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You make some valid points in your article, but also leave the door open for much scrutiny of your audit process. Perhaps you should enable comments on your article to allow others to weigh in directly on the page. By not doing so, you are hurting the visibility of your own site, hindering engagement and putting very little value in the feedback of your readers.
No he's right! Lots of problems and it's being fixed in our next sprint. Appreciate you curating them all together :)
And yes, do add comments!
Sprint eh? Agile approach?
Agile's kinda overused and perhaps misunderstood. If I said "hackday" people might get the wrong idea too.
Moving forward, development will be done in batches so Ben & Jon (the awesome devs behind this) can work more efficiently on this and other projects. "Growth Hacking Sprint" coming... #BuzzWordBingo :)
don't forget #bigdataVCseedroundpivot
I definitely don't want to start some Agile discussion, but I think most sites these days have to do small, frequent iterations. It just makes more sense and enables you to move faster and adapt. Amazon for instance does tons of daily updates and most people don't even notice. There's something about taking small bites out of a problem more often that seems to speed the development process along without breaking big stuff.
and yet it can also lead you down a path that leaves you in a difficult and painful place that is impossible to come back from!
Really I think the pros and cons of both approaches shake out quite differently depending upon how many people are informing the process. When you are able to set a course and work untroubled to your final destination, or when updates are simply an extension of the plan, then small and frequent iterations will work. Then again, when a project is greatly influenced by a need to mesh with external processes and address the needs of many stakeholders, thinking long and hard before changing is advisable.
I think you're right. Agile is not for every situation, and when you have to many inputs it definitely plays havoc with the general direction and scope, and you can end up with a total failure. That goes for every development methodology though and is a product of the project management as well.
Having no inside knowledge of how things work behind the scenes of this site it's hard to say what approach is best, but many big projects seem to do better these days with smaller cycles.
Hi, and thank you so much for commenting.
Yes, I should definitively add commenting to my blog, will do it (it's not about "enabling", it's about "developing": I rolled my own blog engine and never took the time to complete it :)
In the meanwhile, you can comment the article on my Google+ page:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/114867727838406985245/posts/cfh6kEo1Ahx
Again, thank you!
Fred
Perfect, thanks for the quick response!
Install Disqus?
Yep, painless and easy. Discus makes commenting way more accessible, when you ask people to create an account just to comment on your blog you're putting up a big wall. There are some concerns with someone else holding your data that are valid but I think it's far better than no comments at all.
A bold analysis. I never thought to analyse a site I am a member of and point out their SEO mistakes! It is a valid argument though, especially since the site is affiliated / co owner by one of the largest SEO companies in the world..... You should have Disqus on the blog or something through Frederico as surely an article such as this is intended to provoke comment.....
I cannot deny it I meant getting attention and provoking comments, other than championing Visual SEO Studio (disclaimer: I'm the developer).
I felt doing a public seo audit of Inbound.org was safe enough not to offend anyone (if I did, my apologies, no offense meant). As I said in the article, "the shoemaker's son always goes barefoot". I well know there always are other priorities (e.g. a commenting system on my own blog; btw, I'll have a look into Disqus).
The link indeed got attention, floating at the top of the "hottest" section for two days, and drove targeted traffic: about 200 visits up to now, and about other 100 from tweets, G+... Inbound.org seems to work.
Good discussion. Most new sites, and even established sites like SEOmoz, have a ton of SEO fixes. (I know from personal experience. Thank goodness no one ever did a public audit of SEOmoz while I was there :) I love the new Inbound.org and know it's tough to weigh the cost of developing new features, bug fixing and SEO considerations against each other when relaunching an entirely new site. Personally, it drives me crazy that the top 5 pages all have duplicate title tags that say "Incoming Articles | Inbound" (including the Tools page). But I trust these things will get fixed eventually and I look forward to Inbound's continued success.
I didn't notice the dupe title tags actually. Surely that is a ten minute fix!?
A ten minute fix here, five minute fix there... interrupts whatever else Ben & Jon are doing. Better for them (and therefore better for me) to batch it all together.
You're right, even SEO experts will put SEO aside during initial development, and I agree with it. They're focusing on things like features, look and feel, spam protection right now. Time spent on SEO would slow that down, and since membership is growing anyway it isn't that crucial. It's the right call.
The title tags are driving me crazy too... ;)
Looking forward to having <title>The Top #{number_of_posts} Ever on #{category} - As Voted by Inbound.org</title>, <title>Inbound Marketing Tools - As voted by Inbound.org members</title> etc...
Doing a public audit to the official site of a SEO company would have been more than bold, it would have been unfair. I well know there always are other priorities. I myself have a lot to do left on my site.
I think a SEO agency should be judged by the earning it returns to its customers, more than its ranking for the "seo" keyword (and SEOmoz fares pretty well on it).
Good recommendations. And please please get rid of the target="_blank". It should not be forced and makes me unable to open links with my Kindle(!).
Thank you for your comment Jim. About Kindle not being able to open links with target="_blank", I admit I didn't know... but may be you were not asking me but Inbound.org? :-)
Oh, this is crap. Why is inbound stripping out get parameters from an URL?
Just tried to share this with the inbound community:
Never ever rely on robots.txt to prevent Google indexing
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731356
Use the the noindex robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header!
But ?id=4731356 is being stripped out and so I removed it.