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Are You running a big girl or big boy website?

I bet you aren’t. And more importantly I bet you that Google doesn’t think that you are. How do I know? Serious businesses act serious online.

The Signs are everywhere

#seo

A photo posted by Tim O’Keefe (@timokeefes) on

Today your absence is glaring to Google. Lets look at Coca Cola. The worlds largest Brand. I think Google probably trusts them. Definitely an adult website.Um maybe thats the wrong word.

Definitely a mature website.  A quick look at their website cocacola.com and I am redirected to us.coca-cola.com/home/ coke

A sneak peek at their html and not impressive at all.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>Coca-Cola</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=””>
<meta name=”description” content=””>

They leave their keyword and description blank. Although this isn’t a lesson in technical SEO, but notice the title tag is only their brand, no other words other than Coca Cola. They are not trying to rank for anything else but their brand.

Leaving the keyword and description meta tags empty is horrible SEO. Not including the keyword tag at all is OK as none of the big engines read it anymore. But to list them and leave them empty is a no no.

When looking at their history page, the source code does look a bit more useful, descriptive, and fun.

coca cola history

The html has 33 errors according to W3C standards.  Hey they are Coca Cola and can get away with it. Because all their trust signals are so high elsewhere.  Lets look into some of the elusive obvious signs of trust.

So there are a number of standard SEO items to checklist off like W3C validation. We can look at robots.txt which is the first item Googlebot visits on your site. As well as your sitemap.xml, Google Webmaster and Analytics Claim. How fast is your site? Curiously Coca Cola uses WebTrends not Google Analytics. I find that kind of refreshing. But we are not Coke. Let’s not get any ideas.

Have you declared your authorship and or business a publisher at Google Plus? How about your local Page?

Additionally, notice that they have  statement pages for Terms of Service and Privacy as well as a link to the Contact Page. Because real companies care about legalities.
Terms Privacy

20 Years Old is Old in Internet Time

Google is a registrar of URLS. So they can tell how long a URL has been live and it has recorded its various iterations on the web. Almost as good for historical purposes is The Way Back Machine.

Of course to Google the original trust factor was the old standby PageRank or links.This is the original “what makes Google different” algo.  How many important links do you have coming to the various pages of your site?

The US.cocacola.com/home/ page alone (not the site) has over 14,000 backlinks!

And of course there are huge social signals and presence in Facebook, Twitter,  and Google Plus. They are not even on Pinterest as far as I can tell but their brand is listed all over the graphic sharing site.  Google can tell that the brand is being heavily talked about.

What I find quite interesting is that Coca Cola breaks many of the best practices of SEO. In fact it appears that they have a mirror running at coca-cola.com and cocacola.com. Us SEOers radar would normally be going off. But when you have this much trust. Even ole Google will give you pass.

So when in doubt in your internet ventures ask yourself, “What would Coke do?”. And if you can afford it, it is most likely not a bad idea.