SEO for Mega Websites - Interview with Microsoft's SEO Architect

Posted by Hema Ghosh on November 27th, 2018

In the past few days I came across an interesting interview with WPN . Topic: How to optimize mega sites? Mega What? Exactly, SEO is not equal to SEO. The scope of a domain is in many ways crucial to the SEO strategy. In the interview, Senior SEO Architect Derrick Wheeler discusses the topic using Microsoft as an example.

What sets Mega websites apart from "normal" domains?

How exactly does a "Mega Site" define itself? Mega sites are usually characterized as follows:

many millions of pages consist of different business units are offered in different languages

In addition, because of their size, mega sites are usually not managed centrally but in different units.

What are the biggest SEO barriers to mega websites?

The principle " Content is King " does not work so well on such extensive pages. After all, most of the pages have more than enough of them. That's where the most common problem lies too much content obsolete content, duplicate content, or simply "legacy" bad crawlability

For exactly these reasons, it should be ensured that the page structure is crawler friendly. This can be achieved by a corresponding sitemap and a sophisticated page navigation.

Now you might suspect that Google does not like it, if someone "mops out" a page to a large extent and thereby removes a not insignificant number of pages. Senior SEO Architect Derrick Wheeler, however, calls in here and says:

"With a clean 404 page Google will certainly not respond with a penalty. After all, even only "old" content should be removed and this then comes to the "topicality" of the page to good. "

Efficiently optimize mega websites

Derrick Wheeler refers here to the company's own Microsoft site and explains what was basically done to incorporate SEO measures into all areas of the site. It was based on an SEO concept, which was rolled out on four different levels:

1. Sidewide SEO measures - Here, the priority was to improve the crawlability of the entire page

2. SEO measures based on branches / branches - SEO measures adapted for the respective countries

3. page-specific SEO measures - measures that are taken for very specific pages

4. Standard Measurement System - This means that care has been taken to track all areas of the website using the same tools to ensure comparability. For this reason, a separate search technology was developed specifically for the site, which searches the site with its own web crawlers.

Conclusion

A really very interesting interview in which the problem of mega sites is addressed very well directly on the tangible example of Microsoft. Finally, the mix of standardization and customization seems to be the right concept for extremely large pages. Just a added bonus to run an cost effective SEO compaign, hire some of the good Indian SEO company with good reviews