Victor Pan 🇹🇼🇺🇲 Profile picture
Sep 25, 2020 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Today we’re going to rant about “microsites,” a broad term used to describe creating a “new” website experiences. It will cover the why, some pros, some cons, and probably go off topic.

1/n
Microsites are defined loosely.

This could be a microsite: nike-react.com
This used to be a microsite: hubspot.com/agencies
This used to be and is a microsite: web.archive.org/web/2015121215… (which at some point was spotifywrapped.com, now spotify.com/us/wrapped/)

2/n
Microsites can be subdomains, brand new domains, or even subfolders of a brand - the telling sign is generally the tech stack differs (not always true). Quick hop on builtwith.com and you'll often see React apps powering parallax experiences (RIP Flash websites).

3/n
Microsites are commonplace with large brands because it's easy to bypass red tape. Your average ad agency creative/millennial wants to do something in the 1~2 years they're working with their clients, and the typical "brand manager" wants to be digitally innovative 🤖✨🚀

4/n
Oh, and micro-sites are generally extremely targeted and focused on one objective, whatever they're designed for. Nike React shoes well, let you really experience that $$$. Spotify was likely looking for some media buzz - before "this year in review" content got old.

5/n
So pros of microsite?
🏢 Cut through some bureaucracy. If you've been in an argument about what can be on the home page, you know.
🧪 Really clear attribution. You won't have to share any first/last/mixed attribution.
🎯 Really clear goals. ROI optional.
🤖 Flexible tech stack
6/n... whoops

The cons though?
🌲🪓Campaigns are often short-lived and not evergreen. ♻️Folks let domains expire/no redirects.
🧩You're siloed, when you could be integrated, creating knock-on benefits for the whole website
💿📀💽Data often collected inconsistently.

7/n
I used to be on the camp of "why don't you just do it right the first time?" But as time has passed I've learned that done is better than perfect.

I've learned to let go of "content created" which doesn't require SEO to gatekeep.

8/n
If anything, I've learned to embrace and enable folks who want to do something "different" and help set them up for easier "migrations" once their efforts are wrapped up.

Those are their projects. Focus on your projects that impact your goals, gaining allies as you go.

9/n
"Fight for things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."

RIP Justice RBG

10/end

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More from @victorpan

Nov 25, 2020
The SEO industry needs less gatekeepers and more pragmatists. The typical lifecycle of a "community" is that pragmatists often become gatekeepers, or incorrectly equivocate their experiences as superior to others'.

We can all be right. We can all be wrong.

1/N
Web rings and blogrolls. Social bookmarking websites. Directory submissions. Article submission/content syndication websites. Authorship. Penguin. Panda. Hummingbird. Mobilegeddon. Interstitials. Locality. Query deserves freshness. PageSpeed. Https.

The opinions don't stop.

2/N
In the early 2000's all the articles on SEO were about trying to get your website in a respected web directory, pages on article directories, and how to take advantage of "web 2.0" social media websites - link building was very manual and websites weren't easy to make.

3/N
Read 14 tweets
Nov 6, 2020
Hello friends following me this Friday on "implicit vs explicit search intent."

When you've been around the SEO industry for a while you start hearing new terms emerge. Search intent, user intent, keyword intent. As usual, I'm going to start with a bit of history.

1/n
Informational, navigation, and transactional queries - this categorization has been around since I've been doing SEO, and it takes an internet search to appreciate how old it is - 2002. You can still split up queries this way, but it's not great.

cis.upenn.edu/~nenkova/Cours…

2/n
Who|what|when|where|how|why|which - informational
Login|signin|some branded searches - navigational
Buy|download|upload|free - transactional

These are non-exhaustive "modifiers? off the top of my head that SEO's would drag/drop in Excel as an array to categorize queries

3/n
Read 17 tweets
Nov 4, 2020
SEO pet peeve. Changing the url of your content over and over.
/top-10-thang-predictions-thingingmabob-for-2021
/best-black-friday-deals-2019
/11/2020/same-words-as-your-post-title-2020-whoops
/common-mistakes-not-to-make-in-2019-says-url-but-title-says-2020
Let me fix that... (you say)

/top-13-thang-predictions-2022
/best-black-friday-deals-2022
/11/2020/same-words-as-your-post-title-now-2022-whoops
/common-mistakes-not-to-make-in-2022-to-match-title

Then what do you do again next year? You update them all again. Did you really?
Read 4 tweets
Oct 23, 2020
Happy Friday folx - we're ranting about pagination.

We're going to break down the problem pagination was supposed to fix, the problems it ended up creating, and why I want to kill it with fire. Something #passageindexing

What'd you expect? It's a rant.

In the beginning of the internetz, websites were pretty simple.

webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-his…

And fun. And wacky. And evolving. More people started connecting to the internet, own websites, publish content, sell stuff online (who would trust that?!), and much more.

2/n
Then there were at least three problems:
- Folx created more content, it was no longer feasible to put it all in one URL
- People broke up their content into chunks for better user experience or ad monetization
- Inventory-driven websites were confusing search engines

3/n
Read 17 tweets
Sep 18, 2020
Happy Friday - let's rant about keyword density, LSI keywords, internal/external links per N words, and word count - vernacular you want to get out of your processes sooner rather than later.

1/n
Keyword density, usually defined as a percentage of amount of times a keyword shows up divided by the total number of keywords on the page, is product of the keyword-stuffing years of SEO.

e.g. I heard SEO Expert Chad recommends pages should have a Keyword Density of 2% !

2/n
Search engines were still using the keywords meta tags for rankings, the amount of times a keyword was repeated on a page had a huge influence on whether a page would rank, and there were algorithms that would pick up keyword stuffing. Yo it's not the pre 2k or early 2000's.

3/n
Read 21 tweets
Sep 11, 2020
The subdomains vs subfolders/subdirectories debate just won't die. Search engines have evolved their treatment of "what is a website" over time, and yet the debates cling to old case studies.



Meme CC: @thetafferboy

1/N Image
Before we start, let's revisit the parts of a URL:
mattcutts.com/blog/seo-gloss…

At some point of this rant, we're going to talk about ccTLD's, sub-subdomains, and subdomain plus subfolder combinations with ccTLD's because #teamsubfolders uses the same argument for everything.

2/N
The concept of a "website" in the early days of the internet was that subdomains were separate entities from the "home" site. This article on website boundaries from Bing is worth revisiting. blogs.bing.com/webmaster/nove…
Websites are "leasing" subdomains/subfolders to rank stuff.

3/N
Read 17 tweets

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