if you see a website that you know isn’t necessarily prioritizing the user than you can tell that they’re not, they don’t have that mentality. [00:27:22] Jamie: Absolutely. And I found our REI does is a great job. Shout out to the REI team made a beautiful work. Even in the values of the company. So how they choose to not only, here is the product you want to buy, but here’s a community that loves the things you do. Or hey, you’re not sure if this thing is right for you, do you want to turn like a day experience for it? And it’s about technology serving the user and that is a, it’s a tipping point right now. A lot of people have reacted with a lot of anger that, you know, Google broke this agreement we had where we would give them content and they would give us clicks. Well, if the content you’re providing could be answered very quickly in this quick little block instead of me having to read about your second cousin’s wedding, I just came get my muffin recipe. And you must think of it this way – If that’s the only value you were providing -> Sorry, it makes sense to not go ahead and give me that click through. If you’re providing more, if that snippet that I’ve seen is engaging enough and will give me more information, then, yeah, I’m going to go ahead and click that. I’m going to give you my time. So humans have time, energy and money. We’ve got –? everywhere. We could make more money, but time is limited. That’s the true human factor. That’s why you were… [00:28:44] Alexis: Are you worth my time? I love that. Exactly, in Frederic’s interview on SEO in the Lab, had talked about websites and the idea that “Are you worthy of me giving you my credit card information?” [00:28:57] Jamie: Exactly. [00:29:00] Alexis: I think that idea of “Are you worth my time?” It even goes beyond that, you know, because it’s like, first of all, are you trustworthy? But then also, are you interesting enough? (lol) [00:29:10] Jamie: Do I feel like I’m empowered? Do I feel smart and capable on your site? (Alexis: Yes.) If I don’t understand how to flow and interact with this to do a simple thing, it’s disparaging. (Alexis: Yeah.) I’m not going to feel like I can handle these next steps. I’m not going to feel like the thing I came here to purchase is going to give me he feeling, the experience that it’s intended to [00:29:31] Alexis: Yeah, we’re so spoiled because so many websites today have such a strong user experience that we’re not used to challenging user journey flows. [00:29:43] Jamie: Friction points are real. Absolutely. [00:29:45] Alexis: No, who I love, they have a great map – Starbucks always has, Like, these amazing used user journey maps that they update all the time. And I’m sure different people in the organization have them. But some of them you can find online that they have, and they map out every single part in the user journey from, like, the feeling that they want them to have when they get in the shop to like the customer ordered the coffee or something. it’s always like, very impressive to see, like that level of user focus and what they want. [00:30:13] Jamie: Please share that link? Yeah. I would love to see that [00:30:16] Alexis: Let’s see if I can find it. I think Kevin Indig… [00:30:18] Jamie: Of course, Kevin has it. That man is, if you guys don’t follow Kevin on Twitter yet. Go do it. He’s from, He’s from the Jira team, actually. So his tool helps save my tail on daily basis, and he’s brilliant. [00:30:30] Alexis: Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for being you. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was one of the things that he had shared. So he, I’ll follow up with him and I’ll check the site and see if I can find it for the notes in this podcast. Yeah. Okay, So what do you think are the top challenges facing large eCommerce sites today? [00:30:49] Jamie: Oh, man, that is such a loaded question. All right, so if you’ve got a large eCommerce site and it was, it was set up a minute ago. You know, it’s been online for a while. It’s trustworthy, it’s got authority. Well, there are two aspects here that are pretty challenging. One,  how is it scaled out? Is every different section of this site an independent CMS? Are they aware of each other? Are they integrated? It’s an information architecture challenge that can result in cannibalism on a really difficult user journeys, high friction conversion points. We also have to look at, for a while, sites focused their performance metrics on full page load, and that ended up with a lot of hole punching and going ‘Well, we’ll get the full page on there and they’re gonna make all these asynchronous calls. We’re gonna load everything that way.’ And it was, it was a way to make it appear to be smaller without actually being smaller or faster. Um, so now that’s led to our pivot for these user centric metrics. Where? Well, how long until I could be interactive? They came here an amount of PDP. I want to buy this thing. So get me the content that tells me “Hey, here’s the thing you came to buy. Here’s the critical influence you need to know, a price, how fast it ships.” Here’s a picture, you know, images are so important because of the closest we can get to a product while being online. And here’s our buy by. And the further I go down that page, the further and going to be away from ready to purchase. I need help, I need more information before making the best decision. [00:32:28] Alexis: Definitely. And this is a question that’s in a similar vein. But what do you see as the most critical elements of eCommerce SEO to get right. [00:32:37] Jamie: That is, I don’t even know where to start. (lol) [00:32:38] Alexis: Do it, well. (lol) [00:32:44] Jamie: I need you to go ahead and pull out your phone, on your own website and try to buy a product going incognito in mode, turn out that WiFi, try and buy a product. If you could do that and you don’t need to go take a walk on the block and chill, you’re doing all right. Taking that back and you’re going to repeat it. And you’re going to try and find that product not using search, by using the categorization. [00:33:09] Alexis: OooOoo, I love that idea. [00:33:12] Jamie: Yes, you have to go through your own hierarchy to complete this. Okay, Now you’ve got the one thing, you’ve got a toaster. Now we’re going to switch from I want to buy a toaster too, I’m a user who wants to host a brunch. So that means I’m not just looking for a toaster. I’m looking for napkins. I’m looking for plates. I’m looking for, It’s Kentucky Derby. I think Moscow mules is that where Kentucky Derby, is that the drink of choice? [00:33:15] Alexis: We’ll go with it. [00:33:16] Jamie: We’re going to pretend it is. Everyone loves Moscow mules and big fancy hats and there’s horses. But go through that journey and try and have an experience, try and complete that. If you can’t, then we’ve identified another problem. And this is where you start to begin to understand from a user focus where are my gap points? While I’m on this article that tells me how to make a Moscow mule because I’m holding a Kentucky Derby party. But there’s no link for me to buy the thing or there’s various dead ends, and you want to spot those. That’s both for SEO and CRO. If we look at it from a search engine perspective, Google wants to give us really authoritative  answers. We’re asking higher level questions. So if we’re having a conversation with a topic of Star Wars, we’re going to talk about siths, Jedi’s, Ewok, Han Solo, Yoda. And that’s just gonna be part of a well-informed conversation. That was a thing, that was weird, but that’s just a naturally informed conversation. And search engines want that same kind of interconnectivity between content on your site. It wants you to have a strong branch like on a tree, and then it will judge you based on how these branches go off, is it a healthy branch? Is this a weak one, a parasitic one that’s really detracting and not able to support the user’s intent. But we have a strong one over here. You can also stop me at any time. (lol) [00:35:20] Alexis: You’re doing so well. I just wanted you to just keep going and I was like, I’ll stop before the closing question, if we get there. (lol) [00:35:31] Jamie: Okay the downside of my passionate rants, every time I get in front of C-level, and this is another piece of feedback that I get on a pretty regular basis is “you’ve got to take a step back from the technical.” It’s very difficult for me to separate out those pieces because the devil is in the details. He’s in the execution. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. And I’m still personally learning in my own growth, how you effectively communicate those to the people who could push the buttons as they go. [00:36:03] Alexis: Definitely. Yeah, I think that’s a huge challenge to being able to, like communicate to someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on, I think. But then also, you have to get them to do or invest in what you’re doing, even though they don’t understand what you’re doing. [00:36:18] Jamie: Absolutely, you know, who am I speaking to you? Is this a good time to make a logical argument? You know, a very passionate, emotional based argument. What is the best way to approach this? [00:36:32] Alexis: So have you found anything that’s really effective so far in your journey? Jamie: Dollars signs. Alexis: Dollars? Yeah. I feel like that sense is telling me how much this is gonna cost me. How much money will I make? [00:36:44] Jamie: And not even how much it’s gonna cost, but how much can be gained? Yeah. So when you present it as, look, we have the assets here, we have, and this is a great time to work with your product content management team to understand those who are taking in data for new products, who are helping to categorize them. What kind of relationships we’re facilitating with manufacturers, to go on. You basically lay constraints for yourself. So I like to go ahead, I consider SEO as like a booster pack. I’m not going to come in and demand that you guys rework everything that you do, but I’m gonna help you as you execute to be foundationally solid, to be stable, to be scalable and to begin to have an awareness of other parts of the system. So when we connect all of these together when it’s an ecosystem that understands “Ah, my manufacturer over here has, you know, made this new product line, and we have a relationship where we’re promoting them.” What places could we go ahead and put a relevant information about those products on other places? So I have my manufacturer who’s making copper mugs, Kentucky Derby’s coming up. Where do I place those so they are relevant to a user and provide value as opposed to the thing I have to scroll past or the thing that takes forever to load. And it makes my page jump. If your site does that, please make someone who can push a button go through that experience. [00:38:15] Alexis: Definitely. But one of the questions I wanted to ask was, do you think in SEO, one day, can sit in the boardroom? [00:38:23] Jamie: I love that question and I want to take it on. I think if SEO’s like myself, learn how to speak, you know this is the new Codex I’m learning. This is a new Rosetta Stone. How to translate my intent and what I want to see done into words that they understand and have meaning to them. But we’re advocates of Web presence, of users, of performance. We should absolutely sit in the boardroom. We are a place to go. This isn’t just about selling things, it’s about selling them in a way that is meaningful, that supports users, because when a user feels like you have their back, they’re going to come back to you. So this is an investment in a lifetime value. You can turn and burn through customers. You can, you know, miff them over, but it’s going to run out one day. It’s not an indefinite supply. So by being that presence who goes there. And we use search engines as away, as a mirror to see them, a reflection of overall site health, a reflection of overall user experience through analytics on page. Then we begin to understand, and we can present that in the boardroom and we can grow the business by making that experience better. This is a digital world. How do we keep up with the next step? [00:39:41] Alexis: Definitely. It’s so fascinating how almost… websites and working on sites have almost gone back to more traditional sales values, cause I just remember watching this. There’s like this ride called ‘It’s a small world.’ I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, at Disney like one of the most daring famous ones, I don’t know, Whatever. I’m not like that.You know, it’s like So basically, you go into it and it takes you in this world, and everyone’s like saying It’s a small world after all for, like, twenty minutes straight. And (lol) [00:40:10] Jamie: I’m sorry, I don’t know that song, can you sing it again? (lol) [00:40:11] Alexis: It’s a small world after alllllll. Okay, you guys got my voice (lol) [00:40:18] Jamie: Worst podcast episode ever. I’m sorry, guys. That was a close, intimate. They’re like ‘Oh, she’s the worst. Derailed conversations for It’s a small world song. (lol) [00:40:27] Alexis: It’s like shield your ears, Alexis is singing. No, but basically the woman who created that ride had asked Walt Disney, “What is my budget?” And she was like, “Oh, I need a budget like, What are you looking at? What are we trying to achieve here? “ And his answer was, “Oh, there’s no budget.” And she was like, “Well, like we kind of need a budget.” And he’s like, “No, build the ride that people are going to want to come back to, because if they come back then we don’t have any problems.”, which is kind of, like, a fun business philosophy. (Jamie: Exactly. And they you have advocates.) And like, that’s almost similar to what you’re saying here is building the site that people are going to want because then you’ll be able to have people come back to it in a way that’s meaningful and interesting to them. Which, man, Disney absolutely ahead of his time, behind his time in many ways, but ahead of his time in like, a few. (lol) [00:41:23] Jamie: If your frozen head is listening to a podcast right now. Thank you. And also, with the hell man. (lol) [00:41:29] Alexis: Okay. All right. So for the final closing question, what are your three nuggets of advice for an SEO working on a technical Ecommerce site? [00:41:47] Jamie: My three Nuggets of advice are: Go buy something, Do it through product categorization. We’ve got to go down and find it. Do when you’re throwing them on the PDP. Do it when you’re trying to have that experience, that conceptual journey that goes across categories [00:42:06] Alexis: I love that one. [00:42:07] Jamie: Understand how products come on and off your site? How are they on boarded? At what point is there a PDP? At what point is that PDP go away? [00:42:21] Alexis: Such a good one too. We could also talk about that for probably another hour. How to offload it. [00:42:27] Jamie: We’ll talk about that We’ll have a Disney sing along. It’ll be great. I love rocking out to poor unfortunate souls … Ursula, you’re my personal hero or spirit animal… (lol) [00:42:38] Alexis: Throw in the Little Mermaid, Not like the Disney version, the original story. (lol) [00:42:44] Jamie: The Disney version bothered me as a child because I just thought to myself ‘Write it down!’ (lol) Alexis: You’re like, ‘obviously.’ Jamie: This could all be solved if you more the note that was like “Hi, I met you the day, you were drowning. I saved you. I really liked you and impulsively traded my voice for some legs.” [00:43:02] Alexis: Yes, you’re like “and… it was not a great decision. In retrospect.” (lol) [00:43:10] Jamie: “I think that ate my friend for dinner. He was a small crab … Alexis: and I still feel really bad about it. (lol) Jamie: I feel like, if she had lived on, finished out her days on land, it would have been really sad. Now they’ve been like, “Oh, we’re having flounder for dinner.” (lol) Alexis: Oh, gosh, that is true. That is very true.  (lol) Jamie: I think we answered the question of whether or not Ariel was vegan, and Ariel was definitely vegan. She went into the open ocean every day and she sucked in krill. Those are living so that would be vegan. Oh, complex dietary ethics for Ariel. (lol) [00:43:52] Alexis: I’m there’s a specific word for what she was. (lol) [00:43:58] Jamie: I say I supposed to answer another nugget of advice. Understand your infrastructure. So say you’ve got a blog and your blog is categorized. Do you use the same categories in your blog as you use in eCommerce? How does that connect through with– you ‘ve got community support or questions? Understand the flow of those. You begin to use the same words to describe something you create consistency. And baseless words off of what your users are going for. You know, we look at site search more times. The conversion rate is five times that of those who are trying to find another way. How do you facilitate that pathway? Because when you do that, it’s not just about the user experience. You’re also allowing a chance for a greater order value, for a greater sense of investment from user is now engaged with your content. It’s, it’s selfishly altruistic. [00:44:56] Alexis: I love that word, “selfishly altruistic” But that’s what it’s like, what a lot of friendships are. You know. You have to take care of yourself first. But you also have to take care of the people around you too, you know, And by taking people around you, in a way, you’re taking care of yourself [00:45:14] Jamie: And loving someone as another person in this works interpersonally as well for their flaws. Being willing to acknowledge your own and figure out how you know you can learn better, do better or just being able to laugh at them. It’s a beautiful thing. (Alexis: So beautiful.) I think the video game goat simulator taught us that a bug can truly be a feature. But it’s in how we handle it. You know, bugs, we treat them as part of the experience. They become a feature. [00:45:54] Alexis: I love that. And with the goat, which is the bug, which is the feature, we will close out. Thank you so much, Jamie, for coming on the podcast today. we should totally do it again. [00:46:08] Jamie: Yes, we’ll try and stay better on topic, but I make no promises. [00:46:11] Alexis: I thought it was awesome! Thank you so much. Signing off, ciao! The post 3. Interview w/ Jamie Alberico, Arrow Electronics appeared first on TechnicalSEO.com.
45 minutes | 2 years ago
2. Interview w/ Frédéric Dubut, Bing
Linked Resources: Frédéric’s Twitter (@CoperniX)Word embeddingsWord2VecVisualizationAndrew Ng’s deep learning courseBing’s new indexing APIFrédéric’s TechSEO Boost presentation (w/Christi Olsen)Frédéric’s article on ML and guidelinesMartin Splitt‘s Article on JSPlaylist for Martin’s JS Series BM25 (i.e., more advanced TF-IDF) Topic Timestamps: [0:15] intros[2:45] why the relationship with the search community[4:05] how can webmasters help Bing (remember Bing!)[5:45] why is the community focused on JavaScript?[9:00] frederic’s techSEO boost talk[12:15] what should SEOs know relating to machine learning?[14:15] trust, bing, and spam[15:30] Bing’s approach on dealing with spam[16:45] importance of high quality results (especially top results)[17:15] search and SEO community relationship[20:15] what makes a strong eCommerce site? (trust)[22:15] bing on accepting feedback[27:15] internationalization in bing[28:15] why word vectors[32:15] related content hubs[33:15] more word vector stuff[35:45] Karen Jones -IDF[37:45] 3 pieces of wisdom 1. remember that we build sites and products for people 2. take Andrew Ng’s deeplearning course 3. sign up for BWT (submit URLs or use their brand new API)[44:15] closing Favorite Quotes: “In the end, we build all of this for people. ““One of the one of the way we frame it here (at Bing is) if you look at all the eCommerce websites on the Internet, one question we asked ourselves is, would we give our credit card numbers to that website?”“It comes from the fact that our users really trust us to serve the best and most authoritative results.”“Because when we fail it has real life consequences for these people. “” We are an industry where we are builders. We build websites, we build products, we build the search engine. We all build these things for people.” Transcript: Note 1: Add about ~15 seconds to timestamps to account for intro. Note 2: If you see notice any major errors, please reach out to seointhelab [at] merkleinc.com, we tried our best to stay true to the vocal version. [00:00:02] Alexis Sanders: Hello. Hello. And welcome back to the podcast. Today we have Frederic Dubut from Bing as well as Max from Merkle. Max, would you like to give an introduction of yourself first? [00:00:12] Max Prin: Sure. Thanks, Alexis. My name is Max. I lead the technical SEO team here at Merkle and we focus on the most technical aspects of SEO, such as structural data and crawling and indexing. [00:00:25] Alexis: And then Frédéric. [00:00:26] Frédéric Dubut: I am Frédéric Dubut. I’m part of the Web ranking and quality team here at Bing, with the specific focus on anti-spam, anti-malware, and all the bad stuff. [00:00:37] Alexis: Awesome! And one of the things I found in my research of you, Frédéric, is that you speak five different languages. How did that even happen? [00:00:46] Frédéric: Well, I don’t speak them very well. And really, I’m truly proficient in French and English. And then they said practice makes perfect and for language. I think like the lack of practice makes you forget very, very fast in France. And Max went through the same system that I believe you have to start studying foreign language when you are like, ten or eleven or so. And you have to say, like seven or nine years of language. So And you have to take two of them. So I picked English and Spanish. That’s why there’s two. And then I was interested in Japan in general. So I learned a little Japanese lived there a little while, and then I start toward Zurich. So I had to pick up a little bit of German. Here are your five languages. [00:01:29] Alexis: Wow! So we could do this podcast in, like, totally in French, probably with you and Max. And I would just listen in… I’m just kidding. [00:01:37] Frédéric: exactament. [00:01:40] Max: Yeah, because after several years living in the U. S. You forget your French. That’s very hard for me. [00:01:52] Alexis: I imagine that’s so true. Gosh… [00:01:56] Max: I could actually, actually a hard time like talking about SEO in French. So everything is in English. [00:02:04] Alexis: Is it just the work terminology? [00:02:05] Max: Yeah, everything. All the key terms, Everything is in English. [00:02:09] Alexis: Ah, that’s so interesting! And fascinating. Awesome. Okay, so if we dive into some of the meat of the podcast, one of the things that I’ve been seeing, you (Frédéric) speak on the circuit a lot. And, of course, thank you so much, because it’s so fascinating. One of the things that I’ve been noticing is that Google and Bing as well, especially, have been integrating more in with the search community, which is awesome to see, and one of things from the SEO perspective that I’m really interested in is – what can we, as SEOs, do to support Bing? [00:02:40] Frédéric: Yeah, that’s a good question in general, the reason why we want to interact with the communities, that they keep us honest. In the sense that we know the product we want to build. we think we know how it’s working and then You talk like ten minutes with SEO’s, and they tell you exactly. No, no, no. This technique you thought you eliminated it actually works Great. These kind of things, eh? So for us, it’s really enlightening. So any feedback the community has, it is definitely the best way to help us make a better product for users. [00:03:12] Alexis: So it’s almost like by going to these SEO conferences, or search conferences, You guys were doing some product research? [00:03:17] Frédéric: Yeah, absolutely. And I like the product of a program manager role is very focused on customers, understanding users. And we have, we’re in a very interesting position at Bing, where we have two different set of customers, so to speak. We have the final users who are actually using the product and entering the search queries. But the Webmaster community as well and SEOs is extremely important. Without webmasters, without people who write great content for the Internet, there would be no point in having a search engine. So for us, it’s extremely important to interact with both. [00:03:52] Alexis: Definitely! that’s awesome! And are there any specific tasks? I know that when you spoke back at SMX East, you talked about how we could optimize our crawl efficiency as something that is helpful to Bing and is really useful. Is there anything else like that that you can think of that at the end of the day makes both our websites better as well as Bing a better search engine? [00:04:15] Frédéric: Yeah and for a lot of people, it will be just making sure the basics are working (in terms of crawl indexing). A lot of the technical SEO is not very different for Google and Bing. But what a lot of people don’t realize is sometimes they just allowed Google to crawl everything and Bing gets a disallow. And if you are an SEO, webmaster, and you complain that you feel you’re too dependent on Google to get your search traffic, but at the same time, you’re blocking all the other crawlers, all the other search engines from indexing your website… Well, you’re never going to get away from that situation. And those people don’t realize these are like two very related points, so make sure the basics are working for being in the same with our working for Google is definitely number one thing for most people. [00:05:02] Alexis: I love that point. Think of Bing, remember Bing. You obviously can’t see me right now, but I’m wearing a Bing sweatshirt today, so really reppin’ Bing. [00:05:12] Frédéric: I don’t. (Lol) There’s only one person on this podcast wearing Bing swag. [00:05:18] Max: That’s not true! I have a Merkle branded jacket that has a Bing logo on the shoulder. [00:05:20] Frédéric: Nice, nice, there’s only one person on this they’re not for wearing Bing. [00:05:28] Alexis: That’s awesome. So you reminded me of a tweet that you had recently where you asked people in the search community what they’re interested in hearing whether it was about JavaScript, machine learning or search history, right? And the top one was JavaScript. Why do you think that this search community is so fascinated with JavaScript? [00:05:48] Frédéric: Well, I think there’s a legitimate concern from the community that as their websites are getting more, more complicated, the search engines are not going to represent them (in their index) in the best way. There is a lot of misunderstanding around what are the best practices for JavaScript (or for other things we should do or the things we shouldn’t do). Maybe in the search engine side, there was some miscommunication in terms of “do we support JavaScript” or “we don’t support JavaScript”. It’s much more nuanced than just saying, “Oh, yeah, of course we support JavaScript.” Yep, in Bing we can claim with support JavaScript, in the sense that our crawler is able to download those kind of resources. Render the pages for most frameworks. But there is also a relative very process intensive, additionally intensive process. So you have fairly little control in what search engines are going to index on your site from JavaScript compared to a regular HTML. And I understand that can cause some nervousness in the SEO community. So that’s probably why there is a lot of questions and concerns. [00:06:54] Alexis: Yeah, so like a lot of anxiety combined with probably like you said, some different formats of information. I know that one of the things that we’ve seen is that for certain sites, JavaScript – totally fine. But then you’ll go. You’ll have another site experience where they’ll switch over to a very JavaScript, heavy experience and their traffic will suffer from it. So I think that lack of consistency in terms of experience is so fascinating, and I think it’s something that makes people really anxious because they don’t want to have that type of trend in their performances as well. So thank you for sharing that. So are you going to actually write a piece on that? [00:07:26] Frédéric: I think the piece will be on ML and guidelines actually. One of the reasons is Google came recently with very good article. I think it was Martin Splitt who wrote it about RenderTron and Techniques to make it easier for websites to be indexed when there is JavaScript. I think there is a lot of literature that has already being written on JavaScript. So I felt that even though, it was fairly clear, I think was forty five forty one percent that close, close enough that I felt there was not enough written around ML and guidelines, and that’s probably why I’m going to write about all that. [00:07:59] Max: Yeah, I was about to say, That’s the good news about, like best practices for JavaScript. Is that what you can do to make sure search engines can understand your Content is to serve a prerendered or HTML  snapshot and it goes for both like Google and Bing. once again like what you do for one search engine, it’s not different than what you would do to optimize for another search engine, so optimization of time. [00:08:22] Alexis: Optimization of time. I love it. And I love the idea of basically endorsing content that Google has already done, saying this is fine, it works similar for Bing, let’s focus on what we need to with machine learning. Which brings up the talk that you had a Tech SEO boost, which was so fascinating as well. And I loved your little quip where you said that Bing was the first to have to be powered by a neural net, that’s so exciting and so interesting. [00:08:45] Frédéric: Yeah, that’s a little known fact that that’s why Christi (Olsen) and I insisted we kind of hammer it like at the end of every conference now. We say it’s like Bing was the first one. Interestingly, these were like very rudimentary neural nets at the time. Like, our founder with deep learning. It wasn’t really deep in it in any way, because only one hidden layer and it was well, it was very simple. It shows that it’s something that’s been tough mind at Microsoft research and Bing search. Now at Bing for quite a while, we believe the best way to scale search is to use machine learning to make the machine learn about one of the best results to be returned for a query. And that’s why we have taken this approach that may be slightly different from what other major search engines do. [00:09:30] Alexis: I love that it’s like the most shallow, deep learning that you have. (lol) I’m just kidding, of course. [00:09:36] Frédéric: That’s right. It’s just quite bits. That was thirteen years ago. So… [00:09:41] Alexis: It was deep for thirteen years ago, exactly. And you mentioned to they had, like a ton of features over, like, five hundred features that were engineered into it. Which, I mean, it’s one of the very challenging things that have probably been custom done. [00:09:54] Frédéric: Yeah, and honestly, I don’t I don’t know exactly how they did it back in 2005. But future engineering is definitely a big challenge and that that’s why a lot of the discussions around ranking factors sounds a bit funny, especially for us at Bing, because some of the features are like derivatives off like several other features. You combine thing and it’s a very, our engineers take is that it really is a machine learning problem, so they create new features that will really make a lot of sense for humans. But have actually a great predictive power for the for the model. And that’s where, like, this ranking factor thing, like always comes in a bit odd for us. [00:10:33] Alexis: yeah, I loved how powerful your example of what a machine sees is so different from what a person sees and in your example, You had used a stop sign where basically, all you did they did was cover up a small part of it, and the machine from that saw something totally different, which was a speed limit sign. And I think the idea that machines process information differently than humans process information is so interesting and so fascinating and probably something that you have to deal with on a daily basis. [00:11:00] Frédéric: Yeah, then that starts, like with some of the worst cases where we see things better, different from what you are seeing, like cloaking and this kind of things that’s more like it. These are considered, like the cardinal sins of SEO and search, because if the machine can’t even access the same thing as users like lose all trust in everything you’re doing. But even like going back to JavaScript, that’s also exactly what the problem is with JavaScript is not having the guarantee that machine is going to see all the goodness you’re showing to users when you have a JS heavy page. So I’m training all these features reading all this knowledge can get complicated for sure. [00:11:44] Alexis: Definitely. So what do you think is the most important part of machine learning for search professionals To understand? Because you and it is so many complicated elements like Bing’s LambdaMART, vector space, (which I love, that I really hope the “it’s the same in the vector space” catches on in the industry) and of course, RankNET. What do you think is really important for people who are maybe less technical or less well versed in mathematics to understand about what you’re trying to achieve with machine learning? [00:12:13] Frédéric: So that that’s where I think the guidelines come rolling to play. If you look at the process of machine learning it, it can get pretty complicated from a technical point of view. If you’re not technical, that that sounds like a foreign language. So what is really important to remember is it’s a way to generalize search algorithms that is trained with how humans will be judging the sites according to the guidelines. So the way we train our mission early model, we have a subset of queries and URLs, and we send judges to these websites, and we ask them to rate them according to the search quality guidelines and that makes your training set. And we hold a little bit of this data as, like validation and test set. And then that’s where you train your machine learning algorithm. You want to go with them to perform really great on this small subset of queries and URL’s that have been judged by humans. Then you validate with other metrics that generalized pretty well to the 1,000x more queries and URL’s we see. So in the end, thinking, with my site, according to guidelines, get to perfect or excellent or good rating is probably a good way to think about it. [00:13:26] Alexis: Nice. I love the idea of using humans as almost like he said, training all of that data so that you can, then iterate on that process to make it more efficient and better in the end, there’s like something very beautiful in that. Hopefully, one day it’ll be all machines, right? [00:13:40] Frédéric: I don’t know if I would trust machines to the 100% of the work. For one, I like my job. I don’t want a machine to take it. (lol) In the end, we build all of this for people. So keeping people involved in the process, keeping the machine honest. Looking whether the results make sense, not just that the metric looks good. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. [00:14:04] Max: And Frederic, you talked about trust towards a website. I remember from experience that Bing is pretty aggressive with, like spam or like a big red flags about websites. A few years ago, I remember website that we were launching and it was a dot info. And just for that reason, it could not be indexed right away. Can you tell us more? But like maybe some, some big red flags that Bing, as in the system that say “that website, most likely not a good one.” [00:14:36] Frédéric: So like in the same way that I don’t think there is any like silver bullet in terms of good ranking factors, when you go outside of the worst offenders like cloaking, I’m not sure there is anything where we would we ban outright a website. I think what happens at Bing, compared to other search engines, is we tend to see violations of a Webmaster Guidelines, as mostly voluntary. I when I hear Fili Wiese (and I know he doesn’t represent Google anymore), but he talks about this manual penalties and he says, this is mostly education and if people fix their issues, (Google will) remove the penalty and everything is great. And on our side, we take probably what I more punitive approach, where if you try to cheat the system, you’re going to have a penalty that is going to last for a while because we don’t want you to cheat the system again. And we’ve seen before if we remove the penalty. The sites tends to just do the same things again so that That’s why I like when you say we’re harsher on spam, I think the idea of spam is fairly similar. But the way we approach it is a bit different. Maybe more of a punitive way to make sure like people who live by the rules, actually are ranked higher in the results. [00:15:45] Max: That makes sense. [00:15:47] Alexis: It brings back this idea. The fact that you know your site is a relationship between your experience, your users, and then also search engines as well. Because there’s almost like this implicit trust that’s formed and you mention the word trust. Of course, I know that with Google, this whole idea of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is becoming more and more important or popping up a little bit more. But I think it’s so interesting and fascinating that you know you’re using that as a standard, almost as if it’s an actual relationship. [00:16:16] Frédéric: Well, yeah, and it comes from the fact that our users really trust us to serve the best and most authoritative results, and especially for queries is like the tax season is picking up, and people want to make sure that they’re not giving their social security number out, and all of their confidential information out, scammers. And a lot of people will trust whatever comes at the first positions on Bing. And If they click on the first link, like they cannot even imagine, most of them actually cannot even imagine we will send them to a scam or anything like that. So it is a huge responsibility for us. That’s why we take it extremely seriously. Because when we fail it has real life consequences for these people. [00:17:00] Alexis: Definitely. And do you think, Oh, I know that one of your articles that you mentioned, that you’re thinking about running with the history of search, which I don’t understand why it was the least popular? Because I feel like to hear from your perspective of the history of search would be so incredibly fascinating, because I felt that (and I don’t know if you’ve felt that this as well) that as time has gone on, people have gravitated more towards that first result. Where is in the past? I mean, when I was younger, just remember almost being told to more critically evaluate all of the results that were coming through, and then now it’s like, oh, just click on the first one. Whatever that says is fine, which probably shifts more responsibility onto you as a search engine and your team. [00:17:38] Frédéric: Yes, and so there are two aspects to this from one sense, and it makes it slightly easier because if it puts more weight on the number one number two number three results, that means also like the weight of responsibilities is lower for in return, things that are not necessarily the best results like number nine or number ten. For some queries like if you type something like [Facebook log in], there is an excellent number one result I can think of and not much more two, three, four, five that I think would fulfill their user intent. So to some extent it makes it a bit easier for this category of very navigational like very explicit intent queries. But on the other hand, you’re right, that it’s definitely changing. If you’ll get the best twenty years, search is to be more of an information retrieval problem. So really the idea of like, as you mean, this is a library of all the knowledge in the world. “How can I find the ten best pieces of information or the ten best books in the library” to match this this query and slowly, we’ve evolved towards more like task completion, actual transactional intent, and also more and more money got involved. And so that’s where you get spam and people are between SEO and that that’s probably the main thing that changed like search. Like the idea that you get a lot of people who love to be a number one and we’re going to do whatever it takes to be a number one. It’s not just an information control problem anymore. It’s becoming a really full-fledged products where all of these dimensions relevance, quality, context fall into place. [00:19:23] Alexis: You know, when you have a lot of money on the line, I can imagine there’s a lot of consequences that could happen. And, of course, we’ve heard recently about so many different breakouts of data and data leakage issues, so super fascinating. So thank you for sharing that with us. Okay. Do you’ve any questions, Max? [00:19:39] Max: Yeah sure. Since maybe you in Seattle and I hear there’s a big e commerce company in Seattle. If you can tell us, maybe it might be a little bit outside off, like the internal, Bing system. But like what For you makes like a great, like, eCommerce experience like features on the website that user expect maybe, and that then, yes, maybe that Bing will reward without, giving away ranking factors. That’s not really my question, but something that you guys are looking for because users are looking for it. [00:20:13] Frédéric: Yeah, when it comes to the Bing eCommerce company in Seattle, it makes our life will be easier because one of the one of the way we frame it here if you look at all the eCommerce websites on the Internet, one question we asked ourselves is, what would we give our credit card numbers to that website? And so when it comes to our neighbor in Seattle, sure, like, I think anyone in the world so confident that if they give them their credit card number, is going to be taken care of with the greatest care and they’re not going to get unwanted charges. And on the other hand, there are many websites on the Internet were like, never ever I would even give like four digits of my credit card and when you look at these sites, this is really the question you trust yourself. Like, Would I give them my credit card number? It works in the user’s mind. It’s like, what are the trust factors on this website? Does it look professional that have an actual contact address that we can look up somewhere. I know that Google has in their guidelines has the BBB rating, and I don’t think they use it at the ranking factor or something. But the idea that someone else is vouching for you is something that you need to take into account if you have an eCommerce website from a trust point of view, all of these things are probably the number one thing you want to make sure users are willing to do business with you, are willing to give you their credit card number, And that’s what we’re looking for at the  end, user satisfaction. [00:21:38] Max: I love that you said that, because just from a design standpoint, it’s today, it’s with frameworks and built-in features and even would Bootstrap in orders like a CSS and HTML like from works that you can find out there. It is pretty easy to make scam looked really good and really professional. So I’m glad to hear that it’s not just about that website can look good and be still a scam. And hopefully we won’t see it popping up in any search results. [00:22:06] Alexis: Definitely. Just it sounds like it all comes back to trustworthiness. So kind of really excited to hear that. Okay. All right. I’m going to go back to one of your tweets. In your tweet, You mentioned that you review user feedback and that you set aside a specific time to review that, which is really exciting because I feel like I’ve really felt a lot of positive energy coming from the Bing team in terms of almost doing a listening tour and trying to figure out what’s going on in a space. And how can we then learn and react from that? So how has your time that you’ve spent reviewing user feedback ever resulted in a new project? [00:22:39] Frédéric: Yeah, that’s Ah, that’s if only super important to look at feedback. That’s a personal belief I have that as products or product managers, it’s an essential part of our job. And I don’t know if you can do good product manager work without listening to your customers and users and partners. I can think of two examples where it’s been extremely useful. And one, it was a very visible feedback. If you remember last spring, I think Yoast posted something about Bing crawling too much. But they have a lot of data, probably from their plug-in, and they are very well informed on these problems. And we took the feedback very seriously and way heard before from other people. That Bing tends to crawl too much compared to Google, and that’s something we definitely started to look at very closely. And that’s what resulted last week. I believe in this new indexing a API were announced at SMX West, as well as the integration with the Yoast Plug in on My Yoast, which was announced at their conference last week. So this is very concrete case where the feedback we’ve been listening to, and we’ve been aggregating, compounded with someone very visible and very vocal who forced the same feedback resulted in something extremely concrete that we announced in the past couple of weeks. Something that is a bit fuzzier probably is around spam and all the all the times we are failing our users, so to speak. And I take the feedback extremely seriously. And when I hear several different people tell me, if I type a query for this domain, like the name of the drug or this kind of things, and I really see bad results. This informs where we’re going to invest our resources. And if I hear that a certain area is getting more and more spam, or if some very technical people come to me and say, I notice that this category of site, putting these key words in this way or whatever is ranking higher than they used to. This is just all goodness. So I invite all the listeners if you have any feedback you want to give to us, you can tweet at me directly on Twitter. Or you can use the feedback form on Bing on the upper right menu and we take it extremely seriously. [00:24:58] Alexis: That’s awesome. It’s almost like keeping one ear to the ground just to make sure that everything is going well, like a pulse, which is awesome. So thank you for doing that. [00:25:05] Frédéric: Yeah, and in the end we do it for our users. So, like we have a lot of ways to scale or understanding of user satisfaction with metrics and numbers. But there’s nothing like qualitative feedback, like actual people. I have a personal belief that if you talk to ten users and you listen to their actuals verbatim feedback you learn so much more than just looking at a number, even if the number of covers one billion users. [00:25:35] Alexis: It’s just so interesting to hear, though, that that qualitative feedback is so valuable because I think a lot of times when we think about data, we think about data and the massive amounts of information that, like even we receive on the webmaster end. And I mean, I can only imagine how much you guys received on your end. But we usually think about all quantitative, quantitative, quantitative. But the value of qualitative data is so interesting and how it can give you a totally different perspective. So thank you for sharing that with us. [00:26:02] Max: I’d like to go back on the fact that there’s not a lot of differences. And what webmasters technical SEO’s and the SEO can do to optimize for search engines like at least Bing and Google. There was one that I can think in term of, you know, those technical tags that we implement, and things that we do a hreflang tags for international SEO and we all know that hreflang tags – they do work for Google, well most of the time, but it could be extremely complicated, setup and implementation really are to manage. Bing has not been on board with, like a tag, can you tell us a little bit about like, how are you guys like, really handle that? Not duplicate content, but violations, international violations and how you detect like the targeted audience, basically for this website that are multiple, like regional languages to target. [00:26:55] Frédéric: So I’m going to be a very disappointing answer. I’m not very familiar with the hreflang tag treatment at Bing, so instead of giving an answer that I think would be inaccurate. What I can tell you is if you have a Web sites like, let’s say, blah dot com and in English blah dot fr in French. And if it is the same company and like, we have some ways to detect that this is not duplicate content that this is actually like two different language is the same thing if you have, like, slash en and slash fr on given website. But in terms of hreflang, I just don’t know, so sorry about that, [00:27:43] Max: Yeah, as well, as we know, like officially Bing does not support hreflang tag again. That’s not something that I’m really surprised of because it’s a very complex implementation. I even heard people at Google that have been working on creating those tags that they’ll not extremely satisfied with the way it turned out. That it turned out to be more complicated, that they wanted it to be. [00:28:04] Frédéric: Well, What I can tell you is it’s already complicated enough when you have only one language and in two different websites, and you want to do just a simple redirect from one to the other or simple economical. And sometimes when I look at the presentations from other SEOs in in conferences. And they show this super complicated graph for like, four websites, all canonicalizing to one another with the hreflang in like multiple foreign languages like, it just sounds like an extremely hard problem. So I’m not surprised that some people at Google say it is hard, we don’t get it right all the time. [00:28:41] Max: Yeah, Sure. [00:28:42] Alexis: That reminded me just a concept of different words going back to the question of vectors, you talked about in your tech SEO boost this idea that when you associate words as vectors, it ends up being more efficient. Why vectors? And I’m mostly curious because I’m in a class, and we literally just learned about how to calculate the distance between two vectors. So I loved when you muttered under your breath, you’re like you could just use the cosine of the angle. I was like, uou totally can. (lol) It was like I can find you the formula for that. But I was curious about what is it about vectors? And for people who are less technical with math, vector is almost like just a direction or an arrow with a line. So if you look at Frederic’s presentation, you can get that type of visual or just Google word vectors. But why are word vectors so useful? [00:29:28] Frédéric: so so in ah, in summary, like the key concept here is embeddings, and the idea is that you get, I don’t know, maybe one hundred thousand words like a million words in the language, and you want to find similarities between the words. So the way we do that is we convert these words into a series of numbers. And, like, depending on what the exact implementation we have, it’s a one hundred numbers that are going to represent what this word means. And you train your model so that words that mean roughly the same thing or that are similar have numbers are close to each other. And so that’s a nice way to essentially compact the knowledge in your dictionary into a simple representation of one hundred numbers. And so although all these numbers represent different direction in them in the most dimensional space. So if you imagine, like the real world of three dimensions, there, like three numbers, like left right like that so to speak, in this world, it’s like one hundred different dimensions. And so we tried to find the similarities, and in the end, you mentioned like we measured the distance essentially between two different words. And so if you have something like, let’s say apple and orange, these are like fairly different objects. The words are completely different, but these are fruits, so you the concepts are still, like relatively similar. So I expect these words to be relatively close in the space. And the reason why it’s extremely useful for search and SEO in general is it just gets you away from this idea that you need to see synonyms or you need to make sure that you cover like ten different variations of the same concept. The hope here is that the machine is going turns than that. If you are, ah, fruit distributor, you don’t need like apples pears distributor dot com, orange business dot com, pear business dot com. We understand you’re a fruit distributor. All these things like makes sense to the machine so that that’s why it’s extremely exciting for us as A development. [00:31:51] Max: I love that you say that I always used the superhero example like telling people that, Yes, if you do want to rank like about Superman, then maybe good that your website talk about, like Batman or Spiderman. And again, as you just mentioned about the fruits, they’re all different words. But they are related because there were, like, superhero name, and it will make the website worth more relevant for a particular topic. And, something like that, I need to expand to the context of what the topic is actually about. [00:32:22] Alexis: Yeah, and it’s almost like a lot of people in the industry I’ve noticed over the last, probably two years have been talking about this idea of entity optimization versus focusing on keywords but focusing on that overall, being known for something, essentially. [00:32:36] Frédéric: Yeah, that’s very interesting. We will be working on entities for quite a while at Bing, and there was a time like before and entities and vectors, and this concept of similarities really caught on where this was a bit much more, kind of handcrafted, so to speak. And so you would have liked this very strict relationship or like an entity links to another with, like, for example, Microsoft is a company. So next to the type was really a field in the entity is “company”. And then “is CEO” is like Satya (Nadella) and that would be like a related person. And then the relationship and it feels like What is relational? It is a manager and like and what? It’s kind of magical with these vectors and entities is  – all of these relationships come completely natural. You don’t need someone to tell you exactly what is the relationship between Microsoft and Satya. And what is extremely interesting to look at the literature and that that is probably one of the most fascinating properties of these vectors, is if you, the distance between Microsoft and Satya Nadella in the Vector Space is the same as the distance between Google and Sundar Pichai. [00:33:26] Alexis: Weird… [00:33:30] Frédéric: And so, like you just drove, like essentially a triangle between Microsoft, Google and Sundar Pichai Then you can extremely easily find that Satya has the same relationship with Microsoft which is similar to their relationship with Google and I find that it’s really fascinating, and that just makes sense, the relationship so much more powerful because you can just learn them in the wild. Instead of being to handcraft them over time. [00:33:30]: That’s so mind blowing. And when I’m visualizing this, I don’t know if anybody has seen the graph of Word2Vec. But basically it sounds like exactly what you’re talking about, which it’s probably stands for word to vector, but basically it’s like that three dimensional graph of words. So you like, you’re talking about You could almost see the clusters of information of things that are, like, similar and related together as almost like a group of things that air in one area. Just kind of cool to think about. But that’s actually it’s even more mind blowing that like that relationship, the distance is exactly similar. That’s crazy. Yeah, mind blown. [00:34:52] Frédéric: I think in their example, they used a man, woman, King, Queen, if I remember correctly. And yeah, that’s exactly what I had in mind. So I think if you if you’re if you’re in technical SEO reading the work to make paper or in general like these foundational papers and word embeddings. [00:35:11] Alexis: that’s so brilliant and so fascinating, too. I really hope the you know it’s pretty much the same in the vector space like no, totally different in the space. I really do hope that catches on. I think it’s kind of like, interesting to think about. I mean it basically, just if you were when you said something like that, it inferred that like, it’s all about relevancy. But I just think it’s kind of like another funny way to say that. I think that SEOs tend to find funny ways to say things. Also, I do want to give you shout out – I thought it was really cool that you mentioned Karen Jones in your speech. I know that she recently passed away, but really cool to have women of science mentioned and especially lauded for their accomplishments. So, thank you for that. [00:35:52] Frédéric: And she is really one of the most important persons in the field of information retrieval, which is like the precursor to search (and SEO). And if you look at her work, a lot of people talk about tf-idf. So she’s the mother of -idf. And this specific part of the formula is actually one that it survived the time, so if you look at for more advanced things like BM25. The tf- part has been changed quite a bit. But the idea of the -idf is almost exactly the same. BM25 is considered state of the art today for informational travel in in some sense. So it’s quite incredible that her work, really, is still extremely relevant to the field, like forty years after she wrote a paper on the idea. [00:36:39] Alexis: Isn’t that crazy? I think. Isn’t that, like every scientist’s dream that their work out-lives them? So amazing. [00:36:45] Frédéric: Yeah, There is in a lot of conferences, They have these conferences there where they call the “test of time” paper for and they look at all the papers that were published ten years before. I think ten years is the canonical time. And they give the award to whatever paper is still relevant or the most relevant at the time. [00:37:07] Alexis: And I mean, obviously something that we want to encourage our scientists to do is have relevant papers!   All right, so for the closing question, Frédéric, basically, I’ve been asking all of the other people that have joined the podcast. What are their three golden nuggets of advice, which is essentially – what should you do from an interpersonal level, a site-related level or really, just a personal development level? Could be anything but just three pieces of advice that you have for our listeners. [00:37:35] Frédéric: That’s ah, that’s a great open question. I would say that the number one is to remember that you build things for people. We are an industry where we are builders. We build websites, we build products, we build the search engine. We all build these things for people. So this is the number one thing, my goal, as a Bing product manager, is to make sure the product is going to be useful to the people who use it and the consequence for you as webmaster or SEO is – it is important that the content you build is going to be useful to my users, because I mean the intermediary between my user and you. So I want I want to be able to vouch for you and say, “Yes, I think this is a great result, and I happily send by users to you.” So that’s definitely like the number one from, Ah, more technical point of view. On. I’m just going to reuse what I said a few years ago. [00:38:32] Alexis: I totally feel for you. You can totally reuse whatever. [00:38:35] Frédéric: And definitely start looking at embeddings and similarities and how modern NLP is done with deep learning. If you have a little bit of time, take the Coursera from Andrew Ng. There’s a machine learning 101. And there’s the deep learnings specialization, which is a set of five different courses. I found it easy to take deep learning, even without the machine learning knowledge. I just happen to do the machine learning before, but this is a great course. You don’t need a lot of technical math background, and he’s going to give you a lot of the understanding around deep learning. So that’s That would be my advice. Like if you if you can blow a little bit of time over the next few months to take this specialization or even if it’s not on Coursera just like, learn more about these things, deep learning and how it’s using NLP that that is the future. That is really the future. You get an edge just by learning about these things. [00:39:37] Alexis: Yeah, I love that. Andrew is definitely the man, too. So… [00:39:40] Frédéric: absolutely he worked with biggest companies. Like just not Microsoft. We need to hire him at some point, just so he can  have the Grand Slam Big companoes. [00:39:52] Alexis: Yeah, when you look up his resume, he was very high up in Google. Then he worked at Baidu. So. Yeah. You guys totally need to hire him at Bing So he has, like everything. [00:40:02] Frédéric: Exactly when, when your lowest achievement is being a professor at Stanford like that, just speaks like… [00:40:08] Alexis: That’s so true, but yes he’s actually his class on machine learning is also very good on Coursera. And then I think it’s a little bit better than the one that’s on iTunes University because that one’s basically the older class, but specifically for Stanford. Yeah, great, great point. I’ll definitely I’m going to check out that deep learning course too now. [00:40:29] Frédéric: Yeah, the machine learning one is definitely a bit more technical. I think, and especially he had two versions, one on Coursera, and he had the one on the Stanford website. But they think the iTunes one, that’s really the one he had on Stanford. The one on the Stanford websites – it was really assumed that you basically followed all the classes at Stanford before. And so we have, a lot of knowledge in algebra and like a lot of things like that. [00:40:58] Alexis: yeah, if you don’t know what partial derivatives are, it’s very discouraging. (lol) [00:41:01] Frédéric: Exactly. He forces you to compute them. (lol) Whereas the deep learning one, you don’t need that technical background. And a lot of times he says that he actually say, if you know about these partial derivatives and everything – Great – here is like some reading for you. If you don’t know about it, just forget about this. Understanding concept Is somewhat more important than being able to complete it partial derivative. [00:41:25] Alexis: Yeah, I love that idea of having to understand intuition of what you’re actually trying to achieve in math. I feel like that’s something that’s underappreciated art, which I thought you did a great job in your tech boost talk as well, like saying like, “Well, here’s the intuition of it, you know?” [00:41:40] Frédéric: Well, I guess I tried to channel my Andrew at Tech SEO boost, because he does that a lot. I think these videos and then when we talk about one hundred dimension vector spaces, it’s gonna be extremely hard to visualize or understand what it is. And so a lot of time in his videos is going to explain the intuition behind it. And like, why we do this a certain way. And that’s why it’s just a great, great series, of course, and not just like good deep learning class, It is just like I think the reference at this point to learn more about deep learning. And I will use my my third key points, maybe to do a little bit of upselling for Bing. In the sense that, we released this crawling, indexing API very recently. There was an integration with Yoast, but you don’t need to use Yoast. If you have a website that is running on any platform, you can still go ahead – register with Bing Webmaster Tools and start using the API or even just submitting your URLs directly there. And for most websites, if you do that, you should like differently great improvements in terms of the crawling and indexing. So that would be really my top recommendation. If you feel you’re old Index isn’t crawling properly with Bing start with Bing webmaster tools, submit some URLs and that should solve most of the problems [00:43:05] Max: Are you saying that we should not use XML sitemaps anymore? (lol) [00:43:10] Frédéric: XML sitemaps are good, but they are just a least of all – like the way we see it – it’s the least of all the URLs on your website. And if have a million of them, maybe you care a lot about ten thousand of them, not the entire one million. And that’s great, because you can submit ten thousand URLs to the submit URLs feature on webmaster tools. And these are the ones we’re going to prioritize. So we can discover all million from your sitemap. But instead of letting us decide which ones are more important, we just prefer you telling us which ones are important. [00:43:40] Max: That is amazing. Thank you, guys, for putting that together and making it available. [00:43:44] Alexis: Yeah. Congratulations! That’s so exciting and exciting for us as well in the search community, so thanks! Well, I know you have a tight time schedule, but thank you so much for coming on our show and for educating us all on Bing and the history. And of course, some of the more technical knowledge as well, very, very exciting and very honored to have you on the podcast. We’ll definitely have to check out some of the more technical things, like embeddings as well as deep learning. So thank you for that as well! It’s been an honor! [00:44:12] Frédéric: Thanks for having me! [00:44:13] Alexis: Alright. Thanks, ciao everyone! The post 2. Interview w/ Frédéric Dubut, Bing appeared first on TechnicalSEO.com.
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